Miss Havisham's backyard cottage

In the slaughterhouse of love

In the slaughterhouse of love, they kill
only the best, none of the weak or deformed.
Don't run away from this dying.
Whoever's not killed is dead meat.

~Rumi

Florence & The Machine - Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)

Ciphers

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation."

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

Feast for the eyes

Karlie Kloss photographed by Patrick Demarchelier for Vogue, February 2010

"I wish someone would tell me about me."

 Bette Davis, All About Eve

Rolf Armstrong, 1930's

Nature Girl / Ice & Fire

journeys

Bad habits

Clowning & Clara Bow

Lady Butterfly in love

From munieca

A poem for the moon in its full glory tonight

All night I could not sleep

because of the moonlight on my bed.

I kept on hearing a voice calling:

Out of Nowhere, Nothing answered “yes.”

~Zi Ye

A Color of the Sky

Windy today and I feel less than brilliant,
driving over the hills from work.
There are the dark parts on the road
when you pass through clumps of wood
and the bright spots where you have a view of the ocean,
but that doesn't make the road an allegory.

I should call Marie and apologize
for being so boring at dinner last night,
but can I really promise not to be that way again?
And anyway, I'd rather watch the trees, tossing
in what certainly looks like sexual arousal.

Otherwise it's spring, and everything looks frail;
the sky is baby blue, and the just-unfurling leaves
are full of infant chlorophyll,
the very tint of inexperience.

Last summer's song is making a comeback on the radio,
and on the highway overpass,
the only metaphysical vandal in America has written
MEMORY LOVES TIME
in big black spraypaint letters,

which makes us wonder if Time loves Memory back.

Last night I dreamed of X again.
She's like a stain on my subconscious sheets.
Years ago she penetrated me
but though I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed,
I never got her out,
but now I'm glad.

What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle.
What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel.
What I thought was an injustice
turned out to be a color of the sky.

Outside the youth center, between the liquor store
and the police station,
a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;

overflowing with blossomfoam,
like a sudsy mug of beer;
like a bride ripping off her clothes,
dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,

so Nature's wastefulness seems quietly obscene.
It's been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.

~ Tony Hoagland

The moon through dead trees

 

 

I hold against all modern religions that they have provided their believers with consolations and embellishments of death, instead of giving them means, in their heart, of living with it and coming to an understanding with it. With it, with its entire unmasked harshness: this harshness is so tremendous that precisely with it the circle is closed: it leads back to the extreme of a gentleness that is great, as pure, and as perfectly clear (all comfort is murky!) as we have never suspected gentleness to be, not even on the sweetest spring day. But toward the experiencing of this deepest gentleness which, if only some of us felt it with conviction, could perhaps gradually penetrate and make transparent all the circumstances of life; toward the experiencing of this richest and most wholesome gentleness humanity has never taken even the first steps - unless it be in its oldest and most unsuspicious times - the secret of which has been almost lost to us. Nothing else, I am sure, was ever the content of the 'initiations' but precisely the communication of a "key" that made it possible to read the word "death" without negation. Like the moon, so surely life has a side that is continually turned away from us, which is not its opposite, but rather its completion to perfection, to fullness, to the whole and full sphere and globe of being.

One should not fear that our strength would not be sufficient to endure any experience of death, even though it would be the nearest and most terrible; death is not beyond our strength, it is the measuring mark of the brim of the vessel: we are full whenever we reach it - and being full means being heavy...that is all. I do not wish to say that one should love death; but one should love life so magnanimously, so without calculating and selecting, that love of death (the turned-away side of life) is continually and involuntarily included - which actually happens invariably in the great motions of love, which are impetuous and illimitable....It would be conceivable that death stands infinitely closer to us than life itself....What do we know about it?


And love too, which mixes up the numbers between people for a game of nearness and distances, in which we enroll only insofar as the universe seems so full and there is space nowhere but in us. Love too takes no account of our categories, but snatches us, trembling as we are, into an infinite consciousness of the whole. Lovers do not live by the segregated Here; but as if a separation had never been undertaken, they lay hands on the tremendous possession of their hearts. Of them one can say that God becomes truthful to them and death does not harm them: for they are full of death in being full of life.

- Rilke, Letter to Lotte Hepner (1915)

(Quote found on Blind Pony Books)

Bad (r)omens

The other night I spilled an almost-full glass jar of Celtic sea salt on the floor of my kitchen. I knew there was some superstition about this, but I couldn't remember what exactly it was, or what I was supposed to do to counteract it (throw some salt over my left shoulder to spite the devil). So it looks like now, as penalty, I'll have to wait outside the gate of Paradise for as many years as there are grains of salt. Or maybe I will just "shed as many tears as may suffice to dissolve the quantity of salt which I have spilled." Either way, that's a lot of years, or a lot of tears.

And perhaps too the spill represents the decay of a Bad Romance.

We 'el tel you the reason
Why spilling of Salt
Is esteemed such a Fault,
Because it doth ev'rything season.
Th' antiques did opine
'T was of Friendship a sign,
So served it to guests in decorum,
And thought Love decayed,
When the negligent Maid
Let the salt-cellar tumble before them.
- "British Apollo" (1708)

Well. As a man thinketh.

Butterfly burning

She lived, more than most, in a world of make-believe.

I have felt the swaying of the elephant's shoulders

I dreamt of an elephant standing before a small pool. There was a line of elephants, adolescent-sized, all standing in front of pools, and people would square off before them for some kind of hand-to-hand combat. It was my turn, and I said to the people around me, "I would rather hurt a human than an animal," and then something about animals' consciousness being pure. I walked up to the elephant and gently extended my face to his, offering soft sounds and words. He came closer and our energy simply melted.

Then the elephant stood up on its hind legs and rested its front feet on my shoulders, like a puppy.

The day after the dream I saw this post on The Lipstick Diaries and felt inspired to find myself an elephant necklace. Of course I went straight to etsy, and after a fair bit of contemplating, decided on this cute little guy.

The colors of the Dark One have penetrated Mira's

    body; all the other colors washed out.

Making love with the Dark One and eating little,

    those are my pearls and my carnelians.

Meditation beads and the forehead streak, those are

    my scarves and my rings.

That's enough feminine wiles for me. My teacher

    taught me this.

Approve me or disapprove me: I praise the Mountain

    Energy night and day.

I take the path that ecstatic human beings have taken

    for centuries.

I don't steal money, I don't hit anyone. What will you

    charge me with?

I have felt the swaying of the elephant's shoulders;
    and now you want me to climb on a jackass? Try
    to be serious.

                               - Mirabai

Idea box

Lake Coeur d'Alene, Idaho

There are a number of model T's sitting on the bottom of the lake, due to people in the early 1900s who would drive across the lake during the winter time in order to save half the distance in getting around the lake. When the ice broke, so did the chances for getting across. Also, there are some steamboats on the bottom that had been burned when they were no longer used to ferry people around on the lake. Divers frequently visit these ruins on the bottom.

wellsprung//waters

I run from place to place ~
because why not?
My apartment smells of sweet potatoes
& sandalwood.
I take my tea strong
and my chocolate dark.
This night feels like oh so many other
nights: The premonition of spring,
the tease of night-blooming jasmine
on the tongue. The past is becoming past.
The darkness is receding into
candlelight. There is only one here
who knows me, & only one I
know. I remember every night in this
one: the plain familiarity of strewn clothes
& clean sheets. A face in the mirror that must
be my own. The tender imaginings of
solitude that never tire. A million lives
crushed & scattered like perfume
petals on my pillow. A recurring dream.
A reflection split in two. A gaze I return
unflinching. All of it contained in the vessel
of this night, in the barrel of solitude
deep and beckoning as a well.

Messages from the Underworld

The morning's dream themes:

A baby girl I had forgotten I had, and left in the care of N for her first delicate months.

{You indeed have to take care of your newborn self}

 

A back yard apple tree bursting with ripe fruit. I was warned by the landlord that the last tenants hadn't picked the apples when they were ripe, so now, he claimed, they were wild and inedible. 

I tasted one on the sly: Ambrosia. 

{What we make up 

vs. 

what's true}

lust to live

"Why "2THESKY" ? "To" or (the Japanese character) "ニ" are not correct. It must be "2." As I have said before - photographs are an imitation of reality and life, the counterfeit of reality, not creation. Therefore, a photograph is a secondary thing. I do everything with a spiritual feeling. I wrote something into the sky, because I had the feeling that I would like to create "another sky that is mine." This makes me think about death and life. If one becomes heavier, the other one becomes heavier too. With the premonition of death comes the desire for life, the lust to live. This book is my "posthumous work," but maybe it is not finished yet, maybe from now on life is going to begin. I am crossing the rainbow bridge, ah! I am falling... " nobuyoshi araki

Use them all

In the last few weeks I've seen the same piece of creative advice from two different channels: Use all of your ideas. One artist said that this philosophy came from observing that when she lets even one idea go, her work suffers. The other artist said that this artist told her that he uses all his ideas in part because "if an idea is any good it’s on the verge of being stupid."

I have always felt that, even in some of my best writing projects, I am a born collaborator. I get sparked & energized when working with another person. Part of it must be having an audience, being seen & heard -- a habitual need so entrenched in my psyche that I feel virtually nonexistent (ha! virtually nonexistent -- story of my life) without the mirror of an other. But the truth is I could be spending the abundance of my solitary time creating. Not just dance videos or journal entries, but clothing sketches, film treatments, book proposals, one-act plays, photography projects. Yesterday my coworker and I conjured an entire film, complete with cast, based on some wacky vision-association of a Dragonminge (too many references here to name), all conveyed over the medium of AIM. I suppose I don't have any shortage of ideas, however silly or unrealistic; what I feel lacking is the confidence and company with which to execute.

I know of one person I feel creatively linked to in a way that feels cosmically compelling. However, for the time being, emotional circumstances preclude involvement in each other's lives. Maybe someday the forces will align. For now...I'll keep scribbling and bibbling, bibbling and scribbling, and trust that the impetus & wherewithal to use all of my ideas will come.

nature amore

nature girl by grupo grial

“there is pleasure in the pathless woods;
there is rapture on the lonely shore;
there is society, where none intrudes,
by the deep sea, and music in its roar:
i love not man the less, but nature more.”

- lord byron

'For mediocre lovers, it is easier to spurt and shimmy away sexual energy than it is to open their internal knots, which would allow their energy to circulate in a much more profound and blissful depth. Loosening… knots releases the fear stored within them. Mediocre lovers are afraid of letting go…'

~David Deida, lifted from F/lthyGorgeousTh/ngs

Noire et Blanche

Man Ray 

'We are given the shadow for the thing, and in the end we live among shadows, and not only believe that things are made for the sake of their shadows, but find that this is actually the case.'

Edgar Wind - Art and Anarchy

The Return of the Dancer

In my body,

a homecoming.

öde

When you decide to marry yourself to something, you have to let go of what comes before it, and you have to mourn it like a death.

{When you become something that is your destiny,
you have to let the rest go.}

I Come Before Dawn

Muhammad says,

“I come before dawn

to chain you and drag you off.”

It’s amazing, and funny, that you should have to be pulled away

from being tortured, pulled out

into this Spring Garden,

but that’s the way it is.

Almost everyone must be bound and dragged here.

Only a few come on their own.

This curious child

She generally gave herself very good advice (though she very seldom followed it), and sometimes she scolded herself so severely as to bring tears into her eyes; and once she remembered trying to box her own ears for having cheated herself in a game of croquet she was playing against herself, for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people. "But it's no use now," thought poor Alice, "to pretend to be two people! Why, there's hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person!"

In which we enter willingly the Dark Night of the Soul

In the black of night,

unsure when the next wave will hit,

you lie awake through the interminable storm

and pray for dawn.

Ever have the feeling...

you miss someone and you're not sure who it is?

It could be John Lennon. Or Leonard Cohen. My childhood. My childhood dog. Amelia Earhart or Annie Oakley. Princess Diana. The illusion of symmetry. A feeling I had late at night on a Thursday with a past boyfriend who told me that I looked like an angel in that light. It could be my sister's grilled cheese sandwiches. Or my high school neighbor who drove his car off a cliff. Or my mother, long ago and far away. It's a feeling like an exquisite emptiness--what drives me to write. It's the feeling that comes once the umbilical cord gets snipped. The feeling after Savannah the cocker spaniel knocks me into the pool, after the roller coaster ends, after the ex-lover drives away, after the drug wears off--:

I wanted safety, sanity, in the midst of the madness...but now that it's over, I want my fix again.

Image taken from The Land of the Silver Rain

A cage of my body

I am a bird of the heavenly garden,
I belong not to the earthly sphere.
They have made for two or three days
A cage of my body.
--Rumi

The Child of Solitude Grows Up

...This is the temple

of my adult aloneness

and I belong

to that aloneness

as I belong to my life.

~ David Whyte

Saintly ejaculations

"My me is God!"

—Catherine of Genoa

"The hero is always blind"

Charles Seliger, Don Quixote, 1944

In the dream I was in a house cluttered with lamps and tables, trinkets stacked in dim rooms and passageways. My bed seemed to be in a living room reminiscent of my childhood home. I can feel the direction it was facing in, the sense of being out in the open, unprotected despite the vague sense of people present in other rooms in the house; and the lack of privacy. I was trying to sleep, but some invisible beings were tormenting me. Poltergeist. What lingers are images of being pelted with rocks, hiding under the covers and the weight of something or someone sitting down next to me, trapping me in. I kept trying to yell, scream, call out, but my mouth emitted only the lamest of grunts. And then I was sitting on a man's lap (an energy similar to Gerard Depardieu's character in Maitresse); he was faintly paternal but also shadowy--I wasn't certain I could trust him, and on some level I knew that he could not protect me. I was telling him about the ghostly assaults, which he didn't seem to take very seriously. Speaking was hugely laborious--my breath wouldn't come, each word was an effort, and it felt terribly important to get him to understand--to convey the magnitude of my anger or shock or terror. I was under siege, plagued by the threat of a battle I had no chance of winning.

Frame plates

Because food is a work of art.

From d-vision (found via Funfurde)

SONG

under the burden

of solitude.

under the burden

of dissatisfaction.

the weight,

the weight we carry

is love.

who can deny?

in dreams

it touches

the body

constructs

a miracle

in imagination

anguishes

till born

in human––

looks out of the heart

burning with purity––

for the burden of life

is love,

but we carry the weight

wearily,

and so must rest

in the arms of love

at last,

must rest in the arms

of love.

no rest

without love,

no sleep

without dreams

of love––

be mad or chill

obsessed with angels

or machines,

the final wish

is love

–– cannot be bitter,

cannot deny

cannot withhold

if denied:

the weight is too heavy

–– must give

for no return

as thought

is given

in solitude

in all the excellence

of its excess.

the warm bodies

shine together

in the darkness,

the hand moves

to the center

of the flesh,

the skin trembles

in happiness

and the soul comes

joyful to the eye ––

yes, yes

that's what

i wanted,

i always wanted,

i always wanted,

to return

to the body

where i was born.

allen ginsberg

Life, Death and Time

  So fades the lovely, blooming flow’r,

      Frail, smiling solace of an hour,

      So soon our transient comforts fly,

      And pleasure only blooms to die.

- "Distress"