What is Hidden in Ourselves?

What is hidden in crevices, tiny tide pools, our obscure and wayward selves? Our main narrative, who we are, what we've been through, how we think of ourselves, our stories, the way we present ourselves to others, what if that falls away? Our mainstream still, empty, non-existent. Creeping out of the shadows, slithery, bat-like things, or fairies, gnomes, sylphs and undines, or a cast of characters of every shade and tenor, or visions of sublime beings composed of light? Would the inner child – of fears and magic – creep out? Would we utter pure poetry, mad phrases? Would stray, incoherent thoughts stream by, seed fluffs floating, promising blossoms? Can we surprise ourselves? Do we know ourselves? Are we open to stories of our lives that don't fit the main narratorial road we've carved out of the mountains and sand and ocean of our experiences? Can we accommodate our minorities, submerged selves, to create an inner democracy between what composes us? Listen to stray thoughts on the edge of your consciousness – what do you hear?


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I wrote this prosepoem 5 years ago, but edited it for Big Tent Poetry’s June 4th poetry prompt: where will our wild things be?

Sure... it's a rephrasing of the question posed by Big Tent's auteurs, but you can see from my piece, I understand what's being asked! ::grins::

(I've been all those things - sublime vision of light, and yes the slithery bat self -when I dare!)

The Lady and the Chimera, 12" x 9", 30.5x23cm, oil on canvas, 2010.

                                                        

Rendering, rendering...

Rendering, oh my life is rendering... what you see here only a small bit -  2 hours before I can watch it 'to see.' I hover over my work like a worrisome hen. And only at 50% resolution (any higher resolution and I'd be waiting days for every little bit to render).

What I'm working on has taken days, and will take days to render when it's finished, something like 30 hours, and the videopoem is sooooo boring! Oh, not the music. The solo piano of Jose Travieso is incredible. I decided not to interrupt his ecstatic playing with voice but to have words you can't quite read float over the screen. Of course I'll tell you what they are when I upload the video, if, if that day ever comes! The footage of me dancercizing in the living room leaves a lot to be desired, for sure. Originally I liked the funk of the ordinariness of it. My house shorts, dog-walking Summer clothes, baggy, unglamorous. But it all bores me now. My apartment is small and overstuffed. I've layered way too many filters. I am finickity, perfectionist, long, long hours without stopping. What is this strange obsession to finish what is dull?

click image for larger

                                                        

Sampler of Videopoem-in-progress

direct link (it's unlisted): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TciSPbfRLQk

A tiny sampler, an unfinished cut, of a new videopoem I'm working on (already the little piece of lettering floating over the screen has burgeoned four-fold to staggered layers and the colour is now a deep dusty magenta).

The crazy woman dancing in her baggy shorts in the living room sometimes with her dog is NOT how I would imagine a video for 'El Loco' but somehow it works - there is a resonance.

I'm pairing a crazy dancing episode with a brilliant ecstatic piano solo, where Jose Travieso explores avante-garde music in what he calls, "sporadic music." Sporadic music, he writes in the notes to the album I drew this track from:

is a collection of open technics of composition where the different musical elements (specially rhythm, melody, tonality, modality and structure) are affected by a constant process of transmutation and instability, changing everytime by means of harmonic relations, games of additions and substractions, retrograde expositions of previous schemes, logical transformations, sudden ruptures and a few more of crazy things like these. The composition based in ´sporadic musicª is a very creative and unpredictable work, creating rules, use them and later break them at all to do and mix new rules and so on. The result is minimalist and reiterative, expresionist and unstable, surrealist sometimes, always interesting...

'El Loco y la Niña,' or 'The Madman and the Little Girl,' by Jose Travieso - http://www.josetravieso.org.

                                                        

A Lascivious Tray

For my housewarming you arrive with a cooler on whose ice a bottle of Moet and Chandon Brut Imperial champagne waits, and a power drill to hang my curtains.

While you hang, I toss organic baby spinach, fat green leaves, sliced large white button mushrooms, raw and thick, thin wheels of hot red onion, peeled sliced sweet mango, a handful of ground walnuts, slivered almonds, flax and sunflower seeds in a raspberry vinaigrette.

On the sectioned tray I lay ripe strawberries sweet as jam, green grapes, sinful fresh figs.

From its wooden case, I lift fresh smoked wild Sockeye salmon and lay it down.

Large green olives stuffed with garlic nestle beside the focaccia embedded with olive slices, sun-dried tomatoes, chopped onion and herbs.

Around balls of sweet honey dew melon I wrap ribbons of proscuito.

Peeling the papers from the cheeses, I uncover Isigny Sainte Mère, a creamy Normandy Camembert, Pont-l'Evêque, a soft cheese, pungent white Cheddar, tangerine-coloured rich Mimolette, and from sweet sheep's milk a soft Italian Percorino Toscan Fresco.

It is a steamy June day.

We take each other's clothes off in the enrapt way way lovers do. We feed each other with our mouths, teeth, fingers. We hold strawberries between both our lips and bite them.

We sip long crystal flutes and drizzle champagne into each other.

I'm sure I lap-dance, it's becoming a blur. Leonard Cohen's woman, that beautiful Anjani, sings soft, sultry songs of his poems.

Lust breathes us.

Later, drunk, I dance in the living room, a naked middle-aged woman.

The curtains are drawn tight.





This morning I videod my exercising, dancing, and then layered so many filters on the footage Final Cut Express says it'll take 4 days to render a 12 minute section! I'm currently trying to circumnavigate that by saving to QuickTime, but that's a 20 hour process! Oy ya. These stills may be all that there is to show of my afternoon's work. Let's just say, three years later, not naked.

It was a memorable night, perhaps our best, but our last. I’ve kept the empty bottle of champagne on my shelf since then, knowing I had to write about it. In the Winter I received a letter from his other lover and then we discovered each other, though I had ended my relationship with him not long after the evening I write of here. This is a section from a much longer prosepoem.

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This prosepoem piece was written for Big Tent Poetry's May 28th poetry prompt: aphrodisiac.


You can read the response of some Big Tent contributers and readers here: Rubies In Crystal at WordPress.