martes, 17 de febrero de 2009

My Life in Red

Occasionally it happens. I am walking up the hill and turn a corner to confront the red azalea in bloom and I enter the world of color. The flowers are close and spaced in a way that gives a sense of depth and the air turn red. I walk back and move in again to the color feeling that my eyes have scraped the color out of the air and it has come to rest somewhere within me.
It can also be the green light through bamboo and I will stop to feel the cool liquid breeze, the moving waves of light, the whining of a thick bamboo stalk gnashing againt another, the sudden rustle of leaves chattering above me, and the smell of damp mud. The bamboo and green light I associate with treks up to the Espiritu Santo River, the Holy Ghost River, with two large dogs panting yards in front of me, but I have felt it walking down into the gully of a creek and instead of bamboo straining out all light exist for green, rain forest palms are doing it.
The sense of these moments and sensations can seldom be shared. You can note the green light and point it out, but then it somehow has been spoken and shared and is less real once it is in the world. It has moved from feeling to consensus.
The sense is fragile. If you focus too long on moving into the red, gathering it in with your eyes, you spoil the moment. It should remain brief. Later I can remember the feeling if not the moment of suddenly being in red.
I also find that much that fascinates me (horned spiders, a large red centipede dead in the mud, the buds of an orchid, counting time and remembering events such as deaths by the blooming of a flower, finding a twig is actually a bug) will only impose the burden of a polite response on someone else when I tell about it. Being there is everything and is momentary. Memory is our great comfort.

jueves, 12 de febrero de 2009

A World Never Quite Finished

As children it seems magical, perhaps bad magic, that so many people come and then disappear from our lives. Moving as a child means that many people disappear. It is like being moved from one enchantment to another without ever figuring out the magic words or curses. It creates a huge gulf of confusion, a sudden disappearance of sense and meaning, and perhaps leads to the creation of a fantasy world that is more consistent, more maleable than the real world. It makes us all creators, artists.
I don't know what makes a person want to paint or write or dance, other than to entertain others (a risky business and hard to do)or to create a world that is understood. A few find a comfortable life through art, but most don't. As a hobby, we never completely master the skills needed.
The process, sometimes struggle, pays off with meaning or with the state where what one is doing seems to call upon another magic, almost out of time. I am using writing as an example. A distant cousin of mine whom I love very much (Lars Ly) always has five or six paintings in his studio. He moves between them, perhaps waiting for one of them to capture him. And when a painting is done is instinctual in the sense that there is no definition.
I also have a friend who complains about all she has given up to be a writer and threatens occasionally to stop. She just published a CD of her reading essays about what it was like to be a Cuban refugee dumped into the upper Midwest. Her name is Marisella Veiga and the CD is called Square Watermelons. This is a plug. I listened to it and it is amusing, relaxing (the soft voice) and profound.
I myself have had the fear, probably irrational, that at the point where I have a great book of poetry or an appreciative editor for a novel, that those genres will no longer be read. I will be obsolete. Blogs give me that feeling. And I guess I miss the fence between myself and the world that a book provides. It has an audience, but that audience is only fictionalized in the mind of the author and becomes a bit more real when he or she meets a reader. But the book is not me, it is something I made. Blogs seem to insist that this is me.
Of course everything we do creates identity. The work of blogging is creating identity. This is who I am and your reactions tell me who you think I am. Since identity is social, both processes are necessary. I still am a bit leary of the blog. And disappointed with everything about the writing life, except writing itself.