Dire

"Turn down your thermostats? Buy a smaller car? Conserve? I spent quite a bit of time in Russia and China, and that's the first stage. You go from having your own car to carpooling to riding the bus to mass transit. You eventually get to where you're walking.  You go from your own apartment and bathroom to sharing kitchens with four families. That what socialism and the elimination of capitalism and free enterprise is all about."  The Wit of Don Blankenship.

"A lot of people look at mountaintop removal as a negative, but I see it as a positive. We don't want to defend mountain removal, but I want us to promote mountaintop removal because we need flat land. We can't have economic expansion without places to do things and part of mountaintop removal is for places like hospitals, airports and different types of merchants." The Wisdom of Daniel Mongiordo

After a long, clambering hike, I reached the top and gazed out over forest, valley and other peaks I looked forward to climbing.

Servant girls

Very still, their eyes on the middle distance, long hair twisted and tied in back, high-waisted chemises covering modest bosoms, these young women populate the cemetery.Visitors wander the paths, point out to each other monuments and structures, say the names of families, individuals, dates, admire sculpture and landscape and foliage,and then leave. Not so these jeune fille who stand, hot under the sun, wet under the rain, cold under the snow, sun and moon climbing up and down from horizon to horizon over and over, and like good servants, still ponder the mysteries that occasioned their creation.

I imagine unfocussed eyes tightening up as night frees them from surveillance, and whispers traveling, not on sightlines which never intersect, but along the currents of the darkness, not the angels who are sent to watch, nor those resolutely grasping books or anchors, or pointing confidently upward, but rather those adolsecents snatched in some reverie, frozen into stone and made to gently wonder forever on behalf of the grief and grievers long gone.

It's so good to be awake, they say to each other as their spirits pivot from contemplation of loss to the presence of the place, the cool dampness of its air, the rustle of its trees. In the distance, the hospital's lights blink on an off through wind rocked branches. Drag racers score the night with their unmuffled roar. These girls stretch and whisper out into the darkness, not along the sightlines which never intersect. They answer back, and start to chat and make plans. Can they get away long enough to listen in to the happy talk at the coffee shop at the train station down the road? Can they even  get to the dance club, and move to the music.

But it'll take time to extricate, time to hitch rides on passersby, and perhaps everything will be closed by the time they get there and perhaps the pores of the stone will be closed by the time they get back. Not melancholic but frustrated tears now, and not soft words but sharp. Still, undressed and unshod, shaking their hair loose, at whatever cost, they set off to find whatever life they can.

Eggs

Once upon a time, three eggs found themselves in a small hollow lined with leaves near a forest road.  You might think they were together because laid by a single mother, bird, snake or turtle, but in fact they had had very different adventures to reach the place where they lay shell to shell on the soft cup scooped in the duff.

The one with the brown shell was called Hardy. "This place is like the nest where my hen laid me. I remember how warm it was under her big, feathered bottom. However that time didn't last long. A hand with very quick fingers reached into the dark place where I was resting quietly, grasped me quickly and pulled me out. My hen gave a short squawk and let me go. I was balanced on top of a lot of other eggs just like myself.

The tiny blue egg called Cheep asķed, "Were they your brothers or sisters?"

Hardy said, no, they perhaps were distant cousins but they didn't have time to find out the connection because soon they were all put one by one on spoons and deposited in a pot of boiling water.

"What is that like?" asked Cheep in a small voice as if guessing it wasn't good.

"You can't imagine. We knocked around in the pot as the water pushed us around. After the first shock, I became solid inside. If there was anything alive in me...well, now I'm like a stone.

"We were cooled down in a bath of cool running water, then bundled together in a cloth and put into a basket carried by a stout girl walking briskly down the forest path. She tripped and I was thrown out, and rolled here next to you, Glory.

The third egg, the one with many colors, red, yellow and green in swirly patterns all over it, spoke up in a formal voice. "What happened to me was different. The lot of us collected one morning were put on a table where we rolled in small circles, though one disappeared suddenly and we heard a smash. I was picked up an a needle punched through one end of me, then again through the other end. It went right through me, All my parts were punctured. Then lips were put to one end and my innards were deposited in a bowl. I was blown empty as outer space."

"How did you get to be so pretty," asked Cheep shyly.

"It was a long and complicated process. I drawn on with crayons, dipped in cups  of hot colored sour-tasting water, heated and dabbed, and drawn on again over and over. The fnal step was a shower of this glittery stuff that catched the light.

Then, after all that work, I was carefully placed here, I don't know why, and...well, nothing after that. I don't understand it at all. What about you, little Cheep?"

"My place is above us. I was just minding my business along with the other eggs in the nest when one of them, a bit bigger than the others, hatched first and out of it came a big, ugly, blind with wings like sweeps. It backed into me and pushed me up and over the lip of the nest. As I fell I brushed against leaves and landed on a soft spot and rolled here. I'd like to go back but I don't know how. Meanwhile, what's been moving in me is becoming still. I feel I could have been something, I don't know what, but the window's closing."

So the three quietly talked, each touching each other, as the night cooled down, dew fell, and the sun rose.

"What is this," they heard a boy say. "A very strange clutch. What kind of fowl made its nest here?"

A girl's voice said, "It must be a magic bird that has different eggs according to its dreams. This one," she said picking up Hardy, "must have been a dream of the earth, see, it has heft, and this one," picking up Cheep, "must have come from a dream of a sky, like this above us this morning."

"What about the decorated one," asked the boy, as he spoke sharply to a dog to stay back.

"I imagine the bird dreamed all that's beautiful, intricate and colorful under the sky and a bit of heaven thrown in. It must have been a gorgeous dream."

"You're silly," said the boy, "but take it and see if you dream anything like.  The blue egg'll be good in the collection I'm making of local bird eggs and feathers."

"What about the brown egg," asked the girl. She knocked Hardy on a stone, peeled him and smelled the white flesh. "Here, Hugo," she said to the dog who was only to ready to wolf it down.

Their voices receded in the distance, and the rising sun found the little impromptu nest of improbabilities vacant again. 

Visit

Such a relief to encounter you again. For days now I've been growing more and more lonely. It's not that I'm not with people, nor that we haven't sometimes had enjoyable conversations, but an absence has been gnawing at me, and this morning on the train, I found out what it was.

Having wrestled with the issue of creativity recently, I'd turned to LeGuin's Steering the Craft to try to activate my writing. She's a good writer, and I'm prepared to do anything. The first assignment titled Being Gorgeous told me to write some narrative employing sound effects like onomatopoeia, alliteration, repetition, rhythmic effects, made-up words or names, dialect, but not rhyme or meter, and meant to be read aloud.

Okay, I said to myself last night, here goes, and filled a few notebook pages with dead, directionless nonsense. I read it and groaned. It was late; I went to bed.

In the shower at 6:15 the next morning however, energized by the hot water, I started to think of something better than the dull make-work of the previous night. What about a set of illustrations from an alien creature how-to lovemaking guide. A narrative could be the series of captions elucidating the details of the pictures.

I began to think of all kinds of creatures practicing different kinds of amorous moves. My imagination went beyond the limits of human anatomy: why only two arms? why only five senses?

Later on the train, notebook in lap, I got down to the good work of actually imagining specific tableaux of entanglement involving particular organs and acts--and here's the thing--you, my creative playmate, showed up, guiding my story forward, whipping out weird nomenclature with a jovial facility that suggests the well is deep.

The confident creativity that characterizes you could have gone on much further--I sensed I was in the zone--but the train arrived at Community College.  How delighted I was to sense your presence, magisterial and impish at the same time. How I'd missed your ability to surprise me with myself.

Not running this week because of a hamstring injury has made me a bit moody, so your showing up lightened the day remarkable. I caught myself feeling even exuberant. Don't wait so long to turn up again, or I'll have to come after you.
  

Peopling

You won the bet, hands down. From early morning we'd known this was the day our granddaughter would be born. The word had gone out the night before, and girlfriends who'd promised to assist had arisen in the wee hours to drive and arrive in time to take our daughter to the hospital. Miss O was coming.

News bulletins: departure for the hospital, dilation, administration of anaesthetic, water broken, clearly an exit strategy in place for the internal resident planet, then...blackout, hour after hour going by. News? None.

So, you asked me, do you want to wager when she will come, within a half-hour. I shrugged and guessed five-thirty or six o'clock. No, three--thirty, you said with confidence, everything will go quickly.

I was just thinking of stories I'd heard, but you, I realized, had an altogether deeper kind of knowledge, gathered from other women as you had waited for your (our) children, lore annotated by your own experience actually having babies, and all augmented by what you know of our daughter and second births generally. You were not plucking random guesses out of the air as I was, but making a shrewd estimate based on your acquaintance with the signs and the odds.

Delight at the new of the smooth delivery of a healthy Miss O, big and beautiful, was supplemented by respect for your powers of prediction. I was reminded of how much an insider you are, and how much an outsider I, to the circle of initiates in the mystery of producing people.

Why create?

What a strange journey thinking takes us on. I began by asking myself how I could write, draw, compose, that is, create more than I do, or to put it the other way, how I could capture in communicable form, that is art, more of what I see and how I respond to the facets of this scintillating world, so intriguing, so impressive. I end by addressing the question of why we, including God-in-love, create at all.

On the way I've changed my mind about the meaning of old tools, generated and discarded new analogies, used my trust with triads to posit new categories, had insights while showering and bright ideas just before going to sleep, gotten lost regarding my intentions and targets, regularly reviewed my notebooks, and ended up with what seem to me interesting notions about the 'why' question as it applies to artists and others. 

Who am I to speak about any of these things, I wonder. Here goes, anyway.

What if we think the impulse for creating, for encountering creations, for encountering generally as proceeding from three self-reinforcing desires: to discover and describe the livingnesses of things (whatever, wherever, whenever) so as enjoy the resonance in our own livingness; to be intimate, that is closely acquainted, very familiar, with an other or others so as to be known as we know; and to be delighted by the very activity of creating.  Livingness, intimacy and delight: what makes these good candidates for answers to the 'why' question is their self-reinforcing, hence self-justifying operation. We create, indeed we encounter, because we like doing it, because part of the payoff of the outcome is enjoyed in the process. 

Livingness I've discussed elsewhere as the openness of things to what is and can be, describable in terms of potentiality, energy and power. Its presence (or absence) evoke response in ours. How often when we read a story or poem, or see a performance, or listen to a song, or see an image are we moved in our sense of where we are and what we are ready (or not) to receive or do. 

Intimacy, a word that leapt of the page of Egon Friedell's Cultural History at me, not a new word but one that seemed all of a sudden like a key, speaks about the space between the participants in an encounter, a space filling up with strands like hyphae penetrating, suffusing, reading each.  The artist looking at the model, the writer contemplating the world under creation, the songwriter trying to capture some poignant but evanescent original feeling get to know what it is they seek to present with a thoroughness and depth commensurate with their own need to be known, to be recognized, understood, welcomed. 

A resource for intimacy may be what I have called the 'freedom fields' or 'relevant perimeter' on other posts in this blog. I realize now that while the categories are meaningful, my understanding of their significance was not; they are not so much presentations of what is actual versus possible as what is obvious vs what can be inferred, what is definite vs what is indefinite:

    what something (or somebody) is vs what it can be, can have, can do; 

    what is evident about sth (or sb) vs what is hidden, invisible, suggested; 

    what is present of sth (or sb) vs what is absent, missing, empty; 

    what sth (or sb) is as an individual vs the form, the many, the whole; 

    what sth (or sb) is now vs the past, the persistent and the coming to pass; 

    what sth (or sb) is for itself (I or as if I) vs an other, you, myself.

In any case, these considerations show the way to deeper familiarity. 

There's direct pleasure in where we are finding ourselves, what we doing, what we having contact with in the course of our creatings. The simple activities of looking, of moving, of handling are often their own reward. Thinking about these I've come up with three categories of such delights: settings, kinetics, contacts.

Gardens (after Julie Moir Messervy) are designed to represent in some way sea, cave, harbor, promontory, island, mountain, sky. They are archetypical places that speak to some of our most evocative childhood experiences. To occupy any of these (in the making or made) and look out from them is simply intrinsically satisfying.    

The movements of creating (or appreciating) include dancing, flying, climbing, extricating, walking, riding, and burrowing--dancing for its rhythm; flying for its grace; climbing for its exertion; extricating for its conquest of obstacles; walking for its steady progress; riding for its sense of control, burrowing for its dark passage. 

Touch, as of hand on body, lover with lover, for instance, or parent with child, is also one of the delights of creating. Drumming, stroking, kneading, scratching, tracing, twirling, probing, and the many moves that fall into these general categories, are ways we handle the stuff of creation: words, paints, sounds, movements, what have you. The pleasure is in contact made, or received, the mutuality of maker and material.  

These fundamental archetypical delights--settings, movements, contacts--simply start to happen when we start creating, as do the rewards when we begin to portray livingnesses or explore intimacies. This may be why we create. 

I put this forward not so much a proposition to be proved as a possibly useful perspective for people such as myself who want to stimulate themselves into making art. It may be that I just need to discipline myself to set aside time for creating. There's more that I need however than just time and maybe these reflections indicate what that is.  Perhaps the merest glimpse of something's potentiality, energy or power, the simplest acquaintance with a non-obvious aspect of something, the first touch with raw stuff will be enough to get me going. Let's see.