Author (#19)June 2008 Archives
...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.
