Nine Steps on How to Survive Yourself
- When you start taking yourself too seriously, think of whales — the dark secrets of water they swim through, the envelopes of ocean they open with their toothless, bristled mouths.
- Read a poem in which you learn baleen whales were hunted once for those bristled mouths — the coarse hairs used for corsets, umbrellas, brushes and brooms. The hardware of a whale’s mouth living among men and women whenever it rained, whenever a woman brushed her hair or breathed out.
- Think of your own hair. How when you moved from your last apartment, you had to sweep the corners and floors and were amazed at its persistence: the dusty strands and S’s curling around chair legs, the wild grasses swaying beneath beds; the skies of it clouding over doors and portholes; the shy locks clinging to the edges of night-tables and beds.
- If that doesn’t work, then say corset five thousand times until it morphs into core, ore, galore — an ocean of sound much larger than you could ever worry about.
- Try not to panic if the evening turns a bitter abrupt green. If the clouds are bruised apples tumbling towards you, and you fear you won’t be able to catch a world wider than you.
- Be grateful for small survivals: the dimple of blue the blue-bird flies through — that slit in the day, that vial of violet. Don’t worry if your words sound over-poetic or sing too trillingly. What is a trill, anyway? A thrilled sound? A leaky lullaby stuck inside a bird’s mouth?
- Invite a friend over for a drink and toast to husbands and violins, to the novels you’ll never read: their restless heroines, their badly-lit stairwells and awkward conversations; the names of their meandering, snow-encrusted fields.
- And if certain words you once loved, elude you, adopt new ones like siblings you never had, like a troupe of performers encircling you, building their archipelagos of patient sound: ochre, aver, circumvolution.
- Finally, if all else fails, sidle up alongside the stars in someone else’s poem; stars guiding them on a night drive to Texas; learn from those stars, from their sleepy-eyed tolerance, from their sluggish, whale-like swim through the darkness.
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