sky

Most of my life I have just been looking for a quiet place to sit. It seems silly to write this. It seems so easy. But I don't think I had realized it until now. I have always had the calling... to be quiet, to be observant, to trace shadows on the wall. These are the things I was as a child. I think they grew into a sort of shyness. Being a writer is to be a watcher, an observer. If not watching from the sidelines, then I am called into awareness of my own movements in space, exactly at the moment(s) that I am making them.

It is difficult to pour the tea from the teapot and simultaneously trace the steam-trails that rise cloudy over my table. Difficult to drink the tea while naming concussive//successive hits of: //dry earth//desert sand//wet leaves//(each), as they break like waves into my awareness. It is inward to sit with hands cupped, (in-shape), and outward to gaze skyward, to translate the near shade of translucent blue arcing overhead. It is painful to switch so quickly from being prone to the world, (acted-upon), to become describer of these things felt. But this transition from soft body to clicking consciousness is one I am practicing-- burn-path tracery, knife-edge projection.

Mountain skies have a different color of blue-- a crystalline, watercolor wash of metallic and smoke that is not seen at lower altitudes. I am thinking of the blue sky in Boulder, CO as I write this. I am looking out of my window in Denver, CO and thinking that these two colors are close-- they are neighbors, they are adjacent. But the essential quality of the air is different, it is painted over our heads with a different brush. The weave is looser in Boulder air, the blue tightens around a smaller woven scaffold here.

I can be soft and peaceful looking out of the window here. I am relieved to return to myself in a quiet moment, to feel the stretch of my body through my clothes, to watch creeping sunspots alternate with shade. All the best things come from here. From the quiet space of 'here' afternoon. There is a ticking of clocks, a softness of rugs, a weight that means 'afternoon'. The washing machine hums and ticks, my tea expands into the pores of the hand-thrown earthenware cup. My fingers flutter in arcs and curlicues over the keyboard. The birds are hovering over a nest.

It doesn't matter exactly where I am sitting-- which town, which city, which home. What matters is the cloak of peace and introspection than I can make, a soft force-field expelled from my sitting form. (from the center of my sitting form, back against the couch, soft rug under my bare feet). It is hard to sit in this open space. I have become a receiver-- a ringing conduit: for energy, for memories, for spirit, for sound. I have become a malleable body that is porous. Sometimes it feels too open-- an old yoga teacher would tell us to be open like the sky. Sometimes in those states I would start to cry, feeling my body becoming translucent-- open to shifting winds, sun beams, open-woven like the sacred blue watercolor wash of wherever-sky smudged and shining overhead.

"Anavopaya is the means whereby the individual utilizes his own karanas or instruments as means for his transformation for Self-realization."
"In anavopaya, the senses, prana and manas are pressed into service."
(Pratyabhijnahrdayam, Jaideva Singh, 28)

(elg, march 9, 2015)

DREAM SONG

Sunlight, moonlight,

Twilight, starlight–

Gloaming at the close of day,

And an owl calling,

Cool dews falling

In a wood of oak and may.

Lantern-light, taper-light,

Torchlight, no-light:

Darkness at the shut of day,

And lions roaring,

Their wrath pouring

In wild waste places far away.

Elf-light, bat-light,

Touchwood-light and toad-light,

And the sea a shimmering gloom of grey,

And a small face smiling

In a dream's beguiling

In a world of wonders far away.

 
Walter de la Mare

light

I’d like to speak about light:

desert pearl light,

slanted pastel light,

smoked glass light.

(Please think about these things:

about the fall of light through glass,

about the press of sun through walls,

about adobe steaming in hot sun,

and the silence of desert-above-pine trees in Taos summer).

Coming around the curve,

the lit scene behind us broke jagged into view--

(underwater backdrop, milk haze, watercolor map)--

an Eocene landscape dropped suddenly away from our car.

You froze this panorama picture for me dear,

living stage, wet and moving-in-haze;

you pin-pointed and stuck

the exact moment of landscape coinciding with consciousness in me.

I could hardly turn away from my new bones of painted earth,

edges that abraded like river-banks, worried and slow,

ever-changing overlap of thin skin boundaries.

As a child, I could recite all faerie cosmos happenings in white waterfalls,

could trace smoke constellations onto dark green pine-scrim,

could wait quietly sitting on logs,

sit quietly in wood fire ash and burnt coffee smoke.

Thin film of mountain dust and dirt ash,

I felt tarnished, worked like a copper coin,

burnished under dust,

gold-blessed.

4/22/2010 elg

nest

"Thus the dream house must possess every virtue. How-ever spacious it must also be a cottage, a dove-cote, a nest, a chrysalis. Intimacy needs the heart of a nest. Erasmus, his biographer tells us, was long in "finding a nook in his fine house in which he could put his little body with safety. He ended by confining himself to one room until he could breathe the parched air that was necessary to him.""

I write a lot from bed, and always have. I think Colette did this, perhaps only at the end, when confined to her bed that was pushed alternately to and from the open window, depending on the French season. I find comfort in it.

I keep thinking about Annie Dillard needing to shut the blinds in her studio every day, even though they look out onto beautiful forest land. My blinds are closed, but I think I may need to stop the click-shuttering of memory slides in the back of my head, the colors blur together, I hear them turn over one by one, like my Dad's early first "digital" clock that he dismembered so you could see the numbers turn over on themselves, just the innards of the clock, working away in regular whirring increments, numbers on a spool.

With tests looming, I am trying to calm myself down. I am trying to remember landscapes that opened up around me in my past, places that responded to the immensity of space within me. I am calling up that feeling of response, the first time I drove around the curve of canyon into Taos, NM.

The basin opens up before you as an immeasurable plain, and a kind of vertigo sets in, like being underwater and feeling the shelf of sand drop off darkly and without warning. I am remembering the highway that seemed to have no end, when I first started college, first drive to school in Santa Fe, and I remember thinking "How will this landscape change me"? What will I become here?" Its strange, even at that young age I prioritized the power of a landscape to effect serious change, to warp, to expand from the center of the mind, to accrete. My choice of that particular high desert site for a home was most painstakingly made.

Inviting that much space into my life at such a malleable age has turned out to have a reverberative and long half-life, shelf-life, pantry-life. I was watching old movies last night, and some of the Civil War footage, and thought "I want lace curtains one day." You know, the kind that you see as you drive by old farmhouses, the kind you see at the onset of dark on the prairie, the ones wavering just so as you drive by and think about the concept of home. I miss this feeling. I still feel homeless in New York most of the time, and fight it.

I am trying to make myself strong, trying to not feel the alien terror of anonymous places like airports with dirty carpets, subway tunnels with sulphur smell rising from the grates, giant warehouse stores brimming with flourescent lights, constant change of place to place. I am excited for a time when I can have a house again. When I visited my sister last month, my favorite part of her house was the old 1930's wooden back porch, old screens still latched strangely, set up for summer cross-breezes and set above the backyard with a view of the neighbor's houses curving upward.

I thought that this was a place that felt like home. This is where I would have spent my entire adolescence, with a stack of Virginia Woolf books strewn across the dirty floor, notebooks of scribbled ideas, packets of seeds, bizarre almanacs and books on how to make your own herbal elixirs, homemade jam. What we agreed on, was that it felt like "home", to both of us. It had those qualities that we remembered growing up, tactile wooden smell, creaking screen doors, privacy, space to dream, access to inside/outside, free but still safe.

As a teenager I used to sneak out onto the roof outside my bedroom window and smoke cigarettes. My father would get furious b/c the roof itself was not in the best shape and me sending the entire front porch to the ground would have been kind of a bummer. But I couldn't help myself, and mostly just sat there while the cigarette dwindled away unsmoked. I was looking at the huge elm and maple trees outside, moving silently overhead. I was thinking about something C.S. Lewis had written, on learning of his wife's terminal disease, that there was nothing more beautiful than the image of bare branches against a night sky.

I am still trying to find my right place in the world, but just recently it has dawned on me, I am ready for a Home.

april 8, 2011 elg

Kermit Lynch

And trying to cobble together a few starting place fragments, for an organization to follow. There are innumerable books/articles/posts on soil composition-- for it to work here and now, I must combine the personal with the scientific. I have to find a way in, a scratching place, a tiny toe-hold in this vast rock face. EG

best Vouvray vineyard sites, (acc. to Loyau)

La Bourdonnerie. A wild site where bumblebees (les bourdons) seek shelter.
Bel air. A well-situated site that has a pretty appearance.
Barguins. A vineyard created after much hesitation by the proprietors. They shilly-shallied (barguigner) for a long time before deciding to plant.
Bois Rideau (frost curtain). A forest rises above the vineyard sheltering it from frost and hail.
Gaimont. A knoll that receives lots of sunshine.
Paradis. Vines that prduce the fruit of the Creator.
Les Gais d'Amant. A site preferred by lovers.
Les Maderes. A vineyard near the village of Vernou whose wine in certain years has a flavor reminiscent of Madeira.
La Reveillerie. A vineyard with an eastern exposure that receives the earliest rays of sun (reveil=awakening).
La Queue de Merluche. A parcel of vines that is shaped like a salted cod's tail, which we call merluche (queue=tail).

Kermit Lynch, Adventures on the Wine Route, 43

a place to start:

In Pays Nantais, there are 3 main soil types: sandy soils, soils from acid rock rich in potassic minerals, and soils from basic rock rich is ferromagnesian minerals. The sedimentary rock is made up of armoricain sandstone and schist, magmatic granite or gabbros rocks, and metamorphic gneiss, micaschist, amphibolite or serpentinite rocks.

In Anjou, the sub-soil is mainly composed of argillaceous slate, sandy shale and carboniferous schist from the Armorican Massif. Eruptive seams of spilite, rhyolite and phtanite are also found here.

In Touraine, the sub-soil is composed of chalk limestone from the Paris Basin with clay-limestone and flinty clay soils; the terraces of the banks of the Loire and the Vienne are made of sand and gravel. The banks of the Cher are often made of flinty clay soils.

(from vinvaldeloire.com)

thrift

national geographic april 1965
'appomattox'
'brittany'
'new york fair'
'man-in-sea'

suitcase record player,
stack of beloved country records,
'music for dining' in green,
candle-wax spray on the table-top (milky-white),
wine-stain,(blood-red rings on wood-grain),
.

if i make the right list
i can reconstruct the occasion
of objects, who lived-out their wooden life in old(er) atmosphere,

i can raise their ghosts if i want to,
and plug the holes that were left by now-dissapated clouds.

the other night, my things
exuded colors like lamps,
(shades of):
green jealousy,
yellow claustrophobia,
red anger
white clarity.

i don't know what i am trying to say
but i know it has something to do with the light;
milky-rain light of today,
cold wet light of driven-through fog on the highway to alpine,
broken bottle light of mason jars like castanets.

if i understood the quality of this light falling,
cloud-like (first cloud: pikes peak, colorado, more fluffy, less wet),
maybe i could find myself pin-pricked within it,
headlights through fog,
fast appearing and carrying stains of rain on the pavement behind,

or evergreen-tops,
fast spires spinning like green corkscrews,
as we rode by them in loud ferries.

in here it is face-blast-space-heater and dryer hum,
a nostalgia of sound:
zipper thwack on metal drum,
static electric sound of childhood,
(like dishwasher sounds it puts me to sleep).

how little could i leave?
what husk would tell the real story,
the inside tale,
the detritus-key-map-decoder (trailed)?

are the things we find in dusty thrift stores any indications of our real life?

march 12, 2009 elg

dusted

stillness and wildness in inverse proportion-- the wide spaces here are stretched, they pull at your insides. i want to hide the vastness of this experience in the shells of the mundane. we slip easily out of these day-skins each night, and leave them husked beside our beds. what does it mean to be a permeable body? to be a wide filter that catches things in the breeze?

as i was hanging my laundry on the back-yard line the smell of pine resin drifted down from the trees. it is beautiful and sharp, and reminiscent of my rocky mountain childhood. what does it mean, to have one scent blow through another body? to have the essence of pine infiltrate clean linen, to have yellow indian curry powder color the inside of my suitcase and front covers of books, to have creosote oil sit lightly on the air, to blow through white linen sheets in the bedroom?

now i sit breathing ground coffee in the air from a blue plastic cup, smell wet rosemary and dryer heat hum, hear doves and the shakiness of my own body, here, still getting adjusted, still fragile, and off balance, distracted but sharply attuned to every small shock and vibration of this desert house life. i am thinking about lists, and skeleton-structure, dusty pathways through adobe streets, paths of memory, birdcalls, unseen lenses into a smaller part of life (higher magnification). i am looking for stillness, and like a compass or barometer, trying to settle myself at a still point, re-orientation in a known place, new-life in a place that is saturated with colors and smells of an older life.

even the dust here seems holy, like cinnamon particles in the wind, like juniper berries ground, like prairie dust rising from earth. this life must be a sieve-- and i need to learn to see it, soft-focus on the mechanism of capture to strained particles out of the air: mixed gravel, flakes of mica, particles of mica in schist, powder-residue-lacquer-coated spring breeze.

\\marfa, tx\\
march 6, 2009

Bog Queen, by Seamus Heaney

I lay waiting
Between turf-face and demesne wall,
Between Heathery levels
And glass-toothed stone.

My body was Braille
For the creeping influences:
Dawn suns groped over my head
And cooled at my feet,

Through my fabrics and skins
The seeps of winter
Digested me,
The illiterate roots

Pondered and died
In the cavings
Of stomack and socket.
I lay waiting

On the gravel bottom,
My brain darkening,
A jar of spawn
Fermenting underground

Dreams of Baltic amber.
Bruised berries under my nails,
The vital hoard reducing
In the crock of the pelvis.

My diadem grew carious,
Gemstones dropped
In the peat floe
Like the bearings of history.

My sash was a black glacier
Wrinkling, dyed weaves
And phoenician stichwork
Retted on my brests'

Soft moraines.
I knew winter cold
Like the nuzzle of fjords
At my thighs -

The soaked fledge, the heavy
Swaddle of hides.
my skull hibernated
in the wet nest of my hair.

Which they robbed.
I was barbered
And stripped
By a turfcutter's spade

Who veiled me again
And packed coomb softly
Between the stone jambs
At my head and my feet.

Till a peer's wife bribed him.
The plait of my hair,
A slimy birth-cord
Of bog had been cut

And I rose from the dark,
Hacked bone, skull-ware,
Frayed stitches, tufts,
Small gleams on the bank.

Rock Salt

Rock salt,

polished-bronze.

Your colors are black and silver, gold and mica-schist.

You are very old,

and description of you must be succinct.

You have become too sharp

in my heart (black-lit).

When I breathe in

you entangle my thoughts.

When I exhale, you lodge yourself

like sharp pebbles in the soft parts of my heart.

I am sad like a storm

brooding over trees,

fuming soft like clouds,

(releasing rain over fields).

You have covered your mouth onto mine,

like a death-lid,

faint taste of blood-metal in the rain.

I asked to be struck,

Thorough-core,

Lit-match

(now I am filled with sparks).

I remember only shininess and dark—

through opals, grey glittering gems,

Glance-lit.

You are shapeshifter:

Dark smoke,

Written-on,

Polished stone.

I am embers ground,

(Shavings curled in the fire),

Black sand then glass--

rock-peeled--

stone-schist--

(black alchemist).                         (4-2010) elg

Lampblack

You are ravens-head,
lampblack.
I am powdered ash, white stone,
goldenrod.

Together we make a circuit,
halo-haze, coiled spring, resin-ground.

You are obsidian,
lava-ground, jet-stone.
I am cindered-flowers, dry marigold,
sandalwood, sweet smoke.

You are inscriber, chalk-marker,
Graphite-sewn.
I am worked-on, cinder-prone,
Soapstone.

(older poem, elg 2010)

Source/seed/soil.

"The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually."

Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 3

307

I am sprung from you and likewise you have devoured me, I
melt in you since through you I froze.
Now you press me in your hand, now under your foot with
grief; for the grape does not become wine unless pressed.
Like the light of the sun, you have cast us on the earth, then
little by little carried us back in that direction.
We return from the body's window like light into the orb of a
sun, pure of sin and blemish.
Whoever sees that orb says, "He has become alive," and who-
ever comes to the window says, "So-and-so is dead."
He has veiled our origin in that cup of pain and joy; in the core
of origin we are pure, all the rest left behind like dregs.
Source of the source of souls, Shams-e Haqq-e Tabriz, a hun-
dred livers are on fire for you-- so how many kidneys?

from Mystical Poems of Rumi 2

Vintage Jenny & Francois Post (2011)

(REPOST. FOUND THIS RANDOMLY, I WROTE IT IN 2011. Touched today by its sweetness. I wanted to remind my self (today) that old interests, loves, passions have a way of seeping into the ground (water table of consciousness). They are never lost, but constantly circulated in that rich soil before growing up into the light again. Also, emotional to read about my initial experience with some of my most dearly loved wines (& winemakers...). Thanks for reading. xx

(from May 2011)
Anyone that knows me even a little is aware of my love of the "dark photo"... the pinpricks of light in a mostly dark frame, the partial illumination of dark profiles, the blurred candlesticks on the table, the windows lit at night like stage-sets. My technique has become decidedly shoddy. My teenage self would be most appalled that I shoot mostly 'digital' these days, and am not wielding heavy and obtuse camera equipment, large plates, liquid emulsion, or Civil War era photo technologies.

My childhood heroes Edward Steichen, Brassai, Steiglitz certainly gridded my early visual sensibilities, and to this day I still align my world onto a 2D black and white photographer's plane. My early days in Denver had me trolling old railroad tracks and peering into abandoned buildings with my camera, wearing my dad's old flannel coat and combat boots, I was always looking for the shot, the perfect crumbling facade, the darkest peeling paint wall. Sometimes I would be surprised, a sudden nostalgia of Christmas lights wrapped around a tree outside one night, the vast quietness of the old Union Square train station space high above my head. There was an self-enforced loneliness to these days, a built-in solitude, a serious focus, serious work.

In the ways of life, and accumulated experiences like stacked chrome slides, this earlier severity has thankfully morphed with more tactile, meaty, and live interests today. My sensibilities today have turned more towards the waxiness and polish of old Dutch still life oils, hanging rabbits, glowing apricots, feathered game birds. I am obsessed with taking photos of food and wine. I know that this comes out of older things, other places I have lived.


In Santa Fe, my favorite time of day was just at nightfall, driving around the curve on the highway that suddenly meant 'home'. In Seattle I tried to describe to my boyfriend why it made sense that our house was on a hill, because at night when all the lights went on it felt wild, (as I imagined it must have felt thousands of years ago, camped out on a plain, other fires surrounding and keeping danger at bay).

I still can't quite explain what I meant then, but I feel it, and am obsessed with what I have come to call the hinge between day and night, the fold-over point, the in-between moment that is neither, the in-between moment that breaks day to night.

Living in Marfa, TX last year I revisited my sunset shots, my oncoming night shots, headlights, train lights coming fast out of the dark. Now, as I feel my way around to a certain and specific life here in New York, as I feel my way through the lights and reflections of the wine world here, I realize that my photo days have never really left me. I take pictures of wine bottles to remember what I drank, I take pictures of wine in glasses to capture something bejeweled, something vibrant or deep in the color of it, the light through it, the candlelight surrounding it. I am aiming at more of an atmospheric record here. I want to create a sensitized image that has sound in it, clinking of glasses, movement of light and shade.

The difference now is that I want to be in the picture. I am impatient these days, there is too much good wine to drink, I don't have time to sit behind the lens arranging everything. I want to be a vibrational part of the scene, with my own colors and lights.

My friend Dawn recently asked 'what is it with all of these dark photos',,,, so here it is, long way round, but this: I am trying for the correct texture. I am trying at once to capture and to appreciate the thickness, the heaviness, the dense sweet atmosphere of a beautiful moment, a night, a time, a dinner. Last night's dinner with Jenny and Francois, and their beautiful natural winemakers, was one of those scenes.


The dinner: all of the remaining bottles grouped together on the table, low-light, French, English, hush, laughter. Some blessed person filled my glass with Els Jelipens 'white' X (but really an orange wine!). This was one of the most delicious wines I have ever had-- heady, orange peel, sugar-spice, beeswax. The beautiful winemakers (Gloria Garriga and Oriol Illa) make this wine by extended skin contact, and aging in beeswax lined amphorae (Penedes, SP). It was a bright spark of a moment in the night. They also poured a vertical of their reds (Sumoll/Garnacha), what kindness and generosity.

The Domaine Rimbert St. Chinian 'Mas au Schiste' 2007 was delightfully light-spicy, some fantastic gamey carignan, a gorgeous and thoughtful Loire red from Grange Tiphaine 'Clef de Sol' (Cab Franc/Cot) 2009 from 60 year old vines-- rich and deep but not cloying or chewy, very refined and beautiful (like winemaker Coralie Delecheneau who so eloquently explained the wine to me).

So, along with my Domaine de Deux Anes, the lights, the thickness in the room like family dinners, listening to my friend speak French to his neighbor, listening to people be quiet and drink wine, watching people that make wine drink it, thinking about small vineyards, real soil, farms, making my way around to a new concept of 'patriotism' (from my thoughtful friend Jesse), me speaking bad French (did I call O. Cousin's wife his son??), but understanding French in a way that I missed, a way that felt like a wave of the whole language coming back to me, not single words but a whole rich-gravy onrush that I used to know.

I feel like I am on the right path. And in my most rambly of ways today I think I have come around to it-- I am looking for the moments when the candles are blown out after Christmas eve dinner, the smell of baking spices, smoke hanging in the air, coffee steam, shifting embers in a fireplace, hush. I want the real things, I don't want the fancy talk, I want the grains, the essential parts of this life. I want the pure ingredients-- the cinnamon bark, the prickly pear cactus, the small french melons, the creosote, the tobacco, the mica, the limestone, the chalk, pine-resin, the freshly mown hay.

Thank you Jenny and Shane, and everyone else, thank you winemakers who brought real earth with you, who brought live things to us, bejeweled things in bottles that are alive.


Some Notes:

(Wines I poured yesterday):
Courtois VdP de Sologne 'Quartz' 2008
Nadia Lusseau's Cotes de Duras 'Haut-la-Vigne' 2009
Plageoles' Gaillac 'Ondenc' 2008
Domaine de la Tournelle 'Terre des Gryphees' 2007 Chard, and 'Fleur de Savagnin' 2007
Estezargues Cotes du Rhone white 'Les Grands Vins' 2009
Chemins de Bassac VdP Cts de Thongue 'Isa' 2009
Binner 'Muscat' 2008, 'Riesling Katzenthal' '08, Grand Cru Riesling 'Schlossberg''04

Surprise at the sugary pear spice and perfume of the 100% Sauvingnon Blanc 'Quartz', the meticulous restraint of Domaine de la Tournelle, both Chard and Savagnin (god knows I love Jura and oxidative wines), these were very precise and sat very well on the palate, no overbearing sharp notes, just hints of Jura nuttiness and beautiful lingering finish. While the Binner Schlossberg Riesling was obviously a stand-out, the Binner Muscat surprised me with its heady stone-fruit nose and then serious rooted/grounded backbone of minerality, a sort of tightly-packed backbone that really anchored the fruit.

The Plageoles 'Ondenc' was really something, and difficult to describe. As much as I love the image of father Robert Plageoles trolling through the forests around his home seeking out rare old vines, and forgotten varietals, I think that the wine stood up very well on its own, with really unique qualities; a slight cloudiness, slight sweet white fruit, pears, but something that reminded me of the forest floor. Maybe this was my imagination, as I became fixed on the idea of their family bistro in Gaillac that has old-vine specimens in formaldehyde jars lining the top of the walls.

The Bathers

They make in the twining tide the motions of birds.
Such are the cries, also, they exchange
In their nakedness that is soft as a bird's
Held in the hand, and as fragile and strange.

And the blue mirror entertains them till they take
The sea for another bird: the crumbling
Hush-hush where the gentlest waves break
About their voices would be his bright feathers blowing.

Only the dull shore refrains. But from this patient
Bird each, in the plumage of his choice,
Might learn the deep shapes and secret of flight

And the shore be merely a perch to which they might
Return. And the mirror turns serpent
And their only sun is swallowed up like a voice.

W.S. Merwin, The First Four Books of Poems, 155

sky

Most of my life I have just been looking for a quiet place to sit. It seems silly to write this. It seems so easy. But I don't think I had realized it until now. I have always had the calling... to be quiet, to be observant, to trace shadows on the wall. These are the things I was as a child. I think they grew into a sort of shyness. Being a writer is to be a watcher, an observer. If not watching from the sidelines, then I am called into awareness of my own movements in space, exactly at the moment(s) that I am making them.

It is difficult to pour the tea from the teapot and simultaneously trace the steam-trails that rise cloudy over my table. Difficult to drink the tea while naming concussive//successive hits of: //dry earth//desert sand//wet leaves//(each), as they break like waves into my awareness. It is inward to sit with hands cupped, (in-shape), and outward to gaze skyward, to translate the near shade of translucent blue arcing overhead. It is painful to switch so quickly from being prone to the world, (acted-upon), to become describer of these things felt. But this transition from soft body to clicking consciousness is one I am practicing-- burn-path tracery, knife-edge projection.

Mountain skies have a different color of blue-- a crystalline, watercolor wash of metallic and smoke that is not seen at lower altitudes. I am thinking of the blue sky in Boulder, CO as I write this. I am looking out of my window in Denver, CO and thinking that these two colors are close-- they are neighbors, they are adjacent. But the essential quality of the air is different, it is painted over our heads with a different brush. The weave is looser in Boulder air, the blue tightens around a smaller woven scaffold here.

I can be soft and peaceful looking out of the window here. I am relieved to return to myself in a quiet moment, to feel the stretch of my body through my clothes, to watch creeping sunspots alternate with shade. All the best things come from here. From the quiet space of 'here' afternoon. There is a ticking of clocks, a softness of rugs, a weight that means 'afternoon'. The washing machine hums and ticks, my tea expands into the pores of the hand-thrown earthenware cup. My fingers flutter in arcs and curlicues over the keyboard. The birds are hovering over a nest.

It doesn't matter exactly where I am sitting-- which town, which city, which home. What matters is the cloak of peace and introspection than I can make, a soft force-field expelled from my sitting form. (from the center of my sitting form, back against the couch, soft rug under my bare feet). It is hard to sit in this open space. I have become a receiver-- a ringing conduit: for energy, for memories, for spirit, for sound. I have become a malleable body that is porous. Sometimes it feels too open-- an old yoga teacher would tell us to be open like the sky. Sometimes in those states I would start to cry, feeling my body becoming translucent-- open to shifting winds, sun beams, open-woven like the sacred blue watercolor wash of wherever-sky smudged and shining overhead.

"Anavopaya is the means whereby the individual utilizes his own karanas or instruments as means for his transformation for Self-realization."
"In anavopaya, the senses, prana and manas are pressed into service."
(Pratyabhijnahrdayam, Jaideva Singh, 28)

repost: Marfa, TX

(old writing of mine: 6/2009, Marfa, TX)

This is a magical place to wake up. Windows open, birds calling from all sides. My yard backs up against the vastness of desert—when I water my plants in the morning, I get the smell of carob as the water hits the hard dry desert soil. The rosemary bushes have doubled in size since I moved in-- their tough skins and fleshy leaves have protected them through all hours of hot yellow sun.

When I water the tree with drooping leaves like a willow, the smell of wet dust rises up to my face. Here in the desert the smells are easily distinguishable, one from another—there is nothing between them in the air to confuse their origins. As I pour water into the dirt well of the tree I look down my block—one block from the edge of town—one block from an open vista of vast desert. It seems strange to go about daily business as if I did not have this piece of knowledge—a raised topographical sense that I am teetering precipitously on the edge of something wild and large.

On our block, perfectly gridded, there are houses facing a dusty street—the ocotillo cactus have orange blooms at the top, and the barn swallows swoop in elegant curlicues down from the wires, looking for nest sites. The hot smell of tomato leaves in the sun is another reason to get up early—to watch the slowest of births from green to yellow flower- to what? I haven’t seen any farther just yet—all of my exotic heirloom tomato seeds died in the withering heat of the laundry room.

There is a purity to the air here—a lack of sensory noise—a dryness and sparcity made of sagebrush, wet creosote, rosemary leaves, and wet earth. To me it feels like a place where I can be anything—a brain of clicking wires, a soft body, a capable body. I feel like the mechanizations of my thought are visible here. I can wake up in the morning, replay the nagging shard of an awkward interaction last night, but can move past it, somehow, by getting back to the soil. I turn around this morning and bury the incident in wet dirt. I can breathe it back into the wind that whips around dry bushes in the field. I can open myself to the sky like the overnight cactus bloom-- a bruised and torn blossom that appeared one morning, sprung up the sides of the fingered (widow?) cactus outside the back door.

Marfa is not a difficult place to write about, the difficulty lies in watching yourself act in such stripped and bare bones of a way-- in unshaded outlines of movement and thought.

Marfa is a beautiful filament of a place, a facetted piece of quartz or clear stone, a central point that focuses and frames light. It is a lens, like the shard of heavy glass that I found on my first week here; packed with dirt on one side, shining green in the window dusk of falling afternoon.

Binner 'Les Saveurs' (Riesling, Sylvaner, Auxerrois, Gewurztraminer & Pinot Gris field blend), 2012

Instant nostalgia. Smells. Like. Home.
Lean chalk brightness and lemon seeds on nose, fresh so ALIVE.

Smells like cut lemons, bottom note on end of palate holds together brioche (?), pound cake, curd.

Light light golden yellow, no orange. Tiny bubbles.
Unfiltered-- tiny spun sediment, clear gold.

Lemon sediment.
Smells like walking down West Street in Greenpoint on a Sunday morning....(!)
Still tang of early morning air-- alpine restraint, high altitude purity.
Particles of sun in my glass, lemon laced with powdered sugar on nose.
Glycerin + stones.
CHALK.
Tastes like still Vertus or Cramant, but more citrus leanness, soft ferocity, serious restraint (with the grapes used).
No hint of honey or cider or wax... CRYSTALLINE.
Nostalgic stained glass window, no color.
Hint of honey nose, vibrating field of alive & tension!

'Boisson vivant', 'Le Grand Clere' Cabernet Franc 2011, Francois Blanchard

Black tar, cloves. Cassis on nose, no sugar. Blackberry jam, smoke. Perfume and smoke opening up within parameters. Black tea/oolong. More structure & tar than licorice/smoke over stones.

Clears palate, purple perfume, cassis jam. Sitting and drinking with my sweet younger brother Andy: "Tastes like the earth that its grown in." 

Mineral tartness. Black stone/ drying on palate like Italian wine. Smells like Piedmont. Blackberry + LEMON. Acidity but doesn't cut through all, well-balanced, TART.

Orange pith, sour juice, so well rounded. Seamed at edges/cocoa/sweet/tart. Almost Bardolino or Dolcetto. "Herbal licorice" "mustardy", garrigue, dry, dusty bookshop! 

Black tea, ROSE

Blackberry compote and cocoa powder.

tasting notes.

My wine descriptions can tend towards the flowery... sometimes they become long poems that have little to do with wine.  I try and restrain myself. Usually I am able to bring my thoughts up just shy of overblown, just this side of ecstatic poetry. But I am realizing that the standard I should hold myself to is my own-- what does "speak" to me about a certain wine?  What shows itself to me, what is revealed, and how to translate a complicated experience?

Writing about wine cannot be strictly intellectual-- it is a translation through ebbs and flows of an experience. It is layered and sewn, pasted and glued end to end. And back to front, sub-soil through sod through wind to tops of clouds. I have been letting my imagination run away with me lately, and have been hugely surprised that my tasting notes circle around to the beginning, all on their own. When it works, they curve around to the beginning after running a gamut of thoughts, smells, memories, and colors. They become a stack of trace paper with drawings on each page, they become a cross-section landscape of a summer rainstorm turned to dusk in the desert. My tasting notes have the potential to frame all of the ways I have dabbled in the world, all the ways I have of  remembering things, all the quiets and noise, all the lights and the darks.

I've been trying to celebrate my own language of wine. My 'language' incorporates many different fields of study-- everyone's does! If there is Greek poetry in my notes its because I lived it in the mountains of Santa Fe-- wet sage and chamisa breeze through my book pages. If the trajectory of a wine speaks to me in curves and tapestry weights its because of countless hours spent walking through the dark and muffled quiet of Met museum storehouses, through dim lit picture galleries. Tasting notes have become a story-- an arc of sensations that curves back through older stories. I have smelled the powdery, sharp tang of high desert chamisa in a bottle of Foradori Nosiola. I have tasted hot chamomile-in-the-sun in dark sherry soleras of Sanlucar.  I am starting to celebrate the verbose and the sensual in my tasting notes, the trajectories and tangents because that is how I experience wine. It is pre-verbal, it is nostalgic, it is haptic and tactile. It is happening before any of these words.

I remember a man performing a Samuel Beckett play on a dark stage in Taos, NM. When we went outside after, you could smell smoke in the air, through sagebrush. You sensed that wood stoves were leaving thick, smudged tracery above each house, and the sky was pitch black. I think this is why I have always loved living in desert landscapes-- there is less sensory noise, the spaces are more open and clear-- they are scrubbed with soap suds and sun in the morning, and stain brightly from a few select markers.

My friend that lives in the desert of West Texas told me that one mountain range bordering his property grew out of an old sea bed, a huge limestone shelf that has eroded down through fossils, sea creatures and chalk. The mountains on the other side are volcanic, and ring with a sharp metallic sound. I watched a storm roll towards me in that desert, and tried to understand the gold dust that kept falling on my white skin. His skin is bronze from the sun, he sat under a burning stick of incense laughing, saying that being dusted by anything was sacred.

In my writing I try to pull at a thread-- without unravelling the whole cord of spun experience and sensation. If I am lucky I can trace it through wines-- I find the personality of the winemaker in the wines and it is astonishing! In Sanlucar I came to understand two different winemakers by tasting through barrels of their sherries.  One shone through her wines deep and quiet and shining in the dark-- a cold brook in the early spring. Another was loud and alive with yellow bursts of energy-- it was electricity and sea tang, burning in the sun, burned onto the crisp, hot sand-edge of coast.

Tasting the 2011 Domaine de Montbourgeau 'L'Etoile', (50% Chardonnay/ 50%Savagnin sous-voile, Jura, FR) today. Its a mixed experience, and somewhat confusing. This was one of my favorite wines when I first started working at UVA Wines in Williamsburg, BK years ago. It was a bit of a tough sell because of its salinity and vibrant sherry-like qualities. I remember it as tangy and laser-edged, clean but also incorporating the oxidized aromas and tastes of Savagnin under flor (chicken stock, turmeric, curry, tea leaves, sea-salt). When I started at UVA I had years of selling sherry under my belt. This was a wine I sold with zeal-- equal parts all things I loved about wine: clean, focused aromatics of an alpine chardonnay, and oxidized yellow viscosity and depth.

Today I feel nostalgic. Is this why the wine is taking me back to late Fall afternoons? Kicking through piles of old leaves, "after-school", walking home in somewhat meandering and lonely ways? The wine opened up with manzanilla sherry and apple blossom on the nose, pale gold and clear. What is confusing to my brain and palate is that half of this wine is sherry and half cold, crisp yellow apple aromatics. I can't seem to fuse the two. I want more of one or the other, not both. The wine opened up more to granny smith apple and blossom, & the purity of cold-pressed apple juice. There was a little yellow candle-wax in the viscosity, and slight yellow spice (curry, turmeric).

On the palate the wine became yellow sour apples, sherry tang sharp, savory & apple-turmeric spice. Do you see why this is confusing? It combines fresh and cooked elements in equal proportions. The body of the wine is a bit thin, but still very fresh. As I drank the wine it took on more savory baked apple components, and a curry powder (vs leaves). There was a hint of cinnamon but no sugar, baked yellow apples. And then the stack of descriptors congealed into a blustery late Fall afternoon: falling leaves, decay, cold wind, slightly sodden yellow fruit on the ground & dimmed aromatics.

The wine took on the shape of a cold, gray day that was spent indoors, looking out at the falling leaves and tree branches. There was a dusting of black tea leaves/oolong/tannin pucker and shorter finish. The baked apple atmosphere added a malty, vinegary depth and a tinge of dirty rainwater. Does this sound appealing? It is-- but not exactly the experience I was looking for. The brightness of apple blossoms folded into wet yellow flowers with a haunting of smoke and wet wood. Drinking this wine took me back to cold, clear, and lonely afternoons. It was the loneliness of childhood, of sharp experience, of watching lights come on in the houses across the street.

'Street Haunting'

"The hour should be evening and the season winter, for in winter the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are grateful. We are not then taunted as in the summer by the longing for shade and solitude and sweet airs from the hayfields. The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow. We are no longer quite ourselves."

(Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth & Other Essays, 20)

splintered diamond mind

"The creative life ! Ascension. Passing beyond oneself. Rocketing out into the blue, grasping at flying ladders, mounting, soaring, lifting the world up by the scalp, rousing the angels from their ethereal lairs, drowning in stellar depths, clinging to the tails of comets. Nietzsche had written of it ecstatically-- and then swooned forward into the mirror to die in root and flower. << Stairs and contradictory stairs,>> he wrote, and then suddenly there was no longer any bottom; the mind, like a splintered diamond, was pulverized by the hammer-blows of truth."

Henry Miller, Sexus, 265

In the mind-world ideas are the indestructible elements which form the jewelled constellations of the interior life.

henry miller, sexus, 264

I will start with water and candlelight. For this is like me sitting next to you, without speaking. I am the candle flame above the steaming water. Though there is no wind I sway and flicker on the walls. I am reflected in you. We sit apart but together make pictures entwined. You invert my image, twist & turn in backwards, I light your watery expanse. We both seem to be still but are moving. Together we make steam chains, light particles underwater-- we make light then dark against the bottom of the bathtub. Together we are seamed at our edges, we are sewn by our opposite. We are quiet together but make columns on the cold window sill, lit from inside sill to outside storm. We make molecule clouds underwater-- watery shapes. Steam and smoke are the parts of ourselves that can entwine in real time.

(dec 19, 2012)

lights

A new alignment of days. Embracing change as constant, embracing time as cyclical, as a spinning wheel. I feel spring in the day today-- it is the same spring that usually graces Brooklyn weekend mornings-- it is a recognition of grace that streams over the tops of Greenpoint brownstones, sun shafts that catch the walker regularly, light paint that washes through cracks between buildings.

I can recognize each thing in my days-- each light-prism moment. I can see each thing and pluck it out of my running days here. I can capture and save it-- savor it from the wash of grey days. I can walk in the sun here, and think about the blizzard there. I am building a scaffold. I write about the same things over and over again. I am trapped in the run-on sentences of my childhood. But it is different this time. I am building a cage for future thoughts. I am tired of them flying away in the breeze, I am building a geodesic dome to the sky. I am holding myself responsible for my thoughts, holding myself as the keeper of my own daydreams.

The things we are drawn to are portents, we open passageways to constellations by seeing them. We can be sensitized film for light paint. There is always CO street light in shades of dust, blue, and dried leaves. I would recognize this CO light first-- the particles that bathed my shape as a child, growing up in blue and brown, in sun. It is dusty motes of afternoon in thick antique shops-- anger dreams in windowsills, old screen doors breathing in August heat. 

CO light is more clear and icy blue than the earth dust of NM. It is more crystalline and quiet than the spirit sparks of Santa Fe mornings. NM air rings. Santa Fe is the high desert and sounds can carry for miles. The smells smudge the air there in vertical stripes-- rainwater through sage, chamisa clouds in air-- the smell of yellow.

Marfa, TX has a quietness and softness in the air that still pulls my heartstrings taut-- it is the sounds of mourning doves on the phone lines, and the smell of carob as the water hits the earth. I can't go back there yet. I can write and remember the splinter thin scaffold of thought structures, I can say that poetry grows there, the most bare bone brittle thin wires of thought make sense only there. There is a lack of sensory noise. It is heartbreaking. But only in this clarity can I picture the contours of my own heart, my lungs breathing dust in and crystals out. I am always trying to understand how crystals grow.

house

Writing out of sadness is difficult-- the light scaffold today feels heavy. And yet, what do we have if no 'structure', no 'skin on the surface of the water', no 'steam fogging the windows from outside'. I want to write about the effect of one thing on another-- reciprocal or reverberative imprints, what smudges us with fingerprints, what brushes our faces with 'dark wings' (annie dillard), what leaves a dusting of residue on the tops of our arms, our upturned faces? How do we recognize and record our own trail through the world. What of we are residue, what of dust?

"A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability. We are constantly re-imagining its reality: to distinguish all these images would be to describe the soul of the house; it would mean developing a veritable psychology of the house." (bachelard, the poetics of space, 17)

Brooklyn

I had forgotten about an older life. My older sun-filled contemplative life (of just a few years ago), sitting on the floor, looking out of Brooklyn windows. From breezy tree-tops, long shadows and frilled sun patterns crept slowly up and over windowsills. Most of my weathered, chip-painted sills were perfect perches for gold-flecked, sun-prism wine glasses. I watched my city through panes of cracked glass.

http://dinerjournal.com/category/wine/