IT CAN GET USED

Very rarely do you hear anyone say they write things down and feel worse. It’s an act that helps you, preserves you, energizes you in the very doing of it.

— Naomi Shib Nye, from an Interview on On Being

I don't listen to podcasts these days, being too taken up with a few books. Would that I had known how to get audiobooks from the library in the worst days of my depression and insomnia. At the very least, the nights would have felt shorter. I hadn't listened to the On Being podcast in quite a while, but tuned in last night for some reason. That particular quote feels extra relevant given my last post.

"I just came back from Japan a month ago, and in every classroom, I would just write on the board, "You are living in a poem." And then I would write other things just relating to whatever we were doing in that class. But I found the students very intrigued by discussing that. "What do you mean, we're living in a poem?" Or, "When? All the time, or just when someone talks about poetry?" And I'd say, "No, when you think, when you're in a very quiet place, when you're remembering, when you are savoring an image, when you're allowing your mind calmly to leap from one thought to another — that's a poem. That's what a poem does.

And they liked that. And a girl, in fact, wrote me a note in Yokohama on the day that I was leaving her school that has come to be the most significant note any student has written me in years. She said, "Well, here in Japan we have a concept called 'yutori,' and it is spaciousness. It is a kind of living with spaciousness. For example, it's leaving early enough to get somewhere so that you know you're going to arrive early, so when you get there, you have time to look around." Or — and then she gave all these different definitions of what yutori was, to her. But one of the was: "After you read a poem, just knowing you can hold it — you can be in that space of the poem, and it can hold you in its space, and you don't have to explain it. You don't have to paraphrase it. You just hold it, and it allows you to see it differently."

After the intensity and sorrow of yesterday, it is likely no surprise that I have a dirge in my head this morning. Brokedown Palace.

Yesterday, Tuesday, was somewhat better. The day was largely taken up with renting a truck with a lift to pick up the washer and dryer, now sitting at the side of the house. We found some other odds and ends left in the trash and what now. You know how that goes: by the end of the move you hate everything, can't see value in anything, and just don't care.

Janet is already sucked into the tv as I can hear some old movie on TCM blaring through the house. My father got addicted to History Channel and it always sounded like WW2 around here.

The sky is that yellow-grey before the rain. I picked some freesia. The iceland poppies are cropping up. I don't think they make good cut flowers, though. A lot of rain is forecast, so perhaps I will be able to do some weeding on the weekend. (I say that every week, don't I?)

Think I will go to the gym instead of yelling at Janet.

Today I am sad about the extinction of the white rhino. And that another white man is terrorizing blacks but it doesn't get called terrorism as it should. And an unarmed black man was blasted with 20 shots in his grandmother's backyard. I just don't think the perspective is as it should be.

When I think about all the Facebook scandal, I can't help but ask could be expected from a company with a privileged, immature, unschooled, inexperienced, uncompassionate (there is not a good word for this), unsympathetic, entitled white guy and his similar friends at the helm. We are just soylent green to him, in some form or other.

I can smell, faintly, the freesia that I picked and is now on my dresser (probably awaiting knocking over by Scotch).

"But no one wants to listen to our sad stories unless they are smoothed over with a joke or a nice melody. And even then, not always. No one wants to hear a woman talking or writing about pain in a way that suggests that it doesn't end. With out a pat solution, silver lining, or happy ending we're just complainers—downers who don't realize how good we actually we have it.

Men's pain and existential angst are the stuff of myth and legends and narrative that shape everything we do, but women's pain is a backdrop—a plot development to push the story along to push the story along for the real protagonists. Disrupting that story means we're needy or selfish, or worst of all, man-haters—as if after all men have done to women over the ages the mere act of not liking them for it is most offensive.

Yes, we love the good men in our lives and sometimes, oftentimes, the bad ones too—but that we're not in full revolution against the lot of them is pretty amazing when you consider this truth: men get to rape and kill women and still come home to a dinner cooked by one."

— Jessica Valenti, Sex Object

I have started or started to finish a bunch of new books. Sex Object is a more interesting read in this post-Weinsteinian #me too universe. What Valenti was saying two years ago, and what seemed transgressive to the world at large seems prescient now.

The main reason I read Orhan Pamuk's Snow, at long last, was that I found it on CD in the library at a moment of desperation. I really really liked it. And so when I saw a nice, $1.00 copy of My Name Is Red, I thought I might have a shot at actually getting through it this time. Turns out in the first couple of pages that it is funny and thoughtful.

But, are they truly waiting? I can't even be sure of that. Maybe they've gotten used to my absence—how dismal! For here, on the other side, one gets the feeling that one's former life persists. Before my birth there was infinite time, and after my death, inexhaustible time. I never thought of it before. I'd been living luminously between two eternities of darkness.

— Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red

The negative engagements I had with Janet earlier in the week have a psychic resonance. I am calmer, but spacier. Slightly down, more vacant than really depressed. I haven't managed to accomplish much of anything but wafting around thrift stores, mostly looking at stuff.

The weather forecast has tomorrow being mostly sunny so perhaps I can get myself to bed soon and up early to work at productivity and enjoy better light. I will bet that some flowers will be inspired to bloom as well.

EMPTINESS

Emptiness cannot be
compressed. Nor can it
fight abuse. Nor is there
an endless West hosting
elk, antelope, and the
tough cayuse. This is
true also of the mindL
it can get used.

— Kay Ryan, The Best of It: New and Selected Poems, New York, Grove Press, 2010