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An Emotion in Search of a Name

 

A stoic does not express emotion. A stoic family is mostly expressionless.

I was reared in a stoic household: Germanic (on Mom’s side – she referred back only as far as “Pennsylvania Dutch,” because she liked their folk art) and Welsh (on Dad’s side – traced back to the 15th century and Sir Rhys ap Thomas, Knight of the Garter and Governor of Wales who hosted jousting tournaments at his Carew Castle. I was pleased to discover, as an adult visiting Wales, that Sir Rhys’s armor was not all as shiny as I’d been led to believe!)

When I was a child, not only was I not versed in the language of emotions, but also it was clear that I should not feel emotions at all. Nor, my parents hoped, would I ever express them, because Mom and Dad would not know what to do with loose emotions flitting around in our home like bats that had snuck in through tiny chinks in our walls.

It took decades for me to feel safe with emotions, and years more to identify and name them.

This past winter I experienced for the first time a prolonged depression, and I gained a huge compassion for people who often feel depressed. The emotion matched the weather, as if layers of gray, leaden clouds pressed down on the daylight, on the land, on my body, on my energy, on my eyelids. Some days the only thing I wanted to do was to hide under a quilt and sleep. What helped me the most was just being-with: allowing myself to feel what I was feeling, and not fighting it. I allowed myself to have compassion for me, and to accept the compassion of friends who checked in on me and who made sure that occasionally I got out from under my quilt even if I didn’t think I wanted to. Like the gray clouds, thankfully the depression has finally moved on by.

Though it is not depression, in the past months I have felt a lot of sadness, and have come to understand that most of it is not “mine.” Several friends recently have lost spouses and friends and beloved pets. Though I do not feel sad in myself for these losses, my friends’ sadnesses have come to visit me. I can name the feeling as “sad” and “grief,” and I have invited those others’ feelings to come in and stay a while with me. I believe that my holding them temporarily may lessen their impact on my friends. And I’m pleased to notice that I can tell the difference between emotions that are “mine” and ones that are “theirs.”

But in the last few weeks I’ve felt . . . something . . . that is probably an emotion, but I have no name for it. It’s been appearing several times a day recently. I’m definitely feeling it, because I’m no longer the stoic I was raised to be; emotions of all sorts are allowed in my life.

And, being a poet, I’m searching for a name for what I’m feeling, or at least a metaphor or a simile that will help me understand it.

        This feeling is both poignant and sweet.

        It is like the aroma of an evening’s dinner, still alluring at the far corner of the house long after the meal is finished and I am full.

        It is a sensuous, musical feeling, like when a dissonant chord is held so long it becomes foreplay, and its resolution portends orgasm.

        It is like the afterglow from a vanished dream.

        It is like Midwestern air just before a thunderstorm trips and falls into a million wet pieces.

        This feeling is like a crocus risking February with both fear and elation.

        And trying to describe this feeling is like hearing an unfamiliar bird that calls from a hidden place, and then trying to describe the call to an Audubon member.

This feeling that I can’t yet name seems to be located not so much in my gut, where the heavier emotions live, but nearer my heart because there is lightness and joy in it as well as mystery. All I know to do is simply feel it, to be-with it just as I was with depression. While I seek its name I will smile or weep, stomp or twirl, maybe share a cup of tea with the feeling, and perhaps a square of dark chocolate with almonds.

Whatever this emotion is, I’m quite certain it contains something wonderful for me. Maybe it holds a wise insight. It might reveal ecstasy, if I stay with it long enough. What a very un-stoic thought!

At the very least, even if I never can name it, maybe this mystery emotion contains the seeds of a brand new poem.

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A Poet’s Field Notes from the Interior

A month ago I went away for a week to do nothing but write poetry.

I went prepared, taking with me my poetry “sketchbooks” (ideas for new poems), and potential poetry drafts that I hadn’t nurtured in years, and a few pretty good poems that just needed their “final” polish (note: for a poet, no poem is ever “finished,” even after it is published!).

Given the luxury of a whole week with no distractions (I didn’t even have to prepare my meals!), I anticipated entering, and writing from, those interior spaces where the emotions live, the deep places that often resist being explored.

But as my writing time unfolded, I was fascinated to see that the drafts I wrote from my interior were mostly theological. What I wrote were questions, dispatched from my internal darkness into the limitless ether. Three, then five, then ten drafts of potential poetry about divinity, and those eternal Big Questions: what does it mean to be human? Is there a God? Can there be an I/Thou relationship between a human and the Creator? Which metaphors best convey the unknowing?

As I wrote I realized I was not seeking answers so much as wanting to ask the questions clearly. I hoped to wear the questions more comfortably in my daily life. This has been a lifelong pattern for me, this wanting to explore the inner questions. As early as age eight or nine I was deeply curious about the target of people’s praying – but I didn’t dare ask about it because in my Unitarian family we had judgments about prayer, and we didn’t “do” it. (We didn’t talk about sex either, but that’s for a future essay, not this one.)

When I was a teenager I consulted pastors and preachers and teachers of various stripes to find out what their personal experiences of Life and Death and God were. Almost to a person, they offered me a book or three to read, and sent me, dissatisfied, on my way.

Then, for three decades I was a practicing Roman Catholic. I found consolation and a feeling of divine connection in the rituals and mysticism of the Church. But eventually those Big Questions started rising up again, and the Church no longer satisfied.

In my late forties I returned to college to complete a bachelor of arts degree. I remember taking an ethics course in which we were assigned a research paper on any one of the major ethics issues (abortion, euthanasia, bioengineering, etc.). We were to research what professional ethicists had to say about the issue we chose, and summarize their work in our paper. But I wanted to unearth, and report on, what I thought about the issue. I was nearly fifty, and I had a lot more life experience than most of my classmates; I wanted to wrestle with my own reasoning, not regurgitate the rationales of others. It took some cajoling, but eventually the professor acquiesced, and I got to write the paper my way. When he saw the results of my ethical struggles, he agreed that all my upcoming papers might be written the same way. He hadn’t been used to students actually thinking!

And now, twenty-some years and a masters degree in theology later, I’m still eager to discover my own truths. I still want to clarify my own questions. I like diving deep and braving those dark, interior spaces. I love the hints hidden in dreams. I need metaphors to provide insights where plain words don’t suffice. All of that takes creative time, plus some amount of courage and tenacity. And that explains why I came home from my writing week with over a dozen raw question-filled poetry sketches instead of a collection of finished work.

Guess I’ll just have to go away for another writing week. I want to explore those new drafts, and see how I might enfold unanswerable questions into meaningful metaphors, so some of my questions can be brought out of the darkness. My inner nine-year-old still wants to hold them up to the light.<

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Poetry on my Mind

poetry photo

Photo by rolandmey

Poetry is much on my mind these days. It is my intention to complete a book-length manuscript of my poems, and to have found a publisher for the book by year’s end. I’m deep into the processes of polishing and organizing 70+ poems, and of researching potential publishers.

So, as I say, poetry is much on my mind, and today it led me on a brief detour, a little sentimental journey that I’d like to share with you.

Sometime in the early ’70s I fell in love with the nature art prints of Gwen Frostic. She carved block prints, some of them four- or five-colors (each color requiring a separate carved linoleum block), but most of them simple two- or three-colors. Each image seems to distill the essence of what Gwen was looking at: a wild iris; a gnarled tree limb; or a great blue heron in flight, her signature icon. Most images were printed on fine textured papers with deckled edges, and sold as stationery and card collections with matching envelopes.

One fine summer day I decided it was time to see Gwen Frostic’s Michigan studio. I packed up our family and drove along the eastern shore of Lake Michigan to the town of Benzonia, south of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. With a population of around 400, the town was too crowded for Gwen, who was a hermit at heart. She purchased 40 acres of isolated sand dunes outside Benzonia, and built a single-story home/studio/shop constructed of native stones, wood, and glass. It looked as if it had emerged organically from the sand it sat on. I especially remember the gently sloping roof covered in soil that supported native grasses and whatever other plants found their way there. In the cool interior of the display room were the lovely prints I expected, plus a mammoth stone fireplace and a natural fountain, both in keeping with Gwen’s sense of natural beauty.

But just beyond that room was a whole other world that I didn’t expect: a huge room crammed full with tons of exotic paper, and twelve hulking Heidelberg platen printing presses. Most of those presses were at work, with steady deliberate movements, imprinting Gwen’s collections of beautiful images along with the illustrated packaging and envelopes to go with them.

Another thing I didn’t expect: when she was less than a year old Gwen contracted an unknown illness, similar to cerebral palsy, that left her with physical difficulties for the rest of her life. When I met her that day she walked with a cane; instead of struggling to inscribe her work and sign her extensive correspondence, she had commissioned a special machine that held a pen and wrote Gwen’s distinctive signature over and over again. She still designed and hand-cut her original linoleum block images, however, and oversaw the work of all those massive presses. Her physical limitations did not stop her from her lifelong creative expression, nor from making her artistic career so financially viable that at her death in 2001 she left a thirteen-million dollar bequest to Western Michigan University to benefit students of the arts and creative writing.

But her compromised health wasn’t the biggest surprise for me that day. How could I not have known that Gwen Frostic was also a poet? And that her books of poetry were self-published gems illustrated with her art and poetry printed on a melange of beautiful papers, some of them tissue-thin so that the poetry was visible through the prints, or vice versa.

I own four of her books of poetry. I confess that I haven’t read them in decades, but poetry is much on my mind these days. So this morning I dug out the Frostic poetry from my library to show to a friend who also writes poetry. His poetry is often more complex than mine, and I thought he’d appreciate something that I remembered about Gwen’s poetry: in her desire to praise the wonders of creation that she saw in the simplest of natural things, she apparently ran out of everyday words, couldn’t find adequate substitutes, and so (I believed) made up words that expressed her awe. Thanks to today’s Google, I’ve learned that those were “real” words, just not everyday ones, nor ones listed in my Webster’s Pocket Dictionary at the time. She used “omnity” where I might choose to use “divinity” or “God.” “Eternity” wasn’t forever-enough for her, so she used “diuturnity” and “indesinency” and “olamic” instead. There was something mesmerizing about these words, like reading a foreign language in which the meaning looks almost familiar  – but you trust that the author knows what they mean, and that’s good enough.

Knowing Gwen must have been like befriending a philosophy nerd high on ecstasy. Her poetry reads as if a philosopher/theologian were translating Mary Oliver from simple to complicated. Yet Gwen had a way of infusing the very ordinary with a mystical word-serum that, once you get used to living with the unknowable (“enigmatical”), makes the whole universe (“multiverse”) glow.

Gwen Frostic wrote her own uncomplicated epitaph: “Here lies one doubly blessed. She was happy and she knew it.”

What more can anyone ask of a life?

In honor of that life, I invite you to take a peek at her art and poetry books – they’re still available from that studio nestled in the sand dunes near the eastern shore of Lake Michigan.  You can see them at http://www.gwenfrostic.com

evolving_omnity.png

© 2015 Gwen Frostic LLC. All Rights Reserved

 

 

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The Muse, the Thesaurus, and Me

 

 

write photo

Photo by gudmd.haralds


In January I gave myself a wondrous gift: a week away to do nothing but write poetry. “Nothing but write” means, to me, no TV, no phone, no clock, no schedule. Just me, simple food, tea, some sacramental chocolate, and whichever Muse shows up.

 


What I hadn’t anticipated about my week away was that, in the middle of the first draft of my first poem, my computer would freeze up and die – wouldn’t let me reboot or even shut it down.

 

I took this to be a direct challenge from the Muse, about how committed I was to my writing. I rose to her challenge by hauling in tablets of paper, a handful of pens, and my Roget’s Thesaurus. I was going to spend this writing week doing things the old-fashioned way.

 

I had forgotten how much I love a real Roget’s Thesaurus. I’d gotten used to relying on the thesaurus built into my Mac, or the one on Thesaurus.com. But both of those are really just synonym collections, not the real thesaurus deal. And for someone who loves words, the Roget’s Thesaurus has no substitute.

 

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One scans a list of synonyms, but one dives into the pages of Roget’s. For instance: I had placed the word “interesting” in brackets into a poem to indicate that it was just a placeholder for a better word that I’d find later.

 

(“Interesting” is a lazy word. If someone asks me how last night’s disastrous meeting went, and I don’t want to lie, nor do I want to give them the blow-by-blow, I answer, “It was interesting.” “Interesting” hides more than it reveals.)

 

So I looked up “interesting” at the back section of the thesaurus, and found the number 617.5 beside it. (That refers not to a page number, but to a place in the main part of the book.) At section 617.5 Allurement I found a whole collection of substitute words, clustered in gradations of meaning. One of those words was “delightful” along with the recommendation that I search further at 829.8 Pleasureableness.

 

When I got to 829.8, I noticed that 830 Painfulness followed, then 831 Content and then Discontent, Regret, Relief, Aggravation, Cheerfulness, Sadness, each with their own full baskets of synonyms. Before 829.8 Pleasureableness there were 828 Pain and 827 Pleasure, and Excitability and other nuances.

 

Now what was it that I was looking for when I started?  Uh-oh! I’d forgotten one of the cardinal rules of using a thesaurus: keep track of the sequence. Like Hansel dropping breadcrumbs on the path to the witch’s house, you must keep track of where you’ve been because you’re not necessarily sure of where you’re going. This keeping track of the path is something my computer doesn’t do for me, but with pen and paper it’s easy to make marginal notes – so long as I remember to do it!

 

There is nothing quite so satisfying as finding exactly the right word for a poem – one with the precise meaning, one with the right number of syllables, one beginning with the sound needed to complete a string of alliteration. That perfect word may have arrived from a totally unexpected corner of Wordland, but suddenly there it is, and the poet places it with a smug “thunk” just where it belongs.

 

I came home from my poetry week with abundance from the Muse: 23 drafts of new poems, waiting to be transcribed into digital form. My computer tech has repaired my laptop, and all is well in my little world of technology.

 

But rather than returning my analog Roget’s Thesaurus to the bookshelf, I’ve decided to keep it close at hand, to inspire, to inform and, sometimes, simply to lure me away to play for a while in the Land of Words.

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Enchanted by Words Beyond My Ken

 

Last night I thumbed through the August 2014 issue of Scientific American. I stopped at an article entitled “The Black Hole at the Beginning of Time” (by Afshordi, Mann and Pourhasan), which postulates a cosmic black hole that preceded the Big Bang.

 

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For all that I comprehended, the article could have been written in early Cyrillic instead of English. Nevertheless, I was mesmerized by the exotic words and phrases that I didn’t understand.

 

There were these:

 

“event horizon”

 

“a rich theory of holography”

 

“cosmic censorship”

 

“the observed amplitude and shape of primordial matter fluctuations”

 

“graceful exit problem”

 

“the sudden, violent emergence of all space, time and matter from an infinitely dense point called a singularity”

 

And there were these sentences that baffled me:

 

“Physicists quip that ‘a black hole has no hair’ – no distinguishing features beyond the basics of mass, angular momentum and electrical charge.”

 

“…our entire universe came into being during a stellar implosion in this suprauniverse, an implosion that created a three-dimensional shell around a four-dimensional black hole.”

 

And there were longer, denser full-bore paragraphs that made my head spin.

 

But then the poet in me had an idea. With my apologies to the academic authors if they are offended, I invite you to look one such paragraph as if it were a POEM:

 

We now know

that the density of ordinary

matter

is only 5 percent

of the universe’s total

energy density.

Another

25 percent comes

in the form of

dark matter,

an unknown form

of matter whose existence

is inferred

from its gravitational

attraction.

And 70 percent of the universe

is made of dark energy,

the mysterious stuff

that is causing

the expansion

rate of our universe

to speed up

(instead of

slowing down,

as originally expected

from gravitational

attraction.)

Structured like that it’s fascinating and lovely, and, like a John Berryman poem, it makes me feel as if I’m teetering on the verge of understanding whatever it means.

 

As a wordsmith, I treasure words. I find pleasure in the arrangements of words that convey an idea or a story (or a theorem) to others.

 

However much I’d like to understand that article in Scientific American, there is simply not enough time (or motivation) for me to learn all I’d need to know in order for that to happen.

 

Nevertheless, I can delight in the beauty and the mystery of the words. I am content that SOMEONE understands them. Someone thrums and thrills with that understanding, and that fills me with awe and gratitude.

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