house project: excerpt from a longer work

VIII.
Nothing has ever quite fit us - not
the spaces
the angles
the doorknobs
the windowpanes.
The shape
of a house
is important.
The next house was narrow
and it pushed us together.
So close we heard
each other saying things
we had never meant
to say,
things we maybe didn’t mean
at all.
Clarity became important
because it became impossible.
We talked a lot more
but silence had the power.
You cannot see the smoke stacks
from that house, you can see
the old man next door
sunning himself in black bikini bottoms.

IX.
Every garage sale was a sacred altar
to our changing conception
of need.
What we wanted was freedom
of movement, less
on our shoulders.
It doesn’t matter how many times
you place objects in boxes,
what means something is
how many times you
try to lift and drag
the heaviest parts of you
through doorway after doorway.
We had been a body
but then we became a house,
as soon as we no longer shared one,
haunted, inhabited, echoing lost sounds.

Alone in the Wilderness

At the age of fifty-one, Dick Proenneke hiked into the Alaskan wilderness, built his own log cabin, and lived off the land until, at the age of eighty-two, he decided the fifty-below winters were just a bit too brutal and moved back to the continental US. Not only was he a profoundly gifted carpenter, he was also a filmmaker and writer. He shot a documentary, entitled Alone in the Wilderness, all by his lonesome during the first year or so of his endeavor. He wrote a book by the same name. The documentary is beautiful, concise, and thoughtfully executed.

i have dark dreams that end in bursts of light.

short shorts

watch:
brent green, nervous films


listen to:
sibylle baier
&
woods

read:
the battlefield where the moon says i love you by frank stanford

enchantment

From the Lives of My Friends

A Poem by Michael Dickman (a Poet from Portland)

What are the birds called
in that neighborhood
The dogs

There were dogs flying
from branch to
branch

My friends and I climbed up the telephone poles to sit on the power lines
dressed like crows

Their voices sounded like lemons

They were a smooth sheet
They grew


black feathers

Not frightening at all
but beautiful, shiny, and
full of promise

What kind of light


is that?


________


The lives of my friends spend all of their time dying and coming back and
dying and coming back


They take a break in the summer
to mow the piss
yellow lawns, blazing
front and
back

There is no break in winter

I am in love with the sisters of my friends
All that yellow hair!
Their arms
blazing

They lick their fingers
to wipe my face
clean

of everything

And I am glad
I am glad
I am

so glad


_________


We will all be shipped away
in an icebox
with the one word OYSTERS
painted on the outside


Left alone, for once

None of my friends wrote novels or plays, from the lives of my friends came
their lives

Here's what we did
we played in the yard outside
after dinner

and then
we were shipped away


That was fast -

stuffed with


lemons.

Carl Jung's Soul

Liber Novus

The Proust Questionnaire, An Exercise in Vanity

Proust's second set of answers to the Questionnaire, as given at age 20.

Q. Your most marked characteristic?
A. A craving to be loved, or, to be more precise, to be caressed and spoiled rather than to be admired


Q. The quality you most like in a man?
A. Feminine charm


Q. The quality you most like in a woman?
A. A man's virtues, and frankness in friendship


Q. What do you most value in your friends?
A. Tenderness - provided they possess a physical charm which makes their tenderness worth having


Q. What is your principle defect?
A. Lack of understanding; weakness of will


Q. What is your favorite occupation?
A. Loving


Q. What is your dream of happiness?
A. Not, I fear, a very elevated one. I really haven't the courage to say what it is, and if I did I should probably destroy it by the mere fact of putting it

into words.


Q. What to your mind would be the greatest of misfortunes?
A. Never to have known my mother or my grandmother


Q. What would you like to be?
A. Myself - as those whom I admire would like me to be


Q. In what country would you like to live?
A. One where certain things that I want would be realized - and where feelings of tenderness would always be reciprocated. [Proust's underlining]


Q. What is your favorite color?
A. Beauty lies not in colors but in thier harmony


Q. What is your favorite flower?
A. Hers - but apart from that, all


Q. What is your favorite bird?
A. The swallow


Q. Who are your favorite prose writers?
A. At the moment, Anatole France and Pierre Loti


Q. Who are your favoite poets?
A. Baudelaire and Alfred de Vigny


Q. Who is your favorite hero of fiction?
A. Hamlet


Q. Who are your favorite heroines of fiction?
A. Phedre (crossed out) Berenice


Q. Who are your favorite composers?
A. Beethoven, Wagner, Shuhmann


Q. Who are your favorite painters?
A. Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt


Q. Who are your heroes in real life?
A. Monsieur Darlu, Monsieur Boutroux (professors)


Q. Who are your favorite heroines of history?
A. Cleopatra


Q. What are your favorite names?
A. I only have one at a time


Q. What is it you most dislike?
A. My own worst qualities


Q. What historical figures do you most despise?
A. I am not sufficiently educated to say


Q. What event in military history do you most admire?
A. My own enlistment as a volunteer!


Q. What reform do you most admire?
A. (no response)


Q. What natural gift would you most like to possess?
A. Will power and irresistible charm


Q. How would you like to die?
A. A better man than I am, and much beloved


Q. What is your present state of mind?
A. Annoyance at having to think about myself in order to answer these questions


Q. To what faults do you feel most indulgent?
A. Those that I understand


Q. What is your motto?
A. I prefer not to say, for fear it might bring me bad luck.

practice

i've moved, and my new room was once a little home yoga studio.


all is well.

the last line virginia woolf wrote in her diary before she died

L. is doing the rhododendrons.

The Proust Questionnaire

The Proust Questionnaire, as answered by Marcel Proust himself at age 13.



What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
To be separated from Mama

Where would you like to live?
In the country of the Ideal, or, rather, of my ideal

What is your idea of earthly happiness?
To live in contact with those I love, with the beauties of nature, with a quantity of books and music, and to have, within easy distance, a French theater

To what faults do you feel most indulgent?
To a life deprived of the works of genius

Who are your favorite heroes of fiction?
Those of romance and poetry, those who are the expression of an ideal rather than an imitation of the real

Who are your favorite characters in history?
A mixture of Socrates, Pericles, Mahomet, Pliny the Younger and Augustin Thierry

Who are your favorite heroines in real life?
A woman of genius leading an ordinary life

Who are your favorite heroines of fiction?
Those who are more than women without ceasing to be womanly;
everything that is tender, poetic, pure and in every way beautiful

Your favorite painter?
Meissonier

Your favorite musician?
Mozart
The quality you most admire in a man?
Intelligence, moral sense

The quality you most admire in a woman?
Gentleness, naturalness, intelligence

Your favorite virtue?
All virtues that are not limited to a sect: the universal virtues

Your favorite occupation?
Reading, dreaming, and writing verse

Who would you have liked to be?
Since the question does not arise, I prefer not to answer it. All the same, I should very much have liked to be Pliny the Younger.

re-wilding

lucas foglia photography.

I yearn to keep. All the pieces of my life that tell me I have lived. Burrowed away. Safe. He said I have a heart like a vice but it’s more a heart like a magpie. A mortal creature, endangered.