Letting the brain fly as it will

Fly brain, fly.

I get sucked into other people's problems and projections too easily sometimes. Especially when I'm procrastinating on my dissertation and I'm hungry for a distraction, oh anything to remind me of something that matters, to remind me of something that resembles REAL things in the world where people feel and love each other and maybe even sometimes fight for each other? Even if the fight is nuts, as it often is in the games of love and war people co-construct in their minds, it's a fight and you get energized and your heart beats like an eager little soldier boy's drum da dum.

Something to trigger the passion in the brain. My stories of heart ache, where I ached until I couldn't ache any more.

It's too easy to become the target of someone else's insanity. The fixation for someone else's depravity. The cookie jar for cookie monster.

I'm no cookie jar. I'm a vat of infinite light and sound
watch the colours swishing round, colour fish
singing magical dolphins,
seas of infinite creatures

you best learn to swim in these waters, swim with me. Breathe like a mermaid. Serena. Serene. Ocean Yemanja Emerald Queen

Third Life Crises and Central American Predators and Such

A friend of mine talks about how she needs 6 hours of uninterrupted time to get 2 hours (?) of work done. For me, sometimes it's days of reluctantly transforming myself back into a monk. Or something.

This morning I wondered through my half-sleep about having a third-life crisis. I did so well in that play last weekend--maybe I was supposed to be an actor all along and here I am having spent most of my 20's in a PhD program for Self-Torturers in which I haven't been nearly as productive as I know I could be/would like to be. But the nature of this activity is such that it's hard for anyone to sustain constant motivation and productivity. You are on your own with usually no support whatsoever and you're supposed to keep imagining that what you're doing matters, that it's worthwhile, more importantly that you want to be doing this.

The whole point of running off to Central America for a couple weeks, (yes I just did that,) was to turn it all off. Because at some point you become so bombarded with expectations and obligations and emails and calendar reminders that it seems normal. But that trip, though lush and full of jungle views, was quite weird. It's like I forgot how to be properly defensive with strange men. I was overly friendly. I smiled, I wore adorable outfits. I had so many stalkers that there was a limited period of time during which I could actually stay in one town before it would get to be too much and I would have to move on.

Now I'm back in Chicago clamoring for space, on some nights opting to spread out luxuriously in the huge apartment I rented instead of going to parties. Luxuriating in my own territory. That trip left a bit of an antisocial (more like anti-random-men) taste in my mouth and it might take a little while to get past it.

The trick I'm sure is not to stop letting people in entirely, but to let them in selectively. You don't want the whole village thinking you're a welcoming target. It's a tough negotiation for women. (And more obviously so in a country where everyone's blood is boiling from the heat and more insidiously so in a country where everyone pretends to be polite and pc.) On the one hand there will always be endless numbers of predators looking for a babe with a friendly grin...on the other if you become too defensive when do you meet someone nice and decent? Barbie would have drowned instantly, that plastic lipsticked beauty pageant grin is there for the whole wide world to aim for. And we all love her, don't we.

My clearest voice and sense of self has always been right here, in writing. Which you would think should be my answer, probably is my answer. The trick is somehow using all this other stuff (i.e. PhD torture,) I have devoted years to in some kind of positive, useful way--whether in academia or outside of it or both. I mean certainly flushing five years down the toilet seems pretty self-obliterating. But that's impossible because I'm a different person now whether I like it or not. My mind has been trained and sharpened and looped into deep, meticulous thinking processes. These five years have changed me, regardless of what I do next.... Some say you can do multiple things, be a Renaissance Man. My father used to warn me against being a jack of all trades, master of none. I hear all these voices. And here I am sitting with them, echoes of echoes. My own dissertation topic a reflection of something I ask myself--something that can seem incredibly clear on some days and the warped, ever new day dreams of a little girl on others (be a fireman a ballerina an astronaut)--how do people figure these questions out, I mean really? And how on earth do you let go of The Bell Jar's tree of possibilities?

Hopeful Sunday, full of breath

I had a very vivid dream this morning, I could sense it was morning (it's those dreams lately right before waking that I feel I am living in...that I'm getting to the theme of my day or the latest "point of it all," just before I wake up,) it was a dream about poetry. It was a dream about my poetry writing. I was in these writing programs in Iowa, I was clamoring to squeeze in these poetry programs because it was important. I didn't do a creative writing workshop this quarter and there is a worry in me because the important thing is to stay motivated, to keep writing, keep going. I was at a psychology conference for a few days, a rather turbulent little conference that is making me wonder if I should be thinking about cortisol and stress all day long which is stress-producing all on its own (someone asked if I'm studying other people's stress or my own?)...and before that I hardly focused on my writing hardly enough for a few months, it was all about pushing my research proposal through. And then the sad truth that I had to give up my beautiful first project for this one. And then the fear of giving up things I love for other things and then the fear of being consumed by the wrong thing.

So I wrote a short-short today. Not a poem. I mean the poems and the fiction and the memoir have all become part of one project to keep pushing the words through no matter what comes.

I started reading Alexander Hemon's memoir the other day and in it he says that he only considers himself a writer when he's actually writing and that's exactly right, write. If you're not writing, but you're a writer then you're not existing so you better get to it!

Another Sunday...body, body, body, dislocate the hip joints by sitting for too long, then tighten everything by capoeira kicking, then breathe with yogic hip openers? It's the same with words, dislocate, then locate, then breathe. 

Deja Vu, Deja You

Sometimes I interact with people in my life, significant people, who have very little memory of the events we have shared whereas I have excruciatingly detailed memories.... This can be a problem. It can make me feel like I am the only one awake, the only one not erasing my experience. It is a broken mirror when you see someone as a fuller past continuity than they see you. You live in me more deeply, Person, than I live in you and is it pointless to ask why? Maybe it is useful to know why the grass is green, and why you don't remember that we've already been here before that you've already said these words before that you're following a script except I'm the only who knows it. 

What is this scripted nonsense--can't you hear yourself? Listen, listen, be your own best audience. Let's keep it fresh, growing, spontaneous, improvisational...let's write new lines, new plays, unearth each other in new ways. I am not your deja-bot, I want to shine not like your PTSD but like glistening possibility.