Dinosaur Book of Green Furor

direct link: The Dinosaur Book is Green Fury

And the dinosaur’s book is green fury.

Promethea's curls and flanks, her energy, combustible.
Promethea has been dancing on the 200 billion year old
dinosaur skull in the glass box that hangs on the wall
since the beginning. Petrescent, converting into stone,
from water. What isn't liquid suddenly flows.
Like lava. Boiling.

Ancient skull without skin, or legs, or beating organs.
Body without organs. The body whose. Stone. Whose
bones are petrified. In fine volcanic ash, for billions of
years. I can read pathways on your bones, a scored
map of the earth, embossed hieroglyphics. Your garrulous
breaking voice in the sparking dust of fireworks, like
millions of dancing fireflies, an exploding outwards.
Your carapace is prophecy, what bends time in on itself,
grounding. You are earth stilled to wisdom. Ancient,
shell of secret signs, messages from the eons.
Mesozoic creature. Who lived happily on the
banks of the stream that was blocked by volcanic mud
creating a 12 mile lake that lasted for another 80 million
years before volcanic eruptions buried it.

Where is your riverbank? Slow mulching of sweet
grasses, sipping freshest of fresh water, dear ancestor.
Another bit of corporeality in the drama that began billions
of years ago when we all, our possibility, came to be in
the expanding light and the fiery dust that settled
into our solar system, and into the earth, and into your
exoskeleton, with its oracular markings, star charts,
which is now rock, condensed history.

"I am writing it just behind the burning bush, by the light
of your blaze," says Hélène.¹

And I see you, remembering the warm fertile lush land
of 200 million years ago, growing a body, organs beating,
a fury of blood, following Promethea across invisible
mountains, down hallucinated valleys, into the heart
of the volcano that continually explodes,
bursting you forth.

From Poem Paintings

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A time-lapse art video: drawing in India inks in my beloved Moleskine Folio Sketchbook A4; pulsing green kalaidoscope in the background; text of the poem moving slowly up the screen at a diagonal; and a voiceover poem. The world is a green furor of creativity - the green fire of life.

I shot the video with a Canon HF S100 and speeded up about 800%.

Twenty min of footage became a 2.5 minute video. A longer drawing would use a huge amount of space on the hard drive, and so, except for short films, I don't recommend this technique.

I edited the footage in Final Cut Express 4.0.1. Because of the camera angle, I rotated and cropped the sketch clip, and underneath added a layer of footage with a kaleidoscope filter, and also ran the text of the prosepoem over the paper at an angle, motion keyframing it, and changing the opacity from light to dark letters over the duration of the video.

I created the music in a cool program, the 'P22 Music Text Composition Generator (A free online music utility).' In this program, each letter has a sound. When you put text in, you can choose the BMP rate and instrument you'd like, and the program generates a midi file, with the sheet music. I layered my track in GarageBand 6.0.2 using different instruments, bmp, splicing and re-arranging.

Even the reading of the writing was speeded up, in Audacity 1.3.12, using the tempo filter.

From start to finish took about 12 hours, there were many layers, of image, text, and sound, each with filters, and I had to render a few times, which took hours, to see if what I had produced worked.

While this method for creating an art video works, my camera battery can only tape for 1½ hours, which is not long enough for most art projects.
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This video poem was featured at Moving Poems, an "anthology of the best videopoems, filmpoems, animated poems, and other poetry videos from around the web" (check it out if you haven't already): http://movingpoems.com/2011/04/the-dinosaur-book-is-green-fire-by-brenda-clews/


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Notes: ¹Hélène Cixous' The Book of Promethea

The Book of Promethea (University of Nebraska Press, 1991)

by Hélène Cixous, trans. Betsy Wing (quote used, p.23)

                                          

NaPoWriMo Day 4: Alicia Ostriker's 'Birth of Venus'

Venus, or really Aphrodite, for Aphrodite seems more sensitive, more of a fragile beauty, has been on my mind all day. I have taken out my unfinished manuscript, along with a pile of papers three times larger of research, and the poem which originally inspired me.

Alicia Ostriker's 'The Birth of Venus' (only a few lines I found on-line due to copyright restrictions):

I

Huge shell the remnant of my great-grandmother dragon,

Split open to form the world,

They have made a boat of it

And set me here.

The effect is of scarcely tolerable pleasure.

II

If I am anything I am young, so young.

As I arrive on this shallow scalloped sea

Zephyr huffs flowers at me, frowning.

The effect is to deepen my reverie.

My face emerges from another world

Behind the picture plane, a world

Of light and clouds, volumes of clouds.

The artist has set it at an impossible angle

Upon my impossibly swanlike

Neck, my impossibly sloping shoulders.

If I am anything I am un...

I will offer excuses and not give you a critique of the poem which inspired me to begin a series of poems in 2008 that I am now trying to finish.

In 2006, I met Alicia Ostriker at a conference, and as I was watching the book table, and she was spreading her books over a section, we chatted a little about how to arrange poetry books for sale. She was quite old, slender, in matte black, her hair, her clothes, her bags, a bit fussy with the books she'd brought to add to those of a local bookseller and whatnot, but very nice. It's not her personality that I remember. It was the darkness in her that surprised me, I guess. The density of energy around her. I don't think I've ever been in a room with someone who's energy was like that. I felt there was something raw about her connection with life. Alicia Ostriker had an emptiness to her that was yet full of intensity, poetic passion, a fury of living that I can't describe but that was remarkable. Later I bought the book with the Venus poem in it, No Heaven, but she'd already caught her flight home and so I didn't get an autograph.

Alicia Ostiker's poem about Venus, and my sheaf of research, is pulling me back to this project, but, still, no poetry. With apologies, for what is happening here at Rubies in Crystal during NaPoWriMo, the month designated to writing a poem every day.

Who knows, but I may write a long poem and so catch  up. Yah. Who knows. (Chews sugary gum and blows a real big bubble.)


Today I worked on a video, an unplanned exercise, sigh. I called it, 'The Dinosaur’s Book is Green Fury.' It is another 'learning' video, which is currently rendering, and I'm fairly exhausted with the work it's been, videoing, editing the footage, editing the writing, reading it a few times, editing the reading, and the music, and creating text for the video and title and credits, and the layers of tracks in audio and video have taken hours and hours, and I offer this by way of excuse.

The video should be up by tomorrow at YouTube or Picasa. I'll embed it here.

Botticelli's Venus, as I understood her, is figuring dimly and slowing in the back of my consciousness again.

                                          

NaPoWriMo, Day 3: Lawrence on Artists

As I tweeted, in exasperation, either something other than research happens tonight or I'm out of NaPoWriMo. My muse is unruly and apparently will not write on command.

And I guess I'm out. Though I would like to continue to post bits from the book I am currently into.

From Women in Love, Birkin, who probably closest resembles Lawrence himself, talking to Gerald:

'...every true artist is the salvation of every other.'
'I thought they got on so badly, as a rule.'
'Perhaps. But only artists produce for each other the world that is fit to live in.'

[Project Gutenberg, an on-line eBook, url to the page where this passage begins.]

These few lines [in Chapter 16] sparked something. I am immersed in thinking about the 'gift economy' (as an parallel system to Capitalism, or what Capitalism is founded on rather), about the artist's life, the struggle to live, what has to be sacrificed for art, and why art continues when society seems in nearly every way to wish to abolish it by ignoring most of their artists' need for decent livelihood.

And in this economic predicament, yes, "every true artist is the salvation of every other." And they do get on "badly"? Surely!

But it is the last line, "only artists produce for each other the world that is fit to live in," that had the wow factor. I feel Lawrence himself is doing this for me, even as I walk up and down the streets and across the parks with my dog listening to Women in Love on audiobook.

And, you see, Venus, Botticelli's Venus, does create a vision of beauty that makes the world fit to live in.


from the VirtualUffizi


Sorry to be so sketchy. But I shall have to give up the NaPoWriMo effort as my muse is veiled, absent.

                                          

NaPoWriMo, Day 2: Lawrence on Aphrodite

Because Women in Love is a 25 hour recording, and I listen to it every night on my dog walk, the influence of Lawrence's novel will affect my writing. I've never read Lawrence, though I do have The Plumed Serpent on my shelves, so must have tried. An audio recording, and Sennheiser earbuds, and I enter deep listening mode. The brilliance and beauty of his language marvels me as I walk the dark streets with my dog.

My writing has been compared to Lawrence's, which is far-fetched, surely, and yet I find I am enthralled with his mastery, as a writer, and feel a deep resonance with his work, at least as it is expressed in this novel.

Tonight, listening to Chapter 14 (of 42, I have a ways to go), a passage spoke again of concerns relevant to my Venus Poems. Birkin and Ursuala are speaking:

‘Do you smell this little marsh?’ he said, sniffing the air. He was very sensitive to scents, and quick in understanding them.
‘It’s rather nice,’ she said. ‘No,’ he replied, ‘alarming.’
‘Why alarming?’ she laughed.
‘It seethes and seethes, a river of darkness,’ he said, ‘putting forth lilies and snakes, and the ignis fatuus, and rolling all the time onward. That’s what we never take into count— that it rolls onwards.’
‘What does?’
‘The other river, the black river. We always consider the silver river of life, rolling on and quickening all the world to a brightness, on and on to heaven, flowing into a bright eternal sea, a heaven of angels thronging. But the other is our real reality—’
‘But what other? I don’t see any other,’ said Ursula.
‘It is your reality, nevertheless,’ he said; ‘that dark river of dissolution. You see it rolls in us just as the other rolls—the black river of corruption. And our flowers are of this—our sea-born Aphrodite, all our white phosphorescent flowers of sensuous perfection, all our reality, nowadays.’
‘You mean that Aphrodite is really deathly?’ asked Ursula.
‘I mean she is the flowering mystery of the death-process, yes,’ he replied. ‘When the stream of synthetic creation lapses, we find ourselves part of the inverse process, the blood of destructive creation. Aphrodite is born in the first spasm of universal dissolution—then the snakes and swans and lotus— marsh-flowers— ... born in the process of destructive creation.’

[Project Gutenberg, an on-line eBook, url to the page where this passage begins.]

From my Venus manuscript, this piece:

She Who Came Forth

The Embrace. Their children couldn't emerge into the light. He was heaven and she was earth. Uranus and Gaia, his wife, who he loved and refused to separate from. Creation waited. The embrace was tight, intimate, sensual, blissful, deeply in each other, unending. Cronus, his son, time, cruel time, cut off his genitals and threw them into the sea. Heaven and Earth separated. Out of the foam, Aphrodite was born. Love.

Aphrodite, who she was to the Ancient Greeks, though she was older than that, and linked to Ishtar-Astarte, and probably brought to the Greek islands by Phoenician sailors, Aphrodite, who later became Venus to the Ancient Romans, is one of the world's oldest divinities.

She was born from an act that separated Heaven and Earth. An ancient divinity present at the beginning of time. She Who Came Forth at the birth of the world.

Or, this is Hesiod's version in his Theogony. Aphrodite represents pure and spiritual love. From her foamy birth the Three Graces received her and wrapped her in rich garments and decorated her with gold ornaments.

The Goddess of Love.

Aphrodite Urania, or Celestial Aphrodite.

The Venus Botticelli saw, painted, understood.

And now I understand from Lawrence that her birth from the sea-foam, the sea-sperm of her castrated father, is not just the miraculous birth of love in the world, of poetry, but of death in the world, of dissolution, loss.

Venus' creation out of destruction marks her. For there is also Venus Pandemos, who, in mythology, is born of Zeus and Dione. She is associated, not with celestial love, like Venus Urania, but with the body; Venus Pandemos is the common goddess of the people. A goddess of sensuality, of lust. And hence of death, dissolution.

Once again, I find I am laying the groundwork for writing, for continuing with the suite of poems I began a few years ago, without actually writing. Yet this research is of enormous help to me, never-the-less.

And besides, you get to read a few quotes from Lawrence's Women in Love, which may inspire you to download the audiobook and listen, or the pdf and read it.