Soughed and Staggered

“If you don’t learn to let go sometimes, you’re gonna break your heart.” —Wild Pink, “Dulling the Horns”

Some smart people recommended this book by a smart person so I bought it and read it and liked it for a while and then I grew bored so I contemplated putting it down but I didn’t want to disappoint myself and the people who recommended it so I kept reading it and then kept trying to like it more than I did and I wondered where is the line between discipline and self hatred between “a good challenge” and self harm and the truth is I don’t know but I started growing resentful of the people who recommended the smart book and kept straining under its weight and eventually finished the book and took a huge sigh of relief when it was all over but also patted myself on the back like hey good job you did something hard but the more I thought about it the more I felt alone and so I fired off a screed in my head about the problem with pretentiousness and then crumpled it up—the version in my head—and threw it away and went for a walk and the next day bought a big dumb commercial novel and thought this is how I’m gonna be now loose and happy and unashamed and freely indulging in “guilty pleasures” but then I got bored of that and started resenting myself for not being able to have fun and lighten up and then wrote a screed against myself—again, in my head—and a screed against selfishness and wasted American privilege and the recklessness of leisure time and so I went out and volunteered at a place for people less fortunate than I and felt a little better and went for another sad and lonely walk but did I say lonely before? I don’t know if I’m lonely per se but all this forced thinking sure makes me feel some semblance of loneliness and all this lying to myself about something as trivial as a book sure makes me feel sequestered but anyway I came back to deciding not to finish the big dumb commercial novel not because I have anything against them it’s just not the right time/right place and now I’m just kind of empty and sitting and waiting to see what I actually can see and find what moves me because the truth is the moment I decide what will or can or could move me I will only get further away and that prospect of being moved or emotionally satisfied will come but only when you’re not looking like when you get this inkling or are delighted by a simple phrase like “the blood soughed and staggered in all her conduits” in Fran Ross’s Oreo and when you’re into it you’re into it and there’s a lofty sense of presence and enjoying the thing and you think how do I enjoy the thing more often? So you go out and try to find similar things to Oreo but those things fall flat and now you’re stuck in the same cycle of putting too much pressure on the thing and thinking about life or inspiration or motivation like something you can think into existence but the truth is you have to let go and when you let go you’ll find the thing and when you find the thing you have to let go of that too because that was the moment you were in and now you’re in a different moment and the thing the moment the inspiration the goodness the joy will always come like a thief or a sneaky lift in the pit of the stomach or deep in the body like in the psoas and it’ll feel like the curlicue of vapor just after the initial cloudburst and a little like you’re about to jump from a certain height it’ll feel a tad dangerous but exciting and the trick is to stay there not in that place of jumping off but at the risk of sounding hokey that spiritual place finding the next height that makes sense but the trick is the trick is to make it make less sense up here and let the letting go start from your feet and maybe you just need to lie down for a while outside and rip a fist full of grass and put it in your mouth and swallow it down without chewing

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