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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