PLEASE NOTE: If you’re looking for the main Bod Library site, click www.bodlibrary.com for pages dedicated to poetry, translation, ecological essay, historical reflection, & adventures in understanding, as well as pages about the Bod (website plans & special collections) & for photos-images-&-hyperlinks. (There are also a few broom closets & playpens-in-progress, pun-filled files currently password closed to the unpunished).
This site (www.bodlibrary.org), on the other hand, is just getting started, defining itself by posts & pages as they develop. Originally this was just going to be a place to experiment with website themes, techniques, & add-ons, closed to everyone but Bod Library staff &/or web-advisors. For Bod Library staffers like “Yours Crudely,” however, most writing involves experimenting with themes, techniques, & add-ons–to which re-writing also adds subtractions, deletions, replacements & condensations. Why should site-writing be different, or less open & accessible to discriminating visitors?
So far, there are pages on this site for Home, which contains both site info & assorted “Posts” (whose post-dates may often be disregarded); Other Home, with more on the sites & their pages; Hai! (Basho for All Seasons), new verses & assorted images in the simple-minded old way; HO, Hyperlink Orifice, home office repository for publications from the Bodangle Peninsula, with its OY (Out Yonder) drop-down to the failed learning experiment cabinet, the further out files & the Outside Inn canceled reservation desk.
For better & worse, writing goes up more or less constantly, daily weekly, spasmodically, whenever, along with frequent (if spotty) re-writing, some of which may at least in theory potentially turn worse to better, groan to guffaw, wordy murk to clear reflection, interminably tangled sentences to sharply drawn portraits of both opaque & transparent worlds.
So far, we’ve been experimenting with “POSTS & PAGES,” the two formats found on this site, as discussed in the “INTRO Post,” below. Both formats are open to “Serious Jazz” & “Just Play” for the benefit &/or fun of any who might stumble upon them. The former tend to be more or less unplanned, unexpected, & unsystematic, though in some sense intentional, meant to clarify, draw forth, enlighten. The latter were never intended to be more than the play we disappear into for life-saving therapy, however temporary.
[Preface & Intro aside, the only “Serious Jazz” posted so far is about Aurobindo (on his birthday, Aug. 15) a couple posts below, scrolling down. Others so far are more or less in the Unserious, Non-serious &/or Anti-serious categories, or, like this, in the meta-menu category. Some posts have been (or may soon be) moved out of the browser’s way into pages, leaving only remnants, if anything. Otherwise, what you find is what you get, transitory bits & pieces of whatever happened to get caught in the maker’s net or emerged from the process of becoming–serious, just play, or some weaving of both.]
play’s the thing…
For actor, dramatist, musician, artist, poet, comedian, shortstop, point guard, the play’s the thing, without which it ain’t got that swing, that whatever-it-is, that je ne sais quoi. (“It’s the play, dummy.”) The same goes for chess, poker, & bridge, as for tennis, pool & sax, leaving personal selves behind in the focused playing. The player emerges out of that attention even as autobiographical boundaries disappear, replaced by the cosmic &/or frivolous play of creation.
Initially, I imagined a website for making prior work accessible–writing, albums, teaching–, some very prior, some pretty much lifelong (the deadline for which thus gets close). Despite many well-intentioned vows to finish these, however, the lure of fresh play continues to lead most days, on & off the website. Though I sometimes log on to add a specific piece, like a freshly published “Seeds of Thought” on the Aldo Zone page (at www.bodlibrary.com), more often these days the writing happens on the site itself, on the fly. (Refreshing in real time now, you’d see this page changed each time Yours Crudely clicks the “update” button. Otherwise, you’re either not operating in real time or are on a different page. Try again later &/or more pages.)
Even writing on writing, serious as that sounds, becomes just part of the play the outside-world person disappears into going to work. Maybe that’s why there’s little biography on either bodlibrary site, at least so far. The biographical person has left the building once the play has started. Still, we also like to know about the players we disappear with into the shared world of that play–whether baseball, dance, drama, piano, ukulele, poetry or comedy.
Even athletic & artistic activities that require leaving the “biographical person” behind, require us to give full attention to the field of play & take on the personality of the assigned roles, nevertheless draw from personal experience & express individual style. The more fully given, the more fully absorbed into the game or artistic process, the more characteristically individual the style that emerges tends to be. The “voice” comes forth with its own timbre, rhythm, and resonance, as well as its own concerns.
At an earlier period, the site would have been Land of Enchantment Poetry Theater, describing current programs, tour dates, chapbooks, cards & albums, with plenty of photos, biographical materials, blurbs, even a store. Before that it would have been Land of Enchantment Game Company, with game-forms & related courses. And before that, a site for the study of Asian sages & ways. None of these ever left, but keep on cycling & weaving together–poetry, play, philosophy, strands in the creator’s loom.
It may be that each strand involves personal, social & essentially transcendent selves–from awareness to expression, & back again. The would-be honest writer may have no idea where the work comes from, let alone where the next sentence will go or what it will say. (If we knew, we’d already have written it.) Part of the excitement, including the sense of suspense, is finding out.
Not that that necessarily works out for the best. As Snoopy once wrote, “Good writing is hard work.” Or maybe hard play, where hard is good, & effort is part of the fun. The proof is in the pudding, disguised as a lump of butterscotch. Eating one’s own pudding sometimes means reading over, in which case “better writing” is still possible, sometimes much better, with or without lumps.
A downside of this approach is that some indigestible bits, bowls, buckets & vats may temporarily remain more or less randomly distributed among the delicacies, in need of a good re-reading & a better re-writing, at least where readers of fine taste are involved. On the other hand, readers of fine taste may be in the wrong place, if not the wrong world. And which world would that be?
We are immediately faced with at least two candidates–& where two are, one & three are probably nearby. In the Bod Library are many rooms & at least two wings, as well as tails & feathers, attics & basements, crawl spaces & fall-throughs, ladders & leap-offs, closets & parking spaces, sheds, garages & car-ports, as well as two hemispheres, websites & psycho-geographies.
Just as the physical Bod Library is housed in three main buildings, the virtual Bodlibrary has three different addresses– www.bodlibrary.com, www.bodlibrary.org & a site to be named later, each with its own content, although some spillover, exchange & liked cross-filing. For the most part, the dot com site is closer to the main stream, like a ground floor on street level, faced by the world as it passes.
The dot org site, by contrast, houses worlds (above, below, behind or far within) that are more personal, like daily living quarters; more inherently private, like sacred texts & mystery rites; more peripheral, like far-out studies; &/or more archival, like the frequently changing Random Periodical & Excerpt Collection accessed via the HO, Hyperlink Orifice, page, now the only known Official Depositary of the Bodangle Peninsula Independent Press Association accessible without a prescription.
A wall or two of the physical library houses work by writers with whom I’ve personally crossed paths in this life, including a few shelves for writers I hung with, followed, &/or played with, and a few more shelves for writers I was in this life, and a few more for ones I feel like I was, so deeply their spirits resonated, or even might have been, for all we know of such things, in other lives. It seems not even Harry Houdini, the escape artist & fraud-debunker, was able to establish communication with this world after death.
If you’re reading this long enough after Yours Crudely’s passing on, however, you might theoretically have written this. Or with a slight shift in perspective, the same muse might be whispering the same tunes to us both. Who am I, then, who writes these words, you may ask, as I do from time to time (rarely getting a decent answer)? I am the one who disappears here, at least for now, appearing on whatever page comes up next.