This is like a dream I once had. Maybe it is the dream that waited for you to photograph it.

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photo, Shadows in the Backyard, by Olli Kekäläinen.

a massive earth angel, aloft,
sky swooping to earth


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photo, Learning to Fly, by Olli Kekäläinen, one of my favourite photographers on Flickr

turned a corner to a spotlight pressed the voice memo and spoke of the startling light white in the close sky for blocks moon talking

nest of hair, of broken golden eggs from Brenda Clews on Vimeo.

[Video shot entirely with my iPhone and edited on a subway with the iMovie app. With no training in film or photography, I guess and fret my way through, but surely Apple was aiming at folks like me with these gadgets and programs.]

What made me cut my hair in 1981?

It was time for a transformation, and it shocked people. I went from curly tresses to a near brush cut. I wanted to divest myself of that Farah Fawcett sex appeal look; I wanted to be a hermit. Perhaps I was a little crazy in those days. I was working on a thesis that was secretly about my visions, which of course no-one knew and which of course I didn't finish.

Perhaps a cat got into the basket and tumbled out with a golden egg. Afterward, it became a divine cat that glowed in the dark. I think maybe that happened to one of the cats over the years... Bastet, the ancient Egyptian feline goddess, hung around, yeah, for sure.

I've never showed anyone this nest before. Oh, my kids have seen it -and agreed that it's a bit weird, but that's it. I didn't want anyone to think me too strange. It's sat, covered and unnoticed on a bookshelf in all the places I've lived since making it, grad residence, a condo, a couple of houses, a couple of apartments, it's been across the country and back. At the time that I created it, I wasn't consciously thinking of divine things; in retrospect, though, I recall being immersed in that mythology, the divine conjunctio, and was good friends with a woman professor of English Lit who was studying to become a Jungian Analyst in Zurich. The Divine Conjunctio is quite a universal mythos, and so in my voiceover I read back into the nest of hair and golden eggs. Giving it a context it never had. Thirty years ago I thought of it as a magical ritual piece, and as conceptual art. Now I show the whole thing on-line! The cut lock had something to do with Isolde, but the version of the voiceover mentioning that was too long for the video.

[You do not see the sound wave in the iMovie app for the iPhone, so deleting the ums and ahs wasn't possible.]

A nest of your hair from three decades ago, it's certainly quite a memento. Something strange, and magical about it. I can see this image, these metaphors sparking the imagination; even in me, revealing this hidden basket evokes images, thought, wonderings. And perhaps the phoenix that emerges is the revealing itself, a video, a speaking, an uncovering of a fled spirit -for the remaining egg is cracked and broken, and the other has disappeared.

If I was better at filming, it would be interesting to make a poetic video with my HD Canon Vixia camcorder and Final Cut Express. Perhaps someday I'll give it a try.

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The bits and pieces that compose this post came from my responses on a thread at my Facebook page (with thanks to Boris, Dave, Stirling, Kim and Bent).
With special thanks to Dave for a humourous and inspiring conversation at his Facebook site on his yearly haircut, a total head shave.

Fantasy matters.

Without memory, the fragile present disappears.

Where time clots, a stillness whirling
in the motion forward. Points
of condensed age in the meridians.

I look to see

a dissolving mirror
bones, skin, neurons

the self-image.

This is not a poem neat as intact
fishbones, mysterious as dinosaur
fossils. The poem writes through
me. Rises from ruminations, dried
flowers on my spine
bursting seeds.

Are memories nomads wandering
our minds? Seeds of recollections
reflecting whole scenes from our past,
or partial images in the distorted ways we
compose and re-compose our lives?

Is memory how we narrate the stories
of our lives? Where we describe
our experiences to ourselves...

Do some experiences burrow like
bulbs in the network of capillaries,
memories memorizing themselves,
knots in the ganglia?

Replays of moments we've lived
that change as the story changes.

We are forever changing our stories,
aren't we.

Is that the river? Our blood
of experience?

Our collections of images,
re-iterating ourselves,
recalled, recollected, replayed.
Memories are slowed time,
knots in the Chi of
our neurocircuitry.

In the forever now, memories
where time recoils and coils slow eddying
resisting the rush.

Who I am is my memory of myself.

I remember you remembering yourself in me.




Wandering Nomads Bone Image, 2011, 19cm x 16.5cm, 7.5"x6.5", mostly archival inks, sepia, black, red, orange, and oil pastels, Moleskine sketchbook. Fishbones, dinosaur bones, ivory piano keys of the mind playing its strange music, I don't know. When I sat to draw an image for this poem, a vertebrae emerged. Click for actual size.

(Picasa's a bit strange these days. Below a thumbnail for 
services like Facebook to read feed readers)





(Readings of the poem didn't, um, didn't, and need more tries, but the afterward, which is more like a pre-amble, was kind of fun.)

direct link: Writings of 'Who'

A videopoem performance piece.

For a backdrop, I slung a rich, red Chinese satin cloth over a room divider, pulled my iMac up close, and recorded a recitation of the poem ten times in PhotoBooth, each time adding more jewelry, a swath of orange beads across the neck and shoulder, a rhinestone dangly tiara. The excesses of perhaps too much expression decreased as I became tired and the speaking of the poem emerged more clearly as it rendered through me.

Besides preparing for a performance piece, I used a number of techniques and filters in the editing of the videopoem. In PhotoBooth, Apple's fun camera still and video program, I used a spotlight plugin, which was cool; unfortunately Photobooth's resolution is low. The video was imported into Final Cut Express where I layered it in curious and idiosyncratic ways, adding a vignette to the base layer, and color emboss to the other one. Both those layers also received a maximum de-interlace flicker filter. The lens flare title and credits were done in iMovie and added as tiny clips to the timeline. I used FCEs scrolling text option for the poem, adding a light rays video filter to it. Finally I added a caustics render video generator track to the whole piece.

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For textual influences, in comments on the original poem post I wrote:

Kristeva did a lecture at the University of Toronto in the late 1990s on the question of 'Who' that I attended, but didn't connect then to the 'who' of the muse. Blanchot's 'The One Who Was Standing Apart From Me?'... is my particular inspiration here.

On the 'coded' "unconscious" of the Freudian/Lacanian school: I, too, incline towards a phenomenology of consciousness, whatever that may be. How often do I access my own personal symbols to write? References that might be opague to others. From Célan I learnt much on interweaving the personal myths in such a way that my symbol stream is only hinted at and whose full meaning remains just out of reach.

Kristeva is where I first learnt of the 'speaking subject,' the 'speaking voice.' Can we take it further to the 'writing subject,' the 'writing voice'? Though I don't want to get trapped in semiotics either.

John Walter wrote, in response to the poem, and it is worth quoting: "You ask the hard problem that Beckett asked throughout his entire oeuvre, especially the trilogy of novels Malone, Malloy Dies, and The UnNameable as well as his classic one man play, Krapp's Last Tape: "Who is the voice speaking within me, if it is not me, and it speaks when I don't, all my life, up until my last breath."

You pose it in a variety of fascinating ways here."

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Poem, written in 2006; videopoetry performace, 2011.

Have to hunker down for a few days to pull together and finish a draft of my 'Green Fire' poem that I've been working on for a few months. I need about 50 minutes worth. Ha. That's a lot. Of poem.

You can see I am writing, or at least, playing with Photobooth on my iMac. ::smiles::

Or is this - the proof-is-in-the-picture, which is a bunch of self-portraits taken by the computer - properly known as navel gazing.

::chuckling::

I turn 59 on Monday. Very happy to be the age I am, and no way I'd want to be younger.

The wrist that caught my fall on the dark iced road, thin as a swan's neck, a bent wing fading into fingertips.