Bridges

Last night there was the bridge over the river into Brownville in my dream. The river was tremendous and blue and lovely. It was more peaceful than terrifying, though there was a moment, as I drove onto the bridge that I was very afraid. The fear left, as I knew it had to, in order for me to get across. There was another bridge, sometime later, and it was incredible and long and as I drove across it, it became ever more steep so that I was driving almost straight up, and for a moment I was not sure I ought to be leaning forward as I was and then I reached the top of that one safely as well.

I wrote of bridges yesterday and still have many to cross. Perhaps the imagery will stick with me for a while. Perhaps I just read Ex Machina too recently and find that I am curious, I do not know.

Very simple yoga practice last night. I warmed up my spine and then meditated for a short while. Change is an invisible event, it must be approached sideways and gently and persistently and eventually you become aware that it has happened, but it is not for a very long time that it is possible to look back and see where and how it happened. Note: I do not include traumatic change, like physical injury or illness or falling in love or becoming a parent or theatre.

Today finds me unsettled and out of peace with much. Not cranky or disheartened, just not at my best or brightest. I will drink toddy and eat soda bread and approach the day gently, ever ready for a good warm hug if I need it. I think I will stay in instead of wandering about as I’ve been doing. I’ve an appointment this evening, and then I’ll probably head back home and be warm in my own space some more.

The wind is frightful and the sun is strong. I’ve to open the windows soon for the little ones, they are in need of a good long breath of fresh strong air.

Lent Day 3

Right. Day 3. I have spent the day thinking, while knowing full well that it was not the case, that today was Day 4.

Realized that to think of this 40 days as a test is to establish it as a challenge that is perhaps not what I'm interested in facing. It is not whether I will keep the rules that I've set myself or not, it is implied and known that I will. What is unknown is the experience of doing so and also the experience of life in this time.

Today I found myself paying very close attention to my muscles stretched and held an form all twisty-round. The seconds and breaths were about awareness of posture and tension and musculature.

And red lentil soup. On which I have just stuffed myself. (by the by - always have a recipe for this, along with an onion, tomatoes, red lentil, cardamom, garlic, cinnamon and a bit of chili powder on hand. you will thank me later. really.)

Last evening's reading of Bozo Sapiens brought this wonderful information into my life: 'Want to be more perceptive and engaged in the world? Stop eating: ghrelin, the resulting hormone, boosts learning capacity to such a degree that the researcher who found the connection speculated that "perhaps the cognitive brain is a side-effect of hunger." (Nature Neuroscience, vol. 9, Feb. 19, 2006. p 381-88)( New Scientist, Feb. 25, 2006, Andy Coghlan) - Must here say that I very much distrust speculation - if the evidence is there, that is fine, but speculation is bad science.

As for yoga: The Circular Motion exercise is the only one that has never really made sense in practice or on paper. It still doesn't.

There is no real certainty in this. Decisions must still be made whose impact on my life will be felt beyond Easter. Also, I've to do dishes and want to wait until at least tomorrow evening. If not the day after. I have a very long day tomorrow and am very tempted to take a shower and get into bed and read Martha Nussbaum until I fall asleep and dream of characters as letters moving in a dance over a broad stage, singing to me their names and various histories, presenting to me more layers than one night's dreaming can reveal or understand, while outside the steps where I sit for many nights in focused attentiveness, the world begins to name itself with symbols and sounds carried proudly aloft or discretely sewn in a pocket, perhaps tucked away, as mine is, just behind an ear, protected by the hairline and the relative grandeur of the appendage.

I remembered today to buy toothpaste.

Tracks in the snow

The knitting projects for the year have begun, in grand fashion. This is not to say that there is anything grand or glorious about collecting needles and yarn and pattern and focus, rather that both of the projects I will begin soon are huge and will take many months to complete. The patterns are entirely new to me, and I've decided to be smart about them (as the finished projects are gifts for other people) and make actual swatches, to scale replicas, if you will, not only for practice and note-taking purposes, but also to have some remnant of the things in my home.

Not every project must be large and impossible. There is a need for fingerless gloves and perhaps even socks. A pattern has been chosen for the cabling that I would like to use on both of them. I find the idea matching gloves with socks deeply silly and wonder where the hell it came from. I feel that thick wool boot socks and matching gloves in various shades of orange and purple and green will be a lovely addition to my winter wardrobe. One of these years.

The small projects; the ones that take an hour or two; the ones that take an hour or two every day for a week - these are the ones that keep me focused on the larger ones. I learn more about consistency. I have something to do. Results are not necessarily immediate, but they are noticeable. and I've got stuff to show off to people. Which is always the goal, na?

I've broken the big projects down as much as I can. The house, the afghan, the couch runner thing, the novel. The novel is the one that has the most little steps. I've got an idea board for it. I've got ideas. The time is a little more haphazard right now as there is much going on. That will get worked out. Because it is a nice little project to sit with the calendar and my work schedule and move around each other for a little while.

Last night I began the replica of the couch runner thing. I've altered the pattern slightly to accommodate the yarn and needles that I've to use. This will be the first project involving more than one color that I've done in a very long time, and I'm more than a bit nervous, so the color change practice is good. It is good to just jump into a thing, knowing that there are more jumps ahead, never fear about the lack of challenge.

Also - oh, yeah, there's an also - the reading. I love the reading. but there's a hell of a lot of it to do this lifetime. The library that I leave to the world will be my gift to the next me. This is my reading list. What is yours?

The world here is cold, so cold that we all wish to be fitted inside with blankets and warm drinks. Our wishes go unfulfilled and the outdoors calls with sunshine and snow and we walk around in a daze, not quite believing where we are. These are days of coffee shops and long lunches and plans for winter adventures in snow-covered cemeteries in boots and gloves and many long layers under something lovely in flowing skirt. There is quiet in the walking, even the crunch does not always travel as far as it could. We will speak of fairies and families and perfect picnics as we take pulls from flasks of liquid warm and spicy. Our feet will freeze and our noses will turn us all into shunned reindeer and when we go home and finally sleep the dreams will dance in delight because their world has been given beauty and cold and spice.

5 April 2009 noon

(still watching Simon Schama's Power of Art)(I seriously love it)

JWM Turner had a way with light. Apparently he also had a way with line, though because his lines are fluid and liquid in places and invisible in others, it is not often mentioned. I mention it now. I am still too struck by the works to talk much about them, also my ignorance shows itself to no great harm if I choose to acknowledge it and put a name to it that tells it where to go to change its face.

I am thinking of the people in Turner’s paintings. Of the vast range of the sky and the sea and the atmosphere and ho little of the space is filled with the image of humanity and its suffering or turmoil or death. Of the sense that there is much suffered in the bottom third of the painting that cannot be erased by the ephemeral beauty of the rest of it. I do not pretend to have any knowledge or understanding of the reasons for these compositional choices, but I can tell you very exactly what I feel and think of them. I feel very small and pointless and entirely connected to something that will do as it pleases whether I care or approve or no. It is not a fatalistic naturalism, but a pragmatic view of nature – it does not matter whether I exist or not, nature will.

The wind is blowing with a vengeance borne of neglect outside. It brings snow to this warming earth and sends so many of us indoors, where we will be safe and warm and can complain at our leisure about how unfair is the spring and why won’t it just be warm, forgetting just how warm is the summer, how still and wet the August days in the city when the wind has not abandoned us, but brings only strength and destruction and dust, nothing like relief. Nothing like respite. We do spend time looking for the beauty that will be in front of us eventually, say in Eden. I hope the people who seek Eden will find it, and tell their families and their friends and then get on a bunch of boats and planes and cars and trains and move past the gates and enter the garden and leave the rest of this life to me and my own, so that we can struggle as we will, learn and understand and adapt as we will, eat as we will and never again worry that we are surrounded by so much “life sucks” that we forget our manners and start acting inappropriately.

Yesterday the wind was not so full of cold and I walked with a book in my arms and my hair in a whirlwind past the old place and saw the magnolia buds. The flowers this year have been a grand shock. I am not ready for them, I have become accustomed to the gentle browns and grays and how bright the blue of the sky, the colors on the ground are startling and make me catch my breath, but I know that if I do not see, I will miss what is loveliest in this town – watching it change and remain the same no matter the season or day. This storm that sits over the Midlands and the Plains seems to have some grand purpose, some scheme in mind that requires our absence from its air for a time. We have grown soft in the days past of sunshine and breeze and left-at-home coats. The winter does not toughen us up anymore, rather it makes us fluid, longing creatures filled with hope, easily wounded.

There are leaf buds on a tree that I walk by, though I could not tell you where it grows. The buds have not changed size in a week. I tend to take my cue from them, waiting until the sun finally has its way as it does every year, and only then crawling out to show colors held away so long they are surprised at their own names. This is the wind, the time that kicks up the debris of little urban messes and makes the dust into something solid, with faces and arms and biting tendrils, the edges of leaves never sharper against such tender skin as legs and cheeks and eyeballs.

We command each other to make apologies for this weather as we do for all things unexpected. It is not our right to hold humanity accountable for nature, and yet we do. We forget that the greatest stories happen in a land, on a land, under a sky, on a sea, within a context that we seem to believe we can ignore because it has been explained as so many atoms, particles, light bits and patterns made up of names with definitions not reliant on mystery any longer! We have been freed of superstition! Only to fall victim to narrow minded self-assurance? So we are told. So we tell ourselves. Repeatedly.

I wonder. I wonder how many clichés I can come up with to explain my point of view, to explain how limited is everyone else’s, to justify my constant struggle with absolute hermitude, knowing I cannot be away from an espresso machine for long enough to unpack into my little cave. I wonder what is happening in the world that exists beyond and beneath what we are told about the world. I wonder how much of it does not need the reminder, would not care to share even the bottom third of the canvas, knows that Eden is where the rest of the world lives, and that’s more room for the rest of us.

Perhaps less than solid

It is the third day of the month of national poetry writing, the 30 days of the year when the prolific nature of every poet is put to the test and heaven only knows what strung out bloodiness results. I would put myself to this test, spreading my lungs out over my ribs, no sound escaping with air, but with letters and rhythms struggling in the places between walking and thinking and typing and writing and keyboards. I would. I cannot. My imaginings are occupied on roads without names finding songs that tell stories about people who mean little to my responsibilities. They build cities and stories about cities and wonder at lives lived encrusted in the local magics. I guess that ought to be 'magicks.'

I have plundered my daydreams and found a jewel, something private and impossible to make fiction and real for these creatures rolling around in the muck of my still-forming stories. I do them disservice. They live and breathe and have names, and I have yet to find them places. There is little poetry solidifying itself in my life. All of the language is blood.

I have begun watching Simon Schama's The Power of Art. I had seen the Caravaggio episode, a friend of mine recorded it. I remember being thunderstruck at how meaningful the thing was when I saw it - how appropriate the timing of such overwhelming talent and ability and faith and that particular inability to see the morass of humanity as anything but sublime and fertile.

Now I am again struck at the peculiarly urban nature of certain art - the squalor and pageantry that walk the streets together, claiming the same spaces, the same roads and histories, though seen and told from perspectives so skewed as to be legitimately called alien. There is some magic, some mystery in the creation and maintenance of a city, a proper city, I mean, not just a large collection of people in tall residences. I mean a city, a living, breathing organism with a personality, creation story, art, food, smell, bureaucracy, music, trade, death, cancers and buds and patterns of traffic and chaos moving through every world created within its geography. There can be no city without a sense of expression. Reliance on trade as the defining characteristic of any urban area as a city reduces the human element to mechanization, something which is far too commonplace in this world, and has been throughout much of the history the world has seen fit to throw up in front of my eyes.

Why else would marble become flesh? Why bring Jesus to earth and give pilgrims dirty feet? Why find satisfaction showing mortal beings that no wealth, pomp or decree can prevent the beauty of Death its due? The city is a place that can live on the illusion of immortality, after all, the buildings will outlive us, perhaps we can outlive ourselves, skip the tradition of social construct, we'll just not acknowledge the right of Death. Rural life does not allow such illusions, a claim I do not make in the spirit of romance or idealism. Nature is a pragmatic lady, and Death is her triumph.

But we will insist that we see what we wish, will we not? We will see Nature as Fury, as Benevolent, as a Bitch. We will see the city as proof against Death, as the City of God(s), as the ultimate expression of our human capabilities.

I like to think of cities as the ultimate version of Voltron, made of the collected abilities and presences of every inhabitant, ready to establish that I Am Here. Problem with that is the rest of that statement: Best Not Fuck With Me. Bit defensive, bit challenging, bit headed towards disaster, that.

These thoughts are still shadowy, but I could not pretend that they were not there, could not go forward without finding them some sort of solid ground whereon to find their feet. It is a complicated thing, this world that builds itself from the patterns and details of the planet that is my home. I am in no hurry to define it for itself, the job is already done.

Bits from Sunday pm

It is not so easy to recapture the silence and movement of yesterday in the chatter and chairs of this afternoon, but I will do my best.

The television is not where it will be, though it is also not where it was one step closer to ready for the summer's heat escaping from the sunny funk in the kitchen that was the whole reason to move the television in the first place.

Every goal must be achieved through a series of steps as I reconnect with my home after it or I have been ill, usually both together and similarly. The funk must be identified and eliminated, it does violence to my healing senses from its invisible perch lately placed somewhere near the kitchen sink. It could be from the dishes.

The dishes get done last.

In order to move the cookbooks and the cat food and the table, the television, DVD and VCR must take space from the radio, writing desk, telephone and lavender which have been dislocated to the chairs for the duration as Pledge wipes make their way and the broom sweeps up litter and I mop the rugs of cat hair, glad to be free of the vacuum that sits in the almost way and has and will until I get around to letting go. Sets of altar decorations (for every horizontal surface is an altar) move together and are cleaned together and rearranged as I make plans to do this again in two months, only hoping that my apartment tetris skills allow me the mental space to work again, tho I have the had space for days and have not used it but for sleeping. The refrigerator top, the table top, the boards and blocks and stove-top and burners and door handles the hyphens between movement.

And all of this accompanied by dancing and a grace the felines do not acknowledge to my face. It is the grace of knowing where everything is or will be, how to get there and how to make things happen. The invisible part of housework and homemaking and living in rooms defined so specifically. This is my little cave and I the bear, groggy and dreaming and unwilling to tolerate tripping over shit in my way and tired of litter under my feet and in the cats' fur and sensing the absence of friends and comfortable surroundings.

The sunlight in rays inaccessible to small cats leaves the kitchen warm, spreads the smell of something. The discomfort is no longer bearable.

I have not been well enough to dance through the mess, cleaning. Today is different, legs and back and arms and focus working, though slowly, and the sink is clean, the stove white, the trash out and in the late evening I find quiet in the chair too large for the living room, and my home settles.

The funk is still present.

The dance continues.

Last night ramblings and other things

Here are some other things:

Inspired by Jenny's blog, I would like to add the following things: hibiscus, peanut butter, photocopiers, double Mondays on Tuesday (I've been walking into everything today), sleeping kittens, long evening phone calls.

I have a new friend. 3 new friends in 4 months. I feel very odd about this. not the person, mind, Just the whole thing where I'm meeting people and then they are my friends - I take a while, I always have - it just doesn't happen that quickly - Ula and I sniffed around each other for like 6 months before we got comfortable - is anyone else having the most deeply layered deja vu ever in the history of ever? Or is that just me. Yeah, this train of thought is annoying me. I have a new friend. It is happy-making, not the kind of thing that should be weird-making.

Sounds like I get to go see King Lear this week. Woot. I lurv Shakespeare performed. Even if it's performed badly - there is nothing to beat live entertainment. 'specially when it's in a cemetery.

Have begun the habit of words again. Enjoying the dopamine rush after writing. I am truly upset about the reality of the idea that it is difficult to create anything worthwhile in a time of happiness. Although, as was once pointed out to me by someone else, I am fueled by angst. my angst tends to be of the shallow variety - while being very sweetly kissed in my dream by a married man (inaccessible and Not In My Goddamn Space All the Time are simply not the same thing. for one, it is much easier to yell the latter and the former is too associated with personal problems.) I suffer because I want to say spam. Yes. Yes. Although it's better than the half-awake rage fueled by the thought of "you fucked her IN MY BED!!!!" stupid half-awake rage. Odd way to begin the day. And I got sleep and everything (whine whine whine).


There is much to be thought about and experienced and spoken of, but for now, these are the ramblings:

I am remembering. I remember now. The stillness of mind, the feel of the pen in my hand, the rhythms of words sprung with an energy that never fails to catch me off my guard and shock me to my core months and years later.
I remember thinking and seeing at once, as if the acts were never separated or unbalanced. The leaves on the tree in the yard out font. The storm whose beginning was the single crack of thunder from somewhere just above my head. The slow smile of acknowledgment - the rain begins.
I remember now that staring at one rain-soaked leaf for 10 seconds becomes an eternity of sound, color, movement, with me, the observer, the speaker, the seer, watching it all - the drops of water leaving themselves spread ever thinner on the veined bit of growth; the gold of the street light and the silver of the lightning; the fine lines of tiny raindrops heavier than mist; and the wind, the blessed wind again, calling me, bending the cobwebs and blowing the dust further away from the bits that once knew this path well. Gears of a sort, levers and firing mechanisms and something like a quiet pulsing metronome that had studied and understood the inherent value of variation.
I remember the language I never fully spoke, never wanted to claim as my own. A language trapped in words, fed in sound, sight, touch, taste, smell.
I remember a walk with a poet. On the way to lunch, across a street and a hole in the sidewalk surrounded by orange cones and yellow tape, guarded by a machine with a name.
"There's a poem right there," he said.
It is that poem. That is what I remember now.

Good, long morning

The phenomenon of all three of us being up and relatively active before 10 on a Saturday morning has me smiling and wanting to hide in my room to read and write and make lists and pray and ponder and plan.

The kittens are being very adorable and running all about like the small bundles of barely confined energy that they are. The constant distractions of little grown-ups. And Anne moved the microwave.

Caved in and checked out yet another book before leaving work yesterday. I am reading through our collection of Jose Saramago. The libraries have only the novels that have been translated into English. I am pleased that there are about 10 of them, but am discovering that I would rather read them in the Portuguese. The story isn't hampered by the translation, at least it reads clearly and well, but the language is so specific that I wonder how much of the poetry is lost. I suspect that my feeling is mostly inspired by my desire to learn another language. The motivation to travel frequently brings this need or desire to the fore of my thinking.

Today is a good day. I am glad to be in it.