Ren Powell's Blog, page 18

Cursing and The Slow Pull of Quicksand

Still working on the grant application. And kind of caught in a maelstrøm of insecurities. I keep wondering when I will reach the other end of this “crisis”, or just learn to give into it. All my coping mechanisms seem to come with their own pitfalls and red herrings.

Maybe it is silly to try to make sense of all the clues. I fail miserably at those IQ tests where you are presented with a row of numbers and then asked to pick the next logical number. But give me a series of random social interactions and I will find a pattern, predict a relationship, judge motivations.

But that is what poets do, right? Find meaning in random connections? I have always been fascinated by the roles of truth and fiction in poetry. The juxtaposition of perspectives that throws everything we know into question. That’s the entire point, right? Shake it up. Surprise me.

I know Horace said poets should inform and delight, but that is School House Rock in my book. I want poetry that invites me into an exploration with no lesson waiting at the end. Honestly, I guess this view of poetry is rooted in my anti-authoritarian core. I am pretty sure there is a test that labels me as having a disagreeable personality. But “Who says?” and “How so?” are important questions.

And there is: “This, too.” And “Then there’s this…” There are more than 13 ways to look at anything. If we can allow ourselves to let go and do so.

I read that when you are stuck in quicksand, it isn’t really as dangerous as we are led to believe. Apparently, the key is to spread yourself wide and keep moving, gently, to allow the sand to move into the open spaces, to lift you bit by bit up and to the surface.

Yesterday E. cursed while we were on our way to work. He never curses. He apologized. To me: someone whose everyday speech has been peppered with curses for the past two years. Sometimes words, sometimes fully expressed incantations. I have been anything but gentle, and the fact hit me hard yesterday in the car listening to his apology.

There is good here.

This, too. I need 13 ways of looking at the day today.

(But one of them will definitely involve a curse.)

The Danger of a Singular Perspective

So much of the morning wasted. I would have been better off sleeping in. I have nothing to say. I saw a meme about discernment – about knowing when your voice isn’t needed in a conversation. It is such an important lesson. But there are days when being humbled also means slipping into feelings of worthlessness and inconsequence. An even more difficult lesson to tease out and understand.

What does a single voice matter? Everything is contextual. Yet in this borderless culture, nothing is contextualized enough to allow for nuance. So we keep getting louder and more strident, bullying the parameters of every discussion into a narrow place. The place where we are, unequivocally, in the right. In fact: not just right, but the unquestionable authority on whatever tidbit of insight/wisdom/instruction there is to be had/shared/beaten over someone’s head as a form of retribution. Personal. Tribal. Cosmic.

I am wondering if there isn’t a form of mild trauma experienced by everyone on social media – just reading social media. “Reading” is an extended concept here. People are “discussing” an actor slapping someone with the same intensity and derision as they were discussing an actual (ongoing) war the day before. Blocking one another now based on their allegiance to a celebrity, or a particular critical reading of the event.

One view. One perspective. One context. Right. Wrong. The binary of the network.

Thriving on the extended “constructed drama”, that may be easier to deal with than actual destruction, but it’s just a diversion of the pain – not even a distraction, certainly not a balm.

And maybe this is just me within the context of burn-out. Me, dreading going to work today. Me, counting down the hours until summer vacation.

Me, so tired of all this darkness. The world right now is heavier than it needs to be for me. I don’t think that does anyone any good.

I wonder if toxic empathy is related to narcissism? Yeah. I am not sure I really care. The wheels just keep turning.

Last night while falling asleep, I realized that I haven’t basked in proper sunshine in over 3 years. It explains a lot of what I am feeling, I think. I remember hearing that when Norwegians emigrated to the American midwest a lot of them became mentally ill – they developed agoraphobia, kenophobia on the plains. They couldn’t adjust to the wide-open skies. The Norwegians that I knew in Texas missed the mountains with a bodily ache. They were willing to hike with alligators to get a taste of the wild.

I miss the intense sunlight of the desert. The sticky-asphalt heat. I am depleted.

It is probably irrational, but this morning I keep having the thought that if I could get down to the Canaries, lie on the beach, hike the volcano, I could get off the medication.

Thinking about it actually brings up a feeling of grief. My stomach clenches and a sob swells into my chest and threatens to escape. I guess this is a kind of homesickness of the body.

A Loose Collection of Mixed Metaphors

Monday morning and nothing is exactly as I’d want it to be. And that is fine, really. I take a deep breath and am grateful for the coffee.

I spent this weekend with kind people whom I haven’t seen in years. And people I’ve never met. I have moved a half-hour train ride away and it may as well have been to an island in the middle of the ocean. Funny how easily a little resistance can shape a habit. Can dig a ditch, can build a wall.

And I would love to think that I will pull myself together and become more social. But I am still finding life completely overwhelming. Still wondering whose body this is. Whose neck I see in the mirror. Wondering how exactly to talk to people.

“Introduce yourself”.

Yo soy. Yo no estoy. I am goo, and you can’t hold me to anything I say right now. Or rather, anything I say won’t hold. I am fluid and formless.

I don’t know myself, but it’s not the result of an unexamined life. On the contrary, it is a life so examined that the fabric has been teased apart. I am a collection of discrete elements. And I am trying not to panic.

I recognize something in the line above; I am a loose collection from a poem I wrote in 2016. From the book I wrote wherein the translator described the poetry as my “late style”. I read that as a curse.

How have I survived rattling around these past years? Wide-open, and pinched simultaneously. A sack of bones.

At 4 am yesterday I was focused: writing. At 4 pm I crashed and splattered like a water droplet. Every time this happens I wonder if I will walk away for a day or two. Or for a year or two. Or more.

Identity is a complex issue. Language. Nationality. What they call the “formative years”. The America that shaped my formative years is not the America of today. I have lived here for more than half my life. For more than thirty years. And yet when people meet me they still ask me where I am from. As though answering that tells them anything about me.

I am from roach clips, milk lines, and Stranger Danger
I am from paisleys and bean bags, tv dinners and moon pies
I am from fire & brimstone, and inappropriate touches
I am from kerosine lamps and cinderblock walls
I am from scholastic books order forms and second-hand clothes
I am from guns and gophers and bloody chickens
I am from photographs cut carefully around the shapes of bodies
I am from sudden disappearances, fresh starts, and new names

But I say something like, the West Coast mostly, I moved around a lot. Then they tell me about all the times they have visited America, or the relatives they have there, or how much they love or how much they hate the culture. “Americans are…” and they begin to shape me.

And I go home and dig a little more deeply into the ditch that separates me from the world. I am still too easily twisted by casual contact.

A Post-Pandemic Frankenstein

Yesterday a news update on the radio explained that hospitals are no longer going to report cases of Covid to the government. There’ll be no more daily statistics to follow. It’s as though they’ve decided that our participation in the pandemic is officially over – after two years and twelve days.

It’s difficult to know exactly what has changed these past two years. Two years older, some unavoidable milestones in any adult’s life, a major shift in biology, something of a creative crisis, something of a professional failure. Face-to-face with what were once “irrational fears” that actually came to pass. Well, not pass exactly, but taken up residence in the everyday. I am living with new shadows. Different kinds of secrets.

And understanding the value in that.

But sometimes while we are vigilant for what may be approaching from one direction, something else will creep up and bite us on the neck. In Europe, we are all living in the shadow of war, in the shadows of past wars. No secrets here. This bodyless, beating heart left on the stoop. Did you feel competent before? Adept? Useful?

Daily life goes on regardless. If not regardless, necessarily.

Life goes on after metaphorical deaths, after concrete endings. Sort of.

It has always taken so much effort for me to get out the front door. The pandemic ground me further into that introverted groove. And now even a planned phone call is difficult: a bit like levering a rock out of a trough and pushing it up a hill.

And we all know how that goes.

There has been a long list of reasons why I have not run in the mornings these past weeks. Why I’ve not kept a faithful yoga practice. And when the bones of your life begin crumbling, what happens shape of it? Of you? My sense of identity is becoming ever-more-misaligned with reality. It is painful.

Pulling myself together is an overwhelming task that I just can seem to begin. Starting over without the benefit of momentum. It feels unnatural. Forced.

Wrong somehow.

And I think I am afraid of what the resulting creature will look like. I am afraid of what it may need from me.

Seasonal Procrastination

It is still dark when I rise in the mornings. But the sun rises while I walk Leonard around the block. It is nice. But we change the clocks this weekend. We gain another hour of darkness. And every year around this time I remind myself not to let myself get too hopeful about the light, knowing it’s something of a false start to a delicate season. It’s like practice for the actual season.

I walked into the yard to fetch Leonard yesterday without pulling on a coat. The air was still. I felt exposed. Almost indecent. Spring/Summer always demands a mental adjustment. It’s a time of opening and acceptance. It demands risk.

The summer is fragile here. A gust of the north wind can displace it on an afternoon in July. Warmth is always something of an unfulfilled promise. Which shouldn’t be surprising, considering all the unfulfilled promises that every summer vacation brings.

Talk about shifting the blame.

I should say: considering all the unfulfilled promises I make to myself about this time every year. Counting down the weeks until vacation. Shoving everything I want to do ahead of me as though come June I will have the self-discipline of an Olympian.

I put too much of a burden of expectations on summer. I anticipate its arrival as if it were an awards ceremony for something I forgot I was never in the running for. All my half-completed projects. All the mental energy never followed up in the physical world. Everything seems so much closer to “done” in my head until I actually have days of unscheduled time and realize that the “everything” in my head is an overwhelming mountain of vague plans, loose bullet points, and incongruous metaphors.

I hear myself lecture the students again about how thinking about doing their assignment, learning their lines, sewing their costumes, is not actually doing any of that. Again. And I know damned well that I am lecturing to myself.

I set the timer and hope I can get some wasp work done in the real world before it’s time to go to work. Writing. Painting. I try not to think.

But the clean laundry is piling up again on the sofa in the bedroom, and I keep thinking about folding it. Thinking then maybe it can just stay there another two months, and that come summer I will sort through it all and simplify my life.

A Close Reading of a Life

The more difficult things become – subjectively – the more I want to make beautiful things, and the more frustrated I become with my lagging craftsmanship. I spend evenings in the studio staring at the paper. Judging. I should have invested more time here. Been patient with myself. I understand now the absurdity of impatience.

M. writes about her diagnosis in a chat message. B. talks around hers over the phone, but on social media, she writes amusing anecdotes about chemo and radiation therapy.

And I find myself separated by one more degree from other – more sudden – death. My brother’s chosen brother, whose parents watched the coffin being carried out of the church yesterday. Put in the ground.

There are places we don’t want our minds to go.

I pull back and assess an angle from which to offer… what exactly? There’s no comfort to offer M. and B., so I offer attention. And I try to comfort the grieving along that chain of sorrow. The people whose pain I understand. Whose helplessness I can relate to. We can choose our connections, but we cannot choose our losses.

I can at least relate to loss.

Yesterday I dug out the last letters to and from my mother. And to and from my grandmother. All the pain came rushing back very unexpectedly. The anger. Fury. Clicking and popped in my chest like a wasps nest as I told myself to keep breathing. To let go of the tightness. There is nothing to brace myself for. It’s over. I copied them and tore them into strips and began the process of making something.

Beautiful is absolutely the wrong word.

Meaningful?

True.

The odd thing is that sorting through this single box of the artifacts of my life, I also ran across love letters from my ex-husband. I couldn’t bring myself to read them but I glanced at some of the phrases on the brittle paper. I’d forgotten the sweetness. The openness. And I mean forgotten in the sense that in reading them I experienced no recognition whatsoever. I am glad I didn’t see these during the divorce process, it would have overwhelmed me to see the whole of what was lost over the years. What good I needlessly let go of. Why can’t I look at these and just think: how lucky we were for that span of time? Without running a post mortem on those twenty-two years. Appreciating, but not clinging, to the people we were.

Nothing is permanent and, for me at least, life has been a series of small but absolute endings that are metaphors for death itself. My mother used to practice for her own mother’s death. That seems superfluous.

Some holy people meditate on their own rotting corpses. But new life begins in the decomposition. The ripping up of the old constellations of parts, making something new of the elements.

For right now: I choose to focus on that. The ripping-up. The making-new. One true thing from all of the lies.

I think that the more I do it, the better I might get at it.

Making a New Cognitive Map for the Real World

It’s still morning, but two hours have slipped out of use. It’s Parkinson’s law. The tasks I have to do will expand to fill the time I have to do them in. Except with this rare free day, I am sure that the tasks I have to do will expand exponentially and I will get less done than I otherwise would.

Like the morning writing and painting. Running. Yoga. These things that used to click into the routine – a habit chain. One can only blame Covid restrictions for so much. One can only blame menopause for so much. One can only blame grief for so much.

I was complaining about an imposition on my class schedule at work and a colleague said that it was “possible to be more flexible”. I nearly took aim and cast my pencil at her heart. After two years of taking every day as it comes, tossing out curriculums and calendars, teaching to a quarter-class whatever I can justify – on the fly – I am keenly aware that there is a point at which being flexible transitions into an amorphous existence.

Goo. And not the good kind. The kind that doesn’t provide a steady perspective for investing emotionally. For caring.

It is the definition of demoralizing.

Rather than a depressive disorder, demoralization is a type of existential disorder associated with the breakdown of a person’s ‘cognitive map’. It is an overarching psycho-spiritual crisis in which victims feel generally disoriented and unable to locate meaning, purpose or sources of need fulfilment

The New Internationalist

Is it any wonder I am desperate to find my way back to a routine? To find a new focus, unrelated to my employment? To students?

I laughed yesterday. It took me so by surprise I was concerned for a second that I may have “clicked”. The setting wasn’t comfortable. The people I was with were students with whom I have a tense relationship.

It was a silly translation mistake that stuck illogically in my head. “Mus” is mouse, but pronounced “moose”, but I will spare you the rest. The images that I just couldn’t shake, couldn’t make sense of for a full minute or two, brought on a wave of sincere, spontaneous laughter. My whole body felt it. It was a release of tension that I could compare to so many other bodily functions, but won’t.

How rare a moment.

Last night I googled how to put more laughter in your life and found silly lists of suggestions: follow funny people on Twitter, etc. But as important as thoughts are, thinking “that’s funny” is not laughter. Laughter isn’t a thought, it is a physical activity. And like so many other physical activities, maybe it really is best when done with other people. Laughter is a weirdly contagious activity. Like crying.

Maybe part of the problem is that I spend most of my physical time in the company of teenagers who are far more inclined to share their tears than their laughter with me?

Or – you know – maybe it’s just me.

A few years ago I took private lessons from the yoga instructor I still go to. The problem was, I could lower my body into chaturanga, but then my brain couldn’t seem to connect to the muscles that would push me up into upward dog. I repeatedly fell on my chin. It was like someone had cut the necessary wires. I had to re-map my nervous system. And there was no way to “think it” into being. I had to move.

For Christmas this year, I gave E. a scratch-the-peaks map of Norwegian hiking routes. The thing is, the map isn’t the hike.

And I’m thinking: here, I have this map for a better life – one with more laughter, with meaning – but I can’t seem to connect my brain to my foot to take the first step. It’s all just theory at this point. Theory and some falling on my chin.

Contextualizing Anxiety

The past week I have had more days when I wonder if I closed the sliding door. If I put the peanut butter back in the fridge. If I fed the dog.

It’s not age. It’s inattention. It’s the low hum of continual anxiety.

I have always been an introvert, and the post-Covid culture here is moving too quickly for me. Social “engagements” on my calendar feel overwhelming. I think of the ironic fact that I know that when the time comes I will feel far from engaged. I will be sitting outside myself, judging myself, second-guessing words and gestures. Stockpiling the “should-have-said”s and “shouldn’t-have-said”s. The wins for the losing.

I am wondering what has really changed. It seems that my entire adult life, I’ve responded to any ambiguous summoning with an emergency readiness. An emotional “prepper”. And that was before last year and what my shrink calls “the crisis”. Before it got worse. How can I give other people that much power? Blaming that last staw for the whole load is absurd. I know that. I also know that the problem isn’t other people.

We want so badly for our experiences to be explained as simple cause-and-effect events. Because anything else would be irrational. Untrue. Unnecessary pain. Anything else would be the work of a shadow-weaving woman making a weighted blanket from the loose atmospheres of dreams and memories.

But I keep her close, like a lover I know will hurt me. It’s my fault. Holding onto the destructive stories like talismans. The devil you know.

I have a metal ruler in one of the drawers in the studio. It is jagged on both long edges. I am not sure why, and I am not sure how I came to have this ruler in a drawer. in the studio. I catch my fingers on it every time I open the drawer. And yet I haven’t moved it. I haven’t gotten rid of it. (What would I do with it? Where would I send it?) I mean, I bought it after all. I put it there. It must be there for a reason.

Maybe I am misinterpreting the phrase “trust yourself”? Maybe I am misplacing my trust. Maybe everyone (I’m sure of it) feels this way when the season changes and death is everywhere, making room – clearing room – for the sprawl of strange offspring. Another round of the unknown. Mystery eggs.

I’ve learned that more than moths and butterflies emerge from cocoons. It seems nothing that I learn makes for good small talk. And I am beginning to understand that that doesn’t matter at all.

My favorite wasp fact so far while researching this project:

Adult tarantula hawks are nectarivorous. The consumption of fermented fruit sometimes intoxicates them to the point that flight becomes difficult.

I really don’t think life is wonderful. But I do think it is in every way amusing – and awesome.

Awesome:

adjective

causing or inducing awe; inspiring an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, or fear: an awesome sight.

exhibiting or marked by awe; showing reverence, admiration, or fear.

Anxiety:

noun, plural anx·i·e·ties.

distress or uneasiness of mind caused by fear of danger or misfortune: He felt anxiety about the possible loss of his job.

earnest but tense desire; eagerness: He had a keen anxiety to succeed in his work.

In Favor of a Personal Anarchy

I forgot to hit publish yesterday.

And that’s the way the day played out. The minutes and hours slipped by unattended to. I try to tell myself a day lost is not really a problem. That there was some meaning in it – a justification of some sort. But no. I wallowed in a kind of neutral existence. Distractions. And though I know there’s no point in feeling guilty about it, and that regret is an absolute waste of time and energy. I regret. I lost something that never was.

A chat message from a student popped up in the afternoon. And I made the mistake of reading it. Sometimes giving in to what you don’t want to do is easier than breaking the inertia to do what you want to. To do what is actually, personally meaningful.

Instead, there is this thing forced upon you that allows you to be passive and still feel useful. But it’s just the illusion of something meaningful. A conscionable time-suck.

And what popped up was one of those messages that brings with it frustration and inconvenience, and the desire to shake someone by the shoulders. Metaphorically. And as always with teaching, it brings with it a mirror revealing one’s own bad habits, excuses, and cowardly aversions. And it takes conscious effort to sort out who and what I am honestly frustrated with. Who needs the metaphorical shaking.

Is it possible to stop overthinking time? Is it necessary? Is there a way to channel this aspect of who I am into something worthwhile? Because, at this point, I am done trying to change who I am. Or find excuses for why I am not perfect. Rationalizations, and diagnoses.

Besides. On a very basic level: if I change who I am to be happy, I won’t be the one being happy, now will I? A diagnosis doesn’t point out what is wrong with me. It points out what society doesn’t want to be bothered to deal with. At least without getting brownie points for going the extra mile.

Who is perfect? And why does anyone need to offer up explanations for their “imperfections”? Enough self-development. Enough growth mindset with Dweck’s schadenfreude for celebrities and the arbitrary, questionably “chosen” goals we are all supposed to aspire to.

I honestly believe that one of the most important differences between pain and trauma is that the latter is entirely the result of an ongoing social response to a past event. The culture’s clinging to expectations, and models and categories that demand a rationale for why you don’t fit into the damn box. Exceptions are allowed. Under prescribed circumstances, and according to prescribed forms of variation. Cultural tropes. The bureaucracy of it is like some kind of virus: the more we break out of a norm, the more codified variations of the norm will develop. And under our expert, discerning eyes: a blossoming of diagnoses like bacteria in a petri dish.

Control. Sovereignty. Govern(ance). Govern(ment). Command.

It is what it is. And I’ve no words that can accurately describe it on its own terms. It being why my dog won’t eat today. Why the kale is still alive in the garden after two years. Why I am frightened.

Beginners mind. That’s all we need. Look. Listen. Touch. Taste. Breathe. Move on.

A re-Beginner’s Mind Maybe

You can’t wander into a flow if you never begin moving.

I’ve begun thinking in terms of platitudes, I’m afraid. It is probably time for another break from social media.

There’s never enough time in the day – and that has to be a matter of structure and attention, not time. A matter of pulling out the paper and the charcoals, and getting my fingers dirty.

Caging the oxpecker.

Stories should never begin with, “Once upon a time.” But rather, “And then, this time…”