Stuck

The last couple of days I've been moving my office, combining my books and papers from two locations into one:  whereas I used to have my desk and biblical studies texts in mine and Nancy's cottage and my organizational and leadership studies (less used than my biblical texts) in the workshop, now both are combined in my new office space in the building formerly known as my daughter's cottage.  Next up, I'll go up to our storage facility and get boxes of goodies such as feminist studies and liberation theology, subjects I first studied in 1983 but have used little since, though I still have the (old and outdated now) texts and still display them proudly.  I remember at my ten-year high school reunion (that would be 1988) how I delighted in shocking my old classmates with "liberation theology" and my plans to write a book about "Jesus the revolutionary."  I'm looking at the shelf space I've reserved for those unused texts right now.

While going through my papers, I came upon a poetry collection I put together 'way back in the Summer of 1982, the summer I spent in New Orleans with Nancy before my senior year in college, the summer I studied Old Testament and English Literature at Loyola, and Nancy and I played racquetball on Loyola's courts.  I tried to get some poems published that summer, unsuccessfully, and eventually (by July, actually) I stopped writing and learned how to bake bagels and cook Chinese food.  But today, re-reading those poems, I was struck by how similar one is to the one I posted here under the heading "Suicidal Tendencies," the older of which I reproduce for you exactly as I wrote it on 4-3-82:

i stand

from

a great height

staring

at

the ground

i

stiffen

slicing regretfully

through

the air

breaking and shattering

then die

i stare

at

the ground

from

a great height

and

a black

yawning

void

stared back

just as intently

If you can get past the presumptuous lower case "i" and the confusion of tenses in the second verse(?) ("stare" vs. "stared"), or the staccato line (what was I thinking?) or the question of whether this is a poem at all, I'm sure you'll recognize (a) the similarity to the more recent poem and (b) the same suicidal tone.  I find it shocking to handle a piece of paper I typed on thirty years ago and find thereon evidence that my thoughts have changed so little in the interval.  I get the feeling that I'm stuck in some way, unable to grow, like a bug in a piece of amber . . . no, that's not quite right.  It's like I'm stuck in one of those snowglobes, in a makeshift office vignette, me alone at a desk made out of an old door, surrounded by amateurish shelves and second-hand furniture, pretending to work on astonishing, insightful prose, awash in academic excellence (Maryville, U. of Chicago, Yale, Emory, Princeton), when in reality I'm cataloging the same artificial snow flakes lying around in the same, predictable heaps, coating the scene unconvincingly in a faux romance.  The truth is, I have not grown a lick in thirty years, I'm still just as stuck ruminating on the same existential issues in tired, trite verse and all my experience and education have not led me beyond a childish, "I don't want to die."

Look, depression engulfed me in 1979 and shook my world mercilessly, and the patterns of falling faux snow were new and intriguing, but bit by bit they grew too predictable as my world was shaken less and less, and less severely, so that today I feel like that globe is covered in dust, unshaken, sitting on a shelf somewhere little noticed with me inside railing repetitiously.  Honestly, through this blog I'm trying to rock the globe (my little vignette, not the earth), to jolt it off the shelf so that it falls and shatters, even if that means spilling me stickily across the floor.  Maybe I'm waiting on one of you to seize this tacky, nostalgic trifle and hurl it against a wall, daring to injure the occupant in setting him free.  However it happens, I want to be free, not pain-free or depression-free (I'm resigned that I'll always be depressed) but stasis-free, alive and growing so that the next thirty years resembles the woeful repetition of these prior not at all.  I find the thought horrible that I will be trolling the net thirty years hence and find my writing and thoughts as closely resemble those in this post as do those in these two poems.  That will truly be a wasted life.  Thank you for reading.