Ink Tarsia: word mosaic

“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

Makes me happy – our new solar panels have produced approx. 42% of our electricity since September. We hope the panels (Sharp 2.7 kilowatt array, Fronius inverter) will meet 55% of our electrical needs each year.  

Debate on how to calculate actual production involved a mathematician, a physicist, and a master electrician. The English major was clearly over-simplifying the math.

I’m learning that solar harvest, like a garden’s, is seasonal.  January’s production was discouragingly low.  March, with many snowy days, has been a surprise. The system often produces at capacity at mid-day. Fall and spring may be our top-producers. While folks in more temperate, low-lying parts of the country are planting tomatoes and ground cherries, feasting on spring peas, we harvest the sun.   

The panels were expensive, even with utility rebates.  At least this investment is outperforming the stock market.   

Last year, in early June, we visited Pearl Lake near Steamboat Springs.  We stayed in a cabin on a small ranch, where the boys could feed ravenous baby lambs with bottles, or watch a bedraggled, grumpy peacock strut in his stall near the horse paddock.

 A storm moved in the afternoon we arrived, bringing microburst winds through the canyon, toppling old growth Ponderosa pines (just missing the cabin roof), and dumping nearly a foot of wet, fluffy snow.  I sat by the crackling fireplace, reading scrapbooks about the ranch and local history.  One told the story of Minnie Pearl Hartt, PEO member and “prizewinning fisherwoman,” who donated part of the family’s sheep-ranching spread to the Colorado State Park system, including the lake that had been named after her.  A smaller pond had been reserved for Minnie to fish, nicknamed “Mini Pearl Lake”. 

The next morning, the snow had stopped, and we drove to Pearl Lake.  Heavy snow dragged the tops of laden aspen trees to the ground, and coated pines with globes of white.  We were alone in the park as we walked the path to the lake, through a tunnel formed by bent aspens, like walking through an arch of swords at a royal wedding.   

The forest was still, except for chunks of soft snow plopping through branches.  Quick-melting snow dropped from treetops, and limbs would shift upwards with a crack as they were liberated from the weight.  The rapid melt sounded like artillery.  We grabbed trunks of bowed aspens lining the path, and shook off some snow, just to hear the swish of leafy branches snapping back to full height.       

Fog and cloud had settled low, obscuring the mountains ringing the lake.   But when we returned the next morning–snow melted, weather warm enough for shirtsleeves, forest floor nearly dry–all the trees stood tall and green.  Skies clear, sun shining, we saw Pearl’s legacy.   

    The calendar changed from February to March while I was in Oxford, MS.  The season changed to spring, right before my eyes.  The first night in Oxford was chilly with humid cold that seeps into the bones, past fleece layers and gloves.  By Sunday lawns were greening, tidy quilts of pansies appeared in beds, a bright red bird (not a cardinal, but what?) sang in the tree outside my hotel window.  That afternoon my flight would land in ice-coated Denver.  I’d make the long drive home on treacherous roads, dodging accidents.  It would be months before I’d see daffodils again.         

Springtime in Colorado is more a concept than a season.  Winter tends to move right to summer, with alternating patches of both in September or May or July.  When I was a girl, my teacher put up calendar posters with daffodils and grass for March, flowers blooming irreverently all over April.  I’d look out the classroom window at the dusty, brown brown brown playground outside, the April-bare trees, and daydream about the Easter dress my mother was sewing for me.  That Sunday I’d have to choose: wear a heavy sweater over the yellow checked seersucker, or wear my scratchy old Christmas dress to church.         

Why couldn’t otherwise smart teachers get the seasons straight? Those dumb posters were a full two months ahead of Colorado’s spring. I’d never hunted Easter eggs without a heavy winter coat. 

“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.