Loss of Words
I recently picked up Renata Adler's works. Specifically what some call one of her more masterful pieces 'Speedboat'.
Adler studied for an M.A. in comparative literature at Harvard under I. A. Richards and Roman Jakobson. She also studied philosophy, linguistics and structuralism at the Sorbonne under mentors Jean Wahl and Claude Lévi-Strauss.
It was her verisimilitude, that strata between film critic and award-winning journalism of politics in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The New Yorker that drew me.
She has the bandwidth to contribute 'Speedboat' a fast-moving first-person narrative, that contains some of the most advanced contexture, and structure I've read in a long time, to waxing on Watergate, serving as a film critic and overall critic's critic.
I don't think I'll ever forget her bold and ice-cold takedown of film critic Pauline Kael's 'When The Lights Go Down'. That one made it into the pans hall of fame.
I try to ignore the mean girl side of Adler. Why? because as she proves, broad public consumption journalism doesn't have to be bone dry and a colossal bore. Memorable journalism or even just op-ed writing can leave a mark. You walk away remembering the context, not so much as for line by line contribution of facts, but because of its rhythm and style, the music of it. This writer is one hell of a composer.
She Who Works The Earth
Throughout my life, my center and balance have been nature and the animal kingdom.
When it is pure hand against stone, the universe will again point me back to the earth, nature, flora, fauna.
I was blessed with a nature that animals find nonthreatening. I'm usually able to get close enough to observe their majesty, it's truly been one of the greatest blessings of my life.
Be this as it may, it always seems that those moments of hand against stone lead us away from the very thing that heals us. Long hours at work, interpersonal frustrations of the daily that leave us so exhausted that it is any wonder we can perform the basics, and we fall into bed feeling empty, unable to see a future, grieving for broken expectations, or worse, defeated.
It has been my experience that when the Universe sees me straying from True Importance or the right kind of evolution, She will use abstract, and wonderful ways to direct me back to the Way. Now, figuring out exactly what that is, feels so many times to be a fool's errand. I keep thinking that it is a math problem to be solved, rather than an experience. I want to complicate, the Universe wants to simplify.
Well, how can this be a possibility when the very world itself seems to be more complicated as our weary days wear on?
All I have to go on is the memory of the past, where it seems the Universe had done exactly that. Simplified. Torn up the hard clay soil of my stubborn soul and planted a seed. Nothing is quick. It takes seasons.
Right in the middle of this maelstrom, I get a package from Linda Rand, a writer, poet, and a hands to earth wonder. Her eyes like the sea when the sun strikes it, her trademark fire engine red lips and corn silk flaxen hair, she herself is a vision. Her prose and art are an extension of that beauty.
From her apothecary and botanicals garden, she's sent me several little packages of seeds.
Enclosed are two pages of typewritten prose. I'm so thrilled to see this, I'm feeling transported a bit back to the era of Dorothy Parker. I finish reading and decide to plant the seeds.
With each planting, I set an intention. "Let one or more things I do today really matter to the fabric of the Universe." and "Give me the strength to see the process, and not the disruption."
Now I wait for these little seeds, in this garden and the one in the backyard.
The Hours
What did you do to honor your artist’s way?
What did you do to build that all-encompassing life so compressed and deadened by utter unimportant cirucmstance that calls itself the most important narrative? How do you take back the Hours?
Redefine
How do you call the shots? Shoulder-check the disruptors so rudely barging in?
How do you draw the line?
Perhaps with a caligrapher’s pen or architect’s grid paper
The line that draws the space between you
and the Hours
This morning while I was ruminating on two friends whose lives have taken them on some of the most transitional and transformational journeys, through change, loss, and just unexpected veers in the road, one of my Orioles left her feather while picking her breakfast at the feeder.
I thought about these rocking transformative times in our lives that feel like cyclones. I thought about the gold thread of faith, community, and other powers of the universe that remain spun into the cyclone that will be the plumbline in the new milieu at the end of the cyclone.
Shattered State
It's taken a couple of days to want to talk about this one. After it happened, I sort of took a short break to recharge.
But the reason I think it's important is because it is microcosm of the great unraveling that I think is taking place.
This weekend amid my regular activities I'm driving down my town's little Main Street. A street where nothing happens but curbside burgershop dining and window shopping.
At the one bus top we have by the tracks I see a commotion. It's a woman wearing partial fatigues who is attacking an elderly couple at the bus stop. I would learn later that she hit the man in the face and was throwing some type of liquid on them by the time I got there and screaming. It doesn't take it long at all to register this was most likely a vet.
She was first trailing away from them yelling when I parked my vehicle next to them and assisted them. I checked them for injuries, asked where they needed to go. There was a language barrier. I'm absolutely embarrassed to say that along with the other language I'm learning, I hadn't completed Spanish. All I could get from her was 'hit' 'husband' and 'liquid'. Then I look up. The assailant was coming back. Her arms were open, no weapons, but she was yelling. I in turn, yelled at the couple to get in my car for protection but my spanish is for shit and they looked so shocked they could barely move. The whole thing was happening too fast.
I had one choice, I was going to have to keep her away from them myself. I scanned her for weapons saw none, I walked outward toward the street and backward, she beelined for me, it's what I wanted, I wanted her moving away from the couple, as they made their way across the street. I stopped and took that same pose she had, arms stretched out. She could see I also had nothing on me. She was screaming at me, something about 'making us go home' 'you think I'm unfit' She called me by another woman's name in a barrage of cusswords.
I said absolutely nothing. it would do no good to speak to a delusional mind. She didn't 'see' me, she wouldn't have 'heard' me. She only saw the figure in her mind. That figure was most likely an authority in whatever armed services she was enlisted in at one point. Shit got tense when she picked up speed and suddenly made it so close to my face I could feel her breath. Now, we all say, right? that we know exactly what we'd do in situations in theory, when we play them out in conversation or our minds. If I were to play this out in my mind, I would've said something like, "I'd make short work of her ass and call it good"
It would've taken a minute, she was tall and built like me. But, no, that isn't what happened...
It's when the other person gets so close, you see their eyes, feel their aura. What this woman had done was against the law. But her eyes said, "I'm scared here. I can see myself reeling out of control and I can't stop it...I can SEE everything has gone to shit..."
It was as if some kind of force kept both our arms locked in non position. She also, never moved her arms, just got nose to nose, eye to eye. It was then we heard the sirens. Her face melted into another look and she walked into middle of road and waited. She'd been here before, she knew what this was about.
In a city like Portland one cop car comes if at all, in a small town where nothing ever happens, and it's a call about an elderly couple getting their ass kicked, THEY ALL show up. Soon the vet, the couple and I were awash in flashing lights and cruisers. They were trying to find an officer who spoke Spanish. I walked near the officers who detained the vet, I made a 'calm down' hands motion to them, even after all of this shit, I didn't want needless harm to come to her. Isn't that strange, not wanting the assailant to suffer?
The cops in our town are just our town's residents, so I believe they were familiar with her. They were respectful and well mannered with her. When she maneuvered a foot behind one of the officers to get him off balance, and to keep her from screaming without a mask in his face, he did slam her head down on the cruiser hood until she agreed to gain control. She calmed down after that and was let up.
The elderly couple refused to press charges, due to the language barrier, for some reason they didn't want to bring 'undue' attention to their family. I thought about that, I thought about how much injustice happens due to language barriers, and recent immigration friction our nation faces.
The police ended up not booking the vet, which I'm actually grateful for. This may sound strange, yes I do think violence needs a few hours in the klink, but there was something about her situation that made me not want to see her booked. I think someone got ahold of one of her contacts that may dispense her medication. She came back a few hours to the same place where it all happened, the bus stop. I saw her as I drove by that day. She was only one there, and she 'looked' medically restrained. I wonder if she returned to try to relive what had happened.
The next day I drove by to find the bus stop enclosure shattered. The enclosure reminded me of our Nation's state at present. How many of our crisis can converge at one time?
Bouncing off one another. One victim of one circumstance, attacking another victim of another circumstance and all the dirty glass walls are closing in until someone puts their foot through one.
Yes I'd say the unraveling has begun. Whether we want to face it or not.. it's here. It's not something you can turn your head away from any longer. It's in your backyard. It's knocking on your back door and it's telling you to do something about it.
Carried
The bottle wasn't supposed to make it in the shopping basket. I felt strange, like some other woman putting it in there.
The bottle wasn't supposed to make it home
The bottle wasn't supposed to be uncorked with a glass sitting next to it. I laughed, all those times I never bothered with a glass.
It wasn't supposed to make it up to my mouth where it's full bodied sweet-sour aroma, immediately twinged something in my brain, like my brain was already gearing up for show down migraine hangover. Breathing in what started to smell like toxic fumes, my arm started to twitch from holding the position too long.
A voice said, "Jennifer, pour it down the drain. The whole $16 bottle, pour it out now. You are in this place because you've forgotten that small simple adage of turning it over. That ole' give you the grace to handle what you can, realize what you can't, and the smarts to know the difference? Yeah, that one. This is what happens when you start bearing up arms and readying yourself for a battle that is too big for you. Now, pour it out, or I will kick your ass with a migraine that will send you to ER. I've done it before, I'll do it again."
$16 bucks literally, down the drain. The stench of a too-big-for-its britches Cabernet filled my nostrils and made by stomach hitch. How the fuck was I able to drink turpentine all those years? I stood there at the kitchen sink. I was worried, not because alcohol almost made it down my gullet. But because of what transpired to get me there.
What is so hard about all of this, is that we can't really name it. It's a big game of who can handle the apocalypse better? Who looks the best on FB? Who's killing it in their career? Who's excelling? Who is not doubting? Who's taking up the bullshit marketing of their brand and using it as their calling card in society, when really it would just be more helpful if they told the truth about themselves?
To someone like me, it wasn't just a bottle of wine. For someone like me that could have been a loaded gun or a butcher knife. It simply said, "I don't want to play this game anymore. I'm tired of feeling like one half of my life is inhabited by A Great Gadsby-esque group of people who dance as the world burns and the other half, frozen in fear, trying to figure out how to feel, let alone what to do."
This is not to become anyone's burden here. People don't have the bandwidth for that shit. I will just say that honesty is probably a helpful component now. If I needed to be reminded to turn it over, then there may be others as well.
I laid down last night sans a migraine, but something else happened. It was astounding. It was a flush of the most astonishing neurochemicals I so rarely experience. It washed over my brain and untied my muscles, I started to feel almost like I could float. Then, off into twilight and off into dreamland. I felt carried by something, covered and protected. Maybe this was all I was looking for.
The rising sun hangs a blood-orange fire in a pink haze. What once presented a beautiful sight causes a low-level knot in the bottom of my stomach. Almost threatening.
I wonder what today will bring.
A Corvette blasts past me on the near-empty freeway, tipping 100mph toward the ball of fire in the sky. I laugh and think to myself, 'Yes! race into the apocalypse, It waits for no man!'
The punishing heat and dead air sky have caused, like the moon, a crazy aesthetic in people. Anxiety so thick, like breathing hot steam.
Customers at check-out counters, screaming
Erratic driving
Psyches morphing, twisting, assuming startling forms on social media
Lost, drifting souls on the streets. Faces have set jaws and lips pursed into hyphens.
Nervous
On the way home I watch out the window at a humanity that has slowed its activity in the impossible heat. I drive over the overpass and a pigeon flies off of the freeway sign directly into the street.
Her strength sapped, she banks recklessly, she tries.
I suck in a startled breath. She slams into the grill of my car and becomes a lump in the rearview mirror, smaller and smaller.
The knot in the pit of my stomach rises. I grip the steering column until my knuckles turn sheet white. Her sudden violent death seemed an omen.
The omen of a new day. A Nervous new day. I wonder if I will ever again see the cool, scented sanity of the Harvest Season.
The Beauty of the handmade with author beth Kephart
I smiled wide and bright at the sight of the blue little package in the mailbox. It had come, something I'd been waiting for, that was so vastly different from what I usually pluck out of the box. I realized that this very emotion was part of it, part of the magic of the handmade. It's a feeling that is broad and sweeping each time I receive a package from a beloved soul. I noticed the carefully handwritten envelope and the signature sticker.
I opened the envelope to find another lovely layer to protect the treasure inside. All part of the art presentation. I opened the second layer to find a gorgeous journal. Carefully assembled by the hands of talented author Beth Kephart. She'd recently begun to explore visual art assembly in the ancient practice of making paper. I'd seen the unique process only a handful of times previously and it struck me that it truly was one of the most process and involved art practices among the writing sciences. Parts of Beth's writing came to me as I took in the treasure she sent me. Beth teaches her students to be so very present in their practices of investigating context of the physical world along with the ephemeral world of writing. I could imagine her expert deployment of these skills as she made the piece.
Recently in my own life, I'd begun to change my relationship with Time and how Time was treated in daily life of working, learning, reading, and making art. As our world becomes increasingly digital and separated, I find myself wanting to slow, to return to core of the handmade. Handwriting becomes a more important practice to me. I'd recently purchased a set of calligraphy pens both standard and those made to write Arabic, Aramaic and Hebrew languages. I myself am exploring a new practice, as I learn to speak these languages, I also learn how to write them. This is all very new to me, and I'm not sure how it will inform the other investigations of art practices but I am assured that it must be something I should be doing.
This particular piece is a journal, but it is now framed and hangs in my writing space. It is precisely this journal, this piece by Beth, that I will write down the day and time that my first novel is published. Those that I love will sign the piece and it will be reframed and put back on the wall. Significance in art practice is such a powerful thing. We look back on sentiment and realize that it is truly a part of our journey that needed to take place. So very grateful to the wise and lovely teacher, artist, writer and light Beth Kephart.
Woman In A Man's World
In the shop connected to the engineer's office at a building I worked in (The Nines), there was a mannequin there from one of their staging scenes. I put the plans I was working with in her arms and a welding hat on her and considered her improved. I couldn't help but notice how closely it illustrated how I feel at times working in fields that are still very much male-dominated. It feels exposing. Standing in a group of men or at a conference room table full of men, I STILL feel like I'm sitting there with no clothes on. This is a feeling that is hard to describe. I think this image does it better than my words would.
Metamorphosis
I took this image last summer when Hades came to visit us. It was the turbulent last few weeks of the Trump sectarian regime, our ability to breathe was literally taken from us and all of nature screamed in agony as she burned and choked to death.
This was the challenging ending of the hardest four years of my life. Scott Ferry wrote a powerful poem about the tearing away of the skin and I thought, my god, if that doesn't just nail it. I left the link on his name active for those who would like to subscribe to his poetry (which will peel your eyeballs btw).
A few years ago when I was a regular free diver and lived in water more than on land, I would sometimes miscalculate the strength, PSI, and depth of water. This put me in situations of suffocation, one scenario was a near-drowning event. You never really forget that pain. Your brain wrenches on the mandible muscles of your lower jaw to open your jaw wide, tilt the head back and pull deep. Another message screams in an override to keep to mouth firmly shut and to block off upper sinus pull, to protect the lungs from filling with water. Cortisol immediately floods the system and panic spread through the system in a matter of milliseconds. It takes a few seconds and then the cortisol accumulates in the lung region to energize the upper thoracic region to ready itself to do its job, but the brain is blocking the instructions. Pain spreads like fire throughout the chest and upper body as panic worsens.
The world's most experienced divers can override this terrible malady and rise more effortlessly to safety. Most of the time the nervous system's response is too much to bear, it's one of the most excruciating nervous system scenarios one can be in. I mention this for a reason, that reason is, that growth can sometimes feel like this. Renewal, change, pupae, chrysalis, hatching, blooming, this time of the year when we see all of Nature modify herself in experience and presence. I can't help but wonder if the impetus isn't just a hint of suffocation? That painful path just before the changes begin to unfold? I wonder... I wonder when I watch the egg count rise in a little Robin's nest just outside my office door, or when I watch the Mallard flock present their hatchings, two by two, and swim fearlessly into the great big world.
Isn't it just the slightest suffocation that forces them to kick the egg open and emerge into the massive expanse of oxygenated air? I wonder as I grapple with working 80 hours a week, juggling rebuilding, post-pandemic, juggling creativity, study, and a consultancy. I watch my movements, this earth dance I do, change in its choreography. Adulting as they say, in ways I'd not previously done. It's uncomfortable, and it feels as though I've left a confined space with too little oxygen to meet the present needs. In these moments where it can feel so exhausting and near unbearable if I can remember the feeling on the other side? Remember the beauty that comes from it. Perhaps this is what gives us the drive to persist. I guarantee you, if Hades decided to return, it would find an entirely different creature in its midst. Spring, the season of growth.
Asemic Writing
Aside from the fiction writing I do on the side (working on novel) much of the writing I do on a day-to-day basis is technical. Business plans, processes, technical systems engineering stuff. I was drawn to the meaningful elements of Asemic writing through one of my favorite poets and visual artists Sam Roxas-Chua and writer/painter Patrick Collier. This transcends the practice of conjuring an image or feeling through the sparing use of language and descriptors. This practice forces me to not let that muscle atrophy. A marking with a single intent tells a backstory through flow and composition. This particular piece I borrowed on my recent studies in Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic languages. It tells of a reality which can only be blurred even further by the concrete ‘consensus reality’ or ‘truth’ imposed on it (bold yellow line.) The arc is rule of law itself which tries as it may, to cast a measure over it. Both aspects are bold, but in retrospect do very little to change the simplistic, natural power of simple reality, a reality which is shortening day by day by day (burned edges) as time passes. The piece is called ‘The Blurriness of Bold Lines’
Today is January 6th 2021, Unquestionable Treason Fell Upon This Nation's Capital
Asemic writing piece for R today
'Anaise in her blanket'
ancient Arabic Serta script of Mark's Gospel
America Is Done With Political Grifters
The days of singular, grandstanding, grifting, me-first in politics while attempting to maintain the illusion of people first is over. It was over the second a pandemic rolled into our society and set our Nation aflame.
Article on Medium
America Is Done With Political Grifters
Universe
My good friends know that for a period of four years or so I studied the Corvidae (Corvidae is a cosmopolitan family of oscine passerine birds that contains the crows, ravens, rooks, jackdaws, jays, magpies, treepies, choughs and nutcrackers)
After a particularly big loss in my life, a nutty, humourous bird, An American Crow, I'd come to name Magellan, swooped down and lifted up the top of my hair on the crown of my head and then giggled at my awe-filled disorientation of the event in a branch above my driveway. That was the beginning of a three year friendship.
There were many stories about Magellan over the years that I'd shared with you here on FB. They were mostly humorous, but to me, awe inspiring. I'd developed a call he could understand and respond to. He introduced me to the three seasons of hatchlings he and his mate Maria had. His social experiment made it through the ranks of the expansive SW Roost, whom, in large part reside among the Fanno from southwest towns and sometimes stretching to Hoyt Arboretum. At one point, and I'll never forget this, one cold winter day at a time where there wasn't much to eat, a large majority of the SW Fanno roost descended on my property. It was the first time I'd realized this species' intelligence. They are communicators, sentient beings.
I kept the gifts he'd given me and placed them in a nest I'd made for an art installation.
The most painful and poignant memory I have is the song he sang for me before he died. He'd been practicing my whistle and one clear fall day, on his regular branch, he sang that song for me. It took me a second to realize it was him. That was the last song he would sing for me.
Before Magellan so unceremoniously introduced himself into my life, I was not a person who was engaging in Nature as I once had. Traumatic instances were pulling my attention away, a narrowed in focus that made my life nearly unbearable. For me, Nature is in the blood. My family are habitat restoration scientists. Over the years I learned more about ecology than I'd ever really need in my life, but it went along with who I was. I was at home in nature, sometimes more so than in human company. But Magellan's time in my life was an experience. It was an experience where the Universe reached out to me and said, "we must not let this part of you die." This experience in my life was shared by family and friends. My friend Julia Oldham made the artwork you see in the image. My mother knitted a doll of Magellan for me one Christmas.
The point is, that it was one testimony to the fact that I am not a lone facilitator here. There is indeed something, someone, some system, much, much larger than I, very engaged in my process of living. It knows when I am in danger, it knows when I am in pain, it knows when to protect me. To this day, I simply cannot explain away its presence.
When I look at this little art installation in my home of the memory of that experience I am reminded of this. Somehow it gives me comfort as it expands my vision, zooms it out when I become rigid, too drilled in, when I lose the Nature of my humanity through struggle. There have been other miracles I've seen since Magellan's passing, miracles I've been lucky enough to witness, miracles with humans and with the animal kingdom. Because of this one experience with Magellan, I can now see them for what they are. Reminders of connection to the Whole. For this I am so very grateful. Grateful of the memory and the experience.
In The End, They All Take Their Rightful Place
“The Trump Regime See Their Days Numbered, What Comes Next Is Truly Terrifying”
