Dear Friends,
I have a serious case of Object Attachment Disorder. Take, for example, this Walter Foster book on how to draw with pastels. Really, do take it! I put in a box that I left at the Goodwill, so you can find it there easily. It looks like an ordinary, harmless, slightly lame, instructional drawing book.
Let me tell you what it really is: it's a fetishization of pale green wool carpet, romantic love, and velvety softness. It holds two, maybe even three generations of longing in it. It's cliché to the max, and I finally set it loose. No, no; congratulations aren't necessary. This is about a grieving confession of short-sightedness. No, it was more willful than that. Complications? You betcha! These great barges of emotion don't float down river easily; you really have to inventory it all to launch these behemoths.
My Grandmother gave it to me, and like everyone's grandmother, she represented a sophistication that I was encouraged to strive for; she was genteel, I suppose, and from a time period, status, and income level that I did not know, so of course it seemed desirable. So it wasn't just instructions for drawing, it was instructions for a lot of things, including manners and relationship, and morals, oh! So many twisted morals! Still, what it came down to, was the cover. I loved the cover of this book like crazy. It was big, like, 18 inches by 12. It had the same vase of flowers (my Grandmother said: vaahs) on the front and the back, except the back did not have the title. This was magic to me, this flattened and bizarre three dimensionality.
I almost just tore the covers off, and pasted them up in my laundry room, next to some other odd private and suspect bits of identity- prints of Frida Kahlo paintings, a photo of a Spirit Bear, a playing card with a bullfighter on it, an old postcard of a Montana highway. A sort of vision board of guilty image pleasures.
But see, I don't want to stay in this place of longing any longer, so I say, Take it All Away.
