Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Untitled (Displacement Myth)

The soil was rich, a dark, dark brown that reminded Rowan of coffee grounds.

She dug her hands into it, feeling the moist earth sift through her fingers and against her palms. The smell of coffee in her memory mingled with the earthy smell; she could see the cup of it in Noah's hand, and the blankets in the other, the streetlights casting stark pools of light in the parking lot. He had smelled of coffee, he always did. She had held onto to him tightly, inhaling his scent, desperately trying to cleanse herself of that sterile white smell that clung to her like a disease.

Her hands tightened around the earth and she drew back, touching the leaves of the small potted aspen next to her. To the left out of the corner of her eye, the large oak loomed. She tried not to look at it.

The park was abuzz that day; families flocked to the huge green of Tamarack with baby trees in their black plastic pots. Mothers held the hands of little toddlers who clutched green toy buckets and shovels, and fathers pushed back the brims of their baseball caps while they toted trees and tools, looking up at the sun as it climbed in the sky. The park's Arbor Day celebration every year was a huge event in Terry, and it teemed with trees of various ages planted every year at the end of April. To Rowan, it was as large of a forest as she could find in eastern Montana, and she knew the best oaks to sit in with a book. “Your own little urban forest,” her Dad always said, his eyes twinkling.

When was the last time they had done that?

Penny, who was six, was next to her, arms pushed into the ground all the way up to her elbows, watching her older sister. Her wide blue eyes blinked, red hair blowing around her face in the breeze. Her little willow sat beside Rowan's aspen – the tree their mother had selected for her. The one her mother had asked her to plant on her behalf was a small cottonwood – funny, Rowan thought wryly, that she'd picked a cottonwood, what with her allergies and all. She used to fill burlap sacks with all the cotton that piled up under the patio table and in the corners of the fence to make pillows for her stories until Momma had apologetically thrown them, sneezing as she did.
Momma hadn't come today, and neither had Dad, who had muttered he didn't want a tree and had gone into the garage. Penny and Rowan had left both of them near the driveway, where Shawn had always worked on his pickup.

Rowan swallowed hard and stood, reaching to the fold-up shovel she'd thrown in the pack. The sound of the shovel slicing through the earth was softened, as though the ground was hurrying to muffle it. The white noise of the people around them grated on her nerves. Couldn't they all hear it? That horrific boom that the trees had done nothing to muffle?

Sometimes she thought she could hear his neck snap, like a sharp clap of thunder during the lightning storms he loved. That wasn't possible.
 
Penny pulled both fists out of the dirt, itching at her cheek and leaving a smudge across the her face; warrior stripes on an angel. “Can we plant mine first? Please Rowan?”

She smiled a half smile and nodded, tucking loose strands of auburn hair behind her ears. “Yeah, love. We can do that.”

The rosebud of Penny's mouth saddened a little as she watched her big sister dig. She wished she'd hum again while she worked, singing under her breath the way she always used to when she'd load the dishwasher or pull weeds in the garden.

Rowan stuck the shovel in the ground and got down on her knees, taking the willow and gently pulling it from the plastic pot it rested in.

Shawn had teased her for how much she loved trees almost as much as she poked at him for obsessing with machinery. He had always been in the garage, tinkering with whatever broken pickup or car was parked in the left side of the garage that Dad had designated “the Shop.” Putting a lift on his pickup had been the latest thing, though they'd sold it to someone in Forsyth last month.

Rowan ran her hand over the thinness of it's branches and it's tiny trunk, looking at the white roots that ran through the small bit of attached soil. They looked like veins, pale and stark against the brown. She hurried to cover them, patting the soil in place quickly. The veins in his arms had been green and purple, vivid through his still, translucent skin.

Penny patted the soil, the dull thud of her little hands packing the tree in place. She smiled. “Next?”

The two sisters worked on their knees, until the three little ones stood newly grounded, cottonwood, aspen, and willow in a perfect line, facing the big oak.

They were so little, Rowan thought, and so young. Their branches were thin, their bark still supple, and they all reached for the sky in a child-like stretch that Rowan watched Penny do before running off to join the other younger kids spinning on the axis of the blue and white merry-go-round.

To this day, she didn't know where the scream had come from. She'd looked at the accident, the mangled front end of the gray dodge accordioned into itself, the bits of glass crunching under her feet and sparkling obscenely in the ambulance light. She'd seen the open door of the ambulance where she glimpsed the matted fluff of her brother's black hair and heard her father saying, “I'm the father it's ok” to the paramedic in the white latex gloves – she hated those powdered gloves so much – who was trying to stop him, and saw Penny's face pressed against the window of the car where she'd been told to stay, her face red in the neon lights that wouldn't stop flashing, casting the scene into a bloody pall.

None of it was real. None of it could be – this was a scene from the movies she'd watched, these were the bad things that happened to other people on the evening news at night, while she was tucked away under the pages of her current book and the songs on her tongue.

In the real world, Shawn would be sitting next to her on the grass right now, waiting for them to be done planting and for Penny to be done playing and for Momma to be done talking to all the people she knew from church and for Dad to finish reading his book in the shade.

They would be staring at the rough bark of Rowan's favorite oak's trunk, wrinkled like the corners of the eyes of a wise old lady. She would be teasing him, and he would laugh that funny laugh where his voice would disappear that she'd been hearing for the last twenty years of her life, and his eyes would crinkle until he would say, “Ohhh man that's funny.” Fun-nay – that's how he said it. But this wasn't a real world anymore, and it hadn't been for a year now.

Because Shawn had fallen asleep at 2:30 am on April tenth, at the wheel of Dad's Dodge.

He had driven off the road and slammed into that oak.

He had gone through the windshield and his neck had broken.

And he had never woken up in that white bed in the hospital where he'd been hooked up to all sorts of tubes and wires, his paper thin eyelids covering his big brown eyes that none of them would ever see again.

All this left her staring at the trunk of the oak, the huge spot where the pickup had torn it's bark away and slashed deep scars into it's wood. It'd been a year, so the color of the exposed part had darkened and deepened as though it was trying to camouflage the damage, but the scars were still as sharply horrific as Rowan remembered seeing that night.

She closed her eyes against the sirens and the flashing lights and the colors.

“Rowan?”

She felt the touch of Penny's hand on her shoulder. Turning her head, Rowan saw her baby sister run her fingers through the little round leaves of the aspen, so green. “Hmmm?”

“I don't feel much like playing anymore.”

Rowan knew that face. She knew that blank stare, the one that was warding off whatever was surfacing in her memory. Her little sister's chin wobbled. “R-r-rowan...”

“Come here baby girl,” Rowan whispered, and Penny curled up on her lap, tucking her face in the crook of her neck. Rowan held her tight.

They sat there, the two girls and the young trees and the old trees.

They stayed until the roots of their legs let go, and they left the park, carrying the past in their pockets and under their nails.

Monday, March 25, 2013

This weekend, I had the misfortune of spending my money on the new movie "Olympus Has Fallen" which is yet another story about a foreign country (and following the same streak most of these other movies are following, that country is again North Korea) taking control of our government, before being defeated by the courageous hero played by King Leonidus himself: Gerard Butler.

I thought the script was awful, and the one redeeming thing I found about it was, as usual, Mr. Morgan Freeman. My boyfriend and I went in with high hopes...and had to squelch our laughs while they dragged a defiant Secretary of State down a hallway as she started shouting the Pledge of Allegiance at the top of her lungs. It was pretty awkward.

But, because of it's mythological content (seen most obviously in the name) I decided to post about it. In the movie, there is a program that controls our nuclear weapons "launch codes" or something to that effect, and they call it Cerberus, after the three-headed hound guarding the gates of the underworld. Accordingly, this program has three pass codes needed to gain access which would metaphorically allow "the gates of Hell" to be opened - as Mr. Freeman states in one of his lines. I'm curious - why does the government's (at least, the movie world's version of government) always use mythological names for classified things?

So disappointed. But the trailer for the baseball movie about Jackie Robinson looked good.

Thursday, March 21, 2013

"In Thrace the natives show their visitors
Two trees so close together that their branches
Seem to grow upward from a single trunk."

- Ovid's Metamorphoses

Happy World Poetry Day.

I wrote what is below before I read the story, but the story of Baucis and Philemon is one of my favorites from Ovid, and I didn't realize until today how well these fit together (at least in my mind).

How far down does your love go
earthed in the
rich soil of your soul that turns
and breathes
takes root even in the tips
of your fingers
Grounding you in a place
there is no ground
but skin
under gentle palms
His rough cheek against the flower of yours
The leaves that brush against
both lips
and arms that wind as branches do
in the most ancient
of embraces.
This –
is this what it is
to touch another's soul and find
it is your own?


by Autumn Toennis - Jan 2013


Trees. Always trees, and the timeless love they symbolize for me.

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

"The world I see and the words I have do not match."
- Helen in Timberlake Wertenbaker's The Love of the Nightingale

 One of my favorite quotes, and to come from such a terribly sad story. I happened upon Tereus, Procne, and Philomela (or Philomele) last semester in my Revenge/Tragedy class when we read the above play - a feminist take on the Ovid myth, written in the late 80's. It has a much more modern feel to it than the original story, but some of the language within still struck me the way specific phrases in Ovid do - like the phrase above.

There are moments in stories where certain lines jump out at me and put into words all of the scrambled swirling thoughts in my head that I can't keep straight - or say something much more eloquently than I could ever hope to. This above line did that for me; my words not matching the world is something that I feel everyday. They are inadequate for the beauty and the pain that I see and I read and learn, but...nothing I write or say can satisfy what I feel and want to convey. And sometimes it's the smallest things, like those twelve words, that let me breathe momentarily with the realization that someone, even if I don't know them and never will, understands, and wrote the words I felt.

It's my own sort of "pain" I suppose - nothing like what Philomele and Procne, and even Tereus, suffered, but a frustration that hounds most people my age and probably well beyond. A search for understanding that's never content. And...pain is beautiful in it's own way. We write tragedies, we read sad stories, we cry when we hear songs that make us weep - but they're all beautiful, in their own way.

Maybe it's because we know that pain is something that will never disappear, that it's something that will always be with us. And because of that, we must find the soft things about it, the delicate parts that we hear in written in notes of songs and the eyes of all the people around us who have, in their own ways, experienced their own pain.

Or maybe it's just me. When I was younger, I took piano lessons from third grade all the way to my senior year in high school. In the evenings, while my mother would do dishes, I would practice piano because I knew she loved to sit and listen to me play. The only problem was that even from a young age, I loved the songs with that left that melancholy taste in your mouth that you couldn't quite explain, the ones that were sadly sweet, or bounded in huge angry chords. Momma would always say something akin to, "Why can't you play something happy, Autumn Marie? Why can't you play something happy for me?" She loved jazzier tunes, or happy ballads, things that I couldn't bring myself to play. I had a wonderful childhood - there was nothing terrible about it to induce this, but I played my sad songs - and I still do today.

I don't know why.

I think humanity is in some ways obsessed with pain, is fascinated by morbidity. We see it in the news, read it in articles, watch it on television, and read it in stories as old as that of Procne and Philomela and Tereus.

We haven't changed at all. And we're still asking the age old question: why?

A grave in Rome, Italy, Campo Verano



On that happy note, most recent song favorite - it's a cover.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p856dtR4mms

It fits this picture perfectly in a lot of ways.

Monday, March 18, 2013

Mr. Nabokov

"While she poured him another glass of tea, he put on his spectacles and reëxamined with pleasure the luminous yellow, green, and red little jars. His clumsy, moist lips spelled out their eloquent labels—apricot, grape, beach plum, quince. He had got to crab apple when the telephone rang again."

Beautiful. Sad. But so beautiful. It's after reading small things like these that I wonder how I can even acknowledge myself as a writer - that feeling of "how can I ever write something worthwhile?" etc. But at the same time, it's one of those that made me want to go out and write something so short and powerful. I loved it. To be cliche, there were so many "signs and symbols" within the story that I know have to mean something...but I'm not sure what. I think that's ok for now. We always discover new things every time we read a text again.

The myth that I felt a connection to through the story was of Icarus and Daedalus - the son who tried to fly, and the father who wanted to free him. That imagery itself is beautiful, but it's the ten little jars of jam that I can't figure out.

Time to read it again.

Thursday, March 7, 2013

The Spinners


I do believe that some artists place things in paintings for particular reasons - the ladder is fading into the darkness for a reason, the cat at the women's feet has great significance, etc. But sometimes I wonder if when they paint, some artists say, "I will place this object here just to mess with my viewers because it doesn't actually mean anything!"

I do hope Mr. Velasquez is not one of those artists.

Because of the light in the back, my gaze is immediately drawn to the well-dressed women admiring the tapestries at the back - which I would presume is the one Athena wove, since the spinenrs at the front of the painting wouldn't have wanted to incur the wrath of the goddess by hanging Arachne's as well. And because of the era of the painting, and the dress, I would say they wouldn't want to hang Arachne's tapestry out of superstition, because of the story passed down from grandmother to mother to daughter over and over again as the years passed. They sit spinning, gossiping in whispers about secrets the fancy ladies in the back know nothing of.

But when I look at the tapestry itself, I see a different story. I rather think that the image woven is of Athena cursing Arachne. The figure on the left appears to be wearing a helmet, something that the goddess is commonly depicted wearing. And if that be the case, I would say that the spinners deliberately spun that tapestry themselves and hung it for all to see as a warning against pride. Maybe the pride of the rich who come to view the commoner's beautiful work?

Maybe the cat playing with the ball of string indicates that we were all being toyed with by a higher power. Maybe the ladder going into the darkness symbolizes that we should only reach so high.

I love paintings. There's so many layered meanings in them. Thank you, Pascaline de Mesmay, for showing me that.

Saturday, March 2, 2013

Ticuna Initiation Ceremony

In the Ticuna Indian tribe, when a girl first begins to menstruate, she it separated from the rest of the tribe, and sequestered in a small room where only the elder women of the tribe are allowed to see her. They spend the time there educating her about the myths, history and stories of the tribe - a process that can take up to six months.

After that is finished, she is painted entirely black, and the symbol of her clan is painted on her chest. Then, all of her hair is pulled out by hand (though, in more recent years, the girls have the option of simply having their hair shorn). She emerges from the room, and it dressed in traditional garments; her eyes are covered, and then begins the four day period in which she is not allowed to sleep at all. During the day, as the tribe sings and chants and plays all sorts of instruments as she (assisted by a man on either side of her) continuously jumps back and forth over a campfire.

At the end of the four days, she and an infant from the tribe are carried to the river and placed in it, to represent the symbolic cleanse of her childhood. After this, she is officially considered an adult.

Friday, March 1, 2013

Phaedrus

" I don't know why I'm so gripped to go there
A universe riddle that only I know?
Mr. Robert he says, "It's all in the head!"
Tell me, Phaedrus, what's good, is it Idaho? "


I was driving home last night from acapella practice, with my iPod on shuffle and "Idaho" by Nerina Pallot surfaced. It's one of my favorite songs, and the timing was ironic because it's a song I associate with traveling - which I will be doing today right after this class actually. But the above lyric, the one right at the end, caught my attention.


Phaedrus.


It sounded mythological, but it wasn't one that I recognized from the Ovid book. Why would she put his name in the song? Why does he know what's good?


There were several men who came up with that name during my search, specifically Phaedrus, a book written by Plato, but the one who seemed to make the most sense was the Greek Phaedrus, who was the head of an Epicurean school of thought. Because Epicureanism revolves around the ideology that "pleasure" is the greatest good, it would make sense for Miss Pallot to add his name into her song, asking him, "What's good?"


Not as interesting as I was hoping for, but still neat to know the reason behind that line. There's always meaning in lyrics.

Here's the song - it's beautiful. 


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RlcDuRQSas