December 2007 Archives

Every object is a relic, a plume of meaning. Time is no arrow.

Four is my favorite, luckiest number, but the number two is a close second. Salt & pepper shakers, turtle doves, mittens, a pair of bing cherries still dangling from the tree. Natural artifacts seem to look most beautiful in pairs, or at best, in nicely arranged piles of themselves. There is something especially pure and robust about things in twos. Nabokov exercised his gift of synesthesia by assigning a color, often a spectrum of colors, to each letter of the alphabet (in both English and Russian). I have often felt the same towards numbers. I obsessively engage myself with doubles.

Right now there are two cats, Moe (short for Mohawk) and Walter. Walter is new. A guest cat who looks a little like a rattlesnake when he hisses will be roosting here for the next six months. He and Moe have been having a staring contest lock-down for the past two days, but now they are bundled up next to the space heater (we ran out of oil in our house), at least tolerating the other. There are two candles burning, two pillows, two fingerless gloves woven from alpaca wool, two books splayed open on the bed, two chocolate cakes in the oven (so Martha!).

I went to sleep way too early last night. Heard fireworks powdering the sky in a still, dark room.

It's 1:00 in the morning, and I am calm like a cloud, rapt in a peace essence. I left the house briefly to rent a Woody Allen movie at Video Verite, and ended up with an Irish coffee (my new favorite drink) in my hand, playing Frogger at Moloko Plus (they have an Atari) with friends, including Elias, who I haven't seen in ages and is now a neighbor just a few blocks away. Everyone living and thriving in the NoPo.

Everything seen in softness tonight. Feel the twinkle.

Hello, diary. Happy Solstice.

My arms and legs feel clotted from working hard all week, sitting sedentary at a desk. Four whole days without having to answer to fussy graphic designers = paradise. I love my clients, but I am looking forward to not having to quote a project, source paper samples, order ink draw-downs, wrangle with book layouts, and schedule press checks until next Wednesday. When I haven't been working, I've been swathing myself in decadence - tapas, expensive Chinons, swills of brandy, chocolate the color of black magic, tiger stripes, and fake gold.

Amidst this indulgence, I went to see Petra again. She's my psychic friend who is not only a fellow red/curly headed Virgo from Arkansas of fairly immediate Cherokee ancestry, she and I even have the same bad ring tone on our cell phones. As opposed to the tea leaf reading that I received last time, we did a more in-depth tarot & clairvoyant session and talked about utilizing ancient energies (I embody the more mythopoetic fairy/elfin archetypes), gaining spiritual sovereignty (she pulled the Queen of Wands), and fracturing masks. She said I wear two masks - she saw them clearly, splintering my face into discernible halves. One has the contours of a phantom mask, with an odd spherical cup covering my right ear. The other is more fragmented and has left a deep scar in my cheek from repeated attempts at removal. I have worn the masks for so long that they have ossified, bolted at the temples (she said this plugging explains my frequent tension headaches which only occur at my temples, particularly the right). The masks have, to some degree, protected me from the world, but at potentially disastrous risks - of hiding things from myself and others, of disconnecting from myself to the point of disassociation, to the point of not even recognizing myself in the mirror. A life, covered in rime.

She offered to do a channeled healing that would help loosen the masks. I had to stare her blankly in the eyes for a few minutes while she spoke in another language (tongues?) and visualized the masks chipping apart. I felt a warm ruffle traveling up through my throat while she was speaking, like birds flapping their wings along my esophagus. She said it would take a few days for the healing to integrate, but I haven't had a headache since then!

Much of the reading was quite general, touching on larger forms in my life that I tend to minimize the importance of, that are actually huge & looming, titanic - that the most important things right now are taking really good care of and connecting with myself, and exploring my abilities as a healer/seer. She's convinced I'm psychic, that I am starting to receive subtle signals (particularly with regards to numbers and ESP-esque coincidences, although, there is no such thing as coincidence). Sitting on the code of the universe, waiting for it to unfurl.

We also talked about resisting the language of pattern/routine. Doing something fun/incisive/exploratory every day. Like Fred Rogers sandbox kind of fun. Today I'm going to sew together some Christmas presents and buy a few more jewels for my lady friends. Moe is getting a flea collar and hairball meds for Christmas, although I might surprise him with a catnip mouse. Another year at Maryrose's Monday night, the drunk poet society. I hope we have a resurgence of singing "Under the Bridge" acapella with a lot of that Chris Piuma ukelele.

More soon,
~ADE

Thanks and props to Mr. Anthony Georgis for dragging me out in the rain on a cold, cold day. The umbrella was broken, but the industrial grade galoshes proved their might.

I have a date with the very talented Miss Brooke Thompson this week to talk tattooz. I have in mind my right forearm (to fall into symmetry with my left) or shoulder blade. Maybe the center of the back for a spinal thrill.

I want to do something very simple this time, with whooping cranes. I'm still deciding between one crane, mirrored, like the sparrows on my wrist (since everyone asks, it is a symbol for self-reflective thought), or a pair of cranes. The image I've been fumbling with is a beautiful photograph of a crane with its beak to the sky, with another descending towards its tail. There is something so open and bellowing about it, as if to say, "Here I am! Look at me now!". Here is a somewhat accurate example, but I want mine to be in black outline like all the others:

Just plain crummy out today. Think I'll just stay home.

To my bleak readership: no apologies for the silent treatment. I've been busy. So busy I've been dreaming in numbers (I do lots of calculation at work. Sadly, my subconscious doesn't always dispose of the constant mathematical debris of my 9 - 5 life, so I often dream of troubleshooting difficult press sheet sizes, laying out a book project, or suggesting the right paper weight).

Plunge into the tableau:

Being & Time is changing my life. I try to read a few pages every day, but I often start circulating around the same swatch of text, reading it again and again. I am especially hung up on the concept of "worlding," the production of a world, right now:

The world, in resting upon the earth, strives to surmount it. As self-opening it cannot endure anything closed. The earth, however, as sheltering and concealing, tends always to draw the world into itself and keep it there.

The opposition of world and earth is a striving.

+

...the world worlds, and is more fully in being than the tangible and perceptible realm in which we believe ourselves to be at home. World is never an object that stands before us and can be seen. World is the ever-nonobjective to which we are subject as long as the paths of birth and death, blessing and curse keep us transported into Being. Wherever those decisions of our history that relate to our very being are made, are taken up and abandoned by us, go unrecognized and are rediscovered by new inquiry, there the world worlds.

What a filling thought! The overarching membrane of the world, flushing in. The parchment veil, all of us operating beneath and within it.

In addition to my daily reference to Being & Time, I have plenty of reading for the winter, including a beautiful copy of The Maximus Poems IV - VI, a cultural history of labyrinths, Levinas' Proper Names, Donna Haraway's Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, and the new Oliver Sacks. Oh, and Dune, ha.

Lately I have been working on small, diurnal essays, prose poems, prayers and meditations on a life of "withinness." Moved by Chris Marker's film transcripts, Anne Carson's long poems in Plainwater and Glass, Irony and God, Lisa Robertson's lush occcasional writings, Tsurezuregusa, and zuihitsu, a form of Japanese writing (primarily by women), the name of which translates loosely to "following the brush." I will try to post the ones I deem fit for sharing as often as I can. Here is a recent one:

+

NOVEMBER 3, 2007

"The east sea and the west sea rhyme on in her head
Forever instead."
- Elizabeth Barett Browning

"Human love, while it is happening, will seem like something within withinness."
- Anne Carson

Today the mind is a sleeve. Loose and close. We went walking against the afternoon ripple, in the Indian summer-sun. Our faces leering in the dappled hieroglyphics. Our way of making the Outside lingual. The gnarled tree and the city lake and the wild slopes are interior and within. We are spacial lopers.

We sat blank among the leaves, drinking root beer from a bottle and watching camera phone filmographies - short, cellular artifacts. Garden snakes eating toads, ants towing bees, a corn snake bending around an arm. The ant drops the bee and runs away.

+

I awake in a waft. Dreamt about a still sea, bloated from the bellows. Water had become a bodily hyper-space, flanked by fractal dunes.

The same water squeezed from the duct forms the cloud, the salt-pool unusually near. It rides inside the body. We are ocean.

There is an old Zen koan that I always mis-remember:

"But the tears that fall are not beads for stringing."