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

I remem­ber an argu­ment– a nice one– that I had with my brother Matt once about a poem, a Mark Strand poem, called “Keep­ing Things Whole”. I do not remem­ber it in its entirety, but I do remem­ber Matt’s reac­tion to the theme, which was, I think, about per­sonal mean­ing in life… the nar­ra­tor talks about his pres­ence in the world; that is, when­ever he walks through a field, he is what is absent in the field. After an array of such remarks he says that while oth­ers may have their own rea­sons for mov­ing, he moves to keep things whole.

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

I can’t really think how to begin all this again, and we’re all in one of those times of infi­nite com­pres­sion: like a supert­er­res­tri­ally dense onion… a Plu­ton­ian onion, per­haps? How do you begin to pull back the skin, sort­ing through the layers?

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.

There is much to tell you, gen­tle reader– much more than I have time for this mild sub­trop­i­cal morn­ing in San Diego. But I shed the warm blan­kets of blogging-laziness to announce one thing: Thurs­day, June 22nd, saw the unanticipatedly-kind CIS offi­cial smil­ingly stamp­ing Iryna’s pass­port– and Katya’s by phys­i­cal asso­ci­a­tion– with the “Green Card” stamp. My wife and stepchild– Con­di­tional Per­ma­nent Residents!

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.…

The fog rolled in some­time late last night, obscur­ing my rest­less dreams and turn­ing the night world into a ghost story. Per­haps fit­ting, the dark spir­its try­ing one last time for a pall (should dark­ness gov­ern in a thing so small); this is the final day, the long-awaited con­clu­sion to months of prac­ti­cal pur­ga­tory. The crack is start­ing to show, and as Leonard Cohen says, that is how the light gets in. A long winter’s night, except that it was win­ter and spring too, and April is the cru­ellest month, and are you done with ref­er­ences yet? April was dif­fi­cult, true, but May was worse; mostly because the closer you get to the end, the more the prospect of time is an irri­ta­tion, an insect-like aggra­va­tion that pesters and mis­qui­tos your con­cen­tra­tion. It pep­pers your con­ver­sa­tions with vam­piric nee­dles. It clouds your eyes like a fly swarm.

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.

and I quote:

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.

on the East Coast, this is already fact; on the West Coast, there is still about forty min­utes… so I sit on the cusp of my two month anniver­sary, hap­pily wed­ded [though too often sep­a­rated] to Iryna Clark, born Kotl­yarova, and for­merly Zinchenko. It is with plea­sure that I over­lay my name on these for­mer ones.

This pic­ture, shot by my mother, is first offi­cial [by paper­work, though not by vow] por­trait of Iryna and I as a mar­ried cou­ple. It was cold. I had been ner­vous (refer to the water in hand). But while pin­ning the flow­ers on my lapel, and see­ing Iryna with the much-coveted nosegay (oh there is a story there), my heart sang; deeply into the din­ner in Lit­tle Italy and on into an elated drive up north. I can see with stark clar­ity the dark umbers and cold-browns of the cor­ner of Man­hat­tan, on into the Bronx, as I sat in back with my new wife; it reminded me of so many bus-rides I had taken through­out the north­east– always alone, book or sketch­book in hand, look­ing out the win­dow, mus­ing, wrap­ping my thoughts into the clouds. How strange, how far the dis­tance from those times, and what a mile­stone of mem­ory. I am too tired and screen-struck to explain the fine nuances of it, but the core of it is fairly easy: I was rippled-through with poten­tial, with the strik­ing open of new vis­tas, with a new panorama lay­ing itself out before me in the soft pur­ple and crushed-leaf shadow of dusk. I loved being mar­ried, which is one of those things I always expected to be sur­prised at and was only sur­prised that I wasn’t; that is, I loved it thor­oughly with­out cling­ing to any remainder.

The length of this two months has been mea­sured in hard­ships not related to being mar­ried– in fact, it is this mar­riage that enables some san­ity whilst the rest of the envi­ron­ment con­torts with ambi­gu­ity and flux. And I promise you, all you peo­ple of the world, that I will bring such joy and hap­pi­ness into my wife’s life, bring such light to her days that all the days before will seem in shadow.

So good­night; or, if you’re read­ing this Iryna– good morn­ing. And Happy Anniver­sary. I love you

Again, for test pur­poses:
“For a start, I think, we must stop treat­ing beauty as a thing or a qual­ity, and see it instead as a kind of com­mu­ni­ca­tion: Beauty is an unsta­ble prop­erty because it is not a prop­erty at all. It is the name of a par­tic­u­lar inter­ac­tion between two beings, a self and an Other; I find an Other beau­ti­ful. This act of dis­cov­ery, we shall see, has pro­found impli­ca­tions”. –Wendy Stiener, Venus in Exile

…to for­mat and re-vamp. this is a test post…