IS IT ALMOST OVER?

2016. I want a do-over!  

The last couple of months have been major downers. Politics - always a dirty business - reached new levels of outrage and we’re still picking the scabs off.    

Personally, I abandoned all my righteous intentions this year - diet, exercise, intellectual pursuits.   Someone posted a cartoon on Facebook: “ My new diet: eat everything I want and hope for a miracle.” That pretty much sums up my year. 

Is this the year I got old? My hair doesn’t seem to know what’s what. The same expensive haircuts don’t lead to the same chic results.

The eye doc told me I’d see better with wear-all-the-time-glasses so I bought a really cool pair.  I don’t. Whatever happened to staying up half the night doing stuff? I can’t even make it through half the day!

However….as the song says….we’re still here. So let me see if I can uncover insightful, meaningful thoughts to share.  

Beth Lyons "More Fire Glass" new space

Start with art. (Always a good plan.)

A dominant theme: if you have the bucks, you get to be boss. Not exactly a news flash.  We visited the Glenwood Museum in Potomac, Md.  - privately owned and only exhibiting pieces owned by the privates. And Crystal Bridges in Arkansas: ditto.  

Rich people have always called the art tunes whether we in the biz like to admit it or not. Somebody out there will argue that some “street artists” or “outsider artists” managed to circumvent the gallery/museum/critic world. So what! They’re paintings are not selling for over $1Million per foot (Hockney).  

Is this a good thing or a bad thing?  Or do we just face up to it and say “it is a middle class or upper class question in the first place. Who cares?  Pay the $20 admission fee.”

And speaking of art (again?), our local art museum hit an all time level of WTF!  The gallery shop is being run by volunteers and everybody knows you need a BB (big boss). Exhibits? The current one is Escher…I thought that was cool back when I was 20 but 50 years later? Really? That’s the best we can come up with? another half-baked canned art-right-off-the-truck show? However, if your target audience is 20 somethings, it’s a bullseye.  I’ve given up on MAG.  I’m taking my few $$$ and going to another playground.

Rochester discovered center-city housing options.  We lived in Center City 25 years ago and pleaded with anybody within earshot that the keys to long-range city stability was more market rate housing. (Increase property tax revenue, up the “eyes on the street” and decrease crime and grime, up levels of public pride.) Now every building includes housing in renewal plans.  Unfortunately, every building plan also includes “public funding”  often in the form of tax abatement.  Alas, the 7 to 10 year property tax abatement plan works for exactly 7 to 10 years - for the initial owners.  By the time the original owner moves on (at the same time the tax rate reverts to full value assessment), the assessed value drops like a stone because those market rates were made up in the first place and don’t hold.  Something must be done to get this one figured out; I don’t have the answer. 

Memorial Art Gallery, the City of Rochester, Town of Penfield, Rochester Civic Garden Center…nearly every entity I can think of… suffer from the same disease:  a lack of grand vision.  David Brooks in an interview with Krista Tippett said about this lack of greater goal, “we walk in shoes that are too small.”  I love that analogy.  I share a tendency to blame our restricted vision on lack of leadership and certainly, the grand vision needs a voice - a cheerleader.  But I worry that if we wait for the “right leader,” we may never move off “Go.” Or worse, we may follow a charismatic leader with subversive intentions. (I’m not pointing fingers here.)  Besides, it lets the rest of us all the hook.

The dreamers among us - SPEAK UP! PUT IT OUT THERE!  What’s the worst that can happen? O.k. Labels…derision…”there they go again”…eyes rolling…laughing behind backs…deaf ears….”we tried that once”….So you’ve been warned. Do it anyway.  I admire you if you can form coalitions to make these dreams come true.  You astound me if you can raise the money along with the awareness to reach the goal.  I envy you if you have the moxy to muscle through the GI (grand idea) into power circles and insist attention be paid.

But here’s the thing:  the dreaming part? That’s legit…that’s what separates us from … well, anybody else!  I wrote previously that this national election removed any lasting idea of American exceptualism.  

Well, we may not change the course of national politics but we can certainly break out of the shoes where we stand.  

More from Beth Lyons and her team in the lovely new gallery space. Happy New Year!

KINTSUGI - REPAIRS

Social media can be blamed for a lot!

Social media can be blessed for a lot!

For every story of false news, there is the counterweight of uncovered justice.  For every feud fueled by misunderstanding, there is a love story re-ignited after years of isolation.  

But how to wade through it all?  The blast is unrelenting. 

In true “Two Faces of Facebook”  fashion, this week a friend lost a friend as a result of some political posts. She asked “how do I get back?”  Now there’s a question!  Get back to innocence? Get back to full acceptance of the other? Where is “back?” Should we stay in broken friendships out of loyalty, shared history and memory? Well, yes.  Until we can’t.

In a scene from the movie “Stepmom,” a dying Susan Sarandon tells interloper Julia Roberts that people stay married because they need a witness to their own life.  I think that’s why we fight for long-time friendships and forgive relatives for otherwise unpardonable breaches of civility. 

I didn’t have many words to help my friend through her relationship crisis but I loved that another of her friends wrote “his (life choice) is one of righteous certainty while yours is one of joyful inquiry.”  That sets up the contradiction in clear, creative terms. Can “certainty” and  “inquiry” be friends?  Not always but sometimes they can find a way back.

Kintsugi is an ancient method of ceramic repair (If you ever have a chance to view the 2000 Chinese movie “The Road Home” you won’t be sorry.  It’s one of the most beautiful love stories I’ve ever seen on film. One scene shows kintsugi in practice.)  Here are some photographs of ceramics repaired (kintsugi.) There’s a metaphor implicit in this philosophy.  If the objects are worth having in the first place then, when broken, they are worth repairing.  Sometimes they are more beautiful after the repair.  But they are never the same as before.

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I follow Hyperallergic, a daily on line, art focused news source.  Today the art of Todd Murphy ’s one man exhibit at Marc Straus Gallery is featured.  Here are some photographs from the installation. He encases women’s dresses inside plexiglass, lighted boxes.  The skirts “hide” images - tree branches, a starry night scene -  “mysteries” revealed in women’s voluminous skirts. Hmmm….quite a rich vein of psychology in these things!  The show (in Manhattan) is on view until December 11.

  

HAPPY THANKSGIVING

Snow is expected tonight at our house. The forecast was preceded by a frenzy of preparation: snow stakes pounded into the hems of the driveway, the remaining porch chair escorted to the barn, one last leaf pickup before exchanging the tractor sweep for the plow blade. And because stringing Christmas lights and hanging outdoor wreaths is easier on a 70 degree day than on one in the freeze zone, those things got done too. Thanksgiving is only one week away; it isn’t too early for ‘Christmas: Part I’ is it?

It feels like the end of something to be soberly marked - more than the usual entrance to winter.  An unendurable national election has finally finished and with it the inescapable proof that our culture and societal mores have shifted into territory that feels tainted, raw, ugly.  One journalist wrote this week that this election - every part of it - disproved the exceptionalism we Americans claimed as uniquely ours. The “Highest Office in the Land” will go to the most vulgar if he/she throws enough bloody meat to the masses.  God Bless the U.S.A.

I need the solace of my house, my family, my friends. No rehashing, please! No more explanations, no recounts, no justification.  I’ve listened and heard all sides. I hate to sound so dramatic - so naive! -  but I feel like something good and fine is gone. I will continue to plan for Thanksgiving and Christmas this year and for as many more as I have left.  Snow will come every winter here. And each time, the first snow (not the second!) will be anticipated, expected and met with childlike wonder. 

But mostly, quiet!  Snow is quiet.

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Odds and Ends 

It’s almost time for the end of year “blessings count”…it’s going to be a tough one for me this year!  Meanwhile…on my desk…

An 11 foot landscape painting by David Hockney just sold at auction for $11.7 million, slightly more than a million dollars per lineal foot. What do you make of that?

“There is a crack in everything.  That’s how the light gets in.” (Leonard Cohen who died this week)

A news story:

To help save the economy, the Federal government has announced that the Immigration Department will start deporting seniors (instead of illegals) in order to lower Social Security and Medicare costs. Older people are easier to catch and will not remember how to get home.  

I was worried about you.  Then it dawned on me:  I’ll see you on the bus!

Maybe my all-tiome favorite artist, Cy Twombly

NICK CAVE AT MASS MOCA

Enter "Until" installation, Nick Cave

Nick Cave’s new exhibit at MassMoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, has marched around inside my head for nearly a week.  It’s time for me to get it down on paper.

  I like the IDEA of Nick Cave.  I like that he graduated from Cranbrook Academy of Art, a place that I associate with beauty, scholastic rigor and high achievement in fields associated with hand-crafted arts.  I like that he was once a dancer with Alvin Ailey, a dance troop that co-incidentally just performed in Rochester, New York.  They are extraordinary in every way - bodies, movement, expressed emotion. 

And I especially like descriptions of his work that include such phrases as “blurred lines,” “performance, dance, moving sculpture.” I’ve never seen his Sound Suits in person - only on YouTube clips -  but I can imagine the delight of his audience - particularly students! - and the chosen ones lucky enough to perform in these masterful total immersion art creations. 

So I am sorry to admit that I was underwhelmed with the MassMoCA installation.  “Until” is the title of the show; I avoided reading about it in advance. I read after seeing the show that Cave designed this exhibit as a racial discussion started by the term “guilty until proven innocent.”  Stretching the experience as far as possible - onto my very tippy toes! - I still don’t get it.

Viewers enter Space #5, the largest installation space at MassMoCA, and find themselves immediately submerged into glittering movement -  ceiling strung  colored aluminum “lawn ornaments” - thousands of them! Spinning and shining and twisting the light in every direction - pure joy! And these things fill maybe half the football field space, hanging from the 24 ft.ceiling to nearly touch the floor.  A narrow path is cleared to walk through the maize.  So far, total enchantment!

This is "Heaven"

Then you find yourself in the half-court standing under a cloud the size of most smallish bedrooms of hanging crystal.  Cave says the inspiration was a thought: “I wonder if there’s racism in heaven?” which leads me to obviously assume that the cloud and all the junk piled high on top are “heaven.”  But to get to “heaven” to see what’s on the other side of that huge cloud requires climbing one of four really scary bright yellow scaffold ladders - not heavenly! And once on the top of the ladder, if you are average height, all you see is a wall of junk.  Perhaps if you had a bird’s eye view and looked DOWN on this mess, you’d have a different take.  But not this time…and as an observer, I can’t re-design the installation.  So I’m forced to give it a grade of C-; it missed the mark.  

At the far end of the space draped again from the ceiling are long “nets” of various colors.  The nets are made from strung beads on heavy black thread; the beads are the same solid plastic as some hair scrunchies.  So what goes on here? Is there a reference to (literal) racial hair dos? metaphorical “fishers of men?” hair adornment? I didn’t get it…again. 

And finally, at the very back of the space is a partitioned off room with a video playing on endless loop of images that transform from abstraction, flowers, dancing “Bo Jangles” and back again.  A sign outside the room cautions: viewers may experience dizziness.  I suffer from vertigo; I assume the signs were truthful and spent no time pondering this video.

Then we left.

Now…after a week…here’s what I think:  not every artist no matter how gifted can pull off installations.  And in fact, most that I’ve seen fall flat on their good intentions!  And this space - a FOOTBALL FIELD!  REALLY? - is ridiculous! 

Videos are an entire other breed of cat.  I need a lot more education before I can comment one way or another on their artistic and relevant success but as a non-authority, I see way too many that are way too self-involved and I leave way too often thinking “who cares?”

But I still love the idea of Nick Cave and those Sound Suits are transformative!   Good enough for me. 

NOVEMBER SWEEP

It’s time to clean off the laptop screen and my desk of oddities I found interesting during the past month.  I need a journal to keep such gems in retrievable  order. Instead, I scribble on the back of whatever is handy - BJ’s recipe, invoice from Warren Phillips Framing, correct spelling of “Griebsch.” I drag odd photographs over to the desktop screen and when I can no longer actually remember what I found so thrilling about that plant or that story, they go into the trash. (Don’t you love that fizzy sound that trash makes when you hit “delete”? Almost as good as the smell of my glass cleaner: both give me an instant sense of accomplishment.)

So here are a few pieces from my vegetable stew.  First, check in on hyperallergic.com  once in awhile.  You’ll find stories pertaining to (mostly) the arts that send you on excursions you never knew you wanted to take!

Today’s hyperallergic.com story of interest?  Poisonous pigments in 19th century British Wallpaper.  Arsenic was a common standby in 19th century households.  Used for everything from rat and mouse poison to face powder, it was also the ingredient that turned William Morris’s wallpaper into delicious shades of green.  Yes, people did eat/lick wallpaper. Why? I always wonder why children would lick lead-filled paint. Historically, they seem built that way and some died from licking arsenic-dyed wallpaper. If you are curious, read Lucinda Hawksley’s new book “Bitten by Witch Fever: Wallpaper and Arsenic in the 19th Century House.”

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Speaking of wallpaper….I have wallpaper fetish! When I can’t sleep and don’t want to disturb the dogs or Chip, I cruise around on my laptop at WALLPAPER SITES. I know…weird! Here’s the one I fell in love with recently. Have you ever noticed that no two people EVER love the same wallpaper? Really…I don’t know how wallpaper printers stay in business! Every time a potential buyer walks into any house, the first things they say is “OMG, that wallpaper has to go!” We just this summer papered our powder room and office. The paper was MEGA-EXPENSIVE and IMPECCABLY TASTEFUL (not literally - no licking, please.). I’ll make sure that’s in the listing info with # of bedrooms and central air when we sell.

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My writing group met as scheduled Monday -  Halloween. We had a raucous good time.  If you don’t belong to a writing group, start one! You won’t be sorry. Keep it ultra simple, no more than 8-9 people - no boss. Share leadership. No nibbles; no treats.  And invite people who don’t know each other to begin. It’s taken a year and we’re still learning new things about each other; we are about as different as 8 women can get in background, training, ages, etc. We used Halloween as “prompts” (half the fun of writing group is forcing the nostalgic memories out of our minds’ attics. FYI, we get through about 3 exercises in each morning session.) 

This time last year, Chip and I were in Hillsborough, North Carolina, working with Patrick Dougherty on a huge twig installation.  A small donation to the Hillsborough Arts Council now gets me regular newsletters; here are some photographs from their annual “handmade parade.” 

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Yes, in spite of rotten weather (rain, black ice, sleet and finally snow!) , Chip and I drove to MassMoCA last week to see the Nick Cave installation.  I have pictures - still sorting.  I’ll write about that (maybe)  another day.  I also have parts of Alain de Botton’s TEDtalk “The Religious World” swirling around with notes on this scrap of paper that seem really fascinating…if I could only read it. 

I’ll listen again. Or maybe you could listen and share your input with us?

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MAGIC AT MASSMoCA

https://youtu.be/Mx1_zBkqcUM

Before you read a single word, click on the youtube link above to see some magic.

This is Nick Cave.  He graduated with a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute, earned an MFA from Cranbrook Art Institute and danced with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.  He continues to study, teach, create and perform.  Someone wrote that he straddles dance and visual art; that his art is bizarre, brash and beautiful; that Cave blurs all lines between the sensory experiences brought about through sound, color and performance. 

I think he is purely magical.

Last Friday, a Nick Cave installation opened in the 30,000 square feet “Room 5” space at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.  The exhibit will be on view for awhile - a year at least - but I’m taking no chances. I’m going to North Adams next week expressly to view/experience this installation.

I’ve written before how MassMoCA changed the dynamics in the previously dying mill town of North Adams, Mass. I am witness: I will make a reservation in a nearby inn for two nights, spend money in accessible restaurants, and possibly do a little shopping.  In past visits, I’ve seen live performance in MassMoCA’s “Black Box Theater” and certainly will stop again at the newly constructed Clark Museum in nearby Williamstown.

Let’s not pretend that one wonderful cultural addition to a previously deserted corner changed western Massachusetts into a travelers’ mecca similar to Paris/London/FLORIDA!  Or that a museum can replace the hundreds of jobs lost when factories or mines close.  Plenty of reminders of poverty remain around the Berkshires just as surely as they do around the Adirondacks or Appalachia.

But it can go a long way!  Bentonville, Arkansas, in addition to Crystal Bridges Art Museum plans a “MassMoCA-esque” in nearby abandoned factory buildings and Tulsa, Oklahoma, is allocating tax money for improved cultural ties to help create an “Art Corridor” between Bentonville and Tulsa. I remind you that this is the heart of conservative USA where the mantra is “government is no damned good/taxes too damned high.”

I didn’t like Crystal Bridges….it seemed too-too….too new, too forced, too instant money.  But I’ll go back someday mostly to see how it has settled in, if surrounding areas look improved and to see the factory-turned-contemporary-installation-art-museum in Bentonville. 

Meanwhile….NICK CAVE!!! HERE WE COME!!

ARTFUL SOUNDS

Listen to Julian Treasure’s TED TALK.  Julian is a sound expert.  I fell into his talk by accident.  This happens to me often and it’s one of the great gifts of our computer age.  I start with a word or two heard on National Public Radio which leads to a Google search and WHAM-O! There’s Julian Treasure talking about sound. Magic!

Julian claims that listening is highly undervalued, that we modern people only retain about 25% of what we hear.  But we move into states of creativity or stress depending on even minor sounds around us.  One test using typical subdued office noises showed a drop in worker productivity; when the workers were moved into quiet, contained offices, productivity skyrocketed 66%.  

So much for “open office concept.”

A petty crime wave (purse snatching, car break ins) hit Lancaster, California, and the locals tried all the usual crime fighting methods until finally, in desperation, someone suggested calling Julian Treasure.  He proposed drowning the 5-6 block area with sound. Hundreds of Bose loud speakers were installed and played “white sounds” - birds chirping, waves crashing, wind rustling leaves -(softly) for 5 hours a day. Immediately, crime dropped by 15%.

O.K., I ‘m a skeptic. I remember the stories circulated in the 1950s about buyer manipulation.  Buried within movie comics or news reels, subliminal messages were embedded (Go buy Good ’n Plenty now!  Go outside for a smoke!) Somehow, just as forever linking school desks with hydrogen bomb drills, manipulating human impulses with sound raises - for me - the Manchurian Candidate and the scariest possibility of mind control.

Julian has confronted people like me and answers the question straight on. Are we equally fearful of mind control as we walk in the woods? wonder through a garden? listen to an orchestra? What about architecture? Unknowingly, we respond - and conform our actions -  to color, shape, quality of light or lack of it, ceiling height and volume.  In fact, a wonderful book - A PATTERN LANGUAGE written by Christopher Alexander in 1977 and based on proven theories of his team - describes why humans are “happy” in environments with certain measurable and repeatable characteristics.  The theory presents 253 “patterns” that form a language that any layperson may use to design optimum architecture, urban and livability spaces. 

Alexander and the unit of scientists included such patterns as ratio of window to wall area, optimum lengths of city blocks, best mixes of business to residential use.  I remember feeling as though I’d opened Hammurabi’s Code for Contemporary Life and Design when I discovered these theories! 

Add Julian Treasure and sound? If successful/fulfilling patterns for livability can be traced back to repeated patterns in nature, then why shouldn’t the same be true for sound?  How about I change  “human manipulation” to "human response"?  I’ll feel better about the discussion.

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JACQUIE'S 4TH FLOOR STUDIO

Jacquie Germanow has a wonderful new studio on the 4th floor of her family’s industrial complex.  She gave us a tour last week.  The windows look over a major still-functioning industrial section of Rochester, dominated by the Genesee Brewery and finally, the river. Light pours into her space on three sides.  I would stare out those windows all day and never get any work done! She is clearly more disciplined than I am.

Here are some pictures. 

JACQUIE GERMANOW/ARTIST

Photography and Tulips

Here is a photograph of the Canada Tulip. It was hybridized especially to celebrate Canada’s 150th national anniversary. Presumably - and I’m only guessing here - anybody can go to Canada and purchase the Canada Anniversary Tulip bulb, plant it in the garden and wait until spring when it erupts into this flower mush.

The 150th Anniversary, Canada National Tulip

I confess:  I don’t much like this flower.  I know something of tulips’ extravagant history. Victorian plant collectors spent their fortunes on tulip bulbs; they were solid collateral in international finance circles. The bottom fell out as all bottoms do. It’s an interesting tale (pardon the pun.)   

But I still don’t care for tulips. They supposedly stand for “elegance and grace” and “perfect love” according to various meaning-of-flowers’ internet sites but in my opinion, a tulip has no nuance. It’s the Kardashian of flowers.

Photograph by Robert Mapplethorpe

Here’s another photograph of a single tulip. This photograph was taken by Robert Mapplethorpe and it is breathtakingly beautiful. In this picture, the tulip is ALL nuance.  No longer is it merely a flower; it’s a metaphor for a kaleidoscope  of human emotion. This is a marriage of a brilliant artist using a tool (the camera) he clearly mastered.

I stood beside an art dealer once looking at a photograph on a museum wall. She represented international art photographers and I was trying to say something not-stupid. 

“Photography may be the most democratic of all art forms. Everybody has a smart phone now and nothing is out-of-reach.”  

She looked like I had reached over and plucked her eyebrow.

“I don’t agree at all!” and she marched away.  (Oops, that did not go well.)

Recently I ordered Teju Cole’s book of essays “Known and Strange Things” and this is what he says about photography:

“Photography is inescapably a memorial art. It selects, out of the flow of time, a moment to be preserved, with the moments before and after falling away like sheer cliffs. It is about retention; not only the ability to make an image directly out of the interaction between light and the tangible world but also the possibility of saving that image. Human creativity, since the beginning of art, has found ways to double the visible world. What photography did was to give the world a way to double its own appearance.

But when the photograph outlives the body - when people die, scenes change, trees grow or are chopped down - it becomes a memorial.”

Today is Labor Day. Go take some pictures with your smart phone.

FALL CLEANSE

My controlled collection of "stuff"

In mid-August the texture of the air changes. I find weeds less worrisome at this time of year.  A riot of black eyed susans camouflage my end-of-summer laziness and I can look around with an equal sense of relief and appreciation. Thank you, Husband, for your diligent watering throughout a drought but thank god! it’s nearly over until spring. 

Now through Fall, we’ll be transplanting a few things, eliminating others, re-arranging, filling in, balancing the garden in terms of color, foliage, height.  This is called OBSESSIVE CONTROL! Every gardener has it. No matter how “natural” you lean, what “wide swaths” you cut or leave, you are manipulating your environment and therefore, join my club, you are a control freak. 

But here’s the thing: the obsession - owning, rearranging, controlling - doesn’t end outside my door with plants. It crouches inside with needy objects in every corner, every drawer, every cupboard.  Lee Randal  writes: “I am my things and my things are me.  I don’t want to give them up; they are narrative prompts for the story of my life.”

Whoa!  Had I only read that several years ago before I tried “staging- houses-for-fun-and-profit” or “staging-houses-for-people-even-when-they- didn’t-want-their-house-staged-but-I-thought-it-looked-better-anyway”…I could have saved myself frustration and those poor sods pain!  (“Poor sods” - I’ve been reading a lot of English literature lately.)

I’ve never made the leap from objects I own to some esoteric soul identity (could explain why we’ve moved 9 times in the last 40 years!) but an entire library of books written during the past dozen years by highly creditable psychologists explain it:  “The Comfort of Things” by Daniel Miller, “Why We Need Things for Psychological Stability” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (remember him? he told us how to be happy years ago. It involved work…not things. I wonder when he changed his mind?),”Storage Hoarders” by Aggie MacKenzie.  

In 2001, British artist Michael Landy publicly put all his belongings through a shredder - 7,227 objects - in a performance piece he called “Break Down”. For a year afterward, he didn’t produce a single piece of art.  Randall believes Landy erased himself along with his “markers” and needed time for self-discovery. Obviously, Landy finally "found himself"; he’s still throwing things into the trash. Most recently, he invited artists on line to participate in a piece titled “Art Bin.”  130,000 gallon trash cans were placed around the exhibition hall into which Landy methodically tossed stacks of the“selected art.” So what is the message? that all art ultimately heads for a land fill? that any artist who would participate via the internet is asking for humiliation? that none of it matters and the only thing that survives are the metal containers used to collect this detritus?

 Landy is 53, still throwing things away and obsessed with NOT owning anything which opens up a whole new category of the human=objects dimension.

Jean Paul Sartre wrote that we can know who we are only by observing what we have. (!)    How does this “we are what we own” jibe with the environment?  All those objects that tell us who we are come at some expense - not just to us who bought the junk in the first place, but to the makers, packagers, transporters, sellers, power plants at each and every step of the process. What happened to last year’s Declutter Your Environment- Declutter your Brain? I’m a product of the era when obsolete by design was practiced, exposed and damned. Now are we to feel psychologically nude? 

“I am what I eat.”

“You are known by the company you keep.”

“Shorn of my possessions, I would still be me but not for long.”

No wonder some of us are still searching for our true selves: the  instruction booklet changes every year or two and I can’t read that fast!

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A cartoon from The New Yorker shows a Japanese couple in traditional dress standing in the doorway of their home.  The corner of a tatami is turned up. A rice bowl and chopsticks are askew on the floor.

“Oh no!" says one. " We’ve been ransacked!”

ANOTHER ONE OF THOSE SOUL TALKS

I’ve been obsessing about death and dying lately and that should come as no surprise:  I am IN THE ZONE.  

You know “the Zone?”  Until about age 50, death is something “out there;” it’s part of life but even if someone dear dies, somehow it doesn’t quite pertain to the “us” at our core.  That starts changing sometime between 50 and 60.  

I began noticing the shift because I’m a classic movie fan.  I started counting the beautiful people in movies that were gone. There they were, in their prime, gorgeous bodies, at the top of their professions - all gone. I really mourned the loss: Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor, Gene Kelly, et. al. Is that weird?  

Then I had a serious illness and WHOMP! WE ARE NOT TALKING ABSTRACTIONS ANYMORE. 

For maybe a year or two I swung between “I am going to die soon” then, uh-oh,  “I did NOT die! So what am I supposed to do with this gift of time?” 

(Don’t start with that “value every day” stuff - it only adds pressure and stress! )

I did try a few things. I’m not a joiner but I joined. I’m not a good committee participant but I participated. I decided I should write my memoirs; they remain stalled in the early 1960s ( a LOT of things stalled in the 1960s!) I tried to keep an open communication line with the universe - “a door closes, another opens…but only if you’re ready.” I took a course in eastern thought and tried yoga.  I guess my doors were only ajar - nothing came to stay. 

I worked on “forgiveness” - I still do. It’s hard. Acceptance is another concept I can’t quite get my head around. When is it o.k. to accept and when do you fight like hell?  “Fighting…”is that merely trying to keep control? How does age and experience change my response to circumstances and how do I accept that my experience counts for very little in a culture of age discrimination?  (I often know the answer to a lot of stuff! Really! I’m a reader - a studier - a critic! but am just too damned disgusted to share them ONE MORE TIME with you immature morons! Don’t you people over 60 want to tattoo that one on your blouse or something?)

So here we are. More people are dying that I know and the obits list new “members” every day who are my age - sometimes younger, sometimes only a little older - and I am sad. But I enclose two wonderful poems that I really like because they make me feel better (Light bulb moment:  good writing can have that power!) and  a photograph of one of my all-time favorite “houses of worship.” You gotta’ love the human spirit!

I could be hit by a truck tomorrow or live long enough to actually pay off the house mortgage.  In the meantime, fuck it! I’m buying the chair!