Sunday, May 20, 2007

There's Art On My Pizza


Couple things...Sarah's been working away on Goose Girl stuff...Paint and wooden blocks everywhere...Sam picks up a piece of half-eaten pizza with some paint on it and cries out, "There's art on my pizza!" I just wanted to make a record of that somewhere. And the amazing person pictured to the right, Ursula K. Le Guin, opens her _Four Ways to Forgiveness_ with the best description of actually receiving a written text (call it apocalypse) I can recall. Read away, mes amis:
"On the planet O there has not been a war for five thousand years,” she read, "and on Gethen there has never been a war." She stopped reading, to rest her eyes and because she was trying to train herself to read slowly, not gobble words down in chunks the way Tikuli gulped his food. "There has never been a war:' in her mind the words stood clear and bright, surrounded by and sinking into an infinite, dark, soft incredulity. What would that world be, a world without war? It would be the real world. Peace was the true life, the life of working and learning and bringing up children to work and learn. War, which devoured work, learning, and children, was the denial of reality. But my people, she thought, know only how to deny. Born in the dark shadow of power misused, we set peace outside our world, a guiding and unattainable light. All we know to do is fight. Any peace one of us can make in our life is only a denial that the war is going on, a shadow of the shadow, a doubled unbelief.
So as the cloud-shadows swept over the marshes and the page of the book open on her lap, she sighed and closed her eyes. thinking, "I am a liar." Then she opened her eyes and read more about the other worlds, the far realities.

Saturday, May 05, 2007

Woman's Work is Alchemy: daily life is what gives substance to transcendent ideas. Matter. Mater. Mother.


Sarah here. I have another moment and wanted to share what I have been reading lately. Thank you to all who posted replies to my last entry. I was especially moved by everyone's openness and receptive imaginations. I wanna be more likes youse.

Ladies, anything ring here? And fellas, handle with historically sensitive, kingdom-ish, imaginative, macho-less (all respect),"neither slave nor free...", care. love to all.

It’s impossible to give our children as much attention as they need, never mind half as much as they want, for the simple reason that there isn’t enough to go around, and every mother is in competition with her children for the available supply. No matter how much she tries to do each day, she’s aware of scanting something else, something vital and timebound that won’t wait for her to catch up. Her children will be grown up and gone from home before she finds the clarity of soul she wants to devote to them. Her house will crumble, or she’ll have moved out before she ever gets it in order. Or she’ll give herself to her house and children, and her poems will never be written. More likely, both. Each part of her is inadequately served, no matter how strenuously she neglects the other.

Joan Gould _Spinning Straw Into Gold_

Friday, May 04, 2007

Eraserhead


Catching the Big Fish is David Lynch's book on Transcendental Meditation, creativity, staying sane, and many a snippet on being aware of what's going on in yor head. Quite a treasure for someone (like me) who thinks about Lynch all the time. So thankful for him. Here's Lynch on Eraserhead:

Eraserhead is my most spiritual movie. No one understands when I say that, but it is.

Eraserhead was growing in a certain way, and I didn't know what it meant. I was looking for a key to unlock what these sequences were saying. Of course, I understood some of it; but I didn't know the thing that just pulled it all together. And it was a struggle. So I got out my Bible and I started reading. And one day, I read a sentence. And I closed the Bible, because that was it. And then I saw the thing as a whole. And it fulfilled this vision for me, 100 percent.

I don't think I'll ever say what that sentence was.