“He was angry…with the change of fortune which was reshaping the world about him into a vision of squalor and insincerity. Yet his anger lent nothing to the vision. He chronicled with patience what he saw, detaching himself from it and tasting its mortifying flavor in secret.”
–James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Striving for reprieve from chaos, be it internal or external, is for me best achieved when paired with an infusion of wonder. When my too-chaotic mind is given vast and quiet spaces to breathe, it fills them with dreams—dreams that usually restore the tumultuous beatings of my heart to a healthier rhythm.
Usually.
Dreams are themselves a complicated matter and rather like a double-edged sword. They are effective in breathing wonder back into my world, and at the same time worry me over their potential destruction of my reality. They exist in a precarious space between the simply necessary and the devouring. Though this is something about which I’ve written before, I haven’t tried to define it to this length, nor explain why it’s such a challenge when the wonder element of such dreaming fades beneath time or the realism that tends to roll so densely across life’s enormous sky.
I look often to the past for answers, but I find no singular memory that emerges on reflection—no “and that’s how the twins of beauty and despair were born grappling in my soul like Jacob and Esau.” The wonder grew—and continues to grow—over time, cultivated by art and literature, by creation and an internal fire. Every story that captivates my soul adds its colors to the palette with which my imagination paints my reality. But reality has a will of its own.
Take a winter’s night last February—when this question first appeared to me. Irritated with myself for failing to produce the words I could feel but couldn’t see—I stomped outside the coffeehouse in an effort to calm myself—and froze beneath the sky. The moon hung a pale crescent, a perfect floating Cheshire Cat smile. A string of some long ago music floated on the wind, and I was struck by the memory of it all: by the worlds I grew up in, the wonder it would seem I’d forget but then return to me in a single breath. How could it be so elusive when I needed it and just outside my door when I wasn’t looking?
That sense of near-tangible wonder evaporated when I settled back at my laptop, but at least now I’d identified my query, the question my heart had been asking.
I don’t think my imagination has lost its strength exactly, but its potency. Since the fading has been a gradual one, I’m not sure of the cause. The weight of an ever-encroaching adulthood? Concerns over career and expenses and respectability taking up all the air in the room? Or has it faded over a lack of exercise? Did I let it sit dormant too long? Replaced by dreams and distractions of a material or technological sort? My heart twinges with discomfort at the suggestion; I think we have found a likely culprit.
No matter the reason, I shouldn’t like to lose it further. I’d like to gain it back. But doubt is a formidable opponent—not doubt over whether or not I can get it back, but whether or not I should get it back. In the past it wasn’t much of a problem because the nature of the dreams was whimsical and dramatic. Now when the box opens, when the bridge expands, the dreams that spill out are less captivating than they are mentally exhausting. On most occasions they take shape as a cacophony of voices and questions in my head—a choir of problems demanding to be solved or written out all at once, and I’m too overwhelmed to navigate any of it.
“A moi. L’histoire d’une de mes folies.”
My dreams seem to take on such dark hues of late; it frightens me, the speed at which they flood my mind—to the point I’m even hesitant to dream anymore. It too often becomes a struggle, mentally trying to wrestle wonder away from the claws of these suffocating, fatalistic creatures.
I can’t fathom this is making concrete sense to you; it hardly does to me. All I know is that I used to see the world in such a way that I could paint it in the most fantastic shades, could bend it with my mind into any shape; I had only to blink. It isn’t so anymore, but I do not ask to go back to the way things were if it means undoing what I had to learn.
I suppose then, that’s the answer. The wonder is still there; it hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s only shadowed, veiled. And I can’t seem to throw back the stormy fleet of clouds. How do you catch a shadow? How can you clench it in the grasp of your hands and bend it to your will? I feel the strength of my resilience, feel it struggling against the gray, and I fear for my spirit.
I feel a lion pacing a cage. I pace the apps of my phone, hardly registering what flashes on the screen. A bit of poetry, a portrait, a gothic castle in the mists of Normandy. Oh look—another friend’s engaged. I pace the walls of my room, wander the cracked concrete grid of this town. Broken glass on the sidewalk; I’m not impressed by anyone’s attempts at small talk. I murmur sweet prayers and nothings to the gargoyles down the street. I drive the circles of this city, seeing nothing.
But when I can feel the wonder stirring—just behind my chest, like a pool of water at the bottom of a dark and very long well—how can I not also feel that, external situations aside—if I could just reach down, reach out, like frantic, thorn-scarred hands tearing into the mire and muck, eventually, if I dug and stretched and scratched and clawed and fought and strove so hard—I could not also pull it out—and back—into being?
This life is a portrait—a great mess of swaths and swirls and splotches—depicting some type of artist: lost in dreaming, warring with reality—with the self, with the world. Prone to self-sabotage; striving for peace. One to seek, not one to yield. I can’t tell what it means, can’t even quite explain what the portrait looks like; I’m painting it, you see. I’m too close to see. So forgive me if I lose my perspective, as I struggle to forgive myself. I am my own worst enemy. These nightmares and dreams come from the same keep. I search for the wisdom to know the difference, though both carry the nature to teach.
This pursuit of wonder is an ongoing trial, as I struggle with my belief over whether I’ll ever reclaim it, or something akin to it, again. Be it this year or the next, in this city or another, will the clouds roll back; will I behold the stars again as I once did—in all their signs and wonders? Until a time when I might know, I resign myself to testing the strength of my power with my writing, conjuring what stories I can against these dark but often insightful shadows. I continue to paint this portrait life of mine—by forging ahead, by maintaining a willingness to grow.
Until otherwise known—
“Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes.”
To arts unknown he bends his wits.
Ever your restless poet,
Andrew
// Featured Photo Courtesy of Luke Isbell //
a literary labyrinth 