Home Repair, With Music

When some empty room
demands its contents
be shifted, noisily,
I repair to the attic
where expectant echoes
are sealed in shook boxes
that shaken again recall hope
with strings attached. Oh,
melodious knots; a few
wrong notes horned in.

“I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully as you can — in some beautifully bound book. It will seem as if you were making the visions banal — but then you need to do that — then you are freed from the power of them. . . . Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your church — your cathedral — the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them — then you will lose your soul — for in that book is your soul.”

C. G. Jung

Dear Diary,

Some days I want to kick you in the teeth.

But not today. Today is not a day when I am impatient with the process. Today is a day when meandering along streams alert for the shine of hard gray stones and the flutter of dragonfly wings has paid off.

Yesterday I finally read A Room Of One's Own, and today I came across a fine batch of contemporary lit reviews. The net payoff is to affirm that one writes best in positive environments.

This is especially good timing. I've grown quite tired of being chronically on the defensive. One's detractors, if attended to, can radically warp the process.

Note to self: if you can't assume the audience you need, you must elicit it. The best writers create not just a story, but also a readiness for it.

Socialist CEOs

If you dig down through this UCSC sociology website, you're sure to notice how inter-weaved the major corporate boards are. And maybe, like me, you'll wonder about the motivations of the individuals involved.

Right about now, I'm seriously imagining that almost every one of these board members justifies what they do as contributing to the greatest good for the greatest number. If I'm right, they are essentially socialists.

Don't that just make you think?

Right-Wing Shills

In my favorite conspiracy theory, Limbaugh, Beck, Coulter and Malkin et al would be media plants, whose assigned role would be to expose how ridiculous certain world-views are.

Heh. Call them political goatses.

There might not be a straight line between how the public thinks (our jointly agreed upon least common denominator idea of what it means to get along) and how the public could think better (and not just in order to get along, but to hook-up for the sake of what? Mutual empowerment? Eco-embeddedness?).

It might be that certain treks through dark woods must be traveled, enabling breadcrumbs of process and experience to accumulate in our boot soles that we might firmly embed our learning along the furrows of  fields we walk now so as to nurture the roots of what we are to reap next season.

(hmmm. has potential; needs editing -- which I've been steadily doing . . . )

NB. Define "season" -- it's probably generational.

Stand on your own ground, not my shoulders. Or face.

Please and thank you.


Possibly relevant forewarning: having too strong an opinion about my posting of this request could be a sign of your inclination to climb on board uninvited. N'est pas?

My Situation, Your Personality

A recent study (found at Mind Hacks, most likely) clarified something or other. To wit: we write others' stories to conform to their personality (an assessment which may actually amount to not much more than a first impression) and our own stories in terms of the situations we find ourselves in.

Having known myself in various guises for more than sixty years, I gotta say that those who've known me in limited situations have seen only parts of my elephantine self. Unlike parents, siblings and spouses, those witnesses to my life, who, when they died, took so much of myself with them.

::

Speaking of elephants, did you know their urine can eat through metal?

I'm currently fascinated by the fact that my handwriting has radically morphed, and I've learned to write without sacrificing peripheral vision, which is to say that the eyes of the other are deflected while mine own are given wider berth.

The curious-making part is that all I have to do is shift my awareness from the page to a point above my head, from which I watch myself write. Somehow that puts the writing in just the right kind of mental space, a space between my inner and outer selves.

tfmmt

thanks for making me think


Next time I'm moved to comment on someone else's blog post, I'm going to leave a link to a comment that I post on my own blog, letting that link read simply "tfmmt." The other blogger can acknowledge or not; the point is not to challenge, not to invade others' spaces. The point is to link between independent thinkers.

I'd much rather that so many blogs ask not for email to verify, but for a blog to verify. As if to say to spammers and comment bombers, "Put your mouth where your mouth is."

What's needed is a blog-to-blog mechanism verifying logged-in status before comments are accepted, at the individual blogger's discretion, via their default comment settings. Maybe.

Meanwhile, this blog does not accept comments, but does welcome links. Put your mouth where your mouth is = put your comments on your blog and link back to the material you're commenting on if you're so inclined.

Organic Intellects

For instance, there's the likes of Penn Jillette, Dan Ariely, Eva Illouz, Susan Sontag and many, many others. They feed, water, and then eat what they plant (or find) in the gardens of their own minds. And, they inherently recognize that no garden grows in isolation, or at least that no garden grows without an awareness of fences.

The mere allowance for, and/or consideration of, thought's outward boundaries and containment exponentiates the world's possibilities.

::

kudos to Cory Doctorow for conjoining Big Think interviews with Jillette and Ariely in one provokingly subtle Boing Boing post today.

Writers' Groups

They have their points, so many of which are negative.

Doing The Years

In year one, the seasons changed
forever. A second trip round the sun

while I hugged the land close and alone.
A third world turns, crops rotated.

My womb opens and I am become
a field of regretful pollen, wind born.

I lose count on my one hand,
the one that strew ashes.

Behind the back of my mind, another
hand flexes. This is the tiller

of fields and boats, the seven-fingered
hand that strokes my throat twelve

months without cease, another twelve
intermittently. I swallow word medicine.

Year six, Tibet: high desert bells
longing to fill a vastness.

In the seventh, I see the ash hand's
two missing fingers for the first time.

Three more before I stop counting —
Or shall I settle bared clay feet?

Memory Bones

The good times that rolled like rounded hips in tight jeans
across hard-wooded honky-tonk floors, loose jointed like
Willy Nelson's smoky vocal cords — remember those?
Sure you do. Every time you itch or ache, cough or sigh.

Under all these dance floors are memory bones, rattling.
They say, Now is a good time to remember. Now! Dance!

Eight. Balls.

I was more than ready to hear one writer after another at Prairie Lights tell me that The Voice is what we turn loose lest we be blocked. That's for one. And for two, let the first draft roam like Lewis and Clark.

Note to self: A certain fictional voice fits very, very tightly with an impulse to get my left eyebrow pierced once I've found the right-sized bell to hang above this rolling orb. Unfortunately, the voice is some each of a precocious and naive eight-year-old, an educated and sex-crazed twenty-eight-year-old, and a wrinkled and celibate fifty-eight-year-old. Or maybe it's just me.

Damn.

I'd thought my narrator had to be male, but maybe not. And whether it's written in 1st or 3rd, gender matters. Gender always matters.

Party Time!

If you watch "Good Night, And Good Luck" about three times in a row — at least once with a cigarette in your mouth and once without — you might get to grooving with me. Note that it's all about thought crimes.

Too much of politics is about "if you're not with me, you're against me." The other too much of it is about how innuendo, that appeal to "can't you just imagine," gathers innocent chicks beneath one's feathers so as to fluff those feathers oh so pleasingly.

Call this version of chicken you-know-what sociological masturbation. Liken innuendo to intellectual pedophilia, and you'll be well ahead of the flock.

Waving A Flag

I've been talking to myself most of the day today, and this is where I ended up: in the sociobiological sense, I am meant to act like a certain kind of traffic signal, like a worker guiding vehicles through a mire of highway construction. But I have more to say than Go, Slow, Stop. My role, to which I seem to have been bred, is to point the warning finger of one hand towards the steaming pile and the come hither finger of another hand towards manna.

Given that my biological replicate could have been born in another time and place, this is only to say that in my role here and now, I just gotta say whenever to whomever, This here is not so good and that over there is so much better. I'm compelled to beat others over the head, on the one hand, or lead them by the nose, on the other, until they get it.

I'm so relieved to find a metaphor with which to interpret this compulsion to argue with blockheads versus my "better" and more encouraging nature. I'm so relieved to see that I can fit several views together, and thereby reconcile the urge to correct and criticize with the urge to celebrate. Flag signalers need to do some of each to fulfill their roles.

::

Recommended reading: Howard Bloom, The Lucifer Principle. ( Ha! Slime mold!)

And by the way . . . You do realize, don't you, that we seem to be evolving to become as social a species as ants, termites and bees?