LISA CHUN

Is This The Way Dreams Get Built?

I’m in the studio lately working on a spring show which will be in my new gallery space and will also feature new works, I believe on paper, by my friend Ben Haggard, both of us working from inspiration gleaned from his garden and/or photos I took in his garden last fall. March 20 is the opening reception. More on this as it develops.

Yes, This is the Way Dreams Get Built

This evening I sit
at the typewriter, oh the blessed/cursed typewriter
where I am trying to make poems appear out of thin air.
Ah, the dry, dismal trying of it.
I am buzzed from an afternoon of drinking smoky oolong tea.
I am full from eating too many almond cookies.
Tonight trying to write is like facing my fear of swimming.
Every attempt is an attempt to transgress the grip of the reptile mind.
I am holding steady but reptile mind has grown into a steamy jungle.
It is green, so verdant in this place where it lives. One could be
easily captivated and never get out. Swimming should be like it is
for the babies who are in the pool at the same time that I have my
morning lesson. A loving, gradual acquaintanceship that leads one day
to a full blown romance. Safe, safe. These mornings
when I am in the warm, shallow pool with so many of them and my
heart swells at the sight of their tiny white rosebud heads held up above
the water by their loving mothers, I wish I was them,
oh my god I wish I was them
instead of me, gripped by this turgid, unreasonable fear
that I might breathe water instead of air, that I might lose it and die.
Then I could face this thing
before language got invented for me,
before thought settled in, before criticism, self flagellation and
Before Fear.

I’m thinking poetry is the only cure.
Self-love is the real cure but poetry is my way
of saying it without saying it.

All this work, the many layers of this work,
it feels like I am moving a mountain one teaspoon at a time.

I think this must be the way dreams are built:
First a glimmer, something shaken down
from the stars, something made of light and air and
dare I say hope. Then comes all the days of quiet activity
in support of it. I am thinking:
This is what we are made up of.
Something in between the dreaming and the doing.
Something arching down from there to here.
We are the arching.
We are neither here nor there.
We are the hope that lives between them,
the continual blooming outward and upward
of something we want
but we can’t see.

If You've Ever Hugged a Tree Clap Your Hands

   

Late this fall I was hiking with a friend at Atalaya and as we were walking up and up and up, transforming as we talked, turning fear into love, fear into love, upward into the protective shelter of the pine trees, when she suddenly bounded up ahead of me and in the love that was inherent to the moment she zealously wrapped her arms around a good sized ponderosa pine and stayed there a good while. I was very skeptical. In my mind I'm thinking, what is this, are we going to have a corndog New Age Moment and then get freaking caught by someone? As if she heard me she insisted I try it. So, skeptically and to indulge her, I approached a tree that was near the one she was so enamored with. What could it hurt me? In the newspaper the next day: Girl Hugs Tree, Is Changed Forever...Into a Corny Hippie Lover of the Natural World? Not very likely, so...

I hugged that tree, why yes I did. And there actually was a profound moment when I felt like the tree was hugging me back. Seriously, it was incredible. Like a very ancient parent figure making it safe for me, hugging me to that place of quiet stillness that's so hard to get to sometimes. Corny and beautiful. Mostly beautiful.

Kind of related to this, one night on the internet (that'd make a good book title: One Night on the Internet), I don't know what thread I was following but I came across this guy's blog/website/whatever. He lives in Wisconsin with his family and engages regularly in tree hugging type activities. He even made a book about it.

There's a t-shirt, too, which I ordered in case I decide to go truly public (more public than writing it about it on my blog, that is). His site is called The Heavy Duty Press  and I hope you check out his "Log", the lunar updates. It's cool, he's funny but boo-hoo plans not to update the site much this year, opting instead to do regular real-life stuff, with his hands, geez. Imagine that. 

I've got caffeine jitters really bad so...must go..now...

But here's a thought to end on an up note with: Do something different - right now, quick - cause why not?

The Haze and the Light

 

Some days it's so easy to be true and feel free and other days there's a tenderness and fragility that's hard to reconcile with the real world. Sometimes this shift is a moment by moment one, and one just needs to be okay with that, I guess. Music really brings me to center and lately it's a mixture of Iron & Wine, Grant Lee Phillips, The Watson Twins and Coldplay that are doing it for me. Mellow and moody, good for making the kind of art that I make.

I'm working steadily on a new body of work and just sitting with it every day, letting it flow, is like a lifeline, a comfort, a source of love and nourishment. I'm laying down some butterflies at the moment, some of the ones that didn't get ravaged by the plague of mice I had in the last house I was in, just before I left it (more biblical symbology, I fear!). One butterfly in particular has lately been a marvel to me - on one side it's brown with elaborate false eyes and its other side is a beautiful dusky, subtly iridescent blue. It seems to have found its place near an old illustration of a field looked over by a hazy sun, or maybe it's a moon. Haze and light and the dusk of unformed dreams, it's all beautiful to me. It's like poetry without the words. It's the feeling that comes in anticipation of the words. Or, almost in reverse, it's like my longtime friend's adopted son who is blind and lives with her in Sudan where the White Nile and the Blue Nile meet. He has never seen flowers, trees or fruits but in his happiness he will spin around and around shouting out their names. It's all exultation and poetry for him. The fevered joy that comes from knowing a thing and not having to prove to anyone else that you've seen it.

P.S. To see the very powerful and moving story of my friend and her son, click here.

Monday Morning Sign & Poetry

     

As I was walking to my morning appointment today I stepped over this word "trust" written into the sidewalk, then stepped back to take the picture just at exactly the moment my Ipod shuffled to Thich Nhat Hanh saying, (I'm paraphrasing, hardcore) Don't worry about the future. Don't get attached to what you do being successful. Have confidence in your work. Do the best you can and let your work contain understanding and compassion. Be attendant to each moment. Do your best.

Mmmmm, I say. 

Can't quite get into the writing groove (but full of energy now that my acupuncture herbs have been adjusted!) so I'm going to share a poem I wrote while I still lived in D.C., maybe ten years ago. It originally appeared in the 48th issue of Gargoyle as "Seven Stages of Seasonal Affective Disorder." Also a good time to mention that on my Lisa Chun Website, if you go to the "Word" section on the main menu  I've split the poems into two portions - past & present and added more poems to both. I know there are some of you who have spent quite a bit of time there over the years and I'm happy to say that after five or maybe eight years - yippee - some new stuff! How's that for not fast but eventual progress? Onto the poem.

these things in winter


1. nights. even the light from the moon is cold. i lie awake. the phone
doesn't ring for ten days.

2. food and drink. obsessive thoughts about food and drink      as a way
of removing myself from the weather, from the absence of a warm body
next to mine in my white     bed while the white of the snow outside
threatens to press in. i drink martinis. more for the shape of the glass,
it's cool elegance, than for the drink itself. vodka so smooth it's like
water. cigarettes to chase away the smoothness. blueberries as
stolen treasures in winter. strawberries coated with white chocolate
from france.

3. the writing assignment given to our group during the whitest of the
winter months: write for 90 minutes write without censoring yourself
the history of lovers'/childrens'/strangers' skin.

4. this image/a postcard i sent to myself while in portland: a french man
waiting in the airport. dark. dark liquid for eyes hair even his jacket
made of dark leather. his palm pressed into mine briefly. quick talk about
films, foreign of course, and days without any sunshine. the liquid
absence of any light. he was      smooth and dark and liquid. he was on
his way to kenya via paris. i was on my way home. for a small moment i
wished i was on my way to the continent he appeared to be, full of
jewels smoldering in their dark liquid light. wished i could go where he
was going      instead of slipping      so quickly past him      a kiss on
each cheek, then goodbye.

5. grief. both expressed and unexpressed. a woman who had given
birth to her baby four months too early showed me these pictures. small
body      like withered fruit      small and bruised and dark.  fallen. he had
fallen. like a small planet, like a tiny fragile star that spun too quickly
towards earth      with no control no     choice but to be
consumed by its own heat.

before death: wrapped in a small blue afghan. after death: ashes,
ashes. i managed not to cry in front of her. i just looked at her      for
an extra second      i just took it all in.

6. the unexpected injection of color. a man told me this. he liked to
chew lipstick off women's lips. he liked to suck their clip-on earrings into
his mouth and in a fit of passion spit them to the other side of the
room. i was told this while eating lunch. i have no reason for mentioning
it now. except for the shock/the picture of something so brilliantly red
or so dark plum almost blue      painting the inside of a man's mouth.

7. forty-five days until spring. forty-four. i watch old movies pretend
not to be counting.

Insomnia & Acupuncture

 
For a long time I was plagued with insomnia. Then more recently I had nightmares coupled with insomnia. Then I went to acupuncture, Chinese style from a lady with a Jewish name, and she cured me pretty good. It took several months of concentrating on de-stressing plus her finessing a concoction of herbs that I take twice daily with warm water. When the nightmares were bad the herbs were bitter. Now they just taste like earth and I like it. It’s miraculous to go to sleep at whatever embarrassingly early time that you can only imagine - that I will never tell you (except to say that if you were to call me to go to a party, and it’s on the early side before it becomes a rager, and I don’t pick up the phone, Shannon, you’ll know what I’m doing: practicing for the days when I become a really old lady) and to wake up at 6 in the morning, as if no time had passed but a lot of ground was covered, in dreams which unfurled, one after the other, Un Interruptus. The way we like it. Yes. Yes.

I sleep but now I have no energy. I sloth around most of the days, zombie like, i.e. totally relaxed, beleaguered by the slow details of winter. The snow as it drifts onto the leaves of things. The draft that creeps in through the cracks in the kitchen windows. The art I’m not making. Or the art I am making but all the while applying this slowed up feeling - which can’t be a good effect, unless my aim were to put people to sleep, and I’ll tell you it’s the opposite, I would actually like to help people come awake – which is to say I’ve had my Persephone stolen and she’s hiding, locked away in the Underworld, along with all my radiant, burgeoning, gurgling like a brook in spring feelings. All I want to do is lie down and watch videos of English people in fantastic period costumes. Which is pretty much what I've been doing, just mix in a tinge of guilt and maybe a smidge of Fear of Eventual Destitution. On Friday I am going back to acupuncture and I’m going to talk to her about reversing the course, bringing me back from the Underworld. Even if the cost is some uneven nights, some not sleeping. I want to be with the living. I want to be able to talk to other humans. Coherently, without spacing out and without having to convey how tired I am, how relaxed I feel, so tranquil I may just…lie down…in the middle of this sentence.

Sunday in Pictures

Winter Light, Winter Love

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ben & Joe: Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!

 

I’ll tell you what I love. I love eating dinner at Ben & Joe’s house. This even despite the fact that they have tormented me with Photoshop collaged pictures of a dead mouse/joe/a big knife and Youtube videos of a Japanese claymation Nekko cat, like me, going apeshit over the sight of a mouse. I forgive it all to get to eat at their house.

When I’ve gone there for special occasions it’s been  6 or 7 handcrafted courses, each course artfully paired with a wine that Joe brought back with him from Germany, something with terroir, noble rot, good fruit, good year. Salad comes towards the end, European style, and salad is Ben’s specialty. In fact, I’m told Ben has Salad Mojo as his Super Power [I’ll cover Super Powers in the next blog posting, promise.]

Ben & Joe make all of us other food lovers look bad because, shit, they grow their own fruits and vegetables in their Santa Fe garden which looks like a permacultured version of an English Secret Garden. How is this even possible in this high desert which has never given me any luck, in fact inflicted upon me a biblical level of signs, possibly of the end times - all my attempts at a garden obliterated by wind, hail, grasshoppers, rabbits, too much water, too little water, gophers, flash floods, lightning. So this is part of why Ben is said to have Salad Mojo. Fresh, organic greens from their own garden. Come oooonnn, get real. Plus, Ben’s work has something to do with permaculture and he has visions of creating a New World designed around the agricultural innovations that…well, wait a second, I have no idea, no idea of what Ben’s work is or what his job title is though I have many times been around the group of people involved in this work and I have nodded with a look of deep understanding as this agricultural/educational/reformational jargon gets tossed around, but people, really, I’m just here to eat. I want to eat my salad that’s laced with love and tarragon flavored salt and honey from a local beekeeper. Mincemeat pie, something I never thought I’d be caught dead eating, a new favorite. Joe’s birthday soup made with pumpkins, apples, leeks, curry and topped with crème fraiche - I would give my children away to get to eat again, so thank god I don’t have any kids.

Speaking of kids, when Ben & Joe came over recently in coordinating Christmas bathrobes and matching Santa hats to watch Mary Poppins (Joe has 9 siblings and Ben has 8, something like that, and Ben had never seen Mary Poppins before this momentous night on which I unfortunately was crashing from a series of hangovers built up over several uncharacteristically boisterous nights out) I said, I know you grow your own freaking vegetables and then labor over them shaman-style in the kitchen for 8 or 10 hours but you should know that I very lovingly and purposefully ladled this soup by hand, by my own hand, out of the tureen at Whole Foods and I bought this salmon and leek quiche with my own money from the French bakery down the street and carried it home MYSELF, walking over snow and into foot deep puddles, again, with my own two feet. That’s as good as it gets. At least until I once again get to live in a place that has a working oven. Oh yeah. And they say all good things come to those who wait. And wait. And wait and wait and wait.

P.S.  I will never, ever tell you where they live or how to get invited to one of these dinners unless perhaps you shower me with expensive gifts from far away lands and sincere forms of flattery that make my hair shine and curl up with kitten love. And Ben & Joe aren’t even their real names - or are they? You will never know!