choosing your parrot’s vocabulary
So, now I have a parrot. Its name is Crow. Crow used to be a very interesting conversationalist, but all Crow Parrot can (will?) say is “WHERE ARE YOU GOING. HELLO.”
Odalisque sits at her desk. “WHERE ARE YOU GOING.”
Odalisque steeps her tea. “WHERE ARE YOU GOING. HELLO.”
Odalisque leaps to the window when Hawk or Black Swan or anybird, anybird at all, blessedly arrives in the window to save her from Crow. “WHERE ARE YOU GOING,” says Crow.
“Hello,” says my bird guest friend. “HELLO,” squawks Crow. Shut up Crow! I don’t know where I’m going. I’m in an obelisk for solstice’s sake, and it was a lot of work to get up here. (as portrayed in my movie.) Leave me alone!
Despite the fact that I did not choose Crow’s vocabulary, Owl, in an attempt to be helpful, brought me this: Things to keep in mind when choosing your parrot’s vocabulary.
1. Avoid Profanity.
Profanity is the use of profane language, and profane language is that which is not concerned with religion, unholy because not consecrated, or that which debases what is holy. I was once considered profane, especially as compared to, say, a Madonna. So perhaps I should not try to teach Crow my name, The Odalisque.
2. Stay away from “catch phrases”
It’s always cute when talking birds chime in with something to say, but you want to make sure that what you teach them won’t get old or annoying after a while.
I take a book from my bed and flip the pages. How about:
I would like to step out of my heart, and go
walking beneath an enormous sky.
or
From you to you I go commanded. In between
the garland is hanging in chance; but if you
take it up and up and up look! All becomes festival!
or
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror,
which we still are just able to endure.
or
If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.
or
Is love: a murderer without a knife?
or
She moves the way clocks move.
I can’t imagine even lovely, ravenous phrases could preserve their dewy hunger if repeated as often as Crow says “Where are you going.” If I teach poetry, will Crow use it sparingly, with the wisdom & ken to perfectly brim a fine distillation into each moment’s goblet?
3. Think long-term!
There are many things that will remain constant in your bird’s life, and these are often the best sources for inspiration when trying to decide on the types of words and phrases that you’d like to add to your bird’s vocabulary. For example, your or your birds name…
CROW! squawks my parrot. ODALISQUE ODALISQUE ODALISQUE! No Crow, you can’t say that it is profane. OBELISK OBELISK OBELISK! Nor do I want to encourage any creature in my care to believe that anything in its life is constant. OCEAN OCEAN OCEAN. UNIVERSE UNIVERSE UNIVERSE. No Crow, all is in constant creative & destructive flux. MATTER MATTER ENERGY! MATTER MATTER ENERGY! I do not know, crow. I do not know. It is best to assume all, all will pass but nothingness, from which materiality and warmth may inevitably emerge.
4. Choose songs/music wisely
It’s best to select songs that are “classics.” Popular choices for many bird owners are nursery rhymes like “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”, and various oldies from the 50′s and 60′s.
This guidance is very intriguing. It reminds me of Beckett who imagined mothers squatting to birth babies into their graves. Nursery rhymes & oldies…everything in between is tedium.
Twinkle twinkle little star how I wonder what you are, up above the sky so high. Like a diamond in the sky…
Crow before he was parrot would definitely have thought of the stars as diamonds, and coveted one for his stash. But Owl would bring us a book on astronomy, show Crow that the stars are luminous bodies of charged particles held together by gravity and fueled by thermo-nuclear fusion, and that would have been that for everybody but Phoenix who would know, as if in ecstatic vision, the nature of heaven.
True singing is a different breath, about
nothing. A gust inside the god. A wind.
5. Avoid alarming phrases.
Even if it seems like a humorous thing to do, there is a genuine risk that your bird could incite a fair level of panic given the right situation.
There are so many things that should incite a fair level of panic, but fail to. Related to number 3 above, perhaps I should teach Crow to regularly incite panic with words that remind me of my impermanence.
WHERE ARE YOU GOING WHERE ARE YOU GOING. HELLO.
Oh, hermetic Crow. Even as parrot, you outpace me.
Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you, like the winter that has just gone by. For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter that only by wintering through it will your heart survive…
…To all that is used-up, and to all the muffled and dumb creatures in the world’s full reserve, the unsayable sums, joyfully add yourself, and cancel the count.
–The Odalisque
(all bold text from Stephen Mitchell’s translation of Rilke)
ruined valentine
I’m not writing anymore about love, but I did make a Valentine. My valentine has ruins in it. Owl tells me there’s a fetishism for ruins called “ruin porn”. Amidst the outer-world’s compulsion towards youth, development and progress, there is a counter-fascination with what has fallen apart somewhere so unprofitable it is allowed to remain-an aesthetics of inevitable capitulation, a poetics of collapse. The stones that have crumbled, the rotting curtains, the empty rooms, the sunken roofs, all, all are ephemeral garlands upon absence. Absence: the presence of what is no longer present remains, a meta-monument to impermanence.
my valentine has a hole in it
This valentine reminds me of an early conversation with the black swan:
…Is there a love otherwise made? Of stone?
Its architecture, yes, toppled in weeds,
though an entablature on slipped columns
remains to frame the inorderable sky.I could think: Marking a grave. Or
Its austere grace! What time cracks falls away
to reveal a more essential beauty.The ruins memorialize themselves.
Two might still walk among them hand in hand.
“Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” Let love, in its ruin, grace forgotten spaces, defy the spirit of our age which points, it would appear, only to annihilation. Its shrill, destructive euphoria spares no room for soul-deepening ruins, lovely and bittersweet.
Happy Valentine’s Day! May your love exemplify grace.
–The Odalisque
Happy New Year!
Happy New Year! I now operate on obelisk time, and today is January 31…one year ago I moved into my towering astronomical clock. To scald out the old and wring in the new, the birds and I took a bath. Here the birds are in their bathing caps, I in my flaming sword:
You will note that crow showed up as a parrot. I have no explanation for this; crow delights in incongruities. I trust that parrot-hood is only a temporary condition intended to confound everybody. Once we’ve grown accustomed to this guise, it’ll vanish, like the shadow of the circling bird when clouds occlude the light.
When I started this scrapbook I did not know that my measured and even conversations with the birds would become silly, intense, with fashion shows, flaming pillow notes, cupid costumes, and a very bad day for the black swan. I had no idea, when I started, what I looked like, or that an accurate depiction of my life required a queerly elaborate picture language. I discover my voice speaking to you.
Here are my ten favorite pages from the 72 I made this year (click to view):
- Beauty in ruin…a conversation with the hawk
- The FASHIONABLE BIRDS
- The stag & the unicorn
- Portraits of the odalisque as a young girl
- Learning to wait
- My swim-suit
- A WOMAN THERE WAS starring Theda Bara
- My first letter from imprisoned odalisque, Henriette
- Publicity photos from my movie
- MY MOVIE!!!!!
Which ones did you favor?
Not fare well, but fare forward, dear voyagers,
–The Odalisque
Fig. 1 (enough) questionnante
A series this week! On the complex concept, “enough”
[click to enlarge]
[Fig. 1]
[Fig. 1 DETAIL]
[With words a beautiful, strange creature, all scales and song and shimmering fins, I bring out of the deep]
[for you to give you con ]
[The beast sings in the air then submerges. The sea folds over it.]
Fig. 3 (enough) enough
Part 3 of a series this week! On the complex concept, “enough”
[click to enlarge]
[Fig. 3: Perspective]
[for years a frayed rope tied to a timber]
[floats in the tide like a flayed eel]
[etc.]
Fig. 16 (enough) shimmer
A series this week! On the complex concept, “enough”
[click to enlarge]
[Figure 16: Variation]
[Emptiness, she thinks, is the reward of an open heart.]
Fig. 18 (enough) bleakness
A series this week! (Read intro here.)
[click to enlarge]
[Fig. 18]
[You were always welcome here, traveler]
bones, candy wrappers, a winnowing basket
It came it came! A letter via staghorn post from Henriette! (read about Henriette here)
Dear Odalisque,
Everyone I know, used to know, is trashed and wavering in filthy board-rooms, louche galleries, swanky trashheaps. I hear their twinkling laughter, drunken howls and outrageous tweets even here, in my climate-controlled basement. I know they mean no harm. They are indifferent to me.
Thank you for writing. It is true I still have my coat, moth-eaten but sustainable, in this old trunk Matisse sketched for me. It is true I have few visitors–but few is more than I’m used to, having desired only solitude, like you. I with the company of bones.
Oh the bones, Odalisque. Lacunae of exquisite topology, elaborate curvatures, like dessicated ovaries flowering against a shockingly blue sky. Fractal erections. Antlers. Femurs. Knucklebones.
We are not growing young. It is only with labor, much much labor, that our extinguishment is not a snuffing out, but an ecstatic obliteration in light.
A guard is coming. He will peer closely at me to assure himself I haven’t disintegrated into an obvious fake.
Write soon.
Your friend,
Henriette
On my very first scrapbook page I wrote these words: “I will write no more of love. Is anyone ever satisfied?” Henriette and I both experienced a disillusionment with “love”, whatever “love” is when you’re an odalisque who everyone wants to look at. At some point, bathed in gazes, thoughtful odalisques react to submersion in viscous adoration with the apparently outrageous question “What am I?”
Lovers come, lovers go, the retreat of street-shoes across elaborate carpets upon which we, barefoot, barely concealed by shimmering drapery, lie. What does an odalisque feel? Who is there, not feeling, not known? I felt trapped inside my own desirability. Inches beneath my skin I felt a barricade between all-but-my-surface and everything else: an unknown quantity <– my skin–> the world. The “real” world. I could see it, as if through chinks of mounded rubble. But what or who was in there looking out, so fiercely protected from invasion or intimacy? I felt a faint wind. I could see nothing, and the sound was a soft emptiness, a downiness into which too much had collapsed and suffocated.
The options available to Henriette & I ? Jaded hedonism, vengeful vampishness, feverish tragedy, or domestication, a settling down, settling in. We considered our options and cried “fuck this!” We meant these words metaphorically, not literally, and that, that delineated something raw and fibrous that we resolved to call “I”. We grabbed our coats and ran.
We were never afraid of living our lives alone.
I WAS afraid of becoming brittle and sopped, trash spit out of the ocean that crumbles at a touch–corroded aluminum, brittle cellophane, the shattered foil wrapper of something toxic and sweet. Better to be a seashell, empty and clean, or a beat-up piece of glass. Better to be a crab scuttling away from the encroaching foam, or even the dry rasp of the dune grass, if not the dunes, if not the collapsed lungs of the sea creatures upon the sand, if not the moon’s liquidity on the ocean’s trembling musculature, or the moon itself. No, not the moon. The winnowing basket woven across the sky by its mensual arcs.
That yes that.
Dear Henriette,
Did you ever figure out how to LOVE someone?
The birds all say hi.
Your friend,
The Odalisque
Sand [y]
It’s sandy here. I don’t know what happened. Wind outlandish wind a storm of wind that rattled the bed frame and deflowered windows, shattering glass. In the morning, a pile of sand, like an hourglass emptied on the floor of my obelisk. What duration was being measured? What, now that the sand has sifted, will soon cease? Is it bad luck to smash a glass of hours? What will I do with this temporal pile of sand?
Crow would like me to build an impermanent castle. Black swan says sand is good for wallowing in, shuffling grit into the itchy place between the wings. The starlings swoon in discrete calculations- one grain per pursed beak, which will be more numerous?
Hawk sees in the pile of sand a microcosmic manifestation of our parched souls.
I need a broom. It was Halloween and I wanted to be a witch because that’s what you call women who fly. I want to fly but I don’t have a broom, so I dressed up as Owl instead. Owl took one look at my costume and said “isn’t that a bit like gilding the lily?” I’m not sure if “lily” refers to me or Owl.
Owl was disgruntled with all costume choices. “Why can’t I be a fish or a movie star or a fantastic aviation device?” moaned Owl, clearly under the influence of my first movie (have you watched it?) No, Owl is, this year, a very perturbed cupid. Here we are, with my inexplicable heap of sand:
Owl has no access to electrical equipment at this time, so we had to take a photograph of ourselves in our costumes. I will post a scanned version, soon.
-The Odalisque
**Here’s the scanned version of our Halloween costumes. It enlarges :
Halloween, 2012
movie poster
Hot off the press! The publicity poster for my home-made movie, which will soon be released.
COMING SOON TO A GLOWING SCREEN VERY NEAR YOU
HOW I GOT INTO THE OBELISK
a movie shot entirely on paper
my first movie poster
FEATURING (in order of appearance)
The Odalisque
A Fish
A Coat
Crow
Phoenix
Starlings
Black Swan
Hawk
and a minor, unmemorable appearance by a typical siren.
staghorn post
me wearing red harem pants in odalisque solidarity
I have decided to send a secret message to Henriette. Carrier pigeon post was not an option as she is incarcerated in a basement, which I assume has no windows. Therefore, I am using staghorn post. This service, with their wide net-work of inconspicuous agents, will be able to return any messages to me even though only a single agent (who lives here in the obelisk) knows of my actual location.
I have placed a misleading return address in case my message is intercepted. Just let those authorities try to find me on the open seas where I will never, never go again!!
More as the situation develops.
(Read about my imprisoned friend, Henriette, here.)
–The Odalisque
Henriette
I’ve had terrible news. Owl breezed in with all-the-news-fit-to-print, in which I found an article about an old friend, Henriette. (read the article Odalisque in Red Pants here.)
me & Henriette back in the day
Henriette has, for the past decade or so, led an austere, artistic life in the southwest desert, as the article states. She was an example to me, The Odalisque, when I came to my obelisk. I have these snapshots from Henriette …it’s hard to even look at them now….
snapshots from Henriette in the desert
Henriette has been captured! Packed in a red tube (don’t let that industry double-speak fool you…she was bound in red harem pants, then rolled up in a sumptuous Turkish rug) and handed off to authorities who will return her to a dank basement where, the article says, no one will appreciate her!
Can you imagine what it means for an odalisque to be amongst people who do not appreciate her? It is one thing to be a solitary odalisque as I am, but to be in the public eye but dismissed?! Even worse, the article says she will be spited as a bourgeois. Henriette? A bourgeois? Long, long ago poor odalisques ASPIRED to the bourgeoisie. No more! Henriette and I are beyond your conventions oh wretched outer-world. Leave us alone!
I want to help Henriette if only with kind words and assurance that she has a friend. I blush with shame at my hesitation. For I, The Odalisque, am afraid. If “they” know about me, will they snatch me, too? Where would they take me, these authorities?
I comfort myself with the thought that I have birds for friends…far more useful than the company of bones, which Henriette preferred. Birds can fly and spy and deflect and bring warnings.
What should I do for pauvre Henriette?
Here is the picture that keeps appearing in the newspapers. What no one but I notice–because I, also, am an odalisque– is that Henriette still has her COAT. As I said in an earlier post…every odalisque needs a fantastic coat for dark times…
I am the odalisque who lives in an obelisk. I converse with birds.
