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Voice

“What is the source of our first suffering? It lies in the fact that we hesitated to speak….it was born in the moments when we accumulated silent things within us.” ― Gaston Bachelard

Lately I have been playing with a metaphor for the changes I have been witnessing within myself: that certain people (human and furrier) have rearranged the furniture in my head (or possibly heart). What I had not really considered is that the different things inside me might have more or less import than others. Bachelard’s comment suggests that some of the things themselves are silent and equates that with our being unable to speak, so a silent thing inside leads to silence outside. So is the flipside of this idea that loud things lead us to speak loudly?

This makes a lot of sense, especially if you look at internalized oppression. In one person, that kind of institutional wrong could be held tightly silent on the inside and lead to a keeping-your-head-down kind of silence or a shame-filled silence; in another person, it could lead instead to rebellion, activism, or some other form of proud rejection of the wrong being done and the ideas behind it.

I think, though, that other “things” are a bit more like cats: sometimes purring, sometimes snoring, sometimes quietly patting us on the face to wake us out of a dead sleep or a crazy dream, pointing us in the direction of the cat food, the pragmatic necessities and the sweet varieties that life offers on a daily basis. These are generally not things that require yelling or even singing; they certainly do not demand our silence.

So then, if I return to my idea for this blog, that poetry can be sublime, ridiculous and useful, I also return to what sort of speaking poetry can do on a given day: give voice to the things that do not dare speak, tune the angry things to a frequency people will be able to hear, and hum simple tunes to keep our voices warm and ready to say the words that are still slowly making their way toward articulation.

Narratives for Survival #1

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So I found this meme on Facebook the other day, not long after Umberto Eco’s death, and I thought that it might just kick my writer’s block in the pants. “To survive, you must tell stories.” I tend to look at this blog as a “platform” for my books of poetry that I am going to be publishing in the next few years, a way to “build an audience,” and I imagine that many of my readers who are also bloggers feel a similar way.

But I often get dragged off course, usually by popular culture narratives with kickass women characters who lead, make choices and decisions, fight, kill, deal with the trauma, and work to balance the things and people they love with the things and people they have to deal with in often less than loving ways. These are the narratives I am magnetically drawn to.

Clearly, they are not the only important narratives. I have a shelf of books on World War II and the Holocaust because memory and testimony are crucial types of narratives for survival. I don’t write about these much because I don’t have firsthand knowledge, but I am going to be giving my writing students a speech by Elie Wiesel to read because they might take his thoughts on “The Perils of Indifference” better than they would take such thoughts from me.

There are also meta-stories: stories about how stories affected you, as we often hear when we start talking about representation in popular culture narratives. So Whoopi Goldberg has often talked about the galvanizing affect seeing Nichelle Nichols playing Lt. Uhura on Star Trek had on her when she was a little girl, suddenly realizing that a black woman could be a leader rather than just a servant. So clearly it is just as important to consider how we tell the stories we tell.

But there are other narratives too, the stories we tell ourselves when we are too tired to do the laundry or too hopeless to fall asleep at three in the morning, or too optimistic to consider consequences or too busy to separate the recycling. Sometimes they serve us well, reminding us to save our energy for the big things or to hold on to the small things until we have the resources to work for the bigger things. And sometimes they just get in the way. So maybe it is not only about what stories we tell and how we tell them, but also how we use them and how they serve us and others or do not.

Emergence

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“Poetry puts language in a state of emergence, in which life becomes manifest through its vivacity. These linguistic impulses, which stand out from the ordinary rank of pragmatic language, are miniatures of the vital impulse.” ― Gaston Bachelard

As I have mentioned before, in science, emergence is the process/concept that/whereby a thing has characteristics that are not shared by its component parts. Hydrogen and oxygen do not necessarily glitter, gurgle or slake thirst by themselves, though when put together as water, they do. Mind is an emergent property of the physical brain and its chemicals and electrical impulses. Like that.

So words, which written in the dictionary and unread, do not have the power they have when we put them together, read them and speak them. Nothing about each word separately—and still less each letter separately—moves people to go to war, make peace, marry each other or even laugh when laughter seems impossible. All of this comes from the emergent nature of language. To take language a step further, we can talk about poetry.

(And I should make clear that we could just as easily talk about science writing, since it is kind of amazing that we can communicate the incredible microcosms and macrocosm of our universe, brain to brain, through language filtered through the scientific process. This is only different from poetry in that the beauty of the content is foregrounded; the beauty of the carrier of the content—language—is usually pretty dry, although I have heard lots of arguments for the aesthetic appeal of the math. Sorry, that bit is lost on me. But I believe these people because when they say it, they get all starry-eyed.)

I am not sure that Bachelard is using this particular definition of emergence in his statement above. I think he is saying something more, perhaps that while language shares in the magic of emergence, poetry puts language on steroids, and the emergence that is made possible through poetry is something more like the Big Bang, not just a universe but a universe full of universes may come into being, like Sir Terry Pratchett’s Multiverse. Similarly, poetry makes possible not simply beautiful images and ideas but the possibility of Beauty itself. Not to get Platonic here, but there is nothing inherent in a massive explosion of matter or words that should create sentience or souls or song.

It shouldn’t. But it does.

Psycho Sunday: Badass Women in Combat Gear #3.5

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Raise your hand if you spent any part of the 1970s spinning around in your living room, hoping that this time, you’d gain superpowers, a golden lasso and maybe an invisible jet. Watching Diana Prince (Linda Carter) beat up the bad guys and save Steve Trevor (Lyle Waggoner) again was very fulfilling and set me up for two decades of disappointed TV watching until the mid-1990s came around and Wonder Women’s spiritual daughters, Xena and Buffy, appeared kicking ass and dusting their enemies.

And while Linda Carter will always be Wonder Woman to me, the new DC comics movie is coming out this spring, with Gal Gadot in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. Given that Gadot will be in the solo Wonder Woman film in 2017, I have hopes that the actor, writers and directors step up to the plate. I had always hoped for a Joss Whedon written/directed film with Lucy Lawless in the title role, but such vain hopes were not to be.

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I still want some bullet-repelling bracelets in case I need to travel outside of New England, but I suppose if they were out there on the market, the NRA would try to make them go away.

How We Make the Road

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So a while back I came across a few lines from the Spanish poet Antonio Machado, used them for an epigraph for a chapter in my theology thesis and then, as one does, forgot all about him. Then a few days ago, I was digging around on my desk and found another line I had written down and then presumably used as a bookmark until it worked itself loose and found me again, which I wrote about a few days ago. That made me look into him further and I found this bit of a poem.

 

Wanderer, your footsteps are

the road and nothing more;

wanderer, there is no road,

the road is made by walking.

Walking makes the road,

and turning to look behind

you see the path that you

will never tread again.

Wanderer, there is no road,

only foam trails on the sea.

 

Given that every writer of application essays EVER tends to use The Journey as their Metaphor of Choice (this is a professional opinion), I rather like the idea that there is no road, only the walking. And this guy Machado reminds me less of other Spanish poets like Lorca than of the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard for some reason.

And this is a bit odd, because Bachelard says, “What a dynamic, handsome object is a path! How precise the familiar hill paths remain for our muscular consciousness! “Oh, my roads and their cadence.” I don’t know what it means, but I like it.

Bachelard, Gaston. probably The Poetics of Space.

Machado, Antonio. “Proverbios y cantares.” Campos de Castilla, 1912.

 

Pinterest Poem

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I am not sure whether this is a cento or a found poem. I saw something crazy about lasagna on Pinterest and decided that my writer’s block merited strong measures and immediately stole it. Astute readers will also recognize lines from Ernest Hemingway, Emily Dickinson, and Patrick McDonnell’s cartoon Mutts.

 

Writers are desperate people, just the way we want

Them to grace the cover of Life Magazine: somewhere

Between torture and fun and blasting it out

With charges that will rock your readers’ world.

Ten rules fit women use to stay fit. One: Exercise

Hypergraphia, an overwhelming urge to write,

To truly rest up, to stop in at my favorite place

For drinks and comfort food that leaves me

Impressed without fail, in gender reversals

We need in our stories, a great example of why

This is absolutely true, in a slightly more mystical light.

 

I think it’s fairly common for writers to be afflicted

With two simultaneous yet contradictory delusions:

I can always live by my pen, until not writing

Makes you anxious. It’s the one and only thing

You have to offer. Well, that and nineteen lasagna recipes

That will change your life: so flavorful, everyone’s bound

To have seconds. Now, I’ll be unstoppable. Yahoo!

Yippee! Woo! Woo! To keep a love story from being

Boring, you need, when asked about romantic chemistry

On the show, to write about the things you wish

You had the courage to say. Only death can stop it.

Badass Women in Combat Gear: Valentine’s Day Edition, Or, Dorothy Parker Was Wrong

((For those of you who, like me, were not Math Majors in college, I apologize. But this particular blog post seems to need a ridiculous number of parentheses and a rather surprising number of braces {curly} and brackets [square]. Be warned.))

There is a fairly famous rhyming couplet by the 1920s Algonquin Round Table wit, Dorothy Parker, that has been widely anthologized (and it suddenly occurs to me that a whole slew [this is a technical literary term] of the editors anthologizing this were {white} men], which says, “Men don’t make passes/At girls who wear glasses.”

I have been thinking about this since Mike Allegra (heylookawriterfellow) asked me to add to my BWCG series some BWCGs who wear glasses. I thought of this most recently after viewing a teaser for this coming Tuesday’s Agent Carter, in which Agent Sousa (the delightful Enver Gokaj) says to (an injured and therefore unavailable-for-the-mission) Agent Peggy Carter (the even more delightful Hayley Atwell) that what they need for the coming mission is someone who can “blend in with the glamour and throw down in the gutter.” Damn, Spanky, I LOVE the writers on this show!

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Any Gentle Reader who has spent any time at all reading this blog will recognize that this is not only the dual nature of what I look for in my Female Leads of TV, Film, and Life, but also a micro-blueprint of who I would like to eventually be. I have to admit that the second part sounds much less painful to me than the first part, because as Agent Dana Scully admits in the most recent New X-Files episode, running/fighting in three-inch heels is no country for really anyone, but absolutely not Women, Older Men or Sane People of any Gender. Okay, she didn’t say that.

But as Jane Austen might have said, “It was nowhere said, but everywhere implied.” Come on. Amy Acker has said that at one point her only “stunt ability was running in heels” (Citation, as Wikipedia would point out, desperately needed. My guess? A ComiCon. San Diego? Maybe. Who knows?).

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My point here is simply that Dorothy Parker was wrong and Mike Allegra is right. (Full disclosure: I wear glasses. So sue me. {Twenty-odd years at MIT’s Writing Center (some of them more odd than others) has made me as blind as my cat Musashi, if not as a bat or a possum. [If M. were a little boy, he’d be wearing Coke bottle glasses and a bowtie]}.

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So in honor of a Sunday-facing Valentine’s Day (black Tuesday meets the Lord’s day), I offer you some of my favorite female actors (Nope, don’t call me a teacheress, professoress, editoress or martial artistess; I avoid calling them actresses for the same reason) in glasses.

WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA – APRIL 30: Actress Jennifer Beals attends the “Proof” Influencer Screening at The London West Hollywood on April 30, 2015 in West Hollywood, California. 25468_001 (Photo by Michael Buckner/WireImage)

 

I tried very hard to chase down the pics I have seen online of Lucy Lawless as herself, rather than Xena, wearing glasses, to no avail. Similarly, her soul-grandmother, Linda Carter (the always-and-everywhere Wonder Woman, despite DC’s brilliant work with Gal Gadot).

And because I believe it is important to look back and forward at the same time, I also give you Ingrid Bergman and Scarlet Johansson.

Also, the classic, brilliant, unimitatable Katherine Hepburn on a skateboard, because duh.

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To my pal, Mike Allegra, men and women who love women in glasses or, you know, on skateboards: YOU’RE WELCOME. HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY. NOW WE WILL LET THE WEATHER BECOME WARM AGAIN.

Mental Models

So yesterday I worked with an MIT engineer on his thesis about the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant that suffered a severe compound accident from the tsunami that hit eastern Japan on March 11, 2011. One of the theories of thinking and reasoning that underlies some of his research is the idea of mental models, “that the mind constructs ‘small-scale models’ of reality that it uses to anticipate events. Mental models can be constructed from perception, imagination, or the comprehension of discourse” (Johnson-Laird and Byrne). I used this idea when I was writing my theology thesis about environmental survival, and it often comes up in cases where survival is at stake: people have to make crucial decisions at high speed in real time and they rely on their picture of reality, which is itself a) a form of perception, b) usually an oversimplification (occasionally the reverse), and c) affected by language, custom, and other symbolic attributes in addition to our lived experience.

That perception ≠ reality is shown in part by research that shows how inaccurate eyewitness testimony can be in court. “Many people believe that human memory works like a video recorder: the mind records events and then, on cue, plays back an exact replica of them. On the contrary, psychologists have found that memories are reconstructed rather than played back each time we recall them. The act of remembering, says eminent memory researcher and psychologist Elizabeth F. Loftus of the University of California, Irvine, is ‘more akin to putting puzzle pieces together than retrieving a video recording’” Akowitz and Lilienfeld).

It is true public safety officers are trained to observe more accurately than the rest of us, and there are ways of retrieving testimony that are less likely to color the witness’s recall. However, for my purposes here, that is less useful simply because in an emergency situation—a nuclear accident, 9/11—what an individual will be doing is not recalling What Happened Then but rather What Could Possibly Be Happening Now. The former is based on a single instant of reality and the latter is based on All the Reality I Have Experienced Up To Now, taken together, sifted, and drawn on the blueprint in the person’s head.

Think of the house you grew up in. Then think of all the houses you have ever seen from the inside or the outside. Then tell me what a house is. If you grew up in the suburbs, a three-story house or a Roman villa won’t be part of your picture. If you are M.C. Escher, this might be the house you draw for me.

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With an overcomplicated mental model, you might withdraw from action—why try to get down 80 flights of stairs? I will never make it. Social problems, which are indeed multiply constructed, frequently face human inaction for this reason.

If you are a child, this might be the house you draw for me.

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The trees out side the house will have brown bark rather than grey and green grass rather than winter yellow, even if you just ran across the yellow grass and climbed up into the grey-barked tree just yesterday.

I am not sure why I am even writing about this although I expect it has to do with Valentine’s Day. I have written before about the problems of love poetry for a writer who wants to be taken seriously, although I don’t think I specifically addressed the problem that poetry causes for us in our expectations about love. But I have a feeling that this is a thing.

 

Arkowitz, Hal, and Scott O. Lilienfeld. “Why Science Tells Us Not to Rely on Eyewitness Accounts.” Scientific American. 1 Jan. 2010. Web. 11 Feb. 2016.

“Child’s Painting Land.” MediaWiki. Web. 11 Feb. 2016.

Escher, M.C. “House of Stairs.”

Johnson-Laird, Phil, and Ruth Byrne. “Mental Models: A Gentle Introduction.” Mental Models Blog. July 2012. Web. 11 Feb. 2016.