https://www.facebook.com/TammyTVitale/videos/10156096220417807/

 

(be sure you have your sound on for the above video)

COVER:  Normal is an illusion.  What is normal to the spider is chaos to the fly.

Quote:  Imagine yourself drinking water from a well – a traditionally female symbol.  The sweet, clear water – the essence of life – refereshes and relaxes you.  Now make a wish.  In your mind’s eye, toss the wish into the well, and at the same time give thanks to mother Earth fo her bounty.

Inside Left:  energy of the journal = one plus one plus one…unanticipated – the cumulative effect

Right:  Jan 1 – Hello journal for 2017

quote for the year:  “If we shadows have offended, think but this, and all is mended, that you have but slumber’d here, while these visions did appear.  And this weak and idle theme, no more yielding but a dream…Shakespear, “Midsummer Night’s Dream”

word for the year (or at least for January): MAGIC

song for the year:  Tragically Hip:  “Darkest One

MAGIC becomes art when it has nothing to hide.  Ben Okri

(cutout) in a crossroad who I thought I wanted to be, who I actually wanted to be, and how to make it all work together.

(no date)

Your Story is Not in the Book

What if I tell you, my Peach, that there is no order to the Universe, that all life is as random as comets forming out of gas and dust, sparkle and gleam spending eons roaming the empty spaces, trailing tracers of phosphorescent green or sun-kissed orange behind them?

What if I tell you, my Bright Sunflower, that your life is as random as those comets, that you and those like you make stories that start, rise, finish as if life were actually linear:  a specific from a random, where there is no such thing as specific, only arbitrary gatherings of atoms which are arbitrary gatherings of quarks – that groups of us gather and agree to call couch, car, cabbage, what William Gibson has named “a consensus hallucination.”

What if I tell you, my Beautiful Plum Blossom, that what is happening is real, that to step from one string of a story to another needs no more than a sidle to the side when a passing cloud covers the sun, or the moon is cycling through her dark phase, or the ocean bares her belly before the coming of a big wave.  Would you believe me?

**

There is something here that wants to be said but I don’t know what it is.  And still I resist daily writing practice.  Maybe I should go sit in a café like Natalie Goldberg does.  Take her book along with me, use it for prompts.  There’s an idea.  Let’ see how long THAT takes.  sigh.

February 22

I like these quotes.  Have been reading a lot lately, even more than usual, across a spectrum: magical realism, nonfiction, fiction, science.  If I can’t write, I can read.  I’ve seen suggestions that reading is necessary for good writing.

Martin Shaw:  A Branch from the Lightning Tree:  Ecstatic Myth and the Grace in Wildness

“’Threshold’ experience.  This seemingly benign phrase illustrates the sometimes rapid propulsion into a set of experiences that cause a great disintegration of old, often cherished ideas of our place in the world, and the opening to untidy new vistas of experience…without the return, the alchemy is half undone…How does one share a vision with a culture that has forgotten that the process ever existed?”

Daphne Merkin:  The Fame Lunches“…in order to feel safe enough with other people, most of us feel we have to control them. If you fear losing somebody who you think you need, you try to enslave or addict them.” Adam Phillips, quoting Gabriel Garcia Marquez:  One Hundred Years of Solitude

Anne Carson:  Eros the Bittersweet
Anne Carson:  Autobiography of Red
Russell Banks: Trailer Park
Laird Hunt:  Ray of the Star

David Shields:  Reality Hunger (omg where has this book been all my life?!!!!)

Ursula Hegi:  Intrusions

“Endings are hell to write.  I still have a long way to go till the ending.
“This chapter isn’t going anywhere.  To face an almost empty page is scary.  Especially if it remains almost empty after an hour.”  Note to self:  type this out and past it on the wall by the computer.  You are not alone.

more……

…

Nice:  “In greedy circles the lukewarm water was sucked into the drain.”

Terry Tempest Williams:  An Unspoken Hunger

“Each of us harbors a homeland, a landscape we naturally comprehend.  By understanding the dependability of place, we can anchor ourselves as trees.

Gillian Flynn:  Sharp Objects.  Everyone needs a little popular fiction now and then.  This was pretty good all things considered.  Nicely woven.

Karen Russell:  Vampires in the Lemon Grove and other stories

and most especially “Ship of Theseus” – Amazon says:

The chronicle of two readers finding each other, and their deadly struggle with forces beyond their understanding – all within the margins of a book conceived by Star Wars:  The Force Awakens director J.J. Abrams and written by award-winning novelist Doug Dorst.

The book:  Ship of Theseus, the final novel by a prolific but enigmatic writer named V.M. Straka, in which a man with no past is shanghaied onto a strange ship with a monstrous crew and launched onto a disorienting and perilous journey.

The writer:  Straka, the incendiary and secretive subject of one of the world’s greatest mysteries, a revolutionary about whom the world knows nothing apart from the words he wrote and the rumors that swirl around him.

The readers:  Jennifer and Eric, a college senior and a disgraced grad student, both facing crucial decisions about who they are, who they might become, and how much they’re willing to trust another person with their passions, hurts, and fears.

S. contains 22 inserts and will be delivered in a sealed slipcase.

Can I tell you how much this is inspiring to me and how much I want to write something like this?!!!!

[Cutout quote:  Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.  Virginia Woolf]

[This is what the previous pages look like folded down to the size of the journal]

February 25

To physicists, who study energy and matter, a string is anything much longer than it is wide. Or maybe it opens the pathway to a string that exists close to earth’s string…

String theory is very weird, more than you can imagine. It involves higher dimensions and other universes. Vibrating strings make up everything. Everything is chunky and fuzzy when you look at it close enough. You can still hear and see the Big Bang that started the universe. Black holes are hairy. Is dark energy making you lose weight? Is dark chocolate matter making you gain weight? Instead of using the dog-ate-my-homework excuse, try this one. “I left it in the eighth dimension.”  https://stringtheory4kids.wordpress.com/

**

“Joy.  A place where we are for a little while endlessly possible, capable of anything, it seems:  fluid, changing, ephemeral, renewable, intensely alive, close to death, clairvoyant, fearless, luminous, passionate, strange even to ourselves.

“It was written in a kind of waking dream, an erotic hallucination in which I was only semiconscious and yet utterly lucid.  I abandoned myself to the pressure, the touch of language…the trance of it.”  Carole Maso

“Dreams show us that consciousness itself is a scrabbling around at the hem of something so big it would short us out if we understood its true dimensions…A dream is made of spiderwebbing.  It’s a journal whose pages are the pressed wings of luna moths.  It tatters easily.  Gregg Levoy

[cut off at the bottom, a cutout:  i never stop asking “what if?”, and many of my experiments fail, but I learn something every time, and in many cases this knowledge leads me to the next great discovery.   The heart says:  Follow your heart]

March 1 – spent the day rummaging around my books and nosing into journals – it’s it’s like a treasure hunt.

Found this poem tucked in “Women Who Run with the Wolves”  funny how you forget what you write, put it somewhere, find it and think, “did I write that?” and know you did, and feel pleased.

Dining at the Red Sea Restaurant

It begins with the way things drop
from between lips like blue flowers
full of unnamed nectar reminding one
of a childhood memory – something spicy,
perhaps an undertone of medicine –
something hidden.  Full of this I watch
transparent bubbles rise
from the mouth of the fish in the octagon bowl.

The fork travels from the plate to the air
in front of me, pauses, makes promises,
drifts back to the place where it began.  Taste
is a thing to read about in Thursday’s paper
on the subway when the train emerges
from its dark tunnel.  As Winter curls
its fingers across the window, I trace the sparkles
of ice, like the sparkles in front of my eyes, try
to remember what my mother used to say.

Soon snow will come.  Already the birds
chide my procrastination from perches
around the wooden feeder.  Even the squirrel
has taken to hanging upside down from the feeder door.
Its small squirrel scream echo through my house, now
inexplicably empty except for the purple scarf
with gold threads flung in a far corner.
At the window the blue flowers wilt, dry, drop
sapphires onto the peeling sill.  By the time I notice

They too are echoes.  I toss them into the water flowing
under the bridge over which I ride every day.
The forgotten words rise again and again, but I do not
understand the language; the sound escapes in bubbles
from my lips.  Maybe the fish will tell me.  When
the fortune cookie is served, it will not break.
Some things are best left unknown.

[when you lift the poem, there are more pictures and a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye, Kindness ]

[the right page notes on the edge:  Visit to Flat Rock Vortex.  The pasted text reads:  Flights of Fancy, Explore the great indoors, You are what you find.  The poem:

Under a starless sky I lay
sweat dripping down my brow
dropping down to ground
musty with centuries of decay
undisturbed ’til now except for muskrat
paws pattering over memorized paths.

Beside me the river confides her stories
in a language I once knew, and wind
kisses m face, demanding against my lips like a
tempestuous lover seeking an invitation to enter.
Moonlight shadows shift as though pressing closer
to discover some enchantment for which they have
waited since Time began dancing to heartbeats
that must be mine, laughing like water swirling
wild and broken, dropped by storms
whirling in from the North.]

 

March 15

Possibility spreads itself across the table naming itself plan, calling itself goals, affirming out loud that it visions itself into tomorrow, shining.  Disappointment has been chained in the basement – foolish – in the dark it stirs and spins stories that become nightmares.  Better to ask it to dinner, have a few drinks, get it loosened up, turn it inside out to satisfaction, relief, contentment, dress it in bright colors, hold its hand, show it the writing on the page, the writing on the wall, the writing in the news with charts and graphs and a line that goes straight up the side of that high mountain where someday you, having attained the summit, will be showered with rose petals, anointed with myrrh, dressed in silk woven through with tiny gold threads, grow wings, fly with dragons and angels, laughing.

(n0 date)

Damn – I’m going to write this right here.  Because, well, because if I don’t I won’t remember it because it’s a dream.  It’s a dream.  Right?!  It’s a dream dammit!

My computer blipped.  It made the Twilight Zone sound.  The dreaded blue screen appeared.  I was stunned and then angry – the computer is new.  This should not be happening.  This late in the afternoon coffee will not console.  I mentally ran through the wine cabinet:  no chardonnay, some cab franc.  That would do. Maybe if I gave the computer a moment to collect itself, all would be well.  I did what I am always told to do in these instances – rebooted the computer then walked into the kitchen, grabbed the wine opener, opened the wine cabinet, opened the cab franc and got set to reboot myself.

“You could at least try, you know.”

I froze.  There was no one else in the house except the pug with one eye and she was snoring at a spot just slightly left of where my feet were.  Just in case (of what?  A blackout? A time warp?  What?) I looked at the *unopened* bottle of cab franc in my hand.  I stopped dropping drugs more than 5 decades ago.   I do my thyroid meds and hardly anything else, ever, except ibuprofen for when my knees start screaming at me or I get a migraine.

“The worst that might happen is a bad storm movie.”

“Hello?”  why did I do that?  The house was empty.  I had finally gone over the edge. No wings.  Dropping fast.  I imagined myself flailing, I saw the bottom of the abyss approaching.  It wasn’t pretty – they say if you hit the bottom when you are dreaming, you die.  Was I dreaming? I was dreaming.  I had fallen asleep at the computer in an afternoon carb coma from the pasta salad I had.  I felt better.  Maybe on waking I would get a poem.

“You aren’t dreaming.”

“Of course I’m dreaming.  It’s just me and the dog.  Where are you?”

“In the computer where you left me while you headed out to meet the coming storm armed only with a notebook, crayons and a cleared-calendar afternoon.  I’d say I was in your head but then you’d just keep believing that you’re dreaming.  You can’t just leave me and the approaching storm.  The tension is awful.  I keep getting these headaches.  How can I draw or create when all I can see is migraine sparkles and feel like throwing up?”

“That was me in the story.  Who are you?”  It was a dream.  I would direct it.  What is that called?  Never mind, it doesn’t matter, I was in control here. I WAS in control here.

“I am Morgaine. I am Maiden/Mother/Crone, the Morrigan.”

“………..”

“Oh come now.  Do you really think that once you set energy in motion you can leave it and it will stay as you left it?  I’ve been here for 3 years.  I’m tired of waiting.  I have called the energy back.  All you have to do is sit down and be a conduit.”

I *am* dreaming.  Great!  That means I can have as much wine as I want.

Having the explanation taken care of, I poured a tall glass of cab franc, took a sip, enjoyed the dryness and the taste in the back of my throat, and, with glass in hand, sauntered back to the computer.  I was game.  All I needed do is remember to get this all down when I woke up.

**

The computer’s blue face wavered, blinked to black.  All around me the air shimmered.  And Morgaine, the crone Morgaine, the Morgaine I had written of in my chapbook,  Your Story Is Not in the Book, that Morgaine, stepped from the monitor to stand at the table beside me.

Once I was visited by a white wolf while I was wide awake working on a book report for my master’s program.  She had yellow eyes and snow on her fur, stayed for about 5 minutes and then left.  This is a true story.  I was startled, but not afraid.  And I got my master’s thesis, a creation poem, from that visitation.

But then the back of my neck prickled, the hair on my arms lifted away from my skin.  “This is a dream, I say, again out loud, to no one.  “You are macaroni salad and a cupcake.”  The goddess, Morgaine, smiles, white teeth flashing, and answers, “This is neither a dream nor naptime carbs.  Let me show you.  I’ve already summoned the wolf.”

Beyond the window a cloud passed over the sun, the creepers covered the top of the pagoda, tiny star-like white flowers populating the top, making a roof, looking like a doorway to somewhere else.  In the huge old oak, three crows created a ruckus of caws and feathers as the trunk started to twist itself like a rubber band propeller on a balsa wood airplane.  I pinched my arm, felt pain, thought, “perhaps a dream within a dream,” decided to grab my journal and write it all down.  “No need to wait any longer.  The storm has arrived, and on its winds come secret stories demanding to be told.”

March 22

I have been studying.

One kind of hero that often appears in Celtic myths is the princely hunter who has followed the lure of a deer into a range of forest that she has never been in before.  The animal there undergoes a transformation, becoming the Queen of the Faerie hills or something of that kind.  This is a type of adventure in which the hero has no idea what she is doing but suddenly finds herself in a transformed realm.  In these stories the adventure that the hero is ready for is the one she gets… In such adventures the character has slipped out of the realm of controlled action into that of transpersonal compulsions and events.  Now, maybe these can be handled, maybe they can’t.  We are beyond protection in a field of higher powers than we know. Joseph Campbell.]

Continued:  Part 2,  

Part 3

Part 4 (final….for now)