October 17, 2011

The Box Collector

An artist is someone who is constantly searching for containers in which to put ideas and observations.
        I myself have an obsession with clean, empty cardboard boxes. It never occurred to me until tonight this connection to my drive for an organizational principle. One works from the outside inward. Where there is a structure, the words (or images) flow into it. Most often, finding the empty vessel is the hardest part of creativity.
        But the creative urge itself remains a mystery. It is more than psychology, but often soiled with it. It is more than observation, but dependent on it. It has long been unresolved whether great works of art transcend the personality. Like a candy bar left to melt on a sunny window ledge, I tend to believe talent cannot be extricated from the person with whom it is involved.
        I do not believe very many artists have been consistently good, and I do believe some wonderful things come out from humble places.
        No package is ever completely tidy.

October 12, 2011

Full Moon

We carry such a brave weight each day, like a lead vest. The other night I saw the full moon from my garden, and I just collapsed into tears. So many loved ones lost, so much sadness. And the tranquil, stately light of the moon shining down on my living shoulders, bathing the hydrangea and the stones of the walkway. So beautiful and sad.

August 4, 2011

Useless Information

Some information is useless, and it is best to forget it. The tiny, pursed shape of my mother's mouth in death. I can't do anything with that image. It isn't a puzzle piece, or a lesson. Remembering that my Aunt Ada cut out the fluffy heart of her watermelon wedge and put it on my plate, her conspiratorial eyes shining in a bright smile, might induce me toward kindness today. But no one alive now knew her, the soiled white straps of her summer sandals, her uniform of straight skirts and tucked-in blouses, her necklace of glazed nut shells that taught me what the color brown meant. Hairpins everywhere! That was my childhood.
     I have separated everything into piles, and there is some matter here that cannot be recycled. I sought to draw memory into an outline, each entry tidily indented beneath the line above it—an inverted Christmas tree of ideas, my thesis of myself—shuffling away from the left-hand margin of the page.
     But the strongest impressions, pulling against the center like magnets, still lead nowhere. Lucid, canonical in detail, the sights and sounds of a lifetime—shorter than it seemed—refuse to lie down. 
     Best to put them out of mind.

August 1, 2011

August Afternoon

In the house, alone, all day with my dog dying of liver and kidney failure, I think about quitting drinking. Twice I've gone to the pantry and looked at the red line of wine, crouching at the bottom of the large green bottle like a resting ballerina folded onto her legs. I can't decide which goodbye is harder. There will be no more dog walks, no more drinks at sunset. My life, already in trouble at 20, advances through its new 53rd year by a fresh batch of relinquishments, by the loss of things that just a short time ago I seemed left with. I have run out of excitement about myself. I will not be remembered or grieved, like this dog. And I will be cold sober each day, saying my goodbye to the sun.

July 1, 2011

My Secret Collaborator

One—unexpected—aspect of my life has been the creation of videos. I always thought of myself as an artist (like, the kind that uses pencils and canvas) and a writer ... in that order. Sortof. Depends on the decade. But, because of my dearly departed friend John (his HIV+ became AIDS in the summer of 2007), the spring before he died I started making little YouTube videos. That was four years ago, and my technique has since burgeoned. On a microscopic scale, the videos made me  someone who has been (emphasis on past tense) privately but exuberantly admired. Back in the days when my Internet presence was still linked with my half-brother (it no longer is), I had a very small but dedicated group of fans. Since then my personality and bad bad bad bad habits have chased them all away. 

June 26, 2011

Ten Things I Adore

  1. 1. My dog. The last of a pack of seven that lived in our tiny house (all together) from about 1995 through 2010 (in which year we lost four), he is a Scottish terrier of the type seen more prevalently in the early and mid-twentieth century: full size tail (not docked); longer, more pointed muzzle; and leaner, less boxy body. He is over 13 years old and every day with him is a gift. He is the perfect dog for me. I walk through the neighborhood with him almost every day, and I haven't felt that kind of pride since my grandmother sang solos in church.
  2. Good quality teaI have enjoyed loose tea since my teens.
  3. Wineregretfully. If you can enjoy alcohol irregularly, intermittently, the way you might enjoy David Foster Wallace, or tiramisu, fine. If notrun like hell.
  4. Women. I love women. Though they are famous for bonding, the best sorts of women are each little planets, little solar systems that sweep their families into their path but respectfully, charitably, deny the validity of other worlds ... other women. Women are so proud and capable and interesting. They thrive on challenges and admirably perform their duties. They enjoy a little emotion but relegate it to secondary place. They are wonderfully despotic, certain of their tastes (which are much less similar to those of gay men than is generally thought), and are trenchantly practical. Like stamps or baseball cards, if I could, I would collect them all.

June 6, 2011

Old Home Movies

Every so often I think something, or I say something out loud, that comes from long ago. That comes from a more permanent self than the present one. And I am reminded that I have forgotten to--have altogether dropped the habit of--liking myself.
     Perhaps the process of aging itself renders us unmanageable. Like a slender, blossoming cactus purchased on a random Saturday in early spring, in only a few years we explode in new, feeble growth, losing our original shape, cycling through every larger pot and sunnier location in the house until we're turned out onto a patio and freeze.
     I've been slow to comprehend the etiquette of being a mature person. Rules never suited me. But, slowly, it dawns on me that it is in poor taste as someone over 45 to bear too visibly the marks of passage: the regrets, the increasing loneliness, the body's betrayals and frightening changes, and--worst of all--the metastasizing of one's destructive qualities ... weaknesses enlarged beyond the ability of anybody to help, to stop it. One is condemned to his own biography ... long before the last chapter even begins. Youth is the shorter of the two halves.
     Into this chamber of horrors, the sound of my voice as it was at 25, or a habit of mind or truly characteristic response, comes as a comfort ... as a reminder that everyone has something rather fabulous about them--something that is usually all their own. Somehow, in all the world of people, unique personalities exist. I'm reminded of Sunday School, and although I doubt that Jesus loves us all, I do think each person deserves that love.
     The unanswered question for me continues to be: What constitutes success as a person? That statement, or something like it, was the focus of my first website--and my entry into the Internet--over six years ago. Most days, I'm resigned to answer entirely with adjectives that don't describe me: moderation, planning, caution, self-possession, popularity, restraint, good judgment, good health, patience, kindness, the respect of others, etc., etc. I cannot forgive myself for my failure--renewed each morning, like an unwanted library book.
     In warmer, softer moments, I take a more organic view. I think the Internet has placed the self-contentment of others, perhaps, a little too much in our laps. Oh! if we could only borrow the healthy children, the European vacations, and the herb gardens! Everyone my age is dieting, and they all look good ... if a little wrinkled, a little reduced--like chickens just out of the oven.
     How can I make something good of my life, something larger than these late-life efforts to avoid disaster? What was it I was supposed to do, anyway? 
     So far, the only thing I've come up with is remembering what life felt like--sounded like--in its best moments ... like watching an old home movie. Perhaps the only thing that has emerged consistently from me is the habit of looking inside--for everything. As if subjectivity, the plight of the individual--his true character--was the only reality.
    Ironically, I'm reminded of a book by the only poet I've ever (sort of) known, Alex Gildzen: It's All a Movie. Perhaps it is.

May 24, 2011

The Imitation of Nature

Two apparently irreconcilable notions exist in me: (1) the life-lesson that what I say, my point of view, is not necessarily correct--is not the only one, and (2) the desire for a colorful and decisive personality, and artistic productivity. Nothing is uglier than a certain type of intellectual who prevaricates endlessly, who accepts everything as valid, and who seeks only "more information." The act of reading and exposing oneself to unlimited information, forever a sponge, becomes an end in itself. One never leaves the library.
     In developing myself as an artist (and in the broader sense, as a person) I decided to accept and act upon only what seemed certain. I refused to "reach." Too many people reach--they try to handle material that doesn't belong to them, or about which they do not have a complete understanding. In a strictly artistic sense, I always felt this watered down an individual's own, powerful pigments. I look inward first. Needless to say, I am not a newspaper or magazine reader.
     At the same time, I delight in changing my mind. There are too many examples in my life to name, of times when I have embraced a person, place, or thing that had initially failed to appeal to me. Such moments are a special sort of joy. There is perhaps a religious sensation of having "seen the error of your ways." One repents.
     My writing and artwork all begin with a solid foundation in what I know. I know few things. Though I play two musical instruments, I do not know the different keys ("F sharp major") and refuse to learn their names or use them descriptively. I don't know geography (despite my large vintage globe) or current events. I don't own a (roadworthy) car and refuse to sink money into payments or maintenance. I don't like codified or snobbish artwork or writing that considers itself above the pleasure (or understanding) of the viewer. Beyond kindness and charity, I do not know what love means. 
     My development as a writer began when I needed to draft business letters and emails. The uncomfortable circumstance of having to tell an author his corrections could not be made because they were submitted late taught me to strip away everything casual from my text. I learned to make fewer words work harder. Today, I am impatient with a self-indulgent writer. He's got 15 minutes. 
     Then, of course, I wake before dawn thinking that grouchiness and insularity are serious errors, easily made. Is age calcifying rather than coloring me? Maybe.
     I remember being young and wanting everything. At 25 one yearns to subsume into one's personality all the best that life and history have to offer. I often smile to think that every day some new young person discovers Billie Holiday, just as I did at age 12, sitting in front of my mother's massive maple HiFi. I couldn't tell the sex of the singer because of the veiled and mournful tone (and the scratched-up "six-eye" Columbia LP). The name "Billie" was no help because that was my grandmother's name for me.
     My age and the decline of my physical appearance put me on a desperate campaign to "brand" myself, but by a procedure that was a perfect reversal of the 1940s thrift store wardrobe and first-edition Virginia Woolf novels I amassed to help identify myself at age 20. I had carried the culture in my stomach through my twenties and thirties and, fully digested, it seemed time for me declaim, to pontificate, to demonstrate.
     Of course, as I look back my raw skills were in place long ago ... a rather sad realization. That is especially true when I view my old drawings and paintings--much less so my writing, which tends to be pretty but aimless. What seems to have accrued over the two decades--what has been added to my limited but handsome gifts--is a story of sorts. It's a (delightful) strain to get the details right, and I am both writing and remembering it. For example, I can remember that all my lovers were rather cold and deliberate people, but I am writing when I say that they needed an ambitionless and compliant partner ... or that I needed to borrow a bit of their spine.
     And it's this writing that can sometimes be dead wrong, but which is also the fun part ... the assertion, the art itself. Pencil in hand, one dares to draw a line across the paper.

May 23, 2011

Fresh Canvas

After infatuations with C.S. Lewis and Virginia Woolf, the poet Robert Lowell became my favorite writer and remained so for the rest of my life. His 1959 ground-breaking book "Life Studies" was at once a perfect fit for my (many) expressions and experiences, both painting and writing. 
     Just as in college I was unable to paint or to draw without my subject directly before me, so as an adult I cannot create fiction. In order for me to write, I must be talking about something I know, something I witnessed--something from real life. So I return to blogging, always admiring my Internet friend Alex Gildzen's long-standing blog, mainly about poetry and the movies. 
     This new blog, like the last one (that no one knew about!), will exist to help me write larger pieces but will not be so formal as the last one. Like Alex, I may just steal here to write a few lines ... thoughts that are increasingly absent from my Facebook account. Though I crave an audience, my weaknesses make me increasingly silent among my friends. If I speak now, it is not directly into their feeds. They may come here if they wish. 
     These are my own "life studies."