living in the wreckage

Twenty minutes before midnight on Tuesday, I handed in the final project for my last graduate school class. I don’t remember feeling relief, exactly; I just wanted to go to bed, which I did. The next morning I got the kids to school, went for a run, and then, at last, felt the weariness I had been keeping at bay for days if not weeks. I need a break, but the kids still need to be gotten to school and fed, and I need to eat, too, and I have two jobs to take care of, and so on. So no break, not yet.

“And so on” includes dealing with the mess that has piled up in the apartment over the past weeks, months, and years, while we have attended to other matters, such as surviving a pandemic. The mess is made of unfiled paperwork, drafts of unfinished poems and essays, toys the kids outgrew long ago, random things out of place or that have never really had a place, and, now that my father has sold and moved out of his home, several boxes of things from my childhood that I haven’t looked at or even thought about for decades. The mess is a product of exhaustion, overwhelm, and neglect, and it is a place where I hide myself from myself.

For years we have been living in the wreckage of abandoned projects, unmade decisions, old selves, and it is time now to clear it all out, which means actually facing the wreckage, which means feeling the feelings I’ve been keeping from myself about those projects, decisions, and selves. I keep imagining that there is a way to bypass those feelings. For example, I imagine that as long as I anticipate and understand that I will feel bad, then I won’t actually feel bad. In reality, what happens is that I find myself in a close-to-tearful rage while cleaning up the cat’s litterbox, and for a moment I am surprised, and then I recognize what’s going on. There they are, my bad feelings. Recognizing them for what they are doesn’t make them go away, but it does at least loosen their hold on me.

I am also, it seems, attempting to sublimate those feelings—specifically, through poetry, even more specifically, through “Diving into the Wreck” by Adrienne Rich. I love how in this poem she portrays civilization not as a grand ediface, but as a submerged shipwreck. One does not climb up to it, as toward the Acropolis, but dive down into it.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth . . .

There is damage to see, there are treasures that prevail. All the same, these words—wreck, damage, treasures—will not protect me from whatever I find myself feeling when I actually see them—the wreck and not the story of the wreck.