HARK, THE HERALD ANGELS SING

I have been in a gloomy mood today. It's hard to be down on Friday when the air is cool and the sun is shining. But sometimes a cloud just seems to linger right overhead. Then this morning one of my students came in early for some help with an assignment. She said she was feeling blue, too. So, I decided the perfect thing would be to listen to some Christmas music. We did. We listened for about an hour and we felt better.

Think about it. The music is familiar and it is always either upbeat or uplifting. All perky and happy, or spiritual and elevated. So we didn't stop after just an hour. I've been playing it all day. It has been funny to watch the reactions of my students. Some of them asked me why Christmas music, and when I explained briefly that I just needed a boost, they questioned no further. Most of them were taking a test online, and I kept seeing them tapping their feet, nodding their heads, softly smiling--all while taking a test over The Scarlet Letter!

Right now I am "Walking in a Winter Wonderland" with Louis Armstrong, and the sun is starting to shine inside me again.

I have set a goal for myself--I am going to try to focus on those small things that surround me which remind me how beautiful life is. Don't get me wrong. I am not a sad person. Not really. But I do tend to migrate toward what I often think of as a beautiful melancholy. And it is a small slide downhill from there to a darker kind of sorrow. Johnny Mathis can keep me from that tipping point with "Silent Night." And Christmas with "The Rat Pack" practically makes me giddy.

This morning while I was having myself a merry little Christmas, I was reading excerpts from a book titled The Overly Sensitive Person, and I realized that I identified quite strongly with a lot of the characteristics mentioned there. Teaching high school can be trying for a sensitive person. Teenagers have so many problems--problems ranging from mildly dramatic to life threateningly serious. Just walking down the hall with a couple of hundred students is bound to put you face to face with at least one seriously disturbed individual in a matter of minutes. It is an almost physical sensation to be buffeted by their angst. I realize that one of the ways I deal with that is to distance myself from everyone. Over the years my students have even teased me about it. They say things about my need to be contained. They tell me I am aloof. They comment on my desire not to have my personal space infringed upon. And they know that I am not really a person who hugs a lot.

I have been this way since I was a small child. It probably springs from not liking anyone to control my environment in any way. I think that's why I like to write--I can literally control everything that happens. And it's also why I like to make art. The act of creation is the ultimate in control. Recognizing these things about myself is liberating. Afterall, how can you get what you want if you don't even know what you want?

Today I wanted "giddyup Jingle Horse, pick up yer feet," and "Silver Bells," and the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. I wanted to remember the joy that bubbled inside me when I was in second grade and we sang "I Saw Momma Kissing Santa Clause" for the first time, and the way my cheeks turned pink just to imagine that scenario!

So, I hope my photography class is in the mood for some Christmas cheer while we critique their week's work. And I hope they know how much I care about them here in my little Christmas bubble.

IT IS LIKE A MIRACLE!

I had surgery a week ago and have been taking it easy at home, recovering.  I am astounded by the healing abilities of the body.  Immediately after the operation and in the three days following, I was convinced that I would not survive.  But then I turned the corner and the pain began to lessen.  And all of this happened while I sat and watched.  I did nothing to facilitate the process.  We are simply and miraculously programmed to rebuild.  Until we are not.

During the fourth of fifth night of curling myself protectively over my own abdomen in my chair in front of the TV, I answered the phone and was informed that I was a semi-finalist in a $50,000 home makeover contest.  Normally, I would have simply said I was not interested and hung up the phone.  But perhaps due to boredom, or due to the drugs languishing in my blood, I began to question the voice on the other end of the line. 

We had already established that I was indeed Cheryl (pronounced chair-rail) Hicks, but I had to explain two times to the voice that I had not entered a contest before he found the place in his script where he assured me that sometimes one’s name simply becomes available for such contests on the internet.  “It is like a miracle.”

Perhaps that is what made me continue to question the voice.

“Where did you get my name and phone number?  Who do you work for?”

“Yes, well, the identity of the principal of the organization at the immediate top of the corporation is… “  (and here I lost track of my ability to listen.  I am still unsure whether this was due to the painkillers or the abundance of prepositional phrases, but I do recall that the entity itself had something to do with Yahoo.)

The voice assured me that I was immediately eligible for some $200 worth of gift cards and all I had to do was… (again, this requirement of action, even in the abstract, caused my brain to shut down momentarily).

I asked a couple more questions and each one was followed by, “Yes, well…” (sound of shuffling script pages)… and a surprisingly forthcoming answer.  I began to suspect that solicitors were not allowed to lie.

Suddenly the game was no longer challenging for either of us, and the voice asked, most politely, to speak to Mr. David Hicks.  Even as I assured him that Mr. David was also not interested in his generous offer, I was thinking about the identity attached to the voice and about the nature of commerce that bubbles just under the crust of our information driven society often undetected, at least by those like me who live fairly sheltered lives.

Somewhere, probably on the other side of the planet, a human being spent several hours each day/night dealing with people like me and people unlike me.  Some would be rude.  Some would be delighted by their luck.  Some would realize that this might be the best job available to the voice right now and that it was important for his job security for him to conclude each call as efficiently as possible.

I wondered if the voice got any credit for keeping me on the line a few extra seconds or if he was penalized somehow when these seconds did not lead to a successful conclusion.  I wondered what I would do if the only job I could get was talking to strangers on the phone for hours at a time about things most of them did not want to talk about. 

I said, “Thank you , but I am not interested,”  and hung up the phone. 

I repositioned myself physically and wondered about the organism that is our planet, the combined cultures, economies, policies, oil spills, earthquakes, personalities, frailties, talents, technologies, vices , visions and voices that make up the world community.  And I wondered if there was any hope that she still had the ability to heal herself.

SELF PORTRAIT UPDATED

HOW YA LIKE ME NOW?

 

I have started a new self-portrait.  I try to make myself do one annually, but some years I avoid the whole self-reflective process.  Today I was thinking of some of the most famous self-portraits I have seen.  Frida Kahlo, Vincent VanGogh, Chuck Close… It is no coincidence that these three artists have greatly influenced my portraits.

The thing about a self-portrait is that it makes you look at yourself if a different way.  I may put on make-up every day (okay, maybe not every day in the summer), and it makes me realize that looking in a mirror is different from looking at a photograph.  It is sort of the same thing as hearing your voice in person as compared as to hearing a recording of your voice.  It can be almost unrecognizable!  For example, one day I called my house to talk to my husband and when he was not there, I left a generic message on the answering machine.  Something along the lines of,  “Hi.  It’s me.  I’ll call back later.”  Now, I am a little embarrassed to admit that later that day when I came home and played the message on the machine, for a brief moment I did not recognize my own voice and thought for just a moment that my daughter had called.  This can be attributed to the fact that I am a little goofy, that my voice sounds a whole lot like my daughter’s voice, and that the voice one hears in a recording is just different from the voice that resonates out of one’s own head.  And the whole thing reminds me of how many ways I am out of touch with my true self.

I don’t know why artists tend to recreate themselves. I do know that I have never painted a self-portrait with the intention of selling it.  And yet, with the exception of one self-portrait that my husband wanted to keep, I have sold all of the ones I have painted. Perhaps artists paint themselves because the subject is readily available.  Perhaps it is due to vanity.  Perhaps it is a form of soul searching.   My instincts lean toward the latter.

My face has changed a lot in the ten years that I have been painting.  I jokingly told my daughters one day recently that my face is collapsing.  But really, it was no joke.  The plump parts that once made my cheeks perky and my face heart shaped have begun to slump.  I can only imagine them going a bit further south each day, moving steadily and irretrievably toward the land of Jowldom. 

As an artist I always appreciated a beautiful face.  As a fifty-year-old woman, I am learning to appreciate the marks life leaves on one’s countenance.  When I look at my face these days, I see a strong resemblance to my mother.  My relationship with Mamma was not always ideal.   As a writer I have tapped into this vein repeatedly.  As an artist I am just beginning to do the same thing.   When I notice that my mouth is shaped somewhat like hers, I remind myself not to say hurtful things to people.  When I realize that my eyes are large like hers, I realize that in many ways I am still an innocent.  And as I have learned to be a little gentler with myself, I have learned also to cut my mother a little slack.

A few years ago I started a series of poems titled Conversations with the Virgin.  Of course, it goes without saying that these poems are a spiritual exploration, but they are also an attempt to reconcile my negative feelings for my mother with the need to embrace my own femininity.  The two poems below are from this series:

 

 

FULL PARDON

 

Lady of Luminous Laughter,

I know you look down on me

and wonder at my stupidity,

that you must marvel at my inability

to appreciate the wonder that saturates my life.

 

Prone to melancholy, sometimes

I pretend that my tears are born of glee

and that the sudden lurching snap

that jerks me toward the earth’s hot core

is natural, even desirable.

 

Sometimes I confuse you

with the young Cambodian woman

who runs the cash register at the liquor store,

so determined to pull from me

some detail of my day, yet always willing

to pay me for my reluctance

with patience

with her boundless exuberance,

with her predictable reassurance,

with these four simple words, “You are so beautiful!”

 

Sometimes you remind me of my friend Kat,

(You know, the one with the tumor?)

and the way she looked at me that day

and how with a smile that lifted only

the left side of her face, she said simply,

“You have a beautiful life.”

 

Sometimes my face turns hot

and my shame grows unchecked,

blossoming uninhibited in my chest

until almost no oxygen remains and

all I can think is that I should have

visited Mamma before she died.

 

Then, I imagine you there, in that otherworldly place,

with your arms crossed gently over your breast,

holding your veil, soft against your face

and floating toward the ceiling

where, with only the occasional silent smile,

you rain peace and understanding from the rafters.

 

 

AND BY THE FACT ITSELF

 

Lady, my thoughts of you are as thin

as the skin on the back of my hands. 

The star in my lucid dreams you are

and it seems that I can’t even take a phone message

without automatically adding a reference to you.

Holy Mother, I once read

that those wishing to control dreams

should spend their last minutes of life

each night studying the backs of their hands.  You see,

 

and I know you do, that our hands are the things

we see more than others,

more than other objects,

more than other expressions, digressions…

more than thoughts throughout our waking sessions.

 

Ip

so

fact

o

 

when we see them in our sleep,

our deep subconscious minds design scenarios

in which they’re able to function.  And so

sound dreamers function in their sleep.

 

But Lady, my eyes weep tears of blood

as slumber goes

the way of wonder,

the way of distant thunder born of memory,

the way that gender

only begins to explain

the differences between our legs, and so we run

and run and run like dogs asleep,

and never still, we keep

the sacred pacts of childhood.  

 

Today I look at my face

and I see your smile.

 

 

ANATOMICAL POETRY

I am starting a new painting tomorrow and plan to do some studying tonight on the anatomy of the facial musculature.

The painting below is not the one I set out to paint (as previously discussed in my blog a few days ago).  But sometimes I just can't plan what is going to happen on a canvas.  The face is composed (pun intended) of the poetry of Ackerman.  It is as yet untitled.  Perhaps I will just scan the text and choose a line that seems meaningful.  I am always fascinated by the interesting and surprising juxtapositions that result from joining text pieces together with this collage technique.

WHAT HAPPENS TO POETRY?

I spent a lot of time with Diane Ackerman today.  Okay, not actually with her, but with her poetry.  I can honestly say that over the course of the last two weeks I examined each line of each poem in her book Jaguar of Sweet Laughter. This is because I have been cutting the book, line by line of poetry, into strips, which I will use in my next art project.  Ackerman says, “A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.”  I wondered today what she would think of me dismantling her book this way.  Would she understand that my deconstruction, the tearing apart of her patchwork of words, is a sort of ekphrasis? 

I am fascinated by the idea of the ways in which a painting may resemble a sculpture, or how a poem may portray a painting.  I have written at least two poems related to the paintings of Van Gogh, and I am currently working on a mixed media piece inspired by a statue of Cupid and Psyche that I photographed in Paris.

But would Ackerman appreciate my dissection of her work?  Perhaps she would.  She is, after all, the author of a book titled Deep Play, which according to her website, “considers play, creativity and our need for transcendence.”  So maybe she would understand why I feel the need to play with her words. 

You see, I don’t just shred her work and glue it to a panel.  I cut it apart one line at a time and put it in a box.  But not before reading it.  And because of the way I cut the stanzas and then the lines apart, I don’t usually read the poetry in the order the poet intended it to be read.  Instead, I perceive it bit by bit as I trim the now unnecessary white space away from phrases such as “to where he loves being a hermit,” “of night blooming orchids,” and “with a salmon’s purpose.”  I almost never glimpse entire clauses, so when I do, they become as memorable as these bits: “he sees the world through a small tube,”  “the new biography makes me a fortuneteller,” “he will be less than an inkling,” and, “we live in the outback of our art.” Sometimes my favorite bits are mere subtle images, such as, “the vicarious agony,” “an orient of light,” and “hypnotic tantrums of the surf.”

I love the absorption and shift that occurs repeatedly as I cut the poem to pieces, as I consider the variety of line lengths I encounter and the way the before unnoticed ascenders and descenders of the alphabet attempt in their tiny ways to impede my progress in the creation of what will become the equivalent of brush strokes in my new piece.  (This is not the first time I have played with text.  The photo at the top of this blog is a bit of background from a previous piece.)

But for this to be a true attempt at ekphrasis, my work must contain some consideration of the sentiment of the artist, or in this case, poet, when she created her work.  What then will be the subject of my art piece?  Perhaps part tribute.  Not overtly stated, but implied.  I admire the bits of Ackerman’s poems, but also the cohesive creation of each poem and the way they come together to create a volume.

Perhaps part imitation.  But only in the sense that I admire her powers of observation and the way she tints her words with a naturalistic view of the world.  When I started this project, I had planned to create a portrait of a pair of lovers.  I have not turned away from that idea, but more and more images of trees, snakes, oceans and clouds have crept into the background as though threatening to overtake the couple. 

I am feeling some sense of urgency.  This is always a good thing for me as an artist when I put brush to canvas, or in this case, when I apply gel medium and paper to panel.  It means that my thoughts and observations have begun to swirl into a vision that will be shared at some point in the near future.   This sharing, whether through word or image, is for me what gives my life order and meaning.   I agree wholeheartedly with Ackerman when she says, “I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I lived just the length of it.  I want to have lived the width of it as well.”  And so the shape of the collage is decided--a perfect square.

 

 

CONTEMPLATING THE EIGHT BALL’S NAVEL

Sometimes when I have nothing more productive to do, I ponder the seemingly incomprehensible complexity of the universe.  It is mindboggling how everything is tied together--everything from the lifecycle of the tiniest organism to the endless space that surrounds us as it stretches into infinity.   It is certain that there are those who worship at the altar of that which is random, and their beliefs are most likely based on observations that appear valid to them.  Without a doubt they maneuver through the day without applying the idea of cause and effect to their surroundings.

I personally thrive on small discoveries, those serendipitous links that knit together the fabric of society in unexpected ways. It is decidedly so.  For example, the subject of the Magic Eight Ball recently popped up during a discussion in one of my AP English classes, so I posted a link to a virtual Eight Ball.  Most of my students admitted that they could not totally place their faith in the random predictions of the sphere.  At least, they acknowledged that they didn’t believe the answers when they were negative.  They all said that when they asked the orb questions for which they hoped to glean a positive response, if they got a negative answer, such as “very doubtful” or “don’t count on it,” they would concentrate and try again.  On the other hand, if the icosahedral die popped up in the murky blue liquid to reveal a positive answer such as “you may rely on it,” or “outlook good,” they felt a certain small relief and a twinge of optimism that at least for the moment, all was right in their tiny universe.  In other words, my students admitted feeling an emotional response to a system in which they had no real belief.  Sometimes it just takes diligence to get to the answer you seek. Sometimes you just have to ask again later.  You see, it takes an average of 72 questions being posed to the Magic Eight Ball for all 20 of its answers to appear at least once.  Of course, the outlook is not so good for the future of those who have so much time on their hands to be able to sit around shaking an Eight Ball indefinitely, or writing a blog that includes all of the possible responses in italics….  As I see it, yes, it is somewhat reassuring to know that of the twenty possible responses, ten are affirmative, five are negative and five are neutral. 

Some people believe that devices such as this black orb are merely an outlet for the answers that reside within each of us.  If they shake the ball knowing the answer is yes, then theoretically, the ball will stop on one of the positive messages such as, yes, definitely.   

But not even the Eight Ball can always respond with confidence.  It must be ultimately disappointing for those seeking truth to end up with one of the noncommital answers such as reply hazy, try again, or cannot predict now.  And really, even though it is in the category with the “maybe” answers, how much more ominous could an answer be than better not tell you now!?!?

Some people need to believe that there is nothing random in the universe. I ask them: is nothing truly left to chance?   My reply is no.  But maybe if I shake that ball one more time…

If you feel the need to shake the Eight Ball and don’t happen to have one handy, just go to the official web site and shake it virtually: http://www.mattelgamefinder.com/demos.asp?demo=mb

 

What this all comes down to is my hunger for seemingly useless information.  Just knowing that the Eight Ball was invented in 1946 by Albert Carter, and that Carter was the son of a clairvoyant gives me a modicum of pleasure.  As does knowing that modicum, in this sense, is synonymous with atom, and that atom comes from the Greek atomos, meaning uncut or indivisible.  Can a universe in which even the language is so interconnected be random?  My sources say no!

The whole idea of things being random has recently been gnawing at me.  This year in our high school yearbook, we attempted to provide each senior with a portion of a page on which to represent themselves for posterity.  They were asked to list four words that described them.  At least half of them responded with “random.”  What does that even mean?  Are they just attempting to appear mysterious and cool?  At a time in their lives when they should be focused on their future, do they realize that they are proceeding, according to their own self-evaluation, without definite aim, reason or pattern? 

This notion reminded me of something I stumbled upon recently—the idea of a mathematical trajectory that consists of taking successive random steps.  It is called a Random Walk.  Now those who have read my blog consistently know that I often walk to my studio and that I almost never walk the same path twice.  I like to shake things up and take note of the unexpected.  So, I came up with the idea that I could possibly take a truly random walk.  In mathematics, a one-dimensional random walk moves as follows:  You flip a coin and if it lands on tails, you move left.  If it lands on heads, you move right.   Suppose then that I start at the end of my driveway and flip a coin to decide in which direction I will start my walk today.  And then every time I come to a corner, I flip and turn accordingly.  Where would I end up?  In theory—it could be anywhere!  So then I started thinking that a random walk would be a very interesting way to raise money for the Image Warehouse nonprofit and simultaneously map the city of Athens.  We could have a Random Walk-a-Thon!  Participants could pair up or get together in small groups.  Everyone could leave from the Image Warehouse at the same time, flipping and turning and walking, until they had executed a certain number of flips.  It would be crazy interesting to see where the walkers ended up and what they saw along the way.  Just an idea…

Today I am going to my studio, not exactly random because strangely enough if I turn right, left, right, left, right, left…that’s where I end up.  Sometimes I wonder if there isn’t an underlying plan that made me chose that location as my workspace.  As the Eight Ball says, signs point to yes…