Some realities begin as psychic (or unconscious) aptitudes

The soul-

A semi-conscious psychic complex, having partial autonomy of function

In a society where one must not be ‘odd’

-for instance, one may not be cobbler AND poet-

the construction of an artificial personality becomes an unavoidable necessity

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You can’t go home again”

Must the parent be integrated into oneself in order to rid the environment of it’s presence as a Haunt? Is that part of the way the life-force equalizes, regenerates it’s sacred balance?

Disturbed spirits/psychoses=

The result of imbalance

And running from the weight you must swallow for balance to be achieved?

And

Why is contact with other organic life and with animals desirable (or necessary) to contented human life? (pets, zoos, relationship between farmers and shepards and their stock, hunters view of animals and fish, The old man and the sea, the proverbial cat lady)

-Nomadic life vs. settled life (but not agrarian?)

hunter gatherers---------à cubicle drones

what happened? How are we different?

In order to challenge accepted definitions, we must not only re-invent, but prove the worth and validity of re-invention.

I am a free individual.I refuse to admit that this is an illusion. I alone control my body, my time, my productivity. I alone may respond to the choices and challenges of my specific experience. My influences and the things that pressure me prove my freedom, because it is they that force me continually to assert my autonomy and ability. Freedom is shown by all and any action- even the merest.

Searching for a meal late at night with old friends- not friends from childhood- friends from adolescence. A little girl with a crimson red crushed velvet sash wrapped around her head. A rosary on the handlebars of her bicycle.

Black beans in a white bowl for dinner. Someone reads a story about a boy who plays trumpet, his shoes stuffed with dollar bills, over the radio. Her little brother creeps closer and closer until he could lean forward and kiss the stereo on its tuning dial. He quickly falls asleep with his hands folded under his cheek. She listens.

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- Gazing into a spot rubbed, glowing and reflective on an abandoned sedan’s dusty window.

- Billboards peeling so that layers through the centuries are exposed.

- The bridges over every river have collapsed

- The telephone wires are down, heavy and tangled on the ground

- The grass beneath them is crushed and dying

- Curiously, green life is thriving. The one thing that has not stopped is rain. Rain is as plentiful and as heavy as sod.

- So the behavioral patterns are signifigantly disrupted by sorrow? Is that your explanation? It will do, I suppose, though it’s anything but original.

- The prettiest thing passed down to me was a word, not a name but a word I once heard them say and did not know then, I have a vague Idea now, of what it meant, what it means, both in that context and in this one (memory).

- There is no way to explain what you see, even showing wordlessly, leading, requires translation. No kind of communication is honest and unflawed.

- Love is inconsequential as one reality closes on itself- disappearing through a process.

- How many things have you been given in your life and you don’t deserve any of it? Catastrophe will make the difference.

- Rain is as plentiful and as heavy as sod. Boundaries dissapear in it. Things in the ground are drowned in a matter of seconds, so they float up dead as the holes brim over- they wash out over the mud and are pounded into it.

- Graffiti on abandoned freight cars rotting into the tracks.

- She asks herself what else has survived as she passes a heap of wood, scrap; the brakeman’s shack.

West Virginia, September 1999

Black butterfly against a blue blue sky (I don’t have any ideas and I’m starving for images) and my mind the softest emptiness suspended in the midst.

Emptiness cannot be suspended.

But contained emptiness?…

A dragonfly, iridescent green with blue insect eyes like seedbeads and quick transluscent wings lands on my arm, so I watch it, head tilted back, and lose the baby daisy behind my ear.

Backflips off of the ropeswing at its height over sparkling green water. You see your shadow when you arch your back, and are suddenly aware of your body as an incredibly beautiful thing, to cast such a shadow from the air, on such a surface. The water is cool, the exact colors of it (blue, yellow, green) indescribable (I give up).

An old man with an American flag on his speedboat is alone and would like a nubile young girl to ride with him. Searchlights shined in my eyes from another speedboat. I’m tired of intrusions. I do not know if I am capable, any longer, of peaceful co-existence with people who have such obviously conflicting interests with my own.

One thing I wouldn’t know if a stranger hadn’t told me when I was twelve and I went off to climb the shale cliffs alone (the only time I reached the top): The lake is man-made and it provides power, but originally the river was dammed to protect a diamond mine in this valley, which is now filled with water. The man who discovered the diamond rock while clearing land to extend his grazing grounds into the valley, was smart enough to know that if the this wealth was discovered by speculators, the noise of coalmining would be multiplied tenfold, and more importantly, he would be either bought or forced off his land. He went to bed and he thought until he came to a solution.

He went into town to deliver the proposal he had written to Morgantown Electric, and ten years later what could have been a mine was a lakebed. The farmer had not lived to see the project completed- and before he died, he only told his son, and his son’s great grandson told me.