And don’t ‘Do too much science‘! When it takes hold of you, there may be no escape . . .
New Species, Same Old Story
Professor Bob Sponk and his lovely wife Myrtle
discovered a rare omnivorous turtle
and off to the swamp in the jungle’s dim inner-
most sanctum they tracked her, observing her dinner-
time habits, behaviors and preferences; then,
Bob sneezed.
It turns out she eats women and men.
Discovery and learning don’t always have to come at the expense of laborious study and practice. Sometimes they are handed to us by the magician-teachers who simply tell us exactly what they have done, lifting the curtain and letting us see what’s behind it and in the works from beginning to end. That, at least, is how the learning starts for many of us. Certainly for me. I have been gifted, over the many years of my life, in which I was, am and will be a student forever, with a number of such generous teachers.
I can only return the favor as far as my skills and wit allow, but I hope I’m at least skilled and sharp-witted enough to make it worth a few other people’s while. Of course, the plain facts don’t complete the education by a long shot–the study and practice parts have to follow to make it stick and create anything useable out of it. What you do with the information, as they say, is what completes the equation. But isn’t it fun to share our little secrets, to let each other peek at what’s behind the facade of polish and confidence and see what we can make of it?
Herewith, another little set of iterations digitally made to convert a black and white graphite drawing into a full-color digital illustration.
Once again, I begin with a plain graphite drawing, scanned and very lightly cleaned to remove dust specks and make the scan match the original. I wish I had made the ‘lens’ look more curved or somehow indicated its thickness better so that there was a more logical reason for the eye behind it being moved that far from its expected location, but then I remember that this is, after all, an utterly nonsensical and *not* logical creature-person. Next drawing, perhaps. For now, I’ll play with the cards I dealt myself.
To begin the digital part of the process, I just did my usual small test of whether injecting color into a black and white original might bring out some useful or interesting aspects of the character (both the humanoid one and the character of the drawing).
Why not. What if I isolate a larger area and keep the illustration black and white but with the lens area being in full color? Hmmm. That could work. I ‘paint’ in the color, layering it bit by bit and erasing bits to add highlights or even out the application of the colors.
Strangely, I find that having only the lens area colored flattens out the image a little more than I expected. I think this might be in part because the color has reduced the contrast and visible texture of the graphite strokes. Maybe I’ll just add a bit more color over the other parts of the drawing. No, not quite enough, I’d say. So I add a Photoshop filter of ink lines to emphasize the drawn textures and contrast more deeply with the coloring.
Well, here I go again. I can’t resist adding color to the whole image. I think it balances the image better. But I’m married to the idea of letting the part seen through the lens be the only richly ‘full color’ part–the True Self, if you will, seen through this lens. So I decided to keep what wasn’t part of the lens itself or seen through it mainly monochromatic; a sepia tone for the face seemed in keeping with the sort of Steampunk creature’s vintage-yet-otherworldly quality. And then, of course, the face was flattened a bit by the color too, so I added the inky filter to that as well. And here we are. A day of tweaking and monkeying around with the drawing that took me a few days to draw, and here we are. On to the next project, my friends. Hope you find something compelling to do, too, even if as with mine, your projects only lead to more projects. Because that’s what happens when we share our ideas: they proliferate. Granted, some of them grow up to be really weird characters all on their own, but they do proliferate. Revealing, as they do, further parts of *our* character through *their* lens.
The Jitters
Remember the years when we were young
And captive among our babysitters?
Sheer terror would reign with its horrid thrill,
The unspeakable chill we would call the Jitters.
Under the bed or under the house,
A mouse isn’t safe when the Jitters gleam
Reptilian fangs and rhinoceros horns;
O! The scorns we would risk to release a scream!
Anything dark and anywhere doored
Could harbor a horde of Jittery creeps;
They hide under blankets and lurk behind stones:
The wrack in the bones that never sleeps.
Do I hear the wind? Did you hear an owl?
Or was it the howl of the restless dead?
The moan of a sailor just as he drowned?
All around are the sounds of the things we dread.
That flickering light! The curtains a-moving,
And both of them proving that something is near:
We’d writhe in our agonies, plagued by deceptions
And all the perceptions of what we fear.
This, you remember, was life with the Unknown,
And all of the fun known as children was moot
Whenever night fell or a stranger came calling;
Appalling how it never stopped its pursuit.
Now deep in adulthood, responsible, sane,
We scoff at the pain of those gibbers and twitters,
Yet get us alone, in a vulnerable state,
And sooner or late, we succumb to the Jitters.
Endless Falling
A whisper in the gloaming just pre-dawn
A shiver or a prickling on the neck
A flutter of the eyelid, quick, then gone
And hope of any sleep is now a wreck
Above me in the dark are broken dreams
Above my brow an icicle of fear
Above the awful emptiness, the screams
In silent agony are all I hear
And under all this brittle disarray
And under skin and in the bone and soul
And under some enchantment, night and day
I know this wickedness will eat me whole
Against the dangers present in this fright
Against the door of Death I’ll knock tonight
I Loves Ya, Cupcake!
I kiss your cherry-colored lips
And suddenly, straight over flips
My heart in loping, loopy leaps
As sugared-up as Mallo Peeps
Get kids at Eastertime to fly,
As ice cream piled on apple pie
And candy canes in cocoa make
Our livers strain, gallbladders quake,
Arteries cringe and capillaries
Bloat, collapse, and the Tooth Fairy’s
Rounds expand a hundredfold
When molars instantly grow old.
You get my drift: one little kiss
Of your sweet lips can lead to this
Extreme, near-paralytic dose
Of dearness, loveliness, and close-
Encountered expiration date,
But loving you is surely fate,
My cupcake, my delicious sweet,
And death of it the final treat.
If one’s not careful, trimming one’s waistline can lead to wasting away. There’s an art to eating well, after all. What you eat can kill you, but what you don’t eat can, too. What to do?! Think I’ll just lie down here in this quiet spot in the graveyard . . .
The Great Equalizer
Willowy or wallowing?
Slinky or obese?
Ma likes the taste of salad greens
And Pater thrives on grease.
What’s odd is, their cholesterol
And blood pressure and weight
Don’t seem to correspond at all
With anything they ate.
I can’t quite comprehend how one
Eats lard, the other, toast,
And both don’t change; I guess
Food matters little
To a ghost.
Inquisition
Her lipstick was of fiery red,
Her mane wild copper, and her nails
Lacquered in scarlet by which pales
The rouge of which the pious said
Was made civilization’s end,
And surely, in her crimson silk
Cut down to there, she and her ilk
Wore carmine on that downward trend
That would someday blood’s red require
As she and they leapt in that fire
In meantime, sanguine all were those,
This ruby dame and all her kin,
And painted red from cloak to skin,
Until the bloom wore off the rose
And in wine-tinged despair, demise,
They fell in desperate gasps for breath,
Plagued by their past like some Red Death
Infected them; to their surprise,
This day their bad blood did require
They leap in that eternal fire
Desolation
Way out west of Petaluma,
Where the streetlights cease to go,
Only weeds and broken concrete
And barbed wire in one hard row
Braiding up the roadside grasses
In a knotted wind-strung quirt
To whip out and give ten lashes
To the devils in the dirt
There are houses still beyond here,
Long abandoned, though, and shot
Through with rust and melancholy
And dead dreams long since forgot,
And one tough and stringy lady
Hanging on by fingernails
To a past she can’t remember,
Out here where the flat wind sails
* Today’s post is brought to you by: Zombies! Now 100% Recycled!
Her Monument
In a strange little homestead lit by electric light
is a passing builder’s fancy floating in the neon night;
the spirit of the artisan flits by, nocturnal blue,
and shoots the moon by swooping through the ashes in the flue;
she drifts in starry glimmerings beyond the crooked room
where comet dust is settling on the folly of her tomb. O,
let lie the tools of wisdom where your little homestead rises,
and cry Hurrah! for moonlit nights
and foolish enterprises.
Moths have a potent duality of effects on me: they attract and repel with just about equal force. On the one hand, there is their Victorian opulence of velvet wings and ostrich-feathered antennae and their widely looping sweeps of flight as if borne effortlessly on air currents themselves rather than lofting on and above them under power. They can look like jewels tossed into the air or, as hawk moths can sometimes do, trick the unwary watcher into thinking they’re bright, buzzing hummingbirds on the wing.
On the other hand, that sort of squishy, bloated, heavy softness of moths’ bodies and their voracious appetites for things I’d rather have kept to myself (dry goods in the pantry, tender leaves in the garden, and favorite fine woolens) fills me with nervousness that makes the revulsion they inspire in horror stories utterly plausible to me. I can’t help but remember the sweltering summer night when I was young and my family, having been out for a happy holiday evening, stopped at the local gas station to refill the bottomless tank of our giant station wagon; since it was so sweltering, we all piled out of the car to go into the tiny, grubby cashier’s hut where an electric fan was humming and, having an uneasy sense of something untoward behind me, I turned around to see a veritable dust storm of fat moths, attracted by the shop’s fluorescent lights, throwing themselves in spongy, flapping frenzy at the glaring glass until it was almost opaque with their wing-scale dust. Oh, yes, and the fabulously nasty short story ‘The Cocoon’ (John B. L. Goodwin) has never quite left my subconscious mind (awake or asleep) once I read it a few decades ago.
On top of all this, I married a guy who had once had a small moth fly into his ear, get caught and frantic, and instead of finding its way out, worked its creepy, fluttering way right down to beat against his eardrum until a doctor could eventually get the creature out of there. Enough said. I can still look, at times, with a certain dispassionate interest and think of moths as intriguing bits of scientific wonder and visual astonishment, and then I must quickly look away again and reassure myself that there’s not something truly wrong with them. I did at least decide to write a little bit to see if, in the incident of the attack on my husband’s ear, I could imagine the experience from the moth’s point of view.
Labyrinth
I crawled the narrow halls in
Darkness ever deepening,
Thinking I might find some clear way through
But too tightly fitted in, too close,
No chance of going back or backing out,
No scent I could recognize to bring me
Back to the distant shore,
No vision, not a speck of spectral light to give
A guide around those curves crepuscular, those turns
Winding ever more toward claustrophobia, to where
The heat was growing more intense, the sound
Of a pulsing drum seeming to speak of waves, making
Me dream the ocean lay ahead—but behind me, in
The now impenetrable night, some Thing, a dragon
It seemed to me, began to drown the liquid lure
Of the drumbeat ahead with its own more frightful,
Louder noise, and then to scrabble wildly at me
With its terrifying claws, at which it seemed
The labyrinth must finally swallow me and
Draw me down into its fatal end—but then—
In a turn of events that was quite shockingly detached
From any turns my path had made
Thus far, the whole puzzling place tipped
Over on its side—there I lay, too fixed
In the halls’ constricting ways to turn and follow or
To roll, and the sea broke forth on me at last, a rush
Of saline waves tearing upon me, heaving me out
Of where I’d wedged, and in a cataract, sent me
Blasting right back through all the sightless turns
Of that preternatural dark, shot me with my sodden
Useless wings back into blazing day where I
Could lie, quivering faintly in my long-lost world,
Deciding whether it was time to die or time
To spread my fragile wings and see
If there was any life left in them.
Even though Halloween itself has never been a huge event in my life, you may, just possibly, have noticed a rather dark tinge to my humor (if such a thing exists) that pervades the year regardless of its official celebrations. So I’m hardly above taking advantage of the approach of a publicly sanctioned excuse for some of my own cheap brand of funereal jocularity. I plan to shower you with gloomy silliness as the holiday nears, so if you’ve any fearful tendencies, pull up the covers and plug your ears.
A Grackle
May cackle
Creeping down into October and its necromantic nights,
thrilling, chilling masqueraders revel in the season’s frights,
both imagined and uncanny, sweets in surfeit, pranks and scares,
work to raise each other’s hackles, catch out courage unawares–
And the bat and spider, ghostly visitors and ravens reign;
even crows can briefly boast the power to enchant the brain
with a Halloweenish horror, freeze the unsuspecting nape
the suggestible door-knocker turns to sky while dressed in crape–
All a-cower, cowards wander in the dim light of the moon,
hold hilarious their hauntings lest they all prove true too soon,
everyone immersed in darkness, celebrating cyclic fear
as the month and season trickle, bloodied, off to end the year–
All this rampant spookiness, however, leaves the Grackle cold:
black and iridescent bird, she perches, watches, and of old,
knows the crows‘ and ravens’ moment passes, quick as life, is gone,
and her rule o’er earthly foment, like her tail, goes on and on . . .
As November approaches and the always-tedious white noise of political ravings grows ever louder in the US atmosphere, I find myself musing once again that so little is what we think it to be. Clearly, if you read my post the other day, I am seldom content to accept the appearance as the reality, but it is never more significantly the case than around the time of elections. For all that Americans love to crow about being the truest democracy in the world and having the power to determine our own destinies and that of our nation (never mind our meddling globally), what’s most notable around voting time is how little anyone really does his or her research and how thoroughly gullible, petty and narrow-minded most of us are on our best days. It’s really kind of miraculous that, young as America is in the way of being a nation, it still exists as one. We’re all on our own paths, wavelengths, and possibly planets around here.
And those who rise to power in our country are no less prone to manipulating that sort of foolishness than those we claim to abhor elsewhere. We give things whatever ‘spin’ we prefer and, by golly, hordes of similarly spun fellow denizens jump right into the vortex with us, leaving reason and, ultimately, hope far behind. One might think that the current age of electronic wizardry would make us more aware, if not more cautious, of all sorts of trickery and monkey business, but alas, we cling to our ignorance and wilfulness with just as much dimwitted fervor as always. Knowing that the camera sees only what the photographer aimed it at and the recorder hears only what the engineer had it turned on to hear–and that the results of both operations can be almost endlessly manipulated after the fact so as to be something entirely new and different from the initial truth, however truncated that might have been, we still choose to stand with facing our own chosen suns while right behind us, out of frame, utterly different realities are carrying right on with their appointed happenings.
So in honor of this form of deception, whether imposed upon us or self-inflicted, I give you my image of the Grand Canyon. Or, as it was before a little Photoshopping hocus-pocus, a dirt pile under the freeway overpass, whose ‘magnificent agaves’ are small tufts of grass, whose brilliant coloring is all hand-applied, and whose vast open sky is a digital blanket pulled down to cover the abandoned storefronts looming behind the little hillock. What you see is what I get, my friends. Keep it in mind on the way to the voting booth, won’t you?
While I’m on the subject of mystery stories (see yesterday’s post), there’s a true one that I hadn’t ever heard of until recently that almost defies imagination, even generations later. But that’s what true mystery stories do, isn’t it.
The story of a female immigrant serial killer/mass murderer, born in Norway but made in America, was a hideous and irreconcilable tale of horror and crime in the 19th Century and remains one today. Belle Gunness, who is believed to have killed all of her own children, two husbands and a handful of suitors, not to mention an accomplice or two of her own along the way–possibly executing as many as forty people in her lengthy crime spree–is surprisingly little known nowadays. I fear that this may be because we have so many other hideous and oversized monstrosities and real-life mystery stories handy to horrify and mesmerize us that many likely get pushed out of memory by the current ugly news. Undoubtedly the advent of World War I‘s dreadful specter was a factor in overshadowing a single murderer’s story rather immediately on its discovery.
All the same, once I knew of it, I found the woman a compellingly repellant subject for another mystery story illustration, being a subject worthy of an Edgar Allan Poe style drama or, yes, a true-crime cinematic epic. Though it was one of those news stories that ‘rocked the nation’ when uncovered a hundred years ago, the tale of Belle Gunness is relatively obscure nowadays. There have been a few generally tepid and mostly heavily fictionalized stories, books and movies based on the horrors wrought by this one woman’s apparent sociopathy and the trail of blood left in its wake, but it’s remarkable to me that such a grim, terrible story is scarcely known on a wider scale anymore.
Frightening, dark, and perhaps an indictment of the worst of human nature in general, yes–but I think perhaps part of the reason I find mystery stories so gripping is because I think they remind us–again in that somewhat ‘safe’ and detached format of past-history or fiction–that brilliance and the abyss are constantly in conflict in the human heart and only by understanding this and being willing to examine it in ourselves can we have a chance of rising to beauty and shunning the grotesque urges that we might have–and, if we’re truly fortunate, catching up the would-be wrongdoer in humane and forgiving and healing arms before she can ever fall so far. That’s my hopeful fiction, and I’m sticking to it.
La Belle Dame sans Merci of the prairies, Belle Gunness. What fearful horrors shaped this woman’s inner darkness?
Today, I present Belle Gunness, a truly fallen woman and black widow whose mystery may never be fully unraveled, for your contemplation. May we never see her like again.
Art-Colored Glasses 