Midnight In Paris
Drive
The Artist
Another Earth
Monday, January 30, 2012
Painting Medicine
At work, there is a breathtaking view outside the window (16th floor, top) of the city, the Bay Area, the Marin Headlands, and the Golden Gate. And while it is a wonder and a lovely thing, at the same time, every time I walk by and fathom the expanse of beautiful land, water, grass, trees, and mountains of the Bay Area and beyond, I feel pangs of regret at the choices that have landed me here, sitting inside at a computer rather than out there exploring, experiencing, and digging my hands into that world. The Marin Headlands call to me especially - that point where the lighthouse is poised at what seems like the edge of the Earth. So after months of pining, husband and I made an excursion.
I felt a sense of rejuvenation after a chance to really take in the natural world, sit for an extended moment of pause in wonder and awe. I believe this is my new medicine, and something that is absolutely necessary if I'm not going to lose my mind. I could've stayed out there for hours in the cold, and will again.
I love that it is a different flavor, every one of these excursions I make, and each very different personality who accompanies me.
I want to learn to see the world in terms of light and shade, in terms of pigment and textures of paint.
I felt a sense of rejuvenation after a chance to really take in the natural world, sit for an extended moment of pause in wonder and awe. I believe this is my new medicine, and something that is absolutely necessary if I'm not going to lose my mind. I could've stayed out there for hours in the cold, and will again.
I love that it is a different flavor, every one of these excursions I make, and each very different personality who accompanies me.
I want to learn to see the world in terms of light and shade, in terms of pigment and textures of paint.
Apocalypse dreams
Dreamt of a zombie Apocalypse last night - influence of husboy - but this time I got to become a zombie, rather than just be pursued by the mindless monsters - gradually enough so that the humans I was with were able to try and dismember me, a fate to which I acquiesced willingly. They cut off my head and cut my body in half at the waist but it didn't work. I wasn't able to be dismembered. But I didn't want to eat anybody, I simply wandered the foreign wasteland of the earth and encountered other zombies, as if they were just another community of people to whom humans did not have access for fear of being eaten.
In this reality - in that indisputable way "impossible" things assert themselves as truth in dreams sometimes - extra teeth are stored in the knuckles of human bodies (or human bodies become zombies). A group of thugs wanted to use my teeth for something, so they held me down - six or seven of them - and they broke all my knuckles and dug out the teeth with the tip of a knife. I struggled and screamed.
I'm sure this dream had nothing to do with the fact that I woke up in the middle of the night thinking that this conventional life and everything about it besides the husboy just isn't for me, it's suffocating and I can't do it much longer.
In this reality - in that indisputable way "impossible" things assert themselves as truth in dreams sometimes - extra teeth are stored in the knuckles of human bodies (or human bodies become zombies). A group of thugs wanted to use my teeth for something, so they held me down - six or seven of them - and they broke all my knuckles and dug out the teeth with the tip of a knife. I struggled and screamed.
I'm sure this dream had nothing to do with the fact that I woke up in the middle of the night thinking that this conventional life and everything about it besides the husboy just isn't for me, it's suffocating and I can't do it much longer.
Friday, January 27, 2012
No Title
I feel all this pain, and softness & sadness, and al the End of the Day, the End of the Night, it's only about getting to crawl into bed with him, and have him hold me.
We're So Hard - When All We Want Is Tenderness
I'm sorry whoever has to clean the streets I've walked.
If you take a stroll down Webster to Fulton, you'll find the broken pieces.
I beg forgiveness of whoever's feet the glass tears apart.
If you take a stroll down Webster to Fulton, you'll find the broken pieces.
I beg forgiveness of whoever's feet the glass tears apart.
Monday, January 23, 2012
One Flame of Original Passion
From Equus:
" 'Worship isn't destructive. I know that.'
'I don't. I only know it's the core of his life. What has he got? Think about him. He can hardly read. He knows no physics or engineering to make the world real for him. No paintings to show him how others have enjoyed it. No music except television jingles. No history except tales from a desperate mother. No friends. Not one kid to give him a joke, or make him know himself more moderately. He's a modern citizen for whom society doesn't exist. He lives one hour every week - howling in the mist. And after the service kneels to a slave who stands over him obviously and unthrowably his master. With my body I thee worship!...Many men have less vital with their wives."
"'I mean he's in pain. He's been in pain for most of his life.'
'Possibly.'
'Possibly?! . . . That cut-off little figure you just described must have been in pain for years.'
'Possibly'
'And you can take it away.'
...
'Look...to go through life and call it yours - your life - you first have to get your own pain. Pain that's unique to you. You can't just dip into the common bin and say 'That's enough!'...He's done that. All right, he's sick. He's full of misery and fear. He was dangerous, and be again, though I doubt it. But that boy has known a passion more ferocious than I have felt in any second of my life. And let me tell you something: I envy it.'"
. . .
"'All right! I'll take it away! He'll be delivered from madness. What then? He'll feel himself acceptable! What then? Do you think feelings like his can be simply re-attached, like plasters? Stuck on to other objects we select? Look at him! . . . My desire might be to make this boy an ardent husband - a caring citizen - a worshipper of abstract and unifying God. My achievement, however, is more likely to make a ghost! . . . Let me tell you exactly what I'm going to do him!
I'll heal the rash on his body, I'll erase the welts cut into his mind by flying manes. When that's done, I'll set him on a nice mini-scooter and send him puttering off into the Normal world where animals are tethered all their lives in dim light, just to feed it! I'll give him the good Normal world where we're tethered beside them - blinking our nights away in a non-stop drench of cathode-ray over our shriveling heads! I'll take away his field of Ha Ha and give him Normal places for his ecstasy - multi-lane highways driven through the guts of cities. Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor.'"
I've been living in Arcade Fire, wondering in reflection of these words that resonate with something all too deep and real inside of me, how much it requires 'insanity' to truly not only feel passion, but to live in it wholly. Some lifestyles, some professions allow for it - but most, I believe, do not. At least in the Western world, the only world I really know, where just as I find myself settling for a work life that not only leaves me passionless, but what is so much worse, robs me of time to even indulge in the things that bring about the sensation of passion, and make life worth living; I still abhor the idea of it.
I wish I really could deny the laws of physics and the chemistry of my own body to throw everything in gestures of feeling and devotion. But I participate in a society (Sartre would not allow me to escape saying that I actively choose it) which puts limits on my ability to completely listen to my heart, and demands unnatural things of my body. I find myself in this place where the more effort and energy I put into cultivating the self that gives me heart, energy, vitality to be, the more I take away from the self that sustains me insofar as my job is concerned, because that second self is one that buckles under. I want to be able to rush to your aid, but I was defeated before I walked through the door.
And, as soon as I closed up this post, I opened up Paul Tillich, and found these lines expressing what he has to say about grace:
"It strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual, because we have violated another life, a life which we loved, or from which we were estranged."
" 'Worship isn't destructive. I know that.'
'I don't. I only know it's the core of his life. What has he got? Think about him. He can hardly read. He knows no physics or engineering to make the world real for him. No paintings to show him how others have enjoyed it. No music except television jingles. No history except tales from a desperate mother. No friends. Not one kid to give him a joke, or make him know himself more moderately. He's a modern citizen for whom society doesn't exist. He lives one hour every week - howling in the mist. And after the service kneels to a slave who stands over him obviously and unthrowably his master. With my body I thee worship!...Many men have less vital with their wives."
"'I mean he's in pain. He's been in pain for most of his life.'
'Possibly.'
'Possibly?! . . . That cut-off little figure you just described must have been in pain for years.'
'Possibly'
'And you can take it away.'
...
'Look...to go through life and call it yours - your life - you first have to get your own pain. Pain that's unique to you. You can't just dip into the common bin and say 'That's enough!'...He's done that. All right, he's sick. He's full of misery and fear. He was dangerous, and be again, though I doubt it. But that boy has known a passion more ferocious than I have felt in any second of my life. And let me tell you something: I envy it.'"
. . .
"'All right! I'll take it away! He'll be delivered from madness. What then? He'll feel himself acceptable! What then? Do you think feelings like his can be simply re-attached, like plasters? Stuck on to other objects we select? Look at him! . . . My desire might be to make this boy an ardent husband - a caring citizen - a worshipper of abstract and unifying God. My achievement, however, is more likely to make a ghost! . . . Let me tell you exactly what I'm going to do him!
I'll heal the rash on his body, I'll erase the welts cut into his mind by flying manes. When that's done, I'll set him on a nice mini-scooter and send him puttering off into the Normal world where animals are tethered all their lives in dim light, just to feed it! I'll give him the good Normal world where we're tethered beside them - blinking our nights away in a non-stop drench of cathode-ray over our shriveling heads! I'll take away his field of Ha Ha and give him Normal places for his ecstasy - multi-lane highways driven through the guts of cities. Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor.'"
I've been living in Arcade Fire, wondering in reflection of these words that resonate with something all too deep and real inside of me, how much it requires 'insanity' to truly not only feel passion, but to live in it wholly. Some lifestyles, some professions allow for it - but most, I believe, do not. At least in the Western world, the only world I really know, where just as I find myself settling for a work life that not only leaves me passionless, but what is so much worse, robs me of time to even indulge in the things that bring about the sensation of passion, and make life worth living; I still abhor the idea of it.
I wish I really could deny the laws of physics and the chemistry of my own body to throw everything in gestures of feeling and devotion. But I participate in a society (Sartre would not allow me to escape saying that I actively choose it) which puts limits on my ability to completely listen to my heart, and demands unnatural things of my body. I find myself in this place where the more effort and energy I put into cultivating the self that gives me heart, energy, vitality to be, the more I take away from the self that sustains me insofar as my job is concerned, because that second self is one that buckles under. I want to be able to rush to your aid, but I was defeated before I walked through the door.
And, as soon as I closed up this post, I opened up Paul Tillich, and found these lines expressing what he has to say about grace:
"It strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual, because we have violated another life, a life which we loved, or from which we were estranged."
Mischief and Creativity
Sunday was a day of laughter, creativity, emotion, a chance to spend some time in awe at the beauty of the natural world, the trees and the mud and the grass and the rain, and a chance to spend some time letting the children in us take over our adult bodies and reek splendid havoc and mischief. In short, one day to make up so many of the rest of the hours that most of us spend engaged in those horrendous but somewhat necessary activities that dry up our spirits.
Took the train to the East Bay and met one of the dearest people in my life, and we wandered out into the rain and hills of Tilden Park (or at least, we think it was Tilden Park, and not just a big giant expanse of wilderness behind some peoples’ houses), equipped with a palate of gouache paint, Haribo Peaches, and a bottle of honey whiskey.
We wandered up mud slides, into worlds of giant mushrooms and fallen trees covered in moisture and moss. We found a spot with an exquisite view of the Bay piercing light through the trees, huddled on the forest floor underneath some thick coverage, and talked about life, and love, and laughed and painted for hours. It’s not everyone you can convince to go out into the cold and the rain with you on an adventure like that, and love every second of their company. My lady friend is quite a special one.
Sufficiently creatively spent, and now slightly drunk, we made our way back down, spending most of our time sliding. We were both completely covered in mud by the time we got to the bottom, so we thought, what better idea than to break into the construction site we found there. We arduously scaled the fence (actually, I ended up just picking it up and pulling it aside), and made our way around some obstructions to face the downward-pointing innards of grand stadium in ruins and crawling with trucks and construction workers. Oh. Who would’ve thought, on a Sunday. So we promptly decided to run away, but not before grabbing ourselves a keepsake, in the form of a giant orange cone. It wasn’t until we were running back to the car with our spoils that we realized there’d been a man watching us the whole time, who was now on the phone – it was speculated that he was “calling his friends to tell them you guys are dorks.” Now, on the run from the law, we sped away, and sought a safe-house. Another one of my dearest friends was kindly willing to harbor us – fugitives that we were.
She answered the door in her underwear and we sang and played the piano and her little dog barked at us violently now and again. After a while of carrying on like this we decided it was time for food and drink. Loud and obnoxious and enjoying the hell out of ourselves, we sat at the bar at Lanesplitters, ate, drank, laughed, and were marry, bothering and amusing the many bar flies who surrounded us. I love my friends. I love rainy Sundays outside.
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Equus
Reading Equus by Peter Shaffer. One of the strangest, most horrifying and beautiful stories I've ever encountered. It also deals with what I believe is arguably one of the most important themes that can ever be the subject of a book, film, poem, conversation, or thought: the way in which our common conception of 'normalcy' does away with our ability to feel passion.
" I wish there was one person in my life I could show. One instinctive, absolutely unbrisk person I could take to Greece, and stand in front of certain shrines and sacred streams and say 'Look! Life is only comprehensible through a thousand local Gods. And not just the old dead ones with names like Zeus - no, but living Geniuses of Place and Person! And not just Greece but modern England! Spirits of certain trees, certain curves of brick wall, and slate roofs - just as of certain frowns in people and slouches'...I'd say to them - 'Worship as many as you can see - and more will appear!'...If I had a son, I get you he'd come out exactly like his mother. Utterly worshipless. Would you like a drink?"
Thoughts of worship, for most people, bring automatic associations with God, Christian God, institutionalized religion. The privilege of being so emotionally affected by what can be at times absolutely rendering wonders of natural beauty and strangeness and even the horrifying - is worship. The sensitivity of the artist and the aesthete. To feel that capacity within in us to stand in awe and reverence at even the seeming subtleties - to exist in that world - one of seeing and feeling the spirits of trees, of something inside of you being moved by the lilt of a note in a piece of music or a voice, breathing in the smell of the after-rain air at night, marveling at the curve of a jawline. I can only live there. I cannot live anywhere else.
"The Normal is the good smile in a child's eyes - all right. It is also the dead stare in a million adults. It both sustains and kills. It is the Ordinary made beautiful; it is also the Average made lethal."
" I wish there was one person in my life I could show. One instinctive, absolutely unbrisk person I could take to Greece, and stand in front of certain shrines and sacred streams and say 'Look! Life is only comprehensible through a thousand local Gods. And not just the old dead ones with names like Zeus - no, but living Geniuses of Place and Person! And not just Greece but modern England! Spirits of certain trees, certain curves of brick wall, and slate roofs - just as of certain frowns in people and slouches'...I'd say to them - 'Worship as many as you can see - and more will appear!'...If I had a son, I get you he'd come out exactly like his mother. Utterly worshipless. Would you like a drink?"
Thoughts of worship, for most people, bring automatic associations with God, Christian God, institutionalized religion. The privilege of being so emotionally affected by what can be at times absolutely rendering wonders of natural beauty and strangeness and even the horrifying - is worship. The sensitivity of the artist and the aesthete. To feel that capacity within in us to stand in awe and reverence at even the seeming subtleties - to exist in that world - one of seeing and feeling the spirits of trees, of something inside of you being moved by the lilt of a note in a piece of music or a voice, breathing in the smell of the after-rain air at night, marveling at the curve of a jawline. I can only live there. I cannot live anywhere else.
"The Normal is the good smile in a child's eyes - all right. It is also the dead stare in a million adults. It both sustains and kills. It is the Ordinary made beautiful; it is also the Average made lethal."
Friday, January 20, 2012
Wishes of Graveyards and Nostalgia of the Mixtape
A song called "Dannemora Blues" came up on one of my Pandora stations, off an album called "Funeral Mixtape," with an album cover of exquisite colors creating a mood I'm quite fond of - gold-green grass, the suggestion of Versailles-esque composition of conifers leaving open a spiraling expanse of grey-blue about-to-rain skies. I loved the sound of those two words together "Funeral" and "Mixtape." And that lost, cherished, 90s idea of a mixtape. It filled me with an intense yearning to wander an old graveyard, and make a mixtape for the boy I have a crush on (husboy), and walk for a long time in the rain along gravestone-side path, in my Doc Martens and hoodie and old army jacket, with a walkman, listening, and swinging the wet hairstrands from my face, and swoon to the music and the warmth of emotion and the way music and rainsmell always makes it hurt so good.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Altars.
Heart = Home
Altars are worlds, creativity, sensation, chaos and order, the heart in the home of the aesthete, worship, thought, art. I don't just love to be surrounded by them, I need to be. Now we have several :). They’re fun to build with someone you want to share your home and your heart with, too.
Monday, January 16, 2012
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Book Wish List
For a start...
The Courage To Be - Paul Tillich*
Equus - Peter Shaffer*
*kindly purchased for me by my husband, who did so as soon as he read this post. Now, if only he might read them and maybe per chance discuss them with me one day ;)
*kindly purchased for me by my husband, who did so as soon as he read this post. Now, if only he might read them and maybe per chance discuss them with me one day ;)
Pantagruel
“Et de fact, ouyant le bruyt de ton sçavoir tant inestimable, ay délaissé pays, parens, et maison, et me suis icy transporté, rien ne estimant la longueur du chemin, l’attédiation de la mer, la nouvaulté des contrées, pour seullement to veoir, et conférer avecques toy d’aulcuns passaiges de philosophie, de magie, de alkymie et de caballe, desquelz je doubte, et ne m’en puis contenter mon esprit.”
Above is the content for the senior "half page" that I chose when afforded the opportunity to "express myself" and publicize it to the community of my high school. I'm posting this because I found the picture in a box, and it's contained a mystery of my own creating that I finally took it upon myself to uncover. I didn't want to put up a bunch of photos of friends and I being stupid or some trite quote. I was a complete mess at the time, and I wanted to maintain an air of mystery about myself, but reveal something of that dark and twisted inner world that was my mind and my heart and my spirit. The background is a photograph of a tomb I took in a London cemetery, where I went wandering by myself again and again.
What I'm even bothering to write about this for is to focus on the text. It's a quote from Rabelais' Pantagruel. The language is in what I used to think was some kind of old French - but I just recently researched and found that it's actually an incorporation of Ancient Greek into French that Rabelais executed himself for amusement. At the time I knew absolutely nothing about Rabelais, about Pantagruel (I still don't - I'd like to get my hands on the book and actually read it sometime, the story sounds otherworldy), and I could barely myself discern what the quote meant, or so I thought (I know French fluently, but reading classical texts in the language can be a different matter, especially since I haven't really practiced formal French as opposed to casual speech in over ten years). But the words that I did know reached through the strangeness of the language and my lacking skills of comprehension, and affected something very deep inside of me, and it was in an obscure enough of a casing that I felt it fit to present and represent as "myself." I imagine the fact that I was representing myself with something I didn't fully understand was telling and I think I knew that at the time. It didn't really matter. It captured everything that was painful and beautiful and magnificent and most important to me.
The way I translated it for myself (and still do when I read the strange French-Greek hybrid) was this: "By certain promptings internal and external, I have abandoned everything familiar to me - country, family, and home, and I have brought myself to this strange place - having given no forethought to the length of the journey, the chaos of the oceans to be traversed, the unfamiliarity of the territory - for not a single other reason but to see you, and to discuss with you a few passages of philosophy, of magic, of alchemy, of the Caballa, though I doubt even this will ease my sickened, weary spirit."
I had no real "you" then to be referring to. It didn't really matter. After years of not knowing the exact translation, I spent a bit of time looking for it. And I was happy to find I wasn't so far off:
"And indeed, having heard the report of your so inestimable knowledge, I have left my country, my friends, my kindred, and my house, and am come thus far, valuing at nothing the length of the way, the tediousness of the sea, nor strangeness of the land, and that only to see you and to confer with you about some passages in philosophy, of geomancy, and of the cabalistic art, whereof I am doubtful and cannot satisfy my mind."
And while I'm at it, I may as well post the other photo that was in the envelope of items to go in the yearbook ;).
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
New Year's Eve Day II - Oceanside
Endless black sky scattered with stars - as many as can be provided to the eyes with the conquering city lights. Black expanse of crashing curling marbled with white cold and awe inspiringly full of life. My personal symbol of the permanent power of nature over the human. The ocean commands respect. Darkening sky on a day that pulled from the heart the most visceral sensations. Freezing, thinking, walking, painting, talking. On the subjects of pain, love, aging, convention, work, romance, parents, values, travels.
Later on, husband and I at our perch where we were spent of our most important evenings: on the hill just above the drop of cascading sand before the ocean side by side under the nightening sky with a bottle of whiskey warming our bones and loosening our tongues. Once we'd conversed thoroughly of worldly things, then moved onto the subject of astronomy, we wandered down to the roaring black expanse of sea. I wandered further, fully dressed in leather boots and pants, and waded until the water reached my thighs. I looked up and took in the night, I looked forward and greeted the sea respectfully and for the first time in a long, long time, found myself at home in the world, maybe having to do with finally having a certain even minor sense of my tiny, tiny place in this vast universe. Our all-too-human lives on this earth do not give us many chances to be reminded of that; to be reminded that there are such grander scales on which important events occur that have nothing to do with us at all. But because they are not important in the pressing sense that our common worldly concerns are important to us, any sense in which they can be considered important is not allowed much room much for recognition. Stand at the edge of a precipice, take just one more step toward that spot where the undertow would suck your fragile body beneath the weight of the waves, crush it and fill your lungs with water and salt. Linger there for a moment in the dark, under that great expanse of sky.
Soon I found my husband, laughing and wet up to his waist alongside me. We splashed and played far past the point when our toes went numb. We drank and looked out at the sea and up at the sky and we loved each other.
Later on, husband and I at our perch where we were spent of our most important evenings: on the hill just above the drop of cascading sand before the ocean side by side under the nightening sky with a bottle of whiskey warming our bones and loosening our tongues. Once we'd conversed thoroughly of worldly things, then moved onto the subject of astronomy, we wandered down to the roaring black expanse of sea. I wandered further, fully dressed in leather boots and pants, and waded until the water reached my thighs. I looked up and took in the night, I looked forward and greeted the sea respectfully and for the first time in a long, long time, found myself at home in the world, maybe having to do with finally having a certain even minor sense of my tiny, tiny place in this vast universe. Our all-too-human lives on this earth do not give us many chances to be reminded of that; to be reminded that there are such grander scales on which important events occur that have nothing to do with us at all. But because they are not important in the pressing sense that our common worldly concerns are important to us, any sense in which they can be considered important is not allowed much room much for recognition. Stand at the edge of a precipice, take just one more step toward that spot where the undertow would suck your fragile body beneath the weight of the waves, crush it and fill your lungs with water and salt. Linger there for a moment in the dark, under that great expanse of sky.
Soon I found my husband, laughing and wet up to his waist alongside me. We splashed and played far past the point when our toes went numb. We drank and looked out at the sea and up at the sky and we loved each other.
New Year's Eve Day I - Forest Painting
It couldn't have been a more perfect day for going out and wandering into the forest with sketchpad and paint on New Year's Eve day. Crisp winter-white sunlight softened by the slow tilting of the planet toward longer days and less tender beginnings. When I put my face to the open window I smelled the coolness and the earth and the leaves with the greatest anticipation.
Melancholia
Something about this film grabbed me, haunted me, and enchanted me. This is the kind of film I love simply being affected by. No questions. No explanations. Just feeling.
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