Elizabeth Adams's Blog, page 59

Boulder, Stream, and Mossy Rocks

Boulder, Stream, and Mossy Rocks. Acrylic on gessoed paper, 10" x 9".

Over the past few days I've finally had time to do a little artwork, inspired by our recent stay in the mountains. This isn't a literal interpretation but it gets across the feeling of a particular spot. I'd like to do some more explorations of this composition, maybe using different media. I was fascinated by the huge glacial erratics in the middle of the woods -- poised so precariously, it seemed, but actually very solidly positioned right where they've been since the glaciers retreated -- in contrast to the flowing stream, but the forms had their own abstract interest that I've only begun to explore here.

Below, a few preliminary stages in the progress of this painting.

 

 

 

Other-Worlds

 

 

 

 

All of these pictures were taken last weekend near a remote lake in the Green Mountains of Vermont. It was very quiet. We went out on the lake in kayaks, and a loon surfaced about 20 feet from the boat; we hiked in an old-growth forest between white birch trees and huge glacial erratics overgrown with moss and ferns, along a hidden brook flowing on smoothed granite sleek enough to slide down. There were boulders big enough to hide a bear, and tiny homes of small creatures, complete with miniature pine trees, lichen-spores, and mossy lawns, and I moved between the two worlds of my own crushing largeness, and my smallness, dwarfed by the mountains and their vast green blankets of trees.

The medium is the message

I've been away from Twitter and, somewhat less so, FB, for a number of days. That was partly a choice and partly because I've just been working hard and haven't had time to  spend on much else. Today I took a look, and saw that the scrolls -- no surprise -- are dominated by people's comments on the death of Robin Williams, and a whole pile of posts and advice about depression, mental illness, and suicide.

I don't want to take anything away from the sincerity of people's sadness and shock, or the value of focussing on mental health issues. It's just clear that this is the latest "heartfelt-concern-of-the-moment." And I wonder if it's actually symbolic of what makes many people in our culture feel insignificant and depressed.

We've all become accustomed to the online empathy curve, in which there's an outpouring of emotion when a disaster or death occurs, everyone jumping on the tear-and-tribute-filled bandwagon for a few days, until the next event occurs, or everyone has had their say and, like sated guests at a Roman banquet, simply fall asleep, unable to consume any more. In some ways, it seems like the social networks are made for this sort of group catharsis.

Woody Allen's "To Rome With Love" pokes exaggerated fun at the cult of celebrity when an insignificant clerk (played perfectly by the wonderful Roberto Benigni) is suddenly pursued by a huge crowd of reporters who want to know every detail of his mundane life, from how he butters his toast to how he spilled the coffee that morning on his tie. He becomes an instant celebrity. Beautiful women suddenly want to sleep with him; he gets the best seats in all the restaurants; a chauffeur, a new office, strangers come up to him in the street wanting his autograph. This goes on for several days, alternately delighting him and driving him nuts, until, just as suddenly, he's deserted and discarded when the flock of reporters sees someone else on the street who looks "even more fascinating."

Most of us, of course, are not celebrities at all. I realize that I'm able to look in on the social networks, and choose to turn away or not, because I'm fairly healthy, busy, and have a lot of support and love and affirmation in my life. But there are a lot of people out there who don't have that. By the same token, when I pay attention to my emotional state, I realize that it isn't particularly good for me to spend too much time there; I see how manipulative a medium it is, and how it plays with some of my basic human fears, and desires for attention and "success." I can't see how a medium (perfectly reflecting the culture behind it) that avidly picks up and then discards real human suffering in a matter of days, and quantifies our participation with "likes" and "favorites" can be healthy or helpful for people with low self-esteem, and/or mental and emotional fragility. Nothing I say is going to change anything about that, but I feel the need to note it on this day when we're steeped in talk of depression. Not to put too fine a point on it, but I find too much participation in the social networks quite depressing, in and of itself.

Many people have found a virtual support group or online community around particular issues, and that's one of the web's great virtues: I value my online friendships hugely too, and I do feel supported by them: especially by those people whom I've actually met in person. Those relationships and conversations, whether via email or online groups or on blogs, feel deeper and far less transient than on the social networks, of which I guess I've been a pretty consistent critic.

But when night falls, or the days go by one after another, and we actually realize we're alone, how do we cope in our real worlds, in our everyday lives? Are we building friendships next door, is there someone who can come over or meet us in the park, put an arm around our shoulder or lend an ear when we're hurting? Are we there for them, too? Are we involved in our communities, in organizations that bring us into contact with other people? Do we know our neighbors? Because we are embodied creatures living in real places with other embodied creatures; we have eyes that see far more and communicate greater depths of meaning than any word written on a computer screen can convey; we are complex beings whose silence, as we sit next to an empathetic friend, is full and rich, while our computers and phones simply turn on and off.

Browsing, Mexico City

 

 

 

All are photos from March, 2014.

Glad

 

Thank you, K. and G., for the gift of these flowers, and E. for an equally beautiful bouquet of roses and lilies. (My friends know how much I love flowers and plants.)

We've been hosts and guests at two dinner parties this past week, and both reminded me how fortunate we are to live in a peaceful country and to have close friends with whom to share our lives: joys and difficulties, special events, good food, and just the simple passage of time.

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A visit to the Lachine Rapids

Notes below...you might prefer to watch the video in fullscreen mode.

The Lachine Rapids are a stretch of impassable water in the St. Lawrence River just upstream from the city of Montreal. Jacques Cartier was the first European to discover them, in 1535, and they stopped him in his search for the Northwest Passage.

Ships can now go around, via the St. Lawrence seaway, but the rapids are just as impressive and daunting as they must have seemed to the early explorers. Kayakers go down them, and tourists in inflatable boats...we saw both while we were there...but the risk of drowning seems very real. Fishermen are required to wear flotation vests, and visitors keep a close eye on their children.

There's a narrow path between the river and the still ponds on the opposite side, and a lot of native wild flowers augmented by natural plantings with species chosen to attract and support wildlife.

This park is a public area within a large migratory bird sanctuary that encompasses several islands in the middle of the river, and it's filled with bird life all year. Redwing blackbirds were very prominent while we were there, along with many ducks and geese, and of course many seagulls and other marine birds. We saw a dozen white egrets on the protected Isle aux Herons in the middle of the river.

We sat for a long while watching a flock of common terns feeding above this section of the rapids. They're one of my alltime favorite birds -- I love watching them fly.

It's pretty amazing to stand in the same spots where Jacques Cartier and Samuel de Champlain must have stood -- you can almost hear them saying "Merde!" The rapids can't have changed much at all in the five centuries since then, and the power and magnificence of La Fleuve remain undiminished.

Stealth fly-by

Last Friday was our 33rd anniversary, and as we usually do, we took the day off and went out for an outdoor adventure. This time we took our bikes to the path along the Lachine Canal, and rode up to the Parc des Rapides, where the inland river journeys of Jacques Cartier and Samuel Champlain ended many centuries ago. The rapids are extremely impressive, and I'm working on a little video to show you what we saw.

But we also took some photos of ourselves, and J. took a few of me, standing by these rocks on the path. To his complete surprise, when he looked at the pictures after getting home, something else had appeared in the frame, just at the right moment! I can't identify this hawk because I can't see the wing bars or tail bars. The compact body and general dusky tone of the feathers make me think it might be a marsh hawk, but I'm wondering if any of you can give a more positive I.D. In any case, it's one of those weird photos you couldn't take if you tried.

 

The Water-carrier

Still life with Mounir's ceramic donkey, wedgewood pot, and Turkish tiles.

Eid Mubarak to all my Muslim friends.

I find myself thinking a lot about what to paint or draw these days. With Gaza and our chaotic world so much on my mind, it's hard to focus on simple beauty: it somehow seems trivial, oblivious to reality, self-indulgent. And yet simple beauty and simple pleasure is what nearly every human being wants, and deserves.

The little ceramic donkey in this drawing belonged to my father-in-law, so it's precious to us. I think it came from his native Syria, though I'm not sure; to him it was a reminder of the donkeys that used to bring fresh cool water from the mountains into Damascus. In the later years of his life, he had a whole menagerie of small animal figures: birds, monkeys, camels, an elephant, snakes: a veritable Noah's ark. None of them were to scale, which gave the arrangement an even quirkier air. When he still lived in a house, they were arranged around, and in, a large houseplant. After he moved to a retirement home, they were on a wooden stand, and he sometimes liked to rearrange them for his own amusement. His favorite was a tiny mouse made of ivory. One day it disappeared and he was disconsolate. We searched everywhere but never found it. He blamed the housekeeper, saying she must have knocked it onto the floor and vacuumed it up. After he died I hoped it would turn up, but it never did: I like to think it scampered away to live behind the bookshelves, exactly as long as he did.

Last night I began reading Elias Khoury's Gate of the Sun ("Bab al-Shams"). It's been on our shelf ever since we heard Khoury read at the Blue Met literary festival in Montreal some years ago, when he was interviewed and spoke about his close frind Mahmoud Darwish. Afterward we went up and met him, and he inscribed this copy to J., whose grandmother's maiden name was also Khoury. The novel is a story of relationships that contains Palestinian history as well as personal lives; it is woven together rather clumsily - as the NYT reviewer notes - from snatches of stories, but this was a deliberate device by the author, who tried to write in a way that mirrors Palestinian reality, and how the history of the nation and each person feels torn and patched together.

The novel is written in the voice of a surrogate son sitting at the bedside of his "father," an elderly freedom fighter who has had a stroke and lies in a coma. The son, a medic in a hospital in a refugee camp, spends most of his days bathing and caring for the dying man, refusing to believe he won't regain consciousness, and then at night, like Scheherazade, tells him stories, hoping that the words are still penetrating. I've been afraid of reading it, and now, even though I've started, I still am.

The book, of course, reminds me of my own dialogue with my very alert, very aged father-in-law, and of the last few months when he slipped in and out of present time and space as we sat by his bed, talking to him and listening to his own stories. When he died, at 99, a door into our family's life and history closed forever; now we too must patch it together out of fragments. Last night, when the narrator began reciting bits of verse by al-Mutanabi, perhaps the greatest of all classical Arab poets, I felt myself back in the familiar room with its blue and yellow silk carpet, the books lining the walls, the statue of Socrates on the stand in front of the old shortwave radio, and my father-in-law, leaning back in his chair, eyes shut, smiling at the ceiling, as he recited poetry.

Terrible times can paralyze us, or we can use them, turning their negative energy into something better. Perhaps the time has finally come for me to pull out those dialogues that were collected here under the title The Fig and the Orchid, and see what can be done with them. As sad as my father-in-law  -- a former UN administrator of a refugee camp in Gaza, among his many positions through a long life of teaching and ministry -- would be over the events today, he always believed in the power of education, beauty, literature, noble ideals, and -- most especially -- reason and truth. He often spoke about their remarkable ability to endure across the millenia, lifting people above the worst.

"The desert knows me well, the night and the mounted men.
The battle and the sword, the paper and the pen.

--al-Mutanabi (915-965)

Al-Mutanabi, I have just learned, was the son of a humble water-carrier.

Crocosmia

Saturday morning I spent some time in my garden, watering and deadheading the spent flowers. My neighbor, Eric P., has an incredible stand of brilliant red crocosmia, and when I was done with my work I stood and sketched these exotic flowers. It seems a little weird to focus on the form of something when its color is  such a standout, but of course when you take away the color, it makes you really look at the form -- which for these flowers turns out to be very cool. They open in order down the stem, with each successive bud slightly larger and more elongated, until the ones in the back start to unfold. The form is like a set of triangles: the triangle of the entire flowerhead is mirrored by the two triangles of each side, both when seen from the top down or from the side; the bloom is always held above the plane of the stem. 

What makes each flower cluster so beautiful, I think, is that they twist gently in different directions, none the same as its neighbor, and all are in different stages of opening. The busyness of the flowers is contrasted with the simple spear-like leaves, in this case in a clump taller than me. They remind me of delicate, fluttery, show-off tropical birds in a green tree: a big clump of Crocosmia is pretty impressive, especially in a northern garden.

I've never tried to grow crocosmia but I feel lucky to be able to enjoy Eric's! Some of you who live in tropical climates must know this plant well. I think it comes in yellow too, but the red is a knockout punch. One of these days it will make its way into a painting: it's too fabulous to portray only in black-and-white.

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Another painting of Eric's garden
Le jardin d'Éric P.

"Difficulty Can Be Fun"

It's been a long, hard week, full of dismaying world news and, here at home, a lot of work and looming deadlines. I've had my nose to the grindstone for much of it. I used to have a lot of resistance to doing my professional work; I thought that all I wanted to do was have more free time to paint or write. When I did get some free time, I often made excuses instead of actually using it well. Somewhere along the line I saw this pattern and my attitude changed. I'm really glad it did, because resisting what you need to do, and have to do, makes it ten times harder to get it done, and to do a good job besides.

Then, there are a lot of reasons why we resist what we say we want to do the most, or manage to make it into agony rather than pleasure.

Dave Bonta recently pointed me to a terrific essay by writer/philosopher Will Buckingham, "The Pleasure and Difficulty of Writing." In it, Buckingham takes exception to Hemingway's famous quote about writing being nothing but "sitting down at a typewriter and bleeding." He writes:

"But difficulty is not something in itself that we should shun, and neither is difficulty something that people in general do tend to shun. The world is full of people doing difficult things. It’s astonishing. The prevailing orthodoxy that people are, at root, lazy — as if human beings are little Aristotelian universes, and need some kind of outside prompting, some primum mobile, to get things going — is simply nonsense. Sometimes, to be sure, people are doing difficult things out of necessity; but very often, people are doing difficult things because difficulty can be fun."

Learning to persevere in any creative pursuit is really the key, I think. In painting and writing I may get started fine, with enthusiasm and inspiration, but eventually I often find myself in a thicket  -- some sort of difficulty, maybe like the middle game in chess -- and have to find my way out. I've come not to dread this, but to expect it. Sometimes it means putting the work aside for a bit, sometimes not -- but working through that sense of being lost and uncertain is actually the most satisfying part of the whole endeavor.

It can be hard to learn this on your own, and it seems to me it's where a lot of talented and enthusiastic people eventually lose their enthusiasm and may even quit. It helps a lot if students are exposed to an older mentor at some point. You can't teach patience and determination and self-motivation, but a mentor can encourage and share her experience, and model his way of working -- and maybe offer a few key words that will be remembered down the road. A focus on the "tragically struggling artist" may be romantic, or have entertainment value, or be part of someone's attempt to build an artistic identity, but as Will says, it's a pretty destructive image for talented young writers or artists of any kind, who need the tools to shape and live a whole long life, enduring the inevitable ups and downs in as healthy a way as possible.

I live with someone whose ability to keep at it, without drama or complaint, has taught me a lot. When I asked J. what taught him to persevere toward his goals in the face of difficulty, he immediately answered "sports." My dad would no doubt say the same thing: he's still playing competitive table tennis and working on his golf game at age 89, and often tells me about the subtle things he discovers and then practices in order to improve -- in spite of the aches and pains of his aging body. J.'s father, who lived to 99, was still reading and reciting Arabic poetry and discovering new insights and pleasures in it at the very end of his life. My painting mentor went to the studio every day, well into his late 80s, and told me he felt he was "just learning to paint."

For me, as a young person, it was several things: learning to play instruments; a summer course at a college when I was 16 where we had to show up and paint for four hours every single day regardless of how we were feeling; and studying ancient Greek in university -- something that was hard and demanding for three long years; I wasn't even particularly good at it but I thought it was a magical, fantastic thing to do. Forty years later I find that same passion and joy of learning in many areas of my life. Mistakes and failures are inevitable, but the more you persevere, the more you see that they're an intrinsic part of the learning process, and so you actually begin to appreciate your failures too. In Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Shunryu Suzuki suggested that the difficulties in contemplative practice are like weeds, and that we can grow to love them as much as the flowers: he wrote "a weed is a treasure." It shifted my perspective a lot when I was able to see that.

Do you agree that difficulty can be fun? What helped you learn that, and how do you encourage yourself to keep going when you run into difficulties in a project? Do you continue to have mentors/friends, or belong to a writers' group or other collective gathering of like-minded people? Do your online friendships figure into this equation? They (including you readers!) are certainly important for me.