Postcard 53

She's got her boot on my face. Her boot's on my face; my vision is slim. My vision is the scuffed sound of her voice. My neck feels the twist of her laugh. Her nose is powder thin. With nothing but nylons and fuck you black, she hikes up and lets me swat once or twice, tangles up my legs in her arm and laughs -- isn't this just preamble? She is a misabused cathedral on old old land. She bucks against the chest of rattling drawers, and someone walks in. Running out, she laughs again, she knows these robes are stained glass shit. Her body, profaned, belongs naked in the rain. She's got her boot on my face, laughing coldly. She knows, terrified, who's whipping who. The last pagan prayer in this temple was to her. She's pushing up and rising damp, moving my heretical hands where she goes. Her laugh is choking and soundless like her scars and the red on her ass and her thighs. From the first brick, the cathedral was wrong, and wrong as temple and totem.. She was not a stone to hew. In blocks of wet-street smelling street, she rips out her tits and turns on me. Cut them and kiss me with the blood. She slaps me like her boot was on my face, no longer laughing that unlaughing laugh. You're a real man, she says. You're a real man, without even a smile. She should have been a half-buried stone, cusping the earth and laughing at her own tickling vibrations, not a cut and captured temple, a foot on the face cathedral.

Postcard Project Revisited

As I pass fifty postcards posted, and probably closer to a hundred made and mailed, I must call myself into question: What am I doing here?

If I am trying to share with a wider audience, then I am failing. As far as I can tell, I have about ten faithful readers. (This is a good exercise for sublimating the fragility of my ego.) I am not above self-promotion, but neither am I very interested in it. I have been putting off a few ideas to widen my audience, in fact. When I do fret about it, internally or externally, I am immediately aware of the pathetic sound of dross. It is similar to me of the feeling I get when I attempt to synthesize the sublime into some sort of linear coherence.
Which does lead me to what I am doing here: I am synthesizing my sublime -- transcendent and despairing -- into a parceled, non-linear coherence. Reviewing my cards is like watching the arc of my philosophical/spiritual/artistic development in a statistical scatter graph in many dimensions. This was not at all my intention when I began, or even when I began formalizing and sharing. Here is an explanation of my original intent.
I can see now, that I am creating an historic documentation of an informal world view as it examines itself and develops. The form itself is of course feeding back to that development. Its not that I think in the 4.5 x 6 inch boundary, but that I am engaged in a one sided conversation without feedback or reference that would normally be of no more significance than the thoughts that whirl around in my head and fade out of memory. Regardless of the limitations and looseness and loneliness of my form, the structure of writing and the vulnerability of sharing creates responsibilities to both internal veracity and posterity. This is all a lot to say about so flippant a "project", but I take it seriously (but not too self-seriously, I hope):
I have gotten to the point where, on a variety of subjects, I could reference a postcard that would at least begin a conversation on my perspective. I am often tempted to do that,or to tack the link to some specific card onto an online conversation. I have also gotten to the point where I feel that anyone who would take the time to read each and every postcard as part of a larger tangentially connected whole, would have a pretty good sense of the person they are engaging, that is me.

So, taking this project -- that has become a project, that has grown legs enough to have essentially taken over my blog, that has ushered along and matured a perspective to make the more static ideas of my novel fall into question, taking this project as it is -- not seriously, but engaging it, I move forward with the intent of mass and momentum:


I will self promote while hopefully barring my ego from the process. 

I am constantly curious about serious, educated and well developed philosophical ideas as well as ideas in science, the arts,religion and literature. I have no interest in specializing in any of these; I enjoy remaining a dilettante, in fact I feel it is a helpful tool for a writer, but I would like to cultivate a type of feedback that could be transformative to the development of my perspective.

I will be more formal about my postings, aiming for one each Monday afternoon. If you enjoy catching my postcards, that gives you something to look forward to. 

I will continue to make, write and send postcards

Postcard 52

"When you go out, are you pretending to be someone else?" "I'm always pretending to be something else."
The more I approach the true me, the greater the void of true me becomes -- a central emptiness, gravity without mass, light and heat emanating without a source. I'm a black star. All the me's that I pretend shoot out like wavelengths, complimenting or clashing, overlapping or tangential. Some are comfortable and easily slipped into. Comfortable and grasping. Some are stiff and formal, cool and easy, fun or necessary, kicked off with relief like work-boots at the end of the day. I am called all these things, but I am none of them. I am the intersection where they all vanish. I am the dark of the cliff they drop into slumber from. 
When I am terrified, I grasp at one or another, or I plunge some person or thing or identity of self, or some idea of God into the void, and it tightens up and fills, but snaps back. It is insatiable, this self, of others.
But, if I push all that away (with affection), the banks fall off and the masslessness expands. There are no horizons. I float and I expand empty to the blank self that is true. The many selves are distant, bright and comforting like a clear night sky. All the others are shoreline I don't need; I have gills.
I'm a blackstar. Not a father, not a carpenter, not a lover, not a man, not a thinker, not a writer. I'm a blackstar.

Postcard 51

My son has a shirt that reads: I am a noun. Shouldn't it read, I ask: I is a noun? I am that I am, says the Lord, I am the great I am, cast over dark waters, vibrating precisely at the frequency of existence. Forgetting divinity and those origins, there is something magic about words and we know it. Were the earliest words a claim of 'I', of 'you', of 'that'? Does it matter if the purpose is to claim what we are 'is what we are not'? Somewhere in our heads a delicate thing is created: a self, a vague triangulation between the ego, id and superego, or the conscious and subconscious, or whet ever set of that which is, is what is not that we struggle to hold on to with words. The cost of self is separation. The tools we use to bridge separation are words. The work of words is to separate.

What a bridge!

Sit in silence with another, eyes have held and broken, touch has reached out and been returned. The still and fragile you that is only what is not, is perhaps in communion, for it hungers and strains like a vacuum. And here it is: fraternity, affection, comfort, love -- a friend, parent, child, sibling, lover, even a fortuitous stranger. 

Here it is! 

What then, having received for that moment all that we long for, what do we want? Confirmation, security, reciprocation. Are you getting this, is your self with mine, are we a we from what is not we? That moment will pass and if we grow wise we find that we cannot be filled but temporarily through the reciprocation of an other. If we are wise, we know that we are un-fillable, and the vessel is a shell to be born from. If we continue in our wisdom, our love grows to fill the un-fillable and when we get to the end, words fall away

Postcard 50

A writer who doesn't trust language is a like a priest who hates God, a Bodhisattva who denies free will, a groom who believes in the sanctity of nothing, a lawyer who knows there is no legal justice.... Let me tell you about the vanity of dolphins. Dolphins love mirrors. It is true. Give a dolphin a mirror and they will return to it again and again. Are they bored? No, there are plenty of other dolphins to play with. These creatures, to whom hearing and touch are certainly more central than vision, are enamored of their own visual selves. They see themselves and think something along the lines of "that's me!" I wonder if they think that when they vocalize, and I suspect not. Sound projects out and shares the (perceived) instancy of thought. Who could deny that dolphins have a hedonistic joy? I recall the Douglas Adams quote (look it up). My point is that there seems to be a binding between language and self. The words are for identifying between what is and what is not. Say I call a thing a 'tree'. There are many things that are trees, but I most clearly have eliminated what is not a 'tree', so that you know that at least I ma not talking about those things. Now say it out loud: I, Me, My, Mine. You have established a 'you', but only in regard to what you are not. Not the table, not air, not they or them, not bird. Its good to do because I could describe those things so they are indistinguishable from you. A collection of star-furnaced matter, an organized bunch of carbon, a seemingly choice-given being, a person. But you know there is a you that is not those things exactly. What is it then? And where does it come from? Where is it now? As we grow aware and begin speaking, we become better at separating things. And as we grow older and more sophisticated, we continue and our self-seeking identities become more defined. Brittle sculptures. I wonder if, when we die, it collapses and we realize and experience: we are like everything else

Postcard 49

At my grandfather's house, at the top of a low alpine mountain, there is a glass cased cabinet. A curio cabinet with glass shelves as well. In there are artifacts from a traveler's life and mission trips around the world: South America, Madagascar, Borneo. There's a large blue butterfly pinned to felt. There's an ostrich egg, creamy and brittle, meticulously carved with lines and shapes, rhythmic and sharp. Mysterious or even meaningless glyphs dyed a deep burnt-umber brown. It has not left that case as long as I have been alive. It is to me a totem without context, as familiar as grandma's many button jars. Though it seems to be, it is hardly a static object. Like you and I, it is gliding seamlessly through time, always moving further from the mind and intent that crafted it. Always shedding meaning, and in its place, gathering like dust the growing likelihood of its annihilation: the catastrophe, the clumsy child, the errant maid, invisible chisels of entropy. I try to forget the seeming irrelevant fact that at thousand of feet of elevation, it is careening along infinitesimally faster that I am here by the sea. Irrelevant, but poignantly true. In comparison, there is little to separate the idea of that egg (platonically, the form) from the idea or form of a book. In fact, there is little that separates that delicate and empty egg, traveling as it is, away from intention and toward non-existence, from a word spoken or a thought produced in the shell of a mind. Each is cloaked in meaning like the feathers of a cormorant: illustrious and drab, loo light for water, too heavy for air, washed up on a beach like a rag, or clothing an ancient royal, but always frangible and changing.

Postcard 48

I, too, am a member of the cult of fear, the cult of death. I go to the movies, stare at the glowing palloring screens numb and disinterested, play solitaire, watch the news, vote. 

I'm camping in the Serro Alto, a strip of coastal California wilderness. It is raining and the mighty Pacific dresses the rain with fog. The night before, I dreamt of my family and me, together, in a car on the highway -- in a car getting slowly crushed in a rock-slide. The next day, I drove ten miles into town to get some dry fire wood. My phone chattered to life. 

David Bowie was dead.

With dropping stomach, I considered the context: he had recently opened a Broadway play, I had celebrated his sixty-ninth birthday at midnight days before with the First Church of the Sacred Silversexual, and he had concurrently released an album I had yet to hear! 

Here is what I dreamt that night as the nearby stream muttered like barely audible voices in a slightly off-balanced mind: I was there as I camped in that valley. The stream and the steep high hills were there and night had fallen, moonless. Satellites traced faint paths across the sky and bats did likewise, like dark empty meteors. Then, the void of the bats condensed and thickened. The dark silhouette of the skyline gained an awful substance like the idea of a pit of tar without the tar itself. As before, the sky remained indifferent and filled with stars. Red lights rocketed to exotic planets: desert planets, cities, fantasy planets. I could hear their rumbles. A huge and grotesque form grew out of the dark and empty skyline. Bulky on tall spindly legs, it slouched toward me and grew. I felt like a small animal surrounded by fire. Freeze or flee, both in vain desperation. I froze. Perhaps it would not notice me. 

And then, oh then, one of those rockets grew brighter and burned not red, but electric blue. It flew right through the horrible vacancy which shattered like tempered glass. Light flooded me, blinding as the ship landed. The hatch steamed open and out stepped David Bowie, beckoning. 

"I have left," he said, "Come with me." 

How I yearned to go with him. 

"I can't"

"Come," he pleaded with love but without desperation. 

." You killed yourself. Its alright, but you killed yourself and I cant go with you."

Postcard 47

When I climb the hill at dawn, I am granted a pretending sunset -- the sunrise behind me reflects and refracts in the fog banks rolling over the hills and pushing through the golden gate. 

What is it that sailors say about red skies?

Whatever. Its going to be alright.

This time of year, little hopping birds fill trees in clusters, chirping like rambunctious free leaves, released from immobility. This time of year, the birds of prey pair off: marsh hawks, buzzards, red-tails, kites. They fly low and alight upon fences and poles. The world I look on from the hill has a clarity of intent, of consummate energy. 'Keep going' is its wordless mantra. The broken-legged and starving fox, the lame goose cut off sharply from its annual transience, the tree blown or cut down pushing up creepers. Always reaching, as if worship were just a formal and overwrought reaching.

Keep going. Its going to be alright. 

Turning around on my hill, I survey rail yards, shipyards, ports, terminals, refineries, roads and freeways, hospitals, government buildings monolithic, schools, jails, prisons. I see all the things that make us human. I see so many houses and cars that I wonder how, with this being an irrelevant sampling, it could all be possible. Mines and logging and transit. I resist it all, but I know that I participate. I know that I am a symbiote to that very real matrix of systems built beyond any understanding and interlaced. A great gluttony of entangled knots. 

I could move to the hills. 

I could join a hermitage. 

I could become a vagabond. 

I could build a boat... 

There is a heritage I cannot escape nor can I resist that many bladed inheritance to my children. 

Keep going? Its going to be alright? 

Red sky at morning. Red sky at night.

Postcard 46

Thunderstorms are conspicuously absent here. The bay is a temperate bowl with a narrow spout: sucking in cool wet air from the north, warming it, and spitting it out to the east. Never hot, nor cold, only extreme in the speed of its cycles. 

What do we lose here? 

The kinetic stillness of extremes. In the desert, the tundra, the high mountains, each thing is in status with the other; the ground, the many layers of strata of sky. In a thunderstorm, the very particles hold, are holding, trembling in expectant stillness. In stillness and silence, imminence is present like an inscrutable and polymorphous god. Can we summon or conjure this stillness in our own climatous, calamitous selves? Among each other? Can we bring two together charged and vibrating, in stillness kinetic? Will two, without the distortion of words and minor intents, find a common or complimentary frequency, and oscillate in darkness till some catalyst, some cataclysm releases heat and tension in roaring lightening? 

I believe we are perfect conductors but unsuitable containers for these ecstasies. They would fill the burning of anticipation with the void of arc. We'd sob and moan and laugh in terror and joy, then collapse like spent ozone on a salt-white desert. This is feeling alive in moments. Feeling alive like this is a truth, like sand turned to tubes of black glass, sharp and empty, featureless and cool as a stone knife plunged into flesh. But the sand and the sky and the clouds are also otherwise true. We are also otherwise true without ripping matter asunder.

Postcard 45