For Writing Out Loud

Cardinal crazy...

2012-02-12T09:44:00.000-08:00

I was born in July, which means my astrological home is a Cardinal sign (as opposed to Mutable or Fixed). It took me years to comprehend that commencing -- ideas, projects, relationships -- would be my strength, but that I would need to work on the phase known as 'follow-through.'

Endings, on the other hand, are strangely easy. I guess it's because they imply beginnings.

(Oh, my aching Wheel.)

Speaking of beg'endings: since that glorious 2.5 days in front of the fire in December, my writing has repeatedly gone into seizure. It starts, trembles, begins to roll from side to side frothing, then goes rigid.

Retail therapy for writer's cramp.

I've been trying to analyze the source of this peculiar no-write zone, realizing that it wasn't a 'block' so much as a deviation of some kind. In frustration, I even dipped into the old American standard: buy something. So I purchased this lovely notebook over there on the left, promising myself that it would *only* contain real work:

Cue the 3-day freeze. I couldn't even pick it up.

Yesterday, driving to see a client, I began to wonder about the functional shape of my week, so I did a 168-hour round-up.    30 hours at the j.o.b + 45 sleeping + 5 volunteering + 5 meditating + 3 walking or yoga + 15 cooking/clean up/shopping + 10 socializing + 15 parenting + 7 hrs. bathing/grooming = 135 hrs. This leaves me with 33 hours. I just shook my head. Where does it go?

You are looking at it. Those 33 hours go to Hulu, Facebook, Planetwaves and a dozen other sites I peruse and/or contribute to regularly.    When I got home, I did a little more math: averaging 30 hrs a week on the Net times the 19 years I have had access in my home. . . the total came to ~drumroll, please~ 3.35 years. Three and One/Third Years. On the Net.

Breathtaking.   I called a friend in Chicago (whose personal challenges with an autistic daughter, moving, a recalcitrant X and unemployment make my widdle writer's cwamp look like High Tea) said, sympathetically: Seems like you might have just had your Nessus-in-Aquarius moment.

Nessus, my friend explained, is a Centaur planet which giveth&taketh in the same gesture. I call him your best frenemy, she said. Indeed my decades-long relationship with the Web, with all of its fictional nooks and crannies, it's potentials and horse-latitudes, has been a great Frenemy. 3.35 years worth. Just then, her daughter piped up in the background:   Potential energy is not kinetic energy. Kinetic is what moves stuff! (She's named after a physicist, so go figure.)

It isn't just the time wasted responding to raillery and fools and 'special offers' on the Net; in that 3.35 years I've misplaced something about how I am in language, how I was trained as a poet to live with one foot in silence, the other in the glissandi of speech.   I realized today that I have been taken hostage by language as taskmaker, listchecker, quantifier, billpayer, delimiter -- all outbreath-and-hold.

I'm surrounded by the names of things, but the things themselves have become shallows, trickles, vacancies, scribbled bridges between sessions online.

I am going to try an experiment. My ISP allows suspended service for up to three months without closing the account, so for the month of March, I am going to surrender my access at home. I will still have FWOL and email and FB, but getting to them will become something that happens between episodes of Real Life and more critically, Real Writing.

Then we'll see if my addiction to the novelescence of the Web can be tuned to a different frequency. One that includes the completion of One Whole Thought.
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Cavetrees and Violet flame...

2011-12-26T08:50:00.000-08:00

Glory, glory! I am on the early edge of two days of unmitigated, creative work time. It is Christmas Eve, and my gift is 48 hours of creative work/play, giving it the same focus and consistency that I apply to my spiritual retreats.

Burning amethyst!

But as with all retreat or intensive practices, there are preliminaries.   In this case, I woke up with a 33 year time-line wrapped around my neck, mulling over my 'good starts' and the (ahem) diversions that almost immediately ensued.    Facing South (in my mind's eye) I counted down the obstacles. Then I turned around, faced North and, somewhat haltingly, counted up who and what has encouraged and supported my creative work over the years.

Then came time to write it out. Literally, OUT. I have reckoned the obstacle list for my own gagging pleasure, but I will not burden you with those details. However, I was surprised to discover that the encouragement list was a pretty good counterbalance. The one impossible outlier is Sarah's death... I can't separate it from her birth, so it doesn't fit anywhere on the scale. If anywhere, it would be on the North side. I know, that's just perverse, but there it is...

The encouragement and obstacle lists both commence at age 23, the year I gave birth to my daughter and emerged from my 6+ year literary studies with Bob Hays and Anya Foos.   When I start to feel like my work has bogged down or is irrelevant to this epoch, I intend to come back here and contemplate these facts.

Why I am Still a Writer at Age 56

(...even without my Nobel Prize)

Age 23 ~ Sarah Araenya is born listening to Yeats: "For love has pitched its mansion/In the place of excrement/For nothing can be sole or whole/That has not first been rent." Word
Age 24 ~ I travel to Mexico City with Jerry Goins and his artwork. Biggest city on the planet; drowning in inspiration, I begin the Mira Cycle ("The World, being a spherical mirror, pours shape into shape as we follow its impeccable equator...")
Age 25 ~ I rent an office above Pecan Street Cafe, writing and directing poetry theatre... Sarah hangs out in the playpen in my office
Age 26-28 ~ move to Mexico where the dancer Waldeen enters my life; loves my poetry, comes to dream classes, introduces me to her circles
Age 29 ~ work as cultural affairs editor for El Hispano in Albuquerque; teach lucid dreaming workshops in New Mexico, Texas & California
Age 30-32 ~ freelance writer for El Hispano, La Opinion, LA Weekly
Age 31 ~ in the *middle* of a conversation with Maxine Hong Kingston, I enter Akshar for the first time. Persists for about 2 months. Write the best poetry of this lifetime... So far
Age 33 ~ enter UT, get into Latin American Studies program, befriend Richard Shiff
Age 35 ~ reconnect with Jerry Goins
Age 36 ~ meet and fall in (various stages of) love with Sandy Stone, Scot Casey, Lisa Becker, Willard Uncapher.
Age 37 ~ open the gallery TOPOS with Lisa & Willard.
Age 38 ~ while in love with Sandy (& Jerry & Scot & Captain & JoBunny, etc), begin to publish art reviews/criticism
Age 39 ~ meet Vajrayogini, more Akshar
Age 40 ~ liberi! Quentin is born
Age 42 ~ 42nd birthday party reading of short story "What the Thunder Said." Sarah comes later and embraces me -- with real understanding: "Mom, I finally *get* you!"
Age 44 ~ June 30, 2000 - initiate Jerry Goins as principle Consort
Age 46 ~ begin to publish art reviews in regional journals
Age 47 ~ establish or renew connections with four Wisdom Consorts
Age 48 ~ while still publishing about art, start to refocus writing toward Tantric issues
Age 49-52 ~ highly creative period; open the Looking Room, travel, publish, obtain exhibitions for the Consorts
Age 51 ~ meet with Robert Guinsler of Sterling Lord, Literistic-who requested 60 pages of 13 Views of the Moon
Age 52 ~ begin collaborating w/ Jerry on Meeting the Girl in the Bone Bikini
Age 53 ~ write the first essay in Tantra for Bobos, fifty readers sign up!
Age 54 ~ develop & launch Karma in the Crucible workshop, Shanna Phillipson drives 800 miles to attend!
Age 56 ~ revising MGBB and a new workshop, The Senses Ten

Not included in this quick 33-year blessing-line is a host of other, magnificent beings. My sister Susan is a principal in that crowd, which includes Connie, Fe, Viviane, Angel, Elsa, Jeff G, Margaret, Bobby, Alegra, my son Quentin, Annie R, Pat E., Ceci, Jade, the Richards (Alpert, Shiff, Milk), Katari, Raul G, Carol C, Catherine Swan, Trent, Ori, Virginia, Sharon, the Wisdom Consorts and many others. These people have consistently behaved --despite some bruit to the contrary-- as though my gifts were worth cultivating, often stepping up with time, energy, encouragement and warm, soft cash.

Of course there are others firmly entangled in the 'obstacle' timeline. As much as I adore William Blake, my lifelong experience says: No, actually opposition is not truest friendship. (Just ask my comatose books.)

Declaration: I hereby decline any more deliveries of complicated adoration. I am a fearless yogini, but I'm finished with people (including myself) who think that's a theory to be tested, not a reality to enjoy.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Taking a walk earlier this morning, I found my new teacher, this gorgeous, adaptable Treebeing:

Those 'trunk' extensions all began as roots, until someone decided to build a street through here. So the Treebeing simply sent out a sheath of bark over his exposed root-system, and fattened it up so that he had more stability. In so doing, he created a system of little caves and pokes where delicate gardens have sprung up:

(Makes you wonder why anyone bothers with recombinant DNA technology, when all you have to do is ask... )

Now, onward! toward the 13th year of the new Millennium!!

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For Walking Out Loud...

2011-12-22T14:28:00.000-08:00

Crabs who live in glass houses...

Am I living like a Hermit Crab? Could be. But I'd go for a glass shell in a heartbeat.   (Or a heartbeat in a glass shell. )

Everywhere I've lived in the last 6 years has had something of a revolving-door feel to it - as if I could glide out one day (with my little computer-carapace) and just keep going.     This condo, with its fireplace, greenbelt, reasonable rent (and its newly-repaired roof!) isn't too bad.   The plan is to stay in Texas until my son graduates high school, or lures me back to Austin.   Not out of the question for his senior year - though I might just leave everything in storage and rent something attic-y for those 9 months.    "Your corner is over there by the fireplace, Cinderfella..."

I do toy with the idea of 'home ownership,' especially when mulling the fact that retreat space can be so elusive. But why would a hermit crab buy a clump of dirt when there are currents to be caught? delicious algae to nibble? ripples to scurry and skip?

...wind up with a heck of a tan.

Over the next decade or so I do expect to revive the practice of Beguinage - a very (very) long walk that lets me weave in and out of conviviality, usefulness and solitude. My 65th year is earmarked for that stroll, which I think will take about 13 months.
In the meanwhile I have begun exploring that option cherished by all writing nomads: artist residencies. I was awarded residencies to the Rhodes Literary Center (Greece) and Cat'Art (Languedoc) in 2007, but given the kid-variable mentioned above, have decided to explore the Stateside spaces until 2013.

My sources are:
Res Artis - http://www.resartis.org/en/ ... which provides a breakdown by discipline and location
Transartists - http://www.transartists.org/ ... which has a better listing for writers
Artists Communities - http://www.artistcommunities.org ... probably the easiest to use
     (I also poke around the Foundation Center at the Hogg Library in Austin from time to time, on those days when I just feel like being surrounded by paper instead of pixels.    It's less 'efficient' on one level, but more grounding on another. )
~~~~~~
The last few weeks of my employment cycle gets very intense, so work on Meeting the Girl in the Bone Bikini has slowed up a bit since mid-December.   But I spent a couple of hours today reviewing what's been laid out since November, adding little touches here and there. Can't really get a word count yet, cause everything's in a big ol' scrawlographic mess, tracked across several notebooks.    But the work is holding up - two months in and it doesn't look incoherent yet (oh, that'll come down the road).

This is all *new* writing on MGBB. I haven't even started to think about what to do with the dozens (hundreds?) of pages written as marginalia in the last couple of years - marginalia that often took over the page. I worked on a very funny Vajrayogini essay in 2008 while in Denver; it seems somehow piggybacked, but not for the book itself. It is even numbered as a outlier: 'Part Zero: Analogy and Katalogy in BuddhaDamsel Distribution.'

"One summer evening a few years ago my nine-year-old son and I were channel-surfing when we came across a PBS program called ‘Secrets of the Dead.’ No self-respecting fourth grader would pass that up, so he commandeered the remote with a firm “This one!"

The next image seemed to jump off of the screen and hang in mid-air. It was a Sarmatian warrior-queen’s burial mound, her 2600 year-old bones and accoutrements swept bare for the camera.

This was no napping-princess pose, nor had she been folded up into any of the standard parcels (both neolithic Europeans and later Mesoamericans buried their dead in fetal position). Her legs were akimbo, the right heel raised up toward the inside of her left knee, and her arms flared from the sides of her body, the face gazing down and to the left. The entire array resembled nothing so much as a bareback rider, galloping rampant through her afterlife.

“It’s Vajrayogini!” we exclaimed in unison, followed by Q’s inevitable “Jinx!” and demand for a Coke[i].

[i] Which we don’t drink, but you can’t blame the boy for trying.

Though I didn't finish it (rent in Texas hauled me back), there's quite a bit more, so maybe I'll use it for a residency submission. Two weeks in the mountains near Flagstaff? Oh that's almost better than publication.

***

More on The Senses Ten project next week.

(Christmas? uh, sure... Y'all have a Merry. My merriment is all swirled up in the wordcount.)

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Shaping the Day

2011-12-12T08:40:00.000-08:00

     Speaking of shape... About two weeks ago I began a kundalini yoga practice every other day. The idea is to fire up the process of offloading toxins I've gathered in the last 18 months or so. The kriya (kundalini) yoga is also to kickstart my endocrine system, which has apparently gone comatose since graduating from its baby-maker phase.
     Um, okay.   This may take a while. The first round produced almost a week of pure agony, as heavy metals, pesticides and pseudo-estrogens made their way to the exits.   No joy in Mystville yet - but eventually. . .
     Here's the thing: In my world, creativity is inseparable from health, but the definition of 'health' changes from decade to decade. Now, more than halfway through this cycle, I'm just beginning to understand how to optimize the Fifterian. So, Breath of Fire, here we come. . .

~~~~~~~~~~~

Re: Walking in This World (Chaps 5 & 6)

     I have to say that this book is not engaging me as deeply as Cameron's The Artist's Way, but I *am* reading it, week by week, a chapter at a time.   Most of the exercises are reruns, and when I have the kind of time they require, I am more inclined to go uh 'work on' (aka fret over) my current projects.
     Chapters 5 and 6 seem as though they began as the fore and aft of a single thought, then Ms. Cameron decided to break it into two.   Chapter 5 is Discovering a Sense of Personal Territory; Chapter 6 is [ditto] a Sense of Boundaries.    Five warns about disrespecting your time; Six treats letting others absorb your time and/or rain on your project.   Okay. No ectopic pregnancies for Creatives. Got it.

     Chapter 7 - Discovering a Sense of Momentum - brings up 2 points that --while they may not necessarily be true-- could be useful propositions.

     The first is the premise that Creatives often have *too many* ideas, leading to a logjam that manifests as writer's/composer's/painter's block.   The solution, says Ms. Cameron, is to let a small, steady stream of them escape into artform -- spillings, as it were.   (Seems plausible... but beholdened to the old Freudian idea of the psyche as a kind of hydrological system, full of pressures and valves and leaks.   Creatives might be a bit more quantum: here but there/now but everywhen).

     The second posits that if we finish something --preferably related to our project-- we catch the habit of 'concluding' and carry that into our artistic practice. Cameron gave the example of a young composer who had too many projects started, but couldn't manage to wrap any of them. His mentor told him to go organize his composing room. After meeting the idea half-way, he went back a second time and really brought it all to order; wherefrom he rode the wave to completion of several works.

     As my son says: Cool story, bro.

     That might work for men, as the curve around to the housekeeping side of life might be a little longer - and the novelty of it may produce a happy landing.   For the likes of me, not so much.   To finish 'something else' just means I am not working on my art. Simple as that.
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Thought-holder

2011-11-28T07:23:00.000-08:00

Thanks for dropping by... I am warding off some mild flu-thingy
that wants to become a not-so-mild viral invasion,
so stringing together the (real Monday) post will resume in a day or so.

Wish me soup,
M

Back to the writing (out loud)

2011-11-15T14:23:00.000-08:00

I'm gonna let someone else talk for a while. Here's a bit of reassurance from Geoff Dyer's funny and precise "How to Write Fiction":

"Writers are defined, in large measure, by what they can't do. The mass of things that lie beyond their abilities force them to concentrate on the things they can. "I can't do this," exclaims the distraught Mother-Writer in People Like That Are the Only People Here, "I can do quasi-amusing phone dialogue. I do the careful ironies of daydreams. I do the marshy ideas upon which intimate life is built …" From the sum total of these apparent trivialities emerges a fiction which succeeds in doing precisely what it claims it can't [. . . ] [A] more extreme example: Franz Kafka. Was ever a writer so consumed by the things he couldn't do? Stitch together all the things Kafka couldn't do and you have a draft of War and Peace.

...and dearer to my own dilemma:

"This is another lesson: you don't have to know what kind of book you are writing until you have written a good deal of it, maybe not until you've finished it – maybe not even then. That's the second sense in which the cat doesn't have to be a cat. All that matters is that at some point the book generates a form and style uniquely appropriate to its own needs."

Very timely, this, as I wade around in my print-puddles. Of which I have several hundred, all aimed at the Bone Bikini theme. Some of them are strangely deep --there goes a kneecap-- with benthic fishies flickering throughout. Others barely dampen the ground. But I am surprised by how *many* there are. Apparently I've been working on this for the last 4 years without fully realizing it. Hooboy -- I need a clutch of days to gather up one (well-knit) thought. Where are they?!

On the other side of next week, I swan...
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Betwixt... ( a breath in another direction )

2011-11-14T09:34:00.000-08:00

It is 10 days until my daughter's 13th deathday. While I speak of a deathday, in reality it's more like a week. This year the date falls on Thanksgiving, but the days are actually earlier... she went to sleep on a Monday night, into the deepest sleep early Tuesday morning. On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving --the worst travel day of the year-- I was on an SRO plane, transporting her body back to Austin. Needless to say, this has brought a whole new meaning to the phrase 'Black Friday.'

That process underscored the fact that it actually takes quite a while to die. I was aware of the beginning of Sarah's transition as we both slept... had a dream that we were on an endless lift with no walls -- just a platform shooting straight up over the planet. We were a few feet apart on our individual risers, after a while I looked down, she looked up -- and we parted company. I reached for her, but she slipped away. Plummeting back to Earth, I could see the bottom of my daughter's elevator rising out of sight.

As I came to consciousness, the sound of her last breath brought me from a dense sleep to standing position over her, then my arms around her, raising her up to clear the air passage. I'd never heard a death rattle before, and thought she was coughing.   The uncanny stillness of her body with no heartbeat, no breath was at first just puzzling.   Then I switched on a light and saw her eyes, half-open and empty. She was gone.

Or going. The next half hour was more drama than I want to write out here - but then I was left alone with her body for another couple of hours.   I found myself instinctively moving through the process of Pho-wa, the transference of consciousness.   The dissolution of her elements (there are indeed five, the ancients had counted right) whizzed by, as she had not been trained to hold them. But she went almost immediately to Clear Light, abiding there effortlessly. The girl was apparently home in that Space.

The journey Sarah and I took over the subsequent weeks is detailed in her book, Answering Araenya, so I won't go too far into that story. But I learned that dying takes a long time, much longer than the simple shutdown of brain function, loss of breath/heartbeat, or onset of rigor mortis.   Freedom comes instantly, but the passage can take days or weeks; and the treatment of the physical body can reverberate for months after the event.   As a culture we should be aware of this, but given how stupidly we handle (conventional) birth, is it any wonder we're such derps about supporting death?

This period, the days before the anniversary of her deathday, is always a time of great, fierce energy - sometimes fecund, sometimes devastating.   I welcome it, and all of its insupportable gifts.

'See you on the flip side...
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Retreat & Rec()urse

2011-11-07T15:12:00.000-08:00

A Google search for Recursion suggests Did you mean: Recursion.
Hahahahaha (ha) rhrmmm... (ha)

∞•∞•∞

It has been a week, Sahib and Memsahib. I took a retreat day last week - an important breather after many months of push•push•push from the move to San Marcos, the employment picture, the wildheartchild, et so on.

However. In last week's creativity contract I agreed to. . .
• continue w/ an immediate segue to Walking in this World
Yup, though I didn't find Chap One overly-exciting. Guess it'll take me a while to get used to the new rhythm. Here the contract breaks down into 4 more items: Read this week's chapter, yep; morning doodles, nope; artist's date, yep; loooong walk, yessiree.

• write (even a 20-minute freewrite) one page each day
I managed to hunker down over MGBB for five brief scribble sessions. . .

• set aside 2 periods weekly (1 hr+) to muse what has been written
Sorta. I tried to climb up a level and take a look around during the retreat, but today is the real round-up - assessing what I may have th'own down during these collisions.

Seems like MGBB is evolving three tracks: one deals with American violence, another with Pan-american art (eeeeyyeess, there is a pun in that 'pan') - as the Girl (and Her retinue) weaves a third story out of those two.

Found this in my MGBB workshop notes from 2006:

"The reason I work with Vajrayogini is because She both cuts *and* burns.. [audience laughs uneasily]

"No really... if our epoch's political neurosis is couched in terms of 'hidden enemies' and 'secret weapons,' Vajrayogini helps us examine that motif of invisible threat, and use it to think about what is trying to destroy (or at least deconstruct) itself in us."

A subroutine, but perhaps a useful one. Though I hope that by the time MGBB gets into publication, our national obsession with 'Terror' and Wars Thereupon will have joined the ranks of slavery, witchcraft trials, Prohibition, Jim Crow laws and. . . hmmm. If not, maybe this will help get us there.

•∞•∞•∞•

Tekdigression: A few days ago a friend introduced me to SIRI on his (•)phone. Oh finehearts, this produced my very first twinge of envy for that gizma. SIRI is a voice-recognition program that could rock my writing world if I can get my hands on a copy of it for powerbook. (Prolly doesn't work with anything but the IOS5 tho...) Anyhoo, it turns voice into *perfect* transcriptions. I wouldn't use it to dictate my work; I would use it to read my first-drafty scrawl into a text-generator, and *then* edit the second wave from the page. I never gain *anything* from that first keyboarding - mostly it's just tedium, something I have to do because I can't afford a secretary. [end TkD]

And now, back to it...

Creativity Contract (10/31/11-01/29/12)

2011-10-30T15:11:00.000-07:00

Today I finished reading The Artist's Way. Since this is a workbook, the twelve chapters took three months to negotiate, and on the last page there is a creativity contract to continue for another cycle of three months. I am publishing this contract here 'cause my copy will be winging its way to one of the Dames (Somos la misma mujer - 2006-2008). Oh, and as I was typing it out, Beethoven's 9th came on the radio - like a personal lovenote from the universe.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

My name is Mysti Easterwood. I am a recovering Creative. To further my growth and my joy, I now commit myself to the following self-nurturing plans:

∫Morning doodles (with which I replaced the morning pages) have become an important part of my self-nurturing and self-discovery. I, Mysti, hereby commit myself to continuing to work with them for the next 90 days.

∫Artist's dates have been integral to my growth in self-love and my deepening joy in living. I, Mysti, am willing to commit to another 90 days of weekly artist's dates for self-care.

∫In the course of following the artist's way I have discovered I have a number of creative interests. While I hope to develop many of them, my specific commitment for the next ninety days is to allow myself to more fully explore Meeting the Girl in the Bone Bikini.

∫My concrete commitment to a plan of action is a critical part of nurturing my artist. For the next ninety days, my planned, self-nurturing creative action plan is ...
• to continue w/ an immediate segue to Walking in this World
• writing (even a 20-minute freewrite) one page each day
• setting aside 2 periods weekly (1 hr+) to muse what has been written

I have chosen my friend Connie as my creative colleague and Shanna as my creative back-up. I am committed to a weekly phone check-in.

Signed: Mysti Easterwood Date: October 30, 2011 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Some of you know that in 2006 I began writing Meeting the Girl in the Bone Bikini as an introduction to the female Buddha known as Vajrayogini. In 2007 my creative partner and I won several residencies to work on it - one at Cat'Arte in the Aude, another at the International Writers and Translators’ Center of Rhodes. In 2008 various things (the economy, family issues, partner-panic, the Girl Herself) sent the project to the sidelines while I awaited further instructions.

(before cremating...)

They have arrived.

Yes, I am a *funny* girl. Those inscriptions refer to the thighbone trumpet that will be crafted after my expiration date. Dinah won't you blow . . . ?

I made those pants for the first MGBB performance/workshop 5 years ago, and thank goddess they are stretchy. For now, writing takes the lead - though I am slowly growing toward the idea of collaboration again. Maybe with someone musical this time (bells & bones, y'all...). Not to mention an editorial sense of humerus.

Updates weekly, I promise.
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∫∫∫Fruity Birthdayz to You!!∫∫∫

2011-10-25T12:02:00.000-07:00

My morning pages from Oct. 24, dedicated to Viviane and Willard, born (or materialized) on October 25, several years ago...

Greater than . . .

2011-10-18T09:20:00.000-07:00

I finally twigged to what I can do instead of the "morning pages" - which, you may recall from my cranky remarks below, I found useless.

The first move is to take a walk. A long one. Interestingly, this is one of Cameron's key points in this week's chapter (#11, Recovering a Sense of Autonomy). This has also been 'facilitated' by some recent vandalism to my car. I have started parking it well away from my home at night, which requires that I get up and walk each morning. I know that sounds terrible, but really it isn't - I'm assuming that the hoodlums are too lazy to exercise their stupidity when it is rainy or cold, so this is a temporary strategy.

((No, calling the cops doesn't work. This is a small town and until you have lived here 2 or 3 generations ~preferably all under the same roof~ you don't actually exist. ))

The second activity is something I have never indulged: um, I won't call it art, mostly it's just doodling. I gathered up a sketchbook and some pencils last night, found my file of images from an Artist's Way exercise a few weeks ago. As I began to put down lines and color I was actually *nervous*. "This is for fun," I reminded myself, "alley-oop."

Photo of the tea channels in the Forbidden City gardens.

I made a few blobs and squiggles, wandered off into them for about 20 minutes. . . then I pulled out the image file. Ah, the Forbidden City gardens. Can you see the echo? No?   You're right, it may only exist in the doodleverse of my brain, but close enough.

As you can see, I have no skill as a draughtswoman, so trying to draw anything beyond impulse is out of the question. But tracking re/semblance is another discussion...
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Though still plowing through The Artist's Way, I have started writing again - who knows how seriously. The identity of the piece will remain unmentioned for now; wanna give it a month or so to root in my awareness and on the page.   But it has been calling me consistently to the desk (or whatever suitable surface works that day) for the last couple of weeks.   I'm going to take an evening this weekend and *lightly* edit was has appeared so far.
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The weather is changing. Big winds blew in a cool(er) front this morning, and there is some rumor of a night in the 40s this week.   I have a sense that my work will bloom in front of the hearth -- which I sought out with a sense of creative urgency-- so the colder, the sooner, the better.
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About those 3 pages...

2011-10-08T16:52:00.000-07:00

The first task of Chapter 9 in The Artists Way was:: "Now read your Morning Pages, with two markers..." I did, and after 20 minutes was bored silly.   Thirty minutes, and I quit.   Dear goddess, what a waste of ink!   45 days at 3 pages a day, and there was not a single surprise. Not one accidental beauty, no piece of information that I had slipped myself on the inksly.   Nada.

Then, I discovered that pseudoguru Byron Katie also recommends 3 pages of spontaneous 'writing' first thing in the morning. Well then, defenestration, ho... Julie I can forgive -- she did move on to walking into your creative work in a subsequent book called Walking Through this World.    But BK creeps me out, and has for many years.   Most gurus do, but Katie's demurral of the title while letting people treat her as though she's awake (she isn't) turns the shudder-factor up a few notches.

I am not sure of the replacement ritual quite yet. It has to be simple, active and engaged. I have meditated first thing in the morning for years, but I need to do something that connects to my creative work without *being* the work. Diane Ackerman arranges flowers, some people write out their dreams, others sketch them. Collage?   Bibliomancy?   Tarot?

I'm on the prowl...

(Later: Gardening?)

from the Artwriting archives

2011-10-08T06:05:00.000-07:00

(Sorry, my job and Occupy Austin have consumed all non-sleeping time this week. But here's what I sound like around art...)

From Angels to Zoology

        T. Paul Hernandez didn't seem to mind my taking up odd positions at the foot of his sculptures. There is, I have noticed, a distinct spatial proscription against sitting on anything you might want to look at, and since the floor was about the only thing that wasn't calling for my attention, sitting on it seemed the best solution. Consider this a recommendation.
        Mr. Hernandez is from Baton Rouge, and to hear him tell it, Louisiana loves its lawn art: sambos from the plantations, grinning lupines rocked back on their haunches, marias sprung from the corner niche. But T.Paul's garden has--how shall we say?--a few extraterrestrial touches.
        First, the studio is scored with these improbable Camembert walls wavering up between onewhere and another, leaving the impression that there is only the slightest chance they will stop at the ceiling. But more important, during the trek from Baton Rouge to Austin, T.Paul's cherubs and Virgins and concrete critters began to pair off, holding something quite human between them: a goofy grace that loosens up to thoughtfulness. After all, the artist comes from the Deep South, the same South that gave us the continent's first cotton plantations, and four hundred years later, David Duke.
        Embodied in three outlying installations, the icons that hold forth on these matters are quietly insistent. In one assemblage, a chorus of sugarcane rises along with a black man's neck -- the better to reach his vulcanized halo.
        Unlike more strident political art, these pieces stay close to where suffering comes from, that shadowy place that seeps through our affiliations and defenses. But they also freely acknowledge the silliest part of suffering: the painful lengths we will go to avoid it.

More Julie Cameron & the Artist's Way...

2011-10-03T13:06:00.000-07:00

I am now on the 9th chapter of The Artist's Way.

Last night I also re-read sections of Writing the Natural Way, Gabrielle Rico's book. Rico's techniques are more powerful, but she makes me appreciate Cameron's voice, which is gentler and more fluid.

From Week 9, Recovering a Sense of Compassion:

Over any extended period of time, being an artist requires enthusiasm more than discipline. Enthusiasm is not an emotional state. It is a spiritual commitment, a loving surrender to our creative process, a loving recognition of all the creativity around us. [...]

A successful creative career is always built on successful creative failures. The trick is to survive them.

'Successful creative failures'?? Well, in that case I am in great shape...

With the 'guided work' from Chap 8, I was looking at my 2009-10 projects (:: The Senses Ten. Meeting the Girl in the Bone Bikini. Karma in the Crucible.) I did the prescribed steps, drafted out a schedule, and started writing. Then last week's encounter with the Oneiros rejiggered the conditions of my writing, opening a different portal into the work itself.

It showed me that what I really want to say is quailing behind the workshop projects.

This week I'll be investigating that fear and harnessing it. I have no illusions about eliminating it, since the process involves challenging my spiritual & creative co-self. Well, co-selves. There is a caboodle of men who have been muse-monsters to my creative life for many years. Husbands, lovers, sons, fathers, friends. To write what I love∞ is to reckon them... enthusiastically.
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(∞ In every sense of the word: caritas, agape, eros - the melting ache of being-with&away that defines love in all of its permutations.)

It's Not What I Write but How...

2011-09-30T09:13:00.000-07:00

According to Hesiod (and this I have corroborated through my own experience) most dreaming breaks down into two basic types. For visionary or "true" dreams, you go through a gate made of ramshorn, the algorithm of their curling is what establishes the 'truth factor' of the dreamwork there. Another, more heavily trafficked realm is approached through an ivory gate, a tangled mess of tusks --all shapes and sizes from elephant to boar tusks - it looks more chaotic and militant.

Orpheus, Euridike, Oneiros

The dreams derived from the first space are called 'Oneiros' after Hermes the Messenger, who either delivers a message, or facilitates your entry through the horned gates. The second are called 'enhypnion' and are made up of the emotional energy you have to discharge before your perceptual system can work properly through the day. To test out this assertion, try going for a day with no sleep (we all dream, but only some of us remember) - before you know it, velociraptors are bursting through the walls and stealing your coffee. Enhypnion does its job. One way or another.

I woke up just before dawn with a long Oneiros, then to be sure that I actually got the thing, I inserted the message into another dream. The short form goes like this:

We're doomed.

And the long form --a little more cheerfully-- like this:

"The world is set on a flat course to certain destruction. Background radioactivity alone is scrambling the genetic codes that determine this planet's ecological integrity. And that doesn't include the billions of pounds of destructive chemicals that have been set loose in the air, water and soil. It can't be stopped, and it can't be diverted. It's a done deal. As a writer you have no more control over this outcome than turning yourself into a basket of petunias."

Well, no wonder I've noticed a slight downtick in motivation.

Anyway, Oneiros continued:

"But, and this is a really big but... Truth is bigger than Doom. Keats wasn't entirely wrong: Truth is not just Beauty, but the love of Beauty. The work now is to infiltrate every single instant, every object, every ounce of space with the algorithms of that awareness. Your obsession with formalism isn't a throwaway. It is key to practicing Love through the rebirth that is coming. Those who practice Love will be recognized and redeemed. Those who choose hatred and fear will be lost. Well, that's one way to put it... The only Choice has ever been to accept the expanding awareness that Love brings. Or not."

This was a little like waking up to find your bed teetering on the tip of the Matterhorn. I felt my way through the message again, testing it out against the other Truth-scenes in my life - • falling in love with the four hands that were guiding my son down a especially difficult birth-passage? check√ ; • the instant I smacked my Consort on the backside and he burped the name of the girl he had just deflowered? check√ ; • the moment of my daughter's death? doublecheck√√.   These were moments in which Power, Insight and Love were entwined like the Graces, and each yielded a burst of energy that shifted the stars.

This message was bigger than all of those put together.    Up or down, Myst, which way are we going? I knew I needed to write out the Oneiros, but instead I rolled it over into another dream, this time through the ivory gates.

In the dream I was in a house like the one in which I ran The Looking Room (my gallery from 2004-2006), but a kitchen was now where the gallery had been. There was an enormous stove off in one corner where I was making a soup.   A very handsome man came in --smart and seemingly self-assured-- expressing his ardor, and could I please finish cooking so he could take me on a date.   I was experimenting with the ingredients, and had learned to keep them separate from one another in the pot. Used my apron as a kind of spoon, scooping out and testing to see if the carrots were still on this side, noodles on that.

I was very excited by this - thinking it was a weird kind of kitchen siddhi - and wanted him to think so too. He just expressed disdain ~ alright, alright, but now could we go and have a real date?    I became slightly embarrassed, thinking "oh he's right, this is just silly..." then caught myself. I didn't launch this dream to be patronized!   I turned to him and expressed the principle I had just learned from Hermes : despite any very brief appearance of 'normalcy,' the Rigor is upon this planet.   There are others who are All-Love-All-the-Time, but they can only work with those who resemble them.   I then explained that keeping the soup ingredients separate was an indicator that I could manage my perception of Beauty and extend it into materials around me.

We then left the house and I walked with him through the world, pointing out what was dead, and what was still Love.   I told him that companion animals were for the purpose of rousing Love in those who had forgotten how to Be.

The dream trailed off in that way that enhypnion does, but I had wanted to step-down the visionary message of the Oneiros and see if it persisted.   And it did.   I awoke again and realized that in many ways it is too late to do the writing I had drafted in 2010.    The moment of its utility has passed, but another purpose, another motivation has arrived to compel my hand.   The fragrant exercise of the imagination has never been more important.   Our Loves depend upon it.
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Back from the Bust...

2011-09-26T11:28:00.000-07:00

Week 7 of Cameron's Artist's Way was something of a washout for me last week. The morning pages have never felt particularly natural or necessary - but I did them faithfully for 6 1/2 weeks -- until I finally 'let' other priorities take over. Specifically, instead of dribbling stream of consciousness for 3 pages, I got up and walked in the woods behind my house, or did some yoga. This did feel necessary -- esp. as I spend 2-4 hours each day driving for my job and family.

Gabrielle Rico's book is still on my desk, and I thought about shifting to those exercises, but on Sunday my creative mind began to shake the bars on her cage: "Let Me OUT! No more 'exercises' - I'm not a baby or a teenager or a fresh adult. I am old and seasoned and ready to roll! Let me out, I say..." My employment/job runs in 4-month cycles, and I am supposed to have a week-long (unpaid) break between one cycle and another. It has, however, not worked out that way since ... well, ever. We've just started a new cycle, and as I went through the questions with my first subject, a part of me was pacing the length of the cage: lemmeoutlemmeoutlemmeout ... Shush, and have a glass of wine, I replied.

However, not even a good Bandol will shut her up (though you're welcome to test out that theory & bring a bottle over...). So I had just about decided to leave the writing exercises/mentors behind and spend a day in the headwaters of my work. Then I picked up Cameron's book again.

The title of Chapter 8 wasn't all that promising ("Recovering a Sense of Strength"), but I read through it dutifully, hit the Tasks List - and Wallah! this week she is actually having us *do* the work.

There are six steps to the "Strength" task, and the sixth actually summarizes the previous five. I think I can do all of them in one day - some parts 'sitting' with them, other parts as I weave in and out of my domestic goddess/bookmonger/mother duties.

Let's go... if I can show my Creative some tangible progress by the end of the week, it's possible She won't do something colossally stupid like quit my job in the middle of an interview.

Don't laugh, it could happen.
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Oh this makes me feel so much better...

2011-09-23T19:58:00.000-07:00

"The writing of books, especially those books that change the world, requires its authors to get down into the boiler room of the human soul. Even on the most mundane level, the creation of a book is a difficult act. If you have doubts about this, give it a go. Authors are often outsiders, standing apart, self-consciously observing the life that everybody is happily living. They spend much of their life alone, not in this world, but in the one that they are creating on the page[. . .] (emphasis mine)

"It is a profession that has notoriously taken its toll on its practitioners. Many of the greatest writers have been alcoholics, drug addicts, sociopaths, psychopaths, sexual deviants, gamblers, thieves, all of the above, other and most just certifiably insane."

Scot Casey, Bellingham Reviews and Ruminations

Writing the Natural Way

2011-09-22T00:14:00.000-07:00

In the mid-80s I lived in Huntington Beach, CA for a year, and spent the Spring of 1987 going through the exercises in Gabrielle Rico's Writing the Natural Way. I confess that I did not finish the book, but the first few chapters wandered me into a space that produced some of the most evocative poetry I've written:

“The Sea has another Time to Tell”

The line shudders with simile

troubled as the logic

in a seashell’s lip.

Semblance of foam

æther’s argot,

dreamt down

into a ruffled bone

by something so prodigious

we haggle in calling it ‘time.’

Seconds the width of a human hand

hold then

millenium;

And touch in that recalcitrance

the yielding of a rose.

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I just re-checked Rico's book from the local library - struck by how academic is her style compared to Julie Cameron's, and yet the exercises are very potent. Her primary tool is 'clustering.' This is a process which calls for a certain oblivion to time, and willingness to just fool around until the urge to write sweeps over you.

A couple of days ago I sat down and completed one of these exercises - to find that its potency was all that I remembered. What I wrote out --almost as automatic writing-- reminded me that I am in a recovery period, one in which certain projects and people will disappear in a poof of 8th House smoke, followed swiftly by others with different properties and qualities. Throughout the Aughties I worked on nine titles or so, and over the last few weeks I have pulled them out, not exactly reading but glancing through them. Some are still fat and vibrant, like a succulent on the verge of blooming; others have curled up into brittle parchment - touch them with my mind and they'll shimmer to dust.

Choosing which project to revive or focus isn't even on the agenda yet, but in any case, I find the idea of 'free' choice deeply suspect. More often than not, the decisions that work out the best for me have come about through augury. Heraclitus swears: Time is a child / playing a game of dice. / The kingship is in the hands of a child. If the wisest man in Greece (no, it wasn't Socrates, but Thales might be in the running) says that Time is Tyche, chance, a necessary accident, why should I work against that flow?

Instead, I have found it useful to create a certain space around non-linear choice (:: a choice I don't make so much as let it find me), so a couple of years ago I started setting out options near the altars where I do my spiritual practice.

(A momentary digression might be in order: By spiritual practice I mean the convergence of cognitive and aesthetic trainings. Imagination + will = coaxing the senses to unforget the Goal. The only way I can express the Goal right now is as an ethical object... y que Boring, no? So we'll let that discussion make its way back to us another time.)

In those sites --and really, a blind person could find them easily enough in my home ~ they have a certain softness-- the music of Chance is tuned up. My options are usually written on tiny pieces of paper, then strip-curled against the edge of a scissor blade. They go into jars or vases, large enough for my hand. When I seek a direction, first I empty out the resistance to Tyche that may linger in my mind and body - stretching or trance usually accomplishes this in a half-hour or less - then I reach into the jar.

I am never disappointed.

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Last week: Writer off / Mom on...

2011-09-21T15:23:00.000-07:00

(Alert to FWOL newbies: this post is only tangentially-related to writing. It is, however, morphogenetically-related to a long period of not-writing from the Spring of 2010 until August, 2011. Turn back now if you're allergic to anger...)

Didn't publish anything last week... I was too busy destroying the last flimsy scraps of relationship with my ex-husband. Our agon is Parenting... as usual. I've wasted almost a year trying to reason with the man in an effort to bring my teenager home at least part of the time. Went through a round of therapy with the manchild; moved to another city so I could afford the 3 bedroom condo that would accommodate him; enrolled him in the alternative school that both father and son demanded; consulted lawyers to suss out my legal options. After the kid skipped coming home last week so he could --on a school night-- go hear Excision, I finally lost it - not to the point of bodily or property damage, but making it clear that my patience had *entirely* run out.

A Little Background:

Four years ago, the X decided to stop paying child support. We were living in Hyde Park --not the cheapest neighborhood in Austin-- so the loss unbalanced my household budget.   I thought I'd be able to make it up over the next year, so I took a deep breath and moved into a one-bedroom cottage. Then 2008 happened. Like everyone else that year, my income surged and evaporated, mostly evaporated. Meanwhile, the X sent my son home with decreasing frequency while giving him freedoms far beyond what a 13, 14, 15 year old was emotionally or spiritually ready to handle. All discussions to iron out the policy differences in the households degenerated into sniping matches, so in March of this year I withdrew from the fray, insisting that we go into anger management counseling and work out a household rhythm from there.

By that time the boyo was using far too many substances that didn't originate in my kitchen - where another kind of alchemy prevails entirely. I tried to indicate that this was an issue we needed to work on ... and for my trouble I was denounced as paranoid, bitter & friendless (and those are the nice terms).    No, not by the kid --who knows I know better-- but by the X, who greatly preferred his oblivion. Drugs? Our son? There Is No Problem.

But there is. I could count them out here, but I might as well just call Austin PD and ask them to follow the kid around.   So I'll be discreet. But we're a long way from Strawberry Fields.

Since I am loathe to tap the authorities, and I have about that much (holds up thimble) use for normative psychology, I feel that my best bet is to bring the kid home on a regular basis. The idea is to remind him of the massively weird (but quite drug-free) realm into which he was born, and whose riches he stands to inherit if he doesn't warp out or burn up all of his receptors.

But the X has decided to obstruct my influence (and usurp my rights) with his passive-resistance routine: "Oh, I let him choose when he goes to your house, and for how long." Say what? "I don't want to tell him what to do..."   As if. Does the kid only go to school when he wants, stay up till dawn when he wants, and eat whatever/whenever he wants? Not so much, eh. X simply doesn't want to violate the 'Bro-code' with his teenage son by saying: "You are with your mom one week, with me the next." Or two days a week. Or even one.

Sooo, Last Thursday...

. . . I lost it. I had driven to Austin and waited around to see the offspring. After calling his g/f's mom, I drove over to pick him up and take him to his dad's (maybe we could spend a few minutes talking on the way?), but he declined the ride. A few minutes later the X pulled up and the kid jumped in his car. Neither of them even acknowledged I was there.

Fed up with being 'dismissed' as though I were the downstairs maid, I turned my car around to follow them home. This startled the X, who began to act as though I was chasing him, squealing down Far West Blvd at 9 p.m. at 60 mph.    I kept the car in sight as he wove through traffic trying to throw me off.    "Wow," I thought, "he's actually afraid of me. Good."

X then pulled over in a parking lot, got out and approached my car. A million years ago during our courtship, I had told him the story of Ken Kesey offering gum around the room during a barfight.    "Wanna piece of gum," he grinned.   "You're no Ken Kesey," I said. As a look of confusion crossed his features, it hit me: he doesn't even remember that I was the source of that story.    Do I exist? Did I ever? Apparently not.

"What are you doing?" he asked. "Send my son home," I replied. He snorted and walked off. I pulled out of the lot and continued tailing them. He stopped one more time, dispatching my son into a sandwich shop to buy dinner. I got out and leaned against my car. "Almost there," I noted, adding a few other indelicate observations re: X's character. I wasn't nice but I wasn't particularly vulgar, opting to keep my opinions colorful and somewhat grammatical. "You can't follow me home." "Watch me."   He closed his windows and moon-roof. "I'm not done yet," I said, opening the driver's side door ( Hmm... the lock seems to have malfunctioned). A look of real surprise and a bit of panic shot across his face. He whipped out his phone: "I have dialed 9 & 1," he said, "One more digit and the cops are here." "Because I'm making sure our son gets home safely?" I laughed. I am the custodial parent, with a copy of the court order in my car.   "Oh please do," I said, "and the kid comes home with me tonight."

He closed the door again and put away his phone. I followed them out of the parking lot and the 6 blocks back to X house. As my kid got out of the car, I bade him a good-night and bon appetit, turned around and drove home.

"Solo existen el bien y la ausencia." (Jose Lezama Lima)

Jose Lezama Lima was a Cuban poet and novelist under house arrest for over 20 years, and who concluded during his ordeal that only two things exist: the Good and its Absence. That is what reality comes down to, I suppose, but there's a lot of irreality to negotiate on the way. That night I drove home through what seemed like a thousand-mile abyss. During the next 24 hours, my sense of impotence and loss, fury and frustration burned something open in me, excavating what may turn out to be a useful darkness. There I found that the X is no longer excused, tolerated or forgiven. He is simply absent.

Now I can get to work...

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The Sectional Effect...

2011-09-08T19:52:00.000-07:00

As mentioned in previous blogs, I am not quite 'writing' yet -- though this blog is noodling along in that direction. What I am doing is taking preparatory steps in the form of ...

a) creative recovery
b) helping my son find his direction in the new HS and
c) completing the terms of my employment.

As I round up those preliminaries, the work will stretch out and revive.   My chart hints at a few surprises though. Spring of 2012 will unfold under a Saturn/Uranus square... no astrologer has much good to say about that square, but I can probably work something interesting out of it. The Saturn part is happy up there in Libra; meanwhile, Uranus is a natal aspect in my sun sign of Cancer. Both planets are in Cardinal signs - the 'start-ups' of the zodiac. My 8th House Cancer is like a pseudo-Scorpio, all intense and psychic and sexy - Uranus amping up the whoopee factor.   Saturn will be cruising the Libra/Scorpio cusp about that time -- still milking its happy-place in Libra before heading into the vasty deeps of Scorpee∞∞∞.

So what we gots over there in the Spring/Summer of 2012 is some mightymighty Scorp-on-Scorp action.

To get ready for this aspect I have had an uncharacteristic need to ground my activities in a hospitable space.   The 'space' part only took a 6-month search. The 'hospitable' a bit longer.

One of my entreaties to the Lords of the Home-iverse --besides the fireplace-- was a sectional sofa. But where was the $499 going to come from? or, at a great garage sale, even $199? and how do I move 9 feet of sofa in a Honda civic? Turned out the answer broke down --like the solution itself-- into 3 parts: #1 - A sectional came up on craigslist for $150, then a couple of days later dropped to $60. #2 - The owner was in San Marcos and had a truck. And #3 - the sofa (omfg) -- she is in three sections, all about 30 lbs each.

And then, just to be sure that I didn't miss the fancy footwork that went into this transaction, the Lords arranged to have someone else buy the Beast (our purple loveseat-futon - many of you have slept on it) on the same day I bought the sofa. And to be super-extra-clear about the integrity of all of this, They nudged my teenage son to come home, then jiggled the time frame so that all the men showed up *at the same time* (I'd scheduled them an hour apart), to move everything lightning fast and all together.

Shazaam!
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The 12 Week Runway...

2011-09-01T09:30:00.000-07:00

I have a little bookstore on Amazon which has been poking along since the move to San Marcos. Since it's not currently making any money, the fun is in spending -- i.e., my book-buying jaunts. I try to only buy what might otherwise fit into my personal library... though I have picked up a few books that give me the creeps (almost anything by Ken Wilbur), and one or two I need desperately to read (Family Games: General Models of Psychotic Processes in the Family). Then there are books that sell for a penny or under on the Amazon website -- so as much as I would like to list them, they are off-limits.

Julie Cameron's The Artist's Way was one of those. A while back I bought a copy for a friend... well, I bought it for myself, but lent it to her. Over the course of several months I watched it wander through the house: at first it remained on her sofa table, then drifted to the shelf beneath the table. A few weeks later it wandered to one of her myriad desks, and finally onto the bedside stand. Since this person consumes twice the average adult RDA in irony, I suspect she found it frivolous -- but habit-forming.

I also noticed that during this migration she began to make art again. A lot of art. So I set aside the expectation that the book would ever come home to me, and um, coincidentally borrowed her copy of The Multiple and Mutable Subject (hey SS, if you ever want it back, just sing out...).

Anyway, Ms. Cameron's book showed up at my wholesale outlet back in May, so I bought it for a buck, thinking - if not now, soon. The move to San Marcos --while churning through the summer's heat, tribal romance and job deleria-- put working with the book beyond reach until the beginning of August.

Our condo is almost 3 times the size of the cottage in Hyde Park, but four years of writing in 450 square feet has had its effect. So my creative space is scattered all over the house. And yes, it is one space, not spaces, hopscotched around the house in acute angles and nooks. I sit near --if not on-- the floor, with walls on at least half (e.g. a 'corner') and sometimes 2/3 of the way around me (220˚ if you want to get technical). One evening early in August I tucked myself into one of those vertices and fired it up...

Now I am five weeks into what I recognize as my (re)recovery phase. It has been almost 2 years since I set aside my creative work... unprecedented in my adult life. I have been writing almost daily since Bob and Anya declared me 'done' and kicked me out of my apprenticeship when I was 23. I may have gone a week or two away from my desk but 42 journals, several dozen published articles and numberless book drafts attest to the constancy of my foll... er, vocation.

The week's main exercise in the Artist's Way was to avoid reading. Hah! Cameron calls it 'reading deprivation,' and it forced me to note all the surfaces that contain text... it truly is a kind of worldskin, at least for the literate. My friend Denise and I had a chat about this - I recommended David Abrams' Spell of the Sensuous as a longer look at the question of where our omniliterate habits have landed us. (Beyond ironic, isn't it...?) And for the bookstore I just bought Walter Ong's work on literary and oral societies, which I hope to at least skim before I send it out the door.

So, by way of Cameron's exercise, the question I posed to myself through the week was:: is it possible to write without reading? I'm not talking about reference or adjunct or earlier drafts. I mean reading what you are writing in this moment!

When my son was a small child just getting acquainted with the textual universe, I taught him how to control his cognition of the scripts by which we are bombarded. That is, as he was learning to read, he was also learning to unread -- switch off the automatic acceptance of all things written. (I've long thought human design would do well with earlids; this is the literary equivalent). I have since lost that ability (oh it's in here somewhere), but I wonder how such a skill --a minor siddhi, if you will-- would affect my own written work.

You'll probably notice if I pull it off. Might be awful. Might not.

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"Step, Ball-Change and a Pirouette...*"

2011-08-25T16:33:00.000-07:00

or...Moving to San Marcos on the way to OneWhere.

     You may have heard that I rolled down the road to San Marcos last Spring, weakening --if not canceling entirely-- the levitational pull of Austin. It wasn't my first venture: in the late 60s I lived here while attending San Marcos Academy. With my midget guitar and hand-sewn dresses, I enrolled as a folkie, exited as a hippie - anti-war emanations from Austin suffusing my 12-year-old soul. Ironically, marvelously, my mother earned the stiff SMA tuition as a Saigon-based employee of Pacific Architects and Engineers, the Halliburton of its day.   Little did she realize I was taking classes in Advanced Peacenik.

As for this millennium, the decision to move to Hays County started shaping up last year. I needed a place large enough for my teenager, and rents in Austin are … well, what word fits the situation?   Dazzling, really. Did the real estate djinns blast us to Northern California? Feels like it.   A small 2-bedroom bungalow in the center of Austin is 2-3 times what I am paying for a 3-bedroom condo in San Marcos.

So yes, housing prices were a factor. But the other big issue was pure. . . atmosphere.   During one of my reconnaissance missions I met a member of the San Marcos River Foundation, and he told me that San Marcos had more green space per capita than any city in Texas. (I'm not sure at what point 50,000 people constitute a "city," but never mind.). I had noticed upon crossing into Hays County that I was doing this strange thing --what was it called again?, oh yeah, breathing.    My lungs were filling up with something besides nebulized concrete.   Awesome. I'll take two, please. (Lungs, that is...)

We are in the worst drought Texas has seen since the Dust Bowl. In San Marcos I can see and hear it.   I can taste it with my skin, and I participate in this reality, even as it is softened by the little rivers and cedarscrubbed hillsides. When I am in Austin, there is a kind of insularity – as if everyone has agreed that to notice is impolitic, even gauche. "I mean, its climate change, man. What're you gonna do?"

(Well, for starters, turn off your lawn-sprinklers and drip your trees. Trees are big, sighing upstands of home/shade/stability/food for all kinds of critters. You included. Let 'em go thirsty at your peril next winter when ice and wind come to town like the anti-Santa.)

Then there is the creatural side of this place. The critters in Austin are also pretty communicative, but here it is non-stop. My apartment is on the edge of the Schulle Canyon greenbelt so the birdlife has been especially chatty - but I also put out big buckets of water 2 or 3 times a week for the wingless denizens of the Canyon, so they are ranging a little closer than they would otherwise.

San Marcos may be a transitional space; we'll see how the next year unfolds. But I definitely sense a long-displaced clarity wandering back into my awareness.

Welcome home, *Yogini...

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( >\|/< )

2011-08-18T14:50:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the (parenthetical) world of FWOL, where you will see a bunchload of interpolations perking up through any single, simple thought.

That's just how the bouquet grows, cherie...

After a couple of years' pause from the blogosphere, here we go... My concerns here will be the metaschtick of writing: where (& occasionally 'where not'), with whom, and from time to time, how. (Example :: pour large glass of wine into bathtub, step in, hum the first 20 measures of the Halleluajah Chorus, step out, dry feet with printer paper.   The first three letters you can make out in the wine as it dries are the initials of your protagonist. Unless she is a dog.).

I'd do my mentors and teachers and well-readers way wrong if the 'why' went by unremarked, so you'll be getting a piece of that pie as well.
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The hiatus was in honor of my teenager, who in 2010 seemed hell-bent on outdoing both his dad and me for sheer, feckless teenagery. So I hopped off of the writing path and walked alongside those shenanigans for a little better than a year.   He's now in an 'alternative high school' where he'll get tons of attention and love, and a few surprises along the way. For my part I am *hugely* relieved by the environment, which promises to provide some important translation services.

Outside of my engagement with his school, I have pulled the 'sacrificial mom' simulation, and returned to my native attitude: curious and engaged, devoted but detached.   Like any parent, I am invested in seeing my kiddo build (not merely acquire) the tools he needs to live out his vocation. But what happened to mine? I'll be damned if I am going to keep entertaining the delusion that the writer and the mother are mutually exclusive. Aut Liberi aut libri was for a world without laptops.

We can do better. Bro...

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