Vitti

l'avventura

Monica Vitti

Helen breathing

Nancy Spero.

Egypt, I am Egypt.
Woman bodies, a women body, embodied a woman I am, we must.

Egypt calls in spitting sand, bodies ancient, drawn, scolded.
War no more, for the symbolic helicopter sights be seen, villages broiled. Leave us to our own devices and the crickets can have it all.
Helen of Troy: Hanged by a rainbow.

Truth be told, she told us thus: empower all beings, our sisters as brothers, or know you leave us in chains.

Search and Destroy/Goddess Nut and Pregnant

I go, he grows, you grow

Canada geese. The aesthetics of time wasted: curved at the spine and splintered.

Oh, Papa!

Against thee

We seem very poor.
We seem very rich.
We seem out of place and in our own place and of a time and place so very far from here.

I rallied against the institution. The deadlines, the arbitrary fees, the grey and abandoned city.
I am back inside and I ask, whining, scratching, faking humility, please help me grow out of these pretenses.
Please, help me grow.

There are no politics in paint

Varying success.

Paint three hours a day. Paint wet or dry, paint muddy. Critique directed toward Conviction.
Have Conviction.
Have a discipline. Have discipline. Be disciplined.
I wonder if the sleeping dog is sad because I'd rather be sleeping. Nonsense.
The record player arrived from its dusty storage in creaky, sterile form. The right speaker broke and there is an undetermined lack of bass on Scary Monsters.

"Notes on the Exotic."
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/notes-exotic?int-cid=mod-latest

I have been feeding on Vietnam-era films and Vietnam-as-subject films. As I turn one thing into an unrelated other, I imagine my oldest unborn son scouting for souvenirs in Damascus and Mosul and Kashmir, as I romped Southeast Asia nearly a decade ago without finding a single human skeleton to add gravity to my pursuits. 19 years and change in Vietnam/ Cambodia, 13 years in the grey-brown rocky mountains east of the Mediterranean. Redact hash and cocaine for hash and varied opioids, and oil.

My Siberian dog under an Austro-Baltic regime.  I tell him: Sit. Stay.
He runs, and runs and never stops running. Runs to right his birth. 

Down the Company

"It builds character."

Which character?

There is one way glass where waves pass through and bounce back to the wave itself, leading at the elbow. Before the wave was the welcome, a ribbon of arms enlaced and untwined. Before the knotted bodies turned the wheel beneath the watchtower, a mountain range slumped just an inch.

"Some sleep their time."

Sleep how?

Every morning dawns with an ache, a pang of wheresomeness and shallow water. The ankles, out of virtue, forgive the feet for being clean. Where will we sleep? In the middle of the road. Yellow as pin-stripes.

A morning

GlnwoodHastings OW Intermediate

If I believe in what I do, why feel so broken? So flat and empty and dull?

Vulfgang

A snapshot of a Saturday's post meridian after several errant weeks.

One Year the Milkweed

Lest I neglect you for a quicker, flicker of little prosisms.

1944

Oil on Canvas

National Gallery of Art

Arshile Gorky

Converse

Words spoken that hushed say infinitely more. 

Prim and the Bamboo

They share a window sill.

In her own soil, she grows to blossom and blossoms to bloom.

Broad in the shoulders, wrapped in gold, his roots as twine binding stones to still.

In the shadowless light of an overcast noon, why so certain, she?

Une vie d'amour et d'eau fraîche.

Ten Cents

The dime reads 1967, and the idea runs through my head to research exhibitions from the year, understand our international diplomacy and establish how that summer fared, compared with the six before it. I wondered at all of the thumbs that pressed this dime into the thigh of the forefinger and the wares that were worth the price in exchange. How many times, this dime, lost and found, how many times dropped and lifted, lost in a game of cards?

He leads me to Water

Mon cheval est grand et fort.

Inexpliqués

C'est soir, something is astir. I am ready to explore again, explore the pathways of serendipity, chance and sweet vibration. I say this past year has been grounding, wholesome, and no place but this studio apartment could unravel such magnificence.

But a fireplace? 

A basket by the door with collar and leash, wet from melted snow and warm from a panting heart of mine?

It fills pages of the rosy banal: the satisfying tao of a homemaker.

In lieu of flowers, send a garden hose. 

Ouvre-t-il la fenêtre?

Oil on hand-stretched Canvas

4 ft x 5ft

Summer In

Good news, my friends.

I will be spending June July in Cook County, Illinois.

August-bound, this old train of mine.

Mother Knew

But never shared, that our fourteen pound Pomeranean may actually be a Spitz.

Family secrets.

Try the Bulb

The light fixture in the kitchen has been dim for just over a year.

The Ancient Food of Heroes

I ponder, and onder, and onder.
How deep does taste go?

"A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument; everything has been given for an end. This is even stronger in the case of the artist. Everything that happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one's art. One must accept it. For this reason I speak in a poem of the ancient food of heroes: humiliation, unhappiness, discord. Those things are given to us to transform, so that we may make from the miserable circumstances of our lives things that are eternal, or aspire to be so.

If a blind man thinks this way, he is saved."
JLB, 1977


This reminds me of Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse, and the young artist's quest for the model visage for his ecstatic sculpture-in-the-making, which in turn reminds me of three sleepless days in Tours, FR which can't be recalled but in images, which can't be reproduced in images but in words, those, once called, blur and fall back into dark, fragile Memory.

Don't let me forget to go to the post office.

To close one's eyes is to invite the sibling senses to attention. My continued interest in blindness may suggest a need for more quiet meditation or movement performed far from reflective windows or mirrors.  This evening, I am the beneficiary of a spotlessly clean and empty apartment.
Zafu or no zafu, let darkness fall.

Speaking of..




<<<Quote from: Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions/Edited by Eliot Weinberger/
"Lecture on Blindness"/Translated by Esther Allen/Penguin/2000>>>>