Reading Writhing Letters

When the letters began curling like tiny writhing black snakes on the page,

I lost

the ability to read.

The letters floated somewhere between the paper and my eyes, hovered, hallucinatory, unreadable, and I couldn't catch them or make them form words or sentences through I knew coherency was there, below the

writhing floating

if I could just
make them sit

still.

When it came back, focus, and the words stayed on the page, I read a book a day and didn't stop for 15 years.

I gluttonized on words, gorged.

I pushed myself through tome after tome, hour after hour; I let books open other books; I kept ledgers of copious notes, and dozens of journals.

I read all night. I read with urgency, as if my life depended on it. All of the classics, the 'great' books, 'great' writers, 'great' thinkers. Did I waste my youth reading Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Bacon and Shakespeare?

It's all fleeting.

But when the words stayed still, lying in neat rows on the pages, I raced through them. Who knew how long I had?

Evanescence

It is fleeting, ephemeral, fragile --- beauty,

life.

Silence of the deep sleep, death,

of non-being,

eternity,

the norm.

Ouroboros

Monsieur, you have been absent, I thought you had forgotten me. The spelunker of snakes? It alarms you, this imagination of mine.

All my life I have hallucinated snakes.

Even now, they come out of the shower head, slither down my back, small pythons, Black Mambas, always in stone grey or black. Sometimes I become rigid with fear, the hot hissing water.

Ground myself: concentrate on the tiles, the shower curtain, the soap, the wash cloth. Push out sensations of snakes dropping on my head, slithering down my back. Remnants of memories of watching the poor creatures swinging on sticks in the air until their backbones broke and they went limp. It was a game, in a circle laughing.

Terrors of a memory gone awry, misplacing splices of the past out-of-context in the present: I step onto floors thick with writhing serpents, but they aren't real. This phobia of mine.

Freud's interpretation was very narrow; Jung's was better, except that they don't automatically signify psychic fragmentation if they're not dynamically balanced, as revealed in spontaneously individuated mandalas, symbols of wholeness.

Once I did a long research paper on serpents and the winged kind, dragons, in Western art, and explored many mythologies. From Egyptian cobra worship, to Graeco-Roman Medusas, to the Judeo-Christian myth of the Fall from Eden due to the guiles of the Satanic snake, to all the St. Georges' and other Courtly Love heroes fighting all the dragons who had taken over the land and were demanding fresh virgins, to modern day snake cults and Goddess lore, to the R-Complex, or brain at the base of our skulls, the reptilian one, that controls automatic functions.

For me, Monsieur: the power of the Minoan Snake Goddess who holds live serpents in each hand; and the Greek understanding that serpents enable us to enter the mysteries of the chthonic earth itself. They have become a motile symbol of my creativity.

I collect serpent jewelry. Wrapped around my fingers are silver snake rings, silver serpents coil around the tubes that form my dangling earrings, another embraces a crystal pendant that hangs on a chain and falls between my breasts, and my arms are braceleted by silver cobras.

Once when I was young, in a bikini sunbathing alone, a man, himself no more than a messenger, a hallucination, approached, wearing khaki clothes and snake boots, as if out of the African jungle itself, in his hand a choke of snakes that he held over my body, and said, threatening to drop them on my skin, "Will you write?"

My muse is a Lady of Serpents.

She is the Kundalini, the lightning that travels from chakra to chakra in the awakening.

Yes, I have painted snakes, but they don't belong on canvas; rather, they are like the brushes themselves.

Monsieur, I have always known that what terrifies me is my source.

Death of Time

My words silt in the paddies of time, flooded with being.
Time drowns us.

Break out of time: escapee.
Leave the encircling fields of the centuries.

Plummet silence.

Breathe without tracking, calibration, rates, or seizures.

When time stops we die.

Blind Writing

We have eyes, not to see the light, but to cry. Among the animals, only we can weep.¹

Not the unblinking gaze of the ever-recording eye, but the pathos.

To undo the autocracy of knowledge, the way light has been used to mean power, imperialism, right, might, truth, revelation, enlightenment.

When we cry, the forms of the world blur and we forget what we have learnt to see. We move by touch, by the feeling under our fingers, by sensitivity, by silently hearing.

I write when I am almost asleep or just waking, when I can't see; I write in the dark.

When we can no longer see the forms around us, we forget the eternal forms, the eternal light. In blindness, we become visionaries.

Weep for the world; weep for yourself; weep because you can weep. Your heart will open; it will be raw, painful, and blissful, ecstatic: you will be the whole of who you are. There will be the other; there will be meaning in the closeness of connection.

We cannot see the images displayed, on view. We must move through life by touch, by scent, by listening. Only then can we see each other - through the veils of our tears. Our tears break down the walls of our imperialisms, our isolations, our losses. Our mourning and our joy: tears. Tears that implore.

When we have become immured, blinded to the world of cast light, our eyes will open to each other, our fingers will touch.
______________
¹Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 126.

Tidal Patterns

It wasn't always this way. One upon a time the tide remained high. And there were no clams or seaweed to be found and the Tsimshian went hungry. Raven knew what lay under the blue glistening robes of water.

When he wrapped his blanket of black feathers around his strong shoulders, he flew. His sharp eyes watching, looking. Scanning the edges of the ocean, he found her.

Tightly she held the tide-line in her hands. She wouldn't release the ocean to rhythmically rise and fall on the beach, or draw back from it, leaving washed treasures, clams, seaweed, shells, shiny pebbles.

Why did the old woman hold the tide-line so tightly in her lined, papery hands? She sat in her small house on the edge of the sea, holding the waters in the life-line on her palms. Who can tell from the mass of mounds and lines on her hands how she bid the edges of the great water be still?

Inside her sun-bleached house with closed eyes she imagined the ocean, or perhaps she could see it with visionary sight. She sat, the tide-line, her hands, the one interconnected with the other, like a fisherman's net, weeping tears of salt.

Raven dropped from the sky, a shadow of black feathers. He sat down beside her and groaned, holding his belly, saying he had eaten too many clams. He broke her meditation, and she stood, and went to look at the clams, but he pushed her and she fell. Then he poured sand in her eyes so that she was blinded. Pulling the tide-line out of her hands, tearing the life-line from her, he released the hold on the waters and the tide at last fell.

Crazy old woman on the edge of the ocean of time, time's burden, that weight of life-giving water.

And so the ocean drew back its mantle of blue robes and the people feasted.

There were bonfires on the beaches and a festival of clam bakes that lasted days until everyone's bellies were swollen full of food.

Who was the blind old woman crying on the beach with the torn hands?

Raven in his raucous joviality passing from one feasting party to the next found himself before the old woman, who spoke, "Raven, heal my eyes so I may see again." Raven, trickster-figure, Promethean fire-stealer, knew the Gods could must be bargained with, appeased. He struck a deal: "Old woman of the sea, I will heal you, but you must promise to let the tide-line go twice a day so that the people may gather food from the beaches." The old woman agreed and so he rinsed the sand out of her eyes. Thus Raven ensured the life-lines of the people, their continuity.

In my story, as I walk the empty beach strewn with empty clam shells, seaweed, the detritus of modern civilization, I want to find her, and find out why, the witholding.

I want to know why she denounces me, or those like her.

And take the cawl she has wrapped me in off: to breathe, to see.

But I spin like Tiresias under an unrelenting sun.
Why do black feathers lie strewn in my hair?
My eyes, gritty and sore, are on fire -
I see only flaring volcanoes
A red rage of light;
On this windless day
How did my eyes fill with sand?
My hands bleed as I write.
For what do I weep?

Simple Yoga this Morning

Early this morning I pulled out my yoga mat (a sheepskin bought in 1994 and for which I sewed a case out of peach-coloured upholstery fabric as many years ago), laid it on the floor (a very tight fit since I live in a closet), and did this yoga set: Spinal Flex Series.

I began my day with this simple yoga set for the spine for many years - sure it got boring, but different music every day helped. Today, as I flex back and forth, I feel how stiff I've become, how I need to loosen, to take care of this Sushumna, central column, spine, place where all the nerves, nadis, meridians flow. I feel the weight of what I carry as I rhythmically flex, especially when I get to the 'shoulder shrugs,' eh, let the tension go, let it go...

Each day is new, life is strange, but it keeps going. Perhaps I shall still be sitting on my mat, flexing my bent old spine when I am a centenarian, shrunken, withered, wrinkled, but ever so wise :-)

Thinking of you, I got out my old scanner with the crack in the lid, started it up, scanned these sets at least 3 times to get a clear image. My friend who was in her 30s and had pain in her back that was finally diagnosed as arthritis and had physiotherapy sessions let me teach her this set one afternoon when our then younger children were in school and she marveled at it. A few weeks later after doing the set daily she asked, 'Why don't Physiotherapists teach these exercises? This flexing really works, really helps.'

Are we as young as our spine is flexible? It's okay, I won't go into 'yoga teacher mode' and lecture on the spine. Let's just say that all of the billions of nerve cells in our bodies are connected to our brains through the braid of nerves running through the spinal column. If nothing else, keep this central part of your body flexible, in motion, healthy...

Kundalini Yoga: Guidelines for Sadhana (Pomona, California: Kundalini Research Institute, 1974), p.45-6. For another layout of this set, see Basic Spinal Series, and scroll to the end to read a description of Mul Bhand (root lock) and Maha Bhand (great lock).