I grabbed a ball-point pen/And then untied a shoe/Unclad my foot and then/Inked up my archeroo.
“Step lively,” I affirmed/Near nail and metatarsal/In cursive supradermed/”If Wit won’t do, a Farce’ll,”
I wrote behind the heel,/And then be-ringed the ankle/”Brace. Let.” And then “Pig deal”/And asked, “Foot Odor rankle?”
Reshod, I walked untrippingly/And grinned, O Me-O, My-O,/I’d added, sanity-tippingly,/Some Footnotes to my bio.
Here’s an odd experiment. I started on my sketchpad with a small rectangle.It seemed to want a guitarist, his upper body breaking through the boundary of the rectangle with his head and strumming hand and guitar. Another rectangle below had his right leg break that rectangle’s border. His name would be Tallhead, and he was playing so well he was warping space/time around him. But his bandmate, one Clarissa Pealing, provided vocals so transcendent they attracted the attention of a Goddess in another firmament.
So I would describe this extraordinary event with bizarre, variable calligraphing. At first I thought this was a new wrinkle, but then I remembered my teenage read of Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, wherein Gully Foyle’s kinesthetic sense made hybrid sensations jump off the page. I now tip my hat to sf grandmaster Bester. His friends called him Alfie.
The entire text, transcribed:
t.r.o.c.t. & d.f.v.
the riffing of Conrad Tallhead made local space/time subdivide
BUT it was the DIVINE foreground vocals of Tallhead’s bandmate
c l a r i s s a p e a l i n g
that BURST THRough
our very Firmament
& got a Goddess’s
attention!!!!
Some life events, rock concerts included, seem worthy of the note of celestial beings. At least they do to this humble human.
I’ve spent the last few days in an off-and-on Jackson Browne immersion. Mostly this is due to some advice I solicited from my good friend and Confidante, Genevieve L, asking her for thematic input on my last few posts leading to Blog Post #1000. Among her many wonderful suggestions was to concentrate on a famous person.
So here we are with Clyde Jackson Browne. He has been in the American-Music Group Mind for more than 40 years. Bruce Springsteen, inducting him into the Rock&Roll Hall of Fame, referred to Browne’s landmark LATE FOR THE SKY album as “America’s Paradise Lost.”
This being Part I, I will just add that from here to #1000 I intend to splice the finished image/text of a given Part 2 to the next installment’s Part 1. The next post will be titled “BB(p2)/come love me (part 1).” My Part 2s will be polished and complete; my Part 1s will be raw and exploratory.
Back in a week or so . . .
Something tells me that my path to proficiency with oil pastels will involve coloring-book-style exercises at first, so I’m unrustifying my pen and ink skills to prepare for making coloring book cards. This is the first such. Words just naturally snuck in and took over . . .
aboveliness/belowliness
to damn or bless?
aboveliness
death from above
look out below
there’s hell to pay
the heavens know
belowliness
is not our lot
unless we live
neath whip or plot
False duality plagues our thinking. Up is good, down is bad, right? (Not if you’re in a hurricane . . .) To think of a sunset, a woman, or cesspit as pretty or ugly is to ignore most or all of the reality involved.
And we’re stuck with the notion that Above and Heaven, and Below and Hell, are intertwined. If our distant ancestors had evolved underground, it might have been a different story, though not necessarily more correlative with big-picture reality.
If we manage to survive, and we resume our spacefaring ways in suitably expansive fashion, those who follow us will be more capable of shedding false duality. Zero-gee lends itself to a superior world-view to “this is Up and this is Down.” And, free of Earth’s false ceiling of sky, the three-dimensionality of our cosmos becomes evident.
Wish I were up there–oops. Wish I were OUT there . . .
My Mom is in the hospital again. Probably OK, but they’ll keep her overnight for observation. Before I found out, I’d done a card called “two bodies” that began “GARY has two bodies/just as heather has two mommies . . .” and told about my flappy fleshy body being nothing special but my body of work being immortal and immense. It was typical self-aggrandizing crap, and it has now disappeared, and good riddance.
But I left Mom at her urging to go to work, and am now at the library, and, not finding the card I’d intended to post, whipped up this nearly-empty-headed one instead, just to keep every-day-in-March continuity going. I sort of like its clean near-emptiness.
all life is bathed in wavy particles except
that’s not right; words fail
“suchthing” might describe it better by not even trying to
for one suchthing allowed the existence
of the first and lightest few elements on the periodic table
enabling the energetic coalescence of stars
and a suchthing made the first of them eventually energetically die
and the deathpressure filled in much of the rest of the periodic table
and these such things eventually allowed the existence of grandkids
and in the spite of “the Big Bang” there is evidence that our “universe”
is but a localized phenomenon and thus “In the Beginning . . .” never obtains
no matter how far back we go
there’s no suchthing
Tonight PBS took us to the New York Metropolitan Opera and a performance of THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO. You don’t need subtitles to be able to tell there’s a whole lot of Silliness going on. And yet Figaro and his antics have been gracing stages worldwide for more than 200 years. So I find to my considerable comfort that Silliness and Staying Power are not mutually exclusive.
Here I’ve done something quite Silly. The title’s two puns, there’s a Pathet-ically obscure reference, a human Mickey Mouse wears Mickey Mouse ears and a tie festooned with Minnie Mice, and there’s nothing but name-dropping in the lower right hand corner. But: there’s tricky asymmetric balance. There’s a pulse in it of letter size variance and oddly “coincidental” alignment. And there’s a relaxed unforcedness to it that implies an omnipresence of freedom. There’s subtler stuff I won’t describe but I hope will be discovered. So it exists and I deem it worthy of a viewer’s attention. A few days later, though, I may well wonder what the Hell I was thinking . . .
thyme out
there’s no such thing as the Pathet Lao
howbeit Romeo where art thou
yet SPICE invigorates sweet & tart
mercator fibs but o boy can he chart
enticed inducements wave & dart
tie min
tandy, jessica/novak, kim
ian, janis & hendrix, jimi
elfman, danny or elfman, jen
Using the problem-solving compulsion of a materialistic Westerner, it is easy to demonstrate the sound of one hand clapping. One needs only clap the four fingers against the thumb pad and hand heel. It sounds like the underwater applause of diaphanous tail fins. (No, it doesn’t. Maybe the emerging koan is now “What is the sound of underwater diaphanous-tail-fin applause?”)
At any rate, yesterday I started a doodle, got what I wanted from it, and abandoned it. Today I was looking at the pomegranate tree by the driveway and lines metrically near-identical came. I unabandoned my doodle and added a title and the two lines to it. The result is a quasi-koan, though I’d love to hear arguments that it is not.
Snow is falling here in Cottonwood. Earlier I had made up my mind to drive to the Village of Oak Creek to retrieve a CD a friend had burned for me, which I’d foolishly left in my drawer at work and forgotten to take home. (In my defense, I’d had an unexpected 12-hour shift…) But the falling snow convinces me, with little experience driving on snowy roads, to stay in the warm and cozy. I’ll get the CD tomorrow, and put it in the truck before my shift begins.
The moral of this non-story is that sometimes the best thing to do is no thing at all. Thus this page:
Now let us be quite candid
Uplift & have & hold
Then we’ll be even-handed
Hubraics countermanded
It does no good to scold
Nonaction is an unflipped coin
Gong yet unbashed an unboinged boing
One with Clay, Image and Text 