Ren Powell's Blog, page 13

Life as a Ghazel

The wind is moving through the house. It slams against the siding and creeps between the cracks. We’ve had a mild autumn. Only now does an edge of winter bite my ears and nose when I walk to the train. I pull tight the ties of the hood of my jacket to cinch it together, covering my neck. Like a turtle pulling into its shell. And yes, everything in me wants to slow down and hibernate through these dark months.

This morning I drag myself out of bed by the promise of coffee. I sit here, in front of the computer, while gusts of wind knock at the window like annoying companions reminding me to get going. To get going in this weather. In the darkness. But I want another cup of coffee. Another easy neck roll and deep breath. An attempt at a deep breath.

A morning moving from one still state to another. A very strange kind of yoga flow. Inhale. All the way. No. There’s an obstruction in my lungs. The nurse said we’ll check it out. The doctor said we’ll wait and see.

-“So you’ve ruled out lung cancer or something like that?”
-“I didn’t say that.”

To be honest, I don’t know a lot of people. I spend a good deal of time on the periphery, watching. I think I hold so deeply to a shared moment that I remove myself from it. Then move on. Like a series of pearls on a string. Discontinuous engagement with the world. I’ve rationalized that my brain has been shaped by the nomadic aspect of my childhood. Which continued into my adulthood. Now more figurative than literal. Land, keep an eye out for danger, savor what you can, and move on.

Let go.

This doesn’t mean that I’m emotionally distant. On the contrary. All these weak ties are emotional. Sometimes inexplicitly so. If all the narratives are lost, the emotion remains in the body, in a sudden twist, or a gesture, or a pose.

I heard a story once about a woman who left her family to become a nun. She was held up as a potential saint because of her compassion.

I know that reads like a non-sequitur.

What I was going to say is that I have reached an age where my peers all seem to be facing cancer. Illnesses like Parkinson’s. Bones that break all too easily. Unexpectedly. Everything hurts. Everyone hurts. And we are still comparing ourselves to one another.

Some of us move through the days thinking: but that won’t happen to me. I’ll be one of the shining septuagenarians on Instagram snatching more than their own bodyweight. Some of us hold on to the moments.

Some of us. Maybe only me. Have given up on narratives and justifications.

Here is my beginner’s mind. I pause in stillness. Then inhale and rise along the gentle slope of a polished pearl. Then exhale into stillness. One rich movement at a time, like gusts of wind slamming the body.

I read once that the ghazal was a series of discrete couplets, connected like pearls on a string.

(That sentence just hangs there, doesn’t it? Like the pause before an exhalation.)

A Celebration of the Banal

The dog woke me at a quarter to five.

He’s supposed to do that. But it’s not like I always appreciate it.

I let him out into the yard and start the coffee machine. I pour a cup of dog food into the maze dish for him to root around in later. I fill the water dish. And I whistle for him to come in.

Fresh coffee. Flipping on the timer to write before breakfast. A chain of habits. How the days pass.

On the train yesterday, I chatted with a colleague. He asked me if I think about dying much.

He’s a year older than I am. Not that you’d believe that. I touch my turkey neck before I am conscious of reaching for it.

I tell him about B., and how death has been on my mind so very much. “No,” he says. “Your own mortality”. He talks about getting older. Thinning hair. Aches. Losses. Somehow he rather quickly circles back to someone else’s death, too. His mother is well at the moment, he says, but there is “the inevitable”: Death as it happens to someone else. Death in the abstract.

I think there’s a big (culturally constructed) difference between contemplating one’s own aging and contemplating one’s own death. Or perhaps not. Not culturally constructed, I mean. If death stops all thought, well, then, as my generation would say: we literally can’t “go there”. We can distract ourselves with fantasies, myths, fairytales, and horror films: cathartic escapism that makes us shudder, and for a moment allows us to feel like we’ve “dealt with it”.

My left eyelid fell the other day. It was my “good” eyelid. It happened overnight. I know how absurd that sounds, but I swear it. The skin had become textured, like course-grained leather. Heavy, I guess.

My pale skin is rougher and more and more like a relief: more like an armadillo’s rump. Surely there is something similarly textured that we consider beautiful?

I wonder if there are tools with which to make a rubbing of my face. Well, now, there is an art project for me! Before the gravestone rubbing, I can capture, if necessarily imperfectly, this liminal state. Between the beating heart and the silence is a struggle between the body’s hardening defense and the body’s thinning resources.

The lacrimal gland has slipped and now obliterates my eye crease entirely. “That’s new,” I think.

“New.”

If you stare at a word long enough it makes no sense. If you think about it long enough “old” becomes “new”. And “new” can take on an entirely new meaning: new as a shift, not a beginning.

I’ve felt these shifts before. Passing a fork in the road and knowing that was that. Poems I memorized as a child take on new significance. Maybe life is a series of ever-more-complex prisms. What seemed singularly beautiful has exploded with possibilities. Smaller, perhaps: like the beauty of a whole world under a microscope: this tiny, present pinch of life, thoroughly examined with an attitude of wonder!*

At 16, I wanted to be a famous actress. I wanted to have an apartment in New York, and to wear shoes too fancy for the subway. But at 40-something, I found myself sitting on the hood of a car at the lookout point over Bishkek with strangers. I ate dried fish, learning how to pop out their eyes with my thumbs.

Then I flew home to a tiny duplex in need of renovation, and a job that left me scrambling for dignity every day. I flew home to the two kids I never planned for; my love for them would stun me sometimes. Still does. Continual, unexpected little bursts of joy/fear/gratitude. These bursts, these overwhelming moments that strike – not always pleasant- have defined my emotional life. Home is a constant ambiguious reality, though every detail is fleeting.

What do they say? The only constant is the laundry?

I traveled a lot in my 40s. I took a lot of photos of other people’s laundry. I have hundreds of pictures of t-shirts and towels drying on clotheslines. I am always a bit puzzled that I find something so utterly banal to be so compelling.

Beautiful. It’s like the photos don’t capture a moment in time, but the flow of a lifetime. A kind of illustration.

I have just as many photos of dead birds on my hard drive. Both my kids have told me they think it’s creepy.

My memori morti.

When we first moved into that little duplex, I found a dying mockingbird on the sidewalk. I asked a man walking by if I should do something with it. Call the wildlife service or something. He looked at me like I was insane.

“They aren’t endangered or anything.”

Typing this makes me cry.

After that, it seems every time I ran on the beach I saw a dead seagull, swan, duck, or tern in varying states of decay.

I don’t know exactly what to do with all these images and thoughts. But I do know that my little alarm went off and writing time is over and It’s time to get on the yoga mat and move these old bones.

*Young people are using exclamation points again. Unironically. I think it’s something to consider.

Now That That’s Off My Chest

Synthetic fragments: unnatural elements (in my context of rumination: constructed events) juxtaposed without narrative considerations.

It’s Heiner Müller’s term for his post-modern drama. Reminiscent of Dada, I think. An unacknowledged return to Surrealist freedoms. And here I go again: back to our construction of reality. Realities. Our irresistible impulse to fill in the blanks. To justify whatever body-sense is triggered.

An irresistible impulse is actually a legal defense for a myriad of crimes. It’s not the same as an insanity plea, it’s the result of a narrative. Logical. Totally understandable.

I sit in the chair in my doctor’s office and work backward. This is how I feel: this is why. Before that: this. Sometimes I throw her off in time by conflating decades in a trail of thought: experiences lying on parallel, not linear, paths. Because that’s the truth, isn’t it? Not paths, really, just a pile of dried leaves.

Other times she’s not thrown. She’s not listening to the words. I know she tunes the sense of them out. She’s listening to tempo, to registers, to repetitions.

I might as well be dancing.

When the theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold moved away from realism, he put trampolines and slides on stage. He suspended narrow beams for actors to balance on.

Sometimes I wonder what I actually accomplish by talking in the shrink’s office. But gestalt therapy required too much physical trust and physical intrusion for my comfort. So I’ve gone back to sitting with my legs entwined, my hands folded in my lap, wondering if the doctor notices what my body is saying. If she’ll do more than ask: “Well, what do you want to do about this?”

Scientists today make headlines, explaining that sticking a pencil between your teeth to force a smile will provoke a genuine smile. They say it as though it’s a new thought. An invention of their own design.

Actors knew this first. Professional actors, amateurs, or those that embed themselves in our dinner parties, our living rooms, and our confessionals.

Part of me wants to say, yes – it is all invention. And everyone has to do it/discover it/experience it/utilize it on their own anyway, so who gets credit is a matter of history: a story that may or may not wander through a generation or two or more. This is a tool.

So is a circular saw. I know how to use one. In theory.

I have absolutely no idea what to do with it.

The Necessary Room for Solitude

The Necessary Solitude for Work

I am still dragging after losing my studio access for the next two years. This is the third time I’ve begun working up there, then been displaced. I know that creativity is supposed to blossom in a pinch; that restrictions are supposed to spark out-of-the-box solutions. But that’s not happening.

Sometimes I worry there’s no fight left in me. And that makes me feel guilty. Or, or and ashamed. In this house, I am being squeezed and chased from room to room, and I forget what the advantages are of living here. This isn’t what we planned.

I am physically cut off from the paints and the papers, the screens, and the sewing frames. I don’t know why this feels like punishment. Like an opportunity lost. I didn’t make my creative work real enough: I haven’t succeeded in justifying the space I take up. Took up.

So much for my summer plans. I am not depressed. It is nice to know anger can sit in my body without settling into depression. Though I can’t really say much about the relation of anger to self-pity. I suppose I’m seeing the latter surface now and then through the anger, like some odd sea creature in the swells.

I am sad. One can be sad and not depressed.

I will drive to the doctor’s office alone later this morning. A half an hour to sing full-throated with chesty notes. To sing until I cry, and feel very, very foolish.

Today When I Rattle the Bones

This past week I’ve been checking my watch and thinking: yes, but what time is it “really”? It’s not that I am still on Canary Island time. I don’t think I was ever there, settled into a rhythm of any sort. I’ve been just feverish enough to excuse the complete absence of personal discipline for a while now. The week slid by with the days wobbling: up at 5, up at 9, up at 4.

I was counseling a student last week about setting up fences and frameworks to protect themself. Fence-building is something that I have been sort of good at for a long time now. But these days I feel like my life is being dismantled. Not in a horses-escaping-the-corral kind of way, but rather like the dissolution of my cells’ walls. Every organelle is quivering and vulnerable.

When I was in junior high, I spent my free time with colored pencils and cream paper, drawing cells with their organelles and endoplasmic reticulum…

Researchers believe that lithium performs quantum tunneling through cell barriers, allowing it to depolarize the neuronal membrane. This is a not-so-random fact.

I can’t help but feel that there is a meta-perspective just beyond my scope, from which my whole life makes sense. And something tells me that I am not supposed to have thoughts like these. They might line a slippery slope to conspiracy theories and religious epiphanies.

Or they might form a poem.

Dorothea Lynde Dix wrote during what was likely a period of manic depression (mixed state): “I cannot write – I ought not.” I have always felt like I understood what she meant. These thoughts, diagramed and articulated, conjure the black dogs that will rip your life apart.

I am a scattering of facts- banal facts. Random.

Who has the power to choose, to bother, to make sense of it – to validate your life’s story? You risk annihilation by writing it. You risk petrification – from a single perspective, even your own. This, too, is still death.

We spent our time becoming fiction based on fact. I am not sure that I really want conscious control of that.

There was a film clip that I shared with a colleague, thinking it would benefit our movement students. Two days later something in the video, which I can’t fully conceive, had finally tunneled its way into the sensation of a denatured memory. Now I have to leave the room when it plays.

I am aware that is a lot of words. Over-written. And overly-written.

Last night a scene from an episode of an old television series slowly dug into my mind: innocuous, then inexplicably sinister. My body clenched and I flew out of time – not back in time.

Sensations ripped from narratives but returned to the body.

But if I try to place the whens and whys of the pain, or try to unravel the terror from the fascination – finding a dispassionate perspective to see what must have, likely had been… well, I will never know. Meanwhile, it is there like a tiny edge of yellow wallpaper waving to be tugged free. Whatever this it is.

My shrink has a couch in her office. I assume that someone lies on it now and then. Sitting in the chair, I tuck a knee up to my chest and try to appear casual.

Fear the Lawnmower

Demna is verified on Instagram. 360K followers and not a single post, or bio link. It’s the new Burlesque.

The real hook with Harry Potter is actually getting that letter and being admitted into the secret club. That is the ultimate tapped desire in the story. The rest is recycled myth – which always includes prophecies.

I’m eating dal makhani for breakfast. Surfing.
I’ve ruminated over yesterday’s mistakes.
I’ve read the news. I’ve listened to the news.

The war is still raging. The drones are still unexplained.
Now children are being poisoned by cough syrup in Indonesia, too.
There is a very funny photo of an indignant penguin posed to win an award.

Memories are extraordinarily faulty when it comes to details, and they (details and memories) will betray you in the cruelest ways.

Make what you want of that.

I am late for work.

There are days when I still feel that I can’t even begin to understand post-modernism. And now as we are leaving the station, I think I am beginning to get it.

The utter meaninglessness is visible from a meta-perspective: the juxtaposition of the gossip and legislation, of diversion and pertinent – the ostensible distinctions.

No. I still don’t get it. I am stuck with the Absurdists. Or I keep slipping back (t)here, at any rate. Vague intertextual reference intended. I have been rereading retellings of myths. Everything seems pertinent.

Arachne was the first to try to begin the #metoo movement. And she was only half-ass helped by a goddess saving her own ass, unwilling to take a side. Maybe there are no sides. You know: from a meta-perspective.

I’ve also been filling the voids with lawnmowers. Any object my mind can’t find the name for becomes a lawnmower. I mean, the vacuum cleaner misunderstanding seems logical enough. But the bathroom scale, the microwave, the refrigerator, the salt shaker… spoon.

I don’t think it’s Freudian or in any way rooted in trauma. It’s categorical: Domestic objects. I hardly have a relationship with lawnmowers. These days E. has an app on his phone that turns the robot on and off. My only job is to make certain the dog shit is collected before he turns it on. If something slips my attention, the clean-up takes hours…

Maybe it is Freudian after all.

Now I am very late and need to check the lawn before I head to work.

No Going Home Again

I let myself get sunburned. And I really can’t explain why.

We can be self-destructive in the strangest ways. Back at work on Monday morning, then, by evening, hit with the full force of whatever bug caught E. and me down in the Canaries. Something that bit hard around the edges of the brain. It’s not a great way to end a vacation. For a week now, something has been sitting on my chest. And last night I had a nightmare of sorts. I think you’ve reached a certain level of adulthood when the antagonist in your heart-pounding dreams are not monsters or serial killers, but students and colleagues.

I wake with that electric burn from cortisol.

I have been thinking that every time we step away from our routine lives, there is no returning – in the way that no one steps in the same river twice. We have to reconsider the current situation. No pun intended.

My dreams seem to be about powerlessness. About being inconsequential. Twice on this trip men stepped into me. Backing up to press me against a wall, or against a railing. Oblivious. Maybe. I still feel this little twinge of rage. If one can have a “little twinge” of rage. I was surprised by the welling of curses and fury in my chest. I think maybe that accounts for the weight I feel now.

And the added weight of self-recrimination: I said nothing. I didn’t expect that “being invisible” would take this particular form. I mean, I’m growing accustomed to my ideas being shoved aside for “fresher” takes, more “relevant” perspectives, but I really didn’t anticipate the literalness of this particular kind of invisibility, the literalness of being stepped on.

There is a source of the stories, the archetype of the crone who whispers curses at people shuffling by… oblivious to the danger.

I don’t want to become her. And this morning I am wondering if the only way to avoid it is to begin wearing outlandish hats and playing the eccentric. There must be another way to stay “relevant”.

I am still alive in this world. Still caught up in the same current of events as the rest of us all.

Clinging to Habits

I’m rushed this morning. It is difficult to prioritize sleep and still get in all the activities that are “supposed to” fill the morning. The whole idea of my morning routine is to begin the morning slowly, and easily. It depends entirely on having the discipline to get to sleep when most people are putting on a movie, or drinking a glass of wine at the intermission of a play. Back when plays were long enough to have intermissions.

It’s raining. I can hear it through the window. I can hear the soft gusts of patter. And the metallic trickle from the roof gutter to the drain in the driveway. Leonard will drag his feet on the walk. Not the role model I need this morning.

Coffee. Yoga. Walk. Work. Then packing for a week on Gran Canaria. Nothing fancy. Plane, train, and automobile. A budget trip to load up on sunshine before the darkness settles over most of the day, all of the days. And the only time I will be able to see natural light will be when I can slip out of the building at lunch.

Part of me wishes that the autumn break was a month away. We’ve had a long, warm and bright fall and the need hasn’t built up in me as it usually does. In fact, the last week I have been gearing up. Looking forward to the next project. My own, and at work. I’ve been settling back into my skin. Picking up old habits. The good ones.

I always have anxiety about traveling. It has gotten worse over the years for some reason. There is, of course, the unknown: floods, crime, political upheaval (I was nearly arrested in Kyrgistan at the tail end of the pink revolution). But now it is just the treat of a wedge in the routine.

Just as I was getting started.

(Not) Running at the Speed of Light

I opened the door this morning to let Leonard out and heard cows lowing. On still mornings, when we run at the lake, it’s possible to hear sheep. But we’ve never heard cows here.

After I got myself a cup of coffee, I told E., who opened the door for a minute and heard nothing. He doesn’t quite believe me.

It is an odd way to begin the day. Phantom farm animals.

Well, there’s that, and the fact that I looked at my phone and read the headlines.

Yesterday they mobilized the guard here in this area. All evening E. was checking text messages and I was trying to decipher his facial expressions. I can’t help wondering if the current “exercises” are something different than they were a year ago. I regretted watching the new Norwegian war film on Sunday night. Sometimes I wonder if ignorance is fine under the circumstances of helplessness.

It’s interesting that the term “helpless” so often carries an overtone of judgment. Unless you’re an infant or a puppy, it’s something of an insult. I wonder if this is a culturally-specific thing. Shame on you if you can’t straighten out what’s twisted in your world – can’t protect yourself. So, you “got caught”: got caught in the rain, got caught up in the war… It seems to imply a reflexive pronoun. You got yourself caught up in the mess. Why didn’t you run faster? Predict the future?

I am learning to recognize my helplessness without self-recrimination. In fact, with a kind of pride. I would think anyone who has grown children feels helpless in the face of their choices. I think we grow peaceful from sitting back and acknowledging that not only are we powerless, we are not omniscient. We can’t direct the flow of the metaphorical river – that is a weird delusion that in the long run brings no comfort at all.

It’s at the heart of the Tao, isn’t it? A kind of radical realism maybe.

So I take a deep breath, drink the last swig of cold coffee, and call Leonard. We’ll go for a slow walk: maybe the cows are still lowing.

Not Regret

Another Monday after an uneventful weekend. The days slide by in a gray wash lately. I can’t seem to get enough sleep. When I walk Leonard, sometimes my head is full of words that disappear before I reach home. I suppose it makes no difference really. I thought the thoughts, which in some ways is no different than writing them. It is just a question of time really until anything will disappear. Or become so warped by translations of language and culture that it isn’t what it was anyway. It makes the entire idea of authorship immediate, and maybe irrelevant except for that tiny shove of influence that a bit of dust has on the air current in a closed room.

Again it comes back to living in the moment – the moment containing the past and future, morphing continuously. There is a phrase at the edge of my memory about… and I’ve lost it.

It’s odd how sometimes these things will circle back and enter my consciousness more defined. In a sunbeam.

Saturday the sky held a rainbow the entire time we drove into town. My sense of direction is so poor that I couldn’t be sure if it were moving, or if we were winding over the landscape. I should look at maps more often.

Last night I saw a movie filmed in Norway. I thought it was fun that I could place some of the streets specifically by the color of the buildings, and the pattern of cobblestones. It isn’t even a city I have lived in, or that I could navigate on my own. But I recognized it. It made me realize how intimate I am with Stavanger. Twenty years of walking on those cobblestones, around those wooden houses and security fences. I know that place like no other. It’s no wonder I miss it. It’s not just the lake.

Things change. And sometimes that change causes a lingering ache.

I keep telling myself it is fine to have complex feelings. To lie on one’s back and blow dust about in a sunbeam.

Maybe it is more than fine. It just is.