This morning I woke up at the same time I usually do, 5:30, drove to the gym, gave a group of my aging muscles some weights to pull and push, stepped under the hot shower head long enough to run the loofah mitt across my flesh and rinse off the dead cells caught in the froth, dried with those brown sheets from the squeaky roller in the sink area of the ladies room, opened my thick circular lock chosen to prevent another theft, the last one included my Andean stamped passport and listed left off the police report, my favorite tie-dye thong, pulled on my insulated long handle underwear, solid black, and my furry black waterproof boots along with my thin, shiny black, down jacket, jingling my car key in the right pocket, alongside a crushed twig of rosemary, sticky oils lodge under my fumbling fingertips, the sent of a glance along the steep spine of the trail, the midweek reprieve, hoisting the handle of my ragged gym bag, plopping the item of swag from my brief training days as a high desert librarian into the overstuffed trunk, pulling out a can of black beans from my post workout provisions, popping the pull-top, firing up the Mustang, dangling my two hour validation code in front of the red laser beam at the exit arm, hitting the gas, finally making my way to the stream of early traveler traffic on the reopened I-10 as gulps of bean juice dribble down my lips. 

With a train of fog-capped L.A. skyscrapers slowly marking time, my week moves silently through my rear view mirror. I watch the scenes, soft Pacific mist pierced by steel right angle hubris, arduous job as an educational facilitator for brain altered children exhilaratingly exited like our class’ Tuesday afternoon field trip, a gaggle of elementary students departing the Kirk Douglas theatre at decibels above lunch hour commuters, then the ever surprising 210 summit, shrouds of grey opening to mountains, rock curtains open to exodus, 60 minutes an hour, opening to miles and miles of thick split pea splendor. 

An hour of driving, flitting rubber tires rotating over a winter of transitions, psyche’s thick molasses spreading over progress, a traffic incident looming at the racetrack exit, rubber necked, we watch blood soaked up in fine powder, wide bristles of the transit team sweepers open up two lanes for mall hopping, someone in uniform makes the call, haste, brakes, and Saturday lends itself to mourning.

Then the arrival, I sit down with a large cold brew facing forty feet of plate glass, framework for a pastel, the smell of coffee, a Monet-esque picture of the San Gabriels, my eyes strain at their pale edges, a ruse, corner puzzle pieces skirting the Inland Empire, a sky table.

Oh, home at the base of the range, terrain of relief, cliffs’ release, set to break, parked for the weekend on the border, limits poured into the cushion beneath my bottom, a bench that meets the mark, my ass on impact places me firmly on its fibers of fabrication, words woven, clustering on the drive, ready en masse, a fork in the road, solidity for felicity by 9:30 and nothing else matters.

Wily Time

c. 1300

A long time ago the word alone was howled from the jaws of wolves, and letter by letter caught in hungry pilgrims palms, so today it could wind me around the West Coast’s ankles tying me at the breast with a juicy portion of narrative. I languish in its dèrive, a drift, seven hundred years, sentences strung along a sense of invention,

The elders wave, my French ancestors, inventors of pointlessness, arms cast as churning oars for blind realms, no destination, uphill flaneurs, the inception of inhuman spaces, aloft, a-lone, sans the flock, the tribe, the unmanned plane, cloud cutters, faces blank as the desert scrim of the Santanas, spitting low, whittling the gaps inky between their tongues.

My feet bridge the decades. I plug into the window of possibility, cord snaked north from the outlet, a pulse springing from the bright portal of digital loins, fingering the path, tap-tapping, fingernails cut out the nerves of my technological bone, writ on white womb, a cracked vintage laptop, ancient mind sprung by turning it on, libidinal spring, sprung neural “x’s” and “o’s” , contact, a spasm of punctuation, 1300 CE, a circa giants brought 63.3 notches from the lip of the continent across the arches into 12:30, the afternoon peaks, sweet roam.

High. The altitude of hunger, the body abated, dizzy with caloric need. My key forgotten, scooped off the slippery varnish of the table. Leaning,stiff knees bending forward into the frame. Snow filtered air from the humps erasing all but the immediate, cold air sifts past the warm walls of my nostrils, the car motor frigid, five hours ago stabled in a dark marked slot, now a sea of clamoring metal boxes.

The Depths of Survival Engender Shadows

Recently, in this very cafe, I stumbled on a book from the borrowers shelf and when I started reading it alongside my usual order, jasmine green tea, I found the writer’s premise so compelling I voraciously consumed the book…after I extended the cafe library’s liberties to the confines of my car, took off for L.A. with the already stained and dogeared paperback with the definite intention of returning said book, but since I couldn’t stop turning the pages which conflicted with the urgent need to leave the mountain before the forecast of torrential rains started, the fuse blew on my windshield wipers and driving on the freeway in a storm without them is really stressful, plus I truly want to avoid ending up the cause of an incident on the highway, you guessed it, I pilfered, nabbed, snatched Deep Survival.

Over the next week I took the book into a similarly branded cafe in the Marina just north of LAX where I go almost every day after school gets out and I become my familiar self again. It’s a delicious read written by Gonzales much like a thriller in structure but what’s really interesting is not the plot line(s), there are many anecdotes about extremely risky behavior and why some come out alive and others don’t which you’d expect from the title. What I didn’t expect was the author’s inadvertent solicitation of personal myth.

By the end you see into Gonzales’ psyche’s relationship to death which in itself a major component to encounters with disaster comes with writing about survival but he is navigating a particular arena of risk, the confrontation with nature in its most metaphysical sense. In fact, like shamanic work he anthropomorphizes his relationship to the earth in such a way as to see it as a sort of eternal maneater. He recounts the labors of those who die and analogizes their doom as a journey into the claims of terra firma. The planet itself is out to take us as delicious morsels dying at the mouth of its desire. I found myself surveying a most unintended area of feminine risk: the masculine desire to conquer.

Whether through plunder of goods or flesh, history is made up of intentional and unintentional violations of the feminine. Similarly, at the end of Deep Survival I felt I’d excavated a Kali-esque platitude perpetuated by Mr. Gonzales as his perspective on the wilderness surrounding the events he uses to illustrate his point occur. I don’t know how I didn’t see it coming. The ineffable has often been sewn into the unknowable, the creative vastness, the Void, the womb of infinity as a dark passenger. In other words the feminine is placed at the helm of fate in Deep Survival, an odd place for it to be if you have given birth to another human and realize the depths to which the feminine is biologically called up in the perpetuation the species’ survival.

Death does come to all fleshly matter but the true risk of survival from the feminine perspective, notice I said feminine and not female, because I’m not talking about gender, I’m addressing the nature of energy itself. To understand the feminine, the vortex of manifestation as a perpetuator of death is accurate in its simultaneous alignment with life-giving qualities but the masculine, and perhaps this is the true fear regarding survival is that the power of masculinity lies at the feet of the proprioceptor, the field of possibility, the womb that gives life.

To confuse this differentiation is to doom oneself, at least one’s feminine aspects to alienation, to what is come to be tagged as masculine toxicity. The current alien state of the masculine as a quality of energy compounds the safety of the feminine aspect of human survival. Perhaps it’s like David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech, the fish must realize it lives in water and that to jump out of the fluidity that gives it animation is to smother in an avoidable confusion. Blindness to the metaphysical oneness behind duality is fateful. It is a psychic fabrication set for extinction in the 21st century. We are slowly unfurling into chaos as a powerful initiator of intention an essential element of creative invention, necessity being its Mother, the only survivor on this little blue marble so far.

By the way, the book sits next to my cup of cold brew. I stand up to return Deep Survival to its slot on the pop up literary corner. Slightly disoriented from a combination of sitting for so long and being saturated with caffeine,the cup is still half full but I’m I only drink coffee when I’m up here with the mountains, I feel a tug of resistance. I fell in deep like with the writer’s revelations about his underlying intention for wriing about survival, it has to do with his father being a bomber pilot, I won’t say any more in case you decide to read it. I highly recommend you do read Deep Survival. While the ending is surely complicated sociologically, the main premise still relates to the primal thing we all have in common: death and our desire to face it with as much aplomb as we can muster. Mr. Gonzales writes into this idea with virility and desire delightfully crafted to pull you in and keep you even when the rain clouds hover ominously. In fact, I’ve been affected by the neurological connections he makes between survival and disaster. Driving in L.A. when the roads are wet, that’s a big advantage to have.

Constructs of time

Like 2024, MCCC was a leap year. The thirteenth century is considered the Middle Ages. If you are over 35 or 40 years of age you might understand the complications of being neither young nor old. Yet what’s left for the middle child in a family is choice; you may deem yourself closer to the powerful elders or take on the fruits of the youngest variety of the familial structure.

So it is with time. Historians tend to lean toward the gilded political and religious events of the 1200-1300s mainly because common people usually could not read but they could be entertained by visual arts and stories thus media outlets like churches had a captive audience upon which to thrust a version of life that suited a caste society. Similarly we’ve set up a calendar for time that contains the surreal proposal that a day in the year can come and go in order to realign time. Think of it this way; if you are born a leaper on the 29th of February what does it mean that your time of entry on the planet comes and goes at will? You may say it really doesn’t matter. No, it doesn’t, really, because time itself, as mechanics of physics tell us is as wily a concept as space itself. We are here as particles and then we can also disappear as waves according to experiments with the duality of light.

A Day’s Writing Accomplished

3:09pm; Time for another sip of the brew. When I sit down to write I never know what’s going to make it to the page. Swirling with ideas and committed to several projects simultaneously I have learned to follow Carl Jung’s advice and watch the direction my libidinal energies want to take. Looking back over the day’s work, what looms large is the repeated themes of ephemeral time and the physical engineering of manifestation. How those two parts of the human condition interact with reality are divergent along the narratives I tend to create during my interactions with life. Having a whole day to myself was bookmarked by human frailty, the car accident on the 210, and the complexities of mountain weather. The book that I brought into the writing space covers both of these experiences, featuring the inner workings of many mountain climbing rescues and deaths but also accidents along the byways of oceans and streams.

Leonardo da Vinci said, “A river is time in water…” To have a vehicle that takes me from sea level to the mountains each weekend as long as I give it a long drink of gas is to make use of a salve that gives me a way to invite the inner traveler the roam while it witnesses those five days of service. Then when freed, the part of me thirsty for the meeting of ideas and a desire to commune with the ephemeral hitches itself to my gas pedal foot compelling an hour’s worth of pressure to the function of acceleration.

“There is another alphabet whispering from every leaf, singing from every river, shimmering from every sky.”

– Dejan Stojanovic

Vehicles have played a central part in my life since I ended up on the Native American reservation that has existed since my Cherokee relatives populated the Appalachians. Actually, they lived in a very similar fashion to the inhabitants of the 13th century, using clay and stone ubiquitously. I learned to appreciate their place in architecture when I lived in the ancient city of Cusco, Peru. At 11,000 feet, the Andes are populated by terraced agriculture, mysterious ruins, and lots of poverty but the presence of an unexplained prevalence of intricate stone work resonates with my early farm life. As a child I was immersed in nature; trees as well as rocks took on a life comparable to that of my human relatives.

During the days I brushed up against the bark of trees, the twist of thorns, the slime of emerging aquatic life such as tadpoles and their incremental changes were self evident. Those things with long tails and round bobbles for heads submerged in water became leaping web footed land jumpers jumpers. There was no need to question the mystical. It gave of itself freely as if I were an audience member at a theatre play produced by nature and directed by something I could not see but innately conceived from the condition of full embodiment.

Being an inhabitant of South America for three years, the Western idea of civilization was muted in me for a while. What replaced my urban life in the States was a sense that the continuity of life was to be found in the dirt. My dreams lately have taken place in the mud and from a Jungian perspective I realize a primal energy is surfacing in my consciousness. In this combination of the masculine and feminine energies it was obvious as a child that they were fluid expressions of one existence which included me and all that grew around me. My father was a cattle farmer of Black Angus and eventually a Brahma Bull whose horns looked ferocious. It’s presence was that of an interloper among all the female cows so I do relate to a binary prejudice and its origin, in my experience stemmed from fear. My illustration centers around physicality but fear as we become adults is much more insidious. We war with more than our ideas about a stable of bovines. We create conflict and name it color and gender and creed and innumerable subcomponents take hold like beliefs in the forms of organized religions and political affairs. That doesn’t make them more sophisticated, however, it makes their original more obscure and us much dumber about how we calculate their relationship to reality. In fact, as I’ve been spending more and more time among elementary school children I have come to the realization that I cannot expect myself or anyone else to be without conflict. Children engage in it constantly but they don’t have much money and mostly they don’t have weapons of mass destruction although as we know massive destruction is orchestrated in recent history by the very young.

“To put your hand in a river is to feel the chords that bind the earth together.”

– Barry Lopez

When we lose our ability to contain the mayhem perpetuated by our species and its proliferation is propagated and made available to the very young we cannot expect there won’t be fallout. The more I learn about history, though, the more I am in awe of the fact that we’ve managed survival for this long. The theory about homo sapiens in a much abbreviated version is that our brains gave us more availability to reason than say the Neanderthal. But I don’t think that’s the full story. Like the premise of Master and Emissary espouses, we’re in a world made manifest by prejudice for the qualities of the left brain. This side of the brain abstractly broken down in a very simple form is attached to attributes we label masculine. You can see how survival might be better equipped not by labeling the feminine as a womb with teeth, similarly satirized in an indie horror film with the same luminously ironic label, but by balancing our inevitable return to the soil with the other use of the powerful mastication ability of teeth; they allow us to nourish ourselves with the bounty the earth produces enabling life to extend beyond the dependence on the breast. Labeled filial piety, the story of Cimon and Pero are symbolic illustrations of this survival dynamic. As the lactating Pero’s father was dying in a Roman prison she secretly kept her starving father alive by feeding him with her milk. The impulse to live stretches beyond the bars of propriety as the daughter, at least in paintings of the story, leans her body up to her father’s cell where her breast meets his face pressed between the metal facade while the guards are not in close proximity. That primal detail, that we are independently activated by the need to nurture and protect from the energy of the feminine both objectively and subjectively, is what Deep Survival misses in its translation of the elements of survival.

PART II: BOUNDARIES OF THE FLESH

COMING SOON.