Elizabeth Adams's Blog, page 86

Indulgences

I hope you've had a happy Christmas, if you celebrate it, and that this week leading up to New Year's is restful and a break from your normal routine...

Last night's conversation over a multi-course, cooperative Christmas dinner at a friend's house included (not surprisingly) a brief mention of the word "indulgence," but in its plural, historical, Catholic context. "I think it is a French word originally**," said one of the French guests, raising an expressive eyebrow. "Borrowed by the English."

"Well, indulgence is a rather French concept, wouldn't you say?"

Eyebrow up again, slight smile, no comment.

A bit later, as we pushed our chairs away from the table after the main course of roast goose, groaning a little, this same guest -- who had come to the party straight from the airport -- pulled out a bottle of Calvados (apple brandy) he had brought back from France as a gift for the host. "You are feeling perhaps too full?" he said. "In Normandy we like to have a small cup of apple sorbet with a shot of Calvados on it between courses. It calms the digestion and then you can eat again." There was mango rather than apple sorbet in the house, but we tried it anyway, and then went on to dispatch three more courses -- a large beautiful salad; a platter of clementines, grapes, and Quebec cheeses; and dessert (a Gâteau Reine Elisabeth) -- before tumbling out into the cold at 1:00 am.

Tomorrow: reform!

 

** the etymology and gradual change in meaning of indulgence are, in fact, fascinating:

mid-14c., "freeing from temporal punishment for sin," from O.Fr. indulgence or directly from L. indulgentia "complaisance, fondness, remission," from indulgentem (nom. indulgens) "indulgent, kind, tender, fond," prp. of indulgere "be kind, yield," of unknown origin; perhaps from in- "in" + derivative of PIE root *dlegh- "to engage oneself."



Sense of "gratification of another's desire or humor" is attested from
late 14c. That of "yielding to one's inclinations" (technically self-indulgence) is from 1640s. In British history, Indulgence
also refers to grants of certain liberties to Nonconformists under
Charles II and James II, as special favors rather than legal rights;
specifically the Declarations of Indulgence of 1672, 1687, and 1688 in England and 1669, 1672, and 1687 in Scotland.

Crèche

This relic, drawn when I was 5, was unearthed recently in an old scrapbook. I'm not sure little Cassandra showed too much artistic promise at that age, but she did have some quirky ways of looking at things. Animals seem to have figured heavily in her cosmology. I like the startled shepherd at far left, with his pet sheep, and the miniature camel (see the hump with fancy saddle?) at far right. I recognize bluebirds in the rafters, but what is that behind the crib -- a giant fox? A squirrel? It's probably meant to be a donkey. Whatever!

Looking closer, I think this picture shows the influence of Amahl and the Night Visitors, which was first televised around that time: the predominance of the three kings and their gifts, and the star in the sky. I loved Amahl, and sang all the songs, often hobbling around the house with a cane and bursting in on my parents to exclaim "I can walk! I can walk!" In fact, I wonder if that small white figure inside the manger, next to the tall king, is Amahl himself.

Now, more than half a century later, I'm still heading out for midnight mass in a few hours. Montreal is beautifully white with fresh snow, and lot of Christmas lights everywhere. May the peace of this night find its way into all of our hearts, and may you too find what you are searching for.

Reflections on a Visit

The weather was strange for central New York in mid-December, but that strangeness, that off-balance quality, is becoming normal. The geese circled overhead, honking incessantly, and even when they had settled down on the river, beyond the fields, you could still hear them calling to one another, like social media gone wild. I wandered along the shore of the lake one morning after the geese had left, looking into the stones beneath the clear water as if each of them represented a day of my childhood, idly tossed at the time but now accumulated and innumerable. There were dandelions still blooming in the grass, and next to them, thin sheets of ice, frozen overnight and broken in the morning. I knelt down and pushed aside dry oak leaves, looking for acorn caps, but the ones I found were already decomposing into the rich humus beneath the layers of leaves -- all exept for a few, carefully placed on the tops of the stone wall by chipmunks or squirrels for me to pick up and put in my pocket.

Alpha and Omega

Alpha and Omega, mixed media on paper, 14"x 18", (c) Elizabeth Adams

Natalie asked me to publish a larger photo of the image shown in the post about my former workspaces, so here is one, plus a couple of details.

I did this piece a long time ago, when I had first seen and loved the calligraphic work of Thomas Ingmire and some of his colleagues. The background texture is completely built up of layers of lettering, in ink, gouache, and perhaps diluted acrylics - I can't remember - on a background of layered washes in various media that were then distressed by sponges or even by running the paper under the tap. Linocut stamps of the alpha and omega characters were also applied randomly all over the background. The technique relies on the water-solubility of certain pigments and the resistance of others.

The text, of course, is "I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end." The large characters were done with a very large brush in sumi ink, and there are additional stamps over them in white. Some of the small lettering was done with metal-nib pens, and some (the white "I AM"s) with a semi-sharpened twig dipped in white pigment. The center of the large Omega was worked to create a luminous white glow that's more effective in real life than it is here.

This was an experiment that got more serious as I went along; unfortunately I ended up slicing two piece of paper together and the line between the two mars the appearance of the finished piece. As a digital image it could now be completely corrected - but I don't think I had that capacity at the time the piece was done.

The Shades of Cherry Valley

Wind-pollarded trees

Line the Cherry Valley ridge

Silent sentinels

Or splayed-fingered settlers

Frozen at the first war-whoop.*

 

Micro-thin shards of ice, piled by the waves on the shore of the lake.

I'm just back from a quick trip to central New York to celebrate my Dad's 88th birthday (he's doing great.) While there, I went for a ride with him in our newly-restored 1952 Willys jeep, he and I played a few games of ping-pong (he's as impossible to beat as ever) and later went with my father and his girlfriend to a show at the Arts Council in Norwich, NY:  "A Blue Suede Christmas" by Scot Bruce, a well-known Elvis impersonator who plays a lot at Disneyland. He was so much like Elvis it was quite disconcerting!

Natural music was of a different kind. There were thousands of Canada geese in the area, and on Saturday morning when I got up, there were huge flocks wheeling overhead, calling to each other in a wave of sound that was almost deafening. On the way home, we passed a field that was white with snow geese, with thousands more circling up from the field in a continual pattern that reminded me of an insect swarm, or the living balls made by small fish as they try to evade predators. It was the sort of sight we had hoped to see when we visited the snow goose migratory staging grounds at Cap Tourmente in Quebec, but that day we only saw a handful of them.

Central New York has always been fairly wild country, home to large herds of deer and other smaller animals, and a stopping point on the flyway for many migratory birds; it's one of the things I always liked about living there. Now it seems to be even more this way. We saw large flocks of turkeys as well as deer, and my cousin told me that she regularly sees and hears coyote. Dad saw a black bear last year, but bear and moose are only occasional visitors south of the Thruway and Adirondack Park, so far as I know. I'm curious about sightings of bobcat, fishers, and lynx - do any of my readers have any information on those species in that area?

 

*I can never drive past Cherry Valley without remembering the Cherry
Valley massacre, which took place on November 11, 1778 -- a group of
British and Loyalist soldiers, Seneca and Mohawk Indians attacked a fort
and the village of Cherry Valley, and massacred 30 people, mostly women
and children. It was one of the most horrific massacres of the entire
Revolutionary War, and to some respect still haunts that part of central
New York State.

Former Workspaces

Today I was going through old picture archives, looking for something else, when I came across a set of photographs I took of my studio spaces back in Vermont, six years ago. I must have taken them because we were starting to think about moving from that house, where we had lived for 30 years. I haven't looked at pictures of our old house very much since we moved; maybe I didn't want to, maybe I knew I needed time to replace old familiar images with new ones. Now, though, looking at these spaces again, I was surprised by my reactions.

I worked in several different rooms in that old house. The picture at the top is of a wall in what J. always called my "anti-room." It was indeed an anteroom that had been added onto the main house, over a crawl space - the pipes froze here regularly - but the pun J. was making had to do with the fact that it was a very analog space, devoid of the computers in the rest of our work area -- in this one a lot of handwork took place! This was a wall of formal calligraphy practice sheets and several experimental calligraphy pieces, created in mixed-media with multi-layered lettering, and printing, in acrylic, Chinese inks, and gouache.

This is the same room, further to the right, showing the book press and some early linocuts, and a general mess; looking at the pictures now, all I can remember is how impossible it was for me to work in such a small space with so little table space and completely inadequate storage. The calligraphic inscription on the wall is a quote from St. Francis: "Preach the Gospel always -- if necessary use words."

Below is another corner of the room, moving clockwise to the right. The sketches on the wall eventually became a large pastel that I gave to my parents. I still like that red Conté sketch, though, now that I see it here; it must be in my flat file still.

On the fourth wall I had a revolving gallery of drawings - the large portrait of my mother is on the wall of my present studio, too.

We had another building -- a garage with a large open space above that J. used for photography. On the ground floor were two other small rooms, one a woodworking shop, and the other, my painting studio and meditation room, shown below. When I saw this photograph today, I felt again the peacefulness I always enjoyed in that room. It was very much my own, and the desk looked out over the garden. The bookcase is right in front of me as I write this, and the easel and desk are here in my present studio as well. The rocking chair, which was my mother-in-law's, was sold; the Japanese cloth is folded up somewhere, as is that pretty lace curtain. The antique lamps and brackets are in a box; I haven't had a good place to put them. The Cezanne poster, faded and rolled up now, is from an extraordinary retrospective at MOMA that I saw way back in 1978 or so and still remember vividly.

I don't feel nostalgic -- our workspaces now are so much more
functional, with wonderful light and much more space -- I simply remember
the many hours I spent in this particular room, above, pondering life and trying to grow, feeling
supported by objects that reminded me of the best parts of life, and
people who were and still are dear to me. It all comes back very swiftly when I look at these photographs.

 

 

Chilly

The next day after this picture was taken (it's looking south on Papineau) the scene was changed with the addition of a bunch of wet, gloppy snow which has now frozen into ice and a hard mass of plowed clods that encase unlucky cars parked on the streets. Each day the temperature seems to be dropping. In other words, winter has arrived.

I've barely noticed, I've been so busy, except that the ice on the sidewalks kept me from walking for a few days. Like the rest of my fellow Montrealers, I've retreated inside my furry hood and down-filled coat, unrecognizeable for the next few months. The good part is that  -- predictably -- the wet grey day of the storm was followed by high pressure and bright blue skies, which make being out in the chilly air almost a pleasure.

Nearly all of November, J. and I were working very hard on a design job for our main client in the U.S., at the same time as I was finishing Thaliad, launching the book, doing the initial marketing, and placing orders for hardcover copies. Today is the first day I've felt like I could sit back and say, whew! and look around myself a little. So if you were wondering about the dearth of thoughtful, longer posts, that's why.

On the other hand, it's been good to have a break. Oddly enough, while my own writing has been mostly confined to micropoetry, in the evenings I've been reading a very long and wordy book: David Copperfield, about which I'll write more soon. I haven't read any Dickens since the enforced assignment of Great Expectations, which I loathed, in high school. 45 years later, it seems I've changed!

I'm about to go off with J. to the dentist, where one of his remaining wisdom teeth will be removed, and as I sit and wait for him, I hope to finish that book, which I'm reading as an e-book on my phone. I'm already looking forward to the next one -- and to returning to my own writing and art, as well as some Christmas baking, in the coziness of a winter interior.

Lamb

"Rémy Gélinas,

Agneau" -- small truck parked

behind the bistro.

Their bleating's morphed to morsels --

here's the chef in his white coat.

Thaw

Much warmer today

in my red leather jacket

I can walk freely.

Some Thoughts on Mastery

Blue door, blue balloons

tied to a wrought iron fence --

yesterday's party.

 

------

Well, here we are in December, which seems completely impossible. Where has the fall gone? And now the holidays will be upon us before we know it. Advent Sunday was yesterday, celebrated with a marathon but really beautiful service of Advent Lessons & Carols at the cathedral in the afternoon. We sang a big program of fifteen choral works, and to our surprise -- since we were particularly under-rehearsed -- it all went very well, including a rhythmically-tricky "Wachet auf" by Praetorius, and an 8 1/2-minute Victorian oratorio-style piece by Edward Naylor -- a period that's not usually my cup of tea, but I loved singing this one.

I enjoyed the practice of writing micropoems every day in November, and wonder if I'll keep it up now, a bit less regularly - maybe so. Every day as I came up to the studio, I found myself looking for an image that grabbed my attention, and it was good to have the focus on color as a way of sharpening my eyes to see something specific. All the poems didn't come from those trips, but a lot did; I feel like I bonded even more with my neighborhood by looking at it that much more closely, and noticing specific people, shops, corners, events, habits. There were always more than I coud write about, and it was interesting to observe the sifting process - what image stayed in my head and seemed to lend itself to a poetic interpretation. Most often, I think, they were images that were arresting, somehow, but led me to another thought. I think the best micropoems are like that, not just a description or word-painting, but a bridge to another idea. I also aim for short poems that have a good internal rhythm and music, through consonance or other forms of repetition or structure, but in a poem as short as a haiku, this can easily be taken too far. My attempts usually fall short of the goal, but that's why it's fun (and necessary) to practice training your eye, your mind, your ear to work together-- and once in a while, you write a good one.

The more I write them, the more I appreciate the diligent practice of the haiku-writing Zen monks and itinerant poets of Japan, which led to what we now appreciate as their "genius." I'm not saying the best of them weren't geniuses, but while good results in any art form do require some talent, they're mainly the product of passion combined with practice over a long period of time.

I take Malcolm Gladwell's blanket "10,000 hour" estimate with a certain grain of salt, but I agree with him that it really does take years and years of practice to gain mastery in any skill or art. For most of us who pursue certain arts as amateurs, how much time does that represent? Let's say we can devote one hour per day, including weekends, to writing or artwork or music or dance: at that rate, 10,000 hours divided by 365 hours per year equals 27.4 years. No wonder it's so difficult! But if we can focus on our chosen art for one solid year, say, even six hours a day, we can make a big dent in that accumulated total: that's 2190 hours in one year. The professional musicians I know have all studied their art seriously, taken lessons, received criticism from teachers, and kept at it for years; it's not simply a matter of talent. And the ones who are really good still take their music home and show up prepared; they don't assume they can coast along on their sheer talent alone.

A little more math: to continue with the music example, I was wondering how many hours I might have put in over the 55 years since I started studying music as an amateur. Let's say I've averaged a conservative 4 hours of rehearsal or individual practice per week. That's 208 hours per year. Not much, by itself, but taken over a lifetime,  adds up to something like 11,400 hours. Those hours have been spread over piano and flute lessons, band practices, church choirs, school and university choruses, performing in various ensembles, shows, and projects, and individual private lessons and practice in piano and voice. Which probably explains why I am a good overall amateur musican, and not anywhere close to a master of any one of those instruments! But in the last four years, I've been spending at least 6 hours singing and another one or two on my own; that's more like 300 hours a year, and explains why I've felt my musicianship has been improving, even at this late date.

Another figure to keep in mind is how much time is actually available in our lives. 8 hours per day, 5 days a week, times 55 years = 114,400 hours - ten times what I just estimated, more than ten times the estimate for "mastery." A top-level professional musician, my age, who began as a child would certainly have accumulated that many hours by now.

It's interesting to think about what we have spent the most time doing, practicing, and where in our lives we can see the most accumulation of effort -- it's often not just in our professions. Cooking, for instance - think of the number of hours we spend in our kitchens! Parenting. Care-giving. What about you? What have you devoted your time and attention to mastering, and what would you LIKE to pursue, if you could find the time, space, and diligence to do it? Because, all quantitative measures aside, the truth is that the more we practice -- with a reasonable combination of study, instruction, self-criticism and input -- the better we get, and the more satisfying the art becomes.