Author: Dana Henry Martin

Our Backward Mess

Aside from not representing faces with accuracy, painting was an area of strength for him. — hypothetical neuropsychological evaluation of Picasso

Life occurs in an abscess, in our absence, in our backwards mess.

Pictures of hamsters really are hit or miss, aren’t they.

I think more poets should keep their poetry open and their mouths shut.

From the Walla Walla Freecycle list: We are in need of sand, a trampoline and a guinea pig.

I always thought I was Eurydice, the one others look back at. Turns out, I am Orpheus, the one looking back.

My life is all Junes and Januaries.

I came up with a classification system for forms of intelligence last night in a dream: inherent/automatic, enforced/shaped, developed/honed, atrophied, symptomatic and received.

In the end, remaining open might be all that matters.

I washed my dog. I love my dog.

The Problem with Labels

I’ve been thinking a lot about this label of “overfocused” ADHD. I’ve gotten some feedback from advocates and specialists in this area who say they aren’t convinced of my diagnosis. While they agree that I have the qualities described in overfocused ADHD, these experts also note that there are politics involved in framing those qualities as “symptoms.”

Pharmaceutical companies are more concerned about patents than patients.

In their view, many people with dyslexia have these qualities, as well as almost everyone with high intelligence. (Their words, not mine, but I am also not going to pussyfoot around the fact that I am highly intelligent. That would be disingenuous nonsense.) One person pointed out that schools for gifted children see these qualities in their students and begin designing curriculum around those students as early as kindergarten.

In short, what’s seen as a disability by some is seen as an ability by others, as a characteristic to be accepted and harnessed, not obliterated through medication, negative reinforcement, or both.

I’ve also been stumbling a bit over the juxtaposition of the word “overfocused” against the words “attention deficit.” That feels like an oxymoron. Some descriptions of overfocused ADHD say that this subtype is not so much a lack of attention but too much attention and that the medicines typically used to treat ADHD won’t work on the overfocused variant because they will make the focus more intense, including aspects such as worry and rumination, which can in turn make the person with high focus feel worse.

How can you have “too much” attention and still be called “inattentive,” I’ve been wondering. Is there not a better term to describe the qualities of the person who can maintain focus for hours on end? For the mind that can execute a task in this manner? For this level of productivity? Why is this type of ADHD lumped in with ADHD at all? Simply because attention is concerned in some way?

Does the metacategory of ADHD even exist? Or is forcing disparate attention-based qualities under one overarching category an example of rigid adherence to a hierarchical construct, one that might wrap things up in a tidy framework but that ultimately says nothing in actuality about how these qualities are, or are not, related.

I would not have been able to be a music performance major if I had not been highly focused. That educational path requires four hours of practice each day, along with another three hours or so of practice in ensembles and in one-on-one study with your professor. That’s seven hours, at least, of intense focus in both mind and body, seven days a week. (Musicians get no days off, especially not flutists, otherwise the embouchure will fail.) You could easily categorize every single person in a conservatory as having overfocused ADHD, especially compared with the dawdling, low-grade focus many (neuro)typical jobs demand, with two days off each week.

Likewise, as a dyslexic English major, I would not have been able to consume all the novels, plays, poetry collections, essays, theoretical works and other reading materials required without high focus. Yes, it might have taken me four times as long to get through those materials, but high focus allowed me to do so. (As a dyslexic person, the qualities described as overfocused ADHD have allowed me to do everything that I do, and that’s been the case for decades.)

Furthermore, do graduate programs not require outright intense focus? What about those that involve research and lab work? My editorial work has largely been in the field of science and medicine. I believe every scientist and researcher I’ve worked with over the past decade and a half would easily qualify as having overfocused ADHD. One of those researchers even tried to recruit me into the field of biology not too long ago, perhaps because she could see I had a focus similar to her and her colleagues, as well as a mind that dissects ideas in the same way as them. (I tried to explain to her that I dissect language and concepts, not frogs, but she didn’t really get it. For her, talking about biology was so close to doing it, that I might as well have been doing it.)

And who says what’s too much attention, what’s not enough attention, where attention should be directed and, conversely, where it should not be directed? These, too, are political questions. What is championed is almost always what any given culture deems important. That is, what is deemed important is culturally constructed, not immutable. Even what we try to eliminate is important, though, because without those aspects of culture—those fringe aspects produced by the minority as opposed to the majority—culture would fold in on itself.

I suppose my concern is that the words “deficit” and “disorder” are part of this label. That’s the case because those lobbying for these clusters of qualities to be seen as a pathology needed (and still need) that framing in order to secure funding, build alliances and justify treatment options. In short, our health care and educational frameworks are built on, responsive to, and supportive of pathology.

Because medicine is involved in this, big money is involved, and big pharma is involved. I don’t really trust big pharma to define me and my life, or anyone’s life, given that their objectives often run contrary to those involving human welfare, human safety and human expression. Money colors everything, even making medicines unavailable to the masses because pharmaceutical companies are more concerned about patents than patients, therefore only the world’s relatively privileged can afford to get their hands on those medicines.

I’ll close by quoting from the book I recently reviewed, Thomas Armstrong’s Neuodiversity: Discovering the Extraordinary Gifts of Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia and Other Brain Differences:

One of the great disadvantages of the term ‘ADHD’ is that it speaks of a deficit in attention. Children (and adults) labeled ADHD are actually very good at paying attention. They excel in paying attention to what they’re not supposed to be paying attention to! This is called ‘incidental attention’ and is another trait of the creative person.

He continues:

People labeled with ADHD are also very good at paying attention to what interests them. Many parents have written to me saying that their ADHD-diagnosed kids will spend hours focused on building with Legos, dancing, operating video games, or engaging in other absorbing tasks. Unfortunately, the ADHD community has also taken this admirable trait and turned it into a negative. They call it ‘hyperfocus’ and consider it to be yet another ‘warning sign’ of attention deficit. But the ability to focus the mind for hours on a single topic has been considered for centuries to be the trait of an exceptional mind (otherwise, why do so many cultures and religious traditions cultivate the ability to concentrate?).

And here’s the last excerpt I will share:

The fact of the matter is that children and adults with ADHD have a different attentional style than neurotypical individuals. They have a ‘roaming’ attention that can notice many different things in a short period of time and a ‘homing’ attention that can fasten onto one thing of great interest and stay with it for a long period of time. It does a great disservice to those diagnosed with ADHD to say that they have a deficit in attention, when they are acutally good at two different forms of attention and have problems primarily with one other form, sometimes referred to as ‘central-task’ attention, where sustained attention must be paid to routine (and often boring) events that have often been externally imposed.

Origins

When I was young, a small town swallowed me whole. Now, I can swallow a small town whole.

Writing a poem is like walking a dog: It stops a lot when you want it to keep going, and if you’re not careful it will shit on your feet.

We have to stop assuming God is a capitalist who wants us all the be rich.

Go froth and conquer.

I am convinced we are less interested in saying something original than in saying something that has origins.

This poet generates a simple, random sentence.

One of the criteria I had for culling my Facebook contacts this morning was: If I saw you in public, would I hide from you? If I answered no to that question, you are still here.

I just misread the phrase Candid Camera as Candida Camera.

I derive my power in part from the fact that you don’t know what I am capable of, but I do know what you are capable of.

Two Sides

Weird things poets say: You’re not allowed to have an original voice unless we know who you are.

While editing, I misread edit as idiot.

Finally, I understand why I turn to poets.

From the Walla Walla Freecycle list: Looking for bottom half of mannequin or above the shoulders.

I’m so unsettled I feel like a Henry Darger painting.

There are two sides to me: one dark, one darker.

So much about religious interpretation seems to be about making sure women don’t give men a hard on.

Meditation realization of the day: Time does not exist in order for me to be productive.

Poems are like orgasms: never as good as we imagine they will be.

Your ignorance is not my bliss.

She Just Doesn’t See

I want to talk about touch, how it’s the only sense I fully trust. When I doubt my ears, my eyes, or both, I find the world with my fingers, skin and lips.

I can almost see and hear her, lilting through the kitchen in her white nylon underwear.

I work puzzles by going over the edges of one piece with my forefinger and thumb as I hunt for the matching piece on the table. My eyes pick out the inverse of what my fingers feel, as if my hands and eyes together are what someone else’s eyes are without assistance from a secondary sense.

I have routinely felt my way over a new lover’s body with my face, chest and tongue. It was nearly always a sensual experience. But it was also a sensual experience—a way of learning, through touch, if this was a person I wanted in my life. I’ve even used my eyelashes to find out what my ears and eyes could not tell me about a partner.

For more than a decade, I felt my way through music. I started by opening the faux velvet-lined case of my new flute and running my fingers over its perfect, machine-made nickel keys. It took me days to bring the mouthpiece to my lower lip. Taking the instrument in with my fingertips was all I wanted or needed during those first encounters.

I am convinced, now, that I could have kept playing the flute if the notes had not been named after letters of the alphabet. I believe this connection caused my visual dyslexia to leak into my fingers, tangling them up like the piece of driftwood my father proudly displayed in our front flowerbed. I would play the note I had come to know as “E,” and my fingers would try to play the note I had come to know as “F,” most likely because capital E and capital F look very similar.

I made it a long way with music despite my dyslexia, most likely because touch was involved. When I relaxed my mind enough, to the extent that I felt I was no longer in my body, the notes became what they were: whole and pure sounds that represented, but could not be extracted from, the universe—sounds unadulterated by our arbitrary assignation to them of letters or our perverted desire to pull them apart the way a curious child might want to pull the wings off a living dragonfly.

I loved music enough to take it as far as I could. And now I know why, in the end, I had to set it aside. There was nothing more I could do. No matter how much I practiced or how hard I tried, I was never going to have perfect, or even relative, pitch—and I was never going to get my fingers right 100 percent of the time.

(When creating music, you only have one chance to position your fingers and mouth. If you miss that synchronicity, you sound the wrong note—or a disastrously shrill noise that lies between notes and is not unlike the wheeze I imagine being emitted by a bird shot in the throat. Composing with words is much more forgiving because you can backtrack and change mistakes or, when speaking, you can pause—and it’s OK because there’s no tempo or conductor or orchestra mercilessly driving you forward.)

There was also the matter of listening, of hearing. I was unable to separate chords into individual tones, a requirement of my ear training classes. I was also unable to hear any tonal progressions, save for the perfect fourth and minor second, the former popularized by “Here Comes the Bride,” the latter by the theme song for “Jaws.” Even with this imprinting, there were days when the perfect fourth and minor second were beyond me. I couldn’t hear them in my head, let alone give them voice.

While I feel a renewed sense of mourning with regard to my loss of music, knowing it was my dyslexia that held me back, I also feel more indebted to music than ever. I am certain that when I set music aside and gravitated to writing and literature, I recruited the musical pathways in my brain to handle all the reading, writing, speaking, and other visual and auditory processing my new interests demanded. I believe my ability to hear the rhythm and tonality of texts is an outgrowth of my language pathways taking up residence in my musical pathways. Sure, it’s a little awkward, kind of like steering a ship along a set of railroad tracks, but it’s working for me. Somehow, it’s been working for decades, without my even knowing that my ship was, in fact, on a set of railroad tracks, and that those tracks were not submerged in water.

In some ways, my heart wants to break where music is concerned. Look what it did for me. Look what it gave me, asking nothing in return. All so that, one day, I would be able to speak. And write. And keep speaking and writing. And to keep singing my tone-deaf song, my ugly little song that feels more precious than ever to me, the imperfect song that connects me back to my mother as if she and I are two diminished seventh chords standing side by side on a treble clef.

And there she is. I can almost see and hear her, lilting through the kitchen in her white nylon underwear from Anthony’s department store, humming “The Girl from Ipanema”:

Tall and tan and young and lovely, / The girl from Ipanema goes walking, And when she passes / I smile, but she doesn’t see, / She just doesn’t see, No she doesn’t see

And I see my mother now. And I sing for my mother now. And I write for her now. And now her voice is my voice. And now I know her mind—one that always put the cereal in the refrigerator, that couldn’t balance the checkbook, that never wrote anything by hand, that loved to talk but not to read.

And I have her mind. And I am not sorry. And if I could reach out and touch her, I would. I would hold her hand and tell her it’s OK that she gave me this wiring, and I would sing her a lullaby and urge her to rest, just rest, and to please not worry about me anymore.

Controlled Falling

Soon we will come to see ourselves not as sentient beings but as digital beings.

One of my neighbors is a rooster.

Awkward Moments at Work: Misread Query Policy as Queer Policy in company manual.

There are people you pass the time with and people you spend your time with.

I think that, by being here, I might be trying to disappear, a little.

Search term that led someone to my site: conform my identity to time-related expectations of others.

Inside money is omen.

I work very hard at things I set my mind to. I work even harder at things I set my heart to.

Tonight, Walla Walla is hurting me. But at the same time, Walla Walla is comforting me. In this way, Walla Walla is a lot like my mother.

Living is controlled failing.

Amazed

I am not just leaving Seattle. I am leaving a life that I have not understood for a long time: one that has not represented who I am, who I am becoming or who I want, ultimately, to be.

Be a person who can say wow, someone who can be amazed. Be amazed today. Repeatedly.

What we believe we will see informs what we will see. What we believe we will think informs what we will think. What we believe we will feel informs what we will feel.

I want you to ache.

I passed a donkey on my way home tonight.

Driving to Seattle for the weekend last night, I passed Hanford as the sun was setting. The telephone lines in the area always remind me of crosses, grave markers.

I feel safe knowing where all the poets are right now, and that they are on the other side of the continent from me. AWP is like my ADT security system, protecting me from unwanted poet intrusions.

How I ache for land that has been abused, neglected and forgotten.

Tonight, I saw a dozen horses crowding one another on a small hill.

Since passing the Hanford site tonight, I can’t stop thinking about the Hanford site.

Until I Return Home

You travel on until you return home; you live on until you return to earth.

— Ethiopian Proverb

I want to tell you about the land in Oklahoma, how it was often impenetrable, how it did not rain for days that stretched into months, until adults started using the word “drought.” I did not know what the word meant, but I knew it did not sound good and nobody looked happy when they said it, therefore it could not be a word that stood for something good.

I want to tell you that we lived without water the way some live without light, that we took this as normal, that water was rationed, and that my father, being a god, had men drill deep into the land until they hit water. The water would become ours and we would call it well water and say it came from our very own well. I would tell my parched schoolmates that I had a well, welled up with satisfaction at having something they did not have because their fathers were not gods like mine. Mine had made something of nothing and refused to let nature dictate our family’s circumstances.

I want to tell you how my father, with his own hands and his nitrogen fertilizers, used our well water to grow a lush area of green that encircled our house. And then the earth was softer, and then I could drive my index finger down into it after parting the thick mat of grass. And somewhere along the line, I learned the word “aerate,” though my father pronounced it with nearly three syllables, not two. He leaned into the first syllable the way I had seen him lean into his tiller when he was preparing the garden for planting. I did not feel I was hurting the soil when I pushed my finger into it; I felt I was aerating it—which seemed to be a word akin to the word healing.

I want to tell you how I ached for the land farther south in Oklahoma, how I watched and watched every time we drove down I-35, trying to find the precise point where the soil turned from brown to rust red.

I want to tell you how much harder this soil was, the soil both my parents came from, and how dry. And when it cracked, it split open in shapes like the lines on the backs of my father’s hands, the same shapes I now see in my own hands. And I always felt sorry for the cracked soil because I could see how the shapes fit together and wanted to be together, not apart.

I want to tell you that my family warned me about this red soil, how it clung and refused to come out, even in the wash. But with time, I wanted it to cover me, to mark me as its own, a sign that I was from Oklahoma the way my parents were from Oklahoma. Near Buncombe Creek, I entered the water of Lake Texoma and let it leave a layer of rust on my suit and skin when I emerged. “Here, here,” the residue seemed to say. “Here is where you belong.”

I want to tell you that I gave myself over to that soil repeatedly, and that I made a pact to never leave it. I want to tell you that it hurts every day to know I will never set foot in my father’s yard again, let alone lie alongside the soil using my hands to care for it. And I will never give myself to the iron-rich soil that spreads over the southern part of the state, not in the same way. How could I? I have had other places in my blood, on my body. I have other lands in my future, not yet explored. Still, I long for my home, for my earth. I long to return.

Mismatched

If I were in a gang, my gang name would be The Bloodjet.

Today, I am trying to work out what bothers me most. I think it might be systems.

I try friendships on like clothing, and find most of them too small—or their overall effect unflattering.

My husband is going to find me locked in here with all this cake.

All my shames are mismatched.

The capacity animals have to trust, even after enduring unthinkable suffering and abuse, simply astounds me.

Staring out this window has everything to do with learning something about my life, and about living.

I just misread the words living room as Mignon, and now I miss my mother.

It is with the first look in a mirror that we come to know ourselves as a thing, as an object, and as something that—inexplicably—exists both inside and outside of us.

It is when we forget who bakes our bread, who processes our waste, who maintains our water lines, who buries our dead—it is when these people become anonymous that we can live inside the delusion that we have no attachments, no dependence, on others.

Living is controlled falling.

I am tired of egocasting: I want to write something else, read something else.

In the end, even our feces is turned into a commodity. We can’t take a shit without being sold.

I awake, reminded again of our dimity convictions and freckled human nature. So it is; so we are.

The signifier and the signified enjoy no relationship other than the one we impose through language. That bond can be broken as soon as perception is broken, challenged.

At first I felt like a trinket. For a while I felt like a person. Later I felt like a freak.

Search term that led someone to my site: senile warts and irritable bowel syndrome.

When I am an old woman I shall wear people.

Tomorrow, something will happen.

I am the voice of unreason.

I rise and greet this broken nose of a day.

They are coming to take my weekend—the minutes and the hours. I just know it.

This idea that everything must be solid, that everything must last forever, I think it’s misguided.

It seems to me that we are more committed to our own suffering than we are to just about anything else.

Whole relationships these days are representational rather than experiential.

You don’t need surgery to figure out the heart.

I am tired of encountering ossified minds.

I made a paper angel out of my trash. Jon made a square snowflake.

I feel small and dull and flawed.

Writers don’t have secrets; secrets have writers.