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.

Cousin Blood Lion

8pm 2/24/14

At my corner.

The weather doesn't fit the visual, the visual being unsnow.

The visual doesn’t match (it’s cold and windy and 30 degrees) the expectation. This is disheartening. Expecting one thing, getting another, that whole ho hum thing.

Like when the young child learns that her crush on an older cousin is wrong.

Or, as an adult, expecting to get X amount of work done, yet by the end of the day you haven’t touched half of half your intentions.

Or, expecting it to be a normal old Monday: library trance from 9am to 6pm, but it just ain’t so. Or maybe it is so, it’s just that the trance is a different trance, one you weren't expecting.

***

Today my cousin passed away. He was/is 32.

My heart is heavy. So is my head. And body, and this hand trying to write. Everything wants to rest.

***

Why am I here? A few years ago, I once told a friend who was considering an MFA, that the whole thing was self-indulgent.

Today I agree with myself.

***

Disheartening.

Diss heart-ning.

Dissed heart strings.

Dis heart hurting

Dis heart smears itself

Lightening bug

On a distant

disconnected

Blog.

Blah.

!

***

I am nobody

Who are you?

Are you nobody too?

***

The ink in my pen is frost bit, it’s not working with me, not recording what I want it to.

But then, I lift my notebook to the street light, and see that it was writing the whole time.

***

The yellow rectangle of my office floats above me. From where I sit three silhouette trees braid themselves in a conspiring thread to block my view. I am having trouble seeing much of anything, I huff to myself in Eeyor fashion.

 My brain says move, so I do. I come to a new angle and can see into my window, see the pieces of furniture that I imagined were there a few seconds ago in their visual absence. So I see the familiar, see what I expected and a mocking happiness washes over me. My confirmation of what I knew was already there seems so pathetic. Expectancy encourages a change of view I hear my body getting all preachy on me, but I’m in no mood. Expect nothing.

***

My leafs

Look at them holding on

                                         Look how they become “my” leafs when

 I personify them with strength

My leafs

My needs. To connect

I am connected to these “my” leafs (now your leafs)

What they hold on to, is the same thing they must leave

Leafs leaves or don’ts leaves,

Thank you girls for making your own

time thieves

Look how my leafs become “shes”

My she leafs

Our she we leafs

***

It’s a mixture of things—my sadness, the night, the cold air, my readings from earlier in the day—that allow me, right now, to allow nature to work its magic on me.

Tom Grimes said that it is not identity searching which makes us writers (this intrigued me. Weren’t the odd lot of us MFA’ers here precisely for this reason? To consider ourselves for an intensive two years? To study the ways in which we thought or didn’t think?), but something that precedes the quest of identity.

Check this out:

“Maybe what I wanted all along was what Tolstoy and Hemingway seem to have, which turns out, upon close reading, not to be identity, but negative capability, that mysterious Keatsian ability and desire to swim through confusion, and without  anxiously or irritably grasping after facts (those tempting transcendent things), keep themselves afloat…what I was really searching for was not identity, but mystery, reflection, doubt, a constant state of never knowing who I am, always testing, always weighing, always evolving.”

***

Self indulging? Depends on what day you ask me.

Confusing?

Absolutely, but perfectly so.

***

Cousin

Blood

Lion

Snow and Staccato Thoughts

11am Sunday 2/16/14

At my corner. Snow.

More snow.

Light snow like Splenda snow.

Beady snow like Floam snow.

Before I got to looking at this snow,  I walked around a young man in front of my apartment’s pine green dumpster. His music was clear through his hoods, hats, and headphones. The repetitive chants of a rapper’s meditations form and slice through the dry snow air. The voice has been altered:  it’s lowered, and injected with bass. The beat’s been slowed down. There’s something both unnatural and hypnotizing--incandescent even-- going on. The pull is like a moth drawn to zapper light, a zapper light being held by the hallowed arms of Sylvia Plath. Like a poem I think I get.

“I get bad bitches and bad money.”

I fluttered around him. I stepped from the slim deer path of packed down ice, a path of name brand boot prints and un-name brand breeds of paw prints.

I clean my corner and take my seat. I get to looking.

***

Why is everything I take in related to education today? Related to the classroom? This week at ACJ (Allegheny County Jail) my students (eleven men ranging in ages: 20’s-60’s) explored figurative language, simile’s and metaphors.

•    The Splenda snow, my students would dig that simile. They’d dog each other and get into a discussion about the taste of sugar.“Splenda tastes like shit,” one would say. Tastes like         shit, another opportunity to highlight the similes of our everyday speech. What does shit          taste like? I might ask, encouraging them to use more similes in their explanation. 
•         The Floam snow. There’s a culture/era marker. I’d have to check for understanding of this simile. Pictures help. This would be a good segueway into a discussion about the audience.

***

This snow has been trying my patience.

My thoughts on snow right here, right now:

 Snow the shape shifter: How it comes with force, with community, with the masses, demands its place to rest. How it melts, changes it shape and travels to those tiny veins of the unseen, the unconscious, freezes, unfreezes, calls attention to its expansion and contraction. How it calls attention to the blocked, water proofed, barricaded, impenetrable places of the soul. How it points its liquid finger at stunted growth. There, there, there, work on that, make that grow.

Snow the enforcer of absolute thinking:

White or black

Hot or cold

Good or bad person

Good or bad student

Good or bad teacher

Good or bad writer

Real or fake

Love or hate 

Snow the encourager of staccato thinking:

(See above and below format of this blog entry).

***

Somewhere during my writing the young man has left, taking his music with him. I feel a sadness, his bus hadn’t yet come, did my presence scare him away? Associative rhyme:

Good morning Mary Sunshine, why did you wake so soon? You scared the little birds away                    and shined away the moon.

To wake up is to scare the little birds away.

To wake up is to scare others away.

***

Light snow like Splenda snow.

Beady snow like Floam snow.

Blog snow like, like, like...

Connection

"Each year is a surprise to us. We find that we had virtually forgotten the note of each bird, and when we hear it again, it is remembered like a dream, reminding us of a previous state of existence. The voice of nature is always encouraging."
                                                  -Thoreau

9am Sunday February 9, 2014

23 degrees

Sitting at my corner. My first conscious capture is the lime on the wood planks: long stacked-like brick planks that hold the earth from falling into the street. The color links up with my memory and I’m associating:

color pop

push pop

ring pop

candy paint

jolly rancher

sour apple

jell-o jigglers

Pretty paint on barriers like paint ball splots on police shields, like tropical murals on condemned Philly row homes. Bright colors holding hands with drabness: winter whites and bland browns plus the mean mood of those cool winter blues.

The petite chimney of my wide apartment building is putting out a faint but steady puff of steam, looking tired, looking like The Little Engine That Could: I think I can, I think I can.

Pencil-tip pellets of snow drop to my notebook, demand attention: dandruff on a black dress. Plus they have a bounce to their step, a soundtrack to their entrance: Zing! Zing! Like those shoots of light that fall around Beast as he’s resurrected in front of an awed Belle, in front of an ensnared five year old watching through the screen.

I chase a fallen pellet with the tip of my fountain pen, inject it with ink. A tattoo. How this is beautiful and grotesque. The white pellet now a melted clump of black ink, like it never was once snow. How vision is an illusion, how it’s limited in its ability to tell the whole story, the whole history.

How history is an obsession of the writer (me).

 In this vein an image surfaces: crabs (writers) in a bucket. But the other crabs aren’t other writers, they’re me. All those claws, and clamoring for freedom. All  that truth. All those obsessions, and opinions-- they’re me.

***

There’s those leaves again, the ones who never let go. The ones who make their own schedule as to when. How they’re both brilliant and foolish. Tough-- but for what?-- they’ve already braved the winter. Ovid said: “Be patient and tough; someday this pain will be useful to you.”

 I’m thinking about my students at ACJ, how they embody these lone leaves: brittle, beat down, weathered, but connected. Holding on. To be a writer is to hold on.

***

One bird, then two, but they are far and unidentifiable. Then the giving of a red spot, a Cardinal. I feel glad to know his name-- this celebrity.

A school of baby stingrays fly over head and they dart nervously in unpredictable redirections.

As I focus on looking at/ for birds, it’s their sound that comes into focus. How could I have missed this?

It’s amazing, personalities galore.

-joyful

-whiney

-melancholic

-aggressive

-nimble

-friendly

-annoying

What’s going on? Why all the sounds?

I reprimand myself. I am silly to think that these noises are out of the ordinary. I feel further shame, in that I know birds are a big deal in the literary world. How quick I am to find birds and their metaphors in a text, but how blind I am to them in real life. That seems extremely disconnected to me.

The Cardinal lands on a lime log plank while I’m wallowing in my deficiencies.

Associations begin anew:

Christmas

Christmas in the Caribbean

Senses on a Rainy Night

8pm Sunday (2/2/14)

Night time, and the intentions now are different. Take away sight (or lessen sight) and my other senses would be required to do their thing. So I set out to do my thing, call upon my senses to show me what they got. Show me what you got oh put-on-the-spot receptors of my small reality. Show me what you got.

Smell: I take in three deep breaths, nothing. It smells like nothing. Whats nothing smell like? Deep breath again, and there it is: someone’s doing laundry. Somewhere a dryer tube is puffing out warm wafts of lilac, and I’m getting it-- ever so slightly-- emphasizing it and spiking it with narration. I register it to this moment: a memory in process. The mood, my mood, has taken a split-hair turn, enough for me to look at my ambivalence from a different angle.

 I’m thinking about aromatherapy, about lilac, about the book The Giver. In this story, the Giver lets Jonas experience memories of the world: fear, joy, awe, shock, ETC. When I smell lilac I am transported to a pleasant memory that’d be titled, for the Giver’s purposes, as “The Overwhelming Need to Share Something Beautiful.”

I’m five, and I’m snapping lilac. I’m collecting the spectrum (white to purple), holding them in my clutch. I’m barely holding on to my body’s movements in my excitement to share these bombs of fragrance and color. For my mother! For my mother! I can think of no one/nothing  but my mother.

Touch: It’s raining and I feel the cold moist air finding its way into my clothes. My hot skin, barricaded with its man-made materials (say for some cotton laced in the mix) confronts the invasion and tufts of truces erupt in invisible mushroom clouds of condensations and evaporations. Hot or cold, the feeling is wet.

Sound: There’s the drip!/drip!/drip! of water torture that isn’t torture at all. (Water torture provides a sturdy template of sound, but when its mold is removed is the uneasiness of the initial evocation of torture too powerful a residue?) Or maybe I like this idea of torture: going crazy to the sound/feel of water like a “would you rather?” game without an alternative option. drip!/drip!/drip!

Taste: I taste only my mouth. I taste my ambivalence. How I won’t lick the road, or the tree or the house or the human or the animal dead or alive. I taste my baby steps. I taste my taste in growth that’s only comprehended via a time-lapse camera. I taste my ambivalence. Hard headed and stubborn is a taste, too sure of itself to tag any type of metaphor.

Sight: This sight, which I thought would be lessened, is nothing further from the truth. Everything is illuminated with a light that shines not from the sun, but from within. So that dead tree: brighter and deader (yes, deader) and more alive in its deadness (and beauty) than I’ve ever felt.

No people or cars, but yellow/orange squares of windows and the flickering movement of a shitty (sorry-- Eagles and Steelers baby) Superbowl game. A bus (61A) filled with empty seats and bus driver who’s fair game to caste a narrative upon.

A burnt mattress leans against the slick dumpster of our apartment. I’m thinking about the fire that burns behind every visual, every sense, every story, every ambivalence and every open heart.