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.
Shoestrings
Corita Kent (Sister Mary Corita): elephant's q (1968)
Inscriptions and Marks
Signed: l.r.: Corita
(not assigned): Printed text reads: Q / John Dewey says-I'm not quoting his words, (Dr. Felix Adler), but this is what he said, that "no matter how ignorant any person is there is one thing that he knows better than anybody else and that is where the shoes pinch his own feet " and that because it is the individual that knows his own troubles, even if he is not literate or sophisticated in other respects, the idea of democracy as opposed to any conception of aristocracy is that every individual must be consulted in such a way, actively not passively, that he himself becomes part of the process of authority, of the process of social control; that his needs and wants have a chance to be registered in a way where they count in determining social policy.
inscription: l.l.: 68-69-47
" … undifferentiated others certainly originally came from one."
My parents' birth families seemed to the childhood me to be filled with contradictions. There appeared to be a profusion of odd relations: second and third cousins, step- and half-siblings, what my mom referred to as "Shoestring" relatives. Some were actually related by blood or marriage, while others were adopted, the sort of people one might choose, which, of course, one can never do with any blood relative. Most lived far away. We might have seen them once in all my growing-up years, through town for a reunion or funeral, and never to return. Most had legends associated with them. My mom could recite the stories as if she'd written them, though I suppose her mother taught them before she realized she was teaching her anything. Our Shoestrings complete already complicated enough family portraits.
When The Muse and I were Exiled, we could have sworn that we didn't personally know anybody in the entire region into which we were cast.
Escape
Edward Ruscha: Crackers [How to Derive the Maximum Enjoyment from Crackers] (1969)
"My incarceration was also an Escape …"
Being Exiled felt like an assault, an insult to my dignity and reputation. It was also a great gift that I couldn't, for the life of me, perceive at first, for every life is a mix of liberation and sentence. As liberation, it overflows with freedoms. As a sentence, it severely restricts movement. One must always be here rather than there, no matter how one might wish to be there instead. Perhaps a week away on what passes for vacation must serve as the only possibility for distraction. Most of the time, one must contend with the intended and unintended consequences of being themselves. No place seems all that glamorous that sees the same face waking up every morning. Variety might be the spice of life, but most lives are explicitly constructed to inhibit too much variety. They generally promote even more of even more of the same.
So, being Exiled served as an Escape from those patterns.
AShamed
Corita Kent (Sister Mary Corita):
(tame) hummed hopefully to others (1966)
Inscriptions and Marks- Signed: l.r.: Sister Mary Corita
Printed text reads: TAME [IT']S [NO]T / Somebody up there likes us. / A hum came suddenly into his head, which seemed to him a good hum such as is hummed hopefully to others. Pooh / Deep within every man there lies the dread of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked among the tremendous household of millions upon millions. That fear is kept away by looking upon all those about one who are bound to one as friends or family; but the dread is nevertheless there and one hardly dares think of what would happen to one if all the rest were taken away. Kierkegaard
" … one helluva way to make a name for myself."
I was Exiled in considerable shame. Not shame bestowed by anybody else, with the possible exception of a certain misguided skip-chaser who called several times each day from different numbers to harass me about my recent bankruptcy, and most certainly not the citizens of my hometown, who treated The Muse and I with only the utmost decency and respect once our dilemma became public. No, I'm afraid I shamed myself. This was perhaps a misguided act of sincere contrition, for it sure seemed that someone should take the blame for everything leading up to our being expelled from our Eden. In my own misguided fashion, I blamed myself and set about extracting satisfaction in the form of the most profound damage anyone can ever do to themself.
Shaming is no simple form of blaming.
AnAloneliness
Corita Kent (Sister Mary Corita): the sure one (1966)
Printed text reads: Dial "0" FOR HELP
/ The Sure One
/ Anybody who thinks he can manage alone,
he's an idiot
" … damned to return to a world poorer for his absence after inhabiting a world seemingly poorer for his presence."
The Exile didn't begin until about ten days after The Muse and I left our home behind. We spent most of that first week driving across the country to our temporary apartment in the Rosslyn neighborhood of Arlington, Virginia, every inch of twenty-six hundred miles from what had been our home. On the way, we stayed over one night outside of Kansas City with dear old friends, though we were hardly even shadows of ourselves by then. We'd seen Sandhill Cranes gathering like angelic buzzards along the Platte River reaches near Grand Forks, Nebraska. Our cats were grateful for a night over in something other than a motel room. I guess we were sociable enough. The next night found us in Lexington, Kentucky, and the following in Rosslyn. It took three trips to empty the car of all our possessions, up and down in the elevator from the underground parking garage.
Other old friends happened to be passing through town that weekend.
Grooves
Arthur Rothstein: Morning routine, nursery school,
Harlingen, Texas. FSA camp. (1942)
United States. Farm Security Administration
"Losing our Grooves leaves us wandering relatively aimlessly in wilderness."
Being Exiled separates one from their Grooves, their essential routines that pretty much define them. Grooves might seem non-essential, but after losing every other point of orientation, a Groove or two prove at least reassuring, perhaps even confirming. They are who you are and were inseparable before they weren't. Loss of home might feel like loss of self, but losing those Grooves seals the separation. Through early Exiled days, I moved around in a definite haze. I couldn't find my rhythms, the cadences within which I engaged. I suffered from a form of arrhythmia where nothing seemed to work right. I could continue doing anything I'd done before, but without an essential elegance, as if I'd been thrown back into rank amateur status. Even activities in which I'd grown skilled became difficult. I was more likely to slice my thumb when in the kitchen. I'd even nick my chin when shaving.
Grooves grow to become invisible.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 10/03/2024
George Inness: After a Summer Shower (1894)
It Cost Us Much More
I woke this morning to find Molly, our nearly feral girl cat, curled up on top of The Muse's open suitcase. We'd returned home the afternoon before to find our boy cat Max waiting and ready to mount my lap for some overdue petting. Molly had slipped in unnoticed later for her quick bite of supper before disappearing back out into her waning summer. The Muse harvested the week's worth of ripe tomatoes from our extraordinarily productive garden, and we took supper inside, the outside temperature having plummeted into Autumn in the short time we'd been gone. Our absence had made our hearts grow fonder for this place from which we were so long ago Exiled. Homecomings since have been uniformly sweet. They make the leaving seem worthwhile even though the world we find out there seems increasingly hostile to innocent visitors. Decent digs seem almost impossible to find. We traveled well again, our style honed in no small measure by our long-ago exile. We travel almost exclusively via roads few consider taking. We avoid schedules, often stopping to read and learn from those roadside readerboards. I gratefully slow to allow whoever's behind me to pass, lest they follow too closely and learn our sacred secrets. We learned to find our way by being rudely Exiled and thriving anyway. May we never have to go away like that again. I'm grateful, though, for the learning being laid low afforded us. I'd say our understanding's priceless, but it cost us much more than that. It's worth more, too.
SecretPassages
Odilon Redon: Passage of a Soul (1891)
"The roads least taken tend to be the ones most worth taking."
The Exiled do not readily adopt their new home. They naturally resist assimilation because too easy an integration might serve to disrespect their "real" home. They will find many reasons why their new station seems inferior, however superior it might objectively seem to every other observer. Traffic became chief among my complaints when we landed in Northern Virginia. Traffic had evolved into absolutely unworkable patterns there, where the bulk clogged what were euphemistically referred to as arteries. These often proved to be among the longest paths between any two points, but paradoxically also the most traveled. I believed that this had more to do with habit than design. People often follow what appear to be the wider paths, for instance, when narrower ones might make more sense. Of course, if everyone followed these shorter paths, they'd become clogged, too, so I worked hard to keep my emerging SecretPassages secret.
Chief among my strategies for keeping my SecretPassages secret involved turning off any navigation apps that might be recording my passage.
Anonymity
W. Tringham, after Jacques de Sève:
Onbekend dier [Anonymous Animal] (1773)
" … I sense myself a better man …"
Anonymity might be the one utterly reliable superpower that the newly Exiled possess. Though stripped of most of their possessions, they all acquire this one in exchange. It might initially seem freeing to move about the world with nobody watching or anyone watching having no clue what they're seeing, but this gift has indefinite limits. The anonymous hold little influence. They have nobody they can call to help them out should they get themselves into a jam. They can go anywhere without fear of being recognized, but they tend to roam few places where such recognition might matter. It's as if they exist without any observers, without any risk or hope of accidentally bumping into someone influential and embarrassing themselves. The Anonymity, while initially freeing, comes to wear one down. If nobody knows you from Adam or Eve, it might become difficult to know what you believe. Acquaintances can at least remind you who you are or who you used to be, and without that feedback, it grows difficult to remember who you are or were in this world.
Anonymity reliably produces ghosts.
ExPat
Eduard-Julius-Friedrich Bendemann:
The People of Jerusalem in Exile (c. 1832)
" … not actually sentenced to spend time in jail but still there, even if Just Visiting."
Before we'd found permanent housing, we discovered that we'd been Exiled into the one place with more Exiles than any other place in this country. Federal government employees are routinely sent "on station," assigned to work in Washington for periods ranging from a few months to a few years. Thousands are encouraged to volunteer for these assignments, promised better future promotions, and a deeper understanding of how the system they're a part of works. Many bring their families, but more don't, and consequently, there are thousands of people left wondering what to do on weekends. Many work right through their weekends, figuring that the sooner they finish their assignment, the sooner their exile might end. Local connections seem challenging to make. The locals have families to attend to, and other ExPats have their own lives to live. Further, the sheer size of the DC Metro area means that people who work next to each other throughout the week might bunk fifty or more miles apart. Consequently, an Expat's life can be lonely.
The Muse and I, within a couple of weeks of arriving, began hosting a Sunday night potluck supper at our temporary digs.
Accidentally
Unidentified Artist: Avoid Accidents! Think of Safety!
[Series/Book Title: Social Museum Collection] (c. 1903)
" … we ended up Accidentially thriving there …"
Our Exile separated The Muse and me from much more than our beloved home. It also separated us from our accustomed means of thriving. The Bankruptcy cleaned out our liquidity and, with that, our sense of identity. If we lacked money, how would we be able to continue pursuing our purpose? How would we be able to purchase what we needed to survive, especially once we'd relocated into one of the pricier housing markets in the country? We had no idea how we'd survive. We kept moving forward As If, perhaps taking heart from the parable of The Birds of the Field, who apparently manage to get by without the usual means to survive. They manage to live Accidentally On Purpose if that makes any sense. Of course, that notion makes no sense whatsoever to anyone schooled in this culture. Here, we carefully plot our course before purchasing passage. We thrive through planning, or so we continually insist. We're schooled to avoid accidents and believe that accidents result from poor planning and that accidents suggest terrible things about us. We even revile the accident-prone.
The Muse and I set about living Accidentally On Purpose.
Familiars
Anselmus Boëtius de Boodt: Robin
[Erithacus rubecula] (1596 - 1610)
" … long ago when I still expected novelty to light my way home."
I sought out novelty before we were Exiled. After, I felt more attracted to Familiar things, to Familiars. Before, I'd considered myself adventurous when seeking some odd or unusual experience. I'd order the wild boar in the restaurant and seek out the Stearnwheeler supper cruise. I'd gather these experiences like some collect bracelet charms, believing myself especially blessed and a bit courageous. I once drove over an hour to find a trailer in the Arizona desert where a retired fireman from Poughkeepsie had set up shop selling rattlesnake rattles so I could return from that trip with unique gifts for my kids. I preferred to take the less-traveled roads and thought myself unique. That was before I was Exiled.
After being Exiled, I sought out Familiars, even the formerly banal ones.
Leaving
Harry Sternberg:
Father Leaving Home with Suitcase
[Series/Book Title: Life in Woodcuts] (20th century)
"I no longer need to take leave."
The drive up and out of The Walla Walla Valley that first morning of Exile felt promising, for our possessions were already on their way, and we'd been left behind. It seemed as though we were only trying to catch up to our life as we headed East across the Blue Mountains and on through Southern Idaho into Utah. We made Evanston that first evening, just as far as my to-be first wife and I had made it the first morning of our initial Exile thirty-five years earlier. We were catching up to our lives then, too. She was chasing her first job after graduating from university, and I was tagging along, heading into what was then still a seemingly great unknown. I was twenty-two and had never experienced humidity, which made me a virgin of sorts. I'd never imagined what most of the rest of the country routinely experienced, clear evidence that I'd left Eden for some alternate universe inhabited by heathens. Why would any sentient being tolerate high humidity? It did not make sense!
With that first Exile experience and a lifetime's accumulation of others, I'd grown familiar with Leaving.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 9/26/2024
Unidentified Artist: Industrial Problems, Welfare Work: United States. Ohio. Dayton. National Cash Register Company: Welfare Institutions of the National Cash Register Company, Dayton, Ohio.: Departments: Showing White Aprons
Series/Book Title: Social Museum Collection (c. 1903)
A Requisite Humility
Six hundred and sixty square feet of clear verticle grain Douglas Fir tongue and groove boards were delivered to my driveway yesterday. They represent the start of the final chapter in a two-year quest to refurbish our formerly beleaguered front porch here at The Villa Vatta Schmaltz. Those who have been paying attention will have noticed the continuing disruptions I've been reporting for nearly two months. At least two more months of effort remain to finish constructing the structure that will support the porch deck and then to lay those lovely gold-plated deck boards and the bead board ceiling, not to mention the dressing out of the new posts and beams and the construction of the new railing, top and bottom. My role in all this effort has largely been as sponsor and chief miscommunicator, for however skilled I might be as a writer, I suck as the supervisor of construction efforts. The workers speak in nearly indecipherable dialects heavy with incomprehensible terms. I banter through sixteen-inch centers as if I understand what I am saying. I later learned that I sometimes misrepresent my best interests by simply showing interest. Those trying to read the boss imperil the whole enterprise. Any boss trying actually to boss anybody proves to be a serious hazard to navigation. I am reminded how critically important ineptness always proves to be in every undertaking. It usually insists upon a requisite humility and more patience than Job.
CashEconomy
Unknown Igbo Artist: Mami Wata figure (1950s)
"I might have been broke, but never broken."
The bankruptcy rendered us effectively insolvent. We entered a previously unperceived CashEconomy. It was as if the economy had suddenly returned to the gold standard, and we had no access to gold. Modern economies do not trouble themselves very much with cash. It serves more as an artifact than as a means of exchange. It becomes a metaphor, a way of speaking about value rather than a means for holding it. Modern economies transact exchanges with symbols once or more times removed from actual specie, just as CashEconomies sit at least once removed from their underlying gold. It's enough that Fort Knox holds reserves. Remember, it became illegal for private citizens to hold too much gold, even when we were still on the so-called gold standard. Such conventions ultimately came to limit economic potential, and so were done away with in favor of plastic and similar, more imaginative systems.
The most profound initial effect of the bankruptcy was a radical loss of liquidity.
Hopefulling
"(Giuseppe Niccolò Vicentino)(After Parmigianino)
(Previously attributed to Circle of Ugo da Carpi): Hope
(Sixteenth Century)
"We were never caught once."
We entered our Exile curiously hopeful. We had every right to engage in despair, for we had fallen far. We'd been within a month of moving into barrels, becoming cartoon-character destitute wearing barrels with suspenders, yet we felt hopeful instead. Obama had just been inaugurated, and Hope was in the air. We would be there, near where the upcoming miracle would happen, next to ground zero of the transformation. The Muse would even participate in her role in the bowels of The Department of Energy's Biofuels Development Office.
My role was unclear.
BeneathMe
William Blake: Fallen Angels,
Alternate Title: Three Falling Figures (c. 1793)
"Maybe I could find a new identity, even one AboveMe there."
While attending university in Portland, my first wife and I lived in a main-floor-of-an-old-house apartment on a busy arterial. When friends moved out of their main-floor-of-an-old-house apartment on top of Mt. Tabor with views of both Mt. Hood and Mt. Saint Helens, we moved in a minute and soon came to think of ourselves as the sort of people who lived on top of one of the more prominent vistas in the city. Later, when our landlord decided to raise the rent by the amount of the increase in the Consumer Price Index each month, we decided to buy a house. The best we could afford was located down in what we called The Flats, a neighborhood far beneath our accustomed station, with industrial operations squeezed between houses. The adjacent milk bottling plant left the neighborhood smelling of sour milk most mornings. All claims to have been urban pioneering aside, we felt as if we had been Exiled into a third-world nation. It would be where we'd raise our kids and live our lives. In retrospect, it doesn't seem half as demeaning as it felt.
I recognized that old familiar feeling when The Muse and I landed in Roslyn, Virginia, at the beginning of our later Exile.
Experienced
Russel Lee: Cot house in the oil town of Hobbs, New Mexico. Hobbs is now experiencing a boom and the cot houses are necessary for the swarms of workers who come in. This is typical of all oil boom towns. (1940) United States. Farm Security Administration
"I'd been shipwrecked before. I knew the routine."
Until The Muse and I were Exiled following our unfortunate bankruptcy, I hadn't understood how Experienced I had been at the odd art of exiling. Anyone accustomed to living and working in a place might never suspect a simmering exile economy surrounding them. Traveling salespersons might live in perpetual exile, as do consultants. I had been a consultant before the crash, so I had grown accustomed to working anywhere but home. One year, I stayed in fifty different hotel rooms and a few for longer than overnight. Each business trip amounted to a practice exile, for I would be rechallenged to find a cup of decent decaf and an acceptable bakery. I ultimately came to pride myself on being able to locate both within an hour of landing in any strange city. Traveling for a living seemed little different from being Exiled, except for the returning home part.
Leaving home was another matter.
Exiled
Paul Gauguin:
cover art for Catalogue de l'Exposition de Peintures du Groupe Impressionniste et Synthétiste
[Catalogue of the Exhibition of Paintings of the Impressionist and Synthetist Group] (1889)
Book containing eight zincographs and letterpress text
in black ink, with photomechanically printed gray stripes on cover, on tan wove paper
"I never learned how to feel as though I belonged there."
In late March 2009, The Muse and I left our beloved Villa Vatta Schmaltz for an indeterminate exile. Over the prior month, our local newspaper had published my series of essays entitled The White Collar Recession, which recounted our recent dénouement, our fall from grace. The prior autumn's economic crash had left our once-thriving business and us bankrupt. Coming concurrently with my father's death, the blow had been devastating. We fully expected to lose everything, including our beloved Villa, once the symbol of our success turned into our most visible evidence of failure. The bankruptcy administrator found us faultless, but his judgment did little to assuage our feelings. We were less than a month away from moving into a barrel when The Muse was offered a prestigious job with one of the Department of Energy's National Laboratories. The rub was that we would have to relocate far from the center of our universe. When entering that stage of life where we had been expected to be winding down our wandering, we were forced to rewind ours. By the time the newspaper declared my White Collar Recession their second most popular series of the year, we were no longer there, for we had been Exiled.
We landed in a close suburb of Washington, DC, Roslyn, Virginia, in transition housing, a sixth-floor apartment overlooking a firehouse and beneath the final approach to National Airport with two restless, edgy cats.
Graceful
Julia Rogers: Three Graces (1939 - 1943)
" … each seems willing to show up for the cast party following each performance."
I might not live that elegant of a life, but I aspire to live a Graceful one. Not necessarily a well-choreographed or excellently executed existence, but at least a decent one. The presence of Grace in my life might ensure such a fate, for Grace smoothes over otherwise obvious imperfections. The object of life doesn't seem to be perfection but something much closer to imperfection instead. We seem to be given imperfections with the intention of perfecting them. Not to make them perfect, but, as Lincoln insisted, to make them somehow more perfect than before we encountered them. We try to improve. Not all of our efforts succeed, nor do we necessarily intend to succeed in handling all of them. We fail plenty, then begin again, perhaps more humbly than we initially engaged. There might be more Graceful potential in any odd failure than in any unbridled success. Remember, blessèd are the poor, weak, meek, and destitute. Those in desperate need of Grace seem quite naturally to employ it better.
My summer has been a fairly unextraordinary one.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 9/19/2024
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.
Level
Level: Classification Artists' Tools (20th century)
"There once was a crooked man who lived in a crooked house …"
Level amounts to an abstract concept in The Villa Vatta Schmaltz. Built in 1907, the old place has been settling unevenly into place ever since. When remodeling, we must remember that we're restoring relative to what the eye recognizes as Level. That value might differ considerably from what my old Cherrywood Level might propose. An unbalanced roofline was the chief reason we began refurbishing the front porch. When approaching from down the facing street, the house seemed stuck in a permanent shrug, losing at least six inches across the twenty-foot roof line. We'd thought then that the bricks we believed supported the roof were failing, but those bricks were never more than ornamental. They never supported anything. That roofline had been trying to support itself and ultimately began to fail. That it managed to support itself for who-knows-how-long stands as a testament to our good fortune. We might have had to clean up a catastrophic failure instead of merely making the roof line Level again.
As with most projects, this one began under false premises.
Whimpered
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 tailspain 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 …"
The concrete work Whimpered when it ended. There were no ticker-tape parades, no marching bands. No heavenly hosts singing through the firmament. It was almost a non-event. Three remaining crew members worked the walls to a smooth finish. All the pomp and circumstance involved in the BIG pour was absent. I set three cold beers into the ice chest and pointed the survivors in their direction. The next thing I knew, they were pulling away from the curb. Pablo, the concrete contractor, called a while later to say he'd return the following morning to see how the last coat dried. I told him I wanted a walk-around so we could appreciate the work before I wrote him a check. There are odds and ends to finish and a more thorough cleaning of the area, but Jesse, our structural contractor hired to prop up and level the porch roof, will make his mess, and he's next on the agenda; this ending only a way station on the way toward final completion weeks or months hence.
Sports competitions materially misrepresent how contests work.
RidingBus
Jack Gould: Untitled [passengers on crowded city bus] (c. 1950)
" … prefer to wait on the corner for their next ride to anywhere."
The Grand Other enrolled in a new school this term, so her last year's school bus routine wouldn't get her there. She'd have to ride the city bus, something with which she had zero experience. Further, her older sister had filled her with stories about how rough the city bus could be, so she was understandably hesitant even to try that ride. Her mom and dad both went to work long before The Other would have to leave for school, so she was left with a dilemma. Fortunately, her grandfather is an enthusiastic bus rider, and seeing opportunities to engage in one of his favorite activities, he volunteered to introduce her to the lifestyle.
I consider RidingBus to be a lifestyle, a choice.
Anniverse
Izaak Jansz. de Wit, after Wybrand Hendriks:
Echtpaar in een boeren interieur
[Couple in a farmer's interior] (1794)
" … we continue forward somehow."
Some dates seem to attract events. My father and nephew were, for instance, born on the same day/month, January 15, and that became an annually celebrated anniversary greater than the simple sum of two birthdays. My first wife's younger sister was born on Norwegian Independence Day, Syttende Mai ("Seventeenth of May"), elevating that anniversary into a super holiday for that Norwegian family. What one says on such days tends to be the same, ever older stories, grown perhaps even more remarkable with each retelling. For the Muse and I, September 15th must undoubtedly be our most prominent anniversary. It's the day we met twenty-seven years ago, and it carries ever greater nostalgia and significance with each passing year. This year, additional significance attached itself to the day when The GrandOtter, The Muse's granddaughter Sara, gave birth to our first great-granddaughter, making us both great-grandparents.
Such significances always seem unlikely, though double occurrences cannot be described as rare.
ImperfectlyLegal
Unknown Artist: Legalized Plunderers, from Puck (1880)
" … fly coach with their constituients when on the people's business."
The Muse and I last night attended a neighboring county Democratic Party's annual celebration dinner featuring a visit from our spectacular United States Senator Maria Cantwell. A visit with her when she was visiting Walla Walla in June yielded The Muse a senatorial letter of intent for an important Port project and me an appreciative interest in my Blind Men and the Elephant Book. We attended the dinner in hopes of continuing the conversation we'd started and also to revel in what is turning out to be a genuine banner year in the history of our Democratic organizations. The dinner was held at a union hall, where we learned that Biden's term has resulted in a record number of apprenticeships and jobs. That county's economy's on fire!
We were seated at a table with a couple of former school teachers who retired from the Seattle suburbs and moved over into the less urban east of the Cascades.
Senses
Margaret Fisher: With a Sense of Humor (20th century)
" … Presence isn't quite ready to make sense to us again."
I feel moved to consider Senses in this story. Not the usual sight, smell, taste, hear, and feel, but a parallel or even an orthogonal set familiar to everyone: Insense, Outsense, Absense, and Presense. I could throw in the sense of humor, too, and any others that might only come into focus once I start this consideration. I propose this plotline because The Muse and I experienced a shocking Absense over recent days, the sudden disappearance of a presence that had come to kind of define us. Loss seems ordinary enough. We slough off plenty in our regular day-to-day existence, and life itself depends upon death. Everything we consume except milk, honey, water, and air depends upon something dying for sustenance, so we're certainly not strangers to Absense.
The steelhead filet I carefully grilled over hot coals before dinner last night disappeared shortly after that, never to return.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 9/12/2024
Preston Dickinson: Self-Portrait (c. 1926)
Qualifies As A Feeling?
I mostly feel lucky even though lucky probably doesn't fully qualify as a feeling. Further, luck must be utterly out of my control, or else it's not really luck because luck if it's governed by anything, must be ruled by randomness. One might harbor feelings about impending luckiness but only experience luck once it happens. How often do I "feel" lucky without experiencing an actual manifestation of luck? How frequently do I experience luck without having a premonition of its arrival? Both questions seem as unnecessary as they are unanswerable. I might cringe when Friday the Thirteenth comes around, regardless of which day of the week it lands on that month (Thanks, Walt Kelly!), but I cower for nothing more or less than randomness. Not to downplay randomness, for it was probably the force that resulted in us. It routinely produces unlikely results if only because we cannot calculate the likelihood for most results. We might be equally blessed and cursed by randomness, just as lucky or unlucky as we expect to be, depending primarily upon our expectations, which are rarely random and most often focused on feeling luck as if luck even qualifies as a feeling.
GoodMeasure
Unknown Artist:
Ivory and Brass Folding Shoe Measure (1738)
" … I feel deeply sorry for that absence."
I recently happened upon a Neil DeGrasse Tyson video where he explained how, in high school, he acquired his first calculus textbook. He admitted that he initially felt utterly intimidated by the gibberish he found inside. He explained that the jump from algebra to calculus is greater than from arithmetic to algebra. Even so, as weeks went by, he came to catch himself understanding ever more of the previous gibberish so that within that quarter, he'd come to rely upon those previously baffling formulas. This seems the typical testimony of anybody's mastery. It tends to grow upon them slowly, perhaps eventually leading to a flash of realization. Not everyone finds mastery, though, and those who don't often remain baffled about why they couldn't experience that shift.
I was making small talk when driving The Grand Other to school yesterday.
Revealed
Unidentified Artist
[after Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn]:
The Blind Fiddler
-Alternate Title: Blind Fiddler, Led by His Dog
(1631)
" … all will shortly be Revealed."
And so it came to pass that after a weekend drying in the late summer heat, the new concrete porch portal watched the crew return to remove its forms. Screws whirred out, and pry bars separated painstakingly-prepared form faces, oiled chamfer strips and insets intact. Over a scant couple of hours, the place had a new face, one that was in no way familiar. By morning's end, after all those boards had been loaded into a trailer, the yard was bare for the first time in almost a month, and our new home stood before us. The concrete was darker than it would seem by week's end, as Pablo, our concrete contractor, explained. The finishing had already begun. Each edge would be sanded or ground, imperfections filled with a putty-like substance, then sanded or ground again. They will repeat this process until no blemishes remain. It's painstaking work again, back-breaking in its own way, requiring delicacy this time rather than brawn.
The new face seems massive.
Lap-Sitting
Lucian and Mary Brown:
Untitled [boy sitting in woman's lap] (c. 1950)
" … just run-of-the-mill reassurance."
I have proudly possessed a string of Lap-Sitting cats. My current one, Max, finds me most mornings, drowsy and tentative, sitting and staring out the library window. He tries to hop up stealthily, but that's generally beyond his ability. He tromps around the place in those pre-dawn hours. I can hear him coming from clear across the house, for his are no mere little cat's feet. He most often enters from the upstairs window, landing at the end of the hallway with a definite thump before proceeding down the hall to the stairs, which he makes ring with each step, down into the entry hall before turning through the dining room and into the living room where he finally fails to sneak up behind me. He can still surprise me with his timing, though. He suddenly appears on the chair arm, sometimes managing to get tangled up with my arm, whereby he aborts the attempt. He'll sometimes slink away then and not return, but he often mounts a second try, landing off balance in the vicinity of my lap. He often requires a little nudge and some guidance to find a comfortable position before settling in for some serious Lap-Sitting.
I adjust my schedule for these visits, which usually seem far too brief.
Greatness
Edward Ruscha:
Angry Because It's Plaster, Not Milk (1965)
©Edward Ruscha, Fair Use
"Thank you for your patience."
My Greatness must have evolved in me, for I was not born Great or, indeed, born to Greatness. I believe that something, not Greatness, was, however, inborn in me that helped me achieve what nobody who knew me then would have foreseen as my emerging Greatness. The preconditions must have been there, however unnoticed, because leopards never change their spots. Nobody knows how leopards first acquired their spots, only that once possessed, they're never lost. I suspect that Greatness carries a similar distinction because it knows no comeuppance. Once emerged, it's present. Once noticed, it's no longer tacit. It becomes the defining attribute of anyone who owns it, though some insist that Greatness owns its incumbents. Either way, I say it's Great to experience Greatness. Those who have never experienced their own Greatness couldn't possibly understand. Whatever Greatness anyone who's not Great ever notices isn't even distantly related to what that one with genuine Greatness experiences. I'm shocked when anyone even mentions my Greatness, for how could they possibly know of what they speak? True Greatness comes through suggestion: the great must introduce themselves to the unwashed. Some insist that Greatness is exclusively a function of auto-suggestion, though I strenuously disagree, as would anybody possessing the Greatness pedigree.
I'm impressed with how language evolves out from under even its strictest adherents.
Assembling
Edward Ruscha: Chocolate
[Series/Book Title: Assembling, vol. 1,
Henry Korn and Richard Kostelanetz, compilers
Brooklyn: Gnilbmessa inc. (1970)
" … genuinely qualifies as work worthy of shirking."
The final fortnight of each quarter, my thoughts turn to Assembling. If disciplined in my writing that quarter, I will have completed ninety stories, each written under the presumed aegis of that quarter's theme or stated purpose. This quarter, I've been writing Grace stories, though not every piece necessarily seems on topic. If I squint, I can see how I interpret each piece to have fully satisfied its theme, though I seem like an over-insistent assistant district attorney prosecuting my case. Assembling involves bringing each story together in one place so that it might appear to be a manuscript where I can number pages and list chapters in a Table of Contents. The manuscript amounts to the least helpful form for every purpose except one, that of publishing.
Given that I have not published any of the stories I've been creating over the last twenty-nine quarters, I've primarily considered Assembling an optional activity.
Porchy
The Muse's rendering of our finished porch remodel.
"Those without the patience of Job experience the amateur's impatience …"
When creating something, the creator must somehow tolerate a lengthy period where that something does not yet even distantly resemble the end product. The difference between amateur and artisan might be measured in the distance between their patience. Impatience seems the constant companion of the amateur and forbearance, the artisan's eventual nature. The patron's left wondering if their investment will ever pay off. Pablo, our concrete contractor, aspires to be the artisan he only occasionally is yet, though he's coming along. Yes, he did get a little ahead of himself when pouring that first footing and failing the following four inspections. His comeuppance tried everyone's patience, especially his. We ended up with a footing so over-engineered that it will still be here through centuries hence. Whoever tries to turn The Villa into a teardown will curse our existence.
Preparation for the Big Pour consumed more than a week, with constructing forms and fitting them with wooden strips to produce insets and beveled corners.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 9/05/2024
Russell Lee:
Boys on sacks of wool, Malheur County, Oregon (1941)
United States. Farm Security Administration
Almost Exclusively In The Dark
The dust turns to talcum powder as August becomes September. School starts, and I volunteer to show The Grand Other how to ride the bus, but the bus route closed down due to road construction work. I drove her to school, reveling in the opportunity to influence her. I feel compelled to offer her the benefit of my experience, even though she doesn't seem to appreciate my attempts. I know my influence won't be immediate, though it might prove insidious. Grandparents are widely recognized for their insidious nature. We plant seeds we know we'll not see flower; our indifference remains our probable superpower. Few things cannot be improved by the judicious application of sincere indifference, and I can see and raise any indifferent move our granddaughter might attempt. She suffers from the certainty that she can see right through me, but I am not nearly as transparent as I probably appear to her. I'm dense and defensive from a longer lifetime of engaging. I can't quite remember the certainty of my youth, but I considered it considerable then. I earned my comeuppances, and while I'd hope The Other might benefit from them, I understand the rules of this game preclude her directly learning anything from me. That's why I go subversive. She cannot see and might never perceive, though the possibility will always remain. Decades from now, one of my odd comments might finally find its mark. Like everybody, I live almost exclusively in the dark.
Approximately
Russell Lee:
Scooping and sweeping dried hops
from drying room to adjacent room
where they will be baled.
Yakima County, Washington.
There is approximately twenty-five percent
dryout of hops (1941)
United States. Farm Security Administration
"You guys figure out the exact measurements between you."
I am an Approximately person. I do not deal in preciselies. I broadly estimate impacts and generally thrive. I do not appear to have the sort of mind that derives details. I see impressionistically. To my mind, Renoir and Monet painted with photographic clarity. Details lose me. I take measurements to immediately forget them. When Pablo, Our Concrete Contractor, asks my opinion, I refer him to Jesse, our Structural Guy, or Joel, Our Carpenter, for I cannot seem to retain a memory of exactly what we decided when we discussed design. How high the supporting wall should be poured does not reside in my head. I might notice when a disagreement emerges, but I will not be the one resolving the question. For that, we need to convene a conversation. I called Jesse and Joel after it seemed Pablo was measuring from the wrong surface. I could neither confirm nor deny a problem. I held suspicions. I'd also insisted that Pablo call Jesse and Joel. I was trying to encourage some conversation. Why is it so hard for people to talk with each other?
It would have been an excellent idea for us to detail the design of our front porch refurbishing before we started demolishing its past.
FiveHundredMiles
Juste de Juste: Pyramid of Five Men (c. 1543)
" … closed on Tuesdays forever."
My pioneer forebears would have counted themselves uncommonly fortunate had they been able to make twenty miles a day for a month. That would have gained them about what I drove yesterday in just eight hours. FiveHundredMiles seems like a vast distance. We rarely drive more than three hundred miles in a day, and even then, we feel the miles when we arrive. But I needed to run a couple of errands in Portland, and the schedule suggested I might spare no more than a day, so I decided to try. I'd initially figured I'd drive alone since The Muse's schedule's more crowded than mine, but the night before, she sheepishly asked if she might tag along. When I assented, she quickly cleared her schedule. "You'll have to be ready to go by seven," I cautioned. Over and back in a day works best when accomplished in daylight.
We got away by eight.
Helpless
Elihu Vedder: Fisherman and Mermaid (1888-1889)
" … I prefer to do my own ironing."
I am, like all males, Helpless in many ways. All men avoid developing certain skills for a wide variety of reasons. I, for instance, cannot dust. I tell The Muse it's because my failing eyesight cannot discern dust from whatever it’s covering, but since my cataract surgeries left me with nearly 20/20 vision, that reason lacks believability. I still stick by it, dusting being, by personal affirmation, beyond my calling. Nor do I sew, although tailors are often males. My mother was a very talented seamstress, so I probably inherited the genes, and The Muse likewise sews like a pro, so I don't lack a qualified mentor. Yet, I'm sure that sewing remains far beyond my skill set. I am also nobody's auto mechanic or technical support. Anything with many moving parts requiring a precision hand lands outside my skills, abilities, and experiences, or so I insist.
I probably drew my competence lines for reasons other than my lack of fine motor skills.
Fairing
Johann Theodor de Bry:
Little Village Fair (16th-17th century)
"The less than generous sociologist in me steadfastly refuses to see the resemblance."
Last week was Fair Week in the Valley They Liked So Well They Named It Twice. The Southeastern Washington Fair and Rodeo has been an annual event since the eighteen-sixties. It was a highlight of every one of my summers growing up, occurring just when the new school year was starting. We'd begin the school year the Wednesday before Labor Day, then take the following Friday and Monday off. No better way to start a new school year than with a four-day weekend! That Friday would be Kids' Day, and we would flood the fairgrounds to ride the rides, eat the food, and win goldfish that were inconvenient to transport home. We'd wear Rosellini for Governor buttons and dutifully tromp through animal barns and pavilion displays. In its day, the Fair seemed a pretty perfect portrait of our small city's personality, from the Saturday morning parade to the parimutuel horse racing.
The Fair seems less grand now.
F_J_B
H. R. H.: Pen Pictures of the Leading Events of the Last Week, from Chicago Tribune
(Published Feb 26, 1893)
" … they are not incorrect."
I solo worked our candidate's booth at the fair, casting for and reeling in potential voters. I'd learned the technique watching The Muse last year when she was running for the position of Port Commissioner, an election she went on to win. The Muse is a naturally gifted retail politician, which means she can attract attention and gain support. Not every candidate comfortably projects themself onto others, and not every potential voter necessarily appreciates a candidate reeling them in. She'd ask innocuously: "Are you a voter here?" The answer winnowed out the many out-of-town visitors to our fair. Anyone answering was hooked. Many remained oblivious, almost invisible, as they moved through the crowd. She could usually tell if someone was conservative because they'd turn their head a quarter turn away, deliberately not seeing her there, casting into the crowd. They'd become deaf, too, suddenly unable to hear her question.
Those who responded could be reeled in with a follow-on question, and some would soon find themselves engaged in good-hearted conversation.
Jobsite
Lewis Wickes Hine: Construction--Empire State Building, (1930-1931, printed later)
" … we will sorely miss this sacred inconvenience."
A home becomes a jobsite quickly, without very much fanfare. One minute, I was breakfasting on my front porch, and the next, or at most the moment after, that porch was being roughly disassembled. I double-locked the front door to prevent anyone, me included, from inadvertently stepping out into air improved only by naked joists. The idea that such a thing could happen haunted me every time I passed by that door through the first weeks. The view out the bottom-of-the-stairs window became a peek into the progress of the deconstruction and the following rebuilding. I stepped around construction materials to set sprinklers and tried to remember to move the vehicles before the work crew blocked the driveway every morning. The whole rhythm of my life changed.
A work crew seems the rough equivalent of a haunting.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 8/29/2024
Russell Lee:
Smoothing concrete floor at migrant camp
under construction at Sinton, Texas (1939)
United States. Farm Security Administration
Pride As Well As Purpose
This writing week might have served as a reminder of the necessity of deliberately choosing the terms and conditions I'm pursuing. I can default to a mindset believing I'm somehow destined to succeed, but neither success nor failure usually operates so inadvertently. Deliberate choice might not guarantee a damned thing in this world other than clarity of purpose, though satisfying purpose cannot usually be guaranteed. Clarity helps identify failures more often than it ever guarantees success, and while clarity of purpose might best guarantee disappointment, that clarity remains important. For instance, a fresh choice can feel renewing when overrunning original purpose, even in the light of certain impending failure. One dream ending into an alternate beginning might make a meaningful difference. I'm usually tempted to ride a losing horse until a little after losing the original contest, when I could have switched horses well before losing the race, and I can almost always project that I'll lose. It might even be possible to feel pretty damned successful without ever once even finishing any individual contest, taking pride as well as purpose switching horses.
ThePour
Russell Lee:
Road worker mixing concrete in Menard County, Texas (1940)
United States. Farm Security Administration
"I swear I'm just along for the ride."
Ten days later, we might have recovered our porch refurbishing project. A bungled footing pour had set the effort back by requiring some remedial reengineering and considerable additional digging. Four failed inspections, and the inspector still needed to clear for ThePour, which had sometimes seemed like a mythical, perhaps unattainable future objective. The morning of ThePour, we still had yet to receive the requisite permission. I stopped by the job site to chew Pablo, our concrete contractor, a "new one," telling him to stop fucking me and do his job. "We will pass this morning's inspection," I insisted more confidently than I should have. He started explaining to me that one footing might not yet have been dug deep enough, that he might have to jackhammer out the sidewalk and dig from the top down rather than from the side in. "Fine," I replied, "Whatever it takes."
I left it at that, leaving to take our GrandOther to school, promising to return in an hour.
ComingToFuckingJesus
Franz Stuck: The Guardian of Paradise (1889)
"I might convene my ComingToFuckingJesus Meeting,
but nobody even remotely resembling Jesus ever attends."
I am, by nature, a patient man. I am taken to making generous interpretations. I think of myself as forgiving to a fault. I travel without the burden of grudges. I have never been obsessed with the presence of even imagined enemies. I am, in short, usually happily oblivious. Go ahead, take mean advantage of me. I'm unlikely to seek redress in the thoroughly unlikely event that I notice. I am a well-known and long-standing schlemiel, born to be humiliated. But even I have my limit. I rarely experience it, but somebody will likely hear about it when it finally appears. I'm likely to convene what I call a ComeToFuckingJesus Meeting to air my ill feelings. I will expect contrition and compliance from the target of my considerable vehemence. I will come pissed and usually surprise myself with the swiftness of my truly terrible sword.
I am not now, if I ever was, a Christian.
Successable
Franz von Stuck: Verwundete Amazone [Wounded Amazon] (1905)
" … if only we were clever enough to insist upon those more infinite terms of engagement."
Success has ten thousand identities, from the simplest-minded to the sublime. The simplest-minded achievements are those where some winner takes all, where a student earns straight As, and the quarterhorse takes the crown. The more nuanced successes are more common, ones where criteria seem ambiguous and some higher-order judgment appears to be required to even coherently aspire. A mentor of mine reminded me to begin every critique by appreciating that something even appeared on the page, for that alone might qualify as a miracle. Few experiences can be appropriately characterized as total losses; even last place still finishes a race. A firm belief in the possibility of absolute success was never required to enter a race. Once the odds turn against a competitor, it rarely makes much sense to insist upon belief in an unlikely ultimate victory. Choose your success criteria carefully.
It matters which game you're playing.
ReInspecting
François Boucher:
Landscape with Rustic Cottage (c. 1760)
" … an essence of ProjectCommunity."
Failing that first inspection threw our porch remodeling project into some chaos. We started insisting upon dotting 'i's and crossing 't's, which affected momentum. Our concrete contractors found another project to entertain them while waiting for the city to mark where utility lines lay. A couple of days later, we decided that since they would be digging with shovels rather than backhoes, we would be unlikely to get into trouble if we just went ahead and started digging around the offending footings. You might remember that the inspector found the footings too shallow and that the engineer had prescribed simply digging deeper beneath the four load-bearing points along the footing. The crew quickly dug the prescribed depth and dimensions on three of the four load-bearing points. I ordered a second inspection before they'd finished the fourth point, which looked to be a more difficult dig. The inspector appeared at the appointed hour, though the contractors didn't.
It was clear that the work was not yet complete.
Reunion
Louis Monza: Corn Eaters Reunion (1940s)
"Life would be tragic if it weren't so goddamned beautiful sometimes!"
She insisted that she would not attend, that the experience would prove too painful to bear. She had helped organize the last reunion. She had participated but with a role to play, a role she could hide behind. She had been charged with taking pictures, and she'd successfully hidden behind her camera so she could witness without engaging. She felt too vulnerable and exposed this time, so she wouldn't go.
Then she told the most remarkable story.
ReckoningWith
Odilon Redon: Light (1893)
Reckoning With
They insist that you are a force to be reckoned with,
but I perceive you’re much different.
While you undoubtedly are a force
that sometimes requires some Reckoning With,
this characterization misses more essential elements,
for you are, first and foremost, A Woman Of Substance,
not merely of force,
and any attempt to reduce your presence
to one of the baser elements misses points.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 8/22/2024
Claude Monet: Étretat: The Beach and the Falaise d’Amont (1885)
Nothing Else To Find
I might be the most fortunate SOB in this universe. Even so, not everything in my life goes according to plan. Heck, only some things I do seem necessarily planable, but I abide. I have been aging every inch of my way, though aging, being almost imperceptible from day to day, never seems prominent. I take stock each year as Summer starts waning and my birthday reappears. The Muse's birthday follows a few days later, and in the course of a week, we've successfully recalibrated. I nap more than I used to. I hesitate more before writing. When I started this writing streak seven years ago, I seemed fearless, though cluelessness more likely explains my behavior.
I worry whether my writing will prove up to standard, a standard I have yet to define or enforce. I do not want to live on purpose but on something more like an accident. I want what I create to remain mysterious, if not necessarily to my readers. I prefer to believe it's an expression more than a creation; creations need too much deliberation and design before beginning. I cannot command that I be spontaneous, for that command co-opts what spontaneity requires. I might live accidentally on purpose, the purpose an emergent property of engagement. It must not be all that important that I know beforehand what I'll create, but more necessary that I discover something I can relate to when creating or just after. I still do not know how to write, though I'm coming to understand when to write. I might have nothing else to find if I can muster the foolhardiness to write when it's time.
Flipped
Jack Gould: Untitled [boy doing backflip on trampoline] (c. 1950)
"Weird seems to be the word of the moment."
Early yesterday morning or the morning before, I Googled "Jamie Raskin Speech At DNC" to find Representative Raskin's Banana Republican speech, which I'd seen mentioned in a New York Times piece. I'm a huge Raskin fan. We lived just around the corner from him when we were exiled to The People's Republic of Takoma Park in Maryland, and I appreciate his wisdom and wit. We also share the tragedy of losing a child filled with promise for our future. Having survived two bouts with Cancer, he seems exceptionally courageous and purposeful, the soul of effective opposition to the Banana Republicans. He also stood as a manager of the House's January 6 hearings. He chose the right side of history when making it. Google delivered the link, and I clicked on it, whereupon the Google Gods selected an appropriate advertisement as a preface, for, if anything, the algorithm is known for its prescient context sensitivity.
It served up one of those rambling, incoherent Trump ads featuring the chief Banana Republican failing to make either a case or a point.
GiftsDiffering
Matthijs Maris: Fairytale ( c. 1877)
" … surprise and perhaps even delight us in the end."
Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type, a 1980 book written by Isabel Briggs Myers, introduced me to the study of different gifts people bring to their lives and their work. Before I read this book, I naively presumed that my behavior represented normal responses while everyone else's was some variant of weird. I was not wrong in these early assessments; I was just a little incomplete, for coming to know my perspective just began my understanding. My perspective remains my base understanding, for how could it be otherwise? I have never experienced anything from another's perspective, and nobody else has ever shared mine. I remain unique but not necessarily typical, just like everybody. We remain steadfastly different but not unclassifiable. We each tend toward some common differences; those of us more comfortable with introverting are often more alike than we seem when compared with those preferring extroversion. If one does not get too awfully tangled up in their perspective, one might come to perceive others simply being themselves: perhaps weird but not necessarily wrong: different.
The few people populating our porch refurbishment project couldn't be more different.
Sacraments
Carla Liss, Designed by George Maciunas,
Published by Fluxus: Sacrament Fluxkit (early 1970s)
" … enough to fully satisfy our legacy …"
On my birthday or thereabouts, The Muse and I escape whatever life we're living to engage in an annual ritual as sacred as Christmas. We flee to the edge of the backcountry, on the border of the Winaha/Tucannon Wilderness, to partake of an indigenous fruit, the Winaha Currant. We accidentally discovered them decades ago when on an otherwise routine mountain toodle. We found bushes leaden with clusters of lush black fruit emitting an overwhelmingly alluring scent and tasting quite extraordinary. We hesitantly waded into the adjacent chilling stream and commenced to harvest the fruit, punctuating our work with greedy, lip-staining nibbles of our prey. We returned that first day with a couple of plastic bags of fruit, enough to produce some reduction for use in the kitchen: an unusual drizzle over meat or dessert: Sweet but perfumy, Savory, and absolutely unique. These were not quite the generic black currents popular throughout Europe but a New World variant as unique as our region.
We found that first foray into Current-gathering more than refreshing.
Redemption
John Singer Sargent: Death and Victory (1922)
" … the forgivable sin of project work."
Last week ended in deep disappointment. The porch refurbishment project had become an embarrassment. I sent the concrete crew home or off to another job pending a reply from the consulting engineer. I remember cursing the stipulation that this job needed an engineering report, clear evidence of needless regulation, and another thousand dollars spent to dubious effect. I'm learning that every resource this effort has attracted has been a critical puzzle piece, their importance sometimes puzzling until some moment of extremes. We'd failed our inspection—well, actually, the footing poured by Pablo, the concrete contractor, and his crew had fallen short of expectations. It's interesting how I included myself when ascribing guilt. I wanted no blaming or finger-pointing. We were either laboring in concert or wasting our time, so I owned my part in the disaster. We might have avoided the failed inspection if I had been more attentive and insistent. We failed it, as we also failed ourselves.
The inspector insisted that he would approve any plan approved by the consulting engineer if it was executed according to plan.
MovingOut/In/Up/On
Louis Léopold Boilly: The Movings (1822)
" … every damned one of those takes considerable getting used to."
Of all human activities, Moving might be the most illuminating. When Moving, one becomes perhaps both their most vulnerable and their most liberated. Displaced, even temporarily, reveals many hidden edges and allows for much discovery, especially the sort one had sincerely hoped to avoid. Pull a dresser away from a wall and find the remnants of some earlier inattention, like a pair of cobweb-covered underwear. Idealy, Moving should only be attempted in private, but some possessions, like the infamous hide-a-bed, require at least a crew of two to move and, even then, will insist upon opening up when halfway up the stairs. The first and last scenes in many popular stories involve Moving, with the hero leaving on their defining journey and then returning to move on into another realm. There never seems to be any actual coming home, only MovingOut/In/Up/On.
I've been blessed with the opportunity to assist my son Wilder in his latest MovingOut/In/Up/On.
BackAlmostToGo
Kees de Goede: Studie Innerworld Outerworld I/, Naar Mug Stegner
[Study Innerworld Outerworld I/, To Mug Stegner] (1987)
" … I'll be faunching to get moving again."
A certain cadence profoundly influences every activity on this planet, or seems to. Time, as some wag noted, prevents everything from happening at once, but little prevents anyone from occasionally getting far ahead of themselves. This usually happens for all the proper reasons, with good intentions often contributing more than their fair share. Whatever the cause, the effect, if not permanent, does tend to be relatively immediate. A brick wall steps sideways into traffic. An unanticipated force field steals momentum. We get directed to head BackAlmostToGo without collecting our two hundred dollars. We seem incapable of seeing these experiences coming, even though they most often occur like a proverbial slow-moving train. After, we complain about how our senses must have left us behind, about how we must have become temporarily blinded. We're wary for a while after, sensing that our senses hide something essential from us. Our senses were never not withholding much of our experience from us. We register only tiny fractions of the perturbations around us, and we ignore many of those we experience as trivial or unimportant. Importance comes later if, indeed, it ever comes at all.
My latest fall came with the first inspection, a visit The Muse and I invited when it really should have been the contractor inviting.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 8/15/2024
Corita Kent (Sister Mary Corita):
where there's life there's mud (1966)
Printed text reads: FOR[GET IT] /
we don't turn out perfect people
- where there's life there's mud.
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum,
Margaret Fisher Fund
Copyright © Courtesy of the Corita Art Center,
Immaculate Heart Community, Los Angeles /
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Once Upon A Time Aspired
As an acknowledged expert at project work, I would be remiss if I considered this designation to be an inoculation against experiencing any of what projects routinely serve their sponsor. One cannot avoid the inevitable, though one may, if remarkably clever, come to understand that inevitables say nothing about anyone's mastery or understanding. Acknowledged masters managed some of the most significant failures in the history of projects, and most of them eventually became godsends once the people involved accepted that they never were nor could have been in charge. Grace often arrives in sackcloth and shame, only to later tame discouragement. I cannot count the number of blessings I've experienced that were clearly curses when they arrived. It took time and patience for the universe to align around how the grand plan actually turned out. Nobody's very well positioned for determining success or failure as long as either metric seems to matter. Later, often much later, the blessing slips out from behind her disguise, and Grace sets down to have a spot of supper with you. Not one of us are masters, and none have an ounce of worthwhile advice between us. We're all still subject to the capricious winds and capacious disappointments. Not one of us was ever perfect, though several of us once upon a time aspired to become so. "Where there's life there's mud!" Sister Maria Corita
GoldenRules
Corita Kent (Sister Mary Corita):
somebody had to break the rules (1967)
Screen print
The printed text reads: SERVIC[E] ENTRAN[CE] / somebody had to break the rules / The rose is a rose and was always a rose but the theory now goes that apple's a rose, and the pear is and so the plum, i suppose. The dear only knows what will next prove a rose. You of course are a rose. But were always a rose. Robert Frost
Credit Line: Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Margaret Fisher Fund
Copyright © Courtesy of the Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community, Los Angeles / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
"I wonder every morning how I should live."
The question remains open regardless of how often it's answered: How should I live? It might be better understood to wonder, 'How should I live now?' because, with shifting contexts and ever-accumulating experiences, one's response might reasonably change over time. The aspiration to answer this question once and for all might be universal, for it's as inherently unsettling of a question as it is also apparently definitively unanswerable. I have caught myself getting glib in the face of it, resorting to some Hallmark® Card homily as if that might dispatch the troubling issue. I try to do unto others as I'd prefer them to do unto me, The Golden Rule, even though I know not everyone might appreciate what I’d warmly receive. I considered The Platinum Rule an improvement—to do unto others what they want to have done unto them—until I realized that I rarely have access to what others want to have done unto them. I'm not omniscient. Further, even if I knew focusing on their bare want could quickly get me into trouble or violate my own better intentions. I wouldn't want to supply drugs to a person with an addiction to satisfy some Platinum Rule.
The forms of these rules never change.
Inspecting
Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen:
The Field Inspector (April 1894)
"Placating paves more streets than protesting ever did."
When we finally collected the permit required to start our porch project, after nearly two long years of failing to satisfy its requirements, I asked about inspections because I didn't know the rules. The permit person said our contractor would know when to call for inspections, so I set that issue aside as beyond my purview. I had not thought another second about Inspecting until late yesterday afternoon when Joel, our carpenter, dropped by to survey progress. The footing had been poured that afternoon, and all seemed right with the world. Joel asked if the inspector had visited yet. He hadn't, as far as I knew, but I had not been trying to stay in the know on that issue. Joel went on to say that said inspector might insist that we encase the porch deck supports in concrete, too, and that he usually wants to see the rebar inside a form before concrete's poured. However, he often happily assumes the work was done properly if he knows the contractor. The footing concrete has already been poured. He could insist, if he wanted to be a real son-of-a-bitch, that we remove the newly poured footing to confirm it has the required rebar embedded in it.
This practice should be confusing because I'm not now and have never even aspired to become a member of the contractor society that lives and dies by the judgments and rulings of city inspectors.
Designering
Heinrich Aldegrever:
Ornamental Design with a Bat in the Centre (1550)
"We approximately understand what we're doing …"
Design, like almost everything, seems different in theory than it does in practice. In theory, Design must be complete before construction begins. Practice finds considerable overlap. We might diligently try to fully flesh out aspirations beforehand, but our context shifts once we start moving dirt. We often cannot foresee what will become evident after we've exposed rafters and taken down walls. More than fine-tuning occurs regardless of how complete the design seemed during preliminary discussions. The contractor holds more responsibility than they'd ever willingly contract to deliver and always have. They're most likely to notice the small incongruences that could explode into disaster. They're the ones present to see the plan's emerging incompleteness. They're the ones tacitly charged with continually asking the most uncomfortable questions.
Spontaneously mustered conferences are called. Jesse, the structural guy who will perform the follow-on effort, held clues for the foundation builders and vice-versa.
LevelSetting
Alfred Stieglitz:
Georgia O’Keeffe—Hands and Thimble (1919)
"I'll insist on seeing level even if some crookedness persists …"
On the third day, brick removed, the concrete contractors started pulling string and finding plumb. I asked Pablo if he was doing that, and when he confirmed, I cautioned him that many had sought level and plumb in the old house, but they had yet to find it. He insisted that he would persist and lay a footing upon which a level and plumb front porch would permanently rest. The Muse and I left town for the weekend while his crew prepared to quit by noon that Friday. I'm watering around the works this morning, waiting for the crew to arrive to start fitting rebar into the space. Tomorrow, I expect some concrete will be delivered, and the permanent part of the effort will commence on just the fifth day of work.
Pablo moves sure and fast.
FuturesPassing
George Barbier: Falbalas et Fanfreluches: almanach des modes présentes, passées & futures pour 1922: Elle et Lui / France XXe siècle, [Falbalas and Fanfreluches: almanac of present, past & future fashions for 1922: She and Him / France 20th century,], (1922)
"The future doesn't hold a place for any us, thank heavens."
To a man my age, a trip anywhere becomes a trip into an unwanted future. I might depart aspiring to visit my past but inevitably return having glimpsed a dreaded next. It will likely become much worse than I imagine, but the hints I do glimpse leave me stunned. There was a day when the future seemed promising. Midcentury America featured posters promising flying cars and what now appear to have been early precursors to Spandex®. The flying car notion fell apart when encountering human potential. Had we understood the cost of combustion engine propulsion, we might have retained our attraction to wagons and horses. Still, we were smothering ourselves in horseshit then, and the invisible pollution from the combustion engine seemed a vast improvement. Maybe it was.
I had warmly anticipated a visit to Norstrom's flagship store, remembering when Nordstrom really knew how to run a flagship store.
Aches&Complaints
Dennis Feldman: TV and plant in hotel lobby – Seattle, WA – 1974 (1974)
"Sleazeattle embodies the sin of self-importance."
Driving into Seattle from the east on I-90, I was reminded of the many times I'd hitched along that road fifty and then some years ago. I much preferred to hitchhike that route, and as I drive now, I reflect backward on that time and place that no longer exists. Sleazeattle seems all but indistinguishable from the place I knew then. The street names remain unchanged, but everything else has become some post-modern approximation of the authentic article. I explained to The Muse that back then, there was no tunnel on the western side of the Lake Washington Floating Bridge. The freeway emptied onto surface streets that were never not tangled with traffic. We somehow slip through the newer approach and slide the two exits north on I-5 without difficulty, even though it's after five on a Friday. As usual, we must circle a few blocks to get The Schooner properly oriented to the hotel's loading zone. We checked in quickly, and I slipped across the street to park the car in the lot next to the Korean restaurant. Welcome to Belltown again.
We're doing a Jazz Alley show and dress for the occasion.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 8/08/2024
Charles Émile Jacque: Summer (1885)
Committing Sins and Seeking Penance
A spare year ago, I first experienced what my internist would later label Bursitis, a mysterious and painful inflammation in something I'd been blissfully ignorant I even had. It seemed like a made-up disorder, even though it kept me from finishing a painting project. I felt I needed that project as repayment of a debt I'd incurred when first refinishing that surface. I had penance to pay, but the Bursitis prevented my repayment. I hired a painter and nursed my shoulder, feeling decrepit. A year later, I'm still learning how to integrate my now definitely more tender shoulder into my existence. I'm learning that if I don't challenge The Bastard Bursitis, it tends to win. When I buck up and engage with it anyway, whatever discomfort I initially feel quickly disappears. The harder I work it, the more it seems to reward me by forgetting to punish me for my indiscretion. This story perfectly fits my predilection. I want to believe that personal gumption overcomes physical affliction, even though I know that notion to be essentially fiction and dangerous. I live an elaborate fiction, growing ever richer with each fresh experience. One day, the sum of my continuing indiscretions will probably catch up to me. Until then, I'll continue committing sins and seeking penance.
QuickStart
Unknown English Artist: Linen, plain weave;
embroidered with wool and silk in tent stitches:
Harvesting (1701/25)
"What began as endless frustration …"
Two days following the FirstMeeting, the porch renovation project enjoyed a QuickStart. By eight-thirty, deck boards were being pried up. By noon, ceiling props were already being placed, and the brick planter wall was demolished. By the end of that first day of actual work, the ceiling had been thoroughly propped, and part of the brick perimeter had already been toppled. I constructed a peanut gallery comprised of a vintage metal lawn chair and a garden bench where Kurt, Our Painter, and I sat through the early afternoon making observations as the crew did what crews have always done. We considered it a credit to Pablo, The Concrete Contractor, that the crew seemed light-hearted, joking good-naturedly while they worked. Pablo occasionally called me over to point out some fresh absurdity in the construction he and his crew were dismantling. One only knows once deconstructing just how flimsy the prior renovation had been, though we had always suspected.
We decided that the brick front had indeed been cosmetic because the columns didn't extend down to the ground.
Denialing
After a design by Jan van Orley
Woven at the workshop of Daniel IV Leyniers:
Procession of the Fat Ox from a Teniers Series (c. 1725)
Denial remains the first stage of acceptance.
"This process should be upsetting."
The true purpose of that First Meeting wasn't satisfied until a second meeting took place. The concrete contractor, the lead player in this production, couldn't make the initial meeting, so we convened a supplemental session for those who couldn't make the first. Pablo, the concrete contractor, and his assistant Wilbur asked harder questions. The conversation began light-heartedly enough but quickly degraded into difficulties, which was precisely its purpose. We tend to start projects filled with promise. We neglect to recognize what must be sacrificed to achieve that promise, and it always comes as a profound surprise when the first hints of underlying costs surface. I began my contribution by suggesting we could support the roof from the top of the deck. I even took Pablo to the basement access panel to survey the underlying infrastructure. He seemed to become thoughtful as I sold my proposal. Once we returned to the front porch, to the top of the deck, Pablo asked the Golden Question.
We had been seeking problems rather than solutions.
FirstMeeting
Max Beckmann: Meeting of the Forest Owners (1945)
"Now I understand how I will get to trust him."
The FirstMeeting on any project becomes a defining moment, for this gathering always occurs unselfconsciously. The attendees have yet to fall into whatever identities close association always encourages. They're as close to their shoes-off-selves as they'll ever be, if only because nobody quite knows who they're supposed to be yet. Yes, some will show up intending to show well. Others will come inquisitive, but each will come wrapped in an innocence they will quickly abandon in favor of forward momentum. In this session, patterns will make their first appearance. The group's DNA will be present but not yet fully evident, disclosing only hints. Attendance alone will communicate something, for not everyone will make the meeting. Each explanation should say something about who they might become once they join this ensemble. I try to maintain my attention.
The concrete contractor, by far the most crucial player in the early part of this effort, had his sister, who answers his phone, call fifteen minutes before the scheduled start to explain that he'd had a mechanical failure during a pour and couldn't get away from his current job site for the meeting.
Mustering
Master with the Mousetrap: The Two Armies at the Battle of Ravenna, 1512 (c. 1512, printed 1530)
" … we're rapidly closing that overlong-open window."
The scheming part's over now. We're finally Mustering the forces necessary to affect the changes to the front porch The Muse mandated two summers ago. The project hadn't started, couldn't have started, until after the permit was approved. Before then, we were scheming, projecting, and assessing. Permit approval made this project inevitable and, finally, surprisingly, real. Before, it was theory; now it begins to become practice. Very little's settled yet. We've painted only in the broadest strokes. We've spoken as if we knew even though we couldn't have possibly known. We wanted estimates for an effort nobody could imagine. Once the principals converge to imagine together, we will begin the real work of assessing actual effort and focusing forces. So far, I've given notice that we have approved permits, doubtless a huge and important milestone even though we really haven't started anything yet.
The first presumption of many to die in this effort was the notion that we might keep the mess from intruding into our lives.
HeatExhaustion
Arthur Rothstein: Corn withered by the heat and chewed by grasshoppers. Terry, Montana (1936)
" … Grace even within this seeming wasteland."
By August, the surface of this valley becomes burnished buff beige. The days start growing noticeably shorter, though they each nonetheless seem endless. On nights when the outside temperature can't even fall below seventy, The Muse opens up the house before she slips into bed when it's still hotter than eighty outside. I wake from fitful sleep to flip my sweaty pillow before finally surrendering to wee-hour wakefulness again. Nights seem no less interminable than days. The cats don't even bother to come inside those nights. They return listless in the morning to leave half their breakfasts uneaten. They hug cool pavement or find a soggy corner of the lawn to lounge on. I envy their soggy corner.
Our basement provides the only respite.
BustinLoose
Louis Auguste Lepère: Breaking Waves, September Tide (1901)
" … just gravity or something similar having her way with us again."
If I am to take away any notion from this discontented summer, let it be the conviction that things seem like they will never be any different until a slight difference appears one day; then, things can never be the same again. This abrupt nature of change belies the idea that it might occur gradually, according to the Boiled Frog Theory. However, even in the Boiled Frog Theory, the frog has no sensation of boiling until it is too far gone to be rescued. He, too, senses no change until it "suddenly" becomes inexorable. Then, that familiar lifestyle's already over, never to return. This seems the truer nature of life, of living. We might be forever changing, but we only sense we're changing on relatively rare occasions after it's already inexorable. This is another face of Grace.
Those who claim to be masters of change are probably lying to themselves.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 8/01/2024
Rudolph Ruzicka:
Weeks Memorial Bridge, Cambridge, Massachusetts
(1927)
Unchangeable Until It Isn't
I have been quietly and happily dispatching long procrastinated chores this summer. Such efforts only commence after I've reached a certain level of self-loathing. I can shove stuff to the back of the closet for only so long, and it's over once I cross that border. I'm not reforming then, not repenting, just entering a later stage of the same form I had been inhabiting. It's a magical time, though. As I convey each clog, another appears, and each seems less daunting to dispatch. I gained a growing sense of personal authority as if I were discovering long-lost superpowers. Those powers were never lost but merely waiting for conducive conditions to arise. This summer of my discontent presents those conducive conditions, like late summer, which presents differing conditions from seemingly endless same-old, same-old days. I might never understand how change arises from sameness, but I can nonetheless depend upon its eventual emergence. Nothing can never be quite the same again, or really even for a first time. It's all different except my discernment, which seems unchangeable until it isn't.
Doubt
Wouter Pietersz II Crabeth: The Incredulity of St Thomas (c. 1626-30)
"I might conclude that confidence isn't required …"
I pity all True Believers, for they cannot experience incredulity, and without that small skill, they become a shill for every come-on and con artist they encounter. The True Believer insists that their faith sustains them while it nibbles away at whatever originally made them human. Only machines seem capable of unambiguous engagement; every other entity reserves something to preserve itself in case it makes an incorrect assessment. We gingerly place a toe in the water before jumping in. We likewise invest as if we could lose everything rather than as if we were sure from the outset to win. Caution trumps certainty—Doubt conditions belief.
My mother ended every phone call I ever had with her by saying, "Well, I don't know much."
Disappointment
Jan Lievens: Still Life with Books (c. 1627-28)
"Maybe I was meant to f#ck that last one up!"
This world sure can disappoint. It can encourage fantastic aspirations and then fail to reward them. It asks for dreams and then seems to scheme to find ways to undermine them. It wants your best before sending its regrets. We seem somehow destined to fall short of something. Always a fly in the works and one in the ointment. What's anyone to do? We try to remain faithful to largely fallacious ideals. We believe or insist we do, even though we couldn't reason through to resolution, either. Some days, it seems we're all pretending just as hard as we can, actively ignoring the obvious facts at hand. We might not be able to afford to know or afford to understand, so we plan with studied ignorance before blaming the shortfall on happenstance. We inhabit a hyperactive Disappointment machine.
Some people seem less vulnerable, as if they are exempted from the usual consequences.
Delusion
Odilon Redon: Flower Clouds (c. 1903)
" … not even Delusion could save my bacon this time around."
It might be true that every genuinely great idea began as a Delusion. The great discoveries of science often started as no more than metaphor, awfully odd-seeming combinations of concepts as yet unproven. It might also be true that if one hopes to make valuable observations, one must increase their tolerance for Delusion. Those too married to reality rarely see anything creatively, for reality drives hard bargains. It struggles to suspend its disbelief. It relies too heavily upon the familiar. It wants to know the correct answers. Delusion, on the other hand, was never that well-grounded. It makes belief rather than relying upon certified sources. It thrives on what-ifs and speculations, deferring to make its point until after it's considered its space. It understands that even a wrong foot breaks the inertia of stuckness and that movement might be more important than initial direction.
The transition back from a decently Delusional start can prove daunting.
Defiance
Édouard Manet: Excerpt from a book, Les Chats (1870)
published by J. Rothschild
and Libraire de la Société Botanique de France
typography by Gustave Silbermann,
printed by Cardart et Luce
Book with five etchings, two with aquatint and three with plate tone, one color lithograph, and line block prints, two with hand-coloring, with letterpress in black on ivory wove paper, with cardboard and paper cover and leather spine with gilt lettering
"May Grace grant us respite from our Defiant nature, even when we steadfastly refuse to ask for it."
Go ahead. Tell me not to do something. Refuse permission. Forbid anything. I dare you. I encourage you, for nothing better fuels my forward momentum than a decent or even an indecent Defiance. I will insist, somehow, on getting satisfaction, and I will damned well succeed. Vengence becometh mine in those moments, and I wield my very own terrible and shockingly swift sword. I might even become self-righteous, for I will feel wronged and surely—certainly— set out to somehow right that wrong, believing it my birthright. It will become a matter of honor and self-respect, and I might barter every ounce of respect anybody other than me ever invested in me, but I will succeed, even if the success kills me. Do not ever tell me, "No!"
I think people generally refuse to do what they're told.
Diligence
Cornelis Bos: Allegory:
Industry Rewarding Diligence and Punishing Indolence
(c. 1540)
" I seem to need a somewhat stiff wind in my face to find that most satisfying sort of Grace."
I think of myself as more diligent than disciplined. Diligence doesn't need discipline, for it seems to operate on distraction. I loosely focus my attention, then keep returning to the task; no or very little discipline ever required. I can certainly trudge much further than I can march and probably even further than I can stroll. I need not even know my destination to begin, on the principle that any direction, diligently followed, will ultimately guide anyone to a very different location. The difference need not matter so much as its magnitude. The mountains might not be far from my starting point, but they represent a vast difference that naturally seems like concomitant progress. Slow and steady might not win any race, but it does tend to fuel persistence, which can often outlast even the most dedicated competitor. How did I do that? One diligent inch at a freaking time!
I do not operate to any sort of grand plan.
Discipline
Will Hicock Low:
He Met Within the Murmurous Vestibule,
His Young Disciple (1885)
"Almost nothing demands more Discipline than this!"
I was up at 2 AM yesterday, wondering if I still possessed the Discipline to continue writing or if I ever truly possessed it. Discipline was never one of the more tangible possessions. It does not hang near any surface but remains hidden within time. It only ever appears over some longer duration than any instant. I've been meditating twice daily since the Spring of 1974, over fifty years. I've missed a handful of sessions over that period, but no more than the sparest handful, so it might seem beyond question that I possess Discipline, yet I still question myself. Discipline dispensed in twenty-minute increments might be insignificant and hardly seem to make any difference. I cannot assess the difference fifty years of meditating made because I neglected to include a control in the experiment. I would have needed a clone to not meditate over the same period to determine if the Discipline has made any difference.
I can say that I can sit still for any odd half hour.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 7/25/2024
Jacques-Philippe Caresme:
Priest Making an Offering Accompanied by Nymphs and Satyrs (18th century)
Just My Sanity
I write as if my life depended upon it. It doesn't. Almost nothing's more ephemeral than the written word. Even the spoken word outlives it. Unless spoken and shared, writing sits there like a freeze-dried entree, waiting to be reconstituted by breath and tone. Writing's all alone, even if it's been distributed in several languages, even once it’s been designated a best seller. Sales don't have anything to do with it. The most widely misunderstood works in history were also among the most popular. Much can and does go awry when reconstituting an entree. The author's intent might have never been all that apparent to the author, either, so the tea leaf readers who claim to understand blow smoke. Why would any reader care about any writer's intentions? Reading was supposed to be a form of entertainment. Until and unless it's fun, it's always much better left undone. If it's not enjoyable, reading becomes a deplorable act, worse than wasting time, though time might exist solely to provide raw material for producing waste. This writer deliberately wastes his time in the hope that readers might more usefully employ theirs, reconstituting his entrees. My life does not depend upon this exchange, just my sanity.
Whelming
Still Image, Periodical illustration, by unknown photographer:
Bodies recently discovered at Pompeii, in the same position
as when overwhelmed by the ashes of Vesuvius (1893)
"Why would I expect anything to feel any different now?"
I might be a master at overWhelming myself and also at master at underWhelming myself as well. I hold no middle or middling ground, only extremes: swamped or parched, tossed or drowned. I might need a vacation, a break from my usual expectations since every one seems to overwhelm my coping mechanisms. I consequently feel trapped in a world beyond or beneath me, chalking up experience only as an incapable contributor. I figure nothing out. The instruction manual only complicates use. Experience further confuses rather than informs.
I'm almost certain this Whelming amounts to a self-inflicted state.
Aimlessly
Torii Kiyomitsu 鳥居清満: Man Fitting Arrow to Bow
(Edo period, 1615-1868)
"I'm hope I'll be finished by sometime next week."
I've heard it claimed that none of us know how to use the many systems we rely upon. I might use five percent of our Subaru's features. Occasionally, I'll get in trouble and have to ask The Muse to look something up in the absurdly voluminous user manual, a volume within which I cannot successfully reference anything. Even my lawn mower, broken for three weeks, remains a cipher except for the narrowest of uses when mowing lawn. The many systems on my MacBook Air remain largely vaporware, for I might employ one percent of their capacity. Whenever I attempt to do anything there, I come close to the edge of my universe. I often enough fall over into Neverland.
Just this morning, trying to capture the illustration for this story, my usual museum browser refused to find anything.
AKingsGambit
Charles Gifford Dyer: Seventeenth-Century Interior (1877)
" … positively evolving to the utter astonishment of its recently confident opposition …"
I thought the game had begun, but it had not. Preliminaries had been happening for years without an encounter, then that first one disappointed many. I didn't witness the event, having better things to do than watch some boob continue making a public fool of himself. Those who witnessed left shaken by their champion's performance even though his unworthy opponent never managed to commit a single truth. Their champion had more than competently performed the duties of his office, and nobody except his unworthy opponent and his minions had suggested that he was unfit or incapable of a second term until that single disappointing performance. Then, partisans joined the foes to insist that Joe should go. I opposed these moves. I thought them presumptuous. As with most things Presidential, the people have little understanding of anything associated with the role. I figured he'd know if Joe needed to go and act accordingly. He'd never shown any tendency to put himself above his country, unlike his unworthy opponent and, to my mind, his hankie-twisting so-called supporters.
Nobody saw it coming.
Irrelevance
Gustavs Klucis (Klutsis): The Development of Transportation:
An Important Task of the Five Year Plan, Poster, Print (1929)
"May we all experience the Grace that only achieving our own well-earned Irrelevance could ever provide."
From the earliest days of the Soviet Union, the Five Year Plan worked as a central focusing tool. It codified the aspirations of the ruling class, making them possible to describe and enforce. The government imported a small army of American engineers, each schooled in the so-called engineering science of Frederick Winslow Taylor, the self-proclaimed Father of Scientific Management. Employing techniques proposed and affected by Winslow's assistant, Henry Gantt, these engineers created plans to produce the most remarkable products. Whole industries were invented from scratch as the Soviets attempted to jump from feudalism into the modern world in a single great leap forward.
Most of these plans came to naught but the prosecution and execution of those Soviets who created them because they were naively drawn.
Travesty
William, Hogarth, Printmaker: Beer Street (1751)
"Can anybody find me an ESB, please?"
After a five-hour drive and four hours of The GrandOtter's baby shower, I felt more than ready for a couple of beers and a spot of supper. Constantly aware of my surroundings when out on the prowl, I'd spotted a place on our way over to the hotel that looked as if it might fill the bill. The Spot, a so-called Sports bar conveniently located less than a half mile from our hotel. Its website claimed that this bar had been operating continuously since the Kennedy Administration. The menu looked typical bar fare and listed that they carried a beer I rarely see anymore, an ESB or Extra Special Bitter, a common enough brew in Blighty but seldom seen in this country.
Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer my beer to taste bitter. I prefer beer with flavor.
Goner
Lovis Corinth: Self-Portrait with Skeleton (1896)
"Grace visits just before such exits."
I never rise more enthusiastically than on those mornings I'm going away. My imminent absence tends to prize out my most prominent presence. I might dawdle every other morning, but these mornings, I'm focused, for I will soon be gone and unable to water the yard, incapable of performing even the least of my usual maintenance. The cats sense that something's up, and they're there fawning for an early breakfast, feigning indifference. I sense that they understand my importance to their existence, and they might doubt my dedication when they watch my taillights disappear a little too early some mornings. They know if only because we've left a window open that we will not be back to feed them supper or to provide that odd lap on-demand later.
I might rail about the need to get away for a couple of days, but I faunch at the prospect.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 7/18/2024
Lovis Corinth: Slaughtered Ox (1905)
Stop Clutching Their Pearls
As if this world had not grown weird enough, we now have MAGA Democrats, people so devoid of strategic integrity that they're willing to discard a winning administration for less than a handful of magic beans. They seem untroubled that they cannot name a single qualified replacement for the ticket most likely to win, all at the suggestion of a felon and the worst administrator ever to hold office. I expected the Dems to clutch their pearls and wring their hankies. Those are their traditional election-year antics. I had not anticipated that so many suddenly started believing in polls that nobody had ever believed in. Not even the pollsters believe their own polls now. We inhabit a distorted playing field whose dimensions have been obscured by the repeated torturing of traditional rules of engagement.
The opposition religiously refuses to commit a single truth as if incapable of such an act. The incumbent has consistently been underestimated. The almost unforgivable element might be the lagging self-esteem this whole defection represents. Dems have always struggled to stand by their man or woman when the going got real. Berney proved to be enough distraction that the felon was elected the first time. (Thanks, or something!) I've stopped reading my newspapers, and I'm unable to distinguish between news and propaganda. The world seems to have lost something in translation. The MAGA movement was always a scam. Anyone who felt it answered their prayers, except perhaps for billionaires, was a shill. I struggle to find an ounce of Grace in any of this shameful dance.
It has universally been the case that if I can hold my attention and continue engaging, Grace always appears. I pray that will be the case once my fellow Democrats stop clutching their pearls.
Backward
Lovis Corinth: Nude Bending Backwards (1919)
" … we've somehow managed to make some headway, anyway."
I'm entertaining the notion that I learned everything Backward. By dint of tenacious good fortune, my education hasn't managed to do me in yet, but that could happen at any moment. I suspect that everything I have accomplished would have been easier to achieve had I just started the right way around, but I didn't. I didn't even suspect another orientation could have existed; I just went about doing whatever I was doing with more or less the same information. I was never all that interested in learning.
Certainly, my manner of living will not long outlast me.
etymology
Karl Zerbe: The Face of the Big Lie (1951)
"I will feel vindicated when he loses …"
If there is such a thing with words, the usual evolution of a lie moves from the tiny to the more encompassing. Dabbling in lying tends to eventually lead to larger trouble, if only of the parody kind. A "little white lie" can successfully cordon off vast regions of authenticity from further exploration, lest what started as a small secret get inadvertently shared. Honesty became recognized as the best policy because of the exorbitant premiums charged for using its opposite.
We live downwind of a single BIG lie, one which had no clear precedent from which it grew.
BackInto
Dan Rico: Noon Game (1935 - 1943)
United States. Works Progress Administration
"My emotional crankcase drained …"
I had not remembered that ease when I'd suited up, even through the weeks leading up to the disruption. I'd undoubtedly struggled to suit up when I was down, but then I was not even pretending to enter any game. Suddenly, the act seemed more effortless than I ever remembered it seeming. I was BackInto the game again!
I feared my week's idleness might permanently eliminate my acceptance as a player.
ReEntry
Unknown Hopi carver:
Owa-nganroro [Mad Stone Eater Kachina],
(c. 1900, First Mesa, Arizona)
"Grace exclusively works in such mysterious ways."
As the Seasonal Affective Fog lifts, ReEntry emerges from the shadows. The exit had not been deliberate but mere side-effect. The resulting absence seems anything but profound. The symptoms typically linger. I'm always uncertain when to consider any bout over. I'll typically try ReEntry a tad too soon and feel rebuffed, but the sun still reliably comes up every morning, giving just as many second chances as necessary. Sometimes, I require a dozen second chances to finally find my traction. By then, I'm as thoroughly disgusted with myself as I can imagine, though should I fail at ReEntry that morning, I'll find an opportunity to better my recent record.
I am nobody's prodigal son.
Recovery
Edmond-François Aman-Jean: Reverie (c. 1900)
"The patient seems to be Recovering this morning."
With my self-diagnosis of Seasonal Affective Disorder came the emerging realization that I might already be recovering. Diseases and disorders do not just settle in and stay, not usually, not always. They pass through, first rendering us clueless about what might be ailing us or if we're even ailing. These visitors follow a progression from barely there to almost gone, leaving their benefactor or victim in some state of Recovery afterward. Recovery is where I integrate whatever that latest brush might have attempted to teach me. It's where I might freshly revel in same-old activities. It's where symptoms turn vestigial, and effects increasingly become intangible. Memories linger, though, of self-doubt and revelation, exhaustion and foreboding, and a particular haunting uncertainty. The Muse was convinced I had some bug. I believed I had lost my backbone and began slacking. Whatever the lessons, if any, I continue assimilating and integrating in Recovery.
I'm still naive enough to believe that everything probably happens for a reason and that my job primarily consists of determining underlying reasons and making some sense of them.
AintNoCure
Alphonse Marie Mucha: The Seasons (1897)
" … an infinite game perhaps intended to encourage the pursuit of happiness …"
"There Ain't No Cure For The Summertime Blues." - common folk wisdom
In the deepest and darkest days of a typical January, some notable percentage of the population will at any time suffer the effects of what's labeled Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). The effects tend to be mild to moderate depression, said to be caused by light deprivation. Common treatments include exposure to broad-spectrum lighting and long naps. Many escape South to become what we call Snow Birds. Some even become extremists and purchase second houses in places where the sun always shines, like Arizona and extreme Southern New Mexico, abandoning their more Northern homesteads half the time. Zealots might move to some awful place like Florida full-time to escape these effects.
There ain't no actual cure for January's Seasonal Affective Disorder, though there are treatments.
Weekly Writing Summary For The Week Ending 7/11/2024
Unidentified Artist, stereoscopic photograph,
"See him, will you? He can't set his board down,
and he can't get his new cap off." (700 c), (c. 1906)
What Was Never Realistically Figure-outable
I'd thought I'd banished the notion that intelligent people were smarter and leaders could lead, but I keep finding vestiges of my initial innocent beliefs. These wound me because I long ago proved that I could not live up to such fictional expectations. In my time, I have carried the titles but have yet to fulfill the naive expectations. My smarts were balanced with at least a counterbalancing amount of stupids. My leadership required some followership, too. As I've insisted before, I was never once an island and not even a half-decent isthmus. I remain connected to much I'd long ago hoped to out-grow or divorce. Anyone who ever divorced learned that there's no such thing. It's just another fiction. I rarely manifested anybody's overly advertised ideals, or believably wrote about them. But then, nobody's likely to purchase the guide for becoming the imperfect anything. Asperation requires absolute fealty to some impossible ideal. We thrive and also die on our dichotomies.
I stand shivering at the end of another humbling writing week, appreciating your presence here and quietly wondering what's kept you coming back. I remain supremely unworthy of your presence, for I have always been mumbling here, trying to figure out what was never realistically figure-outable. Thank you for following along!
—
Weekly Writing Summary
This Grace Story reports the sorry state of my Clutter, a presence I often struggle to justify. I sometimes think I should produce better than Clutter without always recognizing the Grace it represents.
Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin: The Attributes of the Arts and the Rewards Which Are Accorded Them (1766)
" … poor but honest penmanship …"
—
This Grace Story finds me happily Uncluttering after mentioning my Clutter in yesterday's story. It's funny how this universe sometimes seems to work this way. Just mentioning can start a chain of reactions that makes a real difference.
Unknown Artist: Panel of Uncut “Slip” Designs, Hemp, plain weave; embroidered with silk in tent stitches (1625-75)
—
This Grace Story finds me enjoying the only enjoyable time in the Summer Heat, the wee hours when the world feels moist.
Angelo Caroselli: Summer (c. 1620s)
"Grace appears in these most unlikely places."
—
I went to bed last night feeling every bit as incompetent as I've ever felt. This morning, it dawned on me again just how overrated competence has always been. That's the subject of this Grace Story, Competence.
Gordon W. Gahan: Star's Daughter (Eleventh -- End of Set): "I am interested in becoming a good actress, not a movie star. If I happen to become a star, too, I'd love every minute of it, of course. But my first goal is to become a competent actress."(1964-65)
"It's by the Grace of something far less than any of us that we ever manage to succeed."
—
The original version of this Grace Story was indescribably better than this one, but the original was lost to the ages after I'd gotten a little AheadOfMyself. The Universe attempted to teach me a lesson this morning about the dangers of living in lines.
Vincent van Gogh: Paysan de la Camargue [Peasant of the Camargue, Portrait of Patience Escalier] (1888)
"We do not live in lines."
—
This Grace Story includes no Grace in it. It only implies its presence within an explanation of a True Impossible, a HaveToWantToCant.
Gordon W. Gahan: Taking no notice of a troublesome right shoulder, New York Yankee star Mickey Mantle manages a "thumbs up" sign as he overlooks the Mayo Clinic from his hotel room here on January 17th. The champion slugger will undergo nearly a week of tests at the clinic to see if the shoulder can be fixed up. Before starting on the grueling series of examinations, Mantle remarked, "It isn't sore, but I can't throw with it." (January 1966)
"I must be dealing with a true impossible here."
—
I mentioned in one of my stories this week that all the possible combinations present in every fifty-two playing card deck have yet to result from all the diligent shufflings they've so-far been subjected to. It shouldn't surprise me to realize that I've barely nicked the possible configurations of a week's writings. If I can muster enough trust in the universe, a fresh perspective will emerge every morning, right on time. A few of the resulting perspectives do not honestly seem all that fresh, but each has been different enough, if not entirely different. I'd imagined that I'd eventually exhaust the possibility of posting any new material, but that has definitely not been the case. I'd thought I share that last half-decent Dad Joke and be done with this audacious experiment, but that hasn't happened yet, either. I have more than fifty-two cards in my deck. Clutter came up in the never-to-be-repeated rotation, and did its brother, Uncluttering. The Heat this Summer's delivering also made an appearance. I encountered one of my abiding incompetences in Competence before catching myself getting a little Agead Of Myself. I ended this writing week immersed in a Truly Impossible, a Want To, Have To, But Can't. One of those occasions no one ever actually rises to. Thank you for following along!
©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved
HaveToWantToButCant
Gordon W. Gahan: Taking no notice of a troublesome right shoulder, New York Yankee star Mickey Mantle manages a "thumbs up" sign as he overlooks the Mayo Clinic from his hotel room here on January 17th. The champion slugger will undergo nearly a week of tests at the clinic to see if the shoulder can be fixed up. Before starting on the grueling series of examinations, Mantle remarked, "It isn't sore, but I can't throw with it." (January 1966)
"I must be dealing with a true impossible here."
My senses usually keep me safe from directly experiencing many of the more terrifying realities. It's true that I'm hurling through space on a corkscrewing planet moving at 67,000 mph, or 18.5 miles per second. I sense none of this. Likewise, I hang upside down on the face of this planet while directly sensing none of that, either. My sense of the possible shares some of this blesséd blindness, for I cannot directly determine possibility, either. Much of my work emerges under Wait And See conditions. I can talk myself out of something without directly knowing just how possible it might have been to produce. More telling, I can just as easily talk myself into starting something that will later turn out to be an impossible. Knowing which it might become often proves the most impossible, for will sometimes determines way. Other times, no amount of will can translate into any feasible way. We only ever learn this later.
The run-of-the-mill Impossible might well seem eminently doable at the outset.
AheadOfMyself
Vincent van Gogh: Paysan de la Camargue [Peasant of the Camargue, Portrait of Patience Escalier] (1888)
"We do not live in lines."
I just "lost" my first hour of writing. I hadn't managed to do that in years. I'd grown careful and cautious. As one who measures my progress in captured words, I never approach my work in a cavalier fashion. I tend to be deliberate to a fault, following patterns varying little from session to session. I set up my page before setting to work, saving often, as if sighing. This morning, I must have forgotten to sigh. I inadvertently sorted my collection of stories by something other than the usual Date Created. I had not anticipated that I could have sorted them by Title instead, and there's only a tiny checkmark in the corner of the column label to indicate that the underlying list has even been sorted.
The list made no sense.
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)
September 2024
August 2024
July 2024
June 2024
May 2024
April 2024
March 2024
November 2006
October 2006
September 2006
August 2006
July 2006
June 2006
May 2006
April 2006
March 2006
February 2006
January 2006
