Isolation Jan. 22, 2013

 

Sometimes the greatest clarity in your life comes when you wake up early in the morning, in those terrible moments when your conscious mind can no longer deceive you, casting down barriers that you put up during other times of day that keep you from the ugly truth.

Three a.m. is sometimes called the download time, when the spirituality is awake and aware and received information from other levels of the universes.

This may be the result of lack of distractions. But often it is because at that time of day, pre-dawn, when your natural defenses stripped away.

This is partly what she is talking about in the poem she posted today, about being awake and aware in those early morning hours when other people are generally not awake, a strange time when the hours are stretched or contracted, either lasting too long (that hamster wheel of worry) or shortened when the mind is on the brink of some great inspiration, a dreary moment that churns out a certain kind of thinking.

Like some of her other poems, this is one that is trying to explain something about her life, how she is different from other people and remote for the common routines other people go through, and this difference seems to haunt her, and may explain why she wakes up alone.

She has frequently complained about being up at these ungodly hours, often due to her inability to stop the spigot of worry that washes through her brain, and this poem suggests that there are times when she is on the brink of real inspiration as she ponders the imponderables of life at that hour.

This is her life, a pattern she has apparently lived with since childhood.

The poem suggests an intense loneliness and a disconnect from others, from society. She is awake when others are sleeping and is caught up in these deep thoughts even while other people get on with the ordinary routines of life.

This time tends to distort reality for her, stretching out her hours of worry or goes too fast denying her that moment of discovery she is closed to achieving.

The power is divided into two stanzas. The first details the ordinary world and her relationship to it, the routines other people (including the overachievers) go through. The second stanza describes her world as something surreal where even time is unreliable and reality gets distorted, Einstein-like where nothing can be trusted to be what it seems, even her own thoughts and conclusions.

Other people are bound by typical habits: getting up, getting washed, getting on with their lives.

She is different from the rest, at home, “cold and quiet.”

By cold she may mean emotionally cold or could mean lack of company.

Her life is like a surrealistic painting in which things get bent out of shape, time in particular from what normal people experience, no longer a strict measure by which she can depend on the way other people do.

She contrasts this measurement of time with a curious phrase “A bleak, abundant time.”

There is plenty of time, while at the same time, not enough when it comes to the point where she believes she can put together the pieces of life’s puzzle.

The use of words like bleak, cold, twisted, shrinks, too short, give the poems is somber tone, especially when set side by side with what other people do, the bath, the coffee, the early risers. Their world is full of positive energy, her world is somber, depressed, cold and strange.

But it is not a poem about despair. She is simply defining her life as different from other people, and perhaps even positive in its own light since it appears she finds inspiration in this odd environment.

The poem takes place early in the morning when most people are still asleep. She is up before even the very ambitious people the early birds bent on getting the worm. She is there, wake, alone, cold and silent.

As pointed out, for her time is difficult, doing odd things, unreliable, too long when she is waiting for it to pass, too short when she is on the brink of some discovery.

She does not say what thoughts drag her from her sleep in the first place, nor does she imply envy at the ordinary people who get on with their lives unencumbered by these dark thoughts. But there is more than a hint of sadness in the idea that she is cold.

The poem implies that she is more conscious of things around her, time and deep thoughts, than other people whose lives are built upon routines.

Yet it is clear that she is alone and cold, caught up in this bleak world of her own, when other people are warm, either tucked comfortably in their beds or out into the world doing something.

The poem has an intense sense of isolation, of a need for self-reflection, and again this idea that she must rely on herself.

The poems continues a theme from her other recent poems, suggesting she is unhappy with how her life has turned out, and how divorced from others she feels, even though she has become a member of a new society in her new job.

 

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