Signs

I am starting Andrew Solomon's Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity and finding it illuminating. As an OT who interfaces with disability regularly, I realize there are worlds of experience I barely touch. The book centers around what Solomon terms "horizontal" identities. Rather than vertical identities we share with our parents (race, religion), horizontal identities require peer groups for integration/support/empathy/understanding.

The chapter I just finished is about the Deaf community. Solomon illuminates complexities and contradictions inherent in disability. He takes the view of disability as illness and identity. He explores the difficulty of moral decision making about something such as cochlear implants - a medicalized "solution" imposed by parents and chosen by parents for their children; versus embracing deafness in a child as an identity that can be lived out fully using ASL. He highlights the vibrancy of the Deaf community, which often is a community found and delighted upon in a Deaf person's life. 

Eye-opening was the negative effect the well-intended 1990 Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) had on the Deaf community. With a directive to provide the least restrictive, most integrated learning environments for children with disabilities, Deaf schools floundered as Deaf children were herded into "hearing" classrooms -- their education suffered. Mainstreaming may appear good, but in reality specialized education is required. 

Children who are taught Sign (manualism) often can excel at higher academic rates earlier; learning to hear for a deaf person imposes a significant learning curve during crucial years of early neuroplasticity. Yet the decision to "teach" a person to hear is a way parents can integrate the child into their family, when their own capacity to learn new language (at age 30) is diminished. To what extent should each be required to accommodate the other, to nurture familial bonds?

Psychologist Neil Glickman identifies 4 stages of Deaf identity: 1) pretending to be hearing 2) marginality (feeling excluded from deaf and hearing life), 3) falling in love with in Deaf culture; 4) an integrated perspective of the strengths of hearing and Deaf culture. Some Deaf individuals, whose cochlear implants were chosen for them by their parents, decide to switch them off when they discover a complete and full world within Deaf culture.

Disability has deleterious effects on physical and mental health in families; abuse is perpetrated at higher rates against those with disabilities. At the same time, difference offers enormous opportunities for meaning and purpose for some parents as they meet the challenges of serving and loving their child. Deafness, like other disabilities, is viewed as a deficit - yet the vibrancy, meaning and fullness Deaf individuals feel within a like community challenges that. 

Among the poignant lines:

"Though many of us take pride in how different we are from our parents, we are endlessly sad at how different our children are from us." 

Helen Keller: "Blindness cuts us off from things, but deafness cuts us off from people."

Regarding the effectualness of Sign: "To this day if I sign, 'milk,' I feel more milky than if I say the word. Signing is like speech set to dance."

Fringes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=An-PQEAxsF8
Video: Josh Turner & Allison Young "Crazy" - beautiful, professional voices that are fringed by casual interactions

In current culture, there is a tendency to include unscripted, rough edges of otherwise final, professional grade products.  Audiences crave the personal, and we have certainly always been celebrity-obsessed, with the internet providing infinitely more information about intimacies of people's lives.  I've reflected on this in photography staging--beautiful kitchen scenes of products, leaning in all the dust of the flour on the counter and a few spare berries.  If we had the sculpted, final product, it would seem insincere.  Therefore we leave the fringes in.  Maybe given all the tech interface, this helps to make us feel warmer, more homey.


(Credit:  https://flourandfloral.com/how-to-style-food-for-food-photography/)

None of us need fool ourselves that the "mess" has not been as carefully curated (really, more carefully curated) than the main event.

But something I read recently also made me wonder if there is a sense of protectiveness that we have that allows us to put this input into.  It was an article about irony in our society.

An article, "How to Live without Irony," part of The Stone column in the NYT, Christy Wampole reflects on the hipster as an "archetype of ironic living."  Ironic living allows one to dodge responsibility for his/her choices.  It is a defensive, reactionary posture that acknowledges everything has already been done.  Ironic living minimizes risk, since everything is a joke. It is a mantle to hide behind.  These glasses, these large and ill-fitting clothes are clearly not meant to make me look more beautiful, clearly.  So if you were wondering if I was beautiful, that's not even my intent.  I mean, if you tell me I'm beautiful and somehow you've seen that beyond all this get-up, then I must be especially strikingly beautiful, because that's not what I'm going for.

Of the ironic, Wampole says: "It pre-emptively acknowledges its own failure to accomplish anything meaningful. No attack can be set against it, as it has already conquered itself."

I wonder what else this age of irony could be symptomatic of (inertia, bombardment with information, unwillingness to take risks, new ability to cultivate online presences?).  

If we think these unscripted fringes allow us (allow us to see a person laugh, say something before or after a song), we should be aware that these "fringes" are no less carefully curated before broadcast to millions.  I have been aware of this, posting on Instagram, including borders in my photography.

Wampole that irony is a luxury, and often harder to find among those who have suffered, and those in general less self-aware of culture (the very young and very old).

wall art

redecorating

I took the Enneagram within the last year and was labelled the Perfectionist.  Although not eager to accept the title, I could relate to parts of the description.  I think that may be one reason I don't necessarily like to keep art I've done hanging around where I live -- I can see the imperfections in it, I remember my fluctuating mood doing it, I remember feeling annoyed have to finish it in longer than 1 sitting (!).  I'd rather let those hidden things hang on someone else's wall. :)

Abstract art seems easier for me to stomach in my own space, because it's more transparent what I was trying or not trying to do (?), because it's clear I didn't really know what I was doing when I did it and perhaps don't now. 

"Artwork is not thought up in consciousness and then, as a separate phase, executed by the hand.  The hand surprises us, creates and solves problems on its own." - Stephen Nachmanovitch

Age of Abstraction

It's been a while.  I've dropped the blog in favor of the cheap thrill of posting on Instagram.  There is something (I prefer to think it childlike rather than egomaniac) that in me is still immediately driven to share art after immediately producing it.  It is like it is not real until it has had at least 1 observer outside me.  Or maybe I'm just looking for validation.  Regardless.

Something about doing art before breakfast on a Saturday morning is thrilling to me.  Maybe it's sending a signal that art is more important than food, or just delight in the fact that I have a free morning that I can be driven by aesthetic impulses rather than clock time.

These sketches are done on notebook paper - nothing fancy.  I was complimented that someone reached out to me inquiring about one, but realized I had already marred it by sketching beside it, also it was not done on durable material, also I think you spray oil pastels to seal them, spray which I don't have.

just a weed and its backdrop

The inspiration for all this was a box of broken fragments of oil pastels a woman gave me a few years ago when I spent a retreat day at Richmond Hill.  I composed a pastel scene there over the course of the art retreat, and she was the moderator.  I don't know, but guessing by the advertising I'd guess these are at least 30 years old. 

This one looks to me sort of like an American Indian design.  

Posting on Instagram, I am at once aware that I can channel a childhood inspiration (being an author and illustrator - voila!), also feeling like an egoist, but also thinking, well people don't have to follow me if they don't want to!  As in art, as in all things, I wonder, who is my audience? Who am I potentially offending? Who thinks I am developing mental illness?  But then I prefer to think, this is for me and let people like or walk by or think what they will.

Sometimes I craft my word pairings with my artwork, labor over them and prepare them, edit them, condense them.  Sometimes they come out more impulsively, which I actually think might be more sincere.  Although it takes a more dedicated writer to write something pithy, I wonder if some of the immediate urges/thoughts/less formulated things that are more natural and easier to digest.

I think the abstract images recently were empowered by a photographer who has turned to some watercolor abstract images recently, feeling herself somewhat limp towards photography.  She described herself, during difficult times, pivoting creatively.  When she cannot make photos, she draws, when she cannot draws, she sings....  I liked this concept and think I may relate, somewhat.  

RECENTLY I have been trying to incorporate more fiction (read an article about the empathy it evokes, and the way it sends connections through all parts of our brain in a way that nonfiction doesn't).  Also, as kind of part of this mission, I have tried to skip over the biographical parts of the authors--for example, in the Norton Anthology of English Lit.  I think I often read a fictional work psychoanalyzing the author, which I think the works are never composed to do.  If I know something about the author, it is is like I am seeking the book for traces of it.  So instead I'm trying to look at the work as the work as the work.  Most assuredly as it is intended.  

Oh, and the other things about oil pastels + abstraction: it's all about the process.  It's fun.  

Medical Musings

I recently read that "arthritis" shares the same root as "art."  The Greek word for joint.  An artist joins two things that have not been joined before.

Arthritis, in the medical world, elicits a general sense of resignation.  There is much that can be fixed, improved, healed, cured in medicine.  Indeed, potential for healing is the basis of medicine.  But when the word arthritis enters a room, it is accompanied by a sigh from patients and providers alike.

I am familiar with the general concept of arthritis -- wearing away of the cartilage protecting joint.  However, only more recently have I understood the second component of the disease: the laying down of calcium deposits in the damaged area.

It's as if the body, recognizing that something is missing, is eager to repair it but the workers have run out of the right materials.  Indeed, as people age, osteoporosis-- loss of bone density-- may also occur.  It's as if the body's miners have found their source in the bones and are exporting the goods elsewhere.  So instead of pliable, supple cartilage comes little deposits of bone.

When too does our flexible, cushioning support worn thin, and due to age we replace it with something more fail-proof, more certain?  Stability and mobility are two ends of a see-saw: the shoulder, the joint complex with the most range of motion in the body, is the least stable and for that reason most prone to injury.

The specific area in the body most prone to arthritis is the basal joint -- the base of the thumb.  Thinking of how many ways we use our hands during the day, you can see why this wear and tear might occur in such an area.

I think of the political climate, paired with an understanding of terms of human functional movement.  Opposition in the hand means the ability of the thumb and pinky to move towards each other: "opposable thumb."  When did opposition in the political or business arena consist of moving towards each other?  Yet it's what allows the hand to function as a hand, to hold a mug, a cup.

Arthur Ashe on Monument Avenue,

using his arthritic shoulders to raise a racquet and book.  

Uniquely stable shoulders.