The other day, I was in my daughter's kitchen, where her son was talking about something he had heard at church.
"My teacher said your body is like a glove," he said, looking at his hand, "and your hand is like your soul."
I am unfailingly interested in how we think of the body--so often, our metaphors will have the body as other than the self, or as a not-true self, or as a husk which the soul leaves at death.
Because I am thinking obsessively about shelter and home, I ask myself: is the body a home? a shelter? is it a good one?
I've been sick this week, nothing dire, a stomach ailment that has me sticking close to home. Resting. Needing what feels like safety and quiet.
Is the body safety?
I think a lot about how people say that we live too much in our heads, not enough in our bodies. There's truth to this. For me, it's sometimes hard to feel at home in my body--I think this is true for plenty of women. The body can feel like a lifelong project, one that requires an almost fanatic discipline. How to balance the pleasures of the body--of taste and touch and movement--with the desire for it to comply, to be normal, to be ideal.
I'm thinking about this right now because I just I read this (Nik posted it on Facebook). Too, I'm currently reading this, as I've noted. I also found this serendipitously.
I read, once, on a blog I still keep up with, something a young woman wrote. She said, "I am not my body." A few years ago, she survived a small plane crash with serious, almost fatal burns, therapy for which persists to this day and will no doubt go on for years. The body is a theme of hers--how could it not be? isn't it for all of us?--and she often expresses gratitude for her body, for what she is able to do and be because of that survival, and because of her recovery.
I've thought about what she said ever since. I think, I am my body. My body is me. I try to bring my attention to my restlessness, my ease, my desire to leap up, to depart, my enjoyment, my desire to linger, to stay. These seem to me to be also the movements and dispositions of my spirit. It's hard to separate them. When I'm writing, when I'm making something. When I'm cooking. When I'm with my children, laughing. When my grandchildren are near me. When Bruiser, lying next to us on the bed while we watch television or read, heaves a great doggy sigh. The animal comfort I take in just being near my husband. When life is good sometimes, for hours and even days at a time, I feel entirely whole. At home with myself.
Showing posts with label meditation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label meditation. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 24, 2015
Tuesday, May 26, 2015
Blue.
I had the best day.
First of all, I woke up and the pink roses outside my window arched along their thorny boughs in their full extravagance. Second, I made oatmeal and read the paper. Third, the house was quiet as I contemplated my day. I already had a plan, but I still had time to contemplate it. That's actually the fourth thing: a plan, and time to contemplate it.
I went to school (i.e., work), but first I went to Target (the sixth good thing). My plan, the one I had already made and then contemplated, was to finish printing the full edition of my class's publication. I had six or seven broadsides from each student that had not been through the etching press, and thus had no monoprint upon it. Because the semester (at least for English classes) has not yet started, I knew, or hoped, that the Publication Center would be mostly quiet, and that I would be able to print in that quiet.
Let me pause to say that I have not ever printed all by myself on the etching press. We got that etching press last summer, and it is a beauty, and I have printed with my colleague the inestimable Kat Allred, but I have not done it all by myself. But I really think that, with things like this, you need to have a solo adventure, first of all to summon up and practice what you actually do know how to do, and second, to recognize where you still need to learn.
I got there, and I was right: mostly quiet, mostly alone in the Center. So I began. I retrieved the broadsides with words but no images from my office. I retrieved the linocuts that would be the matrices for the monoprinting. I got out the inking plate and the ink, the brayer and the knife. I summoned up the spirit of Kat and I squeezed some ink--not too much--on the plate. I used the knife to spread the ink so that it was even, then more even, and then I used the brayer to make sure the ink was in a thin, thin layer.
I planned out how to make four prints at a time, using four different matrices on four different broadsides. I worked my way through six or seven prints of each broadside, then moved/changed the matrices on the press bed.
The ink I used was Caligo, Process Blue. It is an indescribably beautiful blue. As I used it, I learned what this ink looks like, and what the subsequent print looks like, when there is slightly too much (very blue, deep deep indigo, and a little blurry), and what it looks like when there is slightly too little (a gorgeous cobalt, a little faded around the edges). I also saw what it looked like when I had just the right amount of ink (perfect).
I made a little over a hundred prints today. I felt my amateurism as I was making them. I felt myself learning. Outside the tall windows of the Center, I could see rain falling. I fell into the spell of that blue and I washed my hands many times with blue soap, to remove the traces of the ink on my skin. Then I started again to take the tattoo of the amateur printer, blue spots on fingertips, as I moved the words to face their inked matrices, turned the crank, the cylinder rolling over it all, and lifted the pages, a little tacky, from their ineffable blue pictures.
First of all, I woke up and the pink roses outside my window arched along their thorny boughs in their full extravagance. Second, I made oatmeal and read the paper. Third, the house was quiet as I contemplated my day. I already had a plan, but I still had time to contemplate it. That's actually the fourth thing: a plan, and time to contemplate it.
I went to school (i.e., work), but first I went to Target (the sixth good thing). My plan, the one I had already made and then contemplated, was to finish printing the full edition of my class's publication. I had six or seven broadsides from each student that had not been through the etching press, and thus had no monoprint upon it. Because the semester (at least for English classes) has not yet started, I knew, or hoped, that the Publication Center would be mostly quiet, and that I would be able to print in that quiet.
Let me pause to say that I have not ever printed all by myself on the etching press. We got that etching press last summer, and it is a beauty, and I have printed with my colleague the inestimable Kat Allred, but I have not done it all by myself. But I really think that, with things like this, you need to have a solo adventure, first of all to summon up and practice what you actually do know how to do, and second, to recognize where you still need to learn.
I got there, and I was right: mostly quiet, mostly alone in the Center. So I began. I retrieved the broadsides with words but no images from my office. I retrieved the linocuts that would be the matrices for the monoprinting. I got out the inking plate and the ink, the brayer and the knife. I summoned up the spirit of Kat and I squeezed some ink--not too much--on the plate. I used the knife to spread the ink so that it was even, then more even, and then I used the brayer to make sure the ink was in a thin, thin layer.
I planned out how to make four prints at a time, using four different matrices on four different broadsides. I worked my way through six or seven prints of each broadside, then moved/changed the matrices on the press bed.
The ink I used was Caligo, Process Blue. It is an indescribably beautiful blue. As I used it, I learned what this ink looks like, and what the subsequent print looks like, when there is slightly too much (very blue, deep deep indigo, and a little blurry), and what it looks like when there is slightly too little (a gorgeous cobalt, a little faded around the edges). I also saw what it looked like when I had just the right amount of ink (perfect).
I made a little over a hundred prints today. I felt my amateurism as I was making them. I felt myself learning. Outside the tall windows of the Center, I could see rain falling. I fell into the spell of that blue and I washed my hands many times with blue soap, to remove the traces of the ink on my skin. Then I started again to take the tattoo of the amateur printer, blue spots on fingertips, as I moved the words to face their inked matrices, turned the crank, the cylinder rolling over it all, and lifted the pages, a little tacky, from their ineffable blue pictures.
Friday, February 21, 2014
Lurid excess.
Wednesday night on my way home from a very very long day, I heard a rebroadcast of Q's interview of Baz Luhrmann. The interview was originally broadcast last August when plenty of professional reviews of The Great Gatsby had already come in of the film in the United States (perhaps it was only at that point opening in Canada?). Sample review from David Denby (also cited in the interview):
In the case of both screenings, I liked the film a lot more than almost everyone I saw it with. I have not had a special attachment to the novel, although I was very glad to read it again, and admired it very much. Its narrative delicacy in contradistinction to what its narrator witnesses is the source of its great beauty. I loved the vividness of the film, its sense of a life careening out of control, the material greed that was almost an innocence as enacted by the eponymous hero, the way it horrifies and enthralls, how appalling and how tragic. I did not mind that the film took liberties with the book, perhaps egregious liberties. I appreciated, really, that the film was not the book, that as an adaptation it was aggressively its own thing, bad taste or not (Stephanie Zacharek: "The Great Gatsby is both too much and what Luhrmann wants, less a movie version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel than a movie version of Jay Gatsby himself. It's an expressionist work, a story reinvented to the point of total self-invention, polished to a handsome sheen and possessing no class or taste beyond the kind you can buy. And those are the reasons to love it.")
Because the lead of both films is Leonardo diCaprio--apt, no possible better lead in my opinion--there's an almost eerie connection between TGG and The Wolf of Wall Street, another film that is excessive in so many ways it's almost impossible to enumerate them. (Daughter, to me: Are you going to see TWoWS? Me: Yes, probably. Daughter: I don't know, mom. Do you want to see Leonardo diCaprio snort cocaine from a hooker's ***? Me: [laughs] Daughter: No, literally, mom, that's like the first shot of the movie: Leonardo diCaprio snorting cocaine right out of a hooker's ***.)
(Let me state parenthetically that I occasionally find myself demurring at the prospect of film-as-ordeal: the kind of film that has the overt, explicit design of putting you through the wringer. This includes most war films, action films of all stripes, horror films, and very, very long films. Sometimes I think, yeah! I want that and the fact that there is more of it makes it even better! bring it! And other times, I think, NO. And that is all.
The historian and I had many a brief conversation over a period of weeks about TWoWS:
"What do you think?"
"Well, don't you want to see it?"
"Yes, I do, but what about you?"
"I want to see it if you want to see it."
"Okay."
... "but maybe you should read some reviews, just to be sure."
(I will leave it to you to guess who played which role in this short little documentary film entitled TWoWS: To See or Not to See.))
Anyway.
We did, finallly, see TWoWS. It was approximately 30 minutes too long. If Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker had wanted to take to time to sit down with me, I would have helped them figure out which 30 minutes to cut (suggestions: cut that dumb, so-called "hilarious" Quaalude scene, about 30% less cocaine/hooker scenes, approximately 25% less insane shouting, particularly that which occurs either poolside and/or on boats. Also, and it pains me to say it, maybe 15% less Jonah Hill.).
But that said, the film gets something a little terrifying right about America, about hyper-capitalism, about who we are. Today, I read this in an article in Esquire:
These may not be fully great films, or completely finished works of art. But I am thinking that they are both necessary. Or at least completely of our moment. They are both talking to us, right now, and telling something like the truth.
[update: see this essay (by A.O. Scott) on diCaprio in the Sunday Feb. 23, 2014 NYTimes.]
Luhrmann’s vulgarity is designed to win over the young audience, and it suggests that he’s less a filmmaker than a music-video director with endless resources and a stunning absence of taste.I saw the film two times, once last May right after the semester had ended, with friends, once with my oldest friend in Northern California a month later. In between, I read the novel on the plane back to America, in one sitting. It was beautiful.
In the case of both screenings, I liked the film a lot more than almost everyone I saw it with. I have not had a special attachment to the novel, although I was very glad to read it again, and admired it very much. Its narrative delicacy in contradistinction to what its narrator witnesses is the source of its great beauty. I loved the vividness of the film, its sense of a life careening out of control, the material greed that was almost an innocence as enacted by the eponymous hero, the way it horrifies and enthralls, how appalling and how tragic. I did not mind that the film took liberties with the book, perhaps egregious liberties. I appreciated, really, that the film was not the book, that as an adaptation it was aggressively its own thing, bad taste or not (Stephanie Zacharek: "The Great Gatsby is both too much and what Luhrmann wants, less a movie version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel than a movie version of Jay Gatsby himself. It's an expressionist work, a story reinvented to the point of total self-invention, polished to a handsome sheen and possessing no class or taste beyond the kind you can buy. And those are the reasons to love it.")
Because the lead of both films is Leonardo diCaprio--apt, no possible better lead in my opinion--there's an almost eerie connection between TGG and The Wolf of Wall Street, another film that is excessive in so many ways it's almost impossible to enumerate them. (Daughter, to me: Are you going to see TWoWS? Me: Yes, probably. Daughter: I don't know, mom. Do you want to see Leonardo diCaprio snort cocaine from a hooker's ***? Me: [laughs] Daughter: No, literally, mom, that's like the first shot of the movie: Leonardo diCaprio snorting cocaine right out of a hooker's ***.)
(Let me state parenthetically that I occasionally find myself demurring at the prospect of film-as-ordeal: the kind of film that has the overt, explicit design of putting you through the wringer. This includes most war films, action films of all stripes, horror films, and very, very long films. Sometimes I think, yeah! I want that and the fact that there is more of it makes it even better! bring it! And other times, I think, NO. And that is all.
The historian and I had many a brief conversation over a period of weeks about TWoWS:
"What do you think?"
"Well, don't you want to see it?"
"Yes, I do, but what about you?"
"I want to see it if you want to see it."
"Okay."
... "but maybe you should read some reviews, just to be sure."
(I will leave it to you to guess who played which role in this short little documentary film entitled TWoWS: To See or Not to See.))
Anyway.
We did, finallly, see TWoWS. It was approximately 30 minutes too long. If Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker had wanted to take to time to sit down with me, I would have helped them figure out which 30 minutes to cut (suggestions: cut that dumb, so-called "hilarious" Quaalude scene, about 30% less cocaine/hooker scenes, approximately 25% less insane shouting, particularly that which occurs either poolside and/or on boats. Also, and it pains me to say it, maybe 15% less Jonah Hill.).
But that said, the film gets something a little terrifying right about America, about hyper-capitalism, about who we are. Today, I read this in an article in Esquire:
We have been pagans since the sixties at least. We revel in the force of ourselves and the forces of nature. The mysteries we worship are the mysteries of science. We're obsessed with football and UFC--sports in which men undergo pain and encounter the reality of death in order to amuse us. Our feasts are elaborate, undertaken with extreme seriousness and a willingness to scour the globe for the most extreme ingredients, including an exciting powder, taken through the nose, that tens of thousands die to supply. We consider total sexual promiscuity a basic human right. One of the most common mistakes in American intellectual life is the idea that the country is in the middle of a culture war, with Christian traditionalists on one side and atheist socialists on the other. The soul of America is up for grabs! Except the soul of America belongs to neither side of that highfalutin intellectual debate. We live in a world of flesh and numbers, pain and tolerance, a world of might--all of us. (Stephen Marche, "Finally, We Pagans Get a New Pope," Esquire March 2014).Yes, that about sums it up.
These may not be fully great films, or completely finished works of art. But I am thinking that they are both necessary. Or at least completely of our moment. They are both talking to us, right now, and telling something like the truth.
[update: see this essay (by A.O. Scott) on diCaprio in the Sunday Feb. 23, 2014 NYTimes.]
Posted with BlogsyTuesday, August 06, 2013
Notes from underground.
It's August. Even though I think of August--always have--as still high summer, you can see the end in sight. I have made a note on my little calendar, counting down to school, that says, "*start preparing." That note is more than a week away. School starting is two weeks away. I am putting things off. I am trying to make these days last.
I have, without exactly saying so, made quiet the object of my seeking. Without exactly acknowledging it, I have been unfolding, letting my mind wander. I think that's what the morning out in the backyard is about. This morning I listened to the traffic beyond the field, and a rooster that was crowing rather late, and the breeze, and the wind chimes. That's noise, but it didn't feel noisy. It felt still. Whatever business it contained was far away from me.
My son, the youngest, is leaving for China in a few weeks. "Twenty days," he says, precisely. He'll be there a year, and maybe longer. Without making a big deal about it, I want to be around to help with whatever would be helpful, but also just to appreciate the house, our household, with him in it. The flux of his friends coming and going. The chance to go to a movie or eat something together. I felt the same way about my older son moving to Tempe for grad school. Not that I was crucial to any part of their plans, but I wanted to be there to help, and to have the occasions to be with them. I count it one of the best parts of this summer that I could go with them to Arizona, to help get them moved in and to see their new place, the start of their new life. How lucky that was, to be able to do that.
When I think of this summer, I will remember that we went to Scotland and spent two wonderful weeks there. This is the summer I listened to Daft Punk almost all summer, on and off, in Scotland and England, here and in Arizona. This is the summer I visited my oldest friend in Sonoma County. This is the summer I drove to Arizona with my son and his family and my youngest son as well. This is the summer I watched The Killing and Top of the Lake and Justified. This is the summer I read The Woman Upstairs and Ender's Game. This is the summer I spent time with most of my children and grandchildren. This summer, I spent time with my friends, did some writing, kept quiet time nearly every day.
Between now and when I go back to work, I hope to work on my second manuscript, write a poem or two, and make a couple of video projects. I want to buy and eat more watermelons. I have been eating the most wonderful strawberries from the farmer's market--I hope there are more of those. I want to make a pie, and preferably more than one pie. I hope to sit on my porch every morning and dream a little. I like spending time watching Justified with the historian, and I hope to do more of that. I don't see any reason not to think of these last summer days as infinitely elastic: I want them to extend and expand to contain all the beautiful morning and evening light, the little gray bird that landed on a branch of the cherry tree this morning, the wind sifting in the chimes, the drift of my thought, the culmination of my efforts, and the steady hand of quiet that has sustained and held me all these weeks.
I have, without exactly saying so, made quiet the object of my seeking. Without exactly acknowledging it, I have been unfolding, letting my mind wander. I think that's what the morning out in the backyard is about. This morning I listened to the traffic beyond the field, and a rooster that was crowing rather late, and the breeze, and the wind chimes. That's noise, but it didn't feel noisy. It felt still. Whatever business it contained was far away from me.
My son, the youngest, is leaving for China in a few weeks. "Twenty days," he says, precisely. He'll be there a year, and maybe longer. Without making a big deal about it, I want to be around to help with whatever would be helpful, but also just to appreciate the house, our household, with him in it. The flux of his friends coming and going. The chance to go to a movie or eat something together. I felt the same way about my older son moving to Tempe for grad school. Not that I was crucial to any part of their plans, but I wanted to be there to help, and to have the occasions to be with them. I count it one of the best parts of this summer that I could go with them to Arizona, to help get them moved in and to see their new place, the start of their new life. How lucky that was, to be able to do that.
When I think of this summer, I will remember that we went to Scotland and spent two wonderful weeks there. This is the summer I listened to Daft Punk almost all summer, on and off, in Scotland and England, here and in Arizona. This is the summer I visited my oldest friend in Sonoma County. This is the summer I drove to Arizona with my son and his family and my youngest son as well. This is the summer I watched The Killing and Top of the Lake and Justified. This is the summer I read The Woman Upstairs and Ender's Game. This is the summer I spent time with most of my children and grandchildren. This summer, I spent time with my friends, did some writing, kept quiet time nearly every day.
Between now and when I go back to work, I hope to work on my second manuscript, write a poem or two, and make a couple of video projects. I want to buy and eat more watermelons. I have been eating the most wonderful strawberries from the farmer's market--I hope there are more of those. I want to make a pie, and preferably more than one pie. I hope to sit on my porch every morning and dream a little. I like spending time watching Justified with the historian, and I hope to do more of that. I don't see any reason not to think of these last summer days as infinitely elastic: I want them to extend and expand to contain all the beautiful morning and evening light, the little gray bird that landed on a branch of the cherry tree this morning, the wind sifting in the chimes, the drift of my thought, the culmination of my efforts, and the steady hand of quiet that has sustained and held me all these weeks.
Friday, May 31, 2013
Something new.
It turns out that our early morning arising is not a fluke but a thing, an actual thing, which we are repeating daily. Or I am, anyway. This morning, for instance, I awoke at about 6.
In case you're wondering, this does not go hand in hand with going to bed earlier. Not at all! No, last night, I went to bed at midnight and read for a few minutes before falling asleep.
This morning at breakfast, my daughter suggested that within a week I'd be back to normal. Maybe so. I'm kind of enjoying the quiet, the stillness, the freshness of these early hours. This morning, I got up and wrote a little, then took Bruiser for a walk.
I'm loving the light at the beginning of the day and at the end, when the everything seems to glow green and yellow. I'm taking more than one walk, and I love that. So if my sleep readjusts to a more habitual pattern, fine. But if I keep waking up early, fine, too. Better than fine.
So that's the update on The Summer Sleep Project. What's that? What other projects are happening this summer?
2. The Cooking Project, wherein I renew my love of and acquaintance with the making of dinner out of actual ingredients.
3. The Walking Project, wherein I walk several times a day, to give my cardiovascular system something to write home about, to commune with my dog, to let my brain do its synaptic business, to calm my soul.
4. The Writing Project(s). There are many.
5. The Gardening Project. I have big plans. Like, so big that they will require the assistance of able-bodied men, such as my youngest son and upon occasion the Historian. Also, I may not be being realistic. Shh, I'm going to plant delphiniums!
6. The Push-the-Reset-Button Project. In which I will shed my Indispensable Man complex and with it my many (over)commitments. (This also may not be realistic. Check my stress levels in August to see.)
7. The Just Enjoy It Project. Can this be a project? We shall see.
The Writing Project(s) update: today I am writing a Fourteen Hour Sonnet. Check the specs out here.
In case you're wondering, this does not go hand in hand with going to bed earlier. Not at all! No, last night, I went to bed at midnight and read for a few minutes before falling asleep.
This morning at breakfast, my daughter suggested that within a week I'd be back to normal. Maybe so. I'm kind of enjoying the quiet, the stillness, the freshness of these early hours. This morning, I got up and wrote a little, then took Bruiser for a walk.
I'm loving the light at the beginning of the day and at the end, when the everything seems to glow green and yellow. I'm taking more than one walk, and I love that. So if my sleep readjusts to a more habitual pattern, fine. But if I keep waking up early, fine, too. Better than fine.
So that's the update on The Summer Sleep Project. What's that? What other projects are happening this summer?
2. The Cooking Project, wherein I renew my love of and acquaintance with the making of dinner out of actual ingredients.
3. The Walking Project, wherein I walk several times a day, to give my cardiovascular system something to write home about, to commune with my dog, to let my brain do its synaptic business, to calm my soul.
4. The Writing Project(s). There are many.
5. The Gardening Project. I have big plans. Like, so big that they will require the assistance of able-bodied men, such as my youngest son and upon occasion the Historian. Also, I may not be being realistic. Shh, I'm going to plant delphiniums!
6. The Push-the-Reset-Button Project. In which I will shed my Indispensable Man complex and with it my many (over)commitments. (This also may not be realistic. Check my stress levels in August to see.)
7. The Just Enjoy It Project. Can this be a project? We shall see.
The Writing Project(s) update: today I am writing a Fourteen Hour Sonnet. Check the specs out here.
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Minister plans pilot badger cull.
I've set up my iGoogle page with BBC headlines (also: the New York Times, NPR, and The Onion), and sometimes, when a headline like the above comes up, I find it completely worthwhile.A Badger. (also, a meditation upon the word "badger.")
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