Essay
By Will Farris
There comes a time when a poet must decide whether or not they will write about god. Writing about god does not require belief in god, nor does it require doubt in god, though it can often include both. Writing about god only requires deciding to write about god. Deciding to write about god has nothing to do with wanting to write about god. In fact writing has nothing to do with wanting to write. I do not want to write poetry, I decide to write poetry. Writing is an exercise in the experience of faith.
Poetry feels like something that is being pushed upon me, that I am being made to experience. There is a sadomasochism to it. It is masochistic because I experience the act of writing to be unpleasurable, often painful, because there is a feeling mimetic to pleasure that I derive from the pain. It is sadistic because it is perverse to subject someone to my writing, to put them through their own experience of my writing, to make them absorb the traces of discomfort that led me to write the poem, that pushed me to and through it. The site of the poetry reading, the act of reading one’s poetry in front of people, is even more perverted. There’s a reflexivity to the sadomasochism that the performance of poetry inheres. As the poet, I am reliving my painful experience that led me to write the poem, of having written the poem, its pain of doubt, as I am making my listeners have their own experience of hearing the poem, to experience their own pain of doubt; I am then also making myself experience the listeners’ experience of the poem that brought me pain to write. Recently a friend said to me that every sadist is necessarily a masochist. I would agree and add that every masochist is necessarily a sadist. It is uncomfortable to watch you have an experience I am putting you through. It is sadistic of you to make me watch you experience it.
I do not believe that pleasure is the point of existence; I therefore continue to write poetry, consenting to the discomfort of having poetry pushed upon me. But what is doing the pushing. Though I’m an eager switch for writing, reading, and performing poetry, I mostly find myself on the right side of the slash. In the scene they call us pain sluts. I think of pain sluts as people who want to talk to god. We are people who chase the space of no-thought. That is, I find pain to be deeply meditative. It opens me up to a kind of focus I otherwise cannot access. Pain takes me out of the body by bringing me into it. I find pain to be particularly useful for this because unlike my experience of most feelings, it is easily identifiable, even localized, discrete. When I am struck on the thighs with a cane that I asked to be struck by, that I want to be struck by, the body reports this experience as pain as a way to let me know that the body is in danger. I know where the pain is coming from. I know where the danger is coming from. It is a danger and a pain to which I consent, even want, maybe enjoy. The door to no-thought opens when you start to really sit with the pain, the experience. It is not that the pain ceases to be painful, but that it begins to approach the abstract, become something observable, like the breath, like something necessary that just happens to me. Poetry is like that. I am not the poet I am being poemed. I am not the breather I am being breathed.
Writing is like being alone in a room. Writing often requires being alone in a room. Being alone in a room can be painful. I have spent much of my life alone in rooms, wanting my life to be over. I do not entirely know what I mean by wanting my life to be over. I think I mean the pain can be difficult. I do not believe it completely matters what I mean. I spent much of the last year wanting someone who did not think much of me to think more of me. But thought is a feeling you cannot always change. Once when we were alone together in my room this person told me that everything in my room was beautiful or had a purpose. That or is inclusive. Beauty is a kind of purpose. This assessment made me feel seen. I have arranged my room in a way that eases the pain of being in a room. Objects arranged with care, intention. Colors soft, organic, even papery. I try my best to reset the space of the room every day. I make my bed, put away my clothes. Beauty is a way of organizing. It can turn pain into something you can live with.
Writing is a kind of social contract. It is an agreement between the writer and the language that we would like to reach each other, to close the gaps within the self. I write because I do not know who I am, or perhaps I do know who I am but I want the language to show me to me. Doubt is the scaffolding of writing, the desire that animates it. Doubt is an exercise in desire. Poetry is a way to animate this desire. Desire is an exercise in faith. When I engage in kink with someone, when I enter a scene as is said in the scene, I am also entering a social contract. I am also exercising a kind of faith, exercising a kind of desire. When I enter a scene I am agreeing to the conditions my partner/s and I have laid out, discussed, negotiated. I have said what I would like to be done to me, where I would like to feel and what and how. I do not want rope here, I do want rope there. I want you to hit me here, I want to feel x, I do not want to feel y. This is a way of letting my partners show me to me, of giving them permission to do so. I am also understanding and accepting that there’s some level of risk, agreeing to the condition that my safety is in their hands. It is in fact an agreement that my life is in their hands. When I am moved to write a poem, I am negotiating the conditions of my contract with life. Writing is also a kind of social contract. I am negotiating the terms with which I choose to keep living. I am giving the language permission to show me who I am. I am agreeing to the risk. I am agreeing that my life is in the poem’s hands. To me this kind of agreement is a divine kind of beauty. Another way of arranging the room. Arranging the room is an exercise in faith.
Being alive is painful. It is boring, unrelenting, and lonely. I believe this to be a truth of living, not a condition of my own experience of it. Yet it is full of a beauty that I can only understand as the divine. It is painful because it is unbearable to keep living. It is beautiful because something helps me to bear it. It is divine because there is no reason for it. Most days I wake up heartbroken to have woken up, to have to live another day again, each day discrete enough to feel uniquely painful but similar enough to stultify. Then I see the morning light. I sleep with the curtains open because I prefer to wake early, with the rising daylight. I like the early morning because the light is quiet, reorganizing. The light peeks through the branches of the poplar tree outside my window, casts shadows on the four walls surrounding my bed. It is not that I hate being alive but that I feel alone without reason. Then god comes in. Then the light looks orange.
Will Farris is a poet and yoga teacher. They live in Brooklyn and work at the Poetry Project.