This page last updated December 03, 1999
Hmmm, not been here in a while, have I?
March 31, 1998
I have been explaining my thought processes in writing and refining the journal, "A Tale Told With Time" (and later, "Weighty Matters") to various e-mail correspondants, and have organized them into an article. Understanding my mental processes may improve its enjoyability.
This, like the journal itself, will be a growing, evolving thing.
Explanation of Journal Process
I've restructured the journal. Parts 1 - 31 have been set aside into book one, Something Really There, and those subdivided into 3 sections. The poorly written stuff has been excised, and other writings made more vivid. Each section has a title, which gives it a thematic focus. In the later sections, the title was easy to find, as an intuitional process has been guiding me in what topics to speak of. The earlier sections were a raw hodge-podge of odds and ends mixed with fascinating remembrances. Yet, with a careful pruning, the thematic cohesivity has been found within those as well.For instance, part seven had a ready title. It contains several examples of "The Leaving and What Remains After". First, Helina's departure from Tulsa, and what remains....(tons of stuff as s/he's the penultimate packrat!) Second, the mental game, of what do you grab when you must leave your house in an emergency, perhaps never to return. Third, what happens after you die. I mention my discussion of this with Andriean, an e-mail correspondant. Then, quirk of fate, this topic comes up big with the heaven's gate people. Their leaving, and what remains after...the web site, to give a peek into their minds. Figarro, in his Community Front Page comments, gives another wry look into "what remains after"...a heap of compost!
Lastly, April 2nd's entry only needed a minor tweak to be the humorous end of this. Removing the mention of the movie we had watched that evening, and focusing on the Open House CD, provided a good end. ( I had only lightly touched on the the CD, an example of those frustrating entries which gave a scant mention of something. I am learning never to mention something only briefly...either cover it in depth, or don't mention it at all.) By giving an example of the Oedipus Rex lyrics, I SHOWED Mark Graham's humor:
Oedipus Rex, Oedipus Rex
Another sad story of death and sex
You killed your pa and you married your ma:
They don't even do that in Arkansas! |
What a perfect ending! Another sad story of death and sex! The section needed a transistion from the deadly serious and that's a natural!As another instance of process, part six has an enigmatic title picked from one of the poems of Rumi which I quote at the end. "Where the Two Worlds Touch" takes on several different meanings. Mostly it means where our personal reality (one world) connects with the reality of others (another world) There are several instances of that. The poem Lazy Sunday Afternoon takes this into the specifically corporeal mode...the "world" of my belly touching the "world" of Laura's physical reality...her back.
The NEW writings are indexed at http://www.aztriad.com/beyondex.html, , "What Lies Beyond". Each separate section will be referenced by 'beyond' in its title. For instance, the first section is beyond01.html.That section deals with my grandmother's death, and all the effect it has had on me. "Mourning" in public has been cathartic. The title did not come to me until the last small poem of the section. Part of the fear of death is because we dread the possibility that it is the utter end of us. If Now is All There Is can be frightening. Yet, there is another way of looking at that. I was reading "Awakening the Buddha Within", and absorbing the truths therein. Buddhists speak of mindfulness of the moment. It opened my spirit nicely for poem reception:
ENDLESS EXPANSION If NOW is all there is
until there is no more,
Death is but illusion...
I embrace the largeness
Of this NOW.
With awareness,
it grows.
JAL,3-30-98
With the understanding that "NOW" is all we really have, "FUTURE" is an illusion. If "FUTURE" is an illusion, so is "DEATH". But how incredibly rich the moment of "NOW" becomes, when we are truly aware of it!
That's a comfort.April 12, 1998
Reflections on the title of My Poetry Pages
Spirt and Earth, Spirit and Earth - All that I am and ever will be are framed within these two spheres: Of Earth, my unique history, origin of birth - the physical landscape and cultural landscape which has birthed me, combined with the Ethereal in me - that in me which reaches towards the heavens, seeks to pull down an fiery chunk of the sun and bring it down to earth, this earth, the physical reality here and now and which will remain long after my own flesh has turned to dust.(That's the longest darn sentence I ever wrote!)
July 27, 1998
I have recently become aware of the hundreds of other online journals. For over a year and a half, I thought I was part of a tiny minority. I am glad to discover some really fine writers out there who make their worlds come alive for me. I hope that I am doing the same with my journal. One new web site dealing exclusively about journals, Metajournals has a good article this month on improving one's navigation. The author explained how readers lose patience in a poorly planned journal. I thought immediately of my main index page, a 'dinosaur' if there ever was one, since my journal has grown. So I put the index to the first book "Something Really There in a section all its own so the new stuff wouldn't be shoved to the very bottom as it had been. Learning that readers like an immediate entry to the newest entries made me put a link to the newest section.from the main journal index
However one peculiar aspect of my journal will remain. All the other online journals separate each day's entry into an individual html unit, except for archived entries. I organise my entries into sections, which are guided by an intuitional process based on the phases in my life. I like the reader to see the patterns in my life. When the days are snipped apart, the phases aren't as apparent.
(note of December 3, 1999: Weighty Matters has the same several entries grouped together set-up, but there is NO intuitional process guiding it. I simply keep filling the page until my ancient editor, which balks at anything over 22K, won't let me type any more. That point reached, I cut and paste that day for a new section. Alternatively, if the section is chock full of pictures, and the following one is also picture-heavy, I'll make a snip to lessen the load time for the poor reader. In WM, the grouping is simply an efficient way to archive them. With well over three years of web output behind me, three times 365 would make for an AWFUL number of little files to manage. On the average, a week's worth fits 22K, leaving me with about 52 files a year. SIMPLER, simply SIMPLER, is the reason.)
December 30, 1998
There are so many ways to express oneself via the web that wasn't practically possible in the days of paper expression. Back then, we were stuck with black text on white paper. Some feel this is still best, regarding anything else as a garish distraction. I have never done plain black on white. While I can appreciate its use in others' pages, for my own, it seems stark. Even in my bio, I've used an interpolated gif (see colormix.com) to make an ivory background. The original pink in my early pages was chosen because all our pages were pink then. I got tired of pink when I started book two , and went to yellow. Then right after I'd finished part ten, I felt emotionally that I had to make a break. The white on black that followed seemed a quiet, cosy and cool refuge, somehow.
Ever after that, I've been selecting colors to my mood. The purple and orange of part nineteen , might be viewed as outrageous by some of more restrained tastes. But I was trying to pick colors that reminded me EMOTIONALLY of Thanksgiving. My current color combo ,variations on a bluish gray (if you see the darker color as navy, your monitor is not long for this world. One of our monitors is like that.), seems to call up feelings of a temperature coolness, appropriate to this time of year. I try to pick pictures that will be seen within the text itself that are color co-ordinated, (each has a bit of blue or bluish gray in the current section) so that it is to me, visually pleasing. If it's not to you, I realize you're out of luck. The preferences section in Netscape, which has a feature to allow one to change the colors, doesn't work on the specifications I've asked for in the various tables, or when I do a font color change within the document. You're stuck.
Ah well. The rest of the format of the journal (rainbow stripes, etc.) was determined back in 1996, by Laura, when I hadn't yet mastered the basics of html. I'm keeping that as a constant, for it gives all the Triad's pages a consistency. It would seem 'jarring' for a reader, coming in from the main index if my format went to frames, for instance. So, even though it is technologically as simple a layout as it comes, that format stays. The COLOR is complex enough, anyhow. If I had whiz-bang frames, animated applets, and what not, combined with the wild color changes, it would even make me want to retch.
Other than that, I try to observe the basic rules, avoiding the unrelenting "wall-o-text" and insufficient tonal contrast between text and background. I don't want to make the pages difficult to read. Heaven knows the context may be challenging enough at that.
(Note of December 3, 1999: I did something different with,Weighty Matters. It has a consistent soft yellow background. If I feel to express a mood, a change is appropriate, for that day, I simply make a 100% table of the desired color.)
December 3, 1999
Oh my, nearly a YEAR since my last entry here. This page needs a good dusting off! So what made me remember I even HAVE this page? I'd printed out two sections of Weighty Matters for my Mother, who doesn't have WEB access yet. In the handwritten letter accompanying that, I did a bit of crowing:
"I think I've reached a new growth in my writing. Aren't the entries of Dec. 1 and Dec. 2 particularily satisfying? I've reread some old entries, they seem incomplete. I'd always fantasized this brevity gave them a "SAPPHO" like quality. Well, that fragmentary quality came not because the ancient Greek poet
intended it, but because pieces got lost!!! I think the influence of reading the journals of truly professional writers on the web is having a good effect!''
