The faintest, mildest, least-noticeable of all things can still have tremendous impact. Take lichens, for example: the most wonderful of flowers, even gardens, on a microscopic scale. Strong enough to wear down stone itself over time, but so delicate and dainty and fairylike that they are rich and glorious even in their seeming fragility.
My fondness for cemeteries is always heightened by admiration for their artful and natural beauties in the wonderful array of stonework and iron, stained glass and sculpture that intermingle with splendid displays of wild or planted flowers, trees, grasses, and moss that may be meticulously designed and tended or equally lovely in their rampant and neglected states. I love, too, a cemetery’s history and mystery; the stories both told and untold that rise up from every grave fill me with awestruck wonder as I perambulate and read, rest and imagine. The silence, punctuated by bird sounds, by wind and rain, and sometimes by the talk of others wandering through, gives me room for my thoughts to roam while my eyes are distracted and enchanted by the views.
And though I don’t necessarily wish to keep them company in a permanent way anytime soon, I find the dead in a cemetery very accepting, even friendly, company, so I am rarely melancholy in a graveyard, mostly meditative. And occasionally, amused. I especially like the headstones and monuments that have either their own sense of humor or have in one way or another become more entertaining than they were originally intended to be. I have even devised an artistic category for the rare few sculptures and markers that are evidently the work of good-hearted but slightly under-talented designers and artists, whom some might charitably name folk artists but whose misbegotten and unintentionally horrifying or hilarious (horlairifying?) tributes I dub not so much Folk Art as WTFolk Art.
I hope beyond words that little Charlie’s guardian cherub was a whole lot less unhandsome when the headstone was first made for their poor youngster, and not yet so weather-beaten. Me, I’d wake up in the grave with nightmares with that weird little blob hovering overhead!
Whether it’s my irreverence in the face of death’s inevitability or the inspiration of such kindhearted awfulness, I do find that sometimes I can’t help writing epitaphs, myself. Even my own epitaph, or variations thereon, because no one’s better equipped to deride my quaint and odd-acious self than I am, after all. Plus, if they’re terrible verses, I won’t be around to be annoyed by them once I’m dead. Sorry, the rest of you.
How about one for the Sparks family vault?
Here lies Richard in the dark
For having died, he’s lost his Spark,
And yet with Kathryn still he’s yoked,
Even when buried, for she croaked.
But wait! There’s more…a little something just for me:
Who lies below tucked in this bed
With hollow bones and empty head
Could not have left us fast enough;
Perhaps a diamond in the rough,
But her potential, though so pretty,
Stayed all unmet, and more’s the pity.
Hey, isn’t this where the aliens are buried? Lemme in!
Solitude is not always lonesome; it can be a deeply joyful place of peace and calm. It can be an inward-looking, melancholic sweetness tinged with nostalgia or the cosmic silence in which every breath becomes a prayer. To be alone in the worldly sense never denies the possibility of a welcome, comforting Other presence, or the awesome sweep of knowing that reassures, despite all challenges, that one has a place in the universe, however small.
Formless in the mist, obliterated by dark and storm, or shut from sight by suffering or fear, the things that ordinarily create a sense of normalcy or rootedness may not be gone, but in the state of being all alone, anyone can become convinced she is alone, and that solitude is a burden or a punishment. But in the stillness, too, is the possibility of deeper thought, of slipping into a state where the good and the powerful and the blessed things that fill the spirit—when there are fewer distractions of person-place-or-thing to prevent it—well up and are renewed.
Love & Homicide in the Wings
A mere moth should never marry A too-pretty Fritillary:
Ay, anterior, posterior, She’ll always act superior,
And opt, yea, to co-opt her an Obnoxious Lepidopteran
To ransom her; by chance some’re Both fancier and handsomer.
Tears will roll like many pennies When he uses his antennae
So he really realizes Not all butterflies are prizes;
Though he scarcely found it scary Marrying a Fritillary,
Someday soon he surely will, her Arrogance the caterpillar
Of his innocent devotion Kill; its wings will know no motion.
Down the alleys ghastly, ill-lit, Flits, forlorn, the moth; to kill it
Is a mercy of the fires On his thwarted old desires—
Clasp a gaslamp, doomed Cecropia! Love you once believed Utopia
Ne’er loved you, never trusted That you weren’t just maladjusted.
Ah! Madame, your Butterfly, alack, will only stab you in the back;
The price of your hubristic pride Could well become Cecropicide.
“*The* World War.” Would that it were so. So many dead that if there’s room in the cemetery for an individual marker, it might have only initials, if any identification at all. And more bones on the pile every day, in every corner of the world.
My meanderings in old cemeteries offer frequent reminders that poverty and hunger, natural dangers, and lack of medical advances or resources were far from the only causes of early and numerous deaths among our forebears. Chief among the causes is—and I fear, will always be—ignorance. All one has to do is spy a few headstones marking the graves of persons killed in The War, the World War, or even the so-called Great War to realize that despite terrible, lengthy, massive battles and wars in ages past, our more recent ancestors still believed that one war would ‘end all wars’ and that it was an anomaly. We should be so astute and peace-loving. Instead, we always find new ways to mistreat and murder our fellow beings, and the rate of discovery for cures and self-improvements never quite keeps up with the pace of our ills, let alone outruns them.
“World War.” The End. If only.
The Emperor’s Newest Costume
An Empire never gave good reason why
It ought to rule instead of native sons
And daughters, who, if they survive the guns
And carpet-bombing, still might long to die,
For terrible and bitter is the rule
Of anyone who dares to steal the throne
Of any land or country not his own,
Who often trades a despot for a fool,
Or worse, fool for a despot, and the land
And all its people suffer at the change,
No better, oft enough, and ever strange,
Without the hope and strength to countermand
The awful miseries imposed by those
Who choose to rule as wolves in ovine clothes.
Let this be a lesson to us all. Seems to me that flags are better planted in our own hearts and front gardens than on others’ turf.
As lazy as I am when being an ‘everyday’ entertainer, that attitude of mine only multiplies and intensifies when it comes to special occasions. I have no interest in hosting a party if everyone is having fun except me. So it’s especially important to me when I’m thinking of any event, particularly a festive one like a holiday (and I’ll embrace any holiday that’ll have me, if it means an excuse for celebrations with friends and loved ones), that I do as much of the heavy lifting as I can ahead of the day. Being a piggy with a sweet tooth, and not opposed to alcohol in moderation, that means I am known on occasion to haul out the Fix It-Douse-It-Forget-It recipes. You know, the ones that you put booze in or pour it over, seal up like little yummy mummies, and tuck away in a safe spot to age until party time. Keep ’em on ice, so to speak.
One of my favorites for this used to be Christmas Pudding, usually using a classic recipe like the lovely one given to me by a friend in London the very first time I visited there nearly thirty-five years ago. I have since become even lazier; it’s a million-ingredient extravaganza with real fresh suet and tons of over-the-top fat and sugary delights, and requires fussy prep and long, carefully monitored steaming in (for those of us who lack a real pudding steamer) a low-tech contraption cobbled together from whatever substitutes one can find for the pudding tin, before one can even attend to the artful draping in layers of liquor-soaked cheesecloth and plastic wrap and tinfoil. Heavens! I’m salivating just thinking of the glory that emerged from those efforts when long weeks or months had passed and it was time for the great unveiling. A large spoonful of that miraculous stuff, re-warmed and blanketed in equally boozy hard sauce and washed down with a good stiff tot of port, and I was undoubtedly well enough pickled to last several months on a dark cupboard shelf myself. But it was a bit too much, not only the excess of caloric craziness and vaporous intake, but also in the immense labors it took to accomplish it all.
Nowadays I am (literally, to be honest) inclined toward greater ease. But I still enjoy some indulgences for the same special occasions, even holidays that might have little personal resonance if it weren’t for the permission they give me to indulge so. Now that we’re rumbling into the high holiday season as America immerses in it (and let’s just start with tomorrow, which according to my quick research, is Nevada Day—who but a handful of devoted Nevadans knew!), there will be no shortage of reasons for partying. Now that I think about it, my birthday is the feast day of La Guadalupana, and since I have without even having previously made that connection been decanting a homemade rose liqueur (from dried Mexican rosebuds, no less) that I think would be highly appropriate to her story, I might have to find excuses to tuck that event in as well. Guess that just confirms my longstanding belief that my own birthday is a major holiday.
But meanwhile, there are all kinds of seasonal treat regarded as something like a serious requirement in this country if one is to celebrate the holidays properly. Anything and everything pumpkin flavored, of course, with warming spices, the occasional fall fruits (apple, pear, quince) and maple syrup and various nutmeats thrown in—these are all high on the list, some of them with an emphasis on High. Oh, and eggnog. Never forget the eggnog. So I, being fairly easily led to hankering for food-and-drink-related things that are being touted and offered nearly everywhere I look, follow the resultant trail of salivation, if not salvation, right to the sources.
Today I felt moved to put together some of these seasonal treats, some to pop in the refrigerator for fairly immediate consumption (though intended to last for a few days in the chiller, at least), and a bit to wait for their starring moments. The former includes a Fall dessert combination of pumpkin, apple, and pecans, and the latter is this year’s take on eggnog. Because sipping champagne-and-roses (as I intend to do with a nice sparkling Rosé spiked with the aforementioned rose liqueur) is probably not enough.
Pumpkin-Apple Dessert makes a good breakfast, don’t you think?
Pumpkin-Apple Dessert
Not pie, but close…to pumpkin pie, apple pie, and pecan pie, all in one big ridiculously happy dish. Or served separately, if that’s your happy wish. See that? I made a little rhyme, too, all for the sake of my sweet tooth. The measurements in all of these are approximate and to taste, as are any cooking times and temperatures. You know me.
Pumpkin Pudding
1 large tin of pure pumpkin puree (29 oz), 3 eggs, 1/2 cup dark maple syrup, 1/4 cup coconut oil, 1 Tbsp vanilla, a hefty pinch of salt, 2 tsp cinnamon, 3/4 tsp allspice. Blend together thoroughly, pour into a greased covered pan, and bake or microwave (on high for about 5 minutes) until the eggs have thickened it slightly. Refrigerate.
You will probably not be shocked to know that I amped my pumpkin pudding up with the addition of a couple of scoops of vanilla whey protein powder, because I will be having some for breakfast once or twice before it’s gone.
Apple Pie Sauce
1 each Granny Smith (or other bright-flavored) and Fuji (sweet) apples, peeled and cored and diced, 2 Tbsp clarified browned butter, 3 Tbsp minced candied ginger, and a pinch of salt, all cooked down into a still-chunky bright applesauce with a quarter- to half-cup of gold rum.
Bacon-Maple Pecans
Pecan halves, bacon fat, and dark maple syrup. Melt and heat them together until the nuts grow faintly toasty and the fat and syrup caramelize, and you have candied pecans made in hog heaven. Yeah, you can use any sort of favored fat you like, so don’t cry if you’re vegan! Goodness is still within reach!
Pumpkin-Apple Dessert after dinner is good, too.
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And in honor of a couple of fabulous Puerto Rican ladies (Natalia and Fabiana) I happen to know and greatly admire, my take on the PR version of eggnog, or Coquito.
[Note: Just to be on the safe side and to take advantage of the slight thickening that heat brings out of eggs, I have made this in custard-fashion, cooking it slightly, but aside from the usual caveats regarding at-risk persons (i.e., the pregnant, the very young, the very old, and those with compromised immune systems) and raw eggs or alcohol, the combination of the two has been scientifically proven to kill, rather than foster, salmonella. Just so’s you know. Salud!]
Coquito Loco Rico
1 cup coconut butter, 54 oz coconut milk, 6 egg yolks, 1/2 teaspoon of salt, 2 Tablespoon vanilla, 1 cup packed light brown sugar, 1/2 teaspoon grated nutmeg, and 1 tsp ground cardamom, all blended together and cooked, stirring constantly, until slightly thickened. Pour into a container that can be tightly closed (I used a 3 quart pitcher with a tight lid), add a pint of gold rum (I used PR-produced Bacardi), stir, seal, and stash in the depths of the fridge for as long as you can stand waiting The large proportion of alcohol keeps the eggs from spoiling. Serve cold or hot, straight up (high-octane!) or mixed with additional nonalcoholic coquito, eggnog, cream, or milk of any kind, and preferably in good company.
Because you may need the comfort, since this stuff can be so good it’s scary. Happy Halloween, everybody. Even if you don’t care to dress up for it or recognize it as any kind of meaningful event for you, it can be well worth your while to gather some friends and loved ones to celebrate something with a flavor-packed dessert or a rollicking drink.
We’re in the process of selling our house, my spouse and I. It’s something we’d considered for a couple of years, downsizing to an apartment closer to a size appropriate for two adults, but we hadn’t made any serious motions because we’d not found anyplace that met our wishes for location, price, condition, and covered parking. (Texas-sized hailstorms, anyone?) When we found such a place, it was when we weren’t really looking anymore, of course.
We’d been out on a Sunday expedition and were heading home when we saw a sign for an ‘upcoming’ listing, called the owner, and discovered that he had something different and probably even better suited to our wishes. Three weeks later, we’re close to closing with buyers. Crazy. What’s fascinating to me, in addition to the oddity of the situation itself, is being reintroduced to the world of Real Estate and its intriguingly arcane, euphemistic, and otherwise idiosyncratic processes and language. Like all other legal and commercial ventures, it’s wondrously weird. Sometimes aggravating, often amusing, and especially entertaining to me when it comes to the times when one party or another is trying very hard to find a word to describe something that is—well—basically indescribable.
I was reminded that both buildings and their furnishings, for example, that are neither clearly classic nor modern can be called Transitional, and that this nondescript term has been so often used in this way that it has become a recognizable style itself, but still lacks many distinct characteristics. It’s more about what it isn’t than what it is. There are long lists of words and phrases and concepts that are equally vague and yet relatively easy to interpret by those of us who have read enough Real Estate-speak and seen the reality of the properties and objects being described to begin to recognize the connections, as tenuous as they may sometimes be, between the word and the actuality.
So when I read “park-like setting,” I am more inclined to think a place is going to require massive injections of cash and labor to sustain its massively over-groomed acreage. “Designer’s dream” usually means someone with far more money than taste hired a person only marginally more skillful to make everything in the building match too well and fit trends so perfectly that they’ll never be wholly in style after their current popularity fades—or, conversely, that some self-declared Artiste so personalized the joint that no one in her right mind would think it anything but a gut job as a purchase. One of the best is always, of course, “starter home” or “DIYer’s delight,” either of which can only mean that the home’s toilet is an open hole in the middle of the living room floor and the last time the roof was repaired it was done with a bright blue tarp.
It’s not so different from the brain shift required of a viewer expecting obviousness and objectivity from abstract images. What looks like neon lights in bokeh, perhaps, or a wallpaper pattern of whimsical orangey bubbles can certainly represent nothing more than a blurry photo of a vintage neon sign or a repeating design made from imagined circles. But it could also be that both images were created, however indirectly, by beginning with the very same photo of a small handful of earthworms drowned in rain, beached on a concrete slab, and desiccated into interesting squiggly shapes in varying shades of brown. Which is what these two happened to be. A DIYer’s delight, if you’re an artist with a post-rainstorm messy patio. A transitional sort of place, I guess, for the worms and for my eye for images, both.
A dear friend reminded me this week, with a wistful note from the University of Whatsis, just what it’s like to have a massive struggle with your direction and purpose when you’re still young enough not to have done so umpteen times and more, and recognized the inevitability of the Next One. Now that I’m older, if not necessarily any wiser but definitely more experienced, I can say with a certain amount of commitment that my credo may be morphing into “if at first you don’t succeed, fail, fail again.” Therein, much to my surprise, I have learned to find a better recipe for progress than in the mere trying. I wouldn’t know what my artistic successes looked like if I hadn’t first figured out how it looked when my art, or my life as an artist, sucked.
I don’t know if what she’s experiencing is anything at all like my first semester of grad school, but I was not at all confident I’d made the right choice, let alone that I had the necessary chops, when I was having my first major critiques, evaluations, mini-showings, and so forth. YIKES. It all freaked me out pretty seriously. But then I had the peculiarly wonderful personal-lightbulb moment of thinking (I seem to recall this actually happening in the midst of a big end-of-quarter or -semester evaluation in private conference with my main teacher/mentor, but I could be conflating events) that, if things weren’t working at all this way, then I would just force myself to start from scratch and do as much differently as I could possibly do.
No more black and white for now, I decided, despite being addicted to plain graphite drawings; all full-color. No more small scale; everything as gigantic as I could afford the materials and workspace to do. No more fussy detail and slowpoke timidity; be fast, loud, bold, loose, and reckless. Away with the still-life! Time to go all figurative, which I’d avoided like the plague. Down with pacing myself! Stay up for ages and do two, three, ten works at a time, even to the point of pinning up a long wall full of sheets and running from one to another and back again. I worked as fast as I could, using every material and medium I could scrounge up anywhere, gessoing over every image that I found unsatisfying immediately and reusing the paper/board/fabric from which it had been erased. I drew left-handed and I drew two-handed. I used dirt and food to draw with, and my works filled up both my trash cans and my portfolio. My teacher thought I’d gone nuts. My work was unrecognizable. I was unrecognizable, even to myself.
But I lost so much of my fear of failure in that burst of activity. If I made forty works for every one I’d agonized over before, then now I had thirty-nine extra chances to get it right, or at least, better. And simply by working more and faster and with so much less self-criticism in the moments of the making, I did get better.
I didn’t get perfect, and I didn’t go sailing through the rest of grad school, let alone life, nor will I, without continuing to have plenty of self-doubt episodes and artistic flatliners and emotional meltdowns along the way. But believe me, those have all lessened in number and intensity, and I have, after each of them, greater faith that the present moment of frustration and gloom and disappointment is not the end of the road, but just a big ol’ pothole in it. Some of those potholes may give me real artistic/creative flat tires or even a broken axle. But so far, I keep potting along and finding that what the potholes are often doing is just slowing me down enough to notice a side road or alternate route I’d not otherwise have noticed. I’m still a work in progress, always will be, but if I’m open to change and challenge in this, there’s good ahead.
PS—Thanks to my darling husband, who took the photo that I use for my Gravatar these days, and for the basis of this little sketch.
Shallow as a one-sided gnat’s freckle, that’s me.
If asked what movie I’d prefer to watch, book to read, music to hear, I’m almost never the person in the crowd who says “challenge me!” I’m the one who wants to be effortlessly and palatably entertained, and that rarely includes any sort of idea or activity that involves my working, learning, evolving, or—banish the thought! (literally)—thinking.
I have always known that I’m not fond of experiencing anything that makes me feel the slightest bit out of my comfort zone, and while I don’t think it admirable or something I find brag-worthy, I don’t think it’s shameful, either. Even the people that I know who crave the New and different and are energized by being amid the exotic, the confrontational, or the controversial mostly seem to find that very pleasurable rather than frightening, and so, choose it because being uneasy or even frightened is in its way pleasant to them. True adrenaline junkies are not alone in this: the great explorers among us, whether those of intellectual or physical, artistic or scientific realms, thrive on the jagged edge of the known and the safe.
So, as I was wandering around the interwebs this morning and looking through a certain high-end vintage auction house’s catalogue of art, I was struck by how many works I could admire for their originality, their technical facility, their wit, and/or their power, but how many I could also truthfully say I was attracted to, myself? Not so many. Some there were that I thought incredibly impressive and deeply respect-worthy for numerous reasons, but few among them would I ever consider hanging in my own house or office or want to look at long term. I do like mysteries and scary stories, and there are plenty of artworks and concepts and images that amuse and delight me for the very reason that I find them ugly or appalling, even to the point of painful laughter, but unless these things meet my own criteria for what I’d like to enjoy at length, it’s all for naught.
And of course, as a visual artist myself, and one who’s never made any particular headway with building a paying audience for anything I do, I am always intrigued to snoop around at such sites’ pricing of artworks. I marvel at what is listed as unsold, seeing artworks of phenomenal skill and complexity offered for what I think pretty reasonable prices (though I certainly couldn’t afford them, not least because of my aforementioned lack of success as an art entrepreneur); at what has sold that I couldn’t imagine living happily with; at what astronomical prices are being asked for things that in my opinion don’t even come close in material costs, labor time, or skill level to what I’ve sold of my own work in the past for comparative pennies. This kind of perusal is highly educational, occasionally frustrating, sometimes encouraging, and most often, just a great source of inspiring ideas and images that make me want to head back to my own drawing board again. Worth all of it, if only for that last.
On reflection, I do remember that I have made many images and told many stories myself that I didn’t want to hang on my own walls, and even a few times have destroyed ones that I knew someone else liked because I didn’t think it represented my ideals anyhow. That’s the strangeness and the delight of the arts, isn’t it. One person’s trash is another’s pleasure. Crazy. Wonderful.
Idylls & Idealism
A lake as cool as fishes’ silver flanks
and ruffled less by wind than lily leaves,
where children roll their pant legs up, and sleeves,
to shepherd pollywogs along the banks,
Right where the river empties in its pool,
sending out eddies limned in leafy green
and damselflies all hover on the scene
as shadow changes sun to shady, cool,
Pale reminiscent ghosts of yesterdays
that elders at their picnics on the shore
remember by their scent, if little more,
and are transported thus into a haze,
For idling lakeside, childlike, it seems,
inspires sweet, idealistic dreams…
Art-Colored Glasses 