by Shawna Lemay
There’s a Trick with the Light I’m Learning to Do
***
Walking through the suburban stand of trees this morning, the light dappled and yellow, mosquitoes biting my ankles, I remember again finding a clearing in the deep forest as a child.
The light filters down onto my face in a way that reminds me of water trickling over stones in a shallow creek.
This feeling as a prelude. I write down today’s premonitions and instances of déjà vu, which may in fact be vague remembrances of dreams.
Having no knowledge of Eastern philosophies or meditation techniques as a child, my goal was to clear the mind, to be beyond thought, behind words. I’m still trying to learn what I was able to do then.
Sometimes, standing in the trees with my camera, looking at a leaf and the light moving through it, and the shadows cast upon it by other leaves, I forget to take the shot.
Photographer’s Dream
***
There are four hummingbirds and masses of butterflies at the golden hour in a garden overflowing with lilies, honeysuckle, passion flowers.
I fumble with the camera and settings until I look up and the birds and butterflies are gone. The light has lost its pizazz.
The loss and despair I feel when I awake is disproportionate to but as real as the feelings I have when I miss a shot because I’m daydreaming.
A Piece of Cake
***
I shouldn’t take offense to what I read in the newspaper, lousy with rubbish news on Saturday morning as I drink my first cup of coffee, not quite awake. The lines are attributed to an artist I’ve never met and which might have been taken out of context or said out of nervousness or said off the cuff, or maybe whose belief has to do with sophisticated connections from a multidimensional universe.
When I look up the quotation a few weeks later, I find I’ve remembered it incorrectly.
She says it’s pretty easy to make pretty things or to mimic pretty things.
And I’ve remembered the word pretty as beautiful.
So I feel a bit deflated as I write this. Whatever argument I might have had, I now have to pick with myself.
I don’t want to sit here and unravel the differences between pretty and beautiful and I don’t want to read the terrifying articles that appear in a Google search, ‘pretty vs beautiful.’
If beauty is uncool then pretty is worthy of censure, is the pervasive view.
Oh sure, I say to myself, beauty is a piece of cake, as I underline the most amazing lines in a book of long-lined poetry.
Easy as pie. A piece of cake. A breeze. A ruddy walk in the park, a lark.
As Rumi says, Beauty surrounds us, / but usually we need to be walking / in a garden to know it.
You’re soaking in it, Madge.
But sure, yes, beauty can be too sincere, too guileless. It hangs there, out in the open, not always accompanied by an apparatus. Has no suitcase to be unpacked in plain view.
The thing is, beauty is difficult. Not just the making of it, the striving toward it, but the holding on to the idea of it when it is constantly dissed and dismissed, considered easy, unworthy of serious attention.
Beauty is belittled, scorned, laughed at, passed over when it comes to grants and awards. And yet, it’s difficult to fake. Difficult to get precisely right. The length of time it takes to become fluid, to combine chance and skill and feeling and intelligence. Yes, the failed attempts. Yes the glitchy cheesy stuff purporting to be of the same ilk. Yes I’ll be quiet now.
Because the truth is there’s a trick with the light I’m learning to do. It’s going to happen in the golden hour and it’s going to be perfectly timed with your breathing at rest. The leaves and the sunlight are going to coordinate their efforts with the breeze and me. I’m almost there, close, so that in two or three more lifetimes, I’m going to sit there and look at what I’ve done and be agog.
My Prize Begonia
***
Early June. Just when the garden starts looking good I encourage my husband the still life painter to pick flowers.
Tea roses, begonias, peonies. Take anything, I say.
The weeds overhear and gain a real foothold at this point.
If the garden ends up less than pristine, I have hope for the less fleeting nature of an imagined painting. I dream a place for it in some meticulous, well-appointed home with clean white walls, and a long couch that makes the perfect vantage point to view it. It’s the dead of winter, say, and this stranger looks over and is warmed and enlivened by what might have been my prize begonia.
An Imaginary System
***
At the beginning of each year I come into possession of a certain number of extrovert tokens. I need to ration the tokens through the year, until the next allotment. Well before Christmas I’m running a sizeable deficit. Converting any of my introvert tokens into extrovert tokens is unthinkable; I know I’m destined to permanent insolvency.
Submitting to a Daily Practice
***
The condensery is intensery.
The flowery isn’t all joyery.
Keep Your Solitude
***
At the end of Mrs. Dalloway, the discussion between Sally and Peter is about how it’s possible to know people. When young, “one was much too excited to know people.” And later, older, says Peter, “one could watch, one could understand, and one did not lose the power of feeling.”
It’s been some time since I was intent on writing out by hand each day the Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi. Grant that I may not so much seek… to be understood as to understand.
How to even be clear to oneself?
At the café drinking prosecco with friends I feel connected and loved but also that I might not be or shouldn’t be. When we leave there is a downpour and we hug then walk quickly off in separate directions to our cars and I sit in mine watching the shapes the rain makes on my windshield and the way the trees on the boulevard appear to be giant green muddled umbrellas. The woman in a powder blue housedress walking her white dog is soaked through to the skin.
I remember that I once gave another friend some advice about her mother. That instead of contradicting her or getting angry and bored with her mom’s guilt-inducing statements, she should try to find out what her mother most required to hear, and say it. Perhaps she simply needs an expression of love or to know she is missed. Maybe a year later the friend repeated back the advice to me saying she wanted to do this but it was difficult. Someone, she said, had given her this bit of wisdom, but she couldn’t remember who.
I used to think that Simone Weil’s view of friendship was a bit hard. We must refuse friendship, we shouldn’t dream of it, but instead, seek what is real. The dream of friendship as set apart from what is possible. “To desire friendship is a great fault,” she says, but I read those words when I felt alone and lacked courage.
“Keep your solitude,” she says this too, and I guess I took it out of context. I took it to heart, because she also says your sincere friend will embrace your solitude.
Henri Cartier-Bresson talks about the held breath that is part of the photograph, and about how one’s intellect, one’s eyes, and one’s heart must all be in alignment in the same instant.
When we look at a photograph of a person or maybe a cup of coffee and an ashtray on a white tablecloth we imagine what came before or after and still lose ourselves in that instant. We marvel at what is before us, we exercise our imagination, and yet remain uncertain; our stance might be one of humility. What one lacks in understanding may be strengthened with feeling, however briefly we are able to cradle it in our lungs.
I have long wished for a friend within walking distance of my house in the suburbs. Tea in worn mugs and cookies in the afternoon. But that, too, is a dream.
I love the line in a letter from Jane Austen to her sister Cas
sandra:
“You know how interesting the purchase of a sponge-cake is to me.”
I’ve not outgrown sponge-cakes, but I’m a bit better at holding my breath, aligning my heart, not quite understanding, but silently feeling. I don’t need to know everything and when I connect with another I assume it’s because she is splendid in solitude.
As a poet I’ve believed part of my task is to be an instrument of peace. To describe that landscape of loneliness, as Anna Kamienska put it, but for a friend, so that we may all feel less alone, more at peace.
My Griefs
***
A year after experiencing Bell’s Palsy, this feeling remains that the affliction will return in spite of fairly low percentages of recurrence. I feel like it’s only a matter of time. The feeling that I was lucky it passed within three months even though for most people it does. I had been convinced I’d be in the small percentage of people who never recover.
The 7th cranial nerve becomes injured due to an inflammation in the fallopian tube. The afflicted side of the face droops and is numb.
I appear to be fully recovered though at times I see traces of asymmetry, lopsidedness and when tense the left side of my face feels tight. When I look in the mirror while brushing my teeth I notice the differences.
The feelings of guilt I have over making a fuss out of a non-life threatening condition when I know those who’ve suffered more.
The difficulty of drinking through straws, eating soup, puckering up.
The word disfigurement. The word ugly. The word lucky.
The numbness of the face accompanied by a giant exhaustion.
Am I not strange looking enough as I am?
Every case and circumstance that triggers Bell’s Palsy is unique, you might read on the internet. Some sufferers report waking up in the morning with the condition.
My computer had crashed and while it was in the shop I decided to enjoy the garden. I was weeding when my left eye started to twitch. It came on gradually after that. I kept telling everyone I was not stressed out that my computer had perished and I was not stressed out in general but of course I was always actually freaking out inside. As a writer who lives with an artist, we’ve learned to live with uncertainty, but this also means we’re in a constant delicate and precarious state.
Truthfully, I am haunted by the possibility of a recurrence. It neither seemed real when I experienced it nor unreal. I felt somehow I had it coming to me. The implausible idea the universe might have chosen me to see how not being normal feels. How people look at you. How you feel about yourself. How I have thought a fair amount about what and how empathy and compassion are and the ways in which they can be enacted. I was not prepared to have people sending me so many well wishes.
There are lists posted on the internet of famous people and movie stars who have had Bell’s Palsy. George Clooney, Roseanne Barr, Pierce Brosnan, Jean Chretien, Allen Ginsberg, Gordon Lightfoot.
The irrational fear of my preoccupation with the sensations on the left side of my face and the possibility of a recurrence could actually bring about same.
“A very beautiful woman who looks at her reflection in the mirror can very well believe that she is that. An ugly woman knows that she is not that.”
—SIMONE WEIL
“We are as forlorn as children lost in the woods. When you stand in front of me and look at me, what do you know of the griefs that are in me and what do I know of yours?”
—FRANZ KAFKA
I picked out my nickname: Moonface. An affinity for the sea of tranquility, sea of serenity.
So many expressions passed over the doctor’s face upon my first walking into the room at the medical clinic on a Sunday after self-diagnosis using Google. Immediate recognition of the condition plus sympathy plus not much we can do here unfortunately plus oh poor duck. Poor poor ducky.
My own expressions in response were limited.
Medical sites don’t make any direct correlations between levels of anxiety and the occurrence of Bell’s Palsy but in reading anecdotal examples there is almost always mention of a stress trigger.
The need to share the experience, how weird it is. The need to read those experiences, to feel less weird.
One such personal entry was by a young woman who’d experienced and recovered from the condition. She worked in a high-pressure job, planned her wedding and a long-yearned for honeymoon to Paris. Symptoms appeared soon after arrival and she’s stoic about it though expresses disappointment that the honeymoon photographs she dreamed of never panned out. I find myself hoping she makes it back to the Eiffel Tower at some future point and takes a picture of herself with champagne glass in hand, smiling.
Right now someone is lying on a couch worrying that, in her case, it will stick for sure.
I’ve not much felt like drinking more than half a glass of wine ever since.
The afternoons I spent on the living room couch listening to entire CDs of Chopin. My eyes too dry for reading. So tired. The beautiful music. The huge persimmon couch, the dog walking by to lick my face and sniff me from time to time. Once he stopped and put his heavy black head on my legs, pressed his chin down, looked at me intently.
Dry eyes are something you have to be careful about. I couldn’t wink my left eye and it would only close when the right closed. For some people the eye won’t close at all and they need to tape it shut. When I walked the dog, the breeze affected my eye, and so I tried Scotch taping it down, but it didn’t work, wouldn’t stay shut independent of the other eye.
I went through several bottles of natural tears.
I returned to work at the library before I should have because I thought to myself, this is my life now, and I have to know how it feels. Everyone was extremely nice and my co-workers gave me flowers. Customers who didn’t know me looked at me with slightly raised eyebrows and ones who did know me didn’t seem to notice or were too polite to ask.
One customer was having trouble keeping track of her fines. They’d gotten away from her and she sat at the desk and told me her problems and began to cry. Water started pouring out of my left eye, too, and I smiled at her with my moonface. After I’d helped her she gave me a hug and we were both very warm.
It was difficult to work with people without being able to smile properly at them. I looked particularly frightening to myself when I smiled in the mirror and I didn’t want to inflict this on anyone and yet it felt wrong not to try.
I used words on myself I’d never utter to another person. I was a mess. I pretended it was all lovely and people told me I had a great attitude.
I became obsessed with the image by Picasso, Marie-Therese Leaning. Her lips on one side of her face and her nose on the other. I understood her. I was leaning, listing. For a while I used her; she was my Facebook profile picture.
Eating lunch in the staff room was embarrassing. Drinking from a cup was awful. I ate a lot of green grapes popping them into my good cheek and I felt like a squirrel. I tried not to drool in front of anyone as I talked about how it was weird, but no, not exactly like dental freezing.
The feeling it could come back at any moment. Now.
Rehearsing in my mind early symptoms and signs. The twitching, the fatigue, the anxiety, the computer crashing, the pulling weeds in the garden, the bills that needed to be paid, the writing I needed to be doing.
My griefs are small and I know yours might be large.
When I think of the weeks I spent with half my face in darkness, like mud, I think of Chopin and am soothed. I close my eyes and listen to piano music and repeat in my head everything will be fine. Everything will be beautiful.
Civilized
***
They had yet to unfriend each other on Facebook.
Shopping at American Apparel with their daughters, they pretend not to see each other, using the racks of clothing strategically.
Two days later they pass each other in the Canadian Tire parking lot. One on the way to buy roses, the other leaving with petunias. So intent on where they’re going it’s impossible for their eyes to meet.
A Flower Held Up to the Light
***
I respond to behavior I don’t understand by posting a photograph somewhere on the internet. The photograph is an indirect response and conveys feelings, stances and opinions that may be wholly unconnected with the behavior that elicited it.
A yarn-bombed Buddha from a trip to Amsterdam in 2011. A tiny autumn leaf dangling from a spider web. A rose kissed with a decisive frost. Early snow falling on the sunflowers in my backyard.
People talk about their trips as though we’ve never been anywhere but they also talk about doing laundry and other chores so it makes us feel lazy even though we also do laundry and buy groceries and dust the furniture.
A rained upon poppy with one petal. Hands, offering things: a wren’s nest, red string, an apple.
When we were in New York for our second time as a family in 2014, our fifteen-year old daughter fell in love with Van Gogh’s Starry Night at MOMA. We returned to look at it three times at length and she became emotional each time. It was difficult to pull her away in the end because these experiences are rare.
A girl with pink hair sketching in a museum.
I took several photographs of our daughter sketching at The Met with various paintings as backdrops, including Vermeers, and once I’d released my shutter and moved away to see if there was another angle, other people moved in and took the same shot with their iPhones. I could see it over their shoulders, but wasn’t quick enough to take the photo of them taking a photo.