of power, time and target. (patron-only post) (Patreon)

(patron-only post)

dear ones ....

today i went to target.

i can handle anything
as long as i have
something
to put it in.

i wheeled my cart down endless aisles
thinking about all of the pain at home
all the
notebooks and piles of cables and lotions
and spices and dead batteries

the markers and scarves
the too-small screwdrivers
the one-glove condundrums
the iphone adapters
the things i can’t let go of

that all want
to matter

but don’t.

as long as i can put them somewhere
IN something
a nice box, like wood maybe, nothing too plastic
to label and write on
then wind with elastic.

i found some cloth boxes in aisle 11
they were flat, then pop out, and i bought
the whole lot. 

and in the bathroom section i found a nice little divided
tray, three sections, all little
and i found my heart getting bigger, expanding.
this was making me so happy.

i stopped in aisle 6 and fondled an elsa doll for ash.
he’s obsessed with frozen right now. i bought her, too.
let it go. i put her in the middle of the bathroom divider tray.

then i saw, on the end of an aisle
-on sale!-
little red lacquer wooden boxes,
no bigger than my fist,
made in the U.S.A.
perfect for storing
unpleasant and unexplained childhood memories. 

i bought three

and then i saw a little chest of metal drawers - soap-sized -
where i could fit a half-dozen ideas for plays i will never write.

then i turned down aisle 7 and found some canvas hanging storage bags big enough to fit every single dead ex-boyfriend from my 20s. 

so handy! - and these could probably fit in the barn with all that furniture
that we don’t know what to do with, and probably never will.

i found my way to the check-out counter - cart piled high
and
one last impulse purchase
bought four little brown jars - like mini jam jars -
where i can stash all unfulfilled sexual fantasies

but not in the kitchen where guests might see them.
i’ll put those in drawers in the bedroom
next to the boxed-up vibrators
that nice fans & friends have given me on tour
which have never been opened
or blessed with batteries.

maybe i can
store the dead batteries
in the vibrators i’ll never use.

i can handle anything
as long as
i have
something
to put it in.

..................

and now back to your regularly scheduled amanda.

mary oliver died. 

her writing meant a lot to me...especially a xeroxed copy of her essay "of power and time", which was handed to me in my early twenties by someone important in my life. anthony? a teacher of mine? that i can't remember is poetic, given the essay. the internet is magical and i found the entirety of it cut and pasted somewhere, and i'm giving it to you, below. read it and then make us all feel better by buying ANY collection of her poems and essays (they are all wonderful, but if you want a great starting point, try "upstream"). she had a WAY of writing, a way of explaining her inner thoughts with word-combinations, a way of explaining nature...she was sui generis.

more: maria from brainpickings wrote this wonderful piece.

.....

this goregeous piece of art came in via instragram by an illustrator who goes by @dantedelavegaa.

now that i am putting out art

art is coming back

i've missed that - i've missed the muse art conversation

i like being a muse with a sword.

......

more reading for you...this is an incredibly searing personal essay written by my pal kristin russo, about her miscarriage. it seems i am becoming a container for peoples miscarriage and abortion stories. 

great. i want them all. and i want to share them all. read it and love:

https://www.autostraddle.com/the-might-have-been-445867/

.........

i've been at home just catching, catching, catching up.

dudes, literally - i've been to target TWICE. TWICE IN TWO DAYS. I DID NOT HAVE ENOUGH BOXES.

 what is MY LIFE.

i live in upstate new york. there is nowhere else to go to buy some of the basic needs. it makes me feel dirty all over. i am also a mom with no dad and a toddler and everything takes more time than i want it to and the list gets longer, not shorter, every day.

i am fine. 

..........

there is a lot to catch you up on....get ready.

i have a lot to ask OF you, actually, with tour coming up....and there is a lot of intellectual content coming down the pike this month - talking, considering, it seems like the right season and time for that. 

if all goes according to schedule i'll be able to get you an interview i did at berklee, and the long-awaited "conversations with people who hate me" podcast (plus bonus patron content) should also be out by the end of the month.

right now i am just catching, digging, listing, settling, trying. 

mary's words are helping me.

i love you, and am beyond grateful for all you, especially in this dark wintery buried season.

much more soon....

the light is within reach

find a box and put some shit in it

i swear 

it'll make you feel better.

i'm reading comments (at night)

xx

afp

OH p.s.: the portland show is SOLD OUT. just a heads up. we'll hopefully be adding a second show there....BUT....reminder to get tickets now and not later. i will be writing at length soon (on the list) about the show itself, what it is, why it's amazing, and all that. but if you trust me...just get tickets, before they disappear.

all tix at http://amandapalmer.net/shows/

..........

OF POWER AND TIME 

by Mary Oliver

It is a silver morning like any other. I am at my desk. Then the phone rings, or someone raps at the door. I am deep in the machinery of my wits. Reluctantly I rise, I answer the phone or I open the door. And the thought which I had in hand, or almost in hand, is gone.

Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart-a pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.

But just as often, if not more often, the interruption comes not from another but from the self itself, or some other self within the self, that whistles and pounds upon the door panels and tosses itself, splashing, into the pond of meditation. And What does it have to say? That you must phone the dentist,that you are out of mustard, that your uncle Stanley’s birthday is took weeks hence. You react, of course. Then you return to your work, only to find that the imps of idea have fled back into the mist.

It is this internal fore-this intimate interrupter-whose tracks I would follow. The world sheds, in the energetic way of an open and communal place, its many greetings, as a world should. What quarrel can there be with that? But that the self can interrupt the self-and does-is a darker and more curious matter.

I am, myself, three selves at least. To begin with, there is the child I was. Certainly I am not that child anymore! Yet, distantly, or sometimes not so distantly, I can hear that child’s voice-I can feel its hope, or its distress. It has not vanished. Powerful, egotistical, insinuating-its presence rises, in memory, or from the steamy rivers of dreams.It is not gone, not by a long shot. It is with me in the present hour. It will be with me in the grave.

And there is the attentive, social self. This is the smiler and the doorkeeper. This is the portion that winds the clock, that steers through the dailiness of life. That keeps in mind appointments that must be made, and then met. It is fettered to a thousand notion of obligation. It moves across the hours of the day as though the movement itself were the whole task. Whether it gathers as it goes some branch of wisdom or delight, or nothing at all, is a matter with which it is hardly concerned. What this self hears night and day, what it loves beyond all other songs, is the endless springing forward of the clock, those measures strict and vivacious, and full of certainty.

The clock! That twelve-figured moon skull, that white spider belly! How serenely the hands move with their filigree pointers, and how steadily! Twelve hours, and twelve hours, and begin again! Eat, speak, sleep, cross a street, wash a dish! The clock is still ticking. All its vistas are just so broad-are regular. (Notice that word.) Every day, twelve little bins in which to order disorderly life, and even more disorderly thought. The town’s clock cries out, and the face in every wrist hums or shines; the world keeps pace with itself. Another day is passing, a regular and ordinary day. (Notice that word also.)

Say you have bought a ticket on an airplane and you intend to fly from New York to San Francisco. What do you ask the pilot when you climb aboard and take your seat next to the little window, which you cannot open but through which you see the dizzying heights to which you are lifted from the secure and friendly earth?

Most assuredly you want the pilot to be his regular and ordinary self. You want him to approach and undertake his work with no more than a calm pleasure. You want nothing fancy, nothing new. You ask him to do, routinely, what he knows how to do-fly and airplane. You hope he will not daydream. You hope he will not drift into some interesting meander of thought. You want this flight to be ordinary, not extraordinary. So, too, with the surgeon, and the ambulance driver, and the captain of the ship. Let all of them work, as ordinarily they do, in confident familiarity with whatever the work requires, and no more. Their ordinariness is the surety of the world. Their ordinariness makes the world go around.

I, too, live in this ordinary world. I was born in it. Indeed, most of my education was intended to make me feel comfortable within it. Why that enterprise failed is another story. Such failures happen, and then, like all things, are turned to the world’s benefit, for the world has a need of dreamers as well as shoe-makers. (Not that it is so simple, in fact-for what shoemaker does not occasionally thump his thumb when his thoughts have, as we would say, “wandered”? And when the old animal body clamors for attention, what daydreamer does not now and again have to step down from the daydream and hurry to market before it closes, or else go hungry?)

And this is also true. In creative work-creative work of all kinds-those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward. Which is something altogether different from the ordinary. Such work does not refute the ordinary. It is, simply, something else. Its labor requires a different outlook-a different set of priorities. Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity.

Intellectual work sometimes, spiritual work certainly, artistic work always-these are forces that fall within its grasp, forces that must travel beyond the realm of the hour and the restraint of the habit. Nor can the actual work be well separated from the entire life. Like the knights of the middle ages, there is little the creatively inclined person can to but to prepare himself, body and spirit, for the labor to come-for his adventures are all unknown. In truth, the work itself is an adventure. And no artist could go about this work, or would want to, with less than extraordinary energy and concentration. The extraordinary is what art is all about.

Neither is it possible to control, or regulate, the machinery of creativity. One must work with the creative powers-for not to work with is to work against; in art as in spiritual life there is no neutral place. Especially at the beginning, there is a need of discipline as well as solitude and concentration. A writing schedule is a good suggestion to make to young writers, for example. Also, it is enough to tell them. Would one tell them so soon the whole truth, that one must be ready at all hours, and always, that the ideas in their shimmering forms, in spite of all our conscious discipline, will come when they will, and on the swift upheaval of their wings-disorderly; reckless; as unmanageable, sometimes, as passion.

No one yet has made a list of places where the extraordinary may happen and where it may not. Still, there are indications. Among crowds, in drawing rooms, among easements and comforts and pleasures, it is seldom seen. It likes the out-of-doors. It likes the concentrating mind. It likes solitude. It is more likely to stick to the risk-taker than the ticket-taker. It isn’t that it would disparage comforts, or the set routines of the world, but that its concern is directed to another place. Its concern is the edge, and the making of a form out of the formlessness that is beyond the edge.

Of this can there can be no question-creative work requires a loyalty as complete as the loyalty of water to the force of gravity. A person trudging through the wilderness of creation who does no know tis-who does not swallow this-is lost. He who does not crave that roofless place eternity should stay at home. Such a person is perfectly worthy, and useful, and even beautiful, but is not an artist. Such a person had better live with timely ambitions and finished work formed for the sparkle of the moment only. Such a person had better go off and fly an airplane.

There is a notion that creative people are absent-minded, reckless, heedless of social customs and obligations. It is, hopefully, true. For they are in another world altogether. It is a world where the third self is governor. Neither is the purity of art the innocence of childhood, if there is such a thing. One’s life as a child, with all its emotional rages and ranges, is but grass for the winged horse-it must be chewed well in those savage teeth. There are irreconcilable differences between acknowledging and examining the fabulations of one’s past and dressing them up as though they were adult figures, fit for art, which they never will be. The working, concentrating artist is an adult who refuses interruption from himself, who remains absorbed and energized in and by the work-who is thus responsible to the work.

On any morning or afternoon, serious interruptions to work, therefore, are never the inopportune, cheerful, even loving interruptions which come to us from another. Serious interruptions come from the watchful eye we cast upon ourselves. There is the blow that knocks the arrow from its mark! There is the drag we throw over our own intentions. There is the interruption to be feared!

It is six a.m., and I am working. I am absent-minded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be. The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt. My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth. It does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot. My loyalty is to the inner vision, wherever and howsoever it may arrive. If I have a meeting with you at three o’clock, rejoice if I am late. Rejoice even more if I do not arrive at all.

There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done. And the occasional success, to the striver, is worth everything. The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave it neither power nor time.

------THE NEVER-ENDING AS ALWAYS---------

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