The configuration of your desire, Monsieur, is complex. The beauty of women, how does it move you?
Scent of her kisses, tender cleavage, your lips, the way she holds you in her tiny hands, what it would be like to plunge yourself into her? She in whom you would obliterate.
Lust and bliss, loin and heart adaze. Or perhaps it is frenzy, a blindness?
Do we fall into what dissembles us?
A whirlpool, its swirling whorls,
undressing us,
naked against the onrush.
Is it that we are always approaching what we can never give ourselves to?
Sheath of feeling. Words groping to touch air.
Monday, October 30, 2006
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Go Backwards Along the Path to Go Forward
Audio Poetry Recording (9:27min): Cable/DSL; or Dial-up.
*If your pop-up blocker is over-zealous, and won't open the SoundClick window, email me at brenda dot clews at gmail dot com, and I'll send the .mp3 file - it's 5.4MB.
Recorded this suite of poems in the Summer, wasn't sure, oh you know the drill, but now, sharing...
More of a drama in this reading, I think. Each poem recorded separately and then spliced, so the readings shift in tone and tenor.
Busy couple of days, and then at a conference on Thursday, where I'm presenting twice, and may or may not post again until after Sunday, but I will write in my notebook, yes!
Listen in the dark, or when you're quiet. The poems in the recording:
1. Ecdysis
2. Technorati Tag Poem
3. Mantra, a Meditation
4. Painting Time
5. Without A Guide
6. What Revelations Are to Come?
7. After Watching Kurosawa's 'Rapsody in August'
8. Sultry Dark Air
9. Heliotropic Coda
(©Brenda Clews)
*If your pop-up blocker is over-zealous, and won't open the SoundClick window, email me at brenda dot clews at gmail dot com, and I'll send the .mp3 file - it's 5.4MB.
Recorded this suite of poems in the Summer, wasn't sure, oh you know the drill, but now, sharing...
More of a drama in this reading, I think. Each poem recorded separately and then spliced, so the readings shift in tone and tenor.
Busy couple of days, and then at a conference on Thursday, where I'm presenting twice, and may or may not post again until after Sunday, but I will write in my notebook, yes!
Listen in the dark, or when you're quiet. The poems in the recording:
1. Ecdysis
2. Technorati Tag Poem
3. Mantra, a Meditation
4. Painting Time
5. Without A Guide
6. What Revelations Are to Come?
7. After Watching Kurosawa's 'Rapsody in August'
8. Sultry Dark Air
9. Heliotropic Coda
(©Brenda Clews)
Sunday, October 22, 2006
Flower
Awakening to the self, but this implies a stasis, stability, security of self, that I am knowable to myself; whereas, I'm not. The mystery of unfolding, rather.
Lying on the floor, awakening, our fingers, hands, toes, feet stretch into the world. That stretching continues as we writhe across the dance floor and then slow our movement to a Tai Chi-like fluidity and finally stop. A room of sculptures stopped in motion, some standing, some lying on the floor. We are breathing, is it.
Later, to the music I unravel my sarong and wrap and unwrap it around my shoulders, torso, breasts, and then brave strangeness and wrap it around my head and arms so I am trapped. I dance like a slave trying to find freedom, from the position of stasis, stability, security of a self. I know freedom is terrifying. With nothing to constrain you, fetter, contain, weigh, what would you do, who would you be?
If we could forget about being watched, read, observed, judged, about the unceasing gaze of the other, what would we be, produce, live?
In what ways do we keep each other in check, clipped, chained, trapped?
I struggle with the sarong I have wrapped myself in, pushing elbows against the tight fabric and turning and falling and gyrating in a self-imposed prison. Because the sarong is in shades of blue I am especially reminded of the burqa, of societies which contain the energy of the woman in well-defined boundaries. I am reminded of living mummies, torture victims, Michelangelo's slaves, of enslavement from without; of the woman in the VIII Swords in the Rider-Waite Tarot deck when we are enslaved from within. I dance my life's struggles.
Twirling, fighting for release along the wall, my private anguish become visible. My upper body and head entirely enwrapped, I am enrapt with an invisibility that gives me the freedom to struggle for inner freedom, but the session is over. I peel off the sarong like a ribbon of skin and sit in the circle, wondering if any of us is closer to who we are.
We are newly reunited, this group. A flower of love is blossoming in the room in the centre of the circle and we are its petals. Here we are free to struggle with pain or joy, to wilt or face the sun while being supported by the roots, our deeper connections.
Many of us hug our teacher, who is newly returned and who holds this space of transformation sacred.
Lying on the floor, awakening, our fingers, hands, toes, feet stretch into the world. That stretching continues as we writhe across the dance floor and then slow our movement to a Tai Chi-like fluidity and finally stop. A room of sculptures stopped in motion, some standing, some lying on the floor. We are breathing, is it.
Later, to the music I unravel my sarong and wrap and unwrap it around my shoulders, torso, breasts, and then brave strangeness and wrap it around my head and arms so I am trapped. I dance like a slave trying to find freedom, from the position of stasis, stability, security of a self. I know freedom is terrifying. With nothing to constrain you, fetter, contain, weigh, what would you do, who would you be?
If we could forget about being watched, read, observed, judged, about the unceasing gaze of the other, what would we be, produce, live?
In what ways do we keep each other in check, clipped, chained, trapped?
I struggle with the sarong I have wrapped myself in, pushing elbows against the tight fabric and turning and falling and gyrating in a self-imposed prison. Because the sarong is in shades of blue I am especially reminded of the burqa, of societies which contain the energy of the woman in well-defined boundaries. I am reminded of living mummies, torture victims, Michelangelo's slaves, of enslavement from without; of the woman in the VIII Swords in the Rider-Waite Tarot deck when we are enslaved from within. I dance my life's struggles.
Twirling, fighting for release along the wall, my private anguish become visible. My upper body and head entirely enwrapped, I am enrapt with an invisibility that gives me the freedom to struggle for inner freedom, but the session is over. I peel off the sarong like a ribbon of skin and sit in the circle, wondering if any of us is closer to who we are.
We are newly reunited, this group. A flower of love is blossoming in the room in the centre of the circle and we are its petals. Here we are free to struggle with pain or joy, to wilt or face the sun while being supported by the roots, our deeper connections.
Many of us hug our teacher, who is newly returned and who holds this space of transformation sacred.
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Cliches
(I may be updating this & the next post in between calls today... they're a bit sketchy still... in this one, for instance, there was a real clash with "the muse" that I could imagine as a "scene" of some sort, we'll see.)
What made the pale suite washed out, drained, anemic? Was it the eloquent executive furniture, the large walnut veneer desks, strategic abstract paintings of desert yellow with some red drips, couches and dried flower arrangements all color-coded in muted tones, a whole suite of executive offices abandoned, places of corporate battles where victories were savoured or wounds sustained, and where profits increased yearly, ever-plundering the populace, until the merger and the redundancy and the emptiness? A commercial insurance company that banked on the stability of the world, drew profits from potential disaster, disasters that could be counted on not to happen but which could be insured against none-the-less. A wealthy world, this --- swish of fine, worsted wool suits, stout bellies and fat expense accounts, of the supremacy of numbers, the tallies of the underwriter who tabulates worth and value and what staving against the inevitability of decline will cost you, enabling an elite business corps to maintain itself, a world of infinitely regressive cliches. One that now lies empty, recently vacated, pale in the cool morning light, surveyed over a styrofoam cup of weak coffee.
What I want to say is that my muse doesn't understand that money needs to be made in order to live.
Afterwards at a cafe, the green tomato on the vine in the window box that ran around the empty outdoor patio next to the red flowering geranium. So sour that looking at it through a closed window made it break open on your tongue, green and puckering, coupled with frilly, vibrant, sensuous red petals.
What made the pale suite washed out, drained, anemic? Was it the eloquent executive furniture, the large walnut veneer desks, strategic abstract paintings of desert yellow with some red drips, couches and dried flower arrangements all color-coded in muted tones, a whole suite of executive offices abandoned, places of corporate battles where victories were savoured or wounds sustained, and where profits increased yearly, ever-plundering the populace, until the merger and the redundancy and the emptiness? A commercial insurance company that banked on the stability of the world, drew profits from potential disaster, disasters that could be counted on not to happen but which could be insured against none-the-less. A wealthy world, this --- swish of fine, worsted wool suits, stout bellies and fat expense accounts, of the supremacy of numbers, the tallies of the underwriter who tabulates worth and value and what staving against the inevitability of decline will cost you, enabling an elite business corps to maintain itself, a world of infinitely regressive cliches. One that now lies empty, recently vacated, pale in the cool morning light, surveyed over a styrofoam cup of weak coffee.
What I want to say is that my muse doesn't understand that money needs to be made in order to live.
Afterwards at a cafe, the green tomato on the vine in the window box that ran around the empty outdoor patio next to the red flowering geranium. So sour that looking at it through a closed window made it break open on your tongue, green and puckering, coupled with frilly, vibrant, sensuous red petals.
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
interlacings of love
I can feel your presence, mon amour, pressing in on me and I imagine you vividly in this room whose walls are covered in paintings, and can almost see you in the night light, as if you are present and flowing around me, but you are not here and I want to solidify in this moment, and yet I know you are here, like a spectre, because you love me.
It is an odd thing, Monsieur, that I feel loved by those who have abandoned me.
It is an odd thing, Monsieur, that I feel loved by those who have abandoned me.
And of course, I loveyoutoo.
Reading Writhing Letters
When the letters began curling like tiny writhing black snakes on the page,
writhing floating
I gluttonized on words, gorged.
I pushed myself through tome after tome, hour after hour; I let books open other books; I kept ledgers of copious notes, and dozens of journals.
I read all night. I read with urgency, as if my life depended on it. All of the classics, the 'great' books, 'great' writers, 'great' thinkers. Did I waste my youth reading Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Bacon and Shakespeare?
It's all fleeting.
But when the words stayed still, lying in neat rows on the pages, I raced through them. Who knew how long I had?
I lost
the ability to read.The letters floated somewhere between the paper and my eyes, hovered, hallucinatory, unreadable, and I couldn't catch them or make them form words or sentences through I knew coherency was there, below the
writhing floating
When it came back, focus, and the words stayed on the page, I read a book a day and didn't stop for 15 years.if I could just
make them sitstill.
I gluttonized on words, gorged.
I pushed myself through tome after tome, hour after hour; I let books open other books; I kept ledgers of copious notes, and dozens of journals.
I read all night. I read with urgency, as if my life depended on it. All of the classics, the 'great' books, 'great' writers, 'great' thinkers. Did I waste my youth reading Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Bacon and Shakespeare?
It's all fleeting.
But when the words stayed still, lying in neat rows on the pages, I raced through them. Who knew how long I had?
Evanescence
It is fleeting, ephemeral, fragile --- beauty,life.
Silence of the deep sleep, death,
of non-being,
eternity,the norm.
Ouroboros
Monsieur, you have been absent, I thought you had forgotten me. The spelunker of snakes? It alarms you, this imagination of mine.
All my life I have hallucinated snakes.
Even now, they come out of the shower head, slither down my back, small pythons, Black Mambas, always in stone grey or black. Sometimes I become rigid with fear, the hot hissing water.
Ground myself: concentrate on the tiles, the shower curtain, the soap, the wash cloth. Push out sensations of snakes dropping on my head, slithering down my back. Remnants of memories of watching the poor creatures swinging on sticks in the air until their backbones broke and they went limp. It was a game, in a circle laughing.
Terrors of a memory gone awry, misplacing splices of the past out-of-context in the present: I step onto floors thick with writhing serpents, but they aren't real. This phobia of mine.
Freud's interpretation was very narrow; Jung's was better, except that they don't automatically signify psychic fragmentation if they're not dynamically balanced, as revealed in spontaneously individuated mandalas, symbols of wholeness.
Once I did a long research paper on serpents and the winged kind, dragons, in Western art, and explored many mythologies. From Egyptian cobra worship, to Graeco-Roman Medusas, to the Judeo-Christian myth of the Fall from Eden due to the guiles of the Satanic snake, to all the St. Georges' and other Courtly Love heroes fighting all the dragons who had taken over the land and were demanding fresh virgins, to modern day snake cults and Goddess lore, to the R-Complex, or brain at the base of our skulls, the reptilian one, that controls automatic functions.
For me, Monsieur: the power of the Minoan Snake Goddess who holds live serpents in each hand; and the Greek understanding that serpents enable us to enter the mysteries of the chthonic earth itself. They have become a motile symbol of my creativity.
I collect serpent jewelry. Wrapped around my fingers are silver snake rings, silver serpents coil around the tubes that form my dangling earrings, another embraces a crystal pendant that hangs on a chain and falls between my breasts, and my arms are braceleted by silver cobras.
Once when I was young, in a bikini sunbathing alone, a man, himself no more than a messenger, a hallucination, approached, wearing khaki clothes and snake boots, as if out of the African jungle itself, in his hand a choke of snakes that he held over my body, and said, threatening to drop them on my skin, "Will you write?"
My muse is a Lady of Serpents.
She is the Kundalini, the lightning that travels from chakra to chakra in the awakening.
Yes, I have painted snakes, but they don't belong on canvas; rather, they are like the brushes themselves.
Monsieur, I have always known that what terrifies me is my source.
All my life I have hallucinated snakes.
Even now, they come out of the shower head, slither down my back, small pythons, Black Mambas, always in stone grey or black. Sometimes I become rigid with fear, the hot hissing water.
Ground myself: concentrate on the tiles, the shower curtain, the soap, the wash cloth. Push out sensations of snakes dropping on my head, slithering down my back. Remnants of memories of watching the poor creatures swinging on sticks in the air until their backbones broke and they went limp. It was a game, in a circle laughing.
Terrors of a memory gone awry, misplacing splices of the past out-of-context in the present: I step onto floors thick with writhing serpents, but they aren't real. This phobia of mine.
Freud's interpretation was very narrow; Jung's was better, except that they don't automatically signify psychic fragmentation if they're not dynamically balanced, as revealed in spontaneously individuated mandalas, symbols of wholeness.
Once I did a long research paper on serpents and the winged kind, dragons, in Western art, and explored many mythologies. From Egyptian cobra worship, to Graeco-Roman Medusas, to the Judeo-Christian myth of the Fall from Eden due to the guiles of the Satanic snake, to all the St. Georges' and other Courtly Love heroes fighting all the dragons who had taken over the land and were demanding fresh virgins, to modern day snake cults and Goddess lore, to the R-Complex, or brain at the base of our skulls, the reptilian one, that controls automatic functions.
For me, Monsieur: the power of the Minoan Snake Goddess who holds live serpents in each hand; and the Greek understanding that serpents enable us to enter the mysteries of the chthonic earth itself. They have become a motile symbol of my creativity.
I collect serpent jewelry. Wrapped around my fingers are silver snake rings, silver serpents coil around the tubes that form my dangling earrings, another embraces a crystal pendant that hangs on a chain and falls between my breasts, and my arms are braceleted by silver cobras.
Once when I was young, in a bikini sunbathing alone, a man, himself no more than a messenger, a hallucination, approached, wearing khaki clothes and snake boots, as if out of the African jungle itself, in his hand a choke of snakes that he held over my body, and said, threatening to drop them on my skin, "Will you write?"
My muse is a Lady of Serpents.
She is the Kundalini, the lightning that travels from chakra to chakra in the awakening.
Yes, I have painted snakes, but they don't belong on canvas; rather, they are like the brushes themselves.
Monsieur, I have always known that what terrifies me is my source.
Monday, October 16, 2006
Death of Time
My words silt in the paddies of time, flooded with being.
Time drowns us.
Break out of time: escapee.
Leave the encircling fields of the centuries.
When time stops we die.
Time drowns us.
Break out of time: escapee.
Leave the encircling fields of the centuries.
Plummet silence.
Breathe without tracking, calibration, rates, or seizures.
When time stops we die.
Blind Writing
We have eyes, not to see the light, but to cry. Among the animals, only we can weep.1
Not the unblinking gaze of the ever-recording eye, but the pathos.
To undo the autocracy of knowledge, the way light has been used to mean power, imperialism, right, might, truth, revelation, enlightenment.
When we cry, the forms of the world blur and we forget what we have learnt to see. We move by touch, by the feeling under our fingers, by sensitivity, by silently hearing.
I write when I am almost asleep or just waking, when I can't see; I write in the dark.
When we can no longer see the forms around us, we forget the eternal forms, the eternal light. In blindness, we become visionaries.
Weep for the world; weep for yourself; weep because you can weep. Your heart will open; it will be raw, painful, and blissful, ecstatic: you will be the whole of who you are. There will be the other; there will be meaning in the closeness of connection.
We cannot see the images displayed, on view. We must move through life by touch, by scent, by listening. Only then can we see each other - through the veils of our tears. Our tears break down the walls of our imperialisms, our isolations, our losses. Our mourning and our joy: tears. Tears that implore.
When we have become immured, blinded to the world of cast light, our eyes will open to each other, our fingers will touch.
______________
1Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 126.
Not the unblinking gaze of the ever-recording eye, but the pathos.
To undo the autocracy of knowledge, the way light has been used to mean power, imperialism, right, might, truth, revelation, enlightenment.
When we cry, the forms of the world blur and we forget what we have learnt to see. We move by touch, by the feeling under our fingers, by sensitivity, by silently hearing.
I write when I am almost asleep or just waking, when I can't see; I write in the dark.
When we can no longer see the forms around us, we forget the eternal forms, the eternal light. In blindness, we become visionaries.
Weep for the world; weep for yourself; weep because you can weep. Your heart will open; it will be raw, painful, and blissful, ecstatic: you will be the whole of who you are. There will be the other; there will be meaning in the closeness of connection.
We cannot see the images displayed, on view. We must move through life by touch, by scent, by listening. Only then can we see each other - through the veils of our tears. Our tears break down the walls of our imperialisms, our isolations, our losses. Our mourning and our joy: tears. Tears that implore.
When we have become immured, blinded to the world of cast light, our eyes will open to each other, our fingers will touch.
______________
1Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 126.
Sunday, October 15, 2006
Tidal Patterns
It wasn't always this way. One upon a time the tide remained high. And there were no clams or seaweed to be found and the Tsimshian went hungry. Raven knew what lay under the blue glistening robes of water.
When he wrapped his blanket of black feathers around his strong shoulders, he flew. His sharp eyes watching, looking. Scanning the edges of the ocean, he found her.
Tightly she held the tide-line in her hands. She wouldn't release the ocean to rhythmically rise and fall on the beach, or draw back from it, leaving washed treasures, clams, seaweed, shells, shiny pebbles.
Why did the old woman hold the tide-line so tightly in her lined, papery hands? She sat in her small house on the edge of the sea, holding the waters in the life-line on her palms. Who can tell from the mass of mounds and lines on her hands how she bid the edges of the great water be still?
Inside her sun-bleached house with closed eyes she imagined the ocean, or perhaps she could see it with visionary sight. She sat, the tide-line, her hands, the one interconnected with the other, like a fisherman's net, weeping tears of salt.
Raven dropped from the sky, a shadow of black feathers. He sat down beside her and groaned, holding his belly, saying he had eaten too many clams. He broke her meditation, and she stood, and went to look at the clams, but he pushed her and she fell. Then he poured sand in her eyes so that she was blinded. Pulling the tide-line out of her hands, tearing the life-line from her, he released the hold on the waters and the tide at last fell.
Crazy old woman on the edge of the ocean of time, time's burden, that weight of life-giving water.
And so the ocean drew back its mantle of blue robes and the people feasted.
There were bonfires on the beaches and a festival of clam bakes that lasted days until everyone's bellies were swollen full of food.
Who was the blind old woman crying on the beach with the torn hands?
Raven in his raucous joviality passing from one feasting party to the next found himself before the old woman, who spoke, "Raven, heal my eyes so I may see again." Raven, trickster-figure, Promethean fire-stealer, knew the Gods could must be bargained with, appeased. He struck a deal: "Old woman of the sea, I will heal you, but you must promise to let the tide-line go twice a day so that the people may gather food from the beaches." The old woman agreed and so he rinsed the sand out of her eyes. Thus Raven ensured the life-lines of the people, their continuity.
In my story, as I walk the empty beach strewn with empty clam shells, seaweed, the detritus of modern civilization, I want to find her, and find out why, the witholding.
I want to know why she denounces me, or those like her.
And take the cawl she has wrapped me in off: to breathe, to see.
But I spin like Tiresias under an unrelenting sun.
Why do black feathers lie strewn in my hair?
My eyes, gritty and sore, are on fire -
I see only flaring volcanoes
A red rage of light;
On this windless day
How did my eyes fill with sand?
My hands bleed as I write.
For what do I weep?
When he wrapped his blanket of black feathers around his strong shoulders, he flew. His sharp eyes watching, looking. Scanning the edges of the ocean, he found her.
Tightly she held the tide-line in her hands. She wouldn't release the ocean to rhythmically rise and fall on the beach, or draw back from it, leaving washed treasures, clams, seaweed, shells, shiny pebbles.
Why did the old woman hold the tide-line so tightly in her lined, papery hands? She sat in her small house on the edge of the sea, holding the waters in the life-line on her palms. Who can tell from the mass of mounds and lines on her hands how she bid the edges of the great water be still?
Inside her sun-bleached house with closed eyes she imagined the ocean, or perhaps she could see it with visionary sight. She sat, the tide-line, her hands, the one interconnected with the other, like a fisherman's net, weeping tears of salt.
Raven dropped from the sky, a shadow of black feathers. He sat down beside her and groaned, holding his belly, saying he had eaten too many clams. He broke her meditation, and she stood, and went to look at the clams, but he pushed her and she fell. Then he poured sand in her eyes so that she was blinded. Pulling the tide-line out of her hands, tearing the life-line from her, he released the hold on the waters and the tide at last fell.
Crazy old woman on the edge of the ocean of time, time's burden, that weight of life-giving water.
And so the ocean drew back its mantle of blue robes and the people feasted.
There were bonfires on the beaches and a festival of clam bakes that lasted days until everyone's bellies were swollen full of food.
Who was the blind old woman crying on the beach with the torn hands?
Raven in his raucous joviality passing from one feasting party to the next found himself before the old woman, who spoke, "Raven, heal my eyes so I may see again." Raven, trickster-figure, Promethean fire-stealer, knew the Gods could must be bargained with, appeased. He struck a deal: "Old woman of the sea, I will heal you, but you must promise to let the tide-line go twice a day so that the people may gather food from the beaches." The old woman agreed and so he rinsed the sand out of her eyes. Thus Raven ensured the life-lines of the people, their continuity.
In my story, as I walk the empty beach strewn with empty clam shells, seaweed, the detritus of modern civilization, I want to find her, and find out why, the witholding.
I want to know why she denounces me, or those like her.
And take the cawl she has wrapped me in off: to breathe, to see.
But I spin like Tiresias under an unrelenting sun.
Why do black feathers lie strewn in my hair?
My eyes, gritty and sore, are on fire -
I see only flaring volcanoes
A red rage of light;
On this windless day
How did my eyes fill with sand?
My hands bleed as I write.
For what do I weep?
Friday, October 13, 2006
Simple Yoga this Morning
Early this morning I pulled out my yoga mat (a sheepskin bought in 1994 and for which I sewed a case out of peach-coloured upholstery fabric as many years ago), laid it on the floor (a very tight fit since I live in a closet), and did this yoga set: Spinal Flex Series.
I began my day with this simple yoga set for the spine for many years - sure it got boring, but different music every day helped. Today, as I flex back and forth, I feel how stiff I've become, how I need to loosen, to take care of this Sushumna, central column, spine, place where all the nerves, nadis, meridians flow. I feel the weight of what I carry as I rhythmically flex, especially when I get to the 'shoulder shrugs,' eh, let the tension go, let it go...
Each day is new, life is strange, but it keeps going. Perhaps I shall still be sitting on my mat, flexing my bent old spine when I am a centenarian, shrunken, withered, wrinkled, but ever so wise :-)
Thinking of you, I got out my old scanner with the crack in the lid, started it up, scanned these sets at least 3 times to get a clear image. My friend who was in her 30s and had pain in her back that was finally diagnosed as arthritis and had physiotherapy sessions let me teach her this set one afternoon when our then younger children were in school and she marveled at it. A few weeks later after doing the set daily she asked, 'Why don't Physiotherapists teach these exercises? This flexing really works, really helps.'
Are we as young as our spine is flexible? It's okay, I won't go into 'yoga teacher mode' and lecture on the spine. Let's just say that all of the billions of nerve cells in our bodies are connected to our brains through the braid of nerves running through the spinal column. If nothing else, keep this central part of your body flexible, in motion, healthy...
Kundalini Yoga: Guidelines for Sadhana (Pomona, California: Kundalini Research Institute, 1974), p.45-6. For another layout of this set, see Basic Spinal Series, and scroll to the end to read a description of Mul Bhand (root lock) and Maha Bhand (great lock).
I began my day with this simple yoga set for the spine for many years - sure it got boring, but different music every day helped. Today, as I flex back and forth, I feel how stiff I've become, how I need to loosen, to take care of this Sushumna, central column, spine, place where all the nerves, nadis, meridians flow. I feel the weight of what I carry as I rhythmically flex, especially when I get to the 'shoulder shrugs,' eh, let the tension go, let it go...
Each day is new, life is strange, but it keeps going. Perhaps I shall still be sitting on my mat, flexing my bent old spine when I am a centenarian, shrunken, withered, wrinkled, but ever so wise :-)
Thinking of you, I got out my old scanner with the crack in the lid, started it up, scanned these sets at least 3 times to get a clear image. My friend who was in her 30s and had pain in her back that was finally diagnosed as arthritis and had physiotherapy sessions let me teach her this set one afternoon when our then younger children were in school and she marveled at it. A few weeks later after doing the set daily she asked, 'Why don't Physiotherapists teach these exercises? This flexing really works, really helps.'
Are we as young as our spine is flexible? It's okay, I won't go into 'yoga teacher mode' and lecture on the spine. Let's just say that all of the billions of nerve cells in our bodies are connected to our brains through the braid of nerves running through the spinal column. If nothing else, keep this central part of your body flexible, in motion, healthy...
Kundalini Yoga: Guidelines for Sadhana (Pomona, California: Kundalini Research Institute, 1974), p.45-6. For another layout of this set, see Basic Spinal Series, and scroll to the end to read a description of Mul Bhand (root lock) and Maha Bhand (great lock).
Thursday, October 12, 2006
On the Beach
I worked 7 hours in an office without a break (my choice), and it was mostly busy, and then a crammed transit ride and 2 more hours of tutoring my remaining Korean student, and this little piece got written somehow in between it all, oh and begun yesterday at a cafe but interrupted by my arriving daughter. It's a bit garbled, at least it reads so to me. Perhaps tomorrow I shall expand it so it is closer to the scene I imagined - just some days don't allow you the time, and who knows what happens to the tenor and rawness of the images that come flowing out on such days (days of work for which one is grateful, too).
Images collect on the beach like polished pebbles, smooth glass baubles, tangles of fishing wire, water-logged boots, seaweed, shells translucent and sometimes chipped, mollusks and sea urchins, dead, cadaverous detritus, swollen along the glimmering band of sand.
I am sure I will see her on her seawalks. That she will be dressed in a long black skirt and gazing out to sea, grief on her slightly wetted face from the spray of the water on the rocks that she stands on, and something indefinable, lit from within, but subtle, like sunset spilling out of her eyes.
But I don't. The coast is empty.
I am not sure who I am.
Me, her, or you, or a transfigured archetype,
a Medusa-lady, the curls in my hair tightly coiled in the salt spray,
an image-maker.
I watch blue dancers leap and fall into disappearing bubbles of sea foam.
You are the edge of the waves that tip over. When the peak cannot hold itself aloft and falls like a dancer letting go of taut tension and plunging. Or perhaps it is words that fall into froth.
If we are standing at a shore of words that encase the earth like the oceans, that is.
Let me bathe in your words; let me drink them into my being; let our vision be as infinite as the sky-line.
Am I in love with you, and who?
Are you my unbidden,
holy muse.
Images collect on the beach like polished pebbles, smooth glass baubles, tangles of fishing wire, water-logged boots, seaweed, shells translucent and sometimes chipped, mollusks and sea urchins, dead, cadaverous detritus, swollen along the glimmering band of sand.
I am sure I will see her on her seawalks. That she will be dressed in a long black skirt and gazing out to sea, grief on her slightly wetted face from the spray of the water on the rocks that she stands on, and something indefinable, lit from within, but subtle, like sunset spilling out of her eyes.
But I don't. The coast is empty.
I am not sure who I am.
Me, her, or you, or a transfigured archetype,
a Medusa-lady, the curls in my hair tightly coiled in the salt spray,
an image-maker.
I watch blue dancers leap and fall into disappearing bubbles of sea foam.
You are the edge of the waves that tip over. When the peak cannot hold itself aloft and falls like a dancer letting go of taut tension and plunging. Or perhaps it is words that fall into froth.
If we are standing at a shore of words that encase the earth like the oceans, that is.
Let me bathe in your words; let me drink them into my being; let our vision be as infinite as the sky-line.
Am I in love with you, and who?
Are you my unbidden,
holy muse.
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
Tuesday, October 10, 2006
Polishing the Rocks
It is the problem of the pounding of the surf.
Fear holds me
captive; like the Tarot card where she is bound and blind-folded, unseeing and scared, though all the swords are stuck, blade-first, in the ground.
It's not a question of personal safety, Monsieur. It's a lifelong problem with creativity that I have, she has. Monsieur, I split myself into a third person, a she. That is me. Or her. Does it matter?
If we deconstruct the subject-object construction, does it matter who swirls in the salt spray, its turbulences of disappearing foam?
Who says the invisible be rendered visible
through our perceptions?
I am the subject; and I cannot look upon myself lest I turn myself into statuesque art, lest I turn the Medusa touch on my seeing eye.
An unblinking gaze. The object of the subject is the subject. Only in the self-portrait does the ruin of the self break down. We are decomposing into text.
Into iconography.
Immortal.
Immortalizing ourselves in time: statues, broken rubble of stones amid the hissing of the broiling waves.
Fear holds me
captive; like the Tarot card where she is bound and blind-folded, unseeing and scared, though all the swords are stuck, blade-first, in the ground.
It's not a question of personal safety, Monsieur. It's a lifelong problem with creativity that I have, she has. Monsieur, I split myself into a third person, a she. That is me. Or her. Does it matter?
If we deconstruct the subject-object construction, does it matter who swirls in the salt spray, its turbulences of disappearing foam?
Who says the invisible be rendered visible
through our perceptions?
I am the subject; and I cannot look upon myself lest I turn myself into statuesque art, lest I turn the Medusa touch on my seeing eye.
An unblinking gaze. The object of the subject is the subject. Only in the self-portrait does the ruin of the self break down. We are decomposing into text.
Into iconography.
Immortal.
Immortalizing ourselves in time: statues, broken rubble of stones amid the hissing of the broiling waves.
Monday, October 09, 2006
Spectre
She is there, walking the sea walls, endless array of black, coats, pants, dresses, and the flashes of red, the ribbon and feather in her black felt hat; or the whiteness of her face against her black hair and the lurid red lipstick.
When she who is a spectre, who is a vision, the invisible rendered visible, a hallucination without reality but a guiding perception of the self, whose look freezes us into self-portraits, whose look turns us into sculptures of death from which the beating warmth of our blood cannot escape, when she looks at us, our unblinking eyes:
We are no more than statues to the woman in black walking the sea wall, her hair, its tendrils and curls coiling in the salt spray. When we are marble, the pale green veins in the rock, we are bloodless, art. Upon whom she splatters red paint the colour of her fingernail polish: blood, the alabaster skin.
The soul which inclines towards meaning in the fire of life, silenced. Art takes us beyond suffering; the Gorgon creates a stage of unmoving characters who are her silent companions. She laughs at my drained creativity; I know this woman. The blood drains from my lips: I am silenced.
I, mute.
Unspeaking.
Pushing against the seawall with my inner lashing waves. Tears of salt.
Her parrot, cinnabar and virid feathers, mocks, repeating endlessly the soulless words that echo on the sea spray while she laughs.
Don't ask why. Why is there cruelty? Who knows? It is; we are.
I want to become a tidal wave but I withdraw.
How can I describe the figure of jealousy, of derision?
What is jealousy? Who feels it? How do we act from this feeling?
Is jealousy the overweening desire to upstage the other?
To cast them into stones of silence?
I evade her stony glance
with questions.
*Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 57.
When she who is a spectre, who is a vision, the invisible rendered visible, a hallucination without reality but a guiding perception of the self, whose look freezes us into self-portraits, whose look turns us into sculptures of death from which the beating warmth of our blood cannot escape, when she looks at us, our unblinking eyes:
The straining eye always resembles an eye of the blind, sometimes the eye of the dead, at that precise moment when mourning begins: it is still open, a pious hand should soon come to close it; it would recall a portrait of the dying.*Medusa would immortalize us as art. The Gorgon is the muse whose terror petrifies us would we but look upon her venomous, spitting face.
We are no more than statues to the woman in black walking the sea wall, her hair, its tendrils and curls coiling in the salt spray. When we are marble, the pale green veins in the rock, we are bloodless, art. Upon whom she splatters red paint the colour of her fingernail polish: blood, the alabaster skin.
The soul which inclines towards meaning in the fire of life, silenced. Art takes us beyond suffering; the Gorgon creates a stage of unmoving characters who are her silent companions. She laughs at my drained creativity; I know this woman. The blood drains from my lips: I am silenced.
I, mute.
Unspeaking.
Pushing against the seawall with my inner lashing waves. Tears of salt.
Her parrot, cinnabar and virid feathers, mocks, repeating endlessly the soulless words that echo on the sea spray while she laughs.
Don't ask why. Why is there cruelty? Who knows? It is; we are.
I want to become a tidal wave but I withdraw.
How can I describe the figure of jealousy, of derision?
What is jealousy? Who feels it? How do we act from this feeling?
Is jealousy the overweening desire to upstage the other?
To cast them into stones of silence?
I evade her stony glance
with questions.
*Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 57.
Power
In deep structures of power:
of the speaking, doing, appearing?
Elements of deep personal power:
or do we resist?
How do dynamics of power unfold in planned and unplanned organizational structures?
Unlike Surface Power, with legitimate authority, expertise, a referent of trust and commitment, rewards/coercions, associations/networks/who you know, a visibility of coalitions, and a show of flexibility/autonomy, the elements of Deep Structure Power concerns management of meaning, symbols that are difficult to define, routines and rules that are taken-for-granted, unquestioned.
Power is the ability to do.
Power is knowing yourself.
Power is having others believe.
Deep structural power is invisible.
In the Deep Structures of Power, mechanisms of surveillance become internalized.
Dynamics of Resistance:
the ultimate subversive
act?
Who creates the story has the power.
Can we re-write the stories,
or abandon them to write new stories?
_____
A weaving of notes found on a scrap of paper from a lecture in 2001 by I don't know who... update: search engines are marvelous: Patricia Bradshaw: "Deep Structures of Power and the Challenges of Organizational Transformation."
- Who creates the agenda?
- Who manages the meaning-making?
of the speaking, doing, appearing?
Elements of deep personal power:
- Privilege
- Self-knowledge
- Disciplinary micropractices
or do we resist?
How do dynamics of power unfold in planned and unplanned organizational structures?
Unlike Surface Power, with legitimate authority, expertise, a referent of trust and commitment, rewards/coercions, associations/networks/who you know, a visibility of coalitions, and a show of flexibility/autonomy, the elements of Deep Structure Power concerns management of meaning, symbols that are difficult to define, routines and rules that are taken-for-granted, unquestioned.
Power is the ability to do.
Power is knowing yourself.
Power is having others believe.
Deep structural power is invisible.
In the Deep Structures of Power, mechanisms of surveillance become internalized.
Dynamics of Resistance:
- disobedience
- subversion
- challenge
- defiance
the ultimate subversive
act?
Who creates the story has the power.
Can we re-write the stories,
or abandon them to write new stories?
_____
A weaving of notes found on a scrap of paper from a lecture in 2001 by I don't know who... update: search engines are marvelous: Patricia Bradshaw: "Deep Structures of Power and the Challenges of Organizational Transformation."
Saturday, October 07, 2006
ἄφατος : aphatos, speechless, not speakable
Speechless,
we speak.
It's the making
mute.
Without hearing each other,
how can we listen?
we speak.
It's the making
mute.
Without hearing each other,
how can we listen?
Thursday, October 05, 2006
Exile
What if relationships are the primary ordering principle?
What if the way relationships are ordered
clarify, explain, and instruct us on the way things
stand towards each other?
If connectivities are performatives, then the grammar
of the relationship determines its patterns.
We meet at the edge of the text. These words unfold through the syntax of your absent presence in the writing.
Those of whom I speak are embedded in grammars too. While we are a syntax and lexicon of unique verbal patterns, we are still bound by the rules of a grammar which shapes our relationships.
In her radical pedagogy, the woman who teaches says: "What we must never do:
• Patronise, reduce, laud, ridicule, dismay
• Simplify, bowdlerise, censure, censor
• Wield discourse as spectacle
• Wield discourse as power
• Wield discourse contemptuously"
And, I would add, silence each other.
We silence the other in the ways that she says, we humiliate them, and finally by ignoring them. Ignoring them, we remove their voice.
If we refuse to listen, they cannot speak.
If they speak they will not be heard.
We have created a hole in the grammar of our connection
which divests the speaker we did not want to listen to
of a speaking voice that is heard.
I know, Monsieur: it happened to me. My words formed an uncomfortable anomaly in the grammar of the group. Without an anxiety about the rigors of practice, I was not struggling in the way I was meant to. Given the nature of the self beliefs of the group, I could not be overtly ridiculed; eventually, I was skipped over, ignored. The member who became absent though present. Silence was wielded as a contemptuous power by those who formed an inner circle and who felt there was no other way to deal with me, and carefully, so my diminishing welcome would not be evident to the others. What happened Monsieur? I went into exile.
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
Remember the Night...
.......................................When, you,
without closure, engulfed me?
.....When I disappeared into your vastness,
became lost in you, lost 'I'?
..... Everywhere you touched, mountains,
valleys, plains, even the ocean in me,
parted, shook, opened.
..... Do you remember how we,
two sighs enfolded in each other?
..... Breath of love. I speak of romance tonight;
forgive me, Monsieur. Afterwards,
we did not speak of it.
..... On the surface of the water that resists
before you fall in, that edge of sweetness.
..... Mon amour, now it is like sitting in a darkened room
with a screen of scenes before us, our hands close,
but not touching.
..... You are so far away.
without closure, engulfed me?
.....When I disappeared into your vastness,
became lost in you, lost 'I'?
..... Everywhere you touched, mountains,
valleys, plains, even the ocean in me,
parted, shook, opened.
..... Do you remember how we,
two sighs enfolded in each other?
..... Breath of love. I speak of romance tonight;
forgive me, Monsieur. Afterwards,
we did not speak of it.
..... On the surface of the water that resists
before you fall in, that edge of sweetness.
..... Mon amour, now it is like sitting in a darkened room
with a screen of scenes before us, our hands close,
but not touching.
..... You are so far away.
Monday, October 02, 2006
When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking
I've always had a natural mistrust of the letter e. It was the egg, Humpty Dumpty, who fell off the wall, yolk and albumen spilling viscously. In high school, I adopted the Greek epsilon, ε, and have scrawled it ever since.
e is a very tricky letter, I tell my young students. It's like the e of flea, and jumps clean over consonants and makes innocent vowels sitting there wake up and say their names. a becomes æ. At becomes ate. It's good, that letter e, but it can't jump over two or three consonants, so 'settle' remains 'settled.' And if e is next to c, watch out: e gets a crush, we could say. Then c gets stars in her eyes and forgets to be a 'k' and becomes a sinuous 's.' How do you read 'receives'? Of course, when two vowels go walking, one becomes shy, perhaps bashful, while the other proclaims its name.
Sometimes my young students can't read 'boat' or 'rain' or 'real' and so we jump up and walk around the room holding hands and I say, "We're a boat! I'll be a bashful 'a'; you be a courageous 'o' and say your name!" Are they puzzled? Maybe at first; then the laughter; then they start thinking up words we can play. If a parent looks in, I say, "It's okay! We're vowels marching around the dining room table!" They smile and withdraw politely.
Never mind the exceptions, I say - that's why we have memories: to memorize the exceptions!
I teach phonetically with flash cards that we make together as we travel into the wondrous land of reading. I teach differently to the regular school system of expecting children to 'pick up' reading from a reading-rich environment. Often my students simply memorize stories that have been read to them and are unable to recognize words out of that context. Teaching them phonetically gives them a way in to reading anything anytime. When my little students get tired or on 'overload' before our weekly hour is up, I'll switch roles: "Okay, time for you to teach me!" And I read so badly and make so many mistakes, but all so earnestly, they're laughing almost too hard to correct me, but correct me they do, my beautiful little charges.
My only motive, afterall, is to set them on a path of delight in the craziness of leaping e's, and vowel pairs who are friends, one out-going and one shy, ou's that are yowling, and the super shy silent h's that follow all the w's of every question word, as I hopefully open the world that a love of reading provides.
__________________________
(This little piece shows the barest surface of a phonetic-based reading system. And, yeah, their marks usually rise about 2 grade points; if they were getting D's, after a couple of months of the crazy Tuesday Tutor, we could expect B's; meaning, yeah, it's not just fun but they also learn actual reading skills that they get to keep after Ms. Tutor's a phonetically dim memory...)
e is a very tricky letter, I tell my young students. It's like the e of flea, and jumps clean over consonants and makes innocent vowels sitting there wake up and say their names. a becomes æ. At becomes ate. It's good, that letter e, but it can't jump over two or three consonants, so 'settle' remains 'settled.' And if e is next to c, watch out: e gets a crush, we could say. Then c gets stars in her eyes and forgets to be a 'k' and becomes a sinuous 's.' How do you read 'receives'? Of course, when two vowels go walking, one becomes shy, perhaps bashful, while the other proclaims its name.
Sometimes my young students can't read 'boat' or 'rain' or 'real' and so we jump up and walk around the room holding hands and I say, "We're a boat! I'll be a bashful 'a'; you be a courageous 'o' and say your name!" Are they puzzled? Maybe at first; then the laughter; then they start thinking up words we can play. If a parent looks in, I say, "It's okay! We're vowels marching around the dining room table!" They smile and withdraw politely.
Never mind the exceptions, I say - that's why we have memories: to memorize the exceptions!
I teach phonetically with flash cards that we make together as we travel into the wondrous land of reading. I teach differently to the regular school system of expecting children to 'pick up' reading from a reading-rich environment. Often my students simply memorize stories that have been read to them and are unable to recognize words out of that context. Teaching them phonetically gives them a way in to reading anything anytime. When my little students get tired or on 'overload' before our weekly hour is up, I'll switch roles: "Okay, time for you to teach me!" And I read so badly and make so many mistakes, but all so earnestly, they're laughing almost too hard to correct me, but correct me they do, my beautiful little charges.
My only motive, afterall, is to set them on a path of delight in the craziness of leaping e's, and vowel pairs who are friends, one out-going and one shy, ou's that are yowling, and the super shy silent h's that follow all the w's of every question word, as I hopefully open the world that a love of reading provides.
__________________________
(This little piece shows the barest surface of a phonetic-based reading system. And, yeah, their marks usually rise about 2 grade points; if they were getting D's, after a couple of months of the crazy Tuesday Tutor, we could expect B's; meaning, yeah, it's not just fun but they also learn actual reading skills that they get to keep after Ms. Tutor's a phonetically dim memory...)
Sunday, October 01, 2006
Letter from a restaurant
Monsieur, the day is over, I worked at the investment bank, bought a sweater, walked city blocks until too hungry to continue. I am sitting in a corner of a Parsee Restaurant that drew me with an unusual warmth in its Indian colours and curtained light writing to you.
I sit at a small table covered with clear plastic under which a string tablecloth, woven in a loose stitch with an orange central flower radiating out in a circular pattern that stands out from the white stitching, lies. Lifting the glass stopper on a bottle of olive oil, I pour a delicate gold stream over my mostly lettuce salad, and then, from the other bottle, fresh lime juice. When the glass of housewine arrives, it is slightly vinegary, and I wonder if they bottled it themselves. The beef Keba is tender, the white rice is intermixed with yellow orange grains cooked with saffron. On the edge of the oval dish is a stewed tomatoe.
The patrons consist of an older retired couple, two young men in suits talking about business, and two Indian families who sit at tables pulled together. My favourites are a girl and boy, both perhaps 18 months old, whose words consist of 'blaaah...' and 'ma-ma-ma.' I think they are told they are too noisy for the woman in the corner because I am pointed at and they both suddenly turn and look at me with wide brown eyes. I smile, they smile, and then they run around the tables until their mothers grab them and put them in the high chairs. The women each have long shiny dark hair and are young and beautiful and are dressed in new sweats, unlike their husbands in their starch white shirts and office trousers. Throughout the meal, they continue to expend energy tying to quieten the children while their husbands talk. I think of an always-smiling young Parsee woman I met at a job recently and her wedding that week in a dress of white lace; afterwards, she said, she was changing into a mustard honey sari with gold threads sewn through it, the colours of the table cloth and the fragrant rice before me. I wonder about the Parsees in India; my young soon-to-be married friend originally from Sri Lanka, and if the life ahead of her will be similar to the families seated near me.
The young children cannot sit still in silence. I ruminate on what I am observing, mon cher. Why do we feel we have to contain energies that are different to our own? Why do we need to bring others down to our level? Why do we try to silence each other in the ways that we do?
These are questions that are haunting me, as you know, Monsieur.
I watch the fathers' irritation with the noisy children; the mothers' attempts to stop them from crying. What is this process of containing that begins so young?
The waiter, who can barely keep up with the orders, and runs from table to table, and the man behind the counter, who is also the cook, look like brothers. They have just opened this restaurant, on borrowed money perhaps. Business is already going well.
I sit at a small table covered with clear plastic under which a string tablecloth, woven in a loose stitch with an orange central flower radiating out in a circular pattern that stands out from the white stitching, lies. Lifting the glass stopper on a bottle of olive oil, I pour a delicate gold stream over my mostly lettuce salad, and then, from the other bottle, fresh lime juice. When the glass of housewine arrives, it is slightly vinegary, and I wonder if they bottled it themselves. The beef Keba is tender, the white rice is intermixed with yellow orange grains cooked with saffron. On the edge of the oval dish is a stewed tomatoe.
The patrons consist of an older retired couple, two young men in suits talking about business, and two Indian families who sit at tables pulled together. My favourites are a girl and boy, both perhaps 18 months old, whose words consist of 'blaaah...' and 'ma-ma-ma.' I think they are told they are too noisy for the woman in the corner because I am pointed at and they both suddenly turn and look at me with wide brown eyes. I smile, they smile, and then they run around the tables until their mothers grab them and put them in the high chairs. The women each have long shiny dark hair and are young and beautiful and are dressed in new sweats, unlike their husbands in their starch white shirts and office trousers. Throughout the meal, they continue to expend energy tying to quieten the children while their husbands talk. I think of an always-smiling young Parsee woman I met at a job recently and her wedding that week in a dress of white lace; afterwards, she said, she was changing into a mustard honey sari with gold threads sewn through it, the colours of the table cloth and the fragrant rice before me. I wonder about the Parsees in India; my young soon-to-be married friend originally from Sri Lanka, and if the life ahead of her will be similar to the families seated near me.
The young children cannot sit still in silence. I ruminate on what I am observing, mon cher. Why do we feel we have to contain energies that are different to our own? Why do we need to bring others down to our level? Why do we try to silence each other in the ways that we do?
These are questions that are haunting me, as you know, Monsieur.
I watch the fathers' irritation with the noisy children; the mothers' attempts to stop them from crying. What is this process of containing that begins so young?
The waiter, who can barely keep up with the orders, and runs from table to table, and the man behind the counter, who is also the cook, look like brothers. They have just opened this restaurant, on borrowed money perhaps. Business is already going well.
Inflamed
The poem I wrote disappeared. Usually I copy what I've written before posting, but the inflamed belly - perhaps it was the prunes and dried apricots, dark chocolate discs, Guinness draft, muesli and raw sugar, all fermenting until my stomach swelled in pain not unlike the labour of birth - and the late hour, I clicked on the wrong button, it disappeared. Poems can't be rewritten, not like prose can. I'm left wondering if what surfaced from the currents of words will reappear, or, if like a melted iceberg, it's gone, become ocean.
I wanted to post the poem, not talk about the bad night, and enjoy my quiet weekend making my way out into the day today, but I'm aching, light-headed, still swimming in the depths of the emotional disaster last week, the emailing, the words, the decisions, the silences, the loss.
Incomprehensible on the edge of.
Aren't they all edges?
And where is.
I wanted to post the poem, not talk about the bad night, and enjoy my quiet weekend making my way out into the day today, but I'm aching, light-headed, still swimming in the depths of the emotional disaster last week, the emailing, the words, the decisions, the silences, the loss.
Incomprehensible on the edge of.
Aren't they all edges?
And where is.
Saturday, September 30, 2006
A Blog Recommendation
John Baker recently interviewed a writer who I admire a great deal, and who has become a personal friend: Five Questions: The Narrator.
Ira Socol, whose work I've been reading for over two years now, is one of the best writers I've found who is posting on the NET. Stylistically, his work is nearly perfect and continually astounds me. He manages, through action, memory, description to convey complex situations and characters. One doesn't get a sense of judgment of the characters in these often complex situations by the narrator of the piece, nor any of the self-aggrandizing or moralizing that is rife in the blogosphere, only compassion. He writes perhaps a kind of 'film noir' prose and his writing, without a word of excess, seems always to overflow into poetry. Despite posting rough drafts for a book, his posts are encapsulated and complete in themselves - knowing the broader sweep helps, but it's not necessary.
While it is wonderful of him to include my blog among his 'most read,' his site is one of the best in the blogosphere and I would highly recommend it to anyone.
Ira Socol, whose work I've been reading for over two years now, is one of the best writers I've found who is posting on the NET. Stylistically, his work is nearly perfect and continually astounds me. He manages, through action, memory, description to convey complex situations and characters. One doesn't get a sense of judgment of the characters in these often complex situations by the narrator of the piece, nor any of the self-aggrandizing or moralizing that is rife in the blogosphere, only compassion. He writes perhaps a kind of 'film noir' prose and his writing, without a word of excess, seems always to overflow into poetry. Despite posting rough drafts for a book, his posts are encapsulated and complete in themselves - knowing the broader sweep helps, but it's not necessary.
While it is wonderful of him to include my blog among his 'most read,' his site is one of the best in the blogosphere and I would highly recommend it to anyone.
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
Writings of 'Who'
Since this poem is with a publisher, I have encrypted it in the same place where I posted it so that the comments are left intact and I can find it again if the need arises (Blogger is a fantastic easily searchable archive).
Sunday, September 24, 2006
Fellini's "La Dolce Vita"
The only man, un autore, who speaks of love in the film shoots those he loves most at close range, his children behind white billowing diaphanous curtains, then, seated in his black leather armchair, in his black suit, himself.
We should learn to love each other so much we live outside time ... detached.
He said (Steiner). La Dolce Vita (1960).
Who can love in a world where money must be made? The film is from a man's perspective. It is the women who talk of love; if love is spoken of. Especially Marcello's fierce, suicidal and beautiful girlfriend for whom love is possessive.
Those whose lives overflow with money don't know what to do with love either. Fellini knows this. Love wants to hold, to keep forever in its embrace, but it's all feathers. The clouds of pillows become unstuffed. We are tarred with our desires. What we are searching for are endings.
(Or so Fellini implies, not I.)
(from a mss-in-progress)
We should learn to love each other so much we live outside time ... detached.
He said (Steiner). La Dolce Vita (1960).
Who can love in a world where money must be made? The film is from a man's perspective. It is the women who talk of love; if love is spoken of. Especially Marcello's fierce, suicidal and beautiful girlfriend for whom love is possessive.
Those whose lives overflow with money don't know what to do with love either. Fellini knows this. Love wants to hold, to keep forever in its embrace, but it's all feathers. The clouds of pillows become unstuffed. We are tarred with our desires. What we are searching for are endings.
(Or so Fellini implies, not I.)
(from a mss-in-progress)
Thursday, September 21, 2006
Andy Warhol / Supernova
Warhol set up a continuous camera at an old, large, lumpy, dark cloth Couch in his Factory studio - people ate on it, talked, gyrated nakedly, made love, fixed motorcycles. They knew they were being filmed but the unblinking eye watching them became unfetishized, ordinary. They played to it, but without response, so they became outrageous before it. It recorded them in black and white in the frame. And now Gallery goers can watch a group, dated in the late '50s/early 60s, slowly peeling and eating bananas with a pronounced sexual tone, a nude woman, whose large breasts are particularly caught by the lighting, gyrating unendingly trying to seduce a man who's more interested in polishing his motorcycle, two men lost in a naked embrace, one lying lengthwise on top of the other, humping for hours while others move obliviously around them, the motorcycle guy, a cleaner.
The eye that doesn't weep, the unblinking eye is a dangerous eye. Warhol made it art, though, and so gave it an entrance into the pathos of living, and thus an ethos. The unblinking eye doesn't have an ethic. Perhaps only the eye that weeps does. And do we find ourselves weeping before the accident victims who he emblazoned from newspaper images into wall-sized silkscreen repetitive images that fade out? Who are these anonymous dead people, are they the future of us?
The film of the man sleeping was nearly unbearable. It was Edgar Allen Poe's tell-tale heart, beating. The camera is angled on his chest and part of his face. We see his diaphragm move up and down with his breath, which is not always even, depending on his inner state, his dreams, and we see his chest pounding with his heart beat. That heart beat eventually pounds in our ears. It is visceral, the core of the pulse, the central ventricle, where the blood gushes in and out of, hundreds of litres an hour. We find ourselves dreaming with the man who's sleeping and whose heart we witness beneath his chest with the black hairs that we can almost feel under our fingertips. We become voyeurs, watching the minutiae of the vulnerability of sleep.
Warhol was a voyeur, no doubt about it. He chose moments in the continuum of images to still, to repeat spatially. Moments that compose us in a moment in time, a moment in history.
If I seek to integrate the critic with the poet, Warhol did not help in that quest. When we arrived, my friend and I, we were given a large black phone with numbers to press. Then we heard recordings, Cronenburg, actors, critics, memories of those who knew him, visited his studio, were part of his crowd or had a portrait done by him. The rooms at the AGO devoted to the show held people standing before large silkscreens or screens of moving images with a big black phone to their ears. It was eery. We were in a wired world that he perhaps prophesied. But we could not fully 'read' Warhol without the 'critical' accompaniment.
Warhol impartially recorded the effects of passion: the most wanted criminals; photographs of horrendous accidents, suicides; and sex, a man's face only while he receives a blow job; and the terror of narcissism as the 3 minute film records an unmoving, unblinking subject who dissembles before it, showing the stark soul in the unwavering eyes and the retreat into blinking, self-consciousness, an attempt to veil while being instructed not to before the artist left the room. As he impartially took snap-shots in the recording of us, in stance perhaps like Joyce's Portrait of the Artist, 'paring his fingernails,' Warhol was, for me, cerebral. You cannot view his work without knowledge of its background, what he was doing, how it came about, what it means, its critical context; without this information, you are lost. Everything is a 'found image.' Nothing is original. It is the unblinking eye, a constant surveillance, even if Warhol's "eye" is a configured eye and pointed like a spotlight. His work is a comment on culture, almost a footnote on it, and we need to be guided through the specifics of that culture was before we can begin to understand it. Warhol has not become fetishized by our culture, become a cliche, though shows like this may help, as well as productions like the 4-hour PBS documentary, to the point where we fully understand the message of his medium without explanation.
tags: Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol: Supernova: Stars, Deaths and Disaster, 1962-1964, Art Gallery of Ontario.
The eye that doesn't weep, the unblinking eye is a dangerous eye. Warhol made it art, though, and so gave it an entrance into the pathos of living, and thus an ethos. The unblinking eye doesn't have an ethic. Perhaps only the eye that weeps does. And do we find ourselves weeping before the accident victims who he emblazoned from newspaper images into wall-sized silkscreen repetitive images that fade out? Who are these anonymous dead people, are they the future of us?
The film of the man sleeping was nearly unbearable. It was Edgar Allen Poe's tell-tale heart, beating. The camera is angled on his chest and part of his face. We see his diaphragm move up and down with his breath, which is not always even, depending on his inner state, his dreams, and we see his chest pounding with his heart beat. That heart beat eventually pounds in our ears. It is visceral, the core of the pulse, the central ventricle, where the blood gushes in and out of, hundreds of litres an hour. We find ourselves dreaming with the man who's sleeping and whose heart we witness beneath his chest with the black hairs that we can almost feel under our fingertips. We become voyeurs, watching the minutiae of the vulnerability of sleep.
Warhol was a voyeur, no doubt about it. He chose moments in the continuum of images to still, to repeat spatially. Moments that compose us in a moment in time, a moment in history.
If I seek to integrate the critic with the poet, Warhol did not help in that quest. When we arrived, my friend and I, we were given a large black phone with numbers to press. Then we heard recordings, Cronenburg, actors, critics, memories of those who knew him, visited his studio, were part of his crowd or had a portrait done by him. The rooms at the AGO devoted to the show held people standing before large silkscreens or screens of moving images with a big black phone to their ears. It was eery. We were in a wired world that he perhaps prophesied. But we could not fully 'read' Warhol without the 'critical' accompaniment.
Warhol impartially recorded the effects of passion: the most wanted criminals; photographs of horrendous accidents, suicides; and sex, a man's face only while he receives a blow job; and the terror of narcissism as the 3 minute film records an unmoving, unblinking subject who dissembles before it, showing the stark soul in the unwavering eyes and the retreat into blinking, self-consciousness, an attempt to veil while being instructed not to before the artist left the room. As he impartially took snap-shots in the recording of us, in stance perhaps like Joyce's Portrait of the Artist, 'paring his fingernails,' Warhol was, for me, cerebral. You cannot view his work without knowledge of its background, what he was doing, how it came about, what it means, its critical context; without this information, you are lost. Everything is a 'found image.' Nothing is original. It is the unblinking eye, a constant surveillance, even if Warhol's "eye" is a configured eye and pointed like a spotlight. His work is a comment on culture, almost a footnote on it, and we need to be guided through the specifics of that culture was before we can begin to understand it. Warhol has not become fetishized by our culture, become a cliche, though shows like this may help, as well as productions like the 4-hour PBS documentary, to the point where we fully understand the message of his medium without explanation.
tags: Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol: Supernova: Stars, Deaths and Disaster, 1962-1964, Art Gallery of Ontario.
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
Visiting "Andy" Today
I'm always trying to unite the critical faculty with the poetic one, but they're not easily seduced by each other, often preferring opposite sides of the bed. It's too bad criticism's a 'talking head,' and poetry is, well, simmering with passion, and, let's not forget angst and deep meditation on the paradoxes and ambiguities and fleetingness of love, life...
Today I expect the collusion of the critical and the poetic to be further clarified. I'm going to the Andy Warhol show at the Art Gallery of Ontario which should be interesting - I find his work, despite its elevation of the commercial icon to art, cerebral. It requires a critic as go-between, as intercessor, a body of theory to explain it. Commercialism figures highly in Warhol's art. He was a successful commercial artist before becoming a 'fine artist,' and he became hugely successful at that, too. He took cultural icons, Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy/Onassis, and made us aware of our deifying tendencies. Or elevated the ordinary to the status of high art, like a show of packing boxes, filming the Empire State Building for 8 hours, filming a man sleeping through the night... I had no use for Warhol's aesthetic or artistic mentality when I was an art student many years ago, he never 'spoke' to me on any level about the possibilities of art. He was the showman showing the showmanship of our society. But then as now, I'm not a conceptual artist. Thanks to this show, though, I am already revisiting my biases and am beginning to even think he was a prophet - of the internet/media driven world that we live in, and that puts him in a whole other category. I may even end up liking him.
I'll let you know.
(Here's a link to an article, Andy Warhol's Smirking Genius, on the PBS 4-hour documentary on Warhol.)
Today I expect the collusion of the critical and the poetic to be further clarified. I'm going to the Andy Warhol show at the Art Gallery of Ontario which should be interesting - I find his work, despite its elevation of the commercial icon to art, cerebral. It requires a critic as go-between, as intercessor, a body of theory to explain it. Commercialism figures highly in Warhol's art. He was a successful commercial artist before becoming a 'fine artist,' and he became hugely successful at that, too. He took cultural icons, Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy/Onassis, and made us aware of our deifying tendencies. Or elevated the ordinary to the status of high art, like a show of packing boxes, filming the Empire State Building for 8 hours, filming a man sleeping through the night... I had no use for Warhol's aesthetic or artistic mentality when I was an art student many years ago, he never 'spoke' to me on any level about the possibilities of art. He was the showman showing the showmanship of our society. But then as now, I'm not a conceptual artist. Thanks to this show, though, I am already revisiting my biases and am beginning to even think he was a prophet - of the internet/media driven world that we live in, and that puts him in a whole other category. I may even end up liking him.
I'll let you know.
(Here's a link to an article, Andy Warhol's Smirking Genius, on the PBS 4-hour documentary on Warhol.)
Sunday, September 17, 2006
On the Life of an Artist
Since 2004, I have been working hard with no remuneration. In that time I have produced four manuscripts of 50,000 words or more that need to be revised and edited. How often do I browbeat myself for not making more of myself? Why does all this labour seem pointless, unworthy, senseless? Browsing The Atlantic Monthly I came across something which helped both to define myself, and to give voice to people who live quiet, hermetic, and let's say it, poor, lives for their art. I quote this section from So You Want to Be a Writer in the hopes that it may help others who are dedicated to their art despite its lowly value in a society that measures success by financial standards:
I think you have to just not care about what people think of you while you scribble away. Future fame or fortune are irrelevant. You do it while your family and friends shake their heads and wonder why with all that education and ability you seem to be doing nothing, and they pity you and shake their heads and you have to just let them. There is no teleology to it; simply, you have to release yourself of the books that want to be born. You labour alone, that's just the way it is. No point fighting it. Without "a product," a society based on capitalism, commercialism has no way to gage value. Until the book is written and published, there is no "product," and, therefore, no "value."
Though I don't know about you, personally I haven't found that giving up and walking away from one's muse is an option. Exigencies of the muse, though, is another topic.
"Wallace Stegner, an author who served as director of the Creative Writing Center at Stanford ... [wrote an] essay "To a Young Writer" (November 1959) [that] took the form of a letter addressed to a former student—a twenty-something young woman with literary aspirations, a graduate degree, and an unpublished novel. Stegner sought at once encourage her and to give her an honest picture of how difficult her career path would be.
He began by expressing empathy for the uncertainty she must now be feeling:
To date, from all your writing, you have made perhaps five hundred dollars for two short stories and a travel article. To finance school and to write your novel you have lived meagerly with little encouragement and have risked the disapproval of your family, who have understandably said, "Here is this girl nearly thirty years old now, unmarried, without a job or a profession, still mooning away at her writing as if life were forever. Here goes her life through her fingers while she sits in cold rooms and grows stoop-shouldered over a typewriter." So now, with your book finally in hand, you want desperately to have some harvest: a few good reviews, some critical attention, encouragement, royalties enough to let you live and go on writing...
You would like to be told that you are good and that all this difficulty and struggle and frustration will give way gradually or suddenly, preferably suddenly, to security, fame, confidence, the conviction of having worked well and faithfully to a good end and become someone important to the world.Stegner warned, however, that fame, fortune, and accolades would most likely not be forthcoming. Not because her work was not good: "You write better than hundreds of people with established literary reputations.” The problem, he explained, was that her writing was aimed over the heads of the mass of readers, and would therefore only ever be appreciated by a small audience of "thoughtful readers." She would thus always find herself struggling—"pinched for money, for time, for a place to work."
So was all this worth it? "I would not blame you,” he wrote, “if you ... asked, Why spend ten years in an apprenticeship to fiction only to discover that this society so little values what you do that it won't pay you a living wage for it?"
But in the end, he argued, living to practice an art that one does well is its own reward:
For you ... it will have to be art. You have nothing to gain and nothing to give except as you distill and purify ephemeral experience into quiet, searching, touching little stories ... and so give your uncommon readers a chance to join you in the solidarity of pain and love and the vision of human possibility.
But isn't it enough? For lack of the full heart's desire, won't it serve?"
I think you have to just not care about what people think of you while you scribble away. Future fame or fortune are irrelevant. You do it while your family and friends shake their heads and wonder why with all that education and ability you seem to be doing nothing, and they pity you and shake their heads and you have to just let them. There is no teleology to it; simply, you have to release yourself of the books that want to be born. You labour alone, that's just the way it is. No point fighting it. Without "a product," a society based on capitalism, commercialism has no way to gage value. Until the book is written and published, there is no "product," and, therefore, no "value."
Though I don't know about you, personally I haven't found that giving up and walking away from one's muse is an option. Exigencies of the muse, though, is another topic.
Thursday, September 14, 2006
Today I Am Not Good with Words (Ver.3: switching to the epistolatory form)
Clouds trap the sky, threatening; the air is heavy with words. Words that have the weight of droplets; the kind that sleet earthwards, crystals breaking on the pavement, streaming on the window.
I confide in you, Monsieur, troubled by the writing we are immersed in. The air is steamy, damp. And the communities, internet colonies, are like flocks of birds flying in scattered formations. Today, mon cher, I am not good with words. I say what people already know.
You ask me to describe her? I trace patterns of words to read the braille she is. It is like surfing where the screen becomes a crystal ball of tides. Posts open and close like visions. Writing hides in an ocean continually closing over itself.
Her stories are long, drawn out, each paragraph a wave dissolving the sand, the shore, encroaching. She is the rising tide; it is overwhelming. My computer screen is splashed with spilling breakers.
Must I imagine her? Like seaweed, hair, dark, long, pulled back loosely with wisps softening around the face, I think. I've never seen her; shall never gaze upon a photograph. She wears only veils of words, an obscuring sea spray of a forcefulness that surprises.
While I want to stay in the imagery of water, Monsieur, the metaphors shift. Let us leave the desolate shore and come into the city of words. Where her house is and where she moves like an exotic figment, a flash of fabric and skin.
A blackness of cloth, surely, but not without red. Brooch of a poppy. Toss of bead earrings, like Native American dream catchers. Or that ruby rising out of a ring of melted, cast sun, the only one on her hands woven with pale veins and the delicacy of a musician's fingers. Open her closet and you will find on the floor red canvas tennis shoes, ginger petal satin Chinese slippers, patent leather ruby heels, flaming red slick knee-high boots. On the shelf, a vinyl orange belt, crimson silk sash, red opera gloves, a vermilion felt hat. Dragging down the white wall like Barnett Newman's "Lema sabachthani" series, a funerary dirge of black dresses, a heavy curtain of silk, cotton, corduroy, rayon, wool hung on cedar-scented hangers.
Her writing spills out of its unkempt garden, overflows with the redness of a sensuality that is both innocent and over-ripe, tended and unweeded. It is like Oscar Wilde's "Salome"; if she who holds the platter on which the prophet's head rests was a writer. Or Beardsley's version in black lines, but aged: white skin, black habit, and the blood red splashes that are uniquely hers. I smell perfumes and compost: perhaps her writing resembles a mass of cut flowers in varying stages, some dying, some bursting forth; floral, with dark passion.
But always the salt swirling about. It leeches the soil. Dying follows her. She's in a difficult economic situation, desperate really. How she came to penury is a tale that grows more strange in each telling. The publications for which she wrote were autumnal leaves that fell and floated away. Her fish bones were broken and reset crookedly. Yet she fishes, and scales mercilessly what's caught. Is she a victim? Or a perpetrator? I don't know.
One doesn't know the true story or if there are any true stories.
An onrush of waves now, from the sky, from the ocean, it doesn't matter. Salt water in my mouth. Monsieur, I beseech you, help me break free of the undertow. Why does she silence us - I, and the others? She speaks in the diminutive. Sarcasm of a sea-side parrot, words twisted in the ruffle of virid and cinnabar feathers, inside the sharp beak. Have I found someone to beleaguer my laboured writing? It becomes unbearable, the denouncer's voice. Do I imagine a fertile slope for my Sisyphean ball of letters instead of an ocean of caustic words? Why can't I turn and go elsewhere, where welcomes wait?
Monsieur.
Your beloved.
I confide in you, Monsieur, troubled by the writing we are immersed in. The air is steamy, damp. And the communities, internet colonies, are like flocks of birds flying in scattered formations. Today, mon cher, I am not good with words. I say what people already know.
You ask me to describe her? I trace patterns of words to read the braille she is. It is like surfing where the screen becomes a crystal ball of tides. Posts open and close like visions. Writing hides in an ocean continually closing over itself.
Her stories are long, drawn out, each paragraph a wave dissolving the sand, the shore, encroaching. She is the rising tide; it is overwhelming. My computer screen is splashed with spilling breakers.
Must I imagine her? Like seaweed, hair, dark, long, pulled back loosely with wisps softening around the face, I think. I've never seen her; shall never gaze upon a photograph. She wears only veils of words, an obscuring sea spray of a forcefulness that surprises.
While I want to stay in the imagery of water, Monsieur, the metaphors shift. Let us leave the desolate shore and come into the city of words. Where her house is and where she moves like an exotic figment, a flash of fabric and skin.
A blackness of cloth, surely, but not without red. Brooch of a poppy. Toss of bead earrings, like Native American dream catchers. Or that ruby rising out of a ring of melted, cast sun, the only one on her hands woven with pale veins and the delicacy of a musician's fingers. Open her closet and you will find on the floor red canvas tennis shoes, ginger petal satin Chinese slippers, patent leather ruby heels, flaming red slick knee-high boots. On the shelf, a vinyl orange belt, crimson silk sash, red opera gloves, a vermilion felt hat. Dragging down the white wall like Barnett Newman's "Lema sabachthani" series, a funerary dirge of black dresses, a heavy curtain of silk, cotton, corduroy, rayon, wool hung on cedar-scented hangers.
Her writing spills out of its unkempt garden, overflows with the redness of a sensuality that is both innocent and over-ripe, tended and unweeded. It is like Oscar Wilde's "Salome"; if she who holds the platter on which the prophet's head rests was a writer. Or Beardsley's version in black lines, but aged: white skin, black habit, and the blood red splashes that are uniquely hers. I smell perfumes and compost: perhaps her writing resembles a mass of cut flowers in varying stages, some dying, some bursting forth; floral, with dark passion.
But always the salt swirling about. It leeches the soil. Dying follows her. She's in a difficult economic situation, desperate really. How she came to penury is a tale that grows more strange in each telling. The publications for which she wrote were autumnal leaves that fell and floated away. Her fish bones were broken and reset crookedly. Yet she fishes, and scales mercilessly what's caught. Is she a victim? Or a perpetrator? I don't know.
One doesn't know the true story or if there are any true stories.
An onrush of waves now, from the sky, from the ocean, it doesn't matter. Salt water in my mouth. Monsieur, I beseech you, help me break free of the undertow. Why does she silence us - I, and the others? She speaks in the diminutive. Sarcasm of a sea-side parrot, words twisted in the ruffle of virid and cinnabar feathers, inside the sharp beak. Have I found someone to beleaguer my laboured writing? It becomes unbearable, the denouncer's voice. Do I imagine a fertile slope for my Sisyphean ball of letters instead of an ocean of caustic words? Why can't I turn and go elsewhere, where welcomes wait?
Monsieur.
Your beloved.
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