I can't compete with Santa

The challenge and lament of kindergarten teachers the week before Christmas strikes a winsome chord in me as I wind down from a spate of arts residencies in far flung public schools. Ponder days disappeared from my date book mid Fall. Early excursions o’er gray interstates to small Ohio towns took my imagination elsewhere.

As small fingers smush graham crackers and gum drops onto frosting spackled milk cartons on the last day of school before that jolly benevolence and his friendly team of mammals drop in, I’m home at last, watching snow fall on black branches, without a thought to the snarled traffic at 55th and Woodland.

I heard this week, while driving, an interview with Alan Menken. He writes soundtracks for movies like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin. Asked if it delights him to have his creations glued, like gumdrops on butter icing, to popular consciousness, how could he answer but yes?

That some of my songs are now ear candy for select grade schoolers in the midwest delights me too. Scale that up by a factor of millions and I might have an inkling of fame’s delight. Is delight scalable, I wonder, or does fame bring a sack of antidotes to the progeny of joy?

This morning I putter in the kitchen, Bob Dylan’s Every Grain of Sand flooding my ear canals. How many songwriters stand in awe at the fact that a young man from nowhere (pardon me, Hibbingers) rose to fame and fortune on a sleigh named song? Access to stunning women, valiant musicians, world travel and the never-ending press parade - all are his because of words he conjured up to sing us.

Dylan’s fame became more than celebrity - neigh cult yet short of worship. The volume of his resplendent work, dependable as Old Saint Nick, assures us of his mystical existence. We don’t quite care if the cherry nose is from too much sherry or too long stints in the barren winds of inspiration. We love him, our fond jester. This clause is non-compete.

Except for the miracle workers who teach our kids to love school, competing with Santa is moot. His job, disguised as Dylan or parents or other consummate sages, is to twinkle and bestow. Ours is to anticipate, provide ballast in our reverence, and to glory in the magnitude of good.

Photo Norbert Aepli, Santa Clause on skies in Adelboden, Switzerland, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license

Short takes

I’m at Target with Tom in search of Merona boxers, Andrew’s brand. A shopper scrutinizing Fruit of the Loom points us to the next isle and joins us as we ponder. Her son is keen on Meronas too. Here we crouch and murmur, two grown women, conversational in the nostalgia of picking out underwear for our grown sons.

What size, really? Medium looks too small, doesn’t it? She says her son’s an athlete - something rigorous like curling. Andrew rides a bike all over Toronto, I tell her. Trim waistlines. Mediums then.
Knit or woven? The knits are softer, Tom interjects. But which ones? Something fun - the green flamingos? Andrew likes green. Or maybe the understated black with thin gray stripes.

As we hand mediums back and forth, the other mom reminds me of a happily married Liz Lemon, eloquent and droll, easy to like. I want her to take the last of the wide green and navy stripes in her son’s size. ‘Naw, go ahead, I’m not attached to them,’ she grins. Tom and I proceed to check out as she squints at the penguin print.

Here I am two days later, folding clothes and wondering what that was. Pawed through racks at Target felt like the backyard fence, the coffee klatsch, the hair salon. What is it about women that has us relaxing into the company of strangers?

As I set down the laundry, a frail finger cut rips wide open on the basket of socks and undies. Were my Target compatriot at hand, I’d show her the welling blood. Attuned to small time adventure, she’d warmly fuss as mothers do.  Not that men do not, or cannot do the same. Women are just more practiced. As the men catch up, we are all the wiser.

Painting by Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, The Marquise de Pezay (or Pezé), and the Marquise de Rougé with Her Sons Alexis and Adrien

Godiva

About to descend to the kitchen world

I remember slipping into another state of grace,
words kept in a tiny tin of alabaster sheaths
held by invisible selves, mustachioed and grave,
who steady their taut arms against willow bark
to snip the bronze tips of Madame Godiva's mane.

John Collier painting of Lady Godiva

Verlaine and Rimbaud

"Situations have ended sad
Relationships have all been bad

Mine’ve been like Verlaine’s and Rimbaud

But there’s no way I can compare
All those scenes to this affair

Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go"
Bob Dylan, You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go


I’ve been reading Verlaine and Rimbaud who, by the way, did scarcely censure underbelly fare.

Here's some morning verse de moi à toi.

Ignore the glial pundits
Analysis assaults the brain
exhausting bright ideas that turn
to excavate the breach.

Cobwebbed attic 'musements
There's gold that looks like rat poop in these rafters.

Now that's a pretty taste

of what's to come!

Arrival
Scorn the chilling splendor

of your youth.

Disenfranchise feelings
of despair.

Aristocrats await you
in their shady goal

emboldened by their shame.

Gustave Courbet painting of Paul Verlaine

Digging Dylan

A 34 year old Yale paleontologist appreciates good music as he scrutinizes origins:

For inspiration I listen to Dylan while reconstructing fossils.
Nick Longrich, Discover December 2010

Playwright Sam Shepard has pondered Dylan’s original gifts from time to time:

Watch the transformational energy which he carries... the kind that brings courage and hope and above all brings life pounding to the foreground... it’s no wonder he can rock the nation.
Sam Shepard, Rolling Thunder Logbook

What is this strange, haunted environment he creates on stage, on record, on film, on everything he touches? What world is he drawing from and drawing us all on as a result? It is right here in front of us but no one can touch it.
Sam Shepard, No Direction Home

Dylan’s contribution to poetry, music and the muse within us all garners critical acclaim merged with urgent gratitude.

Dylan reminds me of an American Brecht, the Brecht whose poems were meant to be sung. There is the same cold humor, the same ironic warmth, the same violent and splintered imagery, the same urgent idiomatic involvement in the way things actually are.... Dylan returned poetry to song.
John Clellon Holmes, Books 1965

By leaving things out, he allows us the grand privilege of creating along with him. His song becomes our song because we live in those spaces. If we listen, if we work at it, we fill up the mystery, we expand and inhabit the work of art. It is the most democratic form of creation.
Pete Hamill, Blood on the Tracks liner notes 1974  

Dylan’s instinctive distinction between polity and poetry has fed the sensibilities of many a fan. A distant poet forebear of the bard understood this well.

Yes, Art is independent of Morals and politics, Philosophy and Science.... The end of Poetry is beauty, Beauty alone, pure Beauty, with no alloy of Usefulness, Truth or Justice.
Paul Verlaine in his 1865 study of Charles Baudelaire

Dylan, world class icon, has reminded us to be thankful for pleasure large and small:

People don’t value their obscurity. They don’t know what it’s like to have it taken away.
Bob Dylan, No Direction Home

He respects the demands on his dueling spheres of expertise:

The writing part is a very lonely experience, but there’s strength in that loneliness. But I’m a performer too, and that’s an outward thing. One is the opposite of the other, and it makes me crazy sometimes because I can’t write with the energy I perform with. I can’t perform with the energy I write with. There just has to be time for both.
Bob Dylan, No Direction Home

Today let us eat, drink and appreciate the appreciators of beauty, unpretentious and unabashed.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Photo of Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg by Elsa Dorlman, GNU Free Documentation License

The ten cent rule

When I was a kid, my dad had a standard question when he handed out my 10 cent allowance. ‘Are you going to spend it or save it?’ he asked.

If I said, ‘spend it,’ that was that. But ‘save it’ produced another dime from his pocket. I used to think my depression-era parents had ruined me for life with thrift. But today I’m grateful for the capacity to relish life in slow motion.

I don’t know how his Hibbing folks approached fiscal education, but ‘madman-jester’ Dylan’s ‘hilarious love of the wisdom and idiocy of words' (Gabriel Goodchild in Robert Shelton’s ‘No Direction Home’), in a canon vast and deep, let his pen wildly savor experience.

Dylan’s ebullient wordage pulls emotion and meaning from a culture where words are a dime a dozen. I think about this in a metro hospital waiting room, TV set to the winter boot parade, a new survey of pop celebrities and a Chase Bank app for mobile deposits. Talky words chase out rare thoughts; show hosts twitch their mega-switches at our helpless minds.

The other occupant of the room has his nose in a paperback as I turn off the babbling box. New arrivals consist of a little girl reading the funnies and a mom with her morning coffee. The receptionist ventures from her desk to readjust the strangely quiet noise scene but agrees to leave it be when I lobby for the peace. A small man of carved cheeks sits down across from me, two tired eyed women at his arm. They discuss the prospects of the morning in Chinese. Now we hear the little girl’s sneakers pad the carpeted hallway through a squeaky door between her mama and the warm tones of a cotton clad nurse. The stillness sounds like freedom.

Dylan’s early Village expertise juxtaposed him to folk shows, poet rants and boozy giggle fits. He spun records and read volumes filled with worlds of sound. He fed the syllables erupting in his mind with morsels of observation, void of TV gibber jabber.

Do mad potions flood the streets of New York while our parochial hinterlands stand desolate and dire? What if Dylan had stayed in Hibbing or got as far as Cleveland and retired? The ten cent rule applies. For every dime’s worth of real time humanity, you can either savor it gladly or choke on the smoke screen of easy distraction.

It doesn’t take a madman-jester to make that call.

Original photo Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license, adapted by Susan Weber

Coop's entourage

In times past, members of the masses, those with very little clout to start with, were neatly packed in God and Country. These two cellophanes remain, reminding us to be humble, idealistic and resigned. We work, we pray, we soldier on.

Then came the mad men who injected commercials into the matrix of mass consumption. Brash celebrities took their extra money for the important job of convincing the rest of us we wanted to be just like them. Nice mansions. Nice cigarettes. Nice cars.

Glitter and glitz took our eyes off the prize which, if you’ll pardon the melodrama, comprised our very souls. By which I mean our own individual personalities that give character and dimension to our lives.

The Coops, the Kates, the Cary Grants were bigger than life, grander than anyone the movie fan could really be. Hollywood worked hard behind the scenes to serve up impossible dreams.

Now we hear there’s another revolution afoot. The masses stand to gain new clout. Madison Avenue can’t have our hearts and minds anymore. The net has set us free! Free to consume vacuous glitz, from Hollywood smooth to Youtube lewd, we are facebook twittizens curating our hipness in snippets of savoir faire. Consumer fools consumed by tools of coolness. Just try and pry my iPhone from my cold, connected hands and... well... watch me blog!

At the end of the high pitched day, what is the distinction here? Then, we watched a few famous people tell us how to behave. Now, we watch each other amateur our ways across the ethosphere as emptiness nips at our insides and the admen scheme to monetize our gape.

What are we to do about the state of our souls? It’s trafficky out there. If an artist has something to say to this loud, littered planet, good luck with finding an ear without an earbud set to stun.

Have you heard about the hermit artists? Of course not. They are hermits. They don’t publish, record or put on airs. They don’t compete with the happening acts or weigh in with the media.

What might they do? you ask. Why would they tell you that? They’re hermits, reclaiming their individuality. Choosing deep over wide. Supposing that the well is not dry, it is merely clogged with quivering mothlings, badly singed.

Photo of film stars Gary Cooper, Phyllis Brooks and Una Merkel

Free Therapy

This never made it to the blog this summer. Life intervened. But here it is.

You might say it doesn’t take much to make me flee the pungent porch on a late summer night for the sanctuary of bright lights, notebook and lanolin. But here I am, resigned to write, and itch and wish I were sleeping.

Lately I’ve felt too shy to pick up the pen. With an author like Laurie R. King churning out wondrous mysteries, why use up time I could use to read her words, trying to formulate my own?

There is already a writer in the room.

How does she do it, thrust me into the role of participant in the chase? Quite a role, too. Trolling British-occupied Palestine disguised as a male bedouin, absorbing the culture, disposing of villains. Or perhaps I’d best let the author speak:

'We picked our way over mile after mile of loose, jagged rock, and although Ali kept reassuring us that Mar Sabas was just ahead, I no longer held much hope that I should see the place in this lifetime. One of my boots was sprung, I had twisted my ankle taking an incautious step, my tongue was swollen with thirst, my woolen garments and the snug binding I wore around my chest chafed and itched abominably, and the patches of raw skin, irritated by the salt water, now stung fiercely when the sweat trickled into them. I had long since entered that timeless state of mere endurance, placing one foot in front of another until strength failed or I ran out of ground.'
Laurie R. King, O Jerusalem: A Novel of Suspense Featuring Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell

I often wonder what compels a writer to give her days to the creation of a novel? Is she touched by a force outside herself, some creative unconscious? Has she made herself worthy of that touch with preparation and hard work? How does she know writing is what she wants to spend her life doing? What is the wellspring of her sustained, intricate form of creativity?

A screenwriter once compared seeing a good film to seeing a good therapist. Both leave you more whole, your ID less fragile. Similar things happen to me when I'm reading a good book.

As the next Mary Russell novel wends its way through CleveNet to my mind, I don’t really care whether my writer questions are answered. Dr. King’s receptionist calls me in. The good doctor will see me now. All I have to do is read.

Photo Nikswieweg, Bedscha

Shredification

Certain sons and daughters asked to stow their overflow with us so they might follow their dream to far off places. Since I’d begun to clear out the glacial accumulation of stuff from our attic and basement awhile back, inspired by the dismantling of my dad’s place, I was less than aligned to the prospect of yet more stuff. But family can hardly be denied when room can be made.

I proceeded to throw out, donate, recycle and shred a heap of my belongings prior to the influx of storage boxes. Halfway through the journals, our paper shredder let out a prolonged squeal under the onslaught of words, and abruptly died.

I might consider this a sign to halt the decimation of beauty, in light of Goethe’s lines on letters (and what is a journal if not letters to one’s self?).

“We lay aside letters never to read them again, and at last destroy them out of discretion, and so disappears the most beautiful, the most immediate breath of life, irrecoverably for ourselves and others.”
Goethe

Surely this genius from another time has the knack for inflicting guilt on pack rat journalistas everywhere. But really, would hypothetical future readers gain much if they even found time to probe my delving mind?

My theory - and I grant you, I am no expert on humanity - is that we’re each born into a mind that wants to cross boundaries. Mom and Dad and village can only provide so much point of view. Our brain needs wider fields in which to romp. Which we find, say, writing. Or climbing trees. Or staging plays.

We find playgrounds when we consume art too, which coincidentally gives us less time and gold for loading up on unnecessary stuff.

If making or partaking of art satisfies the mind’s will to fly, and if sinking into a cluttered life clogs the urge to think new thoughts, it behooves the human creature to take down the tent and clean out the cage (thank you, Tommy Smothers) with bold regularity.

As for generations to come, deprived of our burgeoning thoughts? Dear Goethe, let them dance with their own élan.

Painting by Cornelis Norbertus Gysbrechts

Mostly mushrooms

In Folly, protagonist Rae Newborn works her way out of debilitating depression by building a house. Artisan of wood in her former life, she pieces together her redemption on a solitary island in the Pacific northwest.

Rae is not only the scarred creation of her writer. She is the writer’s scars, revealed as socially useful things.

Another contemporary novelist, Jonathan Franzen, sees reading as antidote to our myriad techno distractions.

‘Reading, in its quietness and sustained concentration, is the opposite of busyness. “We are so distracted by and engulfed by the technologies we’ve created, and by the constant barrage of so-called information that comes our way, that more than ever to immerse yourself in an involving book seems socially useful,” Franzen says. “The place of stillness that you have to go to to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world.”’
Lev Grossman, Jonathan Franzen, Time Magazine August 23, 2010

Folly’s creator, Laurie R. King, draws us safely into insanity and grief. She gives us permission to explore the imperfections that tell our past and shape the rest of our lives.

Shapes and textures of physical scars break the skin like the surprising eruption of mushrooms that populate the forest floor in mid August. If you’re like me, your scars tend to linger in bold relief, so it’s easy to remember the little girl who jumped on the bed and gashed her lip, the young woman who collapsed her lung in a bike accident, ending up with a chest tube, the grown daughter burning her leg on a bare bulb while painting woodwork in her fathers’ empty condo with one low set lamp to see by. I’m growing a new one now on the hand too hastily thrust into a glass made to drink from but quite capable of slicing into the organ we call skin.

Mushrooms and scars might seem ugly. Neither elicits immediate awe the way flowers do, or newborn babes. Maybe we respect the mushroom’s unapologetic overnight bloom, the scarred skin’s unique approach to healing, but is either thing beautiful?

It all depends, I think, on engaging with reality with sustained attention. Sustainable thought? Imagine that, reading, the oldest of green technologies.

Photo Susan Weber, from Flickr set

Game theory

'I understand your trepidation; you have been let down before, but getting your feelings hurt is part of the game.
'
Corey Barnes, The Cleveland Plain Dealer

Barnes is talking to Browns fans about football. But the point could be made about anything you care about, and some things you don’t.

Today my friend’s daughter is getting married in Detroit. I’m not invited, and I understand why. I was demoted from the guest list years back when irreconcilable differences derailed our friendship. Because we have some fabulous friends in common, we’ve patched things up on the surface. Being ‘let down before’ applies to us both, time and again, as we fail to make space for each other in the interstices of our lives.

But football wisdom aside, there’s a difference between something you play (or watch) for sport and something you get one shot at: life. Maybe this is why sports metaphors tossed around by pundits and preachers strike me as shallow. The interstices of our lives are not games; they come with complex, often inscrutable emotions.

Which is probably why a wedding I’d just as soon avoid is still capable of touching my need. To be loved, to be remembered.

Maybe the sports-philosopher gets it right after all. What better life experience than game to teach us this: perspective heals. There’s more to life than any one instance or feeling. There’s more to sport than any one game. And serious as we may think our team or life standing may be, in the long view we’re all running around with ridiculous armor and war paint, heaving our weight in the path of need.

You can tell I’m no football fan. So tell me why the quote at the top pulled me in to the place of heart, this fragile arena of life.

Painting by John Anster Fitzgerald, The Marriage of Oberon and Titania

True Story

Mama hadn’t been gone too long when my Dad ended up in rehab. I was in rehab too at the time, where an equanimity of spirit and growing roundness to my form could only mean on thing: I was pregnant.

It happens sometimes, you know, when life’s unredeemed losses pull you down into paths of least resistance? Humans cope by the means available. So there I was, impregnated by a familiar friend I’d relied on in many a tough situation, but never to this degree.

I’d bring my attentive companion to Manorcare when I visited my dear old dad, recuperating from a cracked hip. At Dad’s age, this entails a lot of difficult maneuvering around damp sheets and bedside commodes, which, one learns rather quickly as daughter-devotee, is not the number one priority of understaffed rehab establishments.

I hope I didn’t give the impression earlier that I myself went to rehab for some kind of socially suspect addiction or another, autobiographically interesting as that might be. To be clear, I was merely the significant other to my sweet, bereaved father in an institution that failed him time and again.

Nights were the worst, when staffing was even lighter than by day and I had to leave. My stalwart helpmeet and I bade Dad adieu and the night traumas began. His room was at the end of a long hall, his only means of calling for help a string by his bed that activated a light over the doorway to the hallway.

Hearing his horror stories about lying for hours in soiled sheets, I lunged to the nurse’s station, which was empty. I tracked down an employee, who received my complaints with a practiced stare before turning to her mop. Several staffers later, as my righteous indignation fizzled into politely desperate pleas, somebody came up with an answer. The light for 32B was burned out! Ah, no wonder no one checked on an 87 year old man on diuretics who couldn’t get out of bed to save his life. Electricity! Technology! Humanity had nothing to do with it.

I’d like to report that everything improved once the bulb was switched. But it only got worse. He developed a chest infection which put the kibosh on physical therapy for a few days. Did you know that if you’re not ‘progressing’ in physical therapy for a few days, your insurance company stops paying for rehab?

The ongoing struggle to have underwriters and care providers speak a common language (i.e. common sense), along with hiring a private night nurse to sit by my father and pull his string to call for help to meet his needs (she had a bad back) and all the other injustices and indignities he and his various roommates had in common would have been unbearable to me, his anguished daughter, had it not been for my dark, sensual, delicious Mr. Hershey, ever at my elbow, always in the know about the trouble I’d seen.

Boredom is a huge obstacle to revival, so the three of us, Dad, Hershey and I, made do. We played cards, watched movies, wheeled around the premises, got out to bingo, dined in to reality shows on two jumbotrons' competing plot twists, both loud enough for senior roomies to enjoy. The whole while, Hershey reached out to me, reassuring, available. ‘I’m here for you, dear. Let me comfort you.’

Oh, did I give the impression earlier that I’d actually gotten pregnant with a living, breathing compulsion of a man, intriguing as that may sound? Hershey was indeed a hunk, and a sweetheart in his way (bittersweet, truth be told, as these trysts tend to be), but technically speaking, we were celibate, my pregnancy symbolic and therefore somehow pure, don’t you think? We consummated our mutual admiration in the midst of adversity and, unlike the mundane scenarios of childbirth, diapers, tetanus shots and roseola, our pregnancy could go on and on with only our fathomless desire to satiate again and again.

I’d like to tell you this theory holds but, alas, poetry and real life have no lasting concourse, only the highs and lows of outrageous fortune. Dad, now healed - hallelujah - abides in the sweetest (that word again) assisted living home your bright mind might imagine. Hershey and I are working things out with, shall we say, a little less rhyme, a bit more reason? I reach for him daily but not as before, when his alluring goodness robbed me of my sensible, honest self.

As for the rounded belly, well, that’s been subsiding too, month by month. And my mother, whom I might blame for the saga just unfolded, blankets a slope not far from my dad’s new home, her ashes feeding the trillium blossoms every spring. I’ve finally come to mourn her, my pregnancy notwithstanding, my germinative ocean refined and encapsulated in the complicity of years. The ones left to me, unbounded.

Austrian Lithograph, The First Birth

Look

Asleep in the trees, I feel my fingers itch from palm to tip, but dream swelled eyes resist the open air. I hold the netherworlds and blindly smile and scratch, until I stop: the itch remains.

Sleep undone, I spring the lids and there she is, madonna moon, a silver shimmering sheen. Hanging baskets join the boughs to rock this pearl, this tiny apparition.

I the witness scan my expectations, troll for means to hold Antigone’s desire before she flees. But now my pride is vanquished by a smile. I the pawn of fate. Here the sojourn ends. There my insignificance is told. A transient beauty noticed by the gods I am the moon and she in me.

Linger in the madness of the place before the goddess hides her face beyond the clouds. With silent, steady hand release her now.

Release her now.

Painting Edouard Manet, White Peonies

Bzzzzzzzzt

Summertime in Cleveland has me sprawled on the back porch like a flayed goose, awaiting the nightly visitation.

Mini-gangsters breach the imperfections of my nylon mesh. Careening buzz saws trumpet their arrival, merciless high frequency their taunt.

I am the oversized sixth grader on a playground of bullies. Or, is this a single Lilliputian who dives at my sweat sodden skin from here to eternity in the heat of the midwest night?

Though I might escape to the drone-free inferno of the great indoors, I stay and study my supporting roles as life of the party and warm buffet in a multi-legged wedding bash my mini-mob is staging.

Ancient salves of lanolin give scant relief nor sane belief there is a balm in Gilead. Alone with my itchy discontent, the self control of planet earth could not contain the madness.

I punch the pillow one more time, my brave resolve ignored by all creation.

Public Domain photo James Gathany

Artist Shaman

The shaman has been revered by purveyors of culture who link our storied past with a starker spiritual present.

Shamans of tribal lore dreamed in technicolor so that humbler sorts might have a taste of raw wonder. Are the artists of today our shamans then?

Surely not all artists. Some sell out. Some mistake celebrity for art or feast on tawdry expectations.

What separates the shaman from the shameless, in a word, is dream. The shaman artist slips into madness for awhile to gather up insanity for a world gone sane. Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne ‘shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers... while Suzanne holds the mirror.’

Why do we need what the shaman offers? Ah - because we are so dangerously civilized. Take it from the jungle lad, who sees these things.

 ‘The city people are very careless and very dirty. Unlike animals, they have no sense of personal cleanliness. They do not eliminate odor and sounds as do animals in the jungle. They could not go half an inch in a jungle without being killed by somebody.’
Dhan Gopal Mukerji, Jari, The Jungle Lad (The following Mukerji quotes are also from this book)

Shamans deal with life and death, it seems. The further we roam from our astute animal instincts, the less protected we are. Devoid of nature’s teaching, people crowd together, calling it sane to hoard the wealth.

‘It looked to me as if people were always saving money in order to be robbed.’
Mukerji

The artist shaman brings us close to nature, a drama of the here and now.

‘This is what I call drama, this theatre of nature, where no one hoards for someone else to steal.’
Mukerji

So here is the secret of nature; it happens now. We may champion the profit motive, but profit forces us into the future. What value do we find in the work inspired by profit and how does the chasing of gold poison our character?

Humans, with our vast intellect, have been caged and humiliated by our noisy swagger, prey to the very fools we emulate.

‘Being noisy and thick-skinned has made a fool of the rhinoceros. I have known people who have killed him from the grass by driving a poisoned spear into his belly.’
Mukerji

There is a shaman musician, deaf only in the worldly sense out of which she steps in the giving of her art. She would have us overflow with now-ness in the otherworldly principle of sound.



Photo Nick Farnhill, White Rhino in the waterburg Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0

Swoop

If there’s one place on earth where joy eclipses toil and grief, it’s music.

But there’s an endangered tribe running through the bliss fields, prone to miss the magic. You guessed it - musicians.

Recently I heard Judy Collins describe her struggle with depression, alcohol and drugs from early on. If a singing angel yearns for joy in the midst of plenty, what’s to become of the rest of us?

Many people tell me they love music. Some of them are musicians. Most of them are connoisseurs, curators of their music collections, fans of bands and troubadours. At least that’s how it seems to me, but of course I’m biased because I’m a musician endangered by the making of music.

Music can be a buffer against the cares of the world. A friend of mine had a tough childhood. Hank Williams on the radio at night was his refuge and salvation.

But it’s hard to find joy in a craft you love that also says ‘get out there for the world to hear.’ Getting it out there is more than hooking up some mics and amps and letting ‘er rip. It’s a rowdy expertise we call ‘marketing’ which has a tendency to leak frustration, doubt and a certain crass materialism into the pure realm of music euphoria.

Imagine a winged creature at home on the wind, suddenly forced to truck around bird ads on her skinny legs and spritely feathers. You think we’d expect her to sing too?

I haven’t figured out how to avoid the derangement of the market place. Yes, I do love music. But I’m hopelessly inept at sales. ‘Swoop with me into the wild blue yawn?’ I might as well tell you to get religion (my religion), which won’t be happening anytime soon.

See what I mean? Hopeless.

Painting Margret Hofheinz-Döring, Meeting of Birds Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0

Why do music?

My sister Mariah’s got a phenomenal cache of recipes. A large bunch of fresh dill from a Chicago farmer’s market needed one.

‘Do you have Mrs. Waltz’s dill bread recipe?’ I asked her. She clicked back immediately, ‘It’s in Mom's recipe booklet I gave you, Montana Dilly Casserole Loaf - and I love the attached potato salad recipe - it's the first thing I thought if when I heard fresh dill.'

Mariah’s our family recipe caretaker. Our mother used to say, ‘I’m not a good cook. I just have good recipes.’ Because of Mariah, Mom feeds us still. Caretakers abound where humans love.

2 Men and a Campfire shared songs they love at the Beck Cafe Thursday night. Cat Stevens, Paul Simon, Lennon-McCartney songs with spot on harmonies and well hewn guitar grooves had us humming down nostalgia lane. Dale and Ryan care for the good songs when they perform them and emulate them in their own compositions.

An original Lennon lyric sheet just went for $1.2 million at Sotheby’s. I’ll take the live rendition any day. Recipes are made for cooking/eating, songs for singing/hearing.

And what to make of the 45-year-old carpenter who retrieved his high school class ring from a quarry he’d lost it in as a boy, swimming with friends? Care taking is a communal story. Somebody’s got to drain the quarry and somebody’s got to want what’s down there.

Recently I strapped on my guitar to begin again to sing the songs I left behind some years ago. It can seem pointless, in the glut of digital music distribution, to be caretaker of songs I write. The communal piece appears lacking - no Beatlemaniacs or Dylanatics revere my tunes, hankering for more. Scarcely friend nor kin has asked about the golden ring ‘on a ledge that would have been 35 feet under the water line.’ I guess it’s up to me to drain the quarry and tote the ring, both.

A recent TED talker describes his 'why' discovery this way: ‘People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.’ He says rational explanations about how a product is so necessary and desirable miss the point entirely. Buying decisions are made in the intuitive, feeling part of our brain. The ‘why’ of our exertions draws others to things we revere and offer up creatively.

It’s not the zeitgeist's job to track down my songs for posterity. I’m the caretaker, quarry drainer, ring bearer - chief cook and bottle washer. I do it because I love making music. I do it for community. I do it for love.

Next to godliness

I like cleanliness.

When our boys were young, their two little hot wheel runaround pals named Ian and Evan moved away.

A few months later, we visited their upstairs apartment in a large brick house painted gray. Wading through the rooms knee deep in randomness, I wondered if I dare leave my boys to play and possibly be swallowed whole by swamps of stuff.

As I recall, I made a flimsy excuse and darted for the door, my sons in tow.

The generation of our children is one I know more closely than most. Now young adults, my children and their friends buoy me with selflessness and candor. They would save the world, or at the very least proclaim it worth their efforts.

Most of them are graduates of rented student houses rife with late night schmoozery. I've never been in one of those communal digs where bathrooms or kitchens got a once over more often than maybe once every rent cycle, which could be months or years depending on the student migration timeline.

I remember my own collegiate avalanche of under-managed personal debris, the dredge of deadlines daunting me from term to term. Then in nursing school I shared a small flat with Grace, a contralto at the institute of music who was rather disciplined as I recall. I think we did the dishes and I can't remember bathroom chores becoming points of tension.

Gradually I think I just ran out of slovenly excuses, cleaned up my act and proceeded on to quasi-ordered adulthood.  Messy, at times. Dirty, not so much.

Those people of the upstairs rental I mentioned earlier? I remember the parents. They were from Montana or Idaho or some such windswept scape. She was soft spoken, evanescent, kind. He was a thinker. He told me once he couldn't imagine why a soul would ask him if he believed in God or wanted to accept Jesus as his savior. (Not that I had, or would. It was just a subject that came up.) I'd never met anyone so sure of the intimacy of that question and the sanctity of inner space.

No matter how well our long abandoned Ian and Evan learn to breach the creep of stuff, the bilge of pesky matter, I'm confident these sons will be alright. And so will mine and all their fond companions.

Unfazed by tidy elders, let them brave this unkempt world.

Lithograph by Ehrgott, Forbriger & Co., President Lincoln writing the Proclamation of Freedom

All the world is somewhere else

'All the world is somewhere else... I am the mask. I am the bird. I am the animal. I am the spirit... I transcend with the being of the mask.'
Chief Robert Joseph, Kwakwaki'wakw (Kwakiutl), recalling his youthful experience as a ceremonial dancer, 1998

'There are three things that maintain a culture - language, religion and art. You lose these three and you lose the culture completely.'
Jackie Paisho, Pikuni (Blackfoot) bead artist, 2005

'You say prayers when you start a basket and you let it know that it is going to be started, to be created and when you are finished, you end with prayers to let it know that its birth is complete.'
Frank Turtle, Yubi-Wailaki, painter and basket maker, 1999

'Art comes from a deeper source somewhere - it's part of the act of just living; you know, let's put on the beans and get the clay out.'
Rina Swentzell, Tewa-Santa Clara Pueblo artist, author and schollar, 1994

For Rina Swentzell, clay can be 'a gritty reminder of the land, a way to hold the places of her ancestors between her fingers.' I tried my hand at gritty reunions last week with a lunge at gardening. Soft and green at the work, my blistered palms sent me to the sidelines to let the weeds have their ancestral way.

The same hands scribbled quotes, shards of artist truth scattered through Art of the American Indians: The Thaw Collection last month. At the time, I felt the author-artists pushing me out of my complacency, where everyday tasks outweigh the urgency of grappling with my far, forgotten roots. Then of course those same tasks led me down the road of practical oblivion, my bits of penciled wisdom moldering in the dust.

My people were Swiss and English, poor orphaned clans. My clay - my songs, my words - forget or deny their sacred worth. Ironic, and perhaps deserving, that the peoples who appropriated this land often sacrifice the very ties to Europe that might redeem their streak of stubborn independence. Stark individualism relegates our heritage to a wan relic of a lush communal presense just beyond our consciousness.

Prayerful art, say the land's native prophets, might yet be our salvation.

Photo Edward S. Curtis, Blackfoot Bear Bull

Day dreams

What would make this a perfect day? Accomplishing tasks... creative work... friendship... earnings... life changing event... humor... acclaim?

Why did I once seek a stage - draw attention to myself? Could be something musicians do; we love to love and that’s how we know to do it.

Maybe the culture makes us all into publicity hounds. Mom wanted to be published. She loved the story of Grandma Moses. Did that touch me too?

Derek Sivers says a leader is a nut with a great idea. The first follower transforms the lone nut into a leader. We can’t all be leaders.

After all, I was raised to please, not to lead. But this very upbringing turned me against forced acquiescence. Pliable robot, Stepford wife: not my style. The problem was, I didn’t have a good model for non-Stepford attitudes, so I winged it. Didn’t know ‘assertive’ so I became stubborn. Wasn’t mouthy so I did sullen instead. Rejected sappy and soft, took up cynical and detached.

Much of that’s behind me now. I’m on the verge of wisdom, though it’s slow going. I often yearn for discipline and simplicity. A home that echos an urge to create. Less stuff in and around me, more space for the bold new thought.

Yesterday I finished a book, paid bills, shredded documents and whittled away at email. Word is I’ll have all this soil prepared by June 1 for planting new ideas. What good is rehash of the past or chewing on the webosphere one more time? Not much.

I asked what would make this day perfect. The answer is always the same. Something new. A thought, a realization that veers me off to someplace unexpectedly beautiful and clear. Clarity is of the goddess. All the rest is muddle.

Muck is of the she devil. She hangs out here because she tricks me into thinking I’ve been stubborn, sullen and detached in all my dealings, even towards her, but I only really treated me that way. Her? I feather her nest with bits of mental, physical and spirit clutter, which she adores.

So here’s the new idea. Clarity cancels out chaos. And once I know this, I’m on a road to perfect days. Free and clear.
Painting Paul Gauguin, The Dream

Genius at work

Artists are the ones we get to gawk at.

While pundits rant, journalists drone, politicians hedge and various experts wow us with the jargon, artists try to connect, and ask us to think for ourselves.

My recent brushes with art bear this out.

I didn’t expect to like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Sadist murder is not my cup of tea. But friends were keen to see it, so I went. To my surprise, it moved me.

Both protagonists have a strong predilection for justice. Her cyber smarts and his journalist brawn skin the lies off elitist hides. As the Swedish film excoriates malevolence, a US audience, stunned to silence, recognizes our own culture’s obsession with power. I recognize myself, minus the culturalization. What if I’d not been taught this particular version of woman?

Or, take the work of a writer who raised a child in a racially mixed union:

‘White culture persists in holding material affluence as the highest symbol of achievement. The way this plays out in the lives of people of color and those who love them can be summed up in one word: cruelty. We suffer for a lack of basic resources because of the hoarding, the feverish consumerism, and the complete lack of concern by people who have more than they will ever possibly need.’
Ann Filemyr, Loving Across the Boundary

A new play, Bill W. and Dr. Bob, goes to the roots of Alcoholics Anonymous. Tendrils of happenstance and desperation brought two men to a strange discovery 75 years ago: ‘I need to talk to another drunk.’

Stranger yet, Bill W. and Dr. Bob knew they had to pass sobriety on to stay sober themselves. What feat of modern medicine has healed more lives than AA? The play makes you wonder.

I was also there Friday when musicians, actors and dancers told A Soldier’s Tale. Self-awareness hushed us all.

After the show, a man in the audience told us he’d experienced mindless military authority firsthand.

But the play resonated with him even more as a civilian, a playwright pressured to get a ‘real’ job to rake in money and status, coins of the realm.

I think he’s already got the ‘real’ job, one that offers the rest of us a deeper relationship to ourselves and each other than any other kind of job can claim. Artists pour themselves into work that moves us to reconsider our world, change how we treat people, alter how we process information.

So next time you pass a ‘genius at work’ sign, look out for the artists, and look out for you, transforming.

Photo Haw-wee

Peanut butter and iPads

There was once a wee child whose parents, in a pique of sound reflection (let us hope) said ‘no’ to his request for a snack.

Half an hour later, he presented them with a 3-D peanut butter and jelly sandwich of paper, crayon and hot tears. His defiance, of course, broke his parents’ hearts.

Fast forward two decades and find the young man, hungry for the magical (so we hear) iPad. He manipulates cardboard and glue into a spot-on replica of Apple’s fabula rasa.

His brother had his way of making miniature civilizations from snips of paper as a kid. Now he builds castles with elegance and code. The brothers launched a lovely new app before the iPad hit the streets.

Last night I saw seven dancers build magic for a rapt turnout of patrons. Verb Ballets worked experimentally with seven modern composers and seven choreographers. I once wished I were a dancer, until the day I noticed it wasn’t so much dancing I craved as the energy, the originality, the doing. I love how dance talks to me about making something with life and limb.

This week I forsook paying gigs for the sake of some timeless space. I now have two songs I didn’t have before, one of which requires considerable left hand practice to get certain guitar figures right. The double gift of song creation: if you really want to play what you hear, you’ve got to work out.

The best part of this week is reading a book, Women’s Lives: Multicultural Perspectives. I never took a women’s study course, so my mind is blasted into bits of revelation. Through this lens I notice, in a recent podcast, how male indie musicians call their female counterpart a ‘girl’ while kidding her about how prepared and smart she is. This alone suggests a place for me in a music culture stuck in gender roles long expired. Let’s name this place defiance.

Which brings us full circle to the child’s response to obstacles. He didn’t sulk, wheedle or yield. He played it smart; he made himself some art.

Resurrection row

I was born in Cincinnati. My father sang Barbershop and made sure the local pool got built. Mom taught me to paint and read and how to make puppet plays and beautiful cakes. Mrs. Wynn showed me how to make mistakes. I taught myself to dream.

Gramma carried Europe on her tongue and pitted cherries for Swiss pies. Grampa built his stone house under white pines and taught his sons construction.

When we moved from Loveland to a tony suburb in New Jersey, I played piano and thought about in groups and out groups and not fitting in. Girl Scouts was not cool but it was fun, with tent camping and folk songs sung in children’s homes.

My best friend and I laughed a lot. We made it through high school by sheer grit and common sense. She embraced my nerdiness and even became a scout.

One day I found myself in college with a mind I hadn’t noticed rising. My first three classes were German, art and film. I went on to study God. My prof inspired us all, then died of cancer. We never quite forgave him but we understood his pain exceeded ours.

My duckiness evolved to something else. Not so much a swan as something sisterly, and brave.

Guitar was just another thing to get my hands on and make things with. I learned three chords or so and felt inclined to try my voice at Dylan, Prine and Cohen mixed with oldies like The Sloop John B. and Go Down Moses. But I made no sense of who was writing what. I never factored nomenclature into songs; it seemed enough to sing them.

Years later, there I was all married and pregnant and a mommy peeling paper off the kitchen wall and the radio wanted to be turned off and my hand scribbled words on a scrap of mail and a song was born and I liked it and figured that was that, but of course it wasn’t.

It was only my mind getting hungry for her heart. My heart. My self.

Which should be the end of story. But all these songs later, I’m looking back and seeing something I hadn’t realized was here. I’m the same nerdy, friendly, complicated girl who’s good at certain things, bad at others, pleased to get my hands on something no one needs to notice. But they’re welcomed if they do.

Photo credit Walt Campbell

Blood in the tweets

Why do recognized leaders of the GOP use gun and violence metaphors in reference to political opponents in their tweets and bites?

‘Let’s start getting Nancy [Pelosi] ready for the firing line this November.’
Michael Steele, Republican National Committee

‘He [Ohio Democrat Steve Driehaus] may be a dead man. He can't go home to the west side of Cincinnati. The Catholics will run him out of town.’
John Boehner, US House of Representatives Minority Leader

‘Commonsense Conservatives & lovers of America: "Don't Retreat, Instead - RELOAD!’
Sarah Palin, Twitter

Why don’t Republican leaders condemn threats and violence carried out in the name of ‘real Americans’ the way Muslim leaders condemn terrorism carried out in the name of Islam?

‘We continue to strongly condemn all forms of extremism and dogmatism which are incompatible with Islam, a religion of moderation and peaceful coexistence.’
Dakar Declaration signed by leaders of the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference, which represents 1.5 billion Muslims across the Middle East, Africa and Asia

Conservative Radio and TV personalities fan the hate fires; some of their followers respond with shameful, bullying acts. But why are official voices of the Republican party - Steele, Boehner, Palin - pouring on the violent rhetoric? Do they expect to gain supporters by lending their stature to extremist groups? If that’s their game, are these Republican leaders prepared to share the blame for blood in the streets?

‘We've had a double-digit increase in sales of handguns and tactical rifles beginning about a week before the [2008 Presidential] election. Manufacturers can't keep up with demand and we are seeing a backlog of orders ranging from six months to two years for certain products.
Fox Keim, vice president of the Kittery Trading Post

If those of us who stand for civil discourse and honest protest do and say nothing in the face of the clamoring mob, we abandon our moral obligation to each other. In the dawning of this realization, citizens are gathering in real time, with real alternatives.

‘I pledge to conduct myself in a way that is civil, honest, and respectful toward people with whom I disagree. I value people from different cultures, I value people with different ideas, and I value and cherish the democratic process.’
Civility Pledge, Coffee Party USA

Photo Matt Fields, Sarah Palin and John Boehner

What's the big idea?

Or rather, what’s your big idea? Not trusting great ideas to conscious memory, I dutifully transcribe them. Some capture the wild beast in few words:

‘You cannot see the red-hot knitting needles spirted [sic] out by that red-faced trumpeter... which needles aforesaid penetrating the tympanum, pierce through and through your brain without remorse.’
Subversive Sounds, Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans

Some hold kernels of truth, ancient and modern:

‘All down history nine-tenths of mankind have been grinding corn for the remaining tenth and have been paid with husks and bidden to thank god they had the husks.’
David Lloyd George

Others suggest seeds of change:

‘It is impossible to overstate the significance of a sixteen-year-old Southern boy’s seeing genius for the first time in a black. We literally never saw a black then in any but a servant’s capacity. It had simply never entered my mind - that I would see this for the first time in a black man. But Louis [Armstrong] opened my eyes wide, and put me to a choice. Blacks, the saying went, were ‘all right in their place.’ What was the ‘place’ of such a man, and of the people from which he sprung?’
The Louis Armstrong Companion, Joshua Barrett

Excellent ideas can be complex:

'Jazz was not simply the free expression of individuals who happened to be black, Creole, or white. Race shaped the music, but the effect of race goes beyond the race of the musicians. A political analysis of the music must take into account the multifaceted interactions among musicians, audience members, and opponents of the music.’
Subversive Sounds, Race and the Birth of Jazz in New Orleans

Big ideas can hit you in the gut:

‘The idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to be yours. The sovereignty you have over your work will inspire far more people than the actual content ever will.’
Ignore Everybody

So what’s the big idea, writing about creativity? All these quotation marks are like chicken feet, poised outside the great ah-ha.

Cluck cluck. Time to brave honest thought, from inside out.

Public domain image, Stamp of the Faroe Islands

Holding lemons

I once found an early morning perch on a wood bench surrounded by lemon trees and vineyards sloping towards the Mediterranean. Diffused light entered open windows and doorways of homes nested in grapevines and cobbled streets.

Caffeine at my elbow, pen and notebook peaceably open, my gaze bending toward sound, I listened to the newness of the day. Muffled voices, cook pots, barking dogs and bird calls caught my silent salvo in mid air, orchestrating morning with song.

It has been too long since I’ve thought of this time where nothing stood between me and myself, nothing but beauty, that is. I act as though it doesn’t matter how I fill the hours so long as I’m well and happy, harming no one.

As though I’ll never die or, when I do, I’ll never wish I’d sought out moments where difference and leisure and weather and dare conspired to free me from lesser masters. Surely we all have work to do and promises to keep, but tell the truth. Is worthy work the only captor on the prowl?

In a few days I’ll mark the anniversary of my last music concert, dished out to sensitive souls who reveled in the liveness of it all.  Labor intensive was the life of a performer, even at its best. Ego intensive, at its worst.

Yesterday a friendly neighbor asked when I plan to take the stage again. ‘Your fans are getting restless!’ he declared. I waited one beat to feel a miniscule bite of pride or seduction penetrate my hide. Nothing. The auto responders once so keen on believing just about any wisp of affirmation have, apparently, gone missing.

Adieu. Adios. So long.

Which isn’t to say a microphone and six strings are altogether out of the picture. Just that something intrinsic to self-reliance has found its welcome here again.

Maybe it’s been a good idea to write about creativity for awhile, swaddling whatever was broke inside a gauzy sheath. I have a feeling this blog may take a turn. And feeling, don’t I know, is good to have.

Public domain painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Girl Holding Lemons

Crazy is as crazy does

‘When you see a Gauguin,’ writes Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, ‘you think, This man is living in a dream world. When you see a van Gogh, you think, This dream world is living in a man.’

Artists are supposed to be our designated crazies.

‘We gawk and stare as the painters slice off their ears and down the booze and act like clowns. But we rely on them to make up for our own timidity, on their courage to dignify our caution. We are spectators in the casino, placing bets... and we can sometimes convince ourselves that having looked is the same as having made, and that the stakes are the same for the ironic spectator and the would-be saint. But they’re not. We all make our wagers, and the cumulative lottery builds museums and lecture halls and revisionist biographies. But the artist does more. He bets his life.’
Adam Gopnik, Van Gogh’s Ear, The Christmas Eve that changed modern art

Gopnik points out that our judgement of mad artists parallels their success, or failure, in creating great art.

'Gauguin’s is a prime real-life case where doing the wrong thing - abandoning your wife and children and betraying your friends - appears to be morally justifiable, since the art made was, as it happened, great... His decision to abandon his family for art looks heroic, in retrospect, because luck was a lady - a muse - who blew on his dice.’

Van Gogh was awkward around people, his manic depression untreated, his oddness off putting. Estrangement, merged with his desire for authentic community, infused his paintings. ‘His inability to join the living doesn’t erode his delight in life,’ writes Gopnik.

Perhaps the ultimate act of insanity, for any artist, is persevering without the slightest assurance that anyone else will ever value the work.

‘The letters of van Gogh’s last year mark his acceptance of his isolation, coupled with the belief that the isolation need not be absolute - that, one day, there will be a community of readers and viewers who will understand him, and that his mistake had been to try and materialize that community in the moment instead of accepting it as the possible gift of another world and time.’
Adam Gopnik, Van Gogh’s Ear, The Christmas Eve that changed modern art

A 21st century bard, Pere Ubu’s David Thomas, echoes this in a recent Plain Dealer interview.

‘I'm too old to pay attention to much anymore, other than just getting the work done that I've got to get done. Whether anybody hears it or not, that's not my problem. There's no point in worrying about it.’

A fan club spanning time and space so vast that never may the artist know of its existence. Just another instance of an artist out of touch with reality? In face of public indifference, ‘saner’ artists put down their instruments, forfeiting their chances to endure.

Painting by Vincent van Gogh, Vincent Willem van Gogh

Wyatt and Vincent

They lived oceans apart in the later days of the 19th century, Earp the gunslinger, Van Gogh the psychedelic sower.

From a distance, they could be brothers. At the moment I'm feeling a bit too boringly sane to editorialize further, but we can track their smokey trails in these two eloquent documents.

Notes from American Experience - Wyatt Earp on PBS:

Wyatt is accused of stealing a horse in Van Buren, Arkansas. He evades punishment by fleeing... spends the next several years in saloons, gambling houses, and brothels of the frontier. He has multiple relationships with prostitutes, as well as several arrests for his involvement with them.

Wyatt Earp never lost the quiet charisma that had inspired loyalty and hatred in Tombstone.

He did not look old, a friend recalled. Somehow like a mountain or desert, he reduced you to size.

He died at home unsure of his legacy without ever making sense of the forces that had shaped his life.

Notes from The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Provence:

Vincent - as usual connecting everything in his mental world - added Wagner to Monticelli, Delecroix, the Dutch painter Jongkind and himself in a list of crazy drunks and heavy smokers. These had all hit the bottle or lit their pipes, Vincent presumed, because of the mental exhaustion of devising complex harmonies of notes or colors.

That was no doubt what Vincent hoped to achieve with his painting: to find in art a force stronger than his neurotic temperament.

“Old Gauguin and I understand each other basically, and if we are a bit mad, what of it?” [said Vincent.] They would be vindicated - he thought, entirely correctly - by their pictures.

Vincent wasn’t only an inspired, mad artist; he was a great painter desperately trying to remain sane.

Photo credits Dodge City Peace Commission, Wyatt Earp and unknown, Vincent Van Gogh

Two Emmas

In a world where Mars, Inc. spends tens of millions on cocoa research for the commercially coddled (i.e. those of us who can afford both health and sweet indulgence), let us pause to consider the lives and loves of two Emmas.

I have to confess my heart skipped a beat to think the venerable Cleveland Playhouse was bringing Howard Zinn’s play about the revolutionary anarchist Emma Goldman to the stage. How very - revolutionary - of them!

But no, the Emma coming to Cleveland this month is described in promotions as the ‘beautiful, witty, and much too mischievous Emma Woodhouse, one of Jane Austen’s most unforgettable heroines.’ Reading the script for a study group, initially I found Austen’s Emma a faint pastel compared to the Zinn character’s vibrance. What’s so unforgettable about Emma Woodhouse?

Austen’s Emma plans tea parties, country excursions and formal dances, the better to practice her matchmaking cleverness on young friends and admirers.  Zinn’s Emma is a garment worker who spends her cleverness convincing the boss to unlock the eighth story shop doors so the workers won’t perish in a typical factory fire of the late 1900s.

Austen's young women of Britain’s Regency era are fragile creatures, admonished for going to the post office in the rain (‘You sad girl, how could you do such a thing!’) and warned against being ‘extremely imprudent. Emma might catch cold from the draft.’

Meanwhile Zinn’s Emma is handing out leaflets at the crack of dawn with like minded cohorts and facing down club wielding cops at populist rallies.

I might write off Emma Woodhouse of Hartfield if she weren’t so much like me. I’m not into the social flitter flutter, but I’m fond of domesticity, the intimacy of meals and music, the intricacies of the heart. Austen’s Emma renounces marriage at one point, because she craves autonomy.

‘Oh, I will never marry. Few married women are half as much mistress of their husband’s house as I am of Hartfield... I shall have music and sewing and books and nieces and nephews.’

When she does decide to marry, she veers around the handsome charmer to choose  Knightley, an aptly named challenger to her egocentric lapses. Hearing her condescend to an elderly, less privileged neighbor, Knightley tells her,

‘If her situation was equal to yours, I would leave her silliness to itself and not quarrel with any liberties you might take in mocking it. But she is poor. She has lost most of the comforts she was born with, and if she lives to a very old age she will probably lose more. Her situation should elicit your compassion... Yet now she is laughed at, humiliated... It isn’t pleasant for me to say, Emma, but, as your friend, I have no choice but to speak the truth. It was badly done, Emma. Badly done indeed.’

After which Knightley walks away. But Emma stays, thinks it through, and in a keen blast of selfless autonomy, decides he is right.

‘How could I have been so contemptuous? Why have I sacrificed the good opinion of such a great friend?’

Her response reveals the steel of a woman who, born into other challenges and partnered with her noble accomplice, might well remind us of Emma Goldman, the heart muscle of downtrodden citizens, beating at the system with her passion for a more perfect union of power and principle.

Picture credits Morning Dress from 'Ackermann's Repository', ca. 1820 and T. Kajiwara, Emma Goldman