Apologists
Oliver Herford:
The Goat, for "The Crocodile," by Oliver Herford (1891)
"When you're President, the Apologist supply is infinite."
Whenever a new incumbent ascends office, a crowd of true believers quickly encircle the new President. Their primary purpose might be the opposite of their apparent one, for they might seem to be there to ward off any serious misperceptions and set the story straight from the outset, though they're likely also defending their delicate egos lest some inconvenient truth slips out. It's important to understand that everyone engaging in the following farce already knows the worst about the incoming President. They know most of his most serious shortcomings, for he'd been featuring them as evidence of his superior experience for the position throughout the campaign. Seriously, anyone still able to stand in public and spout self-importance after being convicted of rape and fraud might have curiously earned his place as the leader of the free world, a role that might require an egregious amount of shamelessness.
The Apologists have a ready response to every criticism.
Rationalizing
Helen Hyde: In the Rain (1898)
"The result will mete out its own punishment. Vengence was never mine to deliver."
Slightly more people voted to elect The Oldest President (TOP) than voted against him ever holding public office again. He had abused his privileges during his first turn. He had been promising ever greater abuses if returned to office, so those who couldn't see any attraction to him as either candidate or ex-president were baffled as to why anyone might feel moved to waste their franchise on such a clearly unworthy character. Their vote amounted to an act of self-abuse, I suspect, or maybe it was just a mistake. Ask, though, and one acquires a fresh lesson in the human power of Rationalization, the attempt to make some irrational act seem reasonable in retrospect. Every terrible public servant has trailed a long line of Rationalizers behind them. They've attracted the Lesser Of Two Evils Crowd, who always seem to see only the worst in anyone representing an opposing party. They'd vote for Hanibal Lecter if he were a Repuglican running against anyone enjoying a more conventional diet. They also attract the partisan who never even investigate alternatives. They vote without reflection, choosing not to choose, a part of this country's sometimes overly-proud suffrage tradition. Democracies include even those opposed to democracy.
Then there are the Pig Shavers, the ones who split hairs.
DogEaters
Adriaen van de Velde: Dogs (17th century)
" … they will insist that they represent the real spirit of the laws …"
We speak of the Republican'ts and the Democans as if our society's essential divide lay in mere political labels. It likely lies much deeper than that, as deep as belief and perspective might lie. On one side, we have a cadre who, try though they might (they don’t really try at all), still firmly believe they inhabit a zero-sum world. Conversely, we have those who understand it needn't necessarily be so characterized. It can be a zero-sum world if we insist that it must be, for the world, indeed, our universe, seems poised to be responsive to whatever belief we bring when considering its nature. When it comes to universes, it's not believe-it-when-we-see-it, but we see what we believe—it cooperatively becomes whatever we believe. The eyes we bring to the inquiry make all the difference. Of course, we're always blind to the eyes we cannot bring to an investigation. The Republican'ts, like the Southern Confederates a century and three-quarters before, experienced a zero-sum world of their own projection, where one person's loss was necessarily another's gain. They seriously entertained the notion that force alone could secure their future. They held hostage the means for securing their fortune, believing they could hold justice at bay indefinitely, infinitely.
The zero-sum people see a dog-eat-dog world, where every newborn puppy's destiny must be to either master the skill of puppy killing, or they will undoubtedly be killed and eaten by another puppy.
Inconstancy
Allart van Everdingen: Reynard disguises as monk and distracts cock (17th century)
"Hail to the chief."
[Author's Note: I draw this story from various archetypal descriptions of a psychological type: this one, the eternal eight-year-old who cannot successfully focus upon anything for long. The particulars might misrepresent, though I feel confident that these patterns paint quite an accurate portrait. When dealing with Inconstancy, any opponent can feel confident that their opponent will be their opponent’s most effective opposition, for they cannot maintain their focus or attention long enough to achieve any strategic objective. Hell, they rarely maintain focus long enough to settle on a coherent strategic objective. They mainly pursue warm air, not possessing adequate attention to heat their story to the point where it truly qualifies as hot air.]
Perhaps his sole superpower lies in his sheer Inconstancy.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 01/16/2025
John Singer Sargent:
Sketch of Sir David Murray [1849 - 1933]
and John Seymour Lucas [1849- 1923] (Jun 18, 1907)
This Seems Inevitable
Winter finally came in the middle of January. Its tardy arrival served as a lesson for me that all inevitabilities eventually occur, however delayed, and that I might depend upon this one principle. Hell might never freeze over, but nobody ever proposed that it should. It will be enough if the backyard pond freezes over, which it usually does, for a week or so before the end of February. Next week, another long-dreaded inevitability will occur when the least capable individual ever to be elected to the highest office twice is supposed to take an oath he has no intention of even trying to live up to. Warren G. Harding might have been less interested in the office, but he had the public courtesy to die before anybody proposed he run for a second term, and nobody would have. It's inevitable that our next incumbent's lies ultimately get the better of him, for he convinced a spare majority under decidedly false pretenses, and he will prove incapable of delivering on his many contradictory promises. I do not know where his sandcastle will first exhibit cracks, but I sense it won't stand long. He inherits an impossible act to follow, an economy in better shape than any odd anyone can remember, and an unparalleled-in-generations standing in the international order. It seems all downhill from here for him. This seems inevitable.
TakingCredit
Honoré Victorin Daumier:
Very High and Mighty Legitimate Brats.
Peoples, defend yourselves, tear yourselves to pieces,
sacrifice yourselves for these royals,
you belong to them, imbeciles, plate 19 (1834)
"He firmly believes he's smarter than everyone else, which renders him the stupidest …"
On inauguration day, the adults will leave the administration, and a malignant narcissist will move in. He started TakingCredit for good things his predecessor accomplished before he even took office. He seems to maintain such a high opinion of himself that he simply cannot help himself. He seems to firmly believe that he is, indeed, the greatest. He accomplishes this astounding feat of self-esteem by steadfastly refusing to acknowledge anything he might have attempted that didn't quite make the grade. Indeed, his actual track record shows him mostly failing, though if you listen to him and his minions tell the story, he never fails. He will rather quickly begin identifying people who disappointed him. He claims to pick only winners, but his choices inevitably prove faulty. He will fein surprise then and insist that this seldom happens to him and that it was actually somebody else's fault that he selected a faulty incumbent. He maintains a queue of even better candidates, though he insisted before that his original list comprised only the best and brightest.
I will have to get used to having a malign eight-year-old in the highest office in the land.
Disingenuosity
Anonymous, after a design by Hans Baldung Grien:
Tenth commandment:
do not give false testimony about another
[iende gebod: leg over een ander geen vals getuigenis af]
1539
" … the least qualified President in history about to begin his second term."
It would simplify the situation if certain nominees would appear to testify wearing orange jumpsuits. Some of these guys seem like they're interviewing to be included in the Colorado Supermax Class of 2030. They quite transparently lie or withhold or deny. Their clever attorney clearly counseled them to go ahead and be disingenuous. They give Disingenuosity a bad name. History will remember them, but not kindly. Those disseminating straightforward questions become infamous, especially when 60 Minutes replays the juicy part of their testimony after the future incident. There will always be a future incident with these clowns. There always has been. They are uniformly unqualified for whatever role the incoming executive has nominated them to fulfill. Everyone in the hearing room understands they are not voting for or against the clown before them but the impending executive who chose him. Partisans need to appear supportive. Opponents must appear fair and balanced, which is always tricky in a context where the clown in question won't answer even the most straightforward question. This one's mom submitted testimony against him.
He calls known facts with sufficient evidence anonymous rumors and innuendos.
Ineptitude
Israel van Meckenem the Younger:
The Fight over the Trousers (c. 1495)
" … the patience of Job and the countenance of Greek statuary …"
Through his first foray into The Presidency, our impending incumbent proved incredibly, if intermittently, inept. Usually, his operation proved capable of producing run-of-the-mill cruelty and only managed anything more significant by accident. Many attempted initiatives got away from their initiators to take on their own lives, seemingly without meaningful external control. They proved the adage that a broken clock works twice each day, even though it's ordinarily so wrong as to be useless. Those of us opposed to those initiatives learned that we could usually rely upon that administration's inherent Ineptitude, which would have been humorous had it not also been occasionally so disastrous. It was as if the incumbent brought no executive experience into his role, for he seemed incapable of even the barest executive performance. He exhibited little strategic influence, frittering away his time on initiatives that could no more than temporarily annoy his opposition. His opposition would occasionally register outrage when something especially egregious occurred, but they primarily focused on building their coalition and expressing gratitude their opponent was so poorly resourced.
Before taking the oath of office that he will have no intention of upholding, he's been busying himself with selecting prospective cabinet members.
IntoFamiliarity
Rembrandt van Rijn: Peasant Family on the Tramp (c. 1652)
"I might even rediscover who I always was …"
Trump's election as President for the second time left me peering into a dreaded future. I felt curious and confident that he would once again prove himself not nearly up to the task and dreading the inevitable failures he would most certainly produce with his inept attempts. His successful campaign rendered him no smarter or more popular, and it seemed inevitable that he would be dragging his familiar ineptness into everything he attempted to accomplish. I most dreaded that impending bumbling, for he would set about attempting to reinvent wheels his predecessors had already successfully invented, leaving us worse off for his efforts. It seemed a certainty that he would leave us all worse off. We liquidated our stock portfolios and hunkered in, though that's not all we did in response. We also fled IntoFamiliarity as an antidote to the dread.
Finally, almost three years after returning from Exile, I began organizing my tools and basement workshop.
SelfRecrimination
William Blake:
To annihilate the Self-hood of Deceit & false Forgiveness
(1804-08)
"The usual answer will be, "No, there wasn't," but only because there never is."
After any significant loss comes a period of SelfRecrimination, I suspect that the healthiest might engage in the deepest reconsideration of their former positions, for a loss should properly bring some of anyone's basis into question. What of what then seemed so right was so wrong? Could I have credibly owned any alternative position? Would I have agreed to pursue any other end with anything resembling a similar passion? Were my convictions wrong enough to warrant a reconfiguration of my perspective? Each of these questions should rightly feel unsettling, for these challenge the very basis upon which any thinking person holds any position.
Contrary to popular opinion, the best team does not always win.
Pherocity
Spex:
The sovereigns offered their subjects entertainment and fierce beast fights in circuses
[Les souverains offraient à leurs sujets des divertissements et des combats de bêtes féroces dans les cirques]
(1882 - 1884)
" … we cannot help but hear their disturbing noises."
Outrage, outward rage, might be the signature emotion of the MAGA movement. They seem consumed by theatricality, always performing as if they were cast in a production from Ancient Greece where the actors needed to artificially project their voices so the backbenchers could hear their lines. Their every expression seems cartoonish and caricatured. They seem incapable of thoughtfulness or gentleness. They never seem to be merely disappointed with an outcome but enraged. Their emotional content seems unsustainable, but with each new performance, that same familiar character emerges. Whatever the role, they seem to overplay their part. They seem decidedly self-conscious, not just in role but hyper-aware that they're in that role. They rarely, if ever, let down this facade. Some speculate that they're deep down shallow. A seething frustration lies just above their surface. They have an unscratchable itch. They bitch about everything. They would seem ferocious if their performances were in any way believable. They project a phony-seeming form of ferocity instead, mere Pherocity.
They seem to believe everything's a life-or-death matter and a zero-sum game.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 01/09/2025
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo:
Punchinellos Cooking and Tasting Gnocchi
[Punchinellos’ Repast] (1740/52)
Stay My Course
This week, I saw inklings that we are moving back into a post-truth era with Zuckerberg deciding to stop fact-checking on his Meta platforms. Also, President-Elect Unmentionable released a fresh stream of whoppers. I suspect he's warming up for his inaugural speech, which should set fresh records for fictional content. The need for reliable witnesses has never been greater. In my eighteen years of posting here, I have tried to avoid sharing lies and advice. This hasn't been much of a stretch. I've thought of myself as a principled contributor. I have occasionally, like anybody, been caught echoing what turned out to be false stories or lousy advice. I've quickly taken them down when notified of my error. I look back and wonder how that one slipped through my defenses. I come to the same conclusion. I want to believe the best of everyone. I find it incredible that anyone might want to deliberately spread false information. My nature has made it difficult for me to create this present series, where I'm striving to describe patterns that often violate what I consider to be moral and ethical boundaries.
When our leaders lack moral foundations and ethical edges, their only recourse might be to spread more lies. Hence, another post-truth era. I will not be vacating Facebook, though. I intend to stay and remain the bastian I believe I have always been there. The Muse promised to show me how bluesky works. I might dabble there as I dabble on SubStack and LinkedIn. If I stay in one place, the world will undoubtedly slip by me. It has slipped by me before. Whatever I do, this world will eventually learn to slip by me. For now, though, I will stay my course. Leaving FaceBook would abandon my audience. Why would I do that?
Pretexting
Charles WIlliams: A New Mode of Presenting Two Addresses at Once
(published February 1818)
"We must be their enemy."
When one feels called to save the world, one must find some Pretext for engaging because nobody would ever recognize their savior should they happen upon them. Vonnegut described The Second Coming as featuring an undescribably ugly alien who appears at a suburban shopping mall and communicates exclusively through tap dancing and farting. Rather than recognize salvation in their midst, a disgruntled crowd beat him to death. One might choose to dress themselves up in any costume, but whichever one they choose, it will be a mere Pretext, a cloaking mechanism primarily intended to prevent others from understanding one's agenda. This charade must occur if the means don't matter. If the ends truly justify whatever must be done to achieve them, then deception becomes job one. Making America Great Again, for instance, must involve tearing down America's reputation. The best economy in the world must be characterized as failing. Justice must be framed as fundamentally unjust. Wrongs become violated natural rights. Up must always be referred to as down.
Educating a population in this kind of negative thinking also involves continuous Pretexting.
Threatenings
Attilio Mussino: Harlequin and Pulcinella...
were threatening each other with sticks and blows. (1925)
"That's a promise, not a threat!"
Another common aspect of the MAGA style seems to be a fierce vacuity. They spend inordinate amounts of time threatening people, places, and things, even nothings. They always seem ready to interpret any butterfly's shadow as a mortal threat and overreact. This comes across as needlessly theatrical, maniacal ravings rather than well-thought-out intentions. These performances might primarily serve as distractions because any attempt to parse any deeper meaning or significance or, heaven forbid, pattern out of them will leave one grasping hot air. There's rarely anything there, and whatever manages to manifest bears little resemblance to the fire and brimstone characterizations that utterly fail to describe what was supposed to be coming. These performances almost always prove unsatisfying both from a content perspective as well as from any resulting action that might have been expected. In retrospect, they seem like Daffy Duck or Donald Duck rants: many feathers, little consequence.
They do seem to satisfy themselves with this barking, though.
Newness
Attributed to Philip Dawe: The New Fashioned Phaeton (1776)
ABOUT THIS ARTWORK
Devoting less effort to the fabric textures and pearly luster of high-society mezzotint portraits, publishers also mocked sartorial excesses, especially those with foreign sources. In 1770s London, the epithet macaroni was directed at dandyish men and overdressed women who adopted an outrageous, European style and acted in an affected manners that their genders were said to become indistinguishable. Such costumes evidently even made leaving home difficult. This print’s subtitle, “Sic Itur ad Astra” (which translates as “Thus one goes to the stars”) comes from the Roman poet Virgil and suggests that the wigs and expanding carriages shown here have reached astronomical new heights.
—Art Institute of Chicago
"There was never a prescience half as satisfying as projection."
Newness is getting old. As I have aged, the new has increasingly lost its attraction. The information age might have finally done it in, what with the daily builds and too-frequent upgrades. I can't hardly start my laptop without some update needing to be installed, and the old, once-reliable app suddenly behaves differently, never to regain its former utility. We seem too anxious to abandon what was in favor of what never quite is yet. We speak of evolution but experience near-constant revolution. What might I depend upon now?
I struggle even to imagine replacements when an old and once-reliable falls by some wayside.
NuthingBut
Honoré Victorin Daumier:
A Young Man to Whom Nothing is Sacred,
plate 8 from Professeurs Et Moutards (1846)
"We will be inaugurating the lamest duck in our country's history …"
In courts of law in this country, witnesses are compelled to swear to tell "the whole truth and NothingBut." Consequently, telling falsehoods can result in a perjury charge for lying to the jury. Outside of court, nobody holds anybody to such stringent expectations. We all can get a little loose with literal truths, but most of us work hard to avoid materially misrepresenting ourselves if only because few want to be fairly characterized as loose with the truth. We rely upon each other to fairly represent our experiences, so it’s scandalous, if not strictly illegal when a private citizen routinely misrepresents himself. Further, deliberate misrepresentation tends to introduce a parody of a response as repeated attempts to uncover the truth produce responses intended to cloak it further. These interactions resemble old I Love Lucy episodes from the fifties but are not nearly so entertaining.
As of this writing, our current President, Joe Biden, has kept his promise to tell The People the truth.
Statusing
Nicolas Toussaint Charlet:
Metselaar bij een muur [Mason at a wall] (1821)
"They despise themselves most."
With the MAGA crowd, I sense that I could never belong. Though I cannot delineate their selection criteria, they run a more exclusive operation than most country clubs. It seems backward and upside-down from more established segregations, though a few selection criteria seem obvious. They stand in apparent deliberate opposition to more traditional segmentations as if formulated to thumb their nose at an establishment. However, they seem every bit as exclusive as any old-school gentleman's club. Those granted entrance can seemingly do no wrong until they do. They remain blessed regardless of their sins, former or ongoing, much as their leader enjoys blind forgiveness from his followers. They do not perceive themselves as members but as loyal and devoted followers. They insist they're Christian, though apparently only in name. They also claim conservatism as a central organizing principle, which seems unlike any conservatism the good old days knew. It seems secret, though, as if its members were plotting the overthrow of something. Those not allowed into their club believe they represent a malign influence on our politics and treat them with the same respect they traditionally extended to the Klu Klux Klan.
The apparent obsession with status, though, baffles me.
BeingGrudged
Edvard Munch: Two Human Beings. The Lonely Ones (1894)
" I'm hoping the arc of our collective experience turns toward enlightenment …"
Last week, I proposed five elements of what I referred to as The Stupidities that seem to be ascendent as we move into our impending NextWorld. These elements terrify me because they seem to reduce our polity's resilience. They amount to increasingly popular fallacies, mis- or dis-representations of our everyday reality. They undermine an individual's ability to agilely navigate together into our future. Gathered together as a common practice, the group engaging in these behaviors damages their abilities and hobbles their societies. As I explained before, those engaging in The Supidities tend to insist that they're certain about what nobody could ever be certain about, often about delusions and fictions. They engage in what The Muse refers to as The Sins of Self-Importance; they are vain and sincerely believe that everything was always actually all about them. They also exhibit a discernable addiction to common Inanities. They seem dependent upon and exclusively informed by unreliable sources that have few compunctions about just making shit up as news.
Another common presence in this mix engaging in The Stupidities seems to be, among a significant portion of the population, a sense of BeingGrudged.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 01/02/2025
Jan Goeree:
Frontispiece Design from Corpus Inscriptionum (c. 1707)
Gallery Statement: A weeping Minerva is depicted here near a dilapidated statue of the city of Rome, surrounded by all manner of ancient remains. The drawing is the design for the title page from a collection of Roman inscriptions compiled by J. Gruter and published in 1707. The engraving was used once again in 1726, with a different text, as the frontispiece for a survey of the monuments of ancient Rome.
—-
The Day Inexplicably Turns
Into the new year and still without a killing frost. My Magnolia tree is budding out and will bloom before the end of January unless some winter settles in. I'm now praying for what I so recently dreaded, though the extended rainy season has already answered many prayers. It still unsettles me to acknowledge that we utterly rely upon the rains, which come more or less randomly. Anyone still holding on to the conviction that we must have strong central coordination might have missed this underlying condition. The context within which we exist was not concocted by us, no matter how much we might have tried to reengineer it to do our bidding. Now that we're actively influencing age-old patterns, our world responds, coloring outside expected lines. Summer gardens extend into the following January. Winter might not come this year. Magnolias might bloom twice. Our NextWorld seems only tangentially related to our more familiar ones. It's a wonder I hadn't noticed much earlier. I might not have been paying close enough attention, but I suppose it's our nature to take much for granted. We might be more blessed than we could ever appreciate. As I've watched my world slink toward the dreaded upcoming inauguration, I have been paying closer attention. I suspect the tardy winter will arrive to inconvenience what might have been an early spring, and everything will become jumbled again as if that might constitute a difference. I anticipate everything becoming strange once the new administration begins with their abomination. I savor these final few days before the air turns gray and the day inexplicably turns into a long night.
Inanities
George Wesley Bellows:
Dance at Insane Asylum (1907)
"I'm confident it's coming."
In the late 1980s, a relatively new phenomenon entered America's media landscape. A disc jockey from Miami found traction as a political commentator. He was never knowledgeable. His superpower seemed to have been his willingness to say anything on air. He was not careful to distinguish between fact and fiction. Indeed, almost everything he said on air was provably fictitious, but the delay between utterance and rebuttal rendered his utterances most memorable. Ordinary people were attracted to this doubtlessly entertaining programming, and very quickly, the vocabulary of political dialogue changed on Main Street. What had previously seemed unspeakable became common vocabulary. In this way, formerly arch-conservative opinions slid into more of a mainstream position.
A decade later, a media billionaire from Australia started an alternative news service patterned after the worst of the British Fleet Street rags.
Vanities
In the manner of Adriaen van der Werff:
Bubble-blowing Girl with a Vanitas Still Life
(1680 - 1775)
"He spends his wealth on the equivalent of candy and gum."
We were the first country founded on the principle that every citizen was granted the freedom to pursue happiness. Unsurprisingly, this freedom has not resulted in unbridled happiness. Like always, true happiness seems intermittent and the purview of a select few. Most seem to more or less content themselves with the understanding that they possess the right to pursue happiness, even if it continually eludes them. Happiness, under this freedom's influence, seems to have taken many curious forms, the Second Amendment right to bear arms among the strangest. Who would naturally correlate gun possession with happiness? The Beatle's tune Happiness Is A Warm Gun was intended as irony rather than a declaration of natural fact.
Happiness can be a tricky objective.
Certainlies
James Gillray: Election Candidates
(published May 20, 1807 by Hannah Humphrey)
ABOUT THIS ARTWORK
Despite its jovial hand coloring, James Gillray’s response to the 1807 parliamentary election in the district of Westminster caricatures real candidates with ruthlessness. Here, Gillray implied that the winner, the radical Sir Francis Burdett, had extra help. Burdett becomes the goose atop the pole, supported by a demonic figure with a pitchfork, while the agitated constituency below degenerates into a mob.
" … can't see how this latest experiment in degenerative Democracy can go any way but sideways."
The first of The Stupidities I introduced in yesterday's missive deserved to be Certainty; for Certainly, Certainty must be the primary difficulty of our age. Every age preceding us complained about the complexity of their situation, and should have. Each successive generation could rightfully complain about their age's complexity, which might mean that our world has become increasingly complex. Suppose the purpose of civilization was ever to somehow tame this native context each generation faces. In that case, civilization has utterly failed because it seems that it has managed only to amplify complexity rather than attenuate it.
Perhaps because of this, the urge for simple solutions seems to grow with each successive generation.
Stupidities
Jean Dubrayet*:
Minerva bindt de Domheid vast met een touw
[Minerva ties the Stupidity with a rope] (c. 1627)
Titelpagina voor een boek met tekenvoorbeelden.
[Title page for a book with drawing examples]
*"Jean Dubrayet was a print maker who is known for works such as Minerva ties the Stupidity with a rope and Portrait of Ajax." (Google AI experiment) I could find no other biographical information on this artist.
" … the trinkets with which our future was purchased."
It might be that history has always been a slave to the Stupidities. When I was still very young, I remember my more ancient elders wondering how their world would get along with the quality of young people coming up to eventually replace them. The young have always known nothing, and to those who knew everything in their time, they unavoidably seem relatively stupid. Youth tend to master stuff that seems meaningless to their elders. Our own Grand Other was showing off her gaming computer, a gift she and her dad built together as a Christmas present. She was proudly displaying the high-quality graphics, which I could barely see. I was thinking that the old text-based Adventure® game I used to play back on that 360 clone in the 70s had far better graphics, and it was text-based. I lasted a few seconds before I excused myself and went to wait for The Muse in the car. It disturbed me deeply that our Grand Other would somehow tumble to such stupidity! (She belongs to an after-school sports team at her high school. Her sport is, and I kid you not, competitive gaming!)
I'm ordering handbaskets.
UnSerious
Cornelis Visscher after Adriaen Brouwer:
Hearing [De Fiool Speelder] (c. 1649-58)
"We seem poised to reenter kindergarten, where the bully holds the pulpit."
We console ourselves by remembering how inept he was the last time he was in office. He managed to use his office to be cruel to innocents, to unconscionably waste resources, and to inflate the deficit toward no discernable end. Still, he mostly proved incapable of inflicting long-term damaging influence. The office of the Presidency quickly snapped back into respectability once he was ousted, even with him endlessly whining that he'd been illegally overturned. He provided nothing that any court considered proof of his assertion. He proved to be an eminently ignorable distraction, a sore loser, and the most UnSerious candidate ever to seek re-election. That he won astounded everyone I know.
This time, he will be the most UnSerious President in the history of this nation.
Surrealizations
Dorothy Dehner: Landscape for Cynics (1945)
"Merry Christmas might take any of a variety of meanings in any NextWorld."
When The Muse and I bought our Villa Vatta Schmaltz, we imagined it would eventually become the center of many extended family gatherings. I imagined that when my kids had children, The Villa would naturally become the over-the-river-and-through-the-woods holiday destination of choice for them, as my folks' place had been for me and my family in my time, but it hasn't. Our twelve-year exile opened space for different patterns to imprint. By the time we returned, we remained as off the holiday radar as we had been when exiled in Washington, DC, and Colorado, both places too absurdly far away and lacking any history for the family to reasonably consider as holiday destinations. So, those generations imprinted on other places for the holidays, though I hadn't reimprinted on this NextWorld until this just passing Christmas.
My Christmas gift was the Surrealization that I had been living embedded in that past notion, that what I had tenuously believed would be the case twenty-some years earlier would likely still eventually come to pass.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 12/26/2024
Tobias Conrad Lotter:
Astronomische theorieën en uitleg
[Astronomical theories and explanation] (1749)
Adequately Chilling
The first week of Winter brought Spring-like weather with Chinook winds and more rain than we've seen since last Spring. We've had three bomb cyclone systems bump into our coast since Halloween, each bringing fierce wind and much-needed rain. The Winter Wheat, already sprouted in the fields, has gotten a great head start. Our wheatfields sport Spring Green cover while we continue waiting for our first killing frost. I still have last summer's petunias, geraniums, and roses, which are still blooming. I sank the fuchsias into a composter bin; they seem secure enough for now. Winter has not come yet. Moreover, our usual weeks of numbing fog mostly missed us as those wet and windy systems repeatedly scoured our valley. I began a new series this week that has yet to reveal its purpose. After the terrifying results of last Fall's elections, I needed something more positive than politics to focus my attention on. I anticipate a period of great upheaval, even tragedy. I needed to clean out my backlog before taking on another initiative. Winter might not come this season, but the events unfolding on the world's stage threaten to be adequately chilling. I worry about our NextWorld.
UnProcrastinating
Stuart Davis:
Advancing and Retiring Colors Diagram (1942)
" … I can accomplish virtually anything."
Almost four years ago, when we moved back into The Villa Vatta Schmaltz after a twelve-year absence, we just crammed some stuff into whatever corner availed itself, particularly in the basement. Then, life regained momentum, and we didn't find a reason to retrace our earlier decisions. Clogs resulted. Particularly in my basement shop/laundry room, the clutter predominated. I'd just splayed most of my tools along the vast workbench top and worked around that mess. A month ago, I took positive steps toward eradicating that embarrassment. I hired Kurt, our painter, to refinish a peeling back wall, and I pivoted some of the shelving ninety degrees to provide space along its backside for pegboard, where I imagined I could mount my hand tools for tidy and convenient access. Painting done, I've not yet started moving back into the freshly refurbished space.
I am in the process of UnProcrastinating, with the explicit intention of creating a fresh context, if not a NextWorld.
Distinctioning
Jan Luyken: Vrouw Wereld toont kinderen de brede en smalle weg
[Woman World shows children the wide and narrow road] (1699)
" … largely unexplored."
When might this NextWorld appear? From here, the answer to this question seems to depend upon what one considers a distinction between one world and a next. What change, one to another, might qualify as enough to accept it as a genuine difference? I know, this seems awfully subjective. Some people maintain stricter standards than others. It might be that those who acknowledge slight differences as constituting distinctions experience more successful lives, for they might more comfortably manage to "change the world." Those who hold the strictest standard when making such distinctions live in a world that, by self-imposed definition, must always stay the same.
But aren't some changes more obvious?
Faith-Based
Jehan Georges Vibert:
Trial of Pierrot (Not Dated - late 19th century)
"I will have levitated by the means of tugging up on my own shoelaces."
I might be one of the least religious people you could ever meet. I don't have much particular animosity toward religion, only that I don't belong. Their lore doesn't interest me much, and their metaphors tend to lose me. For instance, I will never understand the concept of a personal lord and savior. I cannot understand what that phrase means nor imagine what such a service if competently performed, would even look like in practice. I never bought into the idea of original sin, either. I appreciate the good works various religious bodies perform. I am rightly appalled by the evil organizations engage in, seemingly as a matter of course. Any collection of individuals organized together becomes capable of evil far exceeding any individual's potential. I believe that groups must be more careful lest they inflict unintended damage on others. The notion that one collection of people is necessarily superior to another due to their beliefs disgusts me.
All that said, I acknowledge that my life has been a Faith-Based initiative.
ThinkingIll
Lovis Corinth: Cain (1916)
"No whining!"
Two days into creating my Christmas Poem Cycle and halfway finished, I encountered a definite blockage to completion. I caught myself seething inside. I have been holding an anger, and the old, probably incorrect definition of depression was "anger turned inward." The idea apparently was that inward-aiming anger might fester into deep self-destructive sadness while anger aimed outward might at least dissipate, perhaps even harmlessly. But we live in an era when anger has turned outward, which has resulted in considerable carnage. School shootings seem to have become a daily occurrence, and what are those but outward-focused angst? You must have played hooky through those years if you were not seething through middle school.
My challenge as a poem writer involves poisoning the well.
WritingPoems
Yashima Gakutei:
Woman About to Write a Poem (c. 1824)
" … not the definition of insanity but of quality."
Every year, as Christmas nears, I find myself stuck to my desk WritingPoems. Years ago, I solemnly swore to stop buying presents in stores. I'd had it with that despondent shuffle exhibited by people hoping to find that perfect gift while having no real ideas about what such a gift might entail. That annual desperation of hoping a pre-Christmas miracle might appear in an overcrowded aisle. The passion play involving the eternal search for perfection, demanding faith and devotion yet often fruitless. It might be that perfection cannot be successfully sought but can only happen unbidden. Anyway, I'd had it and swore off that curious addiction. I would henceforth write poems and give them as gifts.
After more than twenty years of experience, I can't say that WritingPoems has necessarily been easier than shopping would have been.
NextWorld
Franz Marc: The Bewitched Mill (1913)
"I guess I'll keep watch and see if I can catch a NextWorld emerging."
The inescapable ignorance of youth and the inevitable arrogance of age conspire to mislead most into believing that youth possesses innocence and the elderly own prescient wisdom. What could prove to be further from the truth? Youth has never been able to hear its elders, let alone understand them. The elders innocently expect their broadening experience to amount to something when it rarely does. Youth insists upon making its own mistakes and elders have little with which to trade but their undervalued perspective. The NextWorld, the one continuously emerging, has never turned out to be as anticipated or similar to what came before. Forced to poke sticks into darkness, civilization continually moves onward, if not necessarily forward.
I have little to offer in the way of advice.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 12/19/2024
Rembrandt:
Self-portrait in a Soft Hat and Patterned Cloak (1631)
Tomorrow Morning's Problem
Someone I was chatting with at a holiday party asked me if I was retired. I'm never sure how to respond to that question because I don't consider myself retired, yet no one employs me. I responded by declaring myself a writer who puts in his daily hours. I don't know what I'd do if I retired. I still feel the deep need to create something every day and the responsibilities owning The Villa place on me. I continue to get up very early every morning to seriously consider what I should be doing that day. By the time The Muse rises hours later, I've already accomplished something, however modest. The balance of my day builds upon that early success. I rarely fail to achieve something of my own devising, early each morning. If I fear anything, I fear not accomplishing that something. I might suffer from some obsessive-compulsive disorder, except my world seems exquisitely ordered. I am free to procrastinate after I've finished my writing, and I procrastinate plenty, but I am never free to avoid my writing. Am I retired? Not hardly. I can't imagine myself ever hanging up my spurs.
As I finish another series, I ask myself if I have another one in me. The answer is an inevitable maybe. I cannot know until I've finished whether I have another in me. The honest answer would be that I didn't but that I didn't need to have another one in me before I started writing. What would become another one was never in me before I began but passed through me as I continued once I started. The starting primed the pump. The daily ritual maintained the flow. Knowing was never necessary or, I suspect, sufficient. There's no going back to recover what was never started. There's never a good enough excuse for not starting. I have not yet decided what my next series will focus on. That's tomorrow morning's problem.
Passing
Winslow Homer: The End of the Day, Adirondacks (1890)
" … anyone Exiled never returns."
Our Exile didn't so much end as pass. In the same way, a person passing from life to death does not undo what they've accomplished; their story continues in their absence. As this series might have demonstrated, my Exile, our Exile, remains a prominent presence even now, three years after it passed. It continues Passing. I expect its Passing to continue until I pass, too.
The final few weeks away were excruciating.
PiecesOfMe
Louis Rhead:
I diverted myself with talking to my parrot (1900)
"Another Exile might be in all of our near futures."
These Exiled Stories have not just been about me, but actual PiecesOfMe. Everywhere we landed on our twelve-year odyssey, PiecesOfMe sloughed off and were left behind. By the end, I felt as though I had been pruned to within an inch of my existence. Though I supposed I was supposed to return with treasure, I returned immeasurable instead. What had I gained but some stories? What had become of me in my absence? Who was I supposed to have become? I returned dumber than I left and likely no wiser, either, for I had been absent the entire time. I'd learned a raft of things that have no practical application back in my homeland, even as generalized abilities. How could I apply my learned facility with public transportation in a place offering little of that? How would my learned tolerance for high humidity serve me when living on the edge of a vast desert? I returned with very little to show for my absence but stories.
Did my extended absence at least make my heart grow fonder?
LastAdolescence
Carel Christiaan Antony Last:
Meisje met Tulband [Girl with turban]
(1835 - in or before 1839)
"Once we were empty nesters again … "
More than a year before we returned from Exile, well after we'd comfortably settled into Colorado, The Muse received an urgent message from her granddaughter, our GrandOtter. The Otter had struggled since graduating high school, and even achieving that success had proven extremely stressful. All drama aside, and there had been ample drama from The Otter over recent years; she suffered from a baffling collection of diagnoses. One suggested she exhibited symptoms of some borderline personality disorder that seemed to me to have been an over-the-border one. Whatever the context, when The Otter contacted us, we couldn't help but respond, for she was our GrandOtter, and we'd considered ourselves an implicate part of her childhood and life. If she were in trouble, we'd respond.
It was always difficult to separate the real from the imagined with her.
Separations
Félix Edouard Vallotton:
Cancellation sheet,
fragments of ten woodblocks from Intimacies (1898)
" … actively engaging in her separation dance."
We ended our Exile with several preliminary Separations, for we'd become connected, perhaps even addicted, to our Exile after more than a decade gone. We had been Exiled for almost as long as we'd been together before we were Exiled. The Exile threatened to outshine our prior experience together to become the new anchor. The shelf life of any Exile experience was never meant to outlast the sum of any of the Exileds’ pasts. We felt some pressure to return before we exceeded some imagined upper limit, after which no one can credibly reappear, but we couldn't simply disappear. We had made connections. The Muse was still employed and more or less enjoying her Exile career. I'd made peace with where we'd landed, only rarely feeling too isolated to bear. Wherever we were once we landed in Colorado; we were much closer to home but still more than merely a long two-day drive away.
My mom died after we moved to Colorado.
LeaveMaking
Randolph Caldecott: Taking leave. (1885)
"More complications sat between us and our exit."
We focused on leaving through the last half of our Exile. For over six years, The Muse schemed to position herself—us—where we could cleanly leave. In Takoma Park, Maryland, our starting point seemed impossibly far away from our target in Southeastern Washington State. A single hop home seemed unlikely to work from there. Further, after the first six years in Exile, we barely had our heads above water. We'd need more capital to achieve what we aspired for upon returning from our Exile. The Villa would need considerable refurbishment once we returned, and we'd learned that opportunities for accumulating wealth were few and farther between there than they would be almost anywhere else, like in Colorado.
Our first move took us to Colorado, then, where we figured we just might be able to swing purchasing a home.
ChristmasesPast
Samuel Palmer: Christmas (c. 1850)
"Our Exile was best when ChristmasesPast were the present."
The Muse and I didn't dwell day-to-day upon our dilemmas. We had our lives to live, Exiled or not, and the usual activities of daily living consumed most of our available attention. However miserable we might have become, we maintained a believable semblance of normalcy. Wee-hour thoughts rarely visited and never persisted into full obsession. We did not live lives of silent desperation. We were comfortable after a fashion. In some ways, we became more comfortable than we'd ever been before while we were Exiled, for some of the complications of regular life didn't haunt us in our absence. Our social obligations narrowed. Our acquaintances slimmed. We knew few. Our time largely remained our own. Once we developed routines, little further problem-solving was involved in our daily lives. It was sometimes like we had been furloughed from our regular life instead of being absent without leave.
When the Christmas season came, though, we teleported ourselves home.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 12/12/2024
Copy after(?) Maurice-Quentin de La Tour:
Self-Portrait (18th Century)
Except For Occasional Reappearances
I took myself to lunch today, the busiest day of my week after the carpenters finally showed up this morning to begin installing our new porch deck. They'd hauled away the gold-plated deck boards—clear, verticle grain Douglas Fir tongue and groove three-inchers—a few weeks ago to sand and finish them in a heated shed. The boards returned transformed! We'd discussed the final details as light snow fell, and I left exhausted. I decided to take myself to lunch to purchase some respite. I went to the Sub Shop to order some of their chicken rice soup, which isn't soup so much as a thick goup, perfect for a chilling Thursday lunch. I ordered the soup and a half of a tuna sub. As she dished up my goop, the checker said she'd bring out my sandwich when it was finished.
I retired to a table in the back and enjoyed my goop, but my sandwich never came. I returned to the counter, and the checker reacted as if she'd never seen me. I responded to her asking how she could help by saying I was back for that half sandwich she'd said she'd deliver to my table. She looked astonished! "I wouldn't have said that," she replied, "because I don't deliver sandwiches to tables." She went on to ask what I'd ordered as if she were speaking to someone who had recently returned from the Twilight Zone. She turned to dish up the goop, and I stopped her, saying I'd already eaten my goop and just wanted the sandwich. She asked me what I wanted as if I had yet to order and paid for what I wanted just a few short minutes before. She took my order and passed it on to the sandwich maker, who had witnessed my earlier interaction. A minute or two later, she handed me the tuna in a to-go bag, though I'd ordered it for there, and, curiously, didn't charge me again for the sandwich she'd not acknowledged I'd earlier ordered and paid for. She'd even thrown a chocolate chip cookie into the bag. I retired to my table to swallow that sandwich, wondering.
The Muse has been out of town this week, so I've been lacking one of my usual verification mechanisms to confirm I'm present. Due, probably, to some Heisenberg factor, I might not actually exist unless observed by someone who knows me. My cats often perform this service, but in that sub shop, I was missing my verification medium and, therefore, experienced what it might be like without me being present. This episode perfectly encapsulated my Exiled experiences. You might recall the episode where I was feeding feral cats with a four-year-old. We named one of those cats The Cats Who's Never There. I got to experience how that cat must have felt. My certainty that he probably didn't exist and that raccoons were eating the food we left collapsed his existence wave, but only for me. For lunch today, I had a dish best never served, the sense that I might not actually exist and that I might have been permanently Exiled to someplace else, except for those occasional reappearances.
ConstantCompanions
Possibly after Ignatius van Logteren:
Young Bacchus and Companions
(not dated- Early Eighteenth Century)
"He serves as a continuing inspiration."
My Exile was eased and occasionally burdened by the presence of ConstantCompanions in the form of two cats. Crash, the senior partner, had adopted me when I was recovering (poorly) from my second divorce. I suspect he recognized me as a fellow Exile and took to jumping up in my lap. I've always suspected that cats are clairvoyant or, if not, that they're not entirely subject to the same space/time limitations that contain us. I believe he knew what a remarkable companion he would become for me and chose that fate as an act of appreciation and service. He was a life-saver through those harrowing days when The Muse and I first found each other. We were both exiled then, and both were somewhat worse for the wear. Crash took great care of us.
Later, after we found The Villa and relocated to Walla Walla, we found our second cat, Rose, who was forever skittish.
FellowTravelers
Jean Charles Cazin: Tobias and the Angel (1878)
Background Note:
Tobias and the Angel is the traditional title of depictions in art of a passage from the Book of Tobit in which Tobias, son of Tobit, travels with the Archangel Raphael without realizing he is an angel (5.5–6) and is then instructed by Raphael what to do with a giant fish he catches (6.2–9). The Book of Tobit is accepted by Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians as part of the biblical canon but not by Judaism or most Protestant Christians, the latter including it in the Apocrypha. (Wikipedia)
" … mirror images playing before us."
Those who have been Exiled develop an ability to recognize others who have been Exiled, their FellowTravelers. This fraternity was never anything anybody aspired to join. Each was conscripted, much as each was Exiled, not necessarily against their will but probably without anybody first asking permission. Being Exiled must leave similar wounds across its population. Exiled men, women, and children each seem to carry this common attribute. Time doesn't seem to affect its presence. Neither does any trauma related to the experience. For some, their Exile served as an escape; for others, an imprisonment, yet for both, the experience seems to leave similar indelible traces. It's rare that anyone quickly discloses their personal experience with Exiles. Most keep this story secret until the listener can be fairly classified as an intimate. Yet when the disclosure finally emerges, the previously Exiled listener will probably experience an I Knew That Moment. They realize that they knew without being able to assign an explicit label to that sensation.
We're all connected in myriad ways.
Arrogance
Hieronymus Wierix: Val van de mens [The Fall of Man] (1578)
Allegorie op de ondergang van de mens. De Wereldse Mens (Mundanus Homo) valt met tafel en al door het geopende luik in de vloer. De duivel (Diabolus) houdt zijn netten gereed om hem te vangen. Een naakte vrouw, de Zonde (Peccatum), trekt de Wereldse Mens aan zijn jas, zodat ze hem met haar pijl kan doorboren. In het midden richt de Dood (Mors) zijn pijl op de vallende man. Hij wordt tegengehouden door de Goddelijke Genade (Gratia). Boven haar hoofd de duif van de Heilige Geest. Geheel rechts vechten Arrogantie (Arrogantia), de man met helm, schild en opgeheven zwaard, Eerzucht (Ambitio) en Geweld (Violentia). Ze strijden om de aardse rijkdommen die van het bed van Vanitas door het gat in de vloer zijn gevallen. De voorstelling wordt verduidelijkt in de Nederlandse, Franse en Duitse onderschriften in de marge.
Allegory of man's demise. The Worldly Man (Mundanus Homo) falls into the floor with the table and all through the open hatch. The devil (Diabolus) keeps his nets ready to catch him. A, Sin (Peccatum), pulls the Worldly Man by his coat so that she can pierce him with her arrow. In the middle, Death (Mors) points his arrow at the falling man. He is held back by the Divine Grace (Gratia). Above her head, the dove of the Holy Ghost. On the far right, fight Arrogance (Arrogantia), the man with helmet, shield, and raised sword, Ambition (Ambitio), and Violence (Violentia). They compete for the earthly riches that have fallen from Vanitas' bed through the hole in the floor. The performance is clarified in the Dutch, French, and German captions on the margins.
—
" … an infantile worldview and a wound that could never heal."
The Exiled exhibit a common Arrogance. The act of being Exiled feels undeserved. Consequently, the Exiled feel wronged. They believe themselves to be, as a class, innocent parties. Nothing better fuels an Arrogance than having been unjustly punished. The Exiled feel almost saintly superior in their anguish. Many carry a martyr complex. The world they've been cruelly forced into feels far beneath their station. Having been coerced into abandoning the center of their universe, they recognize how everything in the Exiled-Into hinterlands stands well beneath their standards. Forced to live among the rabble, the Exile might seem withdrawn. They are probably not as shy as they first appear. They are seething and have no idea what rules govern their presence there. They feel embarrassed.
Washington, DC, might seem like a shining city surrounding Capitol Hill until you search for an apartment on the backside of that shining hill.
Impermanence
Lee Russell:
Migratory berry pickers in temporary home
near Ponchatoula, Louisiana (1939)
[United States. Farm Security Administration]
"My sense of Impermanence gratefully proved impermanent itself."
A fundamental paradox of living involves the necessity of seeing the temporary as somehow permanent. Life is a wasting state, destined to end eventually, but living seems best served when presumed to be permanent. We don't take the temporary as seriously as we take the eternal; just a subtle reframing materially transforms experience. We live in a too-disposable era where many things come in single-use packaging. We've grown too used to discarding so that we too easily perceive even our precious, non-refundable minutes as somehow disposable.
When I was Exiled, my life seemed to go off the books.
Untreatable
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes:
Of what ill will he die?, plate 40 from Los Caprichos
(1797–98, published 1799)
" … the lesson that seems to need to be relearned anew every time."
Being Exiled does not amount to a treatable condition. It is not a problem requiring a solution, though I first considered it a serious problem. I spent considerable nonrefundable time needlessly and fruitlessly seeking a solution. My life became a parody just as certainly as if I had awakened to find myself cast in an old I Love Lucy episode. This experience might have been tragic. Indeed, it seemed as though it certainly could have become tragic. That it didn't, or eventually didn't, amounts to a form of magic. I certainly contributed to the comedy of errors. I sought salvation from what I might have more productively considered a mere flesh wound, a scratch. I blew my condition out of proportion and then blamed the Gods, the universe, or my ineptness for cursing my meager existence. I felt cheated, wronged, and violated. I was the one wielding the weapon, though. I was burgling myself unawares.
In this life, stuff happens.
Reappearing
Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn:
The Incredulity of Thomas
["Christ Appearing to the Apostles"] (1656)
"Home seems less where the heart grows fonder than where one's pasts live …"
After Being Exiled, The Muse and I occasionally Reappeared on our old home turf. We came for various reasons, usually to see family, though I also once came alone to repaint the Villa. I'd slip down to the Main Street Starbucks at 5 AM to swipe some wi-fi and post my latest dispatch. I would inevitably get spotted by somebody from my former existence. I would get the opportunity to explain where I'd gone and what I was doing returning. Somebody would usually ask if we'd come back, but I'd have to admit we hadn't. Not yet. We'd recount a few of our former misadventures before disappearing into the ether again. I'd run into old friends wherever I went, even visiting my mom in the old folks' home. Another inmate's kid or a staff member knew us under other circumstances and usually asked after us.
Our stories always seemed pretty lame to us.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 12/05/2024
Cornelis Visscher: Lievens van Coppenol, Writing Master (1658)
Muster An Effective Resistance
As Winter approaches here, a persistent inversion layer appears. It brings low cloud and consistent temperatures that very slowly work their way downward toward freezing. For weeks, temperatures might hover in the low thirties without actually freezing. The petunias have not yet been frostbitten, nor have the geraniums. Their days will come as December unfolds. Genuine cold will arrive, and the fireplace will become the center of our lives again. This old house becomes its coziest when it's coldest outside. Sure, a place this ancient leaks a lot. A more or less subtle yet constant breeze discloses its respiration, but it's nothing that can't be cured by putting on another sweatshirt.
The Muse becomes even more the South Dakota Farm Daughter when this weather arrives. She bakes her pies and buys a hog's head to render into head cheese and souse. She finds poppy seed for Stölen-making, and we continue experimenting to find better ways to shell fresh chestnuts. The outside world seems as though it's upside-downing itself, preparing for a new administration spouting absolutely insane notions. Another inversion, with temperatures hovering just above chilling. It remains out-there as it has always been in-here. This time of year, we might just as well celebrate something as collapse into tears. We celebrate being here, at the right time and place for a change, rather than Exiled. Exile might come again next year. For now, we're still here, having so-far survived. The outside might rage in impotent insistence. We can muster an effective resistance.
Mine
Kate Greenaway: Baby Mine (1910)
Edmund Evans, Wood Engraver
"I haven't quite yet gotten over it."
Being Exiled eventually reframed my notions of possession. Before, I held a narrow idea of what belonged to me. Besides books, I never cared much for possessions. After Exile, I held onto my collection of books until just before we relocated to Colorado, when I gave away at least a quarter of my collection to the Takoma Park Library fundraising book sale to avoid moving so many. I took to borrowing books from libraries instead of buying them, and I grew to feel that I came to own any book I'd read and even those I'd just perused. Before Exile, I'd also imprinted on our home as our possession. This relationship was a unique one. I felt more the steward than the lord of that manor. That possession was more obligation than anything else. Exile left me feeling as though I was neglecting that obligation.
My relationship with real estate shifted when we bought that second house in Colorado.
Never_Returning
John Steeple Davis: Rip Van Winkle's return. (1879)
Charles Maurand, Wood Engraver
"We returned sequestered and suspicious if we ever returned at all."
At some point after we'd relocated to Colorado for what we imagined would be the final part of our Exile, I started believing that we would be Never_Returning from that excursion. Our source had by that time changed too much for me to believe that we might find enough recognizable remnants of our former existence to believably argue that we'd returned, for time and passing circumstance had already pulled that rug out from underneath us by then. I didn't necessarily view this realization as tragic, for it seemed simply inarguable. We had once imagined we would one day return. Then we came to understand that returning might have never been in the cards, that the plane within which our return might manifest might have evaporated like a wave function upon the moment of our exit. Only constancy of perception could have ever argued otherwise. That constancy almost always proves to be little more than an illusion, albeit reassuring, until it isn't any longer.
If I'd been baited and switched, I had baited myself.
Explorers
Oskar Schlemmer:
Three Figures with Furniture-like Forms
[Drei Figuren mit Möbelformen] (1929)
"That wanderlust has largely left us since we returned from Exile."
Exploring became one sure way to distract ourselves from often depressing realities after being Exiled. We could go discover something. Though earlier explorers had already discovered every possible thing, our surroundings were new to us; strange customs always surrounded us. We were looking for roads less traveled since traffic seemed to be the most significant barrier to going anywhere. We learned when to avoid the freeways and when they might be okay. We'd often chart a course around the most direct route since they frequently proved to be the most significant hassle. If everyone's discovered a shortcut, it takes longer. We ached to discover our own secret passages.
We kept our navigating systems offline when Exploring because we didn't want The Cloud to learn and then advertise our secret shortcuts to anybody else.
SnappingBack
Corita Kent (Sister Mary Corita): enriched bread (1965)
Inscriptions and Marks:
Signed: l.r., in black ink (ball point): Sister Mary Corita
Inscription: ENRICHED BREAD / WONDER / Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say this hope lies in a nation; others in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works everyday negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever threatened truth that each and every man, on the foundation of his own sufferings and joys, builds for all. Camus / Help build strong bodies 12 ways sTANDARD LARGE LOAF no preservatives added
Inscription: On verso, l.l.: 65-2
" … still in more or less one piece."
When we were Exiled, losing my DelicateBalance and slipping into LostDays rarely lasted long. We would shortly be SnappingBack into more fully functioning organisms. Just the continually threatening nature of being Exiled sort of insists upon the Exile's full functionality. Days lost cannot turn into lost weeks without increasing the already screaming threat level. We had defenses to handle and offensives to scheme. Exiles do not simply take care of themselves. As with everything, there's always something insisting upon attention, threatening an already tenuous homeostasis. Remember, we had chosen not to be mere renters, so we needed to maintain that all-important owner mentality. We had responsibilities! However powerless or exhausted we might have felt, no excuses could have worked. Like our pioneer ancestors, we'd get back behind the plow mule again, usually by the following morning.
Our discipline doubtless helped us recover after we'd stumble.
LostDays
John F. Peto: Lights of Other Days (1906)
" … a familiar part of our regular repertory."
Lest any reader of these chronicles receive the impression that The Muse and I were exceptionally courageous or virtuous after being Exiled, I must note that we experienced at least our share of LostDays there. Sundays seemed to have presented particular problems for me, for I couldn't seem to settle into any rhythm for them. Separated from my weekday routines and alienated by bizarre local rituals, I often felt like the odd man out on Sundays. Both DC and Denver exuded football madness in season, an attraction I never even wanted to muster. There are rituals that inhabitants of big cities observe that nobody not of those places can ever come to understand. The Sunday morning church bells served to alienate me further there. Our small hamlet outside of Denver featured a mega-church with parishioners in the tens of thousands among its half-dozen affiliated campuses spread along the front range. Whatever might have occurred in their sanctuary, they reliably produced a mega-traffic jam every Sunday at noon. We were wise to head in the other direction.
I mentioned in an earlier installment that shopping seemed to be the entertainment of choice for those living anywhere near shopping centers.
DelicateBalance
Peter Sheaf Hersey Newell:
Old Father William Balancing an Eel,
from "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" (c. 1901)
" … whimpering like a wounded puppy."
I live in a DelicateBalance. I never know precisely how delicate my balance might be until some event or experience nudges me off my center. I sometimes seem remarkably robust with the sense that almost nothing could possibly throw me off balance. Other times, I feel precariously poised upon some precipice and likely to take a terrible tumble. Most days, under most conditions, I feel in no danger. I've always been most imperiled by forces I could not see coming. I seldom accurately anticipate the arrival of any unbalancing. These events bushwhack me into becoming their victim. I seem powerless to avoid these, depending upon my allostatic load, a rough measure of the level of burden I'm already compensating for carrying. When that load's been excessive, a feather in the wrong direction can tip me over and pour me out all over the floor.
I don't suppose I carry an unusually high allostatic load.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 11/28/2024
Claude Monet: The Petite Creuse River (1889)
The Impending Downfall
My Business Law professor told me back when I was still an undergraduate that if I wanted to predict our political future five or ten years out, I should just keep an eye on British politics. He insisted that the United States parrotted whatever our British cousins did over the prior couple of centuries with a few years' lag. It never seemed to matter whether the British did something brilliant or stupid; we'd be following on their tail. Their Brexit vote, arguably the most foolish political movement in modern history–at least up until the MAGA movement kicked in—took place in 2019, with the catastrophic effects starting immediately. Their government's "conservative" response to the vote's impact proved disastrous, for they began to engage in austerity to manage the immediate effects of choosing to walk away from their previous prosperity. After a few years of that absurdity, with government services worn to less than a nub, their conservative movement in Britain effectively ceased to exist, a victim of their own appalling excesses. We're about five years behind. November 5, 2024, was our Brexit vote, and we narrowly chose to leave our union. We will shortly experience an austerity-induced recession, which could become depression-quality depending on how quickly we smarten up. Our unemployment numbers should soar as qualified workers are serially disqualified from contributing because Congress could never codify the rules for their inclusion. They took five years. Like Britain, we chose to follow lies rather than obvious facts, chasing pasts improved with fictional proofs. Our government, by and for The People, seems set to turn against The People in favor of a regressive austerity that can only wound the weakest while enriching the already wealthy. The comeuppance will come after providing a lesson Britain had already learned and we could not quite learn from yet. Divided, we fall. We can only stand tall when united. I'm grateful for the coming comeuppance if not for the impending downfall.
ThanksGiven
Giuseppe Rosso: Thanksgiving (1968)
" … an experience one cannot choose but for which might feel gratitude later."
I had not understood when, sixty-seven installments ago, I began this Being Exiled chronical. I thought I might be trying to release some trauma by recounting it; a strategy long ago rejected as ineffective by trauma specialists. I had no intention of discovering justifications for gratitude, for had we not been wounded by the experience? Didn't it ding our dignity and leave us wondering about our viability? Of course, it did, but those feelings seem no different from what any random day might deliver. Nothing's strictly one thing or another. We live bittersweet existences, usually more salty and savory than sweetness, anyway. As we age, we grow to favor bitter flavors and think of ourselves as more sophisticated for appreciating them. We find our friends in the most unlikely places and grow to appreciate experiences that might have otherwise just made us bitter.
I might as well feel grateful, for all was not lost.
IdEntity
Julia Margaret Cameron: Julia Jackson (1867)
" … I returned an IdEntity with Ego clearly absent."
After bankruptcy took my professional identity, my ego seemed to recede. I became progressively less and less interested in making something else of myself. For the first time, I stopped striving to become something other than I was. I also lost much of my former curiosity for uncovering who or what I actually might be beneath my cloaking exterior. I became more instinctual as I became less purposeful. I began following my senses. I was never skilled at following maps, so I relied upon a kind of dead reckoning to guide me. I'd imagine the topography, then follow where that notion led me. I often ended up very near where I intended. I sometimes ended up in another county, but neither outcome mattered. I usually had no particular place to be. I held few imperatives. I began thinking of myself as more an observer than a player. What I wanted or needed didn't seem to matter very much after we were Exiled.
My therapist friend Carole first noted my ego's absence.
MissingHistory
Arnold Topp: Abstract Composition, from the portfolio "New European Graphics, Portfolio III: German Artists"
[Abstrakte Komposition, aus Bauhaus Mappe "Neue Europäische Graphik III: Deutsche Künstler"]
(1921)
"I couldn't hope to become a local while being Exiled there …"
Exiles arrive with little knowledge of the history of the place they're relegated. They remain contextless for a time. In some ways, their initial contextlessness never leaves them, for most of the local history could never have been captured in stories and books but needed living to comprehend. Even the written stories impart little meaning without some understanding of locations. Locations take considerable time to imprint on any newcomer who first tries to get from place to place and can't yet be bothered with history's subtler dimension. Later, an insipient disorientation settles over the Exile, and he seeks resolution. He asks questions, hears stories, and slowly starts comprehending.
Once we'd arrived in Colorado, I'd occasionally meet someone who claimed to have grown up there.
TrackingIn
Pierre Redouté: Morus rubra = Murier rouge. [Red Mulberry] (1801 - 1819)
"We couldn't help but TrackIn some of what we'd acquired … ."
The house I grew up in featured a Mulberry tree in the backyard. It grew over the clothesline, resulting in some interesting sheets reminiscent of Batik in season. Us kids would climb high to reach the ripe fruit, TrackingIn bright purple footprints across my mother's kitchen floor. Ever since then, I can't help but imagine myself TrackingIn whatever I've just been walking through. This time of year (late November), I notice my Muck shoes carrying smashed Dogwood berries in their treads. Last night, while The Muse and I were preparing supper, I noticed we were listening to The Big Broadcast, a Sunday night tradition broadcast on Washington, DC's NPR station, WAMU. This show replays radio dramas from the heydays, and it, along with Hot Jazz Saturday Night, became a habit when we were living in Exile in Takoma Park. We continued listening when we relocated our Exile to Colorado and still tune in sometimes now that we've returned home.
Nobody returns unchanged from any Exile.
ElbowRoom
Eugène Delacroix: Standing Lion (1833)
" … lest I become a traitor to my home."
I continued my Discrediting efforts for the duration of our Exile. I wanted to avoid becoming 'of' Colorado, for that would violate my relationship with my true home, the one from which The Muse and I were then Exiled. I tolerated no mixed emotions; even when I found some aspect of our temporary home endearing, I'd find some reason to characterize it as one down from my "real" home. Denver was remarkably easy to characterize so, for it was always a curious major city. It didn't look the least bit pretty, though the views could be fantastic. It grew according to nobody's master plan, being one of those railroad towns that got out of hand. It grew by booms and busts, upward and outward when the times were good, and then down and out when the booms went bust. All the booms eventually went bust except for the population one. A confusion of brick buildings were torn down in the fifties and sixties in the unlikely belief that skyscrapers would replace the resulting naked parcels. The naked parcels remain today and serve as eyesores and parking lots, some with unlikely single-story suburban buildings littering urban views.
Had the place been Vienna or Rome, I would have extended the same treatment, for I was in the business of ego defense.
Discrediting
Edward Donovan: Anchovy, Clupea encrasicolus (1804)
" … not a single deli in all of Denver could hold even a small candle [to the one I left behind.]"
Under the Absence Makes The Heart Grow Fonder Clause of the Exile's Charter, I set about hazing our new location shortly after we arrived. I've noticed that I do this by attempting to discredit the new place by demonstrating how different it is from the old familiar one. As with anywhere, living there accustoms one to certain readily available items. For instance, people living near the ocean grow accustomed to eating only the freshest fish. Move one of them inland, and you'll likely hear no end of complaining at first about how much better the fish were when they lived at the beach. There will be no slight hint of derision embedded within these complaints. Perhaps they're protecting or promoting their ego. The net effect of these grumbles reduces the validity of the newer place. I'm uncertain why this is so often the case.
I felt the lack of Italian delis almost as soon as we landed in Colorado.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 11/21/2024
Mary Cassatt: Meditation (1883)
You Were A Gem
My first wife's mother, Nancy, my first mother-in-law and kids' grandma, died this week, aged ninety-six. Her mother, "Grandma Nelly," had lived into her nineties before her, just like most purebred Norwegian women do. She was an educator and a former Dean of both Seattle Central Community College and Chemekita Community College in Salem, OR. She profoundly influenced me, her son-in-law, who had been designated Not College Material in high school. She encouraged me to continue my education after I'd been out of high school for seven years. She gave me a book that showed me what my working-class upbringing had never known. It explained which clothes fit what conditions, when to wear a brown suit and what to wear with it, and how to comport myself in business, stuff my business school studies never covered. I learned to dress at a price point above my station and to shop the all-essential menswear sales. Her master's degree was in home economics, and her PhD was in education. She was a whiz in the kitchen and could paint, hang wallpaper, and sew with the best of them. She finally convinced her caregivers to stop trying so hard to prolong her life. She told them this dying stuff was boring, like watching paint dry. She died like she'd always lived, on her own terms. Rest In Peace, Nancy. You were a gem!
AWriter_(4)
Lambert Antoine Claessens,
After Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn:
Philosopher, Meditating (18th-19th century)
" … evidence that I'm at least still trying to make some difference."
I recently realized that this year, 2024, I have been meditating twice daily for fifty years, with very few instances where I could not maintain this pattern. I have yet to give up on the promise the practice held, and while it promises nothing explicit, the implicit benefits continue to attract my almost undivided attention. Initially, the promoters of the practice promised no end to the benefits. They described it as a backdoor route to everything from perfect health to increased intelligence. Some of the devotees went on to carry their originating metaphor out of all reasonableness, claiming they could break some of the otherwise immutable laws of physics. I never held much interest in violating otherwise immutable laws of physics, so my practice has encompassed much more modest objectives, like no explicit objectives at all.
I firmly believe that it's beneficial for me to engage in something diligently, so fervently that I will not shirk even such a trumped-up obligation as meditation.
AWriter_(3)
Edouard Vuillard: Album Cover for Landscapes and Interiors (1899)
"I became AWriter by typing with my two-and-a-half typing fingers: Another Summer."
The Muse recalls always thinking of me as AWriter because I always seemed to be writing, but I had not gained the discipline being AWriter requires. She says she thought I'd become a consultant to collect material, and she might be right. To my mind, AWriter, a real one, writes. Their writing can't be contingent upon how they feel or whether they're inspired unless they trade in mere transcription. I once believed writing required inspiration or some other high-minded situation to express itself. That became a self-defeating belief because it often dissuaded me from writing. It generated excuses instead. Whatever else might be the case, a straightforward fact underlies the whole writing business: Writers Write. It's just as simple and certainly no more complicated than that.
That said, though, it must matter what AWriter writes.
AWriter_(2)
John La Farge: The Dawn [Former Title: Dawn on the Edge of Night] (1899)
" … before I could properly proclaim myself AWriter."
When my soul brother died of ALS, I became the apparent heir to replace him as the author's representative on our mutual publisher's board of directors. This nomination boosted my sense of legitimacy as an author, if not necessarily as a writer. It was unusual in the publishing industry for an author's representative, let alone an actual author, to serve on a publishing company's board. Other board members included a bookshop owner, a diversity and inclusion expert, also an author, and a woman who worked for a prominent author's company, so it was more than just me there representing author interests. The assignment confused me since its details had little to do with what interested me. I was never that into balance sheets, but the responsibilities leaned more toward encouraging a coherence between the firm's philosophy and its operations. That purpose was right up my alley. I even felt hesitantly competent to serve.
The firm's CEO took to coaching me through a book idea I'd been harboring but hadn't managed to get flying.
AWriter_(1)
Jan Ekels II: A Writer Trimming his Pen (1784)
"I wasn't quite a writer yet …"
I discovered that I'd become a writer while in Exile. This discovery took a while, for I needed to work through the usual stages of acceptance to make it. I had already become an author by the time I made this discovery, and though I'd been writing for decades, this discovery shocked me. I had previously considered myself a wannabe writer with the aspiration but without the necessary certifications. I didn't yet understand just how one became a writer. I just knew that I hadn't become one until then, I had. The final transformation came in a moment of begrudging and beligerate acceptance, an "alright, then, dammit" moment that finally quieted the roiling questioning and controversy forever. Before, I wasn't. After, I really was.
This discovery resolved nothing but the lingering background uncertainty anybody might hold about any aspiration.
TheLight
Warren Mack: Colorado Landscape (First half, 20th Century)
"The last half of our Exile would surely cast lasting shadows."
Before we left Takoma Park and The East, I would tune into television serials set in The West to vicariously experience TheLight. The atmosphere in the East becomes heavier. It seems to blot out much of light's native intensity. A few Spring and Autumn days might approach the everyday clarity of TheLight in The West, but in Colorado, every day features blinding brilliance. I noticed that difference first. I'd rise early to write on the East-facing concrete pad porch of our Barbie and Ken transitional apartment to watch the sun rise out of Kansas to bathe the bluffs and plains in its purity. At better than a mile high, the air's thin, so the sun slips right in. Sunglasses were never optional there. I wore long sleeves and havelocks to avoid melanomas.
I watched for that returning sun every morning The Muse and I lived there.
Suburbia
William Michael Harnett: For Sunday’s Dinner (1888)
"I said I thought I might be able to live there …"
Though I was raised in the fifties and sixties, I came of age without developing an appreciation for the modern American suburb. We lived in a turn-of-the-century castle, compared to the concrete slab construction passed off as Mid-Century Modern. I disliked the gently curving streets inevitably leading into cul-de-sacs in which those places tended to be built. The streets typically sported what I labeled Tourquise Names, with hyphenations stolen from far-away places, describing nothing similar to the local topography. Mar-a-Lago Lane overlooking high desert terrain. Their cookie-cutter sameness and visual blandness, with each place identical to its next-door neighbors, disturbed something wild within me. I'd always dreaded ending up in some Suburbia somewhere.
Exiles exist to expose us to our worst-case scenarios.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 11/14/2024
Archibald McLees, Engraver: New Spencerian compendium of penmanship, Part 2 (1879)
We Can Be Certain Now
When I began writing this series, I couldn't have known we would experience something like another Exile together when I was halfway through creating it. Exiles might be much more common than I had earlier appreciated. I had innocently figured that most people never experience that sort of trauma, and it was consequently a rare sort of event. I recognize familiar tells when surveying my friends and colleagues' reactions since the recent election. We're all Exiles now, seemingly kidnapped against our will and forced to cope with conditions we'd hoped we'd never have to face. Our faith has already been wounded, and we anticipate it will get worse, much worse. We're heartbroken, and we damned well should be. What's coming still seems utterly unnecessary. We seriously believed that we were better than this. It sure seemed like we used to be. These feelings provide the context within which Exiles have always existed. The sense of unfairness never completely relents. It would be unreasonable for me not to doubt my ability to cope with the upcoming insults. Must we exist on platitudes now? We were formerly engaged in serious business. We're forced to struggle to barely achieve survival, and even that's in question now. All Exiles start the same, with their end in question. Every Exile ends differently; of this, alone, We Can Be Certain Now.
VenueChange
She wrangled a transfer to her lab's home office in Colorado, where real estate seemed more affordable. Slip over here for more ...
Visitors
Isaac Israels: Two Donkeys (1897 - 1901)
Gallery Notes:
Scheveningen’s donkeys were not just entertainment for seaside visitors; Israels made grateful use of them in his paintings. He portrayed them a few times, either with children riding or a boy leading, or as here, waiting for the next ride. Their keeper lies in the foreground, on the sand.
"I remember we'd once been Exiled before our Visitors found us home."
Visitors transformed our Exile. On our first days there, two old friends just happened to be passing through the area to visit relatives, and we spent two days easing into that terribly unfamiliar place together. It seemed much less foreboding with them there to distract us into entertaining. Something about visitors brings the host out in us. We might not usually take ourselves out to dinner, but when we have Visitors, we're much more likely to consent to the splurge and even try to find the best. I become tour guide-y, even when I'm unfamiliar with the territory. I have an almost uncanny ability to find interesting places, and our Visitors almost always appreciate my efforts. We wouldn't have visited half the tourist traps in DC had Visitors' presence not quietly goaded us into agreeing to go.
The GrandOtter was our most frequent Visitor after we were Exiled.
Just_Visiting
Philippe Pigouchet: Visitation, from Book of Hours (15th Century)
" Who would greet us when we returned?"
During Exile, The Muse and I were able to infrequently return to the scene of our banishment to visit family and friends. We learned early in our Exile that holidays were lousy times to visit since people already had their traditions, and the last thing they needed was some fifth-wheel visitors messing up their rhythms. Also, we ached to visit ordinary times rather than during celebrations when people might be on their best or worst behavior. The one visit we made over Christmas, early in our Exile, proved disastrous. We never attempted a repeat performance.
I usually managed to make it back for my grandson Roman's birthday, even though it was in February.
DaGoils
Beatrix Potter: Cats in the Window (1909)
" … those fading days may never go away."
Before I move these stories away from Takoma Park, I must recount one of the most fulfilling activities I engaged in there. Our Sherman Street neighbor and benefactor Clair had been involved with a group that cared for the town's many feral cat colonies. He recruited me to take a turn. Rather than try to domesticate these critters, these people trapped and neutered them, then returned them to the wild, returning daily to feed them forever. Each volunteer agreed to feed a certain number of cat colonies for specific days each week. I decided to service five drops, four days each week. I was responsible for buying and dropping the food off each designated day.
The colonies lived invisibly.
StatusQuoing
Constant Troyon:
Vache qui se gratte [Scratching Cow] (1858)
"I knew most people only in passing."
Eventually, that second Exile settled into the very soul of domestic tranquility. The Muse's early struggles to adapt to her job's politics settled into her widely acknowledged mastery of that context. She held a job that made a difference and was held in high esteem by her colleagues. I, too, had found a level. The yard in Willow Street offered me opportunities to tend a garden and mow a lawn. That house could have been more reliable. The HVAC repair man and I were on a first-name basis. He confided that the owner had installed the air conditioners upside down and backward. The house was so big, and the climate was so fierce that two air conditioning systems were stacked into the attic. The heating system, too, exhibited problems. We returned from a visit home to learn that the young woman we'd hired to tend cats and plants hadn't noticed that the furnace had failed. We lost about half the house plants, and the basement filled with millipedes. Millions of them. That took some serious cleaning up.
That landlord had hired a management company to watch over his home while it was rented out.
Preservation
Pieter van der Heyden after Pieter Bruegel: Everyman (1556 - 1560)
Gallery Notes: The bearded figure with the lantern represents Everyman during his lifelong search. The legend explains, ‘Everyone searches for himself in various things, all over the world. How can anyone then get lost, when one is always looking for oneself? However, no one knows himself, … Whoever understands this has insight into a great miracle’.
"We live lives of ritual and habit …"
Pieter van der Heyden after Pieter Bruegel: Everyman (1556 - 1560)
Gallery Notes: The bearded figure with the lantern represents Everyman during his lifelong search. The legend explains, ‘Everyone searches for himself in various things, all over the world. How can anyone then get lost, when one is always looking for oneself? However, no one knows himself… Whoever understands this has insight into a great miracle’.
"We live lives of ritual and habit …"
Life continues in remarkably similar aspects even after being Exiled. Conservation and Preservation Laws applicable to physical systems also seem to apply when considering social ones. My rituals and familiar patterns continued trying to replicate themselves even once their originating contexts disappeared. Many attempts seemed absurd, though I rarely considered whether my intentions were reasonable. We were used to taking Sunday toodles when living in our small city, so we attempted to continue the ritual after moving into a big one. It might have taken us half the afternoon to get to what we might consider country, at which point we'd have to turn around to get back home by suppertime. We toodled anyway! In this and a thousand other ways, we preserved our rituals even into Exile.
Before, we'd home-can tomatoes every summer.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 11/07/2024
Charles White: Harvest Talk (1953)
Frequent readers might recall that The Muse and I started a project to remodel our front porch in the first week of August. We end the first week of November without a completed remodel, ultimately violating our original worst case by not completing it by Halloween. Halloween found me camped out in front of the blocked-off front porch steps to ensure no goblin fell into our porch deck frame's black hole. I’ve reset my original expectations a half dozen times since we started. Everything I knew about project work informs me that we're executing normally. No project was ever supposed to be completed on the initially expected schedule. Each rightly became an exercise in recovering from the shock and shame of turning out different than initially expected. Project Mastery, a subject in which I once taught well-respected workshops, was always about managing emerging expectations rather than ensuring the originals occurred. No force in the known universe could ever ensure satisfying original expectations and it's at best naive to presume that anyone in this generation could so succeed. No, we're born to experience serial failures and somehow manage to recover from them. The MAGAs will prove to have been every bit as cruel and unreasonable as we expected they would be, and we will prove to be worthy of unexpected opponents. Who will ultimately win depends upon whether one believes in an end to history. I suspect the people to whom I will become the 16th great-grandchild will still wrestle with the same dichotomies. Evil might be just as eternal as good. My job, and your job, must be to stand on the side of good, however seductive evil might seem this time. Thank you for following along!
Tourististan
C. M. Bell: Smithsonian Institute.[still image Stereograph} (1870-79)
" … charge nothing for admission but leave a much more lasting impression."
Neither The Muse nor I had ever lived in such proximity to famous places until we were Exiled to our nation's capital. There, a National Mall holds a collection of monuments and museums that contain something akin to our national heritage. Millions of visitors travel long distances to visit these places. It's a tradition that if you're about to graduate from a high school located anywhere along the Eastern Seaboard, your class will travel by bus to what The Muse and I came to call Tourististan. On any odd summer afternoon, tour busses line The Mall from Fifteenth Street to the foot of Capitol Hill, idling, belching diesel smoke. They disgorge their passengers into swirling crowds of the usual suspects: boys showing off to imaginary girlfriends and preening teen females carrying identical non-functional purses. Add to the mix families pushing strollers filled with kids too young to appreciate anything they might witness. Welcome to Tourististan.
We gave The Mall wagon room and usually went out of our way to avoid the place.
Dislocated
7310 Willow Street, Takoma Park, MD (2012)
"Dislocations do not always prove to be as perilous as they seem."
Three years into our Exile, The Muse and I were Exiled again when our landlord informed us that he would sell the Sherman Street house. He and his wife were relocating back to the States from The Hague and needed the cash out of that house to buy themselves a place in Houston—no hard feelings, nothing personal. We would have put an offer on the place if we had been in any position to purchase it, but we were still recovering from our bankruptcy three years earlier and couldn't quite imagine floating the deal. We'd been juggling finances since we began our Exile. The Muse had contracted with a couple to make a down payment on a rent-to-own arrangement that gave us some cushion, but that deal had fallen apart after less than a year. Those renters had left the place worse for their wear. The Muse's son agreed to move in and help recover from the damage for reduced rent, so we'd been paying premium rent in Takoma Park and subsidizing our original mortgage back home.
The last thing either of us wanted was to go out searching for another place to live.
Self-Determination
Laura Theresa Alma-Tadema: Self-Help (c. 1885)
"When I could no longer believe in who I might become …"
Besides laying open the myth that I could return home for Christmas, my Exile also displaced my inherited faith in the great American Self-Determination Myth. Most Americans of my generation were taught that we could accomplish anything we put our minds to and that any of us could grow up to become President. This might have been an odd offshoot of Jefferson's assertion that all men are created equal, a helpful fiction not necessarily intended to have been interpreted literally. Anyway, like almost everybody, I came of age believing my lot in life, if not at that moment improving, was definitely, if invisibly, trending better. Sure, my current trajectory might seem unpromising, but the magic of Self-Determinism would shortly muster a miracle. I just needed to contribute faith, patience, and persistence.
The thing about belief was always that it conveniently becomes self-sealing.
AwayForHolidays
Lucian and Mary Brown: Untitled [boy with Easter egg] (c. 1950)
" … celebrations exclusively reserved for nuclear families …"
A myth promotes the idea that anyone far away might successfully return home for holidays. I'd attempted to accomplish this end for most of my adult life before being Exiled. Once Exiled, the underlying truth finally sunk in. Before Exile, I grew up and moved away, dutifully returning almost every Christmas and many Thanksgiving holidays. I considered these excursions high points. I'd reclaim my childhood bedroom and introduce my kids to country Christmas traditions, though I might have noticed I no longer belonged there. It had not been my home for years, and my annual return was more nostalgic than substantial. I'd forgotten how to appropriately dress there, and my interests seemed more distant from theirs every year. I sincerely wanted to be everybody's favorite uncle, but nobody ever gets to be an absentee anything. You're either there or not; if you're not almost always there, you've already gone, your annual appearance more ghostly than actual.
Exiled to the odd other coast, returning home for Christmas was mostly out of the question.
PoliticalExile
Emil Orlik: Three Women 1905
" … a much broader connection than I ever could have discovered had I just stayed home."
Our Exile was as much a political act as it was social. Our business went bankrupt in no small part due to the corrupt practices of the George W. Bush administration. The mortgage bubble his supply-sided economic policies promoted ultimately brought down the economy on our shoulders. He'd been doing damage to the high-tech industries our consulting firm relied upon since the very beginning of his very first term. His hasty invasion of Afghanistan, followed by his foolish incursion into Iraq on blatantly false premises, had amplified uncertainty, which is one thing every economy fears. The oughts were fraught with stupid political turbulence. We fled into Exile and the welcoming, reassuring arms of the first term of the Obama administration. Washington, DC, in those days, was a palpably hopeful place. Obama had made viable a hope many had not dared to dream. We relocated to a place very near the center of that renewed enthusiasm.
We had been politically active before being Exiled.
TheInvisibleHusband
Carle Vernet: Hussard Walking in Front of his Horse,
Smoking a Pipe (February 8, 1817)
" … one impossible plan."
It might be true that every Exile serves their time alone. Certainly, The Muse's Exile seemed very different than mine. She would disappear into the Takoma Park Metro Station every morning and return every evening, off to engage in meaningful work and petty politics. She was an increasingly significant presence in her workplace, expanding her role from its initially forgettable status into something with genuine if informal, influence. She was becoming something. I was the one who ensured she got up on time and would often give her a ride to the station. In the six years we lived in Takoma Park, she drove the car to work three times. I regulated her departures and arrivals. Having supper ready when she returned became my primary occupation.
I had rarely had so much alone time.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 10/31/2024
Edvard Munch: The Vampire II (1895/1902)
We're Not Going Backward
I have avoided making overt political statements in my stories, and not only because politics tend to render stories less timeless. For instance, I did not write a January 6, 2020 story, though I've never tried to hide my affiliations. Like you, I have always believed Trump was a dumpster fire. He represented what was always reprehensible about Americans stretching back before and including Andrew Jackson’s champions, which included some of my forebears. I might be remiss if I missed this opportunity to acknowledge at least that these Exiled Stories, as well as the preceding Grace and Fambly stories, were all created beneath a pall of the possibility that old Mr. Corruption might get reelected. Now, five days before the election, his reelection seems even more impossible than it appeared eight years ago when we were all blindsided by the most catastrophic election returns in the country's history. Trump didn't disappoint my expectations for an instant of his term. He proved inept and incapable, the very soul of terrible. He's only gotten worse since.
But I come here to praise Harris, not to recount Trump's many shortcomings. If he didn't have shortfalls, he wouldn’t have any falls at all, for he's a singularly unimpressive person, a failure by almost every measure; even his purported wealth appears to have been phony. He still owes money to every venue he rented for his 2020 campaign. This campaign only made that debt worse.
Harris has already accomplished what so recently seemed impossible. She's managed in a few scant months to remind us who we were and who we might become again. The seething foreground her opponent foments was never once a threat unless, and of course, we took that noise seriously. She didn't and hasn't, and in the process of taking her opponent unseriously, she's reminded me of who I intended to be. I had been afraid and needed reassurance. I believe we all needed to see a slim woman stand up to that shameful fatcat and his minions as if they couldn't ever lay a hand on her. They haven't. They couldn't. They can't. They will continue to ineffectively rant, but we're well on to their con.
I feel courageous now, American rather than cowardly courageous, the kind that proudly hails instead of disgracing itself. Harris did the impossible. She reignited a flame that most commentators had insisted might never burn again. I could not have been more delighted to vote for Harris and Walz. I have avoided engaging in the traditional catastrophizing Democrats always engage in every four years. I have at times pretended to feel confident that the American character remained intact, that it had only been napping and would be ready to engage again once awakened. I'm awake now that we're not going backward but forward again. Finally!
Reading
Anonymous: A Man Reading (c. 1660)
"I gratefully retained little but the memory of the pleasure I derived when Reading to survive my exile."
However hostile and unwelcoming DC initially seemed, its libraries warmly embraced me. From the Arlington County library in Ballston, Virginia, and on to Takoma Park's little city library and Montgomery County, Maryland's Silver Spring branch, I found warm refuge within each. I rushed to the Ballston Branch to find a remarkably bright and well-appointed space when we were still in temporary housing. I marveled at the selections and immediately chose two books that would profoundly influence me and my upcoming transition. James Carse's The Religious Case Against Belief and James Hoopes' False Prophets: The Gurus Who Created Modern Management and Why Their Ideas Are Bad for Business Today. Carse's book reminded me that the purpose of inquiry might never be to find an answer but perhaps to more deeply appreciate the questions. Hoopes' book read like I had written it and reassured me that maybe I wasn't as crazy as I sometimes felt. I also found some CDs by Acoustic Academy. These became the soundtrack for my upcoming successful house search. I devoured those books before rushing back for more.
Those libraries and, more importantly, their books became my refuge while I was Exiled.
Carole
Jack Gould: Untitled (man talking on telephone, looking down) (c. 1950)
"She was my guardian angel …"
Joinings and ChanceEncounters aside, I felt intensely lonely after we were Exiled. I became a resident alien who would never feel entirely at home in my indentured homeland. I'd lost more than my home. My career had imploded with the bankruptcy. I lost my business partner, who had necessarily moved on and into another career so that we might survive. I proved less adaptable. The Republicans had left the economy in another tailspin again, and jobs were scarce, but even if jobs had not been thin, I was uncertain if I would ever prove to be employable again. The segment of society I'd successfully serviced seemed to have evaporated, and I felt every bit the old dog considering new tricks. I had not just been Exiled but obsoleted. None of my formerly familiar employments seemed available. I felt cut loose and sinking.
My writing seemed like something I might successfully fall into again.
ChanceEncounters
Edvard Munch: Encounter in Space
Original Language Title: Møte i verdensrommet
Original Language Title: Begegnung im Weltall
Former Title: Meeting in Space
(1898-1899)
"It’s the purpose to which we are blind that determines what we’ll leave behind."
Meeting Mitzi during that GWU lecture series was just one of the consequential ChanceEncounters I experienced while Exiled. It seemed as though one of the purposes of being Exiled was to stir up the old routine to increase the likelihood of ChanceEncounters occurring. I've long considered them just the sort of magic this world relies upon, for formal channels seem far too narrow to produce sufficiently substantial connections. However much the matchmakers might insist on the importance of formal introductions, informal ones most often suffice. Of course, they lack the sense that anything of substance might be brewing.` They're notoriously easy to miss, even if one's paying close attention. I suspect that a certain inconvenience improves these outcomes. They happen through a fog of annoyance. They happen to us. How fortunate for us and the world when we notice.
The Muse was never fully satisfied that I had not become a hermit while we were Exiled.
Cadencing
Pierre-Auguste Renoir: Near the Lake (1879/80)
"Better if it stays a mystery …"
As unlikely as it had seemed when we moved in the first of July, a rough rhythm had begun emerging from our SettlingIn by August. The GrandOtter was visiting, as she had back home in summer's past, encouraging a sense of continuity. Sure, we were still almost entirely unfamiliar with the territory we'd inhabited. Still, with remarkably few repetitions, the sense of surreal novelty began dissipating, with a false sense of familiarity replacing it. We were still strangers enough to believe we'd mastered what we couldn't comprehend, but a routine emerged. We knew where to go to find gelato, which provided ample encouragement that we were at least secure.
While we were still in our temporary housing, when we were still searching for a place to live, my publisher sponsored a book marketing seminar I attended.
Joinings
Unknown Artist: Hurdigurdiano joining in the wedding dance of Signora Fisketti (19th Century)
" … a heretical thought for this formerly heartbroken Exile."
Unknown Artist: Hurdigurdiano joining in the wedding dance of Signora Fisketti (19th Century)
" … a heretical thought for this formerly heartbroken Exile."
I was never much of a joiner. The Muse belongs to a half-dozen societies and study groups. I stay at home to get supper ready for when she returns. If I had been a joiner, I might have found a church to join after we had been exiled. Takoma Park featured several fine churches to choose from, representing all the usual denominations, but I never learned how to select a denomination, and I remain uninterested in doctrine. I "joined" the Library of Congress. The Jefferson Building's Reading Room served as an ample cathedral for me. I could choose my own doctrine there from the most extensive collection of material ever assembled. I could access much of it, too, and even have books delivered to my study shelf. I'd hop the Metro or sometimes ride my bike down to that library, where I'd sit on a hardwood chair every bit as torturous as the worst Pilgrim or Quaker pew. I almost always felt saved when I stood up to leave at the end of the day.
The Muse was dissatisfied, though, with my general get-up-and-go.
Belonging
Cornelis Visscher (II): Abraham verlaat Haran
(Abraham leaves Haran], after Jacopo Bassano (1638 - 1702)
"I could not hope to thrive without holding some deep sense of Belonging …"
Being Exiled disrupted my sense of Belonging. I fled from a place I had been steeped in all my life to a place where I didn't know myself from Adam. So much of anyone's identity seems intrinsically tied to their place, their spot, that prolonged distance from there wears one down. The open-ended prospect of never returning should be more than merely disturbing; it should and did spark a genuine existential crisis for me because I'd lost the defining element of my identity. I could and did navigate our new world as if I were present, but I wasn't. I might have been somebody else, and I could not have told anyone who that somebody else might have been. I arrived and lived initially as a placeholder of myself, hollowed out and thin.
A concerted search for myself ensued and took several forms.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 10/24/2024
A. J. Defehrt: Art of Writing, from Encyclopédie (1760)
Memorable And Mild
Anticipating the season's first freeze has always signaled a frenetic response from me. Even when we were Exiled, I'd scurry around draining hoses and composting the contents of planters, maybe managing a final garden weeding before the pre-winter freeze settled in. I accomplish an easy dozen long-procrastinated chores that final afternoon. I even bring a few favorites inside, believing they might thrive, though they only sometimes manage to survive. The Muse complains that I bring in more white flies than begonias and geraniums. I have always been a soft-hearted gardener, hesitant to prune, so my garden becomes overgrown. I meticulously compost, though, and that last afternoon before the first freeze typically sees much material added to the composter. I'd bought some fresh composting worms and added them to my newly relined bins earlier in the week. I added the remaining rhubarb and that volunteer tomato that has seeded itself beneath the witch hazel bush with the contents of a half dozen petunia planters on top. When the frost coats the pile, the guts of that bin will be seething with enthusiasm. By Spring, I'll have a couple of cubic yards of the finest worm casings and a few hard husks and cobs of indigestible corn, marking the end of this year’s growing season. May the upcoming winter be memorable and mild!
Walking
Gesina ter Borch: Walking Skeleton (c. 1656)
"Better for me to maintain about the speed of a walking horse …"
Exile encouraged The Muse and I to engage in Walking. I believe it's true that urbanites walk more than their suburban or rural counterparts. The suburbs seem predicated upon automobile travel. One must hop in the car to go anywhere there. Even more so, our rural relatives, for everything there lies further than a short walk away. Our Takoma Park place was almost a mile from the Metro station, a comfortable twenty-minute walk. We soon considered it nothing to take that hike. Likewise, we could walk to the food co-op, the farmer's market, the local library and the video store, and even supper. Before we realized it, we had changed our lifestyle. Walking became an integral part of our Exiled days. The house was also within two blocks from about five different bus lines. It became more convenient to hop on the bus and walk than to find and pay for a place to park on the other side, so we walked. We became walkers.
In this respect, if few others, our lives in Exile were vastly improved over how they'd been before.
Credentials
Charles Le Brun: King Louis XIV Receiving Ambassadors from the Court of Spain (c. 1674)
" … just another form of playing the same game …"
No other place in this country was ever even half as formal as Washington, DC. Everybody there seems to carry Credentials, usually on a lanyard around their neck. Those without that lanyard seem mysterious. Perhaps they're visitors? Maybe one of the rare private sector employees? Most work for our government and interact with material deemed secret from somebody. Every lobby features a security checkpoint requiring ID to pass. Office suites require a magnetic card or an escort to enter. Further, business casual has yet to arrive and might never arrive. The men wear suits and ties, and the women wear equally formal attire. Casual Fridays were never observed. People engage exclusively in serious business, much of it mandated by Congress.
The Muse received her credentials after undergoing a thorough FBI background check.
BigBox
Ken Whitmire Associates:
Untitled [interior of a store] (c. 1940, restored 1970s)
"I preferred the neighborhood hardware store over the Home Despot …"
Shopping seemed less a necessity in DC than a pastime. Sundays, it seemed people flocked to shopping malls and Big Box Stores. Parking lots filled, and a seemingly sacred commerce commenced. Somebody would always be in the market for a mattress, so they were always on sale, never not! Families seemed to promenade around shopping centers as if on display themselves. Kiosks featuring the most curious businesses attracted what appeared to be primarily teenage girls. We would go when The Muse deemed necessary, for I would never even imagine going to such places unassisted. Truth told, I'd often cool my heels in the car instead of accompanying her inside, for those places always seemed so out of scale they terrified me. Further, our recent bankruptcy had left me with an aversion to buying stuff. I figured I could hold off buying things until they were really needed, and if my luck held, I'd never need to buy anything but groceries again.
Back home, we didn't have Big Box stores, so I never needed to learn how to navigate them.
EssentialErrors
Charles Bird King:
The Vanity of the Artist's Dream (1830)
Former Title: The Anatomy of Art Appreciation
Former Title: Poor Artist's Study
Former Title: Still Life, The Vanity of An Artist's Dream
Gallery Text:
In this humorous still life, King pokes fun at popular taste and laments the plight of the arts in America. A masterful example of trompe l’oeil illusion, the painting depicts a cupboard filled with the possessions of an ambitious and well-educated but financially unsuccessful painter. Brushes, drafting tools, treatises on art, and a cast of the head of the Apollo Belvedere, the celebrated antique sculpture, are crammed in next to stacks of unpaid bills, letters from parsimonious patrons, and a “last prize” medal. Behind the loaf of bread, a fictitious news report complete with typographical errors ridicules the unsophisticated tastes of the era, and makes clear that America was a difficult place for painters like King who wanted to emulate the arts culture of Europe in the new republic: "The exhibition of a Cats Skin in Philadelphia produced TWELVE HUNDRED DOLLARS, totally eclipsing its rival the splendid portrait of [Benjamin] WEST by Sir T. LAWRENCE, the later we regret to state, did not produce enough to PAY ITS EXPENSES. OH’ ATHENS OF AMERICA. I, American (Newport, RI 1785 - 1862 Washington, DC)"
"I was usually successful when staying his hand!"
Being Exiled necessitated resolving many long-settled dilemmas. For instance, I'd encountered the necessity of finding a barber shortly after we moved into our temporary quarters. This might have once been a trivial challenge, but no longer. Now, the field seems crowded with pretenders, people who might hang their shingle without the first idea of how to barber. Some characterize themselves as "stylists," a meaningless term strongly suggesting someone who chose beauty college over learning the barbering trade. Stylists tend to call their shops "salons," as if to announce that they are different, hugging to the higher end of style and service when, in fact, they're mostly beauty parlor operators. According to some long-ago misplaced agreement, men were never supposed to break the sanctity of beauty parlors, and women were to respect the neutrality of barber shops. Greying this boundary has radicalized what was once a simple hygiene activity, turning it into a cultural statement accompanied by many seething resentments.
I'd maintained the same stylist in Portland for over a quarter century.
Stranger
Walter Crane: The strangers entertained (1910)
"Avoiding traffic became my occupation …"
I recently had a conversation with one of The Muse’s fellow Port Commissioners. He reported that he had been worrying about an impending move. He and his wife had bought a condo in town into which they would soon relocate. He explained that when he first married, he’d moved out of his parent’s place on the farm and into what had been his grandparent’s house next door. He’d lived there until ten years ago when he built his present house three miles from where he was raised. This condo would be the furthest he’d ever lived from his home place. It was ten miles away, in town. He said he’d never been away for longer than two weeks in his whole life, and he was wondering what might become of him if he couldn’t look up to see the familiar hills or predict the weather by checking what the clouds were doing. He seemed to have been scared of becoming a Stranger. I knew too well how he felt.
Once the movers left, I realized I could no longer consider myself a visitor.
MisRemembering
George Inness: October Noon (1891)
Gallery Text
Blurred, softly painted, and almost otherworldly, October Noon differs markedly from the realistic, crisply rendered American landscapes that hang nearby, such as Bierstadt’s magisterial view of the Rockies. Though Inness probably based this scene on the flat, marshy terrain near his New Jersey studio, his image retreats from hard facts and recognizable places to suggest a peaceful, imagined, or dimly remembered landscape. Formally evocative of work from the French Barbizon School, Inness’s quiet paintings found favor among New York patrons overwhelmed by the rumble of the new modern city. As one New York critic put it, “Now and then [Inness] has a picture of perfect peace. . . . It tranquilizes the soul even to look upon it.”
" … a heretic in Rome …"
Creating mémoire inevitably involves some MisRemembering. Dates, places, and sequences aren't always stored in recoverable order, and even short-term memory might prove unreliable. Still, it's a genuine shock whenever I discover that I've gone and done it again, presenting some fiction as representing what actually happened. The Muse usually serves up my undoing, for she has often been a witness or co-participant, and her memory might disagree with mine. Through such disassembly, the story might straighten, leaving me feeling at least temporarily crooked. But MisRemembering's no actual sin. It's more like a part of the price for engaging in remembering, with no way of escaping. The sin lies in the more deliberate DisRemembering, intentionally burnishing the facts, often to enhance the author's reputation. Every writer is probably capable of committing this sin. What matters might be how they respond to being outed.
I MisRemembered key elements of two recent stories, TheMove and SettlingIn.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 10/17/2024
Rembrandt van Rijn: Lieven Willemsz van Coppenol,
Writing Master: The Smaller Plate (c. 1658)
Trading In Authentic Impressions
I feel grateful for my unreliable memory. The Muse corrects me at inconvenient times, often after any possibility of properly correcting the record exists. This frustrates me, but it's exasperation of my own making. I can always make amends or attempt to. Even an inadequate explanation might restore some lost credibility if only to reset my listeners’ expectations that I'm not the most reliable source. Gratefully, my stories don't have to be true to be useful. They might accurately represent my lasting impressions even if they materially misrepresent what happened. Time scales shift. Whatever happens becomes different if seen through any rearview mirror. I'm never entirely sure I'm present at any moment, anyway. I'm reasonably confident that I was effectively absent through the first few Exiled months and I still find reason, now that I've returned, to question just how present I ever become. I distract myself partly by reflecting and attempting to remember things. I cannot simultaneously be there and here, though I don't go anywhere different when I'm in reverie, writing. I shift my attention, which doesn't demand that I watch whatever's playing before my eyes. I remain grateful that I'm so easily distracted I possess the genuine superpower to doze off, particularly when in the middle of some traumatic experience, so I never accurately record what happens. I trade in authentic impressions that might or might not necessarily strongly correlate with what actually happened.
Settling_In
Corita Kent (Sister Mary Corita): for eleanor (1964)
Inscriptions and Marks Signed: l.r.: Sister Mary Corita IHM
(not assigned): Printed text reads: THE BIG G STANDS FOR GOODN[ESS] / 4 Eleanor
" … we could read their deep disappointment at what their future had wrought."
When I was little, on Christmas morning, my siblings and I would sometimes rewrap already-opened presents so we could open them again. July 2, 2009, brought that feeling back into focus for me. After more than three dog months living without our stuff—that having been boxed up, carted off, and stored somewhere until we found a place to live—opening those boxes felt like a ginned-up Christmas. The Muse was overjoyed to be reconnected to her extensive dish collection. That house was the only one we considered that came even close to having enough kitchen cupboard space to contain it. We parked our china cabinet along the one blank kitchen wall to hold the display items.
My office space, a narrow windowed room off the dining room, seemed perfectly dimensioned for my purpose.
TheMove
Corita Kent (Sister Mary Corita): dip (1967)
Inscriptions and Marks: Signed: l.r.: Corita
(not assigned): Printed text reads: DIP / IN STOP / Cherries when love on stilts picks its way along gravel paths and reaches the treetops I too in cherries would like to experience cherries as cherries. No longer with arms too short, no longer with arms too short, with ladders on which for ever one rung, just one rung is missing, to live on stewed fruit, on windfalls. Sweet and sweeter, darkening; A red such a blackbirds dream-who here is kissing whom, when love reaches treetops on stilts. Günter Grass
"We would be months getting accustomed to Tacky Park …"
July 1, 2009, would be warm and sticky, hanging in the high seventies into the low eighties. In the unaccustomed humidity, it certainly seemed much warmer to The Muse and I with The GrandOtter beside us, as we packed up our few belongings and the cats and left the temporary housing high-rise for the last time. We were unaccustomed to the drive to the other side of The District, for Rosslyn was just over the Southern border and Takoma Park, hard on the Northeastern edge, eleven miles and nearly an hour's drive. We were to meet up with the movers at the Sherman Street house. This was the day we would finally move in; TheMove was at hand. We'd left home three full months before and overstayed our temporary housing welcome by a month, but we were finally going to land somewhere.
As it does in summer back there, the world smelled musty and damp. I'd already sweated through my clothes by the time we arrived.
Finders
George Walker: Leech finders, Plate 35 (1814)
Engraver: R. & D. Havell
"We mostly avoided going that way."
The transition from seekers to Finders felt abrupt. After weeks of fruitless seeking, we became Finders one early Sunday morning in May. We had almost overstayed our welcome in our temporary housing, for our search had apparently been unusually fruitless. The Muse pleaded for an extension, which was granted, but we were already more than ready to regain access to our stuff and move out of that high-rise. We had taken to cruising our chosen destination on weekends. The Muse with her Blackberry at the ready, refreshing CraigsList postings, so we were around the corner when our new home's listing first appeared. We were there in seconds. The owners had recruited the neighbor to show the place. They'd relocated to The Hague for the wife's job. The neighbor and I turned out to be brothers from different mothers. We instantly hit it off, and he became our champion. We learned later that he called the owners when we left to tell them that the right tenant had just left. He implored them to say "Yes," that they wouldn't ever be sorry for a second. They weren't.
A financial and credential check was still required.
North
Corita Kent (Sister Mary Corita): right (1967)
Inscriptions and Marks — Signed: l.r.: Corita
(not assigned): Printed text reads: [W]RON[G] WAY / Prophets of boom / and if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something that wants help from us. Rilke
" … With our attention finally properly focused …"
To move to Washington, DC, is to confront racism face to face. In many places, the racism seems securely hidden to the point that you'd swear it doesn't exist there, except, perhaps, in that one isolated quarter where African-Americans traditionally settled. In Portland, Oregon, where I spent twenty-nine years of my adult life, the "black" neighborhoods had been developed using an overt discrimination called "redlining." Banks would only loan mortgage money to African Americans in certain areas. When I-5 was created, it was built right through the middle of that designated area, further fragmenting and isolating the neighborhoods there. This practice was hardly unique to Portland, though. Seattle was no better and might well have been worse. The Bay Area in California designated Oakland as their minority area and the East Bay. East Palo Alto was, for years, the South Bay's designated ghetto.
When shopping for neighborhoods, our realtor advised me to avoid certain areas.
Circling
Corita Kent (Sister Mary Corita): tomorrow the stars (1966)
Inscriptions and Marks — Signed: l.r.: Sister Mary Corita (not assigned): Printed text reads: come alive / Tomorrow, the stars
"The East was looking iffy after Cheverly."
I employed a Circling process when searching for a place for us to live. Circling makes it particularly difficult to assess progress because the ending point of a Circling route is always back at the starting point. It often seems as though absolutely no progress has been made, affecting motivation. The only clues that I had been doing anything all day were the fresh marks on the master map denoting identified unsuitable areas. The Circling eventually managed to winnow down what seemed like infinite choices into a more blesséd few. I figured that any day I could disqualify an area had been well spent. I might not have produced any likely candidates, but if I had managed to eliminate territory, I wouldn't have to worry about further canvassing that area.
The elimination began before we started searching when we decided Northern Virginia would be unsuitable for our habitation.
AlmostRandomly
Corita Kent (Sister Mary Corita):
a passion for the possible (1969)
Inscriptions and Marks — Signed: l.r., within image: Corita
inscription: l.l., in graphite: 68-69-63
(not assigned): Printed text reads: Playboy: Are you hopeful that we will choose our future? William Sloane Coffin: It's possible, if not probable. If I can be theological for a moment, I think there's a great difference between being optimistic and being hopeful. I am not optimistic but I am hopeful. By this I mean that hope, as opposed to cynicism and despair, is the sole precondition for new and better experiences. Realism demands pessimism but hope demands that we take a dim view of the present because we hold a bright view of the future; and HOPE AROUSES AS NOTHING ELSE CAN AROUSE A PASSION FOR THE POSSIBLE.
"We continued searching AlmostRandomly …"
Our highest priority upon arriving in Exile became finding suitable digs. The Muse's employer had thoughtfully provided temporary housing through an Oakwood franchise, the sort of housing guaranteed to encourage short tenancy. I'd lived in an Oakwood property when working for a boutique Silicon Valley consulting firm fifteen years earlier. That was a sprawling two-story suburban affair ringing a swimming pool. This latest one was a fifteen-story highrise overlooking a firehouse. The swimming pool was situated out back behind security fencing and a thick hedge. Both were places that reeked of dislocation. I inhabited my Silicon Valley one four nights each week, baffling myself at the supermarket when failing to remember which refrigerator I was stocking. I'd invariably end up with too much and too little of some things because I could never keep my inventories straight. Our Arlington neighborhood of Rosslyn apartment wouldn't offer any such entertainment.
The apartment proved to be a definite downgrade from our usual and customary.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 10/10/2024
Corita Kent (Sister Mary Corita): n is for caution (1968)
Inscriptions and Marks
Signed: l.r.: Corita
(not assigned): Printed text reads: Throw caution to the wind
inscription: l.l.: 68-69-14
—
My Context Trying To Clue Me In
During an optometrist appointment this week, I was delighted to notice that I could easily read the bottom line on the chart with or without my glasses. My eyesight improved and stabilized after cataract surgeries four or five years ago. Those surgeries marked the end of my middle ages, for it was when prepping for the surgery that my high blood pressure was first acknowledged. I pled that I suffered from White Coat Syndrome, where the presence of a medical professional elevated my blood pressure to alarming levels, but neither The Muse nor the doctors bought my story. The Muse insisted, as only The Muse can insist, that I finally find a personal doctor. I'd successfully avoided having one through my remarkably healthy fifties and well into my sixties, but I complied and began regularly visiting pharmacies shortly after that. My blood pressure returned to normal, and my eyesight improved, so I felt satisfied when my eyes seemed to see so well during that latest examination. Then came the part where I was told to cover one eye and read the chart. My right eye worked fine, but the chart became a complete blur when I covered it to read from my left unassisted. I couldn't even read the largest letters. I spent the better part of a half-hour fussing about my performance before I checked my glasses. The left lens had some severe scratching, obscuring the view. I needed new lenses, not new eyes. How often have I mistaken some shortcoming as defining me when it was just my context trying to clue me in?
Variety
Corita Kent (Sister Mary Corita): morning (1966)
Inscriptions and Marks
Signed: l.r.: Sister Mary Corita
(not assigned): Printed text reads: [tu]r[n] [tu]rn / turn / Morning Sometimes we go on a search and we do not know what we are looking for, until we come again to our beginning In the beginning (in the beginning of time to say the least) there were the compasses: whirling in void their feet traced out beginnings and endings, beginning and end in a single line. Wisdom danced also in circles for these were her kingdom: the sun spun, worlds whirled, the seasons came round, and all things went their rounds: but in the beginning, beginning and end were in one. And in the beginning was love. Love made a sphere: all things grew within it; the sphere then encompassed beginnings and endings, beginning and end. Love had a compass whose whirling dance traced out a sphere of love in the void: in the center thereof rose a fountain. Fields were set for the circus, stars for shows before ever elephant lumbered or tent rose. Robert Lax
—
"I feel nostalgia for those times without wishing to return to them for a minute."
Washington, DC, surprised me. Like most cities, it seemed as if it would be something different than it turned out to be. Like New York City, which is merely a close association of remarkably small neighborhoods, DC is also tiny at its root. It carries much history on its shoulders, but it's not a very complicated place. It is, or always was, a "Chocolate City," one of the few with a genuine African-American majority. It also features one of the more entrenched aristocracies in this country, featuring diplomats and higher-ups to match or better any other place. It has more blue-collar workers than most places but also more white-collar ones. It features more professional administrators than anywhere. Those elected to high office might maintain their offices there, but an invisible cadre of office workers and security personnel manages their affairs. It's the best-guarded city, and nothing happens there without many pairs of eyes witnessing, confirming, and cataloging. It features more Variety than any other ten cities anywhere.
I noticed the Variety of goods sold in supermarkets first.
Good For A Goose
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iAlogue (1)
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Steam Festival (4)
Vaporized (6)
Work (16)
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