How to Disappear Completely

On going away, giving up and the possibility of grace.

Originally published in January 2024, but since it rings true every cold-as-hell January, I’m repinning here. I hope you find some self-forgiveness and grace in it.

It’s been a while. Here’s why: I don’t like January. Or maybe January doesn’t like me.

This is a personal-historical thing. It would probably be simpler to state that I apparently suffer from seasonal affective disorder, a cyclical winter depression that seems pretty common and that makes sense to me not only as a mental or emotional illness but as an extreme but completely understandable form of post-holiday fatigue that is difficult or impossible for people of a certain temperament to escape. But just saying that would be boring. Wouldn’t it? Also not really a post or whatever you call these things. I’d rather kvetch.

To begin in the middle: I broke ranks in late December from the surprisingly consistent writing practice I’d established in the previous months and went down South to visit with my family, where I celebrated with them — first my 60th birthday, then two days later, Christmas. Back in New York at month’s end, I enjoyed a joint birthday party with my dear friend from college (we were born seven days apart in 1963) and a room full of the smartest, kindest, most virtuous and loyal friends a person could ever hope to have. (As a bonus, the literary talent quotient in that room was very high.) But given my way, I was able to find something difficult about this happy occasion. I had to work on something internally in order to fully enjoy the party. I had to find a way to relax into the moment, to allow other people do things for me out of the goodness of their hearts and their affection for me, to spend time, money and effort to attend an event in my honor. I had to back off my usual hyper-deferential posture and let them wish me well and celebrate me without giving them anything in return but my gratitude.

That is some Catholic School shit right there.

I bring that up because it seems relevant to my temporary disappearance from this venue, which I’ve come to value for the mere fact of its being here, as a sort of home base, a place I can leave and return to at will, that either forgives me or doesn’t particularly care when I fail to meet a commitment, and that asks little of others yet allows me to sometimes speak to them in ways they find valuable.

A day after the party, I felt refreshed. The break from the writing routine was good. And on New Year’s Eve I noticed something unusual. A fog had cleared.

For three months I’d been working in more or less in the dark, not unhappily, in a sort of “cloud of unknowing,” that indeterminate state in which nothing is firm or certain in the mind but that can be the most fruitful ground of all. In the literature of Christian mysticism, the supplicant surrenders to the infinite unknowable and disappears into meditation and worship and prayer to God, but in the occasionally parallel secular universe of making art (in this case textual art), this means writing, just writing, without a mind occupied with goals, larger plans or context, ambitions, practicalities or even a subject, and in that way surrendering to the unknowable, and proceeding with faith, as one might in prayer. This was a rich time but, to be blunt here, it wasn’t getting the book I was supposed to be writing written. There was no organization to it. It was roaming. And the clock was ticking. I would return to my full-time duties editing in a month.

So on New Year’s Day, in the newly clear air, I went about easily planning my project. It all seemed so logical. I saw what I needed to do to bring coherence to my work, and I did it. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t do this a month before but I decided not to question it. I booked my research appointments, spent hours in the library reading and writing. Connections in the work were revealing themselves. Everything was coming together.

Then, without any sort of warning, everything stopped. The work, I mean. I lost all ability and desire to return to it. The total clarity that seemed to arrive unbidden, like grace, was apparently a cosmic head fake, a Curry-like crossover, a ruse, and as wise and ancient as I am, it took me surprise.

Though nothing substantive in my life was wrong (in fact, quite the opposite), I grew melancholy, took long, solitary walks and started avoiding friends and loved ones, though I was able to reserve a modicum of good will for the cashiers and gym associates and sales people I interacted with, for the old gentleman hobbling down the subway stairs and the young, houseless men and women I walked by as they huddled with their dogs and change bowls under their makeshift sidewalk tents. I had that much humanity left in me, at least.

It was around that time — a few days after the New Year — that, while walking along the cruddy stretch of Delancey Street beneath the Williamsburg Bridge I came upon this tableau in the photograph below. I couldn’t decide if it was the funniest thing I’d seen so far in 2024 or the saddest.

Photograph by Peter Catapano

The timing — definitely funny. I could see a poor, hungover soul waking up on January 1, thinking, “Well that didn’t work,” and tossing out the Big Book for good. But it could have been sad, too. What am I talking about? Of course it was sad. Not just the book. The uncrushed cigarette butt, the busted spoon. So forlorn. The discarded AA book almost seems beside the point. The spoon and butt seem pregnant with an even more poignant meaning. Every detail telling a story. But of what?

And of course I had other questions. Why the fourth edition? Is there something wrong with the fourth? Maybe it was like, “I’m really a fan of the third, you know, old school!” or “I’m good with the paperback.” And the pot? Why the pot? Was there some fire-based pagan ritual in the offing? And don’t think I didn’t notice. It was a pretty nice pot. Putting it out on the street suggested a sort of material letting go.

I knew if I thought long enough to imagine in some realistic detail how those items got put into the pot and how the pot got put on this cruddy curb so close to the day of the year specifically designed for alcohol abuse, it would definitely be sad. The trick was not to think about it. Because I needed a laugh.

I needed a laugh because, as I said, I was mildly depressed in a way entirely appropriate for the first week in January, when people have stopped wishing each other Happy New Year (woop!), and the weather sucks, and you realize it’s going to keep on sucking for the foreseeable future, and you can’t afford to go to Puerto Rico, even for a “jaunt.” Maybe that’s why this little naturally occurring sculpture called out to me.

If I had an editor who demanded that I distill this wandering meditation into one line to convey to readers what it is about I might say: The challenge of persisting in our chosen work through difficult times. But that’s also pretty vague. You’d think I’d be better at this part of it, but I’m not.

There is something, though, about the matter of “chosen work” (you don’t have to do it, so why do it?) that is relevant here. The thing about independent projects and labors of love is that you are never really off the clock. The work doesn’t end when you close the notebook or move the canvas to the corner of the studio and get lunch. You take it with you. Or it follows you. It sits in your stomach while you are eating, grips your legs while you are walking, your hands while wiping down the dishes. It is in your head when you wake and in the water running over your head and down your back when you drag yourself into the shower wondering what, if anything, you are going to do.

All this intention living inside you takes up mental and emotional space, and, I found, the effort involved in maintaining it can make you tired the way a five-mile walk or an hour of swimming can. This is not a lament or a complaint about the difficulty of a task that artists choose of their own free will. Just to say that the break from that, and from the pressure of finding something pertinent to say to the 280 of you kind enough to subscribe to Question Everything, was nice, and the immanent return to it was daunting.

But let us return to the pot, because the fact that this particular discarded vessel with the Big Book framed by the busted plastic spoon and the cigarette butt caught my eye is worth noting. Isn’t it? It must be. Because there is a lot of crap on that street to choose from. The stretch of Delancey Street beneath the Williamsburg Bridge is the dumping ground of some of the most compelling refuse in all of New York. This is not litter I speak of — such as the single-use McDonald’s bag or Big Gulp cup made to be discarded — it is the abandonment of intimate objects: the burnt-out waterlogged mattress, the smashed teddy bear (the freaking teddy bear!), the faux-fur winter coat torn apart and lying beneath the unholy din of the L train thundering on the tracks above with all the fury of the Teutonic hordes storming Novgorod. Delancey beneath the bridge is an incoherent netherworld of once-meaningful objects downgraded to trash.

Battle between Novgorod and Suzdal, public domain

So why this pot? Not sure.

I do know that after seeing the pot I became, for at least part of the month, one of those sad-seeming post-middle-aged man walking the street in long coats, taking uneven steps, occasionally pausing to stop and think because thinking and walking in some instances becomes a form of multitasking. I was thinking about finding my way back to work that a week before was shining with possibility but that seemed now entirely without luster or promise. I was sad, but OK, it was January. When I couldn’t think of anything else to do I walked. I ate well and exercised and slept as much as I could. I have friends, many brilliant and dedicated and temperamentally indestructible friends, and when I felt up to it I talked to them about things that matter to me and them and about the weird fluctuating satisfaction that comes from pursuing an activity that by all indications is pointless and nonremunerative, but that is actually the source of much meaning and joy. It was about then that the second fog began to lift.

As the month ends, I feel like I am being deposited back into the world like a miniature Gumby tumbling out of a cosmic vending machine. A little disoriented but I think I recognize my surroundings. Days are getting ever so slightly longer. Songs sound good. My back doesn’t hurt. I recently walked back to that spot under the bridge where I first saw the pot. I wondered whether someone had reached down in the gutter, picked up the Big Book and read it. Maybe a life was saved. That would be a nice way to end the story. But this is not a story. And anyway I couldn’t be sure. By the time I returned the street had been swept. The pot and everything in it was gone.