Decajour II: Jan 13-22

1/15
This decajour should have started on Monday, but I was traveling, so it had to wait until today.  Going to le Job Jar this afternoon, it popped the same project as the last decajour!   (In a parallel universe, the graf research will continue apace - but its actual writing is up the road a bit.)  

Prodded by my Inner Leni (Riefenstahl), I am weaving a writing schedule for the rest of this solar year - which of course ends on the Vernal Equinox.     And in some ways, the JobJar's chosen project may read better in the fading light of Dionysius than that of Lupercalia (am I mixing my ancients? oh well...) 

Either way, I expect a good little frenzy upon publication, by dint of season if nothing else.    As Mr. Yeats once allowed:

"I saw a staring Virgin stand
where holy Dionysius died
and tear the heart out of his side,
to lay that heart upon her hand
And bear that beating heart away.
Then did all the Muses sing
of Magnus Annus at the Spring,
as though god's death
were but a play."

I am no virgin, but I do love me a god'death from time to time. 

As for the schedule... one does well to mind the caprice of the Hours and not get too far ahead of their blessing.

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(my Inner Leni ~ hah ~)


1/17
Dreamed with the Philosopher Husband last night.  Or mostly him. It was a hybrid figure, an amalgam of the PH and an earlier paramour (the physicist who would later develop an over-unity generator).   He called himself by the PH's name and was exceptionally kind to me.  He came with a newborn I had somehow mothered, and asked for help with her.  I was relieved to see that we had finally birthed one of our children, even if I didn't remember the labor.

Woke up knowing this was the harbinger of "our" work, which was so bizarrely stitched, unstitched, ripped-out and restitched in the lifetime prior to this one.    But this round the work is mine to do -- as he has already wandered into the madness that ever awaits his genius. 

Eternal Return, ye hardly knew us.


1/18
Wrestling with the employment scenario.   Do I accept a 'better-paying' job with longer hours?  or do I muddle along with this part-time gig that *barely* keeps the lights turned on?    Logistically, the new offer makes only half-sense in some ways.  While there is a  modest (but helpful) improvement in salary, it provides perqs I neither want nor need - and I think the job should go to someone who actually values those things.     I like the company, but I want their part-time position, which would still trump my current workplace, and give me indispensable flexibility.   

Meanwhile my Inner Leni is a tad disappointed.    I've been able to put some time into Project #1, but no predawn writing.    I practiced the matutinal folly as a much younger writer - and have discovered that there's something about those two hours across the nightday border that blends the dreaming and speaking-being.     I have to leave that boundary unmolested.  

But I have been attending to the Work upon rising.   And it seems to be waiting for me with more generosity than in months past.   I just can't set a clock to it.


1/19
Full Moon in Cancer this weekend (with Jupiter on my natal Sol) in my house of sex and death.   How well I know this spot.     28: the degree where the Banda Aceh earthquake happened in 2004, under the Cancer full moon, opposing the Sun in Capricorn.   My partner and I spent that weekend in a hotel, watching the  hearth, weighing rubies, singing Ring of Fire along with Johnnie Cash.   Sunday afternoon an alarm went off for 10 full minutes, driving everyone into the stairwells and streets.   It turned out to be the very moment the sea shook and poured over Indonesia.  Ring of Fire, indeed.


1/20
Still waiting for Sex at Dawn to arrive through interlibrary loan... this city does not charge fines for overdue books, so there is little negative incentive to return anything.  My book is likely sitting on some citizen's bookshelf, unread, forgotten.    But today I ordered Frans de Waal's latest, The Bonobo and the Atheist, forming an argumentative set with Richard Wrangham's Demonic Males: apes and the origin of human violence -- waiting for me in the Library Next Door.  

I need to read --or at least skim-- these to see where evolutionary biology may be  taking the discussion of compassion and lovingkindness.  Could these qualities be *innate* to sentient beings. . . Humans?  Maybe, if we are still 'sentient' after all that our metaprogramming -- keyboards, screens, tumbledown architecture, chaotic urbanity,  rogue neurointerruptors, sullen calories--  has engifted us.    

And breaking my own metaprogramming, I am trying to teach myself to monetize my intellectual pursuits.    So as I read and take notes, I'm determined that my five decades-plus of ratiocination turn -- if not a profit, then less of a loss.    These books are pursuant to a larger piece of writing,  but the 20$ reviews pave my pockets, and pay for... what?  Two lunches for my teenager?  I'll take it.

1/22
Ok, I've been reading Richard Wrangham's work - two books, one on the civilizing influence of cooking, the other on what we might call 'personal' violence in primate populations.    Both have an unfortunate tic common to most scientistic writing these days:  the style is polemical to a fault, ax-grinding so loud that it overwhelms any attempt to think dispassionately about the material offered.    

The actual 'set'  through which I am trying to think  (as noted above) is the contrast between Wrangham's Demonic Males... and de Waal's The Bonobo...  But I picked up the book on cooking -having long been a fan of Brillat-Savarin- thinking it would fill out the 18th C. Frenchman's discussion.   Not. Even. Close.    It is a screed against vegetarianism, veganism and the raw foods movements, setting up the straw man of their 'atavism,' then burning it down with the idea that we could not have evolved into homo sapien sapiens without eating cooked meat.    It would be a damned site easier to read without this bias permeating (pun intended) the book.   But I slog on.  

If for no other reason than to remind myself, again and again, that new ideas can incorporate earlier points of view or behaviors.   My own disputatious nature has got to be reined in, and RW's books give me the redflag reason why. 

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Decajour I: Jan 3 - 12

1/7

Somewhere, in a biographical sprint, I wrote:

"My lifebeat has consistently cut across the Western flow of time:  weeks play out in  ten-day cycles (a Franco-Tibetan device)..." 

While employers and universities have disputed the measure, it still seems to be the right rhythm for my attention.   The Jacobins instituted a 10-day week as an early edict of the French Revolution, but I'm not sure where I picked up the idea of the Tibetan decajour - perhaps from some lost Snellgrove citation (actually, it was in Colin Turnbull's 1970 work Tibet).  Anyway, it stuck.   

So, the first bead that bounced out of the jar on the 3rd will have my somewhat-fraught attention till the 12th.  'Fraught' - as I will be traveling during that period, putting another 2,000 miles on my little r0'vum (yes, it looks like an egg) while doing research on another project - so there is some 'deconvergence' expected.    (And thank you, Frere Derrida, for imposing enantiodromia upon unsuspecting nouns.  Makes my job so much easier.)   

~~~ 

Though it may seem coy, for the moment I won't share too much identifying information about these projects; but I may, from time to time, refer to the explorations toward their fulfillment.   

Part of the research for #1 has been to read, at long last, Sex at Dawn, which is turning out to be pure delight.  I've spent a good bit of the last six years ruminating the shift from 'survival of the fittest' to 'survival of the altruist,'  so I was  gratified (but unsurprised) to see the theme emerging in contemporary ethology.

Another book *I* don't have to write.  Yay!  

1/8

This year, as my New Year's gift,  I rounded up all my anxieties about the writer's life  - and kept interrogating them until they cooked down to the forms I mentioned in last week's blog : mothering, money and time.   So here's the score:  

• The intensive-mothering phase is over (Q is 18...(and alive, praise All-of-the-Ah!)).   
•  I've had a rather bizarre money Möbius twirling through this lifetime:  the more money I have, the broker I feel.  So yeah, I'm flush now. 
• The sensation of being out-of-time started shortly after my 16th birthday - so I have finally recognized that for the illusion it has always been.   Living, I have discovered,  happens in little bursts;  it's the dying part that takes for-f*cking-ever.  

I was 23 when I consciously recognized the 3rd obstacle:  too-lateful-ness.   Seriously.  Twenty-three.  But in those days the stressball was more like grandpa-with-a-tuba,  chasing me around the desk while gargling Flight of the Bumblebee.   It popped up again in my 30s when I went back to university.   At 40, my second husband found the damn thing in a closet and tootled out a few bars after I birthed my son - maybe I looked too tired to do it myself.   But whether I manufactured the message, or encouraged someone else to spring it on me,  there was never going to be enough time to write beautifully, incisively, joyfully.   Never.  

So whenever that fisheye-time-lens comes bulging 'round the bend, I just pull out my pen and poke it.   Dry bubble.

1/9

Driving now to Austin.   Flash:  Life is happening faster than I can get it down.  That would be reason enough to write fiction ... assuming it existed.   It could be argued, finehearts,  that just because something  is invented doesn't make it unreal.    The only way to keep up is to recognize that imagination is about 15 minutes ahead of experience.  ¡Salud!  

1/10

Two words:  Silver Sun.    

1/11

Yesterday's surprise:  I lost a bet on the bookstore income.   Great! more time to write. 

1/12

Spent the day wandering around taking photos of various graf'ed walls in Austin, legal and otherwise.

Austin Graffiti - Castle Hill

Gotta do it while I'm here;  I thought I had lost all my notes when the 'new' computer died last month - but my tech recovered the harddrive AND added another gig of Ram.  (Damn, son!)  

I left the tyche jar back in Abq, so I guess my decajour will extend into a (an?) hendecajour this week.   Ooooo, stretchy.  

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Meanwhile, back at . . . (decajour 0)

In 2013 I managed to do a few things, but (real) writing was scarcely one of them. No,  Facebook posts do not count.    Having escaped the turbidity of the FB pool,  I won't guaranteed that these blog posts are *that* much more lucid, but here I can tack to the winds of bigger projects, and talk a little bit about what Gets Us There.

First thing I noticed coming up to the Yere Neue:  in the Aulde -- fraught with moving and REmoving and the various employment scenes  and worrying about the teenogre a state away and battling the intergalactic bugfestation of '13--  I also managed to get a few notes down on five separate writing projects.  And I *love* all of them, equally - though I might note that on certain days I hate them equally for not being done, goddamnit.   Where to begin, how to choose?

After 35 years of writing professionally, I still do not understand exactly how I work.   But this year I have reckoned my 'obstacles' and am trying to work around  their mitigating or stimulating presence.   It's something of a juggling act: whenever I catch myself squeezing one of the Three Stressballs (money, mothering, its-too-latefulness) I immediately add a Write-It-Anyway ball and start working.

And I am experimenting like mad to see what really gets me to the desk.   Living in this aleatory state, I decided to do the White Thing and gamble.  I wrote each of the projects down and balled them up into tiny paper beads,  put them in a jar, shook for 14 seconds while chanting the Names of the Rose and pulled one out.  Turned out to be the essay that is, in fact, the most time-sensitive.   If I don't have it done in time to publish in February,  I'll have to shelve it till 2015.

Which very well may happen.   The other experimental question is: how long do I work before I make some kind of real breakthrough in the material, then get bored and wander away.    I have a history of this, so instead of pushing into total darkness, I am giving myself permission to drop the project and go back to the gaming jar. Jigglyjigjiggle, who wants to be next?  

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(P.S. “Monsters exist because they are part of the divine plan, and in the horrible features of those same monsters the power of the creator is revealed.”  Umberto Eco)