Taliesin is closed

I was hoping that on this trip I'd finally get to visit Taliesin West, but unfortunately they are closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays in August.

I've been rediscovering one of my favorite authors lately, reading Clive Barker's terrific novel "Sacrament". I first read it when it was brand new. I remember greedily snapping up my first edition copy the day it hit the bookstores. I found a café that afternoon and read until my eyes were sore, savoring every word. "Sacrament" is a book which was great to begin with, but it has improved with age. I'm catching things this time around that went completely over my head the first time around – nuances and flourishes in Barker's characterizations and subtleties in his descriptions that are simply wonderful. I've always been a repeat reader. I have a selection of twenty books that I read every summer – I'm wondering now why I never added any of Barker's books to this list. I think that both "Sacrament" and "The Great and Secret Show" belong on it. Both books are brilliantly realized and written with so many layers that they stand up wonderfully after multiple readings.

Perhaps it is time to totally revise my yearly reading list anyway – I may stop reading "The Stand" and replace it with one or two of Barker's works.

I'm hoping to finally see Taliesyn West in Scottsdale.  I've been saying that I was going to go there for a long time, but this time I think I'll actually do it!

Desert

(thats the Sierra Vista Public Library up there!)
Its pretty interesting living in the desert. The weather is variable and unpredictable. The mood of the landscape can change entirely with the influence of a passing cloud, or a flock of doves chasing a hawk, or the sound of a locust out in the grass somewhere. Looking into the backyard this morning gave me both a thrill and a chill - the grass is more than a foot tall, and its refreshingly green. There are wildflowers everywhere, white, purple, blue, yellow. The mimosa tree is in full blossom an waving hairily in the wind. Those things are the thrill. The chill is the knowledge that soon I'll have to get out there and cut down the grass and wildflowers. City ordnance won't allow us to have natural meadows on our property - we can be fined if the grass is too tall. For now, I'll enjoy the meadow as it stands.

Walking this morning I was reminded about just how easy it is to miss the beauty of the desert altogether. When you see it from the road, driving by at 75 MPH, it is a blur. The greens and browns blur into a muddy smear. The distant mountains are beautiful, but the near field is obscured. Someone who has only seen this place from the road has not really seen it at all.

When you walk, everything is different. You can walk out into the grass among the mesquite trees and cactus, and suddenly find yourself swallowed up in it. What looks dead from the highway is full of rambunctious life. Lizards, birds, snakes, rabbits, jackalopes, coyotes, javelina! A riot of activity. And the colors, so blurred and ugly are clarified and delineated. Flowers, grass, sand, stone - and the sky, which can be so blue sometimes that it hurts to look at it. That's why I tell people that Arizona is hell for a motorist, but heaven for hikers.

Here is a pic of two of the fine folks who keep me in coffee (and the occasional cookie!) when I'm working in my favorite cafe!
It rained - and not a small rain either! Torrents, in an unbroken cover of clouds, which is very unusual here in the desert. Most of our rain comes from isolated groups of clouds. Its quite wonderful when we see an unbroken cloud cover from horizon to horizon.

This desert has so many moods. Rain only enhances them. I remember some of the rainy stretches back east. Boston would be gray and rainy for days, sometimes even weeks at a time. That kind of constant rain could really take the steam out of your day.

Here, when it rains, it usually comes as a welcome break from the beautiful weather. In monsoon, you can watch the storms build in the course of the day. Often there are cloudless mornings. Ten O'Clock rolls around and there are a few puffy clouds, perhaps some high cirrus. By noon, the clouds have grown into castles - huge thunderheads loom on the horizon. Late afternoon they begin to march, down the mountains and into the city. And by early evening, normally the storms have done their damage and there is only a residue of rain or clouds. Some evenings produce lightning displays long after the rain has stopped. Sitting in the livingroom with the curtains open I can watch the flashes, so much brighter than the electric lightbulbs.

Mind at Work Mind at Play

So – the tentative title of the book is "Mind at Work, Mind at Play – an exploration of the human playground" I'm sure I'll come up with a better subtitle sooner or later. It's a good thing though that I haven't made or inserted the title page yet! This morning was marketing time. Ordered a few tees, designed and ordered a few mugs, and wrote a short piece on silly HW movies about princes masquerading as paupers to find true love. The Cinderella story has been with us for so long that we will never escape it, seemingly.

More than anything, I dislike the morality that it portrays. That misrepresenting oneself in the name of true love is okay because essence perceives essence. It that were true, why would the seeker not be able to spot the true love at once, without subterfuge?

Back to day to day notation. I was talking with some people yesterday trying to clarify the point of MAWMAP. The concept of the mind as a playground expressed in a book form is what I've been able to define. Essentially, when I work on the book I'm playing with my mind, using it as a tool of exploration and enjoyment. We spend so much time dwelling on negative thoughts, so little time exploring the mind and finding the ways that it can delight and enrich us. It's the old cliché, that we can't see the forest for the trees, that we can't take time to stop and smell the flowers. When I write, I try to be as free about it as I can. Right now the work is disciplined, because I'm in work mode. But when I open MAWMAP and put pen or brush to paper, the rules are eroded. I was looking at some pages yesterday, and thinking that someone else reading them would think I was nuts. The thoughts are garbelled. I was using and English format, but all the nouns and verbs were nonsense. I laughed a few times reading it, but there is nothing of substance there. Play, plain and simple. The book is an expression of my own innate playfulness, with all its grandiosity, pretentiousness, innocence, arrogance, anger, meanness and tenderness I can muster. The content is irrational and unfathomable – but the process that it illustrates is not. This book is not intended to be appreciated for what it contains, so much as for what it is. Something to be held and looked at, enjoyed hopefully. It is also an exercise in touching the past to some degree. I'm doing something similar to what monks did – but rather than duplicating the thoughts contained in the Bible, I'm creating new thoughts on a minute to minute basis, or playing with images and a juxtaposition of symbols, without working to hard to create associations between those symbols.

Blue

I like blue - particularly when it is the sky. Today I'm driving in it. Who knew that the sky could get so big? Its been diminished lately due to cloud cover and thunderstorms. They have their own majesty, but the sky is shrunken to smaller proportions when they are present. Today's a day with high cirrus clouds which seem to enhance the sky's enormity rather than diminish it. The mountains seem to drift like ships on the horizon, each range behind its parent just a little more veiled, but there is no ending to them, only a distant vanishing point. And as I drive, that recedes into infinity.
I also like blue when it is on my brush, hitting the paper to transform the plane into a space of its own, with echoes of that infinity. I like blue when it is wrapped around my legs in my jeans. I like blue when it is wrapped around my beloved as a dress. I love blue ice, with a flavor supposedly blueberry, but really just blue itself, not like any other flavor.
I like blue when it is in your eyes, or in your eyes reflected in a mirror. I like blue when it appears from the point of a pen or when it rushes by in a river, or is captured in the stillness of a lake. I like blue when stars fall through it. But most of all, I love blue when it is true.

Note by the Man I Might Have Been

I've been working on a book for about a year now. More correctly, I have been working on a volume in a collection of books. I always have a volume or two in progress, but this one has had a peculiar focus for me. The volume itself is a luxurious, oversized and leather bound book, with hand marbled paper on the cover, and handmade Amalfi paper, slightly off white with a beautiful laid surface that holds both watercolor and ink nicely. The ink never crawls, and there is no bleed through, even when I work the sheets heavily. The pages are entirely hand written, and hand illustrated. Although early volumes of this project were fairly standard journals - accounts of my day to day life. This latest one is a little different. I remember reading an essay by Camus where he discussed the process of writing. "Everything as it comes!" he said. I started writing with that impulse, writing every thought I could capture, no matter how stupid or insignificant it seemed at the time. This new book has some of that. I have several titles for it. One is "Mind at Work, Mind at Play" and that describes the shifts between free writing and more structured things. One of the other titles is "Notes By the Man I Might Have Been" which are elements written like entries in a normal journal, but as if written by myself on a different time line. They are fanciful, and definitely fiction, a fun way to see what alternative choices in my life might have gained or lost me. Would I have been happier had I married that woman? Would I have been better off had I accepted a record deal with Taang? What if I had become a witch, or followed a different path altogether? What if I'd never gone to Germany? Some of these questions are addressed in a journal written by a very different me. Is it profound in any way? I doubt it. Are there valuable thoughts in it? Some. Does it attempt to teach or even reach deep truths? No. Is if fun to work on? Absolutely! And I find it fun to leaf through. This is not a book to be read and explicated, so much as it is an attempt, simply, to share thoughts. Thoughts are nebulous, confusing, sometimes ugly, sometimes beautiful. Sometimes they engender trust, sometimes they are full of lies, sometimes they are patterned but just as often they are chaotic. Some of the stories are funny. Some are tragic, or very very sad. Some are even truthful, insofar as distant memory can be truthful.
I've been telling people lately that the book is a playground at its essence. I go there to play games with myself. My hope is that some people in leafing through my book will find it entertaining. What do I want the book to do? Well I certainly hope that it will entertain. Some people may like the paintings. Some may find the writing interesting. Hopefully, some will find the exercise interesting enough that they will create their own! I'd love to see thousands of these kinds of books made in the next century, some on paper, some digital, some in formats and media that hasn't been dreamed up yet. But at base, people sharing thoughts. My particular format has been the book - old style is what the kids say about me. I like the look and the feel of a book, particularly ones like this one that are well made. I love to leaf through volumes, looking at thoughts that others have left there for me. I also love how much a book can change with its setting. It appears one way in daylight, a different way in flourescent light, different still by candlelight. Surround it with gold and ornaments and it can set a spiritual tone. Put it plain on the grass in a meadow and it becomes something altogether different. Thoughts are absorbed as they are read, like somebody eating a light snack. Pop it in, swallow it down, digest what is of worth, shit out the rest.

Strange Overheard Conversations

One thing that I love about sitting to work in public places is the absurd and amusing conversations you can overhear. I was sitting in a café this morning reading a newspaper. At the next table over, two gentleman were discussing the recent plans (currently covered exhaustively in the news) to build a Mosque near Ground Zero in NYC. One fellow was saying to the other that it was a bad idea because Ground Zero is to US Citizens as sacred as the Kaaba in Mecca is to Muslims, or the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem is to Jews. The other fellow replied that he had no gripes about a Mosque near ground zero, so long as we were allowed to build a Hooters, and a Catholic Church near the Kaaba.
It would behoove both of these gentleman to read Roger Ebert's blogpost about the subject. It is astute, patriotic, and clearly delineates the issue. Here is a link to it:
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/08/ten_things_i_know_about_the_mo.html
Thanks to Wanda McCollar for posting the link on her Facebook page.

Another odd conversation was between a child and her mother. The child was asking her mother if they could take a trip on the train. The mother asked her why it was so important to her right now. The kid said that her best friend had explained that taking a trip on the train is how her mommy got her a little sister.

The mother thought about this for a minute, then told her daughter: well, it wouldn't work. In order to get a little sister on the train, Mommy has to kiss Daddy, and since he's in Germany right now, we can't do that.