Without a Guide

I dive. Into a moat of possibilities, primal soup of beginnings, where things are disjointed, undefined. A flux of moments not yet become time, flotsam on the edge of becoming, half-formed bits of genetic material seeking connections, a way to complete what is only dimmly begun. It is dark, watery, and things fly at me, scraps of detritus that perhaps I could make sense of if I knew the design. Do flowing magnetic waves draw disparate things into new configurations? In this place without rationality that I have so dangerously found myself in, how are things connected, and through connection, created?

technorati Profile: technorati tags: origins , shamanic journey , primal beginnings, manifesting, creativity, creation of life , becoming.

What revelations are to come...?

...red spots develop under my cheeks, and as I powder them they become raised wheels, one on each side, which the thick powder whitens, six spokes, a central hub and an outer wheel, a relief scultpure of perhaps a millimeter depth, like something from myth, an archetypal drama of the ancients, which the attempt to hide with powder only accenuates. I feel no horror, or pain, but awe as I brush the powder on skin that has become wheels and spokes. Sculpted like Alchemical wheels of time, or Tarot wheels of Fortune, the configurations are mysterious, almost reverential, an embodied reference to the Wheels of Ezekiel, but also to the powdered faces of highly-stylized Oriental performance, and somehow the magnificent coiled antlers of Bighorn sheep...

_____________
probably unecessary note: ...yes, it was a dream, the one I woke with today, but I have decided to treat dreams as real and as poetry in themselves... hence I've cut away the narratorial voice of the daytime ego that we use when relating dreams, as well as any analysis. There is resonance with the Symbolist and Surrealist poets, I know that...

technorati profile. technorati tags: dreams, symbolist poetry, surrealism, prose poetry, wheels in myth and symbolism, mandalas, mystics, writing.

Painting Time

Let go of the stability of knowing how to see, the molecules are dancing, big bundles of energy like rivers of colour and the jostling of air, where you can see wind currents by watching the way they move, and how the air sweeps back from the leaves and branches and the knotted woody bark of the tree that is a current too, one thicker than the other, both humming with motion.

What does a still world look like?

Always the humming, buzzing, jostling from inside things; I've never seen it flat still like a photograph.

Everything is singing, transforming at different rates with different densities, and I don't know what separates anything from anything else.

Spiritus Mundi, perhaps. It's all animated all the time: vibrating; singing.

Our words mapping the design of ourselves
in the world in frail gaps.

I reach for you
without
solidity.

---

with thanks to Robert Preuss for his ekphrastic writing on Van Gogh

Technorati Profile/ technorati tags: molecules, perception, creation singing, prose poetry, vibrating.

In the time it takes to write a paragraph...

Sipping coffee, slowly, flicking from site to site, reading here and there, fat Summer rain falling on the open windows behind me spraying a little inside, checking the books on the windowsill, Life of Pi, Only What Is, Rocking the Cradle, they're fine, fluffy dog at my feet who stands every now and then and looks into my eyes to see if I can hear the loud drizzling and noisy plonking drops, and gets her ears rubbed. This rain so heavy, it would redden the skin if you were out uncovered. A cloud burst that's poured and already spent, the thunder god disappearing over the city skyline, leaving fast running rivulets on the streets, in the drainpipes, ecstatic drenched leaves, mud wherever it can be, flocks of flowers, and a brightness everywhere that is visionary in the time its taken to write this paragraph.

technorati tags: rain, writing, fertility, thunder god, visionary earth.

The Magic of Mantra...

In the transformation from caterpillar to butterfly, deep in the cocoon of sound I've woven tightly around myself, if I become a slush of nutrients as the waves of colour begin radiating through me, making iridescent wings, then that's today, where I've meditated most of the day, chanted my silent mantra endlessly until I've forgotten who I am until my life is unrecognizable until I'm bliss floating through the air rather than a woman walking her dog in the summer-scented warmth of the late evening air.

technorati tags: mantra, meditation, caterpillar, butterfly, bliss.

An Empty Wallet

I've had a nothing day, exhausted kind of, but not, just in limbo. Feeling oddly drained. In deep meditation it came that it's because I'm broke, that money is a form of energy and that's why I'm listlessly floating through today. My daughter is away, thankfully. I'm out of dog food & coffee cream & fruit & vegetables, though there's canned dog food my mother gave me, and I've powdered milk that I can use, and multigrain bread and cheese and butter and eggs and sausages and mushrooms and onion and lamb souvlaki in the freezer, as well as rice and oats and raisons if I need more. The cheque from tutoring I did last month for an agency didn't arrive last Friday as it was meant to and that was to be my grocery money this week, and when I emailed Monday I was told the family I tutor for hadn't paid their bill. But this company takes half of what I make, they charge $40./hr, give me $20., and have made hundreds off me this year. You'd think they'd have some reserve to pay their tutors on time! Yes, I paid off over three grand in debts last week, and not a cent left over, but then I was getting a tutoring cheque... Friday there'll be more tax refund deposited, and I'm working next week, but sheesh. Where'd my energy go? Why does it always go when my wallet is empty? Even though I know it's just a temporary state, and really I'm fine, there's good food, I even have a little Merlot to sip later. The dog's happier with the canned stuff anyhow- she thinks it's a treat. And surely I can do without coffee cream for a day. But that's not what I'm learning here. Why can't I just not be affected by an empty wallet? I want to achieve a state of being where I completely trust that what is needed will come so I won't care when this happens and it won't affect my energy levels in any way.

As to why I don't have steady employment, that's somewhat of a mystery. My record with I don't know how many employment agencies is exemplary, if I am to believe the feedback I receive. Yet I don't get full time jobs. Or even permanent part-time ones. At this point, I think my employment situation is a result of my art. My newest tactic is not to look for work that will take me away from it so much as work to support it, and me and my kids, of course.

Believe it or not, this is a brand new way of thinking for me.

And I am resisting the little voice that says, oh call the bank, have a small overdraft put on your account for weeks like these...

Ah, defiance against 'the system' helps, I'm perking up, and also the chorizo and mushrooms are ready, maybe wrapped in a toasted multigrain crust with some chopped onion and mayonnaise and a little mustard...

Ecdysis

Ecdysis ("the shedding of an outer integument or layer of skin, as by insects, crustaceans, and snakes; molting"), a poem, technorati tag poem (mostly composed of lines edited out of the original version of the poem & spoofing technorati, just a little), and painting of mine published by qarrtsiluni in their short short current issue (100 words or less). Go check it out; submit a piece yourself if you haven't yet and feel so inclined.

Hope you're enjoying the bounty of the Summer!

If the direct link didn't work, copy & paste the url: http://ahappening.typepad.com/qarrtsiluni/2006/07/ecdysis.html

And the painting is actually an older one (perhaps *molting* is a theme in my life :grins:); the photograph taken of it with a prism's light shining on goes back a ways too. The photograph, which is the one I wanted, literally a needle in a hatstack of 200 boxes that we moved, fell out of a stack of papers in a box I was looking through on the weekend into my hand. I was able to submit it because my newly refound refurbished scanner worked (the second time, at first it just crackled and groaned)!

If you wish to, can I ask that you comment there? And I will respond to your comments, so do check back.

Rewoven Space

The attractiveness of non attachment. But when your attachments re-attach themselves, the philosophy needs revising. Shedding encumbrances sounds ideal, easy. Most of the rest of us have to fit things in; we're here to stay, and our collections come with us. No aphasic amnesia for the amassment of a lifetime. Back on the Wheel of Samsara, burdened with unopened boxes in spaces too small to encompass the return. My entire library crammed into a bedroom without the bookcases that wouldn't fit down the stairs. Accessible through a list of contents; but inaccessible. The abode that was found, that fit, the one for unencumbered living, too small for what fills it now. A burgeoning life, cast aside, that returns to take up where it left off. The hexagram of the return displaying its full force of bounty. A thesis to be finished, heirlooms of words, the library from which I referenced, homeschooled, taught, gifts to the future. Space must be rewoven for this amplitude, its largesse.

Debt-free and Dancing

A small celebration today. Not on the move, which I'll try to write about perhaps this weekend. But on being debt-free.

A goal since 2000 that I wished on, worked towards, danced at weekly Sweat Your Prayers™ with pain and wish for deliverance, was to be debt-free.

When I married my net worth was half a million; when I left the marriage 12 years later, I was a quarter of a million dollars in debt, largely due to my husband's spending habits (sports car, high speed boat, buying a cottage that had to have the most expensive finishing, paying off his visa year after year, itself largely composed of repair bills for the car and boat, and so on, I'm not saying it wasn't a fun ride but someone had to pay the toll). It was all rolled into a mortgage on my house, which he walked away from, not offering one cent on paying off that debt, a house I had originally owned outright. So I rented the basement, gave up my study/bedroom on the top floor and rented that, slept in my daughter's room, and continued on for 6 years, until I couldn't any more. My monthly payments were astronomical in comparison to my income. I sold my house, making almost no profit. With the money I bought computer equipment for my kids and I mostly, and financed a move to Vancouver and paid one year's rent on a house there.

After that year was up I had problems finding full time work, which I've blogged about, so accrued some debts, but tiny ones in comparison to where I'd been.

I'm happy to say that as of today I am free of debt to any institutions I owed money to. There are some debts to individuals and to family still, but the larger stuff is gone.

It's taken an extreme amount of effort to get to this point, now nine years after my marriage ended. But I've done it. I am proud of myself!

No, no money left over to go out and celebrate being debt-free to any institutions or companies. That's not the point. I'm doing an inner dance, and singing through today. The personal debts, the way I've been helped out, I now know will also get paid back. This is possible, today is living proof that it is. I gave up my credit card in the late 80s; my husband didn't. But then I gave him up. And slowly on almost no income I've managed to get back to a balance of 0, and now see that it's possible to again build equity. Maybe not all the way back to where I was before marrying, but somewhere.



Postscript: Cripes, yes I was debt-free after selling my beloved house, my home, but I was still basing my life on projections in the future - a year of writing, then a full-time job. It didn't materialize. I feel quite stabilized now in that I'm living in meagre surroundings but I can afford this. In the here and now. I'm not living 'on projections' (which I also did all through the married years). Is this called facing reality?

Whatever it is, it feels pretty darn good.

Postscript2: Do I regret marrying him? Look at my two children, just look at them. Well, this is the public internet and you can't. But if you could, you'd know that's not a relevant question.

No regrets. Only why was it at nearly the end of the marriage when I found out his family has a history of doing this to wives? His grandfather blew through his grandmother's fortune, philandering on her, even bringing his lovers into the house when she was there, and left her penniless, something his father grew up with with a lot of anger (he died just after we were married and was ill for some time before that, so I didn't hear the stories). And who knows of the generations before that. There was precedence. None of his wealthy family seemed to think what happened to me meant anything; I guess it was old hat to them. Now that's where I should have been more cognizant. I would have if it had been a history of violence towards women or children, obviously, but a history of financial abuse of wives? You'd hardly have thought it possible, given the patristic economic structure of past centuries... surely there's a story here of generations of a family.

What's happening...

Well, I had a post up momentarily, but took it down and submitted it to qarrtsiluni, where it may even show up if the editors decide to take a chance on it, or me.

Then I walked on this pressingly humid day down a long city block to buy fruit and vegetables in preparation for my children, who arrive in an hour by train. Having found all the nectarines I've purchased in the past few years to be crunchy like apples, I picked only one. After filling my cart with produce and paying, I began the trek up the street but stopped and took out the dark almost brownish red nectarine, rubbed it on my blue-hued sarong, thought never mind if it isn't washed, and bit into it.

Honeyed. Drippingly honied. Juicy and rich, the colour of the setting sun, massaging my tongue with ecstasies, covering my nose, cheeks, chin with a delicate layer of nectarine syrup that I wiped on my hands, and both arms, until I was a sticky, scented fruit flower for bees. Eating such a ripe and succulent nectarine was practically pornographic, well imbibing such a treat in public seemed like that. It was flagrantly sensuous and delicious.

When you thought you were going to have a nearly flavourless, crunchy thing, a rich medley of juices burst into your hot mouth. And then you just wanted to drop your cart and go back to the little Chinese grocer's and buy the whole bushel... you went on to the supermarket instead and bought milk and yogurt and bottled water for the move tomorrow. But you had your moment.

Tomorrow my two brothers and son and daughter and I are moving our household goods from an outer suburban storage unit to one nearby. In 35C humidity! Somehow 60 boxes of books and solid teak shelves to hold them have to come down into my subaltern abode, the basement apartment where my daughter and I currently live, and I know it's impossible and it has to be done. But, oh, how good it'll be to have access to my books again!

I'll be back in a few days...

*hugs xo

In the Studio We Paint Ourselves

I am at the door and they see me. Frightened I run up the white stairs, winding around. They are moving as a group in dark clothes across the tarmac, stark as knives in the glare of light. Their pleated black coats, heavy. My daughter flies up the stairs, "It's okay, they're here to visit, not to hurt you." Distrustful, I descend the stairs.

The foyer which is where I live has become a studio but is still a garage. Its gilded mirrors and high ceilings and brocaded ceiling and graceful wainscoting and trim seem as Renaissance as their Shakespearean coats. My paintings hang everywhere.

Where am I? This is no place that I've ever seen before. The hardwood floors gleam, light pours baroquely in through leaded glass windows. The mantle over the fireplace is magnificent white marble with Corinthian columns on either side. I can breathe in this elegant place.

A friend who emerges from the group waves her arm and shows me my space and shows me that I need not fear and leaves. I want to hover in her vision of me for it is not my own.

Another woman in black leather with blonde hair is standing astride a motorcycle at the opened garage door, so perfect for a studio, to have a door that unfolds on rollers and slides up, and I would like her to stay, to visit, to talk, but she roars off.

I wake to heavy fertile rain falling outside the window.

The Deeper Meditation

During the years I've been a single mother mostly full-time I've found that in the Summer, when I get a bit of a respite, I am always surprised at how I virtually collapse. I had things planned for this time alone. Then I realize that 'being up,' holding an emotional space steady, as well as earning money from different sources, and all the shopping, cleaning, feeding, structuring of a life all year takes its toll, and everything that was put off comes around. I worked one day this week. Last night, after spending 5 hours reformatting a Win98 laptop with a noxious virus that kept replicating as fast as I could delete enough space to run the utilities disc, I gave up on my planned projects and of trying to keep normal hours and am letting myself fall into whatever feels most natural. If that's going to bed at 2am and getting up at 5:30am and then sleeping from 11am to 12pm, okay. I eat very simply when I'm hungry (lots of fresh fruit and vegetables); go for long walks with Keesha, my dog, through the St. Clair ravine (yesterday I saw perhaps 3 people in there, one sun bather reading, two jogging women); read, and rest, and rest. I don't ruminate. I don't think. I just feel all the places where it hurts, all the things that bewilder me, and let heal. I have to be through this by Sunday...

The Deeper Meditation

I want
to lie here

and do
nothing
but heal.

I trace
the world
mnemonically,
move
through the scenes
of my life
like a sleepwalker.

Bandaging
rubbing cream
into old scars
massaging
peeling the layers
behind which I hide.

The rain
falls softly
as I lie prone.

Breathing deeply
the humid
healing air.

Morning Pages... The Dark Moneyed Heart

The business world will never open it's dark moneyed heart to me... long have I tried to understand this aspect of the networks of relationships in the world. A symbolic system rules our realities - capital enables us to survive in Capitalism even amidst the rich resources of the world. Marx died penniless and in debt. Hadn't I better go in fear of what dumbfounds me?

Making it in the world means making it economically. Being grounded means being moneyed. Yet the soil is not made of printed paper money. Rather it's in the ineffable mysteries of bank statements, stocks, numbers on sheets, endless transactions.

If I wanted to reproduce the world papered in money I couldn't have done a better job than a globally persuasive Capitalism has. Health is cash flow.

It isn't really, but how did we substitute a symbolic system for reality?

Despite what may be said, it is not plain nor simple nor easy to understand.

It is the dark moneyed heart beating at the centre of it that I understand least of all.

It is a system we've created and I accept that. I accept it as I accept the aesthetic system, in its art, literature, music. Or any of the other systems. But that doesn't mean I don't see such systems as manipulations of and overlays on nature.

It's just that the economic system is so vast and complex and all-pervasive; the multiple ways it substitutes a monetary system for reality are confounding and largely unpredictable.

I cannot walk barefoot on the earth, nor do I live in an Eden where food is plentiful. Nothing is free. We are trapped in our own syllogisms.

It's too late for me to go and do a degree in economics. But everything pales beside it. It's the monolithic, gigantic, over-arching true God of the millenias.

Terms like lucrative are appealing, aren't they? Wealth. Prestige. Success. Mammon shores us up. Let's be practical about it.

But Mammon is shouting at me through dark beating waves, "Then you make a better system of distribution..."

Computers' Befuddlements...

Today I saw my paintings on a PC, an older one I think. And was shocked to see the darkness of the images. Not only is the colour off, but much of the detail is lost. Now I'm thinking of posting two images - one for an Apple, and one for a PC. Or is it a problem of older computer models versus newer ones?

Can you let me know which one shows a range of purples in the dresses? From dark where the paint is squeezed on pure to more transparent where it's washed out, as well as a few strokes of a magenta overlay on the upper body...

The whites are another aspect entirely. The white in the lower left corner is actually whiter and brighter then the white under the right most figure's feet - which is actually quite bluish.

Oh, for colour calibration!

A beautiful interpretation of a dear friend, laurieglynn, that I certainly didn't see (or intend): "as I visit this remarkable painting once again, that the first image is rising and the second holds a sphere of Light~~as though in the Dawning, she captures the Morning Star in her hand, while the third one brings up the Sun~"

She must have been an angel on an Apple! :) Beautiy in the eye of the beholder... thank you, laurieglynn!

Lightened for a(n imaginary) PC (I don't have one here to compare):

Apple version:

Final Self Portrait: Dancing Of The Selves

click here for larger size

Dancing of the Selves

What is the self?

Peel away to nothing.

Only energies,
inner winds and flames
streams of thought
a body of cells of earthdust.

Who am I?

Am I my memories
shifting and changing like ice flows
or the sand of the desert?

We are transducers, relay switches,
cross-currents of selves.
I deconstruct in paint across the canvas.

Am I what I offer--
scrawl of words, strokes of paint,
a flash dance through the air,
a few ideas, a point of gravity
where the light bends?

My children who tumbled out of me?

I am a link
in the generations,
an ancestor's grand daughter,
great aunt of the future,
a name for genealogists.

A living person
breathing on this page
where I write quickly.

A slight tangle
in the gangalia
of cells, and
my memories,
gone.

That's not me.

I am only
who I am
loving you.

__________
For Sparky's Self Portrait Marathon. Thank you, Sparky, or Wally Torta, for all the time and care that you've put into this marathon. Take a look at the slideshow of all the entries in the marathon, fabulous! Thanks to Natalie for conceiving this marathon.

Dancing of the Selves, oil on canvas board, 22" x 28".

Self Portrait #10 - Dancing Selves, Version 2

I'm trying to remember how long it takes for me to 'come round' to a painting - they're always such a shock when they're first done. Even things we create we have to get used to as they grow on us.

I'll fiddle with it for a few hours, then go to the library to pick up some books that have come in, and perhaps buy another canvas. Usually I trace the drawing, just in case I'm not happy with the painting, and I didn't this time because the large roll of parchment paper is in the back of the closet under the stairs, behind the small kitchen cupboard with the hot plate on it, and behind the iMac box, and it's a determined effort to get anything out of there. The canvas board seems to work, it's fairly dry this morning, and no buckling, but if I try again that means re-drawing the image, oh groan.

The colours are darker than they are in real life. I had hoped the way Flikr and Blogger lighten everything would compensate for it; but, no, and I didn't see this until it was uploaded. Flikr's free accounts have a 20MG limit each month, and I'm already at 28% of that. There'll be more posts of this painting later too.

When I look at it, I see wailing almost - that there's some storm or tempest. Or is that just my tired eyes? I was up till 3am and then woken at 9am by the thunderous noise of young children running and shouting just above my head. It's a good thing I love children, eh!

Self Portrait #10 - Dancing Selves

I would say this is my least successful so far. It's still wet, and this is only the first layer of paint. But I wanted it to be done, and of course it isn't. We'll see how I can "fix it up" tomorrow.

Almost there... Updated below, a sketch now...

One more day and then Sparky's Self-Portrait Marathon is over, and what a month it's been! As I'd been planning, I took some photos of "dancing." But seem unable, so far, to use them as inspiration for a painting. I stare at the blank canvas, this time larger, 22" x 28", draw some lines, erase. I know that the paint won't be dry enough by tomorrow to 'finish' anything that might happen today, and so then I consider entering the last set of 'dancing photos' and letting it go at that.

Only one of the reasons I started blogging was to deal with an incessant writer's block, and painter's block. It's been the most terrific remedy, too.

So paint I must.

It made me laugh, but someone said that my 'self portrait' photographs were way better than my paintings!

Now, don't ya know, the lawd made cameras to free up artists from havin' to represent the world representationally. Oh, they can do it if they want, but they don't have to no more!

But it's having an effect, all this honesty. People still prefer what "looks like" to an interpretation that becomes another kind of "looking like..." And how I've wished I could prop up a mirror where my workplace is and do one from life, but money went into paint, the latter seeming more of a priority.

In the midst of all this, naturally crisis arises, and the moving company threatens to auction or throw out my household goods because they discovered they can get three times what I'm paying for the space my items take up. So a new apartment search is on, reading classified ads till I can't see straight between paint brush strokes and blog reading. Just now PS-Storage has called to let me know the size storage I need is available and if a suitable apartment in this area doesn't emerge over the weekend, my brothers and son and I hopefully will be moving our stuff downtown. The storage is within walking distance; it'll be good to have access to my household again. All the books will have to come into this tiny basement apartment, though...

I look at the blank canvas, sigh, pick up a pencil... we'll see what, if anything, emerges.

Sometimes, it's just DIVE.

__________

Later, well, it is white canvas board, and I took the photo in direct sun, but the whites don't want to show.

Don't know how much of a self-portrait it'll be, in the traditional sense, but at least there's something to guide the paint now...

After meditating, and walking Keesha (my dog), more diving... see you later!

Celebrating the dancer, sort of...

These are not as well done as they could have been. I got into my favourite dance duds, ran upstairs when the house was quiet, set up a tripod, dashed and posed on the timer a few times, grabbed the tripod, and headed back downstairs to my underground abode. I could have asked, I guess, when my landlord was going to be out, but then I'd have to admit I was 'taking photos for a self portrait marathon' - and who wants to admit a thing like that? Okay, so they're blurry. Sorry. And the bookcase smack behind me, well, some clone stamping, and viola! Gone for all intents and purposes! Okay, so I had to blur the background over the vanished books with an impressionist brush, put a spotlight or so on each figure to make them visible... shucks, I'm only tryin'! I am posting these with the affirmation that I will make my final self portrait out of them by Saturday. In storage I have a large 8' x 5' mirror that I practice poetry/dance performance pieces before, dang if I can manifest one of those mirrors before the ending of the marathon - hence the camera. And I will write a prose poem too... (please tell me I'm silly, because really I am :).

Self Portrait #9

For Sparky's Self Portrait Marathon. Take a look at the slideshow of all the entries in the marathon, fabulous! This excessive gaze at the self is over at the end of the week. Doing these self portraits is excruciating.



The face is wider and rounder than mine- but I'm not aiming for a "photograph." I had difficulty uploading a photo with an accurate rendition of the colours and white in all the right places. I eventually photographed it in direct sun, the light of which is glancing off the paint.

7.75" x 10.25", oil on perhaps paper, perhaps canvas, I don't know, I bought a few rolls of it at Active Surplus awhile back.

Workspace

You can see the little card table, and the board on which the last self portrait is taped. Above it is our "dinner table," and about 3 feet away, where the camera is, is my futon couch/bed. The computer is inbetween, as well as an older Ikea leather chair. It's called cram-it-in in the most minimalist way possible. I know it's hard to imagine, but cozy is the word for it. Two can fit in here if we stay seated; three, and it's over-crowded... :)

Paper Wings

This poem's joined The Festival of the Trees 1 --- swing over, hyperlink-like, and read Dave's great inaugural celebration on all the terrific posts submitted. Every month there'll be a blog post by one of the rotating editors :) devoted to collecting all the posts submitted that month on trees. Tree worship is alive and well and thriving!
Paper Wings


I open 500 envelopes a day: transactions, records, letters. Slice them open like pockets, remove sheaths of paper.

Paper cuts, edges like swords.

The first paper was stone. Scrawling on cave walls, then wet clay tablets, wax-coated inscribed by metal, bone, ivory stylus. Papyrus, sheepskin, parchment.

Unfold letters, staple, sort, deliver it to the offices.

Papering the world. It burns. Flames of culture singe.

From pictures to pictographs to abstract figures to alphabets, our grammars of sound ground into ink of soot, glue and water scratched with reeds, or quills, taking the five outer wing feathers of geese, swans, crows, owls, turkeys, hawks.

As body is to breath,
paper and ink are to mind.

Without papyrus, animal skin, parchment, vellum or the plant fibre, cellulose mulch of pressed paper... our history.

The body of language is inked paper.

The Gutenberg Printing Press, replaceable wooden letters. 1436. Cursive handwriting, 1495, Manutius of Venice, the 'running hand.'

Our 26 alphabet letters not till the end of the 16th century.

Mass printing. Mass distribution. Wide scale literacy.

The first paper was stone. You drew on the cave walls.

The world is papered with knowledge. Burn all the paper in the stoneage firepit of our souls.

Smooth burning words under my fingers.

Forests are the lungs of the planet; and wood dust and water promise of immortality.

Give us our words, records, songs, drawings, photographs, to store. Save diagrams of what houses us. Even Capitalism depends on the paper that money is printed on. Bank statements, loans, stock certificates. Cheques, vouchers, tickets. Medical, dental records. Taxes. All the transactions.

Delible records kept in the vaults of time. Mementos.

Ownership tattooed in the ink on the paper that becomes passport of proof.

Birth and baptism and education and marriage and employment and travel and retirement and death certificates.

The paper trail of our lives.

Envelopes as wallpaper. Bodily fluids, tissue papers. Cards, wrapping, origami. Computer paper. Specially treated, bonded. Newspapers, boxes.

The world is awash with paper.
Inscribed paper.

Mind. Hand. Ink. Paper.
My letter opener flashes like a slicing knife.

Envelope after envelope, stack after stack of paper. Filing ourselves. Pixelated language printed out reams upon reams collected, stored.

I wander the stacks of the library afterwards, shelf upon shelf, floor upon floor of bound books of yellowed paper inscribed with words, figures, numbers, images.

This gift of trees,
memory of ourselves.

This love letter
of paper.

________
ah, sigh, I've been tinkering with this for months, it just keeps growing...

Self Portrait #8, plus photos

This week I tutored a sweet Japanese Physics student through stages of a philosophy paper, it was hard work for both of us -me eliciting coherent ideas and grammar, he pushing himself to produce, and then felt bad because I spent the money on paints and cheap brushes (when I have tubes of paint and sable brushes in storage). But a friend at another site loves #7 and has asked about it, so I should feel better...

Also I found a card table with a wobbly leg that I fixed in about 2 seconds and it's now a 'painting table' - so I don't have to put the dishes on the floor while I use the tiny bathroom counter - although it takes up nearly all the room in my tiny space. It's so damp down here too, that I wonder how these paintings will dry. Oh, fret, fret.

Ok, a garden goddess, based on a photo my daughter took (my choice of location & pose, I couldn't resist those roses), and I look way younger, but whadya wanna make of it? ::grins:: Paint & brush seem to be doing their own thing. Perhaps I'm celebrating a younger self, who knows. I guess I'll have to get a really fine brush to darken the face more & put a teeny tiny dot of colour in the eyes...

It strikes me that the 'open heart' of Self Portrait #7 has here turned into a canopy of open, blossoming magenta roses...

Oil on canvas, 9.25" x 7.75".

Update: Here's a merge of some photos over the last three years... no, one can't be blonde forever:) Click for larger size.



For Sparky's Self Portrait Marathon.

Morning Pages...

What engulfs emits light.
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I had put this commentary in a comment below, something I might try from time to time when I don't want to overload the image for you...

I read this article, Lighter Side of Black Holes, and later the image I've posted emerged. As I pondered my syllogism, what engulfs emits light, I wondered how it would translate across time shifts and conscious ripples. The statement spawned in my consciousness from reading about a 'scientific discovery,' that is presumably based in the empirical world, in the 'real' world of verifiable happenings, could be applied to other areas of human experience.

Emotionally what does it mean: what engulfs emits light.

And in terms of a kind of dominant gene, combative, Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest, Tennyson Nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw, all the devouring that goes on, is there always a record of the engulfment? That light is emitted?

The conclusions my night-time/morning mind came to, what engulfs emits light, have pulled me into strange and wondrous musings on the philosophical ramifications...

"Scientists have cracked a huge cosmic paradox — how black holes can be the darkest objects known but also responsible for a quarter of all light and other radiation produced in the universe since the Big Bang."

Like, wow.

Morning Pages...

Once it appeared in the world, there was a difference.

Things weren't the same afterwards.

What was puzzling was that no-one noticed when it happened. Life went on.

But everything had changed utterly.

Morning Pages: On a Summer's Morning

(I am attempting morning pages, even if it's only a few lines.)

On A Summer's Morning

Something a little more pure. Where the gift is.

The hot humid air bathes me.

I use espresso coffee in my coffee maker; flavourful, earthy.

Free the moment of its burdens.

Find home.
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After which I meditated for many hours on what home is, and this continued day after day. It's become a mantra whose sound I follow. Even today watching the leaves catch the morning's rain, remembering filling the hugest flower pot I could find with as many red geraniums as it could fit for the doorstep of my old house and wondering where again I shall be watering such richly red blossoms. I think of Jean, Mary, Tamar, who are all in perhaps similar though different processes on the meaning of home...

And then the Linden tree down the street, filling the road with such gold. I picked up a handful of marigold-yellow seed fluff and placed it in a small pewter-glazed ceramic bowl. The beginning of an alter, it feels like.

But that's another story.

Self Portrait #7

Paint's still wet (oil on canvas)...

I haven't painted in a very long time, but yesterday bought a small set of oils and one brush, and tonight cleared the foot & a half space on the bathroom counter where we have our dish rack and painted one of the self portraits. There was no black or even brown paint, hence the blue hair. Is the red paint her heart? I give the paint a fair bit of freedom to do what it wants and become witness to the results. What emerged frightened and exhilirated me. A meditation in 'emergent self'? - my dream of a few nights ago said, use brushes, not sticks, which I took to mean paints not watercolour pencils. Interesting. Not quite starlight, but tiny pin pricks of an opening of something...

Mary Ann says, "The red part in the middle looks like your heart is open for all to see."

For Sparky's Self Portrait Marathon.

Self Portrait of Woman Keeps on Walkin'...

Update: Sparky's asked me to decide how to post this mini series. Gnash, gnash. Ok, decision. All together, but he only has to post one. There are 10 so far, and I'm planning to paint at least one of them too.

They're all clickable for readability.
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Da Original



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Da drawing:



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De first batch of Self Portrait of Woman Gone Walkin':







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Da Second Batch:










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Yat is enough. She gonna stay home now! (Or leave town!) NO MORE WALKIN', Self Portrait!

(Sometimes ya git caught in a swirling eddy [of walkin' S-Ps] [oh, 'n there's no overlayin'; they's all real shots in real places, even if enhanced later] & ya can't hardly git out!)

From my notebook...

(the first two, the twigs, & vertical lines, from dreams the night before)

Don't use twigs, use brushes.

The downward vertical line & the upward vertical line don't meet, and she saw this years ago and went away distraught.

It's SunFire Day. Solstice.

The typoGenerator* threw up some of my images. A photograph of a red tulip; a line drawing of a pensive woman.

In the field of green, some random red.

My dog lies sleeping beside me; she always has to be near.

The wall clock ticks. The world holds still. O

Meditate.

(I did for an hour.)

Then move, fast.

(I didn't. But ran into an old friend in her blue Rav4 later, the same car she drove me out to a farm in the country 5 years ago to meet and fall in love with a certain puppy, an occurrence which seemed stretched like a line inevitably from this point.)

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*thanks to Dave for the link

The plain face...

Surely post & then take this down... the photo underlaying the drawing (which will surely do more walking), unadorned, plain, as is, the background fuzzed, oh yeah, well...

Re-visers, oh, oh..... A Wandering Self Portrait!

I apologize for updating posts; it drives me crazy too. Yesterday was a case in point (surely dozens of times, those with aggregators must have... oh, sorry!). But the post kept growing! I eventually took the drawing and photographed it in different places - no overlays, the real drawing in real places: leaves, a gutter, a posting pole. Now I'm thinkin' where else I could take her. Any suggestions?

Self Portrait of Woman Wandering the City.

No comments allowed on this post; you'll have to go back to the other one...

Self Portrait #6 - Using the Non-Suffering Method of Drawing THE SELF PORTRAIT GOES WALKING!

For Sparky's Self Portrait Marathon.

The Non-Suffering Method of Drawing a Self-Portrait: take a photo, some good contrasts work best; lighten it & print (no need to use copious amounts of toner); paper clip it to the sheet you want to draw on; hold up on a window with bright sunlight behind and trace...


This is a traced drawing of the new profile pic. Looks way too young, but that's beside the point. Why? It's hard to draw ourselves - afterall, we haven't spent a lifetime looking at our faces. I have no real idea of my eye or nose or mouth shape, nor the way the curls fall. So I'm learning... for all you folks who don't draw, this is a viable way to learn! Even if it doesn't exactly turn out to 'look' like us.





A hand drawn image of a photograph photographed. O, this is fun! Lady of the Vines, or the Forest, or Fence Sitter.






In the gutter!

WORK AT HOME on this woman!

YES, she's been sighted all over the city!

Self Portrait goes walking!

Intrepid artist wearing a sun visor and sunglasses and a skimpy red dress seen taping suspicious SELF PORTRAIT to public poles and drains!

Blogsday for Bloomsday

It's an enjoyable, funny, sad, irreverent, serious hour of blog readings trolled from the NET on June 6th (I'm, umm, before the middle, it was interesting to hear an actor read ma words, too). Sit back, enjoy, while you compose another self portrait for Sparky's Self Portrait Marathon. Open Source Boston Radio:

Click to Listen to the Show (24 MB MP3)

Self Portrait #5, Chorus in Red

For Sparky's Self Portrait Marathon.

Update: Surely our self-portraits are versions of ourselves, and it looks like I've done versions on an image. Wonder how that happened? So far this is my favourite self-portrait. It took the longest; is more complex than it looks with something like 87 layers in photoshop. There were the photographs, one of which I chose, printed in black and white and inked in the outline and coloured the dress with a red and wet watercolour pencil; I traced this version in ink on tissue paper, and painted that dress with the same red and wet watercolour pencil and stuck it to the printed one. My daughter likes these 'two Brenda's' best, kind of a collage. Then I photographed the collage and layered it with the original photo plus another one. I crudely cut out dolphins and used them as patterns, decreasing the size on some (that's where all the layering is); then I wrote a couple of words from the post in; drew some right angle red lines and enhanced the red in various layers and posted it. It probably does "look" like me - in that if you saw this collage & you knew the Summertime me you'd recognize me. If you know what I mean! But then, hey, it's a photo, and a take-off on a photo, and a take-off on a take-off of a photo...

I kind of look like a chorus in red, don't I? :grins:

Yesterday's post: On the steaming city day, a high and dusty South wind, I walk miles breaking in new shoes that break in my feet. Red spots that threaten blisters that never arrive. Returning other shoes for exchange, I walk in a ridiculously skimpy red sundress and put the brim of my hat low because I don't care and don't want to see anyone's disapproval. Aging women shouldn't have to hide themselves, and so I don't. It's too hot to wear anything else. Finally on the way back, walking very slowly, I stop at Future Bakery for a coffee. The patio is large, partially covered with a Corono Beer tarp and a couple of tables have Corona umbrellas. Wherever my skin touches anything it sweats. The backs of my legs, behind my knees, the soles of my feet. Somewhere birds impossibly chirp. The sounds of the voices of the people around me chirp. It's a good spot, where students and writers come to drink, to study, to write. It hasn't changed in 20 years. Near me is Ye Olde Brunswick House; across the street my favourite Indian restaurant, Nataraj; an ice cream booth; and on the other corner, By The Way Cafe, which hasn't been a vegetarian cafe in at least two decades but whose sign still says it is. And now I must make my way on to buy fruits and vegetables and then home. Where I will ask my daughter to photograph me for another self portrait...

Of multiples. Duchampian. It was actually fun tonight, playing, thank you Jean!

Self Portrait #4, a photograph of a reflection...

Does a photograph of a reflection of oneself in the glass covering a watercolour drawing by oneself count as a self portrait? Tired, having walked many miles in search of shoes for my daughter, for myself, in 32C/90F humidity, now listening to Anjani's and Cohen's Blue Alert and sipping red wine...

For Sparky's Self Portrait Marathon.

Self Portrait #3

Who am I? Why do I find self-portraiture harrowing? What my mind sees and what my hand draws are not the same. Is it that my eyes are trained to see like a camera, and my hand feels its way over surfaces, uncaring about representational likeness? If someone who knows me saw these self portraits would they recognize me? The problem is no, they wouldn't; not out of context. I don't know who I'm drawing, but it's not me. Could I then call them versions of the self?


Because Natalie asked, for Sparky's Self Portrait Marathon.

Two renditions of the same self portrait drawn in a tiny mirror, on a small piece of canvas, 3.5"x5", india ink, watercolour pencil. Click on image for larger sizes.

Blogsday

I found this in my inbox, neat huh:

"Hello,

I'm writing from Open Source, a public radio show based in Boston and distributed around the country.

Last year we started what we hope will be a yearly tradition for us called Blogsday. Based loosely on Bloomsday, which celebrates "Ulysses" as an evocation of the whole world in a single day (in Joyce's case, June 16, 1904), the idea is create a mosaic portrait of our country from excerpts of blog posts written on the same day. (In our case this past Tuesday, June 9th.)

After assembling the excerpts we bring in two accomplished and agile actors to read them. I'm writing now because your post on June 6, "On Saturday Night," caught our eye and we're interested in using it on the show, which will air live on Thursday night from 7-8pm EST.

We can't pay anything -- this is public radio after all -- but we can guarantee a respectful treatment, a national radio audience, and a link on our blog.

Best regards, Chelsea"

I don't know if it's podcast. Chelsea did email me at 7:30pm: "It's being read right now. It sounds great. Many thanks." It was a long day and, oh, it was nice to say yes to Blogsday in honour of Bloomsday...

Self Portrait #2

Another sketch, for Sparky's Self Portrait Marathon, surreptitiously where I'm working. The small mirror was under the counter, it was dimly lit, and I had my sketch book flat in front of me, so... Someone did say, "That looks like you!" But then my daughter said it was cartoony and didn't. Representation. Oh, sigh. Self-portraits. Oh, sigh.

While I released myself from having to make people look like themselves some time ago, and consider my drawings instead 'inspired' by my models, and it was very freeing, I am trying to create more of a likeness, however that may be!

Eyes are too big. Reading glasses askew - that's me!

Random Bits from the Notebook...

Don't use twigs, use brushes.

The downward vertical line & the upward vertical line don't meet, and she saw this years ago and went away distraught.

It's SunFire Day. Solstice.

The typoGenerator threw up some of my images. A photograph of a poppy; a line drawing of a woman.

In the field of green, some random red.

My dog lies sleeping beside me; she always has to be near.

The wall clock ticks. The world holds still. O

Meditate.

(I did for an hour.)

Then move, fast.

(I didn't. But ran into an old friend in her blue Rav4 later, an occurence which seemed stretched like a line inevitably from this point.)

Self Portrait #1

It's a self-portrait, because Natalie asked, for Sparky's Self Portrait Marathon.

I know it's pale and limpid. So many night-time dreams over the years that I ought to draw, paint... but I don't know.

Daily Sustenance...

Perhaps I'll write about meditation, what I do daily, sometime...

100 Days, a place to meditate, is a wonderful site if you'd like to find compatriots.

Dress Us In Apple Blossoms

A short prose poem published in Qarrtsiluni that I wrote on Earth Day, Dress Us In Apple Blossoms. I took the photo of the apple where I was working just before eating it. When I looked at it later that night, I found the image disturbing - you'll see what I mean. And got to thinking about apples and Eve and wombs and death and Genesis and nature. We're revising the texts now, planting new seeds...

On Saturday Night

Do you ever get those evenings that never quite fall into an activity, or a rhythm?

The hours drift by, unfulfilled. The rain falls in rich curtains of fertility. Everything is bathing, the trees, shrubs, flowers, birds, earthworms. But your mind strays, unfocussed.

I wouldn't call it boredom, but it sort of is.

When nothing you can think of is enough to rouse you from your couch of comfort. The hours aren't weaving or unweaving anything. You're just wasting them.

You feel spent, uninspired, worked over, at odds, suspended.

I don't feel like drawing
or walking the dog.

I don't feel like being alive
or dead.

Or creating art out of my life.

I don't feel like being alone,
or with anyone.

The lush Spring rain
simply falls
without metaphor.

You want to eat something
to nourish and fulfill
but all the multi-grain breads and cereals, the fruits, oranges, apples, strawberries, grapes, and almonds and raisons and cheeses, the fresh vegetables, carrots, green beans, cauliflower, broccoli, and herbal tea of cranberries and vanilla that sits steaming in your hand
doesn't satisfy.

And you ask questions of the moist fresh air all evening
about what was, is, or will be
asking about intention
knowing that's it,
the intent to be
is everything.

And you write it,
this mundane
enfolded mystery.

Sex and the Artist

This is a rather funny, depending on how you look at it. A dear blogging friend, Bill, bought one of my watercolor pencil drawings:

Dance, the Dream, Disappearing Into Each Other, 8.5" x11", watercolour pencil on paper, 2006.

The writing along the blue woman's leg: 'shadow my desire'; up the older woman's arm, 'what rises into the self?'; and curling from thigh to breast to arm, 'repose curls in on itself.'

(click on it for larger sizes)

He wrote in a recent comment, "By the way, my Mother in law thinks my awful painting of those people having sex should be removed from our quest bedroom. I love it by the way and will post it framed soon."

Huh? I overlaid (uh oh, I'm noting my terminology) 3 sketches of the same model from the same lifedrawing class and then colored them so that they seem what I thought was melting into each other (uh oh, terminology again) like a dream, sort of surrealist. All I can see is the figure 8 of the composition, which I like and didn't notice until it was finished. But now that he mentions it...

A prime example of how the artist creates a work but doesn't thereby generate the meaning... (Wayne Booth's Rhetoric of Fiction, but don't ask me for a page reference, it's in storage! Booth says there is a gap between author and text, and between text and audience. I'll say!)

But perhaps unconsciously... (O, roll over Freud, roll over).

Bedroom in Seaton Village

The futon bed couch arrived, was constructed, laid with a sleeping bag and pillows...

Upon which I immediately sat and meditated and then napped. Not quite the Bedroom in Arles, but nice...

And even nicer to be off the sweating floor (a swamp, shhh). Austerities of sleeping on a foam mattress (nee sponge) on the floor gone. It feels positively luxurious. Emergency measures were called for. Beautiful Kobe design cover in flame colours ready in 2 weeks, and I’ll post it then.

Update: Perhaps I should dress it in velvets, as this filter suggests...

Woman in Green

She begins a new page on my website.

Floor Sweat

That obscure country north of the border...

"Canadians are healthier and have better access to health care than U.S. residents. And, according to a new study, Canadians obtain better care for half of what Americans spend on their medical system." CTV News

Not only that but, thanks largely to the Liberal Government under Chretien:

"The [Canadian] federal government has posted a whopping $12-billion budget surplus for the fiscal year that ended March 31 [2006]." Shaw News

Compare this to the U.S. Deficit of 8.4 trillion dollars. Methinks the US has to consider electing a president and a party who can put the economic stability of the country first, even risking electoral consequences to do it. And, Americans, do something about your national health care!

Hexagram of I & Thou

Vines

Crawl of vines
inside
the window.

How can you breathe
without air?

Fresh, profuse tendrils.

My fingernails,
green like Spring.

Celine, worms
with five hearts
fill the earth
create the soil
out of which we grow.

The spirits are watching.

My mouth fills with loam
thick, rich humus.

Do I seek
what is too deep
and far away
from sunlight?

Thin mantle of earth
that supports us.

Remove the screen
find pure green.

It was the vines
that undid everything.

I'll tell you what's sacred.
Not the gods out there.
This flare of life
in the shrine
of our bodies.