Hungry hungry hippos
lightening up on the occasion of this week's Gemini Full Moon
cw: disordered eating; cynicism
n.b. This letter/diary entry was written three weeks ago, deep in a luteal phase of decay and surrendering even to destructiveness. It should go without saying that I feel differently now. That makes this chunk of text “bloggier” than other posts. It can’t be relied upon as evidence of anything with substance in the present: to freeze (and judge/analyze) the body’s processes is fundamentally to misunderstand the way the body works (you’ll see obvious examples of that all throughout the text). Emotions flow, thoughts stream. There’s nothing about which to form an opinion. I offer a slice of annotation describing what it’s like to be stuck in one’s own web of stories. Thanks to Brittany for sharing her stories and for encouraging me to set fire to mine.
“Without hope we yet live in longing”
—Vergil, to Dante, Inferno IV.42
What is the relationship between desire and hope?
I have been feeling emptied-out, done, finished (since submitting the dissertation and getting away from the UC). —So, have all my desires been met? My desiring mechanism dried-up? —I must have it all; I seem to want for nothing. —Yet some secret desire - for what? - must be lurking, since I feel like a ghoul, i.e., dissatisfied... Not a person anymore - a haunting and a corpse on its way out. —A “being” without the experience of successfully doing or having done anything (no value judgments are possible except negative ones now).
The sheer worthlessness of what activities (enormous effort, comic levels of obstacle, tragedy, sickness, strife) I had chosen to fill my life til this point can no longer be avoided - I don’t care even to avoid it now. What would be the point? Do I even mind the hopelessness of this vacated situation, this now where I am? Vacation - only enjoyable because it’s time-bound. To vacate a place, create a vacuum. Make absence, make light of something. Evacuate cognitive (and real) bowels, finally, after long toxifying stubborn stagnation.
(Can this really be the way one feels? No - these aren’t feelings, they are judgments attempting to control underlying feelings. The feelings are tired, sad, and lonely. Hmm. Even to state that is a struggle. There’s a glimmer every so often posting here that is reminiscent of the old LiveJournal days, when we were writing just for our few close friends, daily sweet tidbits, fears, the human processes, before nihilistic hot takes and performative detachment/essayism set in as defensive trauma responses to the existential threats of our generation…)
Neither the well-meaning mentors who gently advise against graduate school nor the factory-farm institutions that ensorcel you into graduate school tell you about the interstitial pause upon completion, the dark side of a pure insight of emptiness, where nothing matters or happens that could matter. Nor are you given any idea how long it will last... When I finished my MFA thesis and handed it in (is this true?), I had already stopped eating. I drank only these prebottled banana-orange smoothies from the cart outside that cafe in the arcade in downtown Ann Arbor. I would drink one per day (on those days I went outside). That hard-won thesis, like the dissertation draft I just finished, fell on deaf ears, and withered of no “community,” no celebration. The falseness of that place (the MFA context as I was equipped to experience it) knocked me out cold. So I prayed, fasted, went inside myself. I took ill. I swore off a rash of things, people, ideas.
I remember being as scared then as I am now during that time between when I stood watching all these bridges burn and the later time when, spontaneously it seemed, fresh water ran under a new one, and I realized some part of myself had allowed for and overseen some reconstruction. New beliefs were apparently already being installed - more cautious ones, I don’t dare say “wiser,” no matter how I desire to see my former self enriched... So, there’s an extant desire - to have learned one’s lessons. To choose meaningfulness and see it well applied. Even the emptiest souls (purest nothings) are harbored in creatures with nervous systems, seeking warmth and milk.
Today, and lately, I see clearly the whole doctoral program/project as a shameful waste of precious effort, precious time. This is exactly how I felt about Lingua Franca in 2016. I buried it for nine years. Did I never look at it, choose a new meaning for it? I did discover a copy at my mom’s house this past summer, felt carefree (and curious) enough to skim the contents. I recognized (with “grim satisfaction”) that the poems were generally better than I remembered judging them to be, through the eyes of [redacted faculty advisor] and a couple of her most ambitious parrots in my cohort.
I can see now that I was under an evil spell then, the collective delusion of the MFA workshop mentality (emphasis on the malignant failure of feeling in the framework of “mentality”). Obviously the PhD...structure... is poisoned by the same ideological rottenness, cauterizing its participants with the same basic uselessness - its volunteers - its impotent would-be martyrs. With a sibling sting like calling up [redacted advisor] makes me feel, I am ashamed to have fallen for such an egregiously-marked trap as a PhD in Literature (i.e., to have hoped for / fallen for higher education/academia as an ideal). It feels like a scarlet letter now - if you know [what it really costs to get a PhD], you know, and perhaps ought to be ashamed.
I value self-expression nevertheless because of its primacy in “the healing process” of the individual bodymind (the human personality microcosm of the social/ecological consciousness). The highly sterilized and machine-processed environments of the university, while theoretically safer for developments of cultures of ideas and their keepers / tale-tellers, and so marketed, still too closely resemble a vacuum. Self-expression serves no purpose in a vacuum; nor, and now I am willing to admit / neither too proud nor ashamed to admit, are universities apparently any good for fostering and launching effective self-expression either (Berkeley, Michigan, Santa Cruz). For me, anyway. “Don’t save her - she don’t wanna be saved” (J. Cole). Fuck pedagogy on those terms! —there’s no nervous system safety in those sanitized labs, the human is gone out of them already, any action taken is invasive...
Today, I regret my dissertation, and am disgusted by it. I have paralyzing contempt for my gatekeeping superiors and the system in which they work. But none of that’s important now. What do I do? To be at peace about this is not possible without significant “spiritual bypassing.” Is that therefore the source of this deep and wide dark emptiness I feel? There was “nothing to live for” in 2016, either, I remember. But, as I know I will do now, I lived. Even my life’s great love is a dream of meaning, like my [proto-him] lover was then. The difference this time is I have fuller knowledge now of the partner’s almost-insufferable humanity. Does that not mean he is worthy of compassion? Did I know then to use [proto-]love as a mirror?
Fine - I know better this time about the mirroring of self and otherhood (person, institution, et al.). By that token, what, then, is publication? Accolade? - demanding that the illusion in the mirror wink back at me? I’ve been laboring under a grotesque fun-house effect these last years, and finally felt like my own unbridled savagery had smashed all the glass off the walls into vicious shards. Now it’s like I’m going around looking down for glimpses of bits of myself, an eye, a finger, cutting my feet and knees on all the brokenness, howling and cursing. It’s as if now that I know they’re me, it’s no longer enough to do it (to do anything) “for them” - so I have to find a new reason for bothering with the social life of a human being... and I find a vacant stubbornness in my gut and my mind’s eye. I’m in no hurry.
Decision or observation made today (after six days of crying the nothingness clean, just, leaking, coasting in neutral, vaguely) is that I’ve tried way too hard up til now on keeping up appearances, in a few different ways that can mean. I’ve ended up with a mind like the upright coffin full of knives that Johnny Depp’s witch mother is locked into in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” movie that bursts open and gushes ecstasies of blood. I added one knife at a time over the years until the entire skull was coated in layers of slice and dice, rusty and shiny, sharp, raw, rough, smooth. Nothing gets out alive at this point (ha). It’s like that, crossed with the scene in Matilda where Headmistress Trunchbull forcefeeds the chocolate cake to that fat truant student - but my mind makes me play simultaneously both evil authoritarian and sweet-starved innocent with no capacity for self-restraint. Cue circus music.
Images load up for a finale and are fired. I’m off track now - life’s needs barge in - my body is cold and hungry. Like I felt in Michigan in 2016, I never want to eat again. I want to fade away, weaken, until I fall asleep forever, like the cosmic kitty in the sky whose purrs and twitching turns the planets. I remember feeling fragile then, bitter, brittle, like I do now. The Anna Karenina feeling of extreme heaviness, the train gathering too much speed. Like I woke up one day and my bone marrow was replaced with something of the wrong texture - acrid ash where gooey marshmallow should be. Oh well. Tennis, anyone?
(By “Tennis anyone” I am rephrasing, in an Ashberyan way, my opening inquiry: What is the relationship between desire and hope?
Shame is the other side of desire and regret is the other side of hope. I keep filling with and emptying of these, like the shore, taking both sides/tides.
And I reproduce here one of Ashbery’s great poems, “Homeless Heart.” I have written about it in previous posts and will write about it again, probably for the rest of my life, because it, too, like all his best poems and like all great poems, fills and empties with desire, shame, regret, and hope.)
When I think of finishing the work, when I think of the finished work, a great sadness overtakes me, a sadness paradoxically like joy. The circumstances of doing put away, the being of it takes possession, like a tenant in a rented house. Where are you now, homeless heart? Caught in a hinge, or secreted behind drywall, like your nameless predecessors now that they have been given names? Best not to dwell on our situation, but to dwell in it is deeply refreshing. Like a sideboard covered with decanters and fruit. As a box kite is to a kite. The inside of stumbling. The way to breath. The caricature on the blackboard.
How to dwell in a way that is deeply refreshing, as he suggests? “The way to breath.” In my next post I’ll address some of why and how I still know to be true the relationship of books and language to the body and its vibrancy and healing.
