Roar of the Tidal Pattern

She left too many spaces between her paragraphs,

and they encroached.

Masque du Shaman

Dreaming, Monsieur. All the muscles enclosing the head, redly, dark eyes staring out. It reminds me of wounded and healing. Then I saw your face like a carnivàle mask of clouds floating, and emptiness, the void itself, where your eyes and open mouth.

A burqua of white around my head, the snowy landscape. The purity of the whole unbroken light, its whiteness.

Rigid

Did anything change?

I don't think so.

Once she was back in her unkempt house, where she was looked after until she regained her strength, the tirades began again. She said she was living out of a dumpster which was of course ludicrous. She lashed out at anyone who was younger, brighter, more beautiful. Which was most of the women in the world since she was old and on the decline.

The black habits continued. Dark and flapping with a cane at the seashore, she looked like a nun. Except for the florid red lipstick, the crimson suede gloves, the cherry red French lace petticoat under the thick layers of black burlap when the wind blew.

Liqueur du Feu

Driving me home, you softly asked, 'I'd like to lie naked next to you,' and I thought how warm and comforting. Only when our clothes lay on the ground you became fire and I melted into liqueur, hot sweetness all over you.

Driving

When we drove he kept his hand high on my inner thigh. Did I like it? Of course I did, Monsieur.

I - The Lake

From the wing chair covered in brocades of cream, through the variegated leaves of the pothos in the porcelain pot glazed with orange blossoms, the lake rushes in equal potencies of green, grey and blue. It reflects. Mist drifts steadily across in streams of softnesses with pale blue sky patchily appearing and sun that reveals its presence on the blinding whiteness of cumulus clouds over there. The sky is like a steamer rushing by. The lake is greener at the shore and around the islands in contrast to the band of deep blue towards the horizon.

In the distance to the East, look, the mist is broiling into a squall and the water froths with whitecaps and it looks as if the turbulent sky has fallen into the water, their boundaries disturbed.

Elsewhere, patches of snake green appear and disappear on the surface of the water according to the whims of the fleeting sky.

The winds blow the mist at velocities I can only imagine. What appears like steam billows past the window at race neck speeds.

Despite the rippling shoulders and back of the lake, the harbours in the islands are still. Like moments of meditation.

II - The View from the Lake

In the offices behind me, activity, jobs, maintaining the flow of business, for increasing or keeping profit margins, including the wide net of support staff, is fierce. Perhaps it's like the fierce lake with its patches of squall or sun and its endless flow of mist. Everyone works hard and everyone is tired at the end of the day.

I think of letters and numbers, words and money, invisible, flowing, like the continuous traffic on the highways splayed out before me in all directions, transferring, shaping. Do we corrode the landscape with our civilization?

From the Island View Room with its antiques and Persian carpet high in the corporate bank tower the sky is an opague pale grey; it has stopped raining but is thickly overcast.

In the distance the Scarborough Bluffs are lit by sun and look like the white walls of a white city of vision.

How do we fit into the landscape we have so crudely carved?

River of Light

From high in the corporate tower, in the dim distance, in the atmosphere of drifting fog, the curving highway, everybody driving home, a flowing river of light.

White blood stream of the city.

Fog Lights

Through the fog, forms. Other buildings, sky. It could be the corneas of my eyes.

The corona of the sun is hidden.

There are no sun spots today; no solar flares, no solar storms.

The world is quiet. Lying under a blanket of mist. The wind is absent. If the birds fly, they fly blindly.

Do you have your fog lights on as you make your way along the snaking highways? Somebody stops or swerves in the flow of cars and there is a pile-up. Buckled metal and torn and broken lives, but not yours. You are caught in the stopped and slowed traffic and are late.

Not to meet me, but the others.

I am behind the fog.

Am I seeing anything other than dim forms and whiteness?

Lies

Again, it happened. Out of nowhere, envy, its clout. Why is it that you often don’t know who is competing against you? Lies, demeaning. Set up for an ignominious fall. Only what is sought, those daggers of hidden stealth, is of no interest. Uncompetitive. I am filling the place of, not seeking to fill.

Today envy wore black hair and a black blazer with a red chiffon blouse and a smiling demeanour in the office tower that could be anywhere in the world.

Disguise

Sometimes one has to pretend to be who one is to be who one is.

If I disguise you in metaphors, it is only to reveal you. Or myself. Or the interconnections that interweave us.

November 28, 2006

On the afternoon of that day I.

The time went by too quickly.

When I saw the date, I knew.

It was very strange, this feeling.

I could not know what it was all about.

But I knew the day was significant.

It had arrived; such long waiting, and now it was here.

What did it mean?

Tide-Line

They disappear. They always return. The men who love me. It is too early to say if it is a pattern.

Sometimes I feel like the woman in the sea-cottage who holds the tide-line tight in her hands. Then I don't drift in and out like the moon-pulled sea; then I remain, present.

Mist

Dense fog today. The world is impenetrable. Nothing but the whiteness of cloud. Breathe the cool moisture; walk blindly forward. The ground remains; the route is the same. Follow your feet, knowing the way. If, according to the Hopi, there are two kinds of time, what is unmanifest and what is manifest, then we are inbetween. The world that is coming to be in its ecstasy is not yet born. The fog carries us through. Float on the breath of the mist.

Wild Man

Monsieur, you are staid, professional, solid enough; quiet, muted.

Yet you are a wild man.

When you strip your clothes, the frenzy begins. How can such passion hide under a veneer smooth as the pin stripes in a suit?

I remember, and am awakening. Erotic energy rises like smoldering bush fire. In your absence.

For you are not here, only there.

Constructions

A new character has appeared, to whom the narrator is speaking. Without a name, or identification. Will he or she reveal themselves further? Or only remain in an antagonist position just out of view...

Do I hallucinate you? Who are you?

My hallucination of nature doesn't agree with your hallucination, that's all. Or to you it's not a hallucination, but reality, and you strengthen your position with references to nature writers and by being in a group who believe similarly.

Except it isn't. Reality, I mean. You're taking a position on reality, writing your own essay of it, complete with a thesis statement. Only it's all your thoughts on it, a master narrative, if you will, that continually runs through your mind shaping what you see according to the story you carry.

Which is fine, is good. We'd go mad without our stories. They cohere us, put us in social and historical context; they organize reality for us.

Reality probably needs organizing! For all I know about it.

Everything we can say about Nature, the original substratum, the wilderness is constructed.

Sure, bring the sun in. We don't know what 'sun' is anyway. It's just a word!

Whatever that is in what we call sky is not sun, light, right, might, sol invictus, or illumina...

___________________

Culture creates the overlay.

The overlay enables us to all live together, but it isn't true.

___________________

Can I burn under the artificial sun
in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Museum in London?
Will the fog
of the weather project
hide me?

light glancing

The waves of the ocean that I watch from the window move like imagination across the dreamscape.

Close your eyes, dream the world.

"...That summer all the world
was soul and water, light glancing off peaks."

Michael Sims

Wilderness

"I don't find anything out there. I find my own relation to the spaces. We see nature with our cultivated eyes. Again, there is no true nature, there is only your and my construct."

Olufur Eliason

You say the wilderness you walk in every day exists.

But you have named every tree, shrub, bird, insect. You move through a wilderness of labels, of theories of ecosystems, of words and images that describe it. You cohere this experience of wilderness; without you, it wouldn't exist.

How can we see but through our own perceptions? A trained and honed perceptual apparatus with its own caring, ethic and aesthetic.

Could we stumble blindly through the bush --- what would we see?

What of the feral child's experience of the wilderness --- raised by wolves, who move by scent and on all fours, who tear at the beating body of fur and blood with bared teeth?

There is only the subjective, the relational. How can there be an objective universe?

We create the world we live in.

It's emptiness.

Hallucination

Mediating the world, ourselves. How can intentions expressed as words, as images, create the reality we are living?

Within the film of my life I create the story I am living.

That story also shapes outer events. The world coheres to my version of it.

Do you understand that
the world
is a mass hallucination?

That we have agreed
to hallucinate it this way
and we teach our children.

Weight

Weight of words, Monsieur.

Referring to what is just out of reach. Emotion, idea, situation, description, always approximating, never fully expressing what they create and shape. We are not feral. Culture moves through us, syncopates its rhythms in us, punctuates us.

veils of words and images drifting over the world

Fever

Was it that she'd always had a raging fever?

Does rage have a temperature, and had it now peaked, and was broken?

Tempest

She crawled along the key and decided not to give in.

When the winds subsided they stabilized her with intravenous fluids, medication. They checked her blood, ran a CAT scan, an MRI. In her stupour, she relented.

I could feel the tension of resistance dissipate and she became like a boxing glove gone limp. The stuffing disappeared. She could no longer hit; the psychic force of her anger gone.

Her black dress lay on the floor, salty and ragged. She looked strangely newborn in her hospital green gown. Unlike herself.

Only her fingernails were glaring red.

Would it build again, the tempest?

Perhaps.

Perhaps not.

Capture

I am most comfortable if you are lovingly diffident, sweet but often absent; yet I desperately need your ardour.

If you discard me, or appear to, for you never actually do, I am comfortable; if you don't, I panic, sending dozens of invisible arrows to scare you off, so you will shy away. My mixed messages, subliminal. No, I do not always do this knowingly. I'd like to stop, if only I knew how.

For me to be still, and not flee in every other thought, and be your woman is most difficult, even if I am perhaps your woman.

Capture terrifes me.

Like conventional relationships.

Love that is richly fantasized, and remains. Approaching but never arriving. Hidden in each other's lives. Intimacy, this dance of closeness. Which can't settle.

Can we roam through each other's hearts
like oceanic tides?

Fear

Monsieur, my fears?

It is the ancient fear of entrapment.

Sea-Break

The sea wall, broached. The heaving ocean swells over it. Water flying in howling wind collapses the brick and mortar and concrete stays like pins. There is no barrior.

What is to keep her from sweeping out to sea, her black dress like a murder of crows flying about her?

Her eyes are lit with terror as the water rises, foaming.

She shrieks at the turbulent sky; her voice joins the screaming winds.

She is thin and flaps like a scarecrow.

She stands on an outcrop. The water swirls around her feet, but doesn’t wash her away. The rock holds her safe.

Her face a venom of fury
when she sees me.

What is it she desires?

Molten

The sky is molten, mon amour. A broil of clouds in my heart. How long can I wait?

In this silence in which I wait.

You cannot know, mon homme chéri.

For I do not wish to burden you.

A relational line, a trajectory, a specific set of connections, patterns, motions into. Fire of desire. The threads extinguish themselves in the smoldering flame. What is moving towards erases itself as it burns, charred, blown away in the wind.

Will you catch me?

Or will you let me pass by?

Money

If language mediates between the world and our visceral bodily sensations, is a discourse teaching us how to organize ourselves collectively, cohere us socially, shapes how we think and feel in our approach to reality, then money mediates similarly.

Money is the mediating transmission of the world we have created for our inhabitation.

Money flows as invisibly as language through the atmosphere, roaming the globe, making our world, enabling us to live, eat, work, support ourselves, our families, each other.

Money transferred to luxury cushions us against the harsh elements.

Money is our mediatrix.

The earth turns on its axis but the world turns on money, capital that sloshes through the global markets with the force of the daily oceanic tides.

Core

At the core, in the stock market, picking who you will support is as risky as any artistic venture, any poem-on-the-edge. Decide on what you will support – research, intuit, trust, leap. How is the support of each other’s business’s through purchase of stocks any different to the galleries that sell our work? Aren’t traders traders?

Investment is risky; art is risky. Of course there is the rote way, the safe way through the tried and true, but that’s not where the excitement is, nor the gains. Do we invest in our talent?

Intimacy

The weave of words that flows over the world: in the absence of the objects to which they refer; in the absence of the author who set them in their sequences on their journeys.

Phrases, sentences, paragraphs, flowing, flowing, on and on. Picked up and read, retained momentarily. Onward, joining, dispersing, shoals of words, tides of words, flowing through our consciousnesses, into our ears, our eyes, and out of our lips, from our fingertips.

The weave of words that weaves our world, shaping it into familiar patterns, without which it would all fall apart and yet which like a membrane separates us from reality. Mimicry. Artistry. Telling us how to see, how to be. The language that shapes us, shaping. Weave of words sculpting.

Is inseparable from time which structures us, organizes us into communal cohesion.

Who cares if we are carriers of the word, transmitters of culture?

The intimacy of love sighing, your lips

kissing you, I
melt in your mouth

Esoteric

the inner meaning of us, our relation,
cannot be grasped or apprehended in this language
or any other language
even the language of the heart

even as it structures our desire