I wasn't ready at all to say anything about anything interesting.
In lieu of a Sunday Mourning post (again): my thoughts and my feelings. Plus, a little shout out to Mary Oliver.
There was no Sunday Mourning post because yesterday, I was sitting in the dirt and watching Patti Smith. I also haven’t been reading or listening to anything on repeat, so I don’t have anything to rehash. But, I do have big feelings on this muggy August day, and the need to sit at my dining room table with a fresh cup of coffee at hand.
On August 13, 2022, I got on a plane with two suitcases and moved to San Francisco. I’ve already discussed my feelings of uneasiness about living here — just the general dread of feeling like I’m breaking into my skin and trying to convince myself to fully exist in this city. I feel like I’m losing my mind all while becoming more accepting of life. It feels like my tenderness is so petulant, my child-like wonder needs to grow out of me. The other day I was talking to a friend and I said that I feel like people can look at me and just know that I don’t have my shit together. She laughed and said, “I think you’re the only person I know who does.” We went over all the ways why I think I don’t versus her thinking I do: I live in a studio rather than a proper apartment (you can afford to live alone in San Francisco), I have to work two jobs (you have such hard work ethic), I haven’t gone to a proper university (you have three degrees and two certifications of completion), etc. and it ended with her saying that she would never have put money on how negatively I view myself because I wear my confidence so well. A true method actor. We both agreed the true issue is that I don’t ever feel fully satisfied with life and nothing more. “But like, you don’t have your shit together.”
I get in my head about everything, and I believe that’s why I feel so deeply. I cannot just like things, I have to love them. I cannot just have friends, I have to be in love with them. I can’t just be okay with life, I have to want more. I find it exhausting most days. Not too long ago, I was on the phone with Chiara and she told me she admires how much I allow myself to feel, without any restrictions. It was during that phone call that I realized how my natural need to obsess over everything is also why I am able to get over things rather fast (it can also be my unmedicated BPD but who’s to tell?).
My talk with Chiara made me think of one of the last conversations I had with Sergio, because why? Well, everything is a reference of a reference of a reference, of course (even this, I think that is pretty meta of me). He told me that what drew him to me the most was how I speak “No one else that I know can intellectualize what you think and feel the way you do. You speak so elegantly and with passion.” When we were much younger and drunk he said something about that — how the way I speak is intimidating. It is something I’ve heard many times in life, whether genuinely or mockingly. When people start commenting on the way I phrase something, ask for a definition of a word, or ask me to use simple words, there is a pit in my stomach. I want to speak how I speak, and I want it to be left alone. Now, please understand that I don’t see myself with such a high vocabulary or with much intelligence, I just have a lot of passion.
But I often think about Chiara telling me that I make her cry every birthday because my words are beautiful, and how she gets on me about writing more. Marino tells me that I have the ability to put into words things he cannot. My journalism professor encouraged me to stick with writing. Laura told me that she reads everything in my voice and that it’s not an easy task. John told me to not give up on my dreams of being a writer.
It’s all so kind, but I don’t have it in me to be as kind to myself as they all are. I am always devouring the words Paola told me when we were eighteen and fighting “You’ll never be a writer.” And how I described the weather a few weeks ago, she commented “How poetic and deep. Just say it’s sunny.”
I’m not as confident as I seem and many things get under my skin (but also, many things don’t) — some things I cannot get over, no matter how many years have passed.
I have a habit of picking at wounds and wondering why I never heal.
I’ve been thinking about Mary Oliver lately. I reread her book Devotions every year, I cling to it because it made me fall back in love with poetry, and it was the last book she published before passing away. Her death still saddens me. She is just as polarizing as ever because she believed in God and wrote a lot about him and she wrote often about the violence of the world. Her poems are simple, yet she has managed to gain notoriety. I believe that Oliver succeeded at living on the margins of her lines and the space between words. She understood the delicacy and beauty of simplicity and occupied as much space as she could without getting too lost in her words. For The New Yorker, Journalist Ruth Franklin wrote a beautiful and in-depth piece on the criticism of Mary Oliver titled “What Mary Olivers Critics Don’t Understand.” I recommend reading it, or anything by Ruth Franklin for that matter. Oliver is inspired by poets such as Rumi and Rainer Maria Rilke (aren’t we all), and when comparing Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” and Oliver’s “The Swan,” Franklin wrote, “In keeping with the American impulse toward self-improvement, the transformation Oliver seeks is both simpler and more explicit. Unlike Rilke, she offers a blueprint for how to go about it. Just pay attention, she says, to the natural world around you—the goldfinches, the swan, the wild geese. They will tell you what you need to know. With a few exceptions, Oliver’s poems don’t end in thunderbolts. Theirs is a gentler form of moral direction.” This beautifully sums up my opinion of why Mary Oliver was a successful poet.
The poem that I keep reciting in my head like a mantra is “Dogfish.” I wasn’t going to post the whole poem, just my favorite bits, but I want to share the poem in all of its wonderful glory. All the bold parts are the parts of the poem that mean the most to me
Some kind of relaxed and beautiful thing
kept flickering in with the tide
and looking around.
Black as a fisherman’s boot,
with a white belly.If you asked for a picture I would have to draw a smile
under the perfectly round eyes and above the chin,
which was rough
as a thousand sharpened nails.And you know
what a smile means,
don’t you?*
I wanted the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,whoever I was, I was
alive
for a little while.*
It was evening, and no longer summer.
Three small fish, I don’t know what they were,
huddled in the highest ripples
as it came swimming in again, effortless, the whole body
one gesture, one black sleeve
that could fit easily around
the bodies of three small fish.*
Also I wanted
to be able to love. And we all know
how that one goes,
don’t we?Slowly
*
the dogfish tore open the soft basins of water.
*
You don’t want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don’t want to tell it, I want to listento the enormous waterfalls of the sun.
And anyway it’s the same old story – – –
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in
this world.*
And look! look! look! I think those little fish
better wake up and dash themselves away
from the hopeless future that is
bulging toward them.*
And probably,
if they don’t waste time
looking for an easier world,they can do it.
Mostly I want to be kind. The line chokes me up every time.
As I mentioned in the introduction, I saw Patti Smith. I want to discuss this in-depth, but I feel like I’m still processing yesterday. In true Patti fashion, she started off by reciting “Sunflower Sutra,” by Allen Ginsberg. “we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery.” She covered Bob Dylan’s “One Two May Morings” and she cried while singing. This has been one of my favorite Dylan songs for a little over a decade. I always thought it sounded like a song (lyrically at least), that Leonard Cohen would have created (Dylan and Cohen do strike a resemblance to one another). Toward the end of her set, I mentioned to the group I was with that if we were closer, I probably would have cried. I was pleased that I hadn’t cried. Then, I broke when she began to cry while singing “After the Gold Rush” by Neil Young. To be honest, I learned of this song from her 2012 album Banga because she has a studio recording of the cover. Right when she finished singing the song, she said “Oh, I miss him.” Patti Smith is so tender-hearted, so earnest, so full of emotion. Big Patti Smith fan over here, which I’m sure you have gathered by now. Side note: I haven’t found anything to confirm my theory but, I’m 100 percent convinced Young’s melody and even some lyrics went into making Via Chicago by Wilco.
After the show, I couldn’t help but talk more about Patti Smith. Her time at CBGB, Just Kids, “Roman Holiday.” The whole time I was talking, I kept replaying the image in my head of when I talking about The National/Mike Mills, and one person had a look of boredom on their face while scrolling through their phone. I can’t let that image go. “I have a habit of picking at wounds and wondering why I never heal.” I ended my passionate rant by apologizing and everyone kindly told me they were interested in what I was saying.
I lent my copy of Just Kids to Maya (person, not dog) and while handing it to her, I remembered that there is a piece of Morrisey’s shirt smashed in the pages of the book because, in 2017, I brought the book with me when I traveled to San Francisco to see him at a venue up the street from where I’m currently living.
A full circle moment.
-A.