RUBIES IN CRYSTAL
Does language hover between my nerve endings and the world, or is language my skin itself?
Sheath of feeling. Words groping to touch air.
Then dinner for my kids, not me, I only eat once a day, although I snack on & off too. Finely chop celery, onions, mushrooms, garlic, slice the chicken into small strips, put on water for the pasta, butter in the wok, melting and sizzling, then onions and garlic, watch the tiny bits cook, twirling with a wooden spoon, then the chicken, stirring, brown everything, add the mushrooms and celery, and just before its ready, the sliced spinach leaves, oh, and make a simple Bechamel sauce out of butter and flour and milk in the microwave and put in some salt and parmesan cheese and stir the sauce into the chicken and then add the pasta. Even the dog whimpers for some. Easy meal. Go back to my computer and read more blogs. Blog reading takes up the greater part of the day I sometimes fear. Issues with plagiarism at thenarrator's site today, but then, that's what sometimes happens to our most talented. My son, who turned 18 yesterday, and re-organized our entire closet of a kitchen while I was shopping, has gone out jogging with our dog, and my daughter, who was reading on my bed, is napping. It's raining gently outside. I'm living in some kind of continuum where the molecules of the air are bright with light, are bouncing all over the place like little suns, even when all the lights are out.

"Sketch for Self Portraits," coloured pencil on paper, 17"x13 1/2", 1997
The brain is a standing wave. What does that mean? When my mind feels like it's turned to deep oceanic water? I can't feel my brain. It is I who is doing the thinking. I am an electrical impulse. I am chemicals pouring from one cell to another. Who am I? Am I the memories that compose me? Am I my mannerisms? My gesture in the world? Is my voice me, its particular cadence? Or is it the way my body moves, even if I am unaware of exactly how it is that I do this? I am moving bones. How is that possible? How do I understand, after half a century of living, how this energy bundle called me is me? Being a person is often so strange that I don't understand it at all. I haven't any answers, nor do I seek answers. The point is that being a 'sentient being' is the strangest experience surely of all; we're aware of ourselves in ways that other members of the geosphere don't seem to be. Or perhaps all living creatures are aware, they just don't go around muttering about it...



"The Vision of Ezekiel," German, early 16th Century, Woodcut