Friedrich Nietzsche

On Writing, Poetry, Health, Trauma, Surviving, and Lucid Dreams

This essay was written on Twitter throughout the day on January 1, 2023.

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I’m drafting a new essay here piecemeal, the way I write my notes for a story on a series of notecards, real ones, old school. That’s really all I ever do here: Write long stories in small chunks, in vignettes and aphorisms and observations. I’m doing that today.

Ginsberg didn’t have time for metaphors. I might not have the time or desire to fix my typos or to state things perfectly in this story outline. I certainly don’t have time to say things in order. That will come later. Or the narrative will remain disjunctive, which I also like.

There’s power in disjunctive narrative. Is disjunctive even what I mean? It’s not. What do I mean? I mean narrative that’s all scrambled up the way we think about our lives and stories. I mean: no imposed order other than capturing what the mind presents as quickly as I/we can.

Because we all do this. We all have minds. Our minds don’t live inside narrative. We have to learn narrative in order to survive. Narrative turns chaos into something we can respond to and live within. But today, the particular, infinitesimal part of the we doing this is me. This is my scrambled story.

Welcome to my mindfield. You have one, too. We all do.

You’re inside your mindfield right now. I’m inside mine. Don’t confuse the mindfield with a minefield. Having a mind is not the same as littering the land with weapons: the communal land; our lands that are shared but are not, and never will be, owned.

I’ll tell you the two endings to this draft essay right up front, where they belong in a scrambled story. First, this ends today. I had transient ischemia overnight, then SVT, then atrial fibrillation, then hypoxia. Diltiazem will end that until I visit Mayo next month.

Second, I had the most profound lucid dream in that hypoxic, crushed-heart state. About my trauma, of course. But also about healing. There was healing once I made the choice to leave the concrete place with the men and dance on sand with four women who’ve tried to be my mothers.

But it ends today. Once I have the diltiazem on board, along with the fludrocotisone, along with other treatments that are on the way, this will be over. What, you ask? All this trauma (re)processing. These dreams. This heart stuff. This near-death stuff. Over. And on my terms.

I’m fixing my busted heart enough for now to get back to real sleep, not the galloping, faltering sleep of the arrhythmic and heart-strained. I’m throttling my trauma (re)processing until I can do it slowly and sustainably.

That image, the one where I’m dancing on the sand with my four mothers, is where I’m landing with the trauma work for now. It’s what I’m holding onto. Because I did that. In my dream, I made the choice to leave the nightmare of concrete men. I went to my mothers in the soft sand.

[Interlude while heart recovers. Imagine soft music playing. Mill about.]

[Adding a note to clarify that I have my endocrinologist’s and interventional cardiologist’s support to take diltiazem. I’m not making that call on my own.]

I’ve been making use of a writing studio I rent from time to time. It’s ten minutes from my home, just on the other side of Flying Monkey Mesa as the locals call it because of its dreadful googlable history. I’ve been able to drive to it since I started taking fludrocortisone.

I can’t sleep at the studio because of my heart issues, but I can be here during the day. This morning, on my way here, I encountered a rockslide that the police are monitoring. Then I hydroplaned twice. It’s been raining, a lot. The rocks and roads aren’t behaving.

Depending on what happens with the rockslide, I may have no way home this afternoon. The police officer said he didn’t think things would get so bad that all the lanes would be affected. We also haven’t had this kind of rain in years, so … [shrugs] … who knows?

I want to say “of course” about the rockslide and the hydroplaning. As in: Of course, this, too, is happening on top of all the other issues and impediments in my life that are or appear to be in the way of my living right now.

But there’s no “of course” about it. That would be my mindfield imposing on the rock, on the road, and on my travels in this time and place. The natural world does not collude. And roads are just petroleum-based gloop we smear on the land. Of course roads succumb to the elements.

Earth is not people. It’s chock full of us—mostly the dead, as Nietzsche observes—but it’s not people. It’s of us, in a way, but not us. It doesn’t lie. It doesn’t conceal. It has no desire to do harm.

Earth is mostly not even of us. There’s so much in addition to and beyond us. We’re just people: a minority in the living, breathing world.

You might be ahead of me if you had an OK childhood. It’s taking me longer than it might have taken you to figure out people and their behaviors and what informs those behaviors. I’m also thinking about all of this in light of what I read by Aldo Leopold yesterday.

I’m watching rain fall from my writing studio’s eaves. It’s wearing little ruts in the decomposed granite in perfect little lines. I could align my knobby spine with the ruts and have perfect contact with the Earth—or at least with the decomposed granite lovingly spread on it.

I can’t speak to the collective mindfield other than to caution us against thinking we, together, know more than we know or are more important than we are. These thoughts feel basic, pedestrian. I feel silly sharing them.

We got into trouble when we made ourselves larger than the Earth.

My thoughts are as simple as a Yugo. I’m not a 1963 Ferrari 250 Gran Turismo Omologato thinker.

I want to talk about surviving. When my mother died, she left me a letter. Part of it read, Do whatever you need to survive. It was her last bent-tree message, her last encoded bit of wisdom, stripped bark-bare at the end of her life.

It’s what she’d been telling me all along, in words and through her example: Do whatever you need to survive. And I have. I’ve already survived, as have you if you’ve lived through trauma. Surviving is a process, not an end state. It’s not something we have to strive for.

You are here. You have survived. Your body knows how to do this and how to continue doing it, even when the seasons change, even when your heart is strained, even when new aspects of your trauma come tumbling out of your mind’s many closets.

I want to pause here and say this: Men deal with this, too. Men have power and privilege, but it’s not doled out equally, and men are asked to do so many unspeakable, nearly unsurvivable things during their lives. Everything from war to daily living is hard on men. It is.

Men survive unfathomable trauma, too. My heart is with those survivors. In the end, many of us are survivors, maybe most of us. Some of us don’t even know what we’ve survived, the enormity of it. The iceberg below the surface of it.

But when men come through great trauma and it’s paired with power and privilege, they can become dangerous in ways they wouldn’t be without that power, that privilege.

[Another interlude. My body needs me for a moment.]

[Also, Happy New Year. I’m expunging today. What are you doing?]

[I’m suddenly thinking about James Tate’s Jesus riding his little donkey. I think of that poem in moments of sudden, unexpected happiness while surrounded by what is awful. The poem pleases me in ways I can’t articulate or even comprehend. I mean, I could but I won’t. Explication is a buzzkill.]

[I’m wrecking grammar right now. I sort of love it: both grammar and the wrecking of it. Better than wrecking lives, including my own.]

[James Tate came after T.S. Eliot. Matthew doesn’t know that. Matthew thinks no poet has written significantly since Eliot. Matthew’s wrong. He was wrong in The New York Times. Writers write things down, so it’s not Matthew’s fault. Good writers can write the wrong things down.]

[The problem is the voice Matthew has, the power. Matthew is part of a larger system of power that’s a problem now and has been and will continue to be a problem.]

I’m drawing an iceberg now, an iceberg of something: behavior and what informs behavior? What we see and what we don’t see? I’m trying to figure something out.

My family and the Land Run, my family and Choctaw Nation, my family and Chickasaw Nation, my family and secret pregnancies, my family and the circus, my family and the rich husband, my family and a fancy house, my family and phonographs, my family and furs, my family and cars.

My family and suicide, my family and The Great Depression, my family and shipyards, my family and displaced Asian-American families in California, my family and racism, my family and fighting racism, my family and no farm, my family and no fancy house.

My family and being shunned, my family and learning to run, my family and fire, my family and oil, my family and power, my family and crime, my family and lies, my family and phobia, my family and rape, my family and incest, my family and trafficking.

Also, my family and surviving.

I forgot a big one: My family and the Dust Bowl. Also, my family and Freemasonry. My family and Mormonism. My family and (alleged, attempted) poisoning. My family and a gunshot to the back (at least, I think that’s how it was told to me). My family and mobile bars in GMC vans. Well, one van. One mobile bar.

[Interlude. Heart racing. I met a poet once who said she disdained any poet who feels anything while writing. That still has me stumped.]

In the dream, two men were after me. One was the devil. I was in one of those Russian-looking apartment complexes with exposed-aggregate concrete and iron rails everywhere and an open courtyard with all the apartments surrounding it, facing in.

I knew both men, but one was a shape-shifter, a self-identifying soothsayer. I never knew if he was there to help or harm. I saw the first through his window while passing by with a load of laundry. He was red, hot, everywhere in the room, and spinning like PSR J1748−2446ad.

The second caught me looking in the window. He saw me run toward the open concrete stairs leading to my apartment. He ran after me, yelling: I told you the devil was real. I told you to look to the angels. I fell, my heart arrhythmic. I clung to the rail, bleating.

I thought the second man was going to help me. Instead, he told me it was my fault. What had to happen now was on me because I didn’t feed the angels. He grabbed my ankles and dragged me, step by rough step, lower and lower. The concrete tore at my knees and shins.

I don’t want to do this, he said. He meant it. He was doing what he thought he had to do, what he was compelled to do by some imagined power. My skirt snagged on the stairs, exposing more and more of my legs, then pulled higher. I clung to the railing. I was so tired. I almost let go.

Then I did it. I said no to the dream, to the scene, to the weakness, to the surrender. To all of it. I closed my eyes. When I opened them, I was on the sand, in wildlands, no concrete in sight and no men.

Four women were with me: my mother, my mother-in-law, my dearest friend Pat Best who always said I was her daughter, and my neighbor—the one who recently tried to love me.

We stood in our respective traumas, unable to speak, tension in and between us like circus wires. Then the tension broke. We danced. For the Earth. For ourselves. For each other. For our bodies. For surviving. We danced and laughed and felt love’s malleable connective tissue.

Three of those women are dead. I love them dearly and understand them better now more than ever. It was just a dream, one I lucidly chose, but there was real healing in it. The one who’s alive can’t love me. We are tension in this life, but we are soft support in other realms.

I had four mothers: one cloth mother, and three cloth-wire mothers. It’s still four mothers. I’m lucky.

I had one motherlike monster, a skinwalker who trafficked me with her husband. I was also unlucky.

As we were dancing, one of my mothers had chest pain. She pulled out a blood pressure cuff and took a reading on her right arm. The other mothers laughed. Stop, I said. This is important. We all need to take our blood pressure readings now in both arms. Things got serious.

Our blood pressures checked out. No big differences between each arm. No heart disease. No blocked arteries. We laughed and continued to dance. I woke up.

That’s all I have to say today. The rest will have to wait. I’m staying on the sand with my four mothers, with their cloth and wire. We’re all together there, and we’re surviving. The cloth is for our bodies. The wire is what we’re using to skid over life’s glowing coals.

Throwing Roses into the Abyss

Throw roses into the abyss and say: “Here is my thanks to the monster who didn’t succeed in swallowing me alive.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

The Roses of Heliogabalus, by Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1888), oil on canvas. Image used in accordance with U.S. public domain laws.

I am alive, despite having experienced trauma for years. You could say trauma is my monster, a hydra that’s reared various heads over five decades, from infancy into middle age. Sometimes all the heads appear at once, like a giant air balloon tied to another, identical balloon—and another and another—a train of memories and flashbacks as real as the window I’m looking through now at the world beyond. But there’s never glass between me and the trauma, not a single pane. I meet it with no shield and no weapons.

Nietzsche says we can’t live as the vanquished. We have to live as the victorious. To do this, we must show our thanks to the monster for not knowing how to devour us. We must throw roses into the abyss. For him, the monster is what lies within us. For me, the monster is both internal and external—and never exclusively one or the other. A thing happens. As a sentient being, I respond. Now the “thing” is within me, kneaded into my response, often long after it has raised its tail and returned to its bottomless lake. This works in reverse, too. As a sentient being, I can’t perceive anything that happens without being informed by my lived experience. The external is never simply external, and the internal is never simply internal. Within is without and without is always necessarily within.

Trauma starts outside us, but it twines its way through each of our two hundred six bones, ninety-thousand-mile nervous system, and more than six hundred forty skeletal, visceral and cardiac muscles. The sequelae of trauma are significant and can include disruptions to nearly every system in the body, behavioral and cognitive changes, high rates of retraumatization, changes in our core beliefs and values, difficulty with living a “normal” life, and much more.

So the monster is not just internal. It is also external. And the two are perpetually engaged in a simple but exquisite water dance. For me, throwing roses at the abyss performs three functions. First, it’s a way to honor the parts of me that have worked together to survive. Second, it’s a way to begin forgiving the monster that is trauma. And third, it’s a way to bring greater presence and beauty to my past, present and future—even if trauma continues to be there, hissing in the margins.

I am alive, and this site is where I throw roses into the abyss. Let them fill the chasm.

Naylor-Nyad

For two decades, I’ve maintained a list of quotes I like by poets, writers, and thinkers I find interesting. This post is part of that series. All posts in the series are organized alphabetically. Some poets and writers have their own dedicated pages.

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Flagstaff was where I first fell in love with Arizona mountains, but it was Tucson that taught me to love the desert. And once you’re under that sinister spell there is no turning back. No one becomes a desert rat by choice. It just snags you, both literally and figuratively. — Roger Naylor

Anyone who hasn’t been in the Chilean forest doesn’t know this planet. I have come out of that landscape, that mud, that silence, to roam, to go singing through the world. — Pablo Neruda

In you the wars and the flights accumulated. / From you the wings of the song birds rose. — Pablo Neruda

Lament of old mouths, blood of old supplications. / Love me, companion. Don’t forsake me. — Pablo Neruda

Perhaps that sad land
moves in me like a ship:
but I changed planets.
The rain no longer knows me.

— Pablo Neruda

Why do you / treat me as though / I have already left? / I am still here. — Annie Klier Newcomer

How many times would my self have to die before I realized that it was never alive in the first place? — Thandie Newton

In death we belong to everyone / who can pass our names through their warm mouths, / who can smell the rotten air without flinching — Hieu Minh Nguyen

You were once & perhaps continue to be / the myth you tell to scare yourself / into loneliness. — Hieu Minh Nguyen

… a man can be always in the wrong and always appear to be in the right, and in the end become with the clearest conscience in the world the most unendurable tyrant and bore; and what applies to the individual can also apply to entire classes of society. — Friedrich Nietzsche

A subject for a great poet would be God’s boredom after the seventh day of creation. — Friedrich Nietzsche

And if you are not a bird, then beware of coming to rest above an abyss. ― Friedrich Nietzsche

Art makes the sight of life bearable by laying over it the veil of unclear thinking. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Close beside the woe of the world, and often upon its volcanic soil, man has laid out his little garden of happiness. — Friedrich Nietzsche

He who directs his passion upon causes … deprives his passion for people … of much of its fire. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves? — Friedrich Nietzsche

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species. — Friedrich Nietzsche

One man’s morality is higher compared with another’s often only because its goals are quantitatively greater. The latter is drawn down by his narrowly bounded occupation with the petty. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Why after the usual sort of social gatherings do we suffer from pangs of conscience? Because we have taken important things lightly, because in discussing people we have spoken without complete loyalty or because we have kept silent when we should have spoken, because occasionally we have not leaped up and run off, in short because we have behaved in society as though we belonged to it. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Women … speak like creatures who have for millennia sat a the loom, or plied the needle, or been childish with children. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Yes, there are friends, but it is error and deception regarding yourself that led them to you; and they must have learned how to keep silent in order to remain your friend; for such human relationships almost always depend upon the fact that two or three things are never said or even so much as touched upon: if these little boulders do start to roll, however, friendship follows after them and shatters. — Friedrich Nietzsche

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. — Anaïs Nin

I know the shock of hitting paved road after riding grass-track roads and walking in the country all day. The rhythm of the tires on the two-lane blacktop says to me: civilization, town, other people, and I don’t want that. As when I was a child, I want to remain in the open, becoming something other than human under the sky. — Kathleen Norris

Maybe the desert wisdom of the Dakotas can teach us to love anyway, to love what is dying, in the face of death, and not pretend that things are other than they are. The irony and wonder of all of this is that it is the desert’s grimness, its stillness and isolation, that brings us back to love. — Kathleen Norris

I began to see each of us as a treasure-bearer, carrying our souls like a great blessing through the world. After the relative emptiness of the Plains, partaking in such a feast of humanity was a blessing in itself. — Kathleen Norris

I was a New Yorker for nearly six years and still love to visit my friends in the city. But now I am conscious of carrying a Plains silence within me into cities, and of carrying my city experiences back to the Plains so that they may be absorbed again back into silence, the fruitful silence that produces poems and essays. — Kathleen Norris

The city no longer appeals to me for the cultural experiences and possessions I might acquire there, but because its population is less homogenous than Plains society. Its holiness is to be found in being open to humanity in all its diversity. And the western Plains now seem bountiful in their emptiness, offering solitude and room to grow. — Kathleen Norris

We have time on our hands here, in our hearts, and it makes us strange. — Kathleen Norris

A great poet is somehow in control of [prosody] and makes it orderly — Alice Notley

sex is for god because it’s a furious / violent brightness so I make a straw fetish / with a red tonguelike clitoris to protect me / from literature and from my dear friends — Alice Notley

that never being what anyone thought / I never cared what anyone thought / as long as I could go home, and resume my work — Alice Notley

There’s always plenty of raw meat to heal hurt power. — Alice Notley

To be is not / to have; nor to belong; nor to have been born. / You are not the child of earth. Beauty still thy name. — Alice Notley

I walk down the street as though I own it. All the while, the trauma has lodged in an obscure corner of my soul. — Diana Nyad