Two cups of tea
One in the morning
to prop up eyelids
after too many hours of reading in the half-light
until the half-light slipped outside
One in the afternoon
to remind the stomach
it is not nap time quite yet
watching closely as the first shift of the teabag
sends curlicues of flavor swirling
through the hot water
Princess I am not
The Princess and the Pea
was one of my favorite stories
as a girl.
I wanted to prove
to someone
that I was not the one who was not bothered,
the chill one, placated.
But I was.
free-spirit private school til fourteen,
my eaglet's wings compressed in on themselves
when confronted with the terror that is high school.
No longer did I breathe Devil's advocate
or correct my father's spelling--
No longer was I sure.
That story has sat quietly, as I did,
in the back of my mind
for years.
But
I now realize, I am no longer the placated one
the girl who didn't raise her hand to disagree.
Now I pass sleepless nights
because I can feel something far beneath me
a pea
a thought
a word
I try to find that missing...something
I slurp my soup and revel in the sound
I fall small and kiss every bruise
I bury my nose in a thousand thousand books
praying for a pea wedged between the pages
I learn to speak up
dust off those vocal cords with a stiff brush made of
horsehair and valid opinions
Misguided, sometimes, maybe,
but valid all the same
because I feel them
and I read and I read and I read
and feel
[found this quote today and it set me off. I'm not sure if I want it to end here, though, I might need another stanza]
a writer is a world trapped in a person. --Victor Hugo
can you imagine--
a whole world
fills you to bursting, lifts the back of your throat
as if your body means to vomit
world vomit
beautiful, intricate, universal bile
that cannot stay inside one moment longer.
a writer is a world trapped in a person, he says,
and I can see that.
I can also see the days where that world is asleep
and that person despairs because she feels so
indelibly empty
[#1/30 2014: Write a beginning poem. It's cheesy and it's rife with cliches and almost-rhyme scheme, but hey. It's done.]
Fresh Meat
This year is to be the year of new things,
I can feel it.
But more than that, I can
do it.
For the first time
in a long time,
I have followed through--
For the first time
in a long time
I've started something completely new.
I haven't worn roller skates since I was maybe eleven,
elbows dragged on carpet walls
as I tried to stop with grace
and no muscle.
I never quite knew how to use them--
my wheeled feet, I mean.
Muscles too weak to keep them in any one direction at a time
joints not forgiving enough to allow for every direction at once,
balanced as precarious as a gawky middle school giraffe
with just as many knobby knees.
My brother cracked his skull on that sparkly roller rink floor once.
I remember going to the hospital
and following my rock to the bathroom--
Dad couldn't handle punctures in his young one's skin.
My brother, always the injured,
a constant state to which I played the sarcastic
albeit meek, and ultimately less intrepid counterpart
My always-broken brother took the fall enough for us both.
But here I am
padded to the gills
and feeling just as helpless.
I feel my legs give out and a single instant of pure fear
when a hand comes out and grasps my own
If ever I thought I couldn't begin again
and needed a stubborn push
it was in that moment.
But I held Slam's hand for the lifeline that it was
and pushed off once more.
I can do this.
March review for the Eclectic Reader's Book Challenge 2014: Traveling With Pomegranates by Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor, 2009. [Travel category]
This month was Travel month in the great world of Caty Reading-dom, and I've had this book on my shelf for a while. It had all the hallmarks of things that strike my fancy: female solidarity, travel narratives, pomegranates, imagery and mythos, a clever cover...anyway. Sue Monk Kidd has been a name I've toyed with for years; I'm pretty sure I own both her novels, but I had never read them before this. I bought them in high school, when they came out, book guzzler that I am, but it took me until now, until this book, to sink my teeth into her. (And Dance of the Dissident Daughter, which she talks a lot about in this book, is already ordered and on my desk expectantly.) Traveling With Pomegranates: A Mother and Daughter Journey to the Sacred Places of Greece, Turkey, and France is the story of Sue Monk Kidd and her daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor, taking a number of trips in the formative stages of a new epoch in their respective lives, attempting to find their ways back to themselves and each other, each battling through different feelings of loss and uncertainty.
I could tell from the first pages that I was going to like the book, I could feel the way each woman's sentences mirrored those thoughts that I kept in my own mind, but rarely gave voice to. They thought so deeply about everything, which is clearly the point of a memoir, especially a travel memoir--to go back over the things that have happened and lay on top of them a film of greater meaning--but I still liked to think about these women in the moment, accessing such deep parts of themselves and putting them down on paper. I liked to read passages where one woman wrote about another who had separated herself to go and write, and the book would then revisit the separate woman and I would get to go inside.
This dual nature of the book was intensely poetic to me, the two halves that make up the whole. There is one point where the women go to Eleusis and visit the well where the goddess Demeter is said to have wept for her daughter Persephone when she was swallowed into the underworld by Hades. At different points in the narrative, we get to hear both women, young and old, at this well, as well as watching from the other's external perspective. As a young woman, I identified with Ann, having recently graduated college and felt at a sort of loss for my next step. This was a clear parallel that I sort of expected to take away from their story. What I did not expect, however, was the sort of eye-opening I got reading the Sue chapters. Each time I finished one, I would take a moment and sift over the memories I have of my own mother in the past years and I was startled to see the different shape of those memories after reading. I am planning on passing my copy along to her soon, and I am interested to see what she identifies with, or to what extent, rather.
A striking moment early on comes in the pair's first trip, where Sue buys the two of them small pomegranate charms at a shop in Greece. The pomegranate comes to symbolize so much for these two women: the stories of Demeter and Persephone, the female mysteries of womb and woe, the first experience and the re-experience. I too have a connection to the pomegranate, but mine comes from a different realm. I bought my charm (seen in the above photo) at a hole-in-the-wall jewelry stand in Israel when I was 16. The charm reminds me of the first time I visited the country, the first time I started to connect to my Judaism on my own terms, rather than those meted out by whatever religious program I had been a part of, synagogue or Young Judea or what have you. Pomegranates play a big part in Judaism as well as Greek culture, steeped in theology from the Old Testament as "God's Fruit," the fruit some scholars believe to be the forbidden fruit of Eden. The seeds are said to number some 613, coincidentally the number of mitzvot (commandments) of the Torah, and are meant to represent a sort of righteousness, as well as learning. I knew a little of Demeter and her pomegranates, but it was interesting to see a different side of the symbol I have come to love over the years.
I haven't really even touched on the feminine aspect of this book, and I don't know if I have the words for it right now. Plus I wouldn't feel right pasting it onto the end of a post like this, just for the sake of having it. Suffice it to say that Ann's struggle to find and keep herself throughout her impending marriage, her Yellow Wallpaper dream, and her rewriting the ceremony with her mother all resonated with me on a level that I am looking forward to exploring more. I will flesh that out better another night. For now, adieu.
February review for the Eclectic Reader's Book Challenge 2014: American Supernatural Tales edited by S.T. Joshi, Penguin Horror Series 2013. [Anthology category]
This month was anthology month, and what better choice than the collection of horror stories that I got from my secret santa? It felt quite perfect, actually. Guillermo del Toro is curating a horror series that I have been obsessed with from afar since my boyfriend told me about it late last year. I am a sucker for good designs (half my beer choices are based on the name and the label, I'll be honest), and I've always sort of had a thing about covers. So when my secret santa bought me the anthology, it seemed a perfect confluence of events, begging to be taken advantage of. And I did, because who am I to say no to The Fates?It's been a while since I've read an anthology cover to cover. For school, it was generally a few select stories, although the overachiever in me always tried to read as much as I could to get a sense of the whole collection. As such, I wasn't quite sure what to pay attention to in my reading. Obviously the stories all have a common supernatural thread, as well as being authors from the States--those are the two qualifications for the anthology set forward in the title--but I wasn't quite sure what to do with them. In the end, I simply relished all the different interpretations of the word "supernatural," as well as all the different writing styles, letting them wash over me one after the other. Joshi organized the book chronologically, in addition making a note when authors played off of or influenced each other. As a result, I was treated to a sort of whirlwind tour of supernatural writing through the ages, and I really quite enjoyed it. I enjoyed finally reading some stories that have been on my list for a long time ("The Fall of the House of Usher" by Nathaniel Hawthorne), being exposed to the beginning of a mythos that I've become familiar with through countless televised cultural appropriations ("The Call of Cthulu" by H.P. Lovecraft), and falling in love with new weirdness ("The Late Shift" by Dennis Etchison).
In my last Eclectic Reader entry, I talked about what the genre of horror means to me, what my immersion in this subject has taught me. I talked about it as a way to answer questions that do not or cannot have concrete answers, a way for humans to rationalize the unrationalizable, in a way similar to religion. Guillermo del Toro, ever the artist and mastermind, brilliantly hits upon what I was trying to evoke in his series introduction, talking about the beneficial qualities of horror, of being scared, "for to learn what we fear is to learn who we are." Gah, this man has consistently found a way to make my heart tighten in that singular realization that someone else feels exactly the way that you do.
In another instance of the universe and my reading list aligning, I just started watching HBO's True Detective, which happens to feature the story "The Yellow Sign," part of The Yellow King by Robert W. Chambers, which happens to be collected in this volume. It was, in fact, one of my favorite stories, largely due to the intricacies of the characters and the ambiguity of the horror described and the conclusion, things that I'm looking forward to seeing portrayed on screen.
I would be hard-pressed if asked to try to choose my favorite story within the multitudes, as many of them touched me in ways that only they could. I guess I'll list some of them with a little bit of reasoning:
I hope you have enjoyed my ramblings on American Supernatural Tales. It's been a fun time. I haven't read an anthology in a while, as I mentioned before, and I think I wanted to keep my post as open-ended as I could in order to address everything I wanted to. Stay tuned!
I am having an extraordinarily hard time concentrating at work today. I am becoming involved with my own fingernails, the organization of my notebook, the chipping off of my nail polish...I have barely finished two reference letters today when I was supposed to be done with 3-4. I guess I'll have some work to take home with me tonight. I don't want to ask for an extension because I messed around and couldn't get stuff done today, that's a ridiculous reason. I've been distracted by all sorts of things, like the possibility of going to a new gym later which I ended up signing up for online because I was nervous about it. It'll be nice to have a gym, my mom goes to this one at home and she loves it. Apparently everything is purple. And I get a free tshirt, which is baller. I love free tshirts.
I think I'm settling into work alright, I just finished my first petition letter yesterday, which is the second stage of a case, and it really helped me to figure out what these reference letters need to have in them. I like the way I was just thrown into this, learning as I go and asking for help as I need it and relying on the wonderous internet for any and all inane questions I may have. In fact, my boyfriend just sent me a video lecture a few days ago about this very topic. I haven't watched the whole thing, just the segment it starts at, but I really love what this guy has to say. It's an interesting intersection of the future of learning and the reality of our highly technologized society, and I adore his tangent about "a lack of respect for learners." Don't assume you know everything on your own. Ask questions. That's what I'm being forced to do with this new job, I'm being forced out of my comfort zone, asking questions about legal proceedings and academic jargon that I don't quite understand. And the beautiful thing is that sometimes my coworkers or my supervisors don't know either. And then it's this whole shebang of learning and sharing and growing together.
This blog post is evidence of how much I cannot pay attention today. Remember what I started talking about? And then how I immediately changed the subject and went on for a long time, getting increasingly more random with every vomited sentence? I think I like the way my fingers sound on the keys. That clack pushes me, incites me to--if not brilliance, then at least a hard-fought battle to mediocrity. I like to watch my fingers create something, even if it doesn't make any sense to the rest of me. Sometimes I type just for the sound. And I'm learning to use that.
I should really get back to this client. He's quite interesting, given the bare bones of information I can scrounge from Chinese-to-English Google Translate, and I owe him some more respect. Toodles!
