Tack Coat

The tack coat of dawn gives way to the scumble of morning.

Dawn. Hot pink rubbed over midnight blue. Sudden lightning. My dog in my arms, trembling.

A rabbit appears out of nowhere like a lost thought. I think of an old friend.

Some folks decorate their porches but never sit on them.

Little man down there putting away your grill, come out of your garage and look up.

Some people kill birds. Others put out bird feeders.

Tonight’s sunset turned the sky into a cauldron. Below, a thrasher the color of depleted soil foraged quietly beneath a sapling.

Birds define the air.

How do you see the air without the bird? Assume there are no trees.

In the sky, a great heron goes unnoticed by lovers on a picnic.

A tender young boy watches a pair of red-winged blackbirds as his friends taunt him.

A scissor-tailed flycatcher perches on a stop sign until I get too close with my camera.

The verses are in the land, in the trees before they became paper, in our hearts before they were rewritten by language.

I just saw a man texting while driving a tractor down a major thoroughfare.

I might be getting too involved with the animals who live in my yard.

The Loneliness of Recovery

I used to think to be not alone meant / never having to walk through the high wheat / or struggle in the water.

— Allison Seay

I am standing in the high wheat. Field with Sheafs, by August Haake (1911–1914), oil on cardboard. Image used in accordance with U.S. public domain laws.

When I was a teenager, my mother’s best friend came over one night after a long absence from the weekly happy hour my mother hosted. When she arrived, the friend was serious, even somber. She stayed just long enough to tell my mother and their mutual friends that she wasn’t coming back to the group because she had quit drinking.

Couldn’t you just come and not drink, someone asked, flummoxed by the surprise announcement.

No, she said. And I can’t be around any of you again, not while you’re still drinking.

She explained that being around people who drank would jeopardize her recovery. She couldn’t be in that physical or psychological space anymore. My mother didn’t understand, or maybe she understood but didn’t accept her friend’s decision. This was, after all, the woman who had been there through everything with my mom. They’d known each other for more than thirty years. This woman even picked out something for my mother to wear to my father’s funeral. I remember her bringing a selection of outfits home for my mother to try on.

Nothing black, my mother had insisted. I hate it when widows wear black at funerals.

Her friend complied. She fanned out half a dozen wool and satin pieces in beryl blue, emerald green, and ruby red—the rich colors of a painted landscape. My mother sat slumped on the edge of her bed, barely present.

Get up and try these on, her friend coaxed.

Her concern for my mother was evident. It was one of those defining moments in a friendship. Through death, they had become even closer—friends for life, or at least that’s what everyone thought at the time.

After her announcement, my mother’s friend rose and walked purposefully through our paneled den, the one with the mirrored wet bar my father built before his death. She reached the thick cedar door and let herself out.

Empty Space

There are many differences between the alcohol recovery model and the mental health recovery movement. Still, situating myself within the recovery movement feels similar to leaving everyone and everything I’ve known, the way my mother’s best friend had to all those years ago. For one thing, there isn’t a recovery-oriented support group in my area. I don’t feel comfortable at local support groups that follow the disease model, suppress or dismiss research that challenges that model, treat the DSM as authoritative, teach people that medications are the best and often only option for managing their assigned illness, accept funding from pharmaceutical companies, and act as mouthpieces for those companies.

I’ve tried to take part in those groups—to create a space for myself and my view there—and I’ve been met with everything from dismissiveness to outright disdain. For me, they are not places where healing can occur. Rather, they are culdesacs that lead to feeling, and learning to be, what Lewis Mehl-Madrona describes as “forever ill.” In Coyote Wisdom, he writes:

On the down side [sic], support groups for particular illnesses sometimes encourage stories that keep people sick and support them in seeing themselves as ill. People who absorb these stories can come to define themselves as forever ill. A healing story needs to challenge their membership in the community of sufferers.

In my experience, label-specific support groups don’t tell healing stories or encourage peers to create those types of stories for themselves. Instead, I’ve heard group leaders refer to their own mental health labels as “awful,” “terrible” and “horrible.” I’ve seen peers internalize that language and mindset. This does an incredible disservice to the community and is, in my opinion, contemptible. I won’t set foot in those groups anymore because of the culture of self-loathing they cultivate.

Recently, I ran into someone from a group I used to attend. Though it was wonderful to see him, I wasn’t sure how to pick up where we left off more than a year ago. My DSM diagnosis has changed since I attended that group, but that information isn’t important because the DSM isn’t an accurate or helpful classification system. Whatever label I do or don’t have is just that: a label. My thyroid disease has also been addressed, but explaining how that affects my well-being is taxing for even the most attentive listener. So a silence opened in the conversation, like a crevasse in brittle ice. I stood on one side, he on the other. I care about him. I also care about myself and need to do what’s best for me, which includes walking purposefully on my own path, the one that leads to healing. Now I understand how space forms between people, like it did between my mother and her best friend.

Hello, Out There?

There are like-minded people in my area, and I’ve had a difficult time connecting with them. Often, when I reach out, I don’t get a response. I know survivors experience frustration, exhaustion, burnout, and a host of other issues related to trying to have their voices heard while also caring for themselves. Nobody in the recovery movement owes me anything, and I don’t want to take time or energy away from their important work. At the same time, it’s hard to go it alone when I know there are others in town who feel the same way as me. I like to imagine us coming together in friendship and shared purpose. (That’s my internal idealist talking. I’m trying to find my internal realist, but so far she’s eluded capture.)

I’ve had difficulty with recovery-oriented online support groups as well. Members seem to spend an inordinate amount of time fighting with one another, suppressing individual voices, and creating caustic environments in other ways. It’s exhausting to take part in those groups. I often come out feeling worse than when I went in. Online groups also tend to share a great deal of misinformation about mental health, most of which goes unchecked. There are perspectives and opinions, certainly, and those should be respected. But sharing inaccurate information doesn’t help anyone.

Whether in person or online, it probably doesn’t help that, in addition to being an idealist, I’m sensitive, introverted, and have a low threshold for interpersonal strife—either experienced or witnessed. Still, I’m here. I want to speak, write, and act in accordance with what I value, which is a model that promotes well-being over ill-being, individual approaches over generalized protocols, and healing over harm.

I’m over here in the high wheat, in the water. I will stay here even if nobody joins me.

Aside: Reaching Across the Crevasse

One way the mental health recovery movement differs from the alcohol recovery model is that there’s really no room for leaving anyone behind. That silence I felt when talking with my friend recently? I decided to try to connect with him to the best of my ability. He’s my people. Everyone with lived experience is my people, and I am their people. I can’t forget that. While I do need to distance myself from the disease model and the “therapeutic” frameworks that fall out of it, I don’t need to distance myself from anyone who’s open to where I am coming from, even if they remain on the other side of the crevasse.

In part, I told my friend that I am looking at well-being as opposed to ill-being these days, and at a mental health model that supports everyone (regardless of DSM label or lack thereof) having the tools and supports to live meaningful lives. I added that I believe we can all heal from trauma, adversity, and distress—which comes in many forms and touches most of our lives in one way or another. Finally, I said that I don’t think the medical system (physical or mental) goes far enough in not just treating illness and ill-being but in showing us ways that we can thrive and experience well-being.

I guess that’s my new elevator pitch, though it’s a little long. I’ll work on it.

A Secret Order

In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order.

— Carl Jung

This morning, my chihuahua threw up on me in bed. I was curled up in the fetal position, and she was behind me with her chest against my back. You could say she was the big spoon and I was the little spoon, as preposterous as that might sound, given that I am approximately eighteen times her size. But there it is: big spoon = chihuahua, little spoon = human.

Understandably, being woken in this manner led me to believe I might not be in for the best of days. As I took care of my dog, got myself cleaned up, and cobbled together all the linens that needed washing, I felt defeated before I’d even brushed my teeth. Then my centralized pain set in, along with intestinal distress because I dared to eat out yesterday afternoon. As if that weren’t enough, I felt like I was being strangled. Yesterday, my new thyroid surgeon examined the scar on my neck from the thyroidectomy that my old thyroid surgeon performed last fall. He needed to assess how much scar tissue was present. Turns out, there’s a significant amount of scarring, and manipulating the area has made it extremely tight and painful today.

I needed to get it together, and fast. My first session with a holistic therapist was scheduled for noon. This meeting was important to me. I didn’t want to arrive at the therapist’s office sweaty, whiffling, and redolent of dog vomit. I needed to be lucid, solid, maybe even likable. (The last one is always a longshot for me, but I hold out hope with every new interaction.)

I made it to the session with my pestilent body in tow. A sack of pain I was. The therapist put me at ease by pointing out her Carl Jung action figure and saying, Not everyone has one of those.

They don’t, I thought. But they damn well should.

She also had a stuffed Yoda on her desk. He was wearing spectacles. I should probably show her my bright orange, 3D-printed Yoda head at our next meeting. I don’t have any Jung tchotchke to share, but I do feel Jung at heart, so at least I have a pun lined up for next week’s session.

The therapist knew things were serious when she began charting my immediate family, and I was in tears by the time she asked me what my father’s name was. I would have totally lost it if she’d asked my mother’s name. (It was Merry, which is heartbreaking considering how much trauma she was born into and lived through. Given her life circumstances, my mother’s name was a cruel, impossible demand—a mirthful adjective that would never find its occasion. What were my grandparents hoping for, beyond hope, when they fitted her with that albatross?) In short, I wasn’t able to mask my physical or emotional pain, and that made me feel as vulnerable as a fledgling swallow leaving the nest for the first time.

The therapist asked how I was feeling. I told her I was a burning tumbleweed careening down a hill, setting the countryside on fire.

She seemed to understand.

I asked her if she thinks there’s more merit to the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress than other DSM diagnoses. She said she doesn’t give a hanging chad about diagnosis. She only cares about hearing and seeing the person in front of her.

You are not a diagnosis. You are a human being, she said. What I’m hearing and seeing is you.

I tried not to cry because I don’t want Therapy Dana to be someone who is weepy throughout an entire session. But I’m not sure I’m in charge of who Therapy Dana is or isn’t, let alone what she does and doesn’t do.

I chose the Jung quote above because it makes me think about the DSM and its litany of disorders. The DSM is a dead end that never leads back to order. How do you make your way out of that book once you’re in it? My therapist says you have to stop looking at the disorder and start looking at what will help you heal.

I don’t always know where to cast my gaze, but I’m looking.

Trauma as Mineralized Body

If you cannot find it in your own body, where will you go in search of it?

— The Upanishads

My freeze response this morning was kind of like this, but without all the great scenery and gentle animals. A Fairy Tale, by Arthur Wardle, oil on canvas. Image used in accordance with U.S. public domain laws.

This morning, I felt like a length of fossilized wood, my body having turned to stone. I was lying in my bed, white sheets a blanket of fresh snow glinting near my mineral-laden bark. Every time I imagined getting up, my torso and limbs tightened. I was stuck. I wasn’t able to move for more than an hour.

This happens sometimes. It’s one of my responses to trauma. Most people have heard of fight and flight, two physiological reactions to threats and perceived threats. There are two other, related responses: freeze and fawn. Many people who’ve been traumatized have some combination of these four responses. I’ve experienced all four, but my primary responses are flight and freeze.

Of the two, I like flight more. Much more. At least with flight, I’m in motion. I feel like I’m getting away from a threatening situation, my body moving, machine-like, under its own direction. Freeze is worse because I have all the emotions associated with flight, yet I have to experience them wherever I happen to be when the freeze response starts. Inside, I might be saying, “Just move. You’ll feel better if do. Start with a muscle, any muscle.” Yet I can’t move. I can’t speak. I can’t even think properly because my limbic brain has sand bagged my neocortex, which can only watch on, enfeebled.

You wouldn’t have known what you were seeing if you had walked in on me this morning. You would have seen a woman in seeming repose staring at a ceiling fan, its faux-wood blades smearing with soothing regularity.

Aside from the discomfort of the freeze response, I hate freezing because it’s triggering. The first time I froze was when I was thirteen years old and my father’s best friend began molesting me. I also froze in 2009 when I was sexually assaulted. Powerlessness, shame and despair are associated with the freeze response. It’s no surprise that people who freeze when being molested, raped, and sexually assaulted have higher rates of post-traumatic stress than those who don’t. There’s more self-blame associated with freezing than with the other responses to trauma.

I had physical symptoms this morning, too. A migraine. A tinnitus flare-up. Burning mouth syndrome. These issues, along with my freeze response, were my body’s way of dealing with distress I experienced yesterday. Along with three other psychiatric survivors, I was invited to share my account of abuse within the mental health system with a local healthcare organization. As I listened to the other women’s stories, I felt like my heart was being fed into a meat grinder, stuffed into a casing, and sewn back inside my chest. Those are the strongest, bravest, most intelligent people I’ve had the pleasure of sitting alongside in a long time. The day took a toll not just because I shared my story, but because we shared our stories. Nobody should endure what we and so many others have endured. Nobody should have to live with the trauma that led us to seek care or the additional trauma that seeking care can lead to. Nobody should have to face the very real risk of being retraumatized every time we tell our stories in the hope that healthcare might improve, that others might understand us, and that we might be able to speak and write our way back to life.

Though I still feel crystalline, I am moving, albeit slowly. I’m writing slowly, too, with my fossilized mind.

Everything I need to know is in my body and always has been. The body is a great teacher, and I am trying to learn from what it is telling me rather than vilifying it. The more I can see why I am freezing, as opposed to resisting the response, the more I am able to see what my body wants me to pay attention to. Today, I am paying attention.

Throwing Roses into the Abyss

Throw roses into the abyss and say: “Here is my thanks to the monster who didn’t succeed in swallowing me alive.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

The Roses of Heliogabalus, by Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1888), oil on canvas. Image used in accordance with U.S. public domain laws.

I am alive, despite having experienced trauma for years. You could say trauma is my monster, a hydra that’s reared various heads over five decades, from infancy into middle age. Sometimes all the heads appear at once, like a giant air balloon tied to another, identical balloon—and another and another—a train of memories and flashbacks as real as the window I’m looking through now at the world beyond. But there’s never glass between me and the trauma, not a single pane. I meet it with no shield and no weapons.

Nietzsche says we can’t live as the vanquished. We have to live as the victorious. To do this, we must show our thanks to the monster for not knowing how to devour us. We must throw roses into the abyss. For him, the monster is what lies within us. For me, the monster is both internal and external—and never exclusively one or the other. A thing happens. As a sentient being, I respond. Now the “thing” is within me, kneaded into my response, often long after it has raised its tail and returned to its bottomless lake. This works in reverse, too. As a sentient being, I can’t perceive anything that happens without being informed by my lived experience. The external is never simply external, and the internal is never simply internal. Within is without and without is always necessarily within.

Trauma starts outside us, but it twines its way through each of our two hundred six bones, ninety-thousand-mile nervous system, and more than six hundred forty skeletal, visceral and cardiac muscles. The sequelae of trauma are significant and can include disruptions to nearly every system in the body, behavioral and cognitive changes, high rates of retraumatization, changes in our core beliefs and values, difficulty with living a “normal” life, and much more.

So the monster is not just internal. It is also external. And the two are perpetually engaged in a simple but exquisite water dance. For me, throwing roses at the abyss performs three functions. First, it’s a way to honor the parts of me that have worked together to survive. Second, it’s a way to begin forgiving the monster that is trauma. And third, it’s a way to bring greater presence and beauty to my past, present and future—even if trauma continues to be there, hissing in the margins.

I am alive, and this site is where I throw roses into the abyss. Let them fill the chasm.

Nobler Animals

The bird you can hear is the one who has the sweetest song.

Earlier, I saw a heron flying and thought it was a ship slicing the air.

American goldfinch, drop of sun.

The birds give voice to the trees.

Two ravens ink the air.

How small the bird. How vast the sky.

After the rain, a house finch bathes in a pothole.

The sky lives through the birds.

Wet swallow, who destroyed your nest on this stormy day?

Swallows, turn my home into your nest. I am only here with your permission.

The barn swallow’s body is a sunset within the sunset.

Neighbor, how can you walk with your head down on this beautiful night?

One swallow, it seems, is having more fun in the air than all the rest.

Sweet robin, I didn’t see you there. But I heard your song.

I’ve had nobler animals in my life than humans.

Starling, that’s a window, not a way through.

When you clear the land, you must confront the sky.

Landscapers, what have you come to destroy?

Bulk Bin

I am overeating bulk bin item #6431 from Sprouts.

4:52 p.m. and my monitor has already gone into night mode.

When the leaves turn red, what is there to say? I can only stand in the sun and admire them.

I am nothing if not future soil.

You say dry skin, I say Thanksgiving for dust mites.

A deer whistle screaming through the suburbs.

Travis Syndrome: Overestimating the significance of the present.

Bizarreness effect: Bizarre material is better remembered than common material.

Naive realism: The belief that we see reality as it really is—objectively and without bias.

Bikeshedding: The tendency to give disproportionate weight to trivial issues.

Subjective validation: Perception that something is true if a subject’s belief demands it to be true.

Rhyme-as-reason effect: Rhyming statements are perceived as more truthful.

Pareidolia: A vague, random stimulus is perceived as significant.

Overconfidence effect: Excessive confidence in one’s own answers to questions.

Illusory correlation: Inaccurately perceiving a relationship between two unrelated events.

Confirmation bias: The tendency to seek, interpret, and remember information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions.

You have a wildly imaginative mind. Cherish that. But don’t take it for something it isn’t. The universe does not hang from your antlers.

Glitter, glitter. Love, love love. Poof. You’re the universe.

Language that makes you feel unbound can still be its own form of restraint.

Even Rumi, poor guy. Some of his supposins are absolutely ridiculous.

All I see is cognitive bias. In poetry, art, philosophy, spirituality. Some of it is beautiful, but only because of my own cognitive biases.

Outward, cognitive biases. Inward, cognitive biases.

This beautiful, tender darkness.

What can I know that can’t be unknown?

Meditation music coming from another room.

This dark tunnel, this little death.

Four apples tossed into the courtyard.

There is beauty here, too. Look up.

Inside the tunnel, I wasn’t the tunnel, but I wasn’t not the tunnel.

I return to Kansas to find it’s still Kansas.

Across the street, a man wearing a salmon-colored shirt walks among salmon-colored leaves.

Home: Autumn leaves mingle above bright-yellow caution tape.

Flight: No bird is more in the air than any other.

Square bales of hay have given way to round bales of hay.

From afar, a white grain elevator looks like an old milk bottle.

In Kansas, a scarecrow wears khakis.

In Oklahoma, cows walk northeast through a shorn cornfield.

Like a petroglyph, a handprint stamps the dusty Ford Explorer’s rear window.

The better the land is, the more people want to live with it or exploit it.

It seems my mind is as the environment is: cluttered in the city, open on the field.

The trumpet player on a nearby bench who is fully committed to the wrong notes.

Even storm systems are moving to Canada.

The moon competes with electric signs for attention.

Ornamentation: Four doves in a bare cottonwood.

Just met a young man who is traveling around the country in a 1989 Acura named Steve.

Going to the Petrified Forest today. Totally appropriate.

How is your persona feeling about itself today?

I stand in the room of the pueblo that once held household waste.

The Wupatki Pueblo, silent except for a fly buzzing near my left ear.

In the valley below old volcanoes, cinder rolls out a celadon carpet.

The supermoon rises above a Chevron in Flagstaff.

In Marble Canyon, a homemade NoDAPL sign by the highway.

Inside a canyon, you don’t go back in time. You go down in time.

I walked beneath a waterfall with Dhammapada in my pocket.

Water drips rhythmically from the cliffs and makes its way to the river.

Above a waterfall, teenagers howl like coyotes.

Alone together, we pass one another on narrow trails slick with sand.

Perched on the cliffs, hikers fill the canyon with chatter.

The tunnel inside the mountain where we get to know ourselves.

Who am I to speak for this rock?

The faces of these rocks trace the wind.

A fence made of dead tree limbs.

A deer crosses the highway at the deer-crossing sign.

In the pasture: dozens of buffalo and a single cow.

Sheep huddle inside a dilapidated barn.

And you get a pipeline. And you get a pipeline. And you get a pipeline.

Divided we stand.

I’m afraid the November 14 supermoon will have Trump’s face in it.

Thought I heard a bird in the wilderness. It was just someone’s ringtone.

Dear Kansas, Things aren’t going to work out between us. Yes, it’s you.

Meanwhile, Cascadia is figuring out how to become its own country.

Float me out to international waters.

Today, I will step inside a canyon and go back in time.

Mo(u)rning.

Current mood: Shelter in place.

Sunset at Dead Horse Point: One dozen tourists arrive with their tripods.

Two hundred seventy-five million years of rock can’t be wrong.

I can only hide in these canyons for so long.

A raven’s shadow on the far side of the canyon.

At least my job isn’t driving pigs to slaughter.

I feel like I am moving through model train scenery.

Growing up, I was never far from a snakebite kit.

All the land I love is full of snakes.

A chimney acts as a headstone for the farmhouse that once stood here.

Bare aspen white out the mountainside.

My life needs a runaway truck lane.

Six bighorn sheep appear as suddenly as memories.

Pines offer their dead needles to the earth.

A choir of windows sings the sky back to itself.

Balconies perched beside the highway.

A shawl of clouds around the mountain’s white shoulders.

Stumps stacked like bodies beside the shallow river.

Mountains inside clouds the color of mountains.

Two wild turkeys following the train tracks.

Fences dash the hopes of tumbleweeds.

Evergreens march deep into the field.

Half-buried cars next to the highway.

The earth’s ragged edge cuts the sky.

Grain elevators are the skyscrapers of rural America.

The dead deer is the color of harvested wheat.

What punctuation does the sky know?

Bales of hay stand shoulder to shoulder like commuters waiting for the subway train.

The sudden green of an irrigated field.

Each memory is a black cow lying in a flaxen meadow.

Marriage is a commitment to a lifetime of shared cognitive bias.

The telephone poles are crosses divining the pasture.

I live between wind farms.

From the mouth of the false teacher: “I am always ahead of everyone else.”

I just want to lie down on my therapist’s couch and hope I don’t get bedbugs.

Synthetic thyroid is to natural thyroid as Splenda is to sugar. My brain is a bitter confection.

My words keep getting twisted up like snakes in a hibernaculum.

I’m caught between worlds: world of plain speech and world of rhyme and meter.

In the end, we’re all two-headed ducks who must decide which head to trust: the one that got the brain or the one that’s anencephalic.

Do not throw this world away for the promise of a magical discotheque in the sky.

I don’t even know what to say. I’m watching a train wreck, and I’m not very far from the tracks.

Outside, birds shrill at the threat of a chainsaw, eighth notes shaken from their lines.

Microchimeras

The color of the branches depends on the color of the sky.

Dreamed I was selling replacement parts for a machine that didn’t exist. People were buying.

My bed and I are one thing now.

Fresh snowfall on a row of trash bags.

Love note: The dog threw up on me.

Poetry needs to get over its savior complex.

The fog of words.

Radiology waiting room: A preacher screams inside a woman’s phone. Hallelujahs for all.

Nobody is born naive. We are all microchimeras. That’s not poetry. It’s science.

The sun has tipped into the window. Its bright arm reaches across the bed.

In the bath, I filled my belly button with water and pretended it was an ephemeral pool.

Love note: Flush the toilet.

I decided something was true, then I serendipitously found evidence for that truth. Yes, because of confirmation bias.

Question any voice claiming to be the embodiment of God.

If you think something, you will then see it in the world. Yes, because of observational selection bias.

Statements delivered with authority are believable, even false ones. It’s easy to make nonsense sound profound.

If it looks like a dream and feels like a dream, it’s a dream. Another delusion. Don’t fall for it, and don’t pay for it.

Question any voice that claims to have come here from outer space with a boatload of awareness that can now be doled out to you.

Question any voice that claims to understand quantum physics in spite of never having studied physics.

Question any voice that tells you they’ve shifted into another dimension.

The universe is not here to be your servant. Question any voice that tells you that’s the case.

In photos, my right eye is the believer and my left eye is the skeptic.

My dog is lost in a drift of white sheets.

In my dream, there was no lock on my front door, but only friends tried to enter.

Dawn: sky the color of a fresh bruise.

Ini K’ani

I spent part of the afternoon with a downy woodpecker.

I had a dream about two secret words. I held their names on my lips when I woke, but a waking word entered my mouth and I lost the secret words. They meant, During wars, the only ones left in this small town are the unemployed, and they sounded a little bit like okey-dokey.

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There is a seam in the sky where a backgrounded opacity meets a foregrounded opacity. We have been painted in.

The female cardinal is neon in this light.

I caught my dream words this morning before they leapt from my tongue: I am hunting words through an increasingly gentle forest that opens onto a faceless marsh of mallow. Stop, please. Language, stop me. Stop until words make me hungry again. Then I’ll eat them like durian, treaded skins and all.

Every day I live with this illness is a day for me to take stock. That is how my illness is the gift I never fathomed it could be.

This season, I have a favorite chipmunk. I should love them all equally, but only one is my darling.

My words from three dreams ago swam back to me last night, the ones I lost on waking but that reminded me of okey-dokey. The words are “ini k’ani.” I looked them up, and both are Asomtavruli letters used to write in the Georgian language. Ini is the equivalent of an English short “i,” as in “hit.” K’ani is the equivalent of an English “k,” but glottalized. Who knows why I would dream these sounds at all, let alone on two different nights.

Musical instruments have humble bodies, yet their voices are bold.

When did the poetry community become a bare knuckle boxing ring?

Visions are what happens when the mind is ever so slightly batted away from its cultural trappings, when certain centers flash that are typically dull and systematically made duller by the very culture that produces and sustains it. But the visions are still steeped in the culture in which the mind lives. They are not free from it, though traces of free thought can be made out, like the echo of a long overgrown trail within dense forest. As a friend says, visions are “trances and traces.”

Tra(n)ces.

Living and dying are not two things. They are one thing. They sit side by side, as intimate as young lovers.

Moments after the samara wheels to earth, it stands upright, like a ballerina doing a revelé, poised to tunnel the soil with its gaunt root.

Death is kneeing life in the groin today.

Sentences make words feel like they have friends.

My darling chipmunk is staring into a puddle as if it were a reflecting pool.

Some people spend their whole lives polishing a lump of coal, convinced they’ve gotten hold of a diamond.

The whole point of living in Kansas is to be lost in the world and to lose the world.

There is definitely more to life than poetry acceptances. For instance, there’s poetry.

Sometimes there’s not much bridge left to burn. Better to let the elements deal with what remains.

When you continue to speak despite the fact that nobody is listening, you must be saying something that is either of no importance or of grave importance.

I am not the world’s ornamentation.

Maxine Kumin says Anne Sexton lived a year longer than she would have otherwise because a priest told her something that kept her going: God is in your typewriter.

The first bird of spring has emerged, but it does not sing. It screams.

I have work to do. I can’t be bothered by small fish who want to rub against my ankles to irritate me or to pleasure themselves.

The buds on the trees are a form of pointillism.

I think I’ll change my first name to an open parenthesis and my last name to a closed parenthesis. My middle name will be empty space.

My body is like a barn left to the field.

If I were an animal, I would crawl off to die on days when my body feels like this. Then I would start to feel better and come crawling toward you. I would be the one with detritus hitching a ride on my flanks. Everything wants to make its way back to the living, even rubble and scraps.

I filled Easter eggs with lines from my favorite poems and hid them at my alma mater with the help of a dear friend. I did this because poetry is action and poetry is love.

Review of Wunderkammer, by Cynthia Cruz

Wunderkammer, by Cynthia Cruz
Four Way Books, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-935536-47-5
Perfect bound, 72 pp., $15.95
Review by Dana Henry Martin (aka M Ross Henry)

The wonder chamber, or cabinet of curiosities, occupies a unique space in history. These rooms emerged in the sixteenth century and functioned as encyclopedic collections of objects belonging to three classes: “naturalia (products of nature), arteficialia (or artefacta, the products of man), and scientifica (the testaments of man’s ability to dominate nature, such as astrolabes, clocks, automatons, and scientific instruments).”¹ Wonder chambers were regarded as a microcosm or theater of the world, and as a memory theater.^2,3 Also known as wunderkammern, these rooms grew out of an age of unprecedented European discovery whose essence was only partially captured by returning ships full of objects from uncharted lands. Noblemen, scholars, and merchants were eager to add these objects to their personal wonder chambers so they could have a miniature representation of the world located within the walls of their own homes.³

The Tate describes Renaissance wunderkammern as:

… private spaces, created and formed around a deeply held belief that all things were linked to one another through either visible or invisible similarities. People believed that by detecting those visible and invisible signs and by recognizing the similarities between objects, they would be brought to an understanding of how the world functioned, and what humanity’s place in it was.⁴

It is this context that we must bring to a reading of Cynthia Cruz’s third collection, Wunderkammer. In this work, the poet continually defines and redefines the concept of a wonder chamber and, in doing so, suggests a new group of visible and invisible lines that connects all things to one another. People and places, health and illness, dream and reality, and time itself (past, present, and future) weave and unweave in the creation and subversion of order and meaning. In Wunderkammer, Cruz explores the dark side of wonder and the implications of believing that by cataloging the world we can at once understand and control it.

Throughout the collection, we encounter a series of wonder chambers (wunderkammern), side worlds (nebenwelts), self-portraits, and poems set in all manner of locations, including gardens, hospitals, hotels, passageways, and sanitariums. Taken together, these poems transmogrify the wonder chamber into a phenomenon both tethered to and unmoored from history, myth, geography, culture, and cultural artifacts. A bombed Berlin meets ancient Greece meets a Greyhound station bathroom. Hades meets Eden. Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood meets South America’s Orinoco River meets an unnamed airport city. Swarovski meets Warhol meets a boombox meets the Bathysphere. The products of nature, the products of man, and the testaments of man’s ability to dominate nature glimmer and whir inside the rooms Cruz constructs, each poem another cubby or display case spilling over with necrotic, narcotic-laced secrets.

The collection opens with the first of several poems titled “Nebenwelt.” In this piece, we find a speaker “drowned in a cream velvet / Mini gown, mind blown out like a city” who vanishes into a “… silvery paste of vapor on the ice.” The poem concludes with a sweeping gesture away from the speaker to the greater, fetid world:

A row of pretty blonde dummies in the Dutch death

Museum, death dressed in Chanel and Maharaja

Paste jewels, a vibrant green bacteria of sea and decay.

This side world sets up the collection as a whole, moving from the personal to the larger, and largely human, forces that shape and limit identity. The dummies in the museum speak to a cultural representation of women in life and after death, as well as referencing the historical role of wunderkammern as precursors to museums. In the last line, the sea is invoked—that body of water humans have crossed time and again on quests for discovery and domination, the same body Renaissance ships traversed in search of artifacts, relics, and natural objects with which to build miniature worlds.

“Wunderkammer,” the second poem in the collection, turns to ancient times—“A Greek crime mars the pastoral. / Charts and maps, an atlas of anesthesia- / Laced nostalgia.” The preoccupation with memory that wonder chambers embody seems to have grown out of their precursor, Italian scholar Giulio Camillo’s “theater of memory.” Its architecture was similar to an amphitheater, and its function was to allow its users to memorize all the world’s knowledge.⁵ Camillo’s work was informed by mnemonic techniques adopted by ancient Romans and Greeks in which visualization was used to organize and recall information. Cicero described this technique as the method of loci (also called the memory palace).^5,6 By taking us back to ancient Greece at the beginning of Wunderkammer, Cruz both situates her collection within a larger historical context and also sets up one of the work’s main themes, which is memory—from its “incessant rush” early in the collection to its effacement near the collection’s close:

This is not meant to be a koan
Or a fable.

I am telling you everything.

One day they’ll remove
The memory out of me.

— “Hotel Feral”

Rather than facilitating memory, Cruz’s vision of the wonder chamber is one in which memory is haunting, failing, or entirely absent. The wunderkammeris not a means for sharpening memory. Instead, it has the capacity to preserve trauma, promote amnesia, and dissolve identity.

In “Self Portrait in Fox Furs, with Magic,” Cruz draws on the concept of the “memory palace” while subverting the idea that a microcosm of the world can be representative of the world at large. “In the city / Of palaces,” she writes, “I lived / Inside a doll house.” Other types of chambers appear in the collection. These include cages, jewelry boxes, mansions, palanquins, wards, a music box, and a locked motel room. These chambers fit together like a set of nesting dolls—some smaller, some larger, but all of them conscribed the way the wonder chamber itself is conscribed.

Throughout the collection, the wunderkammeris imposed as well as self-imposed. The imposition is evident in the poems “Junk Garden” and “Hotel Oblivion,” respectively: “I move my body / But I never leave this room” and “We are promiscuous / In our thinness, don’t leave the green mansion, / Are trapped inside the snow box, noiselessly / Splendoring.” But self-imposition is also articulated. In “Atlas of the Molecular Kingdom of Girl Orphans,” Cruz writes: “In the end, I made my way through the never-ending / Atlas of my own making.” The imposed and self-imposed seem to converge in the poem “Kingdom of Cluttering Sorrow,” in which Cruz writes: “I am frozen forever in this wonder / Room, this zoo of one million / Diamond machines.”

The closing poem, “Some Velvet Morning,” comes back to the marred pastoral introduced at the beginning of the collection. The poem is set in an undetermined point in the future, in a “Garden with its brilliant white / Hives of memory, its mausoleums / Of locked, oblong boxes jam- / Packed with history.” No longer just a chamber, a memory theater, or a museum, the wunderkammer has undergone a transition. It is now a mausoleum whose locked, oblong boxes are reminiscent of the neatly housed and organized specimens of the wonder chamber. Rather than reflecting the world of the living, the wunderkammer houses the world of the dead.

Wunderkammer starts in death and ends in death, but its central question seems to be whether we can come to know the self, to develop an identity, when the impulse to see the world through the lens of the wunderkammerhasprevailed, when an entire sea and its suffering has been compressed into “Spots of water on crystal.” Perhaps we can’t. In the collection’s third poem with the title “Nebenwelt,” Cruz writes: “Like you, I am / Incapable of interpreting my own body, / Its soulless and mollusk iterations.” Though the speaker is addressing a specific “you,” the lines feel as if they are being directed at the reader. With this utterance, we become more than visitors at the wunderkammer. We leave the chamber-turned-museum-turned-mausoleum to reckon with our own sense of terror, knowing that the wunderkammer has been handed down to us, too, and that it informs our perception of ourselves, each other, and all that is. What have we tucked away in our own memory theaters and what shadow puppetry is enacted on the scrim? In a world where even language is implicated, we are left wondering what part we have played in what Cruz describes as, “These words, this terrible song.”

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Sources

The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Collecting for the Kunstkammer.” http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/kuns/hd_kuns.htm (accessed February 25, 2015).
Mendoza, Bernardo Uribe, Rodolfo Ramirez, Neslson Cruz, Manuel Guillermo Forero, and Patricia Cervantes. 2000. “A ‘Virtual Worlds’ Theatre of Memory (Scheme for a Contemporary Museum).” In Virtual Worlds, ed. Jean-Claude Heudin, 205–213. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F3-540-45016-5_19 (accessed February 25, 2015).
Funston Antiques. “Wunderkammer: An Introduction and Preface.” http://www.funstonantiques.com/2009/05/09/wunderkammer-an-introduction-preface (accessed February 25, 2015).
Tate Britain. “History of the Wunderkammern (Cabinet of Curiosities).” http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/mark-dion-tate-thames-dig/wunderkammen (accessed February 25, 2015).
Neault, Michael. “The Museum as Memory Palace.” http://blog.art21.org/2012/08/30/the-museum-as-memory-palace/#.VO9Io_nF_uM (accessed February 25, 2015).
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “Mental Imagery > Ancient Imagery Mnemonics.” http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mental-imagery/ancient-imagery-mnemonics.html (accessed February 25, 2015).

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“Review of Wunderkammer, by Cynthia Cruz” first appeared in Prick of the Spindle.

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