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
I am getting my very own piano! My landlord (who is also my "house-mate," although we don't share a living space - I rent a one-bedroom apartment inside the house) said she is excited to hear classical music issuing from the vents! My friend Paul, who is also a classical pianist and Flamenco guitarist, and owns one of the best restaurants in town (Le Pigeon), will be accompanying me to the piano store to spy spinets and tinkle on uprights. I think a little spinet made of cherry or walnut, with a bright resonance, would be just about perfect. A lot of my friends ask, "Why don't you just get a free piano off of Craigslist?" But when you play classical music for 14 years and are accustomed to an instrument that is tuned well, you don't mind sinking a little money into it. And I've been such a cheap-skate lately that I will consider it a long overdue gift to myself.
Time to recoup the sheet music left bookmarked and splayed open at Ritchie's house, and other locales. Pencil-marked Bach inventions and thunderous Rachmaninoff concertos, nom nom.
(photo by Alicia Rose)
Come see a beautiful show with me, this Wednesday (April 2) at the Holocene. Mr. Ritchie Young and his band Loch Lomond will transport you.
The entanglement of things. Eros and ides. I recently read a friend's piece of writing that deals with the idea of extension and uncoiling, how other people, engagements, and commitments can cause you to recoil (either into yourself or away from yourself), and therefore, hinder your own extension, propulsion into the world.
As for us, we are like plants that have the one choice of being in or out of the light. - Simone Weil
These are drifts of concepts that I think about almost every day. I myself undulate between a circling around the epistemological self: solitude, intense emotional tallying, a census of what being means, evening dasein. And then a wheel that spins among many people and along multiple trajectories, the spokes reaching further the more curious I am about a person, or perhaps the more I love them. There are some people that I love very much, that never see the spinning. Love is locked in a mirage of distance. And there are others I draw closer to because they appeal to my curiosity, they compose a necessary anthropology. I know many people, and they all mean something specific to me, even if they no longer talk to me, or if my feelings go unmatched. It is the bewilderment of this meaning-seeking that is often most interesting in human interaction. The compass of intent, the gesture of silence. As if all life were documentable.
Today was very cold. I leapfrogged from my semi-weekly Saturday morning coffee date with Derrick, then onto Bethany, who has an exciting (possible) name change in store (which rekindled my interest in shedding my absentee father's last name for something less dry, English), then over to two hours of sauna and girl talk with lovely Theda, who is a dove, pampering me with Guatemalan hot chocolate and thieved candies and listening, above all. Until the weather turns, I am happy spending my Saturday nights sheathed within my pleasure dome.
~a.
Time for a nice little [boring] post about all & sundry & miscellany. I have been busy, but everyone I know is so busy, and linear time is accelerating, and I am coiled up in my warm room, furs and thin cottons and red velvets and many surfaces softened by the color of pearl. It has been: wake up at 6AM, spend a few minutes whispering to the cats, wind my hair into some sort of nest (a friend said my hair is getting very "Antoinetty"), and work on a loosely tethered stack of poems while listening to music made of bells and hammers and spoons and brushes, that is a morning cyphoned. Speaking of Marie Antoinette, I can't wait until my hair is long enough to wear in a long cone full of feathers, like this:
I like the black mesh eye-mask she's wearing.
The rest I'll do in clumps of associations of actions/thoughts/movements/enjoyments, as I am already starting to fall asleep a little. Kundalini yoga classes. Kundalini means "coiled up" in Sanskrit, and it is about rousing the energy of your consciousness, which sits wrapped around your spine like a sleeping serpent. Sweet foods: vegan cupcakes, dark chocolate, rhubarb pie baked from scratch. The din of gamelan dinging. Scenting the apartment with thieved wildflowers. Brisk walks, smelling/feeling what is crushed underfoot. Large apples: Jazz, Braeburn, Pink Lady, sometimes I eat TWO a day! Dried cherries and ginger, soft Italian cheeses made from raw cow's milk. Little pickles. Whole almonds. New girlfriends, others more lost to me, but there is a grace in the reaching. Sharing manuscripts. The slight powder of the cherry blossoms. Pale surfaces, patterned palettes, and a tumbleweed named Terry.
Lv,
ADE
First result from Google search for "healthiest person."
Paper is again my preferred tablet, and I have shoveled my laptop aside. Cinched. There is a root trembling in the bedrock, and it says, Trash the need to explain the self. Enjoy being in your life. Work the teeth of myth. A pendulum, it is noiseless and it swings from self to self, locking and unlocking, in swift wafts.
"Now" is a swath, a frayed tapestry of crushed forest floor cherry blossom, sucking in the pink perfume. Silence from someone with a hammer-heart, he is locked, forever. I continue to care. I only hope to muffle hammers.
Learning to dance with a bird who doesn't request explanations, but does ask "What is poetry?" or "Have you ever been in love?" (perhaps only once or twice, truly?), or "If you were a mixed drink, what would you be?" It is easy, and it doesn't sheet me. I am not in the business of technical love, not now.
Winds warping immensely. Burning rose and dry sage oils. Feeling food again, daily tangelos and large apples eaten on the street, fistfuls of parsley, a long walk every day, walking very fast, musculature of the world. The cats get milk now, and I think I'm getting crow's feet. My body's surface, it is shifting, flattening in places, and the interior is a dark cool crystal.
It is called a black 'sea' of roses. For a black 'ocean' is weight. Ocean is rain. Ocean in rain is rain. The rain (the ocean that's coming down) is soundless too, her charm nullified in that that night no one is around, she's smoking a cigarette. Graceful dipping her legs stretched down from a chair in night. Rain 'at' night is that black ocean around blank with nothing but waves. The Euphrates River is the forest's choppy black waves that are not in water.
