Sheath of feeling. Words groping to touch air.
Sunday, November 02, 2008
NaNoWriMo 2008
Aiming for 2000 words/day, should reach 50,000 words before the end of the month or have a few days for crises'; NaNoWriMo is exuberant, hell, a way to drive yourself |insane|.
Saturday, November 01, 2008
NaNoWriMo begins...
Yes, I've begun NaNoWriMo - 402 words so far, only 49,598 to go! No plot, no outline, allow oneself to compose a story unplanned! Discover it as you go. Why not, I ask. Why not?
Is this fun? I don't know. I'm surprised too. Where this character came from, I have no idea. But here he is - Moedello. And onwards...
My site at NaNoWriMo is RubiesInCrystal.
I'm writing it on Google Docs (which some of you have heard me rave about). I'm sure I'll be posting bits on this blog throughout the month. The first beginning...
No beginning. Mœdello, I tell you this. Remove the concept of beginning. Everything develops out of something else. Coming into fruition or withering away, seeds set a long time back, perhaps when the universe developed out of something else. No ex nihilo.
Take off your monk's garbs, leave the Order. Forget the salvation of the timeline. Without beginning, there is no end.
It's a gentle truth. Whatever we are will become something else. We live in continuums. Going all the way back and all the way forward. Nothing is wasted and nothing lost.
Even black holes, which suck everything in, disappearing past the event line, the horizon of being. Which then evaporate. We think they're gone, information lost, trajectories lost, where there was is now nothing, impossible to conceive, inconceivable. Yet transforming, evaporating from disappearance.
Perhaps we are an evaporated black hole. The disappeared who are here, a living universe.
Drop your robes, Mœdello. Unstring your rosary in the garden. I am not a wanton woman tempting you.
I'm only writing this to discover time, the passing. Because I respect the time that our grammar weaves, teaching our minds generations after generations. Organizing our memories, too. Timelines. Enfolded complexities of living.
If I could understand where you're coming from I'd go there too.
Or perhaps only visit. Bringing my past to meet your future.
The horses were white and galloped powerfully, muscles and nostrils and flank hair and hooves. Were they in a pasture or were they a memory?
You came from Italian stock. From farmland. You gave up the soil for the dry run of Ecclesiastical words. Hearing, breathing the scriptures. Predictable shadows on the walls. Walking by pillars every day, upheld. Comfort in the predictability of the hours of the days that repeated themselves without interruption and were unlike the cycles of farming, dependent on the weather of the seasons and the market. When the rains stopped, the famines began. The horses died. It was cracked and dry.
You all went away, there was no food. The friar on the street of the city where you stood shivering took you in. The friar who offered you his robes. You were thin but he fed you and taught you to mime the sacraments with him.
It wasn't that you didn't believe what the Church offered.
I never said that.
Is this fun? I don't know. I'm surprised too. Where this character came from, I have no idea. But here he is - Moedello. And onwards...
My site at NaNoWriMo is RubiesInCrystal.
I'm writing it on Google Docs (which some of you have heard me rave about). I'm sure I'll be posting bits on this blog throughout the month. The first beginning...
No beginning. Mœdello, I tell you this. Remove the concept of beginning. Everything develops out of something else. Coming into fruition or withering away, seeds set a long time back, perhaps when the universe developed out of something else. No ex nihilo.
Take off your monk's garbs, leave the Order. Forget the salvation of the timeline. Without beginning, there is no end.
It's a gentle truth. Whatever we are will become something else. We live in continuums. Going all the way back and all the way forward. Nothing is wasted and nothing lost.
Even black holes, which suck everything in, disappearing past the event line, the horizon of being. Which then evaporate. We think they're gone, information lost, trajectories lost, where there was is now nothing, impossible to conceive, inconceivable. Yet transforming, evaporating from disappearance.
Perhaps we are an evaporated black hole. The disappeared who are here, a living universe.
Drop your robes, Mœdello. Unstring your rosary in the garden. I am not a wanton woman tempting you.
I'm only writing this to discover time, the passing. Because I respect the time that our grammar weaves, teaching our minds generations after generations. Organizing our memories, too. Timelines. Enfolded complexities of living.
If I could understand where you're coming from I'd go there too.
Or perhaps only visit. Bringing my past to meet your future.
The horses were white and galloped powerfully, muscles and nostrils and flank hair and hooves. Were they in a pasture or were they a memory?
You came from Italian stock. From farmland. You gave up the soil for the dry run of Ecclesiastical words. Hearing, breathing the scriptures. Predictable shadows on the walls. Walking by pillars every day, upheld. Comfort in the predictability of the hours of the days that repeated themselves without interruption and were unlike the cycles of farming, dependent on the weather of the seasons and the market. When the rains stopped, the famines began. The horses died. It was cracked and dry.
You all went away, there was no food. The friar on the street of the city where you stood shivering took you in. The friar who offered you his robes. You were thin but he fed you and taught you to mime the sacraments with him.
It wasn't that you didn't believe what the Church offered.
I never said that.
Friday, October 31, 2008
veil of sky
whitened edges and solid infinity above, the clear, blue, serene sky,
this day when the veils between worlds thins
this day when the veils between worlds thins
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Nanowrimo this year?
With the impossibility writing has been presenting for me these last months, I wonder if joining Nanowrimo this year would be a good discipline and challenge?
The first year I began where I was, and let a story unfold. Of course the manuscript is huge and unwieldy! I've never edited it into something more reasonable. Though it's possible that the urge to do at least one complete rewrite will overtake one indolent day.
Nanowrimo begins Nov 1st - enough time to decide.
The first one began in a temp job matching files to original ledger entries in a vault at a funeral home in Vancouver. A natural title was Book of the Dead, and I incorporated a couple of other texts, the Egyptian and the Tibetan ones, into the writing.
That was fun, discovering each day what was to happen, and layering the text with references to other texts.
We build on ourselves.
I find it inspiring to be among those who are running their own writing races separately but together as a group - last year of the 100,000 who enrolled world-wide, 50,000 participants made it to the finish line.
It's interesting to reflect on my own Nanowrimo path. In 2004, "Book of the Dead," was more of a 'novel' and 50,000 words; in 2005 my writing was shifting to prose poetry and I wrote that year's in smaller numbered segments that I still haven't finished but it came in at 50,000 words and then I spent a few days reading it and deleted a third of the manuscript, never mind (the first pages can be found at my art website here); in 2006 my writing moved even more towards the poetry end of the spectrum and while I wrote "EnTrapped WOR|l|DS" in November of that year I didn't enroll it in Nanowrimo since it's only 17,266 words, and too short for the contest, but poetry's like that - though it is a completed manuscript, which made me happy.
I wonder where this one might start and what the writing style might be?
The first year I began where I was, and let a story unfold. Of course the manuscript is huge and unwieldy! I've never edited it into something more reasonable. Though it's possible that the urge to do at least one complete rewrite will overtake one indolent day.
Nanowrimo begins Nov 1st - enough time to decide.
The first one began in a temp job matching files to original ledger entries in a vault at a funeral home in Vancouver. A natural title was Book of the Dead, and I incorporated a couple of other texts, the Egyptian and the Tibetan ones, into the writing.
That was fun, discovering each day what was to happen, and layering the text with references to other texts.
We build on ourselves.
I find it inspiring to be among those who are running their own writing races separately but together as a group - last year of the 100,000 who enrolled world-wide, 50,000 participants made it to the finish line.
It's interesting to reflect on my own Nanowrimo path. In 2004, "Book of the Dead," was more of a 'novel' and 50,000 words; in 2005 my writing was shifting to prose poetry and I wrote that year's in smaller numbered segments that I still haven't finished but it came in at 50,000 words and then I spent a few days reading it and deleted a third of the manuscript, never mind (the first pages can be found at my art website here); in 2006 my writing moved even more towards the poetry end of the spectrum and while I wrote "EnTrapped WOR|l|DS" in November of that year I didn't enroll it in Nanowrimo since it's only 17,266 words, and too short for the contest, but poetry's like that - though it is a completed manuscript, which made me happy.
I wonder where this one might start and what the writing style might be?
The Keys
If I take off my readers, can I write? A disjuncture between life and writing, or that I want to hide? Without seeing the keys or the screen. Write blind. Behind where words form. The words that shape reality even as I speak them.
Glide through the world of words with a dancer's ease. My body is a word, a gesture, a line scrawling across the horizon of time.
Am I purple, or aubergine? A curve of a back before a computer, hitting keys I can't see?
And how many mistakes before we get it right?
And how many times are the crystal glasses broken before we can---drink, see, touch?
It's cyclical, the years go on, some good, some bad. There is no will to it. Whatever you want to happen happens; you are a consequence of your past; and each day is a surprise thrown up by the fates of fortune.
When I sat down to write I knew nothing,
and less now.
Glide through the world of words with a dancer's ease. My body is a word, a gesture, a line scrawling across the horizon of time.
Am I purple, or aubergine? A curve of a back before a computer, hitting keys I can't see?
And how many mistakes before we get it right?
And how many times are the crystal glasses broken before we can---drink, see, touch?
It's cyclical, the years go on, some good, some bad. There is no will to it. Whatever you want to happen happens; you are a consequence of your past; and each day is a surprise thrown up by the fates of fortune.
When I sat down to write I knew nothing,
and less now.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
slats
water drizzles over slats
onto rocks
iron ivy
crawls over the lamp
I'm tired
of the restriction
of vulnerability, sensitivity,
injury
walking in the warm,
light rain
before the seasonal cold
sets in
I look out through slats
hiding or revealing myself
or you do
rocks become water
that float away
____
Tired of protecting my knees when I dance, I didn't. For a number of weeks. Bending low, I used my knees, experienced the freedom of a fuller movement, bliss. My knees are now so sore I'm on Ibuprofen, which helps reduce the swelling, constantly and a prescription anti-inflammatory, as well as icing them fairly frequently. So this poem, the first I've attempted in what seems like a long time, was triggered by that, tired of the iron ivy on the lamp, not wanting to protect one's sensitivity, and whatever the emotional corollaries are, the rocks are water that float away.
ps I think I have a 'stretched' tendon, that it's just a regular sort of minor injury anyone who participates in sports or dance gets. Not serious and with a bit of pampering it'll heal fine.
But an interesting process in terms of our emotional proclivity for protection of our sensitivities.
[Okay, okay... last night I danced with my jingly silver belly dance belt over a black danskin at Tam Tam like a dervish. Shhhh...]
[No, no. I arrived late, 10:30pm or so, to a dark hot dance studio of drummers after seeing the Tibetan Lhapa documentary, changed into black sweats, danced, realized that there were only a few dancers, some as old as me, and so I put on the belly dance belt and let go, it was fun, I left around 12:30pm, some people thanked me for dancing, said it was beautiful, and walked home by myself, arriving home at maybe 1:30am; this pattern is normal, I go, dance, rarely join the group for food after. Arrive alone, leave alone. Now what that had to do with emotional corollaries, who knows.
It's all connected though, isn't it. :)]
onto rocks
iron ivy
crawls over the lamp
I'm tired
of the restriction
of vulnerability, sensitivity,
injury
walking in the warm,
light rain
before the seasonal cold
sets in
I look out through slats
hiding or revealing myself
or you do
rocks become water
that float away
____
Tired of protecting my knees when I dance, I didn't. For a number of weeks. Bending low, I used my knees, experienced the freedom of a fuller movement, bliss. My knees are now so sore I'm on Ibuprofen, which helps reduce the swelling, constantly and a prescription anti-inflammatory, as well as icing them fairly frequently. So this poem, the first I've attempted in what seems like a long time, was triggered by that, tired of the iron ivy on the lamp, not wanting to protect one's sensitivity, and whatever the emotional corollaries are, the rocks are water that float away.
ps I think I have a 'stretched' tendon, that it's just a regular sort of minor injury anyone who participates in sports or dance gets. Not serious and with a bit of pampering it'll heal fine.
But an interesting process in terms of our emotional proclivity for protection of our sensitivities.
[Okay, okay... last night I danced with my jingly silver belly dance belt over a black danskin at Tam Tam like a dervish. Shhhh...]
[No, no. I arrived late, 10:30pm or so, to a dark hot dance studio of drummers after seeing the Tibetan Lhapa documentary, changed into black sweats, danced, realized that there were only a few dancers, some as old as me, and so I put on the belly dance belt and let go, it was fun, I left around 12:30pm, some people thanked me for dancing, said it was beautiful, and walked home by myself, arriving home at maybe 1:30am; this pattern is normal, I go, dance, rarely join the group for food after. Arrive alone, leave alone. Now what that had to do with emotional corollaries, who knows.
It's all connected though, isn't it. :)]
Monday, October 20, 2008
Toronto Zombie Walk
Ahhh, now that's motherhood!
A great scene photographed by Roger Cullman during the Toronto Zombie Walk 2008 Postmortem. A Zombie Walk of a thousand-strong in Toronto yesterday emerging from Trinity Bellwoods Park. Which I missed! Oh, bomb! ZombieZoots! The march of the Zombies on the Zombie Walk passed by my apartment yesterday! Munching on brains, gore galore. The ghoulishly lively undead! Where was I?
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Woman with Flowers 7.1
(7th sketch in series, first iteration of this one) Woman with Flowers Flowers, props upholding the woman. The flowers, fragrant, imaginar...
