Renascence

In An Unquiet Mind, Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison wrote she once had been making several copies of Edna St. Vincent Millay's poem Renascence. It isn't clear whether Dr. Jamison was copying by hand or machine, but the idea stuck. Two years after reading her book, I finally copied the poem myself. It took just under two hours of handwriting.

I have read few poems myself, but whenever I had a chance to memorize a good poem, it invariably had something to do with the theme of rebirth and rediscovering of self. There is something deeply personal about these poems, something that I yearn to experience intimately but fail to achieve in most activities hitherto.

It is true that for the first 23 years of my life, death was a fashionable idea—but one out of my power. Life was foreclosed the moment my childhood memory started; it was not one of color, not one of black and white, but one of gray. A numbness, where even the idea of ceasing to exist became too much of an effort. I did not know what my life thus far led to, until I was 23, when my personal hell began. And me, as of today, falling short of a poet, can only do injustice by describing it.

It seems that history is folding on its own to create a circle—an expanding wheel of the sum total of what life means to me. As the wheel spins, I started to have extended depression-free periods for the first time in my life. At the beginning, it was a week, and then two weeks, and finally, one whole month. I savored these periods as if watching a flower unfurling in late winter, and behind it, an inbound snowstorm.

Snows did come in my late 20s, but so did the gaps between them. Upon each falling, I rebuilt myself. Often I remember these tumultuous periods with great reverence, and an increasing gratitude toward the universe. To my greatest joy, I began to appreciate my traumatic memories because they died in my stead in these winters. My past died so I can be lighter than I ever was.

Now, in my early 30s, life did not just become enjoyable, but more and more so. Experience is not just magnified in its intensity, but in its clarity as truth. I developed my handwriting and often spend hours making squiggles on paper; sometimes, I sit by the piano and play a few notes I can remember, all the while immersing myself in samadhi. I no longer see the necessity to debate the state of the external world and how it affected me, whatever that state might be.

And all at once the heavy night

Fell from my eyes and I could see,—

A drenched and dripping apple-tree,

A last long line of silver rain,

A sky grown clear and blue again.

…

O God, I cried, no dark disguise

Can e'er hereafter hide from me

Thy radiant identity! 

(Excerpt from Millay's Renascence)

And this is why I could experience Edna St. Vincent Millay's poems and Dr. Kay Jamison's proses. To my infinite gratitude, they not only gave me the opportunity to experience my self more deeply, but also gave me the language to accurately describe it.