| in america 15 part 3 - 2008 april-may | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
18 April Ros died 14 years ago. Jan 22 - Sept 23. Jennifer Rosalynde de Lanerolle 1932-1993 nee Ainslie. She ran Women's Press as managing director 1981-1991, was sacked 1991 and tried to form her own publishing house, Open Letters. Pandora award for women in publishing 1992. I knew her 1971-1973. She was 61. Ayisha and Indra. - Bramble Press? Ambient, Adeft, Brava, Soma, Alder, Ant Bear. Idea of the press - am I sick of it already. Tired today. Cold. 20 Indra de Lanerolle executive producer Frontline - lot of credits 1994-2005. [notes on book covers at Borders] Margin publishing University presses are nonprofit and subsidized Foundations - Heritage, Cato, Brookings, Century C/f 'trade houses' Norton / New Press A model - Dalkey Archive State University of Illinois "has pieced together out of bits of free space and free time a model that could easily be emulated at universities throughout the country." University offices and grad students, professor director. "There is no reason why university presses should not encourage ancillary alternative publishing houses that could share their facilities and publish in areas that the university is wary of venturing into." Andre Schiffrin 2000 The business of books: how international conglomerates took over publishing and changed the way we read Verso
[6 pages of notes on publishing - business models, cover design - paper - name - format - order management - costs - POD - front and back matter - editing - contracts - prepublicaton - sales] 21 Ant bear. A large edentate mammal (Myrmecophago jubata or tridachyla) of tropical America feeding chiefly on ants. It has a long snout, protrusible tongue, powerful digging claws, and a shaggy, black-banded coat. (8 feet long; 2 feet high) [image Funk and Wagnalls 61] Giant anteater. Largest member of the anteater family, tropical grasslands of Venezuela, once in lowland forests of. - I'm raring now, and Becci isn't replying to the last note, neither is Jeanne. Juliana. 22 Luke. It was 4 in the afternoon in London, he was looking at sun after a long winter. He dreamed he was at the house on Pender and there was a cat he was responsible for. He had neglected to feed it and it had nearly starved. He woke sobbing. There was a related story. In New York last fall he got to talking to a woman on a park bench. He was telling what he was planning to do and she said "But what about you? What do you want for you?" When he was back in London he checked helicopter schools, the market for pilots. He bought a radio to listen to them. He needs $45,000. I said I'd sometime like to come to London for a month. He went to a party in London and ran into Sharif and Manuela - Sharif from Vancouver, who was on his way home from a conference in Dubai. Conference on mosque-building. Andy had a 60th birthday celebration at a pub in Islington. His kids both performed. Andy has kids who sing - Roy went to South Africa and had all his teeth replaced with implants for $12,000. All Roy's teeth are out - Roy! Josh's kids are in school. He's got a new job at the BBC, managing something about web IT. Luke likes the stability with Indra. If she were overhearing, he said, she would mind that he didn't say he likes being with her. He's using her and I'm not disapproving. I want him taken care of even if it's by a woman who is fooling herself. Is he starved at early love? I think so. Open heart. When he talks about information technology and NGO's his voice goes harder and more upper class. Sean has thyroid cancer. - Kri figured out that she rushed into being smart and verbal with her mother because at least it was contact, and that it's why she is distressed at the thought of hurrying to finish. Emilee saying Francis doesn't understand. Her prose died because of it. I'm replying that he's no matter, he's not her reader. One more. Deena turned around, she's dropping her defiant insistence and wants to make an album about becoming herself. - Then email from Al announcing publication of his book with Trafford. (I spend the next hours researching Trafford.) Chris Day has self-published a book called Dying is fun about motor neuron disease. 23 What I wrote Emilee: Subject heading: intense & purposes Dear you, that F does not understand you is no matter. He is not your reader. The woman I sent your tantra piece is. Others like her, who are lonelier in their brilliance than he is in whatever that is called. It is sweet-hearted of you to want to make him comfortable but don't let it clip what was so glorious a dragon's flight. When we don't have the reader we need, we have to imagine one. And there is still me. From every direction now the dark man lingers - the taboo you've broached is central and primal - I'm thinking of Freud - you have stolen the father from the mother and that brings with it great, primal fear - and so here we are in one of the burning cores of unconsciousness studies - very tantric. Standing still in it, yes. What do I know about writing to a reader - why does the quality of the reader make so much difference - not to everyone I don't think - I would notice my emails to Jan were better - but I can write good letters to students who are only medium bright, for instance lately to Deena. The grey has been moving in these mornings. When I was at Borders last night to look at book covers - which I won by circling the blocks many times looking for parking - I opened a book and said I'll buy this. When have I lately bought poetry. It was Sharon Olds. Intense and purposes: teaching letters. - I took on a rumble at Starbucks. Was that bad? I was at the armchair by the window, left computer and journal on the table to buy a NYT. Two people sat down near me, one on the other side of my table, the other at the nearest other table, across a narrow passage. They talked all the way through the NYT and the LAT. The nearest one across the table had a few strings of greasy hair and dirty fingernails. The other was thinner and dirtier. The one near me began by saying Starbucks reminded him of Moby Dick. Went on to mention "the poet Charles Olsen." Meantime the other man was talking about yuppies moving back downtown. They continued to make speeches, each on his own topics. The man across the table was sitting with his dirty hand on his cup the way men sit touching their beer cans at readings. "I like ee cummings." "Anne Sexton was a great poet. I met her when I was 19, at a party. I'd been drinking. I made a pass at her. She was a beautiful woman. I like her better than Sylvia Plath." The other man, who doesn't know these references, goes on talking about something else. What was maddening about him. His complacent bluffing voice. There was no mind in what he was saying, everything was rote, but he was stroking himself continuously, obliviously, with reference to real minds. There was also the way he was assuming I was being honoured to hear him, or else assuming I didn't matter. When I was folding the sections back into the paper I decided from one second to the next to jump them. I said "Do you guys realize that when you talk to each other neither of you hears a word the other is saying? You just talk past each other." The dirtier thin one said it wasn't my business. I said I'd had to put up with it. The thin one said it was a public space. What did I say then. The closer one got into it I think. They said I didn't have to listen, I said I was leaving. Then I said, "Not so much you" - to the thin one - "as you" - to the other one - "you're unbearable." We gave each other a long stare. He said "You've made my day." I said "Good."
[opposite pages more publishing notes] 25 Sharon Olds. 2007. The book is beautiful. It's a size we can't have [not so]. Borzoi Knopf. Even background color a sort of matt silvered pale tan. Perfect design. Heracleitus' The unswept floor in mosaic. Could do this design in dark green with white. Color photos. Author photo. 15 front pages, 5 back, 38 in = 123 = 85 content = 143 total. Cream paper. Set in Bell. - Virago Modern 1986 shiny dark green and white - cream paper - 287. 26 Outside Starbucks, hot Saturday morning. A woman in green pants with a cap of hair dyed solid chestnut brown parked her small parrot on the back of my chair when she went inside to order. He had eyes like white buttons with dark centres, red streaks under his tail feathers, a smooth beige beak like a separate thing stuck onto his face. The newspapers have a soldier in Iraq threatened for atheism, 400 children of the polygamous Mormons in foster care, who had been isolated in their mad sect all their lives. A pretty spaniel sitting elegantly panting. The woman with the bird said he was her best friend. Barefoot street man in a long skirt, cart decorated with a live asparagus fern. Blank three year old twin girls in a double pushchair each with a polycarbonate baby bottle, different colors. 28 In the earliest dawn a big moth woke me battling against the window. I lifted my head to look out and saw that the honeysuckle was full of moth blur. The honeysuckle is in fullest flower, white flowers and yellow, and the moths were feeding. The light on the page is whiter than it was a moment ago. A hot glow on the horizon where the sun is about to rise. Thin cloud over there is catching - there is the first arc of fire - now I can't look at it anymore but I see light steadily increasing on my page. There's my shadow on the TV closet door. On the mantle in Tom's blue vase an amaryllis stalk with large blood-red flowers facing four ways like loudspeakers on a post. That sentence influenced by Eudora Welty. It's the amaryllis I bought the first Christmas in this house. It seems its natural blooming period is April. This is the second stalk. I had it in a pot on the rail and one day saw a bit of red in the thicket of honeysuckle. Why is Tom irritating me this weekend. I like him less when he isn't working. He presses me to watch primary politics with him. I don't like his heavy stupid touch. He eats as much when he's not working as when he does - there's a solid pillow of fat at his waist, he sits all day in his boxer shorts showing his varicose veins. - I feel disloyal saying these things but I'll say them. Here he is back from buying the papers and mailing his unemployment stub. There he is on the kitchen couch reading the front section of the Union, sun on his silver brush. Now the sun has got far enough south to reach the amaryllis, starting from its southern edge. White-lined sphinx moth - pink underwing 21/2-31/2". Sphingidae / Hiles lineata hawk moth, hummingbird moth. North American deserts. Change underground and dig their way out, mate shortly after, then die. Emerge at dusk. Large plump bodies and relatively short wings, have to beat them fast to stay up. Like white or pale flowers that they can see at night. 1st May Two mornings ago, about nine, I suddenly thought of going camping. Phoned Tom. What would you think of going camping today? He was cranky and I was casual and he said give him until eleven. I put this and that in the cooler, watered the plants downstairs, hairbrush and toothbrush, journal in the green bag. We'll buy food later. When I got to Georgia Tom still cranky. Made a deal: you want the AC on and I'll agree so long as we take the shortest route. Up 163 till it turns into 15 and then right to Poway. Gas up. I use my card, he pumps, I wash the windows. On up the grade through Ramona. Let's have breakfast in Santa Ysabel. Flowers on the verges, a blue skin on grazing land, California poppies and lupins in the grass. Restaurant is closed in Santa Ysabel. We could eat in the casino. New road with slashed earth sprouting flowers. Slots chirping, room like a big dark gym. On the way out Tom gets his $1 slot up to @29.20 and I say cash out now but he keeps going and plays it back down to zero. Indian Flats campground is closed. We creep along the dirt road above it until we find a perch with a view southwest across ranks of blue mountains, Pine Mountain's buff knobs and tough old pines above us. We put up the tent but I make the beds on tarps outside it. As soon as it's dark it's cold. We get into our beds and lie there seeing the stars milk over with cloud. Sphinx moths motoring about in the nearest bush. Very distant barking. In the morning it's Tom's birthday and very cold. I make us tea and we walk up the road with our cups. We're looking at plants. The yerba santa is everywhere blooming pale purple - we didn't know it was called that. Indian paintbrush in neat clumps red or, once, pale orange. Something blue next to it. Chia with its specks of blue flower. Beavertail with a flower or two, magenta. Something white floated in swathes 8" above the sand. Tiny yellow thing. Desert Canterbury bells indigo blue. Below us roadways and amphitheatre in decomposing granite - everywhere the boulders' surfaces shredding. Everywhere the shrubs radiant with clear growth - redshanks, manzanita - everything. Refreshed. Further on where the line of oaks rose from the campground's streambed, broad trees hung with old-gold tassels. Tom and I walked along looking at everything, "like one mind" he said later, interested together. Then he sits with his back to a rock wrapped in blankets and I make breakfast on the silver camp stove. Pancakes, bacon and scrambled eggs. The pancakes are thinly burnt. He gets back in bed. It isn't clearing. I say why don't we pack up and drive somewhere. We could see if it's warm in Borrego Springs. I want to show him the San Felipe Valley. From the Warner Springs road the mountains stand far back with trees spread somehow beautifully on their upper slopes. We take the south fork and there's more and more. Then the short pass through the gap - brown stone and grey-green agaves. 2 The sun is far enough north now to touch the wall above my bed in the morning, like May in the north room on Pender. A dream after watching Carrier last night of being at some army gathering and being described by a woman doing training as an elder. There was a lot else but the part I want to say is thinking that I would have to work out a social style to keep from being written off now that I look like an old person. Emilee's Vaylor Trucks wrote last night formally to thank me for supporting her. I can matter as an old person by supporting young people, and that only while I still have institutional power. When I was younger I didn't know how much of what I got was the leap of feeling people have toward young bodies: the leap I still have toward young bodies, liking to absorb them. I sometimes think of Jean Waite, wondering how she stayed interesting to people through her eighties. She had a sociable quality, what was it. Interested. She had a steady interestedness, well bred. Also she was tall. Letter from Luke this morning talking about editing the web. Continuing: Tom and I had coffee in Borrego and stopped at a bookstore. I bought Lightner's San Diego County native plants and Tom found a hat I bought him for his birthday. It's a sage-green baseball cap that suits him. And then we zipped home through more marvels of space. There was a moment falling asleep on the mountain where I saw fairyland beauty. Small scenes, two, taken from what I'd seen during the day, flowers among rocks, but sharper and as if color on black. If I can do that I want to do it more. It is whatever 'vision' means, like other times I've slept out and seen faces: maybe something from the place. Three more days. 3 Saturday. I've cleaned house. Washed the heater and put it away. It's eleven and there's light sun, breeze enough to lift the palm fronds and turn Robert's vane. I have the day. Want to break through.
5th Finished the last vol of DR, now into one back, 1983-84 Dec-April, relieved to be on Saturna and out of the desperate tight circle with Jam. Checked through hoping the whole volume would be that - a real place, free days, air, water - it was. I love transcribing it. Packets today. It's cold again. 6th Tom at the VA for his physical - says his bp was 100/60 and his pulse 64 - good cholesterol. He's ten pounds overweight but other than that they can't believe he's 62. Outrageous.
Ant Bear Press. Virtual publisher and publishing coordinator. Authors invited to join the virtual imprint A skills consortium for skill learning I'm the owner of the idea and the owner/director if I own the ISBN numbers There is a fee small enough to give me tax benefits - check how this works Authors responsible to provide edited formatted copy or they pay me or others to do it I design templates Purpose is to get work available To increase author courage To develop embodiment studies presence To bring the books to larger publisher Method is: simplest possible They have to agree to format and in exchange get templates, support, model, website for sales There can be imprint outsiders who use the model independently We could use the model to publicize Virtual office online - behind password Transparent story outline so anyone can follow - use Blogspot Do it as services for people who aren't in the consortium A wrinkle I haven't figured out is how the imprint can be an entity and still have the contract with authors Action now - develop model, ISBN, website, mission statement, author sheet, talk to authors Start with Lisa, Favor, Stacey, Layla, Kate, Anna Develop: Being about, In English, Kri, Emilee, mbo reader, magazine anthology, Intense and purposes: teaching letters. Marketing I wouldn't be offended by: excerpts in periodicals, interviews about the idea of virtual press and skills consortium. Focus on primary markets. 7 Lisa writes yes she's interested to publish with me. Lexi says she googled embodiment and [the college] and found my journal. Her fury was because of what she read, grumblings about [the college]. Her insults though are still hanging in the air so I don't want to say anything more to her. A distaste. What is it about this book - Shingo's feeling for Kikuko; his disappointment in the ugliness of his wife, daughter and granddaughter; the way they all talk about sunflowers, bush clover, the season; the order of household and neighbourhood, maybe a feeling for the preciousness of peacetime restored? I'm reading it this time older than Shingo, who Kawabata thinks of as older than I think this age is. Tod Dockstader. Musique concrète in 1960s. Recently composing again. Feeling crummy - sore midback, achy muscles - it's damp and dark - I've written the only one of my 8 letters I could be interested in - the rest is slog - blank Angela who won't make any kind of contact - Gary's long thesis to be read for the 4th time - David's 4th packet on anarchism that I have to find some little thing to say about - Jaes thanking me because I've invited her to write her own story and she has, and she feels freer for it - so there's that - and the story of her year in the snake pit - Deena another thin packet, she left her boyfriend - Lexi's indulgent puff - so this semester Deena, Deidre and Jaes are the ones I could do something for but only Deidre is putting anything together intellectually. I'm fed up with servitude. When I can't do good work it's scandalous waste. I've done a lot to make this mediocre job worth my time - the magazine, the website, the lectures, real letters that aren't boilerplate or greasy flattery, remarkable letters. Today I'm disgusted that I haven't put that effort into something for me.
[opposite pages web research on Airstream trailers] 10 Price of flour up from $8 a bag to $50. Global food shortages. Mortgage crash, gas at $4. Tom and I more prosperous than he has been since about 1985 and I ever. 11 It's Sunday morning, nearly seven. Grey. A fast drip ticking in Richard's drainpipe. Birds' small scritching somewhere not too near. Yesterday Tom and I in La Jolla on the garden tour. In Bishops School a small concrete square under a banyan tree [sketch], maybe 15x15. Gill's arcades. Tom and I crossing the grass laughing at a tuba ensemble feebly playing an ode to Viagra. It's bigger, it's bigger, it's harder, it's harder. Tom was in his jeans and a black teeshirt, his doc shoes and his bracelet. I liked his bad boy vibe in among the society matrons. A garden high on Pepita Way that had tight steep trails and a lot of blue and white things in small pots. At the apex of the trails a small platform with a view across treetops toward La Jolla Shores. Against the back wall of this platform a little boulder with a spring trickling down its face, then along a slot in the floor and then away under the wall - that was good. Two chairs and a table with wine glasses. There were more very mediocre gardens with too many people on narrow paths. We were feeling class irritation, naturally. Stopped in PB after, sat with our lattes watching much younger bodies passing on bikes and skates. A lot of plump men without shirts. As we were arriving on the cliff walk, looking down at the beach, I saw a black-haired girl in a bikini playing ball with a young man. Said to Tom, There's a very pretty bikini. What it was, was the line of her waist and hip. She was the sort of small girl who has an unusual amount of indent at the waist, an exquisite curve out around her hip. Tom saw but he averts. I want to share that kind of pleasure with him but I also like the way he looks away as if he doesn't trust himself not to like it much too much. Ways we are easing into ourselves with each other. I was ragging on him about the way he takes a ridiculous round-about route. Nothing annoys him more than me telling him he's doing something wrong but I wasn't going to shut up. He said I'm like a chipmunk gnawing on an elephant's foot and I just won't quit. (We were shooting along 5 toward Pacific Highway by then.) I said slyly Does the elephant have a little owie. He sent me a look I saw in the corner of my eye. It was admiration. Scandalized admiration. I'm laughing. - We are playing that way, elaborating on each other's nonsense. It's gratifying but at the same time I marvel it took us so long. 12 Coming of age in Karhide 1995 I admire her strategy as a fiction writer. She publishes first in sci fi magazines, among the outsiders, she's immense without being famous. She gets herself out of what she doesn't like about her time and place. She evades perpetuating it. She lives where she can always be a newcomer. She varies framing parameters. She makes herself aware of the outside, the real, the way little famous novelists are not. The planet is real to her, time is real to her, vast time. She becomes physics, and she is a smiling grandmother in Portland, registering erotic sensation exactly. "His skin against mine, a wonderful feeling like sunlight." What I want to say is that she's larger than she's known to be. People like her, critics and public do, critics for her skill and public for her love, but they see her as a fiction writer. In my experience she is Odo, she's a philosopher who has chosen a medium that gives her simultaneously scope and privacy. She doesn't have colleagues, she doesn't have to go to conferences. She teaches without having to read student papers. She is a global synthesist. She teaches a framework centered on early love, and defending early love by scholarly research. She has been my teacher since 1977, thirty years. Lessing, Dorothy Richardson, Gordimer, Woolf, but none of them have her off-world scope. DR is closest, DR has historical metaphysics. These massive women and my journal with its unconnected bits. I'm sore-hearted saying that. They have made something one thing, and given it, and I am just a little bit accomplished, hugely helplessly prepared and undelivered, making do with tiny satisfactions. A student who's grateful, a free moment with Tom, my unread thesis, a lecture at a college where the standard is so low I look like a star. 13 So here it is. KC writing about Fading [ie In America]. Having discussion about students up there is ethically questionable. Whether the student is identifiable or not is irrelevant... . It would be easy to interpret what you've written wrongly. Prospective students might well find it disturbing. But were the admin of the college to see it, there could be more trouble. You leave an impression of disdain for the faculty which, while not likely to surprise faculty, does not give a particularly healthy impression of the program. It also makes you sound childishly vindictive - gossiping publicly about a group of people (who are offering their educational skills to prospective students) can be seen as intending to be destructive. (On a personal note I can't think why you wouldn't talk with the faculty at the residency about how to go forward, rather than isolate yourself and then talk about yourself as being the odd person - disingenuous, perhaps.) I don't think you're politically naïve, thus quite deliberate about the project. I imagine, then, that you are aware that there is some danger in writing about an institution of which you are a member. If you want to stay with [the college], if you care about the program and developing embodiment studies, it would probably be wise to unlink the journal from the college profile page. Please do work to close the gap between you and the faculty you find impossible, try to find the 'charm points' that will complement the work you want to do. Please don't encourage students working with other faculty to work with you at the same time - or if that is happening, talk to the other person about it openly. - And then something about Hazel getting fired midsemester for poaching.
Meantime a note from Michael Deragon saying "as always thanks for the brilliance" because I named why he's lonely. So what do I think about KC. She's worried about the program, will admin make more trouble. Would it make trouble for the program at my account? No they'd fire me but they couldn't blame the program. Or they could blame the program for not firing me I guess. My joy at [the college] when I felt I and students could be our difficult selves. My joy with Margo when she seemed to like me to know what I see. Seven years later I see more lying everywhere, more forelock tugging, social fear so pervasive people don't know how deeply they have adapted themselves to it. So I'll password protect, for now, and when I leave or am pushed out I'll put it up uncensored, and will that be vindictive? It will seem so. What am I feeling. Sore hearted. Is it the sore heart of ages ago? I'm brave. I'm doing good work, I do exceptional work. I can see it's not an overriding value. Having Fading up has defended me in some way. It's like hoping someone will come for me. What would Joyce say. She'd say, You knew there was going to be trouble. She'd laugh. It's still like wanting my mother to come through isn't it. What's the alternative to that? I saw a glimpse earlier, it was what it would be like to treat anyone as if they are students. KC now. I can't do anything for her. She drinks. She drinks partly because her social mode is so self-deprecating some private self must constantly feel insulted. But I can't tell her that, so what would it mean to treat her like a student? Gently, which I am, but that gentleness is why I need the journal. Am seeing Sampson in chains, a largeness. Okay, so it's necessary self loyalty and people can't stand it and what else - making a living - there's a contradiction I'm struggling in - the work needs me to be the opposite of what the program needs me to be. The work needs me to be fearlessly perceptive and articulate. The program, meaning the faculty, needs me to be paddedly congenial and circumspect. The walk to beautiful - Nova doc about small young country girls in Ethiopia who have fistulas repaired at a hospital in Addis Adaba by surgeons lit up in their work. 14 Tom was laughing. He said, You're dancing on the trapdoor, in about six months it's going to be over. I adored him for laughing. He began after I said what I like is that I'm saying to them, I'm not hiding it because I'm gutless, I'm hiding it because you're gutless. Tom is happy like water warming in the sun. He's reading The golden notebook and cooking his own dinners. Steaks. Burritos. Spaghetti. This is the first he's been willing to cook since I've known him. He loves Doris Lessing. He is my compadre after it all. 16 A man with a long pale face, high bald dome of forehead, has written a book called Reality that says some version of You are god, there is no universe, only consciousness. Calls himself a mystic, is presumably a classics scholar. Writes at length in an offensive now children style [Peter Kingsley], keeps saying everyone else has always been wrong about everything. I'm interested in something about him, something correct and something incoherent, and the mix. Is it easier to say the incoherent. It's the way if he says everything is consciousness it's inconsistent to want to talk about Parmenides or ancient Sicily. If I were to believe him I would have to say he doesn't exist. Consciousness has thrown up a seeming to reach up to a library shelf to take down a book with a photograph inside the back cover. The correct. Something I knew about dwelling alertly in attention to being as such. The incoherence is fascinating in itself. Reading it I look for a way to make it gel. Something orphic - Greek shamanism, whatever that was. Velia in southern Italy, from the western coast of Turkey, Anatolia. Southern Italy Pythagoras, Orpheus. Priest of Apollo, used incubation, altered consciousness. Saying yes to everything we see or think or hear. A state of total alertness, complete acceptance. "We are all dead." "Everybody is a myth. You are a myth." I sympathize with his feeling of having seen through something though the way he keeps having to say so makes me wonder. Oneness in the sensed.
I agree with his refusal of reason. a power waiting patiently ... a female voice that talks, in silence, through every woman who has ever lived Underworld a place of decisions. Justice and truth.
When he says "You will have to make the journey on your own .... It exists for you alone" the sensation of believing or as if believing, trying it on: I am all there is, and this book is (unusually) speaking through to me. At that point I'm imagining it half and half - I'm all there is but it is coming from somewhere else. As well as being birthless it's also deathless and whole and of a single kind and unmoving - and neither is it incomplete. Entering the illusion and creating an illusory structure in it gradually start to find ourselves inside the structure she has built. her teaching Parmenides' poem a magic spell The cosmic order is being established at the only possible moment it ever can be: right now. The way he is saying choose right now, it's a matter of life and death; and everything only happens now. If there is no time there can't be consequence. "A decision waiting to be made." <full alertness of> everything forming a single whole whole, unmoving, quite still ... what in fact is happening is that reality is perceiving itself through you. x < we forgot a long time ago. The future and past that were taken away from you are given back. But they are no longer the independent realities they once seemed to be: they are only inseparable parts of now. The moment you understand something, you have to let it go. "There are no little corners for memory or safety because there is only room for being." Kosmos a clever piece of work Elusive beauty of the world of dark and light, birth and death
He says Parmenides says the earth is round, toward end of 6th BCE, describes two polar zones, an equatorial belt and two temperate zones. Says Parmenides' people, the Phocaeans, sailed far enough to see stars vanish behind the horizon. 7th c from Massalia, Marseilles, as far south in the Atlantic as Senegal at least. Another past Britain and Ireland to the "solid sea." Pytheas. He understood how tides were linked to the moon, measured maximum heights of sun and lengths of daylight. When we live the illusion to the full we are nothing but reality fulfilling its own longing. information about planets and galaxies and space; but none of this is real. To go the whole way through all there is, an utter innocence and simplicity is needed. There is no transcendental reality to get away to. In the experience of completeness there is nothing to become. Turn awareness back, at every moment, to its source. experience of utter stillness No death. Zeno his adopted son. If we miss the true solution we end up destroyed, "not all at once but little by little throughout the whole of one's life."
Sunset tonight a pool of golden fire. There's a Santa Ana. The door was standing open this afternoon and a little sparrow flew in, was beating against the window. I fetched the broom and herded it toward the door. It got stopped at the north window. I had to scoop it and flip it out. It arced up screeking its little story. This week David Brooks "what you might call
neural Buddhism." "In unexpected ways science and mysticism are
reinforcing each other." "New movements that emphasize self-transcendence
but put little stock in divine law or revelation." SD Union
May 14 2008 B6 from NYT. Connecting science and mysticism.
|
