Ren Powell's Blog, page 20

Expanding My Vocabulary

Wasps don’t have lungs.

And I am not sure what to make of this. I am working on a new project and learning about an insect that seems to be primarily known to exterminators.

There are over 150,000 species of wasps and a new one was discovered just last year here in Norway. She is beautiful. Iridescent blues and greens with a rust-colored abdomen. It is a kind of emerald wasp – or cuckoo wasp. They are kleptoparasitic, which is an amazing word.

When these wasps are threatened, they can curl up into a ball to protect themselves. It’s called volvation. Which is another delicious word.

Yesterday I spent the entire day surfing the net, discovering so many book artists and visual poetry artists. In these difficult days, with so much pain and so much fear, it is good to take the time to see what beauty we are also capable of finding.

Making.

It is how we cope with the realities of the world, after all.

I’m off to paint.

On Not Being a Reactive Artist

This morning I am making significant changes in how I use social media. This is part of a huge shift in my priorities in general. How I want to use my time. In some ways, it feels odd to do this now. It seems self-serving. Focusing on that very first circle of awareness at a time when there is so much immediate trauma in the distant reaches of my awareness.

I keep reminding myself that it is about balance. And about making room for genuine responses to the larger world. I do nothing to benefit the world, passing on memes or summarizing what I read in a news article. I have to acknowledge and then give up the desire to be the “first to know”. The currency of relevance. I am not relevant in terms of current events.

But I do have something to give.

I remember my publisher referring to books as “ferske varer” – produce that goes quickly out of date. And I get that – in our market-driven system – that is a fact. But I figure there has to be another way of approaching art. A way to avoid being swept up in the attention economy, the consumerist throw-away society.

I don’t think I am advocating preciousness. Just attention.

This is my problem. I’m not making blanket statements about the state of the arts.

I know there are artists who strive to make that one beautiful thing. And there are artists who are driven by other (legitimate) impulses. I think that I have spent years waiting for inspiration, in the sense that I have been expecting that the outside world would cause a worthy reaction: “The artist responds to their culture”, “Art needs to be relevant”. Relevant to who or to what? My culture – our culture changes so quickly. Maybe change itself is the only thing one can honestly respond to.

I need to slow down. Step away from social media’s armchair generals, and the what-I-ate-for-dinner photos. I need to turn off the podcasts I’ve been listening to for hours a day. I need quiet.

It may be age? If it is, so be it. Maybe I am old enough to recognize what stays. To be concerned with what stays.

Maybe art dies. The way Peter Brook talks about a deadly theater, I think there are deadly artworks on the walls of galleries, too. In books.

I’ve written seven books, including one that was consciously “relevant” and is dead to me now. I don’t want to do that again.

I don’t want to grasp at the present.

I’m making clay from recycled paper. An ouroboros in praxis.

Shhhhh.

This is not a treatise. It is a diary entry. Nothing more.

One of Those People

Early this fall, I ran across a clip from a DV8 production, and about two minutes into the scene I was slammed with a memory. The cutting edge of a memory – not of having seen the clip or the production, but of something from my childhood. One of those emotions without a name. No story, no features, but as vivid as the taste of something turned sour and effervescent. Something wrong. Dangerous.

I can’t place it. I don’t want to place it. And I know enough about memory to know there is really no point in trying. The imagination is powerful and will find reasons.

I used the clip then, and again since then, for teaching because it’s a good demonstration of dynamics and movement. And because, in some way, my allowing this in and holding it in my gut for those few minutes and in the echoing hours, I feel like I am paying some kind of tribute to that child I was. Respect for whatever she had that got her through.

Memory is weird, and it stitches things together in ways that make the world both more bearable and more complicated than it needs to be. I may be projecting the ambiance of a known event onto something else, following a trail of music. Footsteps on gravel. Or a gesture. A shadow. Because some hurts aren’t easily contained.

Early this morning I saw a brief film clip on Twitter and that same taste returned. That same fear. And again, it made no sense, since the film was made in the late 90s. But set in the 70s. Something in the music. Something in the angle of a jawbone. I have no idea. But I sit with it after the fact. I sit with a raw ache.

On this morning’s beach run, E. asks me if the memory writing is affecting me more than I know. And I deny it, and I talk a lot about who-remembers-what.

Then I realize that this is all about grief.

My trauma is not what you think it is. What I was told it was. What breaks “those people” is not always what we want to believe it is. We don’t want to look at the subtle and dangerous ways people move through the world. What they casually do to one another in the daylight. The real monsters are never what we expect.

Jimmy is dead. So is the father who was not my father, and the mother who chose not to mother. And I was and have been so many things along the way to now.

I am sharp as a bone knife. I am resonant as rosewood.

A loss will leave a hole. But a hole is not without purpose: a sound hole in a rosewood guitar will amplify a melody.

And forgive me if that metaphor is ridiculously strained. I need a nap.

In Our Hearts

Thursday already. A free week flying by – though in a witch on a broom kind of way despite the sunshine. I wake up every morning and wonder if I should check the news first thing. Before writing, before coffee, before anything else. And I do. And I am left with the same exact uncomfortable anticipation.

Wanting, hoping… that is not the same as anticipation. There’s a horrible, unspeakable desire for it to be “over” before it gets worse. It is what I want. But not what I anticipate will happen.

I was wondering when my social media feeds would return to normal and am disappointed to see how quickly they are. Sort of. And I am only sort of disappointed. I mean, this really isn’t something that will be solved or “over” quickly, and the days go on as they do where we are – yes, with a shadow over them – but there is still dinner to cook, and evenings to be filled with something other than a meditation on pain.

This whole thing makes me wish I were one to give blessings before dinner. I suddenly understand the whole purpose of such a beautiful ritual. I never imagined that “the starving children in China” blessings had any potential to be anything more than racist, guilt-inducing tactics to make children in privileged countries eat vegetables.

Only now am I understanding that gratitude can be disconnected from guilt. This is how we can experience the small, but significant moments of joy.

This disconnection (guilt from gratitude) is probably the only way that gratitude can ease the pain of living. And dying.

It’s not a new question: How much do we take on ourselves in terms of the world’s pain? In solidarity? In community? How much do we do so in self-preservation – out of fear – as performance – as opportunists?

How much of today’s private moments of ease do we turn our backs on in deference to future and potential troubles? How do we honor and acknowledge the suffering of so many, while authentically acknowledging our own ignorance, avoiding masquerading/appropriation… How do we unashamedly focus on gratitude rather than guilt?

Computer language is binary, but the real world isn’t either/or.

What can we hold in our arms? “This, too.”

“And also…”

Under one arm are my private sorrows: my own struggles and the pain belonging to people I love (and am losing right now). Under the other, the knowledge I have of all of the people who are (violently) losing their loved ones or facing the (violent) loss of their own lives.

Exactly how do we carry the joy?

I have never been an occasional poet.

I think that’s because at some point I realized that my best writing comes from the body.

Writing is difficult right now.

So far was so good…

in terms of actually writing every morning. But I slid into this morning sideways for some reason. Maybe the obscene ambush of last night’s poetry reading bothered me more than I’d like to admit.

Maybe it was just too much on top of the memory work I’ve been doing. Too much on top of the ranting of the Beat poets, and a day’s worth of everyone needing to have a say on something so few can speak authentically to?

I finished the exquisite corpse poem rubric last night. A grid with 1024 possible poems: permutations of 4 dramatic elements and 5 stories.

Snap, crackle, pop: the sounds of the wasps. And now on to the poem of erasure.

No essay today. At least… not now.

To Cry, “Hold, hold!”

The lateral flow tests have been negative all along, but I’ve had something – something that is finally letting go. It’s getting just a little bit easier to move around in my body. To think of running again and morning yoga.

Nothing can ever go back to normal – back to anything. It never could, though only now do I feel the truth of that acutely. The universe is in a slow deconstruction but every moment brings new (sometimes beautiful, sometimes terrifying) constellations. However fleeting each will be. Maybe the art of living is to notice, then to let go of all of them as they pass.

There has to be a reason humans have always wanted to fix their experience of the world in stone. It seems to me that classical Greek artwork is an attempt to capture the past. Because a smooth thigh is always nostalgia. The visible maps that living etches into a forearm, over a chest, are the present and the inevitable future. The present, breathing body is more threat than comfort. Every inhalation of oxygen is destructive.

In the absence of oxygen human life is measured in minutes. In the presence of oxygen, normal metabolism generates reactive species (ROS) that have the potential to cause cell injury contributing to human aging and disease.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213231715000336

What gives us life, inevitably kills us. So often used as a metaphor, our need to breathe is a cliche that is impossible to break down to its basic, startling truth. It is so ingrained in the art of language that it has become necessary to reverse engineer the metaphor. Breathing is like being in love with the wrong person.

Breathing is like belonging to a family, a community, a nation.

The Romans celebrated the struggle. The statues’ sinewy arms in battle with creatures real and imagined. The faces are expressive and contorted. Though still nostalgic. En medias res, we want to cry out, “Stop, stop” before it’s too late. We want to stop one another/ourselves.

But caught in stone, it is never too late. The sculpture can still generate the feeling of hope: that things will go back to normal.

I could subtitle this essay Art as Momentary Comfort.

What Goes Viral

I’m going through another round of insomnia. E. and I go through a kind of checklist of what might be keeping me up nights and days. We both expect it to be like a button: when we name it, I’d get some kind of an electric shock to light up the path from initial thought to anxiety. But no. My conscious mind is as flat as a salt lake.

Nothing is bothering me.

But the news is filled with headlines to provoke the most gut-wrenching responses. And on social media artists of all kinds are using the war to promote their own careers/identity: “support” the cause by purchasing my books because I am donating proceeds to…

My son reminds me that people are more often acting from a place of good intentions than exploitation. I can’t help but see a variation of Mother Courage, in a culture where image means even more than capital.

But I vow to push that image aside and to stop myself from assuming the worst in people’s motives.

The pharmacies in Norway are almost out of iodine tablets. So once again I ask myself what is overreacting, and what is naively hoping for the best? Even in the event of a nuclear explosion, people over 40 don’t need iodine supplements, according to the national news. I feel relieved. And I also remember I still have iodine drops in the cupboard left-over from my brief foray into a vegan diet. I relax a little.

I wrote that before I realized that foray is a military term.

The UN released a new climate report.

I’m sure everyone can guess the summary.

I remind myself that these are not post-apocalyptic times. And if they are apocalyptic times, well then what’s new in the large scale of the world? Why not here and now? But the thing is, the apocalypse itself? It won’t happen in a cut-away – before the story picks up again, what’s left of us wandering in fur coats, ripping at dried meat with our teeth.

I ask what I can do. Knowing that cluttering the internet with memes and potential disinformation isn’t helping anyone. Knowing I am not a qualified armchair general, and that my perspective on events I have no first-hand knowledge of is irrelevant and only adds to the noise. What can I do?

There are monks and nuns who will sit in a cave for years to (in essence) pray for the world. I wish I believed in that kind of supernatural power.

What I do believe is that if I take a chunk of time in the day to focus on compassion, it might linger in my heart the rest of the day. It might guide my words and my actions.

Maybe I can believe there is some kind of supernatural chain-reaction of compassion mirror neurons (as there clearly is for anger and fear). Maybe it is real and maybe it matters. One person at a time.

A virus spread around the world that way.

Something Warm

Kristin Berkey-Abbot has an urge to knit.

And I get it. She says that there is a factory that will produce better socks than she could ever knit, but that she has a “yearning” to knit. And, boy, do I get it.

This year I am teaching master classes in the Movement for Stage courses. Using the techniques I learned from Jeff Corey long ago – rooted in method acting, but much saner than pulling your teeth. At least as I teach them as I have come to understand them working with students over the years.

I talk about how words are often rendering of what we want to do. Stanislavski broke it down into thought actions, speech actions, and physical actions. And while I don’t believe these arise in any prescriptive order, physical actions are what the body understands and “feels” regardless of whether the actions are implemented.

I make the students stomp their feet while they say, “NO!”. Repeatedly, then without stomping. The physical truth of the action still lives in the body and the voice as energy. As impulse. It is still communicated.

Right Perspective, Right Speech, Right Actions. In acting, we may not aim for “right” but we aim for “true”.

I tell a student to punch (the hand of) her partner while saying her lines. Then we hold the student back so she isn’t physically able to punch. She uses the words only.

I tell a student to hug her acting partner while saying her lines. We tell her that her partner is inconsolable and the stakes are high. We come with specific scenarios of isolation and despair. Then we literally hold her back from her partner and say, “Hug and comfort them – and say your lines!”

Oh, how we want to hug a whole nation of people right now! Wrap them in soft socks and blankets and give them a cup of hot cocoa and press our cheek into the hair on the back of their heads.

An impulse that bypasses thoughts and words, that first arrives in the body.

“I am here for you.” Though I am not.

So I get it. There is a spot on my body, somewhere near the solar plexus, that rises up in recognition of the urge.

I wish I could knit.

Instead, I will hold this urge and try to let it guide me in whatever I am able to do in the world. And I will not give in to helplessness or misdirect my frustration.

And I will try to acknowledge the truth of my (non)involvement. My ambivalence regarding war. My cowardice regarding violence. My fears for my own nation and family on a cutting edge of the Russian state.

Maybe right now the truth is that I have an eye on Sweden and am saying let’s build a blanket fort right here, we’ll invite Finland and pretend none of this is happening. All of the monsters are locked in the closet. All of the energy disperses through my fingers typing too quickly.

I know that’s not the Right Perspective at all. So I squirm in my chair trying to find a different angle on the situation.

There are those guerilla artists who cover trees in yarn.

Let’s cover Ukrainia in yarn. And Europe and Russia, and the whole bleeding world while we’re at it.

Hug, Squeeze, Pet, Nuzzle, Embrace, Swaddle, Clasp, Cuddle… Hold.

Life Disassembled

Promising myself to read the news a day late from now on. By then I figure what is not true will be caught out, or by then the “truth” will be irrelevant but the consequences real. Either way, I have no need to be on the front lines of information. I’ve no expertise in sorting, or in contextualizing all of these perspectives. Don’t mistake this for apathy.

Being cautious is also an act of compassion.

But after this morning, witnessing E. dealing with a transient physical pain, after hearing him curse and watching him shudder. I have been thinking about pains. There is evidence that the brain registers different kinds of pain as overlapping, neurological patterns in the brain. A stubbed toe. Hurt feelings. And I would argue shame is also a form of pain. Our language isn’t a coincidence. Our metaphors may not be logical, but they are not arbitrary.

I’ve also heard that our brain can only process one pain source at a time. The left toe. The lower back, etc. But I’m pretty sure this is a myth. I asked E. today if he wanted me to stomp on his toe to distract him from his pain. He declined.

Even if there is a scientific fact here – on a molecular level – our consciousness is slow and sticky. And certainly, heartache doesn’t disappear with a stomachache. Because the ache in the heart is not a metaphor when it is in the body and not projected onto a scene in a poem.

I’ve spent a couple of weeks trying to sort out a response to my son’s question about visual poetry, “What is poetry, then?” I’ve been struggling with it, drawing, diagramming. Constructing Rube Goldberg machines.

I thought poetry is the vehicle that transfers the memory of experience from one human to another. It’s about recognition and community. An art object with a social function.

But what about improvisational arts? Where the vehicle is conjured, in concert with the receiver, with no intention on the part of the artist? The artist is a facilitator and the experience is immediate, not re-constructed. This, too.

So is poetry also a verb? One that describes the activity in the moment the receiver recognizes her own experience as kin to that of the artist. And vice versa. We know what it is to be the human-animal right now. Under the language. Under the intellect. Our bodies come into our awareness, as their own form of intelligence. The body/mind, whose own language is entirely unintelligible to our thinking mind.

We may as well be watching/hearing/feeling bees buzz. And allowing ourselves to just sit with it. No close reading. No critical analysis. Those are elements of the autopsy.

Poetry is a secret door to the truly surreal. Poetry is the anti-conceptual experience.

This is why, in my mind, poetry is no more defined by beauty or order than a painting is defined by “green”.

I always take the long way around to find the same basic ideas in everyone else’s manifestos. At least nearly the same. I am convinced that the greatest human need is belonging, precisely because our greatest human reality is our isolation from one another. Language brings us close – poetry brings us close – but just as the like poles of magnets can never truly align, neither can we. There is tension there. Here. This is also a deep truth we recognize in our bodies.

The bottom drops out on us sometimes. Or – maybe more often – we are standing next to someone when it drops out from under them, and we feel it. We make the leap despite all that repels us from one another: an understanding and a recognition that, as soon as we put it into words and images, is gone: sucked up into tropes – dead symbolism.

Poetry is the death of itself and the source of itself.

Beautiful, and absolutely not beautiful.

Between the Headlines

On my second glass of wine. That’s a fact. It’s not 4.30 am, but nearly bedtime. The beginning of a week-long vacation, though with a long list of things to do.

I scroll through Facebook and Twitter and all that is there – because all of it is real. The silly cat videos, the bad jokes, the rage. And the war.

I feel stupid saying, “I always wondered…” but at some point, I began wondering how people in Europe lived day to day through WW2. What they filled their inner monologues with while making breakfast, washing clothes, walking the dog, doing homework… painting or writing.

Even in the thick of it, I assume you don’t survive by filling every breath with fear and grief. I mean, can the human body transform that into an exhalation of joy? Even the tiny joys that spark a giggle, that sets of a chain reaction of giggles that culminates in a sob? And the cycle continues. Thre must be just enough joy to see us through? We need to allow ourselves to take in the good, too.

I don’t know. Victor Frankl wrote about man’s search for meaning. But Primo Levi did – or didn’t – take his own life after surviving the unthinkable: the inconsolable grief, or the absurd existence. Or an overwhelming, existential responsibility: be your own god?

Take your pick.

There are people who die in the time between the moment the powerful men sign the documents until the then-agreed-upon moment soldiers actually stop shooting. Are there moments of joy then? A dirty joke in the trenches? Or a whole afternoon miles and miles away from it all? Because even after the shooting stops, there will be moments of grief.

Here’s a secret. I had recurring nightmares for a few months when my kids were in elementary school. We lived next to the school building, actually. It had been a Nazi-run hospital during the war. During the occupation.

I dreamt over and over again that World War III had begun. But my passport was blue, and my children’s were red. We walked through the moors and we were being sorted. Blue. Red.

It was during those months that I would wake and not know who I was. I would have to piece together my identity bit by bit as I lie there in a hypnogogic state. I would begin with my body in the bed, in the room, in the house. Who else was in the house? Could I move my left hand? What was my husband’s name? Like an alien slipping into character. Bit by bit (of information).

My grandparents were still alive then. Both of them. My grandfather who fought in the war; who saw the bones in his forearm while shielding his eyes when test bombs exploded over Bikini Island; who said “America was the greatest country in the world”. I wasn’t ready to renounce my citizenship. Not because I believed him. But because I loved him. I wasn’t ready to cut off the thread-bare ties I had to… to what? Memory? A constructed identity? I couldn’t entirely let go.

But my children. When people would marvel over how wonderful their English was? Every compliment from a stranger was a weird twist of othering. I was the other in their constructed identities. I was the other in my own children’s eyes. The Norwegian government reminded me now and then that they were not “my children”, they were citizens of Norway.

Mind you, I’m not comparing this to anything. I only dreamt of war. And I am no prophet.

Now when I wake in the morning, I know where I am. And I am acutely aware of how far away my children are. From me. From one another. And how the world is a place in continual upheaval: there, or there, or why not right here now? The unthinkable…

Unthinkable, until you knew it all along?

There are photos of protesters all over the BBC. Of people fleeing their homes. One woman’s bloody and bandaged face seems to be headlining all of the news sites.

But on Facebook, I run across an old photo of two men embracing. One of them is dead now. But in the photo, his friend is embracing him – no, his friend is bracing him – from behind. The friend’s chin is resting on his shoulder. One hand grasping a bicep, the other a shoulder. The friend has a tight-lipped smile. The friend’s eyes are open but cast downward. I search for an adjective. It is something like reverent. He seems to be holding him in the moment. Grounding him. Giving him permission to feel.

And the man who is now dead? Both hands are touching his friend’s arm. Palms open and cupping the forearm. Accepting the support. Eyes closed, head tilted upward.

This, too, is life. A moment that is real. I have no idea what was really going on as this photo was taken. But the gesture to give comfort, and to accept comfort, is clear.

Chadwick Boseman died not long after this photo was taken.

May we all have friends to hold us, and to ground us, and to brace us for the joy as well as the sorrows. Because god knows, we are going to have plenty of both. Maybe at the same time.

Even those of us not in the heart of the destruction.