On Weariness and Wonder
Weary
is my reply. A soft-spoken word
with pearl grit at its centre.
It harks to yesteryear, endless days
spent ladling a weak broth,
the maid caught in the mantle mirror,
her gaze ringed as a raccoon’s.
Weary wears a good cloth of faded blue,
stitches holding fast.
It’s a womanly word, over-borrowed
by the lovelorn when this world disappoints.
In fact it’s more akin to a pebble found
pocket-deep, steadying anxious fingers
as evening draws out a sob. It attends
to a sadness it would never cause.
Know this, when I’m in a state
weary will gather me tight,
weary will get me home, and later
decline the offer of a fireside seat.
The latch on, the cat out,
weary climbs the staircase step by step by step
pausing at the landing switch
for breath, then lets the darkness come.
Barbara Barnes
First published in The Interpreter's House, reprinted with kind permission of the author.
In a note accompanying this poem on The Interpreter’s House website, Barnes explains that its origins lie in a fleeting interaction with a director colleague, whose use of the word struck her as particularly poignant. One of the things I appreciate about this poem is its humble origins; from a single word, whole stories are opened up. Barnes is an actor as well as a poet and there is something tenderly theatrical about this piece; the reader as audience observer, privy to an intimate, vulnerable scene. The words are as carefully chosen as props, those couplets like footsteps climbing the staircase. It’s also incredibly tactile, offering us softness and grit in equal measure. It’s not in the poem but the word “ache” comes to mind; how the body nurses its private griefs. Part of the sadness here is in the poem’s restraint; there is no great outpouring of emotion but, rather, a “steadying” against the tug. To share a “fireside seat”, the poem reminds us, is in its own way a luxury – too often, the world does not permit us our grief.
Something else that I enjoyed here was the love of language this poem embodies. Like an actor interrogating a script, or a therapist noting a client’s phrasing, the poem invites us to be curious about words. At the centre of the poem is that word attends, which feels exactly what the poem does itself – a conscious, step by step by step attending to the fabric of a word, the meanings and worlds half-hidden within its utterance.
You’ll often hear poets talking about how a poem can surprise them in the writing. Similarly, as therapists, the destination is never fixed, the journey rarely clear, and typically littered with surprises. Such is the potency of language; far from a “code” or set of tools whose use we can master, working with words is almost like working with living, breathing creatures. They speak to us in ways we can’t always fully discern, shapeshifting in the hinterland between conscious and unconscious. Peopled and historied.
All therapists will recall moments when they have somehow landed on a particular phrase or metaphor that speaks to a client, which can almost seem to unlock something for them. In therapy, as in poetry, it seems to me, experimentation with words and language has the potential to change our relationship to our experiences, and with language itself. As Seamus Heaney put it, "If you have the words, there's always a chance that you'll find the way".
In her brilliant essay “Forests of the Mind”, Jay Griffiths reminds us that language is rooted in metaphor, “the greatest human gift”. Metaphor, Griffiths argues, is “how we relate to each other and how our one species attempts to comprehend others”. It enables us to “listen and speak more intensely”, carrying its “cargo of meaning” across the “oceans that divide us”. Griffiths’ writing itself embodies this yearning for playfulness; slipping the bounds of literalism, it revels in the mysterious. Elsewhere, she laments the use of lifeless language where “words of heart are needed”. Incidentally, as a therapist, this is one of my issues with CBT; it is a model I use and respect, but the language of cognitive dysfunctions and negative automatic beliefs leaves me cold. For me, one of the great joys of therapy is that it is essentially life-seeking. Particularly when working with clients who are, in whatever form, wearied, it can be an exercise in tracking and liberating that which propels and energises, the capacity to feel, love and connect.
Going back to the poem, it’s interesting to me that there is such life to be found in a poem which is essentially about a state of depletion. When we're exhausted or burnt out, the natural tendency is to shrink and hide away – conserve energy, reduce threat. Where physiological or psychological safety is lacking, where it is all a person can do to get through the “endless days”, where “darkness” is a refuge, the task is simply to “hold fast”.
One of the most sadly corrosive effects of depression is how it can drain a person’s energy. Not just in a physical sense (though that is a big part of it) but in a kind of spiritual sense too; vitality is squashed, care fades away. Often (though, of course, this differs between people) it is difficult to be creative in a state of depression. Words themselves feel lacklustre; meanings deaden. The cruel irony here is that this makes it all the more difficult to connect – with others, with the world, with language – when connection is the very thing that is most needed.
In Barnes’ poem, weariness is, by contrast, richly meaningful, textured with history – a wellspring of resilience at its centre. The poem breathes life and warmth into the word, takes it in and returns it dressed in costume, the stage set. Though it depicts a series of solitary scenes, to me there’s a sense of companionship in the poem; care and compassion flowing directly from words themselves. As in therapy, the offer here is one of emotional recognition: if we think of it like this, does that resonate? I particularly like the way in which the poem reaches back in time, reminding us of the histories and legacies that continue to take their toll; the poem as an “over-borrowed” solace, a well-thumbed pebble passed from person to person. Within this feeling of familiarity is an ephemeral yet very physical sense-making.
I was recently lucky enough to take part in a production myself, rekindling a love of theatre and acting that has been ‘on hold’ for some years. I played the romantic poet Lord Byron (“mad, bad and dangerous to know”) in Liz Lochead’s play, Blood and Ice. As we explored the script together, I was reminded over and over to be curious about language; each line an invitation to attend, its “cargo of meaning” ready for the unloading. It was a privilege to work with a richly poetic script, immersing myself in the world – or worlds – of the play alongside a brilliant, passionate group of people, all committed to the task of bringing the words to life.
Byron himself was no stranger to dark moods (as I write this, the final line of Barnes’ poem reminds me of his apocalyptic poem Darkness). Lochead’s play does not dance around his capacity for cruelty – indeed, there is much weariness (and more) among the women he comes into contact with. In Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron writes (autobiographically) of one who has “grown aged in this world of woe / In deeds, not years, piercing the depths of life, / So that no wonder waits him”. The “refuge”, he goes on to say, is in creation: “and in creating live / A being more intense, that we endow / With form our fancy, gaining as we give / The life we image”. His reverence for the therapeutic potential of the creative act is one area at least in which Byron and I are aligned.
I might challenge him on one thing though. The Byronic hero is an introspective being, finding solace in “lone caves”; the poet at work in the “soul’s haunted cell”. Solitude can, of course, be deeply restorative, necessary and richly creative. When we are weary though, it can also become a cage. At these times, perhaps more than ever we need other minds to attend – to remind us of the bravery of “holding fast”, to witness the sobs, to offer us words, to keep the fireside seat warm.
