Author (#19)February 2008 Archives
I am at one of my favorite old coffee shops, Palio, where the tables are large and made of wood, of library ilk, and the coffee cups are the size of soup bowls. Medical students come here to talk about plasma and proteins, the various variations of isotopes. I wandered here and have spent the morning downloading applications for writers' residencies that I want to do next year, one in a snowy, creek-side A-frame in Sisters, Oregon, and another on the Oregon coastal range. Osprey and heron friends. Shrews. Chopped wood and food-stuffs, take me there.
I've also spent the morning shopping for lap harps. Since it's uncertain as to when I will ever have regular access to a piano again, I think a harp would be a worthy alternative. I played harp growing up, and it is quite similar to the piano, in a structural and behavioral sense. How you splay your hands across it. An instrument of peculiar intimacy, when held.
Today is another canopy, although one that is more tightly cinched by the spikes of pleasurable work, a tent teetered only by the winds within. Book layout for our first Ecclesia chapbooks, research, perhaps a short respite to rake the leaves and sweep the deck, crafting questions for my interview with Corey Arnold tomorrow evening over dinner. Life is loam, life is ebullience.
Mr. and I are fantasizing about taking a road trip to a shitty fisherman's wharf kind of town next weekend, getting a cheap motel room, and hanging out with surly sea-men in smoky bars. The only thing is, my license is suspended (I drive my friend's cars illegally, regardless), and neither of us has a car, but I don't think either of those things should stop us from accomplishing our mission. I want to stomp around in the floam of the ocean and argue over the difference between flotsam and jetsam.
...
Swann. Swee, swee.
A few nights previous saw a blood moon - I glanced but a slow sliver before it was mottled, completely, in carmine.
Grace in all things, even these bardo states that toss me between pond and reservoir, palm and paw. I feel like a curio cabinet, swung open, split with shelves and sub-divisions, drawers that can't close completely. Sheaths and sheaths. Shivering cocoons. Dead letters and bodies, unlocking.
After an evening of effusive engagements, along with the social melee of Nick Jaina's double-header CD release party, the day is blanketed in canopies of lethargy. I am at a cafe with Daniel, who is reading The Great Gatsby and intermittently editing one of his latest short stories. We just came up with a way to say "I drink your milkshake." in sign language, involving teat-suckling hand gestures. Tonight is a going-away party of sorts, since Nick is going on tour for two months, so I'm storing my energy like a camel.
...
Reporting from field:
At night my house is a dark, plumed forest. Voices whorling.
Who would believe what a poor set of ears can tell you?
Who would believe what a weak pair of hands can do?
I could listen to Another Green World on repeat for an eternity...
I have a date to go see this on Tuesday night at OMSI, a photojournalistic survey of glaciers melting and moving. Nothing romances quite like National Geographic.
When my day is a mist fever, bequeathing, I ask my body what it wants to do. A scythe speaks, it is a slashing. It is a matter of a difference dividing, portals opening. It seems every day presents death, and it is my duty to wedge it. No minor function arising. Every day I walk through halls of the spirit, braids undone, coilings.
He cut my cords, snapped them with salt water, and I could feel,
something planetary. Ecstasy. I am at the verge of truly speaking. It is danger. I can sense the steep wells, walling. Those who are unfortunate not to, not to walk through waves.
+
Valentine's Day was great, until I barfed at my friend Jason's birthday party.
My body is full of dulcimers. Today I watched a sub-par documentary on Klaus Nomi with Brooke. We ended up talking over most of the movie and eating grilled cheeses and doing arts & crafts instead. I made a miniature, mustachioed nesting doll for R. Then an UDLE meeting downtown, Chinese food with Ted, and now I'm half-alive and can't believe I haven't lost consciousness.
Ok, I'm 'tardo. Off to bed.
From room to room, spirit. Today on the Max, I asked to be lifted, and when I opened my eyes I was a flickering feather, as if life were a mere glass that needed only to be polished from time to time.
The beauty of the world is the mouth of a labyrinth. The unwary individual who on entering takes a few steps is soon unable to find the opening. Worn out, with nothing to eat or drink, in the dark, separated from his dear ones, and from everything he loves and is accustomed to, he walks on without knowing anything or hoping anything, incapable even of discovering whether he is really going forward or merely turning round on the same spot. But this affliction is as nothing compared with the danger threatening him. For if he does not lose courage, if he goes on walking, it is absolutely certain that he will finally arrive at the center of the labyrinth. And there God is waiting to eat him.
Lately a shrill timbre. We had an amazing impromptu Schezuan feast at Orland's on Chinese New Year. I made mapo dofu for the first time, and a dish called Ants Creeping Up A Tree (for poetic value, mainly), and Orland made the most delicious eggplant dish I've ever tasted, with long slender Chinese eggplants instead of their fatter relatives, along with plentiful mushrooms, steamed greens, rice, oolong tea, and several bottles of wine. The night collapsed into dancing in the thick of pink fog, floor-crawling, shouting into blinking megaphones, falling over in moon shoes. Nick Jaina did some impressive contact dancing for a very lucky few, including me and my new gelfling friend. So, yes, so very nice through and through.
Soul dancing at the Goodfoot Saturday night. I spent most of the evening dancing solo in a flapper dress, next to this huge fan that blew my dress around. It was cooler than Marilyn. This morning, we finished parsing together our lecture for the Pecha Kucha event, which is slated for tomorrow evening at the Imago Theatre from 7:30 - ?, for those out there who might be interested.
Now I'm at home, bejeweled and well-napped (I was writing on the couch and fell into a long, languorous cat nap with Walter), rose-oiled, skin the hue of teeth, drinking champagne and eating chocolate with lavender and blueberries. The cats are brushed and well-fed, and I have to drift off because this week is very busy, what with a lecture to give, a Pranic healing session Tuesday night, my first psychic class with Petra on Wednesday, and Jason Leonard's 30th birthday party on Thursday night at the Roadside Attraction, w/Nick Jaina, Loch Lomond, et. al.
Allowing the gaze of the intruder.
A lucid brush between rooms.
With one lash of the eyes,
I see either desert or busied utopias.
Life is no longer a cone, it is a sphere.
Happiness swoops in and leaves a nest of jittery eggs.
I've been neglectful of this dwelling, and this is really just a note to self.
Life has been wild rides in the back of sloshy wet pick-up trucks, dinner parties that devolve into fog machine dance parties, with moon shoes and alien megaphones. Watching the unfurling of the universe, happening. Cats sleeping in my underwear drawer and conversations about waste management, fragility, trips to Japan and the surf. New tattoos. The Ecclesia is coming together frenetically, but beautifully.
Forever falling spirit.
Wild Nights - Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!
Futile - the Winds -
To a Heart in port -
Done with the Compass -
Done with the Chart!
My dream site/organization: The Institute For Figuring
Through the simple drawing of a circle in sand we open the door to a realm where figures disport themselves in play. Dividing this circle by a cross we begin to invoke the relations inherent in its form. From such beginnings emerges the game of mathematics.
If mathematics is a language of pattern its structures may be seen as the verses of a formal, yet fantastical poetics. Across the globe people have delighted in the harmonies of this language and the patterns discovered therein. These are the songs that figures sing amongst themselves.
Mathematical forms are but one kind of figure. There are many others. Long before the development of algebra, Indian culture anticipated fractals in paisley patterns while Islamic mosaicists explored the symmetries inherent in a plane with their unparalleled command of tiling. Throughout history humans have developed a vast variety of methods for investigating and constructing different types of figures - what we might term figurative technologies - from weaving, knotting and “string figuring,” to origami, tiling, perspectival drawing, and holography.
Nature too inclines towards a figurative poetics, materializing throughout its domain exquisite formal structures - from Fibonacci numbers found in the pattern of a pineapple’s scales, to the miniature geodesic spheres of carbon “buckyball” molecules, and the logarithmic spirals in a galaxy’s rotating arms. Likewise, culture abounds with structured forms. In myths and mandalas we find relations described by projective geometry, which some philosophers also ascribe to structures of the human mind.
By classifying such figures and recognizing their diverse manifestations hitherto unsuspected correspondences are revealed.
The Institute For Figuring is an educational organization dedicated to enhancing the public understanding of figures and figuring techniques. From the physics of snowflakes and the hyperbolic geometry of sea slugs, to the mathematics of paper folding and graphical models of the human mind, the Institute takes as its purview a complex ecology of figuring.
