I have been absent from Substack for a while, although I’m never too reliable on how often I write. When I don’t write here, I’m either not writing at all, or I’m writing elsewhere. This other place is practically but also symbolically different: things I write there pretend to be poems. They are often disconnected thoughts with a lot of line breaks. They are always in Italian, there’s a decent amount of cursing, and lowercase is the default. The people writing here and there share the same body, mouth and fingers with which they type (although one mostly uses a keyboard and the other writes by hand or on the phone), but I’m not sure they’d have a lot to talk about if they went on a date.
They’d be able to appreciate the presence of some common grounds — how arbitrary things are, how little control we have, how extremely painful and generous life is — but they’d certainly call it a night pretty early, and maybe only kiss to see how that feels. Incompatible mouths. They’d be happy to go home.
My poet self doesn’t even read poets, but she lives like one. She would make Rilke proud, not for the quality of her work, but because she lives by what he said: “This above all—ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I write? […] A work of art is good if it has sprung from necessity. […] I know no advice for you save this: to go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create.“.
He’d be probably more judgmental once he knows she posts them on Instagram.
“Letters to a young poet” is a cuddle to mind, heart and body. Rilke‘s insights are a gift to anyone who lives as a human on this earth. For this human right here, the question of how to balance and integrate duality is always present, but changes theme. At this moment, the duality is psychologist vs. poet.
One writes on Substack, the other on Instagram.
One expresses herself better in English, the other in her mother tongue.
They both believe in the unconscious, but one is a translator, the other is a surrenderer.
One wakes up at 7:00, the other is still awake.
One speaks at a proper volume, the other whispers.
One finds meaning inside the depths of herself and others, the artist decorates these depths as if she’ll never get to escape them.
In the book “Psychomagic”, Jodorowsky talks about living like a poet when he was a young man who could have been raised in Russia but instead grew up in Chile: “For example, Lihn and I decided one day to walk in a straight line, without ever wavering. We walked down the avenue, and we came to a tree. Instead of going around it, we climbed up and over it; if a car crossed in our path, we climbed on top, walking on its roof. In front of a house, we rang the doorbell, entered through the door and exited where we could, sometimes through a window. The important thing was to maintain the straight line and not pay any attention to an obstacle, as if it did not exist.”.
Being an artist is this, whatever that means. To decide, one day, to walk in a straight line. Not because straight is better than curved, not because it’ll be easier or funnier to explain, not for any other reason, because there are no reasons to do it. I just do. And after I decide, I start walking, and nothing can stop me.
I struggle to find better metaphors than this one.
When something painful happens, my other self soaks in it. She is not even that scared of dying, to be honest. She flirts with dissolution and destroys with total devotion. She holds on to irrelevant things and doesn’t need me to tell her they are. She knows. Yet, she hears my remarks and reacts disgusted: “Don’t you get it? That’s the point. Full commitment”.
The psycho-enthusiast that is writing in English knows how many projections dress up the faces she encounters, and has the banal goal of suffering a bit less. She won’t get there through easy steps or resolutions (she shares a certain subtlety with her counterpart), but she will try to
water a plant with her tears,
build a shelter for her fears.
She’ll look for syllables that rhyme, words that resonate. She wants to find a story where between here and there, before and after, there’s a difference. Where April does not come back unaltered every year.
There’s no desire to heal in the part of me who wrote: “If an atomic bomb exploded, I’d think it was my fault”. I know exactly what she means, and I have to work every day not to kill that part. I know very well, however, that she is also refraining from killing me, because I’m the only thing keeping her from total annihilation, but she’d love to get rid of me at times. We’d live much more straightforward lives if it was just one of us.
To be this or to be that. Once again, to be both. Being powerless in the face of dilemmas. Letting them engulf you, and then, when it seems like the day will never end, snap out of it. Find the therapeutic undertone.
My poet self writes because she must. And to be fair, this one too. She needs to write, yet she has no goal. She needs to write, otherwise she’ll explode. I need to write, otherwise life won’t look like life anymore.
“Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating.”
Empatherapy 