Wind velocity readings, lookout style

When the wind is out of the West, and I pee off the catwalk to the East, I notice that you can track windspeed via landmarks. Wind 0 - 5 mph -- hit the grass. Wind 8-12 mph -- hits rhododendron. Wind 15 - 20 mph -- hits edge or over the edge of the butte.

Journaling a streaking incident after too many days cooped up, continued.

As I wrote that, the wind picked up -- it might be 20 Mph. It's teasing though, it dropped off again as I stopped writing, picking up again as I start writing now.

As, as I walked back, I wanted more & more to take off my clothes; the more it rained the more I wanted my shirt off. I saw the lookout tower in the distance -- always reminding me of Thai architecture with its winged-hat look.

I got to the top of the stairs of the tower, the wind stronger up here, and rain; and I stripped in the doorway. The soaked backpack & timer by the propane heater.

HA! I got out there on a good gust in between sentences --

Ok -- soaked backpack in front of the propane & wool pantlegs too. I debated whether I should head down naked, or carrying shorts. Just in case a truck headed up the road when I was downstairs. I'd decided to go down & grab a full water container in either case. Eventually, I wrapped up a pair of shorts & stuck them in my mouth like a Pika carrying grass. I dove out the door into the howling wind and rain.

It was just like cold-water swimming. Once you were in, you were fine. I jogged downstairs,m ridiculous with my shorts in my mouth. I walked around in the dewy grass for a minute, the wind not so strong down there, and then put one of the 5-gallon water container on my head. I ran back 7up the stiars, my shorts in my mouth, and my water balanced on my head w/one hand like a Haitian.

What a great time.

Getting out in the rain after too many days cooped up, no date

Think I'm gonna dress up & take a walk. I've huddled in this propane-warm cabin too long -- I'm going outside for a walk. Got 2 hours before the next check-in. I'll take my radio just in case. I wanna get wet and cold, come in & watch the steam rising from my drying wool pants, and enjoy myself.

And this time I remembered to close windows to keep out brave, fat chipmunks.

****

Man -- I feel GREAT! just took a walk down about a mile or so to see what I could see. I feel so much better now.

On the path/road not 1/2 mile from here I found carnivore shit. Looked too big for coyote. Maybe Cat? I pray -- it's not far if it is.

Further down, after doing a second radio check to make sure I was still in contact w/ Mt. Hood Dispatch, I walked down the 400 Rd. I made about 1/2 mile -- no grouse by the way -- and it started to drizzle. I headed back, joyous as ever. I was just dripping with joy. When I turned around, the road looked completely different. Now uphill, now curving to the *right* -- so I didn't put my slingshot away -- who could tell if there were any grouse on *this* road or not?

On the way down -- I'd found some lichen that was in the road, blown off a tree. It was so seaworthy -- shaped just like some sea lettuce I've seen. My mind raced -- sea -- up here -- evolution.

I walked back, and it started to rain seriously, and I smiled at the change. I forgot all about the electronics in my backpack -- didn't worry about them at least.

I came to a boulder overhanging a ledge, headed Southwest -- into the wind. I walked out & stood, arms to the side -- huge smile. I felt *so* good, it felt so good to have the wind strong against me, reminded me of the times when I've felt the sentience of the wind -- when I related to it as a spirit. I walked back -- happy.

[to be continued]

Prose poem description of the cabin etc. (no date)

Here I sit, quivering with Poems. Rexroth's "Signature of all Things."

I put down the book, some of Snyder's
poems have quieted me.
I look slowly around the sky cabin,
not expecting.
Olive-yellow trunk box (full of wire & cable, I know),
A couple of old wood chairs on either side of the
glass-paneled door --
Socks on one, towel on the other,
drying.
The spotting scope -- black, matte black.
The podium holding Osborne Firefinder atop,
A photo of cattails in a pond,
A painting of a medicine man,
A face of a hawk -- both images cards
Received from male relatives
In the post this summer.

A 5-gallon, square, opaquish water jug,
1/5th full,
Kettle (aluminum) and flowered enameled pot,
Bean stains varnishing the outside where it boiled over.

An aching back or a turned-in butt on 2 pillows.

Dripping rain and wind outside,
Catwalk dark with wet.

Wind sounds like a tundral howl,
"Howa, Howa -- Whoooooo ---" whistles off.

An eagle feather,
Speckled white fading into brown --
A little but of white down,
Hanging from an eye-screw placed
Perfectly
In the middle of the ceiling.
Olive-yellow tongue-in-groove ceiling.

2 light bulbs I can't afford the electricity to use,
A 2-way radio on the desk,
And this penned hand,
Writing.

Torrid Zone

Torrid zone -- between Tropic of Cancer 23 degrees 27 minutes North of equator and Capricorn 23 degrees 27 minutes South of equator.

Torrid, A. [L. torridus, from torrere, to roast.] 1. Dried by or subjected to intense heat, especially of the sun; scorched; parched; arid. 2. So hot as to be parching or opressive; scorching. 3. Highly passionate, adent, zealous, etc.

Torrid zone; are of the earth between the tropic of Cancer & the Tropic of Capricorn & divided by the equator.

Websters new unabridged.

Adrienne Rich quote

"...Clara, I feel so full
of work, the life I see ahead, and love
for you, who of all people
however badly I say this
will hear all I say and cannot say."

ending of "Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff"
in Adrienne Rich's Dream of a Common Language, p. 44

Tired of writing, and a favorite line, unknown date

She [Natalie Goldberg, have been doing writing practices out of Wild Mind book] wants me to write about my home now. I don't want to, I've written enough tonight. The only line I like is;

The sunlight was all dusty, and the air smelled like a cold, rusted muffler.

so there.

Writing Practice, different subject every sentence. Unknown date.

White tigers have always astounded me, but look so plain in zoos. I prefer the orange ones.

Birds are cool, but blue I like better.

Alligators -- bah these are all animals, I have to stop this cycle.

Space ships are large and have blinking lights.

Dew on the grass in the morning lights up like little frosted crystal globes.

The wind here sounds like it's pushing up against a shelter made of plywood & corrugated tin, and makes me think that I'm in a poor Mexican town, hoping for my life that I won't freeze tonight.

A black spider with a yellow zig-zag on its belly hanging on a web, thick & frosty white.

Topics, topics -- they don't have to be nouns, you know -- they don't have to be verbs, or adjectives -- they can be feelings -- under images; and the longer you pull the sentence out the longer you have before the next one.

I see a bridge, with sunlight dappling the surface of the shallow greenish water below. There are steelhead under there, or coho salmon, and it's the mouth of Eagle Creek on the Clackamas.

Mermaid mistresses give juicy, dangerous love.

An arsenic lobster (stolen from Lorca) falls on my head, and I'm black (stolen from Jimenez or Machado) with a diamond inside.

Mowing the lawns of cemeteries -- the hills covered with mist & trees & the mausoleums are on top of the hill to the left.

Spirit folk went through my dreams, always clad as Indians dancing, carrying their loved ones' images, up on stilts with feathers & dead, in their hearts as they travel.

I love: the earth, frogs, women, butts, women with frog butts -- that's K. actually -- and thinking, and being ungrounded, and accepting, and love.

God is: God is a leaf in a stream -- one more try.

God is an autumn leaf under a thin sheet of near-freezing water, washing down a clear Northeastern stream.

God is Heroin, to some I'm sure.

I don't know how much time I've got left so I'll write until 21:00 hrs. -- that's 3 minutes left. My hand hurts, and I feel like I'm writing a bunch of crap, but the school of disembodied poetics keeps coming up, and that's exciting me, because I think maybe it's a sign from the Universe that I should go to School, and I can just see it now, my old bus & T. & maybe fly fishing in the summers, and my arm is burning up, and I don't want to slow down or stop writing or stop breathing, because I've only got a little of it left but my arm is burning off, and I keep holding my breath, and this is all a bunch of crap anyhow. And I sure wanted to end on that last line but a minute lasts a long time when you're in pain.

July 21st Writing Practice: Fishing Reverie, friend rememberance continued.

When I visited Robert this last spring (of my 22nd year) -- we of course went fishing. The water was bigger, and so were the fish. But it was still cheap, and we were still the best fishermen out there. In one month I'll be standing next to him as he gets married. Long hair, some bags under my eyes that weren't there before, and Robert standing next to me. it makes me cry -- just Life -- going. Changes & passages -- like all the poems about autumn you hear old people writing. I can feel a little autumn in my heart right now. It's real, like a flannel shirt -- and I'm getting older. I love you Robert. You've always been a brother to me. Good luck in your new life -- it's not much different. Do things cheap, and well. Have fun, learn, and pay attention. Like figuring out how to catch fish -- chance plays it's part, too.

****

I'm crying, I don't know why. I think it's because those times as a kid were so lonely. Robert was, in a way, all I had in the whole world then.

When we were fishing, I could forget about all my hurts. I could be scientist, an observer, a mountain-man -- the knowledgeable one. It was a way to touch the cycle of things, to enter into the biology of things. We stepped in clean & pure -- naieve of any blemishes to our soul. We *were* fishing -- no separation. Zen buddhists know what I'm talking about. No separation.

July 21st Writing Practice: What I did the summer before my 9th grade year -- kissing girls and a fishing reverie

I kissed a freckled, brown-eyed, brown-haired Hawaiian/Mexican girl named Kathy. I kissed her every day, before she went off to do her paper route.

I discovered Tewinkle Park. It was a mound pushed up by bulldozers, with a never-running set of water slides, a path, and 3 golf-pond like "lakes." Robert Z, a full-blood Czech kid who looked like an all-American California boy and I fished there every day. I mean that -- barring some severe edict from the Parental Units, we were there every single day. We used jigs called Sassy Shad, which looked like little grey rubber fish with a paddle for a tail. When pulled through the water, it really looked like it was swimming.

Our favorite was night fishing. We'd sneak around the shallows, with unweighted plastic worms on our ultralight outfits (spinning gear that was almost as small as it could get, so even a small Bluegill would feel like a Marlin) and cast onto the shore, or a boulder next to where the behemoth bass (usually 12" or so) were sitting in the shallows, starting at the surface of the water. We'd pull the worm off whatever we cast onto, so it would make a natural, meaty Thunk! in the water -- bass would drool all across the lake. We'd stare at our line -- plenty of slack, so that when they picked it up, they'd have no un-natural resistance.

Two twitches, and the line would slowly head for deep water. Our hearts would beat out of control, and in a forced hushed whisper, we'd call to the other -- they'd reel in and run over -- stepping quietly so we wouldn't shake the water & scare the fish. The line would still be moving. We'd both be visualizing a huge bass swimming, green & dank, with a potbelly & enormous mouth, swimming with OUR worm in it's mouth. It was always OUR stuff -- we bought all of it together. I kept my stuff at his house because it was closer ot the park & my mom hated the idea of fishing.

We'd set the hook, and the jiggling rod would be all marlin again, and the bass would be strong and live at the end of the line, maybe (beyond all hoping) it would jump & splash the light from the baseball fields all over the little lake.

We'd pull in an exhausted little fish, and let it rest in the shallow water as we watched its gill plates breathe, and were amazed that we'd connected with this little wild thing.

Carefully, we'd lift it out of the water & get the hook out with a minimum of contact, so we wouldn't mess up the mucous layer on the fish that we both knew was protection against fungus & parasites. It was beyond shame to see a fish you "recognized" ("that's the one that lived under the pillars by the gazebo") floating and dead due to messy release or bad hook timing -- letting it swallow the hook.

We switched to fly-fishing, and kept fishing there well into high-school, even though it was a "kid" thing to do. All that started by seeing kids fishing with handlines & velveeta cheese between the slats of the little pier as we drove by.

[to be continued]

July 21st, wildlife at the butte

The chipmunks I've baited up to my railing have today decided to start exploring the interior of my quarters. I was writing a letter to Eric O. when I heard a scratching at my East window. It had it's head turned sideways -- halfway through the window. It got in, and I stopped writing to watch.

Just now, I returned from a short walk to find the fatter of the two scampering, big eyed & fluffy, under my bed. I checked my pantries & apparently they hadn't been discovered yet. I had even put a note on the door to remind myself to close everything up when I left, but forgot one of the windows.

During my walk around the butte, I spotted my second snake. The first was a good-sized garder snack (black-yellow) up by the "X" on the helipad. The next, a brown checked snake (possibly even bigger) slid into a pile of rusted cans that I was inspecting, newly found. I think it was bigger -- it took a long time to drag itself over the tin into it's den. Impressive, patient animals.

July 21st, Preterist definition and an Eagle sighting

Preterist, n. .... 2. in theology, one who believes that the prophecies of the apocalypse have already been fulfilled.

****

15:20 hrs. Just spotted my first Golden Eagle today. Thought it was a Raven, until I got the glasses on it. It was flecked w/white -- probably newly fledged [I now know that a young Golden is an important omen in the Lakotah way, known as a Spotted Eagle]. Seemed nearly full size. Blessed Be!

Blog notice, some photos incoming

Howdy all, back online and meeting tonight with a good friend who visited me while I was staying up at Hickman Butte the first summer. He is an accomplished photographer and dug up negatives and prints for me to work with, so soon there will be a few more photos included in this blog.

More posts to come,

Bp

--Back on the 24th, see you soon--

Headed to the desert, enjoy the start of your summer I'll be back soon.

Love,

Bp

July 20th, Ditty about reading and writing so much

Drunk with literature, I go staggering down the street, bumping into posts and leaning into saloons -- looking for my style.

July 20th, 10 minute writing practice continued

[more of the writing practice on "the sweetheart" assignment]

You -- what? What do I look like? (an image of a woman, a cross between Natalie Goldberg & Louise Erdrich comes to mind)

That doesn't matter. Oh you think it does? And *my* life?

If you insist. I'm a writer, and have been for many years. I live somewhere in the mid-or-South-West,. I'm in my early-mid thirties, I teach writing workshops, and have published books.

I enjoy poetry, but write mostly prose. Yes, I'm your anima; a little healthier than the little, scared girl who wants/doesn't want to have sex ha?

I guess I'm grounded (you put those words into my mouth). I plant gardens, I can & pickle, and own dogs. I have a small symbolic fence around my yard, and there's mountains in the distance. I'm NOT Natalie Goldberg, good try.

Yea, I live somewhere in the Southwest, it's cool this time of year too. I am successful in that I don't have to worry about money; and I have the time, landscape, and solitude to write. I write well, and simply. I like art, and something about me reminds you of both Georgia O'Keefe & Ellen Butler [my high school photography teacher, pragmatic and smart]. Both true -- not as rangy or sharp as O'Keefe, though. I do love her stuff.

I enjoy photography (Arbus and Avedon) and am a member of both public radio & TV. It's all I'll watch, and that not too often.

I have both a bathroom and an outhouse. My house is small, and reminds you of the "flower house" on the corner of 25th & ... P or Q -- Quimby, -- what's the P street? I don't know.

Anyway, that's me. Nice to meet you. I'll be here the rest of your life. I enjoy your intention to be a voice, or conduit for the planet & for spirit. The idea seems kind of highfalutin, to me, I just try to be honest -- look up Frank Waters. Much Love.

July 20th, 10 min writing practice

"Giving Voice to the Sweetheart" writing practice

[Ok, there has been a lot in this journal that was embarrassing to post, but this has got to take the cake. Whatever, I said I'd stop complaining about that aspect of this blog, but man... I'll just continue to write it off as an anthropological exercise.]

You really are living a writer's life. You live alone, in a fire Tower, with mountains; you look up words in the dictionary, you read voraciously and choose your books carefully, you are cultivating your mind with both words, whimsy, and discipline. You meditate. You spend lots of undisciplined, useful time "musing." Lately, you've been writing spontaneously and this could be very good for publication, especially the "Go Tell it On the Mountain" book. You can take these spontaneous essay fragments and pull together a lucid, readable essay piece.

You are an imagist -- as Jacob L. Said. You are one of the people that Ross feels has the most promise as a writer. You write a lot -- face it. Look at how many pages you've cranked out since you've been up in the tower, *at least* 120 - 150 pages in in 2 months? That's great. Who cares if you sent most of it off, your pen is moving across paper -- good job!

[next embarrassing installment, what she looks like and where she lives]

July 20th, perfection in small things, life as art

It all looks like art if you do it right. Even the putting down of a book; it will angle jsut right in the light, casting a long, meaningful shadow. Everything becomes perfectly placed, as in a movie set -- perfectly chaotic, even.

"It revolves around staying with it." To some, a vibrating, warm energy that flows as an orange column & excites the nerves when aligned with; to others, a calm loving pheeling in the diaphragm. The flowing "rightness."

Staying there, all becomes art.

****

Just as we've all heard eight trillion times, it involves forgetting. Actions consummate themselves, are final and satisfying *in and of themselves.* Life becomes sex, a pleasurable, active, forgetting and involvement.

New "Want List"

New "Want List":

Rexroth, Lopez, McCarthy, Eliade, Ovid, Shakespeare, Snyder, Huxley, Calvino, Blake, Novalis, Pound, Marquez, Paz, Hammil, Lorca, Everson, Faulkner, Jimenez, Machado, Vallejo, neruda, Blas de Otero, Boehme, Stevens (Wallace), Lawrence (DH); Walking on Alligators (on writing), Passion of the Western Mind Richard Tarnas;

Most, used copies. Rexroth, Snyder, Paz, Hammil, Lorca -- for essays first, as well as poetry (prose) etc.

New, positive: McCarthy. New, possible, Everson (Naked Poetry, new release)[couldn't find this book when I transcribed this post or I would link it for you]

****

Switch to scene in a private library -- "only about 50% of those are read, don't bee too impressed." The man is quietly proud of their interest. The book that reminded him, was Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian -- gleaned from a "free box" in the basement of a housing co-op in Berkeley, CA in the 90's.

July 20th, more Zen musings

Reading about Zen has always slipped by me, consciously. I've avoided it somehow. Normally I would pour into it's volumes, comparing "true" Eastern scriptures with their modern, Western, proponents -- etc. but I only read quotes and note authors and titles out of bibliographies. It's always been this way.

****

Maybe the calm, gentle voice knows that the Aryan aggressor academe in me, the dogma-lover, would claim victory over the precepts of Zen after having only read it, knowing nothing at all about it, really.

****

I've read the *results* of Zen on a few western minds (I won't even try to resolve the contradictions and hypocrisies in that statement), Gary Snyder's poetry, prose, essays, interviews, for instance. But I haven't read The Three Pillars of Zen by Philip Kapleau Roshi. (notice that I know a title right off my head, however).

****

July 20th, Zen Rake

Time to be gentle, time to listen to "all those inner voices," that turned out to be one voice -- and that one calm, patient, and understanding. Time to put on my socks before going outside, and to do the dishes. Time to breathe easily, and eat slowly. To *do*. To *be*. No becoming, except as that of a cold, closed poppy opening to the warmth of the sun -- naturally and without strain, unconsciously.

July 20th -- eyes of cows

I'd recently written in a letter to my mother that I was pretty sure I was smart. I'm not too sure "smart" is accurate now. Thinking about it, "enthusiastic" & "passionate" came up. Something bred out of the majority of society.

You can see its lack in the eyes of cows.

Not that I'm not a cow, I may just be one of the ones that wanders off a bit to stare at the trees outside the barbed wire -- or one of those rangy-horned, sagebrush cows that scamper indelicately off when you're hiking in the Puebelo Mountains. Ones who've gone to seed a bit, whose meat is used for jerky & their hide for boot leather -- still dim, but Remembering, nonetheless.

The eyes of a deer, or an elk -- that's an entirely different story; one I hesitate to even start in on. The depth of a deer's gaze, the sex in the elk's (of course I'm thinking here of a full-antlered stag in the rut -- pounding the ground with his powerful, impatient steps, ripping up bushes for practice and release). I'm not ever going to go into it, I don't have the time to write such a volume -- or the maturity. My feet are still unhaired, and my hands soft. I'll wait until the bottoms of my feet are shod in thick leather, and my hands tawny & strong & brown like a rancher's tanned grip.

July 20th -- Federico Garcia Lorca poem

Fuck Yeah! (Lorca trans. Bly)

New York


(office and attack)
to Fernando Vela

Beneath all the statistics
there is a drop of duck's blood.
Beneath all the columns
there is a drop of sailor's blood.
Beneath all the totals, a river of warm blood;
a river that goes singing
past the bedrooms of the suburbs,
and the river is silver, cement, or wind
in the lying daybreak of New York.
The mountains exist, I know that.
And the lenses ground for wisdom,
I know that. But I have not come to see the sky.
I have come to see the stormy blood,
the blood that sweeps the machines to the waterfalls,
and the spirit on to the cobra's tongue.
Every day they kill in New York
ducks, four million,
pigs, five million,
cows, one million,
lambs, one million,
roosters, two million,
who turn the sky to small splinters.
You may as well sob filing a razor blade
or assassinate dogs in the hallucinated foxhunts,
as try to stop in the sawnlight
the endless trains carrying milk,
the endless trains carrying blood,
and the trains carrying roses in chains for those in the field of perfume.
The ducks and the pigeons
and the hogs and the lambs
lay their drops of blood down,
underneath all the statistics;
and the terrible bawling of the packed-in cattle
fills the valley with suffering
were the Hudson is getting drunk on its oil.
I attack all those persons who know nothing of the other half,
the half who cannot be saved,
who raise their cement mountains
in which the hearts of hte small
animals no one thinks of are beating,
and from which we will all fall
during the final holiday of the drills.
I spit in your face.
The other half hears me,
as they go on eating, urinating, flying in their purity
like the children of the janitors
who carry delicate sticks
to the holes where the antennas
of the insects are rusting.
This is not hell, it is a street.
This is not death, it is a fruit-stand.
There is a whole world of crushed rivers and unachievable
distances
in the paw of a cat crushed by a car,
and I hear the song of the worm
in the heart of so many girls.
Rust, rotting, trembling earth.
And you are earth, swimming through the figures of the office.
What shall I do, set my landscape in order?
Set in place the lovers who will afterwards be photographs,
who will be bits of wood and mouthfuls of blood?
No, I won't; I attack,
I attack the conspiring
of these empty offices
that will not broadcast the sufferings,
that rub out the plans of the forest,
and I offer myself to be eaten by the packed-up cattle
when their mooing fills the valley
where the Hudson is getting drunk on its oil.


--Federico Garcia Lorca
trans. Bly
News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness pps. 110-112

May my invective poetry/writing be as fantastic, may it be so.

July 20, Notes over Breakfast -- poetry musings

Notes over breakfast -- Gerard De Nerval, "ancient energies" poet. Late 1800's.

[all from News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness Bly]

German tradition of "animal thinkers" Boehme & alchemists, Goethe and Novalis, Rilke.

Spanish: Jimenez, Machado, Lorca.

North America: Jeffers, Wallace Stevens.

Wow -- Wallace Stevens "Anecdote of Men by the Thousand."
"Whales weep Not" D.H. Lawrence

               Oceans

    I have a feeling that my boat
has struck, down there in the depths, 
against a great thing. 
                    And nothing
happens!  Nothing... Silence... Waves... 

--Nothing happens?  Or has everything happened, 
and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?

                     Juan Ramon Jimenez

God! I love those spaniards: Reminder: look for good translations, Jimenez, Lorca, Machado, Vallejo.

July 18th, Garden of Forking Paths, Quantum Physics, notes on Book ideas

I'm reading The Garden of Forking Paths -- and realized that it was published 5 years after the Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics -- 1957 -- published '62 -- It's Borges's musings on this, I'm sure of it.

****

Ideas for Lookout Notes book:

Zeroxed -- linen paper outside -- stapled. Cover, a photo of Hickman zeroxed onto cover -- tape showing that held it on. Maybe a photo of me on back cover.

Intro: this book is created from excerpts of correspondence, journal entries, & "legitimate" writings put down while I stayed in a Fire Lookout Tower in the Mt. Hood National Forest. I've limited myself to very little editing after-the-fact, I.E. after I left the tower. Thus, the flavor of the pieces were maintained -- and the roughness. Enjoy.

Sign & number them.

Introduction --
Place --
Miasma --
(fantasia, catharsis, revelation)

Excerpts from radio messages -- definitions out of books (watch copyrights), incoming correspondence.

Send one to Snyder & Whalen.

"Dedicated to Gary Snyder -- whose work has never failed to give me hope -- both in the human race, and the artistic process.

And to my friend Ross Christian, without whose example I would not be writing today.

Blessing: May this book give permission to a flood of publications waiting to happen within the talent group of friends, so far unpublished, who are like a crowd at a banquet, plates at the ready -- waiting for someone to scoop the first serving."

Things to work on: format develop & allow for an intense amount of flexibility -- maybe prose - verse, adjunct prose; maybe chapter intros & maybe no explanation whatsoever -- maybe chronological order -- maybe titled chapters -- maybe not.

"The format developed organically, it isn't chronological -- or sequential -- it follows flows that occurred over the 4 months there. It's natural."

July 18th, insect teaching

(after finishing a small writing)

"It's so simple you see" -- the fly hovers between transparent wing clouds, swings back and forth in front of the mountains,
"It's just life, that's all. It's not a hard thing to do at all."

He flies away, and leaves me at the desk to write this down.

July 18th, The Sun, A Butterfly, and Chinese Poetry

Let it be said that the day was warm -- that the man laid nude on the catwalk and his flesh drank deep the nourishing rays of the Sun.

A shadow passed, and I looked up into a grey stormcloud, hinged bright penumbra halo.

I got dressed, and went back out to the walk, noting the flight of a Zebra Swallowtail below. So angular -- in my youth, the swallowtails in general were diamond & ruby to this butterfly collector -- but Zebra were nearly unheard of in the lowlands where I lived, and were especially prized. Never in all my childhood did I kill either species to impale them with a pin. Not that I wouldn't have at the time -- it just never happened.

Now, watching the jagged geometry of it's flight from above -- I wonder at the design it's tracing. A fractal perhaps, like the view from the top of the juvenile Doug Fir tree beside it -- perfect geometry. Or something more delicate, more subtle. "nonsense" to the uninitiated -- but a fluid, consistent 'chaos' to the new Scientists.

As a child, the erratic flight always seemed a programmed evasion technique; but I had a particular relation at that point. Now, I wonder if its sketching something more important to my understanding.

Maybe it will be one of those visions that lets gates fly open in your synaptic mass, like your first orgasm, or psychadelic experience.

I notice another butterfly off in the Rhododendron field, sketching its own, similar, chaotic pattern. I am reminded of a poem, "Visit to the Hermit Ts'Ui, by Chiien Ch'I -- written in the 8th century, in China (translated in the 1960's by Kenneth Rexroth).


Visit to the Hermit Ts'Ui


Moss covered paths between scarlet peonies,
Pale jade mountains fill your rustic windows.
I envy you, drunk with flowers,
Butterflies swirling in your dreams.



Ch'ien Ch'I
(Love and the Turning Year;
One Hundred More Poems from the Chinese
Kenneth Rexroth, P. 67)



I look out over the butte and realize I'm in a garden of pink Rhododendron flowers & small, precise conifers. I realize I'm alone, and will be for months. I realize I'm watching butterflies -- and have been for nearly an hour.

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 15, Writing to The Old Man -- Dizzying continuum

So I might write to The Old Man. Everyone's got one. He's out there, and I'm writing down all the debris I pass as I walk backwards into my future. I'm saving the images of the debris, so he and I can laugh and joke about it when I get there. I sweep the debris away, and continue to walk.

The coordinate-system is all fucked, too. There's the up/down & side/side. That I follow. Then there's this arm that reaches up into the up/down and across the side/side. It's not sharp & black or grey & easily readable by false light, like the other two. Its that red-brown of a horse. And it's a strong, muscular, organic bend like a horse's neck turned - to.

When you're contentedly traveling your grey side/side, you'll hit this (with it's color, that can only be seen correctly in sunlight and still is a mystery/beautiful) and suddenly be stretched out flat -- your head in the future & feet in the past - or vice versa. Suddenly, dizzying continuum. I wrestle with this. -- gotta pee.

****

The wind sounded like a car coming up a wet driveway.

****

July 15, The Weather and I, Dancing

(I wrote a cathartic, painful letter to an ex-lover -- and the weather cleared a bit & then closed in -- and now the storm is above me, and I'm fasting, and the rain increases as I want to write faster and faster, not knowing even what I'd say -- just trying to let this stuff come through me -- what this weather resonates, what it says within me -- that I can't tell the outside from the inside -- that as I looked out the window of the lookout, I expected windshield wipers to come on and clean my view -- that that's a perfect analogy to my consciousness, that I even took a walk around the catwalk, but came back in. That it's raining outside. That I'm alone, and it's raining outside. That the current of a poem I heard a few times before is coming into my mindpan. That I can't, don't want, to control it. That the rain and thunder and dripping is a percussive orchestra -- that there are rhythms there, that I'm relating them, that they enter me, that I am relating them, that there is a rhythm here, that I want to express it.)

****

I'm becoming ecstatic, I imagine myself listening again to that poem (I'll write down the name later -- I've got it on tape). I imagine it affecting my whole life's work; I imagine academics & professors discussing the influence, rationalizing it; that, when asked, I just scream out "Because it got it, it got me -- right in the gut. It got me right in the gut, and I stayed there, and that it gave me a hard-on, and it gave me a context when I was ecstatic."

And then I come to a realization -- there are forms of writing that I've read and only partially digested, that give the ecstatic experience context, aesthetic context. They give me a structure to let this feeling out into. They build structures that resonate and allow me to communicate when I'm ecstatic. That I need to read those that illuminate me most -- those that give me a stiffy.

Lopez comes first to mind. Erdrich poetry. Sometimes Rilke. I can't see the ecstatic crunching down into form and words as easily in Rilke sometimes. Who else -- who else do i walk away from with a hard on. Lopez -- man -- he gets me like few others. Lopez -- and someone else, there is someone else, who I can't think of -- who makes me pace & rant after reading them. I did that after Chaim Potok -- but that was mood, & company, & timing. Lopez always does that for me. Rilke used to. Erdrich can. I'm going to nap -- to dream.

w/love, Bp

July 15, Storm moves out, napping contemplated, fasting

It's just beautiful outside. A storm has broken, the thick cloud bank & 15 mph winds, hail, & thunder rush in about the butte & then retreat again, quickly, into silence. The clouds have lifted, and there's a dark cloud above -- the ridges & peaks are offset by brilliant white mist, thick & curly, that travels down the drainages like baby dragons. Then the wind stops, and they sit -- curled & banked, like Tibetan fire in frieze -- blazing white against the dark blue-green ridges. One of my "chow-dog" ant friends just crawled around on my left hand as I wrote, tapping staccato with its bent, drumstick antennae.

As the clouds move back in, I have a strong desire to nap, to let this all sock directly into my subconscious. Why pretend -- just because my eyes are open doesn't mean I'm awake. Maybe I'll experience more if I'm asleep and unconscious. Maybe then my antennae will flow about in the wind like feathery tendrils of sea polyps, pulling perception in, like barnacles grabbing zooplankton out of the surf.

It is fogging in again. I'm writing while pacing slowly. It's raining. I may still take a nap. The fast today is burning out my back & arms & gut, slowly -- it feels like ashes re-lit & slowly blown on. Especially in my hands.

July 14th, William S. Burroughs

Finished Nova Express by Burroughs. I like the ideas, the subliminal stuff, etc. Didn't enjoy the cut-up sketches -- made my head hurt.

July 10, writing exercise -- laces into atoms

The Good Reverend is on his way up to the tower, yeah!!!!!

[The Good Reverend is a nickname for a good friend of mine. We met in Berkley the year before I was working at the lookout and became fast friends. I think the name came from the fact that he was studying comparative religion and biblical Mediterranean languages when I met him. He's smart and contemplative and quiet, with a wicked wit and generous heart. One of my only visitors up in the tower that summer. Visitors had to be OK'd through the Forest Service office and driven up to the tower by the forest patrol. It was all very uptight, since the lookout is within the Bull Run Watershed, which supplies water for the greater Portland area and many counties near it.]

[What follows is another writing exercise with a bizarre prompt... no idea where the prompt came from.]

Don't you hate it when you reach down from your bed to tie your shoes, and the laces fall apart into atoms.

****

Last time that happened to me I was sitting in a hospital bed, stinking of 3 weeks of sponge-baths and catheters, and cruelly bitter sweat. The thin mattress with its cheap egg-crate foam was bothering me so I swung my now skinny legs, covered with dark purple constellations, over the edge of the bed, and pulled on my socks. I hadn't realized until then how dammed bright it was -- and how flimsy. Everything in the room was flimsy polyester cloth (easy to wash I guess) and thin-walled aluminum pipe. I hated the rattle of the rings against the pipe as they pulled my curtains closed.

I could see outside the window today, and the huge trees out there (horse chestnut I think) just glowed in the sun. The sunlight seemed to set them off, like a candle does a lover's skin. I sat for a long while with one sock only half pulled on, staring out into the breeze and foliage outside. I could make out a lawn and curb -- and barely, some cars. One car pulled away, and the movement shook me from my reverie. I looked around, a little embarrassed that I'd been sitting immobile so long. I reached down, slowly, to pull up the other sock. I hated the look of my skinny, wrinkled arms sticking out of the over sized, one-size-fits-all smock they gave me to wear. I looked like a dried-up old desert crone, or a dark-skinned concentration-camp internee.

I lifted one shoe off the floor with my toes -- it was one of a pair my daughter had sent me -- brand new running shoes, with extra-soft soles & they didn't weigh a thing. I pulled it over my thin, wooden foot. Not bothering with the laces, I reached down with both feet to grab the other shoe.

At this point a nurse walked by in the hallway outside, it's walls a stupid mustard yellow. Luckily, she didn't see me sitting up, or she'd be here in a minute, her strong hands pushing me back into that thin-mattressed bed I hate so. I pulled the shoe up to my hands slowly, and felt incredible, dull pain throbbing along my vertebrae, like a diseased snake had replaced my spine. I could see it now, all dull & yellow, pocked, with scales missing.

I slid this shoe on. Something changed and my stomach registered it with a twitch. I crinkled my forehead & squinted my eyes to see. The shoe, halfway on my foot, was vaguely transparent. It was letting off a fine shower of particles, too small to see -- but sparkling. I "humphed" and pulled the shoe on as forcefully as I could, as though that would set reality straight. I reached quickly for the laces, but they slipped through my hands, disintegrating into a transparent whitish cloud, then reformed & flopped again to the sides of the shoe. I sat there a long time, hunched over -- staring at my right shoe.

A nurse's footsteps passed the door again, but this time they stopped. You could almost hear the incredulous stare that must have crossed face when she saw me there, sitting up. She rushed into the room, and I felt the strange tightness come over me as her cloud, her essence, crossed mine. I could smell her perfume as she reached down and grabbed my thin calves, pulled the shoes off me.

She was muttering to herself like a disturbed chicken. I was smiling, and would have been chuckling had I the energy. She took my legs, and pulled them carefully onto the bed. She was very, very careful -- and as strong as a Russian masseuse. She laid me back down, and I was still so amused I didn't even think to protest. She was muttering something, I can't quite remember what, something about "ungrateful old men," and "people who won't let themselves be taken care of."

She was quite peeved -- not only because I wasn't dead yet, but because since I did this on her shift she had to handle a cadaver that still breathed. Somehow that breathing made her look at things she didn't want to look at in her life -- like that useless marriage she carries around like a cross on her back, or a bundle of luggage too large to carry. Yeah, she was peeved. I almost bust out laughing, but I was sure the pain would make that a bad idea -- coming in like a thousand spears into my gut. No matter -- it had been a successful day anyway.

"Special Significance" -- writing exercise. Hanbleceya ceremony

[I was knocking around rough drafts for essay answers to college entrance forms, and this one asked about an event of "special significance" in my life. Don't recall if this ever made it onto an application or not -- it was probably going to Evergreen or Prescott college.]

"Special Significance"

In the spring of 1991, a friend and I walked into the newly-thawed hills of Eastern Oregon to fast. We had been planning this for over 6 months (if "planning" is an appropriate word to use here). After finding our individual spots together, we camped 1 night at base camp, made some sage tea, and had a couple hours of sleep. We headed, individually, to sit in a circle of stones fasting for 3 days and nights.

Our newly-met Cherokee teacher told us it was a fast, not a vision quest. "You hear "Vision Quest" and you expect something -- you two go out there and fast, sacrifice for the people."

It's been 2 years now, and I fully expected to have a more recent example to use for this exercise; but in considering the events, i realized I couldn't have done any of them without this crucial first step.

Many things happened there. For one, I melted into a landscape more thoroughly than I had ever thought possible. I was joining the birds' morning salute songs by the second day. Secondly, & this was more subtely realized, I faced my own death, or mortality. I knew I would die. I *felt* that reality, and it changed me in ways I'm still discovering. One of the most marked being a switch from a fear-based mind, to one of trust & intuition. I am more free now than I've ever been.

Upon returning to Portland, Ross and I were already planning our 6 1/2 month trip through mexico & the Southwest, by thumb & freight car. That, too, was an incredible adventure. But as for significance -- it remains based in those 3 days. I would not be sitting here, as I am today, without them.

July ? again, extirpating nasty image from head

I couldn't get the image out of my head, so I'll write it. I had been riding along in a green forest-service truck, and the driver was talking about all kinds of "waste-birds" -- crows, starlings, gulls.

The gulls were the worst, he said, they would cover the field all white when he turned it over -- digging around for bugs and whatnot. "Shit, we hated them dammed things. We'd sit on the back of the tractor with .22's and just picked em off, one by one. Then we'd plow them under."

Then, sensing my ecologically correct attitude, he said "they eat up all the eggs. They did a study, where they put poisoned eggs in dummy nests, and killed off a whole load of 'em, and you know what? The waterfowl population that year doubled. I hate them dam birds."

"I remember seein' em, dead, around the sewage-treatment plant. I guess they'd get into the used condoms. They'd pull 'em out of the treatment ponds, and then couldn't digest 'em"

The image seared into my brain, like a hot brand. Now to get it out...

A slick commotion of white & grey features, bright beak & eye lowered down to the surface of the roiling shit-stew, dredging a worm-looking thing, transparent neon orange, from the muck. Then swallowing it down as it flew away, it tasting not only like the sewage below, but with a texture meaty and satisfying. It felt good and substantial in the stomach. The seagull flying away, full and satisfied.

A couple days later, the same seagull stumbling around on the cement next to the piping & meters at the treatment pond. It's hot out, and the bird is delirious from all the toxins re-circulating in his bloodstream, the rubber lodged somewhere in its lower intestine, plugging him. His world sways & flashes & drops about him as the delirium gets worse.

Soon, an organ just pops, ruptures -- the pain increasing to a pitch unimaginable to our culture anatomies. The shock aiding it to pull free of the strong magnetic attraction of the body, of matter, and allowing it to fly away, towards the sun -- the big garbage dump in the sky.

July ?, 1:21 AM -- frozen corn, horror films, lack of someone to woo, Dreads and plaster

Can't sleep. Got a bowl of frozen corn to munch on, and took a look at the moon through the windows. 5/8 full. My calendar is way the fuck off then, it shows 1/2 moon, waxing, on the 12th. The way its going, it'll be full in a day or two -- unless it was full a couple days ago.

Outside, it's got a pale, ghostly demeanor. The butte looks like a moor (again) -- once they'd have a poor, busy 1950's teen stumbling about in scared -- her ponytail all in a whirl. What a sadistic crowd we were (are). Wanna see kids chopped up for having sex. Every scene you see the soft-porn aspect of a teen slash-em-up movie -- you know the kids are doomed any second. The ultimate production of a crazed society formed on the protestant work ethic. "Fuck -- and you die, kids, -- gimme your money, thanks."

So I'm sittin here (on the Group W bench -- I mean I'm sittin here -- ), munching on frozen corn niblets, in the mood to write a corny love letter, but have no recipient in my life for such a letter.

Reminds me of the new, hippie chauvinistic I ran into a while back talking to some trail crew, or wildlife biologists -- "you aughta find yourself a kind little Betty to take up into that tower with you." "yeah, a Little Betty; you mean woman, right?" [lyrics] "where dehumanizing the victim makes things easier, it's like breathing with a respirator (Disposable Heroes of Hiphopracy)."

What was I saying? So, got no-one to write to. No one to woo.

I'll just read a chapter of Wild Mind & write instead.

****

Instead of that, I wrote G. Doten a letter, a writer who I met while working for an Irish stucco & plaster company in the bay area. He, a burgundy-haired, dreadlocked, Bostonian with a thick accent -- was their mudboy. Also their token drug-user. He writes shorts & scripts, etc. We should all be famous some day. He may be the first of my friends to rise up.

Federico Garcia Lorca Poem

[after a night of many dreams involving the sea]


Gacela of the Flight

I have lost myself in the sea many times
with my ear full of freshly cut flowers,
with my tongue full of love and agony.
I have lost myself in the sea many times
as I lose myself in the heart of certain children.

There is no one who in giving a kiss
does not feel the smile of faceless people,
and no one who in touching a newborn child
forgets the motionless skulls of horses.

Because the roses search in the forehead
for a hard landscape of bone
and the hands of man have no other purpose
than to imitate the roots below the earth.

As I lose myself in the heart of certain children,
I have lost myself in the sea many times.
Ignorant of the water I go seeking
a death full of light to consume me.


Federico Garcia Lorca, Trans. Stephen Spender and J.L. Gili in The Selected Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca, P. 167

July 5th writing exercise: I don't remember

I don't remember: I don't remember my Dad saying goodbye to me the many times he left as I was a child, before & after the divorce. I don't remember being born, being compressed in a space that I didn't fit for 26 some-odd hours -- I don't remember my first kiss, I don't think, unless it was that one girl I hated in first grade out under those 3 enormous trees that sat in the grass outside the 1st-graders rooms, the ones that were also on my block, and had paired winged seeds. They've cut them all down. She had foofy little skirts, and her underwear was constantly visible.

I don't remember: fish -- fishwives. My first fishwife. Anything of that sort.

I don't remember: orange fishes, orange oceanic fishes staring out at me from amongst kelp, and how I felt them, underwater exploring for the first time and underwater for so long I was finally arousing suspicions that I was part fish, or dolphin. Or how nothing under there, under the swells, under the greendark water, seemed to treat me any differently as they would a seal, or lumbering manatee. And how the eelgrass tickled my leg slimily and I got scared & realized how much I couldn't see with a mask on and how much this looked like 1,000 leagues under the sea, or batman and how there were always monsters, or bad guys in James-bond underwater viper machines out to kill you when you were down here -- and sharks -- I'd forgotten all about sharks, and suddenly my fascination with what was right on the bottom below me, amidst the eelgrass and red algae that clung to the rock and hid all sorts of interesting aquatic life, vanished, and now I was interested in keeping an eye on that vast sandy-grey-blue that you saw when you looked out towards the barren sea, and how a huge shark could lumber out of that grey like a bear out of a wood, or worse yet, streak out like a cheetah after an antelope, and how I was a big, soft, alien & stupid piece of pink meat floating like a chunk of bait amidst a plane of rocks, and alge too small to hide me, but too deep to push off of to get a good escape -- and my mind raced to swimming back to shore, my fins carefully not breaking water, not splashing too much, to not attract attention to myself and how I would crawl up on the grey pebbley beach and my parents would finally pay attention to me because I'd have a big, lacerated bite in my leg, and I would have swam in bravely anyway, and would be laying on the beach bleeding all manly-like, rationally, glad that the sting of the salt-water was cauterizing and disinfecting my wound for me, and I would wave off help and walk to my towel & lay down in the soft, warm sand with my leg hanging over the edge of the terrycloth, bleeding into the sand, and I would be getting better already, and I respected the shark and knew it wasn't evil really, just doing its thing, as per nature. And the more I thought about it, I would love the shark, for its primordial nature and how it touched me, and made me a man.

July 5th Writing Exercise: I remember

[These writing exercises, I may have mentioned before, aren't supposed to be punctuated at all -- your pen is not supposed to leave the page at all in fact. I couldn't resist punctuating them in my journal, and for this blog I will cut them up into some paragraphs so it's not quite so hard to read]

I remember: I remember thick cotton stockings over my legs, and the nicks and scrapes on the black paint on the wooden floor of the Stage Right, the night of Tosca's opening, when I was a 10-year-old kid, and I had a goat in my arms like a nativity figure, and I was nervous and excited despite the fact that I didn't have to sing. And I knew that Barbara & John (lifelong neighbors as a child) with their salt-and-pepper hair were out there and my Mom -- I think, and maybe my Dad.

And I remember something about the director-lady or the director's assistant, and she was nice, and hustled us around backstage and helped us with our costumes - and we got dressed in a long room with white countertops in front of enormous mirrors with lights all over them just like you thought they'd be backstage at an opera-=house or theatre.

I remember the pudgy-faced black curly-haired little Italian kid who lived in our apartment complex and had gotten us the parts, and I remember how his arms and fingers were fat like a baby's and how he was so arrogant, and self-assured because he'd done this before, and his Mom doted over her young Opera star, gave him candy (covered with olive-oil for all I knew) and how I really didn't like him much but he was one of the few kids in the neighborhood who could speak English, it being mostly Cambodian and Vietnamese immigrants pretty fresh off the ship.

They lived across the street crammed 10-12 in a 2-bedroom apartment, and you could smell the fish, bitter cooking smells at all hours of the day and night, and it was kind-of off-limits -- I never went through that complex where the kids walked around the gravel-covered parking lot in thongs (flip flops) and torn shorts -- circling around on little bicycles, their grandmothers & great grandmothers nearby with nothing better to do than watch the children, where they were in a foreign land, and the cars drove by fast, and I'm sure the grandparents didn't speak the language at all and were thusly afraid of everything and pulled their culture they brought with them in the seams of their clothes, and the smells those clothes carried, they pulled that culture in like a flower-stand on a rainy day, the pulled it into that little apartment building, or more likely, into that little apartment itself, all thick with the smell of old people and pickled fish and sesame oil, and I'm sure they hit their kids if they spoke english at all, and sat in those cramped dark apartments and tried to recreate Vietnam, but couldn't because the Safeway up the street wouldn't allow it, nor the advertisements they put in full color in the nearby papers with coupons to draw out the poor-- reluctant ones -- I'm sure it wasn't allowed at all and that the system got in after all, and the kids started buying their own clothes, with bright colors and stripes and spent more time in the parks, now that their bikes had bigger wheels and ranged farther and farther, and they didn't have to depend on the timed efficiency of the schoolbus every day, and they got aloof as they grew tall & handsome, and drifted away.

July 5th, Vampire dream

The dream was cinema-graphic, about 2 vampiresses. They were gorgeous, and lived at a stone mansion with a vineyard. One was a gilfriend of mine, and we all slept together in the same bed, but when I had first walked into the place my girlfriend vampire had sprinkled Holy Water & crossed me, so I would be protected from both her and her friend. Apparently there was a connection between the desire for blood, and sexual desire. The vampires were passionate people, passionate lovers.

July 4, Childhood recurring dream

As a child, I had this recurring dream. It always started out with a vast blackness, and a low, resonant hum. The kind that moves your ribs & stomach around until you were hungry, and made your palms hot & itchy.

Then something would appear, a planet usually, and usually Jupiter -- your favorite planet as a kid, with its big red cyclone eye. It would appear in the distance, crystal clear & light strong & sharp amidst the clean blackness.

Slowly, after a long time, you'd notice that it was getting closer -- that it had been the whole time, but you hadn't noticed until now, when it took up almost all of your view.

You'd remember now that this was the dream where you crashed into things, and your heart would beat faster as you traveled through the roiling mists of methane & gas you would resist, twisting your head in your sleep this way and that, pushing against the sheets, sweating.

Then you would fall against the surface of the planet. It would fall right through your chest & different layers of the planet, they'd be getting bigger, too.

Little in your bed at home, you'd be calm again; eyes closed, but seeing something far off and truthful.

Soon there were large objects with space in between -- like planets themselves, but closer together and all a field of color -- then, as they got bigger, one would head towards you all alone with its buzzing, it would be transparent & loud with a sound like mad bees.

You'd break through its definitive, but transparent shell & inside were things that moved too fast to be seen, but you knew they were there, and your heart would beat faster and faster, but this time you didn't squirm, you were too far along, and the last stage was irresistable -- no way to stop it. And the buzzing would become a whine, and a light would grow and grow in front of you and the noise was unbearable, and you entered it. Its cold, but somehow like the Sun, and the noise would tear you apart if you stayed, and you'd wake up in your bed -- the walls and the window and the vine-covered fence outside and your sister in her bed, dark in the corner, all seemed very far away, and you very small amongst it all; very small and very light.

July 4th continues, some ranting then Sun worship

I get to this place, and I just wanna tear at myself with a kitchen fork -- tear all the flesh off my bones that I may finally feel the breeze.

****

It's like a shit I can't take -- except I'm the shit & I'm the rectum & muscles trying all at once.

****

The Sun just broke through the clouds and toward my face, and I smiled and laughed, and tomorrow this will all be nothing.

****

I'm falling in love with the Sun. I've always been in love with it -- as a kid, barrel-chested & spindly-armed, my olive limbs dangling, I would hunch over at the beach, digging sand crabs. I would feel my back turning brown, I would feel the touch of the Sun. It warmed my chest and face, it sank in, and made me feel better. I've always been in love with the Sun.

July 4 writing practice continues... weather and the virutes of solipsism

The storm clouds are lifting outside -- some light brilliant against a grey background. The wind music has started up again.

I can't help feeling my moods connected deeply with the weather. Sometimes it seems like my moods create the weather -- but the scientist in me believes vice-versa. that my moods are reflected in the weather, and that when it changes, so do my insides. Oh, for the summer to finally arrive and unhinge me from myself.

****

I have such an urge to be torn asunder. I want nothing left, only the void, and my crystal-clear body consciousness.

****

I'm in no position to talk about anything but myself. If I become slightly detached at this point, I still only come to myself honestly as subject - matter. I cannot, at this point, speak honestly any other way.

I rely heavily on Kabir, "In his twenties, Kabir was very concerned with Kabir."

Fucking great -- because I am. The cult of the I -- what am I anyway -- what is hiding under my grandmother's sunday skirt. Where are my hobgoblins, those beautifully unruly bullish parts of my personality that run unchecked through my darkest sleeps. I want to meet them -- not in my own film, either.

I came up here to test my sanity, amongst other things. To "come up against it" as it were. It surprises me when it happens. Normally am amplification of my Judge's Voice "You are insincere, you are a faker, you cannot even begin to realize the beauty in a flower, much less commune with it." i don't know where this voice came from, or what it's doing here, or what it's afraid of, but I'm tired of it, and instead of killing *myself* -- I might attack it instead. I don't want to be understanding, it isn't. I want it gone -- if that means understood & assimilated (psychological birdsong & flowers) then fine. Let's Do It!!!

Whatever it is that's keeping me from flying into the glare of that lake in the distance & going through that light into a fullness and voice so far incomprehensible to me; what ever keeps me from flying through the glare and into the voice -- universe -- reality beyond. I want to deal with. Kill, destroy, love, understand, heal, nurture -- I don't care, I am tired of not living. Now.

****

July 4th, some sky, some religion, much writing exercise

The clouds cleared for a minute, and to my West there are greyish, pale Angel's Slides coming down out of the sky. "When I was young we were told to be extra good when we saw those, because angels come down 'em from heaven."

Well, I'm extra Me -- whether that's good or not I'll leave to a higher count.

****

I can't seem to shake my Judeo-Christian - Protestant & mostly Catholic foundations. When I reach down there to pull them out, it'd be like cutting off my feet, or pulling the bottom grapefruit out of a pile. They'd all fall. I'd fall. I might have to start at the top & skim & remove & edit and release until I am there, and nothing that I am is resting on those Roman Catholic bricks -- and then throw them out into the river.

****

I feel like sitting here writing about how much I wanna write. It's none of the main things I think about anyway. It's not really an altruistic purpose, either. It's pretty narcissistic & self-centered. I want to see someone read something I wrote, see their faces soften or harden, and maybe a glint of recognition or humor as they catch some subtle cosmic joke in it all, and had it back to me saying "that's really good -- I really enjoyed it" with a boyish and youthful naive charm. I want to be the one who "knows." I want to be the teacher, the knower, the kind-of outsider who has relevant observations. I am embarrassed of this fact, and it stifles my writing.

It's good to read people who are full of themselves, like Bukowski or Miller. There's good stuff in there, and they know it. it might not be prophetic, or universal, or even literature -- but there's some good stuff in there. I want to participate. I want to be a writer -- one who'se read. One who people enjoy. I hypothetically know that can't be my motivation -- and it might not be -- its just a wish.

Maybe I need to be struck down; lightning, plague killing off my whole family, interned in a concentration camp, lose my legs; before I can understand. Maybe I need to be a latin-american mother of 6 who has had a succession of alcoholic boyfriends who beat her & her children and who is now living in a hovel outside town and working in a rich person's house as a maid, and pretends to be stupid so they aren't threatened, whose children are going toward gangs before her very eyes -- off looking for fathers amongst their peers -- and who knows they could be wiped out any day, if not by another kid their own age, then by a cop, or a store owner who won't spend the night in jail, much less years. Maybe then I'd understand what it is to be human.

Maybe this driving force that haunts me always, whispering "faker," "charlatan," "impotent half-assed little white kid" into my ear would stand at attention and take my orders -- go to bed. Shut up. Sit down. You are nothing now.

Images of me pulling & tearing and birthing out of a reptilian chrysalis of complacency & politeness reign over the mountain landscape about; superimpose it and pull me back to the page -- pen dancing.

Normally, I would stop there but I won't today.

[to be continued]

July 4 still, musings and on reading and Arthur Miller

There's something to being alone up here, a young writer, reading. An author, amongst all this solitude and silence, can pluck loudly strings that send you, as a writer, flying. I was confident with Snyder, and now manic and self-absorbed with Miller.

I was envisioning taking speed-typing classes, so I could keep up with my thoughts, so I could let the original flow flow -- so I could be hyper. Instead, I just eat lots of food to slow down the flood, and watch a pen slowly sweep up after the last tracings of dust in which a party had ensued but you could only guess at it. There will be no typewriters up here -- I'll have to find a way to send all that energy into little sentences, or to somehow hold them in stasis as my slow mule of a hand plods silently along and I pick up the gems left on the road by my leprechaun mind.

July 4, dream, aspirations, Rilke

Woke my self up because I was licking the rough edge of my quilt, dreaming I was licking a beautiful woman's ear.

*****

I read 1950's era Snyder, and am so encouraged. "We might just make it -- maybe there is a way to live as my blood and psyche has always called me to, maybe I will be happy and healthy ("I" being "all")."

It's just so encouraging. Easy to envision myself living in a tribe/group collective, farming and gathering, and taking responsibility, writing poetry because it's important to write poetry -- the people writing for what's next. Feathers & furs and new information too.

****

Thoughts of college & schools welling up. Frankly, the perks of my privilege -- I'm white American for crissakes, even male. What does this get me? Right now, it gets me less "work" and more Work. Rolling & dancing & lavishing myself in Time, afforded me by this position.

Time out of the financial system -- privileged time -- time to think & find mentors and synthesize where nothing has existed before. I intend to revel in this, as I am now. I intend to lick up and take as far as I can every little opportunity (privilege or no) life affords me. I have done this, as long as it serves my needs and desires. The needs of growth and expansion, learning to support that expansion and make it communicable.

Help myself so much that it naturally helps everyone. Love and accept myself completely always as my practice.

"Take my practiced powers and stretch them out until they span the chasm between two contradictions ... For the god wants to know himself in you." -- Rilke, trans. by Stephen Mitchell

[this book, linked through the text or in the sidebar, deserves special mention. It's one of those books that can change your life, honestly. Near the time I spent at the lookout, I had it physically on my person for almost a full year. It's a beautiful translation (the folks who think Bly did a better job can jump in a creek)]

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.

July 2, impending boss visit

Grey day. It's noon, and I've read more Dancing Wu Li Masters, and took a nap. I dreampt I was fishing on the coast -- it looked like somewhere around San Simeone. I caught a barracuda, and had a running commentary about barracudas going in my head as I reeled it in, and lifted it into the air by the gills. It turned slowly into a mackrel.

My boss today said he was going to come out tomorrow to "talk with me about a few things." My mind went wild! Paranoid, schizoid ponderings as to a possible list of things I could have done wrong, that he wouldn't talk about on the radio.

My mind raced: Somehow, my thought life and "real life" transposed and I told a bunch of people that I was hunting in the Bull Run with my slingshot; I left a gate open last night when escorting the FCC camp crew home, that someone was scanning channel 3 when I was talking to the bus, and I said something not PC and they called and harassed him; or the FCC caught the one "fuck" that slipped out of my lips over the radio; or that one of the bosses picked up on all the banter on channel 3 which is supposed to also be official business only even though it as late at night. That someone saw my bus enter road 10 late and night and reported me; that all my relays I've been doing on the radio are inappropriate and I need to be more professional; that I'm fired (a reason I haven't thought of yet; that someone was listening to channel 3 late last night, and I said something about the local people that they didn't like). (restatement -- but could be severe; that I wasn't supposed to talk to the owl crews, and that when I spotted that truck the other night I shouldn't've said anything -- (a distinct possibility); that when the ranger heard me talking about the badness of burning plastics, he went to T [the supervisor] and told him my political views were immature & inappropriate to a forest-service employee; that when I told that ranger about my hike up the butte, he told the supervisor and it wasn't OK for me to be trudging around like that; that since I was in a politically-sensitive zone, they'd been opening my mail and found out that I am hunting grouse; that I don't need to offer radio assistance to every person needing a relay, and that it is unprofessional; that there's something I said or did that offended someone or was unprofessional or inappropriate to the forest service or my position in it, and it was or wasn't on the radio, and that I'm in trouble, and must lose my position here -- and that I lose his respect in some way -- that's it.

I'm afraid of losing his respect in some way. I'm afraid he'll be disappointed in me for some reason. I'm not getting fired -- I'm not really scared of this, it's a smoke screen for me being afraid of disappointing some supervisor and having him "just live with it" but always thing lower of me, and I won't be privileged or "good" in his eyes after this. That's what I'm worried about. Nothing else. I'll just breathe, drink some tea, and relax -- how bout that.

What if -- rant: Question for a 2-year-old

What if you were sitting at the base of a mountain and it meant nothing to you. What if the beauty didn't. What if you just sat there, empty, and the mountain did, too, and there was no hum between the two, to , too.

What if you were sitting amongst it and it wasn't a Chinese landscape painting replete with geomantic implication? What if the wind were just cold, and the clouds were just wet, and you didn't even want to be out in it? What about that?

What if, when you walked around amongst the shrubs and grasses, they were just shrubs and grasses, and you couldn't hear their singing, or their heartbeat. What if they bothered you?

And the only thing that shook you was lightning, or death?

What then?

What if climbing endlessly on an escalator going down, in a mall, towards the phosphorescent lights, over babies and puppies and wives, and what if you never reached the white linen suit at the top? You were bloodied anyhow -- it would stain through.

What if all this struggling in the hooked nets pulling at your flesh, the thorns and places were just that? What if this was your gift, a plain of broken glass to distill happiness from; no shaman to save you in this land of grey suits and yellow ties. What if?

And you never deserved it, and even that didn't matter?

*****

What if that hole in your stomach, that kitchen-drain, black-hole thing that you fill with thick foods; what if they didn't work -- and it just kept sucking and howling and didn't let up? Would you pull your hair? Would you walk in the sunlight on sidewalks amongst the people? Would you?

What if, what if there are no answers -- never were, and this was all just made up? Like little kids in a sandpit in kindergarten digging to China for fun? A candy-cane -beamed structure to hold you above. What then?

What if this really was a place where a stranger could stab you in the back for no reason? Along an alleyway, after dancing, and drinking; and forgetting. What -- what if it was dark out, and the gruel dribbling down the middle of the alleyway didn't smell so good, and everyone else had walked ahead, and you were alone amongst the garbage bags, bleeding, and staring at the orange reflections of the streetlights dimpled in pools on the street.

This two-year-old in line in font of me in the grocery store just stared back -- the begged-for bag of candies in its brittle orange cellophane hanging from his forgotten fingers, eyes wide and staring.

He never did answer me.