See See See

Today, while reading the syllabus, looking for Sheryl’s office hours, I re-read the course’s holy grail quote:

“If a man's imagination were not so weak, so easily tired, if his capacity for wonder not so limited, he would…learn to perceive in water, leaves and silence more than sufficient of the absolute and marvelous, more than enough to console him for the loss of the ancient dreams.”

Today I will go to my spot and I will look/perceive as I have never perceived before. I will be the hand that holds my head to acknowledge.

I pride myself on my imagination, why am I then, so resistant to try alternative pathways to imagination, i.e. sitting and perceiving in nature? Why don’t I trust it? Is this true?

I’ve felt the spark in small glimpses-- this nature inspired imagination, and certainly felt the imaginative in the nature readings (Kincaid, Oates, Rogers, Doyle, and Clifton, all kind of made me writhe on the floor in admiration).

Nature enhances creativity…Hm.
Writing this out just now, may have revealed a misdirection: nature enhances creativity=look to nature for its handouts. And this, more than anything reveals my poverty mentality.

Even so, this seems to be a conundrum. Nature does inspire creativity, but at the same time I can’t expect it to inspire creativity… when I do, nothing comes of it, and my mind happily skips to the nearest human or drama (which honestly speaking is a reliable source of imaginative thinking and creativity according to my brain's wiring). Ah. this reveals something now seemingly obvious, I resist nature writing because I'm not "good" at it (pathetic, I know), which is why I took this class in the first place.

I've managed to run back into my head. Lets try nature again.

Today I will go and document like a mad scientist, the things I have not until today, wanted to see. Today I will perceive in leaves.

                                       ***

Siobhan’s semi-scientific notes

(which will be later layered with the help of the internet)

-The lens: Me. 28 year old female

-Place: 500 block of Coal St. Pittsburgh PA 15221. The alley between apartment building and The Garden Manor Mental health care home

-Time: 6pm, dusk

-Weather: Deceptively cold, 34 degrees, Cloudless dimming blue sky

- The birds: Three. Hopping around on the mental home's well trimmed for winter lawn. Their legs are hidden in the grass, making it appear as if they’re floating on grass. They’re pecking here and there. Seeds? American Robins. Turdus migratorius

                             

-Trees: Way more than I originally thought

Ash trees. Transparent slender clumps of leaves with visible darker seed inside. Look like clumps of band-aids with a circle of blood/injury. Fraxinus

                   

Maple trees. According to the helicopter leaves I find on the ground. Holy happy childhood memory.  Catholic elementary school, 1991. Acer

Elm trees.  Says the leaves picked from the collage of fallen soldiers, still hugging in death. Ulmas

-Moss: This covers some of the ground at the base of the line of trees. It seeps onto the lime green wooden planks which mark the borders of the alley. Anomodon viticulosus

Plus, a tuft of onion grass!  I pluck some of it's top hair and inhale it's poignant memory. Romulea rosea

                                                  ***

My mom works at a Headstart program in in the Poconos. She’s told me of a device the teachers use on child who can’t sit still, can’t look into things for too long: the weighted vest, or "sensory hug." I like the two very different implications behind these names.

                                                     ***

In what ways have I approached nature this semester? When/how/why has nature acted as a weighted vest for me? How has it acted as a sensory hug ?

When/how/why have I been a weighted vest upon nature? How have I been a sensory hug for nature? (I just imagined nature yelling at me in a cutting, abrupt voice, "I don't need your sensory hug!).

                                                                               ***

I have come to these assignments as:

an explorer, a disbeliever, a believer, a mule, a mourner, a child, an adult, an artist, a cynic, a psychic, a writer, a fallen leaf, a leaf still holding on, an idealist, a realist, a student, a teacher, an insider, an outsider, a hippi, a hip hopper, an energy, a void. 

An (anticlimactic) human.

Poem

Human

Humanity

Human in a tee

In my white tee

Tree staring

Nature blog writing

steady

trying to circle me:

A sailor(ess) went to 

sea sea sea

To see what she could 

see see see

But all that she could 

see see see

all that she could

per

ceive ceive ceive

was the lossses of her

ancient 
dreams

dreams 

dreams

*all images from internet

Disclaimers and Dr.Pepper

3-11-4

6:08 pm

First, let’s address the disclaimers.

Disclaimer: This is my third time out this week to collect myself through nature writing. Every day, as the weather improves, I can’t help but to think, so will my writing (I am a superstitious writer). Here’s the thing, I am obsessively searching/on the lookout for new angles to write from. I know that this warm tease of weather will bring out new ideas, plus I’m reflecting nature’s cue, feeling refreshed myself. Lately, I’ve been suffocating in my winter tone.

  Disclaimer: I am writing long hand today A.) because I can stand to, temperature wise and B.) more importantly, I’m trying to stack up my chicken scratch in this specific notebook, my notebook from jail.

Last week, one of eleven students/men did their homework (three pages of “whatever you want”-- I know, this open endedness is probably part of the problem).  So, I had to get up on my soap box real quick and tell them about themselves (this is truly an art. You cannot be the yakkity yak bully public school teacher, but you also want/expect for them to do some work).

Next, my student asked, “Siobhan, where’s your three pages?”

Trying to save face, I passed him this scarcely written in notebook.

He says, “This not three pages,” smiles, and hands it back to me.

I told him (after sucking my teeth), “Come to my school Brandon. I’ll show you fifty plus pages.”

He caught me, and I was glad he did.

Never preach what you don’t practice. More accurately, be able to back up the practice you preach.  Even though I easily had more than three pages of writing sitting inside my school bag, inside the car which sat outside of the jail at that very moment, there was no way to prove that I had kept up my end of the bargain. He wasn’t trying to hear it, just as I wasn’t trying to hear why he or his classmates couldn’t produce three pages.

***

So here I am at my corner.

Different weather (warmer)

Different smell (the faint undertone of fresh dog poop-- juicer)

Different sounds (“I’m about to pop you! You know not to go in the street!”)

Said the woman in a tight purple shirt walking a pit bull, to one of her three children. They passed earlier on their way to the corner store.

Humans dominate in noise making when the weather gets warmer. We want to make sure we still got lungs that work, want to make sure the long corridors of streets are capable of carrying our voice like the dusty telephone lines above our head. Cabin fever is a hell of a disease (in the voice of Charlie Murphy).

People and dogs galore.

Do you remember the original/animated 101 Dalmatians? In the opening credits, shown are owners walking their dog which looks like them: the lanky and pointy nosed bun wearing librarian is walking the lanky and pointy nosed grey hound (are grey hounds exceptionally smart? I suspect this is the suggestion here). Then there’s the squat bald Danny DeVito looking  man who, you guessed it, is walking Squat the bull dog.

My point: why is this theory so damn accurate?

In the Islands (St. Lucia) there was one main breed of dog: a mangy nervous rat looking mutt thing (sadly, starvation had a lot to do with this look), and even here I found my brain adhering to the dog/human theory. St. Lucians, generally speaking, are a nervous/superstitious people who do not have the luxury to keep dogs as pets. These dogs (most which are street dogs) are treated as nuisances. 

Back to America, where we have such things as dog walkers/dog sitters. The thought of a dog walker threw me for a loop when I tried to lay the 101 Dalmatian theory on my imagined female dog walker. Confused, I wondered  which dog out of the her bunch was hers? Any? Then I realized it didn’t matter, the woman was a dog walker. She likes/is all of them. She’s not the reflection of one dog at the end of a leash, she’s the reflection of all/many dogs at the end of a leash.

I used to fantasize about having a yellow, black, and chocolate lab all at once. There’s was something about the sameness and diversity of that bunch, aesthetically speaking, that intrigued me. It's like those murals where a group of differently colored people have their hands in a pile, or a generic ad for a school that needs to include a model/student from each continent in one jolly unifying shot. 

                =    

Holy staged.

I swear I smell hot dogs right now. Someone is really pushing this whole summer feeling thing. I guess that makes two of us.

At my feet sits a crumpled receipt. You know my pandora box opening self is gonna look:

Drum roll please:

Family Dollar

Store # 03675 Wilkinsburg

Dr. Pepper 16 oz. $1.25

Tax .09

Total $1.34

Not the best piece of literature, but it does, as usual, invite me to associate:

Dr. Pepper

Dr. Pib

The bib of American 
drinking

Pop

Soda Pop

Soda

Baby bottles filled with

Cola

Pepsi black

Coke white

Look at you

ready to fight

Face it

Facts

Pacts

with

Corporations

Type two diabetes

in third world nations--

Vacation 
Stations 

Haitians
Banana 
Plantations

Lent the season

of first world

rations

Voice Overs and Nature

8pm Saturday March 1, 2013

At my corner.

This time I am prepared for night writing: extra writing utensils (although, tonight, no ink will freeze) and a small flashlight (that too will prove unnecessary, as I’ve aligned my sitting to the light of a helpful tangerine street lamp). I have a small square of cardboard to sit on too.

I open my notebook and stare at the white blank page. Last week my eyes rolled from the white pages of my notebook into more whiteness of the snow as if no line of sight had been broken. Tonight, without having looked up and out and into my surroundings yet, I know there will be a contrasting story to tell.

I concentrate on the blank page, make my eyes blur at the white in front of me. Gradually my ears take over. When one sense is down or shrouded in un-stimulancy, other senses kick into gear, make up for it.

I hear a train in the distance. As I concentrate on it, its faint whistle becomes more distinct, closer even. I imagaine the specific body of the train, the body which carries that distant voice. It’s a tired train and an old parts train. A slow train, but a sturdy, knows what its doing train. A wise train.

 I usually hear the trains at night in bed. In the eerie world between sleep and awake, I hear their sluggish moans. Eventually the sound will become incorporated into a dream until the next train comes along, knocking me out of my REM'ing.

I hear the acceleration of buses running their lines through the peculiar bus high way that cuts through East Pittsburgh. When I first moved here, I thought it was a highway under construction, a highway closed like the tunnels that seemed to shut down at the drop of a dime. After never seeing cars on this highway, and eventually, seeing only buses, I realized it was not only not shut down, but designated for buses only. I equate this highway to Pittsburgh's version of a subway or EL.

This busway is actually the Martin Luther King Jr. East

 Busway. Originally it was a railroad line, yet upon purchase,

 the Port Authority of Allegheny County converted/added a

busway in 1983. It ran between Downtown Pittsburgh 

and Edgewood, a length of 6.8 miles. Today, it extends into

 Swissvale another 2.3 miles. Currently, it is undergoing 

negotiations as an alternative car route for the congested 

Squirrel Hill tunnel during its closings. (wikipedia)

I hear a bus approaching and look out into the world beyond my notebook. The 61A North Braddock/Downtown approaches and stops at the dumpster in front of me. Someone gets out from the back door. “61 A North Braddock,” a woman announces. I think about her voice. Is she somewhere, a real woman, paid for her voice over? Or is she computer generated?

 I think about voices like these, down the Shore (and this is how you must say it when referring to going to the Jersey Shore), there is the woman bleating behind you, “watch the tram car, please.”

That please is interesting, a speck of recorded kindness and /or manners. I also suspect this “please” aids in fending off being possibly cursed out, not that it (the voice) would care if it was. But for the driver of the tram, it affords a small mental protection.

There is the “Now, that was easy,” button you can buy at Staples. This phrase, much like the “that’s what she said” fad, can easily be attached to many situations. If you could be summed up as a recorded phrase what would yours be/say? I suspect you wouldn't want to be, oh fellow creative writer. “Now that was easy.”

These audible false voices are a good example of what Jack Turner was referring to when he wrote about  “imitations” of the wild. Instead of present time conversation, these voices are used to inform/imitate dialogue without requiring a human to human interaction. It, and you, stand alone in passivity.  No matter how many times you shake that doll, unhappy with her answer, she will only ever have one (or 30) disconnected and uncreative premeditations.

This is sad, our children’s toys teach them the one sided conversation at an early age, the call without a natural or caring response.

 Turner said that “these abstractions never work, they never achieve a sense of power and fulfillment. They correct neither the cause nor the effect. We end up feeling helpless, and since it is human nature to want to avoid feeling helpless, we become disassociated, cynical and depressed.”

“These abstractions never achieve a sense of power and fulfillment,” Turner says, yet it is power these toys (its makers) seem to be after. The power/desire to limit the imagination, to suggest the limits of the toys capabilities, the ends, no need for further possibility: this doll poops, pees and talks--the end. The need to control the outcome of the dolls functions is a desire to control the child’s imagination. 

Remember when we imagined our doll’s voices, their personality, how they spent the day? That simple freedom is boxed and sold now.

The bus passes and I consider the cool night air. I love it’s (weather) sneakiness, how it allows me contentment in this small space, only to mischievously whisk out a snow storm in the coming hours. 

I love how it makes its own rules, I love its freedom to imagine, to not be confined by outside forces, to just be itself, to makes its mark on the world as it sees right at that moment.

In many ways, weather is boxed and sold. Think of Caribbean cruises, or, this weekend I watched a program about an artist who created indoor clouds and photographed 
them (which was pretty bomb). But there is some consolation in knowing that the capital letter Weather, will and can never be boxed and sold. No no matter how much the paparazzi (weather men/women) chase it, they'll never get that million dollar shot. Never.