Sunday, January 28, 2007

Glint of the Green Cat's Eye

Embroidered flowers, relation to real-world flowers undetermined, perhaps fuchsia daisies and tawny buttercups and peach poinsettias. Thought is vision-based. It transforms through the insula, physical signals from the body, sensations into feelings. Neurocircuitry. I am a wired world. The sensitivity of the central nervous system transforms the world out there into the one in here. I perceive strokes of coloured yarn as flowers with indistinct reference to actual flowers dancing on hillsides of brown earth.

Head-strong, body-wise.

Information comes in so many ways.

Should I tell a story? That's a different shaping of events. Pick a narrative, a point of view. Paint representation in words. Describe a mutually-agreed upon approach to a scene.

On my finger is a thick silver ring set with a black stone in which there is a green cat's eye.

Carvings on a snake-shaped rock, arrow-heads 70,000 years old lying nearby, in a cave hidden in the "Mountain of the Gods" in Botswana. Offerings to spirit.

Anatomically modern humans emerged from East Africa 120,000 years ago. Protozoa on the edge of the expanse. Passing the baton of chromosomes from generation to generation, sacred bundle.

The rock snake is 6 feet long with a gash that is mouth-like. It's carved notches appear to ripple in the light that flickers in the cave, making it undulate, alive.

Can I move from the mystery of the mountain cave to the one of the night sky of stars without connectives? The green cat's eye glints its visions.

It's what we can't see that negotiates us.

About the size of a small asteroid, all the dark energy in the universe. It's absolutely consistent, too, and doesn't clump or coagulate anywhere. Unimpeded surface, if you can imagine that. And it's shaping everything, not only how far we are moving from each other, but perhaps the structure of the evolution of the universe itself.

There is dark energy between you and me.

Oh, laugh. There isn't anywhere it doesn't penetrate. It's about the expansion rate. Be a magnet and it'll slow down. What we need to exert on each other are gravitational pulls.

The thread in the crudely embroidered flower on my sweater pulls. Pulls out, winding undone. A red lace of snake beneath my fingers. Or perhaps we are merely notches in the undulating cosmic serpent that is always shedding its skin, leaving skeins and webs of matter amidst the empty spaces.

One day I'll take you through a time sequence, and you'll understand the expansion and the gravitational fields, and the forces existing on nothing. To grow we have to push our gravity into the expanding fields of dark energy. That way we don't disperse.

Consciousness doesn't actually have an "I." That's a narratorial strategy we fabricate afterwards. Trouble is, there's no-one in charge, only neurolinguistic circuitries, insulas sparking feelings, a lightning energy of consciousness constantly recreating itself as we interpret ourselves in this vast place of fleeting planets and stars and galaxies, where no-one has the final word.

Friday, January 26, 2007

Flames of Insight Curling on the Edges of the Burning Paper

You create this writing. Yes, you do. I write the words, their coherencies dancing to my inner rhythms, but you create the meaning that the words impart. You, the reader, control my writing. Okay, that is going a little far, but I do write for your reading. When you completely miss the point of what I wrote I think it's me, not you. I wasn't clear enough; it's not that you have problems with comprehension, though in my darker moments I will admit I've thought this.

There are different groups of readers too. Who comprehend differently from each other. Offering your writing to different groups can be an interesting experience. But I won't get into that. Oh, and whoever leaves the first comment often defines how that piece will be interpreted and responded to. I often make it a point not to read the other comments until I've commented. I want a pure connection with the writing that doesn't need to line up with the 'group-think' because it's sure of itself. I personally like independently thought-out comments. On the other hand, when discussions get going, that's great too.

The comments often enable the next piece of writing. We are audiences, then, who shape each other's writing. It's reader-response carried to a newly imagined level, this critical approach to literature, but greatly speeded up in the blogosphere. The process of reception and meaning-making that enables the writing to live beyond the page it is written on.

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Blossom

Should a flower not open to the sun because there is nightfall?

Should a flower, soft, delicate, trusting, not blossom magnificently, brilliant unfurling full petals, splashing perfume, colour to the world, inviting pollination, growing rich seeds for the future, pods full of grace, because the sun is swallowed up by darkness?

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Outside, looking in.

Metaphors aren't arising. Something resists them. It's a constructed world that perhaps is a metaphor for its own processes. Of corporate wealth built on bodies of work. Of living off the crème of interest payments. Capitalism is "borrowing from the future."1 These wide berths of marble pillars and floors and tabletops, of huge glass chandeliers and sophisticated stores, of pin stripe people, confident but wary, built on profits from debt payments. What enables one to have what one can't afford, now. Purchases contingent on future payments that gouge the paychecks of the present. A future that barely exists, or does as a distant phantom. All around me at the Food Court where I sip coffee and write in my notebook, not the upper echelons of power but office staff. Thin plastic credit cards already overloaded, mortgages, car payments. And a disjuncture in the metaphors of financial power that the structures are a concretization of. Profits from the excesses of the moneylenders practices, this glimmering, gleaming Mecca of wealth. What if we chose to live within our means - would corporate complexes of banks like those surrounding me vanish into the mirages they are?
_________________________________
1 Cited at I Cite:
Zizek writes: "Lacan's notion of the debt that pertains to the very notion of the symbolic order is strictly homologous to this capitalist debt: sense as such is never 'proper'; it is always advanced, 'borrowed from the future'; it lives on the account of the virtual future sense."

Sunday, January 21, 2007

Relation Of

Monsieur, you can't be possessed. Any woman who would try to possess you doesn't understand you.

One can only come into a relation of love with you.

Saturday, January 20, 2007

How did...

How did you write that poem? How did you paint that painting? How did you find that friend? How did you know to be in that place at that particular time? How did you know how to escape that situation or choose that deal?

Unrepeatable and beyond explanation. Nor can you properly impart the sense of wonder you felt at what happened.

The series of apparently random coincidences that occurred to get you from point A to C were actually specific. A specific sequence. Intuition got you there.

It's a trustworthy navigator.

But requires 'letting go.'

In this way, it is akin to religious belief.

Living your prayer; living your wishes.

Putting aside your tiny maps and trusting that you know the way.

Let go. And find what you are looking for.

Friday, January 19, 2007

'Self-Portrait in Bathroom Mirror' Shots

BC-19Jan07
Bought a new sweater today, have a new job, may be moving into a new apartment, a whole lot of new things, I guess. Not great photos, but what the heck...

Self-Portrait with a Fascinator 2016

On Monday, I walked, buying frames from two stores in different parts of the city, then went to the Art Bar Poetry Series in the evening, ab...