Seasons of Angst for Collyn and Gracyn (and other fellow angsters)
Worry grows along the banks of the furrows
which run decidedly along your brow.
Darkness is not your friend,
and it often comes
in a single, suffocating rush—
a hothouse of angst.
You are the exquisite recipient of genes that rise,
eager to leave their fermented husks,
destined to torment.
But what a lovely façade!
Freckles which spread like constellations
across a sky of milk-white skin,
wisps of ash blonde hair which fall
in single strands across one azure eye
and then another.
Who would see the shards of doubt that threaten—
even in the glow of a bedside lamp,
even in the happily-ever-after of a favorite book?
Who would feel the prick of night
ever present, ever eager to fracture
all that is innocent and good?
Oh that I could take them back,
these genes that have passed too assuredly
from generation to generation.
But failing to–like those before me–
I can only offer trembling hands
which hold the glittering pieces
of love.
Let it be said that I am a master of angst. And lately, the prospect that I have been an unwilling genetic donor of this brokenness has put my angst into overdrive. Angst is that feeling of deep anxiety or dread, typically an unfocused one about the human condition or the state of the world in general.
Oh, there are those with acutely focused anxiety and dread about the state of the world today. All you have to do is tune into any talk radio program or turn on the television, and you will get an earful of this sort of dread. But the unfocused type often lies just below the surface of all that appears to be lovely and innocent, all that seems to float heedlessly like a brilliant buoy across the turbulent sea of life. This sort may appear tightly and individually focused, but in truth, these worries are but metaphors which have razor-like edges that cut more deeply into the general grain of our humanness.
One of my sisters recently lamented the fact that our mom was often unavailable to her for the hour (hours?) after bedtime because she was consoling me for yet another worry or transgression. I once worried for nights about my fear that I may have given my fifth grade teacher an “unpleasant look” as she walked through the aisles during silent reading time. And there was my mom sitting at the foot of my bed, reassuring me for the hundredth time that this act was undoubtedly imagined, not real, and that I had nothing to fret over. This may appear like an eleven-year-old worry, something fleeting and altogether insignificant, but it was not. It was the awkward beginning of a lifetime of brooding over my position–and then the human position–in the universe.
Angst of my sort often morphs into something uniquely terrible. Without boundaries, my angst can suffer from attention deficit hyperactive disorder. Dread scatters like water drops into a skillet of hot oil. Here to there to there to here. . . ad nauseam. This is angst on amphetamines. When I forgot my dentist appointment last year, did I call immediately and beg forgiveness? Or did I wait for them to call me and act duly penitent then? Will Home Depot still mix paint colors that they haven’t had in stock for a decade? And what if they don’t, what then? Why can’t I remember the new science teacher’s name? Why don’t I really listen when I’m introduced? This is the real me, isn’t it? And this is the nature of humans–that we default to self-consciousness when we should be looking outward? I should’ve been paying closer attention, but I was looking at how white her teeth were, and–and I really need to check to see when my dentist’s appointment is. Have I missed it already?
Tragically, angst is a pervasive cancer which finds fertile ground in sensitive souls. So it was no accident that I found kinship years later with confessional poet Sylvia Plath. Plath was–and is–perhaps the truest poster child for angst. From her novel The Bell Jar, she develops and emerges raw in all her splendid self-consciousness and angst. She describes this condition:
because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.
And later, she reveals her fears that she would never grow out of this condition and into something less angst-ridden:
But I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure at all. How did I know that someday―at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere―the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?
Stewing in my own sour air–this is some good (and really bad) stuff, Sylvia! You nailed it, hit the soft target of angst squarely. And as if all this stewing weren’t awful enough, the prospect that it could, and probably would, descend again? This is surely doubt worthy of an even thicker stew.
In her book, Ariel, Plath writes:
I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.
As I watch those I love, those who have unwittingly inherited my angst-genes, I find myself living vicariously as they wrestle with this dark thing, its soft feathery turnings, its malignity. Indeed, there is room for two or three in such bell jars. And once there, the sour air grows denser and more poisonous from generational worry.
Still, I take incredible solace in the words of Ernest Hemingway who wrote:
We are all broken. That’s how the light gets in.
It is ironic and sad that both Plath and Hemingway took their own lives, ultimately being unable to bear their brokenness and to tame the dark thing. Blessedly, light did seep through the cracks of their broken lives at times. And when it did, they lived and loved, they wrote stories and poems of enduring beauty and wisdom. They brought light to others even as it waned and was finally extinguished in their own lives.
If our brokenness lets the light in and if that light is wondrous yet sporadic, so be it. In that splendid light, its rays refracted exquisitely through the glass of the bell jar, there is respite from angst.
