This Piece of Writing Began

       because I cut my first-finger on a long, loping crack in my hand-mirror by tracing the life-line pattern that I imagined it resembled;

       because I can’t make it mean anything I could call prophetic, anything I’d understand, but immediately afterward I saw something aligned to its shape, something calmer, smooth, more assured, in the way my cursive writing had changed, I feel more intuitive trust that my handwriting’s mirror in my journal is more reflective than glass;

       because discussing cursive as a way to write (as I am writing in it, in my journal, and only later typing it into my laptop) seems insignificant to me as a subject—when there are global and local and personal crises that are profoundly important to assess;

       because, nonetheless, I find the enormities I face (and that so very many, if not all of us, face in various guises) impossible to write about directly in poetry, in any insight-seeking prose;

       because, surprisingly, something as insignificant as considering my reasons to write in cursive—something as insignificant as this kind of subject leaks intuitions about what most frighten me and can create sometimes whole paragraphs on a page I can learn from, I can trust;

       because my friend in Idaho writes me only texts, now that she has had another breakdown, and massive doses of B12 injections have begun, or ended, or maybe there’s a different doctor she’s seeing, since she will not undergo the other treatment plan prescribed;

       because she stopped calling me when I asked her to tell me something more about how it’s going, anything at all she’d be willing to describe, but it’s all too much for her to talk about at all;

       because as I handwrite “it’s all too much for her” I can see it happen: the “it’s all too much” dilates and this time I write it again in enormous cursive, so there’s no room for the rest of the phrase (“for her”) on the page of my journal, and I realize this might mean that the cliché of “it’s all too much” has room in it for anyone, which, if I’d been typing, I’d have deleted too soon, too soon, even though I don’t know what to do with it, it’s here in ink, and this continuing is in a cursive that is suddenly so tight that I can barely read it, but read it I can;

       because even though Oppen said that if, when you are writing, you realize that you’ve written a word that scares you, then you have started, still I have to get some words onto a page to begin something happening, I can’t go directly for what I’m afraid of;

       because maybe Oppen meant that all along, meant that the unexpected’s arrival in the midst of a sentence or two, is the way the most useful things to fear can come forward, and that’s what to watch for, not the known-fear I’m already inured to;

       because cursive creates connectivity between letters, which even a frightening word might trust as a net to hold it, hold in it what I can’t see yet, until there’s enough sediment, word after word, to dig into, to find what I’d otherwise miss;

       because what I don’t see, I don’t believe in, even if it has been there inside me waiting a long time;

       because writing in cursive, about writing in cursive, may be creating a kind of magnet that is especially sensitive, especially apt, at drawing more shavings of metallic-fear forward;

       because, as I focus on the act of writing, Oppen can come to mind, and I can draw in my journal, looping his name beside the most frightening words, making images of his letters;

       because I can see that even frightening words might loop or curve in just the way that a growing-thing bends to align with its climate’s forces, and thus survive, even thrive;

       because especially frightening words might want some safety, too, and Oppen’s name artfully, cursively, doodled beside them might offer some solace;

       because what seems silly, embarrassing, outlandish, at first, to me, as I write it, isn’t necessarily only that;

       because on a journal page, written in ink, I can’t immediately delete something that seems silly and outlandish, and since it’s there, I’m more inclined to keep following it with more cursive;

       because, later, I see how the landscape of ‘the outlandish’ is a place new insights find fertile;

       because whenever I resist what I’ve started to write (be it something that seems silly, or be it something so serious that to even begin it leaves me blocked), this is likely a habitual, knee-jerk resistance, which is a thought I can’t even begin to pose to myself without using a cliché like “knee-jerk”;

       because such resistance comes, as much, from what I believe others will think of me as what I might think of myself;

       because asking my writing-self to disrupt the habitual does mean bringing myself to a liminal site that isn’t easy to inhabit;

       because that site isn’t just in one place, but moves around, with cursive I feel in my hands how it’s a site I might find anywhere, at any time;

       because it’s not exclusive to me;

       because so many people I meet on the street, if I really listen to what they tell me, speak in ways that show me they inhabit it, too;

       because I handwrite a phrase into my journal that I find again in an old text that fell off my shelf when I thought I was looking for some other book;

       because it fell open to a line I’d underlined months ago, on a page I remember keeping the book open to, for a long time;

       because the line “surviving is not what we think” (from Cixous) means something different now than it did to me then, I handwrite it on a 3x5 card, cut it in half right across the phrase, and rest one half on my laptop, one half in the pocket where I keep my cell-phone;

       because I will have to think about it and conjure the missing part, and something more might be conjured besides;

       because Kayla told me that Noa, her eight year old daughter, who is in a class in a good school, isn’t taught how to write in cursive, as there’s no time in the curriculum for it, and I feel a need to eulogize what’s lost, and might not even have known about, if fate hadn’t given me Kayla as a friend only recently, and I wouldn’t even know that I cared, if I weren’t handwriting this now;

       because I want to grieve the plants, outmoded things, animals, let alone all the people in countries I don’t know—all of which are lost, and I don’t know how;

       because shame can rise up from that set of words, which is, if I follow it, not only a vibrant, glowing shame but a fear, too, that I need to let be bottomless, even as the cursive gives it a net, and another beneath that, and beneath that is a method of archeology;

       because Giorgio Agamben says “the entry point to [perceiving] the present necessarily takes the form of an archeology; an archeology that does not, however, regress to the historical past, but returns to that part within the present that we are absolutely incapable of living”;

       because there is a lot of room inside what I don’t understand in the phrase “absolutely incapable of living” I can seek the outlandish there, and cursive won’t let me delete anything, not only because it’s in ink, but because the net between letters reminds me that there is a kind of netting that the texture of the paper makes between handwritten words on a blank page, and that reminds me that there is a kind of netting between me and everyone I pause to talk with, as I walk to work, a net that still is porous to whatever might come into it from either of us, or flow from us, from and toward other people and cars passing close to us on the street;

       because when Noa’s grandfather writes her a letter, he sends two copies, one in cursive and one typed, and Noa begins by ‘reading’ the one in cursive, though not for English as I’d understand it, she’s using her artist’s eye to trace patterns in the cursive that only she can see, maybe she’s seeing more than if she knew cursive, and so would miss what this form of intuitive translation can be;

       because what I’m calling intuitive translation might be taking her to a liminal conversation with her grandfather as well as with her future-self as an artist, so that Noa is simultaneously occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a threshold she might not need to realize she can cross;

       because, yesterday, the Yemeni grocer’s uncle, for the first time, smiled back at me when I said hello to him, which I don’t do often, since where he sits, low and right behind the beef-jerky-&-nuts-tiered offerings, keeps him mostly hidden from us shoppers, beside where Ajam stands, and often beside Ajam is his brother Sali, there at the register in their store, day after day, hour after hour, ringing up people’s items, taking cash mostly, since the people in my neighborhood don’t use credit cards very often, I’m like them, in that at least;

       because cursive asks me what did I really see in his face, was it as much a look of surprise as a smile, which I realize now, even as a smile, I didn’t understand;

       because I don’t know if my face showed him that “not understanding,” which I didn’t know about at the time;

       because believing we’d made some mutually comprehensible connection (and I ignored anything that disagreed with that), was only adding to a lack of comprehension between us;

       because it’s frightening to trust that we won’t know each other as anything more than strangers, and yet still can share something in our faces together, and letting it be true that this is a useful fear to live with;

       because all the feelings that I can’t clarify are what I did offer him, and, as I write here, I still feel that something of this is what he was open to receiving, surprised though he was, and this still seems like a lot to have happen between us;

       because I don’t have to fit the pieces together myself, the cursive is merely a net for all of them to sit loosely, as it won’t let me speed to fit the meanings together, using the delete key, to form sentences that my thought-synapses are most used to, and most trust;

       because cursive does, as the commonplace idea puts it, “take more time than typing,” and then I have to type it all again to bring any of it out of the journal, and after letting so much happen in cursive, I am more inclined to keep what I might have disdained as “experiment”;

       because “experiment” is cognate with “experience” according to Raymond Williams, which is what Claire told me and I haven’t had the time, or haven’t made the time, to look up;

       because I just now realize that those two turns of phrase for the same thing are nearly opposite in what they say: “I haven’t had the time” means time is finite, while “haven’t made the time” means that I can make more time and more and more, if it’s for something I might want;

       because I was in Safeway this morning, when a man walks up to me, and since he has two items and I have a cart-full, tells me I should to let him ahead of me, his head is cocked at an angle sharp as the edge in his eyes:

       because my mouth says yes, so quickly, that I’m unable to bring the rest of me along, I’m split again, irreconcilably;

       because the man in Safeway in line ahead of me has turned toward me, not facing forward as he should, not following rules of standing-in-line personal-distance, which include not staring at the person behind you;

       because he is watching me do my best not to look at his ripped nylon white jacket, stained, I just give up and look into his eyes, and he says to me, “You kill me”;

       because surviving is not what we think;

       because I don’t know how to read his expression, and as I try I sink deeper and deeper inside it, I say to myself, drowning is not what we think;

       because he leaves the line and goes a few lines away from me and is already speaking to another woman in line with a full cart, and I can’t see her face, I could move a little to the left to do so, but I don’t, invidious comparison might be the result;

       because for no reason, I remember how I lied incessantly after mom’s first breakdown;

       because I can ask myself, as I write this, if any of the multi-syllabic adverbs I use is an attempt to sound smart;

       because I can let the answer be “don’t know the answer” and I don’t have to know why;

       because I lied, when I said that Idaho is where my friend lives and I lied about a lot of the specifics about her;

       because her eyes are my mother’s eyes, which I’ve never told her, never actually admitted to myself;

       because this kind of lie, I call self-protection, but cursive responds that I haven’t been truthful about so much in my childhood, and forgotten so much else, that I should not imagine I’m telling much truth now, which isn’t my friend’s fault, or even my mother’s fault, but it’s interesting that “fault” comes into this;

       because if I were typing I’d have already deleted most all of this;

 

       because the worst thing about listening to NPR in the car, is you can’t predict what the next story will do with you;

       because it’s easy to think that it’s just me that the story is doing something with, doing something to, that it’s just me being changed by the fact that I’m hearing it, but there’s this illogical feeling I have, a question, really: I wonder if because I chance to be listening, the fact that I’m listening and changed by it, might impact others who are also listening right now;

       because there’s a swelling of realism inside what seems unbelievable in a strong intuition, in something that isn’t easy to think, there’s a place to survive in what I can think and can’t believe, but that swell might be a wave so large I drown in it;

       because drowning is not what we think;

       because I’d turned on the radio in the middle of the program, I didn’t know who was talking, so I had to decide, every few minutes, if I’d leave the radio on, and I almost didn’t, I’m that frightened of everything, I realize, just now;

       because I write in cursive to find out, but much of the finding out, even in cursive, slips under the waves, and I don’t want to go there, dead fish down there but their bones are feeding something;

       because I kept listening, I let myself, I realize, be unsafe for a while, but it’s a fight, and I can feel it, how often I don’t listen at all to anything I deem might drown me, but I could tell she was in her rhythm-ed stroke, moving fast against a current, she was saying “I have a bad memory, it took me years to realize that this is true because I spent years forgetting the abuse”;

       because I could tell she was strong, the current had made her arms into very sensitive mechanisms, her arms were her figures of speech, which would falter yet she’d find a new stroke;

       because my friend in Idaho texted me “inscribe the abyss we are,” after a week of no response to my texting her, and I found the quote in my copy of Cixous, did she know I would?;

       because this journal will go on filling, though what I’ve now written I’m ready to type into my laptop, it’s as much as I want to transcribe, for now, as much as I will inscribe in a typeface;

       because I have to stop somewhere, even as cursive goes on falling and rising and falling in my intuition, I won’t ever be able to get it all to a page;

       because I can prop the journal beside my laptop and see that my handwriting has changed and changed again over even the past month;

       because that the word “abyss,” when I handwrite it, is itself an archeology that has reshaped itself, even as it remains frightening;

       because a word that remains frightening, as Oppen reminds me, is a place to begin again and again;