Poem: 157
Tuesday, 21 February 2017

The Unimaginable Weirdness Of Poetry.

Francis Pedraza
Jul 21, 2017 · 14 min read

I have never written poetry in my life.
In the last week, I wrote fifty poems.
On accident. Not part of some plan.
What is happening to me?
Don’t let me write poetry here!
I need to pause for a minute.
And write in prose only.

It’s only been a week and plain English sounds foreign to my ear.
You see these line breaks? Normal paragraphs don’t feel right anymore.
It’s hard for me not to do
This.
This is weird.
It’s a trip, but I’m not on any drugs.
Other than my morning latte and a few drinks with friends.
I worked full time during the week, got a lot done.
Went out three nights with friends. Fairly low-key.
So these verses were written on cab rides, on walks, late at night.
They just come to me unbidden. All I do is write them down.
On Saturday and Sunday I did just lose myself in it.

I wrote and wrote and wrote.
I have no idea how long this kick will last.
But it has seriously screwed up my life.
I was already weird before, but I’m even weirder now.
I stay up late writing verses of no practical value, that I hope nobody reads.
I respond to business emails in verse.

I send romantic love letters. Even to friends.
I talk to myself in spoken word. I can rap — WTF!
I practically dance when I am alone.

I’m a flowing mess.
This is my story.
The story of my newfound relationship with poetry.
Let this be a cautionary tale to you.

Every poem is like a Jedi that threatens you like this:
Write me down and you will become weirder than you can possibly imagine.

I made that mistake. Don’t join me
On the Dark Side!

Innocent desire

Writing is nothing new for me. I write for fun. I think for fun. Writing is thinking. I guess I had a good education and it stuck.

But over the years, my thinking has become more and more structured, so my writing has also become more systematic and rigid to match.

I became aware of this principle: organization and creativity are in tension. If Creativity is explosive, Organization is “collapsive”: it makes things denser, more networked, more structured and patterned. So as I made organization gains, I made creativity losses: I made less new stuff, the stuff I made was more incremental and less innovative.

I also learned another principle: that structure drives behavior. I began writing on Medium to give myself a new space, a new structure, for expression. And on Medium, I discovered that a Publication was a way of introducing yet another layer of space. So I started creating new publications for various subjects.

Sure enough, quite gaseously, my writing filled the spaces I gave it. I began writing on a range of subjects I had ignored for a while. I found it very fulfilling, but also very frustrating. Because after the initial spurts of creativity, each of these projects very quickly became less about creativity and more about organization.

That’s why I started Explosions. I wanted to write more fluidly, loosely, creatively. I wanted to not care about fitting new concepts into old systems. So I started writing freestyle. My relationship with poetry emerged indirectly from freestyle, not from an attempt to write poetry.

Unwanted verse

“Freestyle” writing isn’t a “thing”, (at least, not that I’m aware of). I’m only now using the term for the first time myself, and in its plainest, most literal sense: no rules, no parameters, anything-goes, have fun, just write. And even by defining it here, I feel like I’m ruining it, because when I started this, the word “freestyle” wasn’t in my mind. The motivation was far more visceral. It was an urge. I needed an outlet for raw, wild, unfiltered, unrestrained, stream-of-consciousness emotion to “explode” onto the page.

It just so happens that, as I practiced freestyle, that what emerged looked a lot like, smelled a lot like, poetry. What’s this? Poetry, gasp! At first, I didn’t know what to do about it. Because I’m sure I’m not a poet; and I’m sure I don’t have any business writing poetry.

My inner dialogue went something like this:

There must be some mistake. Is this poetry, is poetry this? No! Did this come from me or did I come from this? Ah, stop! What is happening?! Strange verse is interrupting my logical processes. Why am I writing, talking, thinking like this? Am I losing my mind? Anyways, this must not be very good. Oh, how embarssing. It must be an accident. Call a doctor! Take it away!

But there it was. Poetry came out of me. I had a baby. I’ve never written poetry in my life. Nor had much interest in it. Years ago I read one book, a brief anthology of English verse, on a family ski vacation. Maybe I came across a few poems, here and there. It has popped up in other literary misadventures, but has never been center-stage. I never took a poetry class, so I never received formal instruction, nor did I feel compelled to write. If you’d asked me, say, after college, to explain the value of poetry, I certainly couldn’t have. I might’ve even made some snide remark!

“Romantic” uncomfortable with feelings

Yet I’ve always had a Romantic side. I write Romantic with a capital R because I mean philosophically Romantic. I’m rather a fan of Plato, the original Romantic: who believed that Ideas are real things, that Ideas exist, actually exist, indeed, that they are more real than anything else. Plato practically worshipped ideas, as he pushed his philosophy to an extreme, to the point of religion. And I’ve always been inclined in that direction; felt drawn to abstract concepts like Beauty and Truth.

In contrast, I’ve always felt at odds with the Realist tradition in philosophy: which reduces everything down to immediate physical observation and practical consideration.

The Romantic tradition is as much the “natural home” of the artists and poets as the Realist tradition is of the scientists and engineers. You might say that Romanticism gave us art, and Realism gave us science. But this would be stretching it too far, because there have been Realist artists and Romantic scientists — and like all useful binaries, it captures but one truth at the price of all the others.

But even as a self-identified Romantic, I’ve never quite known what to do about Love. I’ve always felt more comfortable with aesthetic arrest — with Beauty — and with rational pursuit — with Truth — than with emotional experience — with Love. If anything, I’ve avoided Love my whole life. In spite of my own self-sabotage, I managed to find myself in a few deeply romantic relationships with extraordinary individuals, which, inevitably, I mishandled. Looking back on those relationships now, I (ironically) think that one of my primary errors has been to think, instead of feel. Or rather to give primacy to thought over feeling. To not provide for myself the space to surface feelings, to investigate them and to examine their truth.

For it is my belief now that feelings do express truth. Put more Romantically, I believe that: Love expresses Truth; perhaps even, that Love contains higher Truths, that Truth itself can only bow to.

Perhaps a Realist might translate it this way: feelings and emotions are not irrational, but hyper-rational. They are dense packets. They are worthy of examination. Not just casual examination, but serious “scientific” examination. And not just worthy of scientific examination within the strict disciplines of neuroscience, bio-chemistry and psychology, but of the scientific attitude, the method, of asking questions, investigating assumptions, testing hypotheses, and developing theories.

Thankfully, I understood that a scientist is not just operating as a scientist running experiments in labs or preparing research for journals, but that, in his everyday life, the scientist embodies science. There’s an internalized wisdom gleaned from practicing that discipline, that way of thinking, and it slowly reaches other aspects of one’s life, including day-to-day behavior, and intimate feelings.

I’m also grateful that I allowed myself to think of myself, if not as a scientist, at least as a more or less “scientific” person. Scientists aren’t limited to “professional” science. I can be “scientific” about my startup.

Even as a Romantic, you see, I feel much more comfortable identifying as an amateur scientist than as an amateur poet. Before I could explain my feelings to myself poetically, I had to explain them to myself scientifically. So over the years I have slowly, gingerly, given myself permission to be scientific about my feelings. I started journaling. I started writing them down. I started asking myself questions. I started wondering. What if…?

And naturally, this has combined with my interest in philosophy, which has continued to blossom. Thinking philosophically is very different than thinking scientifically, and it gave me different tools, which were also very useful in constructing, deconstructing, and analyzing thoughts. But I eventually realized that these mental gymnastics can be applied to the heart, and even to the body; that these systems are connected, and that their connections can, to some extent, be mapped, explored and understood.

Crises of Love and Loss

There’s nothing like a crisis for forcing change. Personal growth would happen very slowly without crises, and inevitably, they come.

Going to college, starting my first company, my first serious romantic relationship — each of these came with its collection of crises and evolutions. I had to build then break, rebuild then rebreak, my “operating system” many times.

Crises can be logically analyzed. I kept myself busy with that. I avoided dealing with the intense emotional dimension, because I didn’t have the vocabulary to discuss it, or even, which is far more basic, awareness. I was not aware that these things I was dealing with were emotional. I was not aware that there was a vocabulary. I was not aware that I could get help, or from where.

A spring thaw, awareness came slowly and in stages. First I realized that I had emotions that I didn’t know how to deal with, and tried various ways of numbing them. Including, and perhaps most insidiously, “socially acceptable” addictions like working harder, innocent entertainment (say, Netflix), and thinking more (say, reading more books). Slowly, slowly the reading paid off, though, and in perhaps the most roundabout manner possible, I developed an emotional vocabulary, and figured out that I could help myself work through these problems.

In every crisis, you lose something that you love. At 27 years old, I have been through perhaps “more than my fair share” of crises. So I became familiar with this emotional cycle. I’ve loved and I’ve lost and I’ve loved and I’ve lost.

Escaping through detachment

A crisis cannot exist without feeling. If you don’t love anything, you can’t lose anything. If you don’t desire anything to be different than it is, there’s nothing wrong.

A crisis also cannot exist without belief. If you don’t believe a crisis is happening, a crisis is not happening. If you don’t define what is happening as a crisis, it is not a crisis. If you don’t think that things should be different, it is not a crisis.

These statements are tautologically valid. That is, they are true by definition. And yet for all their seemingly obvious simplicity, they took me a long time to reach, and are familiar to Buddhist, Stoic and other wisdom traditions.

Once I saw these “truths”, a solution presented itself: stop loving, stop wanting, stop believing. If I could just “let go of”, or deconstruct, all of my thoughts and feelings, beliefs and desires — then all of my problems would go away. This is the “thick skin” approach. I won’t let this get to me. I won’t let this get to me. I will keep it very far away from my mind, from my heart.

It worked for a while. And I am very grateful for the skills I learned in the process. How to ground myself, to meditate, balance my life, restructure commitments, control my thoughts, focus. And goodness, was it slow! The intellectual achievement of a realization is ever so far from embodiment.

Love conquers my defenses

It had been two years since my last romantic crisis, and six months since my last business crisis. As this New Year dawned, I was finally feeling a sense of stability, peace, and calm optimism I hadn’t felt in a while. All this detachment stuff must finally be working!

Then I met someone. Quickly fell in love. She didn’t fall in love back. We went on four dates. Nothing transpired. I wrote her a (almost certainly alarmingly excessive) poem. She wasn’t interested. The end.

Drama is besides the point, so I want to focus not on that story itself, which is rather straightforward, but on its spiritual significance for me.

I had built up quite an impressive array of defenses in order to maintain my state of Zen. I had prepared myself to rapidly process negative feelings, negative thoughts, and petty desires. I could endure physical pain, because I had eliminated pyschological “suffering”.

But of course, she came along. I felt immediate feelings for her. These feelings were not rational. But they were big, glorious, and demanded to be felt. Worse, they were positive. Even worse, they had nothing to do with sex. Worst of all, they had nothing to do with me at all!

Love conquered me by invading with maximum force that point in my defenses where I was weakest. I was prepared for negative, even for extremely negative. But extremely positive? I was prepared for normal, mundane, even tragic. But glorious? I was prepared for selfish desires. But selfless ones?

Unconditional love is truly devastating. It is “unjustified”, in that it isn’t “earned” by the other person; by virtue of which, they cannot “unearn” it. It requires no reciprocation; indeed, it just wants other’s happiness.

But it has assertive vitality. It is full of itself and demands to be felt; it is full of all things and demands all things to be felt. It demands passionate expression.

These feelings stirring inside me, I slowly realized that I was actively resisting them. My defense mechanisms had been surpressing emotion and denying expression for a long time. I had become so detached that I wasn’t letting myself feel things or share things with other people.

Triumphant authenticity

Last Sunday night, I sat down to write my last piece of the day. Instead of writing something analytical, I decided to write something loose. So I started a new post on Explosions.

Four hours later, a love poem has emerged. The process of writing it was so intense and pure. I emerged from it feeling triumphant and authentic; more truly honest with myself than I had been in a long time.

Retrospective

Date| Thursday, 20 July 2017

I am publishing the above AS IS.
I ran out of time — I think I fell asleep;
Then life happened — and I never finished this.
I’ll briefly wrap up the story.

I gave her the love letter.
Sent digitally.
I had thought to do it physically.
But I thought — “Too much”!
And I went for a midnight run.
I cried on that run.
I had never felt more honest in my life.
I had said what I felt.
I ran with the speed of Achilles reborn!
When I came back from that run I told myself…
“Whatever happens… remember this moment…
This is power. This is joy. This is freedom.
Stay here! Don’t let ANYBODY take you from this.”

She rejected it. “Too much” she said.
It hurt! You BET it hurt.
Of course.

But part of me didn’t even feel it.
Part of me rejoiced!
Part of me was set free!

I was expecting that.
I was ready for it.

Instead of beating me — it set me free.
It literally sent me out of orbit.
I decided not to give a fuck.
Not to stop writing.
The love I felt for her I just universalized.
Within a week I had published like 50 poems.
Even business emails I was writing in verse.

I remember FREESTYLE RAPPING!
While doing parkour and cartwheels
In between North Beach and Cow Hollow.

No drugs! A little bit of alcohol socially and one or two lattes a morning.
That’s it. And I even cut that out to bring me down.
Because I needed to come down.
My whole being was in such a state.

The whole cycle lasted nearly six weeks — of pure creativity
And it basically lasted after that.
There was no crash.
My brain has been altered

I write differently and think differently
And express differently and work differently.
But not by any psychedelic.

There is more I can say.
One of my friends had a psychic break because
By being in contact with me I set her free –
But she wasn’t ready to be in this state all the time!
And her unique brain just couldn’t handle it all at once.
So much I could say but I am moving on now…

We are a dot on the arrow of time –
The dot has never been at this place
Nor will it again
At every instant in time
You have something to express
Something to do
Do that thing

What is CALLING you to write?
Listen and respond to the call.
Abandon your ideas about what is “correct” to write.
What is correct is to incarnate the call — channel the voice.
As it is. Now. Go! No expertise required!
Say what you think!
Who gives a fuck what anyone else things?

In so doing you consummate a plan far more ancient and futuristic
Than you can possibly imagine.
You participate in an emergent intelligence.
Be an agent of the Tao.
Shine the light of Aeon.
If you have nothing left inside of you to share — THEN YOU HAVE ACCOMPLISHED IT
You are fully published… and you can return to the nothingness
The darkness of the Tao!

Publish until you have nothing more to say.
I dare you.

Order emerges from chaos. Correctness from expression approaching an asymptote by calculus.

How many squares does it take to fill a circle?
An infinite number.

Keep expressing and you will approximate the circle!
The circle is truth. The square represents this pixel in time.
Only you — only you, only now — can fulfill that destiny.

Imagine, imagine if this was the last sentence you would write…
What extra jewel would you leave behind — what would you left unsaid?
Don’t leave it unsaid!

Once you do this — you will fully confront your enormous fears…
And the hilarious social constructs we have set up…
That make expression wrong.

This is a good yoga, a good stretch
Lean into it and keep leaning in…

I am terrified after publishing what I know is my best work.
I doubt what I know is my best work — I wonder if it is my worst!
What is predictable and politically correct and easy to nod to…
That is boring and would have been said by someone else.
Say what you think no-one will appreciate or understand…
Say what you yourself barely understand…
Don’t say what you know, just — say what you don’t!
Say the unsayable, say the weirdness…
That is what is worth sharing…
For that is what is most unique to you!

And stop thinking about the static and mechanical
Be the dynamic force
And let it flow through you
If you let the muse take control of the wheel
She will drive you to a far better place
But first you must wrestle the angel
You must implore Athena’s aid
Otherwise they are furies.
Turn the Furies into the Eumenides.

You know why I didn’t publish this at first?
I was afraid. And I had a fixed idea of what this post should look like.
All in its right timing — I am not afraid now…
I haven’t even re-read it — just skimmed.
It was literally written by another person; that is, myself — months ago.
That other person deserves to be heard, deserves an audience.

The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the view of the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Health and Human Services, or the United States government.

Or me, for that matter.

Can you believe people write that crap?
Fucking lawyers, politicians and bureaucrats!
Wonder what would happen if they were muse-kissed.

Unleash the Furies!

Explosions: Poetry

Every poem, an explosion. Spirit moves through all beings who let it. Move through me!

)
Francis Pedraza

Written by

Is spirit moving?

Explosions: Poetry

Every poem, an explosion. Spirit moves through all beings who let it. Move through me!

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