Speaking in Thorns

The hardest thing, maybe, is having lost your direction. All the things you wanted don't want you anymore.

The road dead-ends in a tangle of thorns. 

In The Track of the Moon's Shadow

There was no glimpse of the direction of my future during the eclipse, only the knowledge of what is being eclipsed from my life. 

Whirlwind in Retrograde

"Don't go far off" he used to say, but in the end, he only wanted me to go.  

Some days, I walk out onto my doorstep and it's like a dream I had once, long ago. Chalky blue-white midwestern light and curiously elongated shadows. There is some solace in the way the wind and the trees aren't bothered about me; I just am, if I'm anything at all. 

There is a house on the next block with a row of temple bells out front. They chime with a most delicate sound. 

Once upon a time - that is to say, three or four years ago - I used to gaze out toward a point on the horizon, northeast beyond the cliffs, gaze at it until I could imagine seeing the traces of my attention there, a phantom signal against the sky. 

What was I signaling? Something desperately important, it seemed. A longed-for future. A magical elsewhere. A certain place where I was not. At night I gazed at the stars and dreamed. Twice I watched the earth's shadow cross the face of the moon and felt my destiny coming into being. My goddess is a goddess of eclipses, after all. 

Now I look out my southwestern window and understand so clearly that what I was signaling was my own self, looking back from where I came.

I think a lot about that place between what was then the future and the past. There was so much I did not see. Ohio like apple-raspberry candies from the dime store. Gingerbread, cloves and chamomile. Soft Sounds of the 70's. Cold grue and aquarium sky. From my limestone perch in Texas, I did not see this, nor hear it, nor feel it. What I sensed, on the other side of my prickly pear reality, was something golden and glimmering, reaching into the beyond. The glow of manifestation, maybe. I wonder now how much of it belonged to me. 

...

One night not long ago, I was at the library, a building that looks like it was designed by Escher on a bender. We sat in the atrium and listened to astronomers talk. Through the pointed panes of glass, a slow twilight was descending. My attention drifted upward until I could see the first stars. 

Far away, I sensed a faint blip on my inner radar, that signal trace of who I used to be. I signal back, a pinprick of light with the density of heartache. I tell her that I am here, looking at the sky 1353 miles away, and if you hurt, it's because the future hurts. But you did make it out, even if it wasn't like you imagined. You managed to do what you were supposed to do. You did make it there, eventually, and for a little while your wish was true. 

I already knew she heard me, because I'd heard it all those years ago. 

...

Now the solar eclipse is coming, and there is nothing to do but wait. We traveled here by the path of totality last summer, without knowing. The direction of the signal in the sky. It seems somehow significant now. 

For the moment I bide my time here in the track of the moon's shadow, among the flat fields and whirling leaves, searching the horizon for a signal from my next future. Perhaps, in the afternoon darkness - if I'm lucky - it will shine. 

The Opposite of Presence

It's late mid-winter in northwest Ohio, and the wind is achingly cold. The fields are empty even though they are not empty. The silence is a deafening roar.

What is this absence that screams so loud without a sound? I keep asking but there is never an answer. 

Muddy sun sets in grey sky. Cell towers blink on the horizon. At dusk, the belt of Venus appears in the east, but close, so close that it feels that the edge of the earth is near.

The pain in my bones signals my own existence. 

I step into the field to pose for a picture, but already I am disappearing from the landscape. It doesn't know me and won't miss me. My greatest value now is in being gone.

Inside, invisible to see, I recall that it was only a year ago that I watched the conjunction of Venus and Jupiter from the end of my street. Every night the planets drew closer and closer. It seemed to mean something then, it must have meant something; even if I can't remember the way it felt now. I watched and waited and was happy then, until the planets moved apart, the way they always do.

Crescent Moon in the Window, Crescent Moon in the Sky

Sometimes it feels like something is about to happen, but nothing happens. I wonder if I missed it, made the wrong move at the wrong time. Perhaps something did happen, but it's too subtle to register in my dim understanding. Maybe I stepped across the line into another dimension, which is so like the previous one it's impossible to tell. Maybe I'm like the foolish protagonist of The Beast in the Jungle by Henry James, who comes to believe that the extraordinary thing that was going to happen to him would be that nothing happens to him (spoiler alert - he was wrong). 

On nights like these, I go outside and look at the sky, hoping for insight to descend. It is out there, waiting, but I can't reach it - there is something in the way.

Sometimes, twilight clouds hang heavy over the house. The cat hides under my bed at the sound of thunder. Sometimes, the wind from the lake batters my west window like a ghost demanding entrance. Erie/eerie. 

One night in the dead of winter, my housemate and I were lying on my bedroom floor, drawing. Far above in the icy sky, we heard the sound of a plane. "I'd hate to be up there on a night like this" he said, and for a moment our imaginations drifted along with the pilot, mapping the edge of the atmosphere. 

Last Thursday I went to a lecture at the planetarium. I felt dizzy as the projected sky spun around and around. The astronomer pointed out what the astrologers call fixed stars. I remembered watching the sky night after night from my altar rock, and later, when the world was very different, standing by the gate and gazing between Aldebaran and Pleiades.

My own past words come back to me, here in her future. "The word on the astral is things will never be the same. You may not notice, though. They've always already been forever changed."

The Blue Hour

Outside the window, it was the blue hour. 

Sometimes when I walk down the road in the evening, the world goes fuzzy at the edges. Like a carefully controlled hallucination just beginning to break apart. 

How is it that I am here in this place? In those moments, it feels like the real me is somewhere else. 

9 crows roost in the sycamore tree. I don't know what it means, only that it makes me shiver. 

My tarot cards show nothing but swords and empty cups. 

Cold

Pluto, 29° 59'

It's the time of endings, and even the birds are restless. Footprints in the snow, walking away. I see (to my surprise, though it really shouldn't be) that I wrote this exactly 2 years ago, and this nearly 3 years ago, and wouldn't you know it's all to do again, because submission to Fate is a constant process, it doesn't matter in the slightest that you are so very tired now.

You're Not Existing In Your World At All

It was the 26th of July, and we were at the storage unit by the side of the highway, loading my belongings into a truck. By then, it was near dusk.

He said, "well, if you choose not to go, imagine what you will be doing at this time tomorrow. If you do go, imagine you're not existing in your world at all." 

...

It's late October, and I'm somewhere else, more alone than I've ever been. If there is a sun anywhere in the overcast sky, I can't see it. Twilight birds flit through leafless branches. I wonder now if there is any world out there where I might exist at all.

The Summer of Irrevocable Change

 

It is here. 

Blue Redux/Chapter 24

Tuesday, the 27th of June. Again, the brightness of the sky draws me outside. The heat this time is stunning.

It's a little more than a month since the day of the blue paint and crescent moon, though the sense of layered time remains. Even if the air feels on fire, the sunlit grass and the shadows are the same. 

Out front though, the yard is empty. Around back, everything is still. In this space is absence, as solid as the heat. There is no longer any sign of laughter or murmured conversation. Cicada drone is the only sound. 

I sit down on the same rock as I'd done before, feeling as curiously old/young as I had in May. The emptiness of the place runs though me now, draining into the hollow ground. It's that sensation you get when the party is over, the guests have left, the visitors have had to go. I know this absence is the price I pay for moving on. My mother has said she never wants to see me again, and the current me, the chronological one, is resigned to this, knowing there was nothing else to be expected, though I worry a bit about child me, who was always so desperate to please. Child me is surprisingly stoic, however. It turns out, like the limestone and the prickly pear and the twisted chapote persimmon, she already knew the score. 

The sun is searing, blisteringly hot. It's the hottest June on record, they say. I get up, seek some cover among the trees. I pluck flowers from the whitebrush and desert willow to save, because they don't have them where I'm going. I occurs to me that I am trying to fold Texas away, put it in a box like a keepsake, knowing that in a years' time it might mean something more to me, but it just as likely won't mean a thing. 

Over top the clothesline again I see the daylight moon. It has grown from the thin crescent of 25th May, dwindled and grown again into a fat waxing gibbous. In recent days the boys have been increasingly restless, the grown-up ones wanting to get on with the rest of their lives, the younger one impatient to be somewhere else. After years of stasis, things had suddenly begun to move. Action brings good fortune, so the I Ching and Pink Floyd say, and perhaps this is true; in fact, I'd say it almost certainly is, as inaction has done us the exact opposite. But for every action taken there is a world left behind, and this, I think, is what I am looking at now. 

Absence of presence as presentiment. The empty space where we used to be.

It's a melancholy feeling, to be sure. 

䷗

But let us allow hexagram 24 to have its say. It is advantageous to have a direction to go. 

Unhexing the Resonance

Places Only Remembered In Dreams

1.

Sometimes I dream of a small building, perfectly square, made of cinderblocks painted azure blue. Inside is a dark space, meant for unknown purposes - unknown to me, that is - at least, there is never anyone around to explain. Sometimes I find things there. Printed pages of stories I can't remember writing. Pictures that disappear when I look too long. Messages from people I've never known.

I'd forgotten that this was a real place, a real building, anyway, until I happened upon it on my recent trip to Victoria. There it was, blue and inscrutable as ever, broadcasting no hint as to its use. I remembered then that back in those times of my restless night driving, it used to have a moon-shaped light at the door. 

2. 

Sometimes I dream of a place that is an impossible combination of English lowland and Gulf coast rice field, the glint of wetland reflecting the grey-grained sky. Ghostly egrets stalk like emissaries from other worlds. Clouds of murmurating starlings glimmer like white noise. Far away in the distance, I see the beacon blinking. I imagine the wisps of fog, the salt air at your windows, the warped wood at your door. 

Bluer Than Blue

It was about 4:30 in the afternoon on the 25th of May. I was walking down the hall when I'd turned to glance at the eastern window, through which you can see the shadow of the earth at dusk. Whatever it was that had caught my eye, there was no sign of evening yet. The sun was still high and bright, the sky was clear, and I realized I would rather be outside. I change my trajectory, turn around and go. 

Out in front, the older boys are washing their car, faint radio thrum as they each polish a side. Around the back, fleecy clouds are just beginning to rise. My youngest, in his last spring as a pre-teen, is occupying himself with characteristic self-possession. He experimentally spins in circles because he's just learned that, quote, "dizziness is fab." 

I make my way to the sunlit grass at the very back of the yard and pause for a moment. There is nothing unusual to see here, it's the same as it's always been, but then the feeling comes over me, the layering of time. It's a most remarkable effect. I take a seat on one of the ancient rocks that jut out of the ground, and notice. If I wasn't chatting with my own child and managed to overlook my aches and pains, I could easily convince myself that it was 40 years ago. Something about the air, the scent of the grass, the quality of light lifts the years away, leaving me free of the weight of age and knowledge. And yet, I know it is there. In that space between is something else, and I ponder it, despite not having the words.

My son, satisfactorily dizzy now, is singing a heartfelt song to the cat, because it's just that sort of day. We've all of us got a touch of spring fever, I guess. I turn my attention to the aged wooden posts holding up the clothesline - they might not be quite as old as the rock I'm sitting on, but getting up there. I notice one of them has a smear of blue paint on it, a smudged handprint maybe, even though there is nothing else here painted that shade. A story that I'd likely never know. The smudge resembled a map of an unknown place, and did not quite match the sky, even though they were both very, very blue. I sat there and let the feelings run through me, the weight of time and also the non-weight of it. 

Up above the paint-smudged post and the cross-piece where the rain-gauge has lived all my life, I can see the faint crescent of the daylight moon. Her horns are tilted downward, the way my great auntie used to say would spill out the rain. And she was right, of course, but at this moment, the clarity of the sky is striking. 

I think, life without you is gonna be bluer than blue, and I feel the sorrow that is the silent partner of time, the counterweight of earthly happiness. I never really imagined leaving Texas, but the feeling in the pit of my stomach tells me it's already past time to go. I tell the limestone and the prickly pear and the twisted chapote persimmon that I'm sorry, but the landscape only shrugs a little. It already knows the score. 

My youngest, done with his song now, skips back to the house. The older boys put up their polishing gear and murmur to each other as they walk away. The sun sinks just a bit lower. The wind begins to sigh. This moment - this one - in the sunlit grass will never come again. This moment is gone forever. 

If anyone else notices its passing, they give no indication. Like the tale of the blue map smudge on the clothesline post, only these traces remain.

Watch Them Glow

This is going to be one of those posts that probably means nothing to anyone but me, but that's all right. Maybe one day someone will stumble across it and recognize what I'm going to describe, and will be relieved that someone else knows what it's like. Even if they don't...well, it doesn't really matter, I suppose, because it's also about trying to convert a feeling into imagery. 

So, please. . . bear with me. 

It was the end of April, and my collaborator and companion (in the Doctor Who sense, as I've come to think of us) had come down to go to Psych Fest. He wore a 13th Floor Elevators shirt and a blue metallic plaid jacket, I wore a psychedelic dress and enormous shoes. It was sunny but not hot, the crowd was amiable, the bands were good, and aside from the lock jamming on the bathroom door and having to be rescued by a bunch of hippies (high fives, y'all!) everything went off without a hitch. 

I don't recall feeling haunted. It wasn't a very haunted sort of day. Everything felt very warm and present in the sunshine, I didn't even have that feeling like I've had in the past, as if part of me had been left behind somewhere. No, there wasn't a trace of any haunting, as far as I could tell. 

It was only a couple of days later that things turned strange. 

At the very beginning of May, each having gone our separate ways home, we set about sorting through the photos and videos we'd taken with an eye toward future projects. We'd got some really good stuff, although the audio capabilities of my little point 'n' shoot camera couldn't really handle the sound at a rock show. Monsieur Pseud (as I like to call him) sent me one he'd taken with his phone, panning the crowd while the Raveonettes played in the background. Nothing unusual about it, really, not technically. It was a perfectly serviceable video and an accurate representation of the scene. I remembered him filming it even, while I lounged on a tree stump drinking Dr Pepper. No, what was unusual was my reaction to it. 

It hit me like a ton of bricks, that feeling of being haunted. It was like deja vu, but not deja vu of the actual event. It felt like the memory of something that had happened many years ago, a record of something of grave importance that had been missed and had only just now returned. What the hey? It didn't make sense, but that was the only way to describe it. The closest term to the feeling, besides haunted, might be hiraeth.

I needed a second, third, fourth opinion. Naturally, I dragged each of my family members in to watch it, asking if they noticed anything odd. Anything about the picture, atmosphere, the music, the mood? Did it make them feel some sort of way? Nope - aside from saying they might feel a bit anxious in such a packed setting, to their eyes it was exactly what it appeared to be, a typical rock fest crowd. It was just me who was being weird. 

Well, okay. There was no obvious explanation. And there still isn't, for the way it gives me a shiver every time. Just an ordinary video. As proof, I present it here, courtesy of Mr. Pseud. A crowd watching the Raveonettes tear it up as the sun is going down. 

But, surely you know by now that these things don't let me go so easily. I couldn't explain it; I could barely describe it. However, if I'm going to call myself an artist, I should at least be able to make something that looks like it made me feel. Perhaps it would help me understand. I got down to work.

My video editing skills are rudimentary at best, and I learned as much from what didn't work as what did. Not that it's perfect, mind you, but my husband, bless him, said it's about as good a visualization of deja vu as he's ever seen. Here is the finished product:

There you have it. Not how the clip looks to me, but how it feels. As if everything is doubled, every person accompanied by their own shade. Like some other, parallel world is close by, just over our shoulders and out of sight. And maybe it is. Who knows?  

Maybe part of collaboration is learning to see through someone else's eyes. Collective eyes of a sort. Again, who knows? Maybe I really am just weird. 

Whatever the case, it's yet another mystery to explore. 

An Everyday Sort of Strangeness, A Quality of Momentary Light

 

Sideways glances at the changing seasons, mercurial weather, mysteries in plain sight. Blinding shimmer, winged shadows, electricity hum, fireflies.

Title quote source

Eyes Open

"As if something out there seemed to take notice"

It's been a year since the Mothwing Collective came into the world, and our explorations of the bright side of the eerie are still going strong. To say more about what the bright eerie is, and what it means, is an ongoing project that will come in time, but for now, here (hopefully, for your pleasure) are more pictures. Never fear, our eyes are open and watching the horizon.

Spectral speculations.

"I dreamt I called you from the past."  

(And I did dream it, via some secret line from 1988 into now, and I told the story of all that happened between the times of your birth and mine, but when I woke up, I couldn't remember a word.)

Rearranging geometries and breaking invisible sightlines.

Fate hums along wires

Eyes Open

Beacon, signal, silent invisible

Lunar lucidity

Hidden turnings. 

Lens flare as Aldebaran, striding across the star map. 

More mothwingy images next post. Count on it. 

The Sopping Tuesday/No Longer, Not Yet/ The Past and Pending

 (With apologies to Edward Gorey...)

It's a dismal anniversary, damp and melancholy, not unlike the day it commemorates. It was the 8th of May, 11 years ago now, when a low rumble of thunder got my attention. The heavy sky outside my window brought on a vague panic; I'd forgotten how dark the hill country could be when it rained. 

I shuddered, a bone-deep sort of spasm. I wanted to wail out loud, because how could I hide from the weather? But there was nothing for it. Instead of wailing, I got in the car and drove to the elementary school where I registered one of my children for classes; the next day at the junior high I would register another. The littlest one, I could still carry on my hip, just barely. I remember pulling into the parking lot and having to sit for a moment to catch my breath, because it had been so long since I'd done anything without my husband that I wondered if I'd forgotten how. I remember seeing the gold-green live oak catkins scattered on the damp asphalt like runes. I was not versed in reading them, but I already knew they said, "you don't want to be here." 

The next day, it was still pouring as I sat at the glassed-in office at the junior high on the hill, filling out paperwork while the pledge of allegiance echoed down the hall. It felt so strange, looking out on the silvery world on the other side of the glass. Vertiginous, like I might fall. Last month, last week, even, we'd been living our old lives somewhere else, and now we were here. 

My black ballet flats were soaked through from the run-off, so after I'd left my teen to his classes, I'd gathered my toddler and gone to Walgreen's for a cheap pair of sandals and a bottle of Excedrin Migraine. I remember our reflections in the doorway glass, the sky behind us, the rainwater rushing down the gutters even as the clouds were beginning to break. I remember how I sought comfort in the drugstore's sameness, how it reminded me of Victoria, soothing my homesickness for moment, even though I knew I was fooling myself. I even remember feeling a little weird about buying the sandals, too, as if by purchasing new shoes, it would mean I was somehow betraying my old self, that it would be the beginning of the end of who I was before I came. But when the sandals were worn out by the end of the summer, I found I hesitated just as much when it came time to throw them away. 

I went to back to Victoria for a visit a couple of months ago. I hadn't been there in a long time. It was equal parts more decrepit and yet also somehow revitalized. My family never had much interest in returning, so it was my friend who drove me south. He wanted to see the place I'd written about, the inspiration for the name at the top of this page. He wanted to know the "infernal geometry of the streets", the unnaturally silent corners, the haunting sense of being in a place that felt like no place much at all.

We sat on a bench downtown and drew sketches in our notebooks and listened to the clicking of the crosswalk lights. We watched the eerie shimmer in the intersection of N. Main and Santa Rosa while the palm fronds rattled in the silence.

We explored the places on the map I'd once made, climbed to the top of an abandoned parking garage where we found mysterious signs and wonders. We rested, hot and tired, as we watched cloud shapes drifting by. 

And all along I had the unnerving sense that I could just go home, as if I'd only gone for a long walk in the sunny afternoon, or just popped out to pick up lunch, like I'd done so often. As if the landscape of my life had not irrevocably changed. As if I could just walk back to the gold house (now painted blue), as if my children would be there, still children, and not nearly all of them grown up now. 

That's when I knew for sure that - in my mind, anyway - I'd never really left. That part of me (my heart, soul, psyche?) had remained there all along. Life on pause, transition incomplete. Those worn-out shoes I didn't want to toss. Unlike the rest of my family, I'd never really made the leap. 

Maybe that was my way of surviving. Perhaps, perhaps. But it's way past time now to collect those parts of myself and go. The life I lived in Victoria and the quasi-suspended-in-transition existence that came after. I'm tired of dismal Tuesdays and dread at the sound of thunder. Finally, at last, I have a new key.

The hex of the past is unwoven. Maybe one day I'll even remember it fondly. For now, though, I must turn my attention to that which is pending, and for the time when not yet is no longer.