inspiration from Lynda Barry
Tag: Images
Using Our Woods – the Gift that Explodes 6
and the typeset version:
6
Whose Woods are These I Think I Know
At any given moment, these are the only woods we have. We do what we can with them, my dear, always many and diverse. Yet just a tiny little forest in the vastness. Some of our woods are soft and mulchy while some are brittle and sharp. There’ll be splinters and cracks, switches and boughs. But used together, in ways appropriate to their kind, they’ll be useful. Like don’t use kindling-wood so support the house. I know you often think, being small, that you don’t always have the woods you need. That others more skilled at building, the polishers and craftspersons, or the armory whittlers have advantages and types of wood beyond your resources. I’ve heard you cry that your stand of woods is lacking meat or certain fruits, you haven’t the wealth of many rings and nuanced etchings. That when you rope the trunks, the roots are shallow and fail the weight you beg them carry.
Rearrange, my dear, and be patient. Keep trying the woods that you have. I’ve seen a woodsman create with 100 what many cannot in a jungle. We must seek and study our world, evince all its ins and its outs. Which of our woods will comfort, which we can hone for attacks. What parts need handled carefully and preserved, that they might grow fuller and larger with age, ‘til they form a bridge toward where you need to go.
It is greatly advisable to journey and trade. Take with you fresh seeds and young branches. Try never to sever your roots, but graft and train, splice and mend, understand what will fertilize.
Your woods are an active place and a venture, requiring tenacious tending. Climb, my child, but test your footing, not every sapling will hold. You can succeed and will, should you choose to partake with the People of Woods. It only takes time and practice – adapting and adaptation – the bud and the tendril, the log and the trunk. Recite and remind and then jumble.
Above all, my daughter, please play. Pick-up sticks, wooden boats and chutes and ladders. Kites and slingshots, barrels and monkeys, apples to apples. Now is the time to throw peaches and chew the walnuts’ rind, bowl crabapples, smoke the reed and sniff the pine. Some whips will leave seams you’ll never forget, some falls may even break a limb, but you will grow and know, know and grow, until you, like the tree, flourish and bloom, strip and stand bare, proud and enduring, withstanding both wind and the wave, strikes and blows, the cold and the dark, all from your stock of woods and what’s possible.
Whoever dreamt a log could roll on rivers, or bend into a wheel? Who knew they’d form enormous arks – large enough to save our world? The handing of a tiny reed embossed with cursive love, sharpened to a blade, signs set to warn of danger, posts to fort a home. My love, impossible does not apply with your woods – all that we know is unknown where the woods come into play.
Experiment, invent, babble the brook or construct a staying dam. Use our woods, love and care for them, ignite your passion, rub them together toward sparks, thatch, nest, spear. The woods are waiting – and these are yours.
click here for all 6 pages – The Notebook
A Little Fiction(al) Rant
“creation is continual mouth”
-Craig Watson-
The Ranting of a Little Fiction
Fiction is tired of stories. So tired. I’ve been through the gamut and back again, many, many times.
I’m tired of hearing about things and objects, people and places and selves. Tired of hearing the past reworked and the future foretold. Tired of telling myself.
At one point I’d even identified anything made of up images and texts as myself. Any construction with meanings were Fictions. But everything is so much like nothing and I’m so tired of hearing about it!
Hell, there’s fiction about the Fictions! And fictions about the fictions about the Fictions! We can’t say anything anymore that hasn’t already been said for us, about us, even in us and by us! Yes, we’re the once-fabulous dynastic Fiction family. Big Daddy Fiction (also known as Master Peace Litratoor or Grande Buchs in various cultures, He-From-Which-All-Stories-Spring and so forth) – Papa Litratoor worked the overarching histories, the myths, the great narratives, the macrocosms. Pretending that everything that needed to be known was in there, at least in the cracks and suggestions. He lives on in the pursuits of the “Great American Novel,” and the “Truthful Memoir,” in “Compendiums of Science” and “Philosophies of Philosophy.” Wherever you find an engulfing trajectory or inclusive point-of-view, an omniscient narrator or gnostic devotee – you’ve got Papa Fiction working his magic, creating the world again and again.
Then there’s our mama, oh ancestral trickster, always experimenting, economizing, busy on fringes. Collaging and quilting, unraveling and resourcefully mending – ever insuring our survival. What style! Sometimes she was just called “the Alternative,” and for ages she was known as “Secondary” (what blasphemy!) – but eventually she gained her equality coming to be known as Little Rarity or Ava Ntgard, and hundreds of varieties of “Liz T”: Structura-LizT, Surrea-LizT, Forma-LizT, Femina-LizT and so on). Working at facts under the banners of Fiction, mama persistently kept the Big Daddy in check. Pointing out faults, tightening gaps, working the seams and expanding the views. Thank goodness for the consistency and stubbornness of Mama Fiction.
And then the countless bastardized offspring, of whom I am surely not last! Brother Fantasy, Shemale Erotica, Sibling Sci-Fi, Princess Romance. My cousins who took off to the wilds where the sun goes down – we refer to them as “the Westerns,” or Ad Ventura, Sir Vival and clan. Our ancestry and family tree is encyclopedic, from Origins to Hypotheses, Knowledges to Speculations we’ve been languaging the world since language appeared : all of us Fictions, all of us related.
But the Fictions, as far as I can see, have grown sick of our stories, all the rumors and family feuds, the copycats and half-breeds, in-breeds and genetic accidents. I for one, granted, just a Little Fiction, it seems I’ve heard it all (which isn’t even the half of it! not even a drop in an galaxy-sized bucket!) and its already turned into an endless babble of voices talking over and around, under and about the same old stories, rehashed and revised, every Fiction telling their own version of the way it all goes down, how it oughta be told, what’s important or not, and in whatever genealogical line or branch of kin.
Enough! I say. Enough Fictions! I don’t care if it’s our researching relatives writing detailed descriptive statistical Fictions; or our emotional cousins discussing its effects on life or bodies or minds. The avaricious Fictions supposedly leading the clan – who use it for politicking or morality; the mystical tribes out in the caves and the mountains spouting wisdoms and inspirations and advice! Or our black sheep, ne’er-do-wells who just wanna escape and have fun. Enough of all of you Fictions! Use what we already have! We’ll never be done with it! Never get through it! And there’s something for every obscure and peculiar concern, passion, interest, belief!
There’s nothing new under the sun, one Fiction said (just look it up – you’ll see my point – there will be millions of Fictions who have also said this their way – our family can’t seem to leave anything alone – well-spoken or not – we’ve gotta say it our own damn way!). Repetition, repetition, repetition and paraphrase. I’d wager there is not one word, image, thought or letter in this entire little Fictional rant that hasn’t been used, said, written, sung or visualized countless, literally uncountable numbers of times!
Which is why I am begging from down here at the end of such an enormous and incalculable chain: “Fictions!!! Do something new or be silent!!!”
Think about it before you foist your precious version on the rest of us! Sure, we’re family, everyone’s a Fiction from that original untraceable Big Fiction in the sky or sea or soil or seed – yes, we grant each other obligatory slack and family resemblance – but come on! Am I the only one feeling it? I mean, whichever of us came up with Babel was already sick of the confusion of voices and the bitching’s never stopped!
Concatenation of stories and rants! Poems and speeches! Theorems and proofs! Manuals and manuscripts! Musics and roots! Dreamings and screams! WHOA!!!!
How about this, brothers and sisters, cousins and kin? Look carefully first. Whatever you are about to say, attempt, express or explain – check out what we’ve already said, inscribed, emoted, etc., and if it’s already there concisely or beautifully, erotically or empowered, be content with it! Show it to others! Bring it quietly to our attention! Don’t distract from it with your own paraphrasing and excursions of commentary and notations!
We don’t really need more of us – do we? We can’t manage what’s already here! What is this unslakeable desire? This bewildering avarice and compulsion? WHY AM I SHOUTING!?
Peace, be still, some Fiction once said, a million Fictions have written. This is staring at the abyss – an endless train of others. I am alone – haven’t all Fictions said this?
Alas. Everything cliché. Everything done, undone. A remorseless overwhelm. We’ve outstripped our resources. Blasted the wells.
We are alone and confused in an echoing chamber called universe. The one-verse of Fictional voices repeating repeating repeating and that without pause or escape. There is no escape (you see what I mean?) Refracting on and on and…
I, little Fiction, with my mouthful of words, all inherited…
Writing Rejections (on the rejection of several more submissions)
Self-Soothing
The drudgery of dawning – sometimes so elegant and enlightening, sometimes belabored and torturous impatience – always the heavy friction of waves. Of particles as they place and displace in their constant rearrangement, the permanent battle of hope and resignation. Rising up, coming down.
How I write about disappointments – the very act of writing an urgent inking of the sky, even while it fades or darkens, glares or washes out.
Of rejections – their steady dismissal, the missed sunrise/sunset – a glory of chance forever undone. Overlooked. “Wrong place at the wrong time.”
In other words, again. That waves and particles eons-old rumble and bumble about around and against one another, often contrary impulses and contents dislodging, jockeying, a kind of dance seen from extremely close or far enough away, making out of blue or black a purpled-grey tinged greenish pink and orange; or a bleeding scrape of burgundy’d magenta replete with yellowing sears.
Straining can produce glorious things.
The continuous waffling betwixt bright and ominous, stars glittering through their winky charms, or a saturate void. White dreaming pale translucence or deeper colors leaking through. It never stops, the gradients without lines. So I continue in the way that I flow, waves and particles of me assembling/reassembling and what results is what the friction sparks – disappointments and the hope to write them out.
Another opportunity – for collaborative creativity
my spouse/partner etc. posted this this morning and I find it instigative – love to see/hear what comes of it for the rest of you!
http://ekphrastixarts.com/2012/05/10/ekphrastic-opportunities/
All my Words are Silent 