Fear is a strange thing. It can galvanise you into action,
paralyse you – as the rabbit caught in headlights – or put you into denial so
that you don’t even know that you are – afraid, that is.
Some years ago I wanted to explore the roots of the
paralysis that can attack when action is needed, the kind that can lead to
procrastination or a time of slowing down before important events, when speed would
be a more helpful option. Brendan Kennelly had just published a book of poems
exploring different emotions. I was about to commence a six months poetry
course with Faber Academy, Dublin, under the tutelage of Paul Perry. It offered
a space away from my usual poetry confreres, or maybe that should be ‘my consoeurs’!
The anonymity of Dublin was to offer me a time to experiment further with
poetry and push out the boundaries I’d reached in workshops with Kevin Higgins
at the Galway Arts Centre. I wanted to see if I could swim in other waters.
I’ll choose one
emotion, I thought, fear could be good. Put it this way: next time I will be
choosing joy! For I am not sure if the universe may offer up opportunities once
we invoke a particular muse. I was presented with challenges that, for me, took
me well into my chosen subject: fear of loss; of being ill; of dying; of being
alone and of going mad. Nothing extreme then!
The core of all this is the fear of change. I’ve been exploring the question of change all
my working life. Some people call psychotherapists ‘agents of change.’ Most of
us want to reach a safe place where we need not fear any longer. We may then
die of boredom but we don’t mostly have things remain static long enough to
discover that. Stasis in biology comes close to being a definition of
death, something that comes from stagnation. One quotation I came upon in my challenge
to learn resilience said, ‘Give me a new challenge every day.’ ‘It was far from
that I was raised,’ as they say, but I have come to see the value of it. The
challenge to be creative is, literally, the gift of life. It was lucky, then,
that I had poetry as a tool.
The poems are collected in Fear Knot, published by Doire Press, 2013. You can press on the Fear Knot cover to the right of this blog to purchase a copy
from Doire. I hope to talk about some of the poems in future blogs.
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