Two Oracular Paragraphs & an Invitation
Dear Friends,
This week I feel as if I’ve forgotten how to write. It’s time to go back into the stream, to enter the waters. One way I do this is by invoking oracles and their art-counterparts, surrealist games and chance operations.
I’ve been at work creating some new writing oracles, but meanwhile here are two paragraphs from recent weeks where I am raising different forms of oracle-energy.
Scroll down for an invitation join Kathe Izzo and I for some generative oracle-play.
— Sal
¶
It is a mirror that tries hard not to reflect. Sometimes I can make out a kind of shadow. There is dirt and open space and the fantasy of perfection. It wants to speak like an oracle. It wants to fall into a dream. It wants the trance to take over. Today is a day of second-guessing. Words appear and are taken away. I wish it were a well or a field in the damp spring. I want a mystery that is not my own. No, I take that back, I want my own mystery to appear in a way that surprises me. Where are the magicians? Let the doves fly out. Let the waking speak to the sleeping and the sleeping to the dead. Too much has already happened today. Let the mirror blank itself so that nothing more need be said.
¶
I am trying to become my own oracle, but the signs are murky. Try again, reply hazy. I think of the days when magic was like a river, but I also can’t look back there. I remember hiking as a teenager and the way I’d jump into the river-water that came, almost frozen, from higher up the mountain. It was as if I craved the searing cold. I’d plunge my head in any tub of water. In the hot summers I still do it, trying to fit my scalp under a running faucet in a small sink. Maybe this is why we like the present, as in the present moment, because it has nothing but the sensation of running water. It’s a relief as old as humans. The patterns of flocks across the sky, the markings on bones burnt and cracked in the coals, and then much later lines on the palm, pictures in dregs, yarrow stalk bundles, rolling dice, the fall of cards. Some people prefer the stars, but they’ve never helped me much. If there is destiny, there is also disaster. Where there is a loom, there is a tangle. I love an assignment, but I usually abandon them before I’ve even begun. And yet. Tell me true, tell me true. Are you broken or are you blue? Let us be interrupted by events, let us be turned.
More Oracular Energies from Around Substack
Speculations on ornithomancy from
A bibliomantic method from
And in case you are feeling bogged down, some frog magic from
An Invitation
Dear friends,
please join me and my dear poet-friend Kathe Izzo for a dip into the wellsprings of spirit and language this Saturday afternoon. We’ll be opening space for the oracular as we write together in this generative workshop.
I’d love to see you!
— Sal
Oracular Writing
A Generative Writing Workshop
with Kathe Izzo and Sal Randolph
March 16, 3-5 pm.
Online
Find new space in your writing and devotional practice during this two-hour workshop with poet-friends Kathe Izzo and Sal Randolph. We will use oracular techniques and forms of writerly divination to invoke our muses and invite the playful trance of the literary subconscious. We will write together under the auspices of generosity, pleasure and spontaneity. No preparation or previous experience is needed.
About Us
Kathe Izzo and Sal Randolph have been poet-friends and frequent collaborators since encountering each other in Provincetown in the ’90s. Their collective projects have included readings, exhibitions, performances, and workshops.
Kathe Izzo/The Love Artist is a conceptual artist & poet working in many mediums from social engagement to long form meme poetry & more, with her specialty being the intuitive space of the noosphere, the meta landscape where we all dream together. Of all the anthologies & journals she has been included in, her favorite is THE OUTLAW BIBLE OF AMERICAN POETRY (Thunder’s Mouth Press). Kathe’s substack: My Braniac Amor.
Sal Randolph is an artist and writer who lives in New York and works between language and action. She is the author of The Uses of Art, a memoir of transformative encounters with works of art, described by Michael Cunningham as “dazzlingly original, ferociously intelligent.” Her poems have been featured in BOMB, jubilat, Sound American, and elsewhere; her performance and social art works have appeared internationally at museums and in exhibitions including the Glasgow International, Ljubljana Biennial, Manifesta 4, and the São Paulo Biennial. She has taught at Princeton and Bennington College. Sal’s substack: The Uses of Art.
Oracular Writing
with Kathe Izzo and Sal Randolph
March 16, 3-5 pm ET
Online
A recording will be made available following the workshop.
$55
Further adventures and new ways of seeing can be found in my book, The Uses of Art.
Artist Sal Randolph’s THE USES OF ART is a memoir of transformative encounters with works of art, inviting readers into new methods of looking that are both liberating and emboldening.
Dazzlingly original, ferociously intelligent.
— Michael Cunningham
A joyful, dazzling treasure-box of a book.
— Bonnie Friedman
Here’s a guide, to waking up, over and over again.
— Roshi Pat Enkyo O’Hara
Love these wide imaginative openings! Wish I could join you in oracular writing today. Family precedes. I hope you’ll do it again.
Thanks so much, Sal.