Channeling other voices

[randy_byers]

Has my writing here become less personal? Probably the most interesting personal story I have to tell of late is something I'd have to Friends-lock and perhaps even filter, and I just don't want to get that complicated. Instead I wrote it in an e-mail letter to Sharee, who is locked and filtered by the sea. Meanwhile, feelings about the election have already gotten even more complicated, and that's as it should be. There is no easy way to resolve the paradoxes. I've said pretty much all I have to say (which wasn't much) in other forums, so for now I'll just point to another poetry discussion over at Ta-Nehisi Coates' place. The poem is "Victims of the Latest Dance Craze" by Cornelius Eady. Here's a snippet that could be about the election:

And in a factory,
A janitor asks his broom
For a waltz,
And he grasps it like a woman
He'd have to live another
Life to meet,
And he spins around the dust bin
And machines and thinks:
Is everybody happy?

But then there's the comments section, and this meditation by someone who signs himself (assuming it's a he) zackboston:

I was first generation college and like many came out of a home filled with wretching and multiple forms of pain tied to what my family experienced as immigrants and their helplessness turned to rage in the face of that. I took solace in mathematics because unlike my life, in mathematics you could describe a problem and actually solve the problem and there was a right answer and a wrong answer.

That was a comfort to me until I faced a course in complex variables where you worked in a space that involved numbers that were the square root of -1 --- some people call it "imaginary numbers." In this space, there were no lines, only circles. I always experienced math on an emotional and spiritual level. So this was a crisis of the spirit for me. What happens when the poles disappear --- when there is no right and no wrong for instance? I took that class three times and got the highest grade in the class until we came to that proof and then I abruptly dropped out. It looked like I would never graduate with my engineering degree becasue of this class.

And in one of those interventions that change your life, someone explained to me about reconciling paradoxes and got me to work with that in my life. To strive to imagine how the pain of my life could be unspeakable but also be the greatest gift and source of joy in my life. I used to have a spoken word poem on my wall over my desk that had this tremendous image of a broken woman who is faced with a broken high voltage wire and she takes one end in each hand and becomes the conduit of power. That's how the work of reconciling opposites felt to me, but it also healed me enough to function in this world.

Comments

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

That's beautiful, the poem and the comment you quoted both.

If you ever publish a book of essays, you should call it Mathematics, Paradoxes, Poetry. Even (perhaps especially) if there's nothing of mathematics, paradoxes, or poetry in it. It's just three words that are unexpected yet beautiful together.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Well, I'd have to write some essays before I could publish a book of them, but yeah, I liked the combination of those words too.