Ruptures or Shutdowns are, Eventually, our Fate

What do I know now? I have lost what I feared all along I was losing, seeing plenty of warning signs, but I waited to see it through. Now I know...this much, and it feels...this bad, and it can only be true that a new period of adjustment will follow, in the knowledge that all over the whole wide world tragedies do hit so many of the most wretched souls in multiples. The earth seethes with the shock and bereavement of all manner of beings, human and non-human, even less noticed than tainted seepage oozing from hidden underground flows.

We almost never read about the evolution of the pain suffered after news stories have covered kidnappings and murders or cases of ravaging disease--how the survivors briefly escape from it and then return, the reconciliations within the mind, the stages and their triggers for fresh starts made for better or for worse. What if there were a separate news bureau devoted to victims' and families' outcomes in the years following after high-profile crises? More usually this is the stuff of private diaries, autobiographies and therapists' notes or even fiction, where it's ever recorded at all.

But in my case I'm talking about heartbreak, much more routine than murder and mayhem. 

O the love relationships that each of us may have sanctified based on rosy conclusions reached and savored like the most exquisite marbles, all in our own private minds! And the writers who have written that they knew a fellow person's thought, could just see it, knew absolutely what would come next, when the fulfillment of that knowledge owed itself instead to well-imagined guesswork. There is no science of what people will do, or how things will turn out in the end, after so many lesser, day-to-day conclusions.

If we felt sure that we read someone's heart, saw the delight in it that corresponded to our own, then noticed it recede or learned that we misread the face and the words, how are we ever to ascertain the degree to which our intuitions about the loved person or the potential for fulfillment as a couple were wrong, or how much the obstacles to a shared future lay more in ourselves or in the other person? And are we safe in trusting our intuitions about new love again?

In  July 1990, another agonizing time, I wrote this poem about the lasting power of infatuation, called  
A Panorama of Loves:

   Stars! Near, immense stars, far, far sown--
   each one, unknown jewelwork of hovering starlets--
   each a beloved, replete in its majesty.
   Forces do breach and strew them, bursting them
   from within, sometimes, off through the gape of stars.
   One star may dazzle another, but does it escape and flare,
   star of its own fate, or smother itself in strange starfire?
   Shooting-stars flee across ages of waiting space--
   breathtaking traces unfurl through their wakes, decades long.

   ©2012

Some time near that same date came this other poem, Grief: The Exile:

   The old boat rises,
   and settles, its timbers controlled by
   the waves that divide them and nails that uphold their oneness.
 
   Why hast thou left me to rupture away from thy pillar?
   Thou couldst have hefted me loose long ago, with thy hand
   unsnagging my anchor.

   The old boat straggles,
   and wallows, the stub of a rope floating
   hopeless to anchor me ever again.

   ©2012

Blessed are a long memory, and better yet a time out sharing between intimate friends, for dicing up and scattering the thoughts that humiliate us or freeze us in a place we'd best be moving beyond. Blessed every bit as much are the tricklings of well-being when we least expected them and can't account for them: thoughts of space and opportunity, or realizations that we pre-grieved for a while so this latest, really, came mostly as plain old heart-ache rather than shock.

Blessed are old, timeless things--how many can this industrializing world maintain, unwittingly or determinedly?--since they reliably gave comfort when sought. The sore thoughts may be at bay now but raw pain, its special loneliness, won't leave till sometime--I trust--we notice that it has departed the way a body ache has healed and gone; we suddenly observe that we haven't been suffering that thing lately.


 

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On the Wing...Compensating as Best we Can

It is true, just as written in a 19th-century medical encyclopedia I remember browsing many years ago in the Irwin Library's Rare Book Room at Butler University down in Indianapolis, that the best antidote for sorrow is a change of scene. Sorrow, of course, is a broad outcome of our common inability to see so many situations fully for how we got into them and can get, gradually, out again. Sadness also comes from the expectation of loss, and all the echoing loss we know will follow afterward. Eventually the person has to acknowledge being self-entrapped in circumstances not right for the long term, and must own being powerless to do anything about it other than break away with a full complement of still more painful regrets. So the answer, fully endorsed by the antique medical reference with its long-winded title and subtitle, for me was to head off to Minneapolis. An invitation to attend a concert down that way had been timely.

It felt a bit thrilling to hit the freeway and car-power my way through jurisdictions southward, after driving only streets, state roads and a few bits of semi-urban freeway all the weeks since January...to visit another friend at her art gallery in the farming outskirts of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area...then land at the rooming house called the Alamo among other sturdily decrepit houses edging up to Dinkytown, all the while beguiled away from the thoughts that had been leading me between eddying ponds of doubtfulness. Older history would catch me up once I exposed myself to it; here was this concert over at Sundin Music Hall in my former St. Paul environs (see bachsocietymn.org) with six men and six women pronouncing old Latin and Hebrew texts embedded into the musical scores of J.S. Bach, Heinrich Schutz and an Italian composer, Salamone Rossi; what an embroidery, a labor, of lives and learning, discovery and re-discovery. These ancient languages, intoned in harmony by people still sleek-faced with youth, in an age when we communicate more and more in acronym and other computer-driven code. What work, what agelessness, an exhibit of things worth keeping when so much background from their time has crumbled away and shed both its poisoning and its nourishing properties.

On the way back my Minneapolis-based friend and I came through another forecast snow squall as we traveled up two-lane Wisconsin 35. Temperatures were a degree or two above freezing; nearing the town of Siren, I felt the little car skidding even at reduced speeds and joined the few other drivers crossing up through town at a creep. Slush lay over the pavement and could be expected all the way along the seventy-some miles remaining till we reached the Twin Ports and my apartment. But highway treatment must have been applied past the town of Webster, where we abruptly left behind the slickness to continue along shining wet blacktop like a beacon the whole rest of the way, no other traffic in sight amid the white-out that swirled on all sides. Once to the right I saw the orange breast of a woodcock wheeling up-over startled, wings triangular, mission his own version of safety. In enough regards the scene out our windows could have been November or December except for the long white light of a spring evening, blizzard-beset, lingering towards its own strange dusk. Far to the sides of the roadway there were likely the season's first red-winged blackbirds and maybe a meadowlark or two nestling in the sogginess, knowing how to wait it out. This is a winter that through a sequence of big snows seems to beg to be remembered. And we've been needing that moisture.

Here at home a winter's piece of work is done, an image as much about weirdness as it is about repletion, or maybe about what happens when we take on more than our bodies or unique nerve networks can bear. But the overweight hummingbird is in his element of blossoms, baggy nectar-pouches as shown, and hasn't collapsed yet. Everything is still beautiful. Right now I strive to believe that half of all anticipated troubles are never met with, because although they lurk, we refuse to go face to face with them, and instead act so as to ease the preconditions, and so something else which might be the best of all outcomes eventually takes place. The pain of coping must relax, intensify, relax and transform into other states of mind.

Good Friday...Any Friday and An Expedition

Good Friday is traditionally a Christian day of mourning the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, though as a person like me raised amid Christian teachings loses sight of the rites celebrated in churches, a holy day is liable to take on personal meanings of the hour or day, connected loosely if at all with the sacred meaning.

On Good Friday 2013 I had decided to take advantage of thawing weather and head north into public land beyond Ely, Minnesota, the habitat of spruce grouse and source of the setting I'd been painting around a spruce grouse drawn from a photo I shot in Lake County two and a half years ago. Passing up through national forest along Highway 2 I sighted my subject bird, the spruce cock, in the roadway doing as his kind will, eating grit to help him grind up food; he has a crop, full of sand and pebbles, instead of a mouth full of teeth.

The encounter, it pleased me to think, boded well for the artwork that would continue from the top of that cliff I traveled toward, 112 miles north of Duluth, where snow would be likely trickled away to expose some of the surface I intended to paint. But by my arrival, no trails had been broken other than by deer in the campground I needed to cross, and my snowshoes sank laboriously at each stride. Sometimes a section of snow as big as a bathroom floor would cave beneath my weight and whoosh downward, releasing air with an industrial-sounding blast from hollow spots way down under. A few times the snow crust barely crushed underneath me. A beast of burden, I continued, seeking a sitting place on top of the rock dome where at last I found my necessary conditions, with roots of pines exposed on pinkish cliff.

Sorrow, mostly a private matter, accompanies me lots of places these days. There are various helps for it but one of the best, and of course not in my estimation alone, is huge country too inhospitable for alien plants or much industrialization/urbanization to expand their reach. Here is the home of the wild beasts and specialized birds still left on earth, and sorrow might well arise merely from thoughts of the earth so glutted with humankind that these very places like the rest become infested with ourselves, our roads and our mandate to develop every resource in or on the ground. 

It is natural to hate sorrow and fear everything that might give rise to it, experienced in different ways by different people. Yet sorrow persists and recurs, accompanies folks everywhere in low-grade, residual or full-blown intensity, offset with our work and contemplation. Sorrow gives rise to corrective courses, new chapters but also illness, which makes way for branching off and innovation by those personally or indirectly affected. Sorrow challenges our lives the way competition, seismic upheaval and disease challenge the trees at root level. We go into the wild and see what the trees have done by way of response.

We go back out into the streets, or, if we have the option to do so, we linger at those places deep in vegetation dead and alive, where we build something hidden, as we see it, from other people. We know ourselves sufficiently torn down by our choices and those of other people that we will make our creation manifest when the good hopes brought back in us somehow, through days and nights characterized by that forest, the heavenly bodies belonging to everyone and the drama of all events determine that the time is ripe.

Artwork can be viewed or ordered here: www.etsy.com/shop/EpiphaniesAfield

Free Gift: an American Avocet Art Print

http://etsymn.blogspot.com/2013/03/handmademn-giveaway-epiphanies-afield.html

Above is the link to a free giveaway, which is an 11 x 8" watercolor print of a shorebird in a cattail marsh. The title of the print and original work is 'Adult Avocet in the Secrecy of Rain'.

The team of Minnesota-based artisans on Etsy, Handmade in MN, has free giveaways of two weeks' length, each giveaway featuring some work by a different member. Viewers are invited to enter a request for the free item by clicking on the link (above) to the team blog.

The original 12 x 9" painting that this print is made from was created in 2001, mainly in the suburban area north of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area and in Lac Qui Parle County over in Minnesota's southwestern corner. When I started the work I was remembering my first-ever avocet, a wading bird with an upward-curving bill, which I had seen along a creek bank in North Dakota in late May when my child was about seven years old and hiking the prairie with me. In coloration and markings the avocet was a book picture come to life, instantly knowable by name. In its behavior, as it chased geese and ducks off a sand bar, the avocet--or blue shanks if you enjoy using old-folks' names based on a bird's quirky looks and mannerisms--seemed militant and self-important, like a thin eccentric clearing much bulkier strangers from a public space, everybody dressed in their seasonal finery.

In  the painting however I was invested in a predominant theme of my own and much other natural-history art, the sense of 'Ohh' that comes to a person who is crossing land or water and sees something that is alive and true to that place, especially if it is seldom seen or never-before-met but has a wondrous mystique to it. Yes, the soul notes, this is a piece of Creation that I have missed out on before today, but can now verify through my own senses which are not to be mistaken. And if I could transform, only for a minute, into an avocet...

Sat Down a While in Spring's Lengthening Rays

Since our region just below the Canadian border has dipped closer to the sun with March, the afternoons now signal almost-spring, with the sun pulled higher off the horizon. It's been a winter closer to the traditional with an enduring, layered snow pack. This winter may have been making up for the one we skipped last year, which was like a freezing autumn hosting an eerie, dry spring. Lately a more direct daylight, reminiscent of other places and earlier times, reaches through trees both bare and needle-thick. 

I daydream of fishing for lake salmon, an investment of chilly, empty-minded hours with strangers full of secrets on either side of me, and forgo the opportunity to get back to artwork that is about delicate membranes taking full advantage of light. The subject I plan on will be a drunken hummingbird, so far just sketched in, but the current focus is an assortment of flowers, surreal, formed like pouches and bottles. A local greenhouse offered plenty of tropical and sub-tropical examples when I was allowed the privilege of a mid-week visit.

The work picks up again in fits and little frenzies in between all the other things there are to do, with new and opposing flower structures to add in though they're all on a theme of choice and satiation. This might be  a metaphor for a lot of us who reflect on all the foods there are to try, especially if we get around to all the places we mean to visit, or other luxuries, and our worldly lives will be the fullest by the greatest possible indulgence in these things, we can afford them after all--even if, in the end, we've fooled ourselves and by a chosen course had reached a point of peril to mind, body or soul. We are of course time and again fooling ourselves in all kinds of ways, all kinds of days, yet most of us in a cyclical manner follow a scheme that seems to have been laid out for us and we dignify it all the ways we can, for our own repletion and for everyone we hope to nurture.

Snow, Heart-ache and Obliteration

Today was a Monday morning road trip the fifty miles back from where I was selling art in a lakeless peat land hushed with snow. Since yesterday evening's approach you could trust in the arrival of more snow as the skies became ever more opaque white, like a mirror of snow alongside the route. Snow had not fallen in the night but, by this morning, had gathered in a cloud ceiling over the region, already the odd flake zooming past my windshield. 

I wonder if all single people reach a point when their singleness, which they've sometimes relished on taking leave of a crowd, and savored out of a notion of personal freedom that married people seem to have sacrificed, intensifies into heart-ache again just like a lonely teenager's. We see we have to make some effort to re-adjust to the single state since temporarily we found we had family or a mate, and we might marvel we could feel this bereft in the age of instant wireless communication. Weather and scenery can heighten a feeling of abandonment by all others who used to demonstrate their care for us. If we love many people now and cherish others from our past, and anticipate reuniting with at least some of these favorite folk, we can hope the loneliness abates as naturally as the ebbing snows of this current, reassuringly traditional winter's lengthening days.

Driving this straight road across the miles of boreal bog all commingled with white over black needles I'm reminded of the 20th-century American writer Conrad Aiken's short story Silent Snow Secret Snow, which must have been included in several of my school English anthologies way back in the 1970s. Made into a movie as well, the story describes a boy losing awareness of his schoolmates and parents around him as imaginary snow fills itself in over floor and furniture in the classroom and in his home, till there is nothing he chooses to know but his enchantment with his surroundings all buried in white. The reader knows it's a disease process, the boy named Paul, aged twelve, fleeing a confrontation with the doctor and his parents to his bed where the snow fantasy can prevail with no adult intrusion. This morning I'm drawing on dim memory of snow majesty a little bit from that literary perspective.

I think I know from long ago the anticipation of snow as a protection and cloak that gave surrounding light a new splendor. When I was a child I'd hanker for snow weeks and months before we'd get any, and savored how it unified all the odd-colored, odd-textured surfaces outside the house, into the woods and pastures beyond us.

A white-out happened to me in early 2010 as I was returning from Ely, Minnesota to the Twin Cities via Two Harbors, where a squadron of long-tailed ducks had been reported by local birders. It took me little time using the spotting scope to zero in on the flock cavorting on Lake Superior's waves. The ducks were white-necked with dark patterning to their cheeks, dark wings sunken in white flanks, and black, ornamental tails spiking upward. Over the birds diving and bowing bill to bill in rituals of courtship moved the snow squall, swiftly denser and denser till every individual was erased just for a few minutes. They sounded like the voices of elderly women seized by hilarity, bearing witness to the former  name 'oldsquaw', abandoned as derogatory, now replaced by 'long-tailed duck.' It seems to me that the flock was on the wing, crossing down-lake, as I left the scene marveling at how quickly a crisp sighting had faded into a mere listening-fest, the flock unperturbed in their blindness and still cackling.

https://www.etsy.com/listing/95122207/original-watercolor-painting-sea-ducks

It was my wish to express a sort of ultimate conviviality, given out by the ducks, upon a background of lostness and disintegration, a whole atmosphere of snow, vapor and seas. 

In the Manner of Wildcats

An old girl and an older boy are treading ice and snow and relishing the frozen sun along a frozen road in February, one wearing mukluks with leather and gum soles treading as softly as socks, one in hard-soled boots. The friends have hardly set forth in the sunlit silence when he says--Wolf! Look! There's an animal hunkered on the road many meters ahead. It's not a wolf, despite initial expectations, but a cat, not moving except to turn its head as the couple approach twenty paces or so at a time, stopping always to gain a better view in their binoculars. The creature is crouched in the posture of a cat on a window ledge, mostly facing the outer side of the road, chin tucked in a manner suggesting sleep, but sometimes turning to gaze at the human forms easing forward in stages side by side.

He says he saw that the cat walked clumsily before it came to rest in that spot and it seems like it might be sick. She says she has always hoped to see one of the wild cats but never has yet, and this one is looking more and more like a bobcat. The tail, which is stumpy, would be black-tipped all the way around if the creature were a lynx, but just black-tipped on the outer side if bobcat. But why would this richly-colored cat, reddish along the sides but darkening blacker along the spine, bob-tailed since no tail shows, be so trusting, even dozing in a road while two people approach like stalkers? The animal can't stay there much longer, he conjectures. Then suddenly, on the margin to the right, is a second bobcat, much browner like pale milk chocolate. The crouched cat rises and the tail flicks--definitely bobcat, not lynx. Oh, this is a scene about mating, oh of course that's what's going on...

A pickup truck rolls into view around the bend, the young driver smiling at the older couple as he passes as if to say sorry I scared your animals, each of which has cleared the scene in a swoop into the cedars on the same side of the road. But the gent says let's stay here watching, they may be back--and he is so right! they are, they're in a stand-off with one cat on the road again, the other alongside in the saplings. The blacker cat's hindquarters are sinking barely perceptibly into a sit-down, the slowness exquisite with all that it may be expressing of both confidence and fear. The thought comes to the old girl's mind: haven't I seen cats in a yard someplace I have lived, acting like this?

In the mind's eye it is more a state of being than of doing; the cats are live imagery, a vivid painting of their kind from out of the present, future and past put together. Like remembered cecropia moths fresh from a cocoon, they are central, and time in which they're embedded appears to have stopped, and the sun's afternoon course and the distant approach of spring too. We Are and They Are, the man and woman both know, though in the time before the cats' re-emergence the woman has been able to sit down on the road and pull on a second pair of socks to warm up her cold feet. 

In retrospect the darker, most beautiful of these cats on the road may have been a female in heat; that would be unsurprising even though it's a guess. Later the mature couple themselves, back at home base again, feel themselves like the wild cats to be loose-legged and deliberate, full of body language, aware a lot of the time of their placement in relation to each other along the road while they walked back to their parked vehicle in temperatures of single-digits Fahrenheit.

Most significantly, in paused time two bobcats were free to claim a road created for cars and trucks and use it for their own, unhurt or harassed, observed in their rituals by humans whose distance, even from so near, was enough for them. My art, foolishly and everlastingly, says: let this moment in this dark tree entanglement stand for all time, though forests change and go away with or without our involvement, and so when our excessive strength and numbers have done their worst upon the land maybe the beasts and infrequent birds, relegated to far edges, will be back as masters of their former realm; something like this has been seen to happen in miniature in modern central Europe, due in major part to warfare...

https://www.etsy.com/listing/80321335/bird-note-card-watercolor-chickadees