Pisces 18° (March 8)

 

Paris, Day Forty Five of Sixty. And Day Seventeen of Bikram. Time is really flying. Anyway I’ll get more into my feelings in just a bit. But let me finish telling you what I was telling you where I left off yesterday…

So here we were yesterday at the Café du Marche and the parade of Arbus characters never stopped. I had long ago articulated my feelings on her work and how she managed to capture something so extraordinary, which was the ordinary becoming the grotesque. Her work happened at a time when you would walk around and on the streets you would encounter mostly older people still hanging onto an outmoded way of dress and overall self-presentation. Her subjects so often were like moldering dolls or marionettes forgotten and found in a truck in the attic. The world was in transition and the relics were still about, walking around, zombie like, unaware that time was almost finished leaving them behind. Well I think what I learned on our walk from the fourth to the fifth to the sixth to the seventh whereupon we installed ourselves in our favorite market café was that: we are in a point in our history where this is all happening again. It makes me want to grab my camera and return on this walk at the exact time next week and see what images I might capture. That part of the seventh is filled with aging folks (makes one think there might be some available apartments coming up—I’m just kidding—not really). I didn’t take any pictures yesterday, though, weirdly. I guess I wasn’t in the head. I mentioned passing these two red-headed older twin ladies dressed in an eccentric style, part Colette, part Vivienne Westwood. I did ask S. if she thought it was polite to go back and ask to take their photo—she said I could make it a flattering gesture—I don’t think I had it in me to be nuanced and not invasive so I chickened. Out. I like the word gesture suddenly. I used to like reading Gertrude Stein. Her words made me happy in their spare absurdity.

Invading thoughts: It might be a good idea to go back to the very beginning of my Blagues and this might be something of a brilliant idea: actually let me put this into words others might quite understand. Hello All. I don’t know if you know this but: I have been writing a daily blog for the past five years. It is called the Cosmic Blague (blaguemeans joke in French) and it was originally intended as a catalyst for drawing out stories from my life, which has been filled with extraordinary synchronicities, so-called coincidences, indisputable divine interventions and, yes, moments when I seem to have been the butt of the Universe’s joke, all such experience which  Kate Bush tunefully called the “strange phenomenon.” I began writing my Blague with the start of thenew astrological year, on the Spring Equinox, 2015, a time when I was feeling more than a bit kicked to the curb by the Cosmos. I wanted a daily ritual of accomplishment and I wanted to tap my well of storytelling but I had a hard time starting. So I gave myself some specific inspiration. In astrology, each of the twelve signs encompasses thirty degrees of the Zodiac adding up to 360 degrees of this cosmic circle, corresponding (close enough) to the 356/6 days of the year. Some time ago, an astrologer and a seer channeled what are called the Sabian Symbols to express the individual nature of each of the Zodiac’s 360 degrees. So, year one, I mused on these symbols, to inspire thoughts I could type down, not only on the symbols themselves but also as a trigger for the personal stories from my experience that I wanted to relate. That was year one. In the years between then and now the Blague took on many forms and expressed a number of purposes. Sometimes it inspired incredible creative flow. Other times it made me feel super locked up and I would find other ways to keep going, including using it as a personal journal, a platform for other writing I had to do—shows, book proposals, articles, branding concepts—or as a way to vent and even gossip about people, places and things, though disguised for the most part—sometimes I would accidentally name folks (woops, that wasn’t good, especially when I got called out). There were spates when it just got really deconstructed and a bit Dada, but I kept going. So here, as I start the sixth year of daily writing I have decided on another way to trick myself into being prolific enough: I’m going to start reading my Blague entries (which I’ve never done) five a day—If I read that many I will have read them all by the end of this next year—and I’m going to cut and paste the best bits for each day’s entry, while writing new thoughts that stem from doing just that. Let’s call it taking inventory of my thoughts to date and “development” of any work that might warrant it. I have a great deal of other writing on my plate this year and won’t have a lot of free time for my Blague (sometimes I would spend hours a day on this); and so if I get really in the weeds with other work, these simple cut and pastes can function as re-runs with a little introduction by yours truly. This has been a really worthwhile process for me and, in typical woo-woo fashion, I will say: I think that by keeping on writing as I have done, mainly, for myself, even though other writing gigs or deals mightn’t have been forthcoming, that I created a magnetic force field to attract other opportunities to me. Because, as I say, it is going to be a busy year. That said I have not promoted this Blague at all, hardly. At first I was posting my postings to a Facebook page, but I stopped doing that. I may again; who knows. Anyway, just letting you know what’s what and hopefully, as I distill the Blague this year to highlight what I perceive to be the “best of” what I’ve done in the past, it might warrant other readers beside myself!

That was a long invading thought…so I think I will stretch the original story about our walk on Saturday into tomorrow’s Blague entry as well. Such a Saturday it was….

 

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree pointof the Sabian Symbol will be one degree higher than the one listed for today. The Blague portrays the starting degree of for this day ( 0°,  for instance), as I typically post in the morning, while the Sabian number corresponds to the end point (1°) of that same 0°-1° period. There are 360  degrees spread over 365 or 6 days per year—so they near but not exactly correlate.

 

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go!
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