50627/50000 words

Okay, so the word count is 50627 by NaNoWriMo's unofficial count. Have I been writing up a storm? Nah. Oh, I've been sweating it, you have NO idea; I've been working with feverish incessant continuity, yes. I've been eating and sleeping this book. Lots of new writing, and lots of old writing. It's autobiographical in the 3rd person, go figure, and interweaves life and fiction, and so I've included many blog entries and emails as I tell the story of the last 8 months of my life. It's all been done in little blocks of writing that criss-cross each other, resonate against each other, dissent or assent, unfolding a story through events and metaphoric and symbolic images. There is huge, mungo HUGE editing to do. It all has to flow with a poetic voice, and that's not easy to create and maintain. I've got to put connectives in, discipline the narratorial voice into a consistent level, add the philosophical dimension of ambiguity and unknowingness while remaining grounded in love and trust, all that. I've done some of the editing/rewriting, buried under my hat wearing tiny spectacles on buses, subways, at the park while my dog wanders freely and without supervision to nibble leftovers on the grass, even in steaming water by the candle light of a dozen tiny tea lights spread along the side of the bathtub, and am satisfied with what's happening, but I have more sleepless weeks ahead of me ironing out this dance pagaent of uncertainties! I've made the word count, yes; I have a single-spaced 130 page manuscript that I didn't have before to work on. That's something to razzamatazz about, for sure. And that, my friends, is what NaNoWriMo is ultimately all about...

From an article in Arts & Letters today:

Whitney Harris: I am totally convinced that Adolf Hitler was only a name that symbolized the absolute and worldwide breakdown of morality in the 20th century. It started in 1914 with World War I when everyone killed everyone and no moral standards remained. Revenge was the order of the day and any excuse was permissible. And afterwards? What did the communists do in Russia? And the Japanese in China?

Sixty years ago on Sunday, the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial got under way to bring leading Nazis to justice. Whitney Harris was one of the principle figures for the prosecution.

Read the interview, "I Hadn't the Slightest Idea of the Scale of Genocide."

The other day I met an old aquantaince in the park. We were both walking our dogs; there was a light dusting of snow; I recognized her, even in her ankle length wool coat, by her handmade felt hat. Her son had taken a year off between high school and university and with some money he inherited travelled in Europe where he had many wonderful adventures. In Italy, however, he met a man at a train station who offered to buy him a coffee. When he came to, he realized he'd been raped. The man had put drugs into the coffee and taken him back to his apartment. The woman and her son met in Switzerland later that day, as they had planned, and when his mother found out what happened she went berserk, took him to the hospital for tests, and has helped him in every way she could to cope with this violation. She attributes the degree of callousness and usury of those who victimize others to the general breakdown of morality world-wide. Who can disagree?

Here is a riveting first-hand account of a survivor of the London Tube Bombings earlier this year: Rachael from North London, in a post entitled, Well, I watched the documentary. She writes extraordinarily well and with a poet's sensibility. To read an account like hers is unforgettable; it changes you, your understanding.

Is a lack of morality the main, fundamental, biggest underlying problem in the world today? Is that what causes such widescale violence and terrorism? Has there in fact been a breakdown of morality this century?
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Widespread atrocities are not a unique phenonema to the 20th c at all; they go back to earliest recorded history with the invasions of the Indo-Europeans in the Ancient Middle East up to genocides like Rwanda. The only difference in this century is the deadliness of the weaponry and the scale of devastation made possible by our technology. The idea of imposing a morality could potentially become another type of "oppression." It's perhaps impossible to fathom a solution to the irrationality of violence other than to keep working at understanding it, and trying to prevent it.

I don't believe in absolute forces of good and evil; but I do think that there is a malaise, a death-wish, a despair underlying violence that musn't be succumbed to - that it's important to keep fighting that dissolution in our own lives, our little plots, in our own ways, through understanding, and through wanting other, safer alternatives in ours and everyone's lives.

Aggression is part of the human spirit. It's not going to go away. But there can be refusal to do things that are deliberately harmful to others, to be conscientious objectors.

This really is a huge topic...

The central problem with the concept of equality is that it presupposes a unitary subject to which all other subjects must adhere. If that prime subject is a white, upper middle class male, as it is in Western European culture, then we can see it is extremely problematic for women and those from so-called 'minority' groups. Women, for instance, have babies. This makes women, and women's issues and needs, fundamentally different to that of the unitary male subject which underlies the notion of equality. It also makes the diverse needs of ethnic peoples problematic. If we are all to be the same, how can we celebrate our differences? Personally I favour Parity over Equality, parity being a system that allows equality in difference, that recognizes and respects difference, sexual difference being a fundamental aspect socially and which, under Equality Theory, prevents a woman from attaining true equality with her male co-workers, but under a political system of Parity would give cognizance to her potential needs as a mother should she wish to become one and remain in the work force. Parity in France has not only given women a legislated 50% entry at the political candidate registration level of politics, but enabled women to receive up to 2 years of maternal leave with benefits and a promise of a return to a job at the same level as she left. It may not be an ultimate solution to the difficulties a "two sex" world gives, nor to the problem of how to democratically define the concept of what a 'subject' of the state is, but it is somewhat better than that afforded by the essentially "one sex" model of equality. Reproductive issues are hugely problematic for equality theorists, and perhaps you can now understand a little of why...

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I realize Parity hasn't worked all that well in France, vis-a-vis the riots over girls wearing headscarves in the classroom (where I see a unitary notion of the 'non-religious' subject operating), behind which is intolerance towards religious difference and discrimination, and a whole host of other problems in the Islamic groups in question, with high unemployment, etc. Or perhaps I'm seeing in it the same problem that Equality presents generally. This is the area which, when I start thinking about it, goes around and around in my head like a record stuck on one huge glitch...

From my current NaNoWriMo project, "The Move."

AUDIO recording...(4:28min) I am rather 'melancholic' at the moment, and recorded this 4 times, eventually going with the first practice session... Oh, and I've used one of my own photographs too.

Lo-fi: Uncertainty…
Hi-fi: Uncertainty…
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This is rather intense, but I can live with it (isn't that ultimately the only criteria?). The character is at a low point in the turning...

From my current NaNoWriMo project, "Parchment of Roses."

AUDIO recording...(4:28min)

Lo-fi: Uncertainty…
Hi-fi: Uncertainty…
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The character is at a low point in the turning...

I'm not sure whether to post this photopoem, its extreme Hamlet-like self-referentiality. When did I compose it? Maybe a month ago? When Kyra, my daughter, saw the photopoem where it is reproduced twice, she told me it was an awful picture of me, that it didn't look like me at all, that if she'd seen it she would never have guessed it was her mother, and absolutely not to post it. The eyes, yes, she she said that was the only part that looked like me. Take that off the computer screen, she said. My fierce little editor....

Yet, on this rainy cold and broke day, I return to it, wondering. My manuscript is being written, yes, the artist is alive, so is the mother, but for how long without a job? This portrait was composed on the edge of.

Even I don't know who that woman is. Even I have never seen her before. She must be a literary figment...

It clicks to a larger and readable size, but you probably already know that...

Which is not large enough for some readers, oh Blogger.

Here is the text:

Self Portrait/Photopoem, Brenda Clews 2005 (self-reflexivity, the self produced in collision/collusion with the self)

[images here]

Is this the colour of the edge, where the light, eyes that, where it pours over, at the moment of, disappearing, that clarity, an obfuscated truth, the face, its waxy quality of lotus cream-colours, burnt auburn waves, emblazoning, meditating with open eyes, the gaze, un/self/conscious, always I take self-portraits on the edge of possible devastation, needing to see who I am... [the last 3 words bleeding into the larger portrait]


Bravely, or maybe secretively (since she's at school, the sweetie), I'm posting this as an echo to, some sort of personal response to, Jean's post on works the National Gallery in London on Self-Portraits; and Richard's post on Self-Portrait with photons in tandem with Jean's. Perhaps...that is; or perhaps those posts reminded me of this one buried in my hard drive.

From The Move, my current writing project...

How to fathom the poetic metaphors of our lives? Where does art come from? What layers of our being do images arise out of? And how do they reveal our lives in their unfolding, and in what ways are they prophetic? It seems as if we already know the truths of our interactions with each other, and she is not sure how that is.

Her life was an artwork where a collection of images had clung to her.

A Mazahua Indian chief, "Margarito Sánchez Valdez, bathed the aviator in incense, wreathed his neck with marigolds and blessed him in the name of Shefi, a butterfly spirit, and Mysyohimi, the Mazahua's supreme deity."

The journey began "on Sept. 6, when Mr. Gutiérrez flew his ultralight, Papalotzin, an indigenous word for the monarch, over Niagara Falls with a cloud of butterflies beneath him."

From there he "traveled more than 4,375 miles from Montreal to Michoacán State, following the butterflies at low altitude. He logged more than 90 hours of flying over 72 days." Last Thursday, "Mr. Gutiérrez wheeled his ultralight plane painted like a monarch over the butterfly sanctuary...and brought it swooping in to land on a stretch of mountain highway."

His extraordinary journey made to publicize the plight of Monarch butterflies, who are vastly thinning in numbers, whose future as a species is precarious.



NYTimes Article: To Save Endangered Butterfly, Become a Butterfly, by James C. McKinley Jr.

My daughter's into the digital camera (finally)... here's a merge of moi, from this afternoon, now how self indulgent is that? Nothing like those rich carpets of gold leaves... we are in an older neighbourhood with many beautiful trees, they are massive and wise and soothing, and often I reach out and touch their trunks, the knotted bark, and caress leaves as I pass by...

All images ©2005 Kyra Clews