Apotropaic Devices: I Will LIft Up My Skirt

 

Tonight I watched a recording of a lecture titled "The Vulva's Pilgrimage: Understanding Medieval Genitalia Badges." I bought a ticket to hear this lecture from The London Drawing Group, so in lieu of listening live at some ungodly hour, I received the recorded version and watched it tonight after dinner. The pandemic has made possible a number of things for me, and, no, I'm not going mad. While I've begun a number of crafts and even dabbled in art for the first time in my life, I'm not yet casting vulvas. Yet might be an operative word there. 

Continue reading here.

We Can Control Ourselves*

Revolutionary (Angela Davis) 1972, Wadsworth Jarrell at Soul of a Nation
The Broad Museum, Los Angeles

To understand how any society functions you must understand the relationship between the men and the women.

Angela Davis 

It's a rainy Sunday morning in Los Angeles, and I'm listening to Erik Satie because it goes well with rain, with melancholy and gentleness. Last night, Carl and I went out with our friends Jason and Leah. Jason is the co-host of our podcast Who Lives Like This?! and given the intimate conversations we've had together and with the wide array of guests on the show, I feel as if I have known him and his wife for far longer than two years. We met downtown at the Broad Museum to see Soul of a Nation, the work of 60 artists that explores "the historical and cultural influences that define their unique approaches to Black art both as a vehicle for change and an expression of self-exploration." (Artnet.com) It was a thrilling exhibit with a wealth of female artists, most of whom were new to me.

Carolyn Mims Lawrence, Black Children Keep Your Spirits Free

What a weird week of near paralyzing stupidity from the southern states and the Republican party and the religious right. I'm repelled, for once, by the snark of memes, by jokes and satire, my ordinary easy and dogged sense of humor replaced by rage. There's no hilarity in cruelty and oppression, in the stripping of women's rights, in the muscle of the white patriarchy and gross subversion of what it means to honor and protect life. Oliver donated to a woman's reproductive health clinic, unprompted by me. Henry said that he was thinking of volunteering as an escort at a health clinic, but he was afraid he wouldn't be able to control his own anger.

The word channel. Channel your anger, I told him, even as I have to channel my own.

Donate HERE.

* I imagine I have readers who agree with what's going on, and I have no conciliatory words for you. The following words are from an ultrasound technologist, though, a confirmed source -- perhaps you will be moved in your tiny minds.

Abortion issues

So here’s the thing:

This Alabama abortion ban is a big deal, in a very bad way. Ohio, Missouri, Georgia, Mississippi, Arkansas, Kentucky… I’m looking at you too, but we’re going to focus on Alabama. If you’ve been living under a rock, let me catch you up. Alabama Governor Kay Ivey just signed a total abortion ban into law, the most restrictive law in the United States. The law will ban abortion at every stage of pregnancy for every reason.

This is not OK, not reasonable, and definitely not acceptable.

If you don’t know me well, maybe you don’t know what I do for a living. I’m an ultrasound technologist. My colleagues and I look at babies in every stage of pregnancy every day. I also work in a high risk unit. My unit and I look at babies and mothers in varying states of mental and physical health. If you think an abortion ban sounds good, then I am a good person to ask about why it isn’t.

So, let me tell you:

• About the woman whose baby developed with no skull, and the brain just floating around. Her baby still had a heartbeat, and she would not be able to access abortion.

• About the woman whose baby has a rare chromosomal condition called T13. Her baby’s organs grew outside its body, and had a cleft palate so bad that there was no nose. She would not be able to access abortion.

• About the woman whose blood pressure is spiking so high that she passes out and is likely to stroke out before her baby is born. She would not be able to access abortion.

• About the woman with such a severe form of hemophilia that giving birth will probably be fatal to both her and the baby. She would not be able to access abortion.

• About the 13-year-old whose school isn’t allowed to teach her science-based sex-education, so she didn’t know how to prevent pregnancy or STIs, but whose body is not developed enough to carry to term without being damaged. She would not be able to access abortion.

• About the woman who was raped by a "friend" who wanted to “make sure she got home safely.” She would not be able to access abortion.

• About the woman who has PCOS, so only has periods every 3-4 months and can’t find a birth control that works for her. She would not be able to access abortion.

• About the woman whose abusive partner removed the condom without telling her (it’s called stealthing, and it happens more frequently than you’d think). She would not be able to access abortion.

• About the woman with the cornual ectopic pregnancy that isn’t reliably in the uterus, and could grow to a size that will kill her. She would not be able to access abortion.

• About the woman who has two kids she can barely feed already, and whose birth control just increased in price. She would not be able to access abortion.

• About the 18-year-old who just started college and is going to be the first graduate of the family if she can just stay in school. She would not be able to access abortion.

• About the woman whose IUD slipped slightly, and is now endangering both her and the pregnancy it was designed to prevent. She would not be able to access abortion.

• About the many, many, many women who just don’t want to be pregnant for reasons that are their own. Health issues, abusive relationships, financial issues, social issues. They would not be able to access abortion.

Some of these might sound like reasonable exceptions to you. And you would be correct. But no one should get to decide what happens with another person’s body, not even to save a life. You need written permission from a corpse before life-saving organs can be taken from them. You cannot be forced to donate blood, no matter how dire the situation. And no one else should get to decide what a woman does with her body -- end of story.

But it’s not the end of the story, is it? Because here’s the kicker: If you consider abortion to be a murder (and some people genuinely believe that!) then miscarriage can be second degree murder. And this is already happening all over the world -- El Salvador, Ecuador, and the U.S. Women are being jailed for miscarriages and stillbirths because they "might have done something to cause it." If you start down this path of jailing women and doctors for making healthcare decisions that affect no one but themselves, then you get women who don’t go to a doctor for a safe procedure, and instead order pills online or use whatever metal instruments they can find to end their own pregnancies. Women who are honestly experiencing a miscarriage (which is medically called a "spontaneous abortion," just FYI) will not go to their doctor for help. They will bleed out on their bathroom floors or die of septic shock. And I haven’t even talked about how this will disproportionately affect women of color, LGBTQA+ women, or trans men. This isn’t about the “sanctity of life” anymore. It’s about controlling women.

We can control ourselves.

A Poem for the Times

Ai Wei Wei, "Spouts"
from Life Cycle*

Good Bones

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.

Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine

in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,

a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways

I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least

fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative

estimate, though I keep this from my children.

For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.

For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,

sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world

is at least half terrible, and for every kind

stranger, there is one who would break you,

though I keep this from my children. I am trying

to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,

walking you through a real shithole, chirps on

about good bones: This place could be beautiful,

right? You could make this place beautiful.

 

Maggie Smith

*

"Spouts piles together thousands of antique teapot spouts dating as far back as the Song dynasty (960-1279). Following Ai's practice of repetition and multiplication, Spouts can be seen as a mass of mouths, a metaphor for the widespread yearning for freedom of speech despite its continuing restriction throughout many societies."

Making Art, Making Cake, Making Love

Let the sunshine in
Photographer: Carl Jackson 

I'm excited to tell you that I have three pieces in the Michigan Quarterly Review. It's a special themed issue titled "Caregiving." I'm in pretty darn august company, including Suzanne Edison and Heather Kirn Lanier. The review has categorized my work as "poetry," but between you and me, they are really prose poems or fragments that appear in my larger manuscript.  You can order a paper copy or download a PDF for $10. There's some amazing stuff in there, and let's hear it for supporting the work and art of caregivers. I recently sent about 180 pages to an editor. I have about 3/4 of the first draft revised and am determined to get the last quarter done by the end of the month. The publication in Michigan Quarterly Review is such an honor —I've probably sent out ten things over the last couple of years and have had all rejections, so this gives me that extra kick in the ass that I need.

Maybe I'll have a book published before I turn eighty but probably not before the Disunited States turns from plutocracy to autocracy.

I guess we have to just keep doing the work. Making art, making cake, making love.

In other news, my fellow co-host and friend Jason Lehmbeck and I had the most profound discussion with two women on the Who Lives Like This?! podcast. Jennifer Siedman and Blyth Taylor Lord spoke to us about their own families and lives, about palliative care, bereavement and the remarkable organization Courageous Parents Network.  Even if you aren't a caregiver, you must listen to it. I beg you to listen to it. Please share the link, too. Remember: we're making art, making cake, making love.

Here's the link.

What are you up to, Reader?

MQR 57|4 Fall 2018

Carried by Great Winds

There I am with what I called 2/3rds of the circus that I run. The work of my heart. Mother's Day came and went. The College Boy is home for the summer. The Brothers are back at it. Sophie had a rough weekend but is better today. I'm going through loads of paperwork and hustling for freelance jobs. I'm baking cakes. I'm answering calls and emails and appeals for help regarding medical cannabis. I'm working on an exciting caregiver project that I'll tell ya'll about soon. I'm reading novels and excited to start watching the Patrick Melrose mini-series. I read those brutal and beautiful books years ago and so look forward to seeing Benedict Cumberbatch playing the lead.

Here's a poem that my friend Noan sent me the day before Mother's Day. It's by Alison Luterman, and I think it's perfect:

Invisible Work

Because no one could ever praise me enough,
because I don't mean these poems only
but the unseen
unbelievable effort it takes to live
the life that goes on between them,
I think all the time about invisible work.
About the young mother on Welfare
I interviewed years ago,
who said, "It's hard.
You bring him to the park,
run rings around yourself keeping him safe,
cut hot dogs into bite-sized pieces fro dinner,
and there's no one
to say what a good job you're doing,
how you were patient and loving
for the thousandth time even though you had a headache."
And I, who am used to feeling sorry for myself
because I am lonely,
when all the while,
as the Chippewa poem says, I am being carried
by great winds across the sky,
thought of the invisible work that stitches up the world day and night,
the slow, unglamorous work of healing,
the way worms in the garden
tunnel ceaselessly so the earth can breathe
and bees ransack this world into being,
while owls and poets stalk shadows,
our loneliest labors under the moon.

There are mothers
for everything, and the sea
is a mother too,
whispering and whispering to us
long after we have stopped listening.
I stopped and let myself lean
a moment, against the blue
shoulder of the air. The work
of my heart
is the work of the world's heart.There is no other art. 

Allison Luterman



A long time ago one of my relatives, from whom I am now estranged, wrote a caustic comment on this blog, imploring me to get my head out of my ass and quit reciting poetry. Something like that. It stung then because there was a bit of truth in my head being up my ass. I felt a bit of the old shame and embarrassment at being bookish, having my head in the clouds, being book smart as opposed to street smart, pretentious instead of easy-going. 

Whatevs, as they say. The thing about being more than half a century old combined with living in the Trump era, is that you can shed all that shame and run for the hills with your poetry, bringing anyone willing along with you.

What else? I went to see an incredible interpretive theater thing called the theater is a blank page by Ann Hamilton and Siti Company at Royce Hall on the UCLA campus this past Saturday. I might as well have been raptured up right there, as it was a wild interactive theater performance of Virginia Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse, hands-down probably my favorite novel ever.* I don't even know how to describe the experience that my friend Tanya, Chris and I had attending this show, but it was restorative and mesmerizing, and we all left feeling -- again -- like we'd been raptured into a writer/reader/lover of words heaven. Check it out if it comes to your town. Here's a video that I found on the internets of part of the performance in another city:




Also, if you're not one of the more than 115 MILLION people who've already watched Childish Gambino's incredible performance piece This is America, you should. I've said it before, but in these messed-up, clusterfuckery times, art and corporeal politics can save us.













* My Top Ten Favorite Novels

1. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
2. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
3. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
4. Middlemarch by George Eliot
5. The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
6. Beloved by Toni Morrison
7. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
8. Love in the Name of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
9. Machine Dreams by Jayne Ann Phillips
10. Possession by A.S. Byatt

Who am I kidding? I didn't even list the children's books that should rank up there. It's virtually impossible for me to narrow down my favorite novels to ten, but those are the ones that come immediately to mind. What are yours, Reader?

She In There

This is what Sophie looks like when I take away even the tiniest bit of Onfi, the benzo that we've been trying to wean her from for four years. I'm still weaning the damn drug, a tiny, tiny bit at a time. I tinker each time, as well, with the various cannabis medicine products, and good things happen. Every day is different, though, and we continue to live this life as an experiment in progress.

Like my dear Dr. Jin said, so many years ago, She in there, she know.

I am sorry that I've left you readers high and dry, an occasional post once or twice a week. I haven't visited blogs or left comments, have been deleting newspapers and articles from my Inbox and have just generally avoided -- well -- everything. I've been down and blue and struggling a bit with I don't know what, but I feel it lifting a bit and hope that I will soon be back in writing daily order. I'm engaged in the world as I've always been, but man oh man every single day we wake up to that vile emperor with no clothes and his persistent presidency. It's a freak show and a clusterfuck, and like we say in the writing biz, you just can't make that shit up. I'm not underestimating its effect on my psyche -- nor should you if you're of the same persuasion. If it doesn't bother you or you're one of his supporters, well, I'd bless your heart if I felt any respect for you at all. May it all be over soon and not because some bomb is dropped on us for being such idiots. The thing is, though, that what's rent is rent, right? The veil has been pulled back. The core is rotten, isn't it? So much work to do and most of it is about coming to terms with our privilege and our whiteness.

I've been reading a lot lately -- have been able to dig in deep and get through to the end of novels and bask there glad and filled up. I recommend Lisa Halliday's Asymmetry, Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing, Terese Mailhot's Heartberries: A Memoir, Claire Dederer's Love and Trouble and An American Marriage by Tayari Jones. I had ordered a book from the library that finally came in, so many months after the request that I forgot where I'd read about it, but I really liked it -- a novel called Elbowing the Seducer by T. Gertler.

Oh, and then there's Fire Sermon by Jaime Quattro. I'm obsessed with her and her writing, her brain and mine.

What else?

I've tried to wander into museums, too --saw a beautiful David Hockney show at LACMA over the weekend and an amazing exhibit that included a multi-media show by Kara Walker at the Hammer last week. I'm so grateful for the sustenance of art -- of words and painting wrought, especially, from great struggle and suffering. Our lives are enriched even as our own troubles recede and perspectives enlarge.

Cambria

Oliver and I, along with my dear friend Cara and her two daughters, drove up to Cambria yesterday. We''re spending two nights here, just hanging out and doing -- basically -- nothing.

It occurred to me the other morning when I was talking on the phone to my friend Christy Shake that the only way to survive the life we live as caregivers to children with seizure disorders is to replenish ourselves in any way we can and to do so regularly.

I know this is a privileged thought -- I know that there are many people who are out there doing the work we're doing who don't have an opportunity to get away, who dig down continually to find strength to keep going. I know, too, that some people just won't get away or refuse to get away or believe that they can't get away because there's no one who takes better care of their child than they do.

I don't know what to say to that other than it's become about as necessary to me to get away as it is to keep doing what I'm doing. As necessary and in order to live, even. Cognizant of my privilege, I can tell you that it's only been very recently that I've "gotten away" and not felt guilty about it or worried that something very bad is going to happen to Sophie. I'm going to say those things without judgement or explanation and will ask you not to as well. Tell me anything, that is.

Caregivers of severely disabled children, especially those who've been doing it for decades, know some things and we know them deep. Things haven't gotten easier even as I've learned how to dissociate and then come back. I don't know the word acceptance even as I surrender. The word toll. Taken.

There's everyone and then there's us.

Three things:

The cumulative years
The present
The projection into the future

I feel joy in my core even as that deepest part is dark. Memory.


I had a long conversation with an Italian artist in his studio amongst sculpture and paintings. Angels and toreadors, winged things, dancers and an architect, the suggestion of things broken and things free. Sophie in all of it, as was Carl and his birds. The words wing and soar. I'm most myself, both consumed and generative, in art.

Nature, too. Respite. Respire.

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew, the poet Jack Gilbert wrote.

"also, that you have enough"

I went to an extraordinary exhibit at LACMA this afternoon with a few close friends.

Did you know that Chagall designed costumes for operas and ballets?

Honestly, this was one of the most extraordinary art exhibits I've ever seen -- just a few rooms of drawings, paintings and sketches and probably around twenty costumes, but each one practically gave me a case of Stendhal Syndrome. Do you know about Stendhal Syndrome? I saw someone fall down as if dead right by Michelangelo's David in the Accademia in Florence back in the last century. It's a thing, really. Look it up or click on the link I just gave you. Granted, I was feeling strung out when I decided to run over to the museum and join my friends. It's just everything lately -- and I'm doing weird stuff since I turned 54, like losing things and leaving my debit card at the post office. Like my mother always said, "I'm glad my head is connected to my neck, because otherwise it would have spun off." Chagall's joy and wonder in music and color and fabric and beauty and whimsy leaped out of every piece and just filled me with joy again.

And then there's the natural world. I'm reading an extraordinary book about landscape and words. The first chapter is called The Word-Hoard. Don't you love that? The book is called Landmarks by Robert MacFarlane. It, like Chagall's costumes and drawings, is joyous. Here are the first two sentences:

This is a book about the power of language - strong style, single words - to shape our sense of place. It is a field guide to literature I love, and it is a word-hoard of the astonishing lexis for landscape that exists in the comprision of islands, rivers, strands, fells, lochs, cities, towns, corries, hedgerows, fields and edgelands uneasily known as Britain and Ireland.

I don't know how many of ya'll out there are lovers of word-hoards, but get thee to this book if you are at all simpatico.

Check out that bamboo that lines the pathways to part of LACMA! That's natural!

Here's a close-up:

Is that not wild?

Why am I asking rhetorical questions?

The universe is abundant.

Here's a poem:


What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade


Mrs. Nelson explained how to stand still and listen
to the wind, how to find meaning in pumping gas,

how peeling potatoes can be a form of prayer. She took
questions on how not to feel lost in the dark.

After lunch she distributed worksheets
that covered ways to remember your grandfather’s

voice. Then the class discussed falling asleep
without feeling you had forgotten to do something else—

something important—and how to believe
the house you wake in is your home. This prompted

Mrs. Nelson to draw a chalkboard diagram detailing
how to chant the Psalms during cigarette breaks,

and how not to squirm for sound when your own thoughts
are all you hear; also, that you have enough.

The English lesson was that I am
is a complete sentence.

And just before the afternoon bell, she made the math equation
look easy. The one that proves that hundreds of questions,

and feeling cold, and all those nights spent looking
for whatever it was you lost, and one person

add up to something.

Brad Aaron Modlin
(lifted from an OnBeing newsletter)













P.S. If I disappear from these parts, it's because I stole the dress that The Queen of the Night wore in The Magic Flute that's in that first photo. I'm going to get married in it and retire somewhere south of the Disunited States. Don't tell anyone.

Monterey Breach: A Drone Short Film

These two have been friends since preschool.

Once upon a time, a little boy named Oliver made a whole lot of money selling lemonade on the corner of our street. He worked diligently and saved nearly all of it and began bugging his mother about spending that money, all at once, on a drone. His mother declined because that's a ridiculous thing to spend money on and you need to save that for college until, years later, it was clear that Oliver actually did want a drone and intended to do great things with it. It's my money, Oliver said. You're right, she said with a sigh. He bought the drone.

Oliver and Joe have been making incredibly inventive films for years. Oliver is game for acting and doing the bidding of Joe who is a preternaturally talented filmmaker and editor. You really can't believe how good Joe is until you see his stuff.

The Bird Photographer took Oliver up to Monterey this week to do a little drone photography and some whale watching. I'm not going to say how jealous I am (for obvious reasons), but Oliver -- on his first real whale-watching trip -- saw just about everything a person could dream of seeing on a whale-watching trip. Breaching whales, lunge feeding,  Great White sharks, dolphins, etc. etc. I have yet to see a whale breach, and I've gone out about eight times which is privilege enough. I just love this state I've adopted as my home. It is truly glorious, and I'm so glad that my children are California-bred.

Oliver and Joe made this short film that they titled Monterey Breach: A Short Drone Film. It blew my mind so much that I think I'm going to have to lie about how I tried to get Oliver to buy that thing for years because I just knew he was going to make something great of himself with it. I told Joe that when he's a famous filmmaker, I'm going to tell everyone that he made short films with Oliver in my little bungalow long ago.

Make it full screen, turn up the volume and be wowed:

and she shouted, "Bravo!"

Girl on the Flying Trapeze, 1936 Julia Thecla

her ethereal and sensuous portrayal of dreams, fairytales, and planetary realms were extraordinary explorations of alternative social orders.

DePaul University Art Museum, describing Julia Thecla 

I watched Wings of Desire the other night on a bed in a dark hotel room for the thousandth time, had forgotten the black and white film turning to color every now and then. We are black and white yet both see color, now and then, but this was after and one of us dreamt (him) and the other knew every word (her). Now and then. The German faces, the wide smile, the tilted head, the closed eyes. There's something spiritual in the library's murmurs, the way the angels walk among books, heads bowed over them. Wings on a bronze statue, a wall that divides Berlin. An angel lays his head on the man's shoulder, yet the man jumps over anyway and the angel screams. The desire for life. The woman on the flying trapeze, how later she shrugs out of her robe, her back, sinuous. The desire for love, to love. Even before I swung above the crowd myself, then, I was told you've an amazing back. I've a memory like a trap. I remember every word. You've an amazing back, he said. Now. Twice I've been told, then and now.

This morning Sophie groaned in her sleep before dawn, and I ran into her while she seized. It was a violent one and I was smacked in the face by one of her arms. I bent over her, gathering the limbs, what flies. I've walked the rope and swung on the trapeze, so many little people below. My back is strong. It never hurts. I don't feel gentle toward the situation in some moments. I don't feel gentle toward her. It's where I leave off and she begins and there's a space there filled with nothing. When I gathered her in my arms, limp now (then), a pieta, I did cry. And cry. And cry. And cry. She was spent and it cost me tears which are, in comparison, nothing.

The dog barked once and a package was thrown through the slot of the front door, made a thump. I left Sophie to go and pick it up, a small but heavy box from Seattle. Inside, a heavy book, The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, translated by Judith Hemschemeyer. A pink Post-it over the crook of the poet's nose:

Dearest Adorable --
Reach for this
volume when
you most need
to counteract
the crazy.

❤️️  Leslie  xo

Yes, I took it as sign.
The signified and the signifier.

I seem to myself, as in a dream,
An accidental guest in this dreadful body. (Anna Akhmatova)

Several hours later, with no prompt from me, I received a picture of a painting on my phone, a girl on a trapeze, awkward yet strong.

I am thinking of you, she said (Tanya, my friend, not the girl). I asked her (Tanya, not the girl), Who painted this? 

Julia Thecla, Tanya said, I love her. 

Thecla is a forgotten Chicago painter of the 1930s and 1940s, in the school of magical realism. I did not know her.

Magical realism, a literary genre to which I have been drawn (then) -- Marquez, Borgia, Allende -- is also a genre of art, I learn (now). There are details (Sophie's groan, her bed, the seizure, her arms, my back, my tears, her limp body) that are real and then something strange, unbelievable  (the thump, the package, the Akhmatova, the note, the painting, the girl on the trapeze, ), through a hole in the door, via air.

I fly through the air with the greatest of ease

The 4004th Post

I think today is International Astronomy Day or something, and yesterday I went downtown with three friends to visit the Mirrored Infinity Room at the Broad. You could go in, only two at a time, for only 45 seconds. Gazillions of lights hung over water like stars.You stood on a platform and looked at your reflection in the many mirrors. It was cool, but we agreed that the pictures were actually better than the experience. There just wasn't enough time to really feel the magic. When I walked out, I remarked that it was what I imagined death to be -- some kind of immediate and quick merging with the stars. At least that's what I hope it'll be.

So, this is my 4004th post. How weird is that? I wish I had someone who would go through all of them and pull out the significant ones, if any. I know the key to the organization of my book is somewhere in there, but the task seems formidable. Anyone?

Anyone?

Sophie continues to recover from her oral surgery on Tuesday. She had minimal swelling and no ice was used. I think it was the CBD. It's a powerful anti-inflammatory. I'm feeling a bit drained from the experience, but it's not about me, is it? Speaking of, I got a dress-down from someone on Facebook. I had objected to her use of the word "retarded" in her rant against Elizabeth Warren detractors. While I agreed with her rant, I was bummed that she'd used the word "retarded" and said so. She defended it. I wrote her a private message explaining why it's so awful. She wrote me back and was very angry with me. She said a lot of things that I've been thinking about, some true and others just plain vituperative.

These things drain me, too, but once you're drained you're empty and can find things to fill you back up.

I can't get this poem by W.S. Merwin out of my head today:

I Live Up Here

I live up here

And a little bit to the left

And I go down only

For the accidents and then

Never a moment too soon

Just the same it's a life it's plenty

The stairs the petals she loves me

Every time

Nothing has changed

Oh down there down there

Every time

The glass knights lie by their gloves of blood

In the pans of the scales the helmets

Brim over with water

It's perfectly fair

The pavements are dealt out the dice

Every moment arrive somewhere

You can hear the hearses getting lost in lungs

Their bells stalling

And then silence comes with the plate and I

Give what I can

Feeling It's worth it

For I see

What my votes the mice are accomplishing

And I know I'm free

This is how I live

Up here and simply

Others do otherwise

Maybe

I've read it about ten times today and gotten something new out of it each time. 

Disney Hall, seen from The Broad

I can't stop listening to this old song:

4,004 posts. 

Art, poetry, music. 

This is how I live. Up here and simply. Just give me one thing that I can hold onto. Others do otherwise maybe.

Silence in Talk

Le Silence, 1900
Odilon Redon

to J.

I first saw the Symbolist painter Odilon Redon's work Le Silence at a museum somewhere on the coast of France during the summer of 1985 when I was backpacking through by myself. Yes, by myself for three weeks. I don't think I spoke ten words during that time, and it was glorious. The painting knocked me flat. I've called upon the peace of it, in my mind, hundreds of times since and most recently today after an exchange with a beautiful human being.

Thank you, J. And yes:

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

Pablo Picasso

Sunday Balls

I'm not in the mood to write, again. So I'll just post some pictures I took today at MacArthur Park, near downtown. They're of an art installation -- thousands of giant painted beach balls floating in the pond. You can read about the project here, since I don't feel like typing out what it's all about.

The park looks pretty dismal -- it's in a downtrodden part of town, everything is dead because of the drought, and everywhere I walked smelled like piss and pot, to tell you the truth. But the spheres were crazy and wonderful, lifting the whole place up. I had a brief fantasy about wading out into the middle of them like a despairing, dark-haired Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita, but instead rolled Sophie's wheelchair to the edge of the water, shoved the brake on and stood for a while to just watch the spheres bobbing. Sophie seemed to enjoy it as well, so that's good. My guilt in not providing enough stimulation for her was allayed at least for the hour or so that we walked around.

Reader, what did you do today?

Back in the Saddle and Some Junk Dada

Oliver, Sophie and I went to LACMA today to see the Noah Purifoy exhibit, Junk Dada. Purifoy is a little known African American artist who was one of the founding directors of the Watts Towers Art Center in Los Angeles. After the 1965 Watts rebellion, he helped to create a body of sculpture with charred debris from the fires. His strategy was to use materials at hand and art as a tool for social change. He worked for 20 years after the rebellion, after which he relocated to the Mojave Desert and spent his final 15 years creating large-scale installations out there. I've never been to Joshua Tree to see them, but the three of us found this exhibit of some of his work engrossing and wild.

Here are a few more pictures:

After the museum we ate some Thai food from one of the many food trucks that lie along Wilshire Blvd. It was hot out, and Sophie hasn't been doing too well the last couple of days. She is on the third week of the latest withdrawal of her benzo, so between the heat and that, I think I know why she had so many big seizures. I told a friend that today was the first day since Hedgebrook that I felt back in the saddle. It was inevitable. When we finished eating, Oliver pushed Sophie's wheelchair while I held her arm, and we all crossed Wilshire Blvd to get back to our car. Right in the middle of the intersection, Sophie began to seize, and I literally had to drag her out of the street and up onto the sidewalk. While seizing. A couple of people asked if they could help, but I said, That's ok, we've got it. And we did have it. Oliver balanced his leftover spicy ramen in a container and maneuvered the wheelchair behind Sophie so that I could position her in it, even as I balanced my Thai coffee and felt my sunglasses slipping off my sweaty nose. I had to hold her jerking legs and keep her from slipping out of the chair and into the dank water along the curb, and I'll admit that the three weeks away from It All didn't do anything to assuage my normal back in the saddle feelings of tempered despair. I never get used to it. At some point, as we made our way back across the street, Oliver said, Well that was fun, and he didn't mean it.

Later, I laughed with some of my comrades over a headline and article that appeared on US News and World Report's health page. Epilepsy Is No Longer a Mystery, it said, so at first I thought it was something from The Onion. It wasn't. Good Lord. I left a few words on each of the sites that had posted the article on Facebook, and let's just say I disagreed. I noted that despite the fact that we all get to see photos of Pluto's surface on our laptops, we are still drugging people with epilepsy up the wazoo or removing large chunks of their brains and filling them up with spinal fluid, and my daughter is seizing for the millionth time for no apparent reason in the middle of Wilshire Blvd. 

Epilepsy is still a mystery, and from my position in this damn saddle, I still see a hell of a lot of desolation.