From “The Wall” by Anne Sexton
We live beneath the ground
and if Christ should come in the form of a plow
and dig a furrow and push us up into the day
we earthworms would be blinded by the sudden light
and writhe in our distress.
As I write this sentence I too writhe.
Funny thing, I read a friend's email to me the other day and she complimented me on my writing, but instead of the word writing, she wrote writhing. And I chuckled to myself, yes, that's about right. Today I read Anne Sexton's poem and she says we are all earthworms; she too writhes.
Today I thought of a first line to a poem and my heart sparked. It was good. I turned up my street into the driveway and became occupied with our trashcan. It was in the middle of the road and I was afraid it would be crushed by an oncoming car (we have already lost two). I rescued the can and lost the poem.
I too writhe.
My mother and I went to a modern dance recital in Cambridge several years ago. The audience sat in bleechers close to the dancefloor; we could reach out and touch the dancers. I don't remember much about the show, only one part, where a woman was on the floor writhing. Her body twitched, vibrated, her hands spastically rumbled over her body, trying to push at something. It hit me then, how perfectly she expressed my feelings with respect to anxiety, how I writhe under fear, twitch, slap, mentally scratch at myself and fight like hell to not be afraid. I had become very good at hiding my writhing. At some point, however, you want to truly be free and not fake free. That's when I started to accept my body for what it was and explore my alternatives.
“Take off your flesh,” Sexton says in the poem, “Unpick the lock of your bones. In other words, take off the wall that separates you from God.”
I struggle to write these lines now. Writing is writhing too, trying to pinpoint your emotions and ideas with the perfect words, dealing with the internal critic. Being loyal to the task however, no matter how uncomfortable, always brings some sort of reward, be it education or awareness. That is why I write.
