Clearing

I'm having sudden urges to purge
To burn.
I have too much stuff collected over the years.
Something about burning old plots and models feels so liberating
Hopefully it will clear the way for new growth and possibilities

Manon

Those arriving upon Manon from afar will see a gleaming city with five spires stretching like fingers into the sky. It seems as if it is a city which never stops growing; a sleepless city. At any given time of day or night, one can observe a hustle and bustle of movement and production. Elevators, pulleys, and stairs draw people in work attire up, up, up into office buildings and factories. It is said that the city itself is trying to reach something just beyond its grasp, and yet it keeps on reaching.

Beyond the outskirts of the city lie five great lakes, from which all of Manon's water comes. The citizens of Manon believe that thousands of years ago a great hand from above pressed itself into the contours of the land and left an imprint where rivers and streams gathered to form the five lakes. From these fingers flowed agriculture, grids, irrigation, and Manon's prosperity.

But as Manon's spires grow up into the heaves the lakes begin to shorten and the water supply dwindles. The Manonians, however, are determined to see their great city keep growing. They do not glance down from their offices so high at the vanishing lakes. All they see is the sky and to them the future is bright.

(Studio I)

Um começo

Era uma vez um lugar onde as criancas viviam em uma cidade caverna...
Tinha sido uma cidade bonita antes, mas com o tempo foi sendo abandonando por seus moradores que se cansaram dela e foi pouco a pouco se desmontando e se tornando umida e escura.

Foi neste tempo que chegaram as familias dos meninos que viviam no escuro. Como toda crianca, eles brincavam eh claro, mas no escuro mesmo. Talvez nem sabiam que tinha a claridade para brincar.

Um dia um grande vento soprou, e neste vento chegou o Indio da grande floresta. Ele perguntou para as criancas: "Porque eh, criancas, que voces brincam nesse escuridao tao pezado? Na minha terra as criancas brincam na luz do grande pai sol com todos os bichinhos e as plantas da nossa terra mae."

Mas as criancas ficaram confusas pois nunca tinha visto bichos e plantas e nao pudiam imaginar como era esta terra de luz. Vendo a confusao nas caras das criancas, o Indio decidiu dar para cada um delas sementes de esperanca.

"Planta estas sementes e cuidam bem delas e cuidam bem delas e quando elas creceram elas vao trazer luz para voces brincaram."

E com isso o vento forte voltou e carregou o Indio embora.

as time melts into a jar

midpoint to nowhere
I'm half way there
In my dreams I have seen
this so-called no-man's land
and it fills my mind with emptiness

A melancholic cloud floats by
in the opposite direction
maybe he's going somewhere
maybe to alphabet land

As I wait for the time
to come the clock tick tocks
unwinds

I fly a kite
and like fishing
I try to catch a bird

(a poem found in my drawer)

Invisible Cities

The Great Khan's atlas contains also the maps of the promised lands visited in thought but not yet discovered or founded: New Atlantis, Utopia, the City of the Sun, Oceana, Tamoe, New Harmony, New Lanark, Icaria.

Kublai asked Marco: "You, who go about exploring and who see signs, can tell me toward which of these futures the favoring winds are driving us."

"For these ports I could not draw a route on the map or set a date for the landing. At times ll I need is a brief glimpse, an opening in the midst of an incongruous landscape, a glint of lights in the fog, the dialogue of two passersby meeting in the crowd, and I think that, setting out from there, I will put together, piece by piece, the perfect city, made of fragments mixed with the rest, of instants separated by intervals, of signals one sends out, not knowing who receives them. If I tell you that the city toward which my journey tends is discontinuous in space and time, now scattered now more condensed, you must not believe the search for it can stop. Perhaps while we speak, it is rising, scattered, within the confines of your empire; you can hunt for it, but only in the way I have said."

Already the Great Khan was leafing through his atlas, over the maps of the cities that menace in nightmares and maledictions: Enoch, Babylon, Yahooland, Butua, Brave New World.

He said: "It is all useless, if the last landing place can only be the infernal city, and it is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us."

And Polo said: "The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension; seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."