small change

winding down

The year is almost done. I should be taking stock, picking over the highs and lows, pulling up posts that marked if not some event at least managed to capture something deep or ephemeral, something to be marked in some fashion. I should let it all steep to capture some of its flavor, should it have a single one.

I feel too drained to dig through the detritus of words and images. Instead of looking back, I will try to look forward by taking a day to ponder what new things I could attempt failing at next year.... Meanwhile, I'll just kick back with a pot of tea and watch as the leaves unfurl in what tea connoisseurs call the agony of leaves.

the empty lot

Christmas Day happened to be a sunny one in this neck of the woods. My spouse and I decided to go for a walk in the neighborhood, something we haven't done together in years. At the last minute I grabbed my camera. I took lots of pictures. It wasn't on account of some grand plan to document the day or the place, though. I took all those pictures because I couldn't resist the light of the afternoon. Of course, none of the shots managed to capture the very heart of this very same light, which, in the middle of winter, can flood me often with greater clarity than that of those endless days of summer can cook up so easily.

One odd sight that had me whipping out the camera was the deserted parking lot of the Larkspur Ferry Terminal in the distance from the ridge of the hill where we were walking. It's not often that one can see such swaths of land empty of cars around here. Oddly, as if in sympathy with the landscape momentarily transformed by the holiday season, much of my mind feels like abandoned tarmac – which explains the anemic posts these days.

Soon the holidays will be wrapped up, the streets filled with traffic, and the ferry terminal parking lot overrun with cars. Let's hope the same buzzing from a rush in traffic in ideas will be starting up in my brain too.

Panoramio has this shot of the Larkspur Ferry Terminal, with the ridge of the hill in view from where I took my picture on Christmas Day.

hairy carpets and other literary gauntlets

As I am listening to an interview Charlie Rose had with Orhan Pamuk back in 2007, I now understand why this writer has such appeal for me: he was a visual artist before he became a novelist. Duh, as if I didn't already know that, having stayed up all night the other night to finish reading The Museum of Innocence. Here is a world curated in words that describe, and so evoke beyond description, worlds unto themselves that are independent of the narrative, or the apparent story that moves from page one to to the end of the book.

Of course, I barley finish writing this sentence (while listening to the interview) that I hear Pamuk declare that for him literature is “seeing the world through words.” Not with words, but through words, which for me is an important distinction. The words are not the structure or line in the work, but the brush and the color layered on to reveal a likeness of something that is beyond words.

Pamuk talks about the craft of the novel, rather than the art of it, as something wonderfully creative and engaging, not to mention pleasurable. Charlie Rose baits him with tales of writers who find the act of writing agonizing. Pamuk responds with skepticism and offers an analogy for the pain of writing as one of boys whose toy trucks sometimes get stuck in a hairy carpet. He then talks about the novel he is working on, one in which, he says, he feels more at leisure to see through words rather than feel driven to impose an artistic structure. I wonder if this book is The Museum of Innocence. It would make sense if it were.

Digging around the web some more, while listening the interview wind down, I find Pamuk's site and peruse the pictures. The last photo in the gallery show Pamuk seated in an armchair and surrounded by a collection of objects, the most prominent of them a red tricycle and a clock (at least for me), both emblematic of The Museum of Innocence.

happy holidays

On this Christmas Eve it is gloriously sunny in the San Francisco Bay Area, though this wouldn't be apparent from the image above. In the hustle of these days, a bit of space maybe my wish for a little peace and quiet, though not for something so grim as in the picture above, in which the space is claimed not from the cover of snow but the lack of a 'scape' int he land itself... 

The roads are chocked with traffic today and parking lots by the scattered malls around here are filled to capacity, with cars circling like crazed ants who lost their trail back to the nest. Sirens are going off in the distance, and the odd leaf blowers joins in, like hounds on cue.

I did try to start the day by going to a yoga class that promised restorative poses. The poses were restorative, true enough, but the room was filled mat to mat. While inside we practiced (some apparently more bent on practicing their coughs and sneezes and wheezes, with one cautious yogini even sporting a full face mask along with the trendy yoga pants), outside the door, the other yogis and yoginis, including their spiritually inclined teacher was whopping it with Christmas cheer and getting miffed at our wanting a bit of quiet and respect for our practice. He was done, therefore, it seems, the world was done with yoga and it was now time to move on to celebrate... and so, with this in mind, I'll move on then, too, wishing you all who celebrate this season a happy time.

flakes

The 'net is abuzz with talk and pixels of snow across the Northern hemisphere. Here on planet California, the sun is hanging out, albeit with a little less enthusiasm than normal, casting light, hazy as it might be, over a landscape that is still deeply green, with dots of red and yellow leaves, holdovers from a season that never quite manages to deliver on its promise of change. The only hint of white is in the sky, whee the gathering clouds bring memories and myth-like hints of the snows of not just yesteryear but of those of other places.

Of course, back in Washington D.C., where my older son is getting ready to come home, after his longest absence from here, it is a different story. I hope he doesn't bring with him a chill, one that may well turn into a deep freeze once he sees his old room, the one I so thoroughly cleaned (and with such sadness) back in May, when he seemed so done with his childhood.

It seems that even after decades of parenting, I just can't seem to get it right when it comes to the timing of letting go or holding on....

when in doubt, add a penguin

... my painting adventures continue with the effort to fix up the painting I ruined the other day. Since I didn't want to scrap the thing and was willing to sacrifice it at the altar of experimentation, all the while hoping not to waste too much paint (which is expensive), I figured (ha, pun ... yes, just as bad as the painting) I figured I might as well go for the absurd, especially on the heels of the rather inspiring comments I received on that first effort. Yule's Odilon Redon reference and Dave's impressions of a pastoral ravaged by industrial forces all led me to add to the blue horizon this bewildered penguin:

less would have been a lot more

The painting looked ready to be hung earlier in the afternoon. Then, as the day wore on, I kept thinking that it needed just one more stroke, just a bit more color in spots barely noticed. By nighttime, those spots looked a bit too heavy with color, so I thought I needed to take back some of what I added. But by then, it seems, the painting itself was done with my attempts to improve it and big chunks of the unset gel, the river that it was supposed to be, peeled off the clayboard in attempt to run off with whatever intent I had for it:

 

mid-december

To Plath, to Sexton

So what use was poetry
    to a white empty house?

Wolf, swan, hare,
    in by the fire.

And when your tree
    crashed through your house,

what use then
    was all your power?

It was the use of you.
    It was the flower.

--Jean Valentine (from The River at Wolf, 1992)

just another rainy day

Plenty of raindrops today, but a dearth of words. A number of posts started, only to be washed away by the misty cold funk of the day. So then, let the camera do the work of witnessing the day – and its odd mood of churning disquiet coming to nothing on the rain-soaked boards of a rotting deck.

stew

 The sun swept through the windows briefly quite late in the afternoon, almost like an afterthought to the day. The unintended slats of shadows it cast on the kitchen wall arrested my imagination briefly, but I broke through the magic of the moment to go buy groceries. 

By the time I reached the bottom of the hill, the sun had disappeared in the pre-night gray funk. Along with it went whatever inspiration I might have had to come up with a bright or shiny insight about the day. But I did come home with just the right ingredients to make a hearty stew for the men in my house.