Sleep

If I'm doing chi kung (qiqong) meditation at home, I have a little routine I like to follow. First I do a little chanting. If I need to, I stretch. And then I sit meditation.

When you go into a sitting chi kung session, you often go very deep. Numerous fascinating things happen: you see colours throbbing and pulsing in front of you. Reality goes in and out of focus. Sometimes there are special guest stars: I recently watched as globs of light dripped down from the ceiling of my room, and two sets of luminous footprints laid themselves out in a counterclockwise circle around me.

When you come out again, you have to settle back down into yourself before you can stand up and walk around. You've been in touch with another, higher level of consciousness. Plus in my case, I've been sitting in half lotus, so things are...numb. I usually have to take a minute or two of just sitting with my legs stretched out before the feeling returns, my energy settles, and I can stand and head out into my day.

One of the things I have on hand for this time is Deng Ming-Dao's book 365 Tao: Daily Mediations. This is a cute little book that gives you a word, a Chinese character done in a gorgeous calligraphy, a snippet of verse, and a prose extension of the snippet of verse that tie in with the word for each day of the year. During my wind-down time after sitting, I'll read the entry for that day and think about it.

The word for June 1 is "Sleep". The poem I thought I'd share because it's uncharacteristically horroresque for a book of cute daily meditations:

Sleep is like a swift train
Plunging into long black tunnels,
Slicing day with red and black light,
No worry about the skeleton engineer.
Head to pillow is like head to track,
Listening to the rumble of destiny,
Knowing that the opening will come.
In sleep, as in the tunnels,
The sound seems ever closer.

Something Useful

I recently followed the advice of Dr. Wicked on "Writing and Technology: Finding Your Place" and purchased an AlphaSmart 2000. This is the durable but less flashy older brother of the Neo, for those who aren't familiar with this cool little device. Basically, we're talking about a super lightweight smart keyboard that remembers up to 64 pages of text and retypes it into the file of your choice when you want it to. It runs on three double-A batteries for a billion hours. Dr. Wicked explains it extremely well if you need more convincing.

I am (and shall remain, I boldly declare) a steadfast believer in pen and paper. I write first drafts by hand. As a lefty, I experience an intuitive connection with the page that is quite different from the balanced intellectualism of keyboard work. And I love the grace and ease of certain pens. I work with a Rotring fountain pen and Aurora or Noodler's ink, which is a much more economical option than some of the roller ball pens I worked with as an academic. At two and three dollars a pop, disposable pens end up costing a whole lot more over time. (To compare, a seven or eight dollar bottle of fountain pen ink lasts a year even with heavy daily use.)

But enough about my pen fetish...

The point is, when it comes to getting text off the handwritten page and into a word processor, I find I often get sidetracked (Videogum, I'm looking at you!). So the idea behind the AlphaSmart purchase was that I could separate my writing time from other, superfun, but perhaps less productive activities. I'm thinking a super lightweight portable keyboard is also a better option than my big old superheavy laptop for transcribing research in the library, for taking out to the coffee house, for dropping on the floor accidentally, and for traipsing about the wilds of Northern Ontario. (Our family cottage doesn't have regular hydro service. There's a generator, but we don't run it 24/7 and it's loud and unreliable.)

So the point of all this, is that I ordered an AlphaSmart from some dude on eBay for $9.95 US, and it came today. They tend to go for a little more than that, but not too much more. I purchased a simple cable that you need to upload files from the AlphaSmart to your computer, and I was ready to rock and roll.

The point to this story is that the AlphaSmart was previously loved by a school that used it to help kids work on their writing (or for all I know, their typing). As it turns out, files do not get deleted just because the device doesn't have batteries or a connection to power. When I turned it on, I found that two of the files had, uh, content in them. Reading these made me immediately want to go out and get some schoolage kids of my own.

The first item:

Dear Mrs. Losey

we would like your approval to have an’end of the year water party’the we would like to set up are water balloontoss,quismo,gallonfill,freetime if you let us do this we will be on are best behavor and we will clan it up.

I have no clue what half of this stuff is. Quismo? Sounds diabolical. But at least this child is promising to honour his Scottish roots. Or maybe his supremacist roots.

I also found this short story? essay? about a touching weekend camping trip:

When me and my uncle were at a forest I was throw rocks I hit something and that something was a Camodo Dragon.It chased us intill my uncle found a stick and hit him with it.Then he died,he picked him up and droped him on his head again an again to make sure he was dead.Then raped him up and was heading home.I sat in front cause I didn’t know if he was still alive.

I love that it becomes unclear whether the kamodo or the uncle dies and gets "raped up". Powerful use of ambiguity, that. Seriously, kid, if you're out there and this is your work, I hope you kept writing. I can only imagine what kind of sick stuff you'll cook up after you experience the horrors of dating and life after high school.

Good to know

56%

The Magic Flute

So one procrastination point on Saturday was taking the evening to go see Opera Hamilton's awesome production of The Magic Flute. A previous production of this opera had left me impressed by the Queen of the Night's famous aria ("Hell's vengeance boileth in my heart"), but basically thinking that Magic Flute was a weird and cute crowd-pleaser. Not so with tonight's production. It was a deeply weird and ritualistic production, rich with quasi-Masonic (or possibly seriously Masonic) imagery, techniques from German expressionist theatre, and some incredible casting of children as the three spirits who help out the protagonists with handy interventions as they undergo their trials.

It was also hilarious. As with many productions of this opera, they translated the recitative into English and spoke rather than sang it. But this wasn't dumbed down dialogue - it was often smart and smartass, too. Way to take a risk, Opera Hamilton!

During the show, I had a flashback to a vinyl record that was in my parents' collection. I think it was just an "opera lite" selection of Mozart pieces, but it had a picture of Papageno on the front.

Papageno is one messed up character.

He's a man; he's part bird; and his job is collecting birds for the Queen of the Night. What they do with the birds, I don't know. But there's something of the weird cannibal in Papageno.

As a kid, I just could not figure out the picture on the album cover, which was much freakier than any of the images I could find of Papageno online. But watching the production at Opera Hamilton tonight, I had moments where that frisson of disorientation came back to me.
Image by Kay Konrad.

Thanks for the memories, guys.