Day 6: In Curvatus
I recalled the wisdom of my first writing teacher, Ben Belitt, who said, “Our poems are wiser than we are.” No small part of the process of writing is the lifting up into consciousness of what has long remained in the basement, hidden, underground, as in a tomb. (Kathleen Norris, “The Quotidian Mysteries”)
I wrote this poem a week ago, and it feels fitting to share it today. I wrote it not about the break up, though it’s about the darkness and emptiness a person (a woman) who’s anxious.
For those of you interested in the theology of the poem, that’ll be at the bottom. Otherwise, take the poem for how you understand it.
*
Homo in Curvatus in Se
And the eye that eyes itself is your eye
And the ear that hears itself is too near…
You’re getting too close to your source
–Andrew Bird, “Eyeoneye”
It starts with your nose: nose to knee.
See your toes? Count them, just in case.
Remember how Mom promised they were candies,
tootsie rolls and strawberry frooties.
If your stomach growls, lob one off.
What you can’t do is think about what got you here,
head buried into your body. You
cannot see how a hand could grip a tuft of hair so tight. You
cannot see how a word could be so hard to pronounce. Forget
etymologies, phonetics.
What you can do is roll your whole body into itself,
curve, till your ponytail tucks between your ankles. (You’re not so
symmetric after all.) Be one with yourself.
You have no opening, a Mobius strip.
Flashes of your violence—your throat, impossibly hoarse.
“Visualize a better tomorrow”: what a joke. All you need to know
is the underbelly of your belly, the sweat under your kneecaps,
the inside of your throbbing head.
You are a rock,
and you are Sisyphus.
*
Homo in curvatus in se is my favorite Latin phrase, meaning, “man bent in on himself.” Most theologians and Christians talk about pride as being the primary sin of Adam, Eve, and everyone since. In my theology class last term, my professor suggested that in curvatus may be a better way of describing women’s sins (which are often so different from men’s!).
How I understand in curvatus is that cutting oneself off from the whole world and drowning in the sorrow you’re experiencing. It’s not grieving–how can grieving be a sin? But it’s a kind of hoarding, a kind of self-destruction that happens within a person.
In the epigraph of the poem are a few lines from Andrew Bird’s song, “Eyeoneye,” which I think is really a song about in curvatus, whether he knows it or not. He helped me understand the concept in a more concrete way. Andrew says in his 2010 Ted Talk:
… My point is [a feedback loop is] the sound of self-destruction.
And I’ve been thinking about how that applies across a whole spectrum of realms, from, say, the ecological, okay. There seems to be a rule in nature that if you get too close to where you came from, it gets ugly. So like, you can’t feed cows their own brains or you get mad cow disease, and inbreeding and incest and, let’s see, what’s the other one? Biological — there’s autoimmune diseases, where the body attacks itself a little too overzealously and destroys the host, or the person. And then — okay, this is where we get to the song — kind of bridges the gap to the emotional….
And so, I don’t know if you’ve ever had this, but when I close my eyes sometimes and try to sleep, I can’t stop thinking about my own eyes. And it’s like your eyes start straining to see themselves. That’s what it feels like to me. It’s not pleasant. I’m sorry if I put that idea in your head. It’s impossible, of course, for your eyes to see themselves, but they seem to be trying. So that’s getting a little more closer to a personal experience. Or ears being able to hear themselves — it’s just impossible. That’s the thing.
So, I’ve been working on this song that mentions these things and then also imagines a person who’s been so successful at defending themselves from heartbreak that they’re left to do the deed themselves, if that’s possible. And that’s what the song is asking.
I love that penultimate sentence: “I’ve been working on this song that … imagines a person who’s been so successful at defending themselves from heartbreak that they’re left to do the deed themselves, if that’s possible.”
So. That’s in curvatus.
June 14, 2014