“Werder an der Havel” (1933, gouache and pastel chalk)
“Baum am Ostseeufer” (nd, pastel on cardboard)
“Wiese mit Mohnblumen” (1893, oil on canvas)
“Ein Steg an einem märkischen See” (1870, oil on canvas)
“Winter Stream” (c1910, oil and pastel chalks on canvas)
“Morgenstimmung im wildpark” (1848, pastel on canvas)
“Windflüchter an der Ostsee” (nd)
“Am Schwielowsee im winter um” (1895)
“Waldinneres” (1886, oil on cardboard mounted on panel)
“Felsige Küste mit Buche” (1913, oil on canvas)
“Kiefern im Schnee” (1910, oil on canvas)
“Birken” (1880, oil on canvas)
“Küste mit Buche” (1913, oil on canvas)
“Our lives, so settled, so specific, are built on happenstance.” ~ Anna Quindlen, from Every Last One
Monday afternoon. Wispy clouds and lovely, 64 degrees.
I don’t know if it’s apparent, but I’m making an effort to write as much as possible lately, here and elsewhere. Part of the reason for my being so prolific is that my computer truly is on its last legs. I often get black screen in the middle of trying to do something, that or everything freezes as the fan makes this very loud sound. Perhaps the fear of this loss is also what is driving the poems that keep coming. I’m not complaining about the result, just the impetus driving it.
“Möwenschwarm an der Ostee” (1914, oil on masonite)
Brett has priced building a CPU for me with lots of memory and speed, to allow me to continue in my habits of having five to ten tabs open at any given time—mail, a couple of Word Press tabs, at least one tumblr tab, and then usually one or two art-related tabs, YouTube, and my MP3 converter. Yes, I know, I have probably hastened my computer’s demise, but I want and need a workhorse, even though the work is only for me.
So anyway, Santa, if you’re listening? A new ‘puter for Christmas would be nice . . .
“where is that voice from nowhere to remind us that the holy ground we walk on, purified by native blood has rooted trees whose fallen leaves now colour code a sacred list of demands?
who among us can give translation of autumn’s hues to morning news?” ~ Saul Williams, from “Bloodletting”
I don’t remember last night’s dreams, oddly enough. I can’t recall a single second. How strange . . . I watched “Walking Dead” last night, so maybe I dreamed of zombies . . . whatever . . .
“Wildpark be Beltow” (1933)
I have Olivia today and Wednesday, and Corey flies home Wednesday evening. He will be home for Thanksgiving, and so we must plan the family dinner, and it will be my first without either of my parents, and would that I could just lie in bed all day, beneath a tumble of blankets, and immerse myself in a book. I really have no idea how I will do it, or if I will actually be able. I only know that I must try, even though I really do not want to.
Life goes on for everyone else, regardless of what I am feeling or how much pain I am in. That is just the way of the world. And so I will probably make my mother’s recipe for cranberry relish, and drink wine as I prepare everything, and just wait for the time after dinner when I can become silent once again.
“Moments like this act as magical interludes, placing our hearts at the edge of our souls: fleetingly, yet intensely, a fragment of eternity has come to enrich time. Elsewhere the world may be blustering or sleeping, wars are fought, people live and die, some nations disintegrate, while others are born, soon to be swallowed up in turn—and in all this sound and fury, amidst eruptions and undertows, while the world goes its merry way, bursts into flames, tears itself apart and is reborn: human life continues to throb.” ~ Muriel Barbery, from The Elegance of the Hedgehog
“Verschneites Gehölz am Ufer des Schwielowsees” (1905, pastel on canvas)
Here is what I have written so far today:
Olivia at Two
Did I ever
walk through the days as she does,
completely unfettered,
keen to commune with whatever comes,
barred by none of life’s lessons—
actions and consequences
absent from her tableau,
and without them,
no hesitation or trepidation
about how fate
can amass repercussions
without regard.
So I will grip fear for her,
tight in my fist, always aware
of destiny’s cruel dead reckoning.
Is it innocence or inexperience
that lets her grab the wet mass
of mud and grass,
examine the detached cricket’s legs
deposited on the porch,
by some nocturnal scavenger?
And what of her fierce pride
in sharing the rusty screw
she has somehow removed
from the old back door?
How curious I am
to see if I can relearn
this remarkable state
of permanent grace,
to see as she sees,
to feel without hindrance
before we teach her
to stay within the lines,
and put away her childish things
because life demands it of us all.
L. Liwag
November 10, 2014
Oh well. Hope your week is starting out on a mellow note . . .
All images are by German artist Karl Hagemeister (1848-1933). I really like his trees.
Music by Anadel, “Remember Me”
What We Need
The Emperor,
his bullies
and henchmen
terrorize the world
every day,
“The Birch Wood” (1903, oil on canvas) by Gustav Klimt
“a dream of creatures with autumn coloured faces their bodies vent to earth falling under the spell of the spinning world” ~ Anja Huwe, from “Autumn”
Sunday afternoon. Cloudy and cooler, 58 degrees.
Last night I had a Harry Potter dream, sort of. I was going back to school, but I wasn’t on any of the rolls because I had failed two classes the semester before. I was hoping to fake my way through. Then suddenly, spells and wand work were required, and I was performing abysmally, unable to remember even basic spells, and Hermione was actually one of my main nemeses from high school, and she was aligned with someone else, and I was left to my own devices, trying to remember things besides accio and stuff, and I had boils on my chest, and I created an itching powder (directly related, I’m sure, to the fact that yesterday I had to take two baths (am and pm) and soak in colloidal oatmeal for nervous itching) and smeared it across everyone’s lockers so that everyone was affected, and then I realized too late that I had also affected allies, and I had that recurring dream part in which one of my classes was never finished because the professor just stopped teaching four weeks before the end and called it a day, and we were wondering if we were responsible for what wasn’t covered, and I realized, too, that I had none of my special grid notebooks for class, nor any of my preferred pens, and I awoke with, you guessed it, a headache . . .
“Moonlight and Birches” (1916-17) by Tom Thomson
And yesterday I had this moment in which I paused to consider whether or not I had truly read To Kill a Mockingbird, or if it was one of those titles that I had read so much about that I imagined actually reading the book.
This is what happens when I have to spend too much time on the phone arguing with people over basic things like health insurance coverage. My mind reverts to a pseudo-fugue state in an attempt to shut down, not deal with too much.
“This October like November, That August like a hundred thousand hours, And that September, A hundred thousand dragging sunlit days, And half October like a thousand years . . .” ~ Ford Madox Ford, from “In October 1914 [Antwerp]”
I wrote another poem earlier today. I don’t know where these poems are coming from, only that they are coming. I don’t claim to be a prolific or particularly wonderful poet, though at one time in my life that was all that I ever wanted to be: a published poet, a name associated with poetry, a person known for her words as poems.
“Birch Wood” (1897, oil on canvas) Antonín Slavíček
As with many things in my life, I did not do what I needed to do to make this happen. I did not believe in myself enough, something I am well aware I have done throughout most of the days of my life. Believing takes effort. Doing takes effort. Effort takes effort.
Do you ever wonder what your life would have been like if you had followed your very first dream, the dream of your life that first spoke to you, the dream that made you sit up and recognize that you were in fact a person, with dreams and desires, and yes, possibilities? My first dream was to be a poet, and truthfully, I remember the exact moment I said to myself that this was what I wanted to be when I grew up: I was in the first grade in London, and I had just won my first poetry contest for a rather short and sweet poem about the seasons.
And then I ran into that English teacher in the seventh grade who took one look at what I had written and told me that it was not a poem because it did not go da-duh, da-duh, da-duh, and I believed him even though I knew better. And then I had that American literature professor as an undergraduate who told me that the only female poet of worth was Emily Dickinson, and I did not believe him because I had read other women, but I let him silence me.
“Mute Autumn odors. The starflower, unbroken, passed between home and chasm through your memory. A strange lostness was palpably present, almost you would have lived.” ~ Paul Celan, from “Die Niemandsrose,” (No one’s rose), trans. Michael Hamburger
The dreams of lives I thought I might have:
Journalist for a large city paper (this I did not pursue because of love, not that he did not want me to but because I forgot to care)
Photojournalist traveling the world (never even tried)
State politician (at the time, this seemed like a great goal to have, and then, not)
Editor for a large corporation (I came close, but then I decided that my daughter needed her grandparents, and so I moved)
English professor at a liberal arts college (Where is the MFA or the PhD that would have allowed me to try for this?)
Published author of criminal mysteries (I have no excuses)
“Birches” (1908-10) by Antonin Golovin
And then these, lesser things, that I have imagined I could do if I just took the time:
Sew a large quilt, one that could be handed down generation after generation
Have a large rose garden, filled with many varieties and scents
Learn to bake a wedding cake
Make my own soaps and salves and scrubs
My life of what-ifs is one long list of should and might, and my biggest hindrance has only ever been myself.
“oh it is the autumn light that brings everything back in one hand the light again of beginnings the amber appearing as amber” ~ W. S. Merwin, from “September Plowing”
“Autumn. Birches” (1899, oil on cardboard) by Isaac Levitan
I offer no excuses, no explanations. I am far too tired to make the effort.
And yet the poems, the sequences of words keep coming, too fast to be finessed well, a tumble of words and thoughts, and I am unused to this creative wellspring, not having seen its likes in years, decades, and I wonder why, why now, why when I gave up on the poems years ago.
Anyway, I wrote another poem today, and once again, I’m sharing, even though it is a first draft, even though it is rough, because the need to put this out here is stronger than my need to hide, so here is today’s:
In the bedroom
smells of my husband’s homemade soup
drift down the hall from the kitchen
he is cooking this for me,
his personal salve for my wounds
his quiet prayer for my wellness
in a few hours I will blow steam across the surface of the deep bowl
across the sunken bodies of the fulsome vegetables
let the liquid slip across my tongue
taste him in the broth:
hot enough to scorch my soul,
strong enough to feed my heart
thick enough to bind my rent spirit
copious enough to recall my father’s love
bitter enough to remind me of death
with just a dusting of grace
L. Liwag (November 9, 2014)
Music by Lewis Watson, “Stay”
Afterwards
Suddenly
everything feels afterwards,
stoic and inevitable,
my eyes ringed with the grease of rumor and complicity,
my hands eager to hold any agreeable infatuation
that might otherwise slip away.
Suddenly
it’s evening and the lights up and
down the street appear hopeful,
even magnanimous,
swollen as they are with ancient grievances
and souring schemes. The sky,
however,
appears unwelcoming,
and aloof, eager to surrender
its indifference to our suffering.
Speaking of suffering,
the houses—our sober, recalcitrant houses—
are swollen with dreams that have grown opaque with age,
hoarding as they do truths
untranslatable into auspicious beliefs.
Meanwhile,
our loneliness,
upon which so many laws are based,
continues to consume everything.
Suddenly,
regardless of what the gods say,
the present remains uninhabitable,
the past unforgiving of the harm it’s seen,
while
the future remains translucent
and unambiguous
in its desire to elude us.
Splashed Color (nd, no title, color and ink on paper) by Chang Dai-chien
“Almost impossible to sleep; plagued by dreams, as if they were being scratched on me, on a stubborn material.” ~ Franz Kafka, from Diaries
Wednesday early evening. Partly cloudy, 83 degrees.
Lots of drizzle the past few days mixed in with scattered thunderstorms. My body has reflected the weather: I feel dampened, pending somehow, as if something is incipient. Yesterday, I wasn’t able to get out of bed for most of the day. Hate days like that, but there was nothing for it. I just wasn’t able.
Splashed Color (nd, no title, ink and color on paper) by Chang Dai-chien
I’ve spent days and days calculating square footage, calculating how much insulation, how many tiles, how much backerboard, etcetera. I am nothing if not a stickler for precision. I know that this is not what Corey had planned when he said he was going to tear out the bathroom, but there was no point in doing it halfway only to have to do more before we sold it.
Tile board (which he had planned to use) looks cheap, but it serves its purpose in a rental property. We’re going with ceramic and mosaic tile. Essentially, we’re gutting down to the studs and starting over. I keep waking in the middle of the night and going to the computer to check something, to make absolutely sure that I have allowed for this or that. Corey says he’ll just be glad when we start to that I will quit obsessing. I concur.
Tomorrow we go to the big box stores to get what I couldn’t get online. Luckily, because it’s the 4th, Corey gets credit for his military service, and we get a 10 percent discount. Any discount is better than no discount.
“I need the shade of blue that rips your heart out. You don’t see that type of blue around here.” ~Cath Crowley, from Graffiti Moon
Aside from preparing for the bathroom reno, there isn’t much going on. We’re still struggling with puppy training. Still lots of hit or miss. I told Corey that not every dog can be as intelligent as Tillie who seemed to train herself that first week. Bailey makes up for the mistakes in cuteness, though. Would that all of life were so . . .
“Snow Storm, Switzerland” (nd, ink and color on paper) by Chang Dai-chien
Ever since my last post about that memory, I have been melancholy. I couldn’t put a name to why, exactly, but it’s here. I know that when I have these health relapses it always throws me, makes me afraid that I’m regressing to those first months after going out on disability when I was so dependent on everyone else, when I could do so very little on my own. That kind of dependence is frightening, perhaps because it may be a precursor to how life will be in the latter years, when so much of life is beyond your control.
I think of Corey’s grandfather, my own mother, how the years are not friendly to the elderly. I watch my mother diminish little by little, unable to finish sentences, repeating things she’s already told me five times. It’s painful. I can do little but watch and try not to add the phrase “I already told you this” to my sentences when we talk.
“I do not want my voice to go out into the air while my heart is sinking.” ~ E. M. Forster, from The Paris Review, “The Art of Fiction”
What am I afraid of, really? Dying without ever doing anything? Without accomplishing a damned thing?
“Snowy Mountain” (nd, ink and color on paper) by Chang Dai-chien
Yes.
I am mightily fearful that my life will have meant nothing when I am gone, that I will have left my children with little, not monetarily, but in the ways that mean the most—in the kinds of memories that they will share with their children, the remembrance of small moments that might still conjure a smile.
I am afraid that I will reach my last days and that I will still be sitting here wondering when I’m going to get around to writing that book, trying to decided whether or not I should get a doctorate. I don’t want to be that person, that lost soul who never quite found her way. I don’t want people to remember me as the woman who never did anything, who never lived up to her potential.
“I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, from Thus Spake Zarathustra
God that sounds so narcissistic, as if I have so much to give, so much to contribute. What makes me any different from the next woman, from the woman in the car next to me at the stoplight, the one who is keeping time on her steering wheel, all the while wondering if she remembered to thaw anything for dinner . . .
“Mist at Dawn” (1974, ink and wash on paper) by Chang Dai-chien
It’s ridiculous, I know, but I still fancy myself that mysterious woman, the one who people wondered about, the one who a professor referred to as a woman of mystery. I like to pretend that’s still me, even though the mystery has faded, and I am just another person trying to get along, trying to survive without going mad.
Can I tell you a secret? Of course, it isn’t much of a secret considering where I am at the moment, but anyway—I always relished my differentness. Not a word, I know, but difference isn’t quite accurate. I have liked being different, not being able to fit into any predetermined niche. I have liked that very much. I have liked that I do not have blond hair and blue eyes, that my name is not ordinary, that my lineage is not easily identifiable.
And yet, there were days when I would have given anything to be like everyone else. Granted, I was still but a child, but to be different when you are a child is a very hard thing.
“He carries stars in his pockets because he knows she fears the dark. Whenever sadness pays her a visit, he paints galaxies on the back of her hands.” ~ Alaska Gold
There was a scene recently in a show that I follow in which the detective goes inside a closet and looks up; she sees stars, the kind of luminous plastic stars that you can stick to the ceiling in a child’s room. I have those stars above my bed. They used to be in the shape of a few constellations. I took great care in the placement, but in the years since, some have fallen down, and the constellations are incomplete. It wouldn’t have taken much to replace the ones that fell, but I chose not to because somehow the incompleteness of what I had created seemed to make more sense.
“Diety Trees” (1970, ink and color on paper) by Chang Dai-chien
And that, my friends, is the true story of my life.
I gravitate towards the incomplete, the imperfect, the jagged and the broken, the lost, the wandering. It’s a harder road, one that fits squarely inside Frost’s maxim about the less traveled path. I remember I came upon that poem in high school, and it made perfect sense to me.
Why choose the road that everyone else has already taken? Discoveries cannot be made on such roads. Everything new under the sun, if there is still such a thing, will not be on a well-trod path. This I know, but I also admit that I probably could have avoided many falls and scrapes had I chosen differently.
“Look at how beautiful this ink is. Now do you understand why I needed clear water? Water is the brightness of the day and the whiteness of the paper. Black is the velvet of night and the satiny ink of the paintbrush. If you know how to make ink correctly, you will never again be afraid of nightmares.” ~ Françoise Place, from Hokusai (The Old Man Mad About Drawing)
“Earth” (nd, ink and color on paper) by Chang Dai-chien
I’ve probably mentioned it before, but I once wrote a poem about my ex called “For My Husband, Returning to His Lover” in the style of Anne Sexton’s “For My Lover Returning to his Wife.” I mention this now because I remember a particular passage of my poem in which I refer to my stretch marks:
Look closely, these faint gray lines
at the tops of both my thighs, surely
she has not acquired anything
quite as exquisite. Mine are badges,
earned by keeping pace with him
for decades–the many treks
we made across life’s arduous terrain.
Each scar on my body is a story. And had I gone the easy way, I would not have these stories to tell. I don’t regret any of it.
“Spring Clouds” (1965, ink and color on paper) by Chang Dai-chien
Look, I once refused to go on antidepressants because I wouldn’t be able to write. I told that particular doctor—who was a misogynistic quack—that he just didn’t understand, that I was nothing without my extreme highs and lows. Later, a doctor who I respected convinced me otherwise, but there is a part of me that still remembers the intensity of living without medication, and I would be lying if I said that I don’t wish that I had that, had those intense emotions all of the time, but the truth is that living day-to-day with such emotions will kill you, sometimes quickly, and sometimes slowly.
This post has taken on a life of its own, which is what happens when I suddenly unleash the floodgates.
Enough.
More later. Peace.
(I am late in discovering Chinese artistChang Dai-chien, also known as Zhang Daqian (1899-1983). In 2012, “Lotus and Mandarin Ducks (1947), a painting by the artist fetched $191 million (Hong Kong) at auction. The price was more than nine times Sotheby’s estimate of HK$20 million.)
Music by Gretchen Peters, “On a Bus to St. Cloud”
We Should Be
We should be born old,
Come wise into the world
Already able to choose our destiny,
Already knowing the pathways that lead from the crossroads of the origin.
Then, it would only be irresponsible to yearn to go ahead.
Afterwards, we’d gradually grow younger,
Come to the gateway of creation mature and strong,
Pass through, and enter into love as adolescents,
Then be children when our children are born.
They’d immediately be older than we are.
They’d teach us to talk; they’d rock us to sleep in a cradle,
And then we’d disappear, getting smaller and smaller,
Like a grape, like a pea, like a grain of wheat …
Lola's Curmudgeonly Musings 