Journal 12.05.10

More and more this past week, I’ve been getting closer to committing myself to writing. Picked up a few Annie Dillard books and have been re-inspired to read and write. Her book The Maytrees is the first book in three years I’ve been excited enough to read and not want to set down.

I am on an exploration and adventure in studying words. Finding words. Sculpting with words. Allowing my thoughts and impressions to exhale through my pen, and come up with something that is undeniably lovely to read. Lovely in that it is graceful, beautiful, perhaps exquisite and harking of some truth as yet said in the way that I’ve offered it in ink.

I do enjoy a puzzle and there is a puzzle, a worthy challenge to reflect something back to a reader that she didn’t know she knew or felt, and in a way that her mind expands, or her heart, maybe both? Of course to induce a smile or laughter by well turned observation is a trophy.

It is more than sheer, or mere, writing for the sake of chronicling events or feelings. The writing I am interested in doing has something to do with creating the world. Inviting the seasons back by writing about them. Casting tendrils of energy into the future with prophesies of better times buried in day dreams. This writing, this word casting is about weaving a self and weaving a world. An essay or a story, or poem tossed into the pond of Time, rippling out psychic impressions to world yet unformed.

Nature, Sappho and Time

{20 Minute Free-writing, no editing!}

Nature is the most profound and prolific of poets. i thirst for and bask under her tutelage grateful for inspiration when it comes. she knows no words and this wordless poetry speaks to the heart of my deepest shadows and luminous joys. A high like no other, the play of light upon and through the natural world, it keeps me here, every day new light, every day a new play. Dimensions through which my consciousness drifts, rooms of infinite universes to explore. and what is it that I find? that I seek? the stimulation of life. vida luminous. ecstatic pulses of electromagnetic messages vibrate in me. through me. and to what end?

circles of existence all dependent upon what we focus our attention on. health, disease, joy, pain, frustration, love, hate, disdain, hopelessness, hopefulness, yearning, satisfaction. culling, weeding, selecting, pushing, merging. light and momentum. light and momentum. pulling out of me, into form. formlessness into form, into questions that truly have no answers save for, “well, why not?” and who does this satisfy?is it the person with the shorter perspective of time who feels more at ease, or the one with infinitude in her sight?pros and cons for each I suppose.

Nature endures, mostly, form, formlessness, abundance, extinction. Are these pulses of existence just like breathing. Will the species we believe are gone breathe themselves back into life? Is it “if we are good” as humanity, being “good” and so they choose to come back? Have we stomped this symbol of The Fall into the ground? Will we grow up as a species about falling from grace? If we never even believed we fell from grace do we constantly have to justify our existence? What does true peace look like? What does it feel like? Can we even imagine it? Does Nature strive, does she “just” exist? The seasons have seemed perpetual. And in our lives they are, however we see evidence of vastly difference schemes of seasons, a wiping of the slate of cycles, to begin again.

The translation of Nature’s antics, the grand (they are all grand, aren’t they) and the seemingly mundane, into words, to share my sight, my experience, my awe and joy, these do not exist in Nature until I have my words set down. My self as filter of Nature’s wonders can create wonders in and of themselves. Ah poetry, what is this? Who are you? What makes poetry? Cadence? Vocabulary? Persistence?

We see that Sappho was a poet extraordinaire and yet very few of her verses survive, simple, yet enough that we know, we can hear her as we read the sparse words. The delicate certainty and verve. I sense in my mind’s eye a gracefully sensuous passion, how does that aura travel so, through Time? And yet, if all time is now, then she exists still, next to me, for all we know, if I shift my awareness to her, here she is. writing poetry right now. Kissing young women and men, teaching them about the emotions through desire, closeness, touching, breathing. Song. She lives in more ways than one Right Now. In my mind, in my pondering her. Does then Nature too, continue through the ages as we remember it, bringing it into form every day, every season?

Eve Merriam. Feminist. Poet. Banned book writer.

I’ve been wanting to scan this poem for some time. I save things that are meaningful to me, and now I have a collection of items that once meant something to Celeste. Because I have a similar sense of literary and social aesthetic as Celeste, many if not all of the ephemera and books in her collection are equally inspirational to me. Because she was 25 years my senior chronologically she collected a lot of stuff from some really cool eras that might be long lost to the rest of us. Both to honor her spark and to honor those whose personal flames of creativity fed her enough to hang onto evidence, I will post what I find here and there and hope that anyone who reads this blog will find something new to inspire them, or at least introduce them to someone who might otherwise be lost in time….

This entry is dedicated to Eve Merriam, writer and poet. She was considered a feminist poet and wrote many works for young person’s.