the male emotional cycle

I’m coming out of a two-week period where I feel like most of my worst traits – well, not my worst, necessarily, but certainly those traits that I dislike the most in myself – have been on clear display. These include minor, forgivable flaws (displaying an unnecessarily surly disposition toward friends and co-workers, or being too quick to impose my opinion on a given exchange or social situation) as well as cardinal sins (seething with rage, bitterness, inexplicable contempt for people who probably don’t deserve it, being unable to communicate in an adult manner, etc.) I’ve also been unfocused, erratic, and just not particularly mature the past several days.

W.H. Auden’s In Praise of Limestone has long been one of my favorites – a poem that I inadvertently echo all the time, it seems. Setting the human landscape as rocky and immutable - god, I hope it's not - it casts the spiritual or sublime as fluid, watery, soluble. In the process, it hits the core of a particular kind of narcissism, and it may even forgive itself for that narcissism at its close:

I, too, am reproached, for what
And how much you know. Not to lose time, not to get caught,
Not to be left behind, not, please! to resemble
The beasts who repeat themselves, or a thing like water
Or stone whose conduct can be predicted, these
Are our common prayer, whose greatest comfort is music
Which can be made anywhere, is invisible,
And does not smell. Insofar as we have to look forward
To death as a fact, no doubt we are right: But if
Sins can be forgiven, if bodies rise from the dead,
These modifications of matter into
Innocent athletes and gesticulating fountains,
Made solely for pleasure, make a further point:
The blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from,
Having nothing to hide. Dear, I know nothing of
Either, but when I try to imagine a faultless love
Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur
Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape.

When I get in these funks – a version of the male hormonal/emotional cycle? – I also often think back to a New Yorker Talk of the Town piece from a few years back that I found totally arresting. In careful prose, Roger Angell absolves Sosa for his corked bat sin thusly:

Baseball is so implacably difficult to play well, day after day, that it almost requires a little cheating now and then to make it bearable, and it is in this regard—and this one only—that it may be said to imitate life itself...The only sadness here is the taint, the little doubt, that will always be attached to Sosa’s name now, despite his sunniness and those career five hundred and six home runs. We can forgive him, even if we question his tale of a batting-practice bat going unrecognized in the heat of the season (and an extended power outage at the plate), and late tonight perhaps forgive ourselves today’s not-so-white lie, last week’s unpardonable impatience with a boring old friend, and all the pot we used to smoke after the kids had gone to bed.

I am still reaching for the best way to move on after these stretches, to tell myself, “That’s ok, you’ll do better the next time you come up to bat,” despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Of course, it only takes a couple of nice hits to erase the funk, or to switch sports analogies for a minute, if you don’t like winning an ugly soccer match, imagine how much worse it is to be the team that loses an ugly match. I’m not winning pretty, but at least it’s not clear that I’m losing either. Not necessarily a good tagline, but one that I’m happy to live with for now.