The Problem of anxiety, as posed and described by John Ashbery in his thus-titled poem is not that anxiety does not stop you from living rather, it colors your life in ways that make living harder, bleaker, duller, hungrier even. There is an accurate sense of timelessness to anxiety that Ashbery captures within the first two lines:
“Fifty years have passed / since I started living in those dark towns”
Time is passing, fifty years worth of time, but there is both a slowness implied, that an entire lifetime even, while also a distorted briefness. Or, perhaps put better, there is a shallowness to the amount of time, that perhaps those years were not as filled or as impactful to the speaker as they might have been to another. The specificity of “those dark towns” is curious to me. Being that Ashbery belonged to the New York School, I first read that those dark towns might have been the separate boroughs of New York, or perhaps that they may have been small towns Ashbery saw or lived in while in Europe? While the borough theory is appealing because it speaks back to the defining location of Ashbery’s school, I think a third option of interpretation may be more likely; these “dark towns” the speaker has been living in for fifty years could be memories. Our past not only gives us memories as mementos, it colors and vails our perception of the present and expectations for the future. If the speaker has spent fifty years in dark memories, possessed by anxiety, then those “harmless” mementos can drop films over the eyes of someone trying to live in the present. To further this idea of obscurity and blindness, the speaker notes that,
“Well, nothing has changed. I still can’t figure out / how to get from the post office to the swings in the park.”
Even subclinical anxiety can create a heightened adrenaline response to ordinary life, which in turn can make the world feel sped up, or in this case, slowed down and unchanged. The speaker “still can’t figure out” how to move from a place of communication (the Post Office) to a place of relaxation and possibly childlike experience (the park), and in fifty years that has not changed. Just these two images make me wonder if the anxiety stems from the present not being able to communicate with the past, and that it is this lack of communication that is causing the prolonging of time, the darkness, and the disorientation.
Even as a brief line, “Apple trees blossom in the cold, not from conviction”,
the poem seems to wearily acknowledge that life goes on, that it must, in accordance with surrounding influences and pressures, not from any internal interest or intent. Instead, the blooming or existing is happening by rote because anxiety has placed so much energy on survival and reliving memories that there is none left for the flowering of new growth in life.
I quite like how the speaker asks if you would include “descriptions of pain, and sex,” and the perceptions of others if youwere to write about the problems of anxiety. I like this because I think it does a really good job of offering a distinction between what the commonly perceived problems of anxiety are and the often oddly banal reality of anxiety. Because yes, anxiety can certainly cause problems with pain in the form of psychosomatic and stress-induced ailments, and it can affect libido and sex, and it can poison and distort your beliefs, convincing you that people are behaving “shiftily” and must be watched. But, the speaker reminds us that “that’s / all in some book it seems.” Those problems with anxiety are known and documented. Instead, Ashbery wants the reader to think on the most innocuous of things, on “chicken sandwiches” and if the reader has never experienced this problem of anxiety, then hurray for them! Anxiety is not simply having problems with the obvious things, the things that everyone might expect when someone says they are anxious; anxiety is about struggling and toiling with the simplest of choices and actions, whether to order a chicken sandwich or trying to walk across town without having a panic attack. The problem with anxiety, as Ashbery describes it, is that basic existence is difficult and that the memories of your past do not remain tamely in the past, that they will follow you into the present to dim and cloud your life until you only blossom because it is time to, not because you are thriving.
Lovely reading of this poem! I especially like the part where you note that “the speaker “still can’t figure out” how to move from a place of communication (the Post Office) to a place of relaxation and possibly childlike experience (the park), and in fifty years that has not changed.” Pressing on what these locations mean–formal communication of a mean-end variety (post office) and a kind of play–is fascinating. In some ways, the problem of anxiety is what keeps the poem from experiencing a place of pure freedom, of “first permissions,” as Duncan would say in his poem inspired by watching children dance in a circle (albeit to the the rather dark change of ring round the roses, which leads to all those ashes and falling).
But the sense of monotony, the lack of conviction, the vigilance (you didn’t mention that glass eye) is heavy here. When the poem addresses the you, could the “you” also be, in some sense, anxiety? You never know where pronouns point in these kinds of poems, and they create a fascinating web of contradictory tones and meanings–navigating that mess without arrive anywhere in particular is precisely the point!
In general, I like how you made this poem sort of legible as a description of the experience of anxiety. Well done!
Alice, you are saying so much with just this sentence, and this is where I want to sit for a moment…
“the memories of your past do not remain tamely in the past, that they will follow you into the present to dim and cloud your life until you only blossom because it is time to, not because you are thriving.”
I was under the impression that you wanted to teach English, not that you were going to become a psychologist or a philosopher. The rest of your reading was enlightened as well, but that last sentence was a freaking home run!
The way that you see the action, or inaction, is so clear. I especially liked your understanding of the blooming apple tree – that it is happening because it must, not because it is actually interested in the process.
I totally understood “dark towns” as memories. For me, it feels like a Jim Croce song, and the dark towns denote empty streets where the speaker has walked alone many times throughout his life. This is what anxiety does to some of us, isn’t it? It brings us back to those moments that we wish we could relive or release, shows them to us again and again, as a refrain but never as part of redemption.
Everything about your reading feels right to me, even though it also feels heavy and sad and full of longing, much like the poem. Thank you for sharing your take on this. It has given me much to consider.