(Dear God, I want to eat everything in the house. And this, after a filling dinner. Bad sign...)
I left the house at about 10:15 this morning, to drive out to North Branch NJ again, to spend a few hours with Combat Paper group again. And I was semi-obsessed as I drove. Last week, as we were cleaning up, we were told that Fox News would be coming to visit today, and those of us who could be there today should show up early, to hash out a kind of game plan. What to say, what not to say. Who to punch. That sort of thing.
Of course I was late -- I should have been there fifteen minutes before I left the house, actually. And Daylight Savings Time had little to do with my tardiness. So, as I pushed through what traffic there was, keeping an eye out for State Troopers as I tried to keep an average of ten miles above the posted speed limit, I lived through several scenarios.
I'd get there, and the video crew would already be set up, and I wouldn't be able to come in and do my little deconstruction project, leaning against a support pillar beside the work table, the way I like to do.
I'd get there, and the Fox people wouldn't have showed up yet, so there would actually still be time for all of us to decide how cautious we would have to be, in dealing with representatives of the news channel that, apparently, actually removes intelligence from its viewers while they watch. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
I'd get there, and set to work, and the video crew would arrive, and start to do their job, and someone with lacquered hair and a microphone would ask me something -- I was anticipating a question about 'desecrating the uniform' -- and I would suddenly become very calm and controlled (so like me, I can assure you), and I would turn this simple question into an opportunity to talk about... things I know. With the hope, of course, of reducing the camera operators to stunned silence, and making the shallow interviewer go red in the face with shame. I love my own inner dramas.
Every few miles, as I checked my speedometer, and tried to anticipate where the polizei would be lurking, I reminded myself that, in fact, nothing ever turns out the way I expect -- I've spent countless hours of perfectly good mental time, imagining in great detail things that come nowhere near materialization (although, in my own defense, what else should I think about?); within about twenty seconds of this little stern inner talking-to, I would be deep in yet another fantasy about how eloquent I was going to be, as I snipped through the green threads in the leg of a pair of camouflage fatigues.
I stopped for milk, which task, as I've mentioned, I've assigned myself. On the way past the great wide fields where the longhorn cattle stand about, I noticed that there was a llama in the same pen with the goats. I stopped for coffees, as I like to do, making sure to ask the clerk at Starbux how she was today. I'm such a creature of habit.
At the Printmaking Studio, there were two cars in the parking lot. In one, two people sat talking, rather intently. The passenger looked unhappy. The other car was parked nearer the building. There was nothing like a Fox-bedecked production van. Maybe I wasn't too late after all. Or maybe Daylight Savings Time had fouled up other schedules after all?
So of course, I was exactly the second person to arrive -- one of the founders was there, making still more coffee. But my milk came in handy. And it turned out that, because some of the other key personnel from Combat Paper had conflicts today, Fox had rescheduled for next week. At which time, as it happens, I will be spending all day in New Brunswick, first singing in the choir for the 10:30 service, and then possibly participating in an afternoon 'Sacred Art, Sacred Music' concert. No time to dash from New Brunswick to North Branch. I'm sure it's just as well. I look terrible on camera.
As it happened, one more vet showed up -- another man named Walter, from Teaneck, who is working on a set of lino block prints -- and even though there were only the three of us at the work table -- and two of us old enough to be the father and uncle of David, the young man who helped found this group -- we still managed to find appropriate things to talk about. Meaningful things, I believe.
For instance, David mentioned that, it was while he was on guard duty at his base in Iraq that, while talking with his duty partner, he decided that, when his term of enlistment was finished, he was going to return to graduate school, and get a degree in painting. In retrospect, he said, it seems strange that he should come to this life-decision, thousands of miles from his home, while wearing a sand-colored uniform and leaning on a machine gun.
I shared a little too -- about how benign my service experience had been, relative to my home life. How, against all expectations, I managed to do oil painting and charcoal drawings in my barracks room. How, counter-intuitively perhaps, my college board scores were 200 points higher, when I took the tests at the end of my Air Force career, than they had been when I took them in high school. How, as a member of the armed forces, I had the time to gorge myself on more reading than I'd ever been allowed to do at home -- Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, de Maupassant, the list goes on...
And I talked a little about my reservations about the vague plans I have, for my Combat Paper project. Most people use the paper as a surface for printing of one sort or another. I want the paper to be more active than that, I think. I'm thinking of tearing some of it up, and sewing it back together again. I'm thinking of sewing sheets of it together, to mimic the construction of a uniform, and wrap some of my foul body-part constructions of plastic over plastic, all coated with shellac. I want the paper to show the effects of some liquid seeping through from behind. I feel terrifically inauthentic doing this, because I suffered no physical wounds during my military experience. All my anger and resentment seems, to me, to be second-hand and somewhat fraudulent.
But when I talked about all of this, the guys told me pretty much what I would have said, if one of my students said something similar to me -- do it anyway. Follow the fear, have faith in the inevitable benefit of accidents, and take one action at a time. The way all creativity, it seems, unfolds. There's an exhibit, of work from the Combat Paper group, scheduled for the middle of next month, and I do love a deadline.
Oh, and I met a glassblower, who has a shop not too far from the Print Shop. He's a big supporter of Combat Paper. I think a visit is in store. I can feel the heat already.
Who needs Fox News anyway?
© 2012 Walter Zimmerman
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