Speaking of seeing things that I didn’t, I love these moments when Diane pops out with a little personality or anecdote. We briefly, gigglingly, considered giving ourselves names like Haiku Emily- given the sides of herself she shows here I though Diane could be interestingly summarized as Hippy Diane, but the names never stuck. It seemed to suit the encounter we were having with Emily, which in some ways was a surface experience only, mediated by computers and images and three lines of text per page. I took a hand at writing haiku here and elsewhere, and though it’s not a good haiku in terms of the turn in perspective that’s supposed to happen, I am glad that I got to say what I wanted about ambivalence. Ambivalence is much more subtle and variegated then dislike- it’s a wavelength-like tension, an inability to decide between love and hate that manages to embrace being both, which, if you can do it, is good for both brain and heart.

My next door neighbor’s dogs, little rabbit sized things, are always barking. Footsteps in the hallway or quiet talking, any hardly perceptible sound can set off the yapping. But I don’t mind the barking so much as the man bellowing “QUIET!” every time they do. Despite their size, they’re fully grown and I would guess they’re past the ability to absorb that kind of mild behavioral training. If I drop a fork in my kitchen, the dogs will bark, but the man snapping at his dogs is more unpleasant to hear. The strange old man’s bite is much worse than their dogs’ barks; in the end, dim sounds set off the man.

Joanna Newsom’s relatively recent song “Bridges and Balloons” recognizes this nicely.

The sight of bridges and balloons
makes calm canaries irritable;
they caw and claw all afternoon:
“Catenaries and dirigibles
brace and buoy the living-room –
a loom of metal, warp – woof – wimble.”
And a thimbles worth of milky moon
can touch hearts larger than a thimble.

Needless to say, when you’re on a boat, you tend to notice things that populate your field of vision, that break up the monotony. Especially bridges, to say nothing of balloons. So it’s not only or primarily the canaries who caw and claw at the sight of bridges and balloons. The mariners are just as excited: the song squeaks and chirps as much as the birds do. And of course, that is precisely what this verse is — the human way of telling the same story.

Here’s a more agitated version of the same thing. The dogs are irritated by the sounds of trains, planes, and automobiles, but it’s really the human — and his/her “birdie brain”:

I hate the steam train that whistles woozy my bird brain,
That sends my spaniel insane…

I hate the livery cars that have my bird brain seeing stars,
That drive my Doberman to drink in bars.

It’s fairly common to often turn to others to mark a moment: it’s helpful to round up a bunch of impressed surrogates to emphasize your accomplishment, for instance. One might think of Keats’s famous sonnet —

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

But it’s especially true of animals, who often perform this job of certifying what we sense in the first place. Dog-whistles and ghosts: surely some things set off the animal and not us. But more often than not, we call on animals and pets to confirm what we already know.

To end, here’s a short poem from the opposite perspective: James Tate’s “The Promotion”

There is a sense of emptiness
now that we walk cement hallways
and it’s tough to leave a mark.
Once, humans bent branches,
tamped the ground.
And something in us remembers
when the paths we took stayed and
testified to our existence.

So we scrawl our names on metro stops, above highways.
We write poetry, turn amps up too damn loud,
and blare our way
through each others’ eyes and ears and brains-
hoping to carve out something
that will remind the world of us.

Kids disappear in the city.
They melt into the landscape.

I told you all this, plus elaborate hand gestures
and passionate ineloquence,
in the Cafe Sarajevo.
And for that one night we were mythmakers, translators, clairvoyants.
In that smoke, those muddy coffees and bad wine,
the ancient, splintered frames of this old world were almost visible.

Then we left, I was so tired I could hardly see
and you laughed at how often I yawned on the short walk home.
And the cold quiet air cleared the streets.

You kissed me goodbye and, happy as I was,
I could see the old sadness
and long distance
slipping back.

And the next day you called from six million miles away.
And the memory of that night is slowly fading.
And I wish now that I had left some sort of painted mark,
like the ones being torn apart,
up the street from Sarajevo,
along the crumbling overpass
beside the park.

We kept our backs to the mangled intervals,
the wounded supports of a once-staircase.

what we wanted instead was death-defying,
a leap down to the road,
not wreckage but the fall
and then the quiet that comes after:
the stillness and laughter made possible,
over time, by the ebb-and-flow of these, our quick wet circuits

the fluctuations in our neural nets
produces both the slipping away
and the clicking, sun-lit and gasping gain:
as seconds leap and scream into existence others,
deep in complex systems, lose their fingerprints.
In the course of a little forgetfulness
minds lose the edge off their frantic spin.

Later, in the editing room
peeling the scene apart with the thin fingers of this transparent tool
I found your face smiling in the space
behind that shadow,
and felt my busy self erased by long thin blades.

I swear I felt us circle in and of life
in the
livewire geometry
of light and code and camera and lens.

we want, so desperately, to see ourselves
in an awareness looking back
everyone has a chapter in their books
on the possibility of artifical intelligence

but there is already other intelligence here
we don’t look these citizens in the face
aware as we are
of the complexity of giving them more than the vote.
did we begin to write robots when we had
forgotten animals?
pushed out to the violent edges of our circuitry
we have them running scared

dedicated to parkour

I have gotten to do some experimentation with CSS myself, and the fact that this kind of coding has been accessible and logical to me is what has really convinced me that CSS is something special. Because it’s not that hard, and I’m not (by any means) a programmer. Certainly, it helps a great deal that I have one (programmer, that is) living in my house and inclined to help me out, but still the degree to which I engaged with this and made things with it is, from my perspective, uncanny.

The fact of separating out style from the function, structure (architecture?) of the xhtml made it possible for me to view code and understand it. Previously I had gone to “View” in my browser, and then “Page Source” and stared numbly at the nicely coloured gobbledygook; but once I saw types of coding tasks separated out in separate pages the whole fandango started to make sense. And writing simple xhtml to make pages and links suddenly seemed so much easier, prettier and more logical then fiddling around with the awkward surfaces of Dreamweaver.

I am interested in the ways that this makes Hypertext creative writing a more feasible and pleasurable experience- both for the writer and the reader. My first experimentation with this is called Waiting Light.

And this, below, is a new version of the poem Waiting Light, not yet webpaged and css’ed. I wrote the first one in a flurry of excitement that fed right into my excitement about this new media, and since then, I have revisted the poetry itself and continued working to refine it. I deliberated about not posting this new version here until I had time to work it into a new web document. This is definitely an ongoing project- but I decided that’s ok, because all writing is.

Waiting Light 2.0

The water in the slow moving,
cool-breeze clouds
- stretched cotton, fleeced,
with the blue shot softly through -
crystallized in a ring of thin banded light early this afternoon;
the product of an equation generously counted out by the whiteyellow sun,
over the hill, above the old convent’s hatted bell

and i thought about the crystal somewhere buried in my machine-
between computing and the current-
dolling out the careful waves of energy; the clock cycles of code.

Of how a maker emerges sometimes, unexpectedly like love,
and crystallizes currents of ideas and desires.
How Defoe became Crusoe to condense into a listed, layered light
the twisted fears and dreamings of early, lonely capital.

How Eliot taught me that we each confirm our prison,
but Pound crystallized
the whole long world of longing, walking into wartime, sorrow
with blue plums.

and how we are like water, turning our faces to be touched
by the waiting light.
Strung and pulled in soft formations,
or weighted low and wet and dark,
the flickering and quiet coloured covenant runs through us all,
even in the aftermath of terror
in the still and same green evening
on our way down into the park.

This is an old story, and still it speaks a strange kind of contemporary truth about the ways we can use technology- about the networks that get built when we reach out with our long tools. I picture each open source program with its lines of open code stretching out to offer what they’ve got. (like Schooltool, or Care2x) And then I look at something like today’s amazing Live8 and our new declaration, as Will Smith said, of Interdependance; and I get all teary (ok, Brian Adams, I know, tears are not enough) and I think: this is an idea that we’ve been working on for a long time. Since the pandas fed each other with chopsticks. We keep saying it to remind each other, and especially those few men who are resposible for representing our desires and best interests on the world stage, that things are better when the system we all have to play in is fair. http://www.live8live.com

Yesterday I had a conversation with two friends about hunger. About how sometimes you can get to the point where you forget you are hungry, and sometimes it’s all you can think about. And Linda said that when she’s hungry the intensity of world conflict makes sense because she thinks about it as the obvious product of so many people starving. Once, when I was younger someone pointed out to me the cycle that might be started by growing up hungry, even here in Canada where kids come to school without lunch and then try to pay attention in class, and find they can’t remember things, and that they’re temper is short and their world seems bleak. That they might fight or fail tests or feel unloveable and desperate, and that that could take a weakened body down a dark road. But I had never concretely pictured the dark movements in history, the violent waves, in relation to all the individual experiences of empty belly.

We can and do do things besides feeling guilty and useless in the face of the reality of this. At http://www.unicef.org/ for example.

If you’d like to say something more detailed to PM Paul Martin then then petition at Live8 has room for, here is a link to his official contact info including email address: http://pm.gc.ca/eng/contact.asp.

If you’d like, you can mention how Russia has already stepped up: Russia forgives debt: Globe and Mail.

Risa Dickens

A Christmas, Christmukkah, Chrismukkaramawanza story thing for my family and for the rest of you, dedicated to my sisters Megan and Brianna. I would love to see this as a book someday, something my Great Grandma could hold. Until then, it would be nice if you emailed this link to people who might like the story. I’ve kept working on it, I’ll post the next draft of the text soon.
Follow this Link … StoriesFromMyMothersSide

Be Well, R.

Hey, check out the Excursus piece built by Andrew Fransblow, Rob Lendrum and myself for the directed study we undertook this summer with our friendly professorial cohorts Matt Soar and Rae Staseson.
http://excursus.touchbasic.com.
We would love to hear what you think about it.