Uncategorized – Wrens on a Wire by Amanda Varrella

The Heat, The Wave

June 27, 2024January 5, 2026Posted in UncategorizedLeave a comment

The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. ~Edward O. Wilson

My computer just broke down. The screen went black with a finality that was so frightening I stopped breathing. I, to my great dismay, depend on my Mac for everything while living and working on this strange and, for most of the year, deserted island. So today I have no choice but to truck to the nearest Best Buy in this lurid weather. My facial skin for some reason doesn’t work in the heat. An enigmatic idiosyncrasy that turns my visage into an explosion of vermilion that scares people. And that also gives me pause: ‘is my epidermis burning off my skull?,’ I wonder. Even though I know it’s not. So figuring out how to afford a new computer in a heatwave, real-feel 110 degrees, with a vertiginous eruption of hell on the face that I need to do so, and humidity as thick as an ostrich fart, is hard to fathom.

But fathom I did five years ago, driving the hour trek with my barely working air conditioner blasting and a lot of prayer because my beloved 2001 Saab was again flashing the engine light at me. Which it was wont to do for no conspicuous rhyme or reason. My iPhone was also continuing to glitch like crazy. So I was talking with the salesman at Best Buy about the urgent phone concern after he had just sold me a new apple laptop by way of a very affordable finance plan. Which, at that point, I still struggled to afford. Though the he was American, it seemed as though the salesman hailed from Eastern Europe. He reminded me of a friend of yore from a small country there. He was as tall as a reed with brown curls like a halo, his face slanted into unobtrusive intelligence with an air of gentle sadness about him.

And as the kind salesman informed me about how the cloud and other aspects of this relic of a device (an iPhone 5) could be related to the telephonic funk, a bilious surge overcame me. The wrongness of it so pure and overwhelming I felt as though I would completely meltdown from the heft of it all: from all I don’t know about the inner-workings of computers and smart phones which I, it pains me to admit, cannot survive without. And from the weight of my enslavement to this insidious oppression.

I readily apologized to my kind Best Buy sales advocate for suddenly being very weary, feeling as though I might fall to the ground, surprised that I actually hadn’t. I let him know that the glistening and ominous phones and computers, all the hidden, blaring unknowns, are reminding me of technology’s terrifying reign upon every facet of not only my little life, but also upon every facet of the whole wide world. Which is so disturbing to me that I physically react to it while in its shining midst, and always have. But that day my collapse into fatigue and violent facial flushing was made much worse than normal because of the other obscenity at hand: The 110 degree heat in early June. And, though I was too overtaken to articulate this to the lovely giant then, my more wild than normal somatic response was no doubt also a reaction to how big tech is a ton more abnormal than the dangerous thermal environmental changes happening, yet has with breakneck speed over the last decade become much more normalized.

Which is all to write that I tried my best to let the visibly concerned and uncertain of how to respond to me salesman know that my current response to the cataclysms at hand, a response surprising even to me, was in no way a response to him. That, in fact, he had been incredibly patient and gracious with me. The salesman nodded with implicit understanding, which was such a relief. He was towering over me, the skinniest, palest and kindest giant I’ve ever met (could he have been seven feet tall?). He then told me that he was my age. A fact he knew from the tedious and time consuming list of information he earlier procured about my identity in order to determine that I was eligible for the affordable finance plan that I really couldn’t afford. He then asked for my phone and pulled it up very close to his face. “I have a disability,” he said. “I can’t see well sometimes.” So he thumbed the screen of my old phone while it brushed his nose in increments, trying his best to find the iCloud setting. Which I, in my state of corporeal shutdown, couldn’t find.

And then the salesman shutdown too. Or, perhaps more accurately, he became surprisingly alive to the profusion of technological menace. Heat, after all, never fails to bring up all that stinks. Mid-sentence and without warning the salesman silently pivoted and, with unusual rapidity, picked up a rose-gold apple laptop from the display table, raised it above his angelic head and slammed it back down. In one fluid motion he again heaved the laptop as high above his long body as the black security cord to which it was affixed would allow and smashed it back down against the table. He did this again, then again and again and again. I didn’t move. This could have seemed to a foreigner, or to the person now frightened by this kind and gentle Eastern European giant, standing right next to him and frozen, that perhaps he was trying to get the laptop off of the security cord, to see something underneath it.

But upon closer view or, in my case, without denial and being two inches removed from his wordless force, this was definitely not true. With his enormous left hand the salesman continued to lift the laptop up and slam it down. He then flailed his right hand out to his side, twisting his wrist up and raising it in a slow wave, pointing my phone at the fluorescent lighting, and then letting his arm fall back down to his side like it weighed fifty pounds. As if he were a performance artist, or paying homage to the Beastie Boys’ tech bashing scene in the film, “Office Space,” the salesman for a second time lashed his hand, my phone, out to his side. He kept it parallel to the ground for a beat before twisting it upward, lifting it high. As if he intended to give it over to the gods technology, who were communicating to him via the flickering bars of fluorescent light. Time disappeared while I watched the salesman thrashing in surprisingly dancerly spasms, my phone disappearing in his giant hand, into the deep blue nefariousness of Best Buy. Into the most appropriate insanity ever.

Then, just as quickly as the salesman’s body began to convulse in silent wails, pretty apple laptop grafted onto his left hand, my black leather covered iPhone grafted onto his right hand, he stopped moving. There was a musical rest of stillness before he began to examine my phone again, holding it so close to his face that I couldn’t see him. And before I knew what was happening, the salesman.shoved my phone into his pocket. After which he was again motionless, as if he were transfixed by some omnipotent and sinister techno secret. When I forced myself to look directly at his face, he was staring straight ahead, catatonic.

This is when I finally broke the spell and spoke, cautiously letting him know that the phone in the pocket of his pants was my phone. I asked him if I could have it back. And with a start he realized the fact of the matter. Without a word he began patting the exterior of his khaki pant pockets, retrieving my phone and politely handing it back to me. “Thank you,” I said. Then, when he didn’t respond, I quietly asked, “Are you okay? “Yes,” he said. After which he pointed me in the direction of the iPhones on display, which he said would be far better than the old one I owned. He began selling me the reasons the new iPhones would be superior, as though he hadn’t just become a fittingly deranged, brilliant modern dancer having either a breakdown or a revelation.

I’ve thought many times since of that fever dream of a day in 2019—at the Best Buy in Cape May County, New Jersey, USA. Thought not of incorporating the knowing, sorrowful salesman’s gestures into a choreographed piece of dance on a stage, but rather into my daily round. I’ve imagined this American European giant’s genius as the 2024 embodiment of Edvard Munch’s painting, The Scream.

A Norwegian masterpiece dating back to 1893: indelible portrait of horror and outrage. Austere illustration of what standing aghast looks like, what standing aghast feels like, what standing aghast is—namely, falling victim to fear and, in victimhood, fading into ghosts of ourselves, frozen. The painting urges us to move from powerlessness into something else entirely, How? By first acknowledging how harrowing and absurd and ghastly things are. By bringing attention to that which we so often suppress for all manner of reasons. Not least of which is, on the universally unavoidable biological level, to survive. Munch’s refusal to conceal the monstrosity of life is the kind of transgressive flash of light that withstands the test of time because, as Nietzsche writes, “we have art in order to not die from the truth.” We always have and we always will. And we couldn’t need art that galvanizes us from being frozen in fear and victimhood (and all of its violent consequences) more now, circa June 2024. A time in which heatwaves of myriad hazardous manner abound.

A time in which art is actually one of the only practical rejoinders to this post-fact scream of a society, one festooned with all manner of maliciousness, of that which tries to make me stand aghast at every turn. And turn, turn, turn I do in fervent prayer. Which always brings me face to face with the blistering swell of unregulated big tech that, in open secret, controls us all. Which is more than apparent in: generative artificial intelligence and deep fakes and fake news; the decline of democracy world-wide; and in love in the time of algorithms. Which has always already been causing a pandemic of narcissism and lovelessness inextricable from our addiction to drugs and phones and computers. The scourge of big tech is also more than apparent in loneliness and division and overdoses and suicide rates, which are at an all time high. It’s apparent too in our confusion about what it means to be human; well as in—and this may be the most important aspect of all—how to trust one another.

So you may soon see me with my apple laptop in one hand and my iPhone in the other, assuming the ubiquitous, tech induced, ingrown posture—face aimed away from you, my fellow Homo sapiens, pointed downward and possessed by those infamous bitten apples. I will seem to be innocuously going about my day in this manner one moment, only to then pivot, raise my computer in my left hand and slam it down. Again and again and then again. I’ll soon also flail my right arm out from my waist, newer iPhone in tow now, of course—apple sure does plan its products’ obsolescence masterfully. Eve’s apple an extension of my right hand, swooping skyward then dropping back down to my side. Up, down, and all around, forms and variations of the Best Buy genius’s blueprint. Maybe you’ll think I’ve lost it? Maybe you’ll think my abrupt and violent interaction with technology is my small attempt to shake up the homeostasis of big tech, of the cultural monolith it has become? That it’s my attempt to slash through the dire normalization of this abnormality in order to be a little less enslaved? As well as to be a lot less aghast by not only recognizing and focusing on one small aspect of this crisis of modernity, but by refusing to be in the grip of it.

Again and gratefully I’ll quote Nietzsche because his observation about art couldn’t be more trenchant, “we have art in order to not die from the truth.” And if he were alive today I imagine Nietzsche would be the still, powerful center of this particular movement. His face would slowly contort into Munch’s Scream as he would, in the same breath, add his own inspired take. Particularly about what it means to not be tyrannized by the rapidly expanding sci-fi techno thriller that is our future. A future all the more elegiac because it is now.

Grace

July 20, 2021January 5, 2026Posted in Uncategorized1 Comment

There must be something strangely sacred in salt. It is in our tears and in the sea.

~Kahlil Gibran

It’s summertime 2021 and the Delta variant of Covid is surging. The pandemic is nowhere near over, as many predicted it would be. And I’m still taking to the sea even though I drove away from it yesterday to return to work and to my home in Swarthmore. In the eerie nighttime beauty of this vacant college town I take late walks to remember what the sea teaches about uncertainty. The spaciousness of the empty roads brings the waves. Rough surf and rush of sea foam, I’m again knee deep in saltwater. Feet burrowing into sand, I’m relating to the waves in recently discovered ways: remembering to experience life’s difficulties not as obstacles, but rather as opportunities to move through the world anew, alight with grace.

I began to learn what the sea teaches back in 2018, throughout many solitudinous and strange months that foreshadowed the pandemic. Because of circumstances beyond my control, I unexpectedly lived on an island that was a ghost town for the majority of the year. I knew no one. Life was suddenly wild with betrayal and alienation, acute health complications, dispossession and apocalyptic landscapes. But the Atlantic Ocean was my backyard. So I did what anyone would do when confronted with such beauty, I ran right toward it. I dug my feet into the force of uncertainty’s indifference, more alive to it than ever. Alive to the ways in which the might of all that is scary and unfathomable can pull me under and toss me about and make me lose myself. But I did this precisely to learn how to be alive to a force far more mighty—grace.

Day after day I planted myself firmly in the turbulence of the surf to balance, figuring out equanimity as the sand rushed out from under my feet. And stillness gave rise to dancing. I learned to be fearless in the face of waves that threatened to destabilize by moving in alignment with them, and even by moving against them. I would mirror the waves’ deep upward curl while stepping backward into their breaks, turning in, letting the change carry me where it would, and then rolling onto solid ground. And it is not hyperbolic to write that the sea saved my life.

For it would unfold to be two years that I lived on my own on this island where I knew no one, a place that was also eerily deserted for the majority of the time. All while I was still newly figuring out not only what it meant to be disabled from a cervical spine surgery with severely impeded mobility at times, but also how to get through an extremely dangerous taper from a benzodiazepine.

During this freighted yet healing time, the sea taught me something that I need to continue to remember: Extremity is very often the best crucible. Instead of overwhelming us, occupying us with fear, and tossing us away, it can reveal in us a degree of mettle and creativity and blessing we never knew we had.

Yesterday, before I drove home, I ran into the Atlantic one last time. The current was stormy. But the sea floor tearing out from under me gave rise to profound simplicity. I found my footing moment by moment by plieing and by making gentle shifts in alignment, maintaining poise amidst the pull of the deep. And when the crashing of a wave or the sharp slant of the current made it impossible to balance, I only needed to take a step and then a small, quick cross-step to land on solid ground. Stability is never more than a mere inch and a breath away. I had the ocean to myself, sun bathers and beach walkers all behind me on dry land, so I didn’t need to open my eyes. I preferred to trust in the principles of providence that I’d long ago learned were at play. But then I was startled by something wrapping around my legs. Tentacles?! Seaweed? Jellyfish?? I am the most squeamish person alive, so my eyes opened immediately while I tried not to scream. I looked down to find long stemmed flowers, ballet-shoe pink and dotted orange, festooning my ankles. Then bagpipes began to play “Amazing Grace.” And as I bent to pick up the flowers , a surge of red petals flowed in and stilled where I was standing, pooling around my feet.

Now near the Swarthmore train tracks, miles away from the coast, the Scottish hymn is still singing. Rose petals and holy water are on the soles of our feet, ankles green-stemmed, new blooms floating behind us as the ocean carries us onward. We’re all awash in sea foam. Drenched in this audacious grace that gives us what we might least expect at the exact time we need it, feeding us moment by moment here on the vertiginous edge of so many questions and currents and tidelines.

Epistolary: Spring Elsewhere, Here

April 8, 2021June 27, 2024Posted in UncategorizedLeave a comment

It’s springtime. It’s the first anniversary of the pandemic. I’m remembering before, imagining what’s to come. I’m sifting through letters and photographs from the past to better be in the mind of all that is life-giving and ancient and novel.

April 2006

Dear jonah,

Everything is before bloom, whispering become and at once immeasurably full. Mornings are bird-sung soliloquies echoing ancient Chinese men wading through wildflowers and rice, relics framed in yellow sky. They plot land and row boats while children ride to school in wheelbarrows, rubbing the night away from their eyes, sheltered under piles of sewing machines and tattered textiles and wood and other towering supplies. Ma mas and ba bas, red coat clad and weathered rough under brown hats, march onward with grave and singular purpose, a secret mission, a survival. A survival of the millions who for pennies labor over the clothes on our backs. This is the textile capital of China, this is the future, this is last week’s black and white photograph—a seam connecting continents, collars to cries. Laments as sonorous and content as an erhu song, alive with the the zig-zag fervor of bicycling teenagers, three and four of them clustered on tiny green seats, legs dangling in black exhaust, arms wrapped around the world. Circles and circles and circles. Fathers speed on mopeds like bright, drunken dragonflies with babies in tow who are helmetless and flailing and flouting gravity. They’re clipping through the masses and the laboring, the tatter rag supply and demand, the women from another time who sew stories eons old into the twenty-first century. Green forevers and magenta buds and the smell of rain that never comes. Dream songs sounding the new of dawn, wrapped in the wind, supine, and bending toward our moon.

~amanda

Contracting

May 31, 2020January 26, 2022Posted in UncategorizedLeave a comment

What would happen if we contracted this distance into a new constellation? Could twenty-first century flowers bloom into a medieval castle? And what would this bourgeoning say to the world about loneliness–that epidemic? Would it begin to show us how to transform it from killer into fortress?

We

October 1, 2019December 22, 2025Posted in UncategorizedLeave a comment

Sky sings and dives into ocean, glacial molten, then lands on the shore and covers us in wisdom. Supine and unified–we–our chests rising and falling to the score of sandpipers trilling toward and away from exactly what they need. Until they still, soundless ancient eighth notes dotting the sand curve of a wave’s last, languid sigh. Sea foam and tidal lines and nautili–we–spirals of abandoned armor. Clavicles, holy water. Shells faces, creased as secrets with nothing to hide. Revelations in a girl’s hand–we–urgent offerings burnished by the deep and etched by gull cries.