[Adding the original dream & something on the process of what's appeared in this preparatory sketch for a possible painting, if you'd like to know what it's about.]

Original dream
…red spots develop under my cheeks, and as I powder them, they become raised wheels, one on each side, which the thick powder whitens, six spokes, a central hub and an outer wheel, a relief sculpture perhaps, like something from myth, an archetypal symbol, which the attempt to hide with powder only accentuates. I feel no horror, or pain, but awe as I brush the powder on skin become wheels and spokes. Sculpted like Medieval cosmological wheels, alchemical wheels of transmutation, the configurations are mysterious, almost reverential, an embodied reference the Wheels of Ezekiel, but also to the powdered faces of highly-stylized Oriental performance, and somehow the magnificent coiled antlers of Bighorn sheep… (2008)

Process of charcoal sketch:

Friday, I decided to try a charcoal drawing to see how my dream of the alchemical wheels appearing in my face, rising in my cheeks, might appear. In the dream, I powdered them as they rose sculpturally. But here I hoped to let my 'unconscious' take over and I did go into a light trance and even worked with my eyes shut at times. At the beginning, I used a sponge and charcoal powder that I then sprayed with a fixative, and kept working. There are distinct shadow and light sides. The wheels are dark - to me, the one in shadow looks floral; the one in light, ocular. The hair fed snake-like into the wheels, which seem almost to be whirring and that is unlike the dream. And I see four eyes!

I find the drawing a bit scary, actually. There's psychic progress for sure. Self-portrait after an alchemical dream. 20"x26", charcoal on Yupo paper.
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Fruiting Bodies is writing begun during lockdown and stay-at-home orders. When you are alone, you don't have a sense of yourself-in-context of the society in which you are a viable subject. You move through your rooms invisible to yourself, you don't think about how you look, and aren't dealing, one hopes, with your otherness among people. Race, colour, creed, size, age, these aren't at the forefront when you are home, in your own space where you are safe to be yourself. The images, in this section, are from my abode, and, when I read them, I find the familiarity of what I dwell among. I wanted this writing to have a spiritual dimension since I believe we all speak in our privacies to something ineffable, to what guides us through our lives.

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This began with an image of memory scrawled in a notebook in April 2019 that I knew I would work with, either in a poem, or perhaps video. That note, 'memories carved on other memories like archeological layers that disintegrate, losing their definition under the press of time,' evolved into this filmsoundpoem of at least 50 layers all wrapped into each other as they dissolve.

In May 2020, I took some clips on a hike that struck me as interesting and began to edit them. Then I expanded the original journal fragment into a page of repeating phrases that were then written onto a new page, edited and spoken as a sound poem of repeating tracks (as part of a series of short soundpoems I'm working on). That final scratched-out page is placed on screen - we love to see other writer's processes.* 

The sheer number of compound images rolled into compound images in this video pushed my hardworking computer to its limit and eventually I simply had to stop, create some handwritten titles and credits, and let this little oceanic memory poem skip out on the waves.

I would like to thank my dear companions, Kate Rogers, Dai Evans and John Oughton for a hike on May 16, 2020 in Presqu'ile Provincial Park near Prince Edward County in Ontario where the lapping beach clips were shot.

As ever, this is a one-woman production - soundpoem, video, voices, editing, everything except of course my friend John, who skipped a stone on Lake Ontario, was done by moi, for better or worse.

https://brendaclews.com
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A preliminary sketch that I hope to work on in the coming days. Photo with electric light during a dark thunderstorm. Self-portrait, stick and water-soluble graphite, 20"x26". Crawling out from a deeply troubling family crisis.

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June 14, 2020

Clara, in Allende’s The House of Spirits is, I think, my favourite character in all of literature. Psychic, clairvoyant, telekinetic, someone who could draw many people to her, helper of the poor, I’ve only just read her and am integrating her still. I suspect she is the real writer of the novel and the narrator draws his story from her copious notebooks. Others… Fevvers in Angela Carter’s Nights in the Circus, but not as much as Allende’s Clara. Two books I’m currently reading! This isn’t much of a piece but it does come from the potpourri of a writing life.

But the grass didn’t get cut. The dog wasn’t bathed. There is no coffee cream for the morning. Laundry is still waiting. The floor didn’t get washed. The dishes not done, though that’s an easy task while the kettle boils for coffee. There was no writing. I started and finished a whole section of what is likely a new project and since then, nothing—waiting in writing purgatory. Tapping the keyboard distractedly, waiting for inspiration, for the muse, for a new place to begin again.
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