I’ve been ill this week. Nothing serious, but the first time since it was something serious that I’ve had to tuck in and sleep 12, 16 hours of each day/night, so it’s unnerving.
The Norwegian’s call that 24-hour period a døgn. Day and night. Night and day. At night the light sneaks in through the gap between the blind and the window’s moulding. Just after midsummer, so the sky is never entirely dark. I remember how disorienting that was to me 30 years ago. Like a hangover, or jet lag. It took a season for my body to learn how to adjust to the elastic aspects of the year. Nothing is circular, really. Orbits are oblongs—wanting to be circles. There’s tension in it all. Like the ring we use in Pilates. The effort of living squeezes circles into oblongs, and perfect rings are left for the afterlife: like the rings of Dante’s Hell.
But for now, the night’s dim light serves as a reminder that darkness is guaranteed to come again.
The seasons here are so distinct that I’m tempted to count the summers I may have left. I don’t know if that is a good thing or a bad thing. The math isn’t difficult, so in the back of my mind, I know the best-case scenario. And I know we don’t always get that. Be happy now, right?
After watching an evening of improv last week, a friend said the so often heard phrase: “It’s important to get in touch with our inner child.” Since I teach theater, I hear this ad nauseam: the importance of play, the inner child, letting go of self-censorship. Hearing this, I’ve always felt defective.
The next morning, I went to the physiotherapist. While she was working around the cording in my left arm, I told her about the time I ran a marathon and barely made the cut-off time, but learned that England has legless lizards just like the ones here. She laughed and said I reminded her of a little kid who starts on one thing only to get distracted by something else and wander off discovering things. I laughed, too. But, later that afternoon, running on the beach, I cried.
I realised I have been in touch with my inner child all along, without acknowledging her.
Play—for me—doesn’t involve an aspect of “look what I can do”, but one of “look at that”. It isn’t a matter of being shy—of fearing judgement—I still point things out all the time, and rarely is anyone ever impressed. I’ve thought all these years that my lack of “playfulness” was a sign of trauma. I’m not sure anymore. If it is, then I’ve funnelled all that creativity into questioning, searching, connecting. This is of no more nor less value than those one or two plays I put on in my backyard when I lived. on and off for two years, in the house on Orange Street—where I had a tire swing in the backyard, and a best friend named P., who lived across the street and went in the grade above me. Both our “fathers” were criminals. Hers wore a uniform.
It was what it was. When I was 10.
I learned to clean seeds from an ounce of pot I never smoked. I read books about snakes. I read books about sharks. I wet the bed.
Maybe I needed a springboard that was beyond where the suburban sidewalk and the Santa Ana winds could send us. Maybe I needed to know that things like legless lizards were real things. I needed real, new things to hold on to before launching myself into unwritten stories.
I’m done whipping my inner child for not being more playful. She’s the kid who climbed across the top of the monkey bars, performed cherry drops, death drops, and wore the seats of her second-hand pants threadbare sliding down embankments. She’s the kid who climbed out of it all. We’ve always been in touch.
It’s still not clear how much of the wasp collection will be explicitly memoir-in-verse, but I don’t think any poems I’ve written have come from such a personal place.
One of the points on the curriculum of a subject I’m teaching this fall is to explore the differences between the private, personal, and professional in terms of working in the theater (presumably as an actor/performer). I love that this bit has been added. I always learn as I teach, and there is so much here to consider, and learn, in terms of all kinds of art. For example, I think the term “interpersonal” should be included in this discussion.
Why do we relish the biographical aspects of canonical works, while smacking down contemporary writers with labels like “confessional”? To be honest, I feel like sometimes the whole thing is a burlesque.
I seriously wonder if signing up for a burlesque course would help me figure all this out.
I’ll be back tomorrow with Wednesday’s Poem. And again on Sunday with another Process Journal Entry.
Until then, have a great day!
Warmly,
Ren Powell’s Acts of a Recovering Drama Queen
Writing against Melodrama by Engaging with the Natural World
Give some love. It only takes a little ❤️.
As a child I was a cry baby. Now it is all inside, but I am still a cry baby that no one sees. The Santa Anas are coming, but today there is the cool night and morning low fog along the coast. A hummingbird scolds from a prayer flag, the dog is growing old, I may be returning, shrinking, back to that crybaby, but no one will see it.
My son's "ex" is a burlesque performer, takes it very seriously as an art form (ie, performance art). She has used it to work out some trauma, she says, so maybe that would be worth looking into! But she warns there are many predators in that world who definitely do not see burlesque as art.
I'm glad you recognize your inner child's been with you all along. Your inner child isn't the same kind of playful as the stereotype of inner child--doesn't mean she isn't there.
When people ask me that irritating question of how old do you think of yourself, I always answer "11." And my inner child has climbed a tree and is hiding there, reading a book.