fiction
you::
angelic
impish
Miro's blue iii (attached)
mellow equilibrium
reminded me of your comment on poetry vs. theory,
Grau, teurer Freund, ist alle Theorie,
Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum
Gray, dear friend, is all Theory,
and green the tree of golden Life
Your roof setup sounds amazing, and I loved the photo of the mountain. I'd like to be closer to Nature than I have the opportunity to be here. That's something I'm thinking about for next year.
How are things going with looking for work? I remember you've been mulling on the idea of being an EMT for a while now. The work sounds really interesting to me, in a lot of ways.
7.15
I've actually read part of that Walter Benjamin essay, you sent it my way a while back and I was real into it. I like "he created the knower in the image of the creator" as a poetic idea. Somehow the idea of an angelic figure or grace more sense to me than "man in the sky" style deity.
9.15
X,
…. the meaning we have is the meaning we choose to instill or impose on the world around us. I think for me that relates to the idea of sophrosyne you're talking about, soundness of mind or truth emerging from love. I think that love is the creation of meaning in many ways, and that out of that emerges the possibility for us as people to have some glimpse of a more perfect and angelic love, for ourselves and others.
Love is strange. I hope you find the right person to love. I'm not sure what to say about love. Maybe we are parallel, rather than knotted. Sometimes I think, I love love more than I love loving, and I also love people who love love more than they love loving.
(gaze wanly at kingfisher together); (dissipate); (wander).
I like this wheel.
Did I tell you I'm playing in the UT gamelan ensemble this spring? That's been a lot of fun to learn an actual non-western system of music.
That's cool. Seattle sounds nice, especially since you know people there, right? The gamelan ensemble sounds interesting- I don't know anything about that kind of music. I'm going to LA this weekend and I think I'm going to figure some stuff out while I'm there.
6.16
I think(?) I know what you mean about needing to nail down the exact nature of things. I've noticed in a lot of my dreams that places have these addresses almost that situate them in this expansive dream-space. Like numbered deltas, or sequential towers.
I have this feeling that the poetry seems to have a reciprocal relationship with the quality of my dreaming-- like by concretizing the locations by writing them down aestheticizes my world in a way that sort of creates dreaming. Like the waking and sleeping imaginations grow each other, like a slowly rotating, expansive space that becomes ever-fuller and more luminous. Loving the space rotates the space so that it can see itself and generates the luminescence.
I've been 'really into sleeping' Not that I'm not necessarily doing it 'more' or whatever, but appreciating the depth of its space, and valuing the ritual of offering up your consciousness to the mystery every day. Recently I've enjoyed the way the internet can be kind of molded to be travelled like the space of dreaming- I guess I'm really into El Toro's desert and the way hyperlinks and pages titles throughout the internet seem to immediately collapse and make different worlds that each have very specific functions. Like, not every building is a cathderal.
(dissipate).
So after this I drove to Grand Basin- I got there a little later than I had planned, and wasn't able to see some of the nicer parts before it got dark out. So then I set up my tent, but didn't bother staking down. Settled down into my tent and started reading my book (The lathe of heaven by ursula k leguin, which turns out to be an interesting book about dreams and actually set in Portland)--
I have an apartment here that I'm pretty happy about. There are pretty wood floors, and lots of bright sunlight, and I have a desk where I can work on things and relax. And there's a high roof that you can get on top of, and watch the sunlight hit Mt Hood at sunset. Attaching pics of my working zone and the roof view. S
Living in a city apartment
I sometimes have to look into my hardwood floors
and wonder
Will I ever reach the glossy heights imagined
where angelic wings form cummulo-beams
Arch-i-tectures
If i unfurl i could join them there
In the assembly of a body
imprinting, mother/fawn/sky
something remains,
falteringly concrete
in gleaming windows
on the edges of leaves
in corners of the breeze
where the secret breathes
Y,
I enjoy your poem also- it reminds me of a haiku poet talking about this tradition haiku poets have, of writing haikus on things like rocks and leaving them by the side of paths. I imagine the poem in dirt (dirt a sort of under-loved place within the duality of western metaphysics compared to the highly-celebrated celestial zone, the poem asserting itself like a tiny dirt angel, flitting at the edge of the path, that you have to be very aware to see. That articulation of a poem compared to say, the ceiling of the Sistine chapel, is I think very nice.
-X
so I recently read an argument against creating artificial life because of the likelihood of creating consciousness increasing the net amount of suffering in the universe
but really apparently and at least for me the issue doesn’t seem to be the suffering but a malaise about what happens after
I don’t criticise the square for not being a cool 3d shape, and I don’t blame the sexy & complex beet plant for lacking the -formal eleganza- of the square
but the concept of the numinous and divine grew out of a body (universal or whatever) where gadzillions of enzymes were pumping madly around -. zingo zingo I’m a matrix of cells, and in the matrix of cells I’m a matrix of localized protein and ion concentrations, and the gestalt of those matrices
Aspiration
– the air/essence/energy/ambition that you draw out of the world to form your aspirations, driving you towards elegance and achievement and success, but at the same time you can aspirate the shit out of something and choke to death on it, alone in the fetid mud of your unkempt garden, which never spawned [VERDANT LIFE] in sufficient concentrations to have made you an ‘admirable figure’ in other words in Midas’ aspiration to the highest wealth, he aspirated hubris as a poisonous fog, and choked in the misery of his own aspirations. So that brings us to…
[au]spices of aspirations: the auguries of anguish
my Beatnik musical about Midas hahahah
to pull fluid from a cavity or chamber -. To aspirate
identification with and of the fluid
The highest good is like water.
Water is good at benefitting the myriad creatures, while not contending with them.
It resides in places people find repellent, and so comes close to the Way.
That's crazy, the science stuff- I feel like I need to read more about all of it to understand more. Geology was always the easiest kind of science for me to relate to, I think because it's like the physical body with sort of a layer of abstraction to cushion you from all the visceral details. I love the way you see biology, and I'm really proud of you! It makes me feel proud to be a person to think about the world the way you describe it.
Pictures- SO funny! Laughing out loud!
I miss you too- let me know if you're down to hang out over the holidays.
attached some new fairytales re: Morphos butterflies.
I sometimes feel like understanding how nature/bodies work is one of the best articulations of spirituality for me. If you're ever bored, you should look up things about protein folding/ functions. It's what we've been talking about in my biochem class and it blows my mind. This enzyme in your brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetylcholinesterase performs about 25000 chemical reactions a second with complete accuracy and no waste.
How are you? I'm at the Helsinki airport right now. I found the only nice bench/cafe which is open 24 hours because I ended up with hang-time between transfers.
I started working as a writer while I've been here, it's been very chill. I'll keep doing it in Chicago, it's all via correspondence. I write from home, it pays well and it's the kind of esoteric topics that I find very interesting like macro-engineering, the atmosphere, or color technology development. Gonna buy a green silk skirt and Simone Weil's books with my first check $.
Chicago will be interesting. Might be a good place for freedom and pleasantness. You'll have to let me know if it's actually like that. I would love to come visit, maybe around winter break?
If you'd like I could probably mail you a book? I'm glad you sent me the Agnes Martin. It's really good. I was thinking about her last week but couldn't remember her name. I was thinking about how you said you liked her drawings because of the love in them. So I was trying to find an image of one but couldn't without her name. I feel like she would have been a great person to meet and talk to.
