Footsteps of a Snake

This morning I suddenly hear the rhythm of my washing machine, in the far corner of the kitchen, just above the basement steps. I'd like to record it in on my iPAQ in MP3, then overlay some bongo sounds and rattles and gourds. Music of the everyday. Of course.

Chuga-chuga-chuga-chuga-chuga.
Ee-Oh, Ee-Oh, Ee-Oh, Ee-Oh, Ee-Oh. Central spindle-thing alternating back and forth.

Not the ancient washer women down at the river in the morning, clank of pans, call of children, swaying palms, dailiness and dust—

just my own Big White Rumbling Square Machine. And me. And the Internet. John upstairs sleeping.

I turn on the air-conditioner and walk around the house shutting windows. John's stretched out in his black briefs and nothing else, blankets thrown off.

Weblogs and diaries are like highways. We need to feel that we're going somewhere.

Attest to. Log, blog, register, track. Recall
to mind
the feeling.

We're trying not to lose
our place.

We're trying not to lose
our place,
yet we have no idea
where we are.

Should the weblog be edited at all? Should I permit myself changes, that is, once I’ve deigned to hit "put" or "publish" on the keyboard? Is the raw journal more honest and authentic and useful? Or do revisions feel truer and serve us more fully because cleaner and leaner, the slack and the sludge and the lies raked away?

Just realized that I haven't arranged my entries here according to weblog custom: most recent ones first. Should I reverse the order? Should I scramble the order? Should I give the reader a choice? Do I still believe in beginnings? In endings?

How about a complex nutty blog-plot, as in the film Momento? That one got me. Holy hell, memory loss every five or ten or whatever minutes. Leonard's pockets crammed with notes, his very body a notepad of tattoos. He keeps saying he believes in a world outside his own mind, a physical world, body of earth, he believes in fact—that's why he keeps a record, that's why he's following the clues, he believes they will lead him somewhere, he believes there's somewhere to go.

Turns out the record, of course, is flawed, too time-dependent, piecemeal, subject to distortion by any unsavory stranger, or even by himself. We can't write onto the body hard enough, continually enough, honestly enough. . . because the body, this body, this HERE AND NOW, this free-and-clear-of-language—well, it's keeping quiet. Of course. Because it's free and clear of language.

Wonder how rearranging entries in my blog-plot would change the meaning. But is there a plot at all? Normally when I write a poem or an essay or whatever I don't fully understand the plot of the thing until it's finished. But what if it's never finished? What if, being a weblog, it just keeps going? Does meaning even accrue, does meaning even matter? Meaning reduced to discrete white moments. Mementos. Small squares of language. This.

TV screen, computer screen, iPAQ, windshield, window…Why always some form of square? I think we all love Macs, even in secret. At least they're trying to be round.

Worried about a friend this morning; she's going in for assorted "procedures." Ok, we don't chop off limbs by the dozens anymore, we don't "bleed" the sick body or stick leeches, fucking hell, on the ill. But modern medicine still looks pretty barbaric. No, I can offer no clever alternatives. I'm just telling you. I read somewhere that the medical world has traditionally and fundamentally viewed the body as a corpse. That seems about right. Students study on cadavers, after all. Everyone has experienced the feeling, I'm sure, in the white glare of the doctor's office, subject to the doctor's gaze, object of examination. Just gone. Body's there, but you're gone. A fluorescent tropical luau featuring just the doctor and your body ("you," in the meantime, dropped off in some ontological Bakersfield and given the choice of staring at dust or staring at dust).

Worried about a friend this morning. She's going in for assorted "procedures." Ok, we don't chop off limbs by the dozens anymore, we don't "bleed" the sick body or stick leeches, fucking hell, on the ill. But modern medicine still looks pretty barbaric. I'm just saying. I read somewhere that the medical world has traditionally and fundamentally viewed the body as a corpse. Students study on cadavers, afterall. Everyone has experienced the feeling, I'm sure, in the white glare of the doctor's office, subject to the doctor's gaze, object of examination. Just gone. Body's there, but you're gone. A fluorescent tropical luau featuring the doctor and your body ("you," in the meantime, dropped off in some ontological Bakersfield and given the choice of staring at dust or staring at dust).

The world’s a flowing thing, so ultimately immense and shifting its boundaries are indiscernible. We can’t get far enough "back" to see it. I therefore wish for some other kind of study. Study-by-poetry. Poetic empiricism. Can we still have science, some kind of science, can without estranging frum Or thit o Th

I'm searching for a memory of don't know why i chose that date it's friend's market up on maricopa hwy on my bike it's dust and fruit and windy roads and everyone else is working not me not me not me

……………………………………………………
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Given how the snake moves, where is the snake at any given moment? It's both behind and ahead of itself. It's both where it was and where it is going. People I guess are that way too, one foot back, one forward, but we are also up in the air, we are away. We're watching ourselves in time. We're blogging.

July 9, 2003

Alarm: it's already the 9th.

The A on my keyboard is growing faint.

We wake up on a dusty hill above some kind of man-made pond in a congested suburban area, small dead birds on the ground all around us. Sparrows, nuthatches, finches.

Someone later in the dream says perhaps a twister hit the spot.

But I'm worried there's something wrong in the soil or in the air.

When my radiation therapy was finally done this May, I had days of happiness like a warm wind. Like an old cotton t-shirt at just that incredible point of softness beyond silk or anything. I don't necessarily want those days back. I fight instead to remember the fear. I want to stay properly freaking alive.

July 10, 2003

Prozac

1:10

I keep wondering how to organize and present my recent stuff, and it occurs to me now: why not right here in my blog? That way the individual pieces—poems, graphics, whatever—appear in the stream of my life, I don't have to extract and force them into some precisely coherent volume. My stuff (and this is maybe just a big fat ugly rationale for insufficient talent) always wants to spill over the boundaries, connect in some way which traditional frames or formats won't allow. If I present those pieces in ongoing stream, however—well, I like it. I like how the raw daily jottings frame the finished poems, and I like how the border between the two realms blur.

And why not, afterall, have a lyric poetry which is fairly mainstream and yet is enriched by a couple decades now of innovations by the Language poets? How about we let the boundaries of the "book" widen? It's been taboo I know to mix concrete poetry, Language poetry, and fairly standard lyric or narrative free verse—but why not? It's been REALLY taboo to mix poetry with critical commentary, but, again, why not? How about a critical commentary which becomes BETTER by becoming more poem-like, and poems which get weirder and richer by opening their windows to criticism? or even theory?

Rather than isolating itself from reason, I wish lyric poetry would come to its aide, help us find new kinds of critical study free of empiricism's excesses.

How about a theory that we just can't get our MINDS around?

July 11, 2003

Stunt Kites (a Tetrad)

July 17, 2003

People blog all kinds of topics, truckloads of daily stuff, and apparently cats are a favorite. So today I will blog my own cat, Rat, who is 19 and dying.

We have shared time, I guess that's the main thing. He was there like highlighter, an eater and a drinker, a sweet returner as days blinked on and off. He was gray and his eyes were green. People remarked on his calm, we called him Rat the Buddha Cat, kittens loved him, he never got mad, he had no sour in him. In his prime he was big as a goose, friends called him part dog.

He was in between me and the world on his quiet feet.

He came from a farm in Iowa. West Liberty or South Liberty, one of those. He was an Everycat, just one faceless gray in a mob of faceless grays out in the barn, his mom a big Siamese strolling obliviously by. I reached into the churning mass of his brothers and lifted him out.

He liked to lie with his front legs propped up on whatever was around: a step, a pillow, a pile of books. He was happy in his skin, he plain loved the ground, but I guess he needed that much of a view.

I wanted a pal for my other young cat, Mr. Bones, who actually resented him ferociously. But he was friendly and indifferent. He sat around and twinkled.

His back legs have almost stopped working. He sleeps all the time in one spot, in a private part of the house. Sometimes he stands up and points his head toward nothing and meows in a croaky voice at the air.

July 18, 2003

Weblog as Reality Poetry.

Story whose narrative edge is always open, like a mouth.

But framed enough to make a thing, face. A volume. I add to my notes as I investigate a subject, and this record of investigation becomes the work, "the book." If it is honest at all, it will never claim to be finished. Many writers' separately published books are together really very continuous. What if their work were shifted to a medium which allows for true continuousness? Weblog as continuous story. River of luminescent, incremental script. Searching for the trail, I leave a trail. I'm on

line.

Also: outside commentary upon my blog leads to my immediate response to those comments right in my scroll, and thus anything said of the work is very soon a part of the work. So watch what you say.

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

July 24, 2003

FINALLY got a homepage together. I've had junk on the web for aeons, but never any central or primary site.

I guess it's workable, although I picture a HOMEpage on a panoramic screen as big as a room and changing continually as the viewer gazes, looking one second like a cluttered office then a kitchen then a bedroom then a forest then blue-black space with stars…The angles shifting also, the office, the kitchen, the forest all seen at different moments differently, animated cubism, no one EYE…

Still tinkering some with my e-nichos and retablos. These came out of a combined interest in Mexican folk art, new media, and concrete poetry. Nichos are boxes of wood, tin, and other materials, and sometimes with small glass doors, in which tiny devotional objects are arranged. Retablos are small oil paintings, usually of saints.

I'm especially interested in nichos with ambiguous "depth." The ones I've made for the screen appear to be both flat and layered, with fluids and faint images "leaking" to the surface from an unknown and dubious background/underground. Well, that's my intent, anyway.

I also like the idea of the secular nicho, retablo, amate etc. Secular with some religious undertones, perhaps; or ambiguous religious undertones.

The ones I've made so far are especially for the screen; they don't print out very well. I'd like someday to make them with animation, the contents of the boxes changing as the mouse-pointer is moved…

Click on each to enlarge:

These additional ones are more like "amates"—woven devotional cloths. They are composed almost entirely of images produced by digital distortions of letters and words. I.e., the bones, letters, "fabrics swatches" etc. which appear in them were all once letters.

July 27, 2003

Quaker tradition: sit in silence and speak only when you absolutely have to speak. When you have no choice in the matter. Let the silence build, or spread, or sink, or reach such volume that words

come out of you that have nothing to do with you or everything to do with you, for once, at once. Most blogging, we'd have to say, is not based on this principal. I wonder about blogging where speech is junk. Where language has no pressure behind it. Yammer. Words that fill the silence rather than respond to it. Perhaps many of the daily chatter-type blogs cropping up all over the web are just another means of avoiding everything from self to death. Blogs are now choking cyberspace the way that other media of course are clogging mediaspace everywhere, and if there's a gap, a silence, a pause, a break, well, of course, that too must be filled with

advertising.

Maybe the worst of the personal weblogs are just another form of commercial. For the self. Tediously repeating I'm here, I'm here. Because in too much noise, one's boundaries start to smudge. Presence becomes thin and remote. Because without the unfortunately painful perception of death, without some necessary foreknowledge of rupture in the static, without awareness of impending no-self—well, we hardly know we're here. And the noise, right now, is immense.

August 1, 2003

Some McLuhan-inspired tetrads/concrete poems about weblogging.

Academic

Personal

Creative

More tetrads on weblogging:

Reading

Writing

What's a tetrad????

August 14, 2003

John asks me whether I heard the plane that came in so low this morning.

There's sugar in my coffee, but I can't taste it.

"Nobody wants to talk about "The Grand Inquisitor" anymore."

Now's the time to abolish war forever.

"Don't think. Blog."

Eh-oh.

August 19, 2003

I teach college English, and every year there's this slightly uncomfortable interval just before everything starts in the fall. The second or third weeks in August just before my department cranks up its pre-semester workshops, meetings, picnics. It's like surfing the Web on a really, really slow computer: you just sit there, unable to do what it is you know you'll very shortly be doing, but unable to start up anything else. Because as soon as you do, you'll have to stop. The net result is some not-too-severe but nonetheless uniquely miserable effect on the brain and body.

I suppose there should be a name for it. The Massively Gray and Idiotic Pause.

Anxious Hiatus.

Brain Skip.

Blast the grit out of your keyboard with a can of compressed air. File your nails. Think short thoughts. But you slip up, every now and then, don't you, you relax into one longer, silkier thought as it side-winds along toward some warm and unsuspecting prey…

then blink back to THE MONITOR, the tyrannical and inevitable PRESENT…

Our department secretary, playing the ukulele and accordion at our Fall picnic. That was a watery part of the world.

It was very watery when I climbed Mt. Whitney in the sixth grade. Granite shine. Snow patches in shade.

Dreaming about George Harrison the night before his death—that was soaking wet.

John and I have subscriptions for too many magazines. I roam the house with a chronic, low-grade fever of concern at how much I am not reading. And that's not even moistl. Dry with an ugly crust.

Cats do smile. That's dewy.

The Fargo Farmer's Market is a fine, light rain. First corn on the cob of the season—just a wonderful mist.

Long-distance travel by car…I'm not sure.

Most political issues…not sure.

Our occupation of Iraq. That's one I'm relatively certain about. Can't even discuss it.

September 2, 2003

11:26

Weblogging like exercise. Good for you.

I love it and I don't.

11:27

Working on a poem whose subject is, of all things, hmm, my hysterectomy. It's an odd one. But I don't care.

My first real teacher said: be strange.

I think we mostly think that we're tolerant of strange. But what we really want is more of the same. That reasuring sleep, neither deep nor REM, a bland, unending, undangerous nap.

3:53

More revisions of latest poem. Made two from the original one.

Where'd My Uterus Go?

and

Where'd My Uterus Go? (II)

September 9, 2003

10:56 pm

The The, or What We Used to Call The Change

September 11, 2003

Early morning. Zero sleep last night.

"Facing the day is something a person does every day…

Despite the flaws and imbalances, there is always something in a minor artist you just can't ignore, some tensile fiber of strength. Yes, yes, I confess, I identify with minor voices, they may be small or weak or repetitive, yet they produce undeniable moments of caged luminosity that strike right into my heart. My moments of transition have to do with caged luminosity, or perhaps, uncaging luminosity so that I can carry something of my creative moments into my day of coping with Others."

Molly Peacock, Boulevard, Spring 2003

"Life is about showing up…" (Ibid)

"God's pain would destroy the world were it not mediated by sacred textuality."

God's pain. Please.

Don Seeman, Common Language, Fall 2003.

"I'm the subject,'" he stated, when explaining how he related to his creativity: "I'm also the verb as I paint, but I'm also the object. I am the complete sentence."

Richard Shiff on the painter Barnett Newman, ibid.

"Lack of an adversary forces us to internalize all the possible arguments and take issue with our own thinking. Such self-assessment comes hard; and for many, it proves unbearable."

"Antagonisms generate activity while increasing inertia."

"As much as he needed to dispute himself, Newman, only human, projected his argument onto a select group of enemies."

*

"Antagonisms generate activity while increasing inertia."

Late this morning

Excuse for lousy writing in a blog: I thought no one was listening.

Reason to work harder on a blog: But somebody might.

5:06 pm

The Earth Virus

September 17, 2003

What Was It Like, Knowing I Might Die?

Morbitity Glyphs

September 18, 2003

Free Steak Still Available

We gave out a number of steaks
this past week, but still have
about 300
steaks left.

September 19, 2003

Joe

Finally, a poem about coffee.

September 23, 2003

heart's a boulder

September 30, 2003

Some funny pieces I've experimenting with. Part lyric, part concrete poetry. El-vis-cerally inarticulate. Blue suede rue.

wire i

wire ii

wire iii

I don't know that I've ever really seen anything quite like these "wire" things I'm doing. Undoubtedly, they're around. Relatively ordinary prose or lyric poetry enmeshed with often abstract (nonrepresentational) concrete and visual elements. Don't know how they'll go over, but I love them. Feels right, the turn to the visual when utterance seems otherwise wrong or impossible. I've been trying some concrete poems with all the resources of Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash etc., but these wire things are done in just ordinary old Word.

October 3, 2003

Poem-ing more than blogging these days.

Friday

It's 4 AM; Do You Know Where Your Mind Is?

October 4, 2003

All of a sudden, I can't get enough of Neruda. I've always loved certain poems, but now for some reason I can't stop reading him. He's like a neighbor I want to have coffee with 25 hours a day.

I love his expansive "I." It's not quite as hugely transcendental as Whitman's—he doesn't insinuate himself into the very grass under our feet or the paper of the book we're holding in our hands, but it's a very generous one. Or maybe it's not a "large" I at all; just one at all times ironically and compassionately self-mythologizing. It's also an I situated always in the widest of contexts. Even if he's sitting or walking or otherwise speaking from a very specific location, the reader senses that he's really sitting or walking or otherwise speaking as a creature of nature, nation, planet. His voice always resonates centrifugally, unlike other kinds of lyric voices which seem to revolve and resolve and echo inwardly.

He's almost always meditating upon his own social, spiritual, emotional, or political condition or location. He's always defining where, much more than who, he is, and this where is almost entirely figural and general. In his poems he's never Pablo on such and such exact spot of beach, at such and such distance from his house in Isla Negra. We don't know who else is out walking around, we don't know what he's wearing, the details of his day have no clear edges and no specific gravity as they do in narrative writing. The details that make it into his poems are drenched in myth. They have more verb than noun in them, more song than syntax, more moment than story, the ground in the air and the air in the ground, the tangible whipped like meringue till it's gritty and physical as always but at the same time full of air and full of space, Mother Pablo full of grace, almost floating.

Another colleague, Jane, from my small, Upper Plains department died recently.

Over the last two years, in addition to Jane, the department chair's husband died; both secretaries, a Seminarian, and one of our graduate students lost their fathers; a Lecturer of ten years died (lung cancer, still trying to teach her classes days before, collapsed on a lawn on her way to class...); and another Lecturer, a tenured professor, and a former grad student lost their mothers. The tenured professor's mother caught fire in a kitchen.

Oh yeah, a former colleague who still teaches nearby lost his wife in a car accident. Oddly enough, he had published a novel just a few years ago in which the wife of the protagonist dies in a car accident.

I think that's it. And I had cancer.

Something wrong in the soil or the air...

You're Jane

Octuary 3, 3002

Ok, I love this sheer goofiness. Be sure to turn your audio UP.

Whitman

Wordsworth

Williams

Dickinson

O'Hara

October 5, 2003

A book read in the order of first page, last page, second page, second-to-last page, third page, third-to-last page—and so on, until the book and the reader meet themselves in the middle.

---------------------------------

a book of afterthoughts
without the
thoughts.

--------------------------------

just wondering.

Sources