Art and Chaos

Somewhere over the western continental United States
2018

And we are put on earth a little space,

That we may learn to bear the beams of love, 

William Blake

When I meditate and lose my breath and go to thoughts they are like tendrils in some dark soup, like fish swimming by, my hook vain. I make them clouds to float, to find my breath again. My thoughts, my brain. I flew back to Los Angeles from Spokane. I looked out the window to see what appeared to be an ordered universe -- neat squares, rectangles and the occasional parallelogram colored in rich browns and greens with wispy clouds floating above. It might have been a brain, thoughts packed tight. In service to breath, become clouds. And then right there, a branch cutting through, tendrils, neurons, synapses, whatever. Threaded through and broken. It's always about the brain, isn't it? Sophie's brain and mine. The word riven. The word wisp. 




Have you been listening to our podcast, dear Reader? This week's episode, Art and Chaos is with the brilliant artist Mimi Feldman. She is the mother of a young man who has schizophrenia. I think it is one of the most interesting conversations that I've had in my life. I feel humbled by her experiences and enriched by her story. I believe fervently that people's voices -- the telling of story -- connects us to one another.

Read about and listen to Mimi's story here.  I promise you will leave enriched beyond your imaginings.


If you have been listening to Who Lives Like This?!, what do you think? My partner Jason and I are having so much fun doing this, but our intention is to also build a real community. We need your help. We're not making money, but we'd like to continue to build the podcast and the community and improve the quality and -- well -- continue doing it. If you're so inclined, please consider supporting us through Patreon. You can pledge as little as $1 a month!

Here's the link to Patreon.

Henry and Oliver took me out to dinner for my birthday -- Henry on the last night in Spokane where I left him to begin his second year at Gonzaga, and Oliver here in Los Angeles, last night.

I know ya'll like my sons almost as much as I do, so here are a couple of pics:

like every lark who lifts his life

Yesterday morning, Sophie picked her cup off the table and,  just like that, began drinking. I'm not sure what happened over the past week, but I really was thinking that the regression was the new normal. I even bought multiple Honey Bear bottles with straws in them on the internets on the advice of another special needs healthcare mother.

Sophie also looked directly into my eyes, and I could swear she said What kind of shit was this past week? 

Then, like the phoenix, she rose up leaving me, a pile of ashes.

The picture above is Sophie with former NFL football player and now medical marijuana spokesperson Eben Britton. Ya'll know what I think of football but -- well -- ummmmm, hmmmmm, yeah. He's a writer and passionate advocate for medical marijuana. This was a Realm of Caring/Faces of Cannabis event with one of my heroes, Ray Mirzabegian spearheading it with the incomparably talented Colorado photographer Nichole Montanez.

She did not take these pictures -- I did, and I was suitably flustered.

Would you like another one?

Sigh.






It's my 53rd birthday today, and my friend Chris sent me this poem, one of her favorites and now one of mine. It's by e.e. cummings

How We Know One Another

The above photographed birthday cards were my two favorite that I received -- from friends who've known me for a very long time and from a friend who has known me for only a short time and only virtually but who knows me as well and maybe even more and better than anyone.

This poem appeared on The Writer's Almanac on my birthday. I haven't read much Dorianne Laux, but I couldn't help but think the poem was a sign of sorts -- that we are known by others, that words find us. I ordered a couple of her books.



Moon in the Window

I wish I could say I was the kind of child
who watched the moon from her window,
would turn toward it and wonder.
I never wondered. I read. Dark signs
that crawled toward the edge of the page.
It took me years to grow a heart
from paper and glue. All I had
was a flashlight, bright as the moon,
a white hole blazing beneath the sheets.

Dorianne Laux

52 and Hot (not THAT way)

So far, I've had a lovely birthday. I had an early breakfast with my astral twin Debra (we have same exact birthday) and then a little later breakfast with my oldest friend Moye. I've received texts and telephone calls and Facebook greetings. We are waiting until 5:30 when The Air-Conditioner Man comes and replaces our air-conditioner with a brand-spanking new one. I am hoping that he gives it to us, out of pity for it being my birthday and 95 degrees in the house and all. If there's anything I've learned in my 52 years of life on the planet, all you have to do is ask and ye shall receive. In the meantime, the boys have built what you see above -- a sort of hacked air-conditioner that my friend Mary Beth directed me to the other night on Youtube. It kind of works. That's a cooler filled with ice, with holes cut into it for an insulation tube (the silver thing) and a fan. The video claimed it cost $8 to make, but we spent closer to $17. It blows surprisingly cool air, and I guess it's as good a day as any to remember the days of my youth, nearly thirty-five years ago or so when I lived in a dorm at UNC with no air-conditioning. Since we started school in mid-August, I spent my birthday there for four years, and the dog days of summer in North Carolina were brutal. We would take a cold shower, soak the towel in cold water and wrap our heads, then sit in front of the window fan to cool off. We've put the hacked AC in Sophie's room since seizures and heat are no good. I am waiting for her bus to get here and then will move out of the way and plant her in front of it. in the meantime, I'm reminiscing about some of the best years of my life and those left to come. Thank you for helping me to celebrate!

Friendship

In a circle of true Friends each man is simply what he is: stands for nothing but himself. No one cares twopence about anyone else’s family, profession, class, income, race, or previous history. Of course you will get to know about most of these in the end. But casually. They will come out bit by bit, to furnish an illustration or an analogy, to serve as pegs for an anecdote; never for their own sake. That is the kingliness of Friendship. We meet like sovereign princes of independent states, abroad, on neutral ground, freed from our contexts. This love (essentially) ignores not only our physical bodies but that whole embodiment which consists of our family, job, past and connections. At home, besides being Peter or Jane, we also bear a general character; husband or wife, brother or sister, chief, colleague, or subordinate. Not among our Friends. It is an affair of disentangled, or stripped, minds. Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities. Hence (if you will not misunderstand me) the exquisite arbitrariness and irresponsibility of this love. I have no duty to be anyone’s Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which gave value to survival.

C,S, Lewis, The Four Loves 

via Brain Pickings 

Last night, I had the last of my extended birthday celebrations on the top of the Hotel Wilshire in mid-city. A few of my dearest friends met me at this funky, little rooftop bar and restaurant where we might have been the grannies of most of the people there. 

As you can see, a teeny tiny little square pool sat in the middle, and when we arrived several tattooed and bikinied gals were casually sipping on their fancy cocktails, looking exactly like a live Barbie Pool set-up. Dang! I should have brought my bathing suit! I said to my friends and felt a frisson of fear at the prospect. We ordered drinks. I had some concoction of gin and elderflower liqueur, lime juice and soda that gave me a perfect buzz after about five sips. We ordered appetizers and sat around the table for hours, discussing everything from breasts to men, laughing most of the time. Somewhere in there, I also had a mule made with lime, ginger beer and vodka -- it wasn't a Moscow Mule, but it was even more delicious. I opened ridiculously fine presents -- a Kantha, an antique bowl and goodies for the bath, and we finished with peanut butter and jelly beignets and strawberry shortcake. By that time, the Barbies had left, the hipsters had taken over and we rode the elevator back down to the street and went back home. I would be lost without these women friends -- the ones that I was lucky to have with me last night and the scattering rest of them, really, all over the world. Thank you, ladies. We do, indeed, have an affair of disentangled, or stripped, minds.

The Landlocked Life

Weeki Wachi Springs

This morning I met Moye at a neighborhood pastry place for a belated birthday breakfast. She stuck a candle in the bunch of hair that I had pinned to the top of my head, and then we lit it and I burst into flames and disappeared. Just kidding. Well, that wasn't funny, really. We actually sat down and drank delicious coffee, ate this incredible concoction of bread, exotic sauteed mushrooms and eggs and shared some divine confection -- a cannelle, I think it was, all crispy caramelized on the outside and eggy soft in the center. We talked about our children and shared some memories of our high school years (we grew up together in Atlanta!) and we laughed together like we always do. She gave me a beautiful bracelet/necklace that I promptly wrapped around my wrist and a wonderful little book of poetry called Poems of the American South from the Everyman's Library Pocket Poets series. She wrote a beautiful inscription inside in her inimitable gorgeous handwriting, drawing my attention to the poems inside that include mermaids, Tar Heels and tender mercies. Thank you, Moye, for your years of friendship, for your sense of humor, your support, your beauty and your inspired art.


September 11th is always a sombre day -- isn't it? Our minds inevitably go back to where we were and how we heard and how we led our lives in those days following. There's a tyranny to sorrow, isn't there? What we are almost required to feel or remember? I'm always struck, on this day, by the strange paradox of the Never Forget communal imperative juxtaposed with the get over it mentality we place on individual loss. It's something I think about, particularly in regard to my friends who've lost a child or suffered some other big loss. There's a tyranny to sorrow, isn't there -- or at least a manufactured order to it.

I was going to post a poem on this somber day of Adam Zagajewski's -- a poem that I've posted before that I think is entirely appropriate, but instead I'll give you the link and post the mermaid poem from the book that Moye gave me.

It's all we can do, really.

Try to Praise the Mutilated World by Adam Zagajewski



My First Mermaid

I
In Florida, where these things happen,
we stopped at the last roadside attraction.

In a small theater decorated with mold,
behind a curtain sagging like seaweed,

a wall of glass held back a wall of water.
And there, in the springs, a woman in a bikini top

and Lycra fish tail held an air hose to her lips
like a microphone. What was she waiting for?

Into the great open bowl of the springs
a few fish drifted. They looked at the two of us.

They shook their heads and their bodies rippled.
Air bubbles shimmered in the filtered sun,

each a silver O racing to the surface to break.
We'd missed the day an unscripted underwater blimp

of a manatee wobbled into view. The gray, whiskered lard
of a sea cow or the young woman who sang --

lip-synched, rather -- some forgettable song,
her lipstick waterproof: which was the real mermaid?

II.
Given the weight of the water, nothing happens fast
to a mermaid, whether it's love or loss.

Not like the landlocked life, I wanted to warn her.
But here came a prince in street clothes,

trying to think thoughts that were heavy enough
to make himself sink to her level. His shirt ballooned,

a man turned not to a merman but a manatee.
Yet, in the small eternity it took for him

to grasp her greasy flipper, for her to find
his more awkward human ankle, and then

for them to turn, head over each other's heels --
a ring rolling away, too beautiful to catch --

they lived happily ever after.
Until one of them had to stop for breath.

Debora Greger (1949-)

Gifts, Poetry and Cake

I've had a lovely day -- breakfast with my friend Jenni, flowers from those neighborhood cuties above, and a coconut cake that I bought myself in the late afternoon. Henry surprised me with a card and an apple, carved into a swan.

Who knew?

Oliver gave me the most beautiful blue reclining Buddha. Here it is in front of my friend Moye's gorgeous pottery:

I posted both the apple turned swan and the Buddha on Facebook, and Heather McHugh -- that angel saint poet who gave me the respite week last year and who is the founder of Caregifted -- wrote a comment that is a poem. Honestly, I am in awe and so honored. Here it is:

amazing how much they have in common, the swan and buddha, in these iterations... but though the steadiness of the buddha's eye is to live for, the seediness of the swan's eye is to die for.

Wow. Right?

And then someone left this link on my last post which I believe is perfectly suited to a person who was born in 1963.



So, there you go. Gifts, poetry and cake -- I am rich indeed.

Birthday Number 51

My first birthday
August 27, 1964

Good lord. Evidently my love of cake began at an early age. Look how young my parents were, how adorable! That was fifty years ago!

I guess there was another party which meant more cake for me:

Doesn't Sophie sort of resemble my darling mother in that photo?

Oh, here I am eating cake on my sweet sixteenth birthday with one of my oldest friends, Audrey.  She lives in New York City but usually calls me a day or so after to wish me happy birthday. We've made a ritual out of that, and I would never want her to call me on the actual day. I'll pick up the phone and she'll say, Happy Birthday! and I'll say It was the 27th! and she'll say I thought it was the 29th! and then she'll tell me that the only reason I remember her birthday is because she was born on the exact day that my parents were married, which was in October of 1962, ten months and several weeks BEFORE I was born, my mother is quick to remind me. You know, just in case I thought less of her. In any case, this silly ritual has amused Audrey and me for decades.

Sometime this week I'll probably eat cake with my other oldest friend, Moye, and we'll laugh together and I'll realize how much I love her and am grateful for our long friendship. Later today, I'll eat cake with my children, open presents from my sisters and my parents, be grateful for a body that is strong and healthy, and a  life that is blessed with beautiful children, family and friends.

I hope to live another fifty years on this wonderful planet, particularly if I morph into my southern Italian peasant grandmother and live in Bora Bora in one of those huts over the cerulean sea.

A Whisky Sour and a Birthday Eve Dinner

Emily, Sylvia, Leah and I have been taking one another out for birthday lunches or dinner for over ten years, now, and tonight they took me to a fabulous new restaurant around the corner called Republique. I got there early and sipped an amazing whiskey sour that had whipped egg whites in it. I know that's standard and authentic, but I'd never had it and can I tell you that that was one outrageous drink? The rest of our meal was outstanding -- we ordered so many dishes that I couldn't begin to remember and do justice to them here. There were salads and sushi and soft shell crab and vegetables tempura and rich pasta carbonara and crusty bread with salted Normandy butter. We laughed and talked and caught up for several hours  and ate so much that we turned down dessert before rolling out and back home.

Thank you, ladies, for a beautiful evening!

Virgo (August 23 to September 22)

I think I'm celebrating my fiftieth birthday until the Virgoan era is over on September 22nd. Today, my dearest in the whole dear world took me to an amazing brunch at an amazing restaurant. I drank a Bloody Mary and a glass of champagne.

I broke my no-sugar fast (one week successful and I will begin it again tomorrow) and nibbled on an amazing pecan cinnamon bun or danish. I ate ground sirloin with a fried egg on top and the most delectable jus (not juice) I've ever tasted.

I opened presents -- incredible presents, really. Art and jewelry that is art, poetry magazine subscriptions, and a purple purse to die for. I laughed myself silly and cried a bit, too. When the time came for blowing out the candles, and I was just about to do it, Cara yelled, "Wish BIG!" and I stopped and everyone stopped singing and then I took another deep breath and wished

SO

BIG, that you couldn't possibly know what I'd wished.

Well, maybe you could imagine.

It was the most perfect morning a fifty year old woman could possibly have, and I just can't possibly do it justice -- or these women who bless my life.

A Good Lord Birthday Food Blog

Last night, I had dinner with D, one of my oldest friends, and my oldest son, Henry. I've known D now for thirty years, and no one currently makes me laugh harder. You will never see a photo of D either, because that's how he rolls, and since I love him to death -- well -- I'm banking he'll always be with me in some form or another anyway, so who needs a photo? In any case, he's got the body of a god and the face of an intellectual which is just about perfect (even if he does put on his trousers backwards sometimes) and I hope he's reading this. We went to a new restaurant in West Hollywood called Connie and Ted's that we could only get a reservation for at 5:15 (perfect when you're beginning the next half century and might need to segue into the early bird special time earlier rather than later). We ate an assortment of raw oysters first.

Good lord, they were icy cold, salty and perfect.

 Next, came a trio of chowda samplers: Manhattan, Boston and Rhode Island. Good lord, each was better than the next. The Boston tasted like it had a stick of the finest butter on the planet melted into it, and the Rhode Island made me remember when I was twenty years old (thirty years ago!) and spent the summer in Newport with ten of my college girlfriends. We ate a lot of chowdah that summer, hung out on the docks with America's Cup sailors, fell into and out of love -- but I digress.

That's what good food does, I think.

My main course was Mediterranean mussels and clams with little bricks of buttery, spicy toast.

Good lord, it was hearty:

Henry ordered fried clams. He said that they were perfect.

Good lord, they were:

I had a slice of peach pie for dessert, blew out a candle after making a wish, and laughed uproariously because D kept teasing me about my encroaching age-related daffiness. The sentence I need a birthday candle plate, pronto!, yelled in my old waiter voice will become part of D's and my stored collection of mutual mockery until the day we drop dead with no pain whatsoever.

Good lord, I hope my wish comes true:

We drove home in a seafood haze, blasting Eva Cassidy singing Lennon's Imagine (and you must listen to that if you want to feel like the troubles of the world have disappeared and what is left is warm and hysterically funny and fifty years are ahead of you, the same, light, wistful, filled up) as the golden light of Los Angeles softened into the sultry air.

Good lord, I'm blessed.
















Thank you, D.


P.S. I'm still shopping around for tattoo artists, so nothing to show you, yet!

50

It's been a good fifty years. If I live to be one hundred, which I hope to do, I'm only halfway through!

Fosterling

'That heavy greenness fostered by water'

At school I loved one picture's heavy greenness --
Horizons rigged with windmills' arms and sails.
The millhouses' still outlines. Their in-placeness
Still more in place when mirrored in canals.
I can't remember never having known
The immanent hydraulics of a land
Of glar and glit and floods at dailigone.
My silting hope. My lowlands of the mind.

Heaviness of being. And poetry
Sluggish in the doldrums of what happens.
Me waiting until I was nearly fifty
To credit marvels. Like the tree-clock of tin cans
The tinkers made. So long for air to brighten,
Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten.

Seamus Heaney, from Seeing Things

One Week Away From 50

I know you've seen part of this, but watch the whole thing -- especially if you're a Sopranos fan.

Birthday Tattoo Call

My birthday is in a little over a week, and I plan on getting my first (and probably, last) tattoo. I think a small, simple mermaid on the inside of my left wrist is what I'd like, but I'm not sure if it should be black and white or colored or a bit of both. The sketch above is by an artist friend of mine who used it for a birthday card for Sophie a while back -- I like the simple lines and elegance (minus the flower, of course) and even the tiny bit of green and red. What do you think?

What about this one?

Ideas? Send me links!

Birthday Number 49

My first birthday, August 27, 1964

Who knew?
(thanks, Dad and Mom, for giving me life)