Why is a question I’ve been asking ever since I learned the concept of ask. Why am I here? Why is it like this? Why anything and everything?

Think I finally may have the answer.

Always figured I would have to find a spiritual answer to that question, my existential yawp. An implied communication from God or something. Some kind of deep soul experience of truth. But no, it comes from science and reason. Who would’ve thunk it?

The answer lies in M-theory, which to my shallow understanding is among the latest of quantum mechanical shots at a Theory of Everything. According to some proponents, there are an infinte number of parallel universes to ours. Not just different dimensions, but entire universes. These places – this infinity of complete universes – could vary from completely different from us to almost identical.

By the very definition of infinity that means that whatever can happen does happen. If something is rare or unlikely, infinity just keeps going until it happens, since the odds of something possible happening are always greater than 1 to infinity.

So that means that anything that can happen must happen, in one universe or another, at some time. There is nothing that doesn’t happen. Which leads us to my conclusion – Next time somebody asks, “Why is this happening?” you just say, “Because it had to.” It’s infinity’s fault.

Everything happens,

LWIII

Now I’ve never been much of one for much enjoying modern art, especially of the non-objective kind. I like abstraction to a point, since all art is in a sense abstracting from nature or reality – an artifice not the real thing – which is why the name art. But if there’s no reference to it in my experience, then it vaguely pisses me off. No doubt there’s something good about modern art, or it wouldn’t exist – only I get left out of knowing what that is.

And it may be merely my hedonism, but art to me, almost by definition, includes a sense of exhilaration and enjoyment, a feeling – even if reversed somehow – of beauty. So modern art, both the confusing and the ugly kinds, creeps me out.

Maybe I have a fetish for meaning. Must…have…meaning….

One time I got to see, face to face unexpectedly, my favorite painting of all time, Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. The dream of a lifetime, something I never thought would happen, plus it was a suprise. I had no idea that that painting was in MoMA.

When we went there years ago, I was really excited, off to The Big Apple to see not only the greatest artists of our time, but most likely the greatest artists of all time, since these modern guys had all the past to build on…at least that was my theory.

We started on the opposite end of Starry Night (woe to my fate that made me turn right) and worked our way through the galleries. I already knew of course that modern art was generally weird, but had no idea it could be so totally incomprehensible. And I did expect a certain amount of beauty.

Hick hits the bigtime. Duh.

By the time we had wended our long, long, long way through all those galleries, my brain was about the size of a peanut: IQ, 8. Why? I kept asking, both to myself and aloud, as we passed all those leering mysteries. The one that finally did it for me was some penciled French scribbled on a brown paper bag under broken glass, saying, “To be viewed for six hours from a distance of six inches.” Oh, the cad! From intrigued to bemused to baffled to furious, my journey was inexorable, my fate an evil doom. Unfortunately I was sober.

So when I finally stood in person before the opus of my imagination, the painting I had dreamt on and spent so much time looking at in a book: my beloved Starry Night, I projectile vomited. Not actually, but I sure was done. Who cares about this shit? The poor dear girl who accompanied me on that trip kept assuring me that the reason these abominations were in the museum was because it was the first time it had ever been done. That was small consolation for me, in my bereaved and bitter state.

So imagine my shock when I first stood before a Jackson Pollock painting, in the Milwaukee Art Museum, later on. We were skating quickly through the modicum of modernists – having learned my lesson – when we came upon the glorious sight of a Pollock, a huge painting practically vibrating off the wall. Don’t recall which one it was, by name, but it was one of his drippings, kind of like this:

 Lavender Mist: 1954, Jackson Pollock

Since I’d only seen his paintings in books, I had always scoffed at Pollock as the squiggles guy or something. But when you stand right in front of one of those giant walls of color, it’s a whole different story. Those paintings are deep, not intellectually but visually. They stand out from the wall like a fat horizontal tone-dance. It’s as if it’s alive in there. – Almost like you can see beyond physicality into the innards of things. Nanoquantumvisiospectravision, freaking amazing. First time I ever saw into the spirit world.

Anyway, point was supposed to be that I saw the movie Pollock last night. Ed Harris was great. Watching him drip-paint, in imitation of the master, was a joy. Made me realize that one of the precious times the genius of a human being lived wholly inside art was when Jackson Pollock dripped in a pure dripping mood, involved in the moment like few people have ever been. Creating something alive.

Yay art!

LWIII

Thanks, Tom, for the opportunity of providing a guest blog post.

I’m Gwen McCauley and I’m a mapaholic.  I know, I know. How on earth could I have allowed myself to get this far without having requested an intervention of some sort.  But it just sort of snuck up on me, you see.

My love of travel is not an obsession, nor is my deep love of all things Portuguese travel.  I can happily spend weeks and months on the road.  In fact, I do spend weeks and months exploring the wonders that are the Algarve, bringing clients along for non-religious spiritual retreats, for explorations and explosions of creativity and now for culinary and dining experiences.  That is all wonderful.  And while to some it may seem a tad obsessive, I know that it really is about focus and commitment.

But what I’ve managed to keep secret from most is the shame of my true obsession:  maps.  In all forms, in all sizes, I am not fussy.  However, I must say that large fold-out maps are infinitely preferable to those books of maps that send you searching higgledy-piggledy for the stretch of road just off the page you’re reading.

And free maps are perhaps best of all: free, fold-out maps.  I can be cheap and feed my obsession at the same time.  Wow!  All that paper, all those folds to get back into perfect alignment, all that countryside to fantasize about, to be curious about, to wonder what it hides …be still my heart!

I have files of maps I’ve collected. I have drawers of maps I’ve been holding on to just in case I need them.  I have collections of maps – maps of outlet shopping mall layouts, village and town maps, city maps, state & provincial maps, country maps, topographical maps, ski-trail maps, hiking maps.  And my latest is a regional snowmobile map that I got for FREE!  All the land surfaces are covered in white snow so it has a lovely 3D effect to it.  What a great little map that highlights the spaces between roads in Ontario’s back woods.

Oh oh, I just realized that perhaps I’m obsessed with maps because I’m searching?  Perhaps I’m on one of those ‘life journeys’ everybody talks about these days?  Oh my, I guess I’d better stay away from all those helping professionals then; I’d best not ‘find myself’ or I’d have to give up this delightful obsession that brings me such joy.  Living life lost …now there’s an interesting approach towards moving into a New Year.  Perhaps it should be ‘living life lost …and loving it!’  Now there’s an intention that could take me far, especially if I could only find a map big enough to cover that territory!

Gwen McCauley, author, artist, poet, coach, facilitator, educator and concierge. I’m in love with all things Algarve and lead retreats and culinary experiences there to feed my own love of the place as well as to invite people to be all they can become.

I love to live life large and especially enjoy working with women who are seeking more in life.  Whether I accomplish that through my writing, coaching or travel experiences is less important than seeing the light of self discovery shine in someone else’s eyes.  Visit www.ouicoach.com, www.algarveexperiences.com or www.myalgarve.wordpress.com.

I have a problem. It started when I was 8. A bunch of us kids were gathered at Grandmother’s house listening to the neighbor girl tell a ghost story. For some reason when she got to the tense, scary part, my eyes started tearing up. That had never happened before and it kind of weirded me out. But I remember afterward on the porch telling a couple of my buddies, “Hey look, I can cry whenever I want!” And somehow, either by remembering the feeling of the ghost story or something (I can’t do it anymore) I could get tears to come to my eyes and run down my face. Kind of like being able to burp or – the ultimate – fart on command.

For a while I enjoyed my miniature fame as a sort of eyeball magician, the lone guy in our small circle who could make tears run out of his eyes whenever he wanted. But then, to my horror, I found it was becoming involuntary. Oh no! I started to tear up merely when I was talking to someone. O lordy, let it not be so. But it was so. I couldn’t stop it.

That was the beginning, and that ghost story has haunted me the rest of my life. Ever since then, whenever I speak feelingly about any subject to anyone, tears start to my eyes, and if I talk long enough and strong enough, they run down my face.

Eek! One reason I joined Scientology in my early twenties was my hope that they could cure this damnable curse. My dream was that they’d say, “Oh yeah, that’s XXX, all you have to do is YYY and it’ll ZZZ.” But no, no ideas, no name, and no cure. And all of my army of therapists (oh, okay, squad) were let in on the secret, and my other cults. Nobody had ever heard of such a complaint, or had a cure for it.

So I call it lachrymosia, for lack of a better, or an actual, word. Never underestimate the value of not crying when you’re talking to somebody, especially when you’re asking them out, or in a job interview, or manning up with your buddies about football or golf, or cracking wise, or trying not to make your interlocutor abashed and uneasy.

Waaaa,

LWIII

Memory: ‘tis ever been both my curse and my bane. Ha, okay, I guess there must be something good about memory, if I can remember what it is.

Today’s post is coming to you courtesy of @davidbmetcalfe, renowned creative director of the Absurdist Monthly Review, as well as a master tweeter and superb necktie picker-outer. I begged the folks in my timeline at Twitter to send a topic that might irrigate the present desert of my mind, and voila, David hits me with “Method of Loci”. He sure has a knack for the absurd, getting me to write a post about a theory of memory. Rather like asking a frog to opine on onions.

The method of loci is a mnemonic device whereby one uses locations to assist in recall. Apparently this Greek dude named somethingorother came up with it back in the day. For a more detailed discussion I refer you to the Wikipedia article. It’s definitely worth the read.

Memory as an artform or a craft that can be learned is a valuable concept, I think. I’m all for it. Now if they could just come up with an art of forgetting, I’d be set.

Ever your guy who remembers what he’d rather not and forgets what he shouldn’t,

LWIII

This is what happens when one is desperate for word count during NaNoWriMo:

It seemed like he had to have everything his own way and that way was not my way because I like stuff to be up front and to make sense but he didn’t like it that way he liked it when stuff didn’t make sense and things that he said where like strange cloth wrappings that went all soft and turned everything into a bizarre funhouse of nothingness that didn’t really mean anything to begin with but was an awful preconditioned reality that he already knew but I don’t already know anything that is so horrible so it doesn’t matter but really it does matter which is why I’m doing this because I would like something to matter someday but that doesn’t matter either because those are just words and words are just a count so that I can get my daily sufferage of time and nature in a basket of awful feelings of sorrow and horror and the feeling of failure that I say I hate so much but don’t really because I do it so much so I must really like it because is everything really so horrible that I can’t do the things I say I like but have to do all the things I day I don’t but really do? I don’t know if that can happen that way because of the bad essense that I am and when I am bad I’m really bad but not so much because I’m not as bad as some other people who are bad but I am kinda bad but that is okay since what we see is what is there and when it’s not there it’s okay too because we need to wonder what is going on here when we just hurry and get things done even though the words are fun to play with and thoughts come slowly if at all but those words do come and here we are now so what matters what happened before since every moment is a new moment that comes to us we know not how and here it is and now it’s gone so now is all we haver right now and this is the time of the life when we finally get going and all our furious anger is left in the lee of the cliff that stands at the end of time and when that time is over it’s the end but not really since every beginning is an end and all ends are beginning always so we can start to keep saying it’s the start of things when we do this in ways that seem so weary but are also very smooth and smart because all of when we go somewhere we go to places we know not of because we know not of every single moment when the new comes in and come it does because it does come in but not as we may have hoped because this is the way that we can type as fast as possible but it doesn’t seem to be that way yet it is because it always is the way it is or seems to be even though what seems to be is not always what is when we wonder about the things that happened or didin’t happen when we go to places where we have not ever been before and those places are not so great but also they are very great so we wonder if that is possible because of possibility is sometimes not possible but also it is possible so that is also true to find the meaning behind the matter of not mattering or nattering as ways of finding the truth is also not the truth and I wonder if I can go to my Outlook and get the chess game that chess game is a very good one even though it may seem at times to be really hard it also is not so hard because it’s always harder than it seems though it also is very easy because all I’m doing is putting words one after the other even though I want them to make sense it doesn’t matter if they don’t because I’m just making up stuff to hit my count and that count is good even though it may seem like it isn’t a good count it is because good counts go to good counties and Broomfield is a good county because it’s its own county and that’s pretty cool even though most cities are not their own county because counties don’t count. So hurry up and finish this word count thing and get back to wondering about the story. I like the idea of a wind that eats stories. And I’ll just pop in a few more words so I can get over the count I thought I was going to get.

Sigh,

LWIII

There is an ignorance deep down life. I cannot say what it is, don’t even know what it is, doubt that ignorance is even the right word, but there it is, a mystery unnamed, a sheen of something holding truth away – if truth is even knowable – an invisible force field of non-meaning. It may be I’m crazy, or that I’m too sane. I have no way of knowing, because ignorance holds me off, inches away. Sane/insane, I know not.

What I do know is I just read Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier. Now I’m stumped, busted by ignorance again. There’s not one word in that book that struck me as fake or out of place or fanciful, but it’s all made up. What’s up with that? The protagonist started out a mystery and remained that way until the end. And now it’s over and still a mystery. Is it is girl thing? Am I just stupid? How can something be so plain and yet so deeply baroque?

So much beauty and so much mystery and so much ignorance. Is ugly good? Is smooth rough? Can the world be reflected in the oily shimmer of a pearl? I think it can, but then that world is ignorance to me. Why are people like this? Why is anything like this? Why everything?

Truth is a glimmer of light across the wall in a painting by Vermeer. Ignorance is everything else.

Gurk,

LWIII

Just finished reading Perdido Street Station, by China Miéville. Am flummoxed. Quite a read, a page turner, but I never read a book before that only contains bad memories for me. I think back on it and squirm and sigh. The art of revulsion.

It’s in the steam punk genre with more that a smidgen of pustule chic. What it reminds me of is the postmodernist concept of “the abject” by Julia Kristeva. The personal abject is those parts of a person that are excreted, things that were inside of us that eventually go outside, such as mucus and feces. If you’re interested in the social abject, go here.

It also reminds me of the story that the first time Ravel’s Bolero was performed in public, some people ran screaming from the theatre. How can a book be so horrible, so consumed by rot and scum and filth? I don’t know, but it does seem to be a logical end to horror, such writers as Robert Louis Stevenson and his Jekyll and Hyde evolving over time into this, abberation as normalcy. Unearthly levels of violence to the psyche, at least for an old guy who’s used to old ways.

I bet when Miéville was a kid he was majorly into popping zits.

I tweeted on this book yesterday @TomYHowe Perdido Station: bloated vile mutant slimy scum turgid viscous poisoned bilious insectile viscid spewing excretion putrid chancreous feces

That was just an example of the author’s standard diction.

Puke on,

LWIII

Wounded healer lead me home,
Lend me the sound of your healing drum.
The beating heart, the blood of pain,
Set my soul on wings again….

This one is for healing, an enchantment to send deep healing to the dark winds and back again, for has not enchantment always involved chanting? And is not art healing?

I do not know, for I know so very little, but art has always ever been my healer, and we have need of healing this November, for NaNoWriMo and for mega wrimo as well. Turquoise is the color of the wounded healer, as a wise woman once told me, so I invoke that sacred color, the celestine of wind and waters, torn by darkness.

The wound is the resource, for it breaks the heart and channels empathy, boon of healers and the healed. Together we sing our chant of health.

Am reading my first steampunk novel right now, Perdido Station by China Miéville. It carries the same casual brutality of much contemporary art, especially recent movies. Don’t know what to think of the author yet. He strikes me as a not very nice man, though I’m probably wrong on that. Perhaps niceness is out of fashion, and slashing pain and gritty slime more the thing these days.

Miéville is a superb stylist, but what he styles is unknown to me before. I am used to writers I can relate to in a human way, but he seems beyond my ken, almost insectile, his words a rending of the wings of flesh into something chitinous and alien, something dark, like a butt tattoo.

Awwwk!

LWIII

Since today is my 200th blog I was going to talk about that, but found out today, October 15, 2009, is Blog Action Day and the topic is climate change. Bloggers around the world are discussing climate change and what to do about it.

I am not a huge joiner of political causes or an activist about anything in particular, other than thinking about stuff, but I really want to get behind this, because climate change and taking care of the environment is so important.

What can someone like me, who hates politics and avoids activism like the plague, do about climate change? Of course there’s the obvious, create a smaller energy footprint my ownself, which I try to do.

There’s always haranguing people, but I avoid that. So all I can do is join the chorus.

 Save The World!

Climate change is real. We must act.

Bless us all,

LWIII

I asked a Twitter pal to give me a topic for today’s blog, and she offered up a doozy: The value or not of bare naked truth: Is truth a fact, or relative?

Truth is one of my favorite subjects, so this should be fun, though I have covered truth-ish ground before. A line from a previous blog on the subject: “Fuck the truth.”

The problem with truth as I see it is that I’m not smart enough to figure out what it is. Almost everyone I talk to knows the truth. Feels kind of like I’m a kid getting ditched. How come I don’t get to know the truth too?

Waaah. It’s just not fair.

Truth is a fact and it’s relative at the same time. Lots of stuff is always true, regardless of circumstances. And one can speak the truth, such as: the dog did not eat my homework. That’s a truth. It is fact.

But then there’s that other Truth, the Big Truth, the one I never get to know. I have a sneaking suspicion it’s relative, dependent on the viewpoint of the truth speaker. Can a measly human being really know the One Truth for All Eternity? Kinda doubt it, though I keep trying.

One thing to remember, truth is only a word. Real truth is not a word.

It’s true, I swear!

LWIII

(thank you @forgetfulheart)

The difference between knowledge and wisdom is courage. One can have all the knowledge in the world but without courage all it does is puff up your wishing and make you bossy. Knowledge is knowing what to do, but wisdom is doing it. Wisdom has little to do with what you know, only how you act.

If I could do half of what I know how to do I would be one lucky guy. Just read a book called Last Night in Montreal and in it a character has friends who sit around and talk about art a lot and another friend who never says a word but just goes out and takes photos. Who is the artist, who is wise?

Guess.

The wise one is the one who acts, the others just know. As much as I love knowing stuff, I have to say doing stuff is better. Who cares how much you know? Most people wish those who know would just shut up and get on with it. Knowing is good for telling other people what to do. Oh yay.

Goddess send me courage, not knowledge,

LWIII

There is no way to success in art but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and everyday.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Pamela Travers is kind of like my mother too, for it was she who first sent my wondering child-soul down the blown rose path of fantasia, the everquest into the mythic forest of the human. It was only much later that I discovered she was not only the maker of Miss Poppins, but also – if not a mystic or spiritualist – a scholar of myth and fable, and a questor of questing.

It took the internet for me to find out about her, even that she was a she, for I never really pondered the author of Mary Poppins as a child reader, just knew it was P. L. Travers – male or female, no matter. When I later found out she also had published a collection of essays, as well as the Mary Poppins books, I had to get it, out-of-print or not. Seventy foolish bucks later I had the new book in my hands. This is part of what I found, from the essay “Now, Farewell and Hail”, in her valuable volume What the Bee Knows:

“Thus I danced the days of my life, seeking, learning, experiencing, always living and always dying, until the long setting of the sun. And again, facing the falling light, I felt the old familiar weight and paused in the gallimaufry.

‘Where am I?’ I asked myself and from somewhere came a voice not mine, a searching echo, ‘Where art thou?’

‘On! On!’ cried the dancers streaming by. But I stood still and let them pass, knowing that I had been hiding – hiding in the midst of the dance as in the rift of a dream, letting being take on the guise of becoming, homeless, looking for home.

‘Where art thou?’ That voice again!

And out, from under the leaves of Eden, I rose and was awake, awake and in my lost domain.

I am here. Now, my eternal instant, that holds what was and will be. I am here. Now, in the all that is here. Gilgamesh reaching for the scarlet flower and the serpent seizing it from him; Isis gathering back to herself the lost parts of Osiris; the Buddha watching the golden bowl making its fateful way upstream; Galileo muttering into his beard ‘Eppur si muove!’; Prometheus bringing down the fire that men, laboriously climbing, must carry back to Heaven, a son of Adam setting foot on the moon; another walking the sky; Demeter searching for her stolen daughter; Sabat Mater, heart-stopped, breath-stopped, waiting to take upon her knees her dead and living son; Halley’s comet still sweeping past; Aratus singing to his lyre, ‘Full of Zeus are the cities, full of Zeus are the harbours, full of Zeus are all the ways of men’; the fox stealing into his hole; the crested wren swinging in her hanging mansion.

I am here. Now, a lost child found, with that Something Else, that painful riddle, again at work upon me. Perhaps it is not, indeed, a riddle but rather an intimation. There are things that may not be understood, except by standing under them, watching, waiting and empty, as a shell that the bird has flown. I could be that my lack is, on its obverse side, my treasure, that which calls and calls me back to the sole and living moment. I shall not be given to know its name nor even to ask to know it. Somewhere within me it is known, it has no need of words. And that which knows it also knows that I shall not stay long with you, my homeland. I shall fall away again and again, drawn by the magnet of Tomorrow and the treacherous hope that it exists, and carries gifts and surcease from care. Sages and seers, Now, dwell in your pavilions. To such as I it is given only to visit them from time to time and know that I have slept – slept and forgotten my meaning.

Death, be my friend! I came, waking, if weeping, into the world. Let me, waking, leave it.

And you, Sweet Lethe, run softly when I end my song that I may not drink deep of your tide. For there is a thing that I would remember.

Now is the day of everlasting. Now is the day of salvation.”

Thanks Mom,

LWIII

As a child I used to dread the sunset because of the longing that came with it. ‘There must be something else,’ I would say, not at all knowing what it was, but knowing, too, that as far as the wind blows and the sky is blue I would go and find it.

~ P. L. Travers

I hate coolness. With a hot hate.

Everything I love is anti-cool. I love kindness and thoughtfulness; sincerity and generosity and understanding and warmth – childishness with a passion. Boy, what a dork, huh?

I also care immensely, and if you show you really really care, man, whew, talk about uncool. Wouldn’t be so bad if the only thing a youngamerican cares about anymore wasn’t being cool. Of course that’s been true ever since Elvis made the scene, so it’s not new. That was true in my day, too, and I sold my soul in High School to be cool.

Been paying for it ever since, trying to recover the real me, who was sucked down the cool drain and frozen for eternity. Pretending not to care as the highest virtue…how did this happen?

What brings this up is a guy on Twitter who followed me, called ihatepoetry, or something like that. Didn’t really bother me, since anybody in their right mind these days kinda hates poetry, since it rhymes with poser. But then I checked out his website and was appalled at the venom of his anti-poetry poetry.

He claims to be a comedian, but in my book humor is supposed to make you laugh and feel glad, not turn you suicidal. The cool people (those scoffers and scorners) apparently took this young budding artistic type – since his talent with words shines out of his hellish screeds – and drove him into the dirt with sarcasm before he had a chance to save himself. Judging from his poems I bet he never, ever writes anything meant to be beautiful and uplifting, since if he did he would barf all over himself. Sarcasm has sunk into his bones like Beethoven from A Clockwork Orange. Nothing but demeaning things from him anymore. Destruction, not creation. Abuse, not use.

Sarcasm is death to the open heart of a writer.

Sad again,

LWIII

rop caps are delightful, and so is collaboration. Tonight’s post is all about collaborative work on the internet, or what might be called omnilaboration, since ‘co’ is two, and the internet is a giant wad of artistic and creative types.

I got this opportunity from Jake Gest, who won the right to establish the subject of my frog blog by being the first and tweeting the word “frog” when I asked for input on Twitter. Later on I wandered over to his blog and saw his post about this free drop cap site by Jessica Hische.

Never in my lifetime have I had so many people to work with, and I don’t even know any of them. Goddess bless the internet. The worldwide web is a web of heads and hearts. It might even be considered one giant world-encircling, globe-girdling, graphic poem song book painting operatic omnilaborative artwork, a symphony of sympathy.

Unite,

LWIII