Strega told me the seal of day never caught on with humankind. Always, she whispered, there were little high energy packets of resistance, stinging nettles, an absence, upon which the overweening light stumbled. It’s this. How the borderland came to be—the earth-sky broke open. She said, now a little light kick tips dreams into the cup of our heads.

Dark is only possible. A broken horizon invalidates the warranty.

Of course this was before she passed over the sill, tipping pot over tea kettle, her black skirt catching wind, pillowing to cushion her fall. Still, once she’d died things she’d tell me made much more sense. For example, the dark she tells me, you’ll find the odor of sanctity is the pale purple of Neptune’s rose.

I thought I’d test that one so to the dark I went nose first. The edges of day and night, more like the air above a frying mushroom. I’m telling you.

It rained for many miles. All grey, the edges of things blurred. Everything looked the same. Up and over the pass it rained but it was as if the higher I drove, the closer I got to the cloud’s natural home, the less giving the grey masses felt.

Past Snoqualmie, the rest stop at Indian John, all wet and standing water. But then the road down onto the high plateau and the weather tired. The rain sputtered out close to Ellensberg and the world took on contours and colour again.

By the time I crossed the Columbia, the roads were still damp, and the earth smelt life a giant white mushroom but the clouds had retreated back to the sky.

Still, they were there. The moon rose unnoticed, even its light was indistinguishable from the general haze of neon celestial reflection.

I slept at a rest stop, under a sleeping bag in the back of my car and woke just before the sun crested the horizon. Ripped open, the clouds were, where the waning moon pushed through high in the southern sky. I awoke on a long slow breath.

Today is the psychiatric assessment, and a (probably not very pleasant) road sign for my 13 year old niece and yet I was more relaxed than I have been in months. The source of the gift of a contented sigh? A gift of cloud, rain, light and silence probably.

When I unfurled and left the car to go get hot water, I found a folded $100 bill clipped under my windshield wiper. Odd the world.

Tragedies.

There will be a life from the moment she was first locked in the ward, sure. Most of us never get to really experience so immediately the consequences of our actions, and in some ways I can see that this is a gift to her. At least since she is a minor, her record will be sealed once she reaches 18, but at only 13 she now must muster the will to change, to accept responsibilities most adults cannot bear. While possible, the chances are extremely small that she will make it out of this alive in any way that matters.

taken by peardg

I am sore from walking yesterday, the powwow at Riverfront was being set up and I was looking for another one of my nieces. She of the Washington School of the Deaf. It turned out that she had already left for the Reservation with her dad. Nevermind. I’m going up there this morning.

Still, I was glad I walked the grounds. It’s been several years now since I lived here and so there is a an almost ethereal quality to my walking here. I went by my old apartment to gather some seeds from a kind of Lunaria that grows here. It has bigger, whiter seed pods than the kind that I’ve seen up in Vancouver so I am going to plant some at home. I was there just after dark and the stands that I went for are at the edge of a badger’s wood. There are coyotes near by too since it is within easy reach of the river. And I visited the witch’s house. Her place is always really beautiful and verdant.  But it was the powwow grounds that really seemed dense with the past and the odd thing is that I’m not much of a powwow person. Love stick game because of the songs but powwows have never been my favourite. Still this time it was different.

I suppose it is because Thyra is dead and she used to be a part of this powwow. Walking around was a bit like walking through the liminal zone where the shades and living intermingle. I kept “seeing” people that were once busy getting ready to dance, or sitting together in their camp chairs talking, and through them would hustle the current powwow workers setting up for grand entry at 7PM.

Today should be interesting because Wellpinit powwow is next weekend and Thyra’s camp is being set up today on the grounds. I’m heading up there in about an hour to exchange one niece for another. I’ll get a chance to walk around Wellpinit powwow grounds then. I’ll also go get some mugwort and buckbrush that grows near there.

I need juniper too and every morning when I burn it I suppose it will continue to keep the shades fed and therefore the memories sweet. At least I don’t use blood like Odysseus, and like Homer (I presume) I know it is a story, even if a compelling one.

Are you like that? I feel so much better when my time is being well spent. Just sitting is something that is really hard for me to do. I can take a book and be OK with it, or my beading, but to sit without a goal, without a task?

My niece is deaf, and the task is to go get her and take her over to the Washington School for the Deaf for her first week as a boarding-school student. She is super excited to be in a place where everyone can talk to everyone else and as tasks go, apart from the long drive, it is an easy one. I am heading out a few days early (she has to be at school Sunday night) so that I can go up to my favourite mountain lake, swim, sleep and just sit. The thing is I am also taking my beading and my notebooks and a few books of poetry.

I wonder if I will ever again be the kind of person that can go somewhere without something to do?  I used to be at one time. When I went out on the road at 16, hitchhiked and walked until I was 19, I went with a hairbrush (really long hair) as my main luggage. There were books during that time, but mostly, when I’d read them, I put them down for someone else to find. I read Darwin, and Edwin Abbott’s Flatland, and Mao, and the Sumerian myths, and even the Bible. I remember thinking then, in fact some really important understandings came my way during that first 2.5-year trek, but I also remember long periods, long, curved roads when all that I was really aware of was the world around me. The only tension I had then was hunger and sometimes cold.

I guess that the real challenge would be to find a balance between the two states. To once again be able to pick up a task, but then just put it down for someone else to pick up.  The critical thing here is to be OK with the probability that some of my tasks, should I put them down, will simply not get done. I am sure there are the sodden remains of books out on the road somewhere, that, once I left them behind, no one ever picked them up again. And the stakes are higher now. I mean if no one ever picked up my old copy of Flatland? But what if I put down the task of making sure a lost child gets found?

How his obsession with grounding human meaning in something that we can authentically share (i.e. meaning isn’t a solipsistic illusion) is reflected in his reading of phenomenology and his understanding of imagination is as complex as it is interesting.

He says of phenomenology and imagination:

Three decisive claims made by phenomenology – as it emerges in Husserl and evolves through his existential and hermeneutic disciples – are: (1) imagining is a productive act of consciousness, not a mental reproduction in the mind; (2) imagining does not involve a courier service between body and mind but an original synthesis which precedes the age-old opposition between the sensible and the intelligible; and (3) imagining is not a luxury of idle fancy but an instrument of semantic innovation.

That’s rather a nice summary; and if each point was followed, it would lead to some interesting conclusions about what it is like to be a human being.

Another dimension of his thought about imagination is that it has an orientation to the “other”. This orientation enacts ethics. Throughout the book he examines “Kristeva’s melancholic imagination, Vattimo’s fragile imagination (and) Lyotard’s narrative imagination” each of which presents “an irreducibly ethical scruple.”  I can feel the religiousness in him here, as I do when I read Alasdair MacIntyre, and can’t help but think about Wallace Stevens’ and his underlying assumptions and this apparently required sense of a moral universe.  I do find it interesting that it appears that these ethical thinkers (all Catholics) have been reducing the scope of the claims they make with regard to the seating of this morality, as they must to avoid the old pitfalls of a necessary, but unworkable, god.

There are numerous similarities between these three. Whereas Kearney’s required Phenomenologically-based shift of perspective is explained as imagination ceasing to “take itself for granted and (coming) reflectively to acknowledge its own pre-reflective engagement with everyday lived projects and preoccupations,” Stevens has this as his “supreme fiction” and his requirement that imagination and reality co-adhere for an effective poem/narrative/life.  For MacIntyre these same ideas are present, at least in part, in his notions of dependence and “goods of excellence.” These men are all humanists in the sense that they have seated the human capacity for ethical behaviour at the center of their lives and read it as the center of ours as well. And yet they also seem monks-in-disguise, not humanists but theists: their work seems a kind of secular application of the contemporary Christian man’s tendency to priesthood when those men aren’t in agreement with the dogma and social practices of the institutional church.

Anyway, I’ve gone off topic. It’s just that I find it interesting the similarities in religiosity, ideas about ethics and their apparent shared assumptions about what empowers and/or constitutes imagination.

One last quote from Kearney, to resonate with Stevens’ struggle between imagination and reality:

The ethical potential of narrative imagination may be summarized under three main heading: (1) the testimonial capacity to bear witness to a forgotten past; (2) the empathic capacity to identify with those different to us (victims and exemplars alike); and (3) the critical-utopian capacity to challenge official stories with unofficial or dissenting ones which open up alternative ways of being.

Compare Stevens’ imaginative force: it is the thing that will ultimately return us “not as a god, but as a god might be, / naked among them, like a savage source.” The alternative way of being to which Kearney alludes is this utopian semi-divinity, an ethical, reasonable yet passionate, human being who shares the world of possibility with the “other.” Here is the basic vision of these post-modern Catholics — an utopian ethic founded on the power of human narrative/poetic imagination. It explains their similarities, and their assumptions, but I still haven’t answered my own question. Without the battle – this “challenge” – as the motivational centerpiece, how will the imagined narrative go?