the damaged fabric

Suspended, still, feeling the pull of gravity, feeling the gravity, knowing the position is a sign of something wrong, the mind shifts and searches without finding right. It will take some unshoveling before the rescue and so in this suspended position the mind must wait. Pulse is racing and blood is running and running wrong and away and tight in the head and where is the sun now relative to the self? These are some of the questions but not all.

This trap, this metal cage, is clutching, holding, protecting, unyielding. Think. Think now. Or wait. Sending all strength to the body, the mind lapses into a dark, dark place. Now there is more stillness than the mind can fathom. Now there is only darkness and calm and here there is no sound.

Across the world in Spain people hold up their phones to a sand sculpture of the Christian nativity. When the moisture that holds this arrangement of grains evaporates they will separate into a thousand directions but for now they stick together, unified.

But here, bodies are trapped in a mass of twisted metal, and on this, a holiday, he is one of them.

But think, there is she, far away in Chicago, left behind, not a soldier. Just a civilian. Part of the peace yet to come. Part of the reason we have to protect the homeland. Part of what is now completely out of reach.

This is some kind of world upside down.

Her day in Chicago yesterday as she remembers it: Above her as she walks to work a man is dangling from ropes off a tall building. His arms comb the air as if playing an enormous harp. For a moment it looks as though he is in trouble but this is simply the dance of his job. This image triggers thoughts of her distant love: a door on his forearm and spiders across his shoulder, along with other tattoos sprinkled over his body, suggest a mystery whose code might be cracked if taken in the right order.

Trying to think about what it means to finish, to end, to let something die, to move on, is causing a dull ache that seeps into the forefront and permeates the farthest reaches of the day turning every one of its details. Have I said what I needed to say? Because the moment of ending puts a stop to all future possibilities, of finding a better way to finish the line. And the feeling of ending is here, now the end is near.

Today in Chicago the sky has become chalk white with snow. The naked branches quiver in the wind. What hits the window sounds like sand. The wind howls.

Unconscious of his current position she is thinking about the day he left. If it had been a swift ending, a stroke of death that snuffed life in an instant without thought or consciousness taking part that would be one thing: difficult, but with clear, hard, sharp, edges of pain that could be signified without vagueness or blur. But this was a slow, burning, agony with a murky, swampy, weary coming to an uncertain close. Something intolerable that could no longer be part of the fabric of the days as they moved forward. A sad end that became clear in the distance and then shape shifted several times before coming to a halt right in front of her. A soldier. Somehow he had become a soldier.

At this moment he is still suspended and until he comes to, his mind will entertain him with notions that keep his consciousness at bay. Some damage can never be reversed. Some memories should never be planted. Just as the girl who closes her eyes at the movies during the bad part, his mind knows instinctively about indelibility.

She is thinking toward him, talking to the spark of him that remains in her head, even though it is over between them and he is so inexplicably distant in every way she can imagine. She forms a complete sentence, she makes space for it inside her thoughts: Today I can think of nothing but the wind, she tells him. The windows won’t hold it back.

He begins to hear noises again and this might be a good thing. He is coming closer to something. He begins to know he is in danger.

Understanding the end requires a vision that takes in the future blur without fear. It takes a belief that time will sort out the details, that there is rhyme and rhythm to the universe. Now that he isn’t going to last, everything melts and morphs including the image of himself and his place in the world. He clings to the thought of oaks being planted hundreds of years before they are needed and to the concert going on now in Germany that will take 639 years to complete. Those who started it will never hear the end. They trust that generations to come will benefit in ways that matter somehow now.

In the near distance a Shia boy tells a reporter: An al-Qa'ida man shot my uncle, then a second man ran over him with a motorcycle. His head squished.

Now again the mind becomes disorganized and the thoughts that float forward need translation that may never come.

Then a memory, cool and clear from the winter solstices of more than one year: Drummers at dawn in a small studio by the el tracks in Chicago. Two drummers measuring the difference between night and day, sunlight eventually outweighing the candles that surrounded them. He is remembering these men drumming and how we no longer heard the wind hard against the windows. The movement of the trees aligned with the rhythms they made. Gradually the sun lit the top of the cloud layer and just enough got through for us to know that it was day.

It was the shortest day or the second shortest day but not the last.

[This story originally appeared on 1001 nights webcast.]

Christopher John Mitchell, aka: CJ

Christopher John Mitchell, aka: CJ
Born October 17th 1963

Clear eyes, finely drawn mouth, strong chin, deliberate gaze, hovering stance.
He waits for the right moment.
He steps without lunging.

Looking both ways, he begs for clarification before he responds;
consideration his specialty.

He listens for the news, he reads the images, he hears the sounds, he looks for the frame.
He hesitates. He remains in the balance. But when his mind’s made up he is certain.

He counts money but is not mean. He has more than one name.
In different categories he is referred to in different terms.
Not so much changeable as faceted.

When I see him, I know I am in the right place.

October 17th, 2007
krn

Echo for 100 nights webcast

The biggest problem facing her is her obsession. Stella is cleaning again. Stella is clean. Everything around Stella is clean. She has washed her hair with each of the three different shampoos that she has lined up in the bath. Somehow the hair is not coming clean. Now she has begun to trim it.

A small elfin man shared an otherwise empty train compartment with a 19th year old American girl who shivered in the top bunk through the dark of the overnight journey opening her eyes only at stations where dogs sniffed around the train cars and East German border guards in long coats paced the platforms. She saw Quonset huts glowing in the dark. She didn’t dwell on the mystery of life nor did she try to decipher it.

This journey appears in full resolution after 26 years as a result of some kind of cerebral cross-reference with the situation in front of her. The two performers on stage will soon jump to cleaning up the mess they have created and, though they are veteran performers, on this night they have no one to clean up for them. Their friends in the audience pitch in. She is stuck washing and rewashing the floor for hours and no one seems to understand why she should be trying to get it clean. Then comes the moment that triggers the memory of the train journey and the elfin man and now all of this in front of her pales in comparison to the pictures in her mind: the Quonset huts and the border guards and the sign that read IT IS DANGEROUS TO THROW THINGS OUT OF THE WINDOW.

Stella keeps returning to the mirror where she finds even more hair to cut from her head. She is trying to finish a haircut she started a week and a half ago. She isn’t counting how many days since she started but it’s 11. She plays not only the radio but a music CD and the television simultaneously. She can hold each sound in a different part of her head while she cleans. It helps trace the lines of thought that tangle around the mile markers of her recollections.

She remembers the performance in which two performers poured mud onto a rug and ran in place, pushing it into the rug and kicking it up behind them and spreading this mud around the room on the soles of their shoes. She found it hard to look.

Douglas had done himself in with pills. And while it certainly wasn’t her fault, she felt strangely implicated in the death of his spouse who succumbed with him of her own overdose. When Maggie had asked her whether or not Douglas might be a good catch Stella said simply, “I don’t think he would do anything to hurt you.” They were found dead together on the floor of their home.

It wasn’t one thing that gave Stella’s life so much weight just now. It was the accumulation. The sum total was almost more than she could bear. Maybe it was more. Maybe she wasn’t bearing it.

The bed was very dusty. It had to be turned and beaten with the broomstick and turned again and vacuum cleaned and aired out and all around the bed frame had to be thoroughly cleaned. There was a fine whitish dust that clung to itself in clumps and mixed with other scraps of substance so small they couldn’t be identified.

It wasn’t only promises that were fragile, the road also bent and the bridge sighed and all of the shadows were wrong. It wasn’t a woman in the far corner, just her reflection in the glass. Another lesson in the aberration of light. When Stella passed the large sculpture of a shoe, the one in the plaza downtown, the echo of the children running around within it caused the hairs on her arms to stand straight out as if pulled by the static electricity from a balloon. The thought of the quiet sound of the hair being pulled to the taut rubber of the balloon excited her inner ear.

Another friend, addicted to noise, walked the city for comfort after a long day’s work. Stella imagined her following each noise that attracted her and eventually losing sight and touch and becoming a single-sensed being simply following sound. But that was a silly thought. Not unclean, but silly.

Clouds appeared everywhere: in her tea, in the rear view mirror, on the television, and the back of her mind. She was working on dissipation, shining a sun so bright that everything dried up. But her vision turned this into a trauma in which everything dried so fast that her eyes stuck to the left corners and she had to turn her head in order to see forward. At this point she decided to accept the clouds.

Michael needed comforting last Monday after being attacked by a man with Down’s syndrome who wanted the label off his shirt. The man succeeded in getting the label off and in ripping Michael’s shirt and causing him to get off the train and come home to relax before getting back on the train to finally make the journey to work for the day. Later when Stella told the story to some of her co-workers one of them, preferring poetry to compassion, commented: “I say, give the man the label.” As if wanting something so bad is license enough to have it no matter the cost to someone else.

In the performance a man measured the length and width of the space and in darkness between measurements rolled up the measuring tape and, because the music had been loud and because now it was not playing, it became possible to hear the quiet sound of the tape moving back into the housing. This was very satisfying.

Everything was next to everything else in such a haphazard way. She straightened the rug. Even her home landscape had turned strange.

[This story originally appeared on 1001 nights webcast.]

how do I make a performance

What is needed:
Interaction between two people
Is this performance?
Something very live or permeable
A surprise
Something funny
Can we reenact something?
Can we reveal something?

I need some kind of proof.
Proof of nearness or distance, proof of the effect of it, proof that we are all in the same room, proof that we are related or how are we related.

Maybe something personal. Maybe letters from home.
Where is the horizon? How do I get there?

Latitude is easy to chart by the moon and the stars.
A sailor needs a good clock to establish his longitude.
He needs to know what time it is back home.

What is the purpose of figures and calculations when it and time and property are all relative? Does my presence signal any kind of ownership?
How do I write this down? How do I show you that I am real? That this is me?
What can I tell you you don’t already know?
Is this the smallest tree you have ever seen?
Bonsai.
Wabi sabi.

Need a tree.
Miniature
Need the small car.
Small car travels the cityscape.
Need the feed to the video monitor.
Need my rear view mirror.

Grass.

The grass is greener if I describe it to you.

Objects may be closer than they seem.

I might need to name them. And mis-name them. Or re-name them.

I might need to tell you this is a tree and this is a car and this is a rug and this is a hat and this is a weapon of mass destruction and this is cancer and this is what is behind you.

No more Janet/Stay balanced

When I got the news that Janet died I came out of my body and stopped caring for a moment, stopped caring about my own self and what I should do. And then I didn’t add right and was angry and sorry and not thinking and I can’t afford to put the thinking aside and the counting and the measuring and I was overexposed in the insulin department, over by quite a few, enough to sock me in the head three or four times and I wasn’t making sense and then it was the first time I really lost my noodle a little bit.

I didn’t know about the glass of water and yes to it and getting it, there is time lost though I guess I was still there in some way and then I was confused. I didn’t know my self from the details of a show I had been watching on the DVD. I was mixed. I was combined with something else and I had to ask what happened. What was just happening? No, really what just happened here? give it to me step by step as if I wasn’t here. I think I lost some time. I think I lost five minutes. And I lost a little more self and I gave it away from being sad.

And now I have to not let that happen again. And I have to be more strong than I was before or just recently. And I have to not throw my body in the way of my hard feelings. And yes I am alive and if I cut that finger off it will not grow back. I have to remember that some things are for ever. I shouldn’t have to but I have to remind myself. I sense I have only so many turns, let’s say one hundred, to get it wrong and I have to keep it low—the number—so that I can survive until it’s time to die.

Janet, who I haven’t seen or spoken with in more than twenty years, got a new kidney from a friend in 2002 and then lived with the trouble it gave her until she died last summer and I didn’t know about it until today. And still it sucker punched me all the way to yesterday. I felt the need to see her and was making my plans. She would be there just like so many others who are out there, my satellites, my possibilities.

Even though I hadn’t seen her in years, I held her there in a place I could reach her and now that place has to be buried. Hard to bury a place that only exists in my head. Memories are there but possibilities not. No more this is what you are like now and this is me, no more remember when you took me as a child to the island, no more why was it like that for you. Now between the two of us it is only me.

this distance

The blue gesture,
this hand,
breaks the heart.

My own departure
separates
the glass, old friend.

All of life
encompassed, contained, surrounded.
The blue sea
the perfect ice berg.

I looked across
two rooms, separated
in size, in shape, in velocity.

the silence after the car stops

The silence after the car stops (if there is silence),
I have heard it three times:

Once when I was fifteen years old and I had just completed a one hundred and eighty degree turn in the dark night on a narrow road in less than a second after steering the Dodge Dart out of a ditch I had careened into while reaching onto the floor of the back seat to grab a glass bottle that was clanking against a hard piece of metal. When the car came to a rest facing the direction in which I had come, it was silent.

Once in Iceland when the road became clay slip and relinquished its hold on foreign bodies such as me and my passenger and our small white rented car and the twist and the turn and the blind summit and the blinding sweep of the majestic mountain and the sign with the exclamation point all became fine reasons to stop driving and get out of the car. Surrounded by rocks and miles from nowhere, standing still and listening; I did not cry.

And once in The Passenger, the film by Antonioni, in which Jack Nicolson, young and thin and not making that grin, stopped his car in the middle of an African desert surrounded by vast mounds of fine sand, creamy in the distance, dunes of sand, beautiful, saffron, cruel. He can’t go on. He doesn’t know how. He stops, he gets out, and he looks into the distance. And nothing makes a sound because there is nothing. There is no sound of the wind whistling through something. The sun beating down is silent.

In each case the silence is a great relief.

in the breakfast room

You have filled the room with your voice.
It is occupied in full and the rest
of us whisper now, our voices curling
quietly as wisps of smoke
to find the corners and slender traces
of space that are left to fill.
There is only so much a room can take.

he found North America and wasn't interested

So there was someone named Bjarni Herjolfsson who was probably the first European to lay eyes on North America. He had been sailing from Iceland for Greenland in the year 985 and got lost in a fog. Since he and his crew didn't see glaciers they knew it wasn't at all Greenland, but something very much other, they never landed but turned their boat and sailed back toward Greenland. When he got to Greenland Bjarni told his story and some time later Leif Eiriksson bought his boat. Leif Eiriksson retraced Bjarni's path and found North America. He called this land "Vinland." Some people say it was because one of his party found grapes growing wild there, some other people say no no "vin" used to mean "plain" and he named it "plainland" not "wineland." What then about the grapes?

A few first moments from an Icelandic adventure in progress

When we got here it was all against the sky. And the sky was all blue. When there is nothing behind it but the sky what you are looking at looks like the end, the edge, the very tip of what there is. And also the light is sharp, it has a sharpness and cutting blue. The camera takes it all in blue unless you trick it. Cool light that cuts and sharpens and brightness that causes blindness and white and the contrast is hard and the shadows are long and the night is twilight for hours until the fog softens it and then drowsiness makes way for sleep.
Now I could sleep again but it would be like a cat nap—the circle of fur in the back yard finding a warm patch of sun not expecting to sleep for long. Each time I woke in the night I checked the window and standing there was attempting to develop a photo in my mind. But each time was much like the last until the fog came and I never looked at the clock. It was its own time and set apart.
It was the quietness that threw me off at first and only secondly the light. It is quiet because at some points no one is about. Or everyone is stopping a moment to think. But I mean really quiet and I hear no motor humming or water falling or wind working its way through some kind of grid. And I was shocked to see a face in a second floor window, hard drawn and a bit suspicious. I thought there was no one awake but this face with a white ring of electric shock hair, tight eyes, and a stern demeanor gazed out at me there on the street stumbling along to find out what there was to do for 5 hours while we waited for the man to let us in to our room. Ragnar, of the tight striped trousers, the hard sparkle and the evil chuckle, his rooms, one of which we had booked to stay in but not until 2pm were all shut up this early in the morning whether empty or with sleepers we weren’t getting in. And he repeated “after two” with great emphasis on the word after. And he had not answered our question each time we had asked by email whether or not we could check in early since our flight was arriving at the ungodly hour of 6:30am. This is the world I’ve expected my whole life. The very nice, the friendly, but the unmovable, the never-give-an-inch, the held fast man who wants you to earn it and then he might bring you in. He suggested we hang out in the garden of the sculpture museum. It, he said is open 24 hours. The gate is unlocked, he means. I wonder when the last time it was that he laid down on the grass of that garden. Maybe he sees a lot of backpackers. His place isn’t very expensive. In Icelandic terms.

First we searched for a hotel that would be serving breakfast. It was now 8am after all and an ordinary hotel would be serving breakfast to early risers. We heard someone at the airport say they were staying at the Radisson. Now that sounds like a place that would have a lobby and a breakfast for weary travelers. Ragnar was going straight back to bed after locking our suitcases (minus the one the airline was keeping for an extra day) in the stairwell just inside the back door. He doesn’t serve breakfast at his guesthouse anyway. He provides a kettle and a toaster in your room and you can fend for yourself, which is fine, but you have to get in first and we definitely weren’t in yet. And who can blame him. Check in is at 2pm. And I’m just stating facts here. This isn’t the office of complaints.

How would we have appreciated the silence of a Sunday morning without this moment? We wouldn’t have. We were so exhausted we would have taken a short nap. But now we ambled down the street in search of breakfast even though Ragnar had chuckled that nothing, I mean nothing, would be open. And he was wrong. But perhaps he doesn’t think about other hotels and what they offer that is different from his own. At any rate everything is close together in Reykjavik and the Center Hotel Klopp was open and had their breakfast buffet spread out in the lobby and they took us in and let us use the toilet and eat breakfast and only charged us most of what we had exchanged at the airport and we were glad to pay it. And somehow I felt on the edge of the known universe. A frontier feeling and the buildings around us in this small hotel lobby reminded me of buildings in small old towns across the United States only different and some of them have corrugated tin walls and they are painted fantastic colors that reflect boldly in the bright light. And we sat in the warm sunny window and the back of my head melted in one spot even though outside it was a bit chilly.
As the morning moved forward we went in and out of various states of being and when, finally, 2pm came around we went quickly and quietly to our guest house and folded into our beds and fell hard and long to sleep until the little beeping woke us up to metal-hanger us out of bed and go back out into the bright and find some kind of vegetarian restaurant that would feed us for less than four hundred dollars and so happy was I that I ordered a piece of banana cake and as I was eating it CJ made the conversion in his head and announced: that piece of banana cake costs $10. Which I later remembered as $12 and it was very good but I will try to enjoy every single thing I eat here and allow the memory of taste and texture to linger as long as possible. Even more than usual it seems like a good thing to savor every moment.
And today we went back to everything we walked past yesterday but were too bleary-eyed to take in fully and went again to the best café in town and found the Icelandic fish and chips and went to the Art Museum to see the Roni Horn exhibit and the admission fee is good for three days so the savoring will be even easier. And even the boats in the harbor impressed us and light makes all the difference.
Hello to all the fine sweaters I will not buy and the sleek outdoor wear that everyone must fork over thousands of kroners to call their own. Maybe I’ll buy an asymmetrical dress or a t-shirt but the fancy high-tech fashions may have to stay behind in their own country rather than making the trip to America in my suitcase.

I haven’t said enough about the light which is what I sat down to describe but I will simply have to try again. Tonight we will go to a backyard fish grill because we’ve been invited and our host says it is so rarely nice weather out they have to do it now to take advantage of it. And it is nice weather, very nice. And bright. And the Icelandic people are wearing shorts and t-shirts but others are in sweaters and jackets because even though it is summer and it is bright, it is definitely not warm.

I'm an antenna in this position

This position I’m holding reminds me of an earlier time. It is the position, because this is the way I was standing. My head was like this to the side when the moment hit me. A feeling of pain was in my toe and now that the whole experience comes back to me I am thinking of my toe though it takes a while to remember what the toe had to do with anything. And there was sunburn. All of the effects can be accessed from this position as if I am an antenna picking up a signal but instead of catching waves from the air, the information is coming from within. When I was standing in this position I knew a certain set of coordinates and here they are again as I pass through that same geometry.

It is the same when I stand in the spot where he told me he would leave me. I can feel it all again and as I drink this tea I make the movements with my lips that he made when he drank. He had a way of tasting and lingering over the texture with his lazy tongue and big loose lips. These are movements of the parts of his mouth that I gazed upon so many times in our home, at our table, in our wanderings. And now as I make them it is a part of him that never left me, some kind of thin residue, long dormant and I can no longer contain it, it pours from my eyes in water and dumps onto the palms of my hands. I am looking and looking deep to see why and where and how this surfaces now and the only reason is that it was here on this spot where it happened. I couldn’t have described his method of tasting his drink but I was enacting a perfect imitation of it.

Forgetting is the only way we have of continuing to proceed through new life. But in remembering there is a depth that informs every present moment. The question is only how to interpret and how much I can take. I can continue forward but only with a shield. When the shield is down I am hindered for days. Sensations get through to the heart center discharging connections to other people and to thoughts and ideas. It is like standing close to a source of electricity and there is only so much I can stand.

The newest volume to the library to forget for later retrieval occurs in a chair and a gaze between eyes, my green ones and the green ones of a performer performing only for me. In this one-to-one performance in the proximity of nine other one-to-one performances (like a teenage kissing party without the teenage hormones or the kissing but all of the awkwardness and the same music) we all sat with another and fell to various degrees of involvement with our partners. I will never be the same. Just what you want in a performance. Just what you want in a day.

Let us sit together. Nothing more. If we sit together we can look at each other carefully. We can watch as the time goes by. We can see what when you hold my hands. How fine it will be if you stroke my hands. We two sitting and you looking at me while I look at you. You hold my hands and stroke them. I don’t stop looking at you.

Let us sit sweetly. Still together and silent. We look, we look deep, and then we look away. I laugh and you look at my hands. Then we look again. Your eyes are blinking so fast and so often. I’m waiting for you. I’m waiting for what you will say. I’m waiting for you to show me something. It isn’t that I want something. I don’t know what this is. This place where I sit is neither here nor there; it is someplace else. Sitting here all I know is that it will end.

I want a photo of the moment I closed my eyes, when I was too full and couldn’t say what was happening to me. I want to remember it, this floating, this instability. I want to hold it. But it is like water. This moment is grace. This moment won’t come again. It is single and pure and separate. This moment is one of the wells now within me, in the library of water that is my body. I’m saving for old age.

This is a story

It wouldn't do to try to scratch the itch, the spot where he felt the itch didn't actually exist anymore. A moment of clarity, that would have been good, like the moment when the stove is checked and definitely off. Later, that look can be remembered because it was sure and definite and clear and the mind can rest assured that the flame is out. In the case of the itch, the leg would have been assessed or made note of before its removal or even after its removal—maybe a moment to acknowledge the separation: there is the leg and I am here. We are two separate items. And maybe one good last scratch all around.

Now the leg is gone and the itch remains. So many habits are hard to break. If you drive a car on the left and are used to reaching out with your right hand to shift gears you still reach with your right even when you are driving in a, say, a British car where the driver sits on the right. You reach with your right even though the edge of the car is there and you bang your arm against the inside of the door. Some things become automatic. This allows the part that deals with routine take it over. It is about economy. So are legs, and in this case, two legs are more economical than one.

But the real problem is this itch. And less, in this case, is so much more. And the economy brought about by habit is that if a spot on the leg itches or tickles one doesn't make a decision to scratch it, one simply reaches down and scratches it. This becomes a problem when the itch cannot be scratched, as in the case of amputation. As in a case like this.

As his mind looks for occupation he is thinking about another brain trick, the jerk that awakens the sleeper as he falls to sleep. It is the jerk that wakes the body when the neurons are misfiring, or so they say. And now he needs an explanation as to why then there is an accompanying dream that explains the jerk? Is this to calm the mind? If so, how does the mind know to make the dream? He remembers being woken up with a jolt from a dream of falling or stepping off a step that was higher than he thought. And he has been wondering.

He told Delta about this quandary. She guessed that the mind worked so fast it worked backwards. The jerk happened and then the mind essentially rewrote the past. A blank spot of sleep oblivion now filled with an explanation for the jerk. That’s why he liked Delta. She was crazy. Can it really be all this so that the mind doesn’t waste sleep time to find the source of the violent involuntary impulse?

There was still a spot saved in his brain for that leg. That was her explanation for why he still felt that itch. His brain was refusing to rewrite the area. He wasn't letting go. He knew there was something sensical in her words but they aggravated him. She wasn't troubled by such questions. She found solutions and moved on. Sometimes, he thought, there was room for further consideration. He couldn't figure how the same brain that could rewrite the past in order to explain with a story the jerk in his body caused by loose chemicals in a response left over from hunter-gatherer times to stop him from getting up from his cozy sleep couldn’t now rewrite the existence of his right leg. He was tired of thinking about it. But the itch was still there. It had been for days now without cease.

He was on the verge of telling her to come in here and cut off his leg it was itching so much. If only he had the leg to lose he would lose it now to lose the itch. He was putting the words together in his head, lining them up in the right order, taking a breath to boost them into the next room.

And just then she comes in and she looks at him and she sees that look in his eye and she herself looks determined and as if she has a plan and she sits herself astride his chair with one leg behind him and she places her other leg where his should be and she doesn't say a word. It doesn't look like his own leg but then as he looks and looks he begins to accept that it could be and slowly, falteringly, he reaches his hand toward it and toward the spot that itches, that spot that has been itching now for as long as he can remember, a constant itch so complete it has become a pain, he scratches at first lightly and then a bit harder and the spot begins to redden but she doesn't move. She closes her eyes. Maybe she is far away. Maybe she doesn't even feel it. He continues to scratch and scratch and it is constant and steady now. He feels a rising sensation a kind of rush. And before he is fully conscious of what is happening he feels a great sense of relief, a burst, a blossoming, a kind of strange itch climax that resolves in a rush of release and a kind of internal light explosion.

As she gets up and walks away he notices that her legs are perfectly articulated from her hips and the only movement in her pelvis is a slight shifting from left to right as her weight shifts both hip bones remain parallel with her shoulders. It occurs to him that she is beautiful to watch. And he doesn't ask himself whether she's cured his itch but he'll be asking himself later.

wordless from Zagreb

Hurtling from Chicago toward Zagreb

I'm trying to understand the distance.
The distance between here and there.
The distance
between my feet and my eyes
between the bones in my neck
between the branch and the rocky sea
between any two particles
between your eyes and the back of my head
between my hand and those clouds
between the answer and the question
between the solution and the compromise
between green and purple
between the sweet and the salty snack
between the quiet and the silent
between the bump and the fall
between the bend and the sigh
the distance between
between the iris and the retina; your thoughts and your prayers; the finger and the nail; the round and the solid; whirled peas and end[less]this war.

Now I am in Zagreb and nothing is clear. Thunderstorms and waiting to feel right again. And busy working. more soon.

mother's birthday

Today when I see a patch of tulips I am drilled through the skull and into my brain to a place so small I can't read what's written there. The only remnant of this imprint that is available to me is a feeling: my mother's joy. I don't remember the days we went to see the tulips in Michigan. I don't remember the tulips. I don't remember walking on the edge of the huge planters that held the earth that held the tulips with their dusky green stalks lush and plush focussed toward the sun and flaming bright with flower. I don't remember that my little brother was there too. I don't remember what my mother said about the flowers or how she might have looked as she beheld the glory of those annual delights. What I have is a trigger and a splash of bliss and a thought about mother. Planted long ago and reappearing every year.

a kind of answer

The following story was written in response to a prompt from Barbara Campbell on her website: 1001 nights cast for her live daily webcast as part of her durational performance telling 1001 stories over the same number of nights. Please visit to see her live performances. My story was #695 out of a future total of 1001 and was submitted and performed live on May 16th, 2007 from New York city. The version below is slightly longer than the one I submitted to Barabara's project as she has a word limit of 1001 words. The story below is 1,165 words.

a kind of answer
Consideration of the box and its contents was not an idle folly. It may in the long run matter quite a great deal. Consideration of what is in the box might actually be the most important event in his life. He didn’t really want to think about it now but now seemed to be when thinking about it was urgently in need of taking place. So while he waited for reinforcements or specialists or at least some advice from someone who knew more about this kind of thing and so that he didn’t lose his edge, he began to think of the things that could be in the box. He needed not to lose his edge. He needed to not lose it. His edge. It wasn’t such a large box. Not that that in itself was a comfort. It didn’t need to be large—but then it could’ve been. Large didn’t really restrict it as far as that goes nor did small. A small package could be just as alarming as a big one, maybe more alarming.

It could be a box of eggs separated by layers of that kind of particle mash molded in half egg-shaped cups like egg cartons for transport from the farm or factory or where ever the eggs were coming from. For that matter, in this heat, if they were eggs it wouldn’t take long for a nasty odor to emanate from such a large number of eggs if they remained undisturbed and if they had broken in their fall from wherever they came from. They could be eggs. Probably not eggs that would hatch even if they were kept warm enough. Probably eggs intended for kitchens. If so they might start to stink soon. How long would it take for them to stink?

He sat and contemplated the box. It seemed like a good idea to take this very seriously. Such a box could contain a world of hurt. Or nothing. Better not risk it.

It might be a computer. What were the chances? It could be a small one. They get smaller and smaller these days. It could be a laptop of a particular shape and the padding that would be around it, or a carton of cell phones all with their separate packaging and instructions.

He was getting hot sitting here, like this, wondering.

Perhaps a tighter attitude, one of wariness and attention. Tension. Perhaps staying alive depended on tension or on the lack of it. It could go either way.

Slowly his mind wavered over the heat strokes of the sun that shimmered across the road. The place on this side of the box, the space between where he cowered or, no, the place where he waited, and the position of the box was melting in the heat.

It could hold ten bottles of lager. Would ten bottles fill it up or would there be extra room? How big are the bottles? Or shampoo, it could be a shipment of shampoo. Or the kind of whipping cream that comes in cans and you shake it and the cream comes out in foam. It isn’t really like cream it is more like some kind of petroleum product but some people liked it. That stuff might explode. Wouldn’t it need to stay cold? Or it could be mangoes from India, the fresh ones, that one’s family send and they must be eaten within a few days because they are all ripe now. The smell is overwhelming. It is intoxicating and then before you can say stop it has become overpowering and sickening and like rot and festering and it is too sweet and calls flies and little gnats that swarm. There’s no design on the outside of the box but maybe there is a box within a box. The design for the mangoes might be hidden inside. Or tea cups with the bubble wrap to keep them from clinking together. Or just the tea. That would be it, bags of tea. Some kind of tea. What kind of tea? How great to have a cup of tea just now. Strangely satisfying to think of a warm drink in this heat. Why wouldn’t it be food? Or tea, in the box. Or rolls of toilet paper. A turtle with a little bit of lettuce to eat. Or ten pints of lager. Or ten prayers from a sacred place. Or ten monkeys cooped up for days so tired from screeching they’ve gone silent. Or ten dreams of old people not able to move. Ten times the rays of the sun. Or, he thought, ten days from my childhood and the smell of sand burning the soles of my feet. A box of shells from the shore. Photographs from a life’s worth of holidays. Tourist brochures from a travel agent gone out of business long ago. Ten promises from the father of a young girl with long eye lashes and round, deep set eyes. The bandages of a saint. The colors of the army. A bag of sand from home. The top ten tastes of food from my home town. Air from 10,000 feet above sea level on the volcano called house of the sun.

What if there were a head in there. A formerly human head now just a rotting hulk of flesh and skull and dead hair. The bodies they found didn’t have their heads and no one has found the heads yet and there could be exactly two heads in there or, well, there might be some extra space, depending on how big the heads are by now. Do heads swell? They could be quite raw by now. Quite rough. Quite hard to look at.

What’s the likelihood that the box is totally empty? Somehow that sounds right. It is empty. And the squad will show up and it will be empty and here will be a round of shoulder slapping and silly grins. Once the tension mounts and then breaks as the discovery is made. Perhaps the forward man will give it a good kick and everyone can see it’s as light as air. Just the cardboard. It is a cardboard box. That’s what it appears to be. Nothing really hazardous or sinister about it on the surface. It’s just. It’s just that. It’s just that no one saw how it got there and, well, it could just be empty but it is hard to tell from here. He told himself again that he is not an expert. He should wait for the expert.

He wanted even more now to just walk over and take a look. And the more he thought about it the more it seemed a distinct possibility. How much longer before the experts would arrive? He could just solve this himself. He could solve this himself right now. He could solve this himself right now by just walking over there and opening the box. Even an explosion would be a kind of answer.

green filter

I drank milk because, with but one stomach, only through the filter of the cow could I handle so much green grass.

Friday

Paralysis as a concept is accessible to all of us. When it is presented in the body of someone who is physically paralyzed, because of spinal cord injury for example, it is received by those of us with spinal cords intact not only as a physical reality but as a breathing metaphor, idea made visible which, as in art work, is an idea delivered in a way we can experience viscerally. It touches not only our fear that a similar accident could paralyze us too but touches that part of us that is tortured by paralysis of another kind. In this way we can feel [this other paralysis] more acutely as it is brought from the abstract into the material world. Physical conditions such as paralysis or stutter or illness do affect our thoughts no matter how hard we try to keep metaphor away from our bodies.


I was made aware that the woman I saw before me, who had been paralyzed from the waist down at the age of fifteen, had a freedom of spirit so powerful she was able to actively transcend her physical paralysis in a way I am incapable of transcending my own conceptual or psychological paralysis.

of the companionship between body and mind
a single curling serpentine chemical path asserts itself into my brain while I sleep--the big physical monkey part of this organism that is either me or my house needs to awake, or release from this mortal coil, the spirit of me

Each part, body and soul, with its own way of communicating and its different reasons to stay alive in this form jostle for my attention and for influence with the weight of me. The eye using itself to see itself but not without an intermediary. Which part plays the mirror?

I've always sought the straight forward approach, thinking it the true way of the body and spirit but especially of the body which somehow always seemed the simpler and more honest of the two but as I drift in restorative sleep and tend toward coma in my chemistry, a fault brought on by disease, it can be easy to die or become impaired and wake up far away and damaged from the place I had originally laid my head and instead of a straight shot of pure adrenalin to wake me up or a boost of cortisol or whatever it takes (a startling pain would do the trick) that snaky chemical path twists and rattles my dreams telling me riddles that question how I've lived, poking a stick at my consciousness, until I finally awake in complete disorientation shouting uncle. OK, I'm alive. This weight must rise and feed itself some sugar or the end is near.

Interrupting these thoughts he asks for "enough for a cup of coffee" --a generalized amount. I didn't ask what kind of coffee he had in mind--there are so many choices to get through--I simply said no and then he wrinkled his face like a six-year-old boy and said with great anguished emphasis "please". In that moment I felt I knew him. This only increased my desire to deny his request--for obvious reasons.

A list of smells

It smells like the hallway after the wet dogs have come through.
It smells like the skylight on a hot day.
It smells like she forgot what she was going to say.
It smells like the sparrows twisting their weight around the tiny blooms on the tree.
It smells like time passing.
It smells like the idea I had yesterday that I forgot when the subject of the gate distracted me.
It smells like Mark Booth.
It smells like the day I was thinking about Iceland.
It smells like the mourning dove that perched on my window for a day and now calls from down the street.
It smells like the UPS man with his bent pen.
It smells like rain in Chicago.
It smells like the truck full of metal driving the alleys just before a downpour.
It smells like my neighbor’s baby.

It smells like the sky is white and flat and far away.
It smells like the newspaper clipping I saved for you.
It smells like your birthday.
It smells like you are upset. That smell upsets me.
It smells like a mixture of everything I ever knew.
It smells like a perfume sample.
It smells like the wind coming across the lake.
It smells like five Indonesian megaliths.
It smells like someone died here. Maybe three months ago.
It smells like someone is mowing the grass down the block.
It smells like the college students are moving out for the summer.
It smells like narcissism times ten.
It smells like a mirror reflecting the sun.
It smells like the flowering trees in Chuck’s front yard in May.
It smells like the corner where you waited.
It smells like cold pizza the next morning.
It smells like the tightness in my hand.
It smells like the inside of my nose.

It smells like the phone ringing just as you place your hand on the door knob to leave.
It smells like the men that stand around outside talking about cars.
It smells like the men that stand around outside.
It smells like 8 and a quarter times 5 and a half.
It smells like the place where the workers stand outside to smoke.
It smells like the planter where they smudge out their stumps.
It smells like the sparrows never take a break.
It smells like the cactus outgrowing its pot.
It smells like I cleaned this house yesterday and then had friends over.
It smells like it but I didn’t.
It smells like I made dinner and then ate it.


It smells like when the phone rang you didn’t answer it.
It smells like the velvet from an old curtain.
It smells like you listening to music.
It smells like you sleeping in a dark room.
It smells like you know me.
It smells like you have that taste in your mouth.
It smells like you want me.
It smells like I better go before it’s too late.

It smells like the planes flying over head.
It smells like the hand towel they give you just before they serve a meal.
It smells like my brother.
It smells like my brother is never around.
It smells like the library of water.
It smells frozen.
It smells like old card board.
It smells like new carpet.
It smells like a carpet that was supposed to be washed after five years but wasn’t and now it is almost seven.
It smells like a trip to the hardware store to buy fuses.
It smells like my favorite TV program.
It smells like I had all day to tell you something.
It smells like mist creeping in imperceptibly.
It smells like when you look out the window and you are in the middle of a cloud and then you burst out on the other side and you are looking down at the tops of the clouds.
It smells like this is not my car.
It smells like I didn’t know what to say.
It smells like I am waiting for inspiration.
It smells like I should create a space for dialogue.

It smells like the day today.
It smells like seashells from my honeymoon.
It smells like all we have is the near future and the recent past.
It smells like there is no space.
It smells like there’s a moment coming, it’s not here yet, it’s still in the future, here it is . . . ah . . . it’s gone man. There is no present.
It smells like George Carlin.
It smells like 1975.

It smells like it has a name. If it has a name I will remember it.
It smells like the first part of the show.
It smells like I can’t remember the last part of the dance.
It smells like the name of the dance.
It smells like the dance when I know it by heart.
It smells like I am the book of my part.

fire and ice

Planning a trip to Iceland.

performance response

I saw a performance recently. A dance performance. It was an improvisation on specific themes, themes that had been researched over a year-long process of preparation for a series of improvisational performances. I was asked to lead one of the post-show discussions. A friend of mine had seen the show the weekend before and wrote an exhaustive report on the experience. This was intended to assist me in my position as discussion leader on the following weekend. What follows is my attempt to return the favor as she was curious how the show had changed.

As I sat watching the performance it occurred to me that I wanted to do a creative response to it. I thought I should get what audience was left at the end of the post-show discussion out of their seats and onto the stage and have them perform for 10 seconds a movement they liked or remembered or to perform for 10 seconds a movement in response to her performance. I thought it would be nice to reflect back what we saw and for Molly to see the audience perform. I knew it would need exactly the right conditions though and so I didn’t go through with it. I felt the conditions weren’t right. The discussion went long and we were being asked to wrap up quickly.

Molly came out before the show and made a kind of introduction. In her introduction, which I think was a bit different than her introduction on the first weekend (source: Molly herself), she said something like:

We are very close here and I can see all of you and you can see me sweating up here. It might make you feel self-conscious if you want to look at your program or shift in your seat. Don’t worry I will not interpret your actions.

This focussed our awareness of the situation. Not only did she come out with her towel and her water but then she started speaking directly to us and then she indicated explicitly our situation in relation to each other. Her specfic words fore fronted our situation whereas we might have taken it for granted.

Later, between sections of her show, she cleaned up a spot of sweat on the floor saying: I’m going to clean up a spot where there’s a lot of sweat. Our closeness, her use of breath and the changing of expression like cloud shadows across her face all contributed to the feeling that she was creating an experience for all of us to have together. This has a different effect than another kind of plan, a plan to tell us something we don’t know, for example, or a plan to dazzle us, or to transport. There was no transportation. And I felt the performance was delivered with humility (this may, in part, be because she felt her first weekend didn’t go so well—or maybe it was explicitly her intention). I mentioned something about this in the post-show discussion referring to the beginning in which she had begun speaking to us very softly. She said her entrance had been different the weekend before, when she had entered with a much grander attitude. This simplicity and humility was something that she aimed for the night I saw the show and I felt glad that I mentioned it and the effect I thought it had on how we saw her show. It caused us to read in a very close and personal way.

At a certain point she was making a move that seemed to link the tip of her toe with the tip of her fingers I thought: She’s a puppet of herself.

She came to some slow sections in which her slowness seemed to indicate she was approaching something or that there was something impending. It felt like a liminal place, a threshold from which she could take off in an unexpected direction. It was creating a possibility of change.

During the discussion one woman said to Molly:

There was a point when you leaned against the wall when everything came together. The wall was not supporting you, you were supporting the wall.

I didn’t have that same feeling but I knew the point she was talking about. What strikes me here is that someone was feeling so connected to the performance that these kinds of notions were spontaneously constructed in the mind.

I thought about a number of things. I thought maybe it’s interesting to look very specifically at what an improvisation is for the audience. One aspect of this experience is connected to the quality of not-yet-happened that live performance has over film. In improvisation it is even more so since the terrain has not been set over and over again in repetitions meant to learn the material by heart. But also it made me think and feel: isn’t everyone a writer, isn’t everyone an actor, isn’t everyone a dancer, isn’t everyone a waitress, isn’t everyone the sheriff, isn’t everyone the garbage collector?

It guess I’m saying I experienced a leveling of the playing field. And instead of the fancy virtuoso performing for the humbled masses we were a group of people who agreed to sit and watch and listen and experience (give our attention to) what one of us created in the room in front of us. And I think performance like this is what I strive for and what I enjoy when I see it. Often in cases where this kind of dynamic is in place, the experience is enjoyable even if the performance is not so good. It is similar to when you see family or friends perform. It is enjoyable and the quality of the performance is a separate issue. We need more and more of what binds people together and makes them feel like friends and family. [During World War II American Secretary of War Harry Stimson, who had been to Kyoto a couple of times and couldn’t bear thought of destroying it and the people and culture there he personally admired, argued to take it off the list of bombing targets. He hadn’t been to Nagasaki. We never really want to bomb our friends.] In every little experience in our immediate environment there is an analog in the big world. If we can do our small work well and set the kind of example we want to see in the larger world, we are doing something toward a better global community.

Um, I think that’s what I had to say about it.

some of the words on last

Last words: Strategies v. Tactics
[from panel on Strategies vs. Tactics through the lens of lastness as it pertains to the last days of the perfomance company Goat Island]

I hear the word strategy and I hear the word tactic and I think.
I think: money and strength and soldiers and marketing and games of war, I think war. I think: politics. Think: life or death. Think: survival. Think.

If not this, then what.

Think: I have a plan and it will result in my happiness.

And then think what we are doing here.

Absence. Avoid absence. My absence and those I need around me. My things. Think what is missing. What have I lost? How can I go on? What has taken my happiness? Why do I feel so alone?

Here in this country we are not, in the theater, on solid ground. In performance even less so. Performance is by its nature ephemeral. It dies the moment it is born and must be born again each time. It does not continue except as it resonates within the people who take it in.

We have no power over death.

This is the end. Everything we have is going to change. All of our instincts and those of our ancestors were to focus on survival. Survival in the primitive sense means finding a sustainable way of life and then protecting it. Change is not desirable. Change requires new plans, new dangers to learn, new obstacles to sustaining life. Get a plan and keep it going. That is our animal goal. But we are more complicated than that and we can change and change brings fresh ideas and new horizons.

How do we change? How do we resist the force of nature, the objective to save our habits, to bend to a plan that is safe?

Change comes to us in two ways: change that we choose and change that we cannot avoid.

Ultimately it is “nothing” that we are afraid of and that “nothing” represents loss and it represents death but we have to move toward difficulty we have to go beyond our fear of death and transform it using the power it has over us.

In response to the decision to end I think I said good, that explains the past few months. I think I said good, that solves my unsolvable problems. I will simply allow them to remain unsolved, that’s how I will solve them. Then I said: It must be my fault. This radical change is coming about because I am intolerable. I have grown a stench about me so strong that the people I work with can no longer continue in my presence. They will break up now and then reconfigure without me. This is easy enough to think about. Then I thought depth charge. There is no way I can survive in this new world. Then I thought I need something to wipe away my tears. I can’t breath. I am lost. The whole of my life is over with this change.

Just as the haiku composer avoids direct revelation of its subject, Goat Island has a silence at the heart of our work which the audience fills with its own material. And just as an afterimage flashes on the white space of a clean piece of paper so do the events of our performances project into the pauses embedded there for their development and imprint.

I remember the empty moments of my youth as if that is where the nurturing of my life took place. What thoughts came together in the moment from which I have an image of a sky ringed by tall grasses with only the sound of the wind as it whispered through them or the moment on the sparkling beach in which I looked up from the sand and my whole world seemed to have healed in the circle grown so small around me that day? A day in which nothing happened.

Simone Weil, the French philosopher, wrote: “To love truth means to accept the void and, as a result, to accept death. Truth is on the side of death.”

In the United States right now there is a kind of irrationality born of fear. People are acting out of it. Fear of death grips us and makes us do things we wouldn’t otherwise do, make choices we wouldn’t otherwise make. In our piece When will the September roses bloom? Last night was only a comedy Goat Island performs silence. Silence reminds us of our ephemerality, of our end, or of the day things stop for us or for everyone. As an audience, silence allows us time to think: about ourselves, our seat, the people opposite, or the fleeting thoughts and associations we are having in relation to the performance we are watching. Some people experience a kind of falling into the void of silence, others find a space opening up and filling with thoughts. For some it is terrifying to be left with our own devices, our own thoughts. Waiting for something to happen brings on existential crisis.

When, in performance, we stop and signify the void we are signifying death and contemplating it and our own imperfections. And we are becoming used to this. If, over time, we become comfortable with it, it becomes less something that provokes fear and more something that provokes contemplation.

each wave, momentary

the roll, the kick
narrow winding
bridge arching
sand outstretched

each wave, momentary
the waves, continuous

It happened again, green
soft, bright, new first time
this air was breathed
the morning caught in its clear fine round
drops of water lined up on the blade of grass.

from Mondays in January 2002

Monday January 7th, 2002
Of the flowers that bloomed in my living room:

The first four flowers out of the bulb were spectacular. Red lush shimmering fuzzy iridescence.
Born for the holidays and growing so large they nearly toppled the whole plant.

The second crop are smaller more modest, looking into the bell at the deep blood red it is less sparkling but deeper, more pure, more true, suddenly a rush of loyalty, suddenly a sense of the stalwart second comer, the slow learner, the one more cautious, less appreciated. But deeper and more still and marking me for life.

After the death of the first and the quieting down of my house, the second one pours a long drink into my soul and finds the bottom. The second one fills me with a sense of everlasting continuity and in the half light of a gray afternoon, the second one needs only this small amount of light to display its color. The economy of it shivers my bones.

I was there when the priest asked: Have you something specific to confess, or would you like a general absolution? He kissed a bit of cloth. He said: Go in peace.
I confess I don’t know the name of my boss.

Monday January 14th, 2002
In the early days of my diagnosis, I could pick myself up with chopsticks. I meant nothing. It was hard to pinch enough flesh to get the needle in, the insulin formed mosquito bites when the needle landed vertically within layers of skin rather than beneath the skin where there should have been fat.

Enroute to Providence I am in the air, fear, sweat, heartbeat, turbulence, dropping, like drops in blood sugar. Fear of flying is about the laws of air, gravity, space, metal fatigue; over worked, overzealous, over time and the American way. And too much insulin.

The policeman drove the long way from one town to another with his suspect in the murder of a child in the backseat. It wasn’t supposed to be an opportunity for confession, by law it was no interview, but they drove through snow-covered countryside and the policeman talked about burial. They call it the Christian burial speech, you can read about it in the manual of interrogation techniques. The suspect, in the absence of his lawyer, told the policeman where to find the body.

I didn’t know what my boss meant, I knew the words, I heard them, I was confused about meaning. I read about confessions and how they are compelled.

Monday January 21st, 2002
Still sitting where you left me, I can’t move an inch. There’s a body of work, there’s a book here and some water and if it’s alright I’ll be here until you get back.

If I tried to get up nothing would happen anyway and the dread of trying and failing is more than the dread of stillness, of stasis, of calm, empty, naked, nothing.

The pile on my desk grows, there are several empty notebooks. Dust has settled undisturbed.
The radiator starts with a slow release and then the banging at the back of the building. Because someone got up and did something there is now a building here and a heating system and stairs and lights and outside there are roads and the whole city system.

In the last hours the spirit breaks the human being will say whatever it takes to make it stop. The interrogation creates the confession.

Have you heard about the woman in the northern suburbs who was hit in the face by a chunk of flying wood when a tree that was hit by lightning last night exploded? It broke her jaw and knocked out three of her teeth.

I thought I saw lightning last night but I stayed away from the window.

Monday January 28th, 2002
Each day something small, a little more.
I don’t know if it can be called progress. It moves forward, in time.
Yesterday, with a small child we tested over and over the laws of physics.
The night before we sat and tested how long we could talk about it before we got up to do it.
We found we could replace the doing completely with the talking.
All through the day we worked our shoulders against the birds.
They’ve huddled so often on the sill that we can never break the habit.
It’ll be wings and cooing and piles of shit forever.
And we inside this building flapping our arms.
Coming home last night, it was first gear all the way.

I confess that:
1) [T]he purpose for the interrogation is not to find out whether the suspect committed the crime but, rather, to determine what caused the suspect to commit it;
2) [I] express high confidence in the suspect’s guilt;
3) [I] attempt to prevent the suspect from verbalizing denials by maintaining a monologue urging the suspect to listen;
4) [I] falsely tell the suspect about evidence implicating him in the commission of the crime;
5) [I] move physically close to the suspect to maintain his attention and interest.

List is from C. Brian Jayne and Joseph P. Buckley, “Criminal Interrogation Techniques on Trial,” The Prosecutor (fall 1991); 23-32.

this flag that doesn't wave

Nothing here but a flag to connect to the machine at large. More soon. Almost nothing here just this flag. Technorati Profile

If the day was lost

If the day was lost in looking at figures and places and features of Iceland a trip to and coming up and too expensive it is redeemed by the notion that we could be happy doing it and it could fill a place for retrieval for years were this grand time makes me strong for this it may be useful.

It’s perfectly legible and yet not a grammatical straight line. Often my problem is the crooked approach or the way I see it. I can try to explain but often get those quizzical looks. I feel this might be a sign of incompetence.

If these birds were so noisy. If these trees had blooms. If the lake were blue. If the sun were shining. If there were no planes overhead to make me think of falling. If my phone were charged. If there was someone else in the house to make me feel at home. If the trains were running this morning so that I didn’t have to walk to work. If I heard their roar from the seat at my desk. If the wind were blowing softly. If the last two letters from the car insignia “Impala” were poised in the pot under the fan cactus. If the white roses were just now looking slightly wilted with age and still so appealing. If the gate made a bang after someone came through it. I would know it was time to sit down and pay attention.

Even the sidewalk has a limited life span

Here is the day that I try. I try to write. I try to talk. I try to read. Everything is difficult. Mind wanders and lingers and falters. I am trying to focus on impermance in this blog but not to the exclusion of anything else. Impermance because I am coming to terms with the necessity of change in a life that has been searching for regularity. As a diabetic I have to establish patterns and habits that can replicate conditions and predict doses. This is fraught with peril. Firstly I am disinclined toward the highly regulated day. I like change. And now after years of attempting to maintain habits and regularity and set up patterns that support my main work, specifcally work in a collaborative performance group; my health in the face of living with diabetes and with insulin (four daily injections); earning some cash on the side (need money for supplies, don't I); and my identity; I have to change it all very seriously. The performance group will split up after our next performance and that's fine but now I find myself almost completely without portfolio (kind of forgot about that). So now I am sitting around imagining what comes next and finding ways to contemplate that. At the moment I may be stuck at "what is a wave?" but I am still hoping for clarity. I suppose I am also trying to find a way to value living in and for the moment since it appears that is what I have been doing for the past twenty years and I am wondering where it leaves me and with what.

Everything in this life is ephemeral. But within that I still need to understand my place and my importance and this feels slippery and inexplicable.

Oh, I just lost another white hair.