Moment of reprieve...

How quickly things can change in little or no time and the devastating/wonderful consequences that can result from those changes.

You want to know what I feel is one of the coolest things about life?

That you can figure and plan to the unth, but usually what happens is something you never counted on or dreamed of.

It is one thing to have a bolt of inspiration, quite another to have a sharp pencil to wrangle the story. 
Jeff over at his Irre(2x)  blog seems to have both quite often.

A while ago I offered him a choice of inmates from a WIP, Asylum Notes, asking to lend his voice as character vignettes.

Being up for play, he chose all three.

 

What I’ve pulled below is from Jeff's forthcoming, The Hidden Conversation: In Abstract, a different angle on the same illustrations. Up on his blog mid-December.

 

Just go with it. Like a river. Life's a river. Why fight it? The currents only stop when there's a need to.

Until some engineer invented the dam.

 

Creations, creator. Sort of a banal combination of words. Repetition sucks, but such is life. We are doomed to repeat history.

Then again, some good things happened in history. Does repeating those constitute doom?

Why be picky? It all winds up in the same place. 

The toilet. 

Or maybe the dirt. Or, heck, the pavement. Depending on if anyone's looking. Funny how manners are dictated by who else is around. Isn't anyone well-behaved for their own sakes these days?

STONE is what it’s made of.

We found St. Peter’s square to be a rock growing out of the water, settling on grand, but undecided as whether or not to fully emerge.

The Carnival trip was designed around shooting  long exposure shots dressed as dark whirling Dervish on top of a canal bridge.

Pause for a blur of ingenious riot of costumes.

We awoke on a stone bench in the morning mist lost on the island of St. Peter’s. Carnivale was over. KB looked great in long johns and a tux shirt with the collar up and the french cuffs down to accommodate his lengthy arms. He carried himself like a dancer and when he stopped he looked as though he were posing.

Those images are vividly burned into my mind because the film had not advanced.

There isn’t proof any of it ever happening.

 

Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace.   -Victor Hugo

 I do not have much patience with a thing of beauty that must be explained to be understood. If it does need additional interpretation by someone other than the creator, then I question whether it has fulfilled its purpose.  -Charlie Chaplin

…If you're anxious for to shine in the high aesthetic line

as a man of culture rare,

You must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms,

and plant them ev'rywhere.

You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases

of your complicated state of mind,

The meaning doesn't matter if it's only idle chatter

of a transcendental kind...   –Bunthorne in Patience /Gilbert & Sullivan

In temple today, sitting zazen, no one notices (good) that I smuggled a small book for notes of the thoughts that fly by to be wrangled momentarily, and then knocked aside so that I can attempt to see the clear void.

Sometimes Buddha, some times the other guys.

It is truly amazing what the mind jumps to, what it remembers, what it can not let go of. With compassion and grace we accept some souls we know only a fleeting time, and, that others are here to stay. It is interesting that the fleeting stay with us in memory longer than anyone else. It is hard to let go of the physical form and even harder to let go of the memory that remains.

 

My task is to fit together model plastic brains.

 There are numerous sets, but each missing different parts. I am not aloud to mix pieces around from different sets to make a few perfect, and so, each is missing some part of its own brains. The saving grace is that all the skulls are complete, so once they are placed over the deficient brains no one will know they are lacking.

Below a high window harsh daylight tumbles down shaft-like mixing with dust rising, she pauses to enter the slipstream  before diving into the daimonion. Her silhouette sets off a harsh, abrupt shadow. She secures a promise by commencing to dance.
In this transparent essence, she madly spins with the intensity and reverence of a Dervish. Her head is thrown back to belie ecstasy and invite delusion. With one hand to the small of the back, the other to her chin she sends the brief chiffon flailing, flying into a luminous smoke blur and sends black   fluid shapes onto the rammed floor following her every course. She glances in and out of the spotlight unknowing if her shadow follows or leads her. Perhaps it does both. The jealous shadow pulls her repeatedly into the focusing light as if needing to be seen.

     Her feet scrape the dirt and then seem to hover. She hides her face and then bares teeth. Bucking and writhing with the allure of a feral cat.

    The dance becomes her.

    She’ll continue till they forget what she wants or she is ready to receive what she has asked for.

As natural light dims and gloom begins to take over, the tiny flames that have burned continuously now draw attention as they slowly grow in proxy, their intensity becoming the brightest glow in the room.

    The moon peeks into the clerestory window, nods its head with apology, and, sinks again below the grease smeared marble ledge.

    She divides the room.  Her facing aspect lit up by a nervous flickering wall of candles. Her dark side lost in the cast of skipping, shrill, wild apparitions skimming the stone wall. The chamber is enhanced with the illusion that she is many, and, lends a potency of impending bizarre.

   Shape shifting, yet ever constant.

   On and on lost in the dance as dawn awakens.

Her shadow fades, pulling at her like the tug of sleep. Her expression satiated, the apostrophe of the night wanes.

   She no longer knows or cares if it's she who’s in trouble, or those around her.

Attendees notice the conversation piece. A hand wrought pewter serving platter with a chiseled pattern of chaos within its symmetrical border. As mesmerizing as a mandala, and awaiting the prize.

 

7/8

He stirred his oatmeal, stubbed his toe, and had a nagging feeling of missing an appointment... years ago.

You can watch and wait for water to boil, it will only take time. You will need 3.10 minutes. Below is a recipe for ‘no time for breakfast.’

0 eggs

0 olive oil

1. Do not turn on an oiled pan to medium heat.

2. Do not scramble egg till frothy and pour into pan.

3. Do not flip over sink in case of error.

4. Do not fold in half.

5. Finished.

To turn a situation into a happy ending you may have to look at it a long time. Walk all the way around it. A big problem could mean a very long walk. Try it on without expecting it to fit. Throw it out and see how it lands. If it will only be just what it is, stubborn and unchangeable, then let it go. Sometimes there is not a happy ending.

from Parallel Line Tend to Neglect

8

In the dead of night Maine winter air is held completely crisp and still. Until unexpectedly, a startling subatomic rumble would echo through the dark, ending by clutching the inside of your throat.

    A rabbit cries for its life and loses. When all is quiet again the silence is ten times as deep and opaque. In forest blackness there lurks a claustrophobic dread.

   The field stones that were sled over years ago became the low walls that are boundaries, trails and points. With the right aerial view some gigantic cryptic message would show itself. Wouldn’t it be keen if through some higher power a mystery could be solved by backing away and beholding an epiphany in the simple stone lines created by the walls.

     Unafraid, I’d go on full moon treks for half the night. The bright light echoed through the bare trees and the snow turned silver under the spherical spotlight. One could easily make out the white flowers and birch. Some stuff was plunged into the inky blackness. I could easily imagine each soul down to the tiniest critter opening one eye as my shoe popped and crunched passed. Then, feeling no threat, closing again slowly.

     I became mindful of the night sky while living in Damariscotta. The northern lights are big theater. The planets and stars shifted into their familiar winter pattern. Knowing where they’d be early evening was a relief to someone without much stability.  Sitting still long enough and you were certain to be rewarded with a shooting star. Space trash was never so beautiful.

And what a prize at the end of the day when one can feel complete by just lying down, looking up, and get lost in the vertigo.

     When your choices are limited completeness is simple.

65/66

He had cats.

This sounds as though he had a disease, an inability to reason.

He simply preferred felines as pets.

Believing the novel idea that you begin to look like the pet you live with, 

she hadn’t decided on what type she wanted to epitomize. 

But, had narrowed it down to mammals.

From Parallel Chances Tend to Neglect

 An open mouth bleeds

Trick/ling down from branch to branch

Drumming out all time

The pale blue cloth turns deep plum

Blank shape, sanguine edged

Outline where a hand removed

From a white stomach

Still clutches a maché boat

Just as very well

Bleached fabric smells as though

It will explode any moment

&

One cannot bleed forever

 

Perhaps notes on moving. And momentum.

I’m wondering, for someone who so very rarely sits down,  how have I managed to collect so many chairs.
Books; examine (once again) how many books you want to move the rest of your life.

Getting a/head of ones self. I have altered moments when I’m driving and do not know what coast I’m on. Or, the license plate in front of me belies a foreign county.

 Travel is good for the perspective, yes?

 I love the act of packing up AND LEAVING.

 GETTING THERE AND UNPACKING, not so much.

I saw Salvador Dali  coming out of the laundromat. He walked past (a very pale) Bud Cort who was  sitting on the curb.
Ct. Kangaroo was in the car next to me as Fidel Castro drove a Dolly Madison truck through the red light. He was eating a package of donuts that had ‘accidentally’ broke open. 

Dave Van Ronk was walking his dog. Actually I see Dave a lot, so he’s not even worth the surprise of mentioning, but it's always nice.

Tune in, turn off, drop out, drop in, switch off, 

switch on and explode.  

–Mr. Kite / Across the Universe

More from the ongoing WIP/graphic work collab with Lonnie.

I will post a picture-page or so now and again.

Just not this now. (I forgot to ask permission.)

• Houndstooth Check; A twill weave construction in which a broken check is produced by a variation in the pattern of interlacing yarns, utilizing at least two different colored threads. This is the weave that hides stains real well.

• mistake; Also called Spontaneous Expressions, and, they add uniqueness and expense to the work.

• now; As in The Now. The very now gets very old very fast and starting from scratch can be old news to begin with. So begin with something that is already on the designated design path that will get you there sooner than now so you can say you’ve been there later. 

• hypomnemata; A material memory. A copybook, a notebook. A written permanent relationship between self and self. Memorandum, quotations, fragments of works, examples, actions witnessed or read, reflections and reasoning heard or have come to mind. An accumulated treasure for rereading and later meditation. Also, raw material for writing more formal work.

• Toshiro Mifune; 

A  line  left blank in his honor.

p.s. - In the early movies they had to wear their own clothing.

These are two details from-

When Sword Swallowing Does not impress.

Together with the unrealized  inventions of man Vol. II

With notes on the impatience of man though out written history.

I show these to remind me of them after they have been  covered, 

sense (see the two ‘s’?) they will be. Mostly.

It’s the type of visual subtext I love.

Title with subtitles always get my attention.

Telescoped writing, is the next best interesting thing.

I have had questions, so the answer is.

The first volume was never finished.

(ha)

Dream; I am riding on a train that is in a perpetual right turn. I realize it’s on a wheel, of sorts, caught in going circles. I end up on my doorstep at a suburban sprawl house. As I reach for the door knob my ‘male’ springs out of the door, pacing, totting in place and impatiently questioning.

“Do you want to go running?”

“No, I want to go eat.”

I works in overtime and overdrive during my outs. I have had white-outs, but I never lost a decade. These white-outs have afforded me of knowing that if I have worked through layers and layers of emotional mud, I didn’t know about it. Thankfully, the upheavals we all must expect lay dormant through denial and have gone undetected.

It’s curious how things were, how they are, how they could be. People in our lives that aren’t there anymore. The way time travels. Simple twists of fate. Some times they happen in an afternoon, 
YOU CAN SEE THEM HAPPENING. 
Another time it takes years to pull your attention full circle.

    At some point you’ve lived long enough to recognize the cycles in life. What folds back upon itself. What wheels around again, and again. It’s interesting to see the circles we chose to close, which are left open, what ones filled up and frozen up with memories.

  Yet, we really never know what the next day will drop in front of us.

   I see a full circle, your circle.

  There is  a dismal attempt to put pieces back together again. I know that it is impossible.

   One of those wicked deja vu days.

One of those, you think you know how the day will go days - and then as simply as can be - someone phones up and rings into a time that you thought was past years ago. And thinking that it would never be, cant be, and will never be - could be here now. If you were only brave enough.

I wrote a lot more than I got down on paper. 

You know how things take flight and circle, spiral up  again and again so high up there that they become unimportant or evaporate until the next time around.

 

Chloe-ism.

Chloe is running from clock to clock in every room trying to account for the lost minutes.

While ‘Drew is listening to a loop of the intro credits to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, staring into the you tube box figuring out how it was done pre-cg.

For three men the civil war wasn’t hell, it was practice.

Fucking cool.

Oh, I mean, it’s a well done movie, sure.

Remember, when you have lost your patience, stop, and wait a few breaths longer.

This unfinished title page 

is a perfect example of the name of this work-in-progress and what lies herein.

I thought Chloe was trying her hand at Beat poetry...
until she told me this was her spelling list.

-->

Same concept, different scene.

By all accounts I have spent most of my life in a  reverie, of sorts.  Somewhere between vague wake and sleep. I catch myself checking if I’m on the right side of the yellow line or glancing at the clock just in time to do something I’ve promised.

I reckon it is just my disposition.  The slipstream is not a bad place to be, better than some. I'm not spacey as I have a trail of work to prove manifestation and a career to track. None the less, (hear that L?), it would be nice to have the chance to choose.

If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.  -Marcel Proust

Just got off deadline with the Magic Flute, the only opera you’ll not find me crying-over in the wings. Near the pit door was a free zone of sorts. I recognize it, having first met a free zone while living in the Vulcan Foundry in Oakland. People placed gently or dumped things they no longer wanted. Of course it was all art and production genre goods: stretchers, sample clothing, used canvas … This pile by the back stage door was of a different nature and mostly unidentifiable, accepting, an empty pizza box, Bose speakers with a nest of wire, half full Listerine bottle. Nothing I would pick up and carry home. Just saying.

I know all of you know this, ...but that operatic scatting has a formal name. Mellisma. Said with an Italian accent. It’s what the Queen of the Night does in Act II. I always thought that was a happy little song, but what she is doing is arguing her daughter into murder.

Have I mentioned the use of panic to calm hysteria?

15

This is theater no one sees. I perform my task, coloring walls with a stream of sweat and consciousness. Or, a river of consciousness. Some days are green. All green. Monochromatic within the subtleness of every corner of that hue. The edges try to creep into blue or spread into  an olivey yellow smear. But I wrangle it, keeping it within the circle of my minds eye. It is a game I play with the chalk color. They have inherent needs to become something that I may not want, and I reserve the choice to let them rule my thumb or keep them under it.

You have to learn the rules of the game.

And then you have to play better than anyone else.

-Albert Einstein

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward;

they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Three made the mod squad.

When I’m on deadline, different thoughts surface, some adjusting into clear memories, others sift away and only an anxious feeling remains. Just shots of memories. Standing at a stoplight on a certain corner as a car speeds by and a passenger yells out the window to you. I’m thinking everyone has this experience of ‘hits’ when the mind is occupied in one area or another. It’s Joan Baez that sings about memories tumbling like sweets from a jar.

 I had thought to put in different names, but this was so very long ago, kind of. And although this may not make since to you, it’s just how the mind works, yes?

Our friend Dana joined in our artistic carousing. He wanted to be a writer so I reckon he felt no competition from us. We loved him because he was quirky (who were we to say), he wore gardening gloves in the winter, brought strange and stranger women home to stay over night and lived to be a character in the movie  Chariots of Fire.

     Dana fired off odd one liners,

     “Jayne, of all your faults, malicey is not one of them.”

     We rehearsed non-existing movies in the subway at rush hour.

    Once, we scaled a fifteen foot cyclone fence at dusk to walk across a barricaded rickety scaffold high above careening traffic. Actually, once was enough.

    We had spontaneous photo shoots on the roof top. On one occasion Kyle dressed Dana as a messiah in a lamé diaper. It was cold. Dana was really cold. I wanted  him to wear double stick tape on his tattered sandals so that he’d pick up and drag leaves, dirt and small sticks. I thought for some reason it would make the image authentic, as though that was important.

Posted just because.

  

Time is what keeps everything from happening at once, twice.

Drawing leaves behind evidence. 

Some times people like you more.

Some times people like you less.

The dogs are throwing themselves down on the bare floor, rolling their eyes and groaning Lurch-like. Yes, it’s moving time again.
Excuse me.
I just popped over from Theme Thursday. And it seems I’ve set a theme and not responded to it. Hoping this will suffice.

Minotaur
plate #20
Seeing clouds as a fingery low moving mask of smoke racing through the deluge of watercourse is where images become the skeleton of a nightmare.
  Yes, the water came down during the dark time. I hurried out at first light to check damage or if all had been spared. The lilt of the rain forgave some of the walls leaving them dry, soaking the facing walls and smearing chalk beyond recognition - yet, still interesting. Looking deliberate, softening the drawing into morphic shapes with more possibilities than the original  state. Is  this formed by another? A message shaping up from another pedigree force? Perhaps next rain will work through this smudge to expose an image sharp as arrows.
  Let  smudge be smudge -  just so, I’ll be satisfied with this question, waiting for the chance of an answer.

I’ve lost week to deadline. That's just how it goes.
I dreamed of an old friend last night and got on to memories I have not thunk possibly ever.
Rely.
Relay in writing, I like that.

In high school art class there was a small yellow and gray streaked glasshouse off  to one side that sat out into a small light shaft. It was off-sight of the art teachers so they had no clue to what was happening inside. You had the teachers buffaloed.
But now thinking about it, that green house was a fishbowl to the cafeteria across the way.

A potters wheel was wedged between short bleachers of plants and supplies. I preferring hand building — since they said I was no good at throwing pots, the product being too chunky and not elegant. But that didn’t keep me from trying. I was in the process of making, as a neighbor was ‘enhancing.' This friend was obviously in need of a something to focus on. He chose one of the still wet deep walled mugs and slowly, oh so carefully carved out niche in the the side and added chips of tiny mud, choosing any array of micro triangular, tubular and spherical pieces all into al area 1 inch in diameter. He worked so carefully it was scary, and so close his nose scraped the clay. When he was satisfied, he straighten up, and a with dawning on his face that happens way too in-often, looked at me wide eyed and awestruck.
“It’s the universe Imploding.”
Whoa. 

It has been a wicked deja vu week.

Real life rang false.
He carried a doll wrapped in scrap paper in his pocket. His mother sent a note along with him, only just this morning, 39 years ago,
“Excuse him from whatever
he wants to be excused from.”