Observing the Observer

Observing, naming, creating stories gives reality to our perceptions of the universe, which is creating itself for us. Observing the world causes it to shape itself into a reality for us.

In the current issue of The American Scholar, Robert Lanza, a proponent of Biocentrism, which builds on quantum physics, writes, "the laws of the world were somehow created to produce the observer....the observer in a significant sense creates reality and not the other way around."

Hmnnn.


If subatomic particles are "watched" traveling through a barrier (in the famous experiment, a box with two holes), they behave like tiny particles, and go through one hole or the other.

If they're "not watched" they pass through both holes, like waves.

But no-one sees this.


Quantum waves are never observed, only inferred from the behaviour of unobserved particles.

Quantum waves are waves of probability, statistical predictions, not material waves, hence nothing but a likely outcome. Outside of an idea, the wave is not there, it's nothing.

Since it's not observed, can't ever be observed, it's not "real."


Nor does the particle have any definite existence, until we observe it.

It gets worse. Quantum waves merely define the potential location a particle can occupy.

But it's all probability!

It isn't an event or a phenomenon, but a description of a likely event.


Dear reader, my golden muse, I shalln't take this anywhere at the moment. Only let me ask, rather than 'how are you?' and 'what's going on?', what's in your quantum fields these days? ::grins:: Tell me about your entanglements over virtual tea!

Krishna was a Butter Thief

Logic is tiresome, like madness. The brown suede cover of my pocket calendar, the one in which I write, was the back of a cow once. Tanned, dyed, stretched. I will not make a metaphor out of this. It was the book that I bought when I promised to jot notes, any notes, regularly. Pencil swatting words on the fly. Discreetly. Grab at slips of thoughts before they slip away. It's the layer below the layer. A veiny map of words pulsing with blood. A cow's shroud, but see, there I go. The skin of a cow covers my book. The skin that was composed from soft grasses that were nibbled and mulched through four stomachs until the ingredients could be usefully used. To make skin cells. Dermatitis of words. Scribbled suede.

It is the hair that seems wrapped on a bone, that sticks out at jagged angles, that I like best. She pushes the mail cart like a hospital bed. Back and forth, three times a day, every day. Slow, cow steps. Bovine mail delivery. I must get cows off the mind. Really, as I sit at the desk looking for something else to fix my attention on, the telephone cord, wrapped in that circular pattern, is interesting. How do you press rubber wrapped around a line into that shape?

Black and white spots today, a vest. Soft fur, brush it. Which is a lie, but it fits with the metaphor I refuse to make. Gibberish. Someone has gone out the door, someone will enter it, and I must watch all the time in case anyone has lost their pass or needs access, like a visitor, or a courier. My fingers race over the keys until they sound like a clickety cart. It's Friday and almost everyone is gone. I shift my eyes back and forth, checking my environment, people walking by. Am I seeing myself? What do I look like? How many people do you have to see before they blur? Into cows in fields bovinely chewing cud, walking bags of internal organs pulsing. We're walking herds. It must be environmental sterility that's making me this way. I cannot discount the effect of where I am. I'm not sure where these cowslips of thought are coming from. Inside the clover of my hair.

When I was a cow I had no time to give milk. All my attention was on my hooves. And then I ate grass until the cows came home. It was very good, if I recall. The gum that I chew is green. It's St. Patrick's Day. Do cows mind snakes? Cows don't get agitated often. I'm not talking about bulls. Mama cows. The ones mooing on the hill. Everyday I eat a fresh baby spinach salad that I make myself. With thinly sliced onions and fresh mushrooms, and liberally sprinkled with salted sunflower seeds, flax seeds, slivered almonds, chopped walnuts, and perhaps cheese cubes. Milk squeezed into solids and dried. Feta cheese salad dressing thrown and tossed until all the baby spinach leaves are coated in oil and dark green. Then I chew, slowly, while all my stomachs digest. They tell me that eating green leafy vegetables with an oil and vinegar dressing is good for us. It keeps us our minds agile.

Really, my hooves are the most interesting part of my anatomy. Everywhere I've been is remembered in them. Look at the indents. See the continents. It's time to move up the hill. I'm being rounded. Milked.

The day illusions fell

This prose poem is dedicated to that magnifique intellectual and poet par excellence, John Walter. Some of the lines in this piece came from a comment I left at his moving poem, Nepenthe. It's also dedicated to my close confidant, Kaj, who received this prose poem as a voice mail message when he didn't answer his Treo, and for which I was generously thanked. Thank you, such beautiful men...
And to Sky, whose photographs and writing of the flowers in her garden inspired the imagery of the last paragraph, so sumptuous they ebulliently began blossoming over here.

encrypted poem

Early March 2007, Toronto

Oh, those years on the earth...

It's my birthday, the double high-five. Nothing special, but I did buy a silk dress which I am wearing at work. Perhaps I'll try to compose some images and see what might emerge from them. It's a difficult day for me, began at 5:15am with sadness, but I'm being brave... and trying to make it like any other day, ignoring the undercurrents, their deep swelling. It's not the age - I celebrate that, seeing myself as only half way through. But, oh, losses, family, really my Dad, such a long time ago now, the ways in which one is honoured, cherished, treasured and loved. Being born was the best and worst thing that ever happened to me, and can I say that after all these years? Does anyone understand this? It's not an easy day. Tomorrow I will probably go to a performance in celebration of International Women's Day with some women friends and celebrate quietly then. Oh, should I post this?

I'll update this as I write it. Please forgive how blatantly emotional.

I woke early, tears in the darkness.

Ironing the black silk dress with cream polka dots like full moons, a few ruffles over the bodice. It ties at the waist. Underneath a silky black chemise with a thick hem of lace that falls below. Since it is Winter, and cold, a wool shirt, the weave, a light-weight worsted, slightly stretchy, in black. An aquamarine pendant surrounded in diamonds, a birthday gift, the last one, from my father before he died.

I remember him on this day, the day he celebrated me, more than I do on the day that commemorated his birth.

The day moves into its heaving. Why can't it disappear into an ordinary day? By evening grief wears itself into memory again.

There are beautiful wishes from friends, and later perhaps my mother, and perhaps my brothers will call, my son certainly will. Only my Dad cared about birthdays, and not his, he wanted no special attention. None of us care that much about birthdays. Only why the slide into grief, the remembrances. As the years have gone on, it's gotten worse, too, missing someone who died 23 years ago now. To acknowledge it as a day of grief? How very odd indeed. Therefore I want to hide the truth of what day it is. You understand.

The day of life, remembering death. Mourning amidst quiet celebration of the day one embarked on life, commemorating the day of emergence, the rhythm of the passing years.

Later now, and the evening mellowed... sitting with my daughter while she does homework, working through things with our banter, the light on the table glistening, her hair, her high cheek bones, enjoying her beauty, sparkle, and one of those soul-baring talks with my brother while she walked the dog, and talking for nearly an hour with my son by phone, so gentle, so wonderful, these simple pleasures, such blessings. In the end, I am a family woman.

Fragments of Images

Friday March 2, 2007

encrypted first draft of poems

Template for the Random Accelerator

encrypted first draft of a prose poem

Mountain of Seeds

Dug into a remote mountain near the North Pole, a seed vault. One hundred and twenty meters (364 ft) inside a mountain on Spitsbergen, one of the islands of Svalbard. Insurance for the future. The Norwegian government is spending $5 million to house 3 million seeds. A passageway, an inner chamber constructed. Doors locking the tunnel, the vault. Seeing a future of severe climate change, devastation. Or our favourite grains bred out. Permafrost will refrigerate if the cooling system fails. Once it's built and filled with the chosen seeds, it will be checked yearly. There are seed banks around the world- one in the Philippines destroyed by a typhoon. Even if the Arctic melts, horrors of global warming under the depleting ozone layers, models of the mountains of Svalbard predict safety.

Surely we will forget. One year the person who is to check will be sick, or their child will be dying, or there will be a war, or they will be too old and tired to remember to pass the combination on. Or maybe a deliberate withholding. Centuries will pass. One day a mountaineer will discover the doorway to the passage to the vault under the overgrowth and moss of the mountain. Or perhaps it will be a sloping hill by then. And just as ancient Egyptian wheat and barley seeds have been discovered in pyramids, these 3000 years later, so will what we plant our fields with.

Long tunnel into the mountain, stocked, labelled, locked, air tight insurance against the holocausts or negligence of the future. An agricultural Noah's arc. This scrotum, this ovary, this seedpod. Cold, northerly mountain of seeds.

Memes...

As I write in my notebook, I look over at candies lined in large canisters as a rainbow of dyed sugar across the wall at the "...Sweet~Factory." Where, later, I will buy chocolates, after sipping a bowl of Miso, a perfectly flavoured broth of nourishment, in the empty Japanese restaurant that is arranged like a cafe on the red granite floor of the underground concourse. It is quiet here, where I come to write, to take a break from the tedium of the job upstairs, the repetition of information which I transfer meme-like from Word file to Excel chart.

On Dawkins concept of Memes: "structured units of knowledge that are able, more or less, to reproduce themselves by making copies of themselves from one mind to another." Marvin Minsky.

A system of ideas can evolve by itself through structured units of knowledge that are able to reproduce themselves by making copies from one mind to the next, without biological change. Without life, or death. Simply being carried in neuronal synapses, from reading, or hearing, or seeing, words or numbers or concepts. Carried on. Through life-bearing organisms, and in texts that we create, documents and spreadsheets.

Like the economic system, but isn't that too big to grapple with? Let me, instead, grumble about how much senseless information is passed on through replication. Information that gives us a demographic, but doesn't impart the bloodbeat?

Where 'being on the edge,' or at the core of a 'denuded' life, a naked life, counts. Having wrestled free of a quarter of a million dollars of debt, most of which wasn't my doing, I live without luxury, accoutrements of ease. I owe nothing and I have nothing. My life at zero. Zero is the place to be. Zero-consciousness: death-consciousness. No debt, nothing to be paid off in the future. In the Bergsonian eternal present, never mind time: financially. My karma is clean. I am free of baggage from the past and encumbrances in the future.

In the movie, Children of Men, the future is presented as an impossibility. Capitalism depends on 'borrowing against the future,' and debt is contingent on future payment. What Children of Men presents is the alternative of no future. The spectre of a species coming to the end of its line. In the film the women of the world are infertile. The 'other,' is blamed: racism is heightened, mass deportations are ongoing. Society becomes totalitarian. The system crashes. Memes flounder trying to reproduce the world through their reproductions of it. Nothing works. The youngest child in the world, an 18 year old, dies, and the world mourns through global networks of news. But there is hope, a Black Madonna in their midst. White roses should line her sacred path instead of the blood of constant murder.

The mystery, protect it, honour. Mystery. Profundity. Fear and trembling. Beauty. The sublime.

Feel it. Live as an unsheathed nerve. A strange image in this underground vault of stores and eateries lined with large tiles of polished granite. Open, vulnerable, sensitive to the essence of the beating pulse. And to write from the real, and not sugar-coat, or pretend, but to feel all life's modalities and tonalities, from the dark and confusing and heavy, to plaintive mourning, to joy and ecstasy and bliss, to communion. Love, every breath. What I like are suspended chords, what Joni Mitchell calls, 'chords of enquiry. They're unresolved.' Then the composition becomes harmonically complex. Then it's possible to hear a full range, including what throbs below the cacophonous surface.

She looks out beneath long and lustrous eyelashes, coated with deep brown mascara, under a perfectly drawn line of dark liquid eyeliner. Courbet-brown hair, elegantly pulled back; lipstick glossy on her lips; nails a deep red; her earlobes and neck and wrists and fingers rung with fine gold. She's from North Africa, perhaps of Middle-Eastern and East Indian lineage. Sleek oiled beauty, an older woman, short, soft, rounded. For her I transfer information from charts to lists. Charts with boxes of names, and numbers, and positions in departments, who's who, staff, or contract, and where. Hierarchies of power replicated department by department. Updating what will be obsolete in a few weeks because people move in the bank, changing offices, positions, and her charts keep up with the changes so that everyone can reach everyone else by phone or email or mail. We need to be in our places, even if we're constantly changing places. Across sound-proofing office dividers, floors that are accessed by different blocks of elevators inaccessible to each other, around numbers spilling out of every computer screen in the whole complex of corporate office buildings. Mergers, take-overs, credit departments, marketing, delinquent accounts. Increase on investments. On the take. On the go. The bodies who make up the organization in the lists. Under those dark, swept eyelashes the lists will be reviewed, corrected with up-to-date information, and fed back into the system. Women like me come and go; we rarely speak of Michelangelo. The bank needs to keep track of itself.

Banks are the circulatory system. If the stock exchange, investment firms and investment wings of banks are the dark beating heart of the global financial empire, banks are its blood. Taking capitalism to every corner of the globe, every tiny capillary. Money in, sending it back out, or using it for loans or investments. Lending it; making money through interest payments. The bank, an aorta. Upstairs under the stories-high glass roof of skylights, a semi-circle of marble counters that the bank tellers stand at counting money. Transactions. In, and out. Money circulating, sloshing around the world.

My mind slowed into thickness and I left, and went to the Japanese restaurant and ordered Miso soup and wrote this while looking at the candies, like sweet tower turrets, a wall of dyed designer sugar laid out like a rainbow. When I go over to buy chocolate, I discover the turrets are soft plastic tubes created to 'look like' a candy store, and the candies are photographs printed on posters wrapped inside the clear canisters.

Falling into Light...

encrypted first draft of a prose poem

On the Monsieur posts...

My Monsieur posts rarely garner comments; it's as if they're too intimate, or perhaps somehow inaccessible. Yet surely we all live on those strange borders between each other. My present relationship is enabling me to explore that edge of uncertainty. I don't believe even in a 20 or 50 year marriage it's ever gone, it might get buried under habit, in patterned thoughts about each other, in the expectations familiarity breeds. And when he or she suddenly has an affair, or becomes ill, or dies, the constructed life falls apart, for that is all it ever was, and the very contingency of our existence becomes exposed again. I would like to remain in that place of openness to the fragility of our relationships. To remain sensitive. We are always disappearing away from each other, even in our most stable, long term relationships. While we know death is inevitable, what we forget is its unpredictability. Perhaps people don't comment on those posts because it brings the unpredictability too close, and it's uncomfortable. We, who want security. Knowingness. We want to control our lives, our connections to those we love, the way it works out for us. Only what is it that life keeps throwing not-sameness, difference, at us, unpredictability, struggle, unknowingness... how can we accept uncertainty into the slipstream of our thoughts, actions, the meaning of our days? This is what the Monsieur posts explore...

Burning Light

encrypted prose poem

Clarice Lispector, The Apple in the Dark, trans Gregory Rabassa (London: Virago, 1967), p.237-8.

Light-Producing Organs

encrypted prose poem

Dream...

Not much going on muse-wise lately. But still enjoying my revealing dreams... this has much resonance with where I'm currently working. And makes me wonder...

I am working in an elevator as a receptionist for a large bank. There are three of us at a long desk. As the elevator goes up and down, the building shakes. The doors never seem to open, though.

On break I have to go to another building and take its elevator down.

Instead of a normal concourse level, I find a Third World-type mall that is empty. It's dark, and there are only a few lights. I walk around to the other side of the mall where there are fields that I can only see as far as the lights of the mall reveal. It could be a Caribbean Island. In the fields men are walking towards me. Dark-skinned men. They are walking like zombies.

I realize that, though I am an older woman, the place is deserted and I am alone, and I get scared. So I run back around the mall, and take the elevator up and go back to my job as a receptionist in the closed elevator in the building that is so high it shakes in the wind.

I am unnerved by what happened and want to leave, but a woman who's in charge looks at my chart and says, 'No, you can't go, you have to finish your hours...'

Dreams...

A crescent moon is in the back of my throat, not white, from reflected sunlight, but the dark side of the moon, what is never seen, and it doesn't hurt, but my throat feels thick and thirsty and so I wake up and sip some water.

The feeling of a crescent moon in the back of my throat persists, even now weeks later I still feel it, magical, mystical.
...
I dreamt I left my natural Jaipur Oriental Musk perfume oil in its small round red box at Wealth Management.

Meaning, I must go back to the job, since I'd never be without my bliss-enhancing musk perfume oil.
...
It was 4am and the phone rang a hesitant half-ring, but I must have been dreaming.

Some revelatory phone conversations with different people in different situations happened over the next two days, however. Where there was deception, truth emerged. I'm still shaken. Even dancing this morning, I found myself crying, something that has happened to many others but never to me in 10 years of this particular dance practice. What can I say?
...
Early in the morning I am sitting at a "treats" cafe in the basement Food Court in a downtown corporate office building ~like the one I work in~ and my man friend walks by with a dark-haired woman in a white pantsuit. She's quite ghost-like. He looks strong, energetic, full of the rush of 'going somewhere.' I have sought to dream about our connection and see some metal holders nearby, shaped similarly to the "treats" logo, they remind me of ones used in hanging file folders. The dream ends with my gazing at similar metal dividers that he has installed on the alley side of the gate to the house where I live in an apartment.

I thoroughly enjoyed sending the person-in-this-dream an email detailing all the ways I could enjoy being a "treat," and then discovered how closely the dream represented a real life situation about which I had known nothing. Dreams can give you a 'play-by-play' on a relationship, but be forewarned: there can be radical and unexpected shifts, in the dreaming images, in life. Always be prepared...
_____
p.s. No, I haven't had a sore throat in years; and no, my man friend is not involved with another woman, at least not in any conventional sense.

Browsings...

Syntax, structured coherencies, letting go to enter the streams-of-consciousness writing. But see how chromosomes are packaged. Tighter than any sonnet. We are form, and bound to form. Still, to untrain my mind, I allow emergences. We each experience the quality of the world differently, the qualia, but there are points, nodes, of happenings, in the world, in the event continuum, around which I gather my thoughts as I write this.

Browsing the news, I find a skeleton of pins, bars and a plate around Barbaro's leg, which is already held by a matrix of screws. The abscess, pummel of pus. Prize racehorse with a splintered leg. Laminitis. Later in the day, Barbaro is put down.

I'm reading Jean-Luc Nancy: "Isn't life always an escape from death? And this escape from death - which at the same time doesn't cease moving towards death, of course - which is it if not life itself..." "...it survives, that is, it is always on the escape, skimming non-existence, contingent..."

But my writing is full of grafts! Inserted into the landscape of soil-drenched words like the traces of a village found near Stonehenge.

And then this: "everything has the mark of its own disappearance." This phrasing, these words, their potential meaning, remain with me. I hover over them for a long time, writing them into my notebook, tracing them with my fingertips. Nancy says death is inevitable, we know that, it's just that when is unpredictable. Unless with drugs, like Barbaro, or euthanasia. Is the unpredictability of our disappearance marked on us?
The coleslaw is pale green and crunchy, tiny slivers of cabbage in a piquant dressing; I crave it when I see it. English cucumbers sliced on a diagonal, green and yellow wax beans, chickpeas, tiny diced red peppers, cherry tomatoes, a typically creamy potato salad, pickled sliced beets, and dressing, who knows what, perhaps a version of Italian. This, my small lunch from a salad buffet.

I am deep in an office tower of the corporate world. Outside of nature, here where death is remote, where it's dark beating wings are hidden. What's beating inside my head is monotony. Flourescent lights. A world in which there are no bodily fluids, no bodies with organs. A world of sheer surfaces, billboard women, men divided into one of two ranks: managerial or service. Or am I unfair?

Some scientists in Britain created a mechanical stomach that partially emulates the complexity of the chemical and muscular processes of digestion. It is of plastic and metal strong enough to hold the corrosive gut acids and enzymes. The scientists deliver foods to the mechanical stomach that even contracts just like a real one, and can even vomit, and watch the bile begin to dissolve everything into its constituents. The stomach isn't like a real one, which is beyond our ability to reproduce fully. Learning how our digestive systems work, especially the absorption of nutrients is the point of this digesting machine. Testing foods, antacids, even how poisons get absorbed, fascinating.

Back at the desk where I sit it's not as if I have anything important to do; they just need me here. Anyone. Someone who's good at the tasks. They don't even mind my writing, or me in the act of. Digesting.

Glint of the Green Cat's Eye

Embroidered flowers, relation to real-world flowers undetermined, perhaps fuchsia daisies and tawny buttercups and peach poinsettias. Thought is vision-based. It transforms through the insula, physical signals from the body, sensations into feelings. Neurocircuitry. I am a wired world. The sensitivity of the central nervous system transforms the world out there into the one in here. I perceive strokes of coloured yarn as flowers with indistinct reference to actual flowers dancing on hillsides of brown earth.

Head-strong, body-wise.

Information comes in so many ways.

Should I tell a story? That's a different shaping of events. Pick a narrative, a point of view. Paint representation in words. Describe a mutually-agreed upon approach to a scene.

On my finger is a thick silver ring set with a black stone in which there is a green cat's eye.

Carvings on a snake-shaped rock, arrow-heads 70,000 years old lying nearby, in a cave hidden in the "Mountain of the Gods" in Botswana. Offerings to spirit.

Anatomically modern humans emerged from East Africa 120,000 years ago. Protozoa on the edge of the expanse. Passing the baton of chromosomes from generation to generation, sacred bundle.

The rock snake is 6 feet long with a gash that is mouth-like. It's carved notches appear to ripple in the light that flickers in the cave, making it undulate, alive.

Can I move from the mystery of the mountain cave to the one of the night sky of stars without connectives? The green cat's eye glints its visions.

It's what we can't see that negotiates us.

About the size of a small asteroid, all the dark energy in the universe. It's absolutely consistent, too, and doesn't clump or coagulate anywhere. Unimpeded surface, if you can imagine that. And it's shaping everything, not only how far we are moving from each other, but perhaps the structure of the evolution of the universe itself.

There is dark energy between you and me.

Oh, laugh. There isn't anywhere it doesn't penetrate. It's about the expansion rate. Be a magnet and it'll slow down. What we need to exert on each other are gravitational pulls.

The thread in the crudely embroidered flower on my sweater pulls. Pulls out, winding undone. A red lace of snake beneath my fingers. Or perhaps we are merely notches in the undulating cosmic serpent that is always shedding its skin, leaving skeins and webs of matter amidst the empty spaces.

One day I'll take you through a time sequence, and you'll understand the expansion and the gravitational fields, and the forces existing on nothing. To grow we have to push our gravity into the expanding fields of dark energy. That way we don't disperse.

Consciousness doesn't actually have an "I." That's a narratorial strategy we fabricate afterwards. Trouble is, there's no-one in charge, only neurolinguistic circuitries, insulas sparking feelings, a lightning energy of consciousness constantly recreating itself as we interpret ourselves in this vast place of fleeting planets and stars and galaxies, where no-one has the final word.

Flames of Insight Curling on the Edges of the Burning Paper

You create this writing. Yes, you do. I write the words, their coherencies dancing to my inner rhythms, but you create the meaning that the words impart. You, the reader, control my writing. Okay, that is going a little far, but I do write for your reading. When you completely miss the point of what I wrote I think it's me, not you. I wasn't clear enough; it's not that you have problems with comprehension, though in my darker moments I will admit I've thought this.

There are different groups of readers too. Who comprehend differently from each other. Offering your writing to different groups can be an interesting experience. But I won't get into that. Oh, and whoever leaves the first comment often defines how that piece will be interpreted and responded to. I often make it a point not to read the other comments until I've commented. I want a pure connection with the writing that doesn't need to line up with the 'group-think' because it's sure of itself. I personally like independently thought-out comments. On the other hand, when discussions get going, that's great too.

The comments often enable the next piece of writing. We are audiences, then, who shape each other's writing. It's reader-response carried to a newly imagined level, this critical approach to literature, but greatly speeded up in the blogosphere. The process of reception and meaning-making that enables the writing to live beyond the page it is written on.

Blossom

Should a flower not open to the sun because there is nightfall?

Should a flower, soft, delicate, trusting, not blossom magnificently, brilliant unfurling full petals, splashing perfume, colour to the world, inviting pollination, growing rich seeds for the future, pods full of grace, because the sun is swallowed up by darkness?

Outside, looking in.

Metaphors aren't arising. Something resists them. It's a constructed world that perhaps is a metaphor for its own processes. Of corporate wealth built on bodies of work. Of living off the crème of interest payments. Capitalism is "borrowing from the future."¹ These wide berths of marble pillars and floors and tabletops, of huge glass chandeliers and sophisticated stores, of pin stripe people, confident but wary, built on profits from debt payments. What enables one to have what one can't afford, now. Purchases contingent on future payments that gouge the paychecks of the present. A future that barely exists, or does as a distant phantom. All around me at the Food Court where I sip coffee and write in my notebook, not the upper echelons of power but office staff. Thin plastic credit cards already overloaded, mortgages, car payments. And a disjuncture in the metaphors of financial power that the structures are a concretization of. Profits from the excesses of the moneylenders practices, this glimmering, gleaming Mecca of wealth. What if we chose to live within our means - would corporate complexes of banks like those surrounding me vanish into the mirages they are?
_________________________________
¹ Cited at I Cite:

Zizek writes: "Lacan's notion of the debt that pertains to the very notion of the symbolic order is strictly homologous to this capitalist debt: sense as such is never 'proper'; it is always advanced, 'borrowed from the future'; it lives on the account of the virtual future sense."

Relation Of

Monsieur, you can't be possessed. Any woman who would try to possess you doesn't understand you.

One can only come into a relation of love with you.

How did...

How did you write that poem? How did you paint that painting? How did you find that friend? How did you know to be in that place at that particular time? How did you know how to escape that situation or choose that deal?

Unrepeatable and beyond explanation. Nor can you properly impart the sense of wonder you felt at what happened.

The series of apparently random coincidences that occurred to get you from point A to C were actually specific. A specific sequence. Intuition got you there.

It's a trustworthy navigator.

But requires 'letting go.'

In this way, it is akin to religious belief.

Living your prayer; living your wishes.

Putting aside your tiny maps and trusting that you know the way.

Let go. And find what you are looking for.

'Self-Portrait in Bathroom Mirror' Shots

Bought a new sweater today, have a new job, may be moving into a new apartment, a whole lot of new things, I guess. Not great photos, but what the heck...

Hesitancy

What position doesn't fluctuate? If the real is what returns to itself, can I? How can I stop the constant shifting, my heart, my muse?

Monsieur, I cannot flow in one direction. Despite effort, a contradictoriness. Potent feelings flow in opposite directions, collide, aren't neat, contained, tidy or even explicable. While I would like to not be confused, unsure, and have only my own fears to battle, I am a storm of paradoxes.

Always departing, never arriving.

Can writing write this impossibility? Such honour of the heart.

I curve and sway with your rhythms in a dance of intimacy. We are a single flower, padma lotus, spectral whiteness of prisms, following an inner light, its lightning, even as the moon's tides surge in us.

It happened suddenly, in the quietness of the moment.

Afterwards, enwrapped, arms of peace, and a peace that lasts for many days. And then the breaking, chaos swirls over.

There is a way through. A way through the resisting what we are approaching, pulling away, succumbing, falling back. Even with the red and white blossoms that perhaps notice us or don't, roses of love with baby's breath in the pale blue art deco vase on the table beside the nightlight. Even in the cramped place with roots behind the walls that we can't see, on the soft pale cream sheets. In reciprocity.

Jazz Riff, or an Autopoiesis

No

intervals.

It’s not what

they say-

no gaps.

Continuous

from the

first

moment.

Only

different

approaches.

I sway back

and forth

like a

stripped

mast

in high gale.

After,

it doesn’t

stop.

I am

speechless;

This

whirling

back,

intoxicated

to find

the illusion

I was

chasing.¹

Photo from the Brazilian designer, Sandra Machado's Collection, Noiva.

Vestido Corset em organdi, renda e cetim de seda
Design Sandra Machado
Foto Isabela Carrari
Modelo: Carolina de Siqueira Meneses

(used with permission)

____

Autopoiesis: auto(self)creation, "organized states that remain stable for long periods of time despite matter and energy continually flowing through them." Wikipedia

¹ The last stanza references Clarice Lispector's, The Apple in the Dark (Virago, 1985, trans. Gregory Rabassa), "as if he had caught up to an illusion he had been chasing all his life and had touched it in the midst of his own intoxication" (p.44).

Would you trust this woman...?

My boyfriend is away. Did I say I had a boyfriend? How very unusual for me to admit to such a thing! I never have 'boyfriends,' I only have connections that may or may not be called relationships, and yet towards whom I remain utterly faithful until he abandons me. Or I him. It always happens. And things somehow continue to continue after a respite too. I don't think I live in a world of normal intimate relationships, whatever those may be. To say, I have a 'boyfriend,' balks on my tongue. It feels like ownership. Like settling into someone else's definition. Like something people can make judgments about. Like an incredibly weird sort of dalliance of sex and fun with a little angst thrown in that is so strange that I'd almost rather not. So I make mysterious references to whatever might or might not be going on in my life at any given time. Men I love, and who love me. Yes, always that. Honoured. Of course. Treated with respect, kindness, generosity. Always. But never with full openness. There are secrets. Things that are hidden. Other relationships, other heartbreaks behind the facade of our dalliance. There is a hint that we might possibly make it to some semblance of a kind of connection I might mention to my children to warn them. I never bring my men home, though. Even with delicious sensualities, things usually never get that far. Though I never lose them either. We somehow all continue on together, closer in some ways, more tenuous in others. We never fully lose touch. Mostly it all exists in some fantasy arena, and afterall I do have a penchant for brilliant, independent, single men. The love life of a middle-aged creative woman is far more complex than it looks on the surface.


________________
Class this under humour. Really I am only talking about a very few men spread over years... :giggles:

Memory

Memory is a coordinating system. When you start losing your memory, you lose the coordinates of your mapping system, the one inside your mind that helps you negotiate all the terrains from the past to the present to the expectancies of the future. A coordinating system that is multi-dimensional, composed of inner and outer landscapes. Whose latitudes and longtidues are strands of narratives composed of interpretations of memories. Memory: what repeats itself. If a coordinate is touched, awakens, it opens out that area of the map and all the strands of narratives connected to it. Until it falls apart, senility, dementia, Alzeimer's, stroke, aneurysm, until the memories slip off the narratives like beads tumbling off a broken necklace.

She's lost the narrative of the streets. She can't remember where she lives, or the directions home. She thinks buildings long gone are still there. She can't remember what she said five minutes ago. What was a finely woven grid of electro-chemical impulses is sagging in places, torn, drifting, unable to complete its circuitry. Memory is unravelling and so is identity. But in a fog of forgetfulness that releases her.

_______________
At some point I stopped writing inspirational posts and let the deeper images emerge. My writing continues to deepen, at least I feel as if I'm diving into my undercurrents as I explore difficult terrain without covering it over with glossy patinas. Or perhaps I still do. Who knows? I let the images emerge whole and just polish them a bit in the grammar and in the ways that the metaphors are constructed. This piece is about my mother. It's a very difficult situation.

Communing

Yesterday, a day of inner communing. In dialogue with key people in my life, psychically, spiritually. Does anyone else do this? Talk to people you are not talking to? So many responses flood back!

What I am curious about is the intention - the thought behind the thought, where directions are decided, approaches, withdrawals, what the issues are, what new variables have entered our field of connections.

When I enter into this kind of communing I am amazed at how variable we are, hour to hour we make and unmake our minds on nearly everything. Once I gently plummet and discover the main feelings and intentions, though, all the actions and words make sense.

Knowing someone does this, psyches out others, even if gently and with only the best intention to love, honour, respect, I have some questions. Would you veil yourself if you knew I was plummeting you? Discovering if you truly love life or are staking your belief on what is actually a philosophy of death? Finding out if you are producing your best work or only being frivolous? Asking if you are faithful to what you state belief in or if you participate in guile? Seeking to know whether at heart you are fine or are in trouble?

The day went like this, with its infinitudes of caring about those I love, until I was finally satisfied. My world complete again. Spiritually connected in the flux of it all to those who are closest to me.

(Note: These little pieces are based on diary jottings before bed - I'm inbetween projects at the moment, keeping the creative fires lit.)

To Stay, or To Go, That is the Question

Should I stay, or move on?

This question central in many facets of my life presently. Yet even the new vistas we explore become continuations of the old issues from which we cannot escape. The larger ones, that are like the song we continually sing of our lives. I am always ready to move on; staying becomes a challenge that really is the musical score I dance. Leaving is easy, staying is hard, and knowing this doesn't make it any easier. There is nowhere to go anyhow. All new scenarios become reflections of all the old scenarios until you understand that you cannot escape yourself. If you cannot escape from yourself you might as well relinquish resistance to whatever it is in the present circumstance that you want to leave. Life certainly has its own logic but it is most irrational in its insistence on keeping you on your path of challenges no matter whether you stay or move on!

Portal of the New Year

Touch

In the steam, you disappear. Monsieur, I feel your presence only by knowing. You sit before me until you vanish; hot clouds dissolve us into vapour. Your strong sensuality, like Zeus, yet you become a phantom. Until I am alone. When the hot breath of air presses in on me your hands rest on mine, our knees touch. Two figures of naked skin streaming as the steam subsides. It was in the room you built, this womb of steam from which we emerge wet and hot into the cold air of the welcoming night.

Rapture

How deeply
the unfolding
through the water
of the blessings of
our bodies of rapture.

We are clothed in the streaming truth of
the night sky, its melting snow.

An offering
to fire and transparency.

In the hot springs as the clouds uncover
the full moon of the New Year
you plunge into me
while I dance in the water,
surging, volcanic.

Waves of heat
absorb us

Into an immensity that has no name.

In the creative presence of sensuality
our union effaces the conditions of union.

The essence of passionate love
is mystical union.

We become
a writing of love.

Transfigured.

Rupture

Do we imagine the depths of each other
differently?

Were we Shiva and Shakti dancing?
Our own Lucía Y El Sexo
under the moon in the water?
You kiss my breasts as I float
before you, I massage your floating
rapture,
and how many times do we
undulate?
How continuously
do we hum ecstasy
in the silence of the Winter's night?
Your final surge
rising, fertile, flowing
light, filling the lucid
darkness,
honey of
delirium.

We offer each other such
pleasure.

Afterwards, the next day,
driving me home, you said
you wanted to be clear,
that you love me
but weren't in love
the magic of transformation
absent.

You want your life to change,
that's what love does.

Your New Age
speaking
cliches
clashed
with your
strong loving
and a year later
I received a letter
from your other lover
about your nights with her
filling the hours
around ours, as well as
the others you had
slipped into bed with.

It was never
a question of love.

Portal of Breath

There are words I must speak, though surely never will. You call me across the expanse. I kiss your closed eyelids. I lie over you softly, breathing with you. With each wave of breath, like sea foam, I cover you with a silent resounding mantra, I love you. Even while you call me to you, you do not hear the rippling of my heart. It is when you are asleep and I lie with you that I hear the fullness of the silence between your breaths. You are the full intoxicating sea-garden in repose and I am calmly delirious in the scent of the night. In the morning you have forgotten everything; even the savouring. How do we "translate the silence of the real encounter between the two of us?"¹

Relation of

Monsieur, you can't be possessed.

One can only come into a relation of openess with you.

You leave, and yet always return. What you dismiss, you affirm.
Yesterday was no; today is yes. The horizon floods like continuous
Kabbalistic light.

______
¹Clarice Lispector, The Stream of Life, trans. by Elizabeth Lowe and Earl Fitz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p.43.
_____
for Kaj Devai, from the manuscript, EnTrapped WOR|l|DS, 2006, in which he is listed as a reader of this book in my Google Docs, and in 2007 he accessed and printed on his printer and read apparently a few times, and then had me read this poem to him over the phone in 2008, and agreed that in this writing I should tell the truth.

Happy New Year's 2007

After dancing for hours to the beat of 30 or 40 ecstatic drummers on African drums, walking home past groups of revellers and noisy happy nightclubs, near dawn, I took this to celebrate the New Year with you...

During this festive time of the birth of the light, of the New Year, wishing you pure magic and joy, prosperity and success.

That the dance of impermanence flows with agility, grace, openess, love.