August 31, 2009
Working today on a second new text piece for the prairie project – at some point it will end up as a video poem, perhaps, or handwritten on top of some images if my prairie photographs turn out even reasonably well…I somehow managed to shoot a decadent 20-30 rolls in the few sunny hours. They have no text, so perhaps I will write directly on the prints. Or, in the great experiment, text optically layered on film within some photographs if I can build the setup right. That experiment happens tomorrow, good lord willin’ and the crick don’t rise.
Evening stage of text was/is working with laying the piece out visually, in India ink and bamboo pen on sheets of bristol board and watercolor paper, trying to find the right visual shapes for the structure before I hopefully ink it onto big 30″ high paper rolls first thing in the morning, and then haul those rolls out to the prairie tomorrow afternoon to photograph.
I just need the ink to oblige, and the sumi brushes, and of course the sun and rain to be kind. And it’s about negative twelve degrees, so I’ll need to cover my face in lard (against frostbite, if you’re wondering) and carry big spear to keep wolves away.
After eleven days of steady application of tiller, fertilizer and water, it did feel that today the real growth started sprouting in earnest, because today was mostly awkward and unpleasant and uncomfortable and unsightly. I was mostly irritable and irritating, like the process of pearl-making that mostly seems to involve slime and food poisoning.
Discomfort and volatility and prickliness is often a good sign that something is about to emerge, or at the very least that unfamiliar waters have been encountered, and the comfort zone has been breached, and new growth is necessary. So I’m diving right down into it.
The writer Elissa Schapelle said in an interview years ago that she knows she’s onto something good if she throws up in the process of creating it. It pertains to babies, too.
In my equivalent stage, I tend to find a lot of spiders hanging out on me. This used to be terrifying, but now is a source of elation since I associate it with a particular creative prosperity. Also, they are cute tiny pixie spiders for the most part, and the ones that aren’t keep the situation nice and spicy.
Regardless, mostly folks don’t tend to believe me. I spent the first week in my Tower at Ragdale with spiders crawling out of my sizable bouffant because when I put it in a poof, I have about 5 inches of dustmop cleverly attached to my brain. This left the tangible evidence of web remained, so spiders were presumed to be in there…somewhere…
However, today! Today, I was writing out the structure of the text by hand in the big downstairs barnhouse workroom that looks up at the iron hayloft hoist. It’s spacious and light-filled down here, and a welcome break from the lunatic tube that is known as the Tower on a claustrophobic day.
Today! Today! I was scratching along with my wooden pen when a tiny white spider ever-so-delicately descended from my hair, landed neatly on my knuckles, crawled to my middle finger, hoisted itself around and nestled up quite sweetly underneath the fingernail to ride along as I wrote. The little spiderling was absolutely minute. Because nobody ever believes me, I took a picture. You can see the little dot. Very tiny, on the half-moon of my middle fingernail.
According to Vedic thought, the middle finger is the Jupiter finger, and stands for lessons learned the hard way. That’s my specialty. I felt like the spider really understood me, and that everything was going to be okay. We had a moment of true communion.
I let it write with me for a little while, and then I didn’t want it to drown in the vat of violet ink, so I took it out to the terrace and placed it on the left shoulder of Bird Girl – the bronze statue that Sylvia Shaw made, which achieved additional fame as the iconic image for Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. I figured a spider would be very capable of finding a home from that point onward.
Speaking of the Garden of Eden…sure enough, as soon as I move into this gloomy, brooding, fecund, feline stage from which green sprouts emerge, it’s nearly time to move on to the next station in this fifteen week migration.
(Today, I have come to wonder whether that isn’t the uniquely successful mission of two-week, single-class residencies – just turn over the soil, add a little fertilizer and water, and then send us out into the world to root down and flower fully. We divest ourselves of two weeks of hyperactivity and hilarity, and then inflict our angst and moping upon someplace stupid enough to offer extended residencies.)
Perhaps it’s best, then, that the next stop is my early stomping grounds, The Great American South – which, along with the Yankee Texas known as New Jersey – really specializes in a broad bandwidth for angst, moping, stupidity, deep roots, and stinky flowers.
(It is my admittedly personally biased observation that the generalized midwest prefers the cultivation of closely-held feelings that are not too much of an intrusion into cohesive community life, and places tremendous respect on self-restraint and consensus and communal constraint…a certain holding back the soul. Which doesn’t make it less fully-felt, presumably, but makes intensities a bit more lonely and mysterious to navigate. This perhaps not entirely accurate cultural broad stroke brought to you by my teenage time spent bunkered down in the midwest with all the soldiers and harlots and heavy liquor drinkers in the Quaker compounds of Indiana.)
So from the parenthesized and bracketed mid-western two weeks that began with the new moon, will proceed the South and a big fat summer full September moon. Of course. There’s a ready supply of the boiled down fat of a slaughtered hog, because if you’re going to eat something, do it all the way. A key to living big. Living large. Blood and tears. Come what may. The land of the pig, the moon, and the magnolia flower – big, white, stinky, beautiful but sinister…
As for the new moon and the prairie versus the full moon and the magnolia – regardless, this is the exact time period where I need another week or two to really dig down into the site-specific work. With photographic projects, it’s increasingly astonishing how much it is still a real medium of time – writing can be done anywhere, because its fundamental home is internal to the writer. But photography does actually require some semblance of a tangible, site-specific reality, and it’s always gone too fast. More cause for existential brooding over a satisfying feedback proof loop: oh look at the fleeting and inherently transitory nature of time. Like that. Like that. Oh, mortality – there it goes again. Again. Again.
When photographing cities or architectural/built ruins, the shapes and places reveal themselves to me much more readily. When there are only plants to work with along a flat horizon, so much depends on the all these small nuances of light and more complex composition – studying and watching and observing it all takes a great deal of time and sensitivity of eye to learn the various options. Two weeks is far better than the half-hour or hour I usually get, so there’s no room to complain. But one of these days, I will relish the opportunity to let the relationship fully develop, and not be so rushed.
There has been much talk as of late (here at Ragdale – where many are reading the writings of Teresa of Avila – and in publications, including Aperture and BOMB this month) about medieval methods of memorization where the device is to store information in the form of an architectural structure…build a castle, fill it figuratively with particular knowledge in particular rooms, then walk through it.
I suppose I would build not a building but a marvelously alive, re-composing ruin, and then all the knowledge would sort of tumble into other rooms and tumble out into the moat and become waterlogged and swell, and then be partially crushed by the drawbridge and crawl up, half-mad, through the chambers, making riotous mayhem of the tidy parsed bits of highly processed learning, and everything would run together until nothing was in its proper categories and then all the words would be hauled out and burned at the stake, amidst much gnashing by the sympathizers and cheering by the adversaries, and then I would come back a few hundred years later and photograph it, and find that new words had been formed in the intervening centuries, and the stories had changed and the books were different and it was all new. And it would be in the South.
And it would be hugely alive, like a pig that escapes the slaughterhouse and runs free in the woods with fearsome tusks, scaring all the suburbanites who think their air conditioning will save them.
Today’s lesson: Live large, like a wild pig on the lam in a Jewish town: happy, loud, and free. Get stinky and awkward. Dance with spiders and other scary things. And remember…fuck housework.