Juggling Projects

Research and writing as a staggered process

After a couple of weeks of sunny weather, and mostly warm breezes, autumn slammed into this weekend. Walking Leonard, my shoes soaked through because the little creek has spilled over its banks. The fields are mire after this morning’s rain. But now the sun heads toward the horizon and the clouds are discrete once again. Grey-blue, and dirty lavender. Everything feels in-between. In between the blue and the grey, between the sickness and health, between ambition and resignation.

I started the wasp project last year, when I had so much time on my hands—and so little energy. Now my schedule is bursting at the seams again. I couldn’t be more grateful. Still, I’m realising how important it is to put—and keep—everything in containers of time, and of attention. Saying no when asked to make exceptions is difficult, but I can recognise the dangers now: when I’ve played helpless when I give in and shove aside my own plans to please others. I imagine myself tying myself to the railroad tracks in a parody melodrama. Secretly relieved to be helpless.

Cancer comes with lessons. The first of which may be that we don’t have unlimited time to do what we want to do, or to be with who we want to be with. I’ve had a deep impulse to do “all the things”, but also a sense of disconnection. Most days, I hover somewhere in-between.

I need to stop researching the wasps, and settle into the writing. I’ve collected all the facts in a notebook, and will pull bits out as I write the poems. All of this is one container.

And now I create a second container, in order to pick up a project I’ve dropped twice over the past ten years. I’m resuming research on Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven. I missed the window of time when few people knew of her, and there was relatively little on the internet about her work or her life. Still, there is something about her story that I can’t shake. Not that I understand why. There’s a play here that I want to write.

There are historical artists who fascinate me: Dorothea Dix, Oscar Wilde, Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven, Andy Kaufman. The thing is, I have no desire to have known any one of them personally. I have every reason to expect they’d have been hurtful, vulgar, and other kinds of abrasive toward me. I think I would squirm watching them be cruel to other people. All the same, since they are dead—because they are dead—I can move in close to their ghosts. It wouldn’t be incorrect to say that they scare me, these ghosts.

Does that mean I recognise their contempt, their abject desire for freedom, their narcissism—in myself? That might explain why I keep dropping the Elsa project. But now I am realising, I want to do it, and there may be no time but the present. I honestly believe that not focusing all my energy on one container, will keep me from drowning in the darkness of either project.

I just need to limit my time in the “in-between”, and work. I need to keep something in my hand at all times.

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Thank you for taking the time to read or listen. I’ll be back later this week with an audio poem. And again next Sunday with another Process Journal Entry.

Until then, have a great week!

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 ❤️.