Kei Miller, "Book of Genesis"

Hi all--

I'd like to tell you I turned 45 this month and became wiser. More mature. Ingesting medications on time, taking long walks, reading physical books instead of a screen. Doing more meditation. Cleaning the apartment, car, and office regularly. Organizing my papers and thoughts. Making sure everyone in my life gets the attention and care they need. Watching out for others I can help.

Well, it's been a month since the birthday. I'm angry and nervous. I need to clean the fridge and the apartment.

I wish I could tell you I knew how this "growth" thing works. I feel like I've done it in fits and starts. But inconsistency is far from the worst sin. Worse is that I don't know exactly what worked. This, I believe, is a problem Dan Clowes explores with greater depth and stakes in his incredible graphic novel Monica. Monica, the title character, struggles with loss and abandonment. She doesn't know her father; her mother left her with her own parents as a child. You can grow despite that, but anyone telling you rage born of sheer neglect will simply recede is a damn liar. Especially when you see the cults that allowed for that kind of cruelty all around you. In Monica's case, the violence of Vietnam and the excess of the counterculture don't just create deadbeat parents. They become the world we know, where aging hippies are aggressively confronted by red-hatted cable news junkies. Where any talk of justice is drowned by a not-entirely-true narrative of personal responsibility and success.

In Monica's case, therapies do help. So does aiming for a better job. Still, they don't answer the question of how to come to terms with the sheer inhumanity of American life. For myself, I'd like a little more method to this madness. If I do something that works, I want to recognize how it works and see it through. I know that can make things better. I don't know if it gets me or any of us to where we need to be. We need to know justice is possible, real justice, not simply the dark fantasies of procedural addicts or paranoid rich people.

On a more positive note, there's this poem, "Book of Genesis," which I need to memorize.

Kei Miller, "Book of Genesis"

An amazing poem, in both senses of the word. It not only astounds, but confuses. We are awed to the point of perplexity.

How does this happen? Well, there's a book full of the word "let." "Let" has an ancient power, the freedom of God themselves. From its "clipped sound all things begin," a clipped sound incomplete and therefore all-powerful. It permits beings to emerge and complete themselves. "[A]ll things begin" not just from "let" but "let there be light." A field of seeing and distinguishing, where things can be distinct in their own right. God creates, exercising their freedom, and frees.

Will this book allow you to cast a spell? To work its divine magic and create? Once, it made "fir / and firmament, feather, the first whale." Note the repeated "fi" and "fe" sounds, as if God spits out made-up words which come to life. The firmaments which cleave heaven and earth are of no less majestic origin than fir trees, which refuse to be anything other than green. A mere feather can fly or float, counterbalancing the weight of leviathan. All our whalelike endeavors–society, government, grand schemes for power–would love to drop so gently as a feather.

Book of Genesis (from On Being)
Kei Miller

Suppose there was a book full of only the word,
let – from whose clipped sound all things begin: fir
and firmament, feather, the first whale – and suppose

we could scroll through its pages every day
to find and pronounce a Let meant only for us –
we would stumble through the streets with open books,

eyes crossed from too much reading; we would speak
in auto-rhyme, the world would echo itself – and still
we’d continue in rounds, saying let and let and let

until even silent dreams had been allowed.

The question of immediate relevance, though, is our freedom. Our ability to create. So we have to imagine ourselves with this book. We have to imagine ourselves with the awesome responsibility of making one thing for ourselves. We must "find and pronounce a Let meant only for us." How would we take that responsibility? What would actually happen?

"[E]yes crossed from too much reading; we would speak / in auto-rhyme, the world would echo itself" – we would be reading this book all the time, never stopping, hoping and praying we found the wish we need. It's so funny: it isn't clear we'd bring anything into being. What we want to create is the wish. The permission.

Freedom doesn't lie in getting what you want. It's something else entirely. It is closer to openness, to letting a field of possibilities emerge. You grant yourself freedom, you grant yourself permission, but the heart of it is figuring out how to articulate what is unique to you in the first place.

You'd say "let and let and let / until even silent dreams had been allowed." Again, maybe nothing is created. All that happens: you saw you had a dream, and you acknowledged it.