Dear Friends,
Whenever her phone rang or her doorbell sounded, Dorothy Parker would say, “What fresh hell is this?” I’ve taken to repeating it under my breath every time I open my social media apps.
This may sound dark, but it reminds me that I can approach the onslaught of news and opinion with my own attitude: with humor and, above all, with curiosity.
Rewriting social media posts into my own idiom began as an experiment, but it has become a practice. I invite you do to the same, whether on paper or just in your imagination.
The space of your own imagination is sacred; it is where you are intimate with your heart-mind and the reality of your experience. Imagination is resistance.
— Sal
What Fresh Hell?
A Post on Risk-Taking
Unsurprisingly, it is good; there is little risk in taking calculated risks. Apparently it’s like moving through the city on an afternoon when no one is thinking of me. I could turn right, I could turn left, I could go into the movie house. Not even a quantum computer could predict my choices. Near me are groupings of artificial plants. They look plausible enough, but their roots are purely in imagination.
A Post on Kittens
There were three, swirled like a cinnamon bun, then there were four, then five. Some slept through everything, some tumbled and chewed on any ear available. This is all a kind of sweetness, like rushing somewhere in the morning; what do you put in your mouth? I put everything in my mouth, and much is bitter, much is filth. Among the troubles are the new troubles, clawing each other with soft, open paws. Where is the honor among kittens?
A Post on Animation
Perhaps it is an insult to life itself, perhaps there is nothing that can be done. An artificial woman is weeping as an artificial man snaps the handcuffs shut. She is also a real woman, and he a real man. Tell me, what is the problem here? Sometimes we fail and fail, overriding the self. Sometimes the failure and the loss is what is sacred.
A Post on Species
The sand lizard and the adder are among those who have benefitted. By themselves, they did nothing to influence the outcome. Somewhere, right now it is raining. Maybe there will be damaging winds. A child is looking at two pictures, trying to find the differences between them. In one, there is a cloud. Meanwhile, on a bed of fallen leaves, a rough green snake is swallowing a large caterpillar. Nothing happens without a photograph.
A Post on the Moon
Waxing, gibbous, photographed. All the craters you could wish for in one place. Who is there to describe the feeling of bombardment? Imagine a lone molecule of oxygen escaped from a tank, years ago. Imagine a dozen, a thousand, a million, all lost to each other. Of photons, an uncountable number. Every year oxygen votes for reaction and photons vote for the sun. The dust is patient, and the inner self unrevealed.
A Post on Women
When you sit behind a screen, so they say, it makes you a woman. If you are near other women, if you are near ladies, if you are near lawyers, all of it: estrogen. Being close to men or robots makes you a man. Meanwhile, some men I can hear are at a logical extreme, more and more abstracted into a few button clicks. From behind my screen, I observe two women, building their conversation slowly. One says forbearance. She says temperance. The other says unmedicated anxiety.
A Post on the Annunciation
Is the agitation appropriate? The doctor says yes. Every fabric is lifted by wind, or perhaps fabric is wind itself, the way you are, and the sky has a strange light—the light of information. Be afraid, be not afraid, the choice is yours. It is an image without its alternate text and so, invisible to the closed eye unless you read it to me. A door opens and a library of gusts chills the air, and this is what we must learn to bear.
Tell me what you’re making of all this, and how you are holding true.
Here are the two first installments of my practice of making poetry from the inundation.
What to make of ‘this’?
Sal asks, shows free fun practice.
Imagination.
Thank you.