venus

poetics of life.

venus went on walkabout today. she traveled between us and the sun -- a cosmic tour she hasn't taken since 1882, and the stress and strain will be so taxing she'll need a 100 year nap before she does it again -- just like sleeping beauty. to us, she's a mere chocolate chip in the sky, a mole on the cheek of the sun. to watch her on her heavenly hajj would mean a certain forfeit of vision. too much light, too much to know, too much left unobscured always comes at a price.

she sent herself packing this afternoon, on a celestial transit. i took my own transit -- muni 33 to 33rd avenue and geary, then the 18 to the legion of honor, to see the cult of beauty before it evaporates on the 17th of this month. aside from giving birth to a cupid or surfing a clamshell of cartoonish proportions to the shores of ocean beach for a dramatic, aphroditic rebirth...how better to evoke the moods of venus than to observe acrylic depictions of beauty in an urban palace-- laced with french words and rodin's thinker at the gates -- high on the cliffs of a foaming sea, with pearls of the aesthetic movement breifly tucked inside?

the cult of beauty began with getting lost. i found men in bushy black wigs looking annoyed, plenty of plucked chickenish baby jesuses in the arms of crusty-giving diabolical marys, grandfather clocks with melted pendulums, and dead pheasants stuffed in ratty baskets surrounded by fruit and feral children.

lunch was calling.


lunch was a salad called dame edna. the man who sold it to me looked like an escapee from the ice cream shop in disneyland -- red and white checkered shirt with a red and white-striped aprion. i sat in the garden, in speckled light, where the bellows of a wild 4-year-old had to traverse afar in order to reach my sensibilities.

dame edna came 15 minutes after i ordered her, my number was 22. it usually is.

after dame edna was banished from sight, i watched an older chinese man watch me, an older, school bus-driver looking woman take pictures of the sky and knit a lapis-blue pot holder. i heard two women lament the wind, the cold.


the cult of beauty was like a souffle left to cool in the kitchen -- waiting, melting, imploding with every passing second.

as i passed between silent onlookers, main-attraction hoggers, vapid old ladies with dandelion bouffants and hyperactive yorkies, i decided only to look at what seemed relevant to me in that very moment. to be thorough, i read the introductory plaque at the entrance -- i was about to enter the world of the "aesthetes" -- painters, artists + provocateurs who gasp -- made art for art's sake. apparently, this was a rather shocking and french thing to be doing in victorian england. fortunately, not everyone lived in england at the time, so the shirts came off, the ladies reclined, and fleshly apples were replaced with fleshly flesh. most human depictions were clearly of the female persuasion -- though many were neutrally gendered and unconcerned about it. clothes were loose -- one esther had turned her mustardly overcoat inside out and began ripping the pearls from her hair -- in preparation to reveal her true roots to the man in charge. evidentally, the chinese exported to persia in the days of xerxes, and esther had her hands on hottest haute couture from the orient.

pavonia -- peacocks -- abounded..eth. one designer, whistler, was commissioned by a shipping baron to create a display room in said shipping baron's house where he could display his baronly blue and gold crockery for all to see. whistler made the room one big indigo ode to the peacock. the baron did not approve. whistler needed this deal to go well because he was on financial rocks and when the baron decided he wouldn't pay him for his peacockery, whistler painted a parody of the baron dressed as a peacock, pounding on a piano, and sitting on a miniature version of the house that whistler sullied, without compensation. the title of the sheet music reads "the gold scab: eruptions in filthy lucre" as a welcoming banner to the creditors who then seized whistler's property and possessions when he lost his battle with the baron and plunged into insolvency.


it's the pieces that i remember now, hours later, still searching for the beauty mark on the face of the sun -- tempted to run next door to the old folks' home to borrow a pair of solar shields.


i remember one life-sized painting of a fat-bottomed woman -- a gypsy, i'd imagine -- running up two steps and into a starry night -- pausing to glance over her shoulder at whomever was chasing her to recover their filthy lucre. i couldn't find any title or placards to go with her, so she is just the gypsy under the stars, escaping the shelter of an indoor life for the chance of survival on the outside.


i also remember leighton's bath of psyche -- a woman who would be called fat in 2012 was the subject of dangerous beauty, conjured from greek mythology and placed in a long, rectangular frame. she was plump as a grape, sensuous as a sun-warmed peach, good enough to bite even in two dimensions. she was wrapped in a purple satin sheet, standing near a pool...as myth would have it, she was so nerve-fryingly beautiful, she often deterred would-be suitors with her looks alone...the original and accidental aesthete.

and of course, the essential "midsummer". two ladies fanning one special lady dozing in a chair -- a throne it seems -- draped in monk orange robes. marigolds are strung across her chair -- like an indian bride -- suggesting feigned napping in order to evade arranged nuptials. the two fanning ladies seem mildly perplexed, should we wake her up? oh it's too hot...let her sleep."

paintings, garden chairs, tea pots, japonisme  -- remnants from an era that sought to "evoke a mood" and "prompt vague associations" ...no more strict and lucid narratives adhering to a plot or plan...just prettiness on a page that unnerved a public set adrift from traditional signposts of content.

luchador

lychee

the only thing you have to do, is die.

plants.

i planted two lychee seeds (pips) in a clear, cubic vase with two scoops of potting soil. the soil was sitting in a large plastic bag, folded over, on one corner of the deck. i couldn't remember the last time i had intentionally touched dirt, or touched it with the intention of putting it to use. i felt like i was freeing some kind of black but wholesome magic from a rubber body bag. dirt, soil, in a bag, kept in the corner.

i filled the vase, pressed the soil down and was reminded of tamping espresso. manipulating earth, pressing natural matter into itself for a desired affect felt a lot like praying for the first time in years. pushing dirt into a vase evoked tactile memories -- hands pressing clay, plunging into barrels of dried legumes, smearing red clay on my chest. dirt -- even the kind that comes premixed and aerated -- is a kind of mana ingredient like blood and anything with potential energy -- a womb for life, an egg, chlorophyll. it is nothing and everything, common and miraculous, filthy and sanctifying, dark and magical.

i stopped. i can't plant these seeds without reading a how to. i need to google "planting lychee seeds" before i continue. spliced into my dirt euphoria was this idea of not knowing how to plant seeds, an awareness of how long it had been since i'd purposely touched dirt paired with the shock of not really knowing how to plant a seed. was the seed too dry? should i soak it first, suspend it with toothpicks in a glass filled with water and set to bake in a windowsill? had i waited too long between the time i pulled the seed from the lychee and now, and what about this pot, was it the right shape and size? anxieties that would rattle ancestral chains and made me wonder if basic respiration would someday require directions.

instead, i pressed a forefinger near the center of the vase -- just deep enough to leave an inch above and below the tips of the seeds. i guessed which end should go up and which end would sprout roots. i had no knowledge of lychees, their seeds, or basic horticultural experience aside from sprouting beans in first grade. what i knew about them came from picking them up at chinatown stalls on canal street in a blue plastic bag that said 'thank you' at least a dozen times. from mantle to core, lychee anatomy begins with a hot pink geometric helmet, a pale membrane, and a phallic layer of middle jelly around a mahogany seed. the seed is ornamental, something that should be kept and not discarded.

i dropped the seeds in the holes and covered them with dirt.


curiosity ensued.

i googled it.

several variations on planting lychee seeds -- water the soil, don't water the soil (water the gravel beneath the soil), give it plenty of air to breathe, choke it with saran wrap and rubber bands, high humidity, low humidity, full sunlight, cool dark and damp.

my lychee-planting method -- however ill-conceived or unresearched -- followed intution and best guessery. before this morning and several thousand mornings before it, someone had to guess which end goes up, how much sunlight is necessary and whether to water the soil or the gravel long before the days of saran wrap, rubber bands or google. maybe ignorance is the new final frontier.  

soundtrack

on a standard stroll through the park i found this *everyday exotic* view of the conservatory of flowers. i like the chipped-tooth, torn edge of the fence and the branches straining for a peek at the great white nipple that houses first class flora, conserves them.

i remember being six and sitting in the passenger seat of a bright yellow ryder truck with the windows down, listening to tracy chapman sing revolution and crossing the golden gate bridge with my dad and my sister singing along. 

it sounds like a whisper
and finally the tables are starting to turn

i thought of the lines cut into a pond, with sisters and skates. how many lines are recut--rigid against new lines and directions, rejecting right angles, covering the surface with oblong laps and figure eights. over and over the same lines until the surface is scarred with overlapping lives -- five-fingered reincarnations of the same dizzy girl on the same solemn pond, year after year. i thought of my dad singing american pie, playing his guitar alone in every basement i can remember:

oh, and there we were all in one place
a generation lost in space
with no time left to start again

i want to write a love letter to my generation. weeks before i finished graduate school, nyu discovered an indian burial ground beneath the fountain in washington square. native american holy land, desecrated by decades of poets, students, lovers, dealers and sidewalk chalk. the famed graduation ceremony at the replicated arc de triomphe would be canceled so the fountain could be moved into alignment with the archway, by a matter of inches. exceptional circumstances, a year suspended in construction, redirected pathways, undesirable detours, and a city built on bones -- all harbingers of a new soundtrack. we set out early, only to find the road signs painted over with hot tar, to deter the invaders. stamped, soaked, dried and processed for a world that didn't exist, we stepped into a ring of tigers with handfuls of daisies. and as they told us, as all good christians should know, nothing is new under the sun. but the events of the day are recaps of past lines cut into a frozen sea, towers falling at rapid speed -- a dramatic mock-up of cataclysm. quietly offed and sent downstream, mine are casualties of a revolution. water-carved canyons cleared the canvas for a new order,  where death was a prerequisite for life. and the gifts of death are the great lakes, the urgency to act and the atoms of stardust in our bodies. cutting and clearing the old to allow the new to emerge -- to be a part of an evolution -- is the organic fate and folly of the ones caught in the crosshairs of a new cycle. we aren't the last, we're the sacred mulch for a more fluid and amorphous disorder -- a place to love and belong once it's finished. in the meantime, we keep reaching for the fallen railings of then:

I met a girl who sang the blues
And I asked her for some happy news
But she just smiled and turned away
I went down to the sacred store
Where I'd heard the music years before
But the man there said the music wouldn't play.


.outside the conservatory of flowers.

adios mariposa