After a bit of sickness

[This post happens after a whole lot of writing exercises, and some mention of not being able to keep food down. Also, mention of nearly zero visibility in the tower -- basically completely fogged in with clouds.]

I feel better, and still haven't eaten or drank. I took a fucking *walk*, that's all.

This whole month, inside the mind (tower) not having anything to see, no visibility (only because I was "above it all") is too easy an analogy. Like when K. [an older poet friend from the bay area, somewhat of a mentor] called out, derringer in hand, "give me a sign, that's all i ask, a sign to know you exist." God sends? A man, out of nowhere, carrying a sign, "Jesus loves you." The sufi's say" It's closer than your Jugular." And I believe them.

(I must find this woman Cynthia, the one whose eyes are blue, jaw square, and has lived the life of the mendicant)

I'm going to write a letter to my sister. Bye for now. Much love.

July 17th, Writing a good letter

"You know you're writing a good letter when you jump up from your desk & pull down 1 or 2 books, and when you hunch over your notebook like a kid with a magnifying glass over an anthill."

-- Me


"God must not engage in Theology; the writer must not destroy by human reasonings the faith that art requires of us." -Jose Luis Borges

July 3rd, dream, quotes

Dreampt of a menege troi, 2 women, soft-skinned & poets both. One reading poetry (looked like Joy Harjo's work on the Southwest), the other sitting above me. It was wonderful -- I woke up happy.

"I think it would be misleading to call particles the entities involved in the most primitive events of the theory (quantum topology) because they don't move in space and time, they don't carry mass, they don't have charge, they don't have energy in the usual sense of the word.

Question: So what is it that makes events at that level?
Answer: Who are the dancers and who the dance? They have no attributes other than the dance.
Question: What is "they?"
Answer: The things that dance, the dancers. My God; we're back to the title of the book."

--Finklelstein quoted in The Dancing Wu Li Masters p. 332

"... Where is the fiddler and where is the dance? [The Judge]"
"I guess you can tell me." [The Kid]

"I tell you this. As war becomes dishonored and its nobility called into question those honorable men who recognize the sanctity of blood will become excluded from the dance, which is the warrior's right, and thereby will the dance become a false dance and the dancers false dancers. And yet there will be one who is a true dancer and can you guess that might be?"
"You ain't worth nothin."
"You speak truer than you know. But I will tell you. Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horor in the round and learned at least that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance."

-- Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy (no page # written down)

The peyote ceremony -- my night of Dark. Self-acceptance afterward.

"You came forward, he said, to take part in a work. But you were a witness against yourself. You sat in judgement on your own deeds. You put your own allowances before the judgements of history and you broke with the body of which you were pledged a part and poisoned it in all it's enterprise."

-- Blood Meridian, Judge Scene

I seem to be doing a good job of running away up here. I don't go down out of the tower much, I read, and think, and just *sit* here. I have been socked in pretty good too. ["socked in" refers to being clouded in, it's like being in a dead calm, and you can't see anything, sometimes not even the base of the 50 ft. tower. The lookout can't watch for fires, but can still work as a radio relay so they keep them up in the tower as long as they can stand it. Many don't last 3 days, I lasted 30 consecutive days fogged in. Many bets made and lost in the ranger station when I pulled off that new record] When the weather warms up, I might be out more. I don't know that, though. I mean, I read up here when it cheers up, too. Maybe I'm supposed to read, maybe I'm not a nature poet, or fanatic, or shaman -- maybe it's just the people I respect are. I don't believe my transcendent faculties are non-existent, just maybe atrophied. Who the fuck knows anyway.

These people around me -- even the radio tech -- he said "Oh, I couldn't sit inside and read -- not on a good day, anyway." And Russ, "I didn't get as much reading done as I'd hoped -- I was too busy investigating the landscape." If I know him -- he'd be out in the wind naked right now having some transcendent experience, realizing God in a cut on his leg from a beargrass frond. But I sit here and write, and theorize. I spend all my time in the city socializing, running around; and now that I'm out in a beautiful setting, I read. What a dick.

Fri. 20th June

This morning, I awoke with Marley's "Exodus" turning immaculately in my mind.

Every day has a different flavor and this morning's Tai Chi and Meditation were no exception. I allowed myself to fall 3 times during a right-leg kick, to relax myself enough to finally pull it off without pulling my center of gravity off to my hindside.

The meditation was good and long, but I found myself spending most of my time strategizing letters to Prescott college, or thinking Evergreen might be an option, etc. I didn't clear up as much as yesterday -- if that can be quantitatively discussed.

My water is ready. One minute.

****

I'm beginning to really love oats.

So, my walk back was eventful. I slowly walked, tugging at a rusted eyebolt sticking out of the ground (thinking of P.B. and how he loved things-rusted). It was set in concrete.

I stopped walking to roll up the right pant-leg of my gie -- and there was a yellow, triangular arachnid on it. I at first thought it was a huge tick, for it had a bloated triangular body, and all its legs were gathered up around its tiny head. But the legs, long and nimble, gave it away as a Crab Spider. It was gorgeous. It had an incredibly luminous-soft lemon-yellow body, with a tiny tangerine-colored pinstripe around it's abdomen. I gathered it up in my hands, heading for the nearest Beargrass flower cluster I could find. It was the closest color I could see in the surrounding landscape that would afford the spider camouflage.

It jumped out of my hand and scrambled into the grass.

Now, I'm here with a ready-to-eat bowl of oatmeal to my left. Goodbye for now.

****

"I think nothing is of any value in books excepting the transcendental and extraordinary. If a man is inflamed and carried away by his thought, to the degree that he forgets the authors and public and heeds only his one dream which holds him like an insanity, let me read his [poem], and you may have all the arguments and histories and criticism."

---"The Poet" in Complete Writings p. 248, William Everson