“Good luck exploring the infinite abyss”
Garden State (2004)
I have been lucky enough to visit the captivating Province Town, Massachusetts, every few years or so since I was a teenager. This was pre-pandemic of course. It’s a vibrant and liberal peninsula, where I have enjoyed many vibrant and liberating experiences… often vicariously. Such as the 2019 Carnival Parade; a dazzling celebration of all gender identities and sexual orientations. However, I regretfully missed seeing the diarist David Sedaris performing in P-Town during a previous visit, even though I had the offer of a ticket – which I gave to my older brother instead. I regret this now, as I have since become a huge fan.
When I was there in the summer of 2018, I became obsessed with copying Billy Collins poems into my journal. I don’t really know why I felt compelled to do this… I think I often try to occupy my mind in bemusing ways when I’m away from my dog – who, by the way, was having a glorious time at his ‘home from home’, with his human Granny and Grandad, in the very rural Ceredigion, Wales. As I was saying – poetry copying – quite the sedate and introspective activity, not exactly fitting with the setting. Then again, the glass-like water in the bay; reflecting the ‘special light’ (as mentioned in the post ‘Borrowed Dogs’), creates an absorbing contrast to the town’s flamboyancy. Is that a word?
I chose the following poems:
- The Long Day
- More Than A Woman
- Creatures
- The Deep
- Haiku
- Lines Written in a Garden by a Cottage in Herefordshire
- The Future
I also attempted to write one of my own, but I can’t quite bring myself to reveal it right now. Maybe one day… ?
Last year I returned to ‘The Deep’. I was thinking about a complex counselling client whose life circumstances took me way out of my depth! But that’s all part of the job right? The poem begins by introducing a ‘map of the oceans’, where ‘everything is reversed’. I found myself re-writing the following section of the poem,
‘and drop another couple of miles and you have reached The Abyss where the sea cucumber is said to undulate minding its own business unless it’s deceiving an attacker with its luminescence’
(2)
It is puzzling to me now that I didn’t go on to write the next bit; ‘before disappearing into the blackness’, as if I would get lost down there, simply by forming the words on the page. It was an extremely difficult ending with this client, for many reasons which were beyond my control, but I wish I had approached it differently.
‘You’re not cut out for this,’ I often thought to myself, as explored in The Grounding Power of Walking (3). The article (with a backdrop image of a person walking with a dog) promotes daily walking to manage the sometimes destabilising experience of being a counsellor;
‘A curious contentment can be found in wandering and wondering through outer and inner spaces. I may even go so far as to call it happiness…’
This reminded me of what I need to do, and keep doing, to maintain my sense of perspective. The self-doubt can dissipate at these times, leaving space to replenish my capacity for the counselling work. As Sands so astutely notices: ‘Even walking a well-known path in the opposite direction can bring a completely new perspective.’ I often take a different route impulsively, it feels. This ignites curiosity about why I changed something on that particular day, at that particular time. It’s often on those sorts of days that I find myself writing too.
The writer’s block I have mentioned in previous posts, really set in around the time I stopped seeing my counsellor of 5 years. It just wasn’t the same having therapy on Zoom, plus it had already been a very prolonged ending, for good reasons. Regardless of the Zoom limitations, it was a lifeline for that first arduous, disquieting year of the pandemic – but it was time to end.
Around that same time I started a new job as a grief counsellor. I was so naive. It (the writer’s block – as if it is an entity in it’s own right) plunged to new depths in Iceland last summer. This was where I reunited with my US family roughly halfway (and north a bit) between us, after not seeing them for nearly 2 years. I tried writing a diary of everything I could remember about the trip, but couldn’t finish it. Many qualities of the place, though, are unforgettable.
Kerid crater lake, at a mere 180ft, provided just enough depth for an unexpected conversation between my younger siblings, my step-mother, her friend and her friend’s teenage daughter, and me. As we approached the ridge of the crater and began the spiral descent, a strained acknowledgement unfurled about my (much) younger brother. He was on the verge of leaving home for college… ‘flying the nest’.
Once we reached the water’s edge and settled on a large rock, gazing into the dark aquamarine – almost luminescent – water, we seemed to sink deeper into our memories of caring for babies. The containment of the crater gave permission for us, the three mothers in the group mainly, to share our mixed feelings; about the intense relentlessness of caring for a dependent. And subsequently, the protracted loss of letting go. This coupled with a reluctance to face oneself again: We sat slightly back from the cryptic crater lake, choosing not to approach our reflections in the patient, waiting water.
My own children are still young and so I don’t, yet, have to face that final wrench. I have memories of my younger siblings as babies and looking after them; feeding them, changing them, reading them to sleep. Now it’s like a gulf exists between us; emotionally as well as geographically. Where did they go? I often ask myself. Where did I go? They’ve probably been wondering. I became a parent. And when I do visit them in the US and when I do get a break from parenting… I’m inanely copying poems into my journal.
What a brilliant memory though of the P-Town Carnival Parade; my young siblings and their diverse group of teenage friends dressed, ironically, in striking black swan costumes. My tiny intrepid daughter taking the lead, as a rainbow bird. I was watching on the sidelines, with her baby brother and with my father; the two of us (my Dad and I) dressed also as black swans, albeit half-heartedly.
I wish I could be a better sibling, as we all watch our father slowly disappear – each with our individual and isolating experiences of this, it seems. Meanwhile, the cancer; gaining in power and pressure, exposes itself in my father’s crushing discomfort. A back-breaking battle with the ‘treatment’; an active volcano surging under the heavy earth and its gravity. He’s still going… and I wait with the weight of not knowing how to help from a distance, or even when we were close in Iceland, and not knowing, fearing, what it will be like at the end… and afterwards. Relieved that I have seen him. Regretful that I too, felt crushed.
It wasn’t the holiday we had once hoped for (ambitious ‘wild west’ plans scuppered by Covid), yet it was one I will remember vividly. There were no dogs though, that would have helped! There were horses… lots of wild Icelandic horses… watching me in my grief. While the darkness of my father’s illness was held more lightly, perhaps, in the midnight sun. I’m not sure I could handle a winter there…
P-Town, too, with it’s ‘special light’ and ‘gallus’* people, enabled me to tolerate delving into my darkness. I wish I had remembered this in the confines of my bedroom on a drizzly Brizzle day, during a global crisis, after a zoom session with a deeply distressed woman. Working in a tiny office space in my bedroom was a problematic, temporary situation I try not to think about these days. I try to remember that, with the ‘good enough’ conditions and containment,
“Out of the darkness and formlessness something evolves…” (5)
and
“…This aesthetic element of beauty makes a very difficult situation tolerable”
(Bion, 1978, from A Seminar held in Paris)
But what about when it’s not good enough?
And what of my grief for my counsellor of 5 years. I recall a crumpled ball of paper, a letter, held tightly in my fist, after reading it aloud to an empty chair. It was called ‘The Letter Your Teenager Can’t Write You’ (4) – again something I had copied because it summed up a lot of what I couldn’t feel, let alone say or write, when I was a teenager. I have since travelled a long way from that place with it’s extremes of stagnant, stifling heat and ice cold antipathy… am I trying too hard to be poetic here, as if it might make something less real… what am I actually trying to say? I felt constrained and bitter in relation to my parents? Nevertheless, I have since travelled to somewhere softer and lighter and more colourful.
In our final session my counsellor and I had each prepared a journey and landscape to describe. Mine was akin to Collins’ antidote to ‘The Abyss’ in the final section of his poem as follows,
‘What attacker, I can hear you asking,
could be down there messing with the sea cucumber?
and that is exactly why I crumpled the map into a ball
and stuffed it in a metal wastebasket
before heading out for a long walk along a sunny trail
in the thin, high-desert air, accompanied
by juniper trees, wild flowers, and that gorgeous hawk.’
(2)
The rocky mountains aren’t quite the desert, though provide the desired effect – as I soak up the memories and associations, the abundance of tiny mountain flowers of all colours; from my Colorado photos in the post ‘Mild Mild West’ – not dissimilar to parts of the Icelandic landscape, although the black rocky volcanic surroundings of Reykjavik were like nothing I’d ever seen before. I wish I had stepped onto one of the black sand beaches or walked behind a giant waterfall.
I digress. My part-imagined/part-remembered place, with a herd of peaceful horses as witnesses, was the destination I chose to finally say goodbye to my cherished counsellor. Before moving on to discover the next leg of the journey.
Most days though, I’m not gazing at a special light on the ocean, or soaking up the thrill of a progressive parade, or imagining traversing the rocky mountains in the company of wild horses… I’m juggling childcare and work; both draining in multiple similar and differing ways… and this is probably the sort of poem I need to be re-visiting:
Haiku
Walking the dog,
you meet
lots of dogs
Soshi
* ‘Gallus’ is a term my superb Scottish Sister-in-law recently told me when describing my 8 year old daughter. It means bold, cheeky, or flashy.
© 2022 Psychodography Blog
REFERENCES
- Braff, Z. (2004). Garden State. Fox Searchlight Pictures.
- Collins, B. (2013) ‘The Deep’, in Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems, Random House
- Sands, M. (2021) The Grounding Power of Walking, Therapy Today, 35-37
- Schmelzer, G. (2016) http://gretchenschmelzer.com/parents-corner
- Bion, W.R., (1990). Notes on Memory and Desire. In R. Langs, (Ed.), Classics in Psychoanalytic Technique (pp. 243 -244), Jason Aronson, Inc. (Original work published 1967).
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