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The Mnemonics of Knowing – Three

Nell — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:09:28 +0000

The test involved slides: a minute for each slide – to look and write down what was pictured. Name of work, artist, date. I am not good with tests or most games. Not just the ones one knows about. There are tests and games you only feel. They are given at any time. I refuse if I do know. And you can only avoid someone’s friends for so long. In fight or flight, I usually flee. How strange then, not to be scared.

This was not because I had someone watching out. I had my system, I had done the work. It’s hard to describe, being behind my own recognition. Cues inside associations…. songs, streets, colors or a rhyme. Expressions and sayings. Animal, vegetable, mineral …. that open query. The first thing coming to your mind. I put this together, it became my world: happless incongruity falling into place. Something not to talk about but know. Private meaning. A code. I was ready, my mind in place.

I imagined the allignment of a sun dial, beam of light onto metal. I looked up across the room at the tops of heads. Coming back from getting water, he looked up at me and smiled. This moved through my body, a pang. My freeing thrill. I continued my work, so brilliantly not quantitative. Long since sleeping having slept, I was going on the energy beyond being tired. I felt good. This happens even when the brain is on its own. After the test he had a break. We took our tea behind the building. I went home to bed, still in the test, still at school. And back behind the building with him, beneath a tree.

There is a way I was always with him, knowing his voice, a definite smell. But there is a way he was only in my mind. He took the place of all I longed for. I would catch myself catching my breath.

The Mnemonics of Knowing – Two

Nell — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 18:40:24 +0000

I liked the buildings. It was the disappearance of architecture, with sun through windows. I spent more time. Like infants still want to be enclosed, I wanted to be indoors, the outside coming in. Autumn, so easily remembered; this one now recalling many others. The chill just right. How dusk came to mirror the previous dawn. It was that liquid range in light, orange to amber. Forgetting time. Something had started, and was ours.

He was not some letchurous professor. Wide plank floors underfoot, part of it was being conscious of more. Continually. Aware of myself, being myself more. I would watch, learning to know he was privatly there. This once, someone noticed things I hadn’t known about myself, and then told me. He knew.

We didn’t make plans, it just happened. So much started making me think of him. Walking. The trees. Linseed oil. Things made of cotton, wool or paper. I kept a list, which of course is a primitive device. He brought apples and I fried them in butter. I remember, then. I saw us in my place, as though I were outside myself but still adjacent to him. We ate, and it had suddenly become Indian Summer. We opened the windows and took a nap, had dreams.

The Mnemonics of Knowing – One

Nell — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 18:34:03 +0000

I HAD NO IDEA he was watching me, that he even knew I sat where I did. When I wasn’t watching the slides on the screen, I was watching him, and not once did I see him look at me. It is true what they say – some people are able to see without even having to look at all.

The older, two suburban women had been there every week, but had I known this before? I thought they might require smelling salts. When he came over, it looked like their bodies spun around 180 degrees without any effort at all, just to see. They distracted me. Dark lipstick and face powder. Strong perfume. At first I could only see his mouth moving. Then I noticed his eyebrows in the air. He asked me if I would have tea with him.

Did he know I did not drink coffee? It’s unusual not to be a coffee drinker. He drinks tea. He talked in a rush, like he was trying to get over the preliminaries, get to something more immediate. I couldn’t imagine. He told me he didn’t sleep at night. I told him I was the same. Neither one of us had a car. I was surprised how things like this could happen when you’re not thinking they could.

Even that day, I think I feebly tried to explain to him the devices I used for remembering the art. What I couldn’t understand was how he seemed to already know what I was going to tell him before I had finished. When we walked through the door and out of the building, later, he took a wool cap from his pocket and put it on with one quick, curved motion. I knew then.

geography

Nell — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 21:22:31 +0000

During the past four months, I had declared several times that a GREAT MOVE had been decided upon. The first announcement was that I was moving to Norway – to be an expatriat socialist — and I even got a Norweigan friend’s real name, address, and phone number to use in an application for immigration. Norway was too expensive, it ended up, and someone said it is cold as Alaska there in winter. Talking to my therapist one day, I suddenly realized my European plan had, all along, been more of a beginning gesture at actually leaving the city where I’ve been for over 20 years. At the time, though, it had to start out as leaving a whole continent. Then there was Canada: I felt this was where I’d always wanted to immigrate to, anyway — somehow I am a North American before a U. S. citizen. It seems, though, that no country wants disabled people over 50, with only enough money to maybe afford another five years of life without an income. Since this time, I have learned that hoardes of wealthy Americans are moving to Europe. It’s as if they have decided they don’t want to be on a sinking ship.

Another month went by. It looked like I would have to remain in the U. S. First I thought of the small, vibrant towns along the Oregon coast. I would leave the midwestern north for a small town where there were no longer the extremes of heat and ice. I would forego any kind of suburb whatsoever. How amazing it would be to live again in the northwest, the misty green glow. But then someone told me there are meth-heads all over Oregon. I didn’t ask questions, right away remembering the only meth user I knew about personally actually had lived in Oregon. It was this woman’s younger sister; she had become addicted to meth as a young wife and mother of 21. She lost her child and husband, but remained a meth addict, eventually managed by a public health program . She had kept employed all these years, to the age of 45 or so, as a housepainter who worked with a master housepainter. Finally, I thought of Washington state. I really didn’t think at all about Seattle, where I lived for five years in the 70s. It has twice the population it had when I left in 1981. There are stories about bad Seattle traffic. And of course is the added expense of living on the coast. I would live in maybe Bremerton, I thought, north of Seattle….I went on the computer. There I found, on a message board, a testimony as to why a woman was leaving Bremerton — uncaring and too high priced — for Olympia, “where rent is affordable and there are plenty of hippies.”

So I’d decided to move to Olympia. Why not? I liked the thought of hippies. When I left Olympia, I had been attending the experimental college there and had tired of everyone seeming what I called then “new age.” I had left for Seattle to punk out, go to Ramones concerts and smoke cigarettes without everyone inquiring about my self-destructive behavior. Maybe now, by 2010, Olympians would be less lockstep as hippies than they had been 30-some years ago.

Within a week’s time, I was showing my online friends photos of apartments I might be able to rent near Olympia. I was gathering excitement about moving in the spring as the days went on, talking all about it with all my friends. Then one night, I was speaking with a women I’d known a while who was a Matis native Canadian. She had told me she was a medicine woman, and smoked a special pipe. I had found her, mostly, psychologically aware and insightful, and very low-key. I was telling her again about not having left my apt in three months, even if they were months of ice and snow. I even told her about problems I was having with my weight, depression, and finding myself debilitated by lack of exersize and normal activity.

This woman finally said to me, “this is called geography.” She explained that alcoholics, which she had once been, play “geography” all the time. A person has a life full of problems. Instead of approaching their problems, they find it easier, for whatever reason, to simply move, but then there they are: in a new location with the same basic problems they had brought with them.

I realized that I had, many times, employed geography to help me with change when I wasn’t willing to work on it in any other way. I have lived all over the U. S. — the south, midwest, southwest, northwest, New England, and back to the midwest, right in the middle of Chicago. As a child, though I mostly lived with my parents and brother in suburbs of cities, I spent every summer on my grandparents’ farm in rural Tennessee. I can live in a big city, a small town, or maybe even in something close to wilderness. I might even make it in Alaska in winter. I would not make it, though, in a suburb, in the sun nor shadow of parking lots and malls, housing developments, haphazard commercialism for miles and miles. And I would not make it in Florida, which is one hot, humid, semi-tropical suburb. My mom is forever telling me it is time to move in with her in her little house in Florida. I could not live with a parent I allow so easily to try absorbing my life into her own. And near her is my republican, younger brother — the proginy who runs the family business, manages all finances, and is the executor of my mother’s will. The drama of parental favoritism and sibling rivalry has never been more wacky! My brother, a golfer, who’s probably never read a book in his life, is like a villan of women in a Jane Austin novel: a biggoted, moral force.

Much has transpired since I was first daydreaming of becomming Scandanavian. I made a reservation for a moving van in March. The next day was when I realized it was all geography. I have to become active and conditioned, get over my social phobia, and find a reson to live despite my exhaustion, chronic pain, and lack of local friends. First I told myself I would need six months, and that I could move in the fall. Later, though, I realized I need a whole year. So the moving date is set for a year from next month, when the lease is up. I keep forgetting to mail the signed lease to the landlord. I have so much trouble keeping papers straight — I don’t even have a desk anymore. My books – this past two years out of boxes and on shelves the first time in 12 years – they will have another year to be on shelves and actually available. And then I will move. And hopefully I’ll still have room for my books. And it won’t be geography.

what i’d say about myself

Nell — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 18:08:42 +0000

I am female, in my fifties, and attempting to learn to write again, as well as pull myself out of a rut I’ve fallen into due to illness. I was last known to be writing prose poetry and short fiction, even working on a novel. At this point, I’m interested more in finding a daily, working drive, and hope that I might shape everyday entries into small, biographical narratives or memoir. I am looking for friends, teachers, and any artists or writers who find their creative work necessary to happiness. I plan to actively read the writing in other blogs, and hope there will be readers here to advise or comment for any reason, if possible, on my writing. Community, beauty, truth and humor are things I look for in each day. I move moment to moment. Sometimes moments are repeated. Sometimes a moment is a lifetime.