Netterdämmerung

The Muse called the other day - and asked (as he is supposed to do) if I was writing.

"Well, I was sick all last week..." and threw in a few rancid details.
Silence.
"Oh, and I've been looking for work."

He was having none of that, didn't even glance at the diversionary bon-bons.

"So...  Are? You? Writing?"
"Yes," I lied.   Well, maybe not lied-lied, but I did leave out the beginning of the sentence:
"If by 'writing' you mean sitting at the computer, fiddling with a blank Word document till I need to eat, pee, stretch or check my Facebook page, then Yes."

§§§

With that not-quite-truth staining the back of my tongue, over the last few days I executed  a hard shut-down from the 'Net -- just to see if I could compose anything without  immediately fact-checking, jingling the grammar gods or pestering my erstwhile agent.   Don't get me wrong,  this is not the beginning of some soliloquy about how Noble Our Life Without teh Webbin'.  I <3 me the Interwebs, still believe in that Ever-ever-land where the \/\/\/ opens humanity to unprecedented levels of creativity and connection, and DarqueNet doesn't sell pharmaceutical-grade opiates  to high-school seniors.

(cough)

But I digress.   After surviving nearly a week of Netlessness, I have decided to disconnect until the end of an *actual* day of writing.   Bruce Sterling once told me that he never permitted Net access in his writing space - and even in that antedeluvian year (I think it was 1999) such an idea seemed impossibly ascetic.   But it has been 11 days since I last opened the file on HAVOC (yes, yes - I was ((actually, still am)) sick; and yes, I was also applying for jobbyjobs).  Time to invoke Martial Law, find my Inner Leni and put her in charge of the Reword/Reward circuit.   ¡Achtung, Mammies!

World Away

I am sitting outside on this mid-October day, in a state of oblivion regarding the fact that I have just over a week to do EVERYthing.  It's not hyper, that bole.  The high wind will pick up and toss me into another language and form, my eyes resting on things my children never saw.  Thank you, Goddess; it will help to be free of these mindprints, free of the way I slip into Quentin and Sarah's frame, voice, shape while regarding the home to which they have become --what do we say?-- insensible.

And speaking of insensible:  my body/brain seems to be manufacturing its own sedative.   Last week I was a twitching, list-making mess, wondering where in the Universe was the cashflow for this folly?  This week I am just present - there isn't even a  sense of trust or precognition or rhei.   It's not Zen so much as an irreversible fatigue with the argumentative nature of existence.    "Pipe down, World.  Give yourself a fucking break."

Havoc floats by and waves.   I have said in its writing that I will wrap myself around the real world again, I will hold it in my heart and go dark and dark until Time herself is reduced to a simple green comma, curled out and holding the last white tear.

For Linking-In Loud

Today I filled out a Linked-in form - and for its 'professional description' box I wrote: Unprofessional: presently mourning the death of my teenage son.  Check back in 2017.  

Blunt enough, Myst? While I recognize that hanging with me isn't that much fun these days, I seem to be retaining a good dozen close and closer friends - people who are gambling better than even odds that I will stay glued to this planet a few more years.

(I suspect that God is the bookie, and She at least, will break even.)

As both of my children were born and did die in this lovely little city, it behooves me to take a long wander away from its charms and mementos - which are mauve and ultramarine glitterbombs ticking away every few feet.  So I am preparing for pilgrimage - to places far and tremendous - wondering what kind of story I can possibly offer that will serve as a social emollient, yet preserve some of my very necessary dysolation.  [No, that's not a word - yet...]

I continue to be a writer, as witnessed by the crepuscular production of the handbook I mentioned in the previous blog.   That work --titled HAVOC--  tries to ravel and reweave the first chaotic hours after my son's death.   It is the only thing I can work on right now that doesn't interfere with the interiority - dysolation, if you will - this kind of experience demands.   But I still have to buy the apples, the coffee, the wine; still have to ask the woodcutter to bring the ksilo down to the terrace, and say pleasant things to people who have earned the solid-gold right not to know how much I am suffering.

~~~

While the  question of 'my story'  is on auto-ponder, and Havoc makes its way down the mountain, I do realize from time-to-time how much I miss the other work. The work that addresses who we love, and how; what potencies remain unawakened by our forms of cherishing;  and the questions of temporality, habit and Nike ~necessity~ that delapidate our caresses.   And more critically, what to do about those erosions.  What to do... what to do...  at one point I had a few ideas. We'll see if they return.

I am not in the same anaesthesia that characterized my daughter's death (how amazingly awful is it that I can compare these?),  but the wit I can bring to these issues is off, belayed by this thick longing to hear and feel and smell my son's corporeal presence.  And not separately, but with that delicious overlap that declares what you love in its profusion.  When a zephyr brings one of those traces to me, or I am sheered blind by his utter gone'ness, my body's only recourse is to weep.  And this isn't just your average 3-hankie sobbing fit - this is an infibulated roar, a baying, as if I am trying to succuss my feet up through my hips and out my throat.    I've learned to wrap my arms around this and drag it out of social range, but if delayed too long, I begin to burn, to fry from the inside, as if some hidden sun has lost its ozone layer, and it's August all up in here.

And maybe it is.  I hear there is a Mediterranean dish that involves cooking a squid in its own ink.   Sounds promising.

Decajour VIII: March 17-26

[Nota bene (added December, 2015):  The 'decajour' referred to below is a ten-day rhythm that I began to observe sometime in the 90s, and have used as a measure of creative time for the last 25 years.
          A seven-day workweek is from the five observable planets of antiquity + sun and moon days. If we are hold to that atavism in organizing our time, why not update it to include the three "new" heavenly companions ~Neptune/Ouranos/Pluto~ and designate their days?  
         My creative rhythm swings between intense and open, so out of 10 days I usually see 6 or 7 that are intense, 3 or 4 that are more open, expansive - adding up to a 'decajour.'   The previous 8 blog entries show my experimentation in 2014 with a layer of this decajour attention even as I continued to work in a conventional employment setting.
         Now I am a little freer to implement this rhythm more fully.  We'll see if the creative work is enlivened thereby. ]


3/17   Well, my d'jour aleatory (or Tychic) system may have expired - or withdrawn into some kind of twilight.    I jiggled the jar and pulled - only to realize that I had NO interest in working that project.  Pulled a second, and again: Nope. 

And in any case, the trip to Chicago may have reconfigured how I can work for a while.   I'll only have one and a quarter part-time jobs (workplace #1 is winding down; workplace #2 is still in its experimental stages) for the next few months, but there is so much chaos between the ebb of one and (ostensible) flow of the other that my writing time will be even more erratic.   

So this d'jour I am going to work on the two remaining projects, getting them in shape to submit for residency applications.  I need to be ready to step into αὐτoποίησις  this summer as both employment scenarios come rolling to a natural halt.  

3/18  Spent a rather amazing amount of time looking through residency lists yesterday.   I think I have rounded up the handful that may be interested.  Meanwhile,  the decision to trim the four projects to two is taking hold.  I may consign the other two to the post-publication pile (along with MGBB, the 13th Moon, HomOneiros and spin-offs... (or is that 'spins-off'?)).  At this point, I just want to be sure I can get at least ONE long essay and ONE book finished in 2014.  

I wrote to WU a few days ago, begging his indulgence with the slooooow pace of my reading the preface draft to his work.  He has been revising the work over the last three weeks - we are now in V.6.   I've only printed out three of them, and the latest version awaits my attention in pdf form.   In my flurry of excuses, I threw in that I have a hard time reading *deep* work in electronic media - what I call 'wet-text.'    It is true, mostly because I have spent the last 20 years yapping online: social frippery for the most part, and have trained myself to skim this 'wryting,' using that peculiar organ I call the eyr - not seeing without hearing/not hearing without seeing.   

Thinking perhaps I protested too much, I pulled out the PDF and *tried* to read it Saturday night.  I was 'not even wrong,' -- untwisting Dr. Pauli's famous exasperation.    It is that bad.  I need paper; I need to be able to touch the document, involve it with the rest of my posture.   "My intelligence, as well you know, is corporeal," I mumbled.   

Well, yes.   To underscore the point:  today I went to the gym, took the long-suffering document with me (Version 4, the last one I printed out), and propped it up as I bicycled and walked.   Funny thing, that.   As my heartrate went over 120, the writing 'became' more lucid, more finely argued.   Yeah. 

Looks like I might need to drag a treadmill into my office.   Seriously.  

(Triska)decajour VII: March 4 - 16

3/5  This 'writing' cycle will be a little longer (13 days), owing to the job-based travel on my schedule for the middle of this decajour.   And when I woke up yesterday and inquired of the jar, it threw me #5, the 'wander around' directive.  Which is exactly what needs to happen right now, as I am not ready to shift out of last week's activity.  

This cycle, as I mentioned in Decajour VI, will be a reading period, tho.   I don't write while I am traveling - but I do read more incisively in unfamiliar environments, something I discovered years ago. 

3/6-15
Reading through Wu's preface - which kept morphing into newer versions.   The man gets it did, I have to say.  Wish I had one-fifth of his drive.  

O.k.  - two-fifths.   And that wish may be coming true.   Pluto parked itself across from my Sun a few days ago, and I felt this internal shift...  Hard to describe, but my FB icon of Malificent is pretty close.   Plutomystium.   Dark, but more like a ray of dark - cutting through my dithering habits.  

It's probably time to dye my hair, but the j.o.b. delays the impulse.   This summer. 

Decajour VI: Feb 22 - March 3

 2/22  Today I found myself esp. delighted by the fact that I Did Not Know what the gods would put in front of me for the next 10 days.    And lo, when I reached into the jar, #3 popped out, a project I haven't touched since moving to New Mexico!   I (actually, Alana Keres) published a related piece last March, but it was only a fragment of the story - which I will expand over the next ten days (and again, whenever Tyche deems).

Upon moving to New Mexico in 2013, I figured it would take about a year  to re-establish my writing practice, as I caught my bearings, paid off the move/other debts and restored my savings.   Mentioned in Decajour V,  news from my  employer last week brought new confirmation to that timeline.  I find myself fantasizing about transferring my 10-day creative week to Real Life - modeling the work/life balance that one would imagine a post-industrial world could sustain: 3 days in high focus/2 days lolling around/3 invigorated days/2 days in a lower key.   Repeat the whole thing twice more to complete the 30-day month.

That would give people (well, for now, me) 18 days of high focus (what we now call 'work') and 12 days of going easy (current parlance: 'days off').   Compare that to the contemporary 20-22 days on/8 days off every month.     Perhaps I'll soon be able to experiment with this rhythm.

2/23  Discovered the campus Satellite coffee house last night; dunked a red-eye at 7 p.m., was asleep by midnight - such is the power of my serotonin production.   Got a couple of pages written as out of the corner of my ear I listened to a kid --maybe 23 or 24, just back from Afghanistan-- bang around the scales of his emotional body.  PTSD and then some.   I just wanted to put my arms around him and transfuse clarity, balance - and wipe off the clotting of so much violence. 

Yet the writing rolled out. . . Something about this particular project has caught me, as though it has my sleeve and is drawing me along.   Woke up this morning thinking:  I can't know the whole picture of this lifetime, but through the work, I can call the pieces together.  The very action of seeking/creating narrative not only changes what this life (well, these lives: Mystes', AlanaKeres', Eleusis') means, but what it can accomplish.  That has to be enough. 

2/24 - In which I realize that some time soon, I will have to just take The Leap.   It's not a suspicion anymore.   There's a depth that I can't even touch at this point, one that only comes with falling out of time. 

2/25 - 3/3  Squeezed out about 1000 words on this piece, but realized that I have buckets of background to review.  Printed out the letters between the various players (Eric, Jesse, Paco, moi, Sally); started drafting some questions to deepen the pool; reviewed my journal notes from Feb/March of 2013.  Curious that this floats up for consideration during exactly the same period in which I produced the first review.    Though. . .  this desert is a far cry from Texas wet last year.  Hell, Texas 2014, with its polar vortices and ice fairies, is a far cry...  (maybe the artist's Icelandic girlfriend stirred the cauldron widdershins). 

Then my friend Wu revised the preface to his book.  And re-revised it.  I think he's on version 4, and I am still reading V.2.    Sigh.  

(I suspect the next decajour will be devoted to reading. )