magnetic_fields ovenbird I recently finished reading Magnetic Field(s) by Ron Loewinsohn, a mind bending work of fiction that I could probably spend days delving into. Among the many thought provoking ideas the book explores, the notion of “true being” struck me as particularly compelling. This theme is extrapolated in a number of ways. For instance, a man is in a long term marriage and is also having an affair. A friend wonders in which iteration of reality the man locates his true being. Does he see the structure of his marriage as his “real” life or the moments he spends secretly with his lover as the location of his being? Is the affair a room inside the house of his marriage that he retreats to? Or does the affair become the house in which his being is most fully expressed, while the room of his marriage shrinks and crumbles? Loewinsohn explores the idea of place in relation to being in other ways too. He muses about the structures we build to contain our being, both literally and figuratively. Houses are a location for being, but poems are a location too. Love itself is a place in which we explore the idea of our own being. The man having the affair thinks of his relationship with his lover: “This was love, he knew now, more than love for her beauty, for her perfection, but a love for the PLACE—hard to describe in any other word—the zone or area that their being together like this in the outside world, actually moving through the world, created.” In relation to poetry a character says (and raze quoted this same passage on the “poetry” blathe!): “With most books you just read them and you’re done with them. You can use the information or you can’t. But with poetry it’s different. It isn’t like something that you use up but more like a house you live in.” The very definition of “place” becomes deeply complex in Loewinsohn’s hands. It is concrete, and poetic, and figurative, at the same time. The spaces we inhabit are tied to our own sense of self and being. We move between spaces, destroy them, steal them, rebuild them, occupy them. And I got to thinking about the structure of my own life and about where I would locate my being. This used to be simple. As a child I had a first home, and that home was the only home I had ever known. The physical building and the people it contained—my parents, my brother—were the location of my being. I KNEW myself completely in the context of those rooms: family, house, school. My being was integrated and singular. It is far more fragmented now, like a house with additions built on, with outbuildings and sheds, basement suites and hidden closets. There are rooms that have been closed off inside myself, and rooms that have been re-opened unexpectedly. There are private rooms and public ones. The most obvious framework of my life includes the house I live in with my husband and my children. I am a mother. I am a wife. My being is supposed to be primarily located within this framework, but there’s a tension there. Motherhood is not a role I have easily adopted. Love for my children comes easily, motherhood as a construct does not. Motherhood demands that so many rooms inside yourself be locked so you can attend to the act of mothering. The intellectual rooms, the poetic rooms, artistic rooms…these were sealed for such a long time. I’ve only recently started prying them open again. And while the roles of wife and mother are real and essential to my identity I question whether they are the location of my true being, or if my true being preceded the house I built from the social structures I found myself adopting, and if it now exists in rooms hidden beneath the framework of my life. Red is such an interesting space in the context of all of this. It is a place that I now inhabit. It is a poetic space and it is a house full of rooms. But it does not exist openly. It’s not a room I show to people or invite others into. I have read a lot of poetry in the past year and have even written some I’m proud of for the first time in my life, and so I find myself living in two sorts of places at once—the surface place where the people I know would likely locate my truest being, and the poetic places that run underneath it where I, perhaps, locate my truest being. Motherhood is a role I must play, whether I want to or not. While BEING a mother can be a joyful thing, the WORK of mothering is often not. It is sometimes a mask I have to wear, or a room I must occupy though it isn’t comfortable. Motherhood is a defined role that I don’t have full control over. Society has defined its shape and its expectations. It existed already, outside of me, before I came to occupy it. Which is why poetic spaces are, perhaps, more likely to allow access to one’s most authentic being. Poetic spaces allow you to explore the essence of things, apart from any defined roles or specific rules. There’s a freedom of movement that occurs in poetic spaces. I wonder if it’s possible to integrate these places again, so that the poetic and the concrete feel like aspects of a whole, the way they did in childhood. As a child I belonged to the structure of my family which allowed me the space and freedom to explore who I was and what my mind was capable of. As adults the surface structures frequently act as hindrances to that same kind of exploration because we get locked into ideas of who we SHOULD be rather than who we are. I have no answers. Just a million questions. I’m throwing open doors I didn’t even know were there. It’s terrifying and beautiful and there’s no end in sight. 260417 ... ovenbird A blather book club would be very helpful in exploring books and ideas! 260417 ... raze few books have lit my brain on fire the way this one did — some of my thoughts are on the reading_now blathe. and i'm not sure i've ever encountered a fictional character i related to as much as the mortimer boy. i wasn't so deadly serious or death-obsessed as a child. i was also lucky enough to have a father who understood me in a way mortimer's father never does (he wasn't shut out of my music; he was an integral part of it). but i know well the feeling of being a boy who's old before his time, and what it is to be someone for whom making art is as necessary as breathing, at a time when most kids your age are more interested in action figures and saturday morning cartoons than home-recorded concept albums and poetry. nothing i've read has moved me to fill so many pages in my reading journal. i had to start a second book when i ran out of space to ink my thoughts in the first one. i can't remember what this relates to, but it's something i wrote that strikes me now: "there are unseen pictures that live inside of pictures, clothes that create zones, and the versions of women that walk around inside the minds of these men take the spaces they inhabit for granted because their men are unable to see them as having the same thoughts and complexities as them." i need to read it again one of these days. i'm sure it'll blow my mind all over again. 260417 what's it to you? who go blather from