It’s certainly a fine time to be in the old familiar places of the northwest. The Evergreen State is at its lush floral best, the cool-weather walks already impossible in Texas by mid-June are still a fine evening pleasure for scoping out the neighborhood sculptures and specimen plantings in their cottage-garden settings, ferries ply the waters of Puget Sound, and even Mt. Rainier comes out of hiding behind various veils of cloud from time to time.
Sweet, blessed sleep! Yea verily, I got to sleep until the morning was almost gone today, and ohhhhh, how lovely it was indeed. Now this is vacation. A true holiday. Never mind the fun things we do, the glorious people we see, the magnificent scenery, it’s the sleep, Baby!
I don’t feel especially guilty about it, as you can tell. We once lived next door to a rooster, one of that breed who are supposed to be known as the royal emissaries of the dawn, but who deigned it his personal form of rule to choose when he would actually crow, preferably sometime in the early afternoon or perhaps around, no pun intended, the cocktail hour. I really admired him. I think that if I couldn’t choose when to be sleeping and when to be awake (even, astonishingly, productive at rare times) I would be a truly miserable character.
Instead, I get this great opportunity and I nab it gladly. I will go with my husband and complete an important business transaction with partners today; we’ll run errands, we’ll have dinner with longtime friends, we’ll come back to spend the night with my sister and her fur-bearing ‘family’. Seems like a useful enough day to me, especially if it culminates in a long night’s sleep before the next day. Hurray! Hurray!
My eyelids are growing HEAAAAAAAVIER . . . 
Anybody who’s known me for more than half a day figures out pretty quickly that without my requisite ten hours or so of sleep per 24 hour period, I’m an increasingly lost cause. And there’s no surprise in travel increasing the sleep-deficit effect until the relative percentage of my vegetable content threatens to permanently overcome any humanity I might pretend to have. A couple of very early mornings in a row, accompanied by social activities and gadding about town wherever I happen to be located, perhaps enhanced in their potency by certain giddy overeating episodes that are completely compulsory when I’m in places I don’t often get to visit–all add up to one semi-comatose creature plodding like a Fat & Sugar Zombie (clearly I don’t eat brains or one would think something useful therein would have rubbed off on me) down the byways of my days.
I am so grateful for any nap. The one in the car when my chauffeur-spouse is too tired to drive safely and we stop off in a random parking lot to steal a few winks. The micro-sleep in the dentist’s chair while that nice hygienist is mercifully buffing away the sins from my teeth. The fantastic curl-up right between the softest sheets in the known universe when there’s time at home (or home-for-the-moment), dreaming of nothing, nothing, nothing.
If I babble on an ordinary day in my blog posts, and you all know I do, it can only be made exponentially more exotic and random by lack of sleep. So I am sure that you will all pardon me while I kip out just for a little longer and press my nodding noggin against the nearest available horizontal surface. Just so I can wake refreshed and entertain you that much better. Not making any promises, mind you, just a hopeful, wistful wish as I toddle off to dreamland . . .
Dreamlike days wandering leisurely about in a favorite place . . . if there’s a heaven, it will have had stiff competition from certain days on earth. Yesterday here in San Francisco continued to be spectacularly sunny and full of the usual beloved scenery, friendly folk and delectable dining (more on that tomorrow). The air was filled with floral exuberance, food-stall enticements, salt tang from the waterfront, and the sounds of birds, humans and cable car bells all singing of happiness. Bicyclists jostled for space with meandering pram pushers, pedestrians, cars, buses, trolleys and hand-carts.
I forget, between times, what a vertical city SF is, not only in its hilly terrain but in the many buildings and monuments that spike up in a fountain-like spray of height and the tall trees all around and the masts of innumerable boats and ferries as one nears the waterfront. I think somehow this raises my spirits as well, a little like the developers of the High Gothic style’s vertical temples of pillars and points aimed at Heaven. Thanks to a Muni passport for occasional breaks from the walking, it’s still a magnificent city for traipsing around on foot for most of the day without flagging too badly. Being elated by the beauty all the livelong day, I am distracted from any such mundane concerns as it is.
And it’s nearing time to do just this again today, so I shall leave you with some more glimpses of our happy peregrinations.
Because I’m told that Sharing is a good thing.
Since we arrived yesterday afternoon for a couple of days OFF (excuse my yelling it!) in San Francisco, a longtime favorite city of ours, I will keep it mighty simple today. If you’ve ever had the smallest opportunity to visit this great city, you have no need to know why we’re thrilled to be here again, even for a quick stop. Stupendous food everywhere you go, glorious scenery (in this case, enhanced by perfectly clear, sunny and warm but breezy weather), fantastic walking, gorgeous architecture of all sorts, beloved historic and tourist friendly sites and sights galore, and most of all, a deeply endearing mix of cultures and ages and backgrounds among the people that make the people here memorably friendly and thoughtful and just plain fun to live among, however briefly.
So we are off from our temporary digs, located just outside the gate of the wonderful SF Chinatown, to enjoy the beauties of this marvelous place. I can’t be sitting around clicking and nattering on the web when San Francisco is right outside my door, much as I love talking to you lovely friends. I’ll give you a few quick snapshots from our locale here and get out to stock up on lots more.
Happy Sunday, my fine friends!
The end of one thing is almost invariably the beginning of another. Nothing reminds me of this more pointedly than time spent at the airport. People are jammed into this microcosm of hurry-up-and-wait, playing out every aspect of plodding patience and spiky urgency, of rabid determination and aimless uncertainty, on the spectrum ranging from action to stasis.
It’s easy to forget, when one is in the Infinite Queue that always precedes ticket purchase, baggage checking or security examinations, never mind plane boarding, that even the most extreme globe-spanning flights comprise in reality a very small portion of one’s entire life span (one hopes). Even easier to become so focused on the specific trip being taken at the moment that one will be leaving many places yet to journey to others, long after the current sojourn is a distant memory. Every one of the departures and arrivals may have its own significance, indeed, but each is only a passing event in a longer timeline.
Perspective is difficult to achieve and even harder to maintain. To go toward one loved person or place demands that we leave another behind. This is how we will always be, one foot planted and reluctant to move from where we have been and the other striving to move us toward the new, our hearts and minds leaning forward or back but seldom willing to hold still right where we are. And it isn’t such a bad thing, at that. It’s how we grow and change and find new loves, none of which can happen without taking the occasional flying leap, whether it’s on an aircraft or strictly metaphorical. Time flies, but so can we.
When I was a young artist-in-the-making, it irritated me to no end that people who saw my interest in art and knew of my Norwegian roots often instantly assumed that I was a big fan if not acolyte of Edvard Munch, Norway’s best known artist. Besides that my knowledge of Munch’s work was pretty nearly limited to ‘Skrik‘ (‘The Scream’) and what little else I’d seen even in passing was not at all to my taste, I took it as an insult and a frightfully narrow-minded view of my potential. And that, my friends, was the capper, because it implied that I was not in charge of my own future but predestined by my ancestry to be a pale imitation of somebody I wasn’t particularly fond of or impressed by in the first place. I was jolly well going to go my own way and choose my own muses and inspirations and, most of all, I was absolutely not going to be told what to do and when and how to do it by some ghostly abstract borne in my bloodstream.
As a very fortunate young pilgrim, I did manage to get to the Old Country and spend a little time rooting around my ancestral stomping grounds during my undergraduate studies. I got to meet and spend time with my great-aunts and various other relations and visit the house my grandfather helped build for his elder sister, our Tante Anna, and the family farms–the sylvan Ovidsland property with its tidy white house and taller red barn set in among the slender birches, and the more remote summer pastures of Eitland, a smaller and more rustic place on land with a sweet little lake for fishing up dinner. I was able to see the headstones of relatives long-gone, outside the little church where many of the family had attended services for many an age, and walk paths and travel roads where many of them had trod and ridden for ages before that.
Eitland, painted by an unknown family member or friend in the early 20th century.
It was a rich and rare opportunity to both visit the places of my family’s past and to live among my Norwegian family in their current places and way of life, something that few people get the chance to do and that I will treasure for as long as I live. Because it did change me, and change my point of view. It may seem strange, but some of the greatest change happened in completely unexpected ways; I was not especially surprised, though quite pleased, that getting to know family I had not known before and see the world from which my grandfather in particular emerged to live in the States (my other three grandparents‘ ancestors all came from other parts of Norway, where we had less constant and present contact). But I never imagined that simply setting foot in the country of my ancestors would move me as it did. I could never have begun to imagine that I would be so struck, feel such a palpable and somehow heart-wrenching connectedness on standing in front of the amazing Oseberg ship in the Viking Ship Museum of Oslo–but I was; I did.
And I was truly astounded to discover, when I–a little reluctantly, perhaps–went with my sister to visit the Munch Museum that I not only found Edvard Munch’s work much more technically impressive and more profound, his life story and the stories that gave life to and were expressed in his work more impressive and thought-provoking than I had ever dreamed I would allow, but indeed, there was a lot more that I found simply compelling and even, startlingly, appealing. First of all, the guy could draw. He could paint, make prints, tell stories. He was, dammit, gifted and actually worthy of the attention. How very annoying of him, really. Because then I had to come back and re-think what I was doing a little bit. Was it so terrible to reflect something of our however-peripherally-common ancestry in my own work?
I had, if anything, a new appreciation for how much I didn’t wish to emulate his life, with the illness and suffering that marked life for and around him. But to take, as he did, what life presented and put it through the same filters of self and vision and thoughtfulness and surrealist whimsy and passion–that might be precisely what could make me more, dare I say it, myself as an artist. Who knew.
So by the time I set about making the collection of artworks for my master’s degree exhibition, it was an amusing ‘closing of the loop’ to find quite a number of people observing the works in preparation and in the finally installed show coming back to that same old observation that had used to frustrate me so. ‘Has anybody ever mentioned how much your work is reminiscent of Munch’s?’ It was even amusing to me to realize that, though the subjects might stray from his, though the media were sometimes decidedly different and the techniques concomitantly skewed to fit them, and though most of these viewers had no inkling of my ancestry, apparently there was a little something making its way up from my roots to the surface of my art.
Somewhere along the way I had also started to grow up a bit and begun to figure out that we all, inevitably, have less control over our own destinies than we fancy we do, and that that’s not inherently a bad thing–that life will always surprise us and challenge our grand plans and hopeful dreams and carefully charted paths. That the very things we can’t predict or control help to guide and shape us into things we might never have imagined we could plan or wish to do or to be. I guess I just took a longer and more convoluted route to letting my little commonalities with my fellow Norwegian artist Edvard show through; being dead, he could spare the time to wait for me to catch up. And once I got comfortable with the idea of seeing a hint of him in the mirror, I didn’t feel like screaming anymore either.
Building Strong BonesIn the lovely resonant
shadowed hollow of
an architectural ruin,
the beauties of
its skeleton become
more than engineering,
more than a means
of shelter or a clever
way to shut people
in or out–
What happens is
life becomes caught
in the interstices of
a building’s bones–
vitality drawn off
from all the smaller lives
that have come through;
in the humming open space
of a lovely
building in ruin,
mortality is kept
as though in a jewel-case
or a body quite perfectly made
for being loved
The depth of the lake cannot be guessed
Its shimmering silicate glacial glow
With turquoise mask screens what’s below
In filtered glimmer, thought at best
To be just deep enough to hold
Beneath the frigid upper glass
Down in its centermost crevasse
Something mysterious, so old
It’s passed from memory and ken
And only surfaces when stars
Come showering down as red as Mars
To call it upward once again
Communing with its antique kin
For roaring moments in the night
Before the day dawns turquoise bright
And glassy water closes in
Once more its inexpressive glow
A wall of silence ageless, stern
And secretive, where none can learn
What lives those fathoms down below
Much as I adore where I am at any given moment, I’m not above reminiscing about and longing for other places I’ve enjoyed, or fantasizing about ones I’ve yet to try even in the midst of the current Happy Place. It’s not a matter of comparison, of course, just that persistent tickle at the back of the mind that everyone suffers who has ever been two places–opposite ends of the couch or of the world–that are both pleasing and desirable for their own reasons.
So I can sit in a ray of gilt sunshine, in a high-backed soft chair, sipping cool water and feeling quite contented–yet my brain keeps flitting around, from Praha to Portland, from Boston to Berlin, from San Juan Viejo to San Antonio. In my heart, I may be tucked up in a mews in Wexford or striding along the West Side to find a small concert venue after dark in New York. Perhaps inhaling the dazzling steam of glorious Indian food in a surprise find restaurant in Oslo, watching the koi slide through their semi-tropical pond under the snow-frosted glass pyramid of the conservatory in Edmonton or testing the tenderness of lovingly handmade pasta in a cozy family ristorante in Bolzano.
Wherever I may be, my thoughts will always drift. It’s not the least a sign of dissatisfaction or discontent, but rather that I’ve found delight and happiness in such a wide variety of places that they all compete for attention even (or perhaps especially) when I am full of well-being. There is so much beauty to be enjoyed in the world and there are so many great sensory experiences to be had that the soul grows restless for them.
Much as I like my reminiscences and the memories of all of those fantastic places I’ve journeyed, the astonishing and dear people who have welcomed me there and introduced me to each place’s peculiarities and pleasures, and the thought of all of the songs, foods, walks, sights and adventures that have enriched every one of those times, I am always hungry for more. The sweet sense of something marvelous that’s yet-to-come is as poignant and piquant as the promise of any other sort of romance, and my wishes always lean toward the more-ish, especially when the outing is made hand in hand with my dearest companion. Though the old-fashioned postcard tradition for travelers may have been to write to friends and loved ones saying ‘Wish you were here’, the truth is more often that I wish I were nearer to them, wherever they are.
I have said that music transports me to Other Places. Indeed, all art has that potential for me, for internal travel. It’s one of the great joys of art. As I write this, I’m listening to a live broadcast of this evening’s concert from the Swedish Radio Choir‘s (Radiokören, or RK) concert, one that travels particularly far and wide–and deep–in my heart and mind for a whole lot of reasons.
The note from chief conductor Peter Dijkstra:
Tonight at 1930h I’m doing a concert, live on Swedish radio SVT2 and on Webradio (http://sverigesradio.se/sida/default.aspx?programid=3989, at least in the US) , with the Swedish Radio Choir and Orchestra with an ‘alternative Passionprogram’:
Ligeti – Lux Aeterna
Bach – BWV 12 Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen
Poulenc – Stabat Mater
Highly recommended!!!!
Right at this moment, the radio host is interviewing Maestro Dijkstra, and hearing both of their voices, I feel almost as though I’m in the concert hall watching them chat onstage, myself. I’m quite sure I recognize the lady’s voice as that of the same well-spoken broadcaster who interviewed my husband when he was conducting on that same stage at Berwaldhallen at this time of year a few years ago for RK’s Vårkonsert, or Spring Concert. Peter Dijkstra had fairly recently signed on as RK’s chief conductor at the time, and was in town part of the time rehearsing the choir; it’s amazing how quickly the miles disappear when we hear familiar voices or sounds–and the Radio Choir’s distinctive choral sonorities are certainly a part of that equation for me, as well. Their recordings have been for decades among those most widely recognized worldwide for consistently outstanding quality and depth in an incredible range of literature.
So here I sit, listening to music sung by a beloved choir and conducted by a truly fine, familiar conductor, and despite being at my desk in my own house, I am traveling to worlds and galaxies far beyond the view of my window. The György Ligeti piece is a perfect vehicle. It’s best known for being that magical, eerie and ethereal sound heard in the famous scene of approach to the monolith in Stanley Kubrick‘s seminal film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and on a personal level is memorable and imaginatively inspiring even more directly because I have heard a couple of groups conducted by my spouse, in both rehearsal and concert, of this famously difficult piece. Each time, the piece itself transforms the performers as they work to ‘get inside’ and master it, and in turn is transformed by their performances, by the acoustic and atmosphere of the place where it’s being sung, and by the expectant and electric energy of audiences who are constantly challenged and awakened by its dramatics, both distinctive and subtle.
Johann Sebastian Bach and a great many of his works are widely familiar to audiences all around as well, and both in spite and because of their very familiarity bring us to an array of places remembered and imagined each time we hear them sung or played. The more famous and oft-played a composer’s works, the more variants we’re likely to come across in style and interpretation, in levels of technical expertise and period accuracy, and especially in the performances’ potential for transportation. I find it profoundly intriguing to see and hear how deeply performers can immerse themselves in the math and mystery, the dancing joy and bottomless grief and resounding laughter and historical drama of Bach, and to experience the accompanying journeys offered to me as a listener. I go to places of Biblical and Apocryphal history, yes, but also to more abstract aspects of the music and the texts: to dark forests and sunless night, and to soaring starry space; to drought-quenching fountains and streams; to realms of green and warm and welcoming respite and meditation.
The Stabat Mater of Francis Poulenc, in his characteristic tonalities and performed here with exquisite power and emotional richness (and with a supernal soprano soloist’s voice soaring over the top of the intense and wildly beautiful waves of the choral singing) pulls us into a specific story, but is nonetheless large enough in its musical generosity to allow visions of many other places and states of being. This, too, is a strength of music and of outstanding moments of swimming in it–that it allows us to transcend what is and see, hear and feel what may be.
Music can fill me with passion, and it can also empty me so completely of passion that it lulls me into the abyss of restful peace where I feel nothing can touch me at all.
The images in this post are not based on any of the music in this program at all but rather are documentation of one of the small worlds I myself created a little while (well, a teenager’s lifetime) ago. I wanted to make a place that would act as a safe haven, fantasyland, and visual lullaby for the baby boy my sister was carrying. More than seventeen years later, our younger nephew his brother still has the same little woodland clearing in what’s now his room and seems not to be overly anxious to erase it under a more sophisticated or grown-up paint scheme and decor. So I suppose that perhaps it still offers for him adequately what I myself will never grow too old or mature to want: transportation to other places and planes, times, spaces, moods, hauntings and hopes and happiness. I hope that the luminous-paint stars that I sprinkled on that bedroom ceiling still light up after the lamps are turned off at night.
Art-Colored Glasses 