New Homeowners

I’m not good at writing short blog posts. Writing a post takes me ages, both to digest and clarify what I want to say, and then smoothing out the words to say it with. Worth the effort, but an effort nonetheless, like any good-for-you undertaking. And so there is a lot of procrastination, hence the once or twice a month posting. Dave says I need to get better at writing short updates, that every post needn’t be a philosophical magnum opus and like so many other things, he is, of course, right. When I click on to the various blogs I read, I am always disappointed when the same post loads day after day without an update. I want to know what’s going on!

So this is just a short one to say, we moved into our new house two weeks ago, and it’s stressing me out. There is so much to do (which we knew when we bought the place), and all of a sudden it’s kind of hanging heavy on my shoulders. It turns out owning your own pile of property is a totally different bag than renting someone else’s pile. When you rent, there’s a lot of stuff you just shrug off. Things aren’t how you would want them to be, but . . . it’s not your place. So whatever. You live with it. You laugh at things like the bathroom in an old apartment of ours that was completely tiled in blue: floor, walls and ceiling (my mother, on seeing it the first time: “Oh, it’s like a crematorium!”), and the blue toilet with a cigarette burn on the lid of the tank, whose push-button flush mechanism you had to hold down for what felt like forever for it to flush properly. For me, renting involved both the freedom to not care about imperfection and the countering undercurrent of thought that one day, when we have our own place, everything WILL be perfect, because it will be ours.

So now, of course, I am experiencing the full heaviness of material possession. I have taken on this house, and everything that is wrong with it. Because there’s no excuses now for things not being right, except, of course, not having the unlimited pots of money necessary to make them right. I know I need to let go, to combine the lightness of renting — of knowing that, really, our stay in this house is also a temporary sojourn, no matter how many years it lasts — with the satisfaction of fixing things up, however slowly that progresses.

My mother wrote me an email on our moving day on this very subject, before I was even aware of this dilemma myself, and as usual, hit the nail on the head:

Not to be too Mommyish, not to mention philosophical — I guess this is how we get so attached, we put our heart and soul to something (houses, children, work) and then it is o so hard to let go (houses, children, work). I do not envy you, but I rejoice that you are having the chance to really enjoy the opportunity, with or without detachment!

So I’m working on it, Mom, both the enjoyment and the detachment.

Edward Hopper, "Sun in an Empty Room"

(We have this postcard on our fridge, and whenever I get overwhelmed with the piles of boxes, and our shabby furniture sitting sheepishly in the new rooms, it makes me feel calm.)

View from our front window. Not energy efficient, as you can see.

For a long time, I’ve been so unhappy in the studio, and with my work. In fact, feeling miserable was the primary motivation for starting this blog a year or so ago. I wanted to do something that made me feel that I was at least a little bit connected to the outside world, that the hours I spent in the studio were not meaningless, uncounted by anyone except myself, and to post updates on my slow daily progress on the internet, so that, even if nobody ever saw them, it was at least a gesture, some small public proof that I existed.

(You know, if a tree falls but no one is there, et cetera et cetera, only my version was, if a painter spends 8 hours a day in the studio, but never finishes a painting, let alone shows it to anyone else . . . is she really an artist? (And how long before she goes completely MAD?))

And the months wore on, and paintings didn’t get finished, and I got more and more fed up with myself and bored by the limits of my own brain, and less and less happy to spend my days within the narrow four walls of the studio. Life was going on outside, without me.

So I kind of just stopped for a while, this past summer. Not completely. But largely. I experimented with acrylic paint, with an eye to having a less-toxic alternative in the event of pregnancy & motherhood. And basically hated it. And got really depressed thinking about having to give up painting when we decide to try and have a baby if I couldn’t find a workable alternative. (Even though I was already depressed and not really painting anyway—there’s nothing like the thought of having something taken away from you to make you desperately cling to it.) I started a collaboration with my friend Jesse, a poet, which got off to a promising start, and then stalled due to my lack of follow-through (although I hope it could potentially enter a new and different phase, maybe less trying to create a specific correlation between a poem and a painting and more of an ongoing conversation between makers of different kinds).

And I thought a lot about happiness, and what Art Means to Me, and whether I could maybe just stop doing it, and what other kind of job I might be able to do without hating it too much and maybe making actual money at, and whether being afraid that if you don’t have children you’ll regret it terribly later on when it’s too late is really a sound enough basis on which to launch a pregnancy attempt or whether really, truly, sincerely wanting to be a parent in the full knowledge of how it will likely lay waste to your life as you know it is the only ethically valid reason for bringing another human being into the world.

I didn’t answered any of those questions, really, but I did come to a few realizations apropos of my studio practice — that is to say, painting — the most important being that no, I cannot give it up. Painting is such a fundamental part of my identity that even if I stopped doing the activity, I would still think of myself as a painter. David pointed out that in my horrible nightmare, I was going to be caught on the evidence of my painting glove, which he thought spoke psychological volumes about my self-identification as an artist.

Another realization, which was not so much of a realization as the compounding reinforcement of a feeling that I’ve had for some time, was that I am happiest, truly happy, when I’m working from life. Looking at something in the world. And conversely, that I am not happy working out of my own head, despite years of trying. I’m just not that imaginative. I end up feeling sterile, and the paintings stunted. I had a conversation with Catherine Murphy as I was about to graduate from Yale about working from life, how I thought that was the direction I was going to go in. So I’ve had this inkling that it would be the right process for me for a while. I don’t know why I’ve resisted it for three plus years, though. My old friends, fear and doubt, no doubt.

Another snippet of the Fairfield Porter interview with Paul Cummings:

PC: Do you think that painting is more of an emotional thing than an intellectual thing?

FP: No, I don’t think it’s more emotional or more intellectual. I think it’s a way of making the connection between yourself and everything.

PC: How do you mean “and everything”?

FP: Well, I mean “and reality,” which is everything. In other words, you connect yourself to everything, which includes yourself.

PC: Through the painting?

FP: Yes, through the process of painting. And the person who looks at it gets it vicariously. If you follow music you vicariously live the composer’s efforts.

PC: But don’t you think the person who looks at a painting has en entirely different relationship to it than the person who has painted it?

FP: Well, for one thing they see something that is hard for the person who’s painted it to see. I mean they see the person who has painted it and they see his emotions, which he maybe doesn’t see.

Porter’s brief, unsentimental description of painting from life resonated with my own experience very strongly:  that it’s about connection, both inward and outward. Restating it in more flowery language won’t improve it, so I won’t try. Only: YES.

I’ve been walking around these days and finding the world to be almost shockingly beautiful. Feeling connected, feeling awake, looking at everything more than I ever have before. Everywhere I look I see paintings, waiting to be made. Forms and shapes and color masses before me coalesce into paintings, group and regroup into new compositions, waiting for someone to translate them into paint. Houses, trees, cars, telephone wires, our television, a wind-up red ladybug, the cord to my laptop, the view from my bathroom window. Nothing too mundane to be beautiful. Where even to start?

I’m in a hurry to finish this painting of our orange living room, because, among other developments, we’re buying our first house and moving in less than two weeks! It’s almost incredibly to me, but true. With gratitude to parents and grandparents for making it possible. So I hope I can pull off this painting, in the midst of the packing and the frenzy. And I’m looking forward to all the new paintings I hope to make in our new home.

My painting is bad enough to warrant constant practice.

—Fairfield Porter

You have to get it wrong before you can get it right.

Or maybe the italics should be: You have to do it wrong before you can get it right.

This sentence came to mind this morning while I was painting away, happily. (Happily! Did you read that?? I have not painted “happily” in lo these many moons. Indeed, I did not know if I would ever care to paint again for the better part of a year now.)

I’m painting an interior scene—the living room in our apartment, which is painted a melony shade of orange. We didn’t choose it—our landlady, Jean, did—but luckily orange is maybe my favorite color. Also, it helps fight the Portland winter grays.

I’ve never done this before—painted an interior. Just set up and painted right in my own house. But I’m loving it. I’m not sure how well the painting is going to turn out. I’m not sure it looks like anything right now. But every day when I paint on it, I experience pleasure. Pleasure in the process of painting. And when I’m done, I always experience a bit of a let down when I look critically at the painting, and it doesn’t look as good as it felt. But I’m not letting that distract me too much. I think this could be a sea-change.

I was reading my Fairfield Porter book, a painter I love, and envying his practice. Painting his household, his family, his rooms & furniture, the landscape around him. And I found myself wanting to do the same. And feeling like I couldn’t. That it somehow wasn’t serious enough as an enterprise. That it was also boring, and bourgeois, and archaic, and not a cool contemporary thing to do. And that it wasn’t a focused enough project, that it would be scattered and piecemeal. And then I just thought, fuck it. Having a more narrowly focused project (pictures of figures turning into trees, for example) wasn’t working for me anyway. So maybe I’m not a project artist. And this feeling that my overall work has to be “about” something, preferably something based on critical theory is just a hangover from graduate school. That is to say, more or less bullshit. And maybe, just maybe, things will come together somehow anyway. Over time. If I can manage to keep painting over the Valkyrie chorus of my own nay-saying.

I am not trying to interpret any slogan or phrase in my painting. The visual arts are non-verbal and direct; modern education is verbal and indirect . . . The experience of a painter while he is painting is about the nature of the paint—that is his most direct experience—all other things, like what he is looking at outside the painting, what he remembers, what he thinks about with the left-over part of his mind, all talking to himself, etc., and all translation of outside sensation, insofar as they have to do with the painting, have to do with illusion. Therefore the realism of my paintings is its illusory side. What illusions this evokes in the spectator is mostly beyond my knowledge.

—Fairfield Porter, Interview with Paul Cummings, 1968

The thing that I am experiencing very intensely with this painting—besides, of course, always and forever “the nature of the paint,” as Fairfield says—has to do with getting it wrong. By which I mean, when I go to paint anything, I initially always have it in not-quite-the-right place, and not-quite-the-right color. And I used to be very discouraged by this and think, why can’t I get it right? If I were a better artist, I would get it right from the beginning. But what I’m seeing more and more clearly is the utter fallacy of this idea. In fact, the only way I can see how something should look is by painting it and then seeing how it isn’t quite there yet. I have to paint it first so that I have something to compare with the world in front of me. That first attempt is not just a regrettable error, to hasten past on the march to goodness and rightness and doneness, it’s an unavoidable, deeply necessary part of the process. The wrongness is what gets you to rightness. Only actually making something allows you to see how it can be adjusted, moved, tweaked, changed, to better reflect reality or express yourself. You have to write the first draft before you can write the second draft, let alone the final draft.

I’m not sure I’ve fully expressed how revolutionary this is to me. Maybe it sounds damningly obvious. But to actually experience this in action feels nothing short of of revelatory, hitting home with the force only a truism can bring to bear when you suddenly realize that its cliched wisdom actually applies to your own, unique existence. (And yes, air quotes and eye-rolling accompany that “unique.”)

And furthermore, if I actually just painted a painting perfectly straight from the get-go, everything in the right place, nothing to be scraped out, or moved or repainted ten times, the surface of the painting would be about the most boring surface ever. Smooth and flat, with no history of its own making:  no brushmarks, no depth, no layers, no impasto, no glimmers of colors showing through other colors, in short: none of the physical qualities that I love about paintings. The haptic stuff. The textures you want to touch. The actual paint, built up on a surface that both makes an image and is a thing itself. All the reasons I started painting in the first place. Whoa.

You have to get it wrong before you can get it right.

I haven’t written here for a long time because I’ve been busy, both outwardly and inwardly, and haven’t had the discipline to delve into my various unhappinesses, those usual suspects, and write about them, even though I know writing about this stuff actually helps me see it a little more clearly, for a while. It’s just a lot of work, wading through it, and I haven’t made much progress recently. And I don’t want to be tedious . . .

. . . what to do for work, if I can find a way to make art that feels truly honest and self-generated, whether I have the necessary boldness to keep pursuing that goal, whether I even still want to be an artist, should we buy that old house or is it a terrible investment, is now is the right time to start trying to have a baby (or at least not the most inopportune time), would having a child make all of this impossibly more difficult, or impossible and wonderful in a way I can’t yet imagine, or just make it all matter a whole lot less . . .

So I’m dodging the whole sloppy bullet for the moment, and writing about something else entirely. The one year anniversary of this blog is coming up, and I didn’t want the silence to stretch on for too long.

I was really taken with the recent NY Times magazine article about Carl Jung’s big red book. I don’t know a lot about Jungian psychology, except that dreams are considered very important, offering clues to the deeper aspects of one’s psyche. And I’ve never been one for dreams, really. I seldom remember mine. And is there anything tedious than listening to someone else describe theirs?

So Jung went through a mid-life crisis of some kind,

. . . characterized variously as a creative illness, a descent into the underworld, a bout with insanity, a narcissistic self-deification, a transcendence, a midlife breakdown and an inner disturbance mirroring the upheaval of World War I. Whatever the case, in 1913, Jung, who was then 38, got lost in the soup of his own psyche. He was haunted by troubling visions and heard inner voices. Grappling with the horror of some of what he saw, he worried in moments that he was, in his own words, “menaced by a psychosis” or “doing a schizophrenia.”
He later would compare this period of his life — this “confrontation with the unconscious,” as he called it — to a mescaline experiment. He described his visions as coming in an “incessant stream.” He likened them to rocks falling on his head, to thunderstorms, to molten lava. “I often had to cling to the table,” he recalled, “so as not to fall apart.”

Had he been a psychiatric patient, Jung might well have been told he had a nervous disorder and encouraged to ignore the circus going on in his head. But as a psychiatrist, and one with a decidedly maverick streak, he tried instead to tear down the wall between his rational self and his psyche. For about six years, Jung worked to prevent his conscious mind from blocking out what his unconscious mind wanted to show him. Between appointments with patients, after dinner with his wife and children, whenever there was a spare hour or two, Jung sat in a book-lined office on the second floor of his home and actually induced hallucinations — what he called “active imaginations.” “In order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me ‘underground,’ ” Jung wrote later in his book “Memories, Dreams, Reflections,” “I knew that I had to let myself plummet down into them.” He found himself in a liminal place, as full of creative abundance as it was of potential ruin, believing it to be the same borderlands traveled by both lunatics and great artists.

Jung recorded it all. First taking notes in a series of small, black journals, he then expounded upon and analyzed his fantasies, writing in a regal, prophetic tone in the big red-leather book. The book detailed an unabashedly psychedelic voyage through his own mind, a vaguely Homeric progression of encounters with strange people taking place in a curious, shifting dreamscape. Writing in German, he filled 205 oversize pages with elaborate calligraphy and with richly hued, staggeringly detailed paintings.

The Times had some images of the paintings in his book (which I’ve used in this post), and I thought they were incredible. And that night, after reading the article, I had one of the most frightening dreams of my life. I wrote it down soon after waking, before the details sank bank into the mist. So I hope you’ll forgive me, if you find other people’s dreams as boring as I do, for sharing it here. It left a mark on me in a way that no other dream has.

I was evil. I had murdered two people and ripped them apart and eaten bits of them. I had mucked about with their bones and flesh in the most sickening way imaginable. In my dream I was both reading a novel about a character who had done this, and somehow I had also actually done it in real life. A little confusing. A police dragnet was closing in. I heard they had found a glove with traces of paint on it (the kind I wear when painting), and also, a dirty hankie. I knew I was doomed, they would find me by the DNA evidence on the hankie, and the circumstantial evidence of my nitrile painting glove. I went to my parents house to see if they could fix it, make me feel better, absolve me, return me to my childhood innocence. My father was there, and he started telling me how he was feeling a bit depressed about his upcoming trip to India.

There was a man with whom he didn’t get along, but had to contend with. There was a picture of this man on the wall. He had ridiculous long ears, like a donkey, except that they both faced the same way; one was twisted around and attached incorrectly to his head. He looked both ridiculous and sinister. I confessed my crime to my father in sheer desperation because I was physically sick over what I had done, but also about the inevitability of being arrested. I wanted to be caught, and yet also wanted terribly to escape, with the panic of any hunted quarry. Above all I wanted relief from my guilt, from the horror of my own actions. And there was none to be had.

I woke up to the early morning darkness, Dave’s untroubled back, and the sound of rain. Slipping thankfully back into my own skin with unspeakable relief. It wasn’t real, it was only a dream . . . It was clear to me in that moment in a way I never even stop to consider, because my conscious mind says, with perhaps misplaced confidence, that I would never commit such a crime, that my own innocence and peace of mind is the most valuable thing I possess. I understood, deep in my bones and gut, the words Satan says in Milton’s Paradise Lost:

Me miserable! which way shall I fly
Infinite wrath, and infinite despair?
Which way I fly is Hell; my self am Hell;
And in the lowest deep a lower deep
Still threatning to devour me opens wide,
To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav’n.
O then at last relent: is there no place
Left for Repentance, none for Pardon left?

(Paradise Lost, Book IV, 73-82)

As I lay there, it was remarkable to watch the shrinking of the dream, from all-encompassing, from one end of my horizon to the other, from there is no other world but this to a swiftly fading memory, like an unthinkably gigantic balloon that has been popped, and as the air that kept it aloft whistles out it shrivels down to a few soft rubber fragments in your hand that you look to with awe to try and recreate the power it had over you.

What does it mean to have a dream in which you plunge the depths of the human soul’s potential for defilement? I can see that my father looms large, that I still turned to him for absolution. Even while in the dream he was trying to tell me that he’s just a man, with his own problems, his own issues, that he cannot fix my life for me. And what does it mean that I was going to be caught by the evidence of my own painty glove?

The funny thing is, now I can’t remember who the men were that I killed. Or even why. Just that I had done it.

I do not know who I am.

Is this what adulthood is like? You find yourself being carried along, heading somewhere, somehow, surprised how it all seems to keep happening, with or without your best or feeble efforts to make it one way or another?

I am painting the plum tree in our friend Tom’s amazing garden and a friend of his asked me if I was painting “just for fun.” It stumped me. Because, basically, yes? Since I don’t have a gallery, or anything resembling a career at this point. Except, no? Because I take what I do more seriously than “just for fun” or, god forbid the dreaded word, a “hobby.” And, *self-hatred/pretentious ass alert, despite saying I’d never prop up my ego with this, I did go to Yale. So I hedged, saying, “Well, I do teach painting,” in an attempt to give myself some faltering sense of legitimacy. But seriously. Saying that you teach to give yourself cred as an artist is putting the cart before the horse, big time. And wicked lame.

Ego, ego, ego.

But the truth is, painting the plum tree is ‘just’ for fun. It gives me great pleasure to paint outdoors, in the sun and fresh air, negotiating the boundless complexities and subtleties of stuff in the flesh. I like being overwhelmed by all the visual information in the world, how it forces me to simplify, omit, choose. And fruit trees just make me happy.  I like painting leaves and fruit. There is no conceptual angle to put on this, no way to make it more complicated or sophisticated.

I just hope I can manage to pull a decent painting out of it.

Having been feeling blog-blocked recently, I resumed my old habit of dictionary browsing:

black box: 1:  a usually complicated electronic device that functions and is packaged as a unit and whose internal mechanism is usu. hidden from or mysterious to the user; broadly:  anything that has mysterious or unknown internal functions or mechanisms

cipher:  1: the symbol 0 denoting the absence of all magnitude or quantity:  NAUGHT, ZERO  2 a: a method of transforming a text in order to conceal its meaning (1) by systematically replacing the letters of the plaintext by substitutes in the same sequence either singly or in pairs or other polygraphs (as by writing 1 for A, 2 for B, etc., or F for A, S for B, etc., or QL for AB, etc.) or (2) by systematically rearranging the plaintext letters into another sequence (as by writing them normally in a rectangle and then copying them off from the columns taken in an arbitrary succession) — called also respectively (1) substitution cipher and (2) transposition cipher; b: a prescription for a cipher system:  a key or memorandum that enables decipherment c: a message in cipher:  a text in secret writing  3: an arabic numeral:  NUMBER, FIGURE 4 a obs: a symbolic character (as a letter, hieroglyph, or astrological sign) b: a combination of symbolic letters; esp:  the interwoven initials of a name:  DEVICE, MONOGRAM c: a sign in Karl Jaspers’ existentialism serving to mediate between the existent and the transcendent  5: one that has no weight, worth, or influence:  NONENTITY 〈doomed to die as a 〜 in some vast statistical operation in which our teeth would be counted . . . but our death itself would be unknown — Norman Mailer〉  6: the sounding of an organ pipe caused by a mechanical defect

2 cipher:  1: to use figures in a mathematical process:  do sums in arithmetic:  FIGURE  2: to produce a cipher—used of an organ pipe  1 a archaic: to express (as thoughts or words) by written or graven characters  b obs: to show forth:  make plain by visible evidence:  PORTRAY  c: ENCIPHER d obs: DECIPHER  2 in shipbuilding: BEVEL, CHAMFER 3 a: to compute in figures:  calculate or figure arithmetically—sometimes used with out 〈a sum -ed out〉b dial: to figure out as if by calculation:  solve by pondering

Some random notes I jotted down in my Human Development Psychology class, about one’s Thirties:

-consolidate identity
-come to terms w/ personal limits
-”sometimes I would like to be everything and I’ve learned that I can’t. You have to work with what you have.”
-deeper awareness/consciousness of self
-”I found something that I had before but I had no way to get to, like a new room.
-Yeah, I can compete at X job, but maybe I just plain don’t want to.
-create a new dream or modify an old one

Why am I taking a psychology class, you ask? Maybe now that I’ve mentioned it (and that the course is over) I’ll finally get my act together and write a post about it. I’ve only been procrastinating for about three months now.

My parents just left after a lovely, elongated weekend visit. I feel quite bathed in affection, good wine, and tasty food. Since Dave and I moved to Portland, I only see them a few times a year, which is quite a change after living within a half hour of them for most of my life, and enjoying the proximity. (I know this makes me a bit weird.) So we make the most of our short times together, indulging in lovey-doveyness.

Having them here, I was reminded of a conversation I had with my mom on the afternoon Dave and I were preparing to drive away from Massachusetts, almost two years ago. We were at my parents’ house finishing packing the Subaru. The moving truck had already come and gone from our apartment in Watertown, and we were drained. Working with the moving company had been an unpleasant experience. At the very last moment, they had gouged charged us an extra seven or eight hundred dollars to finish putting all our stuff on the truck, saying that we had gone over the number of boxes their man had originally estimated it would take to move our stuff. We had no choice but to pony up, or they would’ve just left the rest of it sitting on the side of the road. (Movers are snakes: apparently it’s a completely unregulated industry, with no pricing transparency or accountability.) In addition to feeling jerked off, we then felt like jerks ourselves: somehow, we had gotten to be adults in our thirties without knowing that you are expected to handsomely tip the guys who do the actual heavy lifting of all your crap into the truck. I have no excuses for us, except that we were overtired from packing till almost 3 am, and had never used movers before, having always done it laboriously ourselves with U-haul trailers. Anyway, after the rat-faced foreman in the red sox cap (may I indulge myself in a natch here, despite the fact that I normally loathe this formulation?) finished reaming us for an extra 800 dollars, he says, “You know, it’s customary to tip the guys.” We were horrified, because we had literally no cash. NONE. And the nearest ATM was several miles away. And they were already behind schedule, champing at the bit to be off to their next job. And so it came about that, several days after Christmas, in 2007, we did not tip the men who had worked bloody hard for several hours wrapping, lifting and moving all our earthly possessions. Feeling like we’d been ripped off and also feeling like absolute assholes ourselves was a nasty combination of emotions. I still feel rotten when I think about it. When our stuff finally arrived in Portland, I tipped both the truck driver and the guy who unloaded it all $100 each to try and make myself feel better.

Bit of a tangent there, about the moving company. Maybe it’ll expiate my guilt about not tipping those guys by posting about it.

But what I really wanted to write about was something my mom said right before we left Massachusetts. Dave and my dad were in the garage doing car things. My mom and I were in the kitchen. I thanked her for all the hard work she and my dad had done to help me pack up our stuff. I had had primary responsibility for the bulk of the packing, because Dave had already started his job in Oregon after Thanksgiving, leaving me alone the three weeks before Christmas to cope with the surprising amount of belongings we had accumulated (free storage: not such a boon, after all). I had been daunted by the task, and my parents helped me tackle the basement, an epic undertaking, with their characteristic generosity and cheerfulness. They are good worker-bees. Very efficient. I find it helpful to have someone to boss me around and keep an eye on the big picture, as I have a tendency to get bogged down in the minutiae of material goods—what should I do with this bag of mysterious cables? should I file this or recycle it? should one sanitize, wrap and move the toilet plunger or just buy a new one on arrival?—without supervision. Anyway, when I was thanking her for all their help, she suddenly burst into tears, and said, Oh, that’s just what parents do; that it felt like yesterday, just yesterday, that she and my dad were young marrieds and had bought their first house, and dad’s parents, Wendy and Jenny, came up from New Jersey and helped them fix it up, cleaning and sanding and painting. What happened? She asked, plaintively, rhetorically, Where did all the time go?

I suddenly felt as though I had crossed an invisible bridge from childhood into uncharted territory. I had a vision of generations telescoping together. I could see that my mom was no longer the young mother in my mind’s eye, that I myself was no longer exactly young, that I was a married woman moving 3,000 miles away from my parents, that the next step in the cycle of life would be for me to have a baby of my own, whom I might one day help clean and pack up an apartment to move away from me to start a new life, and get, in turn, weepy over memories of my own parents.

Living so far away makes everything poignant.

We drove cross country from Boston, arriving in Portland on the first of January, 2008, a coincidence which makes calculating our time in Oregon a snap. It was a wintry voyage. Much of the time the interstate was covered by eddying snow, sifting like sand across the pavement, obscuring road markings and occasionally making it quite nerve-wracking to pilot the car.

It was memorably punctuated by a rousing unplanned stop in Iowa to stand 50 feet away from Barack Obama in a high school gymnasium a few days before the Iowa caucus, and for the first time in my life feel personally invested in a candidate and hopeful about the political process.

The last day we drove all the way from Salt Lake City to Portland, arriving late at night to blow up our air mattress and fall asleep in our empty new apartment, wondering what our life here would be like. The last hours of the drive were on I-84, along the Columbia River, the border between Oregon & Washington state, and I still remember when Mt. Hood swam into view in the darkening sky, magisterially hovering above the lights, and seeming, silently, to welcome us.

But mom, dad:  I miss you.

Double martini salute!

Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind.

—Emerson, Self-Reliance

*defined by Webster’s Third New International Dictionary as:  1: the state or quality of being indwelling or inward or of not going beyond a particular domain:  inherence:  as a: the condition of being in the mind or experientially given b: in Kantianism:  the condition of being within the limits of possible experience — contrasted with transcendence  2: the indwelling presence of God in the world

Recently, I realized that I tend to do some of my best thinking while walking. On Sunday, Dave and I went on a glorious hike up the side of Mt. Hood, and as soon as we were following each other down the trail, feet padding softly on the forest floor, the words just started to flow. Having my body engaged in the repetitive motion of walking seems to free up my brain. I think part of it has to do with the movement, and part of it comes from not having to look at someone’s face while you’re trying to articulate something. I’ve noticed that I always get writing ideas when I go running, which have generally evaporated into the mental ether by the time I’ve gotten home, showered, and made my way to the computer. And whenever D and I go for an after-dinner stroll around the neighborhood at dusk, peering at houses, previously inchoate thoughts seem to well up and spill over into speech.

For some reason, we were talking about god. I started it.

I said that I think belief in god, or in some sort of intelligence or consciousness or disembodied force underlying the creation, basically just comes down to a feeling which you either have — or you don’t. Dave says he doesn’t, and never has. From his early childhood he remembers feeling, simply, definitely, that there was no god. I asked him if that was a scary feeling, if the universe felt cold and empty and threatening. He said no, but that staring up into the stars is scary even if you DO believe in god, unless, of course, you believe in one of those pajama-wearing, bearded, father-figure types, who’s prone to intervention, and will whisk you off to your own personal salvation.

I always have had a god feeling, I think, although it has evolved considerably, and blinks in and out nowadays. I do remember being terrified by death at a very early age. We were driving around in Boston’s Back Bay, looking for a parking spot, and while sitting in the backseat staring out the window I had this shattering epiphany that one day, I would not exist, and people would still be driving around looking for parking places, living their lives, going on without me, not even noticing or caring that I, ME!, wasn’t around. How was that possible? In the fullness of my consciousness, enthroned in the unthinking egotism of a child, my mind simply could not contemplate its own non-existence. Really, I’m not sure my so-called adult mind is any better equipped to contemplate it. Apparently around this time I made bedtime a hassle, refusing to go to sleep, crying when my parents left me. My father eventually soothed me by telling me that although my body would, one day, die, the essential part of me — my soul, consciousness, the true Self — was eternal, and could never be destroyed. I think this was a comfort, but I can’t remember now.

Anyway, I have a more complicated religious/spiritual background than Dave, who was raised in a household that was more culturally than religiously Jewish.  I was simultaneously brought up in the Catholic church, and, in case that wasn’t enough, a cult (a term I am not employing frivolously) devoted to an interpretation of Advaita Vedanta. So there’s certainly a lot to write about there. But in brief, I was exposed to a lot of religious/spiritual doctrine as a child, and I do remember one period when, at bedtime, I would lie in my bed and imagine I was holding God’s hand. Except that since He was God, His hand was unthinkably enormous, and all I could do was hold out my cupped hand, and He would rest the tip of His massive finger ever-so-lightly on my palm.

Mist lifting . . .

I got over that kind of conception of a “relationship” with an anthropomorphized, father-figure type of god pretty early, it seeming to be pretty clearly a child’s conception of a god. But what I can never quite wrap my head around is how many millions of adults stay permanently in this phase. I mean, even though I know that faith is the primary virtue in most monotheistic religions: Have faith. Be like a little child. Leave everything to God. Just believe.

Well, I don’t believe in ‘faith’ anymore. Anything that makes simply believing a virtue is out in my book. In fact, nothing seems more pernicious to me. Why should we simply have faith? The world is incredibly fucked up, and we should be questioning, questioning, questioning, and if the answers are not forthcoming, because, goddamn, these are the hard questions, then we should not fall back complacently on some cliche like, god works in mysterious ways. It is hard for me to respect people who have never challenged their belief system, stepped outside it for a moment, doubted, experienced the dark night of the soul without the anodyne of belief. What if there is no purpose to our lives, what if the universe is vast and chaotic and random and our insignificant lives have only what little meaning we are able to construct out of them in this world, right now? What if there is no grand design and the stars are just dying suns, unimaginably far away? What if there is no antidote to entropy? What if we really are alone here, and when we die, we simply cease to exist?  If you haven’t at least entertained these thoughts as equally, perhaps more likely, possibilities than the alternatives proposed by religion, if you have remained safe in some comforting safety net of faith, then, I’m sorry, but I don’t find such faith a virtue, nor do I respect whatever religious doctrine requires it of you.

To stand in doubt, to acknowledge that we don’t, we can’t have the answers, that anything that purports to explain the universe is just a nice story for children, that our certainties are few and mostly unpleasant, is the only honest stance.

Where is my god feeling now, you ask, after such a rant? I tried to describe it to Dave as we hiked along (and engrossed in conversation, missed the trail turn-off and hiked a good, oh, three or so miles out of our way. It was pretty, though.).

Somehow I do, still, have that feeling. I cannot justify it or even explain why. I just feel that there is meaning in life, in the universe. I just don’t think it’s understandable or provable. I think it is an irreduceable mystery, and has to be.

Rather than “top down,” my god feeling is more “inside out.” It’s a feeling that at the core of things, there is . . . something. I imagine zooming in with a giant microscope, first to the level of the cell and its amazing, industrious workings, then to molecules, then to atoms and their tiny electrons whizzing around, and then to . . . subatomic particles, I guess, and then to . . . space. Farther in and farther out.  Oceans of space. Permeating everything. And when I imagine that space, it doesn’t feel empty, but full. Full of what, I don’t know. Something ineffable. And that’s neither religious belief nor scientific fact, just an inchoate, incoherent feeling I have.

Well, most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion . . .

It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on our memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day. Trust your emotion. In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity, yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee . . .

The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure that it is profane to seek to interpose helps . . . Whenever a mind is simple and receives a divine wisdom, then old things pass away—means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour. . . If therefore a man claims to know and speak of God and carries you backward to the phraseology of some old mouldered nation in another country, in another world, believe him not.

— Emerson, Self-Reliance

Too . . . bright . . . can't . . . see

So, I started to write about the poetry project and instead deviated yet again into the litany of my discontents. Yeesh.

Did I forget to say how much I’m enjoying Jesse’s poems?

The main challenge in working from poems is that I’m so literal-minded, it takes me a while to get past the most obvious, pure illustrations that first spring to mind, to something a little more interesting, elusive, allusive, oblique. It’s a fun challenge, though, in associative thinking.

When I wrote something to that effect to Jesse, he wrote back:

i think i know what you mean about the impulse toward the literal.  for me, when i’m responding to some other work (a painting, a poem, often a movie), i often start with some detail (not necessarily a primary one) and then spiral out or away from it, feeding more off of the state of mind into which the original work pushes me than off of further details in the original. and in the end, the original detail might disappear. other times i take several details and rearrange them in different ways and then look at the blank space on the page that now needs new connective tissue.

And that seems like a great way to approach making paintings as well as poems, especially for me:  to practice being more flexible and letting things go, once in a while. I hope that some of these paintings end up being completely different from the way I had envisioned them at the beginning, even if it means that when they’re finished one can no longer trace the thread that connects them, Ariadne like, to the original poem.

Here is one of the poems that I’ve been working with:

What They Wanted

I wanted to want—  what they wanted

To dig a pit and stand at its overhang

To wait for gusts—  lean when they did not come

I might have believed in palimpsests—  beneath
my skin

A part of me wished to measure out my other parts
and scatter them—

so long

suckers

—in the wind

A part a part a part a part

___________________

I don’t know that I can write specifically about what I am drawn to in poems, but it is usually an inchoate pull towards certain words or phrases, rather than the poem as a whole. One of the very few things I have retained from my many years of studying Latin is the rhetorical device synecdoche, a figure of speech in which a part is substituted for the whole. (A contemporary example of this would be the use of “wheels” to mean a car.) Anyway, I’ve decided that my own approach to poetry (and novels too, actually) is fundamentally synecdochic:  certain parts of the text come to represent the whole text, in the congress of my mind. It’s a kind of selective vision:  my brain only really focuses on the parts it likes the most, and sort of ignores the rest. You could justly say that I’m a lazy reader, and don’t take the trouble to integrate the work as a whole, as the author created it. But I’m going to call myself an interpretive, nay, a synecdochic reader.

Anyway. I just decided after I wrote this paragraph, re-reading What They Wanted, that it’s even appropriate for me to read the poem that way, viz. the last line:

“a part a part a part a part”

So I feel fine about my reading habits.

The image that came to mind after reading this poem was of a kind of whirlwind, pieces eddying in mid-air, a cloud of undoing. I’ve explored a similar image before in the painting Atalanta.

Atalanta, for me, was about the process of making or unmaking yourself, caught in an ambiguous moment between creation and dissolution.

But that painting is kind of a squishy whirlwind. This poem makes me think of a person cut up into pieces, like a flesh-colored paper doll. Sharp edges. Angles. Discrete pieces of paint.

For the first time ever, I’ve been using tape to make hard edges and straight lines.

(The irony is that in creating an image of pieces blowing apart I’m actually carefully building the painting. Painstakingly constructing an image that’s supposed to be about deconstruction.)

This painting is a funny size, I forgot to write it down exactly, but something like 19.5” x 26.5″.

Also, since the canvas is going to be stretched over board when it’s finished, I’m playing with the idea of having a shaped canvas, because I can cut the underlying board to whatever shape I want with my jigsaw. So the white areas are places I’m thinking of cutting out. We’ll see if this actually turns out to be something that fundamentally, structurally enforces the idea of the paintings, or is just an extraneous “cool” idea.

I’m thinking of making a bigger version as well, maybe 4’ x 3’. This poem, this image, really resonates with me.

I also very much like the line:
“I might have believed in palimpsests— beneath
my skin”

I love the word palimpsest. It’s the perfect metaphor for paintings, and for life. Coming from more medieval times, when there was no paper and parchment was so expensive that it was habitually scraped clean and then written on again.  All paintings are literally palimpsests, of course, layer over layer, the final image a thin surface crust over the history of its own making. And our bodies palimpsests of the years of our lives, although never scraped clean but only perpetually overwritten. Every new experience lying atop the accumulation of previous ones, so that we can only make out our past through the scrim of all that has come between. The illegible sum of our parts.

I have embarked on a new project, and uncharacteristically, it is a kind of collaboration. While we were on our blissful rafting trip down the John Day river a month ago, our friend Jesse Lichtenstein, a writer and poet, asked if I would be interested in collaborating, sharing his poems and my paintings and seeing what might transpire.

I said yes immediately, even though I have never been much into the idea of working creatively with others before. I had always thought of myself as a studio tyrant, wielding absolute power over my tiny fiefdom, life or death, my way or the highway. And I am, I guess. All artists are. But having come to the point of near despair over my own work, having come to the brink of deciding to just . . . stop . . . because I can’t seem to find a way forward that feels right to me, working with input from someone else feels like a light in the tunnel, a way to make some work without laboring, camel-like, under my self-imposed burden.

Because for the past several years, I have not felt able to make work in a simple, straightforward fashion, comfortable in my skin in the studio. I have felt myself poised unnaturally under the spotlight of self-consciousness, that old well-poisoner. Every little thing I do, every move I make is somehow a reference on me. Is this the kind of painter I am? What does this say about me? My intelligence? My skill? Oh, you can’t do that! It is a pernicious kind of egotism, undermining everything I do before I get a chance to at least finish it and then assess what it might mean.

I am in search of a painting process, an art that feels completely natural to me, a way of working that regenerates itself, leading to further exploration, a deepening and complication of inquiry. I’m not talking about an unfortunate thing that happens to a lot of artists, where they find a method that works for them and simply start repeating themselves, where the work becomes a kind of brand, but about tapping a vein of work that, while necessarily narrowed to provide a certain focus, is deep and on-flowing. This search is inextricably linked to the search for self-knowledge, for how can I locate that vein if my own anatomy is mysterious to me? If I don’t know what way of working best suits my particular form of intelligence and sensitivity? I have, however, long suspected that it is probably working from life. In the absence of physical data to be checked, verified, used as a springboard to more imaginative leaps, I tend to clamp down, feeling unsure of my bearings. I become anxious when I try to work solely or largely from my imagination, although that may sound somewhat counter-intuitive. I want something to look at, a tether to anchor me to something solid. Then I feel free to wander a bit, secure that I know where I am.

But I find myself blatantly jealous of all the artists who just know how they make their work, whatever their work is. And it makes me question very seriously whether I’m really meant to be doing this. I suppose there are as many different ways of coming to work as there are artists, but I particularly envy Anne Truitt’s description of how her ideas for new work came to her, in particular the absolute clarity, the lucid Platonic image of the piece simply appearing in mind, and having “only” to be physically realized.

In the last few months, I have become more conscious of how my work takes form. It sometimes happens unexpectedly. Just as I wake up, a series of three sculptures may present themselves somewhere that seems high over my head in my consciousness. They simply materialize, whole and themselves, in a rather stately way, and stand there, categorical in their simplicity. This can happen anywhere, not necessarily just after waking, but, characteristically, without any preparation on my part. Sometimes a single piece will appear; never more than three at once. I cannot make them all. Less than a quarter of them ever reach actuality. Other pieces result from a more or less conscious concentration on a particular area of emotionally charged personal experience—a person, say, or a series of events, or a period in my life. . . There seems no end to this kind of formulation. These concepts hover, already complete, it would seem, on the edge of my consciousness . . . when all this was new to me, I used to be overwhelmed and would wake up in the middle of the night flooded, inundated by peremptory demands for making these sculptures.  (Anne Truitt, Daybook)

Anyway. While I acknowledge that I feel lost right now, it is fun to work on paintings inspired by Jesse’s poems, because they’re not all about me. And it is a tremendous relief. What a bore I am!

Long, tearful soul-searching session with Dave recently on a Saturday morning, both of us in our underwear lolling about in the heat. (Side note: I am finding Portland to be an arid place this summer. It is relentlessly hot and dry, hasn’t rained in at least two months, and there are no lakes to swim in here. I am desperately nostalgic for the plethora of New England lakes and ponds I used to blithely take for granted. Even the over-crowded bathwater of Walden Pond in August (my friend Serena used to call is the Pee-ond because of all the kids in it) now seems a mystical lost aqueous Eden to me)).

I talked about how I felt I had never taken a real risk in my life, never sacrificed anything substantial to the altar of art. How I’d always been safe, and making art had always been a safe option. I said that a lot of people understand that choosing to become an artist is an inherently unstable, risky “profession,” and that being poor is the price you pay for getting to do what you love and having lots of freedom. And that they consciously make that choice, knowing what they’re getting themselves in for. (Of course, this is probably not necessarily true: lots of people start out with something in their twenties, semi-consciously, not really understanding the consequences of this decision, in the blithe youthful assumption that something will work out somehow, and fetch up on the other side of thirty perhaps disillusioned, but also perhaps without back up options or escape hatches.)

And so I’ve been castigating myself for being a coward. For never having consciously made the risky, scary decision that art was worth that much to me, worth instability and never making much money and stress. I just glided along in my twenties, the way a lot of people do, never having to put a felt, lived value on what the real cost of being an artist might be. Unlike a lot of people, I had no student loans from college, and unlike almost everyone I know, I have no student loans from grad school, because my parents were able and willing to pay my tuition. I never had to assess, is it really worth it? How much am I willing to pay for this? Is the validation of having gone to a prestigious grad program really worth all that money? And just how frail is my ego, anyhow? (Answer: monstrously bloated yet shockingly fragile. Just like everybody else’s.) Now all the rest of my classmates have these grinding loan payments every month from the privilege of going to Yale, and I just skip along, financially unbowed by the experience except . . . don’t you always get what you pay for? And not necessarily so much from what you don’t personally pay for? Even paying something for something makes you value it in a different way than if you get it for free. (Mom, Dad: this to not to say that I’m not deeply grateful to not have to dish out a pound of flesh to Fannie Mae every month.)

Anyway, I’ve come to feel that I’ve never properly assessed my relationship to art as an adult (because I’ve never felt like, okay, I’m an adult, until oh, pretty recently, with a shock of horror — late bloomer, I guess), and it feels like time to decide whether to double down & recommit to it, but consciously, a second time, as an adult in fuller knowledge of the consequences and losses and sacrifices it entails . . . or back away, hands in the air, and say, well, maybe this isn’t what I want to do, after all. Maybe I want a real job with a paycheck, and being able to afford nicer stuff, and not feeling pressure pressure pressure all the time to accomplish some sort of inchoate, overhanging all consuming personal task, like being on an invisible spiritual quest in the middle of the ordinary world which doesn’t much give a shit, and constantly getting slain by the dragon instead of killing it and parading its head around town so that everybody can say how great I am.

Dave thinks it’s perfectly natural that I would be having a crisis about art at this point in my life, that it is a sign of maturity to be wrestling with these questions, with money matters, and what art is for, and big life choices like, how do we want to live? How can we afford to live? Where should we live? Should we have children? How should we raise them? How in god’s name does anyone afford to raise them? And also keep doing the work that is important to them without losing themselves to parenthood?  When will we know how to be grown-ups? And how will we know if we are doing a good job?

Some of the only dry ground in this quaking swamp is this:  I am so grateful to be married to Dave, who always listens so thoughtfully, and somehow keeps being willing to have these tearstained meaning of life conversations with me. We had our second wedding anniversary at the end of June, and bailed out of going to a fancy, expensive dinner at the last minute, because it just felt too pressureful, and ended up going to a no-frills sushi place, where the fish was fresh and nobody was about to write ‘Happy Anniversary’ on a desert plate in chocolate syrup. Just holding hands and occasionally bumping my head into his shoulder, I was secure in a mutually serene yet effervescent happiness, bubbles of joy continually sparking up from the depths and nudging my heart. Later we realized that we’ve so far failed to give each other any kind of gift or card on our anniversaries (all two of them), and then I think Dave felt bad, and actually did start to make a list of things he loves about me . . . but he never got around to giving it to me, and when I politely  enquired about it, he just gave me shit for not writing a list of things I love about him!

Dude. Thanks. For making me laugh, and always, always listening.