Fleurs (1904) by Edouard Vuillard

 

Fleurs (1904) Edouard Vuillard

The Ambitious Fairy Project is inspired by this short story.

"When I realized what the Erl-King meant to do to me, I was shaken with a terrible fear and I did not know what to do for I loved him with all my heart and yet I had no wish to join the whistling congregation he kept in his cages although he looked after them very affectionately, gave them fresh water every day and fed them well. His embraces were his enticements and yet, oh yet! they were the branches of which the trap itself was woven. But in his innocence he never knew he might be the death of me, although I knew from the first moment I saw him how Erl-King would do me grievous harm."

Angela Carter, The Erl-King

(Some of the aspects of this story inspired The Ambitious Fairy Project. Perhaps, an ordinary girl being attracted to something intensely and then overcoming that desire so she could save herself. As a writer, I am not particularly interested in portraying superpowers as metaphor. I see them as outside nature. I use them in that way. And for me, Nature is everything. That is to say, Evolution, too. Humankind is part of Nature. But many things are outside it. Ask yourself what and why? For many things are and to our advantage. It's not all dismal or wrong or twisted.)

Missing this.

Conversation. What is it? A Mystery! It's the art of never seeming bored, of touching everything with interest, of pleasing with trifles, of being fascinating with nothing at all.

— Guy de Maupassant

And the wind blows.....

Come sail your ships around me

And burn your bridges down

We make a little history, baby

Every time you come around

Come loose your dogs upon me

And let your hair hang down

You are a little mystery to me

Every time you come around

We talk about it all night long

We define our moral ground

But when I crawl into your arms

Everything, it comes tumbling down

Come sail your ships around me

And burn your bridges down

We make a little history, baby

Every time you come around

Your face has fallen sad now

For you know the time is nigh

When I must remove your wings

And you, you must try to fly

Come sail your ships around me

And burn your bridges down

We make a little history, baby

Every time you come around

Come loose your dogs upon me

And let your hair hang down

You are a little mystery to me

Every time you come around

Come sail your ships around me 

And burn your bridges down 

We make a little history, baby 

Every time you come around 

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Everyone has a love song.

In every child, in every eye
In every sky, above my head
I hope that I know
So come with me in bed
Because it's you and me, we're history
There ain't nothing left to say
When I will get you alone — The Verve

Learning to rely on yourself is a gift and a hard lesson to master.

“I am too intelligent, too demanding, and too resourceful for anyone to be able to take charge of me entirely. No one knows me or loves me completely. I have only myself”

― Simone de Beauvoir

My body is growing older, day by day.

“Life is mostly an exercise in being something other than what we used to be while remaining fundamentally — and sometimes maddeningly — who we are.”

                              — Meghan Daum

Three years ago to this very day, I walked out into the bright sunlight of a cold winter day and took this photo of myself with my phone. I clicked the vivid mode on the color section and gave it more light so it would warm up the gray in my hair. I am gray-headed with little threads of browns and blondes, just as I have been for most of my adult life, only now I am more gray than dishwater blonde. I am a gray ghost. The flesh on my body is thinning and fragile, my hair is thinning, too, and when I am ill, I do not recover like I did as a young girl. My bones ache after a long walk and I love long walks and often take them, then come home and pop an aspirin because I know I am going to hurt. But it is a privilege to grow old. To get old. To die old.

I have no selfies to post. No new ones. I am not sure I would if I had one. They are always deceptive in some way. We never want to post a bad photo, do we? I have posted some pretty weird photos on this blog.

I grew up in a society that worships youth and beauty. I suppose all cultures have their own idea of what beauty is, but whatever it is, it is always young and never old. Just look at the young—aren't they all beautiful! When you get old, everyone young looks beautiful, believe me. When women get old, they turn into ghosts very quickly. This transformation starts around fifty. You start to disappear, year by year until one day you walk down a street and no one even notices you are there. Because you are gray and fragile looking, even when you smile. The only color is the blue in the veins on your wrinkled hands. Hands never lie. 

Most women will dye their hair, get a few lines stretched out around their eyes and mouths, invest in expensive creams with retinol. Even Google says young women in their thirties should use retinol. Why not? No one wants to look old. No one wants to fade away. Especially a woman. Beauty is everything, is it not?

I never really thought of myself as movie star beautiful even when I was young and beautiful. I never could define what beauty was. Most of the time, what I thought was beautiful was not always even pretty. I was an outlier to begin with, even as young as four years of age. I collected bugs and made pets of frogs and when the frogs died, I dissected them so I could see how their bodies worked. It grossed out half my friends and the other half took pictures or collected money from others to watch me do these bizarre little experiments. I watched my Daddy clean his game and skin catfish with a pair of pliers, sometimes taking notes, always with interest. I loved fishing and spending time on lakes and rivers and bayous. I stole abandoned bird nests out of my neighbors' trees. I don't think I even looked in a mirror unless forced. I became an artist, lived in books. I knew I would never dye my hair, never go to a beauty shop, though I did indulge my aunt who owned one. On several occasions, I let her wash and style my hair. Once she even colored it. The next day I went swimming in a local pool and it turned green. That's how I started the ninth grade, with green hair.

This does not make me saintly or wise. I was smart, but wisdom comes with life and making mistakes. I am no saint or role model. By fifteen, nearly sixteen, I wanted to be beautiful when I fell in love for the first time. I was so desperate that I would have sold my soul to be perfectly beautiful to gain his love. He never loved me. And I pined for more years than I care to admit for this beautiful blue eyed boy. To this day, I still have a photo of him and remember how he crushed me emotionally. After his rejection, I was cautious and selfish. That was the lesson I had learned, and it was not a good lesson. The better lesson would have been to let go of the idea that if only I had been beautiful enough, he would have loved me. I was so stupid because let's face it, youth is really wasted on the young as the old saying goes. Age and experience can only bring wisdom.

But beautiful girls were everywhere and I was awkward and bookish. Soon, I learned what power was. I can't say that being so-called beautiful and powerful pleased me. But it taught me better lessons, some even more brutal than lost love. What I really learned was that I was "fundamentally" the same girl I was when very young, you know, the girl who collected frogs and like to go fishing, the one who read books all the time, the awkward outlier. This was a privilege that I did not fully understand because so many of my friends did not know who they were at all. Some of them died not knowing. Some still live now, not knowing, and they are ghostly just like me, with their dyed hair.

At nineteen, I had a very good idea of who I was. My mother said I knew it at four years, and maybe she was right with her little joke. I was very serious then as now. I never did dye my hair or worry over my wrinkles. But I knew that others would look at my gray hair and talk and judge me. So at a very young age, I decided how to live my life the best I could without worrying over too many judgments. It cost me. It was not easy. It was full of losses. But how can we be anything more than what we truly are. To live a lie is painful and very bad psychology. But the young do not appreciate my age. Certainly not in our present culture. The old and the gray are belittled as traitors and even monsters today. It's so amusing yet disheartening to see this. Irony.

So, beauty remains. It's powerful. We worship it, we long for it. As we age, we feel the loss of it as fiercely as the loss of time. And even I must admit that how I look certainly represents a part of who I am. I often look in the mirror now and wonder at myself, what I have done, whom I have loved, what I have lost, what I desire, and yes, if death is shadowing me. I am, to a degree, this old body.

And my body is growing older, day by day.

And death is shadowing me.

And yet, I know that I am still that young girl at heart. I am not lost. I am not unhappy. I still have my mind. I still fall in love with people and places and things, even ideas. I still desire and to feel desire is everything. And age has given me privilege and wisdom and freedom, and perhaps, even opportunity.

I am not dead, yet.

Ambition

 

The Fall of Icarus, 1636, Rubens.

In mythology, Icarus was warned not to fly too low as well as too high. He ignored the first warning, then flew too high, and his wings melted in the sunlight. He fell into the sea and drowned, consumed by his own ambition.

It takes a lot of ambition, hubris, and bravado to write a big novel at this point in my life. Failing is always an option. Because I have nothing to lose at this stage but time, it is important for me to write on, depending on my own ambitions, even to the point of delusion. And while time is one of my most precious possessions, it faces two rivals, meaning and sanity.

Sometimes, we have to take a risk, we have to be willing to fail, we have to be willing to look foolish, or even waste time when time is running out. We feel we don't have any other choice.

And perhaps, that is the success of writing a big novel at this moment. The journey. Flying high. Flying low. Just flying at all.

The End of 2022.

When Spring arrives, leaves you never saw will shadow the ground, and flowers you never beheld will star it; the grass will be of another growth, and the birds sing a new song—the aged earth dates with a new number. — Mary Shelley, December 31 1822

My first acting gig.

 

I did a lot of plays over the years in school. The Christmas play put on by the High School Drama Club. I still own these books. The top row collections are favorites. I read those very early in life. I had 3 lines, which I recited to my mother right before she took this photo. Of course, Mother made the costume. I had wings too.

Merry Christmas and God Bless Us, Everyone.

 It looks like a hallucination. But I was always a hippie girl and I love colored lights and tinsel. I am laughing. But I love it. I love Christmas and this has been a great Christmas so far, mainly because I am not living alone, I am baking, and I decorated everything. Like over decorated. It's been fun. I just had fun. I even colored this text. Oh, well.....2022. I have three trees this year, next year I am adding another one!!! If you look close, you will see that this is my Santa Claus tree. 

CHANGE.

“You cannot change what you are, only what you do.”
             — Philip Pullman

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

 

I love this novel, so much so that I am going to do my own annotation of it after the New Year and write a long review on Amazon and Goodreads. It is part detective story, part love story, with a tragic backstory that really comes forward at the end. I love these kinds of structures. Also Walter Hartright is not the typical everyman at all and based partly on Collins' own father. He has become one of my favorite characters in English literature. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins is really a beautiful novel with so many fine moments of great writing. These Victorian novels that were serialized have highly influenced my work. The author's peers were critical of it though it was highly successful with the public. Think Game of Thrones. I believe they were critical because Collins attempted to give these women, creatures of their times, agency and purpose, and he also damned the idea of families putting women in mental institutions to be controlled. Women were property in Collins' time. He hated that. If you have never read this book, give it a try. Highly recommended.

Bocca Baciata by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

"The mouth that has been kissed does not lose its good fortune:

rather, it renews itself just as the moon does."

Model: Fanny Cornforth

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1859

Movement: Pre-Raphaelite, Romanticism, Narrative Art

Girls and Goblins and Gardens

 

The Rosebud Garden of Girls, Julia Margaret Cameron, 1868, albumen print. 

"People often believe the creative life is grounded in fantasy. The more difficult truth is that creativity is grounded in reality, in particular, the focused, the well observed or specifically imagined." 

For years now, I have been working toward a goal, to paint some pictures, compose a few bad sonnets, and write The Ambitious Fairy Project. Ten long years of reading, waiting, studying, and some suffering. Ten years of anxiety that I would never arrive at this moment, that I would never be able to do what Julia Margaret Cameron described in this simple quote. 

Many of my posts, previously to this one, have been an assemblage of things that went through my mind as I faced this reality. It has been daunting at times to push forward toward a life I wanted, a life that might have escaped me. I had thought to delete all the posts here, and I will be deleting old posts as time passes, keeping only those relevant, because I have finally arrived at a good place and I want to remain here and focus only on my current work, to specifically imagine what is in my head and heart. Some of my goals are very simple, a return to a kind of Romanticism, to the hallmarks of sincerity, to the folk and fairy tale, to the crowded, rambling work of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, where plot and character mingle, to the love of the narrative form and structure represented by the Pre-Raphaelites, to find all that in the post-postmodern world and recreate it as something valid today.

Postmodernism is over. It's been over for years, and yet many cling to it. It brought us many wonderful things, but it also did some harm, and we are struggling through a complicated time. I first saw that struggle clearly (though it had been happening my entire life) around 2000, a change, or maybe just a realization of a reality in flux. Time is a long arc in history. It's hard to see what is happening when you are standing in the middle of the happening. One just catches glimpses. 

All art really reacts against what came before it. It evolves. It struggles. It shifts. Some of us are living under the weight of futures that have been imagined for us, some of us are living under the weight of futures that may never exist. What is clear to me is that we all live under the weight of history, whether we like it or not. The modernists did not know what to do with Time. The postmodernists hated Time and did not believe it existed. 

But Time is real. (Though complex.)

Learning to Sleep

 

The Sleeping Beauty by Burne-Jones.

One of the things I have achieved over the last few years is how learning to sleep, which would change my life for the better. People who suffer from depression, or who do not adhere to any kind of schedule usually end up with insomnia and yes, bad sleeping habits. For years, due to medication mostly and habit, I was a night owl who liked to sleep until noon most days. And it became harder to maintain as I had children. I cheated even then, going back to sleep after my children went off to school. And then a doctor made me realize that insomnia was part of depression and if I embraced that, I might could change how I slept. I did not believe him but a few years ago I attempted to do what he said. It was really rough the first year, but the second year was better and the third, and now sixth year in, I am sleeping at night, sometimes falling asleep so naturally I cannot even believe it's happening. Of course, this meant controlling my caffeine consumption, knowing when I got over stimulated, and practicing, with some failure I might add. But now I am a sleeping beauty, so to speak.  It took me six years to change how I slept. It's a milestone for me.

One of the things to note here is how long it took me. Six years to really reach a natural new sleep pattern. 

The Past

“As much as I try to make the past keep still and mind its manners, it moves and murmurs with me through every day.”

— Deborah Levy, Swimming Home

One of my favorite passages from Lestat is prior to his change when he has a panic attack, literally, and experiences an Existential crisis. It's hilarious and I always laugh out loud. I have previously posted this. I love it.

“I realized aloud in the midst of saying it that even when we die we probably don't find the answer as to why we were ever alive. [...] Do you realize that! We'll never know why the hell any of it happened, not even when it's over! We're going to die and not even know. We'll never know, and all this meaningless will just go on and on and on. And we won't any longer be witnesses to it. We won't have even that little bit of power to give meaning to it in our minds. We'll just be gone, dead, dead, dead, without ever knowing.”

                                          — The Vampire Lestat

                                                (Anne Rice)

Wonder is my drug.

“We live in an age when you say casually to somebody 'What's the story on that?' and they can run to the computer and tell you within five seconds. That's fine, but sometimes I’d just as soon continue wondering. We have a deficit of wonder right now.” — Tom Waits

People make and create decisions and ideas, often with a personal fear. Do. Not. Do. It.

“Fear is the mother of foresight.”

                         — Thomas Hardy