Happiness, thy name is Ragdale!

August 20, 2009

At 4pm today, I arrived at Ragdale to begin my two-week artist-in-residency, and already the magnificence has begun. Before we get to the pigeonaire, or the immensely talented chef, or the ferociously alive acres of wild prairie – with a whole meadow of milkweed pods about to come into bloom – or the incandescent and equally elated fellow artist comrades gathered from all corners of the world…let’s get one marvelous thing straight: I am sleeping in the 19th century children’s playroom, and working in…………a tower cupola.

It looks like a closet door. A humble, serviceably modest hundred year old closet door. However. Open it, and enter the queendom of dreams and fairytales. I know it is the queendom of dreams, because throughout my girlhood I squinched up my eyes and pounded my fists and wished ever so much for a spendorous tower cupola in which to write. And a secret staircase. And a bookcase reached only via sniggedly ladder.  And off scamper happily the dreams, and their weavers plot and plan and knit and purl and unfurl and unroll and rustle about the parchment plans of squiggles and dots and all sorts of arcanery until voila – twenty-five years have passed and I am twisting the old brass doorknob, and discovering a creakity narrow staircase egg-pasted with luridly tinted 1930s travel posters (touting the French-operated colonial trains of Africa, for instance, with gouached gazelles (chartreuse, mais bien sur)) that leads me up up up up up ever narrower to a resplendently prismatic cupola – all bottle-glass windows, high up in the trees with a circumnavigal view of the prairies. And, because they are the champions of long-awaited hopes and dreams, dusty eaves festooned with balletically edwardian daddy longlegs (so one is never ever lonely). It is the gala ballroom of finespun spider society, all top hats and spats and emerald diadems, gracefully endowed with all the laconic charm of arachnid bon vivants.

A 19th century estate in the very plush historic Lake Forest neighborhood of Chicago, Ragdale is very much a wrinkle in time (if you read the original novel of The Time Traveller’s Wife, Audrey Neiffeneger wrote it here, and set it here. So the grounds are belovedly familiar, in a perfectly surreal romantic kind of haze. For that matter, if you happened to be aware of the Obama inauguration, the poem “Praise Song For the Day” was written here by Elizabeth Alexander.

It is a very praise song kind of place. I feel absolutely humbled by the opportunity, the gift of this experience, the blessing that is belief and support of a dream. The atmosphere here is palpably loving: simple, earnest, intense. The landscape, the structures, the humans, the animals all exude that harmonious chord of yes yes yes absolutely yes yes yes yes yes.

Before the kitchen goddess graced us with our formal dinner (the dining room is her temple, we her congregation, there are candles and wine and everything. We know that’s how it truly all began, these liturgies – an amazing woman, good food, and gustatory praise for the universe), I poked through the mote-ridden attic with a children’s book writer and Louis Armstrong scholar this afternoon, and we came upon stacks of children’s tin cups, skates that require keys, fencing masks, victorian portraits, cookoo clock lead acorn weights…moody and evocative yet emotionally quite buoyant. Perhaps because with sufficient creativity, we can be inspired by the past, rather than weighed down by it.

[Short pause whilst I went downstairs to examine the contents of the fridge, and accidentally ate seven (yikes) leftover homemade blueberry creme puffs that the chef  had made for dessert. We all know cremepuffs don’t keep. At midnight, they turn into donkeys – if you haven’t read the folktale to that effect, I will write it for you. I was simply performing a duty.

And for all those who think the ages of goddess worship are over – prepare to stand corrected. This chef! My goodness. The scents issuing forth from her kitchen can be enjoyed all the way to the lake  and back again. She seeded, planted, grew, harvested, and cooked yellow wax beans this evening, straight from her garden out back. Along with some sort of delightful local fish creature who I am certain quite happily sacrificed its life for immolation at the stovetop temple. I am considering replacing my fingers with forks and spoons.]

As far as tomorrow’s projects – I was intending to begin work on my Aleph Bet project (working with the Hebrew alphabet in poetry and text-layered photographs, and have “brought in” huge scrolls of paper and a delightful collection of sumi inks and brushes to begin my exploration of the letter Hey…and several new cameras).

However, in stumbling across the dovecote – again with the Louis Armstrong scholar – we got to talking about Borges’ delightfully decrepit pigeonaire (which I photographed in Argentina), and Louis Armstrong and France in the 1940s, and carrier pigeons used by paratroopers at Normandy, and I recalled that my mother’s father – a conscientious objector during WWII – apparently raised and trained carrier pigeons which my grandmother rather pointedly donated “to the war effort” whilst he was held prisoner in labor camps and  busy organizing against his pigeons’ employers. Theirs is an epic counterbalance.

So tomorrow – perhaps some photos and text putterings about the doves of peace and the pigeons of war… To be a drafted pigeon fighting the fascists…birds of service.   So perhaps some dovecote photographing, and a little scribbling in the prairies, seeing what words are lurking about in the thistles.

So here I am, in my cupola, writing my goodnight amidst the midnight winds and stars and thunderheads, above hundreds of acres of never-touched prairie, alongside this sea of lake, with three ladybugs snoring at the window latch. They sound like ladybugs snoring. The beating of tiny insect nostrils, a polka-dotted pranayama.