new

I found an old remnant of writing this morning (reworked a bit, below), and can barely remember writing it. It's uncanny how things, once articulated, have a way of making themselves true. The wish of a dry and dusty desert landscape life has always threaded itself through my day-to-day life, (under-conscious hazy cloud backdrop), but never have the details (once specified, thrown into the wind) so obviously become the track that my life runs along.


'I am ready for that open space I have always looked for. I am ready to face a landscape that is bare, windblown, sparse, and scrubbed. I am ready to face the wind on sharp intake as I come around the side of the trailer-- I am ready for the scratches and dark hollows under my own eyes. I am ready to turn into something new, into something old, something that I was in my own mind before anyone else saw it coming. I am ready for red dust on my skirt, and jeans and off-white velvet sweatshirts stretched thin. I am ready for the lonesome whistle of wind, for distant train calls, for sharp corners that recede into infinity, for blue sky and yellow earth. I can examine these things now, and think to myself that they are strange, I am strange, I have been building an arsenal of vocabulary and voice, of tumbled, shorn bits of words that make sense now in their new combinations. I have been collecting bits of stone and rock, in each pocket they click together, hanging down at the lowest part, against my leg from the inside. I have been collecting these bits, pieces, flakes, scraps, and now I can string them together into a new alphabet.'

I once admired a (textile) artist in Seattle who went on walks around the area collecting small objects. When she got home she arranged these objects into a new personal lexicon for herself-- each thing a letter-- their groupings turned haphazard into poetry. (In art school I made a board game like this once-- a player would arrange objects onto a haiku pattern grid, spin a spinner that linked object with word-- I think I called it the "random poetry generator"??? Not many people could appreciate the subtleties of haiku (you were supposed to write it down and take it with you!) that centered on recurring words like 'taxidermy', 'neon bar sign','smoke','darkness', and 'dirty ashtray'.....)

I am tired of ideas around the edges... am tired of skimming the surface of things, of exploring the safe remnants around the edge. If I were to go to the heart of the matter would it seem scary? Is the process different, would it seem too big-- would I be able to recognize my ideas from the center, instead of noticing their outside contours first?

These are questions I hope to answer from the desert....

Last night I dreamed of mountains, greenhouses, castles, and snow. I read somewhere that when you dream of exploring buildings, houses you are really examining the twisting passageways of your own brain. It is a strange place indeed, I had been to some of these places in dreams before but I had never been able to access certain parts of the landscape-- now suddenly I was "behind the walls"... a pathway in/through. I have been reading John Updike like mad lately-- an image of a green house from yesterday lodged in my brain-- at the time I thought "there's my novel".... how strange. Of course the ideas would be housed (dark green painted walls and wood trim), cold and creaky wooden house, cold but full of books... steps up to another story... I'd like to hold on to this shell of story. I know I will recognize it when I see it again.