Not likely. At this point in Hurting all we know is that we've had enough, and we're too defensive and confused to do much about it. So instead of radically changing the big things in our lives, we usually opt for making last-ditch efforts to change the superficial things. Maybe if we tightened our torso, we'd feel more in control, so it's off to Pilates class. Maybe if those frown lines disappeared, we'd feel less anxious, so it's off to the BOTOX doc. Like the girlchild in Marge Piercy's “Barbie Doll,” we run “to and fro apologizing” to ourselves for not being the person we always dreamed we'd be. As if we're offering one last desperate sacrifice to the God of Happiness, we cut off our noses to spite ourselves. There, I've done everything I can, we think. Now give me a better life!
And when no better life materializes, we truly fall into the kind of despair William Butler Yeats describes in “The Second Coming.” We can't fix ourselves, we decide, because everything falls apart—our bodies, our lives, the world. No center holds anything together; it's all anarchy. So why bother trying to be the “beauty of the world, the paragon of animals,” why bother trying to be some perfect Gap person in a shiny little Pottery Barn life? Like Hamlet, we tell ourselves there's no point. The world is nothing but a “foul and pestilent congregation of vapors,” and we amount to nothing but a “quintessence of dust.”
Okay, fine then, you think. I'll stop trying to please everyone else. I'll stop blaming myself for everything wrong in my life. I'll stop worrying about the misery of the world. Who needs any of it, anyway—the sea and trees, red ripe tomatoes, office blowhards, artsy posers? As poet Deborah Garrison eloquently says, “Fuck them all” (“Fight Song”). Or as poet Etheridge Knight more delicately puts it, “fuck/the whole mothafucking thing” (“Feeling Fucked Up”).
So! Terrific! The Hurting poets have done such a good job of expressing all your sorrow and outrage that here you are feeling like a one big F-word piece of dust. This is supposed to make you feel better?
Well, we think it's a start—at least you're acknowledging your pain. It's real, and it hurts, and you're sick of it. The trick is how to move on from here.
What you don't want to do is stay trapped in this fuck-you frame of mind. If you isolate and alienate yourself from the world, you'll become the creature in Stephen Crane's “The Heart,” squatting in a desert of your own making (like an angry loser on Survivor). Sure things were bad before when you were sitting in that cold graveyard or being pelted by the freezing rain—but is this really an improvement? You've felt frustrated in your efforts to evolve into a fulfilled, happy person, but did you really mean to devolve into this—a naked, bestial monster eating its own bitter heart out?
Of course not. Ultimately what you want is what the speaker in Knight's poem is pining for—something and someone to love, so that “[your] soul can sing.” Allow yourself to rant—fuck ‘em all—but then get out of Hurting, fast. If you want to love life again, you'll need that heart of yours, and the less bitter, the better.
Love
She tries it on, like a dress.
She decides it doesn't fit,
and starts to take it off.
Her skin comes, too.
LOLA HASKINS
Fulfillment
For this my mother wrapped me warm,
And called me home against the storm,
And coaxed my infant nights to quiet,
And gave me roughage in my diet,
And tucked me in my bed at eight,
And clipped my hair, and marked my weight,
And watched me as I sat and stood:
That I might grow to womanhood
To hear a whistle and drop my wits
And break my heart to clattering bits.
DOROTHY PARKER
We Don't Know How
to Say Goodbye
We don't know how to say goodbye,
We wander on, shoulder to shoulder
Already the sun is going down
You're moody, and I am your shadow.
Let's step inside a church, hear prayers, masses for the dead
Why are we so different from the rest?
Outside in the graveyard we sit on a frozen branch.
That stick in your hand is tracing
Mansions in the snow in which we will always be together.
ANNA AKHMATOVA
(Trans. Stanley Kunitz)
Worked Late
on a Tuesday Night
Again.
Midtown is blasted out and silent,
drained of the crowd and its doggy day.
I trample the scraps of deli lunches
some ate outdoors as they stared dumbly
or hooted at us career girls—the haggard
beauties, the vivid can-dos, open raincoats aflap
in the March wind as we crossed to and fro
in front of the Public Library
Never thought you'd be one of them,
did you, little lady?
Little Miss Phi Beta Kappa,
with your closetful of pleated
skirts, twenty-nine till death do us
part! Don't you see?
The good schoolgirl turns thirty,
forty, singing the song of time management
all day long, lugging the briefcase
home. So at 10:00 P.M.
you're standing here
with your hand in the air,
cold but too stubborn to reach
into your pocket for a glove, cursing
the freezing rain as though it were
your difficulty. It's pathetic,
and nobody's fault but
your own. Now
the tears,
down into the collar.
Cabs, cabs, but none for hire.
I haven't had dinner; I'm not half
of what I meant to be.
Among other things, the mother
of three. Too tired, tonight,
to seduce the father.
DEBORAH GARRISON
Crumbling Is Not
an Instant's Act
Crumbling is not an instant's Act
A fundamental pause
Dilapidation's processes
Are organized Decays.
‘Tis first a Cobweb on the Soul
A Cuticle of Dust
A Borer in the Axis
An Elemental Rust—
Ruin is formal—Devil's work
Consecutive and slow—
Fail in an instant, no man did
Slipping—is Crash's law.
EMILY DICKINSON
Thursday, 11:00 A.M.
At the periodontist,
I always read
what they have.
It says here:
mothers of adolescents
are often
pessimists
(wild with S.A.D.
and November light).
The book of
dental doom
suggests that
if I go on
as I have,
not flossing,
on aimless watch
for the spring,
I might easily
outlive my teeth.
ELIZABETH ASHVÉLEZ
The Pear
There is a moment in middle age
when you grow bored, angered
by your middling mind,
afraid.
That day the sun
burns hot and bright,
making you more desolate.
It happens subtly, as when a pear
spoils from the inside out,
and you may not be aware
until things have gone too far.
JANE KENYON
Barbie Doll
This girlchild was born as usual
and miniature GE stoves and irons
and wee lipsticks the color of cherry candy.
Then in the magic of puberty, a classmate said:
You have a great big nose and fat legs.
She was healthy, tested intelligent,
possessed strong arms and back,
abundant sexual drive and manual dexterity.
She went to and fro apologizing.
Everyone saw a fat nose on thick legs.
She was advised to play coy,
exhorted to come on hearty,
exercise, diet, smile and wheedle.
Her good nature wore out
like a fan belt.
So she cut off her nose and her legs
and offered them up.
In the casket displayed on satin she lay
with the undertaker's cosmetics painted on,
a turned-up putty nose,
dressed in a pink and white nightie.
Doesn't she look pretty? everyone said.
Consummation at last.
To every woman a happy ending.
MARGE PIERCY
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of “Spiritus Mundi”
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Hamlet II.ii. 270–279
I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension, how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet, tome, what is this quintessence of dust?
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Fight Song
Sometimes you have to say it:
Fuck them all.
Yes fuck them all—
the artsy posers,
the office blowhards
and brown-nosers;
Fuck the type who gets the job done
and the type who stands on principle;
the down-to-earth and understated;
the overhyped and underrated;
Get a bullshit detector.
Client's mum?
Up your bum.
You can't be nice to everyone.
When your back is to the wall
When they don't return your call
When you're sick of saving face
When you're screwed in any case
Fuck culture scanners, contest winners,
subtle thinkers and the hacks who offend them;
people who give catered dinners
and (saddest of sinners) the sheep who attend them—
which is to say fuck yourself
and the person you were: polite and mature,
a trooper for good. The beauty is
they'll soon forget you
and if they don't
they probably should.
DEBORAH GARRISON
Feeling Fucked Up
Lord she's gone done left me done packed/up and split
and I with no way to make her
come back and everywhere the world is bare
bright bone white crystal sand glistens
dope death dead dying and jiving drove
her away made her take her laughter and her smiles
and her softness and her midnight sighs—
Fuck Coltrane and music and clouds drifting in the sky
fuck the sea and trees and the sky and birds
and alligators and all the animals that roam the earth
fuck marx and mao fuck fidel and nkrumah and
democracy and communism fuck smack and pot
and red ripe tomatoes fuck joseph fuck mary fuck
god jesus and all the disciples fuck fanon nixon
and malcolm fuck the revolution fuck freedom fuck
the whole muthafucking thing
all i want now is my woman back
so my soul can sing
ETHERIDGE KNIGHT
The Heart
In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.”
STEPHEN CRANE
Hiding
WHEN YOU
SHUT DOWN
So you're miserably lonely and bitter, and you can't even believe this is who you've become—you never meant to end up Ms. Utterly Hurting. You always thought maybe you'd wind up more like Ms. Happily Ever After (post-feminist), some Lisa Simpson-meets-Madonna combination of smart little achiever turned sexy bad girl ruling the world turned married mom of two kids with cool names.
But no, here you are, wounded from disappointments you never imagined. All you know is you can't spend one more Thanksgiving with your fractured family, or one more year in your pressure-cooker cubicle, or one more decade losing people to death, distance, or domestic bliss (theirs, of course). You can't and you won't. You simply refuse to set yourself up for more letdowns, more pain.
So you hunker down tight in your little fortress, like Jodie Foster in Panic Room. You've got your Entire History of the Blues CDs, your two-year-old pile of unread New Yorker magazines, your collection of Thai take-out menus, your new interest in needlepoint—who needs family or friends when you've got all this to keep you happy, right? You put yourself in emotional storage— Rosie O'Donnell calls it “bubble-wrapping” your heart—until it's safe to come out again, if ever.
This is Hiding—when you pull back from the world, almost daring it to find you and hurt you again. You decline invitations, stop calling friends back, do the minimum at work (but always act tremendously busy)—in general, you push every-one away, halfway hoping they'll leave you alone in your misery, and halfway hoping they'll stick with you and somehow break the spell of your unhappiness. You're like the worst kind of adolescent—a sullen, door-slamming creature of darkness who secretly dreams of being Prom Queen.
In “Red Onion, Cherries, Boiling Potatoes, Milk—,” Jane Hirshfield warns us that when you become like this, “a soul, accepting nothing,” you're in real danger of starving yourself. In Hiding we're like stubborn children, refusing everything, the delicious peaches as well as the nasty boiled potatoes and dry toast. We confuse sulking with “holding out for better.” “No,” we say, pursing our lips. No, we won't meet our friend-across-the-hall's-brother for drinks, and No, we won't join the office softball team. Too bad if that means we're saying no to the possibility of lo
ve or even just fun. Like the cut flowers that refuse to drink, we'd rather shrivel up and die than expose ourselves to the possibility of pain again.
But the heart sees what's really going on here, says Hirshfield. Even though we do our best to keep it at a great distance, the heart remains alert and tries to keep us from becoming like the speaker in Philip Larkin's “Wants,” who desires only oblivion. Locked away in our safe rooms, we tell ourselves we're not missing a thing out there in the world. It's all a sham—invitation-cards to dull parties and other people's weddings, dinners, meetings, “the artful tensions of the calendar.” Who cares if Christmas is coming and then, relentlessly, New Year's Eve-and-no-date? Even sex seems to lack passion and intimacy; they're all just following “printed directions,” or so you like to think, basing that generalization on your last long-ago experience with the seemingly attractive bicycle messenger. Everyone just pretends to be happy, they fake that pose of contentment in the family “photographed under the flagstaff.” But you see all this for what it is—little activities to distract ourselves from the coming of death. You'd rather face it alone—hiding behind your triple-locked door, watching endless reruns of Seinfeld, teaching your cat to come when you call.
But deep down some part of you is still affected by beauty. You know that you are being childish and stubborn. You know that this lockdown is a conscious choice you are making. As Wang Wei suggests in “Returning to My Cottage,” you still hear the “faraway bells echo in the valley.” When you get up to open the window or change the channel, you hear laughter from your neighbor's dinner party, you hear doors opening and shutting as people come home and go out. The sky and the evening breeze still beckon to you. You consider calling up some friends and going out, but then the fear takes over. Why go out? Why try? You'll only be crushed again. A simple Wednesday evening begins to seem dark and somber, so you give up, “go in and bar the door.”