r, Montreal, Canada
Dear Poet,
Do you know what fatigue is? No matter how much I read—medicine, philosophy, literature, theory—and how tired I become—I have had chronic fatigue syndrome for 5 years—I still don’t know what fatigue is. Perhaps you happen to?
Thank you so much,
r
BK:
Dear r.,
I am not sure how to answer your question through a memory of my own body, or even in a philosophical sense. What is fatigue? There’s a card drawn by Rachel Pollack that I love, in which a figure is kneeling next to a subterranean spring. I love this card for its qualities of rest, of waiting with the place where the question is, even when and as nothing is bubbling to the surface. There’s another card she created, for her Shining Tribe tarot, that relates directly to experiences of profound fatigue. A figure leans back, and what I remember Rachel saying is that this person, this being, is waiting for whatever it is that might function as restorative (not the word she used) to come to them. Give up the effort of searching for a remedy, the card says. Let me see if I can find the image. Here it is. Notice the left hand is in the pool of water. What do you see in this image?
When fatigued, I tend to give up, but I also get myself into water, or near water, if I can. I used to lie down, eye level to the river near my home in Colorado. That was so nourishing. But no, I don’t know what fatigue is or where it comes from. That is not my place to say. Eleni Stecopolous, a poet, just sent me a PDF of her incredible new book from Nightboat Books, in which she writes about impasse, and fatigue. Would you like to read it? It might be more helpful than anything I am saying here.
Here it is: https://nightboat.org/book/dreaming-in-the-fault-zone-2/
