The spiderwort is going wild, as planned.

 

Emma by Jane Austen is a novel I really like a lot.

By chance and one might say, luck, I read Emma by Jane Austen this last week. It was the one novel by Austen that I had not (really) read. I suppose I flipped through its pages several times and read passages, but not a deep read. Perhaps I thought it a straight comedy and was never in the mood for that. I hardly know or remember. Emma has left a deep impression on me, which may or may not have something to do with the Romantic Period or Percy Shelley or English gardens, I don’t know or care, but I have decided to put aside my previous reading plans and reread all of Jane Austen along with some biographies, letters, and other non-fiction materials. I am going to reread Richard Holmes’ biography of Shelley, too. And it’s spring and summer and I am thinking of gardens and flowers and paintings and the beauty of nature. If I had lived in England, I would have loved a cottage and a garden and country life. I have lived a country life. Emma is a very mature work by Austen, a novel with themes that explore self-reflection, self-awareness, and the how people can move from self-delusion to reality. It should be taught in senior year of high school where young women can discuss these themes and ask themselves questions. I’d love to teach it. There is a harshness to Austen that many overlook. She might have even been more radical than we normally think. No, she didn’t run off with a married poet like Mary Godwin but just maybe Austen had more psychological insights than the former authoress, perhaps because Mary Godwin Shelley was plagued by depression and abandonment issues. There is such clarity to Austen’s work. That was her gift. One just has to read closely.

Easter is about Hope.

Image: The Easter Bonnet ~ Anna Whelan Betts

My garden 2022

 This iris is an old fashioned two tone purple with an orange beard and came from my mother's garden. It was destroyed (after years of nurturing) by the water pipe replacement winter of 2020-2021. The loss was deep as it reminded me of both my mother and husband, both dead. 

And now I realize just how difficult it is going to be to replace this plant since this is an old fashioned Heritage plant. Mother and I had these in our gardens for years and I may not be able to replace the plant.  I do so feel this terrible loss, though I am not sure if it is for the plant or my mother or my husband or all three. Or am I lamenting the passage of Time and the loss of all things eventually. 

It is a beautiful iris. I want replace it. I am going to look carefully in May for any signs of smaller plants that may have been scattered across the lawn and flowerbeds by digging equipment. I do see a few of the white ones pushing out here and there. Maybe one of these survived. I nursed this one for years and it was so beautiful. I had no idea it was a heritage plant, but now looking back at my mother's garden, I should have known better. I've attempted to maintain the plants she gave me over the years and have been successful to a degree. But the iris was her favorite plant. She loved them so. She could not grow them in Greenville, the town we moved from years ago. It never got cold enough.

Speaking of cold, after the last two winters, I will never wish to live anywhere north of where I live in the entire world. If anything I wish to live south of where I live, closer to New Orleans. I need the sun. I need warmth. Winters ruin me.

Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by William Styron.

It might surprise people to know that I suffer from Depression. I do not have Major Depressive Disorder but I do know what it is like to experience a major depressive disorder episode. Despite my smiles and good cheer, I tend to write about very dark themes. Loss. Abandonment. The perils and weight of Time. The stress of the past. Melancholy. Even betrayal and suicide or murder. Some of my characters are 'mad' as William Styron became in the summer of 1985. I have never read a book more palpable about depression than this one. Several times while reading it, I felt my body tense and I literally became anxious due to Styron's descriptions of his feelings. I was so depressed in high school after the death of a childhood friend that my teachers became concerned about me and I literally missed 100 days of school that year. Looking back, I felt very similar to what Styron felt but I never became suicidal. (One of the similar traits I possessed was that I did not sleep or talk much. I could not talk. I was disconnected.) Styron makes it clear that melancholia and hypochondria sound alike as words and tend to feel alike and are related emotionally, and I agree with him. Depression and Anxiety are so interconnected that sometimes it is difficult to tell one from the other. A lot of artists and writers suffer from Depression, though so do plumbers and electricians. We just don't hear about them when they commit suicide. Suicide is about pain. And all of this is probably rooted in one's childhood and concerns loss. Loss of what doesn't really matter as long as it is psychologically coupled. I take Prozac for my depression. Sometimes I go off it, but not often. Twenty years now. Depression is wily and sneaky. One is the midst of it before one knows it. Highly recommended read.

You are not a gadget

 Ben came by the house today and also had our lunch delivered. He stayed  (six) hours and we talked about everything, including Jaron Lanier's book. There was some tech jargon he explained to me, which helped in understanding how MIDI was locked in and what that really meant. Later we got into the values and devaluing of the arts. Just a note. Ben doesn't do social media though he does use the Internet for certain things. But social media has never interested him that much. This is my second read of Lanier's book, which I found so interesting and also kind of frightening. None of my children really do social media much. I began thinking about that and why. I have never really asked them in detail. None of them are on Twitter at all. Probably because of how they live. (?) But I'll have to think about it later. No answers really, just musing. I wanted to post this because I have a feeling I won't get back to the Internet this week. And by the time I come back, I'll be posting another book I am reading and an update on WIP.

I spent a lot of time outside today.

The sun was shining.

Small things. Beautiful things. It's been such a harsh winter.

Lanier, as we all know, is a genius and a very decent human being. He cares about creative people. This book was written over a decade ago and he saw the film industry as it is now, gone the way of the music industry. It all reminded me of the news on Twitter this week over the new four payout system in publishing. I remember when they began basketing royalties, and the three payout system was harsh. I think, in hindsight, I was lucky to have chosen the path I did. Lots of experience, timely checks, and less stress. 

But now I want to write a novel.

Oh, well....

An interesting photo of Picasso.

 Picasso with a cat. (I am looking for the photographer and will update.) Apparently, Picasso loved cats, painted cats, etc. So I may have to read to find out who took this and the date. And yes, I am a cat lady, as they say.

And I knew that I wanted you...

I remember you closing the shutters
And laying down by my side
And the light that was still slipping through
It was painting your body in stripes
I remember the trees summoned down
Like an archangel choir
And the ocean was all we could see
And I knew that I wanted you 

Local Natives

Silent lights, iris and mimosas, 1913, Henri Matisse

 Post-impressionism. 

Silent lights, iris and mimosas, 1913, Henri Matisse

This is my motto for 2022.

“There's no prayer like desire.” ― Tom Waits

Some insights from Tom Waits

“The world is a hellish place and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.”

— Tom Waits

This is the future of those that don't die young.

“But you cant be alive forever, and you always wear out life long before you have exhausted the possibilities of living. And all that must be somewhere; all that could not have been invented and created just to be thrown away. And the earth is shallow; there is not a great deal of it before you come to the rock. And the earth dont want to just keep things, hoard them; it wants to use them again.”
 

            — William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses

Jane and Nature in Natural Light.

“We create a meaningful life by what we accept as true and by what we create in the pursuit of truth, love, beauty, and adoration of nature.”

― Kilroy J. Oldster

Rufus Wainwright - Sonnet 29 - Shakespeare

Even in these dark times, there is still such beauty. I choose beauty over darkness. 

I am known for this.

“There are obstacles one can overcome only through indifference.”
― Marty Rubin

I will not let my anger and disappointment be commodified by others.

"Always there have been penalties for Luddites, and I am one familiar with the penalties, though so far I have not been hanged. Luddites are guilty of disrespect to any silliness that is popular, to any meanness that is profitable."

— Wendell Berry

It's 2022 and I say to you, Happy New Year.

I was a girl who embraced her contradictions because I believed certainty was the cold lie, and so my life has been an odd mix of conflicting perspectives. Sometimes I trembled, while dancing at the cruel edges of paradox and its relentless ambivalence. Sometimes I thought I might go mad with it all, but instead I have learned how to love and dance and sing and wonder. Failure became my best teacher, and the trivial of my life and experiences was remarkable, including myself. Living was enough.

It is all enough.

It's a New Year/blog/experience and so forth....

Moving on. Welcome 2022.

The Annunciation by Arthur Hughes

 This is beautiful art from Arthur Hughes. The colors are just stunning.

I want to write about this in sections, because these are profound words from Joni Mitchell and I suppose this is about monogamy.

“I don’t know if I’ve learned anything yet! I did learn how to have a happy home, but I consider myself fortunate in that regard because I could’ve rolled right by it. Everybody has a superficial side and a deep side, but this culture doesn’t place much value on depth — we don’t have shamans or soothsayers, and depth isn’t encouraged or understood. Surrounded by this shallow, glossy society we develop a shallow side, too, and we become attracted to fluff. That’s reflected in the fact that this culture sets up an addiction to romance based on insecurity — the uncertainty of whether or not you’re truly united with the object of your obsession is the rush people get hooked on. I’ve seen this pattern so much in myself and my friends and some people never get off that line.

“But along with developing my superficial side, I always nurtured a deeper longing, so even when I was falling into the trap of that other kind of love, I was hip to what I was doing. I recently read an article in Esquire magazine called ‘The End of Sex,’ that said something that struck me as very true. It said: “If you want endless repetition, see a lot of different people. If you want infinite variety, stay with one.” What happens when you date is you run all your best moves and tell all your best stories — and in a way, that routine is a method for falling in love with yourself over and over.

“You can’t do that with a longtime mate because he knows all that old material. With a long relationship, things die then are rekindled, and that shared process of rebirth deepens the love. It’s hard work, though, and a lot of people run at the first sign of trouble. You’re with this person, and suddenly you look like an asshole to them or they look like an asshole to you — it’s unpleasant, but if you can get through it you get closer and you learn a way of loving that’s different from the neurotic love enshrined in movies. It’s warmer and has more padding to it.”

— Joni Mitchell

The Night was once very dark and black and feared.

🌚 “Night knew no bounds. Goethe, on a moonlit evening in Naples, was “overwhelmed by a feeling of infinite space.”

                              — A. Roger Ekirch 

                             from At Day's Close: Night in Times Past

When I was a small child, my grandmother lived in a very old house with little electricity. She was incredibly poor and each room in her house had an electrical outlet that hung down in the center of each room of her four room house. Each wire had a few sockets, the bottom one for a light bulb. She was very careful with extension cords used and so forth for as long as I knew her. No need to burn the house down. Most of the time we were in the dark after a certain time of night. Once I asked my grandmother what it was like for her as a child concerning the dark and she told me. Right then, I became acquainted with Night in a way that none of my childhood friends would ever consider. It made me wonder about past times and how Night was for ordinary people in villages and small towns across my country, and then across places I had studied in school, and later, all around the world. Once people thought Night was an entity, the dark simply rolled out as the sun set like a supernatural force. Cities and people once used torches and then candles, followed by lamplight of some kind. I walked around my house for three days with just candlelight last year just to see how it would be and I could hardly read a book. In fact, I did little reading and writing in that time. And I do not live in true Night or darkness. Not like these past people did. Even in the suburbs of a small city like Memphis, I have light in the sky. I have street lights. I have vehicles passing the street in front of my house. I have good flashlights. Even my Apple phone has a flashlight. So no, I am not in the dark of past times. But my grandmother lived in the countryside the first 20 years or so of her life and it was dark. Perhaps not dark as past times, but still very dark. They had oil lamps. No electricity until the 1930s for her. No indoor plumbing, no washing machine. Certainly no dryer and the refrigerator was some sort of antique that really did not work. But it was the light that my grandmother wanted. She taught herself to read and she loved to write letters and read magazines and the few books she could get from the county library when someone traveled to the next town. Electricity is something we all take for granted. It's just there. And are lives are not interrupted by Night at all, especially in large cities.

IN order to really grasp Night, I went to the planetarium in Memphis. Before the show, they turned out all the lights and it was so dark and black, that I could not see my own nose or my hand when I raised it toward my face. I felt an immediate sense of anxiety and because it was a social experiment, the blackness went on for minutes. During that time, I felt blind and as though I had been swallowed by Night. I couldn't even breathe properly. I lost, briefly, any sense of space and direction. In that moment, I felt as though I was in past times and I was out in the middle of the country, with no moon or stars, no light, nothing but darkness. It felt like an entity.

In Anthropology, we learned very quickly that fire was one of the most important possessions of early hominoids. Before they learned to make fire on their own, they captured it from Nature in various ways. Lightning strikes being one. Can you imagine living in darkness, moonlight or starlight your only source of light at Night and then one day you capture Fire? And then later you learn to make this Fire and it not only lights your Night, it warms you, and it also cooks meat and fish. It also scares some predators. Fire was a gift.

These three books have been valuable research for me, along with my own personal experiments to understand Night in past times and to experience candlelight, lamplight, and even firelight. This has been important research for my work-in-progress and also for my own connections to my grandmother and her mother and the people who came before them. When I read about Goethe or Shelley or other historical figures, I try to imagine how they lived in the Night. And even now, around the world, in less developed countries, people experience darkness in a way that we do not understand at all.