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Paralysis
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Superkabuki: a dream
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Movement
It has been a while since I last wrote in this journal: there was glitch at the ubc site, and access was blocked, and, alas, I was also running around in headless chicken mode, so that is another reason for the lapse….
My son and I spent a night in Sapporo this weekend. We took a trip to the modern art museum, to a few galleries and past many undergound shops. I think there were at least six shopping arcades (maybe four blocks long each)?, and even though we didn’t see everything, we spent our evening just strolling past store displays, past endless items of clothing and toys and gadgets for sale, on sale, not on sale….
After an hour or so my mind numbed and I lost interest in buying anything, and then a strange compulsion came over me that I should at least examine things for their aesthetic values, as if each thing deserved some sort of critique (good design, bad fabric, cheap zipper, etc) until finally even my judicial game lost its allure and I wished to vanish into the sky. Instead I pushed my son, via stroller, through patches of loose snow, across glare ice roads, carried him up and down a series of stairwells until we reached our hotel.
On the 1.5 hour train trip back the next day, my son was shouting “Cars!” “Train!” over and over whenever we pulled away from a station. He also developed a routine of burbling his lips at the people sitting behind us (who thankfully found him amusing…). As the train compartment was silent except for my son’s one-man-show, it was a bit of an event. Although I secretly chuckled at his high jinks, I did make repeated efforts to calm him down, honestly I did. Children, however, have an energy that cannot be corked easily, and my son is always thrilled about riding trains. I did hope no one was too annoyed, however.
The year is new and I am optimistic that I will reside in a more creative space. I have hopes to make more paintings, poems, stories, essays, make anything really, and to do less practical sheeeeet. I felt the understandable need to be practical the past two years (feed son, dress son, change son, repeat, etc.), but I think it is time to find my inner life again. I hope you, too, my friends, can find a place and time to whittle on blocks of dreams.
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The Sun
The sun has just come out of the clouds after a long, long hiatus. While snow has a brightness that is in some ways as blinding and as brilliant as the sun’s, ultimately living things have a bigger need for the sun and its power. The appearance of the sunlight brings the end to a somber song and a smile forms more easily.
I had been missing the sun without realizing it! How much better the world looks when a patch of blue sky appears and the sun opens its cyclop eye. Some might say the sun brings an illusion of hope, but I think the hope is no illusion. The sun does transform the world and gives it life, especially after reappearing from an extended holiday. The darkness heals us, and the light gives us the power to grow more.
At night I didn’t sleep well. Even with three blankets I shivered and I hated to move from the one spot I had semi-heated. Since yesterday the air has turned the corner toward that the type of cold that eats your flesh and stops the blood from pulsing through extremities.
As I shoveled snow this morning, my fingers disappeared at the tips first and then became shadows in the final space beneath the knuckles. I cannot enjoy shoveling as much because I love these hands and wish they would stay with me and help me with the work. I wonder if all the freezing my body has experienced–growing up in Minnesota and now again here in Asahikawa–will allow my flesh to stay fresh longer? How many times will I freeze before I become inedible and freeze-dried?
Never mind, the sun is here! It paints the side of the school building into a perfect white triangle of light. I can almost see the a, b,c written at each side. I am glad I don’t know what the given value is for any side. I don’t want to be logical today or to decipher a geometrical puzzle. I just want to face the sun, close my eyes, and accept the offering.
I just spent a steady hour with a red pen (I don’t usually use a red pen, but I felt a bit peevish) dancing, sliding and hopping through two English Literature students’ graduate theses on Midsummer Night’s Dream and something by D.H. Lawrence I have never read.
The smell of coffee grounds scooped into an unused filter lured me forward to the last pages and it held its lovely scent in front of my nostrils as a reward. Now I have the cup brewed and a snowstorm outside the window to lull me back into blissful solitude.
As it is an official work holiday, I would have had rather been at home, but it is my job to help these students and I can’t refuse to help them…I haven’t the heart to be so cold (or is it bold?). Now that I am here, however, I can feel at peace.
The two informed me that a drone of fourth-year students would be flying to visit me in January as the deadline approaches…something I am not too excited about, but I am also well aware how few college students are good at doing their work ahead of schedule: procrastinators reign supreme.
Yesterday:
My son and I visited a woman and her two children whom we met at the shopping mall. They are from Tehran. She is lonely and cold in this city; her husband is an artist and instructor for Tokai University, so she spends her days with her one year old while her husband and older daughter, age 9, are away at school. She misses her parents and her very big house and her maid and the inexpensive fruits and vegetables of Iran. She will return home in February with her children for a 2-3 month visit.
She had her veil off at home and she had a thick shock of lovely brown hair, something one would never imagine being tucked underneath her calico blue and white cotton head-scarf. Her daughters are bright red cheeks and smiles. We ate pistachios that had been soaked in some sort of reddish sticky spice and my son chewed like a beaver through the skin of an apple, creating a superficial spiral design with his front teeth. Luckily I had brought them four new apples (an apple in Japan is over a dollar each!), so I could feel less guilty over his baby beaver antics.
Well, I had hoped to use these “days off” to write and read, but I have yet to act on the first of these goals….am I the same as those students who put writing off until it’s too late? I hope not! Here I sign off to dip my toes into imagination lake.
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Letters
Snow is a letter sent by my father
and in it he writes:
Drop words
And chase after
snow monkeys,
the ones whose tails
are on fire,
still their screams
in thermal waters,
and lull the broken
animals to sleep
inside your arms
underneath the glass
dome of light.
Om.
My own letters write
the hands at night
with blue stars and clouds.
Stick-figure symbols sink
into the flesh of the living
until the earthly body
is swept clean
Hum.
Snow is a letter sent by my mother
and in it she writes:
Open your dead horse blinds
and leave
them alone until it’s time
to sleep.
Watch the Mississippi shimmer
the eye coins of memory,
study its ink,
how it carries slabs of ice as gifts.
Receive.
Snow is a letter inside
an envelope stuffed
with human breath
mixed with the howl of
the Burlington Northern,
nests of elm tree twigs,
goose droppings, wild
grapes, ducks clucking,
white mist hissing
in the roadside ditch,
and the snow is
neither open or sealed.
Our hands decide the task.
Snow is a letter sent by my sister
and in it she writes:
I lived a life for others
tying shoes and washing
towels and shaking rugs
and received a life
seed by seed.
I counted them at night
as the moon befriended me.
My life was lived for others
and I believe those I lived for
understand
why I don’t need anything.
Release.
By the command of the ice ghosts
the evening enters
the hawk’s shadow.
No one hides.
It sees.
Snow is a letter sent by my brother
and in it he writes:
I am a perpetual sinner
whose sins lurk inside my brain
enough to scare me
into never wanting to be alone.
God gave me a blanket, which I love
to wear wherever I go.
It is made of oily purple wool,
furtive whispers, and dripping icicles
and when I drive down the road,
singing in my car,
I dissolve.
Reborn.
Letters drop from the sky,
an unruly flock of salted crows,
blinking in naked trees.
These birds nag and they peck,
insistent, at face and fingers.
They taste of dried chokecherries,
surrendering
is bittersweet.
I eat.
Snow is a letter written by love
and in it it writes:
this and that and there and there
and here and here and here
and here, here, here and here
all is all and is all is
all is closer than the fat cat�s ground
the mouse befriends the grouse’s louse
the wolf loves the porcupine�s red wine
and without logic
we sing much more blissfully.
Freed.
Snow is a letter I write often
and in it I write empty space
since I prefer to dream:
Out from my parted mouth
a jet black river
uncoils,
uncoils,
uncoils,
sluggishly slithers.
Alive.
Snow is a letter inside
an envelope stuffed
with human breath, the footsteps
of small red boots, the windowsill
I stood upon, the tickles
and the torture I received, the guitar,
Jimmy Cracked Corn and Tannebaum,
the Crusher and the Diamond,
the life I lived, the lives of those
nearby who lived alternate destinies.
All is all and is all is
all folded inside ice.
The cat, the louse, the grouse, the squirrel,
the mouse, the wolf, and the porcupine.
Red wine, the crows, the hawk,
the shadow, the ducks and the geese. All star
wrestling, the chokecherries, my hands,
the windowsill, red boots. The funeral,
Ave Marie, O Christmas Tree, the hospitals,
the lock, the cage, the misplaced keys.
The shovel, the blood, the scar, the tombstones,
the dream, the ice, the oak leaves. The dead
horse, salvation, the book, the coins,
and bumblebees. The eyes shut tight,
the ditch, the mist, the grapes, the wine,
the guilt, the pleas. The howls, the rain,
the cornsilk, the stars and clouds. The thunder,
the basement stairs, the furnace room,
the drawings on the wall. The cottonwood,
the elm tree, its seeds, the snowman walks,
and the snow monkeys with their tails on fire
scream and scream and scream.
Open it.
The river stirred and swallowed,
lulled the broken animals
to sleep inside its arms
underneath the glass dome of light.
The river breathes.
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Sunset and honeybees
The dusty blues and greys of the sky, of the clouds, and of the buildings slowly dissolve into each other and in a few minutes all we see will become indistinguishable, except that trees turn blacker sooner than the rest of the world, at least now, right after sundown. (P.S. I returned from the bottom of this journal to tell you that everything melts eventually into one blackness).
Night enters early up here in the hinterlands. I can now see which professors remain at work on a Friday afternoon (assuming they have their electric lights on) and which ones have snuck out early. Four windows are bright squares of white light.
If I were an owl I could see the titles of the books lining their shelves, but since I am a mere human, all I can see is an inkling of what might be going on. In one office, some students are sitting around a table: pages of books are being flipped over occasionally, a girl leans over her books so that her hair falls like a theatre curtain, a professor with wild Einstein hair (yes, it is even white) stands in the corner with his arms akimbo, his mouth is moving like a ventriloquists’s dummy, and then a glimpse of a young man’s hunched grey jacket, and then a disembodied left hand flips a silver pen in circles and it gives off sparks.
I am really spying now, but if they looked across the courtyard, they would just as easily spy on me, eyeing them, with my two thick sweaters, left hand propping up my chin, and with white cup of tea nearby, but fortunately they wouldn’t see the remains of three (they were small, honest) chocolate chip cookies next to the cup.
At this moment I must also appear to be an earnest member of the steadfast worker bees, and this journal is my final honey for the day. Soon I, too, will sneak out into the night a bit early and then take my son somewhere he can run and jump around like a puppy in a field of dandelions. Well, that is purely figurative, but let’s say to the local gym’s kiddie room.
One more thought: How do bees make honey anyway? Well, the ‘glories’ of the internet led me to this page, and my favorite line is:
“Bees actually have two stomachs, their honey stomach which they use like a nectar backpack and their regular stomach.”
After you read it, would you choose to be a worker bee or a house bee? I’d rather be a worker bee with a nectar packback because at least I could visit all the colors and tender shapes of flowers and sip nectar all day; although having the house bees stick their tube-like tongues into my honey stomach to drain it afterwards doesn’t sound like much fun.
Happy weekend!
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Parachutes
How many entries will be about snow? Even I am beginning to wonder, but really it is the dominant aspect of my life these days. It determines when and where I can go and it determines whether I reach my destination. Thank god for four-wheel drive. I am enjoying the safari (well, the arctic safari?) rides like any proper thrillseeker should.
The snow is gentle this morning, however, like millions of minuscule ghosts floating down on white parachutes. If you watch it fall long enough the snow carries you off into another world, mesmerizing peace. That’s not a bad deal, is it?
Yesterday I turned one year closer to the 4-0 (no need for specifics at my age). Of course, I don’t really think about the number much, as I never have felt my age at any point in my life. I always feel both older and younger at the same time. I have always been an eighty-eight year old in a hot pink bikini.
Twenty years ago, my image of someone my age was of a preppy golf-playing polo-wearing yuppy lady with a bob, with two cars, 1.5 kids, a double car garage, and, oh yeah, a house with central air and heating, and maybe a healthy addiction to credit cards and valium.
I have none of that and so I am thankful for this life. The need to NOT be like everyone else has its price (you know, poverty, panic attacks, confusion, no community), but I am still glad my mother taught me to follow my own path–life feels more tangible, fragile, and richer because of it.
As my dear friend, Ines, said (where did she disappear to, like so many friends…?) (in French Belgian accent): “Rebecca, people like us feel more pain when the pain comes, but we feel more love when the love comes.” Then she would close her eyes, twist her mouth into a small pout and say “Pppuu!” with her lips, as if that was the conclusive irony of our lives.
Of course, I am always longing to be even more nutty and more artistic and to live a life of total mental and creative freedom, like Sun Ra (“I am the alternate destiny!”) or Taneda Santoka (“Which way should I go? The wind!”), but I also have that sinister practical bent, which keeps me thinking of paying bills on time and of finding a decent wage and of making sure my son is safe.
I wonder if I will someday have the courage to leap off the cliff of creative bliss? I hope to leap out of the plain sooner than later.
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Foot on the brake
Although I shouldn’t be slowing down yet, I find I am physically feeling a bit lazy; no, I had better say I finally have the time to feel the exhaustion in my bones.
The two online grad classes are done, but now I am the appointed official organizer for a three-day English intensive retreat and those stacks and stacks of ignored papers which need marking call my name impatiently: “Hey, when are ya going to assign us meaningless little numbers?”
Instead, I am dreaming about not having to come into the office on Saturday and Sunday for the first time in months (ooo, I can lie on the electric carpet in my fuzzy grey socks, eat tangerines and read novels!).
I didn’t realize how much time it takes to study via computer, but now I know. Next term I will only take one class. I learned a lot of new words and concepts, such as cascading style sheets, file structure, f2f, blog, RSS feeds, hyperlink, and radical humanism. I learned to be wary of techno-utopians as well as of techno-cynics, as both camps have their biases.
I enjoyed being a student again–it gave my brain a bit of acceleration and we took a short spin around the block.
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Crosby, Minnesota
A small painting I did while in Crosby, Minnesota (my dad’s hometown) back in 2001, a few weeks before I met my lovely luv.
I used this image as paradise for the last hyperlink in a poem I wrote in the voice of an old Ainu woman, but I am not content yet, suspect I exoticize her voice too much, when what I wanted to do was empathize…needs work. I did this for my Text & Technologies class, which, BTW, was a lot of fun. I just wish I had more know-how, so I could make things look less simplistic. Step-by-step…
You can see the poem (and other stuff) here.
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Throats and noses
Both little man (LM) and I have caught colds, so intermittently during the night LM awoke to complain about it…not much I could do but offer him juice (which he refused) and pat his back (which he preferred). He also developed his first real snore around five a.m.. He sounded like the one of those soft rubbery dog toys: skeeekskeeekskeeek.
This morning right before I left out I thought I heard big guy (BG) singing a song, and he sounded pretty passionate, like he does when he is in the midst of making a new song. I peeked my head in the bedroom and realized he, too, was snoring at a high pitch. Maybe it is officially high frequency day. I will have to teach my morning class with my nose plugged (well, it already is). All noises must be above “Mi” on the scale, circling my head like flies. Mi a name I call myself , Fa a long-long way to fall…
Oh yes, the snow falls again today in soft fluffy mini bits of rabbit fur. I think snow helps to cleanse the mind, snow erases distraction and snow makes the world a room of one’s own. Snow is a blanket that encourages everyone to go back to sleep and dream.
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Snow outside my office window
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Shoveling snow
I love shoveling snow, especially fresh fallen powder, and after the weekend I am sure it will be my main source of exercise this winter.
At least three feet of snow has fallen within two days, and every five hours yesterday I shoveled the car out and the building’s front walkway. I even crazily decided to shovel again at midnight last night (hope no one peeked out at me!), and now again I was at it this morning (and late for work, too).
When I shovel snow I think only of it and see only it, carving a small cave of whiteness around me. The silence beyond the scraping of the shovel against the pavement is supernormal. I escape from everything and everyone, except the falling snow and me.
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Kyoto thrift shop
I liked the juxtaposition here of emperor photos (or military leaders?) and the sixties nude. These thrift shops are just north of Kyoto city hall.
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Osaka Liberty
A classic photo of Osaka city. This is a shot of America-mura, which (of course) has nothing to do with America at all.
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Hibernation longings
I am still asleep, foggily typing out this blog, before I go teach two classes back-to-back. I had a week off from teaching and now it is time to be on stage again. Once there, it is not bad, even enjoyable…but it is the “having” to go that feels unnatural this morning. I’d much rather be home cuddling with my hot-water-bottle son underneath the comforter.
Why did I develop today’s anti-work ethic? Maybe everyone has it now and again (but then again maybe some rare bird always enjoys singing for his/her paycheck). I guess my enjoyment of working tends to disappear near the end of the term (exhaustion), when I have just returned from vacation (culture-shock), and when the mornings first turn cold (hibernation longings). All of the above is true today.
I wish I could shapeshift into a big brown bear and hibernate, my belly full of chestnuts and blueberries.
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Biking in a misty wind
On my way to work, the wind tried to peel me from the bicycle more than once, sudden gusts in the shape of two square hands pushing occasionally and forcefully against my right side, but I prevailed and remained balanced…as I think I must be part circus acrobat.
Inside the wind a spray of rain showered down on me as well. You know the type of rain that happens even while the sun is still shining. A mysterious mix of weather this morning, maybe the sort that meteorologists enjoy staying up late studying….
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Coltrane is on at home
We are home.
Took a trip to the main island, to Osaka and Kyoto for four nights, and I felt overwhelmed with the sudden onrush of city life–crowds, cars, taxis, buses, airplanes, trucks, motorcycles, bicycles, mopeds, shoes, and faces that didn’t smile as much or hands that didn’t hold doors open as much, and the simple exhaustion of travelers who have nowhere to rest wholly, intermittent stops in cafes and on park benches. The biggest and realest smile I remember receiving was from a sunkissed woman in her forties who was living under the Marutamachi bridge. She was washing her clothes in a red plastic bucket.
The trade off was the beauty of old wooden buildings, the smell of cedar walls baking in autumn’s sun, the Kyoto fragrance of senko (incense), the narrow dark stone streets with their long narrow alleys leading to mysterious lives.
Last night in our own beds, we all slept happily, cozily, and we didn’t get up until it felt right. A fitting end to any trip. Happy Workers Day! November 23, 2004.
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Snowflake by snowflake man
Yesterday and today…snow, not the icy or miniature variety, but full fluffy soft snow…the same as the snow from my Minnesota childhood and so I am in love with this land and the snow that covers it.
When people grow up in tropical climates, they usually have no conception of why any human would want to live where your eyelashes and nostril hairs freeze, where your first breath outside comes out as a cough because the lungs can’t handle a sudden rush of frozen oxygen/hydrogen molecules.
Yet there is a deeper silence in a world of snow worth all the blue extremities. I can remember letting the flakes settle on my knit mittens and marveling at the delicate beauty of each unique crystal. I have to remember to do this today.
Which reminds me, do you know of Wilson A. Bentley (1865-1931), dubbed the Snowflake man? He was the first to photograph a snowflake, photographed thousands of them and none were the same. These are the wonders I live for–and if you have ever lived in a land of snow, you would probably say a prayer of gratitude with me for the muffled blue-white beauty, especially in these first days of winter.
P.S. Thankfully, I can share a Bentley snowflake with you because he never copyrighted his work; of course no one can sell his images for money either. Thanks, Snowflake man!