Hard day. Mentally jarring day. Feel like I’m coming down off a Rocky Mountain high. Too much too do. Too much to think about. Too much, yet not enough.
Wish I were one to budget time. But time means little, and I’m better balanced on the edge. It’s just that I don’t move forward, backward, anywhere at all it seems. I only wave my arms about and manage to stay on the line.
And worry, when inevitably, I’ll fall off.
There is no doubt that I have strong ties to the earth. In looking out this morning, I see neglect in gardens gone wild because they were not tended to this past spring. I remember the same guilt and despair I felt because of this six years ago. Two friends of mine had died. This summer I lost my best friend and my father. It is as if I’ve given all I could give back to the earth.
Next spring, I hope to care for what is set to bloom.
Panning in, in black and white, touching tree tops as we seek out the story. At long last, there it is: a man on a bridge, about to be hung.
But remediation allows for afterthought, and this is where I went: Beside the wooden bridge and railroad trestle, along the banks there are no Union soldiers, but instead the men are raggy-clothed and skinning possum for a meal. But hyper-reality, not fiction, changed the links to empty banks.
New Haven city streets where beggars sat on blankets at the front doors of the Malley’s, Eli Moore’s and Kresge’s to catch the shoppers at their slower pace. These too, are gone.
We have created laws that disallow them their own life. We’ve built them homeless shelters to protect them from the stars and their propensity to roam and breathe their freedom. We pompously pump ourselves and pat each other on the back, for no one has been seen upon the streets unless they fiddle or can dance. They’ve been hidden from self-righteous starry eyes. And I remember, back when many had no legs and couldn’t dance, but with their dignity intact, instead sold pencils.
Did they crowd into the shelters, safely tucked into bed #29 each night? Did they ever learn to like processed chicken and fattened beef? Did they thank us for plucking them from the path across the country, and away from danger of the trains it was unsafe for them to hitch a ride?
Or do they simply die?
——
New Media Moment: This was inspired by the film seen in the New Media class of the French film version of “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” The film opened with this aerial view of the visuals of trees and area before coming to the drama on the bridge. (“La Rivière du hibou”, 1962, Director: Robert Enrico)
So many different ways. Yesterday’s class focused on one story, Ambrose Bierce’s “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” Text versus movie. Ensuing discussion of sequence and presentation in comparison and contrast. How key plot points were manipulated–how they can be and need be, for and by the medium of film. Is the movie judged by having read the textual version, or vice versa? Are the tools of sound and visuals helpful to reader/viewer involvement, or are they a hindrance to the writerly effect? How important is following the linear narrative in such a story, with its breaks in sequence by flashback and fantasy?
Neither is more important or better than the other; each must be judged on its own. And yet, there will be an opinion formed regardless of ignorance of the technicalities or of clear knowledge of each.
That then, is what makes each an invitation.
Yippy-I-O-Ky-Ay.
I get Bill’s first post operative speech for a birthday present.
That’s not to say the process of growth in learning–although it means that as well–but more the growing in learning the process.
I’m learning, for example, why writers and actors, normally on the more creative end of things, often gravitate towards directing or producing.
It’s called being a control freak.
And I’m afraid I can’t stop myself.
This evening I realized how many paths we walk on a daily basis, and yet how they meet and cross as in a maze.
My life is a balancing act of extremes in thought process, yet one can be applied to the others in almost every situation. From the nitty-gritty world of Statistics, I travel through time spaces of normal patterns of sleeping, eating, laundry, dinner, family, friends, classwork, picture framing; all the way to the creative extreme of New Media. Statistics teaches discipline in meticulous concentration on selecting bits of information and finding the method of arriving at a conclusion. This is just another exercise in determining narrative plots in a story. Presentation of researched figures and probabilities can be likened to the selection of the proper medium format to use in presentation of a creative work, i.e., shall it be text, hypertext, or visual such as a short film. Or, shall it be a combination. What are the variables? What are the possibilities? The probabilities? Is it valid?
In between the extremes, there is less exciting but no less important detail going on. Shall I make chicken or beef for dinner?
The driving rains have let up for a moment; black clouds like smoke are racing from the northern sky. I wonder how much water is still up there. I wonder how much was given back to earth. The human body is made up of sixty to seventy percent water. We look to the sky to see our heaven. I wonder how many people may have rained back down.
One of the most fascinating things about people is their ability to see two conflicting sides to the same issue. In this political election year, there is an extraordinary opportunity to comprehend the other point of view; to see the basis of opinion, and comprehend the way the mind works given X information. I’m going to take advantage of it. After all, if one believes they are totally right but there is one other who believes the exact opposite, wouldn’t it be interesting to explore the paths that take them there?
I’m sitting here trying very hard to keep my mouth shut about the hooplah Opray Winfrey caused by her gifting of cars to 276 audience members. No matter that GM paid the bill, it’s the blind rationale of the screaming that’s going on about it that I’m focusing upon, and I don’t have time to do the research that nobody else has bothered doing either.
I may have to shut all the computers down for the day.
I knew a man from Yucatan; golden skinned, straight black hair and feathers. And one from even further south and east that wore great wondrous lions dancing on his dress. Bronze-skinned, rock-faced sturdy braided souls that wandered with the buffalo, and those who peeked from holes of warming fur and lived in domes of ice. It made me long for ribboned wreaths and gaudy spangled velvet vests. I wore them once, but likely never will again.
We need be careful what we lose in our great rush to be alike.
Something that was just an annoyance for many years is starting to make sense. The signs, the media in all forms, the candidates whose names are built from letters painted red, white and blue. There is no mention, though, of Democrat, Republican, or any other group affiliation. Precursor of the future and a healer of the problems we now see more clearly?
Frantic, pounding rain, as if driven by the fury of a challenge to its power. Another life force laughing in its absence called it out. Perhaps the grumbling of St. Helen threatened more than earth itself.
I fell today, and scraped my hands and knees upon the concrete of the human mind. Stinging with the grit embedded in my being, as it becomes a part of me I picked up in the grazing. Standing, stumbling onward, but the connection has been made and added to the knowledge that ignored all warnings of good sense. Tasting blood of bitten tongue–it happened just that quickly–and the flavor is the salt of one’s own life. Eventually it heals; eventually it seals it all inside.
Well, after the Statistics fiasco (hopefully she’ll give credit for trying weally, weally hawd) New Media went better than expected, bought the video of Apocalypse Now for $1.00 at the library sale (saw it when it first came out in the late 70s), came home to find a message on my tape that my friend, Gus, is doing very well after a quadruple bypass, Sims 2 is on its way to me from Amazon, and there’s still a couple cigarettes left in the pack I went through last night.
And yesterday–while I normally don’t work in the shop on Sundays, I did to accommodate a customer whose son was home for the weekend and wanted to pick everything up. She never showed up, but I got some work done and did my class work and study as well. But the best thing of all: A friend I haven’t seen for about a year stopped in with his “fiance”, and I was so happy to see them, meet her, and get a chance to see how happy Louie is now. He’s 54, never been married (he is a little bit strange, but lovable–I’ve traveled to many archery events down south with him and produced a magazine with him long ago) and I wish them the very best. His mother was one of my good friends, as well as Louie and his brother Ron. I love the circle life makes.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology