On Gaslighting.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 11 Comments

Via email, my daughter’s school sends me a survey. The survey poses a question about what I desire for my student. The question is phrased in a way that reminds me of a question I was recently asked, by someone I hardly know. The question was unique; the questioner asked specifically about me and my life, and how I saw my life in the wider context of the town.

I’ve been thinking of that question since that conversation, returning to it in odd moments while opening my post office box or washing the oatmeal pot. It’s a question we might all want to be asking ourselves — not just what would improve our individual lives, but how do we understand ourselves in the landscape of where we live. Or maybe this is simply April musings, cusp of a storm that could go either way, rain or snow or perhaps simply wind, sweetened with the scent of thawing soil.

Here’s a few lines from a New Yorker article that seem contemporarily apt….

Gaslighting essentially turns its targets against themselves, she writes, by harnessing “the very same capacities through which we create lives that have meaning to us as individuals,” such as the capacities to love, to trust, to empathize with others, and to recognize the fallibility of our perceptions and beliefs. This last point has always struck me as one of gaslighting’s keenest betrayals: it takes what is essentially an ethically productive form of humility, the awareness that one might be wrong, and turns it into a liability.

— Leslie Jamison

Your own darkness.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 7 Comments

An old friend from years ago sends me a message. She’s persistent, wearing down through my imposed or self-imposed hermitage, whatever this thing is I’m doing, and I drive myself out on muddy roads. She has such a lovely little girl, I’m smitten immediately. I sit down on the floor and chat up the child, and eventually remember my good friend and how much I enjoy her world. She’s funny, with boundless good will and cleverness, in a life that’s had her share of lemons.

End of March, nearly Easter, my perennials spike up further every day. How the earth desires green. I’m far enough along now in my own life that I know the cupboard of my mortal life will always hold certain grooves and scars, its beaten shape, the way the material in my life has shaped me. Aren’t we all that way, though? Maybe this is why spring is the dearest of seasons, that from mud and ice emerge tender shoots, the improbable made manifest every year.

Beginning

The moon drops one or two feathers into the field.   
The dark wheat listens.
Be still.
Now.
There they are, the moon’s young, trying
Their wings.
Between trees, a slender woman lifts up the lovely shadow
Of her face, and now she steps into the air, now she is gone
Wholly, into the air.
I stand alone by an elder tree, I do not dare breathe
Or move.
I listen.
The wheat leans back toward its own darkness,
And I lean toward mine.

— James Wright

“Writing is about breaking down…”

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

A book of Knausgaard’s essays makes its way into my house. On a snowy day, the cats and I finish putting together my taxes, then read. The snow piles and drifts. The next day, the snow melts and melts, running in sun-sparkling rivulets. Readers either love Knausgaard or despise him, like readers understand Halldór Laxness, or don’t, much in the same way that I have never understood Jane Austen. When I began reading Knausgaard’s Struggle books, a neighbor read at my breakneck pace, loving his words. She and I have long since traveled our own different lives. But reading these essays reminds me of her, how profoundly she believed in beauty as a force. Whichever way she’s traveled, I wonder how that’s worked out for her.

Writing is about breaking down what you can do and what you’ve learned, something that would be inconceivable to a craftsman, a cabinetmaker, for instance, who can’t possibly start from scratch every time.

— Karl Ove Knausgaard

Kindness of strangers.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 14 Comments

If there’s a sadder building in Vermont than the county courthouse in Barre, I don’t know where that might be. Over the last nine years, I’ve been here again and again and again and again. On Friday, I arrive again, stepping through the metal detectors and removing my knitted hat to show my barrette. My errand is to leave a handful of copies. I wait behind a man in an orange jacket at the counter who cannot understand what the clerk is saying. She repeats her instructions. Another clerk calls to me. I ask my questions, repeat back her answers to confirm. The man beside me weeps.

The last time I was here, I waited in a room of women waiting to be heard by a judge. In those days, I had survived those court appearances and the craziness of my life by imagining myself a mother wolf. I slunk in, took what I needed, and ran. All morning, the room gradually emptied, until only myself and one other woman remained. She was young enough to be my daughter. The bailiff appeared and said it was the judge’s lunchtime, and we could return in two weeks. Wolf, I stood up, all 4’9″ of rage, and said I wasn’t leaving. The bailiff muttered and disappeared behind the wooden door.

The woman’s name was before mine on the court’s list. She offered to let me go before her. You have a child, she said, and I don’t. I didn’t one single strand of this woman’s story. The judge delayed his lunchtime.

On this Friday afternoon, six years later, when I return to this courthouse I had promised myself never to enter again in this lifetime, I carry the memory of this stranger’s kindness.

Outside, at my car, I can’t find my keys, and so I return again, back through security, back to the window where the man is yet weeping, the clerk repeating the same impossible words. Then I realize my keys were in my hand; I hadn’t looked.

Here’s a poem very much in this sentiment, emailed from my father. Listening to the audio is highly recommended.

Dazzling light.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 8 Comments

Here’s the weird thing about this March: cabin fever is not a thing. March has always marked the time of year when snow and cold has piled unrelentingly on us for veritable months. Not so, this warm year. But climate change does squat for the dearth of light, and certainly nothing for the dissatisfaction that’s creeping into our social consciousness. I am a woman who craves the planetary might of blooming crocuses, the radiant headiness of a forest strewn with spring beauties, the serene hover of a bee tucked into a downy apple blossom. Patience, patience.

Walking home from the library, a sudden snowfall drenches my eyelashes.

On this early morning, poetry:

Strewn

It’d been a long winter, rags of snow hanging on; then, at the end

of April, an icy nor’easter, powerful as a hurricane. But now

I’ve landed on the coast of Maine, visiting a friend who lives

two blocks from the ocean, and I can’t believe my luck,

out this mild morning, race-walking along the strand.

Every dog within fifty miles is off-leash, running

for the sheer dopey joy of it. No one’s in the water,

but walkers and shellers leave their tracks on the hardpack.

The flat sand shines as if varnished in a painting. Underfoot,

strewn, are broken bits and pieces, deep indigo mussels, whorls

of whelk, chips of purple and white wampum, hinges of quahog,

fragments of sand dollars. Nothing whole, everything

broken, washed up here, stranded. The light pours down, a rinse

of lemon on a cold plate. All of us, broken, some way

or other. All of us dazzling in the brilliant slanting light.

— Barbara Crocker

Necessary Birdsongs.

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments
Lake Champlain

Mid-March, the unlovely muddy Vermont: I bend beneath the snarled rose bushes, seeking green nubs pushing through the wet earth. By June, this world will be verdant, lush, those old roses a tangle of green, tiny blossoms each a delicate bouquet of pale pink. These roses, planted by someone doubtlessly long passed over into the other world, ruggedly fence my house, their flowers such a dear sweet fragrance.

In this brown world, I wander to the places where, in springs past, I’ve heard the early songs of redwing blackbirds. Yesterday, I hear these birds, not the full chorus yet, but the warm-up crew. We are well before the yard clean-up and gardening season. The town roads are rutted, hard to travel, and the summer folks have not yet returned. Hidden in this clump of cedars, the blackbirds steadily, without any fuss, go about their blackbird lives. Not so many weeks away, marsh marigolds will blanket these wetlands — dazzling yellow, killer green — but for now, the dun palette of silvery cedar, umber earth, the birdsong melodies yanking us along to spring.