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Homesick

Invariably it comes over her whilst out venturing in the big world, playing the Voyaging Visitor, the sudden and absolute, overwhelming inundation of wishing, just wanting so badly to be home again. Just that. Adrift in a World Class City so brimful of sights galore, awash with sites of inarguable Cultural Significance, not to mention Artistic Merit–she is filled only with mental foot-stomping at every proffered profound possibility.

Homesickness, they diagnosed it in children– understandable in kids away from home for the first time to camp or boarding school– expected even. She was always an odd one, never homesick, not then.

In an adult full-grown and even worldly, by some calibrations, the identical overmuch yearning ranks as idiosyncratic and really rather gauche, after all. Consider only the glorious display of delights that abound in excursion! Such a trove of occasion! But no. For this one the campaign amounts to a measure of ash on a tongue craving only sweet scent of rooms with no fragrance at all.

She recalls with a pang that absolute quiet of mornings, back there, stretching so richly expansive with sheer unobservedness, downright overflowing with freedom from… every last trace of potential judgment– which is it, after all, on some level. The vise of anxiety occasioned by daily, discursive exertion of behaving just so, of shaping oneself infinitesimally toward a perceived audience framed by grillwork of projected expectation. Oh, first world headcase’s burden in simply sharing space with other bodies–for all that a felt yoking tug into place of face pieces to form appropriate expressions for Agreeable Guest.

True pleasure travel– that lark! Oh, she knows! She has done it, by god. Travel that’s actually awesome, inspiring, and actively,vitally vibrant. Ooh, la la!  Quelle jouissance! This, regrettably, entirely other occasion of travel, which should by all rights be enchanting, instead unfolds as an experience, internally, of crap. Actual versus experiential, to be sure, but here, somehow, now, all the warmth and kind hospitality in the world serves merely to rattle peevish nerves like links in a chain forged, doubtless, by her own perversity.

She feels unequal to company, unable to explain hipdeep dragging disinclination toward generalized delight, instead drifts dismal into shadow-silted corners, explores odd empty nooks in chilly cafes and cluttered libraries, hides herself out inside books, accomplishing hunkered achievements of invisibility. In this way she whiles away time, willing it to pass more rapidly onward, to bring her the sooner and faster back into arms of the beloved, back to the place where she lives as herself, known and familiar, returned awash with great gratitude, cured and home again.

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Making arrangements

Chris says I line everything up against the wall like I’m staging an execution.

The other evening he walked through the front door, into the bedroom where I stood changing the duvet cover, and, coat still on, started picking up and moving things around on his dressertop with pronounced deliberation.

“Breathing room!” he hollered dramatically, exhaled with satisfaction, and only then de-jacketed to begin the work of winding down.

— A moment: lest I risk casting my hero here as anal retental villain, I should own upfront that the seemingly innocuous things mentioned so fleetingly in scene above aren’t exactly as innocent as they might appear. They weren’t in fact just sitting on top of the dresser, all, you know, innocent and random.No, they were in fact stating my presence and command in some subtle way. They had indeed been placed. I’d arrayed them for my own inner notion of display, whether consciously or no, in the course of tidying up the house.

To me this snapshot moment illustrates the visual surface tension continually at play within our home and life together: my darling a trained visual artist in several media and I for my part more and more actively embracing self-identification as visual+verbal designer. So we end up tugging back and forth a bit, negotiating the construction of shared space in mostly gentle and small-scale physical ways.

(My honey’s outburst on this day did, of course, as well express natural relief upon homecoming after a long workday, a literal request for what he most needed right then: air and space. The big working world out yonder is a tempestuous and trying arena and civic government most cussedly so. The daily trials wear a body down, torque it by situations of engagement and sortie into shapes all out of alignment. The by-contrast-snowglobe where I currently reside is a topic for another post. Here I’ll restrict myself to the subject of choreographing physical objects in space.)

To be fair, he may have a valid point about my up-against-the-wall organizational bias (ahem, pill bottles). Thought the specific dressertop lockstep that provoked his outburst had more to do with dusting than intentional design–yet this pattern been noted as a tic, so I’m on the lookout for tendency.

Recently I mentioned to an art school-trained designer friend and Etsy shop proprietor my ever-so-slooooowly developing scheme to sell vintage stuff etcetera online. Prompted to assist, she pulled up an array of relevant and tidy product photography by way of example, mentioning in passing the Rule of Thirds. This rang a distant little rusty bell, but it took Wikipedia to clue me in a bit more concretely.

The Rule of Thirds dates from an occasion over two centuries ago when one John Thomas Smith, engraver, outlined it as his own device of ideal proportion while discussing design elements in landscape art:

Two distinct, equal lights, should never appear in the same picture : One should be principal, and the rest sub-ordinate, both in dimension and degree : Unequal parts and gradations lead the attention easily from part to part, while parts of equal appearance hold it awkwardly suspended…Analogous to this “Rule of thirds“, (if I may be allowed so to call it) I have presumed to think that, in connecting or in breaking the various lines of a picture, it would likewise be a good rule to do it, in general… I have found the ratio of about two thirds to one third, or of one to two, a much better and more harmonizing proportion. (1797)

In the original Smith launches into in raptures of fraction and orderly division most likely common to a thinker in the late Enlightenment, though today it reads as somewhat manically fastidious. Consonant, all the same, with a fella staking out ideological turf in naming and defining the rules of art.

I should think myself honored by the opinion of any gentleman on this point; but until I shall be better informed, shall conclude this general proportion of two and one to be the most pictoresque medium in all cases.

Q.E.D., motherfuckers.

For my own part I have, upon reflection a possibly relevant recollection. Back around 1987 (o, the predigital days of the 20th centurie…) I took a black and white photo darkroom class at the local community college while on official leave from “real” school. One day I was immensely gratified to come to class and find the teacher using one of my shots the day’s instructive lesson. He was, as I recall, a middle aged (though probably little older than I am myself now) white guy who favored short sleeved button-down shirts from Sears. His name escapes me now, although the lesson of that day certainly made its mark. He held up before the class a still life I’d arranged of a pyramidal alignment of minor kitchen objects– salt cellar, onion, spoon, bowl– and illustrated for us how the visual structure conspired to move the eye dynamically through space within a two dimensional context. Now that I think back on it, his lesson that day strikes me now as fueled fundamentally by the sort of asymmetrical design aesthetic outlined by Smith in his Rule of Thirds.

The content of my photo class picture probably causes little surprise for anyone with passing acquaintance recent Navelgazer posting.The plain fact is I’ve always made these odd conglomerations of the whatnots, though the activity has ramped up quite a bit of late as it evolves into some more conscious endeavor I’m still struggling to name. Still and always impulse is reflexive, reaching out to arrange things just so. Leaning toward some inner knell of balance that is, for me, markedly intuitive. I’d very much like to say, “Rules schmules, I just fiddle till it feels right”– but this is surely disingenuous. I’ve had schooling up to here, and no doubt my perspective is framed by all manner of foundational and structural beliefs I’m not even fully cognizant of myself. All the same I tend to resent, somewhat, the pretensions of self-proclaimed artistic authorities, naming their Rules and so forth. Though I guess I get the urge to quantify for a critical and rationalistic audience and activity, art, that is at heart mysteriously passionate, unknowable and wild, that creative life force. Rules are just so much logical scaffolding erected to polish windows on the real edifice of the work itself.

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Straightening

I’ve spent the last couple of days engaged in some pretty intensive bouts of housekeeping: that is, of the organizational rather than cleaning variety. Sorting and organizing and assessing what all’s squirrelled away here on my giant wall of bookcase, laying out for review all the different types of creative work I’ve been making. Taking stock and as I wrote it on one of the chalkboards mid-whirl through the rooms, “seeking balance through harmonious order.” All of this dervish-like activity, I must admit, has seemed at times little more than some variety of cabin fever breaking out a rash of OCD-grade wrassling with disorder. That ever onward march of entropy assuaged in small domestic gestures.

But it seems worth noting that the shoulder that’s been torqued and paining for longer than I can remember is this morning rolled back into its proper anatomical position. The hip, for that matter, has followed suit and sits square on the chair, ache-free and stable. I am, it’s true, suddenly made aware of the need to strengthen that old “core,” to firm up the marshmellow jelly belly necessary for supporting the whole– but it’s a start.

For the first time in awhile things seem to be coming together.

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Julian Fellowes

Julian Fellowes interview

I love his thoughts about Highclere Castle’s architectural/political history (nice too how he intertwines the two aspects).

On writing characters: “You …build on emotional predicaments you have witnessed.”
You take their problem with their mother, whatever it is… It’s only ever a lifting-off point.”

On the period chosen for the story:
“Both Gareth and I were very keen that although these people were leading a life that in some ways is like something on the moon, we wanted to make it a recognizable life. By 1912– I mean, my grandmother was pregnant with my father at the date we open this series. He was born in the following July, and this is my father– it’s not my great-great-great-grandfather– this now. He only died in 1999. It’s not that long ago. It gives us cars and trains, they have a telephone and electricity and all that. When people are watching–obviously I don’t mean they relate to the way of life, because they don’t live like that–lots of them didn’t live like that then– but they understand the life… It looks like these are kind of modern people in a sort of modern world– as opposed to when you do something about the Civil War, it’s miles away.”

On what he wants viewers to take away:
“We examine different human predicaments. We examine relationships with your parents and disappointment and sibling rivalry and failed love– these things go through the series whether or not they’re servants or family. I think that the way managing this world emotionally– and people knew the rules. I mean they could be friendly, certainly– I mean handling that kind of television cliche when everyone’s horrible to their servants is unrealistic. There were lots of jobs, they didn’t have to stay. The average length of time a footman in London stayed in service was 18 months. The old thing that everyone stayed forever is all nonsense. .”

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Ingrown

45 years old and all I can see is this damn blemish.

O panoply of most microscopic yet irksome concerns…
it would feel more worthwhile
to occupy myself with someone *else’s* needs,
a child’s for instance, legitimate, developmental…
but that there’s a whole ‘nother topic for another post.
In the meanwhile I excavate the geography of my own face–

I did it to myself. I mean, it’s not a zit exactly, though I do get those from time to time, too, even unto Middle Age, le sigh.

No, this particular little bugger stems from having plucked a hair. That’s all. Took my surgical steel tweezers to that little bugger and nipped him out– only to have it go and get all irritated and ingrown like they always do. A surely victimless plucking event recently routinely followed by two weeks of cosmetic histrionics: swelling, unpleasantness, and social blight.

high school classmate echoes out of yore,
“Never touch your face!
The oil and dirt on your hands
will make you break out!”

In point of fact it must be noted that I’m temperamentally prone to a mindless digital nitpicking (when Chris catches me at it, he gently slaps my hand away and I, in my more gracious moments, thank him to do it) which could surely have contributed to the exacerbated infection in this case… To be sure some sort of egregious disharmony has surely been struck to render this here chin a Rorschach of “dark spots”– apparently attributable to what amounts to genetic compulsion: based largely on stray observation I conclude inherited tendency toward facial self-dissection through the maternal line. I suspect my sister, too, quite frankly– therefore both sole observable blood-kin cast as big pickers. Not so the now-deceased Victorian dowager Grandmother by adoption– she’d not have deigned to pick so crudely upon her visage with a filthy digit. But those brash and vulgar redheads are another matter altogether, now, fairskinned ill-gotten sprouters lightly furred with glowing down on chin and cheek which caught in the right backlighting proves perceivable as both haloey and soft but inevitably is punctuated by the odd stray follicular rebel, that one that will occasionally spring forth, so absolutely singular and fat with ambition.

Then, by gott in himmel, my mother, my sister, and I myself will pluck that hair straight out, right there and then, just wherever the moment finds us in the course of daily routine (though in strict point of fact we’ll likely as not have been picking already, absently scritching away with fingernails in creeping persistent survey for telltale tiny roughnesses to remove), this unconscious digital address having located a specific marauding irritant will fix upon the discovered protrusion, urge together those always too-soft fingernail tips, reflexively scissoring to grasp and pull!

Unfortunately in response (in my case alone for all I know) these wiry buccaneers of my biology, solid sprouting hairs grasped  between crescents of thumb and index finger snap, then plunge and burrow and cause to fester itty bitty swollen caverns of reddening fleshly gore, churning subterraneanly with uninvited microorganisms, fashioning and forming around a minuscule kernel of aggravated infection.

The difficult pale knot so accomplished will then rise with ohso stately grimness from the epidermal underworld, brim and build to a white welt of threat, tauntingly too deep for release, yet, ugly and evil with lurking— until at last I can bear no longer and go and fetch equipment and tools and set to turning the whole thing inside out.

Begin: Hot hot water on a scrubbing cloth:
dip, apply; dip, apply and hold, hold, hold;
dip, apply; repeat.

Bit by bit the thing will give, some small entry will open, softened, sometimes chafed, to opening, and then, oh release, the grotesque and voluptuous thrill of expression. 

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Schoolmarm Chic

I have a problem. A thrift problem.

Lately when I play dressup, I’ve caught myself thinking of the style I’m concocting as Gypsy Schoolmarm Chic (swirly typeface in my head).

Liking the whirly wild of the one combined with the sexy stern of the other, I offer it up as a sort of fanfic elaboration of the naughty librarian motif.

Part of the project, frankly, has to do with locating and/or innovating apparel that allows me to dispense altogether with the brassiere (that hateful scratchy mechanism in the tradition of corsets and bound feet). Consequently I gravitate  toward quasi-renaissance accessories in thrift racks which provide, by way of buttons, hooks, ties, and an assortment of latchy catches the strategic cinching and trussing up of collective bits into a shapely yet comfortably wearable form. This granted Madonnaesque tic toward support attire à l’extérieur instigates a slight revision: Exoskeletal Gypsy Schoolmarm Chic— not quite the domain of Steampunk, but retro-dramatic costumery all the same.

Recently I came up short with a raft of self-induced anxiety about this, ahem, fondness for thrifting (which becomes paradoxically frequent in inverse proportion to availability of funds). There I was, all caught up in dramatic and fun! throes of characteristically gothic self-recrimination when of a sudden I was visited by a windfall revelation– or, rationalization, maybe– either way the idea descended with the benificent flutter of virtual rose petals: I could open a resale shop on Etsy.

 Cue chorus of heavenly host. Oh, I know, grand online sales dreams are a dime a dozen. Still, it just might be a workable solution, if not to global belligerence and rampant economic inequality, at least ameliorating a bit the losing equation of household finances. (Theoretical) income could (conceivably) offset expenses ($ if not time). Given how the lowrent resale shops I frequent are so universally void of dressing rooms, this plan as well accounts for the bits that simply don’t fit that I inevitably wind up home with, having raptured over decorative stitching or fabric tooth and thrown my couple bucks down on the secondhand roulette wheel (more soon on affiliated seamstressing badge also currently undertaken).

It further makes me happy that, in allowing some space for (occasionally absurd and undignified) play and exploration, even up against the starchiest of uptight bugaboos like Mr. Worthwhile Use Of One’s Time and Money, I’ve succeeded in pushing past and through simple narcissism (ooh, shudder; tho who’s to say not simply a deeper form of narcissism)– all that dressing up and posing for webcam timer ding (honestly)– push past traditional scruples and modesties, brushing by (clearly) a couple of very widgedy Shoulds, to arrive at a delightful arena for the performance of theatre in the miniature peopled with variable invented personas, each attired expressly to suit her role.

(Quite possibly my imagination runs to the theatrical lately thanks to Julian Fellowes, whose wonderful attention to costumery I’ve been engulfed in lately by way of both video and ebook.)

Floyd thinks I should simply pay more attention to the squeaky hedgehog.

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Ketchup

Snow today, readying for the weather. Up early with the spouse to help build plow teams. Coffee and raisin toast, litany of nightly carnage on the morning news.

Write a book, he says. This thingamajiggy is only for people who write books.

Instead I write a moany email to to a friend. All about my habitual (indulging) inclination toward stuckness, blah blah blah. Immediately after hitting Send I see the whole thing illuminated in reverse: the simple problem being my inadequate supply of stick-to-it-iveness.

And so I sit me here writing. As episodic and halting and whatever whatever as the project may be. Regardless, so, I write.

I’ve been grappling a bit lately, actually, with what indeed to post here on the blog, words-wise. Images seem to have been no problem whatsoever for awhile now, but I can’t seem to fix on a doggone thing to say out loud in this space. Facebook yadda yadda and Twitter blurt and nary a paragraph for Navelgazer. The thing’s become a dingdang slideshow.

Where have I been writing? A bit on my iPhone, on and off. There’s a running Note called Writing/Thoughts. It’s undated, unfortunately, so not so terribly helpful in a journal or blog sense. Sort of blowsy impressionistic blur of days around the hood, most likely, maybe something in it for the essay I’ve been noodling so long now.

Suddenly, now, the past few days there’s been a spate of urgent chronicling and inventory. New year and birthday and all, o, that august numeral of forty-five.

I’m both embarrassed and ashamed to be so insistently insolvent. The lizard brain somehow still lurks among the 1% while the earthly body sinks down through the muck of ninety-nine.

I seek reprieve in video consumption, social media, and fattening snacks.

My husband works and sleeps then works again.

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Chicago Politics

It’s all around me here, even while I lurk like a snail up inside its shell here, tucked into a third floor L train overlook, nested in amongst radiator clank bracketed with ice-steamy windows– still there is the exoskeletal framework to lug.

My husband, our sole brave breadwinner, works in the employ of that great municipal monstrosity, the City, pulling levers and switches deep in the gut of churningest turmoil, from my perspective. From his it’s something finer and more upstanding surely, yadda yadda. Granted I’m the sticky prickly one in the family– but for when I has to comes clean, clean up and shape up and make a good showing. Yes, I can make a spitting image. I had extensive training through dancing and private schools. Though I practice the elusive art of invisibility currently, I was once a clambering enough mannequin well practiced in the forms and costumes (if habitually disposed to escape to kitchens, basements, attics, and bygod servants’ quarters).

In my family of origin (cue bells tolling upon that phrase) politics was my way or the highway. Blunt force of ethics backed up with a legal degree and/or gender and/or age. A youngest daughter couldn’t win, by definition. So I became at times the most apoplectic of closet reds that litter soft suburbia.

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Just for the Fun of it

Every once in a while put on
every polka dot in the cupboard.
Make binder clip clothesline
displays of many monogrammed
handkerchiefs and scarves. Tally up
batches of both suspenders and braces,
garters and laces, patches, pocket
lint and spare change, stray
kites’ tails, rags, bones, and baby teeth.
Lay on layers like sediment of age and play-
ground granite, complete beaches of
microscopic boulders, bubbles
of air, molecules, subatomic
particulate tracery of every breath and
gesture for good or whimsical ill
or thought-mired sin of omission.