Autumn has her cruelty.
I went to the woods and it shouted glory at me. Crimsons, blood-blue purples, fringey golds and a tinkling orange like an orange that is no other orange, an orange that is unbelievable except that it is millioned, and moving, and actually there. It’s actually there. It’s less that you are looking at it then that you’re inside it. It is all around you, so it has to be true.
At the same time I’m corresponding with people who are facing trouble. Big Trouble. I’ll say nothing about Israel and Palestine here; but they are here. It’s all right here.
Like a brazen hussy, I’ve been whispering about gratitude. I’ve been biting on earlobes. Trying to show a little leg.
Autumn is like that; both cruel and unspeakably lovely. These things do not preclude.
“The thing is,” I said, “hearts don’t actually break. We say that they do, we say it flippantly and often and everybody knows what we mean. But if we think about it, if we look and feel, it turns out nothing could be further from the truth.”
Show me yours; I’ll show you mine.
I said: “Heart’s don’t break; they gallop”.
I was thinking of the Veda, the poetic symbolism of a horse standing in for our life’s vitality, power, our senses and belly and strength. In Sanskrit, our Ayus.
Or maybe I was thinking of Silvia Plath: “I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.”
Or Ada Límon:
As if this big
dangerous animal is also a part of me,
that somewhere inside the delicate
skin of my body, there pumps
an 8-pound female horse heart,
giant with power, heavy with blood.
Don’t you want to believe it?
Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see
the huge beating genius machine
that thinks, no, it knows,
it’s going to come in first.”
It feels like your heart is broken. It seems so. But it isn’t true.
And this may be the problem: we feel, and things seem, but despite what we feel and how things seem, life is otherwise. One of the symptoms of “my heart is so broken” is alienation; a sense that we’re apart, a feeling as though we are seeing life through a pane of glass.
When the pain is personal, it’s as though life goes on for other people but not for us. Honesty tells us this isn’t so either. Calendar pages fly away like rustled leaves. Your back pain flares up. You fart. It’s Beckett’s awful “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” The agony of it. The insult.
Impersonal pain is awkward. A loud bang. An object you can’t find a place for. A rebuke.
“Your soul isn’t broken,” I told someone: “souls don’t break.”
“It feels like it has,” she answered.
And that’s the rub. I lift my skirt so that I can kneel.
“Let’s talk about being alive,” I say. I mean, roughly: let’s talk about gratitude.