In April 2018, I made a video of myself reciting e. e. cummings’ “somewhere I have never travelled,gladly beyond” that looks (and sounds) like the awkward offspring of a dramatic performance and an academic lecture. Yet for all the imperfections—or perhaps because of them—I refuse to delete it. And so it has accompanied me for the last six years, a capsule of time that contains one minute and forty-three seconds of my past.
Looking at it now, I want to say to my younger self for God’s sake, woman, get a comb and do something with that rat’s nest on your head. Not that she would have paid attention: the more punk-looking and unruly, the better. My hair was a statement of defiance, not just against gender norms that invalidated non-binary forms of self-presentation but also against the inconvenient encroachments of middle age. If e. e. cummings could flout conventions of form and grammar in his poetry, I could do the same with the elements of my own life.
I could get away with a hair rebellion because the silver wasn’t coming in as fast as it is now and the lines have begun to score my face had not yet surfaced on skin that was still as oily as a teenager’s. Hair that had barely begun to gray and occasional bouts of acne were enough to convince me that I could still pass for much younger than 52. That youthfulness is only heightened by the old hoodie I’m wearing and the place I’m standing: a tiny 600 square-foot studio apartment that I’d called home for five years.
Most of my neighbors were students or young people just starting their working lives. For a long time that didn’t bother me. I was a teacher and scholar, a faithful acolyte to the gods of literature who cared little for material things. But in much the same way I swing the camera to and fro as I speak, change had begun to swirl around my life. The college where I was teaching had announced plans to downsize the following fall; and adjuncts like me used to living on three-course contracts per term were no longer guaranteed even one class. If I didn’t leave, I would become as extinct as my adjunct professorship.
The imperative to evolve (or die) felt almost Darwinian. My income could not keep pace with the increasing cost of living in Austin. And the noisiness of both my neighbors and the heavily trafficked street nearby threatened my sanity. I could have ignored those signs; but the one thing I could not ignore was the older woman with dyed hair and shapeless bus driver clothes who moved into a studio cater-corner from mine.
I guessed she was sixty or more—unimaginably ancient to someone who half-believed she was still a student. Just before or after I made the video, I reported her to apartment managers for letting the dog she rarely walked use her patio as a bathroom. The poetry of my scholar’s solitude felt threatened, and not just by the odor that occasionally wafted through my kitchen window. I had words that helped me find solace in beauty; but the woman, who never received visitors, had nothing but a dog that pooped all over a (very public) veranda she never cleaned. What else had loneliness done to her?
Perhaps that’s part of the reason I made this video; as a memento mori to the life I knew I had to leave behind. Three months later, I was in a real-world job that forced me out of suspended animation. Another six months and I was in a one-bedroom apartment; two years after that, I was in a house of my own. I’d grown up, reluctantly. The new life that felt like an ending was really a beginning. Perhaps that why I come back to it now, as I move from one life I thought had finally taken root to another that will not (yet) allow me to discern its shape.
Past is prologue because everything about us, from our bodies to our lives, is cyclical. Our lives only appear to move in straight lines when the reality is that they move in cycles that incidentally exist on the continuum of time. Much as I did in my adjunct days and for the better part of one year, I have lived from contract to contract. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, living in the untethered way I thought I left behind with the students, the noise and the hapless patio-shitting dog. Yet oddly, it makes a kind of sense, especially when I look at things through the lens of cummings’ poem.
In completing another cycle of seasons, I have returned to the edge of a new spring, of the kind suggested by the flower imagery cummings uses. Something larger and greater has brought me here; and I understand that something even less than the speaker understands the beloved “you” he addresses in the poem. The speaker is in love and I am not. Yet both of us have become subject to the will (or force) of something greater than ourselves. With small hands, the speaker’s lover transforms him just as life “opens” me with its “hands,” changing me not because I wanted it to be that way. But because life exists in time which in its relentless movement forward, brings—or forces—change.
The speaker travels into the unknown with gladness while I travel into my unknown with doubt, of the kind that assailed me six years ago. Perhaps that is why I chose this poem then and why I return to it now. Like the video on my iPhone, it remains an unchanging comfort that eases passage into the unknown of “beyond” with, if not gladness, then something like acceptance.