The left hand of darkness
This week’s weird idea
I have a confession to make.
I finally read two poems by Wendell Berry, a poet Mari has been trying to get me to read for years (⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️, will read more). The poems are “A Warning To My Readers” and “The Real Work.” But that’s not the confession.
First, here are the poems. Go ahead and click over to read them. They’re short, but they reverberate:
So, you have read the poems, now the confession. I try go for the positive in these newsletter posts. At times maybe relentlessly, doggedly positive. Does that mean that I’m a positive person all the time?
Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no.
I’m a long time depressive, regularly visited by what Churchill called “the black dog.” So if I write a positive essay, as I’m beset by all the doubts and despair this world pelts at us like a constant rain of used diapers, does that mean I am, in some way, lying?
Maybe I’m unqualified to write anything positive, given my own wildly-overpowered ability to catastrophize. (When someone asks, “What’s the worst that could happen?” a dark part of my brain replies “Hold my beer.”)
Even worse (here comes the catastrophizing), could this newsletter become, in a perverse way, a discouragement to you as you hold up your own battered umbrella in the diaper storm? Am I creating another way for comparison to be the thief of joy?
In ”A Warning From My Readers,” Berry tells us “Do not think me gentle / because I speak in praise / of gentleness” because he is “…a man crude as any…full of fits and furies.”
Well gosh, me too, although I lean more toward anxiety than anger. So what right do I have to present positive thoughts? Then I saw this line in “The Real Work”:
The impeded stream is the one that sings.
So maybe when I, maybe when you, maybe when any of us make the effort to look for the positive, to look for solutions and connections, it’s not a facade. We aren’t hiding our “true nature.” This is our true nature, this yearning for our best selves and a better world. We’re choosing to do "The Real Work," even (especially!) if it takes more effort than wallowing in surrender.
It’s not denial. As Berry says, it is singing.
Go see
This is both amazing and adorable.
Jason Kottke
Have a listen
Part of the "fixed camera on a DJ playing a setlist" subgenre on YouTube, MAJ does some amazing deep dives into very specific music from around the world. Guaranteed to have stuff you have not heard. Yet.
And keep breathing
Quick note: the title for today’s missive comes from a poem Ursula K. LeGuin wrote in her novel The Left Hand of Darkness:
Light is the left hand of darkness
and darkness the right hand of light.
Until we talk again, I remain,
Your pal,
Jamie