My good friend Scott Stephenson will be appearing once again next week as New York Fashion Week draws to a near – with his much appreciated take on fashion-as-it-is-was-and-has-been. I have really loved his friendship and intelligent words, and we have, since my visit to France last summer, been writing to each other about various topics, namely Polly Mellen, the state of the fashion industry, and the recurring theme (on my behalf) of a strangely vivid road. It is only with Scott that this metaphor for my life blossoms up, and it really is extramazingly vivid to me.
Below is my latest take on the journey, my difficulties in finding the space and comfort to be ME, whilst retaining my dignity, pride and personality – as well as my knowing that this cross-over of modeling and writing will not manifest itself in the usual way of being a “model-blogger” or a “socialite-columnist” – unless I were able to write about what I see, feel and know, and AVOID at all costs, the blaze of mediocrity, falsity and superficiality that I’m presented with everywhere I go. I am also between a rock and a hard place because I do have the opportunity to write for fashion magazines, being a model/ writer and all, and yet I refuse to do what everyone else is doing (which is Being Boring. No offence.) This is why I created Paper Castle, because there are very few ARTISTS able to find outlets for their voices, their hurting feeling thinking belching screaming crying fighting pausing loving lying waiting hoping longing sighing souls. Instead, we are turning into a culture of PLEASERS and PANDERERS and FOLLOWERS and I won’t stand for it.
S: Haven’t had any meetings with magazines here yet. I’m so stubborn about being myself and not turning myself into one of those posey fashionistas with blogs. BLEH. I’m sorry, but X, Y, and Z Personal Style Bloggers, et al, make me want to hurl into a waste paper basket, filled with their iPhones/ Blackberries; thus in the process destroying their twitter accounts, their 8000 comments per post (not exaggerating), thus obliterating their self-indulgent desires for fame and coolness, all in one hearty chuck (sorry for the visuals)
And at least my vomit would actually contain some food. Some delicious and enjoyable food and substance of LIFE. Wank off and DIE IMMEDIATELY!!!! *HORNED SIREN NOISE LOUDLY BLARES LIKE TRUCK BACKING UP OVER THIN LEGS AND TAKE AWAY STARBUCKS CUPS* *YES, YOU, SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTERS AND NARCISSISTS, MOVE IT! GET OUT OF THE WAY, YOU’RE BLOCKING THE VIEW WITH YOUR OVERSIZED SUNGLASSES AND GIVE-AWAY DESIGNER PURSE!*
Sorry. Scott Stephenson and Sophie Ward are coming, and you do not want to do battle with their intelligence. Is the return of “the supermodel”, as everyone has been so longing for (the golden days of Cindy, Linda, Christy et al) manifesting itself in this manipulated “sexy model” vibe coming through recently? Why is Terry Richardson… (alive?) working so much? Why is American Apparel now promoting soft porn? Why is every model having to go topless and pantless and arch their back, open their mouth, spread their legs and tousle their hair? Why is this the way women are making money these days? Are people really that starved for sex?
Leave Your Mind Behind, and Bend.
There is a being inside my brain that howls like a wounded animal in the light of all this. I’m not sure if you saw the video I posted on Paper Castle’s fan page about Embracing your Inner Girl. (Thank you Jocelyn Murphy who brought this to my attention)It’s very powerful. The state of the modeling industry is THE REASON I refuse to model. It’s not because I don’t think I could model, or that I’m not beautiful, or not able to be a model. It’s the ENVIRONMENT, like a natural ground that is oozing black muck from beneath, and starting to bubble in places, amongst the moss and nice shady trees. Yes, I have found myself wandering back over the territory of the right-hand road, which once appeared like a huge vibrant colourful flower garden, buzzing with perfume and butterflies, and which, further down the road now, has segued into dark forest with black gunk seeping through the grass beneath my feet. A funny smell, a sense of danger.
Once again, I know I’m in the wrong place, and I must return to the light, to the other path, to another route. What it is I’m trying to find, I’m not quite sure. I still have my pen, I still have my hands, but I feel as if I’m writing on the leaves and the trees as I pass them. Throwing rocks with words scrawled upon them. I’m wondering if there will ever be any more paper, and what kind of a state the Castle will be when I find it, when I return to it. Is it being looted? Are strangers wandering through it? Are the windows punctured with bullet holes, or thrown stones? (my own stones!?) I’m sure there are a lot of weeds, a lot of vines, and many spiders haunting cornerstones and turret walls.
But I am still walking towards something I once said I would walk to, yet can’t remember the name of anymore. Where is the map I once had? I think it dissolved in that river I crossed. Where is the compass that was guiding me? It must have fallen out on the swing bridge I climbed. Do I have many clothes left, water, food, pens? Just enough. Just enough until sun down, then we’ll see what comes out of the shadows, and moves with the firelight, what rises with the smoke, what falls from the tree, what dances with my notes.
Kind of loving the Problem Child vibe at the moment.
Ps. All the budding (and established) photographers out there, TOTALLY go to the New York Photo Festival website and SUBMIT your work to the Photo Awards. I hang out at the Powerhouse Arena every Wednesday helping the Director of Exhibitions put on the NY Photo Festival. Lou Reed has an amazing eye, apparently (two eyes) and Vince Alletti was the first person to write about disco. I love our curators. Can’t wait to meet everyone and see all the photos you submit. If I were any good at photography, I’d do it myself. But I got words. Send them your imagic voyages!
Powerful. Genius. Crazy painful life. Powerful beautiful life. Genius madness love. Timeless goldness. I’ve been around the bend, through the desert. Maybe I’m still there, I’m not sure yet. I’m not sure if the mirage is an oasis or the oasis is a mirror. I have been very, very angry. So angry I’m not sure you’d appreciate the electricity – perhaps . . . because I know you have been angry too. I know we have all been “raging”, as one ” rages in the small spaces of their bricks.” I have been hating and frustrating and piercing through some descending shroud of darkness that has befallen my reality: the fallow time of winter encourages it, and yes it is perhaps nature, the nature that we are all manifestations of. I am wary of manipulating nature. I am wary of the responses of the rats that run the subways at night, the rats I watch while waiting for the trains, the rats who race – literally – with pieces of baguette in their mouths while the screeching subways scrape onwards and through the sooty dark pylons of stations. The animal with its food, food as big as its body, is listening, listening so loudly – and as the train comes into the hole (”which way is it coming? from where?” the rat thinks. “From above!? No!” In the words of Dorothy Parker: “What fresh hell is this!!”) the little rat bounces along, alone, towards some kind, any kind, of safety. Food. Safety.
Meanwhile, we humans stand leaning against our concrete pillars in the cold wet subways while the trains scrape like banshees along the dark and sinister tracks, killing screeching rats, and we do not bat an eyelid. Don’t show them your emotion, ohh no – never! This is normal. This is natural. This metal on metal noise is completely usual, get used to it. The animal on the tracks with its adrenaline filled body and the ears pricked and the fear taken, and running, is not separate from our animal natures. The animal inside us has been tamed and caged and we have tamed and caged it. We built the cage, we medicated the emotion, we left the caverns, we created the circus, we disdain and disown the circus, we hate the rats, we hate the garbage, we frown upon the rain and “Keep off the Grass” (if there even was any) and WALK and DON’T WALK. Safety? CAGE.
Soon we will be the only “nature” left in New York. In the wintertime, this is what it feels like. The trees are barren and cloistered by concrete, like shackles around their middles. The puddles that collect in their roots are filled with trash and frozen over, like scabs full of madness. What have we done? Why am I so angry? Would you like to know? I can’t even begin to explain it. I’m angry because I am sad. As our friend Elissa Down told my sister recently, “anger is the next level of emotion up from the rock bottom of sadness.” Many people might think, what do you have to be sad about? Why are you sad? Life is beautiful. Yes, it is. It’s excruciating sometimes. Waking up is the most beautiful and saddest thing when the dream has gone. When the adulthood is ripe. When time is exfoliating the soul and youth is vanishing and the world is pressing on. I don’t really mind about that. I just need to be able to express WHO I AM, and WHAT IT’S ABOUT, and where it’s all coming from.
The following is all from a book written by the brilliantly wise William Bridges, called The Way of Transition. It’s the only book that speaks properly to me right now, and which makes sense of the world around me, as well as many threads of what my family and friends are going through too. You will see why:
“To understand thing we must have been once in them and then have come out of them; so that first there must be captivity and then deliverance, illusion followed by disillusion, enthusiasm followed by disappointment. He who is still under the spell and he who has never felt the spell are equally incompetent”
–Amiel
“Taking our cue from the machinery and the data that dominate our world, we usually view knowledge as something that accumulates piecemeal over time. You start out with a little, and then you gradually pick up more and more. It’s like possessions: they pile up over time. But passive accumulation isn’t the way that you learn the most important things that you should know about the world. The way you do that is much more the way that Amiel describes in the quotation above. First you are immersed in the knowledge, then you get distance from it (and you even deny it), and then you return to a new relation with it.
That is the kind of knowledge that he experience of transition leads to. First you know, and then you let go of what you know – or thought that you knew, because the disenchantment process makes the old “reality” seem very unreal. Then, during the neutral zone phase of transition, you no long experience the old reality and may feel thatyou lack a reality now or that your reality is confused or crazy. But that state also passes, and you return to your life again. Yet it isn’t the same life – it’s a new, transformed life. It’s you-but-not-the-old-you [...]
Our society is not very sensitive to the knowledge that comes from seeing the tricks over and over again, for it is created over time by a dynamic and maturing relation between the knower and the known, rather than being just there to be acquired as rationalistic knowledge is. Do we discount such knowledge because we fail to appreciate the importance of the transition process, or do we fail to understand the transition process because we have forgotten the importance of such knowledge? I don’t know. But I do know that the two difficulties go together.
I know that we avoid endings whenever possible, and we steer clear whenever we can of the neutral-zone emptiness. Endings feel like failure to us, and at a deeper level they awaken in us the fear of death. So we use the busyness and structure and status of work and family life to hide ending it from view. Only when life makes death an unavoidable fact do most of us overcome this aversion, but by then the resonance of that grand event is so great that the little-deaths of endings are often drowned out in the mighty music of the final scene.”
(That is partially why I am angry – this American “pretending” that everything is fine and “just keep going”)
“All those transition points in a traditional person’s lifetime were treated as practice sessions for the ultimate ending that they would finally encounter. Death is a shocking new experience in our society. It is no wonder that we use what I earlier called “the additive fallacy”, to avoid endings, believe in doing so that if we just keep adding and adding to what we have, we’ll end up with something new and will avoid the need to make any endings.
“But it is not just endings that we fear. The aloneness and emptiness that are often felt in the neutral zone are just about as fearful for many modern people as endings are, for they reawaken in us all our childhood fears of abandonment. And since most modern people no longer know the natural world well, the idea that we need a fallow time or a time of gestation isn’t natural to us any longer. Whenever we can’t see that anything is happening – and you usually can’t in the neutral zone – we doubt that anything can “really” be going on. And the chaos, that state of pure energy that is experienced either as a jumble or as a time of empty nothingness, makes us feel out of control and a little crazy.
“We fail to see that real new beginnings, the kind that revitalize and inaugurate a new order of things, come out of that chaotic neutral zone. Instead, we try to make a fresh start by an act of will, putting together a plan that lays out a whole sequence of actions that we will take to transform ourselves or our worlds. When the plans don’t work as we expect them to, we shake our heads sadly and conclude that either the plans themselves were defective or there was a problem with how the plans were implemented. The idea that we failed because we tried to make a change do the work of a transition doesn’t occur to us [...]”
(The forced hand of humans altering the course of nature. This is what also angers me. Genetically modified food is again Bigger-faster-Better-More (see below) and everything associated with aggrandizing societal gain, has raped and destroyed and pain-planted our planet. Our humans too)
“In the modern world, very few individuals or organizations understand the need to relinquish periodically all that they have depended upon for their meaning and security and to explore the neutral zone in depth, in order to discover there the thread leading to a new life.
“And here it is that the old clearly do have an advantage over the young – or would, if they weren’t often so ignorant of the way of transition. I think, though, that I am stating the case too harshly. For what the old lack is an affirmation of the wisdom that many of them in fact, do possess from living through a lifetime of transitions. So we have a secret cadre-in-waiting, a group of people whose experience has taught them, individually, what once whole generations were taught by their wise ones. To recognize this wisdom will benefit its carriers and the society at large.”
“Age puzzles me. I thought it was a quiet time… I grow more intense as I age”
– Florida Scott-Maxwell.
When the author was married in the seventies he writes that, “We all talked a lot about growth ” and how “everyone was self-consciously trying to grow. In once sense that was just California at that particular time, but Americans in general have always admired growth. We admire the fastest growing companies and the cities that grew the most in the past decade. Magazines list the national economies that are growing the fastest, ranking them in descending order of growth speed. Bigger is better, and bigger-faster is better still. Even the doubters become believers when the growth in question involves their own assets.
“But there is another kind of growth, which is much harder to measure. Fewer people admire it or seek it out today. It doesn’t involve expansion, simply the mysterious process of maturing. It’s goal is not to increase in size (or intelligence or sophistication or experience or skill), but simply ripening. We cross the barriers to this kind of growth by breaching or surmounting them, the way we do when we are bent on growth as increase. We overcome the barriers to growth as development when we are able to view our problems as signals that it is time to let go of the way in which we have been seeing and doing things and initiate a developmental transition.
“The barriers to this kind of growth are overcome whenever we stop viewing our flaws and problems as things to be solved or removed, and start viewing them as signals. What the problems are, really, are old solutions that have outlived their usefulness. From that point of view, whenever we do away with a problem instead of listening to its message, we trigger a whole string of events that lands us in trouble. [...] The problem, the flaw, the inferior element is not only not bad, but is the very thing that has the power to rescue the person who, without it, is not whole and cannot develop and mature.”
“We neither get better or worse as we get older, but more like ourselves” – Robert Anthony
“Every culture has it’s own favored image of movement through space. Ours is the straight line, the shortest distance from A to B. Getting close to B – “getting there,” wherever there is – is what we like to call “making progress.” Further is better – further ahead, further up, further down, further in, further out. Far out, we say. Far out! The typical journey of American history has been a one way trip. From the Old World to the New World, from the seaboard colonies to the western frontier, or from the farm to the city. Americans have always been looking for something that is out or over “there” – or else fleeing from something that is “here.” Either way i has been a one-way trip to some destination where things will be better, where you can escape from your past and start over again. Americans lives often have a two-dimensional quality, like the maps on which their travels can be traced.
“But other cultures, including most of those that have produced the spiritual treasures of humankind, have seen movement differently. Not from here to there, but here to there and back again. The natural figure is circular. As the Tao Te Ching says, “Going on means going far,/Going far means returning.” The great journeys are pilgrimages to a sacred place, and then after the journey has done its transformative work, pilgrimages return back home again. No matter how enormous the discoveries are, they are meant to be brought back into everyday life. As the Zen saying puts it, “After enlightenment, the laundry.” Although, of course, it’s not the same laundry any more.”
“It is gravity that causes water to flow, draws it away from its spherical form and makes it follow a more or less linear and determined course. Yet water continually strives to return to its spherical form. It finds many ways of maintaining a rhythmical balance between the spherical form natural to it and the pull of earthly gravity… What causes water to follow such a winding course (as a meander)? Its endeavour to complete the circle is here only partially successful, as it cannot flow back uphill to its starting point. RIght at the beginning of its circulatory movement it is drawn downhill and in following this downward pull it swings alternatively from side to side.” – Theodor Schwenk
Recently I have been questioning everything, the way I’ve been brought up, the epidemics of depression as well as “positivity” in our Western World, the stories I’ve been led to believe and the meandering journey I’ve been going on. I loved this next passage, in relation to my belief that endless “enlightenment” is actually unhealthy, and that there needs to be a place in this world, especially as it becomes more populated and more crowded and more constructed (I am wary of using “civilized” . . .because I would disagree that more construction = more civilized) and as we feel more and more hemmed in, “raging in the small spaces of our bricks.” It’s imperative that places like Paper Castle create habitats for freedom of expression, freedom of human emotion – the real stuff in life, the water, the way, the fear and anger and pain and joy and sorrow and celebration. It is imperative.
“We weren’t following any book or instructions (”The Way to Make a Successful Transition” ). To have planned how to deal with that chapter of our lives according to some set of steps would have turned a meaningful experience into a mechanistic one in which we managed the situation instead of really experiencing it. Trying to be loving and supportive and conscious by means of technique robs your life and your relationship of the richness that comes from the build-up of unmediated experience. The whole whopping mess of joy and pain that living provides anyone who will stay open to it. One of the pitfalls of the enlightened outlook is that it gets selective. It opts for joy, it opts for sexual fulfillment, it opts for self-expression and openness and communication and sensitivity. In doing so, it cleans up the compost pile by sorting out all the weeds and the manure.”
(Earlier Bridges talks about our chemically created fertilisers being robbed of the organic matter that mulches new plants and nurtures growth so well. The decay of lost dreams, lost hopes, lost lives, dead matter, is the mess that provides the nourishment for new growth. The other thing about this society, and particularly America I’ve noticed, is the obsession with cleanliness and killing germs and staying chock full of vitamins. The fear of “sickness” and “germs” is a curse unto itself, a self-destructive fear that perpetuates its own demons. I hate it. Give me bugs and dirt and germs any day. Strengthen my immune system. I love you dirt!)
“All of us wish we knew exactly what to do, but if such a book of answers actually existed, we would find ourselves faced with an even more serious problem. The book would make you and me unnecessary, because then the world would have no need for the unique person that each one of us is. It is only in living out the unique way of your individual life and following the meandering journey that you have been on since you were born, that you and I make the choices that are right for each of us. Without the necessity of living your way through the situations with which the world confronts you, you’d have no life of your own. For there isn’t a bright, fresh-off-the-rack life hanging in the closet, waiting to be taken down and worn like a new coat.
“That is why we are here: to go on our own personal meandering journeys and to be shaped by them. If that were unnecessary, we wouldn’t be here, living the lives that we are living. How that all adds to the great pattern universal reality, I don’t have a clue. But that it does add up is clear. Any particular acre of earth is inhabited by a particular group of creatures, each of which is busy living out his or her own particular journey. The interrelated paths of those journeys would look like an introduction-to-geometry diagram by comparison. What we call “reality” is nothing more, or less, than journeying going on at every level from the subatomic, to the personal to the galactic.”
I feel a little better now. I hope you do too.
NB: All of the above comes from the Transitions book, pages 192 – 209. All of the italics are Bridges italics. I have not changed a word.
PS. (While I was writing and sharing this I was bombarded with images of spiders, from somewhere beyond my conscious mind. I just researched what spiders symbolize, because I remember when I was creating an epic screenplay with my friend Blake, that we were surrounded by spiders, harmless ones, but they encroached on our living quarters like pilgrims.)
“Spider’s body is made like the number 8, consisting of two lobe like parts connected at the waist and eight legs. Spider is the symbol for the infinite possibilities of creation. Spider weaves the webs of fate for those who get caught in her web and become her dinner. Spider gives you the power to create! Create! Create!
The web of fate represents the wheel of life, which does not include any alternatives or solutions. It is typically human to get caught in the polarity of good or bad fortune without realizing that we can change it at any time. If we are not decisive enough about changing our lots in life, we may end up being consumed by our fears and limitations.
Also don’t become too involved in the weaving of your life plans to notice opportunity at the outskirts of your web. The most important message from Spider is that you are an infinite being who will continue to weave the patterns of life and living throughout time. Do not fail to see the expansiveness of the eternal plan. You weave your own web.
Spider silk is a fibrous protein secreted as a fluid which transforms from liquid to solid as the spider draws it out with its legs, becoming elastic and stronger as it is stretched. The liquid could be viewed as emotion and an example of how our emotions combine and repeat within ourselves individually and as a species. A spider web grows stronger as it is stretched. It is only through the experience of life that we grow stronger. When we are emotionally balanced, we understand the importance of being flexible, not being rigid and unyielding to thoughts, actions and emotions and that all things change.
Web weaving spiders typically eat their web every day or so, then rebuild their web all over again. Spider encourages us to examine what we are creating, to be unafraid to cast off old ways, to consume the experience of our journey, then to begin the cycle anew with a fresh outlook. With great patience, spider waits knowing the cycle of creation will provide what it needs. Many spiders rely on a sense of touch, being able to feel vibrations on the web or ground. From this we can learn how important our sense of touch and vibration are. We can feel the vibrations of emotion from others. In learning to pay attention to them, we empower ourselves to better understand any interaction.”
PPS. How amazing are First Aid Kit? These girls are fantastic and beautifully REAL. I’ve been following them for a while. Evolving and awakening. A “female Lennon and McCartney” for sure. I am enamoured.
“Great is the art of beginning, but greater the art of ending” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
I have been tired, melting, pushing on through some desert of a chaotic, formless void. I am going through the eye of the needle, the pinch of the hourglass, waiting, wondering, not knowing what I’m moving towards, and yet thread by thread unhinging myself from all that I have been attached to. I am accumulating futures, and abandoning pasts. I am zinging freely on towards who knows what. I am patient. I am impatient. I am whole, I am halved. I am free, yet I am locked. I can’t go home, but I can’t get close enough to what it is that I want. What is it again? I love my friends, my readers, my collaborators who read this – I love them too much to stay away.
“God sends the wound.
God is the wound.
God is wounded.
God heals the wound.” – Elizabeth Howes, Jungian therapist
But I have great work to finish, pressing things of importance, pressure pressing on and in and all around. I push against it and the muscle fibres grow thicker. Strangely I realized, a few nights ago, that “it seems sometimes as if I have a voice living within me; a very wise voice who directs this pen and paper, and teaches me – the me who ironically, paradoxically feels like a very young soul. So, there are two parts to me: the writing voice, who is immeasurably old; and the striving, awestruck, living, breathing, excitable me. Sophie Ward, the body, the vessel. I’m the one who carries the spirit through the world, across the page, over this cosmos. And when I am most excited – that is when the inner voice, some ancient soul, is exclaiming at the sights of this earth – sights it seems he had long since forgotten.”
“Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not yet understood.” – Henry Miller
“I began to have an idea of my life, not as the slow shaping of achievement to fit my preconceived purposes, but as the gradual discovery and growth of a purpose which I did not know” – Joanna Field
Just wanted to drop in to say hello…..I miss you guys. Back to the drawing board. aka. LIFE.
So I am going on a hiatus, a pilgrimage of literary bravura, towards the unknown future, within the realm of unending potentiality, upon which my own expression will be explosively expressed. I don’t know how often I’ll get back to the gash, but I now realize I must disentangle myself from the entire area (of the internet), in order to gain some perspective, some tact, depth, life, a streaming issuance of words from pens that will certainly be midwife to future gems, books, films, poetry in motion which you will hold in your hands, your children’s hands, and so on and so forth.
So forth! I have said this before. Just letting you know my time has come to dive deep. Tips and encouragement (and donations to Paper Castle, for the publishing of our books) are so hugely appreciated, you wouldn’t believe how much every dollar counts. My publisher friend is in fact having a BABY in a few months, and my work on Paper Castle has become very intense and yet limitless. I need to travel new roads, and feel that a crazy research/ reading/ hermit-like/ eccentric/ creative time of pulsating material outwards – and collecting value inwards – is about to occur.
Building upwards and onwards. More books upon books. We will have something to produce when the time is right. When my circle of winners unite. When. When? When I say so! Great castles take slow and steady building. Every brick has been lovingly placed and cherished. But now I am going walkabout, into nature, into nurture. I’ll see what I can bring back for you. It might be tomorrow, it might be many weeks. I will explode back before you know it.
I love you all! In the meantime, you can live vicariously through my eyeballs in this photo diary which I will be updating thrice weekly. I won’t be far. But I will be deep.
My fellow Aussie writer and ex-model comme moi, Tara Moss, has a lovely blog within which she has recently been sharing and showing and telling about the desks of writers! Mine is sparse and white on the right. The others are like dreams, and super splendid. Having said what I said about my desk – I do tend to write more on my couch or bed than anywhere else. Very Proustian of me. But I also believe Descartes (or was it Nietzsche?) was also fond of writing in bed.
Also contemplating a re-route from NYC back to Australia because apparently I am too much of an ALIEN on this extraordinary alien Visa – IMG need to give permission, or transfer sponsorship, in order for me to work as a writer in this alien land! So I might need to leave again. The road is getting narrower, the open plain that this journey was at the start has suddenly turned into a very slim, slimey, and narrow tunnel, with small light at the end. I’m not really complaining though, going back to Australia will give me a chance to finish my novel, write my screenplay, see my 3 of my old friend’s new babies, snorkel and lie on the sand, drive into the red desert, and not worry about being crushed by the cruel fist of a New York winter. What doesn’t kill you only makes you “Stranger” said a friend of mine tonight while he sipped his white wine gleefully, after we’d sent 89 text messages. What? Stranger? I do feel the urge for strangeness coming on, (yes, Tavi is encouraging me from across the land!)
So unless I instantly become benefactor to a great fortune, or IMG assents to becoming the trampoline for my writing, to launch me into the stratosphere – I have a lot of work (and again, traveling) to do.
I feel like Conan on the Tonight Show, getting shuffled further and further back into the shade of the darkest night. After all we’ve worked for! Why, God, why! I’m with you Cone. We will shake our pale fists with lanky elbows at the Gods for wreaking this unheard of wrath upon us. (Weirdly, we are actually in very similar situations = NBC/ IMG. Choice to jump ship or stay on and make magic happen during the coldest of winters/ latest of time slots.)
I also miss my brothers a lot, so a quick trip to Australia while I sort out my Visa isn’t looking so bad.
However, I will miss Jon with a chronic heartache. The only other option is to get hitched. Do you guys feel like coming to a wedding in Big Sur sometime?
At this point it looks like I need either:
1) a literary agent,
2) a deal with Paramount/ Warner Bros/ Universal pictures,
3) a wedding dress,
or
4) all of the above (definitely my choice of preference!)
INTRODUCING BLAIR SMITH AND MORE FROM EAMON LOINGSIGH:
“SALVADOR TO LAPAZ”
From sealed bus windows the derelict cannot lick you,
and you find yourself in Salvador,
five hands in your pockets,
only one your own.
Desperation swarms to you,
in the city at polar ends with its beginning.
So we suck ourselves back to seventh floor balconies,
and dream their open hands, hollow eyes, and the place it once was.
A place where a leather tin-man was once-a-walking,
his only vocal, his leather tin.
You sleep forward now,
grinding and shaking into town,
miles from where the train guard threw your cervaja out the window,
as if the hills could open it, sip it,
to a high walled un-hostile hostel.
A salad of once scattered fruits.
The Latvian in the tracksuit who cannot stop to breathe it in,
the stoner from Bristol – a cartoon who shares our puff.
The German girl who limps and the French that do not smile,
all stay here for a while.
The earth is a cell laid hallow sheath,
An impetuous paradise churning,
Burning within its parboil simmer,
And bulb out of the pasty film.
Watching suns and moons,
Holding on as they faster quicken,
Turning quicker in their youthful boons,
Flicker,
Flicker through the sanguinary churns of ballads unjust,
Its prisoners grow from within its crust,
And brackish browns gargling in the deepest red,
Just honest children born of bacchanal stead.
And generations come and pass along the coasts of Gods,
Blind,
Feeling out for the moon to find,
A new life of softened terrors that tread among gentler frauds.
The golden tinctures of rum whisk their sons into the wash of perpetual vengeance,
Washing them into the marching promenades and archways,
Ushering them into the flowerets,
The Autumn-swept cemeteries of homogeneous civil wars.
And when the theatre and spine of the mastiff Gods,
Are brought down by the logic of aloof mobs,
And the light behind the eyes of man begin to tremble,
And assemble against this deflated chamber of tremble,
An age of cynics then do apply,
Their masks and portrayals of a supernatural fool,
Deny,
And then reply,
With a burlesque of wisecracks and the reign of ridicule.
Men in suits gather in great columned edifices,
After a hundred years of meditations,
And conclude that boyhood victims shall die for their projections,
To sad songs of impatient rest,
The gaunt face of justice barely revealing itself,
From the gloomy chant of the ancient contest.
They are hoping to usher us in one way or out another,
To the silky hills of imagination,
To the upright flounce above the stewless jaunt,
Divine assimilation,
And the godless haunt.
Do not go into the muscle of memory,
Find blind paths where you and I can make it together under the influence of the newly laid hallows our bodies create.
All this earth needs is a little more plump milk,
From the moan of mothers,
From the ecstasy of her bent back and contracting pelvis,
Rushing down in waterfalls from her backlit love,
Onto children bathing in the warmth of the fatty sauce her body built,
From the love to create,
And the gathering of her floods,
Over the town bridge for all to cleanse the guilt,
Of a lover gone wicked with the sickness of fate.
“Love, is not much more than a wondrous derangement and those with the fatal gift of a wild and starry imagination stand in awe of the night-sky that spells their depictions, their stage-plays of invented constellations.” – Eamon Loingsigh
(Read a delightful interview with Eamon by clicking on his name above, or going here)
“It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.”
– Decouvertes
“An EPIC (from Greek: ἔπος “word, story, poem”) is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. Oral poetry may qualify as an epic, and Albert Lord and Milman Parry have argued that classical epics were fundamentally an oral poetic form. Nonetheless, epics have been written down at least since Homer, and the works of Vyasa, Virgil, Dante Alighieri and John Milton would be unlikely to have survived without being written down.”
I have few words at my beck and call this minute. A bell tolls in the Brooklyn distance, the sky is an indigo blue. The apartment is still and quiet and now a plane vibrates its way past the now deeper, darker blue. The pine doors, the French doors (what then is an English door? Are there Russian doors?), still. Nothing. The body tired, still, nothing. The mind alive, unhinged: everything.
Today the most arresting and illuminating thought struck me. Perhaps it has been striking me for the last few days and yet the morse code in which it was written in took a while to stream through. It head towards my core. Always as I walk, the thoughts and creative sizzles of inspiration jellify their way through my cells and atoms. This afternoon I was moved to tears when I realized this very thought. Where did it come from? I have no answer for that question.
First, the affairs of the day, the tribulations of the mind. I tend not to rest very much these days, which is unfortunate because rest is such a blissful activity. Of course, it would not quite be so blissful if I hadn’t worn myself out in the first place, now would it? (Another plane past my window rides its sky highway) The silence is beautiful. The gentle rhythm of the sounds around me. The ever humming fridge, which as some of my longest readers will know, seems to perpetually follow me (– and there I was wondering, existentially and dramatically, where the food will come from!) (I find it fascinating that, as my friend Dan pointed out, “food has always been there.” Who is providing the food, before the markets and the farmers and the truck drivers, before the seeds and the water? Food has always been here. For the dinosaurs, the amoeba in the primordial pond, the leaf-worms and crater bugs. For humans and babies and beings. What is this benign benevolence that is essentially looking after us all, the balance of what we call “nature?”)
As I left my sisters apartment the other night, heading home after watching Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, half a glass of wine gratefully streaming through the blood in my veins, I was warm and relaxed – and thinking. I guess it was about 11pm, and it was cold. 2nd Avenue was mostly shuttered up, every restaurant boarded away, except for a few late night cafes and a yellow, Moroccan, cabin-like establishment on 1st, scribed with the message “Become your Dream” on its wooden lean-to front. Indeed I have seen those words so often since the night I left the East Village for London in November. I have seen those words written with fat black texter (texter… that which makes text?) on old thrown folded-over mattresses sent out for the trash on the sidewalk. Become your dream. I have seen those words on cardboard boxes and on railings (or was it a tree?) Now those words are embedded on the fabric of my brain, the ephemera of the mind, the velvet of memory, the chiffon of pure thought. This is what happens with me. I see something, I feel something, I know something, and I never forget it.
But becoming my dream was not entirely what set this thought pattern in motion, nor the realization that I want to explain. It was while walking past all of this, the deserted avenues near midnight, the cool open sky and seeing 2nd avenue gape northwards, full of tiny yellow, red, green lights – that I finally accepted the fact that “I live here.” For the entirety of my sisterly stays here, up until now, I have never felt at home in this city. Always putting on seatbelts in the cabs, avoiding the grates in the ground, fumbling for my metrocard. I always felt like an outsider: without an apartment, without a Visa, without a job (except “to share life,” and write) – and all I could do was wait. Wait for this piece of paper or that stamp or that card or some kind of job. I went away for a month to London, 2 weeks to France, 10 days to Florida, before finally (it’s never final) finding myself an inhabitant (albeit not wholly of my own accord – I do realize that wherever I am, and whoever one is, we stand on the shoulders of many), of New York city. City of lights.
And we are all fascinated by light. Yes, it is child’s play, the play of the unborn human, the soul dancing in the cosmococcal blood of the womb. I experience my first pangs of homesickness when upon returning to the apartment I see an image of sky like lapis lazuli and sand like red watercolour – and I know it’s Australia, and I know what is hurting. It is the soul seeing the blood of the womb, the earth from which it was created, the air it was nourished by and the sky it first saw – and wanting to return. It is the realization that life is speeding on, sped up, faster and more multiplied, greater and greater weight, lighter and lighter height. It is the understanding that two cannot become one and yet can become four (and eight and sixteen and so on. The division of one into two into many) as well as the fact that love only grows. I realize how much I miss my little brothers, and the white sand of Western Australia, that endless stretch of ruggedness at the edge of the Earth, some of the oldest land on the planet. Ancient.
“The soul is an eternal, immortal, blissful, luminous entity which is smaller than the smallest of any matter or energy particle but in expansiveness greater than the greatest of any material object. The soul is the light of all light and the life of all life.” (from ‘Yoga Physiology’, Advance Yoga Study, ‘The Science of Yoga, Ayurveda, Tantra, Vedanta, Indian Spirituality, Philosophy, Religious and Social Traditions’ by Swami Dharmananda, pg 10)
Then, after sleep, and after having one song in my throat all day and night (Brindavan Hare Ram by Krishna Das), I clear my day and follow my feet. I walked to the subway. I entered the subway. I searched for my pen. I waited for the train. I retrieve my journal. I board the train. I sit on the green plastic bench. I write. For 5 stops I wrote, and I couldn’t stop writing:
“The subway smells like hazelnut chocolate. Nutella. Sky blue and warm and semi-Australian. A realization from the last days: “HUMANS ARE ALSO NATURE” We are not “MAN MADE”, even though men and women made us – where did they come from? and they before that? We are all nature’s expressions of LIFE. We are not (unnaturally) separate from the plants, flowers, root, stem, petals, stamens, tree limbs, roots, twigs, fluttering leaves green in tree breezes. We are not “unnatural” beings because we too are mammals with hair on our bodies, tooth and nail. We put one rock on top of another and call it man-made. Which would be correct – but the materials were nature’s bounty. We are too proud of our man-made distinctions: buildings taller and taller, rocks piled higher than ever, and impervious to the elements.
Is it because we are weak that we need shelter from nature? Is it because we believe we are separate, at the mercy of the tornado, the fires, cold bitter winds? Maybe this is what made us feel weak and incompetent, so that we might build bigger and better and shield ourselves from pain? This is what has separated us: NATURE. And yet this is what we are: NATURE. Everything here is “nature” – we have just given names and words and a hundred languages to our existence here. Grunts and points and hungers and thirsts. Nature is no different from man-made, at the base of it all. At the root of the root of this woken dream called “Life” – we are so tired and confused, and bold and bright, like all of Nature! We are most certainly a way the “cosmos” – whatever that is (!) – can know itself. AND MY GOD we are knowing ourselves:
OUR SELF. THIS “LIFE” THING. THE UNFOLDING OF “TIME” THE DEVELOPMENT OF “LANGUAGE”
WE MADE IT ALL UP.
(Carl: “For heavens sake what happened to you?”
Square:“I was in some other mystic dimension called ‘UP!’”)
We are here. Human beings, just like plant beings, and flower beings, and elephant beings and monkey beings. By some weird flaw or random occurrence in “evolution” we have outlived (and replaced) the dinosaurs before us, and are the dominators of this place called Earth, now.** What will come next after we become extinct? There were giant lizards who roamed before us. Now we hold the throne of this mantle called “Earth.”
Bless us.
Then the train pulled into 8th avenue and the doors opened and that full stop was the last thing I set down in ink. Now reading again, I am struck in the very soul with new questions and realizations. Language and meaning fascinate me. We are all new souls here. (**What is “now?” What is “Earth?”) We have created all meaning on this planet. We have inherited and taught and passed down from perhaps millions of generations of human beings (and where have they all gone? Their carbon and the energy of the atoms in their bones has not left this round ball that hangs in our galaxy). This was what began germinating as I then walked 40 blocks North to Central Park.
On my journey I moved through Times Square, and the perpetual up-gaze is enough to demonstrate how awe-struck I was on this cool and yet sunny afternoon. A couple were having wedding photos taken on the steps beneath an ad for an automobile. Someone who looked like a homeless man tried to sell me a ticket to Billy Elliot. A line formed out the front of Late Night with David Letterman. Huge screens of M&Ms, essentially edible coloured pebbles, strew in pixels above the heads of hunters. “A feast for the senses” I read on a cab once I arrived at Columbus circle. I start to suppose, “but isn’t all of life a feast for senses?” before realizing that we have put stone upon so many stones, and sense-feasts are less easily come by nowadays. What a man-made-feast-for-the-senses promises to provide, is a recreation of the Eden we have eliminated. This was not a sad thought. It was a thought that would soon be echoed and cemented another 20 blocks North, at the Natural History Museum. My destination.
I sat on a rock in the sun. I enjoyed what we call lunch. I felt my veins course in bliss with sustenance as it hit the walls of my stomach and the cells absorb it. My ex-boyfriend used to look at me like I was crazy when I asked him whether, when he’s really hungry, did he feel his stomach leap like an animal at the food he gave it? He said no and changed the subject. That was 5 years ago. I wonder if he feels it now. A black guy then tried to sell me his CD, by rapping on the rock. “Yo I’m from Brooklyn, you feel me?” (Maybe?) He told me (via rap) that his CD had 21 songs, and that I’d get a “live performance” if I bought his CD for $10. “If you have a camera phone you can film me and put it on YouTube, Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, all dat, so would you help me fulfil my dreams?” I told the kid I admired him, (he was 21) and that he should definitely put himself on YouTube, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, all that. “Go for it man! Keep going for it!”
As I basked in the sun I listened to him visit many more humans perched on this rock. A couple of people gave him a dollar, and I heard him say, “That’s great, yeah, why not! If a million people give me a dollar, I’m a millionaire!” Interesting thought. I got up and Krishna Das was still in my head. I found it on my iPod, and walked through the pale yellows and browns of tamed, and yet ever alive, nature. Sky still blue. 60-something-street soon turned into 70-something, and as I looked up at the bare branches of the trees, I had the thought that moved me. I had the thought that made me weep with happiness and mind-splitting awareness. I became intensely grateful that I could walk, and that my toes were cold with the frozen ground, that I had sensation in my feet. I saw that the lake in the middle of Central Park was frozen over and the birds were still sitting in it. I felt that if not for gravity, would I not be a human? Would none of this be here? I understood “gravity” in that series of moments, and felt my body grounded, and something like the top of my head open up. I looked up towards the blue sky and knew that it could have been another colour. That we might not and could not have been here, if there was any slight change in variable.
I had the reverent feeling that what we have around us is beautiful, that people know it is beautiful. The sky is blue, yes, and it’s beautiful yes – but how often do people really FEEL it, with their soul? It seems we have been put on this planet to become aware of it, and with an ingrained gene in our DNA which is love, and reverence for beauty. Because the sky is blue and not green, is it anymore beautiful? Was I taught that blue is beautiful as a child, or is it in my coding, my organics, my awareness, my spirit, that which is everywhere, animating waves and beetles and giving shape to grains of sand and red rocks on my homeland. I think it is part of our spirit, to see this world, and fall in love with it. That is why we are here. Because of love, and beauty. Because we created it, lost it, and may, if we wish, find it again, over and over and over.
I wept with delight at these new waves of love for the planet, the things my eyes are able to see, the sensations around me, cold, dry, quiet, loud, warm, fast, fear, love. I bounced in my step as I went on towards my destination, the American Museum of Natural History. I saw its castle turrets loom out of the blue and the branches. As the sun hit its front, I was aghast with further delight at what has been inscribed, chiselled, into the gray stone of its beautiful face, something I had never noticed before. (The watcher alters that which is watched. It is true)
STATE OF NEW YORK
MEMORIAL TO THEODORE ROOSEVELT
A GREAT LEADER OF THE YOUTH OF AMERICA
IN ENERGY AND FORTITUDE IN THE FAITH OF OUR FATHER
IN DEFENSE OF THE RIGHTS OF THE PEOPLE
IN THE LOVE AND CONSERVATION OF NATURE
AND OF THE BEST IN LIFE AND IN MAN
TRUTH KNOWLEDGE VISION
Once inside I found further inscriptions, four paragraphs spread between two walls, with dinosaur skeletons between (likewise, I am humbled by the fact that before we had computers and machines to make marks for us, to help us read and write – there were chisels and tablets of stone. That which is most important must have been the only thing worthy of being written. How much energy went into chiseling words like that. How important and lasting the words.)
“MANHOOD”
A MAN’S USEFULNESS
DEPENDS UPON HIS LIVING UP TO HIS IDEALS
IN SO FAR AS HE CAN. IT IS HARD TO FAIL
BUT IT IS WORSE NEVER TO HAVE TRIED TO SUCCEED
ALL DARING AND COURAGE ALL IRON ENDURANCE
OF MISFORTUNE MAKE FOR A FINER
NOBLER TYPE OF MANHOOD
ONLY THOSE ARE FIT TO LIVE WHO DO NOT FEAR TO DIE
AND NONE ARE FIT TO DIE WHO HAVE SHRUNK FROM
THE JOY OF LIFE AND THE DUTY OF LIFE
– Theodore Roosevelt
On another wall:
“YOUTH”
I WANT TO SEE YOU GAME BOYS. I WANT TO SEE YOU BRAVE AND MANLY
AND I ALSO WANT TO SEE YOU GENTLE AND TENDER
BE PRACTICAL AS WELL AS GENEROUS IN YOUR IDEALS
KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE STARS AND KEEP YOUR FEET ON THE GROUND
COURAGE HARD WORK SELF MASTERY
AND INTELLIGENT EFFORT ARE ALL ESSENTIAL TO A SUCCESSFUL LIFE
CHARACTER IN THE LONG RUN IS THE DECISIVE FACTOR
IN THE LIFE OF AN INDIVIDUAL AND OF NATIONS ALIKE
- Theodore Roosevelt
On yet another wall: (I was spinning like a woman in a slow motion movie scene)
“NATURE”
THERE IS A DELIGHT IN THE HARDY LIFE OF THE OPEN
THERE ARE NO WORDS THAT CAN TELL THE HIDDEN SPIRIT OF THE WILDERNESS
THAT CAN REVEAL ITS MYSTERY ITS MELANCHOLY AND ITS CHARM
THE NATION BEHAVES WELL IF IT TREATS THE NATURAL RESOURCES AS ASSETS
WHICH IT MUST TURN OVER TO THE NEXT GENERATION
INCREASED AND NOT IMPAIRED IN VALUE
CONSERVATION MEANS DEVELOPMENT AS MUCH AS IT DOES PROTECTION
– T.R.
“THE STATE”
OURS IS A GOVERNMENT OF LIBERTY
BY THROUGH AND UNDER THE LAW
A GREAT DEMOCRACY MUST BE PROGRESSIVE
OR IT WILL SOON CEASE TO BE GREAT OR A DEMOCRACY
AGGRESSIVE FIGHTING FOR THE RIGHT IS THE NOBLEST SPORT THE WORLD AFFORDS
IN POPULAR GOVERNMENT RESULTS WORTH HAVING CAN ONLY
BE ACHIEVED BY MEN WHO COMBINE WORTHY IDEALS
WITH PRACTICAL GOOD SENSE
IF I MUST CHOOSE BETWEEN RIGHTEOUSNESS AND PEACE
I CHOOSE RIGHTEOUSNESS
– T.R.
The last words on Nature and on The State are powerful food for thought. Although at first I retaliated in disagreement about “aggressive fighting”, a closer look at these stone scribed words emits deeper meaning. No one in the hall of the lobby, where these words were written, was reading as I was. I did not see anyone else absorb the wisdom. All were clamoring for tickets and sitting on benches lazily, nonchalant, beneath 90 feet of Apatosaurus bones, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. (Rewind 140 million years ago, and these humans may have seemed so relaxed.) Apatosaurus, formerly known as Brontosaurus, was one of the largest land mammals (and vegetarians) that ever existed.
In regards to the deeper meaning of the sentence beginning with “aggressive fighting” – I believe the operative words are “SPORT” and “FOR THE RIGHT”. Ponder on them a second and I think you will see what the writer, as well as the spirit that moved the hand to write those characters, to create that alphabet, really means to express. Likewise, the words that also struck me tooth and nail, hell mell, infused with the dawn of realization (the dawn of a million suns, a galaxy rise) were these: “Conservation means development as much as it does protection.”
Does this not blast the hippies out of the domed sea, out of the future? Nature is not only to be protected – for this spirit has allowed and even encouraged us humans to get to where we are. We have been permitted entry towards the creation of bombs and guns and knives and all terrors (upon terrors) on the planet. We created those, yes, but as I said before, we are also nature. One of my favourite quotes echoes this:
“The wilderness is not a landscape you visit; it is all around you, wherever you are. We persuade ourselves that our taming of the world is profound, we lay water mains and sewers and read thousand year old books, we drive our autobahns through solid rock, we huddle together in caves lit by the incandescence of television screens. We do everything we can to be safe, and still the planet spins, the winds roar, the great ice caps creak and heave, the continental plates shudder and bring cities crashing to the ground, the viruses infect us and the oceans toy with us, lapping against the edges of our precarious land. We are in the midst of wilderness, even curled up with our lovers in bed.”
(from Paul Shepheard’s The Cultivated Wilderness, or, What is Landscape?)
This is what makes me cry, what makes me grin with mad love for the planet, for life itself. This is what comforts and relieves me – We are not doomed – yes, we may kill ourselves earlier than we want to, and we will die. Yes we may be accelerating the imbalance of our delicate lives here. Yes we may be afraid of dying too soon, because yes the world is beautiful, and we crave its pleasures. We crave to fold into the warm arms of our lovers in our beds at the end of a cold and lonely day. We long to feel food on our tongues, delicious sweet honeys, wines, the fresh juice of fruits, deep, dark chocolate, warm bread made in ovens of fire and cool icy milky things. We want to walk further and discover new sights and new lands. We want to read new information and feel the ocean wind in our hair and under our hands as we walk sinking into sand on the shores we were born in.
We must not only “conserve” nature by protecting it, but as Roosevelt points out, foster our development in an intelligent way. I believe that so much of the planet is shifting towards this awareness. At least on the grass roots, everyday human level in the Western world. I can not speak for the men in conference in Afghanistan or the villagers in Malawi. But I do know that the people I am in contact with everyday, the people who come into my orbit – for I believe we become magnets in our transformation – see and feel what I am feeling too. I am not special. I am not the only one. I am not separate, because as I take the train it takes a split second of a look for someone to understand what I want to say to them. A woman dropped her small iPod on the floor of the train today, and its silver was camouflaged in the grate of the door. She continued rummaging in her pockets. I pointed gracefully to the hidden iPod (a split second) before looking her way (another split), and watching in her eyes the recognition of what I was saying. She bent to pick it up and said thankyou. This literally happened in 2 Mississippi seconds.
I am not separate because as I walk through the stations I see the stairs that we walk down, notice the silver railings which another human had at some point made. I see the screws in the grooves and the grooves in the steps, put there so that we would have some traction, some grip. I see the way we have built our world in efficiency, with shelter, with love. I also see upon leaving the subway that some things have been imposed upon other creations, ugly scrawls, ugly thoughts. Perhaps someone else finds them beautiful? Beautiful in their anarchy?
Today the water came fast and strong through my body. My knuckles ache from typing and my eyes are like stones, and yet the voice is still there. The love is unending. The joy is in sharing and the voice that writes is so happy. The awareness is only growing, and I am expanding so fast to accommodate it. I am at first indecisive about whether this goes in my novel, or on my blog. But as the man who chipped the tablet of stone with wisdom, the work of the ancients is laborious. The ability to share this gift with others immediately is an opportunity and a movement that I cannot draw back from. The spirit of life grants me access towards you. Whoever you are: the voice does not shy – because you are me, after all.
JUST SO YOU KNOW, I HAVE RECENTLY STARTED PHOTO BLOGGING FOR UHH.COM.AU. MY EYEBALLS ARE ON PARADE (!) GO (CLICK) HERE, AND TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS TOO. MY FINGERTIPS ARE TINGLING. (PROBABLY JUST BECAUSE THIS POST IS SO LONG. 4200 WORDS? SHOULD IT BE A BOOK? YOU TELL ME. I WILL MAKE YOU INFINITE BOOKS IF YOU WANT. HAVE RECENTLY BEEN COVERING ALL MY JOURNALS IN CUT-OUT MAGAZINE COLLAGES. WILL POST A PHOTO OF THEM SOON TOO. IT SEEMS I AM DESTINED TO LITERALLY “CREATE” BOOKS: THE WORDS. COVERS. AND PUBLISHING HOUSES TOO)
THIS MAY JUST BE MY LAST POST FOR A WHILE. IT MAY BE TIME TO PUT MY ATTENTION TOWARDS WRITING THIS “EPIC” NOVEL OF STREAMING HALLUCINATIONS WHICH PULSATE UPON ME EVERY DAY. TIME TO GET DOWN TO BUSINESS. TALK TO ME! SPREAD THE LOVE.
“Life is a narrative that you have a hand in writing.”
– Henriette Anne Klauser
"To be a source is to be a kind of tap. I will show you water, but I am not the place where the water comes from. Where does the water come from? That is the question."
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