It used to be that when someone died, a photograph would be taken of the corpse. Children and infants died with some regularity in those days, and parents would often commission a photograph as a memento, their only image of the child lost. In these portraits, a dead infant is posed in a cradle, held by their mother, or sometimes by an older sibling, and usually appears to be sleeping, if sleeping involved donning one’s Sunday best and clutching a bouquet of flowers.
Not exactly okay
March 30th, 2012 § 5 comments § permalink
I haven’t been able to write in a long time. Well, that’s not entirely true. I’ve started and stopped sporadically, writing with urgency for a short time, staring into space, abandoning the urge. These pieces have so far not made it onto the blog. I’m not quite sure what they’re saying.
Things are not exactly okay with me, though they’re not exactly not okay either, if by saying, “not okay” I conjure visions of ledges and medical intervention. But, I’m not entirely okay. That’s just a fact of life for me right now. The last few months have been rough, raw, emotional, chaotic, without precedent and in the midst of all the shit just happening, it’s hard to know what to say, or, even how to say anything at all. In the sprawling feeling you get when your life shifts drastically, there are no edges to write up against. There is nothing by which to measure a feeling of okayness.
And yet, this is what those who care about me seem to need most of all. Out of my silence, they need reassurance that I am okay. This is the question, the desire: are you okay? You seem to be okay. I hope you’re okay… And, of course, I am okay, which is to say, I’m functional, getting out of bed, eating fairly regularly, exercising a little, appearing to the outside world as a capable human person. For me, so far, there has been no option outside of this kind of okay, though sometimes it seems like a little bit of crazy, a binge with the unhinged, an experiment with my life as a John Waters movie would be cathartic. Instead, for me, all that is not okay seeps into the unspoken: an inability to concentrate, a sense of humour worn through, chronic rumination over the loses that have come before, my unwillingness to tolerate banality, pettiness or superficiality, above all my need for vast tracts of empty space and time, long walks through winter suburbs.
Embracing the silver vixen
October 25th, 2011 § 1 comment § permalink
"Senior citizens find that Ulm, Minnesota is a good place to retire..." From the U.S. National Archives.
In the past year or so, my grey hair has gone from novelty to reality, from the odd rogue strand to a topic even new friends now feel it is appropriate to comment on: “Wow, you’re really young to have so much grey hair!” or the more considerate, “I really like that you have some grey in your hair!” In other words, “grey” is quickly becoming a definitive adjective in describing my hair colour.
None of this is particularly surprising in and of itself. My mother was leaning towards more grey than brown by her late 30s, like her sisters, and, as late-night slumber party whisperings declare, you inherit your hair woes or blessings from your mom. What’s more shocking, really, is the fact that I’m now beginning to look like a version of my mother that I actually remember.
I’ve had a pretty fraught relationship with my hair. My grandfather was a barber, so for years he cut my hair. Given that his barbering repertoire was developed in the 1950s and limited to men’s styles, this meant my hair was cut into a slightly longer version of the popular men’s bowl cut. In an era and neighbourhood in which young femininity was defined around bobbles and banana clips, the bowl cut did nothing for my sense of self. I was forced into a vague tomboy-dom that I didn’t have the moxie or athletic chops to really own. When I hit puberty, I finally convinced my father to let me get it cut at a real salon, but my hair betrayed me. Along with acne and growing pains, I developed an irregular curl-pattern that I battled valiantly (though according to remnant snapshots largely unsuccessfully) with a round brush and blowdryer. By my mid-teens, exasperated and inspired by Winona Ryder in Reality Bites, I hacked it all off, doused it in too much gel and began a spate of hair dyeing that would last into my 20s: orange, red (more fire engine than handsome shade of auburn), dark brown almost black, a regretful period of badly-striped highlights, finally followed by an acceptance of the mousey brown that so many tow-headed kids grow into. After eking out some sort of truce in this decades-long battle (though I’ve yet to make peace with my hair’s odd curliness), I can’t quite fathom the fact that it is changing on me again and I don’t know how to respond. » Read the rest of this entry «
The coming jellyfish invasion
October 22nd, 2011 § 1 comment § permalink
You may have heard: in recent years, the coast of Japan has witnessed unprecedented blooms of jellyfish. Nomura’s jellies, to be precise. Massive, flesh-coloured hoods with dense tangles of scalloped orange and blood-coloured tentacles trailing behind, they can grow up to two metres across and can weigh more than 450 pounds (which is more than a lion, if you’re keeping score). Each bloom produces immeasurable swarms, gelatinous masses slowly drifting into the Sea of Japan from unknown points of origin suspected to be located in the oceans off China and Korea.
Fishermen are frustrated. If their nets don’t break, they bring up massive hauls of gelatinous ooze and stinging threads instead of anchovies, salmon or yellowtail. Any fish they do catch are crushed to death or poisoned with venom. Some now drag razor-wire nets through the sea, slicing through the coagulation of jelly-bodies, but this just creates a viscous soup that’s no more amenable to fishing. Besides that, there’s a theory that trauma might cause jellies to release their ova and sperm, so the slice’n’dice approach might be seeding an even greater future invasion (if a drifting collection of bodies can constitute an invasion).
Hold your tongue
September 16th, 2011 § 2 comments § permalink
It’s not something I’ve been doing intentionally, though my long silence on this blog might suggest otherwise. No, the dearth of posts is due to other factors: workload, bike rides, moving across the continent. But, particularly being in a (perpetual) “proto-career” phase in my life, whether or not I should open my mouth is something I’ve spent some time thinking about. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I want to start using this space to bad mouth all the people who might one day employ me (those could never employ me are another story…). But, as anyone still very far from a seemingly ungraspable career will know, opening your mouth can be a dangerous thing and opening your mouth into the archival void of the internet is more risky still.
No matter what field you’re in, there are bloggers, career counselors and outspoken dentists to warn you against saying the wrong thing in any kind of public forum. You will pigeon-hole yourself, they caution, give people a false sense that they know you and a propensity to be disappointed when your real-life self doesn’t live up to the persona they’ve imagined for you. Worst, you might offend someone in a position of power—the online equivalent to inadvertently sleeping with the boss’s beautiful robot daughter. And yet, this same cadre of folks is just as likely to encourage you to start a blog (well, perhaps not your condescending dentist). As I’ve said before, an online presence is increasingly seen to be a part of one’s marketable package of distinguishing characteristics, both on the job market and in life. The advice then seems to be: say something, say it well, but beware! Presumably one is supposed to anticipate and avoid those tracks of thought that might intimidate, offend or otherwise give the wrong impression. Don’t say anything you wouldn’t say to the face of a curious Googler, or your mother, I suppose. » Read the rest of this entry «
Leaving the Zoo: Star-nosed Mole
September 14th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink
Finally, the last instalment in my series of three poems for the Zoo show, again accompanied by beautiful illustrations done by Dushan Milic. Without any further ado, the star-nosed mole.
You are a mole. Star-nosed.
Condylura cristata.
I label you in Latin,
since I don’t know what you call yourself.
Mitch or Starlee? Madame Moleton of Molesworth? Simply, self?
Perhaps you’re unnamed,
distinguished only by dig-pattern,
squeak sequence,
nasal probe arrangement.
Or maybe not differentiated at all,
anonymous in the moley dark.
I’ve only just learned how tiny you are.
Do you understand it?
You are so much smaller than all the BBC animations featuring moles
(and there are many!) would have us believe.
Sometimes only centimetres, end to end.
I can’t imagine.
I imagine you. Can you imagine that?
Your nose is miraculous, terrifying,
so many nerve endings feeling around in an unfeeling word,
four handfuls plus two, naked fingertips blindly grubbing,
twenty-five thousand sensations at once.
I shudder to think of myself so exposed.
If men were moles, there would be protection,
nasal awareness laws: nose means no,
velvet nose veils and erotic nose-fondling parlours.
If men were moles, channels would be carved through dirt by machines.
Lights would be dimmed.
One would be judged by the denseness of one’s coat,
not by the content of one’s character.
The exchange value of invertebrates would increase exponentially.
You labour, you moles.
A labour of moles
throwing soil.
Mouldywarp
Sussing out your wormy prey,
stunning it with toxic saliva.
Stockpiling thousands of stupefied worms
in your underground larders, but for what?
A rainy day?
The coming vermicide?
Or simply to fight the boredom?
Do you relax, chill out? Does a Cimmerian take a load off, unwind?
Or must you move until depleted, softly snoring in some unmarked shaft?
What kind of circadian circuit do you follow through endless darkness?
Working at the speed of neurons, you are expert in snap decisions.
Your nose-fingers probe, judge, determine comestibility
and in less than a second, you have spit or swallowed.
If men were moles obesity would bloom to dystopian proportions.
I’ve seen your stellar nose only in pictures,
and yet, I imagine you there, snuffling along the waterline.
I place a worm near a hole in the embankment,
convinced you must exist.
Are you there in the shadows, waiting for my smell to pass?
I imagine you sauntering out in necktie and tails,
fork in hand,
ready for dinner.
Still at the Zoo: Leviathan & Behemoth
July 23rd, 2011 § 2 comments § permalink
This is the second installment in my series of poems for the Zoo show. This piece, entitled Leviathan and Behemoth, responds to several of Jacqui Oakley‘s paintings. I was drawn to the sense of violent entanglement she captures in a series of amazing animal battles: octopus versus crab, lizard versus rooster, baboon troupe versus guar herd… To me, these pieces evoke epic, even Biblical, reckonings, so I took the liberty of using some particularly vivid bits from Job chapter 41 that describe the supernatural beasts Leviathan and Behemoth, a sea monster and a land-monster, respectively (the italicized verses).
While krakens and cyclopes aren’t your typical zoo inhabitants, I wanted to draw attention to the way animal violence becomes almost mythical in the zoo context. One of the key differences between the zoo and “the wild” is the utter lack of violence in the former: a lion and zebra shacked up next to each other, and yet never shall the lion’s jaws meet the zebra’s throat… While we’re at the zoo, the violence that’s so apparent in a lion’s jaw, for instance, exists only in our own minds, fueled, of course, by all the “kill shots” we’ve seen in nature documentaries over the years. That said, were the lion to actually take down her prey in front of a gaggle of school-children, well, let’s just say, controversy would ensue. So, perhaps animal violence is necessarily mythologized when animals live their lives among us, but I think that just makes it more compelling, particularly when illustrated in as lovely a fashion as it is in Jacqui’s pieces.
The photos below are courtesy of Jacqui Oakley, and show some of her pieces in situ at Loose Cannon gallery as well as a few close-up details.