Planitus sits close by
Panormos Bay
Where the wind
Tears and sings
Past carved Aeolus
And the waves
Crash and roll
All day

An isthmus
Of marmaros
Breaks the sea
But the wind is
Unhampered and strong
Enough to launch
A man over Rohari beach
Or flap his mind
Like a tattered flag
Foolishly put in
Its way

The hills above
Are just a haze
Of dusky rock
And clay
Above
The explosion
Of wind and spray
Close
By Planitus
On Panormos Bay
Where Aeolus
And
Poseidon
Still
Play

I often forget how much my worldview was influenced by Charles Fort.

From The Book of the Damned:  "But that if phantoms climb, spooks of ladders are good enough for them."

In January the teal and brown water.  In May I struggled to ascend the tower in the dark, but snarled in pulleys, debris, and a  thousand shadows all the same, no matter how brightly the sun shone on my back. 

Horizons then , the clean break between ground and sky, tower and sky, then up to the Persian blue east, the bronzed west, and on to the face hanging in the west:  the cloudy brow of Jehovah, the worried, jealous brow. 

But quantum sky bits, just as chimeric in their light as the shadows in their dark, plagued progress.  A magnifying glass to see the brush stroke texture was all that often separated two pieces of sky which both seemed ideal for a single spot.  Sometimes the gift of a bird, or an edge of cloud rallied the spirits, sometimes, there were many days of variations of mere guessing.



But the blue got in.  All of it.  The yellow and the greens and pinks found places in the blue, mostly good ones, with a few possible exceptions that may yet be found.  Now all that remains of the sky is the white and bronzed far western sky.  The tower top is outlined now, and when the sky is done, the next color migration will be of the tan, brown, gold pieces of the west tower face. When those golden bits are all in place, the tower will be half done...

but the last pieces of this puzzle, the pieces drenched in dark....

Those. ...

One sunny day in my kitchen after stirring something in my coffee, I set the long-stemmed teaspoon down on the top of the work island, and noticed something amazing.  Just above the bowl of the spoon a creature was fluttering all spidery and helicopter-like. I almost thought to capture it until I realized that it was the reflection of the ceiling fan creating a 3-d  or hologram-like mirage I had never noticed before.  The fan image seems to swim in space, not on the surface of the spoon's bowl, but noticeably above it, almost higher than the lip of the spoon. If you raise the spoon to eye-level the image appears higher than the lip, but disappears as it reaches the lip edge.

This effect does not work on purely solid objects above the spoon, like an orange held in your hand-- just the spinning fan performs this magic.  And after trying in on different days it seems most spectacular when the light level is especially bright on a sunny day.  The amount of concavity to the spoon makes all the difference too. The deeper the better.

I have just put down John Crowley's novel Engine Summer, and want to toss out my thoughts quickly while still under the spell of the book.  It may take more than one reading to grasp some of the subtle lessons in the book related to "knowing" and "being" -- even though they are explained eventually to the reader's satisfaction, it is with the caveat that such simplifications may be useless.

( Read more... )

Strange that perhaps the most used utterance in the modern world (or just in English?) is the place-holder sound "uh."  An interjection, I suppose. In the same way "zounds!" indicates astonishment, "uh" means nothing really, but implies that one is pausing to collect one's thoughts so that something meaningful might be said.  At least that is the hope. It's nothing more then than a mental fart, the unwanted, to-be-banished step-child of those who aspire to become Distinguished Toastmasters.

I find it breathtakingly brief that a conversation might consist only of:

"uh..."
"Duh!"

The mere addition of a "D" and one is scolded for one's vacuity.

So as science progresses and discoveries become more and more sophisticated, I was overwhelmed with a short but tearful hysteria to discover a new set of elements in the perodic table (checking as I do every few years to see what new heavy one has weighed in) which proudly seem to have been named by lampoonists instead of scientists:  the "un-un" family.  This apparent double negative is actually smoothed over by listening to the sound file where the pronuciation is given as "oon, oon."

I like to make jokes about the elements.  After Harry Potter, almost all the elements could be used for concocting various amusing verbal spells.  Irridium, for example ought to do quite well for making things impossible to get rid of.  And so on.  The real fun is in making these up for oneself, no?

But here's the Unun Family Line up:  Ununbium, Ununtrium, Ununquadium, Ununpentium, Ununhexium.  The yet to be made official abbreviations for these are currently: Uub, Uut, Uuq, Uup, and Uuh. Obviously something going on with two, three, four, five, and sixteen?  But what?  What does it mean to "unun" a number? But I have a hypothesis.  Suppose a Magus were to "unpentium" his computer, later regret it, and then want to have it restored?  Well,  Ununpentium ought to work for that.

And let see.  Hexe is Deutsch for witch, and so unhexium would take off a witch's spell-- and the witch could put it back on again with Ununhexium. Yes, it all seems to make sense to me. 

And then of course, just remembering it now, the use of the word unobtainium in the movie "The Core."  It turns out via Wikipedia, that this is a word often used to describe materials either hard to come by, or impossible to create, and used by scientists themselves.  Perhaps we are not so far from the days of alchemistry-like thinking as I supposed.  Another faux-element word among scientists is: handwavium.  For engineers there is: wishalloy.  Ah, so why was I laughing?

But at least Toastmaster "uh-counters" will now need to figure out whether an uh is truly an uh-- or a reference to Ununhexium.  Good luck with that...

Wallace Stevens would have loved my puzzle, and the amazingly different wrong ways it can be put together. I think the sky might be pieced together exactly as needed to match the various stanzas of "Sea Surface full of Clouds."  Perhaps there is an even better way to construct the puzzle than match the picture? No, that way lies madness...

Today I extracted three conjoined pieces from the center of a cloud and replaced them with three identically conjoined but differently hued pieces that seem to make the cloud now what it should have been, but only almost was.  I found two more pieces of "bad sky" and replaced them with "good sky."  Then I found a piece I had been looking for for months, languishing placidly in the embrace of a distant sky formation far from its true home.  It makes me worry-- what if God were color blind? or...?


nothing so disturbs
as to scan the heavens
and find

five distinct pieces
of bad sky

I'll just celebrate September 7 since I like that date, and O.S. calendar or not, I don't care much whose calendar is more correct. Moons, Martian doppel-jahren, fractional Kalpas-- it's all the same to me.  You pick a date and stick with it.

And so I say Dr. Johnson (was he ever one?) was born September 7, 1709.  And being no Johnson scholar, but feeling that palpable lack, I have determined to read his two volume dictionary (among other reading tasks) in celebration of this birthday event.

I have a book of selections edited by Jack Lynch, but after just a few tastes of these I can see that I must digest both volumes whole, and allow the gustated humours thereof to soak deeply into my constitution, to re-vivify it with meracious and felicitous gemmosities, whose musicke, over these last three centuries, has become less and less heard. Well, I can't claim to have more than an humorous command of the language at present...

Ah, but it is fascinating to see how much the meanings of rather normal-sounding, seemingly well-understood words have become something quite other than they were 300 years ago.  And frankly, the old uses are quite captivating, and seem much more full of poetry than present usage. We now often have to put a word to serious misuse to make it sing as well.

Be still, my absinthiated heart. Soon Dr. Johnson will make thee a bashaw among bards!

Having just finished John Crowley's first published novel "The Deep," it gives me pause to reflect how the craft of his fiction has not so much metamorphosized over the years leading to his more current magisterial works, but how rather it has lengthened and deepened.  It is almost as though his first novels, sparse, but  long enough, are gestural works unsure whether they might find favor with the reading public if they were fully expanded. But counter to this idea is a developing assuredness within the reader, after reading many Crowleyian pieces, that the negative space, the unanswered questions, the things left unsaid, are meticulously planned by the writer-- that the true story must be constructed from the "unsayables" the narrative surrounds. 

The story depicts either a new covenant with God, or a devil's bargain (take your pick) for the human race in which utopia is found in an artificial re-creation of eternal feudal warfare.  A world is constructed as though the flat-worlder's were right all along. The brilliant physical description of this world is one of the most mesmerizing elements of the tale.  The feudal factions are The Reds and The Blacks, and from these are brought forth the Kings that rule.  One faction,  The Just,  function as a resistance movement, and as the final arbiters of the delicate balance of society.  The Grays, equivalent to the clergy,  remain aloof.  Among these factions walks a sentient non-human being whose function is to record, and to perform certain acts that he has forgotten due to damage he sustained upon his arrival.

On his journey, while damaged, he must think for himself and thus he learns things his maker never intended him to know.  What question, what single question does he burn to ask the maker when he returns?  We never know, but neither can we forget we must try to remember it.

There are many wonderful twists from the familiar into the alien in this story.  Such as transmuting the idea of midwives into Endwives.

I leave you with the words of demi-god-world-keeper Leviathan:

He has sails, and I do not. We are not alike.  He is busy and wide-ranging; I am sleepy and stationary. He has sails; sails like woven air, that fine; large as the world. Many of them. They are his speed.

The above may also be taken as a description of what sets John Crowley apart from other writers.

This self-professed "tree hugger" also claimed to be tri-sexual, but refused to elaborate.

Ok, my Cydonia header has been up now for two months, and I was hoping someone would say: "I knew there was a "face" on Mars, but right next to it there is a skull too?  How weird is that?"  People talk of the pyramid shapes nearby, but not something that resembles a human skull right down to great bony orbits and sutures in the headbone?  Is everybody just blind? And just to the left is a little structure that looks like a piece of breastbone and rib, like a whole skeleton might be buried there.

All around the Cydonia area the mesas form creepy shapes that do a fine job of imitating alien fortresses, monuments, plazas, spaceports, and a deep cavern entrance that seems to run under the plateau itself. (see my scrapbook and click on image to explore, or to the ESA site and see even more).  It would take Geiger about 30 seconds of pen work to bring it all to life enough to scare the pants off H.P. Lovecraft.

Mars has some truly alien geography.  If we humans ever get there and start poking around in heat vents and cave areas where water can exist wet, I bet we find some living stuff we have not seen before....

Have I been reduced to this: today I discovered an oddly shaped puzzle piece I have been searching for over the last two months.  I should be thrilled, but once the frustration is gone, thirty seconds is all it takes for the thrill of victory to fade back into boredom.  There are a dozen or so "problem pieces" I can locate on the completed portion of the puzzle which I occasionally revisit and mutter "good to see you are still locked in place you little bugger-- what a pain in the ass you were!"

Sometimes in the morning I find pieces upside down.  A few, or as many as a dozen.  Cats I supposed at first, but now I am not sure.  A small thing really, nothing alarming about it.  But why should I not be alarmed?  The smallness of the pieces?  Perhaps it is telekinesis emanating from my wife's dreams, since she has already mentioned she is growing tired of not having the table available for other uses. 

I often doubt that the puzzle can be completed.  I have made myself a Borgesian fool's errand it seems.  Kafka must think I am an idiot.  Nietzsche stopped by and told me I was too weak even to wrestle with phantoms.

I have put off writing about my youth for a couple weeks due to the intrusion of the 48hr film project going on in Indy.  I have joined up with a team, and this coming Saturday will be in the shoot, possibly acting and crewing.  A seven minute film for the competition will be the result.  Wonderful fun.

I sometimes thought that just waiting, maturing, would help to bring about the complex alchemy that goes on in a writer's soul.  That something that takes reality apart and re-creates it into fiction, an even greater reality, perhaps.  But in writing about my youth I run into my usual problems.  Some things seem to be too intensely remembered to be fictionalized.  In other places there are great boring voids. I vacillate back and forth between autobiography and fictional modes and am sometimes stuck in between. The age of the character, or myself, is hard for me to pin down.  The amount of real experience versus invention veers wildly in one direction or another.  Diction level and genre cannot be established.  Sometimes I am writing a memoir-- sometimes a horror story, sometimes sci-fi, sometimes just re-living memories that leave me wordless.  I would like to combine all these elements, since apparently, I can leave none of them out.

I think this is the stuff you write through.  Perhaps if I wade through five hundred pages of material I will never use or need I might get to a place where something interesting begins to shape up.  Is this the way writers work?  I will walk a mental mile a day.  But without a compass?  Will the stars mean something eventually, the wind, the moss on trees, voices from some distant place?  Will I know when I am there?  I wander among ideas.  I am just an idea myself.  An idea waiting to finish and be done.

This is truly the "mother of all puzzles."  I knew when I started it that I was flirting with the Babel curse itself, and the puzzle has lived up to the tower's reputation.  I mentioned "faux amis" earlier.  I can find a dozen pieces that almost fit, or do actually fit and allow structural dead-ends to blossom and die without warning.  Later, I pull apart these structures and re-configure, painstakingly, many days later, arriving at the correct placement.  (see full-size puzzle images in scrapbook).



Mucking about in the browns and tans and shadows of the quay, (or as the announcer's test says: "hauling stall around the corner of the quo of the quay of the quivery") I could make no further progress for almost a full week. So  I moved into the sky of the right quadrant, and after re-arranging the border pieces again several times, began to pick up a little pace.  Then I slowed,  bogged down by the fact that the sky had many more variations of blue, pink, green, yellow,  and grey than shown in the box illustration.  The pieces mysteriously seemed to be all of a different hue than the ones next to them.  I know the puzzle must be cut from a single piece of cardboard, but to the eye some pieces seem impossibly hued to have been so cut.  Still, when assembled and seen from a distance, the hues blend.  I will probably have to wait until the whole sky is done to see if there is a pink piece in a blue sky, and a blue piece in a pink sky that need to make a final exchange.  Until then, it is a confusion that might well be called "the confounding of the language of color."

I am still optimistic that I can complete the puzzle in a year, counting on an acceleration to occur coming down the stretch this fall.

The dark brown cloth under the pieces has faded to a light, almost golden, color, and the pieces have photographed themselves on the the cloth wherever they lay undisturbed for several months.  The pieces themselves seem not to have faded that much.  Perhaps the image will fade away almost completely before I can finish?

Over on Jeffrey Ford's blog he has been talking of the tower recently.  From a post there I discovered Rudy Rucker's book: As Above, So Below, A Novel of Peter Bruegel.  I have the book now and am reading it.  I am greatly struck by the deep knowledge of European setting and history that he applies to this fiction, so much so that I briefly forgot he was an American writer and not European.

I have been having a series of  "joculum moments" lately, where I imagine that I am having an original idea, only to soon discover that several good-but-not-very-well-read books already exist on the topic.  In an almost related experience, I returned recently to a book store where I had failed to find a book on Bruegel.  Still no Bruegal.  The librarian in me rebelled and I pulled out the books on either side of where the Bruegel should have been-- and there, pushed way to the back was a small but nice book, only a quarter of an inch thick: What Makes a Bruegel a Bruegel, published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 

There is a certain value to maintaining a state of denial as long as possible, at least in most non life-threatening scenarios.  Sometimes good things are forced into being by sheer will. 

For a brief period I was hearing "five by five" cropping up in Sci-Fi movies.  Aliens may have been the first of the bunch, when the female Marine pilot makes her entry dive to the colony on the terra-forming planet.  I wonder how far that line got and if it has an actual history of meaningful military use?

My current bout of nostalgia stems from reading Jeff Ford's The Shadow Year, which caused me to re-read Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, which caused me to re-visit the town of my youth and long for the missing sweetness of the place.  The town of my youth has seemingly been ravaged by a tornado, but it apparently was just time that took down the trees, buildings, that scoured the streets, bleached the alleys, erased all traces of five-year-old's land marks, and left empty stretches of blocks "five by five," where once people thronged, and life happened.


Just above is a picture of a ship entering Trail Creek with the Hoosier Slide in the background (for larger image check out my scrapbook).  The Hoosier Slide was gone long before I was born, all hauled away to make glass jars in places like Muncie, IN.  You can see a small crowd of people at the top. Weddings were regularly performed there.  It was a "Wonder of the World" once.  Now I wonder where in the world those glass jars have gotten to? If there is any point to having the picture above, it's simply that it is easier to find a picture of the Hoosier Slide than of the street I lived on, or the landmarks I remember from the early fifties.  1955 is gone, vanished.  Why should I be surprised?

I have been remembering when I was five years old actually, which is 1953.  When I was five was the first time (and I suppose the last time I ever gave it serious consideration) I wanted to commit murder. I was not successful, but I had made an elaborate plan.  It would have worked, but fortunately for me, the opportunity never occured, and I came to realize the wrongness of the whole idea.  There is a former childhood bully-- I wonder if any of his pieces now reside (an appendix, a kidney) in a glass jar made from the Hoosier Slide?-- who has no idea how lucky he was to escape my vengeance.   Not having even read Poe yet, I conceived of an engine of destruction I called "The Smush."

More on that later, perhaps?

On my recent trip to Michigan City, where I grew up, and where memories of my youthful years now struggle for survival (thus the most recently posted poem), I stood under this oak tree, the one I fell out of when I was fourteen, and noticed that some branches were withered, leaves lacking-- it was in old age and apparently dying.  The whole grove of oaks of which it was a part were all suffering too.  It was spooky standing there with white hair, with arms more spindly than in past times, looking at a tree ever-so-much like some tree version of my own aging self.



I broke my wrist falling from that tree, but perhaps it was more like a death and rebirth.  We had just returned from our family vacation trip to the Seattle World's Fair.   I was strong, athletic.  The tree had been a second home to me.  For years I had swung among its branches like a little Tarzan.  But I had been growing a lot.  Getting slower, heavier. Ever since I had been a small child, I liked to swing on branches and jump out of trees and off garage and house roofs.  Jumping did not scare me anymore than it scared squirrels (from whom I learned the craft).  But as my mass increased it seemed to take bigger muscles, as well as the endurance of flesh-stripped hands, banged knees, twisted ankles, knots on the head. As I matured, it also began to take more mastery of fear to pull off the same stunts I used to do effortlessly, without thinking twice.

I fell from about 20 feet.  It would not have frightened me to jump from that height even then.  But that was about all I was ever able to do safely, even with the soft, soft, sand of the underlying dunes. In fact I was only a couple drops and swings away from where I usually launched myself from the tree for a landing.  But while making an energetic swing, my foot grazed another branch below. That had never happened before!  It pulled my grip loose from the branch I was swinging on, and as I my feet raised up in front of me--just as my back became parallel with the ground-- my grip broke and I sailed out feet-first into the blue, or seemingly, as all I could see was the top of the tree and the sky.

Fortunately I hit no other branches on the way down. I was frozen stiff in my stretched-out position, though slowly rotating so that the top of my head was turning toward the ground as my feet continued up.  This is not a good way to plan how to land!  There was a sense of time distortion, but none of this "complete life" stuff they talk of-- maybe I should have taken that as proof I would live?  But no, I was terrified and trying desperately to get more time out of the few seconds I had to save myself. I still knew, like a diver, how deep I had gone, so that even before I hit the ground my stomach was churning, knowing I had plunged far into the red zone for falling upside down.

I could not rotate completely around, but was able to twist my neck to see the ground coming.  I extended my left arm toward it, so that arm would make first contact.  I would have to use the arm to land with, like landing on one strut of a landing gear.  When my hand touched the ground, I locked the arm.  The arm was a lever, for just an instant, letting me lift my head enough to finish my rotation, and I pancaked the ground flat on my stomach.  The hand-stand attempt had put the full force of my fall into my wrist and arm just long enough, I think,  that I was able to survive bodily impact with the ground. My wrist bones separated, but my neck was saved.  I wanted to shout in triumph, but the wind was knocked out of me. Then the dirt and debris in my mouth almost suffocated me on my first gasp. But after a few minutes I knew I would be ok.

Miraculously, there were no broken ribs. No blood.  A one-armed landing.  Wow!  I was proud that my last stunt (which I now hoped would be the very last stunt) had been so spectacular. I had done a complete 360 flat-out rotation in the sky without water, or a net below to break my fall.  But I was grateful that the patch of soft earth I landed on had not contained a city sidewalk, a row of fence, or even an unlucky rock. That would have made a much different ending to the story. But on that day I got up and walked home, trying not to look at my twisted left hand.

After that fall, my knees became shaky on ladders, and I no longer allowed my squirrel brain direct access to my motor areas.

So, while in Michigan City, remembering things,  I stood under this tree and communed a while, assuring us both that I would never let its importance fall out of me.

Then later I thought this: am I still spinning in that fall?  Do we not we all live out the arc of our everyday lives, keeping our eyes fixed on the heavens, even as the earth moves up beneath us? Am I not turning now to look?

Consider the case of Goforth Blythely, famous writer.  His plan for literary immortality is both simple, and ingenious, and may very probably work. Time will tell.

He has put all his hopes into one magnum opus, or rather, more of a "tiny opus,"-- but even the word opus itself may be too large.

The work is called:  "I Tend to Aphorism." 

It is, so far as I know, the only book in English (or any other language) for which the title of the book represents the book's entire content.

Blythely rarely gives interviews, but in the one short interview he gave after the book's release, he made the following remarks:

"I got the idea from the email practice of headlining the message content so that the reader was informed without the necessity of opening up the actual message.  I can let people know about the book via postings and word-of-mouth. Everyone can talk about it without embarrassment, because not much reading is involved. I get no royalties, but never have to worry about the book going out of print either.

"The book has absolutely nothing in it to criticize other than it's brevity. Yet,  it's message is clear and ironic. Since my whole purpose for writing it was to become well-known forever, I have avoided all the nonsense of having to struggle with grammar, plot, etc., and of being relegated to the ranks of a particular, time, place, generation, or genre. 

"To the question: "Is it a novel, poem, or biography?" the answer is yes.

"No one should have any problem recalling "I Tend to Aphorism." by Goforth Blythely. You need only have heard about it to know the work whole. In much the same way that Aristotle is remembered solely because his name begins with "A", I will have achieved immortality as the the writer of the shortest most important book ever written. 

"Someone joked that I could have written just  "Aphorism."  But what sort of book would that be at one-quarter the length, without development, without the uncertainty in the course of words?  It would have been a mere title and not a book."

We stood
on that hill
decades ago
surrounded
by oaks

tree language
intimate
embracing wind
warm

but that night
has gone
to where we
keep our
pressed flowers,

to lots,
or closets,
old haunts,
garages,

memories fading
to dim colors,
crushed crumbs,
random bits.

and even
the real places,
when we visit,
have grown partial,
missing pieces,
vague,
past recall...

place and self
both at once
ephemeral

and when we
claim no more
to know these
residues of
things,
or how they
stand for us,

the very
fields and forests,
homes,
the sidewalks, streets,
and lawns

will all be bare and new again--

as swept of us
as we of them

This picture is a good metaphor for where I am in my life right now, and also a good reflection on the value of art as a form of denial, of accomplishing the impossible by freezing time.

This is the moment that will be remembered.  Not birth, development, death-- but this single moment where falling to earth or flying to the stars both seemed real possibilities.