Under Your Spell

I escaped into the forest today  fittingly bedizen in Doc Martens and old crappy jeans, equipped with backpack full of paints, booze, journal, camera, and my beloved Anais Nin diary. I don't have a car so I didn't have the opportunity to venture too far esp since I didn't set out until noon or so. Moss Beach Tidepools, I will see you yet.

I chose to explore Sutro Forest, a place my dad has been telling me about for a while now - a little haven in the clouds in the middle of the city. It was a little too close to my work for comfort but once I actually entered the forest, it really did feel like I was completely elsewhere. I wandered for a while, wondering how far I could go, and at the same time fighting off many moments of being taken aback by certain perspectives so striking in their loveliness, it took some determination not to stop and settle down right there and pullout the paper and paints. But I wanted to explore.

I thought as I walked there, how excited I was to know for certain that, right in the middle of this city I have known my entire life, awaited me something unknown - not just the terrain and the forest, but a creation yet unknown that would come of my venture. A realm of unknown within myself would be created out of something that heretofore had felt old, worn, nauseatingly familiar, as this city can sometimes. One thing I love so much about reading Miss Nin is that I've discovered it's not so strange to be someone who thrives off the unknown, to be someone who has inside themselves an insatiable need to constantly live among the marvelous - and to discover that one has the power of transforming the ordinary into the marvelous. Once one has made this discovery - which I did when I was about twelve, using words - every bit of time that goes by that you realize you have not been doing this, that you've spent too much time in the ordinary world and not enough corresponding time digesting it, alchemizing it - creating for oneself an antidote to every day life - is pretty much absolute torture.

So today I alchemized. And it was much needed, long overdue.. Of tremendous aid was the soundtrack to Drive - light, ethereal, striking to the core, and most of all, unlikely. Music transforms the world too, and it turned the forest into some enchanted thing; it lullabyed the petals as they floated to the wet, muddy ground. After wandering for a while through the forest, being struck at many moments by its tremendous beauty, and the wonderousness of such a little lush green gem in the middle of city, so full of life, of blossoming spring, I settled with my back against a rock, facing a few snowing petaled trees. Pink-white petals that covered the trees dropped gracefully peppering the ground and softening its darkness.

 

 
I sat for hours there with the paint, the music, 100 proof peppermint schnapps, and my absolute unrestrained need to lose myself - to abandon myself to creative freedom, and as little attachment as possible to whatever might result. Creative freedom is the only absolute freedom I have left. Discovering the unknown in transforming the ordinary into the marvelous. I felt feverishly torn between working on the painting, and translating my emotions into writing in my journal, which I kept by my side, and filled with outbursts when I could tear myself from painting. Under the spell of the forest, the music, the alcohol, and the palace of my inner life.

I felt that as long as I always have this, almost no matter what else I have to spend my time doing, as long as I have the time and space to create, and to spend time lost in this freedom and in awe of the beauty of the natural world, that everything will be okay. Not that I am a particularly good painter by any means - but it really has nothing to do with that. The moment I realized that (which took me long enough), the creation of visual art ceased to be about control, about rigidness, and became entirely the opposite. It became a realm where my mood was allowed to be translated however I wanted to manifest it - limited only by my own technical abilities. But that matters to me little. If I want to learn more refined technique I will. Right I am grateful for the ignorance and my vulgar brush strokes.

Anais Nin Excerpts

"The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself."


"I have tried not to be neurotic, not romantic, not desctructive, but I may be all of these in disguises."


"Poetry is a cause too. It gives us strength and faith to go to battle, to endure."


"The world of myth...alone makes the monstrosities of history bearable."


"Will the outer life become so strong that the inner life will disappear?"


"Will the outer life become so strong that the inner on will disappear? The inner eye mirroring all is less active. The withdrawal to commune, to relieve, to ruminate, to conserve and interpret, is less frequent. Hardly time to tell what is happening to me. Others' lives, others' happenings."


"I use analysis to orient myself, but once I have found my bearings, I take to my submarin again and plunge back into the deep, below the level of analysis, words, discussions. I am now in that realm, wherein living and writing have their source."


We must have an inner life to act as an antedote to the poisons of daily life, to alchemize events.


"We are only trapped if we choose to be/"


"I saw art as a drug, the only drug left to me now that I am losing illusion."


"A snowstorm. I was working This Hunger, when my typewriter broke down. I went out into the snow with it to get it repaired. When I came back, I did  not feel like wrikting the continuation of Djuna's life at the orphan asylum and her hunger. I felt like writing about snow. I wrote every image, every sensation, every fantasy I had experienced during my walk. The snowstorm had thrown me back into the past, into my innocent adolescence, surrounded by desires, at sixteen, intimidated, tense. I compared my adolescence with the frozen adolescence of others around me today. They all fused: snow, the frost of fear, the ice of virginity, purity, innocence, and always the sudden danger of melting. I wrote myself out. And when I was finished, I realized I had described Djuna's adolescence, and the adolescent contractions of other adolescents. I had written thiry-eight mapges on the snow in women and men, on Djuna and the asylum, her hunger."


That's one of the most beautiful descriptions of the creative process I've ever encountered.


"Days of feverish inspiration, a flood of spontaneous writing. Onrush of associations, of impromptu anecdotes, utter freedom." I want to be there, more than anything else in the world.


"I like it best when I am submerged in symphony, and when the world in my head becomes a world of images and music."


"If the intellect has killed writing, then let the other kind of writing, emotional, kill the intellect."


"I make my concession to reality. I work at the press for eight hours. Then I come home and work on the novel."



"I, myself, concentrated so much on my sixth sense that I developed this vision which sees beyond facts, the better to find sensations and divinations. It is possible I never learned the names of birds in order to discover the bird of peace, the bird of paradise, the bird of the soul, the bird of desire. It is possible I avoided learning the names of composers and their music the better to close my eyes and listen to the mystery of all music as an ocean. It may be I have not learned dates in history in order to reach the essence of timelessness. It may be I never learned geography the better to map my own routes and discover my own lands. The unknown was my compass. The unknown was my encyclopedia. The unknown was my science and progress."

Childhood Existentialism and Old Curved Pocket Knives

When I was seven or so, I loved pocket knifes. Especially old ones with curved blades. I tried to collect them as much as a seven year old could. I felt like as long as I had one I would be okay. I think now that I thought this because I felt that as long as I had a certain means to die if I wanted to, everything would always be okay.. I spent hours laying in my bed staring into the space between my body and the ceiling, with one of those beautiful pocket knife blades over my heart, wondering about what would happen to me if I plunged the knife in, where I would go, what would happen to my mind, my spirit. I yearned for the experience of other worlds.

I still think they're beautiful.

"you still have that knife pointing at your heart, you just don't know what you want to know
maybe one of your goals in life is just to come back to this state, to know what you want to know.

you just have to come back to yourself, re-open this door, and go into it.

you just have to believe in it and it will come." - 2009

Flashing shaking flailing legs skin choking face spit hair she seizes herself and loses everything.

We found her like that, she sleeps with this thrashing music and the flashing lights. How does she sleep like that? Her blood is showing dry through her limbs. What does she dream about when she sleeps like that? Pieces of trash and glass flying everywhere around her head, getting lodged in the walls. Making such a mess of the place. She dreams? She dreams. She dreams about eyes and mouths, eyes closed but still showing colors, mouths closed. Dangling tits and cocks disappeared into what they’re always trying to conquer. Not even remembering what it looked like because it spent all its time disappeared there. Just wide open eyes in drunken surprise looking like a little dog. Chest hair and some smells sort of familiar. Staged words, porno theatre. That’s all lost and gone sucked into the vortex of the past that we try to rearrange conveniently. Technology only has one window on the past, not the way we have, events in disarray like her strewn clothes all around her when she shakes and dreams like that. Every motion was served up to her, brought her a little closer to death. A little closer to God in the end.

Look the music’s finally a little calmer now. The moment it finished she got dropped back down onto the earth, shitted out of a black bloody ass hole in the sky. In a heaving heap that felt like needles. That reminded her of bones and pieces of teeth and trash and fingers. She would’ve eaten her own fingers off if we’d left her there that way, some time after she’d woken from the thrashing, the seizure. She would’ve realized she was nailed in to that little room forever in the dark only her flashing lights and scratching music. Just a few piano strokes for relief.

She managed to climb up out of the rift that opened in the earth when the earthquake hit, the one that led into the abyss that dropped past the center of the earth and skipped through to some other world. But the abyss is sort of cracking now and running after her a little bit as it spreads over the dry earth, running after the people around her, hungry to swallow them up even though it is nature, and it is unaware, it has no wants, no preferences. We give it these qualities based on what we want, what we prefer.

I prefer that the loud music keeps keeping me alive, that I continue to sleep in seizures and that the abyss leaves me the fuck alone. I stared into it too long, became a monster now a little piece of the abyss goes everywhere with me, I bring it with me to every encounter.

She wasn’t always that way. Her heart was pure once, now it’s got a disease.

~

That was from 2009 also. The only differences are: I can't write like that right now, my world isn't wild enough, and my heart no longer has a disease. I wonder if these two are related. How sick do we need to be to create disastrous, beautiful things?

It was forged in hell flames but it was mine. The burnt taste still lingers in my mouth but my saliva sparkles with new, realer life. I am an aesthete to an obsessive degree. That the only reason I exercise so much. 

Retrieval Of Self

"I'll walk the sand-dunes of the moon and pick plums off trees that I imagine and make a desert of my world. Walk with me I'll walk with you. I closed my eyes a few steps back, but where I am deprived of eye sight, I see with my heart and spirit. The light of intution lends itself kindly, helps it see where the world would have it blind. But I see stars, walk under a sky like a dome, like velvet, I see sand tornados under glass. Sea anemonies dancing in sunbeams far under the current in an ocean garden, Dream, float, fly, Stars under glass. Black sky white stars. And right now the "real world" is so so far away."

I wrote that in 2009. I mourn for the way I had the freedom to think.

Salival*

There is really something to, being in the dark by oneself surrounded by the soft-orange flickering light of candle flames, visceral sensations, and intangible intentions that nothing can really replace. Just feeling. Not much more that than. Watching the shadows play, the city lights hum, Tool's exquisite sounds like an ocean not unlike the one Ms. Nin wrote about in the excerpt below. Drowning, watching, listening, feeling, swooning. The first time I ever heard this album it immediately became one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard. Salival indeed. Washed over.

If only I could stay here. I listen, and part of me dies inside so happily. And the whole world melts away.

*thank you husband, for giving me this album. the only time I'd heard it was somewhere online years ago, and then I never bought it cause it was like $200. 

Stand Inside Your Love

By The Smashing Pumpkins
 

You and me
Meant to be
Immutable
Impossible
It's destiny
Pure lunacy
Incalculable
Insufferable
But for the last time
You're everything that I want and ask for
You're all that I'd dreamed
Who wouldn't be the one you love
Who wouldn't stand inside your love
Protected and the lover of
A pure soul and beautiful you
Don't understand
Don't feel me now
I will breathe
For the both of us
Travel the world
Traverse the skies
Your home is here
Within my heart
And for the first time
I feel as though I am reborn
In my mind
Recast as child and mystic sage
Who wouldn't be the one you love
Who wouldn't stand inside your love
And for the first time
I'm telling you how much I need and bleed for
Your every move and waking sound
In my time
I'll wrap my wire around your heart and your mind
You're mine forever now
Who wouldn't be the one you love and live for
Who wouldn't stand inside your love and die for
Who wouldn't be the one you love 

Is there still a place, a role, for passion and devotion like this in conventional, adult existence? I remember feeling like this as a teenager. It revisits now and again, but taxes, insurance, and dinner parties take their toll on passion, on the chances to immerse oneself in the things that make us feel deeply and want wildly. Such a big, wide world - and it's so easy to stay stuck in such a tiny morsel of it, such a tiny plot of planet, such a limited pattern of neurons, day in, day out. What happens to the weird, the unknown, what happens to wonder, to being moved? What happens when we find ourselves so consumed with the every day that we suddenly notice that the amount of time we have for passionate existence is something we scrimp and scrape to obtain - living only for a half hour of stolen time in a day when we're lucky to find even that?

"Its translucent color so alluring and taste and aroma so gently and mellow offer admiring feelings of a graceful lady."

Went on mini-adventure with husband to a Japanese market yesterday. I found this, pink sparkling sake, and a yuzu cocktail, in addition to many other odd wonders I did not purchase (like chocolate mini hamburgers, the only English on the outside of the box reading "Every Burger"). I want to go to Japan.

From The Diary of Anais Nin

If I were to transcribe and save every passage from this book that completely moved me, that resonated with my spirit more than any few lines ever have, that gripped me completely, I would have to take down three fourths of the book. But here is the most current object of my affection:

"I, myself, concentrated so much on my sixth sense that I developed this vision which sees beyond facts, the better to find sensations and divinations. It is possible I never learned the names of birds in order to discover the bird of peace, the bird of paradise, the bird of the soul, the bird of desire. It is possible I avoided learning the names of composers and their music the better to close me eyes and listen to the mystery of all music as an ocean. It may be I have not learned dates in history in order to reach the essence of timelessness. It may be I never learned geography the better to map my own routes and discover my own lands."

Dreams Under Skin

This is the third dream I have had since I started my current job, that involved me pulling some kind of metal or plastic objects out of my body that were embedded there.

Last night I was at the horse stables I worked at for many years - I needed tweezers for something (nothing to do with the fact that someone has made a habit out of borrowing my tweezers to take the bones out of fish - to create dinners which I am very grateful for, however), and I found them implanted in my left shoulder. There were four of five pairs, entirely submerged under my skin the long way, except for a tiny bit of the top of the handles sticking out, so that when it was somehow communicated to me, "There are your tweezers; if you want them, you'll have to pull them all out," I could reach around with my right hand and pull them out of my shoulder.

This also has nothing to do, I'm sure, with the fact that I am surrounded all day at work by people who perform surgeries and manufacture devices to implant into kids to aid said surgeries. I still think there might be a bit more to it though. Much of what I have in the way of freedom, creative space, ideals, is being invaded by the life many of us are forced into living day in and day out. I'm beginning to feel that more and more of me is being infiltrated. I suppose my body is one of the most significant possible frontiers; the most unimaginable one (though not the most horrifying - I'd rather have my body taken than my mind, heart, or soul), so naturally, the fears manifest in dreams. Never mind the fact that I am required to sit all day long and be in one place, under neon lights in front of a flickering screen.

Bursting At The Seams

"There's a hole in our soul that we fill with dope, and we're feelin' fine."

I'm having a particularly hard time thinking square with my spiraling mental patterns.

I'm bursting at the seams.

But I love and I know it's real.

Little Gems

"When we think about the future of the world, we always have in mind its being at the place where it would be if it continued to move as we see it moving now. We do not realize that it moves not in a straight line, but in a curve, and that its direction constantly changes." - Ludwig Wittgenstein

"Is consciousness a permanent part of the universe, giving hope of indefinite growth in wisdom, or is it a transitory accident on a small planet on which life must ultimately become impossible?" - Bertrand Russell

Cellar Door

"An amusing story is told of an Italian lady who knew not a word of English, but who, when she heard the word cellar-door, was convinced that English must be a most musical language. If the word were not in our minds hopelessly attached to a humble significance, we, too, might be charmed by its combination of spirant."

"Linguist Geoff Nunberg writes, that cellar door 'at once brings to mind a word from one of those warm-blooded languages English speakers invest with musical beauty, spare in clusters and full of liquids, nasals, and open syllables with cardinal vowel nuclei — the languages of the Mediterranean or Polynesia, or the sentimentalized Celtic that Lewis and Tolkien turned into a staple of fantasy fiction.' "

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