Salvaged

Here are some poems from an old blog I had. The site is shutting down, so I'm moving everything. Next, I'll be putting up more self-contained pieces that I have on there.


Lenses
Note on the poem: I was experimenting with a fictional voice and watching the sunset go down, wondering what it would be like to feel a part of oneself die with the world. There are some violent images in the poem, and I would like to remind you that this isn't me, but a character I found and wanted to help.

Discouraging sunsets yell at me
gold and green gold and green
make-believe you know me
mysterious girl in gold and green
play me like every other one
and I really want to run
trip and fall and pick the scabs
get up and scream in your face
and the words are gold and green
pinch me and I bruise
but I never seem to wake up
I slap you and you stay asleep
and the blood is green and gold
I hug my arms against the wind
And your breath down my neck
is green and gold green and gold
And now I'm falling falling
falling falling falling falling
to the bottom and I close
my eyes and the shapes
are green and gold green
and gold green and gold

Gravity
Look at the little ones hiding near the wall.
The wall, so tall
It looms over their fragile heads
It has stolen their mothers
And its stolen their beds.
Look down,
Fold your hands,
They don't want to see you laugh
They don't want to see you cry
They just want to see you.

Deus Ex Machina
Tools from God, Heaven,
Divine flashlight to illuminate the farthest corner
Counter-weights, pulleys, curtains...
The cold machines that fool you!

To become oneself, in front of others,
So real, there is an imposition of truth.
We trick you, hide behind makeup and smoke
To tell you that this is life.

And you believe us.

We want to be immortal, if only for a second.
Because, you see,
we made God's hand weeks ago.

And the tools are our own.

I Have a Window
The energy is seated beneath my collarbone,
layers of skin do nothing to protect me.
So raw.

Outside my window people sit and talk
and talk and talk.
No parties, because of class.

I have met my home today, a baby labrynth in its own right.
And I must try and become:
A sexual vegetable.

I think a zucchini will do.

And I wait.

Root Bound

"Just a stone's throw from here, actually,"
she says. "A bit north. Can't miss it."

He thanks her for the directions,

buys some liquorice cigars to pay her back.

A bit north.

It is not worth it to keep moving now, he thinks.

Besides, it is very pretty here:

paintbox sunset rooted by a green hill.

I could just stay here, he thinks.

It wouldn't be so bad.

The cigars are stale.

Leathery and bitter. He eats them anyway.

A bit north.

He looks over his right shoulder and sees it.

Just a stone's throw.

It feels warm here. Comfortable.

The people are nice, he says to himself.

Too bad about their candy.

Can't miss it.

So why is it so unreachable?

He feels his feet begin to root.

Sunset becomes dusk, but he stays there.

He counts the stars. He makes new constellations.

For tonight, this is home,

for tonight.

Tomorrow, he must lift and continue.

Leave sweetness behind to go north,

find a somewhere on his own.

Updates

Alors,

For my regular readers (hi mum), I thought I'd give you a bit of a summary of what has been happening in the Geeniverse lately. The answer in short is school. And that isn't particularly interesting. So, class by class, here we go:

Singing: Not too much. Singing old English love songs about bonny lasses and such.

Voice: Shakespeare, Shakespeare, Shakespeare. It's delightful, really. And for once, I am not too afraid of looking like a dumbass. So, I take a few more risks and get involved. There is no such thing passivity with ol' Bill. I sat on a wall for about a thousand mental years to know this. You can be utterly silent and the most attentive character in the scene. Bystanders are some of the most important people in drama. I have also made very, very good friends with Adriana from Comedy of Errors. She and I would be pals. And I can now breathe properly.

Acting: To quote an exchange I've had with my friend Alex:
"I'M A SEAGULL!"
"Shut up, Nina."
Ca-caw! We are delving into Chekhov, and it is such a departure from Shakespeare. It feels like there is a railway switchman, Petit Prince-style, going from verse to naturalism. Feel it, act between the lines, act in your line, act when others are talking. It is so full of energy, and there is so much detail despite the fact that the language is concise. Often perplexing . And I am playing Masha, the woman I understand the least. But I've been wearing more black and mentally gaining about fifteen pounds before entering. The snuff and alcoholism? Not so much.

Movement: It is becoming less of a constant reminder of my deficiency of grace and more of a learning experience. It's easier now that it is contemporary dance and not ballet. Ballet was maddening. I find that contemporary and I are pals. We are also creating a dance/movement study from a painting. I picked - in retrospect, quite naively - Picasso's Guernica. It is heartbreaking, enraging and exhausting. I am also using a piece of Yann Tiersen's music in which a violin is not so much played, but tortured. Oh, goodness gracious. I can't spend more than fifteen minutes a time creating it. More like GRRRRRnica.

I am also in a small show and still working in radio, but those will merit their own posts later.


And that is all for now. I should probably do some real work, now...

Canuck or not...

... you owe it to yourself to check this out. And yes, this is a cop out for the last post of January (HOLY DOODLE!)

http://www.cbc.ca/radio2/cod/concerts/20091215quest

Resolving

I usually don't think New Year's resolutions, in the traditional sense, are such a good idea. Often, they do motivate positive change, but sometimes, they cause disappointment. How many times have you absolutely promised yourself to do X, and you never do?

At the same time, goals are very important. You can't rely on sheer moment-to-moment intentions to get you through life. Telling yourself to accomplish something in a certain amount of time encourages you to get the damn thing done. And I do this with myself: have this chapter read by five, this paper written by next week, dinner on the table in an hour. In fact, I believe it is the basis of my sanity.

And (I do feel odd, saying this at my age, believe me) as I get older, time seems more and more precious. By Tuesday, I feel like my week is nearly done. My weekends blur together and I can't remember if the party was last week or last night. Everything zips past me, and I lose awareness of what I am given sometimes.

Though aspects of my personal life are a bit iffy, I am LOVING what is happening academically. In class today, we got notes on our Shakespeare pieces. We then took the rest of the hour to talk about process-oriented learning and how we feel about it.

I am a gold-star kind of girl. Did I do it right? Do I get a check mark? For someone to tell me that I can't get it right is to tell me I've failed. Nope, sorry. That was wrong. Therefore, you are terrible.

When you focus on the process, however, all of that falls out the back. You can't get it right, but you can't get it wrong. And there is no end in sight. It feeds my desire to keep trying and discover new things. And, to be proud of myself for my work. Not for the nod from my instructor.

It is better, I've found, to feel the ground under your feet than constantly squint into the horizon. I'm still learning this.

I resolved this year to find joy in the process. To take my time, and savour what I am learning and discovering. I want to fall in love with the world again, and to take care of myself and the people around. I want to be enraptured in the now, with the occasional glace ahead. I want to be on track and on focus.

And, for reading this rant, I give you:

Another Body Blog

Hot Damn, it's Crystal Renn!

I've always had a very strong relationship to my body, and I know other women can relate. It's a stereotype that we get together and whine about our 'huge' thighs and barely visible wrinkles, but stereotypes have to come from somewhere. And I've been in one of those body circles enough times to know one thing: satisfaction is the Holy Grail. Within my particular group of friends, self-flattery is very, very rare. And yet, as I look at all of the women I spend time with, I can't see what they could possibly complain about. We seem to save the ultra-critical (and cruel) lens for our own bodies.

Yet, as every feel-good women's magazine has told us time and time again, there is nothing to worry about. It takes all kinds to make a world, and that goes for bodies, too! They've also had countless articles and polls about how men feel about our bodies. The result is relentlessly unanimous: they love the way we look. And no, they don't see the wobbly bits and other flaws as detractors, more like things that make that woman unique and memorable.

So, what are we worrying about?

As someone who has gone from deliberate food abstinence to dancing and feeling incredibly confident and sexy (and everywhere in between), I can tell you it is all in our heads. That doesn't make the feelings any less real.

When I was withholding food from myself, I was very young. This was in junior high. I couldn't control very much in my life, so my body became my project. It happened by accident. I started to eat smaller and smaller amounts, and I'd get compliments on my figure. I was also in martial arts from age seven to fourteen, so my small frame has always been fairly muscular, never Natalie Portman-esque and delicate. This was, of course, a time when my body was changing on its own. As I developed more of a woman's body, I was unable to stop controlling my size, and I felt disgusting. By the beginning of high school, I was noticing that men - not just boys my age - would stare at me. The attention made me feel like I'd done something wrong.

The sexuality of my figure was something I couldn't control, and it was something I would grow into more and more. I wasn't obsessive like I was in those earlier years, but I'd keep an eye on how my body reacted to my lifestyle. I kept a finger on the pulse of my body. And that's when I spoke in those cirlces. Other girls would butter me up and then complain about their own issues.

I have by no means have had a very bad relationship with my body. And I know many women who have. I'm thankful for it, and what it allows me to do. I've got the luxury of being able to complain about petty things. I'm aware of that.

Going back to the picture I topped this blog off with: that is the beautiful Crystal Renn, a plus-size model. One of the most successful in the industry in fact. Over the holidays, I read her book Hungry, which I recommend to anyone who is interested in this topic. She's gone through a similar journey to mine, but in greater extremes. After trying to get a career going as a straight size model - a period of several years which involved extreme diet control and exercise bulimia - her body began to rebel. She was in the office of her agent when she realised how disconnected she was from her body. When she moved into the plus world, she was able to use her talents and her intelligence, both of which had been robbed of her when she was starving. She does, of course, have to monitor her appearance, but it is more of a careful watchfulness rather than oppression.

It breaks my heart to see so many women at odds with their bodies, distancing themselves from the corporal by measuring everything. Even in many western Yoga studios, the emphasis is on the "burn" and getting a cute butt, not on the fusion of the body and the spirit. My mother, trained as a Yoga teacher, is always puzzled when she hears someone say that they've gotten hurt during a session. "If they actually knew what was going on in their bodies, this wouldn't ever happen" she says "We don't allow the body and the mind to be one. Rather, our bodies become a project."

To any woman who has read this and can relate: listen to Crystal, listen to those very cute magazine articles that tell you how great you are, listen to the man or woman in your life who adores your bum and your tummy. And, most importantly, listen to your own body and what it needs. When you tune in, you'll be healthy.

Take care!

Taking Credit and Taking Charge

I always find it difficult to take compliments for work that I have done and I can detach from criticism. I just don't feel like I own the product. At the same time, however, I feel proud of what I have done.

I've been reading Leonard Nimoy's I Am Spock, which is great if you want lots of Star Trek Trivia. But, at the same time, he spends much of the book talking about his relationship to "the pointy-eared guy", and how Spock has helped Nimoy to be successful. There are debates between the actor and the character over who should take credit for a compliment. Nimoy also has countless stories about going to the writers and producers to change scenes to adhere better to the essence of a character. If he was given a story line that required Spock to fall in love, for instance, Nimoy needed good reasons for an emotionless character to feel this.

It's an important thing to remember, and I've heard many directors say it: when all is said and done, the storyteller with the closest connection to the audience is the actor. After rehearsal, it's all about the people onstage. And in film, the lasting product that we see is the performance that the actor has given. There is, of course, less control in this process due to editing and such. You always identify with the actor however.

Considering that, I agree with Nimoy's insistence on keeping the character straight. I am sure some of the writers must have wanted to strangle him at times, but I feel I would do the same thing. The actor is the guardian of his character. Especially in a television setting, consistency is important.

And just one little note: it is also interesting to go from William Shatner's Up Till Now to I Am Spock, just based on their retelling of some of the same events, including Shatner's on-set pranking. They are very different people and especially different actors, and this has made for quite the extracurricular study session!

Bring it ON!

I'm in love with the idea of having my own company, with my contemporaries, all contributing to one altruistic goal of creating Great Art. And in a way I have it. I have the opportunity to work with my classmates and have access to these wonderful spaces. And, in this university setting, I've got an all-access pass to people of all different backgrounds and sensibilities. I'd love to get it going.

Sometimes, though, it is difficult to think of myself as an artist. Sometimes it is really hard to shake the desire to want an A- at least on a project that you're working on rather than getting caught up in the process. And sometimes it is hard to not create a project based on what you know the instructor likes.

The irony is that they are always telling us to do the opposite, to take risks and to not care what our grades are. "They really don't matter", one of my instructors has said. She waved the matter away with a flourish of her heavily-jeweled hand. "What I'm looking to see you do is to put yourself out there! Forget your fears. No one is judging you." But they are. We all are judging each other, to a certain extent. And despite its connotation, judgement doesn't always have to be critical.

It is finding that balance of reckless abandon that makes for creativity, the mania that infects us until we quench it by producing art. It is a divine energy, the same that has entered saints and mystics for thousands of years, telling them why things are the way they have become. In this world, we need to find a way to balance the rawness of the divine with the consistency that is the manufacture of art.

I found myself in a bad place about a week and a half ago, on the fourth. We'd just finished our end of the semester with the annual coffee house, and there were parties to follow. I watched all of my friends leave the building, forgetting I was there in their excitement. I walked home, sat on my bathroom floor and collapsed. Waves of powerful anger, fear and despair were coursing through me, and I wanted out. The next morning, I felt heavy, weak....but purged. I realised that it was everything I had held on to for the entire semester. All of the anxieties and stress that I felt I couldn't show in the semester had to come out sometime. That was also the night I took out my mother's rosary. I don't pray with it regularly, but I needed something tactile to reconnect me with God, with the heartbeat of everything else that was alive.

I truly believe that creativity is what joins us to our god, and the artist can experience periods of disconnect, which feel very hollow. What happens when we are alive and full of the energy is a high, and when we fall below neutral, it becomes hard to handle.

Part of tapping into the energy is being open. One needs to be healthy, rested, and willing to accept failure as well as success. And one needs to understand that nothing we do is something we can take credit for, not entirely at least.

I am thankful for having become more adult this semester, but I am also thankful for not losing the explorer inside of me; the little one who is willing to try anything, even if it means being laughed at.

You may hear more about Grenadine Dance later...