Category Archives: on writing

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marks herself “safe” in quarantine

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below the skype lineBelow the Skype-line are Bronco flannels and after 5 it’s the Quarantini . . . I got this!

Cyn wants to know where my March posts are . . . you’d think I could find a few moments to wax philosophic or sarcastic or morbid or fatalistic or optimistic about the state of the world . . . but I have a publisher and a deadline that haven’t acknowledged things as they are . . . so I don’t write for me in my voice . . . yet . . . but soon . . . if I survive . . . coping well enough . . . never bother to get dressed below the Skype-line these days . . . as long as everything from the waist-up appears to have it together, I’m dialing in and calling it good . . . it gets even better with the new house drink, the “quarantini” . . . made from whatever is left in any bottle . . . kind of a dystopian version of the Long Island Ice Tea . . .

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palindrome

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020220.sunset over Gourdneck Lake

Two important things happened yesterday–the palindrome day:

1. After weeks under the permacloud of winter in the Mitten, the sun came back. I pulled the car over to grab this shot with my phone as evidence of this miraculous event.

2. I found my voice in a book I hadn’t realized I’d already been writing for several years now. When I heard it, it didn’t sound snarky, impatient and annoyed but joyful . . . as if whooping from the bottom of a well where it had waited for so long to be hauled up in a bucket full of everything I need. I couldn’t see it before . . . but yesterday I could . . . with complete clarity.

From these two amazing events, here’s what stands out:

1. All day, I was rolling my eyes at the big deal everyone was making of the palindromic date: 02/02/2020. But upon reflection, maybe a palindrome creates a portal for a rare and perfect balance of the present with a full 360 degree view of one’s past and future. Maybe it’s taken 909 years to be ready to write my own book in my own voice.

2. Clearly, I don’t give a rat’s ass about the Super Bowl.

 

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a Literacy of the Land

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“One must wait for the moment when a thing – the hill, the tarn, the lunette,
the kiss tank, the caliche flat, the bajada – ceases to be a thing and becomes
something that knows we are there.” – Barry Lopez

IMG_1019Living close to water and trees now, I know Lopez’s moment well, but not the word for it. There probably isn’t one, or we else don’t use it anymore. Today’s vernacular is expanding in a very different direction. Our lifestyles have become so digital and urbanized that we no longer need to know the frore surface of this lake is gleet and glibbed. Only a few generations back, those details would have rerouted my ancestors as they went about their hardscrabble existence in the Scottish Highlands–saving or costing them days, maybe even lives.

Landmarks, by the earth-fluent wordsmith Robert Macfarlane, documents this lost “language of landscape” of the British Isles. I’m reading it with art-gallery pacing, pausing after each paragraph to admire the art and architecture of his sentences. And then there’s the glossary itself curated from his interviews and grassroots contributors. It’s “a kind of sustained prose poem–exquisite in its precision and its metaphors” featuring words like:

ar’ris: the last movements of the tide before still water

borbban: the pearling or murmur of a stream

browse line: level above which large herbivores cannot browse woodland foliage

chawn: a crack in baked soil

flippety: young twig or branch that bends before a hook or clippers

glar: thick, sticky mud

smeuse: a hole in a hedge or wall made by the repeated passage of a small animal

zwer: the sound of a covey of quail taking flight

IMG_1020Discovering a lost word can be as exciting as it is futile. For two years now, I’ve tried to describe where I live at Swanchurch without knowing there is a word for these headwaters that are neither a great river nor a creek or stream or brook . . . not very deep except for a meandering channel. This is a seabbainn.

Once upon a time, that one word said all that–and needed to. Even if I can’t put it to work, but I’m glad Macfarlane has bound a museum of such terms. IMG_0992 IMG_0985Although I can’t remember all the new old words, I still use them–or let them use me. Looking at the mysterious story on a lake in the San Isabel Forest of southern Colorado last week, I saw giel and jabble frozen into patterns rich with meaning. This wasn’t just ice, it was spandled and blae cut. As I tried to translate each feature, something more than I could see became fully real and present . . . and it knew I was there.

© Liana 1/2020

 

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to write what you know

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you strangle-

hold two thoughts

always falling

IMG_3463

onto the keyboard

and push them back

like loose sleeves

 

on the keyboard

throw yourself

a line and climb-

 

out cloaked in

two thoughts

holding the rope

 

you tie your

shoes with one

truth and a lie

 

try to go some-

where different

with the same key-

 

board where

you hang with

two thoughts

IMG_2328

of what you

knew and what

you know now

 

 

© Liana 6/19

 

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choose your words

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IMG_3298

the girl at the open mic had

“Nah.”
– Rosa Parks, 1955

on her t-shirt and she was mad
so was I in a mood and all
of us raging over what to do
our words fisted at the world

then Destiny (her real name)
said maybe it would compel
women who’ve been asleep
to finally rise . . .

IMG_3290.JPG

even the sun punched a big hole
in the night that wasn’t the moon
anymore but all the things
we could see in the dark

this is right now . . . again
what will we write now?

 

© Liana 5/19

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It’s not a rhetorical question, he said.

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img_1953He calls, sad again. A fog . . . a blizzard . . . a virus . . . this sad. What’s the point of the “brown study” where poets usually–and mere mortals sometimes–abide?

I think Mary Oliver put it so beautifully: “Someone I loved gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.”

For “someone” read “the Muse” . . .

for “box” read “box seats” with an unrelenting, ponderous, wondrous, horrified, unavoidable, profoundly grateful, excruciatingly-palpable view of the human condition.

For “darkness” read “brown study” . . . the ennui . . . know it as a study. We are the place where the mystery sets up a lab because it needs observation . . . palliative care and celebration.

For “understand” read “come into fuller self-awareness” which, by extension, brings us to . . .

“Gift” which is the fulfillment of our life’s purpose . . . the journey of discovery in which finding ourselves is how we give the world what it needs. We are the thing Life has been asking for–to do the thing we are here to do with the Light of our Being.

So that is what I think, good doctor.

~ Liana, today

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Ukiyo (浮世絵)*

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* ‘floating world,’ living within transient moments of fleeting beauty (Japanese)

IMG_1675

The second day after it snowed, I was looking at the scene outside my window and thinking it would be good to have a word for when you love something even better because its fading beauty reminds you of how good you felt the first time you saw it. The Japanese word ukiyo comes close but it lacks the saudade, right?

 

This brings me to the work of Dr. Tim Lomas who is cataloging a much-needed repository of words in any and every language that express goodness in its many forms with the Positive Lexicography Project.

Who knew that “the glimmering that moonlight makes on water” has been captured in a single word in two different languages: Gumusservi (Turkish) and Mangata (Swedish).

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The incredibly satisfying and useful word for “Photos I’ve taken that could have been wonderful but weren’t, yet I posted them anyway” (see above example) is actually commonly expressed in three easy letters: WTF.

I think Dr. Lomas should consider adding that to his trove that you can find here: https://karmiphuc.github.io/link-blog/positive-lexicography-project.html

You’re welcome.

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Research shows two are better than one.

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I find two spaces after a period unsettling, like seeing a person who never blinks or still has their phone’s keyboard sound effects on. I plan to teach my kids never to reply to messages from people who put two spaces after a period. I want this study’s conclusion to be untrue—to uncover some error in the methodology, or some scandal that discredits the researchers or the university or the entire field of psychophysics.

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(from James Hamblin, “The Scientific Case for Two Spaces After a Period” in The Atlantic)