b e c a l m e d (1)

I wonder if everyone who has the luxury of self-examination sometimes feels like this? Like they've just woken up from a dream of their own life, where they've been occupying their body's space, but not truly living? As if they're just drifting, a boat with no engine, driven whichever way the tide and swells take them. Powerless and hollowed out.

I was looking back at the notebook I took away with me on holiday to Poland and Germany, and which somebody has been writing in -- maybe me, maybe some fictional character. It doesn't start off very well:

05.06.05. Been feeling a bit anhedonic of late: only alcohol, bad food and the intensity of heart to hearts have taken the edge off that fuzzy anonymity/invisibility, so I've been doing too much booze and fat, and not enjoying life very much. The resultant weight gain has locked me into a tightening spiral of excess, self-disgust, powerlessness, and circle-completing comfort eating/drinking. Not been doing anything creative: Blog stalled. Novel dead.

That's the background for this Krakow trip, which I booked on a whim one lager-fuelled Friday evening in April. I had it slated as a 'research' trip for my novel ("Broken"), a project that I subsequently threw aside in disgust. Stripped of that incentive, I've been feeling ambivalent about the trip, and a bit anxious and nervous about this strange, unknown place.

So. Moody, anxious, anhedonic. No shape to, or pleasure in, my life. Overweight, self-conscious, defeated, miserable, full of self-loathing. The perfect preparation for a holiday, eh?

My trip did get better, though. Strangely, it got better when I was on the train to Germany to see my relatives, trapped inside a metal tube for twelve hours. First, I was reading some poems from Seamus Heaney's big, fat Opened Ground collection, and some of these poems were really speaking clearly to me:

08.05.05. Part of a stanza from "Markings":

All these things entered you
As if they were both the door and what came through it.
They marked the spot, marked time and held it open.

There's something here [although you really need the stuff that precedes it as well...] that means I'm almost feeling the meaning rather than understanding it. These are lines that sneak up on you, say something deep and mysterious, and leave you with a newly-opened space to explore. And yet, as soon as you start trying articulate the meaning that's spoken to you, your words start to drift away from you, or else they pile up on each other, too eager to try and explain what they can't quite grasp -- before the meaning gets away from you.

In the lines before this stanza, Heaney writes about a child's evening football game, the adult's ground markings for a building or ploughing -- images of explicitness and implicitness have been wound together, the concrete and the imagined. I guess this creates a kind of diffuse space in your mind, where the tangible and the liminal coexist, and speak to each other in whispers. This is a space almost beyond words, a 'felt' space that we reach through some unconscious emotional channel. What seems to happen here -- for me at least -- is that the line about "the door and what came through it" does precisely that 'time fixing' thing inside the poem. For a moment, you're on the brink of that wordless space, feeling the poem's images shiver and merge in your mind, feeling the emotional connections, and being 'primed' to feel the strangeness of that door opening.

It's as if life's fleetingness, these momentary clarities and experiences, are held there for a moment in the poetry -- close to conscious understanding, but always provisional -- before they dissolve back into what's lost. And I guess that's the space we live in all the time -- suspended in the concrete now between the dissolution of the past and the haze of the future.

I wonder if there's something here, too, about living in the moment? ie that being here -- and being here, present is partly a function of registering the limitations of not living in the now: that all the energy you spend reanalysing the past or angsting about the future is wasted energy -- nothing's bringing back (or changing) the past, and only action will make the future different. The desire to move through time like a wave...to be a volume of water and feel the wave move through you...some metaphor like that is what I'm stretching for here...

So...all that waffle told me what? Well, that, I don't spend enough examining the world of now. That I drift through my life like a ghost most of the time, hardly noticing where I am, often thinking about being somewhere else, doing something else, instead of making the most of the moment, and taking my chances in doing something different, and taking control of things. How that solipsistic reanalysis of the past is a barrier to action. And, especially, how little time I spend doing the things that I really love doing: reading, writing, thinking: engaging with the world and trying to constantly see it anew, and fresh, and to make sense of things.