I had this post ready yesterday. Then, today came. I haven’t fully absorbed the news, and I generally don’t talk politics here. But overnight, this. I have nothing yet to say about it. A huge shift. No, the shift had already occurred. It’s just now being presented to us in black and white. Red and blue, that is.
If this fraught time has netted one thing for me, it’s a profound awareness that what we imagine is how we live. The silos we live in are made out of our thinking. We build them ourselves, to supposedly keep ourselves safe. If you’re a writer or any kind of artist, your responsibility is now huge. Your job is to keep stretching the imagination, which is slowly working to shape the world. When you’re successful, you break through the cliches that separate us. You widen possibilities.
I find it helpful right now to watch what my imagination is doing, to recognize it as just that, thoughts and images generated by my mind, yet capable of transforming my sense of the world I live in.
I wish I felt like laughing.
What I had already written before today:
Transformations: And I’m once again between-projects in my own writing. You might think I’m wasting great swaths of time, allowing myself to be sucked down the rathole of Facebook, watching dozens of the little videos of cats doing cute things, of partially deaf babies getting their hearing aids and hearing their mother’s voice for the first time, babies getting glasses and the same reaction, a deer mothering a cat, kittens being rescued from a manhole.
I must have clicked on a bra, and now bras follow me everywhere. Tissue-thin bras, wide-back bras, supportive bras, soft bras for old people.
And that horrible makeup women apply on camera to show how it covers everything, and indeed it does. The face becomes a mask. And haircuts! And more haircuts! Total transformation!
It’s all transformation. Turning a deer into a kitten’s mother, restoring hearing, restoring uplift, restoring skin.
Meanwhile, I trust, my brain is resting, passively letting the transformations scroll in front of my eyes. I’m randomly reading magazine articles, picking up bits of thoughts like lint. It’s not nothing.
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Another kind of transformation: back surgery. My back, which I was so proud of after the fusion and laminectomy, aches. It’s not pain anymore, but aching. Well, I think it’s more like my hips. I guess you can’t shift the position of disks and expect the body to say, “Oh, okay, I’ve been in the same position since you were born, pretty much, but now I’m happy to abruptly change.” I do my exercises, I walk, I try walking less, walking more. I have an appointment with the surgeon’s P.A., but I am of the opinion that this is how it’s going to be. I had to have this surgery, but basically, you shouldn’t mess with the spine unless you truly must.
Another kind of transformation: age. I am slowly, begrudgingly accepting the changes. My once-nice figure is collapsing downward and outward. It helps to live here among other old people. We all get it. It’s okay. More than okay. It’s good to be alive. I’m glad to be working, looking forward to what’s next.
Meanwhile, the country is transforming so much it’s hardly recognizable from when I was a child. Which of course is why so many people are up in arms, furious, afraid. Now we’re on the cusp again. But of course we’re always on the cusp. Every minute. Sometimes, like right now, it’s astoundingly obvious. Other times we ignore the changes until something smacks us in the face. Or we have a birthday. Or we have a backache.
The P.S. I had promised to write about Grass River and my reading/workshop there. The election got in the way. I’ll say something about this next time.