white face

just gonna jump in here - in the middle - the party already starting.
I am on the phone with (I don't think) English Teachers Anonymous (but something like that) - there is someone I can't hear on the other end talking about online assessment.
Valerie Wheeler comes in and with me, still with my ear to the phone (how much of a workaholic am I?) she gives me a present: body of a duck, middle of a lamp, some lampy kinda thing and then a beautiful painted wooden face on top. she says it's very expensive, very much not cheap. it's very valuable, from egypt.

There is a lot of scurrying in the house - people leaving for another place. The sky is wild with weather and they put me in a helicopter for some reason. Though I'm terrified and the sky is churning blue black somehow we get right back to the ground. okay i'm bored won't write about this - the party on the side of Siwa's melting city that they were repairing!!! to look like an amphiteatre - or the girl, at the beginning of the party who sang and then backed up and bumped into the three steps that were next to the pool. She flipped on to her hands, jumped one step up, one down, two up, two down then into the pool. Was it part of her act? She was on the bottom a very, uncomfortably long time. I said I hate this. But she came up. won't write about these things/

I do, though, want to remember riding on the wet freeway - in a bus, I don't know, but somehow open on the top. We approach a cloud that is a giant rectangle, cloud lined on the outside, inside, though, open blue then deeper blue then deepest blue black sky. It's not quite like a funnel, but it has some draw. My body rises up, horizontal,my eyes see white and I say something like "i am lifted' but I hear my voice fade away before I am heard. I feel myself vanishing into my awareness of white and soon I see a face, its eyes blinking. i don't know if it is enormous or if I am simply right in front of it (such is scale). It becomes two faces, attached, hers and mine. Then, just hers. I stare at every feature, exactly as they were - but in the smallest scale of white, off-white. It is sweet and somehow it is not scary or even awful, just what is, when the face turns stiff, cracks, returns to falling flesh (peeling white) and bone. It was then, I think, I actually fell asleep and into the rest.

starlings

so no plan here.
it's just Boxing Day.
have an early fire going - a wee minute to decompress between continued festivities.
I guess (in lieu of having the girls about) I got the Christmas I was hoping for: many gatherings, old friends, oldold friends, new friends and newnew friends - music, warmth and a dial way down on stuff.

Was grateful, of course, that I didn't die on the freeway last evening - though I think I felt at the time it would be absolutely worth it. I simply had to pull over - right then. Near miss! whatever - look up, oh my god.

Oh what do i need to describe this: film, I guess, or music, or most like, a multiple, extended (self-edit)?

Okay. So for weeks now I've been wondering, and wanting to take pictures to document, why the hundreds of starlings that I've always loved as if they had something to do with me (like the wild oats, the crickets, snow when there was snow - all one loves), seemed to (did) congregate on the wires right over the freeway - not off to the side, right over the traffic leading west to San Francisco, east to the mountains, our seemingly grim car congestion thronging below. And - as I drove to work, there again, right over the freeway at its busiest part - this on the north/south corridor. They would sit there patiently. Always be there.
No huge statement. Just wondered that they preferred the traffic to the calmer phone wires available nearby.

Christmas Day Eve then. No one on the roads, but me (and the person I almost hit ---sorry, man!) Coming back over the river - the clouds billowy and a saturated sweetest pink over the Sierras, the sky then - speckled darkly, generously, with a fluttering ceiling of the birds I love (that are always, at this time of year downtown) - now I think because of the confluence of highways.

Then, over the highway the whole sheaf of birds suddenly lifts up, like they are all on one piece of giant paper. The sky lightens as they do and they curl away in a reverse wave - separating, taking individual paths. And then, from the east, a cluster, round like a giant hurled ball comes at me, straight at me, then disappears. I think they are gone (and have in the meantime, pulled over and almost gotten creamed by that pavement-colored sedan) - I look up and the birds have become a giant ribbon of birds, shaking out, inverting from top to bottom (invisible when they turn and slice away - DEEP black, a thousand winged shapes, black, shimmering deepest black when they bank and compress). How do they know: now turn, now pull together, now ripple out towards that actual twinkling Christmas star. How do they not crash and fall from the sky? The choreography and impulse and numbers staggered me. Definitely blackbirds in the thousands (that fifteen or so minutes of that later, when I came back around, had mostly all settled into two very tall utterly charming musical trees - tens of birds on every branch). Their animation and energy was thrilling. Shared, distributed. Compressed, dispersed, rejoined, turned, shifted, hopped, lifted - singing.

Oh goodness. Even as they settled into their vibrant, relative stillness, -their twittering silhouettes against the now pure electric blue last illumination of Christmas - words fail.
But they should.
Miracles are expressed in the medium of their mystery - in the fact that the birds really have nothing to do with us. Except that we can see them, love them, be amazed by whatever it is they are doing and how they know without direction how to do it - their spectacle of pure living which looked an awful lot like wild, joyous celebration.

most beautiful girl

soon to be behind a veil.
more on this girl from the remote Egyptian oasis of Siwa and her angry, then suspicious, then protective, then shy, then curious, then almost-smiling, open, then young and waving and heart-breakingly dear big sister - in the future.

wishing them happiness and luck today in their such-different lives.

Blog , v. what you do after you light Alog

The Washington Post has published the winning submissions to its yearly contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words:

1. Coffee , n. the person upon whom one coughs.

2. Flabbergasted , adj. appalled by discovering how much weight one has gained.

3. Abdicate , v. to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.

4. Esplanade , v. to attempt an explanation while drunk.

5. Willy-nilly , adj. impotent.

6. Negligent , adj. absentmindedly answering the door when wearing only a nightgown.

7. Lymph , v. to walk with a lisp.

8. Gargoyle , n. olive-flavored mouthwash.

9. Flatulence , n. emergency vehicle that picks up someone who has been run over by a steamroller.

10. Balderdash , n. a rapidly receding hairline..

11. Testicle , n. a humorous question on an exam.

12. Rectitude , n. the formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.

13. Pokemon , n.. a Rastafarian proctologist.

14. Oyster , n. a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishism's.

15. Circumvent , n. an opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men.

16. Frisbeetarianism , n. the belief that, after death, the soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.

an explanation of introversion

it's not that I don't like people, but of all physical things, talking is the most uncomfortable for me. it feels to me much (and more so) as Li-Young Lee below describes:

I've been thinking about something for a long time, and I keep noticing that most human speech‹if not all human speech‹is made with the outgoing breath. This is the strange thing about presence and absence. When we breath in, our bodies are filled with nutrients and nourishment. Our blood is filled with oxygen, our skin gets flush; our bones get harder‹ they get compacted. Our muscles get toned and we feel very present when we're breathing in. The problem is, that when we're breathing in, we can't speak.

So presence and silence have something to do with each other.

The minute we start breathing out, we can talk; speech is made with the outgoing, exhaled breath. .... as we breath out, we have less and less presence.

An awkward sensitivity for a teacher, but, yup I love rainy days like this one when I don't have to come up with an anecdote or tidbit or theory or utter a damn word.

Hmm. And maybe that's why I like writing. It feels like a conversation, but not one that drains the 'oxygen of the self'.

okay. to sleep now.
will think of those Sonoma hills
and its cows

good old quiet cows.

Late Fragment

a poem a friend sent to me that I'd like to keep around.
(by Raymond Carver)


And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

bad camera / good philosopher

मेलान्चोली डे.

(weird. again on this other computer - the title in arabic...)
anyway, having a harder thanksgiving than I thought i would.
have been so solid and thankful and happier lately.
ah well.
felt though i had to find a quote as an offering of some kind so maybe I can come around now.
so here.
(for me: the many colors of the falling roses.)




‘Lost in the woods I snapped off a dark branch’
VI From: ‘Cien sonetos de amor’



Lost in the woods, I snapped off a dark branch

and, lifted its murmur, in thirst, to my lips:

perhaps the weeping voice of the rain,

a shattered bell, or a broken heart.



It came to me, something out of far distance,

deeply concealed, and hidden by Earth,

a cry, defeated by immense autumns,

by half-opened moistness of shadowy leaves.



But waking out of the wood’s dream there,

that hazel branch sang under my tongue,

and its vagrant perfume rose to my mind



as if suddenly roots I had long abandoned

searched me, the lost domains of childhood,

and held me, wounded by wandering fragrance.

god I love it here!

guess i never thought about the planet being lit up in the universe.
most lovely.

where have I lived and how

does it start with the suitcases?
I don't think so, but it's a serviceable cliché.

anyway, I'm in a place they call Aspen (I might be lying). It isn't really Aspen, but there is some kind of nice hotel there, I think. I'm just waiting outside.

ohoh I know why I'm resorting to lying - because I've left out the whole first part now: the school in the reverse amphiteater - students on the bottom (of which I'm one) and some guilty bit about a substitute who has done a fantastic job checking the work. I appear to be the only one with notes next to my name: missing work or missing comprehension. whatever. I forgot that part of the dream (just like they probably thought I would).

Okay to 'Aspen' - just a stop for me, a destination for many others. I'm waiting for the train to stop. I hadn't realized there was a Amtrak coming and now want to board it, for, as I was waiting, I tripped over a backpack (is that mine?) and another (is that my brother's, my neice's?) The bags have been there awhile, sloppy and half open. They are on the verge of mildewing from being left out. I gather most of them and now need to take the train as (Yes, Freud, damn you - can we get another metaphor on the set?): I've now got quite a bit of baggage.

Only the crew is left on the train and I ask them if I can catch it, just for a little bit; my house is just down there. (I can even see the dip in the road, then another, then the curve where it should be). They tell me just to walk and of course I should, can and do.

When I approach my house, I notice many things at once. It's really old: American old anyway, Old West old. It's front is only vaguely painted (I'm painting my actual house this week). Only the slightest color shows. Has it all dripped off? Gotten rained off? The old boards don't take the paint. (or, old broads - is this my worry?). Anyway, also, what seemed to be the facade of the house, dilapidated as it is, is just the face of the building that now has a courtyard of sorts - still of the same Old West variety, but - how to put it? - what was outside is now part of the inside. As always happens when I dream of my houses, it is revealed to be soooo much bigger than I thought. And, though there was more about being both shocked and impressed with myself that I had been so bohemian as to live in this (oh goodness!) ghost town, painting up one little facade and living there alone way before single women did such things, now - in my absence (I have no idea how long it's been) others have moved in and are, in fact operating a lively bar/restaurant (Plan B??) in the courtyard.

A kid comes up to me, asks who I am and takes my order. I say,"I own the place actually and I'll have a beer, no glass". He says, "People who drink are so much more fun!" and sets off. I notice on the shingles, patches of color have been laid down. They are about to paint. I think the red will be good. The bright red, why not?

In the meantime, my phone rings. It's _____, who never calls. He is calling though, in earnest just to talk and perhaps to schedule more phone visits as he's finally gotten his sentencing, and though his life is going well now, has to go to jail for I'm not sure how long - not longlong, but over two weeks. He is scared, needs connection. There is a lot of dead air on our phone call. Sometimes I forget he's there. I'm looking over the new table cloths in the restaurant, touching the edges of the rotten wood on my house. "Oh, I'm sorry. _____, are you still there? Are you worried? You should take my number." Maybe the whole time the woman is talking me, the phone connection is left open. Part of it anyway.

So, the woman. Who is she? The waiter has sent her to me for further inquiry. She is pleasant, beautiful, running the operation. She is cautiously patient with me when I say the house is mine. I can't offer much proof, but I remember being on the second floor. I think there might be someone there who can testify for me? A husband maybe? Or maybe my stuff is still there. We go in, up the fallen staircase. The door pulls off its hinges. The parlor looks so familiar - but darkened. (this, perhaps, for all my obsession with The Old House). Anyway, there is no one there. Nor evidence of me, my possible husband, my past life, but I'm more and more sure I'm telling the truth. This is MY house.

The woman says, "Perhaps you'd like to look outside. Perhaps that will help you remember." I say yes and right out from where we are standing is an open field - on the near top of a hill, with another rise off to the right and back.

I walk into it and the breeze fills the eucalyptus trees. Its leaves spin in a soft light. The grass is high and wet. A pheasant startles out and flies overhead. I say, "Yes, yes! This is my home. This is natural. It's where I belong. I've lived here. I live here" To the left, there, where this woman is staying now, that is the best place. I've spent happy years here. But when?... There is a clearing, a fire pit. I know the bedroom, the stucco floors. How easy it was to sweep the place, to feel beautiful there, how the breeze would circle, lightly, in the hallway. I think, now, she is Penelope. I'm not sure, but she seems okay on her own. She has lovers when she needs them.

I see, as I walk deeper into the space, a fountain or a large sculpture, up to the right and back, up one other rise. It sounds stupid now, but it is of a giant, peaceful dog's face (a cross between "Dog's Head" in Vermont, Zoe's beautiful face and the Jeff Koon's puppy in Bilbao).



It is then I feel certainty and arrival: this is my house. I walk determinedly forth and it all happens at once. I remember my painter, Keith, telling me - did I really want to fix up the house;it's near near a pretty ugly development (Sigmund?--now what??) but as soon as I'm sure that THIS part is the part that is mine, I see the giant - what is it? I think it's a Mormon Bank. Some collassal, clean, utterly unromantic modern monstrosity. It's right next to my house which, ah-ha, is actually painted - nicely but ugh.... to get to it I have to walk up a small street that's basically a tacky pedestrian mall with garishly lit shoe stores, dollar stores full of useless crap and other stores with the doors open, music blaring, air-conditioning spilling out.

The woman walks with me. I go into the house and notice the fine, painted detail. Yup. This is it alright. It's small. It's clean. It's not what I remember, but in the small upstairs, there is a folder. I am pleased, just to know I'm not mad and that I did something right, that in the back of the folder is my certificate of purchase. There's my name, my client number, a picture of the dull, little house.

So, it is mine. I was so sure it was the bohemian one.
But no. Maybe once - before the Mormon Bank was built.
In any case, I've been gone so long that this place has been turned into a kind-of donut shop. I watch another woman through the window serving coffee in the kind-of harsh yellow light. Business looks okay. For a minute, I get excited and think I could change it a bit: make it stylish, serve the great pastries they make now in the restaurant of my old house. But the hip-hop blaring from the clothing store next to me kills my enthusiasm.

I want to go back to the open field.
I don't know if I do.
I wake up instead in my little house, modest, half-painted, but mine, for what it's worth - and write for a bit too long before getting to my yard work.

very simply grateful

this evening for my many, most dear friends
(and acquaintances).
if i know you, i love you, in all of (because of) your peculiarities.

nono. not drunkblogging. just having a math moment:
adding up my beautiful luck:
years and years and years of all y'all. in this clump. or that.
a blessing. every one.

and just because I'm hearing it right now:

fear is the lock
and laughter the key to your heart
and I love you

and the resulting image

christan faur's work

shredded bits of the Constitution.

the waiting room

right at the end, the little dog finally begins talking again, still in her Queen's English, still about things muddled in the election. She is informed, in command of her facts, looks oddly good in her blue lipstick, but, as with such spouting types, talks when she wants to, for as long as she wants to, and doesn't care if you're listening. I had brought her to my mother, tired, waiting in the hard seats, for another leg of the journey, but the dog said nothing for the longest while as she sniffed around for scraps on the floor.

Earlier, in New York, I am making the decision whether or not to blow out my kitchen, though I don't really live there anymore and haven't quite seemed to accept that fact. I have two dogs now, both the size of my dear Zoe. Or bigger. Even bigger. One is Zoe and one has a bit more Dane in her. They are just back from a walk and I see the other is desperately thirsty and hungry (how long have I ignored them?). I hold this new ones giant head in my hand, love the weight and size of it - as I used to - as I fill a bowl of water and quickly another. When I put the bowls down the dogs growl at one another and I'm a bit scared. They scarcely fit in the room and I hope they don't tumble around, at each other. One of them my brother likes better than Zoe, saying Zoe is a bit removed (ya think?). My issue is how to move them, if I really don't live there anymore as (no invention here) they could likely not survive the brutal trip. Oscar says they can live with him in their apartment in Rego Park.

We are off then, my mother and brother and I.
There is a gigantic sweeping epic I scarcely remember, but the fast tankers in the harbor, wide-angle views down dramatically sloping high, dry mountains, a little metal trinket pressed into my hand by a stranger.

For much of the dream we are, like the dogs, simply waiting to be transported. One room we wait in is large, like a movie theater, darkened and with some steps down. Each person has a computer. Some are using it, mostly it's dark. Without a screen, separated from my family, I somehow am seeing clips of earlier family life. Mostly of my sister. The sound is off and I try to imagine what she is saying, desperately want to know what she is actually saying, but I fail in my dreams as I fail in my life to recall well. She looks just a little drunk but mostly just so very, very young and pretty. She is making friends with someone as she easily did. And I feel that terrible, extremely dull seriousness I felt when it was subtle, but obvious where things were going though everyone else was still laughing, at ease. I somehow enter into the space she is in and she tells me, with her winning, true enthusiasm about new people, how great this guy is and how beautiful his girlfriend is - who then walks up and goes off with him. My sister says audibly something like, "Hey! Soon!" They agree, wave pleasantly, and I'm left, for a moment devastated about all those she never got to meet, that we never got to share.

Not sure what's to bother in the telling of this except that I think I dreamt for 8 hours last night. Some bits I will leave out. Maybe all of it....

So hard to describe these things, how, in the darkened space of the waiting room lighter bits of idon'tknowwhat started to drift in, gather mass, momentum, become leaves or garbage, then women in their burkas and men in their luminous white robes and men in their military wear were herding them all like a waiter clears a table with a bread-crumber. I don't know what their equipment was: giant, flat, effective.

I say "What is happening?" to anyone. And someone says, "Just get out!"

I hurry back through the darkened seats, and feel rumbling in the floor from everyone moving. I see the white of my mother's hair in the back, see my sister actually there now, several rows ahead. She is completely wasted now, (as she would have been, reliably at a point in her struggles, with hours to kill in the dark). She has absolutely no idea where she is or what's happening (...do I?) and someone is there as someone was always there taking care of her like it was the first time or like they could help. I don't know how to get her to come along. I don't know if she does. She doesn't even seem to see me and masses of people are pressing behind me.

Later hours of the dream: shuttling from one place to another, the travel getting ever harder. There is a woman, like the young Dawn Allen, or like our new, most dear Hassan, who is oddly, utterly committed to keeping us safe, to getting us through the long, long lines and onto the bus (packed PACKED with humanity - I am the last one on and will lay on the floor) to our eventual plane home. After the bus, we are waiting outside. Just like Natalie was on the trip, and I was at ten, and perhaps still am, I instantly gravitate towards the animals, the strays - want a moment of their company, prefer it. I go up to the little dog, not my type, but cute anyway. I look close and see she is made up and quite confident and oblivious.
I am puzzled and charmed when she says,

"There it is. Should you care to believe what you're told, please do!"

इ ऍम बीइंग पुनिशेद.

ooh.what language is my title in and why??
i was writing: i am being punished.
because.....
not a week after leaving Cairo they discovered another pyramid 12 miles from our hotel!
and then this happened: a German stuck to a wall near the German Cultural Center in Cairo!!

so... i wrote, I am being punished, (i think by the oracle) for my not writing about our magnificent experiences, not a moment of which I wish to forget. hmm and now my title appears in arabic (?) - perhaps a curse for sneaking pictures in the tomb of Seti II. i hope that's the extent of it.

very strange
oh. speaking of which, here's the German fella at work:

frommyfriendLori

from my brother's travelogue.

hope you don't mind, rhino.
i like to just keep notes here. things I don't want to forget. and though I won't remember the below, I'd like to remember you doing it, and the possibilities that are always out there:
•••••••

OMG = better get me out of this town
I am NOT a shopper, not of that ILK
but this; this is truly the place to let go and let go I did
again!
kind of overwhelmed me
now I HAVE a major secret and YOU are going to have to wait four days to find out.....
mysterious enough for you??

I got two more major chunks of curtain fabric for a total of four squares; each lovely, mostly red or gold and TOTALLY Marrakeshi...and I got some clothes for myself, very minimal but MY color
and I have a spectacular door knocker of brass and a lovely handbag to carry it all in that will be my grocery bag for life, made of cactus no doubt

AND I ran into the sweetest man; a high school teacher of Arabic, who upon finding out I was an American, literally demanded that I come to his house for tea for two hours and then INSISTED on getting me the finest herbs and spices for Berber tea, so he did -- it is pretty spectacular stuff, curry and cumin and pepper and paprika and god knows what else - I hope I can get through customs!

then he dragged me to his friends to buy CDs of Berber tribal music - lovely!

then the curtain really went up - the teacher had warned me not to go into the mountains -- too late in the season but as I wandered around the medina later, some guy spotted me in my hiking boots and set about getting me a full day hike tomorrow in the middle altitudes - a 20 km romp that will take me through mountain villages and all sorts of things - perfect and safe - and just nuts that I would run into someone like that in the middle of NOWHERE

the weather broke sunny today and I saw the High Atlas for the first time, 3000 feet taller than the Sierra around Tahoe = BIG
too much snow to do the summit but it will be a good solid exposure the weather is also good tomorrow

then they will bring me back in time for one more sunset romp in the Jamaa Del Fna;
where I will peruse the snail soup and the goats heads and the monkey brains and ....
probably just order some bread!!

whew

and there is more, MUCH more but I cant and wont say cause I want you to wonder just what the heck did I get myslef into in my final days in theis INTOLERABLY CRAZY TOWN!!!!

this place is everything that you thought it might be and two dumptruck fulls more.......
good luck to us all, alas I must go to bed now with no idea what the vote is but
cest la vie
it will all work out!

interstices

honestly, i don't understand my life.
or, i finally do, and realize that i must, for all i've been given, find a more meaningful way to give back.

in these interstices, open windows into the foreign, such as most people never get.
my love for The Alexandria Quartets honored in every leaning porch, every steady, wary, intelligent gaze. not much time on the computer here, and the sixteen candles in the lobby almost burnt out, still the horns honking on the Corniche (sp) and Sameh (who just brought me a glass of red wine, telling me his name means 'forgive me' ["I don't know why my father named me that"] um... where was I, where am I? Sameh, and all the rest, closing up for the night. but I am jetlagged after 34 hours of travel and as wide awake as I've ever been.
such a day.

again (again for me? why?? the song from the minarette, the goats brought to town to trade for marriages, (impossible to achieve here, apparently moneymoneyrulesrulestradition -poor frustrated men}.still, in it all, the woman next to the dryland boat in the alley, the 1910 bicycle on the dark, windy pier, the hundredthingsyoucan do with a scarf, the lingering faces of my beautiful German family - thanks Uli, if you read this, for your generosity -- sorry about the swingset.

just waiting now for the arrival of my brother.

it is time to go now.
i am humbled. grateful.
goodnight from Alexandria.

sexualityissacred

cant'spaceinmytitlesdon'tknowwhy.

anyway, these words from a politician - Obama.
a first to my ears, from the podium.
eveyone talking about Joe the Plumber.
this is what stuck with me.
we wouldn't even need to talk about values if we understood this -- without, of course, insisting on with whom, for whom, or why - just honoring the gift, miracle and presence of/moment with another.

do we have to make everything a commodity to relieve ourselves from the unbearable burden of respect?

synchronicities.... so many. i carry your heart

nts: the settling of the covered bowl in my washing bucket. last bubbles. in fact, totally outdone, violent, extravagant and alarming, but here, just cruising the internet for something totally other and finding - utterly out of place, so weirdly, one of my eecummings poem for her that, as with Vati's "Air" did for a decade, fills my world when I least expect it, lest I forget- how could you both think I could (insulting, a bit, to the life of constant reocurrence that I live):
but still...quiet:



i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)


e.e. cummings

another old house = the US?

this one is mine. or i've inherited it.
it is huge and has four wide, deep floors.

i am laying down in the bottom one and notice that someone has either tried to cut around the fan above my head, or it's simply slipped but it is detaching from the ceiling precariously. someone has been there.

i go to the second floor and am shocked to find that the enormous, beautiful six foot round cut crystal chandelier has fallen from the third floor ceiling through the second floor floor and almost through the first floor ceiling. (some weird insulation takes up the difference).

i go up to the fourth floor and caution my mother who is there, bringing in groceries into that level which, oddly, for only her, leads out directly to the leaf-blown street. I tell her to be careful. Just after she walks over it without worry, the floor detaches and flies up like an enormous piece of paper, still attached, barely under my feet.

it had been such a grand house at some time.
but all the parties had weakened the structure.
there are footprints even - pressed into the floor from all the dancing.

now it's mine:
a total money pit, with only references to its past livability, functionality, grandure and grace, in need of expensive, labor-intensive, radical overhaul.

It's much too much for me: it's dangerous, about to pancake in around us, and it's my property now.

and says nothing more

nature comments . . .

a giggle in birdshit

calmdarkeyes

don't know why.
several times today i saw a deer i didn't even almost hit, but one I simply shared a moment with on a very, very snowy night, when I'd left my college in New Jersey after hours in a past that feels more like the future.

The snow was blanketing everything quickly. The flakes were huge and joining together on the way to their soft landing. The college was closed. Everyone seemed to be in. My car slid just a bit as I pulled over, seeing a reflection of my lights in the eyes of an animal up ahead.

I stopped the car and turned the lights off (music:off, mechanisms:off, noise-of-self:off) and felt the fat snowflakes land and melt on the back of my neck. My eyes adjusted. Between the dark but white flaking sky and the glowing wide ribbon of white where the black road had minutes before been - was a deer, an especially big one, it seemed, just standing, as if the four lane road had that quickly become a meadow again.

I just looked back and held the gaze. Long, quiet minutes passed. My car began to be blanketed, my footsteps had mostly disappeared and my good ol' sloppy east coast navy pea coat had gone white, the snow: erasing me, including me, taking me, too.

i don't know why i kept sharing that gaze throughout the day today.
there's nothing to it. (not like the time I went for a hike in the same area and immediately saw seven deer. ... and then, maybe a two dozen, and then realized that just about everything I took for a leaf was a deer. Forty at least there, each giving me the hard stare like when was i going to leave so they could get back to taking minutes, or if I didn't leave soon, some kind of trampling would ensue. This wasn't like that. Not a breath of threat or interruption. We were just one animal and another, in acknowledgement of that.
And winter coming sweet and hard.

I've just been off and on again back on that road today - in the middle of news of the Marriot blowing up in Islamabad, of unbelievable campaign inanities and Capitalism on improvised life support with our progeny once again paying the bill for the grotesque, irreverant, untethered orgy of IMAGE and STUFF. (what a week! what next?) It feels like by Tuesday the lights could go out.

And there was the snow deer, in the middle of my sunny Saturday rock 'n roll skating. Later - as I was painting (whitewhite) and earlier scrubbing the rings in the bathtub - hearing, inside myself, that sound, the best sound of all. Snow.

Nature: the context of all.
We've gotten so far from knowing it, ...but are sure to be reminded.

Could be a tough winter coming.

(fade to white)

thrilling!

been obsessing about this all week...

The CERN (particle collider) experiments could reveal more about “dark matter,” antimatter and possibly hidden dimensions of space and time. It could also find evidence of the hypothetical particle - the Higgs boson - which is sometimes called the “God particle” because it is believed to give mass to all other particles, and thus to matter that makes up the universe.

big news coming. eh?
even no news is big news.
so, okay, one side effect might be home-grown black holes that gobble up the earth.
maybe that's why it looks like God's Roulette Wheel.
perhaps that's exactly what it is.

whatever 'the actual' is will certainly have the house percentage.
but it was ever thus. and the pursuit of knowledge ever a gamble - though perhaps not quite so clearly. (though if these guys know how to keep a 17mile tunnel clean enough observe the pure behavior of isolated protons (which run around the length of it in 90 microseconds) then they surely know just a bit more about it than those of us (admit it!) who can't even navigate their Blackberries.

might as well watch the report (in arabic??) http://www.mypopkorn.com/news/international/big-bang-experiment-starts-in-geneva.html?show=MTM3ODY= whose only understandable words are 'scientific experiment'. that's all i understand anyway - except that

"Truth is Beauty, Beauty - Truth. That's all you know on earth and all you need know."

one way or another we will see more of It/both. soon.
God help us.

an etymology

epiphany: While it is defined as "a usually sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something" it is also interesting to note that, in terms of etymology, it is derived from ancient Greek "phainein" which means "to appear, manifest & display" and has the prefix "epi" which means "on" or "to"...

i just like it...
and am ready - today - to display a manifestation

patrick's poem

TWO MOVEMENTS

(fall and winter)

1.

I catch myself, surprised
looking at the wall, expecting
to see a clock. I think of how
things move, or don't.
The chair in the kitchen, caught
in the new fall light is as empty
as it could be: bodies, voices
gone from it, a coat of dust.

The clock is where it always is but
for a moment it is me who is somewhere else--
another house, another wall with another clock,
time beating away the years between.
It doesn't matter if I know what time it is now
or if I did back then.

This wall holds as much meaning as another.
Time doesn't measure itself.
The chair is only meaningful when someone is in it.
This particular light, beautiful on the wall,
the chair, the dirty stove, comes only once
a year for a few days.

It is a real measurement,
as is the memory of that other wall, that other clock
but not the wall itself or the clock itself.

It is 11:48, I find, when I leave the kitchen,
meaning nothing.

2.

For all this love of solitude, standing
in the yard, late, a little drunk, the last
of the cosmos flowers waving in the breeze,
friends are as distant as these stars.

It is sometimes a stupid life, this keeping to oneself.

I have my reasons.

It is the absence of warmth,
not the cold air that seems more noticeable.
I sit down in the old adirondack rescued
from a friend's garden refuse, admire
the armrest that I made to mirror
the one that survived
the years in the rain and the hot sun,
cut from equally old stock, pulled from
the firewood stack,
as close as the original to dust.

It's good work. I rub my hand across
the sanded smooth, unfinished wood,
and from that vantage
view the good wreckage of my life:
a small light burning deep inside the house,
a sliver of moon in the misty air above,
the vapor of breathing escaping into the oncoming winter
this silence that saves me and kills me,
this loneliness I sometimes hold in place of fire.
And love it, and love it. And why not?
There is always the promise of fire.
It is not too much to ask to find joy
in the most difficult things.

littlefriends

unusual

to find myself in such a dark mental space. not surprising, perhaps - what with these upcoming calendar days that i feel no necessity to suffer under and yet whose inexorable pull I feel anyway (and all the odd ironic recurrences: the hurricane in the gulf, natalie's earache, Zoe's collar that (though it reaks of her lonely, paralytic journey) I should be grateful for, and am, like all these tiny bits of residue that are everything and, obviously, nothing: Andrea's journal chronicalling every true cosmic miracle of her first pregnancy, and, on its flipside the child's own call for help or large-handed record of this Saturday's meal, xeroxed and shuffled in with my uncareful Perspective lecture notes; in the dark, last light of another moving day, another emptied garage, - the broken, obsolete phone message machine marked with tape: "Save: Richard's voice!"; our attempts to entertain, to play Liverpool Rummy, to pull through some tiny thread of familial lightheartedness all the while peripherally sensing imminence)[The 'Constant Gardner', the clasp at the chest, the book on ontology - a tiny window of a moment with the self as it wants to be - reading on the fourth floor of Port Authority, waiting for the very late bus, or, here, instead, the seizure - the blank eyes looking at me and saying "Miss? Daddy?", the end of summer anyway, the leaving of the little ones (and with them their soft little hands, their sometimes dumb, sometimes hilarious refreshingly un-adult jokes and piercing screams, the garish Disney songs and deep, true connections (here: hope); the flinted chips of memories - bright, many, but yes, flinted off, as most seem things seem these days - or maybe just on unusual, melancholic, nay (I can say that on days like these) despairing days. can't say too much in this public sphere, not for secret's sake, but, fuck it i can write any damn messy long sentence I want, until it's no sentence of sense anyway.
as it is. fragments.
modifiers and quotes -unrecognized, but of the deepest reference nonetheless, even if, as they are, unacknowledged.
no tadpoles in the creek, but the damn dog still barking. relationships ending - forever and for little reason.
delicate juliet twirling on the grass. where Andrea was Joan of Arc and I, as truth and legend have it, appeared from behind the now-gone cypress tree as the Dauphin, the army, the angel of that annunciation, and the good people of France.

Juliet saying, wait, wait! before being asked to dance again by us, ragged, sitting where my parents sat when I said as the Dauphin in response to yet another earnest request for armies, ..."in time, in time" ...

now she:

not yet. i need to start all my songs with bedumpbedumpbedoo.
she, herself,... no words for it. of that same most p a r t i c u l a r, inimitable, most delightful, oh...

spirit.

waste

of ________.
[where_____________= anything].
sick of it. seen too much of it for too long.

variation

on the tidal wave dreams. another new kind altogether.
this: no height at all, no wave either.
on a beach, vaguely slopey. ___ is in the water ahead of me, barely, but actually a bit too far out. This, because the pull is insane - soooo strong. I've turned around since realizing it and so has she. I'm five feet or so from two guys I can't identify. I want to ask for help, need it, but know I'd be risking their lives. I do everything I can to lift my feet through this thinnest of layers of mercurial water, pulling me and pulling me. I am making a bit of progress when __ shouts 'watch out!' and a wall of pressurized air (roaring fast) simply eliminates everyone.

(oddly - it wasn't a nightmare. just a variation).

exposure

Perhaps the judgment at the end of the last dream is to make me ask myself why I choose to jot down my dreams in a place that prompts me to 'publish post.' (or perhaps why everything I make seems to be ultimately autobiographical). Maybe I AM a ____. At least some kind of a ____-____ ____! But I do enjoy writing these and having my easily lost spontaneous dream images archived for later consideration.

If you judge me for it, perhaps find something else to read?
Love to you and the Universe,
--The Editor

smoking tids and, yes, bits

Kevin has taken his Elvis picture (which I really liked) and a little nothing picture I painted out of my room to keep safe in a little grove at the back of the garden. the absence of those things makes me redo my room.

i look for another place to work also in the sprawly open space (but I don't know where K's secret place is. (LR? hints?). I run into a giant spiderweb and lots of other people from the neighborhood.

some whole long bit about teenagers trying to steal the ford with me right there but they are stuck in traffic and I can't get any one to help. I walk around the car, call 911 and get phone trees and salesmen.

the whole place I live and work (which appears to be a school) is burning. It's been burning for awhile and I guess we don't care. We are upstairs at De Ville Ct. having a kind of dull party and looking through photographs.

I leave. there's some long bit about what sweats I'm wearing and a stack of old paintings on paper tucked into something I need to move. Some were gifts. Some I'd completely forgoten. The building is still burning. It's late Friday afternoon and the firemen are about to quit for the weekend. I call up to Reinhard, "There is a fire we need to put out."

The firetruck speeds passed without doing anything. The inside beams of the building are now orange.

I think I might have to do it myself, dressed in flannel one piece sweats (am I a victim, Freud?) and a light blue sequined bra I accidentally stole - an heirloom from my grandma to Juliet. Then Reinhard and some friends come down. He calls me a bad name and is shocked at some photos he found that I took - he thinks in Austria, but they are the Vermont photos (tough, yes - shocking, no). Anyway, I am the scandal. At least now maybe that building will be saved.

no free lunch

will give myself fifteen minutes - though I think most of this has gotten away.
so incredibly intricate though.

where to start? was in East Hampton, not at the old house but out and about a bit. my friend, Charise from high school was there and others, notably, I guess, Karl Rove whom I sat next to at some outdoor function. I was relieved to see my friend Jeff Jennings at the end of the row of chairs who was already smartly engaging Rove in some fresh discussion of contemporary politics. I said 'Let's go party in New York!'. It was early evening and the train of course takes three hours, but it felt right. I just had to have it, but also, apparently, I had to go see if I was welcome there.

(this after, I think, being on Strawberry Hill. Reinhard's friend, Randi, has kissed me to show me the hill is made of exceptional strawberry ice cream and the branches that have curled around the swingset that we've been swinging into the bright blue sky on he also breaks off: translucent sugar - ah! the Hamptons.)

so I go to New York ahead of everyone and go back to the apartment. ___ is there and many friends. (as I'd dreamt of the night before - the old house returned, full of people partying, using all the rooms). It is all fading fast but I go directly to ____ and ask if I am welcome anymore. ___ is very high and clearly has learned to hate me. I feel very hurt by it and sad for the loss of a sweeter connection. But I can't stay. I wander around the house and see all of A's things, a gold hair brush, shoes that change color when you dial the top of them, wardrobes full of elegant, sparkling dresses. (this is from a later part, but I'm running out of time and the shoes were cool). shoes become an issue though, because I leave the apartment apparently without mine. I am lifted down in an open gilded elevator. A lot of fun. I hadn't known about it. When I get to the bottom there is a man there who says I have to go out, come back in and pay for the ride. I go outside and realize I have no money and I have no shoes. I wander around what is now Brooklyn on bare, dirtying feet. I know they are waiting for me to go in and pay for my gilded ride, but I won't be able to. The street is bustling. I like it but know I'm in trouble. Then I see, just like the universe was providing for me - shoes in many sizes, lined up like the street sellers used to have them. I know I'll find my size, do, and then see a tag on them: 86 dollars!

I think then I go back to the apartment, see Andrea - yes, again not dead just for some undesignated interim of time. She has the shoes that change colors and everything else. She explains that ____ is mad because I didn't accept the offer of some big wigs to sponsor the Homer project, some bank guy and another chemicals guy.

There is a disconnected bit about a bus through the city. Karl Rove there now, calling out a window as I go through the streets (on a bus that won't stop; we'll have to jump) with my friend Brett, that the government just sees a black man as a dark Mormon - whatever that means, but it echoes through the streets and I have to admit he is ballsy and sure of himself.

So, at the end, there is lunch/dinner mostly a lot of champagne with big-wig #1. I'm drinking too much and the Russian next to me suggests I stop so I'll be ready to meet with the chemicals big-wig. I drink the glass to the bottom anyway. The feeling is unnervingly spendy but agressive, dumb, loud, showy, unfun. This is how you have to play to work New York, I think. ____ and ____ leave. The bill is 500 Euros a person!! I pull out all the bills I have. No euros. Nothing more than a twenty. I have used black duct tape to make my own shoes.

change the bulb!

Dimos has given me a studio in Greece. It is one of several apartments at first - painted over and painted over, white on white (like our apartment in Hell's Kitchen where clearly several times people had chosen to just paint over the lightbulb instead of taking it out: - the laziness!! - do it right, for Christ's sake...). While I was waiting to be noticed by someone I was painting in big thick color on the side of a couch and daubing it with my skirt. But then, when I was being shown around by a big Greek sculptor in overalls, I saw that there was a lot of rooms I could choose between. One - recommended by Dimos. A fantasic amount of space. And if I moved a few ladders and things - a corner that I could make into a little apartment. Dimos was busy doing something. Still sweet, no English, busy. Then the delivery came and he was overseeing it. He'd been shopping and bought me canvases and pencils, jars of linseed oil and turpentine, colors and t-squares, pencils, paper, charcoal, mason jars, brushes of every shape and size.... I was totally set up.

I was told by the sculptor, after inquiring, that there were only a hundred rats in the whole building and I was unlikely to run into one. I had also been told, by a friend in the earlier part of the dream that my mother was dying and could go at any time. She was there, unaware of her condition, as we walked around the space - now even larger with a road/parking lot through it and many great white panels so I could work on many big pieces at once.

Then Maria (also of Greece) walked us around the place some more. I could see the huge SPARKLING sea. The studio was underneath and described by a giant freeway overpass. It was in Athens. I would have to stay for the year at least. Abandon my job. (But I'm scheduled to teach eight classes, I worried).

I'm feeling bored with this entry so will stop. But maybe it (and certainly the studio gift) is from watching "The Notebook" last night. The mother, who had not followed her love and became a rich, crusty bitch, telling her daughter "I hope you make the right decision." But at the end I was asking Maria if I couldn't just come next summer, so as not to have to bail on my jobs, etc. To have both, as I always want. Or, because I was feeling like a chicken about totally committing to my creative life, whatever it could be.

So, I guess a little overwhelm right now that my energy is going towards responsibilities and not to my art, my loves. Not enough. I woke with the question unsolved.

Dunno.
Gotta get to work on a boring ol website. (not mine which really needs attention!!) hmm.
Perhaps just a caution to quit choosing by not choosing - the dream theme of the week.
I should probably pay attention.

a painting.

choices

I can get married tonight. I will get married tonight. I only have to choose between three men. i go to the place I am to meet them, a casual bar of sorts, open down to the slope of a hill and a curving street below. They are brought in for me shortly after I arrive. When I see them, my first thought is that they are all handsome, one boyish, one nicely rumpled, the last: just average, but, by any standard, appealing. The second thing I notice is that they are all in wheelchairs. Two of them, aware of my concern, stand up to prove they could stand up (to possibly change a light bulb if it was above them) but they can't walk to me, or move further. They sit and I meet them, get closer to notice one's chestnut curly hair and his tight grip on the armrest. The boyish one is more beautiful. Later, he will tell me a story of a trauma in his life, unrelated to his paralysis and when he tells me I will notice he has a kind of clear, glass mold around his face, the lips of which move as he talks.

After my initial meeting, I go to the bar. I don't know if I'm drinking. But I'm stalling and don't know how to begin to decide, how I could possibly manage a future pushing a grown man in a wheel chair, knowing too, that perhaps within a year my own mother could be in a wheel chair. I stall and stall. The bartender woman knows I won't decide and plots a new graph for me. She carves some fast diagram on the bar and it ends in a letter - the first letter of the woman who will bartend next, who is a psychic.

Much time passes. And nothing happens. The guys are waiting. They are patient. I don't know if they are hopeful. They are like dogs in the pound; the decision is mine to make - some care, even by someone who knows nothing about it, would be better than none.

I see the next bartender is really, really focused as she washes a plate. I try to join her in that focus as I know that, as her hand is moving in circles over the plate, she is connecting with my sticking point, my reluctance, my self-ignorance. When she is done, I ask her if she is psychic and she says, I am - though nothing further comes of it.

It is at this point I go back to the men and talk to them. I see the lovely one inside his protective barrier, see that, though I could listen better, I could never actually be able to get close to him. The other, I find out, has cerebral palsy, and nervous twitches move his head from front to back, up and down, in a kind of yes.no.no.yes kind of nod.

More waiting. More time gone by. Any chance for triumphant celebration - lost.

Two of the men have gone to sleep, uncomfortably in their chairs. The other, the dark and romantically rumpled one, is looking for a berth. He finds none he can stretch out in and heads down the hill and to the street. I catch up with him later in the night. Some how, in the mean time, he had told me, he has advanced dementia. When I see him, he is out of his chair, almost literally baying at the moon, blocking traffic, his hair and arms - wild.

I go back to the bar and sit higher up on the slope on some steps. The bartender sits below me, doesn't see me and talks about the poor men, sleeping in their chairs all night. She is surprised when I tap her shoulder, afraid I'd overheard. I said, "I know. I didn't know. I thought they might be comfortable. I didn't know what to do."

And she said, "Are you, then, simply unkind?"

cloudscape

the back of the moebius strip that got me from here to there and back again: looks like this, i think. home now. half way back around this giant world. i know i went though because i am seeing (amongst my persistent cloudscapes) dear new faces and their gazes. leila and her as darling boy, the singer - whose sweet and humble demeanor and soaring voice i can still see and hear (in my cloudy way), our mayor, our dimos, the community, met and unmet. how excellent: all of them singing. a nice way to end it (minus the brutal flying marathon that followed). have been fighting to stay awake till 8:30 after two solid days of travel. now i'll let myself drift though - floating back just above that many hundred mile shelf of clouds that was trembling with little kicks of lightning above the entire midwest.

envy those below - the flapping shutters, the sheets of rain, the smell of rain and dust. (flooding aside, of course)
very pretty here though.

bedtime.
over and out.

The Cristi Project

Who do you think you are, he says (actually the most supportive one) - Christi?

Who?

Ah. Christ-o.

Yeah, no. looks like. . . Christi it is.

Why do I always do this? Two days, twelve hundred pieces of paper, twenty mile an hour winds. Feel good about tearing it down, pouting and swimming instead. The full moon will come up and go down over this island this night with no one missing my grandeoeuvredemots. Why, though, this need to make 30 foot paintings, to have exhibits that change completely every day for ten days, to need two hundred pound dogs, to paint in reverse on layers of ever-breaking glass, to produce all-night literary readings in multiple languages in a country that doesn't even have the same alphabet?

I must be worried about my very small penis.

Anyway. Lots of soooooooooooooo lovely people around. (Stathia. Leila. Angels. Exceptional). I am certainly the crab in this affair. Will accept ...my peculiar smallness.

.....I do have big balls though).(don't I??) i'll let 'em swing some other time.

must off to the sea!!
sing: (i like to be beside your side beside the seaside by the sea, by the sea, oh how happy we'll be.. or, as juliet mis-sang: i like to peepee by your side, by the seaside by the sea, by the sea. oh, how Happy I'll be!!)

shoot.

should have written a few days back: delirious as i was with one shot of the romance of europe, the hike to the heart-achingly elegant remains of the p e r f e c t accropolis in the settling day - someone out of nowhere playing my favorite piece of music: bach's unaccompanied cello sonata ...(which: someone take note - should be played at my wedding or my funeral - one of which I should at some point be able to manage) lovely, satisfied people all about - always with the very young and the very old every bit as much a part of all that happens in a cicada-buzzing, drifting breezed, langourous, privileged day.

all the perfection i've had such fortunate over-exposure to. familiar with the olive trees, the rocks stacked THAT way. ... spoiled girl.

(athens is fantastic now. white and gleaming. wish i was still there).

But now, the less than glamourous side of international travel. could i seriously be back here in the same damn internet cafe in chios? the same perenially smoking teenagers shouting video game scores at eachother in...yes. i'm here. in greek (which is actually just a gorgeous language ----outside of internet bars). won't write of our weird and uncomfortable predicament here. very unpleasant. and - for all its drama - or because of it --very dull.

and the days with the Swede's (sp?)- the still-trim wives and attentive, sexy husbands, the beautiful sons doing cannonballs, noticing me only as an object not to land on while canonballing and shouting to someone else whatever is appropriate to shout in Swedish while canonballing. they all seem to know it. it's greek to me.

would have to say, I've been happier.

on the other hand, it's getting on towards evening by the bay. my hair is getting tossed by the wind from Turkey. I have a little buzz and something to bitch about from a greek island. (which I really do, but I'll wait and see how it plays out).

was reading Buddhist wisdoms today. a bit about a flower that bloomed after another had perished in an earlier frost.
question: same flower?

i am not the same.
no.
but i'm not different either.

(i do want to club this shoutingsmokeyguy next to me though. is that wrong?)

contempt for the contemptuous?

rawstory.com/news/2008/Conyers_Rove_must_testify_of_risk_0703.html

dare you, you Pug!

Happy 4th of July to the rest of us!

an unnerving, ever-updating graphic

...not quite (i hope) Revelations 8: one-third of the earth was burned up, one-third of the trees was burned up, and all the green grass was burned up. but, damn if most of my favorite spots aren't underneath a scary fire icon (that on mouseover indicate 3 - 5% contained!)
(so far no hail mixed with blood - thank goodness. I'm just NOT ready...)

and I'd been so excited last weekend when I was in the hills kayaking enthusiastically towards the thunder and lighting and have been pretending the smoke was like those humideastcoastwhatkindofweatherisit days and for awhile was relieved to just HAVE 'weather' as if next up were fireflies lifting off the darkening park grasses like i used to love more than anything.

what a dolt.

wish there was sumphin' i could DO besides commit to a very dull, sparkler-free 4th of July which I do forthwith - as notarized by the Understudy to the First Angel of Revelations, (who mostly is still practicing the trumpet - which is hard when it's so smoky).

great ball of fire

Dear Sun,
You're doing a GREAT job!! Keep up the good work.
Happy Solstice!

Love,
Laura

It's not time yet to sleep

well. i seem to want to write something.
what in the world could it be, I wonder?

not a review.
see this movie. "The Fall". Now. Big.
don't read about it first. log off now.

came home and trolled around for a minute to read a review or two - one that, if I recall, passed off all that (the 28 country, no CGI!?! -, gawd what a world - vision) as grossly over-produced, mockishly acted pap but did successfully describe the interior tale as something that Robert Louis Stevensen might have written had he been a casual LSD user. That gets closer. But even Ebert, who praised, couldn't do it justice. no point in trying. such is the power of this medium so used/pushed/reinvented.

and so I i seem to have that feeling. that 'don't talk to me. i've just seen something great' feeling that i yearn for and feel much too rarely- that: the Whole Point of making and experiencing art: that point, that pinprick somewhere. Existential Acupuncture. here touching off spasms of hallucinations founded in archetype, architecture, landscape, tenderness, innocence, the desire to know and to not know, embellished with fabric, beasts, color, blood, race, water, dust, and passions that keep the whole thing moving - the present in a story, the present we are living, the dying we are living. Fascinating to me the parallels between the psychological forms and functions of archetype and innocence; have never thought of it before.

no comment on the drowning scene - for isweartogod every movie I have seen in the past two years and ten months has one, fuck, or that the main character ______ oopsie. gave away the ending...

Anywho... one of my mom's students said about Homeric epics: the Iliad teaches us we are all mortal and The Odyssey that, even so, we must live in the meantime. It is not yet time to sleep. So this epic - a bit in between.

How hard won is hope sometimes. One of the themes, perhaps.
And here maybe hope isn't even really hope, just the need that is love. or the story that is love that pulls just enough, falls and hits against something else - not nothing.

There was something so subtle here that moved me- I won't be able to get it. Something like: that A L L this that is living in this world (a hand opening is the spinning Sufi dancer is the marriage ceremony is a the parting of veil of jewels is the first moment of dying) - is just the teensiest yet totally realized, totally vast and beautiful wee fragment of the ALL. My creed as a pantheist I suppose: every increment and its possible, myriad resonant meanings (and every space between increments) - divine. At least all there for consciousness. Can't say, of course, what can be accessed without it.
But that's it maybe - just that the material for such enormous vision is available if we are alive to it.

But - when the girl (such a real girl) is pulling our would-be suicide back from 'sleep' - through, (okay - maybe this is what i liked)... through the substrata of story, really through the collective conscience, the outside disturbs the story, and almost the health/fate of the character, much like the REAL car alarm sends the man in my nightmare on his heels before I catch my breath and wake.

don't know what I'm saying here.
but that's where the acupuncture happened - the expanding longshot on the white sand. her pulling on his actual lip. the character of one of his selves falling to his knees. all the others weakening. in that moment: a new, more-than-intimate proximity to the happening of his dying.

i guess too, though i always meant for this to be a not-so-looked at blog...dunno who's reading this.. and I am a broken record...I will always wonder at the experience of ____ dementia: what in the world the filmmaker with elephantitis on the roof of ____ really was. or rather, in _______ anyway, such cross over between the fact of the room and the bed and THINGS and the calling away - a story within a story that was, must have been, by, of, about the body and its mind (or is it vice versa?) and the world of the self within the world of others (or is it vice versa?). no way here to not fall to Faulkner and write and and and and, one layer opening to another and another and circling back to the hard, historical reality of the first.

or to sign off and just let Faulkner have the last word on this from As I Lay Dying:

"It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread and not the interval between."


enough. goodnight whomever.
it is, in fact, time to sleep.

not sure why i'm avoiding everyone i know tonight

or maybe some i do but not my main invite, which i feel a bit bad about.
just can't deal with the crowds downtown tonight.
feel the success of second saturday is maybe not such a good thing after all - not for openings anyway. art needs to be considered and I'm not convinced people can really see anything with other social doings going on right behind them.
does my butt look big in these shorts?
what - no cheese plate?
oh great - there's ________!
i could paint that with my tongue, geez.

or maybe, after drawing for eight and a half hours today, i have just simply gone somewhere else from which there's no easy return. which is to say, i lost words at about 11:00 for the rest of the day, and, with the twenty some other marathon drawers, fell deeply into the trance of body shapes, light and shadow, breasts and tendons and complicated muscles, extremely thick or thin thighs, stern watery gazes, maddening hair, humiliating foreshortening (but a lovely recline anyway), delicate, worrisome balance, surprising graphite-gobbling corpulence. mostly though, i can't seem to see or think about anything but male model number one's feet. i've never seen more beautiful feet. his hands too. how much time does one need to just see these structures for what they are?

that's why I can't talk to anybody.
won't worry about it further.
think i'll go down to my studio, tear up that stupid carpet and get ready to rock n' roll.

gone with the wind

and so the day has arrived (or one of the few: dreaded and expected). the beautiful old house, what seemed to be the spiritual body of my precious sister, active, as it was, with spirits from a deep, American past that absorbed and transcended individual lifespans with centuries of accumulations of sorrows and loving and quiet ocean wave sounds and peeling laughter from down the distant, sloping lawn:

torn down.

and Callie, our magnificent, actually befriended tree. and the three-times giant christmas tree and Narnia and her flowerbed and the old kitchen where we'd talk for hours in the morning, looking out at the rabbits and the fog. and the porch where we knew, and were right, that we'd never be happier.

i remember once sitting with Patrick on the girls swingset made out of bound together thick branches (that that drunk creep Ed chopped up for firewood!! after Andrea was gone and the next era of depravity settled in, when all but traces of her actually miraculous domestic touch had vanished) - yes. sitting there with Patrick, looking at the house one Thanksgiving when Zoe was there, and the girls and my family - whole - and so many friends were there and I said, "Everyone I love in the world is in this house right now."

And all the things we could never go get to bring with us - my mother's books, (this hurts) - all her writing on the pages of Whitman and Rilke and all of it, the girls costumes and toys in the attic and perhaps most telling of all, the name scratched into the wall in one of the wierd attic rooms from generations passed that Andrea and I would go see to remark on the miracle of a lived moment - a signature - (Ulfred or Alfred?) testimony to his brief fact and ours and our all quick vanishing into time.
finally dust.



I don't know when it happened exactly - just another moment in what has generally marked the history of progress in this country - as when I was young, and our Ascolano house of the messy olive orchards and wild peacocks was suddenly sub-divided into a plot for sixteen, terra-cotta homes: the wet, sensual scents, the possibilty for adventure in your own back yard, the play of God's actual hand on the bright wildoats.
Obliterated without a word of thanks for the grace we don't even know we were heir too.
Who will remember these things when we don't even manage to acknowledge their passing, when we don't even look right to see the river as we pass over it to some other lost eden, paved: another place to buy more crap, to haul home, where we live alone and blame ourselves for all the wrong things.

It's been interesting that all the painting I've been doing in the past few months (years?) has been about the old house. Recently, not yet knowing the truth, the paintings have been flying into bits and the trees even - purple trees like Cassie and Callie and was it Big Green, flying upside down in every direction. I cannot help but wander those rooms - daily, feeling the banister and praying that praying could change the choices she made on her last day. Old house. Beloved and very old house, your hallway runs right through my body. No one making love to me in some future will know it - but there it is, the fatal corridor held safe there under my ribs, the ghosts wandering its lost length as they need a place to wander, and behind my eyes: the glaring, brilliant summers of her joy and ours.

I'm so sorry, Andrea.
You made life so beautiful for us.

We really tried to keep it safe.
Forgive us for how we might have failed you.

ah! simple pleasures...

kept here for a future blue day and cuz i have to quit sending people stupid videos on facebook.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXXm696UbKY

diet for a new millenium

We'll they have finally come up with something I can eat a lot of and still lose weight!
Here it is:



Mechanical engineering professor Masayuki Nakao said Thursday that he and his students at the University of Tokyo used a carbon-based material to produce a noodle bowl with a diameter of 1/25,000 of an inch.

(a carb is a carb though, so I do still have to pay attention).

okay. is this really what I want to write about? not really. not at all.
a bit perhaps about how good (if still c o l d) the river felt today. or i could troll around for bits of my dream in which, again, I determined the identity of mr. yahoo.
(but definitely not correctly as it was the gelato guy in linz).
mysteries...

would like to say something about my many pretty homes i think I've made, suitable for me anyway, in my unplugged way, and yet so very many days and nights alone. Good thing I love solitude. I don't regret it. (i don't think) largely because I don't believe in regret and just always love living. I guess i just don't think anyone will ever know how much, could know or care how stirred I am from looking up as I wash dishes and simply seeing the great blue door on my neighbor's house in the day's last light, or the sprinkler that would hit my kitchen window right in time with The Band. I wondered if I had the patience to be a real filmmaker what I would shoot, or show of my domestic life that wouldn't just show an aging woman alone, ohhowsad...but might catch something of the grace and privilege of it all.

maybe then the question: are our lives more what they seem from the outside or how we feel as we live them?
how to convey the latter - when it's so subtle and constant? and who could possibly care?

dunno. maybe I'll just sit by the fire, have just a couple thousand more bowls of nanonoodles and muse on it.
most women in the world should be so lucky.

is your salary over 3 million? uh. is it over 4 million? yesseveralidon't know er uh

can we do this every night?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/24761384#24761384

go Leahy!:

"I want to hear directly from these oil companies about causes of the rising price of oil on which Congress can act. This Committee unanimously approved Senator Kohl’s NOPEC legislation, which would put an end to artificial limits on supply by ensuring that the U.S. Government has the authority to prosecute OPEC members for collusive behavior. Seventy members of the Senate have voted for this legislation, as have 345 Members of the House. Yet this President threatened to veto it.

I would like to know what these oil executives think about applying principles of competition from our antitrust laws to the commercial activity of the oil producing states.
The members of OPEC meet regularly to agree on limits on the amount of oil they will produce. That is wrong, and it hurts Americans. If such a meeting took place in almost any other context, the participants would likely be arrested for an illegal conspiracy in restraint of trade.

Do they agree that we need to crack down on speculation and manipulation in the oil commodities market? Numerous experts have testified before this Committee and others that oil prices are moving higher as a result of speculators. Investors are betting up the price of oil, and consumers are paying the bill. Increasingly, this speculation takes place in over-the-counter trading, which avoids the oversight of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, thanks to the Enron loophole.

That is an unjustified loophole, which Senator Feinstein and I, among others, have been actively trying to close. Keeping the CFTC blind to speculation and manipulation in the oil futures market is inexcusable. Last week, Congress passed the Farm Bill that would close this loophole. The President threatened to veto the legislation. I would like to know what these oil executives think about that."

um... wow.

http://www.vimeo.com/993998?pg=embed&sec=993998

still water. (i miss you so much)

As if
As if
I could reach you
As if
As if I could know you
could know that time in your life
Someone (I think) pushed me into the pool
Or I fell (did you) and the pool was deeper by twice than it was and I was in deep
And I thought of you
And I thought this could be bad
But it isn’t . it is beautiful and I won’t miss a bit of it
And I will rise to the surface
Like you and I will feel the blue sweet water all around
Knowing
the distance between me and air is not too long not at all
And as I near it
I trouble
the surface and
it is fantastic to see how my arm’s movement
moves, dances the light on the surface
but it takes too long
just a bit too long and
I
Feel and then know and
then know the surface
is perhaps seconds too far and
Beauty doesn’t matter and
all I thought would happen is wrong
and
I will drown here
like you
with you - as ever I was

not to surface
again.








(we miss you so.
it's all still beautiful.
but so changed.. )

i love my job(s)(s)(s)

even though how I feel trying to blog at this point in the day might be a good reason NOT to like my job (i feel i have about as much to offer as a cold bowl of wheathearts), it's simply a sweet, non-corporate, non-violent, encouraging, funny, winning occupation and I feel privileged: especially looking at art, talking about it with some for whom it's their very first exposure, first impression, first analysis. wish i could take them all to Italy.

how many of them at this point... 80 - 90? ugh. no wonder i'm cream of wheat. but i love it. love their lingering bits of innocence and very individual quirkiness and their already very potent personality strengths. i wish i could write quotes I've heard them say this last week, especially. or describe individual faces or mannerisms. (especially little Melinda's sosweet smile) but I won't do that. (nor will I forget).

i don't look forward to saying goodbye.

vantage points...

(something i seem to talk all day and night about).

but here's this from a dear friend (thanks, Julie! how's your pup?) along with the quote, "This is the sunset at the North Pole with the moon at its closest point. You also see the sun below the moon. An amazing photo and not one easily duplicated. You may want to pass it on to others. The Chinese
have a saying: 'When someone shares with you something of value, you have an obligation to share it with others'."


Okay. I'll play.

An extraordinary image. Reminds me some of the images from Titan, one of Saturn's moons (which I've been next to obsessed with and meaning to nonblog about for a month now) that has H20/Ammonia waterfalls and landscapes that are familiar and not - miraculous dramatic geography, all in a wash of cold, orange methane rain. Like, they say, a planet with all the pre-conditions for life.

Actually. All the time. OUT there.

Stunning.

This too.

All of it.

Farther than the eye could ever see.

or - in an awkward clip from one of my favorite eecummings poems: [this] which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

Amen.

a period of darkness throughout the train

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