Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

I joke with my family that I want to move my office into my clothes closet. It’s dark and secluded. When I stay at hotels, I get the smallest room I can, preferably one whose windows face a brick wall. Maybe it began as a kid, when I crawled into tight spaces to shield myself away from the adults. Their loud talking and histrionics thundered in my soul, and the comings and goings of siblings disrupted my serious eleven-year-old contemplation.

Nowadays, when I write, occasionally I throw a wool blanket over my head to cocoon myself. Sometimes I wear a zip-up hoodie and wear an eye mask to simulate a grotto; Plato’s got nothing on me. I wish to go physically inward, which is why in graduate school, when my roommates and neighbors were deep in their slumber, I was the nocturnal writer who did not sleep until close to sunrise.

I do not want the world too much with me, late and soon; I wish not to lay waste my powers of creative thinking. I need the blankness of an imagined wall or canvas so I can see shapes emerge, so that memories can rise from the depths of my subconscious.

The will of my mind is then mapped onto my sentences, words strung together out of some depth of uncertainty and knowing. I marvel at how syntax carries the pitch of intellect, emotional adventure, and the associative and reasoned movement of my attention. Unlike prose, the shades of meaning in a poem are embedded, too, in its rhythm and its line breaks, which also give the poem its external shape and music. Yet, that cannot happen until I’ve figured out a way to tune out the chaos and let the silence replicate itself into an unheard sound.

This summer, I get to write in a castle in Italy at an artist retreat. I am hoping my assigned room is in a dungeon. Otherwise, I am afraid high ceilings will mean high windows, which will mean a room flooded with light.

I wish to arrive at light like a burst that suddenly suffuses my eyelids; I want the page to contain inexpressible awe at our existence, to enact a calamitous and beautiful journey. Today’s short poem honors the unseen, formidable spaces that define us as much as our existence in the light.

Nameless Places
by Tony Petrosky

Towns.    Cities.
These things, or their memory,
are scattered over the planet.

In the caves
where light disturbs nothing,
small animals, white as the light 
they never see, live.

Looking out from this place,
deserted in the dead of winter,
I hear the slow parade hum
on the expressway. 
A geometric fog lifts over the trees.

Strange animals gather the darkness
into their lives.

"Nameless Places" by Tony Petrosky. Used by permission of the poet.