nest of hair, of broken golden eggs

nest of hair, of broken golden eggs from Brenda Clews on Vimeo.

[Video shot entirely with my iPhone and edited on a subway with the iMovie app. With no training in film or photography, I guess and fret my way through, but surely Apple was aiming at folks like me with these gadgets and programs.]

What made me cut my hair in 1981?

It was time for a transformation, and it shocked people. I went from curly tresses to a near brush cut. I wanted to divest myself of that Farah Fawcett sex appeal look; I wanted to be a hermit. Perhaps I was a little crazy in those days. I was working on a thesis that was secretly about my visions, which of course no-one knew and which of course I didn't finish.

Perhaps a cat got into the basket and tumbled out with a golden egg. Afterward, it became a divine cat that glowed in the dark. I think maybe that happened to one of the cats over the years... Bastet, the ancient Egyptian feline goddess, hung around, yeah, for sure.

I've never showed anyone this nest before. Oh, my kids have seen it -and agreed that it's a bit weird, but that's it. I didn't want anyone to think me too strange. It's sat, covered and unnoticed on a bookshelf in all the places I've lived since making it, grad residence, a condo, a couple of houses, a couple of apartments, it's been across the country and back. At the time that I created it, I wasn't consciously thinking of divine things; in retrospect, though, I recall being immersed in that mythology, the divine conjunctio, and was good friends with a woman professor of English Lit who was studying to become a Jungian Analyst in Zurich. The Divine Conjunctio is quite a universal mythos, and so in my voiceover I read back into the nest of hair and golden eggs. Giving it a context it never had. Thirty years ago I thought of it as a magical ritual piece, and as conceptual art. Now I show the whole thing on-line! The cut lock had something to do with Isolde, but the version of the voiceover mentioning that was too long for the video.

[You do not see the sound wave in the iMovie app for the iPhone, so deleting the ums and ahs wasn't possible.]

A nest of your hair from three decades ago, it's certainly quite a memento. Something strange, and magical about it. I can see this image, these metaphors sparking the imagination; even in me, revealing this hidden basket evokes images, thought, wonderings. And perhaps the phoenix that emerges is the revealing itself, a video, a speaking, an uncovering of a fled spirit -for the remaining egg is cracked and broken, and the other has disappeared.

If I was better at filming, it would be interesting to make a poetic video with my HD Canon Vixia camcorder and Final Cut Express. Perhaps someday I'll give it a try.

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The bits and pieces that compose this post came from my responses on a thread at my Facebook page (with thanks to Boris, Dave, Stirling, Kim and Bent).
With special thanks to Dave for a humourous and inspiring conversation at his Facebook site on his yearly haircut, a total head shave.

                                          

Stone #48

Fantasy matters.

                                          

Stone #47

Without memory, the fragile present disappears.

                                          

Whirling Stillness

Where time clots, a stillness whirling
in the motion forward. Points
of condensed age in the meridians.

I look to see

a dissolving mirror
bones, skin, neurons

the self-image.

This is not a poem neat as intact
fishbones, mysterious as dinosaur
fossils. The poem writes through
me. Rises from ruminations, dried
flowers on my spine
bursting seeds.

Are memories nomads wandering
our minds? Seeds of recollections
reflecting whole scenes from our past,
or partial images in the distorted ways we
compose and re-compose our lives?

Is memory how we narrate the stories
of our lives? Where we describe
our experiences to ourselves...

Do some experiences burrow like
bulbs in the network of capillaries,
memories memorizing themselves,
knots in the ganglia?

Replays of moments we've lived
that change as the story changes.

We are forever changing our stories,
aren't we.

Is that the river? Our blood
of experience?

Our collections of images,
re-iterating ourselves,
recalled, recollected, replayed.
Memories are slowed time,
knots in the Chi of
our neurocircuitry.

In the forever now, memories
where time recoils and coils slow eddying
resisting the rush.

Who I am is my memory of myself.

I remember you remembering yourself in me.




Wandering Nomads Bone Image, 2011, 19cm x 16.5cm, 7.5"x6.5", mostly archival inks, sepia, black, red, orange, and oil pastels, Moleskine sketchbook. Fishbones, dinosaur bones, ivory piano keys of the mind playing its strange music, I don't know. When I sat to draw an image for this poem, a vertebrae emerged. Click for actual size.

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Big Tent's poetry prompt this week was to use the "stories or ideas" of science "as a metaphor for something in your own life or a made-up life. The odd mix of fact and fiction is poetry in the making." I've kind of combined a physics of time - suggesting that, like time slows down in black holes, perhaps it also does in the creation and maintenance of longterm memory in the onrush of the present - with a neuroscience of non-localized (nomadic) cerebral processes where memories might be compared to pockets of stillness in the constant flow of cerebro-spinal fluid, the sparking of chemical pulses. And then I did a drawing where a vertebrae emerged. It was all as strange as any Science Fiction. Ultimately, my piece becomes a philosophical poem about the nature of memory, of subjectivity, of the self. For other responses, see here.

(Picasa's a bit strange these days. Below a thumbnail for 
services like Facebook to read feed readers)





(Readings of the poem didn't, um, didn't, and need more tries, but the afterward, which is more like a pre-amble, was kind of fun.)