Creative Comments

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Originally uploaded by Smithsonian Institution

I have been missing here for a matter of months, for I have found another outlet for my writing. There is a group over at the flickr website that exists for the purpose of encouraging creative responses to posted photographs. I have been active in that group since January, adding bits of prose, poetry, and imagination to a variety of images that I come across. A collection of these quick impressions are archived here:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/creativecomments/discuss/72157621288924406/

when wetlands dry

Dried thistles at China Camp State Park. See more at www.flickr.com/photos/dkkinsf

I mostly had one thing in mind as I set out north with my camera. I wanted to find the sun. It had been cold, grey, overcast and windy all week long, to the point that I looked at weather reports from the entire Western Hemisphere and found that San Francisco temperatures were within 2 degrees of the lowest shown for the Americas. Outside the fog zone, Northern California sizzles. I wanted to find that perfect edge of cool sparkle. China Camp was it.

When I got there to look at the wide open space of marsh and bay, I thought of the first Epigona photo project at Utata.org. For the project, one must emulate the stye of the chosen famous photographer, and in this case it was Richard Misrach. I hadn't looked at his photos for several months, so only had a vague idea of what I might need to do to attempt his style. I took some shots with that idea in mind, then continued to explore through the viewfinder in my usual way.

As I took in my surroundings, I became fascinated by the character of a dry wetland. First off, the scent is different. It gave off the hot, baking fragrance of parched rock, not unlike the familiar scent from the chaparral of the nearby hills. Mixed in was a further sweetness, the honeyed perfume of thousands of tiny blossoms, smelling very much like alyssum. This scent came from the blooming dodder vines, whose rusty red-gold tangle lay in thick mats over large sections of the marsh. Walking out onto the marsh, I stepped on a springy surface of pickleweed, unhampered by the suck of thick black mud. When I got close to the streams running through the marsh, the wetness seeped up around my shoes before I could tell the ground gave way to water. No tell-tale extra growth of rushes warned me, though a small stand of them lined the stream banks.

The mutability of this region inspires me as a metaphor for a fundamental shift in identity. The name itself "wetland" doesn't lose meaning, as the bay tides wash over its outer limits. Streams meander through carrying water from springs in the hills. The hardy native plants thrive in this cycle, for drought is a recurrent phenomenon. The drought in a wetland does not create desert but something of its own, something beautiful and changed. As my life goes through upheaval and change, I can think of the fragrant grandeur of this dry marsh and learn from it. My identity may change in relation to my past, my social environment, or any other factor, but there is within me as well a natural drought resistance. The sun and soil, the movement of the tide, the passing mists, all offer sustenance for my growth. I do not have to live in the anxiety of a parched thirst, but have the opportunity to bloom as wetlands do in the absence of rain.

Enlightenment Pt 6: Blue

As the waves of light roll on in increasing frequency, the green of the heart chakra ascends to the blue of the throat chakra.  If you think of each oscillation of a wave as a bit of experience, the higher frequencies provide a richer texture of sensory information.  At this frequency, we can convey and understand very complicated abstract thought through verbal communication. Listening and speaking depend on the sense of hearing, and the element relating to this and all of the higher frequency chakras is the intangible fifth element known as ether.

Clearly this is a departure from the physicality of the lower chakras.  What is ether anyway?  What role could it possibly have in any serious discussion when, despite thorough research by dedicated scientific geniuses, the only thing known is that it doesn't exist?  Hearing can be measured by the touch of sound waves moving through air to vibrate organs in the ears, but all that is meaningless if the nerves don't transmit and organize that information into recognizable sound images in the brain.  For the purpose of this discussion, ether can be understood as a medium for the transmission of sensory information.  As the empty space between matter, it is an uber-element that combines the qualities of the other four in a quantum realm of probabilities which has no density and is only realized at the moment of use.  In hearing, the transmission involves the earth element of electron particles,  the disturbance of air molecules, the liquid of an ion channel, and the fiery spark of an action potential.  To a conscious being, the result is more than an electric crackle that easily dissipates.  It becomes a sense image, a piece of qualia in the brain, a particular pattern that can be uniquely identified and compared to a pre-existing image, an element of self.  

When the self reflects on the incoming sense patterns and creates associations with itself, an act beyond instinct, beyond emotion, then a higher order of intelligence comes into play.  Ether is the element of that thought, that consciousness, which brings personal meaning into all experience.  Naturally, its expression is completely interior to the individual, whose next best resort is formation of language and the action of speech.  In order even to develop abstract complexity of thought, let alone communicate it, the brain requires vocabulary and syntax.  Fortunately our brains come equipped with a universal syntax able to process any language, but they must receive the stimulation of speech (or sign) to recognize and remember linguistic patterns and to build syntactical analogies between them.  In this way, language and communication between individuals fosters intelligence, which in turn reflects back on itself and develops the urge toward self-expression. 

The interior realm of idea and imagination, the world of the self, is limitless and invisible like the eternal vastness of celestial space.  The far-reaching blue of heaven's dome inspires poets and mystics, as well as anyone else who lies back on the grass on a balmy day and lets his mind wander among the clouds.  High frequency blue light, such as the sun produces, stimulates the pineal gland, which regulates wakefulness and arousal.  Unlike the visceral arousal of lower frequency light, this arousal brings mental alertness without an accompanying physical reaction.  Concentration and meditation blossom in that restful dynamism, a fact well exploited by the designers of most computer programs to the extent that blue is the default color for desktops, buttons, links, and a whole host of icons.  I have 24 application icons on my dock at the bottom of my screen here, more than half of them are predominately some shade of blue.  In this internet age, it is more than apparent that blue is the ubiquitous color of communication and information processing.

We rest on the ground and know the earth for the solid security of its gravity.  We feel the flow of blood and cellular fluids that keep us alive and stir us to procreate.  We turn to the sun for its bright warmth and use its illumination to understand what is within our reach.  We breathe life with each inhalation and feel connection through our awakened skin.  Yet we are more than these experiences, more than what our bodies do and how we react to that.  We influence each other with language, culture, narrative, myth, shared information not directly sensed, and all the communications of our curious, intelligent selves.  Our personalities grow multiple facets through experience, through thought, through archiving and annotating for future reflection.  Where we bring our attention we enrich ourselves, and human civilization has acquired an enormous wealth of written communication over the last few thousand years, now more accessible than ever thanks to the highways and byways of the information age.  Language is the bridge that crosses chasms of time and space, tightens the globe to a linked in society, and spans distance between the questions "Who am I" and "Who are you?".

Having talked the proverbial blue streak, I will next drift out past the sky's cerulean blue toward the thinning edges of the earth's atmosphere.  In the shift to indigo, etheric emphasis moves from hearing and communicating to listening.  There, truly, awaits the music of the spheres.

BABYLON IN THE '90's: OUR TOWN

Where is Babylon?  Find her

In a caffeine dream at the bottom

Of a frothing cappuccino --

Make it a double espresso,

You don't want to miss any of the

24 hour Safeway cinema multiplex

Helter skelter hustle of her laid-back days.

Look for her in the flocks of

Double-breasted gray Financial District pigeons

Roosting high in office windows,

Wheeling, dealing to an electronic pulse

While faxes hum and stutter, and there's

Tokyo on the phone,  a thousand deals done.

Money changes hands in paper, plastic

Promissory notes from endless customer

And harried clerks squirm when shoppers'

Crumpled bills count short of all they need.

"Better put that  jar of peanut butter back

On the shelf and while you're at it

Freeze the retirement benefits for

Old firemen and police.  They're on the ballot

Every year the budgetocracy can't balance."

Campaigning interests squawk but none grow wiser.

Listen instead to the noontime neighborhood

Laughter that lifts the swings and

Slides down a rainbow of Babel's children

Who shed their sweatshirts

Oblivious to the foggy chill in their promised land,

Where scattered Fritos, french fries, popcorn, papers

Beckon the audacious gulls to screech

Their impatience at a ragged scavenger.

"Stir up the trash, old man, but

Leave the scraps for us!"

Despite their lawlessness, they know the limits,

The bounds across which Babylon can't reach.

They make their homes there on the

Black oil sands and watch the tideline

Drawn with bottlecaps, old drinking straws

And the collapsed entrails of human couplings.

Beyond Babylon lies only that reckless surf,

Whose deep, forgiving surge

Bears constant witness to the mortal storm.

(from archives)

Enlightenment Pt 5: Green

In lush, fertile landscapes of jungle, forest, lawn, garden and farmer's field, the color green predominates. It is the color of photosynthesis, the transformation of light energy into food for terrestrial life. It is also the color of the heart chakra, the place of synthesis between those chakras concerned with primarily physical experiences and the higher chakras which are concerned with the expression of intangibles. The element ruling the heart is air and the corresponding sense is touch.

The heart nestles in the chest between the lungs and continually pumps blood through them into tiny cavities where a gaseous exchange between carbon dioxide and oxygen takes place. The element of air becomes body here, and it is the heart's function to distribute that essential substance throughout the whole body. The heart must be a hardy and sensitive organ to maintain this constant circulation and respond quickly to changes in cells' need for oxygen. As such it is particularly affected by emotion, not just the fight or flight feelings of imminent threat or the blood pressure raising needs of sexual interactions, but also the more subtle feelings of belonging and social connection.

Humans are social animals with sophisticated relationships on every level, from immediate family to friends, clans, tribes, colleagues, neighbors, affinity groups, nations, cultures, and even the bonds of non-human companionships. Not only are we interested in each other for the ongoing amusement of our soap opera fluidity in alliances and enmities, but we also need each other to regulate our own metabolisms. Much of that regulation comes from an intangible resonance between limbic systems, a broadly general understanding which we share with all mammals and which flows in almost unconscious ways from eye contact and body language. Even a talking head on television is sufficient to provide a sort of recognition that we exist and there is a place for us within the context of society. Those prisoners left in solitary confinement suffer most from the lack of this basic affirmation of identity and are known to experience psychotic breaks without it.

While the higher chakras deal with communication in more abstract forms, such as language, the communication at the heart comes from touch. Skin is our primary sense organ for touch, it's semi-permeable membrane constantly exposed to air and shot through with neurons sensitized to any change in temperature and pressure from that atmospheric baseline. We live through our skin so much that in English the word feeling is synonymous with emotion and the act of touching. What's more, the emotions that stir the heart most, the poignant (a word derived from the Latin word to prick), touching, heartfelt surges of attachment and intimacy can only develop in individuals who bond successfully with their mother or caregiver at infancy. That initial bonding requires frequent reassuring touch, optimally reinforced with milky sweetness as the babe's lips suckle her mother's breast.

Valentine's Day hearts express a natural human desire to wrap one's arms around another and hold that special person close to the heart, feel the rush of pleasure in the pumping race of one's heart, let the press of skin soothe and comfort jangled nerves, give shape to one's own self in the affirming response of another's touch, and leaning closer still, to bring the lips together in the sweetest of kisses. Whether the air kiss of society posturing or the saliva mixing deep kiss of the truly passionate, whether the offhand slap on the back or the engulfing bear hug, our vocabulary of touch communicates our connection with each other and the importance that has to our sense of well-being.

The power of touch goes beyond the pleasure of intimate relationships. It is a force for healing as well. The laying on of hands is miraculous, not just in the Bible, but in daily practice. Nurturing attention, like the grooming behaviors of other primates, affects the entire nervous system, lowers blood pressure, reduces stress and its concomitant strain on viscera, eases disordered sleep patterns, boosts immune response, and provides the optimum context for natural healing to occur. The touch doesn't even have to reach the skin. Attentive proximity, waving hands over the body to stir the air and change the electromagnetic field, has proved sufficiently effective that some nurses provide this service for hospital patients as part of their standard care.

Just as a leaf absorbs the golden rays of sun and metabolizes them into sugar, the heart chakra absorbs all sensations, from the internal physicality of the lower chakras to direction from the insight of higher chakras, and circulates them as the fuel which activates the entire organism. The steady beat and rest of our constant hearts bears witness to our humanity, our connection to one another, and the truth of our potential to influence each other with the simple kindness of a touch.

Elvenkindness

I know an elf.

Not a haughty Tolkein elf,

Elegant and aloof, seeking wisdom

In a long forgotten realm.

No.  This is a different sort of elf,

White-bearded and of sufficient bulk

To settle firmly on this earth.

 

A puckish sprite

Wiping tears of giddy laughter

While exulting in his games.

 

A shoemaker's elf,

Crafty in the ways of men,

Magicking remnants into gold

For gift and not for gain.

 

A woodland Pan,

Piping a tune in the face of fury,

Who's weathered elemental cruelty

But chooses love instead.

I know an elf.

And of that I am very glad.

(from archives)

Valentine Poem (from my archives)

A dozen red roses

cruised past on the passenger seat

of a red convertible, top down,

drunk on fast air with more kick

than baby's breath

and I thought of valentines, all those

lacy hearts tied up with satin ribbons,

and my own heart, a bloody smooth muscle

bouncing about inside my ribcage

like those flowers without a seatbelt.

Today love is on everybody's lips;

the rain tastes of champagne

and kisses,

full, wet kisses for every

man woman child each shaggy animal

who will lift a face up to the sky

and drink it in.

Now is the time to drive

with the top down

to deliver fresh and dripping

the valentine roses.

Fragile Chips

She'd always been delicate.  Even from the start, her parents handled her with utmost care lest their tiny child might break if not swaddled in three times her weight in blankets.  They watched her closely, held her hand at all times when outside the house, eschewed the parks and playgrounds where rougher children would play, only let their anxious care relax when convinced she soundly slept and even then they would lean their heads down over her small pink lips to listen to her breathe.  She flourished with the beauty of a hothouse flower, translucent to the sun, its petals soft and unblemished even from the windblown scrape of one against another.  She became a constant fixture in the drawing room, among her books and the small upright piano whose keys tinkled lightly to the merest brush of her fingers.  Her tutors changed frequently, college students who would spend a morning or evening with her laying out the lessons for the week.  Her progress, always steady and diligent, was never remarkable, and after a term or so, her tutors would move on to a more compelling interest or promising position. 

As she grew, her doctors had to concede that her condition was not as dire as initially suspected.  Her small heart continued to pump, her lungs drew in the still air of their own accord, while her thin legs held her straight and, under the tutelage of a ballet mistress, learned a certain etheric grace.  Gradually the rounds of acceptable outings expanded beyond the library and museums to include the theater and the shopping galleria.  Her eyes widened at the displays, but it was the bustle of people in all their robust carelessness that captivated her most.  She envied their confident strides, the loudness of their voices, the solidity of their commonplace purchases, their wide feet and easy ownership of space.  In the silent inner reaches of her heart, she determined that she must learn how to become one of them.

She knew nothing of rebelliousness.  Tantrums only confused her ingrained docility.  Any risk held an unspeakable threat, and her foremost concern was not to increase her parents' vigilant anxiety.  As with the rest of her education, she took on the challenge methodically.  "How do you do that?"  she asked one tutor when they passed the ice-skating rink.  "Please show me how to cook," she entreated another.  She began to assert her independence in small ways, choosing her own clothes, painting her nails, preparing her lunch, opting for a different route for her daily walks.  Her tutors noticed the change in her and began to encourage her to try new things.  They invited her onto the campus and took pleasure in her wonder at the laundromat and cafeteria.  Once on their own ground, removed from the confines of the drawing room, they teased and played with her, ruffled her hair, and chased her down to tickle her.

Bit by bit, she sloughed off the habits of her fragility.  With every experience and skill she gained, she cracked anew the porcelain of her doll-like existence.  She could see the chips of her former self scattered on the floor of the drawing room and her old fears tucked into the pages of her favorite stories.  As she moved through the room, the cast-off shards clinked together like the plink of the piano keys.  They no longer had place or meaning to her, and in a final act of emergence, she swept her fragile chips into a pile and boxed them up to set out at the curb for the trash collectors.

The Promise of Spring

It creeps up slowly, hauntingly, heard first as a voice  just before waking.  It is a kind of knowing before recognition, a sensation bubbling up from a hidden source, a trophic change following the angle of the sun.   It answers the sleepy questioning of half-lidded eyes with its own arcana, an age-old charm to release Persephone from the Stygian night.  Her venture to the surface brings a rising sap and swells the barren branches with new bud.  The throat of every bird in the neighborhood warbles an acknowledgement of her arrival and stakes a claim on some piece of her promise.  Even after all these years, I have built no immunity to her seduction and my heart trembles at her radiance.  Darkness falls off me like peeling chips of paint, and my pale white arms show bare underneath.  I can't help but forgive again the perfidy of a changing light, my relief and gladness too real to admit resentment, and welcome in my embrace the return of spring.

This is, Therefore, I am

"I cannot admit it," said Sergey Ivanovitch, with his habitual clearness, precision of expression, and elegance of phrase. "I cannot in any case agree with Keiss that my whole conception of the external world has been derived from perceptions. The most fundamental idea, the idea of existence, has not been received by me through sensation; indeed, there is no special sense-organ for the transmission of such an idea."

"Yes, but they--Wurt, and Knaust, and Pripasov--would answer that your conscousness of existence is derived from the conjunction of all your sensations, that that consciousness of existence is the result of your sensations. Wurt, indeed, says plainly that, assuming there are no sensations, it follows that there is no idea of existence."

"I maintain the contrary," began Sergey Ivanovitch.

But here it seemed to Levin that just as they were close upon the real point of the matter, they were again retreating, and he made up his mind to put a question to the professor.

"According to that, if my senses are annihilated, if my body is dead, I can have no existence of any sort?" he queried.

The professor, in annoyance, and, as it were, mental suffering at the interruption, looked round at the strange inquirer, more like a bargeman than a philosopher, and turned his eyes upon Sergey Ivanovitch, as though to ask: What's one to say to him? But Sergey Ivanovitch, who had been talking with far less heat and one-sidedness than the professor, and who had sufficient breadth of mind to answer the professor, and at the same time to comprehend the simple and natural point of view from which the question was put, smiled and said:

"That question we have no right to answer as yet."  (Leo Tolstoy, in Anna Karenina)

This conversation appears in a novel that was written over 130 years ago.  Those questions are still being asked by those neuroscientists who study consciousness.  In The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, Antonio Damasio argues that such a structure exists in the basal ganglia and the hypothalamus as it organizes information from the brain stem and the neocortex.  He suggests that the awareness of an existing self is a result of an ongoing comparison of an existing bodymap with bodymaps constantly created in response to internal and external stimuli.  (I can't do justice to his well-reasoned and insightful prose, so I won't try to regurgitate his material.  Read the book if you really want to know what he said. Better yet, read all his books.)

By that definition of consciousness, I maintain awareness of myself because of the barrage of images that continue to change my organism.  The arrangement of seaweed on the beach sends a pulse of photons onto my retina, a chemical rush from my amygdala where that pattern recalls other associations pre-coded with emotion, a dance of directives from my sensory-motor cortex, a film of proprioceptive relationships that orient my body to the seaweed, and countless other images racing through my brain.  Each neuron in the process works as a binary system that either fires or doesn't according to how it integrates the flow of excitatory and inhibitory stimuli coming into its dendrites.  That way there are thousands upon thousands of organs to transmit the idea of existence.

One can even question the what the meaning of 'is' is (preferably at one's leisure rather than when on trial for perjury).  The organization of stimuli into discrete items, such as a feather, a piece of seaweed, sand, an ocean, my body, and not into an abstract pattern of interference between electromagnetic waves is part of our typical way of thinking.  When we interrupt that thought pattern with psychotropic drugs, meditation, sleep deprivation, or other state altering methods, we can also lose the ability to identify with a self.  In the extremes, those kinds of interruptions do lead to a variety of unconscious states up to and including death.  On the other hand, such experiences can expand our recognition of identity to include the totality of the energy field we call the known universe.

We may have no right to answer the question of what existence we will have when we no longer can sense through our bodies.  The best we can do is recognize that while we do live what we sense is integral to who we feel ourselves to be.  Our choices and our filters define what we know of existence.  Death remains the ultimate mystery, an unparalleled shift of being that we can't know until we try.  The comfort we can take is that if there is no existence after death, there is no one there to notice.   If that doesn't strike you as a comforting thought, then you might consider meditation.  It is a practice designed not just to reduce the stress in life but also to change the attachment to self in existence.  In other words, it's not necessarily a preparation for death itself or for a ticket to a better afterlife, but it's a practice for a peaceful passage into whatever change of consciousness death entails.

Universal Donor

The cuff is tight on my upper arm
and as I clench my fist,
my vein lifts blue and bulging
to offer what I have to share.
The needle prick, a sudden sharp intrusion,
drops me into dizziness.
I sink with immediate lightheaded,
visceral response to an open vein.
My life pours down a plastic tube
into a sealed pouch rocking in its cradle.

I see my puce purple liquid pulse
slosh in the bag and know
it is only a small part of me,
one eighth what my body metabolizes every day
from food, and breath, and being.
What lights my eyes and whispers with my soul
oxygenates in my lungs, and forced
by steady heart compressions
through my miles of capillaries,
gushes out in little jets
to make a nicely packaged gift
to fill another's veins.
Each corpuscle encapsulates
my unique identity until in sharing
I become universal.
Another needle stick and gravity's flow
conjoins my strength
to another's fading body.

I do not know when I look at the faces

of those who walk the streets around me
which ones teetered on death's edge
until a paramedic on the scene
delivered my transfusions.
My one pint may give
a holiday from oncology,
a neonate survival in its incubator womb,
or sew hope into bullet torn flesh.
I recline on the faux leather chair,
my arm extended and inner elbow exposed
in a prolonged offertory gesture.
I lose only time in the process
of buying time to heal.

It is a small thing for me to do
on a Saturday afternoon
to send my cells on a journey
into a lifepool of beating hearts
and in that swim
erase the thought boundaries
of who I am and who I am not.