Where Water Spouts are Born

"Where Water Spouts are Born."

Allen went to an auction the other day and got three big boxes of National Geographics that were going to be thrown away. We decided we would each take one issue (chosen at random by the other person) and try to make a collage using at least 4 images. We only had two hours total to finish the collage. This is what I came up with.

The Rilke Project III

"Terrible Angels: For Rilke"
Conte pencil, colored pencil

I thought about how to depict terrible angels. I didn't want to do anything that looked like a Renaissance angel. I looked at many images created by Frida Kahlo and I also looked at several books of primitive art. I decided to create two angels who are vaguely skeletal and vaguely reptilian in appearance. I included an angel in the background who is more human in appearance and bathed her in sunlight.

We can never know whether a terrible angel will be pleasing or repugnant to the eye.

In "The Man Watching," Rilke writes of the angel who wrestled humans of the Old Testament:

When the wrestler's sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Rilke says that what we should want is to be beaten by this angel because in doing so, we will go away "proud and strengthened and great." Rilke says that the defeat kneads us as if to change our shape. Of the Old Testament human wrestler, Rilke says:

Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

The Rilke Project II

"When We Win It's with Small Things: For Rilke"

In the poem "The Man Watching" by Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Robert Bly), Rilke says:

When we win it's with small things,

and the triumph itself makes us small.

What is extraordinary and eternal

does not want to be bent by us.

The poem is about accepting what is great and eternal and allowing ourselves to be dominated by these things.

We talk all the time of overcoming our problems. This is important, too, but it is also important to learn to accept things that cannot be changed. In 2009 I want to remember this.

The Rilke Project

"Once More My Deeper Life: For Rilke"
Conte pencil.
After a drawing in Frida Kahlo's journal.

I'm going to work with Rilke now.

I did this simple drawing with Conte pencils, using an image from Frida Kahlo's journal. I changed the drawing, giving my animal longer legs and giving the legs stripes. Kahlo's image was done in paint and bore no dedication. Her entire journal, though, is a dedication to Diego, to her great love for him.

On New Year's Eve, Allen and I drove up to Dearborn, MI to Blicks Art Store. I got hooked on the Conte pencils when I sampled one. We ended up buying the 48 pencil set, although it was very expensive. I was going to come home without it, but Allen could tell that I really wanted it and encouraged me to buy it. We also got a large set of colored pencils and other small things.

I've never worked with Conte pencils, but all of my attempts with pastels in the past were awful failures. I always overworked them, and they were just a muddy mess. This is my first try with the Conte pencils and at least I can say I didn't overwork the drawing. I hope to get better with my image-making as time goes on.

This drawing was done on a sheet of drawing paper folded in half. I'm going to do several pages dedicated to Rilke and then stitch them together into a book.

Why Rilke? Because I love him. Because he understood solitude and because of that understanding was drawn to Picasso's Family of Saltimbanques. Because Rilke put his art at the center of his life and found his salvation there.

The lettering inside the sun in my drawing is from a Rilke poem: "Once more my deeper life goes on with more strength...and the paintings I see seem much more seen into."

When I looked at the Kahlo image from her journal, I saw it with my deeper life. In that moment of seeing, really seeing, I wanted to use her work as a model and make it mine.

On another page of her journal, she wrote of trying out new pencils. That made me smile, since I, too, was trying out new pencils:

I'll try out the pencils
sharpened to the point of infinity
which always sees ahead:
Green-good warm light
Magenta-Aztec, old TLAPALI
blood of prickly pear, the
brightest and oldest
color of mole, of leaves becoming
earth
madness sickness fear
part of the sun and of happiness
electricity and purity love
nothing is black--really nothing

leaves, sadness, science, the whole
of Germany is this color
more madness and mystery
all the ghosts wear
clothes of this color, or at
least their underclothes
color of bad advertisements
and of good business
distance. Tenderness
can also be this blue
blood?

Well, who knows!

The Circus Animals' Desertion IV

"The Circus Animals' Desertion IV"

This is the last in my series of pictures depicting Yeats's "The Circus Animals' Desertion." This photo illustrates the last lines:

I must lie down where all ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

I chose to depict a death-in-life scene, showing the broken refuse of human dreams next to signs of new life. The poor chariot has flat tires, the circus animals are ghost-like, and the snakes devour the eggs, but many eggs do continue, and those hatch new birds. Snakes in my pictures are never bad: they are symbols of regeneration.

Yeats says that his "masterful" images of the past "grew in pure mind" but they began out of:

a mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till...

Our best work comes not from glorious themes but from that which the mind has discarded as unimportant. That is where the imagination resides, in the heart where broken images are waiting for us to make them into new art.

The Circus Animals' Desertion III

"The Circus Animals' Desertion III"

In stanzas 2-4, Yeats tells us that he can do little but "enumerate old themes." In stanza 4, he says of what he has written:

It was the dream itself enchanted me:
character isolated by deed.
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things they were emblems of.

In my drawing, each character is isolated by a deed: walking on stilts, tug of war, balancing on a pig, training a dog to jump through a hoop. My little goat is watching with amusement from behind the curtain.

The Circus Animals' Desertion II

"The Circus Animals' Desertion II"

In the first stanza of "The Circus Animals' Desertion," Yeats writes:

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show
...that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the lord knows what.

Yeats looks back on his former poems with an element of regret. He seems to think that, like a circus, his early work was all for show. Yeats wants to find a way back to the true heart of his work.

My little drawing is of the chariot, the lion, and the woman, as well as a few circus animals. The clownish goat is my favorite, so I will probably put him in every picture I draw in this series.

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On another note: it has been so cold today. Last night, high winds shook the icy trees. All night ice shards were hurled against the house. The dogs were very upset by all the wild noise. I've never seen weather exactly like this before. It has just been a bitter, bitter night and day.

At around 7 a.m. our electricity went out and stayed off all day. It wasn't restored until almost 7 p.m. We heat with wood, so we were fairly warm, although the temperatures continued to drop through the day until it was below zero. The wind sucked the warmth out of this old house and before we knew it our pipes were starting to freeze in the bathrooms. This is not a problem we usually have. We caught the problem just in time.

The Circus Animals' Desertion

"The Circus Animals' Desertion"

I wanted to do a simple drawing today with ink and colored pencils. I love folk art, and I wanted to do a drawing in that style. Doing folk art lets you be creative in such a pure and childlike way.

I based the images on a poem by Yeats called "The Circus Animals' Desertion." It is about the awful moment when inspiration deserts us, when we fear our creative life is dead. In the first stanza he writes:

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,

I sought it daily for six weeks or so.

In this picture, the animals represent the imagination. The people have chained a bear to a tree. The horse, which is symbolic of primal energy, has been tamed and is in service to humans. The goat and the unicorn are escaping into the sky, not only an open sky, but the night sky, a place of dreams.

Some people do not notice the animals' escape; others look into the sky and gesture to the animals longingly. The man on the horse tries to stop the animals by using force. I think each person in the picture says something about how we deal with the loss of our creative power. I remember what John Trudell said in the documentary about him: Our power comes from our relationship to life.

I may do a whole series of these and base them on different lines from Yeats's poem. I had such a good time doing this.

Making Christmas #3

Happy Holidays!

Making Christmas #2

I've been thinking about stars a lot lately; they seem to be in everything I make, whether visual or written.

Making Christmas #1

Making your own Christmas cards is fun.

Provincetown 49

"Mirror, Mirror on the Wall"

This one was so much fun to do. It came together after I found the card for the "The Paper Fool." I guess fairy tales were on my mind because I'll be teaching a course on fairy tales this fall. I also had been reading in The Golden Bough about the symbolism of mirrors.

This is my last week at Provincetown! On the 25th classes start and I am back to my other life. It has been productive, and it has been a blast.

Provincetown 48

Taste, O Taste and See

I like to tell a story with my collages. The collages give me a chance to use visual symbolism freely. The great thing about a collage is that the onlooker can create his or her own story.

My new journal is filling quickly. I have ordered some good watercolor paper and plan to hand-stitch my next journal.

Provincetown 47

Prayer

Another letter from Allen today. He knows me. His letter encouraged me to step out of my dream world for a while and take in the world through my senses. So I went for a very long walk, all the way out to the rock jetty. It was the first time I'd walked that far. I came back and did this collage to honor the letter. He reminded me of how wonderful this place is and how much I will miss it. But he stressed:

"You are there now! Dig your hands into the sand. Feel that water. Reach out and touch buildings, stone walls, even the ground you walk on. Close your eyes. What do you feel?"

He reminded me: "Your heart will long for these things."

I wrote these words on the collage, as well as some Buddhist sayings: "My true religion is kindness," and "Test all things for yourself." I also included the idea that the span of a human life is "one breath." I love this idea: to be mindful with each breath that you are alive. To live an entire lifetime within the span of that breath. And then to do it again. And again. And again.

The moon is out here in Provincetown tonight. It is the same moon that is above you right now. We are looking at the same moon.

Good-night.

Provincetown 46

O Child, Do Not Fear the Dark and Sleep's Dark Possession

The title of this piece is taken from a poem by Delmore Schwartz.

The poem begins:

O Child, when you go down to sleep and sleep's secession,

You become more and other than you are, you become

the procession

Of bird and beast and tree: you are a chorus,

A pony among horses, a sapling in a dark forest,

Lifting your limbs and boughs to the sky, leafing.

And then you are one with the beaver, one

With the little animals warm in the sun

Resting and hidden when it is white winter:

And in sleep's river you sleep

Like the river's self and the marine

Beings who mouth as they glide, nosing

And sliding lithely and smoothly

Gleaming serenely and sleekly.

I had just been reading a collection of stories about the Buddha, and in several of the stories, the Buddha takes the form of an animal. In one of my favorites, he takes the form of an Ibex, and one of the lessons of the tale is not to kill for sport.

Schwartz writes about the river in another poem: "The River Was the Emblem of All Beauty: All":

The river was the abundant belly of beauty itself

The river was the dream space where I walked,

The river was itself and yet it was--flowing and freshening--

A self anew, another self, or self renewed

At every tick of eternity, and by each glint of light

Mounting or sparkling, descending to shade and black.

There is so much in this poem. The fecundity of a river, the renewal properties of the river. The river becomes all of life: joy (mounting or sparkling) and despair (shade and black). Yin and Yang.

This collage has a lot of personal meaning for me. It connects me to my thoughts about my river journey in 2005 and to my thoughts on life, death, and eternity. It also connects me to my childhood: my favorite toy was a mountain goat named "Oddie." I have written about Oddie here before. Oddie was lost but he has remained in my imagination and continues to be my muse.

Provincetown 45

Show and Tell

This one is about the imaginative process and the writing process. The title is wonderfully ambiguous. It refers to what creative writing teachers always tell their students AND it refers to joyful sharing. This one went together very quickly! Can anyone say "Horror Vaccui?"

Someone recently asked me to explain how doing the collages helps me with my writing. It's a bit of a mysterious process; I'm not sure I understand how it works myself. I have been reading a lot of haiku the last couple of days. And the haiku that I like the best creates a strong visual image. It goes beyond words. The words disappear. I think the collages I do are my way of marrying together pictures and words. It is a halfway house for what I want to do in words. I want my words to disappear when someone reads them. I want my stories to enter deeply into the imagination, into that part of the self which dreams. I like working with the symbols of that world.

Making the collages is also meditative. My brain gets tired when I write for long periods of time. I've been so focused on my writing for the last few weeks that my spirit needs rejeuvanation now. The collages are rejeuvanating. I feel myself going deeply into my inner thoughts as I work on them. It's calming and thrilling at the same time.

Provincetown 44

Letter #12

I spent all day and all night on this one. I just finished it a few minutes ago. It is based on a letter I recently received from Allen about cutting down a mulberry tree in our yard. I thought the letter was so tender and affecting that I just had to work with it. It took me longer to do this one because I usually start out with images, not text. It was harder for me to have the text first. I tried several different arrangements until I came up with this one.

All of the collages I have done at Provincetown are done inside a Stonehenge Book of all cotton acid free pH neutral pages. The book is double wire bound. I have also been doing pen and ink pieces (mostly text) on the back of each page. I consider what I'm doing to be journaling more than anything else.

I don't expect you to be able to read the text in the collage (I took words directly out of the letter he wrote to me), so here's what it says:

Letter 12

I cut down that low hanging mulberry tree, the one that fought so hard to make it through the winter. It fell to the pace of one's last breath. Two baby birds fell out of their nest and three little brown bats hung onto tender limbs smaller than a toothpick. That evening as a pink sky was fading to purple, I checked & the bats were gone and the ants feasted on baby birds. There is a lot of life and death in a single mulberry tree.

Provincetown 41

Skin Heart.

This is the first image I made yesterday.

My art class here at FAWC was canceled, but since I had a lot of my art materials with me, I decided to do some journal pages.

Provincetown 40

When We Dreamed of Having Children

This is the second image I made yesterday.

Provincetown 39

Desire

This is the third image I made yesterday.