the sun extends our shadows extend us what are we if we are our shadows extend our light we are extensions how comforting to know where we come from where we go.

 keeping in mind what shadow produce might mean to matter here.

love grows 
as time 
shrinks.

what is produced
in shadow when 
the body is absorbed
by light.

what matter 
shadows 
in 
the shattered world
of shadowed
light.

parson bachelard

 
a material element must provide
its own substance,
its particular rules and poetics. 

you can find a lot of good 
material on the ground
like providence
overlooked. 

still it is up to you
to make it matter. 

and it does.
matter.

can't we just talk about it?

 
to bring forth into view,
to exhibit,
often of witnesses
or evidence
to extend, lengthen,
lengthen in time,
to bring
into being,
to generate.

thy soul is an anarchist, dog.

curb your human, dog. 
make your brain sanctuary, dig.
goonight kidd. 
you can put anything on a string
and sing.
however it is
the intimate imagination
of the vegetating 
and material powers 
that i would like to give
most attention to
in this book.
last night i got my 
persecution complex on.
i can't do anything about
the world or what i wear
but it wears on me at times.
levi's made in u.s.a. cost
150 dollars and they send you 
a used pair. 
this is my customer satisfaction.
and the ride clunky on 
boyish old hips,
dig.

the sea will be disturbed
later
a bit disturbed
then disturbed.
sorry kids evil bastards
run the world.

life is a rehearsal
but improvised not sure
for what but serious
plays the thing.

i in general 
don't make note
of cars 
in autoworld
except as potential
weapons or obstacles.
and i been known to 
complain while in one.
i do want to note
there is one car called soul
and another called patriot.
theoretically
you could own both
but it might get confusing.

fen hangs twenty, practicing for the waves.

 

goomorning kids, this is the first post from away from my computer mom's house. i feel like a proud fledgeling bird. i must say i love my new pooter. it's so cute. and me and mister got new necklaces r.original necklaces. we wore them to the oscars last night, and this morning mister gave his the first immersion in his natural element.

i love going by the sanctuary city signs. yesterday we saw one by orchestra hall on the way to the kodo drummers. this morning i saw my own sign on the sunlit lampost with the dog smelling flower sign that says curb your sanctuary city. it seems a more good message now. those drummer boys really drum your soul. that's a good vibration you have to get in situ, you hear those drums with your whole body, your skeleton dances in your skin. 
passing cornell park we saw a man in the sun on a park bench. one would never know a murder occurred there just recently. he was in bliss, a white pigeon walking around his feet. i said, you have a friend there. he said, you have a nice pal there too. yep. good stuff johnny.

 

if a reverie is to be pursued with the constancy a written work requires, to be more than simply a way of filling in time, it must discover its matter.

gaston bachelard,
water and dreams

charlotte rampling is so fine. we just saw 45 years. i remember her as a girl, in the night porter. to see her grow over the years is such a deep pleasure. you can see her character deepen and mature, radiant on film. now it seems she's living in our cinema world, acting so intimate and subtle, her translucent art; it feels like we're watching her soul.

when i began meditating on the concept of the beauty of matter, i was immediately struck by the neglect of the material cause in aesthetic philosophy. in particular it seemed to me that the individualizing power of matter had been underestimated. why does everyone always associate the notion of the individual with form? is there not an individuality in depth that makes matter a totality, even in its smallest divisions? meditated upon from the perspective of its depth matter is the very principle that can dissociate itself from forms. it is not the simple absence of formal activity . it remains itself despite all distortion and division. moreover, matter may be given value in two ways : by deepening or by elevating. deepening makes it seem unfathomable, like a mystery. elevation makes it appear to be an inexhaustible force, like a miracle. in both cases, meditation on matter cultivates an open imagination.

gaston bachelard,
water and dreams

s. sent a picture of a grainy couple in grainy candlelight in a grainy building across from her. i asked her if she was doing free-lance surveillance work. she said no, the couple just happened to be having a romantic dinner in the building she likes. she didn't happen to notice them. she said she once had to surrender a roll of film to a street person in s.f. who was in the front of the building she was picturing.

i was thinking about surveillance anyway. that funny surveillance park dis-service tree-cam in osaka garden, the sign of a dog on a bike saying no dogs/no bikes and me with my golden buddha dog looking in the lens with my camera eye. last night we watched cameraperson, by kirsten johnson, a film about looking- looking with great feeling and compassion, with being with others, and seeing them with love in camera. so beautiful. in a scene with a physicist with a huge brain and waving arms speaking with infectious excitement about quantum entanglement she says after him, i'm feeling pretty entangled with you, right now.
also there is a short film she made in kabul, the above, about life lived under a giant tethered surveillance airship, which looks so cartoon-like in shape, so benignly menacing, america the occupier, the eye in the sky, seeing all. the ship of state hovers in every shot, behind every act, every scene, so ubiquitous it is no longer watched, only watching. the constant presence of the conqueror. one man talks about god, ever present, all seeing, with the airship looking down on him. 

i think about these ways of looking, all in a spectrum of looking, all of us looking at something, looking for something, looking at spectacles, looking at rocks, looking for god, looking at each other, looking to intimidate, looking for love. just looking.

vagabond for beauty.

way up at the top of the nature section i found that book about everett ruess i read years ago. it's sad like into the wild, and mysterious and familiar as your own shadow. reading it was living it, making a trail into desert wilderness, winding up nowhere but away. from here. not from here. wherever your here is you go with him and ultimately wind up like him, alone, lost or at the end of your civil tether, carving your name on a rock in the sand, not your family name, your chosen name, though it too was a shadow gleaning from a book you once read. i won't say the name, it's all the same. name.

it's a romance, after all. no matter what you do.

everyone is on the border now. if it matters it's mattering. even if it doesn't matter it's still matter. what's the matter. it's a matter question. matter materializes. we matter. everyone. it's not just physical. the images by themselves are gleanings. the images float up from a kind of metaphysical diary of earthly matter.

john was saying shadows are emanations. how they come outside where their form is internal. how they grow by light but they generate by night. i feel pretty entangled with you right now. every day is different. what matters is the matter. how images are stemming directly from matter. how matter is imagining what it would be like to matter.

i've transitioned. i am the soul of my own new machine. can you see any difference? 
take my word it's different, may it please. interiority is shadowy. at times i really don't know what i'm saying, if i could just think about it later. i feel a flock of birds settle in one quickening breath.

all shadows are related to our eternity. 
we don't live long.
shadows of birds are our spirits longing
for wings.

 stop look stop stop look.

reflect watch your head reflect.

fur piper, with fond memory.

we found a hidden observatory lounge. we saw a soft radiance of ghost elementals rising from the burnt meadow below.

dream pipe dreams and bandage clouds.

 wall klee.

park mismanagement surveillance tree photo.

i still take great pleasure in following a stream.

being a photographer means not only to look but to sustain the gaze of others.
                                                                                                                -chris marker

holy fou mogra. i fount water and dreams, by gaston bachelard in the free library. i'm just gazing dreamily at the cover now. sigh. i look at penny the cat. sigh. look at the bald eagle cam in iowa sigh. i know there will be such sweet gleaning from this fount book. i remember the poetics of space. way before i was a cosmonaut launched in the blogosphere. some things, some minds, are such a comfort to return to. like returning to your own nest, your own mind. which i find hard to do sometimes. like yesterday. 
but the hard passes where i get arrested yield gleanings too. i recognized that when i was hurt and angry and then self-critical after the non-response of say johnny to my blog, it went down deep before i could track it, way beyond johnny in a quantum instant, it struck my father chord, and i recognized it today, it's like that phenomenon of the oppressed taking on the religion of the oppressor, as cryptic coloring, as a cover under which they can regain the power lost or stolen or given away. and this feeling resonates back in time to my father and yo-yo's again to the present where we give power to suchlike as donnie-john, and scads of other cads who wrest power from the people and oppress and kill for the elite. well my dad wasn't that bad. i get perspective, sometimes, in my elastic yo-yoing through space-time. 

it strikes a deep chord. a father chord.

 

you can entangle across time. you can entangle into the future, into the past. you can entangle through space. that's what quantum entanglement means. it means that there's another underlying layer of nature that we haven't discovered yet.

-dr. eric w. davis,
in Cameraperson.

are the chronically disappointed bound to be chronically disappointing?

the challenge is to grow more and more eccentric with the times. the challenge is 
to not grow less.

it's like in my brain a door closed. my forehead a slab. thought furrowed. 

it's like i'll never be alright.

it's not light, it's a burden. i guess i'll always struggle with shame and feeling like a nobody. even though i'm kind of shadow proud. craak-shadow, shadow fly.

i know a kid too who i too wear a hood. i take it off in the library. they have signs. no guns. no hoods. HOOdie. the rules of this place. what a place to go by instinct. what a place to go by signs. who follows signs. i bet more go by portents.
i gave lily a skull today. her acceptance was my gift. it's a possum she said. i would be honored. most activity goes on between the signs not acknowledged.
listen, i don't mean to disparage anyone. by disparaging myself. it's when you're called names and you call yourself those names like it ain't nothing i do it myself taking their power. when it's really a struggle whether in your diary or on your street. it's your town. you can modify the signs with sanctuary. you can open your hood in love.

       i feel better after my morning constitutional. thanks johnny.

                                                  it's probably not entertaining enough.

red blue, a knotted balloon
conflating
deflating
a web and a dream.

i'd rather care
too much than too little.
our world is seeming
to fill up with the deflating air
of indifference.

you are my momentum.
you are my rest.
you are my fixed and moving point
in space and time.

except in darkness, we are bound to our shadows, and our thoughts
continue to be involved with them. these shadows grow and contract,
and seem variously to partake of the surface on which they are cast,
yet each is as personal to us as our names, and although we may change our names,
we cannot take another shadow.

-john hollander
the substance of shadow 

ah.
ah!
heartleap.
soon
all
of this will
be gone.

a diary is for yourself.
you don't do it for others.
why do you do it
if all the stuff's inside
you anyway.

maybe it's too personal
to have any significance
& the rest is rant.
maybe one day 
i be able to stop
like drinking
& wonder why
i never stopped before
maybe i die in shame
& mediocrity.

i guess i'm just not lighthearted enough.
& i am an anarchist.
it's disappointing.
who needs it.

i do wish i was better at reading people.
i can tell the haters right off from a distance,
but i can't tell sometime when people smile
and are warm and feign interest.
i guess i'm like mister in the way of wanting 
everyone to be good
and getting in a well of thinking too well
but mister either way 
is happy 
and me in my well
of despondency.