Return/al

In the cool dust
of the round room,
I return

Home is the place
that I am.
That I am with
the Grandmothers
of ten thousand moons.

We work
with our hands
and sit
near the ground.
We build fires
and grind corn.
We grab snakes
and roast them.

Our bricks, sun-dried,
are strong
and lasting,
forming perfect circles,
portals for smoky light shafts,
ladders to the other World.

Dust gathers
and scatters,
but I remain.

My father walks away,
testing my will.
He is surprised at
my resolve
and doesn't understand
that, or how,
I know
where
I belong.

Up the smooth-worn
ladder, in the
earthen room,
closer to today
than before
I returned.

~MH, 11/2007

Viking Ship, Interstate 70, 1976

We are alone except
for snake eyes beaming by
every twenty minutes or hour.
their wakes invisibly mingling
with ours, like molecular
conversations

Our cocoon floats,
escorted by the moon,
our private spotlight,
as mountains,
trees, and deserts fly by
at varying quicknesses

The sky opens wide
Lunar landscape beside us,
and there: a Viking ship
frozen on sandy seas
Stained luminous
in moonlight, and dwarfed
by steep cliffs and
cascading foothills,
skirted by a ribbon of black
highway snaking off to meet
the invisible horizon
and circle the moon

Derelict and noble
Otherworldly, if not
for its dependability
This ship, with hubcaps
for shields,
in a waterless land,
a fixed mark,
On the trip to my parent’s
parents’ house,
And my first
taste of wonder
at four

~MH, 2004

Has it really been April since I've posted?

hmmm... It's not easy being a blogger. People that say it's too easy don't know what they're talking about. There are all of these obstacles and intervening factors. My universe conspires to keep me from posting. Perhaps the only things working in my favor are being alone on a Friday night, friends and mate either far away or occupied. Good music helps. Perhaps that's why I haven't posted in so very long. I inadvertently deleted more than half of my tunes from Napster lite. Yes. I use Napster. I carry the torch of the defeated file-sharing mastermind. But I am not a subscriber because that's a scam. I buy probably 10 excellent tunes a month for $.99 per track and then accidentally delete them. So that when I finally get around to emailing tech support 6 months later, and discovering how to recover them, I can have that glorious experience of being reunited with my prodigal tunes. It is a really nice thing to appreciate your own music and musical taste after a hiatus. It's like looking in the mirror and liking what you see. It's recognition in the purest sense. Here's a sampling of what I'm listening to today:

Passion Sources (produced by Peter Gabriel and inspiration for soundtrack for "The Last Temptation of Christ")
eccodek - "In this Drum a Secret"
Esoin - Working in my Sleep Clothes (whole album)
Angie Stone - "I want to Thank You"
Marianne Solivan - everything she sings and how she sings it is great - totally hot ticket
Cassandra Wilson - "Go to Mexico"
Dawn Penn - "You Don't Love Me"
Handsome Boy Modeling School - "I've been thinking" (featuring Cat Power)
Jeff Buckley's rendition of "Strange Fruit"
Marvin Gaye - What's Goin' On (whole album)
Medeski, Martin + Wood's rendition of "Hey Joe"
Nina Simone - "Come Ye"
Nina Simone - "Feelin' Good"
Norah Jones - "I've got to see you again"
The Roots - "Thought is Like Freestyle"
Carmen Maureira - "Besame Mucho"
Junior Walker and the All-Stars - "Cleo's Mood"
Nouvelle Vague's version of "Ever Fallen in Love?"
Gnarls Barkley - "Crazy" (gotta succumb to the top 40 once in a while, you know)
Gotan Project - "El Capitalismo"
Gotan Project - "Lunatico"
Gotan Project - "Mi Confesion"
Alice Coltrane - "Journey in Satchidananda"
Femi Kuti - "Let's Start"
Caterina Valente - "Malaguena"

You have nothing but spindly limbs and a dream...

Thanks to agentmatr1x for posting this homage to librarians on YouTube:

Purgatory Disease Possession Witches Etc.

More on DH coming soon... Let this image to the left serve as a teaser. Yes, the file labels are:

Purgatory

Names

Education

Disease

Possession

Uncles

Witches

On falling in love with a dead white guy

So, I've found another soul mate to add to my small collection. I confess to having a thing for older men, but I've reached new heights... or depths would be more appropriate. His name is David Herlihy, and he's deceased. Actually, I'd probably fall in love with his wife, Patricia, as well, if only I knew as much about her as I do him. Where to start? It began in October 2006. The crisp autumn air always gets me. It's like there's a pheremone in decaying leaves or something... Anyway, I began a project processing the professional papers of a medieval history professor that died fifteen years ago of pancreatic cancer. BO-RINGG, right? Wrong. So, very, wrong.

The guy was a devout Catholic. Born in San Francisco in 1937 (if I remember correctly), he attended a Jesuit school, a Jesuit college, went on to graduate studies in history at Catholic University. He started out in college researching the life of a San Francisco priest that stood up to anti-Catholic bigotry in late 19th century San Francisco, then into medieval studies researching the papacy and Pisan coinage etc. He went on to Yale, where his mentor encouraged him to delve into the treasury of largely untouched Italian medieval town records. This is the early 1950s. Coincidentally, the UNIVAC computer comes out and is sold to the US Census Bureau to process census data. David Herlihy somehow gets access to similar behemoth computers to apply the same methods to medieval data. This is after he has laboriously transcribed by hand segments of the property tax records ("Catasti"), translated them, and prepared the information for data entry. He also has to learn FORTRAN to write his own data analysis programs. From this laborious process he is able to extrapolate and visualize socioeconomic trends of the 14th and 15th centuries. He's able to construct a demographic picture of a region of Italy from over 500 years ago.

It's getting late, and I'm getting tired, but I will post more on my man DH in the near future. I will explain further why I'm in love with a dead white guy, even though I'm happily married to an older, not dead, guy. Remind me to tell you about DH's feminism, anti-racism, anti-homophobia, pro-family-ism, self-respect, and advocacy for his wife's career in an old-boy's field, and how his work ultimately connects with the spirit of TIME + PLACE....

Betwixt and Across

Somewhere there is a place for all of the people that think and operate "between" and "across" fields of specialization. Sometimes dogged (by others, or themselves) as "slackers" or "unfocused," I really do believe that the world would wither without them. Give them a crevice and they will build an entire eco-system. Give them a canyon they will build a bridge where others put up safety rails and fences. They are the religionless saints doing the work of holding together and advancing our world. Usually grossly misunderstood and underappreciated. Bless them.

election day-after

Despite the titles of my first two posts, this blog is not about politics. My friend Sarah (not her real name) called me last night from the victory party for governor-elect Deval Patrick of Massachusetts. I hadn't heard the results yet, and was elated to hear that he'd won after the recent curse of US politics. While driving home with my partner in the wee hours, we listened to Patrick's acceptance speech. A breath of fresh air in these spun-out days of monarchy and fear. The closer we got to home, the more static we got in radio reception, until finally we pulled to the side of the road to find a spot of reception. There we were, on a rainy Tuesday night, pulled to the side of a deserted urban street glued to the radio. Glued to this man's words, his courage, his optimism, his compassion. His words woven forever into the landscape of that still, deserted street. The moment, the street, the emotion kneaded into my brain.

exhibitionism + democracy

My friend Ann (not her real name) and I had a long discussion about blogs a couple of years ago. I think I can safely say that we were both fascinated by the blogosphere, and at different stages of acceptance of the how blogs change the boundary between private and public. There's a certain repulsion, for some, in the perceived confessional or vain nature of thinking that one's thoughts and words would be of interest to anyone else, including total strangers. Let's face it, you don't publish a blog without knowing that others may see it. It's the Internet, man... In my conversation with Ann, while sharing her aversion to exhibitionist diarists, I defended the blog as a democratizing force in the information world. Still, it has taken a few years, and a major shift in my schedule to bring me to the threshold of starting my own, pseudonymous blog. A wee little foray into throwing my 2 cents into the well of the World Wide Web.