More rooms than doors

it's not nostalgia it's something else

You ever just miss having ideas, that are pure ideas, and not opinions about other people’s ideas, or worse, opinions about opinions? You ever see a radio and get sad? You ever want to access the realm of pure thought, but can’t, because you’re overdrawn on agreeing and disagreeing?

I have been trying to discern whether my own brain is broken, or if I unwittingly hitched it to what feels like the failing CPU of whatever moment we’re in. There’s something luxurious about having your own crisis, insulated from the wider, frenzied absurdity of “culture.” I don’t want to blame Mercury, or the moon, or Tr*mp, or environmental collapse. I want something that’s mine, that I’m on the hook for, that only I can solve. Everything has started to sound the same or read the same or look the same to me: music, books, movies, clothing, everything. Here, everyone is speaking fluent Substackian, including me. “Essay voice” is becoming like “poet voice,” that timbre that announces that you’re part of something even as you strive to distinguish yourself. What happens when we’re given this white box, that makes it all of a kind?

I know that question has been answered, is continually being extrapolated. It’s fascinating to consider the market forces beneath modes of expression and the way, for example, language gets shaped by capitalism, much as it’s fascinating to learn how the accidental discovery of Prussian blue changed art history. You learn something and then see it everywhere. Obviously I’m not against the researching and sharing of trends and artifacts and watershed moments, the careful reading and analysis of texts, the way a book or body of work may speak so directly to a person that it gives way to another book or body of work; this is how it works, after all, this world that I’ve committed my life to. I’m not anti book review or cultural criticism (am I?). I’m just sad because a brave, hungry weirdo used to live inside of me, and I’m having a hard time finding her, and based on what I read [gestures wildly] everywhere, I’m wondering if other people’s inner freaks have gone MIA, too. Everybody’s stuff fits into this box, or boxes like it. I say this with not a little chagrin—my kids come at me swiftly if they get a whiff of ‘in my day’—but the internet did used to feel like the place for the runoff, the ooze, the stuff that wouldn’t fit elsewhere and didn’t belong anywhere. Now, the elsewhere and the here feel identical.

When ‘the best’ a writer can hope for ‘these days’ is having their book optioned for a show or movie on a highly mainstream platform, and every poet is writing a memoir hoping for same, and Miranda July has become the voice for menopausal women everywhere—this, to me, feels like the real singularity.

I’m not cranky; I’m sad. I feel like I submitted my voice to the collective, and in return I got everyone else’s voice. Do I want to hear my own voice again? Was there ever a voice at all? And I wonder if this panic is a failure not of imagination, but of discipline. Yiyun Li talked about this briefly during our last APS Together, of Graham Greene’s Monsignor Quixote, how everyone cites imagination as foremost in the life of an artist, but imagination is really the easy part, and sort of banal. Everyone has one. It’s something closer to science that can transfigure whatever that glop is into meaning but not just meaning—a truth that advances what truth can be. An invention comprised of cadence and texture, a precisely unlocked thing that exists once in the making, and then infinitely, no one’s and everyone’s. A rosary gets crafted once, prayed on thousands of times—I’m looking for that, in language.

I don’t want to get into an argument about what art is or isn’t; I know we’re all weary of that. But I still believe in transcendence, and look for it.

Once in the middle of a semester of graduate school, during a period in which I felt a different kind of exhaustion, I had a vision of a monastic learning experience in which everyone met in a cathedral, having done the assigned reading, and spread out in the pews, and said nothing at all, but focused on some aspect of what they’d read, held it in their mind, offered it silently to the group. No presenting or debating or interrupting, no verbalization of any kind. A group think that would be the opposite of groupthink. A sort of academic Quaker meeting.

And then of course, it keeps occurring to me: that cathedral has to exist within! This is Carver 101! This is Waiting for Godot! Do you know I live in a house with more rooms than doors, and for years I’ve wanted an office, a place to work that’s not in plain sight. Finally, I have one. We figured out how to enclose a space that seemed impervious to enclosure. This is going to change everything, I thought, stacking my books on the shelf, plugging in my pencil sharpener. Here we go, I thought. Outside my window, two chickens scratch and peck in the driveway of the house across the way. Same, I thought. Me, too, I thought. What would it be like to not know that it’s Saturday or January or 2025? Do I need a deep remembering, or a deep oblivion? Is there a place where those two things merge into one? My mother has dementia, and I am starting to forget what she was like before. In a way, that’s dementia, too.

Cousin Katharine, from Jean Stafford’s The Catherine Wheel, which Emily gave to me, which feels like a perfect book about time, refusal, and anxiety, equal parts riveting plot and ecstatic philosophy:

She grappled for the lost time, for the interplay of learned wit, for music as music had sounded then. She hunted, in the hollow of the present time, for the sensations that had once enlivened her on such an evening as this before a party…

Am I suffering from too much yes, or too much no? Obviously I’m not looking for answers; I don’t think there’s anything left to wring out of these old questions. A new year feels like the right time to ask new ones. Maybe I am deadeningly found, and ready to get lost again.