Reading a book is an experience.

I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.

— Neil Gaiman

Walking is very important to me, so I am pounding the streets early before the heat.

 

The things we do learn as we love and lose.

“After some time, you learn the subtle difference between holding a hand and imprisoning a soul; You learn that love does not equal sex, and that company does not equal security, and you start to learn…. That kisses are not contracts and gifts are not promise..."

― Jorge Luis Borges

The Woman in White is one of my favorite novels of all time.

 

The Woman in White

Frederick Walker, ARA (1840-1875)

1871

Gouache on paper

2172 x 1289 mm

Courtesy of Tate Britain N02080

Presented by Sir Claude Phillips in memory of his sister Eugenie Phillips 1906

This life-sized poster is one of the first examples of a fine artist undertaking an advertisement. It was made for Wilkie Collins’s ‘sensation’ play The Woman in White, which opened at the Olympic Theatre, London in October 1871. It combines a Pre-Raphaelite-style beauty with black and white graphic design. Sweeping lines pull the viewer’s eye to the woman’s mysterious and inviting expression.— Tate Britain Commentary

(at the moment, I am reading small portions of this novel out loud to myself.)

Today's question is this.

Mais qui voit-on dans le miroir ????

Camille Claudel had such an interesting but sad life.

 

French sculptor Camille Claudel and her friend Ghita Theurietque in 1882.

I love creating anything, but I would like to be good at something. Laughing.

True perseverance lies in fulfilling our most powerful creative impulses despite all setbacks. We only get into trouble when we become obsessed with particular outcomes, when wanting to be recognized for our art is more important to us than the art itself. Arrogance paired with comparatively little talent (or at least seriously underdeveloped talent) is what results in work that embarrasses everyone but the person making it. You can’t be delusional if what you desire — what you truly desire — is simply to be with your camera or notebook or piano, engrossed and alive.

— Camille de Angelis

Contradictions are painful at times.

  Many things have happened to me in the last several years and I've been thinking about convictions and people who are entrenched in their own convictions. One thing I know from my own life and the lives of people I respect or know well, or from scientists that I have met, known, or studied is that if one experiences life and studies any one thing long enough, convictions are meaningless. Other people are the opposite. They feel you can never remain neutral, as many political figures feel. I think Howard Zinn is one. His example is "how can one remain neutral on a moving train." Some people are even admired for their convictions, etc. etc. etc. I am more align with Nietzsche who felt convictions were just as dangerous as lies. In fact, he referred to them as prisons. For me personally, a person who is likely to change her mind about any one subject based on new information, convictions are just "things" that are fashionable and convenient and generational even. But I would definitely say convictions are psychological prisons. This perspective makes it impossible for me to be a people pleaser or fashionable or tribal in any way. In some ways, it has alienated me from people I truly love. 

It is really not what happens on the surface between you and other people that counts, but how these people make you feel on the inside and how you make them feel on the inside. And I know that is often uneasy for me. And sometimes, you actually know what the other people are truly feeling. The painful part is not caring as you know they would, because you don't hold the same philosophical value on convictions and sometimes a "core" value. You possess empathy but it's very objective and not emotional empathy. (Most people don't understand or practice objective empathy and it must be practiced.) And what you feel really bad about is that alienation, that forceful distance between person and person that you can never cross, because you do not hold the same values regarding the word "convictions." And they will never understand that perspective. It's foreign or unreal to them. While you take the entire situation in through reality, the other people will often choose labels that psychologically match their emotional values. And then the distance between grows wider and there is nothing you can do.

Nothing I can do. This is what it means to be living in true contradictions. This, for me, is the coldest alienation. And perhaps the saddest thing is that I know how the other person will write it off and I have to live with that and go on. I see me as they see me. And it's painful. And there is no defense, no last word, no bitterness, no revenge, no projection, no hate, just the wide space that aways exist between and the sorrow of the situation that I will mourn but eventually move on from.

When I was very young, I wanted to be understood and loved. And then I realized that was also a prison. I had to learn to love myself and believe in myself. I knew how different I was and that even in that difference, I was the same, that all people want to love and be loved. But not all people are happy or content or hold a high value on their worth. But somehow, for whatever reason, at a very young age, I did. Even with all my wounds and neurosis. My problem was being a fixer and I was going to fix my broken family and relationships until I decided I could only fix myself and help people in their journey or leave them along. Probably because I wanted to understand myself and the world and that is how I became a person who realized convictions were meaningless at times. And it was okay to say no, and to change my mind. To be wrong. 

Did you know that some people can never say no without feeling guilty or justifying? Some people can never say they are wrong? Some people can never change their minds? Some people are always looking for labels to explain uncertainty?  Some people are always ashamed or in regret or just feel like they are not good enough. These are prisons. 

I call all this the Impossible. And some people are always in search for it. The Impossible. But the Impossible, this psuedo-perfection and reality is just delusion. And yes, impossible.

(Sometimes, The Impossible transforms into a conviction.)

I am rambling here, but I do understand that sometimes there is no right or wrong, only a decision. Only a choice. And because I have been a creative since I was a child, I understood that choices happen every day, all the time. And some do not have good consequences. Sometimes we are wrong. Sometimes I am wrong. I wish I was wrong today. I will wish it all the rest of the day.

Today I feel like I know this enough to write it here. 

Tomorrow, I may change my mind. Laughing.

The light of the world is a little dimmer now.

 

Lana (December 30, 2007 - May 23, 2021)

Some people do have very short lives. But within that brief time, they radiated so brightly that they touched everyone who ever knew them. Lana was one of those people. For thirteen years, she was a burning star in the lives of her family, and friends, and community. She loved God, her family, and basketball.

It's summer time and the roses are blooming.

 From Ben's lawn. May 22, 2021.

I've had a very good day but I did something silly.

 Today I accidentally deleted links that had to do with my work.

(((omg)))

As I have been saying the last six months, "oh, well..."

Art is not a democratic act.

“Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.”

                         ― Flannery O'Connor

This is one of my favorite paintings.

 

Simeon Solomon

Poetry c.1864

Watercolor

I am feeling low.

 

Painting by

Ion Vincent Danu

Enslaved By Your Roots

This is not the first time I have written about changes. Since 1998, my life, nearly every single year, has been one of major change. Not small things, though I have voluntarily made those, too, but very big emotional things like careers, and marriages, and illnesses, and deaths and those involuntary things that happen to us if we live long enough and love enough. In his incredible book, Life is in the Transitions, Bruce Feiler calls these "Life Quakes" or as I call them, "The Big Assaults On My Stability." I have experienced an unusual amount of them. Nothing is to be done, but how I react. I learned this the hard way at first, and then I mastered a method to deal with crisis so that I could exist AKA How we make meaning in times of change. I am there again, right in the middle of making seriously big creative changes. I did not expect it. Of course, it is never expected. It, this THING, this DISRUPTOR, began last November, though it was probably dormant before that. Who knows? Doesn't matter. Much of it is rooted in me, in various ways, hence the painting. We are all rooted in ways we cannot fully understand, physically, environmentally, and yes mentally. This DISRUPTOR has been of my own making and now I must endure by unmaking it in what ways I can. I will never fully unmake it. I will have to endure its existence to a certain point.

It's going to be chronic.

I am quite familiar with the "chronic."  But I do not like it.

So while I know what to do physically (this is very hard work). It's the mental issues that are going to drag me down. It's the emotional fallout, and today I wondered if I should go back on Prozac and if I do, what dosage. It's not like I have not been here, in this exact place, previously. So I have written it here on my blog because this is a major decision that will affect everything else in my life, especially my creativity. But if I fall into an anxiety/depression cycle, things could get bad, and guess what, I am feeling low right now. I keep journals. I know when I am winding down. It's been over six months and the downward spiral is really clear.

I'll have to choose at some point. But not today. But the choice is there.

Update: NO PROZAC. No sleep.

The bee buzzes in the night.

“White bee, even when you are gone you buzz in my soul. You live again in time, slender and silent.”  

― Pablo Neruda

What is the self?

There is no static, solid self. (mjh)

Vampires still resonate with me as one of the most frightening of creatures.

"His heart has ceased, his breast stone-cold His lips sealed, his eyes blank Still in this world, yet no longer a part! Who is this man? The deceased."

— Part of "Upiór" poem by A. Mickiewicz

My mother was once a baby, too.

Sometimes I like to think of my mother as this baby, sitting on a porch in the warm sunlight, somewhere in the Mississippi Delta. I imagine her later as a toddler and then the young girl and I never go beyond that. I stay focused on those years so that I am not the center of the perspective, that I don't remember her as she was to me, but what I imagine her life was when she was attached to her own mother. None of us really ever think of our mothers outside ourselves and egos. We never think of them without us. We should.

The problems with beauty are many.

“They understand not only evil, it seemed, but the extravagance of tricks with which evil presents itself as good.” 

                    

                            — Donna Tartt,  The Secret History

Happy Birthday to Angela Carter

Late October...the stark elders 

have an anorexic look; 

there is not much in the autumn 

wood to make you smile but it is not yet,

not quite yet, the saddest time of the year. 

Only, there is a haunting sense 

of the imminent cessation of being; 

the year, in turning, turns in on itself. 

Introspective weather, a sickroom hush. 

Angela Carter, from “The Erl-King”, The Bloody Chamber