wilt thou be gone, egyptian grasshopper?

Above is my first attempt at an altered book. I deconstructed a family copy of Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame. By grace of improvised-verging-at-times-on-desperate sewing tricks and jewelry clasps, I rebuilt the book as a small box. The clasps render it collapsible, allowing the box structure to fold out into the floor plans of the Notre Dame cathedral itself. On the back of the box, I made an erasure from the scene where Gringoire questions Esmeralda about her amulet. And her name.

THINGS I DID NOT KNOW UNTIL THEY FOUND ME /
THINGS I COULD NOT FIND WITHOUT UNKNOWING

i. Vincent Van Gogh ate paint.

ii. The entire moon could sit within the continent of North America.

iii. Leonardo da Vinci regularly bought caged birds in the marketplace and set them free. Historians attribute this to his vegetarianism, though I like think it's his obsession with flight. Not content with genius, he longed to be a winged thing. Wheeling about in the air. Furthermore, I think it is possible that somewhere in those journals swelling with mirror-image Italian, he recorded a dream. Wherein an unfamiliar voice whispered: Kitty Hawk.

iv. Birds with their hollow bones. Birds with a compass buried deep inside them, magnetic crystals skirting across the brain. A bird named Dear Friend, with an eye shot out and a wooden leg, decorated with the Croix de Guerre.

v. That a man could bend you at the waist--doubling you over yourself--and kiss the length of your spine and not even love you.

vi. First line of my newest ongoing fictive endeavor: "I enter my dead husband's room naked, with a harpoon in hand."

vii. The U.S. Department of Energy has amassed an enterprising group of scientists, anthropologists, linguists and (!?!) science fiction writers to devise a "Message for the Future" to warn those not-yet-born/not-yet-indoctrinated-into-chemical-witchcraft of its disposal site for radioactive waste in Carlsbad, NM. The preliminary plan includes miles of 25-foot pillars, giant earthen walls, explicit warnings in all extant languages, pictograms and finally--Edvard Munch's darling of Norwegian Expressionism, "The Scream."

viii. Tycho Brahe lost his nose in a duel.

ix. "We find out the heart only by dismantling what the heart knows...

. . .Love is

not enough. We die and are put in the earth forever.
We should insist while there is still time. We must
eat through the wildness of her sweet body already
in our bed to reach the body within that body."

-Jack Gilbert

x. The Universe is heirarchical. And empty.

xi. Among Galileo's possessions preserved as relics for the starry-minded: his petrified middle finger. Here's looking at you, Rome!

xii. "Quiconque naissait poète se faisit architecte. " - Victor Hugo

xiii. I have decided to be more courageous, even in my confusion. What do I want? Not your mouth only but your mettle. After all this, our bodies can stand to be frank with each other. After all this, I can be roughed up and coo about it. I'm content with hair and teeth until my own dreamyheadedness takes over. Distracted all day by the fact that we're really just celestial afterbirth reiterated. Wondering lately: Do I really want the Obscure? Fumbling around in your chest, fool's hands grasping at your panicky bird-heart. Do I want the Arcana? O but there's so much fight in me. Sweet & Inexorable Pilgrim. O how I want to knock the star ash right out of you.

I WAKE EARLY BUT I RISE LATE

Last night/this morning: L, M, Z & me. Lying in a field beside a seemingly-abandoned gas station out in the middle of the pitch-dark woods. Watching the Orionid meteor shower and eating clementines. Shivering under insufficient blankets, Z took my hand. I didn't know what to do. We were all crowded in close, talking about whether it was preferable to think of the stars as fixtures or pinpricks--the sky as a skin or a backdrop. Z, I barely know him. And it was not the ideal moment to say Sorry friend. You are interesting and you look like a rabbit. I mean that as a compliment. But. I have someone. Yes, he is absent. I don't know for how long. But I have him. The question being: when is the ideal moment to say such a thing? I took my hand away when someone asked the time. 3:15 AM. We left at the insistence of coyotes.

The aforementioned love being the one I flew to San Francisco for. There is perhaps too much to say here. See also: a room with sheer curtains. See also: being carried across a beach like some romantic cliche. See also: photobooth pictures where I unwrap myself like a mummy. See also: a museum of mechanical wonders, a city of Chagalls, a sadness called fog.

While on the west coat, I also visited J at Green Gulch Zen Center. It is so strange to see your best friend for the first time in five months. It is so strange to walk in a valley full of Japanese plants where few people speak and no one speaks loudly. A gong sounding every so often. He made us cinnamon tea and walked us through the Zendo. Bronze statues of Bodhisattvas and dim, natural light. Walking barefoot through their sacred space. My best friend has a shaved head and sleeps in a meditation hall with forty others. Otherwise, he is as I remember him.

Been daydreaming about tauroboliums. Bulls adorned with gold and garlands of violets before being slaughtered. The Roman who waits just beneath the stands, arms outstretched, as the blood runs down and bathes him. Purified, deified, feeling fine. How the loves of the first world were dangerous.

Ideal, ideal, ideal. Knowledge, knowledge, knowledge. Boomboom, boomboom, boomboom.

We finally discussed Dada in my Art History class. There was much scoffing from sorority girls. Joe and I decided to make Dada costumes for Halloween. I decided to only make art with a knife.

In other news, I am so disappointed that the Heene family hysteria was a hoax. I had this eager image of the moment when the balloon would be intercepted and opened up to find that child nestled like a baby bird, cradled in aluminum and sleeping.

ON KEEPING EVERYTHING IN STAR-ORDER

So I think the only thing left to do is to follow Tom Waits' cue and move according to the stars. It would be misguided at best, but at least it wouldn't be arbitrary. For one year I saw maps in everything. I traced the veins up and down the forearms of my friends. Treasure maps, I told them. I dreamt of benevolent globes that children could hide in.

Now I'm in the doldrums of formless-college-insubstantia. Unmappable regions. Terra incognita. Hic sunt dracones, I would've said in my previous incarnation.

So with my maps all withered, the legend all askew, I guess I'll just trust in the stars. It puts me in mythic company: First-World explorers, Underground Railroad, Tom motherfucking Waits. The stars are not man-made. So there can be no deceit in them. Right? Right.

I made a constellation projector out of paper and a touch-light. Stars as simple as pinpricks.

retrieved notes from 1 August 2008:

"Thou shalt not disregard the Irrational."

What do I mean by 'Poetry is the most important thing in the world' ? How presumptuous of me, how naive, how self-aggrandizing. But it is just this: stargazing on an empty night; a stranger called Father; cats watching; a broken typewriter; a man who lived biblically; Cepheus is the husband of Cassiopeia. There is order in that. There is light and water and poetry, the three essentials. I don't know the names of the constellations. Cait does, she took an astronomy class at a community college. I don't know their names. There, there, there are things there are no names for. Cait & I run as if there were still urgency in the deadened world of sleep, as if the sky might leave us. These short, staggered breaths, my ribs aching in time-- it's not epiphanic but it's the closest thing I've got. I lay on my back on the pavement. There's that same old dream of leaving. How far can I walk? As far as I am lonely.

Upon reentering Cait's bedroom, I go to each of the four walls. She confirms with compass in hand. I put the edges back, I give the corners back to the room of my mind. I take a black marker and write on each wall: BOREAS, NOTUS, ZEPHYRUS, EURUS.

There is order in that.

Last night, I stood with familiar-strangers/strange-familiars at a bonfire in an empty field. My ex-best friend was drunk and sullen because I'd snapped at her about something. She started apologizing, crying, wouldn't let go of me and kissed me several times on the mouth. It's the kind of scene where everyone looks hard into the fire, pretending not to see. And I couldn't think of anything to say to her. Not one thing. I just rolled my eyes up to the big grayness of something-and-nothing. I looked at her face, knew there was no chance of grace or placation. She told me she loved me, which was embarrassing. I just looked up and said: I wish the stars were visible.

Then there's the other lost friend. Sometimes I fear that Hanan will never get out of Saudi Arabia, despite our elaborate escape plans. I asked her how she felt about the stars. She said that they were beautiful, but that she still loved the moon. She told me about the last lunar eclipse that happened during Ramadan. She said: In Islam, they say it's a sign of God's wrath. But I'm not sure I believe that.

What I don't tell her is this: the Man in the Moon is not wrathful. He has absolutely no anger in him. Just whitewashed, bleached-bone sadness. He longs after something, we can't know what. Maybe it's a girl or something more celestial. But he's loathe to let go. The Man Who Navigates the Moon moves in (n)ever-increasing circles, kids himself that he's leaving, only deviates a hair's width. Still lingering despite the show of going. They say the moon's moving further and further away but everyone knows he won't go through with it. You see the sad display all the time. I've read about it in books and ex-husbands.

The Moon, I don't tell her, is no one to follow. The stars, though---maybe. Maybe.