A Resurrectionist Streak

I’ve always had an uncomplicated affinity with the time of year I was born, but not for uncomplicated reasons.

Although my birthday never falls exactly on winter solstice, it’s always within two or three days and feels like the most natural event to attach myself to for time-keeping purposes. And in the past few years, I’ve fashioned a loose mythology to explain (mostly to myself) how the timing and conditions of my birth translated into some of the dispositions that started crystallizing in my adult life. The first I noticed was a clear attachment to the opposite solstice. I didn’t know it until the first summer in my life that I wasn’t able to return to the Mountain West, but my internal rhythms are quite dependent on the concrete markers of seasonal transition in the region I grew up in to stay basically oriented through the latter months of the year.

Until I was 22, I was lucky enough to return to the Yellowstone gateway town I grew up in for summer gigs even when I was away most of the year for “higher learning” in Virginia. Summer of 2015 was the first that I was detained on the East Coast without interruption, and it left me completely unmoored. The only plus about the perspective that such distance and disillusionment affords is that it makes it easier to research yourself to figure out what might be going on. When I did, the phenomena that I ultimately chalked a lot of my disoriented malaise up to seemed to have a common point of origin in summer solstice.

For my hometown of Gardiner, the longest days of the year coincide with (or at least closely precede) the giant salmonfly hatch on the Yellowstone River. And since that’s largely contingent on temperature, that’s really the harbinger of the short summer season in high country. It comes in seemingly overnight, on the wings of stoneflies who, after crawling underwater for three or four years, inexplicably manage to procreate and die within the single week of their flight-enabled adult lives. The season they usher in lingers usually with some traces of wildfire smoke still in the air until the September morning you wake up to 360-degree evidence of the first snow of the season above treeline. At least, that’s how it basically went down when I was growing up. All told, summers are a compressed 10-week affair in that region.

Some time after taking stock of this whole trajectory from a distance, one explanation for my deference toward the longest days of the year seemed obvious. Initially, I hypothesized that being effectively born into darkness — during this hemisphere’s shortest days of the year — had induced in me a primal desperation for days marked by an excess of daylight, and everything that came with those days growing up in a town that straddled the Yellowstone.

More recently, I’ve hatched a newer theory regarding what a winter solstice birth portends for an individual’s temperament and tendencies. It’s just as unscientific, probably just as baseless, and also not mutually exclusive with the one I originally cooked up. It’s somewhat derived from photos I have from December 2012. The header image I attached to this little missive is one of them. These December 2012 photos differ from others I have from that time in that they’re not of particularly remarkable or remote places. As with the one I’ve enlisted here, they’re all of scenes that are quite pedestrian to anybody who grew up in Gardiner or Mammoth (the Montoming mutts, if you will).

In the picture, the 37-foot phallic formation on the right is the result of millennia of travertine deposits from what was once a spring or fumarole. Officially, it’s known as Liberty Cap, and can be found mere feet from the lower terraces parking area in upper Mammoth. I have only just read that this formation’s name was inspired by the Phrygian-style bonnets rouges that the Parisian working class wore to make “their revolutionary ardor and plebeian solidarity immediately recognizable” during the French Revolution. As somebody who’s grown into something of a Marxist footsoldier, I admit that’s a pretty dope association as far as white settler names for natural landforms go, but the panache was lost on me and my peers growing up. So, we just called it Cock Rock.

As for the little house in the background, that’s an outlier in the employee housing system in Mammoth. Traditionally, it’s the house where the park’s sitting U.S. magistrate lives. It’s a considerable distance from the other residential areas in Mammoth, which is kind of fitting. It’s an unusual house for an unusual gig, and since you’re probably not here to read about the ins and outs of it, I’ll keep the factoid recitation brief, so we can get back to the significance of the damn picture. The magistrate who gets assigned to Yellowstone is the only federal judge to live in and oversee a national park, and only five people have ever held the position. In my lifetime, there have only been two, including the one who served for 31 years before retiring in May 2012.

Because the current magistrate was appointed in April 2013, it strikes me now that this photo (dated December 18, 2012) may have been taken at one of the rare times in the 125-year history of the post that the house sat unoccupied. It’s not something I knew at the time, and I honestly couldn’t tell you why I felt moved to photograph it in the first place. But when I look at it now, I think I might have been subconsciously noticing something for the first time, in the way that only time away from familiar places allows.

What I notice immediately now is just how long and beautiful the shadows are. It’s one of the novel things about places surrounded by higher ground in every direction — the shadows that we associate with the golden hour have reign for several hours. And yes, it leaves these areas cold as balls on even the clearest and mildest of winter days, but it’s honestly the kind of thing that can move me to weep with longing for these places when I’m far away.

As for the updated Sagittarian theory derived from it: Looking at it makes me feel as though being born into darkness might portend both a desperate relationship to its opposite, but also an immutable sense of identity in the shadows one was born in. I imagine this impulse being akin to the geomagnetic imprinting that compels some aquatic animals to return to their places of birth to spawn and die. And I’ve for some time now quietly suspected that Sagittarians have a bit of a goth streak. In the past year, I’ve even adopted a personal shorthand for one of the great Sagittarian poets to grace this plane of existence. Privately, I refer to Emily Dickinson as the OG, or the Original Goth.

Dickinson is abundantly worthy of that title and I absolutely stand by it. But I don’t know if Dickinson’s goth energy represents some predetermined temperament among winter babies, if there is such a thing. I’ve been kind of inclined to doubt that there is. After all, these fractals of mythology have always been explanations of my own devising — ways of rationalizing myself only for myself. But I’ve started to wonder if the observations I’ve used to construct these mythologies are truly isolated and one-off, and what they might add up to if they’re not.

Recently, on the recommendation of a friend who is coincidentally both a Sagittarian and a poet, I’ve been reading about the effects of sustained, episodic trauma on the nervous system. It’s a subject I’ve only recently considered exploring seriously as it relates to my own experience. But reading about it in concrete terms of symptoms and science has shed considerable light on how I understand my childhood and especially my dispositions as an adult.

I think one major reason I have failed until now to understand neglect and abuse in my childhood as sources of trauma is because what was normal for me seemed mild. Mild, of course, compared to overtly brutal and upsetting abuse stories you come across in life. But I think that tendency to compare and minimize what’s possibly affected us speaks more to how easy it is for anybody, child or adult, to normalize the insidious. And maybe the experiences that I always thought of as tame are theoretically tractable so long as they’re the exceptional scenarios in a person’s life and not the norm. But what I’m learning is that chronic exposure to certain stimuli and experiences, particularly during critical developmental years, has serious potential to totally disorganize our nervous systems.

One such sensation during childhood that almost invariably leaves a mark is immobilization in the face of terror or distress. It’s the kind of system failure that happens when you’re terrified, but an assailant ignores your pleas for relief. I feel like I need to sit longer with memories I associate with this dynamic and I probably need to recover many others still. But I will say that what immediately came to mind while I was reading about it were these fairly common weeknight rituals wherein I, probably seven or eight years old at the time, insisted on reenacting Thursday Night SmackDown matches (when WWE was still WWF) with my dad.

Without physical descriptions of either of us, you’ll probably surmise that I was at a bit of a size and strength disadvantage to a guy in his late thirties. A few other things you should know about my rival: he drank incessantly (and largely in public) and I’m pretty confident he has a lot of unprocessed trauma of his own. The way these things often play out, victims tend to continue the cycle. And in retrospect, one of the ways that I can see how this phenomenon manifested with my dad is that, especially under the pretext of play, he was extremely competitive with my sister and me. So predictably, I was always pinned in these SmackDown reenactments, and often held for what felt like a long time after expressing intense anguish.

It’s not the kind of scene that’s easy to reconstruct in detail, but not because it’s exactly upsetting to recall. Quite the contrary, I have no memory of the sensory effect. It was so commonplace that I just recall the basic trajectory of it. And that’s kind of the overarching theme of a lot of my childhood experiences with my dad. It was so normal for him to be passed out on the couch for days after a bender. It was so normal to hear him scold me for being too demanding or having no self-control. It was so normal for Monopoly games to end with my sister and me crying.

It was all so normal that it was unremarkable. And honestly, what made me begin to weigh it with dispassionate seriousness  — in addition to reading about the nature of complex, sustained developmental trauma — was something my mother said recently. I’ve kept her apprised of this healing work that I’ve been inching toward, and asked her if there was anything that happened on a regular basis when I was a kid that always concerned her. I didn’t expect her to have anything like a polished supercut on the spot, particularly because this spans a traumatic and highly stressful period when she was trying to cobble together an exit plan for herself, my sister, and me. But she did immediately say that whenever she could afford and arrange it, she always preferred hiring teens to babysit my sister and me over leaving us at home with our dad.

Apparently, in addition to immobilization, trauma in developmental years is almost invariably tied to this notion of not being mirrored. That is, not being seen or taken into account. On that score, I think my mother’s impulse response was pretty damn incisive. Speaking as a recovering binge-drinker myself, it’s hard to give anybody attention or care when you’re out cold or bombed out of your tree. And all this ado about being consistently immobilized and not mirrored by one of my perceived caregivers really just underscores why I shouldn’t be surprised that my capacity for sensory perception has been deeply impoverished for as long as I can remember. The last bit of science-y shit I’ll cite on the common effects of developmental trauma relates to just that — of not being able to feel fully alive in my own body.

For this initial foray into reading up on trauma, the first of two books my Sagittarian poet friend recommended was The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, a Dutch-American psychiatrist who practices and teaches in Boston. He has this term for the midline structures of the brain that start right above our eyes and run all the way back to where our brain connects with our spine. He calls it the “Mohawk of self-awareness” because it contains the regions of our brain responsible for our self-awareness, and most critically our sensory perception related to it. In 2004, he and a colleague looked at fMRI scans of a number of patients with PTSD and saw that there was almost no activation in any of the self-sensing parts of the brain. Here’s how van der Kolk interpreted those results:

In response to the trauma itself, and in coping with the dread that persisted long afterward, these patients had learned to shut down the brain areas that transmit the visceral feelings and emotions that define terror. Yet in everyday life, those same brain areas are responsible for registering the entire range of emotions and sensations that form the foundation of our self-awareness, our sense of who we are. What we witnessed here was a tragic adaptation: In an effort to shut off terrifying sensations, they also deadened their capacity to feel fully alive.

More than the explanations of immobilization and mirroring, reading this bit felt like a breakthrough. A few weeks back, what I had said that prompted my friend to recommend van der Kolk’s book in the first place was that I was afraid I’d felt all I was ever going to feel. The good news is that if my situation is simply a matter of whole regions of my brain dedicated to sense perception being offline, it’s possible to work to bring them back on. For the foreseeable future, I’m limited to learning exercises and practices that I can do for free and on my own. But having a clear goal in mind feels like real progress. The downer is that I think that means I have to learn to live in a body that I don’t have much experience inhabiting, even though it’s the only one I’ve got.

In a way, the project feels like one of resurrection. And part of the reason I was pretty gobsmacked when that metaphor crossed my mind goes back to my perhaps foolish wont to ascribe certain mythologies to the Sagittarian way of being. It hasn’t escaped my notice that two Sagittarians whose writings have become more precious to me by the year have something of a resurrectionist streak. Those two, Richard McCann and Jim Harrison, have both written in pretty overt terms on the struggle to inhabit a body that has effectively tried to cannibalize itself. And the texts where they do so are among the few that I reread at least once every year.

Of the two, Richard is the only one I know personally — from my time in a graduate writing program on the East Coast. Besides being an artist whose work I find deeply moving, Richard stood out in my overall experience in creative writing programs. Because I’m always armed with theories, I have a theory about why that is. I promise I’ll get to it. But to explain why he’s a standout, first I think it’s worth describing a norm that I’ve had time to reflect on.

If you’ve spent time with me in this space of the internet, you’ve probably noticed that I only really know how to write in my own voice, I’m more associative than linear, and if you come here looking for vivid scenes and sensory detail, you’ll be sorely disappointed. Those three things have always been true of how I think and express myself, and it’s made me an odd case for writing instructors, and probably an even odder peer in many years of creative writing workshops.

What I’ve never considered until now is that how I communicate might have an awful lot to do with not being fully alive in my own body. For about as long as I’ve had to share nonfiction work for critical discussion, I always assumed it was a personal deficiency that I struggle to associate sensory perception with what I remember and what I have to say. Whenever people would read my writing in academic settings, they’d almost invariably remark on this omission. So, to head off that predictable part of the discussion in later instances, I learned a work-around of basically fabricating my best guess at what sensory details belonged in a scene, even though they seldom had any grounding in my own memory. I didn’t know at the time that the reality is that I might not have the same capacity for sensory perception that you find in healthy individuals with conventionally organized nervous systems.

People operate on the assumption that everyone fully inhabits their own body, and I won’t begrudge anybody for that if that’s the only experience they know. But the problem is this doesn’t seem to work both ways. Those of us whose experience of life isn’t fully embodied, whose nervous systems are disorganized for reasons we didn’t choose — the onus is typically on us to represent an experience that doesn’t belong to us. I’ve kind of distilled it to this: People want to know how it feels, not how it feels to be me. That statement is my biggest takeaway from academically-sanctioned creative writing programs in a nutshell. And now, I realize it’s sort of a reaffirmation of one of the phenomena that evicted me from my body for survival purposes to begin with — not being mirrored, seen, or taken into account.

Richard stands out as an instructor because he appraises student work differently. His principal concern is whether what is represented feels faithful to the experience of whoever wrote it. And my theory on that as a critical approach to art — based more on describing the effect of it than assigning value judgments based on what is or isn’t there — is that it’s more in line with the concerns of folks who identify first and foremost as poets. I’m talking about the types who take their vows as artists at a tender age and make it their life’s work to bear witness and attempt to transpose the essence of things, even as they know the fullest conception of anything will always elude the constraints of language. What comes out of that, to me, is the closest thing to absolute truth that we get access to.

My impression of Richard’s approach to writing and discussing nonfiction fits squarely in the lineage of poets. I do not know if he identifies principally as one, but he has written a metric shit-ton of poetry. And his occupation with whether a piece of art feels true or untrue to who put it there actually reminds me of something that a peer I had in undergrad said of my work. This was a peer that had the same major and minor as me, and I probably shared more classes with them than anybody in those fews years. They were primarily a poet, and keeping with the more descriptive than prescriptive tack to discussing a text that I’m attributing to poets, they made the comment on the last essay of mine that our nonfiction workshop had to read that the effect of my voice is “incorporeal.” Per Merriam-Webster, incorporeal means “having no material body or form.” It was neither a compliment nor a dig. It was just a very dead-on description. And knowing what I know now about my limited access to my own bodily existence, holy shit, can you believe a 21-year-old caught that? These damn poets.

The incorporeality is probably what’s offputting to most people about the way I think, talk, and write. I’m struck by how decidedly unfazed Richard was by it. But perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised considering the man has written at length about a period when his body was inhospitable to life.

In his essay “The Resurrectionist,” Richard describes the experience of inhabiting a body that was rapidly deteriorating while he was waiting for a liver transplant in the 90s, followed by the dissonance of getting another life in that body only once another person, an organ donor, had died. I have admired the essay greatly for years now and I reread it often. But only as I’ve begun learning about the duration and magnitude of my separation from my own body have I started to personally identify with it. I think there’s something going on here that’s not dissimilar from my experience with the 2012 photograph I teed this up with.

I think there’s often a lot of information in what we notice, that we don’t immediately notice. In my case, it’s taken years to notice everything I’ve been writing about here. With the photo of Liberty Cap and the magistrate’s house, besides there just being a lot of facts that had eluded me about these familiar fixtures, there was obviously some valence about the way that spot looked that day — that December 18 with those long shadows on one of the shortest days of the year — that hit an extraverbal nerve in me. And whether or not this batshit theory about the resurrectionist streak of Sagittarians holds any water, with Richard as a quite literal manifestation of it, I think I’ve been trying to hash this idea out for several years. And maybe locating myself in this arc is the only reason I can articulate it now.

In addition to van der Kolk’s explanation about the brain areas that tend to go offline in traumatized folks, there was something else he said about the so-called “Mohawk of self-awareness” that completely grabbed me. That is, the only part of these folks’ midline structures that still showed some activation is the region of the brain responsible for processing our basic orientation in space.

In the absence of sensory perception, something that looms obscenely large in my thinking is where I am relative to where I grew up. It’s kind of uncanny. If not a specific mention of Gardiner and Yellowstone, there’s some mention of Montana in every monthly dispatch I’ve fired off here since June (it’s the stuff of drinking games at this point). It was also the subject of most of my personal writing in undergrad, and then in my graduate writing program. I mentioned earlier that I’m more associative than linear. I also think I’m far more associative than logical. And I think it’s why I tend to attach otherwise unexplainable weight to art that I know to associate with Montana. And that actually kind of explains where I got the idea to move in 2019 to Port Townsend to convalesce once I’d resolved to leave the East Coast.

I visited friends in Tacoma in January 2019. I was already quite diminished at the time, but didn’t yet think that getting out of the East for good was in the realm of possibility for me. On a day both friends had off, they proposed we take a day trip to an Olympic Peninsula town whose name I only knew to associate with the press that has published the poetry of Rachel McKibbens, Sherwin Bitsui, and among others, the late Jim Harrison, who most people reading this will know to associate with Michigan, Montana, birds, dogs, fly fishing, red wine, food, and a mystic’s level of commitment to his craft. For no reason other than the fact that I had picked up a copy at Elliott Bay while visiting a pal in Capitol Hill a few days prior, I spent the morning before I hit the road with the Tacomans reading Dead Man’s Float, Harrison’s final collection of poetry.

At no point in the months before I finally hatched an exit plan in June 2019 did it occur to me that I was selecting my place of convalescence based on where I was the day I read poems about Harrison’s lengthy recovery from shingles and surgeries late in his life. But that’s essentially what panned out. And it’s laid the foundation for my own resurrectionist aspirations.

The theme of my time on the Olympic Peninsula has been clarity and stabilization in my mood, biochemistry, and relationships. I think that’s honestly freed me up to figure out what my normal is and understand that it’s characterized by a discrete lack of feeling. And I have to say numb isn’t the worst or most threatening place to be if you’re accustomed to precarity or outright neglect. But the possibility that there’s a range of feeling and experience beyond it, that there’s a chance to in a way come back to life and maybe even make vivid sense memories while I still have the chance — that is at once impossible to get my mind around and exciting beyond words. It’s the most I’ve had to look forward to in a long time.

I can’t imagine that it’s easy for anybody to resurrect. And Richard’s essay, as well as the life he’s had in the years since his liver transplant, is evidence to me that it’s a process more than an event. But that seems fitting. I don’t think Sagittarians would find much meaning in the endeavor if it were otherwise. At least I wouldn’t. And with some of Harrison’s lines in mind, I’ve started to think that my theories on what the stars have to say about winter-born babies aren’t so batshit after all. I wonder if it’s fair to say that the only thing Sagittarians from this hemisphere know how to do is come back from the dead so long as we have a material form to speak of. I’m thinking of the first poem in Dead Man’s Float, a four-liner called “Where Is Jim Harrison?”:

He fell off the cliff of a seven-inch zafu.
He couldn’t get up because of his surgery.
He believes in the Resurrection mostly
because he was never taught how not to.

If it’s in the cards for me to get a shot at being fully alive in the present while I’m still healthy and able, I’m sure I have a long road ahead. And I may never get there. But in all my reading about trauma, at least two things strike me as the real value of getting even this far in the healing process. First, I don’t have to perpetuate the cycle of abuse with people in my life. That piece — the empathy piece — to me, that feels like the single most important reason to do the intense labor of recovering memories and giving the archives of my brain new labels. Second, there’s still a chance for me to inhabit my own body because even if I think and sound incorporeal, I do in fact have a material existence.

And thanks to Richard McCann’s chronicle of the transplant that propelled his body back to life more than 24 years ago, I feel like I have a faint idea of what there is to look forward to on the other side. It’s what Richard calls “dear ordinary life.” Or more precisely, “life as you hungered for it, with its pleasures and its requirements.”

Dear ordinary life sounds like all I ever wanted. With requirements, yes. And pleasures, too. Pleasure! What will it feel like to experience unambiguous pleasure? Ordinary, I hope. Not thrilling or all-consuming. Ordinary will do just fine because I’m less convinced of resurrection as a miracle if it’s something that us winter babies, born among long shadows and even longer nights, have been doing all along.