I like drawing paper bags, so I started a sketch of one. While sketching the phrase “letting the cat out of the bag” occurred, and I like drawing cats, so I put one on top of the bag. Bag and cat seemed to need a context. “Void” filled that void.
But this seems to be only a step. I know if I threw a few hours of hard observational work and trial&error at this concept it would yield a more satisfying, interesting result. But I am as always in a hurry, and so this is set aside for now.
When I was a freshman college student in the early 70s I took a class called CRITICAL AND EVALUATIVE READING. The class required the reading of five books of our choice, and our assessments of those books on 3″ x 5″ cards. I only remember four of the five books I chose. They were Goldfinger by Ian Fleming, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, A Patch of Blue by Elizabeth Kata, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. The last was far and away the densest, most difficult of the books, and I struggled to get through it. Midway I thought I needed some help and so I bought the Cliffs Notes (or it may have been a different study guide; the bookstore had two) plot summary/analysis of Portrait. But I quickly became skeptical of the analytical integrity of the thing. Near the very beginning Joyce writes
When you wet the bed first it is hot then it gets cold.
According to the “analysis” this occurs because Joyce is riffing on the dichotomy of Heat and Cold as a theme for the book.
I didn’t buy it. I think Joyce was reporting a tiny child’s experience, one I remembered myself. It’s true, especially in winter, that the blood-temp urine starts hot and cools quickly. And the “analyst” also didn’t pick up on the growth of the sophistication of the language of the book from the very beginning, which if memory serves is
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down the road…
to the very end, which I think is
Old friend, old artificer, serve me now and in good stead.
So I ditched the Notes and struggled the rest of the way through the book solo. I can say with confidence that I did not fully understand the book and was often baffled by what was being described, or emphasized, or driving the behavior of the principal characters. My assessment was fudgy and deliberately vague so as not to be wrong. C’est la vie.
More than 40 years later, on a different index card, I’ve brought something into existence which would baffle almost anyone, and I don’t exclude myself. A person looking like a blend of Charles Laughton and Eleanor Roosevelt stares over the right shoulder of the viewer, not quite stupidly. He or she is flanked by two dichotomous (perhaps) acrostic poems, transcribed below:
go away
got a pair? well ha ha ha
get a REAL life–it’s the law
only when it’s time for tea
one might stir things gracefully
STAY HOME
Soothing makes a baby Oooooh
Touching when unwelcome: shoo
Adding moisture gains a gleam
Yawning oft subverts the theme
The good news is these are two poems in trochaic tetrameter, with perhaps perfect rhyme and rhythm. The “go away” poem does seem go-awayish, and the “STAY HOME” poem seems to have the lulling comfort of home.
The bad news is it’s hard to tell what has been accomplished here. Some meaning had to take a back seat to the puzzle-solving of the acrosticization. As Chief Dan George says in Little Big Man, “Sometimes the magic works, and sometimes it doesn’t.”
I conclude that its entertainment value is chiefly in the niftiness of the acrostic construction, and may be enjoyed in a similar way that a Lego sculpture might, when all the pieces fit together just right. But, dear Reader and friend, please don’t struggle overmuch with the extraction of meaning from the content. It may remind you of little life moments, or it may seem off the wall. With Acrostics, a perfect blend of content and form is sometimes unattainable.
I had my four ceramic birds on my dining-area card table. plus some union insurance info, a copy of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Rising, two chocolate bars, and a box of soup. I quick-sketched the array and it felt strange, because I was making artwork OF my artwork. But these are strange times…
Here is a companion piece to “The Great Human Adventure, Part VIII.” I think the two will work as a diptych, but we’ll see.
Before I started working on Part VIII I chalked up the back of the paper it is on and placed a piece of black paper behind it and at an angle. Then I drew with a hard-pointed mechanical pencil with sufficient force to impress the line drawing onto the black paper. I’d originally intended to glue a lot of cutouts from the black paper onto the White, but I found that just three were enough.
After I finished and posted Part VIII, I was taken by how completely different the chalk line drawing proved to be, despite being–literally–the same drawing. It was like the second drawing was a whispered rumor of the first.
What with the total eclipse of the Moon coming in scant hours, and my recent acquisition of black paper and white chalk, it seemed time to draw with light.
Here are the words to the double acrostic:
Night Light
Now we were wombed in waters warm and still
In peaceful amniotic near-lanai
Go down where water gives you Zero G
Henceforth let velvet DIMNESS see us through
To be by loving Darknesses enwrapt
This is a non-rhyming poem, so I didn’t begin composing it with the end-words. Instead, and since I wanted to wrap my spot illustration of mother and child with a sort of uterus of words, I wrote the last line, “To be by loving Darknesses enwrapt,” first. And so, curiously, the poem also makes sense from the last line up, if we just change one word on the new last line:
To be by loving Darknesses enwrapt
Henceforth let velvet DIMNESS see us through
Go down where water gives you Zero G
In peaceful amniotic near-Lanai
Now we are wombed in waters warm and still
Writing poetry last-line-first is just like the way Mickey Spillane wrote his Mike Hammer mysteries. He claimed he always started with the ending, then figured out how to get there. Poets, if you ever find yourself running dry, you might do worse than to give the Spillane method a whirl!
I had a second cup of coffee this morning. Then I put on a pair of dirty jeans that need to be thrown away due to a rip near the inseam, gathered a load of laundry and got a wash cycle going, and found a public-domain photo of Chloë Grace Morentz, whom I had just seen in the DVD of THE EQUALIZER, starring Denzel Washington.
This is proving to be a good way to ease into a productive first-day-off. Washing takes about half an hour; drying, 45 minutes. The breaks are just right for stretching the legs, going out and coming back, and having a fresh look at the work in progress. I paid enough mind to this portrait to deem it “finished sketch” so I signed it and scanned it. The scan revealed a few flaws that I tweaked.
Time to go back out to the laundry room . . .
This was all done under the influence of a severe toothache, but I am happy to say the work was engaging enough to distract away the pain for awhile. Now that the work is done the ache is back in full force; but I earned this toothache, and I own it. –The heck with THAT phony-baloney posturing–I’m going for the Oil of Cloves pronto! 🙂
family & vortex
famine & color TV
anthem & o sole mio
migraines & 4 on the floor
insight & clever retort
lattice & tree felled by axe
yelling & time to relax
Note: I have a dentist’s appointment for 11:30 this morning. Please wish me luck!
Andrew Meltzer came by Matt’s Big Breakfast and handed me an envelope. In it was a letter of gratitude, a pin with a 3 on it, and a voucher worth $20 toward a meal at any SSP America restaurant at the airport. (There are over a dozen, and soon there will be many more.)
As far as I know, Andrew is unaware of my artwork and poetry. He is acutely aware, though, of how Matt’s Big Breakfast is performing, and what I and everyone else are up to, because SSP runs all kinds of data on their establishments. They also have video cameras here, there and everywhere.
And I’m aware of them, and of Andrew, watching. And that is liberating. It makes a workday rather like a video game. Get people seated, see to it that they are glad to be there, keep it flowing, let the diners know that we are grateful that they chose us–this is the best of Capitalism, to be able to make an experience valuable, both for the bottom line and for the uplift and empowerment of the weary traveler. As Samuel L. Jackson put it so bluntly and with such panache, “You gotta put butts in the seats.” Matt’s reputation is so solid that airport volunteers, airline employees, and even TSA agents send diners our way, knowing that we are the real deal.
And my work at Matt’s not only funds my artist’s exploits, it also makes me a better artist and poet. The phrase “Work hard, then play hard” comes to mind, but it needs some tweaking to be a good fit. “Build cathedrals with gusto” is slightly better. Every day, working with solid, sincere effort at a host stand, then a drawing board, then the treasure-laden landscape of the English language, is another well-fired brick for the cathedral that is my artist’s life.
Someone in Finland sees and reads some of these posts, or so says the WordPress statistics generator. Person in Finland, hello. I am a fan of your country. I hope to visit it soon. I got a hint as to your country’s greatness when I read Robert A. Heinlein’s advice in his polemic “Who Are the Heirs of Patrick Henry? Stand Up and Be Counted!” He said, “…remember brave little Finland–and keep your powder dry!” So I am remembering Finland, and though I use the American pronunciation of “Finnish” to make of the title of this post a bad pun, my admiration for your country is unalloyed.
Today I provisionally conclude Project Finishline. Since I learned during the project that “Finish” is merely when you cease focus, I have exercised irony and presented a seemingly Unfinished second image. Consider it an opportunity to view the creative process mid-stream, and possibly to finish it yourself.
Thank you, readers, especially the Finnish contingent, for your attention!
Sometimes the impulse to draw springs from a mind’s-eye full-blown vision, with all the conceptual exploring already done. Other times there is a vague notion, of a character or a setting or a quotation, perhaps, and some exploration occurs while drawing. Yet other times the artist just grabs something to draw with and thinks, “I FEEL like drawing, but I have no idea. So let’s just see what happens.”
I have only a slight, tickly notion of what I was thinking when I made the original drawing, which likely happened at least eight years ago. I think I was imagining the taking of an oath of office in a future where doing such would be much more reflective of the person elected, and not straitjacketed by hand-on-Bible or other arcana.
Some day I’ll take a drawing as incompletely formed as this one was, make a hundred copies, and finish them a hundred ways, each as radically different from all the others as reality, including my imagination, allows. It will be an odd hat-tip to Andy Warhol, for reasons obvious and not.
One with Clay, Image and Text 