EXERCISE: One, Two, Three...Infinity?

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

Original posting: Fri, 24 Aug 2001 22:50:42 -0400

Okay, here's the ploy.

Take a series of some kind.  Something borrowed, something blue.  Alpha and Omega.  Anna one, anna two, anna three, four, five...louie, louie, louai!

Got your series?

Frame a story, a poem, a fragment with that series interlaced.  For example, use the words of the series as the headings on poetic bits.  Or consider weaving the series into the beginning lines of each paragraph/stanza.

Now, as the words tumble along, consider a twist on the series.  Instead of one, two, three, infinity, perhaps you want to use one, two, three, mathematics!  Or alpha, beta, gambling?

Start the reader along a path, then provide a little shift that shows them
some magic...

Write, okay?

EXERcise: reading is...

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

original posting: Mon, 03 Sep 2001 20:43:00 -0400

Hum...

Maybe

Reading is like a snake peeling its skin.

Go ahead, play with that conceptual comparison, let those words writhe and turn, let us hear the rattle play.

"Good morning, daddy!
Ain't you heard
The boogie-woogie rumble
Of a dream deferred?"  Langston Hughes

a dream deferred... and out of its time... tink

EXERCISE: Sacred Time

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

original posting: Sat, 15 Sep 2001 21:13:18 -0400

A bit incoherent, but perhaps you'll find some echoes...

"Religious man experiences two kinds of time -- profane and sacred.  The one is an evanescent duration, the other a 'succession of eternities,' periodically recoverable during the festivals that made up the sacred calendar.  The liturgical time of the calendar flows in a closed circle; it is the cosmic time of the year, sanctified by the works of the gods."  Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, quoted in Your Mythic Journey by Sam Keen and Anne Valley-Fox

"But this moment and the meaning of this moment -- fact and interpretation -- are not separable.  Human beings inevitably are philosophical animals.  We interpret, discover, and create meaning in the act of perception.  We think with our senses, see with our hearts, and feel with our brains.  We use images, analogies, and metaphors to understand the world around us and the meaning of life as a whole.  We live within a framework that gives meaning to our experience.  The philosophical context within which we live determines the way we perceive the content of our days." Your Mythic Journey by Sam Keen and Anne Valley-Fox

I think Mircea missed something, in describing sacred time as always a circle.  For indeed, disasters and deaths and other events often seem to "kick" us into the sacred time, the unending now that focuses our lives and attentions and emotions, putting our being into the fires where they forge a new reality.

September 11, 2001.  That date will ring for all of us living now, and those images will be a part of our lives.  And for many of us that moment, that sacred time that started that day, has not ended!

How many of you, turning on the TV, or talking with a friend, suddenly have tears, or reach out and embrace?  It may be something as seemingly trivial as a burly fireman talking about finding a raggedy ann doll, and having to stop and blink away his tears, and suddenly you are crying with him, or something more profound, those moments when you learn that... well, for me, that the husband of a past co-worker was somewhere in that catastrophe.  That emotional contact seems to me to be a hallmark of these sacred times.

Or reading something that makes you reach out and hug your wife, and look at the blue sky, and vibrate with aliveness!

(Or the mundane realization that you haven't even looked at mail since that day, and the bills and junkmail continue to pile up.  Walk in the door and turn on CNN.  Watch, absorb, hold hands with my wife, talk in disjointed sequences, try to pick up the scattered threads of work.  CNN, rumors and news, what have you heard today?  That setting aside of the ordinary priorities also seems a hallmark of these sacred times, when shock and the cycle of emotional reaction take us.)

Take a few minutes.  Capture your own timeline of these days.

As some have done, write down where you were that day, how you heard the news.

Or write down one of the stories that touched you, one of the many incredible outreaches going on here and everywhere.

Think about a child, five years from now, ten years, or more, asking what it meant to live through this time.  And think of the details, the sharpness and gracenotes, that you would like to share with that child.  Do you remember seeing grey snowflakes, and then realizing that they were walls and windows, shattered, like an obscene snowdrift when viewed from above?  Or maybe listening to the blind man who walked down from the 78th floor?

Whatever, get it down now.

And bask in the time that we have.  Touched by the sacred as humanity reaches out to itself, grounded in the profane actions that initiated the Great Catastrophe (with thanks to Alison for the label).