Speeding back up to frantic

I'm feeling a bit more myself today, and the bad news that accompanies this good news is time has sped back up to its normally frantic pace. Of course, having lost two days to recuperation, that also means I'm  woefully behind on things both bloggy and non-bloggy.

Looking back with fresh eyes on my last poem Metmorphosis, I've decided it needs more than just a few tweaks. So, I'm currently engaged in a more radical than anticipated re-write. On the positive side, I've decided to create a drawing to go with it.

The lesson I'm slowly learning is: I need to pay less attention to artificially-imposed deadlines and recognize those occasions when the words just aren't flowing as freely. That will become even truer as real life continues to make greater demands of me. And in the midst of a spiralling economy, it's hard not to heed those calls.

When time-space turns to molasses

A late winter varietal virus is currently coursing its way through my bloodstream. My immune system is working feverishly to subdue the intruder, but still hasn't quite gained the upper hand.

One of the strange symptoms of this virus is its ability to warp my sense of space and time. Accustomed short distances stretch out into vast planes. The passing of minutes that flashed by so quickly earlier in the week, now crawl in a slow-motion creep.

It might just be that the full-body ache and sapped energy have affected my perception, but that's less interesting to read. New posts may be time-delayed going forward.

Mythical transformations

Here is my latest poem, which again takes inspiration from a classic myth — the story of Daphne as told by the Roman poet Ovid. I struggled a bit with the ending, and I'm still not quite satisfied with it. I've also been trying to pay more attention to spoken rhythms. I may yet re-write parts of it. 

Metamorphosis
By Francis Scudellari

With mythic suddenness, as if
set upon by a god's whimsy--
for deep lust or petty anger--
a reposed Daphne she transforms.
Her crowning, walnut strands thicken,
vine outward, a loosed-leaf wrap round
trellised bed, budding ends a-twirl
to bind her to this dreamed waking.

A too-soft heart become bark-clad
thrusts fibrous roots downward, thirsty
gray coils that seek wormy passage
through black soil, to moist tiers below.
Four fleshy limbs harden, turn to
knotty stalks; skyward-bent, pale shoots
freckled with bulging pods that flare
in pollen rich scarlet bursting.

Broad petals splay wide to attract
noon-day sun's lurid stare, its heat;
Liquid thoughts made misty, to sigh
up-swept words, and gathered clouds seed.
Her essence in droplets returns
to mother long forgot, and feeds
a self-less spring cycling; her growth's
exquisite pain subsides to peace.

Simply dashed off

My time has been a bit constrained the past few days, so I'm trying to rein in the scope of my creative endeavors for this weekend so I can get stuff up more quickly. This drawing, for example, was pretty simple to execute, and I'll try to generate my weekly poem along similar lines. I'll give a heart-felt huzzah to whoever can guess the inspiration for the sketch.

Sorry for the silence ...

I've been swamped with work trying to get out the latest issue of The Urban Coaster, which is the community newspaper I help publish. Now that it's officially on its way to the newsstands of my neighborhood, I can press ahead with my other commitments

I should have both a drawing and a poem ready for you in the next couple days.

Too much information running through our Web?

I take time out from endeavors of the creative kind, to issue a brief rant....

The title of the following article from February's Wired may seem counter-intuitive, but that's exactly why it's such an interesting read:

Clive Thompson on How More Info Leads to Less Knowledge
... After years of celebrating the information revolution, we need to focus on the countervailing force: The disinformation revolution. The ur-example of what [Stanford Historian Robert] Proctor calls an agnotological campaign is the funding of bogus studies by cigarette companies trying to link lung cancer to baldness, viruses—anything but their product. ...

Click the title to read the whole piece; it's worth it. It's also a concept I've been talking up to my friends for several months now: giving people easy access to wrong information is just as harmful as blocking their access to the real kind.

There's been a tremendous proliferation of sites and e-mail blasts dedicated to spreading rumor, innuendo and out-right lies in order to attack the innovative ideas that threaten the profits and outdated worldview of the status quo.

There's more of a need than ever for a healthy public skepticism, and the ability to filter authoritative news sources from manipulative ones. Without that, we may find ourselves retreating into a new Dark Age. Speaking of which, I'm overdue for another of my philosophical posts.

Not letting a sleeping poem lie

This is the latest poem I'm working on. I may yet make some minor changes to it. It jumped the queue, as my pieces sometimes do, past the poem I alluded to a couple posts back. It's an invention with no particular inspiration, just vague impressions that had been floating about my imagination.

These recurring deaths
By Francis Scudellari

These recurring deaths brought down by
drowsing shade, Hypnos who nightly
stalks him, catches him, carries him
away to puzzle-piece landscapes;
odd bits jammed together, seeming
crudely fit with hasty fingers...

Time again dropped 'neath paint-smear sky:
purple-black dotted with pink-white.
A speckled canvas further smudged
by thick-limbed clouds that hover over
claw-hammer trees, screw-top bushes;
hills' sparse stubble he stumbles through...

As he chases familiar shapes,
shifting glimpses of strange beings;
their vaguely human faces topped
with twisted horn or ragged mane;
misshapen escorts who lead him
across rock shoulders, mossy backs...

Toward a close-cropped clearing where,
gathered with shepherding eyes, they
watch him, welcome him, offer him
sips from stick-carved ladles and spoons
they dip deep in green, soupy streams
to coax him to forgetfulness...

Weak-willed, he drinks serenaded
by an elemental chorus;
some airy, some hot, some mildewed,
all mismatched voices borne aloft
on ancient tongues whose wings beat
a steady pulse, that brings him back ...

To panderer clock's up-swept hands
pushing the rhythmic details of
a new waked sun's rosy allure;
her plying whispers that draw out
his sharp-splinter want for a day
when evening's pause never ends.

Improbable transformation

This is a second drawing inspired by the dream that prodded me to write Trapped Ghost. It should also form the basis of a future poem, but that may take me a week or two.

Looking for an opening

Below is my halting attempt at the opening lines for a poem that I've been struggling to finish over the past several weeks. Generally, I try to write the beginning and closing stanzas first. Then, it's easier for me to create the story arc that connects the two. This is a bit of a different style for me, so I'd appreciate some feedback on the first few lines before I get too much further into it. Stay tuned also for a drawing that should be ready to post by tomorrow.

I. Love
Words long lost in her mind's murky reverb,
until she discovers them, tucked inside
a tar-black disk's wax-spun groove she pulls from
once-stiff paper sleeves stacked in messy piles

The neighborhood newspaper biz

This post is a bit out of character, as I don't like to delve too deeply into my non-creative activities on this site, but I also don't want to sit idly by and allow someone to mischaracterize what I do either.

For those who don't know, my friends and I started a new community-based newspaper. It's meant to open up the channels of communication in a diverse neighborhood where information doesn't always flow freely. It's a publication with a distinctly progressive voice, which will become apparent when you see this week's lead story on Naomi Klein's discussion of the financial bailout.

The paper is called The Urban Coaster, and it's beginning to get some attention. CommonDreams.Org just featured the Klein story on its national site and brought us a huge influx of new readers. Unfortunately, with the good always comes some bad. There are those in the community who don't want to see a publication succeed that gives voice to alternative views.

Ours is a strange little neighborhood, where a group of very vocal folks try to shout down anyone who disagrees with their self-aggrandizing agenda. They do this to compensate for the fact that their opinions only resonate with a small minority. Some have blogs that they use to bully others into silence, and they often do so in the most reprehensible ways. Actually, I guess that really isn't much different than the tactics of certain Fox News "personalities."

I don't want to dwell on their negativity too much, and I think the vast majority of people in the community will respond to our positive message much more than their vituperative posts. It's just a shame that some feel the need to resort to the most petty of personal attacks in order to promote their views. I'm not going to stoop to their level.

To blog, or not

I'm still struggling mightily to figure out the raison d'etre of this site. I've tried to post a variety of writings, and art, but I don't know if that material is better left to my eponymous site (FrancisScudellari.Com, if you haven't been paying attention). A blog is a strange and different animal. It thrives on daily posts and prefers journal-style entries. I get bored talking about myself though, and blogging is much more of a self-indulgent exercise than jives with my personality.

As I quite literally still figure out what I'm doing with my poetry and illustration, I find myself taking much longer to produce pieces. So, there is a lag between posts. I don't know how much that matters to folks, but I tend to get antsy whenever I haven't posted in a few days (and this post is a prime example of that).

I'm also internally debating whether I should be posting poetry on the web at all, or if I'd be better served trying to send the pieces out to various publications in hopes of reaching print. The egalitarian in me likes to share what I write freely, but so far that methodology hasn't really served me very well — at least based on the general sense of apathy its received with (excepting all you wonderful folks who've commented over the past couple years).

Right now, the inclination is to keep on with the keeping on — but with the understanding that updates might become less frequent. If that changes, you'll be the first to know.

Trapping a dream

This is the poem about the dream that inspired my drawing A hungry ghost. I have another drawing and poem that should be posted soon, and which also come from that sleeping mind-trip. Please stay tuned ...

Trapped ghost
By Francis Scudellari

Raised. On a mirrored slab
inch by inch he glides, spins
up, pulling against straps,
un-willing what binds him,
slow propels him toward
thrice blinking, blurred halos,
the whir of saw-tooth gears,
uncanny steel fingers
bent posed, purposeful:
his many-armed surgeon...

Cuts. His half-conscious mind
knowing but not feeling
the sting of numbed pink flesh;
laser pin pricks tracing
patterns, deep-stenciled shapes
to draw from dead tissue
a thick-brow, brown golem.
Its emerged-eye stare fixed
on the steel-teat mother
as she spills her static...

Milk. Grabby-claw hands, take
greedy-fang bites, feasting
on pulsed bits beamed across
an electric blue stream.
This raw, imagined food
real enough to entice
its once bone-gripped belly
to red-swell large, and fill
a machine carved gap, where
his trapped ghost is growing...

Poetically pondering fate and transparency

Here is my latest poem, a day later than I planned. Circumstance and a mild virus conspired against me. As always, feedback and constructive criticism are much appreciated. This came together pretty quickly once I settled on the Three Fates motif (with thanks to Alicia for that inspiration).

Transparent (To Alicia)
by Francis Scudellari

Her life on a spindle,
slowly spins out, into
a too delicate thread;
knowing if not caring
hands weave in odd patterns
to make a broader cloth.
They bleach it, bony white.
They stretch it, transparent.
They dab it, fine-dust it
with mixed pigment palette--
butterfly-wing powders,
a bright-hue camouflage.

Over measured, hungry
days, rude visitors come.
They bump, up against her.
They feel, to fill a lack.
They smudge, her covering tints;
continue on, smugly
clap fatty hands, to rid
themselves of rubbed-off bits;
her color haphazard
pilfered now, then carried
off on indiff'rent breeze--
whorled wisp, smoky sparkling.

In sunset's cutting hour,
Atropos' polished blades
casting an orange light,
she senses herself fade
to too pale shade, the years
of so many touches
leaving a lone, small speck--
a bluish smear. She waits,
still, so unsure, whether
to fear the next visit
or hope, to meet that fate,
who puts the colors back?

Questioning people's motives

This is the second in my series of "thinking out loud" posts loosely grouped under the banner of Toward a 21st Century Ethos. The ideas are laid down here with broad brush strokes, and the devil will most certainly be hidden in the details.

Never one to take small bites when chewing on a subject, today I try to tackle the question of what motivates people and the need to build a social economy not centered around profit and greed. To discuss economics might seem off-topic, but I would argue that how a society functions at its most fundamental level and the behavior it encourages cannot be compartmentalized from the ethics we preach in church or at home.

In our capitalistic society, no ideal is enshrined as highly or protected as thoroughly as the right to private property and profit. Our legal system was constructed to preserve it. Our myths and metaphors revolve around it.

Our cultural icons are rugged individuals who thrive on self-reliance to achieve great material success. They disdain weakness and collective action. Yes there are many exceptions, but the general storyline still runs through most of our pop-culture mythology. These are ideas that arose from and suited the needs of industrial capitalism.

Some may try to argue that as a "Christian" nation, our ethics are actually informed by the New Testament. And on an individual level that may be true, but it's not the behavior that is expected or rewarded by the prevailing social order. In fact, I would argue, that the lessons taught by Christ are often in direct opposition to those encouraged by our society.

Despite the fact that Jesus repeatedly assailed greed as a motivating force (see Matthew 19:23-24, as just one example), many Christians seem to wall-off their religious beliefs as separate from their economic ones. This is usually rationalized with Christ's own words "render unto Caesar." The meaning of those words is ambiguous, but many take it as an implicit endorsement of maintaining a split personality in our secular and spiritual lives. It may be that he was renouncing participation in the economy at any level, but I'm not here to argue his intention.

I'm also not here to argue against the separation of Church and State, which I completely agree is a vital component of our democracy. What I am here to do is argue for better aligning our social behavior with our ethical beliefs, and there are plenty of common moral principles that span the plethora of our different spiritual traditions.

Here are just a few that I think most of us can agree on: ensuring an equality of opportunity for all to contribute; serving the greater good; rewarding honesty and accountability. Our current system fails at those things in most instances. Naomi Klein, who I saw speak just last night and who is the author of The Shock Doctine, does a better job of documenting specific examples of that than I ever could.

What I would like to do in this essay is provoke people to begin to question whether the social system built up around profit and private property still suits us in a day and age when advances in technology are rendering their pursuit not only obsolete but damaging to our further growth.

There is no argument that as a social system, capitalism served some very well. I firmly believe, however, the beneficiaries of its largesse are a rapidly shrinking minority. I'm also convinced that the corrosive influence of profit-seeking as the prime motivator in our society is undermining the integrity of all our essential institutions: medicine, education, government, and beyond.

There is also a very dark cynicism to the ethos of capitalism. It feeds a myth that human beings are essentially lazy and corrupt, and that they can only be motivated by the promise of fulfilling their most selfish material desires. My experience, and I'm guessing yours too, is that most people are on the whole good-hearted and giving. They are motivated by a desire to contribute to their communities and better the situation of their families. They want a purpose in life, and to belong to something greater than themselves.

What could arise in place of a profit-based economy? I think the glimpse of an answer was provided in Pekka Himanen's book The Hacker's Ethic. It describes a culture where people are motivated by respect and recognition among their peers. These hackers (the term did not originally hold its current pejorative sense) collaborated on open source projects, not to win great riches, but to establish their reputations. Because of the collective work of so many talented indivduals, they also created much stronger products than their proprietary competitors.

How much more successfully could a society function that did not limit how its members could contribute their talents, and that did not impose false rationing of resources in order to preserve an opportunity for the few to profit at the expense of the many? It's a matter of giving up our allegiance to old and outdated ideologies, and of looking at the world with the fresh eyes of a newborn. We do have the ability to make radical changes in the way we live, but we still lack the political will.

The trends of automation, digital communications, and open-source software and hardware (check out this interesting Wired article) are pushing the cost of manufactured goods further and further down. They're reducing the possibility of profit through any but the most artificial of means. This may seem like a scary proposition, but it's also a tremendous opportunity. It offers us a chance to remake ourselves and our society. But first we need to acknowledge the moment for real change that stands so clearly before us.

The flapping wings of half-formed ideas

Suddenly I find myself beset by the flapping wings of too many half-formed ideas. It could be the straying focus of a mind forced into mid-winter isolation. Or it could be a newfound need to obsess over details. But it's become much easier for me to begin projects than to bring them to completion.

My list of in-progress items includes three poems in various stages (working titles: Turn tables, Transparency, and A Hungry Ghost); the rough sketch of a new drawing (tentatively called New Life Sprouting); an outline of the next installment in my series of philosophical essays (Questioning people's motives); plus the very slow to resuscitate next chapter of my short story Belly.

It will help me finally grasp the annoying buggers if I publicly set a deadline for myself. So, I'll commit to completing the essay by tomorrow. And I should have Transparency ready by the weekend.

A hungry ghost

This bit of weirdness was inspired by a recent dream. It would take a very long post to put it in context, so I won't bore you with the details. I'm trying to build a poem around it and the line "a hungry ghost in me, machine-carved." If I'm going to have strange dreams, I may as well use them as fodder to fire off some art.

A mutating light

This poem evolved quite a bit over the course of the past few weeks. Two of its lines were taken from recent drawings: Thin-Fingered Dawn and Aura Spilling. The original working title was "Mr. Sunshine," but it and the overall mood moved away from my first too-personally indulgent impulses to something much more lyrical — at least I hope so.

The sweetness of light
by Francis Scudellari

His early, yellow years
marked by a restless gaze
this thin-fingered dawn that
passing quickly, gently
taps so many strangers
shoulders clad in new day's
rosy hope, his own vague
wishing deep-pocket tucked
close to a youthful heart:
one face returns the smile

His middle, muddy days
ever-creasing, hands held
up to blue-straining eyes
a pale, tulip-cup cap
to direct his wheeled mind
that sprays silver droplets
into shadowy nooks
a knobbed spigot of light
he endlessly spins to
capture the dust-mote dance

His dying, desert hours
golden aura spilling
from a low, lone-struck wound
his self-inflicted flow
that forms three-pronged puddle
that slow-spreads, swallowing
the too-loved particles
long ago cast, outward
waving spores to carry
this infecting sweetness

An update, and two thank you's

I wanted to very quickly let you know that my Zazzle t-shirt arrived, and I am quite pleased with the printing of the image. I still have to see whether it holds up to laundering, but I can honestly say it's a very nice product. I'll upload more designs to my Zazzle Shop soon.

I also wanted to extend a brief thank-you to two lovely bloggers who bestowed awards on me (not so) recently. Daisy Bookworm  and Ellie Blunt (aka The Transparent Hypnotist) both gave me the Butterfly Award. I really appreciate the recognition, and I apologize for taking so long to acknowledge them. I recommend you check out their extremely well-written and interesting sites.

I have a drawing and poem still to post for the week, so don't stray too far over the weekend. With more arctic chill on its way here to Chicago, I think I'll be spending a lot of time in front of the computer screen.

When stark outlines get fuzzy

This is the first in the series of philosophical essays I promised under the very broad and probably too self-important sounding banner of Toward a 21st Century Ethos. Because I don't want to write chapter-length posts, I'm skimming the surface on most of this. I hope what's under-treated will be fodder for the comments.

I admittedly chose to start with the topic that has only recently begun to shape itself in my mind. The outlines of my argument may appear vague and shifting, but that fits well with the subject I'm trying to tackle here.

The human mind seems to have an obsessive compulsion to neatly order the universe. We place the objects around us into tidy classifications, perhaps in order to convince ourselves we've mastered the world we live in. We especially like to stick these everyday things, and even each other, into numbered boxes. The problem is that sometimes the objects don't fit very easily, and we have to shave off a layer or two of truth in order to get them to squeeze into their assigned compartments.

Take as examples some very simple categories that are widely accepted, even though improved science and more accurate measuring devices have proved their inaccuracy. From childhood we learn there are nine planets; five senses; twenty-four hours in a day; and 365 days in a year.

Working in reverse, the precise measurement of a day (one earth rotation) is actually 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4.2 seconds. That's not an amount that can be captured very easily on the face of a clock, however. This error in our neat 24-hour rendering of a day of course ripples through the measurement of our year, and we tack a leap day onto our calendars (not exactly) every four years to even things out.

The number of planets that wheel their way around our Sun might actually be eight, as some have demoted Pluto to asteroid status. Or it could be as many as eleven, if you insist on including the maybe-asteroid and its brethren in the Kuiper belt (see the Wikipedia summary of the controversy).

As far as our senses, without even raising the possibility of ESP, some scientists believe we should include proprioception (a combination of self-orientation and location) as a sixth. There are also those who are actively working to hack the ways we receive stimulus from the world, so one day we could, for example, see with our taste buds (see Wired Magazine article Mixed Feelings).

Beyond such accounting tricks for worldly things, we also like to label and define each other. We group people and stereotype them, and kid ourselves that we can "know" them based on such superficial characteristics as occupation, gender and ethnicity. If I remember my Jean Paul Sartre correctly, and I probably don't, part of it arises from a frustration over not being able to ever fully understand what's in the mind of the other. Unable to accept that reality, we distort it and reduce the other person to a parody of themselves.

The human mind is, obviously a very complex thing. Not only are individual personalities much messier than any categories we can hope to try to group them into, they can also contain traits that we normally view as contradictory. The idea that two opposites can co-exist in a single entity is a particularly challenging one for most of us.

It's much easier to come to terms with an unsubtle universe of clear divisions; constructing a worldview based on black-white, either-or, right-wrong, and us-them paradigms. The more nuanced conception that multiple, sometimes contradictory traits can exist in one person seems to threaten our too-secure sense of who we are, and how we fit into the world.

This may seem a bit of a leap, but what if we take the concept even further and extend it beyond the physical realm to that of ideas. The literal and the metaphorical, for example, are always treated as contradictory, but what if Genesis and evolution weren't viewed as mutually exclusive truths? It's a subject I tried to delve into in one of my very early posts here: The Serpent, the Tree of Knowledge and Evolution? What if hidden within the poetic imagery of the forbidden fruit is a seed of truth about how our consciousness actually evolved?

Can Science and religion on some level be reconciled? What about the teachings of the various religions we view as contending for a single truth? What I'd like to suggest is that these "opposing" truths haven't been reconciled not because they can't be, but because it requires us to extend ourselves beyond our usual comfort zones. It means putting aside the petty desire to prove one "side" superior to another, and instead do the hard labor necessary to win a fuller understanding of reality. It means putting our common humanity above serving any narrow ideology.

It might seem like I'm making an argument for a relativistic truth, but that's not quite accurate. What I am trying to say is that we, the world and the universe are so immensely complex that our limited mental capacities aren't able to wrap themselves around the entirety of it all. Individually, in fact, we may only be able to grasp a small piece of that complexity.

Uniting those billions of pieces collected by each of our receptive minds, however, gets us much closer to a comprehensive view. As technology allows us to link up more easily and gather these fragments into a whole, that becomes a very real possibility. That's a discussion for a future post.

Knitting wheel: an unfocused mind

Slightly late, here's this week's poem. I'd normally explain the particulars of the inspiration, but I think that might skew the reading of it. Let's just say that too much time spent alone in an apartment can affect the mind in strange ways.

Knitting Wheel
by Francis Scudellari

My minded eyes
reluctant too
slip
out of focus
into slumbers
rise
with their numbing
blue, inward rush
hang
on half-hearted
dusty, dull blades
pull
me up, against
a ceiling's cut
light
knitting wheel rays
spinning golden
thread
to make, a sleeve
to warm, a chilled
hand
white fingers, that
beckon, icy
crawl
my spine, trip on
my dreaming, a-
spark
these mindful eyes
reluctant a-
gain
let go, focus
sharpen, thought a-
wake
blurry thresholds
slow-fading, a-
way