loudgirl

fakery

I like multiples. I am happy with the blues.
Deeper richer colors. The color scheme.
I could never have made this up, not in a million years.

the taken-for-granted realm

"By thus returning to the taken-for-granted realm of subjective experience, not to explain it but simply to pay attention to its rhythms and textures, not to capture or control it but simply to become familiar with its diverse modes of appearance--and ultimately to give voice to its enigmatic and ever-shifting patterns--phenomenology would articulate the ground of the other sciences."

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, p 35

I am not a chambermaid

martin's ridge

forgiveness

Long slow time on the lake
striking the tent and the tarp
washing all the dishes in lake water
hanging the prayer flags to dry
laid to dry on the warm gravel beach
swimming in lake water
the sandy floor latticed with sunshine
cold on my body
but loving as water can be

loading the canoe full with gear
towing it back to the camp
his hand on the skin of my back
just touching as face touches sun
as loving as touching can be

the intricate tree line ahead
the intricate cloudscape beyond
burnished brilliance of ripples a path
a path to the Island of Eden
woods glowing with platinum light
yet warmer than that in the sun
pulling into the dock
unloading the gear

lost eternity of loons
and star geometry

but without a wish
no need for a wish

content

It's Content that's Difficult.

A coating of disappointment like sunscreen.

Somebody may die - someone's going to die - someone in this very family

I've always felt like a doomsayer

I feel Norwegian this morning

Hopeless about the possibility of food

I looked for coffee, but I couldn't find it

unstudied expression

8/14/04

Challenging rain. My throat ached yesterday morning; today it's my heart. I love the woods for their unstudied expression. And - no need to keep them clean. I won't write about memory, or awareness, or issues, or interpretations. I have even lost my way to details.

The sun is lightening this paper, although the sun basks behind thick banks of cloud. The intrusion of forms and color disoriented me for days. The sense of privacy, the feeling I need to be ALONE, that interruption would be a disaster - I can rest in 3rd bed as a whole group of people who are tuned in to the mysterious.

I hear my mother's voice when I write. Like Virginia Woolf's "angel." Approval/disapproval and/or their opposites, doesn't it matter? It's a sort of gel that infiltrates and coats, substanceless, colorless, odorless. How long can I keep it up?

fear of pencils

8/12/04

I don't want anyone to see me with pencils. Judi Beach in the newspaper, Eggemoggin Reach. Imaginary Maine. The clock is ticking. On the outskirts. Draining wine from a weak body. Mud in the flats.

Is it a slideshow? What else is capture? Manufacture is not capture. The broken-down metaphor machine. "The system is down." "She's just saying that because she doesn't want to talk to you."

Maybe it's not no-capture, but rather selectivity. So what then is the prompting? S is excellent on the phone, on his feet. He's invaded the bed. The wide-open bed. It's a hard one with heavy covers, difficulty rolling over. Hard rolling over.

farming in memory

8/11/04

No capture. Not sure how it's done. Farming in memory. Elements? The elements have been graceful. Appreciative. Sun air earth water. Wind and bumping along in the boat. Learning is better on the right side than the left? Boat or canoe? Story or sandbox? Who's to say. Leave it to the gods.

Tiredness seeping through my veins. Blood vessels, skin a sheen of DEET. I had my hair in braids - strike out self-consciousness and judgments like a match. Intensely itchy bite on the back of my left thigh. Almost painful. Edgy and overdressed, fearing rain. Fearing purposelessness. Thoughts of the project, need to revise. Thoughts. Half a burned pancake. Rice, over-cayenned, with squash. Lantern light. Climbed Schoodic Mountain. Elderly, exhuasted, past, want to do it everyday.

dogs like to dig

8/10/04
      

Lake water blind. Blue sky blind. White clothes blind. Perfection. Unreachable. Not to capture. Moment's mementoes non-moments. Aftermath. Afternoon. Lobster stew. The sun licks heat onto my arm hairs. When it comes right down to it, who's to say.

I have learned the writer writes in community - or doesn't. Places of mystery or enchantment. I am angry at punditry and the newspaper. Becalmed without vision. The difference between this and writing is the quality of the story. Something doesn't always happen.

Political element - flag flaps in the wind. Dogs like to dig, but not to scrawl. Crawl. Letter to Peter about burrows, badgers, beetles, crawling beasties, more solidly clever than bats, which hang. Email from Brenda. Aftermath.

The Journal develops its own quirks and codes as an Artifact. Excursion. Excuse me. Haphazard. The sun licks hotly down the hairs of my legs.

capture - no capture

8/8/04
   

Birds and beasts, captured onscreen, free in the land. People in the townships, disparities, the effort of justice. I react badly to didacticism - didactyly? the imperative address. Do this, do that, why should I? And yes, no one should speak English as a first language and what we learn in school is hopeless as a joke in the grass.

Learning. I learned I don't just "tag along." I can decide, I learned to steer the canoe, I don't have to switch sides with the paddle. I'm learning to adjust to the sagging flesh on the inner thigh above the knee, to the sight of myself in pictures when I frighten myself, how to take care of long hair, and how to take a break. A lot of learning for one short life.

franklin inarticulate

8/7/04

How to. Stories, tales, and woes. Tears in the night, overtired. The changeling in the kayak. My smart sister. My beautiful lover. Thunder and lightniing. TV crash. Gray sky, gray water, lack of understanding. Centrally located. The Apple sign. Dips and strips. Nothing can be recaptured. Let's choose greater margins of error, like this

trouble and cure

"My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of fact, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive.... The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature."

Charles Darwin (in The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, p 192)

"A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had started to say them. That is, he does not draw on a reservoir; instead, he engages in an activity that brings to him a whole succession of unforeseen stories, poems, essays, plays, laws, philosophies, religions, or ... "

William Stafford (in The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, p 181)