Rant and Ramble

and also: one week of class left.
oh, so thankful, i am.

sunlight, turning leaves, free speech, warm beds, peppermint tea, salman rushdie, iPods, ivy plants, fuzzy socks, good pens, real ink, bells, voices raised in song, dimples, wings, clouds, nonsense languages, brancusi, mucha, fingerpaint, hot showers, hard rain, clean towels, vitamin c, gary larsen, garlic, rose is rose, ani, dave, pablo, bach, big sur, artichokes, apples, yawns, freckles, activism, warm sweaters, strong arms, sunsets, hermit crabs, dandelions, inside jokes, crooked smiles, old friends, sex, spaghetti, thesauri, bear hugs, down comforters, wyoming, good bread, mud, crazy family members, and, really, life in general.

can't you just see it? a munificent garden on a property not too far from town, where i can run a used bookstore with a caf� attached, something on the order of the thunderbird, or books'n'things crossed with tillie gort's. all full of organic hippy food, good coffee and books. now, really - does this sound like the perfect life for me, or what?

and i want it.

so last year, around this time, i drew a silly little card that said "happy thanksgiving jason!" in my signature hand-lettered style, and i gave it to him without really knowing why and felt kind of fluttery about the whole ordeal. and now, next week, i'll be going home to have thanksgiving with his family because all of a sudden we're having a ten-month anniversary, and we've given each other so much (and, really, i still get a bit fluttery at times).

one of those glaring flourescent lights bathed the bathroom at hooter's, turning my skin ugly and pale. i wondered about the women who came in here, our waitress with eyes that didn't seem to look at anyone, the tooloud girls at the table behind us, making rude, desperate comments over the flyers game on tv. a full-length mirror leaned drunkenly against one whitetiled wall, tilted so that i could only see myself from the shoulders down.

on the shelf above the sinks lay two blackhandled steak knives, pointing all their violence at the mirrors, sharp edge against sharp edge, threatening, afraid.

i want to have several gardens, actually. an herb garden (basil, peppermint, oregano, thyme, ginger, garlic), a salad garden (butterleaf, kale, baby bok, cabbage (red and green), tomato, cucumber, carrot), a dinner garden (corn, squash, zucchini, green beans, snap peas, potato, bell pepper, jalepe�os, more tomato) and a dessert garden (strawberry, blueberry, a cherry tree or two) and maybe some flowers. i want a maple tree, an aloe plant, dry beans, some apples...

the garden here still has green to show, despite the season. even more striking, it still has vegetables - the bright red flash of a tomato or pepper, a bulbous orange pumpkin, yellow squash, a trailing vine heavy with fat green peas. it makes me wistful for a time yet to come, when i can walk into my backyard and find dinner, put my face near to the earth and smell the rich, thick scent of life.

kill your television.

...please?

outside my window a scattered maze unfurls, full of yellow leaves against raindark branches. the stubborn alley trees twist into lowhanging branches in the backyard, which in turn meld with the vines which cover the neighbors' roofs and the fence which pretends to separate this piece of land from the rest of the world. the flock of blackbirds came swooping into view, a spinning, glistening mass of brancusian grace. they swirled through the trees like ink, moving from branch to limb to roof to telephone wire, never pausing for more than the breifest of moments. the air quivered with their wings and their plaintive calls.

but the flurry stopped, suspended with all the weight of a held breath, and then burst away in one fluid movement, all of them, gone.

why are you buying your food from a tobacco company?

ah, that's better.

i'm just so tired of this violence inside.

the protestation is easy enough to understand. after all, why would it be art? and the answer - because society says so - doesn't provide much comfort. but it seemed to me that he had missed the point.

of course you could take any old object and place it on a pedestal and call it art, but you'd be wrong. the art doesn't exist in the object, not in this case. the art exists in the mind of the viewer. that's what dr. gregory couldn't articulate, and that's what don couldn't understand. by questioning the validity of that urinal on that pedestal, don made it art. he made art, was made into art. duchamp had no sculptural pretenses, made no attempt to lay claim to the design of the piece or its material construction. the physical fact of the urnial serves exactly the function of the canvas beneath a conventional painting - it acts as the context within which the art exists. where a painting would be paint on a canvas, he creates instead thoughts about a urinal.

it becomes art when society as a whole will look at it and think.

the fountain crosses the divide between "art" and "not-art," a divide which our culture defines in a specific way. art, as defined by our professor and society as a whole, is that which has been created for the primary purpose of intellectual and asthetic contemplation. not-art is everything else, and anything with a utilitarian purpose. those things can be well-designed and asthetically pleasing, but they cannot be art.

duchamp's work would have been impossible in a traditional native american society, where every object has been carefully crafted by an individual human being. where even the wallpaper is truly art, worthy of contemplation as well as performing a necessary function.

what i can't figure out is what it says about our culture that the pure inhumanity of our production of goods allowed a brandnew artform to be born.

hey peter - apparently the german transvestites weren't too far off...

oh, but it isn't enough, you know, it's just not enough to close my eyes anymore. this life drags on unhappily, limping its anger and disappointment, stumbling into puddles of disgust and dispair that we all knew would come along sometime. the denuded maples and mudsplashed sidewalks remind me that the rain waits outside, steady, a hand as strong as his but a thousandtimes gentle against my face, dripping cold between my shoulderblades, between my breasts, between fingers and toes. we came inside with our bags of bristol board and razorblades, and hours later a slow drop of water slid down his cheek, warm. enough to make me cry, had this been three weeks ago. i sleep heavy dreams of blurred hands, slide cotton against my skin in waking, hate each morning that requires me to leave my bed.

i would like to live a life devoid of alarmclocks and with a wider array of flowers.

the tree outside our house has thrown itself into autumn with wild abandon, turning all its leaves bright yellow and somehow dropping so many that the sidewalk has been buried, but without losing its own brilliance. it has become, i think, the most joyful thing in my daily life.

i'm tired, tired, and the words have all wafted away. i am the leaves that hover between yellow and green, stare at themselves long in the river before hurling down, but even that thwarted and must drift serene, peace welling out of nowhere somehow unwanted, silence turning on itself and turning me away. i am indecision and stuttered inaction, full of the spaces in between.

i laid awake last night for hours, wishing i had a candle to light. wishing i had a stronger spirituality to lend, to bend towards this pain. wishing i had a prayer to speak or a god to beseech. but mostly, just wishing i had at least a candle to light.

dear annoying neighbors playing club music really very loud at eight o'clock on a wednesday night,

you aren't cool and nobody likes you.

sincerely,
annoyed design student with lots of homework.

sometimes my world curls up on itself like a kitten or maybe that self-masticating serpent, and all the edges seem to line up, just barely tangential and tantalizingly close to rationality, tempting me with the idea of intimacy between extremes, the soft scent of contentment like a memory on the tip of my tongue, almost solid enough to believe in, almost ephemeral enough to be real. but it lasts a moment too long, divulges its secrets to my scrutiny, and the delicate, indelible lattice of thought becomes only a passing cloud, only another grey against the wide grey sky.

the elaborate winged costume found itself displaced by my familliar fallback - the gypsy. except this time i didn't have my grandmother's costume jewelry to raid, nor my mother's old hippie clothes.

turns out, i have an adequate supply of hippie clothes myself, and since i own legitimate belly-dancing costume, it worked out fairly well. we had a live band at the party, comprised of a housemate's friends and their assorted drums, guitars and didjeridoos.

as the band packed up towards three o'clock, one of the drummers asked me why i hadn't been dancing. before i could respond, a guitarist and a random partier both assured him that i had. and in fact, my jangling skirt had accompanied almost every song they played, but from wherever i happened to be - on the stairs, in the kitchen, answering the front door. i've been too long without dancing, and my blood rushed at the opportunity.

staggering up the stairs after most everyone had left, i collapsed into my very soft and wonderful bed with just enough time to nod my head to the drummers (now jamming in the attic) before falling asleep.

over and over these past years, i have been redefining my world, realigning my values and discovering that a number of seemingly small things actually constitute the most important parts of my life. i have learned the length and breadth of realizing value only in loss: the beauty of waves and constant skies, the ease of sure understanding, the friendships i took for granted over the course of a decade or so, but which now i miss dearly.

happy birthday nika, darling. is it raining at your concert?

in reply to the requisite inquiry about costume, he said
"i don't celebrate halloween. it's a pagan holiday."

to which i burst out laughing, "they're all pagan holidays, peter. just with this one, the witches aren't dressed up as bunnies and big fat men."

the year certainly has turned, though, and the fading light makes appropriate the hailing of death before rebirth. it requires not much imagination to see why the celts would have marked this day as the true ending of the summer year, and paid their homage to the crone and all of her darknesses.

merry samhain, and may your harvests hold you 'till spring.