Elderberry mumblings

Elderberries in OctoberTrying my fingers out this morning:  It is cold in here.  I was up late last night with a restless dog suffering from a stomach ache, and I wonder why is it that they(dogs) do not have "Stop eating, now" programmed into their little walnut-sized brains?  Of course, who am I to even ask that question?  Hee hee hee.  We purchased a new kind of dog food to help Ms. Luna recover from belly rash, and at some point I believe that she got into the bag and helped herself.  Probably when we were watching Game 4, and all those Philly home runs, this being the first time since I was in high school that I have watched The World Series.  Hmmm.  I am ready for a new batch of commercials, was the first night, actually.  "Drinkability."  A new beer-related word, made up for the brilliant audience (noticing that I just insulted myself, or did they?)  Really.  The good news:  I now know how to press "mute" with delightful results.

I am considering writing 2000 words a day, for the month of November.  Having never set such an outrageous course for myself, I am finding it nearly impossible to do.  Today, that is. I am practicing to see if I can really do it, and maybe save some words up to use on the day that I can't type or think.  For Heaven's Sake, I do have a Life to pay attention to, is a picture really worth a thousand words?  Ha!  In that case I may download another, and I would be there already.  

It is an honorable thing to do, bringing discipline to my life.  People have reassured me, "Oh, don't worry, you are an Artist!"  Or, "You are what is known as a "Creative""  A creative what???  I want to shout in frustration.  I have been known to whine, "You don't know what it is like, being me, living in this freckled nervous wreck."

So, I am writing.  Then going for a walk and then going to work.  And today is a "cleanse day" so there is no chance that I will stick my head into a bag and eat too much.

Oh, and the Elderberries!  Aren't they gorgeous?  The tree was so full the branches hung to the ground.

xoxoLC

aesthetics+trash+thinking+writing

Honest, this is just how it was, a pile of trash flowing in and through and over the can.  Nice.  

I am reading "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," by James Agee and Walker Evans.

"And now as by the slipping of a button, the snapping and failures on air of a spider's cable, there broke loose from the room, shaken, a long sigh closed in silence.  On some ledge overleaning that gulf which is more profound than the remembrance of imagination they had lain in sleep and at length the sand, that by degrees had crumpled and rifted, had broken from beneath them and they sank.  There was now no further extreme, and they were sunken not singularly but companionate among the whole enchanted swarm of the living, into a region prior to the youngest quaverings of creation.    (We lay on the front porch:

This book has grabbed me by the jelly-roll.  It was written when, as is written on the back jacket "...the summer of 1936, James Agee and Walker Evans set out on assignment for Fortune magazine to explore the daily lives of sharecroppers in the south  ...unsparing record of place, of the people who shaped the land... unrelentingly honest..."

I cannot leave it alone.  It haunts me.  My friend Gail gave a fabulous workshop for our writer's group exploring "Place," how it informs us, influences us, even creates us.  She read from this book and I was deeply (and continually, it appears) moved by it.  On a comical note, Mr. Agee used punctuation so freely!  Semicolons, colons, parts of parentheses and millions of commas, making extremely long sentences managable, even facinating and I find that I am reading these pages out loud.  The commas create line-breaks, and the text is turning into a very very very long poem, 416 pages to be exact.

Here is what I am working with right now:

On Beginning "In Praise of Famous Men"

If any one of us were to plop

down on any one spot of this land

and listen, watch, listen

one would begin to hear the stories

of this place, this patch of grass

this hill or valley 

It takes a special kind of listening; past

motors, wheels on pavement, hurtling bodies

of steel, past the whine of rolling rubber tires

past distant roring of trucks or Harleys

or jets streaming silver tailings

past birdsong and twitters hidden in blackberry

brush, or spruce or cottonwood.  Past soaring

osprey or turkey vulture standing 

phonix-style atop the power pole

past the hum of the high voltage wires

wind in the pines, current riffling over

smooth river stones.  Past all this teeming

life on the surface, to under

like turning over a big rock in shallow water

under it, when the water settles some

creatures and moss waver in the brightness

or, under the grass roots push deeper

moles grind holes for nests, earthworms

squeeze moist tunnels, mycelium moves

and listen here, where it appears there is no

thing to hear.  this is where stories begin

this is how I weep, walking across the Plaza

past Victorian palms, under now green Tamarac

walking across the village to Medicine Woman's

dwelling, entering into the close thick air

sheltered, tutored, mentored

xoxoLPC

19JULY08