Cellular Memory

one of my grad school assignments last year was an experiment with autofiction – a genre that concentrates on the narrator as observer. these snippets are excerpts from that draft.

I taught ENG205: Ecology & English Literature and two sections (ENG103, ENG107) of Composition & Narratives that semester.  Ellen gave me the idea when she began telling me about her classes last year, about her idea that plants, like people, have cellular memory.  She told me that human bodies process trauma on a cellular level. It is part of why nightmares feel real, why they emerge again and again after a significant event of psychological distress. Our memories are embedded in our tissues, the conceptual and physical linked together.

Scientists have also learned that memory is a chain of ideas – each time we remember something, what we actually remember is the last time we remembered it, on and on in sequence. The course started as an idea on the significance of trees in literature and through a series of changes became an examination of authorial philosophies on the environment. I had to dress it up for the program directors to get it approved.

“Wha d’ya bring grapes for?”

“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”

– Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Brothers Karamazov

I recently finished up the third and final season of Broadchurch, a police procedural drama aired originally on iTV in the UK that was then run on BBC America. It stars the incredibly talented David Tennant and Olivia Colman, as well as a bajillion other incredible actors.

If you know me pretty well, you know that I have loved the show from the scraps I could watch during UK-only initial airing of its first season. The dry humour and expressive reactions crack me up and the production value is stunning. The score (Olafur Arnalds!), lighting, writing, acting, directing, cinematography, David Tennant’s hair… all of it is redonkulous. I mean, just LOOK at this gorgeous camerawork:

the anchor that i tie to my brain

Now that I’m older, I’m haunted.

John Henry was my favorite American legend as a child. We burned tire tread on our Chik-Fil-A cassette tape retelling the myth in our old cloth-seat van. The narrator’s voice, the cadence, the story of a man who burst his heart outracing a machine — the story imprinted in my pulse, a tattoo of instincts and impulse and running headlong knee-knock heart-first toward something greater.

When you’re five, or seven, or maybe even thirteen, you can run forever. But now I plod along. My feet and the rest of me are heavier. My bones are denser, my frame greater. I can run, but running takes practice, not forgetfulness.

Comeback Kid

I certainly wasn’t planning on taking an annual break from blogging, but here I am, writing my first post of 2018 in December.  Welcome back, and happy new year!

I graduated from Oglethorpe in May having drafted a novel in three months, and between that project and the nightmare that January turned out to be writing here fell through the cracks.  Since finishing my B.A. I’ve had a series of odd jobs, competed in my first #NaNoWriMo, and bought my first car.  I traveled to Kentucky, Virginia, Nashville, Vancouver and Seattle in 2018, & I’m headed overseas in January!

shake paranoia

I get angry when I’m afraid.

Not my icy kind of anger.  No, that’s reserved for more genuine injustices in the world.  I mean the downright, take-me-by-the-fists-and-start-punching-and-running kind of anger.  Normal, even kind comments become an insult as soon as they reach my brain.

It’s a miserable conviction to realize fully.  It’s easy enough to see in hindsight, after you blow up at Person A over what they said, that you felt threatened.  Your self-imposed dignity, your history with that person, everything in your heart screams that “NO! YOU CAN’T BE RIGHT ABOUT ME! I’M NOT THAT KIND OF PERSON!”

jar & summering comes

I have an adventure jar full of coins on my dresser.

Well, technically it isn’t /full/, but it does have coins. Most are loose change, a few are pennies my boyfriend hid for me, and a quite a good number are parking lot finds.

This is my adventure jar, for when the day a traveling adventure spontaneously takes me along with it. I don’t know how much money is in there: sometimes I sort the coins by type, without counting, when the urge takes me.

solar theory

today I’m looking by way of the sunlight through my window, and the concentrated heat of electric power is soaking into my lower back. how do tiny whirling atoms make a concentrated current that can, sometimes, give off light when run through a thin wire inside a rounded glass circus? why does a lightbulb give off heat and light?

light is something scientists can’t understand. it does not calculate. the universe is made of particles or waves, and light is defiant like a bucking colt, motion and brilliance in a form too fast to catch.

Dust to Dust

Man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward.

The mountain peaks of journeys make me stare life in the face.  Specifically, climbing down from the top.

If love, giving love, is what makes my heart break, then it is because of the wrecking before it.  The heartache tinges the joy, sharpens the contrast like a knife.  Leaving Community is what makes moving hard, because it tastes like Home.  Leaving means staring the world in the face again, looking at hollow eyes and the ugly bruised scars tracing every man’s heel.

He builds my bridges

Auguri di buon anno.  August always felt like a new year for me. maybe because I associate living and dying with the sweltering that is a Georgia summer. August has always felt like my New Years, full of upheaval and change and the rapid stringing together of events. January is my turnaround, my spin. It feels like a new door, ianus, just a few months after beginning to plough again (tell me school is no harvest, and I will laugh for you: harvests do come). January is cold, ice and snow and the sky that I take for granted sometimes. It’s after the rememberum that is December, the mulling of the advent Story like hot cider being pressed. It’s when the stories begin to glisten again, and maybe that’s why I love to write on New Year’s Eve. the anticipation to the count, the sacrificing of irritations for delight (hopefully), and the moments hanging above before they come spiraling down like a glittering globe of fireflies and songs.

January is my door.  I like to look through it before I start walking.  Something I tell myself when I build expectations is to never bank on the second semester being easier. Change does not equivocate easy in any shopping center. I’m pulling out of my August haze, though, to grasp at this thought.

The forests are green and swaying, full of spanish moss, sycamores and pines. I have a thousand trees I love to dash to from my perch, full of excitement and energy. It’s a maze, a race, and an obstacle course perfect for a sprinter.  I’ve imagined this story a thousand times, and it is full of splender-web bridges, jumps and leaps across layers and over gaps until your feet, shod or not, hit traction and you can fly again with adventure for wings.  I played it while flying on a swing, or when the ice and snow came, all in my thoughts.

Through all the chasing and falling to be saved and laughing, He has built my bridges.  Now I live in a cityscape, but there are still bridges and lights to chase.  Still, when I forget something like water and I’m running in circles, He’ll carry me.  I know that.  What I want to remember what keeps the wood and ropes, the glass and concrete solid as the hours are spent.

Ha ha! to the old year
Goodbye to the cold fear
Gonna cry when I need it, smile when I need it
Goodbye, denial
-Eric Peters

[Photo by Dan Taylor on Flickr.]

Creaking Floorboards

“Why did you come here for, anyway?”
“I love old things.  They make me feel sad.”
“What’s good about sad?”
“It’s happy for deep people.”  [Doctor Who, “Blink.”]

So true.

I have a friend who has lived in more than 5 countries for substantial amounts of time.  I can’t claim anything close to that, but we both know, if on different levels, the same thing.