duality, Toronto, Canada
Curious for methods of dealing with a particular trapped feeling: when you decided to take a particular fork in the road that led you here, but now, years later, can’t stop thinking that you made the wrong turn, wondering or hoping (in vain?) that there might be a way back to it, to re-choose, and how to ward off the all-consuming feeling it leaves us with.
duality
AR:
Your letter makes me think immediately of an early Ted Greenwnald poem, “Whiff”, from his gorgeous 1979 collection Common Sense, which Wesleyan actually reissued a few years back, & which I highly recommend. I met Ted at the end of his life, two weeks before his passing, & we discussed (among many other things) this very question: how to ward off the all-consuming feeling regret elicits if we don’t, or can’t, in some way torque that regret into something else. Ted, it seemed to me, held no regrets that day & instead saw life as a generous library of movement, praxis and experience, & he said to me many times throughout the two hours we sat together, “it’s all on borrowed time.”
If we are but borrowers of time in this sense, rather than its owners, or even primary navigators, if life is the gift death gives us, as my friend Clive Worsley once said, then all experience, all time-lived-space is a non-hierarchical re/shuffling, a pack of cards cut an infinite combination of ways. Ted was drinking shots of liquid morphine as we spoke with a thousand-and-one ongoing projects—books, epistolary collaborations, long poems, conversations—two weeks before he left this earth.
What this teaches us, I think (what it’s taught me), is that the re/shuffling of existence is a matter of cutting into the deck of life ourselves from the position of the present-facing-future. & the agent of that cut into an otherwise static & isolating fate is called love. Yes, the craning of the neck backward, the sidelong glance, & wonder—but not a dwelling in the corners of time passed & past, rather a psychic dance-leap forward & wandering into the radical opening death affords us with whatever time we have left: as Kafka remarked to Brod: meanwhile, I write.
WHIFF
An evening
Spent talking
Spent thinking
About what my life would be
If I’d stayed
With a particular girl or woman
I went with
What would be
If I’d’ve been accepted to and gone
Where I applied
To a different school
Than the one I did
Where I’d learned
Different social graces
Then the ones I have
Where some of the material
Values of the American dream
Had rubbed off
Enough to make me
Live it out
In the good-works sense
If I’d settled down
And settled
For the foundation
On a house
For future generations
Instead of assuming
Immediately past generations
My foundation to mine
If I’d been
A little quicker to learn
What was expected of me
And wanting to please pleased
Going on that way
Through all eternity
I’ve probably been saved
From mere routines
By a streak of stubbornness
By a slow mind
And tendency to drift
By an emotional development
That requires
My personal understanding
Before happening
Feeling out the implications
An emotion has in
Form of expectation
Before trying out and
After awareness
I sense a willingness
To tell someone
I know and like
And sense the same from
Anything they’d like to know
About me
And, at the same time, have
A vast sense of privacy
Which means
There’s no way
I’ll wear out my personality
And its sense of continuity
Although sometimes
I feel empty
But talking to
Someone I like
And trust
And sense the same from
I feel way up
And after a long evening
Of talk about this and that
Feel wide awake
And feel the world
Wide and awake around me
And have a visual intensity
In memory
That, in near memory, dulls
And throbs
And grows vivid as hell
When I bring it to mind
Some time from then
What my life
Would’ve been like
Under different circumstances
Would’ve been different
With its own
Attendant ifs
And its own what-might’ve-been
But this way
I’ve elected to follow
And cast my vote
Each waking day in
I avoid
The possibility
Of taking the past too seriously
Or feeling any bitterness
Or sadness
This way
When my ship comes in
I’ll’ve passed out of mind
Beyond the sight of land
And won’t hesitate
For a second
To look back on all this
With fondness or remiss
The air’ll be clear
The moon’ll be there
And you, whoever
You are and hope to be,
Will be here with my love
-Ted Greenwald
