Love Tārā

I am Yeshe Dawa, the moon is on me.
I sat in mahāmudrā for ten million years:
शिव's throat burned dark blacking-blue
my milk came and went, tides of κέφι
and the suffering of many millions of creaturitas
passed through the open chamber of my heart.
I was approached by monks & told I was a great buddha
& should consider maleness as a form of birth
with perhaps greater potential for further attainments.
From then on I resolved always to be born a woman.

In orbit between the high crypt of the windowless 5th floor (better now, less toxic, but still a space of deprivation) and the cold shuffle of home: from bed to blanket-bunkered couch with stack of books, to bathroom, to changing clothes directly in front of heater (the one shot of heat in our otherwise parsimonious corn pellet usage). A 3rd stop added in later days: SWIMMING!: the mini orbit of lapping, the attention to tile patterns, the enforced breath rhythm – a retraining (recently having gained awareness of a habit of unintentionally holding the breath). These patterns are punctuated by the thrill of excavated winter limbs, flesh flushed pink underneath all skin colors, drippy, shiny, rubber headcaps, foam, the exciting activity-specific equipment of goggles, echoes. Finally, the quick and pleasurable shock from cold pool to hot shower before wetheaded biking. STAYIN' ALIVE!

RIP Lapidaria margaretae.
I trust: lithops energy is underground in winter.

meat is flesh the morning was
zero degrees fahrenheit snow dry
& powdery sky clear but with a brief
bluddy smudge for a sunrise the piglets

all huddled up shivery against their old
ma and the next morning same time the
sky was dark and blowy and it was fifty
degrees with the snow almost rained out
and the runt was pretty much dead

Out of this hardened block of sugar,
I carve you a sugar egg.
I detail curls of frosting: green leaves, red ants, blue bats, white whales, black ink, brown dots.
I leave them to cluster and dry in the aphasiac insides and I paper you another egg.
I paint one eye, leave a circle for the second, leave an open mouth, whiskered, shellack it bright red, and scent it, voluble.
It attends to the space, the gaps, and gathers the past.

fireplaces urinals woodstoves tombs the air was so agitated little winds seeming to cross one another and go all ways at once and the custom in that country had a little framed photo of the dead on each slab sarcophagus with a glass plate covering it and the way the panes fit loosely into the grooves of their marble frames they rattled like all the bones in bardo

visible: textile becomes not a clothing/piece of cloth, but a collection of yarns, and then of fibres
invisible: we inset a strap so that an object becomes something, itself, out of its parts; we hide the labor of attaching the strap, this book is just held, simply, and has always been this way

[woven fibres (textile) ragged out & pulped, set in pasty soup to screens & booked, struck undumb: text]

the pages themselves of the book are invested with mycelia Willie
the pages themselves are wrapped around the columella
the pages struck by inked lead become intelligent
present spore material for furtherance of algal proto-organism

(columella cups and stalks in mess of lichen harvested out of the hunger-organs of an arctic hind & eaten with whalefat & sealflesh, the only wegetable we ever had)

Poca. VA

appletrees grew on either side of the steep street offering every year late summer/early fall their good seedling fruit to our pleasure and we had a kind of proprietary feeling about the particular character of their stripings and russetings and their sweets and subacids and big Spicebush Swallowtails kept the qi moving gently or restoratively up and down the hill even as the coal-owners began to spit us out after so many years of chewing and the pavement cracked up and people started to move away

When one thing leads to another and the first thing dries up, peels off, flakes away; thus with fruit, thus with follaje, thus with wind. Le deuxième oeil, bleu-blanc, voit du vent. Not the agitated contents of the wind but the wind itself. Why the air is moving, why the blossom-end goes punky, why the heart withholds its presence: questions.

The flesh of the fist of my heart,
the distance between me and whales,
the space between my skin and yours,
before,
flames!

Ikea Ikea Ikea Ikea Ikea Ikea Ikea Ikea Ikea Ikea

The Basin's mass of water held up & off behind that big door, we stole down dry stone steps into the graving dock's depths to operate our cinema-machine. Spring-driven device divided night, an hour's chilly labor. Everything changed now. Film-strip finds vaguest ghosts of gone world.

Three distinct layers of organic matter have accreted over the asphalt I laid with a teen work-crew on the grounds of the Physical Culture Palace nineteen years ago. I noticed today eight varieties of weed flourishing there, three of them useful to me. One of them deadly.

Bread is thicker than water

My old father, with the weariness of his tens of thousands of days upon him, used (before he passed) to enrich the fibres and folds of my mind with roumanoglot adages whose age and/or authenticity I don't presume to guess at but whose wisdom I was only ever able to bow to.

Julian was more insistent last night, telenovela style:

-Dame otra cerveza!
-No! Tienes que manejar.
-Quedo! Quiero quedar contigo!
-No, no lo quiero.
-Puedo tocarte?
-No...
-Acceptame!
-Tu deseo -- lo puedo sentir -- vibrando [pulsing hands] -- me hace nerviosa [hands as barrier].
-Comelo!

For once(!), I am choosing to be with the feelings I have surrounding my interactions with Valic, to learn from them, rather than introducing another set of undoubtedly complicated stuff with Julian, my new Spanish friend (stonemason contracted for repair of National Library entranceway).

TANTRASARA(H)

I put myself in child's-pose before you,
mother Nila-Sarasvati.
You give joy & health.
You're sitting on a corpse's chest, on his heart,
leaning aggressively forward.
You have three bright fearsome eyes.
You have a skull-bowl, a sword, big scissors.
Your body shines like blazing fire.
Give me refuge.
Give me ability to arrange words clearly.
Let all your gracious nectar drench my heart
and cut away my pride.
You wear a tigerskin skirtlet
and a garland of bloody heads.
You're frightening
and you remove fear.

(Śiva is the corpse,
я शिव!)

I am developing a habit of hand work (binding) in the morning and creative work (drawing, designing book) in the evening, after an early dinner and a cup of caffeinated tea. At first, when only the head is engaged, there are behavior patterns to constructively occupy the nervous hand and mouth energy, until the hands can be fully engaged as well. I ultimately reach a point in this arrangement where I can make lines without fear. This is the real cure for the funk.

Other temporary and lesser funk cures include
1) giving in to society and relaxing fully and non-critically into some sort of trash (serious side effects)
2) opening pathways to let emotions in, cresting bodily (a process, a developing habit, probably not a lesser cure)
3) expending energy through physical exercise (solidly good).

(Emerging structures and habits occupy spaces of other ones: judgment, competition, repression. In moments of full occupation, it becomes apparent that judgment is a worry about being putrefied by one's own uncomfortable spots or by other peoples' difficulties that we hope to have surpassed, and that creative process envelops dirtiness in a loving embrace.)

My Brother and I were cooking together last night, bitter-greens/brined-cheese placinta and a simple lamb paprika. In the quiet space between two bottles of such cheap cava as is called "soviet" when sold in Brooklyn he proposed, predictably, a tisane of kava kava (Piper methysticum) before our second cork's expulsion in order to mellow us more deeply while the flesh simmered and the yufka rested. I conceded. We took our seats and, after a steeping carefully time-managed by my brother, contentedly commenced to sipping of the root. He talks well at tea, always, and here with the champagne already in him and the good cook-smells around I found him to be even more than usually on top of his game. He set in to narrating dreams.

"You and I were in Bratislava composing a low brick wall around a rye-field; it was distinctly Bratislava, but the boys who came one after another bringing our materials cracked their jokes in Greek, and the café where we presently found ourselves drinking lemonade & himbeergeist with your friend Mioritza was the one we used to like next to the train station in Alexandroupoli. I said something to you about the rye, I can't remember what, something botanical; and in response Mioritza leaned in close to both of us and said, 'That phrase is looking to be surrounded by verse!'"

We both laughed and I got up to roll out the dough and assemble our placinta. My brother worked gently at the cork of our second bottle & resumed, his phrasing punctuated elegantly after the word "dreamed" by the pretty pop which initiated the cork's flight out through the open window.

"And then I dreamed (!) I was in Nashville Tennessee, needing urgently to print up twelve copies of a short book – like a Blake prophecy – the plates for which I was carrying in a shoulderbag. How was I to find the means to do this in Nashville Tennessee? I was at wit's end; but was suddenly talking with someone about local butterflies, about how the Cloudless Sulphurs all parade endlessly southward along the bank of old brick buildings on 1st Avenue fronting the river; and somehow in between the lines of everything she said I started to discern and decipher a code by which I came to understand that if I were to walk ten miles out of town toward Murfreesboro I would come to a settlement of Chineses (cf. Milton, Paradise Lost, III.438) who were managing a magic portal through which one might step directly into Manahatta New Jork. I set myself at once upon this course. Presently my heart became a small tumbled cullet of rose quartz and slipped out of my chest. I carried it a while in my left-hand pocket while I walked and then somehow lost it – though I could feel it thumping still somewhere, expanding invisibly into the dirty world around, loving all."

Ache, trauma of train-travel, weakness from hunger (money short). Oaks so huge they dwarf my desire as I rattle & sway past the high, massy bulks of their leafage. The Pontic flood-plains consume me, swallowing my want in a slow, complex arithmetic of kilometers and hours. Where will this end, whom will I meet in what noisy terminus in the heart of what dirty mercantile city? I'm capable of forgetting, here, in this chaos of sense, while my subtle-body, outstripped and struggling to catch up & recombine, races desperately, bewilderedly, not quickly enough, along the silver double-ribbon of rail behind.

I left the city today for a fungal excursion with my brother and with cousin X, who's visiting against her druthers but in deference to our relentless invitations and who will "post" this when she reaches Vienna by the overnight train on Thursday morning. As I write, however, in the textual present, in the textual present, in the textual present, we are happily at sup on picnic planks here and enjoying our chanterelle and
chicken-of-the-woods fried in butter & dressed with horseradish mayonnaise. Wine, we were just remarking, is slack but excellent. In contrast, butterflies are abundant but redundant: pretty, dull clouds of milky pierids.

To Shit in our Trinkwasser: dispatch from Slovenia

With my brother & cousin X, I recently perused the models and mock-ups of Western Domestic Interiors on display at the newly-opened Pavilion of Cultural Exchange. When confronted with one open closet containing a ceramic basin inviting our excretions, closer examination revealed a transparent but solid barrier preventing any deposit. After considering this, my cousin exclaimed with this always-timely observation:

"In a traditional German lavatory, the hole in which shit disappears after we flush is way in front, so that the shit is laid out first for us to sniff at and inspect for traces of some illness; in the typical French lavatory, on the contrary, the hole is in the back – that is, the shit is supposed to disappear as soon as possible; finally, the Anglo-Saxon (English or American) lavatory presents a kind of synthesis, a mediation between these two opposed poles: the basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it – visible, but not to be inspected..."

One of the features that distinguishes man from the animals is precisely the fact that with humans the disposal of shit becomes a problem.

"Nous avons chiés la moitié de notre merde."

Dear whale-tribe,
I give dispatch from waterbound Lubeck; finally made it all the way downeast into the bright briny borders of this count(r)y. It turns out that for all those years it was only ever a three-hour bikeride away.
Our family is cleaning its hearts! Flensing foot-thick fat-jackets off to expose mammalian circulatory systems: feel the love expand! our hands all together in a big wooden vat massaging a caseworth of sperm! our dirty brig & its high clean sails!
Today the 31st birthday of one of our dead; ten years in the grave this November, I hope some one of you will read this today and think of him.
Yesterday the degré zéro birthday in NYC of one Anatole Naphtali Tober.
I love you all
& you are with me

MR HUNTER'S GRAVE

"God keeps His eye on those that are dead and buried the same as He does on those that are alive and walking. When the time comes the dead are raised, He won't need any directions where they're lying. Their bones may be turned to dust, and weeds may be growing out of their dust, but they aren't lost. He knows where they are; He knows the exact whereabouts of every speck of dust of every one of them. Stones rot the same as bones rot, and nothing endures but the spirit."

"'Several men from Sandy Ground fought in the Civil War,' Mr. Hunter said, 'and one of them was Samuel Fish.'"

"Preserved Fish is in vault No. 75 in the century-old New York City Marble Cemetery at Second St. near Second Ave. wherein lie many of oldtime New York's families: Chesebrough, Lenox, Ogden, Allen, Bogardus, Van Alen, Griswold, Kip, Taylor, Stanton, Webb. A marble slab marks "PRESERVED FISH'S VAULT" where five others (only one other Fish. Mary) are buried. On the Fish plot there also rises a marble monument to Captain H. Leslie, a New Bedford fellow-whaler, who is also in vault No. 75."

"Preserved is a venerable Quaker name. "

A pod of minkes off Quoddy Head

echolocating into ports of call, corpse-fed blueberries steeping in the tub of oil, saltcod lard mash sea-vapor in our cold noses.
sunk by a whale we become enfeebled and draw lots. first attempt by lashing and stabbing with shark vertebra cane leaves only red marks. strangulation with a strip of baleen leads to consumption of remains with a floating piece of weed. gnawing on bones lasts for subsequent weeks.
it is now possible to imagine centuries of hilltop whale yoga, shrouded in skinny anatomy, scrimshaw cutouts rolling downhill.

my heart like a strawberry crushed up in against the ribby heat of my sternum from inside
or like a paste trying to be a vapor, bits of abhogi bone-sherds ground in
like the shape of my arm

My brother's friend Stella visited yesterday from Chişinău (kiss-me-now). We (us three) walked up into the big pasture behind the two fields where my brother's been growing rye four-five years now according to the no-till methods of Masanobu Fukuoka. The purplish inflorescences of orchard-grass spilled pollen-clouds as our striding broke the tall stems: wiry undesirables such as this have come in thick this year to many of the pastures around, thwarting sward-health and dispiriting local ruminants. But the rye looked good.

Stella Rotaru is an intimate of my brother's and a hero of mine. In the postcommunist free-market circus that comprises our brutal now, Moldova has been ripe ground for the slave-diggers; the socioeconomics are perfect and their crop keeps coming. Slave-trade! Moldovan souls in cauchemarish foreign bondage, too much to try and understand. I spin around helplessly in the attempt; Stella makes phonecalls, weaves networks, connects, runs hither-thither, mobilizes funds, rescues people. Into the dark sky of this kali yuga world with its governments laughably bankrupt, Stella rises like some kind of citizen Wilberforce. She acts where all seems unactionable, commits cosmic seva, heart by heart.

Later we had tea and rose-cakes in the kitchen, Grebenshchikov on the hi-fi. My brother told the story about the goat and the beet-patch and Stella said, "When I figure out what that little bit of magic is behind the machinery of a fairy-tale, I think it will give me super-powers!"

make out
hamster and orange juice
paleotechnology
girl on girl yogurt

Aνάμεσα στο παρθεναγωγείο και την έκθεση, σ' ένα δρομάκι πολύ στενό, μονοπάτι μάλλον, χρόνια βρίσκονταν παραπεταμένη – κατά την προσφιλή συνήθεια των αρχαιολόγων μας – μια θαυμάσια αρχαία σαρκοφάγος. Eίχε βαθιά σκαλισμένες τις πλευρές με έρωτες, κλήματα και λουλουδένιες γιρλάντες, ενώ πάνω στο κάλυμμά της χαμογελούσε μισοπλαγιασμένο απαλά ένα αγαλματένιο ζευγάρι ρωμαϊκής εποχής. Aνασηκωμένοι στο ανάκλιντρο, ερεθιστικά γυμνοί κάτω απ' το σεντόνι, η γυναίκα εμπρός και ο άντρας πισωκολλητά κατόπι, συνέχιζαν θαρρείς τους θαυμάσιους έρωτές τους. Mου άρεσε να τους κοιτώ, γι' αυτό, τις νύχτες ιδίως, περνούσα συχνά από κει. Mε αναπαύουν, άλλωστε, όλοι οι έρημοι και σκοτεινοί δρόμοι. Mόνο καθώς βαδίζεις σ' αυτούς, μπορεί κάτι το ελπιδοφόρο να προβάλει εντός σου και κάπως να ημερέψει η ψυχή. Πήγαινα και καθόμουν στο χείλος της μισοσκεπασμένης λάρνακας, σα να περίμενα ν' αναστηθεί το αντρόγυνο ή να έρθουν οι γλυκιές μυροφόρες για να τις αναγγείλω εγώ πρώτος την ανάσταση: ηγέρθησαν, ούκ εισιν ώδε· ίδε ο τόπος όπου έθηκαν αυτούς. Συνήθως όμως ξεπρόβαλε ανάμεσα στ' αγριόχορτα και στα ψηλά σινάπια κάποιος που έρχονταν για ανάγκη του ή κανένας τύπος ύποπτος, μόνος του ή με παρέα. Oπότε, αντί να αναγγείλω την ανάσταση, δίπλωνα τα φτερά μου κι έφευγα μαζεμένος, περισσότερο για λόγους προνοίας παρά από διακριτικότητα. Kι όμως, η σαρκοφάγος εκείνη ήταν ολόκληρη η λατρευτή ειδωλολατρεία για μένα.

Sitting at this same desk, shuffling these same papers, reaching over occasionally to the same old Stella to plunker out "Jesse James" or "Στην Ανατολή", I find myself marking the closure of another year, another anniversary in this history, another moment of reflection in the swift spasmodic rush of nonlinear time. It's amazing how recently it seems that my last gennethlia passed. I was thirty, now I'm twenty-nine. The lilac- and apple-bound cellarholes I inhabited all those years as I worked up my skin's capability to blister under sunlight, my flesh's acceptance of al-kohol, my blood-sugar's marginal & fleeting stabilities; from the perspective of this desk in this office in this library I feel now nothing but an overwhelming and endless flow of gratitude toward each and every one of those windowless spaces.

The first hot days have left cellar dwellers burnt; my body is geometrically bulged/embossed by the sun. Skin discomfort and heat jump add to money worry, general apocalypse fear, transition homelessness. Allergic cellar catarrh in ear/nose/throat persists. I look out on Orinitsa Square with all people sweating, its misshapen rap, converging streets, ambulances. My birthday approaches and I wrap up in my red and white napkin: calendula yellow, cold green, cold water, a new notebook, room cleaning.

Pushkin's Afric grandpère come to Casceaux, to this meager islet and its few stout, ant-addled houseframes, to its weeds scrappily alive with myrmecophilous larval blues. To this island, "where I suffered, where I loved, where I buried my heart." Blue waters steeling over to chop and froth as the ships approach with a storm in company. Memory playing tricks.

My young body softens & blurs under bedazzled years' accretion. Spaces collapse; but only to open other ones. Objects and bodies are spaces condensed. Time is space dancing, with fire in one hand and a drum in another. I am Shiva. My mountain cannot hide me. Kali stomps my corpse, her skully scalpy gear rattling and raining against me. The only breath I can get my lungs around is love. Sat. Nam. Joyful resorption of all this endless excess. «Je» est un autre: moi j'suis Shiva/Girija, jamais seul!

Rina called from the Crimea: she wants me to come sunbathe. I told her, "Too many wide-plank pines, too few hours, too much fatigue, impossible!" Library affairs are dismal too. But I rode my bike out to Hîrbovăţul Nou a few days ago to attend wedding ceremonies of friend Dieter, one of the Anenii Noi district's seven Jews; I drank generously & joyously of the good Feteasca Neagră, staining my mouth and my shirt: but ruddying my fragile spirits, sadly, only for a passing time.

I spent part of today in East Tiraspol screwing in "wide plank pine" aka "half-ass" aka "the way to do carpentry" floors with my friend and part-time employer Petru. Other tasks included running doors up and down the stairs to the circular saw to be cut off at the bottom in order to fit over the floors which were going on top of old linoleum, and answering Petru's questions/guesses about which of my female acquaintances are lesbians (he is avidly dating). He observed, "I don't think armpit hair is an indicator anymore." We were done in 5 hours, including lunch. A short workday, and I feel tired! I can't believe I used to do this kind of work every day.

I ready my bandy bike for a thrust west, the sad me holding tight to the tentative other me and the whole hoping that silence can be trusted. Glows and gleams relamp, chordal voixes knotting, love at long endless last
aum shri matre namaa
girija shankara
aum namaa shivaya
shiva aum namaa

Even an island ringed with windswept blue
even my lonely body in heartbreaking Casceaux
even this lilacking season

Hard times in P-town. Feeling thin, flimsy, dragging. A shift today with afternoon two-and-a-half glasses of graduation champagne, a giggling fit. Circumscribedly thankful to alcohol for changing my brain patterns.

Today the storms and the sun-dazzles mixed, the Black Swallowtails and the Jersey bulls. A massive gift: brief intimacy with one tiny Spring Azure, form marginata. My living decade dies, and somehow I survive it. My ex-lover is very good to me. Lenya Gurevich is very good to me; except that I might have rather had just that one picture alone, the fourth one down, you and me so vividly full of those times. And sad to see no Sarah and know why. Thank you, Lenya; thank you all beautiful women of my life, all beautiful men, butterflies, bulls even. Today Pete Higgins said to me in his spluttery Penobscot-county accent, "I thought I saw a long drinka skim milk out there in the field, I wondered if it was you!" So many hopes inflate my lanky body at this springtiming year's end; but I distrust them like the bemasked fears I know them to be. I trust love. And New England apple-blossom time, ecology of my birth.

Bessarabia, how you weary me! Your rose-petals steeped or candied, your precious little cakes, the interminable Turkic murmur of your samovars. Gypsies, Slavs, Roumanians, Greeks, who can call this a country? Rye grows all over by its own logic; it ergotizes, sours. Bábushki gather dry brush for bake-fires. Butterflies on petals and on pins. Hellenized boyars, The Φιλική Έταιρεία in Chişinău, Tsarist/Soviet annexation. River-borders. Disinheritance.

Black ledge gurgles and swims in a swollen tide, the place's massy present pressing itself into me like how a fine-wale corduroy slipcover might into the slack, sleeping cheek of my beloved. For whom I ache, indelibly.

Trees give leaf, dirt-plots bloom; my grief runs like sap through bast, massing strength in this plant-body to which I potently, pregnantly inhere. I find I can do many things easily, but what I most want to do I cannot do alone.

When I took those monies and that natty outfit & went up to the city solid gone, who'd've thought I'd've been back here now so soon, spilling salty fluids on the parquet and swishing in your silks, finding out in condensed time more about this poor cluttered heart than I'd ever expected to learn in the whole librarybound rest of my lifetime. Enough with these silks, enough with these sobb-spattered spats & gleaming pumps. My life is done and I step out of its crinoline husk in utter gladness: out of my life, into the world! Your long, soft, liney hand in mine; my big-veined, broadish, bony hand in yours. Our hearts enmeshed, an endless text.

The doctor tells me my eyes need work; he speaks, however, against spectacles, advocating instead a more critical participation in world-fibre, specifying particular activities which he says will redound toward a loosening of the warpy little orbs in their pits. Of such he named tennis and butterfly-chasing: loose, quick eyes, never drop the swift bright ball or the powdery winglets!

Taurian nature of our ragged, almost make-believe Bessarabian nation-state's heraldry resonates weakly with my own cuspish star-stuff as birth-month's silver moon and silver rose approach and year's first butterflies emerge. Bull and butterfly: the problematic of me.

Marie, Marie: unmarried, forty, long about the face and thighs... Without the ellipsis, by which I cede punctuational control, without the animating power of a bankrupt tradition of genderbound erotic apostrophe, how could I speak of her? We met at twenty, in sunlight, introduced by her boyfriend's brother: under a broad straw hat our eyes set immediately to vexing themselves brimful with flirtation. My heart was born that day, I later found. A little seed, it quickly grew, through passions, to more or less the size of the grain of rye in Tolstoi's story. A simple growth: that's to say, it grew drily, retaining all its quiet seed-nature, not changing except in dimensions. A fist-sized seed, then, as inert, as simple as a stone, but with secret intelligence charging it with difference. The swelling, splitting, rootlet-fingering – the pain and joy of germination – came later.

One by one my coworkers have degenerated into uncompanionable shades. The air in our office has always been so broad and generous – the wooden furnishings, the big windows, the tenth-storey view through birdflight across shadow-dappled ground to transdniestria: but lately it feels close, clotted, the clerks all mooning around gogolianly, my old friends, Alyosha, Cătălin, Mioritza! I try childhood games, folkdances, guest-appearances by my brother & his tisanes. Nothing yet succeeds in brightening the scene.

Albania Rising. Sunday afternoon, 17 February 2008. A street-scene photographed by my friend Artan at the northwest corner of the triangle formed by the intersections of 7th ave., Broadway, and 43rd st., Manhattan EEUU.

«Let Greeks be Greeks, and Women what they are.» Anne Bradstreet, first anglophone poet of the americas, better-published than Shakspear in her day; which was his, too, roughly speaking. Her husband Simon, whose name she bore in specific weight of the patriarchal logic of zevgari, was the last director of the Massatwoshits Bay Colony before it submitted to a long string of crown-imposed governors in 1684. He worked clerically at Anne Hutchinson's 1637 banishment trial, hollowing himself into appropriate absence as amanuensis to take dictation from one of the best minds of seventeenth-century New Angelund; a mind which, with its body, subsequently went south to unanxiously annihilate itself in the anger of the ill-dealt Mahicans of Pelham Bay, Dutch Bronx.

Open letter. [from LG and JG]:
If pubic hair is always within ideology, what happens when I play with pubic hair patterns? I stay mostly within the bounds of the "New-Age hippie profuse growth" ideology, notable for its inactivity, which nonetheless manifests as activity (comfort-seeking, laziness, resistance to buying anything, including razors, or resistance to heteronormative gender-patterns) which trips me back behind the veil of ideology. Occasionally, for fun, braving discomfort, I will try the "yuppie strip," which in my mind is the same as the "stripper skunk," realizing that this moment of agency is a collective dynamic, reflecting the recomposition (confusion) of class, and that as such my self-interested shaving action coincides with the general need of humanity, or at least of my class, to resist the branding of our genitals. In what ideology do I reside if I play within/among ideologies? How self-aware can we be? Are you reading this blog, Slavoj, or do I have to drop by your house? Jajaja.
File under: more thoughts on play.
On another note, I was unexpectedly gifted eight tiny succulent offspring, treasures, including bomboană, panda (kalanchoe tomentosa), porumb vie (euphorbia mammillaris variegata), jellybean (sedum pachyphyllum), and airplane (haworthia mirabilis) varieties; and while potting them in front of the window watched a gecko squiggle across the window-screen, skin wrinkling. It paused and changed color from light green to grey. In my head I have to resist the overuse of the cartooned gecko in branding (insurance companies, caribbean vacation brochures, etc.) to fully appreciate the beauty of this creature.

Rhythms of me run easy between the library and home. Bodily energy low, attributable to disordered sleep and too much wheat/sweets while in Vienna; otherwise I'm present, comfortable, distracted only in minor keys by digestion of the tight grain of my time with cousin X. Having been away, things here seem uglier, lovelier, easier – lovelier in the sense of being well-inhabited by love, easier in the sense of how a used car can be advertised as having an "easy nose". My affection for this pleasantly ugly cityscape, the loveliness of Rina, Belmondo's nose.
Cousin X set me onto my flight home with a volume of stories published this year in Vostoni Massahousseti, EEUU. They're written by one Heman Chase, some greek, an acquaintance of hers, which is usually code for lover. Excellent stories, drawing things down through me like how breath-yoga does; a great flake to have taken home with me of the brilliance of X's milieu. The title story, "Ils Faisaient du Foin Grec," opens like this: "There, in the dim light, the addicts of chainii grib's productions; eschewing food, stomachs afizz with the acids and answers that are the gentle harvest of their beloved bacteria-yeast complex, these long-thighed gentlemen saunter happily through the mornings of the world..."

Waking, naked, today, feeling my body about me like a little collection of apples (bright; bruiseable; subject to time's arbitrary sweetening, softening, drying, rotting trends), for a disarming moment I couldn't place my consciousness: where was its seat, this morning, as the sky paled and brightened blueward following the set of a big whole moon whose night had been punctuated in the middle by an hour of starry dark? My heart yawned, its vacuum drawing the question in and annihilating it. Here I am, here I am, in the hollow at my core – which flickers back and forth between being a broken grief-pit and a happily vibrating shaivist emptiness. Rising, then, wincing to rediscover the pain of my right ankle, which I turned yesterday on the ice, I remembered, just before my cousin's voice began speaking into the telephone downstairs, that I was in Vienna.
I've been here two days, having played the poor post-soviet card in order to cook up funds through an EU program to come for a conference. It's good to be with cousin X, to share briefly in her brilliant world. Yesterday in the early afternoon we heard a performance of one of the string quintets, K. 515: ecstasy, nasaputaspandana, the Europe-dream somehow transmuted into Bhairavi/Bhairava, or cosmic laughter like in that Milan Kundera book. Tonight she wants to take me out to eat at a lamb/rakia place she likes. She courts me with her city; I resist, but not without pleasure.

Passing the Serpeni Pillar on a windy trip to work today, I paused for a moment to watch the guards in their salute. I was hit by a wave of envy, not for them, but for what they almost are but are not. Maybe other people (those who get off on uniforms) feel differently, but I think that the dress-up men are allowed is far inferior to that of women. Men play dress-up by taking power; the uniforms are the slight, pitiful amount of play that resides inside (on the outsides of?) the structures that maintain that power relation. Meant to show strength, uniforms concede weakness, just as punishment and manipulation (like of nationalisms!) can come from silenced vulnerability. I root my poverty (of being part man) in my lack of sanctioned dress-up. I don't exactly want to engage in the same kind of dress-up that women here are allowed; I envy makeup and heels and accessories and other pizz-pazz, but I do not feel comfortable with these things on my person. However, I also feel strongly that patriarchy is restricting my opportunities for play.

A difficult morning with my brother. The sour weather, the tea, the chains of knotty emotional heritage we wear each thickly midst his sinews and fleshes. The tea he's taken lately to brewing up is this earthy chinoiserie called puerh, boy! It comes in cakes similar to the cook-fire fuel we'd harvest off the street when I was living in Kerala, black bricks at which he works with a little steel pick, teasing out the stuff of our tisane, minding the qi. The pot and cups are tiny, the infusions serial. "The first pot opens on damp warmth, lit dimness, a feline presence; immediately an unwelcome draft rises, brings you to the door, adjusting which leads you to be standing outside when a handsome peasant happens past astraddle his outsized fjord-horse. The second pot is sunlight beclouding itself just as you're at the verge of swim, stripped, at sea's edge, hungering sexually, wanting food. The third pot is a strange bed on top of whose orderly eiderdown you cede to sleep, fully-clothed, having just eaten chocolate, your beloved's long hand resting on your sternum." My brother. I leave for the office at eight, pot four; he keeps going.

I feel it necessary to give voice to a preoccupation of mine that has carried over from my professional duties, with hopes of reaching an audience not ordinarily acquainted with these cartographic squabbles.
The copy of the map shown here sat atop the papers on my desk when I arrived this morning. It is a typical example of U.S. central intelligence agency maps of the post-Soviet republics. Unfortunately, it is also an urgent reminder of the poor state of affairs regarding the availability of accurate maps of good quality for the English-speaking world.
In the middle 1990's it seems that many of the U.S. schools and libraries were dumped upon by this agency of intelligence with such hastily prepared maps. Many documents not of sensitive or classified status (oftentimes educational or propagandistic publications) were deemed undeserving of the costly process of destruction: we can see the form they have taken as an insidious gift to the nation's citizenry.
What's more, the recent ascent of the latest cinematographic work by our Roumanian neighbors has earned their fine films much deserved esteem in "world cinema" circles in the West and has aroused a new and unprecedented interest in our region.
What can we do to stem the tide of misinformation and the air of disrepute which hangs about our image as a people at such a crucial time as this?

When I was a child and played the fiddle, a couple times a year the teachers would dress us all up smart, range us in a hemicircle on the dusty boards of the local Culture Palace and set us to screeching & scratching. Probably the most beautiful music I've ever heard has been produced by such arrangements of forces, and has been striven after in vain by more sophisticated & self-conscious collaborations. Back in Soviet days we used to get occasional visits from some of the lights of Lenigrad & Moscow free-jazz. One underground concert of that stamp was all any reasonable person needed before they were converted forever toward the purer pleasures of the official stage: the child violin-gang.

A street find, this resistant picture. Written on the back: Tiraspol Tinereţe Joc, 1979. Tiraspol Youth Players, 1979. My grandfather's grandchild displaced in time and place?

I went there again today, without you. Your sister used to work upstairs, for Greeks. Greeks upstairs and down. Downstairs was where I went, the breakfast place. One year ago we were there, radiating our complexity. Today, my attempts to radiate anything were strained, and the yogurt was not. This last a minor disaster: I'd gone in, sentimental motives aside, for the yogurt, which I remembered having impressed me with its generosity, its texture, its honey & walnuts; a trace of romaiosyne in the otherwise predictable breakfast menu. Traces, traces only.

Out the window snow dirtily splotches fields running down from the city's edge to the Dniester's banks. We were going to hide for the rest of our lives over there, in the dead places; hide in abjection, ill-health, poverty. Make a home of those things. Why? Rina wanted to, she had a thing about the Trans-Dniester. My cousin talked us out of it: she wanted us to go to Vienna and drink coffee with buttery complements. I told her I embrace Islam, but not its twee shadow-bodies – and anyway prefer tea, like any Turk. She told me I'm not one, I said well neither are you. Then we kissed, as cousins do; and no hard feelings. But no Trans-Dniester, either, for Rina.

I hate the capitalist system.
Shorthand for a thousand things: the internet, violence, phallogocentrism.
A more intricate shorthand, though, in the active totality of the utterance, hides its vulnerable heart: I love the world.

I have been remembering our first days together at Purpooduck.
It was soon after the defense of her dissertation: "Urban Planning as Manifestation of Desire". Rina cooked me placinta, with mustarded sardines on saltines, and bananas republic for dessert. I said, "Rina, I like you!" She said, "You are such a sadist." After some time, sweating, and with heart pounding, I said, "Well, do you like me?" She said, "Don't now be a masochist." Discussion then was stilled till our next get-together.
I learned that every healthy relation begins with a little sado-masochism.
The lack of loving Rina is clotting a spot into the nervous tissues of my body the size of my body, that is to say: all over. The spot, the lack, will not be sated by sadism – or by anything else – this winter.

Every now and then I find myself drifting down streets I know too well, my throat scratchy at the back, my shoulders high and tight; I find myself finding things I already knew were there, where they were, where I expected them to be – where, nevertheless, I'm surprised to find them. Every now and then my entire situation decomposes. In those thens, these nows, the course I can take is clear and single: ignition. Flame be my weather, let heat's happy crackle expand the narrow way! Such is my mantric gesture, my prayer. I mumble, maunder, malinger. Nothing follows.

MY GLANCE CAN CARRY THOUGHT, AND DOES: ACROSS SHORT SPACE OF WATER TO BLACK PURPOODUCK, WHERE YOU ARE. AGAINST THAT GLANCE COMES SUN, CRUSHING; ALL IS COLOR, OR FLAME WITHOUT COLOR, OR WICK-BLACK, DEPENDING ON ITS RELATION TO THIS LATE LOW SUN. I LAY MY HEAD BACK, GLAD TO FIND THAT THE RISING PLANE OF THE ROCKER RECEIVES IT. EYES CLOSED, ANOTHER RELIEF, THE LIGHT FLOODING THEM DIFFERENTLY NOW. I CHOOSE WARM OVER BRIGHT. HEART DRIFTS, MIND SLEEPS. BODY SLEEPS: PENCIL DROPS FROM LIPS TO CHEST, WAKING ME. BIRD-DROPPING, FALLEN BOTTLE-STOPPER, STAR. MY GLANCE OPENS, TAKES ALL, WRITES YOU BEHIND ALL, CLOSES.

My grandfather, crouching at center; his sister, second from right.

Rina invited me to visit her father's mine again. On our last visit I found the mine surface ugly and was critical of the environmental effects. This time we began to experiment with the acoustics of the area. The strange effects we found may have had to do with the positive energetic qualities of selenite which is a very special crystal. There was no normal echo. In this "echo" our yells traveled back and forth, outwardly diffusing into an audio halo, mellowing into a pure tone. Although the surface gypsum did not seem especially friable, small pieces fell off the walls, every time ringing the sound in a crumbling veil. We called this effect the "echoplex" which we may rename because it fails to take into account the warm and loving feelings engendered in us. I don't know if these kinds of things are common occurrences at gypsum mines.
On the last visit I also found a wrapper of the american snack "Twinkie", which gave us a good laugh.
Rina, forgive my habit, gypsum flower.

This morning the sunshine is not as full as it has been, mornings; color doesn't come of it as easily or as richly. I look out at rather a meager world.
There's a delegation of historians from Jassy here today: they make their requests, I serve them their papers, books, microfiches. I'm turned off by the nationalist cut of their suits and of their lines of inquiry. Nothing I say pleases them, besides.
My cousin X is of the opinion I should get out of Moldova, like she did.

Donuts are for children and for yanquis. When a parent feeds a child a donut, s/he grounds the youngster in the ethnic chaos of yanquidom. I knew a yanqui once, he lived here for a year or two. He used to write with spray-paint on the walls of the state office-buildings; for example he did it here at the National Library one time. Finally he was sent away. He used to write, "CIA + FBI = TWA + PANAM," things like that. Things that meant nothing.

It's nice to notice now the days lengthening here, the solstice a couple weeks gone; funny though how the longer days go by more quickly.

Today I uncapped a tubelet of lip moisturizer, "plain flavor," and realized it had the same smell as dumplings with garlic sauce. It was then that I realized I was walking past a couple eating pork sausage out of a tin and that I was actually smelling the pork sausage at that moment instead of the lip moisturizer, but then I smelled the lip moisturizer and confirmed that all three smell the same.
I had a brief communication with Rina this evening. I trust in our friendship but I don't always trust myself. I must guard our friendship from my pride, a task that makes my head ache.

Our systems have been shaken by some kind of doubling of names reminding me of a certain village dance among the hill-people here: the weaving in of the first man, the two women following and the next man diving through the arch of their arms to lock elbows with the first, etc. As a child I never could follow the sense of it, only the feeling. Such is my position now, about this: unprecedentedly strange as it is, someone seems clearly to have been in the office last night after the last clerk left & I locked up. When I came this morning and unlocked the door, it would not open: this because it had not in fact been locked and so my unlocking had locked it. On entering, finally, puzzled, the first things I noticed were an odor of attar, a tension in my chest, and a large photograph on my desk. After these, nothing, against an hour's meticulous investigation. The photograph is beautiful. On its reverse is written a woman's name, nine characters, the first and last of which are S; I happen to know positively, however, that the holder of that name who invests it with a particular significance for me is at present bodily & heartily resident in a snowbound town some thousands of kilometers away from here. I can't begin to figure out who the gentle enterer was, or where they got their key.