Saturday, I helped my mother move and we went through the old ritual where I catch her little cat and get my hand clawed up. She got me good this time and by the next day, a red and enflamed area had spread across my palm. I watched it close to see if it continued to grow and if a trip to the med center was in order. My stigmata. My writing hand. She even got a fang into my index finger.
Today, it appears to be better.
I wanted the inspiration of a little colored light, like some abstract stained glass to hang in the window of my office, the visual equivalent of a wind chime.
I thought it might be fun to make, but first I had to learn about light. How does green light work its magic? What do crystals create when they split the light into rainbows?
My wife has many beads from back in the day when she made jewelry, cool beads of colored glass, little pendants. I thought I might string together a bunch of them and see what it looks like when the sunlight cuts through them.
She has a little sculpture of twisted wire of the hand of Fatimah. (there is great overlap in the attribution of miracles). So why not dangle strands of colored beads from the fingers?
We selected five things that matter most to us in our live: places, people, concepts. We named their aspects as we culled beads. Then I sequenced them into stories. Each strand tells one story. She tied them off and I hung them from the finger tips.
Perhaps it is not much to look at. It is meant after all, to be activated by the sun. It’s stories will be told at a certain time, in a certain place, when the sun cuts through it.
This has not yet happened. I discovered that I don’t get direct sunlight through my office window after the Spring equinox. It’ll likely be Fall before it will work in my room.
Yesterday was a very sunny day and I heard the neighbor’s wind chime and thought I might take the hand outside. It clouded up as soon as I did.
Once, my stepson and I scattered CDs around the dining room floor and through the last daylight into corners that had never seen it. Arcs and circles of various colors met and cycled in strange orbits for an hour or so.
I thought the hand would work like that, like a strange chandelier. So far, it has not. It is just a rather garish thing that sits on my desk, impervious to whatever small light I throw at it. I won’t know what it does for six months.
Some time on google, hunting the elusive Bone, bears some old fruit. Where are you Mark?
I’ve begun a new project that I’m just going to post as I do it. I don’t want to concern myself too much with revision for a change. I want to just belt one out. The story is: Goliath’s Tower. The seed of which is something I read in a book called: Legends of Jerusalem. One of those library treasures my wife finds and tempts me with.
I dreamt last night that my mother was marrying an old man who lived in a little white stone house on an ancient side street.
I was helping her move in. In the living room there was a broken window and three very angry ghosts of three old women. They flew about and attacked me one at a time. They were like bits of gray cloud and were all tatters and bone.
The first one flew into my chest and tried to hide there. With great force of will, I ejected her into the room and out the hole in the broken window. From somewhere I pulled a sword and held it through the hole in the glass so that when the ghost tried to come back through, it was pierced and shriveled and fell to the ground outside.
This repeated with the second one and I was quite satisfied with myself for having cast it away. There was a tree outside that the ghosts spun around and launched out of, racing onto the sword.
The third ghost was much smaller and I thought would be easy to defeat after the other two. She came into my chest and I tried with the same concentration to evict her out the window, but she wouldn’t leave. She had taken residence inside me, encysted somewhere among my organs, and would not leave. It was quite unnerving. I never managed to get rid of her.
I suppose she is inside me still, whoever she is.
How we would see ourselves back then. How we would know ourselves once more.
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Yes. You can dissolve one without question. You can perform a small ritual in a variety of accounts, you can bitch if you have to, but you can in fact erase an identity if you really want to. The faith we place in our tools to reveal us is the proof of how much ignorance we are willing to accept. People who scream for privacy online, miss the point entirely. Online, each of us is an entire generation of children, each of us can be reborn to any age we choose. We can be dumb and happy and entertained and tweaked and random as all get out.
It has it’s marvels. Who isn’t seduced by the tendrils it snakes into our lives. Who doesn’t want to play checkers or tictactoe with a stranger across the world? Someone who doesn’t care who you are or what you are, your race, your age, you sex, your religion. Someone who is as happy to believe whatever you say you are.
I can say I am severnspoon and I am almost surprised to acknowledge it. I could be someone desperately in need of setting himself behind, because he feels compromised somehow by circumstances. A hundred years ago, you moved to a new town and no one had any idea who you were. America was about blissful and constant resurrection.
Men could cross the country and leave behind a trail of aliases that might just one day catch up to him. Never give them your real name. Leave a hobo sign for the next guy.
Somewhere the country got tight and fat and everyone started to know each other and it kind of compromised our American spirit. America is all about free open spaces where anything could be happening and it was likely to be something marvelous. The country was full of such promises as the Rocky Mountains and the Grand Canyon and Death Valley and Miami, Florida: all the landscape of our American mythology has settled into place. We all know the stories now and they have settled out of their tall tale veneer and we wonder now at George Washington and his cherry tree the way we wonder after the cannibals in New Guinea. Who were those people who believed in such things?
We can even watch it on television. On the news. Presidents understand that it doesn’t matter what you mean so long as you say something that is nothing. Your job is to spew bullshit all day, bullshit written by highly skilled and talented individuals certainly, but come on, who buys this? But then you hear it repeated back to you 40 times, from 40 different mediums and the truth just stops mattering. There is enough to worry about with just the constant boiling of breath.
So, yes, you can leave an alias behind. Who cares about an alias anyway? An alias is exactly like an LLC. And why shouldn’t it be? If corporations can get away with virtual facades, why not people? We should all have such freedoms, freedoms at the very frontier of what we are becoming as human beings. I have a greater capacity for personality than anyone in history. The risk is that it is all random somehow, devoid of real character. Cheap, played out, weak. I thought I might lead with intention in some grand effort to defeat the crumbling granularities of our value system. We are only concerned with minute details anymore. Are we going blind to the big picture again?
And at the same time, history seems to accelerate and fade into the background as if it were dissolving into us, as if we were creating history every day. As if we had become great squirrels, storing up for some future drought.
I don’t know about all that and I feel my own interest in the future waning. I have such research facilities at my disposal. I want to sort it all out. I want to try and answer some difficult questions for myself. Pathologies of the psyche, lets say.
I think the world needs to be exposed to it’s great personalities, Napoleon, Magellan, Cortez the killer. What a great and wondrous conjunction of aliases there. I am growing very interested just now in the Aztecs. Montezuma.
I read just today a thing from Magellan’s voyage around the world. One of their ships got lost in a storm and fell several days behind the others. It had found safe harbor and was in need of serious repairs. Eventually, the main fleet turned about to find them and there they were. The limping ship, led them back to a lovely harbor where they beached the smaller vessel and burned it, so the irons could be recovered. Then the captain of the small vessel was taken, and though he was a close personal friend of Magellan’s and the two men liked each other immensely, Magellan had this captain decapitated for mutiny.
It isn’t clear from the recounting that the author, who was present at the events mind you, just what had led to this event although an obvious explanation seems to me that the man had wrecked his ship and Magellan had no use for an extra captain and the man must go down with his ship after all if he is fool enough to ruin it. We are ships, Magellan is telling the captain, we are a part of our ships and can not survive them during the voyage. We can retire one day perhaps from who we were. But while we are shackled to the pilot house, we must tie our fates together or all is lost.
Severnspoon is my ship and by all rights I had to see her through to the end. Our fates were conjoined. Though Severnspoon has a touch of doom in him that intrigues me, I would rather leave it behind just now. Fernando Pessao must have had poets he despised himself for creating. It is a valuable and dangerous lesson. Pessoa.
Severnspoon is a facade though, a thing that requires maintenance, a thing that must be stuffed so it looks human. A tiresome act after all. Keeping a decoy.
