Shelley on what we Modern Americans Need to Do

“Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number-
Shake your chains to earth like
dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you
Ye are many-they are few.” 
― Percy Bysshe Shelley

Who tells the story....

“Who tells the story, who recasts the characters and changes the tone becomes very important: no story is ever the same as its source or model, the chemistry of narrator and audience changes it.”

                          Marina Warner

Melancholia

Francesca Woodman

“But I can't do anything for him and he can't do anything for me. We must wail in our own corners.” 
― Iris Murdoch

Creating Art Quotes

“Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them,so unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!”

                                                  Rainer Maria Rilke

Things I have learned in the last 5 years about writing

No matter what an author writes, the author cannot hide. Be it the author's subject matter, the sentence structure, the diction, or even tone, the writer's personality is going to be revealed. The author is his or her work and the kind of work does not matter. It can be high art as in literary writing or more common genre writing, a memoir, or a year's string of tweets or Facebook posts, even a song. But the exposure is the same. A personality is divulged.

Yes, some beliefs are openly stated. But others can be eventually discovered in the actual words that an author uses. After all, all writing is about experience, whether it is merely described experience or interpreted. I have come to understand that the best writing is interpreted and is done so, with great sensitivity, the kind of perceptiveness that is made visible.  There is a distinctiveness, a peculiar sound and meaning.

This is one of the most valuable things that I have learned about writing in the last five years, not just the intellect of knowing it as a truth, but observing it in all kinds of people. This new way of looking and paying attention has taught me many lessons, even about myself.

It has changed how I pay attention to the world and how I look, and also how I read. But mostly how I now live my daily life. 

Who knew words could be so powerful.
Who knew that finding interest in the everyday things, in what might be missing counts.

Remembering Mother on her Birthday

l-r Virginia and Pauline Church

Remembering Mother, who was born 100 years ago today in Moorhead, Mississippi. Pauline Church Harrington, born October 13, 1919, died August 27, 2009. An incredible human being. A force of nature. She had many gifts. Her love of books and reading was one of them. She could spin a tale out of thin air and loved a good story. Queen of the Day Trip and Color commentary on life. Fantastic cook. In her 70s, she rode in the back of a pickup truck, over land, from Louisiana to Alaska, with her baby sister, Belle. She outlived six siblings, carried five pregnancies to full term, married two men, buried both of them. It's true, her life was detailed by hardship and suffering, but she was a survivor. On life, she told me, "All I knew was my family, especially my brothers and sisters. I was like a mother to the younger ones. We almost starved one winter. It defined the ones who lived together after Daddy died."  On death, she told me, "It's nothing. Just the end. Everything ends. Think of me as  sleeping."

Sleep well, Mother.

Creating art

An artist must be passionately in love with his art. Obsessed or possessed ― go mad for what you believe in.”


                                  – Charlotte Eriksson

I have witched you!

“I kissed you! I witched you!
I laugh at the afterlife’s dark.” 
― Marina Tsvetaeva

Paysage Bleu  by Marc Chagall

The Witch by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge

Whistler's The White Girl 1862

I have walked a great while over the snow,

And I am not tall nor strong.

My clothes are wet, and my teeth are set,

And the way was hard and long.

I have wandered over the fruitful earth,

But I never came here before.

Oh, lift me over the threshold, and let me in at the door!

The cutting wind is a cruel foe.

I dare not stand in the blast.

My hands are stone, and my voice a groan,

And the worst of death is past.

I am but a little maiden still,

My little white feet are sore.

Oh, lift me over the threshold, and let me in at the door!

Her voice was the voice that women have,

Who plead for their heart’s desire.

She came—she came—and the quivering flame

Sunk and died in the fire.

It never was lit again on my hearth

Since I hurried across the floor,

To lift her over the threshold, and let her in at the door.

The Last of Summer

It's very warm today but a cold front is moving toward us. It's due. The first of October has never been this warm since records were taken. I went outside to walk the lawn and look at the flowers, took this photo at the gate. The sun was in my eyes. I love the sun in my eyes. I know it's been very hot this summer, but I shall miss it. Winter is never kind to me.

Rilke on Beauty and Terror

“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”

― Rainer Maria Rilke

On Tribalism and What Art Really Is and Does

On ART: I saw this live in early 1971. It was a huge and shattering experience. I think I lay in my bed for two days afterwards staring at the ceiling. When I got up, I cut my hair like Hanoi Jane, packed up my expensive clothes, studded a pair of used bellbottom jeans, borrowed my Daddy's insulated undershirt, and then went out and joined a bunch of Vietnam War protesters in Memphis. Shaking my head here. But it's true. I got expelled from school twice afterwards. One of my teachers cried when she saw me, every time she saw me from then onward. One teacher became my only support system for two years. But in this moment, I never felt so liberated in my life. And ever since, I've been living in conflict with my environment. The thing I know now, is that I was right all along, even when I thought I was wrong and doubted myself, even when others told me so, even when I went back to things I should not have. I was so literal, this almost destroyed me mentally. And I had no one to talk to about it until twenty something years later when I asked my Daddy for $800 so I could visit one of the smartest therapist in the city of Memphis and talk for forty minutes. Believe me, when I say, I went to this man with a notebook full of scribbles. I am writing this, because the hardest things that any one person will ever do in their life is leave behind the traditions and values of their environment and family and create their own, be it religion, politics, or just local culture. Joyce Carol Oates writes about this all the time. Most people, even brilliant and emotionally sound ones, will never do this. Do we all have to do this? Well, that's debatable. Some people feel that the culture of their environment and family is the best thing ever, that there is no need. I see this in my Facebook feed every single day I look at it. Traditions are valued and nurtured and spread from one generation to another. This is how we ground ourselves and establish identity. But it is tribalism. Too precious, it creates the biases that filter our perceptions and even alters reality. I'd say religion can do this. So can shared beliefs about race, politics, masculinity, the roles of women, sex and sexual identity, the relationship between humankind and nature. The inability to see past our own tribe and traditions is a core problem with our species. But going forward, the future will belong to those people who can. It may not come to them like my beginning, simply reading books all the time and then one day, watching a rock and roll band do something that still is seen as way ahead of its time. The early Grand Funk Railroad was part grunge, part punk, and something very unique. This song went on to be of great value to those soldiers who caught those last flights out of Saigon before the city fell. 

Art is what transcends our tribe. It's what makes a Bob Dylan from a pop star. Art is not something that has rules or that is dictated or organized by an editor or painting teacher, or even a math professor. It is the 'thing' you create out of your own bidding. And while it can make a nod to your influences and tribe, it is never dictated or manipulated by it or other people. Creating good art is the moment of personal responsibility and true autonomy. It will challenge the status quo, often disturb, and perhaps even change people and alter their lives. Art is all about intent and a kind of gutsy form of communication. It's often painful and risky. The people who create art like this have always been the ones to move civilization. It may be a song, or a poem, a painting, a math problem, a performance on a street corner, and yes, even a business of some sort. But it will be art. Art is not about the tools we use. It is about how we use them. Art does NOT look back or hold on to a tribe, it reacts against all that, it violates traditions and creates something new and original. It is just as likely to get negative reviews as it is positive ones. Sometimes it is totally misunderstood for generations. Art is the soul of humankind. That is why I lay on my bed for two days, disturbed, floating, my sense of identity shattered to pieces. And even at my age, I am still trying to gather the pieces up and glue them in a suitable form. Art is ongoing. It's never finished. I am thinking right now, that simply living day to day can be art, too, if attempted. Art is not a job, but it is work.

On Francesca Woodman

She had few boundaries and made art out of nothing: empty rooms with peeling wallpaper and just her figure. No elaborate stage set-up or lights … Her process struck me more the way a painter works, making do with what’s right in front of her, rather than photographers like myself who need time to plan out what they’re going to do.

                                                 Cindy Sherman

Fact

‘It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.’

                                    Sherlock Holmes

On art

“I take seriously Flaubert’s statement that we must love one another in our art as the mystics love one another in God. By honoring one another’s creation we honor something that deeply connects us all, and goes beyond us.” 

—Joyce Carol Oates

Old Fashion Traditional Witchcraft

As someone who has had a wide fascination with folklore and cunning people, I've long wanted to read some books on local conjuring. I once had the pleasure of knowing one of these witches. She was truly one of the most fascinating persons I had ever met. Long dead, she had offered to show me what she called "old fashioned witchcraft" and I'm sorry to say, although she taught me tarot, I passed on the conjuring. If I had been wise enough or brave enough I would have recorded her conversations and preserved her image and voice for future generations. But she made me terribly shy. I think I was half afraid of her and I was younger and less confident.  She was the perfect image of a what we all think is a witch, an older woman, dressed curiously, bent over, with a wicked laugh and sparkle. Her brown eyes are still vivid in my mind, large and always wet-looking, as though she was on the verge of tears and yet, there were no cause. When she looked at you, you felt pierced. I felt pierced. It was like she could see through me and I could hide nothing from her. I felt she knew all my secrets. That is how uncomfortable she made me. I suppose it was part of her power over people. She commanded strength and had a deep conviction about her lifestyle. I envy few anything. But I wanted to know the source of her strength. Of course, at the time, for reasons that are my own, I never spoke of her much. Perhaps it's because I knew others would frown on the associations and that what I treasured about her, most abhorred. In another life, I could have been her and very happy.

Crone work.

Now that I feel like a crone and look like a crone, I've decided to become one.

Why We Write

“We write to heighten our own awareness of life. We write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely...When I don’t write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing.” 
                                                        ― Anaïs Nin

“One doesn’t become a witch to run around being harmful, or to run around being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick. It’s to escape all that - to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to by others.” 
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes

Small Kindnesses by Danusha Laméris

Small Kindnesses
by Danusha Laméris

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk

down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”

(found on Jonathan Carroll's Facebook feed)

Why I write.

  It occurred to me today, that writing has really been about self-preservation in a world that is absolutely maddening. It gives me pleasure to write. Happiness. Peace of mind. Joy. That's it. That's the sum of why I write. Nothing more. Nothing less.