Todd Boss's Blog - Posts Tagged "recovery"
My Disappearing Act
I’ve long been obsessed with “dissociative fugue,” a rare psychological condition that causes people to disappear. “Fugue” from the Latin means “flight.” Symptoms include amnesia, and a will to flee. It doesn’t onset, it just occurs: A man will announce to his wife that he’s walking to the corner grocery for mayonnaise, say, and never return. Victims simply continue walking, sometimes for weeks. Some have been found on opposite coasts or across borders, having dumped their wallets and ID cards and phones and house keys into a trash bin along the way. They won’t know their own names, and when (rarely) they’re returned to their loved ones, they often do not recognize them. Sometimes dissociative fugue is triggered by trauma, but just as often it’s not. It can just happen. The need to fly can just overtake a person.
As a nomad—so often solo in a foreign country where I don’t speak the language, dining alone, sleeping alone, working alone, for weeks or months at a time—I sometimes sense the eerie lure of disappearance. I’ll stand in a crowded street or sit in a windowsill and wonder at the fact that nobody for thousands of miles knows where I am, or who I am. Anonymity seems a kind of shimmering otherworld, overlaid upon this one, in which homeless people and dementia sufferers and maybe children sometimes wander. I think how easy it would be to leave my few remaining belongings behind and step into that shimmer of innocence and dissociation.
This post is not a cry for help, don’t worry, I value too much the loving relationships that remain in my life to ever follow through on such a fantasy.
But in Lisbon this month, I rent a fourth-floor attic garret with a balcony looking west over the Atlantic. I’m in the Alfama district, which means that between the sea and me is a network of mazy streets dating from the 11th Century where restaurants still feature soloists belting out fado, a tradition of sorrowful songs that express what the Portuguese call saudade — irreparable loss. In the evenings, those voices reach my balcony and cross my tiny apartment on the ocean breeze as I lie in bed. I can’t make out the words, wouldn’t understand them even if I could, but their tremulous sorrow is haunting nevertheless. They seem to cry out to me.
I can’t fully articulate the odd comfort I feel in having given up a permanent address. I tried to do it in my most recent poetry collection. I continue to explore it. It’s a kind of conscious fugue, I suppose, wandering out of loss into deeper loss, like someone grown accustomed to cold water by wading who finally dives for a swim. It’s bracing, embracing the deeps, pulling them in to myself, losing myself in the activity of it, stroke upon stroke. I know I'm getting stronger.
And then somewhere, down there among the corals on the watery floor, gleams a poem. I lift it, cradle it, fight it up to the surface with me, and take it to shore.
The poems in my fourth collection, Someday the Plan of a Town (W. W. Norton & Co.), are my only souvenirs from four years of nomadic travel that took me around the globe, first on a series of 30 consecutive house-sits abroad, and later, during the pandemic, on a sequence of short-term rentals in the US. They've emerged from the anonymity of my travels, as visible and audible testament to the fact that I existed at all, invisible and inaudible as I may have been.
I invite you to disappear in them awhile, let them sing through you, wander beyond them.
Someday the Plan of a Town: Poems
As a nomad—so often solo in a foreign country where I don’t speak the language, dining alone, sleeping alone, working alone, for weeks or months at a time—I sometimes sense the eerie lure of disappearance. I’ll stand in a crowded street or sit in a windowsill and wonder at the fact that nobody for thousands of miles knows where I am, or who I am. Anonymity seems a kind of shimmering otherworld, overlaid upon this one, in which homeless people and dementia sufferers and maybe children sometimes wander. I think how easy it would be to leave my few remaining belongings behind and step into that shimmer of innocence and dissociation.
This post is not a cry for help, don’t worry, I value too much the loving relationships that remain in my life to ever follow through on such a fantasy.
But in Lisbon this month, I rent a fourth-floor attic garret with a balcony looking west over the Atlantic. I’m in the Alfama district, which means that between the sea and me is a network of mazy streets dating from the 11th Century where restaurants still feature soloists belting out fado, a tradition of sorrowful songs that express what the Portuguese call saudade — irreparable loss. In the evenings, those voices reach my balcony and cross my tiny apartment on the ocean breeze as I lie in bed. I can’t make out the words, wouldn’t understand them even if I could, but their tremulous sorrow is haunting nevertheless. They seem to cry out to me.
I can’t fully articulate the odd comfort I feel in having given up a permanent address. I tried to do it in my most recent poetry collection. I continue to explore it. It’s a kind of conscious fugue, I suppose, wandering out of loss into deeper loss, like someone grown accustomed to cold water by wading who finally dives for a swim. It’s bracing, embracing the deeps, pulling them in to myself, losing myself in the activity of it, stroke upon stroke. I know I'm getting stronger.
And then somewhere, down there among the corals on the watery floor, gleams a poem. I lift it, cradle it, fight it up to the surface with me, and take it to shore.
The poems in my fourth collection, Someday the Plan of a Town (W. W. Norton & Co.), are my only souvenirs from four years of nomadic travel that took me around the globe, first on a series of 30 consecutive house-sits abroad, and later, during the pandemic, on a sequence of short-term rentals in the US. They've emerged from the anonymity of my travels, as visible and audible testament to the fact that I existed at all, invisible and inaudible as I may have been.
I invite you to disappear in them awhile, let them sing through you, wander beyond them.
Someday the Plan of a Town: Poems
