Seven Tenths

I adore books. However, few of them are invited to take up permanent residence on my shelves. So... it is saying something that James' work has been invited to stay for a while.

Seven Tenths submerges you in the rich blues and beauty of a vast literary seasong. This book is full of magical facts, lyrical imaginative depth and a life experience and worldview that bewilders one with envy at times. Like a Deep Scattering Layer denizen, rich mysteries rise up out of the inky shadows of its pages to revel by archepelagic starlight.

Structures of Serenity

Once again. Purple twilight. Edge of a lake. Wind lapping an oscillation of surge. Shadows dancing. Ripples like static. An optical illusion or an ecstasy of overstimulation. If only I could truly comprehend the complex stuctures of such peaceful serenity. Coolness. Rustling of leaves. Rustling of branches. Rustling of the liquid wet pressing itself into the earth. Dimness of mind. Dimness of heart. Dimness of humanity and self. The sound of breath mingling with the natural worldly sigh and murmur. Beautiful sad self-containment etched deeply into the subatomic riddle: Where do I begin and where do I end?

1. 2 Hydrogen atoms and 1 Oxygen atom joined by covalent bonds. 2nd oribital electrons seeking a partner and escape from the negative charge of particulate loneliness (aka electronegativity).

2. The churn of chemical equilibrium. The balance of holding on & letting go.

2. The hydrogen bonding of polar water molecules creating suface tension & hydration shells. Invisible barrier between one world and the next. Great divider severing ties.

3. Kinetic energy. The inevitability of change.

4. Vaporization & the airy unbiased spread of heat/passion/love washing in waves from one state of being to the next, leaving coolness behind.

Old New Points of View

Walked a new path through the setting sun & twilight down by the Montlake cut tonight. Can not believe how much wildlife this city holds. There were Blue Herons abounding, fingerling fish leaping like mad, bats, and that silky beaver suddenly swimming straight toward me the moment I stopped fanning the internal whirlwind of mindchatter and just stood still.

There is also an avenue of institutional boats on a lonely wooden dock that no one loves as their own at night. You can clambor on board and practice your knots and rigging and all your points of sail. You can clambor on board and just rock with the water and watch the stream of lights cascading over the bridge. You can clambor on board and let the nearby shadows and silohuettes wash over you darkly like memory. Nobody is there. Nobody will stop you. As the world dissolves into twilight, you can shelter there, under the perfect tents of the sail covers, You can rock to sleep on those lonely boats... dreaming you are exactly where you want to be.

Bubble Snail Beach

I have never seen a bubble snail (Aglaja ocelligera to be specific) before today. But I think I might have made up for a lifetime of living without while out at the -2.4 tide this afternoon at Golden Gardens. There were literally hundreds of them out there and globular white egg sacks all over the place.

And... as if that wasn't enough... I also had 3 greedy bickering seagulls drop one of the biggest gunnels I have ever seen in my life at my feet. A beach naturalist gift from the heavens if there ever was one!

What a fabulous sunny day full of tidepools, eelgrass and mud.

Silent Light & the Foo

I hold the belief that we ourselves manifest the world from time to time. This belief shares kinship with the "be careful what you wish for" adage... but is not quite as straightforward as drawing a direct line from an internal desire to it's object counterpart in the real world. It suggests instead that... at least on our most brave and reckless days.... we fling the contents of our skulls and hearts into the world and the "universe" (whatever that means) collects that conscious intensity and mirrors it back to us via material representation. Or, maybe a better/simpler explanation, is that when you have, for example, William T. Vollmann on the brain you seem to find reference to William T. Vollmann everywhere you go.

Vollmann does play a role in this story as a topic of a first question asked "after all this time". Although, I wouldn't say he overtly represents the central confluence of coincidence and creative sensitivity that rippled 'round the magnetic Cap Hill corners and haunts last night. Last night... and maybe all month, to be honest... those places - and people - that ever pull you back (& you can't help but project wilfull intention here) to reveal new layers of personal oblivion were engaging in full on tug-o-war. And... instead of bracing against it... maintaining the equilibrium... pressing on into my self-contained (yet altogether entropic) future... I - for once - forgave myself my failures and self-conscious uncertainty & stopped momentarily to listen to the universal chouchoutement from a voice that has been savoured in the past both in hearing from and never hearing from again.

I turned up at Silent Light in part from this article . I think the refined melancholy of Mudede's voice that both elevated the freedom and reckless abandon of unabashed selfish generative energy and then destroyed it with the swift flick of time's inevitable whipcrack was the energy that set everything in motion. It was after this I also saw a vague and beautiful review of the film he had written. Later in the day, after yet another voice affirmed the existance of the film, I took it upon myself to find out why it had surfaced so forcefully. I walked through the rain for a long way before hopping a bus, finally, to make it to the film on time. Silent Light is slow and silky and lingers/dwells/wallows in an intensely beautiful tangle of emotions that have been wrapping around and strangling my own throat from time to time of late. So... that was big manifestation #1.

Running into the Fjahma in his black hood and that rich dark sensitivity to all that vulnerable human luminescence as I walked away from that film - THAT film- however, was completely arresting. And, it infused a nuance first suggested by the Mudede article, to the 2 hour emotional meditation to which I had just been made privy. I selfishly begged stories off the storyteller well into the night trying to infer from his offerings how those two emotional threads might be fused together.

At the end of it all, I found myself suddenly with a long run/walk home, having missed the last bus on my particular route. A cold dark self-contained entropic migration... but one accompanied by the strange sense that "peace" may in fact be the strongest force binding all the misunderstandings and hurt and passions and loves that dance about time together. For, in the end, all there is left to do is put one step in front of the other... and breathe.

Timbrophily Exhileration

YEEHAW! WOOP! WOOP! I crowed out loud while standing in line at the US Post Office yesterday morning. I could not help myself. My beloved Melibe leonina is now a star on the Kelp Forest Commemorative Stamps. How cool is that?

Human Jörmungandr

I am sure it began as a meditation on the symbolic marks people place on their bodies - like the loving ambigram that will forever reflect and balance the names of mon frere and I on both the material dna & named heritage symbol of our father... or the Dark Crystal symbol of the universe that enshrowds the womb of an adored girl I used to know.

As I wondered about the meaning behind certain self-selected marks of personal identity... I starting looking up symbols... signs... visual cues... illustrations to perpetuate and feed the random stream of consciousness on which I happened to be floating.

I have a small scupture of an Atlasisyphus that was made for me years and years ago now that today crumbles under its planet burden into the dirt of a potted plant. Maybe that's what got me started-- at least in part--on symbols of earthly burden. Symbols of the foundation of the world. Symbols about the precarious stability of our spinning biosphere.

Somehow, however, I found myself drifting off into the direction of cyclical infinity; Alchemical self-reflexivity and eternal return; the Ouroboros circle snakedragon consuming itself, tail in mouth; serpent nursemaid of self-knowledge and the end of human time.

And via this strange tangent two things happened at once... I met the Nordic version of the World Serpent... and I found this gorgeous image from the Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires taken by Robert Wright.

In Norse tradition the gods Thor & Jörmungandr (world serpent) will destroy each other during the end time known as Ragnarök. Jörmungandr is a seagod - one grown so large that he could wrap his body around the entire world . Thor rules the sky. Ragnarök tradition says that the sky lord will slay the serpent and then, after walking only a handful of feet, fall dead from the serpent's poison.

Combining the two (tale & image)... I find myself crafting an evolution for my poor Atlasisyphus & his burden. I wrap humanity-grown-too-large around the world and gift the poor beast with the prophesied poisoning of the sky... the rising of the seas... & the twilight of the gods.

Hmmm... I don't know how giddy a symbol that might be to place upon a life. It's implied longevity does seems more suitable to the realm of the sepulchre. However, tail in cheek, I'm sure the world in all its cyclical infinity & splendor will still be here when the Gumby bending around the nature of our burdens cease.

I Heart J.B.S. Haldane

There are some people you wish you could have met. There are some people who you love across time... for their stories... for their words... for their shear audacity... for the life that still flares and flickers brightly across the universe despite the dark impenetrable truth of their proven mortality. I discovered one such character last night while reading an anthology of stories compiled by Jacques-Yves Cousteau & James Dugan. The story was a nonfictional account of how one man's "job during the war [WWII] was to tackle the physiological dangers to which divers and men trying to escape from submarines were exposed". The autobiographical author was JBS Haldane.

To begin with... if you have never thought much about how dive pressure tables were developed... all I can say is that you should! It is an wild story... full of Nitrogen Narcosis induced near-death inanity & even some full-blown bends driven demise. Mr & Mrs (#1) JBS Haldane were among the primary guinea pigs who willingly self-pressurized themselves over and over again in the Siebe Gorman's Chamber No. 3 in an effort to discover the true resiliency and limitations of mankind when living a "Life Under Pressure"(title of the article reproduced in the anthology).

But... as if this epic contribution to the winning of WWII wasn't enough... the rest of Haldane's life compounds my admiration. Richard Milner descibes the man as "one of the great rascals of science—independent, nasty, brilliant, funny and totally one of a kind". His interests and actions ranged all over the map. He was one of the best geneticists of his time. He inspired literary escapades of men like Aldous Huxley & (nemesis) C.S. Lewis. He served as a spy for Russia in part due to a passionate political dogmatism and belief in dialectical materialism . He wrote and wrote and wrote in an effort to popularize science.

He was simply: Ruthless. Fearless. Passionate. Brilliant.

Wish I could have been him for a day.

Observer of Beautiful Things

Not so long ago I welcomed home from NYC a sometime pal over a couple beers and a checkup on our mutual growth, identity, fulfillment, purpose, contentment, etc at this stage in the game. Not exactly sure now what the question was he posed... but think it was something to counter the "who are you?" I had harrassed him with earlier. After long consideration of the various tendrils and threads that have spun out over time, the only thing I could identify under the smoking gun of his wry quizzical gaze as a constant or consistent pattern in the weave was the fact that I am "an observer of beautiful things".

So... if that is me in 5 words or less.... I guess maybe I was living closer to the core of myself yesterday. I say this because yesterday I saw something exquisitely beautiful: I watched from above a cloudbank a sun set below a plush barrier of transluscent moody white and bleed upward from the mist in glowing red rivulets. Molten light oozing upward as the sun submerged below a dense billow of vapor. The fiery red orb assuming temporary regal descendancy in the middle kingdom between cloud and Earthly horizon.

It was enough to make one fall in love all over again with Le Petit Prince - if only for his tethering of a winged flock - and to ponder further strategies to allow life to evolve in the ephemera and mercurial shimmer of gas, atmosphere and space. Imagine real life lived and lost atop light-infused clouds. Better than heaven by far...

Ouija Board vs. Electromagnetic Telegraph

In 1843 the United States Congress appropriated $30,000 for a project led by Samuel F.B. Morse. This wee investment paid for the stringing of wires between Baltimore and Washington D. C and resulted in the magic we now know as the electromagnetic telegraph.

But that's not what's interesting. What is interesting is the addition of ( & debate over) an odd little amendment to the bill. A Congressman from Tennessee proposed that a full 1/2 of that funding be diverted to a man named Theophilus Fisk's experiments in Mesmerism. I had no idea that Mesmerism & Spiritualism were such huge phenomenons in the mid 19th Century until hearing about the seances hosted by Mary Todd Lincoln at the White House (and attended... so the story goes... at least once by the President) on the radio the other day.

Ouija Board vs. Electromagnetic Telegraph.

Hmm... I suppose with 166 years of hindsight and the Parker Brother's patent board in almost every toy store across America the rolling of eyes at the thought of Congressional appropriations to fund experiments in spirit communication is the most socially acceptable thing I can do (given the traits of my society). But with the mysterious novelty of "electomagnetism" in 1843... and the diaspora of slavery... the bloodred ghost dances of the West... the slaughter of over 600,000 husbands, sons, lovers, brothers, fathers that would occur a mere 20 years later... the hopeful assumption that the magic of the telegraph could be turned toward the heavens and beyond the grave is not such an intuitive stretch for the faithful I suppose.

It is a poetic hope. A haunted hope. One I'm sure Pulitzer Prize winner James Merrill sensed during that 20 year seance that produced Changing Light at Sandover.

The scientific contraction of time and space... Manifest Destiny... empire building... the echo of a lonely hello whispered up to the heavenly ether... the missing loved one dreamt of again and again... the sorrowful and angry turn from one plantation/slave/brother/son/parent/lover to another because the first had betrayed and disappointed with its death... the wish to hold the triumphs of the past and future in perpetual reconciliation and suspense high above the fulcrum of the present... the multiplication table that predicts life unlike yours will soon dislocate you and your genetic code from the filimental thread of time that connects mankind to the collective conscious.

If it took $30,000 in 1843 to only scratch the surface of contracting time and space via the the first telegraph communication, I wonder how much $ would have been necessary to gain mastery over all the rest. $15k for Mesmerism doesn't seem like it would be enough. Maybe that's why the bill didn't pass after all. Congress knew it was too small to make a difference. And, maybe they also knew that if it were something they approved outright with all the poetic hope and vaguary dripping from it that it would cause the people in my society to roll their eyes.

In 2008, however, the United States Government allocated $481.4 billion in "base" funding to what they call the Department of Defense.

That does sound better than Mesmerism, doesn't it? Not nearly so poetic... or vague?

An Invitation To Mass

Athol Fugard's Road To Mecca sings songs about the lonely struggle to maintain and create internal radiance in the face of darkness. I spent time with the play today because of an Arts & Visually Impaired Audiences audio description assignment. However, I'm not sure it was until after the show that I encountered radiance itself.

Her name was Noelle. I walked with her across Seattle Center through a crowd of people milling between the fountain and Key Arena waiting in line for tickets to the roller derby. She was going to a 5:30 Catholic Mass to listen to the songs and church bells. She'd asked me if I would like to attend Mass with her when we were still chatting in the lobby of the theatre together. I had politely declined at the time not recognizing as I should have the unspoken request for a traveling companion. She'd introduced me to her silent doll after that. A constant guardian. Much more consoling and trustworthy than the faerie voices that plucked and prodded one during travels about town--like that grizzled ticket scalper that had called to her as she passed reminding her of their recent walk home together during one of the icy eves of the past few months. Noelle had not recognized him... though she had smiled up at him and chatted back at him with a thundering persistent voice of one excedingly deft at touching the world via the echoing soundwaves that emitted & reflected back to her frail little body. I think he had been disappointed. I wondered if he had felt protective of her. A little like myself at that moment. "She's a real trooper" he had said smiling uncertainly down at her.

I had wondered at the time how comfortable I would feel constantly exposed to a vulnerability that meant being regularly walked home by strange uncertain voices. I had taken it upon myself to help if I could when I saw her outside of the theatre rocking from foot to foot with a consoling internal rhythm all her own. Listening. Waiting. The House Manager at the theatre said that she was a regular at the Center finding her way through an undefatigable patience and trust in the kindness of strangers. "It's a wonderful way to meet new people" she had said with that golden sunlight eminating from her voice. A voice and spirit bright enough to chase darkness away.

.

A kindred spirit for you Miss Helen...

8 Mile Stream of Consciousness

Sun on a winter Saturday. Green tendrils of life straining out of the earth with abrupt impatience for the global axis tilt inflicted stasis. Trying to get a new reading on things. Is it time? Is it time? Is it time? Months of lethargy. Months of not looking up. Months of not looking around. Months of standing still. And then-BANG-a burst of energy that makes you believe in heat and life and the intake of easy breath. A violin player. Hands bare. Bowing complicated rhythms. Standing alone in the middle of a forest path. Momentum. A fog of exhaled notes drifting through the crisp long shandows of a late end of January afternoon. Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Rapini. Roasted Garlic. Kombucha. Beets. Spinich. Goat Cheese. Yum. Portuguese songs. Brazilian songs. Drum beats. Clattaclack of sticks together. Racing dogs off leash off owner running with a body meant to run. Been here before. But not in a long time. But not with the miles behind me that are there now. Cute Polish boy with the silent j name. Wondering how it is pronounced. Having one of my own doesn't answer any questions. Dream about the end of the world. All because the lightbulb burnt out... and then it never came. The end. It never came. I'm still going. Until finally I've done all 8. Accoladed by hummingbirds heard but not seen. Small celebration. Then you press on into the next moment. Bare witness to the illegal exchange of altered reality. Will I tell? Maybe. Maybe not.

The Click In Your Head

My gloves dyed my fingers black. That was probably going to be a small forgotten detail about the day I finally convinced myself I could plummet down a mountain on a snowboard instead of my trusty black atomics. What else... what else could I forget... the too too young instructor that reminded me that I might be able to stand in front of someone someday and share the things I know too... learning the rules goofy and then finding halfway down the hill that I was a regular gal after all... being tumbled hard and hearing myself whoop in the midst of it all. The resolute click in your head when you can finally leap from the fear of the unknown into the substance and specificity of real life.

I'm pinning that click here. "Click". See. Right there. I need to remember that click. Hmmm... what else from the past few days?

I made it back to the 6 mile run last night. "Click"
The nighttime ferry ride. "Click"
The moonlit field of orange sea pens & the orgy of onchidoris bilamellata on Vashon. "Click"
Finishing Home & learning again how well Marilynne Robinson can pierce my soul. "Click"
Finding myself cast as a minor role in Les Parapluies de Cherbourg again and watching the twisting kaleidoscope of meaning change around the end stop of forever. "Click"
Eating strawberries in winter. "Click"
Living in and around the lyrics "the silence of a falling star lights up a purple sky"... "Click"
Reading Bukowski in French and really seeing the verb tenses for the first time. "Click"
Finding myself - finally - learning the fingerings on the last page of the Nyman tune. "Click"

Resolution: To Know & Do in 2009

Science can tell us so many things. How strange and macabre it is, therefore, that so much sophisticated data and analysis produces so little action and will in complex societies. How morbidly odd that we can study a thing unto its death and learn so little from its destruction and demise.

The Puget Sound’s own mobius strip of self-assessing brilliance neutered by the lassitude of political economy was wonderfully illustrated for me this November at the COSEE workshop at the University of Washington. That wonderful event (among many other eye-opening things) introduced me to the Keil Lab’s Aquatic Organic Geochemistry spice analysis efforts: http://depts.washington.edu/aog/spices. Aquatic Organic Geochemistry has the potential to tell us just about anything we want to know about a society based entirely on the remnant compounds found in its water supply.

Keil Lab shows off both the grand scientific magic at our disposal as well as the grave irony of our sociopolitical ineptitudes by telling Puget Sounders more than we could ever want to know about—specifically—our localized addiction to artificial vanilla. (Who knew? Puget Sound really is just one big Starbucks vanilla latte.). This was told to the COSEE audience with a wry and knowing smile from Lab Director, Rick Keil. A smile that invariably brooks the question—“What about those other things? You know… those bad things? What can you tell me about those?”

And, Keil’s wry and knowing response? “Nothing.” He can not tell us more because, if he were to reveal evil, local governments might become obliged to regularly monitor for or—even worse—do something to combat that evil. A financial burden they can not bare. And, apparently, there have been regulations put in place to dissuade too much law-abiding “citizen science” in that particular arena of waste water treatment and analysis.

And, with that knowledge, I despair. There is so much we do not know. So much we can not do. I wonder how much destruction promised by those two truths will be born out of having had the opportunity to KNOW something and simply looking away.

Seattle Snow White

Seattle softened and slowed over the holidays this year. It became an urban wonderland dampened and demured by an unusual abundance of snow. The lengthy hill next to my abode turned into a neighborhood cardboard-box & trashcan-lid luge ride where - depending on the time of day - the differing local cliques overran the hill: erudite university professionals and their families, pre-holiday break cheerful frat boys and girls, the Jewish Huskies from the Chabad house nearby. I think my neighborhood may have actually bordered on becoming a realio trulio "community" for a few pristinely snowbound days. (Amazing what happens when you can't drive away... and are forced to WALK places nearby to sustain yourself!)

I danced/slid/spun/walked all over the place on Christmas eve. Watching the world glow with manmade light... bumping into giant goofy snowmen... listening to off-the-wall Holiday music being played that eve on KEXP. I was so content with the mellowing flow produced by that white barrier of slow and sleepy Hydrogen and Oxygen. So hard to be a green grinch when all you see in Seattle is white white white.

Now, the holidays and snow have passed and it is time to dance/slide/spin/walk away into the New Year. The past two weeks have put a smile on my face. I must say... so far... so very very good.