Thursday, July 28, 2011
Review of We by Yevgevny Zamyatin
Just wrote up a glowing review of a dystopian classic on GoodReads. Check it out. Also, did one for It's A Bird, a very fine, startling, and beautiful take on Superman. I have a small stack of graphic novels, short stories from Zamyatin, more Kenneth Grant, and (what I'm really excited about) Gun With Occasional Music by Jonathan Lethem to get to. It has been a deliciously gray day out here in Flagstaff with rain and epic arcs of lightning, with peals of lightning in quick pursuit. I have projects ahead of me (bike repair and firepit construction) before a little get-together Saturday night. In other news, I start volunteering at the CSA this weekend, which is rather exciting. Wish me luck as I check in with a few possible employers tomorrow, as well. I am on to chapter 19 of the Vincenzi story - recognize that the first ten chapters require some serious revision since they were written last year - and think I have about eight to go plus a brief conclusion/epilogue. Even in a draft format, I want to compile the chapters and have request editors. I would definitely appreciate it! And tomorrow afternoon I am going to finalize revisions I have been postponing and submit them to The Sun next week. I won't hear back for a few weeks or months, but it will be a nice break from thesis-ing.
Monday, July 25, 2011
"Between the Folds" as well as Unfolding & Remembering
See the preview and more info here.
First of all, a hearty recommendation. It is elegant, smart, and precise without missing the playfulness and humor of its subjects. It has to do with paper-folding, mostly origami but not exclusively so, and the way it has become incorporated into artwork, physics, mathematics, medicine, astronomy, and more.
What strikes me most clearly is that with all the attention to physicists and mathematicians experimenting with origami, they don't touch often on descriptions of the universe that depend on membranes. Theoretical physicists, who sometimes seem to change their theories once a month, have at one time or another described the universe as a series of membranes in contact and concert with one another. Or, if I recall correctly, that the universe is part of a whole symphony of interacting membranes that seem to have manifestations in one another's realities. Why, for example, is gravity such a weak force in our universe? Sure, as a human being, an organism, and coherent matter, I am rather pleased to be constituted of more than just blobs of plasma or disparate clouds of gases. When compared to the intensity of electromagnetic waves that can fry a brain or stop a heart nearly instantaneously, or the way massless photons can give me cancer or power a city, gravity comes up a little short. Sure, it might get me if I'm thirty or more feet up and falling, but even that only happens at a rate of 9.8 m/s/s. (Sounds like gobbledygook, but it is the case. Look it up.)
Anyway, what Between the Folds feels like to me is a rich articulation of how our universe might just function. Without a doubt it does this through ingenious artistic and mathematical examples, the "postmodernist's" simplicity, and "les anarchistes" delight in chaos and degradation, but doesn't that sound, well, perfect? Our universe is so richly composed of strange, serpentine dragons that coil around themselves and form proteins in our cells; the peculiar human molding and folding of minerals for our own devices; the aeon's long uplift of tectonic plates as they pass over, under, and across one another; and the terrors of stellar decay and reconstitutions in living tissue. As is put in the documentary, these are transformative processes; origami is the transformation of a simple plane into something else without losing that initial coherency of the plane itself. Most visual arts are subtractive (sculpting) or additive (pottery, painting), but our world as a whole is neither additive nor subtractive (excuse the black hole for a moment); transformation is what our universe seems to be best at.
In Virtual Light by William Gibson (I try to avoid spoilers here), one of the protagonists - a bicycle messenger named Chevette - saves her income to eventually purchase a Japanese bike made from laminated paper. Simultaneously, the plot arises from an attempt to refashion a post-quake (referred to as the Little Grande) San Francisco with an impressive, privatizing facelift. This is revealed in the artifact from which the title is drawn. For anyone who is familiar with augmented reality (AR) programs, well, it has to do with that. What AR does is it allows someone to place digital objects in the analog/material world. With a program such as Layar, one might peer through one's phone at a restaurant down the street and see a series of reviews from Yelp or Google; toggle the phone a little and you can see the menu, specialties, seat availability, and more. If you turn your camera down the street, someone may have just coded in a Chinese dragon to undulate down the street for Chinese New Year or a digitized clown filling balloons and releasing them into the air for a child's birthday. AR creates a reality or series of realities for us to peek into through a digital mediator.
(Note: I have misgivings about AR, but they are not immense. In addition, I think it functions similarly to magical perception in which one perceives the analog/material world and acknowledges and can eventually become sensitive to the layers unseen. Then again, that sounds an awful lot like how a cellular phone or radio transmission works, or even meteorological and geological processes. Heck, even political boundaries function as unseen layers until one is made aware of them.)
The connection here, and it may be thin, is that we have already blanketed our world in an additional layer of information beyond the traditional realities. We have an informational, a digital layer that surrounds us, saturates us, infiltrates us. And this layer is composed of only 1s, 0s, and spaces! Wait, couldn't that also be interpreted as + marks, - signs, and spaces? That sounds just like a plane that is folding up, folding down, or laying smooth. How strange is that? And then another line from the documentary comes to mind, that a fold in a paper cannot be undone; the paper "remembers" the fold, the fold is teaching the paper to exist in particular way. Now we do see a difference, a sort of inherited richness that evades AR: Paper, and I think substance, does not forget what it has been taught; what one does afterward is dependent and controlled by the past.
Though on a more fundamental level, that may sound strained, even paranormal. What comes to mind first, though, is an ecological example. Aldo Leopold journals the exploits of he and his family to restore a Wisconsin farm to like-wild conditions. They plant trees and clear invasives, they deconstruct old buildings and open up corridors for wildlife, and they make space for more-than-human world to reintegrate itself into the place. The space was taught to be a farm, one that wore down the soil and killed or warned off wildlife. The Leopolds and Aldo's students worked to teach the land to be something else, something it once was; those creases and plains remained, but had been transformed and submerged. The project was to reawaken memory, to recall what had been forgotten.
In Waking Life - recently revisited with Miss Becca Taylor - Timothy "Speed" Levitch declares, "Before you drift off, don’t forget, which is to say remember. Because remembering is so much more a psychotic activity than forgetting." And I include this for two reasons: First, I love this line; and second, if paper remembers, if the membranes of our world remember, then that says something of them. Remembering, as it is usually considered, is a process of an intelligent - not necessarily aware - entity. A child remembers to come home before dark, a dog remembers a hand that feeds and pets it, even some single-celled organisms "prefer" those places where they previously found optimum conditions (food, light, shelter). But a crystal can be "taught" to form in different ways (see super saturation) - which is a plot point in Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. What I intend to say is that, if Speed Levitch is right, that remembering is a psychotic activity, and that remembering is also a process of paper or minerals, let alone the stuff the sculpts our world, then these psychic processes are going on all around us all the time.
My friends and I have more than once felt dispirited by the difficulties of getting things "right." As Martin Sheen has said on drilling in ANWR, but descriptive of environmentalists' fight the world over,
First of all, a hearty recommendation. It is elegant, smart, and precise without missing the playfulness and humor of its subjects. It has to do with paper-folding, mostly origami but not exclusively so, and the way it has become incorporated into artwork, physics, mathematics, medicine, astronomy, and more.
What strikes me most clearly is that with all the attention to physicists and mathematicians experimenting with origami, they don't touch often on descriptions of the universe that depend on membranes. Theoretical physicists, who sometimes seem to change their theories once a month, have at one time or another described the universe as a series of membranes in contact and concert with one another. Or, if I recall correctly, that the universe is part of a whole symphony of interacting membranes that seem to have manifestations in one another's realities. Why, for example, is gravity such a weak force in our universe? Sure, as a human being, an organism, and coherent matter, I am rather pleased to be constituted of more than just blobs of plasma or disparate clouds of gases. When compared to the intensity of electromagnetic waves that can fry a brain or stop a heart nearly instantaneously, or the way massless photons can give me cancer or power a city, gravity comes up a little short. Sure, it might get me if I'm thirty or more feet up and falling, but even that only happens at a rate of 9.8 m/s/s. (Sounds like gobbledygook, but it is the case. Look it up.)
Anyway, what Between the Folds feels like to me is a rich articulation of how our universe might just function. Without a doubt it does this through ingenious artistic and mathematical examples, the "postmodernist's" simplicity, and "les anarchistes" delight in chaos and degradation, but doesn't that sound, well, perfect? Our universe is so richly composed of strange, serpentine dragons that coil around themselves and form proteins in our cells; the peculiar human molding and folding of minerals for our own devices; the aeon's long uplift of tectonic plates as they pass over, under, and across one another; and the terrors of stellar decay and reconstitutions in living tissue. As is put in the documentary, these are transformative processes; origami is the transformation of a simple plane into something else without losing that initial coherency of the plane itself. Most visual arts are subtractive (sculpting) or additive (pottery, painting), but our world as a whole is neither additive nor subtractive (excuse the black hole for a moment); transformation is what our universe seems to be best at.
In Virtual Light by William Gibson (I try to avoid spoilers here), one of the protagonists - a bicycle messenger named Chevette - saves her income to eventually purchase a Japanese bike made from laminated paper. Simultaneously, the plot arises from an attempt to refashion a post-quake (referred to as the Little Grande) San Francisco with an impressive, privatizing facelift. This is revealed in the artifact from which the title is drawn. For anyone who is familiar with augmented reality (AR) programs, well, it has to do with that. What AR does is it allows someone to place digital objects in the analog/material world. With a program such as Layar, one might peer through one's phone at a restaurant down the street and see a series of reviews from Yelp or Google; toggle the phone a little and you can see the menu, specialties, seat availability, and more. If you turn your camera down the street, someone may have just coded in a Chinese dragon to undulate down the street for Chinese New Year or a digitized clown filling balloons and releasing them into the air for a child's birthday. AR creates a reality or series of realities for us to peek into through a digital mediator.
(Note: I have misgivings about AR, but they are not immense. In addition, I think it functions similarly to magical perception in which one perceives the analog/material world and acknowledges and can eventually become sensitive to the layers unseen. Then again, that sounds an awful lot like how a cellular phone or radio transmission works, or even meteorological and geological processes. Heck, even political boundaries function as unseen layers until one is made aware of them.)
The connection here, and it may be thin, is that we have already blanketed our world in an additional layer of information beyond the traditional realities. We have an informational, a digital layer that surrounds us, saturates us, infiltrates us. And this layer is composed of only 1s, 0s, and spaces! Wait, couldn't that also be interpreted as + marks, - signs, and spaces? That sounds just like a plane that is folding up, folding down, or laying smooth. How strange is that? And then another line from the documentary comes to mind, that a fold in a paper cannot be undone; the paper "remembers" the fold, the fold is teaching the paper to exist in particular way. Now we do see a difference, a sort of inherited richness that evades AR: Paper, and I think substance, does not forget what it has been taught; what one does afterward is dependent and controlled by the past.
Though on a more fundamental level, that may sound strained, even paranormal. What comes to mind first, though, is an ecological example. Aldo Leopold journals the exploits of he and his family to restore a Wisconsin farm to like-wild conditions. They plant trees and clear invasives, they deconstruct old buildings and open up corridors for wildlife, and they make space for more-than-human world to reintegrate itself into the place. The space was taught to be a farm, one that wore down the soil and killed or warned off wildlife. The Leopolds and Aldo's students worked to teach the land to be something else, something it once was; those creases and plains remained, but had been transformed and submerged. The project was to reawaken memory, to recall what had been forgotten.
In Waking Life - recently revisited with Miss Becca Taylor - Timothy "Speed" Levitch declares, "Before you drift off, don’t forget, which is to say remember. Because remembering is so much more a psychotic activity than forgetting." And I include this for two reasons: First, I love this line; and second, if paper remembers, if the membranes of our world remember, then that says something of them. Remembering, as it is usually considered, is a process of an intelligent - not necessarily aware - entity. A child remembers to come home before dark, a dog remembers a hand that feeds and pets it, even some single-celled organisms "prefer" those places where they previously found optimum conditions (food, light, shelter). But a crystal can be "taught" to form in different ways (see super saturation) - which is a plot point in Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. What I intend to say is that, if Speed Levitch is right, that remembering is a psychotic activity, and that remembering is also a process of paper or minerals, let alone the stuff the sculpts our world, then these psychic processes are going on all around us all the time.
My friends and I have more than once felt dispirited by the difficulties of getting things "right." As Martin Sheen has said on drilling in ANWR, but descriptive of environmentalists' fight the world over,
To this point we've won every fight. But environmentalists must win every fight, for the opposition only has to win once and we could forever lose this incomparable ecosystem that is home to hundreds of bird species, polar bears, muskoxen, grizzles, wolves, caribou, and more.I hesitantly, rather than enthusiastically agree with this statement. We are at a point in our planet's history where a loss is a loss forevermore. Except where that's not the case, where the land can still remember what it was and where we human beings can uncover, to remember what has been asphalted over with the land. Leopold demonstrates this, but also learns to identify with the wolves and that without the wolves, the mountains have no one to protect them. The mountains remember the wolves, they require their protectors from the mule-deer who would, unknowingly, strip the mountains bare. He writes, "Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf," and I think where we can, we need to learn to listen for the recollections and wisdom of the great folding immensity of our mountains (and rivers, oceans, plains, winds...).
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Out West: My Mom's Visit and The Peculiarities of Flagstaff
My mom came to visit for a few days. I was happy to run around with her, showing Flagstaff to her, taking a trip to Rabbit Run Farm and Jerome, and eating plenty of fine food. She enjoyed herself and appreciated the effort made on her behalf. Her visit threw me out of a rhythm, but it was well worth it, and now I am trying to get back into a regiment of research, writing, and work (interning and plant-sitting). As one might expect, we conversed on many things and one such subject comes to mind just now.
She was unable to place it, but my mom had a strange feeling here in Flagstaff. Perhaps it was the dry weather or the altitude, or the way housing and renting work out here (something I think outsiders can perceive rather quickly), or the amalgamation of people that Flagstaff attracts. After a fine evening out, she commented on the intelligence and experience that my friends here have. Not only do people here seem to come from all over, they come with histories and stories and knowledge from all over the place. Flagstaff seems to be a locus for synthesis, for splicing together the peculiarities of our experiences into something more coherent. Well, maybe not more coherent, but stitched together.
Three weeks ago, when driving out to Rabbit Run Farm in Skull Valley, Becca asked me what it was like coming out here (Flagstaff? Northern Arizona? Colorado Plateau? The West? Arizona?) from Nebraska. It seemed both astute and odd; ultimately I couldn't say what it felt like, responding sardonically that the answer would have to be extraordinarily metaphorical to get it right. I let Sarah in on Becca's query at the farm, and she more or less agreed. Out here is different, but how it is, all the ways that it is different sort of hide from language. That said, I think my mom was as aware of it as anyone.
Coming from the Midwest, a assume a sort climatological norm. Hot and humid summers, cold and brutally dry winters; cloud bursts after days of overcast skies, sun and wind that seem to be trying to scramble you like an egg on the pan; and the clear but definite transition of seasons from one to the next. Up here, I was shocked by the comfort of pre-monsoon dry heat and cool nights on my first visit. It seemed deliciously comfortable. The sun - over a mile closer here than in Nebraska - has an impressive intensity, usually clear and welcoming except in direct sunlight at midday. I burned the first few days I was here, unaware that my skin could burn so quickly in such an otherwise mild clime. And at this altitude there seems to be an absurdity of seasons: frosts in June, temperate cool days in February and March, an arid and empty yard that explodes into green between May and June, and nights in mid-July that require a sweater or jacket after a mean, sunny afternoon in the 90s.
We seem to be blessed by manic conditions, by a rapid change from one thing to the next. I have always admired - as long as I can recall, at least - the honesty of weather in Lincoln. If it was cold, it was cold; when it was hot, it was hot; and when you needed to be outside, something about the day could call you out into it. (My mom might argue that I had to learn to listen to such a calling after a lethargic childhood and early adolescence inside, to which I cannot seriously argue. Lincoln, to my ears now, has its odd beckoning calls regardless.) Flagstaff has many blessings and beckoning calls, but you would be wise to pack a raincoat if you're going out in the afternoon, a sweater if you'll be out later. Oh, and if you're headed out in the morning, be sure you have somewhere to stow your early morning garb for when that mercury begins to rise.
Honestly, I think that such upsets make and attract the peculiarities of its residents. How can you expect an homogeneous crowd when the season shifts so radically over the course of the day? People reflect their surroundings and this place has plenty of idiosyncrasies to emulate and admire. It is a little funny that I have landed on housing and planning for my thesis, I can quite rapidly consider a dozen other subjects around which I might right a hundred or two hundred pages. That richness and variety reflects the richness and variety of where I find myself, the people and passions all around me, the needs and potentials hidden beneath the thinnest of skins out here.
Not to say thin skins are common here. I am under the impression that one develops a fortitude from this thin air and this sharp sunlight. I have met and worked with those people who seem capable of letting an emotional or conversational sleight bleed for days, weeks, months. That is not the case here. I have an abundance of strong, determined, and wizened (sometimes harshly so) people to inspire me, not to mention a fickle place to repeatedly suggest a change of perspective.
She was unable to place it, but my mom had a strange feeling here in Flagstaff. Perhaps it was the dry weather or the altitude, or the way housing and renting work out here (something I think outsiders can perceive rather quickly), or the amalgamation of people that Flagstaff attracts. After a fine evening out, she commented on the intelligence and experience that my friends here have. Not only do people here seem to come from all over, they come with histories and stories and knowledge from all over the place. Flagstaff seems to be a locus for synthesis, for splicing together the peculiarities of our experiences into something more coherent. Well, maybe not more coherent, but stitched together.
Three weeks ago, when driving out to Rabbit Run Farm in Skull Valley, Becca asked me what it was like coming out here (Flagstaff? Northern Arizona? Colorado Plateau? The West? Arizona?) from Nebraska. It seemed both astute and odd; ultimately I couldn't say what it felt like, responding sardonically that the answer would have to be extraordinarily metaphorical to get it right. I let Sarah in on Becca's query at the farm, and she more or less agreed. Out here is different, but how it is, all the ways that it is different sort of hide from language. That said, I think my mom was as aware of it as anyone.
Coming from the Midwest, a assume a sort climatological norm. Hot and humid summers, cold and brutally dry winters; cloud bursts after days of overcast skies, sun and wind that seem to be trying to scramble you like an egg on the pan; and the clear but definite transition of seasons from one to the next. Up here, I was shocked by the comfort of pre-monsoon dry heat and cool nights on my first visit. It seemed deliciously comfortable. The sun - over a mile closer here than in Nebraska - has an impressive intensity, usually clear and welcoming except in direct sunlight at midday. I burned the first few days I was here, unaware that my skin could burn so quickly in such an otherwise mild clime. And at this altitude there seems to be an absurdity of seasons: frosts in June, temperate cool days in February and March, an arid and empty yard that explodes into green between May and June, and nights in mid-July that require a sweater or jacket after a mean, sunny afternoon in the 90s.
We seem to be blessed by manic conditions, by a rapid change from one thing to the next. I have always admired - as long as I can recall, at least - the honesty of weather in Lincoln. If it was cold, it was cold; when it was hot, it was hot; and when you needed to be outside, something about the day could call you out into it. (My mom might argue that I had to learn to listen to such a calling after a lethargic childhood and early adolescence inside, to which I cannot seriously argue. Lincoln, to my ears now, has its odd beckoning calls regardless.) Flagstaff has many blessings and beckoning calls, but you would be wise to pack a raincoat if you're going out in the afternoon, a sweater if you'll be out later. Oh, and if you're headed out in the morning, be sure you have somewhere to stow your early morning garb for when that mercury begins to rise.
Honestly, I think that such upsets make and attract the peculiarities of its residents. How can you expect an homogeneous crowd when the season shifts so radically over the course of the day? People reflect their surroundings and this place has plenty of idiosyncrasies to emulate and admire. It is a little funny that I have landed on housing and planning for my thesis, I can quite rapidly consider a dozen other subjects around which I might right a hundred or two hundred pages. That richness and variety reflects the richness and variety of where I find myself, the people and passions all around me, the needs and potentials hidden beneath the thinnest of skins out here.
Not to say thin skins are common here. I am under the impression that one develops a fortitude from this thin air and this sharp sunlight. I have met and worked with those people who seem capable of letting an emotional or conversational sleight bleed for days, weeks, months. That is not the case here. I have an abundance of strong, determined, and wizened (sometimes harshly so) people to inspire me, not to mention a fickle place to repeatedly suggest a change of perspective.
Friday, July 22, 2011
Check out my new post
I have a few entries (the last two most recent) up at the Northern Arizona Sustainable Communities Report blog. Check it out. I has some thrown about philosophy to boot.
You can probably expect a real post up here tomorrow. As it is, I would rather be in the kitchen right now.
My mom just visited. She is awesome and I was happy to host her. I am appreciative to all those lovely people who kept her company and engaged her in fine conversation. I know she enjoyed herself. Tomorrow's post may say a bit more.
There are lovely people all over this damn country. I wish they were a good deal closer. I am thinking fondly of those far away and want you all to know that I hold you close, despite our distance.
You can probably expect a real post up here tomorrow. As it is, I would rather be in the kitchen right now.
My mom just visited. She is awesome and I was happy to host her. I am appreciative to all those lovely people who kept her company and engaged her in fine conversation. I know she enjoyed herself. Tomorrow's post may say a bit more.
There are lovely people all over this damn country. I wish they were a good deal closer. I am thinking fondly of those far away and want you all to know that I hold you close, despite our distance.
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Storms and Absenteeism; Set Aside Haiku
I've been a little absent lately. You may have noticed. I have been writing only gradually on Vincenzi after posting the chapters a few weeks ago. Research on the thesis, as well as reading for Vincenzi, have had a sort of dull, but steady pace. The sun and rains are out - sometimes simultaneously - and that has shifted my mood a bit. As my mother can attest, my mood has been rather and frustratingly subdued due to an overabundance of free time and and frustrating vacancy of income. Both of these I am capable of remedying, but I have a strong preference for work I can stick with over time rather than work that I plan to do for only a scant few, if profitable, months. As it is, I am sitting on potential part-time eggs that would carry through the school year and beyond; to say the least they have not yet hatched. Alas...
Last night, though, there was a storm. The monsoons - summertime, midday rains - have arrived in Flagstaff and I love them. The Southwest has been plagued by drought and fire and despite the divine efforts of some, many parts remain unseasonably arid. (Who would have thought that global climate change would actually get to Texas so soon? Too bad politics don't change as quickly as the weather out here.) At least two of my housemates were frustrated by my eager and sometimes overeager meteorological prognostications, hoping for endless days of sunshine and heat. (I am not arguing with any Midwesterners out there about what constitutes hot, but am mostly reflecting the local sentiment.) I, on the other hand am thrilled. Walking around last night down a nearly deserted San Francisco Street, my umbrella an unimpressive shelter from the rain, was an unadulterated pleasure. It was heavy and chill and wet, but like rain in the Midwest - even where it can be fierce and deadly - it feels like a blessing.
In high school I had a penchant for writing poems about clouds and the rain. A leaden and laden cloud has a distinct look of... well, pregnancy about it. It is full; full of not-yet rain, not-yet lightning and thunder, not-yet sound and fury, and the not-yet life that follows. Rains are signs of fertility and blessing, they bring a sense of novelty to place and a power to disrupt what is going on for what is to come. Desert rains clean off the dust and pollen that has gathered on fenceposts, building walls, car doors, and the rest and it is suddenly gone, everything crisp and new. I recall Daniel Pinchbeck writing in Breaking Open the Head that many intoxicants, marijuana being the most abundant example, can reveal the novelty we once experienced in the world as children; this, he argues, is why everything is so "deep" when one is high and that one can be enchanted by the most mundane of realities. Honestly, I think rain does this to me. (Rain and the movie Pleasantville, after which I always sort of breath deeply and thank the stars I live in a world as vibrant and rich as this one.)
An optimistic assessment of my absenteeism may suggest my own fullness. I am determined to finish the rough draft of the Vincenzi novel this summer - preferably by the end of August or earlier - and am expecting to have something like a literature review accomplished for my thesis before classes begin. I am keeping busy, if somewhat distractedly so, and my silence is a sort of outward contemplation of the internal brewing. I have also made a bit more of a point to meditate and practice focus explicitly, which I have a heartfelt hope leads to greater success on the previously mentioned projects. An uncommon clarity of dreams and recording them also suggest an awakening, heretofore latent power in me; or so I expect. This fullness - characterized by a frustrating lethargy in between bursts of energy and a sense of overall frustration and anxiety - may very well be a creative pregnancy. I like the idea, it is something to meditate on and make real. I hope that with some diligence it will sprout out of the rain-soaked earth, all green and fresh and ready to grow.
...
Post-script: In typing "mundane" I seem to prefer to type "mundance" which sounds like a delightful everyday sort of dance, but also seems to suggest the moon. Of course, Moondance is a Van Morrison song, besides. Not to mention the theme of rain, which suggests "dancing in the rain" (my favorite reference being this one). Mundance is simultaneously mundane (ie everyday, nothing special), a regular and fun dance, and a celebration of the moon (the ending of the day?). Not exactly a "deep thought," but a game my fingers played and wanted to entertain.
...
And some set aside
haiku I allowed to lounge
in my Moleskine
(Note: Moleskine, being Italian, has a pronounced final "e".)
20 June
Le chat noire across
the street, all eyes & black fur
& welcome mystique.
These everyday
monsters - one's intrusion, the
other's chase - spook me.
27 June, from the Macy's patio
Stones scattered in
spirit, gathered in love;
not human, aware.
Not the first to see
the serene excitement of
the bark-line faces.
Midday broken in
copses & stealthy shadows;
revealing? Hiding?
Gewgaw windows of
inverted stars forced
from occultation.
Last night, though, there was a storm. The monsoons - summertime, midday rains - have arrived in Flagstaff and I love them. The Southwest has been plagued by drought and fire and despite the divine efforts of some, many parts remain unseasonably arid. (Who would have thought that global climate change would actually get to Texas so soon? Too bad politics don't change as quickly as the weather out here.) At least two of my housemates were frustrated by my eager and sometimes overeager meteorological prognostications, hoping for endless days of sunshine and heat. (I am not arguing with any Midwesterners out there about what constitutes hot, but am mostly reflecting the local sentiment.) I, on the other hand am thrilled. Walking around last night down a nearly deserted San Francisco Street, my umbrella an unimpressive shelter from the rain, was an unadulterated pleasure. It was heavy and chill and wet, but like rain in the Midwest - even where it can be fierce and deadly - it feels like a blessing.
In high school I had a penchant for writing poems about clouds and the rain. A leaden and laden cloud has a distinct look of... well, pregnancy about it. It is full; full of not-yet rain, not-yet lightning and thunder, not-yet sound and fury, and the not-yet life that follows. Rains are signs of fertility and blessing, they bring a sense of novelty to place and a power to disrupt what is going on for what is to come. Desert rains clean off the dust and pollen that has gathered on fenceposts, building walls, car doors, and the rest and it is suddenly gone, everything crisp and new. I recall Daniel Pinchbeck writing in Breaking Open the Head that many intoxicants, marijuana being the most abundant example, can reveal the novelty we once experienced in the world as children; this, he argues, is why everything is so "deep" when one is high and that one can be enchanted by the most mundane of realities. Honestly, I think rain does this to me. (Rain and the movie Pleasantville, after which I always sort of breath deeply and thank the stars I live in a world as vibrant and rich as this one.)
An optimistic assessment of my absenteeism may suggest my own fullness. I am determined to finish the rough draft of the Vincenzi novel this summer - preferably by the end of August or earlier - and am expecting to have something like a literature review accomplished for my thesis before classes begin. I am keeping busy, if somewhat distractedly so, and my silence is a sort of outward contemplation of the internal brewing. I have also made a bit more of a point to meditate and practice focus explicitly, which I have a heartfelt hope leads to greater success on the previously mentioned projects. An uncommon clarity of dreams and recording them also suggest an awakening, heretofore latent power in me; or so I expect. This fullness - characterized by a frustrating lethargy in between bursts of energy and a sense of overall frustration and anxiety - may very well be a creative pregnancy. I like the idea, it is something to meditate on and make real. I hope that with some diligence it will sprout out of the rain-soaked earth, all green and fresh and ready to grow.
...
Post-script: In typing "mundane" I seem to prefer to type "mundance" which sounds like a delightful everyday sort of dance, but also seems to suggest the moon. Of course, Moondance is a Van Morrison song, besides. Not to mention the theme of rain, which suggests "dancing in the rain" (my favorite reference being this one). Mundance is simultaneously mundane (ie everyday, nothing special), a regular and fun dance, and a celebration of the moon (the ending of the day?). Not exactly a "deep thought," but a game my fingers played and wanted to entertain.
...
And some set aside
haiku I allowed to lounge
in my Moleskine
(Note: Moleskine, being Italian, has a pronounced final "e".)
20 June
Le chat noire across
the street, all eyes & black fur
& welcome mystique.
These everyday
monsters - one's intrusion, the
other's chase - spook me.
27 June, from the Macy's patio
Stones scattered in
spirit, gathered in love;
not human, aware.
Not the first to see
the serene excitement of
the bark-line faces.
Midday broken in
copses & stealthy shadows;
revealing? Hiding?
Gewgaw windows of
inverted stars forced
from occultation.
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