Month: January 2017

“You my whole life’s digression”

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“You could have your arm on fire and say you’re fine”

A music-filled, middle-of-night drive to Oslo and a quiet few hours alone before the day begins, listening to Obama’s final speech. He was not perfect, but comparing him to what is coming is just… well, it blows me away. How on earth do we go from someone thoughtful, eloquent and educated (and scandal-free) to … the indescribable and constant shit show we have been witnessing and are about to witness for the next four years?

Every day the news throws some new crisis/scandal/revelation into the mix about Trump, his dealings, his proclivities – all alongside his monumental pettiness, wasting time Tweeting about Saturday Night Live and Meryl Streep, for god’s sake – somehow imagining that any of it will make a difference now. He’s been elected already – he’s heading into office in only days. And if none of the revelations before the election derailed this orange lunatic, why on earth would a person or the media expect that any of them will make a difference now? The Russians having dirt on him, him being in collusion with Russians, and any number of other uncountable other piles of shit – none of these things are going to make a difference if they haven’t already. People talk of conflicts of interest and illegalities, potential grounds for impeachment, but no, dudes only get impeached for lying about blow jobs. Trump just lies about and conceals everything else and nothing happens.

I am, as I wrote the other day, generally feeling quite happy despite the state of things in the world (Trump, Brexit, Syria, etc.) but at the same time am submerged in a place where all I do is feel. It’s not that I am an unfeeling person; it’s that I have over many years trained myself to tune out or turn off feelings when they become too much. And right now, everything feels like something. Everything takes on more meaning and depth. And part of me hates this. It is as though a flip was switched, and I can’t get it to turn off. It’s painful and distracting at the same time as exhilarating and almost intoxicating. Another part of me enjoys this entirely new experience, feeling the ‘training’ and discipline of ignoring feelings unravel and let feeling take its natural course, wherever it leads.

Part of this requires acknowledging all feelings – and I am used to silently stuffing them down, down and down to the point that I don’t even know I am doing it. As one dear soul said, in asking me how I was doing, “You could have your arm on fire and say you’re fine”.

The other part requires acknowledging the validity and value of the feelings – it’s one thing to say, “Yes, I feel this way” (whatever way it is). It’s entirely another to admit that it is important or not just some ridiculous digression with which you shouldn’t bother anyone else.

Your own dictator

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“How could I tell you anything? You are not even talking to me.”

On to the second of the two “New Age” books I agreed to read:

“Remember that self-doubt is as self-centered as self-inflation. Your obligation is to reach as deeply as you can and offer your unique and authentic gifts as bravely and beautifully as you’re able.”

Self-doubt and struggling with a lack of sense of self are two different things – but interrelated.

I don’t feel paralyzed by strong self-doubt, and I certainly don’t feel like I lack a sense of self. But I do have those moments of doubt that stop me – maybe not the doubts that tell me I can’t do something. More that I doubt whether I have the strength to persevere through difficult things. I feel this keenly with practical things – do I have the fortitude to push through the difficulties and complexities of learning and understanding all the things I would have to learn and understand to take on X career or Y project? I never feel this doubt or self-questioning otherwise. But then, what of this obligation to reach as far, as wide, as deep as possible into your own capabilities?

Is it really an obligation? To whom? Yourself? The world? I wrote yesterday about projected expectations, and other people assuming things about you. I had a conversation with my father recently (it doesn’t happen often; he is the king of assuming things about others), and he told me something about his sudden bouts with anxiety and the nervous and constant buzz he has in his stomach; he asked if I had ever felt that way. Oh, only every day of my childhood. He was incredulous when I said this, “But why on earth would you be nervous or anxious? You were so smart.” As if being smart erases the kind of self-doubt, nervousness, shyness that shadows you every minute of your life – all it does is help you craft an identity, authentic or not, that you can use when you are out, forced to interact in the world. Does the innate ability or intelligence you possess eventually outweigh or overtake all the doubt or nervousness – or the complete misunderstanding or blindness that those, supposedly closest to you, have applied to you?

Are we obligated by having a natural gift or talent to pursue it? Sure, it seems a waste not to, but are we shirking a duty or responsibility by ignoring our “unique and authentic gifts”, or merely letting ourselves down?

Ultimately, as Julie Carr writes, “You have to be your own dictator
and the law is, hate yourself if you have to, but don’t stop doing the thing you said you were going to do”.

FORECLOSING ON THAT PERIL
–Julie Carr
I’ll keep explaining—because maybe you still don’t get it
Those children in California (substitute any state), dead from gunfire—
Let me begin again in a little roof garden with my friend
A perverse reader, he listens to my stories as if they were TV
I mean he mocks me lovingly on the roof and at the library book sale
My friend is not a banker but a prison activist
He used to be a philosopher, but like many philosophers, he’s taken a turn
that should be easy to understand
The trajectory from philosopher to activist is like the curve of a single brushstroke across a large canvas
Artists in the fifties paid attention to that
I hate flat language like this, but I’m pretty flat
sometimes. You have to be your own dictator
and the law is, hate yourself if you have to, but don’t stop doing the thing you said you were going to do
As I tell my daughters often
Emotion is a site of unraveling (JB)
I admit, gripping my T-shirt
I wish I were writing in prose an unfolding intensity that shocks history professors and prison activists equally
Later, in the grass, we’ll practice gymnastics and that way contribute our sweat
to Our Ephemeral City

And, reflecting on the doubt, and the not-entirely-accurate identities we inhabit in figuring out who we are, I realize we are like animals who shed their skin. You change identities no matter who you are, and the former you still informs, as memory and experience, but does not define, as the previous New Age tome I read wisely posited:

“To relinquish your former identity is to sacrifice the story you had been living, the one that defined you, empowered you socially – and limited you. This sacrifice captures the essence of leaving home.”

The writer also cited one of my favorite poems from Derek Walcott (here’s a piece); it half-applies:

“The time will come
When, with elation,
You will greet yourself arriving
At your own door, in your own mirror,
And each will smile at the other’s welcome,

And say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was yourself.”

Photo (c) of Mt Rainier by the late, great Paul Costanich.

The salesman & the sky hook

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“He can’t get anything done. His hands are always groping his heirlooms.”

Who are we when we are not who we are?

“In 1969, Abdul-Jabbar was drafted by the Milwaukee Bucks, where he would perfect his signature sky hook — a balletic feat that involves an explosive one-legged leap before flinging the ball into the hoop with one hand — and win three of his eventual six M.V.P. awards.”

Some people, even someone famous like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, are out of place where they find themselves (not geographically, but in the lives they inhabit). Living, thriving, but always on the edge, a bit out of place and uncomfortable in the confines of what they do and are expected to do. KAJ was a master of basketball but seemed uncomfortable, preferring writing and intellectual pursuits.

You sell yourself every day as something and someone you are not. But how to break free of that persona and its incumbent expectations to become what you really want to be? (Moreover, how do you figure out exactly what you want to be in the face of the cacophony of voices telling you otherwise or praising your current station?)

It’s a strange dichotomy: people project identities, traits, attributes and activities onto you that may be assumptions or based on natural talent you don’t care to fulfill, but at the same time other people are often the only ones who see the beauty, potential, wells of brilliance and ideas, intelligence, depth, warmth and possibility in us – so much more clearly than we can see any of these things in ourselves. How can others see us so clearly and unclearly at the same time?

One woman who saw me very clearly – to the extent that I grew terrified and pushed her away – comes to mind. She pushed me – a lot, which is probably why I never tried to reconcile with her. I pushed her away in a way that I knew would close the door forever. In some ways she knew precisely what I needed and wanted, but went too far, becoming a kind of salesman herself, touting all the possibilities: “It could be like this all the time.”

But no, it couldn’t. I don’t want to be sold a bill of goods and pressured into something – even if it feels good. Sometimes in my own rare zeal and excitement I fear I am doing something similar.

But these days are at least content, if not happy, lying in bed talking about rhubarb or pressure and all manner of other things, reading about the history of Congo, listening to music, all before falling into a restful sleep, dreaming about all those people who perhaps filled roles they never asked for or onto whom I projected the wrong or misinterpreted expectations – like my friend T, whose absence comes to mind more frequently than it should. Today reading about Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and his “sky hook” made me think of an 8th grade prank our teacher (yes, our teacher!) played on T. He sent her across the entire school during class to ask the gym teacher to give her the sky hook. She had no idea what the sky hook was so was expecting to receive an actual thing. She got all the way to the gym and forgot what she was supposed to ask for. She returned to the classroom to get a reminder and headed all the way back to the gym, where the perplexed PE teacher imitated the classic KAJ move, and when T returned, our teacher expected her to demonstrate the sky hook move in front of the class.

Photo (c) 2012 Ruth Hartnup

Between two poles

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“Automatic cars can facilitate our dark side.”

Many things feel as if they pull me between two poles. At one pole, I love seeing the paw prints of wild animals in the snow – mysterious visitors that I rarely see apart from this evidence of their earlier presence. At the other, I hate snow, and I particularly hate the melty, slick state of it right now (it won’t last long; colder temperatures are on the way). I took my life in my hands by heading down to the mailbox (no slips/slides/falls, luckily).

One pole pulls me to music: Weyes Blood’s “Seven Words”.

The other pole pulls me to poetry and all the memories and emotion tied to it, to the moment I lived it.

To Sleep
– John Keats
O soft embalmer of the still midnight,
      Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,
Our gloom-pleas’d eyes, embower’d from the light,
      Enshaded in forgetfulness divine:
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close
      In midst of this thine hymn my willing eyes,
Or wait the “Amen,” ere thy poppy throws
      Around my bed its lulling charities.
Then save me, or the passed day will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes,—
      Save me from curious Conscience, that still lords
Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;
      Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,
And seal the hushed Casket of my Soul.

 

I even sway  – or perhaps sway most of all – between two poles about how to communicate – at one pole, wanting to say so much but, at the other, saying very little. This is always the danger of communication or non-communication. When more seems to be at stake, when your feelings become much more entangled than you could have imagined, you start censoring yourself or stop asking questions and trying to clarify things to get to the heart of the matter. It’s almost involuntary. But I am aware.

And, with this awareness, I am defying my own inner limitations and trying to be courageous about stepping into the middle ground, between the two poles, to say, do and encompass everything and openness.

Photo (c) 2013 Lady May Pamintuan

Trash

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The neighbor (who more or less handles the heating at my house unless something big is wrong) came by early this morning to try to fix it – it takes a few hours to take effect. I have my doubts. This means we need to get a plumber involved, and this cold nonsense will continue for at least a few more days.

The latest book I’ve completed reading is White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg. Given to me by my friend Martina for my last birthday, I am only finally getting around to reading it now – in this reading frenzy with which I’ve begun the new year.

Many passages struck me, but none more so than:

“Why this fascination with the hillbilly? In 1949, an Australian observer described this phenomenon best. Americans had a taste for what he called a ‘democracy of manners,’ which was not the same as real democracy. He meant that voters accepted huge disparities in wealth but at the same time expected their elected leaders to ‘cultivate the appearance of being no different from the rest of us.'”

Sound familiar?

(As usual the English don’t come out looking great.) 🙂

Photo (c) 2010 Cloud2013.

Chilly

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Sometimes you just don’t have the words. What someone tells you and expects you to respond to is just so far outside the norm or what you can fathom in reality that you can’t respond. You can only shake your head and wonder how things spiral and descend to such a depth. I am rarely stuck for words, but I am right now.

Or perhaps I am stunned out of words by the arctic chill of the interior of my house. The previous winters, the house was kept cozy and warm but the underfloor heating has been malfunctioning repeatedly this year. It’s just too cold in this place to live with this. I’ve danced and jumped and run around the house all evening to keep the cold at bay; now I am making hot water bottles, piling on the blankets and plugging in a space heater to make tonight comfortable. It may be time to look at some other solution while waiting yet again for a fix.

And to end and hopefully sleep, I listen to Glasgow’s Bubblegum Lemonade & read some very old French poetry.

Souvenir
–Marceline Desbordes-Valmore

Quand il pâlit un soir, que sa voix tremblante
S’eteignit tout à coup dans un mot commencé;
Quand ses yeux, soulevant leur paupière brûlante,
Me blessèrent d’un mal dont je le crus blessé;
Quand ses traits plus touchants, éclairés d’une flamme
Qui ne s’éteint jamais,
S’imprimèrent vivants dans le fond de mon âme;
Il n’aimait pas: j’aimais!

Undisturbed

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The New Age book, finally completed (self-read audiobook on MP3, split up into chapter chunks), offered a few compelling thoughts and jumping-off points. I am struggling with one bit – that is, trying to respect what it commands – it’s such a pure and true passage, complemented by the poetry of David Whyte (whose work appears throughout the volume). I’d never heard of him (Irish mother/Yorkshire father; grew up in west Yorkshire before eventually moving to the Pacific Northwest of the US).

“Although true solitude — alert aloneness without diversions — can be challenging, it is often the necessary gateway to our deepest passions, and the discovery of what we must do to live them. As David Whyte writes,

…Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.”

Needless: I Surrender

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Today is one of those needlessly and inexplicably emotional days where every thought or feeling seems to lead down a twisting carnival slide, rapidly rounding blind corners and not being sure whether to feel sick, exhilarated or scared.

I’m reading a lot – as I have given up TV (yeah, I know, can you imagine?) – and I am reminded why I struggled with reading for such a long time. Demanding full attention, it also demands full feeling, contemplation and consideration – no matter what it is. I have not wanted to dedicate full attention, feeling or consideration to anything in such a long time.

Right now I am reading some New Agey thing about the soul – not my standard fare but something I promised someone else I would read (years ago, in fact – so long that she has undoubtedly forgotten the promise by now, but I am someone who follows through on promises, even if they are decades old) – and there are passages that are striking some nerves in me, even if the profound moment is usually ruined by a New Age would-be guru Boomer taking everything a step beyond what is necessary for the narrative (for me, anyway, but probably not for this “soul search” he is describing). Oddly, as out of character as this topic is for me, it seems to be the right thing at the right time, even if I am getting a bit weepy and emotional thinking about things tangentially related to topics the book dredges up.

At the very edge of inner turmoil simmering away below the surface, I’m struck by the old pull between what we wish and what we know.

And then, there are always the Swiss.

Photo (c) 2009 Janet McKnight

Regression

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I never felt like a teenager when I was one. Certainly not the stereotypical kind, giddy with mind clouded by speculative and subtle uncertainties and hopes. No wonder being young is such a trial.

2016 ended and 2017 started in completely engrossing, lose-track-of-time ways. Even if the rest of the year is crap (and it well could be), I will have these few days of abandon to reflect on and even savor.