Craft Talk: Despair as a need

I’m behind on Desire as Craft because I need to offer paid subscribers a craft talk on the “craft of despair” and I’ve been struggling to do it. But I think I’ve figured out how. Though this craft talk will be free because it is a little different, I hope more readers will become paid subscribers.

So I will share what will seem like an unrelated telling of my weekend in Canada…

Speaking of Canada, I’ll be teaching at Writing&& Retreat through Artists&& on the Sunshine coast May 15-19. Find out more here!

…where I noticed the unlined and relaxed faces of people in Vancouver and on Vancouver Island. There were no tense shoulders this particular weekend, no look of just gritting by, but actual smiles, dalliances, and even gentle laughter that sounded like joy. A sweet looking man was sitting, waiting for the ferry, swinging his legs and smiling to himself. When I bumped into someone and apologized they looked me in the eyes and said, “it’s okay.”

And most remarkable, was this sight: there must have been some sort of car accident because there were bumper pieces in the road. Cars were driving around it. At the walk signal, a young man—who wasn’t even crossing the street—went into the crosswalk, and picked up the debris. Now, I could imagine doing that but here is what he continued to do. He kept walking with all this stuff in his arms to the TRASH CAN AND RECYCLING. He then sorted which parts went into which then went on his way. He had plenty of room because it seems that the public trash is regularly picked up.

When I got to the border to America, the guard did not say hi and in fact did not speak. He motioned for my documents then gruffly interrogated. I tried to speak very little. He sent me away with the flick of his hand like he was a queen disgusted with his public.

I’m not writing this to be like—O Canada!—but to show the distinction of what I noticed between nervous systems in Seattle and my perceptions of another city across the border. What desires do we have capacity to even feel and want and are we aware of this increasingly rapid loss of feeling as we brace in dread? This question is mostly for myself, having just celebrated my 42nd birthday, seeing the trajectory of feeling ahead of me as a dwindling landscape.

To approach writing about despair, or writing from despair, is to acknowledge that we are writing from a body that is often so braced that we no longer feel its bracing. We are writing within these increasingly tightening containers that we don’t realize are tightening. Like that analogy of getting cooked in the bath and not even noticing our own boiling.

The craft of despair is perhaps attempting a touchstone in writing to find my own humanity in a compressed emotional space. So, let’s bring this to the realm of writing and in this case I’m thinking of the power of juxtaposition.

The surrealists used it, and one of my favorite uses was created by the queer Jewish surrealist Claude Cahun on a banner they hung up on the Isle of Jersey during the Nazi Occupation:

“Jesus is great but Hitler is greater. Because Jesus died for the people but the people die for Hitler.”

When in bed with my lover, my hand inside, her vibrator close, her face is concentrated, eyes closed. Her mouth take little gulps of breath and I feel something about her that is far away in her experience, but also very close to me. Her lips opening and closing in this way remind me so much of my mother at the moment of her death. And I understand for the first time why an orgasm has been called “a little death.” As my mom’s mouth opened and closed I was lying in bed next to her, she was so far away, her one open eye seeing something else, but I also felt so present with her. I was filled with terror in this moment, but also a kind of excitement but I feel strange writing that word. The word awe might make others more comfortable. In bed with my lover, I felt suddenly afraid because this looked so much like death and I could end up seeing her face like this again, one day, but in a very different context.

This moment with my lover didn’t hold the same terror as death, obviously. Her eyes partially fluttered open, she regarded me and went away again.

But this juxtaposition of two types of awe—one that leads to despair and one that leads to a joyful euphoria—helped me to understand the feeling that was similar: to witness someone in such intimacy, to be so close and so far outside of their experience. I held my lover close afterwards because in this case she came back to me.