Home since July 6, 1997 has too often consited of the space of a chair on
the Other side of too many bureaucrat's desks, the softly rounded
"friendly" edges of expensive office furnishings in warm neutral colors
strategically selected to induce a state of passivity, stupor and
somnolence in those who sit there. These spaces sometimes house vast arrays
of new and powerful computer equipment used as word processors.
Institutionalized inertia.
As often as I can I retreat to the cool and dusty concrete block. My eyes
follow the small black line leading from phone jack to modem card. I try to
keep the line from getting tangled through an irrational impulse nagging me
that if it does, I may become lost. I long to return to the edge of the
map. To another black line separating land and ocean. Breathing is easier
in this fluctuating netherzone. On the line, I sometimes find myself
standing in water, sometimes on sand.
.....
Keep up with the downloads, everybody keep up.
(-after George Clinton, Funkadelic)
So much interesting dialogue BLASTing through the lines and into this
machine, finding I can only respond so very slowly with the ink line of a
pen, and not the upbeat tap tap tapping on a keyboard as these two
kinesthetic thought processes are so different. The hand wants to move the
mind in long black lines the flow of which again I find synchronizing with
the space of a breath. If I write too much on the keyboard today I will
hyperventilate.
.....
The rental car as home is full of dirt, roving crumbs, crumbling maps,
torn-out telephone book pages, dirty clothes, empty water bottles sucked
dry, a crushed hat, displaced stones, more maps, receipts for greasy road
food, and two figs freshly picked from a tree in downtown Los Angeles the
"City of Quartz" (Mike Davis). I drive by the house I grew up in and see
how the new owners have transformed it from a desert of a house stripped
bare by a widow, maybe, into a garden. All traces of illness, paranoia and
fixed-income are gone, it is literally the "prettiest house on the block"
almost kitsch with its little white fence. It looks like a still photograph
from another era superimposed on a movie of L.A.
O.K.
L.A.
H.O.M.
A.
(-Terry Allen)
.....
The viewfinder of my camera as home. The quiet solitude of resting my good
left eye against the cool black metal. The mind becomes quiet as it escapes
through this hole. Light rays converge to fill the space inside. The
stillness awakens cellular memories of earthquakes, floods, fires, riots,
landslides, mud slides, debris flows, air pollution and draughts. I think
of emerAgency. I was reading the other day about a theory of astrophysics
which proposes that a "rogue planet" crashed into the proto-earth a few
billion years ago. It is thought that an enormous amount of matter moved by
this cataclysmic event formed a ring around the earth which after much
whirling and condensing became the moon. I like this idea very much of a
ring becoming a sphere moving around another sphere in the path of a ring.
I think of the salty fluid surrounding my eyes as they blink in the
sunlight coming through the lens.
Ever onward, Eve
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