the green notebook,
, some notes from earlier this spring; reading Dodie Bellamy in the Air Canada Lounge, en route to Vancouver,
Tomorrow night, we read in Vancouver. Preparing for our flight, I poke through our bookshelves, thinking I might continue my Etel Adnan rereading, only to discover a further Dodie Bellamy title I had forgotten we owned. The TV SUTRAS (2014), frustratingly and foolishly unopened, clearly landing years before I managed to first properly read Bellamy’s work. Within a few hours, Christine and I in the Air Canada lounge, thanks to passes from her father, as I read Dodie Bellamy and watch planes ascend at angles.
Wait for me, driver. I’ll be right back.
Man getting out of cab.
COMMENTARY
Keep returning to the practice. It will always be there waiting for you. Life will also be waiting for you—no need to cling to it during practice. This is the key to focus. Leave competing demands behind.
I’m enjoying the call-and-response of these texts, reminiscent of what Canadian poet Ken Norris once worked through his own chapbook, The Commentaries (1999), a work that commented upon his own poetry collection, The Music (1995), offering it as his own variation on Leonard Cohen’s Death of a Lady’s Man (1978). As Bellamy writes to introduce the collection, The TV SUTRAS is an “inspired” text.
I use “inspired” in the spiritual sense, meaning a text that is dictated or revealed. For example, each day between noon and 1 p.m., Aiwass, the minister of Horus, dictated The Book of the Law to Aleister Crowley in the spring of 1904. And then there’s Moses, who climbed Mount Sinai so God could dictate the Ten Commandments to him. For The Urantia Book, space aliens spoke through a sleeping man named Wilfred Kellog in Chicago, Illinois, USA. For the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith dropped a magical seer stone into his hat, then buried his face in the hat, and in the darkness a spiritual light shone, revealing a parchment.
This morning, Charles Bernstein announced on social media that Pierre Joris has died, from complications of cancer. Stephen Brockwell and I managed to hear Joris and his wife, Nicole Peyrafitte, read at the 17 Poets series in New Orleans during our first jaunt that way, back in February 2012. They were both so lovely, Joris and Peyrafitte, and we weren’t able to get on the bill due to their long-standing annual reading in town. It was totally worth it.
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Vancouver, morning. Fifth floor. Our room window opens. Do they not know of Connie Francis?
