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.