It’s August now and this year has already become famous for its heat. Nobody’s surprised, but I was maybe foolish to feel physically or mentally prepared, because heat makes me feel most vital, most alive and most myself, until it very suddenly does the opposite. I’m no endurance freak, but I’m self conscious that some people see me as one, given my outdoor hobbies, romantic history, and the compressive relaxation I enjoy upon climbing into a ripplingly hot car, in no hurry to air it out. I don’t have a reason except that these situations are just where I like to be; the spots in life I feel most like myself are places one could describe as hot or uphill.
But July felt unreasonable. In the midst of all its heat, some people broke down, unable to catch a break. The good nighttime cross-breeze in my old house seemed to skip past my bedroom and so for weeks I’d wake up at 2am, overheated, brain associating “too hot” with “time to have a nightmare.” It made me go a little strange in my waking hours and it felt like I was losing the color palette through which I discerned reality, the sun bleaching out my intuition. Then there was that saguaro-wilting heatwave in Arizona, and a cowboy, unemployed and selling his horse for cash, was coming apart in the suffering Sonoran desert, where things were truly too hot and an actual, waking nightmare. My best judgement curdled as I spent those July days heeding a desperate man scratching out sparse and unreliable sketches of a life I couldn’t change, coarse and colorless outlines of a chaotic situation I traced faithfully like a child learning to draw her favorite cartoon character. It all eventually forced me to wonder the worst thing you can be forced wonder about someone: what ever happens to people like him? You know you won't ever get to find out, and that’s what kills you, if the heat doesn’t get you first.
I was burnt down, my whole inner landscape one of crisp, combustible hills sloping towards a dark valley looking a lot like Oh-Fuck Nowhere. Tragically, this is a place where men often live, sometimes their whole lives, in that tumble-down ditch where those who can’t survive the gravity of hot and uphill land (for reasons both in and out of their control). In all this heat, where there first was cautious confidence and bold statements of curious possibility, was now dark, whimpering confusions about a person I wanted to untangle—but at what cost. Which tasked me, all over again, towards the two things I hate the most: math, and budgeting. To sidestep this, I thought about the hopeless situation in terms of meteorology instead. (Meteorology is obviously the weather forecast, but more broadly, according to its dictionary definition, it’s a field of study “concerned with the processes and phenomena of the atmosphere.”)
The way I was, during the heatwave…was that the real me?
How much of who a person is, is determined by the weather?
How much of your core identity is vulnerable to processes and phenomena of the atmosphere, and how much of that do you get to use as excuse?
Who can a person ever really be, when an oppressive climate carves away at the scope of their life?
AHNONI’s new record “My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross” is remarkable, just like everyone has said, and it helped me sit with some of these questions. In July I didn't know what information I could count on—what was the true depths of a crisis or just the drama of a heat-stoked moment—but what was the difference, because no matter which way I cut it, I knew for sure that the darkness and the heat were real. As always, in situations of extremes, something has to give, and you only have a certain window to know what you can handle before the choice gets made for you.
I feel like there’s a reason why the album’s opening track, “It Must Change”—ambiguously but inter-connectedly about ecocide, transphobia, and grief—sounds at first, without awareness of the album’s themes, like its simply a song about heartbreak, about romance gone bad, about somebody done you wrong. That’s not because its evoking an idea of some profound mystical connection between the earth and people in love, or platitudinal yoga class/yard sign “wisdom” along the lines of Everything Is Connected, or Love Is All You Need, or Hate Has No Home Here; but instead for a reason more practical, and achingly, frighteningly plain:
You act, or you don’t. You change, or you lose.
That’s why this is so sad.
Here are a few other songs I’ve been thinking about:
Kara Jackson’s “no fun/party” and her soft redemption of self-destruction, of naming “my hazard” as something to be loved:
Fust’s “Searchers” and its heartbroken sentence fragments, sparkling shards of incomplete thoughts for feelings left unfinished:
Hayes Carll’s “The Love We Need,” a lovely song about my worst nightmare, the frighteningly tangible danger of forsaking true love in favor of a life you like:
Julie Byrne’s “Lightning Comes Up From the Ground” for every single word of it, painful and flawless, recognizing fantasy as a type of electricity, and honoring the special sorrow of futility with a whole lot of grace:
I’m shy of halfway through Sophia Giovannitti’s great new book Working Girl: On Selling Art and Selling Sex. She’s right about so many things and I might write more about it later, but already on page one she comes with the heat, explaining,
“Making art allows for a recklessness making money doesn’t allow.”
It made me think of adventure and curiosity and danger and how readily the world would like to diagnose these interests for you (how passé it feels to add this on, but what can I do, it’s still true: as a woman)—that is to diagnose them as something worse than just interesting, or even worth knowing. And I mean intimately. But sometimes your recklessness is redeemed if you make something of it, such as if it’s raw material for art, literature, or…I can’t think of any other examples. If you don’t, you’re just a concern.
You know, I wish there was a type of person somewhere between a therapist and a priest (I am inspired by my friend who has one, who is both), for several reasons but one of them is that Jesus is the only man that has ever really made sense to me. I haven’t read this book, but I did read this quote on Instagram, from Franciscan friar Richard Rohr’s On the Threshold of Transformation:
“If we don't learn to mythologize our lives, inevitably we will pathologize them.”
We tell ourselves stories in order to survive pathology! I don’t know what this has to do with anything, but sometimes I really earnestly ask myself, What Would Jesus Do?, though more as a thought exercise than an actual moral quandary. The answer is usually a straightforward course of action that would probably totally drain me. Maybe even put me in a situation I wouldn’t survive. Then I laugh a little because I remember that Jesus didn’t survive, either, obviously.
Another song I’ve been thinking about is Lucinda Williams’s “Where the Song Will Find Me.” I recently reviewed her new album, “Stories From a Rock N Roll Heart,” but there was something personal I didn’t get to say about the best song on the record, which is its closing track. Clearly Lucinda is my favorite artist; I think there’s a song of hers in every other newsletter of mine. She is my ideal songwriter, and I’ve worn my own life in through the sturdy heirloom textures of her songs, looking out for people I know to fulfill the narratives of her characters, tracking my own life’s archetypes through the composure of her own mythos.
It took me a few listens to hear this song from her point of view, which is obviously about the musician waiting for the muse to strike. But the first few times I listened, I heard instead the narrator as myself, the listener, one who fills these stories with her own characters. I wasn’t thinking of where the song would find me, as a writer seeking inspiration; I was thinking about an even more innate impulse to me, which is going out into the world to look for what my favorite song is about.
After learning some revealing news one day I read the story of Brokeback Mountain for the first time, at the recommendation of Olivia, my best friend and most invaluable resource as an artist and farmer who has spent several working seasons on her own in bunkhouses with young cowboys. My visceral reaction after reading it put me down and out for the rest of the day, so I ordered the collection in which it was first published, Close Range: Wyoming Stories by Annie Proulx. These are stories of landlocked ranchers perverted by isolation, of rodeo desperados with despicable excuses, and haunted, grisly women who never had a chance. It’s now one of my favorite books. The only first-person story is “The Lonely Coast,” a tale of a female clique of feral barflies (I’m obsessed with the narrator living in a trailer at “Crazy Woman Creek drainage”) with truly nasty attractions and fatal habits. Proulx writes the narrator’s desire and desperation so flat and plain, and it’s as perfect and ugly as it usually tends to be.
In its New York Times book review from 1999, the critic asked,
“Why should you read these stories, then, if their characters' lives are so mean and their fates so inevitable? You read them for their absolute authenticity, the sense they convey that you are beyond fact or fiction in a world that could not be any other way. And you read them for their language, not lyrical but a wry poetry of loneliness and pain.”
I mean, why should anyone ever entrench themselves in another’s captivating inevitabilities? Because it’s a good story? This character, she’s perfect, toxic, unhinged, and correct: “there’s something wrong with everybody, and it’s up to you to know what you can handle.” I wondered about how many women, hearts concave with their own collapsed-in craziness and unfulfilled wildness, may have been just like her, but real and unwritten, even unimagined—in Wyoming, in the West, or anywhere where women get told no but some types will always do it anyway. Not because it’s triumphant or powerful, but because it’s fucked up and interesting.
Is it her desperation that makes her feel authentic? If that’s the case, why does art validate what otherwise might be diagnosed as delusion and toxicity? I can’t draw a line between this character and myself, but I can say that I have the kind of imagination that makes me liable to see the life in nowhere. Anyway, it is up to me to know when it is a gift, and when it is a problem.
Hilton Als said in a 2018 interview in the Paris Review:
For me, writing is a way of struggling through the intricacies of an antiempirical sensibility. And there must be words other than fiction and nonfiction. I see fiction not as the construction of an alternate world but as what your imagination gives you from the real world.
Whenever I tell a story, and someone doesn’t have any advising left to do, they’ll resign to saying, “well, at least it’s a good story.” I don’t know exactly why writing seems to inherently redeem, or make approvable use of otherwise wasted time. I also don’t know how, or why, I found a path to a dozen new places in a dead-end man, even when there were a dozen other men who were on one track to somewhere. Or why the distance between us feel amazing, because distance is not supposed to feel amazing, but it was just like how it all felt the moment before I found him, driving out there for no purpose except to go somewhere new, to see expansive landscapes in libertarian country that were so wide-open they felt like threats. We all think the internet has flattened the world, and it’s always a relief for me to find out that it hasn’t. There are still rugged people and unknown things to understand. But I learned that sometimes you don’t need to see it all to know what you need to know.
What is the reason for any of this—not for writing out, but for trying to live out some kind of story? If you think, “realness, and the search for it,” sure. That works. That is something I thought the book critic was right about—that authenticity, realness, is a thing beyond fact and fiction.
My only answer to the reason question is that in that very real place, the one beyond fact and fiction, a place which is very much hot and uphill—the reality I chose, and all its dramas—that is where every now’s a big surprise. And that is a reason to me.
let’s make a movieee,
Crazy Woman Creek is a real place in Wyoming and when I drove cross country for the first time I drove by a sign for it on my way home and pulled off at the next place I could so I could write it down to remember to look up later. We should start a refuge there.
Thanks you for this post, so many gems. If you are interested in Jesus, the man (as opposed to Jesus the diefied) I recommend "Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time" by Marcus Borg (https://www.amazon.com/Meeting-Jesus-Again-First-Time/dp/0060609176 ) -- I'm not a Christian, but it gave me a different perspective that I keep thinking about.