Tree frog and mindfulness

Tree frog with spruce needles

This morning Pete the Wondercat woke me up at 3:30 and 4:30 with his howling.  I checked his water bowl at 3:30 and refilled it.  He has a special bowl that must, at all times, be filled with clean water or life, as we know it ends.  But then at 4:30, more howling in spite of the fresh water.  I turned down the fans thinking that they might be hurting his ears, because they were starting to bother mine.  More howling.

I finally got up at 4:45, which is at least an hour earlier than I wanted to be awake, but sleep was not coming back.  I did my morning things – get dressed, take medicine, start fans going again to air out the house, feed cats, eat banana, check email, start a load of laundry, wash dishes, open back screen door, open windows, and voila!  A little tree frog had been stuck between the window and the storm window.    

Peter doesn’t sleep through the night except in deepest winter.  His paces and prowls around, checking on everyone and everything.  I have to keep the window shades down in one bedroom or his sits up all night watching the deer, skunks, groundhogs and rabbits in the front yard.  My land is apparently Grand Central Station for wildlife.  Sometimes he’s up all night catching mice.  Sometimes, he just patrols the house and periodically goes back to sleep.  But last night on his rounds, Pete must have noticed the tree frog stuck in the casement window and had been looking at him for hours.  Hence the howling.  And I had been unmindful.  I had not noticed a little life form hanging out on the window. 

Note to self:  check windows more carefully for frogs before shutting them.

Tree frog with spruce needles

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Children, language and poetry

"Bella Principessa" red and white chalk

I’ve never known a child who didn’t love to rhyme.  Toddlers have a special affinity for poetry because they’re really listening to the sounds of words, having just learned them.  With the magical thinking of childhood, it’s possible that the more beautiful and fascinating the words are, the more powerful the child believes them to be.  And the child would be right.  Words can be magical.

I always sang or said children’s songs, nursery rhymes and poetry to my children when they were babies. I sang when I was changing them and dressing them.  They listened with great attention, little bodies quiet, eyes huge, and I thought they were fascinated with poems and songs.  Now that my children are grown, and I know who they are as people, I realize that my infant neurosurgeon and baby genetic research biologist were probably thinking, “What’s she talking about?” and “That makes no sense at all!” 

It never occurred to me that not everyone sings to their babies and toddlers, so when the grandchildren came along I naturally sang to them, too.  Possibly they are listening with the same skeptical thoughts my children had, but the babies seem to like it.  I remember lying in a hammock with my oldest grandchild one morning soon after her baby brother was born, and singing each and every song of our repertoire.  She wanted to hear them all.  I also remember my grandmother singing to me the same songs.    

A couple of months ago, my granddaughters and I were talking discussing something I no longer remember.  What I do remember is this.  “Are you telling me the truth?” the older one, a stickler for details, asked me incredulously.  “Yep,” the younger one said emphatically.  “She’s a thruther.”  I love the exquisite logic:  someone tells lies = liar; someone who tells the truth = truther.  I wish it were that simple. 

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Mental Furniture and Necessary Poetry

I’ve been feeling starved for poetry, so I’ve decided to post one poem a week on Facebook.  Don’t worry, not my own!  Real poetry.  Different people find different things necessary in their lives – art, music, kitten videos.  I’ve found that I need really good poetry to chew on mentally.  I feel very sorry for the children growing up today who don’t have to memorize poetry.  The poems and Bible verses I had to memorize as a child are part of my mental furniture.  And how often do you replace your furniture?  I don’t know what a plane ride would be like without John Donne, Swinburne or T. S. Eliot.  I used to know a whole lot more poetry than I can remember now, which is why I’m posting poetry.  Maybe somebody else would like to refresh an arid memory. 

Until I was 17, I shared a bedroom with my sister.  As long as I can remember, my sister and I both loved poetry.  When we were very small and neither of us could fall asleep, she would demand from her bed in the dark "Say a poem!"  One of the first ones I remember "saying" (this was before we could read) was Wee Willie Winkie:

Wee Willie Winkie

running through the town

Upstairs and downstairs

in his nightgown

Crying at the windows

Crying at the locks

"Are all the children in their beds?

It's now  8 o'clock!"

Years later, just before her first child was born, my sister handwrote out her favorite poems on index cards in her beautiful handwriting so that she could read them to the baby while she was breastfeeding.  Eight years later before my first child was born, she gave the index cards to me so that I could read them to my baby, too.  One of the poems was "Innisfree” by Yeats, which I have always loved.  I always associated Yeats' love of Innisfree with my wanting to go "home" to our childhood summer home in Ephraim.  When my sister was in the hospital, shortly before she died, she was having a bad time.  She felt physically awful; her son hadn't arrived yet from the airport, she was restless and uneasy.  "Say a poem!"  she said, too exhausted almost to speak.  I "said" Innisfree.

“I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.”

"That sounds like Wee Willie Winkie!" she said indignantly, and fell mercifully asleep. 

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There’s no success like failure and failure’s no success at all

After a month of brooding over Leonardo, now I’m mulling over artistic success or failure.  How do you measure success and failure for an artist?  Some of the most commercially successful artists are also the worst artists, so it’s not that.  Some of the most highly recognized and most acclaimed artists are not the best artists, but the best at PR – writing press releases and advertising every single thing, including getting a hangnail. And some of the worst artists I know specialize in shameless self promotion.

Mentioning no names, I’m in the process of disposing of the work of an artist, let’s call her Jacqueline, who died several years ago.  She was an unmarried, childless retired schoolteacher who spent her summers playing artist in Door County, WI.  She donated her work (paintings, drawings and prints) to a nonprofit organization in her will.  The nonprofit organization had an auction and a gallery had a sale of Jacqueline’s work, but there was still a lot left over.  “Most of it never should have seen the light of day” in the words of one curator.  So, I was asked to store the leftovers in an unused storage space in my studio as a favor for an old friend.  Years have gone by, the mice have been busy and the nonprofit says get rid of it, so now I’m throwing out the work of an artist whom I never met and whose work I didn’t respect.  This shouldn’t be a problem, right?  Wrong. 

I feel terrible.  I apologize to Jacqueline with each trip to the trash can and recycling bin.  Her work is insipid and unoriginal, and most of it is now quite dated.  The 1950’s, ‘60’s and 70’s are particularly well represented in pseudo Picassos, Pollack wannabes and attempts at I-don’t-know-what but you can almost heat the disco music.  All of it looks like something I’ve seen before, mostly in art class, by somebody who wasn’t good at art, but something else, like Home Ec or Typing.  Still, I feel bad.  I hate throwing out someone’s labor of love.  And I hope it was a labor of love.  I hope that Jacqueline enjoyed painting and painting was fulfilling her heart’s desire.  Because, actually, it’s just trash on several levels.

Jacqueline spent a fortune matting, framing and shrink wrapping things for her gallery, which was a “vanity gallery”:  it exhibited her own work, which probably was the only place she could exhibit.  Tourist areas like Door County are full of vanity galleries which illustrate the entire spectrum of artists – the good, the bad and the ugly.  So I wonder, as I’m tossing and tearing, did Jacqueline really think her work was good?  How did she not cringe at how bad it was and crawl away to hide in a bottle or book or something?  Or did she feel like a success because she had her own gallery?  Didn’t the lack of awards, commissions and exhibitions tell her something?  Or did she think, schoolteacher that she was, that the only important thing was Effort? 

I’m haunted by the stacks of Jacqueline’s paintings that nobody wants.  I don’t know whether I hope Jacqueline was happily fooled with her own self delusions, believing her paintings (she would have called it her “artwork”) were good, or whether she knew how bad they were and carried on painting, anyway.  I kind of hope she knew and said, “the hell with it.”  But I’m not seeing that degree of self-awareness.  I’m seeing imitations of Utrillo, Modigliani, Chagall and Klee, but no original Jacqueline.  I’m also seeing no solid skills:  no accomplished draftsmanship, no anatomy, no perspective, so she may have been a victim of the free wheeling Abstract Expressionist years.  When I get to the Big Studio in the sky, I’ll ask her.  “What were you thinking?”  But while I agonize over all each contribution to recycling, I have to remind myself that earlier this year, I cleaned out my own portfolios and contributed heavily to recycling and municipal garbage for a couple of weeks.  I don’t want my kids to have to plough through all this junk!

“He only moves toward the perfection of his art whose criticism surpasses his achievement.”  Leonardo da Vinci

And one last question:  did Leonardo think he was a success?  And if he wasn’t, who was?

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PS.  Ha!  Over the July 4^th weekend, I put a half dozen of Jaqueline’s large paintings on masonite by the side of the road with a “FREE” sign.  They all found homes!!  I’m so happy about that.  I’ll do it again in August during a dry, sunny weekend when the tourists are zooming around everywhere.