Despite being tired, there’s a dark, powerful push that lingers behind the curtains. That’s the best way to describe it, the best I can think of: imagine, if you will, a slowly brewing storm-cloud, a thunderhead-to-be, full of force, slowly becoming something terrible, inexorable, natural.

The ‘portentous storm’ feeling is helped, no doubt, by the grey, wet sky and the chill expectancy that swirls around my naked toes. With the song ‘Closer’ by Kings of Leon pulsing with dark, torn, sexual sobbing out of my speakers, the moment crests to a perfect, precise point, and I look out the back window to see the august silhouette of our resident hawk on top of the telephone pole.

I think it is obvious that good things are on their way, just about to break into the surface of today.

As a side note, doesn’t Sigur Ros sound like something like the slow, majestic, time-lapse march of gold– and emerald-colored lichens?

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and famous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in all of us. And when we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
~Nelson Mandela

I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear. ~Nelson Mandela

There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is on a queer, divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others. ~Martha Graham

Now Matt, at the time, was disdainful of the centrality of the man, conscious and perhaps even boasting of an imagined role of keeping things together, even if by virtue of his singularity, or difference. I understood Matt’s point– Matt always seemed to like the poems that demolished man in favor of nature, I think– but it has stuck with me in a remarkable way, creeping into my head like a peripheral glance in a mirror, one that occurs unconsciously and you assemble later, cubist distortions normalized by the kind generalities of the mind…

This arises because, I guess, the present is one of those meshworks, half safety-net and half Gordian knot; both ways it is easy to feel essential, in the micro-zoom, in the day-to-day. It is easy to feel the air you displace as you move forward, and feel the gap you create filled in by the indefatigable atmosphere, and it is easy to know that you are like the key in the lock, a perfect shape and size for the present; that you and the world are each other’s negative space.

I can hear the sound of the ocean from this Del Mar aerie, perched as we are above the Highway 101, the new vein my circulatory system. Iryna stares down her poor laptop, chafing the atmosphere around her with impatience. And I sympathize– sometimes, our knotted net can seem like a noose, or at least a jungle tripwire, and I am a very impatient man. In fact, we could both stand to turn some pages through the old Lao Tzu. Throw some sticks or coins. Sh’eng, Pushing Upwards…
But the realization of the night is this: we are moving. And it is not that we outweigh the world in importance, it’s just that we’re here, through whatever stroke of random grace, and therefore essential; and what’s more, our motion of late– however arduous, or sisyphusian, it might seem– has been foward. Inexorably forward. Continuously, momentously, forward. The air has been closing in behind us

My eyes are pretty heavy; there are early wake-ups these days, but that is more blessing than curse, for mornings involve coffee with my wife and child (!), sometimes a trip to Bishop’s, and a gentle ride up the historic 101 to work, past the half-naked surfers and bungalow-restaurants colored as they are with that California 1950s-tinge. Plus, there is something essential, something that echoes from the core, about waking while it is dark and seeing the gradual ascension of light on the world.

“these are their stories” the TV tells me, and it is pretty captivating, despite my dual belief that it is damn hollow. I think that I would prefer to pull the Pygmy Marmoset right out of Iryna’s dream, or to drink in cool clouds of ocean-stung air, but sometimes the journey from couch to dream is a difficult one. I would make it for the little monkey, I would. If I could.

“You can’t stop someone from walking into their own hell” the TV says, and Vincent D’Onofrio cocks his head in that prescient manner, and then we slip into a series of advertisements that are all distilled sound and color, evolved through several decades of the survival of the fittest. It is amusing and fitting… is TV hell?

I don’t really think so, but I won’t chance it. I will follow my wife’s voice, to bed, and perhaps to that adorable little simian that waits for us on the other side of sleep.

I tried to find an image– via Googling– of a Green Card to jazz up the post with an ‘visual’, but the sites & images that came up were, let’s say, sketchy. And if it takes more than 35 seconds of Googling, it probably isn’t worth it. But there is nothing to worry about– words still have the power.

More to say, more to say… but I am sitting at the Del Mar table, sipping coffee, and the day begins to move towards sunlight and activity. So I can do this for only a little bit; but a vast arc of hope and expectation has come to its conclusion. It is in the nature of these things to not pause, but open up the doors to all the other activities now required, and we tend to forget the singularity of this moment.

The last thing that I want to say is that Katya is telling me that she dreamed about blowing a giant gingerbread man’s head off with a machine gun, while in the girls bathroom of dreamland.…

I wonder, as Iryna sits next to me on the ride home from the airport, if we will feel the shedding, or hear the crystalline sound of the ice-sheets falling and shattering, or feel the thaw of spring and glow of summer all in one evening. Probably not; these things have a way of persisting, leaving ghost overlays, holding on for their wraith-like life. It occurs to me that this is perhaps the purpose of ritual, of ceremony and celebration; yes, to mark the passage of life’s great events, but to give power to the transition, to give it a threshold, and to give you demonstration of its passing. In short, an exorcism, to dispel the spirits trapped in purgatory, who might decide to cling to you as you move onward.

While the assembled students were peppering Paik with questions about how his incomprehensible invention worked, he changed the subject radically. With a waggish smile, he said he would tell us a secret. He had discovered the most powerful artist’s tool in the history of mankind, the Manhattan Yellow Pages. He said that the Yellow Pages was full of businesses that employed experts in the most obscure subjects, all you had to do was phone them and ask about something, and they would tell you anything you wanted to know. Even today, 30 years later, I still think this captures Paik’s genius, he taught me that Art is not an act of creation, anybody can create something, there is nothing particularly original about that. To the contrary, Art is an act of invention and we can innovate only by building on the works of others.