and the sun will return to your throat,

wild fruits I have known,

2012-03-13T22:22:51Z

The Letters of Edward Gorey and Peter F. Neumeyer

The small tree in front of my little house has sprouted flowers. It is the only blossom so far in the garden. Spring has come cartwheeling towards me.

Along my arms are deep scratches without maps. They appeared while waiting for a pizza handmade at the front of the shop by an Italian man born from the centre of an oak tree.
Every time I arrive back here, I look forward to the sound of the pavement slabs moving underneath my tyres just as I approach home.
Each evening when I drink tea, Ian approaches me believing that he is invisible. I gaze straight at him as continues to creep. He would not fare well as a deer.

vanishing,

2012-02-19T01:55:55Z

Edison’s anti-gravitation under-clothing, 1879

And I feel I have something to say before my destruction,
- Kendall, letter to Anais Nin.

Impossible things refuse to jump out of my hat any more.
I pass much of the time, these days, inside of this hat speaking with a rabbit over tea and biscuits. And time constantly tumbling past me in a flurry. I hold onto it sometimes and it drags me, half dead to the sea. I rub my eyes, astonished to still be alive, perplexed that this is my life and that it is not full as it should be, it is not bursting with passion in this moment. The greatest crime I could ever commit - licking away at the sun and murmuring about forgotten days, wishes made in the wilderness.
In this time, I am not a magician.

me levanto,

2012-02-09T02:07:04Z

Fritz Goro - Sooty tern chick standing forlornly as it waits for its parents from their daily hunting on the Great Barrier Reef, 1950.

/.
I felt I was myself a crawling insect doomed to perish, seized by destruction in the midst of a whole world ready to go to sleep.
-Knut Hamsun

I collected herbs from the mountains and dropped them into my breast pocket of my coat. Every time I put it on now, I am taken back.
Each morning I cycle to the sea and work on my Spanish for at least an hour. When Siberia leaves, I will begin to run again. And there are certain books that I pick up that remind me of heightened senses. I try my best to avoid them when the sinking days are around, as if drowning myself voluntarily.
The sacred white tea that was found behind a bakery in Denmark is with me here, six months on. It still clears my eyes, steadies my breaths. I drink it rarely, in the important times.
This is an important time. I am no longer headless but I wish the existential crises' would just shoo. There have been so many over the last couple of years. Does it matter what I'm doing with my life? Shoo, shoo. It does not help in the slightest that there is a dog across the road with exactly the same problem. He and I howl together often but he's far more persistent than me and rarely sleeps.

Seek knowledge, even in China,

2012-01-18T14:12:26Z

Giambattista Piranesi: “Il Ponte Levatoio/The Drawbridge” (1761).

Suddenly, the temperature has dropped. Last night travelling back in the dark, a large boulder of a man picked me up and he looked at me and asked if he could dunk me in his tea as he did not have any biscuits.
I had two hundred and fifty grams of smoky tea from China in my bag, enough to last me until the summer and most of my hair swiped off like a goat by a man who once worked with Vidal Sassoon and in Hollywood. I didn't think that was so much to be proud of when he spoke of the glory and the celebrities but I like my ears just the way they are and his scissors were sharp. He was from Sicily and expressed dismay at my washing my hair with stinging nettles.

Off for the journey of two thousand kilometres where it will almost be thirty degrees warmer than here. A winter of tea and books and the sea. And a bicycle and a small house of my own. It doesn't feel real, right now, as if good things cannot come without great struggle and pain.
It has already been, I tell myself. Go towards good things.

[title - an old Chinese proverb].

to write means to give all,

2012-01-11T02:49:38Z

Letters from a shipwreck - recovered and delivered [source unknown]

migration
some of my writing, hopes and attempts at clarity will be here now - http://birdsongsofpersia.tumblr.com/.
This journal will most likely stay in motion but within another form. It has been dear to me during these last near-on seven years. Thank you all for reading through these turbulent, passionate, sometimes ridiculous growth of times.

With warmth and the promise of hot steaming tea on long winter days,
Jass

the only way to leave the gallows is by flying,

2011-12-23T01:30:20Z

<
by Ben Shahn

Only a soul full of despair can ever attain serenity and, to be in despair, you must have loved a good deal and still love the world.
— Blaise Cendrars

Time in Berlin fell with the snow, gradual and soft, the days almost infinite. I sleep for twelve hours and wake as if from underground, inside myself. The eyes of this city leave me enchanted, powerful beacons of light through the thick, hard winter. I anticipate exploding. I wait, and I wait. For my heart to lurch out through the windows of candlelit slick graffiti bars or into the arms of a ticket inspector of the metro we hop on without tickets. But nothing. Just absence that grows stronger and stronger the more solitude that comes.
God, I'm so so sorry. I have not been enough. Not for you, not for I.
Too - I have not written enough and my life is not a transformation any longer. All the clarity that came in summer migrated to confused, foolish lands in autumn. And now winter.
But enough is a ridiculous notion.
Berlin, an energy of rebirth. A coat and a sweater given to me for the trip east. Blessings everywhere, despite all this.

Wroclaw - baked bread, tea, all day cooking a Christmas Pudding from my grandmother's old recipe.
Here the time hurtles by and I don't know what to make of it all. Deep, relentless confusion.
Be as light as the first snowflakes, I tell myself. Be the breath that came out of you when you saw your first moose in North America. Be excitement itself and curious even for the things that are already known. This must be the core and sweetness of what it is to be alive, I'm sure of it.
To rediscover instinct and to be led on whims and passion.

redoublement des mystiques,

2011-12-15T00:12:51Z

how we talk
together in the snow,
- Bahauddin

The need of deep creative destruction, songs to the arctic owl. Two degrees outside and travelling becomes a suffering to be sharpened and plunged deep into my stomach. Ven sleeping close to me upon the last night on earth, our last together for I don't know how many days or months or years as she makes her return back to Bulgaria and I must at last figure out what it is that I want to do beyond all, past motion, past whatever rabbits jump out of my hat. What is it that I'm doing after all of this? Where is my writing at the ends of the earth?
Try my best not to feel the abandonment, the desolation of a life alone once more. I ask if we just didn't want this life here. Four days together, passing in a stampede of blues.The maddened cold days of Copenhagen. They crawl into our words as irritations build en mass, flattened under the rails by trains carrying wingless birds. Loved, in love and will love but can no longer expect the miraculous to leap out of every street corner. I must have the strength to search it out at least.
The most logical thing. Bounding up to Scandinavia in winter could lose me my fingers. What is it that I'm becoming, growing to? If we are strong enough, we will make it through all. Horses galloping through ice-storms inside of me. To create an astonishing existence, finally.

that agony will be our triumph,

2011-12-03T18:48:01Z

The Ingoldsby penance. John Tenniel, from The Ingoldsby legends, by Thomas Ingoldsby (Richard H. Barham), New York, 1848.

and then the lights come on
in the middle of the night,
what should I do with my life,
how should I spend my time?
- the music of Cocorosie

Eastern France. Rallying instinct together once more. A flute teacher took me here after being approached in a reststation some 300km south of Paris saying that his car was full, that it was full of animals, that it could not possibly hold us all. Stepping in, he had to move his flute. It was his music, the giraffes, he was speaking of, you see.
After he agrees, he becomes flabbergasted that I am not completely mad. That there is a certain kindness to my voice, to my words despite my life and the way things sometimes go. That I call myself a writer if I must call myself anything at all but that I have never been published, that I could never create a product from that far inside. Instead, I write little and sometimes explode with words. I tell him all this in my second tongue and he understands and tells me that he has never been creative, has only ever followed the masters of classical orchestras.
I tell him : one day it will rip you open, this need to create and you must follow it to the end of the world, inside yourself or out of you.
You promise?
He smiles and tells me that I am young but old at the same time and one day he would like to read my writing.
My constant movement is my mask in front of my creativity, I say. I've not given myself the chance to sit down and let it all out of me. It was always something else. I fear I will go to my grave even if I am young now with it still inside of me. Most of all I must give hope to the darkest of times, else all is lost from my life.
You ever think that? I ask him.
He replies in English, this time.
Yes. Yes I do.

Small mountains beside the river. Reading beside it, scrawling notes of upheaval : a little boy approaches me and announces 'bonjour monsieur'. Bonjour monsieur', I reply back, grinning and he flaps his arms and bounds away.
Hikes far up into the sky. Mulled wine, The Taste of Cherry, incense, lentil soup - winter.

I get up before the sun today and walk the city as the rain coats me in song upon my skin. So far, so long, so distant. What it is to burn in the cold winter morning. Ven returning back to Bulgaria without us even having met in Denmark. It will be too much for her to travel in winter to find somewhere else. The Patisserias opening up, lifting their shutters. Freshly baked bread, the first pot of coffee at cafés, the sweeping rain painting my cheeks. Winter coming - soon, today perhaps will be the first snow. And in a day, or two, I will leave one thousand two hundred kilometres east or almost an equally journey north. My sleeping bag that is not ready for winter and now we have no place to live once more and together I do not know how to provide comfort and stability. Alone I would just go south, further and further until a town draws me in, to write in an attic all winter long and sometimes to teach.
But it is not what I want at all. I need us but is it possible after all this, after all the instinct to it and for it?
The old Roman thrones, men prancing down the road with long baguettes resting underneath their arms. I soften the anxiety, shut out the world and let music fill my ears. A cat watches me from a window with curiosity. The sun will begin to rise soon, I tell myself, the world is not a grave. Wandering headless into winter. You have never had much of a need for a head, I tell myself. And onwards.

for wantings to be sharpened,

2011-11-18T02:27:52Z

photo taken by Endless Suburbs

I hear songs of homecoming and hope, but I am weary.
-The Colour of Pomegranates (1969, Armenia)

The starving winter night consumes everything here. As soon as it's gone, it returns, biting upon the day light bit by bit.
Shockingly clear constellations as the village sleeps. I hover around them with the last of the fireflies of Italy, but I do not stay. My attention is that of a squirrel. My, my... what a tail you have, just darling, where did you buy such a thing? Well, it's natural, I reply, insulted, biting down on my finger that I had thought was a nut.

It's the end of November. It's the longest time that I've passed on this island in five years. It's taken this long to reach restlessness, surfacing like an oil spill over everything that has been here. Whole, determined hope had been omnipresent in the last months. Now the bicycle no longer works and so the beach is quite unreachable through the lungs of open sparse fen land. To walk here is to be confronted with the barren parts of you that you push further down when you can, the hardened fields speak of bleak days and thoughts that can't be let go. Some days I can do it but most leave me with the feeling that they will never end, these fields. Only the birds passing overhead to forage for food at dusk by the sea bring relief but hibernation is here, and I find the road once more next week, at last, at last! Yet, when all is met by the song of nesting, what can a man do when faced with long travels into the night?
Work is over but with it the focus and nourishment of pushing oneself to a limit that is so easily defined in this kind of work at least. It's an escape, I know, from the real task of what to do, at last, with my writing. A mask, a cabaret, a brass band to take away the real life of what it is to search, to dig, to transform.
Become obsolete. A focus only whispered in sacred literature.
And loneliness. My rides, as of late, must have thought I was a hermit who needed to talk to anyone more than anything else there could be. Just words, the sound of them, laughter, emotions. I've wanted to speak to everyone I see on the street, almost everyone have passed their heydays, their peaks and settle in front of the television screen while the house is on fire. Just pour some more tea on it will you, dear?

I run into the woods and return with the head of a field mouse. I run on squeaking and bewildered. I don't run any more, these days. It's cold too and I must keep my toes for Paris.

y el monte nada,

2011-11-13T22:51:01Z

Michael Kenna / Plank Walk, Morecambe, Lancashire

he can't write because he aims too high and can never be simple
- Anais Nin, writing of Jean Cateret

They are not light, they do not float, these words. They walk in the dust, singing vulgar songs at the bottom of the night when no one would ever hear. They sweat, they bleed but they never arrive. The pilgrimage to the land that has never existed.
I am not a writer, these words just manifest but they are not from me.
But it is only the journey that matters. I must aim at the ground and anything higher to be considered miraculous.

the rest will take care of itself,

2011-10-16T03:06:28Z

Bears Claw, Moorcroft, Wyoming.
Mitch Dobrowner

In the face of death, one asks oneself invariably : did I see enough, hear enough, observe enough, love enough, did I listen attentively, did I appreciate, did I sustain the life?
- Anais Nin, Journals, Volume III

Every day for the past three months I have ran. I have ran until everything leaves me. Till I'm light and could float, the breaths silver drifting out of me.
One day after weeks and weeks of steady running, my legs feel strong and I no longer feel the desire to quit. It always lingers at the beginning before the woods come and always I tell myself - if you quit now, you'll begin ending everything and things will end you. All that feared may happen, even far away, will heave themselves up and take form. You cannot.
The carnivals of loss, the burning street cars of Rome, of Denmark in Winter or not at all and how could you say goodbye? I wonder if I could not have lived more intensely sometimes, gulping in the forest air. I open my mouth real wide. All the times that I have floated along, have not risen up. Squirrels rush past me brushing against my ankles, I dodging in and out of tree stumps. The old woodland hermit tips his hat to me in greeting and continues to mutter words of a manuscript he's been working on since I had memories of memories but I fear he'll never finish it because he has ideas of grandeur and soon it will be time to begin preparing for winter once more.
On the last stretch, I sprint to turn lungs to fire. Lie panting on the wet grass, taste the dew, bend my feet over my head. Calm the breaths, examine my toes. They're still there, despite the recent cold. Astonishing.
Before it all lies in ruins, I smile broadly at what I have now. The secret passages. One, right here.

and now to rest,

2011-10-13T10:40:30Z

A month or so ago, we were walking back out down the home straight. His enthusiasm had returned and he had began to be interested in everything once more. He approached a plant and sniffed it deep and turned back to look at me. He made the sound of a half yawn and I gazed at him, astonished. It was the sound he made when he was real happy and content. It was the cry he would sometimes form when he would begin to smell the sea air.
I had forgotten this sound.
I will bottle it inside of me forever. If I am asked to describe something good and true in this world, this will be one of the things that I describe.
Simon returned on the weekend, my dear brother. On Sunday morning I came in from the tent to find them sleeping together in the kitchen.
When Simon returned to Bath, he began to fall apart fast quickly, as if he'd been storing all of his strength to say goodbye. A day after he departed, he could barely get out of his bed. He pushed his snout into my closed hand and kept it there for a long while. Sim rang and asked to talk to him, to tell him goodbye. Kudo breathed deeply and sighed into the telephone.
The idea of trapping things that were once wild into small rooms is wretched to me. But to believe in things that are beyond ourselves.
For hours in the rain, I dug the hole out past midnight. I could never dig holes. But this one came fast until I reached the roof tiles. There is another world underneath this one. I reach the chimney and decide it's deep enough. Out in the middle of the vegetable patch. One day there will be fruit tree there, nourished by him. I had dreaded carrying him out there after he'd stopped breathing but the man with the needle did it as he was wrapped in his basket blanket. We lit candles and they stayed lit even through the rain. The lion with a squeak in his head went down with him along with the plastic bone chewed to bits.
He was a great dog, my mother murmurs.
When it comes to me, my voice keeps breaking off when I start to read out a small piece I'd written. There were times when it seemed like I had no one there, but you were. Thank you. We love you. Rest well, at last. We'll always remember you, man.

the wine of wisdom gone mad,

2011-10-13T01:06:49Z

what will sink by Andrew Moore (intitulé par moi)

The personal life deeply lived always expands into truths beyond itself.
-Anais Nin

It was down on the river bank and If This is a Man was open before me. My skin danced in the sun, for it had been a summer with little of it.
Hunger had ate at me all day. It was the eighth day of a fast but only now had it began to get precarious. I follow the traces of my guts, where they lead me. The careful tracking of whims. I was happy, as all happiness seems to be in these days, in surges until the thoughts return.
Content to have found such a book. Out from my mind, my worries, my doubts that had began to surface in the last weeks. The gradual rising of several extinctions, fading away, harder to grasp any longer. Autumn and winter. That everything I thought once real, once true, may have changed form entirely now. That something in construction could fall to the ground from one weakened pillar.
A part of me wants to take myself to ruin, to drown, to go deeper than I have ever gone before. An offering to the arsonist.
But I focus real hard, grit my teeth. Without food as a comfort, I turn to words. A chapter is a feast. Obsessive patterns dissipate slowly. My beloved tea and biscuits in the evening out with the sun burning and sinking into me gone. Missing this tiny ritual fiercely, this comfort. Strong dark, smoked tea from a caravan crossing China to Russia heated gently on a small candle stove burner for days and days. And cooked cheese, despite having eaten so little of it in the last years.
Halfway through the day, I find I have nothing to separate morn and noon. To rest with a full belly. Instead I lie out in the grass with no clothes on with music in my ears, The Rip Tide. The sun here for the first time in years. It had been a dark summer. The island floats further and further north every time I return, I swear.
For the first time since exactly this point last year, I have no idea what will come. No frameworks, no reliance, no power. I must transform it to excitement and eagerness, but it will feel like something has died if all of this turns to dust. Well, what is real now, Snusmumriken?
And hunger on this day challenges for the first time. As if something was eating away at my insides and then making a quick get away with a full belly, while mine lies empty.

A man approaches with a camera asking if I could take his photo. There are certain times when such an appearance appears to be a miracle. Such was the force of a welcome disturbed thoughts.
He pretended to be sitting quietly as if in deep reflection when I took the photo. Laughter came out of me like the song of a hummingbird. I couldn't discern if he was serious.
He introduces himself as Pisal Ekhanit, or Paal. He asks what I was doing here, where I'm from. I tell him real answers, or as real as I can muster in this time.
-So, you're looking for a rabbit here...who stole the sight of your eyes?
-Yes.
-Ohhh, I see.
He was from Thailand and studies law. His PHD.
We speak of rice and environmental governance and children eating three eyed fish in the rivers out there due to leaks of something some such. A mistake mister, it won't happen again! he cackles. But it's not true. It always happens again. We have too much faith in people, and you, here, have too little faith but have a similar system where everyone ends up with three eyes or no eyes and they all get poorer and the river throwers get richer.
All the while he's snapping photos of ducks, as if he's never seen one before. What is it with cameras and those from out east? Is it to crystallise time or is button clicking that pleasurable?
Anyway, he clicks away while introducing me to Thailand and always of rice, for there are many rice fields there. That there is little sense of community here, but where he's from, for the rice harvest, everyone no matter what they're doing comes to help. The villages have rivalries for the best fireworks competitions.
-Is there a deeper sense of being to young people? You know, Thailand has such a rich history of spirituality, do young people follow this or has it gone the other way, like here?
He laughs. No no. More and more young people move to the city. The cities with their Mcdonald's and Coca Cola, their plasma televisions and high speed broadband porn services. Less and less care for the inner life any more. It's the external that excites them.
But one morning they wake feeling as empty as a desert. Then, the real life begins. Or they lose someone or something important to them. They see that everything turns to dust in the end.
I look for the time. Ten minutes. Shit. When you least expect it, things come to you.
I mean here, he says, few people question all the stuff that they've collected. You know the Ancient Egyptians? Who would bury themselves with their gold? They're like them. As if they expect that they can take all of this with them when it all ends. Else, they think they're immortal. But most people are just running away from their deaths. In panic and then they search for things to stop them from feeling. Even in food. Food! And drink, of course, very popular here. itouch 4 or 5 or whatever they're up to now and how important it is for their lives to get it. Careers- to feel like growth is in accord with your bank account!
They don't realise that it all turns to dust.

I look at this man closely. Shocked, happily surprised. Some time ago this kind of conversation would not have been possible. There are times when judgements give the core of man to drownin. To learn, little by little, to open up your guts and let it all in. I would like to set my thoughts out into the mountains and leave them there for a long while. Come back, pick them up and see what we can do together.
He laughs at me.
Surprised you, didn't I?
I smiled.
Let me surprise you with one more thing..
You don't have a problem with the future. You don't need those things, I can see it. But the past clings to you. It's this weight that drags after you.
-How do you let go of it, man?
You forgive. You let it go, you walk on, and be here. That's all.
Just be here.

the courage to go on, to explode,

2011-09-28T01:43:01Z

Unless you love, your life will flash by.
The Tree of Life [2011]

Barbara & Michael Leisgen - Mimesis, circa 1970s

Inside my travelling sack of tea, I find one packet that I had not touched. It had laid there for over two months, untranslated from Danish and Chinese.
Pai mu tan tea - otherwise known as white hairy monkey tea. Having discovered what it is, I jump up and down with excitement, forgetting all else that's inside of me. White tea!
I brew it carefully. Not boiling. 70 degrees. I lose the weight of the last days, weeks, months of uncertainty. Pretend that the electric kettle is a stove kettle and listen to it whistling. I miss them. Run back to the bathroom and pour cold water onto my face after the run.
A day of longing, heavy steps, sadness.
The sunset breaks out, burning orange breathing out onto the grey clouds. Sitting on the steps with a large mug, biscuits, books that have been dear to me. Sometimes after reading a book that has given so much, I don't know where to begin with another and return to these old pages again and again to juice them, going back to underlines, words in the margines, tracing back the words to a part of me at another point in time.
For the first time with white tea, like all great teas - I begin to learn from it, let it guide me, soften my violent blues. As if a bluebird had came to rest on my shoulder while struggling against drowning.
In the last weeks, we'd barely communicated. Where are you?, I would breath upon waking in my tent. What is inside of you?, I ask to the deer calls. Distance and time astonish me. They build a strength and conviction that I've never known, and then, one day writing outside at 2am, tenterhooks have me hanging out in the desert night and all there is are the shaky breaths rising from my chest and alone, nauseous and alone.
And then breaking morning song and creativity, filling you, absolutely.
And sunday night - Jass, perhaps you would have greater lucidity if we were to leave each other....and then you could go anywhere, see anything. And I...I would likely be less strong, yes, but...
And breaking apart, everywhere, all of me at once like cherries dropping from a falling, heaving tree out there in the night. My hedgehog friend who often walks around at this time, blowing real hard, on and on as if playing the trumpet until I clap and clap as if at an orchestra. And he stops the blowing, or whatever he was doing and I listen to the silence and turn into the soil.

a corner that is liveable,

2011-09-24T00:48:54Z

Ko Siu Lan, All That is Rose Melts Into Air, 120 Kg of Rose Petals, India, 2008

Hemingway pacing up and down in his den saying : 'There is another dimension. I am fully aware of it, but I can't get to it'. So he was trapped in his reporting of externals, his faithfulness to the surface, to words actually said.

- James Boyd

An enormous, overwhelming desire for tales to be lost in. To weave, to be woven, to bring everything together.
A satellite heading to earth tonight. I head the other way - far from myself, my doubts, my anxieties, my direction or lack of it. Away from here. The times so dramatically in contrast of belonging, fitting, nesting.
I cycle blind to the beach past midnight. Owls passing over my head, shrews scurrying between my two tyres. They never get hit. I cycle fast to peddle the blues out of me. The moon so bright it burns my skin. Sirens on the bypass, a constant in these days. People torching their own houses, for things have to change. They must. Peddle so hard that my lungs explode, that steam rises from my skin. But I can't get there, cannot touch it or discover it. It will only come when all falls away. I know it too, but must give myself entirely to something, to all.

Past the two broken down trucks, a smoking tin bin fire, the horses. Past the plum trees that have long stopped offering their fruit. Almost Autumn now and golden leaves will take their place. Past the old farm roads, the rusty tower, the rabbits leaping away from me.
And the gunshots. It's hunting season. For an instant I yearn for a blast to the head. I taunt them, shouting out to them, yelling myself hoarse. 'Take your best shot!', I croon. To be invincible for a moment, to fear nothing, to brave death. But they are too far away and I know it and just as quickly as the desire comes, it soars away and I reach for a pulse once more. For harsh, raw, tender, nectar existence. Turn it to song, to imagination, to wonder and wandering.
I make a list in my head of all the things I adore. Try not to dwell on who I miss so much, how it all feels impossible right now. That she will not come, that fear will be more powerful than excitement and joy.
Wild mushrooms, Paris, Rumi, waking up next to Ven. The tingle of new travels, soup in winter, red wine, Anais Nin. Grass dew, tea at sunset. Forests.
Being here and cycling.
The beginnings, once more, of a search for mysticism. I go back east. I listen to the winds of Persia. Climb the hill and scoot back down it, along the thin path to the sea. Cross the two lakes and push up to the dunes.
A bottle of cider that was dragged back sixty miles in a messenger bag. Eight bottles of it found discarded behind a supermarket. Gave one to my driver who stopped for me, heading to the sea too for kite surfing. The best place in these lands for it. As the waves come to me, close to my feet now. Wrapped up, warm. Ducks flying over me head to sea. Where are we going? I don't know, I murmer to myself. Build yourself up and you can do anything, go anywhere. We forget so often. I could drink the night. I fix my headtorch, like a lighthouse and give myself to my notebook.
All this anxiety, this neurosis, this unfulfilled longing. Just concentrate on these small things and everything else will happen as it may. To make this corner of the earth, small...almost invisible...to make it liveable. More than this - to give it passion, softness and feeling.
I turn round. A large, dark shape on the dunes. Somehow I'd missed it.
A van.
At this time, it's like an intrusion. As if to find an old shrivelled man sleeping in your bed. I imagine them waking to the sunset and the dawn birds. I turn on back to the sea, opening up.

cuánto tiempo te quedas?

2011-09-08T22:26:14Z

Will you, won't you, will you won't you,
won't you join the dance?
- the lobster quadrille

Blue painted sleds from Lapland stand upright in the corner, ready to slide heavenward to the planets. Inside of the sled he has placed a small oil-lamp which sheds a blue Arctic light. In his hand he holds a Chinese opium pipe without opium. He does not need opium. He has the gift of reverie. A collection of pipes from all over the world lies scattered. An enormous Chinese gong rings the hours. It once awakened the Tibetan monks, but it came from the flea market. An African pirogue carved out of wood sails on the mantelpiece, with four Africans rowing. Two marge ivory-handled knives are nailed to the wall above Jean's bed. Reindeer horns, hung on the walls, support an open book on magic, and a book of erotic tales. Delicate dried coral blooms unexpectedly from the top of the pile of books. The bookshelves are placed high near the ceiling. A sunburst hat from Madagascar hands from the last shelf. He pulls out a box from under his bed which contains a skeleton found in the Canary Islands. A tree root gathered in Tahiti rivals Brancusi's petrified snakes. Jean is a great wanderer, but he likes to bring back proofs of what he has seen, sand from Mount Athos, liquers from Hungary, water from the Black sea in a bottle, volcanic stones, beaded curtains from Algeria.
-Anais Nin, portrait of Jean Cateret's apartment

'And when are you leaving?' they always say. Some as soon as the door is opened. When, how much and what have you seen? Quick! Look at the clockhands moving so fast! Can't you see how they spin? Talk, talk, hurry up!
So often it has been asked of me, of us this past spring and summer. It will never end until we have a place of our own, once more. Of treehouses and rope ladders, a room full of dusty books and a fireplace outside to sit beside in winter.
Us, beside each other - when will this be?
My mother, when I follow the migrations back once or twice a year, asks immediately, 'and how long will you be staying?' At night she cuts my wings while sleeping so as to not be able to leave. 'Why don't you live on this island?', she asks, again and again. 'Why not get a job here, so that you don't have to worry about all of this movement, this struggle? Why don't you settle, find something comfortable for once? You could do so much...'. No words of mediocracy or my deep need for movement to keep things vital. Nor do I tell her about this need for returning, for having a place to grow, without question or rule. A short time later, she will always begin to desire the space for herself again. To be alone to face whatever it is to be faced. Or to run away, fleetingly, without needing to give excuses. Even the bluntest of knives will eventually cut off the head of Buddha.
The cities and their colours, their warmth, their creativity. More I am lost within them, drowned. More they feed my excuses for my lack of invention. The search for work while buffaloes trample me in their haste for these very jobs. I cannot compete. I cannot fight for this.
More I'm drawn to the forests, to the sea. To feeling, to insight, to contemplation. To quieten these thunderous hooves.
To remember that there is always life elsewhere when times are bad.
I once dreamed of living in a mushroom, to appear as if from nowhere one day and disappear the next. Sometimes I would pick mushrooms and give them windows, a door, a dusty attic overlooking the forest, full of miniature books.
and I would tell them with their clockhands wailing and whirling:
there are no clockhands. What is seen is not the real world. And for note - we will leave when we return.
And I would take a bow while pigeons dance on the rooftops.
But a place to come back to, through all of these wanderings, to always have a point to return and belong to.
Cuando, pero cuando?

that when misfortune comes, you must quickly praise,

2011-09-05T19:35:29Z

Tyr sacrifices his arm to Fenrir in a 1911 illustration by John Bauer.

O' friend, awake, and sleep no more! The night is over and gone, would you lose your day also? You have slept for unnumbered ages; this morning will you not awake?
Kabir, 1440 - 1518

to explode.
and to go on.
As if buried at the ends of the world and inch by inch crawling back. Get up now, walk on. They say, 'this is the real life, there is no other'. Sometimes, now, I quieten while I go on, further into the core, where all exuberant life resides. To peel off layer by layer.
Venera will stay in Bulgaria for an undefined period, until she has enough money to feel stable again. Months. We were supposed to be together by now.
I fell into bed that night, of that knowing. I couldn't move, so full of this new future. Not a breath would come out of me. Lie, waiting for sleep. Waiting for snow in the fields. Soon it'll be winter and my path is to go up north and find luck there. I lay as the thoughts came through in swarms, glistening under the moon.
the wildest and the deepest.
Sink into this.
Something crawling on my bare chest. I reach for it, lightly, but there is nothing there. Return to the sea. And again, crawling. Its feet can even be felt treading on my rib cage. Again, I reach for it. Nothing.
All night while we spoke, ladybirds had scurried across me. Out of nowhere, out of my weary eyes, out of my loins, upon my tongue. Every time I would place them gently on a plant or take them outside to the trees. We continue to talk. This is for the best. We will be apart, once more, for a thousand years this time, but it is for the best. You must understand. I do. The worst thing is that I do. Words without song. Defeat. Despair at such a world.
But from it, clarity.
They continue, those ladybirds, all over me and never traceable. They must be telling me something. But what and how do I get to it?

To wake and run. Until my legs pull behind them all the words I could say. You can't weep when you're running. It's impossible.
I return. A feeling of profound loneliness clings to me. I will be alone to face this, once more. For work that does exhaust and bring ruin, to find mystery and create while everything tries to exploit and sabatage the individual.
With it, I will find something important, I am sure of it.

find some shelter, then create,

2011-08-28T01:01:59Z

Siberia

When a thing is pushed to its utmost limits, it will return.
- Chinese proverb

Chase a deer and find yourself without feet.
An old second world war bomb shelter to be turned into a log cabin.
Transformation, always.
The sun flying into my blood, brushing sleep from my eyes. Little dreams last night, little of anything, just awash with doubts and waking shivering at dawn in the teepee. Of my future and us and when the day will come when my own transformation will take place. When will I become? I rise, running around the garden trying to remove my head. It won't come off. I gurgle, sumasault, stand upon it. Nothing. I bend down and examine the tomatoes. They grow bigger before my eyes. They become my thoughts. The London riots and Tottenham's broken glass, Libya and Muammar Gadaffi live on without me. Their images slick behind my eyes. The television reports endless, deprived, anxious inside of me.
Return to my old sleeping bag and an image of you, asleep, quietens my thoughts. Sleep comes, warm and reassuring.

I'm digging. I dug the graves of executed poets in Siberia. Lost all my fingers to the cold, dropping off one by one, day by day. I played my tin drum through the iron nights by an open fire. Each grave was unmarked but each carried their words in their pockets. Someone must bare witness. I knew extinction well in these days. My father and I working away, rust in my hair. A dull burnt out orange. He hits a hammer upon my knee. I, tin soldier. In the earth a mattress and black bed springs.
The former tennant here, ten or so years ago, had fallen into a bottle that he would drink from every night. Only when he escaped covered in scotch whiskey from head to toe, with great strength and screaming did he venture to the bottom of the garden and place all that he didn't want anymore, mostly spoons that were too bothersome to clean, under the earth with a large shovel and fury in his eyes. The objects, whatever they were, did him no good and off they went.
The shelter, malnourished and heavy, took entire familes inside of it when the bombs came down. There weren't many here, but enough. They would study their toes and feel hungrier than they would outside of the shelter. It did that to you and unknown sounds would come from their stomachs.

The passion for surprise :
Sit through this. While I wrote in the teepee, a giant slug slithered circles around it. Bigger than you or I. Jasmine hid under the blanket while I gave myself to words. She had been bellowing for hours and asking to play game after game. I stuck my head outside and speak to it after I'd had my fill of solitude. We had been quiet for an hour, now. He tells me that he wants to be best friends with her, to not be afraid. That he is for sure ugly but means no harm. That he only wants good things for her.
Trembling, she crawls out from the blanket and asks what the slug is having for dinner.
The neighbours' lettuce.
Mmm mmm, he says.

rat dreams,

2011-06-27T12:04:11Z

A hacksaw to these visions. Awaken from whatever it was that brought you underground. At Roskilde, once more, dragging the sun up by its ears. There is something important here, beneath all of this sweat. Where will we be for winter? I will swipe off her icy hands and bring back a long forgotten hope of clarity and growth. Go to the forest, I keep hearing. First I must make these parts of myself extinct before anything can happen.

death will take it away soon enough,

2011-06-02T12:56:39Z

Snuffkin was a calm person who knew an immense lot of things but never talked about them unnecessarily. Only now and again he told a little about his travels, and that made one feel rather proud, as if Snuffkin had made one a member of a secret society. Moomintroll started his winter sleep with the others when the first snow fell. But Snuffkin always wandered off to the south and returned to Moominvalley in the springtime.
This spring he hadn't come back.
-Tove Jansson.

Central American migrants ride on top of freight trains through Mexico to reach the northern border, where they will attempt to cross into the United States.
Photo by David Rochkind

Spring came and I didn't return. I remained in hibernation. I swam the days away in my blood, clotted and away with the hummingbirds. Winter is the most vital season to the human condition, for its the only time that shelter is so necessary, when guts must rest, heal, preserve. And direction doesn't come sometimes. Thus we go anywhere, anywhere at all. It hits us on the head and we follow its hand, dizzily, foolishly, instinctively and we're on our way.

In Lyon one afternoon, Ven was eating a fallafel on the steps beside the park where old men, and young people at night, gather to play petanque - the traditional game of throwing balls towards a smaller ball (the bouchon), with the aim being to get them as close as possible, and if needbe, to knock other players balls out of the way. The day was hot and sucked all energy dry. This land so far from the balkans and winter, but I couldn't shake them loose, heavy in my loins. I begin to thirst for knowledge and miss my release of words deeply.

A man approaches us. I look the other way to avoid his eyes. These last days, I'd crawled away from almost all social contact. A deep grind of meaningless interactions, and with these hardened eyes, I lose all excitement and enthusiasm that made each day full and of song. The man had approached us a couple of nights previous on these very same steps asking for a phone to borrow for a text message. He introduced himself and told us that he was from Iran and his father a sufi. So long had I been yearning for persia and here it was brought to me.

'You're here again', he says, 'you're so easy to find'.

'Sometimes it's easier for others to find you than find yourself, I guess'.

We talk for a while in french - a tongue that has left me once more. Wretched in these days in france, as if losing my eyes or a painting of my life torn and in ruins. The curse of my birth place, wretched and otiose in my abilities for languages. He speaks clear and with sparks emitting from certain words and expressions. His father reminds me of my own. He pulls out a notepad in which he scrawls poetry.

'I'm a writer', he says, 'it has been a part of me since I was a child. Sometimes I feel that I need nothing else apart from my writing - without food, shelter, company...words are enough for me if there is none of this. Listen...there are songs in the leaves...can you hear them? Can you become them? You see, with words, you notice the smallest of details...secret ones, hidden to everyone else galloping around with their important lives and only seeing large objects and feelings. I will spend my entire life writing, I know it, just as I have until now. Since sixteen I've never taken a job. The french government, when I came accepted that everytime I would come to a benefits interview that I am a writer and it is what I must do. I don't live on much..enough just to eat, but it's enough for I have this, I have words, I have meetings with people like you'.

Slowly, with spring, the caccoon breaks apart, bit by bit.

for madmen only - of the highest sense of scattering, wandering, tumbing

2011-05-19T01:51:18Z

You have either accomplished something,
or have erased yourself
-Lubomir Yanev

myths unravelling.
Waking with the eyelids of the wings of migrating birds - rested after a long travel. France once more. Here, where it all began at the end of last summer.
Turning twenty five took something out of me. Left it roasting in the sun in Italy. It didn't hit me 'til then, but I felt it coming. I felt its breathe upon my lips, whispering inaudible words. Like all the other times. But this turning felt heavy, as if the chance to be ridiculous and foolish was no longer as saintly any more. Dead time builds graves inside of you.
I begin to long for words again. As if they had departed for a long journey with suitcases and drunk with the grapes of tuscany, for everyone loses themselves there. We didn't last long there, either. All and everything had a screw loose and mansions filled my bones with the sighs of maids and the hiss of lizards baking in the sun. A brothel for organic, freshly grown sadness. No preservatives.
Florence soothed, but was not the madness I so pined for. Everything exquisite but conventional.
Days on the road with few rides. Days with our bags growing into our backs, as if one and the same.

Lifeless weeks followed by a slow, gradual awakening, for both of us. Deep tenderness after weeks anticipating the end, like I do with dusk.
This long confusion, and acceptance of it. Things will go as they will and the days will trot on by, slobbering all into my hole ridden shoes. You are here and that is courage itself. Experience carves you out. Eating immense amounts of chocolate, for sweetness is vital in these times. There is great wine in these lands and soft breathing beside me. On y dans le merde but you are blessed a thousand times within it.

be dizzy and wandering like Ibrahim who suddenly left everything,

2011-05-10T11:47:39Z

To live in the world as if it were not the world, to respect the law and yet to stand above it, to have possessions as though 'one possessed nothing', to renounce as though it were no renunciation, all these favourite and often formulated propositions of an exalted worldly wisdom, it is the power of humour alone to make efficacious.
-Steppenwolf, Herman Hesse

Holy days full of hunger and longing. Days screaming by. Twenty five years of age - a quarter of a century, a quite ridiculous feat within such an often senseless and absurd world. Long, long days crawling down to Roma (where no roads every truly lead) to find a place to belong. As soon as we arrive - a great violence and a forest fire.
But incredible encounters, everywhere. On the way south, late at night at a reststation and minus something temperatures, a truck driver approaches us with a package of bread, painted easter eggs and two croissants. He slips a money note into my hand, along with something about Jesus to Venera (who henseforth learns italian from it) and smiles, departing for his camien for the night.
A man and his grandmother screeching to a halt on the swiss motorway...such laughter and tenderness I have not known for a long, long time. An intelligent, deeply thoughtful and sensual couple driving us fifty kilometres out of their way south. Terrible waits but always someone kind to found somewhere.

In Florence...walking the streets late at night and a place to be for at least a couple of nights... before the search for meaning and clarity resumes. I have loved beyond madness and been accompanied off to the gallows once more...yet all the while, things will grow. Give them time.
Where now?

the alchemy of a changing life is the only truth,

2011-04-16T15:49:36Z

hibernation is over.
yet, it appears I have woken, after some days with rigorous excitement, with clotted blood and mice once curled up between my toes, fleeing for dear life for they provide little comfort any more.
Comfort...

So they wandered around Siberia like birds pecking at bits of grain,

2011-03-27T10:36:40Z

Boys gather by a vendor selling tropical fish on his bicycle on the outskirts of Islamabad. (Muhammed Muheisen/Associated Press)

Packing. All of my material possessions...my physical proof of my life into a backpack, once more. Venera asks me, can we take our mugs to make us feel like home even when we're in a forest? I leave books that I've been meaning to read for months. Old hole ridden clothes. Filled notebooks to send back north. Tense, anxious. The beginnings of something great, once more. Excitement jumping out of my toes.
This feeling of promise and possibility.
Swing everything over my shoulders and head down the stairs to the bins. A woman and her son wait for me with teeth the colour of honey. The mother stops me with her hand and tells me to give her everything without throwing it out. They begin to go through our waste. It's always been me on her side. A strange, slightly unnerving feeling being on the other. I hope she uses the quart of pumpkin we didn't use. The orange jacket I found myself thrown away in central. The brown italian coat with eighty five stotinki within the insides of the sleeves, which happens to be the exact price of our favourite waffers.
Even before we leave, the things important to me grow in their majesty. Fill my backpack with tea and poetry. As if my own life becomes vitally important when on the edge of the world, whatever can and will happen. Tell me, if confusion has filled my blood, what is this instinct that never fails to guide me? To be bewildered is merely to be deep within the vast, rigorous and sometimes ridiculous search.

more hope for the hopeful, lucky finds for foragers, wonderful things thought of to do,

2011-03-24T23:01:38Z

I was sleeping, and being comforted
by a cool breeze, when suddenly a gray dove
from a thicket sang and sobbed with longing,
and reminded me of my own passion.

I had been away from my own soul so long,
so late-sleeping, but that dove's crying
woke me and made me cry. Praise
to all early-waking grievers!
- Adi al-Riga

dr. suess - what was I scared of?

Our time in Sofia has come to an end, that which I'd been longing for, for so long. But I forget, sometimes, about my deepened need for a place of our own, regardless of the war overground. For so long I'd yearned and pined for somewhere to rest my head, of my own with my own rules and notes scattered around! What was I scared of all this time? Even if this city had swallowed me up entirely, I still had this place. Even if Venera returned some nights with not a drop of life left inside her and her heart hurting from the roar of the city and the grind of work, there was still the time when our heads were beside each other's. Even if the gray blocks sliced me up, I still had words. Even when everything fell apart with us in december, I still had instinct.
I pack my backpack, pockets heavy with old tea leaves and foreign coins. A letter I began writing to Venera in the summer but never sent. A hammock used one night in the winter two years ago when it snowed and my bones turned into toboggans. Various maps, one that I found in an old abandoned house by the black sea in the summer. A feather that Jasmine, my four year old sister, gave me while we walked in the woods last summer. A pillow case to hold all of my clothes and promises that I'd made for myself. Rope for tying myself up when I get too restless or sad.
How important it is to have things things that are so dear, to not live anonymously, to fill our lives with more and more meaning! There are times when I just drift along, almost invisible. How essential it is that I keep writing, no matter how difficult it sometimes is. How easy it is to be a spectator to your own demise rather than fighting back against your beheader. To be non-committed.
I look around at so many people who know what they want to do what they want to do with their lives. Or think they do. Who have began to build. As if no one is confused, disorientated, lost. And what has happened to just living for experience, I ask myself, under my breath. To work for the feeling of feeling, of learning, of things that open you up in a different way rather than finding a path. Careers...a particularly strange concept. To have just the things that we need and nothing more. To live honestly, even if sometimes it's a struggle. To give to all that stimulates creative impulse, even if painful. For dead time just takes you closer to the dust you shall soon become.
For all will be well. Only these fears will ruin us. Just go and all will open. What was I scared of?