I nurture the love I have for others now, for it's precious and rarer than painite.

“Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

Seven Miles of Steel Thistles: DANSE MACABRE, a ghost story

Seven Miles of Steel Thistles: DANSE MACABRE, a ghost story: “I’m bored,” Philip whined. “Can't we go now?”             “Hush!” said Mum. He hadn’t been that loud. It was just that in this cold...

Exploring and writing truth with fantastical elements is how I work in both my art and writing.

 

Painting by Florence Susan Harrison.

"Fantasy is not antirational, but pararational; not realistic but surrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud's terminology, it employs primary not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes which, as Jung warned us, are dangerous things. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.” 

                       —   Ursula K Le Guin

This beautiful image and quote are from Terri Windling's gorgeous web page on the Symbol, Allegory, and Dream: The Art of Florence Susan Harrison, a thoughtful essay that also is a defense of writing the fantastical in good fiction.  Is this painting not gorgeous and all about surrender and passion and love. The link: https://www.terriwindling.com/blog/2014/03/symbol-allegory-and-dream.html

Windling, whom I have followed her entire career, wrote this piece back in 2014, and when I saw it, I really latched onto the idea that I could write a story about evolution and science in the form of a fairy tale. I had already written a draft or two of my novel previously. But I was never happy with it, and it wasn't because it was a rough draft or idea. It was its form and structure, it's arrangement of characterizations. I was reading Angela Carter at the same time, and I came across a story called The Erl-king, about the same moment I saw Windling's post and something clicked in my brain. I really could write a story about evolution as a fairy and folk tale. I would be able to do this with symbols and metaphors and even with a touch of allegory as Nathaniel Hawthorne used. It would be pure Romanticism, a sort of coming of age story and the narrator would be this rather ordinary human being who is faced with extraordinary circumstances, and it would be akin to my established patterns in my painting and other work, such as poems, etc. I would be exploring my thoughts on evolution and my absolute love of science and ideas and truth in a surreal fashion. But how? Laughing.

The devil is always in the details.

And as it goes in all art, I made mistakes, some that I could fix and some I could not fix with this project. At times, the work was impossible. I was limited. So limited.

I had to put this project away (many times), though I never lost sight of it. But it was not the first novel I had written and it was not even my "dream project." I have saved that for Second Book Syndrome, because I know exactly how that happens to writers. I now call my current work, The Ambitious Fairy Project. (It's hopeful because I have a #2 planned.) In the beginning, it was too damn ambitious and I did not even have the skill set needed to do it justice. And as the years passed, I began to believe I would never write and finish it. And there would be no second book because the first had never been completed. This is an awful reality for any creative. And I write this very sincerely. And even now, I have fears that I won't finish. I will never write another novel. I hold those feelings today as I write this post. But I am on the path. I am committed.  I even took a Cognitive Behavior Therapy program to help me get to this place where I could type the words,  I. HOLD. A. BELLIGERENT. COMMITMENT. TO. THE. WORK. And I have had to come at this project very differently than I worked previously though I had to keep my keen eye for objectivity, something that has been both a blessing and curse. I had to make order out of chaos, not only in my art but in my life.  Covid and illness plagued me. Yes, plagued me. The question of Prozac loomed large. Understanding the critical mind pressed me to the floor on occasion. And none of these things have changed. 

But I have changed. In bits and pieces. Fragile changes.

As the Le Guin quote alludes to, when we really work hard, we have to be vulnerable at the same time. We enter a dangerous territory where there is no safety and we have to find our way through more chaos and somehow organize it as we go. We cannot create order in the old, negative ways. We kind of have to surrender to it. As someone who works with intention and intellect, this has been very difficult to achieve. I am not someone who likes to be so intuitive in the drafting. I want more control. I want to understand it all. See the big picture. 

Yes, I can see the big picture. Laughing. But it's how I understand and deal with my critical mind THAT is completely different. How I am willing to let process overwhelm me and surrender.

It's funny and odd, but I kind of like surrendering right now. It's very passionate. How I fall.....

Smiling.

Heartsease would be a lovely name for a poem, a song, or a novel and it's also a lovely name for this painting.

John Brett
Heartsease 1862
Watercolor and bodycolor on card
'Heartsease' or pansies and fern-shoots; close-up study of yellow, blue and black pansies, delphinia, moss and fern-shoots. In the language of flowers pansies are associated with thought and the fragile beauty of young women. Brett was a British artist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, mainly notable for his highly detailed landscapes.
— British Museum

Van Gogh is one of my favorite painters. Always.

Oleander by Vincent Van Gogh.

Is this what faith is?

“If the Sun and Moon should ever doubt, they'd immediately go 

 out.”

                   ― William Blake

I am reflecting on my mother, Pauline Church.

This is my mother, Pauline Church, on the right, and her older sister, Virginia, on the left. There is something absolutely breathtaking looking at this photo of them sitting there with the little umbrellas, wearing dresses trimmed at the bodice and sleeves, and wearing socks and shoes. I've had to reflect on my mother this last month, our relationship, and just the general overall dynamics between a mother and her child. We were incredibly close all her life, yet often at odds, I suppose because we were both very independent and not afraid to say exactly what we thought. Today I had to face the reality of how much we were alike but how different our lives were when compared. She dwelt with a lot of indifference in her younger life. She idolized a father who died young and doted on a withdrawn mother who never got over being widowed too young. There were 5 other siblings, all younger. Life was work. Her world was limited and censored and lacked the culture she craved. So she never censored me a day. I was reading by age four. We had books and lived in the library. She read all the time. She was an incredible reader and her memory was unbelievable. She could sew, keep house, and was a great cook. She loved gardening. And traveled all the time. Queen of the Day Trips. But her life was hard. Very hard. And she could not spare me certain traumas. And as a mother she wanted to, though I never quite understood those particulars until now. Both these girls loved their children. Loved their family. All their lives. I think now, I was extremely lucky in the mother I had, and Aunt Virginia was one of the best aunts. All the gifts I possess as a person are due to my mother and father, but they were shaped by my mother and the things she wanted for me, a Catholic education, a childhood uncensored, culture, art, books, conversation, ideas, ideas, ideas. Every day trip was an adventure. I had asthma, she put in the tub and made me breathe like one would be swimming. I learned to swim in my grandmother's bathtub. I had depth perception problems. She told me I could see everything as well as anyone else. I did. She said I was smart, I believed her and I was. Of course, I learned that the world was chaos from her, too. I miss her. If she had lived, she would be a 102 this month. I can't even process that yet. In CBT, I came to the realization that I have no triggers, and try as I might I could not write a single one down in the last month. And believe me, I've had enough trauma to fill a notebook. I think I owe that to my mother, too. Laughing. No matter what happened to her, and a lot happened to her, she just went on until the day her body stopped and even that was in resistance. What a woman! Both of them. (I look like my mother and I have turned out to be as strong as her, too. Who knew?)

Witches and trees fascinate me.

Edward Gurden Dalziel

Description

Forest scene during the night, with two old witches sitting under one of the leafless trees at centre, a young witch standing at left, holding up a torch, and a horseman with flowing cape approaching in background at right; four monkeys in foreground, two pelicans and flying parrot behind; an owl and another bird flying above the witches; proof illustration for the magazine 'Judy', Vol 22 p 187, 13 February 1878.
Wood-engraving on thin paper, touched with white body color

Witches and Trees. There has always been a relationship between witches and trees. And so this was one of the first images that I put in my notebook for my WIP. Because I wanted to think about witches and trees for a long time. I wanted those thoughts to marinate so to speak. And I have collected quite a few images of witches and trees. Of lovers and trees, too. Those from mythology. Trees, normally, are deeply rooted. That alone, made me very interested in the concept of people and trees. How we like trees. I know I do. And I love trees with lots of roots that run along the surface of the ground. I distinctly remember such trees from my early childhood. I would walk the roots round and round and round. I also drew lots of trees when I was very young, the same way children will draw little square houses and then post stick people out front of it as their family or themselves. I drew more trees than houses and sometimes the roots took over the entire page. These drawings bothered my mother at times. But they turned out to be harmless. I drew them like I would later draw heavy vines wrapping themselves around one another. I was very attached to the movement of the lines on the paper. But I am deeply rooted. It's the one thing I have known for a long time, even when I suppressed it. I am rooted to a place.

It's October 1.

Two things.

It's time to decorate for autumn outside.

And I am drafting again until December 1st.

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.)