share bread with me

 

Dear Copine,

Here is a word from the French that I just recently learned: copine/copain.  The thing, that I know you already know about words, is that they are made often of other words, or bits of words, and so when you say them, when you write them, when you use them, you get the meaning of the word and the meaning of the bits, too!  So economical, so unfolding and expansive!  Meaning is like that, I guess.

Anyway, the word is made from two Latin pieces that mean "with" and "bread."  Copine/copain is the person you share bread with.  I made some recently, and shared it around with friends.  If you feel you'd like to make some bread, you need 3 days, starter, and a languorous outlook.  If you are busy, forget it, you shouldn't even watch the video!

But, you know, it was mighty good bread, and maybe you want that kind of busy-ness.

a steady hand

 

17th Century Palm Reading Diagram

Dear Sympathetic,

And nerves of steel.  It is a very delicate operation, sifting through the objects of the past.  You need a steady hand and nerves of steel to pull the tiny needles from the endless hay.

I examined carefully several disintegrating plastic bags full of my old figure drawings.  They were good.  The weight was where it was heavy, the line was where it was light, the shadow was where the energy was, the gesture matched the movement.  They were good.  There were hundreds.  They were as good as anything.  Let me try to explain; I would think they were good if someone else had made them, if I saw them in a museum in Europe I would think they were good,  I would say:  I saw this great show of drawings at the Pompidou.  I was in Venice, and the biennale had this amazing exhibit of figure drawings.  

But.

But, let's remember that I made them, and so I am not really qualified to say whether they are good or bad.  Well, actually, no one will object if I say they are bad, but the point still stands.  We cannot really feel sure of the quality or merit of what we have done.  There are better ones, yes; and there are worse ones.  So, where are we?  Good or Bad?  I think we need a new way to end the sentence, the project.  It cannot be money or validation from the Institution, so what could it be, this thing that confers satisfaction?

Also, let's not forget the Famous Artist Instructor* asked to have some of my drawings, because they were that good. I gave them, of course, and within two years I had forgotten I had even been complimented in this way.  So, it doesn't last, that's sure.  It doesn't carry you like a raft over the rough seas.  The other thing I see, now, is that I was A Good Student.  Which means, as you already know, that I followed directions accurately and carefully.  Which, well, may not be anything to celebrate, either.  It might be Bad, even.  But if it were Good, that would not be that great either.

Does this kind of circular stuff make your head hurt?  Or does it let you see that yes, the circle just repeats, and maybe you don't want that anymore, either?

* The thing to note here, is that the Famous Artist Instructor was selling their work, in several high profile galleries, and also, working a full time teaching gig.  This was the late '80s, early '90s, so it should have been the (late and ending) good old days for making a living as an artist, but they were also pulling a 9 to 5 teaching, which suggests that even Famous Artist is not as lucrative as we might all have hoped.

PS  Do, please, take a peek at the Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things.

a diminished thing

 

Ovenbird, detail, by John James Audubon. 

Dear Poetry,

You know how it is; somethings just really grab you, haunt you; dig you, explain you, get you, keep you.  I have been kept by this little phrase for nearly a year now:

"...what to make of a diminished thing."

This phrase is often misquoted in my mind as "what to do with a diminished thing," which is, my friends, the essence of poetry:  'to do' is very like 'to make,' but it is also planets, galaxies, apart.  Let me expand like these galaxies:  you 'make' both a sandwich and sense.  To 'make' is to interpret in some cases and senses.  To 'do' is nearly any action under the sun.  You do not really 'do' sense or sandwiches, even though you 'do' lunch.  Hmm, yes, you are right;  in the UK, they do say, let me 'do' you a bun or a pastie or something or other, but generally, doing is kind of a more active feeling.  Would that behemoth shoe & culture making(!?) machine have advertised "Just Make it?"

Well, now that I have you halfway down the shoe aisle of the big box store, forget all that, turn around and join me here again, while we do this Robert Frost poem together; it's called 

The Oven Bird.

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

PS

Your song of the day, the Ovenbird.  And, did you catch all that 'mid' and how it relates to 'dim?'  Very lovely!

Mrs. McGillicuddy

                      

Dear The End,

Mrs. McGillicuddy is dead.  Long may her memory live.

There are people, often even strangers, and quite by chance, who let you see the layers and depth of the pond we call our lives.  They give you glitter, and politesse, and mystery, and a wink.  And then, one day, they are gone.  The traces they leave are large and small, and everywhere.

A long ago friend of mine, a lover, really, is dying or dead already.  I am not going to check which.  I haven't seen them in ages.  I don't need or want to see them, but, oh!  That night at the Chinese restaurant with the tiger tapestry on the wall- I don't ever want that to leave my framework for understanding the world.  By the world, I mean love, I mean people, I mean meaning.

Mrs. McGillicuddy was a cousin of my Mother's: there were, um, like 75 cousins, at least, and everyone of them nearly identical to the novice and infrequent visitor.  I was a very novice and infrequent visitor, and also, very young, and so I suppose I needed entertaining?  What were the aunts, uncles, parents, and other people doing while these cousins would spin their yarns of Mrs. McGillicuddy?  I don't know, and a few questions about who or when she was have yielded nothing.  She was going to 'get you' if you didn't watch out, and she once chased me around some parked cars in the dark, shoulders hunched, with her hands out in front of her, clawing towards me.  It was a game that scared you just the right amount, like a roller coaster.  But the powerful thing was that she was a different being than my cousin: Mrs. McGillicuddy was more than just a different name for a person you know.

I wish this was more clear, this magic she made... but magic often cannot be explained, and when you try to, you get blank faces and 'that sounds awful.'  But it wasn't awful, and these liminal spaces where taboos are broken are amazingly vast, and so vertiginously free- I don't mean free like you think I do, I mean free like flying, free like falling, like jumping into the sea.  Like being one with all.

And so, then, this is Mrs. McGillicuddy's eulogy, and I am here, reading at the altar, to say a final goodbye to her, to a room full of people who somehow never even met her.

how it was

 Journal Dressing, Carol Ann Carter.  Burns, stitching, tea, mixed media on linen, 20 x 31".

Dear The Future,

I wrote all this out for you, so you'd know how it was back then.  But, it was lost, misplaced, and so it has remained, missing for three years.  I am going to start again, from the beginning.

Here is how it really was:  I was put into the care of two nice people, as a baby.  My real parents' were a raven and a rainstorm.  For a long time it confused me that the two nice people would tell me to 'be quiet' and not to be 'bossy,' because these words made no sense in my language.  Still, we got on well enough.  

I spent an enormous amount of time waiting; in cars, in parking lots.  It's funny though, because I like sitting in cars, and I like parking lots too; even though there was so much time spent in them.   I used to look up at the cream colored headliner of the car's backseat, and focus beyond it; the perforations in the vinyl would move towards me; I tried to get the pattern of dark holes to descend close enough to touch my nose.

When the car was moving, the moon was always with me, following for hours, never overtaking, never slipping behind, always right there.

When moving, in this way, there were so many wonderful intersections!  The airplane going crosswise, just over the tip of the pine, the train on the overpass just when I was under; all these amazing nodes of space and time.  Anyway, that's what I saw, and that is how I began to think.

The rain in Spain, and other things that go together.

 

Dear You,

There's so much packed into a word!  All the meaning there ever was for you, and then, all the meaning in the future, and the dictionary meaning, and also, the translation meaning, and all the meaning for another one!  It's very crowded inside words.  

There was a cloudburst, and that, means just one phrase:  Cloudburst at Shingle Street.   Your song for the day, and a teensy part of what can be carried in the word 'cloudburst.'

Until the clouds lift.

The Wonderfulness.

 

Michael Johansson

Dear Viewers,

Ooh, you are going to love these sculptures!  They are just what I would make, if I could make such things.  Actually, I think I might be making these same things, but with different materials.  

What, then is the subject of these sculptures?

A: The stuff humans made that aren't being used as originally intended, being used in new, formally compelling and visually interesting ways: hair dryer, plastic brick, suitcase, flashlight, gameboard.

And the content?

A: The re-presentation of the stuff humans made and aren't using is a little sad, but also nostalgic, funny, silly, and almost, very nearly, joyful.  All the multitudinous associations and meanings of these items, but also the negation of those meanings, because they cannot be used in those ways any longer.

End of art lesson!

Crossfade- Green

Bonus observation:  What an utterly charming artist, that would describe the media so completely accurately as 'ordinary items!'

Losing track.

Dear Radio Dodo Listeners,

I may have sent you this tune, this song of the day, before; enjoy it again, or for the first time.  It's been a lot of years of sending you tunes, and I don't keep very good records.  It's funny about keeping records; all these saved letters and cards, journals and diaries, photographs, receipts, and lists; they become very thin, very pale, very tattered in time.  Like memento ghosts, because their substance has transmuted, and their original meaning is lost too.

Still, what memento shall I make today, so the dust of tomorrow will have someplace to fall?  How about this: a 4 by 4 foot cube of plaster, layered, troweled textures, planes shifting and truncating, overlapping.  Washed with a palest cobalt blue, and on it, I will write you some words, words that subvert themselves, contradict, and open out in vagueness.

Until my next transmission, be well, and be making.

lost stone

 

Dear Shangri-La,

I had a thing I was saving for you.  A thing about the beauty and perfection of a stone.  It meant that the stone was the symbol for all things made by processes of the world.  By extrapolation, it meant we (you, me, the stone) were all beautiful and perfect, not because we thought we were, but because processes had made us so.  Made it so.

All that is what I think it meant, anyway, because like I said, I lost it.  I thought there was a slip of paper marking it.  It's in Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse; so if you really want to, you can go searching for it.  I decided that it's importance was better served through my telling than my searching.

But, I don't feel all that confident about that, and it might be just another miss.  The book's world is very complete, very livable, while you are there, anyway.  But once you leave it, you notice some fraying, or maybe I have frayed?  It's a pretty parable, but don't you already have a drawer full?  I do, and I am trying harder than ever to internalize the messages, the directions, the instructions, and the good advice of so many compelling and enchanting voices.  

In any case, read this instead, if you are looking to read a thing:  Thick, by Tressie McMillan Cottom, because it will rock your tiny boat in a fabulous sea.

Identity Pie

 

Dear Friends,

Today I shall be sharing my secret recipe for Identity Pie.  It's a no recipe recipe, I guess, but as I said before, I want you to enjoy making yours, so feel free to measure exactly, or find another recipe for it.  In any case, this pie will only feed one, so you will have to get together with more folks if you want to make a dinner party out of it.  If it doesn't seem like much more than a list of things, that's because I am trying to include all the things that I did not when I was asked to make it before.

sitting around with a cup of coffee

watching birds, animals, plants, the sea

sewing things like clothes, pillows, stuffed mice

other needlework like knitting, crocheting, quilting, embroidering, weaving

baking bread each week

making fermented hot sauce

being in open spaces

buying lipstick

loving shoes and clothes and temporary tattoos

singing and playing guitar

speaking Spanish & French

writing

drawing

painting

taking photos

shopping

baking

cooking

looking up words

playing solitary games

watching junky, old, television, with questionable white, male protagonists

liking chrome

hating cleaning

liking wine

smoking

considering

apologizing

cutting my hair

appearing knowledgeable

appearing interested

appearing polite

appearing

Mattering.

 

Dear Muttering,

Why do you or I matter?  Well, in geologic scale, we don't.  It's okay to say that.  No, it's actually quite good to say that.  Why?  As insurance against being used.  I don't want, in my desire to matter, to do a heap of unnecessary emotional labor, or to go around working for The Man, our Robot Overlords,  Capitalism and godknowswhat all garbage.  Just exactly why would I try to 'matter' in some ill-defined way which is controlled by the human construct of 'civilization.'  What, I say, might matter to a rabbit?  To a beetle?  A poppy?  A child?  A lightening strike?  A puddle of mud?

Yes, yes, I know, it sounds too romantic for our world of contemporary knowledge; it's just another way for you to put your head in the sand, you say.  But, I do feel that a map, a guideline, a test, is a very handy item to have as we travel through the seasons and years.

One thing I am going to use to shape my meaning and my mattering, is this mantra:  I will not be told to clean things.  I have a coffee table filled with magazines that tell me what to do, and most of the admonitions revolve around cleaning.  Declutter, degrease, simplify.   Exfoliate, shed, let go of.  Organize, dust, deep clean.  Store, fold, be mindful.

These actions do give a nice sense of being in charge, and they seem to need doing, so that's a nice feeling.  A feeling of mattering, a feeling of having control over dust, objects, wilted leaves.  But, mightn't it cause me to focus only on the dead and dying?  Are you simply, in life, making a mess or cleaning a mess?  That seems a bit thin, doesn't it?

Here I am at the end, again, and I still have not given a list of things that I like to think (pretend?) make me who I am.  Up next, the fourth and final episode in this discussion: baking an Identity Pie.

Not Doing

 

Dear Reader,

Recall our last discussion- on what we should do, and by extension, what we should not.  I am going to put some space here, in which you should consider the question, let it sink in; selah, in the musical pause sense.

Ready?  I will go first; I think we should try to do what we like, even though that will mean a certain amount of secrecy.  I would also add that I want to work to be less secret.  What does that mean, you ask?  I am not sure, but I think it means that I will tell you what I am thinking and feeling without filtering it so much that I mediate myself into your acceptance.  Hmm, that makes it sound like I am spoiling for a fight!  Maybe I am.

Okay, you next.  What should we do?

Recall also my pathetic wheel of identity, as I tried to craft a persona that said "I matter and this is why."  This topic will be broadened in our next meeting, titled, Mattering.

Clarity: As easy as falling off a log.

Dear Seeking,

Today I begin my letter to you with a few lines of introduction, or maybe it's a list.  Or maybe it is subject headings.  Or maybe it's the condensed version of the paragraphs that follow.


Give a little bit of your time to me.  Give a little bit.  

I don't mind you coming here, and wasting all my time.


The last place I lived was called Clarity Acres.  It got me to thinking, recently, about whether I had been clear with you here.  These pages suggest a lot of ideas and projects, and places to go to, but I think what I am really hoping you will want to do is jump on in with me.  The water is fine! 

Let's go over it, then, in detail.  This thing is a blog, which is short for Web Log.  What is a log?  Well, if you watch Star Trek, you'll find that the Captain's Log is a nice place for some exposition in the narrative.  A log can be a journal, but the best logs aren't merely lists of what you did and when you did it.

The blog can be a kind of a bulletin board, where you might find a scrap of paper selling a used bike that you are interested in, or a notice of an upcoming Barn dance you'd like to attend, or an idea you'd like to mull on further.

I was dismissive of blogs for many years, because they seemed very dull to me to read (no, the irony is not lost on me!).  And, I also felt very awkward at the confessional position many of them take.  But, like so many things, what is fun to do is not as much fun to watch.  So, you know what I am saying, right?  I am saying that you must be the blog you wish to read.  You must beautify the world of the virtual, collective mind by making your contribution to it.

Well, go on then.

Why & How

 

Dear Readers,

Do you know why I am here?  Did I ever tell you why I write to you?  It might be a good time to remind you, even if I did tell you before.  I write here because of time.  I saw so many things evaporating; things like bowling alleys, telephones with cords, film cameras, all kinds of stuff that maybe isn't very meaningful actually, but it seemed like a lot of good stuff was going the way of the dodo, so I thought I'd make a little list, a little collection, and give it to you, here.  But, I didn't really do that.  I started on it, and sometimes it seeps in, but I thought it was kind of sorrowful to just send you lament after lament.  So that was what I planned to do here, but that isn't what I do, and this leaves my purpose here intentionally ambiguous.  How about you?  Why do you come by?

fast fwd.

Dear Concerned,

I don't actually think they were simpler times; I think we just forgot all the myriad complications.  Once in a while, I get a glimpse of it, out of the corner of my eye; a kind of 'true memory' and it is pretty awful: there is doubt in abundance, and confusion; worry & sorrow are there too.

I am suggesting a kind of fast forward, no, not to the end of the pandemic, I mean something more utilitarian than that even:  I mean, what does it feel like to tell about now in a year or a week?  Let me try:

Everyday, with regularity, I searched for good news.  All I ever found were more reasons to worry.  From the people I knew, I received comfort of all kinds- I tried to send it in return.  I wrote, I called, I sent messages and packages.  I made things to give.  Making masks depressed me, not because I didn't want to wear one, but because it felt like such a tiny little blow against the enormity of the danger.  I did not like the virtual ways we used to connect.  Looking at myself felt silly and it sapped all my confidence and energy.  It turned me into a self-conscious 12 year old, which is something I did not want to be again.  The phrases and language that blossomed annoyed me- 'at the end of the day,' 'pivoting to the new reality,' 'the new normal.'  Why wouldn't people use a language of honesty, of candor?  Why did they hide behind these rubbishy jingles?  I studied daily the numbers and data- it was like a kind of ritual, a kind of penance and a way to bear witness.  People actually took to the streets, but things seemed mired in absolute endless repetition.  Everything fell apart, but it was all just barely taped together anyway.  What was hardest, was trying not to inflict suffering on others.  This is always so, but it seemed even harder than usual: why the hell were we even trying to work 'online?'  None of this make-work mattered much.  The real scare lay in what we were going to do with ourselves if nothing was required of us- it was alternately scintillating and frightening.  There was no reason to do much of anything.  I discovered that I communicate with words, but that isn't even half of the information in a conversation.  The flattening of interactions revealed how our culture and society obscures the elemental levels on which we actually function:  smell, small tells of movement, infinite and invisible physical cues.

And that, is some of what I will have learned, later, in the future.  Back in the olden times.

A hurry.

 

Untitled (doll's shoe & drupe), 2019



Dear Little Ones,

I must break my pattern to send you this right away!  You have probably noticed lo these many years, that I like to send you something every few days, maybe twice a week, with a kind of flexible reliability.  I don't want to leave you so long that you get lonely, but I also don't want to crowd or overwhelm you.

I was sent this beautiful bit of writing from a valued & treasured pal, which is what makes up so much of my substance in this venue.

I know you will love it as I do!

365.

Dear All,

That is it.  One year.  365 days of roller skating at least once each day. 

So, now what?  It's a bit of an issue isn't it?  This might be the root of fear of failure, because really, if you set out to do a thing and you do it, then what do you do?  There's a lot of drama in the trying, a lot of suspense, but there isn't much in the completion of it.  I would worry, for instance, about an injury or illness that might prevent me from chalking up another day.  I imagined myself in traction, like the cartoons, with my leg in a cast, hanging from a bar over the bed, and I would have to beg the nurse to please just put my skate on over it, just for a few minutes.

I have decided, and I have been considering what it means for the entire time, but I have more actively wrestled with it for the last 5 months or so, as this milestone approached, that what I will do is keep at it, but not because it is a goal now.  Which means you can't complete it, and you can't fail at it either, if you decide, say, not to take your roller skates to Maine and use them for a few minutes in hotel bathrooms or the potholed parking lots of roadside rest areas.  I think this is the part I will miss the most, the absurdity of doing it everyday no matter how small an effort or how ludicrous the surface.  I will miss the counting, which I did by hash marks in pencil on paper at the end of the day.  It's gone by so fast.  In many ways I am not sure I recommend it.  It's a sad sort of an endeavor, except for the few times you tell someone what you are doing and they cannot even imagine doing such a *thing; but that is a very cheap way to get your self-esteem, and I told only a dozen or so people what I was doing.  In that sense, it barely existed as a project at all.

It is best understood perhaps as a performance, or a ritual.  Which has now ended, and I must devise a new way to mark time, or I must extend this one further, indefinitely.









* Like, for example, brushing one's teeth everyday, or feeding a goldfish, or drinking a cup of coffee, or looking into a mirror in the morning. 

Images of Matchstick Men

Dear Matchstick Man, 

A sculptor I know asked about the difference between sentiment and sentimentality.  Right now, run and write down what you think it is, before I go and ruin your gestating definitions.  If you like what you write, you can keep writing, and skip this reading.  If you really like what you write, you can keep writing and then write it to someone.  Maybe to me, maybe to The World.  If you really really like what you write, you can put it in a book, on a shelf, in a library.  Then, you should rest, I think, because that's a lot of doing.




Meanwhile, a few of you may have not run and gotten a pencil, and so let us now consider what might be meant by 'sentiment.'  A sentiment is a nice thought or feeling when you look at that sugar bowl that used to be your great grandmother's, as you remember her fondness for tea with sugar, and her enormous aluminum tea kettle, her hob, her back stoop, her crocheted hot pads.  This is well and good and it's what makes Proust great.

'Sentimental', now, is a little stickier perhaps.  It can mean that you are being too soft, or blinded to the hard truths.  Great grandmother is long dead, her kettle is long gone, and there was a time when they thought that aluminum cooking utensils and pots were giving us all Alzheimer's.  Plus what, there must be 7 million other great grandmothers who liked sugar in their tea and Proust has already written all we could hope for in one lifetime of reading.

Now what?  Another thought experiment: let's risk it, let's go ahead and be mushy instead of erudite.  It isn't all that bad, these hearts, flowers, and cliché symbols where a tender, delicacy of expression might have been.  If that is the worst we can do, to make a silly greeting card when we were shooting for a pietà, well, so what? 




I hope your book is done by now, and I hope it is filled with the truths and beauties of a thousand years and a million gestures of kindness and insight.






Oh, yes, and don't forget to take this song with you, when you go.

the debate continues

Dear Women,

I have been considering the Bundt pan as a symbol of the tyranny and shaming of 'decluttering' for nearly two years now, and it turns out I am not the only one to recognize the Bundt pan as a weapon in the raging war of 'stuff' vs. 'organization.' 

Why the Bundt pan?  I found it being sold at a friend's house in a garage sale and my friends' explained their Marie Kondo induced epiphany vis-à-vis the Bundt pan.  They used it barely once a year, and really, even though the cake was delicious, they only made it once a year.  The cake may have sparked joy, but the pan did not.  It couldn't be kept for such a minute fraction of duty.  I mentioned that it might be a problem when one wanted to make it and there was no pan, but this wasn't even audible in the landslide of stuff they were shoveling out their garage door.  They were headed for a new life, in a new town, and they needed less and different stuff for their new life. 

So be it.  I guess I can't rescue every Bundt pan in every home in every town.  A one-woman crusade to save occasional cake-making? 

I give you this article, on the politics of kitchen spaces; see what you think about it, and enjoy, above all else, the freedom you have to hold onto your Bundt pan or to give everything away.

To Clarify.

 

Dear Unsure,

Be thee of good cheer.  You do get it; don't believe for a minute that you don't.  If you still want convincing, though, that art is best when it is unspecified, ambiguous, and open to your own experience, then read this guy:  He's a Guy, a Published Guy, and I hope you will take all the powerful consensus and proof inherent in his Position As Such and believe this Man.  He pretty much explains everything in detail, and leaves no doubt.

I just confirmed these facts myself yesterday with a young woman artist of my acquaintance and I almost kissed her for acknowledging the intuitive, non-linear, and unconscious aspects of her own art-making, or what could be called her 'creative process.'  I am a bit fed up with the term 'creative process,' because it has too much airplay for my tastes, but it serves in a pinch.

You see, we wander around, more or less in the darkened gloom, and once in a rare while, we bump into someone or something who confirms that yes, we are wandering in the dark here, and the contact is a genuine cause for celebration, because isn't it a kind of miracle that people who cannot see where and why they are going should agree on something?  Here's to agreement on un-knowing, then, I hope?








PS

It's nothing against guys, you know, per se, it's just a teensy bit niggling that I am still unable to persuade by methods of brute force and 'gender superiority' alone and if you think I am being a bit too flip, check the most recent stats:  https://www.aauw.org/research/the-simple-truth-about-the-gender-pay-gap/