Every door is a portal but not all portals are doors. What will it take to cross over? The rift is the place where the formerly seemingly singular is pulled apart, exposing what’s above or below and making room for something multitudinous and new. A rupture in the smooth surface of the land, the relationship, the identity, the cloudbank, the sidewalk, the map.
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In the tarot deck, The World card commonly shows a human figure at a threshold, an opening—about to pass through. Someone is preparing to move into a new phase or world or way of being. This liminal space, this between-time, is fertile and rife with risk. To move from the known to the unknown is the bravest, most human action, and it is always rewarded, though not always in the ways we would choose.
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Marie Howe writes of her brother’s death:
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When my maternal grandmother died, I was in Arkansas partway through the third summer of touring the country with two other poets living out of our van and performing anywhere that would have us — bars, mostly, along with the occasional bookstore or coffee shop or ice cream parlor. When I sold my car and bought the 11-year-old 1988 Ford Econoline conversion van for our first tour, I named her after my grandmother: Wilma Traut the Van. I don’t know why. Something about sturdiness and the fact that she gave me my first book of poetry before I could even read.
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We figured that van would get us across the country maybe once, but it was on the third summer out that she started to fail. We’d drop her off at a Firestone, go do a show and tell our sad vehicular tale to the crowd hoping for extra donations and book or bumper sticker sales. Sometimes it worked. Always the van started right back up and then by the next town be stalling out.
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Somewhere just outside Little Rock, smoke started pouring up from the floorboards. I was half asleep in the passenger seat so it took me a minute to realize it wasn’t just both of the girls smoking at once. Andi said, “We’re in deep shit now,” and pulled us into the truck stop fortuitously located off the exit we were about to pass.
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The truck stop had a mechanic who agreed to look at her. Yolanda wandered off to find something to smoke or eat while Andi stood by as he popped the hood and stepped back from the plumes it released. The bag phone plugged into the lighter plug rang—this was 2001, before the advent of cell phones or smart phones or iPads or such—which was odd and a little alarming since no one but our families had the number.
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It was my dad, letting me know that my grandma, Wilma Traut the person, had taken a turn and wouldn’t last the night. They needed to know where I was so they could get me a flight home. The funeral would be in a few days, likely on my birthday.
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One of the things I remember my grandmother teaching me most vividly was the concept of momentum, the fact that an object in motion tends to stay in motion. That we build up speed, and eventually that speed carries us, takes on a speed of its own. At least that’s how I understood it at eleven, sitting on the screened-in front porch of the log cabin that belonged to her father before her and would to us after.
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I hung up the phone and went to get some water and do a little crying away from the steaming truck stop asphalt. When I got back, the mechanic explained that short of replacing the entire transmission, there was nothing to be done for Wilma Traut the Van, that putting new parts in an old system will just blow out the next and then the next, which is what had been happening to us for weeks. He looked at us in our unwashed cutoffs and sweat-soaked tank tops and said no charge for the diagnostic, $10,000 for a new transmission, here’s the number for a salvage yard that will take her away for nothing.
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I flew home for the services, carried the casket as a pallbearer and as the eldest daughter of my family segment, spoke on behalf of us despite some’s insistence that it ought to be only the oldest males from each who represented. I missed two shows, and we finished travel to the last few smashed into a generously lent Acura. We talked about trying again for another season but the touring years were over, we knew it the last time we slammed the van’s back doors shut so the tow could fasten the hitch. I tried to peel off a few of the stickers but they were on there to stay. Not sure what I would have done with them anyway. Sleep well, Wilma, we said. Thanks for carrying us this far.
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Abandonment can be a kind of invitation. What leaves us can be a map. To move with abandon, one must surrender to the animal body. Not all suffering is an atlas, but all pain is a path. All sorrow is a door in a house the photographer explores for its scored bones, its deleted floors and the light straining through the window boards. We see ourselves there, behind the door, the dust around our ankles drifting up. Outside, Everything is still Everythinging. In the middle of the room is a chair, also empty. Not every leaving is an abandonment, but it all leaves a mark. A trail by which someone could say you were here. A dent in the dust, a hair in the floor groove. A gesture of beckoning, someone’s hand turned up and open, maybe even yours.
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Yesterday I was thinking I might not be a poet anymore.
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I started thinking this out of a sense of discouragement and frustration at the limitations of my own art to make a significant difference in a world that feels so desperately in need of change, but the question is about ego, and identity.
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Every meaningful non-family relationship I have can be linked back to my being a poet, even where that relationship now has zero connection to the art. I teach poetry, I write poetry, I coach people in working on their poetry, I attend poetry festivals and read poetry and . . . What if I were not a poet anymore?
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If we’re fortunate, at least once a day we take off our clothes. We are naked with ourselves. We are, for some period of time, a body un-externally- adorned.
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It’s important, I think, for us occasionally to take off our identity adornments—our shiny identity jewelry, our ill-fitting identity pants, our cozy identity sweater, the identity boots that make us appear taller and more imposing to strangers.
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What if I were not a poet anymore? Does that feel like an opening up of space in this life, or an amputation of a limb? I roll it around in my head. I picture it—someone asking “Are you an artist?” And my answering “No.” Or, “Not anymore.”
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I think about other identities I’ve surrendered, abandoned, or sloughed off. Non-athlete. Asthmatic. Chronic worrier. Enabler. Twentysomething. Fortysomething. Actor. Itinerant touring artist. New Yorker.
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I’m not going to stop writing poetry, at least for now, so I guess that means I’ll still be a poet. But that’s not what’s most important. The most important thing is that I can step back in my mind and picture myself, the inmost me, and understand that self as free from these labels, these earthbound ways of labeling and naming and supposedly knowing myself.
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I can locate, in my best moments, this central self, and see constellated all around it these aspects, these actions and identities—and I can know that they are not me.
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And it’s a comfort.
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Because in that moment, I am least alone. I am most connected to the universe, the Everything, God, the Divine, whatever language we give it—I am not the sum of all this doing. I simply am.
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How peaceful that is. What a relief. What a rapturous place from which to begin again, and again.
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Rift. Fissure. Cleft. Disruption. Rupture.
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Does rupture remind you of rapture? Various Christian sects disagree about the timing of The Rapture, even those who agree that it is coming. But everyone who thinks it’s coming thinks that they and those who agree with them specifically will rise along with resurrected dead believers to join Christ at God’s right hand. A rupture, to be sure, but also a healing. To be lifted up, out of suffering, to know you were right all along. To be that sure, that absolutely certain—does that require everyone else to be made wrong? To be erased?
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At the end of his brilliant poem “Scheherezade,” the first poem in his collection Crush, Richard Siken writes:
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After I finish weeping, I could spend days talking about what’s contained in those three lines. But I’m thinking about it now in terms of rupture: everything is going to ruin us. And oh, how we long to be ruined. To be ravaged, to be raptured, to be lifted into a clean beginning. To be possessed by light—owned by it, filled with it, beholden utterly to light.
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And then tell me we’ll never get used to it. Never be bored, benumbed, dulled to the light that in fact possesses our every cell. And of course we get used to everything—our deepest loves, our petty annoyances, our commutes and bookshelves and sandwiches and nightly wine. But sometimes a storm blows through, and the lightning strikes right after the thunder, before we can even remember to count, and we’re reminded how near we are to ruin, how intimate a shadow death is. And not just our death but the death of comfort—a home burned down, a job lost, a reputation mangled when bad old actions surface … Sometimes the poem can do the work of the storm, can replicate for us the rupture some part of us longs for so we can feel again, so we can be brought to feeling afresh, without destruction.
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Tell me. Tell me, Richard Siken. Tell me we’ll never get used to it.
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Here’s what I think: the rift is the passage to the divine. God, Great Spirit, creator, whatever you call it. And the body is the vehicle for the rift.
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So it matters to build a body, a vehicle, that brings us closest to the divine, allows us to experience the rift as an opening rather than a severing. A multiplication instead of a shattering. We build, sculpt, refine the body as a medium of passage rather than simply a physical object. If the body were only itself it could be anything—a lump, a couch, a formless void— but it is the very human form here in this realm that permits the specific human experience of the divine. And the human experience of the divine is not superior to the tree’s or the mountain’s or the hummingbird’s but it is ours, and therefore essential to us. Our gift and our responsibility.
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Those in the rift are full of the possibility of God, and the more aware of the rift we are—voluntarily or involuntarily—the more fully we are able to know the divine and be transformed by that knowing.
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Every rift is a passage, and every passage an invitation to move through or to remain, to stagnate, to refuse change. As Octavia Butler wrote, “All that you touch you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.”
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What I can’t un-think is: what if the end of the world already happened? I’m not alone in this wondering, but it makes me feel alone. Is it possible to dwell fully in the ephemeral now and not fall into nihilism? To hang out in the immediate yes and not collapse under the possibility of meaninglessness? The Buddhists say yes, as does anyone with a bodied sense that time is non-linear anyway, while those who believe in a Day of Reckoning rejoice at the idea of apocalypse since their idea of an after-us is quite exclusive and an infinitely good-scenario/bad-scenario situation depending on whether one gained access to and bought into their brand of God. And since we can’t know what’s after, if there is an after and not a circle or nothing, that brings us, leaves us, in the now together where I think the most we can do is be devoted to each other, to the human good in each other, which is the divine, which is the everything and therefore indestructible, is the now and the after. Amen.
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How hard it is to get to God when your spirit and form are at war. When who you are at your core so badly matches what the world sees and thinks it knows of you, or who you’ve been taught you must be.
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I know a man for whom generosity, tenderness, and caretaking sit right at the center of his being. When he acts from this place, his movements are smooth, the muscles in his jaw relax, his words sound almost like singing. But he was raised by people steeped in the history of machismo, and taught all his life that to behave in the way natural to him would indicate weakness, and weakness is dangerous. So to the world he is hard. His generosity turns to favors which must be repaid. His caretaking is warped into subconscious attempts at control over those he loves.
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The rift is there but he cannot step into it. A rift ignored is a passage refused, and a passage refused becomes in time a door with a jammed lock or a mountain range rising from the smashing of tectonic plates, crossed only at great peril and cost.
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I know a person who wore a mansuit body for as long as they could, used it as a weapon on behalf of wounded humans until they got quiet enough to hear the girl inside, who had always been inside waiting for the rupture. The rapture. The reveal. They are now transitioning their vehicle in form and presentation to align with who their spirit knows itself to be. Is. And ever shall be.
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To transform fundamentally is to step into the rift. How terrifying and necessary, how ecstatic and mortifying it is to change in pursuit of becoming who we truly are. What sacrifice it is to let go of whatever stands between us and our purest selves, no matter how much we love it.
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As Li-Young Lee writes, “the flower was never meant to survive / the fruit’s triumph.”
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Rupture doesn’t sound very pleasant. What ruptures—an appendix? A pipe? But what I mean is a breach, a disruption, a disturbance, something that shakes us out of our ordinary ordinariness and reveals ourselves to ourselves anew.
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I’m a cancer/cancer rising, an eldest child, and a Midwesterner. I am by nature not a big fan of change. But I know that I can change or be changed, steer the chariot or get thrown into the mud.
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This week, we are waiting to find out what the radiation oncologist’s recommendation will be; Dad’s numbers came back indicating that the surgery may not have gotten all the cancer out, that it might have spread. The day we found this out, I was scheduled to run a workshop in my living room. While setting up, I banged my elbow, knocked over a stack of papers, and slammed my pinkie toe into a doorjamb hard enough that it’s probably sprained. When I compartmentalize, I lose track of the edges of my body. I need to move through my days without the worry dominating my thoughts, and also it does not serve me to box up all the feelings and lock them away. I only have so many toes. So I try to open, and open more. To acknowledge the now and imagine a way forward.
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My dad has cancer. That is happening. I am grateful for his health insurance, for the likelihood of a cure, for Mom, for his sister, my Aunt Mary, and for living relatively close to him. I imagine that he will live through this. I imagine that we will get closer because I will be more available and vulnerable. My dad has cancer. I imagine possibilities. I am grateful. I step into the rift, and breathe.
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I’ve been left, but never abandoned. I think it’s true that I’ve never abandoned anyone. I have abandoned books that bored me two chapters in, hobbies (rollerblading, knitting, singing, the flute), and I walked out of the movie Necessary Roughness on a date in college, but that was more about feminist repulsion than abandonment. I’ve chosen rupture less often than comfort, but chosen rupture in larger ways. The sky was blue a minute ago, and now the rain is pounding the trees like they insulted its mother. Like someone punched a hole in the sky and an ocean waited there. What’s waiting for us that we can’t see? What’s going to rupture us into our next holy condition? I want to move with abandon. I want to be an animal more often than I’m furniture. The rain is sacred, as is the flood, and the floodplain after.
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It is delicious to be out of sync with a world that wants us to bend to its order in order to own us. This is why the free make our own rituals. If we don’t create rupture against the patterns that formed us, we’re doomed to elliptical lives that loop in and in on themselves, making us smaller and smaller until we vanish, evaporate, disintegrate, dust. I don’t want to disappear. I don’t want you to disappear either. Let’s stay here as long as we can.
Marty McConnell’s second poetry collection, when they say you can’t go home again, what they mean is you were never there, (Southern Indiana University Press, 2018) won the 2017 Michael Waters Poetry Prize. Her first nonfiction book, Gathering Voices: Creating a Community-Based Poetry Workshop, was published by YesYes Books. She is the co-creator and co- editor of underbelly, a website focused on the art and magic of poetry revision. McConnell’s work has been published in anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2014; Bullets & Butterflies: Queer Spoken Word Poetry; A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry; City of the Big Shoulders: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry; and Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Movement, as well as journals including Bellevue Literary Review, Willow Springs, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Crab Orchard, and Beloit Poetry Journal, among many others.