Ink Tarsia: word mosaic

When I was a kid, my brother and I competed in the sport of cut-down:  May the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits.  May the bird of happiness crap on your shoulder. 

In January, we returned to the mountain cabin to discover a bird had moved in.  Evidence suggested a small bird, what a neighbor calls an “LBJ,” a little brown jobber. The bird enjoyed several perches throughout the house, on nearly every piece of furniture except the kitchen table, and particularly the sham on my husband’s pillow.   

That afternoon, we heard a happy chirp coming from the master bedroom upstairs.  We crept quietly up the steps and peeked in the door, to see an LBJ sitting on the old pink armchair, singing in a patch of warm sun coming through the window.   

The bird was not afraid of us.  When the children sneaked too close, the bird simply disappeared by a convenient escape, to chirp merrily in another room–from a bedpost in the boys’ bedroom (nicknamed the Bunkhouse), from a kitchen chair downstairs, from rafters in the downstairs den.   

The finish carpentry for this log cabin is eccentric—the original owner ran out of energy or funds or expertise—and there are holes in corners, gaps between wall and ceiling, mismatched boards, strange configurations of space and storage.  Plenty of fix-up budget will be spent on finish trim. The cabin may have been built from a barn kit; it seems better adapted to horse stalls than bedrooms. 

My youngest boy loves the closets in our bedroom. Abracadabra, he can enter my closet, squeeze behind shelves set in the eaves, and exit through the other closet.  But the bird could slip from an east room upstairs to a west room downstairs  There are more gaps than we realized.  After allowing a single photograph, the wren would reappear to another room and continue singing.  Eventually the LBJ was shooed out a window missing a screen. 

We successfully evicted the Bird of Happiness. 

Not an hour later, we heard chirping upstairs.  This time my oldest boy was prepared.  He consulted his bird book from Grandma, and announced we had a house wren.  Wrens tend to nest in boxes.  This wren selected a heated, 2000 square foot box, and could move freely from outside to in.   

I enjoyed hearing the birdsong in the house, which I did not confess to my husband, who held a contrary view.  The sound of a cheerful song animated the cabin, gave it a heart, like the tick of a deep-toned clock.  Spring sound echoed through the home in a bitterly cold season—surely this was a good omen. Despite LBJ’s significant contribution to janitorial duties, I secretly wished the bird could stay.  We covered couches, tables, chairs with newsprint when we left, hoping he wouldn’t invite a mate, or a house party, before we could return to seal the points of entry. 

In February, my husband slithered through the narrow attic space to tack screening over vents and penetrations.  We didn’t see the wren that day, but learned he now preferred sturdy posts on the upstairs balcony under the skylights, and spent afternoons on the open door to the Bunkhouse.  In March, we found the wren had gone after a brief stay on the Shrader wood stove.  My boys muttered about the Bird of Crappiness as we cleaned the mess.   

Last weekend, there was no evidence of the wren.  I walked outside with the dog after 7:00 a.m., hearing many species of birds fill the glen with song as April sun paints the tips of rocks and pine trees.  I’d like to think the wren found a new home without much trouble, that he had not been trapped in the cabin.   

I’d like to think only one of my brother’s predictions will come true, and that this will not be followed by a plague of fleas.

“To see is itself a creative operation, requiring effort.  Everything that we see in our daily life is more or less distorted by acquired habits, and this is perhaps more evident in an age like ours when the cinema, posters, and magazines present us every day with a flood of ready-made images which are to the eye was prejudices are to the mind. 

The effort needed to see things without distortion takes something  very like courage.” 

         –   Henri Matisse  “The Nature of Creative Activity”

We head for the cabin soon.  There is no TV, and after long days of chores and fixer-up projects, our evenings in the mountains are given over to quiet pursuits:  walks, books, dinner with neighbors, 1000-piece jigsaw puzzles, fierce bouts of pinochle, knitting looms, projects from The Dangerous Book for Boys.    

We’ve discovered the joy of paint-by-number.  There’s something soothing about squandering time to fill tiny, irregular shapes with a prescribed color, for a third-rate picture.  I love to paint—love the feel of a brush in my hand and the draw of paint across paper—but don’t have the artist’s eye to render what I see.   

My youngest, an artist, is frustrated with his “Celestial Glory” sun and stars kit.   He doesn’t like someone else making choices of color and line and composition for him.  When his brother takes over the painting, making mistakes with blobs of blue paint, he doesn’t care.    

I work at my sad retriever on a plaid wool blanket (“Devotion”), which reminds me of our old yellow Labrador, and feel content.  The hard part—accurate drawing—is done for me.  I move from left to right to fill the brown 7s, the golden 5s.  I mix #4 and #6 for blobs of “B.”  Voila!  I’m an artist.  

As the picture fills in, it’s clear that I’ve traded depth for ease.  This is an odd process, really, that a 3-dimensional dog would be rendered into a 2-dimensional painting, then scanned and schematized into something even an idiot could paint.  The paint-by-number version is even less 2-dimensional.  It’s flat and dull, a vague sense of something canine. 

The mechanical process of filling numbered blanks with paint from plastic nail-breaker tubs deconstructs how real paintings are made, with background and layer and highlight–a stratigraphy of tint.  If an original painting is built vertically with paint, my effort exists only in a horizontal plane, a flat pattern of side-by-side colors.  No depth.  I’m frustrated I can’t take the dog from flat to furry.  I don’t grasp how strokes of paint form the illusion of dimension and life. 

Writing can be drafted mechanically, word-by-number, filling blanks with fragmented text, setting awkward phrases into odd shapes.  Or it can be rendered with an eye for portrait and landscape, a crafting of language and perception into something interpreted, dimensional, whole.  To get from draft to art takes practice, vision, a chill-hearted edit, and perhaps time spent with dogged devotion after the chores are done. 

 ” At the end of the day, what will people say about you?

If folks were totally candid, totally honest, how would your epitaph read? In the Talmud it is suggested that to be successful in this life you should plant a tree, have a child, or write a book. This means you should be sure that you have exerted an influence for good in this life that lives on after your days are on earth are done.”           

– At the End of the Day, James W. Moore

 Tree of Life, David Friedman

The first writing exercise for the online class in memoir says:  Write about something awful you’ve done in your life.  Dare to be honest. 

I consider this.  Some categories of awful can be ruled out quickly—murder, drug trafficking, fraud, solicitation, bunko.  Tax evasion.  There may be a “Wanted” poster with my picture in the PTO work room at school. 

Various not-proud-of-that moments come to mind.  Are they awful? Worthy of 500 words?  This is what comes from skipping Lent.  I haven’t spent near enough time digging in the shadows, watching at minus tide to see what’s deposited on the ocean floor.    

What I choose for the assignment seems fairly benign on the scale of awful:  a catty remark.  Friends read the exercise and shake their heads, is that really the worst you can come up with?  

Perhaps they know my vices lean towards scarves, gym avoidance, good chocolate, and Dorothy Sayers.  Or travel porn—tour catalogs, articles, memoir-–anything that fuels my lust for Europe.  I’ve been on a Jane bender since January, when Masterpiece Theater began broadcasting Pride & Prejudice. 

Because my nasty remark has bothered me for years, I suspect there is much more to it.  (Emma Woodhouse knows exactly what I mean.)   In the murk of “awful” is more to be found than vice or felony—there’s abuse of class, consumption, resource, power, knowledge, trust.  Dare to be honest. 

“Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and the pain of it no less than the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”   - Frederick Buechner, Now and Then