This evening I thought a great deal of the dreaming state, daydreaming or visualizing, and writing, and how closely connected they are.

Writing is not nor ever will be for me a mechanical cranking-out of well-executed words, phrases or passages designed to optimally carry a concept. It is a dream-state where I live vividly. It seems like I could write continuously, living within that writing, for a lifetime. Likewise when I pick up a thread again I am returning to that place, and time has frozen since I left.

Writing is for me supernatural. It is a way or returning to the past or jumping into the future, a dreamscape of my past or future, and most often my present. I can stop or manipulate time. I can return to a story I began ten years ago, opening a door upon myself closed ten years hence.

When I reflect upon my past, my dreamscapes are every bit as much a part of it as what I experienced in fact. Without them and my writing to understand and express myself, I can't live.

I have just found an old journal where I recorded a few of my dreams six and four years ago. Here are some fragments.

I lost my shoes in the mud, then they floated out into the water. I kept fearing that they would sink, but the other person reassured me they'd float. There were lots of lost shoes: sandals and flip flops, floating over the pond. I had to climb onto a raft to retrieve mine.

His car was pulling a trailer, and it was going out of control. I was really mad at him. Both of us were in the trailer. No one was in the cab.


I was running toward a clear plain in a canyon, and I realized the side jutted up really high, so I started running back toward the other side, because I was afraid this huge wall would fall down on me. The other side of the plain was rocky, muddy and difficult to run through. This was like the old land in New Waverly.


A glass steepe with all of these pretty shoes, but all I wanted were shoes that would fit my feet. I said I usually got them at Wal-mart.

Romance novel Cinderellas, watching an opulent royal procession, and on the glass steppe looking at shoes. I could have any of them. Most were high-heeled or strappy or with foil-like lame. But I had to find some that actually fit me.


The Rose Red house, a haunted mansion. The owners had done something to make violent ghosts. I didn't want to admit that I was too afraid to go inside.

An auditorium near the Rose Red house. Someone requested techno music. Nathan was going to submit his work.

Labels: dreams

I completed Villette the day before last. I was intrigued and immersed, but I left off with a dissatisfied feeling. I concluded that mid-century novels are not to my taste right now. They are too much about a suffering creature, her tormentors, and her triumph through perfect virtue. I can really see the religious influence at work as well as the general woman culture. Spaniels were popular dogs at the time. There was one in Villette, actually, that was practically a woman, and the woman's popular hairstyle mimicked the spaniel. I complain about modern culture, but I shouldn't.

Caleb Williams is more interesting to me, written in the voice of the early century, preoccupied with ideas as were other Romantics. This is written by William Godwin, father of Mary Shelley. It is occupied by the idea of a fame-seeker and a popular curiosity. This is interesting as it relates to modern media.

Labels: reading notes

Delphinia moved past them, her fingers clutching the handle of her cane with deep consternation. She felt herself adrift as before, the night in transit with Adelia, when she had sought the peace of nature and dreamed fervently, and wakened to find her friend abdicated. She threw herself near the river, on soft green grass amid snowy drifts of edelweiss.

"There is no one," she whispered, behind her closed eyes reflecting on the self-serving expression of Oskar, the cold looks of Gauvain, Adelia's crafty smile, and Beatrice's condemnation.

She turned in a fever with her face to the grass, inhaling soil, tasting dew. A fragrance rose in her nostrils: a soft crush of sound on the grass reached her. Through bleary eyes Delphinia saw a wavering shape blotting out the sun. She blinked away her fevered tears. The shape knelt.

"Be still, my sister, my luckless other self. You are not alone." A fairy-like touch alighted on her shoulder.

"I love him," Delphinia whispered in fever, "and it is hopeless."

A cold hand slipped under her own in the grass. Delphinia felt herself urged to her feet. She stood and walked beside the shade as bid. Together they looked over the Rhine, glimmering in impossible silvered beauty beneath black cliffs.

Her heart thudded dully in her chest. She dared not glance at the being next to her. She knew her voice, her scent, as though they had been united every day of their lives. Whatever spectral gift lie between them, Delphinia feared to disintegrate by searching for more of Oriente that she now sensed.

"My dear," Oriente whispered in a soft, musical voice. It was then Delphinia realized the dumb girl spoke in death, restored to perfection by Heaven, perhaps. But it was no human voice in the air between them. It resounded in Delphinia's mind, "you long for the restoration of the past days you have shared with your love. I can help you, but I must gain human form. In this castle lies the ingredients to my reanimation. In the library, a book."

Oriente then imparted a plan to Delphinia that was complicated, dark and even horrible. Portions terrified her.

"Why do you come to me, ask this of me? There is one who would give his life to resurrect your living breath, who would not shirk the terrible duties you require."

Oriente faced her with a cold eye. Delphinia stared at her, witnessed her powerful beauty, her straight form. The hint of wickedness about her was an additional opiate to the rapture her presence stirred. "Are you the self-same girl?" Delphinia asked. "How can this be?"

Labels: excerpt, The Soul of the Rose

As summer approaches I think more about projects. Right now I have none, except buying various things and organizing my photography collection.

I have felt at a loss about my creative projects, because it seems like as soon as I call something a project, I don't do any more work on it. I haven't found more inspiration for The Summerhouse, my nonlinear fiction, and I have posted very reluctantly in Dark Virtue, my collection of darkly romantic images and text.

I have been reading Artful Blogging nearly every day. Having any specific blog would not suit me. Perhaps this is why I don't post in Dark Virtue.

There is another blog I have been writing more successfully, "A Fine and Private Place." This takes the title of a book by Peter S. Beagle. It combines with my idea that a fine and private place is necessarily sober, even dark, like a cemetery. Emphasis on "private." The access is controlled on my more confiding concepts and photos.

Labels: Texas, towns

Labels: Texas, towns

Victoria has learned what became of her mother, that she was revered among her people, and she is unimpressed. Her life has been disrupted, haphazard and devoid of security due to her mother's fighting for Romani rights. The man she loves is also a political activist and is recovering from an attempted assassination. All she has ever wanted is stability.

She must let go of her preconceptions, learn to live on the edge and accept the discomforts of life. She must make her own life, not expect to fall into a comfortable shell.

The thing that bothers her most is the idea of a nomadic life with the Romani. Something key occurs that requires Raclaw to leave his home indefinitely and go into hiding. Victoria follows him in order to take care of his niece. She lives with him in a cave.

In her life in Raclaw's household, Victoria has encountered a number of characters. At the beginning she was frightened of even the grocery boy Arsenije. Despite the language barrier she makes friends, developing a close friendship with Faustina, the daughter of a Romanian politician, a man her employer Raclaw plots to overcome.

Faustina and her older sister are tutored by Johann, a German intellectual who is developing a romantic relationship with the older aristocratic girl, though he is poor and his ideas far too liberal for her father's liking.

Johann is a casual and frequent visitor to Raclaw's home, Victoria soon learns, and he includes Victoria in their philosophical discussions, which touches her. She and Raclaw disagree on a number of points. Raclaw is too decentralized for her liking. She prefers the structure of the Romanian lifestyle, the comfort of money and political accord.

Raclaw knows well that Victoria is the daughter of a powerful Romani revolutionary but does not share this information with her. A crippled beggar, who is truly Raclaw's father, plagues her when she visits the village, feeding her this information bit by bit.

Villette has become more intense. Lucy Snowe has become without her knowledge an active participant in life and in the human passions she has forbidden herself. Unfortunately she has chosen an object we would not have for her, and realizes for him emotions she has repressed too long in herself.

The following scene has been my second-favorite in the book, the first being Lucy's older friend relating the story of her tragic Christmas-eve.

"I excuse everything," he interrupted; "my mood is so meek, neither rebuff nor, perhaps, insult could ruffle it. You remind me, then, of a young she wild creature, new caught, untamed, viewing with a mixture of fire and fear the first entrance of the breaker-in."

Unwarrantable accost!--rash and rude if addressed to a pupil; to a teacher inadmissible. He thought to provoke a warm reply; I had seen him vex the passionate to explosion before now. In me his malice should find no gratification; I sat silent.

"You look," said he, "like one who would snatch at a draught of sweet poison, and spurn wholesome bitters with disgust.

"Indeed, I never liked bitters; nor do I believe them wholesome. And to whatever is sweet, be it poison or food, you cannot, at least, deny its own delicious quality--sweetness. Better, perhaps, to die quickly a pleasant death, than drag on long a charmless life."

"Yet," said he, "you should take your bitter dose duly and daily, if I had the power to administer it; and, as to the well-beloved poison, I would, perhaps, break the very cup which held it."

I found that so exciting! I was not expecting M. Paul to lay his feelings open that way. The story just gets better. He appears just when I would like him to do so, at her most vulnerable and exposed. After this scene he delivered to her a secret letter from the object of her affection and was explosive about it. He is exceptionally jealous, and Lucy cares for him not at all. I can't wait for Dr. John to walk out of the picture. The interaction between herself and M. Paul is only what it is, a natural extension of their personalities, an increasing connection that becomes more volatile.

The other development I consider is the appearance of the ghost nun, a figment directly from earlier gothic fiction. The nun has appeared in the story twice now, in the midst of Lucy's high and jumbled emotions for Dr. John, and seems to me part relic of the gothic, which is developed earlier when M. Paul locks her in the attic and she falls prey to darkness and covered furnishings, and some creature of the id, some portion of herself manifested in independent form.

Labels: Villette

<<...>>
Sam Houston Park, Huntsville Texas.

The distorted glass reflected the view behind me as distinctly as the view beyond it. Nathan is reflected in the edge. I like the way the pitcher stands out from the shadows, and the bowl of glossy fruit. It reminds me of a Dutch painting.

Labels: Texas

I just bought Brigitte von Messner's book on porcelain doll creation, hoping it would help me with a repair. I feel like I found out just what I needed to know skimming it in Half Price Books, but there are patterns as well that are likely to fit some of her dolls I have, as well as other large dolls, that I want to re-costume.

I have found a replacement for my broken doll on eBay, which also happens to be broken. I was daunted about doing this at first, but I think it will be easy. My doll has a broken leg. Even though all of the pieces are present, they will not hold together with any glue I have tried, not even Super Glue. I was really disappointed, because even though this doll is not valuable, her artist is someone whose work I really admire, and I hated that I had destroyed one of his limited pieces. Finding this other doll on eBay recently was sheer luck, and in a sense, I am glad the other doll is broken and I have the chance to salvage them into one.

Reading through the book relieved me immediately. I have been pretty worried today about how to do this, or if I should even try. I have studied the leg jointure at length and realize now that the porcelain leg is simply tied to the cloth-stuffed body. It will be a simple matter of loosening the knot cinching the leg at a groove, replacing and retying.

I bought this doll six summers ago. Recently I have been completing an old diary and saw my notes on her, making me feel all the more like I want to bring her to life again.

I have also become interested in another kind of doll called Sophiadolls, but this is something only on the fringe of my consideration. Reading the story behind their creation brought a point glaring to life in my mind that has already been sore anyway. That is my indirect support of unhealthy image types in my choice of art, particularly dolls. I have always been aware that if I had the chance to buy a more realistic-looking woman image I would do so. However I feel now that in settling for less than what I believe in I have introduced a whole army of pieces into my home that now feel like my enemy.

The idea behind the Sophiadolls is faces and bodies resembling real women, combined with an educational force to young women. Each goddess is named with qualities, and the idea is that every woman choose her most appropriate goddess. Well, as a collector I'm not very much interested in the dolls as a learning tool, but I really love the doll Persephone. She is not like any other doll I have seen, and I think she is quite beautiful.

Renaissance goose tray, here.

The stories of Texas:

• The Vampire Nell falls in love with a mysterious drifter, a vampire as well as Southern aristocrat incognito.
• Devil's Oaks in which a female accountant takes a position in an old, powerful estate still rocking from a recent upheaval and suicide.
• The Ballad of Mary Ellen Belle and her twin Ben unravel the mystery of a sheltered, elusive girl under the powerful rule of her cruel mother.
• The Inheritance Madden is not welcomed to the family estate she has inherited, but she fights with every bit of knowledge she can find to possess it. Her adopted brother Reagan, a veritable stranger to her but an expert on cattle, opposes her on every point.
• The Swindler Katherine devotes her buttoned-down life to preserving the reputation and welfare of her younger debutante sister. Her dislike for a traveling salesman emerges into an unexpected relationship when he focuses his attention exclusively on herself, and she finds herself possessing a very real love for a well-known swindler.

Labels: story notes

The ramshackle structure was an impressionistic smear in the wind, partially obliterated by wind-burned twists of trees, mottled in patches of white paint clinging and bare, pale clapboards.

The pathway was a tangled mess of vines over cracked concrete, morning glories glowing pale purple with blanched green leaves.

The structure gave the impression of lacking, leaving a sense of aching, and yet also of abundance, profusion and self-sufficiency.

I was only a boy when I first saw this place. I didn't have the nerve to come closer yet, but I knew I would come back when the impression had settled in my mind, and I had thought of what I must do and how.

Labels: excerpt

There is an annex to the cemetery on a hillside facing the road. I left right after taking this picture.

Something is being built near the cemetery.

A picture book with Spanish text.

Signs encourage visitors to linger and listen to the voices of angels.

The cemetery's first occupant was a young woman named Amy Robinson, buried at her murder site. Others who were murdered were buried here. Some of the burial sites are not original, or are only memorial markers.

A cemetery off Trinity Blvd. for murdered young people.