Echo

This is a day for old songs.
Remembering where I've been
the eye stares at the hand
and wonders at its incomprehensible music.
Before, there was no barrier.
Now I am sitting in a rocker watching the world.
Now I am remembering.
How did creation flow through my hands?
Sensation unknowable.
The past rises up through my feet,
a dust cloud of moments
tangible, tinged with gold.
I exist to illuminate them
My little lantern-soul flickering
in the palms of these hands.
Come, let us tell the story again.

quite contented

Before breakfast at midnight,
We screamed in the snow
Then had a snowball fight,
Ate at my favorite SoCo.

We made awful puns
But I shouldn't complain
They think my humor's fun
And I've something to gain

Like maybe some pounds
From the tastiest food
But my laughter astounds
Who knew life was this good?

Rainforest, waiting

I should say I'm a fire hazard
Sugared petals, flames licking
Spontaneous whirlwind of
combustible crackling
lightning-eye silhouette
tinder-dry litter piling high
tense potential energy
pounding too fast
gasoline, along my veins
rich and incendiary
I have built this world from scratch
from half-formed, orphaned emotion
new hopes and joys,
utterly flammable, butterflies
still dusted
with creation. All my nutrients
bound up in the biomass
of the canopy. I am a
rainforest, waiting, for
the one I call enemy. Will you
light the torch and free me
to rage beond the borders of
your mind
fling open your doors and
stand terrified
as if you had no idea what
a fire could destroy, of yours,
in its unutterable self-destruction.
Don't strike a match, or
do you think you can stand that
close, feel the blaze of my hate
the glow, on your face, and still
retreat unravaged to the cool of the forest.

Creature memories

A lovely excerpt I found:

Tent tethered among jackpine and blue-
bells. Lacewings rise from rock
incubators. Wild geese flying north
And I can't remember who I'm supposed
to be.

I want to learn how to purr. Abandon
myself, have mistresses in maidenhair
fern, own no tomorrow nor yesterday:
a blank shimmering space forward and
back. I want to think with my belly.
I want to name all the stars animals
flowers birds rocks in order to forget
them, start over again. I want to
wear the seasons, harlequin, become
ancient and etched by weather. I
want to be snow pulse, ruminating
ungulate, pebble at the bottom of the
abyss, candle burning darkness rather
than flame. I want to peer at things
shameless, observe the unfastening,
that stripping of shape by dusk.
I want to sit in the meadow a rotten
stump pungent with slimemold, home
for pupae and grubs, concentric rings
collapsing into the passacaglia of
time. I want to crawl inside someone
and hibernate one entire night with
no clocks to wake me, thighs fragrant
loam. I want to melt. I want to swim
naked with an otter. I want to turn
insideout, exchange nuclei with the
Sun. Toward the mythic kingdom of
summer I want to make blind motion,
using my ribs as a raft, following
the spiders as they set sail on their
tasselled shining silk. Sometimes
even a single feather's enough
to fly. ----Robert MacLean in Earth Prayers from around the world

Do you remember waiting for the bus
in the early morning snow
smelled the frost and cold exhaust
frozen nose hairs (and the sharp
burst of cold air in your lungs)?
I was a dragon, mittened, bundled,
waddling, misting poison gass,
smoking like an absurd locomotive
in my bright ensenbleof primary colors
while the salt glittered with rainbows
of antifreeze on the pavement.
We did a dance so that our toes would not fall off
So happy to be zipped in up to our chins
mittens tucked up inside the sleeves
only waiting to shed all the layers
socks wet, hair tangled
everything un-tucked
when we come tumbling
inside from recess.
But the bus is still coming
childhood ambitions still unfulfilled
Castle forts are only the biggest snowbanks,
the lightning-speed rocket still only the playground slide,
packed down with snow.

What I was missing

Stomping my feet in doorways,
puddles slowly spreading from cast-off boots.
Joy that settles quietly in a blanket
blowing my nose into my mittens,
already soaked with snowmelt
trudging-yes- I miss trudging!
The cold, the feeling of cold
and keeping warm as an activity
the primary activity.
Something constructive to fight
Putting on the heat and the windshield wipers in my car,
a complicated dance of agency between the fog and the frost
the crack of ice in a puddle
the whole world as my playground
breathing in snow-filled air
visibly magical now
looking up into a dizzying snow spiral
tasting metal, cold blood,
a glimpse of eternity frozen
my forgotten element,
enemy that I hold close
struggle made beautiful by necessity

See

I remember climbing up into the maple tree and sitting there in its arms and feeling held by the green bowers' embrace an expansive love enfolding me hidden, invisible, green fairy of the air I was, a small thing that could climb with skinny legs dangling, an apple and a book. What else the summerhood child of pleasures? My green libraries the sundappled pages that shifted all around me with the whisper of a thousand voices, each a character and each a friend, their names and patterns known to me within the wide world of my myopic inspection
daydream self that stumbled stopped dead at every dewdrop, pebble alive in millions, little worlds in every corner framed by my own fascinated mind.

What I could learn of, eagerly I climbed, remembering not the day I marveled first, saw the leaves on the trees, unlooked-for mystery revealed, two small windows--each one eye--and worlds were opened, trees, books, everything that I could fit within the frame and always and intently press the bridged glass-rim further up my nose, if the windows were only closer I could see more, know more, peer into the very corners of the universe, tease out test answers, life answers, read what's written on the board, read what's written in the wind, stay a little longer before the great show, spend another moment, breath forgotten, lost in delicate intricacy. Be quiet enough and read far enough long enough read the spaces in between the books upon the shelves, the curves between what is now and what is storied, stored. Futures, sometimes, maybes, more windows seeing past to untold worlds. Around the next corner, or the next, inside the next cover, beneath the trunk, the shafted sunlight, if I hunch my shoulders and direct the torrent, hold my head still with both hands, I might yet find the biggest frame.

Internecine

adj. destructive to both sides in a conflict.

Hidden wrath in a place of power.
So quick no one sees him draw his sword.
Who will inhabit the castle of bone
With life ambition's price to enter?
Unrelenting foe, immovable, unseen.
For you this is not a home but a
Battleground.

Gifts found today

"Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up
Fostered alike by beauty and by fear"
"a Boy I loved the sun"
--William Wordsworth, Prelude Book 1

"While the child was dreaming in solitude, he experienced a limitless existence. His reverie was not merely an escape. It was a reverie of flight." Gaston Bachelard, The Alchemy of Imagination

The gallery of an inspired artist. Charismatic megafauna have their own dignity, and as he says, the inspiring romantic or mythic images resound deep in the emotional consciousness. This is not merely simpering wildlife presented for a WWF calendar, but a visionary on the boundary, at the crux of nature- culture interacting and speaking in our lives through his art.

of things which are small and quiet

Another review, I haven't read anything since the last one, I must confess that I've been renewing the same volume since May, disgusting but true. I just received this in the mail,
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
and as the title promised, it speaks to childhood memories of confusion and wordless reverie, I've only read the first chapter but it's telling me about emptiness and silence and the reasons for them, darkest patches of a child's soul buried underneath years of reflective habit.
Other than that, the writing style is startling, flooded with imgaes of nature, bright, lurid memories. And it is set in India, country of my dreams, maybe all dreams. She sees the biggest thing in the small things. And she understands why I start all my stories with "There was never anything that could be said to describe..." or "No one could tell..." or "Nothing ever happened to change..."

here are excerpts. They are long because they were so full. THIS IS NOT MY WRITING. It is Arundhati Roy's. And if it makes you read her book, then that's good, but if it gives you just a taste of what touched me at the bottom of the well, then that's something too, and you are closer to thinking you understand me.

"Estha had always been a quiet child, so no one could pinpoint with any degree of accuracy exactly when (the year, if not the month or the day) he had stopped talking. Stopped talking altogether, that is. The fact is that there wasn't an "exactly when." It had been a gradual winding down and closing shop. A barely noticeable quietening. As though he had simply run out of conversation and had nothing left to say. Yet Estha's silence was never awkward. Never intrusive. Never noisy. It wasn't an accusing, protesting silence as much as a sort of estivation, a dormancy, the psychological equivalent of what lungfish do to get themselves through the dry season, except that in Estha's case the dry season looked as though it would last forever.

Over time he had acquired the ability to blend into the background of wherever he was--into bookshelves, gardens, curtains, doorways, streets--to appear inanimate, almost invisible to the untrained eye. It usually took strangers awhile to notice him even when they were in the same room with him. It took them even longer to notice that he never spoke. Some never noticed at all.
Estha occupied very little space in the world.
Once the quietness arrived, it stayed and spread in Estha. It reached out of his head and enfolded him in its swampy arms. It rocked him to the rhythm of an ancient, fetal heartbeat. It sent its stealthy, suckered tentacles inching along the insides of his skull, hoovering the knolls and dells of his memory, dislodging old sentences, whisking them off the tip of his tongue. It stripped his thoughts of the words that described them and left them pared and naked. Unspeakable. Numb. And to an observer therefore, perhaps barely there. Slowly, over the years, Estha withdrew from the world. He grew accustomed to the uneasy octopus that lived inside him and squirted its inky tranquilizer on his past. Gradually the reason for his silence was hidden away, entombed somewhere deep in the soothing folds of the fact of it. ...

Rahel drifted into marriage like a passenger drifts towards an unoccupied chair in an airport lounge. ...
But when they made love [Larry] was offended by her eyes. They behaved as though they belonged to someone else. Someone watching. Looking out of the window at the sea. At a boat in the river. Or a passerby in the mist in a hat.

He was exasperated because he didn't know what that look meant. He put it somewhere between indifference and despair. He didn't know that in some places, like the country that Rahel came from, various kinds of despair competed for primacy. And that personal despair could never be desperate enough. That something happened when personal turmoil dropped by at the wayside shrine of the vast, violent, circling, driving, ridiculous, insane, unfeasible public turmoil of a nation. That Big God howled like a hot wind, and demanded obeisance. Then Small God (cozy and contained, private and limited) came away cauterized, laughing numbly at his own temerity. Nothing much mattered. And the less it mattered, the less it mattered. It was never important enough. Because Worse Things had happened. In the country that she came from, poised forever between the terror of war and the horror of peace, Worse Things kept happening.

So Small God laughed a hollow laugh, and skipped away cheerfully....
What Larry McCaslin saw in Rachel's eyes was not despair at all, but a sort of enforced optimism. And a hollow where Estha's words had been. He couldn't be expected to understand that. That the emptiness in one twin was only a version of the quietness in the other. That the two things fitted together. Like stacked spoons. Like familiar lovers' bodies. ...
In a purely practical sense it would probably be correct to say that it all began when Sophie Mol came to Ayemenem. Perhaps it's true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes.... Equally, it could be argued that it actually began thousands of years ago... in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how.
And how much."

And I finished the chapter, and then I cried, and then I slept. And I'm still working on how this is true, and why it's been hidden so beautifully.

more pop music that's embarrassingly true, embarrassing because lyricists hit us over the head with our own malaise, or celebrate the surrender to shallowness of feeling. They say the things that it's not acceptable to express, saying the most (not)serious things about emotion that are taken seriously(not). or maybe it's the other way around...

"i don't love him, winter just wasn't my season..."
"Cause you can't jump the track
We're like cars on the cable
And life's like an hourglass glued to the table
No one can find the rewind button now
So cradle your head in your hands"
...
2am and i'm still awake writing a song
if I get it all down on paper it's no longer inside of me
threatening the life it belongs to
And i feel like i'm naked in front of the crowd
cause these words are my diary screaming out loud
and I know that you'll use them however you want to"

sesquicentennials and other squid

You will find meaning in things when I am gone
And so I'm not worried about leaving.
And because I'm not worried, I don't have to leave anymore.

Pop songs being true:
Black and Gold "Cause if you're not really there, then the stars don't even matter, and I'm filled to the brim with fear, that it's all just a bunch of matter... If you're not really there, then I don't want to be either, I want to be next to you"

Love song "I'm not gonna write you a love song, because you asked for one, because you need one... I'm gonna need a better reason to write you a love song"

I'm actually so impressed with Sara Bareilles, here is another one:
Fairytale "I'm not waiting for the next best thing"

"Who says I can't be free, from all of the things that I used to be, rewrite my history, who says I can't be free?"

Disappearing is how you can tell you were there

Disappearing is how I can tell I was there
Fading out, I feel a sudden elation
I existed! I was material, factual,
solid matter! I will go tell all my invisible friends
and they will be jealous.

goodbyes

I understand why a heron flees at my arrival.
Crashing through the underbrush, I have broken the spell, and things which were silent and unacknowledged must flap away impressively deeper into the growth as the light dies in the autumn sky.
Yet still every time I am saddened. The heartbreak is always fresh as for a moment, the heron and I stare, stark recognition and the tremendous quivering fear that I have transgressed some boundary of his domain. Do I hold my breath? Do I take one cautious step, shift my weight, try to hold every ounce of muscle still to my will? Is that wrong, as caught in his gaze I try to be closer to touch the stabbing wildness even as it touches my memory, that image, the subtle discovery of other resounding deep and far down inside my mind? Do I glance down for a second breaking eye contact, and what has made me uneasy in the face of this unwavering stranger? Does the heron's gaze weigh more than his sudden flight, winging above the riverbed and beyond the treelined banks, yellowing for a moment with late afternoon sun? The rare gold of this memory is measured in sadness.

It is very precious to me.

I will keep enacting this scene, I will crash and flail in the underbrush on autumn walks, always at sunset, and when some minute change, a stillness invoked from the air makes me aware of the heron's gaze, I will be still, I will be sad, I will be perfect, and he will leave. The tragedy thus continues, how could I wish it otherwise, I for my glimpse of eternity, followed by the reminder of his power to withdraw. I am myself, always arriving just in time to see him leave-- which is too late-- always the outsider, always too loud. There is something the heron wants, and to my dismay it cannot be me. But if I am myself, I am part of this scene too, I do what is in my nature, so my presence is no more unsettling than the heron's. What do I tell him that he cannot bear, from which he must turn away and fly? What do I say in my unwitting pursuit about the wildness of the soul?

The beauty of a piece of fruit--
It's keen, awkward taste-angles,
Sauciness, round and rolling with juice.
The quirky mirth of mother earth.

questions of some import

I have assumed that I want to learn.
But what if I don't want to learn this fast?


The future is pain trying to be born:
Baby alligators gnawing at my flesh.
Why am I embodying future pains?
And will I be rent
For the alligators to swim free,
Waggling their tails?

What if I could be yours?

Could we spend an eternity of todays in a sailboat of dreams
power our wishes with marshmallows and love
the fattest clouds that we herd around us
bobbing onto the seas of tomorrow?

And would that be the better part of a life lived on the water?

there aren't any
small cookies in my pocket
unless you count crumbs

What could I say to the unfolding of my heart?
The sigh of wings unfurling
Flex yet be silent, and test the breeze.

Streaming

I have been seeing the ghosts of things past
Sitting in a seat facing backwards on the train to watch the memories and milemarkers streaming out behind us, in front of me. Visions living in the spaces behind mirrors.
Have I regrets?
I am walking along a road, it has rained and the maple leaves lie damp in the gutters. Their companions rustle and sigh in the wind's caress, waiting for release. Autumn lies thick on the land, and the blonde bleached grass and mottled browns of scrub extend over the valley. The only accents are the few blazes of color in the lone holdout trees. I glimpse a river running behind a house. The water is brown with slate grey reflections from the sky, and it looks cold. Its burbling is barely audible, muffled by trees and houses, but I want to stand and hear the full roar. I have come to a fork and choose the path closest to the river, hoping it will open up onto the bank, and I start to walk parallel, craning to see in between the houses. I am approximating, always anxious to see how soon the full flow will come into sight. The farther I go along the road, the more I feel the cold and heavy feeling of committing to a path. Should I have struck across the high grass at the first sight of water, lifting my arms and scooting sideways for a closer look? The river isn't going to meet up with the road. It must curve back around. And now I am taking myself farther and farther away from the clarity I so desperately wanted. Cut off from the source. Car fumes settle around me and refuse to dissipate into the autumn wind. Everywhere boxes and parallel lines, but all I want is to cut the corners. Find the hidden torrent and be swept away.

Purr

No one would ever know what I took in the night,
the satisfaction and sleepy warm fuzzy feeling
I stole, or did it steal over me?
Can contentedness cover me the way a comforter does
so that I hum all over--
a cat that somebody has brought home.
I really like the furniture.

small stones in the river

O crepuscular half-beings--
Time and Space--
be thou appeased;
I have yet to finish my exams.

A hollow space in a stone
of surpassing beauty
and all I can do
is watch the water
knowing that I have no pockets.
The measureless grief
of dropping that one stone
to burble with a thousand other worlds
below the river
is a thought too painful,
too complete, to pass out of memory,
still too bright and heavy to hold.
Yet shadows claim me still
the lives I could have led
inside the intricately textured ripples of a tossed pebble.

Something with wings

Halloo in the frosty silence, halloo in the echoing night.
The smallest pieces of the globe are glowing shards in our hearts
The myriad reflections of a lost myth
Beyond the shadow of smoke, beyond faith,
Formless hope in the wellspring
What is the question reverberating against the walls?
A fairytale, is it made of more than glass?
Can it be bigger than the fine, fragile bird skeleton we clutch at with clumsy fingertips?
What will make it live and sing within the cages of our breasts?

Anything but wings

Here it is, the poem towards the end of the book about fireflies.
Go into the twilight.

I am the one holding the bubble wand. Fortunately (?) my power is in positively altering my environment, though I often do not directly feel the results. Let's talk about allelopathy, secreting chemicals that alter the growing environment and make it less hospitable for one's competitors. Allelopathy is an adaptive strategy. That's not what I do. I am about the business of making things slightly better in the space all around me. I focus and create bubbles, dandelion tufts, things beautiful and simple and buoyant that are dispersed on the wind to take root in some forgotten corners. I no sooner breathe than create, no sooner create than rejoice. And my greatest joy is in the motion and interaction that my loves and small attentions conceive. I create a place that is a little bit better, a little richer, than anywhere else, maybe it is the only clean patch and neat, or riotous and vibrant, but the party which is open, is open even to the people who come and take (we call them generalists) who will take what I can give and then move on. They pop the bubbles which would have died anyway, but they tread on the goldeny threads of inspiration and cosmic joy in that moment of dance between the world and the senses. They are loud and don't know what I have begun to say in the quiet. My worlds are not hidden from the street traffic, and everyone can see what is valuable in it but not why, and they pull the meaning up by the roots, dissect it to see if it had merit. A disincentive perhaps to share my world, to exhale (my being and my breath). Every body has to survive, but if I can't help but live in mutualistic association and I have no protecting symbiont the world takes care of itself by taking from me anything that I offer.

Show up at the page, appearing at this window I offer myself up as a blank mind to the tender mercies of the winds, Muses as faint in scent, as feathery to touch, as invisible, as passingly extant as all thought and inner experience flowering into some product the subtlest fluid of which it is permissible to drink and in drinking to be drunk deeply, to pour forth that fountain-- that voluble torrent of love and care, the softest words whispered to oneself and the dark ceiling in the night beyond light in the twilit chambers where filters each shadow becoming impressions on the pastel wall, as memorable as water beads running in the shower, and as intently noted even while they slide away all. Words are free and thus is their pain; to live fleeting, mutable lives in the mind, altering the landscape for the space of half an eternity--half a second. What could matter in this ever-fixed ever-changed war, where transformation is the only constant, the only choice, and the particular, the definite marks death?

I am frustrated with my own slow progress, self-referential loops that leave me myopic in the passive and descriptive, endless circular thoughts filled with commas, with hesitation. I am frustrated with the way my mind settles and clears following stones thrown to the bottom of a lake. How long it takes. I am the stone-thrower. I fight the gradual accumulation of what I already sense, and would stamp my feet to have the whole before me. Despite my tantrums I work steadily, I progress despite myself, or when I am asleep. I must keep myself in the dark, work miracles behind closed eyelids. No wonder my waking self forgoes sleep as long as or longer than it can physically be forgone, anything in rebellion, anything but what my deep self dreams of, anything but wings. Why can I not grant that boon in and for myself? I am yet keeping myself powerless. Stalemate with stale hopes on a dusty shelf, when I know that the snowglobes hold castles and patterns of the deepest shades, burgundy, royal blue, and the gold that burns. Dust is useful to me yet, and it suits my mood. Things which are glorious pretend at the tawdry. After all, from what matter sprung creation?

Awkward tusks and the tear-shaped moon

'The time has come,' the walrus said
but all the cuckoo clocks had fled.
'Never a moment's rest' cried he
and chased them all upon the sea.
'Time must behave' the walrus croons
under the sympathetic moon.
She solemnly reflects his tears
and listens to his deepest fears.
Her smiles as she looks with glee
at clocks cavorting in the sea
are no less mild than the glance
upon his tusked countenance
as, gently herding clocks, she led
the saddest walrus back to bed.

Held the presses for long enough, i think

So I just went through another period of senescence. Creative abstinence might be a more correct term, though it doesn't encompass the withering shoots going from green to yellow and souring fruit wrinkling and turning hard and sad. I am sometimes a cantankerous old maid, and let my worries keep me in my rocker on the front porch wagging my finger at the world. How much power fear can hold over us! It take a tremendous effort to lift that all off my shoulders vertically, but I've understood the intellectual concept behind melting my fear away. I just need to know it in myself and put it into practice.
I walked around in a mind-dance, wrapped in myself, living in a place that I couldn't explain beyond the pages of books, between the covers. It was fine and I did not know my loss and my loneliness until a man saw me today, and talked directly to the thing in my heart living in the minds of long-dead writers. He stood on a rock and the black-eyed susan he held in his teeth stared straight through me, and I was pinned to myself by his questions, and the manner in which he addressed me. A genuine address to my sleeping self. He held out the flicker or thread on whose tension my whole life is held taut. I am convinced he was an unwitting prophet for just that one moment when he was God talking to me.
What could I do? I stammered, I stuttered, but I was me, after all. And I had never wanted to wake up so much. When my mind is not on fire, it is only damp logs. The sparks hurt too badly if it takes them a while to catch, and disappointment is an acrid smoke of failure clutching at my throat. I feel the layers of swaddling and fight against them. How much more painful still to know that if I were to wake, I would only feel that good as often as a person such as this came into my life, or simply crossed my path as today. A torn soul I fled, not flew, from that brightly shining being. God doesn't want me to give him the middle finger, but reality is too rare and too beautiful to bear on a day like this.

Who likes to feel laughed at?

Once upon a time, the world woke up. It was the funniest story that ever happened. And then it could have been the end, everyone slapping their knees, except no one got the joke, so they just kept living. It would take too much time to explain the joke, so everyone is very patient with each other, and humorless. We ruffle each others' hair, and pretend to be grumpy about this small consolation. If you catch someone's eye right after they see a balloon that someone has lost hold of, they will show you a piece of the infinite, blue chuckling music that we are deaf to. But it doesn't make them happy, for who likes to feel laughed at?

awake and not feeling anything particularly strong

And so I am just going to write and see what comes of it. An invitation into the night, into the mind spaces and the in-between places. Between one window of glowing light and the cathode ray signals I'm beaming out, or between mind and brain, between the fingers and my keys, perhaps that is where it really happens, mind and keys, fingers and keys, yes there's a dance going on, a dance I can't understand because (have you ever felt this way?) as soon as I think about it, I stop being able to type.

for a while.

THe way to keep myself functional functioning in motion is to keep myself from knowing what my hands are doing. IF not, I will steadily undermine all my own work with secret ninja thoughts sent by which half of my brain? the half that doesn't like me, sent to assassinate all my attempts to create something or be happy. I was happy in the midst of a sea of rain, I was happy floating in a dream somewhere beneath the pine trees, I was happy in my nest, in the soft warmth of silence, a cloudlike comfort, heavy and confining.

How do I keep myself conscious, when my instinct is to be ever wider, ever open, and embrace that which is most uncritical and free? I feel afraid, afraid to love too much, to be the firefly leaking sparks in every direction until I must fizzle out. It is uncontrolled, I am crashing and burning. And I like it. The hardest things for me are easiest for other people, and I will start with the basic premise they struggle with for their whole lives. Do I want to close down? There are people who could show me how, show me myself in the mirror if I wanted such things. What is the value of control? Learning it so you don't have to use it if you don't want to. Dammit, that means I should. It's a good thing there are counterterrorist cells in my mind, and spies and counterspies. Otherwise, I would have to make up far more for myself to do. IF I weren't self-sabotaging, imagine, I'd have to imagine a lot more. Have wizard's duels with people I met at the bus station. Not that I ever go to the bus station, but it seemed appropriately inappropriate. I am inappropriate. I laugh inappropriately. And I act this way when I'm sober. I act this way all the time. Do I act this way when I'm me?
How do I console myself, is feeling emotion just my indulgence, my bigger weakness, bitter, the emotions and the elements I'm drowning in, am i the vaguest Flower like the Little Prince's, not seeing anything in front of me, my reasons not making any but internal logic, what is my character's motivation? I worry somehow that metaphors fail me, and everyone else sees through being a hippie, they see in it something silly which escapes me. Perhaps I take myself too entirely serious when I should laugh, so that I do not laugh inappropriately as well as laughing inappropriately. In that case, and on that note, I will end this post by expressing the regret that I ate so many chocolates before bed. Though I cannot guarantee that such a thing will not befall me a second time. Temptation wiggles her fingers even now.

Shabby magic; some words and a handful of dust

As I spell I keep myself spellbound, fixed at my desk, fixed in my head. The words come flowing out, I read them, I read them or do they read me, but we remain aside from the world in a solitary love affair, in isolate reciprocity, ours the dying lovers' embrace. When will the words grow cold and stiff and press too tightly on me, corpse-white? Will I feel the growing horror, loathing as the thing nearest to me is revealed in its full monstrosity and hideous mockery of life? When will I curse fidelity? keeping me rooted in a loveless union out of fear, a miser grasping at sand, fists clenched, now emptying as the final grains tumble and with them, illusion.

Emanate

flight

How dull to be pinned like a bug to this earth, confined only to motorcars and reliant upon roads and contraptions. Oh, to move freely, to soar! To soar. To swoop low over fields, to see the hills come close, as if in embrace, and then to shoot up over it, to rise above it and be not encircled by the hills, not enclosed by the geography, able to see beyond it and to rush to the horizon with a puissant speed and solemnity, but in the intent, the forwardness, the hurtling, soaring flight, a joy, a delight, a rightness with the world, a glorying and a reveling in the air, the speed, the sky, oh god, the SKY, and control, a being-in-oneself, a being in one's element.

from my past self

Hi, I'm writing you a letter. I don't know if I could say this. Out loud, I mean. I say things in my head sometimes, to practice them, because they never sound right in my mouth, and i want it to come out right, but it doesn't. So I bounce things around in my head, to remind myself of what to say.
I'm always waiting. I don't know why, I just feel like that's how it works, and something should happen, someone should say something, like in books where something happens, always. I am always waiting, and no one comes, nothing happens, still and quiet, static. I watch, and I can't find anything big happening, like it does to the heroine in the story. So I read, and I hurl myself into the story so deeply I am the character, and the author, and the setting, and the time, just anything but me, and time stops, all the petty things stop, my body and my aches all stop, and I can be happy, or can will be happy, because it may be dark or depressing, but I know that there will be happiness, but more, not happiness, meaning, purpose. That's when I cry the most. I don't really cry, but I cry more than when I really cry, I cry deeper and maybe it never ends. Jolted out of the story, the plug pulled, my body snapping back, and this sinking sensation as I reorient myself, as I close the book, it/she/he/I screams No! Not back to that, don't go, stay and lose you and find me and ride the waves.
It's called emoting, isn't it? When you are in a story so deeply that you are riding the same emotional currents. I guard myself so much in the real world, but in a book or better, a movie, it's ok to relax, let go, because whatever happens, whichever rollercoaster turns plunge me through despair, rage, loss, I know that the ride will end in fulfillment.
If you take me to a movie, I don't know, would you? you can see me being the other person. It's so much safer to be this other person, because their life is planned out, and nothing bad can happen, or if it does, it will eventually come out right. I can't be me, because everything would be happening to me, all that nothing, like the universe saying one big NO.
Reading novels has left me so dissatisfied with life, with my life. I am wandering aimlessly, vaguely searching for something meaningful, grasping at shadows and elusive aromas that slide along the wind. I want real, but not this real, I want Everything to mean something, life that is like having a lunch of bread and cheese and an apple (macintosh) and cool water after a whole morning working in the garden, a full belly and the satisfaction of life (that's why fresh bread is so good, it's irresistible because it is life channeled into something, you work at it and turn it into life, and you eat it and it fills you, healthy and whole and completed in a way that sweets cannot imitate). But life is really for me like a box of chocolates, but not really a good quality kind of chocolate, more like the nestle junk. It tastes good that first moment, and you enjoy, but then you wonder why you ate it, you feel it, poor and shabby, like dirt, in your mouth, and you think of rich and exquisite things, and filling things, and then all the joy of eating has gone, and you want to spit it out, but you are left with the bitter after-chocolate tang. That is my despair. What I want is the water which tastes so much better, cool and singing from the tap, than any soda hissing when opened. I want full, and satisfied, and all I am is empty, with that tantalizing hint of chocolate, sensations of the strange, and I want more, more fantasy, even though I know it won't fill me, it can fill me, but just in a sickly way, a sickeningly empty way. I want to be full.

storm

Something in the night kept me from bed
an event, hanging in the distance, electrified
the still summer sky. Wide awake, despite the complaints of my exhausted body
only then did I realize fully the freedom of summer, to do anything I wanted,
the boundless sun powering my veins with
raw energy I never felt in winter,
the need to act, to move, to be in motion.
But the charged pause held me too, to wait, part of the calm, and it came.
the reason I was still awake at 2 am.

Storms are the most exciting thing that can happen
No one can stop them, and everyone, even important people
scurry inside, out of the rain.
The danger, the thrill of lightning in the air
fries all superficiality and manufacture and everything is
nature, man just another beast, cowering
in awe and fear of inevitable, majestic Nature.

The vanguard was a blast of warm wind,
rippling in the grass and tossing treetops
to show the silver underbellies of the leaves.
It rushed and trilled just beyond my window
and I pushed up the screen and stuck
my head out, letting the wind make my hair
a brown tangle as I tried to breathe in
the vitality of the tempest,
only ducking my head back in once the
tangles turned to heavy, damp ropes
and the rain came lashing down
shifting to slant through my window
at just the right angle so I had
to shut out the cooling breeze.
But then the light show began
tremendous cracks following
the blue blazes lighting the whole
familiar scene until long after
I could peer nearsightedly through
the fogging glass, and long after
my body shut down, propped against
a mound of pillows beneath the sill,
and the lightning played inside my eyelids
the rain washed through my dream
as I drifted through a sea of raindrops.

summer kiss

How silly to sleep in summer
with the heat and the restless sheets you kick
and find yourself in a web of nightmare bedding knots
and all you want is to run barefoot on the cool wet midnight grass and breathe
that secret quiet air refreshing itself, breathing the new air of tomorrow before anyone else.

hai... ku

How often are haikus
of cherry blossoms and yet
the trees still hold grace

Adventure Parts 2-6

What more could I add?  New friends.  A club with lighting like stars exploding all over my skin, dancing through supernovas.  Being sorely tempted by the ice cage, which required donning Russian hats, fur coats and drinking vodka.  Riding trains, always my favorite thing to do, and running through a train station, weaving around posts and between people to get on the subway just before the doors close, Felicia in high heels, everyone out of breath, hearts racing.  

Late night snacks and feeling like a complete teenager, extending, unculrling conversation in the smoky pale dawn, being too excited and full of party to sleep, keeping each other awake and cuddling, pretending to yell at the guy with the lawn mower, 'people are trying to sleep'.  Breakfast at 4pm (and I'm the only one who eats breakfast food, coke and cigarettes are not for me). 

Frivolous underwear shopping which turned into trying on dresses, which turned into buying the dress I wasn't looking for but should have been.  The deal-clincher was getting locked out of my changing room stall and being able to wriggle under the door in said dress.  

An adventure in making dinner, or was it lunch? And of course pie.  Apple pie.  And being too tired and leaving dishes in the sink (what a luxury!).  And speaking of luxury, a hot tub in a place where the houses have columns and big porches.  Very impressive lighting fixtures.  

Bacon.  

A smallish road trip with a new-to-me musical playing on the tape deck, and my bare feet out the window.  It could be better, it could be raining, and just as we were about to reach our destination, the weather obliged.

A very merry undeathday to you (part 1)

This weekend I went into the city and celebrated Felicia still not being dead, and Elias too come to think of it. I knew it was going to a fabulous weekend when I saw the giant cube. Sitting and waiting for the evening to begin, I came to the realization that my way of participating in New York city is to blow bubbles (but I don't need to put out a hat for collecting change). Some guys across the street were playing really terrible jazz music, and the traffic was going by, while people waited to meet up with friends. My supply of personalized bubbles from Jeni's wedding came in handy, and I gave them out to people who were really excited about it. But what was amazing was the way that the wind blew the bubbles everywhere, out into the street, swirling around the statue, up into the sky. For some reason, skyscrapers make so much sense if there are bubbles floating up up up beside them. If I just blow bubbles in my own backyard, it makes only a few people happy, but in a city, the effects of living your life in a joyful way spread so much further. It made me rethink living in a hobbit house in the woods, because cities are where people connect.
And if you ever want someone to find you, leave them a trail of bubbles (but you have to keep blowing them faster than they pop).
This was such a real feeling of summer, and the East Village, and anticipation.

Come, listen to a story...

I've been thinking about fairytales, because of this guy. I've been thinking about being the wide-eyed child, the tumbling fool who wears his heart on his sleeve and carries his sentimentality as proudly as his old violin. The story is his, a pure expression of his adventurous spirit and good humor.

I was thinking about being the enchantress, the crone sometimes, sometimes the woman in the red dress, every ripple of movement around her soaked in mystery and seduction. She sees potential, and sets it on fire, drives the hesitant into becoming a hero, sets the challenges and makes the requirements, and with relish she plays the villain. My tale belongs to her, my stage manager, who gets things moving backstage, turns on the lights and whispers all the well-memorized cues to herself. She is in love with only the story, the characters as they will come to be.

I've been dwelling on being the reader, whose secret sorrow is the wonderful book she holds in her hands, the barrier between the worlds. She feels the bookcover in her hand, not heavy but significant, she counts the pages between her and the moment when they run dry, her currency the tears shed over beautiful things all too brief. It is for her, this story, and she can love it more deeply than anyone else could guess. She knows that the price of reading is to arrive at the endpages and be cut off from countless worlds as she shuts the cover, as she must. And still she must read, risk that loss, seek out her own suffering in exchange for the golden ball, a pair of shoes, the talking fish and a night at the ball. These things are tiny rivulets that run down into deeper, wilder undercurrents of myth. In the mutable void of story, she is cradled, she is home, for a while. Come deeper into the forest, child. Come, listen to a story...

I am considering playing a part, playing every part, but only if I let myself forget that I am the author. And that is the best game of all.

some snippets for you

Dear Moon,

Sometimes we get too caught up in daylight and activity and forget.  We are so tired from the work and toil of the day that we roll into bed and ignore the dark, ignore the magic and mystery of your hours.  You are beautiful, Moon, and wise.  We feel embraced.

I have to go through the doors that are open, and follow divine timing.  I have to live what I've been reading about.  Reading the book and using it are two different things.  How do I know if I've read enough, or should I just let go and live, step away from chronicles?  I'm not ready to emanate, I'm afraid to purely be.  

There is that shining eternal, a glimpse of soul in the forest, a raw, pure, remembered sentiment common among groves and glades, one of deep truth.   Fearful and lovely, lonely.

There are powers shifting, things blossoming, and I can only half remember, I have to walk the line blindfolded, stern judgment (my own?) behind me.  I shall sow the seeds with truth and carry my burden to its finish.  

I had forgotten the feel of sweat, the smells of work and the dirt, and the sunshine on me hot.  A closeness with the wet and the green, a talking to the particular patch of land as I work.  No, not talking.  Listening.  That is what I had forgotten.  

Listening.

There are some things to be said for solitude.  

I do not know the word for shovel in French.  Nor the word for hoe.

Theme Song... gotta get me one of those

So I've been thinking about what my theme song could be. Polls are now open. Choices are:
When Did You Fall- Chris Rice
Accidentally In Love- Counting Crows
Paralyzer- Finger Eleven
Viva la Vida- Coldplay
On the Wing- Owl City
Hey There Delilah- Plain White T's
When I Was a Boy- Dar Williams

Wet Pavement

Small world, where it rains at night, and things smell of lake and pine and the underside of damp leaves in the dark, secret earth. Driving through cloud-herds, swishing in the fresh, looming blue. Wet secrets whisper from the dripping leaves, the eaves and marges of the forest brooding at the wayside, making way for my wake. Awake still, with reflections past the wipers, the pavement glistening a lake of ice and vertigo, and I slide along it, loosened from perception and glowing lines. I could live in this dark mirrored world where the signs shine out and cars cast glimmering trails, and the noises are those of a mermaid's dim cousin sighing gently in her sleep. For the hushed space of a rainstorm, I dream.

Even affirmations can be frustrating

My paradigms are not shifting. It is as if someone else is confirming a paradigm that I didn't know how to express. But I was aware of it, without words, and because I couldn't name it it was full of hoarse sorrow. As I am reading the Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abram, I am feeling grief for the loss of a larger sense of connection to the community of life. I can feel the nerve endings that were severed when I or my predecessors were cut off from the nonhuman world. My ancestors robbed me of my heritage, this valuable sense, with a vicious and painful separation that is today manifesting everywhere as pollution, degradation, physiological disease and psychological disorder.

I'm beginning even to question keeping houseplants, as it separates a single organism from coexistence and interaction with all others (gee, kind of like us! I don't need ants or bird, wait, do I?). It is cruel to put a fish in a bowl, not because it hurts him, but because it denies and cuts him off from all elements and forms of knowledge, experience of life and life forms, and with this codependence removed, his life is now meaningless, without context, and he is gasping just as surely as if he was taken from the water.

No wonder I am ill. Not like in Madagascar, violently, but this is more a malaise, my head blocked up with a sinus migrain of the spirit. I lost 11 pounds due to dysentery, but I gained 15 back due to anxiety at being again rootless from the material world upon my return to my own culture. Even when I was there, I could feel the way missionaries and colonizers and aid workers had wrenched from the land some meaning, forcibly, with language and science as primary weapons.

I am frustrated by the huge barriers to sensitivity and sensation that exist in our civilized, high-tech culture. And also that people who are in need of life-saving solutions embrace these imperialist, colonialist and violent technologies which will unwittingly sever their ties to any life-source, imprisoning them in the tomb of the individual existence.
I want something so badly, but I can't articulate it.

Keep your eyes on the hat with the feather

I am trying on selves, the image I have is of the costume box adventure, parading in front of the mirror in as many different guises as I can conceive of. What am I practicing for?

a sample of my knitting

One of my qualifications should the zombie apocalypse come: I can knit and sew. Also one of my qualifications for marriage, but hope chests are a bit outdated, and no one really gives a damn anymore about needlepoint (which is good because I've been getting rusty). This took several hours. It's lamb's wool and I am making it into a pouch, note loose ends, it's not finished. It will have tassels.
The design I came up with for a gift! It's sort of every spirally thing I've ever thought about. Also the triskelion, which might be a Celtic symbol? There should be more elaborate interpretations in the future, this first spiral leads to smaller spirals on the edges, and they all circle back around. If we are thinking about symbolically portraying the cosmic dance, for me it would be something like this. There's a lot of focused energy and intensity, but also a bubbling sense of humor and intelligence, of consciously playing the Game.
Textiles do something to my brain. Something good. I have yet to find a metaphor for ecology that I can become so immersed in as the task of knitting. This is the way I see problems. I have a hole, or a dropped stitch, and first I sit very still and figure out what happened, a matter of temporospatial observation, what is the pattern, and how did it change, and take it back to the root cause of the problem, giving it enough slack so that I don't undo it further. Each stitch on its own is very loose, but put them all together and you have something flexible and whole. Miss one stitch, all the others start to fall apart around it. From a tangle of yarn I can create (or help coax into existence) something that will hold together. Turning holes into wholes. That is why I'm optimistic about the environment. I have patience to sit undoing a knot for hours after most people would give up and cut it apart.

Rest

"I haven't slept in ages" said the giant
as he lay down in the valley
a mountain for his pillow
and pulled the treeline snug around his chin.

the draught of knowledge

The bells of the chapel tolled, but he had lost track of how many chimes, so he was still floating out of time, the blue evening light filtered through the library's elaborate window panes and the dusty, weathered stacks. He was stuck inside the sphere of lamplight, surrounded by the piles of books he's made the walls of his academic universe, pillars of text stretching back to the bones of the world. He spent hours hunched inside that yellow sphere with the dust motes and the rustle of paper, his pencil filling in the spaces between the books with his own thoughts. He could have used a laptop, but it seemed more real to him to go at it with his shirt sleeves rolled back, with the real live books sighing away in front of him. He wanted direct contact, his bare skin soaking in the words of ages.
There were people, he knew (though the concept was hazy and half-formed), people outside who did it all seemingly without effort. It just came to them on the morning air, and they breezed it all onto the page, floating not wading through coursework and term papers. He didn't know how you got to that level, surely not by hard work because what those people did was at another plane, more a direct and somewhat mystical channeling of knowledge. He despaired of ever achieving the same facility, feeling himself weighed down by the rigidity of his own habits.
What he didn't know, and what was evident to most professors was that he wanted it badly, there was a fire in him and he would search for books and drink in lectures to feed it. Here was one who needed knowledge, and so the breathing pedagogic fossils knew that he would always find it and they were not concerned. It would never occur to them to tell him this, but they remembered well their own journeys, hunched with their noses touching the pages to better direct the torrent of knowledge. They knew that you either wrote all the time because you had to and the words coming out were as natural byproducts of your existence as shit or carbon dioxide, or you were kidding yourself. The ones who made it--who had to make it--were the ones who immersed themselves gasping in the vortex, becoming percolators and wells and taps for what they could barely sense, the raw river of consciousness tugging somewhere at their souls.
Looking up now from his private fold of the universe, he stared blankly, trying to see beyond the bubble of his thoughts like a goldfish through the watery glass. He wondered about the world outside, but didn't know how to go there, or if they had water.
The library settled on its foundations and he settled too, back into the depths of his research, and the pages rose up to welcome him back.

Three reasons to go back to a monastery

The umbrella in the night
looming dark beyond the flashlight's beam
hides a lotus.

A small orange and white cat
is Lucky
to call this place home.

Bluish white puddles in the dawn
and the ceramic basin of sky
brims over.

Always a first

Tonight I was not as moved by something as I was when first I experienced it. I feel old.

"Always a great one for the tea parties..."

---The Secret of Roan Inish.

BTW, I did NOT paint Tree full of Sky (below). I wish I had, but the talented artist is Clive Barker (see post below).

What can you do with a drunken sailor?

That was the first thing that came into my head, be prepared for STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS! More like a trickle. If there was anything to be said, I would have said it. No actually, I would have hemmed and hawed (what a great expression that is) and then I would have said 'um' a few more times, and then thought about what I was going to say some more, and then tried to phrase it, with the end result that you ran out of patience and finished my sentence for me! I stand in the way of good conversation. I also try to stay on the phone as long as possible, there is something so beautiful in the awkward way people try not to seem like they are hanging up on me, because I'm sure not hanging up! People are awkward and beautiful. Have you ever noticed that? Watch someone eating a sandwich. Watch someone eating anything, really. They are very self-conscious, and disgusting, sort of, you can hear chewing noises and see down their throat. A great thing to do is to try and make eye contact with someone while they are eating, and see their gaze slide away, embarrassed and full of enjoyment. I love how we think that we are so fragile that we can be shattered with a glance! Walking along down the street, carefully avoiding each other, eyes on our shoes, nervously we put our hands in our pockets, we take them out again, we ruffle our hair. Being a human is probably the best game I can think of, because we forget we are playing and we start taking ourselves seriously! Could that be the theme of this blog so far? Hmmm....
I've been in a good mood lately because of the rain. About twice every day for the past month it has been raining in Poughkeepsie, and there is something about the sky just before, just after, or during a thunderstorm, it makes me very happy to be alive, and to be wearing a yellow raincoat, and to be wet/notwet inside/outside, any combination of the above, possibly with a mug of tea and a movie, or barefoot in wet grass. Also, puddles! The smells are better, the sunsets are definitely better, and it's soothing to listen to when I fall asleep. All of which leads me to the conclusion that I should move somewhere like Wales. Oh, Wales... of course I would live in a cottage, and it would downpour regularly and then one day a young, freshfaced Welsh shepherd would knock on my door, carrying a lost lamb and wearing a wool sweater (because damp wool has such a Nice smell), and I'd invite him in for tea (hem hem).
The answer to the drunken sailor question is you press-gang him, of course, but it's suggestive isn't it? In my childhood I was exposed to an unusual quantity of Irish drinking songs. I've no regrets, I won't be the sucker who has to buy the whole pub a round because she kept clapping when the chorus was over. But my true weakness is for folk ballads. Songs that wear their hearts on their sleeves, and are damn proud of it too. Unabashed sentimentality, that's for me, with a bit of antiwar propaganda here and there.
I suddenly had a paranoid moment of realizing how impersonal the internet is, and how little control I have over machines. Why am I trusting the computer? It could kill me with its little finger. If it had a little finger. (WHY is THAT an expression? English, I tell you, it's pretty weird, yeah, hehe.) But the worst is bathrooms that are fully automated. If machines suddenly developed consciousness, a sadistic sense of humor, and a grudge against humans, bathrooms in which the toilet flush, the running water, soap and dryers are all electrical would be an absolute nightmare. Be afraid! Be very afraid!
...And that's my story.
And then we went and had pasta.

Drunk and giddy we converse

drunk with ourselves and giddy with each other
whirl in dance into the infinite
playing the best and only game
the only game
flinging ladders across the void suspended
in midair waiting
to be met halfway
the next step, step again
climb until you run out of rungs and
take the next step in perfect trust
a thrust into the mist, the gist
I understand!
I understand!
spirit-jumping into the world
or out of it. out of time
eternal in between
with no way to fall
word-woven nets unneeded
unheeded in the silent knowing
to keep talking when you feel complete
when there can be no more pretense
and still you allow yourself to pretend
that the golden settling whole
is not gathering around you
but it's getting harder to breathe joy instead of air
the longer you try not to notice
the longer it stays, the only unicorn in the room
the elusive flocking to your beauty
in this moment
filling the world to the brim
the holy grail
the space in the center of two overlapping circles
and a heartbeat.
How can you be afraid? How can you not
be? afraid for the dissolution of affinity
the hesitation, a waver in-
complete trust
afraid to scare it away
the only measure how far from the center
your fear takes you
the conversation in-dwelling
dancing with you as you
pretend that you are not the mystery
that shines in all your faces.

Family Fun

The longest game of cards. Ever.

"We are ganging up on you in a game based entirely on chance."

"It's all good until somebody gets hurt. Then it's hilarious."

Ahhhhh!

So much to write, so little time! It is paramount that I get some semblance of sleep, yet how can I do that when everything is changing all the time, and I'm so excited about it? This is the imagined danger, that I will burn so hot I crisp and fall away into ash. It is not real. I have felt this way sitting perfectly serenely on a park bench, watching a thunderstorm be born. I have sat and wondered if I should move, if it matters whether I get soaked. I have decided it does not matter, and sat there for a while, and then decided it doesn't matter but I like to be dry, and to dash breathlessly in out of the rain, and so I did, laughing. I am taking the party with me, and you are invited. I can see the vortex rippling where I go, ere I go. I am starting to run, starting to dance, and the universe is rushing to meet me. The possibilities are limitless. There. I think I can go to bed, if that's true. It means tomorrow will be amazing.

where am I going

There are people stalking me in my dreams, or maybe just one person, one feeling. The dream is a dark one, and the being sees me from its shadows, and I know it's there, though I can't change my route to walk away. Where are you going. It's not a question. I see the dog sleeping on the sidewalk and don't want to wake it, as I grab my things and tiptoe to the gate, but it is the shade in the house that is awake and malicious and speaks with all the irony of God asking Cain Where is your brother? But this is vicious, dark humor, at my expense...

Beware of: Shadowy figure with a bullwhip and a ferret, responsible for two deaths. I found both the bodies, and realized I had passed by the murderer earlier that day/dream...

Another dream involves a woman with an umbrella, she is short, face obscured, and she does not try to chase me, because she has a sleek gray ocelot that is tracking me down. I want to pet the ocelot even though it is going to bite me and I should be running away. I come around a corner and the woman traps me with her umbrella. I am powerless. I throw up my arms...

some thoughts, perhaps: Even if I do not consciously acknowledge it, perhaps I am telling myself to embrace pain and darkness and things that can hurt me. I am stalking myself, knowing I cannot get away, and my intent is murderous self-love. Maybe I'm the one playing the oldest game.

The Book

The Book: on the taboo against knowing who you are, or The Book: that is changing my life a little right now. I don't usually like books about philosophy, because how can you express something so close to your center self? But in between the words there is something falling, and when he forgets to be a philosopher it approaches poetry. Alan Watts doesn't actually say the important things, but he also doesn't try to. He indicates.
I welcome any comments or thoughts on the passages I found most interesting.
quotes!:
"Is it conceivable, then, that I am basically an eternal existence momentarily and perhaps needlessly terrified by one half of itself because it has identified all of itself with the other half?"

"... as my sensation of "I-ness," of being alive, once came into being without conscious memory or intent, so it will arise again and again, as the "central" Self-the IT- appears as the self/other situation in its myriads of pulsating forms-- always the same and always new, a here in the midst of a there, a now in the midst of then, and a one in the midst of many. And if I forget how many times I have been here, and in how many shapes, this forgetting is the necessary interval of darkness between every pulsation of light. I return in every baby born."

"In unconsciousness all times are the same brief instant."

"... [those] who honestly believe themselves to be lonely, individual spirits in a desperate and agonizing struggle for life. For all such there must be deep and unpatronizing compassion, even a special kind of reverence and respect, because after all, in them the Self is playing its most far-out and daring game--the game of having lost Itself completely and of being in danger of some total and irremediable disaster."

"It is simultaneously the purest nonsense and the utmost artistry."

Three is a magic number

Or, to quote one of my favorite authors "Three is the number of those who do holy work." Which brings me to my three favorite authors: Clive Barker (quote and image), Neil Gaiman, and China Mieville. Concepts dreamed up by these men have changed my life and more importantly my dreams.

Clive Barker is a fantasy/horror/erotica writer, and also paints some of my favorite work (on the left is tree full of sky). The real reason he is on my list is because of Abarat. Barker took a break from his usual and started a series of intensely personal, vivid oil paintings, which grew into the hundreds, and then became a storyline, and then became a series of the most beautifully illustrated, weirdest, wildest fiction I've had the good fortune to come across, with here and there a glimmer of live, imaginative power, higher purpose and philosophical commentary that makes Disney squirm in their mainstream capitalist pants. And it's about to get even better. The next book is called Absolute Midnight. More information here: http://www.clivebarker.info/yaabaratunpub.html

Neil Gaiman should need no introduction. All of his fiction is enjoyable, and the past year I dove into Sandman, opening floodgates that I did not know existed. I'm still traveling headlong, through dreams, through darkness and all unspeakable, and I have no regrets (except that it's over, but it's never really).

China Mieville is the other side of the moon, an Author, someone to draw down the portals. His writing makes me want to drink coffee and cackle insanely, sit on a roof and burn deep into the night (not that i don't want to do any of these normally, well, everything but the coffee). London, or London as it could be, is alive and brooding, breathing, stinking, fucking, dreaming, behind everything he writes. The only author in a long while to send me searching through my thickest dictionary regularly. Even though there are no illustrations (I allow begrudgingly) there are thousands of composite images evolving organically from the smog and diction. Steampunk, socialism, magic and even stranger perversions of the natural world. Perdido Street Station or the short story the Tain are the best introductions to his work.

The inside of my head surprises me occasionally

In the dream I just had, a line of women were walking down the runway, and one woman gets to the front and she's doing a little hip wiggle, and then it turns into a belly dance, and she is making eye contact with the audience and she says "Did you see that? Look at these frills. Of course, if you buy the dress, he's going to want to see some moves." And then she goes over to someone, and her feet are about level with this audience member's face, and she's wearing these ugly transparent drawstring bags on her feet, and she tells the lady "Will you check out these shoes? They're so comfortable." And then someone comes to shoo her off, because she's holding up the line and she goes "Oh, yes, that's right" and holds up an index card, which she doesn't read from, and she says "And next... who had two sandwiches for lunch..." and then she walks off, and the next girl comes on, and she's enormous, and accompanying her is her even more enormous mother, and I sort of follow the first woman but I hear in the background the next girl telling the audience that her dress is made from whey, and then I realize how ridiculous this dream is and I fall on the ground laughing. I end the dream in hysterics, curled up in a ball behind the scenes of the runway.

What do you call Inuits who are really annoying?

Peskimos!

So why mangoes? you may well ask

There are two thoughts. Actually, three. Thought One is an idea I had while doodling in class, about a place I wanted to live in, where I could stand on my balcony and pick mangoes and eat them whole. I can eat at least four at a time. It is a dream of abundant, sensuous pleasure, of sunny, sweet fruit and the flowering of my creative life. Thought Two followed shortly after, and involved having so many mangoes that I am standing on my balcony and giving away a pile of them. As I release them one by one into the air, they turn into golden thought balloons that float and bob gently before you. This is a dream of wealth shared, spent lovingly on you. Taste the mango, enjoy the celebration, a windfall, feel good. Leave the seed somewhere else to grow, and pass on. We are the agents of seed dispersal. What good is changing the world if you don't enjoy it? And what is enjoyment if it doesn't change the world? Thought Three I will keep to myself, for now.