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superior water

piles of runaway pine cones gathered for the burning of sugary smoky flames

seemed lemon yellow when the sun went red

agates lined finely cave drawings mineral deposits in pink on green flecked pocked oval

blue spheres of tart clear flesh seeded and patina wetting indigo to pale dust skin

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Live simply that others may simply live. It is, at the end of the day, a bumper sticker. But it makes a good lifestyle too. It isn’t devoid of joy or laughter (in fact, arguably, laughter is kind of a crucial component of it), or food, or clothes, or even baths. The truth of the matter is that upon stopping at a rest stop on the road back from the sustainable organic farm where we’d been living and working, I stood in awe of the fifteen plus immaculate plastic-laden stalls in front of me. How many people were at this remote rest stop at a time? Five cars at the most. I almost forgot to flush, too, with my hand reaching for a soft handful of sawdust, which, of course, was not there. America is amazing. We live and defend (tooth and nail) a way of life that is deadly. Am I being dramatic? I am prone to it, but I feel surprised that more people aren’t crying out about it the same way they are about a certain basketball player switching teams.

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What is there to defend? Our kids don’t know their own mother’s breast milk. Nor can they tell a potato from a tomato, let alone point out one or the other when they are still rooted in the ground. If they know things like that grow in the earth, that is. I am not a prophet of the apocalypse by any means. I just know that currently, it takes almost 2 acres of land to feed a typical American for a year, with consideration of the corn and soy we grow to feed the sick flesh we consume. By 2050, there will only be .6 acres of land available due to our inability to nourish it and protect it. Our equally sick farming practices. It is time to meet your maker. It is time to figure out what that potato plant looks like (they’re gorgeous!), or what a tomato actually may taste like when it remembers its vine. It isn’t tedious or crazy or extreme. It is quiet and beautiful and life-changing. It feels……right. If Europeans have their “agri-tourism”, we’ve got wwoofing. Well, technically, the whole world has it.

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We arrived at the farm clad in our urban gear, and as we slowly shed it (i.e. trunked it into the back of the car for the duration of our experience) and said a prayer of thanks for lack of mirrors on the forty acres of wildflower land, we began to forget. The anxiety and the neuroses we are prone to when we live meaninglessly routine lives doesn’t leave a trace when it evaporates off of your skin. It is replaced by some dirt, yes, but there is so much on your exterior to awe you that you somehow lose your outline. You forget the boundaries of your body. It bears no pain at all.

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We lived in a trailer adopted from the side of the road by our hosts, who went on to build a solar-powered house using salvaged materials from carpentry jobs. Alongside the house was a smaller building with an architecturally mind-blowing brick oven, in which they baked sourdough, 8 grain, and a handful of artisan breads for a csa (community supported agriculture) and to take to market. We made no waste. Food and human waste was artfully composted to enrich the soil. Plastic bags were washed and reused to store food, as were glass jars. Newspaper can be used as groundcover and composts (if it uses soy ink, of course). Oh, and chickens will eat almost anything you no longer want. Pest control was not so tedious, either. Some row cover for the poor kale that got beheaded by a deer with the munchies. Some ducks to pick up the slack. Good times.

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We drank mead brewed from organic local honey, we danced to car music in the cherry orchards, we ate soups and stews made from vegetables yanked by our own hands from the earth, we perfected the tahini salad dressing and the almond granola, we splurged on some locally-thrown ceramics when we stumbled upon woodland studios, and we spoiled ourselves by making bonfires in the morning to drink tea by.

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union

Sometimes it happens and we don’t nurture it, don’t water it. A natural relationship born maybe of loneliness, maybe of need, maybe of common ground. It grows without force, lazily and lustily, until one of the people involved realizes that the right words haven’t been said, that nothing looks good on paper, and that nature isn’t enough. Sometimes it is forced. A contract, an arrangement, a fight to win destiny, to win objects, to own, to compromise grandly. We try to reduce union, to package it in less waste, to find the language which best fits it. In the end, it isn’t without fraying strings or broken patterns. It isn’t an exercise or a deal. It isn’t man or woman, good or bad, functional or dysfunctional. It isn’t bipolar. It runs its course like a life lived, one of many, and we engage with a blind faith in something out of the grasp, out of bounds, outside of imagination. The break? It’s death,the ultimate freedom, in all of its greatest explosions and releases, we burn to unite until we smolder away into ashy scoops of remains, vulnerable to any change of wind current, ready to be blown away into atmosphere, entering nostrils of the nearest human and populating their cortex immediately and desperately. Uniting.

Details of work by Kandace Manning and Mauricio Cortes

Came back from the 2010 Cooper Union Student Exhibition. What I most enjoyed is the open studio feel of the whole thing, the venturing floor-to-floor, which makes one realize that the fantastic thing about art school is that a whole floor can be filled with a sensation.

Details of work by Christian Hincape and Kandace Manning

I am a bit partial to the intimacy of ink on paper. As always, architecture shines bright (maybe its the gleam of 21st century architecture technology?) at Cooper Union, although I cannot possibly appreciate the structural values of these developments and choose to glaze over with the intent of taking these in much like I do the drawings or intaglio prints. With a sense of appreciation for line, space, illusion and process. In short, Cooper Union looks good in black and white.

Work by Christian Hincape

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nonjudgment

It is so easy to aspire to. So easy to define. But to reach the balance between living your essence peacefully and tearing down those that are clearly in the dark……eh, not that simple. Is there such a point of equilibrium within us that we can stand gracefully in the midst of an engulfing flame with a calm smile and downward-turned eyes? I wish I knew. See, I can tell you that I feel so confident in my choices to cleanse my life and its day-to-day of negativity and its minions, but the words and judgments of those closest (read: family) are able to penetrate that level of self confidence that leaves us wondering what the glue that holds our convictions together is made of (and if there’s any more of it in a drawer somewhere). I find that it is very necessary to re-apply the adhesive factor of non-judgment and wear it as a veil of protection against the atmosphere every time you step out of the house. Because, let’s face it – judgment is significant. It can be a lifeline. We survive by judgment, using our catalogue of past experiences to consciously or subconsciously make choices about the face we make, the words we say, the physical gestures we bring forth. Without judgment we are indecisive, unsure, ill-fitted for the rapidly accelerating human existence. We are paralyzed.

I believe that to know you are right is to judge others as wrong. It is a cure to a disease. Clarity in a sand storm. At the end of the day, it comes down to silence. Judge all you want, but walk away silently, gracefully, full and satisfied with the feeling of keeping something within and growing it until it changes just you.

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Sometimes someone else takes the photograph, someone who can say the words that force you to make that face, to turn your face to that angle, to sit in the right posture without over-thinking it. When you look at the photograph, you see that person as much as yourself, a superimposed, onion-skin complexity that is difficult to assign to yourself. I found myself haunting my past today, getting off the Subway at W23rd and trekking up the avenues to those howling blocks bordering the piers. Passed the deli that I would normally get my coffee from, the pissy little dogs that float next to their pissy owners like well-groomed apparitions, the sidewalk-wide setup of the red carpet for the Tribeca Film Festival… For the first time, I saw the true filth of it, the shroud of absurdity that is Chelsea.

The meat-market, art-market, real-estate-market of it all…The floaty summer dresses and scuffed buttony boots of the gallerinas, the uncomfortably long grey hair of the gallerists. The whole Lewis Carrol face of it. It has aged.

As I took the last sip of my overpriced syrah at dinner at the end of my exploits while watching my child cross his ankles over the top of the high thread count damask tablecloth, thereby placing his shoes on my lover’s plate, I knew I was burying some unnecessary part of me, perhaps the coccyx, appendix, or the wisdom teeth. Something I can look at and say, “Ah, yes! That is me!” But then go on my way without missing it at all.

Oh, and what was I doing there? Printed Matter, that’s what. For the book-drunk, zine-sick, by-the-people, for-the-people curious little bird out there, it is still the place. It is nearly impossible to walk into it and (having given the hipsters and euro-trash a solid shove to get to the good bookcases) not find extreme levels of inspiration.

So extreme that you end up chanting names of books and artists under your breath for the whole train ride, lusting lusting lusting…. As a writer and an independent publisher, I have to tip a hat to a place that has revolutionized (or, more accurately, gave a forum for a revolution) printing, publishing, and marketing of artist books, zines, and periodicals. Everything looks significant in that space. Every word, pun, stanza, xerox…. The winner of the day is one of their bestsellers. It’s about weeds and for me it’s highly enjoyable, although a little vector-y. I would have tackled this with some high-res scans of the weeds.

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Was recently part of some strange dreamlike experiment where the sky turned a mucky grey out of nowhere and heavy, bitter rain dropped before the sun could even retreat. Sensing potential for rainbows, I ducked into the gallery instead of running down the hill to the car through the stinging wall of wet. Out of the window, I watched a true thunderstorm descend and rock the pastures around me. It was a sad and heavy thunderstorm, made even more tragic by the confused sun. Watched passing shadows on the surface of the room installation (Rita McDonald). Was delighted to notice that I can finally, after many bitter years as an art historian/theorist/gallerist look at a wall of bird and vine patterns and feel amused, seduced, and drawn in. And that being enough.

While waiting out the rain, I pretended I lived in these walls, and that everything outside the huge windows was mine. I skipped from one end of the gallery to the other, only echoes giving life to the birds. When the rain was over, I took a hike in the woods, seeing glossy glorious drops of precipitation suspended above me. I never felt so rebellious before. Somehow I had caught this place, the gallery and the woods, in a private act. Like watching someone really beautiful in the shower.

Next day, the sheep at a nearby farm got their spring cuts. Hair has long been used to speak of history and to count the passage of time in literature. I had to indulge in imagining all of the winds, hay, seeds, and ground that have passed through the stunning fur of these animals throughout the year.

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There is a level of frustration akin to sitting in queue in production and  having to nudge, nudge, nudge without forging ahead. I realize that the universe is most likely still on my side when it comes to writing and creating, but I am somehow out of signs.  Usually it throws me a bone, but this week has been truly brutal. I found a single quiet moment of inspiration, in which I managed to spill my guts to a digital recorder I carry around just in case of such a repressed outburst of words. As soon as everything poured out and I felt cleansed, I fell into a dead sleep self-satisfied and peaceful. Woke up the next morning…..gone were the words I recorded. Simply not there. In soggy tired tears, I re-recorded a less inspired version from memory while sitting on the toilet lid trying to steal a moment to myself to regroup. Today, I went to find the draft of a post that has been sitting here, in queue, in order to add images to it and….yep, gone. I have so long used technology for good and beauty that when it betrays me I feel like taking it by the shoulders and yelling, “Why? Why now? Why would you do this to me now?” Except that there are no shoulders to grab…

I am, I would like to think getting better at getting mine. Meaning that I see myself as having matured enough that I don’t need to grovel or put in time to prove my worth to someone, especially if they are paying me. There is nothing I hate more than asking for money for hard work. There is nothing I hate more than resending e-mails to win two seconds of someone’s time. As far as I am concerned, I have already worked, won, willed, etc. I am slowly coming to a place within myself where I don’t have anything to prove and where I measure success with a tape measurer coiled tightly within.

By contrast to the technology swallowing up my energy, my books feed me consistently and lovingly. I have pummeled through Danzy Senna’s Where Did You Sleep Last Night? hungry for a connection between her ficto-memoir Caucasia and her life as the light-skinned child of two different colored parent intellectuals. I did find the connection, but I have to say that she is either an incredible fiction writer, or a sub-par memoirist, because I felt more vulnerability and sincerity in Caucasia. She does, in both books, deal with the complexities of racial history and perception very elegantly and subtly, which is no small task. From the LA Times:

Danzy Senna is a novelist whose graceful explorations of race and identity in works like “Caucasia” stand in stark contrast to the chaotic experiences that inspired that work. That wasn’t supposed to be the case. Senna is the daughter of Carl Senna and Fanny Howe, two gifted writers whose marriage in 1968 shone with a defiant but hopeful symbolism of the age. He was black, she was white; he was an upstart, a figure who emerged from a new, intellectually empowered black class; she came from a prominent Boston family whose roots went back to the Mayflower (and, as it happens, to wealthy slave-traders).

That was the macro, and it was heady stuff. The micro was a very different story. Carl Senna was violent at times, and his divorce from Howe in 1976 was bitter. Among many questions Danzy Senna struggled with was the uneasy one of what her father’s race had to do with his volatility — how the macro drove the micro, how the historical and political might have waylaid the personal.

With that book now freshly behind me, I am floating into Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. So far? Sensational in a quiet terrifying way of nature. What sticks with me are these moments, which I have experienced myself time and time again, where I am witness to something so amazing, that I gasp for air, trying to find a way to save it, to share it, to know why I am chosen for it. She describes one such moment of coming upon a frog that is being liquefied and devoured by a water bug from underneath the water. She is paralyzed as the frog disintegrates and his skin floats on the surface. I also reeled from her description of how the Inupiat used to bury the hilt of a knife under the snow and slather blubber onto the blade of a knife to catch wolves. The wolf would lick the blade to get the blubber off, in the act slicing his tongue to shreds and bleeding to death. A little piece I fell in love with instantly describing her admiring the rose-shaped paw prints her cat left all over her body by coming through the window after his nightly hunt:

What blood was this, and what roses? It could have been the rose of union, the blood of murder, or the rose of beauty bare and the blood of some unspeakable sacrifice or birth. The sign on my body could have been an emblem or a stain, the keys to the kingdom or the mark of Cain.

On my back burner I have Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory. I am absolutely enamored and intrigued with Haitian culture, as well as the immigrant experience, so I foresee good things happening with this one. When I’ll get to it, I do not know…

And finally, a plug for Saved Trees (the site is still under development), my fantastic paper-free publisher and designer. You may or may not remember my modest collection of poetry called Freerange. You may have even read it, who knows?

Well, the book preview that just got posted is taking my breath away. Please take a good close look at Looking for a Place to Sleep by Kek Haj.

Quite seriously a sublime experience. The choice to address homelessness (and hopelessness), as well as mental illness from the perspective of the man suffering and trying to liberate himself is a brilliant one, and this book stands out for me amongst the more sensual pieces of literature of our time.

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Time of resurrection. Time to begin some sort of new movement. Time to start a revolution. Went for yet another hike to the top of a mountain and basked until I burned a bit. But that’s that first sun. That’s what it does to the unsuspecting. Found a gigantic branch partially twisted off of a wild cherry tree. Took springs of it home with little live buds and was rewarded for the rescue by gentle and subtly sweet-scented blossoms the next morning. Oh, and by my lover’s almond latte, of course.

We have made arrangements to spend our summer digging in earth on several organic farms and retreats. It seems as though you’ll be able to follow my adventures in sustainable living here, unless I am too busy rolling around in the grass to remember about all this…

In the meantime, so much hangs in the air in partial completion. I am waiting for answers from two sources, but the more I think about those overdue answers, the more I want to still myself. I just can’t blame these people for disappearing with my work and my opportunities. That would be hypocrisy.

All of my responsibilities, including medical check-ups, financial sort-outs, cleaning, and even e-mail-answerng have completely fallen away and all I see are blossoms, sprouts, buds, rays, e.t.c. Just call me hopeful.

Reading A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard. So far it’s fresh. It’s akin to smaller breaths of scented air. Not one big gulp, but measured out treats for breaths.

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Something goes off under the skull, some bursting potential, dormant all year, now pushing and pushing until I can’t stand it. People go rabid at these first promises of warmth, but by summer they are pacified. Had my first wheat beer of 2010 yesterday while  basking in glorious sun rays, both of us getting our strength. Coetzee’s Summertime on my lap. I am still not sure why I am so drawn to his work… It may be the misogynist in me wanting to see aging weakness of character in a man being glorified, but I think there’s more to it than that. Dare I sneak away to read instead of write for yet another day? I do. This weather is more conducive to Tom Robbins, but I have yet to get my hands on B is for Beer, and that happens to be the only unread one of his in my repertoire. The nights are creamy now, fueled by a fingernail clipping of a moon, a soupy tangerine color drowning everything. My Bangladeshi neighbors must feel it too, as they have added sheer orange, yellow, and blue curtains to my palette. I am on edge- just waiting. I cannot give away the essence, but something big is on the horizon and I am sitting on my hands until next week.

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Got back from teaching a memoir workshop in the Midwest and brought the plain winds tucked into bellows of my purple jacket.  Reading the lusty, exaggerated, hungry di Prima. It’s all about flesh and cum and juice and frightening, diseased indulgence.  Buzzing from Mexican corner deli coffee. Trying to take its edge off by drowning it in almond milk. Writing with a violent abandon. Summer rains are sneaking into the spring (as it now decidedly is), the sky blinded me for a minute while I balanced my laptop on the fire escape stealing the library’s signal. Lightning that made me wince and retreat, with consequent thunder like an angry apocalyptic rip in the purple fabric of the still-low sky. Yesterday the rain came sideways in microscopic particles, whipping and shredding two of my blue umbrellas. The street this morning is a garbage dump, with cardboard and tissues and hopeless umbrella remains perched like petrified flamingos on the curb. Everything around me is melting into brick red, and even the leaf buds on the tree outside are that same exact color.  Silly daylight savings time. Very American.  No more clocks which to set by gently rotating the sharp hour hand with your index finger. Mac Book and iPhone know what to do.

Why memoir? I stand behind it with the assertion that it is the most desperate of creations, driven by fear of leaving something behind, of forgetting, of not putting down a foot. I remember from my thesis that the personal is a gate to the universal, and as I indulge my addiction to memoirs, I realize that it happens to be the most significant act- of creating and recreating the stories you will always tell. Everyone around me has the disease of believing they have lived nothing of note, and yet they are desperate to tell that one story, the tale that amazes them, the one that defines the crux of their core, the spine of their posture. Never assume the world doesn’t want you. It may be cliché, but even thinking of the story behind the spot you occupy under this canopy can produce lusty pages. A challenge: find the “spine” of your existence. The crux, the point at which the haze cleared and you saw the sky open up to reveal some truth that you have lived since. An era. Obviously, write about it. Then send it to us. Eh, it’s a spring thing.

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