Thursday, October 6, 2005

Pretty River    to Sam Pretty River in flat space meanders, turbid with dark matters, building shoals of star-forged dust. Pretty River's fish are burning, trailing cold fire in their pretty wakes. Are you alone in the dark, dark enough to see? Pretty River sparkles with no fault stars and we underlings resolve them how we will, with myths or mirrors. Pretty River murmurs and hisses. They that have big ears will hear rumors of cosmic kisses and near misses. Pretty River rolls like dice; on its stars you cannot map the same myth or tell the same story twice. Pretty River has no morals to apply. The quantum of fate exhibits randomness to a high degree. Pretty River is a quarrel in which all parties agree. Sums over history do not solve the mystery. Pretty river is not a river you can cry, it just keeps rolling on 'til all its deltas epsilon, and all the seas gang dry. And all the seas gang dry, ether washing clean the firmament Pretty River runs on and runs off. © 2005 Dana Pattillo 10:10:37 PM    comment []

Wednesday, October 5, 2005

FATHER EARTH, MOTHER SKY In her post of August 24 Kate Ingold at Broken Windows wrote: Around the time of my step-father's illness and death, I began to travel around the midwest researching and photographing Native American earth and burial mounds. The mounds, some earthen wombs for the dead, nearly all planted near waterways, somehow helped me through the loss of my step-father, a man who had been a father to me for thirteen years before he died. And mentions: My master's thesis was a chapbook of photographs, poems, and essays about the mounds titled "Sky-Map: An Earthwork Diary". I was able to publish 100 color copies when I was awarded a grant by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, most of which are still sitting in a cardboard box at the bottom of our downstairs closet four years later. I asked for and she sent me a copy of that chapbook. As I said in a comment on my last post, it was just my sort of thing and I loved it, text and photos both. In SKY/MAP: AN EARTHWORK DIARY, Kate writes, in the section on Nazca, Peru: In traditional western astronomy, we see constellations as connect-the-dot line drawings. We see reenactments of Greek and Roman myths through the linear connection of bright star to bright star. The Andeans see things differently. Their constellations are in the shadows. They see animals and plants in the contours of the dark space between the bright star clusters that make up the Milky Way. These silhouettes, shadow images, are signifiers of seasonal change and representations of creation stories and myths. Along with all of Kate's words and pictures, these sentences in particular carried me like a river, like the shadow constellations that hide in the brightness of the star river, the Milky Way to my backyard and begin gathering brick and stone for my homemade labyrinth. You can't see the Milky Way from my backyard, but you can see more stars on a clear night than usual in a city like Tulsa; some big trees hold back the haze of street lights. To get a good view of the night sky I have to drive a good way out of town. Everywhere people are, there are lights to hold back the darkness of the night. To see the stars, you must go out into the dark. Go out into the dark, linger, and look. As I've written in a poem, the stars with their long needles will sew your foot to the dark river. In SKY/MAP, Kate writes: Myths seem like guide books or instruction manuals to me.... They are instructions on how to see our connections among one another and the land we live on. She also says, There is no separation between the mounds and myth. The mounds are made from myth, surrounded by myth. Our ancestral urge to make sense of things, to shape our experience into stories must be linked to the atavistic urge to shape the earth with our hands, to dig, pile up and pat dirt into a mound of meaning. Kate speaks of becoming "obsessed with the stars and the universe" after her step-father's death. After my mother's death when I was still a young man, on clear nights I would sometimes drive out to the cemetery where her body was buried. I would go and lie down on her grave. On my back, I smelled the earth, felt cut grass prickling and the air flowing over me, listened to insects singing, distant dogs barking, cars dopplering by, and looked up at the stars that my mother's closed eyes would see if they could see anything. A few years ago when my grandmother died at age 90, she was buried in the same cemetery. After the graveside service for Grandma was over. I walked over and laid down on my back, on my mother's grave, and looked up into the deep blue sky, decorated with a few wisps of cirrus cloud. (My family is used to this sort of thing.)  As Kate says, many of the Native American earthworks were burial mounds. Some of the mounds on the Arkansas River near Spiro, Oklahoma contained burials, and one of those, called Craig Mound, contained over 600 burials. Craig Mound was publicly looted for its rich trove of grave goods in the 1930s, until the state forced the looters out, then it was excavated and by archaeologists from the University of Oklahoma, with the help of the WPA. The present mound is a reconstruction, what was left of the original pushed back together, more or less. The Spiro site is the only one I have visited in person. Not impressive to the eye, you have to walk around until you can feel, or imagine you feel, a power placed there in the dirt long ago by many hands. The Spiro site is now a State Park and closes before sunset, but I'd like to lie on my back on top of a mound on a clear night, to see their stars, and the spaces between their stars, the stars the long dead people mapped their myths on. Surely, some of our stars are the same, and some of our dark spaces, too. [This post © 2005 Dana Pattillo] 5:29:26 PM    comment []

Monday, October 3, 2005

SIMPLE GIFTS: BUILD YOUR OWN STONE AGE RITUAL SITE Have you ever walked a labyrinth? Not a maze, a labyrinth. A maze has false turnings and dead ends; the way in and the way out are hidden by walls or hedges. A maze is a puzzle or a trap; a sort of crossword for the feet. The purpose of a maze is to get lost. A labyrinth does not need concealment; it has curves and turnings that in the end bring the walker to the center of the pattern. The way out is the same as the way in. Turn about and follow the same meanders coiled on themselves. Step over threshold and exit where you entered. Like all forms of meditation or prayer the only change is the self of the one walks the path. The purpose of the labryrinth is to be found. I'm building one in my backyard. It is a classical seven course labyrinth, a pattern that comes down to us from prehistory. I laid it out the courses with white duct tape and plain old masking tape, after I ran out of duct tape. The center is made out of scavenged bricks and pieces of brick, tiles, and glass insulators from old telephone poles. For the outer circuits I am using chunks of native sandstone and limestone, the goaf left over from my fossil fossicking, whacked to pieces with hammer and chisel.  This afternoon and evening, I put down rocks and took up tape, finishing the fifth course just in time to walk the labyrinth as the sun was setting. The two outermost circuits are still in tape, but I need more stone. The entrance to the labyrinth is flanked by two stones that stand about 18 inches high that I think of them as mini-menhirs, and between them is a flat stone. This is the threshold. I step onto the flat stone, take a breath, let it out, and step into the labyrinth. I walk with my head inclined, because the lanes are not all that wide, and I need to watch where I put my feet. When I reach the end of the turning path, the off center center of the labyrinth, I look down at the large porcelain power line insulator that marks the spot, take a breath, let it out, turn on my heel, and wind my way back to the threshold, step onto the flat rock, take a breath, let it out, and step off into my backyard, standing in front of the old brick fireplace/grill that we use at solstice for the fire ceremony. I think I will have completed laying stone for the last two courses by then, and my homely homemade labyrinth will become part of our homemade solstice ceremony. I first walked a labyrinth one evening by candlelight, with my wife and several hundred other people, at a war protest, back when it was still an invasion and not an occupation, a mission that could be accomplished according to the man who set it all in motion. It was a temporary labyrinth staked out on the lawn in front of the local United Church of Christ (The "Don't put a period where God put a comma," people). I think that labyrinth was on the Chartres pattern, much more complex than the one I'm making. Walking that labyrinth was like being wrapped in a prayer; we all committed magic without a license as cars whizzed by on Harvard Blvd. I know it may seem absurd to some pilgrims and seekers for an atheist (with a Goddess Archetype on his back) to speak of prayer or of having spiritual experiences; but I do pray, I do have spiritual experiences, and I don't believe in god. So there. The experience of that labyrinth moved me, and moved with me. I wanted to do it again. I walk my heterogenous little backyard labyrinth every day, morning and evening if I can. I go out and walk it when I come home from work or when Elspeth is pissing me off, because I find the simple ritual very calming. I step off the flat rock between the mini-menhirs, and I come down where I ought be, as the Shaker hymn has it: 'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free, 'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be, And when we find ourselves in the place just right, 'Twill be in the valley of love and delight. When true simplicity is gain'd To bow and to bend we shan't be asham'd, To turn, turn will be our delight 'Till by turning, turning we come round right. [This post © 2005 Dana Pattillo] 8:26:20 AM    comment []

Wednesday, September 28, 2005

EMBERS FOR MEG For forty thousand generations we stirred the embers of a low fire, kept the audible prowlings of the huge night at bay. A small tribe, we looked up at the stars, and the spaces between the stars, tracked the transits and transformations of the moon, counted five wanderers, As chert or clay came to our hands, words came to us, and we built them into stories nested in stories, tool kits for making memory into myth, to tell the children, to tell the children, to tell the children how to compact the whole life of our tribe, a small tribe, into a bundle of words and pictures small enough to carry inside the head of an elder, but enough to survive a long trek, and feed the whole tribe, by the low fire, in the great dark, under a starry sky, give us meaning, give us meaning give us the meaning. by which we mean to survive. [This post © 2005 Dana Pattillo] 8:19:39 PM    comment []

Monday, September 26, 2005

HOME PSY-OPS PROJECT CODE NAME: MONKEY BOY Go to Toys-R-Us or a similar box store at your local metastasizing suburban retail strip tumor (Tulsa's TrU is located at what we Midtowners refer to fondly as "71st and Hell," and buy one or several of a toy product known as "Barrel of Monkeys." Inside the blue plastic barrel you will a number of flat, red, monkeys (I know, we've already reached irony but we must be brave and forge onwards) with curving arms that form a sort of sideways S. Now go to the Office Depot or Staples a few box stores down the street, and buy peel and stick Velcro, peel and stick magnet strip, heavy duty double-sided foam tape, and a paint pen in your choice of color (I prefer silver, it contrasts nicely with the red plastic of the monkey. Attach your choice of Velcro or magnetic strip to the back of the monkey, using the foam tape betwixt the Velcro or magnet strip and your little simian, as it makes a better adhesive to the monkey. Then use your paint pen to scribe a neatly drawn "W" on the chest and your MONKEY BOY is complete. Carry a supply of Monkey Boys at all times. When you happen to be in a parking lot and see a great honking SUV with a yellow ribbon you casually slap on a Magnetic Monkey Boy next to the sticker as you walk by. The Velcro Monkey Boy will stick to the fabric of cubicle walls, if you happen to work in Cubicleville. I bet it might even adhere to tweed, if you back-slapped a Fundy and/or wingnut who favors tweed jackets. A picture is worth 10,000 words (inflation, you know), but alas my dcam has died, my hard disk is in a coma, and I can't use my scanner since I'm using a Linux OS on a CD to access the internet. Otherwise I could have jpegs of the Monkey Boys I made and applied in situ, to go with the words. I also have completed two new Scissor Dances, one called "The Empty Suits Parade at the River of Souls" and the other titled "If Your Mother Was Here / How Many Pecks Can a Woodpecker Peck?" I've been doing scissor dance post cards, some with a New Orleans theme, as well. My Hoo has been Booed. I'll get 'em out there when I can. I haven't spoken of it here, but I have resumed my Black Ribbon and Chalk activities. I pick a neighborhood; Annie Beagle and I go walkies at the sunset. I'm just a middle-aged bald guy walking his dog. But my shirt pocket is full of Black Ribbon leaflets and Monkey Boys, and my baggie shorts pocket is full of chalk. Annie is perfect camo; they see me but don't see me. I talk the talkie, I try to walk the walkie. 9:39:01 PM    comment []

Sunday, September 25, 2005

EARLY AUTUMN METAPHYSICAL HAIKU Mowing the front lawn. Fooled eyes see a dead leaf leap like a frog: Basho! 9:25:15 PM    comment []

Friday, September 23, 2005

Just received from a near flung correspondent Brother Merle: From: Brother Merle Date: Sep 23, 2005 9:44 AM Subject: The Texas Clusterfuck To: Dr. Omed This is really bad since I don't know jack about poetry. I had to inflict it on someone. As they say everything is bigger in Texas. The Texas Clusterfuck No more Texas Two-Step Time for a new dance. Take to the interstate with several thousand pardners and their SUV's. No guns please. This isn't the LA Freeway Leavem in the gunrack. Line up on the highway use both sides if needed. No more Texas Two-Step Time for a new dance. It's simple Start your engines Every five minutes move one car length don't worry if partners run out of gas The National Guard will be along shortly to top them off No more Texas Two-Step Time for a new dance. Make sure that bitch Rita is at your back. Watch for that final surge It's a killer. No more Texas Two-Step Time for a new dance. Now you are doing Texas Clusterfuck. This post © 2005 Dana Pattillo. 8:46:48 AM    comment []

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