Interview With Maureen Seaton

An interview by Neil de la Flor:

The poet Maureen Seaton.

Maureen Seaton is the author of Venus Examines Her Breast; Little Ice Age; Furious Cooking, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize and the Lambda Literary Award; Fear of Subways, winner of the Eighth Mountain Poetry Prize; and The Sea Among The Cupboards, winner of the Capricorn Award. She is the co-author, with Denise Duhamel, of Exquisite Politics, Oyl, and Little Novels. She is the co-editor, with Denise Duhamel and David Trinidad, of Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry, forthcoming, Soft Skull Press. She is the co-collaborator, with Niki Nolin, on “Literal Drift” and “Chaosity,” and the forthcoming “Cave of the Time-Stream,” web-based hypermedia collages. Maureen is the recipient of an NEA fellowship, an Illinois Arts Council grant, and two Pushcarts. Currently, she is Director of Creative Writing at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, FL.

The idea for this interview was conceptualized at Havana Harry, Maureen (and Neil’s) favorite Cuban restaurant in the republican heart of Coral Gables, which is, disputably, the best Cuban food in town. Over Harry’s Chicken (which is breast of chicken smothered with guacamole, sour cream, and cheddar cheese), served with black beans, rice, and overcooked plantains we discussed the importance of well-cooked plantains and the legalization of same sex-marriage. We also spoke about her work as a poet, her concept of the transliminal, her love of literary collage and collaboration, her experiences as a mother, teacher, and mentor; and the 18 months she spent taking care of her dying mother in Jensen Beach, Florida, and Pinckneyville, IL.

Throughout her mother’s illness, Maureen kept a journal filled with random clippings, found text, furious self-portraits, found objects, and images, as well as hand written lists written by her mother. Much of the raw material for this journal, with its gorgeous purple crushed velvet cover, would eventually become her latest collection of poems, Venus Examines Her Breast.

I asked Maureen and she has agreed to share some of her private journal with us because I believe it is important to see the process of making poetry just as much as seeing and/or reading the final product itself. This is the making of poetry, behind the scenes. Where
meaning is made and/or found in and out of chaos. An extraordinary human being, Maureen Seaton is a friend, mentor, and dazzling poet.

Furious Cooking: The Kitchen Cabinet The poem book Furious Cooking (published by University of Iowa Press; April 1, 1996). An art box Maureen made for her publication, Furious Cooking. + View more images N: Before we discuss my favorite book of yours, Furious Cooking, I’d like to give readers a sense of what’s cooking in your kitchen now and what’s stored in your cabinets. Who are/were your mentors? What makes you tick and what ticks you off? M: I only furiously cooked once and that was the time a whole chicken went flying across the kitchen covered with marinade and aimed at my lover. After that I gave up marinating. A poem came out of that evening, of course. I brought the poem to the house of a friend who had invited me to dinner with her and her partner. It was the only time I ever wrote a poem for an occasion. My lover loved to tell the story of that chicken, the way it ended up wedged beneath the door of the dishwasher. I rarely cook the entire body of an animal now. If it looks like someone’s body, I can’t eat it. I’m not a vegetarian. If I didn’t like meat so much, though, I would be. My cabinets are filled with tuna and sardines in case there’s another hurricane in Florida and my mentors have been few and mostly among my peers. Marilyn Hacker, a non-vegetarian, has been there for me for years. Deborah Digges and Mark Cox were good mentors in grad school. You’re my mentor now, Neil. N: Will you talk about the politics of Furious Cooking. Give the readers some background because I think it’s important in the context of all your work and, possibly, your motivation as a writer. M: Regarding the politics (or religion) of Furious Cooking: it’s about redemption for sinners, like a lot of what I write, but the kind of sinners who go on sinning. The redemption is from silence. Into the noise of loving. It’s also about putting another voice out there that doesn’t think certain things are ok: like war for profit. My motivation as a writer is to make my own existence so palatable that my daughters and my students and my friends will want to stay alive with me. N: Women, throughout history, have been silenced, by men and by the church. In Furious Cooking, you’ve constructed a narrative space where women are recast as empowered, transformative beings, even as witches and healers, who rise up to reclaim their literary voice and rightful place in the world. Talk to me about this space and the triggering event for this book. M: The triggering event, literally, of Furious Cooking was a drive-by shooting a few blocks from my daughter’s school in Chicago. There were a lot of teenagers murdering teenagers in the early to mid-nineties in Chicago. How could that happen? A society that can’t protect its kids—I don’t know. It got me thinking about culpability, and then I got into the feminist history of the witch burnings in Europe and worked on a project with a couple of visual artists I knew. We did some stenciling, actually, some graffiti. I had written “The Red Hills” in Ucross, Wyoming in 1987. It was the oldest poem in the book. There was a lot of bloodshed in that book. There was a lot of anger at the usual powers. I tried to express the anger in the arts projects and in a long performance piece I produced at the time with about twenty other women. I hoped the poems wouldn’t be so angry that they lost their punch. I succeeded about half the time, maybe. N: Can you talk about these women, these martyrs? M: I don’t think I can talk about women being martyrs right now, not this week after the election. It’s still too fresh. Let’s just say that I was raised to want to be a martyr for Christ. I used to run my bath water really hot in case someone ever wanted to boil me in oil. I used to pray that they wouldn’t tear my breasts off. I thought I could stand arrows, but not rape; beheading, not fire. I thought about it a lot. In my wildest scenarios, I never dreamed Christ would come after me, but it sure looks that way, (after the election) doesn’t it? Maybe all that training will pay off. N: Talk to me about the Malleus Maleficarum. What is this document and how did it change your life and inform your poetry? M: “The Malleus Maleficarum or The Witch’s Hammer was a comprehensive witch hunter's handbook mandated by Innocent VIII and written by Dominican inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and James Spreger. It was first published in Germany in 1486 and quickly spread throughout Europe, second only to the bible in sales until the publication of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress in 1678. It was divided into three sections: the devil and his witches, how witches cast spells, and legal procedures for trying witches.” That’s the note I included in Furious Cooking. You can buy a copy of the Malleus for yourself, you know. It’s worse than chilling. I don’t know how to describe its inhumanity. It’s part of a legacy kept hidden from little Catholics and from women. It’s what can happen when ignorant people are manipulated by fear. 99% of the witch trials, torture, and executions occurred outside European cities. Millions of people, mostly women, were exterminated for heresy, midwifery, oh, and flying and kissing the devil’s butt. It was a way for the Catholic Church to acquire land and power. N: Tell us the story of the woman in “After Sinead O’Connor Appears on Saturday Night Live, the Pope.” M: Late one night the three of us, artists and writers, were stenciling a hooded figure symbolizing a woman subverting the dominant culture on the sidewalk in Andersonville, IL. We had just sprayed it on when a young woman walked up to us and asked what we were doing and were we from a church group or something. Kind of an interesting spin, we thought. We told her we were just artists working on a project for anti-violence and she came closer to us and said, pointing to the sidewalk, “Is that for me then?” She had bruises all over her face and said she had been beaten up the night before by her boyfriend. We told her it was and she started crying. We knew we were on to something. That was our first night out. N: The opening poem in Furious Cooking, “The Red Hills,” ends with the line “In the darkness we are all holy.” Maureen, are we all holy, yet? If not in darkness, will we ever be? M: I wrote that line many years ago and holiness is still an attractive idea to me. You know a holy person when you meet one. And you honor parts of people who have gotten holier with age. Like my Dad, who recently had this ability to listen to me rag on him because he’s a Republican and, if I would have let him, he would have hugged me (I wasn’t feeling holy enough). It’s pretty dark now, I think, let’s see how we all look under black light.

Sexual Reorientation N: I think it’s important that readers know you’re a lesbian and that being a homosexual gives you (and me) special powers. Discuss the differences (if you think there are differences) between being born gay and/or becoming (or choosing) to be gay. M: I was born just to the queer side of the middle of that continuum you hear about, the one where some people are born undeniably straight and some undeniably homo and there are all energies in flux in between, and some can go either way and they can traverse the continuum easily as they go through life (well, they could if they weren’t afraid of being murdered, for instance, or afraid of societal hatred, that sort of thing). I think I was born with a queer orientation, maybe as a bisexual (I was aware of all kinds of crushes in my teens, well, two kinds), then when I got old enough to finally step into my own shoes (comfortable shoes) (in my mid-thirties), I exercised my preference for women. That might explain me, maybe not. I’m a lesbian now, of that I’m certain. I also think of myself as a femme. I tried being a butch once and I kept waiting for my lover to flip me over and she never did. We’re good friends now, of course. Your special powers are quite apparent, Neil. I see them orbiting your head. Mine are buried in the sand at the end of my street, under the east pole of the volleyball net, growing fins. N: How has your sexual orientation transformed and/or informed your creative life? M: I’ve created hundreds of poems. Every one of them has a name: Piggy and Bob and Ricardo and Swamp Girl, to list a few. I believe I wrote them all with the muse or in partnership with the poems themselves, that everything I do happens in a synergy of relationship. That may be a queer way of thinking. It seems unstraight, at the least. The people I love have informed, transformed, chloroformed and deformed my creative life. Women are better at loving me than men are, on the whole. They like me with hairy pits, for one thing. Less grooming gives me time for more writing. (That will be gross to almost everyone but lesbians—see how lucky I am?) N: What can’t you write about? If you can’t say now, then when? M: Ha ha. (not laughing) N: If you could be any animal, what planet would you like to visit first? M: Ha ha. (laughing) N: Is it true you like ham? M: Only when it’s time-released.

Literary Collage The poem book Venus Examines Her Breast (published by Carnegie Mellon Univ Pr; February 1, 2004). A self-portait sketch from Maureen’s journal. + View more images N: Readers of your latest book, Venus Examines Her Breast, may or may not know you are a literary collagist. What is literary collage? M: Literary collage is to the poem what visual collage is to the painting (think of Picasso gluing a piece of oilcloth onto one of his still life’s in the early 20th century—or Joseph Cornell’s boxes): there’s disrupted narrative, there’s found text glued into original text, there’s completely found text, there might be graphics, there might be recipes, songs, prose mixed in with verse, but the biggest thing is disruption of the linear, of the expected narrative. It’s great fun to write and it totally disarms readers because we’re so used to reading linearly. It’s like having to look at a whole quilt made up of dozens of smaller parts, but up close, moving from piece to piece, not getting the big picture until we can back away from the quilt and see the entire gorgeous work. Yet each part is amazing in itself as well. The reading of literary collage requires exercising the mind in a new way—it causes anxiety at first, but then excitement as the mind becomes engaged, yay! This can take a while. Patience and open-mindedness highly recommended. N: Why do you choose to write using collage techniques and how does collage inform and/or heighten your writing? M: I truly, this is so cliché, did not CHOOSE to use collage techniques. They just kind of happened because my poems were getting bored with themselves. Yeah yeah yeah my poems would say and I too would start to nod off. Furthermore, I was raising two children (by myself, cliché #2) and had very little time to accomplish more than bits and bites of text. I could either kill myself for not having enough time and energy to write a terza rima, or I could take those fragments, move them around, glue them together, and see if my mind could follow the leaps. Lastly (not sure if this is cliché yet or not), I bought my first computer in 1994 and could more easily maneuver text. Voila: collage was born into my household. N: What does collage mean to your process as a writer, as a teacher, as a human being? M: It’s been fabulous. I adore the process of cutting and pasting. I adore its postmodern insinuations: that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts; that the mind, free to make its own associations, will rise to the realms of imagination and critical thinking; that there is no one truth to which we must bow—that every single reader will forge a meaning for her/himself from the text, which is generous and organic, not dictating. I love that! I love giving my students the tools to make literary collage. In one semester I can open up a world to them that they’ve intuitively been waiting for their entire lives—truly, with many, this is the case. As a human being, I’m better for every poem I’ve written, I think. Collage is democratic and reflects for me personally the ideals of the country I was born to care for. All this from the French word “to glue,” you ask? Only if you believe. N: Venus Examines Her Breast is a collection of collage poems mostly using non-traditional forms. However, your book is framed by two poems, “Pilgrimage to Bethlehem Steel” and “Venus Examines Her Breast,” which were constructed line-by-line and put into couplets, which does not necessarily follow the tradition of literary collage. Talk to me about your process behind these poems and how you came to place them where you did in your book. M: I had two older poems that fit the themes of my book—death, dying, and more dying and death—and they were written in my old, pre-collage days. (That’s collage, not college.) I wanted to use them badly, so I “framed” the rest of the book with them, as you noticed. I’m not sure if I was thinking of starting and ending with poems that were more reader-friendly—they were lyric-narratives and somewhat linear at least—kind of asking my readers to trust me as they plunged into the brackish waters of my collage pieces. The final poem, “Venus Examines Her Breast,” was written about my mother when she had first survived the cancer that eventually killed her. It reminded me of the end of that sweet lesbian film (?) where a dog that has died early in the movie breaks free from the ice-encrusted earth and goes tearing across the field. You know, resurrection, lesbian-style. Divine 2 and Divine 3, pages from Maureen’s collage journal. View more images 01, 02, 03 N: How did keeping a journal while caring for your mother help you when you wrote the poems that eventually became Venus Examines Her Breast? M: Certainly, one reason Venus is so fragmented is the subject matter—a terrible prolonged death (my mother had both bone cancer and Alzheimer’s). Actually, I didn’t expect to find poems in the journal later on. I kept it as a survival tactic. It usually takes me two to three years to write a book of poems. For those years I happened to be care giving and grieving. In other words, at the end, it was all the raw material I had. Venus is pure elegy. Collaging the text from the journal (and afterward) enabled me to conceptualize the death and the dying process in dozens of ways so that I, and the reader, would not feel totally pulverized by such a relentless song. I really had no idea there was a book there at first. But I’m a poet. It’s what I do. N: Have you ever considered writing a memoir? M: Sure. But if you think I need time to write a poem, let me tell you how much I need to write prose! I’m excruciatingly slow because of a near-fatal perfectionism. N: Isn’t your work, in Gloria Anzaldúa’s words, a form of autohistoria, a poetic memoir, an altar of words? Talk to me a little about the personal in your work. How personal do you get? How much of what we read is Maureen Seaton? M: When I write I use everything I think about the world or find in the world. I’m most interested in the how of using it. Or: I trust whatever it is I think so I don’t have to think about it very much. Everything is filtered through the personal, and the personal is filtered through the imagination, everything fictionalized in the wordplay, each poem is a world. It’s no good to me unless it reveals me to me and the world to me and makes me want to keep on in the world. So it has to have mystery so there’s fascination and hope and wonder. And nothing is more mysterious to me than the deeply personal and the way the mind ticks and the heart works. And all the things going on around the mind and the heart, that micro universe. I love the inclusiveness of collage writing. Here is a stanza of what I saw one night on my way to Etta’s house in Oak Park. Here is a stanza about the red building in Chicago that lost a window that killed a woman. Here is the method of glass-blowing practiced at Ox-Bow in Saugituck, Michigan. Put them all together and somehow, in some amazing way, there’s a path. And light. N: At Havana Harry’s we spoke about narrative layers and transliminal spaces. I think your definition of these two concepts will help readers understand your work and, at the same time, the power and beauty of literary collage. M: Well, you said we should have had a tape recorder that night! What DID we say about narrative layers? Something about the kinds of poems we like occurring in parallel spaces all at once? Complexity? Layers of meaning? At least three? Did we say three layers? Were we talking about meaning? I don’t think so. Maybe . We were trying to describe the imagination, perhaps? I have no definition! We were riffing. We were ecstatic for a moment. That was before the election, right? Right. (The night of the election!) I can talk about the transliminal a little better than narrative layers at the moment. We’re seatbelted for four years of transliminal. A time between horizons. Transliminal to me means a time when the next horizon hasn’t yet appeared and you’re pulling yourself through the desert on your belly with little water and lots of sand up your nose. It requires incredible strength and a great reliance on others of like mind. It’s right before, it’s transition in the birthing process, it’s terrifying. It is truly the chaos before creation. N: “You’re Babylon And I’m Brazil:” how was it constructed? How did the “narrative” come together out of the chaos? M: There was one semester while my Mom was dying when two teaching jobs overlapped for me. One day I was walking down Wabash in Chicago from one school to the other less than a mile away. Poet and fellow teacher Bin Ramke had stopped me at the first school and we’d talked for about fifteen minutes. That’s about how long before I arrived at the same exact spot that a woman was killed by a window flying out of the red building. (Niki calls it the orange building.) I was swimming in chaos those months. It was my milieu, something perhaps only another care giver for the dying can fully understand. The poem was constructed from fragments that I wrote with my classes that semester. At the beginning of every workshop we’d all write for five minutes. At the end of the semester I had many fragments. “You’re Babylon and I’m Brazil” was a line I wrote with my class in response to an exercise on metaphor. “You’re ____________ and I’m ____________.” We all marked which ones were our favorites and my students liked “You’re Babylon and I’m Brazil” the best of all my metaphors, so I used it as the title of my poem. Bin published it a year later. I’m not sure if he knew he might have saved my life. N: Would you consider this poem a transliminal space and/or representation of transliminal poetics? M: Yes for the poet. Yes for the child who was holding the hand of the dead woman and walked away without a scratch. No for the woman killed by the window. Or yes, depending.

Collaboration

N: It’s impossible to interview you without mentioning your work with long time collaborator, the poet Denise Duhamel and, more recently, the visual artist, Niki Nolan. What I would like to know is how collaboration with these and other artists has advanced (or detracted) from your personal aesthetic?

Maureen and Niki Nolan working together on a project.

M: I’ve been writing with Denise for about fifteen years—yikes! I LOVE collaborating. I love love love it. We’ve influenced each other’s styles unconsciously, I’m sure, although I don’t know if I can say exactly how. Writing with someone else makes you bolder. As a team you can get pretty outrageous. So we must have helped each other grow as individuals. She’s doing some risky stuff right now as we speak. And I kind of went off the deep end a while ago, experimenting with my solo work. We always experimented with the content of our collabs. We tend to experiment more, individually, with structure. My collaborations with Niki are different because we keep our impulses pretty separate—she does the visuals and I do the writing. She’s a computer genius as well as a fine artist. I’ve learned so much from working with Niki—the patience of the painter, the fine eye of the photographer, unique ways of seeing she brings to her digital images. I wish I could do that!! But I can’t, at least not this time around. I have Photoshop! Never used it. Working with Niki is next best. I adore what’s happening in cyberspace right now—words and images flying around. Niki has knowledge of the technology. I have a sense of the aesthetics of it, but no know-how. We’re a good team in lots of ways. We like the same food, just like Denise and I do. That’s crucial. If both collaborators eat ham, it helps. Or olives.

N: What is that magic that occurs when two or three poets get together and create a piece of writing with a uniform voice? Are the poets mimicking each other or is there a deeper undercurrent that the collaborators are tapping into?

M: Maybe the muse. Just waiting for a couple of ripe collaborators to come along and tap the well, the spine, the cistern, the minds of the goddesses and gods. That third voice, a little bit you, a little bit me—then, who’s that? It feels that way when you write solo too, don’t you think: you and the poem, then: Hey, who’s that? Someone comes in while you’re gazing at your cat. I used to think it was James Wright. Then I thought it was Black Elk. You would probably say it was Hambone.

N: Damn right!

N: But is it a merging of voices, of spirits, of purpose, or is it just dumb luck?

M: With another poet or writer or artist it’s just upped, that’s all, the energy goes up a notch, sometimes way up. I think when two poets really click they’re not mimicking each other, they kind of came that way—with similar sensibilities, although they might also be trying to make each other happy—you know, if I write this, Denise will just love it. Something I might not have written alone in a room with my computer on a Saturday morning. The uniform voice thing: yeah, sometimes that really comes through, but I don’t ever think of it as the goal. It’s ok when it happens, but it’s just as ok when it doesn’t. Two voices shimmering beside each other. Sometimes they coalesce, sometimes they retain their separate sounds and shapes.

N: Wanting more from the text is something we spoke about over Harry’s chicken. Sometimes, you said, you get the feeling text just isn’t enough and that when you write you feel like you want to take off, let the words fly. Does collaborating with visual artists bring you the satisfaction you’re looking for?

M: I do sometimes feel as if text keeps me too grounded. I love to dance and I think if I were a better dancer I’d have the same desire to fly away physically, leave the dance floor and just go. When I’m writing really fast that happens to me sometimes. One of those magical mysterious things—I sure do go somewhere else (into the imagination!), but when I look at the page or the computer screen—words, that’s it (although lately I’m thinking more about the negative space). How can I show the flying? So, yes, that’s why I love the digital world. I get tremendous joy seeing my words (anybody’s words) do something fluid in virtual land. It’s not exactly what I sense is really happening when I experience the off-the-page-ness of a poem in process, but it’s good. It’s really good. Still: “In a sheet of paper is contained the Infinite,” wrote Lu Chi (300 A.D.). And poet and teacher Muriel Rukeyser was fond of asking her students exactly where a poem exists, what is it made of? Where is the poem, she would ask. I love questions like that, I love all the possible answers.

Process

Process

Mario Matus & Cynthia Daffron & Neil de la Flor

Cynthia: Standard
Mario: Italics
Neil: Bold

I spent ten minutes putting chords together on my guitar, thinking of writing my first song. Not to worry, Neil, I won't sing (even I can tell how bad it is). But with a metronome or someone to keep rhythm, and no bar chords, we can have some plinging behind some spoken word if we have voice attached somehow. Tape recorder?

Well, since Mario is in our group maybe we can convince him to sing? Could be very interesting and moving. He doesn't have a bad voice.

Songs are cool... we could do "Kumbaya, My Lord.." I could sing but would we rather have a music track with spoken word over it?

Visual - The one thing I know is I somehow want a picture of me sitting on a fence or somehow being divided. I'm the limbo girl, but not how low can you go, rather, up down and around town. Thoughts on how you want to represent your self, culture?

I would love to attempt to draw you on the fence. I haven't had much success finding people to draw. At the same time, I can take some black and white photos of u on the fence. Color photos too. There are some interesting walls and fences in my neighborhood. However, any neighborhood is fine with me.

Why don't you include a self-representation and then include the pictures that an Other takes of you... how someone sees us...

Topics, words. I'm thinking about aspect of there being three of us, a triangle, the balances of triangles (the smallest closed shape, length, height, width, dimensional). I'm also thinking about Rock Paper Scissors, as we have our various different cultures, and how those stack up against the white male hierarchy. For instance, I'm white (which, yeah, is a made up term when the teams were divided -- but anyway, is considered good within the dominant paradigm), but I'm female (bad). Plus you have the aspects of sexuality. In a hand of poker, does straight Apache man trump a gay white male, and is a bisexual actually another word for a full house or just a whore? What about that we're all artists, poets, academics, weirdos? Commonalities in culture, things that we share, as writers, lovers of words, students, liberals, people prone to emotional excesses and moments of clarity.

The question is: how far or how much do we have to be pushed or push ourselves to step over the dividing line between straight, gay, or bisexual. Are these really divisions or like Mario said, really constructions like the white man is a construction. Are we not what Anzaldua says, that there is a bit of queer in everyone because it is in her since we are all human, genetically/socially bound?

The poker hand seems interesting... perhaps we should make playing cards with our pictures on them? The construction issue is too long for me to type out... but I'm going to go with constructions, both self-defined and imposed.

Sex and death. Or rather, not sex, necessarily, but the erotic, joy, as Mau said. And not death, or rather, that too, but maybe loss, grief. As noted, I have a big dead brother theme going in my fiction right now, but that comes out of the circumstances of my not-dead-but-living brother. So how things translate, little deaths (hmm, which in Shakespeare is right back to sex). Also deaths that lead to something else, that is the concept of personal rebirth (not in the Jesus as your personal savior born again way, but more, ways in which one starts over). For instance, every year I celebrate an adopted birthday on Nov.
5th, as it's when I started over in a way. Created holidays.

Who is Mau? Hmmmm. Good things to bring up. Especially the dead but not dead brother. Very interesting idea of little deaths or preparing for death. I know ever since I met Joe (and to some extent during Terri's illness) I knew he was going to die and was able to prepare for it, mourn for him, even while he was alive. Every sickness was like a little death, in a way. In comparison, when my friend Brandon died it was a shock, or when my grandmother died, it was a shock. That's a different kind of death, a different kind of grief. I don't know where I'm going with this but let's keep our emails.

Perhaps we should alter the way the altars are presented... not only the ancestors and those that passed... a mourning for the constructions? a letting go, if you will...?

Also, language. As evidenced by my poem today, it's an obsession, the way language includes/excludes/expresses. Also, the visuals of different alphabets, the lines and

squiggles of the Arabic, versus Cyrillic, which looks like the (what is the English alphabet called? Anyone? I can't remember)-- anyway Russian looks like a dyslexic made the alphabet. The word for "I" as in "I think, therefore I am" looks like a backwards R. But it's also only one letter.

Anyway, so I'm talking randomly, but I just trying to generate a conversation, things that stir me up, things on my mind.

Things in your butt too! Like whippets.

The Western alphabet... we could do other phonetic and ideograms if y'all want...

More on the idea of three:

When I was at Trinity College, 2 women and I dubbed ourselves for a time the Unholy Trinity, the Crone, Mother & Virgin (I was the mother, I believe, which amuses me now). Anyway, it was a reaction, of course, to the Father Son & Holy Ghost. Which brings up the religious cultural aspect. Do we all have some Catholic background? N, I know you went to Catholic school, and I'm thinking you did too M. I have almost no religious background, but technically, I am Catholic, as I was christened. My father was an altar boy (back when he went to church, well before I was born).

I'm a recovering Cath-a-holic...

Jesus Christ was my lover. As far as the bible, I've forgotten or willfully erased from my conscious most of the religious teachings I was taught. However, I do think society is very Christianized. It's even part of the constitution so no matter what Christianity is somehow a part of everything we do or fight against whether we know it or not.

I hate Larry King. Why does Mario use so many ellipses?

Because Neil, my sweet, you read your e-mail’s but not what’s in them, here's the synopsis:

From M’s syllabus: "Begin the creation of a collab-altar/an autohistoria (note 4). Discuss the possibilities with one another, visual, literary, web-based, etc. Five weeks until the launching of the Day of the Dead, Nov. 1. Draw up proposals and bring next week."

From Borderlands "4. In the essay, "Border Arte: Nepantla, el Lugar de la Frontera," Anzaldua identifies border visual art as one that "supersedes the pictorial. It depicts both the soul of the artist and the soul of the pueblo. It deals with who tells the stories and what stories and histories are told. I call this form of visual narrative autohistorias. This form goes beyond the traditional self-portrait or autobiography; in telling the writer/artists' personal story, it also includes the artist's cultural history." She continues that when she creates art, such as an altar, she represents much more than herself, "they are representations of Chicana culture". While her definition targets visual artistry, I believe that it could well describe the Borderlands genre as well.

From me (!) - So if I tell the story about a date I went on with Jerry and his Shiny White Teeth that proceeded to grind to halt when I mentioned to the Jerry I was bisexual, and he told me I'm "defective" I'm not just telling the story of my personal history, but also the culture history of living in a sexual border town.

You're bisexual? I would like to take a video camera to Twist and use part of it as a video montage for our altar.

Yes, everything is construction, but there is an element of self-definition. Anzaldua defines herself as queer, makes a choice to identify with a particular group. Granted, it would be difficult for me to define myself as a black man. But, on the other hand, there's my cousin, a woman of Italian Irish American descent, who participates with a Lakota sweat lodge, does vision quests in the desert, so she's adopted a new religious definition.

I think some people can become black because black is a construction. Look at Melissa. It sounds like she's part black has a claim to black but doesn't get accepted by her black ancestors. In effect, they want her to assume the black stereotype or their concept of what black is. So yes, it's still a construction. Being white has something to do with lineage, values, morals, religion, and cows!

True, the whole black/white thing is a construction, largely an American construction.

I'm into what you were saying about mourning while living, have the chance to say goodbye ahead of time. I'm wondering in the differences in the grief experience.

Not sure?

I think we really need to put Joe in here. I think he is sort of your patron saint in a way, symbolizes a lot for you. In a way, I have one of those too, Anne, the dead rings girl, who I never met, but who I feel in a way, a guardian angel.

Yes, interesting. Not that Joe is essential. What's essential is Cassandra Do and all those who have perished because of the dominant cultural attitudes.

And yes: what's essential is Cassandra Do and all those who have perished because of the dominant cultural attitudes -- but what is also essential is that we do not kill ourselves, believe all the dominant culture hype about how we are bad or wrong or undeserving or deviant one way or another. What is essential is not just mourning the dead, reclaiming and restructuring history (although that is crucial), but also surviving the present, staying alive (ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, staying alive), meaning retaining our selves, our joys, and so subverting that dominant paradigm.

A poet friend of mind in Minnie used to do a Day of the Dead thing where she set up altars all around town and asked people to put the names of their ancestors on a piece of paper & put it in the altar, at which point they were welcome to take one of the little clay skull heads. At the end of the project circulation, she has a ritual reading of all the names on the pieces of paper (along with some poetry, etc., I think. I don't know. I never saw the final event). The altars were quite groovy though, with paper skeletons and quotes and such, pictures.
Anyway, my point is (and you thought I didn't have one) we should think about the physical presence of the altar as well.

Ok.. I think that a physical presence is a good one...do we want to base it on a traditional style (i.e. candles, skulls, pics, etc) and/or develop our own version? Maybe pastels for Neil...

E-Mail to Neil is bouncing...

Collaborators

Collaborators

Neil de la Flor & Mario Matus & Cynthia Daffron

Cynthia, the witch and the warlock
Mario, the Virgin Mary as Guadalupe
Neil, the Tetragrammaton.

What is our culture?

We propose to be handsome monkey kings and queens. Cynthia, the princess of kings, said: ham! And: Ham-ham! Kings ham it up, leave me just a minor step-daughter down, Princess. Daddy said Princess, and sister, mother and I turned and answered. It pays to vary endearments. Red buttocks make for great commanders. Bareback gibbons make for great generals. The Princess Dowager eats autohistorias.

Our Actual Proposal

Create a sacred text (Bible) and an altar out of found material (helmets, plywood, random pots and pans).

Paint, write, free write, merge stuff, photograph, drawings, digital camera, hokey pokey.

Theme: The merging of the individual, where does one start and the other end, what is religion, who am I, who are you, who pooped, what is culture? How about being caught between cultures, synchronicity - things occurring at the same time for a reason (e. g.)

We’ll build an altar consisting of 4 sides, one each for each individual and the last as an amalgamation of the group. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. As individuals, we have the option to pick and choose who and what (yes, the dog did take one of my socks) we are. This relates to all things including gender, gender orientation, culture, and faith. We all have an origin but it is up to the individual to decide the destination.

(And I thought I was a gong, a big gong.)

Create a bile of sacred texts.

(But I was wrong, I was not a gong. I am gone, gone with the windows. )

It’s not about the altar or the text, but about us. The way we work together and manipulate our reality. We will preamble.

Synopsis: This brief proposal outlines our attempt to encompass and form a syncretism of three individuals into a new unit = multi-dimensional, multi-genre, in multi-realities, multi-lingual, multi-phasic, etc. A collaboration is a coming together of disparate elements, in this case characters, whereby a new element is formed. This is not unlike the combining of different metals to forge a new alloy like steel. Perhaps it is the fissioning into individual parts that is dangerous and misleading (nuclear power and the inability to coalesce a completely individual atomic particle) and it is the fusion of parts that can create (the sun, the earth).

What is culture, club and clash?

Schrodinger's Bones

Schrodinger’s Bones

Cynthia Daffron & Neil de la Flor & Mario Matus

He said: Belly dancing bears are born and live and explode into Big Bang bits all at once. Time, the fourth dimension where all things happen at once, is just a trick.

She said: You’ve scheduled a meeting with your neighbor, who once slept with your wife, the one who steals your newspaper. You plan to kill him, but you don’t know yet whether you will, you don’t know if you’ll go against God and commandments. But the cat in the box knows, Schrodinger’s cat knows by the beating of his heart if he is alive or dead or both.

I said: Cats! What does the big bang have to do with belly dancing? What is a belly? Why is my belly expanding? Did the infant universe expand like the big belly? Yogi! I’ve lost my bandwagon. I think I left it behind Schro(ding)er’s cat. My poor cat is all dead. Orange and white, he was just balding between the ears. One day, kaaaboom! Kawabunga! I never slept with the neighbor’s wife but I just had sex.

He said: So if quantum time is all time at once, where is the trancing-transliminal state? The are no borders in all at once, because it is all…transliminal is all and neither, at once, the contradiction, the holding of two truths (self-evident or not) that work together.

I said: What? Have you read the book Arrow of Time by Illya Prigogine? He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1977. Just now I searched the web and discovered he died May 28th, 2003. I never truly understood his work but I think it’s transliminal. His main scientific work focused on a better understanding of the role of time in the physical sciences and biology. He contributed significantly to the understanding of irreversible processes, particularly in systems far from equilibrium.

He said: Some much is given before the end.

She said: So, Roger the Cat, pet of childhood neighbors, long dead in my linear experience, his fur stays soft and warm under my hand. Roger is immortal in quantum time. I long for Roger, for the rabbit in the hat, the belly dancing bear, the moments of grace that are absent from my experience, skewed, linear, true to me, ethics sliding out glass doors like spilt grease onto relative Mexican tiles.

I said: I long for Illya. I long for him to explain to me the context of time. Is it really linear? Do we really die? At the end of life, is there another land? A Borderlands? Space of some sort, like turf or beach sand? Illya, do you hear me? If I reverse Schrodinger’s cat will I find the anti-cat? Isn’t all experience linear, Illya? If so, isn’t all literature. Is literature a measure of time or a reflection of it?

She said: Neil tangos with a rose held in his teeth.

She said: He tangos with a sheep beneath his feed.

She said: Mario shakes and sings “Suspicious Minds.”

She said: A little lives in all of us. Few of us ever live.

She said: In Minnesota, the school buses have shelters (for the living and the dead, Neil said) so you don’t freeze in the winter waiting to go off to school, don’t disappear off the line into a period dot, end of sentence, 1969 - 2004, RIP. Ripped and curled, you could also, in an alternate reality, be surfing in Hawaii, one armed like that girl, a shark swimming away, sated with a full meal.

I said: Who died in 2004? Who hasn’t died, yet? Multiply the 2 by 4 and you get a glimpse of history.

He said: In quantum time, all things are being BANGed. In the quantum time, all things fall apart. Entropy is the fairest of judges. Entropy is your mother’ milk. Entropy is your father’s breath upon her neck. Entropy is we.

I said: The second law (of thermodynamics) states that a closed system will remain the same or become more disordered over time, i.e. its entropy will always increase.

He said: Bang-bang!

New Scientist, July 2002, read: One of the most fundamental rules of physics, the second law of thermodynamics, has for the first time been shown not to hold for microscopic systems.

It also said: Results: researchers led by Denis Evans found the change in entropy was negative over time intervals of a few tenths of a second, revealing nature running in reverse.

And: By using a precise laser beam to trap latex beads it was discovered the bead was gaining energy from the random motion of a water molecule-the small scale equivalent of a cup of tea getting hotter.

She said: Well, if I cross a border, a limit, an edge does that line/space/horizon cross me? Can one really split the infinite? Constructions of human fallibility? Where do the constructions end and the constructing begin? Can we leave the space into which we’re born? Can we traverse the wide open space of our lives?

I said: Follow Illya, he knows the limit. But leave your chromosomes behind.

He said: I think Bongo is the best belly-dancing bear there ever was. There’s a picture of him performing with the Moscow circus in 1948 in a book somewhere. He wears a red hat (or we assume it’s red) since the pic is in B&W, but was it red? Who knows / who cares? Bongo the best belly-dancing bear and he is dancing with me. And Roger purrs contently as he enters the picture because he lives in Cyn’s quantum time and even though I didn’t know him, I know him now because I know Cyn. One degree of quantaration. All Cyn had to do was write about him and now he’s part of me.

I said: The red bear is black and white and is also red. His name is Roger and it is not Roger. Who is Cyn? One degree of separation could get you up into a quantum wind. Mints, anyone?

He said: Is that the next step? The sharing of mints? Thoughts and ideas? Feelings and memories? Where are Schrodinger’s bones? You’re right here with Cyn and I. Cyn is here with you and me. I’m here with Cyn and you. The convenant is 3…plus 1…those that regard/know the trinity.

I said: Zinger! It’s about opening vortices from the experiential world into the transliminal. It’s about drilling holes into our bones.

Pars Pro Toto

Another in a series of collaborative work with Cynthia Daffron and Mario Matus originally published at Admit2, a journal dedicated to collaborative work.

Pars Pro Toto

Series of collaborative paintings with Cynthia Daffron and Mario Matus based loosely on the surrealist game, Exquisite Corpse.