Waves

Today I spent time creating using different dimensions, layers, and forms after making a gift using a recycled bottle and flower pot.

The smaller pot was home to a few plants that ultimately could not thrive in the container, and so I decided to take the hint and create from the material…something else. Maybe not what was expected for its original design. I was reminded of this lesson when I began creating an accordion book, and as the space I had to create changed the length of the canvas, I thought of water. This transformation to, from, and beyond container is something water demonstrates.

I was lucky to grow up on a river and to see a body of water in motion each day. We lived at the bottom of a hill and I didn’t always recognize at the time that I knew I was close to home when I could smell and hear the waves. As an adult, I notice this more and more.

I think this why I’ll walk miles wherever I am to find the water, to go there when I can’t hear my internal answers. In Michigan, I’d trudge to the Huron. Philly, the Delaware. The summer I spent in a landlocked part of LA, I took the train to get to the Pacific or swam at the outdoor pool available at the university gym. Whenever I visit a friend and they ask me what I’d like to do I say: Let’s go for a walk by the water, not always knowing for them what means, only trusting they have their own version to offer.

Now I live close to the East River, and I love to sit there a few times a week. As I approach, I pass underneath the two bridges, traffic drowning out whatever’s playing through my headphones; a reminder to listen. I take them off, and let them rest along my neck, a habit that recently had me referred to as “headphone lady” by someone seeking directions.

A year ago, I was talking to a playwright with whom I’d exchanged work. We were giving each other notes and she shared with me a theory she’d learned about structure, waves structure, as opposed to the traditional three act structure. “It’s mapped with the way the female body orgasms as opposed to a male’s,” and we laughed at the not so subtly hidden singular, spectacular “climax” that occurs near the end of the film (because it’s over, right?? get out of your chairs, throw away the unfinished popcorn, just a few moments left until we wrap up) and began to think about how other stories are structured, especially short stories and poems, and which ones find the most resistance to being “good” or “right,” how much the experience of pleasure dictates the taste over what is worthy. To an extent this is good: don’t let others tell you what you find pleasurable! But how much have we examined our possibilities for pleasure and the way that pleasure creates a hierarchy of correctness? I think the knowledge of connecting cycles of the body to cycles in story and creativity is important, that impulse to be so direct as to call a story piece a climax, but I wondered what it would look like for a form like waves structure to take over. Or to be considered with more rigor, more attention, as a formal choice rather than an accident to be cured.