Falling into a place

As a person who feels compelled to write and reflect but also has an intense need to be outside and active in social issues,  I have struggled at times to strike a balance. In legendary education philosopher Clifford Knapp's Lasting Lessons: A Teachers Guide to Reflecting on Experience, he speaks of how educators always fail to provide time for reflection in the learning experience. In that same way, perhaps we are all missing a learning opportunity that might help us understand the meaning of our actions and experiences.

A few days ago, I attempted to express some thoughts on how my creative habits have changed since the balance was tipped towards being "outside and active" after college.

If the world and my acting within it is a kind of diving under water, I have not come to the surface in a long time. Yet I cannot breathe, it seems, until I move out of the medium entirely, away from my daily relations, to a point of distance and loneliness. Writing, as many say, is the art of a solitary soul. And so being submerged, immersed within the other, enthralled with people and actions, I have managed to drown myself many times over.

I have not slowed or stopped long enough to draw or to paint. For months and years, my dreams of images escape, disembodied. Consequentially, I feel I have lost my sense of form and color, if not the artistic sensibility, entire, then the ability, at least, to enact: agency. To this day I long for the meditation of the quiet studio, building from the emptiness of canvas, a picture, a scene, a world.

I have not slowed or stopped long enough to write the poetry of my mind and heart, either.  I have slowly lost that vital line of communication with myself. A specific language still murmurs underneath my daily experiences, the faintest stream of unrequited creativity. But I rarely give these fancies the attention they deserve or require and have lost the ability to rejoice, as I once did, in expression. Once, in poetry, I could perhaps express my own desires, reenter the inner landscape of my youth, my future, and regain spiritual hope. I once made time for myself to react to experiences and people, to report from a distance, in quiet solitude.

But I've decided that the sense of loss I've felt in months passed is just an impression, speculation.  I'm sure others in my generation have also felt pressure to move away from creativity and slow reflection due to the nature of our modern environmental and social dilemmas. It seems difficult to sit down for too long and daydream with cottony materials of paint and language when a boots and hammer beckon us to the hard work of rebuilding our civilization. But for me, who has felt deadened by the reallocation of creative energy, perhaps the metaphors above are wrong and nothing is dead.

Consider drawing: I still draw. I pencil in the field marks of birds, insect anatomies, the configuration of flower and leaf parts. It is a new form of journalism that somehow has supplanted the old journaling. Strangely it has done more to contain the powerful emotions of place than my previous forms of poetry. The drawing of the sweet-scented goldenrod is a mere place-marker. It holds the light of that day at its angle, the landscape with it, the sky, my own shadowy figure hunched over in the mud to take notice of it.

And writing? I still do it, certainly, in many ways. To be reborn as writer, I may only need to take more ownership of my new identity and changes in my external reality. Maybe it is not my lack of writing but the absence of writers, the change in environment (university to small rural town) and landscape (Southeast to the Midwest). Has this happened to others in my generation? I think so. I've not been in the greatest position to nourish my writing. The first years teaching a lot of new thoughts were thrown onto the table. I'm starting to get it cleaned up. In my last week's visit to Louisiana, I recognize that place may have more to do with my writing than anything else. Strangely, I was sent an email by an old friend and poet conservationist, Kristi, who is now editing Poecology, to submit some writing. And now with water on old roots, I feel exciting new growth. A new creativity that can be used for good.

I'm slowly beginning to understand how we need to move forward as a society and how I might proceed with my aspirations as a naturalist, educator and writer. Strangely, things have begun to fall in place and though I am hundreds of miles from home, I begin to recognize the power of slowing down. Maybe I, too, will fall into a place. and make my contribution to the relations natural and human communities.

I end with the Be Good Tanyas:

You pass through places
And places pass through you
But you carry them with you
On the soles of your travelling shoe

Packed in blue tubs from Walmart

If you drive 15 minutes east out of Baton Rouge on I-12 (20 if its rush hour) and take a right on 16 you will find yourself heading south, through sprawling country suburbs. There in these shakily rural parts, in a new subdivision of some 500 identical houses, lives my brother. Down about 15 more miles is "The Camp", where my brother and I just spent the weekend swimming, drinking, fishing.

I’ve stayed late at my brother’s house tonight to clean up, because it is here that I have had most of my belongings crammed for the last year—in closets, bookshelves, the attic, against the wall of his extra bedroom. This evening I slowly inventory each the plastic tubs I packed my heritage into last May. I spent the last year of my life without them in Ohio, forgetting them, being an intern with no time outside of work to reflect. Now it surges back and I step away to write.

My first order of business is to put on a CD. I choose one I made at the end of a relationship in my final semester of college. It is not hard to remember some of the destruction of that time, the loss of self, the false hopes, all bound by mere abstractions of musical notes and harmonies. I wrote on the compact disc a forceful “Be Here Now”.  It's a command that testifies to the desperation I felt as I groped for companionship and solidarity in those confused months and years of poetry and 24 hour diners.

At first, going through my belongints is empowering. After some time of having no one that recognizes me for my past lives, I finally remember myself. I was a powerhouse, I say to myself. I took on the world from many fronts, an ambitious cartographer of the new world outside of small and homely Livingston where I grew up. I lived in Germany for a year!

The CD book encompasses the range of an entire era, from the beginnings of compact discs (early teenage years) to its digital demise (post-college), my growing up on the cusp of a wave of information and sound. I was enthralled by music as a boy. Saturated, mind and soul. I was a musician once. The CDs tell stories of those exploits, of intimate friends and their mix tapes, places I lived, nights spent at house shows in smoky living rooms. Spaces. The music brings me back through an era of personal enlightenment, of moving out. I remember visiting the library alone in my silver Ford Taurus, where I borrowed Van Morrison’s St. Dominick’s Preview. The pleasures of shared resources. Some CDs I bought as they were released and I begin trying to piece the years together, moving from town to city to oversees. Seeing these old objects that I’ve owned since childhood, I begin to see my life in third person.

And how time promises us the riches of persistent work!  If I had a home it would be a magnificent one, walls filled with books, relics, paintings, music. On the walls would be photographs of the great people I’ve met, people who seem to me now like giants, movie stars, fabled characters in an old, old story. These things remind me of my journeys and the homes I've left behind. Now, it is difficult letting go of even the smallest pamphlet or receipt, for in each is the reflection of a place where I am no longer.

But I cannot fool myself: it is a sad occasion for me. Sorting through the wealth of my former life in college, reflecting on my past productivity and creative drive, I realize that I have lost as much as I have gained. The many embellishments I accumulated only remind me: kitchen sets, tools, oil paints, portfolios. I once had a home, furniture, and rooms to put them in. I had a community that was beginning to know me. Since I moved to Ohio, I’ve given many things away in an attempt to make myself more mobile. My first electric guitar and drum set stay with my little brother. A colleague now has my beer brewing equipment. Now I am the wanderer I was afraid of becoming--homeless, estranged, an out-of-towner. Despite the sense that I have slowed down and am closer than ever to settling down, I’m still traveling.

Now I’m attempting to bring most of it to Ohio in my small 91 Ford Ranger. Certainly, it will not all fit. The filing cabinet, with its paper trail leading back through Quebec and Germany into late pubescent poetry of highs school, will not. The collection of beer glasses—tulips, weizens, pilsners, and pub glasses neatly wrapped in newspaper—would never survive. Is this even possible? It won't work; I need two trucks. But how can I possibly go another year with all this boxed away?

On the floor of Joey’s cluttered guest bedroom and living room, I separate the groups, list them, trying to ask myself what I don’t need, what I can fit in my truck. Now in the office, I make my lists.

My brother enters to look through more photo albums. Since Dad passed away he has been putting together photographs from the camp from the 80s and 90s, childhood pictures, that special light. He has been compulsively ordering and filing them but now has started putting them wherever he finds room. He points to later pictures, reminds me of my silly facial hair, the hibiscus Aloha shirts, the blazer phase: places I can’t remember being anymore. Times when Mom and Dad were both alive; times when people were around and I took for granted their presence, their own wealth of experiences.  “Look,” Joey says. “You after you came back from Germany.” I see myself momentarily as he must have, as the rest of the family surely did. Our beloved, dreaming child, the runaway.

I feel all things at once. It’s hard now to share this gratitude that is, in places, years late. Soon I will have to begin studying for the GRE again. Planning my next step. What is next? Grad School? Work? When will I get back to this place, back to the exhilaration I felt as a child, sailing across the landscape in the back of my fathers pickup? When I will get back to that feeling of home? When will I be finished?

A poem about a place and time

I'm noticing that my eyes are different. When I go to edit poems I have fewer problems chopping, moving, refining. Here is a poem I started in 2009. It feels right to me now. Let me know what you think.

Still Morning After The Festival

Some days it’s almost unbearable

the wet pavement

the cold air that seems to blow out

of a childhood place into early November

has it ever been this quiet in the city?

for two miles the old bicycle

disappears beneath me

I drift without trying

hearing only the wind with trees

and above that

the wind with the wind

under the wind the lake

outshines the gallery houses

joggers glisten and pass

without anything to say

the same birds that have always

been birds stare out

from the garden oaks

dropping like leaves

but returning

unsure of their departure

what is this cold

air, this movement

that makes my eyes burn and tears

dry against my face?

before I left I watched
the small festival, a city
unmake itself

the cars and trucks disappeared

the food was gone

the booths were empty
in the lawns before the capitol

light blew into them
over the tablecloths

the smell of books, damp leaves

I walked through each

between unbuttoned walls

touching the edge of a memory

where people once stood

when I get home, I said,

I will sit beneath the magnolia

tree and listen longer, I will sit
and watch the tops of the pines
swimming in place, touching
the edge of something

not quite gone

not saying goodbye

or hello to anyone

Yaputcha write hand in...

It is too late for this but I'm starting it. I need a different way to keep track of my writing, my thoughts, my inner world. I need to try something different, since small notebooks crumble, get smashed and forgotten in the tillage of my push-pull, come and go life. Paper is great for the mud, beer and rain of the field, but they must be cached elsewhere. And that brings me here.

It has been pointed out to me that I need an audience and that I should start a blog. I thought, I've always seemed to enjoy writing when I was in direct transmission mode. My days of writing really began in chat rooms and in the letters to friends at home and abroad. So... I need to write to people. And now, after ten years of calling myself a writer, I realize that I have had no real audience. I've been in a far off isolated realm writing to and for myself--and I am a hard person to please. The standard then has become to recoil, avoid the dissatisfaction by deferring the writing process. So then the next problem begins: I have not been held accountable for my words.  I always told myself and others, "Language is makeshift. Words are clay in our hands, to be played with, sculpted." But that view is rarely accepted in dialogue. When I used one of my misshapen words from my private world of thinking, I was always asked to elaborate, explain, choose a different word. I would have been better thinking of words as granite stones, complex in their crystalline composites of meaning but solid, resolute. For so many years I have looked upon writing as scaffolding only to be torn down. I have developed some very bad habits and notebooks full of unfinished work. Each page is its own palette of colors mixed but not applied, its own work site of boards assembled but not erect.  In my private world of writing I know my words too well, create new meanings only I can unlock.  My poems were bottled up in short-hand. But I think, at least now, I've had a good bit of practice in the thinking about what I want to say. It's embarrassing to think I made it through my Creative Writing concentration without this basic epiphany. Will my past mentors ever forgive this flaw? Perhaps now I can begin to search for my audience, to imagine that someone is listening, reading. But who is it?

If I imagine a you, it is not too hard to shape a feeling, a some-body.  But who is the you? What body? Who are you reading this? Not family, maybe friends. In my mind I imagine all of the people I've owed a letter, a poem, an email in the last 5 years--professors, colleagues, poets, writers--standing together in a crowd, unaware of one another, tapping their toes, looking at their watches. I've built this anxiety in having waited so long to write. Now I can hardly begin for the apprehension of not meeting both their and my own expectations. My audience, both in the real and literary sense, has waited too long! But what a poor way to live! I must have been writing something all these years. I must tweak now my own perception of myself and get on with the business. Writing is to daily speech what ground water is to surface streams. It runs deep, protected from changes of the daily civilization, to nourish others across the distances of time and space. But aquifers must be recharged. This blog is an important step for me. And, as the new mantra goes, I must remember the audience. They will drink from the aquifer of these words and I hope to to keep their mouths free of grit.

I'm performing some Ishmael-the-Gorilla number, transmitting without moving my lips, eyes fried to a pale screen in my parent's white-tiled kitchen. It's 1:46am. I would never stay up this late normally but here, in Livingston, it is painfully easy to do. Just one room over is the timeless space, the island of lotus: the living room eternally filled with the glow of lamps and television and the voices of happy strangers advertising insurance, medicine, happiness. There is so much to be said for that room and what it has done, is doing to people. So much I want and need to say about my father's condition. But for now I will retire my lonely bones... and thank my audience, whoever you are, for giving me the time of night...