Inviting the muse in San Diego

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Indira Ganesan, San Diego Marina, 2014

Indira Ganesan, San Diego Marina, 2014

When I travel, the muse accompanies me, but she flies first class, while I fly coach.  Meeting her then is a happy accident.  I am in San Diego, to see old friends and attend the 2014 Ashtanga Confluence. My muse can do ashtanga, all of the series.  I don’t want to be like my muse, but I would like her light to light my light.  What I seek is a way to get a novel started from a mere twelve pages of notes that I plucked from nearly 150.  I came to the confluence to maybe learn steadfastness and keep on trying.

David Swenson, one of the yoga teachers here, said that one doesn’t seek a guru per se, except to take an unlit candle to a cave, say, and if there  is a fellow there with a lit candle, maybe he will let you light yours from his flame.  My teacher, Richard Freeman, said the most interesting things happen in the interfacing of ideas, while at the same time, the spaces between words are the most interesting.

My next move.  My next book.  My next time on the mat.

Move: Not dire.  Soon, something will materialize.

Book: Not dire. Not Dior. Not a Diorama. Just a novel, a simple 80,000 word something between hardcovers, extending the life of Meterling and company.  I have to situate the book in a specific decade.  I was in my twenties in the eighties.  My characters are in their twenties in the nineties.

Mat: Wednesday.

P.S:  No more red-eye flights for a while.

 

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Dahlia prep

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Indira ganesan, Dahlias from the Market, 2013

Indira ganesan, Dahlias from the Market, 2013

I went to the local Dahlia Society sale to pick up some tubers for planting. I have only previously planted potted dahlias, the most successful of which was a mystery brown dahlia I got in a hardware store in Boulder that I planted in a large urn.  I filled half the urn with paper, I think, and the rest
with soil.  That summer, the small dahlias kept coming.

Today was lightly then more heavily drizzling, and cold. Planting time is mid to late May, though some afficianados are putting the tubers in the ground next weekend. I might too, if I can ready the ground in time. One thing I must remember is not to water after I plant.

I have seven varieties, selected for color and their name. Bashful. Sweet Dreams. Hamari Accord. And I have a large tuber I overwintered in the studio in packing paper. It grew very well last year, a yellow and pink combination, I think. I was more organized my first year in this garden. Last summer, kittens took precedence over plants.

One kitten, now nine months old, plays with its reflection while her mother sleeps somewhere in the house. I am trying to teach the kitten not to run outside. I don’t blame her. Spring and the garden beckons.

I will report on the dahlias in the coming months. Teaching is nearly over for the semester, and I can get back to the new novel. I will report on that as well.

Giant, Legend, Bard.

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ID 13546676 © Jinfeng Zhang | Dreamstime.com

ID 13546676 © Jinfeng Zhang | Dreamstime.com

Gabriel Garcia Marquez died Thursday, April 17, at age 87, six days shy of Shakespeare’s birth/death day.  A giant. A legend. A bard.  All of this is true and more.  He is to many of us the person who made it possible to believe in the importance of the saga, the stories of our ancestors, the day-to-day occurrences of the village, when an expedition can be undertaken to transport ice back to a tropical town, where a magician come in and make the real seem like illusion.  Garcia Marquez showed us angels who were ordinary old men, only they had molting cumbersome wings–as the story went, either they were angels or Norwegian sailors.   In another tale,  a man washes up on shore and changes the destiny of the land so it becomes named as the place where Esteban died.  In another, a man is killed, and his blood washes in a winding river all through town to the feet of his mother.  I encountered One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1981 or 82, in Modern Literature taught by Beverly Coyle.  It was the same year we read Ulysses and Lolita, a year of reading literary giants and geniuses.  I could not view the world the way I do without having read these writers.  I could not realize what the novel is capable of being. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a practiced magician,  gave us a world in which he numbered fictional butterflies, so that we believed his stories all the more.