I am bad at Beginnings.  Really bad.  As in I will have three pages of blacked-out lines at the end of a twenty minute prompt.

The beginning is the part of the poem, the essay, the letter that I almost always fail to write organically or by the first attempt.  I brood over it for days, weeks, before attempting a first draft and then write, erase and rewrite it over and over again, trying to create the the most precise primary (primeval?) condition of possibility so the rest of the language act would unfold in an essential, authentic manner.  Or at least that’s what I tell myself when the process feels particularly torturous, which it often does; the truth is, like any control freak worth their salt,  I want to get the scaffolding “just right” before launching myself into the ether.  There is no such thing as skipping The Beginning; if The Beginning does not happen, nothing else does.

Imagine being in a subway car, in a big city at rush hour, when all the passengers are pushed up against each other in that horrible, funky, grumbling, non-consenting, purely necessary intimacy; breathing the exhalations of strangers and observing their crumbs of ear wax between stations because there is no space to turn away (or the view is worse if you do); feeling all of the day’s small hatreds leak and mingle in the air, and becoming profoundly aware of the borders of your own body, the way fat gives, the aches that don’t resist and instead deepen into themselves; being jostled by so many different fields of pressure that the overriding sensation is one of  fullness to bursting and simultaneously knowing yourself to be perfectly, flawlessly alone by the irrevocable fact that soon, you will have to fight and push aside all of these tired, pissed-off, grimy motherfuckers to get to the other side of the car, where the doors are, so you can step out at the next stop…

That is how I experience the thought of beginning to write.

One explanation for this difficulty is the myriad ways that I have been othered by broad historical/political/economic forces: immigrant, woman of color, teen mom, poor person, so on and so forth.  I am a voice, a subjectivity that is out-of-context, out-of-place, out-of-alignment, like shorthand notes written in pen on the margins of a library book: one is not sure if the note-taker is trying to communicate with another reader or if this is simply a tactic their shuttered (shattered) consciousness needs to confront the seemingly infallible, sneering world of the properly printed text.  Certainly, these labels have shaped the the terrains within which I imagine and think about myself.  Put another way, however, they are the lenses through which I am alienated from myself and look in upon myself with the eyes of a cold, patronizing, suspicious collective consciousness (the nation, history, popular culture, ideology, etc.).

But a more honest explanation would include how elemental criticism was in the formation of my idea of self; “No’s” and “Don’t's” and “You are wrong’s” were used to control, manage and produce my identity since before I can remember.  At any given time, there is a multitude of disembodied voices in my head muttering scathing judgments from various perspectives about every single thing I do or am thinking of doing.  So The Beginning, for me, is like a clearing of throat of all the things, all the ways, that what I am about to say are in fact, already their own negations.  Since becoming an adult, I’ve basically patterned my life with relationships that replicate this basic condition of perpetual (perceived) criticism because they are familiar and they make sense.  After church and the regime of paternal and relentless verbal terror I endured at home, I plunged headfirst into academia, the “Anti-” brands of activism, mistrustful and controlling romances, and friendships that I keep at arm’s length because I never really learned to just “kick it” with people – we (in  my subconscious) are either comrades taking the world apart with our fury and disbelief, or subjects of each other’s fury and disbelief, which then makes being together totally unbearable.  It has nothing to do with being a masochist, mind you; for someone raised on a diet of fire and brimstone, there is nothing quite as satisfying as inflicting criticism so barbaric in its thoroughness (“round up every last baby!”) and stamina (“if the horse looks dead, shoot it in the head!”), that the opponent loses the will to even try to defend himself.

But precisely because this withering, destructive tendency towards my environment and myself is so powerful, it produces its own nemesis: the impulse towards silence, which Susan Sontag in her book Styles of Radical Will (1969) has described as “a metaphor for a cleansed, non-interfering vision, appropriate to artworks that are…unviolable in their essential integrity by human scrutiny.”  When I suspend the social determinants of my choices (because ironically while they contextualize the oppressed individual within the larger political and economic machine, thus potentially easing the burden of guilt or shame for perceived failures, it is only through a sense of individuated agency that one begins to believe in the possibility of steering a course through, rather be drowned by, the sea of history), when I consider those actions and behaviors I truly feel are mine – not because I was necessarily their origin, but because I feel left with them – I can see that silence has saved me by keeping me sane, acting less as a muzzle than as a leash.  But maintaining the potency of silence as a balm, a salve for the soul that is hellbent on abuse, has meant self-sabotage in almost every aspect of my life where communication is required.

Take my first love, for instance, which wasn’t even poetry. I had been in advanced art classes since I was very young, but even though he himself was a talented painter, my father did not approve one bit.  He wanted me to go into law or medicine – something with money and prestige.  In my senior year of high school,  he was dying of cancer and we were barely on speaking terms.  I was putting together my portfolio to apply to prestigious art institutes and I just started “forgetting” to take my birth control pills. Voila, I was pregnant before the fall semester ended: no art school, no bohemian artist’s life, I was saved from a conflict with the central figure in my life that might have destroyed my desire to create at all.  I embraced the silence of shame, fear and sheer fatigue, and for years I stopped questioning, thinking, living through art.  Yet in doing so, I was also defying my father with the ultimate form of creation, the most banal kind: bringing and raising a life in the world as an unwed adolescent.

There is a purism, an agnostic dignity, to the space evacuated by speech: a solitude that is not peace or safety but a basic ceasefire to the awkward, grasping, chaotic bids to take “one’s place” in the bloodthirsty arena of language.  As an immigrant child, what I did was beyond taboo. The fact that I love my son more than I can comprehend does not negate the fact that my ill-timed pregnancy was very much an act of self-silencing.  Of self-banishment.  Nowadays, I often pull a disappearing act on friends and loved ones (which no one seems to appreciate) when I feel perilously balanced between a state of silence and a state of war.  This is when I know a beginning is trying to make its way through my life – a new thought, direction, poem – and either it will be beaten to death by my armies of internalized critics or turn to mist in my ever-growing purgatory of the unspeakable.  There is the third possibility of course that it might actually materialize into a small, burning life on the page, but I have not figured out the math to ensure that particular outcome.  I am David, my poem is the slingshot, everything else is Goliath, and I do not know if God isn’t basically my idea (and fear?) of the magnum opus – totally silent and immune to discovery.

In a 2012 interview with the Paris Review, playwright Tony Kushner, amongst many brilliant revelations (you really should read it) made this dazzlingly simple yet hard-earned statement about his struggle with procrastination, “The smartest shrinks I’ve had don’t think there’s a clean separation between the salutary and the unsalutary parts of it. And they tell me I’m probably not going to be able to change it. Like sexual taste, your work ethic is formed deep within, and it’s comprised by all sorts of impulses.”  Procrastination is not my problem.  If anything I jump the gun, because I am so anxious that I might try a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand times, and never get to the beginning.  Or worse, that I would get there too late, when I’ve lost my faith in it.  I’ve buried countless poems because their beginnings couldn’t make it out of my body long enough to draw breath.  I’ve always thought of this as my weakness, my failing as a poet, that which might one day take away my capacity to work with language.  I’ve never thought of it as my work ethic, that part of creation that is not hoodoo, muse-magic and miracles, but the distillation of my effort and raw life into a habit.  This stuttering and erasing and false starts and withdrawals, this pigheaded scratching at the wall, this is my contribution to the process of making something exist that didn’t exist before.  How entirely un-glorious and redemptive!

As artists, I think we owe it to ourselves to try to understand what it is that makes us create and destroy our creations.  The hero and villain, the angel and demon, might be one and the same.  Not for the new year, but for life, it seems, beginnings must be wrested from the mouths of silence, from the teeth of war.