I connect you to the words that connect you
to yourself.
You already know the words.
You already know the words to everything you are ever going to write.
You have already repurposed 26 letters into tens of thousands of expressions of hundreds of thousands of ideas.
You’ve already said what you know how to say, and now you want to say something new, something different, something you can feel but can’t quite put into words.
I’m Paula, & I like metaphors. I’m a writer, teacher, professor, Gen-Xer, cat-lover, thrifter, organizer/reorganizer, planner, & change-maker. I am a wife & mother. And the chief poetry officer of capturingdevice.com.
Welcome to my web, my capturing device, my frayed asterisk at the corner.
Capturing Device, the website and the blog, is for me what I hope it will also be for you—poetic license to rewrite myself (yourself, ourselves) on the world. As a poet, teacher, & changemaker, I capture the everyday, every day & give it back in startling & familiar ways.
We already know the words. We just need to find the ones we want and put them to hard use.
Giving sagacious women poetic license to rewrite themselves on the world.
But do I have to write a blog?
Some words feature their ugly with a sound and mouth feel that lingers after the word is gone (sludge, gusset, fetid). Like acid colors and triangle patterns in nature, they warn you to stay away.
Others engage the sickly boniness of their aristocratic inbreeding (pulchritude, bucolic, effulgence) to simply scare you off & save them from doing work. And some are linguistic carrion flowers that lure you in with their liquid sibilance before springing their deadly denotations (acquiesce, hirsute, silverfish).
But a word like blog doesn’t threaten or disdain or tease. It doesn’t do anything but sit, like a tepid lump of beige (not even griege)—unformed, flabby, & tired.
Blog is the sole-surviving syllable of a shantytown portmanteau: weblog. Blog has survivor’s guilt. It’s a purposely ugly word, blog. There has to be something better.
So today, and probably tomorrow, I will explore other words to denote and connote this weblog of musings, missives, and meanderings. This confluence of ephemera, this commonplace, this capturing device.
Not complete but drawing your attention, marking out a space. It is violent, strategic, and imprisoning. It is beautiful, vulnerable, and strong.
There is no box
Boundaries create a safe space that I expand and fill and, in doing so, I re-outline the space I take up in the world.
Steeling Home
We will have vacations and baseball and ice cream this summer, but in light of my theme, these events are not just lowkey entertainment; they are in the service of strengthening everything that makes me feel safe: my body, my family, and my writing (my Work). My summer of Steeling Home has a subtitle: reinforce our foundations and balance our additions. Let’s remember who we are, accept the new parts of us, and make it all work together.
We have the technology
My secret subtitle for this blog is “Crouching Tiger, Kicking Asser” which perhaps over-states my confidence going into Tuesday. Of course, I am nervous about the surgery and, if I had my druthers, I would prefer not to go through it.
I open at the close
Harry Potter’s “snitch” couldn’t tell him anything until he was ready to hear it.
Ideas are cutting instruments
Lakoff points out, “metaphors are more than mere language and literary devices, they are conceptual in nature and represented physically in the brain.” In other words, words take form through our bodies and are expressed as metaphors in our minds.
The business of me sees value in what others overlook and knows that nothing—no, nothing—happens as expected and everything—yes, everything—hatches exactly as it should.