Ugly, Lovely

Ugly

A forlorn identity
for self-defense.
Tightness in the chest,
dimensionless work.
Sleep deprivation at dawn.

Fearing silence,
fearing books,
fearing art.


Lovely

No total darkness,
no purity of light
just a large dusty house of faceted
laughter - even forests given room,
and in the morning there is not perfection.

Henry Rollins

Freaking amazing man. I saw my first Henry Rollins performance this week in Rochester and became a fan within the first 3 minutes of the 3 hour, nonstop monologue Rollins delivered, on topics ranging from vacationing in Pakistan to Van Halen, to the problems of the unexamined rallying cry.

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?

You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you ...

And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."

- Nelson Mandela

Sound of Tomorrow

Newsflash!

Episode 15 of Sound of Tomorrow is now online. In the words of Jimmy Spaceboy:

"Were they lost in space? Victims of interstellar piracy? Stranded in the time of the dinosaurs?

Nah. They were just takin' a break. But the Spacebridge crew is back in the year 2008 with an all new episode. Sarah Smart is here to tell it like it is in her celebrity news round-up, and special guests George Getman and Cassie Lewis give us the lowdown on George's new photographs on display at the Image City Gallery in Rochester."

Take a look:

www.soundoftomorrow.com

Reel to Reel

Rochester lives and breathes the moving image in many ways. George Eastman House and its Dryden Theater; The Little Theatre; Kodak and its long history from box brownie cameras to silent film reels to disbursement in the digital age; a huge medical imaging industry (filming inside the body - how wonderful and strange, this medical breakthrough); Rochester Institute
of Technology's film school.

Photography, too, thrives here.

My writing process has always felt very much like film-making - my poems read as cinematic to me. However, my work is about crafting written language, however visual the results. The screen is only as big as I can write it.

My admiration for film-makers is strong. Anecdotally, it's hard not to love a great film, easy to pass over a beautiful poem without the screen lighting up.

Why is this so? Maybe expectations determine our responses to poetry, or maybe it is true that music and images are closer to consciousness. Is less translation required? Many see poetry reading as a kind of code-breaking. Certainly there are tropes and references that only the seasoned poetry reader picks up. But these are just the written equivalent of the cameo appearances we notice in films.

Personally, I have always written and read in response not only to the images that the literal sense of the words creates for me, but in response to the mood and 'weather' of the writing and its layout, style and grammar - these are like directors and producers of the work. Habitually I respond, in fact, to these things first, long before gaining a sense of a poem's story or literal sense, or of its postmodern disruption of literal sense.

This is the crafts person in me - this is how I read, how I write. The joy of film going for me lies in the fact that I don't rush to deconstruction - the story takes me by the hand, and the critique follows.

Some of my best celluloid memories of 2007 are of Juno, Into the Wild, No Country for Old Men, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (I hadn't seen this - incredible, I know), Crouching Tiger/Hidden Dragon (ditto), 28 Weeks Later (good but so desolate), Sicko and the magnificent TV series Planet Earth.

Happy New Year 2008

My new year's resolution is to keep moving. One of the places I'm moving towards is one of more frequent publication, on blogger and elsewhere.

Often, during silence, I have an image in my mind of walking through a dark field, towards a watery light in the distance. Stumbling over stones, through the grass, in the general direction of the light. I don't know the way, but if I walk towards that farm house window, I will learn it.

It often seems to me that knowing the destination constructs the map out of thin air.

Wherever you wish to go,
if you keep walking you will get there.

Wishing you a Happy New Year 2008!

A Word From Our Sponsors

For those who can spare some online minutes, here is some random fun - plus way too much of the sound of my voice! Actually this podcast is always really enjoyable and I am grateful to the hosts for inviting George Getman and myself for Episode 4.

Hope you enjoy, you can download it at www.soundoftomorrow.com

Thanks for your support!

Cassie

Red roses too

I will never forget the watching the original BBC version of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Like most things, the show was both funny and sad. In the final episode the Earth has been destroyed and a few stragglers begin rebuilding. A rudimentary economy springs up, trading leaves instead of money. Except, leaves have no value.

Someone has the insight that the trees must go, so that leaves are in demand.

The episode ends with Louis Armstrong singing It's a Wonderful World.

*

It would be nice if the current trend of retro '80s wear bore more relation to the experience itself - as a 10 year old, I not only wore leg warmers, but also dreamed about nuclear holocaust. We were Cold War kids - the risk rarely felt close but the possibilities were ghoulish.

Of course, I am now old enough to have experienced something retro firsthand, which does tend to sap the joy out of a fashion trend.

*

One often hears the argument, "it all comes down to money". But where does "it all" come from, prior to that concept, money?

*

Terror, in the literal sense, I would argue - not of death, but of disorientation. Who is good? Well, I must be, or how can I live? Except nothing is so simple, nothing stays the same. It gets to us.

*

I only allow myself about an hour a day of that emotion. There are limits.

*

We couldn't end global warming tomorrow. We could do essential damage control. After a while the actions outrun the woman, outrun the man.

*

To know terror to persist despite it - one definition of courage. I have never met a person who lacked courage.

*

This battle within a person. The body wearing down, the bills to pay. The clarion call of closer issues.

*

I recycle, I watch the news sometimes. I planted several herbs this summer and they bloomed. I bought an air purifier. I wrote this. All this adds up to something, doesn't it?

*

I hear a baby crying.

Thank you for smoking

I woke up in the middle of the night - about 20 minutes ago - and could not figure out what was wrong, why I was so restless. After much thought it seems to me that I never want another cigarette.

(I quit 2 months ago but have been smoking a few socially.)

Strange - very strange, and very wonderful, the tide washes back.

I will never be the moralistic type - I think the tobacco industry, and not smokers, are the ones who ought to lose sleep. But I do love my friends.

Tobacco aids in the blunting of pain until it becomes habitual - then it actually reinforces pain signals whenever tobacco is withdrawn.

The original psychic events that made you smoke may be of only archival interest but the true smoker cannot know this. Smoking makes you feel stuck.

Except you are not. It's like extricating yourself from any other bad scene - it starts with knowing your rights.

Once you interrupt this system - with medicine, meditation, continued quit 'vacations', self care - it loses power, and eventually collapses.

Things that worked for me:

- three extended quits over a 10 year period, for 9 months, 3 years, and 4 months respectively
- attending to my general health
- taking frequent 'rest stops' from smoking of anything from 6 hours to 5 days
- time
- patience
- faith that I was going the right way even when there was no external reason to think so
- knowing the cliched truth that often things get worse before they get better
- stubborn persistence
- trusting that people naturally tend towards goodness, and bodies tend towards health
- loving friends and family


Medical specifics over 10 years:

Chantix AND
Zyban AND
plain water AND
counselling AND
patches AND
online support AND
supplements AND
exercise.

I feel like a hero, paradoxically, because of accepting help, not despite help - as if I were an event planner, successfully delegating aspects of this massive chore, but remaining sane enough to accept credit.

Night Comes on like a Documentary

Under an impudent blue sky

tanks churn up the strip.

.

Everything runs uphill, even water. There’s a fractured

black line between the hours,

like a bridge. Run to cross it

.

as night falls. Guns are fired because

words cannot describe the brute force of words.

.

This scented field full of dahlias, I arrive there, see my own

ghost walking there. This BBC film,

the blossoms of gunshot wounds on mens’ shirts. To surf

.

the gentlest crest

of white. It all runs uphill,

.

even living. The documentary of sleeplessness

runs on behind the eyes of children

.
as their fathers shoot nightmares

in broad daylight.

.

.

Cassie Lewis

Plato's dream

My house is full of ghosts -

Links

You may have noticed updates to this site - I'm now at work on a revised link list to other blogs, thank you for your patience. I also switched the blog language to Australian English from American English, only because it still feels more intuitive syntactically though this was a hard determination to make after 7 + years in the U.S.

A Short Story

Some weather. Some towns.

As a visitor to London last month, I felt just the right amount of deja vu.

I stayed with an old friend - I stayed with the past, in other words, but it has grown up. There are few things more precious than old friends. Stars' light might appear better, conceivably.

No ... To know a person well enough to sense profound good in them, this is what redeems a man.

____

Cities of sleep - The Law in its best sense continues to flourish, a gossamer structure straddling the rocks and steel, like dandelion at a bus stop. Law - like dandelion - grows where it is most needed.

There are green shoots whenever a man's knocked down.

Law to me is something felt in my gut. I don't mean as it is written but shit happens. For instance, when emphysema grabbed his dad, I wanted a chisel or something - to shape things. Guns maybe but it's only surfaces that would crack.

Running really hard along the Thames at dawn, as though to claim it before the tourists come with their sparkle and silver rain - that's something that could help with justice. Buildings are not permanent, not really.
____

I'll fight what happens until there's precedent.

Coffee & Cigarettes

Chantix, the latest FDA approved quit smoking medicine, works very well. If you are interested in quitting smoking, or even in just being less interested in it, this may do the trick.

Maybe they should make t-shirts: "Chantix - the choice of a generation" and then I should wear one. Well, OK. But here's why I am 'spruiking' (Australian word meaning 'advertising' that the U.S. spell check does not recognise ... damn it, spell check, recognise does NOT have a 'z' in it ... oh, forget it.)

Nicotine messes with one's head in terrible and wonderful ways. Quitting smoking before was always like having my heart broken by some charismatic friend. Now I can take or leave the friend.

The concept is that it satisfies the nicotine receptors in the brain so that that they feel as though they have already smoked. Consequently any cigarettes smoked (and of course I tested this one out) will have greatly reduced impact on the brain.

So now I am in the situation of the true 'social smoker' - the smoker who can smoke to be agreeable but feels no compulsion to do so. Every addict's dream. Except of course that, feeling no compulsion, I also feel little pleasure in the experience and almost no desire to repeat the behaviour.

It's a catch 22, guys - smoking is only fabulous when you are gravely addicted. Otherwise it is no fun at all. So the 'social smoker' ideal is a myth.

Chantix has no real side effects other than causing queasiness on an empty stomach. It's been three weeks since I stopped smoking and I've been taking the medicine for two weeks. I quit cold turkey and the medicine made it bearable enough that I have not relapsed and my 'slips' have left me non-plussed.

The problem with giving up smoking is that one still wants to smoke. The problem with Chantix is that one is also giving up the desire to smoke.

So mostly you are going to be left with your self. Your healing neurons. And questions you probably haven't asked yourself since the day you bought your first pack.

The upshot is that now I really want to want a cigarette, but I don't.

Being 5'8"

For many years I have thought of myself as 5'9". I was always "a tall girl" at school, and in my addled young mind this translated as "giant monster".

So 5'9" seemed reasonable, and also, tall enough to be notably tall, thus converting a curse into a blessing.

Recently, I was actually measured for the first time in many, many years. and the factual truth was very different. I am 5'8".

I like my new height much better for its factual truth, and correspondingly, for the other factual truths it has led me to discover.

Not only am I not a giant monster, I am not a definition at all. That is, I no longer fit into any rigid role in my own mind.

There is very great freedom in this. I am not the representative on earth of a prefabricated identity or social role.

I am not so great, or anything, don't get me wrong. But when there is sand between my toes, they are MY toes.

I don't define my toes. They are just my toes. And although I am, as a point of fact, 5'8", this fact does not limit me. It does the opposite.

Oh ... how to say this right? Knowing it is Thursday allows me to take part in the day.

Similarly, knowing I occupy a set area of the earth allows me to look around me, at all that is outside of me, like you.


POSTSCRIPT 02/15/08
It seems I am standing an inch taller than I was when I wrote this post. Thank you, yoga. So I have altered 'Being 5'7"' to 'Being 5'8"'.

Bay Area Poetics

I recently recieved my copies of this new anthology from the San Francisco Bay Area's fascinating underground and all through the sky poetry scene.

I also have the privilege of being in the publication, which was edited by my dear friend Stephanie Young.

Go to www.fauxpress.com for a booster shot of passion, humor and clarity.

Flute class

It has been six weeks today since I smoked my last cigarette. I do not miss cigarettes, but I am learning to breathe differently.

When I was about fifteen I took private flute classes for a few months then dropped them. It was hard for me to learn to sight read music. At first the flute just wheezed.

I felt worn out by how slowly I was "getting it", and stuck to activities like writing, where, as I saw it, I'd already put in my rooky time.

It is alarming to be a baby at something, your gaze utterly fresh. To just not know.

Blissful tides come in, if you can take it. I just couldn't then - too much novelty was being thrust upon me as a teenager, I wasn't about to sign up for extracurricular shyness.

Now, so much later, my incomplete homework arrives back, as it were, on my desk.

I am figuring out, painfully, slowly, how to breathe. Right now.

I took up smoking at age nineteen. Between when I dropped out of flute classes, and when I dropped out of university, one long deep inhalation took place: I took in art's oxygen, and along with it all it's composite parts; love, memory, desire, remorse.

I grew up, and then like lightening, I put up a barrier between myself and anything else new. The extracurricular, by definition, is never thrust upon us. I did what I needed to do.

But one misses out on things that way; one never learns how to play the flute, that way.

*

I don't know why I thought this post.


*

I guess I can stand it now.

*

To admit that, just as it did for Shakespeare's Hamlet, the hurt of not living well enough makes me ponder the worthiness of living at all.

*

Just do something, anything. Even if you fail, year after year. Even if you play badly. Because really you are the instrument.

And you are playing, which is something altogether different.

"I walk, needlessly on guard ..."

- Neruda, from The Night of a Soldier

Neruda, or the way a person shines out

Watching a travel program featuring Macchu Piccu, I remembered Pablo Neruda, whose poems I hadn't read for a long time, since I was nineteen. Around that time I had stumbled upon numerous much better poets - some literally sent me reeling. Neruda was cast aside, fondly, as one attempts to cast aside childhood.

Mostly childhood just hangs around, benign like a cloud on a blue day. It adds charm and tonal variation to the day as it finds form. Always strong-willed, when I decided to grow up I did it with immense conviction.

But force wasn't what was needed, and so much good was lost, that I must now recover from the hard drives of my mind. Neruda, the wearing of soft velvet jackets, doctorates, dancing lessons - the vulnerable romance of breathing a breath.

Insight, and a light touch, polishes the glass.

Amazement - I lost nothing. Nothing discarded was ultimately lost. As I ache for a forgotten part of myself I become conscious, by another small degree.

Space-time is full of cupboards, drawers, dusty sheds. It bends the atmosphere

hurt's shook out/
so we fight.

So we fight. Planes soar over us, wreathing white smoke through the sky. From very high up, it's all loveable. Funny ants.

Red sand blows, it is from the desert.

Aspect of a girl I was - once welcomed, steps forward. Clasps her hands. Tears make rivulets in the red sand.

*

I haven't smoked now in six days.

*

Addiction is white noise for the mind. It smoothes over even as it kills.

A world of pictures.
A very long running track.

Red sand under my feet. Earth/
is constant.

*

Avid, vocalising grown adults

*

Keep going

There are houses, cities. "Paradise is exactly like where you are right now only much, much better" - Laurie Anderson.

If this is true, why
is work's grip so desperate


"I wake to sleep
and take my waking slow." (Roethke)


*

Sometimes human perception runs on odd notions. After only days in a new country it seemed natural to have become foreign to others:

breathing, muscular, brave,
protected.

Day One

I am actually finishing my last cigarette now. I slept unusually deeply last night and there is a little sun poking through the louvres. This blog is still on Californian time.

This is upstate New York. I will have fifteen minutes, at the most, to get ready for work and run to try to make the bus.

The cigarette hisses in my hand. It curls its notations around my fingers, flat statements all starting I completely understand.

That isn't possible. Complete understanding of another's circumstances is not possible. Least of all from burning leaves.

I've doused them. Shower, get to work. Hurry.

Filtered Sun

When I first started The Jetty, my online writing project, it was because I felt a huge momentum brewing, the start of a series what soon became seismic changes in my life. Quitting smoking was the very first of these.

Now it is three years, one marriage, one green card, four jobs, one cat, several yoga classes, one misdiagnosis, a blizzard or two, one cross country move and five apartments later. And I'm quitting smoking.

Nicotine etched itself in there, an untrustworthy sycophant, during the fray. It seemed harmless because time was falling all around me in pieces and nothing flowed as maps promise to flow, for a long time.

Actually if I met the person who handed me that cigarette the day I left my old life for good, I would not be angry. I needed something to put between myself and the glare of the sun, shining steadfast. I had no reply to it.

I didn't just suffer from an inability to plan longterm, but from total dimensional uncertainty. "Where am I" was the constant question, because ground gave way and, just as fast, new terra firma rose up ... friends, work, the way life keeps on trucking.

My poetry seemed ... an expression of myself, a luxury. I needed all of it to keep my heart beating, I became miserly with it. I forgot that it, and the sun, both fuel themselves and need to burn, to live.

There's a kind of quantum leap required in art/in life
second-to-second

(That quote from Mother Teresa again)

"I have found the paradox that if one loves until it hurts, after a while there is no more hurt, only more love."

Tomorrow is Day One.

Talking to the Sun

'Little decisions are the kind I can make
Big resolutions are so easy to break'
- Paul Kelly


New Year arrives with a set of choices presented to me as the sum result of every other choice I have ever made. Words used, gestures of the hands and body, streets I've faced.

Frank O'Hara's poem 'Talking to the Sun at Fire Island' ... The ghetto, desert, tundra ... all are watched by the sun. A poet operates as such in all weather.

Seeing the film 'Munich' last night I remembered for the tenth time that day that the ends never justify the means. To kill one person to save a thousand is not justice.

Today's terrorist is tomorrow's hero . But none of us is objective. Who can make the call?

Freedom of choice requires recognition that there is a choice. Some things must be givensd if we are to survive a single day, but what of the fallout?

My big resolutions are like images at the end of a telescope. They are visions and I walk towards them, in the process I make a million little decisions. A wrong decision moves me of course. 'Wrong' is not a moral judgement, in this context, more a navigational term.

Useless to judge anybody else. Who is objective? Who is an unbiased witness?

All I can do is draw lines in the sand and refuse to cross them ...

And feel sharp pain at a decision that sweeps me off course. Sometimes the effects are sweeping, unpredictable. Sometimes the decisions are arbitrary, they do not release their code.

Sometimes a line in the sand is covered over by more sand, sometimes a line in the sand appears insignificant but is sweeping in its effect.

The man I love parked a truck in a side street on Friday night, and a hit and run driver tore its door off a moment before he stepped out.

He could have died. But he didn't. It's useless to think about why catastrophe haunts our features. It's more productive to consider why we are so fully ina state of grace, most of the time, that we survive.

Why doesn't the air we breath kill us fast? Why don't our feelings drive us to madness fast? Why do we wake up, alone, over and over, with gladness for the coffee, the cat, the kitchen, the radiator?

Little decisions absorb me as I peer through the telescope. I must save this moment not my future. This moment contains all future moments, all past moments.

Suddenly I lose hold of an image. Confused, I wander around the campsite. I kick out blindly. I hurt the thing I love

(my understanding of love is the thing I love.)

I have not lost something that is here. Time is not how we make it out to be in calendars. Until I've answered the questions

(of my self-declaimed transgressions)

I can't inhabit time. Time is like a cloak
seamless

you don't know you're wearing it until you look close. You don't look close until you have to. You don't have to examine until you falter, or rather, until you are aware that you falter.

We all falter.

We are born into time.

Homes grow like sunflowers

Rain in mountain clouds gathering to make rivers
shows us how pressure builds,
drops.

Our minds are clouds
that darken.

Stormy woods.

We are mirrors holding up the sky. You are watching,
you are holding me.

Inside is a wolf running across the ice.

We are made of water,
blue is
                        see through. Concepts drag us down.
                        My life’s work was a confusing dream.
                        I cannot know more than myself,
                        meaning all of it.

                        The day I saw you

I woke up.


Cassie Lewis    

Holidays

Louise Brooks

A woman I know told me that the actress Louise Brooks lived out
the last days of her life in the apartment building into which I just
moved.

She told me many woman had rebuilt their lives in this building.

*

I live on the ground floor and each night hear police sirens.

*

I imagine Louise. She looks in the mirror and sees her beauty,
and behind it her youthful beauty.

She attends to what must be done.

*

When she looks out onto the street she sees past herself,
past her street. Past her history.

*

One night she drinks a little too much. An anonymous man
passes her in the hall and says "sleep it off, lady", gruff but
as kind as the moon.

Classics

"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."

- T.S. Eliot, from 'The Dry Salvages'

Katrina

In the wake of natural disasters one is more in touch
with the fragility of the earth, and its inhabitants, but
also with the strength that lies within this.

Grappling with this paradox until it was no longer a
paradox, I had this amazing dream.

*

The landscape is muddy, post-apocalyptic. There are
floating bodies, debris. Architecture flattened into a
dark soup.

It seems as though the world has ended. It seems so.

I am riding in a wagon with a few other, gaunt survivors.
We are angular, draped in rags. My rags are white, of
faded linen.

They look grey under a glowering red sun.

We encounter a few other stragglers, in a makeshift
cart of their own. I suppose there must be beasts pulling
these carts, I don't remember horses.

Someone addresses me faintly .... "I remember you ...
aren't you a writer of some kind?"

"No, that's all gone now, it's all lost in the mud."

Then I look down at my left hand. I have been unconsciously
gripping a plastic bag, slick with mud, all this way. It
was all I could save before we fled.

From inside of it, I pull out a blue flag, with a picture
of a white dove on it.

A peace symbol.


*

I woke up in tears, and homesick.

Pass It On

Dear readers,


Thank you for your loyalty, and for peeking in the door
of the Little Workshop, from time to time.

There's sawdust in clouds and it is very hot here, and
the ventilation is poor. I am working long hours and
am exhilarated.

My body and mind extend themselves into each project.
I am working from a design that evolves from minute
to minute.

From instinct.

When I get a chance, I'll step back, open the door, sweep
the room, and see.

Maybe a wooden dinosaur, maybe a gazebo, maybe a
ladder poking through the roof.

Heaven

" Heaven is a place
where nothing ever happens."

- Talking Heads

Look Closer

The line 'look closer' is from that most wonderful of films,
'American Beauty'.


Most of my reasons for becoming a writer have evaporated
with time and experience.

I used to think that intellectual pursuit would make me wiser.
I used to think that other intellectuals would be wiser than
bus drivers, or tax accountants.

I used to think that I would be very famous one day.

I used to think that whatever fame I attained would be deeply
satisfying, in direct proportion to its reach.

Long ago, I used to think that writers and artists had a value
system somehow elevated far above that of other people.

And I even believed, for a while, that artists were the only
people who made art, writers were the only ones exploring the
use of symbols.

Most of all, I used to think that writing would allow me to
communicate with more transparency than anything else.

*

What I have found is that none of these things have been
or ever will be reliably true.

The only remaining reason for me to be a writer is that I
love it. And I love it because I love beauty, and because I
love my heart to be full of love.

*

Does beauty have a function? Beauty in the broadest sense,
I mean: a sunset, a beautiful face and, yes, a poem?

Is building a poem like building a chair, and if so, how?

*

I believe, instinctively, that we all seek life and happiness
and the full expression of ourselves. I have constructed,
many times, convincing arguments to support this deep belief.

For instance, I have proposed that even deliberate planned
successful suicide might be a kind of poorly translated desire
to live, or at any rate a desire to preserve what is best in one's life,
by quitting while one is marginally ahead of darkness.

Effort of any kind requires motivation. Motivation has an ultimate
source, no matter how twisted or messed up or confused it might
become on its journey towards daily reality.

Actions are a poor indicator of motivation, because the journey
of an instinct from its deep source to its expression can be long,
treacherous and endlessly delayed.

A therapy subject might take twenty years to realise they miss
their father.

A convicted murderer may have never realised this, or else
realised a day too late.

The journey can be very long, but the source is always the same:

"To live! To live!"

This is my personal conviction.

*

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and yet, for most of us,
this simple observation and many like them secure William
Shakespeare's work a place in the ranks of the deeply beautiful.

Bus drivers, tax accountants, have tended to agree, in my
experience.

Beauty and truth seem to enjoy a happy marriage. Sometimes
they argue, rebel against an intimacy that can get stifling. But
they generally get along.

*

There is a simple truth to a chair. It holds us up. It helps us
reach the table, which holds our food, or our computer.

Between the two, they keep our posture relatively aligned, if
we let them, if they are well-matched in height, and sensitively
designed.

*

What can beauty do for us?
What can it do to us?

*


Only in rare instances do chairs upset us or destroy our
lives. Yet romantic attraction - a variant of the love for
beauty - contains this on its list of warnings. The warnings
that come with the package of self-exposure.

Apprehension of beauty is a kind of self-exposure. It can
make us scared, it can hurl us very far from the centre
of our names.

Chairs so rarely make us scared. They hold us up. Even
the most beautiful ones, carved, elegant, these chairs rarely
let us down.

Partly a chair is very rarely so beautiful as a face can be,
because it is less animate, or seems so to us.

Beauty moves, as well as moves us. And though a chair
moves, too, at a molecular level, as everything does, we
see this movement less readily.

Animation is part of the spectrum of beauty that we are
able to see. Just as we cannot see all the colours in the
spectrum, hear all the sounds around us, it takes grosser
forms of animation to really get our attention.

A girl running, people making love. We notice these things.

Partly a chair feels less personal. We sit on it after various
days, with varying speeds and colours. The chair seems
about the same. It's still there, still friendly, it still holds us up,
while more animated beings argue, chastise, woo, threaten,
hire and fire us.

The chair is more beguiling because more simple to deal with.
Most times, we still feel okay about the chair. It still likes us,
mildly, we still return the feeling.

Partly the chair has less to offer, less complexity. But if we sit in
the chair too long we will, in fact, grow to hate the chair. Its
beauty will grow sour. We will begin to project other resentments
onto the chair, we will be bored. Or bodies will become tense.

If we are prisoners, the chair will become a variety of jailor. It's
support will seem menacing.At the first opportunity we will hurl
it at the glass of a window to shatter it.

With apologies to Sartre:

Hell might be spending eternity in a room with your favorite
chair.


*

A beautiful face is a poem is a chair.

*

The issue, then, is not that beauty has no function. The
issue is that the functions of all things in the world must be
balanced, harmonised.

If one can get too much of a good chair, equally, one can get too
much of a lover. Or a poem. Or an ideology, or a tax accounting
firm, or a bus route.

Repetition leads eventually to boredom.

*

But what I know is that beauty is in the animation, and animation
means constant change. We only notice the grosser movements,
but the chair is always moving.

The closer we look the more movement we see. And after a while
we understand that the chair is never the same chair twice.

A beautiful face changes every moment.

Love is change, and love changes us, and love is the only
motivation, and its journey from its source can be so very long.

Truth and change enjoy a good marriage. Sometimes they
don't communicate well, but at the end of the day truth
changes, changes everything.

*

My intention, here in The Little Workshop, is to build. A chair,
a table, a bench for the garden.

Something to show at day's end.

Introduction

Any new work begins with an instinct. Gradually, the instinct finds structures that will uphold it. And so, writing this first post, I hunt my immediate vicinity for driftwood for a fire.

Auden's line, "always far from the centre of our names" ... How to translate the crystalline intent of this phrase into a modus operandi? For me, the truth of the line is unmissable.

And we are, inexorably, in a "time of war". My instincts say that war is a natural corollary of living - as humans do - partially 'in absentia': the bills must be paid, regardless of our heart's location at the time they arrive.

Other, more profound splits take place. Between what we want to say and what words are capable of expressing. Between experience and shared experience.

Language is the bridge, or one of them. Music is another. Physical gestures can be exquisite, or a last resort. Do we touch the shoulder of a friend, or do we load a gun? Our concepts of ourselves divide and conquer us ...

Words are, for me, a kind of force, capable of many things.

Driftwood for the bonfire on the beach: Auden's quote, the warmer weather, the tinkling sound of a child laughing in the street outside my apartment.

Here in The Little Workshop, my intention is to build much as a carpenter builds. A chair, a table, a bench for the garden.

Something to show at day's end.