Ren Powell's Blog, page 25

A Quiet New Year

I think I am afraid of the quiet. Afraid to let my mind rest. I have been binge-watching medical dramas and experienced a bit of panic when I realized I’ve watched all that are available on the streaming networks I subscribe to. I nearly subscribed to another to continue watching one that I am only mildly interested in. Plot holes. Inconsistent characters. Poor dialogue. Questionable moral standpoints. So there’s…

Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. Podcasts.

It seems I stay with any particular past-time until I hit a point of frustration that sends me to the next. I’m playing emotional Ping-pong. Looking for affirmations, escapism and getting smacked back. And that in itself is frustrating: knowing what I am trying to avoid, knowing that it’s foolish to try to avoid it, and still looking.

I misread something on my Twitter feed and thought a comment aimed at Boris Johnson was aimed at me. The point is: I flinched. I’m not using a metaphor here. I physically flinched. Even odder is the fact that the comment was part of a tweet I had retweeted myself.

Last year I don’t think I made any New Year’s Resolutions. I thought I was in a good place. This year is different. Everything hurts. I am tired of all of this hurt.

I am beginning to wonder if my need for escapism has everything to do with my reluctance to go for a run, or even a walk in the woods. My reluctance to write.

I’m afraid to make room for thoughts.

But it is like trying to run through an endless mire without getting my shoes muddy. The thoughts creep in. But as I slow down, I realize that it isn’t as bad as I anticipated. B. is dying. And we talk about movies and books and wildfires. We talk about what to do with what we learn (and don’t like) about people we love.

And I listen a lot more than I usually do.

I’m not going to appropriate her story, her lessons. But I am going to stay conscious of the lessons she is teaching me now, through the perspective she chooses to share with me.

“Life is too short” isn’t a platitude this afternoon as the calendar flips to 2022.

What I have learned now, at the close of 2021, is that holding two truths that bump against each other is painful, but possible. Necessary, even.

That an unwillingness to consider/allow for/discuss/listen to another perspective is not a sign of confidence in one’s own knowledge/beliefs/intelligence.

That “all or nothing” is a luxury illusion none of us can afford – not in terms of possessions, not in terms of loyalties.

That, as our worldviews get smaller we cling to our rage and outrage to justify our creeping, ever-narrowing circles of compassion.

I am reinterpreting the myth of Narcissus. I believe he must have been fixated on the tiniest of pools. The world as a teaspoon of sugared water… seen through the eyes of Narcissus while he’s listening to a podcast through his earbuds.

I need to go for a walk before the sun sets.

Magpies and Snow

on the morning that will lead to Christmas Eve. I’m surprised to wake to a white world this morning, after last night’s walk under a clear and starry sky. Something moved through while we slept, and maybe took with it some of the heaviness and left the rough chattering of the magpies.

We have yet to put up the tree and wrap the last gifts. But weirdly all I want to do is make something beautiful. And, as always, desire outstrips both ability and talent. Maybe it is appropriate that Amadeus is a Christmas film in my mind. Certainly a film for the winter season. Maybe the threat of wasted mediocrity can be a drive in-and-of-itself? Maybe some of us need a patron saint of Effort? We need to know less-than-excellence is still worthwhile.

A humble, worn begging bowl is a thing of unique beauty, isn’t it?

This year has been stitched together at points of pain. Losses. Abrupt and imperfect endings. And I suppose beginnings that are easy to overlook if one isn’t attentive to possibilities. I’ve been wondering if there is no such thing as a false start. In the same way that there is no such thing as a “failed” marriage, if one approaches life as growth and change and experience, rather than a map of set mileposts toward an obituary: this is supposed to be your wonderful life. Yeah. That Christmas movie that’s all about shirking your fate if you can’t suck it up through the hard times, give into your circumstances, and trust bow-tied, bushy-browed old men who claim to be angels.

It strikes me as ironic that all of us are storytellers. Ourselves as the heroes in everyday encounters. And yet I can’t seem to write a story. My character isn’t woven into given circumstances, and I can’t seem to plot a satisfying arc.

Maybe there is no arc, though there are arbitrary meeting points that matter very much. It seems to me that waiting for them, letting them come, and having faith in their covert significance is our obligation.

I guess that is why I feel pulled toward poetry. These knots of drama and of peace. Pearls on a string. Life as a room full pre-Islamic “hanged poems”* written by individual ghosts: each of arbitrary length, representing arbitrary lifespans. Each with a qasidah’s lack of plot or narrative.

Here is my search for an artistic home to that inevitably leads me to misunderstandings, accusations, and a keener sense of alienation.

In theatre history class I facilitate discussions on appropriation. But in movement class, I teach square breathing: the alternating states of movement and stillness, and the recognition that there is also life in stillness. In the waiting. I try to explain to my students: just wait. Don’t engage the glottal stop, don’t bear down in your throat, just stay open… and wait.

It’s not even a metaphor for life. It is life.

The snow absorbs sound waves. But the magpie’s bellies chatter like shakers in an improvised concert. The front yard is filled with tension. A drama without narrative.

The magpies are quiet now.

Wait.

They will begin again. Like barren Shakers, they’ll gather and make something beautiful.

Then they’ll be gone. Again.

Just wait.

*It is interesting that the phrase I found today was “hanged poems”, when I have been taught that the past tense of hang is hung and that the only thing hanged are people. The more common term is “The hanging poems”, which of course is immediate and… haunting.

Getting Past S.A.D.

Sometimes I wonder if the reason I fall into such depressions is the lack of movement. I haven’t run in two weeks. And now I’m not always succeeding in getting my body into the shower. Sadness is one thing. But sadness is like the turn of the key for an engine that will drive me, spinning, into the familiar trench. Spinning and going nowhere. If sadness is a tug, depression is the friction burn where an ambiguous want rubs against inertia.

An object remains at rest until an outside force acts on it. Until the world shifts somehow.

This is the beginning of winter. And really, what that means is the end of endings. This is a season of fallow time, of preparation for what is next. I like the quiet. And how the calls of a knot of sparrows will slide over the ice for blocks on a still afternoon. They rattle the dried leaves of the hedges, revealing themselves. And the crows hop along just ahead of Leonard and me. Unflustered. All of us. Each of us.

A hawk flies overhead.

But then I come back into the house, come back to expectations that I just can’t rouse myself to deal with. Socks to match and fold. Dishes to wash. Christmas presents to wrap.

In the corner of the studio there are a dozen glass jars, candle wax, wicks and essential oils. The second year the lot’s been stacked there. Ambitions. A second Advent that never happened. I told E. that maybe Christmas in July has to be a real thing for me. I need to put the products of a summer’s warmth on Lay-Away.

E. has no idea what Lay-Away is/was. In fact, no one I know does. I’m reminded that in Norway I am not legally allowed to call myself an “immigrant”. So I have no words to describe this kind of alone.

I thought this year I’d drawn a hard line under so many difficulties. “Now, this time, I will get it right.” I’ve cracked the code. Taken the medications. Figured it out. Got past it.

And then there is the guilt that is really self-indulgence.

Can you smell the burning rubber of spinning tires?
I need a shower.

And then I will try again.

This season is for the birds.

The Last Morning of a Cold Moon

It’s late morning and the sky is a baby shower of pinks and blues, and the fields are frosted with fragile crystals that rise from blades of grass and sharp-edged rocks. The moon is full and painted with shadows. It’s odd how this 3-dimensional moon makes everything feel unreal. The world’s Trompe-l’œil. An existential joke.

Twenty minutes into the walk and my fingers begin burning from the cold. My bones ache. Back at the house it hurts to squeeze the release for the clasp on Leonard’s collar. One more day of teaching before Christmas break. Teaching from home again because we are living through a pandemic of fits and starts and dreads. Sometimes I wonder if the virus is nature testing carefully, patiently trying various combinations before mounting a full-on defence against us.

Or whether we are just watching what has always been happening.

Since B. was given a terminal diagnosis she’s been wondering if other people, if given the choice, would rather know what’s coming – or just get hit by a bus. She says she is grateful for the time to wrap things up. I’m thinking (even after having had those moments of thinking, “this is it”), I still don’t know what I would choose.

It strikes me (again) that I am grateful for not having to choose, for the resignation and the ability to rest in powerlessness: accepting the freedom that affords. And the sudden accountability.

There’s no need to meditate on my own corpse. Impermanence is evident. Everywhere.

Blinkin’ Rainbows

Yesterday on the morning run I had trouble catching my breath. I began wondering if I’d finally caught Covid. Then I remembered that I always have trouble breathing when I am under stress. I remembered the time a doctor did a full work-up suspecting pneumonia when all I really needed was a proper job description so I could draw a ring around my obligations at work. Get a handle on them.

So on the downhill slope of the interval hill, I forced myself to slow down and take a deep breath. Fill the bottom of my lungs. And on the exhale, it was as though a cork popped and I sobbed for several minutes – loudly – standing still in the dark on the trail, with E.’s arms around me.

Then we finished the run.

Draw a ring around it.

I’ve read that most of us have four or five people whom we can truly count on and for whom we will be there for when they need us. The kind of person who will fly 4000 miles over an ocean to be with you through a divorce, then again three years later to be your matron of honor. The bad times and the good times.

One of my five told me she was seeing blinking rainbows on Tuesday. “Not as cool as it sounds,” she wrote. She was heading in for an MRI. I sent her a couple of voice messages so she wouldn’t have to read them. But she hasn’t opened them yet. Since then I’ve only gotten updates from her husband. From the MRI she was taken straight to the hospital.

It’s not my story. But these are my fears, the ones that literally take my breath away. I googled, because we all do that, right? And under the diagnosis (still to be confirmed) is a long disclaimer about the prognosis. If you want, you can follow the link to the charts with the statistics. Some people want to know. And now I wish I didn’t.

What do you do with numbers? What were the statistical odds for this thing to have taken root in her brain to begin with?

So now I have a handle on it: this weird piece of baggage filled with numbers and uncertainties. And with so much love.

I am carrying it through the days. And I will be carrying it around with me for many more days. Turning it over. Staring at it. Wishing it were a magic portal to take me 4000 miles over an ocean to be with her. Wishing it could somehow gestate a miracle.

I’m sorting through the ever-changing travel restrictions. But for now. Just stuck holding this bag. And wondering if I will ever look at a rainbow the same way I used to.

Tolerating Witches

The little blue light sits on my desk next to the computer screen. It’s a bit like playing with fire: trying to balance the ups and downs, the energetic bursts and the calm. Sleep was still elusive at nine – at ten p.m., the room being too warm then too cold. I’m surprised to hear the wind still gusting this morning. But Leonard has finished his breakfast and is where he should be now, curled up on the rug. And E. is still sleeping downstairs. I see a list of late-night messages from students that have collected on my phone. And there’s a photo of my daughter-in-law’s new puppy that slipped in overnight via messenger. So all is right with the world. A cup of coffee and a blanket draped over my legs. This is privilege: this quiet hour before the rush of the day begins.

I find myself living more and more in the spaces between things that have words to describe them. It’s not that I don’t want to write, but that I want to find a way to write without naming experiences. Without sorting my life into the labeled bins. This year I am teaching theater history a bit differently, having put the students into small seminar-style groups to discuss the curriculum rather than use a lecture/assignment model. I’m finding it helpful with ideas I struggle to understand myself: like Artaud’s ideas. I’ve been talking about how Artaud didn’t want the audience to experience a catharsis, but rather take the emotional disruption home with them. Invariably, the students describe it as Artaud wanting the audience to “reflect” on the theatrical experience. I guess it is due to an assumption that theater-as-therapy is theater-as-talk-therapy: the intellectualizing of experience as the route to understanding and processing/neutralizing. After all, what other kind of understanding is there?

There is poetry.

But so much of this kind of exploration is the antithesis of formal education. And even in a small group, an attempt to discuss this just frustrates and confuses the students, who want to/have to sort the information into the bins, to tuck the words away neatly into clear sentences that click like a tumbler lock to open the door to university. Which is what they are here for. What I am here for. There’s no room for negative capability when the exams are scored blindly from a central clearinghouse of random examiners. Sometimes I think there is no room for negative capability in the culture at all.

When the logic or science doesn’t exist, we “make it up” rather than rest in the beauty and in the ambiguity. We are so uncomfortable with inconsistency that we shut down opposing views, challenges, dissonance. We draw rings around what we will tolerate, using them to point out how tolerant we are. This, but not that. And those are the only two bins.

I know this isn’t new. It’s more like a flare-up of a common human disease in Western culture. Forget that last week you didn’t believe in witches. Today you pick one out. You choose a side.

Or maybe: you are one.

And just like that, I seem to have walked out of this little room and into my day.

I didn’t mean to do that.

It Smells Like Cold

The first snows came early this year. And have stuck for several days now. Leonard is thrilled. Every walk is like a treasure hunt. He digs his snout under the snow and pulls on the leash. I wonder if the snow sets the scents in relief somehow – why the same old neighborhood smells are suddenly so mesmerizing. If I had a wish this morning, it might be for snow thinly blanketed over the everyday things I take for granted.

As it is, I am sitting with a cup of cinnamon coffee in front of the computer screen and a blue therapy light. The space heater is drowning out the blackbirds. If they are there. And Leonard is curled up in the living room on the couch. I think the space heater annoys him. He likes the cold.

I slept poorly last night. Ruminating over things I need to say to students about their work that I graded last night before bed. Dreaming about students, and about me behaving in selfish ways: letting my frustrations overwhelm my pedagogic obligations. Being something of a bitch, I suppose. I grabbed one girl’s hair, looked her in the eyes, and told her I wasn’t going to babysit her sister. I’m convinced that sometimes dreams are random and not messages from the subconscious. I’m already totally conscious of my bitchy tendencies. My frustrations. And my obligations. And for goodness sake, doesn’t my awake behavior already give me enough to feel guilty about?

Twelve work days until Christmas break. And again this year I am just not ready for it. Every year it is the same disappointment. It comes unexpectedly and I just can’t seem to rouse the energy to deal with it: the advent season. The planning, shopping, cards, and handmade gifts – and sorrows.

Yesterday, heading to and from yoga on the train, the usually deserted station was bustling. The town square was filled with kids and music. All I could think of was that it was because the shops were open on a Sunday, and that made me sad. Am I a cynic for wondering if the place would have been empty had the shops been closed?

Despite the record high electricity prices making headlines in the national news sites, the neighborhood is lit-up. The windows full of Christmas stars and electric candles. Walking Leonard through the streets is cosy. But the mood seems to slide off my back, and I don’t know why. Or I do really. I grit my teeth at the expectation of the ghosts of Christmases past.

I will try harder this morning. I will try to stop resisting the season and all the pain that comes with it. I will try to find solace in letting the present moment in. To be more porous. I know it will do me good.

I’ll rouse Leonard off the sofa and see if I can look at the morning walk as a kind of treasure hunt. Blackbirds are out there somewhere.

A Crisis of Faith

A student requests a new monologue for her character. Gaia. She wants the character to have a little meltdown about the situation. She wants her character to be less passive about the destruction humans are causing.

I keep telling myself it’s nice someone has faith in me. At least that is how I am going to frame it: trust, faith. Now that I am sitting here again in front of a manuscript with blank spaces – return, return, return – marked with “coming here”, highlighted with an alarming yellow, feeling more than a little lost.

I remember trying to ride a ten-speed bicycle when I was a kid. The fear that ran through me every time I paused and then tried to catch up, spinning the pedals uselessly until the chain finally “caught” and then suddenly pulled again. When I hear the phrase “spinning out of control” this is actually what I think of: pedaling desperately, ridiculously. All this effort, and what for?

I’m not a fan of bicycles. I once pulled the front breaks and toppled rump-over-head, catching my thighs under the handlebars and scraping them into a bruised mess. My physiotherapist mumbled something about crush syndrome, without knowing that I am not the kind of person you should be mumbling about deadly traumas in front of.

The metaphors just make life more stressful. A slight pinch in my chest becomes an entire corset. Python. Don’t you dare breath out because you won’t be able to breath in again.

But after a break, there is a catch – wait for it, stay balanced in the meantime – and then you can more forward again.

The common advice is to just keep the pen moving. Write: I don’t know what to write. I don’t know what to write. Until something catches from your subconscious and is pulled up to the page.

Until Gaia decides to speak for herself and deigns to let you hear it. I’m not sure who I need to have faith in. Me. Or her.

The Weight We Give Things

It’s a quiet morning from the perspective of the world. I haven’t heard a bird calling. Leonard is still sleeping, which is odd. What few sounds may have normally filled the house are drowned out by the white noise of my little space heater. Winter came suddenly. Soft at first with the fat snow flakes, then hard as the black ice that covers the street Leonard and I normally walk in the mornings. If our driveway has ice in the shadow of the holly bush, I know not to take the normal route. I dress like a toddler when the weather is like this. Padded pants and mittens. And if no one is looking, my snowsuit, which was the best four hundred crowns I ever spent at a farming supply store. Maybe the best four hundred crowns I ever spent anywhere. Practical is a kind of freedom that is new to me. A door opening, a gust of fresh air.

Or on a still morning like this, wading into a clear pool.

I’ve eased out of bed this morning and made the mistake of reading the news before sitting down to write. I guess our morning walk and then my run will be all about shaking it off. Jack Kornfield says “After the Ecstasy the Laundry”. But there is also the question of after the Compassion… what then? I suppose it is akin to the obligation we feel to hold on to grief. To “hold a space” for the pain. And there is the guilt we may have when we find ourselves laughing during a period of a new loss.

I remind myself of the obligation to acknowledge the wholeness of the world. I can put down the conceptional understanding of things happening halfway around the world, and I can appreciate the nuzzling of a dog’s snout insisting on breakfast, my husband’s footsteps approaching as he comes in to sit in the chair beside me, drinking his coffee while I write.

Heading out now for a run. I’ll be quiet turning near the edge of the lake. I’ll be listening for the ducks, who invariably laugh just before dawn.

Advent. Again.

I spent ten minutes looking for the cinnamon in the kitchen. The counters, the shelves. I even checked the refrigerator because finding lost items there seems to be a thing lately. I gave up and sat down to write, only to notice the cinnamon on the edge of the desk.

At least I can start the day with cinnamon in my coffee.

Tuesday mornings are slow. A rest day, so no run. Leonard is waiting for his walk. I wonder if he’ll be just as disappointed as I am now noticing last night’s snow is already gone and the streets are black.

Last night we walked while it was snowing big, fat flakes. We passed three kids rolling snowballs along the sidewalk. They’d already packed two balls big enough to make a 4-foot snowman. Leonard was excitedly pushing his nose under every mound of snow like it was a treasure hunt. I had just finished a weight-lifting class and my body was warm inside my snowsuit. The snowflakes stung my eyes now and then. The night was light. And I was thinking: real life is good. I was looking forward to crawling into bed with a book and some tart cherry and sparkling water. Not as cozy as tea perhaps, but more conducive to a good night’s sleep.

It seems like life is thinning down to just these things now. The sore muscles and the quest for a good night’s sleep. This happens every year at advent. The season makes me feel threadbare and inadequate. I try hard to create the kind of warm, cosy, seasonal atmosphere of candle-lit Scandinavian film sets from the 70s, and the results are amateur. Cheap.

There is a scene in the 60s film version of Genet’s The Balcony: the jury in the mock trial are cardboard cut-outs. I think this haunts me a little because the community is an illusion. Like a child lining up dolls and stuffed animals around a tiny tea set, everyone present is in agreement–and while that part is nice, it’s a lonely setting.

Like most kids, I guess, I used to imagine the toys came to life at night and talked about me. It wasn’t nice. A bit like my mother and my aunts gossiping about one another when the other wasn’t present.

Back in therapy now, my shrink tells me things will come up again. I find it odd, because what’s not “up” almost continually? But I suppose I am blowing the dust off the memories and handling them. I’m not intentional in noticing new things–new textures and crevices in the tiny landscapes–but they are obvious now. Sometimes insistent.

I’m mixing my metaphors.

I finished writing a new play for the students and a colleague asks me why I would do that when I could find a perfectly good script that would work.

I just don’t think I belong in this world sometimes. I feel like a cardboard cutout watching, but looking in the wrong direction, eyes fixed. Try as I might, I just can’t get myself “fleshed out” in the real world with everyone else. I don’t really understand what the judge wants from me.