muck.

The past week of thaw and ice and rain and wind and sun and mud and seismic shifts has meant a lot of shaking up, opening up, movement, movement, movement. I’ve gone mudding in a U-Haul, filled a not-quite-five-hundred-square-foot space with my worldly belongings, made a six hour round trip drive to sing songs and walk the dog and eat amazing cake, gotten sick and stayed home, covered for others when they’ve gotten sick, slept in the yurt with nothing but a little kerosene space heater and a lot of wool blankets, made two batches of waffles, shopped for more housewares than I’ve needed in a lifetime, and just generally stretched my perception of need and desire, love and friendship, honesty and trust. Funny how a little mud-season movin’ can turn everything upside down.

I will have photos of the yurt online soon, once I unearth my camera. It is beautiful and round and light and open and cozy and I can’t wait to settle in.  Gabe and I have not truly settled into anywhere together; we have been on a perpetual move for more than a year.  To actually be in a place I want to be, doing what I want to do is overwhelming; I wasn’t expecting it to happen—certainly not now, and certainly not here in this corner of Vermont I sort of pledged not to come back to.  This is why I don’t plan too strenuously; the world seems to unfold before me however it wants, and there is little control I can impose over how and where and when and why it pulls me. 

After reading voraciously through the winter months, March has brought a change. I am out and about in the world now, no longer holed up in the warm cave of other people’s words. There is so much to do--I can no longer afford the luxury of escapism. I want to make, make, make; I have a lot of catching up to do if I want to live my life with some impact.  

What that impact will look like I don’t know. I have spent a good deal of time this past week sharing my cooking with others, which has been more fun than I anticipated, and planning a garden, a good manageable garden, for the summer. I was reading some pretty bad poetry this morning and came across a poem that ended with a line that said, in effect, a word is enough to feed a thousand. Which is patently untrue. Immediately brought to mind a short poem called “Communcación” by Alicia Partnoy, a piece that I could remember in Spanish and had to translate into English in my head (a good sign of fluency):

Yo te hablo de poesía

y vos me preguntás,

a qué hora comemos.

Lo peor es que

yo también tengo hambre.

I am talking to you about poetry

and you ask me

when do we eat.

The worst of it is

I am hungry too.

Here’s the thing:  I know every Bread & Puppet devotee out there has heard the “Art Feeds You” mantra, and I love Cheap Art as much as anyone, but it’s not enough. And poetry may forever be the one constant in my life, the one endeavor I cannot ignore, but it doesn’t seem like art alone will ever be enough to sustain me.  For what, then, will sustain the art? Poetry may be like bread, but it isn’t bread. One of the most destructive things artists try to do, I think, is live on their art—whether in a literal or a figurative sense. It is different than living for art.

Last night, Gabe and I went to see the new Sylvain Chomet (of Triplets of Bellville fame) movie, The Illusionist. It’s far and away the best movie I’ve seen this year, and so heartwrenchingly beautiful it is worth mentioning here. I have no desire to dissect or even synopsize what Chomet conveys in this film; suffice to say it is one of the best treatments of art and poverty that I have ever seen, animated or otherwise.

I realize I am patching together only a vague portrait of what I find satisfying and dissatisfying in this world. I think I’m a bad blogger because I refuse to post for the sake of posting; when I write for the sake of writing, more often than not, I end up dissatisfied.  What I am writing in this moment feels frivolous because it is inconclusive and not self-contained, despite the fact that it is driven by some very real and unnamed sense that demands to be tamed and held and understood. I want to deal with the concrete and specific world. I want to make thought and language concrete and specific. I want to keep it all floating, and I want to keep it all from floating away.