Note To Self
Notice a door on an invisible wall then open the door, walk through. On the other side is another world where you are not totally sane.
Shut the door. Go all the way in and stand there in the open.
Feel exposed in the most unattractive way possible, that’s to say naked in a parking lot kicking thoughtlessly at the air.
An uneasy crowd gathers around you. Be there, in the middle of all those people, without language or anything that can explain away your body. Stop faking.
Notice how everyone is of the same mind that is trying with language to take apart whatever it is they think they see. See, at this moment, that you cannot be taken apart. See how this makes everyone uncomfortable.
Think about that. Discover your brain.
*
Your brain, that is like a house. Your parents are in the next room. Your sister is on the sofa. And you are still small enough to wiggle into the crawl space where it is impossible to figure out where you are.
Think of the crawl space that is your brain. Pull at the loose insulation in the center of your eyeball. Recall the cold dust coagulating between the door and a cable box. Bear in mind the drips of water from the ceiling to the floor. You don’t know how small you are but you know there is always too much of your body.
Judgment is constant. It is living into four walls and a ceiling. It is continuing in the narrative of crawl space. The electrical wire is hooked from the cable box to your eyes to the very old reason you are the way you are, your arms wrapped around the neck of immense quiet.
Silence has hurt you.
I wish there was a language drawn up from the feeling of a rug being pulled from beneath your feet. I wish you could comprehend into the face of hideous loss. I wish I could tell you what happens when you die.
But you know. How can you not know? You curl up and try to become every kind of five by five foot space — so restricted in your thinking.
*
How about you forget thinking. Come back to indescribability in the parking lot. How about you touch your foot to bewilderment. Walk barefoot over it. Feel it split between your toes and into the same wrong emotions you’ve had your whole life.
Thoughts are just thoughts, they can be anything you want them to be. Let’s make them a bird or a peach or a tornado siren. I’ve learned there is no imagination in despair.
Now don’t move, stay perfectly still. Everything is beginning and the beginning is easy enough when you welcome mystery back into your shoulder blades. Draw silence into a simple circle. Make it uncomplicated.
Divide it in half and then in half again and into another shape that fits nicely inside your imagination. The world will come back to you. You will know it when it happens. It will be too hard for you to explain.
| Ginna Luck |
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levelheaded: Note To Self
We’d like to try and describe our experience of reading Ginna Luck’s “Note to Self” in a manner that relates to the poem’s form and language. Here goes.
We walk through a door into imagination. We shut the door so we can’t come back. We see a person, naked, seems out of control (perhaps faking) as a crowd gathers around.
This person – they cannot be taken apart, they cannot be dissolved through analysis. The situation calls for us to dig deeper, open a door and step into an undiscovered part of our brain, a different kind of thinking.
*
Now deeper inside our brain, we see a different image. Rooms, furniture, family. That is a setting, but we can’t truly place ourselves.
We’re alone with our thoughts. There’s some tension, uncertainty in what makes our brain, and how intact the pieces are.
We can see ourselves. We are judgmental, the awareness to which allows us to stop being so. We see who we are and why. We are empathetic, silent.
Silence has hurt us. That maybe have been a long time ago, or ongoing for years.
Comprehension, meaning; they cannot be supplied. Even description is slippery.
Are all the answers already there? Have we always known? Are we caging ourselves?
*
Description and thought are contradictory. Sensation leads to emotion when it shouldn’t.
The poet is assigning meaningless to imagination, too. It’s not real. Despair is.
Trying to simplify. A circle is the most even shape. If we don’t move we might find the nothing we’re looking for.
We are to make smaller pieces. Fragments are easier to deal with. We are out that door we opened. We know; the poet knows too. The poem is all we are given but we are given the poem.
*
That was fun, and powerful. Reading through the poem is following instructions. The imperative mood creates authority, keeps us grounded and encourages us to experience and to stay present. This is a case where trying to interpret the actual happennings the poem takes the reader through – it seems too private. We wouldn’t want to force ours on others. The parking lot, the kicking, the sister, the sofa, the cable box, the electrical wire, the hideous loss – we can guess – roles, connections, synopsis – but that feels wrong for a poem that so directly wishes each reader to find it in their own brain.
It’s a nice tension – the poem being a “Note To Self” hence written for the poet before it is for the reader. But then again the speaker is talking to “you” the entire time, and the “I” jumps in late, creates some distance between the pronouns. The “you” is the self but it also isn’t.
It’s hard to explain the world. It comes back to each of us a different way. If one is to try, walking through imaginary brain doors is as good an exercise as any.
– The Editors
