James Tate

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.

Sacred and Desecrated

One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. 

― Aldo Leopold

I’m staying in a tiny home that overlooks the Virgin River Gorge in La Verkin, Utah. This is my view from the balcony. When I got here, the river was low and relatively unremarkable—a muddy brownish-red my friend in Missouri described as “stark.” Then it rained heavily in Cedar City, a town that should have been called Juniper City because those are the trees that grow there, but I digress. The river swelled and grew noisy, pushing trees and other large pieces of debris aside as it flowed angrily past. This was a new river, a different river, one that felt at once mystical and mythical. But the sky wasn’t about to let water get the upper hand. The sunset last night, shown in my photo, was brief but as powerful as the one James Tate describes in his poem, “Never Again the Same,” which reads, in part:

              The colors were definitely not of this world,
              peaches dripping opium,
              pandemonium of tangerines,
              inferno of irises,
              Plutonian emeralds,
              all swirling and churning, swabbing,
              like it was playing with us,
              like we were nothing,
              as if our whole lives were a preparation for this,
              this for which nothing could have prepared us
              and for which we could not have been less prepared.

Heavy rain and lightning today, along with markedly cooler temperatures, made the creatures who call this wild area home stir. A great blue heron hunted squirming fish from a basalt boulder flanking the river. Squirrels scurried on the balcony then settled in and stared into the middle distance. Broad-tailed hummingbirds fed on native and cultivated shrubs in the seam where what’s wild meets what’s manicured only to the degree that it still looks wild. A red-tailed hawk swooped into the gorge then headed southish following the water.

The collective stench of wildlife urine, pungent and rising from newly moist soil, mingled with the sweet and musty scents given off by the surrounding flora: native plants such as cottonwoods, globemallow, Mormon tea, and sand sage that live alongside introduced species such as cheatgrass, Russian olives, tamarisk trees, and tumbleweeds.

This riparian habitat is unique in Utah. It comprises only one half of one percent of the state’s total land. The highest levels of biodiversity are found in spaces like this. More wildlife species live here. Bird densities are twice as high here. The visitors who flock to this area each year, especially in the warmer months, may look out from their balconies and see something pristine and untouched and remarkable and precious. 

Except for the homes built right up to the gorge’s steep, unstable cliffs. Except for the homes and retaining walls and bird feeders and playground sets the gorge has already swallowed or threatened to swallow. Except for the large banner on the other side of the gorge advertising finished lots for sale—ones that also hug the gorge’s edge. 

Except for the trash dropped over the cliffs’ steep sides and forgotten. Except for the residents who breed their dogs unethically and leave them outside all night long to howl from fear and frustration. Except for what happens behind some of the closed doors here—the kinds of things that could happen anywhere in terms of the broad strokes but whose details follow unique, longstanding patterns specific to this area.

Wendell Barry writes, “There are no unsacred places; / there are only sacred places / and desecrated places.” This is a sacred place, but it is also a desecrated place. Visitors for the most part don’t see beyond the perfect images they capture from their balconies, the ones that literally exclude the houses, trash, and other incursions on the natural land from the frame. They trot out, often barefoot and shirtless, right when the sky erupts with color. They are, as Tate describes, totally unprepared for what they’re seeing, to the point that it makes no impression other than the ones they get on social media for images that have a shelf life shorter than the energy drinks they chug after getting a buzz scaling this or that nameless cliff—not because the cliffs have no names but because those scaling them don’t bother to learn their names before picking up and moving out, on to the next adventure, the next cheap high.

Tate-Tulee

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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And the calm that returned to us / was not even our own. — James Tate

Take a little ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody. — James Tate

I fall and fuck around about, / clumsy, confused and cracked. — Glen Martin Taylor

It’s a bit of last chance alchemy, / to take the kitchen floor suffering, / and turn it into art, screaming art, / to turn a winter’s silence into a song, / to find a sunrise in the last darkness / it’s a bit alchemy, it’s a bit of hope. — Glen Martin Taylor

My work is therapy. My work is autobiographical. So much of my inner life is non-verbal and so it spills out as art. And my work saves me. And so I work. My work is about being broken and mending and healing and being human. I make my work alone, but then someone else sees it and feels it and then I’m no longer alone. It’s easy for me to be an artist. It’s hard somedays to be a person. And so I work. — Glen Martin Taylor

May God break my heart so completely that an entire world falls in. — Mother Teresa

I / ground myself / back into the / body with the / smallest and most / controlled of pains. — Allison Thung

How I wish her here / without a girlfriend shield, / without my brother’s strut / turning her from me forever. — Isaac Timm

When the suffering of another creature causes you to feel pain, do not submit to the initial desire to flee from the suffering one, but on the contrary, come closer, as close as you can to him who suffers, and try to help him. — Leo Tolstoy

rain outside is like god shaking fine / sugar on a cake — Louise Tondeur

By now you’re surely understanding that writing is not my primary work, but an urgency, perhaps an affliction—a consequence of my life. — Stephan Torre

I was given / a wild place to be. Sometimes / it hurt to move out there / as evening rippled, and no voice / came back from the animals. — Stephan Torre

it is love that draws me again / and again from the word emptiness — Stephan Torre

Poems, certainly lyric poems but even most narrative poems, come from an ecstatic surplus of joy or grief which one can no longer hold in one’s veins or keep secret. — Stephan Torre

some lives will not root / in geometry / or hold anything / but the coastal / edges / of rivers and tides — Stephan Torre

Spring, and yet all / the world wrinkles / so easy — Stephan Torre

The culture I toss my poems into is fractured, divorced from nature, frightened, and addicted to technology. I’m not sure I have the language, or generative questions, for it. — Stephan Torre

It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat / but often the shadow seems more real than the body. — Tomas Tranströmer

What a terrible gift / to learn how to say the hardest things / straight. — Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

like when you’ve sloshed in / wet cement and don’t know it till you see the tracks / on your new carpet, yeah, and then see darker tracks, / from when you set your sock on fire trying to light / a cigarette — William Trowbridge

the tires still sing, / Gone. Over and out, / as we drive off, suckers / for the high roll / of center line and landscape, / shedding cares, / shedding cells, / half-hypnotized / by expectation’s / slippery caress — William Trowbridge

My boundaries are as much in thoughts and behaviors as in geography and geological features. My maps are drawn up by culture, custom, tribe, family, and myself. — Arthur Tulee

Every language has a problem because it doesn’t have a tense to use for the dead. — Brian Turner

The name that can be named / is not the universal name. — Lao Tzu

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why. — Mark Twain

I want to be a faint pencil line / under the important words, / the ones that tell the truth. — Chase Twichell