Semester magazine for Ellie Epp's advisor group Fall 2003, Goddard College Individualized
MA program
EE, Editor's introduction
This end-of-semester magazine is an informal publication I assemble
for my advising group in the Individualized MA program of Goddard College.
It is primarily intended to show the members of my group what others in
the group have done since they last met. There are many cross-connections
in the work, and these are not visible unless there is a forum where everyone's
work can appear together.
This semester I have chosen two pieces of work from each of my students
(or three if they are short). I try to pick what I think is the student's
best work, and also work that will interest the others in the group.
Many of the pieces I have chosen are candid investigations of quite
personal questions. I am proud of my students' courage first in creating
the work and then in allowing it to be shown.
This is the first semester our publication includes images. Where
these images are images of people, they are being shown in careful collaboration
with their subjects.
Where
Anne Bergeron, Journals From the Middle Ground
29 October
The last time I was here, clusters of rusty brown leaves still hung
on the trees. Now bare branches and the fine white trunks of slender birches,
grey birches and maples, are interspersed with only a few golden tamarack.
What stands out most against the white birch trunks is the dark green of
the white spruce tree, not as common a tree in central Vermont as the hemlock
and red spruce, but found in small groves all over our hillsides. The golden
leaves of sugar maples seem distant now, as do the bright yellow leaves
of red maples. It's been raining since the snow left three days ago. The
storm moves out as I come to the land. I see the new grey gravel road up
into it for the first time. Not the grassy lane it once was, but inviting
still. Late afternoon. In an hour it will be dark.
I hear water rushing and walk into the woods to look. Water saturates
the ground the small brook that runs down from the hilltops is running
high and fast. The test pit for a small pond dug a few weeks ago is brimming
with muddy water six feet deep. A mound of dark earth forms a cone next
to it taller than me. It is cold. No wind; rainwater pearls on evergreens,
droplets fall everywhere to the ground. I get wet walking through brush,
touching branches. My black rubber boots collect soft mud. I have Dante
with me. He circles the waterhole, sniffs and runs down to the brook and
drinks. He turns to look at me and walks back. He doesn't dash toward the
logging road eager to lead me on a walk, as is his emerging habit when
we come into the woods. Today the road doesn't appeal to him, or to me.
We walk through wet ground to the crumbling stone wall amid white spruce
trees that line the edge of the meadow. I step up onto a small boulder,
leap down into wet field grass. Out in the open mist settles down. I walk
the edge of the field and follow the swath of bulldozed earth up to the
cabin. The part of our spring line that crosses the meadow has been buried;
the ground is smoothed again, the wide trench a few hundred feet long is
closed up. Things settle.
30 October
Here again near dark. I like this quiet time as the day leaves. The
1950 International Pickup truck that we inherited with the place, marooned
on the top of the meadow, is fully revealed now. Blackberry brambles that
covered it all summer were dug up to run the water line or have simply
died away. Its doors are wide open, one white, one green, most of its once
green body turned to rust. Inside the cab, two shiny plastic purple sleds
with white rope attached cover the bench seat. They belong to the kids
at the farm below. From the top of the meadow, a long run down into the
farm's hilly pasture is wide open, the only obstacle the brook that bisects
the field. The truck was last registered for the road twenty five years
ago. I sit on the hood and look at my cabin, a board and batten salt box
built nearly forty years ago. Wooden scaffolding is still there - a series
of 2x6 beams that we stood on when we cut an additional window into the
front of the cabin - as is the white spruce tree growing right next to
the cabin, branches touching the windows, its top nearly as high as the
grey metal roof. I twist around to look behind me, out over the rounded
roof of the truck to local hills. Another grey day, low clouds occluding
the tops of the trees. No wind. Soon there will be snow. Soon it will be
dark at half past four. For now, I look as the sky whitens and the hills
go gently dark.
31 October
The pumpkin by my doorstep in Washington is uncarved; the pot of pale
orange chrysanthemums in a ceramic pot next to it, despite hard frost,
still sends scant blooms out of a bright green stem. It is warm this morning,
in the fifties, with temperatures forecast in the high sixties. I put my
dogs in the back of our old Volvo wagon, Glynn loads slabs of blue stone,
old apple crates and two Adirondack chairs into the back of the truck and
we drive early to our land. Once there, we finish stacking cord wood and
move a pile of brush as tall as we are and as long. Pushed into a hard
pile at the top of the meadow by the excavator, we extricate white spruce,
maple, beech and birch saplings from each other, tangled in each other's
branches and layered with earth. It takes a few hours to move the pile.
The sun is warm, the sky is clear, deep blue; there is a mild wind. We
talk about where we might site the house, whether or not we'll make it
to our friends' party tomorrow night, and then fall into silence, lifting
long branches out from the pile and dragging them behind us down deeper
into the meadow. A better place for burning them once the snow falls and
I like looking at the top of the meadow clear. Just as we finish, I hear
the Johnsons' lumber truck shifting down into first gear on our road. The
load of rough sawn hemlock they leave behind will cover the small temporary
barn we're building for hay storage and for shelter for the sheep.
We unload the pair of Adirondack chairs from the back of the pickup
and bring them to the top of the meadow. We place them out in front of
the barn frame which Glynn cut from downed hemlock from our woods and roofed
with metal. We eat bread, tomatoes and sheep cheese as we look toward New
Hampshire and the five high peaks of the Franconia range. Today, we also
see Mounts Washington and Jefferson, all revealed in the cloudless sky.
After lunch we get to work. Glynn cuts the hemlock to length with a circular
saw powered by a propane generator; I fit the boards in place and nail
them in with eights. We work in tandem until dark, cutting and nailing.
By evening, we have sided the front and back angles as well as the entire
back wall of the barn. The moon approaches half full and is orange above
the hills. It gives us the light we need to collect tools, and carry the
generator to the cabin. There is no rain forecast until tomorrow night.
We leave the wood uncovered and walk into the meadow casting shadows on
the grass. We return to the chairs, where we sit for a time and watch the
moon rise.
November 1
Back to the land by nine o'clock. Hot tea in travel mugs, bread, tomatoes,
apples and cheese in the pack basket, hunter's orange scarves around the
dogs' necks. The first day of muzzle loader season. Hunters who favor bows
have been out for nearly a month. Gradually we work toward rifle season
that begins in two weeks and ends the Saturday after Thanksgiving. My neighbor
Jack hunts with friends on his land and ours. I don't know who else comes
here. I wonder about this briefly, then begin to work. As yesterday, Glynn
cuts hemlock with the skills saw, I fit boards together and nail them in
place. Another warm day, but the clouds have moved in. I cannot see the
Franconias this morning.
The work is pleasing. Carrying boards and pounding nails into thick
hemlock, I work up a light sweat. It feels good not to need the long underwear
I have worn for the past few weeks, to not wear a wool hat. The dogs wander
the meadow's edges all morning, chasing brown squirrels, following scents,
sniffing fox scat. Their orange neck scarves allow me to see them easily
at a long distance. I hear the high swirl of wind in the white pine grove
near where we work.
Dark clouds carrying rain move in sooner than anticipated and we work
quickly to finish our project. At two in the afternoon I nail the last
board in place and our three-sided barn is finished. We move Adirondack
chairs into the barn, and eat our lunch listening to light plinks of raindrops
on the roof. By the time we finish eating, the rain drops have stopped,
there is not enough momentum yet for a steady storm. I get the post hole
digger, loppers and spade. While Glynn works on the roof of the cabin,
I lay out a winter pasture for the sheep, one hundred feet in circumference.
Inside this area to be fenced, land slopes down to the boundary with Rich's
farm: an electrified fence with two charged wires attached to cedar posts,
at the far edge of his cow pasture. The grass in our meadow is browning
and up to the top of my thighs; thin trunked maples rise in it. I clip
grass and brambles, make sure to keep nearby wild apple trees and young
white spruce out of the sheep paddock. The sheep have tastes that range
well beyond grasses they peel bark readily, nibble on evergreens,
chew up apple and deciduous tree branches. My two Shetlands, one Clun Forest
and one Montadale have the appetites of goats and will range far. Once
I have the edge of their pasture clipped and cleared, I take the post hole
digger, pace eight steps from one edge of the barn and stop. Holding the
two long handles of the digger, I drop the steel blades to the ground,
squeeze the handles together and lift the first layer of grass and roots
up. I open the handles, drop the tool to the ground, and the two blades
dig in. I squeeze and take out another clump of rich brown loam. The digging
goes well. There are few rocks, and in several drops and lifts, I have
a hole a foot and a half deep that a six foot cedar post will slip into
neatly. I pace eight more steps and drop the tool to the ground, squeeze
and take out a clump of grass. Over the hills to the south, the clouds
are grey-black. The wind comes up, as it has all afternoon, it's raining
close by. By the time I finish digging holes for twelve posts it still
hasn't rained. Although covered by clouds, I can see the light of the waxing
half moon in the east. I take my tools up to the cabin, help Glynn carry
the generator inside, walk out to the field to survey the coming of night,
call the dogs, follow the headlights of my Volvo down our steep, newly
graveled road.
November 2
In a box of books I find one I've had for a few years and never read
- Bernd Heinrich's The Trees in My Forest. Now that I plan to live
on land that is mostly forested, I peruse the book with interest. Heinrich
teaches environmental studies at the University of Vermont and owns three
hundred acres of forest in northern Maine. He has spent twenty years coming
to know his land and the book is an exploration of the trees and a testament
to his connection to his place, where, he says, he "roots his spirit."
I turn immediately to a chapter near the end of the book called "My
White Pines." I have been watching my white spruce trees with an emergent
attentiveness; Bernd's knowledge of his white pines is intimate. I am taken
with how he describes them.
He starts with their ancestry, centuries of virgin generations of pine
tell part of the story of the natural history of Maine. The white pine
was widespread in New England, New York and Pennsylvania when the first
European settlers landed (196-197). The Abenaki called the trees, "goas,"
and Bernd says they were "by far the biggest and oldest trees"
(197). Of all trees in New England, they live the longest, sometimes more
than three hundred years. They grow straight and may reach one hundred
and fifty feet in height. They were used for ship masts by the colonists
and a market for them was found with ship builders in Europe. By 1820 the
white pine was the emblem on the Maine state seal. The Penobscot River
became the main waterway for transporting logs out of the Maine woods and
down to the coast; by the start of the Civil War, the town had a population
of 14,408, up from 277 who lived there in 1830.
The cone and tassel of the tree became the state flower in 1895 and
the white pine became the official state tree in 1945 (198). Even so, by
1900, most of the virgin stands had been logged off in Maine it is
with this in mind that Heinrich manages his pines (198). A virgin stand
of trees, or an old growth stand, depending on the tree, is generally two
hundred to three hundred years old. Heinrich says that in spite of the
decimation of the tree, the tree is still widespread because of its "biology;"
it is a tree that "thrives on disturbance" (199). Seedlings of
the tree are able to grow only in clearings the tree doesn't tolerate
shade and so, prior to intensive logging, the trees likely grew in
clearings created by fire, high winds or in areas cleared by Native Americans.
Bernd's pines are between fifty and sixty years old they stand fifty
feet tall and their trunks have a diameter at breast height of twenty-two
inches (201).
The white spruce trees that edge the meadow and form a horseshoe around
my cabin are at least seventy-five feet tall. Like the white pine, they
grow in clusters and in clearings. Where they are clustered, the trees
reach tall into the sky; they haven't been thinned or managed and trunks
are closely packed. In the meadow, others grow broadly with more space.
One, in particular, stands alone at forty feet tall. Its branches reach
out widely into the space, from the ground, up, looking like the quintessential
Christmas tree, so different from those clustered, whose branches are thin
at the bottom and often without needles. Those that grow close together,
reach long and tall toward the light, competing with each other for sun,
to photosynthesize.
November 3
I stand in the grove of white spruce where a grassy lane, wide enough
for a truck runs through. Two dirt tire tracks reveal evidence of having
been churned up by trucks that have come through - trucks delivering lumber,
trucks delivering a five hundred gallon propane tank and then the gas to
fill it, trucks delivering cord wood. Today Glynn and I wait for two more
trucks, one that belongs to Stephen Beede, who hauls trash and operates
Saturday morning recycling in nearby Washington. The other belongs to Paul
Poulin, a local logger who will bring us two cords of wood cut to twenty-two
inch lengths nice thick chunks for our large Hearthstone wood stove
that we bought second hand and sits in the center of the cabin. We move
large stones, one at a time, to two ruts that have formed in the lane so
the heavy trucks won't sink in. We are experiencing the rainiest autumn
in twenty-five years. It is so wet that rivers have been cresting at flood
stage, threatening, as is typical in spring, to overflow their banks. Mushrooms
grow thickly in the grass and on tree bark, pasture grass is still green.
I like the rain, and in particular the quantity. We've had several very
dry years lately; the water table has been well below normal and it feels
good to me to know that it is, for the time being, restored.
Shortly after we fill in the ruts, Stephen's two-ton truck with high
wooden sides comes tipping through the pines. He is his usual friendly
self even though it's raining and his partner, recovering from knee surgery,
has to sit in the front cab while the three of us load the truck. Glynn
and I have already recycled all the plastic milk jugs, stacks of old magazines,
newspaper, tin cans, bottles, cardboard boxes, paper bags, and scrap metal
left by the former owners. Otherwise, the cabin was full of things that
could only be thrown out mouse and moth-eaten sweaters, sweat shirts,
blue jeans, tee shirts, jackets and hand knit scarves, old sneakers and
rubber boots full of holes, old board games in dirty boxes missing cards,
pieces, and play money, puzzles with half of their pieces gone, utensils
with no handles or vice versa, wooden spoons with chunks of spoon missing,
pine boards with old, melted candles stuck to them, damp boxes of matches,
old food unopened buckwheat pancake mix with a 1998 expiration date,
half-empty jars of peanut butter, packets of Lipton soup powder, cans of
baked beans, unopened bottles of herbed vinegar with plant stems and flowers
completely yellowed but still suspended in the vinegar. We have dispensed
with all of this. Today we get rid of garbage bags full of the mouse-infested
insulation that we ripped out the first weekend we owned the place, broken
lamps, boxes of cracked plates, chipped mugs without handles, three rusty
bed frames, one heavy mouse-eaten pull out couch, a vinyl easy chair that
looks like someone took a knife to it, the seat of a swivel office chair,
bent curtain rods, torn curtains, three mattresses, one futon, pillows,
all of which have evidence of mouse infestation, a white metal cabinet
with an unhinged door, broken glass, asphalt roof shingles, two bags of
asbestos tile, dented and dirty aluminum pots and pans. Glynn gets into
the wide back of the truck while Stephen and I haul all that we cleared
out of the cabin nearly two months ago. We're happy when we easily lift
the heavy couch, when we toss a mattress deep into the truck, when we hear
boxes of pans shatter the stillness. Near the end, Glynn finds a crock
pot, lifts it to toss it in and black motor oil comes spilling out of it,
pooling in a thick puddle on the pine needle forest floor.
After Stephen drives away we warm our hands by the woodstove until we
hear Paul's truck groaning up the hill. He drives his pick-up with the
hydraulic bed lift right up to the cabin and unloads two cords of wood.
When he smiles whiskery lines fan out from the corners of his mouth; blue
eyes spark. He runs thick fingers, red and calloused from work, through
the short straight spikes of his red hair. White spruce, he says, as he
looks at the grove of trees. You don't see those too often around here.
He walks out into the meadow to look around, but today even the local hills
are enshrouded with mist.
After we finish covering the pile of wood with large plastic tarps to
keep the wood dry until we find time to stack it properly, we hear another
truck coming up the road. Our neighbors, Jack and Suzi, drive into the
pine grove and stop their pickup midway into the trees, before the ruts.
We've come to see how the pioneers are doing, Jack says, laughing. Inside
the cabin, he looks around and nods his head. It looks better already,
he says of the place that is completely gutted, full of tools and work
tables, sheetrock, 2x4s, spades, rakes, hand saws, every tool we own. Well,
it smells better, at least, I say. We discuss our plans for the cabin and
they remind us of the potluck they're having on Sunday night.
We walk out to the meadow, they look at the small sheep barn we have
built and Glynn explains the overhang he will construct on the front of
it this week so we can mount two solar panels. Suzi says she likes the
mist, the occasional drizzle, the quiet of the day. The dark green of the
white spruce stands out in the mist. As they're walking back through the
grove of white spruce, Suzi turns around and looks up at the trees. This
is really nice, she says. We say goodbye and then walk back under the canopy
of trees to the cabin.
November 7
I arrive with the dogs mid afternoon. Though it's clouded up, it's a
dry day, like yesterday, after four days of rain. And it's warm; fifty
degrees. Glynn has been here since early this morning. He shows me the
overhang on the barn and explains how he'll mount the solar panels there.
I inspect the work he's done in the last few days. He took two days off
from work so he could work on reinsulating the entire upstairs in
the cabin is now insulated and covered with clear plastic. He has begun
to do the same downstairs. I decide to wash exterior windows today. Tomorrow
the temperatures will be in the twenties, falling into the single numbers
at night. This may be the last good day to wash windows. I spend an hour
on scaffolding and on ladders scrubbing off pollen, bugs, and layers of
dirt. I force myself to save the insides of the windows for another day,
and take advantage of the warmth to set the fence posts into the holes
I dug last Saturday. I start with the pole closest to the barn and set
the six foot pole down into the hole, push loam with my boot and my hands
back into the hole, packing the pole in well. Then I stand on a small step
ladder and drive the pole into the ground with the round end of a maul.
Dull thwacks fill the air. Wind whirs through the white spruce trees. The
front leading the arctic air that would make this job a slower one tomorrow
is en route. After I have set all the poles, Glynn joins me and we tack
wire stock fencing to the poles. It comes in thick rolls and so has a natural
tendency to curve. The challenge is to straighten it out and get it as
stiff as possible before securing it to the cedar posts with thick staples.
Glynn leverages the fence at each post with a 2x4, stretching it as taut
as it will go. I anchor the fence to the ground with my foot and hammer
three staples along the length of the pole. By dark, we have fenced one
side. A near full moon rises to the east as we finish the last few poles
it is orange-pink in a smoke blue sky. A long wisp of cloud drifts
through its center. The wind picks up.
November 8
Saturday. I arrive at the end of the afternoon, as the day fades. Temperature
in the twenties; wind a constant twenty miles an hour, the Franconia range
and Mount Washington golden rose in the late day light. Snow caps the peaks;
the entire cone of Washington gleams rich white. In the meadow all remnants
of last night's snowfall are gone the green soft grass belies November.
Glynn and I drive down to Norwich on an errand, out over the winding
road through Goose Green, a road that we will come to know well. It intersects
with Route 113 in Vershire and we follow this route through West Fairlee
and Thetford down to Route 5 that runs astride the wide, calm Connecticut
River to our destination. We buy white primer and paint trays at the general
store, then stop for tea at a café in Hanover. On the drive home,
the full moon reflected on the river is a long white beam. Back in Corinth,
we stand in moonlight out in the meadow, our shadows wide and dark; Glynn's
face is illumined, almost clear as day. I see that a curve on the underside
of the moon darkens, the full lunar eclipse begins. We watch in the cold
until a quarter of the moon is dark, then drive home to Washington. By
the time we arrive home, half of the moon is dark; the other half is orange.
While I read, Glynn cooks vegetables in the wok. We check the moon through
our window and watch until all that will be occluded is in shadow.
November 9
Another early morning at the cabin, my home territory, in the midst
of November. Mourning doves, downy and hairy woodpeckers, chickadees show
up at the bird feeder. This morning on my way to the outhouse, I see a
blue bird sitting on the fence rust belly, bright blue wings, plump,
round body. This late migrant is a surprise. I check the field guide to
see if it could be a blue warbler it doesn't appear to be. The breast
is too red. I see that tree sparrows arrive for the winter from the Arctic,
and although I have not seen them, I suspect cedar waxwings forage for
berries in the juniper. Beneath the ground, voles breed, long-tailed weasels
are in the midst of changing to white. Raccoons burrow into big hollow
trees, hunkering down for the winter, preparing to live off the fat they
have accumulated. Beech nuts and acorns provide food for red squirrels,
bear, grouse, turkeys, jays and woodpeckers.
I take the dogs to the woods. The brook still rushes from all the rain;
I watch it spill over stones while the dogs drink. On the other side, we
walk easily through brush, in places we sink into the wet forest floor.
Not five feet from us we flush a ruffed grouse from beneath a clump of
hemlocks. It angles away from us, moving wings quickly, lifting slowly
on a long trajectory into the air. I like this land in November. The woods
open, sunlight comes through, the day holds promise.
In the evening we arrive at Jack and Susi's home for a potluck dinner.
The occasion is to introduce Matt and Sarah, Glynn and me to some of their
friends and neighbors in West Corinth. Matt and Sarah, are a young couple
who live on the Maplewood Road on the village edge, and have become Jack
and Susi's junior partners in their sugaring operation. I meet Lindel,
the dressage teacher who raises horses on Magoon Hill, Ginny and Stephen,
local foresters and editors of Northern Woodlands magazine, Chris
who leaves for the Tobago for the winter on Tuesday and who writes guide
books about the Caribbean. I reconnect with Mary, a woman who taught at
the local community college when I did ten years ago and who has just published
her first novel at age sixty-three. I recognize Louisa, a woman with long
grey hair I met a few weeks ago at the East Corinth library, who works
as a substitute teacher.
I eat in the kitchen near the cookstove with Jack, Matt and Sarah. I
hear about Matt and Sarah's plans to start a tree nursery, their Christmas
wreath business, how they are adding onto a small cabin they have built
on their land. We talk about the sugarbush. Glynn and I walked through
it with Jack back in July, acres of trees linked by blue piping, cleared
of all understory for easy access. The average sugarbush has sixty or so
taps per acre. Each tap produces, again on average, ten gallons of sap
that boil down to one quart of syrup. The return on syrup produced from
an acre of trees is four or five hundred dollars, or as much as twice that,
depending on the year. Jack talks about the Guy Fawkes party he attended
last night; I share a similar story about a Fawkes party on November 5
hosted by a colleague at school. As the darkness seeps into our lives,
little more than nine hours of daylight now, warm gatherings, fires
fireworks attached to an effigy and burned put a hedge on the gathering
dark.
November 10
Up early and at the cabin by eight in the morning. Another day of sun,
warmer by far than the last two. Glynn runs errands in Bradford; I put
a wooden chair in front of the sheep barn, consider the Franconia range,
feel the warm sun on my face, and read comfortably. Dante and Annabelle
sniff the trails of turkey, voles, coyote, grouse in the field and along
the edge of white spruce. I wear a wool hat, fleece shell and vest, quilted
work pants, long underwear.
I hear the cows groaning down at the farm long, deep groans
as they are attached to milking machines. The low buzz of the machine rises,
but doesn't obliterate the brook, flowing fast down the southern hillside.
Haze sweeps across the eastern sky and ridgeline, meadow grass shines as
frost turns to dew. Golden rods stands straight up, its sandy colored flowers
dead on red stalks. Milkweed seed pods dot the meadow in white feathery
puffs. The 1950 International pick-up was hauled away yesterday to the
local junkyard. A few blackberry bushes, still with bright green leaves
rise up from the space the truck left behind. Tiny hemlock saplings hidden
under wheel wells open to the sun. Red squirrels squeak in the woods, metal
on the barn roof expands as the day warms, tiny bangs punctuate the buzz
of the milk machine. Annabelle returns and curls up a few feet from my
chair. I hear her inhale and exhale. In the southern sky, a twin engine
plane glides noiselessly, trails of steam form a "V" that points
down toward the ridge.
I read an essay, "Restoring the Wild: Species Recovery and Reintroduction,"
by Stephen Trombulak and Kimberly Royar. Trombulak teaches environmental
studies at Middlebury College; Royar is a biologist with the state's Fish
and Game department. I consider the animals in northern New England whose
populations were once endangered or extinct. An understanding of the animal
ancestry of the place where I live lets me know the inhabitants of the
land a little better. I read that caribou were native to Vermont and the
rest of northern New England, but were hunted into extinction in the 1800s.
Reintroduction efforts, made in earnest in Maine, have failed. The only
place I have seen caribou in the northeast is in Newfoundland, grazing
on open green meadows in August. Elk, likewise native, met a similar fate,
but have been successfully reintroduced in western Pennsylvania. It does
not surprise me that beaver were extinct in Vermont by 1841. They were
legally protected in 1910, reintroduced in 1921, and have since spread
widely, living throughout the state. It is a similar story with fisher,
whose populations were greatly reduced by the middle of the nineteenth
century. In the 1960s they were reintroduced in Vermont. Wild turkey were
eliminated from Vermont, as well, by 1850, a result of land clearing and
overhunting. In 1970, thirty-one turkeys from stock in Pennsylvania were
relocated to southwestern Vermont, and from there successfully reintroduced
throughout the state. The peregrine falcons, who still return to nest in
the cliffs of Fairlee, were victims of DDT throughout the 1960s. After
DDT was banned in 1972, they were reintroduced throughout the northeast
and removed from the endangered species list in 1999. Osprey suffered a
similar fate, and have returned. Each spring I lived in the Champlain Islands,
I would watch pairs return to nests they made atop defunct electrical poles
in the wildlife refuge at the edge of the causeway. As the woods return,
the animals who live come back.
I hear the Volvo wagon rumbling up the road. I put away the books, help
Glynn unload a heavy spool of wire stock fencing and we finish enclosing
winter pasture for the sheep. Inside, we add logs to the woodstove, heat
pasta for lunch, and sit in front of the fire and eat. Clouds move in.
Upstairs, we spend the afternoon screwing sheetrock to studs, then I put
a coat of white primer on what we've hung. In late afternoon light, we
pack our tools away, and leave the cabin until the end of the week.
Driving home on the Backway Road toward Corinth Corners, the moon, two
days past full, low on the horizon and bright orange begins to rise, heavy
in the sky.
15 November
Since I was last here four days ago, there has been a winter storm.
A fifty foot spruce tree came down right across our road; four more spruces
in the grove by the cabin snapped and fell in winds that gusted to seventy
miles per hour. Five inches of snow cover the ground. Even though the storm
has passed, some of the wind lingers, stirring light dust devils up in
the meadow. Five trees over fifty feet tall gone.
Driving home I notice two moose and a falling star at the same moment.
On the side of the road, the moose stop browsing and stare into my headlights.
I stop the car. They stand still, a mother and a yearling, then they turn
at the same time and walk into the woods. This is a good time of year to
see moose congregating. The rut is over and they come together to browse,
getting as much food as they can now to help them survive the winter. Soon
they will splinter from the group, go off on their own and find a place
in the woods where they can rest, slow down, browse a little. For now,
they browse together as the Leonid meteor shower begins.
* * * *
Anne Bergeron, Annotation of Bram Djikstra's Georgia
O'Keeffe and the Eros of Place
Twenty years ago I discovered the landscapes of Georgia O'Keeffe, those
she painted and those Alfred Stieglitz captured of her body. I found a book
on O'Keeffe's work, and Stieglitz's book with photographs of her, simultaneously.
I happened upon O'Keeffe in a University library while looking for something
else. I sat on a tile floor, leaning against the stacks, rapt by the deep
color in her paintings, by the magnified elements of the Western landscape,
by how intricately she rendered a jack-in-the-pulpit, a yellow iris, red
hills. I read her words accompanying the work. I turned the pages in Stieglitz's
book of photographs, examined the rise of her hip bones, the flesh of her
breasts, the wide backs of her hands, her sharp nose, and dark eyes. I was
as much intrigued by her abstractions of bone, flower and light as by her
intense beauty.
I had never heard her name; I had no idea who Stieglitz was; nothing
preconceived to tell me whether the art was good or bad. I had brushed the
surface of art history in my studies, but had never encountered any work
that looked like O'Keeffe's. I had not been to New York City, the Gaspé,
Lake George or New Mexico. All I knew was that I had never been so taken
with the paintings, words and body of an artist. I got off the library floor
and checked out the books.
I spent weeks looking at O'Keeffe's paintings and writing. She wrote
about driving in a Model A Ford across the desert to camp and paint, of
the wind shaking the tent, of coyotes calling. She ate canned moose meat,
fresh fish, and warm bread in a French home in the Gaspé. She collected
skulls and bones she found on the desert floor.
She said that other people "hung all their associations on her flowers,"
that "some people she had loved made her see nothing," that the
world viewed her paintings as abstractions. But they are so real to me,
she said, that they are almost photographic. In order to understand "the
unexplainable thing in nature" that defines the world as infinitely
beyond our understanding, she needed, she said, to create form. Her words
made a new sense to me. Lawrence
Tree and Red Hills
and Pedernal became the forms I imagined when I pictured the Southwest.
I tried to find more books of her work, searched the Jansen art history
text, found nothing. I savored what I read about her in Stieglitz's books.
I started collecting black skirts. I favored white blouses. I bought two
of O'Keeffe's prints and a portrait of her at the Harvard Coop. I hung the
prints in my first high school classroom in northern New Hampshire. I matted
the portrait and placed it in the 200-year-old house I shared with another
teacher. I bought one book of O'Keeffe's paintings. I talked about her and
her work to my students; we wrote about her images. One March day in 1986,
a student raised her hand in my class and said, "You know that woman
that you like so much who paints I heard on the radio that she died."
At the end of my first year of high school teaching, I quit my job and
joined my boyfriend on my first journey west. As I sat in stalled traffic
on Interstate 95 outside of New York City, I began reading a biography of
O'Keeffe, cobbled together from interviews with anyone who remotely knew
her, from her own writing and from Stieglitz's work. O'Keeffe had slammed
the door of her Abiquiu home in the biographer's face; O'Keeffe was irascible,
reclusive, full of intolerance. Three days into the trip on a Sunday morning,
I walked into the Art Institute in Chicago because I knew I would find three
of O'Keeffe's paintings there. The moment I saw the corner of Sky Above Clouds IV hanging over
the landing on a stairwell, I broke into a run. It was far bigger than I
imagined. I sat before it, stood before it, paced its length, welled with
tears.
Late in August, we came into New Mexico. I hiked in cliff dwellings around
Taos and Santa Fe, skirted Abiquiu. Blue sky, red hills, papery yellow hollyhocks,
dust on my jeans. Dry days walking in canyon washes; cold nights on the
desert floor, wrapped in sleeping bags, watching stars blink in a low black
sky.
In 1989, back in New Hampshire and teaching once more, I took the day
off from school to drive to New York City for the O'Keeffe retrospective.
Paintings, smaller than I would have guessed, and early drawings and sketches,
filled room after room. I saw the The Lawrence Tree, several Jack-in-the-Pulpits,
image after image of pelvis bone and sky. I returned home with a print of
Music Pink and Blue II
and hung it on my classroom wall.
By 1997, when I found myself back in New Mexico, O'Keeffe's work enjoyed
wide appreciation in the culture at large. New books on her works and life
emerged that included her many letters and a wealth of information about
her relationships with Anita Pollitzer, Steiglitz, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Tony
Luhan, Ansel Adams. As we drove down from the San Juan Mountains through
Durango and Aztec, and out a long, dirt road with deep potholes to the ruins
of Pueblo Bonito, I was not much thinking of O'Keeffe. We spent three days
hiking in ruins, and then Glynn and I climbed to the summit of Wheeler Peak.
When we came into Santa Fe, I discovered a permanent O'Keeffe museum would
open in five days.
We drove up to Abiquiu and set up camp on a reservoir in view of the
pedernal, a few miles from the adobe house O'Keeffe called home. On the
far side of the lake, a forest fire burned. We hiked dry trails around Ghost
Ranch and wandered among sage brush in red hills. One day I walked up the
steep road to O'Keeffe's house. A sign warned people like me away. We returned
to Santa Fe, Sunday morning, 7 a.m., two hours before the museum would first
open to the public. The line outside was thick and wound along several blocks
under hot sun. Finally inside, I found guards in black uniforms with strict
orders to usher everyone through in eighty minutes. Even though I hung back
a lot, it all felt like ten minutes, and I was once again out on the street.
What was I hoping to feel and see? The immensity and freedom the places
of O'Keeffe's paintings engendered in me so many years back? The ghost of
a grey-haired woman wearing a black skirt and denim jacket - her set jaw
and wrinkled face? Had I, as art critic and professor Bram Dijikstra would
say, "turned O'Keeffe into an icon of her art a preternatural
creature, shamanistic, exalted, and removed from everyday experience"
(9)? Had I come to acknowledge, not the work, but all of what she had symbolized
for me since that day in the University library? Was it inevitable that
I would leave the museum created to house her work disappointed?
In 1980, in the University library, I found the paintings and the painter
- I found New Mexico, New York City, the Gaspé, Lake George, and
a distinct woman whose body and face articulated independence and strength,
and whose rendering of place was absolutely inseparable, to me, from that
body and face. I read her body like I read the The Lawrence Tree,
Sky Above Clouds IV, Pelvis
With Moon. I read the paintings for what they could teach me about
trees, desert and sky. I read her body for what it had to teach me about
the beauty of flesh. Looking at her body led me to an appreciation of my
own. In discovering O'Keeffe, I acknowledged my own love of place.
* * * *
I have always taken Georgia O'Keeffe at her word.
I believed her when she said,
I find that I have painted my life without knowing. After painting
the shell and shingle many times, I did a misty landscape of the mountain
across the lake, and the mountain became the shape of the shingle
the mountain I saw out my window, the shingle on the table in my room. I
did not notice they were alike for a long time after they were painted."
And I believed her when she said,
"It is surprising to me to see how many people separate the objective
from the abstract. Objective painting is not good painting unless it is
good in the abstract sense. A hill or tree cannot make a good painting just
because it is a hill or a tree. It is lines and colors put together so that
they say something. For me that is the very basis of painting. The abstraction
is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that
I can only clarify in paint."
I found truth in the paradox that abstraction is a definite form, a form
that expresses something deep in the self, not easily apprehended. And I
believed this now famous sentence:
"Well I made you take time to look at what I saw and when
you took time to really notice my flower you hung all your associations
with flowers on my flower and you write about my flower as if I think and
see what you think and see of the flower and I don't." (text
with An Orchid, 1941).
I still do.
Much has been said about O'Keeffe's caginess, her tendency toward deceit.
I do not doubt that. But I trust the depth of her eye, the intensity and
duration of her presence with flowers. I believe she painted what she saw.
She is interested, first, I suspect, in forms and shapes. Given the context
in which she came of age, at least as Dijikstra presents it in Georgia
O'Keeffe and the Eros of Place, she had to be aware of herself as a
woman, creating not so much a new and different art, but an art that was
true to her nature, and of her nature. O'Keeffe's paintings show us the
strong, deep colors of real flowers, their vibrancy and movement. They are
not whispy and cool, but thick and brilliant; arresting. They demand that
you look. Compared to the paintings of the tonalists discussed in Djikstra's
book, who undoubtedly influenced O'Keeffe's aesthetic, her work is less
ambiguous, less serene. She perceives in nature the force of energy present
in it, the life in petals and bone. Her abstractions are detailed and specific.
Some critics have accused O'Keeffe of making an icon of herself. Dijikstra
accuses Americans of not trusting artists. There is something about O'Keeffe
that we do not want to trust. We see the Trickster in one of her many smiles
and are wary. Her good friend, Mabel Dodge Luhan tells the story of O'Keeffe
stealing a stone from her home; there is perhaps a sexual relationship with
Dodge's husband, Tony Luhan. There is the solitary living but so many
people inhabit her writing, her letters. I cannot say that the particulars
of her life do not interest me; the voyeur in me is tantalized by personal
detail. But a desire for this type of detail did not fire my initial pursuit
of O'Keeffe's art - it was the inextricable twining of her painting and
her body that first held me entranced. I wanted to know about that.
I read Dijikstra's study in the midst of my own exploration of the connections
between body and place. His book gives a perspective on O'Keeffe's work,
and the first four decades of her life, that is unlike any I have encountered
previously. When Dijikstra says of O'Keeffe's painting that "form
as such becomes the object of desire becomes what is both other and
self," (6) I know he sees an amorous love of place at the center
of her work. When he says "The world she makes us see is a superbly
self-confident celebration of the material world as coextensive with selfhood,
as the repository of the visual modalities of a personal expression unhedged
by convention and the predictable formal arrangements with which habit contrives
to dull our senses," (6) I see he situates her in a singular
personal world outside of societal constructs, and that such a world is
one few of us let ourselves experience. And so, on some level, I live my
passion for the world through O'Keeffe's portrayal of her own.
Dijikstra says the sense of space in her work establishes a "common
ground" within and beyond us. It is indefinite space, on the one hand,
because what is inside us or the artist, or outside us or the artist, may
not be clear, but her work "celebrate[s] instead the polymorphous eroticism
of the body in nature" (6). I like that idea of polymorphous eroticism.
In her work, I see a passionate love of nature - and of self - fused with
a passionate love of place. Because she boldly expressed her eros for place,
the work touched my own amorous connection with place, and made that love,
not only recognizable to me, but valid. Because I found her body, as interpreted
by Stieglitz (who expressed his eros for her in photographs) not dissimilar
from the size and look of my own (or so I imagined) I began to view myself
with appreciation. When I read critics who equated O'Keeffe's flowers with
vaginas I didn't know whether to think I had been naively tricked into thinking
I was viewing flowers close-up
or whether her flowers, similar in form and function to vaginas, simply
revealed the actual resemblance. I have heard enough people my friends
and colleagues, for example reiterate that "of course, the flowers
are great big vaginas," as if she had set out specifically to paint
vaginas. I think she would have observed vaginas the way she did flowers
and painted them, if that was what she was interested in. Dijikstra's idea
that her paintings express the polymorphous eroticism in nature takes her
work far beyond a discussion about the flowers really being vaginas.
They are flowers, presented in all their erotic clarity and fineness of
detail. And, paradoxically, they are abstractions.
* * * *
In 1998, Music Pink and Blue II hangs on my classroom wall.
One of my male colleagues, a man born and raised in Ireland, brings a fellow
male history teacher, into my room. The three of us are close academic colleagues
we share thirty students in American History and Literature.
"So, what do you think that is?" Liam asks Bruce, with a sly smile.
Bruce says nothing as he considers the painting. "Well, I know exactly
what that is," Liam says. He sounds disgusted, on the one hand, and
yet there is the smile. I know what's coming. Liam asks me. "It's music"
I say. Liam walks out of the room shaking his head, with Bruce behind him.
I half expect the principal to appear in my room to examine O'Keeffe's painting.
I am at the school another year and a half and never hear a word about the
painting again.
Dijikstra notes that flowers have long been associated with female eroticism,
and that association was pronounced in the 1920s when O'Keeffe created many
of her flower paintings (227). What O'Keeffe was doing in her work was to
"reclaim" eroticism, by focusing on it close-up and big, from
the "obsessive cultural symbolism to which it had been confined"
(227). And to demonstrate that nature itself is erotic, I think.
Dijikstra's book got me thinking about O'Keeffe in a more focused and
careful way than I have before. As I look at her paintings and read her
words, I reconsider how much of an influence Stieglitz had on her aesthetic
and popularity. The artist Dijikstra presents was less the darling of An
American Place and 291, than an artist whose style and aesthetic was firmly
established when, at age thirty, she met Stieglitz. Djikstra credits her
with arriving in New York self-possessed and confident in her talent; two
traits her relationship with Stieglitz is often credited with inspiring.
The opening pages of Djikstra's study introduce the gender ideology that
characterized the intellectual climate O'Keeffe came of age in. The painting
of her first studio in New York, Fifty-ninth Street Studio, indicates
a turning point in her aesthetic, he argues. It is an example of "an
art freed from prejudices of gender an art that would instead find
its motivation in a celebration of the creative energies generated by a
sense experience grounded in reality. This fundamentally humanist concept
was the motivating force behind virtually all of O'Keeffe's work from this
point on" (7). Interestingly enough, it was New York City that became
significant in her "attempts to establish analogues between her states
of mind" (7) and the visual cityscape that surrounded her.
What Social Darwinism firmly established that intellectual superiority
lay with men, and concurrently, that the intellect was synonymous with creativity
was confirmed by turn-of-the-century philosophy and science that placed
the source of creative intelligence in the semen or "élan vital"
(36). For men to withhold semen was to store up vital creative energy. And
the art establishment in America, desperate to compete with the cerebral
art of France, wanted most for its signature landscape art to evolve and
mature beyond its "feminine" subject matter. Woman and femininity
were allied pejoratively with nature both found weak for their chaos,
softness and lack of intellect. Gender dimorphism led to cementing the following
unfortunate, prevailing dichotomy: the mind was masculine and the body was
feminine (31).
"True men" would counter the effeminacy associated with painting
nature. Since Social Darwinists considered intuition as a specifically feminine
trait, and since the United States was determined to emerge as a world power,
a masculine art was needed to represent the new "muscle" the US
was exerting in the world. It is this elevation of the masculine in the
political, artistic and psychological realms that influenced the gender
ideology of the first two decades of the twentieth century. The masculinist
ideologies, Djikstra argues, had an influence on O'Keefe's work:
The dominant sentiment that had developed in American culture, as
O'Keeffe was becoming conscious of the art world around her, was that true
individualism and hence true artistry (which was more and more held
to be an exclusively masculine trait) was a factor of 'the spirit
of place' and hence accessible only to those who understood that 'the local
is the only universal.' these favorite slogans of such eager early modernists
as William Carlos Williams and the painters of the Stieglitz circle had
already become prominent notions within the American cultural environment
well before the turn of the century. (43)
The nineteenth century American painters whose native places and landscapes
figured prominently in their art Frederic Edwin Church, Arthur Wesley
Dow, George Inness and Charles Harold Davis, for example would be
criticized by early twentieth century critics like Charles H. Caffin for
their preponderance of "female concerns" (quoted in Djikstra 12).
In fact, intellectual movements, like Social Darwinism, coupled with the
influence of the modernism of the Paris salon and their "derision"
of "women artists" (14) influenced American intellectuals and
critics to rail against a perceived "femininization of American culture"
(13), especially in art and education. Social Darwinists promoted an emerging
masculinist philosophy and science that relegated each gender to its own
unique but "separate role in the evolutionary process" (82).
Caffin's criticism of late nineteenth century landscape painters aside,
the work of Church, Dow, Inness and Davis flourished in the United States,
helped along by a thirty-three percent import duty on the French Salon paintings
long favored by wealthy industrialists who collected most of the art in
the United States. The tariffs imposed a "need" for arts patrons
to look at home instead of abroad for art, bringing Church and company and
their "tonalist" aesthetic into favor.
Tonalism, a turn-of-the-century
movement in American art, gave, if only by necessity, landscape painting
its desired "male" muscle. Undergirded by transcendentalist philosophy,
tonalist painters worked to convey their belief that humans and nature were
"one," (Dijikstra, 25). To express this unity, they sought harmony
with ambiguous lines, soft shadows and somber hues as they explored the
connection between the spiritual realm and the natural world. In the wake
of the Industrial Revolution and the closing of the western frontier, tonalists
looked back with nostalgia to a time when the Americans inhabited their
landscape more harmoniously. The philosophy fueling the painting moved American
art into a more intellectual realm, while at the same time developing a
style uniquely American and independent. Tonalist painters' portrayal of
the American landscape was admired for its "astonished reverence for
the unrelenting, harshly demanding purity of nature, distinctly American"
(17). French impressionism, with its aesthetic of sunlit landscapes, it
was not.
Consider the work of American artist, George Inness, whose paintings
typify the tonalist aesthetic. In his work, November Montclair, painted
in 1893, Inness creates the landscape of his New Jersey home in hues of
browns and greys. Mist permeates November Montclair, occluding the
landscape; soft lines suggest an ambiguity among trees, sky, field. Influenced
by the writings of philosopher, Emanuel Swedenborg, Inness explores the
connections between the physical world and the spiritual realm in his work,
expressing his belief in their unity. By the turn of the century, American
art had entered what critic S.G.W. Benjamin had called for in 1877: an "era
of mental development" (quoted in Dijikstra, 16). Between 1890 and
1910, tonalism had become respected as "a gracefully undemonstrative,
subtly intellectual style of painting that ultimately succeeded in escaping
the clergy's harsh judgments concerning humanity's (and particularly women's)
subservience to the punishing censure of God's will, by first investigating
and subsequently celebrating the bonds connecting the mind, the body, and
nature" (13). Ideas clearly evident in O'Keeffe's work.
What interests me in the work of the tonalists is that it is rooted in
transcendentalism. The idea that reason and intuition hold an equal place
in the ethical and intellectual development in both men and women defies
the pejorative assessment that woman - and thereby nature, body and intuition
- are inferior to reason (24). According to the transcendental ideal, one's
moral development relies on a capacity to intuit "the necessary link
between human understanding and the intrinsic coherence of nature"
(24). The idea that nature lives within each of us, that we are in it and
of it, was dismissed by the growing dualistic science of the late nineteenth
century and by Social Darwinists. It is this articulation of transcendentalism
a union of intuition and reason - that I see now in O'Keeffe's work.
Djikstra book presents this union of intuition and reason through an
extended discussion of Edgar Allen Poe's "The Colloqui of Monos and
Una," which, he says, presented a unified male and female principle
in a society not yet fragmented by the Industrial Revolution. For Poe, Djikstra
argues, only a return to the "harmony" and "coherence of
nature" could reconnect the male/female split wrought by our emergence
into an industrial world. This is what O'Keeffe was doing in Fifty-ninth
Street Studio, he argues, recreating "pregendered wholeness,
when intellect and body are in harmony, when 'the idea of entity' becomes
'merged in that of place'" (30).
In O'Keeffe's work, I agree, intellect and body harmonize; identity is
unified with place. But during the early years of the twentieth century,
art became influenced by the categorization of mind as male and body as
female; a dualism, Dijikstra says the work of O'Keeffe counters.
In chapter five of his book, entitled "The Body in the Landscape,"
Djikstra presents O'Keeffe's childhood in the Midwest as the place where
she learned about "the textures of nature" (46). Watching storm
clouds on the horizon and clouds "shifting hues of blue" (46)
in the sky presented shapes and forms of nature that would become O'Keeffe's
religion: "The meaning of life, to her, was a festive, non-prescriptive
being-in-the-world" (47). She was, he says, "a humanist and a
realist" (47). The tonalists and their theory that nature was a corollary
to human emotions influenced O'Keeffe, or at least was a theory with which
she found resonance. Because tonalists were seen as distinctly American,
the early modernist movement of the early 1900s, of which O'Keeffe was a
part, looked to them for technique and style.
When O'Keeffe was in art school, she painted two poplar trees she had
seen at night. The next day she showed them to a fellow student, who told
her they lacked color. To show her what he meant, he painted bright colors
onto them, in the manner of the French Impressionists. She thought the student
had ruined her work. She painted over it once more, trying to recapture
what she had seen in the trees, but the paint dried thickly and the work
failed. O'Keeffe kept the painting for years because "it represented
an effort toward something that had meaning to me much more than the
work at school" (72). In representing what she saw in the tree in dark,
muted colors, she was working in the style of the tonalists. This incident
and others at art school forced O'Keeffe to resist the imposition of style,
and of specifically masculine and feminine forms. Her idea was to capture
the emotion the awe and delight that she felt in the presence
of nature, and "to find a way to express the nongendered essence of
the gendered human body" (72). Her work to find a "nongendered
essence" was her attempt to recapture the pre-industrial culture of
America, as illustrated in Poe's "Monos and Una."
By 1910, O'Keeffe and other American modernists had separated themselves
in their love of abstraction from a cooler European aesthetic that favored
elevating the intellect over nature as a means of achieving transcendence.
O'Keeffe's work at this time, Djikstra argues, displayed "a continuing
and unwavering respect for the visual-tactile forms of nature" (160),
prefiguring oversized jack-in-the-pulpits, iris, bones.
Again, this respect for form and specificity in abstraction is what I
see now when I look at O'Keeffe's work. It is what makes me believe what
she said about her flowers. Stieglitz saw sexual themes in O'Keeffe's work,
themes she would come to discount. And as Djikstra notes, she abdicates
outline for color (181) in order to represent the connection between emotions
and the objects of the material world, although the color contrasts create
definite lines, as in Music Pink and Blue. Djikstra presents Stieglitz
as an emblem of that masculinist aesthetic O'Keeffe countered in her work.
And, Djikstra says this about O'Keeffe's view of being a model for Stieglitz's
work:
But O'Keeffe recognized that, stripped of its masculinist posturing,
Stieglitz's obsession with the erotic landscape of her body was no different
from her own creative fascination with the earth, the leaves of a tree,
or the curves in a riverbank. She remarked laconically that Stieglitz, in
his art, was not really paying tribute to others, but instead, he was 'always
photographing himself.' Secure in her own creative identity, she understood
and accepted his photographic appropriation of her body as a
form of artistic self-expression. (183)
His photographs, Djikstra says, communicated O'Keeffe's own pleasure
in the sensory experiences of her body and her world.
And this:
Seeing herself become a subject of art in Stieglitz's photographs,
recognizing herself as a landscape of infinitely subtle gradation and linear
variation in the sharply modulated lines and shadows of her loins, her arms,
and her breasts, she at once began to rethink the function of volume and
line in her own work, and to uncover in nature that topography of the emotions
she had recognized in the body of the man's desire. If for Stieglitz her
body had become the landscape of his personal longing, if he was unable
to express himself through her body, and turn her body into the matter of
his life, then the matter she loved could just as easily become body to
her sense of self. (187)
O'Keeffe's perception of a clear link between her body and the earth
may be what spoke to me twenty years ago in the University library. O'Keeffe
did not fear her own nature. She did not fear being a woman, being erotic,
nor did she deny the earth its eroticism. Her work celebrates who she is
and what she perceives. She is a woman painting the experience of a woman,
perceiving nature as a woman, yet she is a woman with a finely developed
animus.
Djikstra says that Music Pink and Blue II is the most graphic
of her vaginal images. The cultural conditioning that equates sexuality
with a fear of loss of control and of the vagina as a "portal to the
unknown" (201) prevents us, Djikstra says, from seeing the image in
its purity: "an affirmation of life experience, of joy; a celebration
of being as being" (201). And because the painting celebrates the joy
of being, it denies "our carefully constructed fictions of progress
as valid motives for self-denial, also certain to undermine the systems
of domination and submission that maintain our economic and intellectual
productivity" (201). O'Keeffe, Djikstra continues, used the feminine
to challenge that way we perceive:
If in the modulations of a shell, or a mountain range, or a flower,
O'Keeffe is able to make us celebrate the body of being, it may be that
her medium for the expression of that experience was most often the female
body, but the essence of what we feel that intense joy of the senses
that is at the core of all good art and that confounds all theorizing
is human and without gender. (201)
Of all of the perceptions about O'Keeffe that Djikstra offers, this one
articulates best what I remember feeling that day long ago in the University
library. There was joy; my whole being leapt in response to the work, unencumbered
by criticism and deconstruction. It celebrated nature landscape, human
and spirit. The human body, the hills, the sky, a shell, an iris, eloquent
examples of polymorphous eroticism.
I brought a print of Pelvis III back from the New Mexico trip
in 1997. Now, it sits atop a book shelf in my room at the school where I
teach. Maxine, a senior, whose brown, oily hair hangs in a pony tail, who
wears grey t-shirts and who dreams of being a corrections officer, came
into my room on Tuesday. She reached out and touched O'Keeffe's painting,
tracing the circle of the pelvis where it meets the sky.
"That's cool," Maxine said softly, moving her fingers out of
the circle and into the shadow of the bone. "What is it?"
"A bone," said Shelby, whose blue hair, tousled on the top
of her head, bounced as she looked up from her writing.
"That's so cool," Maxine said, continuing to trace a line around
the opening in the pelvis.
"I know that artist," Shelby says. "I've seen her paintings
before."
Favor Ellis, Imp
There is a story I want to tell you.
I work with a young man who goes by the street name Imp. Imp and I have
been working together since he was sixteen. He's unusually small, probably
4'7" or 8", and as a measure of balance, unusually tough. He
wears steel-toed boots and a heavy leather jacket every single day, with
spikes along the sleeves, and "NGP" (Nihilist Gutter Punks) emblazoned
on the back. His hair is cut into a bi-hawk; shaved close at the ears and
down the center of the scalp, grown long in two strips above the eyebrows.
This is a style you must earn on the streets, by proving yourself
deserving of respect. He runs with a tough crowd, and by that I mean he
has seen death many times, and has likely participated in bringing people
there. Imp carries a six-inch hunting knife and a smiley, which is a heavy
silver chain with a lock connecting the end links. So named for the wound
it leaves when whipped at a person's throat. In the past year, Imp has
started using crystal meth, which has marked him with "speed bumps"
- red and black sores all over his body, which itch constantly.
When he comes to visit me, he does so stealthily, constantly aware of
any police near the building, as well as any former or current business
associates who may be lurking near the entrance. Imp wheels his bicycle
through the doorway, and we engage in silent acknowledgement that this
is not the bike he had yesterday, and that one was different from the day
before. Once he's through the door, he looks both ways, then at his feet,
before he reaches out his arms for a cautious, necessary hug. He smells
like he hasn't bathed in months, and he agrees that this assessment is
true. I know that if he takes off his clothes, they won't be there when
he wants them again. Plain as that. He forgoes hygiene for the status of
his leather and the safety of his body. He doesn't smell himself anymore.
He raids the fruit bowl on the table, taking bunches of bananas into
his jacket, grabbing a handful of Twinkies if we have any. He plops himself
on to my comfy blue chair and asks me how I am. We talk small talk while
he eats banana after banana, Twinkie after Twinkie. He tells me his body
doesn't feel well, so he's cut down to just three packs a day. He sleeps
outside, so it's hard for him to know how he'll sleep on any given night.
It's been raining lately, and he has holes in the boots I gave him for
Christmas last year. He's been clean for four days, and he's thinking about
just quitting for good. He knows he needs to be totally off drugs if he
wants to get the Peer Advocate job in December. He thinks he can really
help kids, if he had a reason to. He's right, of course.
The last time Imp came for a visit was two weeks ago. We went through
the usual ritual of shy hugs and sly pilfering. He looked particularly
tired, and seemed edgy. He told me he had only had a bowl of sugar cereal
yesterday morning, and hadn't eaten since. He had an abscess on his arm
that he needs treated, but the clinic didn't open again until Tuesday.
It's raining, he's tired, and he's hungry. "I don't know how I'm gonna
do it, Favor." He folded his arms tight over his chest and shifted
his weight in the chair. I told him to sit tight, drink that water; I'll
be right back. I headed for the kitchen. I knew the latest church group
had donated twenty rotisserie chickens that morning. I put one in the microwave
and heated it for five minutes. When I handed it to Imp, he asks me if
I knew he was craving chicken all week. He sat in the blue chair, pulling
meat from the greasy bones until he had finished half the bird. He told
me he thinks it might be time for people to call him by his other name,
Tyson. He asked me if I would be the first to start. He wiped his hands
on his pants, and asked me if he could just rest for a while, until my
next meeting, or until I had to leave. I put a blanket over him, and he
fell asleep instantly.
I typed at my computer for two hours before it was time to go home.
I wrapped the rest of the chicken and labeled it "Tyson's Chicken,"
and put it in the refrigerator. I wrote a note on a yellow Post-It: Goodnight,
Tyson. Sleep well. Your chicken's in the fridge. Be safe, and I'll see
you Monday. F. I slipped the note between his fingers on his lap
and whispered goodnight. He didn't stir, and I realized how blessed I am
that he feels so safe in my space; he's used to being prepared to fight
for his life when he is asleep.
Monday morning, there was a note on my desk: a gift for Favor, from
Tyson. A Post-It on a king-sized pack of Reese's peanut butter cups.
He knows they're my favorite.
This is what feeds me. The tough boys trusting me, warming to me, coming
to me for comfort. Part of me feels lucky, but I know what kind of work
I do to get to that place of safety. I had a reputation a few years ago
of being the only case manager the "hardest" kids would work
with. My secret then was that I had conversations with them, instead of
telling them what they were supposed to do. I made eye contact. I laughed
with them. I helped them clean up after a fight. They all knew what I wanted
from them was that they made choices that made them happy. Not choices
that got them respect or money or power. But choices about their own lives
that made them happy and helped them be safe. And now, get me in a room
with a hysterical twelve year old girl just brought in by the police for
prostituting, and in five minutes, I'll have her drinking water slowly,
breathing and telling me she's scared and doesn't know what to do. Put
me with a boy waving a chair over his head, and he'll leave the room, threatening
everyone in it but me, and hugging me once he gets outside (that really
happened). Even after I lay down consequences for violent behavior, these
kids ask for two things: food and meetings with me.
Favor Ellis, Wake
wrong turn in Arizona
and we were mesmerized.
a circle
of grieving horses
nose to tail
counterclockwise
east north west south
keening over
a bloated foal.
three years later,
I have no words but these
for what happened to me then.
* * * *
Favor's website http://home.earthlink.net/~favorsharee/
Rhonda Patzia, Walking
and rolling meditation
I was fascinated by the concept of walking meditation for two reasons.
First, I can't walk well sometimes not at all. What a challenge,
then, to embark upon an awareness practice that represents a barrier to
me in name alone. I theorized that the experience might be profound for
me, considering that every shaky step I already take directs my awareness
to my feet and legs.
The second reason I just had to try out walking meditation was because
I was told not to bother with it. All the internet surfing I did on the
topic just directed disabled people to sit. The info never lauded the potential
awareness breakthrough of attempting it with a bum gait. I was just instructed
to "sit." So I didn't!
With MS, I can only tentatively plan the night before for the next day.
If I wake up with a fever as I often do I can barely get out
of bed and a trip to the bathroom sends me ping ponging from wall to wall
through my hall of squeaky floors, dodging my dog, who thinks we're playing.
However, this morning I awoke refreshed, but still had to go through
an AM ritual of alertness practices that includes a cup of ice water, a
heat sensitivity pill ALWAYS accompanied by food - and green tea.
Halfway through the green tea, I'm usually coherent enough to find my glasses,
at which point the world materializes enough for me to embrace it - slowly
slowly. But this cloudy and cool morning was different in that I was set
on taking to the streets to meditate rather than striking a normal
body-pretzel pose on my study floor.
I begin. The internet suggests stepping out the door to feel my feet
rest on the ground for a minute or so. I myself begin by struggling with
putting on my biking gloves for a better rolling grip - then wrestling
my wheelchair out the swiftly-closing-in-my-face front door, to my too-small-for-both-ofus
front porch, down my steps (throwing the 20 lb. roller ahead of me), across
the aggravatingly-lumpy grass, down the insufferably chaotic driveway,
and to the sidewalk/grassy concrete area that runs in front of our new
home. Once I get to the sidewalk, I stand to breathe, planning to really
begin the meditation at that point, even though I remember that
one major rule of walking meditation is to make the practice my own. Tomorrow,
I think, maybe I won't cuss at my wheelchair. Two women are coming my way,
so I pretend to be inspecting my wheelchair tire as they pass. No time
to be friendly, I think. I'm meditating!
Pushing my chair slowly down the sidewalk, I breathe and think about
my feet first. My sock is all bunched up with my left foot, the one with
the new brace that is a bit uncomfortable on my ankle, but not enough to
stop me, and the doctor says I'll get used to it. I feel my feet lift and
set down and I try to be intentional about walking in a straight line,
which the brace helps on account of the plastic sole not letting my foot
drop and drag. My walking problems only began two years ago. I asked Mike
then if he noticed. "Yes," he said.
I'm liking what I am doing with my feet, so I relax them and move up
my leg to feel clothing and wind on my shins, then knees, then thighs.
I am attentive to how they are all working, relax them one by one, then
move up to my hips and pelvis. The sidewalk doesn't have grass in the cracks
anymore, but large cement filler nodes in each like keloids. My wheelchair
goes up and down them every couple of steps. I like the roughness. I feel
it moving my whole body.
The how-to sheets for walking meditation talk of imagining that the
pelvis is carving a three-dimensional triangle as I move down a path. This
imagery is fun, but I'm swaying terribly, which frustrates me at first,
until I imagine how interesting my triangle must look.
I go around a smooth sidewalk next to a hilly pond and park area. My
muscles work differently as I go uphill. My back, neck, arms, all tight.
I relax them all and re-relax my legs. I feel like a rag doll and wonder
that I am still moving so easily.
I circle the pond, and when I go downhill, my chair wants to run away
with my body. I have control again with attention to my legs, arms, back.
At the bottom of the hill, I know I need to rest. So I set my wheelchair
in the grass and collapse into it without attention to how I fall. I feel
my body warm and tingly all the way through. I take some deep breaths.
My eyes close. Breathing
But I hear voices. Distant? No, near; and my eyes start open and dart
around and around like tracking lasers, like desperation. Do they see me?
What do they think? Do they know I am meditating? They probably think I'm
praying but like a christian. Wouldn't want to give 'em the luxury
of that thought. "My," they'll think, "isn't she such a
holy and good christian girl!" No, dammit!
I breathe for a while inhale exhale inhale exhale - until I feel
my eyes in my head again and forget what the lightning commotion was about.
Do I roll myself home? I enjoy walking. I exhale and stand. I relax
my muscles. The birds.
I begin
The breeze on my legs and across my face. I feel cool.
The sidewalk cracks. "Bump, bump." "Bump, bump."
Happy. Content. "Bump, bump." "Bump, bump."
Wheelchair bars in my hands. Waving to the passing car.
"Choock choock." "Choock choock." Old woman in a
nightie, solitary, cutting her hedge. She doesn't look up at me and I pass,
solitary. "Choock choock." "Choock choock."
Shadows. Birds. Movement of light.
Wheelchair up my driveway. Gravel. Muscles shifting. Backyard. Park.
Sit down. Breathe
.
After, I feel very relaxed and as if I discovered a form of awareness
practice that is more natural to me than sitting in a quiet room.
Of course, I think, walking meditation doesn't take me back to the womb,
but to a familiar rhythm of my childhood when through play, I was
so in-touch with my natural environment that I never considered our boundaries.
In addition, I remember that my best photography was the result of a series
of walking/wandering explorations that I can legitimately label meditations
now.
Interestingly, with regard to my challenges in walking, I didn't consider
the whole of my problems while I was out. I didn't lump it all under MS,
but just considered my ankle and foot and legs separately. To consider
a particular thing is to love and nurture it. When lumping things, hate
and blame are more natural; and I am fragmented by this ignorance born
of inattentiveness and stagnation.
Isn't movement a necessary part of life, one that an awareness practice
should incorporate?
Cynthia Perry, Practical Zen I
I am interested in the practical application of Zen to everyday life.
I am not interested in using Zen as a method for analyzing my psyche. I
have to study and experiment with how the application of Zen practices
and philosophies can affect my life on a daily level. My definition of
everyday life is very simply the things I do every moment of every day.
It's the tasks I perform day in and day out that put me in direct contact
and engagement with the world. Crispin Sartwell states in Zen and the
Art of Living that it is precisely in the mundane activities of our
everyday life that we come to awareness, if we come to awareness at all,
because almost all of our lives consist of such activities. He goes on
to say that "such activities may not yield works of art. But they
can be experienced as artistic activities when they are experienced in
devotion to process" (32). This paper describes the main concepts
of Zen and relates them, in a personal way, to how I live my life every
day.
The Practice
The first, and most obvious, Zen concept that has impacted my life is
the Practice. The Zen writings point out often that the words, lessons,
and concepts alone are inadequate to help us most fully. It is the practice
itself that gives us tools with which to respond to the situations we all
face every day. The practice of zazen has three distinct aspects
concentration, meditation, and contemplation. The approach toward each
differs, with the result being perhaps about the same a stilling
of the mind. My interest in the practice of zazen is simple. I think it
is valuable and worthwhile to learn how to still the mind. There are times
in my practice that I may use any one of the three aspects of zazen
concentration when I am purposely trying to center on specific thoughts,
meditation when I want to reflect on specific words, or contemplation when
I want to just be - although after studying Zen in more detail, it seems
it is the contemplative aspect of zazen that fits my purpose and needs
the best, and on which I concentrate this study.
The Zen readings point out to me what an influential part my mind plays
in the daily living of my life. I have become more and more aware of how
much chatter and noise are generated by my thoughts - getting to the point,
more than once, of desperately wondering if I would ever be able to stop
what seem like abusive mind games. The incessant internal gossip that compares,
re-lives, analyzes, doubts, hopes, and fears weighs heavily on my ability
to not only enjoy life but to be productive and responsive to it. The Zen
writings describe this mind as the conscious mind. The conscious mind is
the mind that is thinking all the time - the instrument through which all
our thoughts and feelings, impulses and perceptions are translated into
actions in the world. The conscious mind is very busy and quite unstable.
Zen doesn't advocate completely shutting down the conscious mind and our
ability to think. Zen instead provides the disciplining practice, called
zazen, to control the conscious mind so that we can get in touch with the
Big Mind, the Buddha nature, the Universal Mind. The goal of zazen is to
quiet the conscious mind and become one with the Universal Mind. It is
this mind that has always been here and that holds everything in its knowing.
Discipline is the key to developing a practice of controlling the mind.
A basic discipline is required just to begin to include meditation as a
part of my daily schedule. A lot of emphasis is placed on the word schedule
in the Zen writings, to the point of saying that the schedule is your first
teacher. Standing firm and adhering to the same time for contemplation
every day is the first step in letting my mind know that I will not surrender
to its desires. There is great power in the act of repetition, and my body
responds very quickly to patterns of repetition. Once in a contemplative
state, it takes continued discipline to deal with my mind and its thoughts
thoughts that remind me of what else I could/should be doing. Thoughts
that cause me to continually have to justify spending my time in this place.
But eventually, I reach a threshold, an amount of time after which the
thoughts don't pull me, don't influence me anymore. I simply recognize
them, name them, and allow them to move on. It is at this time that my
perseverance wins out over my thoughts and I give myself to the contemplation,
allowing it to be, naturally.
I believe that contemplation is valuable. I believe in the discipline
it develops. I am now at a point in my practice where I want to push the
envelope. I want to become more disciplined about doing it every day and
I want to lengthen the amount of time I sit. It is totally empowering to
know I can have control over what, how much, and whether I allow my mind
to think. I want to extend myself so that I continue to reach what I think
is my capacity for tolerance of time and silence and then push beyond.
Strengthening my connection to the Universal Mind that is the inner place
of quiet and knowing will allow me to find it more and more easily in every
moment of my life.
Present Moment
In his book, Wherever You Go, There You Are, Jon Kabat-Zinn describes
meditation practice as the effort to cultivate our ability to be in the
present moment (9). Living in the present is one of the most powerful Zen
concepts and one that has already greatly influenced how I live my daily
life.
Kabat-Zinn demonstrated what it means to live in the present moment
in a powerful way when he pointed out that every other creature and plant
on the Earth functions in the present. In Nature every event happens for
a reason in its own time. Living in the present is about giving permission
to allow this moment to be exactly as it is without forcing. When there
is no forcing one can surrender to the moment and appreciate it as it is.
Not forcing means doing things in the most harmonious and reverent way
but maybe not necessarily the most efficient way. Not setting goals, not
forcing an agenda but instead, letting go and moving with the flow of life's
energy moment by moment is living in the present. The analogy of the leaf
just falling is a powerful visual for letting go to the moment.
Another benefit of living in the Now is that it gives me a way to deal
with the concept of past and future. I can remember events and people in
my past and I can think about the future but the only real time that I
have is this moment right now. It is true that the circumstances that brought
me to this moment are the result of all that has gone on before it. This
moment is an accumulation of all past moments. Likewise, my action in this
moment is the seed that will determine whether my next moment will be one
of greater understanding, clarity and kindness. I can have regrets about
the past and I can worry and wonder about what will happen in the future,
but it is only this moment that tells me how I feel right now. This philosophy
of living forces and allows one to live the Truth.
Zen writing talks a lot about the kind of Truth that comes from being
aware of what's happening in this moment. Whatever I feel in this moment
is what I am feeling. If I feel sad, the truth is that I am sad and that's
OK. Jakusho Kwong tells us in No Beginning No End that returning
to the moment is a way to renew our lives moment after moment because the
energy of life is one of constant change (247). We suffer because we think
every thing, every emotion is fixed and permanent. It's hard to know which
is the cause and which the effect. Is it because we don't realize that
everything is in constant motion and change that we feel the need to name
and define our life. Or is it our obsession with having to define and label
things that keeps us from knowing that life is constant change and that
definition separates us from the whole? The Truth is that everything is
connected and everything is changing. We are just as much a part of that
dynamic as every other sentient being on the planet and in the universe.
Kwong puts it succinctly when he says, "Once you are no longer separated
from reality, once the duality of subject and object, inside and outside,
appears less in your mind, you meet yourself everywhere (245). Isn't it
interesting that bringing oneself into the fine-tuned space of this very
moment can open up such a vast world of interconnectedness? It's the ever
changing world of constant movement, of no beginning, no end. And even
though to some this might cause a sense of fear and insecurity, for me
it's a connection that brings calmness and stability and, of course, responsibility.
Mindfulness
Responsibility is a word that, for me, describes living mindfully. Mindfulness
means paying attention in a particular way, on purpose. Mindfulness is
caring about and taking responsibility for every word, thought, and action.
Mindfulness comes directly out of living in the present moment. It is described
as the cultivation of some appreciation for the fullness of each moment
(Kabat-Zinn 3). Mindfulness is a sustained, mindful, attentive looking
and feeling in each moment.
Mindfulness cultivates patience; patience cultivates mindfulness. This
one speaks loudly to me. I am a high-energy person who has always prided
myself on my ability to do more than one thing at a time. I'm the one who
carries around the list, constantly checking off and adding each task that's
required to complete the job in the timeframe allotted. I can be fixing
one problem and at the same time thinking about how getting this one done
will affect the next two or three things on my list. My approach to doing
something has been described, in the past, as "blasting". There
is nothing about Zen that says one can't get things done. Mindfulness is
about the approach and action used to carry out the process. Acting with
mindfulness asks us to bring an awareness to each task that allows us to
see and understand the interconnectedness of all of life's experiences.
Kabat-Zinn describes mindfulness as the "engagement with the full
range of phenomena experienced by human beings" (74).
Living my life in mindfulness will require effort and discipline. It
means being awake and aware of what I am doing as much of the time as possible.
The skills I acquire from practicing meditation will allow me to quiet
the thoughts in my mind which will help me stay in the Now moment. Mindfulness
can only happen in the Now moment. It is this kind of attention that will
bring clarity and meaningfulness to what I do which is what mindfulness
is all about.
Everyday Tasks
"String moments of awareness together, moment by moment" (Kabat-Zinn
19). That may become my mantra for approaching the tasks of my everyday
life. The Zen writings have interesting things to say about the everyday
of life. It's referred to as the ordinary - an ordinary that provides the
potential to come alive. It's the soothing motion of repetition whether
we're sweeping a broom from side to side or using circular motions to dry
the dinner plates. Zen emphasizes coming full circle, back to the ordinary
and the everyday, Kabat-Zinn says (267). It's the particulars of life that
count - how I walk, how I sit, how I eat, how I talk, how I relate to another
and to my environment. It's an intimacy with life that includes everything
I do an intimacy that can only happen when I place myself directly
into the experience. Zen is direct experience.
Zen teaching depends on example because we can neither talk about nor
explain reality. Gary Thorp explains the importance of this kind of experiencing
in his book Sweeping Changes when he says that "nothing compares
to actually plunging into the water where you can feel the wateriness
to the very root of your being. When you "experience" water,
you know it in a truly different way. You'll always be able to relate to
it, even though you may have difficulty describing it in words" (136).
Or the example given that in order to make good bread we must do it over
and over until we become the bread. We must figuratively put ourselves
in the oven just as we put ourselves into everything else we do if we are
to know what bread is and what we are. Direct experience is about having
no barriers between you and what you're doing.
It's about doing just one thing at a time and putting your entire self
into it. How many of us read while we're eating. Watch TV while we eat.
Talk on the phone while we drive the car. The true essence of Zen is in
this moment; just do one thing. Experiencing life in this way brings a
certain newness to everything. If we are truly engaged, we will experience
the same task differently each time we do it. We will forget what we're
doing. We will stop thinking and become one with the task. Without thinking,
without expecting anything, we will be completely free within the daily
activity of life.
When we reach this state of doing, it could be said that we are in a
state of non-doing. The joy of non-doing is that nothing else needs to
happen for this moment to be complete. Non-doing means letting things be
and allowing them to unfold in their own way. Non-doing is described by
Kabat-Zinn as letting execution unfold beyond technique, beyond exertion,
beyond thinking. It is a merging of mind and body in motion (44). Non-doing
could be described again as letting go. Just as the rain falls, letting
go is a conscious decision to release with full acceptance into the stream
of present moments as they are unfolding. It seems to me that the ultimate
challenge is whether we can be in touch with our life unfolding. And the
ultimate experience is being in touch with our life unfolding. I believe
the Zen methodology provides the tools that can bring me very close to
this kind of experience.
.
The practice, the moment, and mindfulness in my life every day. Practical
Zen is about coming from a place within rather than being motivated by
activities and interactions outside. It's about letting go. It's about
finding the place, the space, and the time to become quiet. To engage from
a place of stillness that connects me with each moment. It's about waking
up and experiencing things just the way they are, in the here and now.
With full mind, full attention, full awareness.
Cynthia Perry, Practical Zen II
Monday, September 22, 2003
I feel, at times, that my writing is very elementary. Maybe because
I'm amazed at how difficult it is for me to turn what I read and have a
real reaction to around into thoughts that flow and make sense. Is that
one of the goals of this work - to become better at comprehending and then
enunciating information? It's a huge organizational task for me to read
about things in lots of different places and then regurgitate it in a thoughtful,
intellectual way.
I feel I live with a view of life, I live a life that is magical, enchanted,
feeling, and perceptive right now. My practice of being in the present
moment is awakening even more of those types of responses in me. And I
think, hope, more people "should, could" do the same? But when
I get out into the world (traveling) or just think about the people I'm
around every day, I wonder how I think I could do anything to change any
of their ways of doing or seeing things. And how can I tell how they're
perceiving anyway? I don't want to judge. So it's a personal thing. But
what do I do with it? Should I or can I express it?
Things that I would love to experience are moving in the wind, on the
beach, in flowing fabric. Dancing to Diana Krall with someone who feels
it the same as I do and experiencing the sensation of our moving together.
I can sense so vividly what that would feel like that I well up with emotion
and my breath is taken away just thinking about it. That's something I
could do forever.
I react. But who am I to think that the way I react is special or worthy
of note, or that I can affect anyone else's perception.
I am a very organized person. People tell me that all the time at work.
They love me for it. It has helped me find a niche in the workplace. But
just being able to write now as it comes out, feels very freeing. It feels
like I was at the point of explosion and this is a major release.
I feel like I need to find some theme, idea, methodology upon which
to build whatever it is I'm going to take into the world? My perceptions?
My view? Or is my expressing them enough?
Meaning, passion, spirit, closeness, experience.
Believe me, I'm not interested in psychoanalysis. I've mentioned this.
I've done a lot of personal work (I vowed never to go to a psychologist)
using a technique that a friend of mine has developed over the past 15
years. It's personal and I do the work. And it has worked. I'm not interested
in Zen for that reason. But I have found that the idea of being in the
present moment, (that that is the only time we really have) has given me
a place to come back to and feel grounded.
I'm planning to go to a meeting in October where they will talk about
work in the Peace Corps. That's something I wanted to do when I graduated
high school. But didn't. It was a long time after that before I realized
that back then I didn't have a real self. I wasn't really connected to
my self. I have done a lot of work in the past few years, work that has
built my self-esteem and opened my awareness to who I am to falling
in love with my self. I understand now the phrase, you can't say I love
you until you can say "I". If I had known
Using technology. Camera. Music. Tape recorder. If I were more responsive
to technology I could branch out and find new ways to express. Maybe the
camera. Maybe film. I did think about that in one of my "open yourself
to all possibilities" sessions I did with Margo before I came to Goddard.
I liked the feeling of the movement better than the photo that stops the
action.
Am I just all words and no action? What are all these big ideas
building a house, making a film, being an artist? And I sit here reading
words to regurgitate in a report.
I play mostly popular music on the piano now dance band music
of the 40's, show tunes, 60's and 70's popular songs, David Lanz and other
"new age" stuff. I've always been a good sight reader but never
done any improv. I'm just beginning to feel comfortable moving away from
the printed notes and letting my body speak through my fingers. When I'm
not reading the notes, the music flows, moves. Is simple, with a melodic
line that speaks. A lot of times in a minor key. In the mood of Spanish
guitar. With a repeated phrase somewhere in it that is haunting. And the
moment when the minor chording resolves to the major, a feeling of such
beauty and completeness.
My playing has been described as with "heart" at the Unity
church where I've been playing for both Sunday services since May. It has
been another kind of "coming out" for me. A way of learning more
about who I am and to feel more and more comfortable with that. But the
interim minister who is here until February, when we will have a permanent
replacement for Sherry, an unbelievably wonderful person who supported
me and made a comfortable place for me to express myself through music,
wants to hire a permanent music director who will put together "performances"
each Sunday. That's not my style, so I'm giving that up for now. I'll have
Sunday mornings back again. I sold my parlor grand piano about six months
ago. My friends are letting me use their electronic keyboard, which is
wonderful because I can play it, with the headset, any time of the day
or night.
I love the look of Finnish words. Repetitive letters in geometric starkness.
And the sound of Japanese words broken into short, crisp syllables.
Sometimes I think I could just go on living my life, everyday, being
aware of how I perceive the world and everything would be just fine. But
I feel I need more. It's like the Buddhist writings say, we seem to be
searching for something that is here right now. I feel I have something
to say in some way. If my "enchanted" experience of life is what
I have to say, then how, to whom, and why do I talk about it?
There are so many things that pull me in. Goldsworthy's work. Taking
the ordinary and making us see it. The air. The movement of water. It's
not enough to build a small stone fence, you build it for miles curving
around the trees and disappearing into the water. Doing more than you think
is possible. Finding just the right stones. Lots and lots of them.
That juxtaposed to the amount of expression that can be read into a
simple, single calligraphic line. Bringing everything down to one brushstroke,
one moment. Maybe that's all we really have. I don't look at this Master's
process as necessarily having a goal an ending a completion.
I'm not looking for the final answer and then I'll be done. I'm struggling
with finding a means, a method, a medium I can use that will allow me to
continue living each moment with meaning right up to the last one.
The way I feel when I see rows of corn or wheat in the fields. Rows.
Rows of sand in the Japanese garden. Rows of quilting. Rows of coiling
that spiral into shape. Many rows moving together. Pattern. Simplicity.
Essence. Stillpoint. Movement.
I have written these thoughts as they came to me. Can I find the energy
to organize them into something coherent? I would like to just leave them.
Is all I'm trying to do is say something, talk about how I experience
the world? I have enjoyed that part of my writing so far. Being aware and
then writing about it? Or taking a picture of it? Or playing music about
it?
I feel I need some kind of framework that gives whatever I'm doing credibility.
Something big enough to make it real? Or noticed by others? Or gives me
the confidence that I can do something with it? That's what I seem to be
searching for.
That's one of the things I liked about wabi-sabi (besides the words
themselves!). It's not feng shui. It's not something that's out there much
now, YET! It's like I'm trying to be ahead of what the next rush of marketing
hype will be about. I don't want to do that. But I feel like I need some
way to be identified. Why is that? Do I?
No, I have had a very honest, deep reaction to the Zen thing, initially
for its concept of being in the present moment. That has a whole lot of
meaning for me. Just saying it can ground me to where I find myself. But
I've reacted with feeling to some of the aesthetic principles that come
out Zen also the simplicity, the impermanence, the repetition.
Just the other day my "boss", the General Manager, a 35-year
old woman who has a lot of the same expectations and runs the organization
a lot the way I would, said to me that she was impressed with the way I
was saying more and becoming more of a presence in what was going on there.
I have a reputation for not making mistakes. People at work make a big
deal about it if I "mess up".
I like challenges. Taking on big projects that have a meaning. I have
energy and spirit to put into things like that.
I've never had a job as a human resources manager. But that's what I
do at the Community Mercantile, our local, 27-year old natural food cooperative.
I've been in the business world all my life, having spent a number of years
working with my former husband in computer start-ups where I did everything
from writing legal agreements to designing marketing brochures to producing
financial reports. It's there that I gained a lot of experience doing systems
work the design and implementation of procedures and processes. In
fact, I would have told you that I felt my biggest weakness was in dealing
with people, never been anything I was drawn to. But at the Merc, what
I do and the way I do it is working. Jeanie, my "boss", had so
much faith, or whatever, in me that she didn't even look at my resumé
before she hired me as their first HR Manager, more than two years ago.
I'm continuing to write policies and procedures, but I also get to "oversee,
help, interact with" a family of about 100 employees in lots of different
situations. I'm genuinely friendly, have lots of energy, consistently positive,
and also thought of as being very professional with high expectations for
quality work. It's turned out to be a good combination for this environment.
Plus I get to work in a place that sells stuff I believe in and that I
eat! For that I am very, very, very grateful. Like, it has been a perfect
situation for me.
All of this seems a helluva long way from the intricate meanings of
the tea ceremony. But this is what your letter has pulled out of me. Should
I send this to you now or put it with my next packet? I'll think about
it for awhile.
I do believe that the divine plan for me is to live fully, meaningfully,
and productively. It's not that I'm not there now. I'm very, very grateful
for the opportunity to open to the Universe and find more.
Maybe it's all about balance. Balance of moving slowly and blasting.
Balance of rest and work. Balance of emotion and passion. Balance of desire
and completeness. Balance of wanting more and having enough. Balance of
knowing and wondering. Balance of holding in and letting out. Balance of
speaking and silence. Balance of something and nothingness. Balance of
whiteness and color. Balance of thoughts and actions. Balance of pushing
and stopping. Balance of structure and chaos. Balance of control and freedom.
Balance of planning and letting go. Balance of
Pushing, pushing, pushing,
What do I need?
What do I want?
Where will I find it?
Why do I need it?
What will I do with it if I find it?
How will I know if I've found it?
Do I already have it and don't know it?
IT
Why do I think that I will ever find the answer to those questions?
I don't want to get into "pushing" mode again. Searching. Asking.
The Zen thing has calmed me down. Too much?
Should I live my fantasies? Make beautiful meals? Dress in soft clothing?
Dance in a flowing dress? Sit in the middle of a flower garden? Ride the
wind? Sometimes it seems like those are better left as fantasies. It feels
risky any other way. Like I could easily lose my groundedness. I can feel
them almost as though they are real. Maybe that's the feeling I'm trying
to express in words? How else?
An expertise, a mastery, an authority to claim. I had the thought a
couple of weeks ago that one thing I would be good at and maybe should
prepare for is running an organization heading up something. Prepare
for? Anything other than this moment is speculation.
My husband was always trying to turn my creative work into a business.
We'll sell the dolls/figures you create, the children's clothing you make,
the rugs you weave, the containers you coil. But it never worked because
whenever we got to the marketing part, I didn't want to think about or
try to figure out why people buy or what I had to do to get them to buy.
I like the idea of handmade but not the idea of hyping that goes into just
about anything that's out there these days.
I have been writing and thinking for more than four hours. I came home,
opened the computer and it started pouring out. I get up and walk away
and rush back because another thought is coming.
They're out. They came out this way. A big moment of spontaneity. I
can't put them in any order. It's as it has to be.
Thursday September 25
It's 3:30am. I might as well get up and write.
I was only looking at ZEN as a basis upon which to build my project.
There were some good connections being made in all my reading about it.
Getting into the aesthetics, artistic part of it was very interesting to
me. I like living in a "world" of connections. Where I'll find
references to people, events, books, that I've heard about or read or done
at another time. It's like Tuesday. I got off work and it was so perfectly
gorgeous outside I knew there was nothing I could do but go to the university
and lie in the sun at my favorite spot. It's very near the art and architecture
library and I had some books to return. I decided I'd check out the current
periodical section to read my favorite magazines while I was there. (Things
like that excite, fulfill, make me feel good.) I did take the books back,
went to the bathroom and as I walked through one of the aisles of books
I set up an exercise. I thought OK, go to a book that is important. This
has happened quite often for me when I've been unconscious about it. I
will just go to something that is the right thing for that time. The only
difference was this time I was setting it up in the beginning. I kept walking
toward the periodical section. There's a shelf of new books near there
and as I walked straight toward it I was drawn to a book, facing frontwise
on the shelf. I picked it up to find that it was a book on a recent art
exhibition that featured as one of the artists, Brice Martin, someone I
had never heard of until David Clarke talked about him in his article on
Zen and American Artists.
I had made a note at the time I read about him that I wanted to look
up his art. I sat down and read the book. I really liked the art of another
of the artists featured in the exhibit, as well. I learned even more about
the influence of Zen on American art and artists in the 1930's, 40's, and
50's. And even that Georgia O'Keefe had made a connection with and been
influenced by the calligraphic style. It had one of her pictures in the
book. I can't find the word to explain how I felt when I saw her painting.
So minimalist and immediate.
I really love making connections and living in a connected world. It
gives everything meaning and opens to new possibilities, connections, all
the time. It's about just letting things lead you, taking your cues from
listening and being aware. I've also had an interesting reaction to reading
about artists in this section on Zen. I actually had the thought that if
I had pursued a Master's in art history, this would have been the perfect
subject to delve into the influence of Zen on American Art. Continuing
on in a study of art history was never anything I thought I would do at
all. I always enjoyed the connection part of art history the most. Now,
out on my own and away from what has to be done, I'm actually making new
connections that have meaning to me. And finding new artists whose work
I can have personal reactions to. It has a mature feeling to it for me.
A feeling that this is something I will always have.
In fact, that's what living this "enchanted" life gives me
also. It feels like something that will be with me all my life. That it
is very personal. Something I will know deep inside that I have. That means
I won't ever be alone. It feels very satisfying to me.
It was interesting that a friend of mine, well, not really a close friend,
but a girl I went to high school with who is living in Lawrence now, stopped
into the store yesterday at lunch time to see if I was busy. I was delighted
to have someone new to eat lunch with. During the conversation she said
she really wanted to get away from watching her TV all the time, for one
reason because when she did that, she snacked and ate too much. (This woman
is not a typical couch potato. She has her own business of court reporting.
Was on the debate team in high school. Bright. Etc.) She asked me straight
out. Tell me what you would do with your time (if you weren't doing this
"study"). I told her I had been considering that recently. How
would I just "live" my life if I weren't being driven to some
more immediate goal. I didn't have any problem answering her. I told her
I would always be reading something interesting, going to the university
library or to the used book store to see what was "up" next.
Following leads and making connections that would undoubtedly bring new
experiences and opportunities for creativity. I'd play the piano, listen
to music, dance. I'd enjoy fixing good food and having a friend over for
conversation. And maybe just sit. She was invigorated. I said, well maybe
the first step is to get rid of the TV.
Friday, September 26
I am finding it freeing to not be bound to books when I sit down to
write. To be able to just write what I feel, what is on my mind, and try
to relate that to this topic without a lot of extra verbiage from others.
Maybe it's the little things that I need to concentrate on for sure.
That I need to learn how to express. So I can know that I do have feelings.
That I can express them. That I can talk them. To make my life richer,
fuller, more complete. To counterbalance the blasting, routine, organized
world. To go a level or two or three deeper. That by learning how to talk
about these kinds of things, I will become a deeper, more caring, more
communicative, more authentic person. To allow the feelings, the words,
the thoughts, the gestures to become a part of my life. It's about finding
my self in the ordinariness of life. But it isn't really ordinary. But
it's also not the really BIG challenges, either. It's not the bike trip
around the Gaspé Peninsula, building my own house, writing a book,
running a business. This is quiet, unassuming, but truthful. Real. Ongoing.
It's been a long time since I was hard on myself. I'm finding this time
around that I don't need or want to do it. That I can pull myself out of
it quickly. But I am still haunted with the judgment that I'm all words
and no action which is making me fearful to commit to any one project.
Is the problem that I haven't found the right project? Or is it more a
need to just experience what comes, as it comes, instead of setting up
scenarios, creating experiences. For instance, there are particular parts
of the straw bale construction project that continue to be in my thoughts
as a sensation that I would like to experience. In particular, I
am fascinated with the feeling of being in a small room with such deep,
narrow windows, and I can feel, through my hands, the sensuousness of applying
the plaster on the straw to sculpt the shape. What does it mean to imagine
these feelings? In some ways, that's enough. Or has been. Right now my
hands would love to be feeling the cool wetness of the plaster and applying
it in swirling motions at the rounded edges of the window sill.
The pictures of the straw packages of soybean curd and eggs in the Wabi-Sabi-Suki
book. Their stunningly simple beauty is beyond words. The starkness of
the tan straw with the white eggs. The square, triangle, and round shapes
of the soybean products in the simple, red lacquer box. Can the essence
of this beauty be described? Or am I just trying to describe my reaction
to it? What do I feel when I look at it? Order? Peace?
The leaf packages made from wrapped and tied pieces of bamboo leaves.
What do they speak of? What is so intriguing about them? The dark green
leaves that wrap them? The delicate ties? The smallness? The texture? Do
I want to hold them? Do I want to be inside them? Do I want to be them?
What deep emotion is being evoked here? In one way I could try for a long
time to explain the sensation they evoke. And in another way I am totally
satisfied to let them just "be". To experience them and let them
go.
I am really rambling but it feels good to just write from the feeling
and not from an intellectual perspective.
I feel like my study of the different aspects of Zen was being spontaneous
to what the world brings on a path of discovery and connection. I
felt that this was a very worthwhile effort at something that could inform
my work. I probably was getting myself buried a little too deeply into
the specifics of the tea ceremony, calligraphy, and tea gardens. But there
are aspects of each of these that I reacted to very deeply. I tend to get
caught up in following paths of interest and making connections that perhaps
remove me too far. But as I make connections and follow leads I feel passion
and excitement and in this case, it felt like it was, and in actuality
was, leading me to some very basic truths.
I look for signs, synchronicities, and connections in all that I do.
An awareness of the connections in my life helps me make my decisions,
both at an intuitive level and after contemplation. The straw bale house
idea comes from a place five or six years ago when I really felt I needed
to build something of my own. As I look back, in the time period since
then, I have been building something of my own, me.
I would love the experience of heading up a crew that builds this kind
of house. It would be another one of those "challenge" types
of experiences. I found a lot of the sites on the internet related to straw
bale construction, including the ones where women are building their own
and even starting companies related to that idea. That's another thing
I know about myself and have to watch out for. I have to be careful about
finding out about what other people have done with ideas similar to mine
because then I tend to judge myself against them. I'm better off creating
and defining what I do with the knowledge that comes from within me
not because someone else either has or hasn't done a similar thing.
An interesting observation that my recent writing has pointed out to
me - the two extremes total organization on the outside and the huge
bank of feelings on the inside.
Astro Saladino, Reading
notes from: Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City
by Nicholas Christopher (these are all quotes from Christopher)
As with most film noir protagonists, the posthumous narrator is possessed
by what Leslie Fiedler, in asserting the primacy of the Gothic influence
on American literature since 1800, defines as "images of alienation,
flight and abysmal fear."
The disjunction between the voice-over, cool and calm, and the tangled,
ongoing, present action of what we see, provides inherent, revelatory,
sometimes unbearable tension.
Edgar Allan Poe: our first poet of the industrialized, extended city,
an avatar of the exotic and the macabre, the inventor of the modern detective
story.
film noir: a term coined in 1946 by French critic Nino Frank.
Twentieth century man is . . . seized and possessed by his own creation,
the City, and is made into its creation, its executive organ, and finally
its victim.
The oblique lighting and camera-angling referred to, in both studio
and location scenes, reinforce our implicit understanding that the characters'
motives are furtive, ambiguous, and psychologically charged; that their
innermost conflicts and desires are rooted in urban claustrophobia and
stasis; and that they tread a shadowy borderline between repressed violence
and outright vulnerability.
There is organized crime, social conditions at once fluctuating and
polarized, the ebb and flow (and muck and mire) of politics and finance,
ethnic clashes, cultural crosscurrents (and shocks), a Babel of languages
and all their permutations (from street talk to salon niceties), and a
psychic atmosphere in which nightmares and dreams, the fantastic and the
mundane, collide at every turn.
"Labyrinth" (a metaphor for the noir city) derives from a
pre-Hellenic, Lydian word, labrys, meaning "doubled-headed
axe," which was an emblem of sovereignty in Minoan Crete, shaped like
a waxing and waning moon fused together back to back and symbolizing the
moon goddess' creative as well as destructive powers.
In The Dream of the Underworld by James Hillman, "Entering
the underwold" refers to a transition from the maerial to the psychical
point of view. Three dimesnions become two as the perspective of nature,
flesh, and matter fall away, leaving an existence of immaterial, mirrorlike
images. Which could also serve as a definition of film.
"The undersorld is the mythological style of describing a psychological
cosmos . . . the underworld is psyche."
The noir city is not just a given city on a given night but an entire
urban civilization that seems to be unraveling faster than the mind can
comprehend a collective nervous breakdown observed at fast speed.
By night, the city's downtown is a tableau of slashing white light,
steep jet shadows, and richly luminous surfaces punctuated by the flashes
of chrome and glass on parked cars, the mirrors on vending machines, and
even the stainless steel cart of an all-night popcorn vendor, who would
seem to have little prospect of making a sale on the utterly deserted streets.
By 1955, the film noir hero of Kiss Me Deadly is no longer a
prisoner of his own private hell; he is the tenant in a universal Hell,
as boundaryless and unstoppable in its growth as the nuclar explosion that
ends his life.
Much of the tension in the quick, slippery, descending arc that the
noir hero follows to his destruction lies in the fact that the smaller
maze is continually contracting while the larger one is every-expanding.
In the noir cityscapes we are often being introduced to the film's most
significant element the city just as in other genres we more
commonly see one of the characters enter a film's narrative frame behind
the opening credits.
From the first, the labyrinth in the film noir the city-as-world
is made to appear implacable and unassailable, and the hero puny
and vulnerable. The one, all stone and steel, will endure; the other will
play out a short, transient role among millions of others as insignificant
and interchangeable as he, and then disappear.
The city itself is portrayed as a battlefield, imploding from within.
The great, sprawling American city, endlessly in flux, both spectacular
and sordid, with all its amazing permutations of human and topographical
growths, with its deeply textured nocturnal life that can be a seductive,
almost otherworldly, labyrinth of dreams or a tawdry bazaar of lost souls:
the city is the seedbed of noir.
Los Angeles: in 1830 a mission settlement on the fringes of the Spanish
Empire, by 1945 it is a 500-square-mile sprawl.
Like the conquistadors who brought untold diseases of the body to the
New World in the sixteenth century, the G.I.s returning to the US from
Europe and the Pacific carry, not microbes, but lethal infirmities of the
mind and spirit after four years of living day in and day out with brutality
and violent death, and of surviving a war in which 1700 cities and townships
were destroyed and 35 million people were killed.
Lewis Mumford, The City in History: "No matter how many
valuable functions the city has furthered, it has also served, throughout
most of its history, as a container of organized violence."
Alex de Tocqueville: "I regard the size of some American cities
and especially the nature of their inhabitants as a real danger threatening
the future of the democratic republics of the New World, and I should not
hesitate to predict that it is through them that they will will perish
. . . "
Between the economic poles of opulence and squalor, and the overlapping
social codes of rapacious laissez-faire capitalism and organized crime,
the indelibale motto of the postwar American city in the so-called boom
years becomes "Anything Goes."
The broad cycle of film noirs that burst forth on the heels of the Second
World War can be seen to comprise the complex mosaid of a single, thirteen-year
urban dreamscape often nightmarish, often fantastic and beautiful,
always symbol-laden, and sometimes so starkly black-and-white (literally
and figuratively) in its depiction of city life, and of the innermost conflicts
and struggles of the human spirit in the city, that it shocks us into moments
of recognition and epiphany.
These films share a stark, dark vision of American urban life. While
they represent the apogee of black-and-white filmmaking, with their stunning
visual style and technical virtuousity, on the deepest level they are not
concerned primarily with black and white good and evil,a s such
in moral terms, but with the grays, the subtler gradations (as in degrees
of Hell) of a more pervasive evil.
The tremendous postwar boom in consumer goods and luxury items . . .
and the wildfire acquisitiveness and gaudy commercialism that accompanied
it, and that "freedom at any price" ethos takes on an even uglier
tinge.
"final global dementia."
Businessmen have become indistinguishable from gangsters, nervous breakdowns
and emotional burnouts are depicted as commonplace, and all of it is backdropped
by
