An Excerpt from my unpublished Vampire novel, Feeders:

Leah acquired my heart in the manner of a hornbill. She placed the orchid upon my tongue a petal at a time, showing me the ingenious devices the orchid employed in acquiring and dispersing pollen through the aid of a bee.

“I am the orchid Luce. You are the bee. Don’t forget that. I’m always soaking you in nectar and dousing you with pollen. You will always follow the path that I choose.”

This next excerpt I think I may have posted before on this blog, from my most recent novel, Line of Battle:

It was an exceptional period of her life, filled with all those screams, the sheer mass of bodies, the need to honor the dead, and the impact of so much burial upon the eyes, the chest, the fingers, and the arms themselves. And how, when you’ve ascertained through subtle clues (in spite of the handcuffs and the blindfold) that the next session of torture is about to begin, a magnificent array of bright points sprays into your face and the backdrop of your heart. And you are escorted by your torturers through the field of battle to the line of battle that sways first one direction, then the other. And there at the spot where the fighting is most fierce, that is where you find the body of Kurzan hanging in the forest with a single bright hole in his forehead. And having been forced to go this far, you climb the long climb that is the length of Kurzan’s legs and thighs. You scrabble and claw and after quite a lot of disturbing sounds of battle, you reach the central flower in his forehead where the mining stake had been used to pry open a door. And crawling blind through the brightness of the flower, you learn how you only guessed at life before, viewing all life as though through binoculars.

Even as a child, she never wanted a life well-fed, a life of taffeta and wine and ice. She wanted life dirty. To live a truth, she thought, a simple curve that life itself demands of you, is impossible. You hope to find that wedge of unfiltered light, not golden (or perhaps only faintly so), and not lily-like in its hue. She saw the light many times while walking farther and farther in the special hut whose name meant fresh, new. The old man never let the fire go out. And Mars lay naked and warm, floating in milk, in the creamy skin of a woman who carried Mars back and forth across the great ocean. A person introduced and known to her quite simply, as the Envoy. A simple revelation, over and over, of something flawless. And Mars had been there, in its passing.

But that was our second night in Amsterdam. Our first day was a quick intro to the crazy traffic mess – trams, cars, motor scooters (the worst), pedestrians, and bicycles all vie for space on the narrow streets. Bicyclists predominate, hundreds of them all over the place. Women wear heels, skirts, and jackets as they ride their bikes into work. Bicycles have all sorts of baskets, boxes, trunks, and home-made gadgets attached every which way in order to carry home the goods, or say, to carry around five little dogs who sit in their box like it’s the most normal thing in the world.

And of course YESSS to all of you pervs out there, we walked through the red light district the first day. Nothing all that exciting, I have to say, but then, it’s not really my thing. I smelled Ganja everywhere, even throughout the “9’s” the fashionable shopping district where one guy created a bicycle disaster by accidentally knocking over a couple bikes, which then started a domino affect, creating mayhem in the ad hoc bike parking scheme. Oh, and by the way, all you rednecks, the fashion district has a Carhart store.

Of the museums, I hit the Van Gogh Museum. Seeing his paintings rather than studying them in a book, I saw how his painting style communicates through brushstrokes as much or more than through content. At the Rijk’s Museum, Rembrandts and Vermeers hang on the walls. I fell in love with Vermeer, especially, “The Milkmaid,” or De melkmeid.

Vermeer The Milkmaid

Vermeer left me breathless. I had to return to the painting several times. It seemed as if he had opened a window, and if I held very still, I could see a long distance.

The most exciting hour of our trip came about when we happened upon a “holiday show” as it was explained to me. I was cold and grumpy and was not interested in participating in that peculiar form of dementia that in US culture passes for a “holiday show.”

Turn On the Lights in Amsterdam was NOT THAT. A dark, moody soundtrack began. Then on the far end of Dam Square from us, smoke rose up. Soon, stalking about on stilts, fantastical and strange, the Snow Queen, her nemesis dressed in black, and perhaps the Devil herself dressed in red and perched on some Boschian cart driven by a human hamster, all vied for power. Dragons coursed back and forth through the crowd, where we all held our phones in the air, grabbing pictures on the run as we pushed our way out of their paths.

3 grips with flares

So take THIS Santa Claus (http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=seWlP9GZoo8):

This vid (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRfc0r4VvzM&NR=1&feature=endscreen
) has most of the Ellen Ten Damme piece plus the Ice Queen and her consort at the end with fireworks. As Ellen sings, you can see her shadow on the royal palace behind her.

There are a lot more videos surfacing on Youtube, many of them shot by people in the crowd. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7GZMT6w5lE)

The best part of this spectacle was the fact that we, the audience, found ourselves in the middle of it, becoming part of the spectacle as we scurried like rats to let these monsters pass. I found myself nervous when one of the dragons would thrust it’s big mouth my direction, as if the dragons were, in fact, real.

But they are, aren’t they?

When I was eighteen, I left home. I’ve made some real messes since then. Some I cleaned up, some I never did. Most people can’t see the mess on the outside of me. That mess came about because of the first eighteen years of my life. People have NO IDEA about what the eighteen years did to my insides.

As I said before, the doctors say my brother has Parkinson’s Disease. I’m spending more time with him than I have in years, trying to be with him while he’s still here. Trying to be with him with all of myself, parts of which he doesn’t know, and truth be known, I’d rather nobody knew. And I’m trying to learn about the parts of him that I don’t know. But we know things about one another that no one else knows. We know the burnt out mess. My brother and I grew up in that mess. Like we were in the trenches of WWI or something. He’s younger than me. I always wanted to protect him. It’s an urge that’s deep and raw. I try to ride that urge, try to ride it till I fail. It’s tricky. It’s slippery. It comes back on me like a house on fire. It shoots me awake in the middle of the night, screaming like sirens. Because I want to protect him from Parkinson’s Disease. Good luck with that. . .

It’s lodged right here. In my bones, my liver, my gullet. Every little junked-up, nasty piece of my mess. For years I wanted to rip it out, retch it up, shred my skin and pick out the glass. But you can’t ever pick out that much glass. Besides, it’s all mixed up with loneliness, that low, booming ache that’s longer and wider than life itself. Not only that, but somebody tossed Joy right smack dab into the middle of it. Which is kind of fucked up, but what the hell, not a damn thing I can do about it. The whole stinking, wretched mess explodes into blossom all the sudden out of nowhere. Zero to infinity in the blink of an eye. I am destroyed. Each time. And each time I reassemble, but not. Never quite the same, never quite whole, never quite empty.

We are so fragile. So vulnerable. We worm through a soupy mess. Not entirely miserable, not entirely divine. On our journey to Here. To only here.

I’ve started a project about language. About signifiers and symbols. About rhythm, mesmer, and immersion. About poetry, music, and the divine. Just a tiny little project. . .

And doctors have just told us that my brother has Parkinson’s disease. That what we thought was CMT and withdrawal because of depression is probably Parkinson’s, not early stage – rather late in the game. He is slowly disintegrating before my eyes. For me, this is presently beyond language.

In order to write about this, I will need years and years, miles, tons, a rainforest filled with hornbills, and night and day sifting through the junkheap. Here is a poem I wrote about my brother before I knew any of this. It begins at the end and ends near the beginning.

Monsters, Related by Birth

we touch like the blind
having learned the world by feel
you have come from beneath the bridge
where pigeons kiss your wooden arms
and the cleft-hoofed hands I dug from your grave

come to me brother!
like lovers
we know one another
by tonguing that old misery
like last year’s berry

rocking and rocking in waves, I hear
the hush of your blame
your stifled believing
and the way you break the mirrored sea
with one green hand

i remove my face and place
it to the side.
Of the flood that night I recall
the asphalt sea and the moon –
one occluded eye brooding at the beam -

and how your heart tickered the dark
and how I squeezed it rapidly
as only a child will squeeze
while the wickered sea, littered with spark
ran through and over

Anyway, Corey visited a couple weeks ago with his newer leg attached, riding his brand new trike. It’s great to see him traveling – as in “going places.” And as you’ll hear, Junkgirl’s in love. That’s been well over a decade in coming. I don’t know what’s happening with the planets, but lots of people I know are either falling in or out of love – which definitely falls into “the dangers.” More on that as the Fantasmic BlitzTornado of Being rips us to pieces and spits us out. Then somehow we end up put together again – unlike Humpty Dumpty. Personally, I lean toward a Humpty Dumpty outcome.

In the meantime, here’s Corey.

Police were called out Saturday morning after multiple calls came into 911 that a man had been shot. The first call came in around 4:30 a.m. When officers arrived, they found a male victim lying in the street with apparent gunshot wounds. He was pronounced dead at the scene. Witnesses told police they saw a black male wearing a black hoodie and black pants running east bound. He then ran southbound behind some apartments. The man was described as being 5′ 10″ tall.

Sunday morning his girl friend, both of whom I’m met at Red’s, became worried and went looking for him. She found his van abandoned a few blocks from Red’s apartment. She called to report him missing. This is when police informed her that he was shot to death in the early hours of the morning. She had just cleaned up her life so that she could regain custody of her son. Now she has a child to care for, no boyfriend, and nowhere to live. Best guess is that she’ll move back in with her mother across the street from Red’s apartment and maybe start the “circle game” again. Now she’s trapped tighter in the huge web that stretches

Site of deadly killing

As Red and I drive to the corner where he was killed, where branches full of blossoms have been tied to the STOP sign, we have the windows down. It’s a warm May evening. Red blurts out, “Did you smell that? It smells like Crack! God, there’s so much of it, I smell it in the air!”

Revenge and despair.

One of the older whores, been working the street for years. Shot in the head that night.

Yesterday a schizophrenic man yanked each feather off his Cockatiel and stomped it to death.

On my way home, driving in the middle of nowhere, I start screaming.

It’s been a rough week for me. I’ve received several rejections on submissions I made to publishers. Amazon removed our documentary, Graphic Sexual Horror, from their website a few weeks ago. And we had a deal in the works to make the movie available for digital download and streaming. But just as they were getting ready to go live with it, credit card processors refused to process transactions of the movie! ARRRGGGHHH. We’re basically talking Visa and Mastercard here. BIG. I am small.

Let me sum this up.

Censored!

If you don’t know anything about the movie, it ends with Homeland Security using the Patriot Act to force banks to refuse a merchant account for certain porn websites because “violent porn is known to funnel money to terrorists.” (Hmmmmm. Porn sites. Really??) In other words, they wouldn’t process credit card transactions.

What goes around, goes around. . .

It’s so damn hard to make money from creative work. And then to top it all off, to be censored, well that’s blown me out of the water. I’ve been wandering in the desert for forty days and forty nights. I’ve been swallowed by the whale. In other words, I’ve been caught in the Fantasmic Blitz Tornado of Being. If you’re like me and have lived in tornado country your whole life, you know the drill – in case of tornadoes, lie down in a ditch or depression.

Yeah.

I’m there.

This is the problem as I see it. Sure, I can put my work online myself. But how do I (the stupendous failure at social networking) draw attention to a drop of water in the ocean?

So instead of facing reality, I decide to read. Because, let me tell you, when I’m reading an author I love, I get high. Like WAY high. When I pick up something to read, I want to be immersed. I want to be held in thrall. Not entertained. Not distracted. For me, a work of literature or art or music is not an intellectual activity. And it’s not a sport that somebody “wins” at. It has nothing to do with criticism or any of the strange things I read in reviews. I’m not looking to be caught up in a love story or scared shitless, though those may be devices that help achieve the end result.

When the piece hits the money shot (for me), my entire body vibrates. The whole thing is distinctly physical. What a rush! I’m not happy. No. Definitely not happy. It’s something that has nothing to do with being happy or not happy. Something that’s a whole lot like BEING a tornado. Or like walking straight into a tornado. (I know, bad idea. But it’s kind of the story of my life.) There’s the roar and the trees flying all over the place and dirt and cars and houses whipping here and there in this wind that slices us into a million pieces.

But then all the sudden, I don’t know, maybe it burps me up or something. It pukes me out and I get the zizz, the pop, the electricity.

Yep. That’s my drug. My addiction. I get high on art. And of course, not just any “art.” As Leonard Cohen writes in A Thousand Kisses Deep, – “you lose your grip, and then you slip into a masterpiece.” Yeah. Just a little trip. Just a little stumble. And then you’re falling.

Cleave the heart of a raindrop,
a hundred pure oceans will pour forth.
Mahmud Shabestari, The Mirror of This World

That pretty much sums up my fumbly attempt at description. The same happens when I write. For me, the two merge – the activity of creating and my experience of certain creative works. So I’ve put together some quotes that I’ve collected through the years. Some of it feels stuffy. Don’t be put off. I love to find these moments of lucidity when it seems as if someone is talking about what I experience. It reminds me that others have gone before me and left road signs, pointers, tiny folded pieces of paper. And for a split second, I sense that I’m not alone (of course I am but I can lie to myself, right?). My hope is that somehow, I can leave a mark on the path too, something that helps others like me discover a way through the wilderness.

“at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. . . . the sense of Beauty . . . obliterates all consideration. John Keats letter (21 Dec. 1817)

James Joyce speaks of proper and improper art. He defines “improper art” as having the quality of kinesis – it excites emotions that are kinetic in nature, specifically desire (to draw toward or possess the object) or loathing (to push away or abandon the object).

“The esthetic emotion (I use the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.” James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

In regard to Joyce, Joseph Campbell describes “aesthetic stasis” in this way.

“You’ve gone through the objects and a kind of transcendence is manifest through them. The kind of transcendence of which you yourself is also a manifestation, so pure object turns you into pure subject.” Joseph Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space

Walter Pater believed that the arts seek to unify subject, matter, and form, and music is the only art in which subject and form are seemingly one.

“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” Walter Pater, The Renaissance

“We are right. . .to speak of these things and to try to understand their nature and, having understood it, to try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out again, from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of the beauty we have come to understand – that is art.” James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Annie Ernaux, in Passion Perfect, describes the first time she watched an X-rated film. And even here, a thrall occurs, not from the desire for sex, but from moments of clear sight, of being held still.

“This summer, for the first time, I watched an X-rated film on Canal Plus. My television set doesn’t have a decoder; the images on the screen were blurred, the words replaced by strange sound effects, hissing and babbling, a different sort of language, soft and continuous. One could make out the figure of a woman in a corset and stockings, and a man. The story was incomprehensible’; it was impossible to predict any of their actions or movements. . . . No doubt one gets used to such a sight; the first time is shattering. Centuries and centuries, hundreds of generations have gone by, and it is only now that one can see this – a man’s penis and a woman’s vagina coming together, the sperm – something one could barely take in without dying has become as easy to watch as a handshake.
It occurred to me that writing should also aim for that – the impression conveyed by sexual intercourse, a feeling of anxiety and stupefaction, a suspension of moral judgment.”

In a society informed and driven by a million forms of entertainment and distraction, how can I fit in? I don’t. When I’m told over and over that I have to learn social networking, a skill I do not possess and seem unable to learn, in order to navigate the road to “success” as a writer or musician or filmmaker, how do I find success? I don’t.

I am a failure. I float in a sea whose dark seams are deeper than the trench of my imaginings. That journey to Here. To only Here.

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Junkgirl’s lived in the crackhood her whole life, even though she grew up in suburbia. Because crackhoods are everywhere. It’s a state of mind, a way of dreaming your world into being. And in this great American Dream, the dream of “the good life,” of “winning the lottery,” in this Prozac-laced dream of happiness, we’ve cooked up a heady soup of substances that look like food and taste like food but are made from ingredients that bear no resemblance to anything edible much less nourishing. In a society that worships the almighty Drug (just buy this prescription and you will be healed!!), how is it that we expect those most damaged by their early experiences NOT to believe also? Oh, but you don’t take those BAD street drugs, take these new wonder-drugs. Drugs are good!

Even though Junkgirl grew up in suburbia, her life was not a good life. It was more than just a lie, it was brutal – a betrayal so deep that when she fell out of it, she got sucked into a world that seemed safer and better – because when The Lie isn’t a secret anymore, when it’s Your Lie that you get to live instead of Their Lie, it’s better than living the dark violent dream that some families force upon their children. So Junkgirl slid into a world of intravenous street drugs and homelessness.

I knew Junkgirl before she went that direction. I watched her drop away and disappear. And I was there when she reemerged, carrying an unbearable weight of new damage on top of the old.

This story is of the first death in a line of deaths that followed. Because heroin is a beautiful woman. But she’s hungry.

The music is the String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, known as Death and the Maiden, by Franz Schubert. He wrote it when he knew he was dying. The Andante Con Moto (the second movement), the beginning of it used here, sets the theme.

I’ll stop before I get going on a rant and get on to this week’s post. I did a piece on Corey before he had his leg amputated.

Corey has CMT, a disease that also runs in my family. My grandfather and father had it and now my brother does. The nerves in the extremities slowly disintegrate so that the muscles atrophy. With time, the nerve disintegration works up toward the body. In Corey’s family, the legs take it hard. In my family, it proceeds equally through all the extremities. In my father, it began to affect his heart. But he was old when that began. My brother has difficulty walking and his hands shake so much he has difficulty writing.

The first video is Corey showing off his new leg, taking it off and talking about how fits. He looks so much happier now than before the surgery. Though he is still having pain from the fit of the leg. It’s not his final leg (ha), but this is what he’d got until the swelling goes down in his leg.

This next video is Corey talking about his phantom pains. How he didn’t have them before, but now, some days they make him crazy!

I’ve always had this running joke about the phantom pains of my phantom suicide. Those of us that carry around whole truckloads of bizarre and ever rotting, stinking junk, have to deal with our own form of pain that nobody else can see or understand. The metaphor of the dumpster in Stacking in Rivertown is about the junk and the the corpses, the cadavers, the dearly-beloved. The word “Suffer” means “to carry.” For some people, amputation isn’t an option. Instead, everywhere you walk, you leave that beguiling, noxious odor, the damage and the gleam.