Narcissus’ Prayer

It’s a mood and a phase, but it’s one that recurs.

It’s a mood and a phase, but it’s one that recurs. For some weeks now, I have felt uncomfortable with the “too-muchness” (Celan’s word) of myself. I feel my intensity as a burden, as torment. Good thing is that my tongue has also loosened, so that I find myself drafting things, though I have not made any whole poem. As I said in a previous letter, torment can be fruitful.

‘I might have thrown poor words away / And been content to live,’ said Yeats. One of the characteristics of being a poet—of living your life by clinging to ‘poor words’—is that one can’t quite be content simply to live. Living is complicated by words. We look upon the world with changed, electric eyes, and we inhabit the world by our seeing—and sometimes it can be hell. The world is abundant, yet the soul is lean; in seeing such extravagance in the world, it cannot escape the fact of its own leanness.

“‘I might have thrown poor words away / And been content to live,’ said Yeats.”

Intensity isolates. You can’t talk to people about what you see, feel, because by doing this you risk estranging them. And yet the mind, the blood, the flesh is exploding with heat. I should like sometimes to be forgetful of ideas, to not be in conversation with myself in crowded spaces like a mad man, to not be so drunk up on the chalice of love that I spill my own blood everywhere, like a slain ram not utterly finished trundling along.

I ask myself, if I could start again, if I could choose, would I want to be a writer? The answer is no. It demands too much and makes you too demanding. Every vocation shapes one into the kind of person suitable to that job, and writing moulds with very hard, bedevilled hands. No day has passed in a decade that I have not bickered in my mind about words. No moment. It is a dreadful existence, I confess, though you live the life you are given. What choice?

When I look back, I see that my upbringing makes the life I now have almost inevitable. My childhood was incredibly lonely. At the age of six or seven, my father took me with him and my stepmom home to Abeokuta from the Winner’s headquarters in Ota (I had been staying with an aunt); that was the moment when I began to develop this sense of being alone. And not just alone, I also wanted to escape, to step out of time. I could not be at ease in time when the woman was bent on making life miserable.

“Books were a great solace: I could be immersed in a world, I could take root inside a novel and belong to a vision long enough.”

If I did not begin talking to myself at this time, I know I began to dream my way out of my environment—as if I was looking out on life through a window and craved escape. There was a brief hiatus of childhood—between ten and twelve when I lived with my mother. (I spent it chasing butterflies, birds, sucking flower-tips.) But even that period was broken by moments when I had to live with people here and there. Then at twelve my mother died. And the loneliness was greater, more painstaking. I had started rapping; that was consolation: I could say to the wind things I could say to no one. But it was necessary to speak, to find words for whatever dysfunction was taking place on the inside.

“Narcissus” by Caravaggio (1597—1599)

Again, movement. Came to Lagos at twelve. Moved around from house to house like a whore that does home service.

Point is: living with people who were not family, whom I would never stay long enough with, I don’t think I ever took root anywhere. A woman said to me once in Abeokuta (I have never forgotten it): ‘A rolling stone does not gather moss.’ In such contexts, too, loneliness was inescapable. I had to cultivate my own solitude or no help.

I found books in the house of a stranger. He was not a relative; he took me in when the person who had taken me in was going to leave and there was nowhere for me to go. Books were a great solace: I could be immersed in a world, I could take root inside a novel and belong to a vision long enough. It was a good “cure” for my need.

The weight of this history is, it seems to me, that I try to take root in people, especially the women I have loved. Or it seems so to me. A dark night in my life. We had probably just made love, this young woman who was mad over me and over whom I was mad, this was in Ibadan, it was in her room: I opened my laptop and played Titilope Sonuga. ‘The woman is not your mother,’ she said, and I looked to the young woman and said, wanting silly assurance, ‘Are you not my mother?’

The response was low but definite. ‘No. I am not your mother.’

I was wounded to my core, but it was foolish to be. She was right. No woman can be my mother, and I would not even want anyone to be. (My mother said when she left my father when I was barely two: ‘If I die, the boy will live his life’—a statement that has proven true.)

“Language—though it has given and continues to give me a life I cannot have dreamed—has sharpened the pain of being alone.”

I broke up with that young woman, out of mercy to her. And that moment, when I turned off the world, forsaking social media, locked in into myself (after my last suicide attempt), it was a moment when my nature grew more asymmetrical, but it was a moment of great productivity. I turned all the intensity I had towards writing and drugs. I left my house for the joint (an uncompleted building) where I smoked weed with some boys in the morning and worked until late in the night when I sauntered home. I barely slept, since insomnia was my name.

But even then I had someone to whom I took the thread I had in place of a root, who fondled it. She was old enough to be an aunt; a prostitute. I went there early in the evenings before the customers came—I had pride of place, you see—and barely did anything because I did not find her attractive. The belly was a pouch. She would not smoke my loud; I bought her a packet of Chesterfield. She needed a boyfriend, she said, thinking I was a Yahoo Boy. Before I left each time, she sprayed her perf on me. I can’t remember what we said on those nights. But she was a mother figure.

Moving out of that life, I found Christ. He found me. Yet, strangely, Christ has not cancelled the loneliness, though he has remedied the grief. (To want my mother back is naive, I realize; what would we say to each other if we met in a mall? Does she have Yoruba yet? What language do the dead speak? What use would the sonnets of Shakespeare be to my mother who died fourteen years ago?) Grief may have been one form that my loneliness took.

Loneliness is great. I love people, when they are not in a crowd. I am ill at rest in crowded places. But loneliness can be hell, marked as it is by longing and the need to take root. When the world o’erbrims for me, as it does more than a few times every week, when I sense the great wheels of the world turning, I want to pour some of that into someone, share the burden of the self.

But you can’t do that. That, my dear friends, is idolatry. One can’t do that. And I can’t channel this intensity into drugs, or sell myself solely to write. That, too, would be idolatry. You must sit with the self when the world is burning inside you, and with your own hands carry water to the flames. The curse and the blessing: the needle passes through the eye and stitches the light shut. The world is breaking, pick up the rubble and fling it at the birds. I wish these mortal desires would be murdered in me.

You see why I would not want to be a writer in another life, because the pen, language—though it has given and continues to give me a life I cannot have dreamed—has sharpened the pain of being alone. Bereaved words flutter around in the silence and smash their beak into the peace. The peace does not break; it’s made of impossible glass. But the noise, the noise.

I wish You would make me a mystic. Show me how to be one. (But that is a naive prayer.) 🔷

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