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In a tribute to Human Powers of Observation, I noticed that my life had lost its shape or had taken on a new, unfamiliar one.  There is too much drift, too much that feels as though I've become unmoored from what seemed steady and almost virtuous. These are not items large enough to be seen from space, they can barely be identified when in the same room, but they were my almost-constants, like drawing, color pencil work, staying in touch (other than Facebook, without which I would be substantially incommunicado), making stuff, staying awake more, not wandering through my days like a person wearing oven mitts who is trying to replace the screw in a pair of reading glasses.

Having now spent nearly a week with this awareness, I come, once again, to the crossroads of duality.  Perhaps an amorphous state does not signal failure to measure up but instead merely indicates what is.   And how is one to know?  As the day begins here with a burned-out light bulb in an inconvenient place, a shrinking amount of good drinking water and probably two or three other pesky matters, my strongest guidance tells me to let it go, for now.  Keep it simple.  All will be resolved, or not, and that, too, is a resolution.

I am coming around to the belief - too bad there's not enough material here for a manifesto or to gain tax-exempt status - that all is in flux and may always have been in flux, flux is not to be feared or avoided, flux and chaos are second, possibly first, cousins and every thing that is is a process.  An evolutionary process.

Shining brightest in the midst of what for the moment I will call knowing is that immediate action is not indicated.  Rather than action of any sort, a passive yet grace-filled state of allowing has been asked for. At last, an assignment to which I may be equal.

Rosa Mira Books and Melissa Green

If we are fortunate or paying attention, beauty dances across our path more times a day than we can count.  I will take this occasion to share a bit.  Before I link you to the announcement by Rosa Mira Books of the newest work from poet Melissa Green, I wanted to include DAPHNE IN MOURNING, which was printed in the New York Review of Books.

Daphne in Mourning

July 19, 2001

Melissa Green

Palm fronds have woven out the sky.
Fog has infiltrated every vein.
My hair has interlaced with vines.
Cobwebs lash their gauze across my eyes.

I’ve stood so since the world began,
and turned almost to stone some years ago.
Who passes by perceives a lichened post,
my girlish features, ghostly, nearly gone.

My bark is warmer than the dead’s.
Human blood still lulls the underside of leaves.
My fingers hold the very dress I loved
to dance in, when dancing mattered—and it did.

And now, the unveiling of Rosa Mira's and Melissa's collaboration.  A gift for us all.  Hooray to everyone concerned.

Rosa Mira Books: Melissa Green, poet extraordinaire, writes memoir

Detail and disorder

Other than 18 months in a fiction workshop 27 years ago, some sub-contracting work on children's books, then trying with faintly observable success to create series proposals for tv animation, my writing has been non-fiction for more than 40 years.

So of course I followed the guidance, source: either self or other, that suggested I begin writing a novel.  Genre, target audience, still being determined.  I find what steers me with the firmest hand is reading writing I admire.  Right now, that is Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys.  The movie never grows old - the cast, the characters, its smartness - but the book has become a new best friend, the one who tells you what you've done is good and that you can do so much better.  Valentine's Day seems the occasion to say I love Wonder Boys and I love Michael Chabon and I love that, rather than discouraging me, it is the pointy stick that makes me want with monomaniacal fervor to be a better writer.

My son, who frequently reads articles and reviews to me from his iPad, has had to listen to me - and watch my near-swoon - as I thumb my way back to the description of the younger Grady Tripp, narrator, painting with a fine-bristled brush his bold, writerly self, (I paraphrase) as the Spaniard with the knife in his boot and the hibiscus in the band of his Panama hat.  Detail, oh the magic of detail.

Earlier in the book Chabon's narrator tells us, "...It was in this man's class that I first began to wonder if people who wrote fiction were not suffering from some kind of disorder..."  They, or I mean we, may be.

So now as I fall asleep, I leaf through years of moments, objects, circumstances and conversations to see if I retain enough of the specifics to use them, even if only as exercises.  Going back into the monogrammed, brass-cornered trunk under the immaculate garage workbench of one's life to see what is there with new eyes or fresh awareness is assignment enough.  I'll start with that.  Today I don't need to know if any of my recollections will find a home in a story.  First, they need to be brought to life.

Abraham Lincoln

Excerpt from "A Blessing of Women," by Stanley Kunitz in his National Book Award-winning PASSING THROUGH, The Later Poems New and Selected.

"BLESS MRS. AUSTIN ERNEST of Paris, Illinois, whose husband, a local politician of no other fame, organized in 1853 a rally for the Presidential candidate of the new Republican party, following which she gathered the material used to decorate the stand wherefrom the immortal Lincoln spoke and, with scissors and needle and reverential heart, transformed it into a quilted patchwork  treasure."

In her work, shown last year by Lori at Humble Quilts, Susan Macduff shares Mrs. Ernest's recognition of Lincoln as a quilt-worthy subject.

Abe Lincoln quilt by Susan Macduff from Humble Quilts blog.

Yes, I found it on the internet

Because I do not spend internet time in places that annoy me, even to the most microscopic degree, I find it a rich land where the good-of-heart nourish and encourage each other.  We pass along the most choice morsels we find here, and go about our day with greater wisdom, a fresh outlook, new intention.  With passionate thanks to Lisa Hoffman and, by extension, Mary Ann Moss, for the following video and the worlds to which it introduces us.

ink&paper from Ben Proudfoot on Vimeo.
It is not exaggeration to say these are my people, my places. I am shocked to learn that I live perhaps 25 minutes from these businesses and did not know they exist. They speak to me of early childhood, visiting the back shop of the second newspaper where my father worked, after the war, after college. The ink and metal and paper smells mingled. They spark memories of my first job at the Huntington Library, running departmental errands to the bindery in the basement, Italian marbled papers - talk about love at first sight - also letterpress, leather, glue. There was a clerical job at the Washington Post in which I kept records of typesetting production statistics, followed later by a feature writing position for a local daily that had not yet transitioned from hot to cold type. I loved proofreading almost as much as writing, getting to stand next to the aproned men in the composing room as they discarded the metal equivalent of lines I'd just deleted from a story. No wonder I became a fool for rubber stamps. Alphabet sets, almost like letterpress, cardboard, learning the weights and finishes of paper, inks. Look, I'm a cottage industry.

Period of research

"The world is so big, so complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises that it takes years for most people to begin to notice that it is, also, irretrievably broken. We call this period of research 'childhood'.” Michael Chabon on Wes Anderson's Worlds, here.

Explaining is one of the things I don't believe we have to do, an inalienable right, so my connective leaps, which may not make sense to me but I trust them all the same, are not expected to make sense to you.  Hooray if they do and if not, we press on regardless.

Earlier I posted about what resonates and remains, the way in which all we are, all we seek somehow connects to that "period of research" to which Chabon refers.

Since then a 4 a.m. thought threw its opaque cloak over me and hissed that we get to rewrite our story.  A classic of duality, the thought spoke of all that we previously experienced being everything and nothing: every loss, trauma, disappointment, conversation, prayer, lover, child, dance, story - all of it fitting together inside the skin shaped like us, while simultaneously falling away like the boosters that carry spacecraft just far enough so that additional oomph can be discarded and the craft can navigate on its own.  If being asked both to retain and jettison our childhoods does not represent the model of contradiction and ambiguity, then I guess I'm more confused than I believed.

Again, all the words have not yet come into neat alignment, again it is more of a sense than a prepared lecture.  I have no proof, other than my split-screen image of how all the history exists and is the cumulative everything and is something we leave on the other side of the closed door as we move on.

Lynda Barry and fantasy

Art by Lynda Barry

Lynda Barry quote, one of many at Brainy Quotes:

"There are certain children who are told they are too sensitive, and there are certain adults who believe sensitivity is a problem that can be fixed in the way that crooked teeth can be fixed and made straight. And when these two come together you get a fairytale, a kind of story with hopelessness in it.

"I believe there is something in these old stories that does what singing does to words. They have transformational capabilities, in the way melody can transform mood.

"They can’t transform your actual situation, but they can transform your experience of it. We don’t create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay. I believe we have always done this, used images to stand and understand what otherwise would be intolerable."

Lynda Barry in WHAT IT IS

Well of course we create a fantasy world to be able to stay.  I've said it here before and will surely say it again:  Lynda Barry is one of the masters of the universe.   Someday I need to make a comprehensive list.

A phrase came to me not long ago that describes why so many of the things on my imaginary list remain undone, why it may take me days to respond to email, why deadlines are unmet, all the whys of what would appear to be avoidance or neglect.  I wander off.  I leave this place and go somewhere else.  Yes, I am lured by shiny things, or more accurately by beautiful things, optimistically resonant ideas, those elements which still and soothe and act as industrial strength Spackle for all the cracks and divots in ordinary life.  Beauty may be used as a distraction but it has a strongly medicinal purpose, the tonic for what ails us.  What a sweet job that would be, selling it by the bottle from the too-gaudy wagon drawn by a wearied horse, glad to stop for water and feed in another frontier town, hoping with horse-hope that a swift departure will not be necessary.  Today let there be satisfied, paying customers.