Author (#19)May 2008 Archives
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.
