“The leaders of the people who have broken every treaty with my people have their faces carved into our most holy place. What is the equivalent? Do you have an equivalent?”
Alex White Plume, Oglala Lakota activist, on Mount Rushmore
Monthly Archives: February 2013
Wow. You’re Really Old Grandma
Imbolc Valentine Moon
Over half done with the move. I can feel the new shape already fitting round my shoulders as I work. Volumes ready to hand. Ideas jumping from one to another with just a scan. A good feeling.
A bit achy but that seems to come with the 66th birthday. Talked to grandson Gabe, 4 and 1/2 tonight. He asked Kate how old she was. 68, she said. Wow. That’s really old Grandma. Oh, yeah. From the mouth’s of babes.
(Old Man with Beard, Rembrandt)
How old? So old that we’re going to a meeting tomorrow to talk with a women who is, as her book title says, New at Being Old. Us, too. This is a Woolly Mammoth gathering and we’re all of a certain age. Just which we’re not certain, but a certain age of that we’re sure.
When it comes to life, though, I feel gathered, present, neither old nor young, just here, ready to go, still. Epictetus had a depressing way to think of it: “You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.” Still, the soul or the self continues to grow and mature as the mansion begins to sag at the corners, a window or two popping out, new paint needed on the doors, tuck pointing here and there.
So, I feel as engaged, if not more, with my life and work as I have ever.
Bibliomotion
Imbolc Valentine Moon
The move continues. The garden study has begun to take on its new shape, a place for art making and art scholarship. One bookshelf is almost full with reference works like the Grove Dictionary of Art, Oxford Dictionary of Art, four different art history texts, a reference work on materials and techniques as well as my collection of texts on Asian art.
The other emptied shelf has other books, all my pre-Raphaelite books, texts on contemporary art, books devoted to individual artists: Malevich, Munch, Titian, Picasso, Caravaggio. Soon all the art books will be out of the writing study and the freed up space will allow the books have piled up on the floor over the last couple of years to finally find shelf space. Oh blessed day.
Don’t think I’m gonna get to the files today. This involves moving all my art object files to the horizontal file folder in the garden study after I remove all the files related to my history of Lake Superior into banker’s boxes for temporary storage. Then, in the file cabinet here in the writing room, I’ll put all the files related to short stories, novels, markets, Latin plus material on the Enlightenment, Modernism, Romanticism and world religions, especially of the ancient variety. These are the subjects that have held my attention over the years.
I don’t like doing this. But, I’ll like the finished result. A lot. So. Carry on.
Ghosts
Imbolc Valentine Moon
Today, a bit tired due to early rising, moving books put a weight on my shoulders. It was the past and its tangled feelings. Found my first passport and saw a young man with a full head of dark brown hair and a beard that matched. Surprised me, so long have I seen his gray descendant in the mirror.
(arrestedmotion.com 2012 10 upcoming aron wiesenfeld new paintings arcadia-gallery)
That was my passport for Colombia, the trip to check out a bank for the poorest of the poor. Carolyn Levy was in my life at that point, between my divorce from Raeone and meeting Kate a year plus later. A hard time, raising a 6 year old boy, working night and day between church meetings and organizing. A hard time, too, since the future had grown unclear. Something big had happened or was about to happen, but its outlines in my life were not yet clear.
Then I moved out the books related to shifting my ordination to the Unitarian-Universalist movement. Again, a time when the future had become unclear. Writing had not shown the promise it offered when Kate and I agreed I should leave the Presbytery. Frustrated there, I regressed, headed back to the trade that I knew. More lack of clarity.
Poor decisions. I chose Unity UU over First Unitarian for my internship. An error. The humanist congregation would have fit me much better. Then, at the end of an interesting year, I accepted a job as minister of development. Chief fund raiser. OMG. One of the really boneheaded decisions in my life. Not the only one, for sure, and not the worst one, but dumbest? Probably. Kate saw it coming. I ignored her. Sigh.
(Vincenzo Foppa The Young Cicero Reading 1464)
Those books were the heaviest to move because I’ve traveled out of the UU circle, too. A solo practitioner am I, as the Wiccans say. In that vein though I retained many of my books on spirituality, works on natural theology and those commentaries I mentioned on the Torah and the book of Revelation.
Heavy, especially with lack of sleep thrown in. Ghosts. They’re real and they live in the closets, basements and attics of our mind.
Simplify, Declutter, Reorganize
Imbolc Valentine Day
If these impulses have begun, can spring be far behind?
A day, two in fact, devoted to finishing the reorganization of my writing room and the garden study. The garden study will become the central location for all of my art related books, files and folders. The writing room will have material supportive of novels, short stories, marketing. I’ve drug my feet on getting this done, focusing on the more immediate Latin or writing tasks I’ve had, but I need to get this work finished so I can settle into a long bout of revising and writing.
The urge to get cracking on the actual writing of Loki’s Children has begun to build and I’ve got all the Missing feedback from beta readers save one. That means revising Missing will occupy large parts of my working time as well. Need a space arranged to make that easy, both from a retrieval of information perspective and a non-cluttered, beautiful space perspective as well.
The question of what do with my passion for art post-MIA still occupies me. I’ve come up with a few ideas, but none of them really click. The trick may be that I really want to deepen my engagement with particular artworks, artists, styles, periods, movements. That is, stop researching objects just enough to get six talking points, but go into historical and formal analysis with pieces, spending more focused time on fewer works. That sounds like what I really want to accomplish now.
In a small way perhaps become an expert on something, like Symbolists, or pre-Raphaelites or contemporary art theory or Kandinsky or Beckmann. This does help me think it through actually. I’m yearning for a richer experience, an experience grounded in significant time with the art and its analysis. How to do that? I don’t know quite yet.
An early, perhaps the first, female professional writer
Imbolc Valentine Moon
material from the academy of american poets:
About this poem:
Virginia Woolf writes of Aphra Behn, in A Room of One’s Own, that: “She made, by working very hard, enough to live on. The importance of that fact outweighs anything that she actually wrote, even the splendid ‘A Thousand Martyrs I have made,’ or ‘Love in Fantastic Triumph sat,’ for here begins the freedom of the mind or rather the possibility that in the course of time the mind will be free to write what it likes.”
(Aphra_Behn_by_Mary_Beale)
Born on December 14, 1640, Aphra Behn was one of the first professional female writers and the author of Oroonoko and The Rover. She died on April 16, 1689.
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A Thousand Martyrs I Have Made
by Aphra Behn A thousand martyrs I have made, I never vow’d nor sigh’d in vain Alone the glory and the spoil |
Look. Up in the sky…
Imbolc Valentine Moon
A big day for Asteroid 2012 DA14, but an even bigger one for the Chelyabinsk fireball. 
Must have a great PR agent. Timing its fiery entrance as space shuttle sized DA14 passed by ensured the Chelyabinsk meteor, “only” the size of an SUV according to an MIT scientist, a forever memory in the hearts of all of us interested in astronomical phenomenon.
(Asteroid 2012 DA14, seen from the Gingin Observatory in Australia. Image via NASA.)
I heard a New York Times reporter ask the same scientist from MIT if Siberia attracted these kind of events, referencing, of course, the Tunguska event in 1908 that flattened an area of the taiga roughly 1,000 square miles in area. No, he said. Coincidence.
When asked about the how much we should be concerned about an extinction level event, the same scientist, dodged the question. Didn’t make me feel secure. Here’s a link to the article and the video interview.
Oh, My
Imbolc Valentine Moon
Up at 7:00 am. Crack of dawn at this time of year and a good hour before I normally unfurl myself. So a little groggy.
Breakfast with Mark Odegard at Keys. More feedback on Missing. Very helpful stuff. He’s doing some archival work as a volunteer at the American Refugee Committee. Sounds like a really good fit for him.
Back home for Latin. I’m getting called out less and less by Greg. We translate at times as colleagues, at other times as teacher and student. I’m getting better.
I Luv U USA
Imbolc Valentine Moon
I remember the campaign rhetoric that this election was a battle for the soul of the USA. Would we be one people, bent on personal enrichment at the expense of everyone else, or would we be one people, bent on enriching persons at the expense of everyone else? If this election was such a battle, the liberal forces won. The new demographics of young people, gay people, Latinos and blacks all together with a strong cohort of white women and few of cranky old leftist males flexed its biceps. And the shirt ripped.
It wasn’t such an election, of course. Those are base rallying slogans, make sure the Tea Party folks get their tricorn hats and their strait jackets on before coming to the polls in great numbers. Or, likewise, push the left edge of the Democratic out of their cynical chairs on polling day.
What this election was, as Barack Obama’s surprisingly good State of the Union speech reflected, was a turning point in a slow motion melding of a new coalition, one that did not rely on the Solid South or the Moral Majority, but one that patched together gay and lesbian citizens yearning for full lives with a rapidly expanding Latino population, part undocumented, most not, wanting the same thing and the two of them with a rising liberal voice among the young and white women, all grafted onto the traditional Democratic core of blacks, what labor remains and the few bona fide lefties like myself that are no longer pining for revolution.
It has been, for me, a joyous realization that perhaps for the first time since the early 1970’s I can hear my own political thoughts in the mouths of elected officials. I’ve given up on the idea of a socialist America, not because I no longer want it, but because I don’t see the conditions that would make it possible. Still, my political heart bleeds for safety nets, welcoming immigrants, accessible health care for all. That sort of thing. At least now these hopes will not be shouted down. And I’m glad.
All Aboard
Imbolc Valentine Moon
Of course, it’s just a spot on the earth’s orbit around the sun. The very spot where you or I slid out of the birth canal, or, in my case, were excised through the abdomen, kicking and bawling, with no clue about why the world had suddenly gone from watery and warm to non-viscous and cool. No wonder we cry.
(So, there I am, just a bit more than halfway between perihelion and the spring equinox.)
And, it’s an extremely ordinary event. I mean, everyone who ever lived–everyone–had one. Certain cultures, I’m told, place no emphasis on the birthday at all and maybe they’re right, but the sentimentality of our way pleases me all the same.
People call us and tell us they love us. Are happy for us. Gifts come. Cards. Smiles. A feeling of particularity overshadows all else for at least one day. Love gets concrete on birthdays.
Advancing age makes me no less interested in celebrating this most ordinary of events which is, of course, supremely extraordinary in one important way: it’s the only time this happened to me. Or you. 66 is a good number. So was 16. 26. 76. The number says you’re still on board spaceship earth and punching your ticket for another full ride.