obsessive cycles

The mechanics of my living cycles through obsessions, which are people and items that I react to with intense interest. They are usually immediate, thus initially irrational. I try to get to know them better, and through the process I get to understand how I think and who I am. As Anais Nin said, "We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are."

I rarely abandon an attraction once acquired -- the nature of my passion stays the same -- though my level of engagement may change, depending on my day-to-day life and/ or intellectual afterthoughts. The obsessions do not necessarily return in chronological order either; the order is affected by my weathered perception of current circumstances.

The idea of poetry grasped me more about four years ago, when I picked up stream-of-consciousness from Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. I wrote a piece about "life, a delusion, whimsical -- an enigma," which I was so proud of that I sent it to Exeter's admissions office.

"Growing is a sense of the presence of life. The mountain, no, it never grows but life hides in it ... I am not life and I am not my own life's overseer ... My subconscious overtakes my conscious and runs wild like a gypsy child -- and life is allowing it! ... My being is polluted by life, its greediness, its evilness. But on the other hand, I can't live without life and its every essence. The essence, the essence of life, flashing now and then, like a brand of shampoo on the TV screen ..."

And just now, I found an email that I wrote to someone I cared deeply about of the same time period; it was also structured in subtly connected paragraphs, but with first-hand short descriptive and narrative phrases, pieces of conversation, and bursts of emotion.

About two years ago, after reading Mary Oliver's In Blackwater Woods in Mr. Weber's English 210, I wrote a reaction to this excerpt from a poem with the same title as the book.

To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

The reaction was a collection of ten poems, called A Process of Realizations. It was based on a relationship I had, which soon evolved into one with myself. (There's a distinction between being alone and having a relationship with oneself; the former is innate, while the latter is an obsessive phase.) Relationships could be pretty obsessive.

After the collection, I again substituted prose for verse as my roots paper on family history in English 230, and I continued sprinkling my own lines between prose in following English papers. I did it because I could not express those bangBangBANGS, gel-like heaviness and buzzing white lights in prose. I'm grateful that my teachers were appreciative, because it was a need that molded me. A need that is acutely aware and keeps me hyper-conscious.

When I started off, I was an introverted detective. I meticulously recorded how I felt after moments that affected me, in relation to what/who I interacted with and snapshots of where it happened -- also, in context, because at the time I was transitioning from tradition-valuing Chinese culture to American individualism.

While poetry and the free verse form I use have been personal to me from the beginning, I explored the individualist aspect in great poets. I remembered that Mr. Weber mentioned Walt Whitman was the pioneer of free verse, so I bought Leaves of Grass and read pages of it on the plane. The below excerpt is clipped as a Post-it on my desktop.

"Speech is the twin of my vision, it is unequal to measure itself,
It provokes me forever, it says sarcastically,
Walt you contain enough, why don't you let it out then?
Come now I will not be tantalized, you conceive too much of articulation,
Do you not know O speech how the buds beneath you are folded?
Waiting in gloom, protected by frost,
The dirt receding before my prophetical screams,
I underlying causes to balance them at last,
My knowledge my live parts, it keeping tally with the meaning of all things,
Happiness, (which whoever hears me let him or her set out in search of this day.)
My final merit I refuse you, I refuse putting from me what I really am,
Encompass worlds, but never try to encompass me."

-- Walt Whitman's Song of Myself

Poems I wrote were private, but I was also eager to share my crafted confessions. I wrote because I reacted, consciously so, and I hoped that the reader would react, too, even if differently. Like Elizabeth Bishop, I loved painstaking accuracy, spontaneity and mystery, though I doubt my mastery of those qualities. I continued to practice.

Summer 2006, I wrote more than thirty poems in eight weeks, and I feared that I was becoming too self-absorbed. Distracting myself, I experimented with out-of-the-ordinary images, combined icky-sounding words and toyed with the gross and magnificent imagination.

This past term, the writing class that I took forced me to write in form -- blank verse, sonnet, traditional stanzas, etc.. It was a rigorous creative challenge that I have never before experienced. I wasn't sure how that made me grew, until I attempted to understand how my self-focused tendencies match up with my eagerness to meet people and my life's goal to devote myself to development. My conclusion, as of a couple of hours ago, was that my life of cycling obsessions -- made conscious -- allows for risk-taking, and my awareness, sharpened by poetry, yields compassion. And, undeniably, I'm a born reactant, infinitely curious...