Ren Powell's Blog, page 10

And I Know Things Now

I can’t remember what I have written before. So I am certain I’m repeating myself. So many things slip through and past me – always have, but the last two years things have been worse. Better and worse. Now there is the tip of a show tune nudging me just behind my ear. “Well, … ” I can hear her voice, the tune, but not the words. Into the Woods.

“Excited and scared.” (I had to look it up.)

Tomorrow I will sit in the doctor’s office and ask to come off the medications. And the thing is, I don’t have to ask. It is my decision entirely. But I want approval. Sometimes I think I should get a male doctor so that I won’t look for approval.

I am oversharing. And really, I am fine with that.

The truth is, I want to get excited about things again. I am not entirely convinced that being numb has given me perspective. It sure as hell hasn’t given me direction.

Nearly three winters have passed and I haven’t noticed. I haven’t heard the lake singing its haunting ice song in the dark mornings. I haven’t seen the first crocuses pushing up in the sheltered places. I haven’t felt present in the world. Which is ironic because I began on medication because I wasn’t seeing the world as it was. Every story I could tell myself was sharply animated. Crocuses like little knives, as metaphors for what it takes to get through the days. Spring as the cruel Dionysus. April as the cruelest month and all that.

But I disagree with Elliot. February is the cruelest month. The trees bud and signal spring, then sleep again. False promises.

This morning the glass table on the deck is covered with ice. We’ll turn the clocks forward again in a few weeks, and the mornings will be dark again. Yeah, I can’t blame nature for that one.

But for all this complaining, I feel indifferent: the flip-side of ambivalent. Because I just can’t summon the passion to give a f**c*. What I wouldn’t give to feel genuinely torn about something. I want to rouse myself from this long nap – shake off the grogginess and this sense of a pause in things.

Because I know damn well the world isn’t really pausing. “Stop the world! I want to get off.” I think I have felt that way, but not now. Now I want back on the merry-go-round but I can’t seem to run fast enough to grab onto a pole.

I miss running in circles, actually. Maybe it is natural to run in circles. A spinning top never wanders far from its point of origin. Crossing the same river again and again, is is never the same river really. Wearing a deep groove, rather than roaming. Like a tree. Ruminating, like a slow cow.

I know that I am repeating myself. Around and around. Even now in this period of what feels like full stop. I have a fear of falling into dementia. Which I imagine is a kind of groundhog day. Waking up and moving through a day, only to have the same realizations and relive the same horrors every evening: “No, he’s been dead for years now, Dear.” It is kind of ironic that the studies show lithium might prevent dementia, when it seems to mimic its brain fog.

I don’t know, are muffled passions like being under a weighted blanket or a suffocating pillow? When I lie for too long, my legs ache and itch, and the restlessness spreads through me like a poison.

When I am tipping into “moodiness”, I can’t even decide what I want for dinner. I think I will choose ambivalence over indifference. There is something to be said for wanting.

Starting Now

Not first thing in the morning. Not the beginning of the week. Not the start of a month. Year. Decade. Watershed of any sort.

Explore, discover, question, create.

Ce n’est pas an inspirational meme.

The doctor says this is my problem. I’m stifled. Yesterday I looked up the dates on my prescriptions to tally up the months – no, the years now. How the past three years have slipped weirdly out of place in my mind, like vinyl over Formica. It all feels unnatural.

I wrote a book. I got excited. I got disappointed. I got slammed and then let loose. And I didn’t pick myself up.

The death that should have meant rebirth. The coming death that shouldn’t be meaningless, shouldn’t be meaningful either because trying to make sense of it, to “learn lessons”, or to put-things-in-perspective feels exploitative and wrong.

I traveled 7 thousand, 7 hundred and 27 kilometers from home and returning, dropped sprouting ideas like seeds across Europe from 42 thousand feet. Nothing remains and it’s unlikely anything took hold falling from that distance. I lack faith. I know that.

But that doesn’t mean that I can’t start looking for it now. Faith in perseverance maybe? Everything is a platitude when you need it to be something specific, right?

The snowbells are in bloom now, wedged under the dormant hedge.

Just Keep Swimming

There are so many thoughts now that I can’t write here. Not now. Maybe it’s time to start another handwritten practice. I’m not sure what is happening to be honest. I have lost ambition.

I’m not happy about it. But on the other hand, it feels like sleep.

I know I can’t be bothered to stress about typos, or to shape these little posts into proper essays to post elsewhere, to reach a “demographic”. Right now it isn’t about the product at all. It’s the processing.

I’m learning to listen. And to trust that that – in my silence – things are settling into a deeper understanding: more wholly, and more secure with roots taking hold through the time it takes to connect to memory – to experience. I am taking time. Probably because I have to. None of this is by choice. I would much rather slide over everything as though it’s all part of a pop-quiz “close reading” to pin down the meaning of each interaction. But every non-sequitur in a conversation doesn’t need to be a Freudian puzzle or a Cassandrian prophecy. I don’t have to participate in the construction of a distance between moment and mind.

I no longer believe that if I can put words to it, I can handle it better. I can pack it into a carpet bag and carry it with me. Heavily pulling on one shoulder, then the other. I can give someone I love a “truth” wrapped in cellophane and ribbons, but it will always be symbolic: a kind of allusion that takes us both away from ourselves.

I mean, it’s not like we swim in the river then take it home with us, dragging it along like an enormous plastic bag with a single goldfish we want to keep in a bowl in the entrance hall – with blue marbles.

Glass pebbles sorted from the long stretch of beach. I was well into my 30s when we vacationed in Rhodes and I learned that broken glass is rendered harmless by the movement of the tides. Days in, days out.

Nothing truly goes away. But if everything is continually changing, and we are meeting a new world with every blink of our eyes, it’s all past tense and there is no rush to write the story, no singular truth to decipher.

Right now it is about daring to go into the water. About letting the fish go ahead and bite.

Open for a New Obsession

A half an hour has passed and I’ve not written a word. In the other room, a CD is playing: “Dharma Collection”. It stores in a red velvet case. I have had it for years and have never quite decided whether I like it.

So it is one of those mornings.

I am hyper aware of the fact that I still don’t know what I want to do with my life. There is still no planned trajectory, no curated bits to signal an identity. Hell, I don’t even know what to write on my social media profiles.

I am noticing this morning what I miss now after what seems like two years of unraveling. Building and unraveling, really. Two years? No. Three years.

Two years on medication.

Things are not this bad. It is just another dark morning in what feels like a holding pattern.

Bubble Bath as Meditation

I was scrolling on Facebook this morning – something I don’t do very often anymore. Someone posted, “Be careful around unhappy people.” And I thought – yeah, that is why I am not scrolling on Facebook often anymore. Reading comment threads feels too often like watching toddlers scratch and bite over a toy.

Why do I keep going there? The ratio to pleasant interactions/observations to feeding frenzies is not favorable for happiness. Not in my feed at any rate.

Months ago, I disagreed with someone about something, and what sticks in my head (and in the corner of my rib cage) is his, “Why are you trying to pick a fight?” I had to reread what I wrote a dozen times, not seeing how I had done that. Disagreement can’t be tolerated in some places – and it takes time to get a feel for the room, to see who has the “chip on their shoulder”, or what is now the viper you have to be careful not to stumble onto: Don’t tread on me. What a greeting.

I’m not good at taking time to get a feel for the room. From the thousands of potential connections on a “friend”‘s list, and the select 20-or-so that the algorithms presents to, I am beginning to thing that they are chosen by “engagement” statistics. I no longer think of engagement with a positive connotation.

Am I remembering correctly? That we begged Facebook for the angry emoticon?

Since the beginning of Facebook people talked about a need for a sarcasm font. I think that is superfluous. We need an earnestness font.

What point is there in anger and self-righteousness? “Been there, done that,” far too often. And just lately, with my ridiculously sketchy memory, I am not certain of anything – even my own experience – and… I’m finding that it doesn’t really matter most of the time.

My feed looks like one of those centers where people pay to go into a room and throw computers against the wall, or take a sledgehammer to something once-beautiful. I think I read that people don’t actually feel better after this kind of thing. On the contrary. It becomes an almost addictive kind of behavior.

I don’t know. The positive posts that show up in my feed seem saccharine just by virtue of their stark juxtaposition to everything else. Or: poke it carefully with a long stick because it may not be what it appears to be. When the laughing emoji pops up, I assume it is mocking – no doubt because I have used it that way, too.

I do know that I am tired of it all. Literally short-of-breath most of the time. I walk around like Pig-Pen with an aura of crap. I bring it into the room. I see the world through it.

Lately I have been ashamed of myself for all the time I have wasted binge-watching old episodes of ER. Then I log onto the “social network” and read caustic arguments about Madonna’s face. I think watching hour after hour of ER in isolation is better for me then ten minutes of Facebook, if I am going to pick. ER makes me hate myself for being lazy. Facebook makes me hate myself for being a member of the judgmental mob. I find myself, like everyone else, (unconsciously) believing I have a unique and elevated perspective. I use energy to start reasoning it all out, formulating my brilliant insight – more of an exercise of ego than of social service. And either way, completely deluded. My “insight” is a product of the mob mentality. There is no way around that.

They say fish can’t see the ocean they swim in. I wonder if they can see the shit they fill it with?

I liked Twitter. I had a great list. But I left when Musk forced his way into my feed. I miss the contacts I had there. I keep telling myself that choosing not to go to an as*hole’s party, instead of going and saying I will stay in the quiet corner with only my friends is a good choice, and a valid metaphor.

I hated high school. And I never went to a single party in high school. I know that makes me a freak in most people’s eyes. It means their are life skills I never learned. I am not denying that.

Why have I been struggling with social media for over a decade? Didn’t I recognize it?

I heard a podcast yesterday about weak ties and contentment. And I thought of the woman on the cleaning staff at work whom I exchange sincere smiles with every single day. We’ve never spoken except to say good morning – though once I told her her new haircut looked great.

To everyone else, I think I bitch the majority of the time and tell myself it is because we are “close” enough for me to do that.

How screwed up is that?

I’m not blaming Facebook for my state of discontent. It is only one means of self-destruction – as I have constructed it.

There is a lot of concern about AI now. But I think it’s been throwing chum in the water for a long time already. But then: I never went to a party in high school, so maybe there’s no more blood in the water than has been there all along?

I wouldn’t know.

I don’t know much at all. Except now I have an hour before I need to leave for work and am thinking a bubble bath sounds really good.

I’d really like to be squeaky-clean right now.

Virtuous. (←Irony font)

I’m Not Afraid

Another slow morning. Curled up in the library chair (my “fancy” wingtip, even-if-it’s-just-Ikea chair) with coffee, the news, and the white noise of the space heater. It would be perfect, if I weren’t lathering myself with guilt because I am still not back to the old routines.

I try shifting my perspective from “whipping myself back into shape” to something kinder, but I am stuck in this shallow spot – measuring my worth with calipers. Feeling broken because of my runner’s knee, baker cyst, shoulder impingement, tension headaches. I feel the muscle tension inside my mouth. Like after a long cry that doesn’t quite empty you, there is this bit of metal still screwed into the roof of you mouth, pulling at your teeth, burning your throat.

I know these things I am dealing with are little things. No-things. There is proof of this everywhere I look. People I love are having to pushing through much harder walls and appear to do so without self-pity. But I circle back to guilt instead of moving through. It is my weird, little me-made vortex of familiar shame.

A familiar is a demon that nestles in the skirts of a witch. In the shape of a cat, a toad, or a chimera.

A familiar wasp, maybe.

Sometimes these lower ranking demons are conferred directly by the devil. Sometimes inherited.

There is this attic. Cluttered and dusty. And there is a wasps’ nest clinging to a rafter. It looks abandoned, but you never know and you’re afraid to sweep away the small corpses scattered on the floor.

Why would anyone deliberately go on a bear hunt?

I have so many conflicting shoulds. And a long list of over-due tasks. I have de-cluttered the house that feels good. I can see the floor in the library now. The desktops are clear in the room we once called the atelier. (Ah, best-laid plans.) But there is still clutter in my head that is like a wall full of post-it notes, each without context of any sort, few I remember writing; like a stack of books I need to read, but can’t remember why; like repressed memories of one-night stands, abandoned acute (and costly) obsessions, and all of the what-was-I-thinkings. There is a fog of grief over every thought these days.

Can’t go around it
Can’t go over it
Can’t go under it
We have to go through it

Waulking Song

All the things “our” culture has lost. I am not sure what I mean by “our”, really. I’ve got no stories handed down from lap to lap with tiny spoons, in black and white because that is what the past looked like.

I remember getting my hair washed in the kitchen sink. Maybe, just maybe, I remember sitting in the steel sink. I say maybe because I know our minds can assemble sensory information to create new things – that are just as experiential as substantiated memories.

But there are things I can’t fathom into being. My children’s measurement of the past isn’t in black and white. They see one, two generations past in still images – in moving images – in color that looks like I remember it. And I wonder what then gives these moments away as being from “the past” for them. What do they think has been lost, if anything?

In the 1941 films, digitized, AI “enhanced”, and uploaded to YouTube, the women who look vaguely like my grandmother and the picture I have seen of her mother sit around a table and slam the wool against the wood,. They sing a waulking song.

The women have an infantile quality, slightly bloated, smooth – even in old age, wrinkles folding like thick, healthy creases in a baby’s fat thigh. AI has quaint down: the video ends with the credit for the enhancement to Glamour Daze.

Everything seems resilient to the touch. Slightly wet. Like the landscape’s soft moss. Like the wool that keeps one warm none-the-less.

Every time (almost) I go on vacation, I can imagine moving there – living this imagination-enhanced life, where everything is resilient and days and evenings embrace me like a hug. Cosy is the closest English word I can think of. But it isn’t quite right. And because the word I reach for isn’t my mother-tongue, it probably isn’t quite right either. It’s is shaded and textured with colors I can’t see.

Maybe living in the moment means catching all the sensations consciously before they can be processed by memory, by words, by desires. And maybe it means letting them go again – unsorted (good from bad, black from white) without dialing up the contrast.

My grandmother told me that her fondest memories were of doing chores at the children’s home.

My grandmother, though? She couldn’t carry a note to save her life. She only sang in church. Sometimes I think she married my grandfather so his booming, slightly embarrassing, voice would drown her out among the congregation.

But that is neither here nor there. That is just a thought I had that stuck.

What You Attend To

It is a full moon and a mild morning. And a walk around the block that I would have done better taking alone. Beginning a new week with old arguments. The kind that rub on the same spot and threaten to fray everything.

Old resentments rush like metal shavings to a magnet.

It is good to remember how the other day I read something about everyone wanting out of their current life – and I thought: nah.

It is a reminder that things will settle again. Probably in the same old painful places, but settled, and the kind of thing you adjust for without too much effort.

Eventually.

I’ve rearranged the furniture in this little library. Put a vase of dried flowers on the little side table. They dried in the vase. 6 months – maybe more.

I can’t decide if they make me sad. Or if they just are. There is a story there that I won’t write.

The Fight, the Flow, and the Fetish

I set an alarm. But this half-hearted effort to write daily doesn’t always make sense to me. There are too many days where I wake with nothing on my mind and then, while typing, thoughts form on their own – and I am not sure they are mine.

How healthy is that thought when you are a person who continually questions the reality of their perception?

But even if my worst fear is true – that we create our own realities as we go according to whim and to gastrointestinal status – does it even matter that we have this meta perspective? We are caught in a kind of existential paradox because there is no passive state that is an acceptance of reality – because even that passivity is an active state of creation – because there is no non-fictional self.

What if I am randomly choosing words that force changes that ultimately will not be a “good thing”? What if I am writing myself into a corner – scattering red herrings along the way to a dead end. This isn’t how the story is supposed to be going at this point. A rambling rough draft where the character just talks and talks, and the whole thing is overwritten and simultaneously void of craftsmanship.

Maybe it is time to return to haibun. To ghazals. Maybe American sentences.

Once I knew what I wanted to do, but I blink: now this, and now this.

So many times I have (silently) scoffed at people who talk about needing to write. Maybe because I want another need – one that makes less sense of living.

Can We Look Away?

It is one of those mornings when I put my fingers on the keys and stare a few moment as my hands. The pattern of blood vessels on the back of each. Ropey and bluish, like a coarse crochet work. There are still things these hands will learn to do, or learn to do better. They are the rough beauty of solid machinery. They are their own “back in the day” and still going.

They are the touchstone for earned wisdom. Sometimes offering the touch that frightens young and old alike. Where bones become stone, and foreshadow everything overwrought in our poems.

As here.

I wonder what it would be like to live without mirrors – without looking at oneself, or pieces of oneself, as a constructed and staged other.

I would like to live off the grid – in a world where social connections were forged over the time it takes to build a fire and boil water for tea. To cut the bread and soften the butter. Hell, I don’t know how to do any of that. But I do think I was meant for a slower life. One that didn’t come with the expectation of networking, of planning and anticipating the potential usefulness of people, to willfully stitch together the meaningful moments in a kind of half-formed contract of mutual obligation.

I know this is a fairy tale nostalgia.

Maybe I would have grown strong enough to live with gratitude had I outgrown my obsession with usefulness. Maybe I would have valued life differently. Maybe I can still learn to do that.

I doubt it, actually. Don’t we all want to be seen, even when we fear it? My mind keeps returning to Paulus Berensohn.

You see, there is a paradox in his idea of art as behavior rather than art as achievement. I don’t believe anyone who says that the former isn’t valuated by the later.

It would require unconscious art. And it seems to me that art is always intentional – either on the part of the creator and the viewer, or on the part of the viewer only.

So how does this work, really? Is a work of art a beautiful thing while it’s hidden on a shelf in the pantry? Or only after the estate is sold and the work “discovered” and the name written down with the romantic sparkle of “posthumous fame” and the virtue of humility intact.

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it…

Paulus Berensohn was an adherent of deep ecology. There: see? I’ve typed his name again. Guru in life, a name rattling around the internet servers in death.

I wonder. What would happen if we could harvest the mushrooms that grow on the graves of our gurus. Grind them into a fine power with the long bones that fed them. Boil the water for tea.