At My Most Negative ...
March 5 2014


At my most negative
more than usual, that is
because imagining the worst
keeps me grateful.
Gratitude, and forgiveness
the keys to happiness, I've learned,
nothing in there
about a sunny disposition.

So anyway
I stop and look around
and understand
that in a hundred years
the entire planet

  —  busy, worried, annoyed

vain, or grasping,
falling in love
or falling in war, 

flushed with success

or crushed by loss  —
everyone alive, everywhere, right now

will be dead and gone.
Mostly forgotten,
and not much mattered, it turned out.
And after the supernova
even the forgetting, over.

So there is a lot to be said
for nihilism.
You don't drown, you shrug,
and like water off a duck’s back

come up dry,
a little ball of down
bobbing straight to the top.

The failures and humiliation, mostly;
the wins, you still enjoy.
It frees you of pettiness
and self-importance.

This is how you can look out at the world
so detached
it's as good as gone.

How you rise up in euphoria,
giddy, invulnerable
non-corporeal,
so metaphysically free
the boundaries of ego dissolve,
and everything
is possible.

If only you could care enough
to bother.


Here's a poem I haven't been brave enough to write until now. Who wants to proclaim to the world that they're a nihilist, after all? It seems defeatist, almost immoral, certainly unGodly, and maybe just a convenient excuse for failure. But I am one; and instead of being dragged down by the black dogs of negativity and pessimism, I feel surprisingly liberated. It’s the consolation of being to say “really, what difference does it make?”  It’s the way the expression “in the fullness of time” provides perspective, a healthy philosophical detachment from both the good and the bad.

The thing is, you can be a nihilist and still be awestruck by the absolute improbability and privilege of life. It's just that you see it more as playing along: why question ultimate meaning, if the answer is inconceivable anyway? So you play the game as it's been given, just not that seriously. There is even something virtuous in this perspective: a kind of healthy modesty, a detachment, a rebuke to ego; a kind of levelling, that can only be good for the temperament.

The last line summarizes the struggle of being a nihilist: all that good feeling stopped short, when you have to fake it to really care. (And, of course, if you believe in God then all bets are off: magical thinking is not at all compatible with the deadening certainty of nihilism.)

I think the style here -- which is less structured than usual for me, less concerned with sentence fragments and the obvious easy cliché -- fits the theme: why revisit and revise, when there is no posterity breathlessly awaiting my immortal words? Why not just write in a steam-of-consciousness fashion, taking the path of least resistance? In other words, break the cardinal rule of poetry, and just say it instead of show it.