On Hours and Identity

I have no idea why it is taking me so long to write this post, which I started back well before Christmas. Perhaps it is because I have been working on a lot of drawings. That prioritizing will make more sense in what I believe will be the last few paragraphs of this ramble.

OK, you are meeting some folks for the first time. The specifics of the situation are largely irrelevant. It can be anything, social, professional, whatever. You choose what makes sense in your life. Inevitably someone will turn to you and say, “So (insert your name here ____________) what do you do?”

For most of my life - at least for the last 45 years - that was an easy question, “I teach communication at NC State University.” Nowadays, it is a far more nuanced issue.  The cheap and easy way out is to simply say, “I’m retired.” Chuckle, and change the subject, usually with “How about you?”  The clever adversary will return the volley with “Me too.” Then the two of you stare at each other, playing a swift game of Sherlock Holmes. Neither of you come up with “I can tell by the callouses on the fingers of your left hand that you play a stringed instrument, and the flakes of rosin under the fingernails on the right hand would suggest the violin, or perhaps a cello? The fact that you are wearing formal wear to a barbecue would rule out bluegrass fiddle.”  So we may find ourselves stuck with “How about those (insert the name of some college or professional sports team from the immediate neighborhood here.) _________?” The problem with this ploy is twofold: first is that your new acquaintance is an ardent fan of said team and launches into a long a intricate description of the strengths and weaknesses of the Alleycats or whomever, or, two, s/he simply replies “I don’t really follow (insert name of the sport you had chosen here) __________.”

To which you glibly respond, glancing over her/his shoulder, “Oh, there is (insert any name that comes to mind here) _______. I promised him/her/them I would give him/her/them the name of my therapist. I must rush over and tell them before I forget it. Lovely meeting you.”

You see why it was so much easier when you had an occupation that would at least provide a pigeonhole into which you could be neatly stuffed. A quick tip, don’t lie about your profession. This can lead to the dreaded “me too briar patch” - “You’re a forensic mortician, too!? Where did you train?” “Nairobi!?” “Me too! Is that terrible commissary cook still there? The short one who drank so much and put ghost peppers in the coleslaw?” And so on.

But I have been thinking, who do we become when retirement robs us of our convenient pigeonhole? The pigeonhole isn’t simply a conversational convenience, it runs deeper than that. It pokes at our existential “me.” Who am I, and how have I answered the deceptively simple seeming question, “And what do you do?” I came to realize that who we are is most clearly identified by what we spend the majority of our time doing. I mean other than sleeping, or wishing we were sleeping.  Now, I realize that such an assertion does, in many ways, have as many holes as the proverbial Swiss cheese. I mean how many of us actually spend the majority of our waking hours in the activity that we would choose to define us? Before I blush and raise my hand, I need to confess to the significant stretch of time when I - pretty much seriously - believed that a degree in theater would lead to Broadway or the silver screen, I spent most of my time in activities that would fail to really define me. So, that "reality" having failed to materialize, my resultant compromises probably worked out for the best. I really don’t think anyone looks good in ultra-high def. But I digress, let me back up.

I won’t bore you with the years for which my memories are highly suspect and I’ll jump straight to high school. And a bit of a proviso here. The notion that our identity is most clearly defined by how we spend the majority of our time is obviously compromised by the extent to which we have control over our time. So I’m going to suggest that we try to visualize “our time” as a pie chart which we probably first did encounter in high school. If I can steal an example, I’ll stick it in here.

This kind of pie chart let’s us get a better grip on how we really spend time and what portions of a “normal day” are really our own and what portions are controlled by other factors.  A few general assumptions:

Sleep. This is a real biggy, and one that seems incredibly variable. Geniuses seem to provide no guidance. Einstein pursued 10 hours a night,  DaVinci, 5 and those were broken up into cat naps ranging from 20 minutes or so to a couple hours. So our pie chart would simply record what we do - not some mythical “right” amount of sleep.

Work. Another major slice of the pie, and one that bounces around a lot in different times in our life. I guess I think of it as our job, employment, and for much of our lives this becomes the pigeonhole into which others are prone to stick us. “I’m a senior at Treadwell Community College.” “I’m the CEO of Megabucks Marketing.” Anywhere in there. Once we take care of, and evaluate, those two big slices of the pie, over which we often have little day-to-day control (can we all say “COVID?), we can begin to look at some interesting smaller slices.

It is not surprising that I introduce this pie chart idea just as I turn my attention to high school - an environment that we all, to varying degrees, acknowledge is an environment over which we had little, if any, control. You went or you suffered the consequences. That being said I was incredibly fortunate to attend high school at Springfield (Ohio) North High School from 1965 to 1967 - or thereabouts.  During that span of time we had pretty forgettable athletic teams and excellent music and drama departments. John Legend was a 15 year-old grad in 1990. OK, so about a quarter of a century after my class left, and, no we never met, but still. Anyhow, the time that I had control of in high school (which is part of the “work” slice for most high school kids) was spent almost entirely in projects centered in the music and drama departments. I was active in other extra curricular activities but managed to bend those responsibilities to choir, glee club, competitive choral activities, and every play and other drama events I could weasel my way into. Point is this - just about all the high school hours over which I had control were spent on theater and music.

I’m going to stick an emerging pie piece in here. It seems random, but while I didn’t realize it at the time, it would later become important. I was lucky, again, to have been a student - from junior high school through my Ph.D program - before tablet computers were invented. Yet during those years you were supposed to be taking notes, with pen or pencil on paper. I’m mean there is only so much can one “notate” from any lecture - but you need to keep the old writing implement moving to indicate interest and attention. So you doodle. Some might call it drawing. But for me doodling is a more accurate assessment.

This pattern - including the doodling - continued once I went to college. The actual time I controlled in college increased. Naturally I had to find time for required courses, but I could shift those to fit around the courses in my major, theatre.  Then there were my rehearsal times, performance times, post rehearsal bull sessions with the director over late night meals. Taken all together those created a significant slice of the pie, but they were elements I had chosen. So this was the pie I chose to eat, and which expanded my pigeonhole - I am a theater major at Kalamazoo College.

Upon leaving Kalamazoo College, and simultaneously realizing Hollywood wasn't in my future, I began my graduate school career during which the primary pieces of the pie I controlled were studying and "grad-student-type" teaching creating very similar pigeonholes: "I'm a graduate student at _____." "I teach communication at ______." And while I didn't realize it at the time, that pigeonhole "I teach communication/media/technology at ______" - with the situational inclusions of "I'm Andrea/Emily's father", or "I'm Susan/Christine's husband" - would come to define my life for the next 50 or so years. They were not always fully inclusive or descriptive pigeonholes, but comfortable enough for most instances.

And now here I am at the interesting age of 3 score and a baker’s dozen age of 73, and I have a come to pretty good idea how to respond to the question “What do you do?” Which really means who are? What pigeonhole can I put you in?

I am, in descending order an artist/essayist/occasional poet. Now remember this moniker is a purely numeric identity. Other than sleeping, I spend more hours drawing than any other activity. After that I spend more hours writing essays that appear on the Wall, and within those writing hours are poems, some of which, but not all, eventually end up on the Wall.

I should also mention that the first two, drawing and writing, are tightly intertwined.  While drawing I usually listen to music - often to “music without words” classical or some other instrumental variety. This leaves much of my consciousness free to meander around thinking about ideas I might explore on the Wall. Conversely, while jotting down sentences or poems consciously destined for the Wall I often flash on images, photos, and whatnot that may find life as drawings. My nightly meditation sessions often call up images, thoughts, etc., that may find life in either words or drawings.

It is important to note that if I made a pie chart of the big three, even excluding sleep, the three would, in all likelihood, not encompass the whole pie. There are lots of little pieces that wolf down pie. Like walking, a bit of tube watching, watching videos on Curiosity Stream, doing dishes, playing with Vito and feeding Vito, grocery shopping, loading the dishwasher, unloading the dishwasher, FaceTiming or texting , heading down in Big Chicago, for plays, museums, etc., all those little things you thought you might retire from but either can’t or don’t want to leave behind.

Furthermore, and actually most importantly, are the beliefs and the philosophy that guide the construction of the writings and drawings that inform the Big Three. They all need to reflect, manifest, support or clarify the world view that had always been flitting around in my head but really began to crystallize with writing of The God Chord: Physics in the Landscape of the Heart back in the mid-to-late 1990s. Although that book never presents the Distilled Harmony theory, my occasional scanning of early drafts reveals the first suggestions of the quartet that will eventually come to comprise Distilled Harmony; Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity, and Oppose Harm.

Hence, in answer to the question, "So what do you do?" I should respond "I'm an artist/essayist/occasional poet." to which the questioner usually responds with one of these: a) A blank stare. b) "That's interesting. I'm a __________", or c) Oh, "there's __________. I promised s/he them I would give them the name of my therapist. Must run. Nice meeting you."

But, truth be told I usually say, "I'm retired. You?"

 

Schrag Wall PPP: Roll out the Barrel

 The original photograph was taken at Colonial Williamsburg. The locale is a workshop that made and repaired both barrels and wagon wheels.

Looks fuzzy - I'll try to mess around and send a better image.

As promised - Twin 1

 Both images are 38x14. And I forgot to mention PPP stands for Ping Pong Painting because the images sort of “ping pong” back and forth between a computer, a graphics tablet and my drawing table. Here is Twin 1 again:

SchragWall PPP Twin2

 A quick note since we have a few new folks joining us over the holidays, as well as some we have mutually rediscovered.

A post designated 2nd ed., like the recent “Regrets, I’ve had a Few,” post is a “re-post” from the early days of The Wall I have encountered in the course of yet another attempt to put The Wall into book form.

A post designated PPP (like this one) stands for Ping Pong Painting because the image began life as one of my photographs, then gets pulled into Photoshop where I white out the spaces that will make room for the final hand drawn and colored designs. That version of the file is printed out and I do the drawing and coloring of the designs by hand.

If you have any questions just drop me a note at robert.schrag@gmail.com.

Now for today’s post. It is called Twin 2 because you have already seen Twin 1.  I “twin” an image by printing out 2 copies of the image in the “image with blanks where the designs and coloring will be” stage. And then I create two versions of the image using that template. I will resend Twin 1 later. I try to keep to one image per post since it has been my experience that you get a higher resolution image that way which helps if you click on the image and your device pops it out into some graphics application. So Twin2:

Regrets, I’ve Had a Few, 2nd edition. Circa 9/04/2004

 Regrets, I’ve had a few .  .  .  9.02.04

 

OK, it’s true.  I regret that I let Girlfriend hold the water bill.

 

It all comes, of course, from driving a pick-up truck.  Friends assert that I have changed since I traded the Mercedes in for the Ford Ranger.  I’ll admit that I do wear my boots more often these days, and there is something about the side of a pick-up that just begs to be leaned against.  You find yourself saying, “Shucks,” and wondering if it will rain.  But my regret stems from a whole other truck syndrome.  Take a look around and you’ll discover that guys who drive pick-up trucks usually have their girlfriend sitting next to them.  When they cruise through the drive-in at MacDonald’s they never keep the bag themselves – they hand it to their girlfriend.  When they pull up to a tollbooth, they never rummage around for change in the center console; right, girlfriend hands it to them.  Stopped in traffic at the stadium heading for a tailgate party?  Girlfriend hands you a beer.

 

Here’s the problem.  I don’t have a girlfriend.  I had to do all that stuff myself.  It was really bugging me.  So I did the only logical thing.  Right, I went to Wal-Mart and bought a big Tupperware container that fits snugly over on the other front seat.  I call it “Girlfriend,” an affectation I find either droll or pathetic depending upon my current feelings about life.  Now in the evening when I stop down at the end of the drive to get the mail, I slide back into the cab and toss it over to “Girlfriend” as I head on up to the house.  Girlfriend wouldn’t know liberation if it came up and snapped her cute little plastic lid.  She never says, “Hold your own mail you chauvinistic urban trucker wanna be!”  That’s a good thing.  Who wants to listen to that at the end of a long day? 

 

On the other hand, total passivity isn’t all that cool either.  Girlfriend never volunteers, “Hey, hon, this looks important.  Maybe you ought to check it out.”  I mean, it’s a big plastic container for God’s sake.  So the mail tends to stack up there in Girlfriend.  I was cleaning her out this morning when I came across the water bill – under two CDs and an empty Altoids tin.  Girlfriend isn’t very big on neatness.  Problem is, it was due a couple of days ago, and it carried a “new hook-up charge” that wasn’t supposed to be there.  Bummer.  “Girlfriend! Why didn’t you show me this?”

 

She just sat there silently.  Point taken.  It wasn’t Girlfriend’s fault.  It was mine.  I shouldn’t have just left the mail there.  I regret doing it.  But the interesting thing was that regret followed me all through the morning.  It wouldn’t let go.  I mean I knew what I had to do.  Write the check for the legitimate charge and start the bureaucratic hassle of contesting the hook-up fee.  But I couldn’t shake the regret.  It rode along with us; me looking for a parking place and Girlfriend sulking over by her door.  That’s when I began to think about regret as an emotion, as a feeling.

 

I was overwhelmed by the mental image of an abandoned train station.  Night winds out in the middle of nowhere, high plains in winter, tumbleweeds and snowdrifts.  A single lamp flickers behind a cracked window, vainly struggling to hold the cold away.  An ancient engine is hooked to a couple of tired cars, no coal, no will to move.  Regret is a debilitating emotion.  Regret forces us to constantly relive events we freely acknowledge as flawed.  Regret chains us to the past.

 

Life has no rewind button.  The past is over.  Acknowledge it.  Learn from it.  Leave it behind.  Plan for a wiser future, and live that better tomorrow in every moment of your present.

 

“Right, Girlfriend?”

 

“Right, hon.”

Falling Awake

It is dichotomy. I should be quite clear about that right here at the beginning.  “Falling asleep,” going from consciousness to “un-,”  is very often difficult for me. I wish it were not so. “Falling awake,” leaving my dreamworld and returning to waking, is often relentless and able to resist all my conscious efforts to remain asleep. There, now I think we can go on.

Sleeping has always been one of my favorite activities. Well, OK,  it isn’t really the sleeping that I find entertaining, it is the dreaming. The places you go, the people you meet, the adventures you have! - It is all just amazing! Still, I imagine there are probably as may different different explanations and interpretations of dreams as there are dreamers.  Freud got his hand in early, so a fair number of folks followed the leads he set forth in his landmark book The Interpretation of Dreams, back in 1899.  The read is a bit of a slough. I have a kind of War and Peace relationship with it.  Meaning I distinctly remember starting it several times, but have no clear memory of ever having finished it. Still, I have read about it so often that the illusion that I actually read it could easily have crept in. But that is really beside the point since whatever I “know” about Freud’s take on dreams, read or imagined, doesn’t really align with mine. His seems a little too open to idiosyncratic interpretation.

For example, the guy who originally hired me at NC State back in 1980 was a sweetheart of a guy.  Great big guy, an ex-football player,  played offensive line in college. We would have faculty meetings at his house, after all there were only 8 or 9 of us.  The meetings took place mostly in the kitchen where he would serve homemade pasta with fantastic sauce. His wife was equally welcoming and an amazingly talented watercolorist. Sadly, he died relatively young, and yeah, the idea of pasta and football does come to mind. But that is not the point. 

I mentioned that his wife, Annette, was an excellent artist. Well, she was also one in the arts community who did more than her part to put the “New” in “New Age.”  One manifestation of this mindset was her report that she knew that whenever she dreamed of red meat, she was really dreaming about her deceased husband, who had a message for her. No doubt Freud could get great mileage out of this dream. I could not, and I mention it primarily to discourage you from letting Freud creep into our current look at my affection for dreams.  So let me offer some insights into the dreamworld that I find so attractive.

First, life in my dreamworld is almost always new and unique.  I rarely, if ever, dream about anybody that I actually know. There are people in my dreams, obviously people who are precious to me, and who are tightly woven into my life. But their faces are rather indistinct. Sort of my life before lasik. Upon waking I will try to recall who was in the dream. Maybe her? Maybe him? A bit of frustration here as I often wake, as I’m sure many of us do, just prior to some major reveal in the dream plot.

The uncertainty continues through a consideration of locale.  I do occasionally dream about specific places where I have lived.  And a  recurring locus seems to be meetings in large hotels or conference centers where our professional conferences were held. Not a specific one, but locales in that genre.  Often I am lost.  Yeah, yeah I know, why not be lost if I’ve never been here before.  Still, I am supposed to go somewhere to meet someone or deliver a paper. But I’m not exactly sure who, or where or when. Interestingly, I am not stressed as I wander, lost, through these large venues. I would be in “real life.” But these spaces often unfold in scenic places. Interestingly, Venice gets a lot of “recognizable attention,” as do some other pleasant, but unknown, locales. I need to point out that my dreams are, with only a few rare exceptions, pleasant, fun, and fulfilling. And I think that is central to why I object to “falling awake.”  It seems especially unfair as I often have such trouble “falling asleep.”

Recently I have been encountering a new genre of dreams. I call them “flash dreams.”  They seem to occur rather exclusively after napping, before returning to the obligations and activities that may have been instrumental in my declaring: It’s nap time!  Anyhow, it feels like they cram an incredible amount of content into a very short period of semiconscious time, mere seconds to spin out most of a normal “dream script.”  Furthermore they can occur sequentially - that is really the wrong word. Sequentially might be taken to mean that each dream would be narratively related to the dreams that preceded and followed it.  That isn’t really the case.  “Flash dreams,” as I conceive of them, can “flash” by quickly, back-to-back-to-back-to-back one right after another, but seemingly having no narrative relationship to one another. Though I suppose a Freudian could finagle one out of them. 

Perhaps I ought to be hooked up to an EEG machine before claiming these various characteristics for a phenomenon that may be unique to me.  Yet, the experiences of these “flash dreams” are, to date, unfailing positive, and in one recent example, incredibly long-lived. I believe I have mentioned that, by and large, I do not remember dreams unless I can recount them to someone soon after waking, and even then I am not sure if I am remembering the dream itself or my initial reporting of it.

Anyway in a recent “flash dream” - days ago and I still remember it! - I was running along a path in the Glen Helen Nature Preserve in Yellow Springs, Ohio, a place I used to hang out in my high school days. [Do drop me a line if you know where I am talking about, because you would have to be someone I would be delighted to hear from!].  So, like I said, I’m running along a path in Glen Helen. I can hear the rush of the water fall that I know is just up around the bend. It is screened now by lush summer growth thick enough to muffle bird calls and turn the afternoon daylight to a dappled green. I will come out in the thickets above the falls where I can soften my tread and peek out and see if I am alone. I may have heard voices. I arrive in the thicket, the falls are louder now. I reach out to part the branches and — the dream ends.

Ordinarily I would find this an act of neurological high treason. How could my brain do that to me!?  But for some reason flash dreams end more gently, as though they too seek to Foster Harmony and Enable Beauty.  Flash dreams end like the finale of a fireworks display. They light up the sky for a glorious moment of sight and sound, only to then fade slowly out, carving pastel trails down into black velvet.

Shake It Up Baby!

OK, so my hands shake a little. I wish I could blame it on easing into year 73, but it has been with me for as long as I can remember. Never thought about it. The only time it had any impact on my life was in my years doing theater and I had to do some makeup around my eyes. I don’t know how women do that! I had to go with a two-handed grip, right hand on the brush, left holding the right steady, and I still worried about poking my eye out! Then I went up to New York in 1990 to do a spot on Good Morning, America! when Taming the Wild Tube came out, and somebody else did my makeup!! Whoa, was that cool!

But unfortunately there were several other areas in my life when the two-handed option didn’t work, and most had to do with my forays into the field of music. I will not bore you with the painful details of each, but briefly:

Piano. Fueled no doubt by my mother’s ability to sight read on the instrument. My buddy Dan and I drove our piano teacher, poor Mrs. Stupp to distraction. Our piano music kept blowing out of our bike baskets when we left our lessons to ride over to the Milkstore to get milkshakes. Remember this was late 1950s, no fancy “saddlebags,” just wire baskets. And how could you practice without music? Our lack of progress amazed one and all.

Guitar. Fast forward to high school and the age of folk music and Hootenanny. I believe I mastered Michael Row the Boat Ashore and Greensleeves. Three chords, strumming, no picking.

Saxophone. Many years passed between my guitar gathering dust in one closet or another and my fling with the saxophone. I had finished my PhD and secured my first tenure-track teaching position in the wilds of Stevens Point, Wisconsin. Brrrrrrr. Another story for another time. Anyhow I figured I had “come of age,” by some measure or another and it was time to free my inner Eddie Harris. So I rented a saxophone - the only fleeting bit of sanity in this sad saga - and signed up for lessons. My first lesson consisted mainly of how to hold the sax, drooling on the reed, and stuff like that. No actual blowing into the instrument. I headed home with a throbbing version of “Get on Down” playing in my head. I arrived home. Set up the music stand, figured the reed was still soggy enough, and held the sax as instructed and -- blew into the instrument. I believe the moment is no longer listed as a cold case by the Stevens Point PD, as no evidence was ever recovered supporting the neighbor’s contention that someone or something had been terribly dismembered that day in my apartment. I gazed sadly at my shiny toy. Gently put it back in its case, and drove to the music store, returned the sax, and reclaimed the unused balance of my rental fee.

It was then that I realized that the major problem stemmed from the fact, in addition to my minor shakes, my right hand rarely had any idea what my left hand was doing, and vice-versa. Armed with that insight I have managed to avoid activities that required any sort of extended dual-handed consciousness.  I did briefly master three-ball juggling in a college production of The Madwoman of Chaillot.  I think it was fear of failure that made that possible.

But a new issue has surfaced - and it is completely my fault. I have shared a number of my drawings with you here on the Wall. But I always tried to post a picture of the whole image as completed, or nearly so. That masks the current issue. Below is pic of a portion of the image I am currently working on. As you can see I have committed myself to adding color to portions of the image, dots, little squares, etc., that are a millimeter or so in diameter. OK, OK. I am resigned to the time this adds to completing the image, but I still am amazed at the effort it takes to put color in those tiny spots.

The solution is as much mental as it is physical. Physically I go back to the two-handed grip. Mentally I send myself back to the costuming class that I took as a Theater major at Kalamazoo College, lo’ these 50 years ago. We had to design and construct a costume. I think I made a shirt of some type. Anyhow you had to sew seams. To keep the seams straight, I remember concentrating on watching the needle of the sewing machine go up and down. So now, when adding color to these tiny spots, I watch the pen in my hand. Slowly, carefully, up and down. Dot. Dot. Dot. Color. Color. Change pen. Dot. Dot. Dot. Move to another place on the drawing. Create design. Yikes! More tiny little spaces.

Why do I do this to myself?!!  Hush. Quiet. Think like a sewing machine. Dot. Dot. Dot. 

A Raccoon on Hillsborough Street, 2nd ed.

 [I have mentioned before my envy of my sister’s memory. This is one of those times. I have been asked to find a poem previously published here on The Wall. I remember the incident quite clearly, however, the date and the title escape me. So rather than rail against my inability to recall those vital bits of information I have decided to track the poem down. The silver lining to this particular cloud is that I am rediscovering some golden oldies that I get to share with you again. So if I mark a post “2nd ed.” It means I have looked at the piece again and perhaps made some slight changes. The first few are circa 2004ish, so unless your memory is better than mine they may seem entirely new!]

A Raccoon on Hillsborough Street 2nd ed. circa 10.23.04

 

She was clearly more exasperated than frightened by my intrusion.  Pausing and peering at me, her entire demeanor snapped, “Yes? Is there a problem?”

 

I was certainly not going to dispute her right to the half-eaten apple cradled in an appendage far too clever to be called a paw.   I was simply surprised to see her, and a bit embarrassed to have blundered into her parlor unannounced.  However, upon further reflection it became apparent that we were on the back porch.  She would, no doubt, normally receive guests high up in the towering oak that rose just behind the privet hedge.  And that fact alone would strike me from the guest list.

 

I found it a deflating insight.  The oak is just one of many that punctuates this urban landscape with a parallel universe.  I was enchanted with the notion of an entire community of fur and feather, of chitin and complex eye; involved in intricate negotiations and interactions far more ancient and harmonic than our own.

 

Yet, I could hardly expect her to invite me in for a nightcap.  I was, after all, one of them.  One of those seemingly mindless creatures who lay waste the forest, drowns the grasses in concrete, and fills the meadow with huge, leafless burrows.  I was a danger in her world.  I was a car-driver, a coon-squasher, a tree-killer – one of the demons from beyond.

 

I did so want to lead her away from that perception; to point out how fond I was of the furry folk.  I longed to reveal how much joy I drew from her inquisitive face, busy hands and improbable ringed tail.  How could I share with her my envy of her fearless access to the canopy, her companionship with tree and sky?  Of the isolated comfort of a den set so apart from the paths of men?

 

But a door burst open down the street and a troop of students blustered out onto the bricks; voices raised, cell phones chirping, laughing their way into the night.  The lady took her leave, nimbly ascending branches to her privileged life above, while mundane stairs led me down to the world and work. 

The Artist and The Artwork

You may have noticed I quote a lot of songs, poems, plays, etc. The idea is that if someone has already said what I want to say, but better, it makes no sense trying to “improve” when I can simply quote. I think I have already mentioned that when I come across a particularly excellent sentence in a novel I try to contact the author to simply say “Well done. Thank you!” I have also learned that it is wise to make sure the author is still alive. But that is a story for another day.

The question for today is the extent to which a work of art and the artist who created it are facets of the same entity. Sure, being aware of the effort that goes into finding just the right word and crafting an excellent sentence, I do drop authors an encouraging word to let them know that there is someone out there who is paying attention. But on the other hand that doesn’t necessarily mean I want to be their BFF. Actually it more often works the other way around. I when discover that a friend is a “creative,” author, painter, poet, singer, whatever, I am tempted to ask to see, hear, read, whatever, examples of their work. But there are potential pitfalls on that road. What if I don’t like their efforts? Do I lie? Will they know I am lying? Hopefully, I will find the work as delightful as the person - but there is that element of risk involved.

I was reminded of that risk recently when I asked my wife if she knew the title of a particular song for a John Denver quote I wanted to “borrow” for a piece I was working on and she replied, “I hate his work. He was a terrible man!” We have been married long enough that I knew not to point out that that was not the question I had asked. However, later, her non-answer brought me back to question I hadn’t asked but she had unintentionally answered: What are the critical relationships between an artist and their work? Must I find a Woody Allen film flawed because of questionable decisions he has made in his private life?  Do I deny the talent of Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun’s paintings because her patron, Marie Antoinette, was apparently callously oblivious to the harsh lives of the peasants whose deprivations made her opulent life possible - well, at least for a while. Do we deny Picasso’s place in art history because he seemed to switch his artistic style with the acquisition of each new mistress? 6 or 7 depending on what source you consult.

And that last sentence “depending on which source you consult” is one of the two major reasons I believe we need to separate art and artist in any meaningful evaluation of a particular work.  I never met John Denver, and to my knowledge neither did my wife. Did Marie really respond to the assertion that the people had no bread with, “Let them eat cake!” If Marie really did blithely advocate cake for the poor, did Elisabeth concur?” Did Picasso say “Oh, the blue painting is Olga, the pink one is Francoise?” If we wish to argue that an artist’s work is a direct manifestation of their personal beliefs and philosophy then we need to be quite sure that the sources we consult regarding those beliefs and philosophies are themselves credible. John Denver was a contemporary celebrity, which in its own right, negates anything we might know about his private life. If you have seen someone’s face on a magazine at the grocery checkout, you can be fairly confident that the article within is designed to sell magazines, not reveal “the unvarnished truth” about the celebrities on the cover. On the question did Marie Antoinette really say “Let them eat cake!” we would be well advised to remember that when it comes to history, it is the winners who write the histories. Picasso was, at the time of his death both the most famous and the wealthiest artist in France, who, most sources agree, made his heirs and their representatives frantic by leaving no will, leaving the who, what and why of his copious estate - sources vary but all cluster around 20,000 to 30,000 paintings, sculptures, etchings, etc., - drifting in the wind.

The point is that any attempt to link an artist’s work to their beliefs, attitudes and values is most likely doomed to failure simply because of the difficulty of trying to cobble together an accurate depiction of those beliefs, attitudes and values from secondary or questionable sources. I don’t mean to say that the “truth” about artists lives may not lie somewhere in what journalists, critics and historians have written about them. I am saying that winnowing those kernels of truth from the chaff of the articles, videos, exposes, etc.,  that accompanies those kernels is an almost impossible task. And furthermore I am saying that it really doesn’t matter, because even if we could draw a straight line relationship between a work of art and an artist’s beliefs - as is temptingly possible between Picasso and Guernica, that one painting which Picasso refused to “analyze” - we still cannot hope to define a singular psyche of the creator of perhaps thousands of works.

Artists, perhaps more than the rest of us more normal, less-talented folks, seem to shift “certainty” throughout their lives.  It is something we all do. What was "true" for us at 6, is probably called into doubt at 16, 26, 36, and on until 60 and beyond. But because of their status as “public figures,” artists are often called upon to explain and defend those shifts. Ideally the explanation should be made in person, or if deceased this questionable task is handed off to their heirs, critics, biographers or historians. Artists are not alone in this seeming need we have for them to explain their "waffling" on their work and world view. Republicans who began life as Democrats or vice versa, fire and brimstone TV preachers who “stray,” athletes who use “performance enhancing drugs,” famous quarterbacks who conflate “immunization” and “vaccination.”  These celebrities are all often called upon to explain themselves. To "tell it like it is." Furthermore I sincerely believe they would be unable to provide such an explanation even if they wanted to. It takes the likes of Boswell and McCullough thousands of pages to even attempt such reconstructions, and even their painstaking efforts are questioned by other would be "experts."

A friend of mine once reminded me that “we have all been in rooms where we should not die.”  Meaning we have all done and said things, “true” at the moment, yet perhaps better left unsaid and undone, and certainly unexplained in the broader picture of a life. But our foibles rarely hang on museum walls. We are rarely called upon to knit them all into a rational whole. But we do ask just that of artists. We want them to be able to trace their inner lives as a progression of “truths” as reflected in their art. We want the "reality" of an artist to be all wrapped up neatly with a bow on top. That would, I suppose, be nice, but I doubt that such a package could actually be created. Artists seem to be more intense versions of us, you know, normal folks. More swayed by passion, belief, joy and sadness. No doubt that intensity is reflected in their work, but our desire to fully understand the relationship between an artist's art and the person who created the art is most likely doomed to failure.  No doubt there are, in an artist's oeuvre, works the artist would like to assert represent their "real" self, their best self. the self they aspire to be.  But it is more than likely that other works sprang from their "rooms in which we should not die." Our attempting to discern which is which is no doubt an entertaining yet flawed pastime.

Let us conclude this little ramble down the road of art with a thought experiment. You attend a raffle at a professional meeting of an organization of which you are a member. To your delight you win “first prize” that allows you to choose one of two painting.  Yet, the choice is not as simple as it might seem. The paintings are quite similar. Two landscapes, they are the same size, same palette, done in the style of the romanticism of the Hudson River School which has always been one of your favorites. Neither artist will profit from their artwork being chosen. However before making your choice you are informed that one painting was painted by an inmate from a supermax prison, a psychopathic serial killer. The other by a church choir director who gives free music lessons to underprivileged youth after school.

Would knowing which artist painted which painting influence your choice? There is really no right answer. If the psycho versus the minister is a "dealbreaker" issue for you, then you are simply privileging what you know of the artist over the quality of the specific artwork, which is certainly an option and one which easily leads to something like the simple assertion that we can hate John Denver’s music because we hate the man. To me that seems rather unfair to the music.  And by extension, may deny ourselves a number of wonderful artistic experiences for reasons that have little or nothing to do with the quality of the various artworks themselves.  Remember the second tenet of Distilled Harmony is Enable Beauty, not only enable beauty produced by nice people - like Mr. Rogers.

Paintbox

Paintbox

Jack Frost let me tag along today.

The paintbrush flittered here and there.

It seemed quite effortless,

Touching every tree and bush

That caught our questioning eyes.

In the stately maple by the road

Crimson snared the topmost branches,

Pushing slowly down to a brighter red

Which faded past gold to a pure

Yellow, lighter and lighter

Until streaks of original green 

Peeked through, giving up in places

To russet and, just for a while, to

Brown leaves, clinging steadfast 

Until they flitter down

To finally rest upon the ground.

A patchwork quilt resting quietly 

Waiting for a deeper blanket of snow,

And, months from now, 

A renewed burst of green 

Below them, and in tiny buds

Above.

More Thoughts on Home

 Perhaps my reflections on “homelessness” were unduly influenced by the notion of “homes” being physical structures. The whole notion of “hearth and home” and all that. And without doubt the iconic image of folks gathered around the fireplace popping corn and roasting apples is a powerful one, despite the fact that the flames are gas generated and the apples are most likely GMO. I actually did my Ph.D dissertation, lo’ those many years ago, on the inherent power of visual images on celebratory moments. Sparing you those many pages, let me simply assert that those are very powerful images - particularly Thanksgiving. Again I’ll be sparing you those many pages of explanation.

The point is that it struck me that the idea that “home” is irrevocably linked to the structure in which we lay our weary head at close of day is at least partially flawed. As I thought about it, I was further persuaded that, for me anyhow, “home” was most strongly linked to the natural spaces and experiences that contained those physical structures. The “where” at least as much as the “what.” That assertion may itself be influenced by the fact that I am typing these words on the infuriatingly tiny keyboard of my phone while seated on a rustic bench in the Ralston Arboretum in Raleigh, NC.

This is the exact same bench where, 45 years ago, I used to tote my briefcase stuffed with 40 or 50 typewritten manuscripts (No, I will not grade handwritten papers, no matter if your other teachers say it is fine with them.) I would then pull out my red pencil and proceed to “mark” the papers, blissfully unaware that current data would indicate that “marking papers in red causes students to believe they have done something ‘wrong’.” Well, duh. It was marked in red because they did something “wrong.” There was, and still is, something pure and simple about this old bench, something more like “home” than the slick and shiny new buildings peeking over the horizons of the campus just east of this sheltered spot.

Similarly, when I attended my 50th class reunion at Kalamazoo College a couple of weeks ago, I expected to find much changed at my old alma mater. I was pleasantly surprised to find that most of the inevitable changes had actually enhanced the old -  founded in 1833, old here in the Midwest - campus. Yet, there were enough subtle changes to allow us to debate whether or not that science building had once been a women’s dorm, the doors of which were locked at midnight. And where was the location of the coffee shop where we presented our avant-garde radical one-act plays? And what was it called, The Black Door? The Black Spot? Certainly nothing with such an unenlightened moniker could be found on current campus maps.

What had gone wonderfully unchanged however was the iconical cemetery a couple blocks north of campus.  The entrance is guarded by a gothic mansion seemingly just made for an Addams Family special. The road then winds up a hill, steep in places, that eventually passes statuary that pay homage to Kalamazoo’s notables; the Gibson guitar family, the Markins who produced Marathon autos, aka Checker cabs, and the founders of the Upjohn Drug - hmm, cartel is probably a bad descriptor for the Upjohn-Dalton clan who contributed so much to Theater and the arts in that neck of the woods…. But very cool, if admittedly paternal, monuments.

I remember the cemetery best in its winter garb when the drifting snow painted the barren trees and tombstones in appropriate Dickensian monochrome. It is effortless to imagine Jacob Marley being laid to rest here in some hidden corner of this darker version of what “home” might be. Certainly a Dickensian idyll is preferable to the sobriquet my old friend and K-college roommate hung on the place, hopefully in warmer times: the make-out cemetery.

Another of my “homes” that is not a house is a barn. Well, not actually the whole barn, just the peak of the roof where my cousin Doug and I would perch, watching storms roll in across the seemingly endless plains of South Dakota. Being somewhat agoraphobic, I have no idea how we got up there. No doubt I have repressed that part of the adventure. But there we were, hoping that the majestic clouds would sweep past our equally deserving neighbors, retaining their precious bounty of rain to fall upon the home place, Schrag Shorthorn Farms.

I have already decried the modern day neglect of cabin #12 in the pines at Tower Hill Camp in Sawyer, Michigan, but in all fairness I need to note that the stream still exists. You see, in those magical days, before one would deign to drive over to the state beach at Warren Dunes, we would pack up everything needed for a day at the beach - blankets, floats, thermoses, snorkels, masks, suntan lotion, (remember this was the 1950s), books and beverages, and - finally - set out for the stream that was the back door to the Tower Hill beach. The stream was an imminently wadable, magical place, running close to, parallel to, but still a special distance from the entrance road to the state park. It was rarely more than knee deep - unless you sought out the deeper pools to which the ever-present minnows would flee before our intrusion. It was always, it seemed, cool and shadowy even on the brightest and hottest days. Shadowy and secret. We could hear the cars whizzing by on the road above, but it is doubtful that, even if they chose to stop and peer down, that they could see us - or if we kept quite still - even hear us. Shadowy, secret and silent. Surely every home should have such a place in it?

So getting your feet wet in a particular stream can define a piece of home, but other senses can also claim their share of home building. Certain aromas can be transformative. Mall fast food marketers will run a fan to waft the hopefully mouth-watering scent of their product out to mingle with other tacos, burgers, donuts, etc. My olfactory “home” has different roots. 

In 1964 an oddly named musical opened to less than stellar reviews in London. The Roar of the Greasepaint, The Smell of the Crowd never made it to the West End, but the effort traveled well and the show later enjoyed a successful run here in the States. The show remains special to me as I played one of the leads in the version we performed at Kalamazoo College in, humm, must of been1968 or 69. The title is an obvious play on the old theatrical trope “the smell of the greasepaint, the roar of the crowd” that seeks to capture the allure of live theater. And the original version does a rather good job of pointing to the magical tension that exists between performer and audience. Additionally that tension has a specific olfactory recipe. It is brewed, quite literary, from the smell of greasepaint and cold cream, anxiety and anticipation, and the murmur of snatches of interpretive lines, all stirred and heated by the harsh lights surrounding the mirrors in the make-up room. Faces peer at themselves, brushing on highlights and shadow, seeking just the right magical moment to lose the face that “was” in exchange for the character’s face that “now needs to be.” It is a unique sensory environment; one that, once experienced, remains forever unforgotten.

It is that unique sensory space that, in varying degrees, takes on different guises in different situations. But there is a consistency in that the performer retains an obligation to guide audiences to a place of grace. So, to further untangle and hopefully clarify the title, it was the smell of the greasepaint that hopefully presaged the transformation of the the crowd from an unfocused roar to the less strident whisper of understanding. And it was that tingle of anticipation before stepping out in front of a, hopefully attentive, student audience that constituted a vital aspect of my “home” for 45 years. But, when the tingle began to fade and when, in a large part due to technology, the distance between performer and audience stretched to a degree I found uncomfortable, it became time to wrap that particular part of my “home” in tissue paper, and put it up on a shelf until, or if, needed. Hence for the time being my writing and drawing here on The Wall must suffice for my performances from which hopefully you - as audience - may glean a glimpse of shared grace.

So do I still claim to be homeless? Well, certainly in part according to my rather unique definition. I currently reside in two physical structures within each of which I can lose not only objects - keys, phones, iPads, reading and/or driving glasses, etc., - but myself as well. When I wake up at 3:00 AM and need to find either the refrigerator or the bathroom, which way to I turn? Mistaking one for the other can have dire consequences. And when I leave one structure in search of say milk, eggs, booze or bread, does the map in my head automatically default to the map on my phone? Naturally. So yes, if that kind of aimless wandering in a structural wilderness means I am homeless, I’ll still must raise my hand.

However, what may have changed is my definition of home. To be homeless in the traditional sense means one has no home, again in the traditional sense; no exclusive physical place that contains your experiences. In that sense I am either “homerich” or “scatterhomed” in that the places and spaces that contain the experiences and relationships that define me - that are most precious to me - are many and widely scattered. 

So that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. For the moment anyhow.

Millions of Colors

It may have been an early Photoshop ad: “Millions of Colors,” or then again part of an old ongoing Apple debate when they claimed software capable of “millions of colors” but provided monitors capable of displaying only a small fraction of those promised colors. No big deal either way. Just the contemporary version of a discussion that has probably been going on ever since early hominids first started streaking cave walls with various shades of ochre and debating which really captured the true essence of the charging mammoth.

I mentioned in my last post that the final step in RoseCabbage would be to choose the best color from “this collection.” But then neglected to include the image of the collection. Well, the “collection” is a mixed bag of various markers from various manufacturers, but I have neither enough of them, nor the skill at blending those I do have to approach anything like “millions of colors.”  This realization gave memyet another reason to marvel at the genius of the artists like Michelangelo, Van Gogh, Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, etc.  How did they make those colors? I mean they couldn’t hop over to Michael’s or Blicks  or Jerry’s Artarama and pick up a few tubes of the good stuff. They had to mix different pigments with albumin, oils, and other binding agents - including blood if you are a fan of The Red Violin - to create the ideal paint or varnish.

Seems like a lot of steps and amazing expertise to arrive at “millions of colors.” I do suppose that this is one of those situations that argues for the whole idea of apprenticeships. Was there an apprentice in the Master’s studio who could do an awesome blue? A magenta to die for? Perfect varnishes? Perhaps using pigments like these we saw in a window in Florence?

The fascinating movie Tim’s Vermeer (Google it) gives us a peek at how one - at least a billionaire - might attempt to replicate these lost arts. But as we see, it would still be incredibly difficult even with a million bucks and a peek at the original owned by the Queen of England!

So what is the point of this rather strange post? Twofold I guess. First, I encourage you to invest in markers. Lots and lots of markers. Markers with as many colors and shades as you can get your hands on. A number of marker manufacturers have finally realized that whether you are doing faces, landscapes, or abstracts, a wide range of shades; black and brown and tan and taupe and peach and cream and pink ALL matter so be sure you have them in your collection.

Second, take a trip to a museum -fine arts. Obviously here in Chicago I would recommend the Art Institute of Chicago. Washington - The National Gallery of Art. West Coast - The Getty. Those are the biggies, but all you are really looking for are exceptional works by exceptional artists because while you would ordinarily step back from the painting to get the overall impact, here try getting up as close to the painting as the guard will let you and study how the various "pure" colors get - as the Brits would say - Hoovered up into your eyes to create a whole new world of colors. Wonderful.

Well, that’s it for now. Have fun!

Synesthesia and Creativity

Back around 1970 - so junior year at Kalamazoo College - I was assigned the book Expanded Cinema by Gene Youngblood which Wikipedia says "was the first book to consider video as an art form." I'm a little leery of "firsts" and "uniquelys" and other such absolute claims, but it is a very cool book.  I think it is in a box back in Raleigh, which means it survived nine or ten “bookshelf purges” in which I would clear out books I deemed “no longer important.”  I would stack them out side my office door with a sign reading “Help Yourself.”  I think Expanded Cinema made the cuts so many times because it has an excellent introduction by Buckminster Fuller, but even more so because it introduced me to the whole notion of synesthesia.

I think of synesthesia as a neurological railroad roundhouse, sort of like in Thomas the Tank Engine, where the trains get shuffled onto the proper track. To greatly simplify, vibrations come into the ear, strike the ear drum and then make their way to the roundhouse - AKA the brain - which shuffles those impulses onto the right track and we hear music. The eyes do the same with visual data, nose to smell, skin to feel, etc. Well, people with synesthesia - synesthetes - have some unusual cross overs in the road house. For some synesthetes the letters blue come into the eyes black but the brain sees blue. Some synesthetes smell coffee and see specific images.  Sounds can have shapes and colors. It is a fascinating condition, I certainly hesitate to call it a disability.  Especially after watching a couple of recent episodes on Curiosity Stream.

The series is called “Secrets of the Brain” and it is hosted by Dr. Jack Lewis who is out to “learn everything there is to know about the brain!” Well, you know how I feel about absolutes, but he looks pretty young - maybe early thirties - so we’ll cut him a little slack. Especially since since the last two episodes, on synesthesia and creativity are aimed at combining those two of my personal favorite curiosities.

I have already talked about synesthesia, but another episode dealt with creativity. And, as a standard device in the series, Dr. Jack likes to seek out folks whose neurological conditions are the result of other than normal development. In this episode Dr. Lewis encounters a man who, as the result of a stroke develops “sudden creative out put.” Previously the gentleman had no interest in the arts, but post stroke becomes obsessed with the fine arts - painting in particular. He leaves his old life and becomes a fine artist, producing some admirable works, but is unable to explain where the ideas for his works come from.

OK, let’s stop messing around with background information and get to the important part: me. I have been doodling for as long as I was forced to sit in a classroom with nothing but a piece of paper - or to tell the truth, the border of a textbook - and a marker of some type to entertain me. There was a brief, very brief, time when I worried if drawing in a hymnal was a sin. But when I began to help my Catholic buddy make up sins for confession, the whole question became moot. Truth was I just doodled because it was fun and calming. No doubt an argument for putting me somewhere on “the autism spectrum” there, but secretly I’m thinking most creative people are.

Anyhow my drawing, and PPP images are a bit strange, but I am now leaning towards the notion that - having no other rational explanation for them - I have decided that they are a combination of synesthesia and the kind of creativity Dr. Lewis is playing with in his Curiosity Stream series. So I’m going to take you through one image from a  “synestcreative” perspective.  I call it “The Rose,” but in truth it is a cabbage.

As I have mentioned before I have fallen victim to the “billions and billions” of images trap of digital photography. I have more images than makes any kind of sense, but my experience of reviewing them is different from the social hell of sitting in someone’s living room watching the slides of their most recent vacation to Disneyland. If you are too young to remember “slides” go light a candle or make a donation to some deserving charity.

Rather than beginning to drool and slide out of my seat, when I watch my collected images they shift shape - like digital shape shifters.  Like this first image - when viewed statically and knowing it is from a garden show it becomes pretty obvious that it is a red cabbage.

But as I concentrate of the image more intensely its "cabbageness" gets a little slippery, and in my mind it becomes much more like a rose. And having just finished working on the sunflower image “Beyond Yellow,”  RoseCabbage begins to suggest that pieces of it should be removed. And I say "RoseCabbage suggests" because I really am not aware of participating in the selection.  That is not to say that it works like a Ouija board with the image taking control of my hand and moving it around.  Rather I just sort of stare at the image and eventually something feels right. So I draw dark lines around the part of the image to be removed, and blank them out. Like this:

Then RoseCabbage and I work together to decide what designs should go in each of the blanks. And I put the designs in like this:

The next step is adding color to the designs, and RoseCabbage and I will work on that soon. Selecting colors that feel right from this collection. I again say RoseCabbage and I because it is a group effort. A lot of sitting and staring before I pick up a marker.  That step takes a long, long time. And I will share the final result with you when it is done. 

The point is that I think the process by which my drawings come to be is really a combination of three neurological processes, and it would be an error to think of them as separate, or to try to cleanly unwind them.  The initial selection of the primary image is dominated by, but not totally dependent on sights I have seen or images I already possess. I mentioned in the previous post that I have a fairly clear picture in my head of what "home" should look like, yet have no such image in my collection. So it is clear that I will be looking about me for a possible stand in. So creativity plays a large role here. Once I have decided on the primary image the rest of the creative process seems to blend, at least synesthesia with perhaps a touch of healthy autism. 

No doubt some grad student - in art, psychology, or psychiatry - is out there hammering away on a dissertation that will explain all this. But, until then, I think I can be satisfied to just enjoy myself.

Homelessness

Being well aware of the millions of people around the world without a roof over their heads or even walls to support a roof, for whom both water and food are  precarious necessities, for whom vaccines are either rumors or myths, not just for Covid-19, but for measles, mumps, and the other diseases creeping back into the 21st century under attack by privileged 1st world anti-vaxxers; yes, I have some, admittedly second-hand, knowledge of what it actually means to be homeless. Yet, while living in a solid, well-insulated structure with central heating, air-conditioning, indoor plumbing, and electrical outlets per code, every 6 feet along each wall, and a dependable internet connection, I still claim to be “homeless.”

Now wait a minute. Let me explain. Mine is a completely different kind of "homelessness," one that has nothing to do, thank god, with a lack of those creature comforts listed above. Rather it has to do with a more ephemeral feeling of “being at home,” of “belonging,” of “well being.” I have a colleague who moved from the mountains of Salt Lake City, Utah to Raleigh, North Carolina, a city perched equidistant between the mountains and the ocean on the east coast. Upon arriving here, after trekking across the continent, “Never,” she claimed, “have I felt more at home.” I envy her, for never have I felt that sense of being at home.

I think it is my mother’s fault. Her’s and her books. For me, being “at home” has almost nothing to do with where I currently reside. Were “home” to be defined by place of residence, I actually have lived in several places long enough for them to take on the quality of “homeness.” I was born in Springfield, Ohio and lived there - with the exception of two years spent in Vienna, Austria - until I got married in 1969. So what, 20 years? Then there was a span of almost 40 years in Raleigh, N.C., teaching at NC State. It was an enjoyable tenure for the most part, but never, to quote John Denver, “Coming home to a place he’d never been before.” And this is where blaming my mother comes in. She was, more than my father, the one who established “reading” as the activity that trumped all others.

Done your homework? I’m reading. OK.

Cleaned up your room? I’m reading. OK.

Coming to dinner? Let me finish this chapter. OK.

And, of course, you could bring your book to the dinner table, where everyone was reading.

The problem was, and is, that the worlds, the “homes,” created in our books were inevitably more wonderful, more engaging, more exciting than the physical homes, the constructed towns, the bustling cities and the day-to-days lives in which we actually lived. Literature - and of course, theater - set the bar of “home” impossibly high.

Another wrinkle in my admittedly distorted notion of “home” was that it was defined more by the people and the relationships surrounding me in my books, than the structures, locales, and relationships in which I happened to be a flesh and blood participant. Again, fiction cranked the bar way beyond Olympic level. Who could really compete for Dulcinea? Perhaps I could if my name were Bond, James Bond. 

And there were those times, as I assume there are for any serious actor, author or playwright, when the line between the fiction you are creating and your “real life” becomes uncomfortably vague. Truth be told, that fuzziness was a major reason that, despite some very tempting opportunities to “do,” I chose instead to “teach.” But I digress.

None of that is to say that I have never encountered places where, as we say in the South, “I might could” choose to make my “home.”  Cabin #12 in the pines at Tower Hill Camp, in Sawyer, Michigan, was one such place. It has the additional appeal of being close to the woods where the ashes of my parents and my older brother lie scattered. However, when I last saw it a year or two ago, it appeared a touch dilapidated. Damaged perhaps during some ill-planned fit of renovation?  The garden of the Hotel Monna Lisa in Florence, Italy, also seems imminently “home-ish.” Still, I’m thinking it would probably get a bit pricey as a permanent residence, and the mosquitoes are killer after sundown. Hmmm. There must be others. Maybe they will come to me later.

So that’s what I mean when I claim to be homeless. Sites in the “real world” fall short of the “home” of my imagination. I have friends who are quite skilled at representational painting, and it is at times like this that I most envy them that talent. I can see the "home place" fairly clearly in my mind’s eye. It is on a secluded lake. Maybe another home or two are scattered around the lake, but distant and hidden by the trees. Too far to walk, but reachable by boat, kayak, or inner tube. My “home” has a boat house. Both structures are rustic. The lake is hemmed in by pines, a few hardwood’s scattered further back. It is northerly enough for snow between Thanksgiving and New Years. Strangely enough, not too far away are some excellent restaurants, shopping, etc., but not enough to attract tourists. Also strangely, there are people around me with whom I share pleasant memories. However, as is common in some of my dreams, I’m not positive just whom they are or the details of the memories we share. And then there is the fact that the real people who are precious to me in my real life would find my “perfect home” excessively bucolic for long term occupancy.  Hence, another major barrier to somehow, sometime, losing my feeling of homelessness.

As I said, this is one of those times when I wish I had some skill at realistic drawing. If I could get the place and the people in my mind down on paper I might be able to recognize my “home” and find a way to get there. Or at least I could create an image where, Denver again, I could “come home to a place I’d never been before.” Until then, I’ll take comfort in Bilbo’s assurance, “The road goes ever on and on.”

The Tech Billionaires are Grabbing The Low Hanging Fruit

 .

OK, so Jeff Bezos rode his rather phallic contraption 10 minutes up to “sort of” space. Sir Richard Branson flew his more Si-fi friendly looking craft earlier, but a bit lower, up into weightlessness. Elon Musk’s SpaceX machines are making these one-offs seem positively humdrum by routinely ferrying astronauts up to the International Space Station. And in addition SpaceX just sent four “citizen astronauts” on a sort of joy ride around the globe. Cool, I guess, as a pilot for a Reality TV Show “Billionaires in Space,” or something.

Forgive me if I am not terribly impressed. These efforts, from a transportation perspective, failed to raise my eyebrows, as I made my way at heart-stopping speeds - sometimes approaching 12 miles an hour - along I-85, one of America’s “super highways.” Come on guys, give me a break. From a transportation perspective Musk’s hyper loop technology is far more impressive as it, at least, moves regular folks from point A to point B far more efficiently than current systems. Of course there is the problem that that current system just moves us from from one part of LA to another. Not a big deal here in Chicagoland.

The “UFO videos” recently released by the government (see https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ufo-military-intelligence-60-minutes-2021-08-29/ ) seem to indicate that the “My space ship is faster than your space ship” horse has already left the barn. I mean those dudes or dudettes or gender free space entities seem to be strolling around in speeds measured in many multiples of light years. Eat your heart out NASCAR. Which makes me think that rather than messing around with what seem to be sort of "Kitty Hawk" efforts when viewed in the big "transportation" picture, we ought to be putting serious thought and serious research funding into Captain Kirk’s prophetic command: “Beam me up Scotty!”

Yeah. Teleportation. Perhaps quantum entanglement might be a more fertile research field to plow than nuclear fusion or giant solar sails, at least when it comes to space travel. Although, the pandemic has made the idea of terrestrial teleporting across town an attractive notion. But with teleportation global holidays would be back again! Teleporting to Florence or Buenos Aires would beat the heck out of airports!

I know it sounds a bit like Asimov sci-fi stuff. But let me relate a quick family story. When my father received his Ph.D in sociology from the University of Chicago back in - I believe it was 1945. I’d have to look in the lining of his academic gown which I wore to every commence until my own retirement last year. The date is on a label in there somewhere. Anyhow somehow Grandmother Schrag was persuaded to travel from the tiny farming community of Freeman, South Dakota, to the wicked city of Chicago to witness her son’s big day. Dad, wanting to show her the sights took her to an upscale department store, maybe Carson Pirie Scott & Company, maybe Marshall Fields, not sure which.  Wherever, things were going along nicely until Dad led her to the escalator to show her even more wonders on the second floor. I do not know if the words “instrument of the devil” ever escaped the lips of that devote Mennonite matron, but the gist of the matter was clear. "Stairs did not move," and nothing in this fancy, frilly city could induce her to set foot on them.

The point is that we tend to associate certain classes of technology to meet specific needs. Writing moved from sticks in clay, to carving in stone, to marks on bamboo and papyrus, ink on hides, rag paper, to typewriters, printers, and now these screens. Transportation moved from riding on critters to the critters hauling various evolutions of wheels that moved people from place to place, eventually assisting with over land and water and through the air, and now into space. The problem is that each evolution seems to put blinders on the path forward. The question gets to be “How do we improve on that recent innovation? How do I build a better wheeled vehicle? To now, how do I build a better rocket-propelled space ship? How do I pick people up in one place and deliver them to another, like a load of potatoes? And research dollars and creative, innovative energy moves down that predetermined, blinder-obscured path. And the billionaires hustle down that path.

Hauling potatoes or people from point A to point B is the easy path. That’s transportation. Making a potato vanish from point A and the reappear at point B hundreds of miles or light years away - now that is impressive, that is teleportation. Difficult? OMG!! That’s transportation evolution on steroids! Beyond the transition from wooden ladders to moving stairs, from paths in the forest to moving walkways in the airport! Teleportation says no more low hanging fruit that dangle in front of the blinders on the straight and narrow part before us. It means, at least, taking off the blinders and considering the radical new questions we need to address even before we can consider the best route to the answers.

So beam us up Scotty, to infinity and beyond!  Etc,. etc., etc.

Foolish Faux Filing

 Having just finished a few hours scanning through a few decades of photos stored on my external hard drive, It is probably a good time to share this post that I drafted late one night last week. . . , or last month, or last year. Or some other time.

I suppose my first clear recollection of this lifelong character flaw was in 7th grade. I came home after school one day, picked up a blank reporters notebook and a ballpoint pen.  Then I took a stack of 33 lps of classical music and put them on the turntable, hit start and began to write. Free verse, blank verse, some kind of verse. And I wrote until the music stopped or I ran out of paper - I forget which. Point is I sort of lost track of the notebook. I have stumbled across it a few times in the last 50 or 60 years. Amazed each time that I had it in my hands again. And then promptly mislaid it again.

It is a strange flaw that, if I had a shrink, I would certainly bring to his or her attention. It has grown more pronounced as the world has become more purely digital.  A bit of Sharon  Vaughn’s classic country song, My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys goes like this:

“Pickin' up hookers instead of my pen,

I let the words of my youth fade away.” 

Well, hookers have never been part of my existence, but I can certainly relate to the fear of losing “the words of my youth” or the words of my middle age, or the words of my golden years, or any of my words. It’s not that my words are all worth enshrining on vellum in blue or blue-black ink, as Miss Manners would instruct us for important correspondence, but occasionally there is some good stuff there that I would like to keep.

So I have become a digital hyper-saver. I have a DropBox account - maybe two  and I compose and save these Wall posts in Evernote, as well as saving copies in a separate file, before publishing them through Blogger where they are also saved.  And then there is my stand-alone 8TB hard drive on which I save, not only back-ups of those files, but every time I get a new computer I copy the entire hard drive onto my stand alone drive. I think I have copies of about 5 different hard drives stashed there. And we aren’t taking just Wall files, we are talking correspondence, art, music, poetry, research papers, books, etc. If I created it and it exists in digital form, it is on that drive. And as I mentioned at the very beginning of this post I sometimes get lost in there.

I know, doc, that isn’t normal, and I am working on it. But that isn’t the worst part. You see, I’m not really sure where on all those devices - online or stand alone - where any of that stuff is, or even what all is there. Sometimes when I am bored I will click over to the hard drive and browse around. [See above.] The other day I came across copies of a mini-website I had made dealing with the relationship between sculpture and quantum entanglement. OK, after I got there I remembered having done that for a class lecture, and could sort of recall why I thought it made sense. But had you asked me a priori if I had I created such a site, and where it was, my response would have been a more earthy version of “Surely you jest.”

“So,” you ask, “are you getting any better?”

“That all depends on what you mean by better,” I reply.

“I mean this need to retain everything, yet seemingly losing track of where particular pieces of ‘everything’ may be.” You clarify.

“Ah, yes. I have noticed that. And I haven’t even mentioned those writings that I wish to retain, but wish to keep totally private, but don’t know where to keep them. I mean if I could stumble across them, couldn't the CIA? The Proud Boys? So, no, not really better.” I admit.

“And what writings are those?” You ask.

“I’d really rather not go into that,” I reply.

You push a little further, “Can you give me an example of these things you write that you wish to retain, but are ambivalent about sharing?”

“Well, there is seemingly this post,” I mutter.

“What about it” you insist.

“I just sort of found it while looking for something else, and I don’t think I every posted it. There is nothing with this title on the Wall. But here it is on my screen.”

“How else could you find out if you posted it.”

“I suppose I could ask my sister. She keeps all of these posts.”

“That’s very interesting. But I see our time is up. Perhaps we can go into this further in our next session.”

“So do you want to keep our notes from today? Or should I?"