Thursday, February 22, 2024

free flowers

Were I Ross Gay, I would say,

my delight of the day: a jar of flowers upon my kitchen table, found "Free" item from a neighbor's curb, a few blocks away. Flowers I know not the name of, taken from a bush, I discerned upon a second walk-by within the week. Labelled "free" with a sign --one of two jars, Sunday early afternoon. I am not want to take free sidewalk goods, but flowers

Free, I realize as they are sitting, jarred, cut off from their life source, in fact the least free in fact they have ever been. Fated with their clipping. Their date to decay ticking from that point onward. Free? Jarred, not growing--subsisting, now, only, on a 3rd floor kitchen table, far from the earth from which they came.

Free: Without cost, the meaning of the sign, the indicator that they were mine for the taking. Though I saw, during the second passing, the second free-flower-picker left the glass there on the curb. I took mine: a roasted red pepper and artichoke tapenade stout jar--headed for the recycling anyhow, I gathered.

Free: without cost they were given to the homeowner, without cost given to me. Fragranced my rooms this week, of unknown name, from unknown person. Free. Emancipated? Liberated? No, but made or given spontaneously. Not bound by force. Having no trade restrictions, yes. Not fastened, except nesting in the jar. Frank and open in their own way, yes, their fragrance having something to say. Licentious? Favorable. Not allowing slavery? They are captured, now--but their open nameless buds' scent speaking of something not easily captured.

 

Saturday, February 10, 2024

Solitude is fine, but you need someone to tell solitude is fine (-Honore de Balzac): aloneness, togetherness & authenticity

Reading Patricia Hampl's The Art of the Wasted Day includes her courting of solitude; solitude's courting of her. Makes me think of the deep desire for aloneness, for togetherness, how one holds the seed of the other. How Jesus going offshore, away from the crowds, is a confirmation to artists: the desire to be alone to be true. Rilke: "a lot that consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other." Authenticity, true voice, necessarily born out of aloneness -- yet language, Hampl says, "More than a painter, much more than a composer, a writer can never be alone. Our very medium is held in common, the language we are born into...Language is a shared resource, not individual, not unique, not self-made." Typography references: ~Mind your p's and q's --because those letters can easily get interchanged; "out of sorts" --sorts being the individual letters; to make sure they are all in their correct places. Why can a writer never be alone more than a painter? Isn't color and looking also a shared medium, and more immediate, making it easier to grasp, immediately? A writer can remain more insulated, inside. A stranger can catch a fleeting glimpse of a visual artist's work and have a response.

This flux: quiet/chatter; dilation/pointed fixation, need to receive and listen/need to share. Jesus on the boat getting away, amidst all the crowds. A retreat of artists: a common gathering; one punctuated by times to ourselves. We are not ourselves except who we are in relation to other people; a necessarily enkindling spark to ourselves not achieved except in communion, in relationship.  When in a crowd, we are aware of our particular reactions to a scene. When alone, we are reflecting on a scene its significance --for ourselves, but do so in a medium understandable to others--calling them to see it, too, for what it is.

There's a quote out there I think that communicates eloquently the idea: that we are not ourselves except who we are in relationship with other people. Desmond Tutu: "We need other human beings in order to be human. I am because other people are." Ubuntu: "I am because we are."  is true. The flux. The inward/outward. Exercise/sleep. Listening/talking. Sitting/walking. Nothing new.

I'm unfamiliar with Balzac, but find other quotes by him: 

"No man should marry until he has studied anatomy and dissected at least one woman." 

"Nobody loves a woman because she is handsome or ugly, stupid or intelligent. We love because we love." 

"When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even our virtues."

"The heart of a mother is deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness."

Saturday, March 25, 2023

A Thigmophilic being

 I put small bookmarks in pages of books where I want to remember one line--one reference to another book, one word. Usually by the time I am finished reading and ready to return the book to the library, I do not have the patience to go back, take each slip of paper out, and reread the two pages it was marking--to try to elucidate what, exactly, I was trying to mark for myself.

This one I knew I would want to go back for: thigmotaxic--an animal who likes to walk along walls, touching something as it goes. Its cousin: thigmophilic--touch loving animal.

I pictured myself on my walk down the long corridor to my office in the hospital. If I arrive a few minutes early for work, per my preference, I go to kneel in the chapel for a few minutes. Then, I walk toward my office. I've noticed as I do so, I skirt the wall, almost keeping touch with it through my jacket. The corridor is dark--not yet fully illuminated for the day--and quiet: the hallways have yet to shepherd the bustling crowd. In this darker and quiet walk, on my way to start the day, I hug the wall. It is a perforated wall; I assume some kind of sound barrier. My jacket sleeve graces it.

I am someone who likes touching things. I do not always love to be touched. But I can remember myself younger, in a Dollar Tree, exploring things by picking up each, feeling their textures.

Thigmotaxic in Alexandra Horowitz's On Looking describes rat behavior. "They feel most comfortable keeping in contact with something as they travel." Mice, cockroaches, caterpillars share the quality. Perhaps I'm one more animal, drowsy and weary, starting my daily march, making my way along in the dark, desiring this posture of humility--kneeling--then quietly scraping along the wall, as some sort of electrical grounding before the bright lights and bustle of the workday begins.

Sunday, March 12, 2023

Walking and Mindfulness and the Synesthesias of Childhood

I am thinking about the opportunity I have had to publish essays, the comment "where do you come up with your ideas?" Coming up with ideas seems a gifting of life itself, life as infinitely interesting to one who is interested, which is what I hope to always be. Moreover, the subject matter for an essay seems a simple exercise in mindfulness. Attentiveness paid to the present moment, aware of its sensory offerings: sight, touch, taste, smell, sound-- and its interior emotional landscape. At any moment, our motives and our movements are multifactorial. At any moment, they are interesting. The essay as an opportunity to dwell in the current moment, to mull in it, to move around in it, to loll about, to receive it as one's job to to do--as one's calling--listening as one's mission, paying attention as one's calling--seems a magnanimous opportunity. It has made me feel affirmed like Frederick the Mouse in Leo Leonni's tale, that listening and watching and gathering stories is its own type of usefulness, like gathering grain (details as pertaining to story might not be accurate). Mindfulness is perhaps a luxury--to have the quiet, the luxury, the attentiveness, the opportunities for solitude, the time after solitude to write about one's experience of solitude. 

I am reading two books about walking: On Looking, Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes by Alexandra Horowitz and The Old Ways by Robert MacFarlane. I hope I have the endurance to finish the walks with both. I love walking, and their books seem practices of mindful exploration. Alexandra Horowitz, who teaches in the areas of psychology, animal behavior and canine cognition, shares a reflection about how synesthesia is actually the default for children. William James called it " aboriginal sensible muchness." "There is good reason to believe that this kind of synesthesia is the normal experience of infants," says Horowitz. Synesthesia being the overlaying of one sensory experience with another (taste with sound, sound with color). Noting her son's seemingly nonsensical connection of triangle shapes with the characteristics of green and bubbly, Horowitz affirms him. She says, "Who am I to snip that synapse?"

Which makes me wonder, in their revolutionary synesthetic synapse collapsing associations, if poets are getting us back to childhood: our original state. When they layer this word and this color and this feeling, if that feeling of connectedness of our original state feels like home, because it's our first experience of the world.


Saturday, November 5, 2022

Edges / Boundaries / Shape-shifters

 I like taking on art projects. When I am trying to complete what I perceive as someone else's vision of a project, sometimes I think, what if I am bringing it away from their vision, but in a way I think will look better? You'd think it would be good to go that way, but a lot of times, people like their own visions, so I try to respect that.

These changes are subtle, they happen physically, with a brushstroke, a momentary inspiration.

Sometimes we have to try to talk about what is difficult to talk about: fluffier, bigger, smaller, not so dark, more like this.... It's hard to communicate an aesthetic vision in words, which is why other examples are helpful. You translate your word thoughts into picture thoughts. Then I can work from the translation.

I try to help complete the vision. But what about when the picture, coming to life, wants to go a different way?


Sunday, February 20, 2022

the longer I live the more I realize that the answer to that question is probably: totally

 


A post!!

I've been away, living and writing.

But sometimes I come back to this interview by S. Heaney and want to capture 2 minutes of it here:





Saturday, August 1, 2020

Signs



I am starting Andrew Solomon's Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity and finding it illuminating. As an OT who interfaces with disability regularly, I realize there are worlds of experience I barely touch. The book centers around what Solomon terms "horizontal" identities. Rather than vertical identities we share with our parents (race, religion), horizontal identities require peer groups for integration/support/empathy/understanding.

The chapter I just finished is about the Deaf community. Solomon illuminates complexities and contradictions inherent in disability. He takes the view of disability as illness and identity. He explores the difficulty of moral decision making about something such as cochlear implants - a medicalized "solution" imposed by parents and chosen by parents for their children; versus embracing deafness in a child as an identity that can be lived out fully using ASL. He highlights the vibrancy of the Deaf community, which often is a community found and delighted upon in a Deaf person's life. 

Eye-opening was the negative effect the well-intended 1990 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) had on the Deaf community. With a directive to provide the least restrictive, most integrated learning environments for children with disabilities, Deaf schools floundered as Deaf children were herded into "hearing" classrooms -- their education suffered. Mainstreaming may appear good, but in reality specialized education is required. 

Children who are taught Sign (manualism) often can excel at higher academic rates earlier; learning to hear for a deaf person imposes a significant learning curve during crucial years of early neuroplasticity. Yet the decision to "teach" a person to hear is a way parents can integrate the child into their family, when their own capacity to learn new language (at age 30) is diminished. To what extent should each be required to accommodate the other, to nurture familial bonds?

Psychologist Neil Glickman identifies 4 stages of Deaf identity: 1) pretending to be hearing 2) marginality (feeling excluded from deaf and hearing life), 3) falling in love with in Deaf culture; 4) an integrated perspective of the strengths of hearing and Deaf culture. Some Deaf individuals, whose cochlear implants were chosen for them by their parents, decide to switch them off when they discover a complete and full world within Deaf culture.

Disability has deleterious effects on physical and mental health in families; abuse is perpetrated at higher rates against those with disabilities. At the same time, difference offers enormous opportunities for meaning and purpose for some parents as they meet the challenges of serving and loving their child. Deafness, like other disabilities, is viewed as a deficit - yet the vibrancy, meaning and fullness Deaf individuals feel within a like community challenges that. 

Among the poignant lines:

"Though many of us take pride in how different we are from our parents, we are endlessly sad at how different our children are from us." 

Helen Keller: "Blindness cuts us off from things, but deafness cuts us off from people."

Regarding the effectualness of Sign: "To this day if I sign, 'milk,' I feel more milky than if I say the word. Signing is like speech set to dance."