Ren Powell's Blog, page 24

Every Narrative is Now

(This is a cross-post from my process journal, which is password protected.)

I was talking to my doctor about this new project – examining memory. My insistence on the idea that our present determines our past and not vice versa. How if our memories are reconstructed every time we call them up, we are necessarily unaware of their morphing. As would be anyone hearing us describe a memory and remembering the last time we told them the story.

She nodded.

It’s a frightening thought. Considering my mother’s accusations that I have made it all up. All the ugly parts. Considering that the truth is that our lives are a series of disjointed facts connected by our imagination.

Sometimes it comes down to what did I know when? How old were you when you became convinced you could read someone’s intention, but understood you could never read their mind? How old are you when you understand subtext? Accurately? When you know a threat is a threat when you are told it was not? When your imagination connects the facts with intention.

Maybe this is where “the story of what happened to you” is a true reflection of who you are. And it is one of those reflections between bathroom mirrors that goes on and on and on. But look closely and you’ll see small variations in shapes and hues.

My doctor tells me that I need to remember that, regardless of the uncertainty of details, the emotions are real. Fear is real.

I remember a different doctor years ago telling me to trust my fears. They’ve been tested. That gut instinct to leave the room. Leave the house. Go out and play. Say, “No, thank you” to the open-ended promise for favors in return. Taking the beating is an act of rebellion in itself: fear being complicit in the erasure of your own will.

Maybe I can tell these stories now because I can see I can’t stop myself from telling you her side of it: When I was small – too small to remember myself – she said I hallucinated crocodiles in my bedroom. In the middle of the day, she said. Hysterical. Which, etymologically speaking, is an odd choice of words to describe a toddler. Proof, she said, that I never had a grasp on reality.

There was a crocodile in Disney’s Peter Pan. Tick tock. Tick tock. I had a record player. But that would have been years later.

Time bends back on itself in memory. If that were possible. Linear narratives are illusions. Every narrative is now.

I think this is why I don’t want to write a typical memoir. Set a version on paper. Tomorrow, it may not be true. A new fact will surface that skews the trajectory from fact to fact. The cause and effect won’t line up. Maybe every memory is a rationalization of what the body experiences. Feels.

Emotions are not thoughts. Emotions come first.

Memories are true in essence. It seems narrative is just another layer of fiction.

“Anger, disgust, surprise, happiness, fear, and sadness are often classified as basic emotions”.

What about shame?

Shame resides in the body.

This is a fact. No matter what I remember. Piece together. Narrate.

And now I’ve begun.

Would Were Beauty as Infectious

Distract your thoughts.

It’s today’s card in “The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills” deck. Focus on the colors around me, it suggests. The white noise of the space heater, I suppose. The blue light hitting my eyes from an angle, from the tiny lamp on my desk. The deep greens and browns of my peripheral vision as I type. Black on white and all this weird light that is somehow real and not. It is ephemeral. And yes, all things are ephemeral, but this… this is not ink in paper, graphite on paper: when you erase a word there is evidence in the world. Dust like the dust of our bodies.

I hit the delete button and it’s like it never was. That thought. Where is the threshold for entering the world?

Hit “publish”. Tweet. And it’s out there forever as they say. Even deleted it can survive like an angry ghost. Done is done, evidence or not. Light can carry darkness.

There are religious people who employ others to sweep the way for them.

Sometimes the illusion of our own innocuousness, our own powerlessness is a comfort.

Prayers and Curses

I ran before writing this morning. Heading out, we heard a songbird along the trail, and turning back I saw her in a beam of light from the trail lamp. A chaffinch. I think it’s another six weeks before they all return. Another three months before we see the sunrise on our runs. Until then, the crows squabble in the dark. And on occasion, a duck laughs and splashes.

A lonely chaffinch chatters.

This morning there is something tight in my center. A clenched fist shoved under my diaphragm, and I have to keep my mouth closed. I am still not sure how I feel about observing this separation of emotion and intellect. I know this is something I am cultivating for a reason. But often I just want to rebel against my intellect and scream. There is a steady stream of soft curses coming from my mouth these days and it surprises me. My vernacular is unnecessarily colorful, though impassioned. I used to tell my kids not to curse unless they needed to. That powerful words lose their cathartic magic when they are overused and worn thin. Yet, here I am now. Under my breath, on the breath, rolling through my inner monologues.

I blame the darkness and the cold that makes a body tense.

Leonard is curled on the rug. Part of his body slipped under the desk. He loves lying under tables and in corners. Like most dogs, I suppose. Why can’t I be more like him? To curl into the darkness and cold, tucking into himself. Relaxing. If I could I would head off to a dark cabin and light a fire and curl up with a notebook. Womb-safe.

There has to be some trick to accomplish that here. At home. In the every day. And the key isn’t as simple as learning to observe over-the-top emotions and recognize them as arbitrary hormonal swings.

I remember when I was very small, a man pushed me on a swing so high I feared I’d flip over the top. Instead I fell out and on my face. I am not sure if I remember my mother fighting with him, or if I’ve constructed the scene because she told me the man was my father and she’d shouted at him to stop. I have no idea why I would remember this scene. Whether it happened at all. My mother invented pasts for me. Like me, I suppose, she had a difficult time following a single narrative.

I’ll never know the truth. But I do know what it feels like to slam your nose into the earth. And that swings are a powerful metaphor for the loss of control.

There are prayers we say to comfort ourselves. And there are curses for that, too.

Sunday Play

I take refuge in dharma (the enlightened way of understanding and living)

In wriggling back into a kind of writing life, I’m feeling drawn towards Sunday meditations. I miss the 5 am dharma talks by Yeshe Rabgye. Even though they were online, I liked the fact they were live. Perception matters. And in some ways, it was a perfect combination of community and solitude. On the pillow in the living room with Leonard curled against my hip, and E. sleeping downstairs.

It shouldn’t be so difficult to take responsibility for noticing and creating the circumstances for specific experiences. Here at the desk in the bibliotekette, Leonard is curled against the wheels of my office chair. He’s willing to be quiet.

I am struggling with my personal contradictions: the love of rules and a rebellious, questioning nature. There are 250 precepts for monks, 348 for nuns. It figures there are more constraints for women. I am considering my need for a few, significant frames right now. Not 348 of them, though.

This morning I read the phrase “original sin” and began questioning my own understanding of the idea. In my memories of melodious Baptist sermons, it was clearly defined as sex: Eve “ate of the tree”, they realized they were naked (gasp), had garden-destroying sex, she got pregnant, and then screamed her head off “in childbirth”. One of her kids killed the other. I supposed it should be “one of their kids”, but my memories are a mash-up of 70s Saturday morning cartoon imagery, Baptist and capitalism’s misogyny, and Jacobean phrases. Thou shalt reek less of animal baseness by flooding thy wah-hoo with perfumed chemicals daily. I was original sin. While Adam only had to “deal with it”.

I was always confused about the tree of knowledge. I figured that was integral to my sin, too. My desire to find the answers to “Why?” and “What’s that?” that didn’t seem to fade despite repeated slaps upside the head. The animal in me was sin. The intellect in me was sin. The Catch-22 on the curriculum.

This morning I realized that I can read the Garden of Eden story through a secular Buddhist lens. Eating of the tree of knowledge, Eve ate the fruit. Which was not fruit of her labor: Eve is also a fruit of the tree of knowledge, and by attempting to put herself above the tree – above nature, through intellectual distance, she divorces herself from nature/life. She forgets who she is. Her unnatural perspective shreds her experience into harsh elements: bitter without sweet, a sting without a numbing.

There is a Buddhist metaphor of the human as a car. How many pieces are taken away before it is no longer a “car”. There is never a “car”. My grandfather warned me against philosophy and said there was no “God” in it. That makes sense to me now in a way it never did before.

What do we know of human experience (what can we understand) if we spend all of our time staring at a carburetor, mistaking it for the car?

I’m off for a run on the beach. Days like to day the air is as wet as the sand and when the tides flows in over my bare feet, everything seems the same temperature.

Process, Practice and Remembering

I forget things.

I forget to continue meticulously planned projects.

I forget to do the dishes. To take medication. To observe the days passing. What sticks in the tangle of neurons in my brain seems arbitrary. Sometimes I think the only reason I remember events from my childhood is that we moved so often. I remember this event, in that room. Maybe it was the newness and the threats and the vigilance it entails that imprinted specific memories. The love beads hanging in the doorway. The candle-drip wax-paper wooden cable-spool coffee table. The coal furnace in the basement. The mice in the bed.

My step-father laughed and said yes, the lamp oil does look like Kool-Aid. He said, imagine if I put it in the refrigerator: you’d drink it, wouldn’t you? I could imagine it. All of it. We had an avocado green refrigerator. Green shag carpet. Shag carpet smells like the dust of former tenants. The dead slough of strangers wedges under your fingernails. My fingernails.

Maybe that is what happens with all my memories? I disown them? I collect things, create things, and shed them. Step back. Is that carelessness? Is it fear? Is it hope?

Many years ago I took part in a Teaching Artist Conference. We all took part in a performance in the park. Someone directed. I realized that where I really longed to be was on the hill looking over it all, observing and considering perspectives. Things fell into place for me. I have been a bit less uncomfortable when my colleague imply – or occasionally directly state – that I don’t fit in with the drama department because I’m not a performer. Not an extrovert. Have an odd sense of humor.

I am a loose sketch – no lines meeting to form discernible shapes. The leaping between lines creates the illusion of definition, and the illusion of freedom from definition. But isn’t this how our brain works? Molecules jumping through extracellular space to create activity that gathers independent elements like a magnet gathering metal shavings: here you see a mustache, here a memory. And this: this is who you were the last time you exhaled.

Now begin again. Nothing ever really melds to another thing’s in and of itself. Everything falls apart.

The desire to be gets in the way of the impulse to do. This is true of too many aspects of my life.

Richard began a new writing process with the new year. I am easing in, three weeks behind but heading toward something new.

Maybe as much as meditation, I need to explore now.

Chattering

Second cup of coffee. Fifteen minutes have already passed and my mind is beginning to clear. The space heater is on but the room is still cold. I can’t sleep if my feet are cold, and apparently I can’t write with cold feet either. Cold, Clear, Coffee, Cup. A lot of chattering in my head.

A negative Covid test. Which means my cold symptoms are probably a side-effect of the lithium. I’d forgotten all this. The pros and cons of not letting myself slip under the surface. Now my days are often filled with a repeating scene of me blowing up a bright red balloon, watching it pop, and blowing up another… and so on. Can you picture me in clown face? Polka dots? My nose running. Eyes weepy. The edges are softened but I move in slow motion like a nightmare. I walk Leonard in the dark. Take the train to school. Feel like I have a clue, then I hear myself talking: pop.

I try to forgive myself. And work up the courage to begin another day.

On Formlessness

Up and moving slowly. The cogs in my head are moving in an odd rhythm of stick and spin. When Leonard and I returned to the house, E. had already shoveled the snow from the driveway. I couldn’t recall the route we’d taken or explain why it’d taken us so long to round the neighborhood.

I felt a little dizzy. But that may just be the cold.

Last night an email caught up with me. It related to an art project that I was privileged to be involved with last year. It seems like a lifetime ago and pulled me back to a time when I felt like I had a writing career. Like I had something to say. I have to arrange for an Italian translation of the poem that the artist used in his larger, collaborative work. I had to dig through my files: neatly labeled folders with dates and genres.

Neglected.

I am like a stereotypical addict parent in a bad movie. I show up a couple of times a year and promise to get my shit together this time. Then I disappear. No note. Hell, I don’t even bother to say I’m going out to buy cigarettes.

Obviously, in this little parable, it is the poetry itself that suffers abandonment. How’s that for a conceit?

Following Impermanence, I had plans for another book. But every time I began writing it felt like craftsmanship and not art. I know how that sounds. But I felt as though I’d given myself an assignment and was hoping that the life spark would seep in somehow if I made room for it in the work. It felt like waiting for Godot joy.

And I am not against that kind of approach. I even think that it can be a wise approach if one wants to establish a name, a brand and a business. It keeps the wheels turning. And you can be a poet on Instagram with a capital P, which means your work will reach readers. And that is what it is all about.

But ultimately, with all my experimenting with marketing, I acknowledged that that… what? goal? is a full time job and only a fraction of that time is the creative art work. The smallest allotment of time can be spent in open-ended experimentation, play, creation. Meanwhile I work a 43-hour-a-week job that I alternately love/hate, maintain a marriage, friendships, family relationships and my mental and physical health. I walk the dog, cook the meals. Life is so full of goals and wants that it can be overwhelming.

Maintaining a healthy structure has always been difficult for me. I go to extremes. I’ve never been motivated by whips or carrots. I plug into the machine until whatever energy got me moving dissipates. How much of this is bipolar behavior, how much is PTSD-related issues, shame, ADHD, simple immaturity? My shrink shrugs: Does it matter?

In my practice, writing is all about the effort of taking my personal experience/perspective/understanding and attempting to make it a thing-in-itself. A thing recognized by other people. Maybe it is very much about the validation of my human experience as real: this is meaningful, and we can recognize our animal and spiritual selves reflected in one another through the thing.

It’s as though we can’t know one another directly. We need the thing. Like squinting our eyes to see an image we call an optical illusion: the shift in perspective doesn’t make things less real. It enhances our experience. Even the stars disappear when we look directly at them. Maybe we see the world – and each other – best through a glass, or at a slant. We’ve heard something like that before, of course.

Maybe I can do this better without self-assigned projects? Maybe I can drop the form now and write things into being in a messy, organic way?

There are scenes in my head, memories that surface again and again “like rotting wood shooting out of the lake“. And I write them and rewrite them and wonder why I’m not done yet.

And then there are the scenes I may never write. When I look directly at them, my observations are clinical. Big, academic words that engender a detached, legal dignity. Like trigger warnings on a book cover.

At a slant, everything splashes on your retina and indirectly calls up the smells, and the sensations on skin, on membranes… and well, there is this “thing” that is uglier than you thought. And so very human.

Newton’s Cradle, Boomerang, Whatever…

Several times this past week, walking Leonard at night or in the morning, I catch myself in a discussion with my mother. Then I remember: she’s dead. The realization isn’t a moment of sorrow, but absurdity. I am rehearsing for a moment that will never be, a closure that I will never have.

B. gave me a drawing by Story People: “If you hold onto the handle, she said, it’s easier to maintain the illusion of control.” This image is a person clinging to a kind of oar. “It’s more fun if you just let the wind carry you.”

When I catch myself in the discussion, I mentally release my grip, one finger at a time, from the weird fantasy I have had all these years: this running inner dialogue that has become a kind of subconscious tick. Maybe even a kind of hopeful prayer? Against all conscious logic, the conscious acceptance of the situation of the past 30-odd years.

It’s over. It’s never over. I open my hand again to drop the practice, like a prayer bead, like an oar. Only to find it in my hand again.

Maybe this is the underlying conflict/drama in all of our lives: the continuous grasping and letting go. Against our needy, animal nature. Against our cold, intellectual plans.

Newton’s cradle.

I have told myself that once she was dead, I would write a memoir. But I’m suddenly unsure. Unsure of the why of it.

I never wanted the last word.

I wanted the last word to be hers. To be: I’m sorry. Not pity, but acknowledgement and remorse.

Because remorse would entail something of love.

Butterfly Goo and Moonlight

Being patient with myself right now. Putting projects on indefinite hold consciously and without guilt. Considering so much – and maybe for the first time – not grasping for answers.

A man wrote a book about time management. He outlines a lifetime as 4000 weeks. Running yesterday, my attention kept turning to the nearly full moon. The average lifetime (in the West) is allotted 1000 moons. And I have lived through 620 of them, but noticed so few.

The Wolf Moon took full form last night. I read that the it is called that because wolves howl more at the start of a new year. As winter sets in. The nights are already getting shorter, but earth is still getting colder.

My student is researching wolves for a role I wrote for him. He tells me that wolves howl as a form of grieving. I don’t know where he read this, or if it is true, or how we could ever know if it is true. It does make sense to me. The sound tugs up a fear for us because we recognize the vulnerability inherent (probably a prerequisite) in grief.

Loss. Aloneness. It is all a matter of perception, really. The recognition of our disconnection. Nothing is really lost. Except perhaps the illusion of having had. What do we ever have/own/possess? We experience, and cannot possess experiences. We can’t even possess the memory of experiences, because memories are also impermanent: morphing and reassembling, like metal shavings following a magnet.

I am formless at the moment. Even memories of my former selves are formless. I’ll run now and something within me will howl at the moon. Something in me will change shape, pulled by the earth’s magnetic field. Every cell in motion, rearranging, experiencing the morning before dawn.

What Falls Away Gently

There’s a thread you follow.  It goes among
things that change.  But it doesn’t change.

                                   William Stafford

Someone wrote that it is pretentious to begin a blog post with a quote. I disagree.

Many someone-elses write that it is foolish to begin a year with resolutions, that we are bound to fail. But I think it’s the beginning that matters – the evaluation that goes into beginnings and the lessons-learned through practice: it’s not success(es) that make the doing meaningful.

I used to sit in meditation and my mind would have wandered off to work or to relationships. Sometimes to breakfast. And I’d only noticed when the final chime sounded. I thought I’d failed and that I needed to sit the ten minutes again to “do it right”. I don’t do that anymore. Oh, my mind still tends to wander, but I can accept and acknowledge that the effort is meaningful regardless of the outcome.

After two years of health issues, mental and physical, E. keeps reminding me that the only thing that is important now and for the rest of our lives, is to begin again. To hold on tight to Stafford’s thread and ask, “What is this all about again?”

It’s become a tradition and a priviledge to spend New Years Eve with L. and B.

L. is the one who invited me to eat 12 grapes at midnight. She and B lived in Spain for a few years. I believe that to make a wish with each grape is her own twist on the Spanish tradition. Today I reread the blog post from 2020 and realize that my 12 wishes last night were nearly identical to those two years ago: synonyms and shifted specifics. New perspectives. New approaches.

I’m not sure what to make of that in terms of my personal growth. Walt Whitman contradicted himself because he contained multitudes. I repeat myself. I think that is because I contain a multitude of threads as well, and am on a dialectical path. Where it ends doesn’t seem to be as important anymore. Only that I keep moving towards something.

The word “ease” had come up a lot over the past two years. Maybe the past three years. But this morning I read the word “gentle”.

I lingered on the word gentle.

I read Dylan Thomas’s poem again this morning with more empathy – and a different understanding – than I’ve had before. It’s wonderful, because for the first time I see the specific context of the speaker’s perspective. I see the words “old age” (would that Death allowed us all that experience), and the speaker’s projecting his own fears onto his father, and onto every other old man’s evaluation of their worth in the world. I think I’ve read this poem always making way for the poet/speaker’s greater wisdom, and I read the advice in the poem as a kind of sutra. I am thrilled no one deprived me of this discovery: that this (projected) perspective is not wrong, but is only one perspective. A true perspective, but not the true perspective. And that is not to say that no one has ever analysed the poem this way, explained it, described it to me. But if they did, I wasn’t able to take the lesson in.

Long live the hyper-realistic beauty of the unreliable narrator.

I want to move gently into this new year. To be attentive to my rage, to learn from it, and to let it then fall away.

I want to move towards… with new resolutions, and let my future selves return to them each day, re-evaluate. Maybe every resolution will fall away by spring.

If so? Some things will have changed.