One of the things I like about writing poetry is the inherent uncertainty. My poems, according to some, qualify as deliberately opaque. I take the negative connotation personally, sometimes, but I am happy to construct opacity because language need not be exclusively a tool for rational coordination. How do poems get built and why? This poet has no idea.
Essays, on the other hand, tend toward clarity and comprehensibility. And so when I’m at my best I don’t write them. Recommendations, reflections, and analysis are the root causes of most of my problems, along with the panicky, anxious solutions-orientation that follows. What might an essay look like when I’m not in here’s how to live, we unhappy people mode?
Perhaps like a series of open letters to my strategist dark side, that control-obsessed, okay-I’ll-take-the-lead-since-I-deserve-it persona. Dear willing to power character, so to speak. An anti-advice column of not advice, rather a series of reactions whose exposure dulls their impact, not as messy or personal as a journal.
Sounds a lot like an over-wrought tactic for self-development and -realization, huh? I don’t know what essays ought to be for, it turns out. And while mutuality is a result that I’m interested in, I don’t believe it’s often achieved as a mission.
Here we are then, the last day of October, two thousand twenty three years since some guy was born, in front of a collection of paragraphs. Thanks for coming. Perhaps we can work out how to reverse the idiom come to grips with, and instead become looser together in these nearby spaces and times.