Ren Powell's Blog, page 16

Friday after Friday

Every day these past two weeks has felt like a Friday: a vague lightness in the shadow of overwhelming demands, events, expectations. And I can’t help but wonder if as these days pass and the shadow distances into the past, I won’t notice, or think to take the time to sense the lightness. I don’t want to take this for granted. I don’t want to lose it.

I have been thinking more about words and emotions. I have a paperback on my shelf that is 300 or so pages of named emotions. But then I also think of the platypus and how just because we name something (a bird, a mammal, a sorrow) doesn’t make it true.

Words are no more accurate than paintings or music in communicating the human experience in terms of “feelings”. Sometimes I wonder if music isn’t really the most direct way to connect with one another? Don’t get me wrong. I am not a music person. I rarely listen to music, but when I do it can overwhelm me. Especially if the lyrics and the melody work together in a way that makes the diaphragm move unexpectedly and send signals to the brain that trigger loss or longing (if those are actually discrete emotions). Or joy, actually.

The minor chord in REM’s “Shiney Happy People” – the dissonance with the lyrics – is so recognizable to me that sometimes it seems like the only authentic song about happiness. About wanting to be happy.

That song makes me feel human. But even if I found a good word to describe the particular shade of human experience, there’s no guarantee it would help. Maybe the shade is so much deeper when it’s unclassified?

I have a memory of sorts that I sometimes have just before sleep. It has a texture. Textures, actually. Something hard and something sponge-like. It is palpable and neither good nor bad. Though uneasy perhaps. It feels as deep as a well, and as just-out-of-reach (for all its palpableness) as a whole, an “everything”.

And of course, I have tried to pin it down to an early childhood experience. Could it be…? But I know anything I land on to make sense of it will be a guess. And it would take the magic away. Because when this memory comes just before sleep, I relish its uneasiness. I feel connected to something elemental – even if it is only to my own childhood self.

Norwegians have a word for the ancient, or primal: ur. I figure there is a good English word for that as well, but I doubt it sounds as guttural.

A Little Clutch of Deceit

The lapwing is back. In fact, I think there might be two of them living in that field behind the daycare down the road. I saw one takeoff and then another joined her in the sky. I can’t identify lapwings in flight, but the two birds looked very much alike. I can spot a gull, a duck, or an oystercatcher. And though I have never seen the nightingale that lives out that way, I know she is far too small to have been tussling like that in the air.

E. keeps challenging me when I say she, and asks me if I know for certain that the female is the one who broods. So I looked it up. He will be a bit too pleased to know that both sexes brood.

I also learned that I may have seen two males in flight. That they lay 4 eggs a year. And that a group of lapwings is called a deceit.

Sometimes I wonder if collecting useless facts is a form of hoarding. Controlling. Yesterday I listened to a podcast while I ran (the first time post-covid infection). I listened to Lulu Miller read her own brilliant essay titled The Eleventh Word [podcast ]. She explores the idea that our naming things actually creates an environment of fear: that by naming things, we create the illusion of control, but when that inevitably proves false we feel disoriented and afraid.

She gets this idea by observing her son as he acquires language and fear of the unknown at the same time. While I’m no neuroscientist, I think it’s more likely that the child’s brain develops the ability to predict and reason at the same age.

But the correlation here is fascinating and her argument poetic. There may even be some truth to her idea. I remember reading a long time about research that said there are emotions we don’t experience until we know a word for them. I remember it was all very controversial. But I suppose that would support the idea that we would be fearless without language?

I do know there are all kinds of research about using a second language, and the relative emotional/objective value of doing so. I have had students who keep diaries in English and tell me it is because they feel distanced from the difficult subject matter. It’s easier to think about it.

This is especially interesting because when I taught younger kids, I noticed that their “imaginative” language was English, though their day-to-day language was Norwegian. They would tell me that they were more creative in English: it was “easier”. They credited the language itself, not their relationship to it. I’ve always thought that was interesting. At first, I thought it was because they simply lacked the critical skills to evaluate their creative work. They felt freer because they felt an innocent sense of competence (invariably these kids were better at English than their parents and teachers, for example). But I think it is more than that.

How much does language create our reality? (And I am not talking about woo-woo manifesting of goals, etc.) How much permission do we give ourselves to name and claim and control? Or think we control.

Again, not a new thought at all. But it is exciting to wander around and land in a familiar field. At least in something that looks familiar.

Getting on with it – Not back to it.

Well. Butt is in the chair. Pulling myself up by my yoga strap. I will get through this.

I have had two very difficult years – at work and personally. And it is very hard to tease apart the causes and effects. It’s hard to stop looking for a single event that makes sense of it all, to identify the first domino or the kingpin that caused the wheels to fall off. But it is never that simple, is it?

I count 6 major crises in the past two years. At least they felt like major crises. Maybe in other circumstances, they would have been minor. If there is a pot on the stove simmering and you kick up the heat a degree, or two, or five – things boil over.

Everything comes together. And then everything falls apart. Even the bad stuff falls apart. It is a bit like unraveling an enormous and tight knot. There is careful observation and strategic teasing and unbraiding. And there is the random rolling and tugging that inexplicably allows a release. Suddenly. And because it is unexpected and uneared, it is almost anti-climatic. It can feel like all the effort is just busywork.

It can make you – me – question what is actually a meaningful effort.

And I am very tired of writing about the difficulties. I am feeling lighter. Not a throw-open the barn doors and pronk kind of lightness, but it is easier to breathe. It actually is a bit like stepping outside on a good day and looking at an unobstructed, blue sky.

There is still so much to deal with but I am hoping I can deal with the events on their own terms, not as an extension or twisting or consequence of something that defines me.

The sky here is not blue. It is gray and wet. But I am going for a run.

And I hope this is the last of this kind of private brooding in my daily practice.

Forgive me. Gotta run now.

A Single Pen and a Single Cup of Coffee

I wrote years ago about B saying she wanted just a single pen. It was just before minimalism took off as a trend.

She wanted one beautiful pen. I don’t know why that feels significant now really. Except she is in a position to have to choose her moments carefully now. What will fill each one? Living the next months intentionally in a way that relatively few of us are forced to.

I looked for one pen then. But I didn’t look long enough before settling. I purchased a pretty blue pen at an art fair in Boulder, but once I got home I realized that I didn’t like it in my hand. It had an awkward weight. Both literally and metaphorically. It sits in my desk drawer and I never use it. My “one” pen.

I have always thought that many minimalists are just people taking part in a fad for the privileged. Though I don’t think they are conscious of it. These thirty-somethings with their documentaries about the simple life, flying here and there for meetings, borrowing things from friends and parents while their own home is “minimalist”. If they have a home. It’s not a virtue to have that kind of privilege. To be able to afford the kind of multifunction furniture required for a tiny house. The tidy-it-all guru who says to throw out everything that doesn’t spark joy? She actually says when in doubt, throw it out because you can always buy another if you do need it in the future.

Every few years I get an urge to purge my home. Closets, bathroom cabinets, desk drawers. I wish I were better at not accumulating things. E. is the opposite. He hangs on to everything in case it will be useful in the future. Not a hoarder, but nearing that end of the scale. But when our coffee machine broke? The old one that broke before this one had the part he needed to fix the new one. Since then, I haven’t mentally chastised him for hanging on to everything. It seems anything but wasteful. It seems wise. And respectful.

I saw a woman on Instagram (or somewhere) who claimed to fit six months’ worth of garbage in a mason jar. I was stunned. I live nowhere near a place that would allow me to purchase all my food without packaging. (Though I do know I could do better than I do now). I don’t have eternal toothbrushes. If I were to order toothpaste that doesn’t come with packaging, I would have to order it by post, and it would arrive in more packaging than the original tube from the local store. I use so many battery-run things that a third of the jar would be used batteries. I don’t doubt her claim. But I don’t know how she did it.

That bar is too high.

But I could be more respectful of things. I can try to do that without going all minimalistic and moving into a tiny house. That would just be shuffling my stuff somewhere else. I made this mess, I should be responsible for it.

R is writing about his one cup of coffee a day, after years of abstaining. I am not forced to go from 5 or more down to one because of the new medication. And oddly, in the lunch room today the music teachers were talking about coffee. Where to get a good one. How much it costs. How much it would cost were everyone in the chain paid a living wage. I drink tea. I miss the crappy coffee in the lunchroom. And that is kind of stupid. What do I really miss?

I am trying to get back to the wasp project. I keep using my day job as an excuse to procrastinate.

I heard someone say this morning that they quit their job to write full time and that it is “just” a matter of priorities. I love it when people are so simple.

That reminds me. I have bills to pay.

Sorry for the Discursion

(warning: far more political than usual)

Two weeks floating without any kind of routine. Yesterday I cried when I read the news about leaked documents from the Supreme Court. I was embarrassed for crying and wondered for a second if this was it – the tipping into the irrational. Was it the vestiges of Covid fatigue?

But what was there under the tears was my grandmother’s voice. This was the one political issue I ever heard her speak passionately about. She had a lot of opinions but kept her passions to herself. I wasn’t even a teenager yet, and thought my grandmother was the most conservative woman in the world. (There were a lot of things I didn’t know about her then.) She told me about her friend dying from a back alley abortion.

My grandmother didn’t call many people friends. She had built a lot of walls. Maybe because she lost a lot of people in her life under differing circumstances. But this loss was unnecessary. A young woman died for no reason. Sacrificed to the puritan, performative idealism of the privileged. My grandmother would raise her voice on this issue: There was nothing to discuss.

I live in a country where “self-chosen” abortion is only occasionally an issue up for discussion. And this is in a country where children’s health is prioritized (sometimes to a fault). We have generous maternity and paternity leave and universal health care. So why does this matter to me?

Whether I am an “American” or not – whether in my own view or in others’ views – shifts according to the most useful perspective for the sake of the argument. I can say that I can’t go more than five minutes after meeting someone before they ask me where I am from. In that sense, I will always be an American.

I think it is the least interesting thing about me, but I am stuck with it.

The truth is I am absolutely removed from the culture now. Though I remember, in 2016, the surreal experience of waking at 4 am to see the election results on my phone. I tried to go back to sleep. I grieved for a long time. I think I am still grieving all that is slipping away. Feeling ashamed of all that I didn’t see when I lived there. Now helpless to do anything about it.

You can leave your hometown but still feel a loss when it is wiped out by a tornado.

But these tears are for my grandmother’s America which seemed to be on a path towards a more compassionate culture. When I was in high school, my grandmother thought that the local segregated schools were appropriate, and she once dragged me out of a theater performance of Mahalia because we were the only white people in the audience. She wasn’t a forward-thinking woman. But by her 80s called to tell me about a “brilliant young man” she was going to vote for named Obama.

My grandmother went to church twice a week as long as I was alive. Well – until the pastor retired and a young guy took over and preached that it was the wife’s job to “obey”. That was the last time she or my grandfather went to church. She thought it was a weird glitch. She didn’t imagine it was a harbinger of something that… is here now.

I am glad she didn’t live to see this. This promise of death for the women who grew up the way she did. Hand to mouth. No bus fare to a safe clinic. No safety net of people who will help. Who care. My grandmother didn’t need to say that her friend could have been her. And knowing what I know now about my grandmother’s life, I wonder…

America is not known as a compassionate country. No one even knows how many people died in the dust bowl. In the building of bridges and railroads. Reagan (probably wasn’t the first) said that the responsibility of taking care of the citizen’s well-being and caring for those who need it should fall on the churches.

Just like it was in the colonies, I suppose. I don’t think that the issue is a separation of Church and State, because from the beginning the people who ruled America saw Church and State as two branches of the ruling power. Separate, but equal. America didn’t want the Pope to have a say in America, because the Puritans were already there to keep the status quo of the oligarchy. A legacy of Cromwell.

Maybe? I’m not a historian.

I cry for the destruction of what was my illusion of America. I cry for my grandmother and for her friend. For all the women this will hurt. Kill.

But I also worry because American culture is like a virus in the world. And women’s reproductive rights are a domino that will knock over so many other human rights we have been cultivating.

On Tweaks and Wonky Widgets

I finally tweaked my website into a shape that I really liked. Then a widget went wonky and the support person tells me my theme has been retired. No fixing the wonky widget. I need to choose a new theme.

I have a new boss at work. We have new routines. I will have another new boss in August and I am sure they will bring their own tweaks to the routines.

They are interviewing new colleagues. They’re looking for someone I will likely be working with for the next decade (we tend to sit tight on these jobs). The devil you know, the devil you don’t? Rumors abound.

And I am thinking… whatever.

I’ll live. I will set off an afternoon to redesign my website. I will follow the new routines. I will work with the new colleague. These things are out of my control. I can accept that and set those facts aside: “Move on!“

It’s this new medication. My jaw isn’t clenched. For the first time in several years, I don’t feel like I have to control everything. Set all the stories right.

I am not filled with disappointment and shame when I look in the mirror and see all the changes I haven’t been able to stop. I don’t feel that I have to justify the space I am taking up while sitting in the lunchroom with other people. I don’t feel like I have anything to prove – Good enough. And even a bit of “so what?“

It is frustrating that a little pill can accomplish in one week what I have been trying to will/exercise/force/meditate my way to all this time.

My head is quiet. Not numb, but rather as though it’s safe to be quiet because there is something else good just up ahead. Worth all the energy that I have been wasting. In the meantime, I go for a walk and do yoga on my lunch break. Laugh at E.’s dad jokes.

I do have a tiny worry in the corner of my mind. Will I crash? Is this lightness and this quiet “normal”? I ask E. We fall back into that truth that we can’t really ever know what is going on in someone else’s head. What something is “like” is still only relatable to one’s own experience of the metaphor’s vehicle. It is like we are all closed loops when it comes to language. We try. We make theater. We write poetry. We paint images.

But facing this sense of the futility of trying to communicate exactly, I am feeling puzzlement instead of despair. Being puzzled is kind of fun.

The effort is fun.

I had forgotten that while chasing something I was trying to make meaningful – a durable artwork. What a waste of energy.

Saturday I will revamp my website. I tend to curse a lot when I start messing with code and tweaks. I also enjoy it a lot, when it all fits together like a solved puzzle.

It’s Mental Health Awareness Month in the US. Statistically, I am rising now in terms of the great U of happiness. I hope so.

Bipolar, CPTSD, likely ADHD (no childhood data for a definitive diagnosis). No shame.
On and off medication as necessary these past 35 years. Functioning member of society: teacher, artist, mother, wife – with all the normal strife. It’s not all good, but it is all worth it.

Theater of Cruelty

Well, not exactly, and I apologize to anyone landing here who feels misled.

But these past 9 days have felt like a minor ordeal. Every moment that’d been expected to bring a catharsis was just left hanging. I was sick as a dog last week, though my lateral flow tests were negative. Monday I felt well enough to go back to work, only to relapse yesterday (which, weirdly. seems like so long ago). Now I’m testing positive for Covid. I must have had it all along.

What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger… eventually. In one way or another. I went to a fortune teller once (only once) with a question about a then-upcoming show I wrote and directed: will it be a success? She answered, “Yes, but maybe not in the way you expect.”

Safe answer. And it would have been a very kind, counseling kind of answer was it to have landed as a fiasco? “Hmmm” (I could say to myself). “But she said… so: In what way was it a success?”

As it was, it wasn’t a fiasco or a success. Just, meh. Like the production this week. But sometimes meh is fine. Sometimes having enough energy/stamina/dedication/obstinance to get through it all is a victory. When the plague burns through everything, no one said what is left standing is going to be a towering superhero. Sometimes it is a tiny, blind inchworm. Swaying just a little. Getting on with it.

The children’s song comes to mind. Measuring a marigold. I know very little about gardening or flowers in general, but I do remember the marigolds in the kitchen garden. How they took over. Beautiful but invasive. They just keep coming up through the soil, self-seeding. Inch after foot after yard.

That’s a lot of busywork for an inchworm.

The Artifice in Made Things & the Pleasure in Dis-Order

I’m home today with a nasty cough and a slight fever. And I am thinking to lie on the sofa in the studio and watch inspiring films while drinking tea that I really can’t taste.

So I google “films about poetry” and what comes up? A list of films that are love stories. A list of films about poets’ dramatic love lives. Read: sex lives. One particularly disturbing story seems to directly equate a very young woman’s sexual desirability with artistic talent. The trailer is shot full (pun intended) of perspectives dictated by the male gaze. I get a very “let’s ogle her while the kitten searches for true love” vibe.

I am cranky again. I am being very judgmental and unfair. And I have used the word “cranky” a lot the past few days.

I suppose one could scrounge up a dozen reasons to explain my frustration now, but one of them is actually related to my current exploration of “what poetry means to me”. Whether poetry and lyric are inexorably linked. Whether the “exuberance” of the lyric is inexorably linked with desire and other aspects of interpersonal relationships. Or whether the mechanism of “art” truly is open to expressing any aspect of what it is to be human. A human was here. Love, sex, grief, yeah. But also other unnamed things that we recognize without “knowing”.

The asemic.

I have experienced exuberance for no reason. I have felt a swelling in my chest and tried desperately to “remember” the cause – was there something new, did I win something, was I anticipating something: What!? I usually start worrying about my mental health. Exuberance without a dramatic cause – a story – a rationale and justification – is just (hypo)mania, right?

Unjustified emotion is a sign of mental illness. Or hormonal imbalances. Or some other dis-order. Dis-order.

What if everything we tell ourselves about why we feel a particular emotion at any given moment is nothing more than another story we’ve learned to compose as a way to soothe ourselves? To control one another and keep the world predictable?

Kids wake up happy without questioning their sanity or looking for the reason for it. I know there are some adults who do this, too. I have heard people talk about them and rationalize it by describing these adults as “simple-minded”. Or “special”. Unexplained cheerfulness is definitely anti-social behavior. It makes us giggle nervously. I’m not sure if it is a named archetype, but it should be. (Note to self to look it up when the headache subsides).

What if all art is just an act of unlearning? Resisting. And that our ideas of what poetry is can get in the way of that? What if art should start where we are familiar and then chisel at it until it leaves us speechless. What if instead of giving us more stories related to our own stories, it tears down every story?

What if it is the “made thing” that shows us the artifice in all made things? Even our own stories?

I watched a really good lecture about Alfred Jarry’s work the other day. I have no idea if my thoughts are at all in line with his. But I am wondering…

Mid-week, Mid-life, Mid-project Stalling

The sun is already shining through my little library window. I was supposed to see my shrink today to get a new solution, a new hope etc., but she’s ill. So I comply and take the prescription that is not working. I know a sudden realignment of the salts in my brain can damage my memory more than it is already damaged from that time that the factory in Mexico that made the time-release pills burnt down and I went cold turkey.

At least that’s how I remember it. I was in my mid-twenties and already divorced and nose-deep in the drama of a new relationship: barely breathing. Two years of salt and sex and adrenaline and really good writing. And not the lyric kind, but out-of-the-box, authentically articulated, outward-looking work produced with a drive – confidence – that slipped away. The emerging artist aborted in a way. Balance is difficult.

So I sit here, disspirited, feverish, and frustrated. Compliant.

But the sun… it is shining through my little library window and I do have hope. And little else right now. I am eating fish for breakfast and doing yoga and reminding myself that these ruts always end.

I remember the shrink back then who told me that my life would be chaos until I was settled – and by that he meant finished with university, working a nine-to-five with a rote, gender-appropriate, middle-class American lifestyle with minivans and PTA meetings, and I think he’d never even heard of Ballad of Lucy Jordan. I don’t think he understood that not all trailer trash aspires to be WASPs. In fact, probably very few of us do. I didn’t aspire to be him. What does mentally healthy look like? Maybe the more important question is: What does mentally healthy feel like?

So I could have done worse. I have been to Paris. And I giggled when I saw a cabriolet pass by with a middle-aged driver. I was thinking of Lucy Jordan. I always figured the song was about an acid trip. So, yeah, I definitely could have done worse.

I think this thing I am making of myself is more of an abstract sculpture than a portrait. And I can pick it up and keep working on it as long as I live. There’s no rush. And no rubric or model for the finished work.

I did finish the sextain – sestina with an extra metered foot that repeats in its own rotating pattern. It is the text that I’ll print on the paper corset. Waist corset, neck corset.

And now on to the next set of constraints. Because there is a way to squeeze really exciting work out of the tightest of constraints. Hell, they might even be necessary.

Agoraphobia

I have no idea why I’m not sleeping. I doubt there is any use in an interrogation. There are too many factors at play, and I think I have already spent too much of my life inspecting the framework that surrounds it. Looking for weaknesses. Explanations. If I fix this, then…

It seems as though if things settle, they do so on their own and in their own time. Other times I think I just forget to care. I am spinning busywork while I grow accustomed.

We ran again yesterday. We’re trying hard to pick ourselves up. E. first headed toward our usual morning route, but I asked him to drive us to the other end of the trail, where we can cross the bridge and run in the forest.

Two minutes into the run, I was tired. Not sure I could do the short run. I thought about the blood clot that formed in my body five years ago, and I did a mental check to gauge if this tiredness was that tiredness, that sense of being unplugged from an energy source. I felt my heart miss a beat, then felt a sense of disappointment that the fear is still here in my body, fear as tight as a scar running hip to heart.

Breathe. I remember the nurse who would not say, “Everything is going to be fine.” She told me a truth: no one has died on this table during this procedure before.

Breathe. I could – can still – handle this specific truth.

We hit the top of the first hill and then ran down and across the bridge. But three hundred meters into the forest, the forest stopped. Clean cuts across tree trunks. Crossed branches lay entwined everywhere, like an enormous nest for an unknown or ancient bird. We stumbled as far as we dared, then angled off, out of what used to be the forest to find the gravel trail.

I think I just imagined that the birds were louder than usual.

The last time we ran through the forest I’d taken pictures of the newly storm-toppled trees, their root systems upended and taller than three of me. I knew and I know now that this forest is private property and that they cull a section every few years. I know that they are responsible agriculturalists, and they know far more than I do about what is healthy for the landscape, what is possible, what is… fine.

Still, the gaping, empty space is like a brutal statement of fact: there is no going back to what was. There will be scars in the landscape, and there is no longer shelter from the North Wind.

But – or and? – everything you never imagined is possible now.