Monday, November 14, 2005

From my current NaNoWriMo project, "The Move."

From my current NaNoWriMo project, "The Move."

AUDIO recording...(4:28min) I am rather 'melancholic' at the moment, and recorded this 4 times, eventually going with the first practice session... Oh, and I've used one of my own photographs too.

Lo-fi: Uncertainty…
Hi-fi: Uncertainty…
____________________________________________________________________
This is rather intense, but I can live with it (isn't that ultimately the only criteria?). The character is at a low point in the turning...


In the uncertainty of every moment, where the fragile knowing rests on unknowing, how do we push through the collisions of the days? The overwhelming propensity of the world bears in on us. It is vast and unfathomable and mysterious and yet we must. Go into the darknesses and wrestle with the disappearing light, call the dancing angel back, carry what is ethereal and impossible to grasp. Is it always a question of light, bringing ourselves to consciousness? Of evolving into who we are. And of healing the splits, the wounds, the places where the shredding, that couldn’t. How to move from a state of deliquescence to the harmony of integration. Where the ground of being is apparent. When integration itself is only a process that is superceded by chaos, and another integration. Unless it all falls apart, that is. It is always falling apart and always staying together. Living without a shell burns.

Without defenses, without well worn responses, without any agendas to trick meaning or at least a coherency, what then? Crawling like an amoeba without the skin of its cell? Guts spill out. The nucleus is torn from its sacred sac. What is inside splayed over the field of vision. She may not carry the sack of herself like baggage across the landscape of firings and dangers and meltings of what encloses and keeps us safe.

Was any day easier than the one before? Implosions were going off in her mind at infrequent intervals. Memories were raping, denuding, leaving her breathless and torn. Her insides hurt. Her breath rasped and hurt. Perhaps anger was sliding through her brain cells like dark wisps of perturbations, little halcyons and tornadoes, jumbling up the past with the present, living in a storm.

It hurt, wet leaves on skin, where the green veins knit into her hand. “Bury us in the dung of light,” says Celan. Who she meets in the underworld, where it is growing over. I didn’t lose any in the crematoriums, but I am lost, hold me tight, Yorick, whose skull, a soliloquy in Hamlet’s vine entangled palm. The lifeline sparking.

Yet the sky was blindingly bright; the sun a combustion of blessings in the sky pouring benediction over her as she stood in its golden raiment. Last night the moon had yanked her from her enclosed thoughts and she saw how she was akin to insects crawling indeterminately over the globe that the moon shines indiscriminately on constantly. She and Kafka sang. Of trials and metamorphoses. The air windy, crisp and perfect for those shuttling like the Autumn leaves down the dark alley of fences and motion detector lights behind the houses that are rooted to the earth in their basements.

The days were falling on themselves. Diurnally turning day into night into day. Can this be the rhythm of the rising and falling, of the coming together and the splitting apart, of the fearless fathoming of the insouciant depths. Where the eyes blaze.

In a fury of love.

©2005 Brenda Clews

In the Uncertainty of Every Moment

From my current NaNoWriMo project, "Parchment of Roses."

AUDIO recording...(4:28min)

Lo-fi: Uncertainty…
Hi-fi: Uncertainty…
____________________________________________________________________
The character is at a low point in the turning...


In the uncertainty of every moment, where the fragile knowing rests on unknowing, how do we push through the collisions of the days? The overwhelming propensity of the world bears in on us. It is vast and unfathomable and mysterious and yet we must. Go into the darknesses and wrestle with the disappearing light, call the dancing angel back, carry what is ethereal and impossible to grasp. Is it always a question of light, bringing ourselves to consciousness? Of evolving into who we are. And of healing the splits, the wounds, the places where the shredding, that couldn’t. How to move from a state of deliquescence to the harmony of integration. Where the ground of being is apparent. When integration itself is only a process that is superceded by chaos, and another integration. Unless it all falls apart, that is. It is always falling apart and always staying together. Living without a shell burns.

Without defenses, without well worn responses, without any agendas to trick meaning or at least a coherency, what then? Crawling like an amoeba without the skin of its cell? Guts spill out. The nucleus is torn from its sacred sac. What is inside splayed over the field of vision. She may not carry the sack of herself like baggage across the landscape of firings and dangers and meltings of what encloses and keeps us safe.

Was any day easier than the one before? Implosions were going off in her mind at infrequent intervals. Memories were raping, denuding, leaving her breathless and torn. Her insides hurt. Her breath rasped and hurt. Perhaps anger was sliding through her brain cells like dark wisps of perturbations, little halcyons and tornadoes, jumbling up the past with the present, living in a storm.

It hurt, wet leaves on skin, where the green veins knit into her hand. “Bury us in the dung of light,” says Celan. Who she meets in the underworld, where it is growing over. I didn’t lose any in the crematoriums, but I am lost, hold me tight, Yorick, whose skull, a soliloquy in Hamlet’s vine entangled palm. The lifeline sparking.

Yet the sky was blindingly bright; the sun a combustion of blessings in the sky pouring benediction over her as she stood in its golden raiment. Last night the moon had yanked her from her enclosed thoughts and she saw how she was akin to insects crawling indeterminately over the globe that the moon shines indiscriminately on constantly. She and Kafka sang. Of trials and metamorphoses. The air windy, crisp and perfect for those shuttling like the Autumn leaves down the dark alley of fences and motion detector lights behind the houses that are rooted to the earth in their basements.

The days were falling on themselves. Diurnally turning day into night into day. Can this be the rhythm of the rising and falling, of the coming together and the splitting apart, of the fearless fathoming of the insouciant depths. Where the eyes blaze.

In a fury of love.
©2005 Brenda Clews

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

Self-portrait on the edge of

I'm not sure whether to post this photopoem, its extreme Hamlet-like self-referentiality. When did I compose it? Maybe a month ago? When Kyra, my daughter, saw the photopoem where it is reproduced twice, she told me it was an awful picture of me, that it didn't look like me at all, that if she'd seen it she would never have guessed it was her mother, and absolutely not to post it. The eyes, yes, she she said that was the only part that looked like me. Take that off the computer screen, she said. My fierce little editor....

Yet, on this rainy cold and broke day, I return to it, wondering. My manuscript is being written, yes, the artist is alive, so is the mother, but for how long without a job? This portrait was composed on the edge of.

Even I don't know who that woman is. Even I have never seen her before. She must be a literary figment...












It clicks to a larger and readable size, but you probably already know that...

Which is not large enough for some readers, oh Blogger.

Here is the text:

Self Portrait/Photopoem, Brenda Clews 2005 (self-reflexivity, the self produced in collision/collusion with the self)

[images here]

Is this the colour of the edge, where the light, eyes that, where it pours over, at the moment of, disappearing, that clarity, an obfuscated truth, the face, its waxy quality of lotus cream-colours, burnt auburn waves, emblazoning, meditating with open eyes, the gaze, un/self/conscious, always I take self-portraits on the edge of possible devastation, needing to see who I am... [the last 3 words bleeding into the larger portrait]


Bravely, or maybe secretively (since she's at school, the sweetie), I'm posting this as an echo to, some sort of personal response to, Jean's post on works the National Gallery in London on Self-Portraits; and Richard's post on Self-Portrait with photons in tandem with Jean's. Perhaps...that is; or perhaps those posts reminded me of this one buried in my hard drive.

How to fathom...

From The Move, my current writing project...

How to fathom the poetic metaphors of our lives? Where does art come from? What layers of our being do images arise out of? And how do they reveal our lives in their unfolding, and in what ways are they prophetic? It seems as if we already know the truths of our interactions with each other, and she is not sure how that is.

Her life was an artwork where a collection of images had clung to her.

Tuesday, November 08, 2005

The Aviator blessed as Shefi, butterfly spirit...

A Mazahua Indian chief, "Margarito Sánchez Valdez, bathed the aviator in incense, wreathed his neck with marigolds and blessed him in the name of Shefi, a butterfly spirit, and Mysyohimi, the Mazahua's supreme deity."

The journey began "on Sept. 6, when Mr. Gutiérrez flew his ultralight, Papalotzin, an indigenous word for the monarch, over Niagara Falls with a cloud of butterflies beneath him."

From there he "traveled more than 4,375 miles from Montreal to Michoacán State, following the butterflies at low altitude. He logged more than 90 hours of flying over 72 days." Last Thursday, "Mr. Gutiérrez wheeled his ultralight plane painted like a monarch over the butterfly sanctuary...and brought it swooping in to land on a stretch of mountain highway."

His extraordinary journey made to publicize the plight of Monarch butterflies, who are vastly thinning in numbers, whose future as a species is precarious.

Image Hosted by ImageShack.us

NYTimes Article: To Save Endangered Butterfly, Become a Butterfly, by James C. McKinley Jr.

Sunday, November 06, 2005

Photos my daughter took today...

Image Hosted by ImageShack.us
My daughter's into the digital camera (finally)... here's a merge of moi, from this afternoon, now how self indulgent is that? Nothing like those rich carpets of gold leaves... we are in an older neighbourhood with many beautiful trees, they are massive and wise and soothing, and often I reach out and touch their trunks, the knotted bark, and caress leaves as I pass by...
Image Hosted by ImageShack.us
All images ©2005 Kyra Clews

A NaNoWriMo month...

NaNoWriMo Progress MeterIf anyone doing NaNoWriMo this year would like one of these nifty counters for their website - I've put mine in my banner - go here: National Novel Writing Month Progress Meter. Last year I swear seeing the little pointer move incrementally around the dial kept me going until I jubilantly huffed across the finish line with 50,000 words on the last day... (this from a woman who's got many unfinished manuscripts littered about, pieces here and there, until, that is, NaNoWriMo, a marathon writing month when you join in with tens of thousands of other insane writers around the world and convince your muse to take the worded trek, and to travel with you, offering you ambrosia and nectar and good kicks in the butt when needed, writing a first draft of a book of novella length by the end of the month)...

Friday, November 04, 2005

Our Doggie...



Our dog, Keesha, taken today by my daughter (who doesn't like digital cameras, prefering the SLR, but, oh, Keesha was so cute...)




























A writer's dog?... flaked out after a day of heavy writing? You can see our minimal conditions at present: yes, that is my desk, which is also my couch, and my bed (shhh, it's actually very comfortable).

Keesha is a purebred Springer Spaniel, not the show dog though, the one bred for hunters. She's very domesticated. Very cuddly, sleeps mostly, loves any kind of treat, dog treats, people treats, droppings from cats (where she keeps small children's sandboxes in the park clean to my discomfort), organic recycling bins, bones, and sticks are good to chew too. She never walks anywhere, but pulls whoever's walking her (usually me) like I was a toboggan and she was a sled dog. When she's off leash, which is mostly if we're not crossing too many roads, she races from house to house, or field to field, or bush to bush, sniffing and exploring. She's got it figured out in the park socially too, running over to the owners of other dogs to get a pat from them first, before playing with the dog, and usually even dogs that don't like other dogs like her. If a bunch of children come running or walking towards her she barks at them, mostly because they scare her. She'd never bite anyone, and wags her tail like she's auditioning for competing with windmills for making electricity when patted. She's been somewhat of a barker ever since Ralph in Grange Park though, Ralph was a barker, and Ralph's owner & I liked to talk, so we'd move away from them, and they'd keep happily barking for maybe an hour, and we'd laugh and chat ourselves (she was trying to get pregnant by her fireman ex-boyfriend at the time, who lived in another city and would arrive ready for the task, alas, she didn't beget). After she moved out West, Keesha kept barking, looking for another Ralph... which can be annoying, let me tell you. Lately she's abated a bit; maybe, finally, she's forgetting the fun she & Ralph had letting loose with their vocal chords. She's 5 years old. She has limited so many rental options for us, but we'd never give her up. Who else would there be to talk about stuff with? Any stuff, she doesn't mind. Who else is always there at 3 am when you're stressed and can't sleep and need a hug? She's smart enough to recognize a good number of words, follows me around like a loving toddler, is funny, sweet, adorable, and only occasionally irritating... she's actually taught me much about unconditional loving, holding still, being present. I couldn't imagine a life without animals...

3 - BOD (Book of the Dead), continuing the story...

Posting some sections of my NaNoWriMo novel, BOD (Book of the Dead) from last year. This time I'm including a little of the narrative of the woman's day-to-day life...


She checked the phone, and there was a message. It was from Jarret, "Hi, something's come up. I'm putting the children on the train. They have enough money for a taxi, so don't worry. They should be home around 6. I'll be back later, maybe tomorrow."

Nothing more, no explanation of why he wasn't coming home. She felt herself crumbling and began to cry. Why did women always cry when they felt overwhelmed or helpless? She cried deeply for a long time. It helped to release the tension inside. Where was her husband? Was the woman who had answered the phone really with him that morning? She sounded like a one night stand, since she didn't seem to know the name of the man she was with. Could it really have been her husband?

It was nearly six o'clock. She went to the bathroom and washed her face. She put on some lipstick. She smoothed her dark curly hair back. She tried to look like she might normally. She heard the key turn in the door and went to it to greet her children.

"Hi Mom," they each said as they dumped their bags on the floor.

"Hi my honeys, how was your trip?"

"Great," they both mumbled and headed off in different directions, one to the kitchen, one to the bathroom. She heard a bath being poured. In the kitchen, her son was opening a bag of chips and holding a can of pop.

"Hey, it's dinner time, not snack time. Let's get pizza tonight."

"Ok, Ma," he munched as he talked. "Oh, yeah, Dad said to tell you he met a business contact and decided to arrange a meeting. They couldn't meet until tomorrow or something. He'll call later. He'll be home tomorrow night probably."

"Oh. He left such a short message I didn't understand what had happened. What," she said, changing the subject, "would you like on the pizza?"

"Everything."

She dialed the number of the pizza house, ordered, and went upstairs to her computer. Sitting there, mystified at the events of the day, she called her friend, Taim, and left a message asking to meet her for lunch the next day.

It was a quiet evening. She spent it sitting in the semi darkness of her office meditating.
.

Bones were certainly interesting. Within the organism, they provided the structure, the underpinning, the foundation that held the body together. Bones were living and were crucial. Yet to hold a bone, they never felt so important, so central, but light, almost too airy. They are what is most hidden, except for the teeth, and so to hold a human bone was a strange experience. To hold it knowing it was a thigh bone, of someone who died there. That this was all that remained.

Only our bones are left in the corridors of time that we have passed through, rattling on the floors…

Even our bones return to the soil, are ground up in the recycling of time, they just take longer.

It was a few days later, when the Police Station phoned and asked for her.

“Yes, it’s Shona Leicht.”

“M’am, you found the site where the bones lay?”

“In the cemetery, yes. Do you know who it was? Was it a woman? Or a man? It quite frightened me.”

“Well, the thing is, m’am, our department took a look at them, ran a few tests, and they seem to be quite old.”

“You mean they were there a long time? Can you trace them back to anyone missing?”

“Our department says there are a few more tests to make sure, but the bones appear to be at least one hundred to one hundred and fity years old.”

“What?”

“That’s what I got written here. Seemed in good shape for bein’ that old to me.”

“That is very strange indeed, officer. Could there be a mistake?”

“Well, as I said, there’re a couple more tests, but it looks like they’re from maybe 1850 or 1900. Could’a been a pioneer even. Who knows.”

“Male or female.” She was trying to keep her voice steady.

“Female, older though, post-menopausal, cause there’s some osteoporosis around the hip joints.”

“Is there any indication of the cause of death, officer?”

“Funny you ask. I was asking our guy in Forensics, and he said there was nothing to indicate the cause of death, except maybe freezing.”

“Oh!”

“Sorry, m’am?”

“Officer, I would like to give the bones of this woman a proper burial, and would like to know if I may have them? Or if I make arrangements at the funeral home, if they can be sent there for interment?”

“Don’t see a problem with that, if that’s what you want to do, m’am. I’ll have to get my supervisor’s signature, that’s all.”

“Should I pick them up? Or will you take them over?”

“We can take them over to the funeral home. It’s time to go out on patrol anyway.”

“Okay, I’ll call them. Thank you, officer.”

Then she called the funeral home and explained that the police would be by shortly with some bones that she had found in an unused and old part of the cemetery, and that she wanted to bury them properly. After some discussion, she chose a standard package, a single plot, the lower of a double depth grave, a vault and a simple coffin, and a simple marble slab on which they would engrave, "An unknown woman, who froze to death in 1850, in honour.” She said she would be there within the hour to pay for the burial. It was agreed that the burial would take place the next day in the morning.

Tuesday, November 01, 2005

2 - BOD (Book of the Dead), continuing the story...

Posting some sections of my NaNoWriMo novel, BOD (Book of the Dead) from last year. Some other things happen between what I posted yesterday and the continuation of the story here which leave her rather frazzled, one of which is a 'crank caller'...


The phone rang again, and absent-mindedly she answered it. “I have been trying to reach you for hours,” said a deep male voice. The connection wasn’t good and there was static on the line.
“What do you want? Why are you calling me?”
“I wanted to tell you that there is a body in the graveyard, in an old and untended section…”
She hung up the phone and began screaming, loudly, hoarsely, and then sobbing. When it rang again, she picked it up slowly, “What do you want?!”
“To tell you that it wasn’t a dream. An old, homeless woman died in the cemetery where you worked. Her body is still there. You must find it and give her a proper burial.”
The line went dead. Shona shivered deeply. She felt suddenly cold, a sense of dread overcoming her. If it were true, did she cause the old woman’s death by dreaming it? Or did she somehow tune into the experience? Why did she dream of a homeless woman freezing to death alone in an old cemetery and now she has been told by an anonymous caller that there is, in fact, such a body. She dressed quickly, locked the door behind her, got into her car and drove to the cemetery.

She passed shops and houses and parks on the way, and people walking on the sidewalks, driving in cars, in the buses, it seemed surreal this morning, this world, its activity, like ants in an anthill, carrying on our tasks, day after day, keeping everything going. Yet there was a spark, something indefinable, a joy to the whole moving, buzzing, profound venture that life is. She felt a tension between her angst and that joy as she sped towards the cemetery, parked, got out of her car, stood, began looking in all the directions, trying to sense which way to go.

Pulling her coat tightly around her, she began walking towards a forested area, in the far corner; it took three quarters of an hour to reach the copses of trees. The area was overgrown, unkept, had reverted back to wilderness. If there were gravestones, they had crumbled over time. She was moving through tall grasses, whitened with the frosting of the night before, for Winter was setting in early, and brushing her feet along the ground, looking for remnants of gravestones. She wasn't sure that this was part of the cemetery anymore. Her foot hit something, and she leaned down to look, but it was only a field stone. She kept walking. She closed her eyes, seeing if following an inclination other than sight might help. She walked, the day was warm, and she puzzled over the dream, since the woman had frozen to death. Her nostrils filled with an indescribable smell, not of decomposition, but something faintly perfumed, and she opened her eyes.

Before her was a white gravestone, buried in the underbrush, half of it crumbled, and she leaned down and felt it with her fingers. She drew back, it had the feel she recalled from her dream. For awhile she simply stood, her eyes shut, swaying in the morning breeze, her mind silent, poised for what was coming next. When she felt ready she opened them and walked to the other side of the gravestone, looking for the body.

There was nothing. Only tall grasses bending under their own weight. Now what? She walked around the area, looking, but not wanting to look. It was difficult. Her foot touched something hard and she bent down to see what it was and saw a whiteness and found herself becoming dizzy.

Her fingers reached for it. She touched it, feeling the smooth calicified length. She picked it up. As she held it, a life came swirling back to her. The burden of a life came swirling into her heart and mind. She felt overwhelmed by the tragedy of this life, its loss, its loneliness, its abandonment. This person had lost everything, and died here, without anyone knowing or caring. What if it were the goddess herself whose bones had lain here for an eternity, awaiting care? Wasn't even an old and ill homeless woman a goddess? Worthy of dignity at death? She stood in the cold wind and felt anger rise in her chest. "I am here now!" she shouted defiantly to the sky and the trees and the birds and the animals hidden in the leaves and in the forest, but she was speaking to a whole culture that left its old and ill and lonely to die in such ways. "You will be buried properly!"

She turned, with the bone in her hand, and walked back to her car. She drove to the nearest police station and walked in and placed the bone on the counter and said to the officer on duty, "I found this in the cemetery, in an old part. It is obviously human. Can you run a check on it, and please let me take the police to where I found it."

The officer looked at her suspiciously. He reached under the counter for a clipboard and some forms. They went into a small office, and he wrote down everything she told him about going for a walk in the cemetery and finding the bone in an obscure and overgrown corner.

After he had finished taking her statement, he left the room, and returned with two other policemen. The funeral home had been alerted and the manager of the grounds was waiting for them when they arrived. She led the small troup of men across the fields of gravestones towards the forest; at the edge of the wall of trees, she pointed to the gravestone in the underbrush and said that was where she had tripped on the bone.

The police cordoned off the area and began carefully searching. After a couple of hours of watching them scour the area, finding bones and carefully placing them in marked bags, she decided to go home. They said they would call her as soon as they learnt anything about the remains.

At home, she lay down, dizzy and exhausted. The scene was still swirling in her mind, as was her dream of a few nights ago. It was so real as to be surreal. Everything made sense, and nothing made sense. She was confused and yet it seemed as if everything was perfectly sensible. She couldn't encompass the fear and relief she felt at finding, not a dead woman, as she had expected, but calcified bones. She wondered what the forensic department would uncover about her death.

Monday, October 31, 2005

1 - From BOD (Book of the Dead), for Halloween...

For Halloween, some pages from my NaNoWriMo novel last year, "The Book of the Dead," and I did post this section last year, and will add 3 more sections of this story over the next couple of days...

Her fingers and toes began to grow warm, tingling, even as they were freezing. She is losing feeling in them. She cannot move her toes, nor her fingers. They do not feel like they are part of her. Her legs feel numb. She tries to roll, and cannot move. Her cheeks, exposed, are like stone slabs, weighted and heavy on her face, etched with ice, and then she no longer feels her cheeks or nose or chin or eyes. She can't open her eyes. They are encrusted. It feels as if her scalp has been pulled off her head, a terrifying feeling, and then nothing. Her skin feels like a shell, an exoskeleton, but soon she can't feel the ice her body is ensheathed in anymore. She is still breathing, slowly, painfully. Breathing is laboured, like a huge weight is pushing down on her chest, and she coughs and tastes blood against her tongue. The warmth inside her is dissipating. It is like the oven inside is turned off. She knows she is freezing to death and no longer cares. It is quiet, peaceful, her mind slowing, becoming numb, thought processes barely flickering across a withdrawing consciousness. It is empty and alone, this final passage. She can no more will herself out of it than she could will herself not to be born once labour had begun. In the last moments of her life, she utters through frozen lips, 'I am ready...look after my loved ones...'

And then she was gone.

She was gone into the vast beyond. Into the great nothing, the void, what cannot be yet always is.

She was a soul floating in the dark heavens away from the world. She was an angel fleeing the broken world, the corruption and battles and wars of everyday life. She was a soft flower taking her essence across the vast expanse. She was a tear on the face of existence weeping and being swept away. She was one of billions who have passed this way and gone into the beyond. She was sinking into the earth from whence she came. Her body already decomposing even in its frozen state. Her excrescence ripe for the vultures and the bugs and the worms. Her body, its life energy gone, for composting. She was forgotten in a forgotten graveyard. No-one would find her body; for no-one walked that way anymore. The animals and the insects would feast on her remains until only her bones remained to lie in the grass when the warmer weather came.

When the sun broke across the sky at dawn, rising as a red phoenix between the trees where she lay, she opened her eyes and looked about her. Her nightmares were getting worse, though she hadn't woken from this one before it played itself out. Usually you wake in fear before you die, but she had kept dreaming her death until she had been flung to the far reaches of the universe, until she had seen the dark void and the clear light, until she had disappeared into nothing and felt herself as presence everywhere.

She had been working with lucid dreaming for some time...

Saturday, October 29, 2005

One Hundred Million Sperm A Day

The original drawing, albiet with photoshop lighting, from a drop-in, non-instructional lifedrawing session at the Toronto School of Art.





100 Million Sperm A Day

Image Hosted by ImageShack.us

100 Million Sperm A Day, ink, pencil on paper, text a digital layer, 11"x14", ©2005 Brenda Clews

Thursday, October 27, 2005

Sassure and the biological referent...

(Update: added a sketch drawn not on paper but with a stylus and tablet on a screen from a few years ago when I was writing a paper for another ARM conference... there's a counterpoint interplay and vision between the two images that I hope is evident.)

In response to the last post, entitled, "Passion, like a flame... or a semiotics of sexuality, or an anatomy of desire..." A little something on semiotic theory...

Image Hosted by ImageShack.usHi everyone- I'm not saying that we as individuals want or don't want to have children, or even think about them if we're past child-bearing age, not at all, only that that biological reality is there in heterosexual unions in ways that aren't in homosexual unions.

So it can be looked at semiotically in Sassure's sense, where the "referent" is an object in the world, or a relation to the material world, rather than a concept of it. Sassure's work as a linquist revolved around signs. The sign is created by a signifier (material or physical form of the sign) and the signified (the concept it represents, its content). He applied these concepts to linguistic terms, to words.

The word "sex" is the signifier, and what it means to each of us is the signified.

That's pretty easy. Sex is a sign. Albiet a potent one.

In heterosexual sex there is a referent to the world in a way that is absent from same sex sex. It's a biological referent. It operates as a referent in potentia or as actuality or what is forgone or even as memory. Because it's there, I am suggesting that the anatomy of desire itself, its semiotic configuration, is different for a heterosexual person than a homosexual one.

Image Hosted by ImageShack.usAnd then I'm interested in what ways this plays out in culture. But it gets very complicated. I come to this through my work on why the maternal body is problematic not just in our culture but in feminist theory. Where the triad is not really accepted, nor is sexual difference. I'm a sexual difference feminist, in the European sense; rather than a North American feminist in the equality sense (meaning I don't want to adhere to a 'one-sex' model of equality that doesn't recognize my maternal body, its monthly cycles, the children I'm raising, the hormonal fury of menopause). And I need to do this in a non-essentialist way too.

I can see from Suzanne's comment here, and the comments I received at my other site, that I have a long way to go on clarifying what I am trying to say! There is a discussion going on in my post at Xanga, which you can look at here if you wish.

You are all helping me so much on this path, an area I've been exploring in painting, poetry and theory for almost 2 decades now....

Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Passion, like a flame... a semiotics of sexuality, an anatomy of desire

From the September drop-in non-instructional lifedrawing session with the male model:








Image Hosted by ImageShack.us

"Passion, like a flame..." ink, pencil on paper, text a photoshop layer, 11" x 14", ©Brenda Clews, 2005.

The drawing, when I'd finished it, seemed to speak about homosexual love, queer love, same-sex desire. The way it entraps, because of the culture, the struggle with it. For someone gay, it's not just, 'Are they potentially interested,' but, 'Are they gay, or could they be, too' - a double question. So he is... pulling back, thinking, yet crouched, his body alive with desire, his libido flowing towards the object of his desire. Whether who he desires is even aware of him is not indicated in the drawing.

As I worked on the drawing, I started thinking about whether sexual orientation configures the experience of desire. This profile of desire has no procreational element in it; it's pure sexual desire. Meaning it's different to heterosexual desire where there is a potential conception and a potential responsibility. Where, because a child could be created, the weight of love is different.

In heterosexual love, there is always a referent to potential conception. It's a referent that is absent from queer love, where desire is simply desire, without the consequence of a third, a child, being born. Desire is always a dyad; never a trinity. This makes the act of desiring the other different, surely. Not better or worse, only that sexual desire and its potential consequences is crucially different in hetero and homo bodies.

A semiotics of sexuality, an anatomy of desire... I am playing with these terms: sexuality, with its referent to a third in potentia or as actuality or what is forgone or even as memory, as a triad (hetero); where the referent is non-existent, which configures desire differently, as a dyad (gay); and, excuse the play on words, and serious philosophic concepts, and my giggles, perhaps as a monad (masturbation). When we pleasure ourselves there is no biological referent either.

Each line of the drawing, a deepening of understanding. Our culture has its foundation in Ancient Greek thought, where the dominant, founding class was gay, and one wonders on the paradigm of man alone - a solitary male God, a patristic culture, a 'one sex' model politically - elements which are still with us thousands of years later, comes out of an essentially dyad relationship to the other.

Where desire is only between two, and there is never a spectral third...

(Surely we all have elements of each.)

Will I ever understand why the mother's body is so problematic in Western thought and culture? For it is.

technorati tags: , , , , , , , , .

Sunday, October 23, 2005

ARM Conference today...

I am at an Association for Research on Mothering (ARM) conference at York University this weekend.

The image “http://www.yorku.ca/crm/Conferences/mothering%20and%20race%20poster.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Good thing I finally splurged on an internet connection - I thought the conference was next weekend, and so missed 2 days of it! I volunteered yesterday, and sold journals...

More about these amazing conferences later, gotta run...
___________________
Update: When you're working, you don't get to go to many panels. My view of the conference therefore very limited. It's mostly in the chatting between panels where I meet wonderful women doing most interesting work. But over-riding everything is a flow of mother-love, acceptance of each other, nurturance. It's hard to explain how fulfilling these conferences are emotionally. It could be Andrea O'Reilly too, who founded ARM, who's got a fun social side, heck, she's a party person, and not just a prolific writer of books, of which she publishes at least one a year. Leaders really do put their individual stamps on groups. ARM conferences are warm, supportive and with an array of brilliant women doing fascinating research and analysis on the oldest institution of all: motherhood.

This year I finally met Judith Stadtman Tucker, who runs the best site on socially conscious mothering, on "social, cultural, economic and political issues that impact the well-being of mothers. MMOs purpose is to serve as a clearinghouse for reporting and resources that support social change. Its intention is to promote economic and social justice for mothers and others who do the caring work of our society": Mothers Movement Online. Judith and I had an incredible conversation on subjectivity, batting back and forth ideas on parity and equality theories, with her coming to rest at an ethic of care. That care is the way through the difficulties mothering presents to the 'one sex' model of subjectivity and equality in modern democracy, and to its becoming a force for social change.

Do I agree? I have to think long and hard on that one as I read some books she's recommended. I mean it was a position I took willingly a few years ago, almost as a battle cry when I was exploring the literature on the Mothers of Argentina and their effect on the junta's disappearing of people, the loss of their children; by bravely making their grieving and their anger public, they were able to effect change. Based on examples of what mothers can do, perhaps the compassion and care of normative mothering is the way through the dilemma of modern culture. ARM is doing a conference on Carework and Caregiving: Theory and Practice next May. That will help me to deepen my understanding of this concept as it is being explored by feminist theorists currently.

Friday, October 21, 2005

Drawing Down the Muse

BrendaClewsDrawingDownTheMuse

Drawing Down the Muse, ink on paper, 8.5" x 11". These sketches are from a lifedrawing session in Vancouver last July. They were 3 minute poses and I drew three of them on one page. The model had a tatoo of a black cat on her back. By adding the lighting, and creating a literary title, I've turned it into a coven of women in a dramatic setting. They are bathed in what is essentially stage lighting (via photoshop), so a representation of the moon, its shining...

Drawing Down the Moon is the title of a book by Margot Adler. When this ritual is enacted during a full moon, there is a powerful influx of energy. In my drawing I have played on the title, drawing from and connecting to Adler's book, but added a reference to the Muse, or inspiration. I am interested in creativity, our visions and the ways we express them in artistic or literary or musical form. The moon is a very ancient and rich symbol for this process.

It's all in the white moonlight that pulls the ocean with it...

Thursday, October 20, 2005

On-line again, at last...

Image Hosted by ImageShack.usFinding accessing the internet through the library very limiting, and ultimately frustrating, both for posting my writing and art, and especially for the close reading I like to give posts, and the comments I often leave after a day of carrying words with me, I finally got on the phone and called around about internet options. The house in which I am living doesn't have internet or cable. I use a cell phone. And I need to keep my costs way down. So installing a land line was out. It turns out that the cable provider for this area, Rogers, has an "ultra lite" internet service, which they claim is 5 times faster than dial-up, for $20./month, flat rate, no installation fee, no modem rental fee. It took the guy an hour and a half to install it here. And I am ecstatically on-line again. In the intimacy of my living space. Accessing you all in the library was strange, not just because of the time limit, but because reading in a public space over a public computer lacked the intimacy that I have come to enjoy about the way we receive each other's writing on our screens at home. Where it feels like we are talking directly to each other, whispering our thoughts, reflections, expressing our lives...

A spark...


Currently Reading
Poems of Paul Celan: A Bilingual German/English Edition
By Paul Celan, Michael Hamburger
see related

: Small Flame

Love lies on my heart. Like a sheaf of love letters. Or the eclipsed body of my lover. Hours endlessly relentless. Do I dwell in the silence of the soul? Do I even believe we have a soul? A spark of being, that's all there is. A blazing little spark forging through life. And it lies on my breast tonight, love in my heart, beating, expanding, contracting. The pulse. Love is the pulse. My spark is dim tonight, faint.

_

image: http://www.playafoot.com/photos/pages/651.html

Monday, October 17, 2005

The Move- a section somewhere

Somewhere in "The Move" (re: novel-in-progress, or extended meditation, or whatever)- blurring the edges between fiction and life.....


On the edge of calamity, there seemed only a choice between returning to a house where she had unwittingly become a target for projections of her landlord's shadow sides, and had been physically threatened, or a woman's shelter. Unable to find suitable, if temporary, housing, she let go.

She let go of the struggle to find housing. She decided to play a game and find her way, not by the map you carry in your mind, what you've understood about life and your place in it, the route you've traveled, its familiarities, but by intuition. By not thinking you know what lies around the corner; but navigating, instead, by trusting your instincts.

The letting go expanded her vision. Streets took on a luminous glow. The early morning world became welcoming in ways she'd forgotten. As she closed her notebook filled with ads scribbled from papers and online sites, she switched her approach from worry bordering on panic to an open calmness. She had only 9 or 10 hours to find something and move out of the crazy woman's house completely. She began moving through massive tree-lined streets as if she was walking through a wonderland of magic.

She felt an inclination to go down that street, she went. Sometimes there are signs in windows. She had a cell phone. But saw nothing. It was a wealthy area. Perhaps someone had a basement that they would happily rent for the amount of money she had because it would help pay for a ski trip, or an Armani suit. She laughed quietly to herself. Since she was walking through an area of the city she didn't know, it was like an adventure. She didn't worry if her thoughts were rational or not. Anything could happen if she was open. The strangest things occur when you least expect it. Wasn't that the way it always was?

Her feet seemed to fly across the streets, down here, up there, over to a main street, back down. She didn't feel crazed or desperate, only that she was flowing past magnificent houses and a regal path of trees on an adventure. She meandered by homes filled brim-full with furniture and brick-a-brack, imagining lives unlike her own.

After awhile, she began to think that she was wasting time. That following intuition, while delightful, was not enough. She was enjoying a walk on a beautiful morning without a destination and was not focused on the task at hand: to find accommodation by nightfall.

As she headed south and crossed a busy road and was about to walk down another residential side road, she saw a small library. Its entrance was tucked away from the street and could easily be missed. She looked at her watch. It was 9:01 a.m. Surprising for a government-run building, which usually open late, she pushed the door and it opened. Inside she explained her need for housing to a librarian, was given a temporary card and pin number, and she began browsing ads in papers online. She made three calls before she saw it: a one-bedroom basement apartment in the area she wanted for exactly the amount she could afford.

She phoned. It was probably a dismal, bug-infested hole in the wall. The landlord answered. She knocked on his door half an hour later, and found the apartment spacious, clean, with 2 small southern facing windows; it was more than suitable for her present needs. She paid him in cash, signed the rental agreement, which didn't tie her to a lease but to an indeterminate time that only required a 30 day notice to vacate. That evening, with the help of a friend, who hadn't answered calls all afternoon, but arrived just in time with his car, she moved in.

What luck that she was the first caller and the first to see it. It was perfect. And, importantly, she was safe. There would no longer be stress over the paranoid accusations of the owner of the house where she had been staying if she gingerly ventured into the kitchen to make tea. While the apartment did not have a private entrance, she was in a self-contained space with its own bathroom and hot plate, fridge and microwave. Even sleeping on an air mattress seemed heavenly in comparison to where she had just come from.

Pondering on intuition as she pulled a soft, down sleeping bag over her exhausted body, vast new possibilities about how to navigate life opened up. Unless you can free yourself of your preconceptions, your ideas of how things should be, you cannot be open to whatever possibilities are available. Possibilities that meet your needs, and are answers to your wishes.

Letting go to that extent may be only something you did in extreme circumstances. She didn't know if you could live your daily life that way. Could intuition, where life is perhaps lived as an adventure, and which seems to receive perceptions and signals from sources beyond rational reach, be a guide to creating your own reality?

Saturday, October 15, 2005

SunMan, Oh Apollo

Original sketch with photoshop lighting.






Image Hosted by ImageShack.us



"SunMan, Oh Apollo," ink, pencil on paper, 11" x 14", from a lifedrawing class September 2005. The energy of light, of a confident male sexuality...

I rather like him in the 'glowing edges' Photoshop filter... so then he's called "SunMan, Oh Apollo Night," and if it's a little contradictory, well whoever said Greek gods weren't.

The library system has been down most of the week. Even today it's taken more than an hour to upload this post. I feel estranged from you all and am missing the community here more than I can say.

My son just visited for a few days- we hadn't seen each other since mid-July -which was wonderful. After he left, being turned away by 2 internet cafes, where it was claimed that my uploading would slow everyone's games down, sigh, I managed to upload the life drawings that I've finished where my brother works...

Much love to everyone- I think about you all, you're all in my heart. xoxo

Thursday, October 06, 2005

I've moved- into a much, much happier place (I hope). Just temporary, but a rather roomy basement apartment with 2 southern windows, which is nice, and I've been able to turn the kitchenette into my bedroom by hanging a piece of canvas as a curtain giving my daughter the bedroom, which she is happy with. Seems to be a nice house where our dog is more than welcome; it has far more space than where we were living (a one room garden house) for a much better rent, and in the cache area for my daughter's school. No internet, however. So I'm writing this at the library. The CD ROMs and floppies are all disabled in the library system. I shall have to see how I can upload images some other time. I am doing a little tutoring in student's homes, and I've had students so far from Gr 2 to College, and am enjoying it. Not enough work though. My 3-bedroom house of furniture is still in storage. My son is still waiting to rejoin us as soon as I get financially settled again. The process of starting over, once again, just went through this in Vancouver 2 years ago, is gargantuan, and gonna take more time than I had hoped. Still, I bask in Toronto friendliness, and, though am a bit of a hermit these days, enjoy being back. The hot weather that we're still having is such a balm! Love it....

Big hugs and lots of love to you all.... xo

Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Three Angels...?

Without fig leaves should I post this? He's one of my sketches from the lifedrawing session, coloured, and copied onto himself so that there are three of him. I'm calling this drawing, "Three Angels." Who knows what you'll make of this, Blogging buddies...

Image Hosted by ImageShack.us

Monday, September 26, 2005

Angst over my website...

Angst over my website...

I've spent the greater part of the weekend, between looking for crucial housing and employment, on my website. If you have a moment, please take a look. I've renamed it: Celestial Dancers & Divine Mothers.Image Hosted by ImageShack.us

I've redone the Bliss Queen page - even a blurb by our dearly beloved Pru: thanks honey!

Image Hosted by ImageShack.usAnd am now finally offering a Birth Poster, a collected edition of all my birth paintings.

Since I found a painting of mine listed at a Russian art reproduction site, I felt I had to label the birth poster with "SAMPLE." Does this work? Is it passably okay?

And then today I just created "browser button" paintings to navigate the 4 pages. Does it work?

How we feel about our babies, huh. This sure is a baby of mine.

Any feedback will be much appreciated! Thanks!

http://brendaclews.com

Accidents in the Unfolding of Our Lives...

In the unfathomableness of what happens to us as we live our lives, the places where we are so profoundly jolted we can barely understand what the forward momentum should be if we are to remain free of, or minimize, such profoundly unsettling events. Do we cause what happens to us? Sometimes. Perhaps not often enough.

Rather life seems not a rational venture of cause and effect so much as a negotiation through ever-new territory. Where whatever rules there were are superceded by other rules to the point where we realize there is no master equation, no set of rules for every situation.

There is only our dance through it all, and our compassion.

Our grace and our ethic.

Can these simple rudders serve where entire holy books fall charred on battlefields of misunderstanding, judgment, bloodshed, death?

An ethic of responsibility and a heart of compassion aren't rules but ways of conducting ourselves, in tune with the tao, a flow of pure energy, transducers, bolts through which the lightning of love flashes the brilliance of being.

Our dance of grace and our ethic of care.

Hold these close, like twin heartbeats, and may you flourish all your days...

Monday, September 19, 2005

The Male Model in the Lifedrawing Session...

Last night I went to a drop-in Life Drawing session at the Toronto School of Art. Now how often do we get male models? Yeah, oh baby. Yeah, they've been photoshopped to greater or lesser degrees. They're viewable. Click on the thumbnails for larger versions. Only one is mostly done; the others I am in the process of colouring...

Image Hosted by ImageShack.us













Wednesday, September 14, 2005

The Great Bliss Queen's Mansion of Flaming Bliss

The Great Bliss Queen's Mansion of Flaming Bliss is a poem I wrote about one of the founders of Tibetan Buddhism, a historical woman, Yeshe Tsogyal, an 8th c. Queen of Tibet who became a Buddha - The Great Bliss Queen Dakini, a Divine Mother in the tradition of Kuan Yin and Green and White Tara. I read it at an ARM (Association for Research on Mothering) conference at York University in Toronto,"Mothering and Spirituality" in 2003.

I offer a hand-drawn tracing in ink on parchment paper or Japanese art paper on commission, as can be seen in the upper image of this poster, where she is hung over silk fabric and framed in a mantle of Indian silk scarves. The painting at the bottom of the poster is for sale. See my website for details.

To hear the love poem, click on this link: The Great Bliss Queen's Mansion of Flaming Bliss

Image Hosted by ImageShack.us

Monday, September 12, 2005

You cannot travel the path until you have become the path itself...

The Buddha says: “You cannot travel the path until you have become the path itself.” The path is uncertain. Uncertainty is the guiding force. Nothing can be projected, counted on, leaned against. Home isn't the stable habitat one returns to again and again, the familiar space that holds one’s transformations through the years, remaining more-or-less the same: every day cleaning the same kitchen, washing the dishes, some with light scratches and chips, mopping the taupe tile floor, its tiny cracks, polishing the picture window that look out on the same view, except the trees have grown taller with the passing years. Home for those without a home is what you carry with you, your essence, your inner alter, your ability to love and be stable amidst change. This is what she is about to discover. How to enact continuity without a home, when home is someone else's space, filled with the accoutrements of another's living: when one borrows the necessities for living: a bed, a chair, a couch, a fridge, a phone. The challenge becomes how to feel at home where one is the guest, the boarder, the room-mate, the traveler passing through.

The hexagram of transition: between shells, when the inner soft fleshy essential core has outgrown its shell and discards it for another, this moment of vulnerability. The exploration of path here is in the movement between. Where it is uncertain, where everything is uncertain, where even tomorrow is a mystery that may bring shelter or abandonment to the forces of chaos. It is a place where nothing can be counted on, that is as fragile as a sleep when you don't know if you will awaken again or not. When the flow of the external world is unstable and appears as a dream, a series of unreal images, a projection on a screen that surely will be over soon so that you can go home and sleep in your own bed again. For a recluse to be thrown into a world of dependency on others, to be stripped of what is familiar: loved and well-worn furniture, a life gathered over the years in books, paintings, décor, knick knacks, mementos, clothes, of a home filled with the security of the gracefully collected, of the comforts of the known, stripped of what to withdraw to, is to be shorn of a warm mantle that is like a shawl, shorn of the weavings of a life…

---
Buddha quote from Southland's site

Thursday, September 08, 2005

Transubstantiation: Katrina, 2005

I apologize for the bleakness of this poem..


Transubstantiation: Katrina, 2005

When the storm hurricanes
blowing a city apart
then impasses breached
when the inland river flows over
containing levees
and brings the flooding ocean back
and death rises
against the attics of redemption
against the attics of wood and tile and tar
where last breaths, last rites
before drowning
in the communion cup
New Orleans became.

Of storm water
debris of ruin and bodies
excrement and chemicals
and the wailing
loss, wailing
in the diminishing wind.

Twenty thousand in the Superdome
stranded, the unescaped
awaiting welfare checks
that were washed away.
Carnage of a city,
so much death.

The Holy Communion of New Orleans,
what the fundamentalist
administration
chose to ignore,
in the richest country in the world.
People starving, senseless dying.
Freedom of all citizens to
inalienable rights, stripped;
democracy nailed on a cross
broken floating on flood waters.

Days
without help.
Helpless
days.

The shock and horror
of being black, racial minorities
poor, destitute, suffering
in the windless silence,
the swirling storm
not even a memory in the clear sky.
And the deaf posturing of the high priests
of Washington.

A city underwater.
A city drowning
in the sins of a country.

A city of death, swollen with
drownings
disease, fetid, slow evacuation.

America, take this chalice
of holy flooded water,
remember how monstrous
you have become,
and drink.



_____________________________________________
NY Times: "A disaster of Biblical proportions..."
Globe and Mail: The Flagging Empire
Women's e News article on Rape Victims; Charmaine Neville's video on the horror of the rape and killing, abandonment by the administration, and survival: Survivor's Story

A Pulsing Imagination - Ray Clews' Paintings

A video of some of my late brother Ray's paintings and poems I wrote for them. Direct link: https://youtu.be/V8iZyORoU9E ___