My Black Sedan

 

Notebook Page: Addendum- a thing added or to be added, ca. 1968.  Eva Hesse.

Dear People,

If you are 'my people' you will know exactly what I mean, and maybe you don't even need to read this letter, but, if you are anyone else, you will want to hop into my Black Sedan, and let me tell you about the things I have been reading.  It is all memoir and auto fiction for me at this location in the mapping of my present via a fitful and clumsy reviewing of my past (revisionist history?).  Okay, you can call it the same old existential crisis, but I think maybe it is just living.  In any case, I am waiting for the leaves to fall, like I do, and I am reading all these great women writing their experience of living.  The thing that is so wonderful is that it feels like home; like a mirror; like this mirror.  

Maybe all we can ever have is reflections, but these images feel close to what I think could be true.  Jenny Erpenbeck says "...we want to write because we find it hard to make ourselves understood.  Because we find that things fall by the wayside when we speak."  Sing it, sister!  My wayside is littered with the things I meant to say and the questions I wanted to ask.  Like this one:  What, then, do I do instead of trying to get people to like me?  Or this one;  Why did you keep on giving me all that false hope? 

Claire Dederer writes that you find yourself "...flying the flag of idleness and melancholy.  You find yourself not just wanting to do nothing but somehow needing to do nothing.  Maybe a woman's version of a midlife crisis involves stopping doing stuff?"  And haven't we said things that amount to this to each other nearly every time we meet?  Déjà vu!*

Which, because I am reading also Biography of X, brings me to the notion of conviction in making art.  I have often found intention to matter, to be required for making art, but I am ready to let conviction be the one that got away.  I wish someone had told me it was fine to let ambivalence be my muse, but, let's not cry over that spilled milk, let us instead assert that ambivalence is just the ticket for art making, and even for living.  My years of desperately seeking conviction should not be your story; maybe you will want to tell a story that goes like this:

One fine Spring day I set out to make my way in the world, and I met many strange and wonderful beings along the way, and I hoped they would like me, but I also knew it was okay if they didn't.  I could give them things, little trinkets I found, an acorn cap, or a stone, and it was only just that: a giving that neither made or unmade me; their acquisition was not my diminishment.  The little things they might give me, magic passwords and permissions, well I was free to use them as long as I liked, but also free to discard them if they began to feel confining.  The continuing exchange of ideas and words and deeds was the main thing, the quest was just sort of there so if any dolts should ask you what you were doing, you could answer that you were seeking the fair princess imprisoned in her turret.

  

*  Olivia Rodrigo is another of the real, non-animated Disney Princesses, like Annette Funicello, Selena Gomez, Zendaya, Demi Levato, Brittany Spears, Christina Aguilera, Miley Cyrus, Justin Timberlake, etc.  

Notes:  Erpenbeck, Jenny.  Not a Novel- A Memoir in Pieces, New Directions, New York, page 143.                    Dederer, Claire, Love and Trouble- A Midlife Reckoning, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, page 9. 

 

Ground Plane XIX

 

a whole lot of medicine

 

Three Sheep, Henri Moore, 1972.

Dear People,

Your song for today.  While we are listening, let's pretend we are somebody else.  I'll go first:  I am a shepherdess, camped in the high mountains, but soon it will be time for me and my flock to head to the foothills.  I have a little caravan I live in; there is room only for slow things; a guitar, pens and paper, knitting needles, some watercolor paints.  I have been writing to you all summer, trying to tell you about the deep quiet in the darkest part of the night; how it is sometimes broken by a disturbance in the flock.  When I get down to the foothills in a few more weeks, there will be people to talk with and spend time with, and I wonder, will I remember how to speak in the language I haven't used since May?  What will I say when they ask 'what have you been doing?'

on outdoor sofas

                              







Dear Furnished,

The couch on the porch is gone now.  How did it come to be on the porch, I would ask myself-  it is a marker, I believe, of white trashdom.  It was one of only two sofas we had growing up.  The first place I remember, a house; had two sofas.  One was a dark blue, nearly a night blue, with orange and other, less indistinct colors of flowers on it.  I think there was a red, a purple.  It had a flounce, a ruffle at the bottom.  The other couch was a bamboo armed thing, with a chair that matched, in a kind of bumpy green striped upholstery.  Celery green, a pale gold, dun, and off white narrow stripes.  I remember both of these fabrics, the feel, the look, with an intense fondness, even though the stripe was rather scratchy in a polyester way, and the floral was a canvasy twill that you couldn't call soft, either.  I think maybe it was the closeness I am fond of.  I could lie face down on these fabrics, I could turn and face the back cushion, I could pull my legs up under me on these fabrics.  There was a snugness.  Also, it was a place to be near other beings.  A communal coziness, then.

There was a couch on my best friend's porch when I was growing up; it was astoundingly long, with orange and ochre flowers on cream; bordering on chintz in its exuberance.  We would sleep there, on that couch, on hot nights.  

I do not know what became of the dark blue floral, but the bamboo moved with us to the house I spent most of my childhood in, and when my parents moved to a bigger, newer, closer to town place with horrible carpet, wallpaper, and generally soulless spaces (a downsizing of charm, even as it upsized radically in every other way), the old sofa was given to me, because the new house's rooms demanded new, larger things.*  

I had already been given an old couch, a kind of overly ornate carved oak thing from maybe 1910, that my Mom acquired in a lovely wine colored velvet, which she re-upholstered in carmine fabric with green and blue dashes running through it diagonally.  After 6 or 7 years of that davenport, I gave it to a friend of my Mom's, and I bought a walnut stained old thing circa 1960.  It came with gold-green fabric that cat claws snagged on sight.  I had it re-covered in boat vinyl; a warm gray fake ostrich.  It was an unusual kind of sectional: two identical halves; one with a right hand arm and the other with a left, two seats in each half.  I liked to put our fuchsia painted coffee table into the corner position.  Which is why, when I was given the bamboo couch, the only place it could go was the porch.  Which was fine, because all we had for porch furniture was some collapsing wicker chairs, and a wooden rocker whose seat was giving way.

A handful of years ago, we put a respectable piece of 'outdoor furniture' on the porch where the outdoor couch had been; a beige sort of futon thing in sturdy fade-proof outdoor upholstery: if I didn't know it wasn't, I would call it a couch.  It is bland, and purpose made for being on porches, and the stray cat sits on it when we aren't looking.

 *I think maybe I still hate that big house for being so needy.

September

 

Dear Ones,

Your song for today is Silver Dagger  (also known as Katie Dear, Awake, Ye Drowsy Sleepers, etc.)!  From every link, a heart doth dangle.

Katie Dear #1

O! Molly Dear Go Ask Your Mother

Awake Ye Drowsy Sleepers

Who Is at My Window Weeping

Little Satchel

Oh Katy Dear

Silver Dagger (2)

Who's That Knocking

Awake, Awake You Drowsy Sleepers

Silver Dagger (3)

Silver Dagger (4)

Kairosis: or, Another Exhortation!

 

Colette is very photogenic!

Dear Ones, 

Oh!  I want to read this to you, sitting very close; I want to be the one to show this thing of beauty, but, but it won't be intimate enough, you or I will feel clumsy, or unsure, and then it will just be another pile of words. You must read it alone; you must be awed by it and face the wonder alone.

My dearest literary love (at this moment, because I reserve the right to change my paramour parameters) is the memoir-ish sound of womens' voices.  This one, and this one, and this one, this one, this one, and oh!  Claire-Louise Bennett most of all right now.  I hadn't near enough of these kind of voices when I was younger- I had a few, to be sure, Ursula LeGuin, Madeleine L'Engle come to mind, Jeannette Winterson: but now, well, now my shelves are overflowing with good guidance and the words of my people.   

Don't leave me waxing and gushing, hyperbol-izing, and superlative-ating all over the place; please, if you have ever done a thing (which was hopefully to read Helen DeWitt!) will you now, please, also do this one thing, too???  Pond, Pond, POND!!  

PS  More wonderful women writers that might lead you to a "moment of psychological integration in time:" 

Annie Ernaux

Colette

Jenny Erpenbeck

Sheila Heti

Lauren Groff

bell hooks

Carrie Brownstein

Patti Smith

Tove Jansson

Kelly Link

Annie Dillard

Lydia Yukanvitch

Sandra Sisneros

Amy Sillman

Rumor Godden

PPS  Now, maybe, maybe you have finished it, and you want a little more about it, and in that case, but no sooner, you may want to read this.  But, do not read it before you read Pond!

PPPS  Okay, well, since you asked, I love it because I don't think that I am using my first language, either, but if I were, if I could, it would sound just exactly like Pond.  Also:  

There was a storm, an old storm, going around and around the mountain, visiting the mountain again perhaps after who knows how long, trying to get somewhere, going nowhere.

Where it would immediately alight upon the dreadful contents therein and deliver the entire catalogue to those parts of the imagination that will gladly make a lurid potion from goose fat and unrefined sea salt. 

 

Not a metaphor, nothing like that- I'd never want the monster to stand for something, that's for sure.

As if making the world smaller because of all the intact explanations that need to occur in order for one thing to become another thing. 

It's a devil to know what to take seriously.

And didn't I immediately discover that melancholia brought something out in me that felt more authentic and effortless than anything I'd previously alchemized. 

It's been watching me all along, all my life, coming and going- and I don't know what it sees as it stands there, I don't know that it is not in fact becoming a little afraid of me- and I have to be doubly careful I think, not to frighten it away, because between you and me I can't be at all sure where it is I'd be without it. 

 

 

 

Lines: what to move: the paper or the hand?

 

Flying with Friends, drypoint, 2000.

Dear Drafters and Pencil Wielder's,

You may have recalled me gushing over what is sometimes called an action art work of Tom Marioni's; a drypoint made by people jumping and simultaneously marking a copper plate.  I love this print, and I want to draw your attention to the the amount of marks- this is where someone (I am guessing it was Tom Marioni) made a decision to stop adding.  The how is big, of course, but the when is also very important.

Up to and Including her Limits, 1973 to 76.

Next, take a look at Carolee Schneemann's wonderful drawing/space made by suspension in a harness.  It's so poetic to think of her floating and marking, of course, and that would be enough, but there are also all kinds of delicious decisions she has made: how long the lines, when and where, how many, what color.  As you see it here, it is being displayed as a relic of the performances, hence the monitors.  All those should be hauled away, and the harness, too.  

Pink Mound with Eruption, 1993.

Lastly, let's look at another terrific drawing, by Carroll Dunham; dun't you know him?  He is Lena Dunham's Dad, and I love some of his drawings, but not all.  Why just some?  Well, it's got to do with a thing that I have about Philip Guston, too.  Sometimes, and by sometimes I mean in some of the pieces, it is too much-  too much comic* book subject matter, too much pinky, bloody, bodily colors, too much stupid male humor.  This drawing, well, it isn't anything but 'just right,' with the exception of the slightly puerile title.  

Let this be your project for today; marks (which you might decide to call a drawing) made through the application of a system or structure, or both.

*R. Crumb indeed, but he isn't really Our Crumb, he is someone else's, surely?  All those lines, all that facility, all that paper; the question just cries out:  what if he had used his powers for good instead of being culturally clever?

PS  Lena Dunham's Mom is also an artist; Laurie Simmons.