'Behind the Veil: An intimate journey into the lives of Kandahar's women.'

A Globe & Mail series, forthcoming through the next week. I found the first two disturbing, painful. Life is not just worse than ever for women in Kandahar, but life-threateningly dangerous. How, after the short period of optimism and hope, some shedding of the burka for the veil, bravely venturing out to schools, to work, did things turn back into a life that the women say is worse than that under the Taliban? Then there was 'a reason' for the attacks & torture, now there isn't - just a whole city become psychopath. Scary. Sad. Tragic.

Grünemusik's 'Nyx' - experimental music for inner journeys...

Direct link to Grünemusik's 'Nyx' on Jamendo - 6 tracks, about 30 minutes.

You can download this album for free if you wish. It carries a Creative Commons License.


Profound experimental music for inner journeys...

A large vision. I listened to 30 sec of the first track last night and downloaded without reading the notes. This morning, out with the dog in the morning air, I listened.

And I thought how far some of our musicians have moved from 'traditional' music, though I was not thinking of the Orient but of the European concert. Melody and rhythm don't exist in this album in the traditional sense.

There is a beat, but it is organic. As if we are moving through a deep underground cave. Echoes. Stalagtites. Distant water where diving is so deep as to be depthless. Strange sea creatures in those black waters of the lakes in the underground caves. Ecstatic diving, bubbles, cool pure water.

As we move through the dark cool chambers of the cave, its damp limestone walls, light cascades in occasionally. Ebullient. Nourishment for our earthbound bodies.

The woman singing is ethereal, like a Greek siren calling, or an angel healing, she is both, and a vocaloid who is aesthetically crafted.

We move through Nyx as if in a movie. I felt an archetypal narrative unfolding in my depths. The "Primordial goddess of the night"... wow! Yes! I felt her, strongly, in my first listening, before referring to the notes.

The drums throughout hold everything together for me. They are my link to traditional music, tribal music, and the power of the Orient beats here too.

Fukataku's drumming anchors the subterranean journey of this soundscape. This soundscape in 6 sections - organic sonic world of strange sounds and energies and things sweeping, by, close, far, ebulliently, darkly, it's almost a ghost world, and yet more primal than that. The human and the animal and the synthesized all co-alesque in this deeply mythological, archetypal music that is ambient and trance and has flavours of traditional Japanese music which takes the listener through a deep inner journey in the dark and mysterious places of the soul.


Photo of cave from David Darling.
_________________________________
From Nyx's album notes:

Album description

The primordial goddess of the night. Dark ambient atmosphere with Miku-dub.

Notes on tracks:

1) Melisma singing of the vocaloid Miku in the eastern Asia flavor.
2) Electric ambient dub in three parts with vocaloid's chant.
3) A dub version segued from the previous track.
4) Aether is the elemental god of the "Bright, Glowing, Upper Air." Minimal sequence of electric piano diverges.
5) Nyx, the goddess of the night, appears from the bottom of dark ancient Chaos. Based on a session with Fukataku, the drummer.
6) A short sketch in five. The vocaloid Miku sings the last one verse to fade out.
___

Grünemusik is the name of a unit owned by hikaru (nankado). He's been publishing experimental-pop tunes since 2000 in Japan.

Original CD-Rs internationally available on-line at his official website.

The self is contained in its demeanor

I didn't like what I wrote, so didn't post daily as I thought I'd do, and didn't write more... But that's how it is. Writing emerges in the way it emerges. While we can shape it a bit, mostly we have to accept what is manifesting. Trust it. The artist stands aside to let the work emerge in its fullness. Are we guardians of the creative impulse? Gatekeepers. Filters. Beacons. That which flows through us, from our fingers, in our words, or the strings of our instruments, or the brushes we hold full with paint, through our heartminds. We struggle to give form to our visions, yes. It's work, yes. But we still have to stand aside to allow the shining.

What I wrote, which didn't please me:



Less is more. I forget this on the short ride in the elevator.

The self is contained in its demeanor.

The demeanor in the business suit in the high security corporate world in the role. It is professional, underplayed. Wealth glitters everywhere in diamond rings, Rolex watches, talk of trips, events. Hinted. Happily. Less is more; more is more; a code for what is secure, safe.


A way of sitting, like a bird on a branch, sleeping. Upright. Aware, awake, lucid dreaming.

Allowing strange logic. Deep inner mind unfolding dream image sequences.

Rushing past the moment catching up with us.

Faint etchings of the body on the back of the eyelids, like bird scratchings. Strange, thin stick things in suits.


In the park at lunch, a man shouting, furious anger. People placidly watching. His emotion rises like a maniacal tide in him and unfurls spitting salt on the other man, who stands before him.

And again, he is asked to re-do the scene.

The park, lunchtime strollers, people sitting, birds pecking crumbs from the ground, fountain spraying into the air, sun, the film crew at a distance, the camera like a voyeur, the actors alone on the path, a light held by someone, a reflector by another.

That emotion found in his depths, brought curling in fury to the surface and spitting out his mouth.

I don't know how he does it.

Willing it, summoning inner dreampower, the believing heartmind, imagination.

When we watch the movie, we will be suspended in the reality of the dangerous narrative filmed in the sunny gentle park.

The poetries of living...

Even if I am working full-time, have kids, a dog, a cat, too busy, too tired, etc etc, I'm considering beginning a "found poem" of my days. Crazy, packed writing. Allowing impressions to form words that form thoughts and images. Keeping a tiny notebook, smacking keys at lunch on my netbook, buying a new Nano iPod with a voice recorder to record impressions; however I can do it, doing it. Letting it grow in its own unpruned ways. Snippets. Definitely snippets. Trusting the heartmind. Trusting the instinct to poetry. Snippets of what the intellect is grappling with. What the senses are detecting. The poetries of living. Awkward sometimes. Knowing other times. Ambiguities. Allowing the heartmind its impressions, the way we feelthink. Not superseding the raw data of living with a determination to present a nice face with nice smiling theories (though some days are like that), and certainly with no "lesson" to teach (never, it's make your own), no agenda. Not trying to show it's a good world, or a bad one. Or that there is an answer at all. And then again, some days there is, and it seems to click and work. Allowing.

Perhaps this is the first paragraph.

Perhaps I've already begun.

Letting it stream.

First Draft

I want to save how we have developed while I revert back, delete the versions, the revisions, to the origins. To come to first appearance, where the hesitant beginnings are, to re-discover the faint sketch of what is to come. To undo backward to the untouched data as it would display itself now to my worldly eye. To find the first uncut, un-enhanced, unedited draft. Where it is unfocussed and unformulated. Before the narratives tidy it up. Where we dangle freely, a cluster of possibilities.

Brookfield Place: Architecture is Sculpture

I sit in a sculpture that is architecture. White-painted iron arches and ribs repeat over the walkway like a riot of infinite regressions in a mirror. Distorting glass windows over the archways bounce light and reflect the architectural columns in permutated ways. Looking at the rounded arch of white ribs through the glass which is divided into sections by frames it feels as if we’re in the skeleton of an old boat, itself a rendition of a ribcage lit from within the belly of a whale, a huge beast basking in the sun pouring through the glass sky as it rolls through the waves.

The sound of French café music, slightly jazz, sensual, romantic, and a fountain spraying, pouring add to the surreal experience.

Rich forkful by forkful I eat a Napoleon, vanilla cream custard, flake pastry, fresh strawberries, with a smooth yet bitter coffee. My dessert swims in its vanilla cream on a large platter on an outdoor iron table and I am seated in a wicker chair that rests on a floor of polished field stone tiles. Large planters holding Ficus trees and other foliage line the edge of the patio - like a street café in Valencia, or any cosmopolitan European city. There are green and red and yellow canvas umbrellas over some of the tables.

Is this decoration, or does it serve a purpose in the glass-filtered sun? The sun that makes my netbook screen almost impossible to clearly see. The same dancing light is on my lap. I take cell phone photographs.

Santiago Calatrava, a Spanish architect, sculptor and engineer designed Brookfield Place in downtown Toronto. There are resemblances to the Eaton Centre, and I discover in an Internet search that a Canadian architectural firm, Bregman & Haman, constructed both.

An old bank building, in restored condition, is one of the buildings inside the glass structure and which you pass as if you were walking down a pedestrian-only street. Once it was whipped by winds and ice or baked in the hot Summer sun, now it dwells within a light-filled architectual sculpture. Is this a futuristic rendition of the bubbles that might contain our cities of the future? The old building stands without mourning the loss of rain or windborne air, as if realizing a dream of a protected and peaceful existence.

We walk past the building from another century over glass squares of radiating light.



Light resplendent above and below us.

Café Sketch

Two Chinese women, one eating French fries and the other a spinach omelette. One with a white hairband holding straight black hair back, navy blue trousers, a white top, 'business casual'; the other, older, in a flat-brimmed straw hat with a ribbon coloured in blacks and whites, large white pearl earings, a white cotton blouse edged with fine lace, soft black slacks. They are eating inside a café where the ceiling-mounted speakers play romantic French songs. I imagine they are mother and daughter. The younger woman perhaps working in the downtown corporate complex has been taken out to lunch by her older widowed mother. The older woman is dressed for the occasion; it is clear this is an outing. She sips white wine. Her daughter drinks water. The older woman eats slowly with an elegance that recalls times past; the younger appears stressed and looks at her watch from time to time. Simple complaints about living are aired, the cost of rice, or hydro, or plane fare to China, worries about relatives are discussed, lightly gossiped about, who's out of work, who's drinking too much, who works too hard. The missing man, the husband, the father, who perhaps died of a heart attack, or cancer, is ever-present as a shadow. The weight of the loss of him lies between them. Though it is carried lightly today, it never goes away. As they finish their meals, they sit back, one on either side of the marble café table, similar looks of contentment on their faces. It’s been pleasant. A lovely late lunch. Nothing too awkward arose in the conversation. Plans are made for family outings and dinners, perhaps taking the children to the zoo one Sunday, dinner at the daughter's afterward. The mother voices a distant wish that the children's grandfather could be with them. They recognize their mourning. There is a moment of the silence of remembering. It is a full silence that includes gratitude for the blessings of their lives, the children, the houses, the steady financial flow on which their lives rest. And then they rise and the older woman pays not the waiter but at checkout, for this is the way it is done to facilitate the diners who are largely business clientelle. Do they hug and kiss each other's cheek? I do not see before they wander off to their respective worlds.

My "Disappeared" Blog Posts

Perhaps I begin to understand why I am having difficulty writing in my blog, which has been a writerly home to me for some years now.

A man I had an involvement with a few years back, and wrote about in the poetical way I do, has 'blocked' some of my blog posts.

If I do a search on some of my posts, the page appears blank.

Yet I can get to these pages through direct links elsewhere and by pasting the url into the browser.

For instance, he has attacked my 'Bliss Queen' poem in this way. That he has chosen this poem to target particularly perturbs me. It is hidden but still accessible.

You can find it here: The Great Bliss Queen's Mansion of Flaming Bliss.

Yet if you copy & paste these words- The Great Bliss Queen's Mansion of Flaming Bliss -into the Blogger search bar on the upper left, all posts with aspects of the title appear, but not the post with the full poem itself. He's hacked into my Blogger blog somehow, or paid someone to do it, and suppressed my post. (When he reads this post of course he'll unblock it, but then you can run a Google cache search on this date and see what I am talking about.)

There are other posts too.

Until I gave up on men, which I feel I have nearly done, and it's been a few years now, I was intimately involved with a Rabbi (I didn't become Jewish), a swinger (I didn't 'try it out' but he was writing a book and so it was quite fascinating though I backed out after a mere 8 weeks without judgement), and, and I know it sounds silly and yet I couldn't be more serious, a 'non-violent' yet still textbook-case psychopath. It is the gentleman who is in the latter category who has been hacking into my Blogger account, or, more likely paid someone to do it for him, and made some of my posts "disappear."

Posts that he utterly approved of and had me email to him as well as read to him on the phone and enjoyed my discomfort at what I was describing. He is a man without conscience; an 'always happy' man; a man who lives by a code of outsmarting everyone by lying, and lying in a way that is so seamless you'd almost never know he wasn't telling the truth. I only got confirmation by an outside source that caused his stories to unravel. And I haven't yet even written about that! That's the juicy stuff that I dare not tell, and you would understand this if you knew me, though one day it'll make for an interesting autobiography. :-)

Tonight I realized that once again a man that I have been in some sort of intimate relationship with is deliberately suppressing my writing. I have a history of this sort of involvement - and the list is a long one, including and especially my ex - that, firstly, you'd think I'd have learned by now, and, secondly, there are millions of kind, caring, supportive, sensitive, intelligent, loving men in the world who would be much better match for me than the men I've so haplessly gotten involved with.

This whole episode of the 'disappeared posts,' as you can see, and which would delight him no end, seeing as he enjoys watching others suffer, and I know that sounds terrible, but I witnessed it again and again, never understanding his lack of empathy, of compassion, until I realized how closely he fits the 'psychological profile,' is quite serious, and troubling.

I'm being hacked into and I know who is doing it and I don't know what to do about it.

Other than contacting Blogger, and going public.

And making sure to maintain back-ups and copies of my blog. Not just in case of system failure - but because there are strange people out there who do strange things on the Internet.

Everyday I think about posting, I miss being at my blog. It's an important part of my life. But I have no access at work, and my day starts at 6am and I'm home by 6pm and evenings are busy with both of my children living with me, a dog and a cat, and volunteer tutoring my 18 yo student who can't read (which was tonight so I am particularly tired with getting home late) that I can't seem to get to writing. It's like it's on the other side of an ocean and I can't seem to reach ecriture with the girth of water increasing daily...

Health issues have quietened down, and other that being more tired than I can remember ever being, everything is fine.

Beautiful readers, I miss posting and being with you in the ways we are! I am considering how to squeeze stolen time out of my schedule to write secretly, something, anything, because I will go insane if I cannot write.

Well. Not quite. You understand how difficult it is to be somewhere where you may not compose anything of your own. Not even able to get online through my netbook at lunch because that requires 'special permission.' I've had access to my email and blog in all other jobs but I understand that security is tight and I accept the rigors of it all and I need the paycheck and I am not complaining but not being able to write in the poetic ways I do is perhaps the most fatiguing of all.

Anyway, I am so tired tonight that I must go and rest...

So, sweet beautiful blessings to you all, be back as soon as I figure out how to continue to be who I am in a more corporate world, and I will, I've done it before, just not under such a lot of other things that also require much energy and attention.

If you're curious and would like to know the general area I'm working in, check out Varonis. I'm working in the regulated private sector for a business that is implementing this incredible product.

And so on, onward, onwards ho! and so forth, and etcetera.

::SMILING:: hugs xo

An hour of bliss...

It's 9pm, and wilting in a heat wave - though I am in air conditioning all day at work. And then I remind myself that I love the sultry Summer heat and we've had so little of it this year. And so bask in it...

When I came home, my son had taken our dog downstairs, and for the first time in 10 years I came home to a quiet apartment. No happy, crazy doggy to greet me. It felt strange. My daughter's not back from her camping/bed & breakfast trip yet.


I came home. Where is everybody? An empty place? Oh wow.

I rested but also put JazzFM on and listened with ear buds... and had an hour of bliss! Every instrument, piano, trombone, snare drums, the sexy gravely voices of the men singing blues and jazz, emerged from the centre of my consciousness like magnificent flowers blooming... creativity blossoming in the world... fabulous hour of reverie.

Moments like these are enabling - encouraging, inspiring, uplifting, affirmative... an inner blossom of bliss runs everywhere in the molecules of the world like a Tao, and I tapped into it for an hour tonight newly, it's been a long time...

Perhaps the financial stress I've been under with being unemployed for so long is lifting just a little, just enough to feel an hour of bliss listening to jazz...

_
photos are stills from a short video I took back in June... a clip which you might see one day on these pages...

I haven't forgotten about you, dear blog readers. No! I'd never forget about you. I've started a new job that's taking me away from computer access each day, and dealing with some health issues. On the latter, tests & an ultrasound but no results back yet. On the former, the project (in an IT dept at a bank) looks like it's going to be a huge amount of work, and I'm glad to be involved in the process. Hopefully this weekend I can post something. *Big hugs* xo

Caught at a Starlight Burlesque Show at The Painted Lady!

Haha... Claire and I, caught at a Starlight Burlesque show at The Painted Lady last Friday night by Nonni! :) lol

Claire says she looks like her great aunt. Not sure who I look like. Nor why we look zonked - Claire only drank water, and I sipped one tiny glass of red wine the whole evening. Musta been the venue! Had to share - you'd appreciate (& it just came in).

Claire, who I love hanging out with, is a fabulous artist - huge canvases of jungle mythological motifs, Shamanic, archetypal, rich, colourful.

White Fire on a radio show...

(which be forwarned is almost 22 minutes long).

Backtrack to go forward.

In 2000 I began what I hoped would be an epic prose poem exploring the concept of love in our culture through the mythology of soul mates. While I had done much of the research (an unfinished interdisciplinary thesis on light being the core of it), I had a course list of books to read on the changing conceptions of love in Western culture but sadly lacked the funds not only for time to research and write the epic poem but even to buy the two dozen books I thought would be most helpful. So nothing more was written beyond this fragment.

And perhaps that’s all it was ever meant to be. A fragment. The fragment almost became a performance of about 8 dancers, singers and musicians in 2001, but that show collapsed at the last moment.

I was invited by Nik Beat at the suggestion of our mutual friend Mikala to read it on his Sunday afternoon radio show on Toronto’s CIUT FM in November 2000.

An old friend, Christopher Reibling, kindly and without being asked, recorded the show and gave me the tape, otherwise it'd be lost to the fires of time. :-)

And that is what I have uploaded. Because recently I resurrected this prose poem in a videopoem called, ‘Poetic of Light/ Poétique de la lumière, which I’ve uploaded to my website’s Videopoetry page along with a link to the full text of White Fire. I thought that perhaps for the one person in the next 10 years who might be interested in hearing a reading, that, rather than producing a new one, this rather charming radio show would be more fun (lol, everyone who stops by is unique and honours me by their presence!:-).

So, unique one-of-a-kind reader of prose poems/listener of poetry radio shows/watcher of YouTube videopoems, enjoy!

With blessings.

A Poetic of Light/Une poétique de la lumière

This meditative video poem is dedicated to all of you. With thanks...



Poetic of Light/ Poétique de la lumière uploaded by Brenda Clews to YouTube.

The poetry is addressed to the lover, the soul mate, you, the viewer.

My videopoem is finished. After a week of nearly nonstop work, most nights till 3 or 4 am and up again at 7 or 8am and working right through, I am happy with it. For your enjoyment, I have uploaded both the final version with poetry, and the silent version too.

I searched through my writing for nearly a whole day to find what might work. I decided on 'White Fire,' a meditation on soul mates since I had been vaguely dancing with that poem in mind on the day that I taped this, and had printed it on fine paper and threw the pages in the air and danced on them during the videoing of my dance session last June.

White Fire now has a web page at my Art & Writings website, where you may read the prosepoem in its entirety. In the video I have only used a few quotes on the creation of the universe out of light. I wrote this prose poem nearly a decade ago, and at that time I was invited to read it on the radio and it nearly became a performance with 8 dancers and musicians!

The celestial and ecstatic piano is from "Spring" in the album, 'Piano Paintings' by the brilliant Russian composer and pianist, Lena Selyanina. It holds a Creative Commons license and may be listened to, and downloaded freely, at Jamendo (it's also available on the Internet Archives, and as a torrent on Mininova). Lena came by my website, since I had left a note at her site on Jamendo that the music in my videopoem, Venus Enroute, is hers, and wrote: "I am impressed by your art and happy that you have found inspiration from my music. I am looking forward to see how the Spring dance will evolve....with warm greetings from Helsinki, Finland, Lena." How wonderful.

One of the challenges I set myself in this videopoem was to create a self-contained movie. I have, therefore, included the text of the prosepoetry being recited in the movie itself. You will see that I have worked very hard to produce this video in a way that the text becomes a design element in the video itself.

Except at the end, where I felt darkness was most effective.

I hope you enjoy viewing it as much as I have enjoyed making it.

Earlier version without words: Poetic of Light/Poétique de la lumière (a poetry without words) at Vimeo.

Poetic of Light/Poétique de la lumière - In-progress

This clip isn't finished yet. I hope to add poetry -I'm thinking of not just voice, or maybe no voice at all (that piano so beautiful), but having the words float down the screen, especially during intervals when I 'disappear' from the 'room'- I'm sharing this earlier version because it has charm... when I finish this video I'll upload to YouTube... but I thought you might enjoy this stage in the creation, a little clip, this simplicity.

If you'd like to see a screenshot of the Final Cut Express window with the filters I used, you can see it at TwitPic (press the + sign to see full size). This video, taken in June 2009, was shot with an older DV camera, a Canon GL2.

The celestial and ecstatic piano is from "Spring" in 'Piano Paintings' by Lena Selyanina. It holds a Creative Commons license and may be listened to, and downloaded freely, at Jamendo (it's also available on the Internet Archives, and as a torrent on Mininova).

______
I also tried unsuccessfully to upload this video to Blogger for two days! I'm hosting it from Facebook. Yes, I have a YouTube account, but I prefer to keep that site for finished videopoems. I don't think a Facebook url will work, but you can try: Poetic of Light/Poétique de la lumière - In-progress (will work for fb 'friends' & send an invite if you're there- I'd love to connect.) The embedded video doesn't travel by email, and so I like to offer a direct url. I may upload to Vimeo when my 'new week' starts.

Video: 'Venus Enroute' from "The Botticelli Venus Suite of Poems"

Venus Enroute uploaded by Brenda Clews to YouTube.

The poetry is an excerpt from my "Botticelli Suite of Venus Poems":

She stopped to rest. Momentarily, in the field of pure possibility, her position unfixed, indeterminate.

Without hovering, or insecurity.

It was an image of being in the vast field of life.

Without knowing. In a position of unknowing, positionless, I suppose. Existing without location or momentum. Vibrating with possibility. It wasn't exciting or fearful, just what is.

Nothing is fixed or certain, though there are always solutions to problems.

Then she continued on.

She didn't doubt her certainties.

The music clip is from Lena Selyanina's 'Sarah's Dance,' from her album, "Piano Poetry," which carries a Creative Commons license and may be found here: http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/45056.

The chair sequence and the poem added to it had no original connection. I cut the clip from two hours of footage as perhaps 'workable.' Then I searched for a poem. It's amazing how the poem 'fits' the movement, huh? Creatively perhaps we are a gesture, a gesture where here poetry and dance are an aligned fusion.

Albeit, the resulting video is a bit comic. The tag on the back of my dress? As soon as I saw the footage I grabbed the dress and cut it off. The other camera? Ahh, I'm still just learning how to make videos and don't have a clone plugin to remove these elements. Enjoy the humor!

(Or perhaps, in context of the poem, since Venus has swung her scallop shell around to enter the world of experience, we could say the tag on her dress reads: 'If this Vintage Venus is found wandering, send her back to "Mount Olympus"!)

What is most significant about us is not our brilliance, inventiveness, creativity or our rich civilization, but our capacity to love.

Dancing an Unwinding after a Solstice Celebration

Dancing an Unwinding after a Solstice Celebration from Brenda Clews on Vimeo.
This is my first videotaping of dance, something I've wished to do for a long time. After the Solstice DOWH (Dance Our Way Home) session finished, and most of the women left, a few kindly stayed to dance so we could get some stills for an article, but I liked the footage and created this little video dance poem. You can read the prose poem here: brendaclews.blogspot.com/2009/03/ericas-dance-our-way-home.html

Dancing Women: Erica Ross, Laura Nashman, Angela Greco, Jade Niemczyk, Linda Robinson & Brenda Clews

Event: Dance Our Way Home (DOWH), June 20th, 2009, at Dovercourt House in Toronto: danceourwayhome.com

Background music from *Collection Hapa* by Keli'i Kaneali'i & Barry Flanagan: mountainapplecompany.com

Videotaped, edited & prose poetry by Brenda Clews: sites.google.com/site/brendaclews

Meridians of Culture

Direct URL: Meridians of Culture

(I have added experimental avanteguard music in the background: 'Lambkins Black,' by Alphacore, which carries a Creative Commons License. It may be found at Jamendo.)

It's my daughter's favourite of all my recordings, and I think it is mine too. More like a Joycean inner dramatic monologue. I am hoping it moves in the direction of a deeper, richer writing that hints at vast underlying energies the way stream-of-consciousness, surrealist and dream-time writing does...

Hope you enjoy this recording! I am hoping, somehow, to add video to it, though the thought is daunting, just daunting. Any ideas or suggestions for video would be muchly appreciated.

xo

Wrote this poem in the intensity of the afternoon on that day and I wouldn’t describe it only as stream-of-consciousness or surreal or dream-time but as an inter-splicing, like synapses crossing the brain to create strange formations and patterns, of different meridians from the world in which I am embedded. From the sonic to metaphors of natural substances, processes and systems that express thoughts about life and death and consciousness to cultural events, such as the recent tragic death of Michael Jackson and the paradoxes he represents, or personal ones, like my 86 year old mother’s recently broken hip, to historical revolution. The way it is in the deeper speaking, behind which. Life enters. Renovation going on outside my window, which you may be able to hear, became the renovation in the poem. The poem spans many meridians. I’ve decided to call it,


Meridians of Culture

I

In the deepest speaking. Clone the element. Tarry the fishnet. Slice swordfish swording slices. Cut the knuckles. Chuck the jade. Be verbs to your object. Sledge hammer the screwdriver through the wood grain fibres until the wood splits into columbines. Spin with the wind machine. Pan is wandering the forest like a komodo dragon. Whiteness of the clouds pushes in on vision. Tinsley sound, boot scratches soil. Dirt, rocks. Fecund upper being outflowing volcanic rubble. Don’t laugh. You’re next.

Line up; fall out of place. Jump off turning ferris wheels. Neverland never was. Don’t turn a black-eyed cheek on me.

Roth your socks. Mildew doesn’t grow between our toes.

They floated by the Great Wall of China, and then fell. Mao had thick fat lips and I never trusted him. He killed millions in the name of revolution, a tyrant like any other.

Go green. Like everyone. Green, keep greening. I don’t mind my status. Neither should you. Hips are beautiful; why do they crack & crumble? We will all have metal hips in the new utopia. Where we clone with steel. Pins. Motherboards. Chips. Design element.

I don’t want to make this easy for you but it should be fun. Today I’m a bit of vibrating anti-matter; tomorrow I could be a gold statue by the pond of orange fish. Fish float freely through Freon.

Rainbow my world.

The world is sweet. Layers of sweetness. I get caught in the honeyed loving of it all. Birds sing my heart. Happiness.

‘Let me in,’ the man renovating says to his bud. Clatter of sheet metal.

It’s a cool summer of bliss.

But there I go. Not undercutting myself enough. People live different realities.

When you’ve been tortured, wounded and set free every day is a gift.

II

In this speaking, no I don’t. You do wind, wood, fire; I, metal, bone, water. If you can sustain the listening. Where the flames roar.

Punctuated sentences. Punctured.

Eyes of meridians cool the water you pull the sword out of.

Acupuncture of the soul, which can’t be pinned.

Our souls are wind, fire wind.

Burning through life.

The birds in the trees never tire of their singing. Speaking to sing.

Hush rush of cars sleekly sliding by.

Clouds of gold
fall on me.

III

The ear is a nautilus shell out which the ocean pours. Roar of seawater. My spine is brine. Mollusk, exoskeletal dancing on the flashing rock-star studded stage. Sliding into Motown. Ho-town. Show town.

In-earbuds. Listen.

The deep speaking is song. The burning bush sings of nautilus souls sweeping the burning deserts of ruin.

Ozymandias, crumbling.

Dust is the most creative substance on the planet. Ground rock. Galvanized gallantry. Silica strands. Igneous dreams. Encrusted crystals. Embedded dreams. We are miners of the ore.

We come from what we go to. Everything that takes form dissolves.

What is the intuition of the cloud-bank? It’s so white it brights my vision.

Most days I am dissolved and barely resolved.

Hailing baby cries. Rush of thunderbird. Ignition. Trains rocking. Laughter. Baby glee. Sun. Wind. Tree. Out of the dust storm of life. How can a life be fragmented? It can’t unless it cuts into death from life, like a zipper. Maybe we do, death-teeth, life-teeth, hailing our baby screams. Flesh cuts both ways.

It’s irresolvable. Nothing to hold onto.
This ragged bone-edge of the world.

IV

I don’t know about you but I don’t want to be scattered. I want to be collected.

V

Frosted tip of emeralds shining in the raw rock that slips like soapstone.

Green, greening.

He is black, with green cat eyes. Fur over bone.

Hiding in the rocks. Under your toes. Ground bits of the ground world. Greening its grounding. A planet greening its grounding. Magma slips. Seawater steams.

I don’t think I’m living in a forest fire but I could be.

Forest fire of flaming souls.

How can the liquid light of being be honey glossing the fires? Sweetness, beauty.

Sustaining.

The poet dances over her poetry

All photographs taken today, at my first ever rental of a beautiful room to videotape dance. I can't believe I've done this. It's been a wish for 7 years.

(You will note that I lack the energy at this hour with the dog still to walk to clone-tool out the camera that the camera records in two of these stills from the video :-)

(click on any to see larger size in a new tab)

The poet is dancing over her poetry

Since 2002 I have wanted to rent a room and videotape dancing for footage for videopoetry. Today I finally realized my wish in a beautiful room that I rented for a few hours in a nearby church. Though it's taken 7 years, and I'm older now, I am celebrating my courage.

Videopoem (1:56min): Solstician Rain

Direct link to YouTube video: Solstician Rain

The light was beautiful, but ripe, fruity, dense, as if walking through a film in technicolour. Light swimming to us through veils of vapour high up, some particles clear, others refracted. Colour magnified. Air, rich. The streets a vision under a distant roar of stratospheric surf. Then it poured.

The woman I passed saw the light, its ominous hush, picked up an umbrella on her way out. I didn't.

We, my dog and I, stood under a tree cover while thunder broke its drums.

We weren't slicked and soaked by the time we reached home, only dampened with large drops: she, smelling of happy wet dog; me with my khaki green long soft Indian cotton skirt, spotted, juiced.

_

'Solstician Rain' is a description of my walk yesterday evening. An hour or so after getting caught in the rain, I went out and recorded the video. It was dark by then but with various filters I was able to achieve something resembling the feel of the atmosphere earlier. Holding a microphone out of the window, I recorded the rain and thunder. Working in Final Cut Express, I layered video and audio tracks to form this videopoem. I love the rich fertility of this time of year.

The music under the thunder is by AlFa. It's approximately the first two minutes of an eighteen minute piece, 'Poème de la forêt,' from their album, Nuance Khaki, Fiber Lily, which carries a Creative Commons license and may be found here: http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/10688.




Here is a screen capture of this video in Final Cut Express.
Click for a larger size.

Making another dance video...

(I put some filters on the video, which is why these stills from it look fuzzy... not so bad in the actual clip, really!)

Busy, in my own quiet way...

Over the weekend I wrote a dance article, submitted it by email at 2am Saturday morning, after dancing and before dancing yet again, had a belated Mother's Day dinner with my son Saturday night, and worked on a little dance video from a clip I took at Erica's Summer Solstice Ecstatic Dance for Women. It's a sweet down-home video. I'm going to try to finish it soon!

Today hasn't been very fruitful. I've only been sifting through a few pieces I've written for Summer Solstice to see if something might work for this little video. The piece I like best, The Earth is Teeming With Becoming, might not be poetic enough and too, too... dense... and the perfect piece, the Amaterasu one, is too long. Perhaps Bramble Rose, though too short. Then there's The Sun's Trailing Veil... (which I didn't post at Blogger but at Xanga in 2004 & its long been privatized so no link). And perhaps the little video needs no poetry. Or perhaps I need to write a new piece for it. My kids will tell me - in their decisive, kind ways.

I've rented a beautiful room to video myself moving, dancing, but panicked today, it was booked for tomorrow for 2 hours, and had it changed to next week! Terrified is the word. And I'm having trouble figuring out what Creative Commons music might work in case I make videos of any of the clips. Oh, that was Sunday, after the 12 hours I spent on the video, listening to music on Jamendo for hours, downloading albums, not sure, not sure. With the article and working on a dance video (which wasn't planned, I set the video camera up only to pick some stills from it, but I guess making dance videos is my passion), I wasn't quite ready to video tomorrow anyhow.

You can see from these photos, stills taken from the short video clip, that it was joyous, we were joyful. We'd danced ourselves into our ecstasies.

Facebook Reminds Me To Join Myself

THIS IS A SCAM
(but I've had fun with it nevertheless)

I have removed all active links, so dondwary.

IT'S OFFICIAL: I'VE BEEN PHISHED!

Also if anyone knows of a direct and easy way to alert real Facebook of this phishing scam, I'd appreciate it. I've already spent close to half an hour trying to find which help form would apply to this issue. Facebook makes it so difficult to contact them about an email scam, I've given up. (You mean you think perhaps the *real* Facebook is behind the scam, then? Hmnnn...:)

facebook Hi, The following person recently invited you to be their friend on Facebook: Brenda Clews 330 friends 9 photos Other people you may know on Facebook: Cliff Warner Michael Covey John Beck New York, NY Ian Paul Marshall Toronto, ON Melissa Noventa Toronto, ON Patry Francis Boston, MA Facebook is a great place to keep in touch with friends, post photos, videos and create events. But first you need to join! Sign up today to create a profile and connect with the people you know. Thanks, The Facebook Team Facebook is free and anyone can join. Sign Up To sign up for Facebook, follow the link below: http://www.facebook.com/*--------------------------------------------------------------* This message was intended for *-----------*@*---------*.com. If you do not wish to receive this type of email from Facebook in the future, please click here to unsubscribe. Facebook's offices are located at 1601 S. California Ave., Palo Alto, CA 94304.

Has anyone else received an email from Facebook reminding you that you invited yourself to become your friend? And suggesting you add friends who are your own Facebook friends? Duh?! Scam?

Hahaahha... no, I didn't consider actually joining myself on Facebook! I'm still wondering why Facebook sent a "Reminder" that I, myself, invited myself to join myself and that I might like some of my own friends and become friends with them too.

Note: I found 3 other "Brenda Clews's" in the turning world of Facebook, and sent invites some months back, but they all ignored me - wacko Brenda Clews from Canada I guess - I thought it'd be fun to be "friends" with women with one's own name, but I swear up & down and all over Facebook that I DID NOT send an invite to myself. No. I did not.

BTW, *Facebook* sent this email to an email that I didn't list with Facebook but have at other sites, an email account I have set to automatically forward to the email account I regularly use. So it's a scam.

And here I thought Facebook was becoming existential on us! Theatre of the Absurd, and all that. The Surrealism of Facebook life. :-)

And the email address it's from is wonky. SPAMMERSSPAMMERSSPAMMERS or PHISHY-SCAMMERSSCAMMERSSCAMMERS-PHISHY-SCAMMERS-PHISHY-PHISHY

One of those days of running around, chores, places to go, rehab to visit, and now a moment with a thick French press espresso with cream and then my brother arrives for a barbecue. I'm almost too tired to begin preparing coals and food, so we'll see how it goes. As long as he's not in any hurry, it'll be a few hours of slow and fine...

The day is nearly perfect in sunshinyness and heat, and I'd love to have gone to the beach.

Soon, and I promise some photos or a video of Lake Ontario waves...

On the graphic images of violence on the news

On the graphic images of violence on the news.

I can accept seeing videos or photographs of uprisings, rebellions, bombings. Sure, I cringe in horror and shame. These images make me aware in my non-violent world of how bad it can be. They keep me from forgetting the horror of our actions toward each other in times of trouble, resistance, battle or war. It grieves my heart to see the senseless hurting of each other. The desire to control. What power does.

Perhaps seeing these images, their contexts, keeps me from becoming ethically flaccid.

Watching riot police beating dissenters is hardly a pleasant activity, yet the news floods my vision with such depictions.

This is the world we live in. It's a tough world. Behave or be beaten.

Forceful subliminal training. Of a sort. The theory is either you emulate it, which horrifies everyone even more, or it makes you want to stay under cover, stay out of trouble, be an ordinary person doing whatever whatever regime or government mandates.

In Canada, our news is nowhere near as violent as American news, but that's another story.

What I wanted to get to with this post is that while watching some of the atrocities in the political world is perhaps passable, the images of terribly wounded, dying or dead people crosses the line for me. It becomes a voyeuristic media circus that takes enjoyment in human suffering and which does not take into account a person's privacy.

If someone said, 'Sure, take a video of me screaming in horror and shock in the street with my arm blown off, I want the world to see my pain,' that would be fine.

But to blast images around the world of people in the throes of violent mutilations, for I don't know what else one would call the effects of guns, machetes, and bombs, robs them further of their power.

If I was shot in the street does that mean I would lose my right to privacy and that in my weakened and wounded state it would be permissible to take photographs of me and stream them in international newscasts?

What a horrible thought.

Yet this is what we allow our news reporters and producers to do daily.

It's demeaning to all.

The graphic depiction of violence does not reduce violence.

It further dehumanizes an already dehumanized landscape.

My mother was moved to rehab last week. Everything's fine. Her memory is decreasing, though. She keeps telling me that she can't remember where she lives (which may or may not be entirely true, you'd have to know her to understand this). I tell her where she lives. She says she can't picture it. She's been living in her condo for 28 years. We had her checked a year or so back, and it's not Alzheimers, but dementia, what Margaret Thatcher has. Her recollection of the past has never been better and we're hearing lots of stories we hadn't heard before, including finding out recently (actually when one of my brothers was checking her email) that she had two brothers who moved to Australia that she'd never mentioned before. I think they are both deceased now, but their progeny know my mother, apparently she's visited them in Australia in past years. We knew about the sister who was 6 foot tall and died of cancer of the throat (because she smoked my mother admonishes again and again) who had a daughter who has a son (now in his 20s or 30s or something) she won't leave even to come to Canada for a vacation, and a brother who'd entirely disappeared - no-one's heard from him or of him in at least 30 years and he's presumed dead - in South Africa, where she's from. It's all somewhat odd, to discover we had two more uncles we didn't know about on yet another continent, but then that's my mother.

Anyway, she's tiny and frail and holding her own and doing her physio apparently (she had been refusing in hospital), which she has to do if she hopes to be released. My brother who's considering moving in with her may have his hands far too full, though, and we are considering the possibility of a nursing home, though she continues to threaten suicide -"I'll die if I go into one of those, I won't live!- as the spectre looms.

She's an extrovert and has always been very social and as she is already finding rehab much more fun than hospital with so many similarly recovering patients (she's on a hip floor), so she may find a nursing home more congenial to her gossipy nature.

I hope so, because I can't imagine as her memory slips away how my dear and sweet brother, a brother who has been more kind to me throughout my life than can be expressed, will be able to cope.

It's one step at a time, however. She's in rehab. She's in fairly good spirits. She's doing her physio without complaint. She wants to come to my place for a barbeque before the Summer's finished, and she may just do so.


So this is the line, and we laugh:

Granny's in Rehab on a hip floor.

Laurelled Petals

Browsing old sketchbooks when I was making navigation buttons for my new Art & Writings website, I found this poem. It fits quite well with the Botticelli Suite of Poems, and I'll probably add it as a 'page' to that manuscript. You can see I've been into ways to combine words and image for a long time! I must have written this piece around 1976 perhaps... I think the poem was published in a university mag too.



(click on image for readable version)

Bramble Rose

Petal edges
butterfly wings
blue powder.

Blossoming
from the hips.

Singing
hip-hop shaking
strutting
struggle with closed bud
of a cocoon.

Here to blossom.

A whole life
to unfurl.

Unexpected, that.

It never gets boring.

The unflown flying.

Petals in the wind, pink,
blue dusting to indigo.

This sun, this rain
never felt before.

Be the valley of women dancing.
Be the flowers, and the earth,
and the wind, and the moon.

Tattoo me on your skin.
Ink me in colours of the meadow,
a blossoming bramble
rose

As I dance the opulent
blossoming
of you.

__
a little ditty written at Erica's recent "Blossoming" workshop.



Image of gorgeous dancing women - a stylized version of a photograph at Erica's Dance Our Way Home website.

My 86 year old mother who broke her hip on the weekend is doing fine after her operation. The fractured bone only required a pin, which was good. Thank you all for your kindnesses and support.