BY JAN HAAG

INTRODUCTION + ESSAYS + POETRY + MUSIC + TRAVEL + FICTION + TEXTILE ART + SOCIAL JUSTICE +




CYBERBYTES

66 VISITS IN 99 WORDS

Short Short Forms





#1 FLIGHT

12-31-99

I left early, December 6, 1999, from my University of Washington Access Classes to be in the air on my birthday, and chose a seat with care -- to view the mountains. But we must have flown directly above the peaks, for I did not see Rainier, St. Helens, Hood or Shasta. We landed an hour late in Oakland. Amy was patient and there. One could almost predict ubiquitous patience as Seattle's World Trade Organizaton Protest, with its tear-gassing-police violence, had ended only two days before. Amy accelerated into the mountains -- she knew an enchanting way to her Piedmont home.




#2 HIP

12-30-99

Amy's face was round with (cause/cure) cortisone, cheerful and smiling. She'd had five hip operations and survived them all with a cane. Don't be mistaken, she didn't have five hips. She had her two done once and again, and one again. Blazing with good sense and determination, she organized her retirement home into good food, excellent clubs, guilds and map-covered walls. She tended her flowers, books, crafts and my primitive, white-dour-faced cat-painting, bought in Salem, Massachusetts hung there on life-time loan. Though she did not mourn the rose garden she had once lived in, she continually stole hearts.




#3 ALMONDS

12-30-99

On December 7th, we sat on high kitchen stools in Berkeley, knee to knee, slipping almonds. Betty gave salted almonds for Christmas. I gave nothing. She was eighty-one and had traveled the world. I, sixty-six the day before, had traveled part of the world. Happy Birthday! Merry Christmas! I'm not Christian; neither were those who bombed Pearl Harbor, December 7th, fifty-five years ago. Betty, widowed by that war, just returned from India, could forgive my Hindu tendencies. The Orissa hurricane/floods killed, maybe, 20,000 people. We did five pounds of almonds that day -- not nearly 20,000 slipped white nuts.




#4 SIDDHA

12-31-99

On December 8, Betty dropped me at the house of my guru. Late. I heard the purnahooty, folded my knees, bowed my head, touched my forehead to the carpet, chanted a little. Then in the Amrit, while eating sour cereal and sweet chai, I looked for Ruth. She would come, I was sure, before I finished my favorite, yeast-laced breakfast -- an Indian breakfast not served in India. I watched each person, exit, chair. Ruth did not come. I walked a four-block square gazing at houses where she sometimes stayed. My anger at my guru's successor, I found, had disappeared.




#5 METAL

01-01-00

In July in France, I promised thin Maurya Metal who, with her Dutch friend, thinner Ger, had created a garden and restored two ancient stone houses -- to visit her father. My friend, Eva, seeking a restorer for her own ruin (it contained one 15th century wall) in Conques had found Ger. So in December, in Berkeley, I called Martin, a metal sculptor. His studio, creaky, wooden, dusty, dim, stacked with books and models of his sculptures was a claustrophobic heaven. Whiskery, thinly bent, intellectual, jolly, he was pleased to receive a visitor with a promise only six months old.




#6 HUNTRESS

01-02-00

Lean, brown Diana, a year younger/older than me, drove us to Audubon Canyon Ranch and, for lack of birds on a grey morning, she began to admire the spiders. Even they were lacking. She was showing me their far-flung, angular webs woven in branchy bushes, thick and dangerous looking, pocketed in the middle with eggs -- little spiders to be. Suddenly, a dew-bespattered, cart-wheel web, shimmered its diamond dozens at the waking sun; a bird called, I avoided an inquiringly translucent, gold-brown, skinless newt. We laughed, sharing again the love of country walks, adventerous dreams, forty-five years of friendship.




#7 SCHOOL

01-03-00

Craig had failed to grasp or tell Judith, who wore vividly ornate, stair-sweeping skirts that had the look of Rajasthan, that I was to stay two nights and two days, for two hours the year before had seemed inadequate. So the choice was between the gutted houseboat, the non-live-in studio (already inhabited by their studio-mate) or Sparrow Creek School, designed, handmade by Judith, diminutive in everything except the enchantment I felt waking among the things of beauty in a Montessori school. The rest was art, laughter, computers, walks, talks, and feasting at the best Indian restaurant in Sausalito ----------'s.




#8 NUN

01-04-00

With the poise of a Goddess, Ani had been a mother, Vedanta Nun, Tibetan Nun, twice a wife, and was now a Master Yoga Teacher. Stately, kindly, she was becoming matronal -- in all the original glory of the term -- a Saraswati or a Roman Empress. Though pure Scandinavian, her skin was olive -- I had never noticed before. Her huband, Catchatoorian, "Cross Bearer", an Armenian Yogi from India, was now deep into the study of Kirtans -- his and his Guru's voice melodized the house. Her son began, the day I was there, teaching the handicapped how to earn their living.




#9 BUS


01-05-00

We started before dawn sleeping San Jose for Santa Monica. Bus travel is as awe inspiring as a helicopter ride if you are lucky enough to get the front seat. Huge views, excellent pilots, all but door to door service, chat if you want it. But I like silence. Entering Southern California, for me, was like proceeding into sacred space. After a seven year absence, I had forgotten how beautiful 101, 1, is, with their fields, mountains, wild palms, eucalyptus, vast views of the sea, flowering December, bougainvillea, dry heat -- and the price one paid for living in Paradise.




#10 SB

01-06/07-00

Only as I board does anyone mention we change buses in Santa Barbara. Just time to chat with the answering-machine of my former nanny baby's mother, and to wish I 'd called my Gray-Panther-chum from the WTO protest. Then, seeking a coffee shop, this Seattelite prowls the worn beauty of SB's streets, but settles for an ice-cream bar musing again that supposedly vigilant American entrepreneurs apparently to conspire to provide few amenities, bad locations for bus stations. Another collusion to be noted: buses don't serve Ontario Airport, thus encouraging Palm Springs' shuttles to charge excessively -- plus tip. But that's later.




#11 SM

01-06-00

The bus stops in downtown Santa Monica. I shoulder my burden (which confounds customs' agents - "Where 's your luggage?" I, innocent as Virgin Mary, point to the slim black bag). Baggage claim in not my bag. Off I walk to my friend on Pacific Street near 6th. What an amazement to be back in Los Angeles' balmy afternoon. No one's home -- except the promised key under the mat. Night shopping for vegetables. Some soup. Next morning I meet the grown up Gus! handsome as a god, sweet as Apollo -- grandson of Erika who will arrive back from Mexico tomorrow night.




#12 PENNY

2-10-99

Belligerent Penny has no answering-machine. She lives in Culver City, knows the busses, believes in flying saucers, astrological charts, corresponds with the world, developed MS after glittering social success as PR person for The Ice Follies and a fight with drugs. We met in the Korean Zen Center. We shared the bonds of having done time in the glamorous world and decisions to simplify and become hermits. Under her anger is fierce honesty. "No! I don't want to see the Getty! Right now, I don't want to leave home!" -- her pink-rugged, crystalline, spare apartment with enough solitude for enlightenment.




#13 THE GETTY

01-07/08-00

I'd been to Bilbao. Now, to see its born-in-the-same-year sister, I bussed the Xanadu-like streets, as encouraged by Getty, out Montana to Supulveda Pass wondering: "Could I live in Paradise again?" but remembered the first principle of American Capitalism is the taxation of stress on beauty; the second, excess. Germany's Meier had 199 good ideas while designing the Getty and used every one of them to build a maze atop the world in a well of chaos -- antithesis of the complex serenity of the Bilbao -- while L.A's own Gehry was manifesting the architectural masterpiece of the millennium in Basqueland-Spain.




#14 RITUALS

01-08-00

Being from walkable Seattle, distances now seem longer in Los Angeles. Or is it age? Gus was turning twenty-two. Grandma Erika, just home from Italy, Japan, Mexico and I escort him to the Rose Cafe for birthday-brunch. Along the beach, along Ocean Avenue we stroll -- territory lithographer, collagist, painter, Erika, and I, poet, writer, stitcher, have paced for twenty years, philosophizing, giggling, teaching each other about the Sisyphean world. When Erika and I met in Venice (over a pensione breakfast off San Marcos Square) Gus was two. Now he's in college. So am I. Refugee Erika has revisited Germany.




#15 CANYONS

2-13-99

unexpectedly shooting up through moss-covered sticks.




#15 BROKEN RULES

2-14-99

It was a travesty of justice to think that Arnold could be let go, off the hook, and that Erika must pay the price. It was, had been, always would be sheer invention; Arnold's invention; Erika's invention. They had laughed gleefully and played it out, never anticipating retribution from each other and from "the law." In two years, now humbled, Arnold had aged from a successful, broad-shouldered man into a gnome; Erika a crone. But, perhaps, that was more suitable than to spend their wisdom-years continuing to be the free-wheeling, no-longer-young medalists their tarnished fame demanded. Solitude seemed sweet.




#16 PITCH BURNING

2-14-99

Yesterday it begun. Minute sparks of the mind jumped from the fireplace's cave, smoldered on the stone, singed the rug, as if another universe lay behind the too evident flames. With remembered terror fear flashed through soot round the ringed hearts of the logs. O much desired fear! Walking coals, about to be burnt, walking the knife's edge, about to be cut -- blood spurting, hideous things revealed. But only a few sparks darted and died. In silence, in solitude, Annette must wait, without wishing, for a steady conflagration to burn the pitch veil of non-knowledge in which she lived.




#17 ANGELICA

2-15-99

She was like the desert, clean, pure, white, golden -- a soft earth-beige, with sage-green eyes, tall, colossally present, like a brilliant sun in a bleached sky, blasting with beauty, spare, her great boney limbs like incandescent terrain. It was hard to believe she wasn't the landscape. Tucked away, as in the desert, were ravines, arroyos full of salt-cedar, tamarisk, feathery, grey-green. Rock-strewn, silent, alone, her thoughts opened as rocky, branchy enclosures onto gigantic vistas where great oceans had once covered the land. Angelica squatted in the shade on the crystalline land, sifting handfulls of sand, smelling the acrimonious sage.




#18 WAUKEEN

2-15-99

Waukeen was blue-eyed and smelt of earth, the dampness, the rain, the misty coastal reaches of the Puget Sound as if, soaked in salt-water, he had never been dried. He smelt of the wind, the caressing, cool breeze and the thunderous storms that shook the tall, bare trees -- illuminated candelabra in the gold-minting rays of the setting sun. He smelt of the rain's silver drops, and the seagull's cry fleeing before the rampage of high waves on the water. The moss on the south side of trees smelt of Waukeen -- which was, of course, not his real name.




#19 NOBEL GURU

2-16-99

As constituent of his own experiments, perhaps without intent, he leads, undergoes, endures, teaches. Put another way: he opens cans of worms, the gyrating tangles of which he observes, absorbs, inhales, exhales, experiences. Tall, fresh-faced, silver-haired, clever, shrewd, he's the sacrificial lamb; one senses at the core of his being love, gentleness, humor, desperation. President Clinton no more knows his "destiny" than do his detractors, defenders. But he has shepherded his country through an awareness of what sex is, of what truth is, grace, compassion, and he may, like the Dalai Lama, get the Peace Prize for his efforts.




#20 SOAPS

2-16/17-99

Georgia feels like God. God the observer, not the actor. For Shiva commanded: "Do nothing!" Georgia plays the hermit, studies Sanskrit, watches television. A recent soap-opera: "The Impeachment," just ended. Down South she saw: "Rodney King," and "OJ;" near the North Pole "Princess Diana" played; now she watches the on-going series(s) about the Serbs, "Hussein," "The Freezing-Warming-Earth," "Bomb-the-Avalanches," and "Ecoli." She would like to see more soaps about India, Africa, South American, but the media, Weather-Western-War-biased says it must "bleed to lead," or "not be about sex." Georgia shivers, eats, sleeps; God's eye wonders about the other billions.




#21 BLACK BEAUTY

2-18-99

Black Beauty was her name, and her destiny was death. Not so different, note, from the destinies of others. She lived in equinimity. "Here today; gone tomorrow," she kept before her mind's eye or at her tongue's tip. No big fuss. "Let it be, let it be, let it be"-- in her blackness she sang, inviting every single possible thing into her short, happy life, before she lay between the coffin walls or on the slippery slope's flume to the furnace. "My last wish: scatter my ashes in the wind" -- or words to that effect she honed for her black-bordered note.




#22 COMPOSER

2-19/20-99

See Indra's Net




#23 COMET

2-20-99

See Indra's Net




#24 HHH II

2-20-99

See Indra's Net




#25 MELISSA'S MOUNTAINS

2-20-99

Driving up one of the Puget Sound area's canyons, Melissa saw, for the first time -- it had been raining for four days -- the Olympics. "Like the Himalayas!" she exclaimed. The higher she rose, the more majestic they became. Then, plunging down a still deeper canyon, the mountains shrank in height and grandeur. On the farther side of the Sound, they covered just two hand-spans of the landscape: flatten, minor dieties. Pacing the beach, measuring by eye and again by hand, Melissa wondered why they seemed so insignificant at sea level. Distance, she decided. At their base, they'd seem colossal.




#26 STANZIA'S NOVEL

2-20-99

What did Stanzia want to write about if not about people, about their loves, hates and perpetual jealousies, their tedious affairs, their savaging of the earth and their cruelty toward one another? She longed to write a novel, but about what? -- the magicalness of weaving with yarn and needle, with words, with paints, with stone or musical notes, of work, of pattern, the mysteries of the grid, the occupations of humans, who, as soon as they had time, turned from one another to complete creation, building buildings, make artifacts, preserve ancient words, although billions were minted anew each day.




#27 CLEA

2-21-99

"Strangers..." it's a strange concept thought Clea. It's because there are too many of us. Crossing the desert, if you meet a stranger, she wouldn't be a stranger -- nor on a desert island. You'd know each other at once, as children do when they meet someone their size -- they hold hands, they kiss -- as animals do upon meeting their kind. Equally, Clea was willing to admit, my dearest friends are strangers. They know me not at all, or me they. Which perception is real? Neither. Circumstances are real, not perceptions. Perceptions are illusions, Clea concluded, mirrors of the mind.




#28 FRIENDS

2-22-99

Frequently she dreamt of the holocaustic flames of terror consuming her home in the abandoned building. Burned-fur smelling, engines clanging -- the mewing, louder than the roaring flames, of her five. Then she knew a friend heard the tiny sounds beneath the thunder. Yellow-suited, helmeted, he took the kittens from where she dropped them on the sidewalk, took them to safety. Terribly burned, too weak to walk, she coiled up to die. But big hands scooped her as well. Scarlett saved her kittens from the fire. Loved by the world, adopted by friends, she and her kittens purred, grew fat.




#29 ERNESTINE

2-23-99

Ernestine was tall and exceedingly thin, with quite a small round head, bobbed hair, receding chin, big eyes, and, for all that, quite pretty; pretty enough, indeed, to throw one off guard as to how smart she was, how serious, intent. She pursued esoteric languages, deep subjects, iconographies that would stand her in good stead in the next world, if not in this. She smiled and laughed and was first in her Sanskrit class. She had no plans at all upon graduation. An enigma even to herself, one can imagine the picture she presented to her unschooled great-grandmother's generation.




#30 SOLUTION

2-24-99

At times, Felicity felt nauseous about those she brought into life and let die. But, what was she to do? An unsuccessful novelist, she was peopled with beings who lived on white pages, in notebooks, on bus transfers, grocery bills, envelopes, and at times, on her left hand. They clung to, cluttered her life with their passions, pleas. They came without pasts or presents, lived for the length of a thought, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter, Part I, Part II, and died in manuscripts. Then along came the NET; she shooed them all, quite happily, out into cyberspace.




#31 OCTAVIO

2-25-99

Octavio was an old caballero with lace at his throat and his cuffs. Gallant, smiling, extending his forearm for the ladies, his fortune for the beautification of hacienda, town square, biblioteca, it not once occur to him to have less money and give more wages to his workers. He looked upon himself as a humanitarian and didn't mind the wide, dull eyes, the extended bellies, the flies in the eyes of his familia grande. Hurt, he was, and insulted when not one wanted to subscribe a single peso for the equestrian statue to commemorate his fight for their freedom.




#32 SVEN

2-26-99

He could have been called Eric-the-Red. Tall, raw-boned, red-faced, he had a jutting, angular jaw, great, popping, blue eyes with scarlet-veined lids, a loose-lipped mouth, and five, exposable, cracked-off teeth. His real name was Sven. He thought from time to time that his wiring was coming loose, for it was as if a single, fragile, female hair was dragged curlicuing up the left side of his spine or beside his knee or across his toes. He would jump about, cursing, scratching, dancing, trying to shake away the tickle. Had he been, he wondered, evil-eyed by some damned wronged damsel?




#33 THE QUARK

2-27-99

Jessica, at sixty-five, as her hair bloomed into a white halo, discovered that she need not concern herself with time. It would continue to flow through her, in her and around her whether she considered the deepening pores on her nose, or the possibility of bombing in Bosnia. It was. She was. It would be. She would be. She might as well believe in God, as not. Actually, her personal God, Siva, she saw as whizzing molecules, or tinier -- electrons or quarks speeding as fast as light around nuclei; she was eager to join them, join the dance.








CYBER BYTES, 33 IN 66

CHARACTER BYTES, 33 IN 99

Introduction to The Short Forms

COMING SOON

INDRA'S NET, 33 IN 133

LAND BYTES, 33 IN 166

FRIENDLY BYTES, 33 IN 199





Copyright © 1999 Jan Haag
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Jan Haag may be reached via e-mail: jhaag@u.washington.edu





BY JAN HAAG


POETRY + MUSIC + TRAVEL + FICTION + ESSAYS + TEXTILE ART

INTRODUCTION + HAAG'S BIO



21st CENTURY ART, C.E. - B.C.,

A Context