will take the sun in my mouth and leap into the ripe air Alive with closed eyes to dash against darkness.“ e. e. cummings
Today is John's birthday. I posted some photos on Facebook for the boys and then I tried not to dwell on loss. I just can't do that anymore. I was a bit ill yesterday and watched Jane Austen films. Today I worked some and now have called it quits. Too early but it's all right. I have worked hard the last ten days. I moved my office and then I went through all my writing papers and trashed many of them. I felt trapped by them, as though they existed to remind me of work I might not ever do. I don't need that guilt or reminder. I have enough work to last me until I die. Death will catch me working. So I tore them up and threw them in the garbage outside. They are gone. I kept the work I wanted to focus on. The ideas that spring from my reading and art. I am satisfied. And the new room is just the thing for continuing the rest of the year. It stormed yesterday. I slept in the late afternoon and didn't wake until seven last night. Smiling. Joey brought me some supper but I really couldn't eat it. And today I've had little. Cream of Wheat. Toast. Water. I am going to watch Reign of Fire and stare at the dragons. Laughing. I suppose this is more change. And more grief. And some depression. That's okay. Tomorrow is a new day.
Monet's Bridge.
I am ill. It feels physical and yet, I know it is so much more. It rained today, which brought a smile and great relief to these long days of intense heat. I do love summer, but this week I have worked extremely hard in the garden, detailed work, like weeding and deadheading and spraying for insects. Yes, green is my favorite color, the color of my soul, and I suppose that is about summer and grass and all the flowers and plants, the leaves on the trees. Monet had a beautiful garden. Darwin had a beautiful garden. Dickinson, too. Shelley loved Nature. When I go outside, I always have this strange feeling when I come in the house, as though I have left something behind. Sometimes I look down and find a blade of grass stuck between my toes. Yes, I often go barefoot. And I smile at it, as though I have brought a piece of what I love with me.
Tomorrow is John's birthday. Going on six years without him. We had separate interest and did spend a lot of time separated from one another. But I always knew wherever he was and whatever he was doing, he busy and content and alive. And he loved me. He knew this about me, too. But John and I shared a love of gardening. The summers were ours.
And now there is this hole I cannot fill.
Perhaps I have been too busy, too happy, and now, I must be otherwise. And so, I am ill.
This morning, I had to stop creative things and do cleaning and organizing things. I tried not to be too resistant as that only makes one unhappy over nothing and causes stress where stress is really not real, just self induced in a kind of stupid way. Smiling. But there are moments of tension, and one looks at the pile of papers one must go through and just...well checks out Twitter. :Laughing ironically:
The one is me. Laughing more.
Time.
It's running out every single day and I know it. And I feel it. And I still have to go through papers though I have decided to throw most of them in the garbage and be done with it!!!!! What once mattered, matters no longer.
Time is so real I can feel it pressing down on me.
(The master of color)
A note on Climate Crisis: I lost power today around 3 in the afternoon. I did not get it back until almost 9 at night. This is the second time within 4 weeks that this has happened. It was 115F degrees. I've lived here a long time. This has only happened 2 times previously, and one of those times was an ice storm and the other a car wreck where someone took down an entire pole on the highway. But this, this is infrastructure in an unseasonable season of above average temps. Yes. Since middle of May, it's been extremely hot. I haven't complained. I love summer. I grew up in the South without A/C and I tolerate the heat. I've worked outside nearly every single morning since March. I walk in the mornings. But what about other people, those who are more frailer than myself, those who have serious illnesses such as COPD or severe diabetes or asthma, etc. I am writing this because this is the future. This is what we will be facing. I live in the richest nation on this planet. I can't imagine what India, the Horn of Africa, Iran, etc. are facing. And this never makes the news. And by news, I mean CNN and CNN International. People don't read newspapers anymore and some people do not have access to the Internet. They have phones and TV and radios. Some places are going to burn this year. I read a story where 2000 cows died from heat stress in Kansas in June. I don't know how often that happens statistically or the context, but that's not good. It doesn't matter if you eat meat or not. Animals dying in fields (and they were in a field) from heat exhaustion is not good.
We have known some serious science on Climate Crisis since the 1970s. That is 50 years according to my research. Half a century and how have we prepared, what have we done really? Today I was browsing through Twitter and people were making their usual complaints on this and that, all real issues for discussion. But they don't really discuss. While they are writing tweets and complaining, the world is burning and yes, people are already suffering from Climate Crisis.
That is depressing. I've cut so much social media out of my life. My blog is for my family really, to read after I am gone. It's not for money, or status, or bullshit. It's for me and my children. I really don't feel like I need to explain this to anyone. I just don't understand people anymore. Jaron Lanier is correct. There is no Left or Right on Twitter anymore, just DOWN.
If one has read this blog, there are other posts on Marc Chagall. He's a favorite of mine, what I call a true Romantic in the literary tradition. He so believed in love. I look at this and I see two people, flying over a world that is full of the usual conflicts and troubles, etc. But they have embraced each other in complete trust. Not in complete perfection, because there is no such thing, but in an agreement to trust and be themselves, to be honest, to support one another. This has to be the finest kind of love. There is no doubt that Chagall and his wife had such a relationship, that he loved her very much, and she loved him. Bella Rosenfeld Chagall died tragically and unexpectedly from a bacteria infection a few years after Chagall and her fled occupied France in 1941. For many months, Chagall could not paint at all, and what stirred him to return to work was Bella's memory as she became symbiotic with all the Jews dead in that terrible, dark war. His second marriage was much more an agreement for companionship that had more to do with his being an older man living alone, etc. I'll write more on this later. This statement is not meant to diminish the importance of Vava Brodsky in Chagall's life. It was just a very different kind of relationship.
Chagall incorporated elements of fantasy into his art by the way he showed his memories. He loved the circus. He loved clowns. He loved lovers and kisses. This is all very important to my own work, to my own heart's desires. There is always an element of fantasy when it comes to love, the way we dream it, think about it, act it out, couple with each other, in moments of shared intimacy, whatever that intimacy may be. I like to think that Chagall and Bella were happy lovers and friends and told each other stories and even fought with each other with the same passion that they loved one another. No one paints like Chagall. There is really no one to compare him to, unless one thinks of color and then Matisse. Chagall's focus was narrow. But there was only one of his kind. Those are the magical people to me. The ones who really are alone in the world except maybe they have a trusted lover. These creatives live in their own heads, they create their own imaginative universes.
Happy Birthday, Chagall. I am posting one day early because I might not be able to do Internet tomorrow. I've art to make.
"The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and to hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again." — William Cuthbert Faulkner
“We want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life; our calculations have outrun conception; we have eaten more than we can digest.”
— Percy Shelley
It's July and I have a particular mission. It's how to balance the amount of information I crave with the need to let my imagination thrive. That's pretty simple in a sentence. In our post 1980 lives, this is a very difficult thing to accomplish, though as one can read in the above quote, Percy Shelley was thinking about it in the 19th century. For creatives, it's extremely difficult at any time in history. We are running on curiosity and ideas. Soaking up information of any kind is just natural. All the new and colorful tools, all the processes shared by other creatives, these things are temptations. But at some point last year, during my CBT therapy, I came to realize that all this information was really entrenching on my personal dreams. I did some of my best raw work during the early 1990s, before I had the Internet, Amazon Prime, and a phone. And I am willing to admit that this changed not only my process but my imaginative space. It is true, I am a better painter and writer right now due to the fact that I have studied more, practiced more, had good information and so forth, but as Shelley wrote, I have eaten more than I can digest, I have miscalculated. My imagination is suffering, my dreams are suffering. I can see this happening not only to myself but to others. For example, I've been studying ADHD and how it works on the brain and in particular, how that might affect creativity. Psychologists are now doing studies on the connection between social media and ADHD and how social media may do more harm than good with ADHD patients. Information overload does affect how creatives think so why would it not seriously affect those with altered executive skills due to ADHD? My mission is to regain some of that 1980s and early 1990s imaginative spirit. This means less social media. Less reading. Less conversation. I want to nurture my own creative space and give my imagination a place to grow.
There is no doubt that Matisse is my favorite painter of the moderns and that includes anybody who came after. I love Picasso, Chagall, and Van Gogh as much, but not many other artists interest me as much as the post expressionists. Instead of ordering a copy of this painting, I am going to paint my own copy. Smiling. I am ending this month, feeling accomplished and ready to tackle my new goals set for July.
I have so much to do. I sincerely hope and live in possibility that I will get as much work, if not more, done this coming month.
Art makes me happy. I am always interested in color. That is my thing. So it's no surprise that post expressionism is my thing.
Summer is full of color.
