Remembered

Is my art confident? Intensely meditated? Is how deeply I love what will be remembered about me?

Strange questions Lightbrown brings to his biography of Botticelli, who was only remembered by Vasari's Lives of the Artists in what was otherwise five centuries of obscurity.

How odd that it was his paganism which appealed to the fin de siècle who brought his work from the shadows of history.

The barest outline of a life.

Botticelli is his art.

A Love Affair hits #2 on the Charts

A Love Affair #2 in SoundClick's Poetry Charts?! You guys!!! Thanks. 16 min of too-rich poetry, no music, & a Summer weekend? Blow me away...

(Go here to read the poems, which I pasted into a comment.)

(Yes, I am a little out of place at SoundClick's Poetry section, but I've been posting there for a few years, before they even had a Talk/Poetry section, and it's where I keep my poetry recordings: Aural Pleasure.)

Painting In Process July 08

Clipped 2 clamp lamps each with 100Watt daylight spectrum bulbs on either side and snapped it. Blue is a bit bright, slightly darker in the original. The lower right quadrant a little darker than in the painting, but running the Dodge tool in Photoshop over it even at 25% didn't bring it to its shade of colour. Every monitor's different anyhow. My old iMac & new Dell laptop each present colours differently. Overall, and I worked on this awhile, between the 2 computers, the coloration's not bad.

Anyway, how's that drawing I posted going? Eh. Tinkering, dabbing, letting it grow in its own fashion. Slow, but I'm enjoying slow. My paintings used to be done in 20 minutes and that felt fine then only now I want to linger longer, enjoy the process continuously. A dab, a little bit of paint, wait a day, see what's next. This piece, however, who knows, it seems quite complex to me as I work on it, and I don't know in which direction it'll develop.

I just spread the blue of her back into the other blue to syncopate the rhythm across the page better because alone it overwhelmed, was too strong. I started using watercolour pencils because they're more forgiving, and I can test the colours first.

Do I like it? I'm not sure. It's growing on me. It seems diagrammatic. A blueprint. Though of what, I cannot quite say. Groupings, images of women.

72.5cm x 52cm/28.5" x 20.5", oil and watercolour on paper (click image for larger size) or go directly here (you might need to press F11 to see it all).

A Love Affair Charts

I'm tickled no end that something 16 minutes long and all poetry, an almost too-rich offering since there's some fairly complex stuff there too, and no music has made it to #5 on the charts at SoundClick! Thanks to you...

(note: only first poem is explicitly sexual, none of the others are)

A Love Affair (15:53min)

# 24 in Talk (highest position was 24). Total songs: 7,345
# 5 in Poetry (highest position was 5). Total songs: 1,594

(ps-check comments here to read all the poems, which I pasted in)

A Love Affair

This series of poems is about a love affair a few years ago. The gentleman and I haven't been in touch since. Enough time has passed for me to release this recording, made in March 2006. Most of these poems can be found in the archives at Rubies In Crystal.

I would add a Parental Warning Advisory, but only to the first poem.

A Love Affair (15:53min)

Broadband: A Love Affair

Dial-up: A Love Affair

When the Grey of the Sky

When the grey of the sky descends with a feeling of chaos. A windless night while a thunderstorm ensues. We shut the windows, water pouring in.

The basement floods, where my son sleeps, an inch of water; we mop and lay old towels wringing water out for hours until it is dry. The vibrant orange vegetable dyes of his kilim carpet bleeding a little, otherwise no damage. My birth paintings are stored there but the water didn't go that far in.

My son is sad on the night of the flood, it's interim, his staying with me, nothing was damaged but a right mess and will it happen again?

The morning after the flood, the rush of muddy water, clothes that were on the floor, towels, laundry half the night, storm waters, what washed through us?

We threw the wet high density foam mattress in the basement that was a buffer protecting boxes of files, my paintings, out. It dried in the Summer sun beside the building.

Last night it was comfort for a dreaming homeless tattooed man. The white waterproof cotton sheet that covered the old mattress crumpled into a soft bed for his dog sleeping beside him.

I see him in the morning, he sleeps late. The day is sunny and cooler, and I photograph him between the trees, past our swatch of backyard.

In this neighborhood of millionaires and university students, the city will quickly remove such comforts for the outcasts who beg on Bloor Street.

Sun Burnished

pink as a pomegranate, red as a nectarine, fruity, this ripeness turning tawny, O for sunswooning at the bluebluelake

Beach Bum

At the beach, it's hot! Doggie & I took wrong path - long, sandy road instead of short sandy road, uh oh, underbrush is wet, look, a swamp, where to step, soggy foot, don't want to get stuck, large boulders placed along the lake edge, climbing up and down, this way, no that, c'mon doggie! careful! not there, up here - whimper - oh, ok, over this way, found our way to the nearby beach without her getting trapped. It's beautiful here.

A not-very-visited spot, alone in our corner of the bay, light breeze, billowing blue sky, gentle lake of water, a swan and many ducks, being nipped by a blackfly though.

Getting redder from slapping the damn blackfly on my thighs than from the sun.

Parks & Rec guys come and start raking the beach right in front of me, then their all-terrain vehicle gets stuck, sand whipping out behind the back wheels everywhere.

Only here 2 hours, no sunscreen. Sun's a vitamin, c'mon! Sigh, move on.

Into people-land, purer sand, lifeguard, a dozen beach bums, seriously, a few families and some loners, and no blackflies... yes, perfect!

daylily

the afternoon opened like a hot orange daylily and I lay floating in a hammock over the underbrush and cheatgrass lovesongs of crickets and katydids

sun images

yesterday, gazing up


sun a white lit probe in the thick membrane of stratiform sky


today, bathing in warmth


sun a fine dessert wine muscat sweet on my body on my fingers dancing on the keyboard delirious words dancing to husky smooth leonard cohen

Writer's Almanac: It's the Birthday of Franz Kafka...

From The Writer's Almanac:

It's the birthday of Franz Kafka, (books by this author) born in Prague (1883). At the time, Prague was part of the Hapsburg Empire of Bohemia. He grew up in a Jewish ghetto in Prague, speaking German, in a family that identified themselves as Czech. He lived almost his entire life with his parents, even after graduating from law school and holding a steady job at the government-run Workman's Accident Institute — a place where he oversaw the implementing of safety measures. His work helped prevent lumber workers from losing their limbs.

His family's apartment in the Jewish ghetto in Prague was tiny, noisy, and subject to the rule and whims of his tyrannical father. Kafka once noted, "I want to write and there's a constant trembling in my forehead. I'm sitting in my room which is the noise headquarters of the whole apartment, doors are slamming everywhere. … Father breaks down the door of my room and marches through with the bottom of his bathrobe dragging behind him. Valli shouts through the foyers as if across a Parisian street, asking if father's hat has been brushed. The front door makes a noise like a sore throat … Finally, father is gone, and all that remains is the more tender, hopeless peeping of the two canaries."*

In that noisy claustrophobic apartment with his parents and three sisters, Kafka would hypnotize himself to get in a frame of mind to write. He said, "Writing … is a deeper sleep than death … just as one wouldn't pull a corpse from its grave, I can't be dragged from my desk at night."

Kafka was terrified of his father, who convinced his son early on and again and again that he was a failure in life and would never amount to anything. Kafka stuttered around his father, but no one else.

Kafka spent his life steeped in self-loathing, and he had a number of psychosomatic illnesses. To cure his perceived illnesses, he tried all sorts of herbal and natural healing remedies. He went through a phase where he chewed each bite he put into his mouth a minimum of 10 chews. And he became vegetarian, eating mostly nuts and fruits, and followed a regimen of doing aerobics in front of an open window. He was actually a physically robust and healthy young man, but he was neurotic in a number of ways. He confessed that he had "a boundless sense of guilt," and one of his friends wrote that Kafka was "the servant of a God not believed in."

He was engaged to a woman in Berlin for five years, then broke it off with her. He wrote to her, "After all, you are a girl, and you want a man, not an earthworm." They were engaged a second time, and broke it off again. Their distant relationship was carried on almost entirely by writing letters. He once said: "Letter writing is an intercourse with ghosts, not only with the ghost of the receiver, but with one's own, which emerges between the lines of the letter being written. … Written kisses never reach their destination, but are drunk en route by these ghosts."

Kafka died of tuberculosis in 1924, a month shy of his 41st birthday. All of his sisters later died at concentration camps in the Holocaust. Not much of Kafka's work was published during his lifetime. Kafka had instructed his friend Max Brod to set his manuscripts on fire upon his death, but Brod refused, and instead edited and published Kafka's work.

Kafka's best-known work is The Metamorphosis, which begins, "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning after disturbing dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into an enormous bug."

His book The Trial begins, "Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one morning."

Kafka has been made into an adjective, "Kafkaesque," a literary allusion dropped into conversation from time to time by people who may or may not be familiar with his work, which is actually full of humor. "Kafkaesque" has come to be used to describe things of a gloomy, bizarre, eerie, nightmarish, or doomed nature, and is often applied to bureaucratic or institutional situations.

Kafka once wrote in a letter to a friend: "The books we need are of the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation — a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us."

* All quotes by Kafka are translations of Kafka's German into English by David Zane Mairowitz, except for the final quote ("The books we need …"), from a translation by Willa and Edwin Muir.

Where has poetry gone?

Jay Parini, Why Poetry Matters

Where has poetry gone?

Oh, fads and fashions. Poetry was once a dominant art form and ordinary people memorized long stretches of Tennyson... or Keats... It wasn't Pound's fault, forgodssake, there'd always been 'difficult' poetry, but a change most likely brought about by the expansion of the media through radio, silent movies, records... and so on.

Whereas once people were brought to their feelings - ok, ok, interjection - I do believe that we watch movies, read books, etc. to feel, that we want to feel our feelings strongly in safe ways and we do this through our art- the best art calling out the best in us -

And of course our art teaches us about our history and our culture -

Whereas once people were brought to their feelings by the graceful language of poets, they are now brought to the currents moving within by the heart awakening blinding lyrics of a music of so many strains and varieties and so rich across the globe it makes you want to weep.

That's where poetry went, into song -

The poetry that stayed on the page became for an in-focus group of mainly other writers and students/academics, which is fine, we live in a complex society made up of many, many groups all carrying and exploring different facets of the rich world we live in.

If poets want to be heard by the great and massive public again, really & truly turn to the old forms of the troubadour: let the music of language sing.

If most poets are quiet and solitary by nature, then let their beautiful words of pain and ecstasy be sung by those who can.

What I'm saying is that the art form evolved into something more expansive and larger, and many musicians really need the half decent lyrics that on-page poets could provide if they would share.

Perhaps it's like the miser holding on to the goldmine sitting in the corner commiserating on the dearth of poetry! Rich gold veins of poetry in our world are of inestimable worth but they need to be shared, given, offered, allowed to go out freely into the world, circulated, this currency of the heart, used.

Mantra to sleep by...

Even with hefty long walks yesterday to and from the mall where the No Frills grocery store is, about two hours of walking I guess, and then a dog walk, exercise usually helping with sleep, I was still awake at 3 or 4am, and knew I would get up at 7am (even though it's Canada Day, a national holiday).

For the past 13 years I've used mantra to sleep when I know I need to... and while I've been trying to let my mind be the wild place it naturally is, last night I succumbed.

What did I silently intone as I drifted off to sleep?

I love you, I love you, I love you...

Light Catches Diamonds (4:18min)

Light Catches Diamonds- DSL or Cable

Light Catches Diamonds- Dial-up

While I simply cannot record this again, won't tell you the story though you can surely guess, and I dearly hope the volume is high enough (I'm using Audacity on a PC rather than SoundStudio on my old iMac), it is a plain and slower reading, no echoes, promise!

The text for Light Catches Diamonds may be found at my art website.

Thank you, Sky, ydurp, vexations, Ashes_2_Ashes_Words_2_Words, and Richard Geer for your much appreciated feedback. xo

_______________
People have asked if you are supposed to pay for the recording. While I surely appreciate it if you do, no, you don't have to pay for it. You can listen to any of my recordings at SoundClick anytime (streaming is free). I switched from free download to paid because Paintings in the Sand was downloaded about 1500 times and, well, you understand...

Lucubration

.......................... The woman became spirit in the differentiated dawn. By an attic window of diffused sun with which she's not merging but emerging as light. Dust floats scintillating like myriads of reflectors. Bright as the birdsong of the world, her spirit an unburning flame, a panoply of sparklers, a cluster of luminophor, a throng of stars.

In secret transforming into spirit in the quiet of the dawn hidden in the turret of an old house.

I saw her when I lay down to rest, and remembered so that when I came back I could write of her for you.

Sometimes it's like that, the light burning behind your closed eyelids, the woman becoming spirit.

___
Lucubration: that which is composed by night; that which is produced by meditation in retirement; hence (loosely) any literary composition.

It's Time to Give Up Continuous Mantra

Two nights ago I stopped. Let it be.

I think it was 1995 when I began mantra recitation, walking, during the hours awake in the middle of the night, while cooking or cleaning, during repetitive tasks at work. Like Hail Mary's, only not Christian, not even necessarily the Sanskrit of my yoga, often ones I made up to suit whatever my needs were.

Mantra filled my mind, plus the meditation I did every day of 15 minutes or more.

It stilled my mind; my mind needed stilling. I left my husband in 1997. There was an ongoing war in my mind. Mantra soothed it. Mantra lifted my weary spirit over and over for the ensuing decade and more. I've come to rely on it to bring me to a state of inner peace.

Two nights ago I decided to let my mind run rampant again. Be as unpruned as it is naturally. I woke at 2am and lay awake until 6am and didn't calm my tumultuous interior with mantra. An hour of extra sleep before rising suffices.

From now on I will only silently recite mantra during my actual meditations, and what a balm they are, those moments of forgetfulness, of not-being, of being gone. The relief of not thinking, of not carrying the pressure of everything, of letting it all go in the ease and peace that mantra brings.

Outside of actual meditation sessions, I will let my mind become what it is. It's safe now. The last thirteen years of honing and focus through continuous mantra have surely had an effect.

Dawn, the momentary effect

when love's flame
rises

encroaching the dark
birds singing dawn, chirping
grace

or finally knowing what to do,
after such a long time
of unknowing

spreading a caul of light over
the horizon

until the sky is clear, safe, free,

and you may continue on

Prep drawing for painting

India ink on paper with acrylic matte medium brushed over the drawing, 73cm x 52cm, 28.75" x 20.5"

Prep drawing for a new painting. Combining figures from lifedrawing sessions and a very famous Venus, to become part my current work-in-progress: the Botticelli Venus Suite of Poems (I've included some tiny bits of text from my poems which may be lost in the paint, who knows).

Click on image for larger size, & the tiny quotes from which poems.

A Lion Tale...

Irresistible! As an animal lover, this touches me and if you are, wonderful...

Also I spent ages 2-6 1/2 in Kafue National Park in Zambia living in mud huts with all the wild animals about and the lion who I called "blond," and who I told to "Stop roaring all night, you're keeping Mummy awake!"

A hug like that...

Animals who love people.

Burning Video

Watching Kurosawa's Ran, very King Lear, but marvelously Japanese, that landscape, warrior fury, splendour of pageant, emotion moving under

Having been laid off recently, these recessionary times, I went to the Korean Video Store where videos apparently sell for $2. In budget! Korean films and a shelf of Chinese & Japanese. Two Kurosawa's later and one described as "very sexy" that won't load...

When I put the "very sexy" video in my laptop earphones in it smells vaguely of burning

...I wish I had more information, there is a Korean note, with "ONLY" in English

ONLY what? And what did the man in the store mean, "there are some scenes..." and selling me a burning disc with mystical Korean calligraphy

on a label on the disc for $2.? Tomorrow I shall go back and say to the old Korean lady who owns the store and who only takes cash, "It doesn't play..."

Is this part of the mystique of the very sexy burning movie ... I did ask for 'art films' in the Korean Video Store afterall.

Cinnamon Scones

Tax returns done, passing a tray of freshly baked cinnamon scone bits, yumhhmn, buying half a dozen, cloudburst, package of warm scones high under umbrella home

she says they are the best scones she's ever tasted watching the bliss with every bite how are little pockets of pure cinnamon

everywhere in the pastry like raisins only not raisins? Delicious treat, but we'll get used to them, like we did the Chinese sugar donuts

soft sweet twists of pastry fresh from the boiling kettle of oil
rolled in sugar

Sunglasses

Hidden mirrors behind the eyes. Like being looked at through shutters that are bright slats of sun.

You can't see anything but you know you're being watched.

Or tracked. Might be the eye of a camera, who knows. I passed a group in the patio of Mel's and all four heads turned and their eyes followed me and then I noticed the camcorder.

On my way to the supermarket to buy a large bottle of spring water with the old bundle buggy broken from dropping the 18 litre bottles into it and which is kept only for that purpose. I filmed them too. They are burned on my optic nerves and in my memory banks. They were as old or older than I, but had the look of the effect of drugs and alcohol, too much of both for too long. If I'd seen the camera earlier when I was closest to them I'd have asked them to turn it off.

I was thinking of someone who is a compulsive liar. The pose, the facade, an insistence that what is presented is the truth. Seamless illusions. Blatant proof otherwise is rendered insignificant with a shrug. And the way of being watched through the slats that reflect the twisting that is presented as truth. Why do I posit myself in a role of moral conscience? Who cares if the neuronal synapses have been forced to present a false version of a person's life and to maintain those appearances and whether in the final dementia there won't be a terror of not knowing what the truth and the fiction is anymore.

The slats are collages of life. Displaced images. Intertexual figments.

Truth is a fiction; fiction is always truth. The conclusion doesn't follow from the premises presented.

Or the eyeglasses that are mirrored slats for us to look though.

Solstice Moon

Problems, problemas, problematises, how to rectify, fix, endless. Go howl at the full solstice moon! White snake oroboros moan!

Mañana

Have to get 2 years of taxes done today, today, today. No more mañana! Groan. Blue Snake Moan. Or else full moon roaming charges!

Twitter Pieces

This is cool. (What gives you the idea I've run out of things to write about? Whaddya mean? Say it in 140 characters or less.)




His coldness a nuclear chain reaction in me begins and then his desperation and ardour
.
It's clouding over and we don't want to go out grocery shopping and so we're yelling pizzazazhaha, but we won't, not in the morning, no
.
We grocery shopped muffins & juice & coffee on the patio & filled out forms before we went in, filling hunger then filling a shopping cart
.
Ate t-bone, o moan, begroan, dog thrown bone, what to do? What to do? A situation. Avoid? Allow? Be flown with the blowin' rain?
.
Tinkle chinka of change in the silvered tiny square purse and the chugata chugata ... awhhhh sorry, laundry drums spinning round unbound
.
Fast 5km dog walk under 200 year old trees, cool sweat, huge nearly round moon, Oscar Peterson's Night Train, stepping out of stepping into
.
Black Snake Moan. O groan! T-Bone! Rocking scrunchies of laughter!

the exposé blurb

I've joined Facebook, MySpace, and now Twitter. Why? Oh, that's a good question... just 'cause. Perhaps to explore, keep in touch with friends close and far (if you're on any or all please send an invite).

And thus the era of the exposé blurb begins!

eating huge homemade oatmeal cookies lush thunderstorm crashing rivuleting glass and streets aflush water

reading the interaction design article Will sent as exciting as huge sweet cookies and thundering sky of flashing white veins

Night of an Electrical Storm of Rain

I purchased an air conditioner, but taking out the screen and the glass and the window frame was an unbearable task and it was returned. What I'd like is an indoor air conditioner, which will have to await funds.

Oppressing each sweating skin cell, the undersides of one's hair continually damp, this is how it is in the heat.

I can only wear a loose cotton dress with my long hair tied up; shorts or pants suffocate.

Place the small fan on a pedestal over the screen of my bedroom window to get a little cooler air. With a wall of windows facing West on the second floor without tree cover, the apartment is an oven. Like anything steamed, we wilt.

Though I like the heat, it must be 40^oC! I bring home a large fan and hang it in the front room with string since there is no window ledge, and the beating of air through the paddles of the fan helps.

No-one wants to cook, my son goes to work and my daughter and I go out for Sushi.

The thick clouds have an underside of glimmering red like tropical fish chased by a shark. An anvil of clouds are upon us in the middle of the night and lightning like white veins slice the sky and rain beats on the new fan spraying the room.

In my room, which faces East, I remove the screen. It is fresh outside, and cool. I lean out to breathe the cooler air. The CN Tower's lights are flashing strongly, mesmerizing with the glow of red, then white, then green up the length of the concrete pin. Nothing else is visible on the skyline from where I am downtown.

The sound of heavy rain falling on leaves and rocks, the large tree in my bit of land out back and the pebbles that cover an adjacent parking lot. It's a luscious sound. Water hitting the earth. This bridal veil of rain. Drenching richness. How long do I stand alone in the darkness, in my white cotton nightdress, by the open window, leaning out, breathing rain-filled air?

I sleep finally lightly and wake a few hours later at dawn.

I wake loving the world, as I always do.

At the Window

The wine
of love fills us.
We are inebriated
with loving each other
distantly.
I can’t gather you more closely
than this.
I am a chalice
of red lace at the window.
You are intoxicating
blossoms bursting
colour over the landscape of my
heart.

Video of poetry reading of Veils to Clothe Venus

A test, an experiment. I bought a laptop and made this recording with the built-in webcam. It's fuzzy, oh so fuzzy. I wasn't able to figure out how to edit in Windows Media and so it's as is. It's not going to stay up for long - I do have a video camera that will record a person in motion, and seeing this is enough to make me dust it off... more poetry experiments in the future!

Oh, I wouldn't wear my reading glasses, no, no, so I was using a large magnifying glass to read the poem - it's soooo funny. And don't ask what I was doing with my arm at the end, who knows.

Notes for future recordings: memorize, stay in focus, and anything else you the happenstance reader who might bumble upon this site might add if you come by before I delete this, blush, clip.

xo

The Woman Who Lived in a Closet

Nearly a year! I read it with surprise and admiration when it made the world news. But how hungry she must have been to take food from his refrigerator, risking her invisibility in his household.

I could see her, worrying, but unable to starve any longer, and not wanting to die in the storage closet she had taken up residence in, and so she crept out like a stowaway, like a church mouse, and helped herself to the offerings.

And thus left evidence of her existence and was ultimately exposed.

Which may be just as well, perhaps there is a home for her in the state. Or perhaps someone will write a book about her and share the royalties with her...

Incredible story of desperation, daring, courage, and finally surrender.

___

(There is a part of me that is still so very 3rd World and who sees life and what it sometimes takes to survive from a different vantage than many people in my culture, I think.)