“For me, the body is a real place. It is a place you go to, a place you inhabit. It is the fundamental setting of every experience you have. And it is sometimes a place you leave in moments of fear or crisis or grief or depression or pain. I am working toward creating art that happens to a reader in their real body. So, in each story I was playing with bringing the body out of its material circumstances, giving it a consciousness. Letting the body have its own point of view.
While writing Chronology of Water, I literally had that question taped to the wall above my desk. A little note that read, What if the body had its own point of view? And I don’t mean in the ye-olde-philosophical binary of mind/body split sort of way. I mean that we don’t often enough consider the experience of the body as equal to, or inextricable from, the experience of the mind. For instance, if you have a pain in your back for your whole adult life, we don’t ask often enough what story lives there. And what is your spine trying to tell you? I believe that we are all walking around carrying every experience we have ever had written on our bodies. Our physical bodies.
“What was life, really? It was warmth, the warmth produced by instability attempting to preserve form, a fever of matter that accompanies the ceaseless dissolution and renewal of protein molecules, themselves transient in their complex and intricate construction. It was the existence of what, in actuality, had no inherent ability to exist, but only balances with sweet, painful precariousness on one point of existence in the midst of this feverish, interwoven process of decay and repair. It was not matter, it was not spirit. It was something in between the two, a phenomenon borne by matter, like the rainbow above a waterfall, like a flame. but although it was not material, it was sensual to the point of lust and revulsion, it was matter shamelessly sensitive to stimuli within and without–existence in lewd form. It was a secret, sensate stirring in the chaste chill of space. It was furtive, lascivious, sordid–nourishment sucked in and excreted, an exhalation of carbon dioxide and other foul impurities of a mysterious origin and nature.
Out of overcompensation for its own instability, yet governed by its own inherent laws of formation, a bloated concoction of water, protein, salt, and fats–what we call flesh–ran riot, unfolded, and took shape, achieving form, ideality, beauty, and yet all the while was the quintessence of sensuality and desire. This form and this beauty were not derived from some neutral material both consumed by spirit and innocently embodying it, as is the case with the form and beauty of the visual arts. Rather, they were derived from and perfected by substances awakened to lust via means unknown, by decomposing and composing organic matter itself, by reeking flesh. […] And for its part, what was life? Was it perhaps only an infectious disease of matter–just as the so-called spontaneous generation of matter was perhaps only an illness, a cancerous stimulation of the immaterial?” — Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
“Light is energy you can’t touch or corral, which is also the nature of spirit….I have felt ectoplasmic flickers of my father and best friends, life forces that have been snuffed out in the human realm but exist, like candles in another room.”
I have been photographing Blue Ghost fireflies for more than a week in North Carolina and Tennessee. In this photo from last year I have seen true peak, with hundreds of fireflies, which was very mesmerizing, almost dizzying. So much movement in almost total darkness. Absolutely incredible. Blue Ghost fireflies are unique species that doesn’t blink and stays lit for many seconds or even more than a minute. This photo is called Blue Ghost Warriors, since in some cultures they believe that fireflies are souls of the deceased.
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People don’t come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God. -Kurt Vonnegut
I met a man today who fought with the Americans in Italy in WW2.
He’d traveled with his dad to Europe several years before the war. When in Germany, he’d asked his dad, “Why are there so many soldiers? Why are there so many airplanes? What’s going on here?”
His dad told him that there would soon be a terrible war.
When this boy was 16, he enlisted and wound up in Italy with the American Army. He said that he decided to kill as many Germans as he could. This is what he told everybody.
He said when he caught his first German POW, both he and the German boy burst into tears.
Now, when his grandkids ask him how many Germans he killed in the war, he says, “None, I hope.”
O beautiful was the werewolf in his evil forest. We took him to the carnival and he started crying when he saw the Ferris wheel. Electric green and red tears flowed down his furry cheeks. He looked like a boat out on the dark water.”
![Astoria Park Carnival:: [I love NY]* * * *“A BoatO beautifulwas the werewolfin his evil forest.We to](https://64.media.tumblr.com/d8d69fdf00722e7720eeb0d3735ea7ed/f4b6a65de898d77a-62/s1280x1920/11c7d3bf003aab09da7666456773726edac15a5d.jpg "Astoria Park Carnival:: [I love NY]* * * *“A BoatO beautifulwas the werewolfin his evil forest.We to")
