Nicholas Ray (Photo credit: www_ukberri_net)Portrait of Martha Graham and Bertram Ross (1961 June 27) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
THIS WEEK LANDS ON poets, writers, musicians, photographers, directors, visual artists, composers, choreographers, actors and the untitled and unrecognized that squeeze in between. Kipling, Salinger ( my all-time favorite) The Rolling Stones,ย Mozart, Chopin, Opera, Salsa, Beatles, Stieglitz,ย Nicholas Ray,ย Kandinsky, Johnny Mercer, Martha Graham Balanchine, and James Dean. I left out about seventy-five of my favorites.
Composition VI (1913) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)They were all lovers before they were artists.
OUR ARTISTS IN HEART travel mentally and physically through life with all the windows open; awaiting a sight, sound, or feeling that draws them to their art. The feelings are what count on our life ledger.ย I have to thank Billy, my first love at fifteen. He was an artist of music, Gothic charcoal sketches, comic humor, and life. He opened my window to the arts.
That life ledger is always in the red because an appetite of feelings, and emotions eventually depreciates the spirit. Some of us rise above, and the flow of printed green paper comforts that spirit, but emotions continue to dominate all the success.
I have to write this in short sequence, as I am moving between a rigid reckoning of a forever ending TO ONE MY LOVES.
I am not afraid to write the truth, to stare and embrace the reflection. It appeared last night; a thought manifested in an abstract way; a torch of light, a rainbow, an open door that symbolized a guide to contentment, and peace of mind, it felt reachable if only I evaporated into the sensibility, allowing change, a complete transformation from this encampment of isolation and fear of making the wrong decision.
The embryo of thought. Sometimes it is negligible, as is life. I am the puzzle maker and every time I try to carve the right size square, I fall off the board and have more material to write about. The puzzle is so vast that it covers our lifetime and the pieces are the choices, and non-choices that fit into themes. My life, is like a melody, a Gershwin tune. As a dancer and prancer at heart, my feet are my hands, and my hands are my heart. Drizzling rain is relative to thoughts on a Saturday; a few thoughts for my book, assembling the bedroom fan, calling friends, a walk with my umbrella to live in rain, answering emails, and those hypnotic Film Noir Classics on Utube. When world news disables self-absorbency, it’s a relief, I hold hands with whatever keeps me alive.
Greta dressed in pink jeans, a pink striped polo shirt, and low-heeled pumps. As she opened the door she thought, and said out loud one step to go. She flipped down the top of her car to ride visible, a sort of rehearsal to adjust to the main street on a Saturday afternoon. Storm clouds churned and after checking the weather channel, rain coming in one hour, Greta closed the convertible and went back indoors. Not truly disappointed as sheโd stayed up till three am watching the Shooter series on Netflix and woke at eight.
(I use the name Greta in my manuscript because of this, my father repeatedly scolded me when I said, I want to be alone, he replied, ‘Who do you think you are Greta Garbo?’)
Journal June 10th.
The street was quiet except for the barking dogs so I sat down to write, and let the paper stare back blankly. I switched over to Facebook and viewed my feed, the Rolling Stones, Italy Travel, Artnews, Creative Non-Fiction, Emily Luxton Travels, and Jazz photography. Voyeurism, the normalcy of our culture, to watch life from a screen, I’m guilty because I’m at heart a loner, a drifter that moves on the outskirts of socialization. When discourse and confrontation knock at my door, I go dormant to the world outside. My mask is not convincing, So, I bear up, like today, and take nature as my friend; a patch of blue, gray skies, the sun tea cup surprise, the birds and chipmunks on my lawn, and the occasional passersby who are living in their world. At seventy only two lines matter: I’m proud of you, and you could have done better. HONESTY.
Direction is a choice; move back home, move near your children, move for a job, but in my case, I move because my act in Saratoga will come to a close. I’m like a blank space between two paragraphs; it sounds like freedom, no commitments other than being the best I can be. Starting over in a new location is about redesigning within.
Iโm still a nomad, searching for adventuresinlivingness. As I lay my head down on my pillow, the interim is asking me to be peaceful, faithful, and confident. Itโs about time!
Reminds me of when I went off to college, a liberating extension of those early days when belonging to things didn’t matter, life mattered. If you are single and without children, this is the knife that we must slice into a piece we accept, or no peace will lull us to sleep.
ON THE ROAD FROM SOMEWHERE TO SOMEWHERE, I CAN’T REMEMBER. MAYBE SANTA FE TO SAN DIEGO.
My direction is following Lawrence Durrell, โSpirit of the Place,โ and living where I would never expect to live.ย I wish I could control my impractical, impulsive, and annoying spirit of adventure. I think about architecture, Jewish deli’s, Italian restaurants, at one movie theater built in the 1930s, and neighborhoods of unfamiliar lighting, expressions, and conversations. Gambling on yourself is how much you can adapt, change, influence, and accept the days of your life.
In my syndicate, there must be a dozen pals with the same unsolved equation. Is it age that blocks me and maybe you from relocation, or is it the trauma and stress? What liberation to just pack a suitcase and board a plane like in the movies. Separation from the familiar. The spirit of adventure has arrived. My home sold and so relocation isn’t a muse any longer, it’s reality. Today, coincidently is Independence day and so am I. It is a day of nostalgia. The Rudster painting Follies. It took two summers to remove the aluminum siding, scrape, caulk, prime, and paint my chosen seven colors to resemble a wedding cake. Mr. Doolittle built the home in 1883 as a wedding present for his daughter.
The Rudster painting Follies. It took two summers to remove the aluminum siding, scrape, caulk, prime, and paint my chosen seven colors to resemble a wedding cake. Mr Doolittle built the home in 1883 for his daughter as a wedding present.
He’s digging my grave For the dragon he pays With our nest, now shaved Tumbling into the abyss I visit the comfort robes of the past Monogrammed in stone
The will to relive what’s past comes at night
And must be excluded by daylight.
Of HUMAN BONDAGE
The sky hasnโt decided if it will let clouds overturn the sun, and I havenโt decided if I will pack the stack of books on the floor. No, I donโt feel the drive to lift and organize, my bed is warm and the house is not as warm.
I brought my coffee and peanut butter and honey toast upstairs, on a tray, I happen to collect trays, reminiscent of times when women ate breakfast in bed. Propped upright, I explored a movie about uneven love, tragedy, and resurrection. Of Human Bondage lit my taste, featuring Bette Davis and Leslie Howard. —– FILM MADE IN 1930 IN GRISLY BLACK & WHITE. Uneven love. Days now remind me of reading 1984 in high school, and Fahrenheit 451 on film. We did evolve from a simplistic, hand-carved culture, built on rebars of freedom to a house full of furniture, relics, gadgets, screens, gates, and beeps. The beeps for me, make me jumpy, not seductively strolling around my apartment lighting candles in peace. I really do shimmy every time I hear the beep. I chose Sunday to shut down all communication with the mainland, take the longest bath I can stand, and write. I need a rest, like a chaise lounge on a spacious veranda with honeysuckle, wisteria, and lavender, and then a mile away is the ocean, let me swim again.
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
I feel artists, and their works are not featured in the media, or maybe it’s because my scrolling is stuck on the essentials of living. In times of war, people must have known, see it now or never. Over two million working artists in the country, so google says, and when was the last time you discussed it at dinner, with anyone. I haven’t, and I don’t know why? Pop-up thoughts on life.
Writing somberly so if you’re not in a dreary mood, skip reading. Somber writing is akin to writer’s block. It’s not a block really more like a disregard of hallelujah holidays, maybe. Disinterest in shopping, village festivals, parties, writing, dancing, and eating. If I place all the options on a puzzle board, this leads to the center. The vortex of discontent is a punctured life.
A fractured life impacts emotional posture and is not unlike physical posture. We slump or stand tall. We love instead of neutralizing, we are inspired instead of stagnant, we romance our passions and we live to love. My heart is at the starting gate to love again, but the racetrack is missing. I’m undercover. I watch Blacklist or some foreign film in the evening. Most weekdays I’m circulating between finance, selling furnishings online, and writing.
The windows of my home reflect the splendor of nature that plays all day long in the winter. I’m spending more time watching sky stage plays: clouds still, clouds moving, colliding, changing colors, sculpted into aberrations of animals and faces, than cognitive thinking. The scenery is accompanied by my collection of records and CDs. Thank you to all my musician friends for the gift of mood enhancement. When I’m sorrowful I listen to Ennio Morricone, when I need a lift, Vivaldi, Sundays it is Turandot or some other Opera, and when I’m a go-go girl, Swing, Salsa or The Stones, when I feel alone, Sarah Vaughn, Nancy Wilson, and Etta James, for writing inspiration Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Annie Lenox .
I don’t see any remedy commercials for a fractured heart. By tomorrow the despair could vanish, like the rain that puddled us for the last two weeks.Everything Iโve experienced is good in the beginning. So, to begin the beginning, Iโm going to listen to Begin the Beguine.
“Begin the Beguine” is a popular song written by Cole Porter. Porter composed the song between Kalabahi, Indonesia, and Fiji during a 1935 Pacific cruise aboard Cunard’s ocean liner Franconia. In October 1935, it was introduced by June Knight in the Broadway musical Jubilee, produced at the Imperial Theatre.
I wonโt get out of this unless I have faith in myself. If God does make miracles, Iโve used mine up. My wonderous, rewarding, illuminating, creative adventurous life was a row of blessings from people that erupted into my life at the exact right time like we had an appointment. Strangers one day, pals a week later, years later our rebar, supporting joists of our underpinning in life.
Loners were postured in film, books, and art as mysterious, untouchable, or approachable, they even became romanticized as people of superior cerebral awareness. Iโve met and gained friendships with several over the last few decades. My first high school boyfriend was a loner, he became popular but his soul craved mind expansion and he needed solitary confinement.
How this relates to the intensification of rancorous physical assaults in as many venues, streets, and shops as you can name is my pestering pursuit today. People are exploding with anger, frustration, and hatred. I understand the anger and frustration, but not the hatred. Are all these perpetrators unloved, or do they live amongst compatible comrades? People are shot because their hamburger wasnโt properly served on time, or they have a different opinion. I was living in Los Angeles in 2018, one day driving down Pico Blvd I noticed a sign, โWalk in Anger Management.โ Maybe we need to convert a few drive-thru food diners to Anger Management centers. It sounds amusing, doesnโt it? If I was financially able, Iโd open one in every major city.
What has happened to our culture is unimaginable for a woman who grew up in the Love and Peace generation, or even into the eighties and nineties. We didnโt shoot one another, maybe a fist fight, or a shouting match but not murder in cold blood.
Could this macabre movement be softened by friends who love you more when you are gentle and kind? It cannot be that simple, or could it? When I used to rage about some occurrence that ripped me personally my partner would come to me and say,
โLouLou put your guns down,โ that always made me laugh, and then weโd talk out what triggered my fury.
Humankind is in recession, we need a John Lennon to lead us back to where we belong. ย TO BE CONTINUED
You see a chime, the moment it responds to a breeze, the sound is beautiful, like Chopinโs Nocturne 1. Sounds that accompany a descending light mist, or setting sun, but the chime improvises its sounds and movements when a vivacious wind girdles its ether. This abstraction reminds me of sensitivity. It can be soft and gentle, nurturing to the souls of those less peaceful, but when the velocity of attack hits, sensitivity is a walloping eruption of rage, drifting on uncontrollable. I’ve been punitively and cordially of being too sensitive. There are more good reasons to alter my sensitivity than not to, but the one reason that hovers above all else is that everything we do, feel and act in life needs revision. We should never stop evolving into more thoughtful, loving, or wise human beings. Every day, there is an opportunity to leap into saintly hood. It is the same with my writing it can be better.
The next adventure is closing in on me as foreclosure is over the June horizon. The dismantling of possessions brings me some sort of twisted alignment to my life. Picking and choosing what to pack, eliminating what Dodger and I bought together, and vacillating over treasures that are now more weight than worth. If I am ever to rest in one address, Iโm sure it will be a headstone and a plot of dirt. I chose a destiny to relocate, and so the highway off-ramp will evolve, I just have to be patient.
It is the inner self that concerns me, and how I will adjust and adapt to leaving my favorite house. When I was thirty, I was afraid of getting married, and when I was forty, I was afraid of not having children. Now that I am sixty-nine, I have a fear that once was my chant, the idea of moving.
The word coddiwomple is English slang, defined as โto travel in a purposeful manner towards a vague destinationโ. If you are anything like me you may be coddiwompling your way through life, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
I looked at the list.ย The list looks back at me; trivial, trite, redundant, so I turn on the news.ย The sky has taken the bail, the air is earnest spring, clouds and impending rain like a suspense novel you just started reading.
The list is still in front of me. Call the bank for the fourth time this week. Their new and highly improved website refuses to give me access. Find the copy of the passport application I just submitted.ย Next, pack up winter clothes and replace them with spring-summer. ย This obligation irritated me until late afternoon, and then in one swift harmonious leap, I packed up the winter clothes and removed them from my eyesight.ย Then, I heard a breeze, a solid applicable one that needed to blow through the winter staleness. I opened all the doors and windows that I can open, and let the house breathe. I’ve been quarantined since a week ago Saturday with Covid. ย It was not as agonizing as I’d imagined. Two days of annoying muscle and nerve pain, and flopping over four or five times a day to sleep. Today, I will use my energy to cross off the mindless tasks.
Next on the list, are estimates on the spring cleanup of five hundred or more dead stalks, leaves, bushes, etc to make Follies ready for spring.ย Internal conversation goes like this, I should do it myself, save the hundreds they will charge, but where do I empty all the leaves? The village has rules about placing leaves on the street. Too physical, back to the list.
Submissions for publication, are the most tedious and necessary acts if you are a writer. Nope, not in the mood for that. So I took a drive along a country road, with the top down, and listened to Joe Bataan, a waist-twisting Salsa boogaloo disco singer.ย I turned around after fifteen minutes, even Joe cannot spring my spirit to life.
My relationship with the world is not dependent on what happens to me. It is with Ukraine.ย My heartbeat is in slow motion as I watch the latest news feed from Zelensky. He is holding a press conference this Saturday. It lasted two hours or more. As the camera scanned the packed room of reporters; expressions rooted in awe, admiration, eagerness, and razor-sharp comprehension I thought, they resemble a child’s face the first time a book is read aloud.ย Within the hour’s conference, a news blip surfaced. Blinken and Austin will meet with Zelensky in Kyiv on Sunday. My suspicion is they were watching.
As I sat down to dinner, I thought of the announcement earlier that day, “One loaf of bread fed forty people in a bomb shelter. How do we live within the torture, death, and starvation? How do we get up and laugh or enjoy an outing? For me, I have not found a way.
We can pay to go into space, text unlimitedly to avoid, a phone call, we can avoid meeting because we have too many social media replyโs waiting. We can upload, download, delete and save in a second. We can install security alarms, and electronic remotes to open and close our appliances, and electricity. We can drive a car without hands-on, we can buy a private plane, an armored car, bodyguards, and we can remain anonymous by creating a false identityโฆ What we are not doing is improving our behavior, our own personal evolution as humans. Our civility is most recently televised as the Chris Rock, Will Smith slap. Iโm sixty-eight and have watched the Oscars, so I remember what they gave the audience- humble sweet, amusing award-winner speeches, not a political coma, or reprisal for a joke. If Chris did not know the sensitivity of Jada for suffering from alopecia, ( and she is gorgeous with or without). After the slap Chris said something like, this will be the most-watched television show. WHAT? Is that all there is to our humanity; attention, vanity, and ratings?
As time grabs our life without us evening knowing it, one day we may wake up and say, I donโt have that much time left, what should I do? If you are single without children then the options are galactic, unless you live in Ukraine. The war bleeds in my veins, sometimes I feel nausea from the videos, and other times enraged that this was not prevented. The best news of the day is that Russia is expelled from the Human Rights Council. Pause, just today? I am half-Ukrainian. My father, grandfather etc, were Ukrainians. I’ve always thought and said I am half Russian, as noted on Dad’s papers. But I am not Russian, excuse my blind spot.
The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me. Ayn Rand.
ADVENTURERS IN SINGLE LIVINGNESS 