December 28, 2009 at 12:00 pm (ARCANA)
Tags: Birds, Blogging, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pied Beauty, Poetry
No, it’s not over. I’m still here. And it’s not that there hasn’t been plenty to say. I just haven’t. The assigned theme for poetry group last week was writer’s block. This is what I wrote:
A variation of what I wrote in November. October had enough inspiration in it to keep me making poems for years to come, but I’m better at finding poetry than at making it. Yesterday I found it in the sky; birds. They were not geese and there was no V formation. No MC Escher imitation of birds turning in sync, now snowy breast, now silver wing. Just birds. Black ones, plain and graceless and all the more beautiful because. They reminded me of this:
Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things–
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced–fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise Him.
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July 16, 2009 at 12:00 pm (ARCANA)
Tags: Blogging, Thoughts
I’ve been reading a lot. And drawing. None of it makes its way here. I don’t know why. I’m really a very private person. Someone made the observation that the Pixie talks when she wants to, but when she doesn’t she just doesn’t. She’s as closed as a nut.
I guess I’m a little like her.
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February 24, 2009 at 12:00 pm (ARCANA)
Tags: Blogging
Eight months on and I’m still strangely self-conscious about having a blog. Some days I’m determined to do something with it; to write more, to write more for others than myself, to share my own artwork. And some days I think I’ll never write another word again. Either way, it’s time to do some rearranging. I need more focus. For now I’m planning to divide this thing into sections: Art, Books, and Fluff. Not that the art and book talk won’t be utter fluff. You can expect the lit crits to be generally uninformed. I have a compulsion to share anyway. Makes it tough for you dedicated readers, but I can’t seem to help myself. I’m most confident discussing art and so I will. Even if you gnash your teeth and beg me to stop. If you don’t like it you don’t have to look! That’s why I’m giving it its own space. I need the freedom to carry on endlessly about my lust for paper. And, yes, there will be fluff.
I wonder what you hope to find when you visit. I’m clear on what a select few of you are after. (Yes. YOU.) But many of you are a mystery to me. Feel free to post comments anonymously, send me an email, or throw paper airplanes.
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December 4, 2008 at 12:00 pm (ARCANA, ARTS)
Tags: Art, Blogging, Music, Nature, Thoughts
I have nothing to say. Sometimes I don’t. There are times when I just want to sit quietly. This doesn’t really carry well in a blog. Often writing in a blog seems to mean not having a filter between your thoughts and expression of them. Or perhaps the blog becomes the filter. The main objective is expression though and, at the moment, I’m expressed out. Instead I’d like to share some of my favorite quiet memories.
Rembrandt: Self-Portrait, aged 51
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra
Daybreak on the North Sea
Green Fields at Home
Anticipation: Washington, DC
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July 21, 2008 at 12:00 pm (ARCANA, SLICE OF LIFE)
Tags: Blogging, Thoughts
I knew it would come to this. Eventually, I knew, it would come to this. I have a blog. I have a blog, damn it. There. We’ve set the tone for it at least. If I must blog I’ll do it for myself, thank you very much. I’ll not be catering to my husband’s delicate sensibilities of what a lady should sound like, nor will it always be child-friendly. This is for me. I am a thirty-seven year old woman who can say damn it all whenever she pleases. At least here.
So here I am. Not really writing. The friend who suggested I blog – you know, the one with no noticeable blog himself – says it’s perfectly fine for me to write short little passages here and there with no real connection to one another. “That’s the blogging genre.” he says “No linking narrative, just stand alone chapters.” No linking narrative? I tell him that’s disgusting. I am appalled. And yet, here I am. Maybe I’m really only equipped for sound bites. I know part of it is the inescapable fact that I am a mother. Even my thoughts are rarely my own for long. They’re constantly hijacked. I’m afraid it might become a permanent thing though. Or that it will get worse. I fear someday I’ll be wandering in and out of my own conversations, tossing in random bits at irregular intervals. Madness, that’s what that is. I don’t want sound bites. I want continuity! I need linking narrative!
Perhaps if I write enough a pattern will emerge. A linked narrative within myself? That’s possible. Or I could spend myself in words and have nothing further to say, no longer need narrative at all. Perhaps. My great great grandfather wrote obsessively. He kept a journal for decades, kept records for the church, wrote letters, recorded purchases and payments to his farm supply store, noted the weather on the back wall of the store. All in his long-looped, elegant handwriting. He wrote so much his hand went numb. On his deathbed he couldn’t speak but waved his arm about, writing words in the air, fervently, endlessly. He hadn’t yet run out of words. Maybe that’s my continuity. The words themselves.
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