Pepsis Formosa

a mutualism of writing, such as it is

Monday, May 18, 2009

Species


What is it? Oh it is a thingy. What is it exactly?


P5038374


Does precise nomenclature knowledge matter? Can't we just say it is a red barked plant or do we need to know that it is a Cornus sericea subsp. sericea or Red Osier Dogwood? Without Linnaeus, the original persnickety namer-of-things we would not have enough understanding of what things are to understand how they are related and where they came from and where they are going. It isn't just about biological systematists counting stamens but the sexier epiphanies such as the Wallace line and evolution are built upon precise naming of things. Darwin didn't know his famous finches of Galapagos were even finches until a taxonomist told him so. They didn't look like finches, knowing precisely what something is called tells you so much more than a name. So you see precise knowledge about what something is called isn't about dividing it from everything else but about connecting it to its related plants and its place in the big picture --a connection not a separation, inclusion and belonging, evolution. Yes the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) can be stodgy and tedious but imaging going back to the murky imprecise days when barnacles were thought to be the same creatures as geese? Or am I loosing some sort of magic or creativity by being a stickler for precise names? Should I lighten up and enjoy things as individuals whatever they are?

red

It is not just a thingy. It is a gorgeous hunk of ruby bark. It’s where our eyes stopped against the bleakness of the grey white snow. That day while walking on the ice, over an untended gap of earth that exists for the service of space that’s needed to hold six lanes of rail track and a broken metal fence. Do you remember the smell of the Jewish bakery when the wind blew east? Didn’t the smell of the yeasted bagel infiltrate our nostrils and create a want of food that was previously not there? Or am I only imagining those smells that we may have smelt four months ago?

It is not from laziness or lack of dedication. Sometimes it’s not about finding the right place but for getting a little lost in space. A playful shift in alchemy can become a tool of understanding. I am more a hands on person. But my picture is as big as any scientist. I like looking at the negative space. For me this brings meaning, belonging. I like reminding myself of something that reminds me of something that reminds me of something else. I need that. Peripatetic movement is the nutrient that my mind grows best. I like run-on sentences. For some people, a controlled vocabulary is necessary to help make sense of the world in a physical realm. However I don’t want to be decisive here: Making and reading a detailed map is an important skill. I am not denying this. However I am much more interested in getting off the road for a while. There are many ways back to town, sometimes longer but more interesting. Perhaps along the way we might stop and decide to stay put. I like to live with the option.

There are different ways to understand the world in which we live. There is a place for everybody.


Sunday, May 10, 2009

gateway

Barrier, hurdle, obstruction: No matter how ambiguous and flimsy the route to the other side may technically appear, matters lie on perception and its competence to deal with the imagined or otherwise... Perception, a wand waving trick that transforms an obstruction into a threshold? ...can your perception be trusted?



the great allure of the other side anyways... The other side is not so much greener as much as it is unknown....

...passing on to the dark side of the vestibule, a crossing both physical and temporal allows us to reinvent ourselves? After all, context is everything and perhaps you aren't really so fucked up after all, you were just a beautiful picture that was just in the wrong frame... or on the wrong side of the frame...





Is there longing to be on the Right side of the gateway? At the liminal moment, the crossing, is there doubt that you even know which side is the Right side? In order for the far side of the portal be the side you want to be on you have to believe that it is.




But after the passage your work isn't done. On the far side of the threshold further movement is still necessary or stagnation will set in...

Monday, April 6, 2009

through the lens

Phototropic contortions stretch out my limbs
growing blackness off grey
space divided by foreground background
positive negative
nestled between two worlds
radio waves have their way
and allow me to unfold

Photobucket

but eyes too yearn to reach closer to a sense of focus
and the mind's eye clouded by consciousness
scrambling for reason and structure
rhythm finds a beat
no matter the chaos
through lost lineage
through scaling

Photobucket

poisonous perspectives permeate interpretation of the past
this memory has fault lines

Photobucket

integrated lenses, past self is reinterpreted by current self
a double exposure
onion skins peeled
and realigned
as opposites attract
so does soft and softness
without a pure direction
stories overlap
always giving a different understanding

Photobucket

without memory...
self as a broken record

Photobucket

a splitting of stems into three: trifurcate trunk composed of three lenses,
past self, present consciousness, future expectations.
each past through the curved glass changes the past
memories of happiness reach for the light

Sunday, April 5, 2009

I can always find what I want while lying in the ditch



Looking to be sanctioned by all the wrong things in all the wrong places always at the right time.


Sometimes we all want to be saved, worshipped, and made to belong. There are myriadian amounts of ways to be rescued from this terribly frightful inhospitable thing called atheistic existential existence. Even on our good days.



Plants will save me



Hurting myself will save me
Elitism will save me
Bush doctor come save me please

Friday, March 13, 2009

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

What are we without our stories?

Do we exist without self narration? Scars, artifacts of life lived. Words are used to attract a revisitation to the past. Look at me! I was such a clever, a terrible, a mortified, an audacious, sensuous child. Younger time, another time, decorated in pink filters of sainthood or devilatious ostentation: However we hung, we were ‘the one’.
Let me tell you...
Some of us were so great our laurels now do the speaking for us. No need to pursue. No need to ensue. Relax. Take it easy.
Roll with the embroidery.
Oh yea. Let me tell ya 'bout the good ol' days, the golden years, my time, my stories ad nauseum repetitions. Gather 'round now children, the patriarch has a story to tell, he doesn't do much of anything anymore but has stories aplenty, stories of the good old days.
Is there a youthful urge to create new stories, fresh material and an older adult urge to recant the glory days of old, the one important decade of their slowly fading darkening memory? Scars may be the ultimate stories written on our bodies but they too rot away when we die. Tell your stories over and over because after your body is dust and bones stories alone remain, if you are lucky.
Back when I was a kid…
The first time I was on my own I…um,
Mutinous rebels were we. . . Let me tell you...

As our legends unfold from our silvery tongues polished up perhaps refined over the years and made more presentable.
What gelatinous threads that we hang from!
The problem of stagnant stories prematurely purveyed as the highlight of dull lives is the underlying urge to get better more interesting material, fresh dirt. What dirty depths of disgusting behavior will you go to in order to have the best stories, something presentable to garner the ephemeral conversational spotlight? When all your stories stripped away would you still be interesting? If you were an amnesiac would anyone find you worth listening to? Personalities are more than stories, bodies are more than portfolios of scar tissue. Context is huge but it isn't everything.


Tell me...

Tell me who?

Just tell me tell me quick so I can tell you my story. Your story is okay but my story is really great.

arscrrr 018

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

The Man Who Remembered all of his Dreams

"You boys with your motorcycles. We call them Donercycles here doncha know why?"

I could see her from my bed, in nebulous white slapclapping her mouth with what must have been a wad of gum.

". . . doner organs but you were lucky dear," How was she able to do that, I wondered; chewing gum and articulating at the same time? My slump back to sleep kept simultaneous beat to the clacking of her teeth and I was back in the school courtyard. Engulfed by great walls of stone overpowering the horizon, I instinctively marched forward with the rhythm of loud mastication, tracing the gigantic bricks with my fingertips until I came to the one that I knew would let me out. I looked more closely and as I peered, the stone transformed into a heavy metal door. How do I open it? A key appeared in the socket. I entered the other side into a constricted passageway that gave me the chills. It lead me straight back to the schoolyard. I tried the door a few times and then realized it was a loop. Whinging, I reached for the wall once more and looked up. The wall sank into the hospital whites of my sheets. Submerging itself between the folds of flimsy poly-cotton blend. A group of doctors circled around my bed tapping pens against clipboards murmuring, shaking heads. I could hear the S’s snaking from their mouths overlapping each other’s, entwining between themselves, weaving a shield of filmy protection against my ears. I struggled to sit up in my stupor.

I remember stocking the liquidation shelves in the back of a large room. Cheap! Read the hand written black markered poster board. Buy five now and get one free! That was my writing. I looked at the book I had clutched in my hand. How To Fix a Leaking Heart; it was a thin hardcover dressed up in shiny rose coloured paper with a picture of a drainpipe Y joint embellished like a heart, dripping its blood red nuggets of lost love juice into the dredges of the human waste cesspool. The book in my other hand: Ten Steps to Great Sex. It depicted a grey silhouette of a caucasian thirty something heterosexual couple linked together at the middle. Him on top and her on her elbows with her head arched back, mermaid hair cascading in waves behind her. I looked on the shelf at the book I had just placed. Heroes to Die For. Militiamen and rock and roll stars living it up on a cluster of pyrocumulus clouds undulating their silky felonious ways over burning trees. I was drowning in the degradation of words and smarmy stale pictures of skin veneer proof and testimonials espousing the right though not righteous paths of formula, not virtue.

Overcome and wild with rage I stormed from the room, the building, books flying, me throwing them, flinging them across the room, people gasping, hovering, protecting their faces with their arms as I accentuated my point with flying hardcover and paperback bestsellers "I'll give you Five Ways to Find Financial Success!" I screamed at a well-dressed man clenching his blackberry. "Find True Happiness Through My Pathway of Love!" I yelled at an older woman clutching her handbag. I thrust my crotch in gyration and saw my boss from the corner of my eye coming straight for me. I was mad. My head was pounding and I was out of there in seconds down, on my bike I did a wheelie and skid out onto the road.
I never made it home. I only made it here. Here where the doctors hover and stare.


Photobucket

Premonitions or prompts, is was pointless the debate whether some dreams predicted the future or merely gave me the ideas to translate into waking world actions. I debated that anyways, having plenty of free time. I always got into trouble when I was all riled up and maybe if I could have learned what I would eventually learn from my dreams I probably wouldn't have crashed. But then if I already had that inner-peaceful wisdom I wouldn't have needed to lean anything from remembered dreams anyways. Here where the doctors hover and peer. Where my dreams trounce my waking head with premonitions or prompts: Predetermined arcs of fate are just learning? Maybe predetermined to learn? I never claimed to have learned everything from the remembered dreams, not yet, still just a human but one who lives in two worlds. I live in two simultaneous worlds of colour and clarity topographically merging colours and form, textually into each other, leaving me perplexed, overwrought and on occasion, amused.

Photobucket

I was in my grandmother's garden. It was large and rolling with shrubs the colour of burnt wheat. Thistles wind rustled and whistled. She was not home. Though my task I knew, was to dig up potatoes. The first few I dug uneventfully but the third potato I dug like an excavation. It kept emerging in expansion until it was the size of a small house. My cousin appeared, though I had felt his presence all the while and began laughing. "You will never get out!" he snorted, his eyes swimming in a murky sea of mucous. I knew I would never be able to dig the giant potato in its entirety and I couldn't return to the safety of Grandma's house without three potatoes. That’s what she had told me, this is what I had promised her. The dreaming continued through an endless cycle of Sisyphean digging and undercurrent feelings of overexposure. I longed for the safety of my grandma's house.

Photobucket

Sinister. Funny, I should feel this way in the dream time not awake. Living in two worlds can be draining. I have but two choices; adapt or perish. Through force of will, through will of force, I was a living palindrome. Mirrored one side of the other the two worlds, unimportant which was the reflection and which was the reflection on the reflection, both became repetitious hell. Doctor dreams and dream doctors. How to break the mirrors of memory? I would have to take control of my dreams or maybe even my waking life. I would need to subjugate this immobilization into Control; self-mastery not in the vein of those trite-as-shit softcover mass market books whose existence nudged me in this fate’s direction originally. Hell, that past is just a reflection too. The cloying claws and pawing pedipalps reaching up at me to drag me back down the mountain in my dreams, they are mine, my hands wrapped up in primal packaging for maximum impact are mine. They are my hands holding under in this hell. Waking up does no good. This is me here, in unconsciousness and awareness I need to take hold. I need to adapt.

Photobucket


My dreams were a prison and my prisons were dreams. I began to understand why the brain forgets dreams. Unfortunately I could not forget mine. As one doctor was holding my wrist and looking at the stopwatch, I sensed that I was only to get worse and I no longer could care what is dream and what is waking reality... Two worlds, frayed threads holding together bulging seams, both worlds are overstuffed with cushy fluff, seemingly profound non-sequiturs begging agnostic treatments.

Photobucket

...something like a bee, dream pollen on its legs, flower to flower. Wake up. That doesn't help either. Or maybe a wasp? I am the pollinator and the stinger. I forgive myself for remembering my dreams, shit always flows down hill, let it all go. Insight salvaged from the sewage of my memory? So easy to say, so hard to do. My eyes open, turned on, tuned in, awake, aware, alive, but I still need to activate wakeful movement. The dreams are mine, I am struggling against myself then, I forgive myself for that. Forgiveness is an ox in cerebral narrative. I am an ox, for Christ sake. Eyes open so long but awakening to... This is what scabs are made of, ruderal growths a nightly coughing up of dream dust blood emesis. I am a field and there is growth. Growth is not a false stoicism or healing but an admission and embracing of decay, anything but denial. Healing a trite concept perhaps not admitting the cyclicality of it all. Onward, here I am: Awake.

Contributors

Followers

FEEDJIT Live Traffic Map