additional space

 

Dear Y'all,

Yes, I am thinking of you!  I still have to tell you about two books I read, but you know how it is, things keep coming, clocks keep ticking.  I am reading another book now; and there is a part about space and time; and that made me think on space.  Well, let me be more precise.  In my reading, I tripped on a thought from my own mind; it happened when I was re-reading a sentence, trying to 'know' it, to feel it, to internalize it.  Of course I wasn't even sure what the sentence meant.  And there was a song on the radio, a song that sort of drones/expands/continues, like many songs I am fond of and insert a little pause in my mind's endless rattling.  So this little stumble, and wondering if a person I know would like this book, caused me to consider a thing a woman I know used to say when she was leading our monthly group centered on anti-racism.  She felt, and I am not here to dispute it, that our systemic, learned, invisible-to-us, racism needed to be addressed somatically; or to put it the other way, anti-racism needed to be embodied individually.  To facilitate this embodiment, we would begin with various meditative practices.  

All this preamble, all this context, just to tell you that what she said often during our meditative preparation was: open your consciousness a little wider, make a little more space for even this; this new grief, this new atrocity, this new information.  She said there was ample space for these feelings to fit in our crowded brains.

Now I have heard a lot of these kinds of instructions, and you have, too: imagine the liquid gold flowing and filling yourself as a vessel, breathe in the positive and exhale the negative, let thoughts float on by as if clouds.  Not much of it has been worth remembering and certainly not worth repeating, but this one, an invocation to make more room for things, make space for difficult thoughts and feelings, this seemed very useful to me.  I often feel very small when I am overloaded, over extended, and grasping, and like I need to cram things, or get rid of things, or bar any further things from entering and this phrase suggested that I just needed to notice that there was plenty of space for everything.  Rooms and rooms, acres and miles of space.

PS  Have another version; let me know which you prefer; write to me and leave your note in the usual place; the oak bole by the dry riverbed.

music for another Monday

 

diagram of how we see an infinity mirror

Dear Monday,

You know I love you, don't you?  We all heap the disappointments of the past upon Monday.  It's as good a day as any, dies lunae, Moon-day, Monday is!  Our weariness with the tired story of history, of our own repetition is not inherent in Monday.  Poor Monday is the scapegoat of the week.  My own, personal, big bad day of the week is usually Sunday.  I like to save Sunday for a Sunday Snit.  Which is a thing you are entitled to when you observe a workweek.  I am all done with that, thank you very much.  But, for Monday, please have this wonderful Arvo Part composition: Spiegel im Speigel, which is the mirror in a mirror of the infinite reflections.

PS  Learn a little more, on Wikipedia.  Yes, I have issues with representation on Wikipedia, and some bozo took down my contribution within days, but I also use the holy hell out of it, and I am a monthly donor.  You can be too, if you want to.  Wikipedia is flawed, but it is also kind of ours, in a way that Google, Amazon, Meta, etcetera, will never, ever be.

a big green boat

 

Dear Listener,

Ooh, sometimes, sometimes I am caught, I hesitate to give you a thing, and why?  Because the ocean would make you crazy* if you kept on looking, because the love would make you sad, if you kept on feeling.  The size of this song is so much bigger on the inside that you will feel small and so alone that you might have chosen to feel whole instead of broken by beauty.  Okay, you are warned, yes?  Listen, or not.  Maybe it is your song the day.  

If you aren't split in pieces by "you can stay with me and just can pretend I'm not there," you must already be shattered.

* “Looking at the waves scudding outwards and getting lost on the horizon, he could not help but recall the words of his mentor, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who had once told him that a part of eternity lies in reach of those capable of staring, unblinking, at the sea’s deranging expanses.”  -Benjamín Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World.

further dust

 

Dust storm in Mongolia, 2023.

Dear Thoughtful,

Here we are again, meeting over a cup of coffee and a phrase.  It's a pleasure to have someone to talk to about myriad meaning.

"The novel was bad; I never finished it; but the writing thickens the dust." - Vera Caspary, from Laura.

The sentence for me is puzzling, but in the most gratifying way.  I think, because the writing of the novel was not finished, that the thickening of dust could refer to time going by.  It might also be that the time/dust obscures the meaning of the writing.  It might be that the writing does the obscuring.  It might be that the act of writing passes/passed the time.  It might be that the writing's dustiness makes it hard to recollect the reality or facts?  Also, it borders on nonsense, on absurdity.  Those are the ways I have counted to love that sentence.

"...The writing thickens the dust."  It sure does!

PS  Let's have another version of yesterday's song of the day, today.

thickening dust

 

Thick dust.  Bodie State Historic Park, California.

Dear Misc.,

I have a backlog of things to tell you about; two books, some art, some music.  A large playlist of songs around the word 'radio.'  Some thoughts on disdain and reverence.  There are scrappy notes and lists all over the desk, table, nightstand, coffee table, to remind me to write to you here.  But, (and yes, we all felt that 'but' coming, didn't we?), but, I want to give you today a totally different song, a song that isn't yet on a list.  

I also want to give you a line from Vera Caspary's novel Laura:  "The novel was bad; I never finished it; but the writing thickens the dust."

It's so good!  The book, and beyond that, the line!  And beyond that, "...the writing thickens the dust"!!!???  Well.  Take a day to think on it.  I will be back tomorrow, and we will toss around the old pigskin of meaning!

mangle-wurzels, pickle-chicken, goodness

 

Dear Delicious,

Today, in the heatwave, under the heat dome, in the year 2026 of our Climate Catastrophe, I could not help but think of all the goodness.

Goodness like ricotta cheese.  Like wind in leaves.  The smell of hummingbird sage.  The soft clucks of quail.  Goodness like olallieberry jam; bread.  Just good stuff all over the place!  An avalanche, really, of good things all within a few feet of where I was reading.  And yes, that also was good!  I am reading a mystery, Three Bags Full.  And in the book: mangel-wurzels.*  So good!  I feel I looked up mangel-wurzels once before, many years ago, but I had forgotten them, so they delighted me anew.

I was pondering all the goodness, because I was, in the part of my mind that wasn't reading, thinking about Wanting.  Wanting as one does when one plants a garden and wants to reap a harvest.  That kind of long-term want.  The planned for, effort-full, pay-out or pay-off.  I know its siren song- I have planted and watched things die and wither, along with hope.  They grow funny, or sickly, or poorly, or, worst of all, you neglect them, just once, by mistake, and there they lie: all dead.  Gardening isn't for gentle souls.  It is for tough nuts that don't crack.  And yet.  In all this want, there is so much other goodness you could acquire.  Frozen wild blueberries are SO good!  Yes, they are in a deathless plastic packet, but, they are good!  It is nice, it is 'rewarding' to grow ones' own whatever it is, but it is also nice to reap the harvest of the market, the icy frozen shelves.  I mean, I guess, that you can want, I won't stop you, want until your teeth hurt, but, if you find yourself being injured by your obsessive desire, please stop to consider a substitute before you go hurting yourself further.  Maybe, while you are fiddling around with re-directing your desire, you might even stop wanting what you haven't got.

What you have got, I bet, is a jar of pickles.  Probably one that is shoved to the back of the fridge.  I had one.  I ate the pickles very intentionally, because I saw a fellow on Instagram use the leftover brine to marinate chicken!  I don't know what he did with his pickle-chicken after the brining.  I dipped mine in flour and cayenne pepper and pan fried it, and whoo, pickle-chicken is good!

*  The mangel-wurzel seems like a machine you crank that would wring out your clothes while simultaneously playing a hurdy-gurdy tune!

not small

 

Musique for a Monday

 

Dear Radio Dodohead,

My DJ played this song the other day; I could not remember hearing it; I think I missed it, like I missed  Lizzie Mercier Descloux.  Maybe 'missed' is the wrong word:  I was late to hearing it.  I listened to some other Suburban Lawn songs, and saw there was this beautiful thing, too, a whole album by Suburban Lawn's lead singer:  Salon de Musique.

PS  

I think what gets me, when I find I missed a thing, or that I am very late to a thing; things like Eve Babitz, The Fabulous Stains, Hal Hartley Films, or No Wave, is that I wonder what other lavish gifts of the era I missed- and I also wonder, why, oh why, in the name of all that is good, didn't I miss seeing Beatlemania at Knott's Berry Farm?

a shape

 

Dear Working to Refine & Define,

I am trying, working, I guess, to find a 'poignant' shape.  This is a thing that concerns me deeply- perhaps all artists are looking for a poignant shape.  I want an emotional shape that is not defined already.  Not a heart or a butterfly, or a hand.  I want a shape that feels like something, but is not something.  A shape with fullness, and flourish, or a shape with weight and sadness.  Or a shape that evokes the moonlight.  Or satisfaction.  It should be rounded, some, I think, and maybe a bit awkward in proportion.  I often end up with something kind of mounded.  A half oval.  But, I have to be careful not to end up with something too human breast like.  Similarly, it can't be too much of a lemon or a pear or an apple.  It can't look too much like a mushroom.  Blobby, yes, but kind of symmetrical, I think, is what I want.  It should be like a view of the sublime, this shape- an awing feel.  Maybe bodypart-ish, but not specific.  Biological looking.

I once used a shape that was a cross between a wire whisk and a light bulb.  I used it enough in graduate school that an artist visiting my studio asked me what it was.  I said I didn't know; just a shape.  This fellow, then, warned me of the danger of using shapes without knowing what they were or where they came from. 

Curious, isn't it?  A warning like that?  Was it that the gods would be angry that I used a thing that came from the unconscious?  He went on to tell me that he had a shape like that, and he used it for years, until he recognized it as something in his studio- perhaps a light bulb?- and then he stopped using it immediately.  

Now, I wish, like a wish sandwich, that I could tell you what that all meant.  What lesson there was in his warning me about using shapes without... permission?  Full knowledge?  Clinical trials?  I do not know.  I know one thing, that if you are going to warn a person, you might take some care, do a little background check, because I think if you warn a person not to go over a certain fence, not to cross a line, they are not likely to obey if they aren't afraid of the undefined monster you say lives on the other side of the fence.

written on air