Our prompt for this session was: “Minds unraveling.”
More details on this session will be posted, so check back!
Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.
Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!
“All Hallows’ Eve” by Dorothea Tanning
Be perfect, make it otherwise.
Yesterday is torn in shreds.
Lightning’s thousand sulfur eyes
Rip apart the breathing beds.
Hear bones crack and pulverize.
Doom creeps in on rubber treads.
Countless overwrought housewives,
Minds unraveling like threads,
Try lipstick shades to tranquilize
Fears of age and general dreads.
Sit tight, be perfect, swat the spies,
Don’t take faucets for fountainheads.
Drink tasty antidotes. Otherwise
You and the werewolf: newlyweds.
Our prompt for this session was: “Write about a person who surprised you.”
More details on this session will be posted, so check back!
Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.
Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!
You Are Old, Father William by Lewis Carroll
"You are old, father William," the young man said,
"And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head —
Do you think, at your age, it is right?"
"In my youth," father William replied to his son,
"I feared it would injure the brain;
But now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again."
"You are old," said the youth, "as I mentioned before,
And have grown most uncommonly fat;
Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door —
Pray, what is the reason of that?"
"In my youth," said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,
"I kept all my limbs very supple
By the use of this ointment — one shilling the box —
Allow me to sell you a couple."
"You are old," said the youth, "and your jaws are too weak
For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak —
Pray, how did you manage to do it?"
"In my youth," said his father, "I took to the law,
And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw,
Has lasted the rest of my life."
"You are old," said the youth; one would hardly suppose
That your eye was as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose —
What made you so awfully clever?"
"I have answered three questions, and that is enough,"
Said his father; "don't give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I'll kick you down stairs!"
Our prompt for this session was: “Write an imagined history of an ancestor.”
More details on this session will be posted, so check back!
Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.
Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!
Ain’t no way you could know this, but you were the first of us to set foot on the land that became the state where I was born – Oregon. And now here we are, strangers but not estranged, more like kindred, more like forevermore tethered to terra firma by death date and birth date. Yours: August 16, 1788. Mine: August 16, 1975. Here I am centuries after your death, wanting to share with you what has become of the place where you gasped your last breath and I gloried my first.
There’s much I don’t know about your living-and-breathing in Cape Verde, so I’ve envisioned what it was like, have pictured you hanging near the ports – burnished, famished bleary-eyed – proclaiming to anybody with ears that you’d board a ship bound for the New World and change forevermore your fortune. Then Captain Robert Gray and his crew docked their sloop for a little R&R and refitting. The way I picture it, Gray trekked inland and highsighted about how historic his voyage would be, and how he’d captain Lady Washington around the Cape Horn and through the Drake Passage to America’s west coast to trade trinkets for furs and sail on to China, about how he was looking to add a new member to his small crew. As I imagine it, his notice sounded to you like the ocean looked in your dreams. So, you fat-mouthed to Gray and crew how much you knew about seafaring, how quick you could learn what you didn’t know, big-upped how good you were with your hands, how able a swimmer you were, the super thew in your thin arms and legs, declared if there was a challenge to be met, you’d meet it, so help you God!
Whatever your pitch, sure enough you were soon aboard the ship and sailing around the horn for this New World. What were those days like? Did you expect to watch the sunset over the horizon, to witness a full moon in a sky spent with stars, to hear the music of the sails catching the wind, but instead sorrowed over gales bashing the yards, a tempest tossing the ship on her broadside, Gray yelling, “All hands on deck”?
Our prompt for this session was: “Write about knowing that the world is alive.”
More details on this session will be posted, so check back!
Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.
Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!
Powers, Richard. Bewilderment. 2021. New York: W.W. Norton. [page 173]
Yet Kepler never saw a single planet straight on. It cast a wide net, watching for the faintest imaginable dimming of suns many parsecs away, and it gathered that light with a precision of a couple dozen parts per million. Infinitesimal dips in the brightness of stars betrayed invisible planets passing in front of them. It still stupefies me: like seeing a moth crawl across a streetlight from thirty thousand miles away.
But Kepler couldn’t give me what I wanted: to know, beyond all doubt, that one other world out there was alive. I don’t know why it meant so much to me, when it left so many people cold. Not even my wife really cared all that much one way or another. Robbie did.
To know for certain whether a planet breathed, we needed direct infrared images fine enough to yield detailed spectral fingerprints of their atmospheres. We had the power to get them. For longer than Robbie had been alive—longer than Aly and I were together—I’d been one of the researchers planning a space-based telescope that could populate my every model and decide forever whether the universe was barren or alive. The craft we were backing was a hundred times more powerful than Hubble. It made our best existing telescopes look like old men with dark glasses and service dogs.
It was also a wild fling of cash and effort that made no practical difference in the world. It wouldn’t enrich the future or cure a single disease or protect anyone from the rising flood of our craziness. It would simply answer the thing we humans had been asking since we came down from the trees: was the mind of God inclined toward life, or did we Earthlings have no business being here?
Estábamos 6 participantes desde Nueva York, Islas Canarias, y Argentina. Tuvimos algunos problemas de conexión que dificultaron el debate, pero a pesar de ello, nos enriquecimos mutuamente.
Elegimos imágenes de Luci Gutiérrez, ilustradora española, que combinamos para la sesión de hoy, publicadas en el periódico el Mundo, en 2008 y en una cubierta de un libro para la ONCE, en 2009.
La primera imagen nos invitó a pensar sobre la Imagen sin rostro, solo un código de barras. Los códigos de barras solo son leídos por máquinas. Y todas las máquinas leen lo mismo, sin importar el dónde y el cuándo. Muestra un egresado que se convierte en un número que va a cumplir a su función. Pero el ser humano se levanta cada día con un”código de barras” diferente que solo puede leer otro ser humano. Es un dibujo que informatiza e iguala a todos los seres humanos. Graduamos a seres uniformes. Sin embargo, la nariz asoma modificando el código. Tener la capacidad de romper/luchar, la pequeña rebeldía. Pero alguien apunta que si intentas salir, igual no existes. Si no cumples con la mayoría, darás error. Pero igual eso es lo que queremos. ¿Es más importante romper lo normal y aportar cosas diferentes? ¿Es posible vivir siendo diferente?
Las segundas imágenes provocan reacciones diferentes en los participantes. Impresionan de “igualdad”, cada uno escribe la historia del otro, son iguales. Pero también es posible que sea una imagen de cómo se escribe la historia desde fuera. Parece que los lápices salen desde fuera. Son complementarios, pero también los cuadernos de tapas rojas son una alarma del pensamiento homogéneo porque son iguales. Pero vistas ambas imágenes, parecen mostrar el paso del tiempo. Lo importante es lo que unos tienen que escribir en el cuaderno del otro. Los lápices cambian de tamaño, porque hay más historias que contar.
Todo crece en la imagen, pero no parece crecer el espacio del texto, los libros son iguales. Como si se negara la identidad, al tapar las identidades. Hay un discurso común que homogeneiza las identidades, que oculta las caras. Pero también puede tener que ver con que está dirigido a ciegos. O tal vez, indica que la vida es la que es y no puede hacerse más grande, más larga.
Hay un discurso de identidades oprimidas. La composición parece llevar desde las imágenes de abajo a la superior. Creando personas que pueden terminar siendo homogéneas.
El tiempo pasa de una imagen a otra. El dibujo es exactamente igual, en los libros. Cambiaron todo, pero no cambiaron el dibujo que hacen en los cuadernos. Cambiaron ropa y cuerpo, pero no cambiaron su historia. Otro participante ve que, a pesar de las diferencias, mantiene la igualdad, la armonía. Crecer sin perder las identidades de igualdad.
Escribimos sobre los símbolos que ocultan o descubren nuestros rostros. Los compañeros escribieron sobre la vergüenza, como impulsor de la ocultación. El humor como forma de hablar de eso que queremos ocultar. Los rostros que queremos ocultar y no sabemos cuándo. La piel como ocultación de la voces. Voces que están en algún lugar.
Descubrimos como escribimos a la sombra del texto y cómo las imágenes muestran historias diferentes que se crean en combinación con nuestras propias historias previas.
Aquí, ahora alentamos a los participantes que si así lo desean, compartan lo que escribieron a continuación. Deja tu respuesta aquí, si deseas continuar la conversación sobre las imágenes de Luci Gutiérrez. Pero antes, les recomendamos tener en cuenta que el blog es un espacio público donde, por supuesto, no se garantiza la confidencialidad.
More details on this session will be posted, so check back!
Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.
Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!
A Portable Paradise - by Roger Robinson
And if I speak of Paradise,
then I’m speaking of my grandmother
who told me to carry it always
on my person, concealed, so
no one else would know but me.
That way they can’t steal it, she’d say.
And if life puts you under pressure,
trace its ridges in your pocket,
smell its piney scent on your handkerchief,
hum its anthem under your breath.
And if your stresses are sustained and daily,
get yourself to an empty room – be it hotel,
hostel or hovel – find a lamp
and empty your paradise onto a desk:
your white sands, green hills and fresh fish.
Shine the lamp on it like the fresh hope
of morning, and keep staring at it till you sleep.
Our prompt for this session was: “What brings you to the table?”
More details on this session will be posted, so check back!
Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.
Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!
Our prompt for this session was: “Write about where you are.”
More details on this session will be posted, so check back!
Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.
Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!
Our prompt for this session was: “There is no other way to say…”
More details on this session will be posted, so check back!
Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.
Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!
Our prompt for this session was in two parts. First we wrote to “Write about the person others think you are.” Then we wrote to “Write about what others don’t see or know.”
More details on this session will be posted, so check back!
Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.
Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!
Connections in Narrative Medicine 