Saturday, March 31, 2012

Leisure, Luxury, Creation


If every day could be day of leisure, luxury, creation, exploration, and freedom it would be a day like yesterday.

Much needed rest until 10:30 am or so, buttermilk pancakes cooked in bacon fat from homemade bacon, vanilla-sugar-tossed farmers market strawberries and basil. Eat, lounge, luxuriate in the food, sensation, the designer white. 

Moss Beach. Ocean waves, fog dance with sunbeams, undersea vestiges, sand-crystalized treasured tumbled over the rocks and shore for us to explore and touch and smell and capture in photographs. Whiskey and paint and discovering hidden spots on hillsides protected by trees to rest, play, create.

















Back to the glittering world of Friday-night San Francisco North Beach, drink, and hot ramen steaming into cool night outside. Neon lights and sparkling-lashed girls. Curiosity pulling us out of comfort zones and devilishly delivering deliciousness. The right kind of nourishment to keep up with the vivacity of the night.

Home. White sheets. Settled after high-strung satisfaction, but never leaving that feeling of close to heart because of the company. Just husband and I. Falling asleep to a day so delicious it dangerously tempts more, and Donnie Darko flickering on the screen all piano notes and tricks of sunlight and so comfortingly disturbing it makes me wish I had the power to escape the world by way of daylight hallucinations.







Tuesday, March 27, 2012

A Beautiful Night of Darkness and Work


Poetry is symptomatic
of a disruption
of a moving and beautiful disturbance of the ordinary
which, as an artist, one seeks to the point of obsession

In such a sense, poetry is cheap.
we can imagine ourselves as being made up of moments that move us
the dip of a lash, a mobile army of metaphors, the still secret and tiny dance of evaporated hydrogen and oxygen puffed white and silver above a bay-wrapped city-scape, a blissful hour of the trickery of otherworldly morning light
To live in these moments, a life composed only of them…


 



In a dangerous and potent combination of moments a year or so ago, I placed faith
in something different
I was reminded of the moments when I was born
when sensation, reflection, the movements of the soul first began to stir
My reaction was realization, that this world is not a pleasant one.
The entire Earth is a screaming place.
If it were only a matter of being unnerved by disagreement, that would be easy.



 But the Earth screams of deeper, darker things
of denied truths
wasted lives
misunderstood intentions
dreams left to die
deception
identities
forsaken
foregone
condemned
deprived
depraved
punished
wracked innocences

possibilities made impossible.


The poem's unfinished.

Monday, March 26, 2012

every relationship has been a certain amount of falling from grace I never belonged there to begin with.

Just waiting for sobriety to spin away like a wicked dancer, even though I need that core for commitments I've made - to the world, but commitments to the world that relate more to myself than how I spend forty hours per week.

Just sitting in the oil-film over my skin that seeps into my eyes and stimulates the body to think they're tears. Makes my body temperature rise and my soul settle in a false sense of heavy acquiescence. All is not well. This is the thing, in being committed to someone. The lows are eviscerating. Excavating. And they've never been really, fundamentally worth it. They've never made me feel this need to shift everything, shift my thinking, my habits of mind my thought process to work, to wrap around a concept of two. Of harmony, in two as one. My thinking is shifting, because I am allowing it to. I've never been ready. I wasn't when this started, but I knew this one was worth making myself ready. I'll spend longer than he likes, becoming ready. My best is held back by the demands on our time, and more so by my own ignorance. But it wants. It wants to surpass the expectations. It's learning how.

This isn't the only time I've ever said to myself "I've never felt like this" - because every experience is new, every interaction, everything I allow myself to feel, every place I allow myself to go, is new. But this isn't just new. It's the deeply imbedded past, too.

It is hallowed ground.

And even while every relationship has been a certain amount of falling from grace I never belonged there to begin with. And while the flowers at my tips in the height of springtime will wither and fall and die and never come back quite as beautiful as they were before blissful naivety was wiped away, while the branches that support them could rot and grey crumble wetly and die, the ones that support all kinds of even the best ideals and concepts about a being, even them - this all is not just a feeling I've never had before, an amazing experience because of its novelty. This is a life-long reality. And life-long is no small thing to commit. A moment of passion and excitement can sweep one of ones feet make one see the world of possibility more brightly than is real I'm well aware of that. Because I've experienced many. I've known the kind of person it makes sense to follow that wave with and the person that it does not. Very. Few. At the bottom of everything, you always know the truth. I am guilty of denying a lot of those. But I am in touch enough with my heart to know at bottom what commitment is the one of the most important to make and how much it is not a thing to be taken lightly. I have made stupid decisions, but I know that with the big ones stupidity and quixotism are not to be followed - if if quixotism is at times guided by soulful impulses.

It seems to be a fundamental affliction of the human condition that it is so easy to forget that a lifetime, is all we have. Who we choose to spend it with, as far as a human partner who we commit ourselves to, is, I would venture to say, the most important decision we could make, as people who only live on this Earth for such a very, very short time.

Saturday, March 24, 2012

No Unity

The Tribulations of Having Time In One's Life Only to Dedicate to Learning a Few Things:


"A man can only think over what he knows, therefore he should learn something; but a man only knows what he has pondered. " - Schopenhauer


And this, I think has something to do with being inescapably afflicted with Philosophical/Artistic temperament - to which today's world in the society I live in is not very kind. 
"You, the bold seekers and tempters, and whoever embarks with cunning sails on terrible seas - you, drunk with riddles, glad of the twilight, whose soul flutes lure astray to every whirl-pool, because you do not want to grope along a threat with cowardly hand; and where you can guess, you hate to deduce." - Heidegger

Friday, March 23, 2012

beautiful obsession

It's a chill day - in pajamas-that-function-as-work-appropriate pants - my favorite. Muscles worked from even a short run yesterday, dinner with laid back family, Dad's Birthday, finally building the golden tendrils in those relationships. Listening to Lush Pandora and looking at photographs of Los Angeles sun light.

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Bittersweet morning.