H0LIDAY HUMBUG

Louise Erdrich, “Advice to Myself”
 
Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup.
Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins.
Don’t even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic-decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don’t even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don’t sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in through the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.
“Advice to Myself” from Original Fire by Louise Erdrich. Copyright © 2003 by Louise Erdrich. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
 
 
Ellen Skilton, “New Fridge, Old Song”
This morning, lemon seltzer cans all line up in the new refrigerator door preening for the cameras. Oh, the sweet joy of new beginnings in refrigeration! Soon enough though, spills, half-eaten burritos, and partial cat food cans will take over again, lurking in the back corners, hiding in hard-to-reach spots. Its stainless-steel skin shimmers in afternoon light, but the sheen of this cooling wonder is already dulled by a weekend of fingers opening its doors. And yet, even when bread and cheese turn moldy and milk transforms from liquid to a smelly solid mass, a white-throated sparrow’s welcome song can still reach your aging ears from its perch on the back gate.
 
Smudged, dinged and damaged
by the long slog of it all.
Then daybreak again.
Ellen Skilton, “New Fridge, Old Song.” Copyright © 2022 by Ellen Skilton. Published by permission of the poet. All rights reserved.
 
 
W. S. Di Piero, “Chicago and December”
 
Trying to find my roost
one lidded, late afternoon,
the consolation of color
worked up like neediness,
like craving chocolate,
I’m at Art Institute favorites:
Velasquez’s “Servant,”
her bashful attention fixed
to place things just right,
Beckmann’s “Self-Portrait,”
whose fishy fingers seem
never to do a day’s work,
the great stone lions outside
monumentally pissed
by jumbo wreaths and ribbons
municipal good cheer
yoked around their heads.
Mealy mist. Furred air.
I walk north across
the river, Christmas lights
crushed on skyscraper glass,
bling stringing Michigan Ave.,
sunlight’s last-gasp sighing
through the artless fog.
Vague fatigued promise hangs
in the low darkened sky
when bunched scrawny starlings 
rattle up from trees,
switchback and snag
like tossed rags dressing
the bare wintering branches,
black-on-black shining,
and I’m in a moment
more like a fore-moment:
from the sidewalk, watching them
poised without purpose,
I feel lifted inside the common
hazards and orders of things
when from their stillness,
the formal, aimless, not-waiting birds
erupt again, clap, elated weather-
making wing-clouds changing,
smithereened back and forth,
now already gone to follow
the river’s running course.
From Poetry (June 2006). Copyright © 2006 by W. S. Di Piero. Reprinted by permission of the poet.


 
POETIC THEMES
            Just as the natural world is dialing down to darkness, this week we’re asked to rev up for the holidays. This can mean only one thing, sooner or later: whole body exhaustion. If you are a ball of goo on the couch, it’s not just social expectations this week; there’s a special kind of emotional fatigue at work too, especially for those of us for whom cultural and family traditions can be triggering. Setting limits on output isn’t easy. A somatic approach to the psyche insists that we don’t really have a choice about those limits. We can’t “construct” boundaries based on a cognitive construct or willpower; there are limitations that we quite simply have, and ultimately they will find a way to stop us. The choices we make about energy output have consequences because we have predetermined, finite resources.
               The “spoon model” of energy output, observed by those with chronic illness, is useful for all of us: each daily activity is measured by how many spoonfuls of energy it requires, and careful priorities must be set since we have only so much juice in the tank. To discern how much we have to give, we must go beyond what the dominant culture says we should give (since we are embedded in systems that are designed to exploit our resources to benefit the few. Disproportionally. Yay, Nap Ministry!). If we are to heal the damage done by compulsive patterns of mismanaging our energy, we must reexamine the toxic habits our culture has inculcated in us that teach blatant disregard for the needs of the body and psyche. Over time, as the messages from within are continually drowned out and silenced, we can lose touch with our own needs entirely. To repair this rift, we need to tap into physical feeling as we would attend to hunger or thirst so that we can sense again, and honor, the signals our body is sending.
            These poems offer different prescriptions for treating ho-ho-holiday exhaustion. We can allow for stillness, even stagnancy, or we can escape! Erdrich’s advice is to stop organizing, stop fixing, stop doing, as is epitomized in the poem’s mantra-like first line, “leave the dishes.” This principle is not just about repairing our culture’s tendency to overdo, it actually breaks down the “insulation” between the daily grind and who we really are. Beyond the ruse of necessity, according to this poem, lies our truth. But this poem’s specific strategy for touching truth is to toggle between depth and humor. The prescribed reaction to mold in the fridge: accept new life! And her irreverence helps us . . . well . . . relax.
                The instructions to welcome the dead who collect on kitchen jars might be dark and intense if they didn’t follow on the heels of her instructions to let everybody eat cereal for dinner. Some of us sink into this blend of morbidity and humor like a comfortable couch. The poem shifts us from “doing” verbs—throw patch mend buy sew invade worry pursue go after stuff sort answer weep break grow recycle read destroy pull strike shatter—to “non-doing” verbs: leave. let. drift. grow. And arguably: don’t? “Let the wind have its way” is such a lovely articulation of the ethic of allowing, which respects dust as a precious manifestation of the earth element. Each instantiation of rot, crumb, and crack is a holy testament to natural processes of death and decay. As a defense for non-doing, we are called to imagine the heart as a memento-stuffed closet we’d never want to clean. We’re invited into this inner chamber, away from the ruse of necessity and toward all that is authentic, genuine, gritty, true. Spending some time in stillness, we can sift through the dusty stuff tucked away in the corners of our heart. Allowing natural processes to have their way is a kind of unflinching esteem for the whole of creation as holy.
            And I just had to include a variation on the theme in Ellen Skilton’s haibun, a poetic form of prose interspersed with haiku that was originally used for travel narratives. And truly, there’s the promise of change that moves this poem along, from the pristine, cool wonder of now and the half-empty cat food cans to come. The old slogsong of awakening to newness each morning, only to watch the mold and milkcurdle take over, is the story of aging. And yet—yet! The white-throated sparrow still breaks through the “hard-to-reach” spots in our heart, like a haiku breaking up the prose.
            In contrast, “Chicago and December” insists that to escape all that is damaged, insincere, and affected, we need to fly toward whatever ragged, authentic form of beauty we can find. For those of us staggering through the end of the year“one-lidded,” the craving for something colorful in the gray Chicago fog is so like the way we hunger, viscerally, for something real inside aaaaall the cultural bullshit around us. Di Piero, an art critic herself, uses the art world to represent what is true. Looking out on the bling of Christmas lights all across the skyscrapers, we feel, more than see, the two museum lions guarding the world of art, wild and proud as pyramid sphinxes. We feel, more than see, their proud heads yoked with wreaths, ribbons, and “municipal good cheer.” From this “mealy mist,” our desire for escape, “worked up like neediness,” is granted by an explosion of starlings. Not pretty or nice birds, but “bunched scrawny” things. Real things.
            The pace of the poem picks up to a staccato rhythm, like wings flapping, till we as readers, as movers moved, feel galvanized. We too crave release from all the holiday ribbons and baubles; want instead to be “lifted inside the common hazards and orders of things.” Nothing strung with lights, just the rattling dance of nature “smithereened back and forth.” The snare-drum rhythm of movements is cadenced by unexpected rhymes: “switchback and snag / like tossed rags.” Enjambments both condense and stretch out a moment: “elated weather- / making wing-clouds changing.” It’s a relief to be for a moment “already gone” with them, following the river’s course, lifted out of the whole scene of bling and jumbo wreath and crushed Christmas lights. And so we pray: move us, lift us from out of it all, give us our wings back, our proud lion manes.
 

PRACTICE
            An explosion of starlings, wrought physical, might inspire you to go for a run. If so: HUZZAH! YOU ROCK! Lift yourself out of the sleepy fog and awaken fire and flight and freedom. As an alternative (since I'm not much of a runner), you might want to move to this gorgeous video of a starling murmuration by Søren Solkær. That could be whole-body movement, but I like to sit and just free up my arms to move with the switchback and snag and smithereens.
Or, your couch-huggin’ brownie-poundin’ booze-guzzlin’ body might have a whole lot to say about the prospect of a jog. In that case, you could instead explore Erdrich’s evocative models for non-doing: how might you experience physically the feeling of dust bunnies forming, the buildup of earth, new forms of life growing, old things drifting in through the windows of the mind? Find a weighted object to place on your chest and consider adding a source of heat, like a hot pad. Best of all is a “laundry bath.” I like to dump all the laundry hot from the dryer onto whichever kid happens to be prone on the couch, feeling low. With or without heat, allow yourself to recline on your back with your legs extended up the wall, or furniture, and relish the warmth of thoracic cavity, imagining your ribcage as a dark receptacle stuffed with sacred-to-you people or things, stuff you’d never throw away. The imprint of life lived, like the sticky fingers dirtying the fridge door with sacred smudges. Take yourself out of the long slog, and wait for daybreak.