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Thanks Jez

Ash Ode

When I saw you ahead I ran two blocks
shouting your name then realizing it wasn’t
you but some alarmed pretender, I went on
running, shouting now into the sky,
continuing your fame and luster. Since I’ve
been incinerated, I’ve oft returned to this thought,
that all things loved are pursued and never caught,
even as you slept beside me you were flying off.
At least what’s never had can’t be lost, the sieve
of self stuck with just some larger chunks, jawbone,
wedding ring, a single repeated dream,
a lullaby in every elegy, descriptions
of the sea written in the desert, your broken
umbrella, me claiming I could fix it.

Dean Young

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A+

61.2 (Inner Truth) –> 14 (Possession in Great Measure)

Changing Line: Inner strength or weakness are always being communicated to others. If you are devoted to higher things, that will be felt. If you are not, that too will be felt. Self-development is the only way to attain the power of inner truth. When our values are firmly in place and we nourish ourselves with correct thoughts, a good influence cannot be prevented.

Yesterday’s general dismal atmosphere, punctuated by intermittent storms, followed by this morning’s bright chilly gorgeousness, feels like an extended metaphor for the transition between yesterday and today. While the SHOCK I worried so intensely about yesterday did not come, no fewer than THREE of my dearest friends got some incredible shocks. I lay in bed, eating cupcakes and watching 30Rock and intermittently reading a book of poems and fielding their emails and phone calls. No sobbing-and-barfing for me, thanks, no straying off the beaten path. We went real bland and happy yesterday. Finally the time came for the evening’s social events (SHOW UP AND BE NICE) I was anxious, but put on my dress, my earrings, my eyeshadow, my cute little gray flats. I had a few drinks with J and then we went to a phenomenal reading which was followed by a showing of Jurassic Park. And then I walked home in the drizzle, my purple scarf pulled wide and wrapped around me, my hair fluffing and curling in the humidity. I made tea, slid between the covers, and blessed everyone and everything I could think of that I was not, having been given the SHOCK of my life, sobbing-and-barfing on the bathroom floor.

The outcome of today’s reading–Possession in Great Measure–affirms that an extended effort to be humble and wide-eyed and accord the Self with the rhythms of life without protesting or asking too many questions has brought me in accord with The Sage and now we can work together toward creative goals. My written exchange with Rabbit last night was of a similar tenor: Humility. Invisibility. Stillness. I did not think I could sink into these so comfortably–I thought I would struggle against them wildly–but they cradle me. Strange and steady.

It’s a bit of a gold star or good report card. I feel pleased.

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Previous Post

Just told a friend who is stressing about a dude who sounds very like the dudes I have recently been dating, “I think some dudes like to feel feelings but they don’t like to catch them. Which is dumb because it seems obvious to me that faithfully attending a feeling will get you MORE OF THAT FEELING, but who knows.”

And then I realized that was about the smartest thing I have said in 2 years and there is just no way I am going to keep dating the same guy. I know that guy now. I can spot him paying for his coffee.

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Previous Post

Just had the thought, “I need to know about the Weimar era because I am going to write something about it soon,” which is the first time my creative brain has actively requested input in about a year, so that’s pretty amazing, and I bought this book:

Aaaand that’s all I really have to say about that.

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In today’s worrisome, inscrutable I Ching

This morning I threw #51 Shock, in its static form. The image, thunder over thunder, is pretty straightforward, and the traditional invocation from the sage is don’t fear the storm that is needed to clear the air. Shock is thrown as a precursor to major life events–losing one’s license, one’s job, etc–and is designed to disrupt the narrative the ego tells itself about the world’s design and one’s place in it. In its static form, there are no mediating or specifying factors, just BOOM. Thunder over thunder.

The last time I can remember throwing Shock was about a week after The Professor got fired, when I finally pieced together why, and realized it did not really have anything to do with his sleeping with me. At all.

An email from d: Well, I do prick up my ears when I get 51, but it is not necessarily cause for alarm; its a cause for attentiveness. And sometimes the unexpected arriving can be a lovely thing! Also: this hexagram could be speaking to a shocking thing that happened in the past and wants current attention…so I think in this case: meditate on if anything happened recently to induce anxiety/unease, if shocks from the past have risen up from mind/body/world, and to walk in the world today slowly and with vivid attentiveness in case a shock/surprise is zigzagging towards you.

I asked the I Ching to clarify the nature of said current or oncoming shock, and I threw 20.4 (Contemplation) –> 12 Stagnation.

These are both fairly straightforward hexagrams, and in terms of the clarification I requested, seem to suggest something moving within; as today is a quiet at-home day, maybe d is right: something large and painful I have been carrying might shift, moving me out of a space in which I have been stagnating, today. Though why that shift would be shocking, again, gives me tremendous pause. I would rather not end the day sobbing and barfing (or you know, spend any part of the day doing that.)

The fourth line in Contemplation is especially inscrutable. From an email to d: The 4 was “Those who understand proper principles will lead others with respect, tolerance and gentleness (from the walker)” and in the Anthony a rather long discussion of total receptivity and social invisibility (“we must behave as if he were king and we his guest”) it, interestingly, warns against using the I Ching to selfish ends, IE expecting that events will transpire on one’s timetable, thinking “well, I’ll TRY this I guess but I doubt it’ll help” or accept readings that are encouraging and reject those that imply criticism.

d writes back: I think you should go back to your fine relationship with the Sage, be ready for anything, expect nothing. Move slowly. See friends, eat well, love your animals, don’t worry.

I expect she is right. Death, natural catastrophe, illness, sudden disruptive events (surprise! I don’t love you anymore!) [by the way, right after I wrote that parenthetical exclamation I burst out laughing, which was awesome] just happen. The pain is inevitable. It is inevitable that at some point I am going to be back on that bathroom floor, sobbing and barfing. I accept it. In the meantime I will keep trying to practice humility, innocence and attentiveness, in hopes that I might, as Dana suggested, spot the Shock zigzagging toward me and be prepared to care for myself and take moral and emotional inventory as soon as it comes.

I think I’ll start by doing dishes.

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No Future

I don’t know if this has ever consciously happened, but earlier this week I wrote a poem that now has me on an internal and philosophical line of inquiry. The poem is called No Future, after Lee Edelman’s scathing tract about futurism as embodied by the specter of the baby, and also driven by Otto Dix’s “Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber” from 1925. The poem is littered with physical stuff, a tremendous accumulation of it. And it incorporates text from a book I am reading that equates a cluttered physical environment with a emotionally and mentally cluttered environment. The speaker, who is speaking to a purveyor of said stuff, is listing it and refusing, refusing, refusing it. There is no future in it, the narrator says. I do not want your stuff. Can you please stop sending these skulls, this Wedgwood tea service, this Star Wars paraphernalia? Though I could easily substitute preconceptions about family, fidelity, the trajectory of human relationships, heavier and more inarticulate stuff. I have been thinking and thinking and thinking about this, all week. How the repetitive thoughts and the relentless scrutinizing of all the ways I have failed, or failed to measure up, are just clutter. I don’t want to think that thought anymore, or that one. There’s no future in it. What does an empty mind feel like? What sensations and emotions and new experiences are earned by a mind and a pair of eyes that do not constantly apply a constellation of filters? What would happen if the prerequisite of every day was not a barrage of sensation and experience, if there were periods of absolute quiet and stillness? The poem did this to me.

Translation Theory is going to be an intense class. In the 2.5 hours we ranged freely from Dryden to Sappho to the Victorians to Native American Myths to Homer and of course, through the Bible. When I got out my mind was buzzing terribly, my body like a plucked guitar string, vibrating that way. I met with A at My Favorite Bar and we had a lively debate about the legacy of colonialism upon language, history, myth, story, narrative, art–and then we parted ways, slightly buzzed, shaking our heads.

I’m tired now, and happy. I read two books today and worked in the office and had a phenomenal class and a long dog walk and fantastic drinks and all the things. I had all the things. I sort of just want to smoke a little and watch Ab Fab now, turn it all off and turn myself over to silence and night time and negative space. Alone is not lonely at all.

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Next Post

I had another lover; I’m sorry. She was an artist, in a way. She could have been famous in her time. She offered to draw my face for free. An old face haunted by nothing, she said. I told her I would like to live within her, but she told me that she had another. I told her I would be willing to live between her, her and her other. Then she said that loving me had grown her a conscience and could I please leave her.

Michael Lee

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Next Post

Life I love in me

I do

You

Luster of this world that fills me

I complete my own picture by knowing how to stay in the frame

Nature supplies the medium

Of which I am

The medium

Of which I am

The medium

Of which I am

The medium

Ariana Reines

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Why would I mind?

Much to say about the books I’ve been reading, the terrible awful movie I saw at the ‘bama last night, adventures in asian cooking, upcoming plans to hike the Walls of Jericho and attend a Cat Fancier’s Show in Birmingham, much to say about classes and writing (which I am, Holy Jesus, doing again, and passionately, voluminously) but, as ever, the living is really getting in the way of documenting the living.

I am happy. Legitimately, truly. I was describing this to my therapist, worrying that I might not get enough selfwork done before another inevitable…plummet. Eyes welling up with tears. Therapist just shook her head gently. “Everyone has those, Farren. Everyone. Everyone. What you are doing is working. Do not take that away from yourself.”

You’re not a baby if you feel the world.