Listening to Talk Talk's Living in Another World

A memory today

C-Section 1978

ME: Chattering away to myself

Doctor: What's she saying

Johnny: She's reciting Shelley

laughing.....

6 Years Ago Today with Colin Harrison

So, I am in Paw's recliner, my eyes closed, rocking, listening to Colin playing with Little People. Me, just a smiling. He is telling a story about Mommy, Daddy, PawPaw, MawMaw, and it's Christmas and it's snowing and everyone is happy and all these little details.-----Half an hour later I open my eyes and there is white doughnuts pulverized all over the room!!!!!!! It really did snow. Out comes the vacuum at 11:30 at night!

The Maze by Stars

KONSTANTIN FYODOROVICH BOGAEVSKY 

In the center of the maze
On a summer afternoon
I sat alone and waited
Until I saw the moon

And then the stars errupted
From the blackest sky I've seen
And I fell into a dream
I fell into a dream
I fell into a dream

I fell into a dream
I fell into a dream
I fell into a dream
I fell into a dream
I fell into a dream
I fell into a dream
I fell into a dream
I fell into it

In the center of the maze
You're a distant memory
And in every cul-de-sac
There burns an effigy

And then the stars collapsed
And they hit the distant hills
And the fires are burning still
The fires are burning still

They always will
They always will
They always will
They always will
They always will
They always will
They always will
They always will

I don't wanna find my way
I split the secret room in two
I don't wanna find my way out
I wanna watch the moon with you
I don't wanna find my way
I split the secret room in two
I don't wanna find my way out
I wanna watch the moon with you
I don't wanna find my way
I split the secret room in two
I don't wanna find my way out
I wanna watch the moon with you

Bob Dylan on Poets

Poets don’t drive cars. 

Poets don’t go to the supermarket. 

Poets don’t empty the garbage. 

Poets aren’t on the PTA. 

Poets, you know, they don’t go picket the Better Housing Bureau, or whatever. Poets don’t… poets don’t even speak on the telephone. Poets don’t even talk to anybody. Poets do a lot of listening and … and usually they know why they’re poets! 

Poets live on the land. They behave in a gentlemanly way. And live by their own gentlemanly code.

And die broke. Or drown in lakes. Poets usually have very unhappy endings…

via Brain Pickings.

Know the Self, Know the World

Remember the clear light,
The pure clear white light
From which everything in the universe comes,
To which everything in the universe returns;
The original nature of your own mind.
The natural state of the universe unmanifest.
Let go into the clear light, trust it, merge with it.
It is your own true nature, it is home.

– The Tibetan Book Of The Dead

Quote

“I have such a fear of finding another like myself, and such a desire to find one! I am so utterly lonely, but I also have such a fear that my isolation be broken through, and I no longer be the head and ruler of my universe.” 


― Anaïs Nin

Books and Work, June 2019

Books. Books. Books.

Choosing a path, for now

I do believe I have posted this wonderful photo previously. It's part of the Natchez Trace near the bottom area of the state of Mississippi. One of my favorite places to be sure. Old. Haunting. Full of history. This photo clearly has two paths to be taken and I am at that point in my life and work. So the last couple of weeks while I have been cleaning and organizing material, I've made some decisions on how I am going to proceed right now. What work should be first now? Why that work should move forward? And so forth. I suppose this means, narrowing in, finishing something, finally. Because there are so many projects that were started and left hanging from years ago. And then new projects started. I've decided to push ahead with The Fairy Tale Novel. It's at a stage where I am extremely motivated. Motivation is always something a creator needs buckets of in order to keep working through resistance and fatigue. I desperately need to stay in the story, to become obsessive if need be, to immerse myself in my fictional world, with its people and places. My senses need to be there, not in other places. It really wasn't a difficult decision at all. I've been floating too much. I like to float, but now I've got to move deliberately.

Monday Morning Fun

I miss my Daddy.

This is my Daddy and me, in St. Francisville, Louisiana. I loved these trips. Years later I realized that one of the reasons I truly loved St. Francisville was because I always associated it with Daddy. It took me a lifetime to understand that. Smiling here. He was incredibly generous, but somewhat of a mystery to me. To some, he was a stranger. But not to me. I understood him better than anyone in our family. I love him, still. He was the World War II generation, a generation of men who went off to fight a brutal war as boys really. Most of them came back home with a sense of shock and gratitude. They knew hard work. They often drank too much. They did not know how to share their feelings openly.

My Daddy was like that. Smiling. He often said, "We'll see." That was the only way he knew how to say 'no' and even today I can remember him saying these words to me. But he loved me and showed me in little ways. He always bought me pumpkins for Halloween and gave me 'cookie money' at Christmas time so that I could bake all my goodies. He did this because he knew it was the two things I treasured. At times, he bought odd little things for me, such as yard art and even my favorite candy. He came by my house often and never stayed long, thirty minutes at the most and talked about nothing much.  After he died I learned he did this to his favorite sister, Polly. I felt lucky to understand what these little visits really meant, that these were big moments of love, the only way he knew how to express it.

But did he love. He adored my mother and his children.

The last years of his life were difficult and very frustrating for him. He told me how unhappy he was, but I didn't know what to do about it. He was grateful for the help he had, but we all  paid a heavy price for that final comfort. That decline and his death essentially destroyed the illusion of family for me. I cried for a long time, mourning him and a life that would never exist again. Everything died with him in early 2007, every illusion I knew. Every hope. It was the beginning of a decade of a real and deep unhappiness for me. I was shattered.  Reality set in.

But somehow, I don't know how, because I lost so much, when everything else faded away in my life, (including Johnny) I was left standing. My heart intact. Hope once again alive. I was not broken.

I started breathing again in 2018....  This year, I am even working again, on real things, real words, real thoughts.

Daddy, thank you for that time you gave me the words I needed to hear. "I love you."

low ‘words’

Three inches above the floor
 Man in a box wants 
to burn my soul 
And I'm tired 

 "Is that the truth?" he says 
The pain is easy 
Too many words, 
too many words 

And I can hear 'em 
And I can hear 'em 
And I can hear 'em 
I can hear 'em 
And I can hear 'em 

If you're hearing screams 
Come back child, 
come back 
My hands are dry 

But I know they're gonna 
make it just one more night 
Too many words, 
too many words 

And I can hear 'em 
And I can hear 'em 
And I can hear 'em 
I can hear 'em 
And I can hear 'em 

Thoughts on Anger

“Anger continued on past its usefulness becomes unjust, then dangerous…It fuels not positive activism but regression, obsession, vengeance, self-righteousness. Corrosive, it feeds off itself, destroying its host in the process.”

                                                                              Ursula Le Guin

THE MORE LOVING ONE by W.H. Auden

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well

That, for all they care, I can go to hell,

But on earth indifference is the least

We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn

With a passion for us we could not return?

If equal affection cannot be,

Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am

Of stars that do not give a damn,

I cannot, now I see them, say

I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,

I should learn to look at an empty sky

And feel its total dark sublime,

Though this might take me a little time

I. AM. WRITING.

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."
                                            
                                                                                Carl Sagan

Speaking Truth to Power

There must be civil and moral laws higher than the tribalism of the family, the clan, and the political party. Civilization collapses when we don’t apply justice unilaterally. 

                 Joyce Carol Oates   

I. AM.

Sir Frederic Leighton "Flaming June" 1895 |