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In this life I can only see the forest, or the trees. Not both, not ever. I'm not that fast, or adaptable. It's the writing/editing toggle so many of us are familiar with, just a little bit stuck; to shift gears, I have to reset the whole engine. If I'm looking, or reading, it's usually the trees I see—not just their shapes or foliage, but the knots in the bark, the veined leaves, the browned edges. Close readers, or, as Durga described perfectly in her latest piece on To Die For, those of us "who valorize half-moments, perceive poems in movie stills yet balk when asked to describe that same movie’s plot."
I have always resisted this interpretation of myself—struck with a naive, binary fear that being so heavily invested in the world of details meant I wasn't built for the world of ideas. The pattern was undeniable: what I recalled from most experiences wasn't a theme or an understanding, but a brief touch of a hand, a line of poetry, a flash of light. It's a lot of being in love with something without being able to explain why, not remembering what made something special, just knowing that it was.
In In the Mood for Love, it was this scene, and when it starts to rain, and this song I will never outlive. In New York, it is the August sun on the brownstones, the shadows cast by the fire escapes, the smell of the flowers on the High Line. A student not of longing but of light, as Maggie Nelson would say, except I have always thought they were one and the same.
These are the details around which the rest falls into place—the insignificant minutiae that add up to something larger than we have the words for. Or, as Haley put it, in her essay about the families we make for ourselves: "The most important parts of our lives are what happens in between the common landmarks, the valleys of lived experience." Maybe the whole point is we can't see the forest, until we've long past it—but there's the feeling of being engulfed by it all the same.
(Say: think of a safe place, and one might picture a room, a bedroom probably. Say: imagine a safe place, and I would conjure this field, discovert, golden, but surrounded by trees.)
Sharpening the particulars of everyday experiences have helped me navigate the world and find a direction in it—and more importantly, find the people who have helped me through it. Take, for example, the kinship we feel for strangers who not only share our love for certain books, but highlight the same parts, that unshakeable sense of kismet. The people who see what we see help us feel seen! A writer I've always felt that way about is Lucy Morris—who just wrote something about that exact feeling, in the process of becoming obsessed the details of your own body despite knowing better.
Sometimes it's not in what we've done or said but the things we haven't, the questions we leave open-ended, the shared absence of something that takes on the shape of a singular desire:
First this, from Jack Gilbert:
Can you understand being alone so long
you would go out in the middle of the night
and put a bucket into the well
so you could feel something down there
tug at the other end of the rope?
And then this, from a longer poem by Carl Phillips:
What’s the word
for the kind of loneliness that can feel like swimming
unassisted in a foreign language, for the very first time?
Can you feel our worlds aligning?
xoxo,
Tracy
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