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

[maryread.livejournal.com]

thanks for that.

i have come up against that reconciling paradoxes thing right prompt, while writing on my Content Thing again. i've pushed at it until i stopped, some kinda roadblock, immobility, and noticed it's not enough fun, and there has got to be some fun, otherwise no point in going there. i'll be looking for at least the absurdity amongst the bleakness, and trying to think of other people who might be on the same page with me.

[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.

[alces2.livejournal.com]

Excuse me, just a second, just have to scream to the side here. No problem. I must say that I get really, really frustrated when someone says, oh I have something really huge that happened but I'm not going to tell you. I think my preference would be to not even hear mention of said event since my curiosity is a horrible giant monster and it will be banging at the bars of the cage for hours, wondering, wondering, wondering. Even if it has absolutely nothing to do with me. Never mind.

Feeling about the election have become even more complicated? All said in forums where I don't exist. Bang goes the bars, bang again.

The only thing I have anything at length to talk about for the whole thing is about math and I'll wander off where I shouldn't. I was first generation college. However I studied i (square root of -1) in, hm, either high school or maybe junior high. I was in advanced math classes in junior high and high school, My various college entrance exams provided me with credits for a number of semesters of math. Even then I took many semesters of math for electrical engineering. Math, imaginary or otherwise, was never a problem. Don't know why I never had a problem with i. Admittedly I haven't had much of a problem with me either except for the silly part about having no particular drive to get beyond a certain point. Basically I'm a slacker with high math and science skills and I even know how to pronounce nuclear, that is to say my ability in English is also not particularly atrocious. See, I told you I shouldn't have gone here.

And if we delve into opposites there is a thing called shadow work in an extracurricular area in which I am involved and I do have a hard time there for I feel no shadows inside me. Oh, I suppose I have some opposites but they don't pull me apart. They don't even bother me very much. What I am I am. What exists within me and in the world is. I function in the world and I don't feel too much angst about the whole thing. Or do I? I don't feel the need to talk to people much but once in a great a while I'll put down a long string of stupid, strung-together meaningless blather. However, as noted, I usually keep it well-tethered, whereas most do not. At times, my loss, I suppose. Again, I don't worry about it too much for any great length of time.

Unfortunately that stupid curiosity monster is still banging against the bars.