Ink Tarsia: word mosaic

Found this via my FreeWill   horoscope (Leo) and a Google search:   

 “I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,

and I have been circling for a thousand years;

and I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm,

or a great song.”    from Rilke, Book of Hours, transl. by Robert Bly 

This poetry Madlib was posted by Turning Into the Slide:   

  I am circling around ______1_______, around the _______2________, and I have been circling for __________3____________, and I still don’t know if I am a _____4______, or a _____5_______, or a _______6_______. 

1. Something greater than the self/inspiring/sacred:_________

2. A mythic place or object:___________________

3. Measurement of time:__________________

4. Creature or person/vocation:____________________

5. Weather: _________________________

6. Creative act:_______________________

“All I’ve got

is a red guitar,

three chords,

and the truth.” 

  – U2, “All Along the Watchtower”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ixs57zxTiQ&feature=related

“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

“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

“There’s experience and artifact.”   Participants in the manuscript workshop scramble quietly to jot these opening words from Dinty W. Moore.  We’re sitting in a spare, tall-ceilinged conference room in the new Journalism building at the University of Mississippi.  Some of us live within a few hours’ drive of Ole Miss, others have traveled much further to attend pre-conference writing workshops at the Mid-South Conference for creative nonfiction.   

Ah, I think, I have lots of artifacts to write about.  Sea glass from a Maui beach, photos from last summer’s camping trips in the mountains, my kids’ artwork, Roman-era tiles from Caesarea in Israel, the old pewter teapot from Ireland.   

But this is not what Dinty means.  Artifact is not stuff.  It’s the so-what. In writing essay or memoir, it’s not enough to describe personal experience with craft and wit.  Artifact is what is made from that experience, the switch to writing experience in a way that will benefit the reader.  If experience prods the initial impulse for writing, artifact asks, Who cares?  

Dinty says he’s a “bear” about revision.  By draft #28 or #30 or so, he says he should be able to articulate what question he’s answering.  My short pieces are critiqued at the end of the day, and by then, I’m concerned I haven’t done near enough work with the so-what.  In the workshop we’ve been awash in experience, most of it beautifully written, and for me the better work that emerges from the group stands out from the others because of well-considered insight we can take with us.   

For the rest of the conference, I will hear a little voice in my ear asking, What’s at stake? Who cares?, like a dogged tune, what my aunt calls an earworm.   Despite the parroting repetition, this is one refrain I don’t want to chase away. 

I’m reading the first entry on the blog of a friend, Kathy Rhodes, whom I met last month at a creative nonfiction conference at Ole Miss.   

 “Why am I here,” Kathy asks, “when I’ve go so much to do elsewhere?”  

Though I don’t edit a journal or craft the Great American Southern novel, my list of obligations is nearly as long as hers:  run a business, raise a family, manage a household, volunteer, teach, care for an old dog and other arthritic family members.  Why add a blog to the mix? 

Tough question.  But at the deep-down core of things, I know I have to write.  Despite the sneaking suspicion that I might choose writing ahead of, say, running payroll or making dinner, this blog may be a good place to give that inner writer some space to play.