Writing with Tanya: Two Prompts

Female Nude with Green Shawl Seen from Behind - Käthe Kollwitz (1903)

  (1)

 Story Portal Prompt: at what point in your life did you feel least like yourself? How did you get back? 10 mins. Go.

Least like myself?  When most depressed back in the 1990s, I feared melting in tears and despair, so began taking anti-depressants.  I am still on them.  I've tried going off them twice, and each time, it wasn't more than a week before I felt again like there was no reason to get out of bed.  So which is the real me?  The one more in control or the one in a sobbing mush on the mattress?  As a medicated person, I've been able to retire from a non-traditional teaching career that I am both proud of and humble about.  I made it through a losing tenure battle, two moves, and two job changes--which included leaving behind the educational theatre for which my experience and PhD in dramatic arts had prepared me.  As a medicated person, I've become a friend of the truth and of Jesus which led to membership in the Religious society of friends and a life as a poet.  Daily, I feel myself becoming more comfortable.  Is this my self?  It is a self that gives me confidence and peace and only the kind of troubled mind that helps me see what way is opening for me.  I love that.  When I look back at the roles I played through the years, they often seem like separate people--Susans I cannot imagine ever being.  

(2)

Story Portal Prompt:  Dorothy Allison wrote: "Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I'd rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me."

Write a story about going naked rather than wearing a coat the world (or a family member, teacher or culture) made for you.

Try for a beginning/middle and end. Ten minutes. Post if you like.

Luckily, most of the roles I have played throughout my life came with their own costumes: daughter, student, hippy radical, wife, editor, organizer, professor, director, teacher--and those are only the offstage roles!  Now, retired, I have my lounge-around look which is another costume.  Which of these were assigned me and which did i choose for myself?  That's a nonsensical question, given the expectations I--and most humans--have internalized about what success at any moment looks like.  That's all part of the narration, and I was never one to rebel against it when other issues were more important.  Going naked may have more to do with naming--choosing to be called Susan rather than Ms. Chast or Dr. Chast.  Just Susan, a small person of no importance.  What do you do?  is the question that most often greets me, and even now I try to answer it.  "I am a writer," I say.  Not,  

I am retired.  I have no political or religious affiliations.  Here I am, just me, a brown-eyed older woman with a wrinkled neck and a slouch, here I am just doing this thing with you.  Let's enjoy this worship, this film, this performance, this dinner, this task.  Let's grin and enjoy (or frown and enjoy) how we pass the time together."

I imagine my companion lingering a little longer, and then looking for me again when we are in the same place. And again.  And again.  But so far, that does not happen. Nor do applying the hooks of story from experience, the normal clothes I try on to impress people.  I tell myself that people make these connections when young classmates.  During those years, I just kept moving on.  And people make those connections in their families, but my brothers and I are very, very different.  Pursuing this line of inquiry makes me sad, so I laugh myself out of it.  I enjoy being a hermit in the company of cats.  I enjoy writing this and that and reading short poems and long novels and not having any demands on my time.  And so I don the clothes of a relaxed stay-at-home or I sit here naked as I wish.  There is no one to make me rush for cover.  I love being naked.  But that, my dear imagined readers, only leads me to another story.

   © 2020 Susan L. Chast

Writin with Jesse

Vast and particular

Fascination and anger

Clown

In this vast pandemic the world seems united, smaller than usual, though we still have the haves and the have nots. I just heard from my Bengali friend, the Indian poet who was my partner at Poets United for three years. There the poor have been laid off work and are struggling to get back to their families, struggling to stay alive. In comes the winds and floods—cyclone runs, and she is grateful for her strong roof. I am grateful for mine. It is a white box I sit in, with a grey top. The winds take down the deadwood but the house withstands the battering of the dead and the dying. All that dark red is outside, swirling like a scream, and in here I have a calm, a golden flame that is amazingly steady despite the wind. How odd that it persists whether I feel fear, anger, despair or giddiness. I pray that everyone has it, this little house of heart that shelters their flame whether walking the road, drenched and hungry or sitting ensconced in front of media, full with enough or hoarding against fear. Sumana is in almost constant prayer with a mantra that takes the edges and escapes off her absorption into the universe. She cannot write, barely eats, though, oddly, she sometimes watches the NY Governor talk and hopes he becomes president. She cannot write, and neither can I. She has had to let her servantrs go, as they wanted to join the mecca back to their family homes. She loaded them with money and gifts and gratitude. I who have never had servants struggle to understand her NORMAL. It is not the same as serfdom or English manors where nobility are responsible for towns. It is more intimate, like sharing the home with another family. I gave up sharing a home when I became a professor. Cats and books and paper and media became my only companions, and they are still. I have given nothing up, but I've grown smaller anyway. No more public performance. No more attempts to publish. No more excursions to rallies and large gatherings. 

I have become my grandmother, sitting surrounded by art and my own work, but looking with longing out the windows to the world. In here it is modified paisley and subdued greens, soft like feather blankets, each seat a pleasure. Outside the universe and viruses are dancing, wild and free, as if humans had never constrained or tamed them and turned them to their own use. They are recalling their ancestors, hoping to resurrect them.  Oh, yes, I am reading Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind a tome by Yuval Noah Harari.  He puts words and philosophy to particulars I've long suspected.  I know what we have done.

Blue succumbs to red

The sky a mirror of blood

we shed, pretending.

I hide in pine tree

havens where soft browns and greens

soften existence.

Can I live here forever?

I ask white pine. Only if 

you entwine roots with everyone.

Jesse says that I Seek Justice for a larger world even when writing personally. 

 She noticed when I noticed color.

On viewing the National Theatre's Anthony and Cleopatra 5/7/2020

A Playful Pair

Guardian review of Anthony and Cleopatra

Heaven help me!  I found the death
of Anthony comic, Shakespeare’s
words rendered ridiculous by the
behavior of their characters.

Mind you, I am not used to stage
on screen—the projection needed
become mere yelling on film, and
not the famous nobler caressing language.

Of fame and fortune I cannot
speak when Shakespeare demotes women
as in today’s production wherein
Cleopatra so rarely rules.

But is nobility possible
in our world, where words are suspect
and pronouncements of honor are
laughable even without profit?

Poorest Cleopatra’s final praise
of Anthony questions his life—
Could he exist?  She does only
in death.  And the comedy ends.
 

Comedy is supposed to end
in marriage, but here the world
ends in  relief.  The day ends, 
and our downy windows close.

My blog poems are rough drafts.
   Please respect my copyright. 
If you quote, credit this page. 

     © 2020 Susan L. Chast

A Mary Oliver poem

Morning Poem

Every morning

the world

is created. 

Under the orange 

sticks of the sun

the heaped

ashes of the night

turn into leaves again 

and fasten themselves to the high branches ---

and the ponds appear

like black cloth

on which are painted islands 

of summer lilies. 

If it is your nature

to be happy

you will swim away along the soft trails 

for hours, your imagination

alighting everywhere. 

And if your spirit

carries within it 

the thorn

that is heavier than lead ---

if it's all you can do

to keep on trudging --- 

there is still

somewhere deep within you

a beast shouting that the earth

is exactly what it wanted --- 

each pond with its blazing lilies

is a prayer heard and answered

lavishly, 

every morning, 

whether or not

you have ever dared to be happy, 

whether or not

you have ever dared to pray. 

from Dream Work (1986) by Mary Oliver 

© Mary Oliver

Starting Over after a 2-Year Hiatus: A Story

I was so worried about being empty-headed that I filled and filled my head with interest and information and activity until I overflowed.  What a waste, I thought.  Unlike music filling and spilling, this was less touching than intrusive.  And, actually, I had to sit and let it all settle—use some up and let the rest settle—before I noticed that a little emptiness allowed for my soul to expand.  Soul is the opposite of ego, I think.  Brain activity expanded my ego, but this expansion took some of the “I” out. 

Perhaps I am still capable of asserting my skills, but that isn’t the pull of the soul in the moment.   The pull is to get up, move outdoors and walk.   We are mid-winter here in the Northeastern United States, so the sun lingers longer each day—at least daylight is longer even in the rain.  Winter hasn’t really shown up.  One 32 degree day and one tornado do not a winter make, but make my thoughts turn toward climate change.  If I’m ever to walk out of doors, I had better do it before it's impossible.

Winter here has meant road work every few blocks and the noise that accompanies it.  I don’t feel up to wrestling with that.  Standing in my yard to sense which way my path might lead, I notice buds greening themselves on Azalea bushes and Dogwood trees.  The Crocus heads peeping out of the earth two months early are dwarfed.  They didn’t have enough cold to hibernate, rest, and grow underground. 

They remind me of the fact that fewer species of plants and animals survived last season’s storms and fires.  I recently heard that it had reached 60 degrees in the Arctic.  I wouldn’t surprise me to hear that we had become un-moored from our place in the solar system, and were about to drift away with unknown results.  I try to imagine President Trump guiding the ship of state through that emergency, with no belief in science and with a full crew who is not privy to his navigational charts.  Non-cooperation lost us our leadership as nations unite around the earth.  We may be more powerful than any three of nations put together, but that doesn’t mean we can navigate the universe.  The whole earth would have to choose a path; we cannot detach our land mass from it.

There goes my head again.  To drop out of the rushing panic such thoughts bring, I get on my knees near a bed of soil that could be a garden.  I wrap my mind around my own land mass—this quarter acre which represents my citizenship, a stability I hold onto despite ensuing storms and hordes of displaced people on the move around the earth. 

I think I feel the earth warm and soften under me, and imagine I hear a sigh.  Walking anywhere else leaves my mind.  I could use loving care and so could my earth.  No, this is not MY earth.  I don’t own this spot so much as it owns me—never mind the jokes about mortgages and related costs, paperwork, and permits.  Never mind the taxes I have to pay to village, town, county, state and country.  Suddenly, I want to have a better relationship with this earth, one in which I accept who she is and learn how I can take part in her healing. 

I’m late.  I know several people who have been doing this all their lives.  Maybe now I get why.  My soul has grown enough to understand that, but it stops expanding the minute I think competitively.  So what if others have been doing this for decades?   I spent the same years following a leading to teach and to purchase land.  Now here, again, I’m being pulled in a definite direction.  Hallelujah!  It’s about time. 

 I rip up a tiny area of lawn before going back inside, feeling as if I’d been in prayer.  My knees ache.  I’ll have to contend with physical limits, but I can, I think.  To begin with, I’ll reread Braiding Sweetgrass.  I’ll research what is and who is indigenous here.  I’ll move slowly.  As Theodore Roethke put it, in his poem “The Waking”:

The Waking

By Theodore Roethke

. . . .

Great Nature has another thing to do   

To you and me; so take the lively air,   

And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.   

What falls away is always. And is near.   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.   

I learn by going where I have to go.

#  Susan Chast, copyright 2020