The Quiescence of Frigid January

The Quiescence of Frigid January

I “remember” the somewhat curled, old printout I made of Jack Kerouacs’ tips on being a writer. Somehow the long list of inspiring words has blended into my own sense of adventure, and my terms for exciting authorship are my own.
When I contact the adventuress she is trying to remember Jack Kerouac, the great authority on truly wonderful authorship. She is also striving to understand the need to write, and reluctant to embark upon any such journey, choosing to peruse sheaves of quilled delicacies from children, Alzheimers’ patients and The Walrus Magazine, a Canadian Poets’ Own – only to look for more inspiration.
What writing is to me when it is a brilliant butterfly in a zephyr gale opens the histories and WORD written into billions of years of adaptation and of magical discoveries because it is a free will blown beyond the cares and ennui of practical maintenance.
I aspire (and most likely always will flutter more dangerously into that candle on a Friday night) to let the depth of perception become the flow of these essays into illustration. For an artist, writing is a cold and Pecksniffian  sear upon a boldscape of colour, texture and form. Words or perhaps rhythms, rhymes and sentence shaping need explain the urgency of self-expression, or that messianic call to “show” others the meaning of life.
I have researched January as Janus, the god who gave this dried out frozen month its’ name. Synonyms for Janus-faced (as befits the month of January) abound besides Pecksniffian ( meaning “thew” ) begging for mention of some riotous themes I feel deserve equal billing:

left-handed,lip, mealy, mealymouthed, Pecksniffian, phony ”

As well:                ” artificial,backhanded,counterfeit,double,double-dealing, double-faced,fake,feigned, hypocritical, Janus-faced, jive”

Lovingly collected and presented, free of charge from the word dispenser at Merriam Webster Thesaurus.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/Janus%E2%80%93faced

Definition of Thew:

Popularity: Bottom 30% of words

1a :  muscular power or development

b :  strength, vitality

2:  muscle, sinew —usually used in plural

Damn January Anyway

Why, I wonder, have I chosen a word for January that involves the concepts of muscular power or development? I think of this month of shut in days as times of iron detention, ice hard will forcing me into quiescence during the fortitudinous provision of coolers and moistening fertility for the world.

We Canadians are proud of our snows and ices. Yet January is mealy-mouthed,  double-dealing, backhanded and counterfeit. We are. We Canadians. No sooner has the pride of identity of belonging to delicate individual caloric florals and of maintaining the very sinews of coherence for the worlds’  last delicate few million years of life than the commoners’  whine farts out, dying of blighted short dark days of bitterness in the frost death of all.  We are not proud, we all say. Damn January anyway.

Thank you, Ma’am

These years thawing the personal poet from years of permafrost is too difficult.

What bounced into poetry and more quickly conceived of design and colour, the listening that let bells and high violin notes define life, which let the rough rude scrape of chromatinous leaf equal those as magical musical events ( although it be the sonar elephant in a sweet ringing of nightingales ) is now numbed. It has the texture of an eraser, a rubber. Perhaps it is the spent rubber after a night of Spring banging away at a frigid January, to no avail but for the swollen red extremities, the ensuing pain.

This written work is just an exercise and particularly has no reason, no mission, (not even the Missionary position) not much sense and it is a way to re-kindle the quiet world of intellectual pursuit.

what a’ do when i’m senile

January is a month of new beginnings, and every gardener will start something growing indoors, whether this is a pot of fast-growing herbs or the thought of bulb roots beginning to spread their vital, newness of adolescent, short roots into the seemingly stalled, dead earth.

We gardeners have hope. Gardening is my saving grace, if all other activities fail to attract me to act, even if it will not pay me a wage. Gardening is, at least, fruitful. My dining table often has huge bouquets of garden flowers that cost me nothing. My cooking is nothing without the Basil I grow summer and winter indoors, nor the Oregano, Thyme, Mints and other fresh things that I have grown organically over the years.

The gardener in me is not a joker or a lame aspirant in reaching for the correct words or tenor within an increasingly literate web. My gardening self doesn’t care what people think, has no need to win at gardening shows or to sell produce.

 If I become senile my love for flowers and herbs will shine on, touching, sensing volatile oils, scenting fragrances that will be curative.  I care so much about peoples’ right to perceive beyond the restrictions of physicality that I recently shared an article about nano sculptures made by 3D printer. The sculptures fit into the eye of a needle, in fact one hundred of them could fit into this space.

These classical sculptures gave me an idea; that even if a person has a pins’ breadth left of vision due to glaucoma , they could still experience an aesthetic journey into the shaping of things.

Even if a person is born blind, I felt, some nerves or process could see these minutiae.

Link here to see worlds' smallest 3D printed sculptures

 3D printing lets you print the colours of the work onto them, I think. So a child could see a 3D image of Mommy. Start with Mamas and breasts and little flowers and cows. People so have the right to see something and to elevate the wonder within them that shows them the Creation evolved  by a Supreme entity, void that is at once life and breath in all of its dappling and flashing, velvet and knifing splendor.

Here is the sort of miraculous journey that lets a person go beyond what is safe and familiar. Information from every school and culture is available to anybody via a world-wide library. We are encouraged to go beyond. There is no reason now to believe in an old age spent nodding at bees and eating handsful of mint and rose petals for days of palliative erotica.

is senility just wrenchingly redundant boredom?

Now that I have recognized that my body is still in January, though- I realize that I need some time to eat fresh herbs from my fingers, or to lay in a pool of glass-filtered sunshine. I spend time thinking to the bees underground, anyway.  And not the nota benes or their knees, just bumblebees.

Even moles and bumblebees get bored and evolve conversations with monstrosities outside their own personal boxes. So I get to learn at the spirit-3D print of the bees’ knee or agape at the feet of wise voles of vole hill.

There is no reason for our thoughts to be large and small, just understandable. For instance the other day I was remarking upon the witch hat rock form under the neighbours’ garden, since I was thinking of how a mineral may have gone askew. I got to report the comments (in pictures) of voles, who are avid geophysicists .. It had separated, thought the vole, and my question was- is it going to cause trouble?

A three way dialectic ensued, during which a knowledgeable scientist told us that it separates from and then clips the rocks every year.

 The vole heard me describe the whereabouts of his own entry as “under Ians’ Onion patch”.

She asked, then: “Are there any juicy onions?”.

A fourth conversationist joined to say, “No, I pulled them all”.

But at that point the vole had managed to rush down about eighteen feet and had found tiny green spring onions forming. They were from seed fallen through the patch, collecting growths of onion sprouts on their sides in slight crevasses of the rock.  Or they were.

Even if I have no one left who understands me, I imagine, nature will love me and keep me informed.

At least.

A Third Day:       January 21^st, 2016

Tears in my heart this second, after watching a video of a wedding- a NewZealand Haka. Trying to describe this in words is not possible, unless one were from Maori ancestry and had literary mastery the equivalent of Katzansakis at the fulcrum of his abilities.

To quote:            

I said to the almond tree:

 "Speak to me of God ."
and the almond tree blossomed.

·         The Fratricides (1964)

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Nikos_Kazantzakis

Calling in Canada

I am reminded that this day is January, 18 degrees below zero and that I am escaping the idea of its death blows toward youngsters and linesmen underground, and the boredom of routine house cleaning.

  I am aware that I have never even holidayed in New Zealand, although Australian and Maori New Zealanders have been my friends since childhood.

You never know who a person truly is until you have understood their environmental conditions, and have lived their lives with them, to some degree. The richness and closeness of tribal society is a Canadian way, certainly, and even I have spent time in a medicine wheel prayer circle, or outdoors praying for rain with a friend who was one of the shamans of our area.

Our minds are so much more a global village in Canada, and probably because both environment (being grandly enormous and subject to extremes in weather) and our economic barriers keep us separated from each other.

In intellectual minds there are few separators during the meaningful times of meditation, or when there is mutual concern, joy or sorrow.  Canadians readily hop over fences and boundaries. At Tim Hortons’ coffee shop you find yourself sitting opposite the Minister of Forestry one day and a famous sci-fi author the next. They want someone to chat with while taking a coffee and sandwich.

You thought they would be snobby, but like you they are only too willing to explore social themes or politics or like Roger, talk about building his castle or reinventing the faster snowmobile.  Some of these people are very rich and well known, while others, like myself , have been poor artists and single Mommies all their lives.  Above all, if you love your brothers and sisters your relationships, whether long term or of the instant will become enriching and valuable days of thought and experience, because everybody counts.

Tears are still behind my eyes. We live in a winter of long miles away from each other, of huge economic hardships and in fear of meeting up with the wrong racial politick.

Not too many aspects of society demand or allow up front emotion in Canada,  and the familial side of each groups’ tribal identity is occult. In so many ways Canada is a lonely place, unless we share humanistic goals and work together in a communally thought out space, which demolishes distance and social hardship. I think that is why, when people share their very sacred marriage vows and celebrations with us over the net, we still cry, no matter that we do not know the couple or their families.  I feel that the tears are for that lonesome Canadian way of life sometimes, so often a masked, cloistered and inhibited social yearning.

You can see this wedding Haka via this link:  Wedding Haka

Perhaps Facebook has brought rays of kind intention, some meaningfulness into my cyber-day. The sun warms my skin through the window. I have forgotten the effort it took to start writing again, and my heart has remembered that tears and deeply felt emotions have been far from my experience for some time.

There is awareness that our global village experience becomes a parochial nuisance at times, too. We hear each other think when we have gone on beyond the documents or postings and we collide. Here is the time to sow (even if I have to fake it, this being yet another miserably frozen day) – it is a time to create something that is my future, and not to reap what others have so passionately sown.

Social media can, I imagine, make of our readership somewhat of a social succubus- our global awareness having left egos less convoluted and more susceptible like youth to emotional or psycho-sexual plundering.

Buddhist masters say we live in a dream, but it is not so viable an idea when one can verify events, names, situations and interrelate so instantly across the world.

I feel now that it is time to give my blog in, that musing about frigidity in January is not so productive as in sharing whatever seeds of expression this might sow elsewhere.

Cheers! Sue.