Please email all questions you would like poetry to answer to [email protected], with “Spinster’s Almanac” in the subject line.
Dear Spinster,
My unhappiness and depression have accumulated so much that they have blown up my life. I go out for long walks at night when I can’t sleep to think about all my passive self-hatred has taken from me, and try not to let it lead me into the nearest river. I feel so alone. Who are the poets of loneliness and failure? How will I make my life okay again?
Reader, I would like to join you on your night wanderings a little ways, if I might. The night is long and empty for too many of us whose screaming brains and broken hearts would fill it up with our numbered failures. I would like to take your hand. Into it, I would like to press this poem, which came to me at just the time I needed it myself. I will also hope that your river is a metaphor, but if you think you may harm yourself and need concrete urgent assistance, please seek out resources that can help.
I write a lot about loneliness of one kind or another in this column. Partly because it’s what wells up in my bag of questions, partly because it’s a feeling I’ve known in many guises. The world is often unkind to women making their way in the world alone—single or sick or estranged or resistant (of course it is unkind to men too, and today’s poem is by a male poet, but I am writing this to you, lonely wandering witches of The Toast). I’ve written about grief and passion and pragmatism, all which have their place. But today I would like to write about tenderness. About learning to be kind to oneself in the absence of love for oneself. About Franz Wright, and his extended hand in the darkness: “To Myself.”
“To Myself” opens like an Edward Hopper painting (think Compartment C, Car 293 or Automat with the lighting of Nighthawks), mirrored and in the present progressive tense:
You are riding the bus again
burrowing into the blackness of Interstate 80,
the sole passenger
with an overhead light on.
It’s a simple descriptive opening, but evocative of the sadness your letter describes: unglamourous transit, solitude, hiding, darkness. I find the description melancholy but almost soothing in its familiarity. The overhead light comes after the pause of the first stanza break, and snaps like a spotlight: Wright’s “you” (the narrator’s own self) and the reader’s “you,” finally noticed. The progressive tense gives the lines the sense of ongoingness, emphasizes the long passive morasses that often characterize depression. Here you are; you have always been here.
When I first read this poem, the title and second-person address seemed unremarkable; many poets address the narrative “you” as a personal self in contemporary poetry. But now Wright introduces a first-person narrative to speak the “you”s: “And I am with you.” It’s literal, of course; the poem is “To Myself,” but it also feels religious, Christ-like in its personal intimacy, God-like in its expansive observation of the landscape:
I’m the interminable fields you can’t see,
the little lights off in the distance
(in one of those rooms we are
living)
It’s a complicated comfort, isn’t it? The endless distance, the hidden and isolated nature of the individual, but also the lights, far and small as they might be, where the voice in the back of the head resides along with the body. If there is anything spiritually nourishing in the world, it feels very far away, and yet it persists, trying for companionship through the darkness.
Reader, when you take your night walks, does your depression come in like a nasty little voice somewhere behind your temples? Is it that voice you are living with in your head, giving voice to what you see along the streets or fields? Wright’s voice knows this:
and I am the rain
and the others all
around you, and the loneliness you love,
and the universe that loves you specifically, maybe
Wright uses this lovely flourish of metonymy to affix the narrator of the poem (and therefore the “you” as well) in the reality of the world. He counters the isolating effects of depression that can divide the individual from the wider world by ascribing divided speaker to its features, troubling but lovingly rendered. He emphasizes the unity of the self, the natural world, and humanity, while acknowledging the narrator-you’s isolation. Do you cultivate noxious affections for the feral cats or empty lots on your trajectory? Wright is patron saint of those affections, the familiarity one clings to in the absence of anything warmer.
But what if the universe “loved you specifically”? What if you had a voice in the dark to hold your hand through the world of things that hurt? Wright’s divided speaker cultivates that kindness between the fragmented lonely self, even through “the catastrophic dawn, / the nicotine crawling on your skin,” his visceral descriptions ground him in the physical world, and prevent the poem from flattening into limp platitudes.
It’s a poem that is interested in how depression feels, not just in the heart or the ego, but in the troubled body, stuck but in motion. Are you aware of how your depression feels, reader? Can you channel a few moments of your nocturnal walks to meditate on what your sadness and isolation feels like, in your breath, your muscles, your habits? This is a useful skill to cultivate for therapy, for friendship, but also for your relationship with yourself. It will help you know what you need, how others can help.
It is valuable to create relationships based on such observation and empathetic reaction. Just as you would offer tissues to a congested or weepy friend, you can offer yourself kindnesses to ease your pain. This is what I find so beautiful about Wright’s poem: the climax isn’t pain or suffering, but tender care in reaction to pain and suffering. He reassures himself: “when you begin / to cough I won’t cover my face, / and if you vomit this time I will hold you.”
Take note that he specifies “this time.” You might have failed yourself a hundred times before, but it doesn’t preclude you from being present and kind and helpful this time. You can look at the river and think I will walk home, I will take a hot shower, I will cover myself with a warm soft blanket. Wright embodies his subject with physical symptoms that the poem’s speaker responds to in emotionally significant physical gestures; instead of dividing the I and the you of the poem with shielding hands to the face, he unites them in a promised embrace, the fractured self giving and receiving comfort.
The coming together of the self might suggest future healing of its painful fractures. The poem concludes with abstract hope bolstered again by concrete action. The speaker is soothing: “everything’s going to be fine // I will whisper. / It won’t always be like this.”
I know this may seem hollow. Who can promise that it won’t? I’ve yet to hear a kindness that a depressive brain couldn’t poke a dozen holes in, but Wright immediately resolves in the poem’s final line with “I am going to buy you a sandwich.” It’s such a small everyday promise, but carries with it connotations of comfort, sustenance, and camaraderie. Wright’s sentiment distills embellished and fraught modern self-care ritual into a simple self-kindness: the means to nourish the body so it can keep going a little further. It’s a small tenderness that is more manageable that cleaning the whole apartment and more affordable than a spa weekend. It is, at its root, separating one’s empathetic nature from the depressed brain long enough to say someday I will be more okay and get into the shower, eat a banana, or make myself a strong sweet cup of tea.
You asked for the patron saints of lonely failing poets, and reader, there are dozens. We’ve talked about Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” before, with its reminder that one does not have to be good, and about Karen Solie, queen of lonely highway motels and rocky promontories. Rachel Wetzsteon set her loneliness off with a sharp eye and an unrepentant discipline. Poetry Foundation ran a roundup of poems on loneliness and solitude here. I have no doubt that readers will add more in the comments. All these poets will have things to tell you about absent lovers, empty rooms, and fear, but I want to equip you chiefly with this poem of Wright’s because I want you to know you are worth caring for. I want you to have his shaky roadmap toward tenderness. I want to whisper in your ear: “It won’t always be like this.” I want to slip you the cash to buy your own sandwich.
This column is gratefully dedicated to the memory of Franz Wright, 1953-2015.
Tags: advice, depression, franz wright, loneliness, marika prokosh, poetry, self-care
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this poem is absolutely perfect and reading it is like…a thunderclap! gosh. thank you so much for sharing it.
I basically only read poetry if it’s, like, BITING POLITICAL SATIRE or risque and full of wordplay (I know, I’m a bad English major), but this is a really beautiful poem. Thank you for sharing it.
Gorgeous, as always. A bit of kindness (to yourself, to others) can make all the difference in the world, or maybe be the little light in the big dark.
“You might have failed yourself a hundred times before, but it doesn’t preclude you from being present and kind and helpful this time.” These are important words to hear, thank you for writing them.
Lovely post, thank you so, so much for this.
A small aside re depression: One issue I rarely see emphasized – though maybe its just me – is the fact that depression can be the result of, and contributor to, problems in the way your brain regulates mood. (Another way to say it: depression can distort your thinking.) On the one hand it can be scary to think you can’t rely on your own mind and the thoughts it produces… but on the other hand there can be value (and even comfort) in considering that your perceived failures, regrets, anxieties might be not be reflective of reality. And that maybe you shouldn’t be trusting everything coming out of the screaming brain.
I’m not necessarily advancing any medical theory (eg chemical imbalances)… and I’m not advocating for or against the use of meds. Talk therapy (notably CBT) and other therapy approaches can help … & I’m sure some people probably find relief in informal approaches that dont involve a professional (though a therapist, etc could be helpful due to the whole distorted thinking part). Anyhow, I’m only mentioning all this because it helped me; I was able to sort of separate myself from the depression, which made it easier to tackle. If I’ve said anything harmful or offensive or incorrect here please let me know!
I know this is a lot of magnitudes down, but I find myself thinking this for PMS too – my hormones definitely put a lot of things out of whack for me in the week leading up to my period, and whenever I find myself feeling particularly worthless/friendless/what-have-you it’s helpful to look at the calendar and say “no, they don’t all hate you, you’re just 3 days from your period and it’s messing with your perception.” I feel a lot better after that. It can be hard to talk about because PMS is so often used as a shorthand to dismiss women as being irrational, and I don’t want to give that fuel, but…sometimes I am being irrational, I guess.
The Toast and Franz Wright, together!
This poem is beautiful and evocative and your analysis makes me love literary analysis all over again. Thank you.
Here is my favorite poem about loneliness. It’s a Greek fragment sometimes attributed to Sappho, and this is my translation:
The moon’s gone down,
and the Pleiades too. It’s
the middle of the night, time passes,
and I lie here alone.
It doesn’t offer any solutions, but it just sits with the feeling and gives it a voice. Sometimes even the moon has left you behind and every hour ticks by and you’re waiting for something to change, but you’re stuck in your own private midnight. Those are the moments when I really need lyric fragments in my life, especially stuff that sounds a lot like Sappho and might actually be.
Fragments are lonely things themselves. Surviving in quotations by grammarians who think this beautiful limpid line contains a particularly interesting use of a preposition or something. Surviving in papyrus scraps that someone in ancient Egypt tossed in the trash. They are inherently the poetry of what is missing for us, even though they were composed as part of a whole once. I find that oddly comforting.
‘Private midnight’ – what a lovely, evocative phrase.
Wonderful translation, too. I agree with you about fragments – I hadn’t thought of it in exactly those terms, but they way you described it there makes a lot of sense to me. Must crack open my copy of translated Greek fragments again soon!
Thank you! If I can make more people read or reread Greek poetry, my life as a professor dropout shall not be in vain.
I think I just pinpointed what’s comforting about poetic fragments–they’re broken and they’re beautiful and their beauty is inextricably tied up with their brokenness for us and that’s okay. Would it be nice to have the whole poem? Maybe, but what we have is capable of being lovely and moving and real, and that’s worth something.
Edit: here’s the Greek for anyone who wants it, beautiful thing that it is.
Δέδυκε μὲν ἀ σελάννα
καὶ Πληΐαδες, μέσαι δέ
νύκτες, πάρα δ’ ἔρχετ’ ὤρα,
ἔγω δὲ μόνα κατεύδω.
The value of a good sandwich cannot be overstated. On my bad days I think about the toast soup recipe Mallory posted recently, and picture myself as a soft little bear, and it eases the depression and anxiety, just a little.
Something else that helps my depression and anxiety is steady, gentle rhythm. A particular favorite, and appropriate for the late night walks, is Patsy Cline. Her voice has enough depth to be conversational, enough richness to make the walks into a luxury.
This was one of the most important things I got from therapy (that was kind of CBT and DBT-based). I went for body dysmorphic disorder and later anxiety, but the concept that I did not in fact know everything- that the ways in which I was thinking were not actually objective and were in fact quite distorted by that point, was very humbling and absolutely necessary for my recovery. I needed to know that there was a lot I didn't know, and a lot of ways in which my brain was working against itself. Even today, when I feel my anxiety getting the better or me, the knowledge that it is my anxiety that is causing me problems and not often the actual situation, can be a great comfort.
This column is always just what I need; thanks, Marika.
Yes! Exactly. Thank you so much for articulating that, as I was struggling to find the words. Sometimes you don't know what you don't know.
*Realizes she's quoting D. Rumsfeld, closes laptop*
Funny how i was just thinking how a new Spinster’s Almanac entry would do me good, and there it was in my RSS feed.
Jessa Crispin, formerly of the Bookslut, has been tearing it up on Twitter lately on the latest takes on who qualifies as a spinster. The Toast knows from spinsters, one of the many reasons i keep coming back. What relief I get in typing those words.
Oh. Oh.
That poem. That image is one that has stayed with me for years. Seeing it in words on the screen was like a smack upside the head, in the best possible way.
Thank you.
Walking is good. Walking is the best. Maybe sometimes as you walk, you could gently redirect your thoughts from circular thoughts about self-hatred towards the things that you see, things you hear, the feeling of night air on your face, the scents of the world. When I am deeply buried in myself, I name the things I can see and hear and smell. I just list them. It’s a tip a mental health nurse gave me in a suicidal crisis, and over the past 18 months of practice (during which time I have become immeasurably happier), it has become something I instinctively turn to when I’m a bit down. Just list things: tree, tree, tree, sycamore, holly, tree, bramble, fence, concrete, brick wall, street light, plastic bag. If you know another language, try using that to name things to make it more challenging. The idea is to pull yourself outwards, reconnect yourself to the world around you.
I have also memorised poems to recite to myself when I feel bad. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Terrible Sonnets” are my choice. I recite them to myself again and again and again–twenty times, thirty times–as substitute prayers. Doing this pulls me out of the whirlpool of depressive thinking. It gives me something else to focus on (all that tricksy Victorian syntax).
Another thing that I’ve found helpful is talking aloud to myself. When I let my self hatred speak aloud, I can at least hear it. It’s more concrete and less insidious than when it’s silent. I can listen. I can eventually, reply, question, argue. I also like to let my kind self speak aloud to me. I tell myself I’m ok, I tell myself I’m safe, I tell myself I am loved, I tell myself to relax, to breath, to make a cup of tea, whatever. I imagine that I’m talking to someone I love. And oh my god, it is ridiculously soothing. I’ve also recorded myself speaking in a kind, reassuring way–I have listened to that when I’m sad, and it helps. It makes my self love seem more real, more powerful, more comforting.
One last thought: you don’t have to make your life ok again. In fact, I’d argue that you cannot make your life ok again. It’s the wrong way of approaching the situation. If you’re hurt, you don’t say “How can I heal this cut?” or “How can I mend this sprained ankle?” There are certain things you do to help ease the pain, to protect yourself, and to facilitate healing; but although you will be doing the healing, it’s not the conscious you, and it’s not something you can set about deliberately. Healing your heart and mind will be similar: you can’t consciously decide to make things ok again, but you can do things that support the deeper work of healing. This shift of understanding relieves you of a terrible, impossible burden.
Alone at night on a bus under the overhead light, on a walk, remembering to breathe and name trees, or in a small boat on a dark lake. This is one of my favorites, Jennifer Hecht’s September. Brace yourselves:
Tonight there must be people who are getting what they want.
I let my oars fall into the water.
Good for them. Good for them, getting what they want.
http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index/index…