Looking in the Mirror

Asking for the truth

I have been thinking a lot about mirrors this week. The first reason, when I started working on this week’s letter, was that I wanted to write a new series about PRACTICE- That’s what this newsletter is about- it’s how I practice, and the mirror is such an important tool to learn about your practice.

So yes, I started out planning to write to you about mirrors and how much they can help us, because as artists, we need to know the truth, and a mirror will give us that.

mirror- a sketch idea for a woodcut by me

Then this week unfolded in the world as it has, and I can’t get away from this truth: when I look in a mirror, I see a middle aged woman with a son in elementary school, who loves to sing and write- which is more or less the CNN headline that tops the page of search results when you enter the name Renee Nicole Good.

The picture that tops that article shows that she had a nose ring in the same place where I’ve sported a little hole since I was seventeen. I had just sent an email to the shop in White River about making an appointment to have it redone. I have a funny story about how I got mine. I wonder if she did too.

I can’t write about mirrors in the way I had planned, how they can teach us to release tension, put good technique into our muscle memory, and give us the precious gift of non-judgmental self-awareness.

I can’t write about the mirror like that this week, because Renee Nicole Good’s Instagram bio reads “Poet and writer and wife and mom and shitty guitar strummer…” and when I look in the mirror that I keep by my desk, I have to look over the top my small grey notebook that I call Glimmers & Blinks ☆ where I collect song ideas and fragments that sparkle or make me feel a hitch in my breath that I hope I might be able to convince to become a song some day, and I’m pretty sure somewhere on Renee Nicole Good’s abandoned desk there is probably a book like that. My third-grade son is dancing to his current favorite song on Spotify as I write this. I gave him my phone to get another 15 minutes to work. I bet that Renee Nicole Good, being a mother and a writer, had probably bribed her way to some extra minutes to wrestle with words. I’m looking in that mirror with my parlor Larivee (which I strung up with some really soft nylon folk strings this week to see if I could use it to clawhammer) in the floor stand next to me, and I’m wishing I could write the letter I had planned about checking in with the mirror to get closer to the sounds you want to make. I love it when I get to show someone something that makes music easier. I’m pretty sure Renee Nicole Good would have gotten a little something helpful from that letter, in a universe where she just drove away, and the algorithm decided to show it to her one day, because my Instagram bio reads- I sing and write and play guitar and love you. Mom & Wife & Daughter, and if AI can do anything, it can recognize that those two bios are an awful lot alike.

This is not the first time I have wept tears of grief and rage over ICE atrocities. They come so fast and furious, it’s hard to comprehend. Like I said in the last essay I wrote, “It’s a cascade of stolen lives and senseless violence. We can’t even hold one sorrow in each hand; we have to become jugglers of loss to manage all the heartbreak.”

I grieve for all the families and communities that are being terrorized. It’s all tragic. This isn’t the first time for the rage and tears, but it is the first time that looking at the target felt like looking in the mirror.

Because I clumsily try to write poetry. Because my favorite name is Mom. Because I am happy with a guitar in my hands. Not many people are like you, but the ones that are, they are a lot like you. I can say with confidence that Renee Nicole Good didn’t go home at night to study a car ramming manual; she was looking for the napkin where she scribbled something about time and drying towels that she didn’t want to forget.

I’m going to do my best this next week to make some art, something to help process the weight of all this. I hope you do too.

In 2020, when Renée Nicole Good went by Renée Nicole Macklin, she won the Academy of American Poets Prize for this poem:

On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs

by Renée Nicole Macklin

i want back my rocking chairs,

solipsist sunsets,

& coastal jungle sounds that are tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of cockroaches.

i’ve donated bibles to thrift stores

(mashed them in plastic trash bags with an acidic himalayan salt lamp—

the post-baptism bibles, the ones plucked from street corners from the meaty hands of zealots, the dumbed-down, easy-to-read, parasitic kind):

remember more the slick rubber smell of high gloss biology textbook pictures; they burned the hairs inside my nostrils,

& salt & ink that rubbed off on my palms.

under clippings of the moon at two forty five AM I study&repeat

ribosome

endoplasmic—

lactic acid

stamen

at the IHOP on the corner of powers and stetson hills—

i repeated & scribbled until it picked its way & stagnated somewhere i can’t point to anymore, maybe my gut—

maybe there in-between my pancreas & large intestine is the piddly brook of my soul.

it’s the ruler by which i reduce all things now; hard-edged & splintering from knowledge that used to sit, a cloth against fevered forehead.

can i let them both be? this fickle faith and this college science that heckles from the back of the classroom

now i can’t believe—

that the bible and qur’an and bhagavad gita are sliding long hairs behind my ear like mom used to & exhaling from their mouths “make room for wonder”—

all my understanding dribbles down the chin onto the chest & is summarized as:

life is merely

to ovum and sperm

and where those two meet

and how often and how well

and what dies there.

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