on cartography

 

[From a larger essay project]

 

But to write about myself, I would have to be able to see around myself.  I would have to see my own gesture, hear my own tongue.  Smell my own scent.  Impossible. Unattainable.  I only know what I intended.  The perfume on my inner wrist, the hollow of my throat, placed carefully in the morning.  I cannot tell you how my body shifts the tones, only that it must happen.  A matter of chemistry.  I am not completely fanciful. 

 

See, text limits.  You cannot tell me either.  Even if you wanted to.

 

And of course, you have snuck into my text.  Invasive, invaded.  I need to map the ways I am overrun, the ways I am persuaded.  I can fortify if I can track you. If I can learn the location of the chinks you slip between.  But I am bad at mapping. I am even worse at defense.  See the way you enter, without effort?

 

 

 

*I am writing about maps these days. Strange essays that meander without direction, and I am drawn again to cartography.  The art of leaving things out to describe.  

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Disaster Heels

Though a later night than I’d meant, I navigated buses and danced around and had an altogether splendid time.  If you love dancy music, check out Skalami.  They are a lot of fun, and bring me back to what I used to listen to. 

I’m realizing: I love music.  To be fair, it’s not a completely new revelation.  Tomorrow night is another fun evening, checking these guys out.  Nicest people you’ll meet and I’m happy to go support them.  

Looking around tonight I realized that, despite everything, I love what I’ve found here in Seattle.  It might be a bit rocky at points, and I have lost many things, but I am finding a place.  

So enjoy the music! And dance, dance, dance!

Postponed

I’m going to hold off on Monday Journals for a little bit.  I have pages of scrawled notes, but I can’t seem to get the art to work.  Spring lurch I suppose.  Working on getting my headspace back.

Word Play

For everyone in Seattle, I have three photographs up in the University of Washington Photography Group’s exhibit “Word Play.”  For those of you not in Seattle, here’s a pdf recreation (click here), complete with black frames.  All of the images in the show have some sort of text accompanying, from pieces of poems to myths to narratives.  The text is displayed to the left of the series.  If you’re in Seattle and want to check them out, the show is in the Barrel Vault Gallery, off of the third floor lobby in the University Medical Center.

My chosen text.

Titles for the photographs:

Here

Steady

Untitled (For C.)

 

 

***** Updated ****

 

So here are some pictures that Dave took at the opening.  I’m not sure what Lou and I are laughing at, but we were enjoying ourselves!

The Book of…

Reading Hélène Cixous’ The Book of Promethea has found me at a strange place.  “Our history has a bumpy geography:” she writes.  What history doesn’t?  It is a book about love, but un-love.  The not-love that is love.  The pain of it all.  “Because in love not all is love.”  And the absolute fiery consuming beauty.

And then I read this and I am foolish and little and young; I know nothing of tragedy or pain.  

This is a terrifying place, the world.  There are so many breakable moments, so many crushing defeats.  So much love beneath it all but how to find that vein… sometimes it seems I know, other-times it is impossibly distant and I am parched.  (Cixous’ voice infects me. I mimic poorly, but I can’t approach her book without beginning to slip into it.  My thoughts want to follow hers, trace the spaces between lines for some thread back to myself.)  I am wandering.