No Year

Not feeling any great deal of excitement for the coming year. sorry.  Decided not to make any commitment toward trying to improve the self or condition. These energies seem better spent learning to feel content with what there is. Hope is only a thing with feathers, and as such difficult to catch and will often fly away when you are not looking. There will be no new job, no new writing, no new body, no new mind set, no new projects, no new future, no new place. In 2011 there will only be the sound of being, which I suppose if you are inclined toward Zenisms, would sound something like water moving through a small stream in a mossy forest. If you are not a zen master this may appear to be resignation or apathy, but your western ego driven logic lies to your mind. What is often called action is really only the sound of the same car crashing repeatedly into the same wall. 

Take for instance the Japanese Maple seeds I got from T's mother's garden in Washington state over Christmas. Getting home Sunday afternoon, after an early morning flight the first things I did was plant a few of them in different environments to see what would happen. I never sleep well the night before flying. Though I am often tired, I toss and turn for hours begging sleep to take me, but when it does my dreams are anxiety ridden catastrophes that leave me feeling more tired than if I had just spent the night awake waiting for the sun to rise. Some of  this stems from a paranoia about missing my flight (something I have done more than once), another part of it has to do with packing and making sure I remember everything I need, then there is the matter of navigating the process that awaits me upon arrival at the airport the next day where a body must move through an endless stream of verifications and interrogations in order to ensure the comfort and safety of all passengers. As a result, I often arrive home feeling as if I am caught between worlds, the place I was and the place I am. In order to secure my own passage completely I always feel the need to ground myself by reestablishing a root connection between both places- some type of tangible proof of the other spaces existence. Thus the need to begin planting immediately. A few of the seeds are spread outside in unused portions of the garden or an outside container and another couple more in small containers inside, and one more placed inside a Wardian case (a gift from T). When I am done, there is only the sound of waiting that moves through the apartment suggesting the fate of these sown seeds in the unnoticed movements of the day. If I have read the signs correctly there will one day be one of these long after I am gone:

 

There is more than one unacknowledged legislator here. 

Perhaps Herzog could clearly depict the struggle that is inherit in this process, the ultimate tearing and reconstruction from which new life springs as a matter of fates colliding. His characters obsession's are often a desire to live this process out to its ultimate conclusion either in mastering it for their own purposes (they, as the ghost of Ahab would no doubt tell them if they were keen to listen for such voices, can not), or in surrendering to it.  They are endlessly replaying the myth of Icarus in the form of conquistadors like Aguirre, or Fitzcalraldo. Timothy Treadwell seeks his own liberation and sanctification in his Grizzly activism. But  Herzog is also capable of turning his gaze inward toward his own megalomania that becomes clear in the Antarctic series, and even with his relationship to Klaus Kinski. Throughout his work there is a battle of wills between two forces of nature, both demanding one another's submission. By doing so, they only confirm their autonomy by revealing the fragile balance that exist between homeostasis and chaos. 

2011 will only mark a period of time, it will seem neither remarkable nor significant until another 100 years have passed. This is the curse of our free will. We have the ability to order the universe into segments but exchanged for understanding the implications of what we do we do the moment our actions occur as events.

Feliz Cumpleaños José Lezama Lima

December 19th 2010 is the centennial of Cuban born writer  
José Lezama Lima:

December 19th 1910 to August 9th 1976

is raising a drink to this person whose writing has the ability to split your head open and draw out from within it the language of infinite origin:

I encountered the word potens, which according to Plutarch represented in priestly Tuscan the "if possible," the infinite possibility we later observe in the virgo potens of Catholicism -- or, how to engender a god by supernatural means -- and I came to the conclusion that it was that infinite possibility that the image must embody. And since the greatest of infinite possibilities is resurrection, poetry -- the image -- had to express its most encompassing dimension, which is precisely, resurrection. It was then that I gained the perspective that I set against the Heidggerian theory of man-for-death proposing a concept of poetry that establishes the prodigious causality of being-for resurrection...So, if you asked me to give a definition of poetry...I would have to do it in these terms: it is the image attained by the man of resurrection.

Translation by James Irby 

    In Mexico he felt strange and aloof. The gods of light drifted off when they saw that that was a subterranean world, a world of chthonian deities. The Mexican had gone back to the ancient concept of the Greek World: hell was at the center of the earth, and the voices of the dead rose up through fissures in the earth. On his first morning in Mexico, looking into the bathroom mirror he could barely decipher the face on the glass. The mist, locked in a foggy blue from the beginnings of the earth, impeded his image's advance. He thought himself the victim of a spell. With a towel he wiped the fog off the mirror, but still he could not arrest the image in its reproductive play. He moved the towel from right to left and as soon as he reached the edges the mirror would cloud over again. With that first terror of his first Mexican morning, the land apparently wanted to open up its mystery and its spell to him.

From Paradiso; Translation by Gregory Rabassa  

Know your rights

Is remembering, is trying to keep the picture clear in my head of the women standing between the right and left lanes of traffic on a small meridian at the intersection of 40th Street and San Pablo in Emeryville.

"No sex for six years!" She announces authoritatively. Her voice is horse from standing and shouting in the cold dark wet traffic of the haunted shopping district that is this place.

"Now that I've got your attention." She starts again,

"No Housing for five years!"

"No Charity for Seven years!"

This goes on for the entire duration I am waiting for the light to change. For a moment I consider joining her on the meridian, I imagine forming a coalition watch dog group for paranormal traffic violations. Our mission will be to announce the procedures needed to maintain multidimensional relations. It is widely known that the sections of this mall region were constructed over the archeological foundations of another people, archeologist hired by the companies who sought to developed the area in the 90's found numerous shell mounds representing millions artifact. This story was told to me during an interview I did for a community magazine in the East Bay the first few months I was working here. The man I was talking to claimed to have been an archeologist on the project that discovered the sites. The job was put on hold and a new team (because every company is a team) of consultants was brought in to reassess the situation. The new team constructed a much more reasonable proposal for the development of the area. In recognition to this territories past 40th street morphs into Shellmound Street leading to Ikea, an AMC Theater, and a little further down the way to Powell Street Plaza Shopping Center. Good things seldom happen here. Not far from where I am right now I was once given a traffic ticket in front of a Pet Co for running a red light on my bike: $436. A few months later I had a bad accident on the same stretch of road just in front of the Best Buy."No employment for 8 years!" she screams just as the light changes and I am off hoping to make it through the area without injury. To do so one must avoid the Emery-go-round Shuttles that travel between the Bart Station and the main shopping centers making frequent stops, there is also a matter of merging into the left lane in order to turn on Hollis Street and right on Mandela Parkway.

Under the MacArthur 580 Freeway are the chain linked lots of fettered concrete slabs overgrown grasses, and bobtails seeding the desolation of this region.From here it is a straight line to the West Oakland Bart station. The Flats, as they are sometimes called, are an uneasy mixture of industrial force aiding and abetting the continued notion of our manifest destination. There are entire lives lived under shadows of the steal and concrete plants near by. The electronic crossing guard on the right side lane of the parkway at the corner of West Grand has been broken for years, the recorded voice of a female endlessly repeats an undecipherable warning to all who pass.
...
Thinking about Blake in the City,

see Milton:


Between South Molton Street & Stratford Place:

putting us somewhere on Davies Street or Oxford Street if I am reading this map correctly. Where Blake lived before and after his ill fated move to Felpham (the only time in his life when he was not living in London).  (Johnson: 234)

There is a map to made of this some how. Blake draws his visions from his surroundings, He is seeing all there is to be seen in space, London appears as we see it and as he does, called by another name: Golgonooza, Created by Los, it is the city of "art and Manufacture" (Damon: 162).

The spaces he draws from his attention to the world not "imagined" because for Blake attention is not complete unless it is fully engaged with the imaginary sense that is needed to see everything there is to see. Where the known world stops, content on the organization of generalities as the limit of our knowledge, Blake urges us to continue past this point. 

....
Finished reading: Hunt for the Eye of Ogin.Great!

Started reading: 2666

It is Friday, Christmas is coming.

Father Christmas

12/06/10, 7pm. Monday night. The grocery store across the street from me closed while I was away, sometime around Thanksgiving, laying off everyone in the process - several of whom I have known for the last five years. Way to go America! I have night terrors about finding a Whole Foods or a Trader Joes catering to each and every green urban yuppie's wild consumer desires where my normal grocery store with crappy produce and expired diary once was. Now that it's against the law to be homeless in San Francisco (ie no sleeping on the sidewalks) (Way to go Left Coast! Way to rock those progressive values!) I'm guessing people from the Marina and Noe Valley will feel a lot better about moving here. It was never a great grocery store, but you could get the things you needed for a lot more, however, they did have the best intercom radio station playing continuously that I have ever heard. Lots of R+B and old Soul; where else in the world could you hear Small Face's, Itchychoo Park other than your living room? Beneath this section of space once lay the track for the San Francisco San Jose Train line made possible by generous contributions from Henry Mayo Newhall and Peter Donahue. The latter of whom would eventually form what would become PG+E  and father Baroness Mary E. Von Schroeder (born Mary Ellen Donahue) who built the house I live in and most of the houses on our bloc in 1890.