Watch some TED talks and see what happens

We watched three different TED lectures on the theme of space the other night, the first of which closed with a reading of the following quote.  I believe this is where we need to be taken, regularly, to acquire and, it is hoped, maintain some sense of proportion, while recommitting to an immeasurable sense of wonder.

In his book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, the astronomer Carl Sagan related his thoughts on a deeper meaning of the photograph:

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

—Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

...the baffled king composing hallelujah

Yes, I know you've heard dozens of versions.  k. d. lang is my favorite.  This is the song and hers is the voice I want to hear over the headphones in the middle of the night when I've misplace my center, as I seemed to do yesterday.


In this week's "You Rock" Hall of Fame, Leonard Cohen joins Lynda Barry.  Simply assume they are there every week.   I wish (among so many other things) that I'd written, "...the baffled king composing hallelujah."

Uploaded by ljw2909 on Jan 10, 2009

kd lang's performance of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" at the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame induction of Leonard Cohen in 2006. Be sure to watch the entire performance. Leonard is in the audience. I hope you will watch Leonard's induction as well, which I also posted.

TO WRITE IT

Thanks to MG for the gift of this today.

TO WRITE IT

You must always be alone.

But don't beg a soupscrap of charity

or birdcrumb of tolerance.

Shift for yourself.

As furniture heaves off your life

you'll love your deliverance.

Until loneliness slips in, scrawny

and hungry, Miss Loneliness, over the

barrenness, bribing with company.

Restlessness, one of her attendants.

And the drunk twins, of course,

Memory and Remorse.

Refuse them. Stay faithful to Silence, just

Silence, sliding between that breath

and now this breath, severing the tick

from the tock on the alarm clock,

measuring the absence of all else.

And the presence, the privilege.

Anne Stevenson

The first step toward reconsidering (shudder) memoir

Ideas appear for me either in a shout and burst or creep like a thaw so slow the ground only becomes workable in time for the next frost.  On the front page of the LA Times Sunday "Arts and Books" section, a boxed promo mentioned something about a writer returning to memoir.  I haven't yet read the article, but already those few words took me down a different street.

Bits of memoir elbow their way into some posts, usually because one thing reminds me of another and I dig up the shard of history to which it has referred me.  When people-in-writing started to call the telling of one's own story creative non-fiction I thought, with a device like a rib-spreader to open my head, I might be able to fashion such a work.  This was not to be; my stitches were uneven, my seams bunched, and the whole business was amateurish and embarrassing.

Why it had never occurred to me that memoir, rather than being something cathartic or painfully intimate or narcissistic, could be an opportunity for creative writing, a chance to practice writing poetically in prose form, I can't say.  I am very glad that I didn't keep that secret from myself forever.  The awareness is only that; it is not the beginning.  What is does offer, though, is the possibility of approaching a story I didn't feel needed to be told, which it may not.  But what if ordinary - this is where the poets step forward - can be made into something more.  As I attempted it, memoir was a leaden thing that even I couldn't tolerate.  Soon I will drag some of the pieces out of the drawer into which I stuffed them and see if I overlooked a potential for something more; not because it's my story but because I may have discovered a new way in which to see and present it, like any story.  At the very least, it is an option, an opportunity, a sound ecological practice.  Making something pleasing from what looked like residue.  In theory, at least, it doesn't seem impossible.

Love letter to Lynda Barry's mind

This morning I typed Lynda Barry's name in at YouTube, looking for her brief explanation of how one can keep a diary in four minutes a day.  But I found this instead.

Giving us lots of time to prepare, the Academy of American Poets has sent out reminders that April 26 is "Poem In Your Pocket Day."  As they describe it,

"The idea is simple, select a poem you love, carry it with you,  and share it with co-workers, family, and friends..."

WHAT IF  we had poems in our pockets AND had memorized them?  I know this is not new thinking for many of you and I ask your patience with me, still breaking in my poetry shoes, trying to remember that I can wear them for every day and not just save them for good.

Lynda Barry's mind, as expressed in this video and her various works, ought to be declared a national treasure.  That she is aware of the mind, generally, as a pearl of great price makes me feel as though I just woke up from a mediocrity-induced coma.  It is not just what she says, but the uniquely plain-spoken AND sort of revolutionary way she says it.  Poetry traveling to us through time.  My embarrassingly low-brow response is, Duh.

We are encircled by fires, asked to extinguish the minor blazes of how to fix this, how to heal that, where can we find the money, time or energy for at least nine minor-to-major situations on what seems a daily basis.  Behind those pesky and attention-demanding fires are the others, the real fires, the ones that are not meant to be dampened but fanned.  They are our sources of light; they are our light.  Here we are, back again, caught by the inexpert attempt at balance that is life.  How do we keep our small worlds from falling into the chaos of under-attended ordinary existence AND continue to be flames, or at least embers, of all that is soaring, expanding, contributing and becoming?  We just do because we must. 

Weather prompt

Following two days of record winter heat, Los Angeles returned to the sort of overcast morning that reminds us the beach is not far away.  Mornings that others proclaim gloomy have never seemed that way to me.  The sun will be back.  Soon.  Thoughts brought on by the low ceiling,  the deep marine layer - our weather people apparently delight in the naming of things - and a cottony quiet interrupted only by the local parrot flock have Karla Bonoff's bittersweet tunes spooling among the mental trees.   The following has always been my favorite, supported as she is by James Taylor and Garth Hudson of The Band on accordion.



Grace and luck, the difference between them, are playing kick the can down the fog-dimmed street.  Angels, with the Heaven Can Wait image of Warren Beatty symbolizing how, in our earthbound forms, we may be called to deliver messages from ineffable sources,  have sidled into the auditorium, wanting to see how I explain my way around this theme.

I subscribe to a daily email message called Notes from the Universe, offered "...to remind you of life's magic."  Today it was suggested that I steer my imagination toward what I DO want, rather than what I don't.  Since right now I seem to creak as though my joints were made of wood, I HAVE been giving energy to the unwanted, neglecting visions of success or triumph or the simple accomplishment of, say, a page of illustrated letter forms that might become something.

Lucky is not the first word I would choose to describe myself or my life, nor am I anything approaching unlucky.  What I feel has been a continual presence for me is benevolence, grace by its many definitions, which does not mean life became something other than what it is, fraught at times to the point of seeming almost too much to bear.

Duality stares back at me, no matter where I look.  I walk around with my hands doing the dance that indicates balance, half this, half that.  Seeing the bigger picture, if only occasionally, tips things into grey areas that match today's sky.  The circular path brings me back to where I began but this time with an idea of what unconscious connections were formed between weather and angels.  We'll call Karla Bonoff a bonus, for I can't tie her precisely to the murky theme.  Perhaps it makes sense to you.

Thank you to Beth for her comment yesterday about making herself write - in spite of all that is missing or present.  She helped kick my ass into action this morning.

When the morning voices are silent

“If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.”
― Ray Bradbury

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WHATEVER THIS IS, it is not a 'dry' spell.  It may be an altered state, like being hit with soft lightning.  Nothing is singed but the circuits seem fried.  Not one thing works the way it did even a few weeks ago; small domestic tasks, creative intentions, simply staying awake, all are beyond my capability.  Do powerful solar flares turn humans, or some of us, into sleepwalkers whose arms and legs have become almost too heavy to lift?  I guess that would produce sleepshufflers.  More accurately, sleepsitters.  Merely considering such a notion probably condemns me to eating lunch at the crop circle table.

Last week I thought I'd caught the end of a thread about a correlation between a lightness of mind - being open and available for enlightenment -  and a perceived greater density of body, slowed movement, reluctant joints, gravity's target demographic.  It would not be shaped into a coherent, familiar form and I thought it needed a new shape, a fresh voice, a reduced self-consciousness to emerge as anything other than half-baked.  It still sits in draft form, abandoned after I tried to force the momentary weightlessness of the entrechat - or an old favorite, jumping as an elevator starts to descend - into a shotgun marriage with the windows (not windmills) of my mind.  An ill-fated union or at least not one for which I had the necessary flair.

I DO stuff myself full of the morsels Mr. Bradbury lists and I know the state of wanting, working to trap what they suggest before anything escapes.   My morning voices feel short on pep, lacking conviction and seem to wonder aloud when they will be allowed to go back to their bed.  It is NOT a dry spell.  It feels more like a too-small house being taken over by too many relatives with boundary issues who didn't bring even the most essential items since they knew they could mooch off me.  I feel like I've been sleeping on the floor of the sunporch, then spending the rest of the day trying to clean the kitchen and not succumb to the vapors, though that would give me an excuse.

Mr. Bradbury, I was certain, would not suffer a whiner nor would he tolerate any excuses.  We are writers, we write.  Since this is what I have in the moment, in keeping with his ethic, this will be what I write today.  I hope tomorrow's morning voices have emerged from their anaesthesia.  I hope my missing parts will be restored.
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"The mere attempt to examine my own confusion would consume volumes."
James Agee