Ren Powell's Blog, page 21

In the Shadow of a Volcano

I slept in this morning. An old-fashioned flu is tap dancing in my head. And the news is unsettling. Understatement. The news is terrifying. Overstatement. I have made a decision to choose a few media outlets and not get my information from social media.

There is a voice in my head that says that continuing to write and put everyday meditations out there, cluttering the air-conditioned and carbon-emitting servers, is wrong.

But then: Do I just shut up, and give my life over to a single aspect of what is real right now? War has always been real somewhere in the world. What is the appropriate response? To quasi-educate myself on “this just in” facts that are often not exactly facts in retrospect? Often opinions and often unwitting reproduction of propaganda for some covert (to me) agenda. That’s not paranoia, that is reality. I am trying to un-load the propaganda of my own opinions, which are also a form of bias.

And I am not telling myself to be neutral. We border Russia. And blood-of-my-blood is literally on the line. I am not neutral.

There is a video on the news: Putin dressing down the head of his own foreign intelligence service. I don’t know that I have ever seen a man so terrified.

And I don’t know that I am not reading something into the video. I am not sure who would qualify as an “expert” in body language. And I would not claim that, but after teaching movement for stage (body language) for more than 20 years, I would say I have consciously observed enough to be justified going with my gut feeling here.

I wish I weren’t. I wish I could unsee the fear. Because now it is in my own body. Mirror neurons and all that.

Today I want to work on a particular poem sequence with erasure that is part of the wasp project. I feel guilty for turning back to such a personal subject matter.

And my body is completely confused. The mirror neurons set in motion. The image of Putin, leaning back, sighing, chuckling. It brings up memories of helplessness that my body can not sort, or shake off. The hide-under-the-desk drills, the step-father cleaning his gun…

Again, my doctor’s words (recklessly paraphrased): no matter the veracity of the details of the narrative, the emotions are real.

The neurons record. So maybe I can keep my head down in a small bubble of time and space and trust that my personal little project is still universal.

Then I can look up and take in what I can of the world here and now. Weaving, sewing myself in and out of the fabric of community?

That life isn’t an either/or of the individual and the community – it is a messy and very unregulated, self-deceiving geothermal pool. In the shadow of a volcano.

Too Much Information

Wednesday morning. And maybe the only thing left that resembles a routine right now is this early morning writing. I haven’t run in nearly a week. I haven’t cooked. Two days ago Leonard jumped down from the bed and hurt his forefoot. So walks have been pared to a minimum. I’m living on lithium, paracetamol, mozzarella cheese, water, and wine. And that probably isn’t a good thing.

I’m napping daily on the couch, one arm thrown around Leonard. And I find myself looking for the next flashing signpost to tell me how to return to “normal”. Where to go to where I will recognize my body and its habits. Every bruise, every stiff muscle, every low-grade fever, and added pound is a surprise. A weird game of “sweat and spin” that brings back memories of elementary school recesses, arms wide, spinning till we drop on the grass and lie there until the earth is still again.

But it’s never really still. I am too sensitive to the world despite the medication. I still feel every uncomfortable bite. In Rhodes, I swam in the ocean and there were small translucent fish whose nibbles stung like mosquito bites. On my calves. thighs. They would swarm and dart away. So many, so elusive, that I began to wonder if it wasn’t my imagination entirely. A few – a single – fish perceived as a school?

Everything in the water is a threat, but am too lethargic to respond. I lie on the couch and the world spins. Hypomania submerged under pressure, not dispersed. A rabbit shaking in the bushes. Still shaking in the bushes.

A distorted response to a colleague slips past the salt fields. A play-doh version of me. Better to stay at home, one arm around Leonard. Cringe is a popular word lately. A kind of aren’t-we-so-adorable/awful word. No one taking themselves too seriously.

But there’s no self-irony in shame.

And there’s no comfortable way around or alongside the word compliance. You just have to stay in the water.

The Assumption of Uselessness

I woke at three this morning. Seems that my body is rejecting any kind of comfortable routine right now. The covid tests are negative. And it’s as if no one has permission to be any other kind of ill now. Yet after two years of hand sanitizer and no touching, it’s like the first month of kindergarden: every bug roaming the building hits the body like an unfamiliar saboteur.

Suck it up. Have another cup of coffee and an over-the-counter pain killer. Get on with it.

This pandemic came when my life naturally split into the third – and final – phase. If we talk about the life cycles of female wasps there is a before, a goo, a (biologically mandated) reproductive adulthood – or – a non-reproductive servitude, and death. But humans in all our complexity are only somewhat gooey before the reproductive (servitude, choice, willfully overruled) weirdly overlapping phase of what it is to be a child and a grown-up. We are goo again before we fly through as many years again, with no need to chew indigestible fibers and spit out nests. No need to willfully overrule social expectations.

I am trying to embrace the freedom of this “assumed uselessness”.

I know this is not the truth of all human cultures. At all times. But this is the experienced reality of my here and now. And what to do with it?

K. tells me about the senior grant available. Teachers get a few months off unpaid, and a stipend to pay for a course or project of some sort in their field of study. I guess it’s assumed someone my age has paid off their mortgage already and can live off savings for a few months.

The purpose of the grant is to encourage older teachers to keep the spark of interest in their subject and stay in full-time employment longer.

In praxis, I believe that the education department is at odds with itself when it comes to how much they want older teachers to stay in their jobs. There is a continual emphasis on novelty and criticism disregard of past practices. There’s no sense of critically-designed evolution, but a series of “fresh starts”.

Interest in the subject isn’t the problem. Neither is the ability to “think new”.

People who research the subject say that younger people are more likely to think out of the box. But that older people are better able to combine approaches and find new, functional permutations based on experience. But then, people who research the subject often have a vested interest in the outcome of these kinds of studies. After all, the criteria for success will be redefined with every iteration of the study.

The potter wasp is solitary. She builds a nest, fills it with caterpillars, lays an egg, and leaves. She moves on to the next field and begins building a new nest: the same – but different.

I am craving the same – but different.

I can’t in good conscience apply for the senior grant. I don’t think a renewed spark of interest in my subject would motivate me to stay in full-time employment as a teacher longer than I have to.

Not this kind of teacher.

Next week is winter break and I can spend every day in the studio.

And not be held accountable for students’ satisfaction scores. By the time they eat their caterpillars and go through the goo, I will be in another field entirely.

A Closed System

For some reason, the word press box to the right of the screen is showing me a reminder that “transparent text may be hard for people to read”. I’m confused because I’ve never used transparent text. At least not since writing secret messages in elementary school, using lemon juice. Wait. No. that’s not transparent text, is it?

Disappearing. Reappearing. There’s another memory. Beach towel, shag carpet, tire swing. Monkey bars, dandelion flavors, an enormous model of the human ear.

Guitar, bell-bottoms, foam hair curlers.

I am just picking up random things in my past. It’s a bit like an allergy scratch-test. Does this one cause an inflammatory response? This one? There’s nothing therapeutic about it. I’m just curious.

Knowing doesn’t change the alignment of molecules. Erasing/rewriting the text doesn’t rewind the sequence of events set in motion. It begins something new. As new as the world gets.

We are messy. With an odd compulsion to put things in order.

I’m wondering about the process in which paper wasps turn plant fiber into paper. Plant to pulp to two hundred neat, hexagonal chambers lining an umbrella. Order into chaos into order. Larvae deconstruct in a cocoon. Reconstruct with wings. Order into chaos into order.

My project is still without a name. A proper title. One of the people in the WIP misunderstood and thought I’d titled it Exquisite Corpse.

But no. Exquisite Corpse is just the methodology of the world. My methodology moving through memories. It is context, not subtext.

Not the text itself.

Over now to my process journal. These things have a way of spilling one into the other. But at least, this way, nothing is entirely lost.

What is Ithaca?

Today I feel like things are falling into place. I am tempted to search through these morning essays to see where I have felt that before – to see how it went all wrong. In some ways, I already know. I know where an aim was slightly off-course, where a goal was masquerading as something other than it was. How beginning with the doing takes on a burden of producing.

It’s like a whack-a-mole game with capitalist values, status, and the quasi-religious imperative of usefulness.

At what point do I give in to my own desires? Keep my head down and work?

I’ve not really given death much thought. In so many ways, that is a good thing. I have lived each day with what it brought. I’m satisfied with that. I haven’t reached any brass rings, but I’ve experienced more than I could have imagined had I tried to map out a life-thus-far.

Those minutes in 2017, in the ambulance when I thought I was dying, I asked myself if I said what needed to be said to everyone I loved. Did they know? Know I loved them. Know I was sorry for those times I was not loving toward them?

That lasted about half an hour. Then the threat passed. The blood began flowing again. And I just thought: all in all, I am doing okay.

But now. This understanding of time from another perspective: I have more questions. More self-serving questions that I am going to allow myself to address. Without guilt.

It turns out, the answers are bringing a kind of weird calmness. No more whack-a-mole.

I’ve said before that I asked all the important questions before the age of twelve. Including “Where does all the garbage go?”. “What happens when the cemeteries are full”. “If there’s a God, then… ”

A pat on the head. A glass of water, and off to bed.

Before the age of twelve, we encourage one another to paint, draw, write, dance. But it seems we do it as though we are facilitating some kind of audition for the future sorting. This is your lane. Stay in it.

The downside of the hive aspect of human eusocial behavior.

Dystopian writers have already thought about this. Stories that speak directly to the fears of teens and adults alike. How am I being culled? Limited. (The Giver, Divergent, etc.)

After twelve, I had found – for whatever reason – that I had no backbone.

“Your work here is derivative”. A pat on the head. Nice try. Find something else. Back to the starting line.

I am reverting to my childhood now. I’m napping even. Shamelessly. Joyfully. Like waking up after having been under a spell. Remembering the original quest.

And I am not going to justify anything anymore.

A woman in an experimental poetry WIP group mentioned Ithaca:

Seeing Myself Seeing

This morning I have been thinking about what I want out of life. Not in terms of a stockpile of accomplishments or acquisitions. But which moments do I want to squeeze from the days? What does a good day look like?

I haven’t really been taking photos since the end of summer. And it feels like I have lost that particular practice of meditation. The noticing. The meta-awareness of my own limited perspective through the lens.

This morning there is a cluster of snowbells sheltering under the dormant hedge in the front yard. A promise.

I took a picture.

I’m not sure why. I could have come back to the little library and written about it – as I am doing. But why that, then, too? What’s up with this need to see myself seeing? To document my perspective?

With all that I’m learning about this stage of life, sometimes second-hand, it seems like an obligation to notice the world while I’m still in it. It goes back to that perennial question: what am I doing here? Maybe all I owe the world is my gratitude to a cluster of snowbells on a morning after a storm.

And once again, I hold to my belief that we have the concept of metaphors entirely backward. Our experience is always the vehicle, and nature itself is the tenor. Our art is always in service to nature.

Insert a Venn diagram where we are a small circle in the larger circle of the natural world.

Maybe it is a pantheist idea to think our purpose is to be in service to the world? And maybe it’s self-serving to think that if I can be in harmony, it will contribute to a more harmonious world? To think that my perspective could serve to open other people’s perspectives?

But what if I’m an unwittingly altruist ant in a crowded nest, thinking I am working for myself? In which case, my (self-)perceived egoism is nothing to worry about.

When I think about perfect days, I think about all the things E. and I filled our days with when we were falling in love. Drinking hot chocolate in the dunes after dark. Finding silly things-we’ve-never done to do together: surfing, landscape-drawing courses, trekking the Hardanger plateau. The excuse about everyday obligations taking over doesn’t cover it. There were everyday obligations on those days as well. It may have felt like time out-of-time, but it wasn’t. And what if our idea of cause & effect here is all wrong? What if the feelings didn’t spark the experiences, but the experiences (the willingness to experience) sparked the feelings?

Once again, nothing new here. A cliché idea from any self-development course or marriage-counseling session. But once again, experience cannot be learned by rote.

So I keep writing it down.

And I will give myself permission to continue with this memoir project. Out of my comfort zone and crossing genres. So much to learn. So many ways to fail. So, like crossing the plateau: one careful step in front of another. Staying in the moment, which does mean to focus from one, specific perspective.

One at a time.

The Better Part of Valour

We are at a strange place in this pandemic. More hospitalizations than ever. But fewer people on respirators. It’s five a.m. and I already have a handful of students home with the virus. The messages ticked in on my work app overnight. I expect more.

My back aches and I’m still dealing with night sweats. Wondering if I need to find a test. Wondering what the rules are this week for all that. The loosening of the rules means a heightening of anxiety. More personal responsibility, I guess.

In Norwegian, the word for discretion is more commonly used than it is in English. At least that’s my impression. When my supervisor at work refuses to give me a clear guideline on a sticky issue: “Bruk skjønn”. I know then I risk being thrown under the bus if things go sideways. “Bruk skjønn” when the representatives of government institutions choose to bend the rules: the personal discretion of bureaucrats. At least when rules seem unfair, they don’t feel personal. Or dependent on the quality of the morning’s cup of coffee, or traffic. Or whether you remind someone of their mother-in-law. Whether you are someone’s mother-in-law. Whether your party is “safer” than someone else’s funeral. Use your own discretion.

What is already uncertain/imperfect information becomes arbitrary fragments and soundbites when we are making decisions based on a social media game of ear-to-ear where every guppy becomes a werewolf.

If I’ve learned anything these past two years, I’ve learned to acknowledge my own wisdom – and my own ignorance. I’ve spent more of my conscious hours in grey zones. Accepting. I no longer have the same need to assert my opinions on every complex issue. I think about what happens when I write. How my thoughts become somehow more clearly defined. More “real”. When shared or spoken, they become something to defend. They take on an even greater illusion of solidity. I’ve heard myself making surprising statements I suddenly feel obligated to believe. But I don’t. Not really. It’s dangerous.

Once you pick a side, plant a flag, take a stand… it becomes all too real. I think there is a reason Buddhists focus on right speech. What is nothing more than thought & air has flesh and blood consequences.

Watching the public discourse would be like watching a farse if the stakes weren’t so high.

I remind myself to let go of the anxiety. I meditate on a stormy sea calming to a reflective surface. I see my own shame. Deal with it.

I can’t take them back, all the words, but I can move forward with more care.

Opening Letters to the World

Dizzy this morning. Waking again in a shirt so damp it borders on wet. Oh, these growing pains. I remember when growing pains were the deep throbs behind a breast bud, an ache in the femur that felt like the sharp edge of cold.

Now there is the ache in the femur that is the sharp edge of cold, a deep throb likely a straining bubble of panic. A night sweat: a who-knows-what. Don’t google it.

I remember when taking a nap meant crying. And here we are again.

Since I have stopped worrying about the truth of the details and focused on letting the memories surface as they will (still half-submerged, like the Loch Ness monster, more suggestion than shape), my sleep has been crowded with sensual details. Mostly from the desert.

Cinder block, a metal slide at noon, a scraped and weeping knee – the wound full of sand. Dry heat filling the lungs. My lungs. My knee. My fingers running over the porous, snagging surface of the cinder block wall.

There are slots in the decorative blocks, like hotel key shelves – or like letterboxes – in an old movie, but there’s no one to slip a note to.

I got through my childhood not having been bit by a snake. Not having been stung by a wasp. Not having been thrown into the back of a windowless van and driven out of state. I’m thinking of childhood fears and how one of these things is not like the others.

The devil you know is always less frightening than the one you might conjure. What if someone did read a letter? Where would that lead?

A small desert spider scuttles back into her burrow. A blanket fort. A sliding, mirrored-door closet filled with unopened letters.

Five Hundred Twenty-Five Thousand Six Hundred Minutes

Just difficult news coming in via messenger. It used to be the paper mail. Or phone calls. But it makes no difference to me. Communication: the medium isn’t the message. I got a notice on messenger when my brother let me know my grandmother had died. It didn’t hurt more or less. It hurt. When my mother died, the blinking dots on my computer screen — waiting for my brother to say more — didn’t make my emotions more or less complex.

In November, when I woke to see the message from B’s husband about her terminal diagnosis so out of the blue. I was grateful not to have two thoughts in my head — how do I respond with him watching/listening to respect his feelings, and what the hell is he saying?

Yesterday: M, now, too. Diagnosed with a cancer that moves through her body. I see the message while I’m in class. My colleague is presenting the choices for next year’s musical to the students. Rent is one of them. He explains, “This song is about what you’d do if you were told you had one year to live.”

I start crying.

No one knows all of the reasons why. And this moment is not supposed to be about me – for so many reasons – it is not about me.

This morning a different kind of message pops up. My brother, awake on the other end, still in yesterday. Our dead mother’s estate isn’t going to let us go without a final dig into our wounds. I watch the three dots blinking while he explains and hits enter.

That sounds melodramatic, I know.

I was sketching wasps yesterday between classes. Thinking about how there are some species where all of the females lay eggs, but then they kill each other’s offspring until only the queen’s eggs are left. The remaining larvae are fed meat. Then they spin their cocoons and transform. Six legs, two antennae, five eyes.

Last night my head was filled with cracking and popping. The white noise of a fan. Most wasps don’t see well in the dark. And they can’t see the color red.

Some wasps navigate by moonlight.

When the queen wasp dies, the colony continues.

The average life span of a queen is one year. The workers’ three weeks.

There are, however species of wasps that are solitary. These females have an average lifespan is six weeks.

And this is my process diary. Processing. Lately, the white noise here is deafening.

The Unconscious Effort of Living

My confidence sort of bobs in and out of view. All the gurus say people like me are waiting for permission, but I don’t think that is an honest assessment of what is going on. I am waiting for a guarantee that I will succeed and avoid criticism. I’m waiting to experience some kind of fairy tale emergence: affirmed, appreciated, acknowledged – the words aren’t coming to me this morning, and that hardly helps matters.

I remind myself that this is all a fluid state of existence. I wonder if all living things are in a fluid state of existence. That would be some sort of comfort. Maybe a constant state of anything is death. Inertia.

Any kind of meditation on this brings me back to practice.

Practice is like breathing. We are what we do and we cease being when the activity stops.

Human beings breathe. I saw an odd meme on Facebook about how we actually have only 2 minutes to live. Then we breathe again and reset the clock. I am aware that how profound anything is, is entirely based on the context in which we encounter it. So, yes, this struck me as incredibly profound. Meditating on this thought is grounding. I feel the reality of my soft animal body, fragile as a tissue paper crane.

I think butterfly. Spider web. Magnolia. Jellyfish. But everything is a matter of perspective.

Fragility, too. A spider web is 5 times stronger than steel.

We breathe.

I go through it every year with at least two groups of students. I pull out the skeleton and have them gather around. I point to where the intercostal muscles should be. The diaphragm.

I show them how the ribs will rise and fall with each breath. I tell them that no matter how determined they are to hold their breath underwater, the body would eventually inhale. The weird voluntary/involuntary muscles of the diaphragm override our will and contract to increase the volume capacity of our lungs, to change the air pressure, and we will inhale. The body is determined to live. It trusts instinct over intellect.

We work to keep ourselves alive—whether we are conscious of it or not.

I see an internet search result: “When you inhale, your diaphragm lowers”. But that’s the entire truth. When your diaphragm lowers, you inhale.

This morning I write. Imperfectly (as always), but I write. I trust that some mechanism in my body is weirdly triggering/triggered by the unconscious drive to be.