Sacred to a time.

Beth Kingsley Hawkins is the Hummingbird Lady. She and her husband have a hummingbird-oriented gallery across the street from the Village Gallery of Local Artists, where Beth and I and about 40 others display. She is sweet, with long silver hair and deep smile lines, showing in her very countenance a life richly lived.

The words:

Borderline: the makings of a rowdy foofarah

Eagles will fly over it and therein lies no flaw

Troubled citizens do well to learn and be akin

Having, SHARE thanksgivingly and everybody wins

NOTE: I admit with some sheepishness that I’m playing hooky from the monthly staff meeting today. I will blame the rain, but I hope this page helps push my karma back in the right direction.

I have had the privilege of knowing Professor Colleen Kennedy, pictured and acrosticized above, since my sophomore year in high school. It was chiefly she who secured the Glendale High School Circus Minimus team their stunning victory at one of the annual Junior Classical League conventions. (I was on the team as well, but I was worse than useless, and we won in spite rather than because of me. Colleen was the one who supplied the answers, for instance that it was Phaethon who almost burned up the Earth with his dad Apollo’s fiery carriage before Zeus did him in with a thunderbolt.) I lost track of Colleen after high school, and found her again via Facebook, that marvelous finder of lost acquaintances.

I had wanted to render Colleen in inkwash, with both the above acrostic and a sonnet of her fourteen-letter name, in this post. Alas, I have run out of the time I set for myself to do so. But it is actually better this way: the page would have been far too busy with all of those words on it. So Part 2 will have a portrait of Colleen in inkwash, and a sonnet (only half constructed as of this writing) beneath the portrait. I’ll also say a little about her remarkable career.

The words to this one:

Combine a supple willow with a strong majestic oak
Or titanalloy bike wheel card&clothespinned on a spoke
Let Hell & Heaven honeymoon beyond the Blakean ken
Loose Loomcraft on a tapestry your only tool a pen
Eject all negativity INject a dose of Glee
Express a jazz-riffed sentiment delivered R F D
Now you’ve a bluesy CK minded indisputably

Here is a tip of the hat to a man who makes charming and odd and oddly life-affirming movies. His is a voice with heart and ultimately against cynicism. I have festooned this page with ampersands–my way of saying “Encore!”

Here are the words, with ampersands transliterated for the sake of clarity:

Watch and learn from this commanding dreamer
With his imps and scandalous redeemer
Everlasting heart and candied sadness
Eckhart Tollesque Now and Clear unmadness
Stands and understanding rock you on
Savored grace to forge and whisk upon

My thanks to Denise Huntington for synopsizing the life and philosophy of Eckhart Tolle for me, enough to confirm that he, too, belonged on this page.

Preparations are under way to switch media. Before the end of the week I should be posting a new drawing done either in ink wash or monochromatic (or nearly so) watercolor. Meanwhile, I’m trying to be less heavy-handed with pencil. My hope is that by the time I get to Washville I’ll have a steadier and less hammish hand.

As has happened before, I was merrily rolling along with this drawing, filling in value-stripes and making up the acrostic poem as I went, when the playlist in my head suddenly went mid-song to “Stop! In the NAAAAME of Love!” by the Supremes. I emerged dazedly from the creation-fog to look, really LOOK, at what I’d done so far. Soon I concluded that further fill-in and acrostic line composition would yield a visually weaker image. So I Stopped in the Name of Art, love in my heart and relief in my soul that another couple hours’ work need not be done.

However, after scanning the image and color-enhancing it, I wonder if something else is going on in my devious mind, laziness- and/or impatience-based. So I’ll have my cake and eat it too, reserving the right to resume work on, or do a remake of, this image in the future. I’ll also, though I love one-liners, complete the acrostic poem here below. (Here below: a new oxymoron! [smiles])

Ethery Energy

Entangled emissions transform what we see
Then grapple diffractively giving a damn
How skeinlike the photons in warp & woof spree
Evicting electrons with quantum-leap hammer
Revolts of the voltages keying in G
Yield patterns of randomness nonsenselessly

See also, via Internet search, “Double-Slit Experiment,” which regards diffraction/interference patterns of electrons fired one at a time through one of two slits, and prepare to be increasingly blown away the more you “understand” it. For me the light-play when a single electron seems to interfere with itself is understandably ununderstandable. “Photoelectric Effect” is a good other place to get non-clues. [smiles and shrugs]

Thirty years ago today, August 19, 1984, I took 4 hours, eight minutes and change from my non-busy schedule to finish my first marathon. It took about two and a half hours to go the first 17 miles. Then both of my calf muscles cramped when I stopped to relieve myself, and the last nine miles took a little more than an hour and a half, though it seemed a few years longer than that.

Today I looked in vain for the photo of me crossing the finish line, but I did find an ink-wash drawing I’d made of my friend Elizabeth Carson Manley that same year, and an aquatint intaglio print I’d made about half a dozen years prior to that. They and the marathon fill me with pangs of loss for what I used to do readily and now no longer do at all. Here is the image duo, with mild color enhancement:

On a brighter note, one thing I did badly if at all back then was Versify. Today I Versified with pleasure and satisfaction, thus:

words\mean\words

deviation from the mean
takes you to another scene
going from the mean to kind
tends to from the norm unbind

deviation from the norm
may make words or actions form
if you want a pit to warm in
get invaded by a norman

deviation from the narrow
lets you feast on other marrow
wider belt’s alleviation
makes for further deviation

words in some concatenation
spark a primal fine elation
use your bean bin bong boon lean
get your wordsworth be unmean

NOTE: William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads in 1798, which jump-started the Romantic Age in English literature. Here’s more on him and that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wordsworth

NOTE: William the Conqueror invaded England from Normandy in 1066, slaying King Harold and changing world history.

Sacrifice yr frowny panic
Unto feline calm unmanic: a
Purr-loined Lap Dance eases, tantric

I’m left-handed, but every seven years or so I do a right-handed drawing. It builds character. It also gives one more empathy with people who have cerebral palsy or Parkinson’s or any other disorder that countermands a brain’s instructions to the body.

Here is the page:

Here are the words:

The DNA [or ancestry] lacks DAR [Daughters of the American Revolution]
It fits the life curves like a sari
Gave a sculpted bird a wing
Hit a drive like Vijay Singh
Thrashed that NMSQT
Yet another mystery

Vijay Singh is a pro golfer. The NMSQT is the National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test, which I took in 1971 and achieved a raw score of 147, highest in Glendale High School’s Class of 1972. I did not become a Merit Scholar, though. [sad face]

Here is an unsigned, undated page I did a few years back. It is almost entirely of Richard Feynman quotations, though I do acrosticize the question/word Truth? with “cut and dried? without a doubt? straight from the horse’s mouth? undeniable? forsooth? aye & begorrah?” because if Professor Feynman taught me one thing, it is that Doubt is essential for seekers of Truth.

The quotations:

“Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars–mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is ‘mere.’ I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination–stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern–“

“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.”

“Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers in the preceding generation . . . Learn from science that you must doubt the experts.”

“I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong.”

“Shut up and calculate!”

“Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.”

“Listen, buddy, if I could tell you in a minute what I did, it wouldn’t be worth the Nobel Prize.”