The lake outside the cabin was frozen over, and I walked a bit away from the group constituted by my father, brother, sister-in-law, and their dog, to look at the stars at midnight. You could see the milky way above us and the stars glistening with a kind of diamond clarity intensified by the still cold cloudless winter night. Looking north up Long Lake, standing on the water beyond what would be the dock edge in summer, we could see the northern lights glowing and changing in the distance, impossible, ultimately, to confuse with the yellow domes of light pollution from Three Lakes and Eagle River.
It was a kind of personal sublime, made more searing by the fact that opportunities like this ended up being rare last week--my brother and his wife and dog weren't part of the package when we made these plans, which I had seen all along as a chance to spend time with just my parents, to relax at the end of a year has been all about my brother and his wife, to recover from some of the abyssal loneliness and isolation and general invisibility that was especially present this past year. (Not that 2008 had the soul-sucking drama of 2007; it was more just a general slog, walking uphill, trying not to trip over every damn thing.) The kind of abyss that swallowed me whole a couple days before Christmas, especially on the day I turned in all my grades but everyone was already out of town and it was clear I wasn't going to get to see The Poet again any time soon (we still don't know when we'll be able to even get a drink), and I was so tired and already stressed out about New Year's and wanted to celebrate but instead I cried on the phone with The Poet about nothing in particular then drank a bottle of wine and watched some movies on Hulu. The night before I realized I was going to have to take a half-Xanax when my heart started racing as soon as I tried to go to bed and I had the sensation of falling through the ice on the lake and no one noticing in time. And all that was before I found out about the change in the Wisconsin plans--that I didn't know until my parents picked me up from the airport on Christmas Day and I made the mistake of trying to repress the panic and the disappointment--coming out first as anger after the family party, then as something more akin to a nervous breakdown. And my mother did apologize for not telling me sooner and for allowing them to come in the first place. My father thanked me for being transparent about my feelings (the trigger of the nervous breakdown was something that seems too minor on the surface to even go into yet isn't, for other complicated reasons) which is actually kind of a big step for us all because a year ago I probably would not have pushed back on the trigger issue and it would have poisoned the entire trip in such a way that I wouldn't ever have been able to go back to the cabin. Which was part of what compounded the panic attack. I didn't want to break down like I did (but it wasn't controllable in the end), but in a weird way it's a step forward to be able to do so.
And it worked out okay in the end, more or less, except that I didn't get as much of the quiet time that I was planning for--my brother and SIL just kind of hung around all the time and the dog was there and people were always talking so I didn't get a really decent period of quiet zazen until a day when I stayed in for a half hour while everyone else was playing outside in the snow with the dog. Though I suppose there's something to be said for staying in the room, as it were (it was too cold in the bedrooms to really hang there by myself anyway), for the amount of laughter generated by our attempts to remind ourselves how to play Clue (and for my ability to win three of the four games while drunk), and for the fact that we probably wouldn't have gotten outside as much as we did if it hadn't been for them.
(And I should interject that I do genuinely enjoy hanging out with my extended family and--most of the time--my parents, so I'm not one of those people for whom the holidays are just an exercise in barely-concealed contempt and drinking too much and feeling shamed for who you are. Highlights of this Christmas at my aunt's house included the success of my pointy red shoes and a long conversation about philosophy, Eastern religion, and literature with a cousin of mine who is also in a PhD program and who is trying to move back to New York. Also catching up with various aunts about my crazy personal life--not an enormous amount of detail, of course, but still--and the opportunity just to help out, hang out, and laugh.)
But to return to the lake, to midnight, the snow around my shins, the diamondedge stars, and the northern lights silhouetted against black outlines of pine trees. It touched something in my soul, something that I hadn't known was there in such a piercing way before. Call it, perhaps, a specifically northern sublime, bringing together any number of feelings I have when I am there in any season--catching the sunlight over the lake at a certain angle, the sunrise over the trees in the morning, coming around a bend in the road or over a hill that reveals a kind of absolute wildness, isolation--even when there are vacation homes all around. (And some of these have the same effect as well.) The feeling of being in Rhinelander at dusk the winter I lived up there seven years ago, over on the edge of town where all the shitty big box stores are, yet noticing the trees towering above the strip malls, and the prairie edge sunsets throwing swaths of color over the sky. All of this is in my soul. And I realized that any man I truly love will need to be able to look at the northern lights with me and understand this without my having to explain it at all.
It's always hard to come home. At least Chicago functioned as a buffer between two incompatible worlds--it's brutal to wake up in the cabin and go to sleep the same night in Brooklyn, but the traveling itself wasn't easy. And it's only been in the last couple of hours tonight that the relentless assault of bass from the apartment upstairs (and I mean it when I use the word "assault"--I ended up sleeping for part of the morning on the floor of my living room just to get away from it) has finally let up. For how long I don't know. The assault started on Christmas morning about an hour before I left for the airport and was in full swing when I came home yesterday afternoon. Something similar happened last year at this time, so I hope that it's seasonal. Nevertheless, I'm on edge a bit, even as I write this now. (Much in the same way as I was when I first moved here and spent two and a half months worried that I'd made a horrible decision.)
And so I want to return again to the night on the lake. I'm not going to think in terms of "resolutions" for this new year--rather, in terms of decisions--gathering as much performative force as I can from the speech act. My decision for 2009, most simply, is this: to live for myself. This isn't to say that I want to live selfishly--quite the opposite, in fact. I want to break away from the D.I.Y. Medsua thing I have going on all too often, where I become paralyzed by the spectacle of my own suffering. Neither is the idea to live for myself indulgently--especially when so many of those very indulgences backfire and sap my energy or worse. What I mean is something like taking control, but mostly in the sense of cultivating intentionality and presence, not allowing myself to waste time, and working on making the kinds of decisions that are best for me--rather than continuing with the narrative of things just kind of happening to me, of being pulled around, helpless, invisible. Perhaps, too, this is a way of saying that I will begin treating myself the way I would like other people to treat me. I want to live generously, to communicate energy to myself and others.
Some of this is prompted by the simple recognition that a lot of the next year (and the year after) is going to be taken up by things I do for others in the form of obligations such as those related to teaching and keeping friendships and also by a number of professional hoops that are going to involve a certain amount of subjective violence, inconvenience, long nights, and writing. I will need to write the bulk of my dissertation this coming year. I will be applying for jobs in the fall. I will (hopefully) be continuing to teach at Not-NYU, which likely means that I will also be continuing to teach 8 a.m. classes. And none of my other problems are going to magically disappear because it's 2009. It's easy for me to see how this could shape up to be a kind of miserable, sloggy, lonely, frustrating year. But I don't want it to be. For one thing--it's not sustainable. It just won't work if I'm exhausted all the time, if I can't find some joy in something related to my dissertation. And it won't work if I'm not working because I'm too tired, or too depressed, or whatever. My time management has gone to shit lately, but I don't think it's just a matter of staying off of Facebook. Something else has to happen, a decision to live better all around, to rethink the things that I do, to recapture one of the best things E ever did for me, which was give me a reason to work all the time so that I could be ready to do crazy things spontaneously. I want to regain some of that sense of flexibility where it doesn't seem like just fucking around when I should be doing something else.
Speaking of what happens when I should be doing something else. What both zazen and teaching have in common is the fact that when I am doing either one of those things, I am fully present to that activity, time has been blocked out for it that isn't invaded by other things I could be doing--it isn't even a question. (This is more true, of course, about sitting zazen with other people, though I try to take the same attitude at home. One of my great accomplishments of 2008 was adopting a meditation practice and sitting for fifteen minutes every morning I taught.) So much of my life isn't like that. It's a symptom of massively wasted time, of continually missed opportunities. So, in living for myself, one of the central ideas is that I will try to spread the sense of presence and energy from teaching and zazen to other parts of my life--to make decisions that allow me to feel as good about the other things that I do, as present, as intentional. It means valuing the time that I have alone to think / read / write / meditate regardless of when it comes and under what circumstances. (Ergo, obsessing less about boys, and all of that.) And also being a bit more aware of what I'm doing in terms of eating and drinking. One of my friends announced today (from my futon, where she'd spent the night) that she was going to quit drinking entirely in 2009--I don't want to go that far, but I also want to make sure drinking remains fun and doesn't consistently result in days (like this one) lost to hangovers. What's encouraging here is only that I began 2008 with a cold and didn't have many of those this past year; hopefully, beginning 2009 with a hangover means that they will be similarly rare. Hopefully.
And of course, I'm likely undervaluing the very good things of 2008 as well. I did accomplish an enormous amount professionally, though I'm probably hyperaware of the costs. I got what is, in the end, a fantastic adjunct job as adjunct jobs go. I have grown a lot by being with The Poet in whatever form. I have more or less succeeded in getting The Ex out of my life and resisting his attempts to continue to influence me. I am fully over The Professor. As I mentioned above, I began a meditation practice, and even though the changes it has caused have been subtle, they are noticeable to me and they're important. I am slowly turning my apartment into a livable home. I have closer female friends than I've had in awhile, even though they aren't the same ones I was in the process of losing a year ago. There's not so much hugely catastrophic drama going on. I no longer feel the need to tell perfect strangers fucked-up stories about myself. I'm writing a dissertation, whether I think I'm ready or not. I have prowled the Brooklyn Museum by myself and walked to the southern end of Prospect Park. I didn't have no one-night stands, but I had fewer one night stands than I did in 2007.
And so. This is an unwieldy post, but I'm mostly writing for myself right now. And that's something I'll be thinking about, too, how to get back to a more fluid and performative writing that's actually useful in my own life.
For now, though, I think sleep (if my bedroom's not vibrating) will be the good plan.
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