Once in a Blue Muse

Tuesday, March 22, 2022

An ekphrastic opportunity, redux

In March of 2004, I received an email from one of the members of the band, Thermonuclearity. They had read one of my published poems and wanted to know if I'd be interested in a collaboration, writing poems to echo the feeling of their music.

"i represent a two-member band (electronic music) who's currently working on a new album. this is a concept album about the winter and it's called "halcyon days". i would like to know if you would share your gift as a poet with us and if you would write a short poem leading into every track of the album."

While I had written some ekphrastic poems before (poetry that is written in response to a piece of art, typically visual art), I hadn't done so with instrumental music. But I was intrigued and agreed to give it a shot. If they didn't like the work, they didn't have to use it, and I would have a group of poems that otherwise might not have been written.

Over the course of that year, they would send me a music file and I would draft a poem from the emotion in the song. I immersed myself in the sounds they created, finding new depths of meaning on each listen. I sent them the group of poems and hoped that the project was as satisfying for them as it was for me.

By then, I was already drifting from poetry to fiction and spent the next few years working on my first novels.

Every once in a while, I would poke the internet to see if Thermonuclearity had released the album, but I hadn't found anything. I continued to listen to the tracks they had sent me, and they became some of my favorite writing music.

I think I got a few emails from them over the course of the years - both members of the band had families and their priorities took them elsewhere. As the mother of two young children, I absolutely understood that.

Time passed. At some point, I found them on Twitter, and clicked follow.

Last Wednesday, almost 18 years from the day I received their first email, they tweeted something about new music being released shortly. I replied, happy to hear they were still creating. They sent me a private message letting me know that in addition to new work, they are also planning to release the collection (Halcyon Days) we had collaborated on in 2004. Including my poetry.

It's honestly somewhat miraculous that this chain of random circumstances even occurred. From band members in Germany finding a single poem, published in an obscure journal on the internet in 2004, to connecting with me from that poem, and then 18 years later (!), a single tweet shows up when I happen to log in to Twitter that manages not to get lost in a rapidly moving timeline. And that 18 years later, the band is still making music together and going back to release the concept album.

I will certainly let folks know when it's released and where to get it. If you like instrumental/techno music, give Thermonuclearity a listen. Perhaps you will be as entranced as I am with their work.

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Wednesday, March 09, 2022

"What the ice gets, the ice keeps."

"South - Frank Hurley (3)" photo by CineconcertsMP,
used with attribution, and creative commons license, CC BY 2.0

I first heard of Earnest Shackleton from a PBS documentary in 2002. I was so moved by his story, I started working on a poem inspired by it. This is the poem, many times revised and rewritten. I post it in honor of the mission on the occasion of the discovery of Endurance, long believed to be lost in the icy embrace of Antarctica forever.

If you don't know about Shackleton and his mission, it is well worth reading about. His 'successful failure' is studied in MBA programs about leadership, which I totally understand. But what captivated me about the story is that Shackleton promised his sailors he would rescue them and they believed him and he did.

127 days later.

Everyone survived.

What kind of person must Shackleton have been that all who sailed with him had absolute faith in him, even as they lost their ship to the pack ice?

So to the Endurance and her crew, I raise a glass.

"What the ice gets, the ice keeps" (E.S.)

"Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold. Long months of complete darkness. Constant danger. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success. " January 1914

I.

He must have had a pull stronger than magnetic north
to draw so many men to his desire. Did his eyes blaze
with passion as he caressed the curves of his ship?
His wife, child, not enough to anchor him. The Pole
stolen, he claims a continent as consolation prize.

II.

He drifts with deadly currents, a man of action
forced to watch land and sun recede; tastes failure
in the brackish water that pools at his crew's feet.

III.

They salvage Hurley’s negatives from the groaning ship.
He must choose only a few, cries as he smashes glass plates
and the pack ice locks Endurance in its embrace. A crack
reverberates through still air. Sled dogs fall silent.

IV.

Sailors savage seals and penguins with greater skill
than killer whales. They reek of fish. Hair, skin,
clothes stiff with spray. They sleep like sardines
in the shelter of two upturned lifeboats, imagine tea,
whiskey, lavender-scented linens. They fear
even death will not rescue them.

V.

A tiny sextant against frostbite, thirst, madness,
Shackleton sails an open boat 800 miles to desolation.
On the glacier he swears to his two companions
the whaling station waits over the next rise. And the next.
He transforms five minutes’ sleep into thirty. Whalers weep
when three wraiths shape themselves from fog.

VI.

In time, the sea calls many of her sailors back --
as if earth alone could not sustain them, as if
Antarctica herself had transfused ice water for blood.

Lisa Janice Cohen
April 4, 2002

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/shackleton/

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Tuesday, February 22, 2022

Creating new systems, reclaiming my time

"Grind, grit, and goals can only take you as far as the personal walls you hit." (LJ Cohen)

In January, I wrote a post about 'falling to the level of my systems', essentially acknowledging the ways in which I was struggling with my focus and concentration and how that impacted my ability to create.

Since then, I have been building up some new and conscious systems (aka better habits) with a little help from my friends.

While I still crave in-person writing meet ups and retreats, the logistics of that given covid risk are still non-trivial, and I've been grateful for the weekly writing zooms with Elaine Isaak as well as sessions with Marianna Martin. I've also done informal sprints on Twitter with various writers and Lancelot Shaubert invited me to join his discord channel where, among other things, he hosts writing sprints.

All of this is to say, we all do get by with a little help from our friends. I have been making steady progress on the multiverse novel. It has hit the halfway mark in a solid first draft and have the next 10 or so scenes breadcrumbed out.

"Reclaiming my time"

Ever since I heard the incredible Congresswoman Maxine Waters use this phrase to sharp and strong effect, it has been reverberating somewhere in the back of my mind. Last week, as I was reaching for my phone, her voice whispered in my ear. I paused. Took a breath. Broke the chain of actions that would have sent me scrolling on FB and Twitter - sometimes for hours.

Her words gave me another way to think about social media and my use of it.

I'm going to just say it outright: more abuse than use. I am well aware of all the tricks FB and the rest use to keep us (me) glued to the outrage machine. And because I knew about it, I thought I was clever enough not to get caught.

Spoiler alert: I wasn't. The seductive and addictive forces of social media just played into my insecurities and massive fear of missing out that I still carry from childhood. Which meant, even as I was telling myself I was using social media, in fact, it was using me.

The cycle went something like this:

Wake up. Check my phone for messages and notifications. Start scrolling. Realize several hours have passed. Castigate myself and wallow in self-loathing because of my weak will. Swear to do better the next day. Repeat.

And it wasn't simply a matter of wasted time, though that was bad enough. What was worse was the background static filling my mind to the point where I had lost the skill of stillness.

Coaxing creativity is like trying to hand feed a hummingbird. It requires calmness and inner quiet and a meditative letting-go. When I am working on a novel, I need to create space in my mind for its world. It's as if the world of the novel and all its characters inhabit the nooks and crannies in my brain and I walk around containing this holographic sense of the story. But with so much background noise, there's no room for anything else.

I used to believe that social media was not merely useful, but necessary for creative folk. It helped me connect with other writers and artists (which is amazing!), helped me talk about my work (also good), and reach an audience (more promise than actual outcome). But over time, I've come to see how social media has become at best, a crowded place of anger, outrage, and shouting and at worse, a vehicle for propaganda and hatred.

Finding Stillness

I had come to a place of fear that I would never finish this novel. That I had somehow lost the drive and the ability to write. But what I had lost was stillness.

This past week or so, with Maxine Waters' words both a beacon and a mantra, I am finding my way to stillness again. I find I now crave it more than I need the quick and dirty dopamine hits of social media.

And the more I dwell in stillness, the easier it is to set down the phone and the more that shy and wild bird will light on my soul to feed me.

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Monday, January 24, 2022

Learning to repair what is broken

Broken raku vessel mended with gold

Hit it with a stick

I have been 'playing with clay' for over 13 years and one of the first lessons I learned as a beginning potter was that of impermanence. As my first teacher taught me, there are almost limitless ways to ruin a pot along the way. I still hear her voice in my head when I mess up centering ("an excellent way to ruin a pot"), trimming ("yup, a great way to ruin a pot"), or glazing ("a perfect way to ruin a pot").

I also remember another one of her adages: Hit it with a stick. Which was her answer to the question of what do I do when the pot is knocked off center. So the second lesson I learned was of transformation.

Some of my favorite bowls are the squared off pieces that I took Stephanie's advice with and hit with a stick.

There is no such thing as perfect

There is no such thing as perfect. I am quite good at critiquing my work and picking it apart. My current favorite tea mug is one I hated when it first emerged from the kiln.

Now I embrace its imperfections - it's slightly wonky and on the outside where I overlapped 2 glazes, there's a little crazing (spiderweb cracks). Because it's on the outside only, it doesn't pose any hazard to using the mug and has, instead, become a subtle design element that I believe enhances the look of the piece.

Our scars show our journey

The vessel in the image at the top of this post was one made by a fellow potter and fired in a raku kiln. It cracked and broke into several pieces upon cooling and my potter friend asked me if I might try to repair it using the kintsugi technique.

The philosophy of kintsugi is that of using the cracks as a way to enhance the beauty of an object, rather than attempt to invisibly mend it.

I am also a (now retired) physical therapist and this applies to the body as well: injuries are mended, but there are often scars - some visible, some invisible - that show where we have been hurt. I have come to believe this to be true for our psychic wounds as well.

We may very well heal, but the healed places will be different than they were before the hurt.

If I could make my soul visible, perhaps there would be gold lines wavering through it. And I think that would be quite beautiful.

Little, Broken, Still Good

I recently re-watched the Disney movie, Lilo and Stitch and literally caught my breath when Stitch says at the end: "This is my family. I found it, all on my own. It's little, and broken, but still good. Yeah, still good."

I have been feeling very broken lately, with the jagged places raw. There's a novel I've been poking at for several years now, only making minimal progress. Most days, when I think about opening the file and working on it, I feel as if I have failed the story and failed myself, having lost my way as a writer.

In the enormity of the world's suffering and pain, how can I even pretend that my creativity matters? That my own distress matters. That I even deserve to feel whole?

Impermanence. Imperfection. Transformation.

I was text-chatting with a writer friend last night and they helped me see myself and my work in a different light - ironic, as *they* were the one who reached out to me because they were struggling. But that's how it works, I think. We are here to help one another.

These are some of the things I wrote - ostensibly for them - but also for me:

So many people are fighting to force things to be 'normal' but there needs to be a reckoning for all our losses. And I don't think our culture has the ability to do it. Not fully. Not in the way it needs to be done.

And those of us who have the sensitivity to see it are mocked for it.

And I know I get sucked into minimizing my own reactions to it all, end up wondering what's wrong with me.

I worry for the future ... and how to carry that grief and not let it consume you. I haven't figured out that at all.

I think the sensitive ones like us are the emotion translators in the world. It can be exhausting. But it's also [critical] to do. To express in art and reflect back to the world.

[It's] work. Hard work. Necessary work. Sacred work.

And as I wrote those final lines, it felt like something unlocked deep inside me. My broken pieces weren't grinding against one another quite so hard anymore. They fit together. Not seamlessly, but with the seams shining in the places that had been cracked apart.

It is okay - more than okay - it is essential - to bring beauty into an uncertain world.

Both what we create and who we are as creators don't need to be perfect. They and we can't be perfect. But if we commit to repairing the broken places with care and gentleness, gold will shine through the cracks to illuminate us all.

Subscribe to BlueMusings and receive my short story collection, STRANGER WORLDS THAN THESE, as my gift.