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!

I haven’t thought about it for a while, but on leaving work today, the knowledge that the coming dark was a turning point in the solar movement along the horizon, the clear sky and the waxing crescent of the moon in my southern sky, brought the memory sharply to the surface. The thing about that moon map is that it measured the passage of time in a way that made it seem a geographic phenomena. Many decades later when I learnt that some people conceive of time as something that retreats the further one travels from home, I understood it instantly. Time is a spatial phenomenon.

We are so reliant on the linear representation which our calendars and clocks provide for us that it seems difficult to grasp what time is like to those who map it on bone and through standing circles of stone. It’s not, I think, as simple as wanting to know when the next season is coming. It has to do with wanting to know where and when you are.

In one place I used to live, the winter solstice sun rose just between two tall cottonwood trees in an otherwise low-growth field across the road from my house. The first year I was there, when the sun rose that day, it was if I had been given a map that had a big golden X saying “You Are Here!.” The thing is that it didn’t map the earth, nor even my place in the universe. It mapped time, laid it out flat for me, so I could understand the dips and curves that had rolled me into this time. It located me “now;” not in splendid isolation, but like an asteroid that inhabits a location because of the various positions, trajectories and speeds of all that is around it.  This is what I mean by knowing where you are — it is knowing one’s movement patterns in relationship to all the other patterns that impinge upon yours.  This is what I felt in that bone that mapped the moon’s time.  The bone mapped by relating the moon’s movements to a specific bit of horizon, to a specific bit of land known deeply by the woman who gathered the bone, and who day after day, went out stand in the same place and watch time rise a little further along the horizon and then swing back on itself, marking time as something curved and sibilant.

With the sun, such a map is a simple arc, moving south in winter and then north in summer. It works well as a guide for groups of people because of that simplicity. The sun can locate us all at once. But with the moon the movement pattern it describes is far more complex and more difficult to track.  We can do it with our tools of course, but what happens is that we map it against something outside ourselves. This is our 3rd person sense of locality and its that sense of things that gives us the perception of time as an arrow — a movement even simpler than the sun’s year-long arc. The consequent maps, whether of space or time, locate all of us simultaneously, and all of us are placed against a rubric that stands outside our individual selves. This is the beauty of 3rd person reasoning, but by its very nature, it is not something that can give us that personal shot of feeling that we need to locate our 1st person selves in the time we move through.

To do that we need something that can map things in relationship to our particular selves in motion, our particular bit of lived on land.  That’s why the bone map works so well in evoking a sense of personal immediacy that includes the world. It’s a feeling of immanence, yet there is no transcendence to balance it because there is nothing else. So it isn’t really a “dwelling within,” so much as a simple “dwelling.” This “dwelling” is something that exists simultaneously in each object in the world and, most importantly, in the resonant space that defines the “between” that makes distinct objects possible.

The little grooves on each side of the s-track of holes on the bone marked some specific location, some rock or tree perhaps, in that long-ago relation’s world. When she stood there, had the marks lined up to her reference points, she knew exactly where the moon had risen the day before. By virtue of that she also knew that in this one spot where her feet pressed against the earth, she was also in that time past, and she knew she would be in that future time, when the next day the moon would rise again. The map of the rising points, her sense of intimacy with the particulars of the land, must have crafted an experienced world which welded her sense of space to her sense of time. Quite literally, she stood at the center of all time and space because it was mapped based on her particular location within it.

What I have been wondering is what it must have been like to have that sense of time and space be the predominate measure by which we guided our actions. Because we must live almost entirely with 3rd person concepts and maps, it seems nearly impossible to credit 1st person locality as a true measure of what is, yet really, our bodies must do this all the time. Every time we swing along the road on the way home our bodies are mapping time and space in just the way my relation did. The difference is that since bodies do it unconsciously, and we have largely lost the art of bringing this into awareness, for us, learning to map reality in the 1st person sense, and do it consciously, has become a kind of mysticism.  All my relation really did is find a way to share the intimate map of her individuality with those that would come to hold the bone. The thing is that part of what the bone said about her was that she had a specific place and a specific time and that these were as much a part of her as the hands that drilled the holes and the longing to represent what she had come to know. She was a woman, I think, that must have really known where she was.

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.

So I have moths in my head.

Did you know that there is a theory that the reason male moths dive into candle flame is that the light emits a frequency also emitted by female moths ready to mate? Then there’s the moon theory, the idea that moths (normally nocturnal) are guided by the need to keep bright lights at a certain spatial location, and of course floodlights and probably modernity generally, muck up that previously perfectly functional instinct. (Something to consider with respect to human instincts and post-modernity, and probably the connection my mental moths are making to Proust and the Squid and maybe to The Empire of Illusion.)

So I dreamt about moths with wings made of water and white flowers, growing, a great white bell of a flower hung down toward the earth, and out of its mouth fell, fertilized by the moth, its joint seed, a great white moon.

For me this all has something to do with how the mind works. I have absolutely no clarity about this, but if my past processes hold, if I keep reading, keep calm in the storm of confusion, one day the bazillion moths fluttering in the great cavity that is my head, will begin to dance together, and then the emerging pattern will start to make sense. I will be able to interpret the bits and their relationships and some new understanding will come of it.

I’m going to leave this post here. I suspect, however, the moths will show up again as the weeks proceed.

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

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.

There was one dream — I was one of two young women. We were apprentices to a witch named Uath de Voor. We were moving up the mountain, back toward the narrow valley where our camp was situated when two young men came along, looking for de Voor. There was something about them: eager and curious, driven by their desire to know, completely oblivious of the worlds of others when those worlds conflicted with what they wanted.  They knew de Voor had warned them away, that she wouldn’t work with them, and they came anyway. We warned them, told them that relationship couldn’t be forced just because they desired it, but it did no good. I was afraid for them, but as it turned out de Voor was just not there. They couldn’t find her. When they got to the camp, the kettle steamed, the lean-tos were all in place, but she was gone. Still I could feel the air swamped with anger at the disrespect that the boys’ behaviour portended and I knew they were in danger while they acted in this way.

And there was another — I was an observer in this dream, watching a young, very beautiful but entirely vapid, woman walk up a spiral walkway. As she reached about 30 feet above the wide expanse of marble floor she came across Strega. Just as she reached the witch, Strega caught her under the thighs and over the edge she went. She was dead on impact. I remember the horror of that, and Strega, she just looked over the edge at the dead young woman and shrugged. Some people must die she seemed to say and the woman should never have gone up the ramp toward her. She was my mentor and I knew she was right, but still I felt the horror and the fear of the young woman’s death.

As dreams go, these two teach much about my inner workings. I dream a lot about power, its relationship to behaviour and the choices it forces. If you think of everything in the dream as a part of self then the woman who dies and the young men are as much a part of me as are Uath and Strega, as are the mountain, the steaming kettle, the hard marble floor. Working with dreams is like working with stories or essays, they are narrative puzzles that take on different meanings depending on various element juxtapositions.

And meanings: Some things must die for other things to be born. The entirely self-referential must die so that one can learn from another. That which is empty, regardless of how comforting or pleasing, must topple before the possibility of learning can proceed on up the path. There are others of course, but these are the ones that seem particularly present for me today.

Darkness seems to me just such a meaning, just such a dream lesson. It is a requirement of growth, not its impediment. And of course power is what both motivates growth and its purpose. Power is the seed that splits and out of which the new dicotyledon emerges and it is the point of the plant’s long fight toward what it desires.

So it is dark today and I feel a kind of humming emptiness. It’s as if that place out of which the dreams come is open to this world of offices and computers, deadlines and chores. It’s like that seed coat has split and out of me there is pushing up through the earth that is my self, something that has been born out what was once here but is now gone. I have no idea what it is, or what it will grow into, but I can sense it like the echo of mugwort’s odor.

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.

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.

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.

Behind me:

In front of me: