Skipping thro’ the Birchen Wood, I Thought I Spied a Whale

Posted on November 30, 2011 by kathryningrid

Here in the forests of my imagination . . .

What wondrous light through yonder branches gleams? Would that it were the opalescent glow of glimmering brilliance coming to infiltrate my idle brain. Or perhaps, an itinerant faerie spirit heading my way, jeweled sceptre alit with inspirational powers to be bestowed on my waiting brow with only the lightest of touches. Even the wan incandescent light that flickers in welcome warmth when someone stops by and drawls, ‘Whooooa, cool poem, dude!‘ is an apparition that I welcome in these woods.

But left to my own devices, I am often content to play hide-and-seek with the absurd and ridiculous denizens with whom I myself people the copses and clearings. It’s hard to be bored when in the world of my imaginings I might just as well see a party of rhinoceri dining daintily on macarons and sipping mimosas as find the standard woodland chirpy-birds and curly-tailed possums. And of course I can find plenty of entertainment in the latter, should my rare white rhino friends fail to materialize on the occasion.

The who-what-when-where-why approach of old-time journalism is hardly limited, but so often is put to service in creating dull worlds that have no scintillation or silver-lined possibility of their own. Why should I merely recount the facts, if my friends and compatriots have the same at their own fingertips or floating in the ether encircling their own fevered brows? I feel much more compelled, drawn (and quartered) by the fantastical and unreal, and that doesn’t mean that I must limit my contact with the quotidian. In my view, the real world and everyday experience are both bursting with nonsense and bizarre occurrences that would challenge the sanity of anyone willing to look just slightly under the surface, a tiny bit off of the center of the frame. It’s this singing netherworld of oddity and mystery, of hilarity and not-yet-discovered realms of the heart and mind, that pulls me into its mystical swirl and mesmerizes me.

I am astounded when I hear tell of people admonishing artists and creative folk to give up their wastrel ways and do something Productive. Where these same critics expect inventions or discoveries of import, let alone life-enhancing pleasures and spiritual inspirations, to emerge if not from creative work and play I am unable to guess.

I’ve long since left it to others to describe what they tout as Fact and confirmed Truth. There are endless phalanxes of politicians and scientists and religious leaders, hover-parents and bosses, dictators and dullards, all of whom readily offer their convictions of reality whether I ask them to or not, so I learned that I’d much rather stick to my own version of reality and just see where it takes me.

Does this approach expose me to ridicule and censure? Of course it does. Anything anyone else tells you ought to be taken with an entire inland sea of salt, if it keeps you from swallowing nonsense wholesale. I certainly don’t believe everything I say!

But I did learn, when I bundled up my outsized cravings for outside affirmation in the dense wrappings of uneasy reality and flung them all out the casement, that any reality is somewhat overrated. That the lilac scented porpoises leaping in my own candy-colored seas were not only good company but sometimes took me along to actual places of learning and wholesome connection with genuine people willing to dive into alternate worlds too. And that I grew more deeply convinced that nobody is in such dire need of the strictly factual that their lives can’t be enriched, like mine, by the meandering, iridescent, depthless, deathless joys of curiosity and invention and hope.

. . . and away I swam, bathing in the limpid phosphorescence of wonderment . . .

Stage Blood and Loud Noises

Posted on November 11, 2011 by kathryningrid

I’m a big fan of cheap theatrics, except when they’re being used to manipulate the innocent for nefarious purposes. Take, for example, the “rainforest” fakery of grocery stores that play a musical little mini thunderstorm soundtrack for a second before spritzing their produce bins with a fine mist of “freshening” water to impress us all with how natural and pristine their dew-flecked delectables are. Always hoping that we will be pleasantly enough diverted by this charming display to ignore the general reality: that we are being annoyingly dampened whilst attempting to retrieve our groceries in an ostensibly sheltered indoor space. That the soundtrack is remarkably similar to that White Noise one we play to put us in a somnolent state in the comfort of our own boudoirs, and could reasonably, therefore, fall under suspicion of attempted brainwashing more than vegetable-washing (no one need comment here on how much the two may be assumed to resemble each other by our grocery-vending overlords). That adding moisture to vegetation that has been removed from its growing environment speeds its decay and makes it more vulnerable to contamination of many wonderfully creepy kinds. That the ensuing waste of live produce drives up the cost of said produce almost as much as does the production and installation of the whole set-piece that put the drama in motion in the first place.

And we complain about the price of the Real Deal in the farmers’ market.

On the other hand, as a flaming fan of fantasy, I have to show my appreciation for the sincerely phony. You know: art for Fun’s sake. Silliness. Over-the-top drama on the stage and on the page, to drench the theatre or the reading room with tears and terror. Wildly, extravagantly gorgeous embroideries and carvings and photos and engravings and pastels and bronzes and encaustics that make no pretense of being journalistic but want only to transport us to their own extraordinary alternate worlds. This is the stuff that dreams are made on, and from which new dreams are made. Because it expresses our true selves in ways that no other thing can: art.

There are many lost or neglected skills and crafts in the wonderful world of art, and many yet to be discovered. The universe is awash in potential song, image, and dance, and the invitation is out: come and play! Write a play! Bring on the new opera, the marvels of a magical aquatint, a novel, a scintillating sweep of tapestry, a ballet, a symphony–or maybe it’s time to revisit some longtime form and bring a new perspective to this fabulous world of ours by opening new vistas into yet another set of worlds. Write a love letter to creativity that you’ve never written before, and all the rest of us are here waiting to share the love. After all, there is something deeply inviting about fiction and fun for their very own sakes.

Delight amid Sorrows: Día de los Muertos and Singing Neruda’s Poetry

Posted on November 1, 2011 by kathryningrid

Once upon a time, Pablo Neruda came to my rescue.

I was a perplexed and moody undergraduate taking just a few too many credits at a time to cover for the semester I’d frittered away (both the time and the tuition money) in getting a much broader, deeper education by gallivanting across Europe with my sister to work on being ever-so-modestly less perplexed and moody (it did work, I swear it did!). By pushing a little extra during my remaining semesters I knew I could graduate ‘on time’ with my class and not use up further masses of time and money and my parents’ remaining non-grey hairs, so I crammed a bit to compensate. And by the time I signed up for one particular poetry course I was just a tiny bit frazzled. I knew I had a sort of dispensation from the university to take a certain number of credits Pass/Fail rather than as graded courses, and decided that since I’d not used that option and had taken other legitimate English courses already, now would be an excellent time to relieve a small portion of pressure by opting for P/F. Señor del profesor had a slightly different idea.

As in, “What, are you nuts?” and a firm No. Oddly, it had not occurred to me that this particular academic rubric could only be invoked with the professor’s permission. Silly undergraduate. My response was to burst into tears. But he persuaded me, in good professorial fashion, that it was for my own good and that he was quite certain I would do Just Fine in this course if I was committed enough to take it in the first place. So I pulled up my socks and took it like a good girl. I guess it’s only fair to confirm the obvious, that the professor did his part to get the aforementioned rescue work underway, and I’ll tell you now that being a true educator rather than a sometime impostor like me, he kept at it throughout the semester, and I was no easy or patient patient.

Meanwhile, I quickly discovered under said professor’s tutelage that my incredibly narrow view of poetry was just a sign of lost time and an opportunity to open an infinitely interesting and challenging world of unexplored wonders. But I was still horribly intimidated by the prospect of learning to bravely parse and explicate poems, and I was still amidships in the throes of general anxiety and fear of speaking up as it was. Yikes! Bit of a fright, that.

Then the wonderful Chilean master Pablo Neruda beckoned me to come in and make myself at home. His writing, so evocative and so deeply personal, made me feel somehow safe. This, despite his writing in Spanish, a language unknown to me except for some very useful food-related words. Now, I will admit to having read numerous translations of his poetry alongside the originals, but all one really needs when presented with this juxtaposition is, as I had, a little youthful church-Latin exposure, a handful of high school and college French classes (sorry, I came out of it with appreciation but not much real knowledge), and the will to make serious inroads in various dictionaries; the work simply sings. The variety that emerged from the different translations brought out a wonderful amplitude inherent in Neruda’s poetic work and inspired me beyond measure.

I fell in love with several of the Neruda poems I got to read for that class. But the poem that truly resonated in me turned out to be his ‘Entierro en el Este‘[‘Burial in the East’], and I happily labored over three different translations of my own after studying the existing ones by pros and linguists far beyond my skill level right alongside the beautiful Spanish-language original, whose marvelously lyrical sonorities drew me in inexorably, filling me with their dark and earthy music. Can’t say exactly what happened to those translations. Surely the world is missing nothing with their disappearance. The professional poets’ translations and transcriptions remain for Anglos’ edification. Far more importantly, the rich and exquisite deliciousness of the Spanish version remains, and not just on the page and in the ether but also in my heart.

Because the class requirement to learn and recite a chosen poem in class before writing a paper on it made some strange little spark light up in my soul and I realized that, however hard it might be to memorize a poem in a language I’d never spoken, it was well worth learning this one because I sensed how its incredible beauty would resonate not just with me but with my peers if I managed even barely well enough. Its sheer musicality made it easier to learn, with the help of a Spanish-speaking coach, and the difficulty of learning a foreign-language poem and its meaning deeply enough not only for the recitation but to be able to write semi-cogently about it kept it ingrained, I found, years later as well. Too, it gave me the great gift of lightening my fear: standing in front of my classmates and giving my all to this lovely Chilean masterpiece in Spanish somehow made me less terrified of forgetting or of making it dull–something I just knew it would be hard to do with such beautiful and moving words. I lost myself in the poem, which is precisely what good poetry in any language hopes to make us do.

ENTIERRO EN EL ESTE

Yo trabajo de noche, rodeado de ciudad,
de pescadores, de alfareros, de difuntos quemados
con azafrán y frutas, envueltos en muselina escarlata:
bajo mi balcón esos muertos terribles
pasan sonando cadenas y flautas de cobre,
estridentes y finas y lúgubres silban
entre el color de las pesadas flores envenenadas
y el grito de los cenicientos danzarines
y el creciente y monótono de los tamtam
y el humo de las maderas que arden y huelen.
Porque una vez doblado el camino, junto al turbio río,
sus corazones, detenidos o iniciando un mayor movimiento
rodarán quemados, con la pierna y el pie hechos fuego,
y la trémula ceniza caerá sobre el agua,
flotará como ramo de flores calcinadas
o como extinto fuego dejado por tan poderosos viajeros
que hicieron arder algo sobre las negras aguas, y devoraron
un aliento desaparecido y un licor extremo.

Pablo Neruda

INTERMENT IN THE EAST [translation: KIW Sparks, 28 October 2011]

I work by night, in the heart of the city and surrounded

by fishermen, by potters, by the cremated dead

with their saffron and fruits, enveloped all in scarlet muslin;

below my balcony these terrible corpses

pass by with the rattle of chains and the playing of copper flutes,

such strident, lugubrious noise,

between the colors of those weighty, poisonous flowers

and the cries of the ash-covered dancers

and the crescendoing monotone of the beating drums

and the fragrant smoke of the burning wood.

For once they reach that place where the road meets the turbid river,

their hearts, stopping or perhaps starting a larger movement,

roll aflame, the leg and foot catching fire,

trembling ashes falling onto the water

to float like calcined blooms

or like a fire set in antique times by voyagers

so powerful they could make the very river burn, could eat

a food no longer known and drink the elixir of extremity.

El Día de los Muertos has a certain similar quality to the Neruda poem for me. The traditional Mexican celebration of the Day of the Dead coincides with the Catholic commemoration of All Saints’ and All Souls’ days (the 1st and 2nd of November, respectively). The depth of passion with which the bereaved mourn lost loves is brought to balance in Día de los Muertos in a marvelously worldly and tender way when families gather to tend the graves of their dead, to meet over feasting and drinking, amid art and dance and music and prayer and embraces and revelry of all sorts and to remember with love and joy the lives of the dead whom they have known and now carry in their hearts. I’ve long cherished the magical folk art arising from Día de los Muertos tradition, loving of course the charming and even joyful representations of Death as the natural culmination of life, and admiring the attitudes that these in fact symbolize. They feed that sweet dream in my heart of hearts where life and death intermingle in the most fitting way they can and we all dance between them with passion, with love, with hope–and with a river of deep, sonorous and abiding poetry flowing in our veins.

Wait for Me! I’ll be Right Back. Maybe

Posted on October 15, 2011 by kathryningrid

Once upon a time, I wrote and posted a poem. It was yesterday, in fact, that I posted it, right here, along with some photos of mine, and got a number of comments from you kindly people when you read it. Ironically, perhaps, it was titled:

I Don’t Think I’m Crazy, but I’m Not Crazy about Clowns, Either

–now I’m a little unsure about the Not Craziness on my part, because the post has disappeared from my blog and only appears as an unillustrated draft in my archives at the moment. Naturally, this is precisely when my otherwise quite nice tech homies of WordPress have deemed it a fine time to take a weekend off from Support to spend fine tuning all of the neat things they can do for me. Of course, people, I already knew about my own craziness. I’m quite happy in it, for the most part, as it’s just a friendly sort of nuttiness and of being, erm, offbeat or eccentric that I’m pleased to hone to a fine art. But when it allows cracks in my little tiny universe where something I’m pretty sure I did actually do can leak out and disappear on me like this it’s just a little disconcerting. I shall have to have a little heart-to-heart with the WP techno-mavens when they–and I–both get back in our respective grooves and see if we can’t find the alternate dimension wherein my wandering words may be, perhaps parked in the wordsmiths’ Naughty Corner to think over how they dared to disrespect the dignity of the Clown race.

I can only hope my earlier words have had a good think . . .

We’ll see if the ether-gods and I allow yesterday’s post back to the party when found. Words, as we all know, have a tendency to be incredibly unruly. In the wrong hands, nothing but trouble. Left to their own devices, heaven only knows. So we shall just see.

In the interim, I’ve got loads of other words stacking up and raring to go. You are so deeply not surprised. So I’ll keep plugging away and we’ll see what transpires right back here where there’s room for more. So I gather.

We'll see how everything stacks up as we go along . . .

I am slightly tempted to take a brief commercial break because, since I brought up the whole subject of craziness and now have the best sort of it running through my pretty little head. Three words: Crazy. Patsy. Cline. I have a feeling even a clown could be saved from the purgatory of the social outcast just by listening to the inimitable Patsy’s rendition of that immortal song. Words, you know, being powerful–and when linked to music, another incredibly powerful force, possibly that much the better. I might just have to take a moment for the same therapy.

Surely ‘Tis Better to be Bombastic than Merely Bumptious

Posted on October 3, 2011 by kathryningrid

As my music teacher once told me, "if you make a mistake, be sure to make the same mistake again, and with real conviction, when you get to Verse Two."

No one will be surprised to hear that as a kid with no sense of direction, space or straightforward western left-to-right/top-to-bottom reading I never did master reading music. Apparently I was a pretty decent prevaricator and persuader, though, because I faked my way through my five years of piano lessons by conning teachers and friends into playing my assignments for me up front ‘so I could get a feel for how they worked’–so I could phony them up by playing primarily by ear when lesson time came around again. Not to say that this flim-flam actually made me a good player. I had the decency to stop taking lessons when I was old enough that the act was wearing as thin as a starlet’s underwear. My teachers deserved to work with students with a certain amount of potential, after all. But I learned lots of fun and useful things from them in spite the inevitable moments of frustration and drudgery inherent in beginner’s practice. Not least of which was that the root not just of learning, but of potential innovation and variant excellence is the Mistake.

This is not meant as license for licentiousness–free rein to make egregious errata just for the lazy-ass or mean-spirited fun of it. But there’s a great difference between tripping on the invisible banana skin and bounding around boisterously without regard to the laws of gravity just to see how much I can liven up a dull funeral service. There’s a yawning gap between plonking a wrong note in the heat of a performance and sabotaging a poor defenseless deceased composer because I don’t care enough to learn her work properly. Despite my inability to make head or tail of those dots on a score, I did earnestly try to learn the proper notes right through by however devious the means.

I can neither confirm nor deny that the keyboard biff-ery that inspired the above gem of guidance regarding consistency of form used to disguise a melodic pratfall in any way improved upon the intended character or direction of the piece. Can’t even remember what I was playing. But you can be sure that the technique offered was a face saver, if not a life-saver, many a time after. Sometimes it’s just best to own up to my impressive capacity for fallibility right off, and enjoy a good horse-laugh at my own expense along with all of the other merrymakers in the room. Sometimes, though, I would rather take a page from the Bluffer’s Guides and adopt a meant-to-do-that nonchalance. There’s only so much I can take of being the unintentional class clown. Part of me dreams of Emma Peel sang-froid, a fantasy that however insanely unreachable is yet not easily quashed.

After all, it has served as the inspiration, time and time again, for all sorts of larger than life ideas, stories, poems, artworks and practical on-the-spot excuses, and who among us does not need those! Dogs, however voracious, can’t be expected to digest every available hunk of homework; traffic cannot account for the vagaries of my inspired life behind the wheel at every moment; and certainly the good taste and etiquette handbook, no matter how comprehensive, simply doesn’t have the capacity to cover my every gaffe and blunder in thought, word and dork-dyed deed. So thanking my lucky stars, and my long-ago mistress of pianistic peregrinations, I will continue on my hapless yet happy way, pretending to know what I’m doing in life while covering my blunders with bluster and the best imitation I can give of correctness. Whatever that is.

What I MEANT to say was . . .

Brightening Our Days with Scary Stories

Posted on October 1, 2011 by kathryningrid

The news and indeed sometimes our own everyday lives provide plenty of stories of sorrow and horror and True Crime, which is–oddly enough–precisely why I like a good fictional tale of dread, doom and destruction. It’s such a relief to remember how to detach from dark and grotesque and terrifying things and even to laugh at them. But I’m mighty squeamish, when it comes to the real thing or even a too-good simulation of it, so slasher movies just don’t do the trick for me. I do need the remove and control that reading or visibly stylized and artificial images provide.

Something is amiss in the conservatory . . .

It’s why when it does come to film I love the Alfred Hitchcock classics of suspense, or the genteel Gothicism of movies like Bunny Lake is Missing, Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, and Gaslight. I avidly read the yarns of Roald Dahl and Edgar Allan Poe and Saki and their ilk, and bask in a good Henry James or Robertson Davies ghost story. I thrive on the dark-tinged fantasy of Edmund Dulac and the witty weirdness of Edward-too-good-to-be-true-named-Gorey.

Oh, yes, I’ll happily digest the terrors of a good contemporary thriller novel or the occasional modern fright-night movie, but I’m a sucker for old-school drama, it seems. Even in music, I can find lots of vicarious thrills and scare tactics in a great modern film or TV score and there are some current composers that excel in this (Danny Elfman, are your ears burning?), but my heart never ceases to lean back toward the bejeweled darkness of Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain and Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre and, if I’m in the mood for cinematic music, perhaps one of Miklós Rózsa‘s classic romantic scores.

I am haunted enough by my own spooky imaginings . . .

It’s a fine thing to have the worlds of imagination in which to safely plumb and defeat all horrors and terrors. So I do like to indulge the urge myself with stories and poems and artworks of the brooding and twisted or the cheerily perverse and demented sort whenever I need reassurance–or just want to share the twinges a little.

What better way to find comfort on a drearily dark day than to curl up with a bit of artistic darkness?

Be Not Afraid of Me,

Unless You have a Good Reason

I buried the various body parts

in secret locations around the state,

reserving the heart of him I hate

to pin on the board for a game of darts,

and when it was thoroughly pierced and minced

I put on my favorite dress and heels

and danced a couple Virginia reels

before I washed up the room and rinsed,

then took the mincemeat left of the rat,

put it in the kiln for a nice hot burn,

where it made a fine glaze for a lovely urn,

and filled it with daisies, and that was that.

You might think I’m a teeny bit callous, cold,

rejoicing in vicious destructive acts,

but perhaps you’d relent if you knew the facts

and the rat’s true story at last were told–

but worry you needlessly? I? A shame,

when it’s highly unlikely by any stretch

of imagination you’d be a wretch

of such magnitude and incur the same . . .

now let us sit down for a cup of tea,

our own snug little tête-à-tête;

don’t worry about what you have just et,

unless you have reason to fear from me . . .

So what's the score on horror? Do we close the book on beastliness? Oh, no, there's ALWAYS so much more . . .

Smile and be

What looks like a smile

From this distance might

Be the bared fangs

Of monstrous threat

Or then again might be

The hateful grin

Of rigid death

So much to read

Out of a single smile

But all I need to know

Is, do I keep on

Going toward it

Best of the Very Worst, or How I Rose Above Personal Mediocrity to become a Self-Made Above-Average Character

Posted on September 30, 2011 by kathryningrid

”]The ever-inspiring Nia, photojournalist of all things sweet in Istanbul and wherever her travels have taken her, has tagged me with the honorable task of reviewing my short (thus far only, I hope) history as a blogger and passing along the challenge for such introspection and resurrection to some fellow internet trapeze artists as well. As one who has always prided herself, if that’s not too extravagant and approach to it, on being comfortable with her place in the middle of the pack, so to speak, in the universe, it is a tingly and cheering surprise when anyone tells me I’m otherwise. I mean, I knowI’m special, wonderful, and adorable and all of that since people I love and respect tell me so in my real life, but I am also fully aware that the rest of the planet is absolutely brimming with equally special-wonderful-adorable creatures in that sense. I’m also well aware that nothing I have done, made, said or been has shaken the foundations of reality or made me rich or famous, nor is likely to do so–and I really am okay with that!

So to be singled out as worthy of mention in this my new endeavor is flattering, frightening and flummoxing all at the same time. But mostly it feels really nice! It is a fine affirmation that my ego, smiling broadly at me in the mirror, is not so far off-kilter that my average-and-ordinariness cannot be seen by others, too, as maybe something a little shinier and more compelling than they actually are–or perhaps even edging upward over the years and efforts somewhere a tiny bit closer to excellence. Complacency, no, never, I hope. But isn’t it nice to get that sore shoulder once in a while that comes from cheerily patting oneself on the back?

Buckets of bouquets to us all!

I would like to offer the same supportive and enthusiastic back-pats to the following fellow toilers in the fields of blogdom:

Ted Griffith, who braves the blogosphere with wonderful photographic art despite frequent disclaimers of intimidation and inexperience apparently quite similar to my own;

Madeline of ah-lum-dahp-dah, daring adventurer and journalist (with great humor and compassion) of her experiences around the world at an age when I still thought it was incredibly gutsy to say Hi to a stranger at a boring reception;

Fellow unreasonable optimist Jared at Lexidelphia, poet and commentator on such useful things as mustache characteristics and the importance of being an impertinent little upstart when questions ought to be asked;

Milady Hannah-Elizabeth of The Last Classic, writing a remarkably insightful and thoughtful rumination on life with all of its ups and downs;

Beautiful Desi of The Valentine 4, whose ability to calm the stormy seas around her with wisdom and humor and passion are a great example to us weaker-willed souls;

Aaron Leaman, who like the rest of us hard-working arty types, starts with Nothing and makes Something–in his case, artful and thought-provoking photos, vids and texts.

Jack Campbell, Jr, of This Average Life, a guy that just happened to post today on the selfsame theme I had chosen for the day, with a unique twist. I think that qualifies as good taste in ordinariness!–or something like it . . .

My Fellow Bloggers: Should you choose to accept this mission, you will only need to revisit and link to 7 of your all but forgotten posts, linking to them, and then pass this mission/challenge on to 7 other bloggers . . . here are my own responses:

#1 Your Most Beautiful Post (in your opinion): Another Kind of Safety (or, better yet I hope, something yet to come)

#2 Your Most Popular Post (per stat views): The Supercooled Liquid that is Far More than Smoke and Mirrors

#3 Your Most Controversial Post (per reality): As American as Whaaaaaa . . . ???

#4 Your Most Helpful, or “How To” Post: Happiness may be Ephemeral, but It’s Sure Worth the Effort

#5 Your Most Surprisingly Popular Post: I Hereby Crown Myself Mistress of the Mess-ups and Guru of Good Intentions

#6 Your Post That Didn’t Get the Attention It Merited: Be Still and Listen, Thou Big Dope

#7 Your Magnum Opus (post you are most proud of): I’m hoping like crazy that if there’s an individual post that’s “best” it is yet to come. What I’m really proud of is finally getting up the nerve and the gumption to actually join the blogosphere and persevere at it. And all of the rest of you that commit to this humbling and exhilarating and inspiriting task should be equally pleased to be in this weird and wonderful company!

This little piggy cried, "Me! Me! Me!" all the way home . . .

Please pardon my wallowing in self-congratulation for a moment. Whee! Whee! Whee!

Let’s Just Start with the MacGuffin:

Posted on September 25, 2011 by kathryningrid

Surprising as it sounds and contrary to all expectations, it turns out she was the heroine in her own story.

Sometimes the pivotal, crucial piece of information on which the plot hinges--the fantastical and showy part--doesn't wait for the denouement . . .

Whatever the exotic and thrilling final chapter of my life is going to be, nothing could fully prepare me, let alone anybody else, for it; I think, however, that I may have tromped through the facts of the event many times already without even recognizing where I was. Heck, I may exist in a universe parallel to the one I think I’m in as it is. It’s as though I’d backed through a door into my life and discovered I was somewhere well into the whole chain of events, been mystified by them (though everyone else is in on the joke, having started someplace more logical), and dashed back down the hall in hopes of a do-over. Pretty sure I showed up in my underwear onstage, come to think of it–everybody else seems to at some point.

Here I am, then, living a serio-comic mystery story, ending utterly unknown, and apparently it was written by a bunch of clowns more interested in spectacular pratfalls and occasional bouts of farcical action with absurd and incongruous outcomes than in logic or meaningful purpose. This is not, mind you, a complaint. Once it occurred to me that my calling in the grand scheme of existence was as comic relief, things got a lot simpler and less intimidating. There’s no grail for me to hunt, no world-saving invention for me to create, and certainly no audience expecting anything beyond my appearance in the olio portions of the program, say just after intermission and before the serious third act commences. Even in my own life I might end up playing a bit part, and that’s kind of comforting to me, as opposed to having some dreadfully high purpose to accomplish before curtain call even though nobody’s bothered to spell it out for me.

I make art that way most of the time.

Some drawings and stories start with a title that has no inherent plot or direction implied in its wording but is hoped to goose my brain in a fortuitous direction. I told you before about my [nonexistent] spy-mystery tale used (along with a few nonexistent chapters’ headings) as a springboard for illustrations. My sister donated another title for me that led to a couple of drawings that turned out to have no detectable connection with the title, “Penguins in Peril.” Much of the time, my mind takes such convoluted routes from Point A to Point B that I’ve exhausted the entire alphabet and gone into numbers before looping back to B, where I thought I was headed. If I ever really go there at all. “Penguins in Peril” is such a great title that I’ve tried, really tried, a couple of times to get it right but it just hasn’t happened yet. Ah, well, I like the drawings I got out of the attempts and I still have this fantastic title for future reference. A bonus!

There are other tales and pictorial ramblings that spring from the convoluted mental meandering itself, and these too can take their own tangents and drag me right along with them. If, as I’ve posited before, everything is research, then whatever I discard, carom off of, or don’t include in the current project is fair game for the next.

I figure that ought to apply in life as well as in art. What I didn’t succeed in becoming or discovering or doing this time around, maybe I am just saving up to do when I’m older and more, erm, mature (okay, that’s just not gonna happen). Maybe I’ll get lucky and either someone else will get it done, or karma will plunk me into a future person-place-or-thing better equipped and more highly motivated to get the job done.

And that’s what this is all really about, isn’t it. Motivation. I’m just hiding behind the actor’s persona and pestering the director to tell me “what’s my motivation?” when I know perfectly well that it’s I who am supposed to weasel that information out myself. Sigh. That’s why I prefer to keep goofing around on the edges of ~~sanity~~ purposefulness when making my various stabs at art, and just see where the jollity of the moment takes me. So much more fun, so much less, you know, <makes a face like a baby that just tasted a spoonful of pureed broccoli instead of the expected bananas> responsible. This way I’m also able to be just as surprised by the thrilling finish of the story as all of the innocent bystanders. Whatever it is, guys, I’ll see you there. Wear a Kevlar® jumpsuit, and perhaps also a water-squirting boutonnière, just in case.

Writing good mystery stories is tough enough--solving the mysteries of one's own life, toughest of all . . .

I’m Not a Real Person, but I Play One on Television

Posted on September 24, 2011 by kathryningrid

Maybe, Mr. President, but in the spirit of clarity and full disclosure, I think the other thing we really have to fear is ourselves . . .

. . . or as the ever-astute Pogo said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

I’m speaking, of course, for all of us lily-livered, yellow-bellied, totally ordinary milquetoasts in the world who have ever awakened on a perfectly calm and sunny day filled with dread for no other reason than that we are over-anxious about anything–or nothing. By this, of course, I mean practically everybody. On a bad day. Those few of you magicians who have never once had this experience, I salute you with admiring astonishment. And I implore you to hustle out and patent your technique and figure out how to produce it in vegetarian-safe three-a-day capsules for the rest of the waiting world.

Meanwhile, back at the Reality Ranch, I can lay claim to having plenty of days free of the aforementioned bane, but certainly plenty of times too when it seemed it would be far simpler to raise a sunken battleship singlehandedly from the bottom of the Mariana Trench than to haul myself out of my cave and interact with the world as though I were a competent human. And I’m not talking about dealing with true clinical depression or anxiety disorder, both of which as you know by now I have entertained as unwelcome guests in my own head in times past (pre-treatment). I’m talking about that state most mortals enter occasionally, where we’re certain that our horrible inadequacy is a glaring banner of toilet tissue perpetually trailing from our waistbands, that we are so clearly impostors in our own lives that we’ll soon be successfully replaced not by another person but by a badly made mannequin and no one will notice or care.

Yesterday, I was reminded in conversation of a fine and sometimes very helpful method for dealing with this characteristic in myself. Don’t know why I’d forgotten the source for so many years, as it’s really rather handy. I was in the high school drama program–and lest you die of shock at this news, be assured that I got into it initially because (a) I liked reading and viewing plays and (b) I happened to know that there was a lot of off- and backstage stuff to be done. Somewhere along the line I drifted from stagehand duties and lighting design and being mistress of all things costume and prop and set-related to, you guessed it, acting. Clearly not because I was destined to grow up and take Broadway by storm. But there it is, weird as it sounds. I mentioned in a previous blog that I have won theatre awards, including in those years, Best Actress, but this was high school, and hardly a magnet school for the Arts, for Pete’s sake.

However, I think I did perhaps earn the award from among my peers, and obviously not because of my natural vivacity and gregariousness. What I had was a wonderfully tolerant and clever set of teachers that did their best to spot weaknesses and needs among their students and find ways for them to overcome themselves. Because of course that was precisely the problem in my case. How could an uptight introvert get up onstage and act? I could barely conceive of how to play ME in my own life at that point.

The answer was really rather simple to state, and not, it turns out, impossible even for an uptight introvert like me to execute when I put my also-natural stubborn will and desire to be better than I was behind it. “If you can’t imagine someone like you getting up on the stage and acting a part, then start with playing a good actor. Then let that actor play the part.” Convoluted? Of course it is. Silly? You bet. But somehow that one extra step of remove let me pretend it was somebody else doing what I knew I couldn’t do myself, and that was that. While I had forgotten the specific inception of that nugget of useful knowledge in my life until yesterday, I know that I have employed it to many and varied extremes over the intervening years, and can thank the idea (and Mr. C and co.) for thus having pulled me through many a dicey situation since.

So far I have played a college graduate, a construction worker, a landscape and interior designer, an artist, a teacher, a poet, an administrator, a blogger, and many other roles, not all perhaps to award-winning standards, but enough to help me survive them and sometimes even forget myself enough to truly enjoy them in the moment. And I think I’m continuing to get better at the role of Me, the one role that might actually matter the most come to think of it. I’ll keep you posted if any honors other than my self-appointed tiara should pop up.

Never Fear, My Darlings, We're All in this Together . . .

Friends Well Met in Cyberspace

Posted on September 22, 2011 by kathryningrid

We have constant reminders of the dangers lurking around the dark corners of the webiverse, and indeed we would do well to heed all such warnings. But I have seen that the obverse of that coin is equally impressive and far more enlightening and cheering: cyberspace is full of fantastic people and inspirations, and I don’t have to go far to find them. The kindness of strangers is quickly transformed into wonderful streams of affinity and even deep friendships when we have the ability to find so much common ground despite the physical, cultural or temporal distances between us.

Case in point: ceciliag, author of the exquisitely artful and personal blog The Kitchens Garden. I saw, without surprise, that today she had received a much-deserved blogging award for her marvelous work, and was delighted, because in the short time I’ve followed her blog I have come to see her as an inspiration, a mentor and even a friend. That’s the beauty of this concentrated contact we can develop with wonderful people whose shared insights and arts move us to do more than merely hang about the fringes basking in their gifts, and actually get to work on our own, howsoever we can! What I saw with surprise, and gratitude, was that C had generously passed along the award to other bloggers, and included me. I will of course try to narrow the field of my admired cohorts enough to pay the gift forward, because others besides ceciliag have strengthened, entertained and inspired me as well. She must know that I would gladly have included her in my own list had she not been the one ‘tagging’ me!

The purpose of the award is clearly to reinforce the ties between us in this remarkably friendly and creative world of blogging, and also to introduce us to more new connexions that we haven’t yet known to enjoy. Along with the fine mandate to share with you some links to other blogs I know you’ll find delightful, I am tasked with telling you 7 things you don’t know about me. Finding 15 bloggers whose work I admire and think deserves recognition is easy (though keeping it to only 15 mightn’t be)–but since I’m so boldly non-secretive a person, I may have to fish around a little to think of any things everybody doesn’t already know about me. So first, a blogroll of other worthy persons whose blogging efforts I hope you’ll support and find as delightful, provocative, educational, witty, touching, and/or flat-out gorgeous as I do.

In Search of My Moveable Feasts

And now, as if my dear readers haven’t already heard enough blather about me, here are seven things you might not have known.

1 I consider ginger root the Universal Donor. I can think of hardly anything that can’t benefit from the addition of ginger in one of its many forms.

2 I have something a little like the earworms people get when a pop song (or, among people I know, a movement from some classical piece) gets stuck in their head for a day or week–but mine is a permanent repetitive tune. My personal theme song, I guess. At least it plays in variations sometimes, thank goodness, or I’d go batty. Or have I already?

3 Once, long ago, I got to make a commissioned artwork to be presented as a gift to the Bishop of El Salvador.

4 The shelves on my desk have a miniature found-science collection of bones, bugs, bird nests, rusted hardware and seed pods.

5 I have a horror of telephones. Yes, it has a good latin phobia name too. But what do we phobics do to get over it–call each other???

6 My ability to raise one (either) eyebrow sardonically once garnered me the nickname “GP” for reminding my teacher of Gregory Peck’s expressions. I don’t think she meant it as a compliment, ‘specially if she had any idea that my sense of irony was mostly aimed at what I thought was the absurdity of her teaching style. Mea culpa.

7 At various points in my life I thought I’d study to be a pastor (that was clearly before I started developing into such a heathen); a marine biologist (all that scientific knowledge started to get in my way); an architect (oh, yeah–a dyslexic who can barely do grade-school math). Turns out I wasn’t really cut out for any sort of well-defined path.

Which brings me right here! And I can definitely say I couldn’t be more pleased with having landed among you. It challenges more different aspects of my personality and self-image than pursuing any of the aforementioned would have done in my case. And it lets me keep up the hunt for my vocation, if I have one, with a dandy support community that often drives me down previously unknown and unexpected paths of fun-filled mystery. So thanks, and here’s to all of you, not just those on today’s list!

Bouquets to all!

Art-Colored Glasses

Original poetry, essays, artworks, photographs & musings on whatever moves me…

Category Archives: Writing

Skipping thro’ the Birchen Wood, I Thought I Spied a Whale

Stage Blood and Loud Noises

Delight amid Sorrows: Día de los Muertos and Singing Neruda’s Poetry

Wait for Me! I’ll be Right Back. Maybe

Surely ‘Tis Better to be Bombastic than Merely Bumptious

Brightening Our Days with Scary Stories

Let’s Just Start with the MacGuffin:

I’m Not a Real Person, but I Play One on Television

Friends Well Met in Cyberspace

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