National Poetry Month, in a Plague Year #2 – Allen Ginsberg

National Poetry Month, in a Plague Year

#2 – Allen Ginsberg

Seems appropriate, during national poetry month, and on the 23^rd anniversary of his death, to mention Allen Ginsberg.

I’ve often wondered if Allen Ginsberg and I would have gotten along. There are odd little coincidences and catches surrounding my experience of Ginsberg … He died the year before I went to the writing school that he founded with Anne Waldman in 1974 (the year before my birth).

My first summer at the “Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics” (yes, that is really its name) his presence and his absence were palpable. Everyone was still very much grappling with his death.

I mostly felt shut off from a lot of the discussions and sadness and celebration about him. While I had read a few things, I’d only gotten a book of his work about the year before. I hadn’t even realized, when I applied to Naropa (the school where the JKSDP lives), that Ginsberg was a founding father.

I got to know Ginsberg after his death, in my two years at the school, feeling his influence all around. I checked books out of the library with his handwritten notes in them. I had teachers who were his former students, friends, lovers. I heard gossip, worship, and derision. Becoming so steeped in this world of his absence, my “personal” experiences with him are rather ghostly than concrete.

Here are two. First, one morning just before a weekend workshop that was going to deal with Ginsberg, I woke to find a hand written notation in the front of my copy of his 1996 “Selected Poems”. I had no idea how the note had gotten there, although it seemed to be my hand writing. I couldn’t remember having written it at all. It felt like a message direct from Ginsberg himself. It reads: “If you say it / absolute, perfect honesty / they will get it. / Trust yourself”.

And once I had tea with him, in a dream. (Dreams were definitely something to pay attention to at Naropa … for instance, the gossip around school was that everyone always eventually had a dream about a particular teacher of poetic theory … And I did eventually have mine, it was wild.) In my Ginsberg dream I was in the mountains, high up among tall narrow pines. I struggled along a frightening, narrow dirt track on the edge of the mountain – up and up, until I found a little cabin. Inside the cabin, Ginsberg sat waiting for me. He invited me in, offered me tea. We sat and drank the tea together. Mostly in silence. And in the end, I left the way I’d come, feeling as if I’d just had a visit with a Buddhist master, feeling as if I might be able to see straight through the veil if I could just let go enough.

I’m not a Ginsberg scholar in any sense … but I think that his poetry tells you a lot about him. For one thing, he cared deeply about the suffering of others, was deeply affected by the intrenched inequalities and injustices in our social and economic systems, and was brilliantly, joyfully, and exuberantly defiant of those who cared more about the bottom line than their fellow humans.

I think he probably would have had a lot to say about the way COVID-19 has brought into such stark relief the disparities between rich and poor, the ominous greed of the power elite, and the fragility of our very un-ecological economic system.

For now, I thought I’d share one of his most haunting and heartening pieces – the Footnote to Howl, written in 1955. It’s a very Ginsbergian celebration of the world and all things in it (except, possibly, Los Angeles).

FOOTNOTE TO HOWL by Allen Ginsberg

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!

The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!

Everything is holy! everybody’s holy! everywhere is holy! everyday is in eternity! Everyman’s an angel!

The bum’s as holy as the seraphim! the madman is holy as you my soul are holy!

The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstasy is holy!

Holy Peter holy Allen holy Solomon holy Lucien holy Kerouac holy Huncke holy Burroughs holy Cassady holy the unknown buggered and suffering beggars holy the hideous human angels!

Holy my mother in the insane asylum! Holy the cocks of the grandfathers of Kansas!

Holy the groaning saxophone! Holy the bop apocalypse! Holy the jazzbands marijuana hipsters peace peyote pipes & drums!

Holy the solitudes of skyscrapers and pavements! Holy the cafeterias filled with the millions! Holy the mysterious rivers of tears under the streets!

Holy the lone juggernaut! Holy the vast lamb of the middleclass! Holy the crazy shepherds of rebellion! Who digs Los Angeles IS Los Angeles!

Holy New York Holy San Francisco Holy Peoria & Seattle Holy Paris Holy Tangiers Holy Moscow Holy Istanbul!

Holy time in eternity holy eternity in time holy the clocks in space holy the fourth dimension holy the fifth International holy the Angel in Moloch!

Holy the sea holy the desert holy the railroad holy the locomotive holy the visions holy the hallucinations holy the miracles holy the eyeball holy the abyss!

Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours! bodies! suffering! magnanimity!

Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!

                                                                                                            Berkeley 1955

National Poetry Month, in a Plague Year

National Poetry Month, in a Plague Year

What does poetry matter during a time of plague? Has poetry ever stopped a plague? Probably not. Has it ever stopped a war? I don’t have the data but I’m going to say it’s probably doubtful.

So then what does it matter? What can poetry, or any art for that matter, do for us, right now?

At its best: poetry tells the truth. It tells the truth in a way that gets at what is beyond words. That knowing just beyond sight, beyond hearing. It gets to truths that aren’t able to be codified or ordered. It gets to the kind of truths that don’t just happen in the brain, but in the whole body, in the soul, in the heart. And even if the truth that the poem is expressing is something that could, by the right person, be distilled down into a digestible sentence in a text book – what poetry does is give the reader, or hearer, an experience of that truth.

And an experience requires participation. It requires a meeting between the object of art, the poem, and the person reading it. In between is a third thing (as D.H. Lawrence would have called it), a meeting, a negotiation between the poem and the reader. The meaning is there – but it’s also, in that moment, in us.

Poetry, as well as other art forms: music, painting, sculpture – opens the possibility within human beings of being able to hold multiple truths at one time. What John Keats called “Negative Capability”. Here’s the bit from a letter where he first mentions it: “I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” In the midst of uncertainty, anxiety, and doubt – in the midst of fear and threat – what better skill than to be able to hold it all in balance within ourselves: the fear, the hope, the conflicting sources of pain and joy.

And of course, poetry invokes Beauty. A whole treatise unto itself … Whether you think that beauty is the driving force of life that sparks evolution, cell mutation, the co-arising of bee and flower, the language created by a pine tree as it spins out the patterning of its DNA, ring by ring. Or if you believe that beauty sings from inside a balanced mathematical equation, that it is the force of gravity and the movement of planets. Or the painting of a twisted, violent, yellow tree against a deep blue sky.

For me poetry helps because it reminds me of what humans can be. It reminds me of why we might be here. It reminds me of what we might do, how we might see. And how we might change the world to make it more true, more beautiful.

And so … a poem. By the U.S. Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo, from her 1990 book In Mad Love and War.

Eagle Poem

To pray you open your whole self

To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon

To one whole voice that is you.

And know there is more

That you can’t see, can’t hear;

Can’t know except in moments

Steadily growing, and in languages

That aren’t always sound but other

Circles of motion.

Like eagle that Sunday morning

Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky

In wind, swept our hearts clean

With sacred wings.

We see you, see ourselves and know

That we must take the utmost care

And kindness in all things.

Breathe in, knowing we are made of

All this, and breathe, knowing

We are truly blessed because we

Were born, and die soon within a

True circle of motion,

Like eagle rounding out the morning

Inside us.

We pray that it will be done

In beauty.

In beauty.

Identifying and Dealing with Anxiety and Emotional Shock During the Pandemic from someone with C-PTSD

Some tips on identifying and dealing with Anxiety and Emotional Shock

During the COVID-19 Pandemic

From Someone with C-PTSD

I’ve spent pretty much my whole life with, at minimum, a low-level feeling of being under threat. Feeling like something, someone, somehow – is about to attack. On bad days, that sinister feeling ramps up to an overwhelming sense of imminent disaster.

The strange thing about being a survivor of child abuse with C-PTSD (Complex Post Traumatic Syndrome Disorder) right now is that, on the one hand, you’re going to be triggered way more than usual.I know that from just the past week or so of escalation of the virus in the media and around the world.

Example: Just this past week, I was going along, seemingly fine, getting my office work done (from home) and I started to struggle to breathe. I ignored it for a bit, kept working. I started to feel dizzy. Okay … time for some intervention, I realized. I started to bring out a few of the laundry-list of techniques that I’ve learned over the past 6 years that I’ve been engaged with healing my trauma. The first few didn’t really work. I ended up in full blown “Flight” mode (As in, Fight / Flight / Freeze) – pacing back and forth around our little apartment, rushing out onto the patio, back inside again. In my head started the doom loop about how I couldn’t breathe because it was COVID-19 and I was going to die.

And yet … I’d had exactly those symptoms before. In fact, for about a year and a half these attacks happened quite regularly. So I managed to hold on to that tiny part of my brain that remembered and could match up the symptoms, then and now. When I made that connection, I engaged a series of Acupressure points on myself that had worked in the past. And viola! I could breathe again!

And think again.

So wait, what was the pro-side? After 6 years, I’ve finally started to learn some techniques to help mitigate panic, anxiety, and emotional shock, and – perhaps more importantly, I’ve started to learn how to track my body and mind, so that I can tell when it’s happening.

So that’s why I thought I’d share. Because with the world-changing events going on around us, the depth of the uncertainty about what’s to come, I know that a lot of others out there, even those without C-PTSD or PTSD, will be feeling intense anxiety and even emotional shock.

First, a few ways to identify if you’re headed into a full blown anxiety attack, emotional shock, or perhaps if you’ve been triggered into your own trauma. Here are a few things to watch yourself for to try to catch yourself before you’ve fallen too deep down that rabbit hole:

1.     Fear, anxiety, panic attacks. This includes a whole range of symptoms. Overwhelming sense of dread or terror, going blank, irritability, feeling jumpy. Physical symptoms can include heart palpitations, upset stomach, headache, dizziness, shortness of breath, shaking, insomnia.

2.     Brain fog. You can’t think straight, can’t concentrate, lose focus easily.

3.     Dissociation. This is the process of disconnecting from your own thoughts, feelings, memories, identity, and even your body. You could even get a sensation of floating, or like you are watching your own life as if it were a movie, or like you’re a ghost watching the world (this is a further form of Dissociation called Derealization/Depersonalisation, which I am quite familiar with).

4.     Physical side effects. I mentioned some in #1 – but essentially this is because your body has been triggered to go into fight or flight mode. This releases adrenaline and a whole host of other hormones. In addition to the list above, also add things like random aches and pains to the list.

5.     Exhaustion/Fatigue. This tends to come with more long term symptoms – but even in the short term in can take hold. This can be because of insomnia, but a general sense of unrelenting fatigue without having a reason is a key sign of trauma.

6.     Your emotions are all over the map. One minute you feel amazingly powerful, happy, positive, the next like a small child about to be punished. Cycles of shame can arise, as well as blame, anger, and guilt.

7.     Old patterns raise their ugly heads. Old habits that we’ve managed to come to terms with may come back: from negative thinking patterns to addictive behaviors.

8.     Depression and hopelessness.

9.     Inability to feel compassion for yourself or for others.

So … if you’re tracking yourself and noticing some of these arising. Or even just that nagging pit of the stomach feeling of anxiousness – what can help?

Before you can start to address the emotions and the overwhelm, it’s important to get yourself out of shock, back into your body and to fully engage your brain. When we are triggered into Fight/Flight/Freeze, a large part of our brains actually go off-line and so we lose access to logic and compassion. It’s important to reboot, get the different sides of the brain talking to each other again, in order to start to address the trauma.

These techniques can help with the reboot:

1.     Cook’s Hook Up. It’s a technique where you cross one ankle over the other, then one arm over the other, twist like a pretzel, and do deep breathing. You can find tutorials online. This helps get your left and right brain talking to each other again and also helps reroute disruptive energy in the body.

2.     Ice. This is more for when things get a bit extreme, but it works. Put some ice on your forehead or the back of your neck. It kind of helps reset your brain into the here and now, getting it out of a shock or trauma loop.

3.     Intense smells. Like ice, it’s a way to cut through the noise. Essential oils are great for this. Lavender is really calming – but Peppermint can be great for clearing out the fog.

4.     Tapping. This can be just one finger on each hand, or your feet, or your hands on your knees. Tap back and forth, left-right, left-right. Again, getting your brain to connect left to right.

5.     Touch parts of your body and name them. Hold your foot, say “This is my foot”. Touch your left shoulder, “This is my left shoulder.” Sometimes it’s good to do this a few times, or to tap or squeeze the body part. You’re bringing your attention to that place, re-entering your body.

6.     Box breathing. There are so many different varieties of breathing techniques that are useful. Box breathing is using a 4/4/4/4 pattern: in 4, hold 4, out 4, hold out 4, repeat. Count as you breathe. Feel the air in your lungs.

7.     Heart Math. This is a great technique that allows us to reconnect with our heart center. Look up more details on line. The basics are: first, focus on the area where your heart is, basically center of your chest. Just focus for a bit. Then, start to breath in and out and imagine that your breaths are going into and coming out of your heart. Do that for several breaths. Next, think of someone or something you love. Try to feel the sensation of that feeling in your heart as you continue the heart breathing.

8.     Swallow water. I know this sounds a bit strange, but it is weirdly efficient. Basically just take a small sip of water, cool/cold is usually better because you can feel it more easily. Feel the water travel down your throat, all the way into your stomach. Give yourself space between sips to notice your throat, your body, your reactions. You know you’ve got it when you notice that your body makes a small involuntary sigh after a sip of water.

9.     Notice colors. Pick a color, say blue – now notice everything in the room, the car, the store, the area, that is blue. When you find something blue, say the world blue in your head or out loud.

10.  Acupressure points. Here are some great points for dealing with anxiety (taken from a pdf I got online called “Self-Care for Anxiety – Tips from Chinese Medicine”. These are the ones that helped me with my recent panic attack. I do them in the order shown, but I don't think that that is necessary.

When you’re stuck in shock, triggered, it’s easy to believe that the feelings or thoughts you have at that moment are forever. Once you are back – in your body and your mind, it becomes easier to see that all things change. All things pass. This doesn’t solve anything, doesn’t make the suffering of the world or yourself less … but believe me, it makes a difference. It’s a door.

Culture and Nature

The content of the article linked below is, ultimately, distressing. By using harvest records from 664 years of grape-growing in the Bourgogne region of France, these researchers were able to determine that there has been a significant increase in temperature in the region - harvests are now happening 13 days earlier than the average for the previous 664 years. The most significant change has happened since the late 80's.

That is nearly half a month difference, and reflects some noteworthy warming.

And that is distressing. At some point, if unchecked, getting grapes to harvest in the Bourgogne is going to start becoming more and more difficult. 

But on the other hand, this study surprised me by also making me feel quite tender-hearted about the history of wine-growing and growers in this region. 664 years of families growing grapes and making wine is a long time. 664 years of knowing a landscape, working with the sun and seasons, predicting rainfalls. 664 years of integration between the economics, the politics, the culture, and the nature of this region.  The simple fact that grapes can still grow there at all is testament to conscientious farming practices - considering that the history of large-scale farming in the United States goes back only a couple hundred years - and the result has been massive top soil loss, mineral depletion, and post-war, with the full-scale implementation of corporate farming - ultimately the loss of small farms and the cultures that they created.

Too often we humans think of ourselves as separate. Different from the rest of nature in some essential way. Whether it is Biblical "dominion" or Cartesian "Dualism"--from the vantage of our cars or desks, it can be hard to feel anything but alienation from our planet. After all, our busy, frenetic, increasingly internet-and-media-focused lives even leave us alienated from each other and from our own bodies.

I've never been to the Bourgogne, but did visit Toulouse once for a Eco-Criticism conference at the university. After our first day, the whole group went out to eat at a local restaurant, where the chef was frustrated trying to find me (a vegan) something to eat, even commenting that the diet was "not very practical ..." (And by the way, the resulting pyramid of rice with sautéed vegetables was absolutely gorgeous). But the first thing we were served was a local liqueur mixed with a local sparkling wine. A traditional aperitif in Toulouse. It was golden and tasted like sunshine and earth fused on the tongue. It tasted like what I had imagined wine must be like when I was a kid. And there was a centuries long history to its production.  

Whatever concepts or devices may block the way - we are all made of Earth. Quite literally. 

This article (below) had the amazing effect of making me both hate and love human beings at the same time ... 664 years of harvest records for one wine-growing town in France ... and what they mean.

https://climatenewsnetwork.net/french-wines-show-hot-dry-years-are-now-normal/?fbclid=IwAR2bU9DRpZ1ui9liHGPNL5FTsmSfnXghxvw8GNLGn4BkA7_uYmrGt_e5MYo

Forest Fires and Carbon Emissions

It's been over a year since I posted anything on the blog. In a very practical sense, it doesn't really seem to exist anymore ... but I'm beginning to contemplate a resurrection.

To that end, I've been posting short little blurbs and news articles on FB the past week or so in the lead up to the Climate Strike this September and I thought, why not transfer some of these over to the blog as a start.

So here we go:

I've been seeing some interesting reactions around the net to the news of the fires in the Amazon. People saying "But the smoke will block the sun and slow global warming." Sorry - but trees are one of the most important ways for our planet to trap carbon (C02 is the top greenhouse gas we're worried about, followed by Methane). So not only are we losing the forests that act as filters and carbon-traps, but the smoke is full of carbon, therefore increasing the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. Add to that that the main reason for the fires is to clear land for cattle grazing, and you also add in an increase in methane production as well. Article below about the importance of our forests.Here is a great article about the importance of our forests.

https://climatenewsnetwork.net/tree-loss-brings-more-warming-as-world-heats/?fbclid=IwAR1ktCxMNiQ_vknOkxill6PJOtN0PJJH5DQ8Xau-T1XCt1XMCdj12kVh5Es

And if you haven't signed on for daily updates from Climate News Network, I highly recommend it. I know that the stress of the endless flow of climate news can feel overwhelming - but they actually include good news stories, too, when they can be had.

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bodhi - The Paintings of Joan Watts

bodhi - The Paintings of Joan Watts

Its been a long while since I’ve touched the blog and it feels very appropriate that my first one back in business is to highlight the newest work of Santa Fe painter, Joan Watts.

An exhibition of Watts’ latest series of paintings, bodhi is up for another week or so at Charlotte Jackson Fine Art, in the Railyard (through June 26). This group of 20 paintings has a special place in my heart. I was honored to be invited up (Joan’s house and studio is up the hill from our apartment – I can see the edge of her house from my porch) to visit Joan and see the first three of the series almost two years ago. Joan and I talked, with the idea of me writing up an essay about her work and particularly its connection to Buddhism. As happens with me, I procrastinated and the article didn’t get written. In the end, though, this was fortuitous, as Joan invited me back up again to see the completed 20 paintings in the fall of 2017. She had named the series bodhi, and it turned out that this series, to my mind, is a perfect expression and encapsulation both of Joan’s skill and depth as an artist, but of the ways in which Buddhism and meditation infuse her work.

I wrote the essay and as it turns out, local art book publisher, Radius Books, accepted a proposal to create a special book featuring Joan’s work and my essay. The book will be coming out at the end of August and having seen the proofs I can say it will be beautiful. This is the kind of book that is a work of art in and of itself. (Here’s a sneak peak, here: https://www.amazon.com/Joan-Watts-bodhi-Michaela-Kahn/dp/1942185472/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1529256380&sr=8-1&keywords=bodhi+joan+watts; and here: https://radiusbooks.org/books/joan-watts-bodhi/).

Walking through the gallery on the night of the opening, I was struck again by the power of these paintings. They are mostly white – only the faintest bit of color is anchored at the bottom of each piece, which rises and fades into pure white as it goes up. You can see the artist’s hand at work in the painterly waves across the surface. 

These are minimalist works and demand time, patience, and attention. They require that the person looking at them gives something of themselves to the viewing. Each piece held me for a while. As I stood there I could have sworn that I was on the precipice of understanding some strange unknown language speaking through them.

To give you a bit of a taste of bodhi and of my essay – I am including the press release I wrote for the show, which includes some excerpts from the essay. As we get closer to the book release date, I will circle back round with some more of the essay. And in the meantime I think a few articles about art, minimalist art, and maybe even how I came to write about it, may be in the offing.

Enjoy the images and if you’re in Santa Fe – go see Joan Watts’ bodhi in person!

From the press release:

Each painting is a breath.

Have you ever really felt a breath? Inhale. Slowly. Feel the texture of the air, cool through the nose, the slow expansion of belly, chest, throat. You are a three-dimensional being. You are connected to this invisible matrix that binds the world together. The world is inside you. Exhale, slowly. Chest falling, muscles letting go, the air leaving you, warmer now having taken a bit of your heat. You are falling outside yourself, released, part of the world. This is only the beginning of where the twenty paintings of the series, bodhi, by Joan Watts, are leading you.

After two and a half years when physical limitations prohibited Joan Watts from painting as she was used to, Watts discovered a new mode of working which has allowed her to create a new series. No longer able to spend whole days in her studio, Watts required a reduction of the elements and variables used in her process. Brushes had to go. Her use of saw-horses had to change. Drawing inspiration from the meditative practice of Japanese calligraphy – where a practitioner will create a complex character in a single elegant movement - calling on years of both artistic and meditative practice, Watts was able to adapt her method of working into a heightened state of concentrated effort.

In reducing her artistic process down to the bare essentials, Watts is, in effect, re-creating the experience of meditation on her canvases and panels. What is sitting meditation itself but a trimming down to essentials? Cut out the distractions, the extraneous noise. In the beginning, as meditation is often taught, the novice is told to merely follow her breath. In. Out. It is much harder than it sounds. Almost immediately thoughts, memories, emotions rise up. In meditation you are taught to recognize these thoughts and emotions and then let them go.

The paintings of bodhi strip away distractions. A single color, a square format, gentle textural waves, a subtle fade into white. These paintings enact and guide us toward a meditative possibility. With their rising and expansive movement, they have an ability (if we are willing to give ourselves over to it) to lead us back into our own body, our breath. Color on the canvas pools, rises and fades, like a thought or an emotion inside us: roiling in, shading our mind, and then, with our exhalation, the thought too disappears into white.

Watts’ work in bodhi is a gift of space and solitude, a small piece brought back from beyond and made tangible to lure us, to perhaps help show us how to make the journey for ourselves.

[[Credit for the photos goes to Charlotte Jackson Fine Art]]