Manual for Observers of the Snow Moon
The End of Shoes
I’ve been searching for decades for an elusive shoe, the one that will end my desire for all other shoes. As I eagerly await a new, in-transit prospect, I have an Amazon-Prime-Delivery-moment to reflect on the nature and history of the quest.
I have a pronounced allergy to excess. A visceral objection to material encumbrance. Moreover, a nagging, consumerism-inspired anxiety created in the dissonance between the multiplicity of options and the dearth of satisfactions. I’m afraid my journey has now yielded excess instead of the desired monastic efficiency required to “think about other things.” Not that I am entirely so high-minded. I am aesthetically drawn to the ascetic. My fashion taste being in the ballpark of post-apocalyptic barbarian and Diane-Keaton-joined-a-cult. (An ex once described that ballpark as the “elegant retiree”, this before the advent of menocore.) “That’s a wicked woman”, a friend’s child remarked upon seeing me in an old opera coat of my mother’s with a $2, satin, Chinatown dragon hat.)
This ideal shoe must be practical, serving a range of weather, supporting varied occasions, and functioning in different walking conditions. While all of these pose unique challenge, I’ll wager that the topline to hem relationship presents the make-or-break situation, one with elaborately specific exigencies for each person. It’s a moving target because these shoes must work with a variety of pants, skirts, and dresses.
My memories of the incipient quest take me to grade school, where sneakers sufficed. Not to say that the type of sneaker was not a consideration, but once that decision was made, it was truly the shoe for most of living. The narrow range of situational requirements in that time of life eases the task. I had a pair of pale blue, Converse high tops that lasted through quite a bit of 5th grade. At some point near the end of high school, I moved on to black low top Converse, which I revisited again 15 years later in graduate school. A mistake I’ve now made too many times, alas, those shoes do not have arch support.
Several years ago in graduate school, I committed to a pair of black, mid-calf, motorcycle boots from J.Crew. (At the time, I also wanted the sweater to end all sweaters and jackets, a tall order. I ended up with a grey, cocoon shaped cardigan, which that same ex with a knack for sartorial nomenclature coined my “Romulan” sweater. I don’t think Romulans actually wore sweaters, but if you take a sidelong approach to imagination, you kind of get the idea.) I still have the boots, several soles later. My dog, Petey, once ate through the buckled straps and I had those repaired, too. On the last trip to the cobbler, a strap was lost and they again face sole repair. So I’ve come to terms with my waning enthusiasm for them. I consider throwing them away, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to do it. My perspective on their topline to hem relationship has changed over time (or maybe my body has changed), while they have stayed the same. A classic growing-apart.
The ugly sneaker seems to fit the bill for many, but I’m not there. All I see is “trend” in flashing neon. I imagine commuters changing out of these kinds of sneakers once they get to work, a kind of reverse Mr. Rogers. The comfortable shoes get you where you’re going, but the right pair is waiting for you when you get there. They’re forever relegated as the means in a troubling ends-justify-the-means scenario.
Included in the list of contenders, sitting at the back of my closet: Birkenstock London, Dankso Maria, Clarks Wallabee, a pair of dusty-colored monochrome, Maison Martin Margiela high-top sneakers. A leopard bootie from Boden and perhaps surprisingly a pair of Nike slides are clear front runners. I love my LL Bean winter boots, but the shearling makes them prohibitive most times of year. WIth all of these options, I still struggle to find the right pair on any given day.
When my new Doc Martens arrive tomorrow, I know that, as yet another pair of shoes, they won’t have the capacity to end the chronic nature of consumer desire. I’d like to believe that fulfilling my list of impossible requirements was possible. However, here’s a new kind of wager. These new boots will help me be the person I want to be by dressing like I already am. If it’s wise to dress for the job you want, “like the boss” as it were, then I’d like to think of my best self as that boss. In my case, since the boss is that ascetic-loving, Inner-Worldly mystic living in the awareness of abundance, she doesn’t think about shoes– she’s moved on to other things.
Lunar Mythologies: Part 1, Wolf Moon
WOLF MOON – January 2019, Harlem, NY
POST TRUTH INVOCATION OF REALITY:
August 2016, 2 years and 5 months ago: Lunar Eclipse in Aquarious
New discoveries and relationships will send you on a special mission to find plans for a brighter future.
August 2016, 2 years and 5 months ago: Lunar Eclipse in Aquarious
Through darkened space I headed towards glowing light. People worked keeping the fire alive, the floor was concrete and the expanse of space seemingly limitless. The fire’s glow could not illuminate the outer reaches of sight, perhaps that was because we were outside. Perhaps in the woods. This fire was contained in an anagama the size of a long hut. The anagama is an ancient type of single chamber pottery kiln. The single chamber, built in a sloping tunnel shape, means there is no separation between the pottery and the firebox. A continuous supply of firewood is thrown into the hot kiln and consumed very rapidly. Stoking occurs around the clock. The process produces fly ash. It produces volatile salts. Wood ash settles on the pieces during the firing, and the complex interaction between flame, ash, and the minerals of the clay body forms a natural ash glaze. This shows a great variation in color, texture, and thickness, ranging from smooth and glossy to rough and sharp.
Pieces closer to the firebox may receive heavy coats of ash, or even be immersed in embers, while others deeper in the kiln may only be softly touched by ash effects. The way pieces are placed near each other affects the flame path. The appearance of pieces within localized zones of the kiln can vary as well, taking on similarities based on region.
The potter must imagine the flame path as it rushes through the kiln, and use this sense to paint the pieces with fire.
The length of the firing may take anywhere from 48 hours to 12 or more days. The kiln takes the same amount of time to cool down. Records of historic firings in large kilns shared by several village potters describe several weeks of steady stoking per firing.
A lot can go wrong. Potters work for months, leaving their pieces to wait, in precarious fragility, for the en masse, communal firing. A bit of residual moisture or a slight aberrance in arrangement could create an explosion with reverberations throughout the kiln. Months of work could be lost. Livelihood can depend on a single firing.
I could see people tending this fire. They threw huge rolls of cotton batting on top of the wood. I worked with textiles, not ceramics, so I could recognize this type of fuel. Although in my work, it was generally used as insulation, layered between other pieces of stitched fabric. Then the people themselves started falling into the fire. I saw them go in, they were perhaps friends of mine. And maybe they went in, in so far as they were my friends. I imagined the flame path rushing the kiln, and could see who would become beautiful and who would perish.
August 2016, 2 years and 5 months ago: Lunar Eclipse in Aquarious:
After 95 years, my grandmother, Mary, died.
August 2016, 2 years and 5 months ago: Lunar Eclipse in Aquarious:
I invited women, friends, into my home, an old one room schoolhouse in rural Maine, for an event called Chatter. They would tell their stories, perform their idiosyncrasies.
Chatter describes women’s speech as rapid and not very articulate, comparing the sounds and content with the noise produced by magpies, which is importunate and annoying.
Chatter is a signals intelligence term, referring to the quantity of intercepted communications. Intelligence officials monitor the quantity of communication to or from suspected parties such as terrorists or spies to determine whether there is cause for alarm. Because chatter is a measure of collective behavior, it tends to be a fairly dependable indicator.
August 2016, 2 years and 5 months ago: Lunar Eclipse in Aquarious:
My husband and someone I believed was my friend slept together. I left Maine for New York City and did not return until . . .
August 2017, one year and 5 months ago, Lunar Eclipse in Aquarious:
I drive to Maine from New York City with other artists’ work. Paintings and banners and razor blades and books and photographs and a so-called honeypot bound for an exhibition called Address, as in, to speak to a group. These works Address the townspeople, because chatter is a measure of collective behavior. These works read as follows:
Dad’s Balls are Dad’s Business
Since Evil is a Substance, Space is a Problem
The Past is a Wilderness of Horrors, Ditto for the Future
This Is Pompeii
January 2019, Present Time, Lunar Eclipse in Leo:
The final Leo eclipse in a series that’s been striking the Leo-Aquarius axis since August 2016. In fact, the stunning Leo total solar eclipse of August 2017 was part of this same lunar thread. Stories and situations that have been developing since then could hit a surprising arc this January.
The Leo-Aquarius eclipse series is the axis of individual truth vs. collective.
January 2019, Present Time, Lunar Eclipse in Leo:
White, Catholic, teenage boys mock Omaha elder and Vietnam veteran
January 2019, Present Time, Lunar Eclipse in Leo:
My ex-husband’s ex-girlfriend, the one he left for me 24 years ago, was involuntarily committed to the behavioral health ward of a New York City hospital. It is her birthday. I’m trying to get her out. Other patients slip me notes with their names scribbled down, “Please call someone to help me, too” they whisper.
January 2019, Present Time, Lunar Eclipse in Leo:
I awaken in the sunshine behind a low stone wall and look out over a vast green field of short, dense grass. Sheep in the distance, brown hills rising behind them. I marvel at not having realized what a beautiful home I’d inhabited all along. I took pictures with my phone, but they disappeared. The field and sheep and light remained, material and well.
DEFINITIONS:
Wolves live, travel, and hunt in packs averaging 7 to 8 animals, with records of up to 30. Packs include the mother and father wolves, their pups and older offspring. Wolves develop strong social bonds within their packs. Wolves are ritualistic. Wolves have excellent hearing, and under certain conditions can hear a howl as far as ten miles away.
Rituals are a series of acts regularly repeated in a set precise manner.
Loyalty is faithfulness.
Faith is Without question
Instinct is a largely inheritable and unalterable tendency of an organism to make a complex and specific response to environmental stimuli without involving reason
COMMON NOTIONS:
Repetition is impossible but we understand it none-the-less.
If it were not for the poetic, the experimental would stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again.
TRANSLATIONS:
The howling of wolves is a portion of eternity to great for the eye of man.
The howling of wolves is a portion of eternity to great for the eye of man.
We will not remember the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
We will not remember the words of our enemies, but the sound of our friend.
PSYCHOMETRIC PROCESSING:
SOLIDARITY
Care.
A pink rose bush, withers for winter and dies. The ground opens up, a fiery pit of skeletons.
Freedom.
Under the grounding weight of comfort I sleep, surrounded, in trust, by the group.
The “sounds of our friends”.
My right hand is hotter than my left.
DRAWINGS:
CLOSING:
“A healthy Feminine is much like a wolf: robust, strong life force, life-giving, territorially aware, inventive, loyal, roving. To adjoin to the instinctual nature does not mean to come undone. It means to establish territory, to find on’e pack, to be in one’s body with certainty and pride regardless of the body’s gifts and limitations, to speak and act on one’s behalf, to be aware, alert, and draw on the innate feminine powers of intuition and sensing, to come into one’s cycles, to find what one belongs to, to rise with dignity, to retain as much consciousness as possible.” from Women Who Run With the Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D.
A Mystery Skool Production
Hunting Manual for Detectives, Monks, and Others
Hunting: A continuous attempt by an automatically controlled system to find a desired equilibrium condition.
Drawings by Jessie Mott.
Radical Creative Immersion
Female Background is spending the month of October immersed in the radical creative energy of Ultracultural Others.
Self-integration for PEACE.
Rope
Part 1: Hair
When you ask for my help I will let you sit in the garden.
I will invite you to sit in my garden, the one that I built, but only after you invite yourself. This insinuation on your part lets me know you are weak and avaricious and I will plan to care for you like I have cared for that garden. I will have you sit on the ground and I will cut your hair, watching it fall amongst the blades of grass. I do not like touching you, but I continue, marveling at how the thick, greasy masses are so unlike my fine, discrete strands. You may have cried, because you were lonely and also failed, but it doesn’t so much matter if you did. My hair is short then and I cut your hair to appear like mine, only slightly damaging it with a knife. This was to let you begin again, saying at the same time ‘Kappiyam bhante’ or ‘I am making this allowable’. I invite you to move into my home, although you also invite yourself because the movement is beginning. I invite you into my home, the one that I built so you can learn how to be me.
I know that I am leaving. I packed for the inn over a period of months. I drove through the mountains and lakes and drove back and forth past the front of the white building. Waiting to see if it would be my home and it did not answer, not with a flock of black birds, not with anything, but I was already packed. I collected all of the memories I could find and arranged them neatly and beautifully into small wooden boxes. I made sure these memories were the elaborately specific ones, the ones that could never be replaced or recreated. I left the more obvious ones out, the generalities, so that no one would really notice that the unusual ones had disappeared. (Being unusual, they were harder to see anyway, so it is never so difficult to make them disappear. Their absence rarely raises suspicion.) I wrapped the small boxes in strips of white paper and glue so that they could not be opened again. Looking at the small mummified boxes was a reminder of necessary omissions, but not of those things themselves, those would be lost forever. You hid things, too, with craft, using a small knitted pillow to conceal spent casings from bullets used to shoot law books, which were lined up for execution in the back woods. A facile and darkened mimicry.
A tree grows around a rope.
I considered taking you with me, but I was sacrificing you instead. An offering to make peace in my absence, to heal over the wound. I could not take you with me. When offering such things, a layperson can either remove the seeds or make the fruit allowable slightly damaging it with a knife. This is done by piercing the fruit; it is a form of seduction meant to reveal what is inside the skin. And I could count on you to be weak and not of your word. I saw that in you from the beginning. And your insinuation, your striving. If not for these things the replacement could not have happened. Now it would simply be a process of “making allowable”. Just the body sitting in for another body, learning to speak the language.
Would you be poisoned forever by your own treachery? Never whole? Never integral? Word always loose and false. There are twenty more years to diverge now. But those years are already past, not the future.
Stories are written as if they are the past but I am foretelling this story not telling it. I know what will happen. I see the world coalesce around my pain and my birth. You tried to burn a silk scarf with an iron and we were surprised at the length of time it took to create the dark impression on the peach silk.
Monks will refrain from carrying on correspondence with women, other than for matters pertaining to the monastery, travel arrangements, and providing basic information. When teaching, even in a letter, it is easy for inspiration and compassion to turn into attachment
The earth will move with me as collateral from these violent observations. Nations will change too, because language will change. When female background is born the world will lose its words. All scrambling to put like with like instead. Consumed with fear and compulsion. It will be foretold with the undifferentiated, incessant voices of women escalating to a violence. Against one another because they cannot learn, they’ve become small, trivial.
Part 2: Chatter
I will practice replacing girls with other girls. With moving them into the background. All of them, so there is nothing to be distinguished between a landscape and a swath of hair. The hills around my house and the back of an animal. I will have a puppet theater in the bathtub: two twins moving back and forth between personalities with a simple incantation “you be me.” And then to switch, “ok, now you be me.” Mimicking each others speech and manner. Telling one another’s story. Becoming one another like jumping rope double dutch style.
I will cast spells of objects and actions over time. I will take the puppets into the woods, as snowy trees move back and forth and I’ll have them whisper in alternation: “you be me, ok, now you be me.” I will change my body and my dress. I will wear glasses, pretending not to see, and then dye my hair. My costume will make us indistinguishable to the untrained eye so that when I am ready to leave, you will not notice me gone, will not feel the absence.
“I made her for you. I will give her to you at my vanishing point.”
Women’s voices will be indistinguishable from one another; as the sound and number escalate, like a flock of migrating birds marking the time to go, the effect is dissonant, raucous, desperate, and volatile. It portends a violence. The are no distinctions, pure background.
Part 3: Fertilization
Once a single sperm has penetrated, the cell membrane of the egg changes its electrical characteristics. This electrical signal causes small cortical granules just beneath the membrane to empty their contents into the space surrounding the egg. The contents swell, pushing the other sperm far away from the egg in a process called cortical reaction. The cortical reaction ensures that only one sperm fertilizes the egg. The other sperm die within forty-eight hours.
I move away from the plot of land in the midst of trees demarking, but only barely, parts of the rural hillsides. I move up through celestial spheres, I watch these earthbound parts getting smaller. You try to follow, grasping skyward. I see the perspectival distortion of your form as I look backwards, your head striving large and body trailing small behind you. Passing the boundary from one sphere to the next, it is time to let go. The sphere’s membrane closes, forever. Your rapid mutual descent to earth tempered by snow falling quietly and gently. Nestled together back into the hillside, the bucolic sphere rests on a small wooden stand, which rests on a small wooden, bedside table. This makes it all easier, more stable.
A midwife protects the boy’s arrival.
Celestial Mechanics
There is a movement, as in circles of a purgatory, from the detective to the monk. It is both a natural progression, but also a spiritual progression involving certain practices using a series of ropes and strings. The movement, which might be understood as a progression, or even an ascension, requires the proper movement of these ropes and strings involving the dexterity and coordination of an athlete combined with the precision and vision of a craftsman. The detective learns to identify clues and to collect them. He begins organizing them, using the ropes, tying one to another in an appropriate sequence to create a tool, like a net that may slowly hold all of the clues. It will account for them, that is why the order and sense must be present, leaving no space too large for things to fall through or too small for things to become pinched.
When I fell in love it was by the ocean, but not in a warm place. There were trees and moss and grey weathered decking. I was doing simple tasks with my hands like crocheting and making nets. In order to make nets one must tie a serious of knots and connect them. Like a wall with images and names, bits of button or cloth pinned up in clear plastic sleeves or bags, old hairnets and cigar boxes, an ashtray from a rest stop in Alabama – all clues that a detective collects and then connects with marker or pieces of red string, connecting until something comes together that can be used to catch other things. To hold other things. Maybe fish. A shape of time.
The future, it is like pure spirit, no encumbrances like body, pressing down and deforming the truth. The good detective, the one on the ascending path, has learned that eye witness testimony is either unreliable or exactly as true as anything else in the past, meaning not nearly as true as the future. It is this realization, among others, that incites the detective to ascend towards the monk. Moving from a series of clues that reveal a story to no clues, pure story. There is no language in the future, language has always been the currency of falsehood.
The detective moves towards the monk. The ropes once used for tying nets are now just turned and turned, no knots. He begins to learn his witnesses cannot be trusted, perhaps through malice, but more often by nature. As with making nets by the ocean, double dutch moves ropes in a rhythm, but unlike the detective, who ties the series of knots, who closes the loop to contain things, the double dutch ropes keep moving. They are never tied off; they never stop. This is why the detective introduces (again) double dutch to New York City. I will go there.
When you sense what is invisible, or what is different than you sensed before, a different kind of substance, it may be considered an illness. Like deafness or blindness, a diminution of certain senses that allows others, now enhanced, to come to the forefront. This substance that I sense is between the other stuff. Between the people and the words and the chairs. It is what lets the double dutch jumpers know the moment to jump into the swinging ropes, it is not only where the ropes are but where they aren’t and this is never static, so what is it they are waiting for? What are they accustoming themselves to as they rock back and forth judging the moment. Sensing the moment. Falling in love. Sensing the movement of space and substance and accommodating oneself to that rhythm, first inside feeling that particular fullness and lacking that is that other person. It is a rhythm that you must match before you can jump in. It feels good to be home in that way, to find a movement that is yours, even if it looks different than you thought it might.
I started seeing things differently. Only the word seeing no longer seemed like the correct word. I have heard people talk about the spaces in between things. The illusory spaces and the idea that even in what we think of as discrete bodies there is more space than substance. In this way people can imagine the physicality of interconnectedness, as well of course as disconnectedness. I’m afraid once I invoke the language of the space-in-between, it concedes too much to the concept that there is in-between, somehow as primary, or in-fact. As if the point were made by banging a hand on a wooden table, only further confusing the issue by emphasizing the wrong senses, materiality, violence, the concrete.
I watch the girls playing double dutch. Two swing the ropes, connected not through ropes but through rhythm. And the one girl readying to jump in. She rocks back and forth, one might say waiting for her moment. She is not waiting. She is preparing. She is becoming part of the rhythm, taking on some part of the motion and adding her own.
I am seeing the rhythms that are entered into. The ones that match our own, so we can most easily move with and through them. It is seeing what isn’t there. It is learning to see what is not visible, like background. Like female.
Don’t Touch
DREAMLIFE: A collection of women’s dreams, recorded and then translated here as part of the Female Background metabolism. A way in, a way out.
There was another mother telling me that her son had a condition where his ears dripped lots and lots of wax and my son was trying to play with him and she kept telling him, “Don’t touch his ears.”
“Don’t touch his ears.”
I had a suitcase in a hotel. I couldn’t figure out whether I should take the bus there or drive myself to get the suitcase out of the hotel.
The Ghost
Walled in under the snow, things will take a turn.
Dreaming and doing manually, self-raised of weeds.
The Old Garden, fruiting time, birdcraft.
To fruit time: games of patience.