Lewis Wickes Hine: Syrian-Arab, Ellis Island (1926)

And Properly So
My Summer Of Discontent coexisted with my writing this Grace series. I see now, as the Summer and discontentment fades, that I spent my summer suffering from one of the more ordinary blindnesses, the one that sees the present altogether too clearly, and so cannot adequately either see past or foresee future. Presence never was an end-all or a be-all, but merely one of the simultaneous states informing and misleading us, in probably roughly equal proportions. The heat gets me but not nearly as thoroughly as I can get myself. I can see in retrospect what I could not even suspect prospectively. Every long-suffering experience quickly turned to dust, the same as every thoroughly satisfying one. I actually accomplished something this summer in spite of or, perhaps, because I was suffering. Summer wrought what summers have always wrought: Autumn, and all the uncertainty that season has ever brought. By the time the next three months have passed, I will have experienced snow again and re-engaged in my annual Seasonal Affective Disorder dance. This could become my Autumn of Discontent, but I've grown weary of discontent. It alters nothing but the quality of my experience. It apparently cannot even chase away Grace, for here, at the very end of my Summer Of Discontent, I hold a completed journal of my experience entitled Grace, and properly so.

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Weekly Writing Summary

This Grace Story, Senses, found me attempting to make sense of a glaring Absense. I employed my parallel or orthogonal senses: Insense, Outsense, Presense, and Absence.

Margaret Fisher: With a Sense of Humor (20th century)
" … Presence isn't quite ready to make sense to us again."
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This Grace Story found me listening with rapt attention to an alarming story of ImperfectlyLegal corruption.

Unknown Artist: Legalized Plunderers, from Puck (1880)
" … fly coach with their constituents when on the people's business."
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This Grace Story found me retelling an anniversary story; an Anniverse told a little differently but always on the same day every year.

Izaak Jansz. de Wit, after Wybrand Hendriks: Echtpaar in een boeren interieur [Couple in a farmer's interior]  (1794)
" … we continue forward somehow."
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This Grace Story, *RidingBus, found me riding a city bus with The Grand Other in tow, showing her the
ropes of a fresh lifestyle experiene. This story proved to be the most popular one this period!

Jack Gould: Untitled [passengers on crowded city bus] (c. 1950)
" … prefer to wait on the corner for their next ride to anywhere."
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This Grace Story acknowledged without celebration the cessation of effort on the concrete work. Most good work can be said to have been Whimpered into conclusion.

Corita Kent (Sister Mary Corita): feelin' groovy [print] (1967 Signed: l.r.: Corita (not assigned): Printed text reads: DO NOT ENTER / WRONG WAY / The tailspin / Going into a tailspin in those days meant curtains. No matter how hard you pulled back on the stick, the nose of the plane wouldn't come up. Spinning round, headed for a target of earth, the whine of death in the wing struts, instinct made you try to pull out of it that way, by force, and for years, aviators spiraled down and crashed. Who could have dreamed that the solution to this dreaded aeronautical problem was so simple? Every student flier learns this nowadays: you move the joystick in the direction of the spin, and like a miracle, the plane stops turning, and you are in control again to pull the nose up out of the dive. In panic, we want to push the stick away from the spin, wrestle the plane out of it, but the trick is, as in everything, to go with the turning willingly rather than fight, give in, go with it, and that way come out of your tailspin whole. Edward Field / SLOW DOWN YOU MOVE TOO FAST Simon + Garfunkel)
"Most good work ends with something other than a bang …"
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This Grace Story found me reappreciating the definition of Level, understanding that what the bubble insists might not quite fit into any pre-existing context. Freedom remains a severely limiting concept in practice.

Level: Classification Artists' Tools (20th century)
"There once was a crooked man who lived in a crooked house …"
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This final whole writing week of this Summer Of My Discontent, my Summer Of Grace, resolved little. It saw the last touches of concrete finishing for our Front Porch Refurbishing Project, but not the end of the effort. The Muse and I suffered an enormous loss and struggled to make Sense of it. I witnessed ImperfectlyLegal shenanigans and felt moved almost to rage. The Muse and I experienced an anniversary, and I created an Anniverse to retell the story imperfectly. I successfully taught my granddaughter, the usually immovable GrandOther, how to ride the city buses to school without getting too lost on the way (Hooray!!). The concrete foundation part of the project that had continued for five weeks was finally finished and Whimpered. I ended this writing week reflecting on the absolutely abstract concept of Level. Thank you for following along through this overlong and blistering summer!


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Tags: #Grace, #PureSchmaltz