Entr'acte / the Meta

12-5/9 

Put two ideas or tangibles together that don’t go + see how they relate. Even the game Mixed Taste has rules, and though it can’t be considered to be in the reaches - except the reaches of one’s mind - they do change every time. Giant Tortoise + Punk Rock scene of Vivienne Westwood. Second year novices + the ’67 Rambler. The Dog Catchers of Vatican City + (you knew this was coming ) Fisherman of Switzerland. 

Our minds want a linear story + what we can’t figure, our minds are able to massage into a believable form. Our intellects + our hearts build, (knock down + rebuild!) what we think we believe. In our life’s exploration we have criss crossed the path from where we have been, back again over familiar terrain + not even recognized it. This reminds me of the resolute feeling of what jet lag is - working thorough everything needing attention at one time, + being totally, absolutely, completely ineffectual with it all at the same time. The wayward intent, though, becomes the layman’s Shunyata. This emptiness / openness permeates, + is seen as something to work through, but in the moment, you have to accept it. 

What may seem like a waste of time to some, my skin becomes thick + sharp with memories yelling Kiken, Kiken!

Sometimes what looks large from a distance, up close, ain’t never that big. -Bob Dylan

It is bravery when the risk is recognized. 

Entr'acte / the Meta      

12-4/9  

  

Paris is not in Italy. But it’s close. 

The dreads have made it to the door — I have to remember each time whether to keep them at bay, or embrace them fully (the whole catastrophe) to knock the scare out of me. I reckon it is different at different times in our lives. This past year, nicely, mercifully, is over. Spring will. Time passes + what has to be done will be done. We’ll also find the hell raising to get done, for that is what will sustain our artist souls. It is a little slice of immovable heaven since we’re unsure if it will be that or the other we will be facing at the end. Wow, the silence afterward work has been put to bed. Who doesn't look forward to that? Virgil had a tattoo the color of a peach pit that read  Fléctere si néqueo súperos Acheronta movebo. And if he did not believe it on his deathbed -  he had the reminder while he lived, + the devotion to wear it on his sleeve.

A real fable to try on. There was a storm overhead whipping up. I could see Orion steadying himself, trying to keep from being blown away. I ducked under a flopping wing of a torn roof seeking protection. Only half afraid, I wanted to remain outside to see the stars resistance + watch others scatter to safety. 

Hera is alive and well and living in Juno’s body. Her story has stained her. She studies by firelight and has learned to ignore her personal daimon. She does this because she can’t imagine not. If she were flesh + bone, one could see her mind peeling back to reach for an understanding of the mix - genius, legend, messiah complex. She believes things she will not talk about. All we have is an early paper photo where the slow film + long exposure created a halo of bright light around her white gown of voile. The negative is seen bleeding black. I do not know how this relates to life, or this muse, but it is simply beautiful, + its otherworldliness effect intrigues me compared to the sharp focus of realism.

Hera has left no comment on her married life. 

Ah yes! To Le Guin, where the rules change in the reaches.

Entr'acte / the Meta 

12-3/9  

…And what comes before destroying oneself?

You destroy other stuff!

American things happen. Raise your hand if you’ve seen ridiculous fun called Destroy Build Destroy. Omfg — what an absolute train wreck. What an anomaly. Rough translation: Tribe of three teenage boys purge their testosterone by performing the title. Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo also asks that same eternal question. What are those boys doing in the background? Flipping each other with towels? Whoa to the Legion of Decency. Out of control + unaware of what, if anything, important is going on. Managing on the edge of chaos is an art, these boys are not anywhere in the vicinity the A word.

 

Where are the brick + mortar places that we played 'bohemians sit in a cafe + quietly revolt phase’ games? Gone. These guys would have destroyed them all. Some of the places have been gone for years, decades. I know intellectually that nothing lingers, + you don't need to have a physical place to exist if it is existing in your mind as a memory. But emotionally, those are memories that will follow me til I die. Weird. But there you go. You think something will be  around for ever-ever, but you’re just wrong. What can be built from the pieces? And then, destroyed again.

Perhaps this is what I’d hoped for ever since that day: the destruction and loss of everything. That’s right. Destruction comes before creation, and to that goal even my own conscience must be cast aside. -Lelouch vi Britannia / Code Geass

Better than waking up to a plate of croissants and syringe of smack in a Paris hotel.

Entr'acte / the Meta      

12-2/9  

Sacrifice feels like you’re winding up 

to do. And the slaughter is not the end unto itself. There are reactions of what you want to happen,  + when you want something bad enough you can talk yourself into needing it. What remains is the longing for things that didn’t happen. 

It is more difficult to make a beautiful painting interesting than to make an interesting painting beautiful. Someone needs to not only understand this, but put it into practice - then, please, explain it to me. I think Pessoa could have. When he said you or they, he meant himself. And when he said himself, he still meant himself.  His switchbacks + sideways created authors unto themselves. You are excused from being my idea of you. I channel him on my blank writing days. I simply cut + paste everything I say, because that really is as non-sequential as I feel.

It becomes the winding up to say something unique, + after it’s launch from the tongue + now almost landed onto paper — the phone bleep-bleeps because I’ve forgotten to switch it to airplane mode. Then it becomes chasing the idea. The time lost has severed the thread. Finding even one word to get back on the track is impossible with every lost moment. What is that lost time called?  Were does it go? There must be a word somewhere that simplifies this feeling of difference between unfurling and unraveling.

I awake excited about the day + end exhausted from it. And, somewhere in between I visit the central gardens - at a distance of 6 feet. I absorb details surrounding me. Sort of like superman hearing everything yet waiting to hear the one thing that piques his interest. I land on a pair of converse shoes with laces tied together, apparently granny thrown to sail up and whip wrap around the electric line going form the street to the park privy. (EW! Helen! A public bathroom!) And that’s not all I see. Focusing on these keds, I see the structure of the thing gently swinging above me. The black cotton canvas, + the work involved in making it. The fertile land in Egypt where the raw materials were grown, the sweating backs of the laborers, their homes, their families setting the table for the evening meal. I see the manufacturers in distant regions, the machines, the dyers coloring the threads + weaving the tough cloth, the seamstresses, those who made up the individual pieces — the shaped stamped rubber toe, the converse decal, shoe laces + the plastic end tips of the laces. The schleps that brought the pieces here + there + those truckers that connected the dots to make the product displayed above me. And beyond them I see their thoughts and hopes for their lives + their days + their next moments. The domestic lives each play out as their realities unfold before my eyes. All these hours, all these lives dedicated to the building of a pair of shoes someone has casually thrown up on wires. I become dense smoke + feel myself shrinking + implode in my seat. I’ve traveled 30 years + 3000 miles without out leaving my bench. I leave the park exhausted, like a sleepwalker, having lived a whole life.

In order to understand, I destroyed myself. -Fernando Pessoa

It is what has happened in the shadows that will remain with me forever.

 Entr'acte / the Meta      

12-1/9 

The picnic that is River of Mnemosyne. 

Where Anything can happen and will.

Already, my life is a shaky substructure teetering on misunderstandings, hearing half truths, and damn if I can’t think of a third to make this a well rounded sentence. 

Hellhounds in the Museum sounds like a regret. Or a challenge. Or perhaps, a regretful challenge. Why are these damn muses always so damn obtuse? Damn. And again. I can’t help but think they are made for a creator of one. Someone whom picked a muse essential to their own story, an offhand MacGuffin to move some one’s single pointed plot along + simultaneously chosen to throw everyone else off their creative slipstream current by turning every other table upside down along the way. Hellhound on My Trail. But, I do go on. Yes?

Hellhound in the museum is a contra flavor of elephant in the room, or perhaps - I can’t find the correct lipstick shade.

The hellhound most defiantly is in the Natural History Museum. (And likely designed, painted and built by a friend who knows no hell.) An extended Hellhound family captured in any number of ways- all illegal, and any number of places - all private property, with any number of intentions - all anti-Peta. Gutted and stuffed into a cyclorama. Minding their own businesses and refusing the fourth wall, the red eyes of the pups peer out from a dark den with an imagined tunnel to inner earth + intertwined with roots of a faux Balboa tree. Their cockeyed painful look of taxidermy is carried over, belying tameness in the state of frozen time. 

One member of the family if noticeably missing - perhaps this hound is employed as a docent in the rod sterling wing, aptly named the Other Night Gallery. Peering into hellish paintings with hellish themes, darting here and there around suspended frames. This floating feature mesmerized me. Where my 20th century mind said how is that? Today I laugh haha! The hellhound is at home + looking quite natural wearing a this is not a tour tee, grappling with a megaphone and queuing the horror foley with a condescending drawl.

On the other hand, maybe she's belying a peanut farmer, with chicken feathers stuck out the corner of her mouth. Is she the goody-two-shoes cousin from the other side of the tracks? Mules on her feet and diploma clinched in her paw, glasses balancing way down on her nose, as she searches for a brood to teach the dangerous ways of the deadly forefather hellhounds. Or, posing as a derby fox type character? Dapper and charismatic in a bell top hat and knickers holding a riding crop, to ward off the ferrel dogs that would pursue her. Shapeshifting into kitsune or his twin the Inari Shrine variety. 

I’m imagining the drawing by the dutch classic blurring the ape form into human merging into frog. The morphing of animal farm that shape-shifts into and back from. Where the entire animal kingdom, including humans, don’t land far from the same tree. This could all be an irrational notion. Though empirically, the tracked mud and indelible foul breath proves this character is real. On the other hand, from my lips to gods ear.

The Greeks say Cerberus was a demon, but I say not. He was no Black Shuck of East Anglia, but a three headed sweetheart that was misunderstood, left unattended, and neglected at the gate — how could he not be a little defensive? As the saying goes, (okay, yes - I’ve viewed the film Fiddler on the Roof three times this week) deviation from the norm will be punished unless it is exploitable.

It is the preverbal hellhound of the mind — second cousin to the monkey mind we all know so well. We are the hellhound enclosed in the museum; our virtual mind. The visiting character is masked up and sashaying around dull thoughts and puny sparks. Perhaps she wears the PPS mask begrudgingly, because when the muse was imagined it was not necessary. She had another mask in mind. The mask behind the mask, where no-one is the wiser. A Hell Hound of Baskerville by any other name. Seen in Bulgaria, Turkey, Vietnam, Siberia, Romania, Russia, Chile, Lithuania, Sardinia … You get the picture. Or in other words, the big dark harbinger of death is inside us all. Peering around wildly with red eyes that illuminate our fears.

Though they are buried in opposite ends of the earth, one dog will find them both.  -Djuna Barnes

As the good book says, someone wants us to sacrifice something.