dusting off time

The other night nikki and i hung out and we were talking about our families and childhoods and how we got into performing. she's been on a big memoir kick recently, writing out things from her past whether with her family or old places and lovers, and she asked if i hadn't tried writing about all my years performing, what got me started playing music and doing poetry and how all my years acting have influenced the full aesthetic i strive for while on stage. and i said yeah i should do this. and started the next day! it's taken me awhile of hemming and hawing to find an angle in on my past, for months now, and suddenly there's pages and pages of experience, certain gigs, teachers, desires acted out... and i'm finding it is not enough just to write about one angle like performing, the past is so intricately interwoven that to write about one thing i have to bring in my social searching, my family, my loves, etc... "as the pattern grows more intricate and subtle, being swept along is no longer enough." even if i never publish this, or not till years hence, it is such a worthwhile exercise to dredge up the full contents of my life. i suppose i would have to say all my views on memory in that essay i wrote are wrong. or if not wrong than i was missing the key point that though we can only access our memories from the present and can view them how we will, who we are now is only possible due to the precise nature of what has happened to us, from the big events down to the smallest corner we went around instead of going around another. even if we don't remember these things, and perhaps especially if we don't, because our whole lives of memories are still stored in our bodies and acting out through us everyday, the whole weight of our becoming determining what we do from moment to moment... i suppose that's what they mean by fate. destiny (rilke's destiny) would be learning to take up that body of fate and let it lead us where we want to go and not just at the whims of passing time.

pirates at the end of the world

In the first dream things were falling apart fast, another black skied apocalypse with the buildings crumbling in and the birds flying off. even the insects had made their peace and began crawling up out of the ground, dancing in their bioluminescence on the stalks of the tallest grasses they could find in order to say goodbye before lifting off for some other planet. those appliances and gadgets smart enough to have found a mind of their own also followed suit, though a large washing machine that had had enough of our human meddling heaved itself up in the air, and hovering like a strange mechanical land shark tried to land on me. then i went outside, and things seemed normal again, at least as normal as they always are with the greying zombies walking around, ghosts fading in and out of the walls, and all succumbed to the monstrous tv eyes that floated in the orange haze that now blanketed the city.

Falling back to sleep, i was captured by cartoon pirates, along with a pig and some other anthropomorphized creature, and were forced to do a lot of the grunt work swabbing the deck and such so the captain and his crew could sit around drinking and playing video games. we were also land pirates, the ship able to sail down the roads with as much ease as on waves, and stopped here and there to pick up food supplies and more crew members, large bloated men in scroungy shirts with even mangier facial hair and sharp knives. at one stop however the pig jumped off to try and catch a rabbit to eat, since we prisoners weren't given much food, but he only succeeded in catching a small black kitten, who immediately took to me and the captain let us keep despite the jealousy and hunger of the crew. he figured they wouldn't mutiny over such a small matter. the cat ran around and nosed into everything and i worried that he wouldn't fall overboard and drown. eventually we passed what was like a school district with people waiting at the bus stop for the school schooner to take them home, and things were mellowing out until the cat pissed all over me, and there wasn't much choice but to wear the smelly clothes.

action breeds action: on establishing a healthy practice

something it’s taken me almost 26 long years to learn and i’m still only beginning to realize it: the more you do the more you are able to do. power builds by use. will, focus, practice, patience, compassion, communication, these energies are a muscle, you have to exercise them in order to make them grow stronger. Like a corollary to the first law of thermodynamics, a body in motion will remain in motion. as soon as you rest, you loose all drive and ability to act.

i noticed this first at work, where on slow busy days i get a lot more done. there is no time to sit down and i go from task to task in a continual flow. but as soon as there is a lull in orders and i sit down, smoke a cigarette, read the paper, play pinball, i loose all momentum, and getting back into the kitchen is near impossible. the same goes for writing, the moment you stop working on a poem, a story, it dies, and the longer you wait between working the harder it is. you must keep going, you can not stop loving it and living it or entropy takes hold, the flatline fading of the couch and the doldrums. of dying daily. you must keep exercising your muscles or you will rot where you stand.

and more, finding this kind of practice, anything you choose to do regularly builds that flow of energy, your will to act. i’ve heard several writers and artists talk about running or biking regularly in order to build a healthy practice for something, anything, to get the blood moving and apply that to their primary task. recently i have found myself creatively slowed down and realize i have a poor practice of it of late. this past week i’ve had to watch the dog and chickens and gardens while my housemates are on tour, and this regular activity is already allowing me to focus in on having to perform my tasks on a more regular basis (even if these creatures are taking up a lot of the time i would like to spend on my crafts). this is like the path of karma yoga, of doing one’s daily tasks without looking forward to the reward of them being done, of building a healthy practice out of doing the dishes, going to work, watching your children, whatever it is you are required to do on a regular basis. the key point being that it’s regular (though not necessarily clockwork) and part of one’s flow of doing.

because it is a flow, a font. you have to be open to it and let action well up and pour through you, and it will carry you along through everything you want to do. drinking won’t, tv and video games won’t. the internet won’t (unless it’s part of a practice of research or networking). Remember, you are what you choose to pay attention to. of course, it helps if you have specific and limited paths to practice. one can’t build focus towards any one thing by spreading thin towards everything. i would recommend no more than one practice from each discipline (unless you choose to focus on multiple from one discipline). physical- running, biking, yoga, martial arts, etc. mental- research, essays, conversations, crosswords or other logic puzzles, math, etc.. creative – poetry, fiction, visual arts, music, dance, photography. the day to day – work, pets, children, cooking, etc. emotional- all your various relationships. spiritual- church, personal rituals, exploration (external or internal)… you probably get the point. the benefit of a multi-disciplinarian practice being that it allows one to exercise the numerous modes of being that make up a complete human and thus allows one to grow in totality and not just specialized in one direction at disadvantage to the others. keep in mind we are multifaceted and easily atrophy, and if you maintain good practices across the board than when the situation arises you should be capable of doing anything.

his angst was gnawing at him

And the question of the night, just why was the President reading Camus' "The Stranger" on a recent vacation? perhaps he heard the Cure song, "killing an arab" and thought, oh i can relate to that...


and
the word of the evening:

hegemony (n.)- control or dominating influence by one person or group over others, especially by one political group over society or one nation over others

tongues against the grain

i went out to dinner with aurelia the other night, between bouts at the bar. i had missed all the intelligent conversations we get in, that with some people it is easy to talk, that there is still a spark of intelligence left that is willing to be exercised when so often it is just the recounting of the daily hijinks and work and bullshit like there's nothing more important to talk about in this world. i rue this daily. i am also shy, but that's my own problem. over thai tofu salad she lamented that no one is willing to really talk anymore, that here we are in this city (this world) which professes to be on some advance edge but we are not even willing to critique ourselves much less critique the main society that we are embedded in and constantly struggling against. i didn't get to raise the point that counterculture is dead, that any sense of struggle gets co-opted, that people would rather try and be happy or sated for the day than face all the frustrations and unsurities that comes from opening that can of worms. what are we to do about this world? where do we even begin talking about it? certainly not in a blaring bar, though centuries worth of artists and revolutionaries found their greatest conversations over a glass of vino in smoky backrooms.

for my own sake, and i've said this before in so many ways, i often feel i am living in an aesthetic void, an age in which the meaningful, the epic, the search for Truth and Beauty, are no longer relevant. youtube is. snakes on a plane is. the yeah yeah yeahs and poems about getting beaten as a child. i'm reaching a point where i almost no longer care, and will go about doing what i feel it is important for me to do and say, except that i don't live in a vacuum. any writing i would want to do, any stirring song, comes from this world and reaches the ears of someone in this world. but maybe only a few who will actually listen. that art music literature have reached a relative null-point is telling of some deeper lack of meaning or view in our culture. that "the da vinci code" was a bestseller. that i can count on one hand those few people who inspire me, whose work i actually admire, and even then only occasionally. that as this year passes i hear more and more people make passing jokes like "lets burn all the great works of art," "let's murder all the bad pop stars," "let's ship andy warhol's bones back to new york where he belongs," as if the only thing we have holding us back from whatever turning point in creativity, in life, is the cultural drift of the past, the dead heavy hand of these artifacts that we can say everything has been done, everything has been said... why bother to add to it anymore? let's just get high and see what's on tv.

i've said before as well, what's the alternative? a return to the folk, the ultra personal where the art is only being done for one's self and closest friends, recounting personal experience (as the best art has to) but out of any context of the centuries of culture to which we are heir. we live in an age where anyone can write about their day, and if it is compelling enough, the whole world can listen. where anyone can record their fourtrack pop song and post it on myspace. but who's actually listening? with such an influx of information you can't possibly sift through it all, and the signal to noise ratio approaches a blind static panic. like the hordes of fashionable hipsters who i'm sure are all interesting enough people in their individual but subsume it all to the latest trends of cowboy shirts and tulled skirts and indie pop much less the "masses" in their tshirts and reality tv. we are all stars, and every star wants to shine, if it weren't for the uniform illumination of the streetlamps. what's the alternative? certainly not a silent acceptance of the everyday and the status quo.

through the spiders web

i went to go visit my muse, who lived in a tall row house on the edge of a cliff (like most of the houses in my dream city). she was getting ready to go out so i waited and noticed a small yellow butterfly-flat spider was weaving a web over the entire door which i had just disturbed by coming in. the spider and several more like it were quickly weaving across that entire side of the room and the strands were so thick my muse had already hung some clothes over them to dry. i was concerned how we would get out of the room, but she just walked right through the web, breaking it but saying sometimes you have to disturb what's there.

we started walking along the back side of the city, following a map my younger brother had given me that was marked with an x graffitied on the wall of some building. (this is not the first time he's hidden stuff in the walls of buildings in my dreams) we found it and i reached through the wall to find another map, looking back to see already the x was fading indistinguishable into the other tags. this map pointed to the location of various small islands off the shore to the north and their relation to certain places and trials in my quest dreams and methods for reaching them in a faint alchemical script.

so we started walking north out of the city towards the forests, stopping briefly at my cafe so i could tell my boss i wouldn't be in to work for awhile.

spells on the wall

It was rather disconcerting to find that someone had posted a magic spell on our bulletin board at work. a shoddily photocopied sigil of an upside-down pentagram surrounded by almost illegible hebrew letters above a cutup poem that claimed to be "a piece of machinery for the advent of the meat-eating masses backstroke" with a bunch of seeming drivel, including something about the inferno of Liza Minelli, and ending with a call for the targets of the spell (presumably meat-eaters?) to get cleft lips for christmas. i won't reprint the whole of it here, as it was put in a public place it probably works mimetically and i don't want to inadvertently infect anyone with it. and who knows what the intentions of the poster were, if it was just some random piece of junk someone put up or if they really do want to give people cleft lips, and are fully capable of doing so. either way, it bothered me on some deep level, enough that i didn't even take it down because who knows what sort of wards people put up on these kind of things. i've seen too much to take any bit of random symbols and mumbling as just that. they have a power only at the edges of our comprehension.

Masks of Mnemosyne (the formation of memory)

Masks of Mnemosyne (the formation of memory)

"freedom depends on the struggle of memory against forgetting."
- Milan Kundera

• Memory is accreted (like a seashell, armor, crystal) in our bodies and blood*, taking on a recognizable pattern, a body and meaning that can be called a life. when we are young and have no memory we have no such psychic detritus carried around us, but as we age we can't help picking up memories, symbols, songs, and attaching them to ourselves as sort of an addendum to that central self
• Thus we can say of an object, idea, person, moment, that it “gathers world” (ie: accrues meaning), which though often psychic or imaginative in nature can be displayed in a physical manner (wrinkles, collections of junk, crumbling, etc…)
• World itself could be considered an artifact of time, the shell or record (imprint) left behind by the movement of light/ life, in the way vinyl is a physical imprint of the sound waves of a song.
• Memory is not a recollection in the past, but a reconstruction in the present of what one images the past was like, and like dreams, may not bare any factual resemblance to what actually happened.+
• The longer ago something occurred, the less factual or clear the memory becomes. it is much easier to remember yesterday as it happened than last year, or childhood. as memory recedes it turns into myth (ie: its meaning takes on larger and metaphorical proportions turning the contents of our lives into a cohesive story instead of a disjointed series of circumstances).
• Memory is aided by symbolic, emotional, or physical cues (mnemonic triggers) in which the present reflects or replays some similar aspect of the past. music is an excellent example of this, hearing the first strains of a song related to your first relationship can years later still bring tears to your eyes.
• Object-bound (codified) memory is called history, imagination-based memory is called dream, or in the collective, myth. history is no more factual than myth, as both are perspectives relating event to meaning. and as myth is an amalgamation of countless archetypified memories, so is history a collective story we build around ourselves (in the world) in order to give ourselves a sense of time
• Media (writing, recordings, photographs, etc.) act as External Memory Devices, in that they take on the burden of memory into a physical object, thus removing any dreamlike/ mythic qualities of the memory. the current proliferation of EMDs marks a transition from myth to history, as well as the view of World from mind (“God”) to one large medium (artifact, the husk or corpse of “God”)
• While memory remains in imagination (subjective), it is fluid, malleable, and can take on whatever perspective or meaning the rememberer chooses. in a process similar to Dreaming Back, “bad” memories, moments of failure, anger, regret, can be re-remembered in a different light, one that allows the rememberer to get over or move past certain negatively ingrained perspectives or hang ups, thus altering where they stand in the present, as well as what they can make of their future.
• When a memory calcifies into history (becomes objective/ objectified), it is no longer fluid and can no longer be re-remembered in a different angle (unless of course the process of objectification is one of re-remembering), as it is no longer in the world itself. this also means that the memory is no longer personal, and belongs to the collective store of memory, the Record, and thus available to anyone as a memory of their own life. this is particularly true in ages of hyper-information, like this one, where the contents of individuals’ daily lives are offered up and become more readily available to strangers than ones own childhood. an example is a song coming on he jukebox and everyone singing along, even if they do not know the words or hadn’t heard the song before. what this means in terms of collective myth remains to be seen.
• With this vast store of memories to draw on, it would seem the artist should have no end of themes and experiences to draw on, effectively being bale to take on any life that is presented to them. However, art that is drawn from one’s own emotions and experiences rings the most true, as it has been lived, and the artist must be wary of assuming experiences that have no relation to their own. yet there is a balance to be found in taking the historicized memories and already written works of art of the collective and running them through one’s own experiences to create art that is both true and able to touch upon those deepest and most common themes of being human: love, death, family, struggle, the search for place and meaning. this could now be said to be the task of the modern artist, to take these themes that are available in the collective memory and return them to the fluidity of the subjective, where they are once again able to be reshaped or re-dreamed into whatever form imaginable or desirable, and thus to recreate the lost sense of myth in our culture. as Joseph Campbell put it: “dreams are private myths, and myths are collective dreams.”


• * memory and the body– one talks about having intellectual memories, emotional memories, muscle memory (the learning of physical tasks to a subconscious level). really, this separation of memories is a misnomer, as mind and emotion exist nowhere but in the body. there is only physical memory, the storing of tensions in muscle, the decay of skin cells with age, the patterning of genes, which can be read on a variety of different levels. take for example accounts of a person doing yoga for the first time, or receiving a strenuous massage. memories stored in the muscle tension are released and they have a flashback to that memory, effectively reliving the primary experience. however, most of us are not nearly so attuned to our bodies as to have such visceral remembrances.

• + time and memory– the trichotomy of past/ present/ future is also a misnomer, and the perception of time as a linear flow is an illusion, although sometimes a convenient one. Really all we live in is the present, and any perceptions of past or future are but imaginative extrapolations of this one current moment. a kind of subjunctive pattern recognition in which we can assert a sense of causality and desire in order to effectively plan our next action, and feel not so lost in the chaos of sensory data. as World accrues meaning, like seashells or thorns buried in the skin, so does times (our sense of eventuality or continuation) leave shards or ripples of itself in the periphery of our experiencing. these objects of memory are interpreted as a “coming from” that “goes somewhere,” and give us a reason and context for our present. it is also possible to remember the future, interpreting the present pattern in a manner that points to what will happen (prophecy).

asterism

Blinking balefully between the barlights and billboards. “that one’s Deneb,” he said, “and that’s Vega, and the third making the long point in the Summer Triangle is Altair.” It wasn’t a constellation, but it’s shape, drawn out of our peculiar penchant for pattern recognition, was one of the only asterisms visible in the city sky. “though i might be wrong which are Deneb and Vega, but it doesn’t really matter.” it’s not like we were trying to go sailing. He pulled out a piece of paper and began drawing clusters of dots, “let me show you something. you know where the big dipper is, right? well trace up from the lower side and you’ll find the Pole Star in the little dipper. Up from there, Cassiopeia, which looks like a crooked M. continue that arch and you’ll hit Andromeda and from there trace the longer arm down to Perseus. I’m not sure if that’s clear, oh wait, i’ve got a book of star charts in my bag.”

I flipped through it, mesmerized by the map of spectral points lines, like some secret forgotten tome of connect the dots, while he turned back and continued the winding conversation about comic books, snakes on a plane, the current debacle in Israel. Around the tables others stood in the summer sweat, drinking and talking and looking for some meaning in each other’s faces but none of them looking up. I wanted to take the book and use it for what it’s for, to find a way out of here. I wanted an antique telescope (even if the magnification wasn’t enough), a tall hill, a rock to bust the streetlamps, and all the heavens spread wide before my gaze. I sighed and lit another cigarette.

For the past several years I had made it a habit to go out at night and look up, try and familiarize myself with the few constellations i could find and name and watch their course as the earth spun through the year. as if being able to orient myself to the universe i could know where i was, or what i was supposed to do with my life. for centuries man has thus looked up and seen the vast oceans of light in which we are only the barest speck of dust. we have based whole societies off these configurations, determined harvest times, sailed around the world, created mythologies in the movement of figures in which we could understand the process of life, even if the constellations only appear as congruent, due to our perspective looking out into space, one could be spread out across billions of light years distance. but i suppose it was reassuring, and still is, to imagine the sky as a large dome of night on which the stars are drawn. a sense of center, of importance. but now we have forgotten even that, and walk around as if there was nothing outside ourselves, no greater reality on which to plot our lives, like we could no longer find a place or meaning beyond that small internal starlight that pushes us through the days.

the next night, another bar, another restless longing. “i want to go on an adventure, but where? how far is there to go?” eventually remember the Perseid meteor shower and we head off to the cemetery, which though still in the city is the closest darkest place, and even if we don’t see anything it’s still a nice walk. down the path between tombstones, like the black road of the Milky Way mapped on earth. i look up, try and orient myself, excited to use this new knowledge so soon. my companions are talking, adjusting to the dark. “ok, there’s the big dipper, there’s the pole star, Cassiopeia, Andromeda, Perseus, we should be looking there… oh, fuck yeah! there’s one now!” a streak of light falling through the clouds, caught between a tree branch and an obelisk. i start jumping up and down, running backwards. “there’s another!” no one else has seen them yet and i take off running, zig-zagging through the graves to the tallest hill where i plop down on a headstone and stare up rapt. an hour passes in the drift of clouds and the overfull moon. i keep on reorienting myself but there are no meteors. eventually we head out, and on the way see a couple more, but that’s it, as if they only fell when we weren’t actually looking for them. i feel ecstatic, radiant like a star myself, but saddened that that’s the best it would get this night, this century. back on the streets it’s impossible to see anything up there and someone says, “well, now what?” Perseus may have slain the gorgon and turned Cassiopeia to stone to wed her daughter Andromeda, freed from the rocks, but now he is fading, forgotten, dying out as his story turns to dust and his stars fall, dead long before he was imagined. i wonder how long might we last, who aren’t already emblazoned in the heavens?


this following little ditty was based off key lines in the above piece, much like the deconstruction exercise...

a star fell off the map
and got tangled in the treetops
i wondered what myth had crumbled
while we kicked among the tombstones,
some warrior-god forgotten
between barlights and billboards
and finding fate in faces
and not one looking upwards.
if i had a telescope
and a rock to break the streetlamps
i'd sail the constellations
to see if it was my own

notes on days

spinning along the tightrope shadows of telephone wires
and the constellation crunch of fall's first fallen,
though the days lay dogged and panting still
the underlying heat subsides into the liner notes
of stolen LPs pouring over star maps at the bar,
charting the course of cool breezes from dream
to rust in the trajectory of meteor showers and silence
and long walks in harvest moon hoodies
hanging from the eaves of the hospital
with a stack of hotcakes.

landscapes as large as insomnia

A couple weeks ago several of us started a writer's group so we could get feedback on work in progress and talk about our craft. also including furious rounds of exquisite corpse and writing exercises as homework between meetings. this last week we decided to each write a poem of sixteen lines, edit it down to eight, then four then two lines, a process of, as i see it, learning to refine the essential or necessary metaphors of the piece.

the problem being that for days i have been feeling unable to write. not writer's block, there are still too many themes and images welling up to be written, but just sort of a dauntingness of knowing how. not to mention working way too much and sleeping way too little and the always frustrations of figuring out the logistics of living, and the full moon and in the trough of my bimonthly manic cycles. and spending whatever free time and energy i have writing long letters and doing way too much research on Yeats' complex and strange symbol system (which is another story entirely and too close to home for casual thought).

finally last night i went to armand's, where i go after work occasionally to get a drink and write, and just started in on a piece about my grandmother's funeral that i hadn't been able to touch yet and probably needs a lot more work if not the rest of my life to consider in full. but much too long to be the 16 line homework assignment. but relieving, and like turning on the tap again.

so tonight after reading octavio paz's magnificent piece "sun stone" i just figured, it didn't matter what i wrote, as long as i went at it, and came up with the following bit of train of thought that while much much too short (it is a theme of all themes i could expand indefinitely in any direction), the process of culling it down was highly highly illuminating as far as seeing how metaphors are constructed from disparate images.



16.
i call on the names of all:
candle light, tabletop, train tunnel,
terror touched in a stranger’s face
and turned to smile (we’re really not so strange)

call on sublime sunsets
over rose petaled oceans
and lightning storms, days of travel,
the crumbling chessboard of roads and fences

this third smoke, that man’s beret,
the glare and howl of the television,
every drink shared between friends
and every toast thrown at the wall in rage

i call on you the names of all:
histories and communiqués and fading,
every memory lost and rewritten
on the silent stone of this world

8.
i call on the names of all:
the light that turns the stranger
from a tunnel of terror to smile,
across the storms of road and rose

i call on you the names of all:
the everyday glare shared like toast
with the memories of history smoking
on the silent stone of this world

4.
i call on the names of all:
daylight shared with strangers’ smiles
to toast the tunnel of memory smoking
on the silent rose of this world

2.
i call on shared sunlight smiles
to toast the tunneled rose of time

from sun stone by Octavio Paz

"I search without finding, and I write alone,
no one is here, and the day ends, the year ends,
I have gone down with the moment, all the way down,
the road is invisible over all these mirrors,
they repeat and reflect forever my broken image,
I pace the days, the moments pave this roadway,
I step upon the thinking of my shadow,
I pace my shadow in search of my one moment,"

track is to time as tunnel is to transformation

after visiting Selena's flat i wandered into another house (built on a cliff edge like all the houses in my dreams), where some old friends were hanging out, and all the curtains bedspreads table cloths were a syrupy lime green color that nauseated me but then i remembered i had a sweater in that color (i don't really). so i went out onto the backporch, really the landing over the back stair well, which was a small bedroom decorated with all my twin brother's discarded childhood toys, including a strange multimedia collage of a sci-fi train depot. Rob (who i saw yesterday) came out to smoke a cigarette and asked to show me the rest of the house. we went down and explored several rooms, one of which i thought Sarah Baure used to live in, except it was like the room was being swallowed by the wood paneled walls and doorway. it was covered in yarn and her spinning wheel still sat in the middle. i somehow missed the ground floor.

outside, i found myself walking along the train tracks with someone i thought might have been an old childhood friend (either James Thompson, who i haven't thought about since middle school, or Marshall). there were several tracks parallel to each other and they were all still active. every few minutes a train would appear around the bend and blast by, making it an interesting little game to not get hit. i looked back, and saw my two younger brothers following along the track. devon kept on balancing on the rails and i was worried he was going to get hit. along the track to the left, Christian and Chris St-Pierre were walking (i also saw them yesterday), and we were all heading for the vast train tunnel that appeared up ahead. eventually we all crossed to the left, james was gone at this point and devon was ahead of me. my friends took a small access passage to the side while my brothers and i forged ahead, running swiftly through the dark coals next to the track until we came to a larger room that sloped upwards. devon bounded up the hill saying it was possible to do in five leaps, with malcolm on his heels. i however had a bit of a struggle getting my legs out of the now quicksand like mass of soot. at the top was a small exhaust tunnel they had both just squeezed into to crawl back to the surface. i looked at this and decided to wake up.

i think one of my goals for today might have to be to get a flashlight and go explore the train tunnel down in the hollow. three nights of train dreams, there's something up in my subconscious about the need to get moving.

Later: the hollow is dark and quiet, no busses, no fireflies, the occasional bat and the crunch of gravel as spat and i walk along the rails. "so if you see any vehicles up there, make yourself invisible. i guess it's more of a mind thing. i hear if you think of fresh fruit salad cops can't see you. that's an old SoCal punk mindtrick. Exene Cervenka told that to Sweet-tooth, who told it to me, and now i'm telling it to you." we grow quiet as we approach the tunnel's mouth, passing the spot where Selena and i found the dog's head. crunch of gravel, voices from over the hedges, and a bus on the bridge. paranoia and rot in the bushes.

and the gaping dark, with two steel strings leading off like guiderails to time. flashlights lit we step inside. it's muddy, thick gray ooze covering the tracks, and water drips down the walls onto years of worn graffiti. every 40 yards or so an alcove sits off to the side, large enough for two people to stand in if a train comes. after the first few moments with the mouth growing smaller behind us it's really not as imposing, not like the tunnel in my dreams.

not like the train tunnel from my childhood, back in old town in alexandria, left over from an earlier age and now connecting a grocery store and a playground. we used to walk through it to go swing and practice cartwheels in the field on the other side. i remember the lights were a ghostly yellow and the echoes were filled with extra voices. reaching the other side without running was always the biggest challenge.

it's hard to stomp through the slime, but we're between train schedules so we have time. looking down i notice footprints in the mud, someone else walked this way since the last rain. barefoot, and running all over the place. spat jokes it might be a ghost, but there's nothing really all that haunted about this tunnel. we try to gauge if we've made it halfway, and soon come out in Oakland, down in Panther Hollow, pants and shoes caked and with all the surreal feeling of having taken the offbeaten path.

Jack Kerouac's Belief and Technique for Modern Prose:

Jack Kerouac's Belief and Technique for Modern Prose:

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language &knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven