Laconic Lunacy

Until you stand in a dark field, devoid of street lights and car eyes, of candle wicks tickling the night and fluorescence, on a midnight full of moon the field is a silver fox of rolling fur and its tails are the trees swaying in the twilight breeze - can you comprehend the being-divine? I hear no melodies, Lord, not one running through my mind tonight. I know they shiver and shift on the edges of my consciousness, but they've stagnated or silenced, like gnats in molasses - drowned, perhaps. An inelegance predominates, a hyperbolic nil, and I can't clear it out, for every other "it" is out, and this sticky residue, this vapid ectoplasm alone remains, home of fruit flies and ravens. A great Nothing populates this ghost town, with vacancy on every neon sign, dusty dens, and only tumbleweed duels at noon, though nothing moves, not even this moon as the sun since fled the sky.

vivisect to scrutinize,
I'm an insect on a slide -
careful with my psyche, loves,
where the spear enters my side
bleeds everything that's making me
alive? whispers the night
the bullet moon,
my bull's brown eyes
collide in a horoscope horror
blinding bright

Moon and Mythos

a la olwen

the fabular moon, unequivocal,

argentine in tiding time,

tugs the waves of my heart

fro and to phantasmal dreams

witness the boreal sky-shivers

boring into my deep being

where black, shadow, light

are born in a breath-bright

moment, it passes, and forever

bliss scars my sea-deep soul

scalding love, blanket violence

together we're never far from home

lunar lunacy, hanging bloody by,

a heavenly sacrifice, only why?

All too often, we flatten our colors into the simplest pictures of black and white. Knowing what we know now, what ill-prepared, naïve decisions might we make? There is little merit to making colorful decisions from black and white knowledge; we are not myths. How often, in our daily lives, do we find characters of unequivocal evil, or unblemished good? The knight in shining, undusty, unnotched armor must be fighting inside a mythos quarantine, for the moment he steps outside his sterilized story, dust settles into the corners, and branches snap at his suit, and swords will seek chinks in his defenses.

La la lune

http://benjaminwblog.com/2014/07/la-la-lune/

Of what does the other moon dream?

That half whom we never might see

Does it face the stars complacently?

Knowing the sun its other side feels?

it pulls at tides on a world unknown

oh, olwen, I’m following the heart of thee

as a doe lightly leaping over still waters

my heart quickens – I loved the darker half last

la la lune, la la lune, what do the shadows see?

You can spend every moment of every day studying the facets of spiritual love, and be completely baffled at its prisms on a twist. “You can learn all that there is to know about their [love’s] ways in a month, and yet after a hundred years they [love] can still surprise you at a pinch. –Tolkien (with Ben interpretations and additions).

I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says "Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again.”

― Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass

What is it, Olwen? It is the quilt of snow over the trees and fields, the cirrus clouds on summer days that look like cracked ice drifting over a tropical sea, it is in the sunflowers and snowdrops in their seasons, the tulips in the moment, and the cold snarl of the mother bear; it is the dance of sun and moon, the clasp of a warm hand when yours is chilled to the bone, and it is being tucked under a mighty wing, wide as the heavens and closer than your own heart. 

Audio Books and Fae Things

I used to glance askance at audio books, always assuming that listening to a book was ridiculous in comparison to reading the book myself. Only in the past year have I realized how foolishly blithe this was. Audio books are awesome. Not as a replacement for reading, but as an opportunity for reading while driving, running, working, or for listening to other interpretations of passages that I’ve only read within the echoing chambers of my skull.

At first, I started “audio reading” books that I was struggling to find time for, but had always wanted to read, but then I realized an alternative use for this particular format. My speakers aren’t particularly good in my car, and the bass and treble often get truncated, and because I often acquire my audio books for free from librivox, every chapter is a different reader and some of the authors are impossible to hear. The difficulty, then, is knowing that I might miss important information, and that makes reading more involved books almost impossible. The alternative I found is listening to poetry and mythology. I’d always wanted to read the whole of the Ramayana, the Poetic Edda and the Central American mythos. Listening to the philosophical conversations between Arjuna and Krishna is easier than struggling to follow difficult Russian names in War and Peace (which I’ll just have to read in my free time), and listening to the rhythm of poetry has revived my interest in certain poets that I previously struggled reading because of how I read their poems.

I started listening to Wordsworth, Edgar Allen Poe (I’ve liked his short stories, but his poetry I never read much of), Keats (I always liked Keats), Whitman (thought he was a bit wordy), TS Eliot, William Blake (I really enjoy listening to Songs of Experience). I even have new playlists lined up for some other poets I’m excited to listen to as well. One of the neat aspects of public domain readings is that I can find single poems all over the place, and combine them into playlists for long trips.

Turns out, audio books are awesome.

Today, as I sat on the deck listening to The Raven and then The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, I realized just how beautiful it is in the hills. I always realize this, over and over. I can’t even count the number of types of trees I can see just from my deck, even though the big-leaf maple does its best to hide all the rest. It’s really quite beautiful.

Is this your dream,

your fulfillment of being?

a heart leaves on wings,

forgetting – does the brother bird

remember his siblings

when they are old, gone

from their fledgling feathers left

to molt on the forest floor?

melancholy hills cover the sunset

so it strobes over and over –

a million sunsets over the ridge lip

bleeding until the silhouettes run

together in the dark,

and father earth and mother sea

flush the light into the western reach

of endless night.

I’m fae today, stepping gingerly between the shadows of the moon left by lofty branch boughs – silver traces like icy-argentine rivers, like eyelashes of light on the cold, bumpy ground. The moon is too slow for the agile earth, and revolves the wrong way though it tries, like swimming against the current, to travel east, though each night its journey is westward bound, following the sun inevitably. The stars wink, knowingly, for it’s all a ruse.

http://benjaminwblog.com/2014/06/audio-books-and-fae-things/ 

Another Place

I started another blog at: http://benjaminwblog.com/

Or, rather, I started a new place for the same blog. I've still got a lot of work to go on that, and it also is spread out over two domains - but I'm enjoying the project so far. It's also easier to remember a url like benjaminwblog.

I'm still recovering from my marvelous weekend. It's difficult spending time at the beach with friends, and then finding yourself back at work, programming android devices and wishing you could hear the waves, the storms flattening the salty grasses, the voices laughing in every room. I wish I'd had more time for writing this weekend past. When I find myself richer than Smaug, I'm going to purchase a nice castle on the cliffs of Scotland, and write whenever I can drag myself away from the scenery.

One thing that struck me as strange this weekend was a comment made by the host: "I'm thinking next time, because of the stage of life so many are in, I'm going to have to ask that we try and find sitters for dogs and babysitters for children." (paraphrased - may have been speaking particularly of dogs) Fifteen people at a beach house, four dogs and one child consumed an unsurprising amount of attention. What did we expect?

It's strange to think that I may be one of the oldest at the event, and I'm nowhere near that stage of life. Yet, even I've noticed responsibilities resting heavy on my shoulders as I move towards house ownership, some financial decision making, and the organization of my own time. I want to have adventures, be a child, run around in the fields and smell each of the different flowers - but does one balance the requisite responsibilities of adulthood and a youthful outlook and joy?

Some of it is found here: "Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?  Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?"  (Matthew 6) You can see it in the eyes of the president, the weight on the shoulders of the exhausted, and the greying hair of the stressed. Worry adds age, and in all this I'm doing my best to avoid worrying about how everything will turn out, and am simply enjoying the process of looking at houses, of writing, drawing, and building a website, and of loving those around me. Life is just the rim of an ocean, rising and receding at the draw of the moon.

Blank

Blank. I cannot remember, anymore, what I dreamed of writing, discussed writing, or actually have written this last week. Everything swirls together, a beautiful misery. I'm sleeping, dreaming, writing, thinking, seeing, ingesting words, and jettisoning everything temporarily superfluous, extraneous, inessential. And it's a race against my leaking intellect. Will I realize the race continues without end, surrendering first? Can I lose a game that exists only within? Or, perhaps, not even there?
Even the words are blank, like fake bullets the target ignores, or disregards - a nuisance, a distraction, a trifle, a red herring, if you please. Color me... disinterested, they say, child's play. They turn away into the sea, a vastness unexplained (by me, at least).
The moon's a mistress made of me, grasping at my tides, I, a pendulum in lunar sway. This lunacy, I plead - do the ocean's truly rise and elsewhere must recede: a teeter-totter, I see, I saw, now my vision's clouded intimately. I loved once, and lost twice, and regret thrice, afore the rooster crowed; and I love thee Lord, but scarcely feed myself. The wolf's teeth are canine white, angler fish's lure so bright, dart frog saturated with color, belladonna - doth beauty's embrace only destroy?
Fairy tale me is no hero, but the crooked man, swallowing stories for life. Not mine, the princess, nor battles won, riches gleaned, the dragon slain. No, I quite believed a different tale. If, knowing everything of everyone: dreams, desires, hopes, prayers, experiences, I expect I'd love them, wholly, unconditionally. The double standard is this: I believe if you knew the same about me, I cannot believe the same, or anything near. There is knowing... yet, understanding is supernal, a celestial gift. This I hide behind lest you enter the shell and find the sea.

Knowledge forbidden?
Suspicious, reasonless. Why should their Lord
Envy them that? Can it be a sin to know?
Can it be death?
(Milton - Paradise Lost)

Midnight Sophistry

It's a night for useless philosophizing, and I, the eternal sophist. When it comes to actual writing, important writing, or important aspects of my own existence, I'm a bit of a perfectionist. Perhaps this stems from my competitive nature. When I watch a movie like Ender's Game, I constantly find myself thinking: "I could beat him, let me play." What arrogance is this? Who am I? But even if I couldn't, my heart would try.
But I know my motivations, and my drive, and I know, too, that if that was my heart's desire, I may very well win it, against superior forces. Such is the power of conviction.  And now, sitting here contemplating pieces I've written and examining them, I find them pierced with errors like arrows, more wholly holey than a frayed web, and less useful.
What is perfect writing? I'm stuck in a platonic mindset where the mere existence of a story implies a perfect story.What is the perfect story? What is the perfect song? Are there an infinite number of perfect stories or perfect songs? Perfect paintings, perfect sculptures or vessels, the perfect art.
Then I think to myself, can there be more than one? Two sculptures, both perfectly done?  This is a mind-bending mental-yoga-preztal seen through a bent-mirror-prism-raindrop-stainglasswindow. Because, to my thinking, unless the sculptures are 100% equally perfect, how can they both be perfect? Is perfect like infinity? The numbers between 1-2 are infinite, mathematically. What about 1-3? Double infinite? No, just infinite. But it's double the infinite as between 1-2, right? Right? So can both paintings be perfect, but one be "double perfect"?
Even if that were true, what is the most perfect perfect? Can there be one? Or, like infinity, can you always add one more? You see? A sophists night.
But instead of getting wrapped up in all the cognitive gymnastics, I'm struck by this fierce competitive desire to acquire the most perfect perfect something, whatever it is. I'll never get there; that's beyond my ken. Yet, the intense craving stirs in my gut most mightily. How can I aim for less than perfection? It's like the quote by Les Brown, famous motivational speaker: "Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars."
Oh, let me hit the moon.

Tuesday Night Lights

Autumn appeared and Summer played its last mischief. The sky was beautiful tonight, like a shadow cast over the purest lapis lazuli, fading into a dull ember orange near the skyline. With a foxtail moon and a dusting of stars, the temperature and atmosphere is perfect for thoughts and simply laying in the grass, staring into the heavens and asking questions of eternity. Where next, Lord? Oh, never mind, it matters little, doesn't it? I can't see very far, truly, when contemplating the greatness of this world, this universe. What's it like, Father? Do you eternally see it as good, each moment since creation?
Silly questions, frivolous questions, but Cassiopeia  smiles and rocks in her little wooden chair as she listens, and pulls up a glass of water with the dipper, though the bear, whose tail it is, was not impressed, and Orion chuckles as he holds aloft his hunter's prize.
Every year, I think, has held its ends and beginnings, its hopes and queries, its trials and joys. What would it take, I ask, for a fulfillment of my dreams? What must I do? The stars just twinkle in response, and the divine is silent, this time, though the breeze over the hills is not. There are a lot of questions, a lot of loves, a lot of thoughts, a lot of wishes, broken or filled or patient, swimming across my mind like those satellites in the sky. Many of these will be broken, shortly, but they'll be replaced with new dreams. Is that the way of it then? Why bother fretting, when all will be clear as this sky, eventually?

We're alike, the moon and I.
Wax to life, wane goodbye
Shedding silver light by night
Shift away by day
No argentine remains to grace
Fae forgotten dreams
I'll trace your name among the stars