Dear Friends,
I hope the sun is shining wherever you are.
I asked readers what they think of this newsletter, one asked how my process is going and it occurred to me, for a blog called A Work in Process, I've hardly written about process, more about ideas / influences on the work. Maybe on the same wavelength Loren of the very cool Paperbacks & Co. prompted me to craft an About blurb, hopefully to give myself and readers a better idea of what I'm doing here.
Paperbacks & Co. featured me in their Writing Challenge campaign for which I revisited Agnes Martin’s Writings, a text I hold sacred. You know those that find you at the right time. This one did at the beginning of the pandemic as the direction in my creative life was changing and it helped to fortify my resolve in that.
From Writings:
In graphic arts and all the arts technique is a hazard even as it is in living life.
The main thing in making art often is letting go of your expectation and your idea.
Artwork is not beneficial, nothing is gained from it, and it does not tell the truth. It is enjoyed or not according to the condition of the observer. A very small gesture of exultation.
Artwork is a representation of our devotion to life.
Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.
The future’s a blank page
I used to look in my mind for the unwritten page
if my mind was empty enough I could see it
Don’t look at the stars
Then your mind goes freely—way, way beyond
Look between the rain
the drops are insular
Writings is my favorite kind of non-fiction, that gently expounding radical ideas, applicable to any artmaking including writing. I think chiefly the text nudged me toward the ongoing realization that I don’t do the work; it does me.
I started writing to myself some pointers bucking status quo advice. I was calling them my paradoxical commandments not knowing or remembering the same lexicon refers to a collection of aphorisms commonly attributed to Mother Teresa (you know the ones, maybe so well they seem stale, but they're beautiful, e.g.: People are often unreasonable, irrational, and self-centered. Forgive them anyway; and What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight. Build anyway.)
This is how mine go:
1. Don’t be productive, or expedient. This is a process of undoing. It is not on a timeline.
2. Don’t be intellectual, or thoughtful. Know nothing = be everything.
3. Don't be special, or try to say something new. Be universal, and precise to the point of strangeness.
4. Don’t be sight-led. Be guided, have blind faith. Close the eyes that process visual information, open the one that penetrates. Put lead to paper and feel the pencil moving to draw sound as a needle does touching vinyl; something is stimulated and you conduct it with minimal input.
5. Don’t hold breaths like they depended on thoughts. Remember: every stuck point is a breakthrough waiting to happen.
6. Don't be serious. Relax; none of this really matters.
7. Don't be complicated. Be simple, write only what feels essential.
8. Don’t be eloquent, or overly concerned with style, putting form before content. Be natural, even awkward.
9. Don’t over-edit. This is a palimpsest, a subtractive process that requires wiping away just enough, not too much. Consider that with every edit, the subconscious receives the message “not good enough”. Consider the cumulative effect of that.
10. Don't be critical. Be kind, and loving.
Excerpt after the painterly sketch. Context: Rae gets debutanted in Tennessee, with Elliot escorting her.
The barn outside the zoo was all dressed up and ready for the ball. It wore a white ruched skirt on a t-shaped platform erected as a stage for presenting the debutantes. Greek statues stood on plinths, and things with French names, hors d'oeuvre, Veuve Clicquot, made the rounds on silver platters. You could forget, you would never even have known it was a barn, all done up like that. You would never even have known this place where you were to be inducted into society was the place where farm animals once grazed on hay and slop, in the comfort of unknowing they were dinner. Meanwhile, all of the zoo animals lived what lives they had in their cages, out of sight, so their captors could conduct their human rituals in peace.
Elliot said it was just as well. He said it was “fitting”, that if he had to play her suitor at the misogyny banquet, it may as well be where they put the animals that roll around in the mud and sniff each other's asses.
Rae said, “Isn't that all animals?”
He replied, “The ones better eaten than seen.”
But they were there to be seen. In their white gowns and tuxes, all wrapped up in bows. There to practice being ladies who married well and gentlemen who did well for themselves so they could call themselves “self-made”, that is to say, made all by themselves from nothing into “marriage material”, because that is what the debutante ball was, a dress rehearsal for the exchange of vows between the well-to-do.
Til death do us part may we prosper.
Elliot in a tux killed her. She could see he loved to despise the whole affair, the competition only reminding him he had none. They laced fingers and she felt his grip.
There was a life she turned away from just by holding his hand. A life with a blueprint laid out under the mild-mannered small talk, the words arranged like garnish on the periphery, or painted like enamel on the lid of ceremony, habit steeped in history. This life suffusing the air laden with pheromones, with Father lead me not into temptation, floating on the surface of a deep fear inherited from the cave people who invented private parts with loin cloths and leaves.
Rae looked around her like she were still deciding if she wanted any part of it. Ladies tiptoed around chocolate-dipped strawberries and devilled eggs, the spikes of their heels hidden under their long ball gowns. They held their baby’s breath in flower bouquets. So much could go wrong at that tender age! They just wanted to do right by their daughters. So did the gentlemen who stuck slices of prosciutto and melon, olives and other foods dainty enough to be stuck and lifted by a toothpick, strips of candied bacon because pig fat fried and sugarcoated is a delicacy. Some dining out on stories of their forefathers, the original self-made men, as their wives smiled, looking back to their daughters, The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree!
But Rae had never heard of a “self-made woman”. She knew they must be out there, but if you were not a man, you probably came into money as if by accident, a solution you were not even looking for, dropped out of the heavenly blue. You probably received it like the rays of that big gold coin in the sky, ninety-three million miles away and too intimate to bear mentioning, kissing you all over and uniformly, not missing any spots, so your skin glowed not at all white under your white ball gown.
Because money was a private matter on public display.
If you were a debutante you probably radiated it like you did your bright future, because your folks were in the business of converting solar energy into your perpetual warm embrace, always trying to find new ways of sweet-talking the ball of fire so it didn’t burn you up as you came into it more and more, and it got under your tan skin. Because money was no object, making you its subject, but a seamless subject-object merger. Because all your folks wanted was for you to never have to feel the cold, and who could fault them for that. She had fought tooth and nail not to be there, but the sun felt good, there was no denying it. Every day the sun came up and did its job, and all she had to do was soak up its generous rays.
If you were a debutante the world was your oyster, marinated and removed from its coruscating rocky shell, gliding slimy-sweet down your throat. One day you would be a lady, married, and when your beauty faded your husband could buy you a new face.
An urge took hold of Rae. She wanted to yank all the tablecloths out from the tables and start a fire with the tea light candles. She wanted to stuff herself full of candied bacon and free all of the animals in the zoo. Just because they were nice to look at didn’t mean they wouldn’t rather be wild.
She just smiled because in settings like these it was customary to show only the good emotions, pretending you were not filtering out the bad.
Her sister Lulu must have heard her thoughts because up she slunk, like the part of Rae wanting to be free. From deep in the autonomic nervous system or wherever such haptic sororal memory is stored, because even before Rae could see or hear her, she could feel her sister’s extrasensory footprint. Up she slunk, in a pronounced jokey slink, because it was a joke somebody who looked like Lulu could ever be stealthy; she caught too many eyes for that. All six feet of her smelled like Wild Turkey bourbon. An egg white-white silk slip dress hung across her hip bones like a hanger. It shimmered, reflecting light like the skin of a salamander little Lulu once broke apart to see a dead thing acting alive, the amphibian segments glistening, quivering grotesquely in the sink, like they had a mind outside of the severed whole to piece themselves back together again, even as they scattered down the drain. A child can die inside of a grownup’s body. An adult minus curiosity equals a dead child, but a child can live forever too, you know it by the glint in an eye. Lulu’s eyes had that glint.
“Yo soeur,” Lulu said. To ears that didn’t know the French word for sister her greeting might have registered: “Yo sir”. It was a way of breaking something fragile as a foreign tongue, this codespeak of theirs. Butchery by Southern accent. Lulu gave a kick to Rae’s shin, which meant she was always taking things too seriously. It rattled something metal from the inset pocket of her mink stole, the one handed down to her from Great Aunt Bunk.
“Can I get some of that?” Rae said.
Lulu produced a flask, shook it to signal it was empty.
She too had brought along a long-haired male, an unusual breed for the Southern country club milieu, only hers was from up North, not Texas. He looked lost, as if he were still finding his way down from up there. He looked like a New England liberal whose liberalism did not make any exceptions for his grooming regimen, too sure of itself to know where it had gone scraggly. It’ll be hard to tell the boys and girls apart in the pictures! Rae could hear the chorus judging suitors suitable or not. Bourbon seeped doubly from the pores of Lulu and her escort, on their breath that caramel aroma rising to the rim of a lowball glass, more pleasing to the nose even than to the tongue. And there Rae’s mind went to hosting a thought of how her sister’s date would taste.
“How’s it goin’,” Rae said to him. She was in need of social lubrication but the champagne going around was not for them because they were only of age to buy firearms and cigarettes. They were not of age for alcohol unless it had been transubstantiated into the blood of Christ, and then it was not alcohol but the liquid iron spilled from Jesus’s veins.
He nodded a greeting.
Rae adjusted her dress. It was sequined and its sequins held her attention at the place where they scratched her underarm skin. In its first life it must have chafed like a harbinger for more chafing to come, because where else do the wedding dresses of failed marriages go but a Fashion District depot like the one where she had gotten hers, the one on offer she’d disliked least. It had cream stains on it. The dresses the debutantes wore had to be white, but nowhere did it say they had to be wedding dresses. She had assumed things about white, ritual, purity, where impurity is redefined by the magic of a legal document, a church and a wand made of flesh.
She had played right to their hand. Whereas Lulu, in her slip dress, with her flask, was still gaming the system. This is why her sister had not been averse to the ball. She always had an exit strategy from polite society, it just wasn’t as blatant as it used to be. Like when they were little girls, enrolled in a program called Pretty as a Picture; training to be ladies was training to be nice, and nice to look at. They had sat at a table in a JC Penney back room moving flatware around a place setting. Nothing could have been more boring than putting all of the pieces in their right places. Something terrible would happen if all of the pieces were not in their right places. It was known implicitly that the world hingeing on those constellations of bone china would fall apart. The girls were given lipstick to apply and Lulu smeared it like warpaint all over her face. “Am I pretty now?” she grinned. Excused from the proverbial table.
Lulu was apparently feeling the effects of the bourbon, swaying, doing a little jig under her ball gown, making it come alive. Her date wishing he had more Wild Turkey to get him where she was, peel off the layers of inhibition. Elliot perfectly reconciled in himself, taking in the spectacle from the remove of an anthropologist putting his anthropological lens on it.
Rae had a toothpick jammed in her teeth—putting hors d'oeuvre and other foreign objects in her mouth kept her from having to expel familiar language—when the lady who taught manners to the whole county approached, her silvery blond hair swirled like a weather formation her face had not been warned about. The lady, whose name was Sadie, smiled a smile turning her cheeks shiny and red like the apples that bob in the wooden barrels at fairgrounds, the ones for pinching between your chin and your shoulder: Pink Lady. She had on a perfectly tailored dress her body looked to have been poured into and a cosmopolitan in her hand, filled to the brim of a martini glass because she was a lady performing a balancing act, not spilling a drop of her cocktail composed of equal parts class and education. Because not even vodka seemed to go to her head. Inside, her cup runeth over. She had faith and that was already everything, so she had more than everything. She had that Catholic-convert faith you sensed could absorb everything angelic and demonic down into it. She chose it and it chose her. It was not handed down to her like a shoe that did not fit. She was not falling back on it like a trust exercise, some human hands catching her like a felled tree in the forest.
Rae had asked Sadie to be her sponsor for the Catholic sacrament of Confirmation because Rae did not have that kind of faith.
Sadie had a son in Rae’s high school class and they lived down the street so a carpool was formed when he and Rae were too young to drive themselves to school. The boy sat in the shotgun enduring the double humiliation of being a freshman and not having a driver’s license. He smelled like burnt toast and shampoo. His wet hair fell in his face and it made him hard of seeing, same as it made him hard to see. He was a football player and a hunter so when eventually he did drive, he attached something resembling the cage of his football helmet to the fender of his truck for ramming into deer, because killing induced manhood. He could ram into a doe, skin her and cut her up into chunks he then packed into his freezer, so his freezer fit the profile of a serial killer’s. At least he knew where his meat came from. Under the muscle and grit he was soft. The ones that present hard always are. On the football field he rammed into other boys who rammed into him, and though they all wore helmets, their brains smashed into their skulls smashed into their helmets. Rae did not understand the rules of the game. She thought killing brain cells is what they did. Of course some acts of killing are socially sanctioned so he was a popular boy, who left Rae well alone when it came time to be dropped off at school. She was rumored to be a nerd and the risk of social contagion was not one he was willing to take.
For this reason Rae had hoped asking his mother to be her Confirmation sponsor would not be seen as a ploy to associate with him. She hoped her subconscious was not playing games and she was not making a ploy to associate with him.
“Hiiiiii!!!!!!” Sadie said.
“Hiii!!!” Rae said and Sadie broke protocols, introducing herself to Elliot, because there were rules for introducing elders that Rae had drilled in her etiquette class and then failed to apply in real life. Sadie introduced herself as Rae’s Confirmation sponsor and, just like that, nested a rite of initiation rife with Church doctrine inside that of the debutante ball, as if one weren’t already too much without the other.
“You mean the Catholic ritual?” Elliot addressed Rae. “I didn’t know you did that.”
All she could seem to remember how to do was smile and nod, and so smile and nod is what she did.
Lulu laughed a laugh that shook her body in convulsions. Elliot glanced sidelong at her like he saw something in her that pleased him because it reminded him of something in him, maybe the same thing he found wanting in Rae. Lulu had weaseled out of the sacrament of Confirmation, one of the things expected of them at a certain age; she would not have her reason perverted by expectation, so she wrote a letter to the bishop telling him all of the ways she did not need confirmation from anybody not least his unholy institution.
Well, did Sadie have things to tell them, as if in answer to all this: a scholarly priest she was following on the internet was proposing exciting reforms in the areas of female priesthood, gay marriage, clerical celibacy, and this Catholic, she pointed at herself, was not above reform.
“Great,” Rae was bracing herself for the moment the devout atheist she had for a boyfriend decided to free himself from the cage of polite convention.
It was then she noticed she did not want to opt fully out of society, not just yet.
But Elliot struck a chord with Sadie. He said, “You have to find meaning on your own terms.” He began to tell a story. It was a story of faith in himself, of action and non-action, of becoming Red Monk. Back before Burma came to be known as Myanmar, he explained, when nobody could get clearance to go, he did. (And here he was careful to exude an air of humility, careful not to show he saw Lulu turning her head to listen, her date searching his catalog of experiences to rival this one. See, the details of how he got to the place nobody else could were not as important as the mood he set not providing them.) His mysterious ways got him there somehow. And upon his arrival, he showed up unannounced at a Buddhist monastery. It was summer and sweltering, and he had run out of water but he did not have a backup plan. He knocked on the door and the monk who answered it peered down into the depths of his soul, seeing something there that so compelled him, Elliot did not even have to ask to be let in. The door just opened for him. Then they got down to the business of doing nothing, Elliot and the monks, for hours on end just sitting, and sitting, and sitting. And sitting some more. Elliot and the monks meditated thirteen hours a day, one more hour than half of those in the day, rising before dawn, hardly eating, hardly speaking. Just being, as they sat Indian style, their fingers touching and extended like antennae, intercepting signals from the Great Beyond.
“What a story!” Sadie declared when Elliot was done, her eyes open wider than when he had started. She turned to Rae, “Where’d you find him?!?”
Rae shrugged, in response to what she heard as an exuberant declarative statement posing as a question. Too proud to show how proud she was of him. A voice over the intercom spoke in the imperative, calling all the debutantes to the stage. Sadie begged her leave but not before whispering in Rae’s ear, “He’s got potential!”
Rae followed Lulu, up some stairs Lulu tripped on before lunging toward a line of girls, each waiting her turn to walk down the platform and stand before an audience while her name and the name of her escort were announced. They got in line and watched the procession. By the power vested in the voice over the intercom, a girl would turn into a lady. Then she would exit the stage, making way for the next one. And there was not much more to it than that. Could you want something more from that you didn't want any part of? When it was her turn, Rae did as the ones before her had done. She snapped into sparkling pieces, dancing as they met their collective fate down the hallowed porcelain sink.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to A Work In Process to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.