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.)   

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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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