“There has started to be more demand from the U.S. for quieter, better sounding products.” -Rachael Pink, acoustic engineer at Dyson, in an article that discusses (among other things) how mascara bottles sound when they open

                “You know, I don’t think I have ever like listened to my mascara.”
                “But you have.”
                -Mary Beth Griggs and Sara Chodosh on The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week

                So much of what’s going on I don’t understand. And there’s an interesting flipside—so much of what I do understand, or at least what I take in and act from, I use without noticing.
                There’s a board game called Spice Road which includes these little coins as make believe money. Lots of games have something like that, but Spice Road has the distinction of being the only one in my box o’ games that actually has metal coins. For a while, every time I taught the game to a new group, someone said, oh wow, these are nice. Then one time someone said, why do you associate heavy with nice. I could fumble for an explanation, something about solidly made or unlikely to break, but I think that’s in part missing the point. Heaviness comes up in that article with Rachael Pink, but it’s really “heaviness,” because you can fake it in all sorts of ways—the feel of a lighter sparking, the click of mascara closing. The same materials in different arrangements produce sounds that people describe as more reliable, or cheap.
                I’m not sure I can become conscious of all the different stimuli I’m taking in and letting direct me. I’d like to be more aware, sure. To look behind the curtain of why I think that and see all the strange reasons and whirring gears and sticky-bubble-gum-repairs that leave me repeating this is a nicely made boardgame. I’d like to keep a sense of humor about it. It’s funny how I sputter and turn. And I’d like to remember that I don’t know, that I’m often a puppet that doesn’t see its own strings. That leaves me ready to pause and listen when someone points out something I don’t understand.

                “[…] art—and poetry in particular—can make the limits of our imagining apparent at the very moment it moves beyond them.”
                -Heather Christle, The Crying Book

                I’m looking for a new metaphor about “reason” and “passion.” A while ago, when I was struggling with something, someone asked “Are you thinking or feeling about it?” The question didn’t quite make sense.
                Last year in a graduate class I had a strange, delightful experience. We were sitting there, talking over the different ways people imagine the world for themselves. A climbing child creates an idea of a tree. A carpenter creates another idea that goes by the same name, and so does the orchard keeper and the ecologist. I was listening to people discuss how these ideas were different, and then I felt like I was spinning, or floating, or falling. The usual handholds I reach to, the perspectives I take up to make sense of things, were exactly what I was trying to question. So for a moment I hung almost motionless a whirlwind of new possibilities out of reach around me. That moment reminds me I’ve had similar experiences before. They’re like when I was a kid and I jumped off a high rock into water. There was a moment that opened between the ground I’d left and the surface beneath which I didn’t yet see.
                I don’t think I can understand reason and passion as separate. Most of the traditions I’ve grown up in treat them that way. And sure, I’ve felt the two pull apart like my two feet when one hits a patch of ice and suddenly I’m slipping toward the splits. Most of the time, though, when I pay attention to what I’m feeling, reason and passion move together. When I’m talking to someone who’s struggling, when I’m trying to help and it’s going well, I’m thinking and feeling about what they’re telling me. I’m trying to make connections and trying to be open. We separate out “differences” to study what we see, but running is left right, left right, and breathing, and pumping arms. Running’s a whole body, the ground beneath it, the air I’m breathing.
                The running metaphor isn’t the one I want. My feet are separate, even if they work together. Sitting in my experience, emotion and reason feel intertwined. Maybe one’s water swirling down a creekbed, and one’s light bending through the water, but I wouldn’t want to make one water and the other light. They’re both both. So maybe I’m still falling, floating for that wide moment before there’s a splash and I’m somewhere new.

                “Under this view, metaphors are not mere linguistic embellishments. Rather, they are foundations for thought processes and conceptual understandings that function to map meaning from one knowledge and/or perceptual domain to another.”
                -Cynthia Taylor and Bryan Dewsbury, “On the Problem and Promise of Metaphor Use in Science and Science Communication”

                I think I can remember experiences in which I had no thought of “time.” Legos on the floor of a childhood room. Clicking together, clicking apart, the shapes they were and weren’t. The shapes they became. I also remember moments when I started focusing on time: getting into the car for a seven hour drive, for instance, and my parents had given me a little digital watch. I looked at it. I looked at it again. Two minutes. And I tried to imagine all the minutes that made up seven hours, to cram them into the backseat with me. I wasn’t sure how they’d go by. In the end they went by with the wind when I wasn’t watching.
                Somewhere, someone must’ve been the first to tell me, time is money. What a capitalist idea. If time were clouds, for instance, you might not mind so much when you watched it drift by. You might think forward to the rain.
                Whatever time is or isn’t, it’s not an apple I can pick or a swing that goes still while I’m watching. Whatever my conception of “time,” it’s a constellation of thoughts I’ve built over lots of experiences and lots of being-tolds and lots of metaphors. It is money. It is something that can be wasted. Like the tide, it waits for no man. It’s a line. An arrow. An ocean. A march. All those metaphors use concepts I can engage more directly with my senses, my actions. I’ve drawn a line, and then used what I drew to try and imagine a geometric ‘line’ that goes on forever. I’ve shivered and laughed in the ocean. I’ve wasted water, and felt awful about it. I’ve counted how much money’s in my wallet. Metaphors are a way we talk, but Taylor and Dewsbury suggest they’re also a means of cognition. They’re a way we think. We take a system we’re familiar with, a system we can touch or see or jump into, and map its properties onto a less familiar system we’re trying to understand.
                That’s pretty wondrous, and it makes me wonder about the worlds I’ve opened up to. If metaphors take a thought-constellation I’m familiar with (swimming in the river; pushing a needle through cloth), and use it to engage with a constellation that’s hard for me to understand (time; astronomy), then don’t my metaphors—my thoughts—depend on the breadth of my attentive experiences? If I never really engage with music, I miss out on music. But maybe I miss out on more. Maybe I miss out on one whole type of system that I could’ve used in struggling with a new idea. To put it another way, if understandings are seeds, and metaphors are planting seeds to grow roots into new soil, then is the diversity of systems I’ve touched and listened to my seed bank?

                Breaking the silence
                Of an ancient pond,
                A frog jumped into water—
                A deep resonance.
                                -Matsuo Bashō, translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa

                I was once involved in a school wide push to redefine a high school schedule. We talked a lot about when students should have break, and for how long. A group of us were big defenders of “unscheduled time” (what a strange phrase), but our language was all about efficiency. Efficiency of learning. Transition time for a mind moving between tasks. I can’t remember anyone pointing out how strange that was, how much we’d all bought into the idea that sitting still for a moment only had meaning if it made you faster when you got back up. Maybe I wasn’t listening.
                I’ve been trying to remember other ideas of quiet. Other ideas of rest.
                Last semester, in discussing a haiku, a friend said: “Those are my favorite kind of poems. The ones that say, there was a sound just now. Hear it.” The comment stuck with me, because I like those poems, too, and then sometimes I’m confused by them. And then sometimes I’m “bored” of them. It’s hard to see what a poem like that might “mean” unless I move over a bit, unless I step out of where I was. In looking at Bashō’s haiku, the translator Yuasa notes, “We start with silence and we end with something moving towards silence, the ripples of the splash.”
                A neighbor’s walking past my window, shoes in the snow.
                Voices.
                Somewhere, a door.
                I’ll rest here.

        

                “And, yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect, we are striving to forge a union with purpose, to compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and conditions of man.”
                -Amanda Gorman, “The Hill We Climb”

                Listening to Amanda Gorman, I feel hopeful.
                In the last months, I’ve talked with old students about trying to decide what jobs we’ll move towards when so many of the systems that coordinate human work are broken. I love teaching, but our education system is so exclusionary, so slow in adjusting, so committed to fracturing thought into smaller and smaller pieces. I love storytelling, but can’t stomach how often “fiction” ends up meaning a few voices are heard and most are drowned out. And every time I get in the car I’m burning oil. My old students say they’re in a similar place: wanting to help, not sure how. And then Amanda Gorman offers us an idea.
                We are not striving to form a union that is perfect.
                We are striving to forge a union with purpose.
                Purpose and commitment. Those are things I can do. Where “perfect” is a judgment on the results, purpose and commitment are working while clarifying in my heart what I’m working toward. Put it this way: I hate grading, and I’m pretty convinced stamping numbers on people causes more hurt than it helps. All the same, for now, grading is part of what I do while I’m doing the best I’ve found. Sometime I might get to leave it behind. For now, I’ll drive less, and learn from people who are pushing energy reform because of all that oil. For now, every semester, I see people growing into their strength and using it more kindly. That’s the purpose. That, says Amanda Gorman, is the kind of thing we can hold onto while composing another moment, another way things are, another now.

                -Robert Rauschenberg, Factum 1 and 2

                I’m not sure I ‘like’ these paintings, but I keep thinking about them. They make me wonder where I hold on, where I let go, and what happens in the moment after I do either.
                Back in undergrad, a friend said education in America had ‘retreated’ from recommending a good life. Education had once talked about what we should be: a person should know some math or have an understanding of history. Then as a society we started seeing the danger of these ‘shoulds:’ who’s making them, and why, and what’s getting left out? What parts of the story do we keep skipping over? Faced with these questions, education (my friend suggested) started trying instead to support students toward their own ends.
                A fellow writer here in Illinois pointed out that, after World War II, Western literature pulled away from objective omniscient third person—the kind of storytelling that claims it can slip between viewpoints, or ‘rise above them,’ and always know the ‘final truth.’ With everything going mad, stories became more aware that they took up one specific vantage point.
                When Professor Lucero introduced the class to Factum 1 and 2, he’d been talking about how (again after World War II) some artists retreated to the act of painting, to “the primal brush stroke,” as something immediate and authentic and real. Here: this was paint on canvas, this was honest. This came from somewhere deep down. Then Rauschenberg comes along and does Factum 1 and 2 to ask, joking and serious as I imagine him, ‘Is it?’ Here’s one “raw red stroke”—here’s another, very similar, imitating myself. You said there was no space for a lie. Are you sure?
                “Retreated,” said Professor Lucero. And the word caught in my head. Where I move back from. Where I move toward. There’s that famous line from Archimedes about the power of a lever if you have the right fulcrum: “Give me a place to stand and I shall move the world.” Maybe we don’t get that fulcrum, that solid place to stand. Sometimes I want something certain, something—a habit, a goal, an approach—that seems solid. Maybe what we get, instead, is movement from place to place. Thoughts that we share. Words in a story. Paint on a canvas, and we go on by letting go.

                “[…] he said, ‘C’mon guys, let’s show the world that Laramie is not this kind of town.’ But it IS that kind of a town. If it wasn’t this kind of a town why did this happen here? […] And we have to mourn this and we have to be sad that we live in a town, a state, a country where shit like this happens. I mean, these are people trying to distance themselves from this crime. And we need to own this crime. I feel. Everyone needs to own it. We are like this. We are like this. We are like this.” -Zubaida Ula, as quoted in The Laramie Project

                “Don’t come to Mississippi this summer to save the Mississippi negro. Only come if you understand—really understand—that his freedom and yours are one.” -Bob Moses, civil rights activist, 1964

                Back in 2016, I told my friend America was becoming something I didn’t recognize. She said: “It sounds like this was your wake up call. But America has always had this side. You were just lucky enough that you didn’t have to look.” I’ve spent some of today reading about civil rights activists like Bob Moses and Fannie Lou Hammer. As I read about how openly and brutally hate, fear, and prejudice stepped up to shove them down, I thought back to that friend. We are the kind of country where white men violently storm the Capitol yelling “this is our house.” We need to feel that. Look in the mirror, own it.
                And keep working on it.
                Because we are not only like that. We are also like Stacey Abrams and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, like Judy Heumann and Zubaida Ula and Bob Moses. Of course there are some obvious ways where “my”—my sandwich, my money, my candidate—can mean “not yours.” But there are so many more ways where “my”—my health, my peace, my freedom—and yours are one. That’s a different kind of ours. That’s the one I choose for our house. I’m working to understand, so I can help with the work.

                “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
                there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

                When the soul lies down in that grass,
                the world is too full to talk about.
                Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other” doesn’t make any sense.” -Rumi

                “Each other” doesn’t make much sense to me. More and more, these days, I don’t feel like an ‘individual.’ The metaphor that keeps coming back, instead, is one string on a guitar. Sometimes it’s a replacement string, left alone in the drawer of this quiet apartment. Not much happens. I’m curled up. Still. Waiting. Sometimes I pick up a book, or look out the window, or water my basil plant, or listen to someone, or write to a friend, or go for a walk, and there’s a guitar again. The bridge and the headstock, the frets, the other strings, and we’re singing. 
                This morning felt kind of fuzzy. Thinking about that now, I don’t mind. I can like the resting times, curled up in the apartment. Then I was standing on a friend’s porch, cold-toed because I’d worn sandals in the freezing snow (I wasn’t there for long). The air wasn’t still anymore. It vibrated. A harmony. We talked about cookies and hot chocolate and plans, and I was more of me in not being only me. The shake of that sound has stayed with me all day, and now it’s back in writing this to you. For a moment, when you read, we’ll be a chord played together. Maybe we always are?
                Looking for “me” on New Years’ Eve, 2017, I walked up into the hills above Santa Rosa, CA. Through trees. The shadows of leaves. Past stones. A rising moon. I walked to a lake, the ripples soft along the shore, and turned back. Stars. Clouds. Hills. The city lights. On my way back down, at midnight, I could hear people cheering. I could hear a tree creaking as it leaned against another. What if the struggle isn’t to ‘find myself,’ but to move past the eggshell of how I imagined ‘myself’ as all this hatches to another moment?

“I had expected her to sink or get swept away
But she became stuck in a tide pool
Swirling between the rocks”
                -Ali Liebegott, The Summer of Dead Birds

                As a kid walking along the beach, I’d pick up pieces of driftwood and throw them out into the waves. I kept expecting them to float away. To go off into the wildness and mystery I somehow felt, out in those swells, and not come back. Then the rolling whitewater pitched them up onto the wet sand. I was surprised. As surprised, maybe, as when someone first told me that the smokestacks which went in my drawings of ocean liners and factories didn’t actually clean anything. They pushed the smoke higher up so it would come down somewhere else. So that we, standing right next to it, didn’t have to smell or feel what was happening. Instead we got that beautiful cloud feathering out into a clear sky.
                I think I wanted things to go away. To be lost, let go of, to disappear. In her poem, Liebegott is throwing into the sea the body of a dead bird. Sending it, maybe, to the land of the dead. I remember wondering, the first time I went to a funeral, what all the heavy stone was for—as though these who had been our loved ones would get back up if we didn’t weigh them down. Hold them where we’d put them, away and out of sight. Untouched. Unspoiled. Forever. But this is the land of the dead, isn’t it, just like it’s the land of the living.
                I wanted things to go away, but I wanted to keep them, too. To hold onto them, this campfire with my family, this friendship, this taste of ice cream. I wonder if both these desires—for things to go away, to be no more and be forgotten; for things to go on, unchanging—come from a place in my heart that is struggling with transformations. That is still learning that there is often also here, that the bodies and the bones don’t go away, though they crumble and come apart and become part of other things. And just now that doesn’t feel like a sad thing.
                The ocean, maybe, was teaching me. Just look at the sand and the driftwood. The wind. The grass growing up along the dunes, flickering, like low flames on old coals that once were branches.

                “’No!’ That’s my new philosophy.”
                -Sally in You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown

                Three weeks ago, I went out to the living room where my flatmate was working away on a big assignment, and said, “I don’t wanna anything.”
                She said, “Maybe you don’t want to one thing.”
                “I don’t want to finish an Uproar post.”
                “Maybe you should find a quote that says, ‘I don’t want to,’ and then you can write, ‘I agree.’”
                We laughed about that. Then we laughed about different quotes, and looked up songs, and ended up listening to You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown. Then we reminded the cat that there are a lot of good reasons not to chew on power cords. Then I washed some dishes. And I realized, I wanted to do all of those things. I wanted to go for a walk (though sometimes it’s hard to get started), I wanted to wonder through You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown again. I want to talk with you. I want to keep working on my book, keep teaching, keep finding ways to help. I want to lots of things: I just didn’t want to one thing, or more specifically, I didn’t want to one thing the way I thought it had to be done. As a teacher, I saw a lot of young people who didn’t want to write the paper. I also saw a lot of students who judged themselves by their productivity (like I do, and am learning to stop doing), and I started to hear in their no an insistence that there had to be another way to write. To learn. To be.
                I hear a lot about powering through. I hear less about abandoning the paths that don’t work. And I think sometimes it’s the no, the refusal, that makes space for a new choice. No. That’s a good philosophy.