http://counterpathpress.org/videoed-readings-of-154-fortiesjackson-mac-low

http://counterpathpress.org/anne-tardos-reading-jackson-mac-lows-forties-42


when I come back to Jackson Mac Low's poems after a while away, I think first - it's nonsense! It's nonsense! And then I settle in and the language seems like clear water travelling, pooling, settling, shining brilliant on the surface then limpid to its depth, then jumbling and rushing on again. 

A beautiful day, a day of small completions. We moved in September but we've never quite finished moving. Bare walls, the odd box here and there. Today I put away the pictures I don't want to hang, got the others ready to hang, sorted through junk and knick-knacks, reordered my bookshelves to get stacks of books off the floor. Now I have a collection of photos and beloved things on top of the shelves - the reading light my poppa gave me, the small dragon from Nan with the coin in its mouth, the silver pocket warmer from N, the opera glasses from L. Photos of dear ones, the old pack of miniature tarot cards, the cup-cake pin-cushion sewn by A. The canasta cards from Auntie M, etc, etc. J & J gave us a photo they took in Malaysia before they left here - it's a table and chair in a bright verandah looking out to trees, a cat watching the trees - so that is on the wall now. One casualty of my orderings was the small photo R gave me last Christmas, of hands laid peacefully in a lap. I had found the right place for it - propped against the window in front of my desk, where it is just within my field of vision as I work - but I hadn't realised the window was leaking from the day of hard rain. Fifteen minutes later I noticed the (unframed) matt board was soaking up water. Only a little water had crept onto the photo. I have weighted it between paper towels. Maybe this will be enough to save even the matt.

I didn't repot any of the plants I bought yesterday - I want to give them a chance to adjust to the new light conditions first. But I cleaned out all the old pots and ordered things on the patio, and even threw out one of the money plants that had got rootbound. Perhaps I'll give away more of the money plants once I've done the repotting - they grow so easily and self-propogate, so they tend to take over. I hope I can keep the new plants alive. I chose a great variety of foliage, and I'm so happy to have them. The oxalis with its great purple false-clover leaves looks a little fragile, but we'll see.

I think this was the perfect new year's eve day. Ready for a new year.

I thought - I need to read a poem, because  I can't remember how they are written. What do people write them about? How do they begin? I resolved to write a poem like the first one I found on my bedside table, and it was this:

http://www.vqronline.org/articles/1996/spring/catullus-alberto-caeiro-fernando/

- or at least, the 'dirty unknown child' section. That is difficult, because it is close to what I saw today.

Bought no orchid, but a bromeliad, a couple of hanging succulents, and something spiky, drapy and flowering that I suspect is two or three plants in the same pot. There were wonderful strawberries in hanging baskets, and although they were hung in the shade, I was too suspicious to bring one home - probably would have carked it on our shady patio, and that would have been too sad. Oh and an oxalis with large purple leaves and little white flowers. I wish I had at least asked about the care of the strawberries.

As I was paying the cabdriver when I got home a Chinese boy of about 8 years old, with no front teeth, jumped in the taxi beside me and closed the door. The driver smiled, thinking I knew him, but I didn't. The boy didn't answer any questions or talk at all, just wriggled and laughed, leaned forward and tried to press buttons on the driver's console, to grab my money, and so on. He wriggled out of the driver's reach and into me, like he knew me very well. While I was putting away my change the driver came around and pulled him, gently enough, out of the car, chiding him that the police would get him. When I got out the boy grabbed my arm and started pulling me down the stairs to the apartment service area, but I didn't go, because my hands were full of bagged pot plants with many dangling fronds, which made them hard to set down. But I'm not sure I would have gone anyway. 

YL wants to translate some of my poems; I have to get a set together for him. Or, I've done this but I am stalling on sending it. It's hard, painful, to go through EVERYTHING and find so little.

SC asked for a 'crime' story ages ago for her journal, so I gave her the garden story, The Trappers, it's called at the moment. But she wants the story changed. The protagonist changes gender and then nothing is 'done' with that. I don't want to change it. I told her I couldn't, and I can't, so maybe she won't publish it now. She wants the officers to notice the gender change, to confirm that it is real. Why would I want to confirm that it is real? It is important but only important in exactly what it does. It gives the protagonist a particular proximity to the 'child'. Gender there is a function, not a condition. Or it's just one of the things that happens. It's not the meaning of the story, and I don't want the story to explain it or be explained by it.

There's the long, dead essay from a couple of years ago, rejected after months of work and now too outdated to use anywhere. A couple of dead conference papers. I said I'd turn one into an article, and as soon as I said that I locked up on everything. Soft Shroud too, which I loved, and now feels like a tangled, unsolvable problem, a mess. I can't speak, I can't be understood because I have some kind of speech impediment, whatever I say. This feels like what they call circling the drain. Self-pity in the ranks (there will be no self-pity in the ranks)

Woke in the night up against that wall and I decided that I had to jettison that agreement for the article just to get my spirit back. Yes, I can do that. Permission granted. It's me, my life, my own. And then the key turned in the lock - if you were to keep going with the article, here's what you should read, do, say... it needn't be a big deal, it is something you do, just what you do normally alongside everything else you do, not what is done to you, not a prison....

So I'm walking to the garden shop now, to think and to buy an orchid. 

boat notes 24/12 -

Morning. It's day but not yet 'sunrise' because of the cliffs. There's this one boat and I want it to go away, its engine pointing on my morning. A sea hawk is whistling and circling over my head, steering in tight circles with its tail and its wing tips. At the kayak station, flat yellow and green house on a barge, kids or tourists playing hackey-sack in silhouette. I woke in the night with relationship panic...
c'mon, c'mon, calls a raven in a cliff echo. Reveal your nest - reveal your nest -

We're moving, we're out of the cove now, sun's warming things up. A couple bail their fishing boat, and N gets his flash out. It's a tour, we're on a tour. Oil emulsifies near the rocks. Scrub on the cliff-sides. Dark grey planes with cream streaming and planing through it. Sun's gone, suddenly freezing. Children swimming to school because their family can afford no boat. How do you survive in a floating fishing village with no boat? Sudden cold winds. Boat hands without boats. Sometimes teachers pick up the kids in their boats and take them to school.

On the piers ladies sell pearls, fake pearls? Smartly dressed, urgent. I lie back in the sun above a city of boats, hat on, wrap pulled around me. A boat above a city of boats.

-
Tiny one-room concrete house, beside a busy freeway on the way to a wonder of the world. Aqua like houses in Patea. In the front garden a large grove of cake-tiered topiaries.

Wedding couple both in white on a blanket in a pine forest, wedding photos by the freeway.

In a town a mamma sits on a broken pavement next to her scooter, helmet on, large sleeping boy of 8 or 9 laid out on her lap, cuddled in.

Mamma in an ornate hat, standing behind daughter on daughter's bicycle, holding on, daughter is smiling.

Sister behind sister on a scooter, wrapping facemask around front-sister's ears.

And hand-ploughs. 

boat notes 23/12 -

Top deck of the boat, Ha Long Bay. Two lemon trees, the furled mast, red flag with yellow star and yellow flag. All the boats repainted white five months ago so they look 'international standard'. This silence is two or three low, even boat motors, and the water carrying on its whispered conversation with the narrowed base of every rock, each one cedes - 'do not cede upon your desire' wrote Lacan I think but where, why? we curl around the corner of an island, there's the sound of an anchor chain, it's just me up here, the shadow cuts away from the narrowed base to leave the island in relief against bright water. But everything here is dimly green, the smoggy, softly smoggy sky is yielding to the evening. Fisherman shouts a song, whistles across from his yellow house-station, our boat sounds a short, bright horn and it echoes around the rocks. Maybe it's not the fisherman who shouts but the Greeks in their bright yellow kayaks, spooning through the last of the light - not last, yet, but lowering. Lights are up on the mast of the Halong Dragon Cruise beside us and here on our deck by our lemon trees, which I know are not lemon trees - leaves are a little like verbena but in a seven-fingered hand. Maybe chilis. Not chilis. Wicker chairs, concrete slab table top.

A bat complains against the cliff and we're still moving. Kayaks go through a low hole in the rock, life jackets still just picking up light as they move out of the rock's shadows and off into imperceptibility, paddles catching just a little more, a final pinch... It's hard to believe no one else is up here, seeing this. G wrote 'H L B is beautiful, would give you time for quiet reflection.'

Now N is here, reclined on a wicker sun bed, pointing his camera at the sky, now Belle and Andy, friendly and independent at the far end of the deck. N's brought me an amaretto sour, the water's heavy and peaceful, soup, glossy molten iron picking up the boat lights, reflecting them in long smudged beams.

I love people here, I love the way we all want to see this wonder. In the cave - 'Surprising Cave' - the surprise is a stalacmite that looks like a cock, and it jumps out at you as you round a corner into this huge cavern, 200 metres across, with 800 metres of walkway snaking up one end and down the other. Looking down on the streams of people trooping along the walk - it's like the Inferno. But everyone's  exciteable, peaceful, capacious and grasping. Graffitti on the cave walls from 1956, 1938, 1905 - crass happy people, taking big bites of wonder and chewing it up, chewing themselves into it. A young fit Greek guy does a handstand at the peak of the walkway - a couple of hundred spectators to see him and laugh! Then our Vietnamese guide does one too, it's better, it's hilarious... I'm complaining in my head about the one boat generator I can hear near us but really I'm happy, happy to be an ugly human ape. N said to the guide, about monkeys  - 'really I think they are just bad people'. and H the guide said 'yes, and if you have a beautiful girlfriend, a monkey will like her too.'

Roof of the cave like the mud of a riverbed with the stones picked out, like paint rolled over a lino cut and sucked into soft peaks. The motor sound suddenly fading - they are moving away. Exciting promise of a different silence. The smell of deisely saline comes up, smell of Tryphena Harbour. Cone light on a cliff side. Another boat moves off. The cavern so huge that the stream of humans seemed in scale. Stalactite legs poking through the cave roof, dragon claws dangling down, the spine of a dragon pressing, dripping wax pillars, mysterious drapes.

So much detail, what for? Words for what I see and love? Can I describe it, and then what? 

I wake up into a panic.
the walls are a wall.
flowers, plants and air have a bright steel substrate,
visible now. I'm at the future,
becoming it, about to lose my organs.

we are home. this country seems astonishingly green, clear-aired, quiet and orderly. my sinuses are throbbing from the pollution and my neck hurts from nodding off on the plane. as we drove through the yellow soup out of hanoi I saw how many flowers there were - in every shop, in hawker baskets on every corner. 

for one night I was burningly excited by the new scaffolding I have been building around soft shroud. I stayed up late, I wrote lines, I went to bed in a surge of its reasoning. it would be the gentle beauty of intimate conversation. gap crossing, bridging. an encomium for this, a lullaby of harmonising dialogue.

I lost that in the days after; interruptions, and... just failure to realise in words what I felt... the voices took on the tones of interrogation and isolation instead. I don't know how to make it otherwise... and - I still very much fear explaining and the loss of energy, immediacy, that might come with that. but isn't explanation precisely the beauty I was after? when a person explains something important, and then it is felt and understood.

Maybe it is not the information that is important, but the relationship?

I don't know what to say; this city's a grind. everyone is constantly on the verge of critical injury. everyone's a toddler playing catch in the traffic. everyone's squatting in a puddle to rewire a live powerbox. everyone's butchering meat on the footpath, and cutting fresh herbs through the dirt and blood. if you have a nerve the city's got an angle-grinder. if your shoes give up the ghost it will glue the soles back on. it wants to back a motorbike over you, and then drive a motorbike over you, then drive another sixty or seventy motorbikes over you. that's the city; the vendor just wants to you take a photo of you in her coolie hat so she can sell you a bag of chopped pineapple.

in the war museum are the wooden stakes the vietnamese used to spike the red river. they tipped them with iron and hid them below the high tide. and the bamboo stakes used to spiked the booby-trapped latrines; and the swinging balls with iron spikes, and, and, and clothing of children killed forty years ago in the christmas bombings, the photos of Heroic Mothers who lost their husband and only child to the war effort, or all their children - two, five, seven, nine....

.

last night we ate in a quiet room in the back of a restaurant, next to the maitre d's family as they ate their own dinner. he was african-french, she was vietnamese, both tall and elegant, their maid shy, their little girl restrained in her squeals and their boy completely elusive, slipping out of the room repeatedly without ever showing his face or seeming to return. in between service the father checks their meals, and teaches their maid to hold both the toddler's hands up high so the toddler can keep her balance as she learns to walk.

at the table in front of us is a chinese couple in their mid-twenties. she's ultimately groomed, with luscious extension curls and doll eyes, wearing a black silk jumpsuit and tan platform heels. she spends their degustation meal examining a series of self-portraits on her i-phone, taking photos of each course, texting with a friend, and checking her face in her compact. two or three times she looks up at her partner, and shows him her phone, then takes it back. he spends the meal just watching her with a half-smile that seems a little bit adoring, a little bit embarrassed. not once does he check his own phone.

at the other table is an older french mother and her 11 year old daughter, both petite and with long, windswept black hair. they look worn out with each other. they both order steak tartare and french fries. the daughter slumps into her silence and the mother glazes into hers.


our meal -

Amuse-bouche

Bisque de gambas, bruschetta d’avocats au wasabi & sa gambas grillée
Prawn bisque, avocado bruschetta & wasabi, grilled prawn

Entrée - Starter

Saumon fumé, crumble d’aubergines au gorgonzola
Smoked salmon, eggplant crumble in Gorgonzola, pesto & balsamic sauce



Foie gras

Terrine de foie gras au sel de Guérande, mangues rôties aux épices
“Foie gras” terrine in Guérande salt, roasted mango in spices



Plat au choix - Choice of main course

Cannelloni de crabe & d’asperges au safran, émulsion de caviar de saumon au vin blanc
Crab & asparagus cannelloni in saffron, white wine emulsion & salmon eggs

ou/or

Filet de bœuf australien Rossini, petits légumes de saison à la Provençale
Australian grilled beef Rossini, Provencal seasonal vegetables


Tangerine delicacy

Sorbet tangerine & vin liquoreux
Tangerine sorbet & sweet wine


Dessert

Variation de gourmandises du Chef
Chef’s delicacy variation

everything was wonderful - perfect, even - except the cannelloni, which was a little too salty and rich, and lacking in integration, because the more subtle flavours were lost, and because it was hard to get firm asparagus spears, soft gooey cannelloni and the delicate salmon eggs on one fork. the dessert was threefold - a chocolate truffle, a vanilla cream and a pineapple 'basket'. Coming after the sorbet this seemed too much. but the bisque and eggplant crumble were incredibly comforting, and the foie gras was - unfortunately - incredibly delicious, memorable, more-ish....

roadside bits:

under a tree by an open front gate
a wooden bed
spread with hay



a man in a string bikini
and a fur hat
follows a divining rod
through the main street




dogs off to market
on the backs of two bikes
six in this cage, ten in that one




a man squats barefoot
on the metal guardrail
of the overpass




under a giant bouquet of blooming silk
a motor scooter
and clouds of dust

BOAT SWAMPED. Occupants Saved by Sapling.

Spent most of yesterday in a wonderful cafe, big, empty, slow, perched over the city. Had the feeling of low-rent real estate in places like Port Kembla, where square footage is not under pressure. Uncomfortable couches, 80's brown, orange and pink decor. I am gaining a very little very tentative confidence that the direction of the Soft Shroud revision may be okay, that I may be able to work with this throughout. I fell asleep thinking of the Earth spinning pieces of broken, buried, brightly coloured ceramic to its surface. 

Dreamed last night that Allen Ginsberg came for a brief residency. I was supposed to work with him on a play. But I really hadn't done anything towards it. I was saying, oh, after I've finished teaching...after I've finished this, and that.... but I assumed he was doing it on his own anyway because he hadn't noticed or interacted with me at all. The environment was more like a high school, we were standing around in formations outside. School colleagues were asking me about it, saying what a great opportunity this was for my career. I thought perhaps I'd better get on with it, try to catch his attention. Ginsberg was old, fat, crusty but also quite deep-voiced and heterosexual. Eventually he looked at me and I thought maybe I had a reason to start writing but at that point I realised that my dream was wrong, that the real Ginsberg was gay and had a fairly high-pitched voice.

I saw a little girl of about four years old get bowled by a motorbike tonight, right in front of me as I was crossing the road. She was not at all hurt. She and her mother and sibling had waded out into the roaring river of traffic at the same time we did. At that point I thought - jesus h, that woman isn't even hanging on to her kids' hands. I wanted to grab the little girl then but I thought no - they know these roads better than you do - if you move in an unexpected way you will cause a problem, surprising the traffic or the kid or both. just then the little girl made a break and ran, right into a moving motorcycle. she was knocked flat onto the road and the motorbike slammed on its brakes. There is so much traffic, with no discernable lanes or other order, so it seems like things are moving very fast. But generally no one is moving at more than 30k, and everyone is super alert. she was not run over and there was no further accident. I helped to pick her up and she brushed herself down, no tears, while her mother told her off. 

that feeling is like cold ground around a transplanted root, bruised root. dumb about whether to breathe or grow. and sending out one long, blind, constantly seeking feeler, looking for the old bearing - are you there are you there are you there? hunting, fossicking. disturbing the earth. interrupting every train of thought. unsettling every environment and every routine. I've only just come to not feel it for a little while, it seems, although maybe there were other times. right now it's back in force.

N says there is a cafe with a second story and a view over the lake. If I set up there tomorrow morning I  may find an orientation. if that isn't suitable I'll just go back to the cafe at the women's museum. comfy chairs. busy, but in a nice way, just non-English chatter. people in their thirties, forties, fifties, with books and business papers, newspapers. one skinny older man walked through in aviator glasses and leather gloves, smoking a cigarillo as he went. young waitress smiling and quick to help us at every turn.

Writing orients me; a plan to write begins it. this is the most important thing, more important than whether or not to go to Ha Long Bay, a question which has worried me all day, because I could not resolve whether it would bring me closer to writing or further away. the contradictory answers perfectly balanced, the feeler-root confused, unable to go further this way or that. confused between the true thing which is a substitute for the long-loved false thing, and the false thing which was sat in the place of the true and was a nurse to the true, and might still....

oh - I mean - amour-de-soi, I think, vs amour-propre. because the recommendation for Ha Long Bay came from "the subject supposed to know". and oh but DID know, DID know! besides which it's a world heritage site. and maybe the healing effect of nature would outbalance self-disgust at participating in the desecration of nature? or stay in the city with horns. 

We went for a walk this morning around Hoan Kiem Lake - got about half-way and diverted into the Women's Museum, where I was unsettled by how much I have forgotten about the Vietnam War, and how much I never knew. Along the way there was a group of friends in their late thirties or early forties, relaxing by the lake - they included a couple, and the others persuaded N to take a photo of the couple, who were draped over each other on a park bench, cuddling, peacefully in love, her in thick pink socks with high heels kicked off....

40% of the armed forces in the South were women....

Bun cha for lunch - broth with add-your-own noodles, beef rissoles and wonderful mixed fresh herbs and lettuce - then back through the traffic for a nap. Reading Joseph Massey. Wondering how to pull myself together to get anything done.

We're in Hanoi. Every time we go somewhere else it becomes clear again that we live in the least cool city in Asia. In bed in the hotel now with our balcony door open - it's rowdy with traffic out there and there's a guy at some night spot nearby playing guitar and singing in Vietnamese, amplified, with the gentle inflections of Elvis's upper range and a loose melodic structure that, pleasantly, I can't quite arrange into a tune. I'm tempted to close the door to quieten things down but the fresh air is so good - it's 17 degrees out there. At home you wilt if you have the windows open for any time at all.

 We just ate dinner at a bright, bustly multi-storey restaurant down the road, and then took a little walk by the lake nearby. There was a crowd of carollers in white boiler-suits with JESUS stamped across the front. They seemed a bit timid in their singing and dispersed pretty quickly, while another crowd, of mature ladies dancing in formation to house music, went hard for track after track. There were Ceroc dancers too, and every other person seemed to have a red cocker spaniel. Cars and motorbikes talk to each other with their horns, and to walk across the road you just walk slowly with intent into the flow of the traffic. It doesn't feel scary. One block over from the hotel is an intersection lined with street bars. Many dozens of young Vietnamese in their 20s sit on the road and footpaths on short plastic stools, drinking beers for about 30c each and huddling together in their black puffer jackets against the cold. It's winter here.

The concierge gave us detailed advice on what to do tomorrow but I am so tired, and we have plenty of time here. Grandma's funeral is at 1.30 tomorrow, so I want to be careful and thoughtful with what I do. I keep feeling some kind of - like, inflammation in my old attachment wound, is the only way I can describe it. Mind going back to the same old sore spots, wants to worry over them, fruitlessly, then to pursue something to try to ease it.

I read Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman on the plane. Mostly I think it's about time, proposing fiction as a kind of navigation tool for the future. But I don't think I like it, because every scenario Katurian proposes has only two options, bad and worse. Even his pig story has just two options - bad for me or bad for them. Tupolski's story is the alternative that turns the ending - bad vs miraculous craft, but that doesn't work for me. Caryl Churchill's  Far Away begins on similar territory - the working out of the individual's complicity or responsibility (ability to respond) to brutal power - but it ends up in much more interesting places to me. Weirdly it seems more socially mimetic as it continues and becomes more fantastic - while McDonagh seems to end up expressing something about a personal limitation? Neither of those thoughts is right, precisely. Churchill with the war incorporating animals, weather etc seems to go into some substrate of the social, into a base increment of defensive collectivity. McDonagh... what is he saying, that to save a child from the horrors of the imagination requires care plus prodigious mathematical foresight in artistry, to the point where it's inconceivable fantasy? That just seems like bullshit. And it's this elaboration - the sense that he is through all this *saying something which must be fathomed* that makes it seem weaker than Churchill's transparency.

today was a lot of slipping in and out of the rain - you can take two steps from shelter to a taxi and you are soaked through to the skin, exhausted, not wanting to wear a seatbelt because it presses wet clothes against you, worrying about the box of books in the boot and whether you can get them safely into the apartment building. the night is very blue and books want to be read. but tomorrow to hanoi, whether some quiet and restoration and stillness can be found there. in all the traffic there could be, like in bangkok, places for budding waterlilies in soft pinks and greens. I'm getting dogged by despair and need something written, something accepted. and need hours and days of quietness. need to write something for the funeral. they are writing on her coffin so I wrote some words but it is cruel because if I feel where we are together most it is three years old, holding hands and crossing the road. holding hands in the big wind and stopping and holding the lamp-post to not get blown away. on the way to granddad's shop. or cuddling up in the morning listening to the radio. hanging out the washing together. and there was a mangler. and there was a candy floss machine. so what to say? my tummy hurts, I want to go to sleep, like that....

medical insurance today. running through policies, took hours. she had a funny little laughing wheeze when she said most anything. and very bright white diamond rings. quick to notice N's changes in mood. stacking up the possibilities. Ectopic pregnancies, twins, hydatidiform moles, neo-nate care, cancer, psychologists, acupuncture, evacuation, repatriation, contact lenses..............................

My grandma, today at around 6.20 pm NZ time; peacefully, with family around her. 

Last night I dreamed that I had taken up an academic position in Hamilton. I seemed to have inherited it, and a large house on campus, that had been owned by my stepdad's uncle. The house was in a poor state inside from long disuse - dusty, dirty, things scattered everywhere. I was going through the books, trying to put them in order and decide what to take to my office. Most were philosophy. There was a huge old hard-cover copy of the works of a particular philosopher - it was the size of about ten bibles but all bound as a single book with one ridiculously long spine. It was unwieldy and and I was excited about owning it, telling myself I'd read it and feeling like this would legitimise my position but at the same time - deep down I knew I wouldn't. I didn't know what the philosopher was about, I didn't know where to start, and I couldn't even figure out if it was his works or - it seemed almost to be a compendium of works by others on him.

The great-uncle's son was there working on the garden - he was also an academic at the same university but he didn't look like one - he was too rough and physical. I asked him about his teaching and he deflected the question. I could see he was deeply uncomfortable and disillusioned as an academic, knew it was not the job he was good at, that in fact he was a gardener at heart and that was all he wanted to do. 

I can't think what I saw today, so I must have seen things I don't recognise. the secretary leaning her hips back against the wall, relaxed and smiling in her brown bob, giving good holiday wishes. N's face a little the wrong colour and with slick hairline when he brought out the dinner, as though he is getting sick too. a photo of patea beach, close to where my sister and mother and aunt are now, ready for when my grandma leaves us. the beach is silvery brown and held together with cutty grass. cliffs layer into the distance and in the foreground there are low silver log fences, to stop people driving through. but it looks deserted.

at the home my grandma is asleep in a fold-out chair. my mother is asleep in my grandma's bed. my aunt is watching them both. time is liquid.

He said this with no apparent guile but I still can't tell if it was therapy when he said it or stupidity - that is what he is like, what the whole therapy was like, wide-eyed blunders and pratfalls, like therapy with Steve Martin as The Jerk. And every time he hurt me, he heard all of it and showed he was sorry.

in my meditation tonight I saw a contemporary cathedral out there in the dark, shaped a little like the holy trinity in parnell, but without the eaves, more closed, blank, and seagulls flocking around it, calling together. and then alone, a large ruby cross, foregrounded - very severe, raw crystal bound in metal.

you were a flower, fallen out the door of your church
and I was a bee used your petals for my nests


http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126556246

i

part of what sucked me down is the question of what to work on over the 'break'. and having too many urgent projects, and knowing split energies in this way is the least effective for me. 

"But Fionn, contrary to what was being said of him, discovered that his journey, in fact, was an attempt to find the size and the range of his consciousness.
   Then came the day that he understood what language was - a bridge between the flesh and the spirit.
   At the beginning, he'd thought the range of meaning extended to the supple body of the woman he'd been given to escape Aengus' wrath. Then in turn, he found it only covered the little black-nosed shape of the bird he'd taken to escape Aengus' fumbling in the dark and the burden of his love. Now, having on successive days become a doe, a fir and a blackguardly dog, he found that the memory of others contributed to what he now was, a horse quietly steeped in a manmade field on Aran. Around him goats were singing. Each mouthful of grass he knew meant a day's work by someone in the past. The very earth his hooves stood on would have come here by boat from the mainland. The seeds of the grass he now ate would have been carefully fed into the new seaweed-nourished soil one at a time. This, the man he had once been knew. Not only that but all he looked on he considered first as Fionn would, then as the woman did, as the bird, the tree, the doe, the dog and lastly the horse. It was the horse ate the grass but it was Fionn himself had sown it. His consciousness now extended through all he had seen. But there was loneliness in this condition. And that was when Fionn considered Fionn."

A Goat's Song, Dermot Healy. 197-198

I have a cold, a sore neck, blocked sinuses, cold feet, can only find one sock. I know if I imagine that my feet are actually sweatingly hot this may confuse them and make them actually hot.

I watched a documentary interview with a cannibal today, his head the shape of an alien and he said he felt like an alien, catapulted from another planet. In the middle of it one of my colleagues came over with potplants for us to mind. he had been sick, feverish, said he thought this would be good for poetry. he introduced the potplants by name. I said I hadn't achieved that level of intimacy with my own plants and he said yes, but you and N have each other, I only have the plants.

then I went back to bed, the sky was a very milky blue, at some point N came and closed my computer for me and eased off the air conditioning just as I was falling asleep.

I have not been meditating much the last week and I find I am not remembering my dreams in the same way. I want to start again, but maybe just sticking to 10 minutes for a while instead of 20, while I am sick. I feel like too much crying and fighting made me sick. This is BD's theory,  that when one cries or shouts one irritates the mucous membranes and germs get in. I think it is right.

Well, I was doing so well before that. And then hormones and stress came and smashed me up, I dropped all my routines and went crazy and now can't remember where I was. Threw my glasses, broke them, had to get them repaired.

But I had seen it coming and went to see G on Wednesday to try to forestall it. Nearly did, but didn't. It was nice to see G. And I did meditate that night, and went to the cafe to write on Thursday and Friday mornings, just couldn't hold things together over the weekend. Tidal rage.

Began something interesting on soft shroud at the cafe. a frame around it. Back to the cafe tomorrow morning, if I feel well.

G said something so - he said 'I want to tell them to have faith, to keep going, nothing will end, don't sell your girls to sex traffickers, no one will die -'

I stared at him and said 'but people do die'.

He said 'yeah, I know - or, I don't know, I just don't know enough about those communities.'

'People die, kids without medicine...' and then we talked about micro-loans, strategic initiatives, like I was teaching him.

My feet are warm now - it worked, I tricked them. A miracle of faith. Does G get this attitude from church? How come he can be so dense, a child? Like a little kid excited about going to Sunday school and learning stories and praying to Jesus. Last time I saw him I said - 'I don't like happy, comfortable endings or messages in my poems, because it's like - like say as a therapist you were just trying to fix all the problems in people's lives so they could be happy. It's not going to work. So you have to find a way to help people be alive and just... (I couldn't find a word) LIVE and be engaged with what is there and not wait for anything.'

He said, 'Oh! I do? Really? I haven't got there yet, I am still trying to fix everybody's problems so they can be happy...'.

He said this with no apparent guile but I still can't tell if it was therapy when he said it or stupidity. 

(written on Sunday, but I fell asleep before posting it)
today I painted a picture. my brush was cheap and pieces kept coming off in the paint. I mixed the palest green-white I could and layered it horizontally across the page.the colour veered into a bluer tinge in the middle and a yellower tinge at the bottom. I was going to leave it like that - once  I'd covered the page I wanted to do nothing to it.

-but I should paint an actual picture! I've got all this stuff out! 
     -but this is the picture I wanted to paint. I mixed the paint and felt it thick on the brush and covered the whole page. who am I painting for? who will see this? No one, just me, and that is the feeling I wanted.

So then I sat there for a while admiring my painting. I noticed if I lifted it up the light caught it differently and there were blank patches where the paint was thin, so ok, don't lift it up. I was almost out of white paint (memory flash - The White Horse Inn at Berrima).

Then I felt something I wanted to do. I thinned some blue paint into watercolour consistency and made a few patches of that on the page, afterwards wiping away some that looked too much like teardrops. Then one patch on the bottom far right ended up looking like a small blue tug boat churning through a golden-green sea. The tug boat's chimney coughed out paw prints into the sky, as well as a very, very tiny blue matrouschka who sailed through the air, catapulted. I adorned these just a tiny bitt - made them clearer with the very edge of a couple of hairs of my brush