Adapting, resigned

 I have deleted all my apps and bookmarks about news, but one. I'm keeping the local paper on tap, for news about Minnesota. I want to know what is happening, in what I fantasize will be part of the new nation that forms when Dick Cheney and his military allies stage a coup, and takes all the blue states with him, plus Montana, good luck with that.  Or when we are carved off the big block of tasteless American cheese that the US has become, and join the Pacific States and New England to cleave to Canada.  

South Point, HI

I am reading with a heat I haven't felt since my days majoring in English in college. My mind is eating up words, and getting  ____________ nourishment, only now feeling the depth of starvation I have been suffering.  What actual starvation will follow in the wake of the inward turning of this America-first world? 

Not exactly grief-stricken, but shocked. Wondering what thoughts the women are having, who voted for the Orange man, now that he is appointing accused rapists and molesters to his government, if their views about separating the morality of the man from his policies is playing out in any sort of way they could have imagined.

Poetry about this would be very dark, coming from a place of incredulity and disappointment. I won't write those poems.  It would only make for more burning of witches.  

Drama need not be written, because it will be going on in a Shakespearean and Kafkaesque manner all around, and at all times.  

County Clare, Ireland

Songs will sound right only in the most cacophonous heavy metal, and bardic dirges.  Birdsong will be a refuge, until it fades away.  Burning forests, and skies that never darken.

So how will feelings and thoughts about what has happened emerge?  I told someone yesterday, that I am now living in geological time. With a view to a past 4 billion years in girth, and an immeasurable future that will see these years as not even a thin line in the strata of time.  Perspective is all at the moment. I am just a little trilobite. I always have been. It gives comfort, that there is nothing we can do that will destroy the earth. Transform it, yes, just like all the bacteria off-gassing oxygen transformed it and made an environment where they could not survive, but other forms of life could.  Is what is happening so cataclysmic as that? Certainly not. We are not so important. But it feels that way. The pendulum swinging with a very sharp edge, the dread, the pit, the raven gronking overhead. The raven would save us it if could.   But the tribes the vandals overran will tell you, the little dark ones in the Celebes and ancient Ireland, too.  This was always going to happen. Kindness is a feature of some future race, being tried out in this little genetic pool that will be snuffed out, and the residue persisting to resurface in some feathered four-leggeds in the far distant future. Jesus of Nazareth, weaver birds, and some kinds nuns the ancestors of those future altruists. 

Don't think this is about despair. It is not. It is about disappointment. I had hopes that at least the christians would take to heart the story of Jesus resisting the devil's temptation during his time in the desert. That riches and power do nothing for you if you lose your soul, your capacity for compassion. 

I still don't know what to make of all of this.  No one can tell me how to survive it. But I do know that even though I may sound like a jaded catholic school girl, I want to write-out what is in me, and not worry about how it sounds.  So here I am, showing up again, on the page.  As time goes on, I will be more accepting of what imperfections and shallow contours manifest. 

Oh I love language. Words. If I could wield them like a sword, envelop a body with them like a lover, make them into a curative healing broth, fling them into the air where they could become birdsong, then I would be happy, content. Nothing left undone. My words. Words not mine once written. Words like foam on the ocean, like smoke over the fire. Vaporous, transitory, ancestral.

Blueberry Island, MN

Darkness, darkness, be my pillow

This was originally written a long time ago.  My nephew is in college now and my niece is headed there next year:

Darkness, darkness, be my pillow
Take my head, and let me sleep
In the coolness of your shadow
In the silence of your dream
            -Jesse Colin Young

A list of just a few things, better when dark, or black:

Fertile earth
Shadow
Star-viewing night sky
Ebony wood
Ink
Little black dress
Sable
Charcoal
Judicial robes
Black belt
Being in the black (financially solvent)
Being in the black (in fire suppression, being in a safe zone that is already burned)
Limousines

When I was a little brown-haired child, growing up among the blond crowds in Minnesota, I wanted to be blonde.  I fell asleep praying to an indifferent god to turn my hair yellow overnight, to cure a family friends kid who had polio and to keep my family safe.  In that order.  All around me, I saw messaging that to be blonde, to be lighter, was better.  Aesthetically, morally better.  The blondes in stories always fared well, angels in religious art were almost universally golden-haired.  The slogan "blondes have more fun" was omnipresent, and there was  an as yet inexplicable association of dark haired girls with evil, or plainness, and light-haired girls with desirability - in a way that somehow assured survival life's trials.

As an adult, I came to understand  that there are powerful cultural biases associated with darkness.  These biases appear in eastern and western, ancient and modern cultures.  Darkness is associated with evil, and to be dark is to be bad.  Troubling also is the fact that some subcultures fetishize darkness, co-opting cultural practices that have African origins, or underscoring the association of darkness with evil or danger, like some popular comic-book characters. Dark clothing or dark appearance often is a shorthand way to establish the "bad-boy" or "bad-girl" tropes - alluring but dangerous. 

I took this very personally as a kid, and always sought out positive associations with darkness.  A grade school classmate I think felt this also - his last name was Brown. Once our class was asked to write a poem about a color.  I wrote about brown, all positive things - wet tree bark, fragrant earth, chocolate cake, rugged bear and soft fawn.  I remember him ducking his head while I read, embarrassed perhaps to think he may have been singled out by the weird girl in class.  Or maybe he hadn't thought about his name that way before and was pleased.  But honestly, I wasn't thinking about him - the poem was about my own brown hair.

Lately I have been thinking a lot about brown skin, like my Colombian-born nephew and niece. I don't really know what it is like for my nephew to be concerned about proper behavior if he is stopped by police - but I hate it that for him a traffic stop may mean either life or death, and merely driving poses a risk.

It's true that there is something primal about the fear of the dark for animals like us who can be prey. That is an honest, no-fault fear that I understand. It must also be the place where the dark-light bias originates.  Humans all over the world beat back the night with artificial light. But in truth, much of that lighting amounts to displays of ego and wealth meant to impress, not protect. It seems to me that humans have overcome the visceral fear of the dark, and it is only situationally legitimate.

The lyrics above, and these writers' works defy the dark-is-bad trope:

But when I lean over the chasm of myself - 

it seems

my God is dark

and like a web: a hundred roots

silently drinking.

This is the ferment I grow out of.

More I don't know, because my branches 

rest in deep silence, stirred only by the wind.

Rilke - The Book of a Monastic Life

 

To be sure, I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.

Nietzsche - Thus Spake Zarathustra

 

In the dark I rest,

unready for the light which dawns

day after day, eager to be shared.

Black silk, shelter me.

I need 

more of the night before I open

eyes and heart

to illumination.  I must still 

grow in the dark like a root

not ready, not ready at all

Denise Levertov - 

What would it take to smash this bias? The "Black Lives Matter" and "Dark Skies" movements have momentum and support, but the depth of the bias is evident in the strong pushback each receives.  Symbols like the flag of the Confederacy, and statutes erected to honor slavers are coming down. Chipping away at these symbols shows that maybe humans can shift the paradigm.

 

 

Check, check, check

Am I hearing all of this right? Check, check, check.

Can I cross "writing" off my new task sheet, listing the activities, therapies, meditation, exercise and medications? Check, check, check.

Am I writing again like I did earlier in this blog, nonsensical, stream of consciousness, bare and revealed? Check, check, check.

Am I spending our retirement money, front-end loading the out flow of funds, trusting that I'll be healthy enough, peaceful enough to endure what ever indignities the passing years confer on me. Check, check, give me the check.

Am I hearing all of this right? Are my hearing aids working to improve my attentiveness, eliminate the undercurrent of frustration that plagued me unawares for years, pulling into my soundscape at last those elusive bird songs heard by the rest of the crew, by my dead friend Curt who urged me to look into hearing aids, who put his in one of my ears at the Black Forest Inn, bringing tears to my ears, but I didn't take the step until weeks after his premature death. Thank you Curt, and check, check, check. 

My checklist says that for this week, I should write for 30 minutes a day. I have a sliver of time before going out to dinner with friends, so I am fitting in this work. I don't want to stop. I think that is a good sign.  I think the clatter is going to drive Carolyn nuts. I will replace this laptop and hope for a quieter keyboard, because I think this is going to be a happy, regular thing.  Check, check, check.