Anxiety

And of the Absurd

Shift Drinks by Jonathon Todd

In South Philly, feeling anxious, the poet considers his job. Of course, he has to give the people something. In theory, he has to give them what they want. He’s read somewhere, heard someone talk about giving the people what they want. But what do they want? What do they really want? A Buddhist anarchist might know. Let things flow. But when reality insists in intruding — giving anxiety attacks, administering them like beatings — the poet must intercede on his own behalf, on the behalf of society at large. He must look up into the heavens and say something: say something like ‘hey! Just you knock it off!’ And heaven might be silent.

So much modern poetry is about anxiety that I would wonder if Auden’s diagnosis and labelling of the age bearing that name was fifty years premature. Our modern age is the anxiety of knowing that solitary confinement is a police car ride away. That everyone really is filming and recording you every moment. That jobs are bad and progressive, like a disease. That there’s really nothing to be done about it all. What is a man to do?

This collection is a strange one, in a sense, although unlike some of its type, it is well ordered. The Shift Drink interludes are well organised, neatly structured as periodic interstitials. Spare a thought, the writer suggests. The idea of history, ‘not property / But a place to be’ is quite well taken. It’s where we are; it’s where we all end up.

But poetry about the mystery of waking up in strange places — body corrupting and corrupted, confused by outward signs. We have had things of that kind before. We’ve heard those words before. Intervening fantasies of Charon’s voyage as an endless, interrupted taxi ride, some on the outside banging, perhaps, on the windows or the radio being on. A dull endless procession, a grey parade.

Is it a surprise, then, that our narrator succumbs to panic? To the glass hallways that admit too much light, to the small quiet rooms the interrogators might catch you in, to the cages, human-shaped, we all find ourselves inhabiting? There’s no sin in admitting it, some people might say to us. Don’t be afraid to cry; let it all out. But what if you can’t cry on normal days and only cry at funerals? What good is letting it all out to you?

A life ‘where we build & build & build in silence making their indifference into comical song.’ Real Gs moving in silence and all.

Indifference — that’s the new idea. A pontiff, the Vicar of Christ, coming to your neck of the woods and the place shutting up shop in consequence, turning its public face over to the TV cameras and its commercial life over to the compiling and selling of tat. The day the pope arrives, all the local residents are told to stay indoors, to watch his visit on the television. All the better for the other watchers of television overseas. They don’t want to see you, after all.

Psychoanalysis — perhaps that’s the trick. The impossible profession, someone said — a difficult business. We grope around in a dark hallway before the door that only opens once. Who said that? Someone who didn’t know more than me, someone who felt no more intensely than I. ‘& this is isolation of myth, & this is my exit’ — as you do. Exit into a gallery.

Yet, for the author, anxiety doesn’t stop coming — inducing in analysts, in therapists, in well-wishers and friends and acquaintances some tips, some more or less urgent suggestions for survival. Bleed a rainbow into your cup and drink it type stuff. And make sure you’re drinking so many litres of water daily that you’re always running down corridors. Do any less and you want the anxiety to win — ‘we run out of options & time / & slow / enough to pull seconds taut.’

We wonder about these things as time passes and nothing works — pull up to city hall to ask some questions, to pound some desks, to mau-mau the bastards. But there’s no one in and we leave wondering about the taxi fare to get there and our back pain, unsated by the walking down office corridors looking for someone paid slightly more than us to harass.

Life is a lottery.

Some are rich poets, perhaps, working on collections like screenplays, headlining the festivals in leather trousers. I imagine one or two poets around the world are rich. Other guys, anarchist Buddhists, normal men like you and me, are landed with all this anxiety, this weight, this mass. It’s enough to make you sick. It’s enough to make you daub something on a piece of paper. To make those churchmen and those clowns in Washington bend their ears. It’s enough to make you say something, to say something despite still knowing the truth.

‘Call out / of work, call out of, call / out. Space hugs this eye. / Ever get the sense that / something is happening?’

I wonder.