2/365: Who Really Wants to be Nice.

Biscuits//Faulkner//Darkness//Carolyn Forche.

Wake and the room is the kind of cold that’s fun to play with. Feet out the covers to tease it, quickly back in again; an arm next, a whole leg. Woke earlier to planets outside the window, bright and inquisitive. Lie there in the near dark, and want nothing. Just the planet light and the street lamps and not a hint of a moon, new as it is. No recriminations. No ruminations. No regrets. Nothing to read or think or do. Rare to be in want of nothing. Not wanting a single thing.

Think of Faulkner and his not constructions in Absalom, Absalom! Think of how important this was, the first time I read it, box fresh out a cult and hardly able to understand it. Think of how important it came to be to define myself not by what I wasn’t, but what I was. Takes a long time to become something, rather than just a person too afraid to do anything. Think of how it is that often, when there’s nothing else to say about a person, they’re described as nice. Friends tease me about how much I hate this word. The blandest biscuits in this country have NICE stamped right across the top of them. This is a lie and not a lie. They are not tasty enough to be nice, and not offensive enough to not be. Nice is a subtractive description, it’s what you call someone when there’s nothing else left. Evil though, or bad even, that’s what happens when there’s too much of a person, when they’re spilling right over. That’s when there’s really something to call them. Nice, and they aren’t enough of anything. Strange then that we hold this in such high esteem. Why be nice when you can be something.

At breakfast, the baby, though not a baby at all, but my baby still, sits with French toast and cinnamon butter left over from New Year’s Eve, playing with Lego as she forks toast to her mouth, this rare sun hitting her two bed-headed braids and I try to take a photograph but it’s pale in comparison as every copy always is.

Noon and the cold only lifts a little. The sea breaks white on the shingle. Grow up by sand and nothing prepares you for the sound of a shingle beach. It is so loud, always, but today, even it’s turned down. The wind departed and the water’s ferocity with it. It is still light at 4 and 4.15 and in the middle of the darkness, when it seems the hardest to celebrate then it’s the most important. Joy’s easy to come by in July or a sweating August night, but December, January, that’s a different thing. That’s when you test your capacity for all of it: for belief, for celebration, for faith, for endurance, for life. Same as the days you wake up and want to wear sweatpants and rot in bed; those are the days I dress up now, because it’s easier to atrophy than not and start down that path and it becomes a tunnel hard to back out of. Bringing the light back, is not, as I used to hope, a question of holding your breath and waiting. Think again of Carolyn Forche’s The Lightkeeper, a poem I come back to often. The second person of the poem adds a layer of intrigue, we never learn who she’s addressing, and it’s better for it, in the same way in Threshold we never learn who exactly Rob Doyle is writing the second person interludes to (I love second person enough to have written a full draft in it). I first read this poem after I’d been ill enough to start thinking again about how finite everything is, and this line, I think of every winter after the celebrations are done but before the dark starts to wane, when January lags and February bites:

Nothing to be afraid. Nothing but happiness as unbearable as the dread
from which it comes. Go toward the light always, be without ships.

My next tattoo, if I do not get the stupid cartoon unicorns I see graffitied all over town - and they are good, very good - will be stolen from this poem, in the same way I stole parts from David Foster Wallace for my collarbone, ‘be without ships’, a permanent reminder.

I thought often of light last year. Think of my Hebrew middle name and how it means my light. What it means to be my own light, when for a long time, I thought it meant I was my father’s light. A shift in meaning, slight perhaps, but a shift all the same. Natural, in the middle of darkness to think of light, just as at the height of the summer days as short as these seem impossible to conceive and the cold too, impossible to imagine playing with it.