A Blog Recommendation

John Baker recently interviewed a writer who I admire a great deal, and who has become a personal friend: Five Questions: The Narrator.

Ira Socol, whose work I've been reading for over two years now, is one of the best writers I've found who is posting on the NET. Stylistically, his work is nearly perfect and continually astounds me. He manages, through action, memory, description to convey complex situations and characters. One doesn't get a sense of judgment of the characters in these often complex situations by the narrator of the piece, nor any of the self-aggrandizing or moralizing that is rife in the blogosphere, only compassion. He writes perhaps a kind of 'film noir' prose and his writing, without a word of excess, seems always to overflow into poetry. Despite posting rough drafts for a book, his posts are encapsulated and complete in themselves - knowing the broader sweep helps, but it's not necessary.

While it is wonderful of him to include my blog among his 'most read,' his site is one of the best in the blogosphere and I would highly recommend it to anyone.

Writings of 'Who'

Since this poem is with a publisher, I have encrypted it in the same place where I posted it so that the comments are left intact and I can find it again if the need arises (Blogger is a fantastic easily searchable archive).

Show encrypted text

Fellini's "La Dolce Vita"

The only man, un autore, who speaks of love in the film shoots those he loves most at close range, his children behind white billowing diaphanous curtains, then, seated in his black leather armchair, in his black suit, himself.

We should learn to love each other so much we live outside time ... detached.

He said (Steiner). La Dolce Vita (1960).

Who can love in a world where money must be made? The film is from a man's perspective. It is the women who talk of love; if love is spoken of. Especially Marcello's fierce, suicidal and beautiful girlfriend for whom love is possessive.

Those whose lives overflow with money don't know what to do with love either. Fellini knows this. Love wants to hold, to keep forever in its embrace, but it's all feathers. The clouds of pillows become unstuffed. We are tarred with our desires. What we are searching for are endings.

(Or so Fellini implies, not I.)


(from a mss-in-progress)

Andy Warhol / Supernova

Warhol set up a continuous camera at an old, large, lumpy, dark cloth Couch in his Factory studio - people ate on it, talked, gyrated nakedly, made love, fixed motorcycles. They knew they were being filmed but the unblinking eye watching them became unfetishized, ordinary. They played to it, but without response, so they became outrageous before it. It recorded them in black and white in the frame. And now Gallery goers can watch a group, dated in the late '50s/early 60s, slowly peeling and eating bananas with a pronounced sexual tone, a nude woman, whose large breasts are particularly caught by the lighting, gyrating unendingly trying to seduce a man who's more interested in polishing his motorcycle, two men lost in a naked embrace, one lying lengthwise on top of the other, humping for hours while others move obliviously around them, the motorcycle guy, a cleaner.

The eye that doesn't weep, the unblinking eye is a dangerous eye. Warhol made it art, though, and so gave it an entrance into the pathos of living, and thus an ethos. The unblinking eye doesn't have an ethic. Perhaps only the eye that weeps does. And do we find ourselves weeping before the accident victims who he emblazoned from newspaper images into wall-sized silkscreen repetitive images that fade out? Who are these anonymous dead people, are they the future of us?

The film of the man sleeping was nearly unbearable. It was Edgar Allen Poe's tell-tale heart, beating. The camera is angled on his chest and part of his face. We see his diaphragm move up and down with his breath, which is not always even, depending on his inner state, his dreams, and we see his chest pounding with his heart beat. That heart beat eventually pounds in our ears. It is visceral, the core of the pulse, the central ventricle, where the blood gushes in and out of, hundreds of litres an hour. We find ourselves dreaming with the man who's sleeping and whose heart we witness beneath his chest with the black hairs that we can almost feel under our fingertips. We become voyeurs, watching the minutiae of the vulnerability of sleep.

Warhol was a voyeur, no doubt about it. He chose moments in the continuum of images to still, to repeat spatially. Moments that compose us in a moment in time, a moment in history.

If I seek to integrate the critic with the poet, Warhol did not help in that quest. When we arrived, my friend and I, we were given a large black phone with numbers to press. Then we heard recordings, Cronenburg, actors, critics, memories of those who knew him, visited his studio, were part of his crowd or had a portrait done by him. The rooms at the AGO devoted to the show held people standing before large silkscreens or screens of moving images with a big black phone to their ears. It was eery. We were in a wired world that he perhaps prophesied. But we could not fully 'read' Warhol without the 'critical' accompaniment.

Warhol impartially recorded the effects of passion: the most wanted criminals; photographs of horrendous accidents, suicides; and sex, a man's face only while he receives a blow job; and the terror of narcissism as the 3 minute film records an unmoving, unblinking subject who dissembles before it, showing the stark soul in the unwavering eyes and the retreat into blinking, self-consciousness, an attempt to veil while being instructed not to before the artist left the room. As he impartially took snap-shots in the recording of us, in stance perhaps like Joyce's Portrait of the Artist, 'paring his fingernails,' Warhol was, for me, cerebral. You cannot view his work without knowledge of its background, what he was doing, how it came about, what it means, its critical context; without this information, you are lost. Everything is a 'found image.' Nothing is original. It is the unblinking eye, a constant surveillance, even if Warhol's "eye" is a configured eye and pointed like a spotlight. His work is a comment on culture, almost a footnote on it, and we need to be guided through the specifics of that culture was before we can begin to understand it. Warhol has not become fetishized by our culture, become a cliche, though shows like this may help, as well as productions like the 4-hour PBS documentary, to the point where we fully understand the message of his medium without explanation.

tags: Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol: Supernova: Stars, Deaths and Disaster, 1962-1964, Art Gallery of Ontario.

Visiting "Andy" Today

I'm always trying to unite the critical faculty with the poetic one, but they're not easily seduced by each other, often preferring opposite sides of the bed. It's too bad criticism's a 'talking head,' and poetry is, well, simmering with passion, and, let's not forget angst and deep meditation on the paradoxes and ambiguities and fleetingness of love, life...

Today I expect the collusion of the critical and the poetic to be further clarified. I'm going to the Andy Warhol show at the Art Gallery of Ontario which should be interesting - I find his work, despite its elevation of the commercial icon to art, cerebral. It requires a critic as go-between, as intercessor, a body of theory to explain it. Commercialism figures highly in Warhol's art. He was a successful commercial artist before becoming a 'fine artist,' and he became hugely successful at that, too. He took cultural icons, Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy/Onassis, and made us aware of our deifying tendencies. Or elevated the ordinary to the status of high art, like a show of packing boxes, filming the Empire State Building for 8 hours, filming a man sleeping through the night... I had no use for Warhol's aesthetic or artistic mentality when I was an art student many years ago, he never 'spoke' to me on any level about the possibilities of art. He was the showman showing the showmanship of our society. But then as now, I'm not a conceptual artist. Thanks to this show, though, I am already revisiting my biases and am beginning to even think he was a prophet - of the internet/media driven world that we live in, and that puts him in a whole other category. I may even end up liking him.

I'll let you know.


(Here's a link to an article, Andy Warhol's Smirking Genius, on the PBS 4-hour documentary on Warhol.)

On the Life of an Artist

Since 2004, I have been working hard with no remuneration. In that time I have produced four manuscripts of 50,000 words or more that need to be revised and edited. How often do I browbeat myself for not making more of myself? Why does all this labour seem pointless, unworthy, senseless? Browsing The Atlantic Monthly I came across something which helped both to define myself, and to give voice to people who live quiet, hermetic, and let's say it, poor, lives for their art. I quote this section from So You Want to Be a Writer in the hopes that it may help others who are dedicated to their art despite its lowly value in a society that measures success by financial standards:

"Wallace Stegner, an author who served as director of the Creative Writing Center at Stanford ... [wrote an] essay "To a Young Writer" (November 1959) [that] took the form of a letter addressed to a former student—a twenty-something young woman with literary aspirations, a graduate degree, and an unpublished novel. Stegner sought at once encourage her and to give her an honest picture of how difficult her career path would be.

He began by expressing empathy for the uncertainty she must now be feeling:

To date, from all your writing, you have made perhaps five hundred dollars for two short stories and a travel article. To finance school and to write your novel you have lived meagerly with little encouragement and have risked the disapproval of your family, who have understandably said, "Here is this girl nearly thirty years old now, unmarried, without a job or a profession, still mooning away at her writing as if life were forever. Here goes her life through her fingers while she sits in cold rooms and grows stoop-shouldered over a typewriter." So now, with your book finally in hand, you want desperately to have some harvest: a few good reviews, some critical attention, encouragement, royalties enough to let you live and go on writing...

You would like to be told that you are good and that all this difficulty and struggle and frustration will give way gradually or suddenly, preferably suddenly, to security, fame, confidence, the conviction of having worked well and faithfully to a good end and become someone important to the world.

Stegner warned, however, that fame, fortune, and accolades would most likely not be forthcoming. Not because her work was not good: "You write better than hundreds of people with established literary reputations.” The problem, he explained, was that her writing was aimed over the heads of the mass of readers, and would therefore only ever be appreciated by a small audience of "thoughtful readers." She would thus always find herself struggling—"pinched for money, for time, for a place to work."

So was all this worth it? "I would not blame you,” he wrote, “if you ... asked, Why spend ten years in an apprenticeship to fiction only to discover that this society so little values what you do that it won't pay you a living wage for it?"

But in the end, he argued, living to practice an art that one does well is its own reward:

For you ... it will have to be art. You have nothing to gain and nothing to give except as you distill and purify ephemeral experience into quiet, searching, touching little stories ... and so give your uncommon readers a chance to join you in the solidarity of pain and love and the vision of human possibility.

But isn't it enough? For lack of the full heart's desire, won't it serve?"

I think you have to just not care about what people think of you while you scribble away. Future fame or fortune are irrelevant. You do it while your family and friends shake their heads and wonder why with all that education and ability you seem to be doing nothing, and they pity you and shake their heads and you have to just let them. There is no teleology to it; simply, you have to release yourself of the books that want to be born. You labour alone, that's just the way it is. No point fighting it. Without "a product," a society based on capitalism, commercialism has no way to gage value. Until the book is written and published, there is no "product," and, therefore, no "value."

Though I don't know about you, personally I haven't found that giving up and walking away from one's muse is an option. Exigencies of the muse, though, is another topic.

Today I Am Not Good with Words (Ver.3: switching to the epistolatory form)

Clouds trap the sky, threatening; the air is heavy with words. Words that have the weight of droplets; the kind that sleet earthwards, crystals breaking on the pavement, streaming on the window.

I confide in you, Monsieur, troubled by the writing we are immersed in. The air is steamy, damp. And the communities, internet colonies, are like flocks of birds flying in scattered formations. Today, mon cher, I am not good with words. I say what people already know.

You ask me to describe her? I trace patterns of words to read the braille she is. It is like surfing where the screen becomes a crystal ball of tides. Posts open and close like visions. Writing hides in an ocean continually closing over itself.

Her stories are long, drawn out, each paragraph a wave dissolving the sand, the shore, encroaching. She is the rising tide; it is overwhelming. My computer screen is splashed with spilling breakers.

Must I imagine her? Like seaweed, hair, dark, long, pulled back loosely with wisps softening around the face, I think. I've never seen her; shall never gaze upon a photograph. She wears only veils of words, an obscuring sea spray of a forcefulness that surprises.

While I want to stay in the imagery of water, Monsieur, the metaphors shift. Let us leave the desolate shore and come into the city of words. Where her house is and where she moves like an exotic figment, a flash of fabric and skin.

A blackness of cloth, surely, but not without red. Brooch of a poppy. Toss of bead earrings, like Native American dream catchers. Or that ruby rising out of a ring of melted, cast sun, the only one on her hands woven with pale veins and the delicacy of a musician's fingers. Open her closet and you will find on the floor red canvas tennis shoes, ginger petal satin Chinese slippers, patent leather ruby heels, flaming red slick knee-high boots. On the shelf, a vinyl orange belt, crimson silk sash, red opera gloves, a vermilion felt hat. Dragging down the white wall like Barnett Newman's "Lema sabachthani" series, a funerary dirge of black dresses, a heavy curtain of silk, cotton, corduroy, rayon, wool hung on cedar-scented hangers.

Her writing spills out of its unkempt garden, overflows with the redness of a sensuality that is both innocent and over-ripe, tended and unweeded. It is like Oscar Wilde's "Salome"; if she who holds the platter on which the prophet's head rests was a writer. Or Beardsley's version in black lines, but aged: white skin, black habit, and the blood red splashes that are uniquely hers. I smell perfumes and compost: perhaps her writing resembles a mass of cut flowers in varying stages, some dying, some bursting forth; floral, with dark passion.

But always the salt swirling about. It leeches the soil. Dying follows her. She's in a difficult economic situation, desperate really. How she came to penury is a tale that grows more strange in each telling. The publications for which she wrote were autumnal leaves that fell and floated away. Her fish bones were broken and reset crookedly. Yet she fishes, and scales mercilessly what's caught. Is she a victim? Or a perpetrator? I don't know.

One doesn't know the true story or if there are any true stories.

An onrush of waves now, from the sky, from the ocean, it doesn't matter. Salt water in my mouth. Monsieur, I beseech you, help me break free of the undertow. Why does she silence us - I, and the others? She speaks in the diminutive. Sarcasm of a sea-side parrot, words twisted in the ruffle of virid and cinnabar feathers, inside the sharp beak. Have I found someone to beleaguer my laboured writing? It becomes unbearable, the denouncer's voice. Do I imagine a fertile slope for my Sisyphean ball of letters instead of an ocean of caustic words? Why can't I turn and go elsewhere, where welcomes wait?

Monsieur.

Your beloved.

Today I Am Not Good with Words

But today, mon cher, I am not good with words. I say what people already know.

Very dark brown hair, long, pulled back loosely with wisps softening around the face, I think. I've never seen her; shall never gaze upon a photograph. She wears a veil of words.

Perhaps a blackness of cloth, but not without red. Brooch of a poppy. Toss of bead earrings, like Native American dream catchers. Or that ruby rising out of a ring of melted, cast sun, the only one on her hands woven with pale veins and the delicacy of a musician's fingers. Open her closet and you will find on the floor red canvas tennis shoes, red satin Chinese slippers, patent leather ruby red heels, red slick knee-high boots. On the shelf, a vinyl red belt, red silk sashes, red opera gloves, a red felt hat. Dragging down the wall like Barnett Newman's "Lema sabachthani," a funerary dirge of black dresses, a heavy curtain of silk, cotton, corduroy, rayon, wool on cedar-scented hangers.

Her writing, its own fertile garden, overflows with the redness of a sensuality that is both innocent and over-ripe, tended and unweeded, like Oscar Wilde's "Salome," if the woman who holds the platter on which the prophet's head rests could write. Or a mass of cut flowers in varying stages, some dying, some bursting forth; floral, with dark passion.

One doesn't know the true story or if there are any true stories.

Why am I, along with others, silenced? She speaks in the diminutive. Sarcasm of a parrot, words twisted in the ruffle of virid and cinnabar feathers, inside the sharp beak. Have I found someone to blot my laboured writing? It becomes unbearable, the denouncer's voice. Do I imagine a fertile slope for my Sisyphian ball of letters but where I don't belong, and why can't I turn and go elsewhere? Where welcomes wait?

Bloor & Bathurst

The area tilts me on an axis. It's as if I am looking through a magnified diving mask. Only it is not me swimming but the world swimming around me. And it is the only corner I have ever been on that does this. Thirty years ago I thought it my state of mind; now I know it is the corner itself. All the shops have changed except Honest Ed's. And maybe it's that vaudevillan double football field store of everything that is a mere four years older than me and long before Wal-Mart. Selling is a circus. Thousands of feet of coloured seasonal lights never stop blinking. Lights that mean shopping, gifts for oneself or others, new things, cheap things.

Poverty drives this corner. The dispossessed come from everywhere, converging. Last year I tripped on the street car tracks and fell headlong on the traffic-heavy road. I'm not imagining that gravity shifts its axis here.

Airflight

For a poem

Words
must dance
a certain way.

In continuous presence.

Doesn't the moment
live us,
if we are living it?

Even if it doesn't exist.

Fading horizon lights
as the wing lifts

Tilts, gunmetal
surge into sky.

Which doesn't exist either.

Air
breathed
here as much sky
as up there.

Every breath
is sky-breath.

A velocity of words

Flowing over
the sonic sphere,
winds of sound
made into meaning.

Perhaps I fell in love
with letters

Winging across the alphabet.

Oceans flow
into each other
like bodies of knowledge.

Are we a rhetoric of ourselves,
our love or war or loneliness-
how can what we say
be empty?

I cannot imagine our lives
without their ceaseless
expression.

The heartbeat at our throat.

As I tilt my chair back
in the pressurized cabin,

These words, even in their
voicelessness, the droning dark
on the ascending flight.

Recipe for Spam

Fried las vegas strip

- 1/2 cup of lot of Best Diet Pills on Market
- at least 1 PHxeARMACY, or more, slivered
- something Mounted on the bottom of the hull, in a little dome, no substitutes
- 3 Jackpot55871USD, shredded
- a las vegas strip, large
- SOFT Verla to taste
- sprinkle of A few Products that can improve your life!
- keep on hand one Pen*i*s Patch formula, you never know!
__________________________________________________________

All ingredients should be availabe on the local drag strip, but can be purchased directly from Y dix rect i ly from the manf ufa g ctur k er.

Directions:

Mix Best Diet Pills on Market, PHxeARMACY, Mounted on the bottom of the hull, in a little dome.

Pour the mixture over Jackpot55871USD.

Throw the las vegas strip into a heated pan drizzled with oil. Pour in SOFT Verla, a sprinkle of A few Products that can improve your life!

Keep on hand Pen*i*s Patch formula in case it gets too hot.

Enjoy! If it should happen that you're Looking for medications? go to Adam.

(This is the same dish they serve in SlotzCity Casino.)

Self-Healing through Self-Love, II

The Grumpy Old Bookman has a review of John Sarno's, The Divided Mind. Dr. Sarno began exploring possible causes for pain for which there seemed no physical cause and which did not respond to treatment:

"One possible cause is what he calls tension myositis syndrome (TMS). What happens in those cases is that various powerful emotions, largely unconscious, bring about a tension in the muscles of the back. This tension causes real (not imaginary) pain, because the muscles are deprived of oxygen. And Sarno's major contribution to medicine is that he has found a way to treat such patients with a high degree of success.

To oversimplify greatly, the treatment consists of explaining to the patient the physiological basis for TMS, and inviting the patient to consider, with or without professional assistance, the possible unconscious emotions which might be the underlying cause."

We underestimate the power of our emotions, and how unruly they can be if there are problems that are hard to deal with: abuse, loneliness, frustration, failure. The strain alone of holding one's world together for one's loved ones can take its toll, as we all know.

Whether or not any of us have TMS or not doesn't matter. We surely could all do with a litte TLC (tender loving care) anytime. I'm suggesting that self-love, which includes self-acceptance, is a viable form of healing our own divided minds.

Last night I thought, hey, if directing this pranic energy of love to my upper arm (diagnosed with bursitus) has substantially healed it, why not extend it to all of me, even where it doesn't hurt. I felt bathed in bliss, let me tell you. Such inner brightness - a flowing healing energy, I felt a high voltage charge of pure happiness. It was like a guided visualization; I used to do this for my yoga students, why had I never done it for myself? I am happy to report a sense of inner calm, balance, and joy today. Being in love has been shown to increase immunity, so it's all good. And, if you're really nice and leave lovely comments, perhaps I'll even try a recording a guided visualization for you...

Self-Healing through Self-Love

It is the end of all endings and the beginning of all beginnings. An intersection in time where the flow reverses. Where what was flowing away begins flowing towards.

Such moments are profoundly healing. The flow turns away from death, the cancerous ruin of the cells in the body, and towards life, the rebirth of glowing new cells. Radiant energies dancing the whole being, aligning with the cosmic forces of love, unity, wholeness, creativity.

Before it was always ending, every time was the last time, the future wrapped up in a ball of time where the strands are always ending. Always coming together in perpetual separation. The wrapping of the strands of moments of togetherness tempered with the forever leaving. The not now and never will be. The refusals of continuity...

The beginning of the beginning, a genesis. The flow reverses its withering away, its letting go, its entrophy undone, and enters the fearful place of the vulnerable, a fragility of the now.
_________________
I wrote that in 2001, in a story called, "Story of Angels," about a man I loved. It was the first serious piece of work I'd attempted. It shifted me towards the possiblity of becoming a writer.

For many years I've been working on modalities of healing. In future posts I hope to talk more about what I now call, Self-Healing through Self-Love. This is what I understand about healing: that's it's not about "lessons," forget that, things happen, the body breaks down, there are stresses and strains, the synchronicities of one's entire system are so complex they are beyond comprehension and things can go awry. There is no "rational reason" for it when it does. Accept the difficulty or illness or disease as a given. As Wayne Gretsky famously said, "Focus on where the puck's going, not where it's been."

Mostly what we need to give up is the lament.

The lament keeps us enthralled with if only.

Rather, in conjunction with medical help, view onself with the greatest compassion. With kindness, warmth, love, caring. Do not be angry at where you are suffering. Do not be angry at your failing body. Neither hold onto the illness because of the attention it gives you. Rather see your body as a wounded child in need of protection and security. One that you wish to free from the burden of illness. Surround yourself with your own gentle, accepting, compassionate and loving thoughts. Allow the pranic energy of radiance, brightness, healing to flow from your palm to the area that needs the strength of your loving belief. Over and over, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month, let the years go by. Keep loving your self, keep loving where you hurt. Eventually you will heal; I have.

It's not that we don't want to die; it's that we want to live long, ripe, fruitful lives well into the great night and let go when we are ready. We all deserve a long and beautiful lifespan. It is with this aim that I approach modalities of healing.

To heal surely we have to suspend disbelief.

Soundscapes, the Moon

A recording: DSL/Cable, or Dial-up. Thank you for listening, it's #3 on the charts...

Tonality of the moon. The deep listening to the speaking that is witheld in the voice. What hides in the silence that isn't silent. Where the gasp, retreat, plummeting. Clouds mull over the moon, concealing and unconcealing like broiling smoke. Deep in the smoking mirror I hear voices speaking. Ceaseless speaking without bodies. Speech that speaks us. Calling across craters, without sound. Staccato choruses and turbulent underpinnings. Your laugh, lilt, the sobbing - glottal, utterance, gesture - cicada of love songs, night life rhythms, beats punctuating words weaving the coiling narrative I speak while hearing you speaking your story. Secret writing that is private out loud. The way we untell the great text we live. Under the moonlight, in the looking glass of the lake, in this silent night.

_
Note by way of explanation, begging apology: I've been playing with semiotics again, my fingers are sticky with phonemes... and as I ate the vowels and licked the consonants, I got thinking about the speaking subject and realized that that idea precludes a speaking hearer. So I tried to write the hearing hearers vantage who's speaking what the subject's speaking. Ooh la! And beside the lake listening to cicadas on a moonlit night too.

My daughter's poetry...

the absence
the negative space
the only space
the free space

the filling space
to cover wanderings
to put everything that doesn't exist
all the figments
and all the fears
blooming creativity
in the corners of the room
behind that beautiful
flower
pot
is what you can't see
underneath the shadows
spawn the ideas
in the absence
in the negative space
the only space
the free space

One of my favourites:

Often I
approach
myself

To see what has become.

Or this one she wrote for a poetry project. She received the highest mark in English, coming in at 89%, oh little girl (oh proud Mama). It's beautiful for me because I, too, usually received the highest mark in English courses in high school. Her Dad's a well published poet, too. She's 15 years old...

If these were your last words, what would you say?

I'd speak about foggy memories.
Fear, and walking in a daze.

I'd scream about being nothing special,
Egging, burning and drawing blood.
About injustice and theory and the snow covered car.

I'd talk about summer wind and sunlight and castles,
A butterfly emerging and the tiny fragile bones of birds.

I'd utter of cottage trips, muddy exploration and discovering new land.

I'd talk about ecstasy and blinding lights,
About bottomless regret and breaking everything in sight,
Rage that feeds your veins and becomes your existence,
Pumping.

I'd whisper about laughing till you couldn't breathe
And crying till you couldn't see.
I'd whisper self-destruction and mind alteration,
Intoxication, self-betrayal and my latest craving.
I'd whisper of breaking down and giving my heart away.

I'd passionately ramble about illusions and life theory,
About religion and everything that starts with why?
About finding a soul and defining a moment.
Life and death.

I'd discuss loving the wind, following daddy-long-legs and falling into comfort,
about campfires by th beach and flying on the swing.

I'd mumble about the hidden feelings,
The ones in the back that blend together
And the unidentified.

I'd mention being liked,
And snail covered roads in the moonlight.

How I can't say anything that hasn't been said before.

Could Be A Disruption by Solar Flares

I look out
under a heavy, concrete sky.

What do you make of that?
A day when the clouds are made of concrete.

So I heaved
with my chisel and hammered
chipping away at the
range of mountains
like breasts
in the sky.

Some days meditation
is like that.

Turbulence in green
under a
clear cobalt sky

when I finished

I sank into a
warm corbeau lap
of hills.

Anything can exist,
why not?

Think of
visionary space.

Why substitute
symbolic systems
for reality-

isn't it enough that
the world inhabits
the world?

Cut the Net With Your Fire

Browsing an old journal I came across something my daughter, when she was little, in the deep night and deeply asleep, said, emphatically, "Mommy, cut the net with your fire."

Cut the Net With Your Fire

I know about being entangled in nets, who doesn't
those impossibly knotted ropy traps
we tie our hearts and minds with

and the nets we get caught in
places we oughtn't be, and swoosh
captured tight and tighter
until it hurts
the loss
of freely moving, living, having our being

perhaps our years of living are learning
how to be free

of any expectations but our own
and trusting our own fierce love to see us through

I tip my crystal glass with its ruby red wine
salutations, darling, and may you always

cut the net with your fire



Sketch, Celestial Dancer III, 2003

(post originally written on June 27, 2004)

The 'new' profile pic...

The new profile pic. Okay, so you've seen it before: but not 'collected.' Ahem. This is the large version of 'how much can you fit into a postage-sized profile pic'?

Dancing of the Selves...

"As my father lay dying": remembering a time of uncertainty.

This was originally a comment at 100 Days, but the system was down. The topic in the comment thread (look at Day 34 & 35) was uncertainty. MB, Lorianne, and Stray have written eloquently on uncertainty. I thought this reminiscence, this understanding of uncertainty might be interesting, perhaps inspirational.


I've had two major periods of uncertainty in my life. The most recent is the near loss of everything I've accumulated, all my books, paintings, furniture, objects, the other one was when my father lay dying. He had emphysema and caught pneumonia in hospital and had stopped breathing and was manually resusitated and the interns and nurses ran, wheeling him through the corridors to Intensive Care. When we were allowed into ICU, he had multiple tubes in, multiple tubes out, was unable to talk with the tracheotomy. For six months the doctors refused to say that he had another day to live. 'Any moment', 'We can't say beyond today', this psychic and emotional torture. Each day I went to the hospital not knowing, I held his hand and lip read not knowing, I left not knowing if I was to see him alive again. I couldn't sleep, left my TA at university, didn't work on my thesis, lived in a state I don't want to remember. It was like that Eastern European or Russian author who's name escapes me at the moment who was blindfolded and taken to be shot each day and each day wasn't shot. Excruciating. Existential angst. Everything out of your control.

Perhaps he might still be alive if he had wantd a cybernetic existence, living in tandem with machines for breathing, eating, excreting, even these 22 years later, he was such a fighter, but after six months of this tethered, Gulliver-like existence my Dad had all the tubes taken out, the machines unplugged, and he faced death directly.

Those few days when he lay gasping for breath, dying as his body filled with carbon dioxide that his lungs were unable to expel were unbearable... true uncertainty is not an enviable or desirable state.

Neither was the year I just went through. But for the last decade or so I have become a meditator. With daily meditation, I began to understand how strong we are underneath. There is a deep rhythm to life that we can trust.

I wouldn't call it bedrock but perhaps the song of the bedrock.

Meditating is not just listening to, but participating in, at our deepest level, shorn of everything, the song of life and death.

And finding the rhythm okay, ecstatic even.

____
The upper right image was of my father and I in 1976, eight years before his death. The one below is of me, three weeks after his death, in 1984. I've always liked the gentle, accepting, peaceful but knowing look in the eyes of this photograph. Did I ever feel like that? I don't know.

Flame of Love

For Sparky's Illustrated Poem Marathon.


Flame of love,

I gave myself

to Love Divine.

_____
click here for larger size


Art influences I would say are Bernini of course, Dali, postmodern digital art (especially in the clumbsy photoshop cut-out making it not commercial art), and something obscure, a Tarot deck called the Secret Dakini Oracle Deck, by Slinger & Douglas. I have long loved mystics, of any religion, creed or belief system. Sainte Thérèse d'Avila was a wild, beautiful and divine woman mystic.

The model? I don't have to pay her.

A day in the life of

Sleeping and waking whenever I felt like it was a bust. I'm regulating, night-time sleeping, daily meditation/nap (which is entirely different to sleeping: the former for physical rest; the latter for spiritual sanity).

Up this morning at 6am, coffee, emails, bath the dog, brush her, shower, dress, jeans, shirt, jean jacket, off to Kensington to meet Theo, an old friend and sculptor - we met in 1982, he was eating dinner at the Queen Mum's on Queen Street and was a good friend of my ex, who introduced us. It took a long time to get to know Theo, years in fact; it wasn't till after my marriage ended in 1997 that he and I became good friends. He's one of my most loyal friends, too. It is through Theo that I have understood that loyalty is one of the most important qualities to me. That's another topic though.

We chatted for a couple of hours, then he went off his way on his bike and I my way. Dropped into Gwartzman's discount art store to get a rip-off Moleskin look-alike for $3.97, but passed on it (my first one's not finished yet) and bought a 9"x12" printmaking board and a canvas remnant. After I dropped my dog off at home, where she barked nonstop I believe, I went to Honest Ed's and bought a T50 stapler that is so stiff I can barely squeeze it, then to a Chinese produce store for BC blueberries, and home to be greeted by now hoarse barks. I've eaten two bowls of fresh blueberries with cream and sugar, stapled a cloth over the under-the-stairs cupboard, and stretched canvas over the board and gessoed it.

Exciting day, huh.

This is blogland!

We get to create these posts, to reveal our lives publicly.

Theo's never owned a computer. I marvel at that.

Looking back aways...

Not a trip down memory lane, but sort of. I discovered my daughter had taken these photos out of the albums we recently excavated to show her friends, and I was touched. In the process of scanning...

In 1977, at 25 years of age. Ah, the world ahead! My first relationship of 5 years that had become a marriage was ending. A late bloomer, I didn't go to university till 21; I was working on my second B.A. and getting straight A's. When I look at these photos, I think I knew more then than now.

Did we all start from a position of surity that has gradually crumbled away? Leaving an essential glimmer in the unknowingness?

light like colourless smoke

Freshly edited for Sparky's Illustrated Poem Marathon.



larger version here

Marigold Moon

For Sparky's Illustrated Poem Marathon.

Muse Calling

One of those days, where I've meditated almost without choice, pulled easily in, and where I keep trying to enter the external day. I am tired. Is it because I've only eaten fruit, cheese, antipasto, and toasted multi-grain walnut bread for the past few days, and my body needs meat even if I don't get around to cooking it more than once or twice a week; or is it financial, I expected to be working more this month than I have; or is it emotional, with some strange responses from women to my output that leaves a discomfort that requires rest to heal; or, as I reach down deeper, is it creative? Is my muse pulling me into somnambulance, the place from where I write, even though today is not a 'writing day.' As I wander about, intermittently laugh or argue about writing with my daughter, I have an odd sense of writing emerging. Why can't my life go on when this happens? I have so many things to do...

An image of a great frozen polar cap shifting, the voluminous depth of the mind working things out in its billions of neural connections, and when it's ready, a piece of writing breaking off like an ice flow, and floating into the ocean where it melts eventually into all the other words.

Is this a Zen of writing?

Do all of our words flow together when we've shut off our computers and closed our books? Into a great linguistic ocean sweeping the globe?

Ecdysis Recording (1:41min)

A recording of my poem, Ecdysis, which may be found at qarrtsiluni.

Take a listen; comment over there.

Does it work? This little poem was difficult to record, not sure why. The short length? How many times did I try, each time finding a different intonation, which led to a different set of referential meanings in the cadence of voice.

In the cacophony of recordings on my screen, I just chose one. For better or worse.

This one: DSL/Cable, or Dial-up.
_

African Angel

A re-posting to join Sparky's Illustrated Poem Marathon.


tags: angels, crafts, African angel, memories, photopoem, Illustrated Poetry Marathon.

Miss Muffet

It clung to the inside of the jar not understanding liberation. It was content above my bed, awaiting flies. I banged the Mason jar again on the door frame under the moth-flicked light, not out of kindness, I just didn't want squished spider in a tissue. Holding an empty jar, I called my dog back in, and shut the door.



I could say, not after Woody Allen's Scoop, after all that laughter and the 71 year old icon that he is despite the magic tricks, or the Life Salad at Fresh with organic carrots, beets, sprouts, spinach, lettuce, basil and a tahini dressing, or the mango, coconut milk and banana shake, or the fine Summer evening spent with a friend. I could say that the last time I tried to squish a spider it dropped fast onto my daughter's bed and disappeared. I could say it's because, well, that's just the chance a spider takes, and it lucked out tonight. But then it might have suffered a concussion being rudely knocked out of the Mason jar on the way down to the ground; I'll never know.

A Day for Bastille

A recording of "A Day for Bastille"... high speed; dial-up.

A Day for Bastille

Hard couple of sweaty hours. Time, incorrigible, leaden. Like a rusted French crown.

Beer holes, bag moulds
thumbs
stuck on tacks.

Empty boxes
of styrofoam
caskets.

Leaned over the small cupboard, over a hot plate. Pushed back the tacked table cloth. Pulled hundreds of bags left by the previous tenant out that my dog would never use; let's face it, the cornstarch will evaporate the plastic first. Collapsed boxes saved for a move that hasn't happened. Hauled out a picnic blanket, a folded umbrella lawn chair, a large backpack on wheels with one wheel broken.

A collection of cardboard tubes line the back like fallen soldiers.

Then shoving
the full cardboard wardrobe
with its dried blood smell
in.

Thinking about ontologies,
multiple trajectories,
about events that disrupt,
about Alain Braidou's
Being & Event.

About how French postmodernism bursts critical space as I seque from area to area of impossible overflowing clutter, from splintered to post-Cartesian thought.

The musty back room of spider shadows repels: during the day bleary hung-over light from its tiny funerary window; at night an unexpected red bulb.

A half wall enclosure built in the corner, inexplicably, and an iron lock;
a bastille perhaps.

Where I store suitcases,
collapsed boxes.

Queen Margot,
sweeping through this cloistered closet,
oh, its been a long bloody revolution.



tags: closets, Bastille Day, Alain Baidou, Queen Margot, poetry.

The Editor

She was a good editor. She delved so deeply into manuscripts that she could write revisions seamlessly: linguistically, no-one would be able to tell the author's original words and her extra phrase, or sometimes whole sentences or paragraphs. It was a talent for mimicry perhaps. When she was finished editing a book, it was an indissoluble whole, with her words etched in like tape, like patches, like embroidery over the holes in the arguments, the lack of logical connectives sewn over, conclusions woven clearly from the evidence of the material, the indisputable truth of the argument, she sewed and sewed, using invisible thread, using thread that exactly matched the original, so that nothing appeared amiss, it didn't sound like two voices had written the book, the author and the editor, but only one, improved on, and the other, hidden, and whose invisible mending is ultimately forgotten.

Writing in someone else's voice depleted her. She worked on non fiction books, and many of them were tedious and dull. It was up to her to spruce them up. To make the language shine in its simplicity without letting her movement through the text become visible. And working on other people's writing blocked her own. She couldn't leave "so and so's" style in his or her manuscript when she closed it for the night and turn to her own writing. It was as if her entire vocabulary was being used in the service of someone else's writing, being used to make someone else's writing better than it really was, and there was nothing left over for her. They wrung every ounce out of her, those manuscripts, those managing editors demanding a good job be done with what was often a mess. You'd be surprised at how many educated people can't write. She was one of those editors, among millions of helpers, who come, and comb through your book, rewriting it, so that it becomes the gleaming tome you are proud of, but who are forgotten, while perhaps mentioned on the copyright page, remain largely unacknowledged.


©Brenda Clews 2006
___
This is from my first NaNoWriMo novel, and it's directly from my own experiences as an editor for the decade that I did it in College and University texts for large publishers (though I have done private editing assignments nearly every year since). 'Minor classics,' that's what I aimed for. If a book remained on reading lists, considered the best in its field 'still,' then I thought my editing successful. Became burnt out, though...


technorati tags: editors, editing books, publishers, burn out.