Clearing out the cobwebs when the cobwebs look just like the web
How does one clean up the internal life, and the Arachne myth
I’ve been feeling a huge push to write more personally about my life, so that I can get it out of me and not feel like I’m carrying around a huge load of unprocessed stuff. But even writing out this intention, I feel it won’t work: I won’t be able to process everything and even if I work hard, I’ll still be carrying this load, this dirty laundry of an average life with some above-average sensitivities and a handful of small-T traumas.
How do people seem to go through life without feeling like they have to iron out every wrinkle, and even then, wrinkles come back all the time. So the wrinkling will never be straightened, and it will keep on wrinkling forever and ever. Do I just drop the idea of smoothing the wrinkles, of carefully remembering everything in a way that feels smooth enough and not chaotically jagged, just poking me every now and then out of the blue? But even if I resign myself to the enormity of the task, and decide to let the wrinkles slide — let my memory become fuzzy by moving old things to the background to make room for new things — the pokes will still come, and I won’t know why, even more than I don’t know why now. I won’t know the why of why I feel certain ways, unless I keep remembering it. And at the same time I know the concept of this previous sentence is very much hindering my personal healing.
What if the cobwebs look the same as the web? When you don’t do the housekeeping, things build up and it’s hard to see how the built-up stuff is different from the stuff you actually wanted. I didn’t know how to do the housekeeping as I went when I was younger, and so even if I do the housekeeping now, it’s too late, too much has built up. Is this torture? How do people live like this? And I’m still relatively young. What happens when I’m twice as old, with twice as much regret, shame, and confusion built up inside? This is torture. Do I have to go through every past year of my life, reframing all my memories and emotional attachments in new ways that make sense to me, in order to clean up the mess? But then what happens when, in say 5 years, I’ve continued to process and heal as a person, and gained perspective that can clean up the mess better — but I’ve already put everything away arranged in the closet. Do I pull it all out again to process it better? But if so, I should have just left it out in the first place. What’s the point of putting something away if you’re going to need to take it out again? This is actually how I live in my house — clothes stay out, because if they are put away, I forget about them and don’t wear them. Stacks of old drawings and old writings have to remain accessible for me to look through periodically, or else I forget that I wrote or drew them. I am keeping everything present to keep it accessible, when so much of it could be wrapped up and stored in deep freeze. I don’t have room in my mind for what is currently happening because I have stored my entire past in there instead. This is why I have to write it out now. I can’t trust my younger self that she expressed things well enough to put the pin in them.
I am used to keeping most of my thoughts private. I am used to gaslighting myself. I am used to negating my own ideas or perspectives about things that happened. I think what I’m looking for is permission to talk about things that happened in a way that doesn’t aim to tell the truth, but to tell an unreality that only makes sense to the writer, to me. I think that’s what I have to do. I have to settle into my perspective in a way that knowingly acknowledges that it doesn’t have to be true. Is this what poetry is? This is why people like poetry I guess. I am not well-versed in standing by my emotional reality. I am well-versed in denying and repressing my emotional reality. But I do feel a sense of freedom when I write in a way that closes the valve of people-pleasing, and opens a valve of emotional truth illustrated by half-truths, magical realism, elaborations. Embroideries. Tapestries. Re-framing reality to better explain myself, to make more sense. Being an unreliable narrator, being possibly, probably, factually wrong in order to express a deeper emotional reality. Is this what art is?
A lesson handed down through my generations was to always make sure to be correct. What correct is, is unclear, but we better be it. There is danger around doing something without considering every angle of possibility of hurting/annoying/disrupting someone else. Even if that ends up happening, at least you tried, and that is your shield, your saving grace. If you act or speak without considering those others, you are in danger. The blowback will be worse because you acted or spoke without thinking, or you were thinking using only your brain instead of every other person's brains. Someone will think badly of you. Someone will think badly of your family. Someone will think, your mother didn’t teach you to consider others, to know how to do the right thing. And my mother will not be able to defend herself, she will just scream soundlessly into a void that in fact she considers everything and never wanted to do anything wrong.
One of the agaves in my yard is growing its death stalk. A tall, fast-growing stalk from the center, that currently looks like a giant asparagus but will soon bloom with flowers, and baby versions of itself, pups to sprinkle down on the ground and continue itself on. And then the whole plant will die. Then I will call my landlord to have gardeners pull it out of the ground, and I will try to propagate the pups, with my thumb that is very much not green, and that will be that.
Watching it makes me think about how it just knows what to do. I try to understand how its DNA holds this information, info that it kept closed in its heart for a few decades, until it’s now needed. The speed of the growth is unbelievable, inches a day, almost like a slowed down 3D printer. The plan for the form has been there this whole time. It uses all of its deathbed energy to produce the stalk, the flowers and finally the buds of new plants, the pups. I think about how our bodies just know how to develop ourselves, how to grow ourselves, in the pattern of us. And how much we try to change, to shrink or to grow, to alter the shape of, instead of trusting the pattern ingrained inside of us. And also, how that pattern differs from the ones we learn.
The unreliable narrator — what happens when you are the unreliable narrator of your own life, intentionally, as a way to re-frame past hurt and to heal? Is this poetry, is this art? Is this okay to do, especially when you were raised to be a people-pleaser, to always try to be correct, to be scared to be wrong?
The Greek myth of Arachne is the villain origin story of the spider, and the explanation of why she weaves her web. It is also a story about differing perspectives, gaslighting, and questions of power, the ability to transform and grow, and the unreliable narrator. My understanding (I say this, recognizing it as a defense against being wrong, and still doing it) is that Athena felt inadequately worshipped by Arachne, a talented weaver who felt proud of herself instead of crediting Athena for her talent, and so she challenged her to a weave-off. Athena first wove a tapestry of a story of proud humans who the gods had transformed into animals, nature, objects, due to their out of control pride. Arachne then wove a tapestry of a story of all the times that the gods transformed themselves into animals, nature, objects, to trick women and to rape by deception. Arachne’s tapestry was perfect, she won the weave-off, Athena destroyed her work in anger, Arachne tried to hang herself in shame, and Athena, in shame herself, transformed her into a spider, saving her from death but forcing her to weave forever and ever. It doesn’t explain how the pattern of the web is held deep in the heart of the spider, unless you believe that the pattern of our art is held within the heart of the artist. Can this be a story about the perseverance of art-making, of the personal perspective? A story about knowing your value and prioritizing the value of your art, the art made and the art still unmade?