The apple's proximity to the tree

The apple and the tree: seeds planted by parental example....

The Parent As A Child

Planted pinks on the parent’s graves last week. Both died in May, 30 plus years apart.  Usually I go with geraniums. Couldn't find any. Too early, or out of fashion, I guess.  

This post is about Mom, who died just shy of 87 years old. She was a life long Republican, but oddly, something of a social liberal who leaned left as she aged, who admired Hillary Clinton.

For 25 years Mom worked as what they now call an "admin" at a state police troop and then when they moved that troop out of town, she worked for a few years at a second one that was closer. She was a discrete and loyal an employee as they could hope, never spoke about work things at home. There was a little hint once.  

While working at the barracks she got a call for jury duty, Years afterwards she said the case involved a motorcycle accident and she relayed a few of the jury selection questions. Had she ever ridden a motorcycle or knew anyone who had? Why yes, her husband. Before they married they rode around on an old Indian machine until they were hit by a car.  Hmm. Because of her job, they asked another question.  Would she always take the word of a police officer over anyone else's?  That would depend, Mom said, on which police officer.  She was dismissed, not sure which side objected.

 Mom had a regular New Years Day Open house and invited relatives, friends and associates from work to stop by. Among the annual attendees was a police dispatcher named Minnie who was usually the only black face in the crowd. Minnie commented on this each year, and she was pretty comedic about it.  To help us see it from her point of view, Minnie invited Mom to a summer barbecue at her house in Bridgeport where Mom would be the only white face in the crowd. Mom agreed to go and asked me to drive.  We were indeed a minority of two. And we were treated  as all Minnie's friends and kin were treated: with mint ice tea and welcoming smiles.  We stayed all afternoon and went away slightly changed.  

It wasn't the first time Mom surprised me. Years before there had been a gay member of the police auxiliary who invited folks from the barracks over to his house for lunch. This was many years ago, another time really and not one of the officers  agreed to go, so the boss asked Mom and the troops only police woman to go. On the day, even the police woman backed out. Unwilling to be so rude, Mom went to his luncheon by herself. 

I was in my early 20s maybe - and I'm afraid I didn't even know what gay was at the time..  She explained without fuss or judgement, very matter-of-factly that it was when certain men liked other men instead of girls, that this man lived with a male friend, and it was like they were married.  She said he was a lovely man, lunch was very nice and she was sad for her host that no one else went. 

There was another thing as well - Mom never voluntarily went to church unless there was a wedding or funeral involved.

I asked her about this several times over the years. She always told me she didn't know what she believed. In later years I pressed her and she said she didn't know if she could know if there were a god or not. Maybe there was maybe there wasn't.  Yet she told me didn't want to fight about it or even think much about it. If someone said 'pray for me,'  she would nod sympathetically.  She would never tell them. And now that she is gone, none of them really believe me. Oh well.

Art: where the broken wings fly after all

Originally posted April 4, 2008. Thought I'd haul it up here again and update it a bit to remind me.

Every person has beauty and value. Some have other unsavory aspects which obscure the beauty and value, but it's there.

Some of us are eccentric, obviously old, ridiculously odd, too fat, too thin or perhaps misshapen or unpleasant or unreliable. Some folks, though beautiful, are misshapen in ways more difficult to see - disfigurement by the constant prejudgement of others, where every word was twisted, shaded, weighted and measured against some mythical standard of perfection. Or by constant criticism during childhood where every flaw was carved up like a roast repeatedly. Or by constant underserved praise and by life passages bought and paid for by blood money rather than earned. This unhappy learning is latter replayed on others.

Sometimes people find it really difficult to get past it all. Some are like moths that have emerged from the cocoon in a jar that was too small. (See my pencil drawing above) Their wings unfolded only midway and are forever bent. Yet even in this there can be value.

Like many other resources, the past can be transformed. Rather than repeat it, and live it out again and again, rather than turn the bitter criticism or the too clever manipulation on others or measuring them against an imagined perfection, or insulting them for dramatic effect (sounds familiar in the current political scene) -- the best use of the past is to render it down into art. (Not the so called Art of the Deal,  but art in the expansive sense - whether literary, musical, visual, theatrical etc.) In that way it is an offering, and something is given to world.

It doesn't even matter if the world accepts it. It is the making of it, and perhaps the offering of it, that heals in a way that golden toilet seats and hair implants never can.

- Mar  Walker

Curious encounters with nature

This is an old smudgy pencil sketch of mine. Not sure an actual horse would react as calmly to the half-man half-butterfly thingie in its meadow - which probably, being self-aware of its halves is having doubts of its own. Once the wings were moving I think there would be a hasty, slightly hysterical horse retreat....




I'm kind of low energy these days as you can see by this kind of sad poem.

Doldrums

A tickle really, a night breeze passes, barely touching
In darkness I orbit the neighborhood's circle,
pass the same facades repeatedly.
Anchored by the hum of the highway,
maybe a celestial dipper or two rising
or a flock of little porch lights 
where a few someones live, 
I appreciate their seeming elemental persistence.
Even now I point a bobbling flashlight to ward away shadows, 
though I have nothing to say to shadows these days.
No one minds my silence.

I originally put his up at https://april30poems.blogspot.com/2016/08/unusual-encounters-with-nature.html?showComment=1472256583013#c7537839509355428630 and added it here also...

Poem A Week No. 2 - Unexpected Attic Access

Unexpected Attic Access

"I need to get into the attic"
the AC tech said matter of factly
.
"Not sure you can get there from here"
I said. As he darted out to his truck
.
I opened the hall closet
empty but for its pile of boxes,
.
Pushed up on the hat shelf,
found it folded back easily.
.
Pushed up on the cloths pole,
found that popped right out of its caps.
.
as I slide box after box out and into the hall
here comes Mr tech with his folding ladder
.
He props, climbs, pushes up the lid
and disappears. "Nice Space up here" he says
.
from out of sight, and a sudden light
shines through the square opening.
.
I have to see, I climb up the ladder, look around
suddenly I;m sitting on the edge of the unfamiliar
.
it's totally clean and empty, but for fiberglass bats
I make mental notes, location of the light switch
.
Kinda odd how you can live for years unaware
under this unknown, unimagined spaciousness...
.

April 2016 Poem A Day # 27 Relief Sculpture

Relief Sculpture

Remove a little here
scoop out some more
deep enough to accentuate,
to undercut, the line of something or other.
Smooth the center, or rough it wildly up.
Remove more, take off the edge itself
so the world curves into concavity.
Take away the center.
See clear through
to the other side.

Serendipity: an accidental photo

This photo about sums up my week. First I've felt like a big oppressive hand was getting ready to grab me by the scruff. (And it was I had a day-long migraine the day after I wrote this.) Second I feel like the puzzle of my life is ahhh still well, a puzzle.

The photo to the right didn't start out as a a trick pic. It  was taken accidentally on Enders Island as I was walking around snapping pictures. I turned and swung around and must have taken a picture while not aiming.... The frame captured the horizon and my hand, all out of scale...  Serendipity!

It was subsequently finessed in the online photo editor "Picnik" using a Puzzle effect and a frame effect - two of the effects Google, (which owns Picnik) hasn't seen fit to port over to the Google Plus "Creative Kit" Unfortunately Picnik will close in April and we will be stuck with a much more limited array of possibilities than previously. Lately I've begun wondering if Picasa Web Gallerys are going away eventually as well, tucked into G+.  I wouldn't mind but they always leave out some little functionality or other that I had admired and that worked well for me.

Oh well.

First Layer: Chromebook as canvas

This is the first layer of a new painting I've started -  just a doodle so far really, and it's just black and white, though that will change. The canvas is the white cover on my Chromebook. Okay I am nuts. I was admiring some of the laptop covers I saw which are sold on various sites around the web. They seemed too pricey though - I thought it would be easier and cheaper just to paint the thing itself. Call me crazy, (or reclusive, awkwardly antisocial in many cases. )

I used an inexpensive acrylic paint in a squeeze bottle. I only have black  right now, so when I get more colors I will add new layers and post a photo of each as I go along.

Images of the unspoken: dances by Pina Bausch

Polite small talk is a social mask, but in the dances of choreographer Pina Bausch - you simply cannot escape viewing the unspoken subtext.

A severe and menacing man chooses among deeply fearful women who offer him a red cloth. He rejects all but one.  All are distressed. A flock of men poke and prod a woman as if she were a melon, or a small child.

These were among a few vingettes in the film "Pina" - a commemoration of the work of coregorapher Pina Bausch. It's not a biography, nor a documentary really, nor an epic. It sets Bausch's major works in the loose frame of her dancers memories of her - which are admiring and well, sort of oddly worshipful. The film shows them onstage and sometimes takes them dancing out into the city, and country.

I hoped the images present in the dances would be interesting and might inspire a painting or a drawing perhaps a poem also.  (I like to paint the human form in motion, and evoke motion, even in doodling.)  The dances were evocative of human relations and contained quite a bit of visual metaphor. The trailer will give you the idea.....

One scene that really struck me contained a couple embracing. Suddenly another man comes out of the side door and rearranges their embrace - then he picks up the woman and hands her to the man. The nitpicking spectator then goes back behind the door, after which, the man drops the woman. She immediately gets up and flies back to him, and they assume the original pose...  Then, of course, the man comes back out of the side door, rearranges them again, and this whole process repeats over and over and over - and  accelerating faster and faster to an impossible pace.

Finally the man no longer comes out to rearrange them. He doesn't have time and doesn't need to either because they have accepted his expectations and rearrange themselves. They subsequently revert to type, rearrange themselves, revert to type......, repeat, repeat, etc etc  What an odd, wonderful visual metaphor for social expectations and the way we internalize them.

Psychological Spaces: Alone, Not Alone

A public place is a place of odd and unexpected possibility.

In a busy world where so many things demand attention and there is always a list of things to be done - sometimes a public place is the only place where obligations can be briefly set aside. It's also a place to be a participant with others in a kind of silent, noncommittal way. Often it's a place of watching, reading or waiting. Sometimes it's a place of writing.

Sitting in a public place, you  have company, yet you are by yourself. You are with the crowd, but not in it. You can feel lonely there, but you don't have to  - with a little imagination, you can also feel your place as a member of our varied human menagerie.

Here, you can quietly observe or discreetly ignore the gaggle of humanity around you. You can chronicle it all  - just in your head, or with a camera or a laptop, a drawing pencil and sketchpad, or with a pen and a pocket notebook.  Or you can sip your java, ignore your cell phone and revel in this small zone of tranquility. 

This, of course, makes a glaring assumption: you have money for coffee, a cell phone and/or any kind of peace.  When 11 million people have lost their homes and half the working age population has given up looking for work - that's not a good assumption. 

If you are homeless, for sanity's sake you have to carve a private space out of a series of public or shared spaces. I think that's why so many choose to live in a car, (assuming you have one of whatever vintage) - because a car offers the privacy of a door and a lock. 

You can't hide out there forever though, and inviting public spaces offer a respite. Of course I have made another assumption: that store owners and citizens aren't complaining and getting non-buyers tossed out for loitering. 

My how the mental furniture around here has changed.....

This phone-photo was taken from the second story of the mall, looking down into a sitting area. It was fiddled with digitally in Picnik. 

POEM: Surface Substance Entropy

A bit of a mood here. Photos of reflections, or where one can look into and out of a building at the same time, taken in CT New Milford, Danbury, Bethel and Georgetown. An improvsed singing track over a keyboard track, a tap the metal mug track - all recorded in Garageband, sound effects added in both IMovie and Garageband. The poem was recorded using the Iphone OS Voice Memo app..

The Poem:

SURFACE SUBSTANCE & ENTROPY

Blue light, evening sky, red arches
frame black branches in reflection or white arches.
or grey shadow of arches and brick. Look through; see beyond the glass.

Notice the distorted view, the glass rippling
with unspoken memories and caught between
looking at the surface and looking through the surface

to another surface, to distant reflections
of that which is behind us --
far away, removed but present.

See into the room, see past the room
as the branches wave, reflecting unseen winds.
Sometimes the trunks of trees become what they are not.

They lift their hidden deadly power, tangled and electric.
The squares of constructed sky reflect cloud
until the pains are broken one by one.

The tenderest green leaves soon turn to barest vine,
and on the car, a curveture of glass
reflecting the ubiquitous trees.

On the horizon the peeling paint continues, and
in the glass, under the sky dome, blurred
with the speed of going, the goodbye waving

Tabernacle of Bees

Have you been a true believer at one time but not so sure anymore? Think the idea of hell is pretty revolting? Ever wondered that religions contradict each other? About all the wars committed in the name of religion?  Ever read up on the sordid back-histories of various religious movements, reformations, new age fuzzies or even the papacy? Do you enjoy poetry?  Tabernacle of Bees might be of interest.

 I originally announced this book in October of 2009. But  conflicting edits proposed by a writing group I belong to, followed by several computer deaths and some other odds and ends, frooze me into a state of indecision about how to proceed. However, recent developments have cause me to act. So finally two years later, in November of 2011, I'd like to annouce TABERNACLE OF BEES, a small book of poems which represent a journey from dogma to doubt and beyond, is now available from Puzzled Dragon Press. It's a short book, just 14 poems, but offers a lot to ponder.

Pale Blue Dot: Carl Sagan Day

I'm posting the video below for Carl Sagan Day,( a day late but posting it nonetheless) It's courtesy of MadArtLab.com and http://youtube.com/RogerCreations where I ran across it.  In it you can hear Carl Sagan's own voice on of his most famous statements about the earth. The photo to the right is a Voyager photo on which the statement s based - where the tiny speck inside the circle is the earth, and us, and all we have ever known.

Obsolete tech devices as canvas and frame

I painted this abstract (above) in an odd place - inside a dead Sharp Personal Organizer, "512K" which, for a short  time many years ago, was invaluable. (Click on the picture to see it even larger - I think it makes the size-transition well) Of course, every darling is brief in the tech world and the planet is littered with abandoned, non-functioning gizmos. Painters - recycle! Below you can see it insituo - in the frame and substrate.

Unexpected results

Sometimes, you take a picture and get odd results. This photo, if you tip it landscape fashion, is actually of the side of a car with an ascending asphalt driveway, all bathed in sun and shadow. With a little tweaking, not much, the pavement turned to purple which contrasted nicely with the reflections of trees in the window. I like it much better tipped on its side - because it removes the visual cues and it makes it easier to see as an abstract composition.

Strange reflections - optical oddities

Occasionally in some unexpected spot, some skewed individual like myself is right smack in the way because they have stopped to take a photo. Usually the camera is pointed a some unsuitable subject like a car fender, a puddle or a hubcap or the edge of a window.

Quite often it is nothing, nothing as in something that is reflected in something else. The odd squiggles in the photo to the left are  not a contortionist zebra. They are Venetian blinds reflected in the plastic cover of library book which is propped open on a flat surface. From most angles you can't see anything. I guess there are wrinkles in the plastic that are bending the reflection.

Or take the photo on the right, which was taken at the Freight Street Gallery. There appears to be an angry woman hovering in the frame.  Nope it's NOT a ghost. (No proof for ghosts, just a lot of  human imaginings....)  It's a reflection of a painting that is on another wall, quite far away from this nice sunset painting. It's not directly across from it, but on wall that forms an L with the wall where this paining hangs. I really don't understand the optical mechanism by which it is reflected here but -  like I said, optical oddities.

Tinnitus - these ubiquitous bells

This quiet morning, with a low sun and odd grey sky, I clearly hear the roar of highway and also a ninth chord of bells inside my head.

For many years I've had a common and incurable phenomenon known as tinnitus - which is a ringing sound in your ears, often related to hearing loss, blood pressure, allergies, or sometimes brought on by dozens of different medications.

I think of it as the hum of the universe. I guess more properly it is the hum of the "innerverse."  I find it comforting to  know everything is circulating and my inner machineries are on with their usual whirl .  On most days  this ever-present accompaniment fades to the background, becomes unnoticed. Today I am noticing it more than usual, though  I don't find it unpleasant.

Not everyone is amused by this malady. It drives some people crazy and they go to great lengths to find a cause and to mitigate the sound, sometimes with electronic devices that make still more static sounds. For me, as for many, the cause is unknown.

It's funny how what one person finds comforting, drives another to distraction. Life is like that I guess, what with all the little preferences we hold.

The photo is a reflection of a patron at the Blue Colony Diner in Newtown. The overall effect of each tiny light, with its reflection in the double-paine glass, reminded me a little of the layered ringing sound. She also appears to be covering an ear.

Comments are welcome.

-- Mar Walker

Interesting talk on the inner grammar of human moral decision making

Interesting thoughts on morality in religious vs nonreligious persons:

http://www.youtube.com/v/KiUqBKGHp8o&hl=en_US&fs=1&


http://www.youtube.com/v/zpqFTuD_5nU&hl=en_US&fs=1&


http://www.youtube.com/v/1qiaJ0myd2U&hl=en_US&fs=1&

Visual Metaphor: the Appearance of Seeing Beyond

This mirror hangs over a booth at a Brookfield diner called Rickyl's, and reflects the ceiling far behind the viewer.

At first glance the strange shape of its gilded paper mache frame makes it difficut to read its spacial position, and it's easy to see it as some sureal portal into another room rather than what it is - a simple, flat mirror.

Rickyl's is tucked away at the four corners area, behind Roccos. They offer great granola pancakes

--- Mar Walker

Dog and Cat Kiss: Interpretations differ - what's your take?

Many folks look at this photo and see a pretty little dog and cat kissing. What we see depends a lot on what we expect. I live with these two characters and what I see are two rivals inspecting the competition.  My pets are companionable but not affectionate with each other, and are often jealous of, or at least very interested in the attention or tidbitts the other gets. In this photo, I think they are checking each others cheeks and breath to see if one has eaten anything the other has missed, checking each others physical status and mood. This sweet little kitty often bites the dogs ears, lips or toes to drive her out of a spot of sun that the cat wants for herself.  The dog, who is aware that direct aggression on the cat is not an option within this pack, for her part will secretly steal the cat's food whenever she has the opportunity.

We often find it necessary to anthropomorphize or romanticize animals, especially when describing them to children, but they have their own agenda and motivations which differ greatly from our own.  This is the cause of a lot of injury.  A child assumes this is their beautiful stuffed toy to hug and drag about by an ear or a limb.  The cat, dog, rabbit, hamster responds with teeth to this attack, ends up euthanized, not beause they were evil or dangerous -- but because their owners were irresponsibly ignorant of their needs and nature.  When any dog is left alone with a small child and injury results it is most usually the fault of the supervising human being. If you own a gun and your toddler shoots someone with it, you are negligent and you get a fine. If you own a dog, and someone is injured, you might pay damages, but in the final tally its the poor dog that pays the price for your lack of objective knowledge about nature.

-- Mar Walker

Repackaging the familiar for a novel view

Anything, no matter how plastic, ubiquitous or overstated, can be framed purposefully to evoke something different or new.  This photo was taken at night, with a phone, while waiting in line for the drive-up window....

As I was writing the graph above - I  saw a very clever  TV ad by American Express that uses this 'reframing' idea. In it,  more than a dozen or so common scenes and/or objects were reframed as smilie faces or smilie frowns. The audio featured a gorgeous cello line, no shouting or flashing, and many of the changing pseudo faces required watching the screen intently.

The process was oddly involving, surprising, delightful - intriguing even, more than most shows these days.  I have a better impression of the advertiser for mounting such a clever ad campaign.   Reframing is a neat trick. Well done.

-- Mar Walker