Word of the Week - 71

Cloud-painted ceiling.

Word of the Week:  CLOUDY

“Sunshine dulls the mind to risk and thoughtfulness.”

The brilliant and indefatigable Maria Popova of Brain Pickings shared why cloudy days help us think more clearly.  She also shares other cloud-inspired articles here and here.

I have my own anecdotal experience of clear skies vs. cloudy skies, nothing to do with cognitive improvement, or maybe it is, but very much to do with a sense of comfort and safety.  In a lengthy period of slow recovery from pneumonia resulting in chronic respiratory infections and a diagnosis of chronic fatigue, I found that an overcast sky gave me a feeling of being enfolded, wrapped in what seemed a vast security blanket.  I only noticed this when blue skies appeared, wide open, without limit, infinite, and how exposed and unsafe I felt.

How long it took to shake this dread of unobscured blue skies I can't recall, possibly a couple years.  It was a sense of there being nothing between me and everything, between me and distant planets, the unknown reaches of space, the void.  Cloudy brought comfort, as though someone had wisely thought to close the wide-open doors.

In thinking of this some twenty years after the fact, gray skies felt like permission to huddle and hunker, to go slowly, really, to hide.  With clear, open skies came a feeling of expectation for which I wasn't ready.  I still needed the cave, the small space in which I could touch all the walls.  A sky that went on forever was too frightening.  I remembered the nurse showing me how to wrap my newborn son tightly in his flannel blanket, saying babies felt unsafe when their limbs were allowed to wave about.  For a time, knowing those blue skies reached into an unrestricted universe was more than I could bear.

I have come to love watching the sky from my second-floor windows, its drifting clouds, thick muffling of fog or, as today, limitlessness.  Los Angeles is no place for a blue-sky phobia. 

Sophie Blackall, Illustrator

"Coney Island," by Sophie Blackall, available here.

Furiously scanning my mental index cards, "Arcana that could become blog posts," the name Sophie Blackall lept forth.  Among the photos on my desktop is one of her illustrations.  I think of her, if briefly, every day.  With the chance, not to mention purpose, of exploring her work in greater detail, it occurs to me that illustrators, like poets, are translators, taking our human experiences and returning them to us in forms we can absorb, process and even enjoy.

I suggest you Google her, in text and images.  I will share some links, such as this Brain Pickings article that offers interview excerpts.  At her website I could sit indefinitely and watch her subway riders glide past.  She has one blog about her "Missed Connections" project and subsequent book, another about more current goings-on.

From "Spinster Goose: Twisted Rhymes for Naughty Children" by Lisa Wheeler, illustrated by Sophie Blackall.

At this late date, it seems unlikely that I will ever grow too old for picture books  Or toys, for that matter, but I digress.

Find a review here.

Here, in her own words, a bit more about Sophie. 

And, in closing, more fine thoughts from Brain Pickings.

Word of the Week - 56

 Wislawa Szymborska

Word of the Week:  POSSIBILITIES

Here, giving the broadest possible definition for this week's word, is the poem by Polish poet and translator Wislawa Szymborska (July 2, 1923–February 1, 2012). In 1996, Szymborska was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality.” Upon announcing the prize, the Nobel commission noted her reputation as “the Mozart of poetry” but aptly added that there is also “something of the fury of Beethoven in her creative work.”

"To me, she is nothing short of Bach, that great cosmologist of the human spirit."  (this quote from Maria Popova, creator of BRAIN PICKINGS where writer and musician Amanda Palmer may be heard reading POSSIBILITIES.)

POSSIBILITIES
I prefer movies.
I prefer cats.
I prefer the oaks along the Warta.
I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky.
I prefer myself liking people
to myself loving mankind.
I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case.
I prefer the color green.
I prefer not to maintain
that reason is to blame for everything.
I prefer exceptions.
I prefer to leave early.
I prefer talking to doctors about something else.
I prefer the old fine-lined illustrations.
I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.
I prefer, where love’s concerned, nonspecific anniversaries
that can be celebrated every day.
I prefer moralists
who promise me nothing.
I prefer cunning kindness to the over-trustful kind.
I prefer the earth in civvies.
I prefer conquered to conquering countries.
I prefer having some reservations.
I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
I prefer Grimms’ fairy tales to the newspapers’ front pages.
I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves.
I prefer dogs with uncropped tails.
I prefer light eyes, since mine are dark.
I prefer desk drawers.
I prefer many things that I haven’t mentioned here
to many things I’ve also left unsaid.
I prefer zeroes on the loose
to those lined up behind a cipher.
I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars.
I prefer to knock on wood.
I prefer not to ask how much longer and when.
I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility
that existence has its own reason for being.

"Sometimes it's necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness"**

From Sunday's edition of Brain Pickings comes this book released last week, which insinuates its garden tools into soil I continually try to cultivate.  Being inclined to snarl at greatly delayed gratification but also being quite familiar with that as the way things work, I want it now.  Instead, I've added it to my wish list.

Marcel is a soulful old elephant who sets out to write an encyclopedia as his legacy. Having seen the Eiffel Tower built in 1889 and the first iMac introduced in 1998, and having filled the century between with a long lifetime of adventures and successes of his own, he undertakes “the enormous task of listing — in an enormous, illustrated encyclopedia — everything he’s learned throughout his long and exceptional life.”


The question might be, "What do I know for sure?" From another article in this BP edition comes the quote, “Knowledge,” Emerson wrote, “is the knowing that we can not know."  And, if I am any example, we don't.  With a few exceptions.

I think at times of a manifesto, never to be written for what cheek would that require?  It is the imaginary place where I store what I do know for sure, my own very personal truths that may have wider applications but not necessarily.  The possibility that I am doing nothing but blowing smoke remains real.  I am a stumbling human on a long road.  No two paths are identical.  Likely none of what I've collected would belong in an encyclopedia.  Notes to self:

- The high road is never a wrong choice.
- Being still is not being lazy, it is being wise.
- What appears to be the doing of nothing is actually the doing of quite a lot.
- An unraveled exterior may disguise unique order.
- When in doubt, sit.  Sleep as often as the opportunity appears.
- Since any destination only exists in this moment, you are in exactly the right place.
- Fall in love with as much as you can.
- Your soul knows what will nourish it.  Pay attention, no matter how odd the choice seems.
- Become soft and what you may consider foolish.  You will survive it.
- You don't need to explain.
- Magic is real.

**One further Brain Pickings link from this week, their Literary Jukebox and a poem by Galway Kinnell.

Pass the potato salad at the Picnic of Chaos

It is almost banal to say so yet it needs to be stressed continually: all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis.

Henry Miller in Of Art and the Future

Once again, Brain Pickings and Literary Jukebox boil it down to the bones.  Flux, we keep meeting like this.

My dreaming last night/this morning was of an estate on a river.  At first the river seemed slow and narrow but I walked with dream companions to other points where it was waterfalls, deep still pools and wide expanses with swift currents.  I thought about rivers when I woke up.  Water - flowing, changing, moving - and the closest I can come to a connection is that the river equals all of this, life as we live it out here in the world and inside, the universe(s) we contain and constant, continual metamorphosis.

I think at least some of our peace comes from letting go of the oars or tiller, acknowledging that we are of and with the flow of things much more vast than we.  In looking over our shoulders to be certain that whatever we just left is still there, fixed and unchanging, we find instead that the water is too fast, the point is much too far behind us and even if we could see it, it would be different than we expect.

This is not information I grew up knowing or even imagining.  Yet what I suspect is on a level of deeper awareness, this is not really news.  I have tried for much of my life to nail everything down, each corner, all the sides.  I've held the image of the picnic tablecloth spread on the ground, pegged down every two inches to keep any corner from lifting or the whole thing from taking flight.  The combination of denial and wishful thinking that I constructed has been evaporating until now only the memory of it remains, along with the reasonably enjoyable Picnic of Chaos, not really all that bad once you admit it is what we have, it is all we have.

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.