Middle Season #30

 

Perceive the world in a new way

 From Rob Walker's newsletter which focuses on the book Grapefruit by Yoko Ono.

But the bigger lesson here (for me) isn’t about any single Ono prompt. It’s about the spirit of attention Ono deploys here. She’s engaged in the world — via imagination. And inviting us to do the same. So I’d suggest a meta-prompt:

Imagine a set of instructions that makes others perceive the world in a new way.

Letting it Happen

 Tara Brach instructions in The Center of Now:

bring awareness of tangle, holding... and letting go, letting it float, dissolve

listening to and feeling the whole moment

senses wide open

living field of sensation; energy expressing, expressing; letting it happen

notice changing stream of awareness;

10 Japanese Concepts

 10 must-know Japanese concepts that will improve your life:

#1: Oubaitori. 

Never compare yourself.Everyone blossoms in their own time in different ways.Don't judge yourself by someone else's path.

#2: Kaizen.

Continuously improve.

Constantly strive to improve across all areas of your life.

Small changes accumulate and make all the difference.

#3: Wabi-sabi.

Embrace imperfection.

Nothing lasts, nothing is complete.

Accept your own flaws and those of others.

Find beauty in imperfection

#4: Mottainai.

Don't be wasteful.

Everything deserves respect and gratitude.

Recognize the value in what's around you and don't waste it.

#5: Gaman.

Have dignity during duress.

Hard times need to be met with emotional maturity and self-control.

We need patience, perseverance, + tolerance.

#6: Yuugen.

Appreciate mysterious beauty.

Often we FEEL the beauty in an object without it being stunning to look at.

Discover subtle beauty beyond aesthetics.

Experience something words cannot describe.

#7: Ikigai.

Know your reason for being.

Define the reason you get up in the morning.

Make it something you are good at, passionate about, and that the world needs.

THIS is meaning.

8: Shikita ga nai.

Accept and let go.

Some things simply aren't within our control.

Accept what you cannot change, and move on.

#9: Kintsugi.

Repair cracks with gold.

Imperfections are a thing of beauty.

The journeys we all take are golden.

Our flaws are embellishments that make us more beautiful.

#10: Omoiyari.

Show consideration for others.

Life is better when we care for others.

Be thoughtful. Build compassion

The skaz tradition

 From chapter "The Door to the Truth Might Be Strangeness," I learn that skaz is Gogol's narrative style.  

The result is awkward, funny, and true, touched with the spirit of the (odd) person doing the telling

the skaz tradition... "challenges the notion that a disinterested, objective, third-person-omniscient narrator exists anywhere in the real world.... Every story is narrated by someone, and since everyoen has a viewpoint, every story is misnarrated (is narrated subjectively). 

Since all narration is misnarration, Gogol says, let us misnarate joyfully.  

The narration in "The Nose," it turns out, is a particular Russian form of unreliable first-person narration called skaz. Imagine an actor tellingn a story in character. And that character is... not right.  

The story is distorted by "improprer narrative emphasis" and "misplaced assumption."  

So, this isn't graceless writing; this is a great writer writing a graceless writer writing.

Our narrator is touched with a stiff but imprecise literary formality.  He's pedantic and superior and overestimates his intelligence and charm.  He has one arm over our shoulders and something strange on his breath as he (clumbisly, grandiousely, making basic errors) invites us, his fellow sophisticates, to join him in looking down at his (lowly) characters.

(yet, we see him as on the same level as the clueless characters). The purpose of this attempt at elevation is to keep himself above the Ivans and Praskoovyas of the world. But because he's no good at it, he gets placed by us, down there beside, or even below them.  

It's like a prose version of the theory of relativity: no fixed, objective, "correct" viewpoint exists; an unbalanced narrator describes, in an unbalanced voice, the doings of a cast of unbalanced characters.

In other words, like life. 

Douglas Unger, one of my professors at Syracuse years ago, offered a model for how people communicate in the world. 

When two people are talking, Doug suggested, each has a cartoon bubble overhead, fullof his or her private hopes and projections and fears and preexisting worries and so on. Person A talks, Person B listens, waiting to respond, but as what Person A is saying passess into Person's B's cartoon bubble, it gets mangled.  Say person B's bubble is full of guilt because, after she forgot to call her mother on her birthday, her brother chidingly texted her about it. When Person A says, "I have to give a speech next week," Person B, thinking of the rude things her brother just texted, replies (out of her bubble), "People can be so hardsh." Person A, his bubble full o f anxiety about this forthcoming speech, hear, "It's true, you'll probably blow it," and frowns. Person B thinks, "Oh, great, Person A is frowning at me because he sees that I'm the kidn of jerk who forgets her mother's birthday." (283)

Later, Saunders talks about how the skaz narration helps us understand one type of evil.

...on the mundane side of things, if we want to understand evil (nastiness, oppression, neglect) we should recognize that the people who commit these sings don't always cackle while committing them; often they smile, becuase they're feeling so useful and virtuous. [refers to Victor Klemperer's I will Bear Witness about antisemitism in Germany. ] 

Also, "Deborah Eisenberg pointed out the great harm tha can be done by a handful of evil people, as long as they have the 'passive asssistance of many, many other people who glance out of the windows of their secure homes and see a cloudless sky."  She goes on to list the sins of such passive people: "carelessness, poor logic, casual snobbery -- either social or intellectual -- inattentiveness." [from Gregor von Rezzori's book Memoirs of an Anti-Semite) 

Do what you please

 From "A Swim in a Pond in the Rain."

The closest thing to a method I have to offer is this: go forth and do what you please.

It really is true: doing what you please (i.e. what pleases you), with energy will lead you to everything -- to your particular obsessions and the ways in which you'll indulge them, to your particular challenges with the forms in which they'll convert into beauty, to your particular obstructions and your highly individualized obstruction breakers. We cna't know what our writing problems will be until we write our way into them, and then we can only write our way out.

A student once told me this story: Robert Frost came to a college to give a reading. An earnest young poet stood up and asked a complex, technical question about the sonnet form, or something like that.  

Frost took a beat, then said: "you man, don't worry: WORK!"

Disappearing in Hell of a Book

 All Soot wanted to do right then and there is disappear. To disappear utterly And completely. Disappearing was a way out of everything in his life. Disappearing was a way out of the cycle of violence. Disappearing

was a way to not hate himself when he saw that skin of his in the

mirror. Disappearing was a way for him nor to hare everyone else

that had skin like his. Disappearing was a way out of everything

and he knew that was the reason his mother had taught it to him

It was the reason she and his father had tried so hard to teach him

how to disappear. If he could disappear, he could be free from fear.

Ifhe could disappear, he would not have to worry about bullies. He

would not have to worry about cops. He would not have to worry

abour legislation aimed at his skin. He would not have to worry

about the history of slavery that led him to here. He would not have

to worry about feeling inferior. He would not have to worry about

being angry, and afraid, and never sure which was better to feel

because they both hurt in different ways but they seemed to be all

that he had left. He would not have to worry about not knowing

what to feel when he watched video footage of people that looked

like him being sprayed with fire hoses. He would not have to worry

when he saw old, grainy footage of a man standing on the steps of

a school shouting

"Segregation now! Segregation forever!" He would

not have to worry when he saw men with torches marching in Vir-

ginia. He would not have to worry when a boy about his age in

South Carolina was found hanging from a tree. He would not have

to worry about watching movies and TV shows in which people

who looked like him always died or, if they lived, were good only

for dancing and talking about prison life and the lack of fathers. He

would not have to worry about a world in which those were the only

boxes he could live in. He would not have to worry about all of the

kids who didn't think he was Black enough. He would not have to

worry about liking hip-hop and Dungeons & Dragons at the same

time. He would not have to worry about his skin being too dark or

too light. He would not have to worry about his hair being che

wrong texture. He would not have to worry about his lips being too

big. He would not have to worry about all of the chings his mother

and facher had both been afraid of.

No. He could be free of all of those things. That was the reason

his parents had taught him to be invisible. That was the reason for

the gift they gave him.

Something you make room for and enter and reside in

Paul Klee. Little painting with pine tree. 1922.

JKZ Covid meditation #42:  

Giving yourself over to the meditation practice, which involves making room for what you're experiencing to be recognized.  It often looks like nothing, looks like silence… 

Not doing is not the same as nothing.  It is so pivotable that it could be said to be everything. 

Inviting the silence that is never not here, the wakefulness that is never not here, to emerge .... as the cloudiness of the mind that’s trying to get somewhere else dissolves… 

Can we dwell in this right-here-ness… Just this… the soundscape of now, the mind-scape of now, the heart-scape of this very moment, the body-scape of this moment; the breath-scape; 

Riding on the waves of your breath sensations.  Noticing how distractible the mind is and coming back; 

Life expressing itself in us in the myriad ways it does as we embrace it; 

Something you make room for and enter and reside in; Wakefulness right here right now; timeless moment that is beyond place and beyond time; 

How to Love a Country

 In the Author's Note of Richard Blanco's How to Love a Country

[The] public role I was assigned as inaugural poet prompted me to explore more deeply my own civic and artistic duty in questioning and contributing to the American narrative through my poetry and the capacity of the genre itself to foster understanding and offer new perspectives.

This collection is largely the culmination of that deeper exploration. The title, How to Love a Country, is both a statement of hope in our nationhood and an implied question about our struggles with it. My intent was to ground these poems in the complexity and contradictions of my personal, as well as our collective, relationship to our country, given the many sociopolitical issues that remain unresolved: immigration, gender, race, and sexuality, among others. Thematically and emotionally, the poems aspire to have a conversation, not only with myself, not only with other poets and artists, but also with all Americans, from our past and present, through an oracular yet intimate village voice that speaks to matters that continue to concern and affect us en masse: Poetry indebted to our pantheon of visionaries, such as Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Gloria Steinem, and Cesar Chávez, as well as our musical folk heroes, such as Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. Poetry equally inspired by everyday Americans, like my mother, who maintains her faith in our country's promises yet also holds it accountable. Poetry informed by the tradition and spirit of predecessors such as Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, Gloria Anzaldúa, Joy Harjo, Sandra Cisneros, Jimmy Santiago Baca, and Martín Espada, as well as the current chorus of socially conscious poetry that actively responds to the most pressing concerns of our day.

Say one thing and mean another

 From Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin.

Sam Masur at age twenty-one did not have a build for pushing and shoving and so, as much as possible, he weaved through the crowd, feeling somewhat like the doomed amphibian from the video game Frogger. He found himself uttering a series of “excuse me”s that he did not mean. A truly magnificent thing about the way the brain was coded, Sam though, was that it could say “Excuse me” while meaning “Screw you.”  Unless they were unreliable or clearly established as lunatics or scoundrels, characters in novels, movies, and games were meant to be taken at face value -- the totality of what they did or what they said. But people — the ordinary, the decent and basically honest — couldn’t get through the day without that one indispensable bit of programming that allowed you to say one thing and mean, feel, even do, another.

My Father in English by Richard Blanco

My Father in English

by Richard Blanco

First half of his life lived in Spanish: the long syntax
of las montañas that lined his village, the rhyme
of sol with his soul—a Cuban alma—that swayed
with las palmas, the sharp rhythm of his machete
cutting through caña, the syllables of his canarios
that sung into la brisa of the island home he left
to spell out the second half of his life in English—
the vernacular of New York City sleet, neon, glass—
and the brick factory where he learned to polish
steel twelve hours a day. Enough to save enough
to buy a used Spanish-English dictionary he kept
bedside like a bible—studied fifteen new words
after his prayers each night, then practiced them
on us the next day: Buenos días, indeed, my family.
Indeed más coffee. Have a good day today, indeed—
and again in the evening: Gracias to my bella wife,
indeed, for dinner. Hicistes tu homework, indeed?
La vida is indeed difícil. Indeed did indeed become
his favorite word, which, like the rest of his new life,
he never quite grasped: overused and misused often
to my embarrassment. Yet the word I most learned
to love and know him through: indeed, the exile who
tried to master the language he chose to master him,
indeed, the husband who refused to say I love you
in English to my mother, the man who died without
true translation. Indeed, meaning: in fact/en efecto,
meaning: in reality/de hecho, meaning to say now
what I always meant to tell him in both languages:
thank you/gracias for surrendering the past tense
of your life so that I might conjugate myself here
in the present of this country, in truth/así es, indeed.

Here's Blanco reading it (in the NYer)

Middle Season #29

The middle season of October.  Vibrant colors.  Leaves beginning to collect under trees, across lawns, in gutters.  The yellow tree a shagbark hickory.  

The season of purple and yellow flowers.  Goldenrod turning to cotton fluff, toad lily in the backyard, the drive tiny hosta (Mary Mary?), dried asters and black eyed susan (?) in a yard in Western Springs

 

Chris Ware's Lockdown

Chris Ware's NYer Cover "Lockdown"

 Chris Ware's NYer Cover Story on his art "Lockdown" tells of Ware's inspiration from his CPS science-teaching wife and 17-year-old daughter.

After the shootings in Newtown, Clara, like many children across America, would come home from school and report that her class had locked down again for a safety drill. These exercises were ostensibly to rehearse students for the possibility of a real shooting. My wife—again, a teacher herself—and I would offer her an understanding look, but, frankly, I gave shamefully little thought to what they both regularly faced, how lockdowns worked, or how the protocols might solve the basic math problem of automatic weapons plus classrooms. These were unthinkable topics, grayed out in my mind. Some clarity was provided on January 6, 2021, when Clara and I watched the rioters scale the walls of the United States Capitol while senators and representatives huddled in fear. At the time, she shared a sentiment apparently proliferating among her peers on TikTok and Twitter: “I’m just really glad that the congressmen who voted to let guns multiply in America are now going through what my generation has for pretty much our whole lives.”

The Queen died, and then the king died

From A Swim in the Pond by George Saunders

"The queen died, and then the kind died." (E. M. Forster's famous formulation) describes two unrelated events occurring in sequence. It doesn't mean anything. "The queen died, and the king died of grief" puts those events into relation: we understand that one caused the other. The sequence, now infused with causality, means: "That king really loved his queen."

Causality is to the writer what melody is to the songwriter: a super-power that the audience feels as the crux of the matter; the thing the audience actually shows up for; the hardest thing to do; that which distinguishes the competent practitioner from the extraordinary one.

A well-written bit of prose is like a beautifully hand-painted kit, lying there on the grass. It's nice. We admire it. Causality is the wind that then comes along and lifts it up. The kite is then a beautiful thing made even more beautiful by the fact that it's doing what it was made to do.

He wore his fears

Johann Walter, Birch Forest, ca 1903-1904

From Jason Mott's Hell of a Book.  The narrator reflects on his father:

    I think it was always running, my old man's fear. Perpetual and widespread.

   Fear of being a bad father. Fear of being a bad husband. Fear of being arrested. Fear of being called skinny like when he was a kid. Fear of being poorer tomorrow than he was today. Fear of giving too much of his life to swing shift and not enough to his son. Fear of cops. Fear of lawyers. Fear of getting injured. Fear of dying, fear of living. Fear of a past that he couldn't change. Fear of a present that was always out to get him. Fear of a future that might turn out

to be nothing more chan the present with more gray hair. Same failures. Same struggles. All of it with fewer chances to get it right.

  Every day he wore his fears just like he wore those Dickies of his.

I'm thinking about this as a description of someone, literally wearing fear.  Fear being the modus operandi. 

Conflation of nature and politics

 

Art work © Zoe Leonard / Courtesy the artist / Galerie Gisela Capitain / Hauser & Wirth

From the New Yorker: 

Since 2016, the American artist Zoe Leonard has taken hundreds of photographs at the border of Mexico and the U.S., following the route of a body of water that divides the two countries for twelve thousand miles, known alternately as the Río Bravo and the Rio Grande (and by at least five ancestral names, in Pueblo and Navajo). The exquisitely installed exhibition “Excerpts from ‘Al río / To the River,’ ” on view at Hauser & Wirth through Oct. 29, offers only a glimpse of Leonard’s epic project—ten works consisting of fifty-six black-and-white pictures, hanging singly and in sequences on the walls—but it conveys her rare balancing act of poetics and politics. You might call Leonard’s approach concerned conceptualism, as seen in a quartet of near-abstractions portraying lines raked in dirt, a tactic used by ice to capture the footprints of migrants. These striations are echoed in five views of irrigation canals, attended by flocks of birds (above, in an untitled detail, dated 2020/2022). Leonard’s quiet vistas run counter to sensationalist media coverage of borderland conflict. Her camera lingers on landscape, not people, who appear in only six images here, as distant figures enjoying a day at the beach on a riverbank in Ciudad Juárez, under the omnipresent eye of surveillance apparatus.

From Hauser & Wirth

About the exhibition

Following the river’s course from the border cities of Ciudad Juárez and El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico, Leonard considers the conflation of, and boundaries between, nature and politics as they manifest in the landscape.

‘Al río / To the River’ is structured through ‘passages,’ sequences of photographs that impart a sense of movement. Pointing to the dynamism of the river, Leonard groups images so that the topography and communities depicted invite associations and interpretations from the viewer.

The artist depicts the river and surrounding borderlands with an eye for the complexity of the various ecosystems, communities, and histories that converge at the river—from families swimming off the riverbank at Ciudad Juárez, to helicopters and border patrol vehicles on sentry; and from dams and irrigation canals, to bridges and boundary markers.

Engage with place in a different way

 

NYT article "In Alaska, Slowing Down to Take Things In" is mostly an appreciation of the Alaskan town of McCarthy and the experience of taking a course in field sketching.

A practice that’s equal parts art and science, field sketching is used by researchers and artists to record their observations of nature, from waterways to winged creatures, mosses to mountaintops. Field sketching pairs illustrations with notes about weather, location, animal behavior and even the journal keeper’s mood that day, offering more context than a stand-alone photo. It’s also a powerful tool for travel, one that forces you to slow down, to take things in, to simply look.

The workshop is lead by Kristin Link, who studied field sketching in college.

Ms. Link, who lives in McCarthy year-round, discovered field sketching in art school. “It’s like you’re more present and because you’re kind of quiet, you can hear people’s conversations and engage with place in a different way,” she said. 

 

In telling you I will be making them

 From A Swim in the Pond, George Saunders writes:

Out the door of my writing shed are some things. What things? Yes, exactly. It's up to me to tell you, and in telling you, I will shortly be making them.  how I tell them is what they'll be. Are those "shaggy sad redwoods, speaking of the long defeat that is life"? "Proud, magnificent red-brown friends of my working days, connecting me with innumerable generations past"? "A stand of redwoods"? "Some trees"? Depends on the day, depends on my mind.  All these descriptions are true, and none of them is, at all.

Later, he notes that outside his writing shed are some things.

The hose is lying out there, pale green in the hot sun.

It is not, by the way, "greenish-looking, on this hot, sunny day." It's "pale green in the hot sun." Why? Because it's better that way.  Why is it better? Because I prefer it.

Well, we can disagree about that. Above, as you read "pale green in the hot sun," did you see that hose? Your reading energy did something at that phrase. Were you in or out? With me or against me? Compelled slightly forward or held slightly back. 

When you find yourself on the side of the majority

 Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

Mark Twain

I found the stories opening up to me

From the last pages of A Swim in the Pond, by George Saunders

When I started this book, as I said at the beginning, with the realization of how important teaching these stories had been to me over the last twenty years.  My intention was to get down on paper some of what I'd learned from them--to preserve those insights, I guess I'd say. As 1worked with the stories, I found something else happening. Freed from the schedule of the semester, forced to specificity by the essay form. I found the stories opening up to me and challenging me in ways they never had before. They are, it turns out, even more wonderful than than I believed all those year -- more complexly made, more mysterious.  And they threw my own work into relief: I see what the Russians did that I have, so far, failed to do.

It's been daunting and lovely to find that my chosen form contains so much potential and that I'm still so far from fulfilling it.

It's also made me feel this: these Russians did what they did so beautifully, there's no need for me, or anyone, to keep doing it.

Which is another way of saying that part of my job (par of your job) is to find new paths for the story form to go down; to make stories that are as powerful as these Russian stories but that, in their voice and form and concerns, are new, meaning that they respond to the things history has given us to know about life on earth in the years since these Russians were here.

These stories, as we've seen, work in a particular way. Ours will need to work differently, not only to distinguish them from the older works but so that they will speak to our time as freshly as these Russian stories spoke to theirs.

Island Body by Richard Blanco

 ISLAND BODY

by Richard Blanco

Forced to leave home, but home
never leaves us. Wherever exile
takes us, we remain this body made
from the red earth of our island—
our ribs taken from its montes—
its breeze our breaths. We stand
with its palmeras. Our eyes hold
its blue-green sea. Waterfalls
echo in our ears. On our wrists,
jasmine. Our palms open, close
like its hibiscus to love, be loved.

We thrive wherever we remain true
to our lucha—hustle of our feet
walking to work as we must,
oily hands fixing broken beauty
as we must, soiled hands growing
what we must, or cutting what
must be cut. Our pockets filled
with the island’s sands and pulse
of its waves, with the gossamer
dew and dust of its sunrises,
with the song of its sinsontes
and its son nested in our souls.

Wherever the world spins us,
home remains the island that
remains in us. Its sun still sets
in our eyes. Its clouds stay still
above us, our hands still hold
its tepid rain. We’re still caught
in its net of stars, still listen to
its moon crooning above its dirt 
roads. We’re its rivers, the hem
of its coast and lace of its sierras,
its valleys’ windsong, its vast
seas of sugarcane fields. We're
our island's sweetness as bitter
as the taste of having to leave it.

Middle Season #28

 

The beginning of this season, there were red and burgandy vines in Bemis -- splashes of color and fading green.  By the end, there were lots of whole trees changing.  Here, burning bushes, hibiscus.

How reading changes your mind

Paul Klee - Dynamics of the Head - 1934

Why do we read?  Saunders, in Swim in the Pond, that "our minds were changed" by having read a story.  He muses about what that means:

But I'll give it a try.

I am reminded that my mind is not the only mind.

I fell an increased confidence in my ability to imagine the experiences of other people and accept these as valid.

I  feel I exist on a continuum with other people: what is in them is in me and vice versa.

My capacity for language is reenergized. My internal language (the language in which I think) gets richer, more specific and adroit.

I find myself liking the world more, taking more loving notice of it (this is related to that re-energization of my language).

I feel luckier to be here and more aware that someday I won't be.

I feel more aware of the things of the world and more interested in them.

So, that's all pretty good.

Essentially, before I read a story, I'm in a state of knowing, of being fairly sure. My life has led me to a certain place and I'm contentedly resting there. Then, here comes the story, and I am slightly undone, in a good way. Not so sure anymore, of my views, and reminded that my view-maker is always a little bit off: it's limited, it's too easily satisfied, with too little data.

The Residue of the Performance

 

I'm currently fascinated by article Steve Keene after reading this article on him in the NYT, "Mile a Minute Painter has a Retrospective."  He painted the cover of Wowie Zowie and Fun Trick Noisemaker.

On a recent afternoon, the painter Steve Keene stood inside “the Cage,” a room fashioned from chain-link fencing and large sheets of plywood, situated in the center of his home studio, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Keene, who is sixty-five, was applying dabs of pink paint from a plastic tub to sixty plywood panels, each affixed to the Cage by a loop of wire. He is often cited as the most prolific painter in the world: he estimates that he has more than three hundred thousand paintings in circulation. His outfit—blue shorts, a white short-sleeved shirt, red sneakers, rubber gloves—was dotted with paint. Certain items in or near the Cage (a watering can, a container of kitty litter) had accumulated so many paint blobs that they’d become nearly unrecognizable. “I love the idea of doing sixty paintings a day, and finishing them, more than the idea of trying to make one that I think is perfect,” he said. “The whole system is based on trying not to beat myself up.”

This month, the art gallery ChaShaMa is hosting Keene’s first retrospective, at its Brooklyn Heights location, and celebrating the release of “The Steve Keene Art Book,” from Hat & Beard Press. Keene’s work is vibrant, graphic, and funny. He’s best known for painting reproductions of iconic album covers, from John Coltrane to Kraftwerk to Hole, though he’ll paint almost anything. (He has also been commissioned to produce original album covers, including for Pavement’s “Wowee Zowee.”) Each weekday morning, Keene randomly selects ten scenes, usually culled from cheap art books he buys at the Strand. He makes six paintings of each image, working on them simultaneously, circling the Cage, adding one color at a time. There is something modest and machinelike about the way he drifts peacefully from piece to piece, never pausing to fuss over the results.

This article provides a sense of what kinds of things he's painting:

That day, Keene was re-creating the grainy portrait from the cover of Neil Young’s “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere,” a vintage Norman Rockwell illustration of an aproned matriarch putting a roast turkey on a dining table (he’d added the words “Food Blog” to the bottom), and a Chinese-takeout carton, among other images. Keene sells his paintings on his Web site, usually for around ten dollars each, but buyers don’t get to choose which pieces they’ll receive—they merely commit to a quantity. “My paintings have been two dollars or five dollars or twenty dollars for thirty years, and I like that,” he said. “There’s an informal network of people who know my work. It’s not underground anymore, but it’s not in an art-world structure.”

I learned some about "process art," which I might have known as a name, but not much more.  It makes me think of Jeff Tweedy's "Write Just One Song," (which is really about writing a song a day, about making art less "precious."

“I just love to work,” he said. He’s a process guy. He’s often compared to Warhol, but Keene feels more in line with Robert Rauschenberg, and with the installation artists of the nineteen-seventies. “They set about to do a series of tasks, and the performance was the art work,” Keene said. When Keene shows his work in a gallery, he often makes arrangements to paint there, too. “My paintings are the residue, or the souvenir, of the performance,” he explained. 

This from a Pitchfork article about him:

When I went to art school, all the art that was really interesting was process art. Basically, you set up a system, you set up your parameters, and then you just work within that.

It sounds like you’re designing a machine, giving the parameters to input the data and then create something else.

You have to be machinelike in the discipline to do it. I wanted to turn it into a craft, like I make pottery and I have to make a hundred plates. Or I’m a cook, and I have to make a hundred pizzas. 

and this, which makes me understand the "process art" better, and makes me think of Don DeLillo and Andy Warhol:

You’ve said that any one individual work of yours are incomplete parts of a whole. Can you elaborate on that?

It’s like you’re at the supermarket. I mean, honestly, there’s nothing more beautiful than just walking down the aisle of the supermarket, all the repetitions of color. So those are like stand-ins for pieces of work, for art. When I’d have these art shows and I’d see people walking around laughing, holding my art and showing their friends what they’re getting and trying to get more—that’s the artwork. Everything else—my paintings—they’re the props. They’re the material to have an artwork. 

Nuances over novelty

He Huaishuo, Conversation in the Forest, 1981

Duckworth underscores the importance of prizing nuance over novelty. He continues:

It is part and parcel of human D.N.A., the human condition, to be interested in things that are new — things that we haven’t seen before, things that we haven’t experienced before. This drive for novelty, neophilia, is with us at all stages of life.

Once you are an expert, you can discern these subtle differences. And I think that makes life full of novelty. … It’s not that you run out of these subtleties. In fact, the more you know, the more you notice. And so, you can, essentially, enjoy a life of never being bored.

Kleptoplasty

 

 Can animals photosynthesize?  Some sea slugs steal chloroplasts from algae; others retain algae in their body and live symbiotically. 

Costasiella kuroshimae (leaf sheep), is a sea slug performing 'kleptoplasty' = retaining the chloroplasts from the algae it eats, so that they can be used to indirectly perform photosynthesis.

From Science Focus:

Some animals have managed to harness the power of photosynthesis. For example, when sacoglossan sea slugs chow down on photosynthetic green algae, chloroplasts from the algae become incorporated into the animals’ gut cells where they continue to pump out nutrients long after the rest of the algae have been digested and expelled. It’s a feat called ‘kleptoplasty’.

Other animals, including some clams and flatworms, also use the photosynthetic powers of algae, but adopt a symbiotic approach where the algae remain unharmed. Corals are the classic example. Most reef-building corals contain colonies of algae, called zooxanthellae, which live in their tissues and bequeath the coral their hue. During the day, the algae provide the coral with most of their energy needs and, in return, the algae get a safe place to live with a stunning sea view.

Making a car appear in the mind

 

      Milton Avery (1885–1965) Edge of the Forest

In this earlier post I listed some idea about enargia, the rhetorical term for describing something so exactly that it conjures the thing into existence.... it evokes the brightness of being.  There were examples from Updike and Shakespeare.  

Here's George Saunders in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain on Tolstoy's "factual" prose.

A fact draws us in. This seems to be one of those "laws of fiction" we'e been seeking. "The car was dented and red" makes a car appear in the mind. Even more so if the fact is an action: "The dented red car slowly left the parking low." Notice how little we doubt that statement, the spontaneous, involuntary buy-in that makes us forget that there is no car and no parking lot.

    But to say that the story is nearly all facts doesn't mean that Tolstoy is a minimalist. He has a gift for making sentences that, staying within factuality, convey a bounty of information and make a rich, detailed, almost overfull world.

    Consider the difference between "The maid carried the samovar to the table" and Tolstoy's version: "After flicking with her apron the top of the samovar which was now boiling over, she carried it with an effort to the table, raised it, and set it down with a thud."

    That apron flick, the woman carrying the samovar "with an effort," the thud as she sets it down, the fact that she's carrying it below the level of the table (she "raised it" before she could "set it down" ) are all acts embroidered into the basic action "woman carries samovar to table." Although they don't make a more particular person (anyone could find a samovar heavy), they make a more particular action. The samovar is heavier and hotter than if she'd just "carried the samovar to the table."

This also reminds me of John Berger writing about the artist Morandi who drew a "Place where a thing is just coming into being."  

I'm thinking about the difference in representation and "bringing into being".

The Creek

 Earlier I wrote about stopping on my normal walk in Bemis to begin breathing at the pace of nature.

Piet Mondrian - Small Birch Forest - ca.1902

Over the summer I continued that practice, stopping on the bridge over Salt Creek to watch, take in nature 10-breaths at a time.  

Often, each breath will bring with it a new observation - something I hadn't seen before (hadn't seen how the current takes the watery grass or the reflection of the few red leaves on the water) or something that "arises" (like a duck landing or a wind picking up and making soft noises in the leaves).  I'll breath slowly, counting as I notice something else.  Occasionally, I'll take a breath and nothing will have changed.  That's not the norm, though.  If I forget myself in thought, or if I find that I've been counting breaths, but not noticing, I'll go back.  So, this practice sometimes takes a lot more than 10 breaths.  After 10 breaths, I'm certainly slower, calmer.  I feel more aware of the natural rhythms of forest and stream, birds and breezes. I realize that there IS a world separate and coherent from me and my accounting of it (which is different still from my normal way of encountering the world, which is where the world is simply obstacles and/or background as I make my way through to my next deadline, project, task, destination.)

Yesterday, something new occurred.  (I did this late morning... I ran for a mile from home and into the woods, then walked, feeling more attuned by the effort of the run) I was watching the stream, noticing endless glittering of sun on rippling water, hearing the rising and falling of breeze in the trees, seeing leaves sometimes fall, sometimes aided by the wind, sometimes not.  I noticed the leaves fall into the water and began watching the leaves travel in the water, carried along by the general downward current, but also by other factors underwater.  Two leaves next to each other do not more down the stream in tandem.  One snags an unseen eddy, one is drawn towards a faster section.

What came over me, what inhabited me, was a peaceful, contented watching.  It was not a scientific stance ("I'm watching for the underwater forces") or expository ("look at how two leaves dropped in the water stray from each other") but quietly appreciative.  Even that description feels not-right.  I wasn't saying "gosh, how I appreciate this nice little hydrodynamic display of leave, breeze, and water."  I was following it along and seeing the rightness of it.  "Yes, this is how things are.  It's the movie of life and it's pretty interesting.... not just the going downstream but also the slight turnings and the accompanying sounds."

One leaf falls now another

Shiro Kasamatsu

 

one leaf falls

now, another leaf falls

in the wind"   Ransetsu Hattori

Consensus reality

Paul Klee, Forest Architecture, 1925

George Saunders, in "A Swim in the Pond at Night" refers to "consensus reality" as the good-enough match between the world and language and writes about how stories "exploit" our fondness for consensus reality.

I once heard the term "consensus reality" used to describe the set of things about the world that we all pretty much agree to be true. Water is blue, birds sing, and so on. And although water is not simply blue and not all birds sing, and to call what some birds do "singing" approximates and undersells what they actually do, agreeing on this consensus view is natural and useful. When I say,"Singing birds were skimming low over an expanse of blue water;" that image is useful if you want to know, roughly, what's going on down at the lake. When I say, "Look out, a piano is about to fall on your head from above," the fact that we've agreed to call that collection of wood, ivory, and metal a "piano," and that thing at the end of your neck a "head," and that direction up there "above" enables you to step out of the way in time, I hope.

"Realism" exploits this fondness of ours for consensus reality. Things happen roughly as they do in the real world; the mode limits itself to what usually happens, to what's physically possible.

 I find the term consensus reality interesting.  I also find interesting how the "exploiting" works in readers brains.  (Listeners brains, too, because everyday langauge does the same thing and jokes and lies also exploit it.)

Saunders goes on to say that stories do NOT need to be realistic to contain truth.

But a story can also be truthful if it declines consensus reality--if things happen in it that don't and could never happen in the real world.

Entering the Stream

I listened to  an early Ten Percent Happier podcast with an interview with Dr. Jay Michaelson.  Michealson is notable because he talks about what "stage of enlightenment" he's on and how he got there.  One thing that I liked about the concept that Michaelson talked about was that each stage marks a different level of attainment that you can't return from.  I think he refers to them as "boundaries you can't recross." Once you've accomplished Y, you can return to earlier behaviors and feelings, but you can't "unsee" X and you'll always have access to X.  There is something attractive in reaching stages that you can "never go back" to.  Here's  Dummies.com on this concept.

When you become a stream-enterer, you can never again believe that you’re really a separate self that lives inside your head and looks through your eyes. Your experience forever eliminates this illusion. When you look within, you can’t find a self anywhere.

In everyday life, however, you may still feel like a separate somebody and may still get caught up by greed, anger, ignorance, and various other negative feelings and patterns. Fortunately, the stage of stream-enterer also brings an unshakable confidence and dedication to the Buddhist spiritual path, so you’re motivated to keep deepening and refining your realization.

The levels are bewildering to me.  But I also am attracted to the fact that there are supposed 4 or 5 stages within each stage.... it's a process that's followable.  Here's wikipedia on the four stages:

A "Stream-enterer" (Sotāpanna) is free from:

• Identity view (Pali: sakkāya-diṭṭhi), the belief that there is an unchanging self or soul in the five impermanent skandhas
• Attachment to rites and rituals
• Doubt about the teachings

A "Once-returner" (Sakadāgāmin) has greatly attenuated:

• Sensual desire
• Ill will

A "Non-returner" (Anāgāmi) is free from:

• Sensual desire
• Ill will

An Arahant is free from all of the five lower fetters and the five higher fetters, which are:

• Attachment to the four meditative absorptions, which have form (rupa jhana)
• Attachment to the four formless absorptions (ārupa jhana)
• Conceit
• Restlessness
• Ignorance

According to this website, which I randomly chose, entering the stream has four steps:

Association of People with Integrity

Listening to the True Dharma.

Appropriate Attention. Having heard the Dhamma, it is important to bring appropriate attention — seeing things in terms of cause and effect — both to what you have heard and to your experiences in general, for this one factor can make all the difference in the success or failure of your practice.

Right Practice

Playground Elegy by Clint Smith

 

The first time I slid down a slide my mother
told me to hold my hands towards the sky.

Something about gravity, weight distribution,
and feeling the air ripple through your fingers.

I remember reaching the bottom, smile consuming
half of my face, hands still in the air because

I didn’t want it to stop. Ever since, this defiance
of gravity has always been synonymous with feeling alive.

When I read of the new child, his body strewn across
the street, a casket of bones and concrete, I wonder how

many times he slid down the slide. How many times
he defied gravity to answer a question in class. Did he

raise his hands for all of them? Does my mother regret
this? That she raised a black boy growing up to think

that raised hands made me feel more alive. That raised hands
meant I was alive. That raised hands meant I would live.