The unseeded seed, unflowered flower, is without consequence, easy, undiscovered, resting in the future.
Quiet in the husk, shell, unrooted, unopened. Genius of possibility, profound. Before the strength of the tendril, what opens, reaches, sensitivity, the grounding, earth, nourishment of soil. Or the unfurling of promise into stalks and leaves and fragrant colour of soft petals fertilized by bees, the wind.
In the flowering, my hands beside my face, fronds, follow the sun from dawn to mid-day to dusk, twisting stalk to drink the light. At night the head of petals rests. Or it rains, cup of petals communing.
In the flower, survival of beauty.
In the flowering, nourishing fruit ripening the future.
In this drawing I am trying to find something lost. A perception; a route; a way of understanding. From my book of doodle drawings, where I allow myself more freedom, less restraint. A poesis drawing - word painting.
DaphneDragonSeaWoman, 2009, 8"x11", 21.5cmx28cm, India ink on archival paper. Finished painting here. Click on image for larger size.
What is written down the side:
...
In the myth of the Daphne
with the dragon
seed pod and the
pelts in the
water of the
women swimming
tangle of lace
of trees, fur over
bone, sky of Seine,
jungle of painted
wood carved
into the new Aceh, gleaming
city washed by the
tsunami. Do dragon seeds
give
birth to
dragons
or to
dreams?
...
woman who is
the mast who is the
boat who is the trees
around whom the sky
...
There is a closet in the corner of my living room that has a full bookcase in front of most of it. That bookcase has to be emptied, felt strips attached to the bottom along with appliance wheels if they work, the closet has to be emptied, re-organized, bags of clothes collected for the Diabetes association (which will pick up since I don't have a car), and I've left it long enough for the pile to only grow. Today I determined to tackle 'the corner closet.' Only what I really wanted to do was draw.
Above is my simple morning sketch. Having thrown a tidbit to the wildcreativewoman in me (lol:)), now I shall deal with that corner.
Chthonic goddess of the greening earth. Wrinkled, like tree bark, painted, an exotic glade. Process, the recycling of Nature, life emerging from death. An organic art. The mask's fronds as if growing out of the forest floor in the Spring. Papier-mache, mulch: paper, or leaves. The face as landscape; the face carrying the landscape with it. Flower colours framing her face; the iridescence of insects, sheen of dragonfly. Feathery wings, plumed serpent, vestiges of living vines. A vision of a Nature spirit, Summer Solstice, a Midsummer Night's Dream. Shaman of the forest. Tutelary guide in the rainforest. Jungle of the imagination. Then the Surreality of the sky-blue mask on the greening gold fields of her face: I offer you a masked mask.
Or go to Picasa and see all the photos, and a larger slideshow:
Above, photos documenting the inception and evolving masque, which were posted at Rubies In Crystal as I did them, now collected in a slideshow. There may be more added depending on when and how photos from the Buddha Groove emerge from various cameras that were flashing that Halloween night.
Below, a slideshow documenting the stages of painting the masque:
Or go to Picasa and see all the photos, and a larger slideshow:
With thanks to my longtime friend, Christopher Reibling, painter, writer, violin player, and Bill Brouard, a digital artist who I know through Facebook, for images (Chris's over 20 years ago-a photograph of a papier-mache mask he had made of a green goddess with ribbons; Bill's recent) that helped to inspire the form of this masque. Also hundreds of paintings and statues of Green Tara... who surely formed the impetus for this piece. Along with a dream I had 2 or 3 decades ago of a chthonic earth goddess rising out of the forest floor, out of the plant material of which she is composed... at the time I called her the green garden goddess, but she's here, in this mask.
In June 2011, I danced in the woods wearing this masque, and created a video poem:
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!
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 matessince 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.
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.
