Thank You Terror
The best description I know of the creative process can be found in Remedios Varo’s 1957 painting The Creation of Birds. In the painting, a figure—either half-owl or a person in an owl-costume—refracts distant starlight through a triangular magnifying glass. The refracted starlight dries birds drawn with a pen emerging from a violin worn around the owl-person’s neck. The birds, as their ink dries, lift off the page & into life.
Most of my writing, I think, has focused on the part of the process that feels like Varo’s birds, how pleasingly they fly away, the delight & surprise, each time new, of their flight. In my first books I mostly did a kind of serial surrealism, repeating rhetorical forms like creation myths or business plans or instructions for children’s games, attempting to stretch the possibilities of the possible within contained frameworks of the familiar. By the time I started writing Thank You Terror in 2013, I’d grown tired of my schtick. Tired of delight.
My goal with Thank You Terror was to spend less time attending to the delight of a bird’s flight & more time with the violin Varo hung from the owl-person’s neck, to write in resistance to what came easily to me. I like to picture the interior of that violin, how the wooden instrument resonates with the beating of the heart, this beating building into a faint resonance, a faint music, rising from the self. That the music of heartbeat, reverberating through the instrument, forms a pen, & only with this pen can the birds be drawn. I’d like to think the writing is a way to hold onto whatever keeps you alive. To channel it. To allow it to remake the world, in all its disparate forms, into something more able to be lived in.
What I found in the decade of writing this book, what I found in the violin-echo of my own beating heart, was grief, a grief not only for my friends who had not made it out alive, but a grief for this world in which we are none of us good. As I penned my grief, the birds that emerged emerged not as birds but as prayers.
This little poem, I see it as a prayer, a way to thank, as all the poems in the book attempt to thank—each poem, as the book as a whole is, entitled “Thank You Terror”— this world that is both the most beautiful thing possible & the most terrible.
Maybe every poem, every song, is a prayer. Maybe we pray because we are, none of us, alone, good, & goodness only happens like how art happens, with the combination of the exterior & the distant starlight & the mysterious music of the self, & this is why we need each other, why we need mercy & love, need someone else’s words to repeat to ourselves during those dark nights when our own words want to lead us into a deeper & darker darkness. This life is a terror. And we must, though the task be impossible, try to pray it, sing it, speak it into something we can love.
