et pourquoi pas?

hay or hey | life in the city

2008-04-20T08:12:00.001-07:00

It's still too cold for me to wear one of my wife-of-a-chicken-farmer dresses. That is lost on you, no doubt, for what does the wife of a chicken farmer wear? Probably nothing at all like I imagine myself to be should I run away and start a chicken farm with the man that I love yet I tell myself one day, one day, I will do this. We will simply take off and go to somewhere in Sicily and start a small no-kill chicken farm where the chickens can run around free-range and we will simply sell the eggs and live a poor but sated life.

In this fantasy of mine, for I do realize the absurdity of it, yet I am also serious about it so go figure, I have long hair that I wear in two wheat colored plaits, pretty old-fashioned and worn thin cotton dresses that show my shape in the sunlight as it shines through, and my husband, my lover first and foremost, we make love every afternoon and I make him food and I love him and I nourish him just as he nourishes me in every way. We laugh together and that is food enough - for joy, true joy, one can almost live on that alone.

"So when you see me walking down the street in a pretty silk dress with delicate blue cornflowers and a scoop-neck, my hips swaying from this way to that, my breasts moving beneath the silk, know that I am preparing the ground for my chicken farm."

That this is me, this is how I will dress for my lover because he is fine and graceful and full of ease of love. He knows things that I do not. He tells me "There are so many ways," and then he shows. That is my chicken farm.

Of course, it would mean unplugging, no wireless, no WiFi, no cellphone, no computer, no Tant Mieux, no Google, no nothing and those who know me laugh at my dream and tell me I would last five minutes without my computer and my web site and maybe they are right. It's entirely possible that they are right. But what are dreams for. They sustain us when we are doing the ironing. They sustain us when we are doing the daily-do. They sustain us through the most difficult times because we hold on tight to our illusion or delusion because it is all we have and in this case, it is harmless and charming in its way and threatens no-one, so I hold onto it and cherish it.

One late summer afternoon, I passed the perfect chicken-farm house in the most unexpected place. It was in Spuyten Duyvil near Riverdale, that area in the Bronx (the greenest borough in New York, mind you), and there were trees every where and the scent of the musk trees filled the air and the linden blossom and the waxy, leafy scent of privet and I swear I was transported. I was elevated to a "thin place". It was akin to what William James would call the ecstatic experience for on that day, everything was right with the world. Everything was Good and True and Right and all of the Platonic capital letters you can apply and say what you will but you are likely wrong if you question for you don't know me and you cannot possibly understand the situation so I won't go into any more detail other than to say it was to me, perfection.

I was always told I live in a dream world, although I occupy this world and try hard to eke out the joy that I can - or as much as one can find in this world, as my friend Hans Koning used to say. We do the best we can and if we are lucky, we find a kindred soul who will be with us on the journey and will not laugh at our chicken farm or running away to the circus or whatever your particular fantasy is - a hike through the Chung Nan mountains in China to visit the Taoist hermitages. I've thought of that too, but no... I want to be the chicken-farmer's wife on the no-kill chicken farm in Sicily. If you want something badly enough, they say you'll get it. So how much do I want it? A lot... People laugh, but how odd it will be then for them when one day they receive an air-poste letter with my tiny Hebrew-looking handwriting that reads quite simply, "It is Spring here. I have never been more in love..."

Such things do happen. One can be almost there... I begin, "It is Spring here...are you listening? Es'que tu ecoute ma voix? Je suis ici."

I am here. I hear.

Thanks for listening,

s.r.p.

pen american center

2008-03-29T13:18:00.000-07:00

PEN American Center Profile, click.

the moment of truth | money honey

2008-03-21T10:17:00.001-07:00

tant mieux on Cyrano - the latest post... pleased to note that this article has been syndicated and has appeared on other sites, including PEN America at http://www.pen.org/ViewBlogPost.php?prmBlogID=262&prmProfileID=40628

thanks, as ever, for reading...

s.r.p., march 21, 1.21 p.m.

clipped from www.bestcyrano.org

How we wait for it… have waited. Some clever producer has tapped into our desire to hear the public’s desire for the absolute, unbridled truth with a capital T. Not some watered-down friendly version that may not hurt us, but all of the shitty little things that people do to each other and think (for none of us is completely immune, though some lead a double life more than others), The Moment of Truth, a new television program, meets the supply and demand theory. There is a voyeuristic demand to peer into the lives’ of others (while not wishing them to know about our own) and most of all, to judge. Continue reading ‘the moment of truth | money, honey…’

editorial | december "I'm All For The Little White Lies"

2007-12-31T06:54:00.001-08:00

tant mieux's december editorial "I'm All For the Little White Lies." This will be moved eventually to the articles section of the site under the same title....

clipped from tantmieux.squarespace.com

a word | december, 2007 | i'm all for the little white lies

blogging heroes -

2007-12-15T15:16:00.001-08:00

teleread selected by publisher Wiley as blogging hero - sadi ranson, david rothman,

read more | digg story

lost in translation - the whisper

2007-12-13T11:28:00.001-08:00

this is a spoiler for those of you who would rather not know... but for me, i was always curious as to what Murray said to Johanssen, so this is interesting.... it's what i thought... and maybe what you thought too - but a nice surprise.....

clipped from www.youtube.com

Lost In Translation (Bill Murray's WHISPER revealed)

teleread makes blogging heroes

2007-12-10T17:34:00.001-08:00

check it out.... new book from Wiley - we've made Blogging Heroes....

clipped from www.teleread.org

Along with Boing Boing, Wonkette and other well-known blogs, we’ve made Blogging Heroes—Michael Banks’ book, which Wiley will publish later this year. Mike likes our fight for e-book standards and against Draconian DRM, in addition to our library-related efforts.

oulipo - definition & homepage

2007-10-16T06:53:00.001-07:00

French society began with Queneau - all sorts of amazing, extremely clever word games that will help you with any writer's block (a thing I never believed in anyway) and the results of which can be very funny and sometimes very smart and witty.... try it, you like it. Oulipo is very Carrollian in some ways --

sadi ranson-polizzotti

clipped from www.nous.org.uk

OULIPO is the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or Workshop of Potential Literature, a group of writers and mathematicians. Members include Raymond Queneau, François Le Lionnais, Claude Berge, Georges Perec, and Italo Calvino.

new spoken word with music on Tant Mieux

2007-10-16T06:49:00.001-07:00

This is from my own site, but I have been working with musician David Beaman, so if you scroll down the list of WAV poems or MP3s, any poem with David Beaman's name attached is worth listening to because it is a poem read set to song; i can't tell you how talented this musician is. The poetry, which is mine, is not so terrible and has been published so can't be all bad, but David's addition really adds a whole new dimension and I can't hep but spread the word... If you like it, please spread it around. I think his work is amazing and the results just blow me away. We're building out a whole site dedicated just to this - and hope to get New play as well as radio play - we welcome any good ideas....

thanks for listening,

s.r.p.

clipped from tantmieux.squarespace.com

Audio files just to add something else to the experience and while there may be small errors in voice here and there, we hope overall the quality and tone of these is quite good. We've worked hard to make them as good as can be for the time being and hope you enjoy listening to the poems. Check back for new poems, as some will be removed and others added as time goes on. Note that some of these poems have been or are forthcoming in various journals.

appointed senior editor at Cyrano's journa

2007-10-16T06:36:00.001-07:00

this first appeared on David Rothman's fine site www.teleread.org where i am also a writer and columnist and podcaster. This is a recent post to Cyrano, where I am most honored to be invited to be on the staff.. Patrice Greanville is a terrific editor, vraiment....

s.r.p.

clipped from www.teleread.org

Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti, the versatile poet - journalist - biographer - photographer - music critic - publishing guru—yes, I could throw in a few more descriptions and hyphens—is the newest senior editor for Cyrano’s Journal. She’ll focus on “poetry, photography and life chronicles” and also sit on the editorial board.

the official author photo | spoken word

2007-10-12T16:39:00.001-07:00

Photo used for Cyrano and general author photograph used for articles and books - close enough to the way I look, except my hair is much longer now - yet this is a good representative photograph for any article, etc to be used. No problems in using this photo if associated with my writings etc... c'est moi ... sadi ranson-polizzotti, cultural and political analyst for Cyrano, writer for Teleread, Blogcritics, and many other online publications and offline. Professor at Emerson Graduate School of Publishing, author (under contract at the moment for a primer on Lewis Carroll, among other books), poet - for some work visit www.tantmieux.squarespace.com or do the usual Googe "Sadi Ranson." At the moment, I am working on a spoken -word project with David Beaman - an incredibly talented musician who has been setting my poetry to music.

Check back here for links to his and my work and visit here or Spoken Word and click on anything with David and my name attached for examples. Soon there will be site dedicated just to those pieces.

s.r.p. | photo, July, 2007 - Bronx, New York.

clipped from www.bestcyrano.org

tam tam books - surrealism, dada - works in translation

2007-10-12T16:28:00.001-07:00

shining a light beyond your own backyard; works of interest from France, literary translation - Serge Gainsbourg. Tosh - interested in Eels (my first, Paris/London) - send copy - excellent site with an eclectic and interesting list....

clipped from www.tamtambooks.com

TamTam Books is a publishing house that specializes in 20th Century international literature and is devoted to the purpose of reprinting lost masterpieces and presenting them to a large English speaking audience.

from the Greanville Journal

2007-09-29T17:05:00.001-07:00

if you don't know Patrice Greanville - you will....

clipped from www.bestcyrano.org

Editorial Caveat: Who is this diagnostician for the American Left?: In French and US establishment journals, Bernard-Henri Levy, or BHL, as he is commonly known, is one of the best-acclaimed “philosophes” and authors in France today. But when it comes to Henri-Levy, surely probably one of the great “poseurs” and leftist apostates on the world stage, such accolades are to be taken with a huge lump of salt. Indeed, a new biography by French journalists Jade Lindgaard and Xavier de la Porte is the first in a series of seven acerbic critiques of BHL to be released in the coming years and marks an unprecedented attack on the high-profile academic.

hans koning - author remembered

2007-09-29T05:35:00.001-07:00

Hans Koning was a good and dear friend as well as one of America's best authors writing to the day he died in April. You can find out more about Hans Koning by visiting his web page here - i promise it's worthwhite. He was one of America's greatest writers. He wrote, "I want to set up a whispering in the whole universe." - America Made Me.

clipped from www.hanskoning.net

Hans Koning (born Hans Koningsberger in Amsterdam), was one of the youngest
sergeants in the British World War II Army. In 1951 he came to this country
from Indonesia. He has since reported for The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, The New Yorker, Harpers Magazine, The Nation and
The Atlantic Monthly, and his many books have received much critical
praise. NewSouth Books considers it an important literary event to put his
considerable fiction output, twelve novels, back in print.

who are you? | the great question

2007-09-28T15:00:00.000-07:00

I should be writing something else right now but I am not, instead I am writing this because at the moment, this seems more pressing.

I find myself a bit lost these days, much like the character I am writing about, that is to say Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass asking myself Who am I? and everyone else around me, like the famed Caterpillar with his hookah, also asking, Who are you? Time and again, I am questioned, and like Alice, I can’t and don’t have all of the answers because Wonderland, like the world, isn’t such a nice place after all. In fact, Wonderland is the world. There is no Garden of Eden. There is no real love to be found, not in the space I presently occupy anyway and if it is offered it is disingenuous.

As Humpty Dumpty would say to me of my name, “What does it mean?” Well, I could tell him, because I have traced it back from it’s original roots – from Sarah – for which Sadi or Sadie is a nickname and that traces back to Cytherea which ultimately traces back to Aphrodite. Somehow I managed to do this a while back and discovered all of the relationships I had and who my father was – of course, Zeus, but who wasn’t Zeus the father of… I found I was involved with Hermes. That we had a passionate affair and gave birth to none other than Eros – god of love.

I found that Hermes must have been true to his faculty with languages because our relationship didn’t last and that he had many other lovers – hermeneutics and all that – so he had other lovers and loves and left me in his dust, but then, Aphrodite was the goddess of love and wasn’t exactly committed, though I believe from what I read that it was Hermes who was one of, if not, the great love of her life, depending on which source you trust. So it all depends. And it all depends if you believe in that at all. Frankly, it could all be nonsense. It’s mythology after all.

So who am I? Or as the Unicorn says to Alice, and some might say to me, “What is this?” in a contemptuous tone. As I come out of the other side of some rather life changing events at the end of a summer I could never have predicted would be so breaking of the spirit, I think of the Caterpillar again saying to Alice, and a popular culture note, a sample used in the song by Big Audio Dynamite II “Innocent Child” at the beginning of the song from one of the film adaptations of Alice a voice-over says, “So you think you’ve changed do you?”

Well, I know I am not who I was a month ago, just as Alice knew she was not who she was when she woke up that morning. That between the Now and the Then there have been many changes. I have lost my faith. I, an officiant in the church, find myself, as Michael Stipe would say, in the spotlight, losing my religion. That’s me. Or perhaps it was taken away from me and I was duped. That’s highly possible. After all, you can’t always go around offering something that is close to your heart and sharing it unless you are dead sure that those you are sharing with are not going to turn around and fuck you later on. I hate to use the word “fuck” but I can’t think of a better word. As a friend said to me, “You were fucked and without the foreplay…” I realize I am being vague here, but the story is too long and I fear if I tried to explain it would not be understood.

What I do mean to say is that be careful what you share of yourself – the places you consider sacred and that you consider or in my case, considered holy, the places I called “thin” places – that are neither “here” nor “there” but simple places of meditation where one can or could just Be without interruption from the rest of the world, once you share those places, they are no longer yours and yours alone. They are, for lack of a better word, in the public domain. PD. Part of Project Gutenberg, pages there for anyone to read and you, my friend, you become the open book where once perhaps you were a mystery and interesting, you become by contrast dull because you have given the key and allowed easy access.

I am not saying these things defined me, because they did not, and they would not again. Nor am I saying that people can steal who you are, but what they can do is make you question who you are and they can in and of themselves question you – ask of you, Who are you? And different people can do this in different ways. You can have a friendly Who are you? The angry Who are you? The vehement, full of fury Who the fuck are you? Who do you think you are? All of these things or one of them, but it all adds up the same – it’s a questioning of identity and if you can’t answer this basic question, which I can’t right now, then I think perhaps Houston, we have a problem.

What you need then is someone or something unbelievable to happen, which is nothing short of a miracle, and as Graham Greene said, We don’t believe in those, do we. Perhaps we do. Perhaps we do not. What I do know is that I read in the depths of my research of the Unicorn in Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking Glass of her encounter with the unicorn that she strikes a deal and maybe this is the deal I need to strike. Alice has never believed in unicorns, and frankly, at this point, I believe in nothing. Not anymore anyway. I used to say of myself I was a Believer. I would believe in so many things, but I find myself disillusioned with so many things – But here is the deal that Alice and the Unicorn strike after she does she him…

“Well, now that we have seen each other,” said the Unicorn, “If you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you. Is that a bargain?”

Now if only I could find a Unicorn – but then, I wouldn’t believe it even if I did see one – unless we struck a deal.

thanks for listening,

sadi ranson-polizzotti

what was he about

2007-09-28T14:57:00.001-07:00

clipped from en.wikipedia.org

Hermes (Greek, Ἑρμῆς, IPA: [hɜ(r)'mis]), in Greek mythology, is the Olympian god of boundaries and of the travelers who cross them, of shepherds and cowherds, of orators and wit, of literature and poets, of athletics, of weights and measures, of invention, of commerce in general, and of the cunning of thieves and liars.^[1] The Homeric hymn to Hermes invokes him as the one

more about her...

2007-09-28T14:53:00.001-07:00

Penelope did try to keep suitors at bay to some extent, but she did have some lovers, and one of them was the god Hermes, who is also written about here, who was also a lover of Aphrodite. These days, i find that like Penelope, all i am doing is weaving an endless tapestry - Penelope wove for some twenty odd years in waiting... but she did take Hermes as a lover, although she was married to Odysseus, he was away (as we know) for a very long time... to say the least.

clipped from en.wikipedia.org

Penelope Arcadian nymph (or wife of Odysseus)

Pan (according to one tradition)

penelope | image of penelope and her suitors and her weaving

2007-09-28T14:49:00.001-07:00

clipped from en.wikipedia.org

eros - birth of

2007-09-28T06:14:00.001-07:00

Aphrodite and Hermes were said to be truly in love and gave birth to love itself - Eros - or in some cultures, Cupid, though some myths have it as Ares most reliable sources have Eros as the son of Hermes and Aphrodite.... I touch on this briefly in another article i've written, but it is tangential, but perhaps somewhat relevant... it will be forthcoming in any event.... s.r.p. - (sadi ranson-polizzotti)

clipped from en.wikipedia.org

According to some sources, the mischievous winged god of love Eros, son of Aphrodite, was sired by Hermes, though the gods Ares and Hephaestus were also among those said to be the sire, whereas in the Theogeny, Hesiod claims that Eros was born of nothing before the Gods. Eros' Roman name was Cupid.

hermes | so who was he?

2007-09-28T06:04:00.001-07:00

so who was he? here is the brief definition....

clipped from en.wikipedia.org

As a crosser of boundaries, Hermes Psychopompos' ("conductor of the soul") was a psychopomp, meaning he brought newly-dead souls to the Underworld and Hades. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Hermes conducted Persephone the Kore (young girl or virgin), safely back to Demeter. He also brought dreams to living mortals.

hermes | overview & why

2007-09-28T06:02:00.001-07:00

god of hermaneutics, psychopomp, and cousin and lover of Aphrodite, for more on their relationship, visit www.wikipidedia.org and look under Aphrodite "consorts" - but look here for an article that is forthcoming.... s.r.p.

clipped from en.wikipedia.org

documentary - the archivist

2006-12-14T07:11:00.000-08:00

I’ve written about this before to some extent anyway, and yet I find myself coming back around to the topic with yet more thoughts and ideas. The topic here is legacy, documentary and why we, or I anyway, feel the need to preserve a given moment.

There must be hundreds, if not thousands, of photographs in my house and all in various stages of their evolution from storage on disk, to stacks of prints, to their finished home in an actual album. Some pasted into those big blank printer sample books that my husband gets as part of his job from printers who want his business (these are large, clothbound books with good paper to demonstrate how a given title would be reproduced and so on.)
I have used and continue to use many of these books as photo-albums, carefully pasting each photograph or photos onto a page, labeling each with date, time, name of person, place and so on. There must be at least ten of these books and they are thick and heavy – cumbersome.

Then there are the thematic photo-albums; four black leather and square editions that carry only photographs of our time in Paris and on which we build each time we return to France. These albums each have companion books, which are comprised of the poems and prose written in Paris at that time. These poetry and prose books are all handset and designed on the computer, printed, and hand-sewn into signatures and hand-bound in either cloth or marbleized paper. They vary in size: Some are the size of a CD case – and as such, are kept in carefully designed jewel cases with covers that speak of the trip and the poems held within - a small booklet that fits neatly in the case.

There is the large black photo album with a metal plate on front that simply says “Photos” and that holds only the photos of our trips or my myriad trips to New York City and visits to see our cousin and assorted friends and associates. All of these photographs are in black and white, perhaps because I see those relationships not in black and white or real color, but in endless shades of grey, possibly because in New York City the relationships, like the city itself, are not so easy to define. They are humming with differences, with each shade of grey representing yet another subtle aspect of the relationship, and some more than others. Always some people appear in shades of grey – always sand only shades of grey – silvered and almost gelatin print.

The photos are arranged by me and put into a clear and specific order. Few, if any, are altered or cropped in Photoshop or any other editing program. I like them as they are – honest and true and clear. Even a photograph of our table in a coffee shop with the various teapots and spoons and books is documented, as is the bottle of honey - the one photograph in color that captures the bright amber of the honey. I suppose I shot the honey-dripper alone and in color because it has taken on a symbolism all its own that is codefied and meaningful.

I should note that perhaps because of my absolute and total obsession, I make copies of each of these photographs and send them along, readily slip-cased and album ready, to our cousin (who lives in New York and for whom I bought the same leather-bound album and in black with the plate etc) and which are then mailed to him with specific instructions to keep them in the specified order. Talk about control and obsessive.

They arrive at my his office clipped and bound together and ready to be inserted into the black book. In this way then, they are an exact replica of the album that I have of those times. So we are perfectly in sync, and as we spend more time together, at each gathering when I bring out the camera and document each moment in those soft shades of grey, we continue to document and build on a shared history.

Soon, this time, after this most recent get together, I will have to buy for him and for us, two other matching albums since I took over 139 photographs over the course of two days. I should note too that there are various poems that apply to the situation and that are safely kept in assorted black Moleskins and on my Web site (which I have specified that the hosting fees be kept up on my death so that the work does not just fade away - for those years of effort and that breadth of work to simply disappear on my death because of a small hosting fee strikes me as absurd).

There is also a green album that holds specifically photographs of which I used a program and turned them into Polaroids. The theme is simply that they are all photographs that I thought would work well as Polaroids. The green album has green leather ties and folds open like a book, which photographs on either side; neat 4 x 6 glossies that tell a story, for like any book, any photograph, the story is inherent.

There is the album I made for my husband on his birthday – a more personal album that is strictly for him. There are the few photographs that I managed to salvage from my childhood and that I had to fish from the ready-to-go-out trash as my family began cleaning house, tossing out family albums and a few other keepsakes that are part of our history.

My regret, I did not get there before much of the damage was already done. What I did manage to save lives in a blue-cloth bound album with pale tissue paper between each page so that the photos do not stick together. The extra, loose photos of that era are kept in a different album and arranged in chronological order. If you flip through it quickly, you can watch as i morph from infant to teenager.

So yes, I am a documentarian. I also make short videos because a photograph captures a moment in time. As Pennebaker said, it’s like “a door opening quickly” and you either get the shot or you don’t. So far, I’ve been lucky and have caught the shot – but I take hundreds of photos to get that shot. But film, with film, with video, you can capture the way a person moves when they speak, their body language and how they sound – their voice, which I’ve always found an important aspect of who we are in terms of our attractiveness, who we are.

Photos speak of a specific moment in time that we want to pocket away and hold precious whereas film shows us as we are, as we continue forward, alive and in the moment and how we will be or ARE at any given time. It's all there, caught - our gestures, our posture.
For whatever reason, my family never saw fit to save the blue ribbons I won from my riding dressage on horses in Epping Forest or my ribbons from winning at track and cross-country running. Nor did anyone think to save my high-honors report cards or my high-school certificate of graduation. Since none of these things were saved, I saw no point in attending my own university graduation since, A., I had completed the work and that is what counted most, so the Bachelor of Science degree was and is already mine and nobody can ever take that away and B. who, after all, would frame or value the actual diploma. I could think of no-one.

Perhaps one day I will pick up that diploma and frame it myself as part of my need to document - not for me necessarily, but for history. Somewhere at my alma mater, tucked away in a file drawer is my diploma with all of its various merits just waiting to be picked up, framed, and then put in the back of a closet where it collects dust over the years but where we feel safe knowing it is there. After all, that is what generally happens to diplomas, unless you are a doctor or dentist or some other profession that requires you hang your diplomas on the wall (I’m not sure why that is, but I usually see this at the offices of doctors, lawyers, opticians and the like.)

Perhaps those specific occupations require to exhibit their real training more than those of us who belong to the fourth estate – or perhaps not. I don’t know the reason. All I know is that the one thing in my life I did not document was perhaps one of the most important, and that was putting myself through, and finishing university with a full Bachelor of Science double major degree.

So it follows that I have become the first in my family to really document the rest of life. It is not that I think our or my life is so important… I do think life itself is important, and I think that it’s true that the ‘unexamined life is not worth living.’

Photographs and letters and writing those letters help us reflect on life as we move through it. To me, these seem the things we may wish to reflect on when we are older. We may not remember who is who, where such and such occurred. The mind is notoriously faulty and unreliable. As an epileptic, perhaps i know this better than anyone. It was not so long ago that I woke up from seven or so hours of seizures and when i awoke, I had total amnesia about who I was, who my husband was, where I was and so on. It was a terrifying experience to not have any reference in this world, current or historical.

To that end, not only do I save virtually every letter received that strikes me as important, but I also save a copy of every letter that I send. I find it sad that we no longer can send telegraphs or telegrams – it marks the end of an era. Had I known they were being phased out, I would have sent a few because there is something incredibly romantic about them. People don’t seem to throw away telegrams and telegraphs but have no problem hitting the delete button in their in-box with email. I’ve always wondered what the difference is. Just as I would save telegraphs, I save certain emails. To me, they can be like letters if written as such.

My emails, much like my articles, tend to be long and wandering trails of thought. They speak to what I’m thinking of at the moment, and sometimes, they hit upon a thought that is important and that perhaps one would keep – or I hope so anyway, though sadly, I think they may find the way of our electronic Trash bin on our desktop, or that little Recycle icon. All of the effort and love put into language deleted in an instant. Would we do this with a handwritten letter or card? What exactly is the difference? Is one more important than the other? I can tell you without hesitation that some of the most important letters I have written I have sent via email.
I pray they were or are saved, archived, somewhere safe and out of view, just as the ones I have received from certain others (and this is for me to know) are archived and saved, as if bound by a ribbon from my hair. Precious and safe.

* * *
I once created a little book called Un Jour de Ma Vie. It is a square little black-covered book with black pages. In it, I pasted a representative photograph for each segment of my day. Beneath each photograph, I wrote in gold ink (the only ink that would show up on black paper) the time of day and what the photo represented. Don’t get me wrong, it is hardly that I feel that my life is so important – I’m quite sure that it’s not. It is more that I want my far, distant relatives long after I’m dead to know that their great great grandmother Sadi lived a rich and full life. I want them to know that I led a life of passion and great emotion. Mostly, I don’t want them to have to guess at who I am or who I was the way I have had to about my own family.

I have no idea who my distant relatives are. Because there was no other documentarian before me, there are no old family photographs (save for the one album from the sixties that I saved, but that’s as far back as it goes, which is not very far). I do not have a photograph of my great, great grandmother, let alone my living relatives in Scotland or my cousins in Scotland . They’ve never seen fit to send along photographs and I suppose I trust only myself anyway to get the right shot that truly captures the moment. So be it.
There’s also the unfortunate fact that I do not see or speak to my father at all, which leaves me with a whole side of my family that I do not know at all, including life-saving issues such as health concerns and the like, which may be important in the future. Let’s hope not.

I have a few photographs of my father, who I never really did like very much and who my family truly hated to the point of forbidding him to even step foot in my grandparent’s house. I never was a big fan of his anyway, but I do have more photographs of him than I do of almost anyone else from that time, which is sort of ironic.

As to my cousin who was one of the few people who truly meant a lot to me, I have none. The great irony, cousin D. was my only sanctuary, love, protector, best-friend, and more. I have no photographs of him. It was my cousin who always led me by the hand, who comforted me when I cried or pouted, my cousin who gave me my first sweet and innocent kiss. No matter what happened, I knew it would be okay because at least I had him. No matter what happened in the family or with various shoulds and oughts, we always found our way to each other, a symbiotic relationship that is difficult to explain out of context or unless you have had a relationship yourself.

How funny then that I have no photographs of him. Nor do I have any photographs of the great estate his parents and siblings lived and house-sat for the summers when the real (and wealthy) occupants went wherever it was they went.

It never occurred to me as a child why they would leave this grand estate with its own orchard unoccupied, I was simply glad for it. I miss being chased through the orchard. I remember lying beneath apple-blossom trees as the petals rained down on us – I remember the feel of dewy grass beneath my bare feet, I remember the hand-slap games we used to play and the other things he taught me, yet I have nothing to document this time in my life. So it is, that I have only then these words and other words where he sometimes turns up in a piece of prose or poetry. While I still remember, I write, because maybe one day, the memory will not be as clear.

Perhaps part of the reason we have no photographs is that our relationship was never ‘okay’ in the family. Perhaps it is that we were so close and that fact worried our parents. Who knows. Regardless, you would expect there would be individual photographs of him and of me, even if not together. I’ve searched through the few remaining photographs that my grandmother keeps unbound, cluttered, in a small box at the foot of her closet. The photos are torn at the edges from years of wear, the edges dog-eared, and some have even stuck together from moisture, thereby ruining the two photos as they merge and blend, one into the other. I have never found one of D., and I have never found one of the two of us, he with his wavy hair and matching features; my other, my first. How to explain what is to some verboten when they will never understand? Why the need to define at all if a thing is kept strictly between two? As Dylan said, “I define nothing…”

When I visit my grandmother, I steal away at least five or more photographs that I press between the pages of my poetry notebook. I carry them home, precious objects, and find a sacred and sometimes secret, place for them where they will now be kept safe and with appropriate reverence. To my regret though, I have never found a photograph of my cousin at the age of sweetness (or any age) or of me from that time. If I bring his name up in conversation, it is quickly discarded.

History is what we leave when we are gone. It is the last trace of us on this earth. I preserve part of mine behind glass, making shadow-boxes like those made by artist Joseph Cornel. They have dark wooden frames and deep-set back panels and a pane of glass to protect the objects therein. In them, I can glue and pin different objects.

One such box has a giant wish-bone and a small note that says “In Emergency Break Glass.” Another has some assorted stones that I collected from various places on the globe – some hardened lava from Greece , a fossil from Parnassus , a piece of a statue that I found near Pont Neuf. Others have feathers wrapped tight in rolled and unreadable letters unless, of course, you were to take off the back and read the furled letter, which would be cheating in a way – better to leave it a mystery. Some have photographs, ticket stubs, postcards, a strand of shells, a cross made of palm leaves, a broken necklace of pearls, a bird’s nest.

Each shadow-box is different and each is made thematically or with a certain person in mind. The last one I made with a specific person in mind and which I gave, rather nervously, as a birthday gift. It included all manner of things, some stalks of lavender, bright ginger feathers, a close-up photograph of my eye, carefully chosen tarot cards, other things that are codified, important.

I cannot tell you of the real terror I had in giving this as a gift. It is one thing to exhibit your art and for people to appreciate, and an entirely different experience to make one specifically for something that is chock full of emotion and shared experiences. The thing we fear most is this: will I be understood? Will my meaning be conveyed and how well? More, what will the response be, and will it be what we want? Take it one step further, do we really want what we want? Does what we want terrify us, or do we keep it behind glass (rather, do I) because it is safe there?

Perhaps I should, like a fireman’s extinguisher in a high-school, place an ax next to each glass covered box such that I or someone else can break the glass at any, or the right, time – maybe then and only then will I really start living.

Until then, I live only through paned glass – visible, but untouchable - and there is something deeply sad in that. It leads to a life of deep regret, and I know this because I feel the stirrings of it already. God, somebody please send me the ax or the equivalent thereof… please, and don’t make me beg. It’s not that I wish to destroy my art or things that have meaning to me – I do not. It is that I wish to not be afraid of what inhibits and terrifies me. It is that I want so much to take that step forward – un petit saut – I make light of it, in French, a little skip. If I could take that little skip forward…

If I could… If I were just not so shy… yet I realize you life once, and this fact helps me overcome. I may be shy, but when I look up this word in Merriam Webster is says “see Coy.” It quotes Milton, “The coy will bashfully yield…”

I relay my message, as one would a telegram, through these shadow boxes, hoping that perhaps the receiver then will take then take the petit saut. Maybe I hope for too much. Likely I do. I want and want and want… How does it go? The heart remains a child… I make my boxes. I document my feelings. I send my telegram. I know it is received and I wait for a ping back, but rarely, if ever, do I get the ping I seek.

Being a documentarian raises questions and brings with it great responsibility. You must choose what to edit and what to keep. I have become the official documentarian not only of my own small family (my husband, stepson and I) but the documentarian of the entire family that I know and spend my time saving scraps of this and that, found objects that live in various boxes and bottles in my study until they are put into service. Also, there are stacks of photographs just waiting to be organized and in the “right” album, for placement is everything in this context.

This is to say nothing of the saved letters that either live in reality in a file, or live stored away in the ether, waiting to be printed out at the appropriate time. I pray that I have chosen the things that truly represent not only me (who I am, my wants, my needs, etc) but those around me and the time.

It’s interesting too to see the mirrors in this house of which there are many as I have a penchant for collecting, and one thing I collect is mirrors because they make rooms look bigger and the old, silver-backed antique mirrors I find to be beautiful. I do not, for the record, spend time admiring myself in them. In fact, I hardly look at myself in the mirror (hence I’m such a fright most of the time) but they add a depth and brightness and serve as a kind of silver-backed bulletin board.

For example, I have a twin arched and folding mirror behind my desk in my study, which doubles as our library, hence it is both my study and our library. About the edge of the framed mirror, which is behind my oak desk, the mirror serves as a sort of bulletin board. In the frame, I have stuck photographs, magazine photos and illustrations, cards, anything that catches my fancy. This of course, is changeable, and changes frequently.

At the moment, there is a photograph of my cousin taking a photograph of me, holding his camera to his eye; a sepia tone photo of all of us on the Bronx Walk (don’t ask) in which my eyes look large and full of seizures (which did happen later that night); a photograph of my leg and the side of my bottom as I pull the side of my floral print dress up – one of the sexiest photographs of me ever (yes, really) – a photo of my feet on the dash of a car, my feet in a pair of silver tap shoes; a photo of Rodin’s Les Mains de mon amante; a photo of a pear tree I saw in Pressigny in Southern France; a photo I took by holding the camera out in front of us of my husband and I in Paris in front of the Hotel des Invalides where Napoleon is entombed and a torn from a magazine photo of Assia Weevil from the upcoming book The Lover of Unreason because I wanted to see what all the damn fuss was about (sure, Plath may have been bent on suicide anyway – but Assia was the catalyst, so curiosity got the better of me. I just had to see what Ted Hughes had left the true talent of his wife for. Who was this ‘great beauty’ anyway? What was it she had that Plath did not? Or was it just that he needed something new (which is more likely the case – the whole ‘new cow’ theory I read about – I forget who wrote the book, but it was excellent and wholly feminist. I stare and stare and Assia, who like Sylvia commited suicide, and killed with her, Hughes’s and her daughter, Shura. Tell me – who is the real selfish bitch here?

So there you have it: That’s on my mirror at the moment. Oh, and a photograph of my mouth, bowed and pouted. I don’t know why I like it. I just do. It’s not saying anything or about to… perhaps I like it so much for the promise it holds inherent; a come-hither kiss. The yearning inherent there. One waits like Sleeping Beauty, yet no beauty I.

I keep the mirror honest. It is reflective of the inner-workings of my mind. If you want to know what I’m thinking, walk into my study and look at the mirror behind my desk. These things are on my mind. So then: pears, dance (the tap shoes); photography; my cousin; Paris; my husband and I there; how I look these days – which I’m obviously trying to sort out in some objective sense, hence the photographs because pictures do not lie. The hiked floral dress, the pouted mouth.

No matter whether we seek to be famous or not, we all, I think, want to leave our legacy. I never had children of my own; I was too busy raising my own siblings during my twenties and after that I became ill and this illness made that a virtual impossibility. I do not so much feel a lack or that I have missed out somehow. I have raised three children and played a large role in raising my step-son. My sister has two children now, Ava and Gabriel, who I hope will, after her anyway, carry this documenting and family history forward.

Right now, I am leaving all of my albums, poetry albums and papers, journals and published works (virtual and print) to my sister if she wants them. The only condition that I ask is that the person I do leave these things to, also carry it forward or in the very least, sees that these things are preserved and not destroyed as were the photos and tokens of my youth.

Life is brief – it seems doubtful to me that anyone of us can really achieve all that we wish in such a brief amount of time. There is yet so much I want to do - write more books, travel and live in more countries, drink more fully of life, and do the things I have been so afraid to do… to learn to take measured chances – not stupid risks, but to not always live on the so-called “safe” side of life. I think that living without some measured risk can be soul-deadening.

It is vital that we live in the Now. Not in the past or the future but this minute right now as I write this article, as you read this article (that is, if you bothered to read this far), then you see the importance of not wasting our lives. Easier said that done, I know, for it all slips away so easily and what I write here is easier said than done. Hence, the ax. I wait for the sound of breaking glass.

Just keep in mind that sometimes, being part of life and living in the Now means perhaps doing nothing but just sitting and holding hands. This too is a part of life and is loaded with meaning if both agree. Common language is to be found in the smallest of details – a token gift passed between two, a quick glance or gleam, a stone shaped like a heart that is given in all faith, a quick look between two that is tacit, understood, or a letter written or received. Perhaps even an ellipsis that says dot dot dot and you fill-in the rest because you know what it means to read between the lines. You hope you get it right. “Did I get the part about the…? I think I did, but then… Did I?” Know that all of these things are your life.

What I want more than anything is that after my death, for those who care to know, that for anyone who cares, that is, if anyone cares, one can say that I lived with faith, with true passion, that I lived in the moment, and that I was willing to give of myself to give and to find a necessary comfort and in that comfort and in being saved, we find a necessary absolution.

To this end, I drink fully and deeply of life in the Now and I let nothing and no-one stand in my way or make me doubt my direction.

Thanks for listening,
s.r.p.