New York light sparks.

With an overwhelming flurry of heart-warm moments just behind me, flipped like a stack of playing cards from hand to hand this past week, this morning I am grateful.  I sink these memories steadfast, like a flagpole on a ship, like a mast, like a lightning bolt struck through the ground.  This morning I want to acknowledge the WHOLE, the stacked layers, the overall feel of beauty and gracefulness, of sustained warmth.

Recently, I have been trying to cultivate heightened awareness in beautiful moments, complete presence/present, a recognition and celebration of momentary gifts-- three-dimensional, round, all-sensory.  Years ago, living in Rome, IT, I made a habit of getting lost, continuously, luxuriously, sunk in a racing feeling of lushness-- thrilling through a trust that I would find my way back to something familiar, a deep belief that important things waited for me around unknown corners.  As a hopelessly visual person, I got lost so many times that I made a constellation map of the city, pictures that I walked strung together by colors and lights, sounds, smells.

I devoured books by Baudrillard on the topic of similar wanderings, and Henry Miller, and Rimbaud, all celebrating the aching loneliness and sharp etched beauty of the wandering 'flaneur' through cityscapes.  As I learned the beautiful old cobblestone streets of Rome, I felt new branchings in my brain, I felt capillaries and neural networks growing that corresponded to the winding timbre of wind-whipped city streets.   

If you asked me today, I could never remember street names, but I could close my eyes and guide you on a picture walk to any place in Rome, through dark streets covered in wood shavings, past ruby red butcher shops, meats in cases, cakes behind glass, Christmas lights hanging askew, steam from coffee counters, metallic puppets in the wind.  I believe in following a haptic path-- a visceral gut recognition that relies on all physical senses at once, with the palest shimmer of a frail and golden string ahead.

The street of antique dealers in the center of Rome is one of the most beautiful I have ever seen.  Each shop crowded next to each other, lit from within like stage-sets, like jeweled dioramas.  Each shop painted different brilliant colors and lit with soft falling lights that collided, overlapped-- chandeliers, candles, otherwordly lights.  Packed tightly with objects, each shop was a tiny version of home-- a microcosm, a condensed version of beauty and comfort and light.  And they were strung; catenary, each to each, lit chains. 

My memories of this past week in New York have been coming back to me in that same same way this morning.  I flip through slides, loud with the whirring sound of childhood, smoke and plastic smell, dust in the light from a projector, quiet as each flashes on the screen.

I remember the lights, the loudness, the shadows, and soft creams and golden hues of restaurants at night.  I remember the color of old and rare sherries swirling in my glass, and the heart-sparks of my friends around me.  As the atmospheric (too dark) photos I am always taking, thin pin-pricks of light spark out of the frame, just enough to trace the outlines of the scene.

Like a Caravaggio painting of faces angle-lit, light as a rain of grace falling, and warmth from the golden insides of restaurants that are full, clinked glasses and steam.  I am grateful for this spate of stacked slides, these crystal refractions, chandeliers overhead, and sparks deep in my glass.
 

  

from "Candor" by Anne Carson

Could 1
If you are not the free person you want to be you must find a place to tell the truth about that. To tell how things go for you. Candor is like a skein being produced inside the belly day after day, it has to get itself woven out somewhere. You could whisper down a well. You could write a letter and keep it in a drawer. You could inscribe a curse on a ribbon of lead and bury it in the ground to lie unread for thousands of years. The point is not to find a reader, the point is the telling itself. Consider a person standing alone in a room. The house is silent. She is looking down at a piece of paper. Nothing else exists. All her veins go down into this paper. She takes her pen and writes on it some marks no one else will ever see, she bestows on it a kind of surplus, she tops it off with a gesture as private and accurate as her own name.

(for Roni Horn)

Jerez, SPAIN

Casa Balbino, Sanlucar

True Manzanilla

Sanlucar de Barremeda
Manzanilla:
Pedro Romero 'Aurora'
Delgado Zuleta 'La Goya'
Y
Langostinos, Coquines, Chocos...........!

"Each one of us, then, should speak of his roads, his crossroads, his roadside benches; each one of us should make a surveyor's map of his lost fields and meadows.  Thoreau said that he had the map of his fields engraved in his soul.  And Jean Wahl once wrote:

Le moutonnement des haies
C'est en moi que je l'ai.

(Poeme, p. 46)

(The frothing of the hedges
I keep deep inside me.)

Thus we cover the universe with drawings we have lived."  (!!!)

G. Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 11-12

This rainy day.

This rainy day, thick with birdcalls that reverberate like bells in fog, like chimes that bounce off of burnished metal and glass, like old Paris, when I sent prayers up from dark church floors.  I walk in the park and the air under the branches feels heavy like smoke (incense), it is thick and hangs close to the ground. 

I walked around and around the park today, around the back of it, past the garages and empty cement pools.  I walked by the mechanic shops and the warehouses.  I remembered Seattle walking through shipyards, past docks and under tunnels.  This wet air damps down the noise of cars, makes it easier to think, easier to feel gracious, grateful.

Now I sit, inside, listening, perched between day and night like a dim bird.

Foillard 'Cote du Py' 2010 Morgon in my glass, and Elizabeth Bishop translations of Octavio Paz on the page.  I hold onto poetry today, its spacings, its spaces, its structure.  New Mexico storms would always roll through so fast, in dark afternoons I used to sit and read under my window, in my adobe house wrapped tight like a blanket around my shoulders, eyes out to the night.

morning reading

"Her untidy blueprint reminded me of yet another kind of house: a memory palace.  This ancient mnemonic device was used by orators in Greece and Rome, and is still a trade secret of modern memory-contest champions.  A practitioner visualizes a large edifice with a warren of rooms that she furnishes with familiar objects.  She then attaches the items or thoughts that she wishes to recall to the objects.  As she walks mentally through the edifice, they act as prompts."

(Judith Thurman, "Drawn from Life: A Profile of Alison Bechdel", The New Yorker, April 23, 2012, 54)

"A few, the choicest, dreams compile a miscellany of places unbeholden to reality, with its more tedious details.  A dream occurred one night, then returned again, in such a way that, making my way at night towards a real place, I recognized the staircase of a house in the rue des Courcelles, and its wallpaper in raw jute.  But my nights reveal it printed with lions of periwinkle blue, beset with oak balusters, with treads and hand-rails of oak; a forest of oaks sacrificed to an 1890 staircase.... The periwinkle lions are pure creatures of dream, held fast in their oneiric alignment by the most authentic plinths and stylobates in their world.  Periwinkle blue, rimmed with a grey-blue border, the mouth heraldically gaping, the tongue a marine helix.  More or less upright, they have a heavy open forepaw.  Rather English lions, in fact.  How lucky that I can't draw.  I'd stick them in my margins for you, faithful copies of non-existent figures.  I take them for granted now, they serve as a firm link, an indispensable complement, to that pattern which is reality."

(from Evening Star, the last recollections of Colette, 50)

clove, coconut, sesame oil, nigella, black cumin seed, turmeric, fennel

gracious.

happy birthday

The Mountains in the Desert

The Mountains in the Desert

The mountains blue now
at the back of my head,
such geography of self and soul
brought to such limit of sight,

I cannot relieve it
nor leave it, my mind locked
in seeing it
as the light fades.

Tonight let me go
at last out of whatever
mind I thought to have,
and all the habits of it.

Robert Creeley

"The days of spring went on, flowers ablaze in the mountains, the skies cloudless and exalting, the foothills so full of wild mustard that at times it felt as if they were walking through avenues of light." (Abandon, Pico Iyer, 239)

Night photo

Brine

1.

we are Myriad;

old lives as cobblestones;

(bared-teeth), sunk

in Earth.

Our memories;

(scaffold-shapes,

mica-schist):

loom over us,

from Four Sides of Consciousness:

as the embedded thing in mud (green circle),

as the adobe bricks steaming in the rain (brown dust),

as the smoke from the distant storm (red circle),

as the sour yellow smell of wet chamisa rising from the plain (spinning circle).

2.

when I lived in New Mexico, the

adobe houses would cluster together wetly in storms.

the lashes of rain would darken even the red dust,

under the trucks, and

rusted car shells.

3.

Here, powdered-iron and

Creosote

hang heavy in the air,

and like (metallic) wet

steel wool,

Coagulate,

(inside particles of storm wind,

nestled in their own-made nest).

4.

The wet brine of a west Texas afternoon,

Creeps

through my backyard window,

Reading furtively,

unbeknownst (to me),

the chicken stock and lentils

hum quietly on the darkening stove.

ELG

2010

Champagne Dinner

My love of atmospheric dark wine photos collided the other night with an amazingly thoughtful line-up of gorgeous grower champagnes, presented in pairs against delicious Terroir TriBeCa food. Many thanks to Peter, Rosemary, Nicole, and Terroir:

Marie-Courtin 'Efflorescence' (2006, 1st)
Ulysse Collin Extra Brut Blanc de Blancs (2007/20-10% rsrve 2006)

Jacques Lassaigne Cuvee 'Le Cotet' (2007)
Varnier-Fanniere Cuvee 'Saint-Denis' (2004-5)

Jerome Prevost La Closerie 'Les Beguines' (2009)
Michel Loriot 2004 Pinot Meunier Vieilles Vignes

Laherte Freres 'Les Beaudiers' Extra Brut Rose de Saignee Vieilles Vignes (50-60 yr old vines)