Ren Powell's Blog, page 27

The Opposite of Disassociation

My computer updated and now, along the bottom menu of my screen, it tells me – unsolicited – that “Rain [is] coming”. And I feel bad because I haven’t looked out of the window this afternoon. I did walk around the house this morning, still in my pj’s, picking up dog poop so the lawn mower wouldn’t catch it. But I didn’t take in the morning: not the weather, not the birds, not the scent of autumn. Sometimes I wonder why the Bible lists so many sins and not this one: inattention.

Yesterday I nursed my cold by lying in bed and watching television. There was a moment when I pulled away from myself – consciously – and I suddenly became aware of the room. The space in the room. The colors of the walls. The textures of everything in it. Everything so beautifully foreign, so outside of myself, so dispossessed of expectations, so soulfully free.

I became aware of the distance between my arm and the blanket, my eardrum and the air vent, my mouth and the closest surface in each direction: the painted pressed wood of the nightstand. The coarse linen of the chaise lounge. I sensed my breath filling the room. Together with Leonard’s breath, and our lives overlapping at a cellular level.

There is a spider that hides somewhere behind my vanity mirror. Also breathing. Also alive and intermingling – atomic. Discrete. Intertwined.

We are inextricably tied to everything that frightens us. That thrills us. That makes us aware of our breathing.

I think I have always held on to this fact as a kind of comfort.

These little moments cut me off from the world in one way, but they also connect me to myself. They connect me to my childhood, and to a state of vigilance that was both necessary and habituated, to time when I didn’t have the self-awareness to judge this openness – or justify it, or pity myself for it. There was no – and still is, no – value judgement hovering over this state of being that I fall into now and then, now.

And then I slipped away from myself, back into the day like a fish into a stream.

The little room smells like tea and nail polish. Rosemary oil in the burner: for memory, they say. Somewhere deep in my chest there is a melody taking form. Ophelia handing out flowers. “I would give you some violets, but they withered all [ …].”

Last weekend I ran along the shore and the air was still. But the sea was still churning from the storm that had passed through. Tall waves, dark and edged with a white so opaque I could imagine I was running through an oil painting.

Sometimes writing is like wading into a stream where others have left all the stories to flow together, to flow through your hands, around your waist and into new ribbons of currents of hot and cold shining with the tiny creatures that give the world life, that take the world’s life. There’s nothing to claim here. Not really. It all runs to the ocean.

I miss writing.

Leaving in an hour for London. With Maeterlinck’s Bluebird haunting my thoughts. It is a good place to be now. Ready for a new season.

a leaf wet with raindrops

Dominion Over Me

Running through the park yesterday, I passed a woman with her arms wrapped around a tree. With her cheek pressed to the bark, her eyes closed.

And with all due respect for literal tree huggers, I wondered how the tree felt about this human pressing her physical presence in that way. I mean, it is an odd assumption – that all (potentially) sentient creatures want that kind of contact with humans.

We seem to have this compulsion to want to handle what we find attractive. We cuddle small children. We are cuddled as small children, yet seem to forget how we resented it. We want to reach out and touch otters, lambs… bear cubs. We want to infantilize the other. Keep it under our dominion.

“Trust me.” Says the man. The teacher. The expert. The child to the hampster.

There are plants that, when attacked by aphids, call out to wasps for help. I wonder if the tree was calling out for help as this woman pressed herself along its trunk. I wonder if the moment of blocked sunlight, blocked air made the tree gasp.

I think of all the video clips passed around social media of rabbits “relaxing” under the flow of water from a bathroom sink’s faucet. The sense of absolute righteousness revealed in the admonishing comments.

We try so hard to disentangle our presence in the world: the good from the bad. But even empathy brings with it elements of oversight:

oversight/ˈəʊvəsʌɪt
1. an unintentional failure to notice or do something
2. the action of overseeing something
for example: effective oversight of the financial reporting process

It makes perfect sense to me that this single word encompasses both of these meanings.

two trees among fallen, autumn leaves

In the Moments of Our Blinking

And we have returned to “normal” now. People still not wanting to sit next to each other on the train. Like before. My ears are full of cotton, and my head, congested. A normal cold. Like before. There is a part of me that thinks my body needs this. That it will somehow be both a workout for my immune system and a kind of catharsis.

Harmless discomfort. Shake it up, shake it off. Go for a run.

I jut my jaw forward to clear my ears. The sky is clear and dark. But those three stars have moved since yesterday morning. Now over the neighbor’s house instead of the street. How is that possible? Is that how this astronomy stuff works?

I love those films where the details change and the character finally notices. Or the viewer does. It seems to me this post-modern trope gets at what all the Modernists were aiming for: the awareness that there is a real world outside of our awareness. In the moments of our blinking.

Astonished. It is a nice word, and it nicely describes the emotion at the moment of anagnorisis: Now the tragic figure gets it. Simultaneously surprised by his own ignorance, as well as the existence of a real world. Or another world, where what where peripheral events were chained together along a different path that led – still – to this very moment. This is what it means to face one’s fate, isn’t it? To understand that we are sliding over the surface, slipping consciously along a sliver of existence. Krill, unaware of the ocean.

We don’t need a god to justify our fate.

Maybe a Galton Board.

Stop Motion Theatrics 1

Leaving the house this morning to walk Leonard, I caught a glimpse of the sliver of old moon before the thin clouds covered it. There will be a new moon on Wednesday. Maybe that’s why I feel an urge to make everything new.

To the south the sky is clear and black. I can see the stars, even here from the new subdivision. We’ve having a break in the weather, a bit of quiet between the hailstorms and the rain. I hum as I walk. Om four times: ha, ri, ni, sa. Amen.

There is a proverb about washing the bowl after you’ve eaten. But picking up the dog shit is far more humbling. Carrying it home to the bin, a much larger metaphor.

I’ve a second appointment with the new psychiatrist today. We left the question hanging: What do you hope to get from these sessions?

This morning, after my habitual meditation – a mash-up of Buddhist philosophy and Christian hymns tweaked ever-so-slightly towards pantheism – I was thinking about the paradox of pursuing ease while pushing to grow beyond of one’s comfort zone.

In another life, I translated what was pretty much Tor Obrestad’s life’s work with poetry (up to that point). I was new to the language. New to translation. We are too different as writers – as people – for it to have been a great match. But one image that remains with me is his description of a waking boy: with the white tips of new growth. In my mind a life’s work with poetry can be a single image if it is that perfect.

I think about the translucent edges of new. I imagine the nerves that grow suddenly, impulsive and vulnerable – the quantum surge of life that is too fast, too eager to be held back. Protected.

The wind burns when it blows over a wound. New cells, shining and wet. And we breathe through it. Everything in movement, as it should be. Don’t clench. Don’t cling.

This week my students do their last performance of the Three Billy Goats Gruff. I’ve been focusing on an acting style that is staccato. The information is conveyed in snapshots, moments. I could describe it as stop-motion theater. (Oh! I like that! Move over, Lecoq).

It’s difficult for the students to master. Even with mirrors, even with mechanical analyses: Thought. Execution. Expression. Thought. Execution. Expression. It is an unnatural style. It is unnatural in its artificial segmentation. My acting students are almost always motivated by a desire to bring stories to life. This is academic.

Tree. Fungi. Forest.
Mitochondria. Cytoplasm. Cell.

Life flows. At some level there is an ease. Something slips through, integrates. It can’t help it. All the shuddering is an illusion of objectivity.

I have been thinking. Maybe the idea is not to move out of the comfort zone, but expand the comfort zone.

acting students dressed as a three-headed troll

Where the Green Grows

This morning I stare at a waning moon and a smattering of stars. The clouds will move in this afternoon and the rest of the weekend will be wet. The late summer feels finished. Leonard tugs at the leash. There is something I can’t see in shadows of the hollybush edge.

Yesterday I took the movement students outside. I hadn’t planned it but room scheduling has been difficult. We ran off what must have been a hundred pigeons from a patch of grass along the quayside. The swan, of course, we avoided. We moved through warrior positions and balanced poles on our fingertips: “Knees bent, knees bent.” It is an odd mantra to have carved into one’s subconscious.

Be ready for anything.

The swan remained centerstage. Unflustered. Such confidence for such a relatively small creature.

There was more wind than we would have liked, but it felt good to move in the fresh air – with the fresh air – outside of the little black box where we all spend the majority of our days. With another group of students, I would have had them let the wind push them around. I would have had them risk the judgemental looks from people passing by. I would have reminded them to commit, to challenge the onlookers’ projections of insecurity, to confuse them. Forget them. Forget the swan. But these students have been affected by the Covid restrictions for most of their theatre studies. There’s little trust in each other, little trust in in their own bodies… little trust in me.

The sunshine barely grazed my skin, but felt good on my retinas. Since the morning and evening walks are in the dark now, it felt like a flicker of past already. Everything is softer now, during this transition. Winter’s sharpness will come, but right now there is a bluntness to the days.

The afternoon is an oversized, red rubber ball that smells like the dark side of childhood.

Everything in its time, returning in its time with a surprising perspective. I am in a holding pattern. Holding so very much.

feather in the grass

Another Equinox and a Carrot

The first day of autumn brought the rain and the damp. At 5 a.m., a reluctant Leonard who hates getting his paws wet. Somewhere near the railroad tracks a dog screamed. I think it was a dog. Leonard and I both standing at attention in the dark, in the silence that followed, then both shaking off our helplessness, because what choice do we have but to get on with the day?

The sun rising vaguely, somewhere in the sky behind the opaque weather front. The neighbor down the road, with the lovely garden and who was wearing knickerbockers the first time I saw him, stares at us from the window of his bright entrance hall. I took another mental picture. I wonder if he knows I do that.

He doesn’t return the smile he can’t see.

Out walking once, I told him that he had a beautiful garden. He turned away from me. But the next day he told me I had a beautiful dog. Now we half-smile and nod often in the mornings. Most days this is all I need from other people. And some days it is all I have to give.

I am trying to reframe my situation: to consider all of the obligations as things waiting for me to return to, rather than the things I have fallen behind on. I know the former ascribes these “things” a kind of volition. But really the later does, too. Entities of sorts to whom I owe somehow, for having fallen short in serving them with the proper devotion.

I wonder if I am unique in anthropomorphising the world in this way? Like a child with toys: fairly, mentally kissing goodnight each one before bed. Then a kiss for God’s white cheek.

I let the small bits of the world down. I disappoint the dusty tiffany lamp with the burned-out bulb, the now-chipped coffee cup.

So much comes down to my forgetting. Forgetting as carelessness: as with yesterday’s discarded, wet socks I found on the bathroom floor this morning. Too much of my life is “I meant to…”

What do you mean to do with your life? I think I have meant to please. Sometimes I wonder if I will die while mentally apologizing to the kitchen sink for the bits of onion and garlic stuck in the metal trap.

At this point in my life, I know all of this involves a willing suspension of disbelief on my part. Though I am not sure if it constitutes escaping from real life, or desperately searching for it.

And this isn’t the first time I have wondered if all of human mental activity is a meaningless distraction. By carrot or by whip we will ourselves on.

Leonard and I came in from the rain this morning. I towelled him off and he ran for the treat cupboard. I slid off my rain paints, and E. handed me a cup of green tea.

Some days, by whip or by carrot, we will one another on.

Some days, it is good to be reminded of this simple thing.

Acknowledging Medusa

The little timer begins with a chime. Returning to these quiet minutes in the library with Leonard snoring on the rug beside me. A cup of coffee, a clear head. A sense of openness – knowing that some things will hurt.

The lithium has been out of my system for a couple of weeks now. In some ways it is like having lifted a bandage from a wound. A sense of lightness, a stinging contact with the air. Awareness shifts. But it is good. A kind of healing process. As long as one keeps in mind that “healing” does not mean returning to a former state. Any former state.

Six months have passed in a frozen moment that was something like a swift slap to the side of a television set to stop the vertical roll. But the world is never frozen entirely. Things shift imperceptibly until they are perceptible. You step back and find yourself in the middle of a new program.

I know that is an archaic metaphor. I know that. And I wonder what all these technological changes in the world have done to people like me, who’ve straddled a revolution that seems like magic. That encourages magical thinking?

I think about those years of my slowly-twisting fingers on knobs. These still slowly-twisting fingers that make me self-conscious. Age-conscious, which is nothing more than death-conscious. I think about the last six months, and what has happened along the edges of the bones in my left shoulder. The build-up of minerals within my body. I try to make sense of competing metaphors. My turning to stone, my falling to dust.

Tomorrow I head back to the physiotherapist who will press a bit of metal against my bruised shoulder and send invisible shockwaves through the skin to shatter the build-up of calcium that is biting into my tendon every time I lift my arms into a sun salutation.

I did my homework on the procedure. The statistics for “success”. For an easing of the inevitable transitioning from one body to the next. The non committal language of my GP: “You can try it.”

I have been thinking about the distinctions between organic and non-organic material and our definitions of life causally tied up with these definitions. About the presence of the inorganic elements in our bodies. The necessary presence. The growing presence.

I haven’t seen the moon since Sunday: cloud cover. But I know it is there, huge and low and signaling the harvest. Already my morning and evening walks with Leonard are in darkness. I run late in the day when I can now, to get some sunshine.

Let myself go.

And there goes the final chime from my timer. Just as Medusa enters.

The Queen is Dead. Long Live the Queen.

It has been so long since I’ve sat here in the library that the roses on my desk have long since died and dropped their leaves – more leaves than I would have thought possible from a dozen red roses of condolence.

The light bulb in my little green lamp has burned out. I type in a relative darkness this morning. In an hour I will leave the house to take the train to work, and I will pass the tall raspberry stalks that lean out over the driveway from the garden and I will grab the ripening berry I’ve had an eye on for days.

Provided one of the magpies hasn’t beaten me to it.

It seems these past weeks I have moved even further away from myself in an attempt to know how to move forward. It is true that death brings change, even deaths that do not spawn grief, but end it. I am “over it”. In a way. Past it, certainly. And now what?

We can do this, you know. We can own our own stories, or just give them up entirely. And we can let go of the need to dictate the stories of others.

We don’t need to be “a survivor” with a constructed story arc that makes us the hero. If we “win” all the battles. We can just live in world with no need to construct a dramaturgy that will bring everything to a satisfying end.

That sets us up to fail.

While avoiding writing, either publicly or privately, I have been thinking again about “whose story”. I have been thinking again about my choice to erase myself from the tidy narrative in my mother’s obituary (which described a woman I never knew): to take that name that is not my name, was my name, out of that paragraph with “[…] is survived by”. Because the truth is that the person who wore that name, who lived that life, did not survive but was born anew, and mothered by so many others.

We can do this. We can give up the need to carry a through-line through the days. Can’t we?

Today I will lecture on Antigone. Creon’s story. And I will ask the students to read the play, translated from a translation that was translated from a translation and handed down through cultures that have come and gone, and were born anew. I will ask them: Whose story is this? Why carry it? Will you somehow make it yours? How?

I learned yesterday that Antigone means “against-birth”.

Can we accept that every considered perspective on every story is a true answer? That all of them are as true as memories?

As true as the dried leaves scattered over a book filled with fragments of poems that I’ve forgotten I’ve written.

I’m off to pick a raspberry.

photo of a ripening raspberry on the stalk

Trying Not to Dismember the Present

Sleep. I really could use a good night’s uninterrupted sleep. Sometimes I wonder if my life doesn’t balance out somehow through sleep. As though I have a preferred, set point of stress that my body will work to maintain. If my days are relaxed and pleasant, my nights will be filled with pinched dreams and ominous atmospheres.

They say that our memories are not recorded like video snippets in a file system somewhere in our brains. But rather: each time we “re-member” we construct a new version of the memory. I wonder then if each incidence of a specific memory is significantly altered from the last without our noticing? Without us having an ability to notice. It must, right? This is what we know to be true. And not only are we not able to be objective, but that our subjective truth has no through-line in time. It is immediate and ephemeral.

We re-member rather than dis-member our memories. Our stories.

A few days ago I was captured by a video clip of a dancer. Utterly charmed. I shared it with students as a way to illustrate some of Laban’s ideas about dynamics in movement. Then I had a dream. And now I can’t look at the video. Or think of the video without becoming physically and emotionally upset. Something – some gesture, some facial expression: a smile – stitched itself into an atmosphere of a childhood memory while I slept.

A present memory and a much older re-memory are bleeding from a nightmare into my days. I suppose this is where the idea of repressed memories comes from? As though the present sends a hook down into the past and pulls up a fragment of a story along with the will to make sense of it.

This dark and stormy night. Fill in the blanks. But I know that – I believe that – there will never be a way to know the objective truth of a re-constructed memory. So I let it be. I admit I am tempted to try to name the atmosphere, a bit like recollecting a taste – the sweet, the umami, the mouthfeel – to shape it into something that can be put safely in a box. Identified and controlled. Like an ingredient in the recipe that makes us who we are. In this case: This darkness. This ambivalence. This vague childhood fascination of knowing there is an unknown something present in the energy that is as explosive, rich, and mesmerizing as death.

Is this a wisdom that only exists in the lifetime before rationalization becomes a habit? A trigger for sense that ushers us to a different kind of innocence/ignorance? A mature and willful distance. The illusion of control that we are so afraid to lose.

If this atmosphere of my memory is real, maybe it has no name because I had no name for it: for a sense memory connected to a psychological process but not to language. So it slips around the traps in my mind and flows into moments of my day, unexpectedly. Darkly.

And I am still fascinated. Like touching a wound. Like sticking a finger deep into the bloody gash to expose the mystery as… mystery.

Here is something as dark and textured as mushrooms. As sickness and birth and sex. Something true that cannot be contained.

And here is the rub: how to let it be. How to know that there is this dancer’s smile in the world and know that it will rush over me as sticky and ambivalent as menstrual blood – and just let it be, making no attempt to tame all this wildness with a story?

Compassion Fatigue

Nothing is a clear shot. Or at least if there is such a thing it is a rare. And maybe it is an awful metaphor no matter what.

Metaphors are interesting things. How often we use them when the vehicle of the metaphor is something we’ve never actually experienced ourselves. Making it, what? An embedded metaphor in a way? An effective way to remove the idea further from the body rather than bringing it back to lived experience?

I woke up cold this morning and pulled on long wool underwear and rain pants to walk Leonard around the block. At 4:30 it is still completely dark now. I am surprised to pass three men in work clothes, plodding along through the suburb carrying plastic grocery bags. Heads down. Not in a group. Three individual encounters. Leonard stays quiet and calm, so I consciously breathe.

Home again. And in the library with a cup of coffee. I find my butt slipping off the desk chair. “Butt in the chair”. It’s not a metaphor is it? “Difficult to keep your butt in the chair”. Just write.

But the truth is, if you are still wearing you rain pants your butt will not stay in the chair.

E. is laughing at me. With me. Leonard stretched over the little rug with his eyes closed.

This is my life. A random, mundane moment. Sometimes I would think I would trade all the highs for more of these relaxed moments – before the news-site headlines creep into my thoughts, before anyone needs more from me than I can provide with a slow stroll through a damp morning and the opening of a treat-cupboard door.

E. brings me coffee. I slip off the plastic pants and am suddenly mindful of the texture of the wool underwear. It is such a silly thing – this illusion of comfort and the connection to something so simple/difficult, to a past culture that I have never experienced and can only imagine where every morning is as cold and damp as this one, but warm with breath of dogs and sheep and maybe a goat. It’d be fun to think this was some sort of genetic memory. But I am sure I have seen too many films, read too many books, wished for a life other than the one I landed in.

What would it be like to wake and move a body through a series of motions – lift, twist, tug, heave – without dwelling on horrors halfway around the world over which you have no influence. What would it be like to have to focus on the immediate, present, physical world. The daily tasks repetitive motions, rituals of will: order, comfort, sustenance. It’s it a form of prayer? A metaphor for what we wish for the world? A vicarious effort to make things better for everyone, by staying alive – contributing? By tending what we can touch?

Scott Peck wrote a book long ago and tried to define love strictly as a verb. It changed the way I thought about my life. About the people who “loved” me, and my responsibility in loving. I am thinking about compassion. As a verb. Maybe the term compassion fatigue is all wrong. Compassion isn’t what is wearing us down.

What is wearing us down is helplessness.

The world is too big. Our reach?… is not a metaphor.