Shades of Black and White : 60 in the “Dear Merwin” series: May(0) 10-11, 2013
Probably about the last the thing I should be doing right now is sitting in front of this screen. I took notes all day yesterday and apparently I find that very visually challenging - it’s the movement, movement generally. I can watch a tree’s leaves all day but cars, human movement- complex tracking perhaps?- …and I have problems akin to working a muscle group to muscle failure but in this case its not a muscle but the various apparatuses involved in processing and utilizing one’s visual environment.
A new ‘trick’ is that I find if I wear an eye mask or one of those crushable Velcro equipped hats and adjust my sight range down to a very small window of visual input I can not make things worse while not spending all my time in voluntary blindness. (see previous posts (presuming I posted that))
So sitting at a screen may not be the best idea. Either or any of my screens, one of which is a lap top “the” laptop and why I still wish I had my old Dell 5000.
The other screen is my phone which I left simply sitting on a page that probably doesn’t even belong to- well more like the page is on my phone but as I decided the page and left it there. Too bad I can’t see much in my phone but tech wise it and therefore I am about 10-15 years behind which in IT if one factors in comparable historic analogies: 200-300 years, roughly.
I miss my Dell 5000 and I would like a new old one.
The once expensive ever a piece of crap computer I sit in front of came my way as so much did after the one-too-many-neurological incidences converted me from hugely naïve to completely retarded. A neighbor, a “friend” suggested I see the woman who purports to have been one of the designers of the Smithsonian’s I.T. system who my “friend” knew from the dog park. My Dell had been running more and more slowly (perhaps matching my speed) and my “friend” suggested this woman who might be able to assist me getting some technology to help me function better post TBI.
Shortly after she doctored it my Dell 5000 was unable to work at all to which I was told “you should just get a new one” (the devil’s latest and greatest catch phrase).
What I didn’t see at the time is that the woman trashed my computer and then said she’d “help” me by deciding which new equipment would be most appropriate for a consultants fee $350. $2,500 worth of crap and a $350 consultants fee (mmm- nothing quite like a retarded person with money). I can’t believe people do this shit- actually that’s not true, now I do believe it.
But back to the crap- a Blackberry I couldn’t manage and wouldn’t be taught how to use. The Blackberry was pawned a few months before I became homeless but I still have the screen I tap at now. Amazing, $2,000 and little to no software.
Over the past few years I’ve been gradually gaining the ability back to communicate and form concepts and words around what I’m experiencing, what the triggers are and exactly what happened and is still happening neurologically. Most recently professor Wolf, Proust and a Squid (?!) helped illuminate much due to the heavy influence of neuroscience in Wolf’s research regarding reading and language. The thing about- now see I admit I go full retard still at times but not when it comes to academics: that is starting to comeback. But of course its coming back because I’m working at getting it back.
Part of academics is simply being curious and wondering the why, what and how. Unfortunately I live in a part of the world where lack of intellectual curiosity is something people are proud of…but then again maybe not everyone can do it whereas I really could always just play. Could, and then I couldn’t anymore.
I’m writing all over place. I’m unfocused and can’t figure out how to get back where I was going: I tangent-ed; which I was once-upon-a-time semi-brilliant at but now I have to be careful, now I have to say -no, no, no, no stop, stop, stop.
So back to my Dell 5000.
I feel nearly 95% certain that it had that it had that little screen dimmer symbol
- would you believe I just found it…on the overpriced piece of satellite crap.
The horror of being on a computer for me, and any pixilated refreshing surface is in part the brightness, the rate of hertz rotations and I‘ll be curious if the two different refreshment patterns (within the same hertz rotation) have different effects on the part of my brain that sees? Though I wonder about the optic nerve given all the weird crap my eyes do at times.
Unfortunately paper can be a mine field as well. Some paper, depending on the kind of day I’m having is so bright I literally can not read text. There too are pattern recognition problems (thanks Maryanne Wolf for that phrase because I can’t find the words on my own anymore- I have to read someone else’s).
To probably anyone - but especially those who have lost and have difficulty with pattern recognition and its related problems I suggest coloring books by a company called Mindworks®. Additionally have something so complex that it can serve as an indicator, a guage. For instance I have an oriental rug that I had to keep covered for years because it made me dizzy. Too complex and everything becomes a chaotic swirl that might as well be moving - I know how I’m doing based on this if I can’t see any of the various patterns on it: I’m in trouble. ( It took 8 years to make out the four squares in the center forming an equidistant cross.)
Weirdly too I have medium/mode issues. Reading a newspaper is just crazy hard for me, like painfully hard- something about columned text- put columned text in a book and I literally can not understand the words. I can read them but they don’t make any sense to me. It is as if my brain says: “that’s a newspaper” “no its not a newspaper” “I don’t understand this shape it’s supposed to be left -to-right”.
Someone recently pointed out to me that a book with two columns of copy IS left to right reading- but I just don’t experience that and can’t understand what the words say or mean when they’re all put together in newspaper layout but in a book.
?
Weird.
So essentially - I’m layout sensitive. Give me left to right or you might as well be sending me something written in another language because 70-90% of the time I won’t be able understand what the words mean anymore- simply because of the layout.
However, give me a standardized test - in one of those booklets I’ve been getting since grade school and a number two pencil and I test really well. I have a hypothesis about this which I had a catch phrase for but can’t remember- one of those things I was hoping would stick didn’t and I didn’t back it up- which is too bad because it was a good catch phrase? More of a nutshell term because the whole thing is/was in there.
The forgotten phrase, which I actually maintained in my head for a good week two, relates to neuroplasticity and has an s word in it ….it sucks when you can’t remember your own thoughts anymore. On the upside Ten years after the TBI I remember that there was a thought, some of it was whereas for the first three years a thought came and was immediately gone.
Personally I believe that inability to maintain a thought may be a contributing in factor in what is referred to as impulsivity in TBIs. When the new normal is: act now because you will not remember unless you are in the action- that starts influencing one’s behavior. You don’t think before you do because you won’t remember- so you better do it because in that sliver of time which once upon a time was consideration you’ll lose the thread and completely forget what you were about to consider. So you start just doing in part out of fear because otherwise your entire day is simply a series of the inactions.
(Prepare for abrupt topic change)
This will hopefully be the entry in which I switch the color pallette of behold the relish and get rid of, what for me is horror bright white. I had both an established theory I was running on and a hypothesis I was testing. I’ve done a lot of that over the years, hypothesis testing.
For months - if not a year - I had poster boards all over my apartment identical phrases or shapes black poster board with white lettering and next to it the same image put on white poster board with black lettering.
I was seeing everything in flashing rotating triplicate BUT with the afterimages bright white, the same way that photograph negatives invert light and dark. I’m always hoping to toggle the right set of switches, metaphorically.
When I erected this color layout I remembered from my work in Communications that reverse print is “more difficult” to read? Or so the thinking goes because studies have shown that readers’ speed of white on black reading is demonstrably slower than black on white. Therefore a light background and dark text is “easier”.
Dark text on white/light being “easier” has not been the case for me perhaps because the slowing of visual processing actually helps me.
Thus when I post this I hope to find the screen darkening button on the library computer that so far I can’t find as an option and that I can alter the contrast levels at the library’s computer which is my only substantial internet access …other than a phone that’s 10-15 years behind the tech curve. Hopefully at the same time I’ll be able to change the white background to a shade of gr(e/a)y which in the case of planty of stuff on this site will alter the visible content.
…I read this guy’s blog, that in all likelihood isn’t his blog- I get tempted to call a number just to hear a voice which could just be a recording -an edited and repackaged bit of content redistributed and traded like baseball cards on the web/net wherein anyone can claim to be anyone or no one.
I haven’t written in a while and there is something I “have to” write. Fact is I write better long hand.
A few of the “have to” writes used to be easy- the sort of thing I wouldn’t have even considered “writing“. “Writing” isn’t a shopping or to do list; they‘re not “writing” until suddenly they beoame “challenging” and suddenly something as easy as a list can become not challenging but nearly impossible. I’ve worked my way back to such things being merely “challenging”.
Physically I’m having a hard time, a really hard time. Now what I tell myself is that I have systems coming back on line and being retrained and calibrated THEREFORE I’m getting better its just hard.
My Para nervous system is starting to engage again - at least that’s my theory. Plus after five years of yoga some improvement in muscle groups I simply couldn’t get to engage. I of course made gait adjustments- that’s what people with injuries do- be they neurological or otherwise.
I recently was able to read a piece of paper- it has been a bad habit over the years: not being able to read something and proceeding as if I could. This piece of paper was one of those things. The Dr. actually checked the box as my having no gait problems back in 2002. This same Doctor before making this determination asked me to walk and as I did he interrupted me and said “unclench your (beat) body”.
Me, I hadn’t realized I was clenching my body in order to walk, so I could make my legs move. I was quite surprised when I relaxed everything I tensed up and it turned out I needed that tension because without it “swoosh” -
The guy/Dr. actually had to physically catch me
but yet
you read his paperwork
and the patient has
“no gait problems“.
?
I’d say having to tense everything up and engage muscle groups not normally involved in walking so as to not immediately fall IS a gait problem …but what do I know? I didn’t go to medical school.
Usually I feel better when I write. I don’t feel better right now. Maybe I don’t feel better because I didn’t write Merwin.
I wrote a poem this morning- though I don’t know that it qualifies as a poem, its silly, adolescent, simplistic, gimmicky, more a riddle than a poem-
but I kinda’ like it.
I have this old love- though ‘have’ is certainly not the case. ‘Old’ - more like middle aged- like me but I don’t feel middle aged, fact is I feel younger? More me let’s say than I did in my youth when I felt like the oldest 10, 15, 25-year-old(s) anyone had ever met.
Love- that’s a tricky word. A truer word, set of them, is that there is an internet presence that has pictures of a guy I loved? Did we know each other well enough for that?
No- but play a love song at any juncture of my life and he’s the bit of video running in my head- I adored him. And if his digital presence is him all I know is I’m apparently the bane of existence? No, actually I’m not that important- let’s just say I’m simply unwelcome.
Sooo
Letters to W.S. Merwin were born - about 70, I like the word the Soixante- plus it has this odd function in French, but I digress- as usual. Letters to W.S. Merwin is as a behavioral modification technique that was working quite well until -yet again- some jackass with know-how or simply access brought a little bit of the nightmare back again.
One of the Merwin letters is about a dream- its one of my favorites in the Merwin series. In this dream, while I’m in the dream I think quite childishly: I’ll send him a picture. I did better at no contact in the dream than I have in real life.
The letters from when his Dad died - he and I both would have been better off without me knowing about that.
I miss my Dell Inspiron 5000.
I miss writing Merwin.
“Writers write because they have to,” though Phillip Roth would counter that I am no writer because I’m not making anything up and I can accept that I‘m not a writer and that I simply write.
Though the continuation of what could maybe be a full play came to me in a flash one day a few weeks ago. The play is abstract, keys on a cell phone- I stopped because I didn’t know where I was going and then while reading Proust and the Squid I came across something (MANY MANY) interesting things- one of which involves the Chinese language and spatial relationships. There’s a correlation between the Chinese readers and the ability to think spatially.
(Though as I edit what I write I am ever amazed at how often my words are out sequence- which is an improvement because I almost never do that in my speech anymore and I had whole sentences coming with the syllables all thrown together and making jibberish.)
I’m still totally excellent at sensing/knowing a space and what will fit in it. That is something I did not lose with the TBI- I always loved spatial tasks like packing a trunk, knowing just how much of x,y,z or where x,y and z could go, fit- perfect sense of that. One of the few things I had had knack for that were unaffected by the TBI. Yet in a strange contrast I have no idea where my body is in space. I can tell what can fit in space and where it/they will and can go but per my body I am in a constant state of “challenged” with that.
Pretty big not knowing where your body is in space.
This lead to all kinds of problems and ancillary injuries, still does and I can’t help but wonder if a little Chinese language training might toggle a neurological relay here and there? If the Chinese charcter strcuture of their language encourages better spatial sense is there some way I can use that and it apply it propo….? (Ie: where my body is in space?)
I have found that moving beyond Falon Gong slow, lining and relining myself up and taking the time to judge me and the space and how I need to move and what angle that means I need to be at and where all the different parts of my body should be and making sure all the right supportive muscles are engaged…its work… and I don’t know if learning Chinese characters via the Pin Yin would help at all with not knowing where my body is in space (a vocab word beginning with “pro” that I’ve been trying to commit to memory for 18 months now!) …
So maybe learning Chinese isn’t the best use my energies (and Tai Chi is far more practical) however wouldn’t it be interesting if a Chinese character “Tia” entered into my abstract cellphone keypad play?
(She did -I have it on many note cards)
It’s a pretty fun scene wherein initially all the males of the cast occasionally, and in unison, flex and grunt “Huh” in relationship to Tia‘s lines and actions. The way things are going steps need to be taken so that that little white plastic shopping bag stays and remains an active symbol in the collective memory mix …just like that white plastic bag in “American Beauty”.
Speaking of America: I recently saw “The Tillman Story” and all I needed to hear was the split, the canyon and the diary. Narrative as truth or fiction doesn’t get much easier to follow than those three ingredients.
Speaking of ingredients: I searched “Boston protests” and Google asked “Did you mean”- because surely I could not have meant what I’d just queried.
Well this is the worst thing I’ve written in awhile- but I needed to write.
My last safe place just got taken away which opens up an array of alarming potentials certainly but in the immediate- the one place I’ve been able to go, the thing I’ve been able to do where I could feel safe and know I was safe like in the company of Sam and Bishop -remember for a little while and experience what that is/was like …and I’m having a hard time dealing with that, losing that.
But I’ve been working; I’m always working because as I said to a Yankee just the other day “It may take me another 10-15 years but I am getting out here”.
Here being where I actually had a local Dr. lie about his credentials a week ago
“(beat) and Cornell.”
I checked, he never attended Cornell. What kind of freak doctor lies to a patient about where they were trained?
One guy I spoke to this week was just frigggin’ everything I love about the North East: you ask a question and you get a serious no bullshit or dumb ass answer.
I said, because I suspected, “If you don’t know what Munchausen’s by Proxy is I’ll tell you”.
I can’t remember if he paused or what the indicator was that no he didn’t know and wasn’t familiar with the term Munchausen‘s By Proxy. Unlike 95% of southerners- HE wasn’t offended by my using a term HE didn’t know and instead of getting offended by He Himself not knowing something and taking that out on me- instead He simply indicated - ‘yeah -what is this we’re talking about?’
After I defined Munchausen’s By Proxy he says:
“Murdering someone from the inside out”
Damn.
Friggin’ nailed it- the guy has ‘it’ between the ears.
In his line of business its usually the other way around: a gun, a knife, a rope, etc. coming at the body from the outside but with Munchausen’s it’s the other way around. And like a true damn Yankee he knew his baseline biology enough to know “weakens the immune system”. I didn’t have to explain the basics to him or suffer through a series of statements, or accusations toward my person, rooted in “I don’t know what this uppity bitch is talking about but she needs to be taken down a few pegs”. Nope- none of that because I was speaking to a Yankee: People who don’t overwhelmingly tend to say have a nice day when what they really mean is fuck you. I’ve had enough of these crocodile smiles to last me forever.
Serg. R & R, a fresh breath of Polish air ready to spell the Italian for me
It has been so long since I’ve been able to speak to people who don’t have their heads up their ass and do know how to do their damn job.
If only by phone I was in New Jersey this week and it was GOOD. I was in Boston a few weeks ago and it was GOOD. And if a 350 lb crackhead hadn’t sliced me open on Cannon Street odds are good I’d have been back in Washington State. But south of the Mason-Dixon always has plans for me that in no way resemble anything I’d want for myself, or anything I’d wish on someone else.
That really is/was a most excellent closing line…
…but there’s still that poem I woke and wrote. Not much of a poem…but kind of interesting structurally and I was right I couldn’t find the CD. The CD is probably in the boxed Cds which I taped shut hoping I’d no longer be doing time at my present address in my present domicile.
I just needed a place fast that would take me under the variety of circumstances and the spot had appeared to be a gardening friendly environment. Not.
“6 months” I’d thought. It’s been four years: I have and continue to experience what living in public housing can mean- maybe everywhere, probably everywhere which is an American tragedy.
I will say this for southerners- especially those that have known poverty: Poverty isn’t easy anywhere but in the south those with the power- its like they want the poor to suffer- as though some of those tithe(rs) get off on killing those that they do in fact think should still be serfs or some form of property. If you ever meet someone who’s family has been poor in the south you’re meeting one of the physically strongest genetic lines you may ever encounter. But then again maybe I’m biased because I keep hoping that’s not black mold and that this building won’t eventually kill me.
Now for my structurally interesting poem
REM: RADIOhead’s phone booth SONG
Replace matter
(Exchange the m)
Retain the energy
(Perhaps retrained?)
Keep T/t/time/thyme
(Is m matter, mass, motion or me?)
Add/+ a skinny ellipse
(resembling a fish)
OR add/+ a right angle
(3 o’clock without a face)
The fish and the clock are the same
(except for the name)
Followed by the e of me
(this mc.squared)
e precedes f
(to which I add no u)
between energy and time
(begin @ “ever since”)
b.holdtherelish
….Sometime later
I couldn’t sleep plus what with my safe place gone I what?
Yeah….
I’m hyper predictable that way and the thing is I know how unfair it is, how unfair I’ve been. I didn’t mean to be but when someone actually takes down all their websites - it speaks though why the one that’s been down the longest and why those links all connect to a Sprint homepage?
But yeah the subject of that poem - I actually created a scenario wherein he pulled his dot coms. I presume one more comment on the blog and its- bye- bye blog.
I remembered my own comments so… I’d never checked to see what he decided to do about an idea that occurred to me as I looked at the photos one night.
One of the posts was gone- maybe more than one. There had been a entry of the hanging of the piece wherein the book is - well point being- I’d always admired one aspect in particular about that piece. A truth I presumed to be true and from later photographs feel that was fleshed out.
I liked that the Corian piece was so likely his wife. I couldn’t help but like that because that’s what you want for everyone- for strangers on the street.
Truth (the) is gone.
But too so is the photograph in the white chemical suit.
I remember that day, (the day?)- okay the week I saw that picture- another guy literally arrived in the backyard wearing the same outfit - though his errand had been dealing with rats at a rental property.
Freaked me out a bit, that house where when I swept away the leaves on a brick porch the word “Steel” kept re-appearing. Steel and three other words I have written in a poem somewhere had been stamped into the bricks for some reason or another.
That also freaked me out.
I remember the write up for Truth (the) was as though an argument had taken place about the cost of the materials, the piece lying like something injured and the picture of its named Truth (the) being stretched, twisted, bent and could probably be quite easily spun.
I wrote something upon seeing it and there was, seemingly, a reply. And then another.
I can’t see his work anymore. That’s how it is, that’s how unwelcome I am- and I’m not saying he doesn’t have cause. But I still run a search here and there.
In part it’s a memory game: I know the face of many a man bearing his name. One shows up with extreme regularity- I believe he’s the accountant, though I could be wrong.
Anyway- so.
What remains of the blog has a bizarre and oddly increased level of typos but more notably, made most noticeably by the aforementioned is where not a single error occurs: there you will find his wife. Which of course is just as it should be.
I on the other hand search his work and a bronze comes up a statue that may have been his - maybe not. I try never to click on the images because then something might register somewhere and there’s a possible reminder of me which - so…
Anyway this - not bronze but the pre-version in wax comes up- very unexpected forms- or form depending on how you look at it. There were two human forms, cartoon like in a way and not at all the classical figures of any era - the traditional human form was thrown on its ear and replaced with a hairless vague but not childlike form as a human, this blank expression on it’s face. I say it because of the positioning and shapes and not girth but bloat you couldn’t tell whether the forms were male of female yet there was a sharpness to the angles of the face. One of the forms held the other as a child would hold a stuff animal or a doll their own size, both the doll and what held it had a near blankness of expression amid one being pleased and the other being held and not wanting to be.
Whoever did the piece is wicked talented- it wasn’t beautiful but disturbing which quite frankly who doesn’t prefer beauty? I can’t say I’d want to own it except for that rare quality of requiring the viewer to pause, just stops you and there is nothing and can be nothing else because the piece is so unexpected in how the forms were presented containing a subtlety nuanced clarity which rightly commands “STOP“ and consider me.
Once the wax is replaced with something more solid it’ll be one heck of a piece- hopefully not too big because it would lose something in that, a lot actually.
I didn’t like what I saw in that sculpture because I saw an aspect of all this, of the subject of that poem- or more properly me and the subject of that poem.
So maybe some day through some error I’ll get to see what he’s been working on, producing- but of course the flip side of that coin is: IF wanted HE wanted that THEN.
Its weird I’ve never been in this position before, though I know some of my ex’s have. You still have all these deep, sometimes pleasant and for me regularly tender feelings for someone (that’s not what my ex’s have ever visit here). But like them I do now really understand having feelings for someone when they soooo don’t have them for you.
So- back to Merwin.
Though maybe Eddie- he lives in Hawaii as did or does Merwin. I still haven’t checked Merwin’s pulse status because the truth is its not relevant.
I’ll probably revert back to my rule? Something I’ve started. As I don’t have much time to write AND writing takes me forever because the copy has to be combed over and over again pretty basic mistake mistakes (but mostly because of the wisenheimer factor) - anyway as I tend to go stream of consciousness I decided to just outline whatever I’m reading or is being read to me lately.
I was going to start with Henry… Thoreau because we read him in high school and therefore the wiring is still in there (ie: my head). Research has shown that re-experiencing one thing in another media format is an effective neural branching technique.
I didn’t go into Walden with Henry this time because I knew I’d be writing for weeks and between physical rehab, efforts at recovering IADL and ADL skills and keeping a semblance of house and home there’s no way I could risk going into such a huge writing experience…then again maybe I was afraid what would come out would so pale to what had been my writing skills in high school.
Love that first paragraph of his, you can actually feel it as if a place in the woods has sprung around you and if you just close your eyes you’ll be able feel the thick moss below your feet and the sweet decay of leaves.
His second paragraph was what convinced I was not and am not in a place for such arguments yet. Dude actually says he’d rather be a slave in the south than experiencing the type in Northeast at the time which of course was not literal slavery but metaphoric slavery. Anyone whose seem the pictures or equipment knows how far past absurd and blockheaded a thing that would be to say and to have said. Just the sort of thing, to quote/borrow from Dazed and Confused, rich white men who didn’t want to pay their taxes.
I couldn’t engage in arguments like that yet but when I go there I need to be ready to ‘go there’ and I am far, far from that place.
So to Merwin or not?
My latest book is “Eat, Pray, Love” (chapter 30 is continuity problem and should have come much earlier) though those are not the nature of arguments but only thoughts, what struck and strikes me. Mostly I can’t fathom the idea of eating a baby anything. I don’t ‘get’ looking at a baby and figuring how to cook it. A suckling pig, a baby turkey- ehh.
Which of course reminds me of phrase I’e heard humans use about other humans which I’ve never gotten. A guy I knew in college would sometimes describe woman he liked as “ so cute I could eat her with a spoon” and I’d just be like- “what?”.
I once heard Heather Locklear say that in an interview about her daughter “she’s so cute I could just eat her”.
When I see something cute the last thing I want to do is kill it but apparently this is not seen as aberrant behavior or want sets. I see something cute and I want to protect it. I don’t ‘get’ wanting to eat it, kill it. It would be like finding a litter of bunnies or puppies and wanting to stew or stuff them.
So that’s one of my eat-pray-loves. I have a note card and maybe that’s what I’ll do for awhile just collect note cards and notes on what I’m reading put them somewhere and come back to them. Mostly they’re single words, phrases or ideas. Some like eating babies I’ll always know what I would write about that but others terms I suspect time will change and when I encounter that card from this or that book.
My Eat-Pray-Love card goes like this:
“
Hustler & self-help? (untrue/b.s./style over content)
Meal of suckling
Cursing at people
Christmas tree farm (that one I should remember)
Florence, Dante (yep there he was - who knew!)
Attraversiamo (la, la, la love that)
‘The’ finger + a smile
insert surname Family Standard Communication Rule
* an idea* non-we-ness: no we in us because each party is alone…together.
“Say it like you eat it”= Writing, say it like I cook(ed) it
Parla come magni
“I’ve been there” vs. the skin phrase (the skin phrase is better)
Codega
U will look @ me but I will refuse to look at u (Ba(h)llard Academy)
Irreverent: check my definition- I ever can’t define it
Lang: lingerie vs. “naughties” ( more proof (as if more were needed) that the movie is/was better than the book)
Sex vs. pleasure
Meal of baby? Again.
”
I don’t remember anything about codega however I do remember Dante and language though I can’t pin point what but linguistically he did something unheard of
- “that’s right”-
he opened up the language and reading so that his work would not merely be accessible to the closed and cloistered upper class. Fourteenth century? A very American idea Dante had, American in terms America of how we Americans like to see ourselves. Dante’s idea was about ideas and ideas not belonging solely to those rich enough for access who first paid to learn the language of ideas - an entirely different language than that belonging to what was the masses. Dante was a quite revolutionary who preceded us by a couple hundred years, kept the best Grecian flame burning -but most importantly- in what was a medium choice the same as choosing water color or oil or pastel, stone or bronze- Dante’s medium choice resulted in ideas being for the masses, not just the rich or the privileged but the common man. From that the notion of the common man and from that idea the common person- all of us being welcomed into the world of ideas welcome to pursue our own Socratic methodologies of inquiry and pursuit.
Not bad- memory wise- considering I couldn’t remember a thing about codega. But then again I have been hanging out with Dante for a good bit of the last year. Dante, Merwin and the bus To Savannah (in previous posts- I think I posted it…maybe not) but I remember all that Gilbert framed around Florence as easily as the information about a bus and Savannah. Not is phone number though despite having hit the same sequence at around 300 times. (Dyscalculia = TBI strikes again.)
Dante, Merwin, and this guy “the windsurfer” I used to call him as non named short hand. The ‘wires’ my brain generates where is concerned that are associated with him act as some highly advanced neural network preservation, gateway enhancer and information retrieval system. Thus, why not strategically cross those wires?
A purpose driven crossing of the wires rather than usual the application of the American phrase “We got wires crossed” “Our wires got crossed” usually indicates a misunderstanding has developed but what about using that same wire crossing mechanism in order to enhance and preserve understanding? - substitute Merwin-n- Dante for this guy and fool that mechanism into its unusual good performance per this guy- while doing something to give this guy what he says he wants and thus what I’d like to be able to give him and is contained in a Pearl Jam song: Release Me.
So I remembered what Gilbert wrote about Dante, despite Merwin not technically being around because like J.K.’s version Merlin says, and James Taylor agree: “love is the finest thing around”…even when its not around in the traditional sense and separated even by as much time and space as separate Dante, Merwin, me, this guy and James Taylor. And in that thread one of them I can remember paragraphs instead of forgetting a should be easy to remember single word. Now tat is some serious code whereas I didn’t remember a word on my note card that amid all the Italian had obviously really appealed to.
“Codega” is one word that appealed to me enough to have put it on my note card while balancing a pen, a light source and a book - yet I don’t remember anything about it- but Dante, like this guy: every detail.
So here I am (or there I was) - up too late - but feeling better. I have that writing makes me feel better feeling and even though I know its obviously delusional on my part “One act play involving two characters” - I just really, really would have appreciated that not being written because I wrote a one act play involving two characters and where is this phantom play anyway- plus the blog changes all the time, the content , the links.
Maybe I’m just marketed to really hard by Sprint - and thus I sooo will totally not be buying that service. ( Though believing in the legitimacy of phone service I suppose I do buy into it.)
It doesn’t get clearer than Stop and don’t contact me but I read something and I see what I want to see? - however in my defense there have been some things…
I know, “Stop” should be chief among them. Heck, the only thing. I may need to hear it one more time. I’ll take notes so I won’t forget- less anger will actually be more effective long term, just lay it out- I respond a lot better to kindness than the other methodologies that have been tried.
I hear better if the other person speaks in first person…that is if I ever have, I’d say the guts but nerve is probably more the receiver’s truth and considering the role I’ve played here, in a wide variety of locations, the receiver’s truth holds more weight.
I lost my “I feel better from writing feeling”. However that’s all honest and there’s nothing much more important than that…its weird how that site appears in two different forms, even the copy is different - one talks about plot and one’s life as plot - long term where the new playwright hadn’t seen in those terms.
Everyone’s life has a plot and plots, subplots. Narrative, I don’t know how anyone can or could possibly make sense of life individually, or generally, without that. But at least one writer at a behold site lived without that- or so a glowing screen purported, post TBI I lived like that for many years and I can’t imagine having never had that- how would you even know what just happened. Of course I missed pieces of my own story- huge iceberg type stuff.
Heck I lived in Munchausenland for over forty years and didn’t know it because I was born into a By Proxy situation- but aren‘t we all born into by proxy as byproducts of what so rarely is an informed union?
The usual suspect,
M.C. Alford
PSsst: My first thought this morning was “systemic tactical alterations” which certainly informs as to plot.
Plot, something everyone is always trying to figure out- all of the time. That’s why novels are so nice the plot is right there, obvious. Whereas in life plot is so often obscured and confused, even where two characters share the same plot while living such different stories and thus can become diametrically opposed or bent at strange juxtaposed instead of just swimming along like Pixar’s ® Dora and Nemo.
I wish I had access the tools a home so as to mirror some what I’ve seen at my mirror because he’s that in which I can see myself most clearly and thus- and in that- he is Merwin.
( An in edit PS: I dove a back into this for skimming across as the line should have been easy enough to find as it was at the end of paragraph, demarked by a parenthesis and contained “Pearl Jam: Release Me“.
Now I can’t find it- which is why I don’t like digital paper, too easy to cook a variety of books. Once upon a time you had for recent to be obscured in and as history but not with the rise of computers.
@ Pearl Jam’s Release Me I had a thought (was nudged?) -to be clear so that there is no way my meaning could be mistaken. There is a line in the lyrics of Release Me a brief verse that is a prism and the beam of illumination, where the song breaks down and away from itself is “Dear Dad” - oh that line for me doesn’t belong to/in R e l e a s e M e instead it links straight to Animal.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The only Pearl Jam song that could come next.
Verses/versus/vs.
Probably about the last the thing I should be doing right now is sitting in front of this screen. I took notes all day yesterday and apparently I find that very visually challenging - it’s the movement, movement generally. I can watch a tree’s leaves all day but cars, human movement- complex tracking perhaps?- …and I have problems akin to working a muscle group to muscle failure but in this case its not a muscle but the various apparatuses involved in processing and utilizing one’s visual environment.
A new ‘trick’ is that I find if I wear an eye mask or one of those crushable Velcro equipped hats and adjust my sight range down to a very small window of visual input I can not make things worse while not spending all my time in voluntary blindness. (see previous posts (presuming I posted that))
So sitting at a screen may not be the best idea. Either or any of my screens, one of which is a lap top “the” laptop and why I still wish I had my old Dell 5000.
The other screen is my phone which I left simply sitting on a page that probably doesn’t even belong to- well more like the page is on my phone but as I decided the page and left it there. Too bad I can’t see much in my phone but tech wise it and therefore I am about 10-15 years behind which in IT if one factors in comparable historic analogies: 200-300 years, roughly.
I miss my Dell 5000 and I would like a new old one.
The once expensive ever a piece of crap computer I sit in front of came my way as so much did after the one-too-many-neurological incidences converted me from hugely naïve to completely retarded. A neighbor, a “friend” suggested I see the woman who purports to have been one of the designers of the Smithsonian’s I.T. system who my “friend” knew from the dog park. My Dell had been running more and more slowly (perhaps matching my speed) and my “friend” suggested this woman who might be able to assist me getting some technology to help me function better post TBI.
Shortly after she doctored it my Dell 5000 was unable to work at all to which I was told “you should just get a new one” (the devil’s latest and greatest catch phrase).
What I didn’t see at the time is that the woman trashed my computer and then said she’d “help” me by deciding which new equipment would be most appropriate for a consultants fee $350. $2,500 worth of crap and a $350 consultants fee (mmm- nothing quite like a retarded person with money). I can’t believe people do this shit- actually that’s not true, now I do believe it.
But back to the crap- a Blackberry I couldn’t manage and wouldn’t be taught how to use. The Blackberry was pawned a few months before I became homeless but I still have the screen I tap at now. Amazing, $2,000 and little to no software.
Over the past few years I’ve been gradually gaining the ability back to communicate and form concepts and words around what I’m experiencing, what the triggers are and exactly what happened and is still happening neurologically. Most recently professor Wolf, Proust and a Squid (?!) helped illuminate much due to the heavy influence of neuroscience in Wolf’s research regarding reading and language. The thing about- now see I admit I go full retard still at times but not when it comes to academics: that is starting to comeback. But of course its coming back because I’m working at getting it back.
Part of academics is simply being curious and wondering the why, what and how. Unfortunately I live in a part of the world where lack of intellectual curiosity is something people are proud of…but then again maybe not everyone can do it whereas I really could always just play. Could, and then I couldn’t anymore.
I’m writing all over place. I’m unfocused and can’t figure out how to get back where I was going: I tangent-ed; which I was once-upon-a-time semi-brilliant at but now I have to be careful, now I have to say -no, no, no, no stop, stop, stop.
So back to my Dell 5000.
I feel nearly 95% certain that it had that it had that little screen dimmer symbol
- would you believe I just found it…on the overpriced piece of satellite crap.
The horror of being on a computer for me, and any pixilated refreshing surface is in part the brightness, the rate of hertz rotations and I‘ll be curious if the two different refreshment patterns (within the same hertz rotation) have different effects on the part of my brain that sees? Though I wonder about the optic nerve given all the weird crap my eyes do at times.
Unfortunately paper can be a mine field as well. Some paper, depending on the kind of day I’m having is so bright I literally can not read text. There too are pattern recognition problems (thanks Maryanne Wolf for that phrase because I can’t find the words on my own anymore- I have to read someone else’s).
To probably anyone - but especially those who have lost and have difficulty with pattern recognition and its related problems I suggest coloring books by a company called Mindworks®. Additionally have something so complex that it can serve as an indicator, a guage. For instance I have an oriental rug that I had to keep covered for years because it made me dizzy. Too complex and everything becomes a chaotic swirl that might as well be moving - I know how I’m doing based on this if I can’t see any of the various patterns on it: I’m in trouble. ( It took 8 years to make out the four squares in the center forming an equidistant cross.)
Weirdly too I have medium/mode issues. Reading a newspaper is just crazy hard for me, like painfully hard- something about columned text- put columned text in a book and I literally can not understand the words. I can read them but they don’t make any sense to me. It is as if my brain says: “that’s a newspaper” “no its not a newspaper” “I don’t understand this shape it’s supposed to be left -to-right”.
Someone recently pointed out to me that a book with two columns of copy IS left to right reading- but I just don’t experience that and can’t understand what the words say or mean when they’re all put together in newspaper layout but in a book.
?
Weird.
So essentially - I’m layout sensitive. Give me left to right or you might as well be sending me something written in another language because 70-90% of the time I won’t be able understand what the words mean anymore- simply because of the layout.
However, give me a standardized test - in one of those booklets I’ve been getting since grade school and a number two pencil and I test really well. I have a hypothesis about this which I had a catch phrase for but can’t remember- one of those things I was hoping would stick didn’t and I didn’t back it up- which is too bad because it was a good catch phrase? More of a nutshell term because the whole thing is/was in there.
The forgotten phrase, which I actually maintained in my head for a good week two, relates to neuroplasticity and has an s word in it ….it sucks when you can’t remember your own thoughts anymore. On the upside Ten years after the TBI I remember that there was a thought, some of it was whereas for the first three years a thought came and was immediately gone.
Personally I believe that inability to maintain a thought may be a contributing in factor in what is referred to as impulsivity in TBIs. When the new normal is: act now because you will not remember unless you are in the action- that starts influencing one’s behavior. You don’t think before you do because you won’t remember- so you better do it because in that sliver of time which once upon a time was consideration you’ll lose the thread and completely forget what you were about to consider. So you start just doing in part out of fear because otherwise your entire day is simply a series of the inactions.
(Prepare for abrupt topic change)
This will hopefully be the entry in which I switch the color pallette of behold the relish and get rid of, what for me is horror bright white. I had both an established theory I was running on and a hypothesis I was testing. I’ve done a lot of that over the years, hypothesis testing.
For months - if not a year - I had poster boards all over my apartment identical phrases or shapes black poster board with white lettering and next to it the same image put on white poster board with black lettering.
I was seeing everything in flashing rotating triplicate BUT with the afterimages bright white, the same way that photograph negatives invert light and dark. I’m always hoping to toggle the right set of switches, metaphorically.
When I erected this color layout I remembered from my work in Communications that reverse print is “more difficult” to read? Or so the thinking goes because studies have shown that readers’ speed of white on black reading is demonstrably slower than black on white. Therefore a light background and dark text is “easier”.
Dark text on white/light being “easier” has not been the case for me perhaps because the slowing of visual processing actually helps me.
Thus when I post this I hope to find the screen darkening button on the library computer that so far I can’t find as an option and that I can alter the contrast levels at the library’s computer which is my only substantial internet access …other than a phone that’s 10-15 years behind the tech curve. Hopefully at the same time I’ll be able to change the white background to a shade of gr(e/a)y which in the case of planty of stuff on this site will alter the visible content.
…I read this guy’s blog, that in all likelihood isn’t his blog- I get tempted to call a number just to hear a voice which could just be a recording -an edited and repackaged bit of content redistributed and traded like baseball cards on the web/net wherein anyone can claim to be anyone or no one.
I haven’t written in a while and there is something I “have to” write. Fact is I write better long hand.
A few of the “have to” writes used to be easy- the sort of thing I wouldn’t have even considered “writing“. “Writing” isn’t a shopping or to do list; they‘re not “writing” until suddenly they beoame “challenging” and suddenly something as easy as a list can become not challenging but nearly impossible. I’ve worked my way back to such things being merely “challenging”.
Physically I’m having a hard time, a really hard time. Now what I tell myself is that I have systems coming back on line and being retrained and calibrated THEREFORE I’m getting better its just hard.
My Para nervous system is starting to engage again - at least that’s my theory. Plus after five years of yoga some improvement in muscle groups I simply couldn’t get to engage. I of course made gait adjustments- that’s what people with injuries do- be they neurological or otherwise.
I recently was able to read a piece of paper- it has been a bad habit over the years: not being able to read something and proceeding as if I could. This piece of paper was one of those things. The Dr. actually checked the box as my having no gait problems back in 2002. This same Doctor before making this determination asked me to walk and as I did he interrupted me and said “unclench your (beat) body”.
Me, I hadn’t realized I was clenching my body in order to walk, so I could make my legs move. I was quite surprised when I relaxed everything I tensed up and it turned out I needed that tension because without it “swoosh” -
The guy/Dr. actually had to physically catch me
but yet
you read his paperwork
and the patient has
“no gait problems“.
?
I’d say having to tense everything up and engage muscle groups not normally involved in walking so as to not immediately fall IS a gait problem …but what do I know? I didn’t go to medical school.
Usually I feel better when I write. I don’t feel better right now. Maybe I don’t feel better because I didn’t write Merwin.
I wrote a poem this morning- though I don’t know that it qualifies as a poem, its silly, adolescent, simplistic, gimmicky, more a riddle than a poem-
but I kinda’ like it.
I have this old love- though ‘have’ is certainly not the case. ‘Old’ - more like middle aged- like me but I don’t feel middle aged, fact is I feel younger? More me let’s say than I did in my youth when I felt like the oldest 10, 15, 25-year-old(s) anyone had ever met.
Love- that’s a tricky word. A truer word, set of them, is that there is an internet presence that has pictures of a guy I loved? Did we know each other well enough for that?
No- but play a love song at any juncture of my life and he’s the bit of video running in my head- I adored him. And if his digital presence is him all I know is I’m apparently the bane of existence? No, actually I’m not that important- let’s just say I’m simply unwelcome.
Sooo
Letters to W.S. Merwin were born - about 70, I like the word the Soixante- plus it has this odd function in French, but I digress- as usual. Letters to W.S. Merwin is as a behavioral modification technique that was working quite well until -yet again- some jackass with know-how or simply access brought a little bit of the nightmare back again.
One of the Merwin letters is about a dream- its one of my favorites in the Merwin series. In this dream, while I’m in the dream I think quite childishly: I’ll send him a picture. I did better at no contact in the dream than I have in real life.
The letters from when his Dad died - he and I both would have been better off without me knowing about that.
I miss my Dell Inspiron 5000.
I miss writing Merwin.
“Writers write because they have to,” though Phillip Roth would counter that I am no writer because I’m not making anything up and I can accept that I‘m not a writer and that I simply write.
Though the continuation of what could maybe be a full play came to me in a flash one day a few weeks ago. The play is abstract, keys on a cell phone- I stopped because I didn’t know where I was going and then while reading Proust and the Squid I came across something (MANY MANY) interesting things- one of which involves the Chinese language and spatial relationships. There’s a correlation between the Chinese readers and the ability to think spatially.
(Though as I edit what I write I am ever amazed at how often my words are out sequence- which is an improvement because I almost never do that in my speech anymore and I had whole sentences coming with the syllables all thrown together and making jibberish.)
I’m still totally excellent at sensing/knowing a space and what will fit in it. That is something I did not lose with the TBI- I always loved spatial tasks like packing a trunk, knowing just how much of x,y,z or where x,y and z could go, fit- perfect sense of that. One of the few things I had had knack for that were unaffected by the TBI. Yet in a strange contrast I have no idea where my body is in space. I can tell what can fit in space and where it/they will and can go but per my body I am in a constant state of “challenged” with that.
Pretty big not knowing where your body is in space.
This lead to all kinds of problems and ancillary injuries, still does and I can’t help but wonder if a little Chinese language training might toggle a neurological relay here and there? If the Chinese charcter strcuture of their language encourages better spatial sense is there some way I can use that and it apply it propo….? (Ie: where my body is in space?)
I have found that moving beyond Falon Gong slow, lining and relining myself up and taking the time to judge me and the space and how I need to move and what angle that means I need to be at and where all the different parts of my body should be and making sure all the right supportive muscles are engaged…its work… and I don’t know if learning Chinese characters via the Pin Yin would help at all with not knowing where my body is in space (a vocab word beginning with “pro” that I’ve been trying to commit to memory for 18 months now!) …
So maybe learning Chinese isn’t the best use my energies (and Tai Chi is far more practical) however wouldn’t it be interesting if a Chinese character “Tia” entered into my abstract cellphone keypad play?
(She did -I have it on many note cards)
It’s a pretty fun scene wherein initially all the males of the cast occasionally, and in unison, flex and grunt “Huh” in relationship to Tia‘s lines and actions. The way things are going steps need to be taken so that that little white plastic shopping bag stays and remains an active symbol in the collective memory mix …just like that white plastic bag in “American Beauty”.
Speaking of America: I recently saw “The Tillman Story” and all I needed to hear was the split, the canyon and the diary. Narrative as truth or fiction doesn’t get much easier to follow than those three ingredients.
Speaking of ingredients: I searched “Boston protests” and Google asked “Did you mean”- because surely I could not have meant what I’d just queried.
Well this is the worst thing I’ve written in awhile- but I needed to write.
My last safe place just got taken away which opens up an array of alarming potentials certainly but in the immediate- the one place I’ve been able to go, the thing I’ve been able to do where I could feel safe and know I was safe like in the company of Sam and Bishop -remember for a little while and experience what that is/was like …and I’m having a hard time dealing with that, losing that.
But I’ve been working; I’m always working because as I said to a Yankee just the other day “It may take me another 10-15 years but I am getting out here”.
Here being where I actually had a local Dr. lie about his credentials a week ago
“(beat) and Cornell.”
I checked, he never attended Cornell. What kind of freak doctor lies to a patient about where they were trained?
One guy I spoke to this week was just frigggin’ everything I love about the North East: you ask a question and you get a serious no bullshit or dumb ass answer.
I said, because I suspected, “If you don’t know what Munchausen’s by Proxy is I’ll tell you”.
I can’t remember if he paused or what the indicator was that no he didn’t know and wasn’t familiar with the term Munchausen‘s By Proxy. Unlike 95% of southerners- HE wasn’t offended by my using a term HE didn’t know and instead of getting offended by He Himself not knowing something and taking that out on me- instead He simply indicated - ‘yeah -what is this we’re talking about?’
After I defined Munchausen’s By Proxy he says:
“Murdering someone from the inside out”
Damn.
Friggin’ nailed it- the guy has ‘it’ between the ears.
In his line of business its usually the other way around: a gun, a knife, a rope, etc. coming at the body from the outside but with Munchausen’s it’s the other way around. And like a true damn Yankee he knew his baseline biology enough to know “weakens the immune system”. I didn’t have to explain the basics to him or suffer through a series of statements, or accusations toward my person, rooted in “I don’t know what this uppity bitch is talking about but she needs to be taken down a few pegs”. Nope- none of that because I was speaking to a Yankee: People who don’t overwhelmingly tend to say have a nice day when what they really mean is fuck you. I’ve had enough of these crocodile smiles to last me forever.
Serg. R & R, a fresh breath of Polish air ready to spell the Italian for me
It has been so long since I’ve been able to speak to people who don’t have their heads up their ass and do know how to do their damn job.
If only by phone I was in New Jersey this week and it was GOOD. I was in Boston a few weeks ago and it was GOOD. And if a 350 lb crackhead hadn’t sliced me open on Cannon Street odds are good I’d have been back in Washington State. But south of the Mason-Dixon always has plans for me that in no way resemble anything I’d want for myself, or anything I’d wish on someone else.
That really is/was a most excellent closing line…
…but there’s still that poem I woke and wrote. Not much of a poem…but kind of interesting structurally and I was right I couldn’t find the CD. The CD is probably in the boxed Cds which I taped shut hoping I’d no longer be doing time at my present address in my present domicile.
I just needed a place fast that would take me under the variety of circumstances and the spot had appeared to be a gardening friendly environment. Not.
“6 months” I’d thought. It’s been four years: I have and continue to experience what living in public housing can mean- maybe everywhere, probably everywhere which is an American tragedy.
I will say this for southerners- especially those that have known poverty: Poverty isn’t easy anywhere but in the south those with the power- its like they want the poor to suffer- as though some of those tithe(rs) get off on killing those that they do in fact think should still be serfs or some form of property. If you ever meet someone who’s family has been poor in the south you’re meeting one of the physically strongest genetic lines you may ever encounter. But then again maybe I’m biased because I keep hoping that’s not black mold and that this building won’t eventually kill me.
Now for my structurally interesting poem
REM: RADIOhead’s phone booth SONG
Replace matter
(Exchange the m)
Retain the energy
(Perhaps retrained?)
Keep T/t/time/thyme
(Is m matter, mass, motion or me?)
Add/+ a skinny ellipse
(resembling a fish)
OR add/+ a right angle
(3 o’clock without a face)
The fish and the clock are the same
(except for the name)
Followed by the e of me
(this mc.squared)
e precedes f
(to which I add no u)
between energy and time
(begin @ “ever since”)
b.holdtherelish
….Sometime later
I couldn’t sleep plus what with my safe place gone I what?
Yeah….
I’m hyper predictable that way and the thing is I know how unfair it is, how unfair I’ve been. I didn’t mean to be but when someone actually takes down all their websites - it speaks though why the one that’s been down the longest and why those links all connect to a Sprint homepage?
But yeah the subject of that poem - I actually created a scenario wherein he pulled his dot coms. I presume one more comment on the blog and its- bye- bye blog.
I remembered my own comments so… I’d never checked to see what he decided to do about an idea that occurred to me as I looked at the photos one night.
One of the posts was gone- maybe more than one. There had been a entry of the hanging of the piece wherein the book is - well point being- I’d always admired one aspect in particular about that piece. A truth I presumed to be true and from later photographs feel that was fleshed out.
I liked that the Corian piece was so likely his wife. I couldn’t help but like that because that’s what you want for everyone- for strangers on the street.
Truth (the) is gone.
But too so is the photograph in the white chemical suit.
I remember that day, (the day?)- okay the week I saw that picture- another guy literally arrived in the backyard wearing the same outfit - though his errand had been dealing with rats at a rental property.
Freaked me out a bit, that house where when I swept away the leaves on a brick porch the word “Steel” kept re-appearing. Steel and three other words I have written in a poem somewhere had been stamped into the bricks for some reason or another.
That also freaked me out.
I remember the write up for Truth (the) was as though an argument had taken place about the cost of the materials, the piece lying like something injured and the picture of its named Truth (the) being stretched, twisted, bent and could probably be quite easily spun.
I wrote something upon seeing it and there was, seemingly, a reply. And then another.
I can’t see his work anymore. That’s how it is, that’s how unwelcome I am- and I’m not saying he doesn’t have cause. But I still run a search here and there.
In part it’s a memory game: I know the face of many a man bearing his name. One shows up with extreme regularity- I believe he’s the accountant, though I could be wrong.
Anyway- so.
What remains of the blog has a bizarre and oddly increased level of typos but more notably, made most noticeably by the aforementioned is where not a single error occurs: there you will find his wife. Which of course is just as it should be.
I on the other hand search his work and a bronze comes up a statue that may have been his - maybe not. I try never to click on the images because then something might register somewhere and there’s a possible reminder of me which - so…
Anyway this - not bronze but the pre-version in wax comes up- very unexpected forms- or form depending on how you look at it. There were two human forms, cartoon like in a way and not at all the classical figures of any era - the traditional human form was thrown on its ear and replaced with a hairless vague but not childlike form as a human, this blank expression on it’s face. I say it because of the positioning and shapes and not girth but bloat you couldn’t tell whether the forms were male of female yet there was a sharpness to the angles of the face. One of the forms held the other as a child would hold a stuff animal or a doll their own size, both the doll and what held it had a near blankness of expression amid one being pleased and the other being held and not wanting to be.
Whoever did the piece is wicked talented- it wasn’t beautiful but disturbing which quite frankly who doesn’t prefer beauty? I can’t say I’d want to own it except for that rare quality of requiring the viewer to pause, just stops you and there is nothing and can be nothing else because the piece is so unexpected in how the forms were presented containing a subtlety nuanced clarity which rightly commands “STOP“ and consider me.
Once the wax is replaced with something more solid it’ll be one heck of a piece- hopefully not too big because it would lose something in that, a lot actually.
I didn’t like what I saw in that sculpture because I saw an aspect of all this, of the subject of that poem- or more properly me and the subject of that poem.
So maybe some day through some error I’ll get to see what he’s been working on, producing- but of course the flip side of that coin is: IF wanted HE wanted that THEN.
Its weird I’ve never been in this position before, though I know some of my ex’s have. You still have all these deep, sometimes pleasant and for me regularly tender feelings for someone (that’s not what my ex’s have ever visit here). But like them I do now really understand having feelings for someone when they soooo don’t have them for you.
So- back to Merwin.
Though maybe Eddie- he lives in Hawaii as did or does Merwin. I still haven’t checked Merwin’s pulse status because the truth is its not relevant.
I’ll probably revert back to my rule? Something I’ve started. As I don’t have much time to write AND writing takes me forever because the copy has to be combed over and over again pretty basic mistake mistakes (but mostly because of the wisenheimer factor) - anyway as I tend to go stream of consciousness I decided to just outline whatever I’m reading or is being read to me lately.
I was going to start with Henry… Thoreau because we read him in high school and therefore the wiring is still in there (ie: my head). Research has shown that re-experiencing one thing in another media format is an effective neural branching technique.
I didn’t go into Walden with Henry this time because I knew I’d be writing for weeks and between physical rehab, efforts at recovering IADL and ADL skills and keeping a semblance of house and home there’s no way I could risk going into such a huge writing experience…then again maybe I was afraid what would come out would so pale to what had been my writing skills in high school.
Love that first paragraph of his, you can actually feel it as if a place in the woods has sprung around you and if you just close your eyes you’ll be able feel the thick moss below your feet and the sweet decay of leaves.
His second paragraph was what convinced I was not and am not in a place for such arguments yet. Dude actually says he’d rather be a slave in the south than experiencing the type in Northeast at the time which of course was not literal slavery but metaphoric slavery. Anyone whose seem the pictures or equipment knows how far past absurd and blockheaded a thing that would be to say and to have said. Just the sort of thing, to quote/borrow from Dazed and Confused, rich white men who didn’t want to pay their taxes.
I couldn’t engage in arguments like that yet but when I go there I need to be ready to ‘go there’ and I am far, far from that place.
So to Merwin or not?
My latest book is “Eat, Pray, Love” (chapter 30 is continuity problem and should have come much earlier) though those are not the nature of arguments but only thoughts, what struck and strikes me. Mostly I can’t fathom the idea of eating a baby anything. I don’t ‘get’ looking at a baby and figuring how to cook it. A suckling pig, a baby turkey- ehh.
Which of course reminds me of phrase I’e heard humans use about other humans which I’ve never gotten. A guy I knew in college would sometimes describe woman he liked as “ so cute I could eat her with a spoon” and I’d just be like- “what?”.
I once heard Heather Locklear say that in an interview about her daughter “she’s so cute I could just eat her”.
When I see something cute the last thing I want to do is kill it but apparently this is not seen as aberrant behavior or want sets. I see something cute and I want to protect it. I don’t ‘get’ wanting to eat it, kill it. It would be like finding a litter of bunnies or puppies and wanting to stew or stuff them.
So that’s one of my eat-pray-loves. I have a note card and maybe that’s what I’ll do for awhile just collect note cards and notes on what I’m reading put them somewhere and come back to them. Mostly they’re single words, phrases or ideas. Some like eating babies I’ll always know what I would write about that but others terms I suspect time will change and when I encounter that card from this or that book.
My Eat-Pray-Love card goes like this:
“
Hustler & self-help? (untrue/b.s./style over content)
Meal of suckling
Cursing at people
Christmas tree farm (that one I should remember)
Florence, Dante (yep there he was - who knew!)
Attraversiamo (la, la, la love that)
‘The’ finger + a smile
insert surname Family Standard Communication Rule
* an idea* non-we-ness: no we in us because each party is alone…together.
“Say it like you eat it”= Writing, say it like I cook(ed) it
Parla come magni
“I’ve been there” vs. the skin phrase (the skin phrase is better)
Codega
U will look @ me but I will refuse to look at u (Ba(h)llard Academy)
Irreverent: check my definition- I ever can’t define it
Lang: lingerie vs. “naughties” ( more proof (as if more were needed) that the movie is/was better than the book)
Sex vs. pleasure
Meal of baby? Again.
”
I don’t remember anything about codega however I do remember Dante and language though I can’t pin point what but linguistically he did something unheard of
- “that’s right”-
he opened up the language and reading so that his work would not merely be accessible to the closed and cloistered upper class. Fourteenth century? A very American idea Dante had, American in terms America of how we Americans like to see ourselves. Dante’s idea was about ideas and ideas not belonging solely to those rich enough for access who first paid to learn the language of ideas - an entirely different language than that belonging to what was the masses. Dante was a quite revolutionary who preceded us by a couple hundred years, kept the best Grecian flame burning -but most importantly- in what was a medium choice the same as choosing water color or oil or pastel, stone or bronze- Dante’s medium choice resulted in ideas being for the masses, not just the rich or the privileged but the common man. From that the notion of the common man and from that idea the common person- all of us being welcomed into the world of ideas welcome to pursue our own Socratic methodologies of inquiry and pursuit.
Not bad- memory wise- considering I couldn’t remember a thing about codega. But then again I have been hanging out with Dante for a good bit of the last year. Dante, Merwin and the bus To Savannah (in previous posts- I think I posted it…maybe not) but I remember all that Gilbert framed around Florence as easily as the information about a bus and Savannah. Not is phone number though despite having hit the same sequence at around 300 times. (Dyscalculia = TBI strikes again.)
Dante, Merwin, and this guy “the windsurfer” I used to call him as non named short hand. The ‘wires’ my brain generates where is concerned that are associated with him act as some highly advanced neural network preservation, gateway enhancer and information retrieval system. Thus, why not strategically cross those wires?
A purpose driven crossing of the wires rather than usual the application of the American phrase “We got wires crossed” “Our wires got crossed” usually indicates a misunderstanding has developed but what about using that same wire crossing mechanism in order to enhance and preserve understanding? - substitute Merwin-n- Dante for this guy and fool that mechanism into its unusual good performance per this guy- while doing something to give this guy what he says he wants and thus what I’d like to be able to give him and is contained in a Pearl Jam song: Release Me.
So I remembered what Gilbert wrote about Dante, despite Merwin not technically being around because like J.K.’s version Merlin says, and James Taylor agree: “love is the finest thing around”…even when its not around in the traditional sense and separated even by as much time and space as separate Dante, Merwin, me, this guy and James Taylor. And in that thread one of them I can remember paragraphs instead of forgetting a should be easy to remember single word. Now tat is some serious code whereas I didn’t remember a word on my note card that amid all the Italian had obviously really appealed to.
“Codega” is one word that appealed to me enough to have put it on my note card while balancing a pen, a light source and a book - yet I don’t remember anything about it- but Dante, like this guy: every detail.
So here I am (or there I was) - up too late - but feeling better. I have that writing makes me feel better feeling and even though I know its obviously delusional on my part “One act play involving two characters” - I just really, really would have appreciated that not being written because I wrote a one act play involving two characters and where is this phantom play anyway- plus the blog changes all the time, the content , the links.
Maybe I’m just marketed to really hard by Sprint - and thus I sooo will totally not be buying that service. ( Though believing in the legitimacy of phone service I suppose I do buy into it.)
It doesn’t get clearer than Stop and don’t contact me but I read something and I see what I want to see? - however in my defense there have been some things…
I know, “Stop” should be chief among them. Heck, the only thing. I may need to hear it one more time. I’ll take notes so I won’t forget- less anger will actually be more effective long term, just lay it out- I respond a lot better to kindness than the other methodologies that have been tried.
I hear better if the other person speaks in first person…that is if I ever have, I’d say the guts but nerve is probably more the receiver’s truth and considering the role I’ve played here, in a wide variety of locations, the receiver’s truth holds more weight.
I lost my “I feel better from writing feeling”. However that’s all honest and there’s nothing much more important than that…its weird how that site appears in two different forms, even the copy is different - one talks about plot and one’s life as plot - long term where the new playwright hadn’t seen in those terms.
Everyone’s life has a plot and plots, subplots. Narrative, I don’t know how anyone can or could possibly make sense of life individually, or generally, without that. But at least one writer at a behold site lived without that- or so a glowing screen purported, post TBI I lived like that for many years and I can’t imagine having never had that- how would you even know what just happened. Of course I missed pieces of my own story- huge iceberg type stuff.
Heck I lived in Munchausenland for over forty years and didn’t know it because I was born into a By Proxy situation- but aren‘t we all born into by proxy as byproducts of what so rarely is an informed union?
The usual suspect,
M.C. Alford
PSsst: My first thought this morning was “systemic tactical alterations” which certainly informs as to plot.
Plot, something everyone is always trying to figure out- all of the time. That’s why novels are so nice the plot is right there, obvious. Whereas in life plot is so often obscured and confused, even where two characters share the same plot while living such different stories and thus can become diametrically opposed or bent at strange juxtaposed instead of just swimming along like Pixar’s ® Dora and Nemo.
I wish I had access the tools a home so as to mirror some what I’ve seen at my mirror because he’s that in which I can see myself most clearly and thus- and in that- he is Merwin.
( An in edit PS: I dove a back into this for skimming across as the line should have been easy enough to find as it was at the end of paragraph, demarked by a parenthesis and contained “Pearl Jam: Release Me“.
Now I can’t find it- which is why I don’t like digital paper, too easy to cook a variety of books. Once upon a time you had for recent to be obscured in and as history but not with the rise of computers.
@ Pearl Jam’s Release Me I had a thought (was nudged?) -to be clear so that there is no way my meaning could be mistaken. There is a line in the lyrics of Release Me a brief verse that is a prism and the beam of illumination, where the song breaks down and away from itself is “Dear Dad” - oh that line for me doesn’t belong to/in R e l e a s e M e instead it links straight to Animal.
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The only Pearl Jam song that could come next.
Verses/versus/vs.
