Snow Gypsy

Learning: The Ropes

2011-05-04T10:52:00.002-06:00

When I dream about education, I dream about strings - if I dream at all. Usually there is nothing but white, a deep vast space without definition.

The opening scene of Grapes of Wrath comes to mind. The landscapes are painted in dust, creased at the edge of dim lit horizons. Vast expanses of space dyed and scattered orange and red. There are houses, two stories tall with a porch held up by cinder blocks and framed by two large, cracked windows. There are lace curtains and holes in the wood covered by sheets and boxes.

Men in suits stand just beyond the porch, bending in towards the windows, one leg raised and bent onto the steps. They tell us to leave.

The creases in their pressed shirts fill with orange dust.

- Really? Who says?

-They do. And they say you need to leave.

-Well, just tell me who 'they' is and I'll go and talk to 'em. We'll get this whole thing straightened out.

But you can't talk to "they," the men in suits tell us. They are just that, a general, faceless article without purpose, function or meaning. It is just. It begins the sentence or ends it, depending on its movement.

The bank, the administrators, the governments that collect and dictate within obscurity. I cannot know them and therefore cannot find them, connect with them, convince them otherwise.

-If only I could meet them, know them - if they saw me and knew who I was, what I knew, they wouldn't dare step foot on my porch or tell me where the dust of my family, my history will settle.

But there is no one. They are a monster, a concrete illusion. They appear, disappear, and then linger, dampening the edges of another novel.

When I think about the closing scene of Grapes of Wrath, where the main character exits the pages through deep under ground tunnels to help those who have lost everything, to guide and protect those who are starved for justice, I think about writing. When I think about writing, I think about higher education and the promise it leaves its readers, curled into their own dust pockets and dim lit skies. I imagine he is giving us words. He will give us the language to define ourselves, to rise above the stereotypes that haunt us, that bind us. He will give us hope and opportunity, that is, the opportunity to question, explore and discover. He will grant us the freedom to present our own truths, to learn and thereby know. He will verify our personal experience, enabling us to stand united and empowered by our own thoughts and ideals. He will give us words and poetry. He will give us both chaos and structure, demanding our vowels and our nouns, tranforming our reflections with new adjectives and verb, illustrating our histories and memories until the future manifests itself in an endless, chaotic and breathtaking tapestry.

I imagine that I am a crusader, that I grant words and thereby a piece of eternity to my students. Without language, there is nothing to know or to argue, nothing to question and therefore, nothing worth remembering.

All I have is language - the thought and the weight of it strangle my vocal chords and leave me silent and still against the torrent of paper airplanes and snickers from the darkened corners of brick classrooms. Ripped pages and chalk dust. Desks with claw marks cut into the sides. All I have are words. Everything else will fade, will lose itself in another empty cardboard box, another basement or attic, another distant memory clinging to the distant edgse of cyber space.

My words will remain, sharp and ready, poised at the edges of my discontent, ready to pounce, to cut my disbelief and cast me back from my perch into the unknown chaos of the white beneath. I cling to each sound, swinging from the 's' and 'j' towards the commas and periods. I leap back with each breath into the unknown. Again composing. Again remembering - as though they are the same thing - every syllable carries consequences.

I must write the world or it will not exist. I must teach my students to write their world or it will not exist. I will forget otherwise. I will be forgotten. As though I never happened, as though this moment, now, never happened.

I am not a teacher. I am a wild, poetic animal machine, a word doctor, a master of language and memory, a keeper of thoughts and stories I will hold and narrate, guarding against forgetting.

I am too dramatic. I am too poetic to teach composition or grammar. I can't and I refuse to. But I will make our words, however improper, legends, holding them high against each wave of dust.

Men in suits on our porches. Their glasses tint their eyes and stain the horizon. I can see their dust cloud for miles, waiting for the car that brings them and takes them. My grandfather sits on the porch in his chair. He holds a bottle of whiskey, and a gun in his lap, taking each into his hands separately.

-Let them come. We are ready.

Basement Boxes and Education

2011-04-21T09:55:00.003-06:00

I could think about memory or I could simply remember it. I could capture it, stuff it into a mason jar, give it twigs and bits of leaves to sustain it. I could feed it with grass and give it water through the holes I punched into the top of its tin foil cover. I could then carry it with me, reveal it to others.

"See, this is what I meant..." and continue on.

Constructing a novel. The shape twists and bends, is wet sand. And this is why I have pictures, ways to build a mold, a structure, for the novel to fill. Like the one above. The words cling to its edges, slowly gnawing towards the center where they belong. If I blink, I'll miss it. The tide coming in.

My mother found bits of my novel buried in damp boxes in her basement. The cardboard was wet sand, dripping onto the carpet and the tile floors.

We spent hours, negotiating the pictures, stuffed and tapped into place. We soaked them in the bathtub to remove the mold. We filled in the holes with colored markers. We cut what we couldn't cover and placed the photographs, damp, between paper towels to dry.

I wouldn't remember otherwise. The hours spent with face paint on my grandmother's brown couch, anxiously watching between brush strokes as the halloween cookies on the table disappeared. Or the leotard I danced ballet in that we ripped attaching the tail we stole from one of my stuffed animals.

I'm writing a novel of important things - these things worth remembering in boxes and envelopes, shuffled across state lines and left, hidden, in the rear corners of desk drawers. My first attempts at colors. My first report card. The letter I wrote to my mother, asking her for a brown bear and a squirrel for easter.

I learned music on a paper piano my father drew for me. Learning was a three step process. Reading the notes that hung from the measures, twisting lines and shifting chords that dipped, rose, and leveled. Finding the notes written in letters (CDEFGAB) written on white paper outlined and filled in black. Listening to the stereo and the tape inside that my father made with all the sounds of the paper notes had been recorded. The touch of the paper and then, the sound it made. I loved to imagine the sound before the note. It was thick, like a cloud, hovering just above my fingers. When I found the note, the sound fell, drawn down until it tangled in my hands and cried, pressing its vocal chords out into the air as it struggled to lift itself up and rise back into the cloud, where it belonged.

I tell myself to describe the shelves above the t.v. and the abstract painting of a city skyline above the couch. And the sheets my mother placed over the couch cushions. Describe the cushions and the pillows what couldn't be covered in sheets. Describe the oak table my grandfather carves and the fold up aluminum chairs stolen from the office across the yard that surrounded it.

I look inside the cabinets in the kitchen, mismatched red and white wood, covered in speckled white fabric. There are the mismatched plates and glasses my mother loved. Once a week, she went to the store. I remember the store, the pale green lights and speckled tiles, shelves shaped like towers and rings of oversized shirts and brittle sweaters, the smell of artificial warmth. The air stripped raw and pressed between vents pressed against swinging glass doors. There were no windows only vacant shadows. Once a week, we filtered through the doors and shelves. We were looking for hinges or curtains, maybe a new fan, blankets, pillows, pens, books. Everything in the world was kept between the aisles. And we would find bowls and plates of different sizes and colors. My mother would hold them in her hands, tracing swirling patterns and beveled edges. She never purchased a set. She selected one at a time. A red bowl with black specks. A white square plate with raised edges and a floral pattern traced in ivory.

I remember her collection of frames. And the boxes where she kept our pictures, etchings, and graded math homework that wouldn't fit on the fridge.

I am writing a novel of important things. Because they are necessary. Because communication is this - seeing, hearing and being seen, the act of being witnessed. It's translation into language is active, physical, abstract.

True learning lies within this process, the process by which experience becomes knowledge. We perceive. We learn. We expand, occupying new points of view, new possibilities within our reality. This is what I tell my students between discussions and peer reviews. Somewhere within my mother cabinets, buried somewhere in a basement of damp cardboard and paper notes, are the answers to every question, the inspiration behind every statement, every invention, every composition. The chords still resonate within me, pulsing. Their shadow follows and fills the loose edges of my present.

There is something to learn, to know, to remember. Important things. In photographs stacked between paper towels, stacked and left to dry beneath the cracked windowsill overlooking the garden where my mother strives to grow peas, apples, and peppers.

I will craft it into a lesson, my fathers drawing board littered with empty pepsi cans filled with ash and discarded cigarettes. I will find the root of rhetorical critique, of evaluation and persuasion within his artifacts, these meaningless things that dampen my memory and fill my imagination until it pours over.

I cannot know what was and what I only imagined. The resonance is always the same, I tell my students, to write and to then, know. They occupy the space between writing and knowing, filling their words until they too, fill and pour over.

Spring

2011-04-11T13:58:00.004-06:00

I remember the blue house next to the highway and the dying magnolia tree curled between the cracked posts of our front porch. I remember the basement, the damp concrete floors dotted with disconnected patches of grey carpet and wool rugs.

I remember the library I built there. Cheap white shelves my father assembled from a box and that I then filled with old magazines, newspapers, children's books, and school work. Overtime, I filled every crease and crevace.

My desk was in one corner. A small table lamp created a shallow circle of light. It ebbed in sporatic currents before stepping off into the shadows in the walls.

My father sat in the opposing corner. His lamp ebbed too. There were ripples in the walls. The ripples crossed, intersecting circles that grew into the walls, tracing the holes were the water had cut through the stone. A fine layer of silver dust covered the moss and mold.

The light fell in waves. There were pens and paper to mark the currents -the fury of it. My father drew and traced for days. He locked the door to the basement when he drew. He kept a supply of empty soda cans for his cigarrette ashes beneath the drawing board bent at a dramatic angle, parallel to his back parallel to the wall behind him.

The weight of his shadow was immense, a wave of ink that buried my own, insignificant scribbles in silver dust. Expanding shadows, shapped like circles, building cascades that left the walls exhausted and dripping.

I learned how to write, here, in my father's shadow. I learned insomnia and passion. I learned starvation and exhaustion, a pulse of lines like words, cracked and pouring over onto the concrete floors. They echoed and built upon their resonance.

There were footsteps on the ceiling, the grooves my mother ground into carpet, pacing between the walls where she left her fingerprints.

Dinner was cold. The smell subsided, woven within the damp air, and the dying magnolia breaking through the concrete walls.

I am not the poet I thought I was. My lines are too long. I can't bear to severe them. They belong together, twisted punctuation.

I am not the writer I thought I was. Perhaps I am poet, only, with an absurd fascination with complete sentences and paragraphs.

I am not the writer I thought I was. I cannot hold a thought, just a image. The image fades and then the narrative fractures. The words break through and pour over, being places that they shouldn't. There are only scribbles, lines mascarading as language mascarading as memory.

This is not intriguing or inspiring. This is memory. It defines me, but it is not worthy material for a respectable novel.

I imagine how I might write it, in lines, the steps, the angle of my father's back, the tilt of his pens, the silver dust beneath his drawing board.

I list my objectives: to inspire, expand, create, facilitate, communicate.

It is difficult to imagine, to know beyond this streaming.
What if narrative lines are not lines, but circles that intersect and blend?
The fall line is never straight. gravity twists it into 'c' shaped arcs and dives, creating spaces the sky fills with wind and shadow.

This is where the poetry kicks in, where it creeps, saturating the edges of the notebooks I left on the floor for too long.

There can never be a single straight line. Light bends, hesitates and encases itself in spiral.

I am not solid in my language.

My mother remembers the carpet, worn down and faded along the path she shuffled. The couches covered with mismatching sheets to hide the juice stains and the places where the dogs and cats had gnawed the fabric.

There are pictures and drawings of pictures on the wall and in the shelves. There are holes in the arms of my father's leather chair from where he tore at it in his sleep.

There are three oak trees in the backyard and a single maple tree. There was a rusted swing set my father build when my sister was born. There was a warehouse next to the office where my father worked, and a blackberry patch next to the office where we hid and ate in summer.

Across the highway was a repair shop, beyond it, a flea market where my grandfather took me on the weekends to teach me the value of a dollar.

There was a general store down the road with milk, candy, eggs, and video rentals.

There were baseball fields beyond it, next to the fire house that funded our uniforms.

In the yard was a chain where we tied the dogs. The chain was attached to a line that stretched from one oak tree to the other. The dog ran across the yard, from one end to the other, dragging the chain behind it. We used to dare one another to cross it, offering candy and back scratches as temptations.

I'm not sure if this is novel. I'm not sure if it's worthy of it. The stories I remember, the stories I imagine - the difference between the two is insignificant. Perhaps they would be better coded in haiku or free verse. Perhaps a sonnet.

I lost my ruler and that is the problem. I can't locate a straight line, anywhere.

2011-04-04T16:05:00.001-06:00

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Notes of Little Brothers: A Philosophy

2011-03-12T10:17:00.003-07:00

"I can lose myself without anxiety because you keep me. This book is not narrative. It is not a discourse. It is a poetic animal machine..." Helene Cixous, Stigmata

My mind is numb and frantic simeltaneously. There are questions of space and presence. Questions concerning space, location and language within literature. Because where I am matters to the question of why, what, and how I am. My words are.

Words trespass and linger, seeping, creeping. My words are scattered across my body, being places that they shouldn't, I turn my tongues within and search between my shoulder blades for the adjectives I've lost.

They fill and overflow, pouring over from every angle. It's an alien substance. But it is me. It is mine. I claim it, driving my hands down my throat to feel the pulsing heart of it in my lungs.

There is flesh in my language. There is dirt in my words. My wandering vocabulary scatters and multiplies. It shifts in the air and returns to me, changed, moved. I cannot control it. I cannot recognize it.

I write and cannot write. The walls expand and contract. Fluctuating presence.

I asked one of my coworkers as we were rolling silverware why none of my books could be published.

"write weight loss poems."
"what?"
"just tell the publisher that these poems will inspire people to lose weight. they'll publish them then..."

genuis.

What makes a space a presence? What translates personal vision to something of external importance? How can I move my words, extend them out to the world beyond my skin?

I live with my words. They infiltrate, invade, persist.
Let them.

I believe that the purpose or drive within contemporary literature lies in questions of space - this frantic attempt to locate and define boundaries of memory, presence, and narrative in order to define "I." In these forms, I am consumed by th eparadox, innate, that these boundaries are artificial, that an idea has no limits and no inherent structure - when contemplating self and other, how can I construct an outline when my object/subject have no solidity. How do I construct and endorse the space without limits?

Writing is an art of reaching. We do not write about, rather we write towards, tracing a line, building it around an idea, a memory, an experience in an attempt to illuminate itself - not the line, but what the line describes. To discover or reveal, to illuminate and find purpose within its radiant glow.

The langauge, the characters, the plot, the setting - this is how I narrate the page that will be me that will be you.

In fiction we strive to understand without judgement.
In poetry we strive to see and therefore know without understanding.

Claude Lanzmann, the filmmaker responsible for the holocause film, Shoah - a film that strives to work "at the limits of understanding," cites a certain "obscnity" in the attempt to understand events that are and should remain beyond understanding.

My thoughts rest in spaces between understanding and knowing. I can't know things. I can't understand. I simply am here. Between.

My brother is in the hospital. His lungs have collapsed due to numerous blood clots lodged in the branches and limbs of his airways. His blood thins, passes from one body to another. The cells turn, twist, and contract, expressing their pain, hiding their knowledge. I cannot understand and fill the space, the miles between our misunderstandings, with rhetorical musings. My words are there to search and reach, to find him and pull him back to me.

"There is an absolute obscenity in the very project of understanding. Not to understand was my iron claw during all the eleven years of the production of Shoah..."

Claude equates the definition of "understanding" with that which excuse, that which makes normal; a state of mind which creates a sense of familiarity and even comfort, that enables us to forget.

"knowing is different from understanding"

To know is to trespass beyond the limits of understanding. To maintain a kind of blindness, the "purest mode of looking, of the gaze, the only way to not turn away from a reality which is literally blinding"

To truly know, to see an event, a moment in its truest form, the experience as it is or was rather than as we understand it to be. They are two separate intentions. In fiction, we can be transported, possessed by a knowledge that expands and deepens our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. In fiction we are exposed to a kind of knowledge which we take and translate into a better understanding of that knowledge - of what it means in relation to us and our individual perspectives.

In poetics we are also transported, possessed. We are elevated, deepened. We are affected.

I send him poems and words. I have nothing else to send or give. It's all I have and am. It's all we have between us. Words and the memories those words create.

But we do not understand. Rather, we strive to see, suspended somewhere within the process by which experience is known, becoming knowledge, we attempt to assume both the experience, and the way in which that experience is known.

Moved by the limits of understanding, we are transported. "Beyond knowing we are blind, encased in night." It is within this state of blindness where we find ourselves groping in the dark.

Remember moments as if they were words, as if they existed somewhere beyond me. I am lying if I believe this is about literature. I am lying if I say it is about anything else.

To live is to move. To move, we must create and then define a space to move within.

A desk and screen. A bed with starched white sheets.

My life is more like poetry than fiction. I can know. I can't understand. Understanding is not an option - impossible. There are only the words and what they mean, not what they intend, but what they persist against.

I would fly there. I would go there. 2,000 miles across the plains and mountains to his room. But my words can reach further, faster. They do not linger. They persist, stretching until they break, scatter, and realign.

Cookies and Doorways: The Architecture of the Lived Space

2011-02-13T16:44:00.002-07:00

In writing, there is always structure. It's inescapable. The architecture of our culture assumes our language. Every word, every sentence, every comma or period traces the pulsating beat of our reality.

Our cities breathe.

My father sits at his desk, all night, while I sleep under his feet, dreaming.

In my dreams, we move through streets and corners, along sidewalks and alleyways, through open doors and windows, carving exits and entry ways, building walls we then decorate and embellish only to move and dream beyond them. Our ceilings grow and vibrate. The window absorbs the engines and tires shifting along the concrete. The skyline edges towards the horizon; its fingers curled, bent back towards its reflections. Metallic shadows. I glisten in the spaces between.

Moments of dust and light I reflect.

To live is to move. To move, we must create and then define a space to move within.

It is a paradox. That I crave freedom, space. That I chase horizons, that I move through currents and mazes focused on the sky and its dimly visible blue waves, cresting above the clouds.

I cannot be so open. Even the sky has a name. Even the sky has its boundaries. It creates them, pressing itself against shelves of land and sea.

And so, in defining the boundaries of a space, we also define and establish the space beyond it. One walls reveals another, demands that there be another. A boundary implies and demands the existence of another, yet unknown space beyond it.

Space is unique. In its division it inspires expansion.

In my room, dreaming of the spaces beyond it. I imagined monsters under the bed and outside the window. I imagined the woods beyond the window, the trees and its branches.

When my father, the architect, designed the interior walls of my bedroom, he imagined me playing in the yard.

Boundaries inspire space. Pressing against its limits, it inspires the dreamer to dream of what lays beyond. It inspires the dreamer to fill it with words. Until we move. Until we open the door. We create a window, moving out and beyond, towards the space we imagined, creating new walls, new boundaries for us to dream within.

Once there, the space becomes the dream, and, looking out across the horizon, we begin dreaming again - another space, another unknown. The boundary creates the possibility of space, of other, that space that is beyond, that is not us - the space that inevitablely makes us - possible.

Self/other - the lines between us, define us, creating the space from which all other spaces are possible.

We create structures then to reveal and expose, to invite and define. We create structures to deconstruct them, to dream and in dreaming, create the world beyond.

To translate these musings to writing, I write to inspire the reader to dream beyond my words, to reimagine them, deconstructing their supposed meanings until they become something other than what they are, something more, something else.

To live then, involves not only movement, but a dreamer to inspire movement.

There are cookies in the oven. My husband is upstairs, watching the computer flicker. I am dreaming in warm spaces, divided between screens and the electric clock counting down the minutes until I move again, less divided, more focused and with a definite purpose.

There are walls in our home. There are windows. I turn a corner and know that this wall is not a wall, but a door. It invites me beyond it, begs me to move through it, just as a stair case begs to be climbed, and a window commands me to look out and beyond.

There are words associated with things. In my home, the words cease. There are structures that simply are; they exist. I know them; they know me. We pulse together, caught in a desperate current. I Imagine it and beyond it. I dream of the future between the living room and the kitchen. I remember the past waiting for the oven to count itself down to zero.

I stand in many rooms, assuming many forms, dreaming of what lies beyond each. In seconds, I build a frantic but calculated web of thought and memory, driving me towards countless questions and the open spaces they invite.

I dream my world into being and it, in turn, dreams of me.

Higher Education: From Naropa University to Technical Education

2011-02-10T11:07:00.002-07:00

What inspires the student in a person?

I tell my students that writers are always curious, always searching, always questioning. A writer is never satisfied.

As a teacher, I am plagued by my own questions. I wonder, even as I inspire and propell my students forward. I question. What am I moving them towards? I question the purpose, searching for it, reaching.

What is the purpose of education? The language of it is well defined, the rhetoric polished. I could define it, vaguely. I could, even, convince you to purchase it.

I know its importance. I understand its necessity. I am, afterall, encompassed within its systems and language. Its rhetoric pulses through me, echoed in resounding refrains that I repeat, preach, and embody in every class and lesson plan.

I tell my younger brothers that higher education is absolute, unquestionable, a cultural, social obligation, an expectation that cannot be left unsatisfied.

But I can't be sure. I can't know what I drive them towards. A grade? A degree? A career? How do we as a culture define worth? How do we value a life?

In class, we watched a trailer from the documentary, "Race to Nowhere." The three minute segment raises questions that echo and drip from my students open and unwavering eyes. What is it all for? What is it all worth? The segment moves rapidly from questions to vivid illustrations. I respond with my own memories and musings. And the system plays on my natural inclination towards doubt and regret.

Am I good enough? Am I qualified enough? Can I succeed?

And the larger question: how do I define success? What does it mean to be a healthy, happy human being?

Between mandatory essays and proposals, the question drains all my words and scatters them across the white board behind me.

At Naropa, I was motivated by the singular desire to write and by writing, to be heard. Beyond its rhetoric, the need to be witnessed remains the motivating drive behind both the art of writing and the systems of higher education.

I was a student and, encompassed within a community that saw, heard and knew me, I grew. Not because of a degree or even, an education. I learned by being witnessed, fully, by being exposed.

This exposure demanded time and hesitation. I had no goals beyond it. What did I work for? What did I achieve? What did I purchase?

Time. Moments. The opportunity to explore and expand how I understand myself.

Why a degree in poetry?

Because questioning, searching, and revealing, because language, because writing has been the only thing I've ever known, ever loved, and ever been good at.

Naropa is, of course, a very interesting experiment in higher education. Where else can I realize a masters degree in movement and dance based psychotherapy? My movement from a Buddhist inspired, experience orientated school with areas of study geared more towards personal curiousity that career placement towards a facet of higher education that is motivated solely by career placement was sudden and shocking.

I was prepared for the shift in focus. I was plagued by questions. How do I inspire these students? How do I motivate them to focus on the moment rather than the goal?

I begin my lectures with a discussion of foundations. I equate writing with living, with the act of searching, exploring. the very concept of want or need.

There are subject that inspire. There are audiences we hope to inspire. And there is a purpose behind our motivations, behind our aspirations. The purpose is the heart, the current, that which movtivates and inspires.

They know this when contemplating thesis statments, questions, answers, evidence, and suport. The purpose encompasses and encircles every rhetorical exchange. It permeates every debate, every quote, every shift in tone and conversation.

What then is the purpose of our time together? They are purchasing time here at Colorado technical university just I purchased time at Naropa. But what will that time mean? What will occur with it? It is simply time spent, time exhausted towards a yet unknown future? Or should it mean something more?

Our society is one bents towards results, towards goals. The future seeps into our present consciousness, like a parasite. The question persists. How do I define our quarters, our semesters, our lessons? What should our time together mean? What is the purpose behind our proposals, beyond narrative essays, grammar reviews? Is it simply to ensure that a resume is more eloquent? That an employer is a bit more impressed? that our students are more prepared to write summaries and reports?

Or do I want and need more from our time together? Should it mean more, should it matter more? What is the purpose within our time? And of course, is truly worth the price we pay for our moments together?

Education and Writing: Connections

2011-01-23T16:51:00.002-07:00

I am teaching others about writing, meaning that I am instructed to guide them and show them how to communicate, how to interact, interprete, and imagine the world that they build around themselves.

Teaching this, in the traditional sense, is impossible. There are no laws or rules. There is no formula. There are only questions, questions which inspire answers, which define and prove their definitions through the exploration of even more questions. Self and other are defined within this expanding process of inspiration and discovery. It is self-perpetuating, a repeating calculation that, as it expands forming new connections, building more elaborate schemes and possibilities, it leads, inevitiablely back to itself.

Trial and error. I teach them rhetorical tools and tricks to help coax the genuis of their experience into the words. I am teaching them how to saturate, how to translate experience into knowledge.

I don't tell them that this is the goal. I am busy correcting improper punctuation and APA formating errors. I am filling in lost periods and commas, deleting rambling runons, and re-organizing paragraph structure. I do tell them that 50% of what I teach them is wrong, but that I do not know which 50% that will be for them.

I tell them to use the words that surround them. To find words and theories to stand upon. I call them friends and make allusions to childhood excursions, fights, and discussions.

I tell them to embrace their language - the language that defines and verifies their experiences. Self and other. I do not tell them that they are a paradox, an equation that refuses to satifisy its own expectations.

I am teaching them how to understand and manipulate language, this other that assumes them.

Language is not mine and it will never be me. But it is all I have.

For years I spoke my own language, until this other crept within the recesses of my brain, saturating every pore of my body. My skin, my muscles, my bones were bound within this alien vocabularly. It is the other and it defines me.

There is the object and there is the word that the object defines and describes. But I can no longer make this distinction. They are one and the same. Without the word, the object does not exist. But, and here is the paradox, without the object, the word persists, echoes within my memory and builds itself again and again.

This is a unqiue quality of human consciousness. According to logic, to my understanding of reality, the object is and should always be the basis from which my mind establishes the distinction between real/false, between reality/dreaming. The word is an abstraction, an other. And yet, even as my sense pour out of me, shaping the object as it sits in my hands, it is the word I remember, the language of objects and the corresponding words that this object inspires.

Without langauge, without these words to define and describe the object in my hand, there is no object, at least, not in the way my words imagine it.

My reality does not then operate according to scales of difference, of one and other as langauge does. Rather, reality creates a space in which language operates, defining while creating and inspiring its own infinite dimensions.

Imagine that. What was real before language? Before I could speak? I don't know. I can't remember.

I also do not tell them this. In class, I instruct them in ways to build an argument, how to present evidence, explore options, question and debate, all on paper. I give them mathmatical formulas to help them make that translation between their minds and the paper, this process of interpretation that they already know, unconciously. I ask them to draw from their own memories and experiences and to place these findings within the experiences and memories of others to strengthen and reflect upon their own arguments and goals.

Memory is fleeting. It holds the past which creates the present and then inspires the future. Even as I dart forward, my life revolves in reverse, a constant dance in which I tetter between past/present, navigating the gap with absent dreams and mutterings.

Without memory, I am nothing. Or am I? What if others remember me? Logic would say that even if this body disappears, if others remember and continue to remember me, an object, that I would be created in each present moment and then inspired towards a yet unknown future.

Communication is the key to immortality as, without the communication of oneself to create memories within another body, their is no self to be remembered.

Imagine that.

I also do not tell them this. I write about it, scribble it into the corners of their homework assignments I am currently grading as they draft their essays on "Education in America." Many are exploring how and why these systems are failing, and while their topic is the same, their questions and therefore, sentences expand out in opposing directions, intersecting and then branching off until the board behind me is covered with their thoughts and traversing vocabularly.

Why is education in America failing? While they cite disturbances in the family, violence, drugs, economic struggles, and war, I contemplate whether or not education, as a body, gives us anything worthy of rememberance. And I try in distain, to remember a book, a lecture, a piece of knowledge. I can't. I only hold the experience of that knowledge, how I moved through it, incorporating that communication within my own body and self.

I cannot remember facts or history. I cannot hold that body within myself and call it mine. It must be experienced, communicated, shared, in order to be remembered. Otherwise, education as it is classically known fades into a forgotten past, leaving the present empty and without a language to inspire its future.

And how, then, do we teach our children and ourselves to experience education? How do I translate experience into knowledge and back to ensure its survival?

The question persists. I dance in the front of the class to a hiphop song to inspire increased knowledge of grammar.

2011-01-21T00:01:00.002-07:00

It can snow in May. I write it as though it can happen, as though it will, as though it has. The past assumes the present, in lapsing tenses. I decide when it ends, begins. Winter persists and lingers, a sign that I am only an instrument of the reality I bear in whisps and fantasies.

Writing Blind

2011-01-20T23:42:00.003-07:00

I night. Imagine the transition, the movement through the space the sentence occupies.

I've stopped writing, consciously. I forget the randomness of it, the desperate that commands it.

I do not write in any direction. I do not write towards anything or anyone. It is impossible. The sentence extends, and it extends, everywhere. It consumes itself, presses itself outward. The page is saturated as I am saturated. This came from me. This is me. And I feel it, each sylable, braced and tingling beneath my skin.

Is it too much? The only thing voluntary in writing is the stopping.

Luminous, each word, navigates the oceans between us, building within our two bodies, one object, one moment - a shared resounance.

I stopped writing because of time. I stole time, then, in napkins and shards of paper. I wrote into white boards with blue markers, into computer screens. I stole the words of my students, twisted them in language, and scattered them across borrowed bits of minutes and hours.

I night.

In marriage, there is strength, this translation between his language and mine. Understanding without judgement. Understanding without understanding. What is not said, but heard. I do not need words. The air is already saturated with their memory.

I stopped writing.

I was grading. I was crisscrossing between languages, forming questions, answers, hows, whys, discussion boards, and dancing rhetoric. Between education and writing, a glistening maze of questions and improvisations. I admit. I am lost, but they all are still following, waiting. Why can't we climb over the edges, brace ourselves and them press through a self imposed sky? I urge them to stand on their words, catch them and ride. The air is thick, buried in its own resonance. These waves and currents. I would strip and wade through them, pulling myself down, deep down, into its syrup.

The sand is cold. It seeps, filling the deep creases left in my hands and feet.

On my wedding day, I danced and the sky lifted, collapsed inbetween the lines, and filled its own absence with fading laughter.

I feel this when I write, as though the world pulses through me, driving me in all directions. I rise and cross, intersecting with the voices in the air, drawn through their memory.

There are hands, everywhere. Luminous. I facilitate. I night and the waves wash over.

Could I live this way? Submerged and tingling, waiting for the circles to intersect, for time to realize what I've taken?

There were peacock feathers and white roses on the bed and on the floor. I engraved our initials into a block of wood within which, I folded pages for our guests to remember us by.

Those words follow us. I take pictures, at times. Some days it is difficult. It is difficult today. To exhaust myself so that I can make room for the voices that are not mine and the stories they pass through my hands.

These histories. They are mine. I claim them though I cannot know them. Knowing is not necessary in modern literature. Neither is understanding. Hearing is enough. The frantic touch of language.

I am married. In marriage, there are routines and patterns. A way of knowing, of seeing through. Interpretation. This is how I realize a person. Composition. I write because I cannot paint in so many unrealized dimensions.

I night. After work, in glares and currents. Electric water. It glistens as it trespasses and slips back within the labrith it creates.

Our book of firsts. Every moment, remembered and documented. Every word fills our home until we burst, assuming the light we create in our silence.

Writing on Scraps

2010-07-07T12:03:00.003-06:00

In coffee houses, over breakfast, at work, the white empty glare of my computer screen sears, pages. It swallows words, and I am terrified of it, writing into that space.

I can only write in corners - on scraps of loose paper. I don't know why.

There is never enough room - it is not a matter of time, but of space, and those who believe otherwise have never held an idea in a cocktail napkin, in margins, recesses, hidden corners.

I always return to questions of memory, more specifically, memory without consequence - narrative collapse.

Over coffee and wine, cocktailing ideas - stains against language.

Writing in nouns because there is not enough room for direction or action -

birds and gravel roads
tires and overheard conversation
white gowns off white gold dipped aspen leaves
pearls

I spend large portions of time sitting and staring into space, losing time to its folds.

There is a mirror in the bathroom and I try and separate myself from my reflection, distinguishing this reflection from other reflections. Strangers to myself. I choose who I reflect. I remove myself from the action and then, from the room, drifting in memory without consequence.

Last night, a man stuffed $500 dollars in my pocket, for no reason, other than he appreciated the time I gave him.

Questions of purpose, of memory are woven within quesitons of time and space.
This is then not about purpose or meaning, but about time and space in writing - writing time and space and the reality of their absence.

It is fundamental - imagining the void.

And while I have felt the void of time and space (absence), I cannot know it as I cannot consicously remember it.

Paradox - what motivates and inspires thrives in a space wihtout consequence.

Plot = narratives of reason and therefore, consequence - cause and effect - a narrative space, where, the story makes sense.

And the story? Where does the story exist?

Narrative plot persists after interpretation, a way to explore and narrate meaning efficiently and effectively.

Before this, however, there is still the story, stripped of action and direction, it hesistates and persists against the space surrounding it, enveloped and consumed.

How space remembers itself?

How language and the fabric it weaves disrupts or distorts the logical progression of consequence - as we are constantly drawn further and further out, traved into the very edges of space (continuous expansion) we are still connected, drawn back through the fabric of space/time, drawn back into ourselves through memory -

Narrative exists in others, in the process of reading, of being read.
The story lives in memory.
There are 2 dimensions of narration - memory and plot, drifting between moments, space, and consequence.

What completes the orbit?

The question of "what is" resonates through space. It's light echoes, reaching back through time until it twists back, touching itself.

The body defined by displacement - the space I displace in presence - this universal absence is defined by the length of time, waves, it takes for this body to reflect itself.

On a bike ride with Adam. There is a tunnel cut beneath the road at the bottom of the hill. He asks me to go first. He tells me not to brake, but to strike the tunnel and the black with as much speed as I can carry.

The instant I trespass into the black, wings cut my vision. Birds descent from the edges, dozens of black birds, dart before me and preceed me, leading me out of the tunnel. In the light, their bodies dart the horizon, connecting the dots, they simulate a curved skyline.

I imagine space in waves and time as ripples. I don't know the language of numbers of physics, but I still possess a language able to express and thereby comprehend the intersection of space, time and memory, through which my body is defined and known in this moment.

Is the story complete or is there more? To define or explain? How does it reflect itself? Does it know that it is being interpretated?

Question: Where does memory reside?

In my skin, my eyes. It draws itself upwards, through the depths of experience, resonating, reaching back towards me and I resist its gravity.

Paper scraps I could rewrite into a computer screen or glue somewhere. I have 1/2 finished language I could staple together
univerisal accidents - bodies in orbit resonance
Alphabets
God
An article states that the key to a successful marriage is sex and the art of successful arguing.

Bodies in space/time collide, break, and reform. A kind of dance into one another.

Writing: Thinking

2010-06-22T08:57:00.002-06:00

I am thinking about writing. In the back corner of the restaurant, watching zebra print booths through orbed wine glasses. The light is tinted orange neon. The shades are drawn to keep out natural light that would compete with the illusion.

There is a picture of a woman in the corner. Her hands are pressed against her own back, arching it. Her black dress narrows and then, cascades down to the floor where some sudden burst of wind or movement takes it.

The tables are lined in white. I push plates, empty glasses of wine, and silverware to the side so that I can think. THere is an unlit candle on the table. The bottom is stained yellow from the oil.

I think about writing on scraps of paper, cut up wine lists and menus and special cards.

I think about writing and I miss it when there is nothing left to think about.

Rememory.

I listen to 2 boys talk about poker. This elevated conversation which they elevate, random words and make-believe terms thrown into the air, to measure each other.

Yes but do you really understand...

I think about writing, which is all that I really do. I lose my words as soon as they find the page.

I think about it in lines, while I am sitting here, in the restaurant waiting for him, for someone to tell me when I can come out.

I dream about it, about writing stories, narrating .

I remember a couple I wrote in Arizona, or thought about writing. They would come to the pool every morning and stay there. Their skin was stretched and tanned leather, cooked into liquid shapes that solidified in the late afternoon, when the sun went down.

I think about finally writing them and what the effect of writing them would be - while I wait for him.

I also think about a young girl at the pool who timed herself, methodically. She lay - turning one side and then, 20 minutes, the other - a 20 second walk to the hot tub - 10 minutes - 15 second walk and dive into the pool - a sudden chill - 10 seconds tredding water - on her back drifting into the wall - and out - 10 seconds onto her chair and towl - adusting and beginning, again - every hour - its sychronized. She arrives at 9, after breakfast. She wears a red swimsuit that is intentionally too small. When she lays in the sun, she never takes her eyes off of the water.

I can't map or time myself though.
I spend all day, all evening watching the clock at the zebra print walls, waiting for times.

Tables to turn. Every 20 minutes or so. Random, but not random flow of bodies from one door to the other.

Yes, I'll be taking care of you...

In passing.
Times when I am supposed to be somewhere. I can't be lost if I am on time.

I don't know this city; it is impossible to know a city so I try and know myself within it.

I spent a larg portion of the morning staring at myself in the mirror. I jumped on the bed and turned on the radio and watched myself from my reflection.

I tried to remove myself from the action, first, and then from the room.

I try and imagine myself in the horizon, somewhere in the books and magazines I have left scattered across the floor.

I imagine myself into words, papers, exams, questions and answers, the necessary equation - and how do I fit, how do I shift into these lines?

Breaking...

I try and imagine myself not here, not thinking but being somewhere that moves. I try and imagine water, the creek I used to run by that slipped through the mountain.

I try and imagine myself as water, bending around rocks, dissolving the earth - frantic and calculated rushing -

One moment bleeds into the next.

I have nothing to do or imagine. I can only wait and think.

Wandering Back

2010-06-04T10:57:00.002-06:00

I'm getting married.
I teach english and writing at CTU.
Spring and summer converge upon each other; a serrated skyline clings to winter, hightlighting.
Melt/Freeze cycles in the mountains and the pursuit of spring corn.
Dual suspension bikes and clip in petals.
Petals and aspen leaves, wild flower festivals.
This sea of nouns, nouns and adjectives - conventions of grammar balanced across a line, a thin line. Impassable.
Writing as a way of living; living in translation.
It takes 3 hours in rush hour to reach the school where I teach. On the way, I talk into a tape recorder. Write myself in traffic. Play it back.
The sounds of cars and concrete becoming silence (or the other way around). My voice curls around the edges of my brakes, wandering close and closer to the right shoulder. The hum of bass and open windows. The wind enters, cascades.
The desperate and sudden thought of slipping out through my broken door and onto the concrete.
How far could my car go before it realized it had lost me?
These thoughts are not suicidal, just bored. I wonder what it would sound like on my recorder. What sounds I might discover in the last breaths before it scattered on the highway.

Between plans and planning, I find time to write, meaning, I find time to dream.
Contemplating it, writing it - meaning this distant and somewhat desperate motivation tomove forward despite -
looking back.

When I think of writing, what nouns come to mind?
Verbs?
Prepositions?

"Miss Kristi, where does this comma go?"
Something that points, that suspends without revealing.
Writing absence, the loss of time -displacement -
a sudden and jarring observation
the motivation of its design

A friend told me, he writes because he does not know - like a fire, the page sears at the edges of thought.

I haven't written in weeks. I spend days in abstractions before I touch my finger to the coffee table and remember -
I have a body.

It's easy to forget.

At my desk there is a pile of clothes I will not fold or move. I will sit there and stare at it. And then, i will move from the chair to the floor where my papers and books are, scattered.

Yesterday in class, I explained punctuation in breaths and waves.

A period reveals a deep gasp, followed by a long and fluid silence. It gives strength to the silence, verifies it, so it persists throughout.
A comma is short, desperate - like something stolen, out of necessity.
A question mark is high and arched; and awkward silence follows and waits to be verified.
A semi-colon echoes, faint and distant. It repeats a silence lapsed into sound, rushed and frantic, robbed and scattered.
A dash - it's name implies - unconscious movement across or through the precipice. A sharp wind. Like it never happened.

I think in waves when I imagine the architecture of a sentence.
Water as the embodiment of sound.
When I was eight, my mother swam in the quarries - blue water purified by limestone. 50 foot leaps into crystals. A kind of release.
When they closed the quarries for mining and construction, my mother took me there again. She cut a slit in the fence. She pulled me through to the other side. The cliff walls in the light were white, like the water. Illuminated the rocks, the earth buried beneath it.
I would not jump, but I remembered, instead, her jump - the faint splash, the ripples that spread around and enveloped her, the waves the tapped against the edges and echoed.
I thought everyone could hear.

When discussing sentences and grammar, there is a sense of being necessary, of being thought - about
in prepositions - what if I dreamed only in clauses? Would the transitions hold, clarify. define?

Time collapses in spirals, slips through the cracked car door.
A truck in front of me has a metal chain wrapped around the bumper. At the end of the chain are 2 large, round balls fused together, dangling under his lisence plate.
I assume that he is compensating for something - his truck has balls and he has a penis - makes sense...

I'm not sure how this story relates to writing, but it does, somehow. The connection is just hidden, sketched into lines of traffic, lines of dialogue I cannot hear...

Reading Cixous, I dream in metaphysics, in languages I do not understand. I dream in bodies, of bodies, sketchings lines that bend and twist into the sounds of sheets rustling, at my feet -

I remember, in closing, writing my father who came and I took him up to Boulder Falls, where the road broke and became dust. There were other people there watching the water cut through the mountain. The watched through a fence someone had wrapped around the entrance. The edges of the wire and mesh were bent at the seams where a boy had pryed it open and pressed himself through to the other side.

Water and stone and concrete - roads collapsed into water - this kind of roaring.

Women with cameras stared at the boy who was climbing the wall beyond them, climbing out of sight, into the water. The rope curled around the stone, snakes and wire - a thin blue line framed in air.

My father gathered rocks, bits of granite that had fallen off of the mountain. He gathered them and put them in the back seat of my car.

"Do you know what this is?" He asked, "how much this would cost?"
Speaking to the granite countertops in my kitchen - black sparks - the art of imperfection, of numbers.

How much she is worth - the mountain - in feet in inches.

The weight of her flattened my rear tires and we walked back to town...

Altered Books and HTML

2010-02-18T11:05:00.002-07:00

I'm learning how to build websites.

Not by choice, but out of desperation. An endless sea of information - it's too difficult to remain, constantly, trapped in my own mind, my own imagination, when everyone and everything else appears to be flowing, leaking, out of every pour into a white sheet, a blank screen.

Considering how a word becomes a thought, becomes an idea, becomes, something more, something else.

A dark space, I called it, the moment before realization, the moment of translation in which letters on paper become images, memories, dreams, ambitions, actions.

Negotiating this dark space of language, through language.

Building a website, I have two pages: one for design, one for the code or narrative that writes or imagines the design into reality.

I write signs onto a blank screen, most of which, I do not understand. They appear between bars, letters and forms, drifting from left to right.

I press a button, and the code becomes an image, something solid, something else, something in the world. Something of words that is not words, something with color, body, something with structures and foundations, lines and paint, flash intros and columns, sectors and vectors, and, so much more.

How does that happen? The greatest mystery of literature, of the imagination, how a symbol, a scratch against a screen can become something with meaning, something more, when passed through the complex systems of wires and hidden spaces that define our minds.

And, not knowing the rules of what html is or what its language means (only knowing that each letter does something after I press f5), I scribble nonsense into language, strange letters and symbols that mean nothing, seemingly. I confuse the computer. I feel like I am annoying it. Creating errors, but errors that still create something. I'm having fun, hardly being productive, scribbling onto a blog because no academic agency will recognize the amazing and profound consciousness that links the art of writing to EVERYTHING else.

Writing as a reflection of it - the process by which the thoughts of our mind become the images that decorate and define our reality. A dark space, a space where nothing can exist as it must leave open the possibility for everything imaginable.

Dark matter? White space. A page, a website, a book framed against the mind of a person, of millions of people writing their own language, their own space, their own vision, woven within this constantly expanding reality - and the space or frame it occupies, infinite.

I'm thinking about infinity and space, reflections on writing, as I'm ripping apart a book sent to me through Linchpin.com, my friend Rebecca. She sent me the book, Frankenstien, and I am ripping it apart. Deconstruction. Tearing out page after page in alterating patterns. Reinsterting them into the text, scribbling into the margins. Building visible scars, visible lines, alternate structures and images into the text itself. A kind of layer. What a text can mean without saying...

I took a picture of it against a clear glass window at work. The window has a circle cut out of the center, a hole, through which many customers would insert their hands - to make sure it was real. A layering of the scene writen behind it, distoried and clear, looking at them, through them, as the same time, the book balanced between layers.

A man I waited upon told me he was the greatest photographer in America, and I disagreed with him as many of his photographs were left, discarded in books and galleries, images he created, images that he did not discover or capture (which is, of course, what it means to write, to write towards something, to realize and discover, to capture a moment and build upon it, expanding it to a point beyond all recognition.)

Layers of pages, ripped and shattered narratives. I underlined the intercrossing text, words bleeding into each other, narratives woven against fractured lines. Scars against the page.

What does it mean to engage a text? To feel it, physically, emotionally? To let a story touch you?

Reading is dangerous. It will challenge me, alter me. I feel it with each word, twisting my mind and body into new forms, falling deeper and deeper within its folds.

Reading (like writing, an extension of) is not passive activity. It is dangerous. It requires a kind of engagement best known as sacrifice. The sacrifice of memory, mind and body to a story that you build within your sacrifice. Your flesh and blood, scattered across the pages.

And not to be so graphic, a text is an empty medium through which a conversation between writer and reader emerges. It does not exist without this conversation - a kind of engagement with the text on multiple levels. Consequences.

To create meaning, to define the boundaries of a narrative that exists only within your reading of it.

Like html? Possibly, scribbing code into margins and waiting to see what happens, how it is received, interpretated by my server and published to the world.

What it means.

Tearing apart the pages of a book, gluing them back together, to touch paper, touch language and create it, word by word, sheet by sheet against a sea of possibility.

This is not about Weddings

2010-02-02T15:19:00.002-07:00

This is not about weddings.

I don't believe it is.

Everyone needs a place, a space to occupy. Creating the illusion of space or rather, writing - outlining or defining more clearly the immensity of space, to make ourselves more aware, more accepting of it existence.

This is not about weddings.

Adam and I drove to Berthoud to find a woman named Marci who bakes wedding cakes and cupcakes out of her basement. That's where the samples were. The pans and icing. When we found her, tucked behind a road without a sign, at the end of a dirt path. There was a cake in the window. 7 tiers. Which is the only reason I knew it was her.

In the snow. In the country. Without lights.

"No one can make wedding cakes out here. There aren't any businesses. She must have given you the wrong directions..."

Inside. Cakes everywhere. Square and round. And pictures. Boxes of pictures we looked through while she prepared samples. In the basement.

And a sign that said: "a woman will spend 150 hours planning her wedding. A man will spend 150 hours saying: "yes, that sounds good."

"It's true," Adam said.
"It's not true...maybe a little."

A house that wasn't a house. A different kind of space. It smelled sweet, white and iced over. Only from the inside. Warm and rich.

My grandmother baked cakes. A long time ago. I remember the icing. Licking the spoon. For my sister's birthday. She built a cake around a doll. Pink icing for the dress. buttercream for the arms and buttons. She was a dancer. Which is why she traced waves into the cake. Which is why she built it in layers. The illusion of movement baked in.

Cake and samples of cake. And icing. Trying to imagine how it would be. Taste and look. How it could be "us."

Circle or square tiers? Mountians carved into the white. Aspen leaves, yellow rose petals.

Amaretto cream and raspberries.

Layer and layered. One on top of other.

I try and imagine it all together. Coordinating my imagination. The only thing that I am good at. That is. What I excel at. The ability to manifest my imagination in words.

To write. To occupy the a space between thought and solidity, between what is and what is imagined, dreamed.

"I should do this..."

Imagine it. Imagine a color for someone, or a flower. Imagine a sensation and express it in layers of cake and icing.

"Did we decide on something?"

"Why? You already know exactly what you want."

Talking with my hands. Tracing it into air. What will occupy the space between my fingers. How the tiers will twist and build. How high and wide. How deep. The edges of it. How it will negotiate itself. Finding pans. A table. To accomodate its expansion.

Composing.

Writing. Like dreaming. The art lies in the exchange, in the translation and re-interpretation of language into solidity. Something I can touch. I can feel.

Imagine. The flowers. White and blue. Off white. Roses tinted yellow and red. Lilies wrapped in birch and aspen branches. Yellow and blue orchids darting from within. And feathers laced around the edges. Reaching into the sky.

I imagine it. Laced and covered in snow. Snow touched by the light.

This is not about weddings.

This is about space. Questions of space, the space my words are consuming.

This space.

I read once and believed then, that space is only defined in the process of its consumption. The space I consume, the space I occupy.

Extending myself out beyond my body through the power of language, consuming a space beyond myself, reaching into another space, consuming, occupying.

To write: to negotiate space in threads.

What I tell Marci and what she translates and reinterprets in icing.

In strings. Vibrating.

I was told by a friend that space exists in vibrations, frequencies otherwise defined as waves - meaning, in movement. Altering the rhythm or tide of ones movement shifts the boundaries of space, creating an alternate reality. A new ending or beginning. A way to imagine how something could be something and everything. At once.

I could consume multiple spaces. Moving within vibrations that shift, that twist and bend.

How I could be married in winter. In spring. How the flowers would change. The inspiration behind it all.

I feel as though my life is moving towards the point of collapse. With each sample. Each check. The reality of it is encompassed in a beautiful kind of fracture. Building, in layers, each dream until it falls within its own masked conversation.

"I just want to see how you would interprete us."

I don't move beyond it. The cake that is. Sitting there, for hours, with Marci discussing the details of baking it...how to best express myself in frosting, in this moment...what I mean. What I am trying to say...

In words, this is not about weddings. Its about cake. It is about cakes and writing. Parallel universes.

Strings.

This is not about weddings.

Space is only something I imagined. I found a cardboard box, filled it, and inserted that space into time.

It will still be there.

This is not about weddings.

Swimming

2010-01-23T00:20:00.002-07:00

A friend told me over a series of peach bellini's that I needed to change the texture of my voice - not the tone, the texture, meaning the sensation it inspired.

Jumping between air and stone - a state of being completely weightless before the violent sensation of connecting with the earth, connecting and sinking into it. The sensation of being consumed.

Try water, she said.

Meaning, to embody the sensation of being weightless and the sensation of being consumed. To let go of my body and feel the conflicting sensations of being pulled from multiple directions, of being pulled upon and pushed against. The sensation of pouring out or spilling over, of expanding, while observing with absolute clarity, the outline of my body against the water.

It makes sense, water, that is.

We had spent the afternoon trying on bridal gowns. Because I am getting married and until I am married, all I will be is this constant unceasing process of imagining it into reality. Mirrored reflections of possibility. I still can't imagine what it means. Tiers of lace. I never minded tradition before now...

Flowers and silk veils. A birdcage. Encrusted sparkles, like rain, suspended against the fabric. What it means to be strapped in to a gown.

And feel beautiful.

I didn't take it off for an hour. She held the train and I skipped between the aisle, between mirrors. Imagining it. The sensation of being touched, of being held by that fabric, outlined. I felt solid and pouring over, a pouring into.

Numbers. I have spent days calculating. Food and beverage costs. Favors and alternations. Shoes and accessories. Music.

I met a couple in a restaurant celebrating their 37th wedding anniversary.

"We walked down an open field."
"Picking wild flowers and sticking them in my hair and around my neck."
"Our friends each brought instruments and played for us. Whatever they could find or remember."
"And then we ate and it was horrible. The cake that is. Like cardboard."
"So that's our advice. No matter what happens. Have a good cake on your wedding day. At least one that tastes good."

Cake. Tiered. Over lace I bought from a fabric store and drapped across the tables.

My friend offered me a vase and to show me a place where I could pick a few yellow flowers. She promised me over malbecs and cheese plates, watching the cooks throw away a plate of fries we gladly would have eaten.

"You guys should come by sometime."

And then comes the story, the story I was trying to write before I was getting married. A story I couldn't make myself believe - but that I kept writing. It began circling into itself, sinking deeper within its center, condensing beyond recognition. A hole burned through the page.

Expanding out. Jumping. Leaping, is what she said. Leaping from one point to another, one voice to another.

Change your texture.

Meaning touch, transforming touch. How the story extends itself out beyond the page, what it grasps, what it clings to - the sensation of being pulled against.

I wrote a story about a woman who meets a man who tells her he is god and asks her to love him.

What does it mean, to be swimming - swimming being only a more poetic kind of drowning. Sinking and fighting against the sinking that embraces, consumes, that will not let go.

Change your texture, your words that is, how they form, how they move.

Imagine them drifting. Now sinking. Now rising. Imagine them diving, the narrative. The water. Cold and colder, dark. There is no light but there is color. Everywhere.

Could she tell him no? She can't love him if she can't have him, can she?

Sacrifice and touch, the sensation of being seen...wandering through dresses looking for the one I can see myself in.

The mirror doesn't lie, does it?

And falling, not like sinking, faster. I can feel everything, even the light, solid against my body.

Lace and lace, gowns, I loved myself in it - in lace and satin. The feel of it against my skin.

He will see me. Here. In this moment.

I rehearse him, how we met, falling down the mountain. He ran beyond me, looking back. Not knowing where the trail turned into the river. Cascades.

Climbing after him. I remember. Sitting with my legs hanging over the edge, watching the water foam and arc.

Do you like it?
It's beautiful.
You don't see this back home.
No, you don't.

In winter, when I believed him. I drove in flurries. Drifting in the black, turned white. White upon white, washing over. Rivers of snow and ice. Trees like arms. Shadows solidified in the cold. Into the mountains. I found him, waiting on the porch. He closed the roads behind us. He told me I was home.

The texture of writing it - the believing like the falling, how I fall in and out of a story that is mine but that I cannot claim yet.

Its a question of texture, of touch, when he asked me to love him and I said yes, not knowing.

Political Landscapes

2010-01-08T10:46:00.002-07:00

I don't understand politics.

A frail sign of maturity - the freedom to admit that I do not understand nor do I care about politics.

This does not mean that I do not strive for justice, that I am not aware of injustice, that I am blind to the constant struggle for equality, freedom, and peace. It means that politics do not promote what I strive for.

My first introduction to politics involved heated discussions with my parents over food. I refused to eat. They demanded I eat. I cited all the reasons why I shouldn't have to, while they, in turn, utilized different forms of guilt and shame to encourage me to eat (other children would be happy to have that - starving children - but i'm not starving), emotions that lead to humiliation, fear, and the resolve that when I came into a position of power I would inflict those emotions on them and see how they liked it.

What politics was or appeared to be at the point (what it still is, for some reason) is a futile conversation between parties, futile as the outcome is already predetermined by pre-established structures of power. It's amusing to a certain degree; a scripted conversation written to create movement, drama, interest, and to promote a greater and expanding audience.

Watching politics unfold, I feel as though I'm witnessing an awkward and stale soap opera. That, or the painful kind of conversation that takes place between a parent and a 3 year old - it's entertaining, but it doesn't get us anywhere.

I'd like to think about this for a moment - the getting anywhere. Most of my college days I spent attending meetings, watching reports, marching, participating in politic debates to the best of my ability. My participation was defined as a vocal kind of watching. It was full of emotion and intention, but no movement, no transformation. Like entertainmnet, like imagination. Something necessary, something I needed, but something that I couldn't define, shape, or comprehend.

In my adult years, still watching, waiting for the conversation that would make something happen in my life and in my world. I watched the same conversations erupt and fold around the most important issues of our day: the war, hunger, energy crisis, global warming, women's rights, student's rights, etc. etc. And there were elections within these conversations, and debates, and struggles -the struggle for money, for power, and ultimately, the right to proclaim victory over another person.

Then I began skiing, I began camping, I began living for and by myself, living for my family, protecting and extending my idea of family even as I found myself wandering further and further into the wilderness- a kind of wilderness where those resonating conversations are silenced. There is only breath, the weight of my body, the sound of the earth rolling beneath me, the sky, and the beautiful, harsh reality of a space that knows me in flesh and blood, that knows me and not the society or culture or cause with which I associate.

When exploring the maze of politics, I've attempted to take the focused mentality I possess in the wilderness, the attention and patience I discover with each step, each movement, and look forward, looking for the "what it all means." And what it all means is that we have overcomplicated everything.

By engrossing myself in politics, by blaming politics, left and right, I don't have to take responsibility for my own actions, how those actions are actively shaping my world. I don't have to acknowledge that I have made mistakes, that I have failed when I needed to triumph, that I have fallen short, and that I have allowed someone else to live my life for me because I was too ashamed to take responsibility for it.

Life is actually very simple. It demands strength and vision, the ability to know yourself, to take responsibility for yourself and those you love, without excuse or regret. It demands the ability to care for oneself, to carve your own path, your own history within this great streaming of histories all converging together to form the present moment.

Our politics do not move, they do not inspire movement. They hold us back. They enable us to deny that ultimately, what is real within me, is entirely in my control. I can care for myself, for my family. I can build a life for myself that is complete and full without the assistance of government aids and programs, without the battery of hopeless conversations. The government creates structures for stability, and it is my responsibility to move through and within those structures, weaving my own life, my own vision.

I don't understand politics as they do not promote the movement that defines myself. Politics do not determine how I interact with others, the character that I build, the conversations I inspire.

I do not understand or care about politics, politics being men in suits enacting living memoirs (what they wish their memoirs would write) rather than living their lives in each moment.

I do not understand politics. And I will fight for the rights of those dearest to me. I will fight against injustice, but I will continue moving further and further away from a culture that would rather watch life than live it.

In reality, stripped and raw, there is only this flesh, this voice, this vision - I cannot lose it. I will not abandon what I know to be real to the illusion of power.

Reading the words of my friends, wonderful people who strive towards a common vision of self-sustainability and self-reliance, I'm forced to proclaim that politics has failed us and that only intimate conversation between individuals removed from outside influence and power structures will enable us to realize our true potential. Take congress for a 10 day winter backpacking expedition in the rockies and I guarantee you, the bullshit will evaporate over night.

After Years

2010-01-07T14:55:00.002-07:00

I spent my new years on a couch in the basement of a man who rents his basement to strangers who are friends with my fiance and now, my friends - a couch and a large red fluffy ball type seating - thing. In front of a t.v playing mario cart on a nintendo 64 with adam, drinking champagne out of coffee cups from the gas station - nice champagne too.

My trip into the mountains began with a kind of pain, this hammering deep inside my head. Not all together bad, just odd - the sensation of being asleep and awake at the same time.

Skiing behind Adam, falling down after him, feeling lost and a bit desperate.

I can't control my legs or arms. My body persists in spite of me.

Falling over cliff bands. Fuck it and tracing my own lines beneath him.

The pounding, deepened, like sinking, not under water, but something thicker.

And sleeping, or rather, collapsing into bed with my wet clothes still on, sinking into the mattress, the blankets, the cold creeping up my spine.

No I don't want any water, let the fucking altitude win.

And the cold, wind and the ice, where I can't turn and feel myself slipping, into trees and ditches. Oncoming traffic. Closing my eyes and hoping that someone sees me, that someone moves me. I've given it up. The seeing that is.

I don't look in the mirror all weekend. Except for new years, which I spend on a couch in a basement, playing mario cart with a dog that isn't my dog, but a dog that I know is watching me when I sleep.

The snow I think, building up around me. The snow I found on my car, the snow that raised the earth closer to the sky while allowing me to sink deeper beneath it.

Thicker than water.

And walks at midnight through a lake, frozen, I think. Snow and ice beneath my feet. I was the only woman who followed the boys through the brush and into the river stocked with fish.

Stocked?
Yea, for years I think.
Why? Thought this was great for fishing?
It's better now.

Snow is thicker than water, more dense. The consistency of being constantly between. I hold it and it melts into my skin.

I haven't looked in a mirror in days. 23 inches of snow overnight at Berthoud pass. Crystals frozen to my face, my chest, under my clothes, under my skin.

The air crystallizes in my lungs.

Skinning higher.

I taught a man how to ski powder. I told him about grapes and coins. To believe that he is squishing grapes with his toes (to keep his weight forward) and that their is a coin, a quarter (since he had big shins) between his boot and his shin, and that if the coin were to fall, he would die.

Dramatic but effective, turning. Learning how to keep weight back but momentum forward, always searching for the fall line.

There is no control in resistance, only in the surrender, the giving up, the giving into, like falling, like flying.

When I first learned how to climb, I would wander to a bouldering spot called Elephant Dome before work. I would run down the bike path, turn right, climb an overgrown cliff, clinging to branches and rocks caught between the earth above and the earth below. I climbed a 15 foot wall of rock, practicing moves and transitions, focusing the sweat away from my hands. I climbed out of fear and escaping the fear I climbed higher, blanking out, waking up 13 feet off of the ground - not moving up or down, just clinging. Inbetween.

And then the inevitable letting go. How I closed my eyes and let my fingers slip, let myself fall back into the fear, driving me up, not resisting but embracing it. In black. Waking up, later. Feeling alive in the black, the sensation of knowing it, seeing it, and keeping it- the fear that is, buried.

I don't know what it means. The idea of sacrifice, of what it means to let go, to realize that letting go is the only option left.

In the mountains, I don't know if I am real. Every moment building to this has felt like a dream, something I imagined and projected. I am still imagining new ways to tell it, to shape it. Writing myself over and over and over until I disappear beneath the pages of a hundred uncompleted and forgotten stories.

Writing.

What does it mean to be seen and to not have any control over how I am, seen?

The giving up, the giving into.

I am not sure if I am real. I know the snow is, though. And I find myself in the lines I carve through it, lines on stone, like lines in paper.

Like water only thicker.

The sensation of drowning in words (I never thought there could be too many), and the collapse into the night that tells me I am new and something more than I imagined I could be.

2009-12-25T23:09:00.002-07:00

merry christmas

there's a fire and a tree. a tree with lights with boxes and paper stuffed beneath. two wine glasses on the end table, half full, soon to be empty. a dog and a man curled around me. the lamp and the kitchen, chocolates in tins and cookies i've hidden from myself, for my own damn good.

i walked into a store two weeks ago to buy dog food. blinders on. dog food. only dog food. and then, there was music and a soft glow, this electric spark. sparks and glitter, ornaments and glass, mirrors.

christmas being anything that reflects and sparkles simeltaneously.

And i forgot the dog food and purchased exactly 170.86 of christmas. All ornaments and statues that resembled snow, what I found building around me in white folds.

I bought a christmas tree and dressed it it christmas, in lights and sparkles. I placed it next to the window, next to the television which is next to the desk where I write, where I should write except it is cluttered with boxes. Overflowing.

I wonder why I feel so drawn to it - sparkles. the snow collects outside my window, casting shadows, reflections, against me.

they call it snow blindness, how the light reflects against the white, striking the eyes, searing. I am obsessed with it, watching it, obsorbing what it reflects back.

it's christmas. my first christmas in colorado, in the snow. my first christmas together and alone, against lives, finding my life buried in facets, crystals settled on the earth.

rolling.

Before christmas, I went skiing. each turn stripped the mountain raw, revealing rivers of ice reaching back towards me. Beneath the ice, rocks and trees, half buried and still breathing.

I set off a small avalanche, cutting too deep. Riding the snow that fell from the earth and drifted into air.

Dreaming of snow. My words swim in white, in folds, pages of white separated by lines, traces I carve into, out of.

it's christmas. it's all about the snow, how it feels consuming me, my vision, melting into my skin.

my fiance is next to me, sleeping, dreaming with me, of snow.

all things that sparkle and reflect. visions of my body, buried. Snow drifts. what lies beneath.

merry christmas.

2009-12-20T20:42:00.000-07:00

Speechless

2009-12-20T19:02:00.002-07:00

I'm getting married.

I think.

Like falling.

In rings. Sparkles. Diamonds, like snow, the snow I cut with my finger, that melts into my flesh.

Predawn. I climb a mountain. In stars.

Stars in the sky, earth, how silver it is - everything, wrapped in night.

Skin on snow. My heel shifts and rises. Friction. How things hold, grasp and ultimately, move.

Maybe I'll turn around. The cold and the dark, building to a point fixed in my throat, my lungs. Swollen fingers beneath my gloves.

Breaking through the trees, like breaking through. Each step sinks deeper. Not stepping. Shifting. Gliding.

Dusty, the dog, is in front of me. Snow on his back, swimming in white.

Purple cuts the hills into the black. Black then white then pink. Stars rising and then, falling.

Snow on snow.

wandering.

Are we there yet? The top, I think. Where we can see the ridge, consumed in pink, a pre-blue glow. And the lines, sketched into the white, through the rocks, cliff bands and trees. How the earth twists and turns. In gravity.

Standing on the tips of trees. Breaking the surface. A sea of buried rocks. How the earth rises. Molds itself against the sky, setting.

And then he is kneeling and I am falling and by falling, I mean falling back. My skis are tangled in snow. An extension of my legs, buried deep. Deeper in him.

I wrote a poem, once, about falling. The sensation of being pulled through sky, of standing still and collapsing, at once. I traced that sensation against narratives of collapse - a falling out like a falling into. The poem became longer. I couldn't pull it back, not against the force of that many words, driving me deeper and deeper.

I wrote him into the pages, removed any pronouns of him and refocused him into the tides of the white, the snow beneath.

And I said yes. To falling, and he is drawing me back, turning me to him. Into him.

The page beneath.

And there are rings, like snow, not from the sky, but from somewhere closer, deeper.

After the falling down, there is the falling into, the descent, our lines, traces drawn into the snow. Rings of light. Reflections against us.

2009-11-30T09:16:00.000-07:00

Scribbles at breakfast

2009-11-30T08:52:00.005-07:00

I like cereal. At least I know this much about myself. The way some people need coffee or tea. I need cereal. And not just any cereal. Ones with sugar. Lots of sugar. And vibrant colors and textures. Pink marshmellows and sugar crusted blue and red balls. Yellow stars, green hats.

I have at least a dozen half empty boxes of cereal hidden in the drawer where I keep the pans and micellaneous baking supplies I never use. I eat a bit of each at once, a handful of each into a bowl every morning.

I can never decide on one, and they taste so much better together. Some combinations at least: like reese puffs, lucky charms, and peanut butter crisp.

I would and could eat my cereal every meal of every day. I leave empty bowls crusted over with sugar on the table, the end table, the coffee table. I snack on honey combs and mini wheats while I write and read and make myself comfortable on the couch in front of the window and the desk where I am supposed to write at - to be more professional.

My computer is on my lap. A bowl of cereal perched upon it. A dog asleep next to me. I'm still wearing what I wore to bed the day before.

And, I think I am a writer, blindly throwing words out into space, hoping that they catch, somewhere, touch and connect with something, to create something more than themselves.

And I think about cereal when I think about writing. All of them. At once. And I wish my stomach could expand to allow more in, to ingest more of what I feed into myself, more words, more time.

I wish that I could paint or draw or build something with color, something that catches the eye and the imagination at once.

I remember my money-making job that I'll enter upon in an hour or so and the dog that still needs his walk and the boyfriend who still needs comforting, after hours, to be sure this life, this interpretation of a life, is exactly what he wants and needs. (How would I possibly know the answer to that?) And the car, stalled out in the parking lot that needs a fuel filter, a fuel pump, and maybe a dozen other things to motivate it into driving itself down the road. And the website that I read for hours last night, on cars and moving parts, how to read engines and transmissions, codes, spark plugs, a maze of wires and fibers all reaching towards a single spark. Ignition! And how I can't wait to stick my head deep within that network, play with those sparks, find where they meet, where they fall apart and how I can rebuilt them.

I dream about the mountains. Feel the weight of the sky, that endless blue pressing down against my chest. I wish I could open and let it in, let it consume me. Filled up with cereal and other sugared thoughts of days and hours and minutes left open and uninterpreted.

I wish someone reads me. I hope someone reads me, sitting here, at a loss of what it means to live and write and make the two come together within the space of one human body. Burst at the seams.

I wish my stomach were larger.

I wish there was more cereal in the world.

There is a definition for it...how things fall apart

2009-11-29T00:07:00.003-07:00

A definition for love in the presence of time:

the need to be remembered, what slips into shadow, an echo, there is a creek in the lake that keeps rising

Definitions of love in the presence of time:

loss as transformation, as re-interpretation, how to read between the lines, I know her because I know the space she displaces

Love in the presence of time:

the dissolution of words and presence, a kind of absence, what fills the space left to mis memory

Time:

mechanical fibers, complex equations, equations that manifest, subtract into and multiply, how these wires, these electrical sensations spark and grow, acceleration, power, control - the illusion of, how these disparate parts assemble themselves to compose a moment in the act of passing.

Presence:

the first time, I looked into the mirror and saw myself as reflection

There is a definition for it - these vibrations, whispers that manifest as words, building into stories, characters.

The tow truck driver, an old man with a strong jaw and black hands, said he would never leave me alone on the side of the road.

I sent my boyfriend to our home and I prayed to another man to deliver me beyond the road.

How things fall apart.

Something gives, catches, and lets go - a miss fire, clinging to an open hole, an absence.

And then, there is nothing. Except the road. Like a scar stitched into the landscape. Towering walls of granite, where the earth breaks and rises, meeting sky.

Rolling. The wind.

Alone in questions.

I began a book a week before about a man who tells me he is god, a man I sleep with, a man I cannot bring myself to love. I called it confessionals and wrote myself into it, a special kind of fiction, living in questions drawn from reality.

What reality?

Falling into fiction. What is god? Love? How could I write god into my narrative forms? Writing my body into his, hers? Is it possible to imagine the spaces a story could evolve within?

I said a prayer to god, for him/her to help me get the car through the tunnel where the tow truck was waiting to take me home.

Two men were in the backseat when the engine cut off on the highway, a man I love and a man I know, and I was silencing them because I was praying to a man I have never known or loved to move me beyond the exceptions of this narrative.

The power stops, cuts off, the acceleration falls, buries itself deep inside. I feel myself, falling.

When I was a little girl, I remember long hallways without windows. Hard benches. And rooms that opened in circles of color and light. I remember voices between walls. I remember statues, like shadows. There, I prayed to a man to deliver me, not knowing what it meant. Being delivered. Like being saved. Like being loved.

In circles. Considering salvation, what it means, against the side of the road, alone in my stories. Like the silence that follows my words that fall into absence.

There is no time in loss, in the moments that follow absence. There are only questions, waiting for the car to start, for the tow truck, praying that it comes, that he comes, touches me, makes this weight collaspe, this story twist and fold. In my hands. Together.

Wishing, like telling, a story that persists against reality.

I have questions about fiction, about time, what it means to wait, to hope, to persist against the reality of its impossibility.

The men in my life. The ones I love, I know, and the ones who deliver, who listen in that space of absence. Beyond fiction. And do I need them?

The words I give to them. This presence and their collapse.

2009-10-28T11:24:00.000-06:00

2009-10-28T10:23:00.002-06:00

It's snowing. Outside. White. I watched a tree break. It's limbs swing and drop to the ground. A sharp sound resonated against the ground. Saturated.

I feel saturated. Watch the sky settle. This emptiness that resembles sound, that echoes, permeates, consumes.

Last night, dreaming of snow, I ate chocolate with a friend and we talked about the witness, about communities of experience, intertwined, connected, interdependent.

We talked about trauma, this kind of isolation defined as mismemory, a way of forgetting that leaves the self frozen, paralyzed, unable to assume a past or a future, only a repeating gap manifested within the present.

Over chocolate pots with heavy cream and toffee pudding. Prossecco bubbles in my throat.

I defined trauma once as a dark body, a language of hidden, forgotten spaces - a place that words would not go, an experience that words could not satisfy.

When discussing recovery from a traumatic experience, particularly recovery from post traumatic stress disorder, emphasis is placed on a kind of telling, on realizing a way to narrate and thereby claim one's story, one's history as one's own. The difficultly in this process lies in the inability of words within traditional narrative and cultural structures to expand their meanings beyond social accepted norms. There are never the right words, never enough words. There are never or never seem to be words that can accurately describe the traumatic experience as it is an experience defined as being beyond or outside of "normal" human experience.

The problem is not within the words themselves, but within our ability to comprehend them, to connect with another individual's experience and expand upon it. Healing or recovery from traumatic events then lies in a kind of storytelling, an expansion of language through the contruction of a community of witnesses. The power of the witness lies in his or her ability to listen, to engage a story and make it come to life, to solidify its reality while simeltaneously assuring the narrator that he or she is not alone. The circle of a story teller is a unique way of expanding human empathy and comprehension through the mediums of language. It utilizes the ability to not only listen and understand, but to engage an individual's story and compose a series of intersecting connective tissues through the very natural human instict to tell, to write, and ultimately, to be heard.

This what language does, what writing does.

There is an ongoing conversation in literary studies exploring the relationship between a reader and a writer. Utlimately, what do they mean to each other? Do we write for the reader? In short, we do not write for the reader but to the reader. We depend upon each other. And as a writer, the single most important task of my craft is to engage my reader in conversation with my text, to have them connect with the story, the langauge, the characters, the setting, on multiple levels and to then reimagine them within his or her own experience. Without this process, this conversation, the story is forgotten, lost, abandoned. Without a reader to listen to my story, it dies, it fades, as though it never happened.

Writing then, as a craft, is not limited to the art of pressing a pen to a piece of paper. It expands, defined as a process, the process of building connections within an architecture of experience. It builds communities, and creates the possibility of new realities, a new language.

Still eating. Spoons and cream. Vanilla gelato and toffee.

Often, recovery for individuals suffering from PTSD involves a kind of isolation, an isolation similar to those experienced by individuals suffering from mental illness. An individual is set aside, alone, engaging his or her story in an enviroment that classifies their struggle as a disease, something which is criticized, avoided, forgotten. Victims are distinguished and separated from their communities (often by their own choice, a consequence of their inability to connect their narratives within a larger cultural narrative); and then, after enduring this process of withdrawl and isolation, forced to live within a tightening circle of fear, anger, and disgust, a circle that has no end, no beginning, and no direction.

Isolation and silence dissolve the self, removing any and all hope for resolution.

Healing lies in the witness, in the ability to build expanding communities through the power of narrative.

To explain:

I listened to stories from several individuals. Their names title their narratives. Carolina. Kenny. Some were veterans, others civilians. Their stories, however, revealed a landscape torn apart by the very concept of war and their own powerlessness to control or explain where their lives had lead them.

Aften listening to them, I asked their permission to write their stories to help me comprehend and engage my own voice and past with theirs. I wrote and read my story to them, my story bound within theirs. Two stories, two separate narratives, linked. These kinds of connections lead to not only a deeper comprehension of the multitudes of human experience, but can facilitate healing through the process of story telling.

Story telling. Narrating over desert and bubbles, across wood tables and the promise of snow lingering within the cold gusts seeping through the door.

"It could be genius," my friend said. "Or it could be completely meaningless. I suppose the difference is between you and the story."

Drafts and Musings: sacrifice

2009-10-21T08:16:00.004-06:00

"I want to be a mother."

I confessed this to my mother on the phone. I interupted her story about the dog, or work, or whatever it was that she might have been discussing, and told her.

"I need to be a mom, soon."

I'm not sure when I forced the concept of motherhood out of my mind. I'm not sure when it crept back in.

I believe it ended with the car. It began with the dog.

Yes. The Dog.

I was a gypsy for a while, meaning that I liked to wander. I worked in a bar and I lived in my car for a few months, partially for financialy reasons, and partially because I just wanted to see what it would be like. I think motherhood ended with the car. The car is where I dreamed about Colorado and mountains and graduate school. The car is how I got there. The car is how I worked, wrote, ate, and played. I loved my car and needed nothing else in the world.

Then, when I made it to Colorado, I didn't need my car anymore. I walked everywhere. I ran everywhere. I lived in the mountains for the mountains and I wrote them into my notebooks, daily.

Then I had my notebooks. I carried my notebooks with me everywhere. Even on hikes, even on expeditions, on long runs. I kept a piece of paper and a pen on my body. Like an extra limb, a point of extension, of contact. I aspired to be a writer, a teacher, a mentor. I worked, hard. Hours upon hours filling my notebooks. I gave them everything that was within me and in return, they gave me stories, ideas, a career.

Then there was a boy. The boy taught me how to ski. I climbed mountains with the boy and he called me "his" because I was the only girl ballsy enough to follow him back down. The boy read my stories, lied and said he loved them, just to make me smile. The boy drank wine with me on the living room floor. The boy said he loved me and asked me to move in with him. Then, the boy bought a home and called it "our home."

And then, there was the dog.

I got the dog after we moved in. And immediately, I began to feel this burning inside of me. I began to think about "our" family; and the more I thought about our family, the less I thought about the car, the notebooks, and the more I thought about him, the dog, and yes, babies. I thought about babies. I watched them play and I held my dog and my boy, and I loved him with everything I had. And there was this burning that began in my stomach, just below my belly button. It spread down, across my thighs, my legs. I was a consumed burning.

But how would I write, how would I work, how would I pursue a career in abstractions while establishing this new personality, this new self growing inside of my body? If it did happen, if it was my reality, this burning, would it continue, like a fever, residing in my flesh permanently, like a scar, a mark seared red? How would my perspective change? What stories would I write, what language would I adopt, would I even remember how or why I needed words so badly?

Could I write sacrifice?

I read once that writing is not writing for writing's sake, that is to say, for the sake of the words themselves. Writing is simply a method, a means to inspire movement, to create the space through which movement is possible. Movement is the breath that defines and articulate our existence, the space within which our narratives manifest.

Re-Writing the Fall

2009-10-06T10:09:00.004-06:00

Wandering into a space versus inhabiting that space, consuming that space. Questions of location and meaning framed by the fluid and permeable reality of time and space. Questions of fiction and character dictated by the language of flesh, of memory.

Transformation in narrative like transformations in space - there is always movement, always.

Like I have been moving myself, wandering, across ellipses and gender, across questions of snow and ink of body and mind.

I wrote a book called "The Fall." And i have been struggling to define and describe its transformation, it's evolution. It began with a fall, a blackout that expanding and curling through space wove disparate narrative lines. I imagined myself into a shape, a body, a conscoiusness within that black space separate, distinct.

It began while bouldering (climbing without ropes) at the Dome. In climbing, in narrating the movement of my hands and feet, my body rising into the sky, I lapsed into a trance. The face of the rock expanded, opened, each round indentation, each perfectly sculpted limb - spaces where the mountain opened for hands, for fingers. I slipped myself inside and soared. 10 feet. 15 feet. I lost count of the ground, focusing only on the sky between my body and the rock. Then I stopped. Slipped. Back into my body, separate flesh, manipulated between the concrete reality of stone and earth.

With my focus went my holds, the direction of my movement shifted before me, pulling me, down. I couldn't climb higher. Frozen. I couldn't climb down. Frozen. I watched the earth rise higher. I let go, falling back into the dirt, watching consume me.

I woke somewhere in time. Where it was dark and the sun had drifted beneath the hill. And I felt very fluid, very alive in falling, in letting go, in being consumed, taken, held against the earth.

And I wrote a book, a poetic narrative about falling and climbing that moved in lines, twisting, until it wasn't a book about falling and climbing, but about skiing and mountains, about a man and a woman, about how love and the bodies through which we love, can be a kind of landscape a way of falling, of being consumed.

I wrote this book for years and years (3 years to be exact). And then, finally, almost by accident, I removed the character the book was supposedly for - the he, my lover. I took his pronoun and added a 's.' And he became she, became the mountain, the sky, the landscape, a different kind of lover to wander through and within - the self of the narrator projected out, turned within. A kind of self love, deeper and more powerful than I could have imagined. The story about falling and climbing became a story about transformation and evolution within the lines we trace, the lines we leave behind to mark our passing. The roles we perform, our characterized emotions and genders, collapse within the space of the page, leaving only marks, the black to outline the shape of our bodies, our meanings, our journeys.

I wonder then, holding myself within its countless drafts. How will it transform, how will it continue to move and shift within the space of my life, my narrative, my constantly expanding and contracting vision?

I write myself into a body of motion that I cannot escape or claim to understand. I only write the downward motion, this possibility of transformation through the process of consumption and self-discovery.

2009-09-12T13:25:00.000-06:00

Ink

2009-09-12T13:11:00.002-06:00

considering ink and the process of being "inked" into being - like a story, a narrative, being stitched into the tapestry of consciousness, of memory.

I've been reading a bit of math lately, mostly string theory, because I do not understand numbers and so, they can mean whatever I like, whatever I feel is appropriate for the reality I am dreaming into being.

I'm fascinated by the absolute certainty and fluidity of inked numbers, of lines as they are translated from thought to paper.

I want to dream in numbers. I want to think in vectors and arcs, in equations and the necessary possibility of infinity.

I am in love with String Theory.

Raising the question of presence and body in narrative.

Reality persists in strings, in layers of meaning and contact, defined in relative vibrations (touch) - this multipled expansion and division of self, breathing within narrative lines (the chest of this equation rises and falls - extension?) narrative lines / narrative dimensions.

Raising the quesiton. A body within a body - noticing how time/space twist, warp and contort - numbers are soft to the touch. I bring my eyes into these pages and build each sentence within my memory - committing, revealing...

the equation / the sentence - stripped to ink = the space beyond

the most beautiful part of my body I carved into myself. Inked flesh. An old man who saw it told me I had bigger balls than a fucking sailor to sit through it (the inking process). I thanked him for noticing it - the most beautiful part of me. I keep reconstructing the process. I build, tracing paper, stitched into my flesh.

Growing and curving - I sense my expansion though its lines.

My lover closes his eyes when he fucks me from behind - (he can't stand to look at it)

searing -

I am saturated in ink, in narrative lines. I am building with each breath an expanding and deepening body of threads, connecting each moment within a tapestry of light - I burn into my flesh - tracing the length of my spine, between my thighs - where i broke into the mountains -

(what is the name of its narrative - names?)

fiction is a plurality - narration in strings - bodies of water and space -

a cry in silence

2009-09-09T12:55:00.000-06:00

Building characters in light

2009-09-09T12:26:00.004-06:00

I am saturated by a unified love for all things larger than life, things which I can touch, things that touch back, full and wet.

Perhaps this explains my sudden and uncontrollable fascination with drag queens.

I look in the mirror and cannot recongnize my self in the afternoon light.
At dawn, there are only shadows, walking memories, dreamt into flesh, into solidity.

Architecture exists in structures, structures designed and bent in order to move us through its disparate parts - a kind of unification through extension.

Unfolding within the pieces of my self, scattered and folded across these dream scapes.

I had a dream that I made love to a woman, and, in loving her, I became her. Expanding her, filling her, until we became each other, and I could no longer separate our bodies. She was in my lungs, my chest, my skin.

I imagine her into my lover, who looks down above me, with eyes and hands that want and move and imagine this body into being.

Is this how I write a character? I build my characters from the outside in - a kind of layering that presents the question of necessity, of how much narrative can be stripped away - of what it leaves behind.

And when I create this consciousness, this voice, he/she echoes, resonates throughout my body, and I consume him/her and become him/her, blurring the lines between us.

Fiction is dangerous. I will lose myself within the folds of its pages. I will drown myself in ink. I will press my lips to words that bite and stain, and feel this burning within me.

Possibility. Why I became a poet.

I imagine myself again and again.

If I could be a man, I would be tall and dark with a lingering shadow. I write him, make love to him, and brand him with my pen.

If I could be an animal, I would be a cat, a stripped cat, imagining I am a tiger. I would live in closets, eat my way through walls, and wade in pink fiber glass - leave scratches on the ceiling to make them all wonder...

If I could be a woman, I would be this streaming, this deepening sky turned upside down, turned and rotated into proper alignment with the mountains, curving between my thighs. I would be waiting for the snow, waiting, bent and folded into a person-shaped shadow. A dot. Where my sentence dissolves my body and extends.

Negotiating collapse is a kind of release. In collapse I dissolve mediums into points of entry, a kind of saturation I liken to an avalanche. In motion, snow is neither a liquid or a solid; it exists between mediums of touch, becoming touch.

Standing in character against the white. A man died here and everything that was not snow fought for his body, fought with skin and metal, carving and finding only an outline, an imprint left within the sheets.

The maniuplation of the imagined space. The occult trace, remembing the diaspora, this hesitation within the fault line before the first and final breath. These memories I translate to early morning - pre-green layers - light settles and stains the outline I leave.

Reconstruct myself in layers in facets - to narrate presence - negotiating the space between streams - what I dream into possibility, framed against this touch, this fantasy.

I dreamed in light in sound. Words touch and kiss, the backs of their resonance. An echo frames a shadow, bent into the touch.

Writing fiction is a process of extension, separation, this fracturing and scattering of self across the fields of its construction.

Questions of architecture and extension. How deep do the dimensions of my flesh recede. Vibrating strings.

Read about electrons, how one can be in multiple dimensions of space and time at once - imagine my body divided, extending beyond the limits of your touch, being a past, present, future, limitless in its expansion.

I feel very large in my electrons, and filled with the light of their voices, manifest.

2009-09-08T12:25:00.000-06:00

Dreaming of Snow on Bear Peak

2009-09-08T12:07:00.003-06:00

I dreamed about snow, how it would feel, swimming in this - ocean. I imagined a billion fingers, fingers like stars - forgotten spaces.

I dreamed myself again and again against the fall, against the memory of what this landscape becomes, settled within rock bands.

I went on a hike with a friend to the top of bear peak. We ran the mesa trail, stopped running when the earth bent towards the sky, and began climbing.

Words saturated the early morning airs, resonate against stone and foilage.

The trees openned and closed their arms, like windows, the sky shattered and reassembled its boundaries within these gaps. A jagged panorama.

We talked about direction and movement. We talked about our relationships, about our relationship to each other, as we continued, wandering.

We talked about the irony of our art - writing ourselves deeper into the questions that first inspired us, questions that we explore without the intention of answering.

We talked about what it means to be women - to possess and claim the duality of ourselves, of our bodies. Of how we embrace and express the feminine and masculine qualities of our selves in the mountains, and of how, we can often be forced to choose who 'I' am, who 'I' express, who 'I' embrace. Can we be both?

Explaining our intense emotional attraction to drag queens. Understanding our undeniable attraction towards fractured narrative lines, towards structures that turn in and devour themselves. Expressing our need to write, to speak, to be heard, to travel - and could we, wander across the world? Engaging conversations, transcending narrative lines, extending our bodies our mind across boundaries of language, space and time.

I remember, a goal I set for myself this winter, to claim some kind of autonomy in my wandering. To find the strength to be alone, to guide, and to establish my own unique presence in the landscapes of my wandering. To not be the girlfriend or friend, following behind, but to lead, to create the circumstances through which my life could unfold within my own hands.

And she responded, that if we were ever force to leave our Adams (our lovers are both named Adam), we could move to San Francisco and become drag kings.

We could...

We dreamed this, together, scrambling over red rock, watching our feet and hands, trying desperately to avoid stepping on the lady bugs who infested the cracks and gaps between stones.

"There must be something on the rock, something we can't see."

There must be, to bring them all here, to this exact point in the sky.

2009-08-28T12:06:00.000-06:00

Questions of Location and Space in Writing

2009-08-28T11:33:00.003-06:00

These are the worlds we write ourselves into:

The world of the past; the architecture of memory. What moves us, shapes us, defines us. These unseen and unspoken forces. The unspeakable story. What is hidden, and what is a constant haunting.

The world of the present moment; this world of texture, sound ,place, of characters and light. What populates my work and the process of my becoming. This business of seeing, of noticing, of realizing the world held within each moment of our passing.

The world of the imagination, of what is possible. To extend into an open space, a space left undefined; a space of seemingly endless possibility where all possibilities converge and exist simeltaneously. Writing as a means to imagine and move within that space.

Speaking then of the architecture of our writing, this question of location and space that populates our work. Where is the author in his/her writing? Where is the reader? Where is the story itself as it continues to be re-interpreted across the boundaries of time and space?

In which world do I place and define my work and my self as its creator?
In which world do I imagine my reader?

The answers to these quesitons emerge in shifting moments of blind scribbling. Contemplated, examined, rehearsed, and yet, open and ultimately unanswered.

In short, where am I writing to and beyond the extension of my mind and body, where do my words, my thoughts, my memories exist?

What the limits of our bodies and how far can we extend ourselves beyond our physical limitations?

What are the limits of touch and sensation?

I could imagine touch as I imagine light. This constant force that colors and populates my reality. This force I know and acknowledge but whose presence remains hidden. I imagine light to be consuming, a body that devours mine, that envelopes me, that defines me. And touch. When looking within, towards the landscape of my own body, I touch myself and thereby define myself within that moment of contact, of sensation. My body is designed to absorb and realize touch, to recognize it, to embrace it. I am touched and in being touched I am defined, shaped, seen. I exist within the sensation touch inspires.

And my words then, as extensions of my being, of my person, reach out and touch another, move another, across time and space.

What is the location of my words. What world do they reside within? Perhaps, it is not a world, but a state of being, a haunting constant which consumes, builds, and defines our bodies across multiple dimensions. Think of language, not as a body, but as light, as a force that moves, consumes, and defines our reality - this unceasing present where past and future touch and expand across the planes of our imaginations.

Perhaps there is no one voice, no single space a word occupies. My words are borrowed, stolen, shared, and in a process of constant expansion within the body of my humanity - a fluid body without location, without space, only sound, only possibility, and the movement that possibility inspires.

Into the Mountains: An exercise in the memory of self

2009-08-10T11:22:00.004-06:00

I assume space, the space I am becoming. I carve my words into my flesh, becoming stone, becoming air.

I had loved a woman once. She was electric water and danced in sequins and heels. She drank wine by the bottle, took off her shoes, and leaned against the street lamp for support.

I remember her in sound, in shades, consumed against the landscape of these glaciers, these snow covered ridges.

I love her in mismemory. I love her in sound, the way her body moved, the way it loved, the way it twisted itself into these narrow spaces, between walls and clouds of smoke. I loved her legs, how she moved without ever touching the ground.

She doesn't belong here, in memory. She is somewhere else, still twisting, still drifting. Forgetting.

A kind of transformation, a kind of movement, up and across this tundra.

I do not recognize myself. I am strange to myself, occupy a space I could not imagine, that I did not create. I fell into space and space rose and formed this sky around me, carved this landscape beneath me. With each step across the tundra, rising higher into the sky, I feel the particles that compose me begin to divide, to separate, pull apart, drawn towards another, distant presence.

This is what I do, now, lost in landscapes of mismemory. I hold her in my arms. I press her close to me as if I could consume her, I could take her, reimagine her into me.

But she is already forgetting. And she is somewhere in the past, a body, a space I cannot return to.

I touch her in memory. A kind of absence carved into my skin. I think everyone must be able to see it, to know it.

Higher, there are glaciers in July. The sun and ice build turqouise rivers, a cascade of damp wind, cutting my lines into stone. I walk on all fours, my fingers clinging to a body dressed in rock. My feet pivot, turn above the divide. Whispers. The wind imagines me in extension and draws me across the ridge in folds.

I contemplate silence, a kind of silence she could never imagine. I contemplate movement and touch simeltaneously and am moved to realize, to embrace our reflections cast across fields of snow.

I was she and she still moves within me, this constant burning, the space she used to occupy.

Wander.

I loved a woman once. We are electric water. These shadows framed in snow and sky.

Home: A Possibility

2009-08-06T15:00:00.003-06:00

A word invites the possibility of space, a space left open, left undefined.

What is home?

I recently created a home, this space I forged out of memory into a body, a place, a location. I can hold this space, this kind of memory, this thing as permeable as water, as air. It slips through my fingers as it rises and consumes me. I build a home out of wood, of stone. I build it in flesh and in memory, the memory of touch, sensation, and the promise of growth, of possibility, of movement.

What I have created is not a structure, at least, not as I would understand it. It has no solidity. It's lines are bent and curved. There are only points. There is only light. There is only the possibility of connection, the thinning reflection of a structure dreamed into and then out of this possibility.

I went home last week, back to Ohio. I remember its trees. That color green. I hadn't noticed until, driving back to visit my mother, I remembered that back in my home, in the mountains, there is only blue and sun, and the sun has seared the landscape, a dry and rich red to accent the skies pressed against the ridges.

Home is a state of mind, a kind of chaos. Connections severed and reconstructed. Imagined. There is the sensation of loss in returning, a kind of forgetting that only deepens and enriches the memories I mis interpret and cling to.

I dont' have a house to return to. There is a building with doors, three doors, and too many windows. And a yard where my brothers have set up a makeshift goal and net, a circle with stones and sticks, a bonfires where they sit at night.

It isn't mine. I can't remember it.

Looking at my mother is a way of forgetting. Her touch. I can't help but love her. Still looking back.

We lived in a basement. The six of us slept in a single room with two beds between us. I remember. Above us, my mimi who let us stay in her basement, bred ragdoll kittens. There were 8 adult cats and their kittens, sometimes totaling more than 20, at any given time. And I would sneak upstairs to play with them and to help mimi hold them down under the facet when it was time for their baths.

I don't remember this new space, this new home. My home is transient, like air, it drifts, lingers and collapses, taking the shape of its point of departure.

How long before it becomes another memory, another point, collapsing within its own reflection?

I am reminded of Indira's Net. This map of the universe. Each point in the web becoming a crystal, a point of reflection reflecting each and every other point within the sphere of its own light. This multidimensional body, how one becomes the other, becomes the other, again, repeating cycles of rebirth, invention, transformation.

I look in the mirror my mother hung in the bathroom and imagine what I reflect back, back against it - what I am becoming, in this space, this moment, translating every moment before, building possibilities like definitions. What is. What was. Reflections endless against the skies of my unknown horizons.

I find home in conversations. In open spaces. In skies. In rocks.

Stepping out into my mother's yard, looking into the faces of my blood, scattered. It is a party for my brother's graduation. There are so many of me, so many people I remember, I hold in my memory. Looking beyond, behind me, searching for the woman I was when I was this home, their home. No one saw me and I was not home. Not even in the presence of my mother, my father, my family, did the possibility of home, of space, of movement, emerge. It was stale, stagnant, a frenzy of isolated spheres, each rotating according to their own rhythm.

It was the city. It was walls, these knitted spaces, closed from within. And feeling this, stillness disguised as chaos, I was removed, distant, alone.

The question of home relates then to the question of self, of location, of site. Threshold. What is home? Home as threshold. Meaning a word. Meaning touch. Meaning a wound. Meaning a point of entry.

The lived space.

Writing myself to possibility. Remembering, where I open, where I fill, where I carve myself into the landscape of my histories.

I remember an island on Lake Erie I named my mother for.

This is an island. This is a lake. A ferry takes me to my island buried in blues, in blacks. On this island where I found home, first, through my mother's mother who lived here and prospered. Where I lived in a cabin made of spiders and worked and lived and wrote.

This is not the island I returned to. It is angry and distant. The waves rise and linger against the sky, drenched in clouds. I fill my head with rain, with thunder and sink beneath the sand. How I remember. Silence, a forced silence, the kind that lingers, that sticks to the air, to my skin and stands, straight.

The memory of me cast a shadow across the lake. And I miss it then, the idea of home, which I translate to mean touch, to mean a point of entry, a way of beginning. My life in flashes. A story I can't believe because I lived it, because I am here, again, composing it, again, this time in words.

There is a picture of me my father kept, a picture of me dressed in a blue tutu. There is a blue bow in my hair. I am turning, twisting, practicing in front of the fireplace. I remember blue, then, in stages, and let it flood me, let it bring me back to myself, this self, in rivers. Where I belong.

Home is then a river, a color. It marks the space, the point where I open, where I enter my self. Repeating.

Mis-memory: an exercise

2009-07-28T14:13:00.003-06:00

Write a space you cannot return to - and that was the exercise, the question to write through. Writing the forgotten space, the lost space, the space without history, without a story.

Considering the language of dark spaces, the language of memory and of mis-memory.

I am drawn again, etched into the spaces, the landscapes of the earth. What I cannot exhaust.

Considering the silueta's of Ana Mendieta. Considering the shape of her body, the texture of her body as it was pressed into the sand, into the mud, into stone. As it became stone, mud, sand. As it assumed the space it collapsed within.

I made my own silueta. I followed a creek path, found a bed next to its currents, and lay, face down into the mud. I felt myself sink, slowly, as the earth took the weight of my body and grew into and around my flesh. Welcoming. It was a way of coming home, of returning to a space I forgotten to remember, lifetimes ago.

I tried to write this space. I tried to write in, as Cecila Vicuna once commanded, in blood. I tried to write this language of touch, the space between, where two bodies collapse into and assume one another. I tried to write the earth, the mud, the skeletons of insects, dead leaves, a smell that lingered over me for days after.

I outlined the space, the impression I made, not in words, but in twigs, leaves, flowers, webbing, dirt. I watched this extension of my body shift and transform. Not me. No, no longer me, but something, someone else, composed in a different language than I spoke, than I understood. For the first time, I could not claim what I had created. It, this impression, this image, this moment was not mine and I watched it be taken by the creek bed, rising, displacing, slowly filling the edges, opening the form and dissolving the borders of sticks I had compose to define this body.

The waves washed every trace of me away until there was only the earth and the space where I used to be.

A story removed. A language of the body, of the flesh and of the earth. What demands touch, what demands flesh over language, over words, over metaphor and symbol. A language, a story, of mismemory.

What does it mean to remember, to witness a story, a life, a body? Considering my own flesh, my own body. I comprehend my own limits, my own shape and form through touch. It is only when I am touched and an external force that I am aware of my body, that my body begins and ends within that touch, that impression. I navigate my body through touch, though impressions, this uncesasing conversation between spaces and bodies.

Considering the memory of these touches. What defines, what determines and establishes the shape of our very beings. What is this memory, this kind of narrative written, not in words, but in flesh.

I look at my hand and there are curves and there are scars and I lift up my shirt and there are indentations, spots, cuts, covered in ink and tattoos. And there are holds in my body, places the wind finds and reminds me of. And there are stories in each layer, each cell, each molecule. There are stories, countless narratives, within each instant, each breath carries with it the resounance of a thousand voices all crying out at once before fading back into the empty space of the page.

What is a body?

Memory.

A body remembers touch. It writes its stories in flesh, in blood, in skin, in color and texture, without purpose, conclusion or beginning. Its stories exist only in moment and writing only in moment, its body appears and then transforms, unceasingly.

Writing a space I cannot return to. Writing the memory of my body just a moment ago. In these passing moments, it has changed. I have been touched elsewhere, made aware, and have been moved. I have breathed and in breathing my chest has risen and fallen and vessels have opened and blood has rushed in river, erupting chaos in my brain still teeming with thought and ideas lit up like city lights. My skin has fallen off and replaced itself and my old body, the body i cannot return to, is scattered in fragments, in pieces across the earth, already being drawn by the wind out through my window and into whatever lies beyond it.

Selah Saterstrom once described this forgotten space as a slab, a point of entry, like a wound, like a word. A special kind of collapse, of indentation - a kind of scar, a kind of marking, a way of remembering a body as it passing into the dark.

How will you write this body? this moment as it passes from you memory? How will you remember your flesh, your blood, your body in this moment? removed.

Beyond the Page: Selections from a Panel Given at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Summer Writing Program, Summer 2009

2009-07-24T10:04:00.002-06:00

Beyond the Page: Structures of Repetition

(note: This lecture depends upon the guidance and words of James A. Yorks, an architect, who donated his time and his vision to this ongoing project)

the space I write myself within must be multi-dimensional
repeat
the space I write myself within must be multi-dimensional

(take a piece of paper; crumple paper; place on desk in front of microphone)

Write this. If I asked you, how would you write this so that I could remember it through your memory, so I could rebuild it from your words?

There are 2 ways to do this:

write the object,
write the space the object consumes/occupies

Question. Which perspective do you write from? Do you write the object in space, or do you write the space the object occupies, the object consumes?

And the greater question: does a language, a perspective, exist that enables you to embrace a multi-dimensional space?

Considering the architecture of the sentence, the architecture of memory – the architecture of a lived space, a space that moves, breathes, expands, contracts and is always in a state of constant transformation.

How do we write the lived space? How do write a story, a narrative, a poetics that lives and moves beyond the page, beyond our bodies, extending out into the past as it creates the possibility of a new, yet unimagined future?

My father was/ is an architect. I say is because he is and was because that is how I remember my father the architect – in the past, I was nine, crouched beneath his drawing board, late at night, hidden beneath my blanket, thinking I was invisible, all the while, listening to the sound of his pencil tracing lines into the pages above me. I have always associated his art with a detached, obsessive preoccupation with concrete and rules. He wanted to create stability, order, to define and compose his reality within the lines he drew (at least this was my perception). I wouldn't understand, nor could he understand how I could choose to be a poet, an artist, to live seemingly without a fixed point, without any solidity to guide my journey, to give my vision form, substance.

Despite our differences, despite my own desire to break free from border and boundaries, to challenge and dissolve conventional structures of meaning and language, my questions of my poetics always lead me back to him – to questions of structure, questions of thresholds and transitions, failure and construction, points and lines, metal, stone, an idea as a process of translation – how to make an idea flesh, how to make flesh, ink, how to make it move, make it breathe, make it inspire.

I spoke with him, interview style. It was poetic. The writer and the architect. I would construct my world with lines that would be words that would become stories. And he would construct his with lines that would become metal, stone, wood. I would reach my hands out through my eyes and touch my words framed in memory and sound. And he would reach his hands out and make my abstractions solid.

What I realized in our conversations was that my understanding of the space I wrote within was confined to one dimension when, beyond my limited perspectives space extends to an infinite number of planes. I would like to read for you selections from our interview and to see what this might inspire about writing and the art of communication.

Q: In writing we have points of entry (thresholds, membranes) points where the reader enters the story, points that are closed – where or what are these space in architecture?

“I wouldn't call a structure open or closed. I would use the word exposed – exposed or concealed structures...we close our buildings in a way. We leave some rooms, some hallways, avenues, but the most interesting part of a building is its construction. There are so many structures within and around a building – like the scaffolding, or the internal wiring. A question now in contemporary architecture, is what is a building, and can you leave it completely open? Can you let those hidden/closed spaces be seen? Can you let the skeleton be seen, exposed so you can see the wires, the molding, the pipes, the frame...this is deconstruction, this is open – leaving the building in a state of being build, when you allow the skeleton to be seen – when you don't hide behind your design...being an architect is all about making a choice: what do you hide and what do you choose to reveal?”

Q: What is architecture?

“to me I am designing space. When I see a site, I see space. What I am trying to do is enclose the space via the structure. It is the manipulation of space so as to move your perceiver, to inspire your perceiver to move – that is architecture – to create a living structure – a structure that is an expression of the space it occupies, the space it is constructed within.

What is writing?

to write is to create movement, not to create something, but to compose and illuminate the space within which movement (meaning imagination, breath, creativity) are possible. The page below you is the formless form. It lets you say everything.

Reconstructing the page. A field of white, this alien landscape made more beautiful by the breath of human contact. The word is the most gentle and profound touch.

How do we transform our writing, the meaning of our writing? By reimagining the space my words occupy. For my book, focusing on ski mountaineering, I did something to change my perspective and open my story and myself to new dimensions of meaning - I turned the page THIS way, I turned it sideways. Landscape.

Space became a dominant unavoidable presence – a presence of absence. I constructed my lines and left them in a state of being constructed. I revealed the page, the hidden or closed spaces. My words became windows, wounds, carving the space below them, revealing not only a journey through white snow fields of the mountains but a journey through space of the page. It was so easy with all this openness to fall into the space below – my words became a distant whisper, an expression of the space below them. They opened to the white, inviting the possibility of reinterpretation, creating a space within which anything is possible, space to breathe, space to move, space to think, to speak, and to be lost within – the freedom of thought and body that only space provides. My work then became an experiment in space, or the movement through space.

In writing myself into the page, writing the page itself, writing the space that my story fell within, I achieved something new – a broader more expansive understanding of how I write and why.

I would like to leave you with a quote quoted from my father's notebook – a quote that he cannot remember the source, but has memorized none the less:

“we create points in space to create lines which we then turn into places. We then maniuplate those planes into volumes which create forms. Proportions create shapes and shapes are familiar. We have multiple forms – irregular and regular forms, centralized forms, linear forms, radial, clustered, grid, geometric edges, surface forms. The question then is how do these forms come together to create the space that defines our design?”

The Architecture of the Lived Space

2009-07-23T10:25:00.005-06:00

Living is defined as the possibility of movement - that unique set of circumstancial touch that makes movement possible, that makes movement a desperately intimate part of our bodies and our selves.

Considering movement. I am in a constant unconscious state of ceaseless movement. My body expands, contracts. It grows, breathes. My chest rises, fall, parts of me die and fall off of my body only to be replaced in memory by another, stronger, younger, more able, more dynamic.

I am consumed by the possibility of my own becoming, my own limitless capacity for transformation, for movement. I am choreographed chaos, this dance of sound, of space, tracing lines around my shadow, lines that become words, that become sound, that become a body - my body, alive in touch, when it is touched, when it is moved.

I think about these things when I am walking, when I am climbing, when I am falling down an unexplored lines carved into snow fields. I think about my body when I am most removed from my body - when I am walking along a narrow ridge. When I am struggling for breath, dangling hundreds of feet in the air along a glacier, clinging to rock through the thinning layers of my skin.

Caught somewhere between light and stone, I think about folds. I think about a piece of paper, how I fold one corner, how one corner collapses into the other, into the other, and how the sky seems to fall within this new space, to define and fill this space I create that I imagine is now blue, is now red, burning in the alpine sun.

I always bring paper and a pen whenever I wander into mountains. I wander with others who don't bring paper or pens and who find it silly and excessive to stop every so often to sit on a rock and write the process of ones wandering.

"I'm committing you to memory."

Writing. The landscape I walk within becomes the landscape I write becomes the landscape of my memory, of my body, of my becoming. I turn the page sideways. In this way, I am the mountain. I am the sun, the sky, that color blue I cannot exhaust no matter how many times I remember it.

The space I write within must be 3 dimensional.

I found in writing that I could only write in moving, in walking, in running and folding my body into these spaces of constant expansion. What Stein called and kept her continuous present. The ing of my writing.

I write then in stone, in snow, in granite veins, in glacier tides. I wrote a book once I didn't publish but kept in my pack, under my skins, wrapped in canvas, next to my shovel, my probe, my sleeping bag.

When I graduated last week from my MFA program, I reflected that I had written my body as I had lived it and I had lived it into writing. This transformation. I remembered a woman in neon lights wandering the streets of a city in the east. And I remembered a woman in predawn skins walking into sun, the delicate sound of her body sinking, each step, into the snow. And to celebrate this revelation, I climbed a ridge and sat, drenched in sky, and watched the glacier below me melt into rivers. I thought about lines, I thought about architecture - the lived space, what it means for a space to have the room, the permission to move as I have kept and practiced this ability, this freedom.

How do I move? How do I extend beyond the dimensions of the page? How do I write this body, all of its lines, its possible becomings?

I thought about Bhanu Kapil and the humanimal. I thought about deconstruction. I thought about memory and place and this space, this moment. I thought I heard my body expanding into its folds, where the sky folded into the mountain and the clouds traced the ridges of my spine.

I had moved. I could see it, the lines I took and carved to mark my passing into this exact moment, the moment I held in my hands.

From one body to another, one moment to another. This space moved and I moved to occupy it, writing the space I consumed.

I write in abstractions grounded in stone. I write in abstracted between certainties of work and morning and taking the dog for his run and cleaning and scribbling between moments and work and "is there anything else I can get for you ma'am?" and the wine and cleaning and my skis and climbing shoes and a pack with my paper and pen kept out in the open for me to notice when I come home after work smelling like pasta and garlic bread and wine drunk out of styrofoam cups and straws and "baby take a shower before you come to bed I don't want to smell that on you..."

And there are mountains I can see from my window and there are words I can write there. And I know and tell myself that there is all the space I need, living in those folds, where I can disappear where I can climb myself into a story worth writing, worth remembering.

Living space. I wrote before I could remember what it was I was forgetting.