Ren Powell's Blog, page 11

All the Things I Don’t Remember

Every time I moved, cardboard boxes and milk crates, I shed memories on the porous sidewalks. Metal roller skates and skinned knees.

My name is…

In third grade mid-year, all the other kids knew their times tables. The teacher put on a record and they sang along. I knew the inch worm song. Danny Kaye. A fog of icky-sweet that some of us know well. An infant, precognitive version of the deep ambivalence. Pleasure and shame.

Danny Kaye still reminds me of something. Sticky furniture, metal tables. A dog who bled behind the ears when he got excited.

Not everything comes together. Not everything finds a center.

I still count on my fingers in a dark closet off a crowed room.

As an adult it’s difficult to sit on the other side of a closed door and listen to the muffled laughter. Adults are conspicuous.

I remember ringlets, yarn ribbons, and seersucker dresses. I don’t remember shoes. There is a school photo somewhere, in which I am missing a tooth. There is nothing charming about it. I might be sneering. Or about to cry.

I have just the memory of this photo. If you saw it, your story would be as good as mine.

I don’t remember sneering. Not until my high school math teacher called me a slut under her breath. And I thought: All the things you do not know, woman.

When my step-father died, my aunt called me in the middle of the night to tell me. She slurred her words slightly, for whatever reason. And she took it upon herself to tell me the details of the accident, for whatever reason. It’d been 30 – 32 years?

“Yeah, no, fine. Thanks for calling.”

She wanted to send me photographs. “Please don’t.”

She asked me three times, “Are you sure you don’t want me to send them to you?” It was the only question she asked me. I had no questions for her.

But now, I wonder if she ever made sense of things. If all her photographs and the redacted stories told and negotiated around dinner tables once every couple of years found a true arc. Of some sort.

“Yeah, no, fine.”

Some hours of Monday slipped from my mind. Again. I am finding that, since I can’t pick up and move, I need to document things so I don’t dwell with the same story twice unnecessarily. Digging ruts in the most uninteresting of places just so we all have our stories straight.

Tightly Wound

I got nothing this morning – except runner’s knee again, which is why the neatly planned morning is falling apart.

Frustration. My body. My dog – who for some reason has turned the clock back suddenly and is waking me at 3 am. And, yeah, I am up for about 15 minutes to deal with the alarm, let him out – in, set the alarm again, but then use that as an excuse to sleep an extra hour.

And crawl out of bed to dawdle with coffee and the news.

I know better. I know opening Facebook brings a world of negativity and is the worst possible way to begin the day – with things that are completely irrelevant to my life, that none-the-less set my teeth on edge even before I’ve showered. If I were watching an ant frantically waving her antennae, banging her head against an expanse of porcelain wall, I would think: You stupid creature. Turn around.

Yesterday in a meeting, I made a statement that hushed the room. Someone finally began a new conversation. I think my statement was a non-sequitur. Lately I have been misreading, mishearing and misinterpreting normal missives. Lately it feels like I have been poorly skimming the world and moving too quickly mentally to be present: to take it in for what it is.

There is a little refrain in my head: I don’t have time for this.

Now, sitting here, I am wondering why I don’t have time. What am I in a hurry to get to? Don’t get me wrong, there have also been annoying things that I don’t/won’t make time for, but this is different. I am not even sure where I am going in such a hurry. Is there a pot at the end of the rainbow, or it is just a deadline, a cut-off, an expectation that I have to meet – or else?

That little ant banging her head, determined to get … through. But there is really nothing there. Nothing to get to.

I need a good run.

I had an aunt – have an aunt, I guess – who used to rewind motors. It is supposed to be a special skill, a relatively well-paid job. These days, it’s also important for the environment. She didn’t know that then.

I need a rewind. Unwind. Run like the wind.

I have been thinking now that I have never seen an ant indoors here. Stupid ants.

Or not.

Leaning into the Wallpaper

This morning I listened to the Life Kit podcast while walking the dog. It was about dealing with dread. And one solution they offered was Death Meditation.

I don’t know. I think I am on board with scheduling time to worry, but I am not convinced that meditating on my own death will help me learn not to sweat the small stuff, as they say.

What if my anxiety builds with the concern that I don’t have time to line up and sort the little things? What if I don’t have time to tie up the loose ends to this self-image I am trying to form – form and show the world?

Really these aren’t rhetorical questions. B. told me that in the sure knowledge of having only months to live, she still sweats the small stuff. Which I tell myself is as much as she ever did: from my point of view, it being a matter of injecting humor into every experience of frustration.

But then, we never really know what is going on inside someone else’s head.

Heart.

There are clubs in India, I think, maybe Japan (one of those countries with a culture that we attribute superior wisdom to), where people stand around and laugh for no good reason. Laughing for no good reason – for no reason at all – requires effort. It requires more effort than I am willing to put into it.

Should I be ashamed of that?

Isn’t it just easier to lean into the wallpaper? To press myself into a deep groove of irony that only passes for humor from a distance?

One of my colleagues has a drama project called “See Me”, which of course centers on how each student sees themselves – as mirrored in the archetypes and character tropes of a classical artwork (my academic reductionist view of the drama exercise). Despite the title, I have always thought the project is about “Me Seeing Me”, really – what I want to see in/of/about me. What I want to project.

And – oh, my god – the effort required to create that story.

I am short-tempered this week, for no good reason. But it takes surprisingly little effort.

Yeah. I’m just rolling with it. I am not sweating anything.

Living with Wounds

Freezing rain. Nothing new on a dark and gusty morning. Feeling myself settle into the familiar. Even the familiar pains are comforting.

Maybe there is a center that holds, patiently, to be discovered again after the turmoil and apparent displacement.

I am in the process of cleaning out the library and the “atelier”, which has never lived up to its potential for so many reasons. I have no access to the studio that was shiny, new and something of a promise. Sorting through it all like an archaeologist, I keep unearthing fragments of whole lives. And for a moment I let myself imagine parallel universes where the pieces came together. This way. That way.

Means and desire. Anupama talked to me about an artist’s requisites of means and desire. But if I am honest with myself it is far too simple a thing for me to use the absence of one or the other as the excuse for silence. I will wait for things to fall into place, wait for the world to align as though it is some kind of destiny.

I have done that again and again, forgetting the burning thing until it smolders. Ash.

The once-famous Zimbabwean writer told me, and everyone else he would mock, that often the overabundance of means will kill the desire. He didn’t use the words means and desire. In fact, I forget the word he used: comfort and relevance? His opinion was that if you are not suffering, you have nothing to say worth listening to.

I still think that is a warped and self-serving point of view.

These days I want to – need to – take it all in at once.

B. calls and we laugh together. Then I send her a voice message to tell her that I’m crying. I need her to know. I need her to see the wholeness of us from my perspective.

I wonder if it is absolutely necessary to make everything visible. Knowing matters, doesn’t it? Just knowing?

Because you can always return to the center, and pick everything up again, artifact by artifact, and turn them over in your hands. Whole – and not – at once. Whole again and again, in changing constellations.

Calendars, Conductors, and 31 Dosas

So many rabbit holes I want to explore today. I am procrastinating. The laundry needs sorting and washing, the atelier needs de-cluttering, and my bookshelves are chaos.

Thursday was the first day of spring in the Hindu calendar, and I missed it. Saraswati is honored on that day, with lavender, saffron and turmeric. I wouldn’t have “celebrated”, but I would like to have known. There is something life-affirming in rituals, regardless of belief. There is something I envy.

A moment of envy can be an awesome thing. It is an admission – a recognition of desire. It’s humbling. It situates you clearly outside of the center of your own subjective concepts of meaning.

I just learned about the goddess Saraswati last month while talking to the theater director and artist Anupama Hoskere. (I am working on an article for Drama magazine, and will link later.) She explained the connection of education through the arts to the universal. She talked about means and desire, and about Dharma.

I am still letting all my thoughts bump up against each other. I don’t really want to put them down as sentences yet. Poetry, maybe. Poetry at the moment is an expanse of dark, open water.

Anupama’s husband is something of a philosopher and I heard him tell a story to children about how water is essential for life. How it is the necessary conductor and filter for all things.

I loved India in a way I didn’t think I would. The aesthetic appeal is obvious. I joke sometimes that if I had a former life it was there. But really, I am quite certain my emotional connection is rooted in the early 70s’ flowing fabrics and paisleys. Incense and flowers and vibrations. The barefoot summers, the criss-cross legged dinners at low tables. Love beads and elephants. Candles and flowers.

Cultural appropriation is a complex subject.

These are my earliest memories. My earliest impressions – even Jesus wore long robes and walked barefoot on palm leaves. And I am not going to lie: at the festival we ate our meals off of palm leaves and I felt a deep-sweet tug coming from flikker-dim rooms. It felt okay to “come home”. These dark, umami memories are mine. And (as Anupama brought up in our talk) duality doesn’t really exist. Certainly not in these memories. They just are. It was much later that any of these things were picked apart and named.

There is a reason we eat yogurt with chilies, not one after the other.

It is what it is. We are more than our parts.

I know it is absurd to say that I felt at home. But then, I am accustomed to feeling at home where I don’t exactly belong.

Years ago, in Egypt the locals badgered us to take photos with them, then demanded money. We were naive about the tourist industry there. In Cubbon Park, two teenage girls asked to take a selfie with me. Look! An old, white woman wandering the park. I hesitated, wondering what I represented to them. I was wondering if it was all the things I wanted them to be free of? The plastic, shiny West? I felt uniquely ugly. And my turkey-neck had nothing to do with it.

And yes, I have read Orientalism by Edward Said.

I have truly given up now of believing I will ever find the “correct” way to view the world. I have let go of the desire to chase that moving target to please anyone. I question myself, and I know my intentions.

As travel notes: I spent only ten days in Bangalore, but I’ve seen more people sleeping rough in London. I have seen as many shantytowns along a single canal in Berlin. And in the city where I live, I have seen the well-heeled (and likely myself), snub the people who sweep the floors in public spaces.

That first day, I felt my body tense when I walked down the street. Yes, I am afraid of cows with horns, but I didn’t lie to myself – it was run-of-the-mill xenophobia. It was knowing you can’t blend in no matter how hard you try. But it seriously didn’t take much of a personal confrontation to let go of it all. Right? Let go of it. Let go of it…

like dough sticking between your fingers.

One of the puppet shows was done by children. They told a story (31 Dosas) that included a recipe for dosa batter. It was repeated by the characters several times, so everyone could learn it.

All of the ingredients need to ferment in a bowl. Together. (Emphasis my own)

Not me, me.

I sent this to myself on telegram yesterday – a note I wanted to return to in the morning writing time.

I have forgotten the exact context. But I think it had something to do with meta-perspective and watching oneself and not recognizing oneself. And I figure this must have to do with behavior. We can’t watch our thoughts in memories. Or at least I can’t. I do step away: did I really say that? did I really do that? And I judge. Or – yeah – rationalize to try to quell the shame.

But lately, when I see the “not me, me” something is different. It is as though, finally, the calm waters of the morning meditation – the “ha” have flooded everything. I put on my happy music playlist and walk with Leonard. No mantras. No affirmations. This not me is a kind of butterfly me.

I have been talking to E. lately about paths of desire. How, it is almost amusing how determined landscapers are to plan where people will walk, fully knowing that there will inevitably appear brown, naked ruts criss-crossing the lawns, according to people’s own desire to seek out the easiest, or most interesting path.

And what is wrong with easy? I believe it is the rigid, external map forced on the landscape that is ugly. I am not saying easy is a necessity for beauty – but maybe intrinsic desire is?

I’m not sure. This really isn’t intended as a linear argument for anything. You know, I want to buy myself a kaleidoscope. Not a cardboard one, but something crafted from wood, or brass.

Something happened to me. The past few months, I have slowly moved into an easy space. Following paths of desire. I am not longer struggling to achieve anything.

This fall B. called while I was on the Gran Canaries. We were talking about what she would do “from here” with the time she had left. She said she didn’t want to spend time vying for attention. To be honest, I am not certain she used the word vying. But it is what I remember: contending, competing. This is not to say she didn’t want to be seen and heard – for who she is.

This year I am not going to plant a garden. I am not going to join my friends who bathe in the sea in the winter. But after class today, I will run.

I love running. I am recognizing my desires.

If I squeeze myself, force myself, bully myself into something I don’t desire, I might just get the attention I desire. (Who doesn’t want to be seen?)

But it wouldn’t be attention to the real me, me. I wouldn’t be seen.

And what is the point of that?

Another cultural meme? I was never the popular girl in class. Never wanted to be. Why on Earth has that been something pushing me subconsciously for a while?

I’m finding my own paths of desire. It is kind of like sinking into a warm bath and sighing.

I love warm baths.

They are kind of like writing the perfect couplet, and feeling the magic before you put it out there for the world to judge it.

It is focusing on a single soap bubble, appreciating it before it inevitably, necessarily bursts.

I have to stop now because I want to go take a bath, but I have to go to work. Oh well. It is something to look forward to after my run this afternoon.

Hope your day finds you on a path of desire. I’ll post a picture of mine on Instagram – for me to recognize.

Shifting Responsibility

I’ve been thinking more about care. And about how I bristle when people talk about “winning” at life. And about joy.

I don’t know that I believe in an intentional deity, one that puts living creatures on the earth for a “purpose”. In part because I am so intrigued by what defines a “living creature” in the first place. There was a sign in Cubbon Park telling people not to pluck the flowers because it causes them pain.

There is a large part of me that doesn’t doubt that, but I also have no idea what to do with that knowledge.

B. mentioned Jains yesterday when we were talking on the phone. It was the middle of the night her time and her mind was hopping quickly from thought to thought. I know very little about Jain Dharma, but have this vague idea that, while they cover their own mouth and nose so as not to unintentionally kill insects, they hire young boys from a lower cast to sweep and clear the ground in front of them. Inadvertently stirring up instincts, I would assume, which those young boys must be breathing in. If one doesn’t believe in reincarnation, it hardly seems like a sustainable model for compassionate living.

At the moment my students are working with a devised production loosely based on the Good Person of Szechuan. The central question we are asking is whether it is possible to be a “good” person while avoiding your own martyrdom.

It seems to me that we tear ourselves up, create elaborate mythologies, construct systems of “justice” that allow us to be comfortable with our actions. What is a “right livelihood”? Where do the domino’s stop falling when we live so closely tied to one another – our interdependent economies of all kinds.

Sometimes I feel that I have a transactional attitude about my self-worth. My goodness. And I began in debt. Maybe when I first felt and gave in to sibling rivalry with a tiny infraction of generosity? Maybe before that.

If I were to create a world full of creatures, I wouldn’t set it up for cock-fights. Not for competitions to gain my favor. There would be no winning or losing, only beauty.

I told E. last night that I was tired of whipping myself like a bridled mule, that God made horses to be joyful and free. I doubt wild horses continually scold themselves.

He reminded me that I am not a mule. Nor am I a wild horse.

If you want to stop rumination, partner up with a pragmatist.

_ as a sidebar, how odd it seems to me that so many words about what I assume to be perhaps exclusive human activities are described metaphorically with the behaviors of other animals: ruminate, brood… there is even “brooding rumination”.

I think I need a new framework for my daily morning mediation. Something much more wild.

Sleep’s Unconditional Care

I was in bed reading before eight. Out by eight thirty. The room was cold, but I wore wool – shoulders to toes. I have no idea if I dreamt, but I woke clear this morning and took a longer walk than usual. Soft rain is perfect running weather really, but I am easing back into full throttle and letting the desire build. It was enough to let Leonard tug and sniff and trot past the duck pond.

I am trying to re-frame my habits. I seriously avoid all the buzz words like “self-care”, but I am tired of even subconsciously pushing myself for “self-improvement”.

I want to be treated with care. No one has to be good enough to take in what the forest has to give; if we are lucky enough to have access, we only need to allow it. No one needs to show a report card to accept what good comes.

I believe that a large, subconscious part of me considers day to day living an obligation. Maybe this psychological bed holds roots from my formative years sitting on a pew two times a week: I will be judged. Everything is recorded on a score card and I need to work hard to pass. Win? No: just make sure to pass. You’ll be lucky to pass.

When Mary Oliver asked what we will do with our one wild and precious life, I doubt she meant it as a veiled threat, though sometimes it feels like one.

It seems that every thought I have that is open (here is a gift), closes down again (prove you are worthy of it). Life as a transaction between us and God – or the universe.

A couple of times a month I get insomnia. Sometimes I am stuck in rumination: counting dramas, counting cows considering dramas in a Far Side meta-perspective of my progress in this (ahem) “journey”. So when sleep comes soft and easy, as it has this week, I surrender.

I am letting dreamless sleep be my teacher. The silent instructor, wiping the slate clear every night.

No need for a score card or documentation.

A Sudden Tug

I’m on my third cup of coffee, which is probably not a great idea. I dreamt last night about B’s dying for the first time. Then I had an awkward dream about eating in a restaurant – and being in the way.

On her podcast B. talked about creating meaning in things, rather than searching for them, as though they are items waiting to be discovered. It isn’t the first time I have heard her talk about this. It is central to her approach to life, I think. And something I’ve learned from am learning from.

I know it isn’t an “original” idea. Even before Sartre and Camus, the philosophers have been talking about our role in creating meaning. I think that the hard part is taking these ideas and actually applying them to everyday life. I mean taking the time it takes to consciously form meaning, rather than passively and unconsciously accepting something prepackaged like a prophecy, omen, horoscope, or pop-culture trope.

Nothing comes from nothing, but the act of creation is about recombining, re-purposing, and juxtaposing odds and ends – fragments – into something that exists in this moment, this context, and in this way is true.

In Bangalore, riding in an Uber with 5 other people, I watched a congregation of egrets fly perpendicular to the path of the motorway. It meant something to me. Even though I pointed it out to everyone else, it meant something only to me – within the context of my life.

The first time I noticed a great egret was in Fort Worth, Texas. I was running along a canal and felt the world was new again. She was whiter than white, and elegant in her crooked lines. I had just had a long talk with L., a woman old enough to have been my mother, and who would continue to be a role model in my life.

I had a good cry. I felt salty. Scrubbed. Whiter than white – feet in the mud.

Later I began to notice all grey herons and common cranes. I learned about the silence of storks. And I began writing a private mythology.

I began reading feathers, not tea leaves. But I consider them Rorschachs, not missives from the gods.

There is a single white duck that hangs out in the nearby pond, alongside a hundred or so mallards and brown hens. She stands out in the 5 am darkness. Leonard tugs on the leash as we pass by. I feel the anger hardening the muscles between my ribs. Constricting my breathing.

This is my fault. I’m not consistent enough with him when it comes to leash training. I’m not good enough at this. Not good enough.

I think there are still lessons to learn about choosing what kind of meaning I give an incident, a lonely white duck amidst the the brown team, a painful jerk of the arm, on an otherwise quite morning.

Living the Past

The slow alarm’s light begins to fade up at 4 am. I like waking this way. The phone rings, but it isn’t B. or the kids, so I don’t take it. I may be awake, but my waking is intentional, and this time sacred. I’m not sure sacred is the right word, but it is dedicated, and protected. Protective.

Leonard has already laid his head on the edge of the bed, and is breathing into my face.

There is still snow on the ground. It mimics – just a little – the morning’s fade up. It reflects the streetlights, the car lights, the tiny beam of light from my headlamp. My body is stiff from yesterday’s housework. I’m wearing my winter shoes with the ice grips, but I still walk carefully. I brace for sudden tugs on the leash. Leonard loves the snow like he loves food. Digging his nose under the crust. It must trigger some instinct to track foxes, and hare.

I think he must not remember the accident – the barbed wire – that ripped his chest open. I wonder if he’s forgotten so much that he could hunt again. I wonder where the trauma sits in his brain, or his body. At what point would he twist inside and stop up. Nope: not gonna.

Is a memory nothing more than a habit of the body? This color, this flavor, this “emotion” perceived but unclassified intellectually. Just a chain reaction of chemicals, hormones, neurons, muscles twitching and tensing.

How the smell of old carpet in an air-conditioned room turns my stomach. There is a memory there. No matter what color the carpet is, it is green. It is synthetic, with a miniature landscape of valleys and hills. And that is all. That is everything.

There is a radio play where the aliens report back that there is no intelligent life: “They are meat all the way through.”

Mornings are soft. And there is a white noise in my head as my ears warm-up after the walk. Coffee, keyboard.

I try to return the call, but there’s no answer. I have the feeling it is difficult news.

So I just breathe.