Figure It Out

by Wayne Koestenbaum

  (2018)

  FIGURE IT OUT

  1.

  Desecrate. Commit an iconoclastic act. Gently ruin an object, a place, a possession. Take a fingernail clipper and scratch the wall of a public building. The post office would be a good choice. The scratch you make will be very tiny and therefore not entirely illegal; the scratch won’t interfere with the mail delivery and so you don’t need to feel guilty afterward.

  2.

  Divide your living space (or your work space) into areas consecrated to different activities. The internet corner. The meditation corner. The sex corner. The reading corner. The chopping celery corner. The remorse corner. These corners may all end up being the same corner, but invent ways of differentiating the functions. (I learned this trick from Anaïs Nin’s diary.)

  3.

  Find in every orgasm an encyclopedic richness. Take the lessons of orgasm and apply them to daily life, as if orgasm could be extended. Behave like an orgasm, without alienating people, breaking laws, or losing credibility. Reimagine doing the laundry as having an orgasm, and reinterpret orgasm as not a tiny experience, temporally limited, occurring in a single human body, but as an experience that somehow touches on all of human history.

  4.

  When I write, I start to feel grandiosely world-historical, like a German poet or philosopher who wants to rewrite the story of human endeavor. Stop trying to be Marx or Freud. Or else finally read that biography of Wilhelm Reich—king of the orgasm—that has been sitting on your bedside table ever since al-Qaeda flew two planes into the World Trade Center.

  5.

  After someone insults you, or ignores you, or makes you feel like dirt, buy a box of charcoal and a cheap pad of newsprint, and go to town with it. Make random marks on the newsprint, each mark signifying your revenge against the person who made you feel like dirt. Perhaps blindfold yourself before going to town.

  6.

  Use a stopwatch to time various ordinary activities (like making the bed or reading a story or boiling water for tea) in order to develop a curious attitude toward these usually unscrutinized acts. Make the bed very slowly. Notice the nubbly sensation of the maybe not pristinely clean sheets against your fingertips.

  7.

  Make a new decision about color. Banish green from your affections. Commit yourself to blue. To orange. Take up puce as a calling. Stop playing favorites. If you’ve always considered red your ideal color, stop wearing red. Move on to yellow. If you’re bored with yellow, find micro-shades of yellow within yellow. Realize that yellow is itself a complicated region, containing Naples yellow, lemon yellow, gamboge, cobalt yellow lake. Find a new favorite among the minor, oddball yellows.

  8.

  Pattern: develop a philosophy of polka dots, stripes, paisley, plaid, or randomly intersecting lines or curves. By “philosophy,” I mean a complicated attitude toward the pattern, and one that is yours alone. Everyone in the city might be wearing polka dots, but let your attitude toward polka dots be uniquely yours. Individualize your attitude toward polka dots. Proclaim that attitude and stick to it. Figure out a place in which to proclaim it. Try to remember when you first fell in love with polka dots. If necessary, find a way to describe the pattern, something other than “polka dots.” Instead of polka dots, call them identity spots.

  9.

  Buy a one-dollar cactus, and start anthropomorphizing it. Call it Sabrina. Hello, Sabrina. Would you like a little water today?

  10.

  Find a friend whose creative life is thriving. Ask this friend some detailed questions about how to thrive. Yesterday a poet told me that he writes at night for six hours without interruption (except for caffeine breaks). The next day he harvests the good parts from the mad kaleidoscope he’d assembled the night before. I asked him, “How do you retain the weather system of the kaleidoscope? How do you prevent yourself from ruining the healthy ecosystem you’d concocted the night before?”

  11.

  Exaggerate the pain that a certain incident gave you—for example, the time that you almost bumped into an old man on the sidewalk, and he growled and cursed at you, waving his hands as if warding off a devil. If that old man on the sidewalk upset you, and his excoriations felt like rape, exaggerate the pain. Beef up the plight quotient of the incident. Develop a series of rituals to ameliorate its effects.

  12.

  Behave like Gena Rowlands in Woman Under the Influence, but only when by yourself. Have a behave like Gena Rowlands hour, when you allow yourself to go theatrically crazy. Do it in a room, like the kitchen, that has plenty of wet and messy substances (ketchup, milk, sherry, honey, yogurt, miso) available for your use.

  13.

  Categorize your crushes. Figure out what they have in common, over the years. Tally how many of these crushes came to fruition. Figure out what fruition means for you. (Sexual consummation? Reciprocated affection? Monetary gift?) Figure out whether you have “used up” that category of crush, and might need to discover another category.

  14.

  Modify your body this afternoon. Perform this modification more slowly than usual, and allow yourself to make metaphors of what the process means to you.

  15.

  If you need to shut a door, shut a door. Right now. Lock it.

  16.

  Always travel with a small stash of nutritious and filling foods. Figure out whether you want to share the stash or keep it to yourself. Figure out whether it will upset you if other people reach with their bare hands into your stash. If you find it difficult to eat food in front of other people, find private moments for compensatory nibbling, or else tell the people you’re forced to be with, “Excuse me, I need to make a phone call,” and go into the corridor and stuff your face.

  17.

  Don’t interrupt other people when they’re in the middle of talking, unless they are unrepentant loudmouths, dying for correction.

  18.

  If you like some aspect of a person, say so enthusiastically, and find an original way to praise that aspect of the person’s comportment, appearance, or performance. Be sure to smile while you issue the praise, and issue it with full sincerity, even if your feeling may be divided.

  19.

  If someone once asked you for an important favor, and you never did the favor, even if you said you did or let the person believe you did, then realize that you might have been doing the correct thing (for yourself, for the other person, for the balance of the universe) by not executing the favor. Realize that there might have been a divine, undetectable correctness in your failure.

  20.

  Choose a short piece of music. Lie down on the floor, not the bed; a certain discomfort is essential to this experiment. Close your eyes, and listen; consider this music the antidote to any assault committed against you. Pretend that the main melodic line represents you, and that the accompaniment represents all the forces that are standing behind you. You might not be aware that a chorus of powers supports your existence, but in truth you couldn’t be alive without this choir of invisible angels devoted to sustaining your life. Consider each blood vessel in your body to be an unacknowledged angel, consecrated to your welfare. When the music changes key, consider the modulation to represent a movement into your enemy’s point of view; be glad when we leave that key behind and return to the original. Later, when you have attempted to practice my suggestions, and you begin to see the results, you will notice that “enemy” is no longer a load-bearing column in your personality’s solid cathedral.

  21.

  Stop being a perfectionist. Or limit your perfectionism to brief interludes, in which you’re allowed to go “whole hog” on the perfectionist path; but then, afterward, institute a scheme that permits an instantaneous crossover to nonperfectionism, license, ease. I advocate extreme cleanliness but I also advocate wallowing in your own filth.

  22.

  Start remembering your dreams by telling them to someone, or writing them down. Take your dreams seriously. (Last night I dre
amt that I was forced to be prime minister of a tiny island-nation torn by centuries of civil war.) Try to keep the aura of the dream around yourself for as long as possible during the morning, even if the dream’s atmosphere interferes with your functioning.

  23.

  Choose to identify with a person in the news. Bo Guagua, son of a Chinese Communist Party leader. Call yourself “Bo Guagua.” See if it helps. It might give you a few unearned liberties. Make a list of those liberties, and title the list “Bo Guagua.”

  24.

  Cultivate your affinities, not your aversions. If you don’t like a book, try to like it. (I didn’t entire delight in Herman Melville’s Pierre, though I wanted to love it.) Find one tiny aspect of the book to fall in love with, even if this aspect fills you with discontent and unrest. (Pierre is about brother-sister incest, and I tend to like novels about brother-sister incest.) Find a way to cozy up to the unrest, to find in that discomfort a mode of home. I am not recommending that you take up brother-sister incest as your next “cause” to stand behind. But if brother-sister incest is necessary (as an imaginative category) to sustain your interest in a book you’d otherwise dislike, then I recommend encouraging your brother-sister incest fantasies as a way of stimulating yourself to enjoy Pierre.

  25.

  If you are not happy with your own body, or feel underconfident about one aspect of it, find someone to perform a compensatory act of worship. It will be easier than you think to find an acolyte. Make sure that this person worships your body in detail and verbalizes the ceremony while it is taking place. Perhaps record the session, so you can listen to it for future consolation.

  26.

  Make a list of all the items you’ve recently googled. Turn each item in the list into a question. If you googled “Bobby Darin,” for example, you might transform that impulse into the following question: “If I were to buy a houseplant and call it ‘Bobby Darin,’ what kind of plant would it be, and how long would it live?” Perhaps take this exercise one step further, and buy a houseplant, name it Bobby Darin, and see how long it lives.

  27.

  Sit by yourself in a public place for one hour, with a pad or notebook, whether for the purposes of drawing, writing, doodling, making random inscriptions, even just writing your name again and again, or writing the names of every item of food in your refrigerator (from memory). Even if nothing that you write or draw proves interesting to you later, you will have attracted the attention of fellow-dwellers of this space, and you will have befriended your hand.

  28.

  Dedicate each sexual act to a specific scene from your past, particularly a scene that represented a site of nonfulfillment, chagrin, or pain. Give that scene a title.

  29.

  Verbalize every impulse. Or else take the silent route; let your impulses live without the punishing, restrictive mantle of words.

  30.

  If you regret not attending someone’s funeral, tell yourself now that it is too late, and no harm was done by not paying your respects at the grave. If you still believe that harm was done, realize that “harm” is usually subjective, and therefore liable to interpretation, and that it is possible that the only harm done (by your nonattendance) was to yourself, and that you can erase this harm—right now!—by telling yourself that you were justified not attending the funeral. If you want your heart to be broken, though, remember that the first time you met the now dead man, he said, “Come sit on my lap,” and you sat on his lap. And ask yourself if you are a kindhearted person to have skipped the funeral of a sage on whose intelligent lap you’d once sat. But then decide that the category “a kindhearted person” is a construct meant to promote unhappiness, and that no person is uniformly kind from dawn until dusk. Kindness erupts in specific, tiny moments, and then it vanishes.

  31.

  Buy a stuffed animal. I don’t care how old you are. Keep the stuffed animal in a private place. Name the creature. Jonathan Edwards. Dorothy Day. When you need advice, ask the toy for advice. Whisper a question in its ear. Your question must be asked with absolute sincerity, a degree of guilelessness that can be quantified. After you’ve asked the question, put the animal’s mouth to your ear, and listen to the answer. The fetish will speak directly and simply. Listen carefully to its advice, and obey it to the letter of the law. After the fake-furred oracle has spoken, say thank you to it. “Thank you, Dorothy Day,” you may say to your stuffed octopus, “for your excellent advice.”

  32.

  Get rid of guilt. Find a place in the out-of-doors to bury your remorse. Take a shovel, if necessary, and dig a small hole for your guilt, even if the hole is in the middle of a public park. Ceremonially deposit your burden in that hole, and then throw dirt on top of it.

  33.

  Notice your own tendency to shift quickly from divine source of vivacity to foul-smelling dirt clod. Wonder if that speed of transit from vivacity to dirt clod is itself a normal human tendency, or whether it is a peculiar and changeable feature of your own temperament.

  34.

  Watch a spider gradually approach a fly, caught in a web. Watch the fly squirm. Watch the spider’s remorseless approach. Watch the spider devour its victim. And then reconsider an act—or an omitted act—for which you feel guilt. Ask yourself: am I as maleficent as the spider? Is the spider immoral? Or is the spider fulfilling its destiny as spider? To fulfill your destiny as human being, what fly must you consume? What fly must you make squirm? Or can you renounce your likeness to spider, and decide never to consume, never to make the other squirm? This renunciation may not be possible. And so resign yourself to sometimes making the flies squirm. List your flies. Some of the flies may not be human beings. Some of the flies may be abstractions.

  35.

  Does a specific part of your body hurt? Devise questions to pose to that soreness, but don’t expect direct answers. Perhaps you need a heating pad, not a new set of metaphors.

  36.

  Do something until you are very tired. Keep doing it, just a little past the point of fatigue. Something repetitious. Keep washing the juice glasses. Notice the sensation of fatigue in your fingers and wrists. Think of that fatigue as a tunnel toward something else. You don’t yet have a name for that something else, but that nameless other place is where your best (post-fatigue) energies are directed, and where you will achieve the only fruition possible—perhaps a meager fruition, but nonetheless a reward. Define the fruition. Can a fruition that stems from fatigue be glorious and pleasure-giving? That’s another subject: the secret dividends of hypnagogic states.

  37.

  Arrest yourself in the limbo between wakefulness and sleep. Just as you are on the verge of falling asleep, pull yourself from the abyss, and linger there. Observe your physical sensations as you hover on the edge of sleep, not quite falling in. Do you see specific colors or geometric shapes? Do visual patterns emerge? Filmy textures, like the skin surrounding chicken livers or beef hearts? Do phrases suddenly appear in your flickering consciousness? Avanti Dio. Tidal wreckage. Variorum sandwich. Earl Grey bottom. Do these messages seem allegorical? What, for example, does “tidal wreckage” symbolize? Are there specific images—in the hypnagogic bath of sensation—attached to the phrase “tidal wreckage”? Linger as long as possible in this limbo zone between sleep and wakefulness.

  38.

  If a sound from your environment (car horns, lawnmower, dog’s bark, street repair) bothers you, prevents you from sleeping, or leads to a train of negative thoughts, decide to analyze the sound instead of simply objecting to it and considering it your enemy. Notice whether the sound increases or decreases, gains intensity or loses it. See if the sound is actually composed of several different sounds. Most sounds are composites of various pitches and timbres. Break the sound back down into its constituent parts, and consider that maybe the individual parts are not bothersome; only the confluence causes distress. Ask yourself what the sound reminds you of. When did you first hear a sound of that kind? Did you always ha
te street repair? Did you always hate the sound of dogs barking? Imagine the dog’s bark from the dog’s point of view, or from a vet’s. Imagine that someone else might hear the dog’s bark as a sign of love, a cry for help, a consoling Morse-code pattern, a hip-hip-hurray. Allow yourself to feel grief-struck that you are now in the process of extricating yourself from your own point of view. The dog’s bark is forcing you to become an alien to your own body. And so you have a right to hate the dog and wish it dead. But: you do not have the right to kill the dog, or to cause the dog any suffering. You must endure the dog’s bark, which is God’s special message to your dirty little self: you, too, are nothing but a dog, nothing but a slavering creature liable to urinate on fire hydrants and to defecate in the sandboxes of neighborhood children.

  39.

  If you require silence for peace of mind, take every possible step to produce a quiet environment. Buy earplugs or a noise-canceling device. Don’t shame yourself for wanting silence; don’t question your lifelong habit of demonizing random noises. Last night I heard a man or woman shrieking and the sound of cars slamming into each other. I looked out the window and saw a man or woman lying flat in the middle of the street, with stopped cars splayed around the body. I realized that someone had been hit, and that a sound I’d considered merely irritating was for someone else the source of direct physical trauma. And so my own wish for sleep and silence became a momentary devil—a pampered desire I could demonize. I could shame myself for wanting quiet.