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)