Emily Pérez's "What’s a Thing You Can Finish What’s a Thing You Can Fix"

Thoughts on restlessness.

What’s a Thing You Can Finish What’s a Thing You Can Fix

I woke with confidence woke with restlessness
woke with a sense that I must work ceaselessly
that I must not cease the working if I want breakfast
I must make it if I want a book I must write it if I want
a mountain I must get in the dirt with my tiny shovel
digging the hole it comes from. If my friend says not
to tell anyone about her surgery and yet she posts
about it on her many social media accounts I must
be spending too much time on social media
accounting for the things that do not need a counter.
The writers say they do not do birthday parties
or playdates the writers say they alienate
their friends there is nothing more important
than the doing there is nothing more to make
of the time than the time to have done the most.


first published in Shenandoah (Vol. 72, No. 1 - Fall 2022)

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I spent last night reading through old issues of the literary journal Shenandoah, something I love doing, and something which you should do, too, if you want to be reminded not just of poems, but also of the fact that people — many people — write poems and tend to those poems and send those poems out all around to all these magazines, where other people read those poems and curate those poems into issues. And sometimes, maybe, you might forget, as I do, how many of those poems exist in the world at any given time, thousands upon thousands, and maybe you might, as I might, appreciate the reminder. And so, do it sometime. Read through the archives. I recommend Shenandoah. Or Blackbird. Or Waxwing. Or Bennington Review. Or the tiny and beautiful Send Me Press. Or so many more. And there are many.

When I came across Emily Pérez's poem, I felt it in my bones. The opening lines exhibit the kind of transformative work a poem can do when it takes on a feeling and enacts it:

I woke with confidence woke with restlessness
woke with a sense that I must work ceaselessly
that I must not cease the working if I want breakfast
I must make it if I want a book I must write it if I want
a mountain I must get in the dirt with my tiny shovel
digging the hole it comes from.

Unpunctuated, relentless, streaming quickly from one idea to the next, these lines quite literally feel like the inside of a brain that cannot settle, the inside of a brain that is influenced by time and perception and judgement and worth, all of it contained within a single thought, a sentence that contains a myriad of notions.

I feel drawn to this poem because I think such an opening really lays out the complicated and paradoxical work our brains do in this contemporary moment. Consider how these lines illustrate how much our brains hold, and how different such ideas are. Pérez's poem begins with confidence and then moves to restlessness and then commits to working and then deprecates itself with its tiny shovel. All of that — from the confidence to the self-deprecation — is contained within a single sentence. And I think our brains do that too; I think they contain contradictory ideas in single sentences, before we give ourselves the chance or grace to pause and place a period somewhere. Before we give ourselves the chance to breathe.

Pérez's refusal to place a period in these opening lines does something surprising and wild on top of this. Re-reading the poem, I’ve found that such a refusal allows certain thoughts to be read in different ways. For example, the lines:

if I want breakfast
I must make it

Could also be read:

I must not cease the working if I want breakfast

This mishmashing, this jumbling — it feels like a brain moving a million miles an hour, even just upon waking. And that feeling, my god, is real. It’s real for me somedays; I’m sure it is real for you.

Restlessness seems like one of the defining feelings of our moment, which is a moment that could be defined as one of great unrest. Rest; rest; rest — the word is everywhere we turn. People beg for it; people beg others to take it. People deserve it. And yet our world is ravaged, each day, by the unrest that those with power cause for those without it. The politics of this country and the endless violence of empires. Economic precariousness and an inability to imagine a future. And so we sit, hearts palpitating, anxious and trembling, trying to sleep and not being able to, and then waking up from our fits to move as quick as we can through the day.

This has obvious consequences, one of which is a kind of collective experience of depression and anxiety. According to an American Psychological Association report on stress from several years ago, “More than half of all adults report they were very restless (53%) or they felt so tired they just sat around and did nothing (52%) in the past two weeks.” That number increases with Gen Z adults, with “more than 7 in 10 noting that in the past two weeks they felt so tired they sat around and did nothing (75%), felt very restless (74%), found it hard to think properly or concentrate (73%), felt lonely (73%) or felt miserable or unhappy (71%).”

There’s another consequence to restlessness, too — one more taken to the literal sense of the word, which is an inherent sleeplessness, an inability to enter a state where one is unconscious, subject to dreams at the same time as one is undergoing a daily act of restoration. And perhaps I am thinking of this because I just finished teaching Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit to my AP Literature class, which we read over the course of a few days while sitting in a circle. It is a book that is one of my absolute favorites to teach, mostly because of the surprising sensation that comes over students when they realize that this room that Garcin, Inez, and Estelle find themselves in is hell itself, and then, too, because of the revelatory discussions about our own hells and how they make themselves up in our lives, how what is hellish to each of us is sometimes similar and almost always undoubtably different.

In that book, Garcin realizes he has no eyelids, which means he cannot sleep, which means he cannot rest. At the end of this moment of realization, he says, in a line that always sort of slaps me in the face:

Ah, I see; it's life without a break.

In his recent book The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life, the contemporary philosopher Lowry Pressly, in a chapter on modern society’s obsession with optimization and the hypothetical future development of an antidote to sleep, writes:

When I imagine a world in which this daily experience of oblivion is neither an individual necessity nor a commonality of collective life, I see a world of terrible, flattening lucidity. Life without the experience of constantly emerging out of oblivion and falling back into it strikes me as depressingly shallow…A world without sleep is a world with one fewer region of human life that is inherently uncontrollable, full of surprise and potentiality, essentially unfathomable but nevertheless emphatically human.

At another point in the book, he writes:

Persistence, like any other form of striving, can be exhausting if unaccompanied by periods of repose. When there is no quarter from striving, persistence turns inward; self-direction becomes self-torment and depletes what it had hoped to sustain.

And so, a world of restlessness is not just a world without restoration, it is also a world without depth. Our restlessness means both that we cannot find ourselves restored physically, and also that we cannot find ourselves surprised emotionally or mentally. When we no longer have ample time to dwell in the unconscious imaginative, that safe place of dreams, and when we no longer toggle between that world and our own, we live only in this world, which is a world whose perpetual unrest and violence and abuse frays our nerves, shatters our souls, and makes it so that our only relief is not a kind of restoration but rather an endless dulling.

It makes me think of this line from today’s poem:

accounting for the things that do not need a counter.

Such a line offers one of the more succinct ways of naming how it feels, at times, to move through our modern world, where so much feels thrust into our perspective and where we each have to navigate how to account for the importance of each item. This is one of the reasons, I think, why leaving social media feels so complicated for people. One must make sense of the paradox that arises in one’s brain — the potential relief that might come with not having to account for so many things, weighed against the anxiety of being left out of all the accounting.

There is too much to account for these days, and we spend so much of our waking lives doing the accounting. We do it often, alone, I think, and yet tied to others who are also accounting, which is saddening, because, as Pressly writes, “solitude becomes loneliness when people are no longer able to be by themselves.” He goes on:

The inability to be alone with oneself, along with the constant connection to others, is one of the hallmarks of the tethered self.

I find this tragic because, it seems, every possible thing we might encounter is funneled through this act of accounting. Every atrocity. Every violence. Every relationship. Every form of media. We weigh and are weighed. We try to figure it out: what’s important, what matters. We watch other people do the same. Or not. We judge and are judged. All of it, all at once. Like today’s poem — contained in a single sentence. We grow tired and we don’t give ourselves space to heal. I know I don’t. I am primed toward restlessness. I exude energy because I am scared, I think, of what might happen if I relax. And yet still, even without relaxing, I am tired.

It is tiring, I think, to feel so close to what matters and yet so far away. It is tiring to be proximal to a kind of endlessness and to have to sift through it to find one’s way. It is tiring to have so much of what one witnesses be awful. And it is tiring to witness it alone, watching the likes go up along with the comments, this sense of intimacy to everything absolutely shattered by distance. It is tiring, I know, to be aware of how awful this all is. And to feel, at times, wildly powerless. Restless in a time of unrest. Anxious in a time of unease. We could dream a better world, I think — but it never feels we have the time or space to dream.

As I did last week, before I close, I’d like to mention that I began teaching my second section of a class for the Adirondack Center for Writers this past week. If you’ve read this far before, and recall, it’s called You Do Not Have to Be Good, and it’s on reading and writing with generosity in mind, on moving away from a restrictive and prescriptive method of such things that can label things in ways that feel reductive rather than expansive.

I’ve asked my students to, in the week between classes, engage in reading and writing prompts that feel, at least to me, like some small way to try to read a poem and then look at the world and then try to approach any of it — however hard — with generosity. I did this with the first session, but I’d like to offer the prompts here again— in case you, reading this, are interested. I’ll be answering them again myself, which I’m excited to do, given how the prompts are the same, but my life — as yours is — is a little different. And so, here’s the second week’s prompt:

Read, as a guide, Steve Scafidi's poem "Among the Millions of Things That History Will Forget." It's beautiful, isn't it? He is one of the poets who changed my life. Really. I mean that.

Then, in a little mini essay or a poem or whatever you want, make your own list of things that history will forget but that you, alive right now, will not. It can take the shape of a list. A grocery list, even. It can take the shape of a poem. It can take the shape of a story. Whatever you want.

And here’s that poem:

Earlier this week, I was up early on a rainy morning, running around the reservoir in Central Park. I was, briefly, the only person on that cinder path, and the rain was growing gentler, and the dawn was light enough that the soft-steel-gray of the clouds was the same color as the mirrored surface of the water, and the cherry blossoms had just bloomed, and the pink of each petal felt like someone had tattooed the word April onto the skin of winter, and everything was perfumed with everything, so that each breath was a breath of flower-smell and grass, of mud and earth, of asphalt somewhere far off and all the cars running over it, of city and sky, of the rainwater and sweat, both covering my skin. And I was happy, briefly, because I was running pain free, which has been a struggle for me lately. And I knew, then, in that one moment, that such a moment was, briefly, mine. That no one would remember it but me. And so I would have to remember it. Birdsong and blooming. A drop of water on the tip of my nose. The way I thought that, maybe, everything would be okay. Whatever that means. And it does mean something. I’m writing it down so that I remember it again, before I forget. It’s the forgetting, sometimes, that defines a life. We write, I think, against forgetting.

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Some notes:

1. If you are in New York City this week, I am reading at the KGB Bar’s Red Room on Friday, April 11th at 7 PM, alongside Adrian Matejka and Haleh Liza Gaforia, in a reading curated by the wonderful Maya Popa. Come through if you can!

   

2. Here is a website — put together by volunteers — that tracks the jobs lost and lives affected by the de-funding of USAID. It’s worth reading in order to fully understand the severity of what is happening, who it is affecting, and how to help.

3. You can find a list of the work that Writers Against the War on Gaza is doing to build solidarity among writers in support of Palestinian and against their consistent oppression here.

4. Workshops 4 Gaza is an organization of writers putting together donation-based writing workshops and readings in support of Palestine and in awareness of a more just, informed, thoughtful, considerate world. You can follow them here and get more information about them here.

5. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.