Distinguishing
Auguste Rodin: The Fallen Caryatid Carrying Her Stone (Modeled 1881–82, cast 1902/24)
"HomeMaking is first about making the HomeMaker, then about making a home."
I'm unaccustomed to thinking of HomeMaking as a distinguished occupation, but like every occupation, HomeMaking involves making distinctions, Distinguishing. Considerable judgement also seems a necessary element of the effort, for a HomeMaker must do more than distinguish difference, but also determine if any intervention seems necessary and if so, how much. I imagine a huge chart denoting forms and degrees of engagement, something like:
If rough, smooth.
If smooth, texture.
And also listing the ten thousand primary elements of HomeMaking, but the pattern would quickly emerge as simple, and as fundamental as evolution:
If not right, fix or tolerate
If right, preserve or improve.
I catch myself in endless judgement of my surroundings, the better, I presume, to render them more properly like home. Not into Home but into more Home-like, an analogy. I perform this service by means of my Distinguishing. I exercise my judgement by first distinguishing. The quality of any resulting engagement feeds my judgement engine which might improve my Distinguishing. It all starts by noticing something. HomeMaking, like everything, utterly depends somebody first observing something.
There might only be five fundamental HomeMaking Distinguishing Elements: Context, Condition, Size, Shape, and Color.
Synapsing
Joos de Momper: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (circa 1620s)
" … as if Icarus had managed to fly around rather than a tad too close to the sun."
I feel as though I've flown a tad too close to the sun. Rather than tumble out of the sky like Icarus, though, I'm tumbling down through ether, imaginary space but always real enough before now. How would it be if one day you discovered that you could no longer access your intuition? No dumber than you ever were, but apparently lacking an essential connection that always reliably animated your processing before. Until then. You'd probably wonder if you'd ever recover that modest superpower again. Mine left under the influence of a certain prescription, one of those, increasingly common, which fiddles with Synapsing to fool some sense into changing. I suppose the drug's designer believed that it was just a switch, turned on or off, permanent effects unlikely. Fewer than .1% ever experience bradyphrenia, a "moderate" cognitive impairment, and I might or might not be experiencing it now. I just know that something's different. I can't even think crooked. Writing this small paragraph has taken several hours and not a second of that time seemed like writing.
I'm uncertain what to do.
Castling
Frédéric Bazille: Queen's Gate at Aigues (1867)
" … to let some inside out and some outside back inside again."
A man's home, long reputed to be his castle, stops feeling very much like home as soon as he starts using it as if it were a castle. I know, paradoxical. The problem seems to lie in the fundamental difference between home and castle. Castles exist first and foremost as defensive barriers, as fortresses rather than as commons, while homes, it seems to me, need to be open to mean anything. Closing up a home transforms it into a mausoleum, the sort of place only tell-tale hearts might ever inhabit. Whether in response to a heat wave or a snow storm, when a HomeMaker has to hunker in, his home becomes his castle and doesn't feel all that much like home for the duration of the defensive action. Castling ain't HomeMaking.
The Home-As-Castle analogy might apply to a whole class of human responses when exercising liberties or freedoms.
Dabbling
Andrea del Verrocchio: Baptism of Christ (1475) -- with an angel painted by Leonardo on the left
"Satisfied HomeMaking sometimes means Dabbling along behind."
I dabble in my duties as a HomeMaker. HomeMaking seems to be one of those occupations that do not quite qualify as an occupation and so cannot be properly considered a profession, and therefore cannot be mastered. No Master HomeMaker Designation could exist, if only because it would demand mastery of far too many elements. My first wife's mother held a master's degree in home economics, and not even she could take on every thing necessary to make a home, let alone to keep it humming. For wiring, she'd hire an electrician. She even retained the services of a professional housekeeper. A HomeMaker might be most properly characterized as a sort of chief contractor who coordinates the efforts without mastering many him/her self, except, perhaps, mastering the fine art of managing masters, though I suspect few ever approach even that level of skill. It's most likely, usually, amateurs attempting to coordinate the efforts of Journeymen, Masters, and other Rank Amateurs. Mastering that mess might be most of HomeMaking.
HomeMaking mostly involves Dabbling in a little off this and a little more of that other thing,
Perdiction
Edvard Munch: At the Roulette Table in Monte Carlo (1892)
" … underdelivering by means of over threatening myself again."
The weather forecast reads like a sentence passed down by a vengeful judge. I can't stop looking for the train wreck coming. I probably imagine it being much worse than it's likely to end up becoming. I remember a hundred and fourteen from when I was a kid. My mom laid out blankets on the front room rug and invited us all to camp out there instead of heading outside. We quickly fell asleep, waking after the fiercest part was over. As if that time created a precedent for future ones, grave predictions of soaring temperatures send me to ground. I hunker down and let the worst of it blow around me, or so I imagine. I focus my outside efforts to early morning or just before sunset and I hole up through the blazing afternoon. Before air conditioning, I'd flee to the basement. Even with the heat pump, lower floors seem preferable.
I wondered if the weather forecast was even accurate.
Flimability
Abraham Mignon: The Overturned Bouquet (1660-79)
Reputed to be Mignon's worst painting.
" … seeing through and not just looking."
HomeMakers possess the oddest ability to see through certain imperfections in their home. Perhaps this results from a certain love blindness, the sort that automatically excuses a grandchild's unfortunate nose or a favorite movie star's indiscretions. We see right through some faults. When we first moved into this would-be home, both the basement stairs and the half bath and hallway off the kitchen were painted in the most awful electrocuted green color with garnish green striped wallpaper highlighting. While we were moving in, that same day, I removed that wallpaper and painted over (two coats) that offense to my senses in the hallway and half bath. The basement stairway, decorated the same, remained unchanged for twenty years. Yesterday, in under two hours, I removed every miserable shred of that wallpaper and purchased the paint to cover the electrocuted green wall color. While ridding this world of that abomination, I was moved to wonder how it was that I managed to cohabitate for two decades with what I could not tolerate even until the end of the first day living here? Explaining this as a form of blindness makes sense. Its presence had apparently not been registering all those years.
I seem terribly skilled at pulling wool over my own eyes.
Denizen
Edward Hopper: Stairway at 48 rue de Lille, Paris (1906)
"I often find myself wandering around the place apparently lost …"
I consider myself more Denizen than citizen. I know myself to be a Denizen of the small hours, for instance. For me, this home seems most homey between two and six each morning. By evening, I can barely relate to the place. Through the afternoon, I'm ready to run errands, nap, or read, escapist activities, but in the early morning, I'm present and accountable.
It seems that our homes make us Denizens of them.
BitRot
Abraham Mignon: Still life with rotting fruit and nuts on a stone ledge (c. 1670)
"It demands patience precisely when frustration might be peaking."
Software engineers hold that a program, left alone and never touched, will eventually exhibit some evidence of failure. They refer to this common phenomenon as BitRot, an exceedingly handy term and concept, since it describes the otherwise inexplicable. It serves as a placeholder for understanding and also as a reminder that an explanation does not always prove necessary to fix an error. BitRot serves as acceptance that a problem exists without ascribing specific blame for its emergence. Sometimes, things just fall apart without a discernible cause. Blame entropy if you must, but accept the difficulty and fix it if you can.
HomeMaking encounters plenty of BitRot in its normal routine.
CanningWorms
Georges Braque: "La Table de Cuisine" (1942)
"We're never through and we leave behind messes and we start new stuff before finishing the last …"
HomeMaking does not seem to qualify as a continuous process, for it features too many flow/stall cycles. Still, it seems continual. Many initiatives get started just fine but get stalled before completion, often for the most trivial reasons. A single missing screw has delayed completion of an otherwise trivial gazebo repair for two months. I'd been to the hardware store many times since and reliably forgot to get that screw. Last week, I bought a box of those screws, just to be sure I had enough, but haven't gotten around to actually using them. If I can find that box when the stars line up, I'll be in business. Until then, I'm backed up.
Each day brings a fresh batch of interruptions as well as new restarting opportunities.
StaleStart
Rembrandt van Rijn: The Artist In His Studio (c. 1628)
" … delight, its deeper purpose."
We speak of fresh starts as if there could ever be such a thing. We speak of restarting, though these more accurately represent a discontinuous resumption with history trailing. I start a fresh series understanding that, by now, for me, any new series will seem at least somewhat stale. You see, I've done this before. Familiarity need not necessarily breed contempt, but it might well encourage wariness, especially with writing. That fresh-faced feeling a beginning brings probably won't last out the morning, and on this morning after summer solstice, the day promises sweat before midday and even more sweat through the afternoon. Still, I begin again, though I'm unable to muster that innocence I once just naturally brought to my game.
The art, if there is one, entails crafting a fresh supper from stale parts, like Tuscan Bread Soup, which combines fresh ingredients with stale bread to produce a delightful dish.
SettlingUpon
Honoré Daumier: The Third-Class Carriage (c. 1856–1858)
"Everything matters unless it doesn't."
SettlingInto eventually becomes a matter of SettlingUpon. The Muse has not quite settled upon the color palette she wants and the repainting cannot commence until then. I remain unsettled about several possible undertakings, so they're not started yet. As our SettlingInto has continued, the volume of SettlingUpons has grown. Dozens of little decisions define our way forward from here. We've successfully landed here but have yet to fully find our land legs. We're still a little wobbly, our way of living still emerging. Much remains unsettled and, indeed, unsettling so far. The SettlingInto might never end, but its infinity will most certainly be punctuated with a series of SettlingUpons. One day—not today, probably not tomorrow, but some day—these projects we've been envisioning forever will be over. Then we will have settled upon much. While our imaginations might have envisioned first class accommodations, we'll very likely settle for third-class passage and even manage to feel smug about our fortune, largely because we will have chosen, which makes a definite difference.
Deciding, though, proves challenging. I've long contended that choice serves as my chief superpower, if only because when I'm stymied, I can always at least choose again.
Quitting
Benjamin West: The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise (1791)
"Let him forever after be known as a quitter …"
I know myself to be a quitter, but a relatively inept one. In this culture, my culture, we revere starters, especially self starters, but look down through our glasses at quitters, with perhaps one exception. Those who've quit a dependence upon some reviled substance—demon rum, evil narcotics, or that devil tobacco—are held in some esteem for what those who've never been addicted imagine a certain depth of character. Of course it's that brand of character that came after a fall and was apparently inadequate to prevent the fall in the first place, but it's generally deemed worthy of a place near if not precisely in the hearts of the nation. Those who continue their abuse of substances sometimes get sent to treatment, which sometimes works. Others enroll themselves into twelve step programs which teach abstinence, acceptance, and forbearance in roughly equal measures, and consider addiction a life-long issue from which one might be recovering but from which nobody ever recovers. People who haven't had a drink in decades still consider themselves drunks and those who stopped using heroin continue recognizing themselves as junkies.
Addiction only somewhat involves a substance.
Routining
Giovanni Paolo Panini: Modern Rome (1757)
" … suggestively licking their lips when I forget to call them to table."
SettlingInto wasn't accomplished in a day. It might well never end, depending upon what The Muse and I choose to settle for. Settled, however achieved, seems mostly an emergent property and not a planned, predefined one. One arrives and only then decides, partly out of necessity, who they become. The context influences almost everything and the context didn't exist until we moved into it. We moved back in, but in name only. We actually found ourselves SettlingInto alien territory with only slight resemblances to what we remembered. Some better, some worse, some simply incomparably different. I've noticed parts of my old self reassembling here, parts I hadn't seen in action for years. Other aspects, ones I'd acquired or amplified while in exile, left me puzzling about just who has returned from exile. We have been, over the past three months, slowly and unsurely establishing routine. We've been Routining.
I'd forgotten how the former dreaded routine first came into being.
WisingUp
Michelangelo: The Libyan Sibyl (1508-12) from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel
"A grain of insight seems worth the investment."
I seem to be getting no wiser as I age. The old adage about older and wiser seems to pair near strangers rather than inevitable partners. For me, aging, like learning, has proven to be more humbling than enlightening. Rather than great mysteries resolving themselves, they seem to grow ever more mysterious, ever less likely to ever come into sharp focus. By the time I've figured out something, I'm usually catching shadows. That thing's time has past, never to return. I might possess fresh knowledge, but almost always of an arcane variety, out-dated, the kind that would have been useful had I known it sometime in the past, but relatively useless in any imaginable future. My understanding of how this world works has accumulated much clutter and become less ordered than it was before I began acquiring knowledge. I seem to be on a glide path to die much dumber than I was born, and no wiser.
That opening declaration represents the extent of my accumulated wisdom thus far.
DownhillBothWays
M. C. Escher: Waterfall (1961)
"I seem to be SettlingInto a place that's actually DownhillBothWays …"
I finally found a wrinkle in my schedule a couple of weeks ago and engaged in a few minutes of recreation. I pumped up the tires on my old coaster bike and took it out for a spin. I'd found an original front wheel bushing while on exile, so the nearly sixty year-old thing runs smoother than silk. I coasted down three blocks to the park, hung a downhill right which, three blocks, later left me at the big park. I hung a reluctant left onto what was once a road but is now a path and circumnavigated the central band stand before taking backstreets back to The Villa, a short and very sweet ride. The Muse asked how it was and I reported that it was DownhillBothWays. She wouldn't buy my story, but it was true to my experience. Riding these streets on this same model bike I rode as a kid, I remember torturous uphill stretches, usually encountered on the way back home after a particularly lengthy ride. Now, the city seems essentially flat, with no street steep enough to warrant any but my ride's single speed.
I might have gained some perspective and experience while on exile. …
MythConceptions
Alexandre Cabanel: The Birth of Venus (1863)
"It's not that the facts don't matter, but that stories overshadow."
We mistakenly believe that the ancient Greeks and Romans maintained the mythiest societies in history, but ours might far surpass theirs. No, we no longer believe in cloud-based gods, but the underpinnings of much of what passes for knowledge, even science, amounts to metaphors and analogies every bit as allegorical as any embraced by the ancients. Physicists searching for quantum gravity follow paths paved with stories, for little of what they seek can be observed with any of our senses, even those enhanced by machines. They twiddle concepts and conclude by means of logic and reason, their allegories growing simpler as they sense they're nearing their goal. Even science has become a faith-based initiative, easily discounted by those holding different MythConceptions and subscribing to orthogonal myth information. It's not that we don't share a serviceable language, but that we don't always share the same metaphors, the underlying stories which stand in as explanations of phenomena. No, atoms do not really resemble marbles, but they can be usefully thought of that way. The danger comes when we mistake our allegories for immutable realities rather than clever analogies, confirmation of what's proper to believe. Atoms couldn't care less what anyone believes about them.
I acknowledge that a significant portion of my admittedly meager understanding stands upon mythical shoulders.
SettlingUp
Jacopo Bassano: The Miraculous Draught of Fishes (1545)
"Whatever we own, owns us back better, such that we owe it forever."
The porch needed painting but not nearly as much as I needed to paint the porch. That porch needed paint when we slinked out of here twelve years ago, evidence of a certain dereliction of responsibility on my part. I was ashamed of that porch but not as ashamed as I was in myself. SettlingInto involves facing up to some past shortcomings and SettlingUp with them. I feel both humbled and fortunate to find myself in this position. Had we simply moved on without returning, these blemishes would have been permanent or, worse, someone else would have had to do my penance for me, like we did penance for the clown that sometime in the past expanded the kitchen. It was my sincere aspiration when we first took ownership of this place that I might prove to become a worthy steward of its heritage. That's meant considerable undoing of past violations of that heritage and also plenty of doing forward, improvements congruent to its bones. There are books, I imagine, keeping record of my stewardship's debits and credits. I hold myself responsible for repaying those debts, mostly in sweat labor.
Refinishing the porch repaid a long-outstanding debt, including considerable accumulated interest, a reason for genuine celebration.
Conspiracist
"French revolution: before and after: satirical drawing by French draftsman Caran d'Ache, 1898, in the middle of the Dreyfus affair and the foundation of Action Française. Although the Ancien Régime is not shown as idyllic, the contemporary situation is shown as an increase of oppression, which technical improvements (notice the plowshare) don't lighten, and to which financial capitalism (the banker with his top hat and his wallet), the Freemason (with his set square and plumb bob) and the Jew (with a curved nose) are contributors." (Wikipedia)
" … they, too, know not what in the Hell they're doing. Neither do I."
My neighbor Larry, a perfectly lovely family man with Bible verses posted on his front door, also has a dirty little secret he's a little too enthusiastic to share. We might be quietly conversing about his RV, which he uses maybe four times a year and has never felt competent to drive, and with which he's managed to a) back into a telephone pole, b) back into the door panel of a parked pickup, and c) pull the rear bumper off of after catching it on a gas station's concrete pillar, when his secret comes out. He keeps the RV because twice each year his family, now numbering thirty-five counting great grand kids, decamps to camp somewhere for a week and he and his wife need a place to sleep then. A man needs a certain amount of aggravation in his life, and for me, that RV might fully satisfy my minimum daily requirement, but Larry's little secret compounds his despair. You see, he's also a Conspiracist.
He might be dropping off a couple of dozen eggs, which he delivers gratis, from his chickens, and the topic springs up from nowhere. "If you just read the mainstream news, you'd never know that anything was going on, but they're trying to make us socialist. …
AMusing
Nicolas Poussin: Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun (1658)
"Musing's almost never about actually discussing anything."
The Muse's frequent lengthy absences best typified our exile years. When we lived outside of DC, she'd spend at least a week each month in Colorado. When we relocated to Colorado, she'd spend about the same time away in DC. This left me out there on my own for what seemed like lengthy periods, often eons, fending for myself, batching it. I always somewhat reveled in that freedom. There I was all alone save for the cats, and out of view from anyone who might care what I did. I could sneak a cigar thinking that I'd likely recover before The Muse returned. I'd been domesticated so long that I would find myself out of practice and default to grown up status rather than revert back into adolescence in her absence. Those days seemed long and hollow, though, reinforcing my notion that good living demands that one somehow must be in service to another and not just to themselves. I'd reheat the bottomless pot of beans for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and never think of concocting anything more complicated or nourishing. I'd hold dialogues with the cats, bouncing ideas off them, continually asking them how they were doing in lieu of anyone asking me that question. That was a Museless existence, hollow and unsatisfying, rendering me The Invisible Husband.
She'd call, of course, more or less daily during her absences, usually on her way, a few minutes late, for her first morning meeting and/or in the final few minutes before falling asleep after an overlong day of briefings and a late sociable supper.
Asymptosis
Paul Cézanne: (unfinished) Portrait of Gustave Geffroy (1895)
" … moments savored in the moment then forgotten forever."
I haven't accomplished much in this life, largely by design. I seem to possess a strong aversion to doneness, preferring to leave good enough unhassled by finishing touches. I tend to take things up to edges, but rarely over them. I much prefer starting new projects over gaining closure on any current one, so I usually abandon an effort in favor of an alluring opportunity, which I will also leave somewhat unfinished once it's close enough but rarely actually finished. I do not suffer from some curable illness or even an incurable one, for I consider my aversion to doneness a feature of my existence and in no way an encumbrance to it. It needs no treatment, though it does have a name. Perhaps it's just a syndrome, a special purpose capability reserved for an exceptional few, which, surprisingly, seems to include me. I'm not its victim and I do not suffer, but I seem to have Asymptosis, or it has me.
Always arriving without ever having arrived. Moving towards without actually crossing any finish line.
Withouting
Annibale Carracci, The Choice of Hercules (1596)
" … a fonder heart and a sometimes smarter response."
He who dies with the most toys loses whatever it might have been that toys couldn't satisfy. The toys might have successfully distracted the dedicated toy collector to the point where he never missed what he might have chosen to do without, though unfulfilled wishes might have provided bitter tastes of them. If he was true to type, he considered these shortages to represent problems that future acquisition might solve, though the desire in the dedicated toy collector never wanes for long after successfully adding another to his collection. He might miss a subtle point, one argued over for millennia, back probably further than recorded history can take us. My parents raised me a proper stoic, I guess, for I firmly believe that character might be best expressed by what one chooses to do without rather than by how much one manages to acquire.
Limited availability was one of the great attractions this small city offered. …
GrowingDown
Salvator Rosa: Diogenes Casting away his Cup (1650s)
"GrowingDown seems a just reward after failing to fully grow up."
I have been growing up for most of my life so far. I've tried to put down roots but with mixed results. Between attempts, I felt as if I was living in a planter, free to grow up, but restricted in how far down I could sink roots. I've experienced at least my share of transplantings, each traumatic, a few promising. My eyes were mostly on the sky, though, more concerned with seeing where I was going then delving into where I was growing. Aspiration can transport almost as thoroughly as physical relocation. Eyes on the prize do not see the present and one can live much of a life somewhere else, head if not actually in clouds, focused there. Trajectory seems calculated up to but not actually into any destination. Careers, marriages, aspirations easily focus upon advancement rather than placement. Where am I? seems less interesting than Where I am going, intentions too easily supplant presence. I'm intending to go nowhere now. I'm SettlingInto here, finally GrowingDown.
Growing up seemed a succession of passing throughs, each pause more of a layover than an arrival.
ClutchYerChange
Paul Cézanne: (unfinished) Portrait of Gustave Geffroy (1895)
" … moments savored in the moment then forgotten forever."
I haven't accomplished much in this life, largely by design. I seem to possess a strong aversion to doneness, preferring to leave good enough unhassled by finishing touches. I tend to take things up to edges, but rarely over them. I much prefer starting new projects over gaining closure on any current one, so I usually abandon an effort in favor of an alluring opportunity, which I will also leave somewhat unfinished once it's close enough but rarely actually finished. I do not suffer from some curable illness or even an incurable one, for I consider my aversion to doneness a feature of my existence and in no way an encumbrance to it. It needs no treatment, though it does have a name. Perhaps it's just a syndrome, a special purpose capability reserved for an exceptional few, which, surprisingly, seems to include me. I'm not its victim and I do not suffer, but I seem to have Asymptosis, or it has me.
Always arriving without ever having arrived. Moving towards without actually crossing any finish line. …
Infinities
Franz de Paula Ferg: The Building of Noah's Ark (ca. 1730)
"I might most become myself there where my usual controls and inhibitions hold little currency."
After eons of prep work, The Porch stands ready to accept paint this morning. By day's end, if I'm lucky and diligent, I might replace the hanging fuchsia baskets, move the geezer rockers up from the gazebo (geezerabo?) and get on with fresh Infinities. This job, so simple-seeming at the start, turned complicated as soon as I set my hands on it. Ain't that the way of this world? Even small distances mislead both eye and imagination and large distances mislead even more. From exile, I easily imagined myself cutting through one SettlingInto job after another, like the proverbial hot knife through soft butter, but up close and intensely personal, gravity influences more deeply. Physics asserts her immutable laws and a perfectly acceptable naive notion turns into another Infinity. Infinities appear when it starts becoming clear just what an effort might actually entail. Some grand complication comes into focus and the timeline goes to Hell. I suddenly don't quite know how to accomplish what I'd set out to finish and I've already started. No way to turn around and not start then. I'm committed to what first seemed like a finite effort but which now seems infinite. The Infinities have found me.
My father, who, if anything, was a most dedicated worker, taught me how to deal with Infinities.
SlideEffects
Jackson Pollock: Untitled. (1953-54)
"Sometimes SlideEffects trump everything else."
Back when we still watched television, I found amusing the many adds for various prescription drugs. Some government agency still vaguely interested in truth in advertising—a concept so long considered not worth considering that I found these ads quaint—insisted that each ad list prominent side effects, which tended toward the shocking. Who wouldn't agree to take a medication likely to effectively treat some skin condition even though it might also cause permanent paralysis or one of the more dreadful forms of cancer? The tradeoffs never seemed to make sense, the side effects just too bizarre to accept the risk, however slight, since slight risks apply to large populations, not to the individual who experiences them. My mom, bless her dear departed heart, gained the reputation of only exhibiting side effects and not usually the primary intended effect of any medication. Her doctor prescribed using a form of Reverse Polish logic to achieve intended outcomes.
Economists call them externalities, the sideshows that tend to pop up around any primary intention.
Evening
JAN BRUEGHEL THE YOUNGER: The Garden of Eden (1635)
"We're shadows glowing within this forest."
First week of June, Evening arrives as an actual breath of fresh air after another blistering afternoon. The house, closed up since late morning, suffocates by then and supper seems unappealing enough to just cancel it. The heat exhausts me without my having to exert anything and leaves me feeling worthless, hoping for morning. The Muse suggests a walk out into the Evening air, and I cannot concoct an excuse to refuse her invitation. I check to find Molly ready to come in from the back deck, I don my walk-in' shoes, and we depart into gathering darkness. The evening feels like velvet on my face. The sidewalks still hold traces of heat and the shadowy yards still show off, in silhouette rather than in full glorious color. The difference leaves them seeming magical. Flowers appear first by scent then by outline. Even without evident color, they seem strangely intact and instantly recognizable. Whomever left their hose stretched out across the sidewalk overnight deserves a stern talking to.
We're all alone, save for one gentleman out watering his roses and a young woman walking her dog.
Kickin'
Late 19th-century photograph of a yamabushi fully robed and equipped, armed with a naginata and tachi.
K. Ogawa: from KAZUMASA OGAWA - Military Costumes in Old Japan,
Photographed Under the Direction of Chitora Kawasaki of Ko-yu-kai (Tokyo Fine Art School), Tokyo, 1895 (Meiji 28)
" … while we're still alive and Kickin', we're all in."
Ask me how I'm doing and I'm likely to respond by saying that I'm still alive and kickin', kickin' apparently being an inseparable part of living. We unquestionably inhabit an addicted society. It might be that once adopting the language of addiction, we began noticing just how attached we'd been, or maybe we are all just addicted to something, whichever, we do seem to be continually occupied with trying (and often failing) to get over or along without something that's insidiously worked its way into our lives. We imagine ourselves free and clear but struggle to find a path between here and there. We aspire more than succeed, it seems, and so consequently well-understand what losing feels like. In our insistence upon winning, we perhaps most often set ourselves up to lose, which gives us almost endless opportunities to forgive ourselves for turning out to be human, albeit more human than we ever intended to become.
I might work just as hard to create my habits as I do to break them once they become bothersome, maybe even harder, for there's a certain satisfaction, a genuine sense of mastery, when teaching myself to master a fresh dependency, with little sense that it might one day grow to master me.
Porching
Anonymous: “Bracketed Veranda from the inside,” in A. J. Downing, The Architecture of Country Houses (1850), 122, fig. 45
[A typical picture of a porch, which includes almost no porch and almost all view.]
"A porch could do a whole lot worse than get repainted."
A man could do worse than paint his porch. It's picky work, under-appreciated effort, invisible to all but the man who could do a whole lot worse than paint his porch. It's knee work. Not an ounce of any standing in it. It's demanding work of the sort that seems to goad a man into taking shortcuts and calling not quite right good enough. A man could do worse than ignore those seductions. A man begins by convincing himself that the finish just needs a little feathering but does not finish until he's scraped and sanded some boards back to their original state. Nobody will notice and nobody should. It's a covenant between this man, who could do a lot worse, and his porch, who knows it doesn't deserve it. He'll epoxy that rotted spot where the railing once anchored. Once painted, nobody knows except the man who could do worse and the appreciative porch, until some other man, who could do worse, sets about to paint his porch again.
Our porch is about 90% perch and 10% entryway.
Mournings
Peter Paul Rubens: The Lamentation (1614)
" … forever rooted in our forebears' and lost daughter's."
Mornings here taste as sweet and cool as a freshly-picked strawberry. However blistering the sun promises to become later, he starts the day with a cool head, in no apparent hurry to prove any point. The yard always finds dew overnight and releases it slowly to create a lush sense of enoughness. The roses bloom with ferocious intensity, colors screaming passionately. …Is a rose, indeed. Names inevitably understate identity. None of us were ever what we were called. In the town cemetery, the stones hold more than mere names and dates. They hold stories, unchanging through decades, varying only in tiny emerging details. My great great grandmother will always be the fifteen year old whose guardian aunt granted permission for her to marry that hapless ex-Union soldier who had been mustered out on a medical discharge after missing his first and only battle. Born in the eighteen forties, she would see the nineteen forties before departing, a lifetime spanning antebellum to anti-aircraft guns, The Oregon Trail well into the Age of the Automobile. Her story's stabile, though her stone's almost unreadable now.
SettlingInto allows us to visit our forebears.
Good For A Goose
Fambly (93)
Grace (92)
Humor (2)
iAlogue (1)
Letters to the Editor (1)
Personal (19)
Steam Festival (4)
Vaporized (6)
Work (16)
November 2024
October 2024
September 2024
August 2024
July 2024
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