“You won’t have time for your little squares,” she said — vastly underestimating my capacity, determination to rebuild a life on this, and love for making little squares. I think I’ve been doing it, in one way or another, since I could hold a pencil.
(Later on, she said I was a role model of work/life balance*. I’d like to think the continuation of my little squares was a key part of that perception.)
* And here I thought I had the balance way too far over on the Life side of the triple-beam! Ha.**
** NOTE: I aspire to always keep it waaaaaaaay too far over on that side. As far as I can possibly get away with.
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[ So I guess we’re continuing with the semi-cowardly parenthetical asides and the footnotes here, eh?
My former blogs — all three of them*** — are completely gone; vanished in a puff of digital confetti when I failed to pay the domain renewal fee for stearthpottery.com, for the first time in — gawd — ten years? Twelve?
I was c.o.m.p.l.e.t.e.l.y out of it — like in a way I never have been before — when that time of year rolled around last fall; I don’t think I’d even checked my personal email for two months.
***tw@se, the despair one who’s name I’m forgetting at the moment [Alms For Oblivion –Ed.], & discursive loop. Today Not @ St. Earth, my blog project from that month at Penland in 2010, is probably still on Blogger/Wordpress some where, but I can’t be bothered to go check. God that was fun.
For a criminally calculated $150, my web host would reinstate the domain (and all of those sites, blogs, and history) as it was; this is for a unique name on the internet that normally cost $10 a year to keep.
Fuck that.
I’ve got a big binder of printouts of tw@se — all 6+ years worth, I think.. somewhere in the piles of stuff. I’ve got the original writing docs for that one, saved to hard drives … I think … and stored in a plain-ish text format that I could probably recover, if I am inclined someday. I think The Despair Blog is stored there, too — an app called Ulysses that I really liked (mostly because it was my first distraction-free writing app, but also cuz it had a sweet butterfly as its logo). And (I did just check), all of DL is here in Bear (my second, current, and still beloved writing app), right next door to the container I made for this one a couple weeks ago.
And, in a pinch, there’s likely the Internet Archive Wayback Machine; and copies and fowards of selected chunks in my voluminous email correspondence* with Carter. And I’ve got Ever-notes going back 15 years, and just found that the very first one is a PDF of the entire 2010 year of tw@se — that’s reassuring.
*So lucky to have had at least one ‘volumniuous correspondence’ in this life. It seems to be a vanishing and vanishingly rare thing, that used to be a cornerstore of any life well lived in one’s thoughts and interactions with at least one like mind.
Oh Carter — maybe it took just exactly this long before I could face the prospect of writing more words, just like this and just like always, without you on the other end to catch them.
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Relax – CG
All I can say is you are not doing it ‘wrong’ but that you could stand to lighten up a bit and figure out ways to ALSO have some easy fun. Do what you do. Play the hard fun game, but also remember to let you hair down and kick back for some ‘casual’ efforts (to put it in Ron Meyers phraseology) and start singing in the shower. You’ve gotta imagine that Pavarotti did that. He didn’t expend himself just on the big stage or just in rehearsals. If he truly loved what he did I’m almost positive he was just bursting with the need for song. He probably whistled tunes waiting for the bus. He probably serenaded the grocer as he picked the perfectly ripe melon for his breakfast. He had to whisper sweet melodic nothings in his lover’s ear….. So hard fun, **yes**, but not as the only way we get to express ourselves. Not *just* that. They are not mutually exclusive.
Or do you maybe sometimes feel that they are? Do you feel that you are somehow ‘cheating’ if you have too much unbridled fun? How could that be possible? That’s only playing into the prejudices of the old coot and his like. Its adopting the mythology of the Puritans. Whatever good points they had/have its not the only version of truth. Just like what I was saying about my own need for melancholy at times, we sometimes need to step outside the rigid demands of hard fun and take time with the lighter side. Not necessarily to plumb the depths of hedonism but to balance out the weight of convention and expectation. Our own. So, dude, you *do* need to relax.
[ wink emoji ]
I relax when it’s done; when I can rest in the knowledge of a good day’s or week’s or making cycle’s or firing’s work. Like most writers, the relaxing part is having written, not the actual writing. And here I am picturing a quaint agrarian scene of people picking cotton and singing. Wait a second! Hang on! Those people are slaves!
So, if you are *not* a slave then **what is keeping you from relaxing?** And if you *are a slave* isn’t it even that much more evident that we need to consciously, purposely, make time to relax and enjoy even the most onerous activities (if possible)? The key is that *this state of mind should be up to us*. Sure, conditions can make it hard, but f-ck conditions! You do what you’ve gotta do (if you are able). Be that island in the quote from Mad Sergeant Welsh. Smile, Sisyphus, damn it! Smile!
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images coming up in the paint — especially in oils, where I just seem to swoop around over and over until something coalesces as if of its own accord: vile, ghastly mushrooms and factory floor caution stripes, narcissictic mothers and dead men’s skulls, breasts and indistinct globular circles, and more/worse. And I look back, as I walk out the door after the lights are out, and think ugh — I don’t want to make paintings about those things. But I is not me, and me is not we, and we are legion.
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My tattoos, now 5 & 6 years old, are framed on my forearms where I was expecting to see them slathered in slip for the next 40-odd years, at the time I had them etched into my skin. So it was a complete suprise to me that my interest in making pots dried up at almost exactly that same point; mostly due to also unexpected big changes in my life’s circumstances, but still — never saw that coming.
Now, when I happen to glance down and remember they’re there, the right one — Order, Thought — holds a paintbrush and the left — Chaos, Memory — holds the paint. Sometimes, much less often lately but still sometimes, a needle in one hand and the other supporting the fabric, working together like centering a pound of clay for a future mug. Unlike with clay, or paint, in stitching they often trade roles; Chaos can move the needle almost as well, at least at certain angles or in particular frames of thought.
In my all-time second favorite art doc — The Secret Life of Lance Lescher — he tells a story about a friend in grad school who fell asleep painting, holding a brush in one hand and a tube of paint in the other, and mimics waking up with a start and immediately going back to painting. So funny; I get it now. (My all-time favorite art doc is Gerhard Richter: Painter, which I stumbled across about three years ago and, like so many things from then, gave some hints I couldn’t yet decode about what was coming up, and wow were they ever good hints.)
I haven’t fallen asleep yet, but I can get into a pretty good reverie; it’s very conducive to a flow state; and the kind I used to wish for at the wheel but usually only arrived at while decorating: dots and pips and stamps. Interesting. Like the three dimensional mechanics of clay required the non-flow, or even anti-flow, command and control, spatial reasoning, proceedural thinking parts of my mind to stay on enough that the Flow couldn’t quite flow.
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I finished three paintings the other day — all acrylics — dried and varnished and dried again, like a super encapsulated version of the firing process with clay. It feels really good to declare some as done; I’ve started something like 50 so far and finished about 10. Unlike pots, they can just keep going and going and going… ha, that story about Leonardo ferrying his favorite paintings around and persistantly making minor changes to them for decades. That seemed insane when I heard it a few years ago; I get it now.
So there’s something very gratifying in deciding one is done, ready to be done. For each of these three, it was like I just knew; that’s kind of a mystical mystery. How did I know? Why? What?
Right?
Maybe that’s the whole ballgame.