How do we think.

Do we know how to think? That's not as crazy a question as it seems. It started this morning with my wondering why we become entrapped in stories that we take to be reality. Like the Bible, or Koran, or the Tao te Ching, or the Mahabharata. These books are holy books, yes, and at the core of their culture's belief systems, but they are only stories. Stories that tell us how about the meaning of the world, how to act in it, and how to think. Because our thoughts are where we are most puzzled. The rest is easy, eating, sleeping, making love, working. Yet our thoughts affect our day-to-day reality and shape who we are and what we do. They are crucially important to our self-identities. Our thoughts compose us and compose our view of the world around us. But the ability to do this is a relatively new creation, entirely dependent on a 2mm layer on top of the cerebral hemispheres, the neopallium (Latin for "new mantle"), or neocortext as it is more commonly called, only about 200 million years old. This tiny layer, which is wrinkled into deep grooves in humans, thus packing in the neouronal columns, composed of some 10 billion neurons, is responsible for "sensory perception, generation of motor commands, spatial reasoning, and in humans, language and conscious thought."

It is the language and conscious thought part that I am musing on. It seems to me that our thoughts are a giddy, wild place, composed of giddy, wild language bits, and that, to tame the inner riots, we create stories that tell us how to think. Because we don't know on our own. We are all busy searching for 'states of consciousness' that will enable us to exist peacefully with the rampant energies of the synaptic connections in our modern brains. Afterall, we're not just thinkers, but conscious of our thinking. And being 'self-conscious' is one of the most difficult states to be in.

Is that why we believe the powerful stories of our culture? Why we take them to be accurate versions of the truth? Because it settles our thoughts, having a specific set of ideas to work with, a certain way to think?

This post is only about some questions I had preparing an omlette for my son, who is visiting for a few days.

Did the omellete curve and bellow like a neopallium? I can't say, but perhaps.

Falling... a story about nothing.

Usually denying myself food and drink after 6pm because I don't sleep well and if I wake to go to the bathroom in the night, I'm awake for hours. Do I remember that my blood pressure is on the low side, and plummets if I'm dehydrated or hungry? Which I am every morning as I rise, make coffee, let our dog out, wake my daughter.

Walking into her darkened room in my long dressing gown, I step on a winter boot, the hem of my dressing gown catching under my foot as it slides, caught on the mid-calf length faux sheepskin. The bog of materials pivots me. I can't rebalance myself, my foot trapped by the gown and the boot, neither relinquishing their hold. I'm lightheaded anyway. I fall straight back like an ironing board.

I try to bend in mid-air, to allow my rump to take what's coming, but can't manoever my body. I fall onto soft carpet, inches away from a wooden chair, on the back of my head, which I'm trying to tuck in for protection.

After impact, I roll on my side in a curled position and cry, oh so melodramatic but a way to release the shock of the fall. My daughter, who usually takes half an hour to wake up, leaps out of bed to hug me and help me up. I'm fine, feel no pain, didn't lose consciousness, no concussion.

The headache begins towards bedtime. I'd forgotten about falling but had spent a listless day of little substance feeling grey. Today it is like a fire simmering in my upper back, shoulders, back of my head. There is some minor bruising, that's all...

Canvas of light

Click on the photo to go to flikr to see the slideshow of the photographs my 15 year old daughter took of her 53 year old mother that night, or the sidebar of Rubies in Crystal for a flikr montage of photos ...

Moving across the canvas, shadows. In the lights once I counted five shadows, some short and close, others long and stretching far. Did that mean I existed? How do photons spin around us and collide into the wall leaving a dark imprint of our shape? Are our obscure lives the canvas that catches us? I dance through the hours of my days, sitting, walking, sleeping, eating, talking. Breath is a dance. Displacing the air, sending the light spinning around us, the impulse of our thoughts flinging ideas into being through our bodies. Is a dance. You at the computer screen with your dancing fingers on the keys playing music for me who reads you. A grammar of light flies off into incandescence, shadowing, spotlighting, a flux that captures us, moments burnt into negative space, where it's empty, in the vastness of dark energy between the luminescences. Give me a moment, this pensiveness, before I turn and gaze upon you, love.


(the "you" in all my pieces is always the reader, you, my unbidden, golden muse, without whom I would write nothing.)

How a woman.

(Sat: With Blogger down again what was I to do but tinker with this? The first paragraph slightly revised (sorry to upload it again to those of you with feeds! Like the 9th time?)

Fri: How hilarious!- Blogger's been acting up this evening, giving error messages, refusing to open sites, and now that it's working again I discovered eight copies of this post! And 8 copies have been duly emailed to me!)

She looks in the mirror, pushes her hair back, curves her back slightly, smiles. The nightdress is dropped on the floor as towels are laid close by. She turns on the bath tap, feels the spray, steps in. The warm waterfall falls on her back and neck and shoulders and soaks her hair; flicking open the shampoo that smells like a meadow of alpine flowers, she pours honey-coloured liquid into her cupped palm, rubs it between both hands and sweeps them into her hair bringing a lather. With the tips of her fingers, she rubs her scalp until it tingles. Arcing her head back, the water runs through her hair until it is free of soap, and then she begins again. After the final rinse she squeezes the excess water out, applies a conditioner and gently pulls a wide-toothed comb through as she unentangles it. Then she wets a facecloth and rubs it over a bar of soap until it becomes soapy, and begins massaging her body. She strokes her feet, undersides and tops, up the curve of the calf, around the knees, up her thighs, across her belly. She gently soaps her pubic hair, but never any lower; the vulva is sensitive. With her fingers, never the washcloth, she soaps the crack of her bum. She massages her breasts with the facecloth, under her arms, down each arm, and finally around her neck. Slipping the shower head out of its socket, she rinses her legs, arms, chest, breasts, belly, back, she gently pulls apart her cheeks and rinses her anus, and then holds the nozzle between her legs, letting the water dance off her labia; the water is warm, the droplets enliven her skin, the soap runs into the tub and down the drain. She holds the warm spray against one underarm and then the other, finding the gentle pounding of the water sweetly erotic, and she thinks of the body's erogenous zones. Today she is meeting her lover, and she is preparing herself.

Turning off the water, she opens the shower curtain, reaches for a towel to wrap her hair in, and then the large bath towel and dries herself slowly. She ties the towel around her breasts and hips and steps onto the tiled floor. Wiping the mirror, she sees a vague form in the steamed glass and with a comb parts her hair. She squeezes some conditioner into her palms and rubs it through her wet hair. Later she will put on matching lace panties and a bra, a tight top and jeans, and a small amount of make-up, concentrating most on the mouth, outlining the lips, applying a pencil, then lipstick, then gloss. She thinks of him the whole while. She sprays perfume between her breasts and behind each ear. She can hear him whispering to her.

The heat in her body already growing. She allows it to flame. The sensations warmly spreading through her in expectancy always amaze her. They are generated only by the thought of what is to come, the pleasures in the hours ahead. Sometimes she is so aroused that she has orgasms, little ones, as she walks to meet him. By the time they collide, kiss, fall into each other, undress each other, she is a heaving, sighing, moaning woman who is fully open and comes before he enters her and continues the crescendos with him thrusting deeply into her.

This is how a woman gets ready to meet her lover...

White Fire

Old projects that you didn't finish and feel guilty about? Ah, I know those. Some of them won't let you alone, though. Like White Fire. Blogs are always new, none of us want to read stuff from years past, so I've posted the beginning of this epic prose poem at my website. And I hope, by doing so, that that act triggers me to get back on it. I need to stop looking at it as a massive research project (which it is) and as something tiny and possible (which it is in incremental bits).

White Fire began in 2000. I wrote about 6 pages, which I read on a poetry show on a local radio station. It almost became a performance in 2001 too, with a troupe of a dozen disparate singers and dancers, but that's another story (that I'll obviously have to tell if I get back to the work).

It's an epic prose poem on the history of love in our culture. Ostensibly, that is, we'll see.

It's theme is a discussion on whether 'soul mates' exist. I personally don't believe in 'eternal' soul mates, only that your soul mate is whoever you're in love with, no more than that. But the question of love, ah.......

Mezzotint, Encounters of the Moment

encrypted first draft of a poem

Birth Posters in transit...

After too much ado, Birth Posters finally in transit. If you ordered one, why it could be one of these. Do you like my intense butcher brown paper wrapping and taping? Do you think they'll be stopped by customs, pounced on as porn of the maternal body? Do they look suspiciously smutty? Over-wrapped? I hope they're not opened! Mama ain't gonna be happy if that happens!