On Perplexity: Chrysanthemum

My head was a glove. It had many fingers. It grabbed for things, but they were slippery. I couldn’t find the light switches, and I forgot how to make food, so I ate cheese slices in the dark. No, it wasn’t that bad. I ate cheese slices in the moonlight. I had had a stroke. I guess I have to keep saying that. It is the context and the lens.

Perplexed is a soft word, charming. A dog turning its head to the side when it doesn’t understand what you mean when you say I love you. I was perplexed, and by this I mean I was stuck in the space between terror and awe. I wasn’t confused; I wasn’t weighing the options. I was startled by the incomprehensible—as if confronted for the first time by vinegar or polka music or a bright yellow. It was delicate, precarious, the eye of the storm. It collapsed, often and easily, into fear or confusion. It was constantly interrupted by self-pity and breakthrough pain.

It is easy to talk about terror, and awe has its own vernacular: divine, reverent, wondrous, uncanny. But terror and awe are nouns, and perplexed is an adjective. To be confused is to be in a state of confusion. To be perplexed is to be in a state of what? Perplexion? It sounds made up, but I suppose all words are made up. What is a light switch? Where are light switches, and what do they do? I looked at the light switch. Sometimes I knew what it was. I flipped the switch, up and down. It tickled me.

I haven’t heard people talk about this part: lacking guile, approaching everything without irony or baggage, being delighted. To be disoriented and to have no compass is a terrifying thing, but I had been orienting myself out of habit instead of toward true north. Light switch: I could learn this. I am learning this. Why would I ever learn this if I thought I already knew what it was?

An elaborate display of ornamental chrysanthemums is not without consequence. It is suspicious. It should be considered as should the single chrysanthemum and the word chrysanthemum. There are ghosts in the hotel, and the man with no face has your bags. These are not things to take lightly. OK, now I’m just saying things, trying to startle you. It felt like that: relevant, with meaning, but the content was hard to track. It was delightful-ish. It turned into fear, even hopelessness, when things needed to get done.

Relearning how to walk was hard. It hurt. It was frustrating. I fell down a lot, but it had to be done, though it was not the challenge I wanted. The world is vast and strange. It is a difficult thing to dwell on. Sometimes things are larger or smaller than they should be. That makes me anxious, which is the same thing as excited, though we call them different things depending on our levels of safety and optimism. Maybe. I am still afraid of falling in the shower, and I am still afraid that my dog will convert to Judaism and want a Bat Mitzvah, and I can’t afford to pay for a Bat Mitzvah. They are both terrifying, though they may be different kinds of terror. This, however, makes me both anxious and excited: duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck ... 

I don’t actually have a dog; my housemate has a dog. He feeds her, but she sleeps in my room. She has a stupid name, so I call her Ladydog  Johnson. She doesn’t respond to it, so I have to yell it really loudly. The internet says that dogs can’t smile. More specifically, the internet says that when a dog smiles, it isn’t a smile, and it doesn’t mean what you think it means. I don’t know. There’s a lot I never knew, and there’s a lot I no longer know, which is OK. When faced with the unknown, people can make their best guesses and get it wrong, over and over, and call it science. Science, science, science, science, science ... 

It’s a mystery if you don’t know the answer. It’s a tragedy if you used to know. That was the general attitude in rehab. You could be brave or not brave, but it was serious business. Discovery was a measure of how much had been lost, how far there was to go. We didn’t discuss perplexity or delight. There were worksheets for tracing letters, memory games; there were achievable goals. L-M-N-O-P is a milestone: five things in a row that connect, being able to remember them in order. A sentence that doesn’t trail off at the end is an incredible relief. A paragraph, just a paragraph, would be my measure of a successful recovery.

Before my stroke, I wasn’t a fan of the paragraph. I wrote in lines. The paragraph seemed so plodding and obvious and, well, connected. There wasn’t room for mystery because there weren’t gaps for the mystery to get into, much in the way that it’s difficult to set a poem to music because a poem is already music, so there’s little room to add more music to it. Now I respect the paragraph though I’m not sure I like it. I am trying to learn it. To me, it is now crucial though still not exciting. Maybe a little exciting. It’s hard to work in a box. For me it is.

Ornamental chrysanthemums. A lot of them. Boxes of them. Maybe more than ornamental, maybe necessary. Maybe necessary chrysanthemums. But how exhausting being confronted by something strange and having to rise to the occasion can be, having to learn the language before telling the story. How exhausting: perplexity and wonderment. How absolutely exhausting and beautiful when everything is confrontationally and abruptly new.

Honestly, I am still not OK, which is fine. I was not OK before the stroke—which is why I had the stroke—and no one ever gets around to choosing their seventh favorite dessert because things really never get that bad. At sixteen, I proclaimed that I would become a poet and experience the world. Then I started to experience the world, and my resolve to experience the world started to waver. I don’t think trauma makes for better art, but I think perplexity is fundamental to it. Chrysanthemum: it isn’t what you think it is. Or, perhaps more accurately, it could mean something different than it currently does.