things are changing...

slowly. surely. slowly, slowly.

till i've come full metamorphosis, you can keep up with me in the twittasphere a little more regularly.



photo is by my multi-talented ballerina / stop motion maker / visual poet friend, the devastatingly lovely, janika evans.

november koan

maybe if i were walking in your direction, i could tell you what i had to say



Photo is by Daniela Edburg.

the last chapter

The weekend was a train wreck.

We'd come all this way, but not journeyed an inch of distance.




And I knew that my life, what I expected, what I accepted - needed to drastically change.


"Learn the alchemy true human beings know. The moment you accept what troubles you've been given, the door will open." — Rumi



Top photo is by Alex Prager.... bottom photo is by me... the palms of Los Angeles, mid-summer.

you & me

Michelle Williams stared at me in the night-quiet of a Brooklyn apartment. Lifted from a coffee table, she was shorn and reduced to 10 questions within Time's red and black oil-slick pages. One question - the obligatory question du jour - What helped you prepare for Blue Valentine? - was sourced from an anonymous John of Montana (Ryan Gosling once compared Michelle to Montana. She's like Montana were his exact words - did you know?)

Her answer: it was a performance bled out of poetry and song. She stitched together the character's outline with banjo notes; reached her bone-thin arm, like a needle through the ice, into the words of Galway Kinnell to fish out its soul; a paper doll stuffed entirely from the wrist and pulse skating atop Kinnell's white pages.

"There's a line in one of his poems, 'Being forever in the pre-trembling of a house that falls.' [...] The poem is called "Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight." Go find it."

Go find it she said. So I did.

And after I found it, I also found Galway's take on finding love:

"It takes a lot of living to grow fully into your own wrongness. And it isn’t until you finally run up against your deepest demons, your unsolvable problems — the ones that make you truly who you are — that we’re ready to find a lifelong mate. Only then do you finally know what you’re looking for. You’re looking for the wrong person. But not just any wrong person: the right wrong person—someone you lovingly gaze upon and think, 'This is the problem I want to have.'"

I sat in bed chewing on this. I wondered if I'd grown into my wrongness fully enough yet - or if I still needed to wrangle my deepest demons to the ground in my very awareness of them. How well did I know the topography of my darkest and most unsolvable problems? Enough to know the shade and silhouette of the right wrong person I ought to be on the lookout for? Perhaps there was still living I needed to traverse to know who I was, which would explain everything - my singleness... the fact that I was alone, awake at night, contemplating such things.

When then, of course, he texted. He who has (self-confessed) run to and from me for a very long time.

"You should write alongside me," he said.

I'd been anticipating his text - not this text, but a text from him - it's always only ever a matter of time. I even had a planned response - the gist of which was to be something like, "I'm sick of this - If you can't run to me without running so long and so far from me - Please don't come back."

But I was feeling particularly melancholy - wondering about my wrongness, you see - so it was well-timed (boys always know), and this opener was also a little outside the scope of the usual pattern - it had different tone, was striking at a slightly different chord... but also (probably especially) because I knew what he meant, as a would-be writer himself he wasn't merely proposing that I write alongside him in the sense of 'you do your thing & i'll do mine,' but that we might be something more simpatico...

So instead of an eternal sayonara, I responded, "Shall I...."

For when it comes down to it, right or wrong, my imagined picturesque future has always consisted of a house or a cabin or a room with another writer in it. A person I sense is there, but who is quiet, as we spend our days tapping, thinking, spinning impossible threads naked to the mortal eye - reconvening at a regular time near dusk to murmur about what we didn't accomplish, or what we hope we did - saying "and what do you think of this?" with a bizarre sort of wild delight I think only a person with one foot in their imagination and one foot on this planet who is constantly trying to merge the two can.

But is this - or he - the right problem for me? Writers as a species are notoriously neurotic, self-absorbed, off.... And when it comes to him in particular, I may never know since I'm not sure there's a chance we'll ever get past his see-saw of approach and retreat long enough to have a real shot. But still - it's a question in my heart.

Particularly since so much of the reason I began speaking to him again some time ago can be ascribed to a coincidence related to Blue Valentine - a theme that now seems to be recurring. In the film, Michelle Williams' grandmother says, in essence, how you much you owe it to yourself to trust that the person you choose to fall in love with is worth it for you..for all it will cost. Which makes me doubly wonder when I see such blue flags.... what they mean... and how they relate to the problem I ought want to have.


Photo is by Henri Cartier-Bresson

the trouble with insomnia

"The armored cars of dreams, contrived to let us do so many a dangerous thing."
- Elizabeth Bishop


i'm up till 5 & 6 am these days... i can't sleep, i can't sleep...

i know what the root of the problem is - my third eye won't close since there's another place it'd rather be confronting its dangers - on a computer screen, or a piece of paper - its been pining away for those white dreamscapes now for too long. i must. resolve. to write.


the photo is by ballestreros + marot.

MoIA: Musee d'Art Impenetrable - imaginary wing

this is exactly what silence looks like in my head.

buried behind an uninspiring stack of rubbish & rust. a simple concept intersected by low-hanging pipes -- that clank.

and my brain is that white wall. a canvas with such potential, restless zen, longing to become flypaper with the smudge of a word - not just any word - a glacial lozenge - with layer of honest frost so flesh-ripping it causes you to gasp, catches in your throat, forces you to breath around it, negotiate through its layers in order to survive.

there are other nooks in my head too.

one featuring a giant ruler that likes to measure where i am with where it thinks i ought to be, condemns my progress, decides what letter should go before z, you know, practical things - the marketing department lets it self-promote and wrest control from time to time.

and somewhere i hear a gramophone playing songs tied to ex-lovers - that's a noisy wing.

and you -- here you are -- observing. hello!

welcome to my museee d'art impenetrable - that's impenetrable museum of art - though the "art" bit is all bravado for flourish and consistency in theme - primarily it's just an impenetrable museum. one that i find difficult to access. sometimes.

BUT - enough about me...

the charming and delightful news is that the image above is from an actual museum -- a forgotten one.

years ago, the artist Marcel Bloodstandt started Musée d'Art Moderne, Départment des Aigles - a conceptual museum with no collection and no permanent location (yep, pretty much the equivalent of my head). this picture was taken in where it once stood in a basement in Berlin; now it's nothing more than a storage shed with accumulations of chairs and random bits and bobs.

but the words are still on the wall and artist Tacita Dean has created a film called "Section Cinema" of what the abandoned museum looks like now.

i love the remnants. but perhaps what I love most is the discovery of Marcel - and how he and i are perhaps more kindred spirits now that his lofty ideas have matured to the point of stagnation, and his concepts become dusty refugees in an inaccessible basement -- which somehow make them all the more sincere and pristine...

and reflective of the modern museums we feel are inside us all...

o, tempus incognitum

"And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been"
— Rainer Maria Rilke

Tempus incognitum - unknown, uncharted time; that which has never happened nor will be repeated is what awaits us in 2011.

I am remarkably excited for this new year - it's as if the shades have been pulled and the world looks clear and hopeful where once a cynical film of doubt had been growing like algae and increasingly tainting my view. With all the 1-1 possibilities, it is being said that 2011 is the year of balance - weights and measures dropping in to even out the negative marathon of bumpy extremes. So on this never-before-charted day of one of one of one-one - I hope you also feel the world afresh and are excited at the page turning to this new year. Good things are coming...


Photo is an untitled by '50s &'60s street photographer Garry Winogrand.

o magnum mysterium

"Awakened at midnight
by the sound of the water jar
cracking from the ice"
— Basho


2010 winds....

the sounds of revelry and gentle snow - en thaw - grey lumplings arriving home with frozen cheeks and noses - gratefully laid to rest & happily tucked in with....

..... kisses xx



Photo is Prague Winter Scene by fellow Czech, Zdenek Vozenilek

attention: this is a live performance

"Why are you stingy with yourselves? Why are you holding back? What are you saving for — for another time?
There are no other times.
There is only now.
Right now."
— George Balanchine

Lives are changed because of silences. Because of words unspoken. Requests, desires, feelings, never articulated. We think that our actions are what shapes our future, but it is the void, the things not done, the scope of the unspeakable, unknowable ether is what weighs down upon us more than we know.

I have left many many places in my past, but as I explained to a friend the other day, the likelihood that I would have stayed put in any one of those locales had someone, the right someone, sat me down, taken me by the hand, looked me in the eye and said, "I wish you wouldn't go. Please don't. Please stay right here for a little while," is frighteningly grand.

Granted, I come across as pig-headed, as unswayable, as confident and unwavering and devil-may-care - to the point that perhaps it is my own fault that nobody ever had the guts or the grist to get in the way of one my decisions and request a serious reconsideration and reversal. Nonetheless, my life's trajectory has largely been shaped by drastic exits simply because nobody ever put up a good case, often any case, for otherwise.

Which brings me to an recent experience of a friend of mine (no, this is not a veiled tale about me). There is a person in this friend's life who was planning a move - a major one - across an ocean. My friend did not want this person to go.

Me: "Have you asked them to stay?"

Friend: "No. But isn't that a huge request? An unaskable request? Something that signifies neediness on my end. Insults them by implying I think they'd consider such a sacrifice, a redirection of their life, on my behalf?"

Me: "Maybe, but sometimes, the only reason I've left, is because nobody told me not to go."

So my friend asked. Imagine it. A life was asked to be changed. And guess what? The person in question is staying put - for a bit longer anyway.

I am not surprised.

We are so afraid of showing our need; showing our affection; our depth of care for fear of frightening away those whom we feel those things toward. But that is the true irony. For really, isn't that the grand quest we're all on anyway? Finding a person, place and thing who can furnish us with exactly that sort of unrestricted devotion.

This prevalent hesitancy and the potentially life-altering wrongness of this hesitancy reminds me of another of my favourite quotes:

"Say "I love you" to those you love. The eternal silence is long enough to be silent in, and that awaits us all."
- George Eliot

Ahh... the eternal silence. Which brings me back to my airplane theme that you've seen recently, together with the girls in dresses and the quotes from choreographers (above).

I've been taking a lot of risks lately (those of you who know me may say, 'but you always take risks' - true, but these are perhaps more directed, more *calculated* risks than usual). Risks of the heart and the deep deep soul. Taking plane rides and grand leaps of faith. Some have worked. Some not so well.

But a novel is being written (there are dancers in it - I feel eerily in sync with the zeitgeist and all the Black Swan buzz) and a venture is being formed. And if I don't hold back - well, actually, the *if* of that is almost irrelevant as I've reached a point where I don't feel I *can* hold back anymore... a sensation that makes me feel as if I've backed myself onto the right gang plank (diving board?)... a place of such overwhelming surrender because there simply is no choice.

In effect, to appropriately end with another Balanchine quote:

"I don't want people who want to dance, I want people who have to dance."
— George Balanchine

And if you have to dance, dancing then, is what you must do; the very abandon of your existence is fulfilled through the act of dance itself.



Photo is by the similarly-minded Rodney Smith, who (if you read his blog) rarely loves exactly how his photos turn out, but the process, the elements that make up the vocation of photography, is his reward.

cutting bait

"I imagine the feelings of two people meeting again after many years. In the past they spent some time together, and therefore they think they are linked by the same experience, the same recollections.

The same recollections? That's where the misunderstanding starts: they don't have the same recollections; each of them retains two or three small scenes from the past, but each has his own; their recollections are not similar; they don't intersect; and even in terms of quantity they are not comparable: one person remembers the other more than he is remembered; first because memory capacity varies among individuals (an explanation that each of them would at least find acceptable), but also (and this is more painful to admit) because they don't hold the same importance for each other.

When Irena saw Josef at the airport, she remembered every detail of their long-ago adventure; Josef remembered nothing. From the very first moment their encounter was based on an unjust and revolting inequality."

— Milan Kundera

I find it quite hard to leave people behind, even when I know I ought. Yes, more than places or work, people prove my foil. Don't they have a way of weaseling in and making it nearly impossible to completely abandon them? Even when it would probably all be for the best? At least, that's what I find...

This photo, entitled Nancy is by the fantastic Alex Prager. It's pretty clear to me that whatever impending circumstance awaits this red head, she needs an extra dose of courage. Whether she is running from or arriving at her fate, there seems to be an ominous fog and longing in the air of the sort we'd all rather avoid altogether if we could.

On a related, but wholly separate note, if you missed Prager's stylized short film Despair (somehow I did!) starring Bryce Dallas Howard - do waltz on over to Nowness for a viewing. It's totally worth the few minutes - ha - for me, watching it conjured up the the equally technicolour work (albeit, written) of Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down.

another chorus, or was that the last verse?

"Only the basic situations in life occur only once, never to return. For a man to be a man, he must be fully aware of this never-to-return."
— Milan Kundera


I'm reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being right now, and Kundera writes about Beethoven's last major completed work: String Quartet No. 16. Beethoven titled the quartet's final movement The Difficult Resolution wherein he supplemented the notes with a question:

"Muss es sein?" "Must it be?"

followed by (twice!):

"Es muss sein! Es muss sein!" "It must be! It must be!"

As we live along, it is sometimes curious to me how we make decisions predicated on the number of fresh chances we anticipate will be in our future that may never come to pass, but I'm also continously amazed by how many tries, how many try-agains, we get - to the extent that sometimes it's as if, indeed, what must be, must be.

So now, as I push off a present experience, I find myself musing: Must it be? Was that just the third movement? Or is it sonata-over?


Photo: We haven't seen Mr. Smith in a while.

just like that, all the magic was gone

i once had a boyfriend who said, "you're like a siren of the sea - men see you and they just don't come back." a sentiment he not only acutely felt, but had also witnessed among other men; his own friends and acquaintances; the type of emails i'd get from ex-boyfriends.

i used to smirk whenever i recalled this statement - revelling in its truth; sometimes it seemed if i snapped my fingers in the right way i could cast a spell that would extract a man's heart from his chest and put it in the palm of my hand, to fondle or eat whole as i saw fit.

but today, i suddenly felt nothing more than human. and that power, that wily brook of magnetic pull - i felt it evaporate - sink down through the cracks of my soul and disappear into nothingness. the beguiling flame, which i probably very falsely believed i could control, could wield for better or worse, to captivate, to bewitch, has gone cold; entirely depleted, diminished to nothing more than the flat reality of my white blood cells.

in its place is a pervasive awareness that i am just like everyone/anyone else. there is no elusive allure. there is no je ne sais quoi; no mesmerizing quality. i am no enchantress. i am just another person among the flesh-and-blood populace. and a largely unextraordinary one at that.

all the while, i'm sitting on yet another runway, hitching a ride to somewhere - hoping to end up - well, maybe not another incarnation of an enchantress, but maybe, better off.

The rather fitting and Hollywood-esque photo is by Alex Prager of LA, which is the city I've just left (again).

i'm still here

Caterpillar: Who are YOU?

Alice: This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. I -- I hardly know, sir, just at present -- at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.

- from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland


Photo is by Annie Leibovitz for Vogue

a lonely hunter

“All men are lonely. But sometimes it seems to me that we Americans are the loneliest of all. Our hunger for foreign places and new ways has been with us almost like a national disease. Our literature is stamped with a quality of longing and unrest, and our writers have been great wanderers.”
- Carson McCullers (author of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter)

After a long stage of restless limbo, it appears I'll be on the road again very soon. I'm glad. I'm ready for a new place to settle. A place to put myself and breathe in a new routine. It's been an interesting and difficult couple of months - life has felt increasingly liquid, less concrete, like I can't get a grip on anything - am treading water in a vat of Jell-o. So many things up in the air - my emotions and things on no one geographical point on the map. Being a perpetual vagabond is a lonely endeavor. I know I do it to myself. But it often seems unavoidable. I long for roots, and I envy those who have them, yet I still can't seem to put them down - not for long.

In the days of old, gypsies used to move in packs. I guess I was born to the wrong time. I've been watching loads of Carnivàle lately, an HBO series that traced, you guessed it, a traveling carnival across the dust bowl of the Great Depression. It got cancelled after a couple of seasons about 5 years ago - I somewhat think it was ahead of it's time - I have a feeling people would relate more to the uncertain desolation of that era now. Me, I guess I've always related to the desolation of that era. But superimpose the magical wanderlust of a carnival on top of it... whoa... I know that. A life that's a series of places and incredulous events... I know that.

Maybe it's just a sign of being a life-thirsty American - who knows. But here's to getting back on that quiet road, to embarking on more jaw-dropping adventures, to hunting down a plot of land to stake a tent... and to writing about it.


Photo is by a guy who still travels with the gypsy packs, and astounds me with the emotion he can capture in a single still frame, Mike Brodie.

portrait of a self-conscious enigma (shh)

no really, i am...

"In the artist of all kinds I think one can detect an inherent dilemma, which belongs to the co-existence of two trends, the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found..."
- D. W. Winnicott

I'm reading a fascinating book about personality types in the context of the Enneagram... soooo insightful. I consider myself a lay expert on Myers-Briggs, but this book and its in-depth exploration of different personalities far out-trumps any revelations the Myers-Briggs' summaries of the Jungian archetypes provide. I *highly* recommend investigating the Enneagram for self-discovery and understanding the ins and outs of the minds of your (potential) loved ones. It's amazing how different our motivations are, how differently we think, and what we need to find our place in the world.

I'm a Type 4 "The Individualist" (it took courage for me to imbed that link!) - and the authors of my book nail me for the way I communicate in symbols. This blog is usually highly personal in a way that can only be intrepreted by those who are very close to me... and sometimes is only an inside joke with myself. It's the typical tug-pull of needing to put my highly personal thoughts out there - but in such an enigmatic way that only I or a handful of people around me might fully understand. I need to stop that. Trying to get over my self-consciousness is supposedly one of the ways my personality type can find fulfillment... interesting...


Photo is by Jackie Young and Cybil Gustafson... from an Austin-based project of theirs called "I am ______ " Who are you? Take the Enneagram test yourself here.

oh how i love thee, may i forget the ways...

"Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that -- well, lucky you."
— Philip Roth

i love thee, i love thee not..... no really, may i forget how i love thee... entirely, sometimes incontestably, and without measure... (cue: opposition to step in...)

photo is from the latest portfolio of work by the enigmatic and darling Tierney Gearon.

subtext

i am here.
on a shelf.
come & get me.


Photo is by Mike Brodie.

flight. cancelled.

"When your dawn theater sounds to clear your sinuses: don't delay. Jump. Those voices may be gone before you hit the shower to align your wits.
Speed is everything. The 90-mph dash to your machine is a sure cure for life rampant and death most real.
Make haste to live.
Oh, God, yes.
Live. And write. With great haste."
— Ray Bradbury


I am Sedona bound.


Photo is for UK Vogue by the surrealist de excellence Tim Walker.

owning my siren self

"Doing all the little tricky things it takes to grow up, step by step, into an anxious and unsettling world." - Sylvia Plath


Right now, I'm on the Atlantic coastline of Newport, Rhode Island and it's lovely - one of the most genuinely charming and surprisingly vivacious towns I've been in a long while. Steve Martin is down the street, strumming a banjo, my skin is burnt from a half-hour of direct sunlight, and I'm about to watch one of my best friends walk down a beach aisle and say, "I do" to a guy who realises how lucky he is to have her - nice.

Also nice is an epiphany I started circling around today - all about recognising my place in the world enough to be confident in it. To allow my age and bird's eye perspective to bolster me from my groundling status to instead take hold of the paddle and start flexing the strings in the grand design of my life. Traces of this thought of my yet-to-be-realised potential struck me more than once today - in relation to different universal themes. A burgeoning sense of my womanly empowerment that I will also blame on Steve Martin and the 75 pages I read today of his (unreleased) novella, An Object of Beauty. Coincidence? Hmmm....


Photo is by Sarah Moon.

clockwork

"Love is a drama of contradictions."
— Franz Kafka


Photo is by Spanish duo Jorge Alvarino (photographer) and Ali Larrey (art director).