spring and fall

Márgarét, áre you gríeving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leáves like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! ás the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you wíll weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It ís the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

            - Gerard Manley Hopkins

     

I almost missed the ginkgos on Monument this season, but not quite.

Thoreau

Summer's End

like a griddle cooling

Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication
for Mary Heaney

1. Sunlight

There was a sunlit absence.
The helmeted pump in the yard
heated its iron,
water honeyed

in the slung bucket
and the sun stood
like a griddle cooling
against the wall

of each long afternoon.
So, her hands scuffled
over the backboard,
the reddening stove

sent its plaque of heat
against her where she stood
in a floury apron
by the window.

Now she dusts the board
with a goose's wing,
now sits, broad-lapped,
with whitened nails

and measling shins:
here is a space
again, the scone rising
to the tick of two clocks.

And here is love
like a tinsmith's scoop
sunk past its gleam
in the meal-bin.

I have loved this Seamus Heaney poem for a long time: its portrays an everydayness yet is evocative of warmth, home, and hidden daily rituals of love.  Mary Heaney, whom the poem is dedicated to, was Seamus's aunt who lived with his family.

At the New Yorker festival, Heaney gives a minute or two of introduction to the poem at 19:42, and the poem starts at 21:58.  It's worth listening to any of his poems read in his own voice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HWurkQ1ao4&list=PLHFpn5CtGS959SiwZad59seGiV52dOlBG&index=2

Afterwards, the interviewer Paul Muldoon reflects on the tension present in the poem regarding the tick of 2 clocks, and attributes it to the tension born by two adult females in the household.  Heaney says, somewhat jokingly, that is a revelation; however, the viewer gets the sense that this interpretation may indeed be something he has not considered.

I think a wonder of art--poetric or visual--is its ability to bear multiple interpretations; and that indeed there exist possibilities of deeper, truer meanings than the creator even intended.

Einstein:  "The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.  It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science."

Iris Murdoch: "There is much more symbolism in ordinary life than some critics seem to realize."

Ray Bradbury: "...I never consciously place symbolism in my writing.  That would be a self-conscious exercise and self-consciousness is defeating to the creative act.  Better to let the subconscious do the work for you, and get out of the way.  The best symbolism is always unsuspected and natural."

color matching nature

Trying to color match nature. 

Eh.  

I enjoyed listening to an interview on "The Big Tree" podcast called "Falling Asleep in Mordor--Tolkien's Eschatology."  Among other things he talks about myth, art for art's sake, and story.  

"The basic question that we have to ask ourselves as modern people is, is the basic character of reality enchanted and exciting and beautiful?  Or is it just a big soulless machine? "– Dr. Adrian Walker

only a few become tadpoles

"Brahms once remarked that the mark of an artist is how much he throws away.  Nature, the great creator, is always throwing things away.  A frog lays several million eggs at one sitting.  Only a few dozen of these become tadpoles, and only a few of those become frogs.  We can let imagination and practice be as profligate as nature." - Stephen Nachmanovitch

"The easiest way to do art is to dispense with success and failure altogether and just get on with it." - Stephen Nachmanovitch

I finished my intermediate ceramics class this weekend.  Although I should have been in a beginner's class, I was fearful of being constrained to make pinch pots for weeks (in retrospect I don't think this would have happened), and also the timing for the intermediate class was convenient.

Things I learned: thicker pieces have less possibility of cracking, using the Clay press in the middle clay room was easier, covering clay while it dries helps it dry more evenly, dipping clay in glaze you shouldn't let the glaze linger for more than 2-3 seconds on the piece before dumping it off, painting on glaze is going to go on pretty thin so in that case you should put multiple layers.

This was my second attempt at a lobster-themed dish.  My modus operandi: putting some organic form on a piece so as to distract from the non-symmetry and other blips in the piece.  

It is always fun to be in a shared creative space.  I could tell getting there on Saturday mornings that this could well be people's favorite spot/time of the week, the thing their minds had been dreaming about and dwelling on their projects during the week.  It is rare to be in a room of 5+ middle aged women, none talking yet all focused and happy.  You could tell the room would enter its just-right challenge/flow state.  It reminded me of a Benedictine monastery: "In a flood of words you will not avoid sin" (Prov 10:19).  Silence was typical, and when words were spoken they were more purposeful, revolving around the work itself.   There was not a lot of idle chit-chat.  

Art that does something! (holds potato salad*!) *not mine

precisely where

art that does stuff

You have to be really aware of the difference between fruitfulness and success because the world is always talking to you about your success. Society keeps asking you: “Show me your trophies. Show me, how many books have you written? Show me, how many games did you win? Show me, how much money did you make? Show me. . . .” And there is nothing wrong with any of that. I am saying that finally that’s not the question. The question is: “Are you going to bear fruit?” And the amazing thing is that our fruitfulness comes out of our vulnerability and not just out of our power. Actually it comes out of our powerlessness. If the ground wants to be fruitful, you have to break it open a little bit. The hard ground cannot bear fruit; it has to be raked open. And the mystery is that our illness and our weakness and our many ways of dying are often the ways that we get in touch with our vulnerabilities. You and I have to trust that they will allow us to be more fruitful if lived faithfully. Precisely where we are weakest and often most broken and most needy, precisely there can be the ground of our fruitfulness. That is the vision that means that death can indeed be the final healing—because it becomes the way to be so vulnerable that we can bear fruit in a whole new way. Like trees that die and become fuel, and like leaves that die and become fertilizer, in nature something new comes out from death all the time. So you have to realize that you are part of that beautiful process, that your death is not the end but in fact it is the source of your fruitfulness beyond you in new generations, in new centuries.

-Henri Nouwen

It's nice to be in a space with so many adults and so many mistakes.  

Zeigarnik

I recently heard that unfinished work takes up a larger space in our minds.  It's called the Zeigarnik effect.  It's the reason T.V. has cliffhangers.  It's no doubt a benefit in the workplace.

In college, I took a ceramics class and created slab-built pieces which featured images of a shrimp boil, other seafood and organic forms.  When I returned after the Christmas break, all the pieces--many of which I never saw to completion--were gone.  They have taken up residence in my mind since.

Yesterday, thanks to a summer class I'm taking at a Visual Arts Center, I got to see a final manifestation.

Memories of Dauphin Island have been emerging in my mind in a special way this year.  Our long road trip, with an extra carrier on top for boogie boards.  Digging holes in the cool sand under houses on stilts.  Riding the waves in.  Sand in swimsuits.  Outdoor showers.  Sand crabs.  Playing poker with cousins.  The Candy house.  Luau.  The rough deck under our feet. Snow cones.  Blueberry pancakes.  Peaches.  Fun with aunts and uncles.  Cousins.  A cauldron of shrimp boil, stirred with an oar.

At Nana's funeral this spring, I reminisced with siblings and cousins about these times.  These now-adults sprinkled across the U.S. -- Louisiana, Texas, Alabama, Mississippi, Virginia--carry in some nugget of their brains this common place and all it encapsulates.

Interesting to think about the ways memory are gathered, and scatter, or are stored, and the ways we can consciously or unconsciously collect them, years later.

yards

It is interesting to me that in painting home portraits, the discussions I usually end up having are over the yard--what's in bloom, what colors to include.  I am often given the artistic license to put everything in bloom!  The house is obviously the focal point, but the yard is important.

When my grandparents came to visit a few weekends ago, my parents got to provide a walking tour of their yard.  We smelled and looked.  A lot of activities these days don't call for such sensory engagement.  Nature is clearly not of human making.  Yet, we can foster it.  

Commentary from my grandfather after the visit:  "[They] have a wonderful variety of beautiful plantings which they were kind enough to show and explain to us.  You'll have to guess what they are since I wouldn't be able to spell them.  I didn't see any weeds or dandelions which I am very familiar with and can spell."

this time I am going to speak to you about the flowers

"In my previous letters, I have often shared my wonder for the birds, but this time I am going to speak to you about the flowers."  

This quote is the way Jean Vanier's last letter (May 2018) to his community, found on his organization's website, begins.   https://www.jean-vanier.org/en

Jean's simplicity and desire for connection is also symbolized by the oranges held high during his funeral procession.  "When we've had oranges for dessert at L'Arche, we sometimes start chucking the peel about at the end of the meal.  Everyone gets into it.  An Englishman once asked me if this was a traditional French custom. I don't know about that!  But I do know that it is one way to bring people out of their isolation to express themselves joyfully--especially if they can't communicate with words."

In 1964, after witnessing the institutionalized life of people with intellectual disabilities, Jean invited two men to live with him.  Today, L'Arche communities are home to people with disabilities and those without, in 35 countries. 

I was familiar with Jean Vanier and had read some of his writings.  I think these past couple of weeks were the first time I'd heard his spoken voice, and seen so many photos of him.  His eyebrows capture some of his essence: extravagance in unexpected places, veering upward and downward at once, arching toward the other.  

Jean said, "We shouldn't seek the ideal community.  It is a question of loving those whom God has set beside us today.  They are signs of God.  We might have chosen different people, people who were more cheerful and intelligent.  But these are the ones God has given us...It is with them that we are called to create unity and live a covenant."

I keep wanting to say, "Jean Valjean," the protagonist from Les Mis, when thinking about Jean Vanier.  The two men undoubtedly share magnanimity of character.  And I think Victor Hugo's aphorism, "To love another person is to see the face of God," are words Jean Vanier would wholeheartedly agree with.  

An Egg-cellent Mother's Day!

The VMFA holds the largest collection of Faberge eggs outside of Russia.  In 1885, Tsar Alexander III commissioned the first imperial egg as a gift to his wife.  She liked it so much he continued to bestow her with the gift of an egg each year, a tradition continued by his son Nicholas II.  

“Youth fades; love droops; the leaves of friendship fall. A mother’s secret hope outlives them all.”—Oliver Wendell Holmes

Happy Easter

"Computers are useless.  They can only give you answers." - Pablo Picasso

Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem

Via Dolorosa, Jerusalem

On a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in February, I walked the Via Dolorosa, "The Way of Sorrow," early one Sunday morning.  To the right in this photo, you can see the cross my group carried through the streets.  To the left, merchants carry bread overhead.  You can see our divided attention: to the hustle and bustle on the morning streets, and to the carrying of the cross.  John 6:35: "I am the bread of life."  Our trip, too was full of the everyday--on/off the tour bus, stopping for meals--interspersed with stopping at places significant to our faith.  It was not all spiritual or mystical, but it was meaningful in ways I will continue to unpack.

Mystagogy, the period after Easter, means leading into the mystery.  It is not something we solve or answer, but instead something we live in.  

Buckley Old-Fashioned

Buckley Old-Fashioned

      1 jigger Jack Daniels bourbon

      packet of Equal or sugar

      splash of water (tap or soda water)

      couple of dashes of bitters 

      Mix together, stir, pour over ice.  

      Add 1 whole maraschino cherry.

The Classic, enjoyed by many at my grandparents' 90th birthday bash last year.  

Peripheral

In Praise of Being Peripheral

Without philosophy,
tragedy,
history,

a grey squirrel
looks
very busy.

Light as a soul
released
from a painting by Bosch,
its greens
and vermilions stripped off it.

He climbs a tree
that is equally ahistoric.

His heart works harder. 

by Jane Hirshfield 

Word of Life

working on an oil painting of Jerusalem, 18x24"?

I haven't posted on this blog in a while.  I think I've enjoyed a more receptive than expressive winter.   Okay and also, as any self-promoting artist, I've accommodated to the medium of the day: Instagram.  I have read a few good books.  Among them: The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (Anne Fadiman), which explores the intersection between Western medicine and traditional Hmong culture in the story of family whose daughter has epilepsy.  I recommend this book to anyone.  Take this:  

"Most Hmong women did go to the hospital to give birth, erroneously believing that babies born at home would not become U.S. citizens. Doctors were more likely to encounter them on the Labor and Delivery floor than in any other medical context because they had so many children. In the mid-eighties, the fertility rate of Hmong women in America was 9.5 children, which, according to one study, was “at the upper limits of human reproductive capacity,” second only to the Hutterites. (The fertility rate of white Americans is 1.9 children, and of black Americans, 2.2.) This rate has undoubtedly decreased—though it has not been recently quantified—as young Hmong have become more Americanized, but it is still extraordinarily high. The large size of Hmong families is the inevitable result of two circumstances: Hmong women usually marry during their teens, sometimes as early as thirteen or fourteen, thus allowing their reproductive years to extend nearly from menarche to menopause; and, as a rule, they are highly suspicious of contraception. In 1987, when Donald Ranard, a researcher on refugee issues at the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, D.C., visited Ban Vinai, he learned that in an effort to curb the exploding birthrate of the camp’s inhabitants, the administrators had promised free cassette recorders to women who volunteered to take contraceptive pills. Many women accepted both the tape recorders and the pills, but they soon discovered a marvelous paradox: the contraceptives, which they had probably never intended to swallow in the first place, were a superior fertilizer. So the pills ended up being ground up and sprinkled on Hmong vegetable plots, while the gardeners continued to get pregnant."

Another interesting book I recently finished: A Man Without Words by Susan Schaller, the story of a woman's experience with a twenty-seven year old man who has never encountered language.  Nouns come first, but through gestures and expressions and the use of ASL, she labors to explain abstract concepts (time? God?) to him.  Ildefonso (her student) had been exposed to the Catholic mass as a child in Mexico.  After many years, Susan revisits Ildefonso and gains increased insight:

"This languageless deaf boy noticed the priest and his robes, the incense, candles, altar, and the rituals of a Catholic mass.  He noticed people with clasped hands, on their knees. ...Ildefonso would have seen much more emotion manifested on the faces of women, children, and men.  He would have followed their eyes.  He told me he had looked up at the ceiling.  He knew the tears and pleas were not directed to the building or anything visible.  Without thinking with a word or a sign, Ildefonso had the idea of divinity or spirituality or unseen mystery.  After his description, he looked at me and explained, 'God isn't up there.  God is inside for me to find without all the priests, robes, rituals, and vaulted ceilings.'"

This book illuminates language as a fundamental to humanity, and Ildefonso's rapt attention and eagerness for communication are evidence of his extreme isolation.  It got me thinking about the Word of Life, Jesus, as a fundamental source of interconnection between people.  A word is something we use, a tool that allows communication with others and takes us beyond ourselves.  The space between people is no longer a space, but a place where ideas can travel and understanding can be achieved.  God uses Jesus as a word, a tool, to communicate with his people.  Jesus is the very medium putting flesh to divinity, spirituality or unseen mystery.  

I am preparing for a pilgrimage to the Holy Lands.  Something - laziness? fear of disappointment? some combination? has prevented me from anticipating the experience too much.  Plus, it's a guided tour, so it's very nice that there's minimal planning needed on my part. But, I do look forward to being "in it" while I'm there.  I look forward to gaining a better grasp of geography and culture.  As a visual person, I look forward to the ways it will provide a visual medium for future prayer.  

--

This painting is done is water-soluble oils!  It is my first oil painting in about 11 years.  (Aroundabouts the same span since I was last abroad!)  Traditional oils requires cleaning mediums with substances with strong odors not conducive to shared living situations (frankly, probably not healthy for solitary living situations either!).  But the invention of water-soluble paints and their use with natural mixing mediums is quite the thing.  Also, this painting is being completed over the course of multiple sittings, so there's that.  ALSO, I overheard a fellow therapist describing something to a patient this week that set off a lightbulb in my brain.  I get tension migraine headaches, which I first remember developing long Wednesdays at Notre Dame in which I had morning class, a 3-hour painting class in the afternoons, and choir in the evenings.  I think the headaches are multi-causal (stress being one trigger) but sometimes I link those initial headaches to the oil odors.  The therapist described how certain postures such as lifting the arm overhead cause tightening of the trapezius muscle (extends from base of head down neck and out towards shoulders), which constricts blood vessels running to the brain.  Picturing my painting posture (canvas on easel, arm outstretched upward), I thought about the tension caused by holding my arm in such a way, and the way the return of blood flow to the brain after relaxing could trigger the tension headaches.  Even treating shoulder impingement for 2 years, I needed to hear another person explain something in a particular way for it to trigger that thought.  Space.  Word.  Life.