Today is Truman Capote's Birthday.

"Sometimes when I think how good my book can be, I can hardly breathe." — Truman Capote

(I adore Capote. Several reasons. One, his first story about his childhood in the South is one of my favorite books. I often reread it. It's so real. His voice is so authentic. And I know this because I know people like he knew. And I had a childhood in the South. Also he and I both taught ourselves to read long before first grade and we kept dictionaries and marked words and wrote books when we were little. He always knew he wanted to be a writer. I never even thought of that though I was writing all the time. I wanted to be an Anthropologist, a Biologist. I wanted to understand human beings. We both suffered from disadvantages, but had visions of what could be. Today is his birthday. I always remember it. He died way too young. His disadvantages killed him. My disadvantages killed my career. Love never moved him forward. Love sustained me. Oh, the wishes he had. I have burned all my wishes, too.

The Goblin Market by Hilda Heckle

 

Some days I am sad and I appear without feeling.

“Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.”
     

                — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The Waking by Theodore Roethke

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.”

                      ― Theodore Roethke

Labels do not matter. Feelings are not always real. But self-awareness is.

 

“I am a complicated person with a simple life and I am the reason for everything that ever happened to me.”

― Charlotte Eriksson

(photo by Karen Elson)

Self-regulation has been the most difficult part for me since Covid. Doing better.

"An artist’s work is almost entirely inquiry based and self-regulated. It is a fragile process of teaching oneself to work alone, and focusing on how to hone your quirky creative obsessions so that they eventually become so oddly specific that they can only be your own."

— Teresita Fernández

There is a moment when you notice that light in your mind has changed. Part 2

 

“She lived her art. She looked like her art. She had the vocabulary of art." —George Lange on Francesca Woodman

I wrote a post much earlier this year (April 17th) with the same title and posted this photo of Francesca Woodman. Of course, I made some plans which went awry. And I am still trying to manage my house, this time as part of the CBT program. I am still unmoored and working to anchor myself. I am still recovering from a physical illness and also from an emotional one. Since I began the program, I have maintained a focus needed to do the things I need to do. The new room is coming along nicely, but I not only worked on that room, I cleaned up. I haven't really thought about my house much since John died, and even part of the house felt uncanny after he was gone, but now I am reclaiming it and I also am getting a bit more organized, something I lost in the years preceding John's death (but after his cancer diagnosis.) One serious problem was the arrangement of the house, how much of my stuff had been, yes, literally stuffed into places it had not been previously. I can't really explain how this happened without disclosure of things I would rather not write here. But I lost my old study, things were moved and just put in places, books too. In the last five years, I did not do anything about that situation and I also added a lot of books to my library. Too many. And I just had a mess. So part of the CBT program has been to clean up this mess, which worked well with my efforts to make a new art room at the other end of the house. In fact I am doing more than that. I am making another place to sit and talk. I want to move my TV out there, too. That is where it was originally.

I can see it all. In my mind.

In the last ten days, I have moved around 1500 books, dusted them, reshelved and organized them. I also started going through my papers. Yes, I have lots of paperwork everywhere. Crazy. We are talking decades of paperwork, and I thought while moving books, I would just throw away anything that I didn't really need or love. And I mean, it had to be useful to me in the next five years or it was out the door. Or it had to be something essential to my history, example, all the book contracts I have signed, all the letters for business, communications that I wanted to keep between teachers, students, friends, etc. I've had to move some furniture around. Jack helped with that Monday morning. I'd like to paint an old desk, too, now. I just want to downsize. But still keep some of the clutter I love. Just not too much.

Out of my therapy, other interesting things have happened. I made some changes on the WIP. And I have obligated myself, as part of habit making, etc. to keep working journals. That's been difficult but I am doing it. I also started working on the Brian Molko project in small doses since Album #8 is going to be released soon. (Probably bit by bit.) But only in very small doses until I have finished my program and made some headway with many of my other goals. I made a little discovery about Molko this week, quite by accident. It is completely coincidental to anything happening to him or me in our separate bubbles. No, I won't be writing about it. It's nothing to do with his music. But maybe his personality. But it is something so obvious that I can't believe I didn't notice it previously because I saw the information and just did not put "two and two together." Those things happen. And it was somewhere around sixty-something weeks ago, which is over a year when I first saw the information. But it's right out in the open for anyone to see if they look, if they take notice of what Molko talks about, when he talks about his life and his love of music, also some little habit he has himself. Habits tell us things about people. I think music does, too.

Moving on, I've had to think a lot about art, how I view art, how I live my art. What I disclose and what I don't. Not much, and my therapist wants me to disclose more. That's going to be the most difficult thing ever. It's not like some people don't know about it, it's just that I never really put anything on the Internet. I don't like the public gaze. Yes. we are talking about that. One of the things I want to do is do an art program again, to refresh my abilities, to work maybe differently, to socialize in a safe zone, to get out of my head, so to speak, to hear and see fresh ideas. Artists need this, it does not matter if they are writing, painting, or writing a song. They need new ideas and fresh ways of looking at art. Then they can go back into their creative caves and make it work with how they feel and work. All this takes time. It takes living and Covid is not letting us live as we did previously. Why do I have a feeling that Covid is going to change the world, that it already has? I collect a lot of images and thoughts on art and art projects that I have in my head, noted out in notebooks. Occasionally they make this page as part of the assemblage. But they are controlled glimpses. Isn't everything on the Internet sort of artifice? I believe the public gaze requires that artifice. I could never be a performance artist. Because artifice exist in the performance of it, in the persona that is really created in front of a camera or on a stage.

There is a psychology to this and I understand it completely. It's part of why Anthony Bourdain was so conflicted. He was a man encased in his own artifice and he hated it. 

I am ending with giving myself another deadline. I am hoping, feeling confident, that by the end of September, house will be organized, and yes, decorated for Halloween.

I am decorating inside with the hopes of seeing Colin, Oliver, and Miles, maybe Lydia, too. That's the plan. 

And yes, I am still on meds.

I think I did that today in more ways than one.

“To make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we 

start from.”  

                   —   T. S. Eliot

 

I just spent over six hours watching crazy films with my son and now I am going to bed.

 So part of my CBT program is to socialize and get out of my head..ah house. So today Jack and I planned a movie day. He cooked too, so I did not have to decide what to eat, which I am not very good at right now. I also did not have to dress up, put on make-up, or wear a mask since Jack and I are both fully vaccinated and neither of us socialize. It was ideal that way. I didn't even have to do my hair. Nobody post these kinds of pics on social media. But I thought why not? I mean I am getting old, my hair is falling out, I've got wrinkles and no amount of makeup is going to change the fact that as a natural blonde, when you go gray, well, you don't have those trendy eyebrows that are so fashionable. But I have never had them. I did wear neat clothes and my black and white chucks. Jack cooked baked chicken, peas, greens, and green beans since we are avoiding carb-carbs. 

I arrived at his house at 11 a.m. and stayed till 8 p.m. We watched three films.  First was The World's End, one of Edgar Wright's crazy films. It was really funny and I suppose we will watch Hot Fuzz next time. I laughed a lot and we ate while watching it. I had to be careful not to choke. Oh, well.

The second film was The Exorcist, which is our "first" traditional Halloween film to watch together since it scares the hell out of me and Jack has a life size Regan in his house, standing right beside the sofa as part of his decorations. Yes, we are early decorating, but who cares with Covid.  Covid has changed the world. It was the director's cut of The Exorcist, which is not very different except for the ending. 

Every time I watch this film, I shut my eyes when Father Karras, a Jesuit priest, starts seeing and talking to his dead mother. I also struggle with seeing Karras get Last Rites, since I have seen that in real life. Jack, like my mother, is a great color commentary personality, so all through the films I get all these juicy details. He has a memory like my mother, too.  One cannot imagine how much those two have put to memory. But they are famous for it. So we don't just watch films. We talk through them, too.  

We also stopped one time to look at a new book he has on the Crusades. What can I say, we both love history and the Crusades are one of our things. This book had lots of maps and I adore maps, so I had to look at all the maps while we paused one of the films. Don't ask. Our third choice was the 1999 The Mummy, because we had just been discussing Egyptian history, too. 

I realized that this is what Jack and I do. We watch TV in the background while we have one conversation after another. I told him I had written my paper in the class on Maat, which he didn't know. How did he not know? Maybe because he was in another college studying Statistics or something similar at the same time. I also told him I would give him all my books on Egyptian history. I don't know why I should keep them when I never look at them anymore. And then we watched The Mummy. It was a fun film and now I want to watch all the old 1960s Mummy films. In fact, I want to watch ALL Mummy films. That's on my Halloween list. This is how my life goes right now.

I had to drive home in the dark. Ugh. Not a good idea, but it's not far and I made it without any stress. I had to find my cat, she was outside somewhere. I had to change clothes, wash my face, and this is it. I took a photo for a joke for Jack, to make a meme on his movie talk. But then I thought, post it on the blog, Jane, let the grandchildren see how much fun you were. lol (And how wild your hair is, too.) That's why I am sitting here. Tomorrow I am back to moving books and cleaning. Speaking of....

The topic of the day on social media was that Placebo "cleaned out" out their IG account. 

I have slept with many monsters.

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

The beak that grips her, she becomes.

And Nature, that sprung-lidded, still commodious

steamer-trunk of tempora and mores

gets stuffed with it all:

— Adrienne Rich

Creed

I wake up to find magic,/ I seek dreams/ and I crave imagination./ This is my creed.

Anastasia Bolinder

Tanith Lee on Love, Once Again.

 "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 who died on May 26, 2015

(I saw this posted on tumblr and I know I have already posted it, but I am posting it again. I did not remember Tanith Lee's birthday this year due to a personal tragedy in my own family on May 24. But Tanith Lee was a wonderful writer, an outsider, totally idiosyncratic, and much beloved by this reader. Love is so important. And I feel so lucky to be able to feel it to the capacity that I do. A gift. A challenge. I love sometimes with no expectations. I still love John and though he is dead, the feeling is still palpable. Love is good. Love is loud. Smiling.)

Why does the vampire still read?

 

Eve's house is full of books. My house is full of books. Today I watched the film Only Lovers Left Alive. I like it. But one question kept running through my mind. Why does Eve still read? She is not human, and doesn't appear to have retained any empathy for humanity in the way we humans work to feel. And yet she reads. All the time. The question is why? I think it's more than curiosity.

Another discussion is Adam? He chose music really, although we know he influenced many scientists. He is fighting depression. Depression in a vampire. This is not Louis from Anne Rice. These are not Anne Rice vampires at all. And yet, Adam is fighting either depression or boredom, which I might add, in psychology, are totally related.

It is the psychology I am interested in when it comes to these two vampires. I want to know why Eve still reads. Maybe it is why I still read after 1000s of books. I certainly don't read for curiosity anymore. Or maybe even empathy. It's not even conclusive in psychology that empathy is created and maintained by reading. Escape is a good answer, the easiest. But I don't read for escape either. One doesn't read Absalom, Absalom for escape. Smiling slyly.

Simulation. Curiosity. To learn. Hmmm. I have no firm answers right now.

The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry

 I began September 2021 here and in my personal life with a quote from Sarah Perry's beautiful novel, The Essex Serpent. It is quote that I scheduled many weeks ago. I knew September was going to be the month I returned to writing and blogging. And that quote is literal. One cannot make serious changes without sacrifices and losses, without rearranging things. And changes don't come over night. They take months and years and I started changes many months ago, some as far as fall in 2018. The Essex Serpent is one of my favorite novels of all time, and that says a lot. It's brilliant, stuffed with all kinds of ideas and with one really focused plot and structure. In some ways I am posting this because this novel is not without sorrow and loss and pain and I have felt those things so deeply. But it is also about regeneration. And that is the important part, how we all deal with our issues and how we move forward. I have sold my soul, in order to live as I must, my conscience and morals remain, but I did seek therapy and my therapist said I must no longer deny some things about myself, positive things actually, not the weaknesses but the strengths. I often hide them because I do not like the public gaze, nor do I need praise or validation. I am very much loved as a human being, as a mother and grandmother, as a friend. My work over the years validates my efforts at work and also I work with "purpose" and not "achievement."  Another thought from the beautiful novel by Sarah Perry. “in the end it was purpose I wanted, not achievement — you see the difference?” There are paths in life that take courage. One never finds true courage unless one is faced with loss and fear. I cannot recommend The Essex Serpent enough. I shout its beauty out and how it transformed my feelings into words. I am so lucky.

Here is the quote again:

“Sometimes I think I sold my soul, so that I can live as I must. Oh, I don't mean without morals or conscience- I only mean with freedom to think the thoughts that come, to send them where I want them to go, not to let them run along tracks someone else set, leading only this way or that...”

― Sarah Perry, The Essex Serpent.

I have made another serious change. I feel good.

 Yesterday, I saw a good doctor and today I am seeing another. These visits were all planned months ago so, no, they are not emergencies, but they could not have come at a better time in my life.  All my doctors have known me for years and years, so they are quite acquainted with a living history of Jane. Laughing.  Today, this doctor knows me really well. Everything. He's my personal physician, and took me on after his predecessor, my old friendly personal physician retired, a man whom I knew as a teenager. There is something odd in this circumstances. One can never fake anything or hide anything or be anything other than what one is to these people, a predicament which can make one uncomfortable at times, but at the same moment, is very comforting. These two men never cut me any slack, so to speak.

The older man has died, God Bless him, he was brilliant and a great diagnostic physician. He had a gift, and I was lucky to be his patient. He understood me so well, and helped me through many years when I went to school, seriously allergic to cigarette smoke and yes, in those days, people smoked in classes. He called me the "Perpetual Tourist" a name that has stuck with other people, too. This refers to my lifelong personal history of studying anything that caught my interests instead of focusing on one subject. He used the word, tourist, because I do become a tourist in a sense, I leave one place and travel to another in my head until I know it as well as I can. I have been many places over the years. No adequate label can describe my love of learning. No label is necessary because another great doctor taught me years ago that labels are worthless when it comes to defining people and I have never changed my mind about that.

I have decided to do something different online than previously, both here and on social media. I am going to intensify my status as the "Perpetual Tourist" and go back to my early ways, to the things I learned that fascinated me. Most people know I love beauty, that I am often amazed at what humankind can achieve, and how social and biological evolutions have, in a manner of speaking, influenced and even determined how things have progressed. I want to spend more time talking about beautiful things I love so that my grandchildren can read about those things. I also want them to understand why it is so important to read around subjects, to not make quick judgments based on modern norms, and I want them to accept the bad with the good. There is no perfection in life, no way to avoid horror and pain and suffering, to create a perfect and fair justice for all. These things I have written about many times for my children and one of WIPs is about that theme. The Search for the Impossible. No one ever finds it. The Impossible is what many people want and seek and what they compare all things to, which is a shame, because it causes a lot of unnecessary misery. I love "big pictures" and "history" and "ideas." I come to all my art through ideas, not people, not characters, not my own personal biases. It is an idea that strikes me first and that leads my creative spirit. And I have my way of living that art that is not really here or on Facebook or on Twitter. And I am going to discuss why this happens not only to me but many people.

I know a lot of creatives and have worked with them over a lifetime, really. They are people who think "outside the box" and only use group think as a tool to gather information. It's takes more than a few college courses to determine how they will see a subject. It takes a lot of study and yes, experience. Like the older man, some doctors are brilliant diagnostics, while other doctors, who are good doctors, do not have this keen eye. Eventually they will solve a problem, but it takes them longer, and they may need help. Nothing wrong with that. Some doctors rely on tests and even other doctors, but the serious creatives and brilliant diagnostics sees things that others do not. It's in the brain. And no one can quite come up with the proper label.

In the last few weeks, I have had to face some stark realities about myself, about my personal environment, and about the Internet and social environment here. I have been under severe stress and I paid a price because I was just angry. And while anger is necessary, it's not very productive. Basically I am a very pragmatic person, I look for solutions and if I can't find them, I go to someone who can and I adapt. I change. I burn bridges. JUST. LIKE. THAT. Burning a bridge is not the ideal choice, but what it does do is prevent one from going backwards. And sometimes that makes burning a  bridge, regardless of the fallout and consequences, necessary. I have burned a lot of bridges in the last few months. And yes, that process added to my stress. BUT I am at the end of the tunnel now. I am out in the light. And I am okay. I am even smiling as I write this.

So look for changes if you know me. ALL. OVER. THE. PLACE. I feel good.

“Sometimes I think I sold my soul, so that I can live as I must. Oh, I don't mean without morals or conscience- I only mean with freedom to think the thoughts that come, to send them where I want them to go, not to let them run along tracks someone else set, leading only this way or that...”

― Sarah Perry, The Essex Serpent.