Ren Powell's Blog, page 7

Shape-shifting

I have a wonderful friend who has had a radio program for years. She used to send me tapes of her programs, now digital files – always a theme. My favorite was Kids. It was on a cassette that we played in the car on road trips until it wore out in a long celebratory ribbon. Pete Seeger. Iris DeMent. She’s introduced me to so many artists I never would have known – never having had the intelligent curiosity to seek out.

My friend has a soft spot for Celtic music and the song “Tam Lin” has also wedged itself in my heart. It is the story of Janet, a kind of proto-feminist figure that I would like to think was probably just an average, spirited woman at the time the song was composed. I think we often look back over history through a lens warped by the damage of post-industrial power struggles and Patriarchal “organization”. But that’s not something I want to argue. So much conjecture.

Listen, explore, create. Do not claim to know anything. – my mantra lately. I’m letting go of some of the meta-perspectives and the need to be right and definite.

In some ways, the song is a reversal of the damsel in distress trope. She saves her beloved Tam Lin, who has been cursed by the faeries. He tells her how to rescue him in the forest on his nightly ride. She must hold him:

Oh, they will turn me in your arms to a newt or a snake
But hold me tight and fear not, I am your baby’s father

And they will turn me in your arms into a lion bold
But hold me tight and fear not and you will love your child

And they will turn me in your arms into a naked knight
But cloak me in your mantle and keep me out of sight”

In the middle of the night she heard the bridle ring
She heeded what he did say and young Tam Lin did win

from the folk song “Tam Lin”

It seems to me the whole song is a guise for relationship advice. A newt, a snake, a lion. We are required to change and to tolerate change. To hold out.

In King Lear, Edgar takes on four identities willfully. More, when one recognizes the absolute validity of a falsely conferred identity. Edgar is a would-be patricide, and a philosopher. The consequences of identity aren’t dependent on the truth. This is the terrifying reality that we all know and mostly deny. What do we trust?

Is there an essence? When Edgar becomes Poor Tom, isn’t he in fact poor Tom? Edgar as he was no longer exists. When he uses that name again, he is changed. We can borrow a line from another play and ask what is in a name.

There is a running theme in Lear about the deceptive (and potentially absurd) nature of language. “Look with thine ears […] And like a scurvy politician, seem to see what thou dost not.”

Ears become eyes. I think of the dadaists and the deconstruction from The Symbolist’s characters: father, daughter – then Tzara’s Gas Heart. Eye. Nose. Mouth.

Beats me if Tzara was searching for an essence. Or exposing the illusion. I think the same can be said of Shakespeare.

Is there meaning only in the wholeness? After all, all Hell breaks loose when Lear splits his crown in two. When his reason and his passion part ways.

And after all, Shakespeare was one of the King’s Men. Maybe in more ways than we want to admit when we shape his legend with our own willful identities.

Enumclaw and Cultural Liberties

Blow winds and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow, 
You cataracts and hurricanoes. 

King LEAR Act 3, Scene 2

There was a television show a very long time ago that traced random connections from one thing to another. I think it was a BBC production, but it could have been NRK. My memory code switches freely, which only proves to me how unreliable memory is. I loved the playfulness of that show. It was like mental hopscotch. Which is called a game of “paradis” in Norwegian.

This morning I was looking up the address of the theater in Washington that will do my play next fall. (I seriously tear up while writing that.) It turns out that it is about an hour away from B’s birthplace.

Enumclaw is the “place of thunder and lighting”. The Norwegian settlers named the area, borrowing the indigenous Skopamish word which also means “he who makes noise… to neigh, bray or sing”. But this is all legend, and I don’t know whose legend.

It is also defined as “the place of evil spirits”. That’s the definition B. told me about. She told me she had been to see the cemetery, and was happy with the place she’s picked out. She’s had Enumenclaw tattooed on her upper back. I’ve googled, and for all the spirits mentioned in King Lear, I can’t find one explicitly evil.

Evil is a very big theme. And while, Edmund says his spirits are “alarmed”, I’m not going to tackle it.

I’ve not been to Washington State, but B told me often that this place reminded her of home, the landscape being so similar. I’ve chosen the themes I want to focus on for the adaptation. Nature being central to everything. There is a part of me that wants to go sit out on the heath during a storm. Method writing. But I won’t. I may read Wuthering Heights again, though. I’ll go hiking in the rain.

I want to be careful to not let the process journal leach too much energy. I’ve kept process journals for poetry books, but this feels different. I don’t know why.

It turns out King Lear is another story familiar to the Jacobean audiences. But scholars think his version was the first to kill off Cordelia. There are sequels to the Lear/Leir story Shakespeare tells, and Cordelia does ultimately hang herself, but much later. In the legends, Cordelia survives her father.

It must have shocked the audiences. I wonder why he would do that? Following the Restoration, Shakespeare’s play was performed with the happier ending. I was taught that had been a kind of sacrilege to the “original”. But now I see that perspective as being historically blind to the very nature of culture. It is almost a kind of idolatry that erases what came before the white Bard that was called an “upstart crow” and plagiarist by his contemporaries.

It is funny what we are allowed to forgive Shakespeare in terms of story structure and dramaturgy. When I read K. my treatment, he kept pointing out cheap plot devices. Yeah, those are Shakespeare’s I kept saying.

“So?”

It’s a legitimate question. “So?” I think we treat the text with a religious devotion that borders on the absurd. I once took an acting workshop from a now-famous actress and when I asked her what a particular word meant in my monologue, she said she had no idea. The question was academic for her.

One the one hand, I totally get it. The poetry is undeniably genius. Even with an American accent – or the contemporary British accent that has little resemblance to Shakespeare’s pronunciation – it is a joy to speak. You don’t have to intellectually understand every little thing to appreciate the beauty of the whole. It is the human equivalent of birdsong.

On the other hand, time has made a fair amount of the text incomprehensible for a modern audience, especially as a performed work. Audiences were not smarter, but they were familiar. Isn’t the essence of conventional theater the melding of human birdsong and story?

I cannot ruin Shakespeare. Were I to stage it with every plot device a product placement, Oswald’s letter a text message on an iPhone, I could ruin any chance for a career in playwrighting, but “Shakespeare” would be just fine.

If I choose to alter aspects of the plot, to satisfy my own expectations of story structure – or if I choose to flesh out characters and motivations to avoid a kind of academic puzzle or psychological Rorschach as take-home work for the so-inclined who may not know, or who forget, that these things were known already to the audience at the start of the play – it will be okay. I’ts not that everyone will approve, but I am comfortable with this.

Different Kinds of Goodbyes

The lapwings are here, with their pterodactyl claws. And I am shredded. Not in a good way, but worn very thin and strained to the point of snapping here and there. But not entirely. What do you do when the good news and the bad news falls into your basket at once?

It is very difficult to settle attention wholly on either as would be the honest thing to do.

I read a poem this afternoon by John Lee Clark: “Long Goodbyes”. Also from the Beauty is a Verb anthology. The speaker of the poem and their family are deaf, and the way Clark write’s about their touching “more things with their hands”, makes me feel like I am missing something essential by not touching everything I can.

[…] pausing
where the walls offered stories,
reasons to stay longer

and touch more things with our hands.
I remember how long,
how wonderfully they stood

unwilling to open the front door,
signing away with warm faces
and hugging goodbye again

before going gently into the night.
My family would huddle to watch
their cars’ headlights roll away. […]

This is supposed to be a process journal for my writing, not a therapeutic process journal. How odd how things will bleed into one another. Maybe that is how both creatures stay alive?

I got the commission to write the Lear adaptation. I’ve added a line in the final scene – in the treatment at any rate – about only just beginning to understand the causalities of the day. I want to hold the details tight to their source for now, but I will say my adaptation is not nihilistic. There are no gentle nights, but there is always a morning for someone. A warm mug in their hands. A soft fabric thrown over their shoulders to rub against their neck.

What use is thought if there is no effort to make it tangible? Isn’t touching how all of us we know the world?

The Hubris of Language

 We can’t restructure our society without restructuring the English language […]

Ursula K. Le Guin

The Marginalian has got to be the most seductive rabbit hole on the internet. Continuing the quote I found there – out of context: “One reflects the other. A lot of people are getting tired of the huge pool of metaphors that have to do with war and conflict [and] the proliferation of battle metaphors, such as being a warrior, righting, defeating, and so on. In response, I could say that once you become conscious of these battle metaphors, you can start “fighting” against them. That’s one option. Another is to realize that conflict is not the only human response to a situation and to begin to find other metaphors, such as resisting, outwitting, skipping, or subverting. This kind of consciousness can open the door to all sorts of new behavior.”

From the fragments of information that I like to believe I understand, there is soft science evidence to back up Le Guin’s argument. There is the story about the social scientists who integrated themselves in another – very small – culture. They struggled with some aspects of the language. Particularly, they said, one word that described an emotion that they couldn’t comprehend. It wasn’t until they’d lived in the culture for years and experienced a personal trauma, that the new feeling arrived – following the word. They explain that it wasn’t a new association, as in “oh this is the feeling y’all’ve been describing, of course”. They say this was a new feeling that the word itself spoken in context brought into experience.

But the catch? Le Guin also said that we forget that history isn’t a science, it is an art. There is no objective truth. I have been witness to a crime and know that if there is an objective perspective, a truth in any eye-witness testimony, I know it is unidentifiable. Random perhaps. His truth. My truth. What then do with do with this story of the researchers, the trauma and an emotional language? Their story?

Isn’t it a kind of origin story? How the bear lost his tail. In another culture, wouldn’t there have been another word, only completely appreciated by the members of that culture?

It seems to me that nothing stands alone. Every word and every sound is tangled with shared experiences of local grasses on bare feet, of the specific steam that rises in this or that day’s weather.

The Greeks’ sea was the “color” of wine.

It seems that we go about it all backwards, looking for some fundamental building blocks that are put together to make the things that we perceive. That we are outside and inside, but disconnected in a way that demands of us to understand what is and to follow the rules. Listen for instructions. That there is a right way.

What if the tree of knowledge is really the source of all neuroticism. That was the point of the myth. The tree of knowledge itself is a deception?

I want to point out, now that the timer has chimed, that I am not laying out philosophic arguments. I am deliberately discursive in the process of exploring – which is the process of writing, I think.

So yeah. When Lear says, Nothing will come from nothing – and the audience hears a curse as literal as You barren c*nt. Is it a story of history that we share with past experience? Or a story of our own time. Is it possible to try too hard when working with the language? Is it possible to be disrespectful with the language? Is it possible to be just sit down naked with it and let it sing?

Yeah. I actually wrote that bit. Ugh.

There went the timer.

The Risks of Desire

It is so much safer not to want. I think it is a fascinating theme when it’s not about romantic or sexual desires.

When it’s not tragedy in the Greek sense.

When it’s not the trope of the supporting role who we discover late had so much promise and gave it all up for some quasi-noble reason. Pathos. Bathos. The soft, nurturing plot device-of-a-person to serve as the scary what-if-you-end-up-like-her motivation.

Not the weird dude in Hamsun’s Hunger. Or any twisty, petulant teenager full of the angst they think proves their talent and conveniently serves as an excuse for staring at the ceiling. For being cruel.

Nothing noble? We’ll go for a tortured genius. Is this desire? Or is it a private performance? When the dog’s dewclaw isn’t looked after it turns in on itself, growing like a proverbial thorn in a self-contained little monologue of pain.

Funny, I wanted to write woe. A monologue of woe. I’ve been reading Shakespeare and my head is full of full words like sorrow and distress. The howling and the hissing of the language is seductive. And since I’m not longer a twisty teenager, it’s an almost embarrassing pleasure.

Hyperbole is wasted on the youth.

Hysteria is a word with a misogynist trail: the unoccupied womb wondering the body and causing madness. What about unoccupied desire?

I want to be careful not to slide into the pocket of pop psychology and the “find your why” zeitgeist. I’m asking questions, not looking for answers.

It is interesting that when I google poems of “risk and resilience” I get hits titled “Poems of hope and resilience”.

But that’s not what I want to look at. Not hope. Hope in the face of defeat seems too binary for our time, now that it seems our cultures have exploded in chaos. Again. A rebellion of language that becomes a rebellion of thinking.

I don’t want to explore the kind of desire that drives crashing through like a wrecking ball to bruise the world, to bruise the world. That’s not desire as a fundamental emotion; it’s desire as the vehicle to direct the fundamental emotion. Anger, I would guess. Try to google “basic human emotions” and you get 3, 5, 9, 12… how we love to put things in boxes.

I am writing a play, not staging it. But I see the play beginning with a huge explosion of cardboard boxes and confetti. They have two hours to clean it up.

Could be the driving image for so many stories. Who’s blowing up their life this time? Who is risking what and what emotion shapes the desire that has them getting up off their knees again and again?

Manic Depression

Poems about disability. Poems about mental health and about mental disorders. It’s easy to conflate the last two. I sometimes have to remind myself I wrote an entire collection about what is it to experience mixed states of mania and depression. That’s how exceptional those months or years can seem in relation to how I see myself. Or in how I want to see myself.

I have been scanning my shelves for the poems that address more than the depressive side of the disorder. Those poems are difficult to find.

(And I would appreciate suggestions!)

I wonder if this is because so many of those poems (if they are comprehensible at all) are vibrant in a way that just feels celebratory? The kind of hyperbole that is forgiven in most poems, that just reads as a tight focus on joy? Where are the poems that feel like wildly flung Frisbees caught in a gust of wind?

And is the taint of shame visible in them after the poet settles and edits?

Instead what I am reading this morning is a poem by Lisa Gill, that is not about bipolar experience at all. Here is the beginning of “The Undering and Other Great Inhumanities on 3.6 Acres”

Remonstrance is no use. I already live
where a downed fence is a plastic tube
running under my dog’s skin, draining
the wound. Even the armchair in the den

held a slumped cottontail, smooth gray
spindle of intestine protruding from a solitary
puncture would. It’s peaceful here. Javelina
snouting the hurricane fencing, sunbeaten

days and every night sky, even clouded,
lit with stars unknown to the city, stars
vanquished from the sight of the dead
or overmedicated. There are so many types

of erosion. […]

from the anthology Beauty is a Verb. Cinco Puntos Press. 2011

The timer is about to go off. I’m going to shut down here and take Leonard for a slow walk. He can’t run because of the scar that runs down his chest. In a moment of excitement, chasing a fox, he’d caught his chest on barbed wire. This is why I have him. A former working dog now at what we call his “trivselsvekt”.

I like to think he’s happy now. We all have so much in common when the specifics are whittled away. Not that that is a goal. Rather, a way in.

There went the timer.

The Mysticism of Shakespeare

I’ve still been spending time with Lear this weekend. With Shakespeare’s language and the rich stories. And I am chastising myself for the arrogance in wondering… why is so much left unsaid?

An example: Edgar – as Poor Tom – meets Gloucester and hears his father say that if he could just touch Edgar’s face again it would be as though he had his sight again. So why doesn’t Edgar reveal himself?

The Tragedy of King Lear wasn’t written as a closet play, and I wonder then if the audience – groundlings or otherwise – were able to get under all the psychological machinations in Edgar’s head to make sense of this moment, in the moment, as the lines were spoken, passing quickly over the heads of the orange-sellers and the old women bitching about their sore feet? Did anyone care? Or am I just thicker than the average Elisabethan?

I’m not interested in the question of authorship that has been recently staged in a “court of law” in London. I think it’s funny that we should care so much. And that maybe it is more about a projection of our very real personal fears of insignificance, than an actual interest in whether a single person wrote the work.

There’s never been a serious question of the originality of the stories. Of any story, if you want to take it that far. And as for the language, I very much love the idea that it began with a sketch of a script that morphed naturally in the mouth of a performer, and then again in memory before it was recorded in text. Maybe adapting Shakespeare isn’t sacrilege at all, but the best way to keep communication between us and “them” alive.

But the question remains. Are we all just thicker now? How many of us get the “gist” of it and take the rest (literally) on faith and fake it.

Are we missing the zeitgeist of the age that filled in the bits that are mysterious to us? I took a workshop once with a now-famous and very Shakespeare-associated actress whom I adore. I asked her what a particular word meant. She said she didn’t know, but that the passage was about…

There’s the rub.

There went the timer.

The Hard Things

Last night I had an idea for a play. And I told myself it was fine – that I would remember in the morning. We all know how that goes. And now it is gone.

I’ve been listening to radio theater and it is interesting to notice the playwright’s creative daisy chain. I would like that now. A daisy chain.

Yesterday I caught myself eating dinner, listening to a podcast and surfing the net all at once. And I wonder why I am not able to focus after 9 am.

Late last night someone sent me a wonderful goat video. I wanted to read a poem about a goat, but the only one I could think of was “Song” by Brigit Pegeen Kelly, and I wasn’t in the mood for that.

I started thinking about the perennial conversation E. and I have about art. He doesn’t use the term with a capital A, ever. He sees art as a form of escapism, not as a portal to a shared experience about what it is to be human. He doesn’t want to spend his evenings looking at the hard things. He says he gets enough of hard things. And isn’t that true of all of us.

And I can respect that. Though I find it inexplicable why we would have such differing attitudes about beauty and awe. Such differing approaches to acknowledging what it is to be human.

But then, I have seen his whole body express awe while overlooking valleys from mountain tops. Maybe that is enough for him. Everything. You can die on the mountainside. At any point of the journey. He doesn’t put it into words, or squeeze it into symbols. He has this, and maybe it is enough?

I would talk to him about this. Ask him. But I don’t think he wants to think about it. It just is and doesn’t need to be teased apart and put together again. If I brought it up, I think he’d just suggest a hike.

I like watching goats. Their pronking moves me emotionally in ways that I can’t keep up with physically or even intellectually. I envy them their in-the-moment joy. At least that’s what it looks like. But I will admit that there is something about their eyes. The gut-hooked association to Christian symbolism that I carry with me from childhood. The dangerous wildness.

So for me, the pronking kids will always have the darkness of Kelly’s “Song”.

Because this all this is true. And I am still learning to hold the paradox lightly and enjoy the flow.

Teaming with Hate

That film clip sticks in my head. It’s from the 1970s – seems they did an awful lot of odd experiments on kids then – and it involved puppets. The kids would giggle and enjoy watching one of two puppets get their heads bashed over and over. They would have empathy for the other puppet. It depended on whether the puppets liked the same kind of food as the they did.

I think we get better at justifying this to ourselves, but I think the basic impulse doesn’t change over time. Disagreement over what is good and bad on any scale feels like an attack. Probably because it sometimes results in an attack.

I was – and am – sad that our national curriculum took out the phrase about tolerance for other people’s values and replaced it with the ability to see what we have in common.

Maybe the weirdest response when someone says they didn’t like something is, “Can you do better?” And among the erudite, defense of an opinion often involves pulling in the opinions of long-dead people to be on your side.

A random phrase in agreement will garner a slew of flattery.

There’s that.

In the best of settings, a kind of dolphin training. Ignore what’s undesired, reward what you want more of.

I just learned that “teaming” is a jargon verb now. I think it is hilarious since the word teaming still conjures a school of fish in my mind’s eye.

This is related to what I am working on, by the way. The timer hasn’t gone off yet, but I am ready to get back to the writing. That’s a good sign. And if you agree, I am going to take that at face value, not look for ironic insults, and offer you a cookie.

The kind I like.

Call and Response

I am reading a short story collection put out by the Bell Press. It is a collection of stories, and a companion response story. It is a familiar concept, but I guess I think of it in terms of a workshop exercise. That’s bizarre, considering my belief about what writing really is – communicating with the dead and the anticipated, as much as our peers. Readers, children, teachers. I figure it is all call and response – no matter how unconsciously we do it.

The Norwegian “taus kunnskap” doesn’t sound nearly as pretentious as “silent knowledge”. But there it is. The cultural history that you don’t know you know, that you carry with you as sure as the mitochondria in your cells. Like a fungus that began taking hold at your birth. We keep rediscovering our metaphors and our stories.

Nothing new here, really, though we crave it and celebrate the impostors. Maybe there is something here to think about: accepting the fact that we are nothing but sputtering mutations.

There are species that are linked physically to their progeny. An umbilical cord that remains through an overlapping of maturity. I guess we have culture for that. A weird evolutionary mechanism that lets us throw tantrums, leave the room, relish an illusion of independence.

So this little project now – a conscious response. An all-in, is-not-cheating or borrowing or posturing, participation in the bigger story.