Journal. Rain and renku
One of the few phrases I remember from German class: “You’re making a face like three days of rainy weather.” Here we are, on day three of rainy weather. What’s maybe even worse, I have “Button Up Your Overcoat” running through my head. Boop boop a doo! It’s actually a twisted little song, in its own cheery way. Never look to song lyrics for models of psychological health.
Now, that’s a path I didn’t expect to start down: art as moral exemplar or art as voice for the way people actually work, by and large. “Button Up” is not prescriptive but descriptive of anxious clingy control disguised as love. “Creep” is voice, not exemplar. “Shake It Off”—moral exemplar. “The Bug”—moral exemplar. I don’t know where I’m going with this except nowhere fast. Is demonstrating psychological health, like “Shake” and “The Bug,” the same as being a moral example, or is it just giving voice to a healthy human experience, which is just as valid as an unhealthy one?
Ah, and now we’re back at renku! I was really fascinated reading Lanoue’s book about it—the way it’s meant to be so all-inclusive of human experience that it isn’t “organized.” (My paraphrase, not Lanoue’s words.) Reading a renku is disconcerting, at least for me, because there’s no arc. There’s a plan, and a cycle, but not a sense of through-directed action or purpose. In the tradition Lanoue describes, the “purpose” is just to undergo experience (or to represent that in the poetry) and then reach enlightenment by letting yourself have the whole world of experience without picking and choosing—not by striving and achieving, but by opening up until you are, in essence, the size of the whole world. Or there aren’t walls between you and it, perhaps.
In that sense, “Shake It Off” and “Button Up” aren’t representing complete and opposed worldviews in the whole canon of popular music; they’re different “renku” representing different facets of experience. I’m stretching my poor examples beyond what they can bear. But I’m also happy to have tumbled another false dichotomy off its pedestal. :D
Real life apparently hasn’t been very interesting since the bear. I’m grasping at straws. But I think that is also a “life is like art” renku-ish illustration: the excitement of bear paws on the back door has given way to rain, low energy, and restlessness. This afternoon when B & E arrive to help V with some repairs it will change again to family enthusiasm. There will be chocolate. And on we go.