I slept in my car last night, the first few hours not far from the Columbia River, the next an hour or so west of Spokane. The air moving down from the Cascades brought some low clouds but far above them were the stretched gossamer of high plateau moisture. Jupiter hung sparkling below the barely waning moon, the sky was so bright it glowed a shadowed blue, and I missed being homeless.

I’m not at all superstitious but I am also  not a bad driver but I’ve been hit twice in the last year.  It might be fun to go out tonight and watch the craziness. I bet the bus and ambulance drivers and cops are not looking forward to this shift.

One of my favourite coffee shops is a 24-hour place. If I could find an out-of-the-way parking spot it might be amusing for a couple of hours. I was going to go see The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus but I’d have to go downtown and that seems a bit risky.

Anyway, I’m just rambling. Tomorrow I’ll go see the movie and depending on the weather, I’ll either go out to the bird sanctuary or to the art museum again.

Another 3 1/2 days off! Wahoooooooooooo!

When I was still a child I held in my hands a slightly curved arc of yellowed bone that had small holes drilled into it. The holes swirled across the surface like a flattened, elongated S. It was a moon map that one of my relations had made long before my life began.  Keyed to a particular bit of horizon, the drilled holes marked the rising point of the moon as it wended its way over the course of a bit more than a month. I’ve never seen another, and have yet to make one myself, but I can still feel the bone in my hands. It made a huge impact on me, although at the time, and for decades after, I could not have said why. Even now, as I think I am beginning to understand it, its power over my imagination is still largely beyond my linguistic mind – as all good symbols should be.
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I am the kind of reader that has many books on the go at the same time. Normally this isn’t a problem since I read almost entirely non-fiction. When I hit the end of a read-run then I’ll pick up some fiction. I take a break, then back to non-fiction. The world is orderly. When I intermix them, things get a little strange. And confusing.

I think it’s something with the way the two genres affect my mind, but when I read them together it’s as if they start a feed-back loop and my mind starts making weird connections, not static exactly, but definately off-the-wall cognitive shots. So for example, I am re-reading Woolf’s The Waves, and there is Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury along with Sherman Alexie’s books. Add to that a book called The End of Illusion: the end of literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, one called Proust and the Squid (great title), one on the philosophy of mind. There’s another on religion and the american mind and one by Foss that’s become a bit of an obsession (can’t seem to let it go, it’s just such a wonderful idea).

So I started dreaming about moths. My son, who sends me random topics to write about, sent me one about moths and their propensity to immolate themselves in candle flame and haunt floodlights. He sent me the topic some weeks ago, but I haven’t done anything about it because I could feel that whatever I thought of moths wasn’t ready to come out through the fingers. I suppose reading Woolf was bound to trigger a connection there. And the other books, those too – like somehow they are growing toward each other, sparking against each other, but only, it seems, when I turn my head, when I am not looking directly, but as Dickinson said, looking aslant.
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I’ve been listening to a live feed of the Atlantis mission mixed with music. Understandably it is called Misson Control and is on SomaFM.  Atlantis is carrying stuff (I’ve always wondered if some wit takes those foil-wrapped Twinkies) up to the International Space Station.  Nasa is maintaining a stream of information for those interested.

I remember sitting as a child with my grandparents as the televised pictures of the moon walk became public symbols of human awe at ourselves. All this still effects me like that day did. So many horrors to our credit, and yes, even here, the money and incredible ingenuity could have worked wonders for those still dying of things like ferocious stupidity, but still…

what we can do

and where it takes us

so much further out

into all that is non-human

one day we may escape

our inclinations

The moon is dark today, as is the sky. It has been raining all day, so much so that even while it was light, going down the narrow walk between houses to get my laundry, I could have used a flashlight to avoid tripping over that *!*&#$ lip of concrete.

I’ve been in my head all day, writing a little essay on Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument and why it isn’t really a problem for physicalism. This may make absolutely no sense to you, but it is what I’ve been doing all day. Next it’s an edit on an essay on Greek god origin myths and their reference to specific body parts and what said references say about the polis-mind of the people. After that, if there is time before I need to sleep, a novel by Louis Owens called Nightland.

I went in to my office to get the first draft of the Jackson essay down. I’ve been struggling with it all week and found that all the home distractions (dishes to do, laundry, cats to pet, dogs to walk, plants to water and kitchen-floor-ground-in-dirt to eradicate by toothpick) irresistible in the face of Mary the supreme colour scientist. So I gathered my materials, drove downtown and sat in my empty office. It helped, because five hours later I had a draft.

It was really dark there. My office is high in a tower and we have acres of window glass but the world just didn’t light up today.

Part of my reaction to the day is because I know it is dark moon. There is something about that, especially now we are past Halloween, that makes me think of dark dreams I have had in the past, and once that happens the dreams are back, slipping under me like a sheet tumbled in a dryer with mugwort. There’s a sense of the dream as ever-there, even though you know it isn’t, or that’s is so long gone that it no longer signifies; nevertheless, it does linger, like it’s a vague smell, or an occasional prickle, like a tiny dried stem that pokes you in the waist when you turn to move your nose out of odor’s reach.

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The odd thing about this time of the lunar month is that where ever you look to see the sun, you are also looking at the moon. So for me now (just before sunset on Friday), the moon is there, just a little ahead of the sun on its way over the crest of the horizon – as it will be tomorrow morning at sunrise.

Tomorrow at sunset they will be nearly on top of each other, that is, they will fall over the horizon together. But by the next morning, the sun will have taken over, and the moon, although close still, will come up after the sun. And the moon will again, wax.

The title poem from Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest has a stanza (the middle of three) that goes

Cattle stare at flat-bed haulers gunning clumps
of black smoke and lugging damaged drill pipe
up the gullied, mud-hollowed road. Road, this
road. Roustabouts shouting from the crow’s nest
float like Ascension angels on a ring of lights.
Chokecherries gouge the purpled sky, cloud-
swags running the moon under, and starlight
rains across the Ford’s blue hood. Blue, this blue.

I know what he means by “Blue, this blue.” I understand that “blue” the word, and that colour, they both hold the same things, this set of experiences, these feelings. The memories float under the word and when it is used; there they are, pushing up against awareness, skewing perception a little to the left, a little right.

Rudbeckia hirta

The Rudbeckia, for me, is like this. In its Fall form there is a bag it carries, full of memory and feeling that transfer — onto a poem, an essay by Searles, my sense that the moon pulls at me, sliding as it does, invisible across the day-sky.

Bits from that Rudbeckia bag spill out at the oddest moments. Sometimes I can figure it out, but others? No. But I trust it, this ability to transfer meaning acquired one way, and then transfered to some other entity, by some other process, to be used some other way. The thing I would love to know…how are we able to do this?

Which is, of course, is how I come to be reading Searle and Lakeoff and Johnson.

By the way, the moon has set and the leeks are soaking in the sink.

I’ve been gardening interspersed with reading Searle’s “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” poems randomly selected from Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest and Lakoff and Johnson’s Philosophy in the Flesh. All the while I have been deeply conscious of the fact that the moon has been crossing the day-sky unseen.

The moon rose sometime around midnight (it is at last quarter) and is, as I sit here writing, close to setting. It will set before dark, and since I have been poorly this weekend, it was daylight before I woke and so, for this day, although I can feel the tidal pull of the moon on my awareness, I have not seen it for at least two days now.

I feel better today, having slept the lion’s share of two days and when I went out this morning for tea, the garden presented itself as a “must do.”  Some plants are still strong, even though the nights have been a bit frosty, but others have long since died back. The tomatoes, cilantro, the lupins, the sweetgrass and the poppies have become dried letters from summer.  When I pulled the dead tomatoe branches today, there was a faint smell left, and I even found one small orange tomatoe left clinging to a wizened branch. The poppies dried to leave architecturally beautiful seed pods on elegant stems.  I have saved those and put them dry into a ceramic pot outside my door. On dark moon next I’ll cut back the lupin pods and place them there along with the poppies.

The moon will be in Cancer at the moment, sinking to the horizon, just north of west. That’s how it feels, that the moon in Cancer is sinking to the west, but of course what is really happening is that I, on a spinning earth, am backing away as I stand and look to where I know the moon to be – that as I spin backwards, the edge of the earth is rising up and hiding constellation after constellation, until finally, it will hide a moon already hidden.

What has that to do with Searle and poetry? More on that after I go pull the remaining leeks.

No matter where we are, no matter what we can see, or how we live, for some time each month we stand between the sun and the moon.

Behind me:

In front of me: