Garden

It is the sound.  You can hear the garden-ness on the breeze. Stagnant, they are merely plants.

But no, it touches everything.  The smell of dirt and growth- that lavender or rose that someone  will try to bottle and spray on herself- "can't you tell I am woman? I smell of the womanly garden?" She asks. I place a sprig of rosemary in my car and the air conditioning makes if feel like a very contained garden in motion.

You should want to eat a garden.  Even if it is a flower garden, the growth is most edible.  T hunger to be beautiful by consuming the buds.  The aesthetic minded murderess will poison her lover with oleander. 

I like the butterfly, but I want the ladybugs.  Ladybugs offer luck, butterflies just the frivolous pretty of a debutante.  Ladybugs are useful and red. Marketers say red makes one feel hunger- thematically, ladybugs are more sensible.

There must be a way to walk. I've never thought of this before, but if y are incapable of traveling through a garden without falling over, are you really in the garden?  The rock gardens in Kyoto.  But the monks can enter, and they do- changing the sand designs and rock placement at regular increments. And nature, of course.  Fish can enter the seabed garden at will.  

Can someone possess a marijuana garden? Or does its cropness or illegality ruin it as a garden? But who could say the plant isn't lovely?  More, consider the greenhouse of an abandoned home.  The plants slowly go to seed, they rot an awful stench but a stench of an effort for survival.  Shouldn't that be enough?  Ants creep in, and then the spiders enter looking for warmth. A beehive is built in the corner.  When they die, it happens at once.  The realtor has the whole structure torn down at once- "we can make a lovely outdoor party space here." 

Soft plants are particularly pleasant. Running fingers down the bud or leaf that feels like animal coat. What came first, the cat or the cat tail?  We see our nature in the desire to pull leaves and flowers- I want to rip the whit flower sprig from the sky and capture it in a vase.  I have no idea where the desire to pull leaves comes form, but its there.  Perhaps a strange nostalgia for the petal picking of a girlish romance.  

We wanted in the rock garden.  We leaned over the edge when the monks were away, but th had stretched the barrier enough to omit us.

I am not a visual person.  I'm not sure why.  I stand in front of paintings and think of them and look and look and read the description and watch other people look and listen to audio tours and look and look and look.  But I can rarely feel anything from this looking.  Gardens are far more than looking.  

In the art museum, I will get in trouble for touching or smelling the piece.  In the garden, such practice is encouraged.

center of the universe

The Center of the Universe

Amanda Martin Sandino

Write a piece assembled from class/presentation notes.

i.

minor key and Debussy-esque

a lesser movement of the Arabesque

where it crescendos into slight cacophony

(but just a piano in the darkness)

the metallic ball. holes many protruding

bifurcated, it feels a great violence

has befallen this projector of the stars

perhaps great violence is what

we must come to

in order to project the sky

ii.

i could live here

reclined

with quiet company

and a moony voice

above.

it occurs to me

i’ve never slept beneath

a naked sky.

i’ll sleep now and dream

i am living

iii.

roofs are meant to be global

skies dark, music playing

time is only one dimension

but space is many

iv.

Nix, the Goddess of the Sunset

We can Simulate a Sunset

All the Known Universe

v.

globular steampunk tortured device

spinning powered by a tesla coil

cgi lightninging in the lobby

vi.

a view of Alexandria via camera obscura

Ptolemy sits with an ancient pre-telescope

In the background, our serapeum burns

vii.

galileo’s sideways study

the scientist was young, thin

voyeuristically

visual consumption

of the hubble telescope

motion sickness

viii.

there is hope here

planets die all the time

earths are dying

all the time

we are not alone

in our ruin,

only alone,

in our cause

ix.

are you afraid of dark matters?

“dark energy” feels maudlin

poets rarely have the opportunity

to name scientific discoveries

x.

we will one day

live on an earth

made Martian

cold world

ocean spaces

signs of was-life

for droids to visit

but none to mourn.

Why are we here?

The energy draws upon us and draws us at its will.  This is my will, but also your will.  You understand, these mean the same thing.

It feels simple to distinguish between the two, and my hereness to your thereness.  But this is an illusion of the misunderstanding that is horizontal time.

I want you to be happy so that I am happy.

But we are the physical manifestation of a goddess with DID.  We are like Tara's one self killing her other selves but without the normal center.  The center is hallow.  There is no spirit.

I want to believe that your success is my success.  That you are my child because you have been my child in some time that is now, but my brain, our brain, can only sometimes understand it.  Maybe it is enough that the sea grass gets it, and thus it sways.  But this is using poetry to escape reality.

We want to be in the shared consciousness of sleep.  We can feel the draw and wish it were more productive in the waking and thus dominating world.  We are not the dream man- Friday is not the fuck wagon.

I want to be happy.  I know that love is somewhere in these endeavors.  I feast upon that energy and try not to feel the hollowness that is our center.  Let it fill with chi.  Let the me wash away.

Shakespeare

So, a very long while ago I decided that I ought to, at some point before dying, finish reading all of the Shakespeare plays. But there are quite a few, and it's difficult to keep track of them all. So I'll put a counter on here. They are quick reads if you are comfortable with the lingo of the times, so I should probably try to read one a week to get them done (I just read Othello in two days, so it's quite doable). Anyway, I'll put a counter up at some point, but for now: here is the list (from Open Source Shakespeare)!

COMEDIES All's Well That Ends Well As You Like It (S) Comedy of Errors (R) Love's Labour's Lost Measure for Measure Merchant of Venice (R, S) Merry Wives of Windsor Midsummer Night's Dream (R,S) Much Ado about Nothing (S) Taming of the Shrew (S) Tempest (R) Twelfth Night (R, S) Two Gentlemen of Verona Winter's Tale

HISTORIES Cymbeline Henry IV, Part I Henry IV, Part II Henry V (R, S) Henry VI, Part I Henry VI, Part II Henry VI, Part III Henry VIII King John Pericles Richard II Richard III (S)

TRAGEDIES Antony and Cleopatra Coriolanus Hamlet (R) Julius Caesar (R) King Lear (R) Macbeth (R, S) Othello (R) Romeo and Juliet (R, S) Timon of Athens Titus Andronicus Troilus and Cressida

How to read the little letters in parenthesis: R= Read S= Seen it on the stage or as a film. As You Like It is a bit of a fib, but I'm seeing it next week so time shall make it true!

GRE Silly-ness

It's actually spelled "silliness" but doesn't that look weird? Anyway. It is really hard to come up with the names of random people you want to cite as examples for the GRE. I mean the perfect examples. I wanted to bring up a particular conceptual poet and her work on FLARF, but I could not remember her name or the title of the work (I got to, "I think it's Vanessa something..."-- I was actually thinking of Vanessa Place's "what does that say about me" poem). Anyway, I couldn't come up with the name so, instead, I cited myself. I actually do have a published FLARF piece. And, I know that the graders of the writer portion can't see your name. So why not? It was a lot more amusing at the time... Anyway, it's nice to be able to mock the wickedness of the ETS machine in some way. And thank goodness it's over! (again...)

God of Small Things

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It took me a while to really work out how to talk about this book. This is definitely a piece that demands meditation. The title itself is enough to give one pause for months before continuing.

The God of Small Things speaks to the importance of small things. Roy is speaking more from an Eastern philosophical perspective than the Don't Sweat the Small Stuff type antimeditation that's become so popular in the U.S. The small things in life are the most essential.

Throughout the book, Roy refers to things as small, and I have to remind myself to take note of them. On page 121:

Something lay buried in the ground. Under grass. Under twenty-three years of June rain.
A small forgotten thing.
Nothing that the world would miss.
A child's plastic wristwatch with the time painted on it.
Ten to two, it said.

It is so easy to read over such things and let them go as overdetail or the unnecessarily mundane. But Roy has made note of the small things, and so we wait for this wristwatch to reappear, as it ever-so-hauntingly will.

The Orangedrink Lemondrink Man is so casual about his introduction of child Estha to sexuality. "Now if you'll kindly hold this for me," he says (74), and, the way Roy writes it is just as small as that wristwatch.

The carelessness of Ammu's statement, "When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less" (107). Impatient mothers say such things, but the scene knells through God of Small Things and had such a realness. A reminder of those tiny things our parents said, which they didn't mean, but we clung to so painfully as children. A moment of pause to think, "How easily I can hurt someone else."

The effect of these words would not leave me for the entirety of the book, looming over each word, and they continue to affect me still.

And the Air was full of Thoughts and Things to Say. But at times like these, only the Small Things are ever said. The big Things lurk unsaid Inside. (136)

They introduce themselves. A monk once told me of the importance of folding one's clothing before stepping into the bath.

Moments of sad truth, and some sort of reality forms via this meditation-- there is something beautiful in doing the terrible:
"Let's leave one alive so that it can be lonely," Sophie Mol suggested. Rahel ignored her and killed them all. (177)

The chapter, "The God of Small Things" is pure action, and most of it minute in detail. Love mixes in with the details of nature, even "vomit-green" is made to be beautiful.

Instinctively they stuck to the Small Things. The Big Things ever lurked inside. They knew there was nowhere for them to go. They had no future. So they stuck to the Small Things. (320)

There's nothing really to say about this book. If you haven't, read it, and read every word slowly. Love is in the tiniest of details. Tragedy springs from a small escape. Sex will lose its name.

The Inspector asked his question. Estha’s mouth said Yes.
Childhood tiptoed out.
Silence slid in like a bolt.
Someone switched off the light and Velutha disappeared. (303)

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Goodreads Reviews

There'll suddenly be a bunch showing up here, as I'm meant to be doing reviews of all I read and will catch up on Goodreads soon, and there's a fancy feature on there to copy and past the review into your blog. I really should send the previous sentence to purgatory for sheer dumbness, but I'll let it sit. <3