2018.06.21 - Day 99

Thanks for the poems. Day 99 already? I must say I enjoy reading other’s posts and find that having to write about what I am reading helps me to clarify things in my mind and see things I missed. Of course, I knew that already but it’s too easy to be lazy and just read.  Might as well keep going a few more days then.

‘If anything, unusual happens, a person cuts you off in traffic, someone suddenly runs out of a room, a stranger looks at you a second longer than normal, you hear a voice in your head that creates an explanation, “He is a jerk,” “That person must have forgotten something,” or “She might be interested in me.” Most do not know of the interpreter, they do not see their thoughts as interpretations but rather how things really are. To my knowledge, psychology has never considered the real implications of the interpreter and this may be because most do not think anything exists beyond it.’


Niebauer Ph.D., Chris. The Neurotic's Guide to Avoiding Enlightenment: How the Left-brain Plays Unending Games of Self-Improvement

I find this idea of the left-brain interpreter fascinating. I knew that we do tend to make up stories and believe them, but didn’t realize just how easily and quickly we make these often-implausible interpretations. I will be noticing this a lot more in the future.

Word(s) of the day: "summer solstice" - the day of longest sunlight; the moment when the sun reaches its furthest point from the equator & seems briefly static in the sky. One of the year's two true turns.
From the Latin sōlstitium (sōl; sun & sistĕre; to stand still). (@RobGMacfarlane twitter)

[Will post later too]

¨Dark streams may swallow me;
while floating,
I will tell the streams that I once had roots.¨

Shizue Ogawa


On Day 55, I said I was going to report on a new adventure on Day 99, so here I am.

Catching up on your reports in the middle of a rainy night, the day I returned from Paris, jet lagged and happy from meeting hundreds of poets, I was pleased to see how enthusiastic you were with your own ventures into books, practices and writing!

I came back with a heavy suitcase of poetry books and flashes of memorable encounters. We were almost 50 Quebec poets attending this year, swimming in a sea of hundreds of French poets and poets from elsewhere translated into French at the "Marché de la Poésie de Paris¨ which is a five days outdoor market of poetry books on Place Saint-Sulpice.

The highlight for me was meeting Shizue Ogawa, a Japanese poet in a white dress and white hat, very Emily Dickinsonian. She spoke very little French or English but we nodded and smiled and exchanged books: she marveled at the little drawings I made along with signatures and I admired the white elegant outfits and straw hat she was wearing every day.

What moved me the most was listening to sweet Josephine Bacon, born on the North Coast of Quebec, reading her poetry in innu language on a Parisian stage. Such a shamanic moment!

Reading your reports was quite an adventure, thank you all very much. Sorry to hear about complications at the dentist Eliza. Hopefully, it's all over now... Will read on to Day 108 as I'm organizing to move to the country house up the hills for the next three months.

And in the midst of it all, on this summer solstice of 2018, I’m still overwhelmed by the distress of migrant children and the "Human Flow" of nearly 65 millions refugees around the world. edited 15:07, 21 Jun 2018

There were 99 days of our lives on the wall,
99 days of our lives.
We took one down and passed it around ...

Until whatever number(s) had been picked as some arbitrary zero point.
And just what ended?
Did anybody die?
Did everybody finish the tasks they had set?

Here we go kids, Starting at the End.
Again.

Again, and again time. :)

Greeting anew' is no light matter nor quaint practice. To greet anew means to allow everything to present itself differently... a floating impression refuses to justify.

Enough, and wondrous. So enjoying the poetry - not one but many smiles. Heather Phillipson, hm. Nodding too, to Mary Oliver's grasshopper, in the garden, and Brenda Hillman's dated Time Problem. <3 <3 <3

Today, aside from missing the finishing session for Conference of the Birds, was ordinary. Perhaps a fitting bookmark to these days. <3 edited 23:34, 21 Jun 2018

What can be reported, about not reporting.
Momentum to add an entry every day faultered. The entries written ahead got used up. Explorations took more then one day. Very personal entries were written that can not be shared with even the closest friends that we have become. Non-verbal and no words for articles and images, feelings, senses, etc. that are too complicated were not shared. Seeing how the steps forward that showed how many more steps would be needed, so no time to publish full complete sentences just scratch some notes and get back walking.
...
perhaps one example: Studying and prolonging hypnagogic-hpnopompic periods or trying to be on both sides has produced some metadata that is very analogous to so many other state change threshold characteristics that all those have to be revisited, noted, thought through and ground up.
...
Plus, writing nothing seemed only slightly better then "Can't stop to talk now, it happened again".

How fitting, that the 99th day falls on the solstice! :)

This has been a very worthwhile endeavor. I began with a resolve to make a habit of doing at least a little bit of reading every day. I have maintained that pretty much through the whole 99 days, so I guess that much is a success.

My reading then led me into an exploration of Tart and Gurdjieff's self-remembering, self-observation, and the morning exercise. I especially appreciated that Zen was reading Tart's book at the same time I was, so that our journeys overlapped and I could benefit from his commentary. I took a side trip through William James' psychological thinking about voluntary attention and free will, and then wound up with Tolle and Gendlin on inward bodily experience.

This was not a random selection of "shallow holes". I see common threads running all through these approaches. I was trying to follow these threads and perhaps weave some of them together into something that would take me deeper.

Being part of a group doing this was most valuable. This is not something that I would ever have done on my own. Thank you everyone who participated in any way.

It is not my day 99. It is my day 69, as I joined on day 31. Today the Sun enters the astrological sign of Cancer, whose symbol is a pair of crab claws, shown as a 69 on its side. Therefore appropriate for me too.

Today I realized that my Mastodon project - to be a queer and quirky chronicler of a visit to Earth by an space alien[1] - was doomed. The people I am coming across are far quirkier than me, and they express it oh so well. I feel like a super-bright kid who was always top of their class, and who qualifies with ease for the next rung on the educational ladder, but upon arriving at the next school or college or university suddenly finds themselves surrounded by peers of at least their ability and often much greater. They're no longer special, and it's very humbling. But that's OK! Instead it becomes a new home. Life imitating Art? Or mimesis? It remains to be seen which is the life and which the art. :)

Today I also continued with the "How to make a poem" course. They are throwing us out of our comfort zone early by making us write a short cento[2], and not only critique a Found poem[3] but also to do our own observational research for creating our own Found poem. We're introduced to the experimental writing group Oulipo[4] to help us with that.

Once again thank you everyone!
"What is the universe without each sunrise? That's how we judge our gods: not on their math but their poetry."[5]

[1] A wire-frame alien whose original home is a virtual world. (Avatar and background attached.)

[2] Cento = Latin for patch. A cento is a pastiche of lines, borrowed from the poems of other authors, to create a new work)

[3] Found poem is a collage of words taken from somewhere else: billboards, overheard conversations, receipts, ads, on-line forums, search engine auto-completes, etc. etc.

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo and https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/oulipo

[5] "Legion" (TV series) Series 2, episode 5. edited 05:19, 22 Jun 2018