Margotlog: Works on Paper: The Bockley Gallery and George Morrison
Don't get me wrong: I enjoy all kinds of electronic media, but to experience the essence of non-oral communication, give me paper. Books, drawings, letters, scribbles, notebooks, lists. The actual art works I've made have all depended on paper. These are masks with a papier mache base, tufted over with feathers and scraps of torn construction paper. Then little phrases or single words written on white paper are scattered among the feathers and paper tufts. It's as if a face has forgotten its essential front and given itself over to irregular thoughts. Sometimes I apply an essence of face--eyes, nose, mouth--but then cross with sticks or feathers.
Yesterday I was reminded of my love of art on paper by a visit to the Bockley Gallery in Minneapolis. An intriguing show was just closing--drawings across various antique paper artifacts like maps, stock certificates, checks, invoices. These drawings by Francis Yellow who is Lakota were almost all silhouettes in bright primary colors of Native Americans on horseback. They reminded me of the ledger drawings done in the 19th and early 20th centuries by various plains Indians who were brought to heel by the U.S. cavalry and kept in prison compounds. Given sheets from ledgers, the Native artists drew and painted a way of life that was quickly passing. Then these images were sold. I can't tell you more than that, except that there was a market for these works, then as now.
Francis Yellow's work not only calls up this poignant record but literally brings together the Native images with the paper artifacts of the culture that attempted to dominate them. To the eyes of a white person, which I most certainly am, there's a strange quietude to these images. They have a stark, fixed, arrested quality. One is forced to look beyond the image of rider on horseback in full gallop to the "official" printing in the background. Though the horse-rider gallops across these maps, stock certificates, etc, the printed elements remain fixed in the background. Tension is of the essence. Yet anger, frustration, despair--none of the emotions one might expect from artists kept in captivity is directly expressed. These emotions exist in that infinitesimal space between the printed paper and the image drawn or painted over it.
Todd Bockley also has a number of works on paper by premier Minnesota Ojibway artist George Morrison. Coming to see these, as well as the show, was my main intent. During the 1990s George Morrison and I worked hard on creating what I call an "oral history memoir." It was published in 1998 as a beautiful book titled Turning the Feather Around: My Life in Art. The Minnesota Historical Society Press outdid themselves: this book is a "work on paper" in the best and more beautiful sense of the term:. From the cover image of one of Morrison's intensely vivid "horizon paintings" to the many many images from his career, to the design, scale, printing quality throughout, the book is a work of art. And its artfulness depends not only on George Morrison's compelling story, but on the fact that we hold in our hands a rendition of that history, studded with beautiful images of his work.
For a visual artist, works on paper are often preliminary sketches--I'm thinking of Leonardo da Vinci's small sketches often of discrete elements of the body, or of his imagined flying machines or of architectural or landscape elements. These are like notebook or diary entries, meant mainly for the artist's personal use, working from first impression to larger, full-scale production. For other artists, especially those who make art in transit, the sketch or watercolor drawing exists in its own right--a work on paper that captures, both in its portability and its immediacy, an impression, an insight, a mood that could not be replicated in a more "substantial" form--such as oil on canvas.
Morrison's works on paper are of both types. But there's a third: the fully formed work which he chose to render on paper with colored pencils or ink or a combination. Morrison was one of the most eclectic artists I know--he worked in metal sculptures, oil paints, wood collages and totems and chiringa forms, and yes, drawings. Not usually watercolor, though. Often the finished drawings refer to surrealist imagery--biomorphic forms that float top to bottom against a horizon. Yes, a horizon such as he viewed every day as a child growing up on the north shore of Lake Superior. A horizon drawn maybe a quarter or a third of the way down from the top is one of his signature elements. It is very strange, very amusing, and ultimately intriguing to watch him combining surrealism which he learned during his early New York career--with the Abstract Expressionist "big boys" as he called them--with the horizon line to which he returned midway through his life. Here's hoping that there will be an exhibit that helps us appreciate the place of these later works on paper in Morrison's career.
Saturday, June 30, 2012
Thursday, June 28, 2012
Margotlog: The Peanut Seller at Target Field
Margotlog: The Peanut Seller at Target Field
Yesterday in a belated Father's Day celebration, my step-daughter (she the math teacher, she with the 9-month-old boy) took her dad and me to Target Field to watch the Twins. It was hot. The Twins were not. But we were sitting in the shade, high up with the swallows.
Baseball allows for drifting with tiny birds and balls hit high. Below, figures race around a diamond laid out in green green grass. Hawkers in bright green shirts pause at the bottom of our third-tier stairs, and shout "Peanuts" or "Kettle Corn," or "Pale Ale." Some smile as they shout as if to admit it is a hard sell from the bottom of the steps. Some add a sing-song or quirky intonation, making me giggle. One handsome young man with copper-brown skin and beautiful chest and arm muscles shakes the "product" at us, then throws it back in the bin. A few lift their heavy packs and charge up the steps. Some climb slowly, chatting with the spectators as they go.
That morning, email brought rejection: my novel did not "make the cut." My step-daughter said, "It's hard in your business getting so many rejections." I felt as if some of my innards had been scooped out. Still it was a beautiful day, we were in the shade, and the swallows swooped and twittered almost within reach. The Twins gave up four runs.
"I'm going to the bathroom," I said. "Want anything?" Both my husband and step-daughter asked for something sweet and cold. Wandering the corridor below, I was nudged by groups of kids in identical t-shirts, by families with toddlers or babies, by swaggering dressers in high heels and bangles. Every ice cream seller had a crowd waiting. Almost every person I saw was white: Minnesota nice, pale-eyed, with blonde or brown hair, and the tall, sometimes beefy body of a Scandinavian or German heritage.
That is, every person but the people working the concessions. They were African-American, or even African.
It's pricey going to a Twins game these days. We, in the top tier, paid $30 each for our tickets. When I finally settled into a medium-length line before an ice cream concession with "dots" in its name, I discovered I'd be paying $4.50 for each small cup. But, what the heck--we were celebrating fatherhood, and I had money in my pocket.
The seller was a kindly African-American man who smiled at the youngsters as they bought their miniature Twins caps filled with cold, sweet "dots." When my turn came, I opted for cheaper, clear-plastic cups. They were cold in my hand as I turned back to find the stairs up to our tier. Halfway up, my foot caught in my long skirt and I fell onto the step. One cup tilted and some of the "dots" splattered out.
Suddenly a peanut seller was calling to me from below. "Are you alright? Did you hurt yourself? I did that yesterday." By now I was standing up, thinking to jiggle some of the dots from the full into the half-empty cup. I looked down: the man had a kindly, brown face. He was the smiling peanut seller with glasses I'd noticed earlier on our tier. The one who called out his wares, then slowly joshed us as he climbed the stairs.
"Come with me, Miss," he said. "I'll get you another."
"Oh no, that's ok," I tried to resist, still befuddled
"No, no, you come with me. Look at my knees. I fell on those stairs yesterday, right in the same spot. They're mean. Come on. We'll get you another cup."
He led me back to the "dots" concession and we waited as the seller filled an order. Then with a look of recognition between them, the "dots" seller replaced my half-empty cup. Two black men taking care of a faltering white woman. Two black men working that day soothing a white woman's misstep with amused dignity and camaraderie. "Look here at these knees of mine," says the peanut seller as we walk back to the killer stairs.
"You are so kind," I tell him. "Thank you so much for being so kind."
"It's nothing," he tells me, smiling through his glasses. "This is the best summer job in the world. I love people. I get to see the game, and I'm outside. What could be better?"
"You have a wonderful attitude," I tell him, thinking of the scowling seller who threw his "product" around.
"You are a lovely human being."
Back in my seat, I hand my husband his cup of "dots." I tell him I met his friend Teferi on the stairs. He looks surprised: Teferi came to Minnesota from Ethiopia years ago. Then moved to California. He just died. "I mean it," I say. "Teferi was right there at my elbow."
"Someone named Teferi?" asks my husband.
"No. The real man."
Behind my dark glasses, tears slowly creep down my cheeks. It is a beautiful day. Swallows twitter and swoop. The Twins give up more runs. And a hand reaches out and helps me up. A hand across one of the biggest divide we know.
Yesterday in a belated Father's Day celebration, my step-daughter (she the math teacher, she with the 9-month-old boy) took her dad and me to Target Field to watch the Twins. It was hot. The Twins were not. But we were sitting in the shade, high up with the swallows.
Baseball allows for drifting with tiny birds and balls hit high. Below, figures race around a diamond laid out in green green grass. Hawkers in bright green shirts pause at the bottom of our third-tier stairs, and shout "Peanuts" or "Kettle Corn," or "Pale Ale." Some smile as they shout as if to admit it is a hard sell from the bottom of the steps. Some add a sing-song or quirky intonation, making me giggle. One handsome young man with copper-brown skin and beautiful chest and arm muscles shakes the "product" at us, then throws it back in the bin. A few lift their heavy packs and charge up the steps. Some climb slowly, chatting with the spectators as they go.
That morning, email brought rejection: my novel did not "make the cut." My step-daughter said, "It's hard in your business getting so many rejections." I felt as if some of my innards had been scooped out. Still it was a beautiful day, we were in the shade, and the swallows swooped and twittered almost within reach. The Twins gave up four runs.
"I'm going to the bathroom," I said. "Want anything?" Both my husband and step-daughter asked for something sweet and cold. Wandering the corridor below, I was nudged by groups of kids in identical t-shirts, by families with toddlers or babies, by swaggering dressers in high heels and bangles. Every ice cream seller had a crowd waiting. Almost every person I saw was white: Minnesota nice, pale-eyed, with blonde or brown hair, and the tall, sometimes beefy body of a Scandinavian or German heritage.
That is, every person but the people working the concessions. They were African-American, or even African.
It's pricey going to a Twins game these days. We, in the top tier, paid $30 each for our tickets. When I finally settled into a medium-length line before an ice cream concession with "dots" in its name, I discovered I'd be paying $4.50 for each small cup. But, what the heck--we were celebrating fatherhood, and I had money in my pocket.
The seller was a kindly African-American man who smiled at the youngsters as they bought their miniature Twins caps filled with cold, sweet "dots." When my turn came, I opted for cheaper, clear-plastic cups. They were cold in my hand as I turned back to find the stairs up to our tier. Halfway up, my foot caught in my long skirt and I fell onto the step. One cup tilted and some of the "dots" splattered out.
Suddenly a peanut seller was calling to me from below. "Are you alright? Did you hurt yourself? I did that yesterday." By now I was standing up, thinking to jiggle some of the dots from the full into the half-empty cup. I looked down: the man had a kindly, brown face. He was the smiling peanut seller with glasses I'd noticed earlier on our tier. The one who called out his wares, then slowly joshed us as he climbed the stairs.
"Come with me, Miss," he said. "I'll get you another."
"Oh no, that's ok," I tried to resist, still befuddled
"No, no, you come with me. Look at my knees. I fell on those stairs yesterday, right in the same spot. They're mean. Come on. We'll get you another cup."
He led me back to the "dots" concession and we waited as the seller filled an order. Then with a look of recognition between them, the "dots" seller replaced my half-empty cup. Two black men taking care of a faltering white woman. Two black men working that day soothing a white woman's misstep with amused dignity and camaraderie. "Look here at these knees of mine," says the peanut seller as we walk back to the killer stairs.
"You are so kind," I tell him. "Thank you so much for being so kind."
"It's nothing," he tells me, smiling through his glasses. "This is the best summer job in the world. I love people. I get to see the game, and I'm outside. What could be better?"
"You have a wonderful attitude," I tell him, thinking of the scowling seller who threw his "product" around.
"You are a lovely human being."
Back in my seat, I hand my husband his cup of "dots." I tell him I met his friend Teferi on the stairs. He looks surprised: Teferi came to Minnesota from Ethiopia years ago. Then moved to California. He just died. "I mean it," I say. "Teferi was right there at my elbow."
"Someone named Teferi?" asks my husband.
"No. The real man."
Behind my dark glasses, tears slowly creep down my cheeks. It is a beautiful day. Swallows twitter and swoop. The Twins give up more runs. And a hand reaches out and helps me up. A hand across one of the biggest divide we know.
Monday, June 25, 2012
Margotlog: Assisted Living
Margotlog: Assisted Living
My adorable, second-cousin Eleonora has a small apartment in assisted living. She is 94. When she and her sister Sadie moved to this Presbyterian Homes complex--regular apartments, cottages, assisted living, and the "health center"--in 1998, they were still vigorous. Eleonora still drove. They did a lot of their own cooking, though extraverts as they are, they enjoyed dining in the main building with lots of other oldsters. I'd visit and dine with them, smirking inwardly at how they flirted with the men. Sadie never married, and Eleonora's husband Dick was killed in June, 1945, when his ship was blown up in the Pacific. It was one of the two tragedies of her life.
When Eleonora talks about Dick, and "the war" (always World War II), she remembers the war's end. She and Sadie were on a bus going downtown Pittsburgh (where they were born and grew up). As their bus wound its way down the steep Pittsburgh hills, a rumble of noise grew louder and louder. Suddenly all the other passengers were standing up, shouting and hugging each other. "The war's over! The war's over." Sadie and Eleonora sat silent and depressed in their seat. "How come you're not happy?" jibed the passengers. "What's wrong with you?"
After a few moments, the bus driver came back and bent over them: "I think you'd better get off. Don't try to go downtown today." His face was kind and concerned.
"My husband was just killed," Eleonora said. "We can't be happy."
Now she talks much more freely about these difficult times, about spending months early in 1946 in St. Petersburg, FLorida, taking care of my grandmother Rose (her aunt) who was dying of ovarian cancer. About my uncle Frankie, who was of course her cousin, almost exactly her age, coming back from the war in Italy. "He was completely changed," she says. "He used to be full of smiles, and such a kidder. Now he hardly spoke." There's a myth s recently surfaced about Frankie. As a member of OSS (which eventually became the U.S. Secret Service) in Naples and Rome, Frankie (like all four brothers, my father included) spoke flawless Italian. He told me years later that his job was to teach whores "bed manners" before they visited the American officers.
Now I'm hearing from Eleonora that Frankie helped Gen. Mark Clark chase down Mussolini. That he was part of General Mark Clark's mission to Germany to sign the peace treaty at the end of the war. Do I believe this? No. But Eleonora gets a kick out of telling it--her hands quiver, the family trademark smirk spreads across her face and lights up her startlingly blue eyes (from the Sicilian side, those eyes. My mother, the snob, used to insist they were evidence of Charles of Anjou's incursion into the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. I always pooh-poohed that Charles of Anjou had anything to do with the family in Palermo. Though it's true, the French and the Spanish tromped all over Italy's lower regions.)
In the last six months, Eleonora has become disaffected with life in a way no one could have predicted. After surviving, even triumphing over losses of her one child (who died shortly after it was born) and then her husband, after keeping a household going for decades--she and her sister Sadie created a home for their sweet and oh so savvy mother Josephine--all by themselves, working women from the mid-1950s to their retirement in the early 1980s. After moving out of the District of Columbia, then away from Silver Spring, Md., to this Presbyterian complex in Dover, Delaware, after surviving many health problems--everything from heart attack to broken bones, after even adjusting for a time to Sadie's death in 2009 from lung cancer--Eleonora is suddenly often unhappy.
"I feel at home here," she says, indicating the familiar pictures on the wall, the overstuffed furniture she and Sadie have always preferred, the arrangement of bills and Bible which indicates she is still in control of her affairs. "But when I open the door and step into the hall, I say to myself, 'This isn't my home. Who are these people?'" We talk about this a bit: the fact that the workers in this complex are exceptionally kind and caring. That she enjoys the minister, a "young" priest-cum-preacher, young meaning 50. That she has a special friend, twenty some years younger than she, who has become her link to the outside world. But Eleonora insists it is "family" she misses most. "I'm the only one left," she said. Which is entirely true, she is the only one left of her generation. Of younger ones, she has me and my sister, she has our cousin who calls her regularly from Pittsburgh. But of the family who peopled her childhood and adulthood, none but she is left.
Thus her joy is to talk to me about the past. About "the boys," meaning my father and his 3 brothers. About the steep hills and heavy snows of Pittsburgh. About the silly stories of her father who used to dress us as a priest, acting out for the family his disguise during World War I, when he had to follow through and actually preach a funeral. Nothing like tweaking the Catholic Church to make these Italian Protestants giggle. As we talk, these dead and gone rise around us in the lamplight. Eleonora is young and vigorous again. The shocks and losses are painful yet she survives. And the crowning accomplishments of her life can be enumerated and enjoyed again: her years as a nurse, helping others in Washington, D.C.. Each time we visit, I hear again about someone in the government who came to her for counseling. Or some snafu in front of a large audience as she began work for the American Cancer Society. Or some insider tip about a president or first lady.
I love these recountings of the past, of little Aunt Jo who at 16 traveled from Scranton to Tampa, as a missionary to the cigar makers. Of the grandmothers, both from Italy, who spent their last years in Pennsylvania, going from daughter to daughter--sometimes two "nonnas" in one house. Of "Uncle John," my grandfather and the patriarch of the family because of his commanding presence and success in so many professions. Always these imposing adults unbend to small girls at the edge of fish ponds, to rascally boys teasing their girl cousins at the dinner table. It was a life crowded with characters and family events. For Eleonora, so full of life, it is painful to have all this disappear like smoke. That's why whenever we are together, we light little fires of remembrance, call up the light flickering on their faces, and impersonate their voices again and again.
My adorable, second-cousin Eleonora has a small apartment in assisted living. She is 94. When she and her sister Sadie moved to this Presbyterian Homes complex--regular apartments, cottages, assisted living, and the "health center"--in 1998, they were still vigorous. Eleonora still drove. They did a lot of their own cooking, though extraverts as they are, they enjoyed dining in the main building with lots of other oldsters. I'd visit and dine with them, smirking inwardly at how they flirted with the men. Sadie never married, and Eleonora's husband Dick was killed in June, 1945, when his ship was blown up in the Pacific. It was one of the two tragedies of her life.
When Eleonora talks about Dick, and "the war" (always World War II), she remembers the war's end. She and Sadie were on a bus going downtown Pittsburgh (where they were born and grew up). As their bus wound its way down the steep Pittsburgh hills, a rumble of noise grew louder and louder. Suddenly all the other passengers were standing up, shouting and hugging each other. "The war's over! The war's over." Sadie and Eleonora sat silent and depressed in their seat. "How come you're not happy?" jibed the passengers. "What's wrong with you?"
After a few moments, the bus driver came back and bent over them: "I think you'd better get off. Don't try to go downtown today." His face was kind and concerned.
"My husband was just killed," Eleonora said. "We can't be happy."
Now she talks much more freely about these difficult times, about spending months early in 1946 in St. Petersburg, FLorida, taking care of my grandmother Rose (her aunt) who was dying of ovarian cancer. About my uncle Frankie, who was of course her cousin, almost exactly her age, coming back from the war in Italy. "He was completely changed," she says. "He used to be full of smiles, and such a kidder. Now he hardly spoke." There's a myth s recently surfaced about Frankie. As a member of OSS (which eventually became the U.S. Secret Service) in Naples and Rome, Frankie (like all four brothers, my father included) spoke flawless Italian. He told me years later that his job was to teach whores "bed manners" before they visited the American officers.
Now I'm hearing from Eleonora that Frankie helped Gen. Mark Clark chase down Mussolini. That he was part of General Mark Clark's mission to Germany to sign the peace treaty at the end of the war. Do I believe this? No. But Eleonora gets a kick out of telling it--her hands quiver, the family trademark smirk spreads across her face and lights up her startlingly blue eyes (from the Sicilian side, those eyes. My mother, the snob, used to insist they were evidence of Charles of Anjou's incursion into the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. I always pooh-poohed that Charles of Anjou had anything to do with the family in Palermo. Though it's true, the French and the Spanish tromped all over Italy's lower regions.)
In the last six months, Eleonora has become disaffected with life in a way no one could have predicted. After surviving, even triumphing over losses of her one child (who died shortly after it was born) and then her husband, after keeping a household going for decades--she and her sister Sadie created a home for their sweet and oh so savvy mother Josephine--all by themselves, working women from the mid-1950s to their retirement in the early 1980s. After moving out of the District of Columbia, then away from Silver Spring, Md., to this Presbyterian complex in Dover, Delaware, after surviving many health problems--everything from heart attack to broken bones, after even adjusting for a time to Sadie's death in 2009 from lung cancer--Eleonora is suddenly often unhappy.
"I feel at home here," she says, indicating the familiar pictures on the wall, the overstuffed furniture she and Sadie have always preferred, the arrangement of bills and Bible which indicates she is still in control of her affairs. "But when I open the door and step into the hall, I say to myself, 'This isn't my home. Who are these people?'" We talk about this a bit: the fact that the workers in this complex are exceptionally kind and caring. That she enjoys the minister, a "young" priest-cum-preacher, young meaning 50. That she has a special friend, twenty some years younger than she, who has become her link to the outside world. But Eleonora insists it is "family" she misses most. "I'm the only one left," she said. Which is entirely true, she is the only one left of her generation. Of younger ones, she has me and my sister, she has our cousin who calls her regularly from Pittsburgh. But of the family who peopled her childhood and adulthood, none but she is left.
Thus her joy is to talk to me about the past. About "the boys," meaning my father and his 3 brothers. About the steep hills and heavy snows of Pittsburgh. About the silly stories of her father who used to dress us as a priest, acting out for the family his disguise during World War I, when he had to follow through and actually preach a funeral. Nothing like tweaking the Catholic Church to make these Italian Protestants giggle. As we talk, these dead and gone rise around us in the lamplight. Eleonora is young and vigorous again. The shocks and losses are painful yet she survives. And the crowning accomplishments of her life can be enumerated and enjoyed again: her years as a nurse, helping others in Washington, D.C.. Each time we visit, I hear again about someone in the government who came to her for counseling. Or some snafu in front of a large audience as she began work for the American Cancer Society. Or some insider tip about a president or first lady.
I love these recountings of the past, of little Aunt Jo who at 16 traveled from Scranton to Tampa, as a missionary to the cigar makers. Of the grandmothers, both from Italy, who spent their last years in Pennsylvania, going from daughter to daughter--sometimes two "nonnas" in one house. Of "Uncle John," my grandfather and the patriarch of the family because of his commanding presence and success in so many professions. Always these imposing adults unbend to small girls at the edge of fish ponds, to rascally boys teasing their girl cousins at the dinner table. It was a life crowded with characters and family events. For Eleonora, so full of life, it is painful to have all this disappear like smoke. That's why whenever we are together, we light little fires of remembrance, call up the light flickering on their faces, and impersonate their voices again and again.
Tuesday, June 19, 2012
Margotlog: The Perfect Lawn Via Imprelis
Margotlog: The Perfect Lawn Via Imprelis
I'm tempted to pull a Jonathan Swift* and champion a world where perfect lawns flow emerald green and uniformly clipped, from coast to coast, sea to sea. Where trees die by the millions, poisoned by IMPRELIS, a touted "green" herbicide created by ("your world made better through chemistry") DuPont, but LAWNS? Lawns like carpets under the sky, lawns like English manor grounds glowing with wealth, lawns maintained by silent unseen chemicals--the final triumph of American perfection.
It doesn't matter that 60-year-old trees stand stark and leafless above these lawns. It doesn't matter that the ground beneath them is so poisoned that it must be removed to ever grow trees again. It hardly crosses the minds above those springing steps and swinging arms who hit their little white balls "far and wee."
Dangerous to human health? Never you mind. Do not recall the countless homeowners with a yen for lawn glory who sicken from cancer and die. Such as sweet Erma and her third husband Jack--he in diapers--who poured a lethal dose of Roundup all around their rambler, in the name of "Let's get at those weeds."
Never you mind the run-off into lakes and streams, into mighty rivers and eventually the Gulf of Mexico. Never you mind the dead fish, turtles, newts, frogs, crustaceans, birds, dolphins--a world made better through chemistry!
A world made perfectly "green" but dead.
Ladies and Gents, there is no such thing as a perfect herbicide. Pause for a brief Latin lesson: "cide" as in fratricide, homicide and yes herbicide means death. And though it is perfectly possible to stick it to one human or a slew of brothers, and still not imperil the entire species, killing "broad-leafed" plants in large-scale applications ultimately endangers all kinds of other living things, from trees to the very soil where they grow, and yes, to the lungs of those who've spread it, walk on it, pick up those little white ball with their fingers, bring it into their homes on their shoes.This is poison and should be labeled as such: SKULL AND CROSSBONES.
Do you want your children running and playing, kneeling and rolling in lawns with such lethal doses waiting beneath their smiling green?
I feel sorry for all the individual homeowners, countless lawn care companies, even managers of parks (Three Rivers Parks in Medina, Minnesota) who've been suckered into using this "green" herbicide - DuPont's Imprelis. Bemused by the name, I've played around with it. Notice: it contains the letters for IMPERIL. I am a bit surprised that DuPont dared warn us.
Many many Americans hold a rampant belief in the power of the perfect lawn. It is the "cleanliness is next to godliness" of suburban perfection. Look at us, we've shaken the soot of the city off our feet! We live on God's green acre. We are free of ache and loneliness, need and fear. We control every weed.
I, for one, abandoned my lawn when I first set eyes on it--my postage-stamp-sized city lawn. BORING. I immediately started planting trees. At last count, I've mothered four blue spruce, one Norway pine, one crabapple, one honey locust, two silver maple, one Russian olive. I let my lawn "revert" to creeping charlie, a relative of mint, which smells great after it's cut. Growing with it are two kinds of clover--white and yellow, and where there's no mowing, native plants that were waiting to sprout grace us with their fluffy purple flowers: Virginia waterleaf, along with violets. A HERBICIDE has never crossed my doorstep. And my trees (well mulched, fertilized when they were small) keep the house cool. As far as I can tell, no one has ever expired from "lawn sickness." My soil is healthy. My heart is pure. Robins love the worms.
* Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal," 1729, suggested that Britain should make stew of Irish babies, as the swift's route to eliminating the native population..
I'm tempted to pull a Jonathan Swift* and champion a world where perfect lawns flow emerald green and uniformly clipped, from coast to coast, sea to sea. Where trees die by the millions, poisoned by IMPRELIS, a touted "green" herbicide created by ("your world made better through chemistry") DuPont, but LAWNS? Lawns like carpets under the sky, lawns like English manor grounds glowing with wealth, lawns maintained by silent unseen chemicals--the final triumph of American perfection.
It doesn't matter that 60-year-old trees stand stark and leafless above these lawns. It doesn't matter that the ground beneath them is so poisoned that it must be removed to ever grow trees again. It hardly crosses the minds above those springing steps and swinging arms who hit their little white balls "far and wee."
Dangerous to human health? Never you mind. Do not recall the countless homeowners with a yen for lawn glory who sicken from cancer and die. Such as sweet Erma and her third husband Jack--he in diapers--who poured a lethal dose of Roundup all around their rambler, in the name of "Let's get at those weeds."
Never you mind the run-off into lakes and streams, into mighty rivers and eventually the Gulf of Mexico. Never you mind the dead fish, turtles, newts, frogs, crustaceans, birds, dolphins--a world made better through chemistry!
A world made perfectly "green" but dead.
Ladies and Gents, there is no such thing as a perfect herbicide. Pause for a brief Latin lesson: "cide" as in fratricide, homicide and yes herbicide means death. And though it is perfectly possible to stick it to one human or a slew of brothers, and still not imperil the entire species, killing "broad-leafed" plants in large-scale applications ultimately endangers all kinds of other living things, from trees to the very soil where they grow, and yes, to the lungs of those who've spread it, walk on it, pick up those little white ball with their fingers, bring it into their homes on their shoes.This is poison and should be labeled as such: SKULL AND CROSSBONES.
Do you want your children running and playing, kneeling and rolling in lawns with such lethal doses waiting beneath their smiling green?
I feel sorry for all the individual homeowners, countless lawn care companies, even managers of parks (Three Rivers Parks in Medina, Minnesota) who've been suckered into using this "green" herbicide - DuPont's Imprelis. Bemused by the name, I've played around with it. Notice: it contains the letters for IMPERIL. I am a bit surprised that DuPont dared warn us.
Many many Americans hold a rampant belief in the power of the perfect lawn. It is the "cleanliness is next to godliness" of suburban perfection. Look at us, we've shaken the soot of the city off our feet! We live on God's green acre. We are free of ache and loneliness, need and fear. We control every weed.
I, for one, abandoned my lawn when I first set eyes on it--my postage-stamp-sized city lawn. BORING. I immediately started planting trees. At last count, I've mothered four blue spruce, one Norway pine, one crabapple, one honey locust, two silver maple, one Russian olive. I let my lawn "revert" to creeping charlie, a relative of mint, which smells great after it's cut. Growing with it are two kinds of clover--white and yellow, and where there's no mowing, native plants that were waiting to sprout grace us with their fluffy purple flowers: Virginia waterleaf, along with violets. A HERBICIDE has never crossed my doorstep. And my trees (well mulched, fertilized when they were small) keep the house cool. As far as I can tell, no one has ever expired from "lawn sickness." My soil is healthy. My heart is pure. Robins love the worms.
* Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal," 1729, suggested that Britain should make stew of Irish babies, as the swift's route to eliminating the native population..
Saturday, June 16, 2012
Margotlog: Tintoretto's Crucifixion (under Acupuncture)
Margotlog: Tintoretto's Crucifixion (under Acupuncture)
To have the quiet and concentration to call up into the mind's eye a great work of art, and let that eye survey and pause, query and recall requires either daily monasticism or illness. Not illness of a ravaging sort, but quiet fatigue, or in my case, the stuffed sinuses of a cold, being treated on a chiropractic table in a shadowed room, my face stuck with acupuncture pins, my back thrumming in the on/off of electronic massage.
One can, of course, study reproductions of an art work. But for prolonged inner recollection, for the revival of a first visual encounter with all its excitement and discovery, and a chance to embed this first excitement with subsequent thought and emotion--well, the acupuncture table is for me.
I saw Tintoretto's Crucifixion (1565) in early May. Accompanied by two friends, Bruce and Joe from Amherst, I climbed the huge staircases of the Venetian Scuola Grande di San Rocco and entered the piano nobile (second story). We spent several hours (with a break for lunch) studying the works, craning our necks and using notebook-size mirrors provided by the Scuola to try and appreciate Tintoretto's enormous accomplishment--much of it on the ceiling. In his furious desire to attain the commission for decorating this huge building and nearby church of the same name, Tintoretto had inserted one painting in its place before the competition began. Though his competitors remonstrated, Tintoretto immediately gave the painting to San Rocco, thereby making it unreturnable. Needless to say, he won the competition.
In the several trips I've made to Venice within the last 10 months, I've thought intermittently about Tintoretto whose work has impressed me far more than any other Venetian's I've seen. Of course, what I've seen is a tiny fraction of what Venice has to offer. In October, I was transfixed by his three enormous paintings in his parish church, the Madonna dell'Orto, not far from his home in the piazza del Moro. This is at the north side of the city, which is quiet, almost entirely free of tourists, and de Chiricoesque in its eerie panoramas. These three paintings, especially the Presentation of Mary at the Temple (see my blog), taught me three things: Tintoretto is a master of verticality, spreading a narrative from earth to sky and back again. The figures of Mary and her mother begin at the bottom of a canal staircase and at the top, against the sky stands the high priest. The compelling call to climb the stairs is dramatically unmistakable.
Second, his "side pieces," meaning the secondary dramas, both influence and reflect (sometimes ironically) the main drama--see the other mother and child sprawling on the steps beside Mary and Anna, completely charming but unconcerned about a religious calling. Finally, Tintoretto has an uncanny ability to show an unfolding narrative in a static medium--now to the Crucifixion.
This enormous work fills one long wall in a side room of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. A first glance tells you that a lot more is going on than simply Christ's Crucifixion. As I lay on the chiropractic table, eyes closed, I saw again what I had recognized when sitting before the painting--unlike many world-famous crucifixions, Tintoretto's does not separate Christ on his cross from the tumult of a huge, horrific public killing We are not asked to contemplate Christ on the cross as an icon of self-abnegation--the supreme gift of a life to ensure our salvation. Instead of paring away all the dross of heat, agony, disinterest, supercilliousness, Tintoretto embraces the long unfolding. Three human lives are in various stages of suffering. Many others are engaged in causing that suffering.
Though Christ has already been raised on the cross which occupies the center of the enormous scene, the two thieves who will flank him are in the process of being crucified. To the left, burly soldiers, sweat and strain to raise the second cross which cants an an alarming angle. Suddenly the physical effort of this method of death strikes you.in all its force. Joe says out of the gloom: "It takes at least three days for a crucified body to die." Ah, I think, returning to this memory as I lie under my almost imperceptible needles, three days of intolerable ache from hands and feet nailed to wood, from joints and muscles hanging with little support, from the demands of bodily functions--thirst, hunger, sweat, defecation, urination--and of senses reeling with pain, dizziness, clarity. "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." Yes in so many many ways.
To the right and somewhat further from the plane of these two crosses, the third man to be crucified is being made to lie down on his cross--his shoulders are prone but his head is raised as he stares at the nails being driven into his feet. Oh my god, what pain with the recognition of what will follow. The coarseness of soul required to enact such cruelty becomes immediately apparent. Then subject to consideration: what is worse? John Brown's hacking up bodies prior to the Civil War--a "flaming sword" of righteousness--or this mundane functionary whose face we cannot see?
There is so much more anecdote and response--the soldiers already throwing dice for Christ's cloak, hidden from the cross by a sandy hill. The women and men crowded around Christ's cross--one (probably Mary) swooning. The sponge being lifted up to Christ's lips from behind--it has vinegar in it. In the lower edge, to our right, a cavalier on horseback with his retinue behind him. He stares up at the scene with calm unconcern. He wears contemporary dress of the artist's era. He is the powers of the moment. But unlike many such figures, he does not represent us. We are entirely driven into this scene from centuries ago, brought into such unfolding agony by an artist of consummate empathy and a talent almost cinematic in sweep
No doubt I will contemplate my inner images of this astonishing work again. It has entered that small museum of paintings that have touched heart, mind, aesthetic appreciation, and amazement.
To have the quiet and concentration to call up into the mind's eye a great work of art, and let that eye survey and pause, query and recall requires either daily monasticism or illness. Not illness of a ravaging sort, but quiet fatigue, or in my case, the stuffed sinuses of a cold, being treated on a chiropractic table in a shadowed room, my face stuck with acupuncture pins, my back thrumming in the on/off of electronic massage.
One can, of course, study reproductions of an art work. But for prolonged inner recollection, for the revival of a first visual encounter with all its excitement and discovery, and a chance to embed this first excitement with subsequent thought and emotion--well, the acupuncture table is for me.
I saw Tintoretto's Crucifixion (1565) in early May. Accompanied by two friends, Bruce and Joe from Amherst, I climbed the huge staircases of the Venetian Scuola Grande di San Rocco and entered the piano nobile (second story). We spent several hours (with a break for lunch) studying the works, craning our necks and using notebook-size mirrors provided by the Scuola to try and appreciate Tintoretto's enormous accomplishment--much of it on the ceiling. In his furious desire to attain the commission for decorating this huge building and nearby church of the same name, Tintoretto had inserted one painting in its place before the competition began. Though his competitors remonstrated, Tintoretto immediately gave the painting to San Rocco, thereby making it unreturnable. Needless to say, he won the competition.
In the several trips I've made to Venice within the last 10 months, I've thought intermittently about Tintoretto whose work has impressed me far more than any other Venetian's I've seen. Of course, what I've seen is a tiny fraction of what Venice has to offer. In October, I was transfixed by his three enormous paintings in his parish church, the Madonna dell'Orto, not far from his home in the piazza del Moro. This is at the north side of the city, which is quiet, almost entirely free of tourists, and de Chiricoesque in its eerie panoramas. These three paintings, especially the Presentation of Mary at the Temple (see my blog), taught me three things: Tintoretto is a master of verticality, spreading a narrative from earth to sky and back again. The figures of Mary and her mother begin at the bottom of a canal staircase and at the top, against the sky stands the high priest. The compelling call to climb the stairs is dramatically unmistakable.
Second, his "side pieces," meaning the secondary dramas, both influence and reflect (sometimes ironically) the main drama--see the other mother and child sprawling on the steps beside Mary and Anna, completely charming but unconcerned about a religious calling. Finally, Tintoretto has an uncanny ability to show an unfolding narrative in a static medium--now to the Crucifixion.
This enormous work fills one long wall in a side room of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. A first glance tells you that a lot more is going on than simply Christ's Crucifixion. As I lay on the chiropractic table, eyes closed, I saw again what I had recognized when sitting before the painting--unlike many world-famous crucifixions, Tintoretto's does not separate Christ on his cross from the tumult of a huge, horrific public killing We are not asked to contemplate Christ on the cross as an icon of self-abnegation--the supreme gift of a life to ensure our salvation. Instead of paring away all the dross of heat, agony, disinterest, supercilliousness, Tintoretto embraces the long unfolding. Three human lives are in various stages of suffering. Many others are engaged in causing that suffering.
Though Christ has already been raised on the cross which occupies the center of the enormous scene, the two thieves who will flank him are in the process of being crucified. To the left, burly soldiers, sweat and strain to raise the second cross which cants an an alarming angle. Suddenly the physical effort of this method of death strikes you.in all its force. Joe says out of the gloom: "It takes at least three days for a crucified body to die." Ah, I think, returning to this memory as I lie under my almost imperceptible needles, three days of intolerable ache from hands and feet nailed to wood, from joints and muscles hanging with little support, from the demands of bodily functions--thirst, hunger, sweat, defecation, urination--and of senses reeling with pain, dizziness, clarity. "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." Yes in so many many ways.
To the right and somewhat further from the plane of these two crosses, the third man to be crucified is being made to lie down on his cross--his shoulders are prone but his head is raised as he stares at the nails being driven into his feet. Oh my god, what pain with the recognition of what will follow. The coarseness of soul required to enact such cruelty becomes immediately apparent. Then subject to consideration: what is worse? John Brown's hacking up bodies prior to the Civil War--a "flaming sword" of righteousness--or this mundane functionary whose face we cannot see?
There is so much more anecdote and response--the soldiers already throwing dice for Christ's cloak, hidden from the cross by a sandy hill. The women and men crowded around Christ's cross--one (probably Mary) swooning. The sponge being lifted up to Christ's lips from behind--it has vinegar in it. In the lower edge, to our right, a cavalier on horseback with his retinue behind him. He stares up at the scene with calm unconcern. He wears contemporary dress of the artist's era. He is the powers of the moment. But unlike many such figures, he does not represent us. We are entirely driven into this scene from centuries ago, brought into such unfolding agony by an artist of consummate empathy and a talent almost cinematic in sweep
No doubt I will contemplate my inner images of this astonishing work again. It has entered that small museum of paintings that have touched heart, mind, aesthetic appreciation, and amazement.
Sunday, June 10, 2012
Margotlog: Summer Reading
Margotlog: Summer Reading
Since I seem to have born with an academic calendar in my head, mid-May to Labor Day is a season out of time and work. Especially in the last five years since I've declared verboten any teaching during the summer.
It takes me around six weeks to recover from the academic year--I drift around the house and yard, gaze adoringly at my deck-boxes of petunias, marigolds, pansies and zinnias. Push my faces into huge peonies and inhale their sweetness. Stand on porch or deck and watch chickadees, cardinals, blue jays, and a bevy of finches eat up the sunflower seeds.
I make lunch dates with friends I've missed for the winter months, go to Italy for 10 days, and move the winter clothes to the third-floor attic, bringing the summer clothes down.
When I was a girl living in Charleston, South Carolina, no school had air-conditioning, and even early May could become muggy and unbearable in classrooms filled with sweating, hormonal teens. My summer reading started almost the minute school let out. I don't remember being made to work at home, except washing dishes and helping my mother wax the hardwood floors.
Since my father taught summer school at The Citadel, the house was quiet, especially in the long afternoons when my mother took her nap in my upstairs bedroom. I stretched out on the living room couch, shorts tight around my thighs, a book propped on my midriff.
It's that position, entirely languid, entirely self-absorbed that comes back to me now. And the books? The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone, a fictionalization of Michaelangelo's life. I remember nothing except the title. War and Peace to Leo Tolstoy--so heavy, holding it up gave me wrist pain. I still haven't reread it. Anna Karenina--this I have listened to many times on disc--a model for idyllic versus quietly tragic adulthood.
Oddly enough, the books from those long, heat-filled days that actually still call up images are Look Homeward, Angel, by Thomas Wolfe and Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. I think their impression on me have everything to do with the family dynamics they depicted--boys of troubled, yet loving parents. The only female characters that I wanted to emulate were the crinolined Southern belles of the historical romances I consumed, including Gone With the Wind. But these were fantasies even I in my dreamy summer mood had to acknowledge were fantasies. No matter how I swished my own crinolines, my cat glasses and heavy dark hair, lack of much bust-line, and rather dance moves--all precluded my becoming a heroine of that variety.
Probably a good thing. But Oliver Gant, the father in Look Homeward, Angel, though an alcoholic, was loving and bookish, and adored his son, while the mother of the tale was hard-working and long-suffering, not unlike my own. This may have been the first time I actually saw glimmers of my own life in literature, glints and glimmers I've been chasing ever since.
Since I seem to have born with an academic calendar in my head, mid-May to Labor Day is a season out of time and work. Especially in the last five years since I've declared verboten any teaching during the summer.
It takes me around six weeks to recover from the academic year--I drift around the house and yard, gaze adoringly at my deck-boxes of petunias, marigolds, pansies and zinnias. Push my faces into huge peonies and inhale their sweetness. Stand on porch or deck and watch chickadees, cardinals, blue jays, and a bevy of finches eat up the sunflower seeds.
I make lunch dates with friends I've missed for the winter months, go to Italy for 10 days, and move the winter clothes to the third-floor attic, bringing the summer clothes down.
When I was a girl living in Charleston, South Carolina, no school had air-conditioning, and even early May could become muggy and unbearable in classrooms filled with sweating, hormonal teens. My summer reading started almost the minute school let out. I don't remember being made to work at home, except washing dishes and helping my mother wax the hardwood floors.
Since my father taught summer school at The Citadel, the house was quiet, especially in the long afternoons when my mother took her nap in my upstairs bedroom. I stretched out on the living room couch, shorts tight around my thighs, a book propped on my midriff.
It's that position, entirely languid, entirely self-absorbed that comes back to me now. And the books? The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone, a fictionalization of Michaelangelo's life. I remember nothing except the title. War and Peace to Leo Tolstoy--so heavy, holding it up gave me wrist pain. I still haven't reread it. Anna Karenina--this I have listened to many times on disc--a model for idyllic versus quietly tragic adulthood.
Oddly enough, the books from those long, heat-filled days that actually still call up images are Look Homeward, Angel, by Thomas Wolfe and Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. I think their impression on me have everything to do with the family dynamics they depicted--boys of troubled, yet loving parents. The only female characters that I wanted to emulate were the crinolined Southern belles of the historical romances I consumed, including Gone With the Wind. But these were fantasies even I in my dreamy summer mood had to acknowledge were fantasies. No matter how I swished my own crinolines, my cat glasses and heavy dark hair, lack of much bust-line, and rather dance moves--all precluded my becoming a heroine of that variety.
Probably a good thing. But Oliver Gant, the father in Look Homeward, Angel, though an alcoholic, was loving and bookish, and adored his son, while the mother of the tale was hard-working and long-suffering, not unlike my own. This may have been the first time I actually saw glimmers of my own life in literature, glints and glimmers I've been chasing ever since.
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
Margotlog: An Ancient Cousin Fades
Margotlog: An Ancient Cousin Growls
You could tell my mother was fading because she became pale. She no longer remembered visitors' names as she walked the porch across her South Carolina house. She slept and slept.
Eleonora, my 94-year-old second cousin, is fading too. But she is not "going gentle into that good night." As Dylan Thomas wrote, she is "raging against the dying of the light."
Since I see her twice a year at best, I've been aware of this more through the sound of her voice than how she looks. What used to be clear and lilting is now gravelly and somewhat labored.
She is also shaky sometimes, reports her closest friend, a woman who met her and her sister Sadie twenty years ago when they lived in Maryland. Now retired, Jo has come to Dover, Delaware, to live in the same senior apartment/assisted living/nursing home complex where Eleonora and Sadie moved in the late 90s.
Odd and unpredictable how we move through various life stages. My mother, who was feisty and even mean as a middle-aged, older adult, became gentle and appreciative after a bout of shingles reduced her to needing daily help. Eleonora who was full of laughter and sympathy can now muster those qualities only for visitors--or so I'm told. Soon I'll find out firsthand.
Is this change in part because she's cut her daily dose of anti-depressants in half? And refuses, even when the doctor (prodded by Jo) recommends she return to the full dose? I've never taken anti-depressants but I can imagine a complex of self-defeating thoughts that might do me in: "I'm no good anymore. No one cares about me. Nothing is going the way it should. They're speaking so low because they don't want me to hear. They're being curt with me. They have no idea how hard this is..." Soon the face lowers into a scowl. Criticism becomes second nature. Everything looks bleak.
So begins a self-fulfilling prophecy. When one resists and complains; others respond in kind. Soon the air is filled with resentment. Love scurries into the shadows and cowers there, persona non grata.
For someone like Eleonora who has been the mainstay of her family--working for years as a nurse in the federal government and along with her sister Sadie, maintaining a home for their mother, the adorable Aunt Jo--retirement, finally giving up her car, losing her sister and now her own obvious decline--must be maddening in the most obvious ways. Crazy-making, infuriating. We, who are younger and apparently will outlive her, we who in caring for her are most aware of her debility, become the enemy!
Preparing to see her in a few weeks, I muse on this conundrum, on how to maintain my affection against what will surely be jabs and scowls. How to honor her wish to "go to the Lord," yet point out that taking anti-depressants will not slow that process down. But will merely make the way less bumpy, a little more filled with light.
I promise an update.
You could tell my mother was fading because she became pale. She no longer remembered visitors' names as she walked the porch across her South Carolina house. She slept and slept.
Eleonora, my 94-year-old second cousin, is fading too. But she is not "going gentle into that good night." As Dylan Thomas wrote, she is "raging against the dying of the light."
Since I see her twice a year at best, I've been aware of this more through the sound of her voice than how she looks. What used to be clear and lilting is now gravelly and somewhat labored.
She is also shaky sometimes, reports her closest friend, a woman who met her and her sister Sadie twenty years ago when they lived in Maryland. Now retired, Jo has come to Dover, Delaware, to live in the same senior apartment/assisted living/nursing home complex where Eleonora and Sadie moved in the late 90s.
Odd and unpredictable how we move through various life stages. My mother, who was feisty and even mean as a middle-aged, older adult, became gentle and appreciative after a bout of shingles reduced her to needing daily help. Eleonora who was full of laughter and sympathy can now muster those qualities only for visitors--or so I'm told. Soon I'll find out firsthand.
Is this change in part because she's cut her daily dose of anti-depressants in half? And refuses, even when the doctor (prodded by Jo) recommends she return to the full dose? I've never taken anti-depressants but I can imagine a complex of self-defeating thoughts that might do me in: "I'm no good anymore. No one cares about me. Nothing is going the way it should. They're speaking so low because they don't want me to hear. They're being curt with me. They have no idea how hard this is..." Soon the face lowers into a scowl. Criticism becomes second nature. Everything looks bleak.
So begins a self-fulfilling prophecy. When one resists and complains; others respond in kind. Soon the air is filled with resentment. Love scurries into the shadows and cowers there, persona non grata.
For someone like Eleonora who has been the mainstay of her family--working for years as a nurse in the federal government and along with her sister Sadie, maintaining a home for their mother, the adorable Aunt Jo--retirement, finally giving up her car, losing her sister and now her own obvious decline--must be maddening in the most obvious ways. Crazy-making, infuriating. We, who are younger and apparently will outlive her, we who in caring for her are most aware of her debility, become the enemy!
Preparing to see her in a few weeks, I muse on this conundrum, on how to maintain my affection against what will surely be jabs and scowls. How to honor her wish to "go to the Lord," yet point out that taking anti-depressants will not slow that process down. But will merely make the way less bumpy, a little more filled with light.
I promise an update.
Monday, June 4, 2012
Margotlog: My Poetic Mess
Margotlog: My Poetic Mess
As opposed to the wonderful Polish, Noble-prize-winning Wislawa Symborska, I do not lie on the sofa with pad at an angle and, for hours, puzzle out a poem. It comes to me in motion.
One of the watershed learnings of my life was reading about Howard Gardner's 7 intelligences. Yes, I have the literary and musical. No, not the mathematical. Yes to the environmental (Gardner isn't sure this should be included). Then came the big discovery: kinetic. The more I thought about a kinetic intelligence, the more I accepted the reality: I have to be on the move.
I'm no sportswoman. Always the last to be chosen by the all-girls teams at Ashley Hall, Charleston, South Carolina. Eye-hand coordination not great probably because my vision is good for close-ups and gazing into the distance. But eye-balling a softball coming down out of the sun? Nope. I squint Plus I don't have physical stamina.
But short bursts, walks of a round-trip 1.5 miles--a sort of heaven. Especially late afternoon/early evening when the light angles down and creates flickering shadows. I can fall in love with green that caught in that net of light. One foot in front of the other, a little jog here, a jog there, words forming in my head, there's a cadence--a poem is being given to me.
If I return to a quiet house, only me and the cats, I will go immediately to the kitchen counter or grab a used envelope from the recycling bin. Slide to the floor in front of the back screen and, looking into the green backyard, write down what is still angling across my thoughts.
Then the confession: I resist going from the private delight to anything more public. The drafts--half legible, often on second reading not quite intelligible--pile up in my study. I kinda wanna lose them. I kinda wanna pretend they're my private treasures. I've completed the compelling cycle. I've caught the spark, lit a tiny flame. That homage is enough.
This is not at all true of writing prose. Prose insists on my alert return, day after day, week after week, season after season. I can pursue a story or essay down the corridors of years, knowing that I have to step aside for a while to gain critical distance. But never believing that the work is complete or satisfying just as it is. Prose is almost always quasi-public from its inception. I'm almost always talking to an invisible audience.
Not true of a poem. A poem belongs at first only to me. It's as if I opened the well of my psyche and dipped words from a private spring. The unspoken music which I create in walking out the words to their rhythm, is its own justification. The rest of humanity doesn't take part in it. Yet.
The process of typing out a poem, and trying to match my inspiration to an arrangement that will appeal to others almost doesn't interest me. I know, it's a weakness, a laziness of sorts, a resistance. I do it, but proably not enough. The pile of pencil scrawls on the backs of envelopes rises, spills off the desk, collects in a corner between sofa and bookcase.
Today, I will tend to some of it.
As opposed to the wonderful Polish, Noble-prize-winning Wislawa Symborska, I do not lie on the sofa with pad at an angle and, for hours, puzzle out a poem. It comes to me in motion.
One of the watershed learnings of my life was reading about Howard Gardner's 7 intelligences. Yes, I have the literary and musical. No, not the mathematical. Yes to the environmental (Gardner isn't sure this should be included). Then came the big discovery: kinetic. The more I thought about a kinetic intelligence, the more I accepted the reality: I have to be on the move.
I'm no sportswoman. Always the last to be chosen by the all-girls teams at Ashley Hall, Charleston, South Carolina. Eye-hand coordination not great probably because my vision is good for close-ups and gazing into the distance. But eye-balling a softball coming down out of the sun? Nope. I squint Plus I don't have physical stamina.
But short bursts, walks of a round-trip 1.5 miles--a sort of heaven. Especially late afternoon/early evening when the light angles down and creates flickering shadows. I can fall in love with green that caught in that net of light. One foot in front of the other, a little jog here, a jog there, words forming in my head, there's a cadence--a poem is being given to me.
If I return to a quiet house, only me and the cats, I will go immediately to the kitchen counter or grab a used envelope from the recycling bin. Slide to the floor in front of the back screen and, looking into the green backyard, write down what is still angling across my thoughts.
Then the confession: I resist going from the private delight to anything more public. The drafts--half legible, often on second reading not quite intelligible--pile up in my study. I kinda wanna lose them. I kinda wanna pretend they're my private treasures. I've completed the compelling cycle. I've caught the spark, lit a tiny flame. That homage is enough.
This is not at all true of writing prose. Prose insists on my alert return, day after day, week after week, season after season. I can pursue a story or essay down the corridors of years, knowing that I have to step aside for a while to gain critical distance. But never believing that the work is complete or satisfying just as it is. Prose is almost always quasi-public from its inception. I'm almost always talking to an invisible audience.
Not true of a poem. A poem belongs at first only to me. It's as if I opened the well of my psyche and dipped words from a private spring. The unspoken music which I create in walking out the words to their rhythm, is its own justification. The rest of humanity doesn't take part in it. Yet.
The process of typing out a poem, and trying to match my inspiration to an arrangement that will appeal to others almost doesn't interest me. I know, it's a weakness, a laziness of sorts, a resistance. I do it, but proably not enough. The pile of pencil scrawls on the backs of envelopes rises, spills off the desk, collects in a corner between sofa and bookcase.
Today, I will tend to some of it.
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