Moving On

I'm archiving this (and all my Blogspot blogs -- not Blogspot's fault -- just timing and nonsense) blog. If you still want to see what qualifies as Tangled Swans in my world, you can follow me at "A Twirly Life" or on Tumblr (http://twirlyword.tumblr.com/tagged/tangledswans).

The Call to Beyond Your Limits

Via Molly Fisk's Facebook, I have found an interesting website, Inward/Outward. This post is a list of ways we sabotage our lives, our callings, with distractions and excuses. These lists abound. There are whole books on getting over yourself and getting to what you want. This one is special. Here's the introduction:

"It makes perfect sense that we should be called to go beyond our limits, because the One that calls us is beyond all limits. I suspect that all the energy we have bound up in resisting our own potential is more energy than we'll need to reach it. It takes as much energy to fail as it does to succeed. The strategies are legion."

I am always looking for names for God, and I like this one: the One who calls us to go beyond our limits, because the One is beyond all limits. 

Inward/Outward describe themselves like this:

"inward/outward grows out of The Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C., where at the heart of being church is learning how to be on an authentic journey with others---inward toward our true selves rooted in Love---outward toward some part of the world's deepest joy and greatest pain."

Here are several (and very old) names for God: Love, Journey, Learning.The more you look, the more amazing communities there are -- out there -- and in me -- where people are searching for something they call God.

"They Leave Me And I Cannot Stop Them"

I have been a lifelong fan of Maurice Sendak. His little book A Hole Is To Dig was a gift from my godmother when I was small, in the 1960s. Of course many many people love him and his work now, and when he died last year, we grieved. This story, again via Andrew Sullivan, points to a video created in memory of Mr. Sendak, made from a audio clip on his last interview with Terry Gross. (That's such a sandwich of references -- just read the article and listen to the clip and watch the video.) I was lucky enough to hear the interview on the radio live, and now I am lucky enough to have it captured in video/audio eternity.

The statement "I am in love with the world" will capture any one who has struggled with loss, with depression, with anger, with love. The explanation of his frequent crying, because "they leave me and I cannot stop them" is what triggered my desire to re-blog this post. I will write poems because they leave me and I cannot stop them. It seems a better choice than walking around with a book on my head.What will you do? Wave a tree branch, instead.

 

The Noonday Demon and A Christmas Letter

I've begun reading Andrew Solomon's The Noonday Demon. It's a bit overwhelming, sort of like depression itself. Confusing and long -- attempting to organize itself over and over according to the idea of the day. Several reviews are enlightening. Joyce Carol Oats picks up on the author's love of his own depression,  a phenomenon I have noticed in myself.

Yet paradoxically, and here is where the foreignness of mental illness is most pointed, those afflicted with depression are often ambivalent about it, as no one is ambivalent about physical illness: ''It was also in depression that I learned my own acreage, the full extent of my soul,'' Solomon declares. And, even more rhapsodically, in the concluding pages of the book's final chapter, ''Hope'': 

''Curiously enough, I love my depression. I do not love experiencing my depression, but I love the depression itself. I love who I am in the wake of it. . . . I have discovered what I would have to call a soul, a part of myself I could never have imagined until one day, seven years ago, when hell came to pay me a surprise visit. It's a precious discovery.''

 
I could write my own depression a song that would strangely resemble an advertisement for bologna. "My depression has a first name," which is unfortunately the same as that of my husband's boss, and (thankfully) also the name of a spectacular painting by Jay DeFeo, "The Verónica."

Here's a link to a slightly brighter photo of the painting, on Flickr. It's a staggering painting, tall and thin. Dodie Bellamy, in her 2010 post on SFMOMA's  Open Space blog, talks about the queasy feeling the painting inspires. "In its prettiness The Veronica is more subversive than Incision, which announces something deeper, intense is going on. The Veronica’s creepiness sneaks up on you. Femininity flails its pretty neck and grows monstrous, out of control." (She also elaborates on St. Veronica, who wiped the perspiration off the face of Jesus as he walked to the cross, and how the image of his face appeared on the cloth thereafter. Definitely a mind trick.)

But I digress.

Every year I write a holiday letter. I should call it a Christmas Letter, because that's the genre. But I want to include, and celebrate, and certainly I don't want to exclude, so I say Happy New Year (!) instead. But I am a devotee of the Christmas Letter form, and that's what it is. This year's needs to be short and I'm considering mentioning that I've been struggling with what Solomon calls "the noonday demon."  Depression has been my constant (if fickle) companion for over two years now, but I am not sure this reference belongs in a celebration of light and new. We'll see what the husband says. 

I'm going to be reading Solomon's book for a while. In the meantime, my own personal Veronica has left the building. Or, at least, seems to have her hand on the Exit.

Angels and Women

I'm still trying to figure out how to link these many blogs. Read here about "The Annunciation" -- a glorious painting by Jay DeFeo. Woman and Angel, Spirit and Body, Mind and Artist.

Mental Health Questions

I've been posting articles I find useful and respectful about mental illness on Facebook in the wake of events at Sandy Hook Elem. This editorial, by one of the favorites, Andrew Sullivan, remarks on his own childhood with a mentally ill parent. Suddenly I am thinking of these recent Newtown CT events in a different light. As the wonderous Dar Williams sings: "Sometimes I think, my father, too, was a refugee. And though they tried to keep their pain from me, they did not know what it was for." What, indeed, is pain for? Perhaps for lighting the way to truth with all the questions that will help us get there.

We may not all have been refugees from the same kind of homefront battles, but most children suffer the greater or smaller pains of growing up with human (rather than perfect) beings for parents. I grew up with wonderful human parents, who grew up with wonderful human parents. My husband and I are doing the best we can to be human parents, wonderful more and less.

I liked President Obama's questions in his speech last night. Is this really the best we can do for our children?  I also like his assurance as he reminds us that we can't go wrong when we're showing acts of kindness. I don't think I'm ready to say this is the best we can do to be healthy and kind in our society. I'm already thinking about what I will change to make my contribution. Questioning the status quo will be the first step.

Momfulness

I heard a great lecture this past week on 'momfulness' -- the art of meditating in the right now moment as a mother. A great idea. One I am familiar with -- I could have written her book, or, perhaps, I did write poems like her book. I'm tired and it's hard to post tonight. But I'm greatful for Denise Roy. Buy her book here. Read about it here. Her books are MOMFULNESS: Mothering with Mindfulness, Compassion, and Grace and My Monastery Is a Minivan: 35 Stories from a Real Life. Even though I don't drive a minivan, I know the feeling of safety and prayer inside a car. I'm not much for peace of mind, but I am hopeful.

We Had to Tell Doctors to Read To Understand Us

While it doesn't make sense to me that 'highly educated' MDs needed to be told to read good literature, I guess I'm glad that they are. Look for an MD in a book club near you. Or, be brave and give a doctor a book!

"The humanities can remind them that they're dealing with very complicated, whole individuals with their own needs and opinions," said Elizabeth Sinclair, coordinator of the Maine Humanities Council's literature and medicine program.

Scalpel, stethoscope, Tolstoy: Doctors embrace literature as tool to connect with patients - latimes.com

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Your Mind is What You Do

The most interesting and beautiful and powerful radio show I've heard in a long time: discussions between science and philosophy about the nature of the mind.

KQED Radio: Beyond the Brain

Crying Like a Caveman

Why we cry is an emotional topic - The Boston Globe

The Most Beautiful Song About Being Depressed Ever

Go ahead, push you luck, find out how much love the world can hold,
Once upon a time I had control, and reigned my soul in tight.
Well the whole truth, it's like the story of a wave unfurled,
But I held the evil of the world,
So I stopped the tide,
froze it up from inside,
And it felt like a winter machine that you go through and then,
You catch your breath and winter starts again,
And everyone else is spring bound.

And when I chose to live, there was no joy,
it's just a line I crossed,
It wasn't worth the pain my death would cost,
So I was not lost or found.
And if I was to sleep, I knew my family had more truth to tell.
And so I traveled down a whispering well,
To know myself through them.

Growing up, my mom had a room full of books, and hid away in there,
Her father raging down a spiral stair,
Till he found someone, most days his son,
And sometimes I think my father, too, was a refugee,
I know they tried to keep their pain form me,
They could not see what it was for.
But now I'm sleeping fine,
Sometimes the truth is like a second chance,
I am the daughter of a great romance,
And they are the children of the war.

Well the sun rose with so many colors,
it nearly broke my heart,
It worked me over like a work of art,
And I was a part off all that.
So go ahead, push your luck, say what it is you gotta say to me,
We will push on into that mystery,
And it'll push right back, and there are worse things than that,
Cause for every price, and every penance that I
could think of,
It's better to have fallen in love,
Than never to have fallen at all,
Cause when you live in a world,
well it gets into who you thought you'd be,
And now I laugh at how the world changed me,
I think life chose me
after all.

Dar Williams, songstress extraordinaire. From her The Green World cd, 2000. I couldn't listen to this song then, without weeping, and many days I couldn't listen to it at all. My husband was furious, but it wasn't about not loving the music. I think it's a measure of how much 'better' I am that I can listen to this song so happily, even eagerly now.

I'm not sure about the line breaks, but that's kind of the way it is in a Dar song.

True Tangled Swans

Such beautiful photos. Posted at the Elements Village Gallery. I'm not sure what an elements village is, but the swans are lovely. And they are definitely tangled all together, the nasty little loves.

Handing Down Depression

Stanford University School of Medicine has dedicated its entire new spring issue of their magazine Stanford Medicine to Children's Health. There is a beautiful and hopeful article about the research currently being done into why teens become depressed, and how to prevent it before it can begin. I also love the illustration of the woman, with black clouds under her hat.

Angels and Corsets

Warning: I haven't read this whole essay, but I liked the photo so much, and it spoke to me so deeply of the whole 'tangled swan' ethos, that I had to reproduce it here. Seems only fair to include the article, too, which I will read later today with my tea.

For photo credits, please see the Poetry Society of America's website.

Anthologies and feminisms: are we having a moment or what?

Leda and Lucille Clifton (1936 - 20100

[from Lucille Clifton's The Book of Light, Copper Canyon, 1993]

leda 1

there is nothing luminous
about this.
they took my children.
i live alone in the backside
of the village.
my mother moved
to another town. my father
follows me around the well,
his thick lips slavering,
and at night my dreams are full
of the cursing of me
fucking god fucking me.


leda 2

a note on visitations

sometimes another star chooses.
the ones coming in from the east
are dagger-fingered men,
princes of no known kingdom.
the animals are raised up in their stalls
battering the stable door.
sometimes it all goes badly;
the inn is strewn with feathers,
the old husband suspicious,
and the fur between her thighs
is the only shining thing.


leda 3

a personal note (re: visitations)

always pyrotechnics;
stars spinning into phalluses
of light, serpents promising
sweetness, their forked tongues
thick and erect, patriarchs of bird
exposing themselves in the air.
this skin is sick with loneliness.
You want what a man wants,
next time come as a man
or don't come.

The Book of Light

l.c. r.i.p.

Mary Karr Has Something to Tell Me on Valentine's Day

And I should listen. See my post on Twirlyword:Poems In Motion about what that might be. Friends gave me her book, Lit, for Christmas. I'm not sure why, perhaps it got a good review? Maybe they liked her The Liar's Club. Which I'll have to read next. Or maybe they're secretly telling me that they know I'm staring to crave that one little drink... maybe I need to riff on Harold one of these days. Remind me.


It's Valentine's Day. Here's a photo of a swan I found while cruising my valentine's old pictures. And here we are. Several years of us.

Clothes of Stiched Photos

Kudos again to Accidental Mysteries for finding some beautiful art, so meaningful, so lovely, so weird. I'm posting this to all three of my blogs (here, Laundry Songs, and Twirlyword Poems In Motion) because this artist really touches all parts of my mind/being. It's clothes! It's poetry!! It's crazy (and think of what Agnes Richter would have thought if she had seen these....)

Jane Waggoner Deschner

work with found photographs

New News Today

From Stanford: People with anxiety disorder less able to regulate response to negative emotions, study shows. People with generalized anxiety disorder, or GAD, have abnormalities in the way their brain unconsciously controls emotions, a new study shows.

(I'm not thrilled with the image, especially if this is really what my brain looks like, I think I'd prefer green and yellow. Or at least orange.)

From the New York Times: The American Psychiatric Association is proposing major changes today to its diagnostic bible, the manual that doctors, insurers and scientists use in deciding what's officially a mental disorder and what symptoms to treat. Alan Schatzberg, the Kenneth T. Norris, Jr. Professor and chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, provides comment in this Associated Press piece.

What to think about all this? I think gazing at a photo like the one below (Fremont Older Open Space) is a much better way to approach the problem of anxiety. Better yet, let's go for a walk.

Looking for Photos of Agnes's Jacket

Disappointed that there are not photographs of Agnes Richter's jacket in Gail Hornstein's book, I searched the web and found this lovely blog entry:

The Lulu Bird: art inspiration: agnes richter.

Here are photos of the jacket that Lizzie took when she visited the Prinzhorn collection in Germany. Thank you Lizzie. (I really like her blog, too, about art therapy, not all that different from poetry therapy, or whatever else we call the intersection of art, madness, healing, and personal journey.)

Risk of Change

This week I am trying to make sense of all the changes. And all the things that refuse to change. While searching for images of the word 'change' I found this tiny blog, 'Risk of Change at Oregon County Fair'. Not much here, but some wonderful photos of the troupe with that name -- magicians, dancers, make-up artists, etc. And this fine fellow: Odo.


He puts new meaning to my favorite motto: When in doubt, twirl.