Poshdeluxe

filling up an empty room

so here’s me, writing in my new space. i’ve spent the last few weeks loading up my xanga things and unpacking them here, rifling through old posts and discovering tiny treasures i’d forgotten. there’s plenty of space here, a new place for everything, and yet, as always, i am left with a few odds and ends, old candles and crinkled notes and half-empty matchbooks, that i don’t quite know what to do with. but i’ve tucked them all away, here on the internets, because, unlike in my real apartment, they are safe from dust, from little bugs and life’s general turbulence.

each entry had to be unwrapped, and some handled with more delicacy than others. a few things didn’t look quite the same as i remembered, and others, like family christmas ornaments, greeted me with sweet nostalgia. surrounded by the words of these past three years, i felt rich… i felt overwhelmed… i felt a little older. taking inventory was like taking stock of my life, counting up the changes and emotions and reactions of a person that i am still only beginning to know.

this isn’t really a clean slate, then, but a chance to move around the same old furniture and see it in a different light… an excuse to clean out those dark, cobwebby corners and toss in a few throw pillows.

so i hope you like it here. i’m excited.

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thanksgiving really snuck up on me this year. maybe because life has been relatively sane, so i don’t find myself reaching desperately for a day of consistency, of family traditions and comfort food. when things are easy, sometimes i stop searching so intently for those little rays of light, the sunbeams and silver linings that illuminate my life, regardless of a contrasting darkness.

and so i’m excited, about driving home on roads crowded with other people doing the same, our communal commute towards loved ones and pie and beds that remember our shapes.

and so i’m thoughtful, about this year and where it has taken me… where i want it to take me.

and so i’m trying, to remember to be grateful, appreciative, sincere in my love.

today i read this article by gary kamiya, and i had to post the last few paragraphs. i hope you enjoy it, but really i’m posting it for myself, so i can keep the words close.
and so i’m remembering.

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Were those blazoned days a one-shot blessing conferred by the sword of Damocles? And is it an illusion for me to believe that I can get them back? That seems to be what Philip Larkin says in his 1955 poem “Reference Back”:

“Truly, though our element is time,
We are not suited to the long perspectives
Open at each instant of our lives.
They link us to our losses: worse,
They show us what we have as it once was,
Blindingly undiminished, just as though
By acting differently we could have kept it so.”

I think Larkin is only half right. The things that we’ve done in life can’t be changed. But we can still change our minds; we can begin again. It is, alas, a process more like work than like revelation. (Indeed, the obsession with re-experiencing lost revelations, a particular vice of my epiphany-addled generation, stands in the way of living.) If we can learn to see the world as it is, even with its lost illusions, pain and decay, Larkin’s “blindingly undiminished” past, with its inevitable losses, can inspire not just regret, but also its companion: acceptance. You must remember this… To clearly see what once was, in all its eternal illumination, is an act of homage to ourselves, and to life, that does not deny what we have lost.

The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz lived through the Nazi occupation of Poland, and saw much of Europe destroyed. In a long poem titled “From the Rising of the Sun,” he recalls himself as a boy in his native Lithuania, looking at the fields that he, a poet in his 60s, is remembering. It is a meditation on how memory both preserves and creates a perfect world — a preservation that does not alter the finality of its loss.

“That boy, does he already suspect
that beauty is always elsewhere and always delusive? …
He sees what I see even now. Oh but he was clever,
Attentive, as if things were instantly changed by memory.
Riding in a cart, he looked back to retain as much as possible.
Which means he knew what was needed for some ultimate moment
When he would compose from fragments a world perfect at last.”

There is no perfection without fragments. “There is a crack, a crack in everything,” Leonard Cohen sings. “That’s how the light gets in.”

And so this Thanksgiving, when my mother gives thanks that we are all together, and perhaps invokes the memory of two dearly beloved family members who were taken from us too soon, I will try to remember Uncle Bob’s laugh, and Aunt Wendy’s songs, and the good times that we have all had together. And maybe not there at the table, but sometime, I will try to keep an old, broken promise to be good to myself. And I will try to remember how everything — the trees in the park, a child’s face, the clouds drifting over a mountain — was once brilliantly illuminated. And let my dark lost years be sad, and my green and hopeful ones be happy, and know that from some perspective far above them, they are the same. And not look away. And give thanks for it all.