Ren Powell's Blog, page 12

Avoiding Inspiration

It’s like I’m trying to prove something to myself. Every “fresh start” stumbles on a flu bug, or something similar. I am not going to call it self-sabotage. I’m not going to label it at all. Because this is life, and I am beginning to think that the proof of devotion isn’t necessarily the steady path, but the continuous fresh perspective.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the word “inspirational”. I see it used a lot lately – mainly in connection with (not necessarily in the context of) B.’s situation. I am wondering if direct language is actually a way to avoid emotional experience. Maybe I will always be a poet because I am dissatisfied with language.

I try to think without words, because words carry implicit judgement. To see things as what they are, requires me to push the words away when they come to mind. “Making sense” of something is the end of experience, the end of listening. Being aware of what is, doesn’t have to mean I have to label it as what it is from my perspective.

And yes, I am completely cognizant of the paradox – or/and the hypocrisy – of contemplating all this: what I am learning here.

There is an inherent paradox (hypocrisy) in the attempt to be self-less and empathetic. How is empathy not still making something about your own experience?

I have never been one to give B advice. But a sounding-board returns an idea, and I’ve been that. Now I am struggling to just listen; I’m learning that there is a wisdom in silence, and a discipline in not trying to “make sense” of things.

Is it wrong of me not to be “inspired”? Because I am not. What would her conscious, unequivocal process of dying inspire me to do?

And, no: we are not all dying as she is now. Some Buddhist monks put in enormous amounts of effort and energy in contemplating their body’s inevitable decomposition. To really live with their own death.

“We’re all dying.” Shrug.

You might as well put on ice skates and glide right over the frozen lake in March without looking down.

It is a deflection of the truth of the situation one is being confronted with. It is a deflection of someone else’s experience. It is a deliberate avoidance of just listening.

Using the word inspired should require the articulation of the specific action that one is being called to perform, “I am inspired to…”

I have admiration. Honestly, no more than I had before, because B has not surprised me at all in her… words carry judgments, and “grace” is a loaded term: equilibrium?

No wait. She has surprised me. She got a dog.

She is not a “dog person”.

Maybe, just maybe, I am inspired to accept that I do not know the truth about anything at all.

So, not Artaud’s spurt of blood

Came home yesterday to find that Leonard had eaten 11 eggs from a carton I left on the counter. He’s never done anything like that before. I think that the sulfur-like emissions coming from the corner of the room last night affected my dreams.

I was visiting B., and she and I went to the hot springs. Not the hot springs there where she lives, but those in the famous photos of the Japanese macaques lounging in the steaming pools, their fur edged with ice.

We got out, dried off, and she left to me go where she needed to go. I stumbled around a bit, feeling abandoned in a foreign country. There was a checkpoint like the one at the hotel in Bangalore. They took the temperature at my wrist, then on my forehead, then my labia. The guard asked me if I was maybe on my period, and I explained that I was through menopause, so: no.

Then menstrual blood began gushing from my vagina. A red fountain that would not stop. Passers-by glanced at me, but it was obviously no big deal. It was life. Or death. Or something in-between.

In Bangalore, it seemed that nothing was in stasis: things were either under construction or deconstructing themselves. Huge buildings going up one brick at a time. I watched a man hanging from a harness placing one brick after the other. It looked like slow, meticulous work. I can’t fathom how many bricks it would take to complete the high-rise apartment building. I’ve never considered him before: the bricklayer. How long will it take? What goes through his mind, brick by brick, day by week by month. Does he look down at the people, the cows, the tuk-tuks? Can he hear it all from up there? Does he feel a sense of ownership when the work is done and the millionaires move in?

There were buildings still standing, but their edifices had been sheered away somehow, like full sized doll-houses. The loose wires and fibers holding chunks of concrete reminded me of damaged spiderwebs, or heirloom lace too fragile to use, too laden with memories to let go of.

Running to the lake, I sometimes pass some relatively new apartment buildings. Along the path there are remnants of old piles that probably propped up a previous railway track. They outline flower beds; they are trimmed like trees, restored as “ruins”. I have never considered before the inauthenticity of their decay. The affectation of urbanity. A prettied-up representation of the “past”.

Most of all: the illusion of a current state of stasis, the illusion of a period of decay that is the “past” – we are the present continuous.

We don’t contemplate a foreign future.

I can’t imagine the future because I am trying so hard to make sense of – to take control of – to understand the now.

Yesterday a student died as the result of an illness. She wasn’t of one my students, but close with some of mine. M. approached me at the start of class. She was choked up, couldn’t talk, so she just showed me the text message. Then the same message pinged on another student’s phone.

The inevitable future comes at us from over our shoulder, covers our eyes and whispers in our ears, and we choose to be surprised.

Separation Anxiety

Ten days with no cuddling is too much for Leonard. In that sense, it is a good thing I couldn’t stay on another week in Bangalore. He’s pouting so that I begin to wonder if he’s lost his hearing in this time. He’s ripped down the blinds in the kitchen (again), chewed the frame of the window frame in living room door, and eaten part of an instruction manual for the feet-up yoga chair. I don’t even know where he found that. When I leave for work later I will need to puppy-proof the house for the almost-seven-year-old.

He’s pouting on the couch now instead of lying in here with me.

I reread the last post from 2022 and am a bit of ashamed of the self-pity. I think I like to think of my “self” as having a center that I occasionally step away from – this resulting in bouts of narcissism, or what I would like think of as regression. But I don’t that that is a true model.

The self is sprawling, with distant and tight perspectives. There is no core of the self, no metaphysical centrum from which we grow in various directions. I think our spiritual and emotional growth has more in common with the growth of bacteria than the kinds of growth we observe in trees.

There is no true and steady center.

Maybe this is the beginning of letting go of the ego?

The Fear of Silence

I’ve been listening to a Freakonomics MD podcast about the effects of Facebook (and social media in general) on our mental health. Some of the studies are relatively old, but interesting.

It’s also interesting that they talk about envy and depression, but not shame.

I don’t think that social comparison is my problem, really. It is the level of snark and meanness. How when someone disagrees with something I write, instead of opening a discussion, they slap with a bit of sarcasm and leave the room – so to speak.

I’ve witnessed people tear into one another in what used to be nested comments, but these days sprawl weirdly under posts as though Meta wants to drag people by their ears into a virtual brawl.

As an adult I’ve never surrounded myself with people who interact this way – casual bitchy isn’t my thing in real life either.

I would have never been friends with Dorothy Parker. There: I’ve admitted it. Consider me uncultivated. Consider me too intimidated to dare.

But the truth is, I’ve never aspired to be her. Not even when ruminating over old, unresolved conflicts while showering.

This isn’t to say that I am innocent when it comes to trying to step on people to feel better about myself. I know I’ve been cruel on occasion. Or tried to be. (The truth is I am not that clever). And I know I can’t blame it on a kind of contagion from social media. It’s just human nature, I think. Honestly, I think it is something I am growing out of, and – yes – maybe growing out of as I grow out of certain kinds of ambition.

For good and for bad.

For the longest time, I’ve thought that the pain I’ve felt when using social media was a weakness on my part: too sensitive, can’t handle wit, take things too personally, too seriously etc. Hell, maybe I am just sour because I wasn’t as good at it as everyone else.

Nah… I don’t know. Yes, and –

Wit doesn’t have to be caustic.

I suppose mocking is a useful skill – I mean, it gets the job done. Though most often I am puzzled over why the job was necessary. What’d they do to you?

There was life before social media. Why is so difficult to imagine getting along without it? In “real life”, I do leave the room. For some reason, it seems more obvious to me that in 5 minutes, 5 days, 5 years, whatever it is won’t mean a thing.

But somehow the hurt on social media is more tangible than the hurt in the real world. Maybe especially when it comes from strangers because I have no greater context to put their comments in. How dangerous is this person, really?

Why is verbal bullying considered a sign of intelligence? We know it is no different from slugging it out physically. If it were, we’d never have repeated sticks and stones as a charm. Words fucking hurt.

There’s the dramatic irony for whoever is watching this century’s little drama. Or maybe just mine, who knows?

And my dear friend, Richard. We didn’t meet on social media. In fact, as much as I use it to keep in touch with the people I love, there’s no one I draw my little circle around whom I actually first connected with there.

Maybe I am just one of those people who would rather cross the street and avoid Speakers Corner and the soapboxes there; who would rather have quiet conversations with people who won’t skewer you for climbing up and down from a high horse over the course of being human and wearing blinders of all kinds – in the moment.

It feels like it’s all a game of “gotcha”.

E. and I seem to have the same fight over and over. And I keep asking him – when he quotes something I said back to me – to put it in the context of the decade he’s known me: my personal history, my core values, which he knows. Picking apart a single sentence isn’t going to make communication richer: “But it’s what you really said…”

Context.

We had an era of constructionism and of deconstructivism. It seems my whole world these days is decontextualized. Fragmented, and filled with what feels like a necessary noise.

I forget too often where I am standing – that people I would cross the street to avoid may be walking by in their big shoes, with their big needs, that have nothing to do with me.

The trick is to find out what does have to do with me.

Cat in the Sack

I think I make this time of year hard for myself. It needn’t be. Not really.

I think it is a couple of years ago now, I heard a podcaster repeating her own advice to her grown children: stay away from anyone who doesn’t have a close family because there is something wrong with them.

I thought my whole body would explode. I am not often privy to such openly-stated attitudes. If they are spoken, it’s behind my back. Occasionally people do forget – and I can’t blame them since I often seem so normal – and they talk about “those people” in front of me. It’s the way my grandparents would talk about Mexican migrant workers: a soft-serve ice cream swirl of bigotry and pity.

It must feel kind of good going down.

A few weeks ago, my own husband had a sudden lapse of context and, commenting on a tv show’s plot, asked hypothetically, “What would it be like to have to cut ties with your family?”

It used to be that people like me – people in my situation were openly sterilized, shunned, and pitied. That’s the thing with pity. It requires nothing of us to pity someone. Like a horribly deformed kitten, we pity it, we drown it, and that’s that.

There’s a whole lotta whispering. Euphemisms and attitudes are taught first to children before they learn the facts. To protect them until they are old enough to hear the stories. The contexts. To protect the attitudes until the children are so thoroughly inoculated with the proper reaction that the facts won’t complicate the social status quo.

Then again, we are a fearful animal. Maybe it is natural.

Sometimes I wonder if other primates, primates that push their ill to the periphery of the tribe, also believe in curses. Invisible infections. Sicknesses, detectable only by context or association?

There is a woman I have read about in the news who can detect Parkinson’s by smell. There’s that little fact to screw up a theory and make someone doubt everything that keeps them afloat.

If I can smell evil, can evil smell an old wound? A posture of protection is an easy mark.

This is the spin I find myself in every Christmas. The existential, “Why, Santa? Why?”

I’ve read the definitions of pity and compassion, but I think they leave out the fact that pity is self-serving. We pity the lepers and send them to martyrs to care for them.

So this is my seasonal dose of self-pity. If I were to ask for one thing from people it wouldn’t be compassion, it would be for all of us to stay aware of the fact that “those people” we’re talking about with our sweet swirl of euphemism, are quietly walking among us. Silently swallowing all of it. The tropes on the television, the cliches in the charity ads.

Awareness of that fact: “Those people” are not a world apart. And anything more is none of our business. They are not our vehicle for seasonal redemption, not the narrative for our Christmas catharsis.

And they don’t need to “prove it” to you to escape suspicion.

Sometimes a silent night is just perfect.

Post Long Covid Torpor

I’m thinking I can probably be happier by not actively participating on social media platforms. And I think I’ve known this for a while.

What was life like before listservs and the blogosphere, much less before Facebook? I emigrated just as those things took hold. And I think that – had they not – my life since then would have been very different.

People ask me now and then how I am thriving out here – this village on the fringes of the city. Across from the mental hospital, down the road from the halfway houses for addicts, walking distance from the train.

I leave the house and walk to the train station. In the afternoon, I walk home from the station. I could live anywhere.

Except I don’t. I miss the city. Any city. The pressure of anonymous, noisy humanity. Like a weighted blanket.

It’s the individual voices, the steady, thin drip of snark, and the randomly-focused vitriol that hurts. Vitriol is an interesting word. I wonder why it isn’t used more often. It gestures, in a graphic way, to petrol and by extension to all things caustic.

In the fall, there are leaves along the edges of the trail that have withered into fragile lace-like structures. The midrib and the netted veins remain as a kind of mid-stage artifact of life.

I missed the fall this year. It seems I’m waking up in the middle of death. And it’s not quiet, as we tend to describe it. It’s the percussive slaps of melting snow, flung by the tires of passing cars. Browning from the edges, like a rotting artifact of hope.

I need to get outside again. To the lake. It was the either to the or when we decided to live out here, where I fall into the cracks of community.

Pulling Inwards

” [W]e’re saying that if you only leave the home three days a week or less, we’re proposing that figure to be the threshold for social withdrawal. In other words, the threshold to meet the definition of hikikomori.” BBC, Science Focus

Who gets to determine where the normal spectrum ends and becomes a condition that needs to be altered – and for whose sake?

I remember reading about Hikikomori some years ago. About the “sisters” who help “coax” men out of their homes. It was presented as a primarily male phenomenon. At the time, I thought it was an odd perspective to force on what seems to me to be a common variation of human behavior. Masked or made visible according to gender norms in that society.

And there’s a weirdly geisha-like aura of these “rental sisters” (yes, that is what they are called) who are paid to “entice” men out of their isolation. I admit that I am bringing my own baggage to the situation, but the adjective “rental” before women kind of freaks me out. Don’t get me wrong, these aren’t sex workers, which in my mind would be a pretty straightforward bribe on the part of the concerned parents.

This is emotional manipulation.

The article says that it’s common that young men who were bullied as children to become hikikomori. And I think: it is probably common that young men who were bullied as children do not become hikikomori. And that: it is probably common that young women who were hurt as children stay “in the home”. Does anyone notice?

We know you were hurt as a child, but don’t make us deal with the person you are now. Suck it up. Mask. Here is a practice, rental girlfriend.

Well-intentioned condescension. It can feel like a kind of bullying.

Is.

But I won’t say more about that. That would just continue to be a wandering rant with no settled convictions. And no one likes ambivalence. There’s nothing to argue with.

One of my first jobs was to work as a car hop. I was the only “hopper” who didn’t smoke. So when the other (older) women took their smoking breaks I just stood around with them – not working either. I got fired.

They didn’t.

For centuries religious people (as far as I know every religion offers an option to) seclude themselves. Historically some (albeit few) individuals secluded themselves in tiny spaces, accumulating and ultimately dying in their own filth, and they were/are praised for it. Most often the hermits take time for a period of devotion. They come down from the secular or religious mountain.

Maybe the behavior isn’t the problem at all. Maybe the problem is the social framework that won’t allow for it.

Maybe it isn’t the isolation/solitude that is making these people suffer. Maybe the continuous signals of pity are turning a period of introspection and growth into a case for pathology.

That’s a lot of maybes.

Out of that, I believe we often create what we fear.

Of course, I don’t know exactly what these families are going through. And I really am able to feel compassion and empathy for these parents. I’ve been there. Looked at it from both sides now, as the song says. I know the fears.

But I also know that I’ve often needed to pull away from social contacts for periods of time in order to heal from the damage they do. If a relative paid someone to posture as someone who cares about me, to manipulate an emotional response, to treat me as though I were abnormal, and imply the verb ser instead of estar when describing my state of solitude, they may well create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

There really is something wrong with me. And I start looking for the why – which I think has to be the path of the first ouroboros.

I don’t mean to criticize families that are doing their best for the people they love. I am questioning a society that contradicts itself in terms of recognizing and allowing for human diversity. I am questioning the motivation for slapping a diagnosis on behavior and forcing the kind of change on an individual that will make the rest of us more comfortable.

I don’t make people comfortable very often. I think that’s why I turn inwards for long stretches of time. If making other people comfortable is the measure of my existence, maybe converting to a religion that offers me long stretches of solitude is my only option if I want to stay “sane”.

Solitude can be the privilege of the artist, of course. But there’s the committee that will decide whether you (or them, or I) make what society deems art. Or whether we are just deluded. It’s the weirdo lottery.

There’s no safe bet for the outliers.

Just juggling the social pressures as the holiday shifts them. Thinking a week in my library is as good as a cave.

No worries. I am going to shower now.

Waiting for Approval

I’ll know by Monday whether I can leave for India after New Year. I’m waiting for funding. For permission to take a very short leave of absence.

I haven’t been excited about it. I have sent emails. Checked to see if my vaccinations are up to date. But I haven’t hoped really. I’m still waiting for approval. Waiting for someone to say: this is a good idea; this you should do; this you can do. I am trying to sort all this out in my head – how my suppression of enthusiasm is related to everything else in my life.

I blame all those mailers I got in college saying I was “pre-approved” for credit; a kind of freedom/privilege and a god-awful pressure to meet expectations as a consumer. A glowing letter of recommendation opens a door but demands a tap dance.

What if I don’t learn anything in India? What if my head just keeps spinning and I interrogate every bit of inspiration to root out potential cultural appropriation as an exercise in avoidance?

I just gave a brief lecture to the students last week about procrastination and the theory of immunity to change. How we would rather take an incomplete than a failing grade. Even when failing is the only option for a second chance to pass.

That is the daily dose of naval gazing.

The Process Journal

I have six more scenes to write for the students. We did a read-through of the first two acts yesterday and I’ve never had a class so skilled at improvisational translation. I’ve never had a class approach one of my scripts with such trust. The characters they created are my puppets at this stage. I am very curious about how this project will turn out. We talk about working outside/in or inside/out as actors. Which (in my opinion) isn’t a real thing anyway. Here the students and I seem to be playing a game of tennis to make the characters come to life. They give, I give. I am not sure why this year, this project, seems so different. More collaborative in spirit, though not in fact.

After New Year, they’ll begin to work to embody the characters. Some scenes will be Brecht-inspired (as is the entire play). So embodied in the way that a sock puppet is embodied by a hand. In other scenes, I will ask them for an abstraction of the character’s movements where the essence of the character is disembodied. And in some scenes, I will ask for more. I will ask them to invest in “physical action” until it they begin playing the way a professional tennis player handles herself on the court. Flowing seamlessly between the mind and the body. Maybe one could say in this case the minds and the body.

That’s a lot put on their shoulders.

The thing is: how you do give someone pre-approval without creating daunting expectations?

Processing

(These unsolicited writing prompts are annoying as all get-out!)

I am trying to curse less often. I try, but then I forget why I would even want to put in the effort of self-censorship. It seems to go against the grain of everything I am wanting to do these days: to just let go.

The daily journaling isn’t what it used to be. I think it served its purpose in a way. But I’ve had enough of the self-flagellation that inevitably follows. I tried briefly to keep a daily journal and a process journal and work on projects. There aren’t enough hours in the day. Not when the days are filled with a “day job”. Which is more than a “day job”, really.

It hurts to think that your life has meaning in arenas you never appreciated yourself. Never planned, or dreamt that there was where you’d make a difference. Where there’s no big love. No compensatory appreciation for your “just do you” doings. Nothing to wrap the pieces in and to hold what is left of you together. It just is. Day-to-day and mattering only in the moment.

Maybe this is what is necessary. To move past caring for the tidy, cared-for object of a self. Ego, not as desire, but as display.

Emma Thompson keeps her Oscars in the bathroom. So there is that, yes. But then again, everyone has to pee. So is her “taking the piss” a performative bit? Yep. I am as human as you, but I have Oscars in my loo. See?

It matters. It should matter.

Maybe to be truly humbled is to give up hope.

The paradox of trying not to try to get what you want. Of believing nature will bring it to you like the inevitable rush of the current in the spring. Of believing what is effort-full is inauthentic.

We are creatures of effort and desire. There is a process in the making.

The Tyranny of the Gift

When did WordPress begin to offer a writing prompt on the blank post page? Have I been gone so long?

It feels intrusive. It’s an offering that probably feels like a service to the giver, but feels like a tiny condescension from this end. Now wild animals are creeping around the edges of my thought, disturbing everything.

Or maybe that is just where my head is today after dealing with the “city pastors” yesterday, who apparently have a mandate (not quite sure from whom) to wander the school building and talk to students who are sitting alone. My students were sitting alone in the library working on an assignment. One of the pastors started “chatting” with my student about his project on Oedipus Rex. I am kind of thinking that is not within his mandate for so many reasons.

The church and state haven’t been separated in this country for very long, but this seems like a weird reactionary move on the part of the school system.

I am inclined this morning to seek this guy out and have a proper discussion with him about the Dionysian festival, about parallels with later Christian tropes and iconology. I have always wondered how lambs usurped goats. How highly sexualized androgyny became asexual. So much really to muse about. I do have a lot of questions and am curious about a lot of things, but there is a time and a place.

My mandate is to teach theater history in that building.

I went to high school in Kentucky. I had a French teacher who began each class by reading from the Bible. In English. My French teacher had never been to France. Which I even then thought was very sad. I don’t know – I would like to think she’d at least been to Quebec. It just seems like such a lonely pursuit, learning a language so divorced from your own life. When I was a child, I loved the language of the St. James Bible. Spoken, mostly softly, sedately by a California preacher who used to be a drunk.

I had a very romantic idea of what a “drunk” was. But the words were magical, like a fairy tale incantation. They changed him. So much hope in the song.

There is a part of me that envies people who can hold on to a belief in universally good magic. And there is a bigger part of me that wants them out of the school building. That wants me to tell them about the way a song can strengthen the heart – harden the heart – until it shatters in a collision with the real world.

You don’t know what you’re stepping into when you start throwing your charms around. Assuming you can blindly separate the good from the destructive.