Name that Rose

I am having a hard time remembering the source of a very distinct impression that 'Name of the Rose' --meaning the heart or quiddity of something-- is a phrase that long predates Umberto Eco's novel.

Of course 'sub-Rosa' is of current (if not common) usage. Generally it means secrecy or to be held in confidence. Michael Quinion states:

"There’s a famous story from those times in which Cupid — the Roman god of love — was said to have given a rose to Harpocrates as a little thank-you bribe for not letting on what his mother Venus, the goddess of sensual love, was up to (very filial, that).

"So the rose became the symbol of confidentiality in the classical Roman world. The ceilings of Roman dining rooms were decorated with roses to remind guests that what was said there under the influence of wine (sub vino) was also sub rosa, under the rose, privileged and not to be made public." (From World-Wide-Words, Michael Quinion)

. . . which leads to the allusion of 'the Rose' signifying Pleasure, but I can't track down the direct link. Any ideas?
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Erisology

A few years ago I interviewed Larry Wright (author of The Looming Tower and well, ~sigh~ Pulitzer Prize winner) about his involvement with the Angelina Eberly sculpture.

I drove out to Mr. Wright's Tarrytown address, and we went upstairs to his library for the interview. My first and enduring impression was: How can he possibly write in so little chaos?

It was appalling. Books were on shelves, papers neatly stacked, office supplies in their little boxes and baskets and drawers -- no tangled pastiche of notecards tacked up anywhere! Even the light looked organized, falling through the canopy of trees and mingling politely with the desklamps. Holy crap.

Such a welter of method would have sent me 'round the Bend.

No problem here. I just finished the revision of Tantra for Bobos' Essay One, and it looks like someone set off an inkbomb in my house. (You heard me, I said "ink"!) And as I shuffle past the mirror, I catch a glimpse of a middle-aged Hyde Park recluse - no cats, but I've got a python to showcase my weird.

Time to get out of here for a while. Life, ho!
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Turbo Thursday

While the rest of the world was still tsk-tsking Obama's Peace Prize, and bits of the moon were nestling back into their shadow, I was having my annual Who're-You-Callin'-a-Writer? Doubtfest. Annual, except for the fact that I've had two (so far) this month.

My kiddo came home Thursday afternoon; a splinter group of his high school mob shuffled through the door with him, then they all huddled like a flock of penguins in the middle of my living room (which is the size of a large closet).

It was good to have the young un's around, even in my absurd state. After being exposed to the radiance of my creative crisis for a few minutes (and emptying the refrigerator and pantry) they shuffled off into the Teenage Twilight, newly interested in corporate and military careers.

My work there was done.

Thursday's turbulence may have been noodged along by some zany astrological aspects: Eris opposite the Moon on Weds; Mars cruising into the last degrees of Cancer all week; and most effervescently a closing square between Venus and Pluto - both sitting on that astrocellerator Aries Point (the first degree of the cardinal signs). Here's Anne Ortelee's take on the final aspect:

Thursday Venus squares Pluto taking stock of the path Mercury’s been traveling since mid August. Venus Pluto closing squares are often psychological in nature and not the pretty or fun days in the therapist’s office. You can clear a lot of old stuff out today but also recognize the energy isn’t as kind or nice as it could be. There is a bit of shame involved with the energy today. Just keep reminding yourself that you and everyone else on this earth is human. Humans have foibles, flaws and do silly, stupid things.

Those are all part of being human. If you were supposed to be perfect, you wouldn’t be here on good old imperfect earth. You’d be floating on a cloud some place. So give yourself a break. Give the other guy a break too. It is a GREAT day to get stuff out into the world and do things. The closing aspects are excellent even if the getting there is a bit fraught with challenges. Your instincts about what will be seen as nurturing versus meddling are wrong today. You will say something that is taken completely wrong if you attempt to nurture inappropriately. MYOB as my mother used to say.

I read this on Friday, as I was throwing away the empty tissue boxes - still a little wobbly, but taking stock of what got swept out with the tide. Happily, no humans have gone missing.

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13 hours in the Life

Writing happens.

Got up yesterday morning and found myself forthwith on the couch, surrounded by all the book-beasties: laptop, file cards, writing pads, printouts and the APT - All Powerful Thesaurus - salaam! (I will never be able to use an online thesaurus with abandon. It lacks serendipity.) Scribbled and nudged and chewed and crossed out and scribbled and tapped until about 9ish when the Girlfriend showed up with a humongous cup of coffee and a cupcake with the word 'EEeeeeeekK!' emblazoned on its sugary surface. Perfect.

She wanted to run away - but I'm a writer. . . would I pass up a perfectly good opportunity to procrastinate? Hell no. So I made her sit and tell me about MSNBC (I don't have a tv).

While I wasn't looking, she shot out the door (think Pepe le Peugh and his unfortunate Cherie) and there I was, alone again with the Work. Ah well. Hit it again until about 4, unfolded from my crouching mantis position to make (another) cheese sandwich. Sat at my altar, doing cheesebreath pranayama and meditated for a while, then back to it.

At 10 or so I called the girlfriend. " Need. Bath. Pizza. Clean House," I whimpered. "Bath. Deep bath. With duckies." She, obliging honey that she is, began to plot and plan how we might actually get pizza delivered at 10 p.m. on a Sunday night.

Then my intuition broke through: Flash. You must stay here. Incoming. I apologized to my lover, saying ~ hmmm... it seems I can't leave. She was not amused. I was perplexed, but knew better than to move against this. Got off of the phone, sore, tired, hungry, groddy with a day of spinning the word-dial.

Then the phone call came (actually, it was two calls - one from Kansas, not an emergency, but important). After being seriously ill for almost a month, a dear friend was being kicked out of her in-laws 3000 square foot house. Her husband had flown in from another state to take care of her - using money they don't have, and it was his parents who were having a typical Republican hissy-fit: our money, our luxury cottage on the lake (their real house is somewhere in Dallas) - feck our 11-year-old grandson, our son and that strange woman you have married.

I was just out there day before yesterday, so I probably tuned in a little more than normal. As my friend was getting the boot, my intuition was on relay :: No bathtub for you tonight, cupcake. You have a murder to prevent.

That might be a slight exaggeration. Might not.

Back to it...

Say Something!

I really should.

Essay One (redux) is about to see some e'light. The moon is disseminating - still shrinking toward the last quarter (with a few bits missing, thanks to our Not Actually Science Agency), about to hop over the last degree of Gemini and into Cancer within the hour. Home free!

If you don't read from me here, it might be that I am actually working. Imagine that.

!!!

!!

!

Frans de Waal popping up across the bookscape

In an effort to expand my understanding (okay, reduce my perplexity) vis. the issues raised below --empathy as a evolutionary strategy-- I find myself drifted over to Frans de Waal's work again and again... Am in the middle of reading On Being Moved, which continues my inquiry into mirror neurons, and lo, Prof. de Waal is cited in the first 10 pages. Then someone sends me a Youtube link to a 5 minute video on Love (insert Heart-of-Gold shipboard Sigh here) that features... yep, de Waal in his chimp and bonobo compound.

I am trying to track down his book the Age of Empathy, but for the moment it looks like On Primates and Philosophers is as close as I'll get. It's a book on the evolution of morality, which I expect will once again look to insider/outsider distinctions as the basis of altruistic behavior. Hope I'm wrong. I realize that it seems irrational to chafe at the idea that loving behavior comes from social compulsion - I mean if not for the "other" or others, how would you compromise? sacrifice? cooperate? But I do find myself squirming at that deduction. There's something a little chill about it, a glint of anxiety that feels antagonistic to real cherishing.

But on the other hand, the depth of his --and other evolutionary altruists'-- inquiry might make it easier to rationalize policy (as in Politics) on social cooperation and kindness as an assumption. Which would be a far cry from the current, lowest common denominator mindset.

Nice Couple Looking for a Threesome. . .

It is likely I will never live down the "bad mommy" moment when my son received a copy of The Selfish Gene on his 10th birthday. "Who the hell gave you this?" I thought... Wait, did I say that out loud? Oops.

Now I find two semi-decent arguments against Dawkins' thesis::

Frans de Waal's new book, The Age of Empathy,

outlines an alternative to “Nature, red in tooth and claw.” Can a vision of a more empathic world change the way we behave toward each other?

and David Sloan Wilson's view

that evolution explains selfishness well and altruism poorly is starting to stink. Can we please bury it now? (See also Evolution for Everyone)

But there is a faint gnawing-through-the-ropes sensation somewhere inside of me as I contemplate each of these discussions. It has to do with looking to social evolution as the basis of altruism. Maybe its just my Texanity trying to get loose, but this just irks me. If there's not a better reason than social pressure for altruistic behavior, there should be.

So what is it?
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Publishing under a Cap Moon. . .

I *just* wrapped my 2-week muse on dreaming in Tantra for Bobos... I thought it would be a quick little write-up, but before I could sign off on some of the ideas, I had to re-test them in the dreamfield. Most were still sound, but the starting thesis - that inducing a state of nudity in the DS would lead to more vivid dreaming - seems to have limited applicability in others' experience.

I continued to write about what was still relevant, but the writing kept grinding down, esp. yesterday - I spent about four hours watching the tires spin. We all hate to write crap, but I thought I was reconciled to the fact that the first 13 drafts of something are often as rattletrap as a bamboo boxcar. Not yesterday. I actually froze - then I went from being frozen to being appalled. And then some.

Checked the calendar. Moon in Cap. Oh. Moon in Cap with Pluto scowling from the Aries point. Meh.

Alice may have more than a clue with her Blah-Busting multidimensional mindscapes (see images below). May need to get me some o' that.

Meanwhile, I wound up finishing the piece, but hope the Aq moon throws a little softer light on it. (One vaseline lens coming up. . . )

breaking out of the blahs [posted by Alice]

The pics are a model in progress. Actually not really a model, because I don't intend to reproduce it in any way. So maybe it's just a...what would it be? It's my Thing.

So this Thing is helping me work out some stuff in the story. My process has gone something like this: research, write, more research, more writing, summer break child care, more research, more summer break child care --and then nuthin'. Full stop. Blah.

Had to get past the blahs. And this Thing is doing the trick. Here I get out of my head (mostly) and into something related to the story, but actually in my hands. I love, love, love playing with my hands again, making all the bits and pieces --painting the bricks, foliating the trees, sewing the hem of the little table cloth, and cutting dozens of black foam core bits. (Kitty litter makes great gravel, btw.) Haven't done this in forever. Loved turning off my rational/analytical mind and relaxing into my fingers' own logic. I cannot tell you exactly what each element represents, and that's the magic I'm discovering. Some other part of my brain is telling me about my characters and their stories.

My greatest difficulty is that I'm working from scratch. In the past when I built something like this, I'd been handed another writer's finished work to interpret. But here I'm working with prima materia. I don't have to interpret God's handiwork, I am God! This means I don't have to worry about scale or function, and I don't have to defend my choices, either. Ooh. And if I want to change elements around later, I can. Power.

However, it's a freedom that can inhibit. Too many choices. But that, too, had helped: it's slowed my thinking. Some choices were easy: the elements that appear on the "rational" (for lack of a better word) side of the model like the spy code, the tea table, the carousing soldiers --later will be portraits. The other side was trickier. One particular breakthrough came last week when I finally had to admit how deeply I had intellectualized the rape that happens at the beginning of the story. The research was all in my head, but nothing had really gotten into my heart. But I had to get something about the rape into the Thing; it was practically the inciting action, after all. Not knowing what I'd use to represent the rape, I began looking up images of rape victims. Spent most of last week in funk after that, rebuilding some shape of this character from the inside out. Rebuilding most of the story's core, actually.

I'm not done, with the Thing or the rebuild. Will post more developments later.

Where do you work... ?

I know somebody out there has a real office, maybe overlooking the East Bay -- or a picnic table out behind the bar where you keep that thesaurus I donated (ahem).

Me, I work the floorboards. When teen-man (formerly 'babyman') is here, he inherits the bedroomlette (affectionately called the cocoon), while I sleep on a futon dragged to the floor in the erstwhile living room. I discovered a few weeks ago that Down Here is Where I Gets It Did.

Srsly. I have had some great desks in the last decade. I don't get crap done there. The futon'd floor is really the zone - mostly because I can fan out the books and keep two legal pads and a stack of 4 x 5 cards nearby. Primitive, but tangible. And you know, I have no friends, just accomplices - so anyone who comes through that door knows they are subject to a) sudden flurries of sticky notes, b) Lady Gaga with a side of Dangermau5, while c) training in hardstyle pranayama.

Well, that and the occasional cognac.

(P.S... Just noticed this on LifeHacker - mine is kinda like Steve Jobs' + futon.)

"Lucy, I'm home..."

Blogging is a nasty habit... one I apparently have not yet given up.

I am scribbling along in other climes, but this is where I a) mumble about the writing process, not about the writing itself, and b) consider other people's books, essays, exhibitions, etc. Now that I have UT library privileges again I am joyously buried in authentic, bound, paper and paperboard books. Not these shiny e-crap things that blister your vision after a 20 minutes.

Maybe I should rename this blog, "For Reading Out Loud."

I also came back to peel off the Puntabulous image of Girl Howdy. As innocent and funny as she was, about 80% of this blog's traffic (while I was gone) came from a 'vagina girl' search. Creepy.

XS and the Girly Gaze

You gotta love a girl whose name boils down to 'excess.'   

I wrote a review of Xochi Solis' show 'Femme Fantastique' at the end of 2007.   XS has since moved on from Volitant to direct the Texas Biennal (which I believe will become as well-known as  sxsw as an art destination).    While I was stalking the FF show (you know I don't just look, I get *way* in there), the dreamstate gifted me a couple of fierce dreams about X, the gallery and the show.    

Unlike my work with Trent Tate's art, those dreams didn't make it into the review.   But you can feel them vibrating in the background.   

Here's the link, in case you're curious.  

Work and Rhythm...

Yesterday was a good day in the trenches; had breakthroughs on two projects, finished up the first Tantra essay. And I had a realization about how I perform as a writer.

I'm working on four projects right now. Though I groused (a couple of posts ago) about the incremental progress, I realized that when I focus on one project, I am working through the other three as well. It's kind of like putting on four pair of gloves before sitting down to the keyboard.

You might think --given that metaphor-- that it would be easier to take them off, that is, write from a single focus. But really, where I am writing is like working in a supercooled chamber, so I need the insulation as I try to call an entirely unknown existential pattern into being.

Super-slow it is. But if I pull this off, the work will drop through the bottom of slow -- and turn up everywhen.

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"It is time to stop insulting ecstasy..."

Excerpted from "What I Said to Myself" in Portrait of Mary by John Amen

". . .
You have for lifetimes strummed minor chords
on the coast of a dead sea. Think major, spindrift.

The sex between you and grief is becoming mechanical.

Despite your vestigial sentiments to the contrary,
a scab's story is much greater than that of a scar.

Your cock is not an umbilical cord, it is your
heart's mouthpiece. Choose sunrise, please.

It is time to do something that might cause
embarrassment. Let emptiness mother your child.

Put away the map, where we're going won't be on it.

There is nothing particularly inspiring about a death wish.
You have learned all there is to learn from the woman in black."

John Amen publishes The Pedestal, a literary mag in North Carolina. Something of a savant, he sings and paints, but honestly, I think his muse has planted herself in the poems. Read what I mean here...

Actually, she IS a dancer*

Today I began to think through some of the outliers on Bone Bikini, especially its potential vis. the dance community. I've been given an introduction to a director of a dance company in Paris who may be interested in the project; which brought me back to the question of how to get into the Rubin collection of VY iconography (a process begun in 2008).

Meanwhile, Tantra for Bobos picked up another couple of paragraphs today, and I can finally *see* the end of this first essay! Hooray for Pisces!

*(Cf "Helter-skelter")

Synchronizing Fires

I am presently gathering up all of the images of the Girl in the Bone Bikini that have swept across my desk in the last 15 (!!) years. She popped in to visit the first time during the spring of 1994.  Naturally, at that point I had only the most minor idea of what that Icon might represent.

Now I am compiling her from as many different sources and traditions as I can think of. Where have you seen a figure that is solitary, naked, with just a suggestion of wrath in her demeanor?   Other qualities are  sexually-generous, amused, beautiful (or remarkably ugly) and bearing attributes that recontextualize fear, hatred and lust?  

Really, I'm askin'...

That would be our Girl.     Whether she turns up as Bridgit, Rhiannon, Sara-the-Black, Vajrayogini, Celtic Tara, Cybele, Mary Magdalene, Eris or Ekajati, thar she blows. So, who (or what) am I overlooking...? 

Have you spotted her in some other form? Write to me...

(And yes, I'll give you credit.)

I <3 the Web!!

I just found *all* of the pages from the Bone Bikini project from last year!

This was the written side of MGBB created in late 2007/early 2008. When Google switched out their web pages from Google-Pages to Sites, I was sure we'd lost the beginning Bone Bikini text.

(Yes, I had copies of it on my computer, but those pages were destroyed in the Sept 12 crash.)

"I first met the Girl in the Bone Bikini 13 years ago; she came on like a hurricane wrapped in Christmas, a Tasmanian angel shattering every color we'd ever mistaken for light. At first I thought she was goddess Kali, but the curve of her hip was more Nataraja than Little Black Peep, and her mind --puissant and entirely open-- was like a bath in hot silk."

This discovery goes along with other pieces of the project that have been on the rise for the last few weeks. As I perused these recovered pages of MGBB, I see bits of Tantra for Bobos peeking through. It's as if one is the invisible architecture of the other. Very cool...

Prince Bobo and the Magical Hubcap

The Intro to the Tantra for Bobos suite seems to be inching into view. I've always been a slow writer (file under: why I am not a journalist); even when I was writing well between 2003 and 2006, it was still a slow process. Now it has decel'ed to the velocity of algae on a rock. Any slower and it'll become evolution. Sheesh.

I am also still maintaining --and paying for-- my creative (?) partner's website. I really have no idea, but he may use it again at some point. Having volunteered several hundred hours into this one (there've been three), I'm not inclined to toss it overboard.

ah well... Bon jour.

Two-step program...

First thing to splash into my awareness this morning was the news that officials in the Swat Valley had traded the safety of every woman in that region for a 10 day truce with the Taliban. Ten days. TEN days, in which the beheadings, beatings, demolitions won't stop; the "government" simply won't do anything about them.

Stupifying, really. I have put a news video up on Meeting the Girl in the Bone Bikini, fyi. I know that my focus on this project has to include the facts of what is happening in Dakiniland - not being overwhelmed by it is the tricky part.

The second clear idea this morning has to do with the disposition of various tantric writings. I Do Not Live with Five Men is almost completed, but I will hold it back from publication until I have run it past the Five.

East of the Son/West of the Mom is being re-written to incorporate some of David Barash's work on redirected aggression. But this isn't a bad start.

Tantra for Bobos

At the beginning of the year I began drafting a map of the sexual-body/enlightenment interface. Most of the so-called 'mystical' systems I've worked through in the last few hundred years line up along that seam, so I know the territory pretty well. Might as well write it out, giving my readers a trampoline foundation for bouncing into the more complicated stuff.

As I gathered up the components of a 'Tantra for Dummies' intro, thought I'd have a great market among the inflatable-doll crowd. Ha. Ha. Then the title hit: Tantra for Bobos. Tantra for Bobos! well, wouldja look at that... I've always liked the word 'bobo' as a self-identifier during my 'fool for love' moments (uh...days, months, decades). It is softer than its translation 'dolt,' and is close enough to Bozo to keep the clown in the room.

As I was settling in for the clinch, I walked around with it for a day, thinking: Now why does this feel so familiar? After a few hours I remembered. My friend Jade is writing a book called 'Tantra for Bubbas.' Bubbas, not Bobos. Two very different creatures (for one thing, I am not a Bubba, nor a Bubbette, of any stripe). I think I can persevere with Bobo in the title, especially since I do not see this as a book, but a series of essays.

***
I do realize that this may seem like another 'Bouvard and Pecuchet' impulse. I'm referring to the novel by Gustav Flaubert in which the heroes couldn't finish building a Museum of Marvels because they couldn't get to the bottom of the enterprise. Everytime they found a 'basis' upon which to organise the collection, they would discover a code that underlay *that* code. Flaubert got to the bottom of it, all right. He died writing that book, then reincarnated as a semiotic theorist. Hardyharhar.

But I have given enough impromptu (and more organized) lectures on the basics of Tantra to know that this is needed. And more complex works like MGBB, Five Men and even Col/Labryinth will have to be published with an exordium if I don't do this. So I'm just heading off trouble at the pass. Maybe.

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First publication of 2009 is in the can now. After a year of pacing off a tightening circle, I turned around mid-February and started unwinding things in another direction. I still wake up to a state of exasperation each morning, but by my first cup of coffee the blasphemy is starting to die away.

And it turns out I don't have to live in Denver to write (there was a rumor), so that's a relief.

I began re-reading Derrida's The Gift of Death to see how his inquiry on the nature of the daimonic informs the development of religion. Really hope I can get Strawson's book in here to see if Panpsychism plays through. And maybe my Neoplatonic pal (Ambassador G!) can show me  how Beauty makes her way through these distinctions. This all goes to recalibrating the Bone Bikini project.

MGBB gets a week of undivided attention now (well, except for the job and the other job and the kid and the otherother job...).

Ah well...

And Ideas have themselves, too...

Jerry Fodor just published a review of Consciousness and Its Place in Nature by Galen Strawson, et al. - as I was reading through the first couple of paragraphs I felt myself starting to nod out. Philosophical attempts to deal with consciousness have been abjectly dull since CogSci waltzed into the room with its MRIs and electrodes and cherrypicking-the-issues. When I bother to stay awake during these discussions, philosophy's me-tooism (not to mention lapsing back into descartian dualism) has been nothing short of enervating.

But soft, here comes an Idea. A really Big Idea. Fodor titles his review of Strawson's position Headaches Have Themselves (which foreshadows the problem with the Big Idea. . . but I get ahead of myself).

First Fodor summarizes the 'hard problem' of consciousness, which remains unanswered by theory and experimentation: if the world is composed of matter and governed by material laws, how does matter become conscious? The answer, he suggests, has been shifted into the "new" question of Emergence & Complexity, which simply repurposes the question: how can Y (consciousness) emerge from X (matter, or organization of matter)?

So here comes the cavalry - Strawson riding in on the back of metaphysics. Whereupon Fodor recoils a few steps: "I must warn you, however, that Strawson’s way with the hard problem is wildly at odds with the views current in most of philosophy and psychology." Okay, I'm awake now.

Three principles underly Strawson's punchline:

• Consciousness is real. (You'd be surprised by the number cryptoswamis who call themselves philosophers who believe that consciousness is an illusion)
• The substance --the haecceity-- of everything is identical (about which we know almost nothing since all of our inquiry is relational, not essential)
• Emergence would require essential difference, and since there is none, Emergence is impossible. (Whoa!)

I'll let Fodor speak from here:

"So, then, if everything is made of the same sort of stuff as tables and chairs (as per monism), and if at least some of the things made of that sort of stuff are conscious (there is no doubt that we are), and if there is no way of assembling stuff that isn’t conscious that produces stuff that is (there’s no emergence), it follows that the stuff that tables, chairs and the bodies of animals (and, indeed, everything else) is made of must itself be conscious. Strawson, having wrestled his angel to a draw, stands revealed as a panpsychist: basic things (protons, for example) are loci of conscious experience."

Everything is conscious? EVERYTHING is conscious? Well, now doesn't that elide the whole problem rather nicely. According the current rules of the scientistic game, a thing can't investigate, experience itself; to do so is a 'tautology' - from the German 'taut' - dead. So are we existing in a functional 'deadology'? Deadology. Deadology. You know, that fits. Intuitively, it fits like a playtex glove. This is precisely why the 'hard problem' will not be solved within the sophistries, permutations and nuances of materialist/dualist positionings. Because (and go slowly with me through this idea, otherwise it will slither away, unthought) the quality of consciousness --a kind of interior tension-- that keeps scissioning itself into me-aware/table-unaware, cannot look at continuity with anything but terror of extinction. That terror *names* the continuity 'tautology.'

What is missing in this meta-philosophical argument is the difference *within* consciousness itself. A difference one plays with in meditation, sex and art.

I like the term 'pan-psychism' for the fact that it starts to answer that terror, though I'm not sure if Strawson thinks in such emotional terms. Maybe I'll ask...

Re: Solutions

Since I have about six New Year moments annually (equinox/solstice/birthday/etc.), beginnings rise and resurge continuously in my life.   That being the case,  I don't make resolutions.   Don't get me wrong, I don't think I'm perfect (well, for some things) - it's just that my defects have a way of canceling each other out if I leave them to grind each other long enough.   

I was intrigued to see that yesterday's communal euphoria knocked away some of my resistance to Resolution. . . sort of.  I found myself reorienting along attitudinal lines, not goals and objectives.    Those adjustments are germane to my writing, but they seemed to fit more comfortably in  ThirdSpaceCharm.

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New Year's ReZolutions

• Listen more (which involves talking less, I'm told).
• Find out what the hell is bugging me, and fix it.
  
• •  •  --> 2 steps: a) unravel what isn't; b) reveal what Is.
• Be Where I am:  In Love. 

As I always say: Better late.

In Your Third Ear

How about that Third Ear... ?

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I have a sense that all writing has been subtly altered by the ease of re/publication on the Net. Everything is a draft, everything can be refined, focused, amplified through successive layers of --can we call it?-- texting. This ease has fashioned a sense organ that operates between seeing and hearing, the Eyr. You may not literally feel a channel open up between them on the side of your head (or on the other hand, you might), but in our electronic missives, texts and tweets we hear one another's color as surely as we see the rhythm of our word choice and punctuation.

At some other point we'll discuss the proxemics of bringing the distance senses into this new intimacy, but for now it is enough to say that the Eyr is changing how I organize the publication of my work. At this point, I am contemplating 5Men as a two-medium project: the recìt and commentary will stay in voice, and the sadhana - the practice - may be published as a booklet.

Besides testing to see how the Eyr works in skinspace, this arrangement would be a satisfying inversion of the order of esoteric operations. Traditionally, Tantras (discussions between lover and beloved) were published and circulated as text; the accompanying practice was secret and given only whispered transmission; and the commentaries turned up in the space between public and private. That 'space' was usually academic or monastic, but I am musing how to trigger an interrogative space within the theatre itself to produce or expand the commentary.

I suspect that the efficacy of earlier Tantras wasn't due to secrecy so much as distributing wisdom along the sensory array. Reorganizing cognition to accept the possibility of liberation, the senses had to be both pulled and pushed into a new alignment with the emotional body. I think we can work that out through the right ratios of performance and publication.

"Five Men: 'More fun than a barrel of Buddhas.'"
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from The Daily Beast

Just came across Playboy's article "The Biggest Names in Sex" which is a list of 55 important influences in contemporary sexual culture. I recognized about 2/3 of the list. Some --such as Charles Keating, Jr.-- were just puzzling until I realized the article also included antagonists to post-Puritanical sexual expression. Mighty white of 'em. And speaking of "white" there were no African-Americans on the list. Odd, I would have thought that Marvin Gaye would've made the cut long before #17 Ed Meese.

At least there was one Latin-American, Peruvian Alberto Vargas in the #39 position. That was only slightly self-serving. Vargas produced the Vargas Girls in Hef's magazine for how long? so his presence in the 'most important' category won't hurt the estate's portfolio prices. As glossy (read: 'inflatable') as those babes may be, I have to grudgingly admit that Vargas formed a domesticated branch of the erotic figuration tree growing out of South America. To call those girls 'kitsch' is too kind, but there is a certain technical brilliance at work there. Damn!

(Looking a little deeper, I see that AV died in 1982, so his career in illustration might be considered a prelude to the e/f wave that rolled across Colombia and Venezuela in the late 70s. It's still kitsch... or maybe it was paleo-kitsch.)
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the Comedy continues...

New year, old business. While I've kept skipping back and forth between eros and art in the last year (year? who am I kidding... between 2006 and now!), I have to acknowledge that there's an unbreakable thread between my training in art criticism, tantra, the yogic practices of vaigrayogini (hahahaha), Latin American violence and my creative/critical voice. Having expanded my inquiry into several separate works -Meeting the Girl in the Bone Bikini, Co/Labyrinth, the 13th Moon (which then reverted to an earlier format: 13 Views of the Moon), IDNLw/5M- I find they are contracting again. Gotta love that Pluto in Capricorn.

During my retreat this weekend I learned very specific things about what could and could not be carried forward. The 13th Moon, surprise-surprise, was a premature baby. Turns out I couldn't have written farther with much resonance anyway, since its paradigm isn't carrying all 32 marks. He had maybe 1/3 of them, which is about 10.5 more than most human beings can sustain, but this was about all 32.

So that one is off the desk. Meeting the Girl in the Bone Bikini is likewise dead as a collaborative project, but is composting nicely. The news over the weekend is that Co/Labyrinth is essentially my Dissertation in biographical form, and since MGBB's heroine---> dragged me (thank you, darling...) into that mess, she gets top billing there.

Meanwhile, INDLw/5M is a pure joy to write. It might even be fun to read; we'll find out when Canto Center is published.

Any guesses on what will be finished first?

~~~~~~~
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V'yogini/Hum

8urning ∞ 8ooks

Since moving into this cottage last year (fresh from my happy encounter with Sterling Lord, Literistic), my writing focus has gone through a number of immolations. In other words, not just burnings, but re-burning the ashes, then burning even those. We're down to a handful of featherfine motes.

The 13th Moon --which was to have mapped the 32 marks of the Buddha through 12 men, then collected into the body of the 13th-- has obviously lost its paradigm.

Accompanying that book (and part of its methodology) was Meeting the Girl in the Bone Bikini, repatterning the female Buddha traditionally known as Vajrayogini. I had been actively exploring her iconography and potentials since 1993, and brought that experience to writing The 13th Moon.

With March '08 came the "scouring" winds... everything swirled away. At first I let the 13th Moon fall into 13 separate stories -- sans the narrative arc into Enlightenment. These I called 13 Views of the Moon. Then, looking deeper into the scirroco that swept through, I began to gather the framework for Co/Labyrinth, a memoir which documents the entanglements of art, money, murder (one accomplished, the second apparently still in the planning stages), social & sexual violence, commodity fetishism... oh, and deception as the default in the New Millenium. Girl Howdy!

Being such a dark meditation, I had to find a way to amuse myself during its weaving, so I've spent the last month writing I Do Not Live with Five Men, a divine comedy of sorts - its hells delivered to their nearby ciels; our human/divinity ratios restored.

Now if I've done this right, I expect a religion to spring up from IDNLw/FM. Subtitled Why the Fuck? lovemongers will be licensed, condom art and public gardening will follow in short order. Being the Errant Oracle that I am (my utterances are both Truth and Delirium) its proselytes will also market the Reformation: Why Not the Fuck?

The Counter-Reformation is anyone's guess, but I'm open to suggestion. While I don't generally recommend saviors, swamis, gurus or intervening agents between Self and Future Self, if you do plan to spend any time on your knees, VG is not without her merits.

(aka: Girl Howdy)

***

Anyway, that's the 08 Wrap-up, my exasperated version of the XXXmas letter. Time to go torch some manuscripts.

We truly do hope that whatever passes for Happy
makes its way to your New Year.
Salud!

How Many "M"s Does it Take?

"In his delightful neo-Gnostic novel Monsieur, Lawrence Durrell writes that there are four "M's" that characterize our age: monotheism, messianism, monogamy, and materialism. Enlisting Freud's scatological interpretation of money, he adds that all of these equal another "M" - merde.^1" "Goddesses, Yes!" Stephan Hoeller.

I'm not too sure I'd call Monsieur delightful, given that its theme is the nature of evil (I was going to write 'human evil' but really, what else is there?), but I was amused to see the good Reverend Hoeller counting the Durrellian M's. The fifth element 'money/merde' is too accurate, no?

I am personally relishing the fact that when money is sequestered in any of the four Durrellian Ms, it does turn to merde - as we are about to see on a global scale. Money concentrated in the hands of an unconscious minority quickly loses its meaning. Its meaning (value) resides in its circulability - functioning as an instrument of representation and exchange -- therefore once stymied, locked into any of the aforementioned 'houses,' it degenerates into shit. Conversely, we will see those four institutions are doomed once their lifeblood, cash, becomes worthless.

While I realize this presents some transitional challenges, the prospect cheers me along immeasurably.
***

Well, that was something of a pregression: I was heading for the idea that those four "M's" - truly five - turn up as key in several of my spheres of interest. There are the five Ms of the h'Indu Tantras, for example, which constitute the core elements to be transubstantiated through its rituals. They are copied and extended in the later Buddhist Tantras, and have cognates in almost every alchemical tradition - from Chinese to Elizabethan to Neoplatonic.

But those M's don't just cook themselves, you know. They are abetted by their position in the alphabet. M is the 13th letter, the caboose on the first half of our alphabet; you might think of it as the day *before* the lunar square, that phase where yes&no balance on a knife edge of possibility. I've been belaboring the annual 13 lunar cycles since 1992 as a rhythm worthy of respectful attention. . . oh here, let me help you with that thought - 13 M)oons.

(You know I'm getting around to something. Hang in there.)

By 'cooking' I mean playing attention across a motif until it livelies up. With today's solstice, we are entering an era where creation is going to be much more directly connected to what we value. By 'value' I mean what we take time to regard, and in regarding, encourage. The age of reproduction is in full swing, we're fantastically talented as a mimetic species, but now there's another step to take. Progressive anthropologists and sociologists have noted for decades that we are still operating out of an ethos that behaves as though we are bereft of creative powers. Indeed our success as reproductive agents have obscured to some extent the depth of those powers. As a species we often behave as though we haven't the heart, the genius or the will to love and be loved by the very ground we walk upon.

But we are! And we can!! What lies between us and their full rigging is one simple step: to witness that Durrell's M'stitutions are not just dead, they are starting to smell up the place.

With today's Solstice --a couple of hours ago at this writing-- I felt the first arrival of the merdophagic microbes* ("M-6"). Compost, ho!
***

I Do Not Live with Five Men is my weirdest writing to date, living as it does on two simultaneous literary planes : the allegorical and the memorial. And yes, there are the M's again, honoring the etymology of meno (monthly/lunar) in the English word 'men.'


(*Or if you'd rather, microbial merdophages. Either way, 'shit-eaters.' )
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Saints and Taverns...

One of my favorite bits of apocrypha is a Sufi story about the meeting between Shams-i-Tabriz (Rumi's mentor and Great Love) and Francis of Assisi.    On Crusade you killed the heretic all day, then retired to whoring and gambling with them all night.    Seems our Frankie, after a long, messy day on the battlefield, found himself playing dice with Shams.   Shams won, over and over until all Francis had left were the clothes (very nice clothes, if you recall) on his back.  Then he lost even those.   

Thinking he was the younger and stronger, Francis decided to wait outside the Tavern door and stab Shams and retrieve his duds.  Problem:  Shams was a) a brickmason, b) clairvoyant, and c-z) an Assassin.  So as the knife came down, the master simply reached up and caught Francis' wrist --with its knife-- holding it in a delicate, twigsnapping vise.   

"Ummm... I won't break your arm if you'll agree to my conditions."  Being in no position to negotiate, Francis agreed.   Shams said:  "Become my apprentice in  laying brick."  

So the Assassin taught the casual murderer how to lay brick and stone, and oh so much more.   

***

I just love me a good parable.   Read carefully, my angels.    

***

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Awww...  I just realized that today is Rumi's Death Day!   I was completely unconscious of this while writing that little bit above.   

Green Mirror?

As soon as I had focused a bit on rewinding the 1991 wish (see Nov. 8 reference), life conspired to put me in the hot seat. "Did we hear a Wish?" says the Future Self. Alrighty, then.

Shortly thereafter I found myself in dialogue with a friend from another part of the country who has been working through his own green man motif for the last several years. It seems pretty clear that we will be part of each other's process for the next few months, which has some complexities I have never quite encountered before.

Being a fifterian, and coming across something nearly-new in the realm of power/love/creativity is more uncommon than you might think. Fifterians, especially 'successful' ones, tend to shut themselves off into protecting-my-stuff mode, and cycle most incoming experience through that delimiter. I do not have this particular affliction, so the news just keeps rolling in...

The most exciting thing about this green man is that he appears to be working with Vajrasattva's power/siddhi, 'mirrorlike wisdom.' Vajrasattva is the Buddha who guards the gate to the Bardo - the state between lifetimes - so he has a psychopomp aspect that relates him to the function of Hermes. And I know directly from doing Bardo practice in 2005 with the tsunami victims that the water element is a big part of VS's 'vehicle;' and this element relates to anger and the transformation thereof. No, really... ask yourself: "What is the biggest mirror in the world?" Answer: the ocean.

This was all new information for him... his practice is predominately Pagan and he is unfamiliar with the buddhakula or any of the qualities borne by that pattern. But as we talked, it became clear that his primary cognitive and erotic practice was in fact a sadhana/spiritual exercise from the Vajrasattva mandala. (Note to skc & tt: yep, Pisces.)

This has given me quite a lot to think with. In his own world, without any explicit awareness of anything I know, he is inquiring deeply into the roots of aggression. And being what I am --Mars/Uranus conjunct, my angels-- this lifetime has been nothing if not learning the algebra of anger/mirrorlike wisdom. And there is an algebra, not merely an 'opposition.' Aggression, as I pointed out in a follow-up note to our discussion, is generally considered the antithesis of the Mirrorlike state of acceptance. But the violence of ecstatic experience pushes 'acceptance' -- ramps it up into another energonomic, that of Mirrorlike Wisdom.

This deeper discussion of MirrorLike Wisdom forms the core of a story entitled "I Do Not Live with Five Men," part of my 'conte philosophique' oeuvre. It'll be finished by Dec. 1.

And yes, Co/labyrinth is thundering along. Who knew I could write so fast?
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rewind part ii

What I am struggling with right now is that I have been committed to my former partner's success as an artist for decades. There have been several waves, but most recently since 2002 Jerry has asked for, expected and received my undivided attention on his creative process, a career which he seems to have utterly abandoned. If anyone wants to disabuse me of that notion, I'd love to hear it. I'm not sure there is any other conclusion available to me after seven months of 'wait there, I'll be right back; no really, wait right there...' followed by an October of mad cross-currents, bearing everything but art.

However, I am a wizard with mirrors, and with the proper lighting through the last eight months I'd managed to convinced myself that we were still operating with three halves of a pair. Now the only way I can fully separate and reintegrate my own creative powers is to develop a coherent narrative of (at least) the last decade.

I am, above all else, a writer - without this reckoning, I will perish creatively before I've even been born.

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Rewinding the Wish...

I've spent most of the day writing. Co/labyrinth is looking more and more like straight-up memoir: it does retain elements of Meeting the Girl in the Bone Bikini, but those are tucked inside a Pan/Green Man story I have watched unfold and abetted in my own (cough) small way for decades. I stopped to take a tea break and dug down into one of the zillion journals I have kept over the last 20 years. Found this from January 1, 1991 (as I was just getting ready to hit graduate school):

"Oh, I think what I want for this year is fairly simple: I want to document the passage of wisdom from the body of an artist into the social body that enfolds him/her. I want to be fully engaged in this when it is time, to wake up each day knowing that's why I am here. And with that focus in place, to give it spontaneous and free rein."

"...when it is time," I wrote. So is it time yet? I've had some exuberant successes (and one still-imponderable failure) in this realm, but by 2009 I think 18 years will have been enough of a warm-up. This is still what I want to do. With one important variation. It occurs to me that I must surrender the documentarian role, and create the opening from my body to this milieu.

("yogini & faun studies" jerry goins, November 2007)

158, 159, 160...

Every 161st person in Colombia will be murdered. That's what 6.2 in 1000 means.

I had to look it up to be sure that some nice little genocide in Eastern Europe, or Africa hadn't taken the prize while I was out making baby and writing about art. . . but no. . .

Colombia still ranks No. 1 worldwide in per capita murders: It is 20% higher than the next most dangerous country (South Africa), but for a real comparison, note that five lowest national murder rates averaged give you roughly a 1:250000 chance of being violently killed there.

One in a quarter-million V one in 161.

So much for the "Athens of South America," eh?

Blunt Force Dream

Did you know that the word 'trauma' comes from the German 'traum' = dream? And that the word 'dream' itself comes from a celtic word 'drom' meaning merriment or delight. Given the traditional German temprament, there is a certain kind of sense in this cascade. Who else but an Allemand would find mirth traumatic? Who has an unconscious grand enough to hold all of life's delight? And how would you go about 'expanding' the storage facility*? I have a couple of ideas... How about throwing an atrocity-filled 'civil' war that hangs decimated human bodies from fenceposts and lamps every few miles? That ought to do it. For 60 years (and counting). No, not in the 15th century, now.

Pregnant Colombiana, circa 1964

Colombia started controlling the content of press images like this in about 1980, but these bodies --these persons-- are still out there, undocumented, and lamented only in the form of a muted tarpit of a society. Artists have changed strategies in responding to these conditions, but for a while their response looked like this:

Alvaro Obregon, Violencia, 1964

The links between this form of (ahem) "social management," the Catholic Church, the Colombian government and its people are deep and extremely fraught. Which is why, every time I hear Uribe bleat about the 'Virgin Mary' overseeing Ingrid's rescue, I start looking around for the dramamine. Poor Betancourt has been so thoroughly terrorized (she knows that Uribe orchestrated the original kidnapping in 2002) that she is going along with it, duly hitting Lourdes and talking to Catholic Weekly.

This was a woman who passed out condoms as her campaign button in 1992. And as a woman from a Liberal family, she knows what Church power actually produces in Colombia, so it doesn't take a lot of imagination to assume that either she or her extensive family still may be in the crosshairs.

Why is this important? First, from the position of someone who sees art as deeply transformational, I have to understand and communicate the dimensions of the problem that Colombian art is confronting. Second, because Colombia is geophysically and spiritually placed --pardon the word-play-- 'dead'-center in this hemisphere's militarism; the resulting trauma extends all up and down the wasp-waisted continental body. Finally, there is an oddly chiasmatic quality to this placement, as if by being in the middle, it is rendered invisible.

But no more. The Betancourt story may be temporarily brought to silence, but something tells me that its unraveling will provide the consternation to get things moving again. And we'll see soon enough what art has to do with it.

Carry on, Peace is coming...

(* Not to rag on the Germans too much, but Deutschlanders are in the equation because from 1923 on, the Colombian education system --administered by the Catholic Church, of course-- actually legislated that Germans be hired in run the physical culture programs in public schools. For reasons I touch on in this essay (still in progress), this had an enormous impact, and I believe it led almost directly to the monstrosities of la Violencia.)

the Weight of Bliss

Still working on the Colombian corporeality section of Oracle's essay. I feel very strongly that this may be the last chance I have to do this, so the writing --while not pouring out of me-- is moving at a respectable pace. May or may not be a pity that it is only 1% of the original project. It is interesting to see how life has condensed what was an immense theoretical vocabulary into a few choice insights.

Thinking about what hooked me originally: a few years ago I was wandering through some new acquisitions that had been curated into UT's Latin American collection by Jackie Barnitz. I breezed around a corner to this:
("Untitled" Luis Caballero, graphite on stretched paper, 130" x 88")

At that point I had been separated from the amor fati for six years. Suddenly I was standing in front of a piece of paper the size of a king-sized bed, with a devastating view. It literally knocked the breath out of me. I sat down on a banco and waited for the image to stop expanding.

It never stopped.



A week later the a/f called - a few hours before his eponymous hurricane hit the Texas Gulf Coast. In love, as in other forms of comedy, timing is everything.

Just Mantic, no 'Ro'

Since we decided to auction off Oracle earlier this month, most of my attention has been on writing the essay for that piece. My limited (ahem) access to the artist means that I have to focus more on the art history than the specific work. Still. This is where being an oneirocritic comes in handy. If the work is derived from a lively, imaginal space, you can always trace a way back to the source from its eidos, the image that appears in hypnogogia. Whatever you find there is all you need to know of an artwork. This is the painting's chorion, its Arcadia - what it really wanted to be when it came into the world. Everything else is just so much arthouse popcorn.

But back to more pragmatic issues: this project needs to accomplish three things. First-to auction the work; second-to invite several galleries to observe the process of the auction and consider bringing in the artist as part of their stable ; third- to permit me to synopsize my views on Colombian erotic figuration and the liberatory energy it brought to a society caught between chaos and carnage.

I find that the essay has an outer and an inner form, so may need to be two documents. In a habit I may have picked up from my old mentor, my best writing sometimes falls to the bottom of the page, so at some point I may publish a book that is nothing but footnotes. In any case, the inner essay will be the one with the endnotes.

The auction is being foreshadowed by a slideshow . . . here's a link, in case you are curious. Brace yourself, the soundtrack is bouncy. I will release the slideshow to a mailing list in a couple of days, as soon as the essays are a bit more legible.

Library Herons

Spent most of the afternoon yesterday at the Fine Arts Library, perched on the fifth floor at a north-facing window. The blessed librarians have moved some tables so that you can work directly in front of that tree-flocked view. The joyful irony is the contrast of that beauty with the work I was examining: Francis Bacon's agonies, Allen Jones' fetish eroticism and a very tough book on Colombian conceptual art. All very, very hard to look at, much less actually to see.

And of course, I don't just settle for seeing.

This is part of the research on an essay that will accompany a short slide show of Jerry Goins' painting Oracle. After an hour or so of excoriating imagery (thank goddess Bacon could paint, otherwise one has a sense he'd've been a very able butcher), I rested my gaze on the cloudline outside. I'm not sure where they came from, but a pair of languid, high-flying herons appeared above the rodeo of trees, looping around one another as they traversed the sky, coming closer and closer to my window. They stalled about 10 degrees out (but many hundreds of feet above me), stirring the air in a spiral pattern for about 30 seconds, then headed west - out to the lakes, I imagine.

I'll take that as a 'Yes.'

Troglodakinis

Added Mind in the Cave to the 'reading-now' list below. An amazing work, perfect companion to Jean Clottes big, bold books on Chauvet.

Still mulling over the cave-geomagnetism-epilepsy-trance-art connections.

gNovember

November is never a great month for me, but I managed to get a running start (see below) before beginning my descent shortly after the 13th. While holed up at the bottom of the month, I added a few books to the MGBB bibliography -- which I am reading in a weirdly polyphonic way:

• Chod in the Ganden Tradition;
• Thekchok Dorje's Chod and commentary;
• a collection of essays on Buddhist terminology by Donald Lopez;
• a book by the Bon lama Tenzin Wangyal - whose lucidity is only matched by his lack of authoritarian bullshit;
• EEnglish's ginormous tome on Vajrayogini;
• and just to make sure I understand the bottomless stupidity of religious systemization of wisdom, Dangerous Friend, which is a defense of the guru/student roundalay.
  

Also still working on the essay "Zoophia" - which I must have finished by Wedsnesday. And then there is the sad and incredible tale of the Little Slideshow that Wouldn't on the Bone Bikini blog, but throwing money (or mantra?) at the problem may hold the key. TBA.

Vajra Yogini, Remixed...

Last week I was contacted by one of our foundations who wanted --immediately please-- a complete, annotated bibliography for 'Meeting the Girl in the Bone Bikini.' Yes, well, hmmm... by 'complete' we mean??? "No more than five pages."

Performing a greatly-reduced tarantella I knocked down the column of books teetering over my desk, gathered up my wishlist and headed for the FAL and PCL (university libraries), arriving about 7 p.m. Taking up the usual positions in the 5Q, 3G and 4H sections of the PCL (you Indologists know where I roll), by 9 I had gathered up the 20 or so texts I was now going anamnesiate (unforget) before 2 a.m.

I wobbled over to my favorite litthole with books on Vedic linguistic theories and Sarmantian warrior queens and Buddhist epistemology and geomagnetic epileptic hemispherical synchronization, ohboy-ohboy-ohboy... and just as the books touched the table. . .

The fire alarm went off.

For the first time in 2 decades of using the PCL (and a decade before that, when the library was in the UT Tower) the damn alarm goes off. A very small, very naughty thought buzzed my brain... I shoo'ed it away. But no way was I giving up my stash. I trudged down to the main floor, carrying 30 pounds of books and a 6 pound computer.

Half an hour later we were back in the building. The one book I had not yet brought into the earlier fold was up in Oversize on the fifth floor, so I wrapped a 'noli-freaking-tangere' sign around my stuff and went upstairs.

Turned out the book wasn't All That, but sitting next to it was K. Dowman's Power Places of Kathmandu. Pulling it down, it fell open to the pages on the Pharping Vajra Yogini. "Of course you did," I mumbled, "because there are 40zillion shrines to VY in Nepal." I riffled the book for the others. There *were* no others. I closed the book and thought: okay, this has been opened to that page so many times, it'll just fall to that spot. I let it fall open. Nope. Again. No. Again. ("is she getting this yet?") No.

It seems *this* Vajra Yogini is a virtual catherine wheel of quirky characteristics, not least is the fact that she is a spontaneous image, not-there one minute, so-very-there the next. Sorta like the Virgin-on-toast, but with a better sense of humor. Needless to say, she wound up in the bibliography.

Mys-tickles

For the last couple of days my neighbors have heard much cackling --with the occasional outright guffah as I weave back and forth through my drafts. The 13th Moon in particular is turning into a very  funny book

"We all need a laugh or a little pick me up -- and you're the designated sign [Cancer] right now to do this for the rest of the world. It's a big job but you can do it because the best way to send an idea is to wrap it up in a person."

from Georgia Nichols' astrology website

Shirleen-the-Sockretary*

I would subtitle this post "Why I Write Such Wonderful Books" but for the heartbreaking fact that a) they are still being passed around like the weird aspic salad at a Thanksgiving feast; and b) it has already been taken.

Giving credit where it is due, let me introduce Shirleen, Green Tara's executive assistant and my writing Scold. She was made to live on one's foot, keeping it toes-ty (bahdambam!), but it just so happens she is the perfect size to cover Tara's real "organ" - the bump that swells up on her crown (classically known as the Ushnishna) when the Goddess is having a Buddha Fit.

Which would explain that little smile on Shirleen's face, now wouldn't it.

(*any resemblance to other Shirleens I have known is strictly intentional...)

Shouldn't your God be Naked, Too?

Up there where most people keep a webcam, I have a different 'tekgnology' - a small, highly ornamented rupa of Green Tara. The angle of her gaze falls precisely on my face as I sit at my desk, and she holds a handful of feathers delivered when an owl or mockingbird or bluejay released a pinion during flight. All of them went from the air to my hand (or on one occasion, my hair), never touching the ground.

Green Tara is, per the Buddha-family scheme, in charge of the air element.

I am very fond of this little statue - my only perplexity is: why is she wearing clothes? For that matter, why is any god depicted as clothed? I mean, given the whole creating-(and destroying)-the-universe gig, they don't really have to 'dress for success.' And being god and all, weather shouldn't be an issue ("Je suis le Temps..." or something along those lines); as for modesty or pudor, ummm, I don't really see the point. If it's god, wouldn't the entire 'body' be generative? So a fingertip or a eyelash would serve the same purpose as anything poking out or folding in.

Of course my five-year-old self thinks that she waits until we all go to sleep; then shuffles off her silly metal dress and goes out dancing with her boyfriend. Maybe someday I'll find a little pile of brass draperies above my computer with a note: gone Naked.

Seven?

I have a friend who is a very prolific writer for national and regional magazines. Her workboard invariably shows at least 13 projects in various stages. Even if she's only running her hands through the text once every couple of days, she considers it 'live' and on the board it stays. And the girl does it! pushes through about 10 pubs a month. Lawdie!

Well... that ain' happenin' round here. I feel somewhat quasi-modal if I can keep one rolling, the second within reach, and can sometimes recall that the Third was the First about six months ago when I was asking the NEA to fund it.

So just to annoy myself I keep the names and dropdead dates of seven projects scrawled on the whiteboard next to my desk. (Currently there are nine, but only because I'm too dazed to reach over and wipe off the two minor thingies I've finished.) Now you and I both know that I can no more manage seven projects than I can look through seven eyes. (But Ithaca gives us the journey, eh?) If it's a matter of eyes, three are enough for now.

"Back to the Sugarmines..."

AGBoyo rolled back over to Dadlandia yesterday afternoon, the Partner is off wandering the impossible beauties of Langue'doc, and here I dither on the edge of Big Word again.

After September 19 I did a sort of half-turn back to bills, middle schools, housework, pop culture... while adding little bits to the projects at hand. I kinda know better than to leave for three weeks - I went off and got myself three writing assignments in the review world which have almost nothing to do with fWOL's main events (MGBB, Oneirocriticon or the 13th Moon).

Money, however, is useful.

And yet it will probably be another decision with mixed results: in 2004 I tried to withdraw from artwriting and just work on 'the 13th Moon.' As *soon* as I made that decision , I was offered a chance to cover a major painter for ArtNexus, the international arts journal. I couldn't say "no" but the 'yes' kept turning into 'hold that thought.' I researched his trajectory, took a boatload of photos, could see the spiritual and aesthetic relevance of working with him, had the jump from regional to international *right* there. . . And let it go.

It would have been one thing if that surrender had led to working on the 13th). But then a friend fired up a non-profit that needed some additional funding (don't they all?) and asked me to write a few grants. Having done so off and on for the last two decades, it was easy to agree. Since I was already writing the grants, I added another compatible non-profit - and voi'ci! I was a "grant writer." Oh, nooooooooo . . .

That twisted pathway *did* bring me to this tiny green house in the heart of the city where my overhead is very manageable, and it couldn't be clearer that the manchild must needs reside with his Da. But I have to be careful about bringing on additional projects.

***

That said, between now and the 12th I'll be wrapping up those reviews and other obligations, and on the 13th spend a little time meditating with the beautiful and laconic Marguerite Porete. Under the sign of her Fidelity, the dithering will stop and I'll be engulfed again. Hard to say from this point which of the 3 will take the lead... we'll see when we get t/here.

(n)Dimensional Mirrors

Compare and contrast...

"The discovery of mirror neurons in the frontal lobes of macaques and their implications for human brain evolution is one of the most important findings of neuroscience in the last decade. Mirror neurons are active when the monkeys perform certain tasks, but they also fire when the monkeys watch someone else perform the same specific task. There is evidence that a similar observation/action matching system exists in humans. The mirror system is sometimes considered to represent a primitive version, or possibly a precursor in phylogeny, of a simulation heuristic that might underlie mindreading. Today, mirror neurons play a major explanatory role in the understanding of a number of human features, from imitation to empathy, mindreading and language learning."

from "What Do Mirror Neurons Mean?"

and

"[N]eurologist Derek Denny–Brown of Harvard demonstrated that animals and people with a frontal lobe injury display an odd, but fascinating, behavior: Even when not appropriate, they touch or grasp things and then have trouble letting go. Termed physically “adherent,” such brain–injured subjects are incapable of letting go or disengaging from the adhered–to object. In 1966, Oliver Zangwell of Cambridge expanded Denny–Brown’s observations by showing that frontal lobe damage or dysfunction was clearly associated with a disruption in divergent [creative or innovative] reasoning.

In 1984, Brenda Milner of the Montreal Neurological Institute showed that patients who had surgical removal of parts of the frontal lobe (for the treatment of medically intractable epilepsy) were impaired at divergent reasoning as assessed by the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test. [ . . .] The impairment displayed by Milner’s patients was not related to the performance of the initial sort, but rather to their inability to diverge from a successful sorting strategy even when provided with the information that this strategy was no longer correct. These patients were locked in a “mental adherence” and could not let go—they were stuck."

From "Neuroscience and Fundamentalism."

I find myself musing how art objects (might, maybe, oughta) memorialize the mirror neuron function so that it compensates (literally co-pensate, thinks with) those individuals who have a reduced or traumatized mirror neuron function. Or, more insistently, what if certain artworks activate and redirect (reinscribe) those neurological functions?

(Big 'IF.' Just like Ah like 'em...)

Then there is the whole question of mirror neurons serving to translate touch (as suggested by the subjects inability to 'let go' when the frontal lobe is damaged). As most of you who have read anything I've published in the last 15 years, touch/vision
as articulated through art objects (emphasis on 'ject') has been a huge concern. Nice to see more data piling up to think my way through.

(I am leaving that preposition right there... yep, in the postposition.)

"Everywhere the Easter... "

(you have to imagine the header in a Billy Crystal/Zoiburg voice)
Walked in to the library a few days ago to see this propped up on the display:


Sigh... A delightful reminder of the pre-web days in which I worked on a (yet unfinished) novel provisionally entitled Nightside Noon for a year. The following year Joyce Carol Oats released another, darker book called Nightside.

But of course... I glanced at it, and well... she *is* a good writer. So, that's better than a kick in the boot.

(In case this little post is too enigmatic... I also redact the blog 'Easter(wood) Everywhere - launched on Easter, 2005.)

'Ethically Adequate Objects'

While I am not presently reading Stephen Greenblatt, or any litcrit for that matter, I did glance at one of his essays this morning. It was ostensibly about writing-as-performance (the [[title]] was a dead giveaway, eh), but its translation from lecture to essay --dare we say, from performance to writing?-- was not his best. It shambled along through sports and Semitism (and its anti-), Shakespeare and long, Clintonian handclasps. But it never quite poneyed up to the topic, which I'll spin down to one word: 'engagement.'

Here's as good as it got (about 2000 words in):

"I do not at all think that everything one writes should have an immediate bearing on the present. On the contrary, one of the crucial achievements in a liberal education is the understanding of worlds far removed from our own. . . .[T]hat projection depends not upon neutrality or indifference but rather upon carrying one’s passionate energies into an alien world. That is, you should write about the other as if your life depended on it. [Emphasis added] My indirect invocation of the current crisis—specifically, of the debate about the legitimacy of torture—is intended at least as much to illuminate King Lear as it is intended to bring Shakespeare’s wisdom to bear on our own dilemmas."

First of all, when Rimbaud formulated: "j'autre est," I am pretty sure he was simply pointing out the psychosis that produces consciousness. Otherness is a mechanism - a very efficacious one to be sure - for controlling the nausea of selfhood. A liberal education has also become --apres post-structuralism-- the opportunity to investigate that mechanism and propose to either dismantle it, or display it transparently as the core of a radical new demophilia. {I know, I know... 'display it transparently' is overkill, but I want the notion of visibility to stand out.}

Second, but excuse me... the very proximity of the words 'legitimacy' and 'torture' makes me want to lean over the sink and wash out my eyes. The fact that this phrase could rise to the occasion of debate after the Geneva Conventions is beyond comprehension. And some part of me wants the Ivy-Leaguers with nothing to lose to stand up on their hind legs and announce as much -- often, loudly , and without the coyness of 'indirect invocation.'

And finally, here --qua Prof. Greenblatt-- is the upshot of his essay:

"But I hope I have done enough to suggest that you approach your writing not only as if it were a performance but also as if it constituted, for the moment, an ethically adequate object for your deepest ambition."

Say what? Oh yes, as a writer I get up every morning and hope that my ethically-adequate object reveals itself. Is it possible that a doctor of literature cannot hear the sluggish, deflationary tone of that prose? I guess that's what happens after enough 'indirect invocation.' Peh.

On the other hand, Simon Crichley of the New School of Social Research is tackling the issue of engagement with more vigor. He acknowledges the skepticism brought to bear on the efficacy of the liberal education (as a path to comprehending the 'other') but is one of the few philosphers cogently analyzing and offering correctives to those inadequacies. I'm only about 30 pages into his third book, entitled ... (JA, you'll love this:) Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance.

Here's a link to a tiny, concise and hilarious [[review. ]]You'll have to scroll down a bit...

The first thing it is forcing me to do is examine my own propensity for utopian thinking, a salubrious step given my recent, declaratory writings around Meeting the Girl in the Bone Bikini. The second has been to give me a place to really devote some thought to the activity of ideologically-driven nihilism, both Christic and Islamic . I haven't been able to think of either of them except as mutual hallucinations. The keyword to my interest in the tome is 'ethics' as I invent or find ways to link my understanding of karma (action in Sanskrit) to public experience - I hesitate to use the raddled and beleaguered 'politics.' But what stipulated my entry into the realm of the Wrathful Archetypes was indeed as political as it was artistic. So I'm retracing a few steps, trying to see where I can vault to another level with this.

***

No word count, but here's the score: Out of 11 items on my schedule (which roughly spans 2 months... late Aug. till October's end), five are done. One, mind you, was a pain-in-the-ass grant for a third party... but that stupidity ended up with the effect of sweeping everything but my own work off of the table. Shaabash.

But poems from Bliss & Emptiness are submitted, one memoir-mathetic (7Sevensquared²) is up and out, the MGBB proposal has been revised and submitted, and of course the 13th Moon and Tate's Oneirocriticon are still in play. It looks like MGBB is going to lead my attention for the next few days, as J and I are fraught with its imagery right now.

So much for "life"...

I went and took a look around, and you know... it just wasn't that impressive.

So here I sit in the hinterland between 'ars' and 'vita.' (Say, just when does the 'breve' part kick in?) The car has no insurance, license has expired, registration is out-of-date and the back tires are bald. Message: stay put and write.

My phones are getting ready to spin down to the Skype line. Message: shut up and write.

Electric bill included a 5000 gallon water leak that doubled the bill last month. Message: jiggle the handle, and write.

e.g.:: Don't waste your emotional energy (water), and write.

But the Boyo is lovely, the Fall is mild, the rent is paid, the Podner is headed to

Dakiniland (France) and there is enough brown rice in the cupboard to get me through

the next 66 days.


So here we go...

*

21 days & 18,697 words

On my way back to Flatland now. The realm of laundry, dishes & unswept floors (keep your socks on - there's a nice lubricating layer of dust throughout the house, wheeeee). And, oh yeah, grantwriting: one for you and two for me; one for you and three for me...

The last couple of days were something of a rough dismount... lost several waves of work over the last 48 hours, which was oddly dispiriting. Techenschiess, trust me, you don't want to hear about it.

The Wrap-Up: I did manage to write one new poem ('Chiasmus' for my daughter), almost finishfinish the Prologue to the 13th Moon; extracted a short called 'New Yellow' from the 6th chapter, and got a good start on the 1st and 2nd chapters. And, surprisingly, I worked on poetry here and there. (Though I was trained as a poet, I haven't gone there in years... ). The Walkology article is drafted and the second revision is underway, but I haven't pitched it to anyone yet.

And the kiddo is here for a few days... & relentlessly beautiful, so that kinda cheers me up.

The 3 weeks did accomplish one, almost intangible thing: the book feels --if not quite awake, then disenslumbered-- kinda like AllGoodBoyo here peeking out, only pretending to sleep.

The Plan is to catch Flatland up to functional standards tomorrow, then write grants like a demon between the 8th and 15th. Between now
and the end of the month there are the more 'normalizing' activities, plus some work on Meeting the Girl in the Bone Bikini to help my partner get ready for the French sojourn. Come October 1, however, I plan to return to a shorter writing intensive and tidy up the first 3 chapters of the 13th Moon for SLL.

dizque: Insh'alla'tu

Until then...

18,400

... blew a day's work yesterday when I failed to back up my Word document - first, thought my system was set to Autosave (nyope...), and then forgot to put the files on the external drive this morning before trying to print something through my network.

Exactly why I have a network in this house is anybody's guess... it is 11 steps from the back of this cottage to the front (10 from side to side), so it's not like I have to go anywhere to print.

***

Truth to tell, the work loss may have been inevitable: about 5 p.m. yesterday I had a classic atacque de nervios... a sweet little cocktail-cluster of agora-slamming-into-claustro-phobia. In the middle of a sentence I just shut down -- heart-pounding, vertiginous nausea in a standing wave of ècrit-o-dread. I called my partner and said: "gotta go... I'm just about to implode." "Where?" he asked. " "No idea, and the lost-er I get the better I'm gonna feel." "Roger that..."

Caught the #7 downtown, took a long walk, then a longer one, wound up back home around 10. There was a moment --around 8 p.m.-- when the ècrit-o-dread palpably withdrew.

god, I hate that zh!t... one minute I'm word-gardening (diggety-dig-snip-sprinkle); next minute, I've careened into the inky depths of Kierkegaardian Sörge.


(remind me to finish that essay on Walkology... I love me some good walkin')

18,037

There seems to be no doubt that the Method is to a) wake up, and b) start writing. 'Pity it has taken more than 50 years (well... only 35 if we start counting from my apprenticeship to Messrs Hays and Foos) to figure this out.

By the time criticoMyst is awake (some three hours after reveille) makerMyst has already been able to get something th'own down. The trick is hiding it from cM long enough to let mM get another crack at it.

"Peekapeeka, risky business...
All dat blood, you gotta follow dat mess.
('Let's go!') hie! hiehiehiehide!" UuuepEp!"
-dByrne

Not to worry, cM will be given her very own essay to chew up for a year or so. Prolly "Cybersoma/Space, Part B" (B-for-Blagueuse).

17,915

... words in the 13th Moon. At least ten of them legible. Maybe twenty.
***
There was a time when I would set a public reading of whatever was under my pen, then drive toward that dateline at an Iditarod pace ("mush!"). Various events have ended that rei[g]n of insousiance (no, none of them involved rotten fruit (it was all frozen)); it's just that now other things compel me. (Death, for example.) Kidding, kidding... I plan to outlive my next incarnation, floating creakily alongside my.future.self like a bag of old curtains; a bloodless, talcum-scented apparition from the cusp of Stevie Nicks, Madame Mim and Lady Gregory.

On special occasions I could drape myself in Christmas lights and read from the Book of the Still-Not-Dead.

Which will be the title of this one if I don't get back to work.

Ho...

3 poems, the rent and a satin-handed passenger

Friday-the-31st (related in some blowback fashion to the 13th - moon or not): rewrote three eulogisms, including a a new one for Sarah; paid the rent; bought water in the middle of a monsoon, so sought redemption by giving a tiny, white-haired elder a ride home from the store. She was - it turned out - a writer. Copywriter for most of her life, now working on a novel, what she called a 'bit of fluff.'

Offered her hand in farewell. It was as cool as an opal egg, and polished.

Notre Lune

No, I was not in Paris this morning, but I did see the total lunar eclipse ... which perfected quickly, then stayed at full eclipse for almost an hour. More than strange.

Sunday/Monday were devoted largely to the hombres in my life (boo-yippee-hoo!). Kiddo started (magnet) Middle School yesterday - I needed to see him across that border; J's new camera came in, so there was a certain amount of technical doodling taking place. He leaves for France in a couple of weeks, and I am teks'port (those of you who know my fluctuating techgnosis are welcome to shudder sympathetically).

The Andy Warhol Fdtn has a new Arts Writer grant and I am trying to figure out which project to submit. I thought either the Oneirocriticon (since it is somewhat written) or Meeting the Girl in the Bone Bikini (since she is splashing nicely in the residency pool); but now I think the second part of Cybersoma/space might have higher qualifications.

This muse is happening in the hair-fine fault lines of the 13th Moon, which won't stay put in any particular genre, but probably won't be seen as non-fiction this century (do check back in 2101, however...).

Of course art-writing is (or should be) as fictive as the work it examines, but I doubt the AndyWarholians are ready to take on that proposition.

Refracting the Antique Light

Back in May of this year I wrote:

I am deep in the throes of reconsidering the cognitive --or maybe 'sensory' is more accurate-- effects of this hybrid seeing/hearing/blogologuing. What am I writing is not really an update of Cybersoma/Space, since I am in no longer in control of the academic vernacular which styled that article. But it's on the same acreage, if not in the same park.

It turns out that those 'reconsiderations' belong to several of the inhabitants (aka characters) of this book. The more deeply I write my way into their world, the clearer my understanding of certain problems I raised in that essay. So maybe I will turn out the long-neglected second half of Cybersoma/Space after all.

As for the academic vernacular - actually, I don't think I was ever in control of it. There is a slightly desperate, mercurial quality that comes with writing utopic non-fiction (as any discussion of cyberspace or the acts therein must necessarily be), and I keenly remember the faintly metallic taste that came with trying to write the ineffable. It was like taking a bath in cinnabar -- oozing sulphur on one hand, silver on the other.

Great fun, but incredibly dangerous, as events subsequent to that essay have borne out. But the Auspices of this year invite me to try my hand again, so let's see how it goes...

spinning the space...

If semioticians can spend half a century writing about writing, does that give me lief to blog about blogging? No? Don't worry, I haven't sunk that low yet.

(Actually, they wrote about language, not exclusively writing, but since they did it from writing... well... we've got a back flip with half-twist in there somewhere.)

Wednesday was indeed spent primarily on Viv's grant; my partner came in Weds. night and we mulled over MGBB for a while. I have in mind to turn the garage of this tiny space into a studio, but we agreed to tackle it after he returns from France.

Thursday was oddly off-kilter. We spent part of the day doing research on a 9th c. mahasiddha named Lakshminkara, trying to verify her relationship to BB Girl's lineage. Then I turned my attention to preparing for a meeting I had been invited to attend at Sri Atmananda. When I arrived, it turned out to be the wrong committee. Half a day basically blown.

Friday I woke up dispirited about *time* - how much I had, how easily it was wandering away from my books. I remembered at 8 a.m. that my son had an orientation at school that morning, so I rushed over to Kealing to see if he needed anything. A little while later Jerry came back from his place in San Marcos, and we managed to catch some good work on the visual side of this thing. But the cloud lingered, and after he left I just capsized. Tried four times to work on something, anything - but the page just seemed bottomless, vacant, sterile.

At 10 p.m. I gave up and walked over to HEB and rented 'the Libertine' - thinking surely it would have French subtitles so I could pretend to do something useful. It didn't. Ended the day watching Johnny Depp wasting syphilitically away at the end of a badly-edited movie. Perfect.

~~~

Saturday I decided to jump-start this process with a little more intent. For the rest of this lunar cycle I am simply not going to do *anything* but work on these books/essays. I am, of course, fully-aware and quite terrified of what that means. There are the demands of hermitage-but they pose no real concern. But I am not just giving up my social life; I'm setting aside my responsibilities as well. That's the really hard part, where my self-image as a competent and mature mother/partner/friend/sister all take a back seat to recuperating the work until it hits a certain level of vitality. Then (maybe) I can resume a more normalized writer-human presence.

I said 'maybe.'

***

The reduced wallspace of my office means that these-->
are something of a challenge. They constitute the third generation of the 13th Moon, the book that refocused itself about a month before my meeting with the agent from SLL in June. Each scroll has hundreds of 'bits' attached to it, and I found that enveloping myself was (at the time) the only way I could proceed. Feck the 'writing-in-the-dark' method. There's plenty of dark between the paragraphs. What I discovered this Spring is that I truly had to have an over(under?)view in order to remain in some kind of dynamic equilibrium with a project longer than 5000 words.

So yesterday I unwrapped one of them, laid it out on the floor --it crawled up one wall as well-- and was relieved to see that the book hasn't turned into heaps of incoherent muttering in my absence. Sophia-the-Seeing-Eye-Snake came out from behind the wall of books and deigned to watch me for a while.

I worked on the 5th and 7th chapters (there are 13, of course); then took lunch around 3 p.m. That became phone calls with my near&far darlings, to explain that I would be 'gone' for a few weeks. No less loving, but very away.

~~

Now I expect this blog will become boring. Very boring. Like most writers I am churlish about work-in-progress. And descriptions of the process generally don't even come up to the level of wallpaper. So I recommend fWOL when you are having an attack of insomnia and need a soporific.

No overdosing here. Nor dependency, I'll wager.

*******************************
...A bit later...


Every now and again I think my friend Scot has managed to obliterate
(emphasis on 'litera') himself,
then we turn up humming the same raga.

http://thelaughingbone.blogspot.com

Oh, and per His Boneness, don't miss this.

(Now, I've sunk this low. )

Jane Eyre Air

Looks like today, with its silken grey skies, will be given over to Vv's project. Maybe I'll go sit on the Sri Atmananda campus and see what it has to say for itself...

Staying Grace...

This cottage fits in a way that I haven't experienced since I lived on Avenue G. I can't say the place is beautiful (yet)... but I woke up last night with Sophia curled under my arm and the night sky burnt black, floating in a kind of residential bliss - as where-I-am and what-I-do intersect precisely, weaving a light, permeable container for my efforts.

Dila's house, as much as I loved it, was broken. The place never felt whole, and when I walked through it, one shoulder seemed to rise of its own accord, in sympathy with the zigzag tear running through the space. Still, the first wave of Tate's Oneirocriticon washed over paper at that address, so its ...let's call it 'alterity'... jogged something loose. Selah.

Following that, the Depew estate was trouble ahead, trouble behind, keeping me half-sick every day I lived there. Most of that year was spent concocting grants, so I had sidelined myself from publication; otherwise, writing in that house took a bayonet and a bottle of blood. I managed to eke out the first chapters of the 13th Moon, but just before we moved the book took a sharp corner and shot off in a new direction.

And landed here. Woot.
~~
Now for the 'log' part of this web-log: Yesterday I spent the morning working on the general shape of an essay on walking. Early afternoon on its pitch. Around 3 I called my partner in Houston and tried not to rave too much; he had just come from a French lesson and was swimming upstream to the studio, his refuge. By late afternoon I had to begin a more direct pursuit of the Almighty Dollar (Euro, Pound... all of the writing is marketable, only some more immediately than others), so I laid out Vv's documentary grant - then spent the next 3 hours trying to install MS Office's thesaurus in French and English. Quel casse-cul.

Got the English, anyway...

More hard-&-software thrashing through the night; as I finally gave up and headed for bed, a little gecko met me at the bedroom door. It ran over to the bookshelf and stopped in front of a work on the Rothko Chapel--so of course I pulled it out. Read the chapters on the historical environment that shaped MR's desire to create a spiritual space for his paintings (and Clyfford Still's influence therein), dropped off to sleep thinking about those violet shadows.

Soon...

Fountain Art

One friend wrote to ask if the Mermaid (Felicity Fishwriter over there to our left) was the work of Saint-Phalle. I was about to write to him that I thought it was Jean Tinguely's when I stopped to look it up. We're both right! Although Tinguely is cited as the designer, Niki de Saint Phalle had a big hand ~tit, tail~ in this suite. That particular sculpture is entitled 'Siren' (though she's missing a few fleshy bits to actually qualify for that species).

(I took this shot while waiting for le Comte St.-Germain at Place Beaubourg behind the Centre Pompidou in Paris. )

'for Writing Out Loud!'

- marks my entry into several new cycles: residential, creative, momological, calendrical. fWOL is something of an echologue, since you probably started out within Humandala.

Isn't it weird how we come to think of one space as 'inside' a cyberterritory, another as 'outside.' z'Far as I can see there's only *one* side. Let's call it 'undovinouter.' (Related to a tesseract? Mebbe. Or one of those crochet'd Cosmos made by the fine folk over at the Institute for Figuring.)

Speaking of hyperbolic planes, I just shrink-wrapped Easter(wood) Everywhere; not sure how long I will let it drift on Blogger's servers before it settles --like a soggy balloon--gently into oblivion. Writing on the Web has a shorter shelf life - which I suspect comes from the irresistence of what I call 'wet text' - electronically lapidated and dilapidated as it is. (There's an odd pair of words, both of which mean to destroy - though in more and less gruesome ways).
***
Coming back from my etymological digressions...

Item Residential: I am now living in a cottage in Hyde Park, 'nestled' as they say, behind two larger houses and surrounded by centurion pecan and oak trees. Soundtrack: grackles, mockingbirds, cicadas - and the stentorian rumbling of an ancient AC unit. Since the end of July I have been moving, painting, scrubbing - exercising the mojo that one must when settling into a living space half the accustomed size. We are (hmmm - "I" am) tucked in to a space with the dimensions of a Westlake walk-in closet. I believe this would be the 'tighten loosely' phase mentioned by Magcig (the shift to Europe being the 'loosen loosely').

Items Momological and Creative: The "we" clause has been altered... my son has gone to live with his dad for this academic year while I nudge my writing projects along. On the creative side I have The 13th Moon, the Oneirocriticon and Meeting the Girl in the Bone Bikini. This blog will be devoted to their progress, and maybe a bit to the spin-off essays that result from their redaction.

One good sign... I dreamed last night about The 13th Moon - one of the characters was helping me see into the qualities I have attributed to his role. It was something of a speleological enterprise as we roped down into a space where on one side there was his persona, and over there were the outcomes with which he is entrusted. They weren't that close, so it'll be interesting to see what kind of viaducts develop.
~~
Day before yesterday I woke up with the sense that I needed to figure out a way to curate a show or shows using the criteria that drives the Oneirocriticon. While I gained a lot of information from Trent Tate's exhibition back in 2005 --and even more from Lisa Becker's the decade before-- there is still a lot I don't know about the process.

I have a draft of Tate's Oneirocriticon: Naked Singularity in circulation right now, sent out to several people who have agreed to add commentary. Each of these men (for reasons that will come clear another time, the preliminary text is only going to men) is a great dreamer, and most are artists. Some of that information will come around when the draft/book is returned to me. Meanwhile, perhaps I can simply incubate an artwork here in Texas sometime soon. (The Rothko would be my first choice, with a side order of Sufis.)
~~
Meeting the Girl in the Bone Bikini has --after its initial presentation back in December-- moved out of written space and into figurative space in the last couple of months. My partner Jerry Goins is working on its iconography, will be taking the project to France in October. Since this is my 'root' cognitive practice, MGBB is a constant for me, lived as a kind of inscription . But it is surfacing. My own residency in France has been postponed till the Spring, where I'll team-tag J's work on the project. We're shooting for a more polished presentation next summer.
~~~

Item Calendrical: 13. My birthday this year completed my fourth 13-year cycle. Since this fell on a "7" year, I'll mark this as auspicious. I asked for, and am apparently receiving, my do-over year -- 1994 was fraught with exuberant missteps. No, I can't claim to be much more careful, but instead of the academic preoccupations - I was PhD student at 39 - the creative energy is freed up for a more outright expression. My joys --such as they are-- are calmer, not so driven. And those joys are finally exorcising a complexity that often made my earlier work nearly opaque.

I should clarify: the complexity is still here, but I'm trying to register it at the level of the story -or better, the book- rather than at the level of the sentence. (Feel free to opinionate on this point!)

***

To sum up... whereas Easterwood Everywhere was about almost anything, this 'blog is focused on writing - where I hope to use your eyes to keep the books in motion.

So thanks for riding along with me a while.

Corriente calamo...

'for Writing Out Loud!'

- marks my entry into several new cycles: residential, creative, momological, calendrical. fWOL is something of an echologue, since you probably started out within Humandala.

Isn't it weird how we come to think of one space as 'inside' a cyberterritory, another as 'outside.' z'Far as I can see there's only *one* side. Let's call it 'undovinouter.' (Related to a tesseract? Mebbe. Or one of those crochet'd Cosmos made by the fine folk over at the Institute for Figuring.)

Speaking of hyperbolic planes, I just shrink-wrapped Easter(wood) Everywhere; not sure how long I will let it drift on Blogger's servers before it settles --like a soggy balloon--gently into oblivion. Writing on the Web has a shorter shelf life - which I suspect comes from the irresistence of what I call 'wet text' - electronically lapidated and dilapidated as it is. (There's an odd pair of words, both of which mean to destroy - though in more and less gruesome ways).
***
Coming back from my etymological digressions...

Item Residential: I am now living in a cottage in Hyde Park, 'nestled' as they say, behind two larger houses and surrounded by centurion pecan and oak trees. Soundtrack: grackles, mockingbirds, cicadas - and the stentorian rumbling of an ancient AC unit. Since the end of July I have been moving, painting, scrubbing - exercising the mojo that one must when settling into a living space half the accustomed size. We are (hmmm - "I" am) tucked in to a space with the dimensions of a Westlake walk-in closet. I believe this would be the 'tighten loosely' phase mentioned by Magcig (the shift to Europe being the 'loosen loosely').

Items Momological and Creative: The "we" clause has been altered... my son has gone to live with his dad for this academic year while I nudge my writing projects along. On the creative side I have The 13th Moon, the Oneirocriticon and Meeting the Girl in the Bone Bikini. This blog will be devoted to their progress, and maybe a bit to the spin-off essays that result from their redaction.

One good sign... I dreamed last night about The 13th Moon - one of the characters was helping me see into the qualities I have attributed to his role. It was something of a speleological enterprise as we roped down into a space where on one side there was his persona, and over there were the outcomes with which he is entrusted. They weren't that close, so it'll be interesting to see what kind of viaducts develop.
~~
Day before yesterday I woke up with the sense that I needed to figure out a way to curate a show or shows using the criteria that drives the Oneirocriticon. While I gained a lot of information from Trent Tate's exhibition back in 2005 --and even more from Lisa Becker's the decade before-- there is still a lot I don't know about the process.

I have a draft of Tate's Oneirocriticon: Naked Singularity in circulation right now, sent out to several people who have agreed to add commentary. Each of these men (for reasons that will come clear another time, the preliminary text is only going to men) is a great dreamer, and most are artists. Some of that information will come around when the draft/book is returned to me. Meanwhile, perhaps I can simply incubate an artwork here in Texas sometime soon. (The Rothko would be my first choice, with a side order of Sufis.)
~~
Meeting the Girl in the Bone Bikini has --after its initial presentation back in December-- moved out of written space and into figurative space in the last couple of months. My partner Jerry Goins is working on its iconography, will be taking the project to France in October. Since this is my 'root' cognitive practice, MGBB is a constant for me, lived as a kind of inscription . But it is surfacing. My own residency in France has been postponed till the Spring, where I'll team-tag J's work on the project. We're shooting for a more polished presentation next summer.
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Item Calendrical: 13. My birthday this year completed my fourth 13-year cycle. Since this fell on a "7" year, I'll mark this as auspicious. I asked for, and am apparently receiving, my do-over year -- 1994 was fraught with exuberant missteps. No, I can't claim to be much more careful, but instead of the academic preoccupations - I was PhD student at 39 - the creative energy is freed up for a more outright expression. My joys --such as they are-- are calmer, not so driven. And those joys are finally exorcising a complexity that often made my earlier work nearly opaque.

I should clarify: the complexity is still here, but I'm trying to register it at the level of the story -or better, the book- rather than at the level of the sentence. (Feel free to opinionate on this point!)

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To sum up... whereas Easterwood Everywhere was about almost anything, this 'blog is focused on writing - where I hope to use your eyes to keep the books in motion.

So thanks for riding along with me a while.

Corriente calamo...