Ren Powell's Blog, page 22

A Good, Soft Thing

Lately, I have been having a difficult time getting started in the mornings. I get up, feed the dog, make the coffee, but then sit and browse. Time I can’t get back and can’t really account for. Certainly, it’s nothing that’s bringing me pleasure. I am on my second cup of coffee before I open the new post screen.

This feels like a Monday morning. I try to get a little handle on what the day and the week will entail, but it’s like staring out the window into fog. There’s something there. Moving around. And I worry it will jump out at me suddenly.

But that isn’t where my head should be right now. The day will come. The week, too, more than likely.

I am crying in the car again. I don’t often use the car, but do drive to yoga on Sundays. And driving home, I cry. It’s a good, soft thing. A kind of surrender really. And there is no one to touch me, or to try to comfort me. And that is also a good thing. It comes like a wave, and passes like a wave. The grief.

I talked to B. yesterday and our trip to Iceland is back on. Suddenly her calendar is filling up with places she wants to be. People she wants to be with. We don’t say it, but: while she is well enough. She’s looking at dates to work around her chemotherapy weeks. One a month for six months. Timing. Logistics.

I wonder if she cries when there is no one to touch her. If it sometimes can be a good, soft thing for her when everything in the world is sharp edges and punctures. Now that every assumption, every conception has been sliced open.

I wonder if crying can numb the raw borders of what was and what is.

I have no way of knowing. No hope of empathizing. And no meaningful comfort to offer. So I listen. That’s good, right?

E.’s footsteps on the stairs. Time to walk Leonard around the block and then head to the lake for a run. It’s Monday.

Into the fog.

The Banality of Pouring Coffee

A slow morning. The minutes, the hours wasted. I have been doing a lot of that these past two years. There’s nothing smooth about the way I drive through the days. I can give myself whiplash gunning the engine like this.

I think the rain has finally stopped. But the sky is still a uniform, flat grey. Leonard keeps pressing his forehead into mine. “Out.” He tries to push the command through my thick skull: “Oowwwwt”.

But he’s been out. If only in the yard.

So I pour myself another cup of coffee. But then: no, that’s not true. I don’t pour anything. I push a button and the machine grinds and then dumps a measure of liquid into the mug. There’s no pouring involved. No time to watch the liquid fill the cup slowly. No decision about when to tip the carafe back, judging: enough. No scrape of the glass bottom over the heating plate when I set it back. There is a whole sensual world lost. A surrender of deliberate moments.

What do I gain?

It’s mother’s day here. And for some reason, I wake in a funk. And when I open the computer and see what’s trending on Twitter, it just gets heavier. Misanthropy hovers over my shoulder and whispers that I need to chuck off all human beings and find a wealthy “friend” with land who’ll let me build myself a cabin there in the woods. I’ll find someone to do my laundry. I’ll write a book about all my original thoughts. Such an original idea.

I’m taking part in a kind of WIP course for experimental poetry and one of the participants suggested that I “lean in” to the banality that I am afraid of… just to see what happens. I like this idea. I mean, you’d think that in our post-postmodern age we wouldn’t care about the accusation of banality.

In the WIP conversation, I once again brought out the anecdote of my sculpture professor calling my work derivative. Strange which pinpricks stay so sensitive on the surface of our ever-thickening skins. It was the unfairness of the remark. I was too ignorant to have been derivative. And nothing is fucking original!

When my students come up with some brilliant idea (which they often do), I don’t say, oh, that’s so unoriginal, Artaud already thought of that. I say: See! Great minds think alike. Here’s what he said about it. What do you think?

And I’m not patronizing.

But I know that there I times I have said things that hurt. Sting. And it doesn’t matter that it was unintentional.

It frightens me how much power we have over one another. “Why do you care what other people think?” Because I am a healthy human being, who lives in a social system – a eusocial system – where kinship is required for survival. What reality are you denying?

Another cup of coffee? Probably not a good idea.

Instead, I pour water into the tiny teapot with its cage for loose-leaf tea. Orange and chili. A thoughtful Christmas gift from my stepdaughters.

I let it sit. And I feel my heartbeat rocking my body slightly. I feel the pinch somewhere at the very base of my throat. I breathe.

This is it, you know? Life. There’s no escaping it. No escaping the laundry – or the guilt for not doing the laundry. There’s no escaping the self-recriminations and shame for falling short of everyone’s standards. Of your own standards.

Maybe what I really need is a post-pandemic cleaning. The phenomenological, the metaphysical.

First I need more tea.

I See Ghosts

In this place of crossing over, of remembering and forgetting, of waking and sleep. Where we cram the shadows like post-it notes into our pockets before we travel: “I will half-remember this wherever I go.”

On this side of the looking glass, where we register the fluid world in oversimplified, stop-motion bits, we collect them in our pockets, too, before we return to sleep.

Sleep: where everything bleeds into everything else, where molecules let go and reconfigure in a continual game of ear-to-ear, of geese-to-geese.

And in the in-between, the hypnagogic state, I see ghosts. Most clearly when I’m depressed, when both worlds are grainy and grey. The veil now is thin, as they say.

I’ve often said (and written about) how when I lie in bed at night, I lie back, sinking into the dreams of the night before. Like submerging myself in the same bath. Colder. Somewhat stale. But real. The same/different river, as they say. And with the same/different voices filling my skull.

I lie back in the bath, rocking my head from side to side, feeling the pull of the water on my long hair. My ears filled with water – vibrating against the tiny drums. The squeak and the thuds of a body against porcelain.

A memory-of-sorts. A heartbeat. A rush of blood like a river against my spine. A mother’s voice that is unfettered by consonants and fricatives. All vowels.

Today I am fettered and tethered, and exposed. The details are exhausting.

Yesterday I taught movement class and was introducing the students to Laban’s method for describing movement dynamics. You break down an action: “kick”, “snap” etc. I asked them to pick a verb that we could deconstruct into Laban’s categories fast/slow, strong/weak, etc. One student was trying to be difficult and said: “Mmmm”. No problem. We can break down a word that is not a verb, that is not a word. Because sound/utterances also have dynamics.

I had a banal little breakthrough about the link between movement and sound. Nothing original or earthshattering, but one of those beautiful moments where experience precedes acquired knowledge. Like catching a fish bare-handed from a dark stream.

This morning I read about the Tetris effect: where we experience the movements we have executed during the day as we are falling asleep. And there is the imagined speech of our inner monologues, which I know can slide out of linguistic grooves, shaking the consonants and fricatives that give it context, but keep its truth.

It seems scientists focus on what we take from this realm into sleep. And don’t acknowledge what is indigenous to sleep, and whose shadows we cram into our pockets: what little gods’ humming fills the spaces between the stop motion bits of our days. A color – or a shade of grey.

They don’t acknowledge what gods and ghosts welcome us back at night, putting a warm hand on our forehead, pushing us under the surface.

Let No One Burst Your Bubble

Up and rested. A little yoga flow, a cup of coffee, and the keyboard. I bought myself a reMarkable after more than a year of back and forth about the gadget. A gadget to solve a gadget problem seems odd.

But I do love a Gadget. Gorgeous Gadfly.

This morning my body feels open, but my mind is empty. Too clear. I had a dream about my irresponsibility. And what it cost.

As though I’d need a reminder.

So I feel like a conduit just scraped with a pipe cleaner. Raw where scratched. The lightest breeze stings. Ambivalence seems to be a word for the morning.

My calendar is peppered with activities. After two years of just E. and me, and work, the idea of dinner with friends is daunting. I am trying to ease back into a normal social life while holding tight to what I have enjoyed about the isolation. And to keep writing in silence. Protecting my joy.

That sounds lofty.

How about “protecting my bubble”?

We’re all sniffing and sneezing at work. But the virus feels more like an inconvenience than a threat at this point. Still, at night I wake still and believe I’m sick. Two years of this kind of subconscious fixation must have dug deep grooves into my psyche. And I doubt I’m alone.

The guilt of a forgotten face mask. Or a poorly (self-)administered test. A careless touch on the shoulder. When the self-serving impulse that spurs a gesture of comfort is suddenly evident. I wonder how to move past this hyperawareness, this self-censoring of the body.

Two of three Norwegians want to keep the restrictions in place. Why doesn’t that surprise me?

The “freedoms from” that they offer are significant.

No Such Thing as a Memory

This morning I am moving so slowly I can see the minutes lining up behind me. And I think suddenly of standing in line for milk at some elementary school. I remember the texture of my dress. The smell of the dry air, and the sour, sick smell of leaked milk that sticks to the small cartons. It is a singular memory of a singular moment, but I can sense the edges of what is familiar here. When the memory jumps from my body to my mind and I know I would have had a turn at distributing milk to the students who all line up like the teacher’s ducks in a row.

If I try hard to remember that day – or one of those days – what are the odds that it is a construction not based in actual experience at all?

Maybe it is best not to think of memories as things. What if there is no such thing as a memory? Only a remembering, as ephemeral and myopic as any other lived experience. I like the idea that there is nothing but activity.

Remembering as the breathing of a shadow self, quantum constructions/constructing. What if trying to remember is a two-year-old thinking they’re steering the car with their toy steering wheel? Angry and perplexed when a hard left doesn’t result in a hard left.

I can’t remember.

I have a shadow self with her double DNA. All the damage done in the mitochondria: those absorbed creatures with their own maternal lineage. These energy powerhouses. This energy – the shadow quality that drives a body through the days. Moving fragments of experience around like a windstorm in late autumn. Or causing a single leaf to tremble, to spin on a spider’s web, like an early morning, summer breeze.

Moving Through It

Another night of ruminating. It is the oddest thing. My mind fixated on a single incidence as an illustration of my inadequacy. Some humiliation. A sentence I shouldn’t have said. An omission of etiquette. Hygiene. And it is cold comfort to consider that no one actually saw/heard/interpreted things the way I did. Things – facts – shortcomings exist whether others notice them or not. This self-loathing can be dizzying. The only end to it is sleep.

And Sleep has been fickle as hell lately. There is something in me that still feels like the last week of Advent. This looming social thing to get over with. All of the looming obligations. After Christmas, everything will be easier. I will be able to exhale.

I am all emotions and no reason lately. It’s like the textures of the year have been knocked loose from time. There are days I look at and am surprised by the darkness and the snow. I think I must have spent the morning writing in late summer.

In Norwegian, menopause is “overgang“. Which means a path over something. Which would imply not only a path away from something but towards something. A liminal space. Something to get over with. I will be able to exhale.

This morning when I came into the little library to write, a book caught my eye. Body Space Image. (Tufnell and Crickmay). And I pulled it off the shelf, wondering if it might be helpful with the memory project. My project. But as I flipped through it my mind turned back to my students. Is this relevant for them? Then there are two post-it notes on one of the pages. One has the address of a Basque translator I worked with years ago. The other is one of B’s old mailing addresses.

Whatever god there is, or whatever it is that fishes up a Rorschach-like response from my subconscious, always speaks to me through the marginalia of books and old notebooks.

Teaching can be a form of procrastination. A diversion. There is a fine line when one works in service to other people’s voices. And life is unpredictable. We are uprooted again and again. Until we are ripped out of the earth entirely.

This book is for me, today. And that’s enough. Maybe it will show me how to – literally – move through the self-loathing.

A Solitary Wasp

I am easing off social media. At least some forms of it. And wondering how to use the rest of it. I’ve been asking myself when I’ve been happiest – or at least most content – with my writing. I think that also means most confident. Proud. When it was easy with no competitive tug, no desire to one-up, no resentment over snubs up and down the hierarchy. Actually, when I was blissfully unaware of hierarchies.

Most of the time I don’t think about it. But the “community” is like a vortex. And the advice (largely American) is that to create a network you have to “give to the community”. And often that falls onto my dinner-party plate looking a lot like quid-quo-pro and obligation. And I don’t have the energy to play. This isn’t when I am happiest, most confident. What begins as authentic seems to edge into artifice.

I am too awkward a creature for this dance.

I am beginning to think there is contentment in the doing. And that it is only found the doing. Everything else is a kind of high. A spike. A moment. And for me, each of those highs is followed by a fall.

So I am up at 4.15, trying to write myself into a steady hum.

But pride? Is there such a thing as pride discrete from admiration? Such a thing as identity discrete from a market economy definition? People “indulge” in hobbies. Self-indulging. I looked up the definition of indulging and it is to allow oneself to enjoy… So why the negative connotation?

So this is me, stumbling over the obvious again: the remnants of America’s Puritan work ethic. The required justification for “Who do you think you are?”

Not even a tall poppy. This is the voice inside my own head.

In my process journal, I’ve been writing about wasps. There are thousands of species and some are solitary, some live in hives. In most hives, the queen controls who may lay eggs with her pheromones. But in some hives, female workers also lay eggs – unregulated by the queen. However, in these hives, the workers destroy one another’s eggs before they hatch. In service to the Queen.

I’ve been writing about what it is to have a life in service. About learned self-erasure. Asking myself if this isn’t how the concept of martyrdom developed in the first place. To appease our instinct to compete in the hierarchy, while simultaneously demanding self-erasure. All for the greater good.

Win for losing. As they say. But don’t enjoy that either. Humble martyr. Get there by not aiming. Don’t even have that thought in your head. That’s also punishable by death.

I’ve been writing about potter wasps. They live and work alone on the heaths. Shaping vessels from mud. Filling them with life. That’s not to say that it’s pretty. But, I admire the work, the life, the focus, the art of it.

Who One Tells and Why

I am never sure what whittles away the first 30 minutes of the morning. The absent-minded shuffling from room to room looking for my glasses. The search for wool socks tossed off in my sleep. But the morning always feels thinner than promised.

This morning begins with a pinch in my stomach. There’s uncomfortable synchronicity in a social media meme that pops up on my phone. It’s a flow chart illustrating the route of telling everyone about your project, and not finishing your project. And last night I joined a kind of work-in-progress group. I keep reminding myself that it matters who one tells, and why. And that the bit of wisdom is equally superstition. And that superstition is a kind of excuse more often than not. A cause & effect that protects the ego.

Not that we don’t need that now and then.

Yesterday I learned that not everything that emerges from a cocoon is a butterfly or even a moth. Some creatures evolve into venomous adults. Bees. Wasps. Incongruous with our expectations? But then I guess it is always about perspective: the nature program that tells the story of the hungry lioness who lost her cubs, the one that tells the story of her prey. I wrote a play for my students last term where a bit of lichen talks about being eaten by a butterfly. Who knew?

I want to get under the short-hand. Challenge the symbolism. I worry that no one has time for that. Then I remind myself that maybe it’s enough that I do. Maybe, actually, that is the whole point.

I’ve been struggling with the why of any kind of memoir work. The Moth’s tagline: “True as remembered by the storyteller”. Fair enough. But why… why is this remembered? And why is it told? To whom?

I am beginning to rest in the idea that this will take form through the process, and that it doesn’t need to be a structural pillar of the work. Maybe structural pillars aren’t all that necessary in the first place. Maybe it is okay to let the goo work its magic and trust what emerges is something greater than a reflection of your own masked Narcissus.

Variations on The Giacometti Code

Up too early again this morning. For some reason, I’ve been waking at 3 am all week. I toss and turn and wait for the alarm to begin chirping at 4. I wonder if getting up before the alarm would make me less tired. As it is, I drag myself upstairs to let Leonard out, feed him, and push the button on the machine that dispenses the coffee. I have to remind myself to unclench my jaw when the noise of the grinder jolts me into 4.15. (I take my waking slowly). One hour fifteen minutes of the morning already unattended. Wasted.

So I’ve been touchy. And out of sync.

I think the Dalai Lama rises at 3 every day. But he has someone to bring him a glass of water and set up his cushion. I’ve always thought seated meditation is like half-sleep and you can count it in your tracker as sleep if you want to.

I can’t do more than a few minutes of seated meditation: dolls begin to move around the room, walls breathe in sync with me. And I swear that fire and brimstone sermons I must have overheard in infancy, creep from my subconscious. My shrink says our memories may not be accurate, but the emotions are. They must come from somewhere.

It took three times smoking marajana for me to connect the three-day funk (funk is putting it mildly: babies spoke to me) to the few hits off a joint at a party. It took me much longer for me to connect seated meditation to severe depression.

But then: I often wonder if the joke on us – that our intellectual drive to find cause & effect for our surprising thoughts, fears, proclivities, reflexes is nothing more than Nature handing us a toy, and sending us in the other room to play while she gossips with the Universe. And when we make our great pronouncements, Nature smiles and pats us on our heads and thinks: Now, isn’t that cute?

If people do something “out of character” we look for evidence of trauma: a stroke, or a brain tumor. Sometimes find one. So is our character architectural? Interactive architecture, built like Stonehenge to exploit the landscape. Maybe this is how we are the authors of our own identities. Not as someone who plots the narrative, but as someone who decides, obstacle by obstacle how to accommodate our environment. And some of us can make a mess of it. Mistaking mountains for molehills and scaling unnecessary walls. Tripping over what seems like a sudden moraine.

Yeah, no. I just realized that is so not an original thought. Though the route to get there was mine alone.

Me, ever-reaching for metaphors that will ride alongside moments and translate them into something meaningful. Trying desperately to line up the days to catch as much light as possible, through rituals. Coffee, then candle, then keyboard. Stone after stone after stone. Like dominos. As precarious as dominos.

Yesterday I thought I excavated a cause & effect for what I have (and haven’t) been feeling these last months. All the psychological tools for self-discovery and examination that I’ve learned during – what? – 30-something years of therapy, put to use to explain the sleeplessness. The shame.

Breakthrough. Eureka. Sleep!

I set the alarm for 4. My quiet time. Just me, and Leonard and the coffee machine. But awake at 3. Again.

I am so out of sync it’s not even properly surreal. I’m assuming surreal requires access to dreams, which require sleep.

So back to the drawing board to find the “reasons”? Because knowing the reasons gives things meaning, and understanding meaning is the key to freedom from suffering, right?

Or was it letting go of meaning that provides freedom of suffering?

I may just ask Nature to take back her ball.

Oh, and if you’ve seen the TedTalk: Giacometti died the year I was born. So I am kind of figuring that is why the 4 am thing is not working out for me.

Existential Helplessness

There were some moments this morning – getting coffee and settling in to write – where I felt optimistic and… light. Ideas nudging the edges of my consciousness in such a good way. And then, they’re gone. Like a magic spell in a movie when the swirling elements drop like sand to the floor.

It’s okay. Like some movie trope, it’s just the cue to try again.

Sometimes the world moves in on you – for you. People come when you need them. And we really hope: when they need you.

I think that our social vocabulary is limited. Love is such a big word when it’s spoken in earnest. “I care for you,” is a beautiful phrase, I think. The honest description of real empathy and fondness without necessarily transgressing a sphere of intimacy. But in conversation? I don’t know. I think I get associations of bald people in flowing robes and a kind of patronizing distance. I care for you the same way I care for the tadpoles at the edge of the pond in spring. Lofty. A chilly warmth that somehow makes it all about them – those them trying so hard to make it all about nothing/everything.

Where’s the comfort in that?

I am fond of you? Archaic. I am out of words.

Another person that I care for, of whom I am fond – a person I “click with”, admire, and look forward to having a long and loving friendship with – is ill. And I can’t find the appropriate words. She’s an ocean away, so I can sit and drink tea with her and just be.

It makes me sad. Flat. It’s as though I don’t know how to pull myself together and make a difference.

All this, this past year, has brought me a new kind of helplessness. Or at least a new comprehension of existential helplessness.

I have definitely entered a new phase of life. Where people I love, from 25 to 70 are grappling with mortality. And there are people, too, whom I do not love, but featured in a few revenge fantasies. I’m seeing how poorly written my fantasies are, how unrelated they are to real emotions. Thin storylines with hollow characters.

The wonderful – literally wonder-filled – thing about this is that I see how unfinished I am. It’s like I have opened the door to a new world. Moved from black and white to color, from a sunset projected onto flat walls, through the doorway to the “real world” which is too big to take in, and too immediate to ignore.

I want to hold someone’s hand, get my feet wet, and listen.

I read the chat messages in a quiet moment. I pay attention to the few songbirds that have overwintered near the lake. I almost wrote, “lonely songbirds”. I figure if I can learn to stop projecting, I can better see the world as it is: its brooding, its illness, death, and its love.