Feeling Fearful, Getting Past It
On poetry, confronting anxieties, and advice from Marina Abramović, Patti Smith, and more
At the beginning of 2022, I spoke with Marina Abramović for Vanity Fair. She was releasing a deck of cards inspired by the method she’s taught in workshops for decades, which are aimed at clarifying the mind. “My entire work—now 50 years into my career,” she told me, “I dedicate to doing the things I don’t like, the things I am afraid of, the things that I don’t know anything about. The function of all this is to get to the other side of your own fear, and to liberate yourself from the fear.”
The shifting from one year to the next is, obviously, a natural time to revisit memories, accomplishments, and failures from the previous 365 days, and to look towards the next ones with hopes for growth, change. I’ve been thinking about fear—the limitations it sets; it’s uses—and as usual this led me to seek out information about the word itself. Old English fǣr means “calamity, danger.” The Latin deponent verb vereor means to “fear, respect, stand in awe of.”
From an essay for Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies:
In the language of Homeric Greek…to be ‘afraid’ (δείδιμεν) is to feel ‘in a double way’ (ἐν δοιῇ).
“We are afraid. It can go either way, whether we can save or lose
the ships with their fair benches.”Iliad 9.230–231
This definition appeals to me because it gets at something intrinsic to fear and worry, that an unknown future whatever might happen, or perhaps another thing completely. Often, when I am fearful of something that has in fact not yet occurred, I find myself thinking, “If I could just know…” Lack of control is a scary thing. It makes me think, too, of the way horses have to learn to trust their riders to take them over puddles, even very shallow ones, because the reflective surface makes it difficult for them to tell whether the water is an inch or five feet deep.
Sometimes it almost takes my breath away, thinking of experiences I’ve let slip by because I was afraid of being bad at them: ballet and ceramics and introductory physics classes in college; speaking to interesting strangers at parties; attempting to strike up a friendship. Having re-started horseback riding lessons just over a year ago, one of the things that feels consistently encouraging is that, when starting at zero—at “bad”—it really does mean there’s nowhere to go but up.
For whatever reason, poetry intimidates me. It didn’t always; like so many angsty teens, I went through a big E.E. Cummings phase. (This, thankfully, waned before I was of tattooing age, otherwise I might have “blow pity to envy and soul to mind” inked across my ribcage.) I’ve always felt at home in the soft embrace of narrative, and maybe my peeling away from the road to poetry was simply a question of mental space: fiction, and then journalism, took up so much, and poor poetry got crowded out. But I also think it comes from a place of being worried about not understanding, of getting things wrong. Like various other personal fears, it has weaseled its way into my writing: there’s a poet in my novel, and I wrote a piece for V.F. about seeing poetry everywhere at the beginning of the pandemic. It seems increasingly silly to be scared of a form of literature. (I mean. The stakes could not possibly be lower.) And I like thinking about things that I don’t understand! So this year I’m planning to read poetry—even just a poem—every day. This is cheating, maybe, (narrative!) but I’m rereading The Odyssey, which I adore even more now than I did when I read it in Daniel Mendelsohn’s class; I loved his book about teaching the same seminar to his father. I’m also futzing around with The Waste Land which, because we just passed the centenary of its publication, has been revisited in various ways: I found these two interesting. My wonderful friend Lucy sent me a bouquet of beautiful poems, here is one. And Ross Gay, always.
Roosevelt’s “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” has been so well-trod that, to my mind, the meaning’s been all but sapped out of it but, for those of us not in a place of immediate physical danger, there’s a lot of truth there. Fearing the thing is, for me, almost always more debilitating than doing the thing: hard conversations, learning to drive, jumping into cold water. Last year I fell during a riding lesson for the first time as an adult, which I knew would happen eventually and had been dreading. The thing about getting back on the horse is as useful in literal practice as it is in metaphor. Between falling off and getting back on I didn’t even have time to become afraid. I’ve watched parents of toddlers employ a version of this trick: if a child falls down, there’s often a split second where they’re figuring out whether to be upset; if the adult they’re looking toward seems worried, this can lead to tears, while if the adult shakes it off with a pleasant “uh-oh!” the kid often moves on, too. It makes sense that seeing other people’s fearful faces is one of the earliest ways we learn to be frightened.
Sometimes if you go back far enough you find something useful—or hopeful. Etymonline.com traces the word “fear” through its permutations, from Middle and Old English, through Dutch and German, all the way to the Proto-Indo-European verbal root per-: “to try, risk.” To try! What a thing.
Here are some of my favorite wise words and pieces of advice from various V.F. interviews over the past year:
Patti Smith said, “I've never been a prodigy. I've had to really work and work and work and discipline. And I wrote so much during the '80s, almost none of it published, but I worked. I really developed my discipline.”
Darryl Pinckney quoted his mentor, Elizabeth Hardwick—“I wish I’d written more”—and went on: “But you can’t. If you haven’t, then you haven’t. So the struggle for self-acceptance, if you’re a writer, is never over, I think. I mean, you know that.”
Marina Abramovic suggested that to survive one’s thirties, one shouldn’t “control anything. Just take things as they are. Follow your intuition. Listen to your body, because our mind really fucks us up so much, because our mind is manipulative. Our mind is always imagining things that don’t exist.”
Gabriela Hearst said: “If you are not in a position of survival, you need to help others, and you need to be of service…Everything I’ve done in my life that is worth it has taken a lot of work.”
Deeda Blair believes that exquisite personal style and scientific inquiry “require the same qualities… In science, a key factor is intense curiosity. And in a sense, when you are choosing clothes, it has to do a little bit with curiosity—or typically, I’d say, quite a lot.”
Gloria Steinem said, of starting Ms. Magazine, “There was always a consciousness that we were trying to do something that hadn’t been done, however imperfectly we’d be doing it.”
Thank you for being here. That’s it for now. If you enjoyed this, tap the heart or share with a friend or, my personal favorite option, leave me one of your favorite poems in the comments. Til next time!
xx KW
Such a newsy edition in the best way! MA's card set seems like it would make for an excellent hostess gift. As for poetry, certain lines by W.S. Merwin are indelible (for me anyway) on the subject of fear. Here they are, from two different poems:
I saw the wolf in winter watching on the raw hill
I stood at night on top of the black tower and sang
I saw my mouth in spring float away on the river
I was a child in rooms where the furs were climbing
and each was alone and they had no eyes no faces
nothing inside them any more but the stories
--from "Piere Vidal"
in youth I hid a boat under
the bushes beside the water
knowing I would want it later
and come back and would find it there
someone else took it and left me
instead the sound of the water
with its whisper of vertigo
terror reassurance an old
old sadness it would seem we knew
enough always about parting
but we have to go on learning
as long as there is anything
--from "Waves in August"
Of course these poems will mean something different to every reader. I can't claim any special knowledge. But I love them both.