What We Weren't: On Choosing a Graduate School

They said they saw in us some unequivocal something.
They thought we would fit in their gold-trimmed boxes.
They sought to keep us on their neatly-paved sidewalks.
They assumed we wouldn't wonder when we looked upon the sky.

But we have walked to the edge of their fortresses.
And we have stood at the crest of their constructs, where all the sidewalks end.
We have seen the place where the world is all quietness - 
have felt the pulse, the heartbeat of the earth when lying against her,
have felt the weightlessness of gravity when standing to our full height. 

And we have found the others who had been there. 
We have felt the silent jolt of envy when we found their creeds in droplets of ink,
their breath still heaving in and out with each turn of the page.
We felt as if we were there, heir to that last lingering vowel upon their parted lips,
so very raptured by their audacious inditements. 

That was the day we discovered what we weren't. 
We weren't able to turn our back on the sound of our own rhyme.
We couldn't ignore the blank space between the lines. 
We had not the aptitude to drop the pen, nor any remorse that may purge us of our mutiny. 

We weren't anybody's lock-pickers.
We weren't the suppressed, the compromised, the unfeeling;
We weren't to be boxed, nor held within a concrete barrier.
We weren't in want of privilege, born into it or not.
We weren't the unknown, and we could never be the unscripted. 
For we weren't, most inconveniently - nay, most delightfully, anything but writers.

@ 2012 by Rachel Lowry. All Rights Reserved {photo}

tabula-rasa-phobia: /ta·bu·lae ra·sae/pho·bi·a/n: fear of the blank page

I have, in the past three weeks, written over fifty blog entries. Why, then, are the ledges of past posts on the Secret Life of Daydreams getting dusty, you ask? Tabula-rasa-phobia. Well, that's what the writer, John Jerome, calls it. In other words, classic writer's fear of the blank page.

Lately, I have had it bad. I arise in the morning with all these thoughts whirling around in my head. They are lucid, opaque, moldable. They can go in any direction and hold any amount of significance I deem requisite. I rush to my page ready to solidify them into words. Yet, no matter how many times I do so, I am revolted by the bit of magic they have lost, as the essence of their ambivalence begins to erode. In an attempt to retain them in their pure form, I leave them to hide behind my blank page. How they must cower as their light diminishes beneath the weight of a new thought, dissolving from the forefront of my recollection. 

And so. I have a new plan this week. It's reckless; it's overhasty; it's imprudent; it's unwise; it's everything a perfectionist such as myself would find abhorrent. This week i will sling adjectives upon the page with intentional negligence. I will misuse and abuse the meaning of words, without regard to (may my professors deny they ever taught me) development, nor punctuation. This week I will slap unstable thoughts onto the page, with no buffer of reason. This week I will perform crimes against all established rules of figurative language, intentionally disregarding (readers, cringe you may) modes of rhythm and tone. This week I will write for the sake of writing — nothing more, nothing less and we shall see what will become of it. If anything more than a blank page, I shall deem myself a literary criminal of the highest class.

@ 2011 by Rachel Lowry. All Rights Reserved {photo vi.sualize.u

My Underground Crusades

When actions fail me (which, last night, fail me they did) words do not. And this is what brought a restless dreamer beyond the warmth of her covers to come before the ambivalent fog of a winter dawn, to wrestle, pen in hand, with her greatest contender: herself.

Here and here alone, within the white and black austerity of my words, can she unburden herself of that which burns in her heart and trifles with her conscience. Last night, a series of under-riding tensions surfaced at the crux of some immaterial, trifling something I cannot quite define but suspect many can understand.

And so I come, as Brian Doyle puts it, "thrashing toward the light with a sharp pen." Because maybe that is all I have right now and maybe it is the only means of sloshing through those times in life when the only way I can handle rage and horror and fear is to write it down and thus "fend it off, fight it, force it to retreat, understand it, hurt it."

@ 2011 by Rachel Lowry. All Rights Reserved {photos via vi.sualize.us}

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

While aimlessly and disinterestedly perusing the dusty corner of the abandoned book section, I found an old anthology of american short stories. And it came home with me. I found myself between the covers for the rest of the evening with this book, and after a number of superb stories, I found a little gem, written by James Thurber, which required three, four, perhaps five re-reads. I so love the charm by which Thurber reminds us that the most ordinary of people may or may not be living secret lives of the most daring of exploits. 

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber 

"WE'RE going through!" The Commander's voice was like thin ice breaking. He wore his full-dress uniform, with the heavily braided white cap pulled down rakishly over one cold gray eye. "We can't make it, sir. It's spoiling for a hurricane, if you ask me." "I'm not asking you, Lieutenant Berg," said the Commander. "Throw on the power lights! Rev her up to 8500! We're going through!" The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa. The Commander stared at the ice forming on the pilot window. He walked over and twisted a row of complicated dials. "Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!" he shouted. "Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!" repeated Lieutenant Berg. "Full strength in No. 3 turret!" shouted the Commander. "Full strength in No. 3 turret!" The crew, bending to their various tasks in the huge, hurtling eight-engined Navy hydroplane, looked at each other and grinned. "The Old Man'll get us through," they said to one another. "The Old Man ain't afraid of hell!" . . .

"Not so fast! You're driving too fast!" said Mrs. Mitty. "What are you driving so fast for?"

"Hmm?" said Walter Mitty. He looked at his wife, in the seat beside him, with shocked astonishment. She seemed grossly unfamiliar, like a strange woman who had yelled at him in a crowd. "You were up to fifty-five," she said. "You know I don't like to go more than forty. You were up to fifty-five." Walter Mitty drove on toward Waterbury in silence, the roaring of the SN202 through the worst storm in twenty years of Navy flying fading in the remote, intimate airways of his mind. "You're tensed up again," said Mrs. Mitty. "It's one of your days. I wish you'd let Dr. Renshaw look you over."

Walter Mitty stopped the car in front of the building where his wife went to have her hair done. "Remember to get those overshoes while I'm having my hair done," she said. "I don't need overshoes," said Mitty. She put her mirror back into her bag. "We've been all through that," she said, getting out of the car. "You're not a young man any longer." He raced the engine a little. "Why don't you wear your gloves? Have you lost your gloves?" Walter Mitty reached in a pocket and brought out the gloves. He put them on, but after she had turned and gone into the building and he had driven on to a red light, he took them off again. "Pick it up, brother!" snapped a cop as the light changed, and Mitty hastily pulled on his gloves and lurched ahead. He drove around the streets aimlessly for a time, and then he drove past the hospital on his way to the parking lot.

. . . "It's the millionaire banker, Wellington McMillan," said the pretty nurse. "Yes?" said Walter Mitty, removing his gloves slowly. "Who has the case?" "Dr. Renshaw and Dr. Benbow, but there are two specialists here, Dr. Remington from New York and Dr. Pritchard-Mitford from London. He flew over." A door opened down a long, cool corridor and Dr. Renshaw came out. He looked distraught and haggard. "Hello, Mitty," he said. `'We're having the devil's own time with McMillan, the millionaire banker and close personal friend of Roosevelt. Obstreosis of the ductal tract. Tertiary. Wish you'd take a look at him." "Glad to," said Mitty.

In the operating room there were whispered introductions: "Dr. Remington, Dr. Mitty. Dr. Pritchard-Mitford, Dr. Mitty." "I've read your book on streptothricosis," said Pritchard-Mitford, shaking hands. "A brilliant performance, sir." "Thank you," said Walter Mitty. "Didn't know you were in the States, Mitty," grumbled Remington. "Coals to Newcastle, bringing Mitford and me up here for a tertiary." "You are very kind," said Mitty. A huge, complicated machine, connected to the operating table, with many tubes and wires, began at this moment to go pocketa-pocketa-pocketa. "The new anesthetizer is giving away!" shouted an intern. "There is no one in the East who knows how to fix it!" "Quiet, man!" said Mitty, in a low, cool voice. He sprang to the machine, which was now going pocketa-pocketa-queep-pocketa-queep . He began fingering delicately a row of glistening dials. "Give me a fountain pen!" he snapped. Someone handed him a fountain pen. He pulled a faulty piston out of the machine and inserted the pen in its place. "That will hold for ten minutes," he said. "Get on with the operation. A nurse hurried over and whispered to Renshaw, and Mitty saw the man turn pale. "Coreopsis has set in," said Renshaw nervously. "If you would take over, Mitty?" Mitty looked at him and at the craven figure of Benbow, who drank, and at the grave, uncertain faces of the two great specialists. "If you wish," he said. They slipped a white gown on him, he adjusted a mask and drew on thin gloves; nurses handed him shining . . .

"Back it up, Mac!! Look out for that Buick!" Walter Mitty jammed on the brakes. "Wrong lane, Mac," said the parking-lot attendant, looking at Mitty closely. "Gee. Yeh," muttered Mitty. He began cautiously to back out of the lane marked "Exit Only." "Leave her sit there," said the attendant. "I'll put her away." Mitty got out of the car. "Hey, better leave the key." "Oh," said Mitty, handing the man the ignition key. The attendant vaulted into the car, backed it up with insolent skill, and put it where it belonged.

They're so damn cocky, thought Walter Mitty, walking along Main Street; they think they know everything. Once he had tried to take his chains off, outside New Milford, and he had got them wound around the axles. A man had had to come out in a wrecking car and unwind them, a young, grinning garageman. Since then Mrs. Mitty always made him drive to a garage to have the chains taken off. The next time, he thought, I'll wear my right arm in a sling; they won't grin at me then. I'll have my right arm in a sling and they'll see I couldn't possibly take the chains off myself. He kicked at the slush on the sidewalk. "Overshoes," he said to himself, and he began looking for a shoe store.

When he came out into the street again, with the overshoes in a box under his arm, Walter Mitty began to wonder what the other thing was his wife had told him to get. She had told him, twice before they set out from their house for Waterbury. In a way he hated these weekly trips to town--he was always getting something wrong. Kleenex, he thought, Squibb's, razor blades? No. Tooth paste, toothbrush, bicarbonate, Carborundum, initiative and referendum? He gave it up. But she would remember it. "Where's the what's-its- name?" she would ask. "Don't tell me you forgot the what's-its-name." A newsboy went by shouting something about the Waterbury trial.

. . . "Perhaps this will refresh your memory." The District Attorney suddenly thrust a heavy automatic at the quiet figure on the witness stand. "Have you ever seen this before?'' Walter Mitty took the gun and examined it expertly. "This is my Webley-Vickers 50.80," ho said calmly. An excited buzz ran around the courtroom. The Judge rapped for order. "You are a crack shot with any sort of firearms, I believe?" said the District Attorney, insinuatingly. "Objection!" shouted Mitty's attorney. "We have shown that the defendant could not have fired the shot. We have shown that he wore his right arm in a sling on the night of the fourteenth of July." Walter Mitty raised his hand briefly and the bickering attorneys were stilled. "With any known make of gun," he said evenly, "I could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my left hand." Pandemonium broke loose in the courtroom. A woman's scream rose above the bedlam and suddenly a lovely, dark-haired girl was in Walter Mitty's arms. The District Attorney struck at her savagely. Without rising from his chair, Mitty let the man have it on the point of the chin. "You miserable cur!" . . .

"Puppy biscuit," said Walter Mitty. He stopped walking and the buildings of Waterbury rose up out of the misty courtroom and surrounded him again. A woman who was passing laughed. "He said 'Puppy biscuit,'" she said to her companion. "That man said 'Puppy biscuit' to himself." Walter Mitty hurried on. He went into an A. P., not the first one he came to but a smaller one farther up the street. "I want some biscuit for small, young dogs," he said to the clerk. "Any special brand, sir?" The greatest pistol shot in the world thought a moment. "It says 'Puppies Bark for It' on the box," said Walter Mitty.

His wife would be through at the hairdresser's in fifteen minutes' Mitty saw in looking at his watch, unless they had trouble drying it; sometimes they had trouble drying it. She didn't like to get to the hotel first, she would want him to be there waiting for her as usual. He found a big leather chair in the lobby, facing a window, and he put the overshoes and the puppy biscuit on the floor beside it. He picked up an old copy of Liberty and sank down into the chair. "Can Germany Conquer the World Through the Air?" Walter Mitty looked at the pictures of bombing planes and of ruined streets.

. . . "The cannonading has got the wind up in young Raleigh, sir," said the sergeant. Captain Mitty looked up at him through tousled hair. "Get him to bed," he said wearily, "with the others. I'll fly alone." "But you can't, sir," said the sergeant anxiously. "It takes two men to handle that bomber and the Archies are pounding hell out of the air. Von Richtman's circus is between here and Saulier." "Somebody's got to get that ammunition dump," said Mitty. "I'm going over. Spot of brandy?" He poured a drink for the sergeant and one for himself. War thundered and whined around the dugout and battered at the door. There was a rending of wood and splinters flew through the room. "A bit of a near thing," said Captain Mitty carelessly. 'The box barrage is closing in," said the sergeant. "We only live once, Sergeant," said Mitty, with his faint, fleeting smile. "Or do we?" He poured another brandy and tossed it off. "I never see a man could hold his brandy like you, sir," said the sergeant. "Begging your pardon, sir." Captain Mitty stood up and strapped on his huge Webley-Vickers automatic. "It's forty kilometers through hell, sir," said the sergeant. Mitty finished one last brandy. "After all," he said softly, "what isn't?" The pounding of the cannon increased; there was the rat-tat-tatting of machine guns, and from somewhere came the menacing pocketa-pocketa-pocketa of the new flame-throwers. Walter Mitty walked to the door of the dugout humming "Aupres de Ma Blonde." He turned and waved to the sergeant. "Cheerio!" he said. . . .

Something struck his shoulder. "I've been looking all over this hotel for you," said Mrs. Mitty. "Why do you have to hide in this old chair? How did you expect me to find you?" "Things close in," said Walter Mitty vaguely. "What?" Mrs. Mitty said. "Did you get the what's-its-name? The puppy biscuit? What's in that box?" "Overshoes," said Mitty. "Couldn't you have put them on in the store?" 'I was thinking," said Walter Mitty. "Does it ever occur to you that I am sometimes thinking?" She looked at him. "I'm going to take your temperature when I get you home," she said.

They went out through the revolving doors that made a faintly derisive whistling sound when you pushed them. It was two blocks to the parking lot. At the drugstore on the corner she said, "Wait here for me. I forgot something. I won't be a minute." She was more than a minute. Walter Mitty lighted a cigarette. It began to rain, rain with sleet in it. He stood up against the wall of the drugstore, smoking. . . . He put his shoulders back and his heels together. "To hell with the handkerchief," said Waker Mitty scornfully. He took one last drag on his cigarette and snapped it away. Then, with that faint, fleeting smile playing about his lips, he faced the firing squad; erect and motionless, proud and disdainful, Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable to the last. 

@ 2011 by Rachel Lowry. All Rights Reserved {photos via vi.sualize.us}

Guilty Of

—Putting on a show of highlights from the My Fair Lady soundtrack when I supposed myself alone in the office last night, to discover by an amused (if not entertained) downstairs tenant, I certainly was not.
—Eating an entire box of stovetop mac and cheese for dinner. Three days in a row. 
—Spending four hours in bed this Saturday morning with Tolstoy's Anna Karenina.
—DI runs each evening to peruse the books sections.
—Sporting red lipstick during house cleaning.
—Wearing dresses in October. 
—Admitting to absolutely no regrets.

@ 2011 by Rachel Lowry. All Rights Reserved {photos via, post inspired by her and her}

Rush Hour

They are my rivals

and yet -

also my comrades.

Each one of them,

boldly making their way across

the battlefields of the home-bound.

Bumper against bumper,

cheek-to-cheek.

Notwithstanding the trappings of

our own tires,

we press on.

Against the peril

of waning time,

we persevere.

Despite the dangers of

our wielding the wheel,

we march forward,

foot

to

pedal.

We are the unclaimed front-liners,

left to our own thoughts.

{for some, a treasured rarity; for others, an unsolicited terror}

We are the absent subscribers,

unaccounted for upon the first step before the front door.

{when the moment has at last come upon us}

We are the unsung lovers,

waiting for the moment of remittance,

{against the crude barriers of a road block}

We are the flightless birds,

lingering restlessly in a sea of frozen schedules.

We are the presumptuous cretins,

who have the audacity to dare defy the dimensions, the breadth of this world.

Mock us, if you will.

But you do not know us if you presume we will lose grasp of the wheel.

@ 2011 by Rachel Lowry. All Rights Reserved {photo vi.sualize.us}

Just for Tonight

Tonight, dearest friends, I ask for not only your ear, but also your shoulder. You see, as I attempt to piece together the wild thoughts of my teeming mind, I address you with a solemnity that can only come from those things we can hardly shape into vowels, or put into words. It's a feeling, a thought, a suspicion which has driven me to reckless attempts to make good in a battle of colliding shades of grey.

When I was young, my sense of morality (though a quivering droplet hewn from the rifts of a great ocean) drove me to freely choose abandonment in one pivotal instance. For years, I would grapple with and attempt to make sense of my decision and the ramifications that followed. This week has brought on a slew of questions and re-assessments of certain assumptions under which I operate.

As always, the gentle and delicious words of Ms. Charlotte Bronte soften my discontent:

I have no conclusion, for some things cannot be wrapped neatly into a package. Some things must be left to grow, expand, and perhaps one day, sprout wings.

© 2011 by Rachel Lowry. All rights Reserved.

Behind the Curtain

The audience mills about in restless anticipation. having found seat 21, section k, on the balcony. Attendees examine their program, size up the room dimensions, against whispers of mutual adulation.

The scuffle of performers can be heard; but nothing more than the tips of toes can be seen behind the silk red curtain, where the director's dimples fit comfortable into the wrinkles that years of smiles have left upon the corners of his mouth. He is content, observing the closure of half a years' work. Whether it be scattered cellists plummeting discordant passages of Bach's Concerto, or a swarm of excited dancers stretching at the bar.

The curtain rises and the blinding lights warm my upturned cheeks as the spectators slip toward the edge of their seats. I deeply breathe in and out before the music begins, the voices expand, the figures shoot across the stage.

Join us to see what lies behind the curtain of the DeJong tonight at 7:30! The University Chorale will be performing a number of Christmas pieces: traditional, as well as some killer soul music. Hope to see you there.

© 2010 by Rachel Lowry. All rights reserved. {via: Belinda Strodder}

Blustery: bləstərē adj. (of a wind) Blowing in strong gusts

Today is quite possibly verging on blustery. I love the wind. It's presence carries some sort of mystical quality to it. It makes me feel as if I'm part of some indefinable something I don't entirely understand, but catch a faint spark of. It defies the mechanics of gravity; it trumps the tediousness of unruffled hairdos and stationary pages; and it tugs at my memory of places that seemed themselves suffused with the enchantment of things we cannot prove, but can only know. It reminds me of my favorite essay on wind. So, so beautifully put:

His death had nothing to do with wind, as far as I know. But maybe there are two kinds of people. Those who like their stories tidy, with a once-upon- a-time and a happily-ever-after, and in between a series of nicely demarcated scenes that rise when they need rise, climax when a climax is called for, and neatly resolve. And then there are the others, who are willing to follow a current, to feel it move discretely through a tangle of branches, to sense a gust of meaning shudder in the brush, to feel the ghostly fingers of the air lift their hair off their necks and leave a shiver up their spines—those who have felt, in all its unlikelihood, the impact of a kiss that leveled your soul like a freight train busting the night open in a small town, on a night of winds, a night of thrilling, elegiac winds. — D. Steiner, Elements of the Wind

@ 2011 by Rachel Lowry. All Rights Reserved. {via: vis.ualize.us}

Sick

6 hours of sleep.
5 hours of homework.
4 hours of work.
3 hours of class.
2 hours of dance.
1 long bath to remind my poor sick, cold-invested body that I still love it.

© 2010 by Rachel Lowry. All rights reserved. (photo via)

Irregular as Clockwork

Irregular as Clockwork

I have known

the clockwork of the heart.

I know it to be as constant as a moment,

as buoyant as concrete

as predictable as life.

I know it to be as volatile as appetite.

as certain as doubt’s shadow,

as capricious as the sun’s agenda.

It beats,

a rhythmic jolt within the detainment of my body.

It pulses,

venturing to verify existence.

It thumps,

echoing the deafening cry of silence.

It flutters,

in erratic ecstasy.

It throbs,

with raw apprehension.

It yearns

with unrestrained longing.

It aches,

as fractured as splintered wood.

It soars,

above skies of untouchable and weightless euphoria.

It grinds,

between the jagged edges of consciousness.

It burns,

like red pepper seers the inside of a vein.

It skips,

at the shift of relativity.

It presses,

like a boulder to the chest.

It sings,

In frivolously vital giddiness.

It sinks,

With the weight of fallen possibility.

It expands,

In divine wonder.

It hums

as a small bird with a million places to be, but nowhere to go.

It murmurs,

In the sweetness of recollection.

It can be stilled

- Oh yes, it can be stilled.

And what of the heart when it is cold, motionless?

The answer lies not in its function,

but in its continuation;

Living still in the off-beat of another,

rising and falling in erratic rhythm,

for it is, I have always known,

as irregular as clockwork.

© 2010 by Rachel Lowry. All rights reserved. {photo via: coupdegrace}

Mirror Image

You know the morning routine.

You run around your bedroom, bouncing back and forth between your closet drawers and your self-made study station. I'm usually hopping on one leg, throwing on my boots and scarf, while grabbing my book bag, bulging with schoolbooks. I turn to go, but catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror.

Oh, there I am. And I wonder as I stare back at that frazzled, hazel-eyed girl,

Who are you? Perhaps, just maybe one day I will have the answer.

@ 2012 by Rachel Lowry. All Rights Reserved {photo source unknown}

The Fortresses of My Mind

Do you ever find that you have lost yourself at the end of the day? You seem to have fallen into a thick void of something you cannot quite define - or maybe it's the lack of something to define.

People surround you, but you seem to have lost connection. You stand alone - unrelated to anything or anybody. The air that you breathe will go right back into the room, as if it had never circulated through your lungs. You wonder if you do little more than fill a space that once was and never will again be? You find yourself searching for a means of solidity, but find only a chasm between absolutes that don't seem to hold.

Someone once said, "If we're all alone, we're all together in that too." Did that someone once occupy that space of nothingness? - that space that has you begging the question of where it is you fit in the world and what your relation to it is. Was he lying, or had he really treaded the spaces of this void?

In the words of my all time hero, Kathleen Kelly in You've Got Mail, I don’t really want an answer. I just want to send this cosmic question out into the void. So goodnight, dear void.

© 2010 by Rachel Lowry. All rights reserved. {via vis.ualize.us}

Wed (nes) day

Good morning, folks!

Dare I mention that I smelled fall this morning?

Well, I did. It taunted me as it came to my nose

and brought goosebumps upon the surface of my once-smooth legs, before it gripped one of the weaker leaves already turning yellow on an old oak tree I pass every morning to get to school.

The leaf quivered for a moment,

before the rays of an 8:30 sunrise

chased it away, but not without

the crude reminder that

its days are numbered.

However, I'd rather not think of such things. Today is Wednesday. My Wednesdays are always in want of a little remedy: a day squeezed between the chaos of Tuesday and the mundane of Thursday, heading for the relief a weekend so often brings, but not quite there yet. 

@ 2012 by Rachel Lowry. All Rights Reserved.