July 2022 Summary of a sorts

 

Wow, July is over. Despite the record high temperatures, the month just flew by in a sunny haze of work and more work. I could hardly keep up with the days. Some days I literally lost in work. I'd think it was Monday, and it would Tuesday and so forth. And not just once or twice, but oddly every week, I'd realize I was not keeping up with time, that it would even be 7:30 at night before I knew it, too. Strange hazy days of heat and sweat and working outside all morning, doing household things while cooking meals, and then writing to get the novel settled in its proper setting. I still have flowers everywhere and I feel very accomplished that I could do such a thing when most days in July were triple digits. We lost power three times in July, something that has never happened previously in all the decades I have lived here. And because I am Mississippi delta born and raised, I managed to keep my electric bill at $150, a sum my son said he had not had that low in over two years at his home. Normally my bill is around $85 dollars so that does tell you that my energy intake was almost doubled. Of course, Joey moved in the end of last month, too. One person can glide through a house almost unnoticed by anyone or anything, but not two. And not when it is 115 heat index on more than one day of the month.

The setback was using one car between us and I have not made any postal runs. Also it was so hot and dry (rain once until yesterday) that I could not dig up some plants to mail to my cousin. I made promises and failed. I am going to get both done this coming week though and make amends. Best I can do.

Other things neglected. Artwork as in visual arts. I was working too hard to keep the flowers alive. Laughing. And I moved my art room, too. It was just too hectic making all the adjustments for Joey moving into the house. Otherwise, it's been a really beautiful month, as beautiful as June. I can't complain. Not even as solitary as I was some days, consumed in my work. I made a discovery, something I was not sure of, something I doubted. But I do love my solitary life and I enjoy silence.

I even posted that quote on beauty and pleasure by Laura Mulvey. Someone replied to me with this:

"Maybe it is so due to the verbalization of the results which always turns out to be a lie, as Theodore Tyutchev put it in ‘Silentium!’,

'How can a heart expression find?

How should another know your mind?

Will he discern what quickens you?

A thought once uttered is untrue.'"

Lots to think about with this little paradox of sorts.

A thought.

“It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it.”

                                             — Laura Mulvey

Strawberry Vinca

 I need to feed all the flowers this morning and yet, I procrastinate here on social media. A lot of that resistance is just getting started and facing a big task. Afterwards I need to write on the new chapter. But as soon as I finish posting this I'll get busy. Lots of things I need to do today. This strawberry vinca is very beautiful and no small thing to me. I looked for it for most of the early spring days and could not find it. It was July before I did and I bought it already growing in a hanging pot and repotted it in a nicer clay pot. It's huge and cost me my saved 'pocket money.' Laughing. And it will die this winter and not return. One of the few annuals that I invested in this year. Sometimes you have to treat yourself, buy something you don't really need, a little folly, an act of being frivolous. I'm known for that, those Fs as my mother called them, Fickle, Folly, Flighty, and yes frivolous. Flawed. We are all flawed. It's called being human.

Are not all loves secretly the same?

"Are not all loves secretly the same? A hundred flowers sprung from a single root. The body’s love will teach the spirit how to love. The spasm of the body’s carnal pleasure, forgetting all things but ecstasy itself, teaches the body to remember the ecstasy of the soul, forgetting all but itself, the moments of oneness, and freedom. The love a man feels only for one other in all the world will teach him, at length, love of all others, of all the world. A cry of joy, whatever its cause, is the one true memory of those wonders the flesh has banished. A cry of love is always a cry of love."

— Tanith Lee, Delirium’s Mistress

Illustration for The Goblin Market

 

At some point in the creation of your work in progress, the author/artist starts to see how focusing helps, how narrowing works, how staying true to the ideal when the mind and heart wandered really matters. This is about how the artist/author navigates the process, whatever that may be. A novel is a long journey.

At some point in the work, you start to see yourself and what you really care about and how the work begins to take shape and form, and you know that even if you had more time, it would not matter, you would still be doing this work, because you love it, because it has value.

That's how I feel. 

That's what I know.

From the very beginning of my creative process I wrote myself a letter on intent and purpose. It's a messy, small letter, but it's a big deal and that's because purpose has always mattered to me, more than achievement, and as we know, there is a difference in those two things. The letter reflects some of what I have written on The Goblin Market that a reader can find in my pages. In that small essay, I write about why The Goblin Market matters to me and what I feel are its borders, the creative parameters that I set for my own work. When I felt I was writing outside those boundaries, I allowed myself to write on, to satisfy the creative urges, but in the end, I cut what did not support my intent and purpose. 

That's called 'killing your darlings' by others, an act that is difficult and not about what doesn't work or is aesthetically pleasing to add, or even what could make your work better. It's about trusting your vision and letting go of words you love.  It's about finishing with a sense of purpose.

Sometimes letting go is the hardest thing a creative can do. To stick to a creative purpose is risky at times, because it does give you boundaries and many artists/authors do not like boundaries. That's understandable. But for me, narrowing my work has made it possible when in the past, the work was always impossible.

The Impossible, which is also a theme of my work, is about perfection and vision and also being incomplete. We are all in pursuit of something and sometimes our professional desires are not in align with our personal ones. This causes conflicts.

Writing that letter of intent and purpose, waiting it out to see what I had done and could do, is all about my Impossible pursuit and how to emotionally and physically negotiate my own process and finish my work.

This artwork is from the fabulous Florence Susan Harrison. (Not Emma Florence Harrison as she is sometimes misattributed.

MOOD

will take the sun in my mouth and leap into the ripe air Alive with closed eyes to dash against darkness.“ e. e. cummings

July 18, 2020

There are these moments when I am watching people, listening to them, reading their tweets and posts, that I know I am an outsider, that I will never be like the crowd. I will never be like them. The lens in which I view the world is very, very different and somehow after all these years, I am still a "stranger in a strange land."—from my notes last week. July 18, 2020

Sam Fender - Angel in Lothian LIVE at Glasgow Hydro

Sam Fender - Angel In Lothian (Lyrics)

Fender is a great talent, and a wonderful songwriter, with a very wide range. This is a song about emotional pain felt in his youth, the battles that we all face, but that are very particular to our predicament. This is a song that made my writing soundtrack. I find Fender remarkable in so many ways.

Jefferson Airplane - Today

One of my favorite songs. Jefferson Airplane was an influence. This song made my writing playlist.

July 14th

 Today is John's birthday. I posted some photos on Facebook for the boys and then I tried not to dwell on loss. I just can't do that anymore. I was a bit ill yesterday and watched Jane Austen films. Today I worked some and now have called it quits. Too early but it's all right. I have worked hard the last ten days. I moved my office and then I went through all my writing papers and trashed many of them. I felt trapped by them, as though they existed to remind me of work I might not ever do. I don't need that guilt or reminder. I have enough work to last me until I die. Death will catch me working. So I tore them up and threw them in the garbage outside. They are gone. I kept the work I wanted to focus on. The ideas that spring from my reading and art. I am satisfied. And the new room is just the thing for continuing the rest of the year. It stormed yesterday. I slept in the late afternoon and didn't wake until seven last night. Smiling. Joey brought me some supper but I really couldn't eat it. And today I've had little. Cream of Wheat. Toast. Water. I am going to watch Reign of Fire and stare at the dragons. Laughing. I suppose this is more change. And more grief. And some depression. That's okay. Tomorrow is a new day.

Green is the color of my soul.

 

Monet's Bridge.

I am ill. It feels physical and yet, I know it is so much more. It rained today, which brought a smile and great relief to these long days of intense heat. I do love summer, but this week I have worked extremely hard in the garden, detailed work, like weeding and deadheading and spraying for insects. Yes, green is my favorite color, the color of my soul, and I suppose that is about summer and grass and all the flowers and plants, the leaves on the trees. Monet had a beautiful garden. Darwin had a beautiful garden. Dickinson, too. Shelley loved Nature. When I go outside, I always have this strange feeling when I come in the house, as though I have left something behind. Sometimes I look down and find a blade of grass stuck between my toes. Yes, I often go barefoot. And I smile at it, as though I have brought a piece of what I love with me.

Tomorrow is John's birthday. Going on six years without him. We had separate interest and did spend a lot of time separated from one another. But I always knew wherever he was and whatever he was doing, he busy and content and alive. And he loved me. He knew this about me, too. But John and I shared a love of gardening. The summers were ours.

And now there is this hole I cannot fill.

Perhaps I have been too busy, too happy, and now, I must be otherwise. And so, I am ill.

Time

 

This morning, I had to stop creative things and do cleaning and organizing things. I tried not to be too resistant as that only makes one unhappy over nothing and causes stress where stress is really not real, just self induced in a kind of stupid way. Smiling. But there are moments of tension, and one looks at the pile of papers one must go through and just...well checks out Twitter. :Laughing ironically:

The one is me. Laughing more.

Time.

It's running out every single day and I know it. And I feel it. And I still have to go through papers though I have decided to throw most of them in the garbage and be done with it!!!!! What once mattered, matters no longer.

Time is so real I can feel it pressing down on me.

Facepalm

Brian Molko is so objectified and fetishized. That's the post. That's it.

Pink Steam | Sonic Youth | From The Basement

Guitar and rhythm ecstasy.

I am in the studio today drawing and reading and cleaning up. I love these days.

 Interior with a Girl Reading, 1905, Matisse.

(The master of color)

A note on Climate Crisis.

 A note on Climate Crisis: I lost power today around 3 in the afternoon. I did not get it back until almost 9 at night. This is the second time within 4 weeks that this has happened. It was 115F degrees. I've lived here a long time. This has only happened 2 times previously, and one of those times was an ice storm and the other a car wreck where someone took down an entire pole on the highway. But this, this is infrastructure in an unseasonable season of above average temps. Yes. Since middle of May, it's been extremely hot. I haven't complained. I love summer. I grew up in the South without A/C and I tolerate the heat. I've worked outside nearly every single morning since March. I walk in the mornings. But what about other people, those who are more frailer than myself, those who have serious illnesses such as COPD or severe diabetes or asthma, etc. I am writing this because this is the future. This is what we will be facing. I live in the richest nation on this planet. I can't imagine what India, the Horn of Africa, Iran, etc. are facing. And this never makes the news. And by news, I mean CNN and CNN International. People don't read newspapers anymore and some people do not have access to the Internet. They have phones and TV and radios. Some places are going to burn this year. I read a story where 2000 cows died from heat stress in Kansas in June. I don't know how often that happens statistically or the context, but that's not good. It doesn't matter if you eat meat or not. Animals dying in fields (and they were in a field) from heat exhaustion is not good. 

We have known some serious science on Climate Crisis since the 1970s. That is 50 years according to my research. Half a century and how have we prepared, what have we done really? Today I was browsing through Twitter and people were making their usual complaints on this and that, all real issues for discussion. But they don't really discuss. While they are writing tweets and complaining, the world is burning and yes, people are already suffering from Climate Crisis.

That is depressing. I've cut so much social media out of my life. My blog is for my family really, to read after I am gone. It's not for money, or status, or bullshit. It's for me and my children. I really don't feel like I need to explain this to anyone. I just don't understand people anymore. Jaron Lanier is correct. There is no Left or Right on Twitter anymore, just DOWN.

The Bicentenary of Percy Bysshe Shelley's Death: An Online Global Event

Percy Shelley dies on this day, in 1822.

To thirst and find no fill, -- to wail and wander

With short unsteady steps, -- to pause and ponder, --

To feel the blood run through the veins and tingle

Where busy thought and blind sensation mingle, --

To nurse the image of unfelt caresses

Till dim imagination just possesses

The half-created shadow, then all the night

Sick . . .

— Percy Bysshe Shelley

(This is how I feel on this day about Shelley)

Snow Patrol - What If the Storm Ends? (w/lyrics)

What if the storm ends?
And I don't see you
As you are now
Ever again
The perfect halo
Of gold hair and lightning
Sets you off against
The planet’s last dance
Just for a minute
The silver-forked sky
Lifts you up like a star
That I will follow
But now it’s found us
Like I have found you
I don’t wanna run
Just overwhelm me


What if the storm ends?
It leaves us nothing
Except the memory
A distant echo
I won’t pin down
I've walked unsettled
Rattle cage after cage
Until my blood boils
I wanna see you
As you are now
Every single day
That I am living
Painted in flames
A peeling thunder
Be the lightning in me
That strikes relentless


What if the storm ends?
And I don’t see you
As you are now
Ever again
The perfect halo
Of gold hair and lightning
Sets you off against
The planets last dance
Just for a minute
The silver-forked sky
Lifts you up like a star
That I will follow
But now it's found us
Like I have found you
I don't wanna run
Just overwhelm me


This is a love song, an intense love song that is about intimacy and more. It's one of my favorite songs by Snow Patrol. And it was always the background theme to the WIP. This is the version that I love and cherish so much, all these years, all these years of so much loss, and now, I can write about it and think about it and not fall to pieces. It's corny and perhaps silly to some, but love never dies.

Marc Chagall was born July 7 in 1887.

“Love and fantasy, go hand in hand.”

If one has read this blog, there are other posts on Marc Chagall. He's a favorite of mine, what I call a true Romantic in the literary tradition. He so believed in love. I look at this and I see two people, flying over a world that is full of the usual conflicts and troubles, etc. But they have embraced each other in complete trust. Not in complete perfection, because there is no such thing, but in an agreement to trust and be themselves, to be honest, to support one another. This has to be the finest kind of love. There is no doubt that Chagall and his wife had such a relationship, that he loved her very much, and she loved him. Bella Rosenfeld Chagall died tragically and unexpectedly from a bacteria infection a few years after Chagall and her fled occupied France in 1941. For many months, Chagall could not paint at all, and what stirred him to return to work was Bella's memory as she became symbiotic with all the Jews dead in that terrible, dark war. His second marriage was much more an agreement for companionship that had more to do with his being an older man living alone, etc. I'll write more on this later. This statement is not meant to diminish the importance of Vava Brodsky in Chagall's life. It was just a very different kind of relationship.

Chagall incorporated elements of fantasy into his art by the way he showed his memories. He loved the circus. He loved clowns. He loved lovers and kisses. This is all very important to my own work, to my own heart's desires. There is always an element of fantasy when it comes to love, the way we dream it, think about it, act it out, couple with each other, in moments of shared intimacy, whatever that intimacy may be. I like to think that Chagall and Bella were happy lovers and friends and told each other stories and even fought with each other with the same passion that they loved one another. No one paints like Chagall. There is really no one to compare him to, unless one thinks of color and then Matisse. Chagall's focus was narrow. But there was only one of his kind. Those are the magical people to me. The ones who really are alone in the world except maybe they have a trusted lover. These creatives live in their own heads, they create their own imaginative universes.

Happy Birthday, Chagall. I am posting one day early because I might not be able to do Internet tomorrow. I've art to make.

William Faulkner died on this day in 1962 and he was only 64 years old; a tragedy.

"The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and to hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again." — William Cuthbert Faulkner

How we unplug and tune out in order to create.

“We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life; our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest.” 

                       — Percy Shelley

It's July and I have a particular mission. It's how to balance the amount of information I crave with the need to let my imagination thrive. That's pretty simple in a sentence. In our post 1980 lives, this is a very difficult thing to accomplish, though as one can read in the above quote, Percy Shelley was thinking about it in the 19th century. For creatives, it's extremely difficult at any time in history. We are running on curiosity and ideas. Soaking up information of any kind is just natural. All the new and colorful tools, all the processes shared by other creatives, these things are temptations. But at some point last year, during my CBT therapy, I came to realize that all this information was really entrenching on my personal dreams. I did some of my best raw work during the early 1990s, before I had the Internet, Amazon Prime, and a phone. And I am willing to admit that this changed not only my process but my imaginative space. It is true, I am a better painter and writer right now due to the fact that I have studied more, practiced more, had good information and so forth, but as Shelley wrote, I have eaten more than I can digest, I have miscalculated. My imagination is suffering, my dreams are suffering. I can see this happening not only to myself but to others. For example, I've been studying ADHD and how it works on the brain and in particular, how that might affect creativity. Psychologists are now doing studies on the connection between social media and ADHD and how social media may do more harm than good with ADHD patients. Information overload does affect how creatives think so why would it not seriously affect those with altered executive skills due to ADHD?  My mission is to regain some of that 1980s and early 1990s imaginative spirit. This means less social media. Less reading. Less conversation. I want to nurture my own creative space and give my imagination a place to grow.