The End of 2022.

When Spring arrives, leaves you never saw will shadow the ground, and flowers you never beheld will star it; the grass will be of another growth, and the birds sing a new song—the aged earth dates with a new number. — Mary Shelley, December 31 1822

My first acting gig.

 

I did a lot of plays over the years in school. The Christmas play put on by the High School Drama Club. I still own these books. The top row collections are favorites. I read those very early in life. I had 3 lines, which I recited to my mother right before she took this photo. Of course, Mother made the costume. I had wings too.

Merry Christmas and God Bless Us, Everyone.

 It looks like a hallucination. But I was always a hippie girl and I love colored lights and tinsel. I am laughing. But I love it. I love Christmas and this has been a great Christmas so far, mainly because I am not living alone, I am baking, and I decorated everything. Like over decorated. It's been fun. I just had fun. I even colored this text. Oh, well.....2022. I have three trees this year, next year I am adding another one!!! If you look close, you will see that this is my Santa Claus tree. 

CHANGE.

“You cannot change what you are, only what you do.”
             — Philip Pullman

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

 

I love this novel, so much so that I am going to do my own annotation of it after the New Year and write a long review on Amazon and Goodreads. It is part detective story, part love story, with a tragic backstory that really comes forward at the end. I love these kinds of structures. Also Walter Hartright is not the typical everyman at all and based partly on Collins' own father. He has become one of my favorite characters in English literature. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins is really a beautiful novel with so many fine moments of great writing. These Victorian novels that were serialized have highly influenced my work. The author's peers were critical of it though it was highly successful with the public. Think Game of Thrones. I believe they were critical because Collins attempted to give these women, creatures of their times, agency and purpose, and he also damned the idea of families putting women in mental institutions to be controlled. Women were property in Collins' time. He hated that. If you have never read this book, give it a try. Highly recommended.

Bocca Baciata by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

"The mouth that has been kissed does not lose its good fortune:

rather, it renews itself just as the moon does."

Model: Fanny Cornforth

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1859

Movement: Pre-Raphaelite, Romanticism, Narrative Art

Girls and Goblins and Gardens

 

The Rosebud Garden of Girls, Julia Margaret Cameron, 1868, albumen print. 

"People often believe the creative life is grounded in fantasy. The more difficult truth is that creativity is grounded in reality, in particular, the focused, the well observed or specifically imagined." 

For years now, I have been working toward a goal, to paint some pictures, compose a few bad sonnets, and write The Ambitious Fairy Project. Ten long years of reading, waiting, studying, and some suffering. Ten years of anxiety that I would never arrive at this moment, that I would never be able to do what Julia Margaret Cameron described in this simple quote. 

Many of my posts, previously to this one, have been an assemblage of things that went through my mind as I faced this reality. It has been daunting at times to push forward toward a life I wanted, a life that might have escaped me. I had thought to delete all the posts here, and I will be deleting old posts as time passes, keeping only those relevant, because I have finally arrived at a good place and I want to remain here and focus only on my current work, to specifically imagine what is in my head and heart. Some of my goals are very simple, a return to a kind of Romanticism, to the hallmarks of sincerity, to the folk and fairy tale, to the crowded, rambling work of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, where plot and character mingle, to the love of the narrative form and structure represented by the Pre-Raphaelites, to find all that in the post-postmodern world and recreate it as something valid today.

Postmodernism is over. It's been over for years, and yet many cling to it. It brought us many wonderful things, but it also did some harm, and we are struggling through a complicated time. I first saw that struggle clearly (though it had been happening my entire life) around 2000, a change, or maybe just a realization of a reality in flux. Time is a long arc in history. It's hard to see what is happening when you are standing in the middle of the happening. One just catches glimpses. 

All art really reacts against what came before it. It evolves. It struggles. It shifts. Some of us are living under the weight of futures that have been imagined for us, some of us are living under the weight of futures that may never exist. What is clear to me is that we all live under the weight of history, whether we like it or not. The modernists did not know what to do with Time. The postmodernists hated Time and did not believe it existed. 

But Time is real. (Though complex.)