Ren Powell's Blog, page 19

Shedding the Sharp Edges

Moving through J.’s vinyasa sequences again. The post-Covid restrictions class is full but it’s also permitted to use the space at full capacity, so it isn’t a race to get a spot anymore. I have this odd sense that things are falling into place again. I recognize this moving body. This tight-tight hamstring. This good balance and grounding on the right leg.

Getting some self-confidence back. Headstands and bridges. Running. Though everything requires a push now. Every run or class or yoga session is still prefaced by an argument with myself. A frantic little search for good excuses not to.

Extended side angle and J. comes behind me and gently adjusts my ribcage, fingers, head. Somehow even in the hot room, sweating, her touch is like being nudged softly through pillows. A touch that is barely a touch, but full of connection. I think that is what makes us all fall in love with her. We love her like we love Mary Poppins. If Mary Poppins escaped from her sharp exoskeleton.

I do a half-bridge, and she sits behind my head, feet on my shoulders, and guides my ribcage upward.

I miss my morning flows. Alone. And have no good reason to not be doing them. These mornings, though, I am so aware of time. The time I have – and don’t have – all to myself. From four to seven. Yet every day I find it’s not enough.

R.’s best friend died last night. The man he has called his brother, whose parents will bury their child. Young is relative. But he was young in the “natural order” of things. I look at the calendar and am surprised to see we are halfway into March. More than halfway. And I think about B. The week of chemo she’s been through. The next one she has coming. Not that there is hope for a cure, only hope for more time. Weeks. Months. Days.

It’s never going to be enough.

I feel both greedy and wasteful. And maybe this is all the more reason to get on my mat every morning. J. asks us what we dedicate each practice session to. At the beginning and then again just before heart-openers. Is it narcissistic to dedicated it to doing the best I can? To yoking all of the aspects of the physical reality of my being in this world, to make it work somehow for the best I can do in the world, for the world?

All those platitudes: fill your cup so you can fill another’s cup. I am self-conscious of the triteness. But I keep asking my students: are we done with the irony, the sardonic attitude of post-modernism now? Can we finally be earnest again?

Maybe we need to be?

Pirandello said life is so painful we have only to laugh at it. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe life reaches a level of pain where we break through the l’umorismo and stop laughing. Where we take off the exoskeletons and are soft with one another.

Overthinking

It is always stupid for me to write about or talk about process. In fact, I am convinced it’s a form of self-sabotage. It’s the final step of a creative project, where I cut myself off at the knees and go back to a safe place.

It’s when the oxpecker shows up and pecks me bloody.

I was thinking this must be one of the horsemen of a creative apocalypse, so I googled. Nothing is original after all. There are a couple of models for the four horsemen of the creative apocalypse, actually. Discussing process isn’t included. But now I am thinking Googling any idea should be.

My grandmother said to me, “Karen, I never understand anything you are talking about, but I’m glad you’re happy.” It could be she said, “… but it’s nice to hear your voice.” I’m not sure anymore. Those conversations took place years ago.

It’s amazing how people close to you can simultaneously make you feel acknowledged and completely irrelevant. Dismissed, with a pat on the head.

We may not remember the details but we remember the feelings.

Am I still spouting half-words and nonsense melodies? I am the madwoman in the cellar, in the outhouse. The deluded relative. Fed. Humored on occasion.

“I’m happy for you.”

“Isn’t that nice.”

I guess it forces the question of self-fulfilling prophecies. It spotlights the need for approval and permission, which are met so often with glib responses like, “Who cares what other people think?”

Not caring what others think comes from a position of privilege: that voice comes from someone with a waiting seat at the table, not a stool at the pulled-out cutting board in the kitchen.

Otherwise, not caring is just another form of self-destruction. Mental illness.

This morning a random essay found its way to my inbox from Academia. I have absolutely no idea why. It takes up Sylvia Plath, and her bipolar disorder as a manifestation of Thanatos. And by doing so lifts Plath’s story – Plath herself – to a mythic plane. Which is very different from the reality of dealing with a mental disorder. To the flesh and blood, and the decaying corpse of a mother of two.

The article further promotes the idea of the “true artist” as a kind of martyr. And it led me down a rabbit hole looking for the origin of the suffering artist. Back to saints of the Middle Ages: Romantic artists as secular saints to the god of exceptionality, exile, and death itself?

I don’t know. I just know none of this is Romantic. And none of these feelings are conducive to getting the work done.

I read a bit of the article:

Unsure of where the emotion originated from, it could be interpreted that Plath’s rage is not towards any person or matter – she is not a victim of these, but a “victim of her own brilliantly imaginative brain” (Stevenson 1), the protagonist of a self-depicted tragedy. Therefore, the possibility of the unconscious Thanatos playing trick onto Plath’s mind, creating internal drama should also be taken into consideration while reading ‘Edge’. Further, as Kaufman (47) denoted, some poets “may envision the muse as the sole sources of ideas, with themselves serving as a vessel of their creative works”, implying that by placing herself as the protagonist of her works, Plath is placing her mental health at risk, by creating and living in a hopeless world. The intersection of fictional and real worlds might have brought her illusions that her sufferings doubled as she shares feelings with the character she creates, worsening her manic depression.

Interesting speculation. (Not that I follow the author’s line of thinking where muses as sources for ideas implies anything about Path’s choice of the confessional form).

But no matter. I wonder though, all this is to what f-ing end?

Is the implication here: “Aren’t we glad she did it?”, “And now she has the legacy she dreamed of”? “Her self-destruction is the evidence of her true martyr/genius?”

Is this a psychiatry paper or a literature paper? A hagiography?

No speculation is ever put forth without an underlying tenet.

No fact is ever presented free of context.

I remember reading that Plath and Sexton, both conscious of legacy, discussed their suicidal fantasies. That Sexton was pissed Plath beat her to it.

But I may have dreamt that.

It’s probably not a fact.

Dorothea Dix, the 19C reformer knew mental illness. And she wrote that she “dare not” write poetry, and turned to oration. But not all autobiographical work needs to be reflexively ruminative or Confessionalist.

There are such things as facts. Even when facts are feelings. And context can be restructured. Perspectives can broaden.

It may not keep the oxpeckers away, but Thanatos wasn’t the god of poetry. Dionysus was.

It’s 7:25 am. too early for wine.

Brooding on (Art) Forms

(So: not a diary entry today)

I have been listening to interviews on the Penteract podcast, and reading essays about visual poetry and began thinking that perhaps I am not working toward visual poetry – as I’m hearing it “defined” in these places: as necessarily disassociating linguistic symbols from their semantic meanings. That isn’t my goal. I hope that I am still working with visual poetry as it is defined by a community of artists here/there/somewhere? The learning curve here is steep. It doesn’t matter in terms of what I am making, but it matters in terms of getting it out in the world. It matters in terms of community.

What I want to do is use visual elements, textural elements, and semantic elements in dialogue. In a kind of gesamtkunstverk that avoids both illustration and lyricism; the narrative and the line (including movement) are only elements in the whole. 

At the risk of sounding pompous, I want to create a Brechtian artwork that makes the viewer intensely aware of their role as observers –  in terms of a disruption of the audience’s habitual (emotional) response to a text or narrative. But I don’t have any desire to deconstruct the sense of either. 

For example: when the narrative text of a poem dissolves into asemic writing it can take on a lyric quality, I don’t want that quality to be an illustration of the text’s narrative, but it would bring with it its own emotive qualities and push the narrative through a transition that will ultimately, necessarily break down any human narrative. 

All of my work the past few years is integrated with a kind of field-guide observational relationship with nature. From wasps to telomeres. My approach to nature isn’t Romantic at all, I am trying to “ground” the narrative and the unavoidable lyric expression in a larger context with a disruption of perspective. 

I want to flip the metaphor relationship of the lyric poem: human experience is the vehicle, and what we consider the “natural world” is the tenor. It is an attempt to move away from an anthropocentric view. 

What is horrific is natural. Nature is horrific. Yes, there is the deer in the grove. And there is the blacklegged tick on the neck of the deer in the grove. And in the gut of that tick, the Borrelia burgdorferi move through the tick’s body.

There is a reason designers look to the tiny elements of the natural world when creating their monsters. And it’s the same reason we already know them.

Ambivalence and Compliance

The soft light of the alarm clock begins to glow at 4:10 and intensifies so I wake before the recording of the blackbirds begins. I’m grateful for this cheap, but fancy clock. It’s a gentle way to begin the day.

The morning ritual is set. Bathroom to stairwell, to alarm panel, to sliding glass door, all with Leonard at my heels. I put the button to warm up the coffee machine while I drink a glass of water, fill the dog bowl and wait for Leonard to trip back into the house to get his treat. Then I take my coffee to the little library and turn on the computer. From here, all order falls apart.

On days like today, no words come. There is a quiet weight in my chest and an almost neutral calm. I breathe. I suppose this waiting is a form of meditation. Definitely a form of faith: with faith’s discomfort.

There are days when no news, no comment, no achievement can be good enough. When there is still unfulfilled anticipation. Something beyond hope really. It’s a feeling that touches back to childhood and naive expectations of a vague “good” that is just around the corner. Surprise me! Come on.

In two hours my watch alarm will vibrate to remind me to take the medication that keeps that feeling at bay. Or at least keeps it from being much more than a memory of a feeling.

Another cup of coffee for now. Another sober look at the wasp project and the steep learning curve as I pick up paintbrushes and charcoal again. Wishing I had the confidence of anticipating the “good” now.

It’s odd how self-confidence can abandon you as decisively as a disappointed mentor, shrugging and saying, “I guess I was wrong about you”. A sigh. “But keep working… Who knows.”

A sigh is still a breath, I suppose.

Excuse the Rant this Morning

I am in such a rush for this school year to be over I am counting down the weeks in small, manageable units. This begins week 2 of 5 before Easter break. Then 5 again before the summer.

At the same time, I hate that I am willing the weeks to roll by quickly. I’m painfully aware of how precious time is now. I need to find a way to sit with this contradiction, knowing that there’s no way to resolve it. In theory yes: breathe into the discomfort, stay in the moment, find perspective on the emotions. But in praxis?

I know I’m not alone. Just when we thought that the pandemic was over in terms of a real threat to whole communities, new threats flame up like half-forgotten campfires.

I am not happy with my writing this morning, but I can hear the crackling of wood re-igniting. The unpredictable popping. And a sizzle. It seems like a meditative transition from the fires in the world right now: to pull up a campfire. Maybe go sit with one. Away from all the uncontained fury online. I think I need that. I need to get away from the dominant rubric for politics that dominates the media.

I want to understand.

Understanding why someone might do something, seeing their perspective, does not mean endorsing their actions or their perspective. It is also possible to understand and still condemn.

And there is no such thing as pure left and right – it is one hellava messy Venn diagram of issues and opinions and perspectives. I have stopped reading US news sources because of this bizarre divide.

It is especially odd that this binary is solidifying at the same time many people are questioning other binaries. Odd is putting it mildly. It is a kind of hypocrisy.

And it is why I have thought I should leave social media so often. It doesn’t bring people together to promote understanding. It brings them together to reinforce predetermined opinions. To form a front. To intimidate and shut down perspectives that aren’t militantly aligned with their own. Slogan for slogan. Rage is contagious. And rage is rarely helpful. Second-hand rage seems especially fruitless.

I think about what people did to one another under the occupation here. Intentional, accidental. I think about literal and metaphorical witch hunts and the settling of old grudges under convenient new banners – consciously or unconsciously.

Old hates just shift their headlines.

Facebook has lifted its ban on hate speech when it is regarding Russian soldiers. There was a two-week window when hate speech aimed at the Irian leaders was permitted. Facebook is determining – around much of the world – what is “socially” acceptable to hate. Are we thinking about the implications of that while we are reading our feeds?

I think I am smart. But I am uncomfortably aware of how malleable my opinions are, how easily I am swayed without my even noticing. I catch myself now and then going with the flow.

I condemn the actions of Putin as much as anyone I know. But I won’t celebrate dead Russian soldiers. I don’t think those these are inseparable. There are more than two columns to separate the world into.

Real-life is not 0 and 1.

I think a few minutes on the beach with a small bonfire might do me good. This isn’t ending anytime soon. Or ever actually. Waiting for a vacation is just foolish.

Deep breath. Find the awesome things out there and sit with them. Right?

A Dog’s Love Life

The sun is out, but there is a cold and very strong wind rattling the windows. Leonard is barking at the voice coming through E.’s telephone. I’ve been wondering how he knows it is a live person on the other end and not a recording. He’s never barked at my phone when I’ve had podcasts playing. I often wonder how he experiences the world. What he hears and smells, and if there are other senses we don’t know about. How when A. heads over to take him for a walk and she is still out of sight down the street, and he is lying under the coffee table, his tail starts slapping the rug in building anticipation.

But more often I am amazed by his… simplicity. I think he understands two words. Neither one of them is “come”. He will stop when I say “wait”, but still doesn’t respond to “stop”. He’s rewarded with peanut butter randomly when he brings me his kong. But still hasn’t understood that if he were to bring it to me… Sometimes he will be lying alongside me on the sofa and then look up and suddenly nip my nose – as though he’d forgotten I’d been there all along. Little moments of unexpected happiness. I do kind of envy him that.

For the record, the other word he knows is “night-night”. He’ll run down the stairs, down the hall, and launch himself – soaring onto the bed for his half-hour of cuddles. We read until he wanders down to his own bed, and we strip off the dog-friendly comforter and turn off the lights.

And I am totally aware that if anyone reading this is not a dog person, they are very done with my writing now.

My point is that he is in the moment. When he perceives a threat, his hackles rise and he growls. Barks. And when the threat passes, he literally shakes it off. When he is happy, he is happy all over. Then the moment passes. When he is happy again, it is (seems to be) the same surprised and sudden glee. There’s no clinging.

I have no idea what this means. I mean: clearly, dogs have memories. But do they have narratives with those memories? Or are these memories simple associations?

Leonard loves me. If I can use that word here in a way everyone understands in context. It took him a few weeks to bond. It took him over a year to bond with E. But he also loves the man who lives down the street. In a sudden, weirdly overwhelming kind of way. You can see it in his whole body when we near the man’s house. How he stares at the kitchen window hoping to see him. How all of the muscles in his face change when the man walks toward him. I actually feel a pang of jealousy. I don’t get it. I mean, the man is really nice and all, but…

I was thinking maybe we aren’t that different from dogs after all. We do have narratives that build affections and then love. And sometimes: pang. Our heart skips a beat. And we can’t shake it off.

I’ve been thinking about all these images in the media right now. The kind that is… pang: but breaks your heart. I might be important to make sure that I expose myself to the ones that remind me to fall in love, too. That there are narratives that build affection and narratives that build hate: and too often too easily those are intertwined and begin to look inseparable.

They aren’t inseparable. Nuance is important. Perspectives and discourse. But the experience of one good thing, simple and true on its own terms? That matters, too.

We have the time if we take it.

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Resisting Beauty

I have a folder full of photographs of wasps. It’s about learning to appreciate them. “Beauty” is such a strange word. And to be honest, I am not sure how helpful it is in terms of discussing art. Or life.

I think that the power that the natural world has over us is directly correlated to the amount of awe we experience when we observe it. The “beauty” but the tension between what attracts us and what repels us. Not fear and seduction, but fear as a part of that seduction.

It’s what gives a mimetic work life.

An image of the Grand Canyon without the threat of thirst, of venomous creatures, of falling rocks, is merely pretty. As pretty as dead as cut flowers in a vase. Or maybe not: cut flowers in a vase are in the process of dying and do communicate the tension of life and death – attraction and fear.

If we are made to pay attention, that is.

Working with the wasps requires me to take an opposite approach: to see past the fear to find an attraction. To allow myself to be seduced; to find the line along the thin petiole that inspired a generation of women to cinque their waists with wasp-waisted corsets. A fair amount of people thought this was sexy. And that makes sense to me: sex has that tension between attraction and fear (death).

I guess my job – any artist’s job – is to get people to pay attention.

So now – another cup of coffee and back to the drawing board.

Redefining Teaching Artist

I haven’t been this excited about writing since early last year. But really, when I say “writing” it doesn’t exactly mean what it used to mean to me, even a year ago. In the same way that reading no longer means deciphering a printed text, or that text means “text”. All these expanded definitions make room for all the mediums I have intuitively felt are experientially indivisible in praxis.

And as for “poetry”? It brings me back to Robert Bly’s leaping: leaping Aristotles’ gap between recognition and distance. Metaphors and communication of the human experience.

Aristotle said that there was no room for metaphor in scientific discourse. And he used metaphors to make his point. Metaphors are about seeing similarities in dissimilar phenomena. How can we escape metaphor when the first thing we need to do is recognize one another‘s existence as human beings?

Doesn’t it follow that everything we comprehend (defined as an experiential moment) is only comprehended via metaphor? The fundamental illusion is that we think we comprehend/experience the world as it actually is – on its own terms? I think of course of Buddhist thought, but this seems connected also to the Judeo-Christian idea that we can’t know/pronounce God’s true name.

The Aristotelian idea that metaphor in scientific discourse is a placeholder for a lack of precise language seems to presuppose that the goal is to find a codified, rigid word with specific and agreed-upon definitions. A dead transference of “fact”. The philosopher Paul Ricoeur says that when we reach this stage, nothing new can be learned. (I’m rather freely paraphrasing what I understand from his words.)

Does it follow that the naming of God, effectively “kills” God for us?

All these weird lines we draw to control ourselves. To judge ourselves and one another. To hold one another accountable to a dead rubric for our experiences. Our contributions.

Last year when I self-published a mixed media work, I took a step away from what I had aimed for and measured my success by for so many years. This year I am stepping further away from the rubric I have used for “poetry”.

Ezra Pound said, “Make it New”. But now I am thinking about – not making it new – but revealing the new.

So if, as Ricoeur* says, metaphor (poetry) is about creating the conditions for learning something new, every poet is a mentor.

*I know nothing about Ricoeur and am extrapolating based only on a single quote in the article “Aristotle’s A Priori Metaphor”, by Sean Driscoll. This isn’t an attempt to make a clean philosophical claim of any sort: just the morning’s thought process.

Off now to sketch some wasp legs.

What We Take Into Account

Insomnia. And waking wet, and checking online for blood test results. This is life, and I keep telling myself not to fight it or resent any part of it.

My back snaps when I twist in my chair. Arguments that haven’t happened and will never happen run through my head like a polluted river.

But even this is a privilege. I know that now.

Deep breath.

All this memory work and the synchronicity of loss and recovery is a slow squeeze. Yesterday I was thinking about how few good memories I have. Or rather, how few good memories I have allowed myself to keep on hand. I realized this has been a choice I’ve made to protect myself from pain. It has been a way of minimizing loss. Nothing is all bad, but a broad brush can make things easier to deal with. Can justify difficult decisions.

Even in the earliest literature, exile is a fate akin to death. A man without a community will die a slow death of some sort.

(Romeo does return from exile, but that wasn’t really a great decision.)

But how long can a blind man wander the desert in exile before he stumbles onto something venomous? But Oedipus didn’t go it alone. His children led him through it – to another town, where he was accepted. Then the earth swallowed him. Sophocles didn’t write about the years of wandering. He wrote a happy ending: death in the bosom of a community.

Maybe I will write about the desert years. What dies out there, what doesn’t.

I will write about what and who we bump into out there. How we can reach out to people we once knew – but, now feeling the contours of their faces with our fingers, we know them intimately for the first time. It is possible.

There are hundreds of movies about the people who meet one another during a “time out” from their normal social configurations. The teenagers in different cliques who bond, then go back to their normal lives with only a private wink between them. The midlife office worker who finds joy on an island vacation then tucks it away as a buoyant memory and goes back to their desk.

I have always found these movies depressing. Claustrophobic.

What about choosing not to go back? Not in a Shirley Valentine kind of way, but choosing not to go back to a community at all?

Schechner said that we had to get naked to leave our socially-prescribed roles and acknowledge one another’s humanity. It is an interesting metaphor that didn’t work well as a stage practice. The problem may have been that stripping the clothing, stripped the individual’s specific identity in a hierarchy, but it reinforced and magnified the socially prescribed roles of our bodies in the community. What is a female body in a community that commodifies sexuality in terms of product and consumer? An asymmetrical body in a community that commodifies a particular kind of beauty in a hierarchy of desire and influence?

Artaud said that it is the community that rots the individual (loosely paraphrasing). He thought there might be a way out. Beyond. But it never really worked out.

Maybe the problem is that life isn’t art. There is no way to will it/shape life into a pleasing dramaturgy. We can only tell ourselves stories with the material life gives us.

We choose our stories. We choose what we take into account.

Not an Armchair General

I left the US when I was 27 and I spent the entire first year in a huge transition. (I’ve written about this before). I was 5 months in the hospital with a difficult pregnancy, the rest of the time I wanded the coastline with all of the abandoned trenches and bunkers from the years of Nazi occupation. I talked to people whose houses were commandeered by generals. Who worried about who to trust.

All these things I had read about in school, but never knew as anything more real than a fairy tale.

My grandfather fought in WWII, but didn’t bring it home. For me, taking part in armed conflicts from America seemed like politicians sitting in a deer stand and deciding where and when to shoot based on the angle of the story – the more profitable alliance. While Peter Paul and Mary protested interventions in South America. While famous people negotiated with people “over there”.

But “over there” is here now, and in part because of my age and situation, it all became real.

When my kids were in elementary school, they walked a block to enter the building that was a Nazi-run hospital during the war. When we walked the dog, we passed the graves of the British pilots who crashed here trying to reach the resistance fighters.

A few years ago, at a party in the south, the host showed me the bottom of the plates in the cupboard – they had the Nazi eagle on them. “What do I do with these?”

One of my kids is now in the military and stationed on the Russian border. My husband is on active reserve – goes on exercises a couple of times a year. There are some things they don’t tell me, and some things I don’t ask about because I know they can’t answer. The government tells us to have iodine on hand.

The line between paranoia and caution is thin right now.

All of the Americans in my feed saying, “Why don’t we just…”, “We should just…”, the Americans thinking NATO is about American interests only. I get it. Been there. Where it is theoretical. Where it is all “just”.

One woman wrote that NATO should engage because Putin only has “short-range missiles”. That’s well and dandy for America, as my grandfather would have said. (At least until the submarines reach the range.) One guy writes that the main point is to break and humiliate Putin.

That’s not what I think the main point is.

The national news’ clickbait has become propaganda, “This is the photo Putin doesn’t want you to see.”

That makes me nervous.

There is a wrong way to put out a fire. Not that I know the right way, but at least I know what I do not know, and I know that nothing is ever “just”.

In any sense of the word.

This is why I am not writing poetry of witness at the moment. I am too aware of what I am not actually witnessing. Too confused by the distances and the very real tug of what I am not able to fully comprehend.

I am not turning my back. I am listening.