notes

from the field--

Still wet.  Still warm.  I am more than a little nervous for the viburnum -- ready to burst, though there are long months ahead of Spring.  

barely

some theories

I was out trying to slow the passage of time today -- to put the brakes on this loaded train barrelling straight for the next year.  I composed a new theory based on this article I've been picking away at for, oh, 3 weeks or so, the gist of which is pretty straightforward but with lots of interesting research.  I'm a fan of empirical evidence -- it's not necessary, but it has its appeal.  It goes something like this:  A new experience takes longer for the brain to encode and interpret therefore the duration of the experience seems longer, while familiar experiences require less brain activity and therefore may seem to pass more quickly.  Think about the last time you were driving -- navigating to a place you had not been to before, and then consider the return trip, and each subsequent trip.  The initial trip seems to take the longest time, and each trip thereafter takes less time, until finally, the distance and time passes relatively unnoticed.  The perception is that time passes more quickly, while in reality, the elapsed time is actually the same for all trips.  

So to test the theory, I set myself today with the task of estranging the familiar and attempting to pay particular attention to all that might otherwise pass unnoticed.  Would this slow time?  Alas, I am a poor scientist and, while I like empirical evidence, my own experiments lack all of the necessary controls that might yield such evidence.  For instance, when I finally thought to look at the time, it was, of course, later than I thought.  

But I have another theory that I am also working on based on my research with the kitchen waste can; the theory that time is a big stretchy bag and it's my job to test the capacity.  I will push it every time.

cowboy poetry

Putting the Rodeo Try into Cowboy Poetry
-- In memory of Buck Ramsey
Let's begin with the wildest landscape, space
inhabited by far more of them
than our own kind and, yes we are talking
other hearts, other stars.  Fall in love with all
that is new born -- universe, seedling, dawn,
human, foal, calf.  Love equally
the seasons, know each sky has meaning,
winter the big lonesomes, the endless
horizons our hopes sink beyond 
once every minute, sometimes
seeming never to rise
again for air or light,
for life.  Fall madly in love
with the earth's fickle ways.  Heed
hard the cosmos cues, the most
minuscule pulsings, subtle nods -- no heavy-
handed tap or poke, nothing muscular,
no near-death truths revealed, no telephone
or siren screaming us out of sleep
at 3 a.m.  Forget revelation.
Forgive religion.  Let's believe instead in song
bird, or Pegasus, the only angels
we'll ever need.  Erase for good
"inspiration" from our Random Bunk-
House Dictionaries, from our petty heads
and pretty ambitions.  Poetry is not
the grace or blessing we pray for -- Poetry
is the Goddess for whom
we croon.  Sing and surely we shall see
how she loves our music in any key--
any color, any creed, any race, any breed.  Rhyme
if the muse or mood moves us
to do so.  Go slow.  Walk
then trot, lope then rock, and roll
for even a split second, our souls in the middle
of the whole storming world
getting western, throwing a tizzy fit,
our horses come-uncorked, just
as we were beginning to seriously think
we could turn the stampeding 
words into a calm
milling herd of steers?

Paul Zarzyski

More cowboy poetry here.

truth

Often I will fill up pages full of words, tangles of thoughts that go on, then read them and say to myself, too much.  How to fit this into a drop?

That which can be sensed by the skin, or the nose, or seen, heard or tasted, or maybe all of these, and at the same time creates deep emotion, can be distilled and presented simply (not to be confused with easily) as that emotion.  But how?  The enduring challenge, to represent and evoke feeling without the slightest hint of extrapolation, neither adorning nor belaboring -- to separate truth from all its distractors.

antidote

The job of the artist is not to succumb to despair, but to find an antidote for the emptiness of existence -- Kathy Bates as Gertrude Stein in Midnight in Paris 

rainy winter days

are made for this kind of fine and lovely sadness:

True to my obsessive nature, I've played this at least five times -- a picture of perfect longing that has me daydreaming of roads, fields, farmhouses, motels, summer, starry skies, Dylan... 

christmas day hike

 

We do not have a particular church so you're much more likely to find us at the church -- out in the great and open presence of all that is holy.  It is a beautiful day to celebrate -- to give thanks and to find ourselves humbled by the gift of so much goodness and light.  

merry christmas!

Peace and Joy to All!

winter

Vivaldi's Four Seasons (Winter I) -- Itzhak Perlman, Violin

edge

I recently made a list of edges, a catalogue of all the places I could think of where one thing meets another -- like the edge of a field and the road, or the edge of the earth and the sky -- definite spaces that are inexplicably narrow and difficult to occupy.

mood

Besides the weather there is always something else that pulls me into a mood.  I am undone by this siren and her beautifully haunted song poems.

Turned. Seamlessly. Inside-out.

recognized

These days have been some dark days.  The sky's everchanging face, a mask of heavy clouds slipping one over another -- and though these clouds are dense -- and I was thinking I wanted light -- the sky has not been opaque.  The dim woods and fields are alive with restless spirits and lovely beasts, barely camoflouged in the subtle shifting of grey light.  I move easily among them, as if they recognize me as one of their own.    

the meeting

I ran right over the hill and stopped in my tracks as this fawn glanced up and walked straight for me -- almost insouciantly.  I stood still and waited for what, I don't know -- until at last he/she had a change of heart and moved across my path, nosing on into the leaves on the other side.  When I finally turned my attention it was like a fantasy movie where things appear from nowhere.  I realized that I was standing in the center of six deer, all regarding me with varying degrees of interest.  

I am used to seeing them and the rest of their large herd.  I often run up on them but then there is a quick rustle and a glimpse of white as they leap away.  I don't know how I managed to find myself so deeply in their midst today or why they didn't run.  We considered each other for an indeterminate moment and then I walked slowly on.  This time they stayed.

heartsick

Heartsick for something I don't (yet) know.  It's not unusual, right?

And is it unusual that this is our idea of a family night?  Before you judge just know this:  food is pretty much the alpha and the omega around here, and as S points out, "it's PG, we parentally-guided it, so it's okay" (trust me too, it is much worse on the bus).  This is inordinately sexy stuff but if you had walked into our living room you might have thought that you had walked into church on Sunday morning -- mmmhmmm ... yeayah ... amen ... porchetta!.  

I regularly vow never to waste my time eating bad food but watching this makes me long for a place where such a vow would be ridiculously uneccessary.

It is Monday.  In Ohio.  In December.  I could wait until I make it to Rome or we could just go ahead and have a Negroni.  Equal parts gin, Campari and sweet vermouth.

The whole episode is "exquisito" but my favorite part is here at 9:00.

chill

Our furnace can't quite beat back the chill in this old house this morning -- so we shuffle around sock-footed and wrapped in blankets as we sip coffee that doesn't stay hot for long.  Outside the deep freeze has crystallized everything, including the sunlight, exquisitely bright -- but still no match for this cold.  

marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.


Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.


Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.


Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.


And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.


We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.


Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.


And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.


Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page


A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-

"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love." 

Billy Collins

groove

yeah...

variations

 ...on a prevailing theme.

I can be single-minded.  I have been known to become obsessed with a song or a scarf -- or a thought, but it might be time for a change.  My scarf is not going anywhere but I'm thinking maybe of switching up my stations on Pandora.  The weather might help.  It's different today -- a little colder, a little lighter ... we'll see.  

consequence of sounds

My rhyme aint good just yet

My brain and tongue just met, 

And they ain't friends, so far, 
My words don't travel far, 
They tangle in my hair, 
And tend to go nowhere, 
They grow right back inside, 
Right past my brain and eyes 
Into my stomach juice 
Where they don't serve much use, 
No healthy calories, 
Nutrition values. 
And I absorb back in 
The words right through my skin 
They sit there festering inside my bowels 
The consonants and vowels 
The consequence of sounds 
The consonants and vowels 
The consequence of sounds 
Got a soundtrack in my mind, 
All the time. Kids- 
Screamin' from too much beat up 
And they don't even rhyme, 
They just stand there, on a street corner, 
Skin tucked in 
And meat side out and shot, 
And I'd like to turn them down 
But there ain't no knob. 
Run into picket fences 
Not into picket lines. 
All this hippie-shit for the 60's 
And another cliche for our time. But, 
But a one of these days your heart 
Will just stop ticking, 
And they sorta just don't find you till your cubicle is reeking. 
The consonants and vowels 
The consequence of sounds 
The consonants and vowels 
The consequence of sounds 
Ahh ah ah ah ahh ah ah ah 
Did you know that the gravedigger's still 
Gettin' stuck in the machine 
Even though it's a whole other daydream. 
It's another town it's another world, 
Where the kids are asleep, where the loans are paid 
And the lawns are mowed. 
Whad'ya think? 
All the gravediggers were gone? 
Just cause one song is done 
There's always another one, 
Waiting right around the bend, 
Till this one ends, 
Then it begins sqeaky clean, 
Then it starts all over again. 
The weather report keeps on 
Tossing and turning, 
Predicting and warning, 
And warning and warning of, 
Possibly it could be news publications and, 
Possibly it could be news TV stations. That 
Very same morning right next to her coffee 
She noticed some bleeding and heard hollow coughing and 
National Geographic was being too graphic, 
When all she had wanted to know was the traffic 
The worlds got a nosebleed it said 
And were flooding but we keep on cutting 
The trees and the forests! 
And we keep on paying those freaks on the TV, 
Who claim they will save us but want to enslave us. 
And sweating like demons they scream through our speakers 
But we leave the sound on 'cause silence is harder. 
And no ones the killer and no ones the martyr 
The world that has made us can no longer contain us 
And prophets are silent then rotting away 'cause 
The consonants and vowels 
The consequence of sounds. 
The consonants and vowels 
The consequence of sounds. 
Ah ah ah 
My rhyme ain't good just yet, 
My brain and tongue just met, 
And they aint friends, so far, 
My words don't travel far, 
They tangle in my hair, 
And tend to go nowhere, 
They grow right back inside, 
Right past my brain and eyes 
Into my stomach juice 
Where they don't serve much use, 
No healthy calories, 
Nutrition values. 
And I absorb back in 
The words right through my skin 
They sit there festering inside my bowels 
The consonants and vowels 
The consequence of sounds 
The consonants and vowels 
The consequence of sounds

this song

has been in my head all day.

I'm pretty sure it's a love song.

noted

It's easy to stand at the edge of a desert and say, " it's hot and dry"  

...and after so much rain it's tempting to sum up these days as merely "cold and damp" but here are some things that I have noticed.  Saturated objects are profoundly dense.  Water has weight and other properties that help it make its own way (physics and stuff).  There is a difference between the emotionalism of color and the drama of contrast.  Remarkable things will flourish in the unusual and extreme ... and trees are rooted in the earth but have enviable reach.  

weighing

I had an ambitious schedule for myself this morning.  I know, Sunday?  It didn't matter anyway because as I was standing in the kitchen weighing the respective merits of coffee and tea, I realized it was all going to have to wait.  

transcendent

I was sitting here dreaming(?)  The sun streaming in low -- warming this wood, my skin.  

I started to write that I was listening to this*...

but that doesn't do it.  Listening does not describe the experience at all.  I'm not sure what does.  There don't seem to be any words within reach.  Dreaming might have to do. 

I am a reader of "comments" and an occasional follower of advice read therein, so my thanks to the youtube viewer who suggested The Orlando Consort, Josquin Desprez:  Motets -- bass and volume up.  The last hour of my life has been, well ... all of this light and warmth, what to say ... transcendent.  I've just never quite been here before.

Thanks too, to this veritable Sherpa who led me this way in the first place.  

*This interpretation is "magnifique" but I have to agree that the Orlando Consort (volume+bass) brought tears to my eyes, my dogs eyes and, very likely, to the eyes of my neighbors.  

trust

Trust that little voice in your head that says "Wouldn't it be interesting if..."; And then do it.  
Duane Michals

noted

Ribbony sunsets, peach and milk...

and an uncommon frosting that was best appreciated up close.  Many thanks to the spider who spun this web in order that this morning's foggy frost might change a common beauty into fine lace, extraordinary and fleeting.