Ren Powell's Blog, page 30

Sunday Links

A poem I wish I’d written:

“My Brother at 3 A.M.” by this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner Natalie Diaz

The Weekly Audio Digest:This week’s writing prompt: Nothing But Metta4 A Guest Blog Post:Impermanence by Ren Powell: Featured Poem/InspirationI Took a Pretty Picture:

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Have a great Sunday!

An Indirect View of the Sun

It’s raining this morning. I think it may be why I slept late.

Sitting on the sofa looking out the window, a slipped ray of sunlight coming from behind my house, over my roof, hit the white trim on the neighbor’s roof to set it glowing against the slate sky.

This happens often. I sit on the sofa drinking my coffee and petting Leonard and I see this phenomenon. I know the sun is there. Momentarily. Then the eaves stop glowing and I know the clouds have covered the sun again. I feel my mood sink as though it were directly connected to the lux measurement of the neighbor’s eaves.

This happens so often on the weekends that I have begun to see this little moment of reflection like a kind of meditation practice. My mood is variable. And I can step back and notice its own nature, which is something my conscious mind can pull away from and observe. In the same way I can observe my hand. Or my aching achilles. What is a part of me is not the whole of me.

If there is a me. There is the image of the rider and the elephant in Buddhist symbolism. But I am thinking most days I feel more like a dog walker with a pack of variously trained dogs of wildly varied breeds. Today I’m being dragged by the loudly complaining husky, but tripped by the yappy chihuahua.

And there really is Leonard. Nudging my arm off of the keyboard. Putting his head between me and the mobile phone. Standing in my way, leaning his head on my thigh: notice me, sit with me, breathe with me.

This morning I was scrolling through Instagram and saw a film clip of a sea turtle eating a jellyfish. There was something profoundly disturbing about it. The vulnerability of the jellyfish’s beautiful body. The turtle’s leisurely matter-of-factness. It’s unrushed hunger. The small fish swimming around the jellyfish’s tentacles, even now as the turtle rips off parts of the body. The fact that someone observed and filmed the scene. This is life. Look at it. What do you do with this knowledge?

Maybe the point is to do nothing at all. Learn to look for the perspectives and try to hold them all at once? The jellyfish’s perspective. The turtle’s. The baby fishes’. The shrimp’s, and crabs’; the sharks’.

I don’t have to always take sides. Even if, or maybe especially when, I identify emotionally with one. Empathy isn’t wisdom. Empathy alone can’t determine the “right” side.

This morning watching the effects of the clouds covering the sun again, feeling my mood sink, I thought of the rash of grassfires we’ve had in the county this past week. Some quite serious.

Rain’s a good thing today—from that perspective.

a strong wind carries
you effortlessly along
in one direction

My Life as a Worry Stone

Now, it seems like every morning I sit down in front of the computer I second guess myself. I wonder if I have already written down the ideas that are bouncing around my head. I am sure I have. My life is all about repeating myself (and maybe repeating what’s handed down in DNA somehow?). Variations on a theme. Every bit of writing a piece of a kaleidoscope image of the same small life. This sliver through this filter. Now turned at this angle.

I don’t know why I’ve become self-conscious about this. It could be a consequence of my restlessness. Feeling like there little that is novel in my life. In the past 16 months, I have not been more than a 45-minute drive from my home. I haven’t sweat just sitting on a beach in the sunshine. I haven’t stopped to listen to buskers in the Bank tube station tunnel or gotten lost in an unfamiliar city. Though yesterday walking back from my vaccine shot at a local jr. high, I got lost here: a 20-minute walk from the house. (I am surprised how many of my neighbors have bright poppies in their stone hedges.)

Part of me would be happy to pack up and move somewhere new. But E. has ties here. And I am as happy as I have ever been. Restlessness aside. Pain aside. I am holding several states of being in my heart at once more easily than I have before. Me packing all my belongings won’t stop the hurt. I am thinking it’s a superstitious impulse. If I make a major change the whole world will have to change. The butterfly effect as an emotional placebo. A half-baked bargain with God. I’ll make it right now. I’ll change and the world can right itself.

I turn my life over and over in my hands and stay curious. This is my life as a worry stone. I suppose it is a kind of sleight of hand or misdirection. Rubbing the stone does little. It’s an eternity project: smoothing a groove with my thumb. But I am doing something in the face of my own uselessness.

It seems to me our culture ridicules self-soothing of any sort, as childish—if not infantile—behavior. We should be stronger. But meditation is a form of self-soothing. Running. Dancing until the sweat of your lower back stains your shirt. Lit candles at the dinner table. A dog in your lap. I am strong enough to hold all the good and all the bad—and not need to pretend I can vanquish the latter.

I keep telling myself.

I am asking myself again whose story it is to tell. Any child, any parent, any lover. Where do we draw the line where empathy & witnessing cross into personal appropriation. Respecting their secrets, their pains, their right to speak for themselves—or choose not to.

These days I am circling an outer ring of something more difficult than I have ever had to bear. The unimaginable. No. That’s not true. It’s the imaginable that your mind toys with like a specter like a hazy figure on a polaroid. The slender man among the trees in the fog. But it is something else when he walks into your bedroom and sits on the quilt so his weight pins your legs. He puts his hand on your sternum and breaths in your face. And he says he’ll be here for you until you die.

Only it’s not me there on the bed. I’m in the doorway. Helpless. Rubbing a worry stone. Wishing it were me on the bed. Surely I could make a pact with God? This is my story. And this is not my story. I am in the hallway. My finger making slow circles on a bit of stone.

A Dark Comfort

It’s something of a wake-up call when you think in the morning: today I’m going to shower and brush my hair. How deep I’ve settled into that familiar groove. The familiar always brings with it a kind of comfort. No matter how dark.

No run this morning because of the strained achilles. So the blue sky I see from the porch while the dog is peeing this morning, doesn’t quite do the trick it usually can. The plants in my yoga room are all dead, so I can’t bring myself to roll out my mat there.

I’d like something to grab me by two corners and snap me like a sheet. I want to hear that sound of straightening things out. And then I want to get on a plane and go somewhere where I sweat just sitting on the beach doing nothing.

And that is not going to happen. The school year limps to a close and then summer lies there like a damp cloth. There is a joy in hiking in soft rain, in hazy mornings. But something in me needs heat this year. Heat to burn off this restlessness. To get me to kick off this weighted blanket.

Every morning I write a single poem – quick and dirty – as part of my writing practice. The idea is to let go of the idea that my writing is too precious, and my ideas too few to squander on an online blog. I suppose it has something to do with the pop psychology model of the scarcity vs abundance mindset. At any rate, this morning I wrote about a late childhood summer memory. The twitter-sized poem touched off a cascade of memories. And I’ve been trying to suss out why they came up now and how I feel about them.

Ambivalence is the first word that came to mind, but that isn’t true. I don’t have good memories of the Kentucky river with its stigmatizing impetigo (white trash rash), the drunken men in their flipping dune buggies with their near-misses, recklessly chewing up the riverbanks. My mother too stoned to care that my 6-year-old brother was on a minibike and split his skull open on the tailpipe of a parked car, while I fussed in a kind of vertical rut, like a hopping, cartoon drama queen. Making “too big a deal of it.”

But I swam across the river once. And back. Despite my fear of snapping turtles, water moccasins, fish in general, and step-fathers in the specific. Death. Despite my fear of drowning like my cousin had been drowned in a bathtub.

I swam over the dark cushion of fear that was almost like a buoy, like a propelling presence.

I’ve been wondering if this is really facing one’s fear at all. I suppose it is – but then, I don’t feel like I conquered it. It was more like a battle and a retreat. All these years of battle and retreat.

And if I were to conquer my fears, to puncture the cushion? What then? What’s going to buoy me and propel me through the world?

these dark shapes that stack
one on one like bones to hold
a body upright

Loosened Into Non-Being and Beginning Again

This is one of those mornings where my tea is already cold as I open the computer program. My routine crumbled even before I got out of bed. And as I type this Norwegian words keep intruding in my inner monolog, which is rare. I don’t want to use the world crumble. “Smuldre” comes to mind instead. I think this means I am primed to write poetry today. Onomatopoeia taking precedence over everything this morning. My personal, physical relationship with words.

Crumbles. “Like a cookie”. Dry, granular.
Smuldre opp. It is a perfect translation for crumble, but the sm sound feels softer. It’s still dry but not granular – more like old paper. Dust.

I suppose being an outsider means having a peculiar relationship to a new language as a boxful of tiny objects to make sense of and piece together. A second language rarely arrives in context.

I over-analyze the shape and sound and discrete parts of each word. I experience imaginative literal (and visceral) origins of phrases. Å gå i oppløsning: To become loosened into non-being. It’s not the same thing as dissolve. It feels different on an emotional level. And for me, all emotions begin as physical sensations.

The thing is I can’t write in Norwegian because how I feel the language and how it is read and understood by native speakers are two different things. Norwegians will argue with me (and be right, of course) that both cookies and wet paper smuldrer.

When I write, I often wind up searching for a way to translate my understanding of a Norwegian phrase back into English. Norwegian has become a kind of poetry tool for me to play with. A shift in perspective that is almost magical. Probably because it comes from a place of ignorance.

I think of Picasso when he talked about the art of trying to paint like a child. This, years after he’d learned classical painting techniques. He wanted to de-familiarize himself with painting.

“It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”

– Pablo Picasso

I have a lot of personal issues with Picasso as a role model of any sort, but I do think that there is a value in going back to pick up dropped stitches – things we let go of along the way that can provide us a kind of structural integrity for our creative perspectives/pursuits/contributions.

I think that this is just another way of talking about “The Beginner’s Mind”.

The creativity coach Jen Louden talks about beginning again – always beginning again. But I am now putting that together with a deeper understanding. This doesn’t mean picking up where you left off and continue. It means pulling back, shaking it off, and beginning again from a point of ignorance—with the integrity of experience, but not using experience as a pathfinder.

Begin. The word doesn’t begin with a breathy vowel, rising passively on the continuation of an exhalation. It is plosive. Explosive. It’s the new calf being let out of the barn in spring.

It also ends in n, the tongue vibrating on top of the mouth.

It’s a nice feeling.

Sunday Links

A poem I wish I’d written:

“The Two-Headed Calf” by Laura Gilpen.

A brief review:

The Girl Aquarium by Jen Campbell: GAS

This week’s writing prompt: Nothing but Metta4 This week’s audio digest for A Diary is Yes Indeed:

Have a great Sunday!

When Nothing Comes

Overslept. Which is unusual. I had odd dreams that I am still trying to make sense of. My mind won’t settle. Or wake up fully. This morning there is a gull outside nearby and at first, I thought it was a dog crying. But there lies Leonard on the rug, unperturbed, and I guess he would know.

Sometimes I wonder if we talk to ourselves in dreams. Though, if so, it seems an unnecessarily inefficient method for self-improvement. I wonder if anyone has studied whether people who don’t read poetry or fiction have more literal dreams. Or maybe people who have random dreams become writers because we are actually extremely uptight and have a desperate need to impose our personal order from chaos.

I can analyze my dream, like a scarf-clad clairvoyant reading palms in a carnival tent. It all seems to fit so perfectly. The symbols, the relevance. But then I think about the human tendency to see faces in everything. It’s called Pareidolia. It’s a thing every human does, apparently. But it is more than seeing faces, and the tendency becomes problematic when any random visual impression is interpreted as meaningful.

So where’s the healthy zone on this spectrum? Rorschach tests to Jesus on Toast to… analyzing my dreams.

This dream was harmless and surprisingly empowering when I recall it and match the small scenes with the “issues” in my life at the moment. I feel better about myself having “worked it out”. But I wonder – did my unconscious mind work it out and present it to me to resolve like a riddle. Or did my conscious mind put random images in an order that would be helpful to me in terms of getting through the day?

Is this subconscious mind the “I” that observes me in meditation? Is it a kind of Wizard of Oz still disclosed? Is this why so many of us like our “gods” and our gurus to speak in riddles, to be shrouded in mystery the way our minds are in sleep? We want to recognize god in the way we recognize ourselves – not in terms of our worst selves, like Zeus, but in terms of the oracle we’d also like to think is in our deeper selves, behind some curtain?

red sky at morning
will bring the storm – we know this
the sun wolves tell all

Hoop or No Hoop

The school year is coming to a rocky end. Usually, the students are calculating grade point averages now. Double-checking the university requirements. Strategically studying for the exams that will lift their grades just that little extra to put them over the acceptance line. But the government has been canceling exams, one by one, and moving dates around for the final grades to be set.

The trickiest thing for me is the requirement for us to hold classes – and for the students to attend – for nearly weeks after final grades have been turned in.

It takes “busy work” to a new level. I feel like I’m supposed to be Julie from The Love Boat – not that my students (or colleagues) have a clue who that is/was. My students are 18, 19, and 20. This is insulting to all of us. Bureaucrats plugging in random dates and expecting us to make sense of it. Justify our students’ time. Be entertaining enough to entice them to come to class. Remind them they have to or risk losing their diploma.

I am a good teacher. But a lousy cruise director. I am counting down the days with a fair amount of anxiety.

On social media, I keep reading the term post-pandemic being thrown around by some Americans. There is nothing here to really indicate that. I have a handful of my students in quarantine this week. Another local school has had another small cluster of cases. It’s worse in other parts of the country.

But more people than ever are conforming to the requirements for face masks on trains and buses. I’m wondering if people are hoping they’ll keep themselves safe enough through a summer vacation? Who knows, maybe feeling like the end of this is near makes people more willing to accept the restrictions?

I’m trying not to get ahead of myself. Not to speculate on the Indian variant that’s made its way here and to the UK. What any of this means for the future. We have the situation today. That’s all we can be sure of.

This fall I asked the students to write about what they’ve learned about themselves during this time. How they’d grown and what they did well. Maybe it is an exercise they should do again now that they are in this odd place with no clear view of the future.

As an adult, I like things to be predictable. I need them to be predictable. I like fences and guideposts: I set them up like those little guardrails at the bowling alley that you can set up to keep kids from losing their ball to the gutter and becoming demoralized. Keep trying. You’re getting better.

When I hit the wall this winter, I read about the difference between burn-out and demoralization. I hadn’t thought much before about the downside of a work ethic. Though now it seems obvious: the American Dream on such a tiny scale. A few years ago somehow it came up in class: “The American Dream”. And my students thought that it meant wanting to make a million dollars a game playing basketball for the NBA. I had them watch The Death of a Salesman. I am not sure any of them really understood the concept of legacy or capitalism’s “required” work ethic that Loman doesn’t really possess. Looks a lot like the NBA dream to them, I suppose. Hell, looks like that to me today.

There is a smart professor on YouTube who says that the play isn’t about the American Dream. But I disagree. It’s about Loman’s moral failure to achieve it. The play isn’t a critique of the Dream, it’s a tragedy: which is by definition a critique of a character’s morality.

Clearly, I miss teaching.

I wonder if my rarified understanding of the philosophical depths of The American Dream and demoralization of the working class is a footnote in the OED already. Whether the idea of doing meaningful work for a “respectable” everyday existence is archaic in and of itself. Replaced with the cult of talents and the lottery of fame?

If you do the right things, work hard, you’ll be rewarded is such a naive story. Maybe all those fairy tales really are closer to the truth than the psychological realism of the 1940s. Some ditz who talks to mice and who carelessly loses a precious shoe will always wind up living in a palace.

Is it possible to become demoralized if you don’t value the work you do for its own significance? You can become disappointed, bitch about fate and “fairness”. But demoralized? And if this is so: is my claiming to be demoralized a pat on my own back with the assumption that my work was meaningful?

I think this is why I’ve had an impulse to pull away from teaching. In the sense of pulling back from emotional or psychological investments in the teaching. (Not in the students.) I feel frustrated with all these turns-on-a-dime. Planning and replanning the practical application of the curriculum: online, offline, group work, 2 meters apart. How can I grade what they haven’t been taught? It feels uncomfortably close to sticking gold stars on their foreheads based on some psychic ability to know their potential – had they had a chance to learn. It feels both intensely personal and weirdly calculated. And all kinds of wrong.

How can it not be demoralizing for them?

I’ve always explained to students that my teaching philosophy in the arts is that I can help them explore their talents. But in reality, I am mainly giving them room to learn to use their own creativity in a way that allows them to learn how to jump through society’s hoops. “What’s the point of this?” “I don’t know. It’s a hoop. You’re going to have to jump through a lot of them.”

I don’t lie.

I’ve worked hard to be a good teacher. It wasn’t a career I chose, it was forced on me by the government here. I was qualified. I needed work. And I’ve been grateful. I embraced it – took extra education and really invested myself in 4 years of teaching and counseling education, alongside my doctorate. The administration stresses how important continued education is. To be a good teacher.

But while I was on partial sick leave, I was replaced with a young woman with no teaching certification, and my schedule was designed around hers. And things went fine.

So where is my meaningful work, now that the guardrails are down and the gutters in view?

It seems I keep circling back around to find myself stuck in the same me-sized, existential sinkhole. So I am here. In this now-space and the future is uncertain. Today what is meaningful? I’m going upstairs to paint. That’s going to have to be enough – hoop or no hoop, a gold star or not.

And then I’ll grade some papers.

the sudden quiet
when the air – the fan – is still
distant voices puncturing
the hum – an urban concert
indiscernible and good

A Story of Going Feral

I’ve been writing for a bit over a year now on the same kind of theme, or at least considering the same kind of question: what is a good life. And because – for me at least – an integral part of that question is: what is an ethical life.

I suppose I can split my life in two – my personal life, which is extraordinary insular, where I can be relatively hedonistic in my pursuits; and my livelihood, which is teaching and laden with ethical responsibilities.

There are days when I fantasize about not having to teach. Not to get away from the work exactly, but to spread myself out thinly over the days. To breathe easily. While the pandemic has been difficult in so many ways, it has also given me the opportunity to slow down. Listen. Can I listen to the birds with the same sustained interest that I listen to a student presentation? This is a kind of work, too. What do I earn from this?

My childhood was a cramped succession of dramas, of noise and movement. A montage of cigarettes and speed, cocaine and black eyes. Drama became a kind of addiction that I struggled with through my 20s. I walked that jagged edge of violence where you never know which side someone will fall on: wounded or… disappeared. And as soon as I write this down I think: no, I’m not being fair to everyone. And still, I censor myself. After censoring myself in the first place. I make excuses for other people.

Maybe no one should ever tell the whole truth? At least not for the sake of entertainment or to makes one’s self interesting like a spectacle at Coney Island. Though people do buy tickets.

When I was in high school I went to the county fair alone and bought a ticket to see one of the “freaks”, assuming it would be a mirror trick of some sort. A kind of theatrical presentation. It wasn’t. The “freak” was a person. I turned around immediately and threw up outside the tent.

No. That would make a good story. I didn’t throw up. I just wanted to. I felt a sense of shame that was too familiar. But weirdly, I felt a shared sense of shame. With the person in the tent. I couldn’t explain it then, and I can’t explain it now except to say I understand why the whales that are kept in tiny pools and mistreated at theme parks will give kisses to their trainers on cue.

I don’t want to choose revenge or forgiveness. I want a middle path here, too. It seems even my personal life isn’t really free of ethical concerns.

And my writing never will be.

So for now, I write about mundane things like lapwings and chaffinches. The vibrating silence of the Hardanger plateau where the snow still lies in July. How cold has a smell where the North Sea is untouched by the Gulf Stream, and the harbour in Stavanger can smell like watermelon.

There’s this to gain: being in the world and not in the past. For now.

Drama is a mode
of poetry – and distinct
from the lyric, so
how do we conflate the two
in the narratives we tell?

Making Sand Castles

There is such a comfort in the quiet mornings. E. still asleep downstairs and Leonard curled up on the rug. The space heater blowing and now and then a blackbird call puncturing its white noise. A cup of good coffee and the feel of my keyboard’s small squares pushing back in a weirdly satisfying way. This cheap keyboard has only a few white letters intact: Z, X, Q and the Norwegian letters. This makes the act of typing feel intimate.

It is an odd way to leave a mark on the world. I seem to be preoccupied with this idea the past year: leaving a mark on the world. I think it’s an idea worth exploring. Yesterday while walking Leonard around the neighborhood, I was listening to a Hidden Brain podcast episode about “stuff”. About possessions and how we infuse them with emotions and then cling to them. He talked about how we even do it with possessions that don’t actually exist: we buy and cling to virtual objects in virtual spaces.

The host and the guest experts discussed why the rise of industrialization has given us the opportunity to indulge in our “stuff” habit. They talked about baby blankets and knick-knacks. But not about our children’s macaroni art on construction paper… or poetry. They didn’t talk about the “stuff” we create ourselves. I am wondering if it isn’t a very different impulse to cling to these things.

I am curious how the drive to create that is so strong in childhood in most of us, seems to abate with the years, until we hit – I don’t know – my age? I haven’t researched it, but what little I’ve incidentally read on the subject usually blames social restraints, shaming and capitalism’s focus on time-as-money. We get sorted out and the culture determines which of us are “good enough” to take an ostensibly creative space in the community. The rest of us, if we continue, apologize for our amateur efforts or keep them entirely hidden.

But I have no idea if this is actually true. I wonder if the impulse to create is nothing more than a way to subject the world to our will. To turn a bucket of sand into a castle, like magic. There is no need to “say” anything by doing so. It just is a tiny bit of the world, transformed by a specific human’s will.

I matter. I can change the world.

I’ve been dealing with the fact that I’ve become something of a cliche. I always have been, I suppose, but this is a new shape. This middle-age (which is past the middle of a life-span) craftsy space. A post-menopausal drive to regain some feeling of relevance by “making things”? Isn’t that what they say?

But I wonder if it isn’t that at all. I’ve never valued myself in terms of motherhood. What if it is really more related to a need to assert our independence (as small children do). Not as compensation, but as the liberation from all the weight that was put on us once our efforts began to be evaluated by a community in terms of “worth”?

I am still here. But for a limited time to come. Look how powerful I am. I can make a book. I’m unique. Just like everyone else.

I matter. I can change the world.

every cat knows
every box is meant to be
tried on and explored
scored and chewed on like deep thoughts
and scattered throughout the house