Category Archives: The Arts

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You’ve Heard of Purple Prose….

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…well, today I present: Purple Poetry.   The prompt for today’s National Poetry Writing Month post invites us to compose a piece based on a color.  I have to admit that my first response was to think of the goofy beatnik poetry in Ken Nordine’s Colors album, which Steve has.  “Yellow was in trouble…” and “Green can be a problem..”  If you’ve never heard these, you must.  They’re just too much fun!

So here’s my own word association dream on The Color Purple (no, don’t think of Alice Walker):

Twisting tendrils pulsing poison

Bloody Portuguese placenta

      birth marks and umbilicus

      bruises rhyme with purple wine

      capillary coupling

People eaters robed in splendor

Atmospheric skies at sunset

      mussels in deep, hazy rain

      eggplant mountains majesty

      purple cows and penitents

Pimpernel-ish violet babies

Lilac lavender suspension

     (dot, dot, dot) of disbelief.

And for the shutterbugs, some photos, too!

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BOINNNNNG!!!

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As we were walking off in the rain to meet his mom for breakfast, Steve made this sound of spring….boinnng!  I thought that would make a good title for a post. I admit that I am a sound effects gal.   It comes with being an actor of sorts and a singer.  Ever notice how most guys do use sound effects at least occasionally in their conversation, but women do less often?  Maybe it’s not really ladylike, but I get more animated as I get more comfortable with the people around me.  I enjoy hamming it up.  I’ve been posting some pretty serious stuff because I have a lot of that in me, too, but lately, I’ve been itching to burst out with something creative and lively.   I am ready to engage in some collaboration, but I’ve been frustrated in my recent attempts with voice students and job interviews (still waiting to hear from Old World Wisconsin).  I’ve found something to try, though….a poetry challenge!

That’s right, folks, the NaPoWriMo challenge is about to begin on April 1!  This is the National Poetry Writing Month challenge: a poem a day for 30 days.  I once self-published a booklet of poems and sold 50 copies at my church’s gift shop, all proceeds going to charity.  One of my poems got published in The Living Church magazine, though I got no payment for it.  My religious poetry tried to be very serious.  Nowadays I write rhyming greeting card poetry for Steve’s aunt, just because she lights up so generously when I do.  I’m curious to see how I might respond to the prompts offered by the challenge organizers.  It’ll be another way to discover who I am, and possibly there will be a collaborative element as I post and receive comments.  My father used to write very amusing little rhymes in Valentines and birthday cards for me and my kids.  I loved getting those in the mail!  I miss that.  Perhaps some of that joy will spring up with this endeavor in April.  Also, it’ll be fun to try to illustrate my posts with photographs to match. 

What do you do when you hunger for creative collaboration?  (…besides what the birds & bees are doing 😉 , which is very satisfying as well!)

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Art, Time, and Love

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In the expansive mist of morning, when my soul takes time and room to breathe and stretch, I gaze around my room and wonder what I might do with myself.  My eyes light on the top shelf of a bookcase, where stands a handmade paper album.  Pages of rough texture wait to absorb something well-constructed, like a bed of rice made to nestle a complicated curry.  What poem or drawing or photograph would be worthy to lie in those lush furrows?  Surely nothing as lowly as what I would create.  Yet I long to put my time, my love, my hands to work, to make something.  I want to slowly blend my life into some material.  The satisfaction is exquisite.  I felt it once, birthing and raising children.  The medium responds, reacts, engages, resists.  It is not a work of power; it is a work of love.

I have begun to notice an impatient annoyance building up in me when I look at photography sites.  I am enamored of the images, but so often the captions leave me irritated.  I do want to know what I’m looking at and where it was found.  I don’t like the flavor of language that suggests violence.  “I captured”, “I shot”, “I took”, “I caught”.  Why not just say that you were there?  It was there.  You made a photograph of it at that place and in time.  Doesn’t that sound more respectful somehow?  It does to me.

I like art that shows that respect.  An artist is generous with time, patient, slow, allowing something to unfold, gently.  There is a generosity of presence in art.  An artist gives herself – body, consciousness, energy, and love – into a relationship with her work and medium.  That’s what feels so rich, pleasing and compelling in a well-made piece.   Whatever it is.  I am often so task-oriented that I don’t think of that.  I was taught to be efficient, neat and accurate.  In preparing a meal, for instance.   When I began cooking for Steve, he’d ask me about supper, and I’d tell him the steps I planned to take and ask for his input on decisions.  He’d respond with something like, “Just make it with love.”  I wasn’t sure what that meant.  I think I have a better idea now. 

I have a whole day and a whole chicken ahead of me.  I want to make something satisfying, not just in the end product, but in the relationship along the way.  I’ll let you know how that turns out.  Meanwhile, I’ll share these pictures from Horicon Marsh.  I didn’t take them.  I like to think I invited them, and they came willingly.

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About Last Night…

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I skipped posting a blog entry yesterday.  We left town at 10:15 in the morning and drove to Chicago for a matinee at the Lyric Opera.  Then we went out to dinner with my newly legal daughter and didn’t return home until midnight.  That is my official factual excuse and reads kind of like the ones my mother used to write to my teachers in elementary school.  “Please excuse Priscilla’s absence from school yesterday.  She had stomach flu.”  The end.  Oh, but last night was wonderful.  I was aware of so much, and now I’m just not sure what to share, where to start, which story to begin.  If I had brought a camera with me, I might just present a series of abstracts and let you fill in the rest.  I didn’t bring a camera; I brought myself.  The data is in me, the images, the sensations, the concepts.  I am full and perhaps trying to stay that way.  If I leak a bit of the experience, will I lose it somehow?  If I try to distill the essence of the evening, will I vaporize much of what I so enjoyed?  Am I allowed to carry my life around like a secret?  Of course, I’m allowed.  The real question is, do I want to?  Why post and share and write and tell?  I sometimes hover between bursting like a pinata and hording like a dragon.  What do you do with the precious value of living?

Smile.  I’ll start with that.

Driving the Interstate with Steve, holding hands and laughing to Garrison Keillor’s radio broadcast “A Prairie Home Companion”.  Finding an alternate route on two-lane highways through the fields when we found the Interstate was closed in one section.  Settling in the upper balcony under a golden ceiling to listen to the virtuosity of a live performance of Baroque music.  Closing my eyes to the modern staging of Handel’s “Rinaldo” and imagining powdered wigs and candlelight.  Imagining what it would feel like to have those glorious high notes, trills, and runs burble out from my own mouth.  Watching my daughter talk about her life, noting her gestures, her warmth, her composure, marveling at her maturity.  Tasting truffle oil, mushrooms, garlic, Sangiovese, gnocchi, gelato – savoring and exclaiming pleasurably to one another in mid sentence.  Talking to the hostess about her Italian family, the recipes, the home country, the history.  Speaking words of love and support and appreciation to my daughter, noticing the shape of the space between us.  Riding home in the dark, so sleepy, so content.

“We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.”
― Thornton Wilder

photo from the restaurant's website

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It’s All How You Look At It

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Stan Freeburg’s comedy musical “The United States of America” contains a line where a Native American remarks to Christopher Columbus that they discovered the white man.  “Whaddya mean you discovered us?”  “We discover you on beach here…is all how you look at it.”  “Y’I suppose…I never thought of it that way,” Chris replies.

Dualistic thinking, good/bad, right/wrong, is all about thinking, as my sister pointed out in a comment.  It’s not about the actual thing in front of us.  So it seems that often all we learn about the world is about how we are thinking about or perceiving it.  Art and artists play around with this quite a bit, of course.  And then philosophers ask, “What is real?”

Who knows.

Do we choose to look at things in a way that gives us pleasure of some kind, even perverse pleasure?  Sure.  I think we photographers get to do this now more than ever with all the tweaking technology allows.  We get to illustrate the story going on inside our skulls.  Here’s an example.

Sample inner monologue: “Rural life is a thing of the past.  Flat, washed out, joyless and crumbling.  There is no life left in the earth by now.  Life is in the cities.  It’s time we bulldozed these ruins and built something we can inhabit.”

Of course, you could be having a completely different monologue in your brain with this image.  Go ahead, share it with us!  Here’s another:

Sample thought: “Ah, the good old days!  Blue skies, wood, stone, a farm.  Life was simpler; it meant something back then to work hard on the land.  All you need is within reach – your livelihood, your family, your pleasure.  Who could ask for anything more?”  Another:

Sample thoughts: “The world is an interesting juxtaposition of contrasting elements – texture, color, shape, pattern, organic and inorganic.  There’s no making sense of it.  The dynamic of life is about the tension and release we experience through our senses every day.  Nothing more.  I need a cigarette!”

There’s no right and wrong in this little exercise.  “Is all how you look at it!”  Please, have a go!  Amuse me!

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The Cycle is Complete

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I have just returned from spending 6 hours at a modern multiplex movie theater.  Hate the glitz, the ads and especially the totally incongruous pre-show music.  I was there to see the HD simulcast of the Metropolitan Opera production of Götterdämmerung, the fourth and last installment of Wagner’s Ring Cycle.  If you’ve never learned anything about opera or Wagner before, I must encourage you to at least read up on it.  This was my first time getting the whole story and the whole score into my head.  I’d heard from my parents about how looooong the operas are.  I’d heard snatches of the music, even parodied by Elmer Fudd (“I shot the wabbit…”).  I’d heard about Wagnerian sopranos and sniggered at breastplates and horned helmets (hasn’t everyone?).   I was not expecting to be emotionally gripped and wrung out on an epic and divine scale, though.  The psychology is deeply moving.  The music supports it as cinematically and sumptuously as may be humanly possible.  The live action, singing and acting, is absolutely intense.  Seeing it with close up camera shots accentuates the intimacy, but it may take away from some of the total experience.  For this production, the set was designed by Robert Lepage of Cirque du Soliel.  It features a monstrous hydrolic machine which often distracts during the quieter instrumental passages as it whirrs and chunks into new positions.  Nevertheless, I was spellbound.  Particularly, I think, because I found myself identifying with Brünnhilde so painfully, on so many levels.   I’ve  been left sobbing at the ending of each of the four operas. 

Yes, I’m a bit of a drama queen.  I was a Voice Performance major in college and spent the last 7 years working for a theater company.  I can really get into live performances.  I put myself into the skin of the lead soprano every time.  But that’s just surface kinship.  Like Brünnhilde, my father was a god (in my eyes, at least, for a very long time), and I did everything I could to please him and do the right thing.  I ended up disappointed, my sister ended up banished, and the betrayal felt very real.  I left my father’s protection and fell in complete and holy love with a hero, a demi-god to many people.  He was duped and taken from me by a fatal disease.  I felt the anger, the confusion, the crushing grief and vowed to put the pieces together and learn the truth.  It took all my strength to face the facts, give up the ring of power, and stand for love.  I want to believe that in the end, greed, envy and the renunciation of love will sink down to the bottom of the river and that true friendship and faithful love will rise up.   So when our heroine mounts her trusty steed and rides into the funeral pyre with the ring on her finger and all of Valhalla (the gods’ palace) burns up and is engulfed in the flood of the Rhine and the ring finally returns to the river maidens, I experience an emotional catharsis that draws from a deep well of tears. 

Brava, Debra Voigt!!!

Drove home in below freezing temperatures, dove under the blankets in my bedroom and looked out the frosty window at this sunset:

It’s like Valhalla is still burning.  Will we ever learn?  At the end of the world, will love win?  The shamans of the Romantic era are telling us it’s possible.  Dare I believe?

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Amusements

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It’s bitter cold and sunny outside today.  A crisp, bright world, intensely interesting.  Here are some things that have captured my attention:

frost on my bedroom window

I doctored these shots a bit, which I rarely do.  There’s so much to explore in photography, even when you don’t have the latest equipment.

My mother sent me this last night.  It evoked those happy tears I told you about.

Steve brought a book to breakfast that my mother and father would love.  It’s called The Superior Person’s Book of Words by Peter Bowler and includes such delightful entries as:

“CALEFACIENT — a.  A medicinal agent producing a feeling of warmth.  ‘Calefacient, anyone?’ you inquire as you pass around the cognac.”

I am creating, with Steve, an Art Trivia Game to be debuted at a dinner party at Steve’s sister’s house celebrating Chinese New Year.  I will also be baking almond cookies to bring to the affair.  The first effort is challenging me to be humorous and inventive.  The second will require that I follow instructions precisely.  I’ll let you know if I succeed at either of those.  I do know that I’m succeeding in keeping myself entertained!

Be warmed and be well, my friends.  It’s a wonderful world we live in!

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Friday the 13th – Rats!

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My daughter added a tidbit of info to my post a few days ago, stating that rats giggle and tickle each other.  I had to check that out and share it with you.  I found that the video at the bottom of that article didn’t work for me, so here’s a youtube clip of Dr. Jaak Panksepp playing with rats.  This is quite a happy little video of some well-behaved rates having a frolic in a nice, clean glass cage lined with AstroTurf.  I had quite a different picture of rats in my head this week.  I grabbed a book to bring to the laundromat on Monday; it happened to be a volume of selected short fiction by Charles Dickens.  I flipped to an entry called “Nurse’s Stories”.  These are not hospital accounts or memorials to field workers bringing medical aid, as I had imagined.  These are the nightmare-inducing tales that young Charles’ nanny told him!  He writes:

“The young woman who brought me acquainted with Captain Murderer had a fiendish enjoyment of my terrors, and used to begin, I remember–as a sort of introductory overture–by clawing the air with both hands, and uttering a long low hollow groan. So acutely did I suffer from this ceremony in combination with this infernal Captain, that I sometimes used to plead I thought I was hardly strong enough and old enough to hear the story again just yet. But, she never spared me one word of it, and indeed commanded the awful chalice to my lips as the only preservative known to science against ‘The Black Cat’–a weird and glaring-eyed supernatural Tom, who was reputed to prowl about the world by night, sucking the breath of infancy, and who was endowed with a special thirst (as I was given to understand) for mine.

This female bard–may she have been repaid my debt of obligation to her in the matter of nightmares and perspirations!–reappears in my memory as the daughter of a shipwright. Her name was Mercy, though she had none on me.”

He then relates the tale of a family of shipwrights, all named Chips, who sold their souls to the Devil “for an iron pot and a bushel of tenpenny nails and half a ton of copper and a rat that could speak”.   This speaking rat, and a cohort of his friends, bedevils poor Chips, at last sinking the ship he crews.  In the end,

“And what the rats–being water-rats– left of Chips, at last floated to shore, and sitting on him was an immense overgrown rat, laughing, that dived when the corpse touched the beach and never came up. And there was a deal of seaweed on the remains. And if you get thirteen bits of seaweed, and dry them and burn them in the fire, they will go off like in these thirteen words as plain as plain can be:

‘A Lemon has pips,
And a Yard has ships,
And I‘ve got Chips!’

So that’s what I was thinking of when I heard about giggling rats.  And then Steve played a selection from a Schubert CD that’s made my blood run cold since I first heard it in college: Der Erlkönig.  The combination of narrative song and piano accompaniment is genius, as you’d expect with Schubert (who is Steve’s absolute favorite composer).  Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau is a master at putting this German ghost story across.  You’ve gotta see this.

So, if you’re not creeped out by now and looking over your shoulder for rats and elves, then enjoy the rest of your Friday the 13th in blissful peace!

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Art, Music & Myth: The Deeper Story of Being Human

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Are human beings the only animals that weep?

Charles Darwin noted that Indian elephants weep.  There have been many books written on the subject of animals’ emotions, and I haven’t read any of them, so I’m not going to venture an answer.  What I do know is that I weep.  And Steve weeps.   When we weep —  not cry, but weep — it seems to come from a sacred place in our soul, a place that has been stirred by something far greater than our selves.  Of course, we can make efforts to wall off that place, if we want to.  Bombarding ourselves with distractions often works to activate those shields.  We can also choose to be curious and try to understand that feeling better.

“I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions . . . The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationship, then you miss the point.” – Mark Rothko

Tears can be a sign of “religious experience”, then.  Fair enough.  Something spiritual is going on there.  What?

“When I was a younger man, art was a lonely thing. No galleries, no collectors, no critics, no money. Yet, it was a golden age, for we all had nothing to lose and a vision to gain. Today it is not quite the same. It is a time of tons of verbiage, activity, consumption. Which condition is better for the world at large I shall not venture to discuss. But I do know, that many of those who are driven to this life are desperately searching for those pockets of silence where we can root and grow. We must all hope we find them.” – Mark Rothko

That loneliness, that “pocket of silence where we can root and grow” resonates deeply with my partner, Steve.  He calls it being moody or refers to his “Slavic melancholy”.  It’s not a sorrowful thing only; it is just as brightly tinted with joy, like some of Rothko’s paintings.  The combination, the totality is what hits home with him.  He says, “The deeper story is to face all of life.  Jesus and the Buddha are heroes of that story.”   They are not conquering wartime heroes interested solely in winning.  They do not struggle and strive.  They embrace all dimensions of life equally: the suffering, the love, the sacrifice, the elation.

Rothko - Untitled Red and Black

In the book The Power of Myth based on Billy Moyers’ interviews with Joseph Campbell, I read:

Campbell:  “The images of myth are reflections of the spiritual potentialities of every one of us. Through contemplating these, we evoke their powers in our own lives.”

Moyers: “Who interprets the divinity inherent in nature for us today? Who are our shamans?”

Campbell: “It is the function of the artist to do this. The artist is the one who communicates myth for today.….”

Steve weeps when listening to Mahler.  And “Puff the Magic Dragon”.  Slipping into his cave, searching for that place to root and grow, he feels the poignant essence of life, the crescendo and decrescendo, and resists exerting his will against the flow.  I think that I have a different sensibility.  Maybe not so expansive, maybe more interior and visceral.  I identify with a lonely pocket of silence for rooting and growing…the womb.  I feel womb-love, the ache, the swoon, the exchange of life blood.  I see colors inside my eyelids, sunshine through membrane, the tragedy and ecstasy and doom of flesh.  Okay, I am in the grip of my biology this week, so this makes a lot of sense.  I have given birth four times and dream of my grown up children regularly.   The story that trips my tear ducts is “Homeward Bound”, anything with a reunion.  The deeper story for me has something to do with connection.  Maybe that’s the Gaia story.  I think she’s like Jesus and Buddha in that she also embraces all of life without struggling or striving, but in her own way.  Perhaps I feel more in my Sacral Chakra,  Steve in his Heart Chakra.

The deeper story of being human is told from inside this skin.  It is not the only story in the universe, however.  There is the elephant’s story, the asteroid’s story, more stories than we can imagine.  I would hope to know many more, and to weep at all of them.

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Zeal for Thy House

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We watched another installment of Simon Schama’s “Power of Art”; this one was on Van Gogh.  I didn’t know that he attempted a career as a missionary and was released for his “over-zealousness”.  That zeal, that fervor exploded in color and paint a few years later.  Perhaps the misfiring of his neurological circuits added to the visions he experienced, but that doesn’t make them any less real, does it?  For the film, an actor portrays him eating an entire tube of chrome yellow.  It is an intensely sensuous clip.  It makes me want to feel the passion myself, love and zeal and lust in an explosion of warm color and bright hope.  I wish I had art sliding around like finger paint beneath my skin.

Making chocolate truffles with my daughter; good gooey creativity

I feel the need to make something.  It’s going to end up being a pot of chili and some yeasty corn bread from scratch.  I wish I had some clay or acrylics lying around to play with, but I suppose it’s just as well I don’t.  I’d feel bad about wasting expensive materials just for the tactile exploration.  Still, I feel a tension within me longing for creative release.  Perhaps that’s because I haven’t been singing regularly for a while, or playing the piano.  I miss getting caught up in the joy of expression.  Do you suppose that our society suffers from creative repression on a massive scale?  With all the technology we have to take creativity out of our hands, are we fueling a psychotic collapse?  What if we staged a revolutionary return to physical creativity, set up mud pie and garden therapy stations, bread dough and needlework,  improvisational dance and percussion…would we see a decline in depression, suicide and domestic violence?

My fingertips get a mild work out typing every day, but it doesn’t feel like enough.  I used to do 8 hours of typing, telephoning, and staring at a screen in a cubicle every day.  It got very old.  I’m lucky to be done with that.  I hope that we don’t press people into that kind of thing more exclusively as our society “progresses”.  It seems pretty soul-killing.  I’d like to set them all free in a wheat field with a box of squishy colors and a canvas and let them stay out all day until the sun sets.  Then invite them to share a bottle of wine with me, some good crusty bread, and listen to them describe their experiences while they show me their work.  I want to hear their zeal and watch it float free into the world…with mine.