The Faraway Nearby

A mature insect, including a moth or butterfly, is called an “imago”; the plural is “imagines,” and the cells that bring about maturity in moths and butterflies and other flyers are called “imaginal cells.” These cells lie dormant in the larval creatures and begin to reinvent it in its mature form, its imago, when the caterpillar has dissolved itself into a thick fluid and its old life is over; it’s a death and resurrection at midlife.

(from the running text at the bottom of the page throughout the book)

…life isn’t a story; it’s a whole Milky Way of events and we are forever picking out constellations from it to fit who and where we are.

“It is only by putting it into words that I make it while,” Virginia Woolf once wrote.

She continued, “This wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I tale away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me. It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what… From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that wee — I mean all human beings — are connected with this; that the while world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art.”

(emphasis mine)

With practice, you can pause the conversation, in your head and around you, but exiting it is not an option; it is you; and if you’re lucky, you’re it, participating in making this tangible and immaterial world around us and within you. You build yourself out of the materials at hand and those you seek out and choose, you build your beliefs, your alliances, your affections, your home, though some of us have far more latitude than others in all those things. You digest an idea or an ethic as though it was bread, and like bread it becomes part of you. Out of all this comes contribution to the making of the world, your sentences in the ongoing interchange.

Stories migrate; meanings migrate; everything metamorphoses.

Others’ woes can be used as reproaches and sometimes are: how dare you think about your own private suffering when wars are raging and children are being bombed? There is always someone whose suffering is greater than yours. The reproaches are often framed as though there is an economy of suffering, and of compassion, and you should measure yourself, price yourself, with the same sense of scarcity and finite resources that govern monetary economies, but there is no measure of either. In high doses suffering is boundless and incomparable and overwhelming. Though sometimes paying attention to others gives you perspective, and in suffering similar to your own you might find encouragement in knowing you’re not alone.

We associate skeletons with death, but bones generate life. abundantly, prolifically. The femurs, the ribs, the sternum and other bones we see dry and white after death, in life harbor the marrow that produces billions of new blood cells daily, a bright red river gushing forth from bone. The process is called “hematopoiesis,” from the ancient Greek words for blood and making. Poetry comes from the same word, poiesis, and it belies Plato’s argument that art is only imitation. Our word for poetry is their word for all the making in the world, of chairs, of houses, of bombs, of books, of blood, of gods. Make a poem is like making a chair; a poem is as real as a chair and sometimes more useful.

Writing is saying to no one and to everyone the things it is not possible to say to someone. Or rather writing is saying to the no one who may eventually be the reader those things one has no someone to whom to say them.

The self is also a creation, the principle work of your life, the crafting of which makes everyone an artist. This unfinished work of becoming ends only when you do, if then, and the consequences live on.

Not to know yourself is dangerous, to the self and to others. Those who destroy, who cause great suffering, kill off some portion of themselves first, or hide from the knowledge of their acts and from their own emotions, and their internal landscape fills with partitions, caves, minefields, blank spots, pit traps, and more, a landscape turned against itself, a landscape that does not know itself, a landscape through which they may not travel.

To dig deeper into the self, to go underground is sometimes necessary, but so is the other route of getting out of yourself, into the larger world, into the openness in which you need not clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest. Being able to travel both ways matters, and sometimes the way back into the heart of the question begins by going outward and beyond. This is the expansiveness that sometimes comes literally in landscape or that tugs you out of yourself in a story.