Ren Powell’s Acts of a Recovering Drama Queen
Writing against Melodrama by Engaging with the Natural World—
The beach is empty, but someone has been here before me, between the 4 am low tide, and the coming high tide of mid-morning.
I follow the footprints near the water’s edge: the person wore trainers with a waffle pattern. Beside the footprints, and around them, are a scattering of three-point impressions from the claws of a medium-sized bird of some sort. An oystercatcher maybe.
I tell myself a story in which the creatures are companions. But there’s no beginning and no end to the story. Just their forever-walk along the beach in the warm breeze.
I find an abandoned crab. A spider. A moth. There’s a thick stem of seaweed that looks like a vertebrae. All dead in the surf.
I think about how everything on the earth is just an echo of something else. How a seashell is kin to a child’s ear, how the soft ear of an infant will fold and stick in place, and how as I age, my ear is beginning to fold in sleep, and stick again.
I think about the sand fleas, the flies, and the wasps. Then, why these poems are so hard to write, and how the subject matter seeps into my mind like a toxin. Yesterday, on our run, I told E. that I can’t find anything beautiful about a wasp. He tells me he can.
The funny thing is that he doesn’t know what I’m really talking about when I talk about wasps, and his words are still comforting.
I speak in bursts into the microphone on my earpiece as I run. Listening to the recording now, I can hear the surf washing in and out.
Shame. I’m talking about shame by the time I reach the concrete and iron jetty. I remember: I was thinking about the dead moth, and the dead crab, and how shame is a human construction that has no intrinsic value in the world.
Shame only serves a purpose when it is a catalyst for change.
I’ll do better, I say, and I try to close a door in my mind. But something sticky flows from the gaps between the door and the walls. It pools on the floor.
I run into the surf, washing my bare feet in the cold salt water, and trying to let my shoulders drop. I focus on the distance between my shoulder and my elbow, my elbow and my wrist: an Alexander technique1 to let go of tension. It distracts me from my rumination. This is where I get into trouble.
Apophenia is the slippery slope towards insanity. Sometimes, it’s by way of poetry. In the early 1800s the hospital reformer Dorothea Dix, with her tight collar and tighter heart, wrote that she was afraid to write poetry—she worked so closely with the mad, she recognised the seduction. She practiced moral therapy2, and ate fresh oranges to try to lift her depression. She criticised the younger women for their wasp-waisted corset fashion that caught men’s eyes. Dix focused on keeping herself contained, in a small, clear space—with a clear view. In the end, she ran up against the walls of a room in her own hospital.3
If she had regrets, they were regrets of what she’d left undone. I have those, too.
I have those kinds of regrets, also.
The sand is packed tightly around the jetty, and I feel the impact of each step reverberate up my shin, all the way to my hip. A tern takes off in front of me. The tiny fist of feathers stretching wide, sleek and sharp, leaves no prints in the sand.
I run inland a ways, to where the sand is warmer, churned by the families who took advantage of yesterday’s bank holiday—the weather unseasonably, un-regionally warm. I make a wide half-circle around the rusted jetty.
The jetty was built by the Germans during WWII. The sea is claiming it, ever so slowly. Maybe giving us time to understand the purpose of our species’ collective shame. Giving us time to work out what needs to change.
Someone traps a wasp under a juice glass on a hot day, and leaves her there, in the sun. I doubt she’s rummaging through regrets during her last moments. I don’t believe that wasps have shame. They don’t need shame. They do what they do to survive. Why do we attribute intent? As though our projection makes it real.
Someone traps a wasp under a juice glass on a hot day. It’s not a matter of survival. It’s not even a genuine inconvenience. It’s irrational fear, and repressed compassion. The wasp is a madwoman in a featureless room.
Someone is swallowing regrets. It’s such a shame.
The far end of the beach is littered with jellyfish. Small, clear moon jellyfish the size of coins. Larger lion’s manes with their orange/red centers. And today, half a dozen mauve stingers—deep purple, gelatinous pockets full of organs—have washed up, far from warmer seas where they belong.
I think they shouldn’t be here.4 And more than that: I know this deep purple color I’m seeing doesn’t really exist at all.5
Thank you for taking the time to read! I hope you have a great week.
Warmly,
Acts of a Recovering Drama Queen is publishing three times a week:
Sunday Shares, Tuesday’s Process Journal Essays, and Thursday’s Poem.
❧ Beetles & Bombs | Poetry & Plays ❧
Give some love. All it takes is a little ❤️.
https://alexandertechnique.com/
https://dictionary.apa.org/moral-therapy
https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2013/september/elastic-state-mind-dlds-autobiography-poems-ren-powell
https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/wildlife-explorer/marine/jellyfish/mauve-stinger
https://www.zmescience.com/feature-post/natural-sciences/physics-articles/matter-and-energy/color-purple-non-spectral-feature/
I always enjoy your meandering, attentiveness to life. Weaving in your own interior, contrasting and mirroring it to all you see/know, walking the fine line between metaphor and madness.:) I can wholly relate.
Thank you so much, Kimberly. That means a lot. I've always figured I can't be alone in the leaping between our inner and outer worlds.