Mr. Sobol, while mentioning his wonderful gigblog, finds resonance in my travelog and the work of Kenneth Rexroth, and sends one of Rexroth's works along.

Inversely, As The Square Of Their Distances Apart

It is impossible to see anything
In this dark; but I know this is me, Rexroth,
Plunging through the night on a chilling planet.
It is warm and busy in this vegetable
Darkness where invisible deer feed quietly.
The sky is warm and heavy, even the trees
Over my head cannot be distinguished,
But I know they are knobcone pines, that their cones
Endure unopened on the branches, at last
To grow imbedded in the wood, waiting for fire
To open them and reseed the burned forest.
And I am waiting, alone, in the mountains,
In the forest, in the darkness, and the world
Falls swiftly on its measured ellipse.
* * *
It is warm tonight and very still.
The stars are hazy and the river --
Vague and monstrous under the fireflies --
Is hardly audible, resonant
And profound at the edge of hearing.
I can just see your eyes and wet lips.
Invisible, solemn, and fragrant,
Your flesh opens to me in secret.
We shall know no further enigma.
After all the years there is nothing
Stranger than this. We who know ourselves
As one doubled thing, and move our limbs
As deft implements of one fused lust,
Are mysteries in each other?s arms.
* * *
At the wood's edge in the moonlight
We dropped our clothes and stood naked,
Swaying, shadow mottled, enclosed
In each other and together
Closed in the night. We did not hear
The whip-poor-will, nor the aspen's
Whisper; the owl flew silently
Or cried out loud, we did not know.
We could not hear beyond the heart.
We could not see the moving dark
And light, the stars that stood or moved,
The stars that fell. Did they all fall
We had not known. We were falling
Like meteors, dark through black cold
Toward each other, and then compact,
Blazing through air into the earth.
* * *
I lie alone in an alien
Bed in a strange house and morning
More cruel than any midnight
Pours its brightness through the window --
Cherry branches with the flowers
Fading, and behind them the gold
Stately baubles of the maple,
And behind them the pure immense
April sky and a white frayed cloud,
And in and behind everything,
The inescapable vacant
Distance of loneliness.

there is no privacy at the speed of Light is a project hosted on ORF Kunstradio and authored by Bernhard Loibner and Tom Sherman aka Nerve Theory. It explores contemporary be-ing and the impact of social and biological entities on that being. Fragment No. 23 is the latest installment:

We live in a world of strangers. Because more and more of us choose to live in cities, we find ourselves living in a world of strangers. We find privacy in the city, and loneliness. As we gain autonomy and our sense of individualism grows, it is more and more difficult to convince others that we are trustworthy. There are two ways we can prove our worth, with credentials and through ordeals. Credentials include credit cards and drivers licenses, and educational certificates. We have identity tags like social security and passport numbers. To supplement our credentials we must submit our physical bodies for measurement and examination. We must establish our reputations through ordeals. Photographs are taken. We are asked to take drug tests for certain jobs, say a hair strand drug test or a simple saliva test. We are asked to place our hands on devices that verify our identity through hand geometry analysis. We are instructed to stare into video cameras for iris scans. These ordeals have become common in many aspects of our personal lives. We live in a world of strangers and it has become increasingly difficult to establish and maintain our reputations. In this world we still rely on personal, instinctive judgment ? the way a person looks and smells, the sound of their voice, and if they can look us in the eye. The way a person moves or responds to our touch still tells us a lot. But our intuitive skills only tell us so much. What kind of music does this stranger like? What are her favourite movies? Does he eat meat? Before we have sex or exchange body fluids we must determine the probability of various kinds of infections. Credentials are important, but ordeals are usually necessary to close the deal.

toting things to the Goodwill store, suddenly a giant cowboy looms up, ready to sell me some land and a house. I confess straight-away that I'm not interested and as a point person for the ubiquitous developers, would he please piss off ... on the horse or hummer he rode in on.

this on the very day when summer starts. when the sun rises at 05:18 and sets at 19:46. not particularly impressive, but thank the stars there is night, otherwise the place would dry up and disperse into a heat-shimmering mirage. no dew here to roll in.

the Milky Way is so ... intense. looking at it, seeing the invisible dark matter that shades the core and gives us relative darkness. it calms the spirit to have such darkness punctuated by such scalable brilliance.

another ebay round mostly of the sci-fi 'zines for Uncle Al -- managed to clear USD 500 on them so far, so he's quite happy with the results.

the travelog clocks the half-millionth hit! (with the counter just started since I instituted the SQL-based site in May of 2004) so, not too bad -- a quarter-million hits a year. prior to that time, no clue, I didn't have a site that fed stats.

the Month of Sundays live performance mix is done. Neil recorded it here. Kudos to he and Roger for facilitating/developing the visitorstudio performance platform.

photographer Geir Ragnarsson shows a nice series from Iceland Day 2005.

house empties steadily of evidences of former existence, leaving echoing rooms and sighs behind. tired of family things, baggage, power struggles, gender clashes, legal crap, bogus relations and expressions. completely. will be glad to be done with all this noise and leave it behind. respect is something I now realize I should never expect within the slowly decaying framework of this grouping. simply because it never was present in the constellation of relationships that was the arbitrary biological unit termed family in this case. with religion composed primarily of Word disconnected from perceptible Action, and a pointless abyss in application between outward appearance (church every Sunday), and actual outcomes that carried weight (praxis-based). there were enough off-balances represented within individuals to finally disperse it. good riddance.

some very nice visual and textual work at poeme sans titre -- Jurij Dobriakov curates this rotating series of presentations.

He knows that it is beautiful and salutary to be the individual who translates himself into the universal, who edits as it were a pure and elegant edition of himself, as free from errors as possible and which everyone can read. He knows that it is refreshing to become intelligible to oneself in the universal so that he understands it and so that every individual who understands him understands through him in turn the universal, and both rejoice in the security of the universal. He knows that it is beautiful to be born as the individual who has the universal as his home, his friendly abiding-place, which at once welcomes him with open arms when he would tarry in it. But he knows also that higher than this there winds a solitary path, narrow and steep; he knows that it is terrible to be born outside the universal, to walk without meeting a single traveler. He knows very well where he is and how he is related to men. Humanly speaking, he is crazy and cannot make himself intelligible to anyone. And yet it is the mildest expression, to say that he is crazy. If he is not supposed to be that, then he is a hypocrite, and the higher he climbs on this path, the more dreadful a hypocrite he is. -- Soren Kierkegaard