Dear Reader,
Today was catch-up day. As in, the past week has been absorbed (by necessity, and rightly so).
My plan was to go to the gym first thing this morning. I did not give Word Raccoon a choice – I made her start the day in workout clothes.
But once there I discovered that while yes, indeed, they were reopening today, they would not open until 1.
Which meant I was not going to be able to shower early afterward and re-caulk the tub as soon as it was dry, as I had planned.
Fine, fine. Tomorrow is another day and all.
I came home and ate breakfast and watched an episode of SpaceMaker Method.
Note to self: do not let WR do that before I have remapped her day when plans change.
Can you see where this is going?
She insisted on decluttering three huge bags of clothes.
I’m proud of her, I am. She’s prepping for the closet organization wall I will be assembling later this month, so I get why she wanted to do that. (She also dropped them in a local donation bin when she returned to the gym, so good on her.)
But it was a backwards day because as soon as business and society had reopened this morning, we had appointments to confirm and coffee dates to extend before the café closes for good, and then one dreaded administrative task that we had been putting off for a week. For good reason. But we really, really wanted to put it behind us.
We did that after lunch, and though it took some doing and some mental profanity, it’s finished. (As far as we know. Unless we hear differently.)
Then and only then did we sit down with When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It: The Parts of Speech, for Better and/or Worse and read a few pages, WR stopping every so often to make argumentative notes. (Some of her notes weren’t arguments. In fact, many lines were just thoughts on language.)
We changed over to reading the poetry collection we bought yesterday for inspiration, and it was potent. WR gnashed her teeth when I asked why she couldn’t write like that.
She said I had hurt her feelings, that I know that she’s still a baby poet and also that I know she resists even the movement that works in others’ poems because she prefers her poems to spontaneously birth themselves. (Then I make her revise!)
Then she began writing a devastating poem that both surprised me and didn’t. That one is…well. Time will tell. It needs revising, but not yet. It’s called “The Protest,” and I suspect it will be one of those poems that stick.
I really enjoyed reading the accretion of poetry in the collection, piled up by one poet after another, all different in style and yet the same in result. (Does that make any damn sense?)
And while I bitch and moan when the music in a movie tries to push my emotions without earning it, tries to make me feel, I willingly surrender to a good poem. So many nuggets of truth, the sanctification of everyday moments. These are people who understand that life and valuing every moment is the treasure.
Sorry. Post-loss thoughts, I guess. Borderline overly sentimental, but I stand by the outline of it.
Last night, WR and I began reading that art essay collection I bought with the intriguing title, and we were so damned jealous of the author who talked about her first encounters with visual art and how disoriented she was by it and how she desired to learn about it.
Relatable.
She also said she will always know more about language than paintings. (Which, same.)
I was jealous because I am sometimes still that hungry young woman in front of a painting begging it to explain itself to me, because I sense things I can’t quite grasp.
I am the one whose face dripped in Spain before a Picasso, not one anyone mentions much (Couple in an Andalusian Patio), and I had to trace those lines myself with paint to see if I could understand what he meant. (God, was I really trusting him to explain love??)
Once I was the one listening to the Matisse painting of Olga, asking myself what she might be saying behind what he thought he was portraying her as saying.
Once I was the one lightheaded before other works of art, nearly fainting before the Pietà, not expecting it to appear as I toured St. Peter’s Basilica. (I had forgotten, then there it was.)
And there was my irrational reluctance to leave David, in Florence, only being coaxed away by the impatient tour guide when I promised David I would return. (I did, a few years later.)
So many other works of art and artists have spoken to me, and I have taken them all in as a part of me. (This is a pre-making-supper blog post, so pardon the hasty assembly.)
Right now there is a Mary Cassatt exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago, and I was so close to it opening week, but it was Labor Day Weekend, not the best time to crowd into the city. But I hunger to see it. I know it might seem like I’m an artistic lightweight to favor Impressionism, and yet I do.
That doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate tons of other art. Why, I’ve bought art right off a local café’s wall on multiple occasions.
The Arts are swirling in my head, and I’m always interacting with them, though nowadays I can’t seem to read anything or see any exhibits without poems coming to me or essays or whatever. It’s a blessing and a curse, you know?
I do not know how people survive without immersion in ideas and beauty, no matter where they find them. For all my talk of museums I do not know how they limit their definition of them to museums and such.
I do not know.
Word Raccoon, what do you make of it all?
Anyone up for a road trip to the Art Institute for the Cassatt?
Anyone?
Drema