Inane revisionism

In a galaxy far, far away...

I crawled into a wormin' hole, and thought about ya

... the love story that never was.

Today's pre-convention mixer was starting to get boring until someone started yapping about the potential existence of alternate dimensions that allow all possible arrangements of matter, all of them equally real. I thought I might as well go Darth Emo with the idea. So there. Sorry, Jedi Grandmaster Lucas, I don't wanna get on your dark side, but you gotta admit, these two look good together :)

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I'm an Apple!

Eve's bane

Just a bit of fruity silliness from a former Mango :)

From Ate Geng's blog: Anicca Is Apple

APPLE

If apple is your favorite fruit, you are an extravagant, impulsive and outspoken person, often with a bit of a temper. While you may not be the best organizer yourself, you make a good team leader and are good at taking things forward. You can take quick action in most situations. You enjoy travel immensely. You ooze with charm when you are with your partner. You have an enthusiasm for life, unmatched by most.

Um, them Granny Smith 'uns make great stuffing for chops?

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( my body's secret heart )

drawn to the vortex
recalled inside like wet silk cloaking rigid shadow
i felt every surge deep in my soul
the affliction of memory and desire too full for flesh to contain
by firelight: copper-rich and ocean tang and the musk of deep rose
giving way to slick surrender

ascending and descending
widening and sliding
aligned into something new

( my body's secret heart )
opening and closing around you, only you, always you

possessed wholly, rapture-fierce, beyond reach of mind or will
the thirst that raged
behind my eyes a bright, discordant melody
darkness and light

( a little of me shall go wih you )
death and rebirth
( i promise )
pulsing with the blind radiance of opal-stone
expiring in slack, satiated breath

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Un jour dans ma vie

(or, just one of those days when i need to get a grip)

woke to the scent of

discovered

on my way to see

read

by

while listening to jazz manouche and hanging out at

scored a bunch of

to make

which tastes better when paired with

spent an evening at

to see

oops. i meant

( who said orgasm alone is the full measure of ecstasy? )

Paris, je t'aime.

pics: penhaligon's bluebell,my fave pickmeup; porte des lions, louvre; jan fabre exhibit, louvre; poemas; cesar vallejo; jardin de luxembourg; truffles; panroasted chicken over truffle risotto; 2001 corton charlemagne grand cru; palais garnier; totally gratuitous pic of gerard butler as erik (currently in talks to reprise role in phantom sequel! waiting for the punchline, sir alw...); j. fosse and g.f. haas' opera melancholia

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Isaac the Magus

Isaac Newton's tomb, Westminster Abbey

"Newton was different from the conventional picture of him. His deepest instincts were occult, esoteric, semantic...[He] was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians..." John M. Keynes on Isaac Newton

I had the privilege of meeting a pioneering member of the Newton Project over the weekend. The Newton Project is a foundation dedicated to cataloging and digitally transcribing Newton's unpublished works and making them available to the public via the internet. A large part of this collection includes private manuscripts that detailed his lifelong passion for esoteric scholarship, which he pursued with equal, if not greater, intensity as the scientific work he for which he was more renowned. A prodigious author, Newton wrote more about theology and alchemical arcana than math and science combined. His extensive research on both subjects (writing up to four million words on theology alone) had been hugely ignored or downplayed by those who esteemed him as the paragon of the Scientific Revolution - a period characterized by critical and skeptical thought.


"Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things."

Though the procedures he used to develop his theories were precise and logical, Newton personally refused to subscribe to the mechanical ideal of the universe. For him faith and reason were equally important parts of the same mission to understand nature. He saw the forces at work in the universe as proof of an inherent divine Will. This Will was articulated as the fixed and essential wisdom that permeates all levels of reality.

"The most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being."

Newton believed that the wisdom of the universe had been given to man as the prisca sapientia or "first knowledge" at the dawn of civilization. The corpus of this knowledge was lost or corrupted over time but he thought it could be found in religious and mystical traditions handed down from antiquity. He was a keen advocate of the principles of alchemy, drawing exhaustively on the hermetic texts of Nicolas Flamel and Ovid's The Metamorphosis. He delved into sacred geometry and numerology. He regarded Pythagoras' "Music of the Spheres" as an early metaphor for the inverse square law of gravity, as put forth in Proposition VIII of Principia. For more than 30 years, through an assiduous exegesis of the Judeo-Christian scriptures, often correlated with astronomical data, Newton attempted to draw a methodology for determining God's plan for history. He devoted a significant amount of time interpreting the form and measurements of Solomon's Temple, believing the ancient site to be a microcosm symbolizing the design of the cosmos.

Fragment of a manuscript by Newton, part of his observations on the Hebraic institution and Solomon's Temple

Newton's mysticism is less an occult practice than another way to investigate empirical phenomena in the natural world, an attempt to find correspondence and unity among widely disparate systems. To him, reality is one. He chose to be unencumbered by the "rational" disciplines, and pursued unorthodox avenues to perceive and decipher the absolute. Newton's preoccupation with metaphysical philosophy is considered desultory by scientific standards, nevertheless it offers insight into the beliefs and motivations behind one of the greatest minds in history, the ideas that shaped his view of the world and influenced the way he directed his science.

"I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
















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XXXV

I: Without knowing how, or when, or from where

Conrad had a rule: he didn't like, much less date, "frivolous" women. He didn't like their bleary, overly sentimental talk, the way they fussed too much over mundane things, their sugary, seemingly boundless enthusiasm.

He met Clarissa, and he forgot.

She was everything he wasn't looking for, and everything he'd ever needed.


II: Simply, without problems or pride

"I'm seeing someone," she protested, frightened by his ardor.

He didn't blink. "It doesn't matter. I'm going to take you away from him."


III: I don't know any other way

He brought her flowers one day.

"But you said you don't buy flowers," she remarked, puzzled.

"I don't," he replied. "I climbed over the wall to your neighbor's yard to get them."


IV. But this, in which there is no I or you

When he proposed to Clarissa, Conrad went down on one knee. He reluctantly acquiesced to courtly tradition because he thought it would please her.

To his consternation she giggled. "Are you serious?"

"Yes, damn it!"

"Well, stand up then."

"What?"

She pulled him to his feet."If you're going to propose to me, you better do it with both feet under you. Now. Ask me again."

Courtly traditions be damned. "You will or you won't?"

Clarissa cradled his face in her hands. "I will marry you, Conrad Lee."


V: That your hand upon my chest is my hand

They emerged from the church amidst a shower of rice and roses.

She grabbed his hand. "Did I say it? Did I say "I do"?" I was so nervous--"

He made a move to pull her back into the church."You're welcome to say it again if you like."

"I DO!" She shouted joyfully atop the church steps, then kissed him loudly on the lips, to the astonishment of all present.


VI: That when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close

She gave him a card every year of their marriage. The cards themselves were nothing special, he said. It was the way she signed them that made his heart beat a little faster each time he read:

There's never going to be enough time with you.

She wrote it every time.






For Papa and Mama, on their 35th wedding anniversary

Love Sonnet XVII by Pablo Neruda is their favorite poem

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Elemental

Sol y Luna

it's you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing...here is the deepest secret : i carry your heart ( i carry it in my heart )
- e.e. cummings

You lounged beside me with easy grace, your shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows. As one we watched the sea flow and crash, one briny wave chasing after another in infinite rhythm.

"I brought you a gift."

You reached into your pocket and pulled out a velvet case. From within you lifted a necklace. A pendant fashioned in the shape of the sun and moon dangled from the chain. Both are entwined inside a single sphere, the moon caught in shreds of fire, the sun lassoed within a silvery embrace. Fine, undulating filaments radiated from the center to touch the edges of the circle, framing the motion of their celestial dance.

It was exquisite.

I turned, and held my hair up as you wound the delicate cord around my neck and fastened the clasp. "I had this made while I was visiting South America. I asked the artist to create a special mold for the design. After the necklace was finished, I had him destroy the mold. So you see, it's the only one of its kind in the world." Your voice dropped to a murmur near my ear. "And it belongs to you."


"It's beautiful." I ran my fingers over the chain, felt its weight pool in the dip of my collarbone. The ornament warmed against my skin with uncanny familiarity; I felt my pulse quicken beneath the supple metal, a first creation, an honor far better than I deserve.


"There's a legend that goes with it. The sun and moon are lovers. They loved each other so much that they left their places in the sky to be together. When they did that, the world suffered. The sun's heat burned the earth while the moon's tears flooded it. So it was decided that they should live apart. When the morning comes the moon must yield the night, but the sun knows that she is with him in the same heaven, even if he cannot see her."


In the same heaven. There is no place I can go you will not be.


I leaned over and caressed your face, brought my lips to the curve of your cheek, tasted salt and honeyed wine down the line of your jaw, breathed the scent of rain and wildflowers in the hollow of your throat.

You gently pressed your forehead to mine. "Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why do you keep on turning my world upside down?"

I felt something in me break, dissolve, liquify; the sea seemed to pour through, roaring like a thousand hooves in my ears. My vision blurred; moisture beaded on my skin, then slid down in tiny rivulets down my arms to the sieve of my fingers, onto the swath of silk hovering over the barren sands.

My eyes wandered over to the distant horizon, to the the path of the dying sun. "What do you think you do to mine?" I whispered, so quietly that only the wind seemed to hear.

You took my hand in yours, your thumb lightly tracing circles on my wrist. Your eyes glowed sapphire, taking on a secret gleam in the fading light of the Palisades. The shadows of the gloaming cast your countenance into stark, near-perfect symmetry. I remembered how the foreboding beauty of the ancient Greek statues thrilled and terrified me, but oh so much less than you did.

"Well, ma princesse, it's starting to get cold out here. Let's head back in."

I stood, my feet vainly seeking purchase on the uneven bank, wet with the rising tide. A tremor began in my soul, deeper than waves, and I found myself grasping your arm, trying to find an anchor in our linked limbs and the steady heat of your gaze.

print by random walffles

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