Today's accomplishment: preserved lemons! My recipe for Moroccan chicken with lemons & olives is complete.
Who would believe what a poor set of ears can tell you.
Who would believe what a weak pair of hands can do.
Never a silence, always a foot in the door.
-Brian Eno
It is daybreak on the Monday following Thanksgiving, and I am in an empty living room in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, empty with the exception of a (momentarily empty) guitar case, several hundred books in stacks, my cat, and emergency candles. The tips of the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings glow from my window. If only one could survive bleakly on the alloy of dawn and candlelight, coffee, and four hours of sleep. I have tried.
This weak pair of hands has moved, a six days' drive in a tippy Penske truck crammed with antiques and ephemera, that survived the Yellowstone State Park police, street bison, and a mysterious break-down in a Wyoming resort town, several starkly quiet evenings in cheap motels, the planetary blasts of the Rocky Mountains, and light Pennsylvania rains. I decided in June to move to New York, and I am here, gainfully employed (and blessed to be so) at a PR firm that works with museums, housed in a beautiful railroad apartment with avocado walls, creaky floors, and hissing radiators. I suspect this diary of sorts will become a series of field notes, measurements, and histories.
It has been a very long time since I've written here, this burly nest. I have been engaged in a lot of eating and enjoying the strong shafts of cold fall air, the memory winds. Pre-occupied with the harvest trance - feasting on enchanted apples with thick wedges of brie (with rind!) and buffalo's milk cheese, crates of clementines, milk-braised young carrots, wild rice with parsley and chorizo, poached eggs, and pools of plummy garnacha. Our Thanksgiving feast consisted of roasted duck with pomegranate glaze and warm, starchy chestnuts (much to my chagrin, I haven't seen a single street vendor selling roasted chestnuts - I always thought it was a very "New York" thing to eat, at least according to many cinematic, albeit hazily remembered, portrayals of Christmas "in the city"). Reasonably charred brussels sprouts. Mashed acorn squash and British-style rice pudding that has served as leftovers for breakfast for almost a week now. My insomniac's breakfast now consists of Irish steel-cut oatmeal with honey, butter, and raisins, with a leftover Bosc pear (the still-life pear) and oily coffee with thick cream. When I am not eating, I am dreaming of it. Although I hardly dreamt of anything last night besides impossible rollercoasters.
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My concern was a mammoth transformation, something bestial. I had only ever experienced, over strange swaths of time, the smallest of permutations, miniature dislocations, in place, understanding, awareness (both self and relational), the when and where of feeling, how to divert or neglect the structures of pressure and relief, awkwardness, a life in abstraction, having a voice but only knowing how to use it within a certain architecture that is very much my own. The realization that it is so very difficult to know anyone, and to be known.
Recurring icons--desert, ocean, ancient stone, ruins. Twice weekly I still dream of sublime waters.
Love is enormous.
All morning I think about hands in the water, hands behind guises, meshes of the afternoon. How I could create so many dances with hands, alone.
Who was my lover in a past life? A marina in waiting. Who has moved with swift agility, up through the present? I can think of a few, pure, smooth stones. Entities in my life that hold ancient information, sear perception. A wordless knowledge.
And all of you have your guises and your masks that you wear and have worn. I am Sumari in another guise. And all of these guises are myself, and all of your guises are yourselves. And as I dwell in many realities, so dwell you in many realities.
The word Shambaline connotes the changing faces that the inner self adopts through its various experiences. Now, this is a word that hints of relationships for which you have no word. Shambalina Garapharti means the changing faces of the soul smile and laugh at each other. Now all of that is in one phrase.
Each of you receives revelations every moment of your lives. Your life is a revelation. We are trying to lead you gently so that you will accept the revelations of your peers. Within you are answers and questions. The questions are to lead you to your own answers, and the answers will not be the same.
The revelations have come through the centuries; the revelations are the centuries. The centuries are transparent. You can look through this history that you know. The selves that sit there know other selves. There are revelations within you that do not need words; they need to rise up like new planets into your consciousness, and you need to greet them gently and not give them labels or names.
We want you to do away with the normal punctuation of your experience, for you put periods and question marks and dashes where they do not belong...the words are stepping-stones to lead you into other areas of experience. Within the word is a wordless knowledge. Now you need the sounds to remind you.
In time--in your time--you will dispense with even the sounds. You will be walking backward, in your terms, into the heart of perception; therefore you will leave behind many of the truths that are now familiar to you, the words that you take for granted. For when you consider an experience, you apply words to it much more than feeling: does this word apply, or does that word apply, or what is it?--and without its label, dare I experience this unknown?
...to see character of people, character of an individual, at random, an invisible thin weight, prior to streams of events or a huge event--character of ordinary people, who have no impingement on those events in history--and see their weight/their relation to it. It's not a sense of seeing character as either good or bad but as if shining thin weight whose composition is grasped "at once," in one instant here.
To see the relation of character of people and the present instant, in every instant. That is, seeing character while (or as part of) continually staying on track every present instant. Even trying to track every instant changes an instant.
- Leslie Scalapino
Day of split daisies, day of split sunlight. People either outlined in thin nerves of sunlight, or people secluded in clouds. I think of their weight, their relation to it ["it" signifying a cloud-veil of reckoning and calculation, architectures of understanding]. A dialysis between people, a molecular movement or shift. Two people as tectonic plates leaving a scrape on one another.
Friday. In the act of being stunned, I felt a sudden cleaving, water separating from oil. The hoof of a cloven animal. What we see is blossom, passes. The rhizome remains. But within the terrain of understanding between people, in the beneath, the rhizome often frays, is overgrown with thicket.
Between that day and today arises an unforeseen and immense bruising, accused of having a "lazy soul," if I translate correctly. If I am a detective, then all acts, when found or realized, are translatable symbols. Each instant, an artifact, whether flanked in steam, or received in trance. Precious visions. A clouded translation is acceptable. It is what the world means in its arrival, to you.
When speaking in terms of theories of experience, I always remember Sythy's notion of "each person as sovereign over a world that is unique and may have unfamiliar rules, norms, and values." The act of granting that sovereignty is the ultimate act of grace.
"...so a piece of writing may be only birds."
In recent correspondence with Nicholas B:
"You have appropriated your language to a point where the herd-language, the herd-spirit, the herd-perspective has trouble making your uniqueness common, shared, brutal, a sign, a mark for all." A granting of sovereignty in movement, inscribed or told.
It is Tuesday morning, and I have been awake since 4:30. The cat kept collapsing onto my face. He would walk up to my face, find the perfect tilt, and then drop, as if my nose made the perfect pillow. So I decided to wake up and paint watercolors in my pajamas. I always have the most random selection of items in my possession when I am at the supermarket. Last night I bought watercolor paper, a big canister of gross protein shake powder, glitter letters made by a company appropriately donned "Urban Bling," seven apples in varying shades of red, novena candles. And now I am drinking my favorite coffee ("hot fat") at my favorite table, and it is June, but I am still wearing an overcoat and carrying my umbrella to work because we are no longer allowed a summer here in Portland, Oregon. It is the time of zero summer. However, I think I'm one of the few people (that I know, at least) who could be happy with ten truly perfect days of sunshine a year. There is something about rain and overcast skies that bruises color and unlocks a sachet of lilac, dahlia, flattened poppies. All colors find their resonance under clouds. And smell is, by far, my favorite hallucination.
Dave sent me a copy of his beautiful, billowy REPEATER mix, and I know I'm supposed to listen to it in a certain order, but I keep stubbornly returning to two songs: "Rondel Zwei" by Pole and "Ruff Way," a dub track by Rhythm & Sound. Sorry to disrupt your logic, Roni - I will reserve all purist intent for my morning bus rides. So far, it is many songs alluding to the heartbeat of a whale, unspeakable haze, swaths of filter. Lovely, indeed.
Oh, and up next in the UDLE reading/lecture series: cross-genre performance poet Bethany Wright & the oft-published Emily Kendal Frey, with music by Bird Costumes tentatively scheduled (however, the music choice might be changing soon, and unpredictably). Please come and be swept up in the processional, drink our wine, take our books home with you and never let them gather dust.
Lv,
~a.
The subject came to me in the middle of a dream. I sat up and repeated it like a formula, Vedic and unbroken. I didn't need to write it down, it had already gathered sense. I am water pinned by stakes, an index of ocean.
This past weekend, I did a 3-day writer's retreat 30 miles west of Corvallis, in the coastal range. So many thickets and briars to pick, wild nettles and injured birds. I was in a hurry when I left Portland and forgot my "hiking" boots (which, by some act of divine mystery, served me well during a 30-mile backpacking trip in the Olympia Peninsula last fall), so I stayed out of the muck and bogs and spent most of my time in the large A-frame cabin. Like meditation, the act of approach was incredibly difficult. By the second day I was wrought with anxiety. Instead of writing, I flipped from Ann Cline's A Hut of One's Own: Life Outside the Circle of Architecture to sight-reading Bach toccatas to thinking about my own discomfort.
Sunday, I found my sediment. Felt pebbled. The cheek of the girl in a mirage I see, a barreled fantasy. Lately, the most powerful, most repetitive visual icon in my writing is a woman, standing in an ancient desert. It is always sunset, and the sun is always a stratum of pink and deep orange. Fazing winds and dry stone pull the trance into view.
This vision is too large to understand. The scene itself reaches across hundreds of other icons, so many that I can only understand them as knobs tuning an image, swelling it with meaning. Disturbances in wakening, or in pulse. The woman is usually dressed in shreds or planks, or rather, heavily stitched in royal vestments. Many things scattering the tract: funneling winds, wisps and weavers, a crypt that swallows the loom, without weft. An animal emerging. Knitting a brain coral, she sits among the laughing desert.
Last night we had to put one of Ben's cats, Sixx, to sleep. A freak blood clot. We found him howling under a blueberry shrub, but by that time, the blood had drained from three of his legs, and he was unable to walk (although he must have known that we were on the way to the vet because he tried to make a run for it, but could only sort of scoot across the sidewalk). We rushed him to the emergency vet, where we discovered that after $1,800 of treatment, he could get another clot within a few days or weeks, and in the meantime, would be in severe pain and suffering. The longest he could live would be up to six months. We decided to euthanize. He died peacefully in our laps around midnight.
RIP, sweet Sixx. I enjoyed our brief time together and hope you don't get into too many cat fights in the otherworld.
A brief field report, before I'm off to a breakfast of cheesy biscuits at Blue Gardenia with my friend Scott (who is my proxy until Nick Jaina returns safely to port). Some things of note. I was recently awarded a writer's retreat in the coastal wilderness! I will be spending an extended weekend canvassing 45 acres of forest and meadow, writing and working with materials on land. I will post what comes into view.
New favorite local music: William Holley. Ben and I went to see him at The Know on Friday. His music is truly wonderful, and I encourage you all to pester him for more songs. Resonances of Arthur Russell, but altogether new. Good to sway to.
I have spent the weekend in a lazy hobble from bed to cafes, to dinner parties (including a warehouse-warming Italian feast at Pinball last night...the night ended with bowls full of spumoni and gourmet donuts and almond cookies, and bloated bellies). A dreamy barista has soaked up most of my weekend like a sponge, but today I have UDLE business to attend to, a forest to hike, elk tacos and sauna time with Theda, and a drink date with my friend Leif. Uff-da.
Oh, and I might be revisiting/rewriting/publishing my Reed thesis. At first, the idea of it sounded positively dreadful, but returning to Jack Spicer's work might be rewarding, an Orphic return in its own right. I'm also finishing up my feature article on Corey Arnold, to be published in this summer's issue of Bear Deluxe Magazine.
As of this morning, I am in love with espresso, straight from a tiny cup and a miniature spoon.
A more bulbous post, soon.
~ADE
