There can be times when you make something and it causes you to feel understood at a secret level.
This summer, in a poetry workshop with the great Catherine Graham, I submitted a poem I’d been going back and forth on for six months. It was excavating a new obsession I was finding myself in the grip of: Formula 1, or more specifically my need to put language around humans’ relationship with speed, or how humans test their physical limitations to walk that very thin line between being super-human and facing true and eternal death.
In the case of one of the most famous Formula 1 drivers, Ayrton Senna, driving a car at unimaginable speeds was a religious experience, giving him the ability to travel outside of the everyday and enter into fathoming.
Senna said there is a point
When you’re driving by a kind of instinct,
on the limit or charging at the death line,
braking just enough.
As I was writing the poem, it became evident pretty quickly that I’ll take every opportunity I can to show off what I know about Senna, and stop there. But that, of course, is not art. That’s knowledge-sharing.
It took months of coming back to the poem, again and again, badgering it in fact, to find softer words. Words that went to more unpredictable places. What inevitably happens during the course of this badgering, or what Buddhists call “the return” when it’s done in a gentler way, is that you find words and ideas that feel like a clenched fist opening.
Fragile is my favourite kind of breathing out
Senna said the same moment you are
the fastest and somebody that can’t be touched,
you are enormously fragile.
To revise a piece of creative writing, over and over again, is to find artifacts or snippets of the subconscious mind, the language and ideas inserted into you from culture, family, nation.
And when it comes up, it is a reach into something very tender, shadowy and sticky. There is a feeling of agency, that something was uncovered, made aware to you at last, giving you the ability to understand at some level what you need/fear/hope for—and also the sensation that you’re going to a place within you that’s brittle. I know it is happening because I’ll always find myself getting emotional very suddenly. So yes, writing a poem about race cars did cause me to cry alone at my kitchen table while the kids were at school.
When I submitted my weird Formula 1 race car poem to a workshop led by the great Catherine Graham, I expected the poets in the group to have questions, suggestions, a few short kind things to say out of politeness.
Inside two solid lines
cars study safety with human eyes.
I found, instead, such thoughtful minds. One told me they felt they saw my soul in the piece. Another said they felt spirit living in matter.
I shared a quote from mystic Richard Rohr that has come to mean a lot to me over the course of writing my novel: “the physical world reveals the spiritual world. Spirit is not in ideas or concepts, it’s in ‘thingness.’”
It is rare for me to experience being understood on a very deep, secret level in my art. I supposed I’m probably chasing it when I’m making something, because when it happens it’s a very freeing feeling.
Saving is my favourite kind of accessory
Do we gravitate to music, poetry, visual art, comedy, films, etc to be understood? To see ourselves more openly?
Are we restored back into spirit when we place the intangible into something tangible?
I’m told there are many ways to feel more fully alive. And I am a chaser of aliveness.
Unexpectedly, I’ve found creating any form of art that has made me feel more alive has pulled me into conversations about death in all its forms (death of a dream, death of a relationship, death of a country, death of a person), and its connections to new seeing, new believing, and the unstoppable life pattern we are all a part of, that keeps running, no matter what. Death and resurrection, death and resurrection, Christians say. Over and over again. And in all places. Secret, silent or splashed on global broadcast channels.
It’s well known that Senna died in a Formula 1 car. You can see the moment on YouTube.
I watched it over and over again, as I wrote this last stanza of the poem.
For Senna, not a bone broken when the car hit back,
his head a pinwheel without wind.
A death erasing future deaths.
Yet after 10 seconds, the helmet rose,
and Brazil’s Catholics pinned their hands together
until after the state funeral.
Now, the helmet sits on my lap
lifting every so often
as I charge language between two lines
and erase death.
Spirit lives in matter
One more thought on spirit being revealed to us in “thingness” (a race car, an ocean, batteries, coffee, music, …). It’s related, I’m told, to the Christmas story. That tale about spirit entering into matter, into human bodies, in a dirty, cold, stable, not a fancy inn. My simple/confused mind that’s always wondering what to believe likes thinking of the holidays in this way. That Muslim side of me and that Roman Catholic side can relate. Simply put, fathoming is my favourite kind of consuming.
Thank you for reading. Wishing everyone a happy holiday.x
What an insightful piece of writing. Amazing Nadia!
Happy Christmas!!
Beautiful. Happy Holidays Nadia!