Anonymous Blogger

I come upon a blog, not a year old, only half a dozen entries, talking of places I know with a foul-mouthed anger inspired by the affair that the writer’s wife is having while the writer stays home with the kids.  Do I know these people?  He attacks his wife’s character and then asks us to empathize with his flawed one (some mental illness, perhaps?) which we do, because the writing is very good.  Names are named. Details given. I determine the identity of the anonymous blogger.  A true shock, my impression so different from this aggressively intelligent and angry writer.  How many different selves we each are, and here, the most manipulative and intimate, the literary self, whispering lines onto paper that whisper to a reader, images that enrapture our emotions.  The caressing bodies.  The rising action.  The falling action.  The denouement. 

Write By Heart

The boys are congregating on the porch and I am reading On the Road, for the second time because the first time I only made it a short way in before I myself had to take to the road leaving behind everything familiar except myself which may have been the thing I most wished to leave behind, for a while at least, but it was not meant to be.

Now I am not on the road and restless because the summer is fading fast, and I am faced with the prospect of returning to teaching classes at the high school, and it fills me with a panic, not feeling confident that I can pull it off even though I've done it before, it always feels like starting from zero because I can't stand to do things the same way twice, even those classes I've supposedly taught before feel just as new as if I never have, and whether that's bad or good, I don't know, but I do know how I feel and that is exposed and incompetent and nervous.

I'm not supposed to admit any of this, I also know, because it is not professional and being unprofessional is frowned upon, but I have never been a professional at anything except being an amateur and since I'm already past 40, I suppose that's how things will remain.  Sometimes I wish things were different, but sometimes I don't, and I don't imagine that would change even if I were a professional, I'd look at some amateur sitting on the porch, fingering a banjo, and dream about a life free of all that professionalism, though other times I might feel great relief that I wasn't so adrift, like I said, sometimes wishing things were different and sometimes being thankful they weren't, exactly the same way I feel now.

Where all this comes from I don't know, a gene drifting down from Siberian gypsies or a reaction to how I was raised or a product of my culture?  These things are hard to sort out and complicated and probably not worth the effort since there never will be a straight answer except for it's just the way things are so why not accept it?

What I do know is that taking the time and space to write these things down gives me a satisfaction that I don't get doing other things and it keeps me feeling calm.  Whether that is because I've taught myself that habit, like brushing my teeth gives me a certain amount of peace, or whether it is some ancient human thing stuck in the DNA, I don't know, but it makes me feel agitated and depressed even when it's sunny and everyone is lovely and I have many hours, if I can't come up with something to write.  That makes me crazy, like a caged animal, so I pace around the house, wasting the day.

It doesn't make any sense because there are always so many important things to be doing, scraping paint or earning money or grocery shopping or cooking or spending time with people I love, but I can't seem to do any of those things or even be content if haven't scribbled something down, even if it's something that has been scribbled many times before.

Excerpt From An Unpublished Essay: Lonely in Kino or The Long Stretch of Day. "Seri Originals"

Around the corner from the ice cream parlor that one could mistake for a puppet show stage, shallow and big faced and screaming out circus music, is the café where all the Gringos eat chile rellanos and tamales and drink horchata because the floor is smooth and swept and the owner wears a clean apron and keeps her hair tucked away in a bun and has, by good fortune, straight off-white teeth.  The Gringos meet there in the afternoon and feel reassured because they have learned to tell time by the sun and learned to love tortillas and say Hola! to the fishermen who don't even nod from the shadows of the twisted trees, watching the Gringos emerge from their shiny vehicles.  

The Gringos love the cafe because it is in Old Kino, tucked in among "the people" and the shacks and sandy unpaved streets.  The building isn't different from any of the other aluminum shacks, but is pleasant with a pot of fake flowers hanging from a dusty beam and a two year old calendar nailed to the back of the door. 
            Sometimes a new Gringo is there, sent by the woman who runs the posada, and then they have new ears to tell all about Kino and how the Seri Indians used to live east until they were pushed to the ocean by the Spanish, and lived here on this beach until they were forced into the mountains by the Ladinos, and how they carved animal figurines out of ironwood and wove tremendous baskets until a Ladino saw they were making money and copied the designs and produced them in factories and sold them cheap with the label "Seri Originals" and no one knew the difference so the Indians themselves came into town, bought pack loads full, carried them back up to their villages and sold them for a huge profit to the Gringos who searched them out, looking for the real thing.

Left-Handed Journal: Update

Artist's Statement for Art on the Town Exhibit: Friday, August 15, Appleton Beer Factory, 6-9pm

Ever since I first heard the word juxtaposition, it has intrigued me.  Why is this concept so important that it has its own word?  It has always felt good to say it, with its many shapes and tones.  But only after I started this blog, at the age of 40, did I begin to grasp its power. 

Before I was diagnosed with a terminal case of whimsy, I spent years reading and writing short stories, hoping to produce the one that would get printed in The New Yorker. But I became stuck, squeezing all my creative energy down one narrow and rigid road.  It was depressing.  Here I had dedicated years and all I had to show for it was miles of rubbish. 

This is perfectly normal.*

Everything began to change when I saw a correspondence by Saul Steinberg printed in The Paris Review, illustrated with his drawings.  I assumed (wrongly) that he had written the words to go with the pictures or vise versa.  So, I inserted drawings into some of my own essays and felt the stirrings of something profound and confounding. 

I began to imagine a newsletter.  A friend suggested starting a blog.  Instead of repressing my terminal case of whimsy, I embraced it, making each day whatever I was inspired to make.  After two and half years of this, I realized that what I was making was a novel of juxtapositions.

Thank you for visiting @ A Terminal Case of Whimsy

*See “The Gap” with Ira Glass, a 2 minute 18 second video by frohlocke.

Art on the Town, Appleton

This Friday. 6-9pm. Appleton Beer Factory.

Featuring excepts from a novel of juxtapositions.

Come on down and say hello.

And don't forget to bring a burning question.

bug

Today a bug lands on me. Instead of swatting it off, I watch it, tiny and leaf-like, bright green, wide faced.

It crawls, spiraling around my finger, its feet tiny n's.  I think I detect it accelerating; a hint of panic, desperate to find a familiar surface?  When I finally put my finger against a tree, it steps onto the bark and freezes, hoping to fool me.

I poke it, and it scrambles a few steps and freezes.

I poke it again but this time it slips and falls right off the tree.  I gasp, attached enough to care even though two minutes before I was most likely to brush it off the moment I sensed it, unaware that there was anything to care about.

I'm in a panic to find it.

I do and am relieved.  I put my finger to the grass and it scrambles on.  I put my finger to the tree and it scrambles off and freezes.

I watch it, then, loose interest.

Invitation

excerpt from an unpublished essay: "Lonely in Kino" or "The Long Stretch of Day" - MUSEO

Here in New Kino - where the wealthy from Hermosillo and the retired gringos build homes on both sides of the narrow road, houses surrounded with concrete walls topped with broken glass, houses dug into the beach, still and hollow, crested with satellite dishes winking at the sea - an old man with saggy eyes leans on an abandoned fence post, picking his teeth.  I stop to read a little wooden sign hanging on a wooden door.  MUSEO.  The man slowly crosses the empty street and asks me for five pesos.  He slips the coins into his trouser pocket, pushes the door open and returns to picking his teeth, leaning his head inside and raising his eyebrows as if he has never seen the place before. 

The museum smells like pesticide and the fungus that grows beneath the photographs of those Indians who used to live here, photographs of people wearing hats, standing on the beach, smoking in the wind, photographs of people who wove baskets as big as caves and painted lines on their faces from one earlobe to the other, over their wide cheeks and flats of their noses because that is all they saw - horizon and the long line of the ocean beach, parallel waves and the long stretch of their days.

The Day Daddy Started Playing Banjo

I thought the kids would react the way they do to my banjo playing.  Instead, they said, about their daddy's playing, "We could get used to this."  And that was just a half hour after he picked up the thing for the very first time.  He scribbles notes in a journal he carries in his pocket.  That first day, he wrote 22 songs.

Observations from the Shores of Crystal Lake

Look how often, the man in the lead, the woman and children following.  I was angered by these types of things in my teens and twenties.  I stopped shaving my legs and insisted on competing with the boys.  Even as a kid, I let my big brothers nearly brake all my fingers playing mercy because I refused to give in.  I picked a fist fight with Tony Angelino and was always ready for arm wrestling. 

In Carnot, Central African Republic, I knew a prepubescent Lebanese boy who lived in a household of macho men and spent his days as clerk, perched in a dark corner of his uncle's store.  One evening the men bet Fadi that he couldn’t beat me in an arm wrestling match.  Young Fadi jumped at the chance to prove them wrong.  He was stronger than I thought, for being so scrawny.  Still, I beat him.  The men howled with delight while Fadi flew into a rage.  For a while I continued to stop by the store to say hello.  But he never talked to me again. 

These days, I am happy to let my husband lead.  It frees me up for these practices that most interest me.  Like following the flight of a white bird across a backdrop of lake pines all the way around the shore and up into the blue until its wings are indiscernible from cellular specks that float on the surface of the eye.  There is a half moon in the morning sky and a dragon fly and a ground squirrel digging in fallen leaves.  A car door slams, a child’s voice rings.  Crows call their desires. 

A very fit old woman jogs along the shore, a flock of seagulls rises like a curtain and whips around before settling back in.  Once, I spent a day by myself, pregnant in Kino, Mexico while my husband attended a graduate school seminar.  I walked from our hotel to town along the shore and later wrote an essay whose name I can’t remember but where seagulls were prominently featured.

We watch a grown man loping down the beach like a child, waving his arms and groaning, chasing the seagulls into flight while his old ma and grandma holler from their lawn chairs for him to come back this instant.

Rediscovering Niki de Saint Phalle

One decade ago, we were in Switzerland to scatter the grandparents ashes, smuggled across the ocean in shoe boxes.  I bought a souvenir at the Tinguely Museum, a book with all handwritten text and a photograph on the cover of a shining mosaic rising out of the trees, a sphinx-like black empress with giant breasts and sparkling blue hair.  The Tarot Garden by Niki de Saint Phalle.

What an amazing hat she wears!  

I remember looking at this book stunned not just by the boldness and the whimsy, but the sheer volume. How could one woman possibly do so much?

Now I understand it differently.  

Niki de Saint Phalle married young, became a bourgeois mother, and suffered a nervous breakdown, realizing she had become what she had always detested.  

Grandma Ga married young, became a bourgeois mother, and ran off to Switzerland to have an affair, her love for Max so overpowering, that after they were married, she carried a small vial of acid in her purse to throw in the face of any rivals.* 

Niki de Saint Phalle took up painting, drawing, mosaics.  

Ga took up making a myth of her torrid love affair with Max.

*Upon reviewing an incomplete essay "Harriet and Max", I now see that it was not Max but rather her first husband John who had inspired such jealousies.  And so it goes with myths, evolving with every telling.

++++++++++

Niki de Saint Phalle writing in The Tarot Garden:

Early on I chose Tonino Urtis to be the head of the crew, even though he had no experience; he had been an electrician before. I have always used my instinct in my choices, not my brain, and very often these choices proved right. I then asked Ricardo Menon, my personal assistant, collaborator and great friend who had come with me from Paris, to find me a ceramist. A few days later Ricardo presented me with Venera Finocchiaro. Venera would become the ceramist of the garden. It was total immersion. She lived at the garden and responded to my asking her to do new things in ceramics that had not been done before. The magnificent work she produced speaks for itself. She has several assistants, the main ones being Paola, Patrizia and Gemma. Sometimes the whole crew would be up at the ovens working too. After Venera left, the crew continued with the ceramics.

Afternoon's Work

I can see the fluttering of two monarchs in the neighbor's garden.  And because I want to be the type of person who crosses the street to look at monarchs, I force myself to get up and cross the street.  I stand, doing my best to take notice, but I'm anxious to derive some kind of meaning from the noticing so I can go back across the street and write about it, which means of course that I'm not noticing at all, but rather thinking about what I should be noticing, and then thinking about how to write about what I'm not noticing because I'm too busy thinking about what I should write.

When a car comes by, 

the two monarchs flutter up 

and around before settling back down. 

Their bodies are fuzzy black 

with the cleanest white spots, 

a body builders dream body, 

all chest, legs thin as veins. 

Its proboscis throbs, 

probing the mound of a black eyed susan, 

its body convulsing with the afternoon's work.  

Its wings open and close.

How Do I Know You?

What I Learned About Being a Miner From the Quincy Mine Tour, Hancock, MI

Drillers worked in groups of four, all related.  One man stood against the rock, holding the near yard-long bit to his shoulder. The three others swung sledges, while the first gave the bit a quarter turn after each hit.  If they were good, in a twelve hour shift, they could drill three holes, enough in six days to fill with powder, blasting the rock small enough to haul up.  When their candle flickered out, one man had to trip his way through the pitch black tunnel to the supply room, hoping not to break a leg or fall down an open shaft.

When the mine grew deep enough that it took the men over an hour to climb down to work, management installed a lift that dropped the men at twenty miles an hour.  At it's deepest, Quincy was 92 levels.  It was over a hundred degrees at the bottom of the mine and steamy, even in the dead of winter, so the men had to go to a dry room to change out of their sopping clothes and cool down before going out into the snow. 

If you weren't killed by a fall or collapse, you went deaf or were electrocuted or developed black lung. Seems fair to assume that there was a significant amount of seasonal affective disorder, depression, trauma.

At the end of 1800's, air compressed drills allowed two men, and later just one, to do in a day what four used to do in a week.  But these advancements proved to be even more deadly.  The miners called the drills "widow makers".  From time to time, the men went on strike.  

In 1913, in the midst of a massive walkout, for Christmas the strikers organized a party where dozens of people died, including many children, stampeding from the dance hall, down the stairwell.  The facts beyond that are only speculation. Some say someone yelled fire even though there wasn't one. Some say they died in the crush because the closed doors opened in. But there's claims of photographs proving the doors opened out, that the strikers were trapped because someone outside had tied the doors shut.

In a posed photograph full of tough dirty men, there is a single row of softer ones in suits and bowlers and one stern woman in frills, wrist bones to jawline, a billowing black skirt and bountiful hat.  Who are these people, no different from any of us, except how the straws were drawn?  Each with his own set of loves and struggles  A family, a dream, a home.