I used to keep a notebook next to my bed every night. I’d sometimes wake with great urgency, ripped from the peace that sleep had rendered, knowing that writing down whatever thought or phrase or quote or scene that was brewing was the only chance I had of falling back asleep. And so, without turning on the light I’d scribble faintly in the night’s small hours, often trailing down and off the page as I struggled against my body’s desire to fall back into unconsciousness.
I miss that simple act. Though all too often I’d reflect on those writings and wonder if there was even a single sentence of true profundity. More often than not the answer was no. Regardless, those late-night words were born of necessity and more than once they were the spark that ignited the most satisfying writing marathons that could last anywhere from hours to days and could produce anything from absolute excrement to a few pages that may eventually morph into something more. And no matter the interrupted sleep; I loved the adrenaline rush as I fought to get the words down on paper before they disappeared into the ether. I embraced the uptick in serotonin that came from the act of creating.
I miss those nights. But lately writing hasn’t brought me the kind of joy or satisfaction that it once did. These days I’m not experiencing the creativity fed by those moments, but rather a sort of underlying desperation to purge my thoughts and quell the swirling vortex of entropy in my brain. And I’ve even been failing at that because too often I can’t even make sense of the thoughts. Perhaps it’s just that they’re coming at me too fast and from a place I’ve kept on lockdown for too long.
I’ve tried to break free of it by changing up what I write and how.
I’ve tried some stream-of-consciousness writing:
Nature abhors a vacuum. Energy—heat, light, etc.—goes where there isn’t any energy. All systems tend toward entropy or an increased state of disorder. This disorder manifests as a rotting apple, a fading orgasm, an exploding fuel tank burning itself out, or some other dissipation of energy. Living things have about seven distinct characteristics, which include a higher level of complexity than the environment, a barrier against the environment, reproductive capabilities, etc. These represent the tendency toward order that all living things share, a tendency toward imposing an order on the disordered environment in its own image.
For example, if I eat a croissant, then my body will tear it apart and use the constituent bits to make more Michelle. Life wants to make more of itself.
This “order” represents what is desirable to us, at the most fundamental level.
We like music because it creates from an infinite number of possible dissonant arrangements a recognizable theme. We hear the melody and take pleasure in the variations that weave a higher and more complex order from what would otherwise be noise.
We like a Rembrandt because of the gorgeous, radiant life in his portraits. He created a visual representation that everyone recognizes on some visceral level, and the measure of his genius is that so many people share this recognition. It isn’t a smudge; it’s a pure moment caught in a canvas. (I have no idea why people like Jackson Pollack.)
Now put death/disorder/entropy on one side and life/order on the other side of a great big cosmic balance. Someone dies and someone else is born. Someone has a great personality and someone else has an ass to die for. A superstring sweeps out at orbit and whatever would be the opposite of that probably happens somewhere, I guess.
Take it up another level. Say God is on one side, Not-God is on the other, and the general region in the middle is where Life dukes it out to a draw, more or less. It’s where we leave out give and take and where order is balanced by disorder. Law versus Chaos.
Two what-ifs here.
What is we’re the fractal elements of an even greater order, which some might refer to a Supreme Being? We’re all on the right side of the scale, all our loves and lives and failures, and the gestalt creates a living pattern that, from some unimaginable perspective, outlines the face of God.
And what if all that amounts to the proverbial dot on a dot on an atom in a molecule in a cosmic blade of grass.
Last week I played around with poetry, which I haven’t done since college:
light
bright, joy
shining, fighting, rising
truth, emotion, pain, fear
fading, falling, breaking
cold, silent
dark
While it’s a perfectly fine example of diamante poetry in terms of structure, it is so utterly pedestrian that it borders on embarrassing. But its sheer simplicity does truly speak to the shift in my essence over the last couple of months. It actually captures it quite perfectly.
So I guess there’s that.
Still, I begin each day hopeful that something will give. Some days it’s the only thing that gets me out of bed: these words that orbit and whirl around all the things I cannot say aloud. I start each day out writing, thinking Today is the day. As if typing anything other than that unthinkable thing were a kind of escape, a kind of release. The kind of thing that will free me from its power and weight. I sit and watch the words collect on the page, feeling satisfied and euphoric. Until I look again and realize there’s only an empty page on the screen. Only the story can bridge it. I’m still trapped on the other side of this wide, dark chasm, waiting patiently for the light to seep through and guide the way.
Feverishly I write.
The mania that is the malady of the dying, or at least the unbearably bored. It is both fragile and has significant roots.
It’s not the writing, truth be told. It’s that I feel caught square in the middle of life and death; a swinging pendulum stopped short in the middle of its journey to either side.
As I’m sure is the case with any major illness, getting the diagnosis of ALS can be an overwhelmingly lonely moment. There is a seismic shift in your universe, and you suddenly feel separate from everything and everyone. Only, I didn’t feel that way when I was diagnosed. I’ve had mercifully slow progression over the last 4 years, and I think that protected me from the raw anguish of it all. But now as the progression appears to be quickening its pace some, I feel that separation acutely. Each fall, each choking episode, each time I struggle to take a deep enough breath to cough and clear my lungs, I feel that separation. And aside from that, burying four ALS patients–friends I’d met through our shared experience, all of whom I’d grown to love–has taken its toll. Tara’s funeral last month broke something in me. And honestly, I feel like I’m woefully behind on the things I should have already done, and that’s causing a significant amount of anxiety. But I’m not going to write about that right now. I’m tired.
Maybe it’s not any of that. Maybe it’s just that aside from writing, my greatest outlet was karate and I so desperately miss being a martial artist. I miss being physical. I miss being able to take out my frustration, rage, fear, anxiety, sadness out on a heavy bag or in the sparring ring.
I would kill for one hour in the dojo. One hour in my gi. Just a single hour to take all this out in some physical way, rather than having it suffocate me from within. One hour to throw strikes at the heavy bag until my knuckles bleed. One hour of roundhouse kicks that go straight through the target. One hour of that fierce satisfaction of going full force in a grappling match, never surrendering to the strength and determination of my opponent. One hour of losing myself in the beauty and intensity of kata. One hour of holding a Sanchin stance so intensely that nothing and no one can move me. In my 30-plus years of martial arts I broke fingers, toes, ribs, collar bones; I had a concussion and sustained an orbital fracture and bruises and cuts beyond that which I can count. I earned my black belt during a grueling 7-hour test that pushed me beyond what I ever thought I was capable of enduring. I would take that physical pain 10-fold right now. Just one hour back in the dojo. But I am trapped in a body that doesn’t give a shit what I want.
The good news at the end of this incessant bitch fest? I have a dog that loves to hold my hand while she cuddles me. So all is not lost; hope abounds.
Rise Against ALS! 