Notes to Self

 I, You, Us, Them, Zero

Life are hard, he said.
Sammy, of the Kafka eyes,
he said that a lot.
He studied metallurgy and
Karl Popper.  Keeping in touch, but not often enough,
I'd mentioned the differences in bread
in his culture and mine -
his new wife wrote back, "You don't know me but
I regret to tell you
Sammy is dead."
He was only 33.
All these years later,
D and P  .... ML and FK  .... and  S, too -  all
gone.
Why am I still here?

And after all the lights go out (the Final Blackout), what then?
Do we get to come back? 
Or just meet up and
reconnect, despite the gap of years,
resume as if we weren't all
different ages now.  Would they even recognize us?
I could spot Sammy, in even the thickest cloud, but
his memory bank's closed, unupdated on the
changed world we'd inhabited. 
Do the dead even care?  We still talk to them
(and sometimes, they to us), but

I want to hear the other part of the conversation,
the part I don't get to know, that they can report about,
about what it's really like, about 
what comes After, when
all the lights go out.


Failure to Communicate

words, adroitlessly threaded
     my piece untangles,
all connection lost.


Drybled 

Inkless pen :: wordrust


So
Cezanne says Do apples, do
Oranges! Draw first, color later.
Fill your pen with Cobalt Blue, paint words
undiluted, ink the muted apples
purple, don't be such a
copycat.  For every passed try,
that's 20 missed flights
to later regret.  Go even
the odds, find colors that speak, 
go clean the clogged pen. Free-flowing
only comes
when  you work at it. 
When you can't be the pen,
be the ink.

Quotykards

[That white snow-river is actually liquid typewriter correction fluid]

Some hand-painted 4" x 6" watercolor postcards made recently with quoties typed on via the 1982 manual typewriter I found at a yard sale last summer for $15 whose keyboard has French diacritical marks (acute, gràve, çedilla, circumflex, diaeresis, ümlaut, etc.)  No tilde or haček , unfortunately.

It was in perfect condition and came with a carrying case.

One can find ribbons for these trusty old chuggalugs for sale on Ebay,
in all black or red/black.


Some more of  the quotykards:

  

And a few quick, motivational ones:

 

 

[That's supposed to be an egret]

Remember "white-out" (for typos)? ha ha
It also comes in handy for fantasy trees' eyeballs.

_____________________________________

Revisiting the Bookshelf

Sometimes I pass by a shelved book and open it up to whatever page it opens up to.
Yesterday it was a Paul Pines book and it opened up to page 34 and this poem:

 

Reading Cavafy

What I like most about Cavafy

is that he can't stop moralizing.

Growing old he sees he also grows

warmer to the barbarian in himself,

the Persian among Greeks,

the would-be voluptuary.

He spends days in cafes

by the sea,

drinking ouzo and wondering

if the whole world is destined to

become as small and seedy

as Alexandria.

The bodies of young men excite him.

He watches them from

his Garden of Missed Opportunities

until it resembles Gesthsemane

where he turns part Christian,

almost anti-Hellene

while the Greek in him

continues to weep

at the tomb of Patroklos,

insisting there is a grace in us

more magnificent than the god

it reflects.

     ~~ Paul Pines

(From:  Last Call at the Tin Palace: Poems by Paul Pines, Marsh Hawk Press, 2009)*    

___________________
 *A book of poems once gifted to me by its author. (Thanks again, Paul).
Poems are for sharing.

Greens

eat your greens
don't be green with envy, go mellow
wear green today
everybody's Irish today
even if you're not
(so they say)

my mom used to collect four-leaf clovers,
for luck - and
as luck would have it,
she always managed to find one

possibly somehow somewhere someplace
this is a non-green day
we should eat our greens anyway
probably

On Giving in to Impulses

To save money last month, I cut my own hair -
watched some You-Tube vids to learn how.
"Hmmm. Not bad."

Well, a bit crooked here & there, but
only if you're really Looking.
So I splurged the other day to go
get it straightened out.

Lost in translation I signaled to the cutter:
No more than an inch,  please, & point the angle
like the model in the poster on the wall.
I shut my eyes, relaxed.

I should have been more specific.
She repeated "angle" but heard "Cut like in the poster on the wall" - as in
exactly.  As in not just the angle point but the entire haircut style,
clip for clip.

I reach for the hair at the back of my neck,
it's gone. ( Let's not talk about the sides.)
What is this new style? Half Angela Merkel, half
early Beatles.  The cutter is pleased.
I am stunned to silence.
I say Merci, pay, grab my coat and slink home, my
tuque pulled down over my ears as
far as it will go.

"Change is good," I tell my mate, unconvinced.
"It'll grow back," he smiles.

I don't recognize the person in the mirror
who stares back at me, a stranger.
We're slowly adjusting,
one comb pass at a time.

It's Not Over 'Til It's Over

They say we will have four more days of the white stuff this week.  Quebec City got more, Montreal less.  It is like it is.

They say it will soon be "like spring".  But first, a little storm, followed by brilliant blue skies, and --

I heard birds out there singing the other day!!  (The birds know.)  Soon the geese will start coming back. According to the locals at the reserve who track these things, it will be from the 1st of April to the 8th of May this year.  Last year I believe it was later in April and over 200,000 of them came, all at once.  I still run outside as soon as I hear them, to watch them fly by.  It never gets old. 

(Are they into mud season and maple sugaring down in Vermont already, Bob?!)

Meanwhile,

Neighbor, clearing what was once the sidewalk

 And now the driveway

Road needs plowed -- again

Well-used path to shed

Running out of places to dump it.
(I want to capture, and  someday paint, that sky's mezmerizing blueness!)

In front of the Cultural Center

At every house, a dug-out path

Father and son, out for a walk

So the roof doesn't collapse

No skaters on the pond today.  Too cold.

What's another inch or two!

At  door of the pharmacy

Outside window
(there's a big, long wooden bench buried under there)

Here comes "Yellow", 

one of two strays we've been feeding and

sheltering all winter

"Where's my dinner!?"

On Lennon's Lucrative Hair

  Heritage Auctions image

How they won the war on the peaceniks, they

got the cynical idealist to play Pvt Gripweed,

cut his hair for this new film role, fit him

up with trendy, round glasses, and
parodied the anti-war parodies. 
     Should I laugh or beat my breast,
     because what's funny about war,
     or anti-war? 

14 years on, the bespecticaled muskateer dies
and the world mourns.

In 36 more, a clever keeper sells
that (now 50-year-old) lock of hair,

for 35,000 smackeroos, smiling
all the way to the bank. 
      (As we get old, do we cash in?)

Look, how we win today's war(s) is, we 

*  $ell Peace, one arm$-deal at a time, we

*  $ell "silly", to distract.
*  For the war on cancer we ask folks to 
        volunteer their hair

        to wigless fighters
*  For the war on poverty, we 
        ask the nation to don Austerity

        via needed cuts and trims.
*  For the Woe-Be-Me's, we 
        encourage the use of rosy glasses,

        to envision future bizness bloomings.  

Do we need new idols now to sing us Peace and Oneness

'mid war, and rumors of?

No, we need:

*  more "forward" thinkers,
        to example us to profit
*  more paid preacher$ 
        to promote pro$perity
        to the Never-Will-Haves
*  more devoted dividers 
        to direct the Disassemblings,
        one hate screed at a time.

See, Oneness is unthinkable (given our differences).

Let's 

*  plan more detention center$,

*  erect higher wall$, 
*  build better fence$,

*  con$truct more temporary Permanent camp$

        for the perpetual (now global) 
        dePossessionings.

Meanwhile, back at the Auction House  . . . 

Imagine! - a dead Beatle's hair attains a second life,
this icon of an icon, still retaining his DNA. 
Lennon LIVES!!! 

There IS no We anymore -  just the remembered things:
those words, those times;  bad luck, good "deals"; 
lyrics from our worshipped departeds, re-sung on the
way to the unemployment office, while pondering the
endless march of the war on all;  and on:      

what disappears,
  what lives on;   
    what never change$;
      what we keep,

        what we buy into,
          what we $ell,
           what we can't, and
            what we just
              reframe.

~~  Words that arose and tumbled out after reflecting on an article about the recent sale at an auction house, of a lock of John Lennon's hair for $35,000; about arms dealing (who buys what from whom and for what purpose). the ongoing migrant situation, and political doublespeak.

Housebound

-16° F  today

and 4 more days of snow to come this week.

I  plan my garden.

Distraction Begets Absence

COLLECTIBLES

        in no particular order:

words
interesting quotes
sea pebbles
potentially usable research
so-and-so's artwork
fountain pens
that type music
important family/friends' keepsakes
odd shaped bottles
books
driftwood
kind rejection slips
artful figurines
old untold stories
amusing images
particular past journal scribbles
impressionable whatevers

DISCARDABLES

(the pen pauses) -

poems that itemize,
like this one,
to fill the blank space,
to remind maybe there's still a There
there.

RESUSCITATIONALS

Find the There that's still there.



    

Signory

 

Unresolveds

awynart2016

Ginger Face while Making Soup

awynfoto2015

Hot onion-cabbage-rutabaga-celery-carrot-potato-spinach-tofu-garlic-ginger-curry Soup.

At the kitchen sink.
What did I leave out?

Little Photo Gallery

Founded in 1608, Québec City is North America's oldest walled city

and the cradle of French civilization in the then 'New' World.

Easier going down than up

Take a book, leave a book.

December 2015

*Photos by Luis Lázaro Tijerina, with permission.

New Year's Resolutions 2016

awynart2016

Hi brrrrrr nation

awynart2016

g

not a flake on Christmas Eve
be careful what u wish for
for then it comes oh boy &
then some, it won't
leave now 'till
april

probably

If only

awynart

Here Yesterday, Gone Today

Beyond words, music, images

A little 7-minute film produced in 2006 at Saint-Lukas, Brussels, school of arts, as part of the graphic design course, animating  "Of Death", a poem by Ivor Gurney, English composer and war poet who spent the last 15 years of his life in mental hospitals.  He died in 1937 at the age of 47, of tuberculosis.

Ivor Gurney, of Gloucestershire, wrote over 100 poems and 300 songs.  Some of his letters and poems were written in the trenches of World War I.

Gurney expressed, in verse, his experience of war, of those things he observed and reflected on during his long walks, alone; his sadness, his yearning for death.  A number of years ago artist Tom Denny created eight magnificent stinglass panels in his honor in a chapel in Gloucester Cathedral, each depicting moments from Ivor Gurney's life and writings.

I was particularly drawn to the 7th one ("To God").   The person who took the above photo remarked that the people standing and gazing at these windows"were moved to tears by what Gurney had seen and suffered."[1]

Poetry, music, and art that move us.  An odd verb--"move"--usually meaning 'to go to a different place', 'change direction', or in this case, 'cause us to react emotionally'.  You don't have to have experienced "war" to understand what its victims feel; you can see it in their eyes, hear it in their voice, identify with its expression in poetry, music, and art.  Not perhaps the specifics, but we all recognize pain, loss, suffering, despair.

Why would one want to continue staring at something that moves one to tears, re-read a poem, or listen to a piece of music, again and again, that haunts by its sadness?  Perhaps for the same reason one reads uplifting verse, is moved by exquisite beauty, or senses the presence of overwhelming love.  Sometimes it's just to make yourself remember, both the joyful and the sad.  One minute you're standing there, and the next minute you're suddenly taken to a whole other  place, and you don't resist.  It's like a magnet, pulling you in.

These moments make a mark; you remember them.  It's how we connect with our shared universe, and by extension, to one another, to people or events that occurred before we were born, to those ongoing.  Such moments will continue to draw others long after we're gone.  Even more so, when we know the story behind the story, as in this case, of Ivor Gurney.

Gurney actually thought of himself more as a composer than a poet.

You can listen to his Sonata for Violin and Piano in E flat major here,
and his song "Sleep" here.

They Found Her

Eight and a half years ago, 9-year old Cédrika Provencher, a little girl in our city, disappeared.  It was summer, she'd gone out near her home, on her bicycle.  A man approached and asked her to help him find his dog.  They found her abandoned bicycle and bike helmet.  She was never seen nor heard from again.

I remember that summer, because of the sudden appearance of posters, everywhere, showing her picture.  Just in my neighborhood alone, stores, banks, bulletin boards, telephone polls posted her picture with pleas for information. Each time I crossed the border into the States, her photo would stare out at me, on the bulletin board at Customs, facing every bus traveler coming or going, alongside that of Canada's other missing children.  Despite the offer of a $100,000 reward, despite 200 volunteers for days combing fields and forests, despite massive and frequent media coverage, despite 500 tips phoned in, no trace was ever found.  Until this weekend.

Hunters in the woods in an area off the highway 20 kilometers away found some bones and a skull, authorities determined to be that of Cédrika.  

Persons hundreds or even thousands of miles away spent months (some, even years) trying to help locate her, many convinced they would eventually discover what really happened to her.  Psychics chimed in, people reported having dreams about her, that she was alive, that she was a victim of sex trafficking; others felt certain she was dead.  I myself believed she was still alive, as every year, on the anniversary of her disappearance, local media again reminded us that yet another year had passed and still no answer.

It made me think about all those other disappearances, the other names and faces on the missing children list; about the disappeared in general.  Some had gone missing as long as 20 years ago, with age-progressed images to show what they might look like now. 

Everyone in this region knows who Cédrika is (was), that missing girl from Trois-Rivières, whose photo is still displayed on some local billboards.  How many other Cédrikas there are out there, whose name we'll never know, their stories kept alive by those still hoping they'll be found.

Rest in peace, Cédrika.