Ren Powell's Blog, page 23

What Good is It?

It was difficult to get up this morning. Which is good because it means I did sleep. Was sleeping when the alarm went off. Even Leonard moved slowly and begrudgingly up the stairs this morning to start the day.

Yesterday there were moments when I felt a kind of excitement around my solar plexus. Like I had good news or a pending something, like a publication or a vacation… I don’t know. I mentally paused to try to remember what the reason for the buzz was but could think of nothing to justify it.

It wouldn’t be odd if it had been just once yesterday, but it happened several times and I am not sure what to do with it. How to think about it.

Is this a feeling other people have? Unjustified anticipation for the next thing – whatever is coming? Do they wrack their brains to try to remember what good is on the way? Like a care package coming in the mail?

I also think it is extremely odd that I can’t let this go and think there is something I need “to do with it”? Identify it, sort it. Almost as though there is something threatening about this good feeling if I’m not able to know where it came from. A sheep in wolves’ clothing.

If it is hormones – my body – trying to balance the day’s lights and darks, is the feeling then not real?

I have a frightening thought: What if this is other people’s baseline happiness? Their breakfast cereal & toast morning background noise?

Some morning the words come. This morning they kind of float in, disconnected from one another, on the surface of a strong current. And it isn’t the words that demand my attention, it’s the current itself. The pull – familiar but unpredictable. Something is coming. Something is calling. But I have no freaking idea what good it is.

Insomnia’s Dog

On my second cup of coffee and my first sentence. Another night of poor sleep. 4 hours. I figure at some point something has to give. I have no choice but to accept the long nights right now. At least my mind isn’t racing, nor am I ruminating.

E. says that when I do sleep, I snore. Which can’t be true. I tell him that he is the one snoring, really, and that he is incorporating that sound into his own dream. Because we do that

– in the same way that our brains take in visual information in the half-dark and make sense of it. A pile of laundry on the chair becomes an old woman sitting very still… but breathing.

I would love to understand the connection between creativity and depression. Why my dreams become more vivid, why in my waking hours I can see faces in the asphalt and – out of the corner of my eye – catch tree trunks dancing in the orange glow of the greenhouse spill.

But when I have the energy to try to harness it all on paper, with paper or paint, it all stops.

This is my version of the Black Dog. When I turn to look at it directly, it is gone. And then you wonder if it was ever really there to begin with.

I had an idea. A brilliant idea. Now it’s gone. Like that nearly-finished novel you outlined while falling asleep, only to find two half sentences on a scrap of paper on the nightstand in the morning. It kills you. If you look it in the eye – the Black Dog – it kills you.

I’ve stopped jotting notes on scraps of paper on the nightstand in the dark hours.

Against all Reason

Managed to negotiate the trail yesterday, with all the fallen trees and scattered branches in the half-dark, only to come home and slip in the living room. Limping a little still this morning, so no run. Last night’s big flakes are now big drops of rain, so there is a large part of me satisfied to get a bit more sleep this morning.

Still having fantasies about all that can go wrong. I’m replaying imaginary arguments with colleagues, students and parents that I really don’t need to have. It’s odd how such an unpleasant thing is the default comfort for my quiet mind. I keep wondering if it is a distraction that still makes room for the background emotions I’m trying to avoid: a more malleable scenario to try to reach some kind of catharsis for the the anger and hurt.

Hurt. I’m not even sure that counts as an emotion. Pain. I’ve read that emotional pain and physical pain light up the brain in nearly identical ways. Which would make it as much a sensation as an emotion. And that shouldn’t surprise us. As much as we deny the body, it doesn’t surprise me that we deny emotions equally then. Intellect is without sensation. It seems to me that we want our nurses to be warm, our neurosurgeons impressively cold. It follows – or presupposes actually – that the closer we are to the body, the lower our status. I think this is true of emotions as well.

Even the Romantic poets who – arguably – had a high-ish status, drew on emotions and controlled them objectively, like tinker toys. They sorted and displayed them like objects in a museum. No wonder the modernists went straight to the scatological: the twelfth night of Christmas, the boy bishop years before the wars.

The Boy Bishop Years would be a nice title for a messy poetry collection.

I wonder if it is possible to untangle anger and hurt from one another. I guess I have always thought, stubbing my toe that one leads nearly instantaneously to the other. The curse word flying reflexively. But what if they are the same.

I’m trying to remember if when the boys cried as infants I really could distinguish between a cry of pain and one of anger.

When something surprises E. it is like a blunt force to his nerves and his fist flies faster than he can reason from pain to anger. He used to clear mines in war zones. We talk about defense mechanisms. But isn’t that really a definition of perspective? I’m not convinced that context and interpretation create ontological differences – the in and of itself of our bodies responses.

I think it’s time for me to go back to reading philosophy. I “got it” once upon a time, and could rearrange the ideas like tinker toys. But now… well, maybe there is a way to let it under my skin.

“Learn to Negotiate Conflict”

That’s the card I pulled today. It feels like the card I needed first would be “Learn not to create unnecessary conflict”.

I slept poorly last night. A bit over four hours. And my first thought is to blame it on the memory work I have been doing this past week. But this happens a couple of times a month. Despite magnesium tablets, tart cherry, pranayama. I think it’s connected to the butterfly goo state of transition. I wonder if colic cries are just infants wanting to f-ing sleep. It is easy to mix-up cause and effect.

I want to cry this morning. Part frustration, part sleep-deprivation. And I keep reminding myself that now is not a time to make big life decisions. On the other hand it seems absurd to wait for “normal” to return.

I want to sit back and watch the storm pass, like some cartoon character who steps out of a brawl to watch their antagonist kicking up a little tornado alone. They say that every character a writer writes is a reflection of one aspect of themselves. I’m not sure how I feel about this. Cause and affect kind of thing. If our imagination can create it, it probably means we have witnessed it somehow, but inhabiting it as a writer does, which is similar to how an actor does, maybe be a reverse cause and effect. Maybe writers become what they write, if only temporarily.

There is research to suggest that personality is not fixed, but entirely contextual. We are not only self-fulfilling prophecies, we oblige the prophecies of those around us. And the thing is, it is rare that we can shake off enough of our context to begin again. There is something in us that will work to oblige even the dead.

It is a theory. For optimists.

I’ve also been thinking about antagonists and their roles in our lives. The triceps is the antagonist to the biceps. The muscles that pull in the opposite direction of where you want to go will engage first. There is a balance of tension in healthy movement. Not balanced tension, but a balance. Maybe we require a kind of opposing force in all things and that there is a functional difference between conflict and contrast?

And I can learn to keep the drama on the page.

I need to go for a run now.

I Won’t Be Nuts for You

I am excavating – rummaging through – piecing together memories. Exploring the random bridges between them that put me often in the wrong body in the wrong place for it all to make sense.

And I “think through” the logical narrative, which only borrows from the stories I have been told. And they never line up neatly at the seams.

I had a title for my new project, but today on Twitter, I see someone has just published a book of visual poetry with an almost identical name. So much for that bit of “clever”.

I tell myself that first thought is rarely best thought so to move on from what no doubt I saw, but didn’t register seeing, what floated into my head like an original idea. When there are no original ideas. Thing is original.

There is a thing called microchimerism. A few years back I read an article about how the DNA of every man who’d ejaculated in a woman’s vagina would remain in her body forever. This is terrifying. Which is no doubt why someone thought it up and passed it on. But it’s not true. Not that part. I figure the person who drew this conclusion from the research had a teenage daughter they were trying to control, unconsciously or not. I know that’s not fair. Maybe unkind. But it is plausible from a historical perspective. Women as mythical creatures, taking on the sins of their lovers – or rapists via their mysterious wombs. Transferring sins via their cursed wombs. I feel like I should write curs èd. Biblical.

When I am feeling very unkind, I think someone would like this to be true. That way no control would ever really be lost. No woman could ever shake it off and move on. It would be in her blood. Her DNA. And if there is something there that amounts to a soul.

And the truth is microchimerism exists, DNA fragments like the ghosts of metabolized twins, of born and unborn children, in the mother’s blood. Blood transfusions can permanently introduce DNA to a body. I had a transfusion in the late 80s. Yet another stranger lives in my cells.

I don’t know why this idea sticks with me right now. Like it is important or relevant to the poetry I am working on. I think it has to do with all the family who make up my family who were never family. Fathers who aren’t. Grandfathers who aren’t. How my grandmother’s husbands all seem to figure into the story – so my story – though only one of them – presumably – tracks through my blood. Which one? I don’t know. I can’t get the sections of the stories to align.

What if there is something besides DNA that sticks? Something that we can’t measure that is passed down through gestures or incidental incantations that work like magic only because we can’t/don’t see them. A different kind of contagion. Words. Movements. The quality of a touch. Things for which we have no words.

What if my grandmother’s response to someone’s breath, someone’s breathing in her bed night after night, has lived in my cells without our knowing. What if generational trauma is not the events we recount or hint at in awkward moments of half-confessions. And what if we consider the gestures, the incantations not as flaws but as contrasting colors, we can see a wholeness the world doesn’t want us to see?

I am not broken. Nor am I exceptional for not being so. The paradigm for what “should be” is a weapon to judge anyone who speaks the truth. Hypocrisy isn’t evil. It is a pair of comfortable blinders. Ear plugs. Stops up the senses to anything outside of the story we want to tell ourselves. Will you martyr yourself in the breaching of that clean, thin narrative? To set yourself outside the social norms: if you are not a trespasser, you are the trespassed territory, the sullied, the ruined, the broken one.

You have a duty to be that so that the paradigm will be true. So if you are okay? Untrampled, unsulled? You’re a liar.

I am not a liar.

Someone already wrote what I’m thinking. At a speech competition once in high school, I heard a girl reciting a monologue about her mother’s love being a gun to her head. “I won’t be nuts for you!” That’s all I needed to know what it was about.

I was surprised to learn that Nuts was written by a man. Tom Topor. I had my own blinders on then: I’m not surprised now. We sometimes only concern ourselves with destroying the paradigm’s restraints that pinch us personally.

Although… Sometimes it is nice to have a excuse to mask our real flaws.

I’m going to try not to do that.

Laundromat White Noise Abridged

“I cried to be with her at the laundromat on Wednesdays. Begged. And there were times she did take me and I walked on the hard tiles in soft shoes – pushed the wayward wheeled carts around. Leaned against the warm washing machines that vibrated against my back. Stared at the people. Watched the clothes tumble behind the glass. Wondered what it would be like. Like through a looking glass?
Laundromat white noise is a thing. And it is interwoven with textures and surfaces. And the sweet/dirty smells of poverty.

And refuge from home – because going home, staying home, home is just a temporary place for a mattress and a record player, an ashtray and a coffee cup that needs cleaning.

The stains wedge themselves into the seam around the bottom of a mug. Deliberately. It feels deliberate. This side of the looking glass is filled with willful, colluding objects. Dishes are the Wednesday night segue to a beating which is a prelude to everything else […]

I still don’t know how to write about this. Not even in the process journal. There is another sentence after the ellipses. But one that risks too much.

Because the party line is “you have nothing to be ashamed of”, but the real response is “for God’s sake, what’s the point of talking about it?” It’s (it’s meaning the events that make you you are) not worth acknowledging, what good does it do to upset people? Is it worth titillating people who get off on that sort of thing?

Titillating is an uncomfortable word.

If someone got off hurting you, you can bet someone will get off hearing about it. So at what point does an act of fury and reclamation become an act of self-immolation?

Regarding the sexual assault on the performance artist Yan Yinhong by two men in the audience, while the rest of the audience filmed with their phones:

Mr. Wu [Wei] concluded that the men’s actions were a form of interactive art, though he conceded that at one point one man may have overstepped a boundary — when he unzipped his fly and took out his penis, a moment also confirmed by Ms. Yan. Even that “basically fit the meaning and needs of the piece,” Mr. Wu wrote.”

New York Times

I already despised Wu Wei.

Interactive art would be consensual. This was a crime. One so familiar we gasp – then shrug.

Why do we turn the anger on ourselves when we perform it? Write it? Because the alternative is to become an abuser?

We can’t control what we put in the world. No matter the care we take in terms of context. A word like vulva will jump out of a paragraph and work idiosyncratic magic. No two people will hear the same story. Even a word like finger can be uncomfortable, can titillate. Or terrify.

And god save us all because someone’s always burning, and we don’t even notice.

An Integrated Memory

B. is learning techniques to cope with her loss of peripheral vision. Reading is one of the first things the glioblastoma has taken from her. She said she has trouble listening to audiobooks. Her mind wanders.

My mind used to wander, too. I could sit and listen to anything. I still can’t. But I began listening to podcasts on my runs a few years ago. When I walk the dog. Commute.

I remember where I was on the trail when Mary Oliver told Krista Tippet about her childhood. Alluded to abuse. I remember it was autumn and the upward slope of the trail was covered in orange leaves.

I remember the green canopy over the trail near the picnic grounds, where I heard about Darwin’s theory of beauty. I remember my breath. I remember exactly how tired my body was at that point. I remember hearing the ducks, which seemed like an illustration.

When I was in high school and college, I’d remember returning to a textbook to find again something only on the edge of my memory. About a quarter into the book, on the left side of a spread, three-quarters of the way down the page.

The last gift my ex-husband bought me was a Kindle. It was a thoughtful present. But all wrong for me. We were separated and I had just spent a fortune on a 12 foot bookshelf with a sliding ladder for the tiny apartment. But I tried the Kindle. I found myself reading the same “pages” over and over and retaining nothing. At first I thought I was losing my ability to concentrate. I was worried.

But I don’t think that is it.

We no longer have textbooks at school. (Not even online, but that’s another complaint.) The students are finding there’s no need to “learn” anything by rote. No need to retain information, because they can google in a fraction of a second and find an excerpted answer. And move on. No time for nuance.

And our curriculum requirements have changed to reflect this. Embrace it. The students are graded now on their ability to reflect, consider, evaluate.

(Don’t get me started on the dangers of indoctrination/random subjective – and ultimately uninformed – opinions and evaluations. I have heard colleagues endorse factually wrong statements, saying it is the student’s opinion and that the actual fact is “just one opinion”, and it is important to support the student’s own perspective. On something about which they have neither personal experience or acquired knowledge. Oh. I got myself started.)

At best: not only does this create an enormous gap among the “strong” and “weak” students, it is unfairly biased against students who process the world physically. It discounts their intelligence.

I am completely conscious of the possibility that at my age, I am “old fashioned”. But I have seen struggling students use actual “cut and paste” techniques on paper and have a conceptual breakthrough in terms of understanding how to arrange the flow of an argument. I have colleagues who use building blocks to show students how Bloom’s taxonomy works. How academic progression is “built”.

I think a lot of people see this as using elements of the physical world as a metaphor for conceptual thinking. But I honestly believe this is backwards. I believe our conceptual thinking is an abstraction of the physical world.

I think I am going to stop using the world “mindfulness”. It puts me in the wrong “frame of mind”. I think it encourages me to take on the role of the know-er rather than the role of the flow-er. And that sounds incredibly stupid and I am so glad I am not writing a book about it.

This time last year I was ill. I was beginning to lose my grasp of reality. The waiting list for a specialist is over 6 months here, so I was on sick leave. Making paper. Sewing books. Painting. Writing, of course. Sometimes by hand, sometimes on the keyboard. I love this keyboard. It is cheap. Most of the letters are rubbed off already, but the keys are almost reminiscent of a typewriter. Mechanical. They push back against my fingers. They ground me. My mouse is a rollerball that looks like a sea creature. I light the oil burner and drop rosemary into the bowl. Today I hear the rainwater draining through the pipe from the gutters.

I have to pee.

When I am in the flow, I don’t feel “mindful” at all. I feel free and fully integrated into the world.

Words Like Scrap Lumber

Friday morning and I am pinning down an imperfect week. And still pretending there is any other kind of week. I am still running in the dark. Sometimes leaving work when the sun has already dipped below the horizon. It’s incongruous that such short days make for such long weeks in the winter months. Time lurches. Suddenly, deadlines are underfoot.

I wish I wouldn’t will the winter months to pass so quickly. I wish I could find a way to give in to them, relax in a “cosy” atmosphere. But I am doing something wrong. There’s such a sharp edge to the end of January. I light the oil burner and inhale the rosemary. Pour myself a cup of tea. Wrap my shoulders in a wool blanket. But reading/writing by candlelight is romantic but hard on the eyes. And a computer screen is just not cosy. So I push through, unable to find anything comforting in the cold draft from the window. I fight it – knowing full-well that fighting it is the wrong thing to do.

And the words, then? Lurching. And I have this illusion that I’ve written more than I have. I have an unearned feeling of accomplishment and an inevitable emotional crash when I see how thin the work is. Ideas take up an inordinate amount of space in my mind. Like Hollywood film sets. You walk through the door and there is nothing there. A pile of random two-by-fours.

Suck it up, and get to work.

Yeah. That’s not a cosy image.

And then… well, what the hell am I building with all this scrap lumber anyway?

Imaginatively Real

I’m circling ’round again with my ambitions. And trying to keep them to myself. Just a few days of digging into memories rips me open and I start looking around for support. And that’s a mistake.

This is standing in an open field with an open wound throat to pubis. Even the wind churns through me. I am a scarecrow of the strangest sort. Naked with a bucket over my head.

I am reminded of a time when I pushed myself through some art therapy with a therapist who desperately wanted me to cry. Collage work. Maybe it’s not surprising all the Biblical imagery one can cut out of fashion magazines. I see now how similar a scarecrow and a crucifix are. So maybe after all these years, I haven’t grown at all.

The collage was my idea. I think I’ve always needed a witness.

A few weeks ago my son recommended Derek DelGaudio’s In and Of Itself. A very interesting performance work (filmed) that is both original and not. It was interesting to watch it with my students and discuss the postmodern self-referential heart of the work. And to begin to question where the post-postmodern artist is heading. The most conservative of the students was put off by the “leaning toward narcissistic” storytelling. But the students who’d had a course in performance, and who recognized Abromovic in the audience were excited by the artist’s perspective.

The question that I always return to, that I didn’t and won’t discuss with my students is: who gets to tell their story? Who gives them permission. And what does it cost them?

The conservative student says he doesn’t like it when people just put all their private information out there. I think that’s interesting. I wanted to ask him if he felt it was an imposition on his imagination. Intrusive and “bossy” in that the other is trying to direct/shape his view of the other?

But I didn’t ask.

In the performance, DelGaudio talks about a sailor’s log, which is half fact and half imagination. Which is a perfect metaphor. Especially if one considers that the “facts” are “observations”, and what I mean is to refer back to his own retelling of the parable of the blind men and the elephant.

DelGaudio tells his story, which is so tightly interwoven with his mother’s story that it is unclear that any narrative is a thing in and of itself. Whose story is it really? While he explores the idea that an elephant was once a magical creature who then allows itself to be defined by others and stops being magical, I wonder if there never was a creature in the first place. All elephants are a single perspective on the savanna. All creatures are imaginary creatures.

Of course, there’s nothing original here, not in the performance, and not in my own thoughts about it. But again, I think there is something wonderful about backing up into philosophers through experience rather than going through the world with some kind of answer key in your hand and adjusting your view accordingly. It’s not that it makes me feel smarter, but it certainly makes me feel less alone.

Maybe there’s nothing wrong with circling ’round again and again. Maybe it’s like playing with the same lump of clay. Maybe it is a practice of staying in the moment. And there can be real joy and real discovery in that.

Maybe every incarnation is as real as it gets.

Wednesday Swimming

I keep wondering if winter should be this hard. Pushing in the darkness. Nothing as absurd as Sisyphus, but something as plodding as a sloth. There’s an invisible resistance.

I’ll go swimming later today. If I think about it now, it becomes overwhelming. All I have to do first, then the train and the locker room and the first 30 seconds of cold water hitting my vulva, my breasts, my scalp. I still haven’t learned to reframe the discomfort as anything but an intimate assault on my body.

I’ve never learned to swim properly. There’s no synchronicity between my legs and arms. I try to pull myself through the water, but I get very little headway for my effort. There’s an analogue clock near the slow lane. I can see it through the fog of my goggles when I turn my head to inhale. Its arms seem to move in slow motion. It’s like an anti-flow state, this exercise. Even with music thumping the bones of my skull, there’s no rhythm.

My core temperature creeps downward. I’m doing it wrong, I know. And the odd things is that I don’t know why I am dong it at all.

I’m still chasing something. Fears. Death. Stories.

When I look down at the bottom of the pool, something in me still shudders. I distract myself. Maybe not understanding is fine for now. My arms seem to move in slow motion. Maybe the resistance is required before a flow. Or maybe there is something Sisyphean about it all after all.