Seriously Well by Helge Torvund
Lately, I've experienced an uncommonly broad swath of intense emotions ranging from elation and infatuation to grief, frustration, and self-pity. The reasons aren't important here (and frankly, some of them are embarrassing), but in order to prevent myself from being swept away by any one thing, I've been reminding myself that each of these feelings will, in time, become stitching in the fabric of my self. This is a moment in time.
In the moment, focusing on how long life is and how much it can hold is hard. Everything I'm feeling makes me wish other things had gone differently. Not that I want a different life, but I would have liked to have arrived at this life more easily, more swiftly, and alongside people who are missing. Perhaps it's also that I am solidly in mid-life, which has meant more actively reflecting on the past and choosing who I want to be in the future.
All this reflection and intensity of feeling brought me back to a book. A book I meant to write about here in Stanza Break over a year ago. Published by The Song Cave in September 2022, Helge Torvund's Seriously Well (translated from Norwegian by the author) met me at a moment when some of the foundations beneath me were shifting. I needed the book at that time and I needed to hold it close and quietly. I wanted to share it, but I didn't want to dilute the magic of it by trying to articulate it.
Seriously Well is a book-length poem about poetry and living, and living with poetry, that arises out of the author's experience with discovering that he has a life-threatening illness. The tone is that of an elder sharing wisdom with the expectation that it won't be heeded, at least not yet. "On the way you will / often be disappointed," he writes—about reading poetry specifically, but of course about everything. And yet, "the glow hasn't gone out [...] And sometimes / you will find a couple of lines, / a little poem, / a little light [...]."
When I first read this book, I was a little adrift. I often find myself wondering why you all subscribed to Stanza Break, what you could possibly hope to find here. This is an anxiety that's kin to a lot of other anxieties about my intelligence and desirability. These are anxieties that impact my ability to write, to connect with others. To be clear, I'm not asking for affirmation. I bring them up only to acknowledge that I haven't written Stanza Break in a long time, partly because every time I try to write about Torvund's poem, I end up writing about myself, and then I read what I've written and think, who cares?
It feels necessary to acknowledge that I am desperate to connect with you, to share some part of my life that I have come to understand better through poetry. In acknowledging that desire, I must also acknowledge my fear that you'll find me lacking—unintelligent, pompous, boorish—or that through this attempt to connect, I will discover that I am somehow monstrous. The short distance between the desire to connect and the fear of being rejected creates a vortex into which I'm often pulled.
Early in the book, Torvund asks,
Who am I
that can change
the world in this way?
Or is there
really
a darkness
out there?
These initial line breaks are superb, creating a series of questions out of a single phrase: Who am I? Who am I that can change? Who am I that can change the world? And out of those questions comes a bigger fear: is there only darkness? I recognize in these lines the spirals I experience when I'm at my most anxious. But Torvund, who has experienced this line of thinking before, resolves the thought by offering its counterbalance:
And does there then
in the same way exist
a light
a flame
a living glow
that makes us
warm and open?
Is it true
that we live
in a connected whole
where we can
open our hearts
and be filled by
peace, confidence
by light?
Seriously Well moves through time and memory, but rather than following a typical arc of diagnosis and recovery, Torvund's poem encourages us to make companions of death and sorrow, to invite them in alongside life and light.
One more reason I hesitated to write this piece is that it seemed gauche to compare my struggles with mental health to the severe health crisis that precipitated Torvund's poem. The more I meditate on it, though, the more I think that Torvund was writing exactly to people like us: anyone who doubts and wonders how to make a meaningful life. He never judges or diminishes any other experience, never lets the fear of his own mortality diminish the struggles we all face. Because his point is that we all ultimately arrive at the same place. "To be completely alive / together with death," Torvund writes. "And it feels / completely different / like a comfort ..."
