Two months ago …

Two months ago I made terrariums for Christmas presents. I looked and saw that it was good.

A month ago I began seeing a therapist for the first time. She is trying to help me with depression and my self-esteem, or lack thereof, but I worry that I am so old and engrained now that my spirit is petrified and unmalleable, and I can’t learn anymore new tricks. She says that I’ve spent most of my life trying to simply survive without the “wherewithal or support to actualize who you truly are.”

A week ago I went cross country skiiing and took these photos.

The vineyards at the restaurant we went to.

A fish in the sky, my brilliant boyfriend noticed.

A pollution squid on the horizon, my insightful daughter noticed.

Mt. Hood in the backdrop of our ski trail.

The sunlight through the fir trees.

Four days ago I painted my nails emerald city green, and had a lovely sushi dinner with my boyfriend who thinks I am neat though I disagree.

Three days ago I read about how paint brushes are made from mongoose, mink, weasel, ox, goat, squirrel, fox, pig, and pony. And that pony fur paint brushes are made from the mane, but that the softer brushes are made from the fur of the horse’s belly.

Two days ago I finally hemmed the three pairs of pants I’ve been meaning to fix for a year now. I mended a rip in my son’s jacket and replaced a button. I made tuna salad. I cleaned my upstairs cubby and made a jug of strawberry and mint infused water. I exfoliated my face and did a skin firming facial and I am ok with this.

Yesterday I made asparagus, bacon and pasta and saw the movie Freaks, which was arresting and thoughtful.
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A couple of months ago after watching a biography on Vincent Van Gogh I came to learn that he, as well as Salvador Dali bore the name of a deceased sibling before him, and then promptly took notice of how each artist utilized his namesake quite differently from the other.

I went on to read of how as far back as the early 1900’s and further it was customary for parents to recycle a previously deceased child’s name, in a time where babies had slimmer chances of survival. And then of cultures where couples whose previous children had died at young ages would often give the next child an unpleasant name, to confuse evil spirits who sought to take them. Viscious Dog. Not Human. Not This One. Nobody.
Bruce Lee, who’s older sibling was a stillborn, was given a girl’s name (Sai Fon) to ward off evil spirits who might try to steal him from his parents.

I wondered about connections between names and living up to idealised, intangible and immortal things and how in a world of so many teeth clashing kisses, starving selfish loves, handed-down cars missing gears grumbling slowly awake, birthdays that only grainy photos of random fat infants can prove sometimes firsts can get overrated.

I thought of motherless lemurs clinging to plastic-eyed stuffed animals and childless gorillas coddling disconcerted kittens. Songs pretending she was you the whole time. And our lost ones and our missed connections. Our ones that got away who turn into our incredulous Pinocchios and indignant, ad hoc monsters in our slanted digitally remastered enactments of civil war.

But isn’t everything first somehow? Even sevenths and thirty seconds.  I thought of how something new and improved relies on a faulty first to exonerate it.

We wear the skins of ghosts. We dress others in them, their faces nearly matching if we tilt our heads and squint just so. I am yours. You are mine. We remind eachother of something.

Street Dog by Amrita Pritam

It’s really something from the past—

when you and I split up

without any regrets—

just one thing that I don’t quite understand . . .      

When we were saying our farewells

and our house was up for sale

the empty pots and pans strewn across the courtyard—

         perhaps they were gazing into our eyes

and others that were upside down—

         perhaps they were hiding their faces from us.

A faded vine over the door,

perhaps it was confiding something to us

         —or grumbling to the faucet.

Things such as these

never cross my mind;

just one thing comes to mind again and again—

how a street dog—

catching the scent

wandered into a bare room

and the door slammed shut behind him.

After three days—

when the house changed hands

we swapped keys for hard cash

delivered every one of the locks to the new owner

showed him one room after the other—

we found that dog’s carcass in the middle of a room . . .      

Not once had I heard him bark

         —I had smelled only his foul odor

and even now, all of a sudden, I smell that odor—

it gets to me from so many things . . .

Source: Poetry (September 2007).

the sentimental minimalist

My computer in its old age has slowed down from the weight of its excess information, so that its priorities have become encompassed. My new pastime, when I am bored is to delete random unneeded files from it. It’s like playing asteroids kind of, but not really. I’ve so many versions of one photograph. So many songs I’ve downloaded and never cared to hear again.

One must not think too long over what needs to be relinquished, on sinking ships. This minimalistic mentality has spread into my personal life, my thought processes, my self conduct, having a history of dwelling far too much over unworthy things, of glorifying the paltry. And I am getting too old for it.

The last home my grandmother moved into has a guest floor full of boxes that have never been unpacked. Of doll collections, ceramics, snow globes and such.
After living here for a year, in the basement I still have about 12 boxes that remain unopened. There is no place here for what’s inside them or at least I haven’t needed them in all this time, and so therefore wonder if I ever will again.

Cancerous cells can be detected by certain respective characteristics though some have been found to disguise themselves as normal in some cases. I am an irrational, incompetent surgeon of the soul. Slow to let things go, so that by the time I realise that something is malignant, it has spread so far I have to radiate everything. Or the opposite, I overreact at the slightest suspicious sign and go hacking through the house like the Shining.

The amygdala’s primary function in the brain is to record long-term memory. It is not controlled by the conscience, and therefore not quite reliable enough to be trusted to know what’s petty enough to cast away. Or at least, I don’t trust it. In efforts to control inventory, I use physical remnants to cast light in the rooms of my memory that have gone dark. First locks of my children’s hair, old love letters from boys who probably don’t remember my name today, interesting rocks, shells, bits and pieces of random debris that matter to no one else but me. I have fantasized lately about giving it to the ocean. What good would it do anyone unless they cared enough to know what goes on in my thoughts? And even if they did, certain relics they could only guess at the importance of.
There is an admirer in me of minimalism, as result of the torture I have caused myself by hanging on to things. My arms have never been free for all of the trappings they carry. After so many years, I have yet to find any on/off switch. I still resent. I still harbor. I still pine.

Last week, my yoga instructor before the practice said as the class waited in lotus; “Today’s practice is about balance. I want you to think about what in your life symbolizes balance, and what in your life you want to infuse that balance into.”
It completely jolted me out of my struggling internal quiet. I suppressed the urge to laugh like a creep. I felt my face smirk and then frown and then mask itself back into zen passivity garnished hope that she wasn’t looking at me when she made her statement. It could be just me, but I don’t think anyone ever feels good about being “adjusted” by the teacher in front of everyone for bad form (hips stacked, head physically turned in the proper direction), and this would have been a time when I needed a complete aural modification.
My heart would do well to stop shrieking. My head could stand to be less scolding. My spirit should come out of hiding. My fears should release my dreams from captivity.

my son just asked why all the latest movies are about a bunch of drunk guys doing bad things

You may have already known that Dante Alighieri, an Italian poet, met Beatrice Portinari, a banker’s daughter, only twice in his life, but was visited by her in the form of a savior, oracle, goddess in his dreams on countless occasions, and that Alighieri eventually made her into Virgil’s guide through Paradise in his Divine Comedy and the central beloved character in La Vita Nuova. Though in reality he knew very little about Beatrice, Alighieri went on to form, almost entirely in his imagination, the immortality of a sovereign in her name. In his poetic renditions of her she is exquisite in image and character, the embodiment of grace, wisdom, virtue. The apparently powerful recollection of her was an instrument of art in Alighieri’s mind, like light in a painting. Beatrice Portinari died at the age of 24 for unknown reasons. It was the late 1200’s.

Fast forward little more than 600 years to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a poet and painter named Dante after Mr. Alighieri, but who went by the name Gabriel. In 1850 Rossetti met a beauty of his own named Elizabeth Siddall, a popular model and muse for Pre Raphaelite painters in her time. He became smitten with her smooth moon white skin, mystical grey green eyes and waves of red hair that lay soft as clouds about her shoulders. From the moment they met onward, for over a decade Gabriel painted her in almost every piece, making her the hero of each epic he rendered. Inevitably the two fell into a love so intense that it became an infatuation that cauterized them from society so that they whiled away their days in solitude together, drawing, painting, writing with and about eachother.

Unfortunately, throughout her life Elizabeth struggled with poor health, so much that when she and Rossetti were finally married she had to be carried to the church, and as a result of her frequent illnesses, she developed an addiction to laudanem, which was frequently prescribed by doctors in those times. By all accounts I can find, Elizabeth and Rossetti’s relationship was often tumultuous, due in some parts to Elizabeth’s tenuous health and stress induced drug abuse. There also came to be other beauties besides Elizabeth who caught Rossetti’s eye. In his later paintings they appear, similar in resemblance to Siddall, with architecturally striking facial structures, and furtive, alchemistic gazes through soft forests of thick hair. I imagine his brush sussing out their curves and spirals like Galatea’s chisel, as they reclined for long hours in his studio, luxuriously before him.
Elizabeth died young, in 1862, unsurprisingly, of health complications some reports kindly say, of a self-inflicted laudanem overdose, not long after delivering a stillborn baby girl other historians exclaim.

Before Elizabeth was buried, Rossetti, as a gesture of devotion, tucked a booklet of poems, the only copies he possessed into the blaze of Elizabeth’s fiery mane.
But 5 years later, Rossetti, by then a drugged addled alcoholic, convinced himself he was going blind, took to writing over painting and became obsessed with retrieving the manuscript he’d buried with his dead lover, until in desperation he finally filed a request with the home secretary to have her grave exhumed, in the dead of night, by a henchman braver than himself. The poems were recovered, some barely readable for a shameless worm than had eaten through the pages and Rossetti, for the rest of his life was tormented by what he had done, never forgiving himself for the violation of Elizabeth’s tomb.

Beata Beatrix is Rossetti’s depiction of the death of Beatrice Portinari, Dante Alighieri’s synthetic salvation. What is breathtaking and ironic, is that he uses the image of his late wife, Elizabeth to personify Alighieri’s unrequited love. In addition, Rossetti draws from Elizabeth’s idealized memory for this piece, since she had passed two years before the painting was begun in 1864. It amuses me the possibility that there are occasions today when one looks for the face of Beatrice Portinari, a mere confection of the imagination, he finds that of a another woman who was not so mysterious and intangible to her admirer, with the unhappy ending, sordid past and broken heart of a true Queen.

forcefully optimistic

My son and I got lost on a long walk and into the subject of connoisseurs, and then tangentially those who think that what makes one most interesting is the amount of some certain commonly valued thing he has done; (I don’t know how to make that sentence run more smoothly) the concerts he has attended, books he has read, celebrities he has met, restaurants he has dined in, exotic dishes he has tried & c. This is not to say that those who are aficionados of whatever sort cannot be intriguing people. But there are ones who have little else to say other than they have seen this, tasted that and been there until their language is a parade of names, or a disguise behind which a truly dull person hides. In public conversations there is an elitism to this sort of convoluted? bejeweled? recitation that ostracizes those in the room who do not share the same taste. Pretension is not always alluring.

“This reminds me of the time I sat on the shore of Walahobiano sipping Poltrimaine between bites of Tribomeque while watching the Mulripodes and I thought to myself, my penis is exceptionally large!”

So when my son rightfully supposed that visiting many countries, or meeting lots of stars at concerts would make one interesting by proxy, we pondered over how it might not always end in this way. One can witness a miracle and feel nothing, while another finds great meaning in the corner of his backyard in how fallen leaves curl into brittle fists. Two people can read a great book and only one may have noticed anything in particular about it. You can speak and not mean, exist and not live, read and not comprehend, so that experiences are wasted as tick marks to a quantity as opposed to anything that changes you or makes you feel anything in particular. The boy and I came to the agreement that it’s how you use, what you take away or become from your experiences, however plentiful or scarce or valued, that makes you interesting, to us at least.

When we are not arguing over housework or internet privileges, when I can lure him out with me on walks I find that my son is growing into quite a thoughtful and intelligent young man. We can have reasonable and philosophic conversations. He does not worry with popularity the way I once did at his age, or think complacently like his peers in attempts to belong to a crowd. He is much a loner, who engages mostly in conversations you must initiate yourself. But he holds his own opinions, questions custom, has clever thoughts that are all his own and is admirable to me. As sensitive as his mother and sister are, I think this will help him to be gentle and understanding and empathic to a very lucky girl, some day. I love that in being a parent I am sometimes the student.

I want to learn to be present in the moment. As I lay in Savasana, the final resting pose in yoga class, my thoughts scattered about like mice. I could not collect and put them away. I hope my car doesn’t get towed, I worry too much, how much time do I spend feeling the emotional reaction of some catastrophic event I created in my head, I think I am not laying in the very center of my mat, The guy next to me reminds me of the Jewish dad in Southpark, There are people I miss already in Austin, Would it be too creepy or early to tell them…
How does one stop thinking, or think less? My brain works like a trapeze artist. If it lets go of one thing, it is only to grab onto another. For a compulsive multi-tasker such as myself it is nearly impossible to stop. To hang in mid-air, still as an ornament. There is always a sound in the distance to distract me, the air conditioner idling, a car passing down the street, someone laughing outside on the sidewalk.

How does one stay present in each moment and still make plans for her future, or learn from her past? It would seem that being so present would induce stagnancy, or catch one unawares. If she does not look before she leaps, landing could be disastrous. Until 3am I stayed up reading about being present I was so present in my desire to learn, until I forgot to go to sleep, or that I had work the next day.
“Problems are memories” I read in one article, which was to say, there are no problems in the now. Who are these people, that push away the past as though no good can come from it, or who never look ahead as though they have no control over their futures. How can you know how far you’ve come, or where you are headed? If each day is so disposable? They are those who live for the moment. Isn’t it admirable? Balance balance balance. Eagle powers come to meeeee.

Present in the moment, my ass. What if I’m in the foodstamp waiting line? When I am at work I have no desire to be present in the moment, to notice the feel of the washcloth in my hand as I scrub the showers, to listen to gentle swish of the spray bottle as it dispenses lemon scented disinfectant. I do not want to be aware of the exercise machines frozen around me like sleeping robots. Fuck that! The moments we should learn to be present in are the ones that matter. Maybe it is not that I should learn to be more present in “the moment,” if it is not one worth cherishing. There have been times that while in a less preferable moment that I have been able to channel a better one and it was present in me. There is escape, and there is abduction. There is obsession, and there is presence. I want the wisdom to know the difference and the self-control to act accordingly.

I learned to do side-crow last week, a pose in which you must be very present, or else face plant and possibly bloody your nose. That’s something.

emotional currency

We have a skylight over our bed. It is like a picture that never stays the same. Once there was a red oak leaf that was stuck on it for three days. We were pretty excited about that.
It is now typically rainy and cold out, which is refreshing where I’m from, where rain is a blessing and what southern Baptists pray for every other week. It is not intimidating, electrical and thunderous like in Texas. It sounds like soda fizz, white noise, a long standing ovation. Aaron says it will get old, which I imagine is true, though I feel like it might take a few years for me, and especially when weather like this makes the land so lush and lovely.  I think it is a fair price.

Another painting looms in my head like a dream I slowly remember, of two trees whose branches make the headless shape of a saint or the holy virgin, the classic image where she gestures with her hands at her exposed heart, aflame and rent with swords. In one tree hangs a jar of fireflies, where the heart would be. In the sky above a barn owl descends, it’s face where the saint’s would be. Barn owls have a holy look to them. I am grateful to have so many recent painting ideas. I would be so restless without. 

Oh, I am a lonely painter.
I live in a box of paints.
I’m frightened by the devil,
and I’m drawn to those ones that ain’t afraid. – Joni Mitchell ‘A Case of You’

Laying all of my pieces together I see I use too many blues, so the sky will be golden in this one.
In articles I read about the influence of color. Reds and oranges used as advertisement for restaurants encourage diners to eat quickly and leave. Blue suppresses appetites, affects our sense of time and in text increases reading retention. And over 60% of purchases are made based on color. A young man told me the night before last that pink uniforms have been shown to calm prison inmates.

Things to know about painting and existing on earth.
- If you don’t prepare your canvas first, your paint will not blend well or spread smoothly
- If you don’t have the patience to give things time to set, you will muddy your color and end up with a sticky mess
- You make more mistakes when you rush
- Hurry before it dries. You may never be able to mix and match this exact shade again
- Don’t be excessive, only take out what you intend to use
- Don’t hover so close to the canvas all the time. Stand back every now and then to get a better perspective or things will get out of proportion
- Choose the right tools. Spoons for soup, forks for salad

The Lady of Shallot came up yesterday in a conversation about two potted blueberries on the back balcony. It is the story of a woman confined to a tower, who is under a spell that forbids her to look directly out the window. She can only gaze into the reflection of a mirror at the world outside, shadowy and warped, which she weaves intricate tapestries of all day.
I had not known that there are two interpretations of the poem. One bitter feminist, which you can easily imagine for yourself. The other more interesting one, is about how artists are unable to live directly in the world, as they romanticise and see it in a way that isolates themselves, so that for their art, they forsake their lives.

Or when the moon was overhead,
Came two young lovers lately wed:
I am half sick of shadows, said
The Lady of Shalott.

It is romance that lures the Lady away from her mirror, when Sir Lancelot comes riding by. She cannot help herself and when she turns to gaze at him, the mirror breaks. The curse is set and soon after she dies.
Some say that Tennyson’s message was that life and art cannot be balanced. One must be sacrificed for the other. Though there are examples of this, I can’t completely agree, or at least, I don’t want to.