Monday, November 10th

The Daily Report

Well, it's been a strange few days. Jack is out west dealing with a family thing, and in the midst of that--which included a very early morning trip to the airport with him because last minute flyers can't choosers--I had a much more social weekend than I usually do, with two concerts. I also got an incredible piece of good news on the personal front last night, which I think will prove to be a bit of a weight off my mind.

This is week one of five weeks where I will be completely alone during the workday. They're spread out over a six week period, but next week I'm going to be keeping my mother company again. While the home alone thing is really generally amazing for my writing output, I think I'm going to wait until I get back to switch Tales of MU back to every other week day, because otherwise I'm likely to come back with no buffer, when I want to use this time to build up as large a buffer as I can without sacrificing quality.

This also gives me a chance to keep Monday completely free for the "get my ducks in a row"

The State of the Me

Doing pretty good.

Plans For Today

MU-wise, I want to get things laid out to absolutely kick into high gear this week. My goal is to have as close to nothing that needs doing next week, so that anything I do becomes a bonus. I'm also going to be working on a newsletter for this week. Expect close to 20,000 words of original fiction.

Poetry Review - Triumph XXI: Atman (Shweta Narayan)

The fall issue of Goblin Fruit is out, cheerily titled Summer is Dead, and it brings with it a triumphant shapeshifter of a poem by genre giant Shweta Narayan. Triumph XXI: Atman is a poem that's hard to get a handle on when left on the page. Some of the rhymes seem incidental, accidental, and the flow of the thing is not readily apparent. You can tell there's a form to it, but it's hard to tease out by looking. You have to read.

When read aloud--I recommend the artist's own interpretation, helpfully embedded in the top of the page--the thing comes to a sort of shifting, slippery, shuddering, slithering life all its own. Without being overburdened by sibilants, there is something distinctly snake-like about the way the poem moves purposefully forward but slowly, with a back and forth, side to side motion. Perhaps this comparison is encouraged by the skin-shredding imagery of the opening lines, and certainly it's cemented when the shapeshifter imagery ends with a serpent's tail. The rhymes come in fits and starts, the end rhyme scheme altering in a way that punctuates the theme of nascent or aborted change and the internal rhymes lurking almost invisibly below the surface of the poem, like bestial features rippling beneath human skin.

The final lines make the focus of the poem clear, for those who don't pick it up along the way: "...screw your pity," the poet says. "Tragic's overplayed. I'll dance my own way, awkward, out of breath," that final part of the quote something that will be infinitely quotable to anyone who shares this sort of experience.

"Triumph XXI: Atman" is a triumphant meditation on life with disability. The message is an important one. The usual narrative of triumph that we are allowed in this world is OVERCOME. We get better. We get fixed, or we prove we can do everything just as well as anyone else, or we get the one accommodation we needed to make our life "normal". When our stories end in triumph, it's the Ugly Duckling, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, or the Tortoise and the Hare; our disabilities are either temporary indignities, superpowers we don't understand, or something that won't stop us from winning (if circumstances favor us, we try twice as hard for twice as long and our opponents don't even try at all).

In other words, when our stories end in triumph, they aren't our stories. They're fantasies, and we were never in them to begin with or are gone from them by the end.

The triumph of "Triumph XXI: Atman" is that we are still there, still present and rooted and alive, spitting defiance and enjoying ourselves.