Alpha and Omega: How to Survive a Mindless Death

Abstraction is what peoples all moments. I think about the mind-numbing banality of surviving in a hyperbolic media culture which communicates comfort is the greatest luxury, when I know it comes at the cost of someone’s suffering. How just the devices — the tools — people hold in their hands destroy people’s on a nerve. The extraordinary geological impact of the bottle of water in my refrigerator grates on the strings of guilt left over from my catholic upbringing. In the flux of constant and conflicting information, writing makes me stop and think about the moment in front of me and all of its consequences. The way I can process the mountainous conflicts of a moment — because my head can’t wrap around something as vast as a little increment of time, sometimes — is to write them down.

Everything, for me, begins with the first letter my hand wrote. At first, it’s a conscious intent to understand my personal response to the happenings around me and how they trigger certain thoughts in my head. Then I allow my imagination to turn whatever it is in my mind into the story my hand is telling the page, which in turn informs me what’s going on. I have learned I have much difficulty understanding anything unless it’s written out. I’m slow to judge any response, until it’s completely written out and edited. Even then, I am often surprised by the things my fingers have produced, because they are never what I thought they would be. I don’t want to be like this despite how gifted I feel. It’s terribly difficult to develop intimate friendships because people rarely understand that I only know what I am saying when I write it down. I totally understand this about myself, and am comfortable with it. I know that seems contradictory, but I assure you it isn’t. Just because I am comfortable with myself does not make me functional in a world which I do not agree with. I must distract myself from the goings on around me, because I am terrified by the ramifications of the human behavior I do not understand in the least bit. So when I engage other people, I can sometimes be very deliberate, brief, and strictly poignant in my words. Sometimes the sharpness of my tongue comes off as harsh, and therefore taken as rudely blunt, and I never want to offend anyone, so I compensate the poignancy of my words with compassion communicated by my body while delivering my words out-loud, or I have to write it down.

Writing through the enormity of emotional range, I can find joy in the comforts of my own skin, even though I’m somewhat uncomfortable in my skin. I suffer from anxiety and certain joint issues which make my body often uncomfortable, so I try to distract myself from the awkwardness of the animal I am tied to. I have been known to mar it with tattoos so I can pretend I’m art sometimes: simply expression. I’m a writer. It’s very lonesome work, but I have difficulty expressing emotions verbally. I stumble over words, and play with my hair, while staring off blankly trying to think about how I would write it out. That is unless I am engaged in a dialogue with a writer, living or dead. They help me realize that no calling is always embraced.

I started writing when I was a child. My first diary dates back to second grade, and I still have it. My life was not one of storybooks and swing sets. It was one of mentally ill parents full of neglect and abandonment, bearing witness to the murder of a friend, in addition to an alleged long term sexual molestation, of which I can clearly recall certain inappropriate behaviors, but no details really, so I wonder if it’s a planted memory from my mother’s psychosis, which I have deduced to be a type of Munchausen Syndrome, or if it actually occurred — not sure it even matters at this point. Maybe, I want to be spared those memories. I don’t know.

I do know the man involved in that deeply complex internal drama is the person who wrote “Roses Are Red” poems to me which lead to me learning how to explicate my secret feelings. Secret because I sometimes need to write them out for my own understanding as to what the emotions are. Since human emotion defies language, art is the only thing that can remotely come close to expressing it. Metaphor offers language access to semiology of the emotional self. Understanding yourself, emotionally, is imperative, so I guess that man gave me my most vital survival skill. What irony, right?

Being a sensitive person — not to mention super-duper-hyper-self-aware — I am sometimes too susceptible to broad hopeless topics like how to end human suffering rather than the emotional magnitude of a single moment. Emotions are something I can understand, yet it takes real concentration to communicate a painting of what you experience. I think that’s what makes me a writer more than a sometimes graceless, hyperbolic, social recluse riddled with mental health issues brought on by the ideological framework of our culture’s gluttonous consumerism and the cliché of the terminally obsessive poet. Poeta nascitur, non fit (Poets are born not made)–I tattooed that on my dominate arm so people will have to ask what that means, just so I can educate them a little on poetry. To give them a lesson about the vital nature of an art which demands you work for it. It’s important to find love in working toward the deeply rewarding as a means to transcend superficiality, and knowing the difference when you’re not.

A superficial life is one of great havoc, since there is no insight to the depths of knowledge. We all exist in a world that constantly presents itself to us in the most superficial ways. Nothing is real to us anymore, except our emotional response to various stimuli, and even then we don’t pay enough attention to what those emotions really are. More often than not the stimuli come to us in the form of some screen, or electronic device which removes physicality from the equation of human behavior. We have removed the necessity of being present from daily life with these devices we now cannot live without.

I think of the brilliant mind of David Foster Wallace (and all of the scary-ass implications of using him as a reference to argue how important writing is, especially to me, considering he hung himself off his terrace, while he was working on his last novel). His earnest, satirical commencement speech, “This Is Water” given to the 2005 graduates of Kenyon College, muses to the importance of the obvious. It’s obvious that human behavior, as a whole, is not conscious of the simple truth that we are killing ourselves and everything around for the sake of money: an invention of ascribing worth to human bodies. The things people in our world are doing, at the moment, are mind-blowingly scary — it’s so not pleasant to think about things that scare you — and few seem to acknowledge the obvious ironies blasted in our faces constantly by the inescapable media. (Some of them, maybe, but definitely not all of them.) The obvious is so hard to see sometimes, and sometimes the truth is the hardest thing to swallow. Like the parable about the fish not knowing water, Wallace uses in that speech, in many ways, we don’t know our obvious ignorance because there’s so much information everywhere which distracts us from noticing the truly important things around us and any real knowledge from observation. Poetry in its simplest form begins in observation. Writing allows a space to generously share thoughts and feelings on any given subject, also giving the opportunity to communicate unique and complicated responses to the environment you observe to the people who are willing to listen. It also allows you to read what the world is communicating to you. It very truly is the expression of the human condition. Poetry has the power to shape and conquer the deepest of human sufferings. As Elizabeth Alexander said, “Poetry… is the human voice, and we are of interest to one another. Are we not?”

As a poet, I absolutely find the metaphor in poetry intrinsic to understanding myself and the world around me. Metaphor teaches me everything I need to know, but only if I pay enough attention to what’s being communicated. It seems to me that our culture has lost the ability to understand the depth of metaphor. Take for instance, the clichéd zombie genre in popular media: people generally understand that zombies represent the fact that we are eating each other alive which alludes to our ravenous consumerism, but we’ve turned that idea into a passive form of entertainment. Entertainment is meant to distract you.

What are you doing when you buy a ticket to a stupid zombie movie about Abraham Lincoln? You are consuming a product, and sometimes the products we consume take the lives of the people producing them like the iPhone 5 or whatever generation that’s next. The people who run the factories which produce that device had to install “suicide nets” around the buildings because iPhone-slaves (that seems to be the only appropriate word to use when referring to those poor people who worked there) were throwing themselves off of the top of the factories they worked in to free themselves of the hell they were living. Suicide of iPhone production line assemblers was so frequent that the factory owners installed nets to prevent losing any revenue for their investors. Apple is refusing their workers the quick painless death from the hell of being constant production animals for the ravenous iPhone market. Oddly, when this information is offered to the mass of humanity, often times it’s offered through the very devices causing so much suffering. Chances are the short news segment about China’s iPhone factories “suicide net” appear before or/and after a commercial advertising the great new iPhone you can’t live without.

We are consuming the lives of other people, and as the thin zombie movie plot communicates, there is an imminent, savage death waiting for everyone in this metaphor. Metaphor has the ability to take an abstract thought and make it personal. If you consume the new iPhone, you are a cannibal zombie, because you are allowing the company who produces it to install suicide nets around their buildings, so every moment of their employee’s lives (your victims) is by effect devoured by each person, including you, who owns one of those cell phones. The only survivors of the zombie movies are the ones who place their faith in humanity and place their energy into preserving the lives of people they don’t know. When we disregard the lives of other people, we participate in our own destruction and it spreads like a pandemic disease. Because I am a poet, I am hyper aware of the human implications of the metaphors our culture utilizes. Often times, it is not pleasant to be aware of such things.

In a world of war and human exploitation, one has to question if we are at all interested in one another. If our culture does not develop a meaningful understanding of the metaphors around us, we are going to lose a powerful aspect of cultural consciousness. I truly believe that, and it’s reconfirmed every time I see a TV screen. Metaphor and emotions are inseparable. It’s imperative to develop a meaningful appreciation of metaphor, so we can fully understand the complexities of the human condition, of our condition. After all, human beings are ruled by emotion, and what better way to understand each other than to understand the various metaphors we use? Unfortunately, critical literacy is considered to have little or no real value in our American culture. I argue that it’s imperative to find a way to bring the literary arts, namely poetry, out of the dark and misty past and deliver the emotional understanding of metaphor to the masses — to make it new, as Pound, as Whitman, as Rilke argued we had to do.

Without poetry I am not sure I could have overcome many of the obstacles I have faced in my life. That’s why I find it so vital to teach our youth the power of poetry. We must find compassion for the emotions conveyed in the metaphors around us, and, possibly, make compassion the first emotional response with each other. The way to do that is to immerse yourself in the arts — in poetry.

I tend to over-intellectualize and lose myself in abstract thinking. Writing keeps me alive because it stops my mind from reeling, and focuses me on the words right in front of me. The process gives me time to think about the obvious and see how it gets abstracted. It’s how I express myself best, and I just may have something worth saying. It’s as simple as that. Poetry teaches me how to examine myself and the world around me, and that’s a skill I wish more people in this world had. We can save our world if we all possessed that skill.