carried away

 

weather.gov*

Dear Dodoheads,

Here is a song, your song for today, that will carry you away with its airy vocals and lilting chords.  If you are like, maybe of a certain age, you will be carried to a time past as well; a time where the room was filled with paint fumes and pencil shavings; the deep concrete sill of the window is covered with bird seed, and pigeons have come to eat.  The sky is light but not blue, and very large.  The song is playing on a tape that a comrade has given you, and the swirling sounds suggest even more and further endlessnesses.

*  Am I allowed to use this image image without clear understanding of air pressure high in the atmosphere?  Yes, yes I can; and you can too!  Because, kittens, we are using it in appreciation of its formal beauty, its aesthetic qualities.

memory of a long gone step

 

Neither the old shoe, nor the new, but another shoe entirely.

Dear Y'all,

Did you ever have a memory in your foot?  An embodied thing, like everyone likes to say now; a step that felt in a shoe today like a step from long ago in a totally different shoe?  A sort of déjà shoe?  I got some new shoes a week ago, I could fill a page with talk of the way shoes are sold now, as 'recovery' wear, for instance, but that too is another digression.  And yet.  You know you don't come here for the straight talk.  You come here to beat about the bush, to stalk the topic, slowly, discursively, with no particular place to go, maybe even hoping we never arrive....

And yet, these new shoes are an odd amalgam of very soft materials (unwoven felt, I'd say) and very tough materials (a beefy Vibram rubber sole).  Well, I couldn't resist that strange union, I guess, but the point is, I got them, and I am wearing them, and they have another contemporary shoe detail, they have that heel that is hinged with elastic; you are meant to shove your foot in hastily and let the back of the shoe flatten out under your heel.  Wearing them like this, in a manner I imagine would horrify certain aged cobblers in Italy, there is a specific fold of material felt under your heel, and it was this that my foot remembered: another shoe, another day.

They were clunky, chocolate brown lug-soled sandals with large buckles- a noisy clomping shoe, that I used more and more 'around the house' after I'd worn them to fairly shabby looking over 3 or 4 years; and when I wore them around the house, I'd skip the back heel strap, and just leave it folded under my heels.  And that is what my foot remembered.  

fragment

 

Quilt, Inez Storer, 46" x 46", 2007.

Dear Archeology,

I wanted to be one, once, you know?  An archeologist.  I thought it would be fun to piece together the past by digging for broken shards and pieces.  

I saw a woman I used to know on the street the other day.  

I ducked, and hid, and ran.  

She was standing, a little on her heels, a little bit back, maybe her arms were half crossed.  She was looking towards the pavement, down.  There was another woman there, taller, blonde, I think; much more substantial.  She leaned kind of forward, in contrast, like maybe she had to be closer to hear the words.  I wondered why, or rather how, I recognized her.  It was the shape, the attitude, yes, but perhaps also the aura.  

I felt that creeping stiffness, when I saw her- that invisible forcefield one tries to erect when under fire.  I remember that feeling so well, from so long ago, when I was just a young woman, and not nearly as sure of my right to be here, and so, when I see her now, I am reduced to a quaking jelly that is not able to move, or defend itself.  I saw her, and I hid, and I thought of you, growing up under that wing, and I saw so clearly that you were maybe always the parent, and not the child, and oh!  I cried for you, and for her, and for me, too, and for all the fragments buried that are the evidence of all the lives and wounds and sufferings.

Marking Time.

Image courtesy of the Museum at Eldridge Street.

Dear Calendar,

You are chock full of National Days (case in point: National Create a Vacuum Day), and I cannot seem to manage to celebrate even a few of these, so I am setting my sights low, on just one per year, and National Egg Cream Day is today!  

If you have never had one, well, you can go out and find one, or you can make your own.  Here is a website devoted to egg creams to set you off enjoying, celebrating, and drinking egg creams on their big National day!

We used to drink them outdoors, at a cafe called Swilly's, in the sun, with Nanaimo Bars, near the train tracks, when the walls of the cafe were covered in a friend's beautiful paintings.  It was a feast of sight, sound, and taste.

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.

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.

Gone

Dear Those Who Have Gone On,

I was looking through some boxes of snapshots-  I know you will recogninize the feeling- like so many drifts and avalanches of déjà vu.  All those different people, so many of them dead and gone, or forgotton, and many of them are me.

It's an exisitential crisis in saturated color on a 5 inch scrap of paper.  It probably isn't good for humans to have this much self awareness.  On the other hand, why is it so sad?  Why would years that I know were perfectly good years, perfectly fabulous times, now gone, bring sadness to consider them?  Is it just "the missing," or is it "the lost and never was anyway?"  I do not know.  But I intend to keep on poking at the sleeping beast.  Yesterday must have some meaning, some relevance for today.  But, it's like a dream you can't quite remember; all sliding away even as it forms on the back of your eyeballs.

Looking at the past in photographs is a form of transcendental time travel, only it isn't working right.  Whatever working right would mean.  I don't think it would mean that everything would prove to have a rhyme and a reason, but I think it would allow you to proceed with less doubt and more truth.  It would mean that you could be that bright spirit that you would like to be, without having to wish for it. 

Anyway, when I saw your picture, I thought of you, and I wanted you to know that I miss you.

ghhhh, hubscam blam, fibbletak!

Dear Fixers,

You know, of course, how photography works- with chemicals for developing, and fixer, a solution to 'fix,' to hold, the silver salts in the positions recorded by the light?  So that they remain in the form of a hill with trees on it?  And if they are not properly 'fixed' they will fade; at first just a little bit, and then more and more, until the image is just a pale, ghostly pattern of smudges?

Fixing things, feeling, events, images, in my mind is of chief concern-  to be able to take these things back out and examine them, to pore over, to revisit and experience all over again; but this is so tricky, isn't it?  How do we save things, and where, and when do we get them out again to look over?  It's a pickle.





A picture of the skate park:  We went to one in a town south of here; we have gone once before, and then tried several times in between to catch it empty.  I have a great horror of looking like the elderly-you-ought-to-know-better-than-to-try-that-at-your-age roller skater that in fact, I am. 

There was only a yuppie soccer mom and her progeny present; a young boy she referred to as "Bud," but he was certainly a Forrest, Hawkins, Seamus, or some such thing, on a two wheeled folding scooter.  He was tear-assing around the place in the usual 4 year old manner, so I steeled myself for a mild losing of face and began to fall on the very wee little hillocks.  He kept on saying "it's only a hill!"  He also asked us where we got those 'roller skaters,' and why were putting on all these elbow, wrist and knee pads.  I thought, but did not say:  I am wearing them so that when I stumble over onto you I don't feel your tiny hands smashed under my knees, you little goofus!  Well, whatever, but I am a 'fraidy cat and safety, or what I like to pretend is safety, first!

I fell three times in front of this pair, and then the young dude who sweeps the rocks I'd been falling on up, arrived.  I made sure he wasn't turned my way, and once more tried to stay upright down the short, shallow slope of concrete.  Yes, you guessed it!  I did not fall!  What a triumph!  But, that wasn't enough- I next tried to get to the bottom of the real ramp, the 4 foot or so one.  It dips down, lies flat for about 10 feet and then heads back up.  I got to the bottom and threw myself on my knees to keep from continuing my madcap pace!  Twice I ditched in this manner, then I crossed my fingers and let the momentum carry me on up the opposite slope.  I wanted to shout and sing it to the rafters!  I could not believe I had managed it! 

The thing, though, that I know, is that it seems like nothing to tell it like this, especially to anyone who's done it or doesn't want to do it, and that covers everyone,  doesn't it?  Or maybe even to anyone anywhere anyplace anytime.  Phooey!  I want to tell you how fun it is, and I cannot.  I mean, I can, but it's so much meaningless gibberish.  It sounds like this:  ghhhh, hubscam blam, fibble-tak! 












PS
Oh, yes;  I wonder, do you think this lovely photograph of a skater falling was taken at Cartier-Bresson's decisive moment?  Or was it a little late, or even too early?  I have adored and carried with me this notion of his for decades, as in a locket:  I never think about the movement of life and photography without it.  If you would like, please take it for yours also- get it here, for free, locket not included.

Sacred Calf

Dear Little Dogies,


You know, I could report to you every day about the marvelous things I see behind the wheel of my automobile.  A few evenings ago, I passed a particularly lovely slope, just after a sweeping horseshoe curve, that I have often seen remarkable sights in- coyote, vultures, some cattle now and then, a shrub, windwolves. 

On this particular evening it was being traversed at a complementary angle by a cream colored spotted cow with a beautiful, brand new calf by its side- the lowering sunlight shone on it's new face, and oh! what a sight!  So new, and so pale- all soft grey spottings at its head; it was an absolutely sacred cow.  This calf could turn you into all kinds of believers, it was that beautiful. 

I tried to fix it in my mind forever, so I could return to it and that moment over and over, because it was a moment that had no doubts, had no questions, no anticipations, no desire- it was a moment that was just full, just right. 

I have seen so many things like this, and I fight like crazy with my mind and senses to save them, but they often fade a bit, and they gather doubts, and they become lost often permanently.  What a terrible, awful pity this is.















PS  Are you aware that dogie (as one hears in the cowboy guitar songs) means a 'motherless or neglected calf" according to Webster's?