Monday, February 27, 2006

The madwoman in the attic looking for inspiration...

Where oh where has inspiration gone? Blogging was easy the first year, lately it's been like, umm, like not being able to find your pantyhose in the morning when you have to get to work in an office you've never been in before; realizing there isn't enough coffee cream for the 2 thermos mugs you need every morning, and milk is so weak; being driven crazy by the Wal-mart clock on the wall that ticks worse than Cap'n Hook's crook because time is passing and nothing is emerging; seeing all the bright diamond glistenings in the snow when you take your dog out for a romp and knowing it's all been blogged and so have whatever photos you can think of taking; a dull kind of February silence filling the well that's frozen...

What am I thinking about? Men, confusing beautiful creatures that they are, but that's a constant, so never mind.

I wonder about evolutionary theory and the development of ethics. This topic's come at me from 3 different sources in the past few days. Something about how do you explain the development of ethic in 'natural selection.' Probably it's similar to wondering how 'mind' emerges from 'brain,' though I don't know. It's fascinating and perhaps I'll be able to work it into a prose poetry piece soon.

I wonder about the ballyhoo at the Museum of New Painting with a face-off on Saturday between the curator of the Art Gallery of Ontario, a couple of well known professors, and international artists over the "new new art." Or what I imagine is a faceoff between new media artists and old media artists, but we'll see...

I wonder about my birthday next week and why I'm here and what life means and what the future will bring, you know the score.

But mostly I wonder where inspiration is.

Sunday, February 26, 2006

A late Winter's path...

A quiet weekend. My daughter at her father's, the exhaustion of single parenting sets in. Yesterday I napped on and off all day, and was too tired to go dancing at 10pm, even though I was showered and dressed and ready to go, so I spent an hour meditating with 'loving-kindness' instead and fell asleep. It's February, classically my most difficult month. Seasonal Affective Disorder. I've tried staring into full spectrum light bulbs in other years for an hour or two a day, clipping it to my computer monitor, making sure to let the light into the retina, with perhaps a minor sense of a lift the next day but nothing substantial. I slump. It has turned cold, wind chill of -17C, with a northerly wind, and I know I'm not going to make it to the lifedrawing session I thought I might attend tonight. What I will do is take my dog out to Christie Pits where she can run up and down large enough hills and buy just enough food for tomorrow at a local Italian grocery store and return home. Probably I shall do my monthly two and a half hour meditation this evening, the one I always do when my daughter goes to her Dad's on the one weekend a month he allows. It's a cleansing, a rest, a time to recoop, a time to prepare for whatever's coming. I can no more avoid the '1/10th of the day' meditation than I can the feeling of exhaustion after she leaves. Her return is always celebratory, usually she returns late, when, after a weekend of rest and extended meditation, I am renewed. While I had some lovely conversations with friends by phone, all plans for activity this weekend went by the wayside: sometimes rest is best...

Favoured quotes

Not usually liking quotes out of context, prefering either the original author's or the poster's comments for embedding the jewel in, I, too, have my favourites. These speak to me about art, ways of being, meaning...


"I stopped and let myself lean a moment against the blue shoulder of the air. The work of my art is the work of the world's heart. There is no other art."

Alison Luterman


"You are not here to love the world; you are here to be love in the world."

Grace Johnson

Saturday, February 25, 2006

A woman who is always there, somewhere.


Update:edit. Thank you, Richard,and MB, for your invaluable feedback. I've made some small changes, & will let it rest a bit and come back to it in a few weeks. The drawing I did in the mid-90s at my long gone cottage on Georgina Island. She's not the woman in this small word sketch, but somehow a similar energy...

In his "wish stream" a woman like her doesn't exit. She is beyond the years of possibility. She is slipped into, and relaxed in, like a well-worn dressing gown, a comfortable old couch, a favourite cafe in which to ponder one's thoughts. She is the warmth of a female oasis where struggle isn't necessary. She is the mother's arms, the place of acceptance, the restful time of sunset. She is the quietening. She is not just over the hill, but down in the valley on the other side, laughing and dancing her opulences. There is no need to impress her, or even to pursue her. She is a feature of the unchanging land. The aging woman with unbounded compassion towards herself and him. She is a prophecy of what he can become. Now she lies like sheer vintage lace over his vision. A bit obscuring, a reaction to the fickleness of his youthful women, an attempt at having a fixture of permanence to rebound back to. But it isn't what he wants, what he dreams of, what quickens his body, opens his heart. The 'wish stream' of images, visions, idealizations of love that he yearns for in his dreamy harem of beautiful women only includes a house mother who services others. Her yellowing teeth, her aging skin and its wrinkles not for the ardour of sweet romance. He found his way into her realm to heal a tired and wounded heart, the slings and outrageous arrows of lost love, and now he must make his way out and away from her, glistening again like a new-born baby.

Thursday, February 23, 2006

Between One & the Other

There is a moment where you're not paying attention when you melt into. Before that, self conscious effort. If the ego is how we see ourselves, we forget who we are. In the forgetting we open. Looking back, we can't say when or how it happened. Only one moment we were skin sliding on skin and in the next culminating towards orgasm; we were moving our bodies with awkward rhythm and then we were dancing without care, liquid motion, instruments of the music; we were struggling with disassembled words that wanted to flow with great pasison but couldn't and the next we were writing our opus. It's the moment of melting, where we've disappeared from ourselves, that I'm intrigued with.

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Hydra-head of Essentialism in Neuroscience

Image Hosted by ImageShack.usEssentialism: women’s essence is maternal; to be fulfilled, a woman must be a mother and spend her life mothering. Which not only is ludicrous but dangerous to the life, liberty and freedom of all women to live their lives fully in any way they choose and to develop their talents, intelligence, capacities in any and every area of human endeavour, not just the one of raising children.

This is not to deny the importance of having and raising children! Nothing could be more important for us as a species. But that one half of the human race should be limited to this role is essentialistic. As if it is her unchanging, eternal role…

That thought system has not only been challenged but overthrown in the Western world, surely. After half a century of feminism aren't we are well past it? Does it keep cropping up in various forms because to have clearly defined roles for people makes the workings of a society easier?

The latest incarnation is in the field of neuroscience. Did you know that “from pregnancy on, female mammals are brighter, bolder and better able to cope with life than their childless counterparts”? That “[t]hese brain improvements are permanent, lasting from childbearing years into senescence”? Basically it all seems to boil down to some hormones that increase the ability to bond and the capacity to love: cortisol (which is usually associated with depression but which appears in elevated levels during the first week post-partum and appears to be involved in initial mother-child bonding), the endorphins, oxytocin and vasopressin, or “love hormones.” And increased neuronal pathways in the hippocampus, the hypothalamus (a region claimed to "strongly" affect "maternal behaviour"), the amygdala (which is claimed to regulate "maternal love"). Much of the evidence for the necessity of maternalizing the woman because it makes her smarter is based on the fact that women can distinguish their own baby’s cry out of a multitude, or their own baby’s smell in blind smell tests. Oh, and mommy rats could do mazes faster than non-mommy rats. It’s all a dubious application of fascinating scientific research and leaves me palpitating with worry. Maternal neurotransmitters just sounds like jargon for yet another hydra-head of essentialism.

The deeper message of this research, it seems to me, is that falling in love itself increases intelligence, curiosity, daring, and the beautiful nurturing behaviour that follows naturally surely sends those “love hormones” skyrocketing.

If you can lay down the inherent essentialism of the article, the research is utterly fascinating.
______________________
Article in question, and from which I quoted: Giving Birth to Supermom, by William Illsay Atkinson.


Sunday, February 19, 2006

Dancing Chameleon

Image Hosted by ImageShack.usSince, of late, I've changed my profile pic rather too frequently, I set out to create one today. I'm trying to post something I can live with. This one's okay, the hall corner we (my daughter's behind the camera) took it in drab so I dabbled a bit with the background, whitened out the window with the tea towel hanging as a curtain. We liked the silhouette; the lines of the body; the painterly background. Perhaps I can leave this photo as a profile for awhile... going to try. I'm not just in an 'identity crisis,' shifting semblances of the self, but a 'life crisis.' Oh, sigh. Who are we anyway?

My favourite creature as a child in Zambia, where I lived in the jungle, were chameleons which I played with for hours. It's hard to stay the same, and yet we never change...

Friday, February 17, 2006

Pearl in an Iced Web of Light


Tonight, the landscape iced, the streets, parks, roofs of the houses, encased. The branches of the trees I passed were glossy and fragile. I went out to photograph in the alley behind the house where I live, and came home with a pearl in an iced web of light.
................

Update: I left this image looking like a stage set, the 'pearl' so flagrantly hung, as a postmodern homage to "Pearl," a 14th century poem by the 'Pearl-poet,' thought to be the same author who wrote, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." My hommage doesn't have reference to a Pre-Raphaelite or New Age female muse, doesn't refer to the courtly love tradition, nor even to the Christian sensuality of "Pearl," with its open adoration and jewelled luxuries, which must have been a relief after the austerities of the Byzantine era. But the "pearl" is imaged, held in a web of light: it's been found, is still shining all these centuries later...

Since I can't offer a url with a translation of the poem itself, but only guide you to a site where it may be found, for anyone interested in long read, I have pasted the entire poem into a comment below.

Thursday, February 16, 2006

Dance of the Dual

This is about a third in to The Move.
.....................


Entering an enclosure of great transparency and light where things name themselves.*

Fulfillment of our desires is not fullness in itself, but a counterpoint between lack and abundance. To know one is to know the other. They are twin forces, balancing each other through all the cycles.

The creative force is the force of entrophy. An oscillating dance, each necessary to life and death.

Life cannot exist without death; so death cannot exist without life.

In counterpoint we know each other.

Dualism enables us to straddle the middle, the golden means, the pivot of the centre. Even in uncertainty.

On the threshold of being, non being.

The dialectic of our soul.

________
*This line, I'm sure, is from Michael Hamburger's introduction to Poems of Paul Celan, which I would've written onto one of the copies of this mms. but which didn't get onto the computer, and which means a trip to the library...

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

A working printer, so editing...

After She added salt..., which was problematic obviously, this, which comes before On the edge of, which wasn't, and which I posted way last year. I have a working printer finally, am editing, but not in any order; since it's all I'm really writing these days, I'm posting little bits...


This is a piece on, hmnn, security, but it's poetic, so what I consider "the glue," connective images running through the whole book; She added salt... and On the edge of I think of "as bones."

.......................

Is feeling safe in your domain security? Protecting your assets, information, property, who you are? She is without domain. Skinless, visceral wandering. Every abode temporary, a borrowed shell.

Without firewall, dam, divider, enclosure, screen, buffer, barricade. Nowhere to hide. The parchments of her words peeled back, shorn of the sheaths of a fragmented grammatology.

Exfoliate. She is peeled, pared, scraped, sloughed. Shorn of her home, its belongings, the collection of a lifetime.

To bruise, cut or injure the skin of.

The petals of the rose, like dried fragments of blood she carries with her.

Living life in uncertainty; in reality, not philosophically. On edges, where nothingness is, a fall into the irredeemable. Shouldn't the irredeemable be a footnote, the never-realized fear, the 'what happens to other people,' never oneself?

Bleeding, a release of. Sloughing. Shedding the impotency of harm.

A woman without armour, a shell, accoutrements, can disappear quickly.

The weight of things so very important.

The last post, on Core Values

I am surprised that my last post garnered not one comment. My site meter showed a healthy number of readers. I wonder what the problem was? And I wonder if I should consider it for the upcoming conference on the ethics of care; I worry, as ever. Writing always has to be poised, somewhere where it doesn't slip over the edge nor is too cliched, conventional.

Of the last piece, I could say, 'You can take the woman out of the Third World, but you can't take the Third World out of the woman."

Although it takes place in this culture, perhaps it's too alien to this culture? Too Africa or India or South American or ...

In that piece I aligned with probably 70% of the mothers of the world. Who do live in poverty, who do hold their families together in often impoverished conditions, who have a strength beyond reckoning if you really think about it.

I'd still like some comments, a discussion of any sort, encouragement, criticism, attack, it doesn't matter. Silence is the hardest of all. What does the silence mean?

Really bad writing? Way too whatever? Someone tell me!

Monday, February 13, 2006

She added salt...

This is a later section from my story, The Move, and any criticism or feedback is appreciated. I want to submit it to a conference on Carework and Caregiving: Theory and Practice (deadline March 1st), but find it onerous, or perhaps I am fatigued with it. Some other responses, or readings of it, would help enormously. And give me a way to introduce it...
..............

She added salt to a bag of trail mix in the bulk foods store before sitting down with a coffee at a table to write. The colours of the street had became fainter and her step less sure on the wavering sidewalk, and she had sat on a bench until everything recombined. The doctor recommended eating something salty and drinking if this happened.

In the past few days she had eaten little and her stomach hurt from the lunch of minestrone soup and a pumpernickel bagel that her friend had served; this small bag of nuts, seeds and raisons seemed excessive. But she continued nibbling. She had lost too much blood over the past week.

Surely it was only perimenopausal bleeding. In the heat wave, on the weakest day, she'd gone out to find a drop-in clinic, walking slowly along the main street, resting frequently. Those she asked looked at her strangely. That day she did not have bus fare to go across town and knew she couldn't walk the distance. With such impossibilities thrown at her, she decided to forget medical help until she had moved and was settled. The woman she was staying with had become crazy with frequent and protracted hysterics over imagined infractions. Every few days, or oftener, she exploded with paranoia and accusations. Only when the woman smoked up was there peace in the house.

She sat at a table in the small cafe and considered her options. The situation where she was living was not good. It had been a mistake, but she wasn't trapped, soon she would find another home. In the interim she tried to stay balanced in her heart, stable in the inner alter of her mind. She was flying a migratory route, on the way from somewhere to somewhere, the general direction known, but not the details of the landing. She bled along the way. That's how it was.

She had lost over a litre of blood in three days; she had counted how many times a day her diva cup needed emptying, calculating the amount. She was anaemic. She didn't care if it might be cancer, endometriosis, fibroids, or a thyroid problem. She hadn't a place to call home, hadn't transferred her health coverage when she'd moved, and who would look after her child and cat if she had to go for tests? It was better to leave medical procedures alone. She took iron pills from the small supply she had, ate when she could, and in meditation focussed on healing the tearing in her tumultuous womb.

"You look pale and tired," Cheryl said when she arrived earlier in the afternoon for a visit. "I'm probably perimenopausal. A very heavy cycle, flooding. But then I'm a bleeder- bled a lot after my first birth. Coming to the end..." she smiled wanly. The two women nodded: the female body, with its life-giving powers, was also a body that bled monthly, and went into hyper-drive when the fertile years were drawing to a close. "Only I didn't expect it to be so physically taxing! It's like the early post-partum bleeding, just after giving birth. A final dramatic flourish before it stops for good." Cheryl smiled, "There are herbs that might help, and homeopathic remedies." "Yams are good," she concurred, "I don't have hot flashes, at least. That must be so hard."

She entered the cool house. Cheryl brought out two glasses of carrot and papaya juice and they sat on the couch catching up with the events of years when she was away, their children's schooling, problems with their ex's, the jobs both of them had had and the employment they were looking for, and their spirituality, meditation, yoga and how they were handling life. They were comfortable together, both knowing the struggles of single mothers. They both believed in the miraculous, too. Often, on the edge of unutterable loss, a threat of deprivation, where she was now, a reprieve occurred that made them both trusting of the beneficence of life. If you were open to survival, to maintaining a stable course, and stayed loving in your heart, generous in ways that count, things worked out. The tornados narrowly missed you; the hurricanes didn't destroy your plot; there were no major break-ins or fires or other calamities. If your inner emotional terrain was stable, so was your outer one. You could fast undo your fragile world by giving into despair or anger. Blaming would destroy the network of support around you, cause a collapse as you were abandoned.

Despite their employment worries, her heavy bleeding and its accompanying weakness, the way key people in their lives treated them, they agreed it was crucial to remain loving, optimistic stable emotional forces in the network of relationships they lived in. They were strong women. They could smile everyday even though they lived below the poverty line. Women like them didn't crumble easily. Despair was a luxury they couldn't afford.

For a moment, during their conversation, feeling the desperations they spoke of, the difficulties, she felt connected to millions of women over the globe who struggle with poverty, grief, racism, violence, but who keep going. Women who are the emotional centres for their families, who are anchors, who place food on the table miraculously out of almost nothing, who dress their children, their spouses, themselves somehow, who clean and maintain their homes, who work for menial wages, where they are essentially labourers, who never allow themselves to succumb to madness, or drugs, or a furious destruction of the world around them, who keep loving their families in profound ways. They grieve, yes, there is sadness, but they have hearts of compassion. It was here that she felt a bond with the strength of women throughout the ages. She knew she was alive, living in her generation, carrying the flame of continuous love through the marathon that history is, only because her foremothers had also carried it and passed it on. If mothering is a stable, conservative force, if that's what happens to women as they take on the responsibility and role of motherhood, then she was grateful for it. This was where there was meaning, the staying-with-it through everything, the power to endure, to continue.

She rose, feeling the light flooding in the window of the store like an illumination, and stepped into the steaming heat, inhaling the humidity, letting it loosen her, as she made her way to pick up groceries before walking across the park to where she temporarily lived, celebrating the loving core, its continuance.

Sunday, February 12, 2006

The Move, Section #59 (An aesthetic of intimacy)

When you are making love to the light rippling in the window, the alter of streaming candles and precious leaves on the silk mat, the colour and movement and sensuality of the dancers around you.

When you are making love to the man or woman of your heart, dreaming your God or Goddess.

When you no longer care how you appear, when you've forgotten yourself, when you hold nothing back, unrestrained, and give everything, your entire passion -pain, suffering, anger, compassion, joy, love- to us.

This has become my theory of art.

An aesthetic of intimacy.

Saturday, February 11, 2006

The Move, Section #80 (on miracles)

When I post a section I have to work on it, which is good, and so is feedback. Much of "The Move," an autobiographical novella, is about synchronicity. Creating new patterns and connections. Unfolding previously unknown paradigms into new realities, to be superceded by yet newer paradigms in the process of a life...

Section #80

She continued probing how what she needed, an apartment, furniture, kitchenware, appeared seemingly miraculously. She was like a magnet. Attributing it to divine intervention was just a form of metaphor to explain it; angelic beings weren't carrying items to her. Anymore than the way any church, synagogue or mosque attempted to co-opt the process of miracle to justify their version of godhead. No-one can claim ownership of this process. What religions attribute miracle to, the stories they create to explain what is unexplainable, because it can't be willfully recreated, are just metaphors for the process, a way to explain the way to.

She had her own metaphors, ones not relying on a moralistic theology. She likened eruptions of the miraculous to an alchemical process. That the deeper work was at the atomic level. Where the vibrating energy flies to form molecules which form things. Before gravity binds them. Once they are bound, they remain that way until the forces of chaos and entrophy break them down. After the molecules fly and before gravity fully solidifies was when it was possible to shift the making of the world into new forms, models, paradigms. Where it was possible to wish a future into being and have it happen.

Where miracles happened.

Thursday, February 09, 2006

How do we think.

Do we know how to think? That's not as crazy a question as it seems. It started this morning with my wondering why we become entrapped in stories that we take to be reality. Like the Bible, or Koran, or the Tao te Ching, or the Mahabharata. These books are holy books, yes, and at the core of their culture's belief systems, but they are only stories. Stories that tell us how about the meaning of the world, how to act in it, and how to think. Because our thoughts are where we are most puzzled. The rest is easy, eating, sleeping, making love, working. Yet our thoughts affect our day-to-day reality and shape who we are and what we do. They are crucially important to our self-identities. Our thoughts compose us and compose our view of the world around us. But the ability to do this is a relatively new creation, entirely dependent on a 2mm layer on top of the cerebral hemispheres, the neopallium (Latin for "new mantle"), or neocortext as it is more commonly called, only about 200 million years old. This tiny layer, which is wrinkled into deep grooves in humans, thus packing in the neouronal columns, composed of some 10 billion neurons, is responsible for "sensory perception, generation of motor commands, spatial reasoning, and in humans, language and conscious thought."

It is the language and conscious thought part that I am musing on. It seems to me that our thoughts are a giddy, wild place, composed of giddy, wild language bits, and that, to tame the inner riots, we create stories that tell us how to think. Because we don't know on our own. We are all busy searching for 'states of consciousness' that will enable us to exist peacefully with the rampant energies of the synaptic connections in our modern brains. Afterall, we're not just thinkers, but conscious of our thinking. And being 'self-conscious' is one of the most difficult states to be in.

Is that why we believe the powerful stories of our culture? Why we take them to be accurate versions of the truth? Because it settles our thoughts, having a specific set of ideas to work with, a certain way to think?

This post is only about some questions I had preparing an omlette for my son, who is visiting for a few days.

Did the omellete curve and bellow like a neopallium? I can't say, but perhaps.

Wednesday, February 08, 2006

Falling... a story about nothing.

Usually denying myself food and drink after 6pm because I don't sleep well and if I wake to go to the bathroom in the night, I'm awake for hours. Do I remember that my blood pressure is on the low side, and plummets if I'm dehydrated or hungry? Which I am every morning as I rise, make coffee, let our dog out, wake my daughter.

Walking into her darkened room in my long dressing gown, I step on a winter boot, the hem of my dressing gown catching under my foot as it slides, caught on the mid-calf length faux sheepskin. The bog of materials pivots me. I can't rebalance myself, my foot trapped by the gown and the boot, neither relinquishing their hold. I'm lightheaded anyway. I fall straight back like an ironing board.

I try to bend in mid-air, to allow my rump to take what's coming, but can't manoever my body. I fall onto soft carpet, inches away from a wooden chair, on the back of my head, which I'm trying to tuck in for protection.

After impact, I roll on my side in a curled position and cry, oh so melodramatic but a way to release the shock of the fall. My daughter, who usually takes half an hour to wake up, leaps out of bed to hug me and help me up. I'm fine, feel no pain, didn't lose consciousness, no concussion.

The headache begins towards bedtime. I'd forgotten about falling but had spent a listless day of little substance feeling grey. Today it is like a fire simmering in my upper back, shoulders, back of my head. There is some minor bruising, that's all...

Monday, February 06, 2006

Canvas of light

Click on the photo to go to flikr to see the slideshow of the photographs my 15 year old daughter took of her 53 year old mother that night, or the sidebar of Rubies in Crystal for a flikr montage of photos ...

A Canvas of Light


Moving across the canvas, shadows. In the lights once I counted five shadows, some short and close, others long and stretching far. Did that mean I existed? How do photons spin around us and collide into the wall leaving a dark imprint of our shape? Are our obscure lives the canvas that catches us? I dance through the hours of my days, sitting, walking, sleeping, eating, talking. Breath is a dance. Displacing the air, sending the light spinning around us, the impulse of our thoughts flinging ideas into being through our bodies. Is a dance. You at the computer screen with your dancing fingers on the keys playing music for me who reads you. A grammar of light flies off into incandescence, shadowing, spotlighting, a flux that captures us, moments burnt into negative space, where it's empty, in the vastness of dark energy between the luminescences. Give me a moment, this pensiveness, before I turn and gaze upon you, love.


(the "you" in all my pieces is always the reader, you, my unbidden, golden muse, without whom I would write nothing.)

Friday, February 03, 2006

How a woman.

(Sat: With Blogger down again what was I to do but tinker with this? The first paragraph slightly revised (sorry to upload it again to those of you with feeds! Like the 9th time?)

Fri: How hilarious!- Blogger's been acting up this evening, giving error messages, refusing to open sites, and now that it's working again I discovered eight copies of this post!
And 8 copies have been duly emailed to me!)

She looks in the mirror, pushes her hair back, curves her back slightly, smiles. The nightdress is dropped on the floor as towels are laid close by. She turns on the bath tap, feels the spray, steps in. The warm waterfall falls on her back and neck and shoulders and soaks her hair; flicking open the shampoo that smells like a meadow of alpine flowers, she pours honey-coloured liquid into her cupped palm, rubs it between both hands and sweeps them into her hair bringing a lather. With the tips of her fingers, she rubs her scalp until it tingles. Arcing her head back, the water runs through her hair until it is free of soap, and then she begins again. After the final rinse she squeezes the excess water out, applies a conditioner and gently pulls a wide-toothed comb through as she unentangles it. Then she wets a facecloth and rubs it over a bar of soap until it becomes soapy, and begins massaging her body. She strokes her feet, undersides and tops, up the curve of the calf, around the knees, up her thighs, across her belly. She gently soaps her pubic hair, but never any lower; the vulva is sensitive. With her fingers, never the washcloth, she soaps the crack of her bum. She massages her breasts with the facecloth, under her arms, down each arm, and finally around her neck. Slipping the shower head out of its socket, she rinses her legs, arms, chest, breasts, belly, back, she gently pulls apart her cheeks and rinses her anus, and then holds the nozzle between her legs, letting the water dance off her labia; the water is warm, the droplets enliven her skin, the soap runs into the tub and down the drain. She holds the warm spray against one underarm and then the other, finding the gentle pounding of the water sweetly erotic, and she thinks of the body's erogenous zones. Today she is meeting her lover, and she is preparing herself.

Turning off the water, she opens the shower curtain, reaches for a towel to wrap her hair in, and then the large bath towel and dries herself slowly. She ties the towel around her breasts and hips and steps onto the tiled floor. Wiping the mirror, she sees a vague form in the steamed glass and with a comb parts her hair. She squeezes some conditioner into her palms and rubs it through her wet hair. Later she will put on matching lace panties and a bra, a tight top and jeans, and a small amount of make-up, concentrating most on the mouth, outlining the lips, applying a pencil, then lipstick, then gloss. She thinks of him the whole while. She sprays perfume between her breasts and behind each ear. She can hear him whispering to her.

The heat in her body already growing. She allows it to flame. The sensations warmly spreading through her in expectancy always amaze her. They are generated only by the thought of what is to come, the pleasures in the hours ahead. Sometimes she is so aroused that she has orgasms, little ones, as she walks to meet him. By the time they collide, kiss, fall into each other, undress each other, she is a heaving, sighing, moaning woman who is fully open and comes before he enters her and continues the crescendos with him thrusting deeply into her.

This is how a woman gets ready to meet her lover...

White Fire

Old projects that you didn't finish and feel guilty about? Ah, I know those. Some of them won't let you alone, though. Like White Fire. Blogs are always new, none of us want to read stuff from years past, so I've posted the beginning of this epic prose poem at my website. And I hope, by doing so, that that act triggers me to get back on it. I need to stop looking at it as a massive research project (which it is) and as something tiny and possible (which it is in incremental bits).

White Fire
began in 2000. I wrote about 6 pages, which I read on a poetry show on a local radio station. It almost became a performance in 2001 too, with a troupe of a dozen disparate singers and dancers, but that's another story (that I'll obviously have to tell if I get back to the work).

It's an epic prose poem on the history of love in our culture. Ostensibly, that is, we'll see.

It's theme is a discussion on whether 'soul mates' exist. I personally don't believe in 'eternal' soul mates, only that your soul mate is whoever you're in love with, no more than that. But the question of love, ah.......

Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Birth Posters in transit...

After too much ado, Birth Posters finally in transit. If you ordered one, why it could be one of these. Do you like my intense butcher brown paper wrapping and taping? Do you think they'll be stopped by customs, pounced on as porn of the maternal body? Do they look suspiciously smutty? Over-wrapped? I hope they're not opened! Mama ain't gonna be happy if that happens!

Monday, January 30, 2006

Enfolded Luminosity: Pulsing Hea(r)t, eye of Ra

A reading, a response, an interweaving, a myth-making story of the artwork by a young woman who goes by the blog name of BoureeMusique. If anyone else has a reading, I'll post it too. Many thanks!

(click on image to enlarge)

How many times can a woman post an image? It's renamed, from "Willow Women," to, "Pulsing Hea(r)t, eye of Ra." I would read that, pulsing heat/heart, eye of Ra. Why? They clearly don't look like willow women anymore- they were so stretched I thought of them as mirages, as desert dwellers (in the surreal mind it doesn't matter if willows and deserts don't go together). But that pulsing sunset, the way it throbs through them, the desert, Egypt, the Nile, Ra, ah! But Hathor, the queen who wears the sun with two horns- and who is most likely the more ancient goddess of light (before Ra, who came before Horus). It's all bound in up there. I wonder what myth the figures in this painted drawing belong to? I wonder if I can make one up, or if you can?

~~~

I will play with it - from left to right, they can be Gwynhwyfar, Morgaine, and Igraine. The Goddess surrounds and envelops them, is the vibrant sun and blood color. Gwynhwyfar is on the left, half-recognizing the Goddess's call but running from it. All she wants is the true love of a man she should have had. Had her marriage been different, life would be less painful for all of Camelot. Igraine is on the right, held by the Goddess mostly complacently. She stands motionless and in a dream-like state, thinking of her Uther. Morgaine is in the middle, her face ethereal because at times she truly embodies the Goddess. She strides - proud but more than that - confident. She sees bitter times, but the sun, the power, is always at her center, because she is ever true. BoureeMusique

Sunday, January 29, 2006

My small library...

I'm far from the world of the text, yet I'm creating my own broken text. Everything spins in my head, fragments of text here, partial images there, authors listed on rolled parchment. Perhaps the texts I've read are smattered over my mindscape like collages: rearranged, cut, reoriented, given different colours, rotated, fragments repeated that have no meaning other than to me. In my private mythology, the place where I make meaning of the heiroglyphic world, where thoughts are scrawled across pages, edited and formatted, lines drifting by that I barely see anymore. I have lost my library. The books I didn't try to memorize on the shelves where they could be found and browsed through. What I underlined then I would still underline today. When did I discover what struck me as most important and relevant could be discerned in a speed read of a few hours and it was the same as what emerged from reading slowly over a week? This discovery enabled me to read vastly and widely through a number of years. The text no longer frightened me with its weight of meaning and the tradition out of which it arose. I could read sources, influences, backgrounds, other authors of the same time period for context. One book opened another. What's important to me remains important to me and didn't change with speed of reading, nor time.

I'm still trying to understand the fundamental grammar of my life. The basic building blocks. What foundation I rest on. In the exegesis of myself, I tear my texts apart until I find bare letters, signs floating over the ground of my being.

Our artifacts are all that will remain of us.

Bare words dragged across the whiteness of pages. A few images here and there. A tune. A tiny bundle of photographs. Some memoraphilia. Memory for a generation or two.

I have been without my small library for half a year and I feel adrift and bereft. How do I re-collect those books, their memories?

Francis Yates. The Art of Memory, on Giordiano Bruno in the Renaissance. Vast tracts, whole books, entire epic poems memorized. A guide to oral memory. How did they do it? By creating a structure to keep books, chapters, paragraphs and lines in. A vast palace of the mind; the inner library. Organized, polished, filed; the cadences of words creating a natural punctuation. And so I must remember my library, for I miss it.

One packed bookcase of art books, from Prehistoric Art to the Present. A shelf of fat, white Abrams art books. Colour images. Hundreds of small colour edition books on individual artists, from the late Medieval period to the 20th Century. Numerous critics, from Ruskin to Greenburg to feminism to the new media.

Two packed bookcases of English Literature. I put Greek literature in here too. Homer, Ovid, Aeschelus. And Babylonian. Gilgamesh; Inanna. And then the periods: Medieval, Renaissance, followed by centuries, 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th. Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne, Pope, Blake, the Romantics, the Pre-Raphaelites, Morris, Woolf, Proust, Joyce... Modern poetry had its own section, and so did novels, which were filed alphabetically.

One bookcase of Psychology, Sociology, Mythology. This is where Jung & Freud went, and Schzaz, and Neumann and Campbell, a couple of first year Introduction to Psychology texts, not much interest in the field. Along with gentle music that I used for the relaxation sequences of my yoga classes. And underneath were numerous books of photographs.

Then a packed bookcase on Science and Philosophy. I stopped collecting Science books a decade or two back. Philosophy had all the classics, the Greek Philosophers, Plato, Aristotle, jumping to Bacon and then on through to perhaps Existentialism, and into our era. Those massive collection books, like Zimmer's Philosophies of India, and another one on Chinese Philosphy. All read, all duly underlined, notes written in some book somewhere or other. People like Augustine and Aquinas were in religion.

Religion a packed bookcase, everything from so-called primitive religions to Christianity to Shaminism and Witchcraft and New Age. My small collection of the Medieval Christian mystics there.

Women's writing took up 2 bookcases. All of it 20th Century. Novels, poetry, essays, feminist theory. And my own area of speciality, maternal theory, packed a smaller bookcase, along with many drafts towards a book spanning almost 2 decades.

Next to my bed the books I was currently reading, and ones most relevant to whatever my current project was. In Vancouver I remember Alex Grey's paintings on birth, which I wanted to study to understand, and still do.

The chunks of the thought of whole lifetimes of thinkers, writers, artists, books organized in simple categories of knowledge, bits of lines, notations in my head, dim memories of book covers. I see my bookcases packed with books that were all read like disappearing visions of another lifetime.

And I wonder if I will ever be re-united with them, these old friends of mine, companions of many years, in the days to come. And I wonder what will happen to me if I never again see them, touch them, open and read the chapter headings, my underlined sections, run my fingers over their spines as I dust them.

Will only fragments of text remain, floating in my mind like resurrected debris torn from its context, its pages, the beautiful books I collected for so many years?

What is to happen now?

Saturday, January 28, 2006

On diets, from a letter to a friend...

Posted this, took it down, and received a beautiful comment from Ken, who couldn't find the post, so it's back... and then added a bathroom-mirror self-portrait, which I'm sure I'll feel silly about after I've gone out dancing, & want to come home & take it down, but which somehow seems part of a post on diet.

~

I like some weight on a man. They're always so self conscious about it too. It's quite funny. Perhaps I don't find that lean and mean in a man who's heavier? They're not happy with their bodies and want you to see pics of them when they were 'in shape,' but just as they like eating, they like sex. A man with a girth is more sensual, there's no doubt about it. In my experience anyhow. And maybe softer inside too, which I really adore.

How I would apply all that to myself I don't know. I've lost about 10 lbs since moving, but it's mostly due to lack of work, income, settledness, even kitchen supplies. I love food, tastes, textures, colours. But dislike being overly full. And wheat gives me heartburn, so I stay away from breads. Well, most carbs. They're just too heavy for me, give me indigestion. So lots of vegetables, dairy, meat, chocolate, and a slice or so of 12 grain bread a day. Like a yogi, I rarely eat after 6pm at night. I dunno. In my early 20s I was severely bulimic. It was quite a journey out of it. But I did it, on my own, it was my 'secret,' and found after I stopped binging and throwing up that my weight remained the same. I didn't put on any weight at all. Part of the journey out of bulimia was discovering that I don't need 3 meals a day, 2 is enough, and that wheat really makes me feel quite sick, and was often the reason I threw up I guess. Mind you, I still love a fresh white flour poppy seed bagel slathered in butter, but I know I'll pay for it with acid reflux some hours afterwards. My treats, then, aren't pastries, sigh, but chocolate things, coconut is ok too. All of which keeps my weight down. Since breads, starchy foods are real weight putter oners. Diet has been a long process for me. And I see my 15 year old daughter going through it now- and is trying to limit foods like pancakes, donuts, bread since she does see a direct correlation to her weight. I mean, we find that pigging out on a half a dozen buttertarts doesn't put weight on the way half a dozen donuts do. It's so interesting the way the body metabolizes, or doesn't metabolize, foods. Some foods just get converted into and stored as fat cells, I guess. Or that's how it seems. There's no reason why indulging in a large bar of imported chocolate shouldn't put on weight like a box of Krispy Kreme donuts, but it doesn't. I've always wondered if it's got something to do with evolution, and that we're optimally healthy on a 'pre-farming' diet... that wheat, corn, rice, all the cultivated crops, while feeding us in multitude, aren't really suited to our digestive systems. Evolution takes a lot longer to catch up, perhaps. I seem to do very well on what I would consider to be a modern version of the hunting-&-gathering diet. Don't laugh, and please laugh. When I talk like this people usually studiously ignore me as a crackpot.

Friday, January 27, 2006

The artist as doctor

A friend, SavonDuJour, asked of the merge of the process of Prostrations, "Interesting. How do you know when to stop?"



When you can't do anymore? Actually when my daughter came home the day I painted it she said, "Don't you dare do another thing to it - it's my favourite!" But, then, she's so sweet... (mostly, that is -:). However, I'm not sure I don't like the earlier incarnations of this piece better... the two in the middle in particular, but then I remind myself that they were soaking wet and when dry would be much faded in colour and vibrancy.

Don't we stop when we can't think of anything more 'to fix'? I don't know about you, but most of my art is trying to save 'disasters,' which makes it a very adrenaline thing. Not peaceful at all. My whole life is thrown on the line each time. When it's done, it's such a relief.

I live in acute embarrassment over my work- it's so on the edge of collapse into disparatenesses that when it works I feel like a relieved doctor who's sent someone stitched but alive into the world.

Is that fair to say? Or is it my mood this morning? The Willow Women piece got accidentally splattered with coffee and so I poured water all over it and painted it last night and it's not worked, and I can clearly see that in the morning light. Which also had something to do with my mental apparatus last night. Not being in the meditative moment. Perhaps I'm being too hard on myself. But it wasn't meant to be a water drawing, didn't take kindly to being immersed. I'm thinking of covering it in spider webs of lines to see if that might resuscitate it. Short of blasting it with volts of cardio-electricity, what can I do? There's the morgue of the paper recycling bin. Or perhaps I could cut it up, organ-transplant-like, and collage it into something else.

Share your process with finishing pieces?


"Enfolded Luminosity" Series: Pulsing Hea(r)t, the eye of Ra, 25.5cm x 31 cm or 10" x 12 1/2", india ink, watercolour pencil on paper, 2006

I finished it this morning quickly- thank goodness for white pencil spiderweb lines. And I've forgotten the difficulties, not understanding how I could ever have thought "stitched," odd how that is...

Thursday, January 26, 2006

Process of a painting...

Click on it to increase the size. A history of a painting... where it's been before it got to where it is. There are other histories, like 'where,' 'who,' 'why,' oh and perhaps most important, 'what'- :)

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

Window in the Earth

When do major shifts occur? In small moments soon gone?

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Enfolded Luminosity: Prostrations...


It's still and always a dance, of colour, form, energies, bodies.

This technique is not the same as paint on canvas, and I'm learning that.

I'm not, well, no, it's not, well, sometimes the idea you had in your mind and what emerges aren't, and, well, it's about acceptance. Dancing a new dance that is always different from all the other dances you've danced.

Still learning the ways watercolour pencils and paper work together; yes, her back is a little 'rubbed over,' but I don't mind that. Aren't all of our backs a little 'rubbed over' with life, what we carry, what we prostrate in our spiritual practice?

I don't know why the Fauvian slashes of colour.

This series (these pencils, this place of residence, my relationships, both in daily life and on line) I'm calling, "Enfolded Luminosity."

Willow Women was splattered this morning by a coffee spill. Maybe I'll throw a heap of water on it and see what happens... it can't be an unwetted drawing anymore.

Dance, Dream, Disappearing into each other is sold; it went quite quickly (thank you beautiful man, dear Bill); there were email exchanges with a few interested people (can I call you that, Mary? it's hardly a fair description of you, your work, our connection), and then the watercolour drawing got betrothed and is awaiting it's suitor now. These pieces are for sale, and thanks, Jean, for reminding me to be more clear about that. Now that I have a working relationship with a woman who manages a print shop, I can also offer 'art prints' on satin finish photograph paper of anything you see here...

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Prostrations...



This doesn't exist in the world. It was between a drawing and a scribbling colouring episode. It only exists digitally. The water that the figures are washed under would have dried anyhow...

It's probably part of my series on temple art, the celestial dancers...

Bowing: a bent, curved, or arched object.

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 ___