Ouroboros by grace (ge) gilbert
Associate editor Julia Kooi Talen on today’s bonus essay: grace (ge) gilbert’s “Ouroboros” floored me the first time I read it. Each sentence pulled me through to the next in this snake-belly-of-an-essay, packed with sharp existential scenes of all-to-relatable self-optimization attempts. gilbert’s wit and brevity astounded me, and I circled back to essay’s beginning right when I hit the end.
Ouroboros
When I first moved to Pittsburgh I slept in a basement in ninety-degree heat and ate pho on the floor while watching television that could rot me. No wifi. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life except write poems and hopefully graduate from a $550 a month cockroach basement and Angry Orchard hard cider. I cooked a lot of chicken thighs and gnocchi and my clothes and hair and bed skirt always smelled like chicken thighs and gnocchi. Weirdly, it’s this exact struggle that I think makes some people think they’ve made it. I don’t think I was any different. It was a righteous struggle, a beaten path toward a funded University program where I thought I would sit in cafés and write poems forever however bad however contrived. I went on a lot of walks. I sat on public park benches with a notebook and wrote nothing to be proud of. I had an illusion of time forever. I sometimes wish I could be struck with just an absolute sense of genius, discover a project that no one has ever done before, a project that only I could do, and I could open up toward the stupid sky and only need a part-time job alongside my illustrious and dedicated writing career. Travel mildly and receive tepid applause for a work that just came to me in some hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. I think the issue with success is that I have no picture of what that would look like. I don’t think I’d ever be satisfied with anything. I am hard to please and I have horrible acid reflux which has made me very bad at living in the moment. I don’t know what a life as a successful writer or person might look like. I don’t want to rot and die in the corporate world at a job I’m embarrassed to tell people about. It’s weird how getting a job is embarrassing for a writer. Very few of us can actually do anything substantial with our careers and yet. Somehow I thought I could push through and be better and yet and yet and Yeti. I set a timer for 25 minutes and am trying to write through it as much as I can. Maybe this is part of the Artist’s Way. This morning I went on a run as a form of self-help and there was so much pollen in my eyes I started to feel like a scarecrow. I feel in my joints the need for competitive behavior. As an athlete, when I was younger, I tried very hard to be successful. In sports failure is immediate and acute. Anticipating failure made me vomit before the gun went off. I needed to win. If I couldn’t win, I wanted to die, and then I didn’t want to practice. It fed itself ouroboros. No matter where I went in the museum of my Big Modern residency, I kept finding myself back in Glenn Kaino’s “Into the Light.” It was a large, barren warehouse of a room filled with stones and figurines and a giant ouroboros carved with Bloody Sunday war cries. There were spotlights and music so loud you could feel the direction back to your body. I kept getting lost in the buildings that wound around its core like its very own snake. I didn’t know what to make of the whole ordeal but I kept ending up back there, complicit in some contemporary art. A viewer with a wristband and museum doe eyes. I wanted to be seen perceiving, learning. I also wanted to crawl into the dark. In the primeval loop of success I am losing both ends of my body and self. I crave making it and any step toward getting there I hate myself for not getting there sooner. Yesterday B and I went to the Goodwill bins and we rummaged poorly through piles of strangers’ dirty laundry. The whole thing felt very frantic, which made it feel full of promise. We found nothing. The building itself half-obscured by an abandoned dandelion-covered National Bank. We have to move. I know very little, and I need a haircut. In all of this I keep spelling Ouroboros wrong. Somewhere in the Gnostic brainstem I thought of plugging a surge protector back into itself and shorted it. The fact that something can become whole through eating its own body, limbs, currents, dreams. How do we make up these symbols? The world has got to get on with us. In the bright afternoon full of bee pollen I listen to Dolly Parton and notice three women in my immediate vicinity wearing dresses with sunflower motifs. I look at apartments in various places where I may or may not be happier.
grace (ge) gilbert is a hybrid poet, essayist, and book artist based in Brooklyn. they received their MFA in poetry from the University of Pittsburgh in 2022. they are the author of the closeted diaries, an essay chapbook from Porkbelly Press (2022), and NOTIFICATIONS IN THE DARK, a poetry chapbook forthcoming from Antenna Books (2023). they were the MCLA Under 27 Writer-in-Residence Fellow at Mass MoCA. their work can be found in the Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, The Offing, Adroit, Hayden's Ferry Review, Diode, TYPO, ANMLY, and elsewhere. they currently teach a hybrid collage and poetics course at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts and are passionate about making the hybrid arts accessible to all. read more at https://gracegegilbert.com.
Tip the author on Venmo @Grace-Gilbert-11.
