Thoughts. Headlines. Collective panic. Advertisement claims. Children born. Loves lost. Lives that intertwine. Sounds that strike like a mallet on a gong. Images that follow like wayward ghosts. Scents that call up long-ago and faraway. A rhythm emerged from the great swirling cloud of the collective mind and condensed into a book called Percussing the Thinking Jar by Maw Shein Win.
Win and I are friends, so I can take you behind the scenes and back in time to the days before this jar rang and clinked with cadence. We would meet at her dining room table—not to eat, but to write our books in that quintessential writer experience of alone-together. With a laptop before her and piles of paper and composition notebooks around her, she collaged collected language into music that danced airily within the space of an ever-rising tower of pages. The notebooks were full of her large curving script that spelled out quirky phrases, rhythmic strings of words, questions, thoughts, imaginings, and impressions she continually gathered. Even as we chatted during breaks from writing, she would periodically write down some snippet of our conversation or an insight that emerged from our interactions. I imagined Win was almost always in process with Percussing the Thinking Jar—that in any moment, her slender hand would reach for the nearest pen in order to scrawl some moment of heightened sensory awareness or revelation on whatever paper was available. These papers would then make their way to the stacks I carefully set my tea beside.
Meals shared. Comfort food eaten alone. Screens replacing second and third spaces. “We pantomime in distant rooms. / Smaze, foke, flare. / Hold open a space for coincidence (Thought Log, p. 45).” As lockdown- and Covid-inspired books ripple out from presses in the wake of the loss, shock, and isolation of the pandemic, Percussing the Thinking Jar peers through a unique looking glass to examine the existential tempest that blew through the communally-oriented human mind forced into disorientingly crowded solitude. This was not the seclusion of the acetic communing alone and at one with the infinite within the cycling forces of nature. This was an aloneness that was erratically interrupted by digital distractions and social upheavals, and seemingly relieved by two-dimensional facsimiles of togetherness. Win’s Thinking Jar is an entry into the mind jostled by the conflicting rhythms of a world that was at once both ground to a halt and sped dizzyingly up. From line to line, the reader bounces to the beats on this jostled jar as the language pulses through syllabi, recipes, the hospice of a pet, the maneuvers of a neurosurgeon, the disappearance of creeks, and the fall of light upon the surfaces of a shrunken world.
Phrases overheard. Letters never sent. The taste of repetition. The feel of the unfamiliar. Things falling apart and reforming. Wars near and far. As the dissonance, disparity, and ecological precarity of the world crescendos into a global arrhythmia, Win raps a steadying pulse through invented forms that evolved out of a primary form she calls Thought Logs. In a deft meta maneuver, she appends the collection with a “Thought Log about Thought Logs,” in which she explains the origin of the form and graces the reader with a glimpse of how they themselves might write a thought log. She concludes this thought-log-poem-memoir-riddle-instruction with “Mantra: Life can’t kill my rainbow.” Win’s four-year process of collecting words, phrases, and ideas and then shaping them into thought logs eventually spawned Log Thoughts, Stroke Logs, Hyphen Logs, Observation Logs, Catalogs, and myriad other logs.
“Apparition of snapped bone trees. / Pataflafa, Flam Drag, Triple Stroke Roll (Thought Log, p. 58).” In the manner of an adroit drummer interrupting the steadying force of their beat with a solo that awakens and enlivens the backbone of the music like a shiver through a spine, Win intersperses her log variations with ekphrastic and other poems that experiment wildly in form, spacing, and punctuation. The percolation of poems is itself punctuated with artist Mark Dutcher’s sumi ink drawings that serve as Carrollian through-the-looking-glass versions of Win’s poetic statements. And in still-point hovers within the ancestral origins of Burmese-American Win’s proverbial thinking jar, the flow of English is twice breathlessly suspended by Kenneth Wong’s Burmese translations of Win’s poems. In these moments, the reader is invited to float in wonder: What is the rhythm and resonance of these circular and looping letters? How does thought shape language, and how does language shape thought?
Meditation instructions. Grocery lists. Ekphrasis. The thumping lives of neighbors filtering through the walls of a home. The lingering traces of apparitions. Win’s subjects titrate between the transcendent and the quotidian from poem to poem and line to line: “How has this department contributed to your personal & professional growth? / My astral body hit the panic button (Thought Log, p.163).” “Dream bigger than an Airstream. / The neurologist will return in an hour (Thought Log, p. 58).” “Scout locations for our punk rock retirement home. / Enter the magic outside (Thought Log, p. 155).” The cadence of her language beats in shifting rhythms that intertwine with these pulses in depth between the boredom, confusion, and fury of modern life and the awe, glister, wonder, and mystery of art, compassion, and expanded states of awareness.
Dreams. Ear worms. Memories that curve through time. Altered states of consciousness. “Does our thinking affect what goes on outside us (Thought Log, p. 20)?” This Thinking Jar calls into question where the mind is and whose mind is it anyhow. Are we inside of Win’s mind, is she inside of ours, or has she opened a door that we have unknowingly walked through—a door to some vast mind we all share?
Stumblings through the health care labyrinth. The aging of bodies and minds. “Even the emojis are aging (Thought Log, p. 162).” “My eyelashes are falling out, one by one (Thought Log p. 163).” As Win taps and turns her jar before the reader’s eyes, the growing and declining cycles of life spiral a pulse we all share: “a biscuit in butterflake motion / the casket <> sunset violet tendrils (The Thinking Jar, p. 145)”. Percussing the Thinking Jar is not a meditation on aging and death. It is a wild and impish reveling in life that both owes itself—and bows—to life’s fleetingness as it oscillates between the devotional inhalations of the almost gone and the carefree exhalations of the fully vital.
The book closes with “Entries,” which begins with “hello nightlight / hello schemer” and is then echoed by “goodbye trumpet of death / goodbye softie”. This valedictory poem is full of entries, presumably from the notebooks in which Win accumulated the phrases, sentences, dream fragments, overheard statements, headlines, and sparks of inspiration that struck her throughout the years she developed the book. This Thinking Jar carries the reader through pulsing waves of sensory impressions—“Eight feet of surface drama.” (Sky Garden, p. 130), suggestions—“divvy up the light” (Minnows, p. 128), dream fragments—“Last night, a blue baby was sipping from a small bowl of Dr. Pepper.” (Sleep Log, p. 60), and words sonically arranged like percussion rudiments—“Pilcrow, interrobang, rubricator.” (Thought Log p. 119), and leaves the reader with questions—“Is emptiness a placeholder?” (Thought Log, p. 80), that continue to reverberate in the reader’s own thinking-jar-mind long after they have set Win’s Thinking Jar down.
Rae Diamond is a neurodivergent interdisciplinary artist, educator, and nature advocate. They are the author and artist of floating bones (First Matter Press), the author of The Cantigee Oracle (North Atlantic Books), and the founder of the Long Tone Choir. She is a student and teacher of Qigong, and harbors equally deep loves for the transcendent and the absurd. Find them online at raediamond.com and @raediamond on Substack.