blank blank fullness

Art is not about making the best, most perfect and magical thing, image, creation, motion. It's about connecting with yourself: good & bad, impulses, desires, imagination, and the influences you've internalized; and engaging it in any & every way you can dream of. And persisting. And staying focused and inspired, true. Working continuously.
And in that way, magic happens.
The best part of you happens.
By way of impassioned love.

One year, 3 months and 4 days ago, upon my return to the United States known as America, I began a new chapter in my life. I also began reading a fantastic book by the name of Eat, Pray, Love. Like all things that motivate the best in people- emotion (mountainous and valley-like), inspiration, new sights and new horizons, empathy and relation; the word on the greatness of her work spread fast. It's a quaint thing. I'd wanted to do an entry on the book after I'd read it, while the imprint it left was still fresh, the ink of her words gleaming on my dead-of-winter Caribbean tan. But I didn't. I just never took the time or allowed that inner seed of desire and will toward expression to plant itself into this blog's box. Ah how it works. All in due time, my dear. Methinks the seed was itself still developing.

So sitting here, 456 days later (I'll give a buffer of 3 days for the time it took from landing to me actually obtaining the book in question), surfing these boundless and tangled interwebs, I ran into author Elizabeth Gilbert's February 2009 talk at the TED conference.

Timely.

Now.

Three months later, and not a moment too soon. Not a minute later than it should.

'surprisingly moving', indeed. The point of her thoughts in talk barreled over me in the same way she recounts her encounter with poet Ruth Stone's "thunderous train of air". The air of creation, of inspiration. That 'other', that genius, that 'buffer' between us - creative souls - and the eventual alchemical outcome of its passing through.

Like the holy trilogy, trinity.

The number three and its effectivity in tying together the ends of then, now, there.

It, Me, This.

Genius, Man, Creation.

"One manifests as two.

Two is transformed into three.

And three generates all the myriad entities of the universe."

He is the middle man to us as middle men that does not ask permission and will not be told 'no'.

Tom Waits asked him to wait, for a more practical time at which to create.

But if you've opened that portal, have stepped once through that door, you will know that forever more, the mirror you see in that room cannot but bounce you back to it.

The Room Full of Mirrors has eaten many souls alive. Those tortured artists Gilbert mentions, the ones who fall into the River of their image, not to rise up like a Phoenix, but drown in their thesis...

& I wonder, drawing out the mirror parallel farther...

Have you ever noticed the infinity produced by two mirrors reflecting the space in between? Curving to the side of an ever-shrinking bending of your line of sight.

That space, is it the buffer? Is it the genius fairy-like creature "living in our walls", two mirrored walls perhaps, with the second mirror as the manifestation of our creative efforts, with our being standing as the other mirror?

Or are we the space between? One side delivering through us what is to bounce back on the other, exactly the same but shaped by our standing there, filtered through our abilities, sensibilities, sensitivities...

Going with option number two -- when that second mirror ceases to back us up in our reflections, and we're left facing ourselves, the work perhaps a little more void of the fullness of bending holograms, is it any less valuable?

Any less of a study and capture of that momentary self-fulfilled truth?

This moment after the allah, the olé: she admits the inevitable difficulty, of dealing with just 'me', sans a fairy genie. And so full is this portion (I admit, I teared) that it deserves its own quote:

"Maybe it doesn’t have to be quite so full of anguish

if you never happened to believe in the first place

that the most extraordinary aspects of your being came from you

but maybe if you just believed that they were on loan to you

from some unimaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life

to be passed along when you're finished, to somebody else.
If we think about it this way it starts to change everything...
Don't be afraid, don't be daunted, just do your job.

Continue to show up for your piece of it, whatever that might be...

If the divine cock-eyed genius assigned to your case decides to let some sort of wonderment be glimpsed for just one moment through your efforts, then olé.

And if not, do your dance anyhow.

Olé to you nonetheless just for having

the sheer human love and stubbornness to keep showing up."

"What the eyes represent for most painters, the mouth was for Bacon, the locus of human identity. The mouth is what bites, suckles, and howls at the moon. By contrast, the eyes are likely to be missing entirely or smeared shut or obscured by a milky scrim, as in his portrait of the writer Michel Leiris. With Bacon, the windows of the soul--not that he believed in the soul--always have the curtains drawn."

- Richard Lacayo on Francis Bacon

A moving passage I read on this morning's passage:

"I heard them talking to one another in murmurs and whispers. They talked about illness, money, shabby domestic cares. Their talk painted the walls of the dismal prison in which these men had locked themselves up. And suddenly I had a vision of the face of destiny.

Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a termite, built you peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. You are a petty borgeois of Toulouse. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time [!]. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.

The squall has ceased to be a cause of my complaint. The magic of the craft has opened for me a world in which I shall confront, within two hours, the black dragons and the crowned crests of a coma of blue lightnings, and when night has fallen I, delivered, shall read my course in the stars."

- Antoine de Saint Exupéry from Wind, Sand and Stars

Held in Montreal, Expo 67 (The 1967 International and Universal Exposition, a sort of "Worlds Fair") was nicknamed "Man and his World", taken from Antoine de Saint Exupéry's memoir Terre des hommes, (literally "Land of Men"), translated as Wind, Sand and Stars. Housing was one of the main themes of Expo 67. Habitat 67 (above) then became a thematic pavilion visited by thousands of visitors who came from around the world. During Expo 67 it was also the temporary residence of the many dignitaries coming to Montreal.

Nice old-school poster for the Expo 67 :

"It is considered to be the most successful World's Fair of the 20th century, with over 50 million visitors and 62 nations participating. It also set the single-day attendance record for a world's fair with 569,000 visitors on its third day. Expo 67 was Canada's main celebration during its centennial year. The fair was originally intended to be held in Moscow, to help the Soviet Union celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Russian Revolution but, for various reasons, the Soviets decided to cancel, and Canada was awarded it in the fall of 1962."

Knick-knack misc things of the day...

A while back I made an analogy in the typical fashion of me;
all at once, a mini epiphany.

But here it is, encore, walk with me as I stretch it out a little further. Diluting nectar with some water to make juicy juice.

People: we're like shoelaces.
It seems like we're separate. Each end existing independently of the other, hanging out, doing its thing, flopping around. But then you start to trace your way back to, wait, why am I flopping around like this? And you see that you are not, in fact, alone, maybe, even, part of another end. And that you are holding a bigger entity together.
You are not just a cool string with a plastic cap for a head.
You are part of the shoe. An integral factor in the equation of kickin kicks. And so essential, too! And so you keep moving. Weaving in and out you discover the rest of your essence is doing so much more than you'd thought, you, over there flopping around. You, plastic shoelace end.
There are parts which are in constant contact, friction, tension and motion. And so you weave. And bob. And make it to another end. It's like, hitting the shores of the new world (aka the Dominican Republic).
All over again.
But, you know, this plastic end, though it looks just like me, well, it's not, it's flopping on the other side of this shoe and, well, that's a whole different world.
And then someone spills ketchup on you.
Oh, heavens what a nuisance. So you get pulled out, to get ready for a good cleaning (or replacement even) cuz you know they'd be damned if they're not rocking some fresh crispy joints.

And then you realize, stripped of your shoe-home that yea, there are two ends to this shoelace story.

But there is only ever one shoelace.

A Drizzly morning, drops send tremors shaking green on limbs' endings
Clouded comfort from a sun hidden, subdued
Clouded comfort from three pillows stacked behind my head
And a warm comforter covering me in bed

Specks of rain, two window panes
Late to bed and early to rise
Makes the day barely distinguishable from night
But dang if that ain't all right
Today, to be that way
First Sunday in the month of May
Bit misleading as names will tell
'Cause these April showers took to trickle
Past their set borders of boxes,
Calendars as hoaxes
As flowers in bloom, content to coexist
Humidity aiding rich growth in this mist

Watching, heard this, paused.
No Direction Home plays a snippet
Familiar yet fresh,
Words I'd used before
Known to my ears in the form I'd alone drawn
Echoes now from time boxed up and past
Here again, to resurface, catch up with itself,
Finding their match

Though I remain unsure
Of their original score...

___________


Praised be man, he is existing in milk,
And living in lilies.
And his violin music takes place in milk,
and creamy emptiness.
Praised be the unfolded inside petal flesh of tend' rest thought.
Petrels on the follying wave-valleys idly sing themselves asleep.

Praised be delusion, the ripple.
Praised be the Holy Ocean of eternity.
Praised be I, writing, dead already and dead again.

Praised be wood, it is milk.
Praised be Honey at the Source.
Praised be the embrace of soft sleep,
The valor of angels in valleys of hell on earth below.
Praised be the non-ending.
Praised be the lights of earth-man.
Praised be the watchers.
Praised be my fellow man for dwelling in milk.

Praised be I, writing, dead already and dead again.