Let me see if I can get this right...
Today, I went to the gym.
I didn't really want to, all that much. In the first place, my right shoulder is still sore, from my stupid mistake during a workout last week. And I'm sure there were better things I could have been doing. But, honestly, I knew that if I didn't go to the gym, I would just waste the day, waiting until it was time to drive to New Brunswick for choir rehearsal, so I packed my bag, and dragged myself out to the car.
Besides, I needed to get some prescriptions filled, and why not drop them off on the way to Summit, and pick them up on the way back? How environmentally responsible of me.
And here's the part I want to try to get right -- which is: what really goes on at the gym, at least for me. Aside from my resentment at having to pay to park anywhere near the building, that is.
I sort of like arriving at the gym -- I've been there often enough that people at the front desk seem to recognize me, which I find pleasant. Then I go downstairs to the men's locker room. Which is not so pleasant.
Not that there's anything wrong with it -- it's been refurbished recently, with new lockers and new shower stalls and I think they took up the problematic indoor-outdoor carpeting, and laid a new tile floor. No, it's just the men's locker room thing in general, for me.
First, I do not look at anyone, even though I yearn to watch each and every man there. And not just because I'm a gay man, either -- most of them aren't really that interesting, physical-specimen-wise. No, what I'm interested in is seeing what these men do. How they approach the simple operation of changing clothes, or arranging their locker, or engaging (or not engaging) with the other men who might be there. If I'm there, and there's another man using a locker in the same row I've chosen, I almost always kind of pretend that I'm all by myself. In my peripheral vision, I can kind of tell what he's doing, or where he is, and whether he's dressed or not. But otherwise, I have no idea whether he takes his clean underwear out of his gym bag, and stows it on the top shelf of the locker, like I do, or if he leaves everything in his gym bag until he's done with his workout.
This may seem unimportant, but in fact I don't really know a lot about how other men do things. I remember, years ago, when I first began working out, in Hoboken, and the t-shirts with the sleeves torn off became the cool look at the gym, and I had no idea how these guys all managed to adopt the same look -- a kind of studied yet careless, casual yet highly inflected choice of costume. How did they figure out what to do, to get their shirts to do that particular drape-y thing? I never did find out.
After I dress, I generally use the bathroom before going up to the workout rooms, and here too I tend to hide myself. I feel very self-conscious in men's rooms, and dread making any sound of any kind. This can often present problems.
When I'm upstairs again, in my workout clothes -- generally the t-shirt I was wearing on the way in, plus a pair of disreputable, paint-stained shorts, of which I have so many. Old Adidas sneakers, only worn for the gym. Those little white socks that don't show about the shoe tops. A pen in one pocket of my shorts, a pair of glasses in another. The Y provides nice workout towels, and I always grab one, on the way into... The Strive® Room.
At this point, I begin to operate in a kind of trance, in a way -- the routine is so set -- the way I pull my workout record sheet from the filing cabinet, and jot down all the day's weight settings, and attach everything to a clip board. But I'm also keeping an eye on the room itself, noting who's where, and what he or she is doing. I'm very territorial in the gym, and almost always feel as though I'm going to get into an argument with someone at any time.
I'm hyper-aware of those folks who come in and don't use the equipment in the proper order, as laid out in the signage on the wall. I'm alert for those who might as well not be exercising at all, their form is so bad on whatever machine I'm using. I feel old and decrepit, if there's a younger guy using this particular room -- which, usually, there isn't. I feel strange and embarrassed, if I'm younger than the other exercisers. I feel slightly defensive, because after I'm done using a piece of equipment, I wipe it down with my towel, instead of with a paper towel and that spray stuff that's all the way at the other end of the room. I rationalize my choice by telling myself that I'm saving paper. When some other patron makes what I think is a big effort at cleaning the machines, with that paper towel and mystery spray, I feel judged and contaminated.
But because I can pick and choose my schedule, I'm often the only one in the room. And I zip through in under half an hour, as a rule.
My least favorite part is the portion of the workout done while facing the wall of mirrors covering half of the room. I don't like looking at myself, but I can't take my eyes away. I can't judge myself harshly enough, and at the same time, I'm desperate to find something appealing and attractive about myself.
There are actually two or three men I kind of talk with, if they're around while I'm exercising, but in most cases, I don't know their names. I suspect that everyone there is a wealthy Republican.
When I'm done with what would be the 'weight lifting' portion of the routine, I go into the cardo room, and if I'm lucky, I'll take one of the treadmills I prefer, and start a twenty-minute walk.
I used to think treadmills were among the most useless and stupid possible pieces of equipment, but somehow I've come to prefer these over the elliptical trainers I used to use -- John and I dubbed these 'bizarr-o-trons' because they seem so... bizarre -- and I like to crank the pace up to about 4.5 mph, or so the dial says. I have to hold onto the side bars at this pace, because I tend to lose my balance a little, but I try to make it plain to everyone who isn't watching me at all, that I'm just touching the rails with the tips of my fingers -- not cheating at all, at all.
And while I walk, I do one of the following things -- or more than one, depending. I watch the Discovery Channel, even though I don't have earbuds, and so can't hear what they're saying. Also, I leave the workout progress screen up on the viewing panel, which means that all I see of the Discovery Channel is the top of someone's head, and maybe their shoulders. Or similar truncated bits of TV viewing. While I'm sort of looking at this meaningless visual stimulation, I count to myself, usually to 100, and then starting over again. I might also watch someone else's TV monitor screen -- if there are three or four exercisers in the row in front of me, I'm often amused to note how many people are tuned to the same football game that's being shown on one of the three giant flat-screen TVs suspended from the second-floor railing.
Today, on one of the big overhead screens, a financial show was being aired, and I was fascinated by what looked like a panel of experts, expounding on what should be happening, and where and how and when. There was a blonde woman and a brunette, both Caucasian. There were three Anglo men, one of whom has male pattern baldness. There was one African American male, dressed nicely like the others, in a conservative suit and tie, and looking dapper, with his silvery hair. While I watched, there wasn't a single close-up of this man, nor did it appear that he said anything during the entire section that I saw. I know he was a real person, because he nodded his head once.
Or, I can watch a cooking show, which can be disconcerting. Today, for instance, a blonde cook breaded and deep-fried some celery sticks, which she then slurped through what must have been a bowl of roquefort dressing, and then rolled her eyes with delight at how it all tasted. Counting to 100 is often the most interesting part of the exercise.
As often happens with me, once I get over the resistance to starting something, I develop a curious reluctance to stop. I use the 'five, or even-number' rule, to decide when I'm finished with my walking routine. Once the twenty minutes are up, I continue walking until the expended calories reach a number ending in five, or zero. This is largely meaningless, as it rarely takes me more than a minute to round the caloric count up just a bit, but I'm helpless in my compulsions.
Oh, and of course, while I'm walking to nowhere, I'm keeping an eye on all the other guys who are in the room, exercising too. Some, because what they're doing seems so stupid, some because they seem like gods on earth. And, as in the locker room and the 'Strive®' room, I talk with no one.
And then it's back to the locker room, to clean up and leave. This is perhaps the most perilous part of my day at the gym, because I will have to be naked (and judged, I'm sure) by the other men who might be there.
I'm usually good at the getting undressed part, and quickly wrap myself in the big towel I bring from home for the purpose -- the workout towels aren't nearly large enough for any serious drying of the human body, in my opinion. I hang my towel and locker key on one of the hooks at the near end of the shower room -- self-conscious, a bit, because my key is looped onto a length of pink chalk line, but again, I doubt if anyone has ever noticed -- and pick one of the plein-air showers for my ablutions. In the remodeling, a row of small stalls was built on one long shower room wall, but they seem too small and cramped for me, so in spite of my trepidations, I shower out in the open. And, again, because I time my exercise period to come after the lunch-time crowd, and before the after-school influx, I'm often alone in the shower room too. Everyone once in a while, some guy comes in from the swimming pool, and there's another ritual I can't really watch. Or men use the steam room, but I've never been inside it. It's stressful enough, not wanting to watch the other men under the hot water, without being in an enclosed space, with all of us sitting and facing each other. Too confusing for me.
Once I've washed myself a couple of times, I dry off and weigh myself, and then go back to the locker to dress and get ready to leave. If anyone is going to show up, it will be about at this point in my visit -- and there seems to be an unwritten, unproven law, dictating that, if there are only two men in a locker room, the lockers they have chosen to use with be right next to each other. I might make a joke about this, and get a tepid response, and then there's no conversation again. Under the guise of brushing my semi-wet hair, I sneak a look at myself in one of the big mirrors, and apply some moisturizer, which I'm sure is somehow not quite the done thing, but again, because I don't feel free to watch what other men do, I can't know for sure.
And this is it. I pack my damp workout clothes in one end of my gym bag, fold my big bath towel and lay it on the outside of the bag, and leave the building. Tossing my used workout towel in the proper bin. Enjoying the way I feel when I walk up the steps to the front door.
I go through this routine, or something close to it, twice a week, if possible. It's supposed to be good for me, and I'm sure that, on some level, it is. But this bi-weekly immersion in a strange world I despair ever of understanding, or of feeling entitled even to enter, does take something of a toll, somehow. Because, no matter how valid my membership is, or how many people say hello when they see me, I still somehow feel like a thief.
© 2013 Walter Zimmerman
Monday, March 18, 2013
Sunday, March 17, 2013
Day of Rest... Or Not...
Well, of course in a way it was really my fault.
Lately, my Sundays have been rather simple: get up at about the usual time; linger over coffee; reluctantly begin preparing for my trip to Branchburg and Combat Paper; lose at least three things as I pack the van with all the necessary tools and carved print blocks and paper; set off later than I'd expected to do -- this all the more remarkable as I think I always set off at the same time each week; speed more than I mean to, and then stop at a Starbux close to the Print Center for coffees and milk; and finally, arrive for four hours of... whatever I end up doing. We have lunch at about 3pm, we clean up at 4 pm, and I drive home again. Speeding more than I mean to. Pretty much week in, week out, for the past year or so.
But today, I somehow managed to commit myself to serial obligations, apparently without thinking either ahead of time, or in time to change my schedule -- I'd agreed to read a lesson in church (meaning a trip to New Brunswick); I wanted to get to Combat Paper (meaning I had to take a change of clothes -- one doesn't want to go mucking about with printer's ink in a shirt and tie); I had a meeting set for 5:30, at home, so an art curator could look over some of my work, to select things for an upcoming exhibit in Newark. Did I mention speeding more than I meant to?
I really love to read aloud, and the acoustic at Christ Church is really marvelous, with the high barrel arch overhead, rolling the sound around and around. I like reading from the Old Testament -- the language is so chewy and stark. This morning, I got to read some verses from Isaiah, and I'm very pleased to say that, in spite of the fact that the text was printed in the program leaflet, I saw many people sitting and listening, instead of following along -- I just think it's so much more powerful to hear these words spoken on the human breath stream, rather than in one's own head. In retrospect, it may have seemed silly, to drive so far (and so fast!), to do a reading that lasted maybe two minutes at most, but there were also some lovely hymns to sing, and John has let me know that he especially enjoys knowing that I'm in the congregation, to observe and appreciate 'the show'. Which, today, I certainly did.
But no coffee hour for me -- instant flight up the road to Rattlesnake Bridge Road (which I don't really know which road that is, because, in the finest New Jersey signage tradition, there isn't any signage), to the caffeine depot, and then to the Print Center. I wasn't even all that late. And because the place was packed, with much activity going on, I ended up working on the second floor, doing a more detailed, life-size mock-up of the book it seems I'll be working on for the next three years. Every time I turn around, the thing seems to need more pages -- and apparently, I turn around a lot. I'm already up to 14 pages, and from what I can see, that's not going to do it, by any means. Given that I can only get six sheets of heavy paper out of each 1 1/2 lb. batch of pulp (all the beater will hold, as it happens), I figure I'll need to feed over 35 lb of cut up pink rag through that mill, to have enough paper for this particular piece of work. More trips ahead, to various thrift stores in the 20-mile radius, to search out men's pink shirts, and then disassemble them... More stray threads all over the den. As though that's a big surprise.
What was a big surprise for me, today, was learning that one of my prints sold at a recent fund-raiser, and the arrangement is that the artist gets 50% of the sale price. Two things shocked me: the print that sold, while... technically sound, and compositionally competent, is a rather strange image, I think -- being based on a 5th century Norse silver coin, showing Odin healing his six-legged horse, Sleppnir, by pronouncing a magic spell that is shown around the coin's edge, in runes. Plus, I added a sectional map of the south-east corner of Iceland. Why on earth would anyone want to look at this? But they did. And... shock #2 -- the sale price was $200! I'm truly baffled, but kind of gratified as well. It's not as though my life is going to change because I have $100 I didn't expect, but it does give that inner warmth, that I so seldom experience. Now I want to make more dragon prints, with different designs -- I can't believe my St. Margaret print wasn't the one to get snapped up. Maybe the next fund-raiser...
And just after I'd been given my share of the profits, in check form, I had to throw all my stuff in the van and hurry back home, to be here for the curator's visit. Well, to clean up a bit before the curator's visit. And to find some work for the curator to look at, so the visit wouldn't be a total waste of his time. Plus I thought it would be decent to sweep the kitchen floor, and give a swift wipe to the upstairs bathroom sink. And then go rooting around in the basement, looking for the boxes which should hold the wall-mounted work I wanted to suggest as my contribution to this show on... encrustation, I think it was? What a strange theme. Plus it's a craft-centered exhibit, which make the idea of encrustation seem even less likely.
But the curator liked the pieces I'd dug out of one of the boxes I hauled up from the basement (don't ask about how many things fell over, and scattered across the floor, as I tugged this container out from under a heap of other things -- who has time to delicately re-arrange things, when time is of the essence? And even more, he liked the odd pieces of glass lying about -- the stuff that's been on the mantle piece almost from the day we moved in 11 years ago, and some things in the sun room, and I'll also add a few pieces I know he'll like, but hasn't seen yet, because they're in plastic bins in the back yard, tucked away where prospective home buyers, looking at our neighbor's house, won't see them and be frightened off... So it seems that I'm being asked to contribute five wall-mounted pieces, and then bring in these random, loose glass pieces, and lay them all out on a table-top,without any other contextual information. I don't know yet whether these things will be lined up in neat rows, or jumbled about -- it doesn't really matter to me, as long as there's not a lot of breakage. The show opens, in Newark someplace, in late April, and will be up for a month. How odd, I think, that all of a sudden, I have work in NYC, in southern Jersey, and in a show in Newark. Plus I'm going a play in which I get to take all my clothes off for my friends, neighbors, and the people I sit next to in the choir stalls. What a remarkable life, even if, as I suspect, it's pretty much pointless.
Well, now I've got some more housekeeping to do, and then time to turn in for the night, before another careening week begins.
Seemingly non-sequitur-ish... But since I mentioned church first of all, I did want to mention a sliver of thought that ran through my head, after the adrenaline rush of reading had more or less worn off. As I was sitting there in the pew, watching all the liturgical activity, and listening to an anthem, and singing hymns, I couldn't help contrast my real inner cynicism with what appears to be a sincere and grounded belief on the part of at least some of the people going through the worship service with me. I live in a world where, at any moment, any terrible thing might happen -- and the absence of that terrible thing happening at this particular point is mostly a matter of luck and probability, instead of being the 'will' of some agency or other. The orthodox view, of course, is quite different, if not diametrically opposed to what I can't help believing to be true. The orthodox view throws out a huge and complex safety net, supported by... Old Testament readings, and New Testament readings, and publicly performed rituals and prayers and sermons filled with conveniently supportive anecdotes. And I wondered, for a few seconds, whether there might not be some tangible benefit to be gained from adhering to this wildly unlikely construct we've handed down from generation to generation. What would it be like, I thought, to participate in the worship activities with the greatest apparent sincerity, even if one doesn't actually believe any of it at all? Is the easing of existential anxiety, even through a religious pretense openly acknowledged, more valuable and beneficial, than living every day with the sense that, in fifteen minutes, everything might be over? Or, if not in fifteen minutes, certainly by tomorrow at the very latest? Does anxiety help me? Or is delusion more help?
I'll think about this while I wash the dishes and refill the cat food cannister. While hoping a meteor doesn't come crashing through the ceiling anytime soon...
© 2012 Walter Zimmerman
Lately, my Sundays have been rather simple: get up at about the usual time; linger over coffee; reluctantly begin preparing for my trip to Branchburg and Combat Paper; lose at least three things as I pack the van with all the necessary tools and carved print blocks and paper; set off later than I'd expected to do -- this all the more remarkable as I think I always set off at the same time each week; speed more than I mean to, and then stop at a Starbux close to the Print Center for coffees and milk; and finally, arrive for four hours of... whatever I end up doing. We have lunch at about 3pm, we clean up at 4 pm, and I drive home again. Speeding more than I mean to. Pretty much week in, week out, for the past year or so.
But today, I somehow managed to commit myself to serial obligations, apparently without thinking either ahead of time, or in time to change my schedule -- I'd agreed to read a lesson in church (meaning a trip to New Brunswick); I wanted to get to Combat Paper (meaning I had to take a change of clothes -- one doesn't want to go mucking about with printer's ink in a shirt and tie); I had a meeting set for 5:30, at home, so an art curator could look over some of my work, to select things for an upcoming exhibit in Newark. Did I mention speeding more than I meant to?
I really love to read aloud, and the acoustic at Christ Church is really marvelous, with the high barrel arch overhead, rolling the sound around and around. I like reading from the Old Testament -- the language is so chewy and stark. This morning, I got to read some verses from Isaiah, and I'm very pleased to say that, in spite of the fact that the text was printed in the program leaflet, I saw many people sitting and listening, instead of following along -- I just think it's so much more powerful to hear these words spoken on the human breath stream, rather than in one's own head. In retrospect, it may have seemed silly, to drive so far (and so fast!), to do a reading that lasted maybe two minutes at most, but there were also some lovely hymns to sing, and John has let me know that he especially enjoys knowing that I'm in the congregation, to observe and appreciate 'the show'. Which, today, I certainly did.
But no coffee hour for me -- instant flight up the road to Rattlesnake Bridge Road (which I don't really know which road that is, because, in the finest New Jersey signage tradition, there isn't any signage), to the caffeine depot, and then to the Print Center. I wasn't even all that late. And because the place was packed, with much activity going on, I ended up working on the second floor, doing a more detailed, life-size mock-up of the book it seems I'll be working on for the next three years. Every time I turn around, the thing seems to need more pages -- and apparently, I turn around a lot. I'm already up to 14 pages, and from what I can see, that's not going to do it, by any means. Given that I can only get six sheets of heavy paper out of each 1 1/2 lb. batch of pulp (all the beater will hold, as it happens), I figure I'll need to feed over 35 lb of cut up pink rag through that mill, to have enough paper for this particular piece of work. More trips ahead, to various thrift stores in the 20-mile radius, to search out men's pink shirts, and then disassemble them... More stray threads all over the den. As though that's a big surprise.
What was a big surprise for me, today, was learning that one of my prints sold at a recent fund-raiser, and the arrangement is that the artist gets 50% of the sale price. Two things shocked me: the print that sold, while... technically sound, and compositionally competent, is a rather strange image, I think -- being based on a 5th century Norse silver coin, showing Odin healing his six-legged horse, Sleppnir, by pronouncing a magic spell that is shown around the coin's edge, in runes. Plus, I added a sectional map of the south-east corner of Iceland. Why on earth would anyone want to look at this? But they did. And... shock #2 -- the sale price was $200! I'm truly baffled, but kind of gratified as well. It's not as though my life is going to change because I have $100 I didn't expect, but it does give that inner warmth, that I so seldom experience. Now I want to make more dragon prints, with different designs -- I can't believe my St. Margaret print wasn't the one to get snapped up. Maybe the next fund-raiser...
And just after I'd been given my share of the profits, in check form, I had to throw all my stuff in the van and hurry back home, to be here for the curator's visit. Well, to clean up a bit before the curator's visit. And to find some work for the curator to look at, so the visit wouldn't be a total waste of his time. Plus I thought it would be decent to sweep the kitchen floor, and give a swift wipe to the upstairs bathroom sink. And then go rooting around in the basement, looking for the boxes which should hold the wall-mounted work I wanted to suggest as my contribution to this show on... encrustation, I think it was? What a strange theme. Plus it's a craft-centered exhibit, which make the idea of encrustation seem even less likely.
But the curator liked the pieces I'd dug out of one of the boxes I hauled up from the basement (don't ask about how many things fell over, and scattered across the floor, as I tugged this container out from under a heap of other things -- who has time to delicately re-arrange things, when time is of the essence? And even more, he liked the odd pieces of glass lying about -- the stuff that's been on the mantle piece almost from the day we moved in 11 years ago, and some things in the sun room, and I'll also add a few pieces I know he'll like, but hasn't seen yet, because they're in plastic bins in the back yard, tucked away where prospective home buyers, looking at our neighbor's house, won't see them and be frightened off... So it seems that I'm being asked to contribute five wall-mounted pieces, and then bring in these random, loose glass pieces, and lay them all out on a table-top,without any other contextual information. I don't know yet whether these things will be lined up in neat rows, or jumbled about -- it doesn't really matter to me, as long as there's not a lot of breakage. The show opens, in Newark someplace, in late April, and will be up for a month. How odd, I think, that all of a sudden, I have work in NYC, in southern Jersey, and in a show in Newark. Plus I'm going a play in which I get to take all my clothes off for my friends, neighbors, and the people I sit next to in the choir stalls. What a remarkable life, even if, as I suspect, it's pretty much pointless.
Well, now I've got some more housekeeping to do, and then time to turn in for the night, before another careening week begins.
Seemingly non-sequitur-ish... But since I mentioned church first of all, I did want to mention a sliver of thought that ran through my head, after the adrenaline rush of reading had more or less worn off. As I was sitting there in the pew, watching all the liturgical activity, and listening to an anthem, and singing hymns, I couldn't help contrast my real inner cynicism with what appears to be a sincere and grounded belief on the part of at least some of the people going through the worship service with me. I live in a world where, at any moment, any terrible thing might happen -- and the absence of that terrible thing happening at this particular point is mostly a matter of luck and probability, instead of being the 'will' of some agency or other. The orthodox view, of course, is quite different, if not diametrically opposed to what I can't help believing to be true. The orthodox view throws out a huge and complex safety net, supported by... Old Testament readings, and New Testament readings, and publicly performed rituals and prayers and sermons filled with conveniently supportive anecdotes. And I wondered, for a few seconds, whether there might not be some tangible benefit to be gained from adhering to this wildly unlikely construct we've handed down from generation to generation. What would it be like, I thought, to participate in the worship activities with the greatest apparent sincerity, even if one doesn't actually believe any of it at all? Is the easing of existential anxiety, even through a religious pretense openly acknowledged, more valuable and beneficial, than living every day with the sense that, in fifteen minutes, everything might be over? Or, if not in fifteen minutes, certainly by tomorrow at the very latest? Does anxiety help me? Or is delusion more help?
I'll think about this while I wash the dishes and refill the cat food cannister. While hoping a meteor doesn't come crashing through the ceiling anytime soon...
© 2012 Walter Zimmerman
Saturday, March 16, 2013
Reality Check...
Forgive any repetitions ahead, please...
Years ago, and not long after the disgrace of the 2000 Presidential election, I saw Al Gore in the 30th Street Station, in Philadelphia. There he stood, big as life, unencumbered by phalanxes of security guards, in the middle of the floor, where the train schedule board hangs. I couldn't believe my eyes, but I went up to him, and addressed him.
"Mr. Gore?" He nodded and kind of looked at me out of the corner of of his eye. "It's an honor to meet you, and I'm so sorry about the election."
I don't remember whether we actually shook hands or not -- it's not like it was flu season or anything -- but I do recall the look on his face, after I mentioned the election. He just looked off, as though seeing something past the list of arriving and departing trains. He paused for a moment and then shook his head, saying something like "It's okay," or "It's better off this way," or something to that effect. As though he knew things that I couldn't possibly be aware of.
Then I had to run to catch my own train.
Al Gore is what I would consider to be a 'real person'. I, on the other hand, am not. Or at least, this is how it seems to me.
I know I've written before about my early decision, when our new encyclopedias had arrived, and I discovered that there were no Zimmermans listed in the last volume, that it would be up to me to recitfy that omission. I know I've written about my disappointment and confusion, surrounding the many unwise life choices I feel I've made, which have resulted in a kind of comfortable, even privileged obscurity, instead of the legitimacy and noteworthiness I felt, at a young age, were my responsibility to attain.
And of course I've written, over and over again, about the terrible betrayal I feel I suffered, at the hands of my indifferent, self-absorbed mother.
But maybe I haven't explored the connections between this grave emotional wound, and what I'm afraid must seem an egocentric need for validated public success and even acclaim.
For some reason that I can't really verbalize, I have always regarded the people whose faces I see in magazines and on TV, and read about in the newspaper or online, as 'real' people, in a way that I am not. Which is why, when I happen to meet someone of established public stature, I often feel a little dizzy, and also have this crazy desire, somehow to... I don't know... secret myself in one of their pockets, so I might be smuggled into that 'real' world.
My drive -- perplexed and self-sabotaged as it is -- for some sort of validation springs, quite obviously, from the hope that, if I were able to establish myself as a 'real' person, then my mother would, finally, be forced to admit that she had been mistaken, in not choosing me all these decades ago. And somehow, there would be a residual emotional paycheck, some infusion of retroactive love, that would make all the struggles of the intervening years lose their sting.
Of course, even when I have managed, either by accident or by dint of strenuous effort (accidents being by far the more prevalent), to snag some column inches in a newspaper, or in a magazine article, that hasn't been nearly enough. Once, early in our budding relationship, John and I took a train up to New Haven, to the British Collection, to see an exhibit there. During our ride out of New York, and as we talked about this and that, I happened to leaf through my newest issue of Readers' Digest (does anyone remember...?), which I'd brought along in case the conversation should ebb. And it so happened that, in that particular issue, was an article about recorded books on tape, and how popular they were becoming. This being 1986, after all. And there, in print, in an edition of one of the most widely-distributed publications in the world, was... my name! In a brief recap of a review of my recording of 'Moby Dick', as written up by Charles Champlin of the LA Times.
As usual, it didn't seem to have the longed-for impact. And, actually, even if it had, how could I have shown this achievement off, to that mother of mine, who didn't want to admit that she'd had any children other than my sister in the first place?
When that reality -- the realization that any efforts I had made, and any success I might have achieved, would have made exactly no difference -- when that awareness sank in, after I saw my mother again, after forty years -- I don't think it's possible for me to describe the utter devastation I felt. With this new, hardly surprising, yet totally shocking realization staring me in the face (with her blank eyes and total lack of affect), virtually every decision in my life fell apart, and seemed to be revealed as either wrong-headed, or pointless. It's as though, having navigated faithfully toward a much-desired goal, and spending years on the voyage, I discovered that the compass had never worked, from the start. As though every rivet and bolt, every nut and nail and glue joint and bit of cement holding my history together had all failed at the same time.
Now, a piece of my sculpture is sitting on display, in an exhibit of glass art, in what must at least be one of the secondary museums in New York City, and for me, it's essentially meaningless, on the deepest emotional level. The only artwork, of what I would consider any significance, that I've been able to pull together in the past year or so, is something I promised to make for the upcoming Glass Weekend in Millville NJ -- and if I hadn't felt so flattered at being invited, it never would have occurred to me to make anything at all. As much as I'm concerned about basic practicalities, such as storage challenges, I also feel a near-total lack of purpose beyond the mere activity of making art (which isn't always as much of a laugh-riot as people seem to think). Why should I bother? The over-arching goal, stupid though it may always have been, has finally been revealed to me as a sham, and I haven't been clever enough yet, to replace this deep-seated, misguided yearning with something else -- something one hopes would be more grounded in what most of us consider to be reality.
It's funny -- one of the illustrations I've sort of planned, for the imaginary book I'm supposedly working on with Combat Paper (which project exists, I think, only so I can please others -- not so different from what I've been talking about all along, is it?), will include a marionette with its strings cut. Free? Sure. But impotent and bereft of any real mobility. It hadn't occurred to me, as I roughly sketched my way through this book about birthday cakes, pink icing, abusive parenting practices and Marie Antoinette, that this particular image would come so close to being at least a psychological self-portrait.
Where is the real world now, I find myself wondering.
© 2013 Walter Zimmerman
Years ago, and not long after the disgrace of the 2000 Presidential election, I saw Al Gore in the 30th Street Station, in Philadelphia. There he stood, big as life, unencumbered by phalanxes of security guards, in the middle of the floor, where the train schedule board hangs. I couldn't believe my eyes, but I went up to him, and addressed him.
"Mr. Gore?" He nodded and kind of looked at me out of the corner of of his eye. "It's an honor to meet you, and I'm so sorry about the election."
I don't remember whether we actually shook hands or not -- it's not like it was flu season or anything -- but I do recall the look on his face, after I mentioned the election. He just looked off, as though seeing something past the list of arriving and departing trains. He paused for a moment and then shook his head, saying something like "It's okay," or "It's better off this way," or something to that effect. As though he knew things that I couldn't possibly be aware of.
Then I had to run to catch my own train.
Al Gore is what I would consider to be a 'real person'. I, on the other hand, am not. Or at least, this is how it seems to me.
I know I've written before about my early decision, when our new encyclopedias had arrived, and I discovered that there were no Zimmermans listed in the last volume, that it would be up to me to recitfy that omission. I know I've written about my disappointment and confusion, surrounding the many unwise life choices I feel I've made, which have resulted in a kind of comfortable, even privileged obscurity, instead of the legitimacy and noteworthiness I felt, at a young age, were my responsibility to attain.
And of course I've written, over and over again, about the terrible betrayal I feel I suffered, at the hands of my indifferent, self-absorbed mother.
But maybe I haven't explored the connections between this grave emotional wound, and what I'm afraid must seem an egocentric need for validated public success and even acclaim.
For some reason that I can't really verbalize, I have always regarded the people whose faces I see in magazines and on TV, and read about in the newspaper or online, as 'real' people, in a way that I am not. Which is why, when I happen to meet someone of established public stature, I often feel a little dizzy, and also have this crazy desire, somehow to... I don't know... secret myself in one of their pockets, so I might be smuggled into that 'real' world.
My drive -- perplexed and self-sabotaged as it is -- for some sort of validation springs, quite obviously, from the hope that, if I were able to establish myself as a 'real' person, then my mother would, finally, be forced to admit that she had been mistaken, in not choosing me all these decades ago. And somehow, there would be a residual emotional paycheck, some infusion of retroactive love, that would make all the struggles of the intervening years lose their sting.
Of course, even when I have managed, either by accident or by dint of strenuous effort (accidents being by far the more prevalent), to snag some column inches in a newspaper, or in a magazine article, that hasn't been nearly enough. Once, early in our budding relationship, John and I took a train up to New Haven, to the British Collection, to see an exhibit there. During our ride out of New York, and as we talked about this and that, I happened to leaf through my newest issue of Readers' Digest (does anyone remember...?), which I'd brought along in case the conversation should ebb. And it so happened that, in that particular issue, was an article about recorded books on tape, and how popular they were becoming. This being 1986, after all. And there, in print, in an edition of one of the most widely-distributed publications in the world, was... my name! In a brief recap of a review of my recording of 'Moby Dick', as written up by Charles Champlin of the LA Times.
As usual, it didn't seem to have the longed-for impact. And, actually, even if it had, how could I have shown this achievement off, to that mother of mine, who didn't want to admit that she'd had any children other than my sister in the first place?
When that reality -- the realization that any efforts I had made, and any success I might have achieved, would have made exactly no difference -- when that awareness sank in, after I saw my mother again, after forty years -- I don't think it's possible for me to describe the utter devastation I felt. With this new, hardly surprising, yet totally shocking realization staring me in the face (with her blank eyes and total lack of affect), virtually every decision in my life fell apart, and seemed to be revealed as either wrong-headed, or pointless. It's as though, having navigated faithfully toward a much-desired goal, and spending years on the voyage, I discovered that the compass had never worked, from the start. As though every rivet and bolt, every nut and nail and glue joint and bit of cement holding my history together had all failed at the same time.
Now, a piece of my sculpture is sitting on display, in an exhibit of glass art, in what must at least be one of the secondary museums in New York City, and for me, it's essentially meaningless, on the deepest emotional level. The only artwork, of what I would consider any significance, that I've been able to pull together in the past year or so, is something I promised to make for the upcoming Glass Weekend in Millville NJ -- and if I hadn't felt so flattered at being invited, it never would have occurred to me to make anything at all. As much as I'm concerned about basic practicalities, such as storage challenges, I also feel a near-total lack of purpose beyond the mere activity of making art (which isn't always as much of a laugh-riot as people seem to think). Why should I bother? The over-arching goal, stupid though it may always have been, has finally been revealed to me as a sham, and I haven't been clever enough yet, to replace this deep-seated, misguided yearning with something else -- something one hopes would be more grounded in what most of us consider to be reality.
It's funny -- one of the illustrations I've sort of planned, for the imaginary book I'm supposedly working on with Combat Paper (which project exists, I think, only so I can please others -- not so different from what I've been talking about all along, is it?), will include a marionette with its strings cut. Free? Sure. But impotent and bereft of any real mobility. It hadn't occurred to me, as I roughly sketched my way through this book about birthday cakes, pink icing, abusive parenting practices and Marie Antoinette, that this particular image would come so close to being at least a psychological self-portrait.
Where is the real world now, I find myself wondering.
© 2013 Walter Zimmerman
Friday, March 15, 2013
A Matter of Scale...
You'd think that, by now, I would have figured this out...
Every day, I swear I get at least twenty really great ideas for this blogue (as I insist on calling it); every day, I swear I get the time actually to write something, and it's as though I've never formed an idea with this brain, ever before, in my entire life...
Oh, there's one. I knew if I complained bitterly enough, something would turn up...
So, today John and I went into NYC, on purpose, to visit the Museum of Arts and Design, and the exhibit on the third floor, called 'Playing with Fire; Fifty Years on the American Studio Glass Movement". Or something like that. I may be making that part up.
But there's definitely a show, and it's definitely on the third floor (the indoor facilities being on the sixth floor, which I seem determined to forget every time I go into the building), and it's definitely a glass exhibit -- though whether it's all strictly American, or from the first 50 years of the American Studio Glass Movement are debatable points -- and a piece of my work is definitely on display there, along with... most of the bigger names in American glass Plus work by other artists who probably don't know me either.
I was there earlier this month (or was it late February? It all bleeds together anymore), and I had more or less the same reaction today as I did the first time I visited the exhibit, after all the other work had been delivered and arranged. I thought the space was too dark -- or there was no attention paid to redirecting whatever lights there are. A couple of the pieces still had the dusty finger prints that I saw the first time -- I mentioned this to a guard today, who later came up to me to tell me she'd spoken with one of the curators, who promised to see that this was taken care of -- and that all the work was to be dusted once a week. Someone's getting high on 58th street when they're supposed to be wielding a feather duster upstairs...
I also felt that strange dissociation I've mentioned -- the odd sensation of an incredibly intimate association with my piece -- knowing how much each glass shape weighs, how it was to create it, how I came to decide whether to use this piece, or something similar -- and this familiarity clashes head-on with a kind of eerie detachment, like being at my own funeral. The work is what is visible here; the artist is incidental, and in many ways, irrelevant. While I was standing around while John attempted to get some pictures of the work -- it's kind of big, and a challenge to document -- a couple probably my age got off the elevator and, talking rather loudly, began going through the show, exclaiming over the work of artists whose names were familiar to them ('Oh, we've got two Chihulys, and a piece by Mark Peiser...' That kind of thing), wondering out loud, about how Toots Zynsky 'gets all that color in' the glass filaments she uses in her slumped bowl pieces. I could have interrupted them, and given them a lesson, but I really didn't feel up to it.
Then they went around the corner, to the space where my work is installed, and installed themselves on a low, short metal backless bench, so they could watch and listen to a video loop, done with great clarity and economy, by William Gudenrath, one of my first glass teachers. So they sat, watching Bill create a length of blue, black and white murrine, slump a plate of murrine, and cut murrine and pick up chunks on the outside of a clear bubble. The work of other artist was featured. And when we'd finally learned the basics of yet another discipine, the tape simple and seamlessly began to repeat itself. I love listening to Bil's voice, as a matter of fact, but again, it made me feel extra useless, as the living creator of arguably on of the biggest piece of work, featuring blown glass elements, in the show, standing behind a few of the few visitors, who might as well have been at home in their living rooms (on an unimaginably uncomfortable sofa) looking at a special on PBS.
I ended up sitting on an empty bench at the other end of the gallery -- where there was no one else, possibly because there was no TV going on there -- and finishing today's NYTimes crossword puzzle, while John did as much documentation as he could, while the bench below the TV screen held first one butt and then another, but always someone's. I did sneak another peek, while he was tinkering with the camera, and was tempted to suggest this shot or that, but decided against this intrusion.
I think it was while I was again so near to my own piece, spread out as it is over a sizable portion of a low carpeted display shelf out of sight of the elevators, that I had a sliver of an art-related memory.
Years ago, after I'd visited State College PA for one arcane reason or another, I was driving back southward, to Philadelphia, I think, taking the only major route I know, winding down through a range of the soft outliers of the Appalachian Mountains. It must have been summer, because the hillsides were lush and green, with no hint of the exhaustion of August in the foliage. It was as I was taking one of the longer swooping curves, that had me driving in a south-bound clockwise turn, with the north-bound lanes down below me, to my left, that the unimpeded view of that one hillside struck me in a totally unexpected way.
There it was -- just a modest old mountain side, really -- clad in an almost unbroken expanse of leafery -- one of probably thousands of such expanses, reaching back through Pennsylvania, through West Virginia, and into Tennessee and Kentucky, hill after hill, one carpet of green blurring into the next. And for some reason, I was trying to picture my art work -- all of it, drawings, paintings, three-dimensional work -- lying on that hillside, beneath those leafy branches. And thinking of how negligible an impact my work would make -- a laughable little heap of oddments, some more colorful than others, but nothing really monumental, or probably, even visible, from this perspective across the valley floor.
And as if to make it worse, I went on to try to figure out how much space the entire output of Dale Chihuly, Glass God Extraordinaire, would take up on that same hillside. Even now, years after this trip, I'm fairly sure that, although his heap would be exponentially larger than the one I could muster, the Chihuly accumulation of bright, colorful objects wouldn't make that much of a significant visual impact, if gathered on this one hillside.
And, of course, I felt smaller than ever, and more futile than ever, in my daydreams of making an impact, a name for myself in the world of glass art. Such a puny 'body of work'. Such a slender, insecure thread on which to hang a name.
I wonder, if the circumstances of my life had been radically different, and if I had grown up in the Bronx instead of McKeesport PA, whether or not I would have been drawn to the graffiti crowd, and how brazen and insistent I might have been, in trying to attract attention to myself, to stand out from an indifferent background that had every intention of sucking me back down into anonymity. I wonder, too, whose work would make an impact on just that one hillside in Pennsylvania.
Probably those men whose art is hidden in plain sight, and probably from they themselves -- the guys in coveralls pouring concrete for the arching curves of highway interchanges. The teams of men struggling to thread the gigantic turnbuckles that hold taut the cables holding, in their turn, the weight of one bridge or another. The guys who build battleships. Or football stadiums. Airports. All those visual and structural gems that, because of their scale, and the way we relate to them, practically disappear just because they are so monumental.
That was quite a drive, that one where I meditated, for a relatively short time, really, on where I fit, physically speaking, on a scale of creative magnitude. Down at the shallow end of the sine curve, without a doubt. In spite of what seems, at times, to be an inconceivable accumulation of crap, too vast and complex for me ever to sort or arrange... To say nothing of actually using the stuff.
Then, at times, all I can do is shrug, and make up some justification for this paucity -- mass and expanse aren't what make art significant. Look at the output of (fill in the name of any artist you choose. Even Richard Serra), and there'll be the same diminution of scale, when compared with even an ordinary hillside. It's about communication, and the redemption of materials, and the honoring of things I know to be true, that matter more than how many square feet of real estate I could claim, if all my work were laid end to end. (Thinking of Dorothy Parker...)
So. Why do I do anything at all, if I'm doomed to insignificance? I guess I'm a firm believer in that aphorism of Gandhi's -- what you do, as a contribution to the world, is probably not important, but it is essential that you do it. That's what I seem to need -- a kind of ennobled hopelessness. A kingship denoted by a crown made of ice, certain, quickly, to melt.
And that's one of the things I thought about today, to write in this space. So I did. Maybe I'll recall the others in a while, and maybe I won't. For the time being, this will have to do.
© 2013 Walter Zimmerman
Every day, I swear I get at least twenty really great ideas for this blogue (as I insist on calling it); every day, I swear I get the time actually to write something, and it's as though I've never formed an idea with this brain, ever before, in my entire life...
Oh, there's one. I knew if I complained bitterly enough, something would turn up...
So, today John and I went into NYC, on purpose, to visit the Museum of Arts and Design, and the exhibit on the third floor, called 'Playing with Fire; Fifty Years on the American Studio Glass Movement". Or something like that. I may be making that part up.
But there's definitely a show, and it's definitely on the third floor (the indoor facilities being on the sixth floor, which I seem determined to forget every time I go into the building), and it's definitely a glass exhibit -- though whether it's all strictly American, or from the first 50 years of the American Studio Glass Movement are debatable points -- and a piece of my work is definitely on display there, along with... most of the bigger names in American glass Plus work by other artists who probably don't know me either.
I was there earlier this month (or was it late February? It all bleeds together anymore), and I had more or less the same reaction today as I did the first time I visited the exhibit, after all the other work had been delivered and arranged. I thought the space was too dark -- or there was no attention paid to redirecting whatever lights there are. A couple of the pieces still had the dusty finger prints that I saw the first time -- I mentioned this to a guard today, who later came up to me to tell me she'd spoken with one of the curators, who promised to see that this was taken care of -- and that all the work was to be dusted once a week. Someone's getting high on 58th street when they're supposed to be wielding a feather duster upstairs...
I also felt that strange dissociation I've mentioned -- the odd sensation of an incredibly intimate association with my piece -- knowing how much each glass shape weighs, how it was to create it, how I came to decide whether to use this piece, or something similar -- and this familiarity clashes head-on with a kind of eerie detachment, like being at my own funeral. The work is what is visible here; the artist is incidental, and in many ways, irrelevant. While I was standing around while John attempted to get some pictures of the work -- it's kind of big, and a challenge to document -- a couple probably my age got off the elevator and, talking rather loudly, began going through the show, exclaiming over the work of artists whose names were familiar to them ('Oh, we've got two Chihulys, and a piece by Mark Peiser...' That kind of thing), wondering out loud, about how Toots Zynsky 'gets all that color in' the glass filaments she uses in her slumped bowl pieces. I could have interrupted them, and given them a lesson, but I really didn't feel up to it.
Then they went around the corner, to the space where my work is installed, and installed themselves on a low, short metal backless bench, so they could watch and listen to a video loop, done with great clarity and economy, by William Gudenrath, one of my first glass teachers. So they sat, watching Bill create a length of blue, black and white murrine, slump a plate of murrine, and cut murrine and pick up chunks on the outside of a clear bubble. The work of other artist was featured. And when we'd finally learned the basics of yet another discipine, the tape simple and seamlessly began to repeat itself. I love listening to Bil's voice, as a matter of fact, but again, it made me feel extra useless, as the living creator of arguably on of the biggest piece of work, featuring blown glass elements, in the show, standing behind a few of the few visitors, who might as well have been at home in their living rooms (on an unimaginably uncomfortable sofa) looking at a special on PBS.
I ended up sitting on an empty bench at the other end of the gallery -- where there was no one else, possibly because there was no TV going on there -- and finishing today's NYTimes crossword puzzle, while John did as much documentation as he could, while the bench below the TV screen held first one butt and then another, but always someone's. I did sneak another peek, while he was tinkering with the camera, and was tempted to suggest this shot or that, but decided against this intrusion.
I think it was while I was again so near to my own piece, spread out as it is over a sizable portion of a low carpeted display shelf out of sight of the elevators, that I had a sliver of an art-related memory.
Years ago, after I'd visited State College PA for one arcane reason or another, I was driving back southward, to Philadelphia, I think, taking the only major route I know, winding down through a range of the soft outliers of the Appalachian Mountains. It must have been summer, because the hillsides were lush and green, with no hint of the exhaustion of August in the foliage. It was as I was taking one of the longer swooping curves, that had me driving in a south-bound clockwise turn, with the north-bound lanes down below me, to my left, that the unimpeded view of that one hillside struck me in a totally unexpected way.
There it was -- just a modest old mountain side, really -- clad in an almost unbroken expanse of leafery -- one of probably thousands of such expanses, reaching back through Pennsylvania, through West Virginia, and into Tennessee and Kentucky, hill after hill, one carpet of green blurring into the next. And for some reason, I was trying to picture my art work -- all of it, drawings, paintings, three-dimensional work -- lying on that hillside, beneath those leafy branches. And thinking of how negligible an impact my work would make -- a laughable little heap of oddments, some more colorful than others, but nothing really monumental, or probably, even visible, from this perspective across the valley floor.
And as if to make it worse, I went on to try to figure out how much space the entire output of Dale Chihuly, Glass God Extraordinaire, would take up on that same hillside. Even now, years after this trip, I'm fairly sure that, although his heap would be exponentially larger than the one I could muster, the Chihuly accumulation of bright, colorful objects wouldn't make that much of a significant visual impact, if gathered on this one hillside.
And, of course, I felt smaller than ever, and more futile than ever, in my daydreams of making an impact, a name for myself in the world of glass art. Such a puny 'body of work'. Such a slender, insecure thread on which to hang a name.
I wonder, if the circumstances of my life had been radically different, and if I had grown up in the Bronx instead of McKeesport PA, whether or not I would have been drawn to the graffiti crowd, and how brazen and insistent I might have been, in trying to attract attention to myself, to stand out from an indifferent background that had every intention of sucking me back down into anonymity. I wonder, too, whose work would make an impact on just that one hillside in Pennsylvania.
Probably those men whose art is hidden in plain sight, and probably from they themselves -- the guys in coveralls pouring concrete for the arching curves of highway interchanges. The teams of men struggling to thread the gigantic turnbuckles that hold taut the cables holding, in their turn, the weight of one bridge or another. The guys who build battleships. Or football stadiums. Airports. All those visual and structural gems that, because of their scale, and the way we relate to them, practically disappear just because they are so monumental.
That was quite a drive, that one where I meditated, for a relatively short time, really, on where I fit, physically speaking, on a scale of creative magnitude. Down at the shallow end of the sine curve, without a doubt. In spite of what seems, at times, to be an inconceivable accumulation of crap, too vast and complex for me ever to sort or arrange... To say nothing of actually using the stuff.
Then, at times, all I can do is shrug, and make up some justification for this paucity -- mass and expanse aren't what make art significant. Look at the output of (fill in the name of any artist you choose. Even Richard Serra), and there'll be the same diminution of scale, when compared with even an ordinary hillside. It's about communication, and the redemption of materials, and the honoring of things I know to be true, that matter more than how many square feet of real estate I could claim, if all my work were laid end to end. (Thinking of Dorothy Parker...)
So. Why do I do anything at all, if I'm doomed to insignificance? I guess I'm a firm believer in that aphorism of Gandhi's -- what you do, as a contribution to the world, is probably not important, but it is essential that you do it. That's what I seem to need -- a kind of ennobled hopelessness. A kingship denoted by a crown made of ice, certain, quickly, to melt.
And that's one of the things I thought about today, to write in this space. So I did. Maybe I'll recall the others in a while, and maybe I won't. For the time being, this will have to do.
© 2013 Walter Zimmerman
Thursday, March 14, 2013
Source Material...
Some days, it just seems to be like this.
For no reason that I can discern, I've been crying a lot today. Not wracking sobs or anything -- just the slow squeezing of tears that roll down my face, almost as though I'm an incidental part of their journey, out of my innards and into the Atlantic Ocean.
I'm not aware of any particular sadness I'm feeling -- nothing that arises, verbally, that would explain this surfeit of salt water. I don't think this is an anniversary of a momentous loss, or any other sobering event. As a matter of fact, it's been a lovely day, if a bit on the cold side, and the only real responsibilities I'm facing is the usual weekly laundry, augmented just a bit by my decision to wash all the polar fleece blankets we've been using.
It's not allergies either.
I do have to admit that, this morning, when John slept much longer than is usual for him, I was sure that he was dead. Because I had decided to sleep downstairs, where the icepack on my shoulder would make less of a mess, so when he had his (insert fatal medical trauma here), I was blissfully unaware. But thoughts like these are, unfortunately, not especially rare. I regularly expect to get a phone call from the police, some evening when he's driving home from New Brunswick later than usual, in worse weather than usual, on a football weekend or something. I have to admit that I live with a more or less constant dread occupying... a significant portion of... whatever place we have inside... that's full of the things we're full of.
So maybe this tear-fest is a normal (as in, physiologically and maybe even psychologically normal) response to my socially unusual focus on my own fragility, mortality, and a kind of global uncertainty that, because I've harbored it for so long, seems perfectly... normal? I am an unreliable witness in this matter, I'm afraid, being indistinguishable from the subject matter.
Well, there is one thing that's a possible trigger, possibly, for all the water-works. (Besides my bum shoulder, about which I'm afraid to consult a doctor, and about which I'm annoyed, that I might have to consult her anyway. I feel like I should just give in and stow a roll-out cot with my name on it in the men's room...) I might have mentioned that an amazing doctor/artist/activist, Dr. Eric Avery, visited with our Combat Paper group two weeks ago, to talk about the exhibit he has on display. He was remarkably clear and focused and eloquent, I felt, about the various prints he'd included in the show, weaving from technical insights to the emotional underpinnings of this work or that.
One of the older works was a large black-and-white self-portrait, done either while he was working at a Somalian refugee camp, or just after he'd returned from his tour there. With what I think was remarkable clarity, he sketched out what his first few minutes at the camp were like, and then gave us some insights into his routine for the year he spent, fighting rampant disease and starvation. The work is powerful enough on its own, but these skillfully-chosen details sank like stones into my imagination, and for the past week or so, I've been... nagged, I guess... by the inkling that I wanted (or needed) to write a poem about this man, and his experiences, and on and on. I did go online (thank you, exo-cranium) to look up the particular camp in question, and discovered excerpts of Dr. Avery's journals about it, in the book 'Para-Sites'. (Which I almost immediately bought from Amazon, unsurprisingly...) More details. More insights. More little stones, sinking and sinking.
So, today, I finally gave in, and put something down on paper. I don't know how finished it is -- it feels pretty done to me, now, but these new works can change, can't they? And as usual with these things, I feel lecherous, like what I call an emotional vampire, sucking creative sustenance from the misfortunes of others. It seems indecent. But at the same time, it's as though, after those details, that I likened to stones, disappear beneath the surface of daily memory, something new and different, yet clearly related, seeks to push its way back up and out, into broad daylight.
Sometimes, I regret to say, I am more successful than I would like to be, in quashing these urgings. Other times, though -- as with this new work, which I think of as a tribute to Dr. Avery -- I'm either not as clever, or not as brutal, with myself, and something does emerge. I've reworked it a tiny bit, and am still unsure of whether I need all of it or not.
I feel somewhat cheeky doing this, but I think I'll transcribe it here anyway, just to see...
Song (from the Somali) In Thanks, to Dr. Eric Avery
There you were, in the sun,
Looking so soft and plump
And so... unbaked.
You seemed, to me,
Like some stray canine
Caught in a house,
Eating what it shouldn't --
Its body cringing one way,
Its head another,
Its loyalties torn
Somewhere in between.
You took your first step
Across the transparent border line
That we all know
To separate a viewer
From what is being viewed.
You took your initiation
Better than most,
Up to your ankles
In the oozing mix
Of the raw easrth
That we had not yet been able to consume,
And the raw remains
Of what we had.
You took a breath --
A sharp, quick intake
(Even I could hear it,
Far across the dark, runny field)
Your mouth the gape of disbelief
That most newcomers wear,
When -- zip and zip -- in went that fly!
I thought I would choke
Like you were doing --
But you were struck with shock,
And me with silly laughter!
What a first morsel
For you to take,
Before you could be sure
Just what, exactly, you were doing here!
(And by the way --
That fly you ate for lunch?
He had a name,
You know.
I called him Foo-foo.
He had a sister, Loo-loo,
And a brother too,
Named Va-va,
And many many cousins,
Too many to count.
They all had names
And they would come
To visit with me
Every day,
To make a living, magic carpet
That would crawl across my face,
And I would give them gifts
Made up of what I had,
Which was myself.
It's so much easier, I've found,
To give,
Than to feel that one is being
Robbed)
After that,
When I saw you,
Sometimes your hands were on my head
Or on my tender belly.
Sometimes,
You were across the way,
And slightly reeling,
It seemed,
Off balance, it seemed,
Like a rock
That's in the process
Of being ground
Against a greater, harder stone,
And getting smaller
All the time.
I really tried to understand
The gifts you brought --
The strange adornments
I was supposed
To choke upon, or wear inside myself.
The colorless wrappings and pinnings,
The foods, from sources
I could not grasp.
And in exchange,
I made sure
We gave you all we had --
Fever.
Lethargy.
Cracked skin.
Diarrhea,
I think you called it.
Cholera,
I think you said it was.
Everything we had --
A stunning numberlessness,
Our adamantine hunger,
An inexhaustible poverty,
The plentiful ailments,
The most exquisite helplessness --
All like a handful
Of the rarest gems
Left to you, to set
Into their proper crown.
And you did what
You felt you had to do --
Prying at me,
Opening my mouth
With your fingers,
And pouring something in,
And not being pleased at all
When all that I could do was give it back again.
Not pleased at all --
I read it in your eyes,
And in the way your face would get,
Like a tired, clenched fist.
You might have tried again,
But another cried,
Then others, more and more,
And you went to him, or her,
Or them.
And Foo-foo's aunt
And everybody else
Came flying back to visit me,
So what I dimly felt
Would be our final banquet
Could begin.
And afterwards?
It really didn't matter so much,
I hope you know that.
What would I have done?
Where would I have gone?
What could I have known?
Who could I have been?
You did your own beautiful best,
Your own shit-besmeared best,
Your own broken, sickness-bedazzled best.
And me? I just happened to be one of those
Who slithered through the desperate net
You spread for us,
So cleverly,
And so diligently,
Every day.
But nothing ever really leaves,
You know.
No one ever really leaves
A sump of woe like this.
Even now,
I am becoming part of the semi-solid place
On which you first put down your incredulous foot.
I rise up again -- this time, without a face --
To mix myself
With what my beaten,
Unnamed family
Has been unable to digest,
Of the little that I've been able
To provide
For them
To eat.
You're here too,
You know --
I told you no one can
Escape --
But I think that, since you still have
Your body on,
You get off easier.
You're being one of
Foo-foo's distant cousins,
Fanning another little girl's face,
Just the tiniest bit,
But the best you can --
Which relief
May well be all
That keeps her here
Another day or two,
While she looks up at the harsh dry sky
And tries to grasp
Just who it is
That she should thank.
Now I think I'll go check on the laundry again. And cry a bit more, in all likelihood.
© 2013 Walter Zimmerman
For no reason that I can discern, I've been crying a lot today. Not wracking sobs or anything -- just the slow squeezing of tears that roll down my face, almost as though I'm an incidental part of their journey, out of my innards and into the Atlantic Ocean.
I'm not aware of any particular sadness I'm feeling -- nothing that arises, verbally, that would explain this surfeit of salt water. I don't think this is an anniversary of a momentous loss, or any other sobering event. As a matter of fact, it's been a lovely day, if a bit on the cold side, and the only real responsibilities I'm facing is the usual weekly laundry, augmented just a bit by my decision to wash all the polar fleece blankets we've been using.
It's not allergies either.
I do have to admit that, this morning, when John slept much longer than is usual for him, I was sure that he was dead. Because I had decided to sleep downstairs, where the icepack on my shoulder would make less of a mess, so when he had his (insert fatal medical trauma here), I was blissfully unaware. But thoughts like these are, unfortunately, not especially rare. I regularly expect to get a phone call from the police, some evening when he's driving home from New Brunswick later than usual, in worse weather than usual, on a football weekend or something. I have to admit that I live with a more or less constant dread occupying... a significant portion of... whatever place we have inside... that's full of the things we're full of.
So maybe this tear-fest is a normal (as in, physiologically and maybe even psychologically normal) response to my socially unusual focus on my own fragility, mortality, and a kind of global uncertainty that, because I've harbored it for so long, seems perfectly... normal? I am an unreliable witness in this matter, I'm afraid, being indistinguishable from the subject matter.
Well, there is one thing that's a possible trigger, possibly, for all the water-works. (Besides my bum shoulder, about which I'm afraid to consult a doctor, and about which I'm annoyed, that I might have to consult her anyway. I feel like I should just give in and stow a roll-out cot with my name on it in the men's room...) I might have mentioned that an amazing doctor/artist/activist, Dr. Eric Avery, visited with our Combat Paper group two weeks ago, to talk about the exhibit he has on display. He was remarkably clear and focused and eloquent, I felt, about the various prints he'd included in the show, weaving from technical insights to the emotional underpinnings of this work or that.
One of the older works was a large black-and-white self-portrait, done either while he was working at a Somalian refugee camp, or just after he'd returned from his tour there. With what I think was remarkable clarity, he sketched out what his first few minutes at the camp were like, and then gave us some insights into his routine for the year he spent, fighting rampant disease and starvation. The work is powerful enough on its own, but these skillfully-chosen details sank like stones into my imagination, and for the past week or so, I've been... nagged, I guess... by the inkling that I wanted (or needed) to write a poem about this man, and his experiences, and on and on. I did go online (thank you, exo-cranium) to look up the particular camp in question, and discovered excerpts of Dr. Avery's journals about it, in the book 'Para-Sites'. (Which I almost immediately bought from Amazon, unsurprisingly...) More details. More insights. More little stones, sinking and sinking.
So, today, I finally gave in, and put something down on paper. I don't know how finished it is -- it feels pretty done to me, now, but these new works can change, can't they? And as usual with these things, I feel lecherous, like what I call an emotional vampire, sucking creative sustenance from the misfortunes of others. It seems indecent. But at the same time, it's as though, after those details, that I likened to stones, disappear beneath the surface of daily memory, something new and different, yet clearly related, seeks to push its way back up and out, into broad daylight.
Sometimes, I regret to say, I am more successful than I would like to be, in quashing these urgings. Other times, though -- as with this new work, which I think of as a tribute to Dr. Avery -- I'm either not as clever, or not as brutal, with myself, and something does emerge. I've reworked it a tiny bit, and am still unsure of whether I need all of it or not.
I feel somewhat cheeky doing this, but I think I'll transcribe it here anyway, just to see...
Song (from the Somali) In Thanks, to Dr. Eric Avery
There you were, in the sun,
Looking so soft and plump
And so... unbaked.
You seemed, to me,
Like some stray canine
Caught in a house,
Eating what it shouldn't --
Its body cringing one way,
Its head another,
Its loyalties torn
Somewhere in between.
You took your first step
Across the transparent border line
That we all know
To separate a viewer
From what is being viewed.
You took your initiation
Better than most,
Up to your ankles
In the oozing mix
Of the raw easrth
That we had not yet been able to consume,
And the raw remains
Of what we had.
You took a breath --
A sharp, quick intake
(Even I could hear it,
Far across the dark, runny field)
Your mouth the gape of disbelief
That most newcomers wear,
When -- zip and zip -- in went that fly!
I thought I would choke
Like you were doing --
But you were struck with shock,
And me with silly laughter!
What a first morsel
For you to take,
Before you could be sure
Just what, exactly, you were doing here!
(And by the way --
That fly you ate for lunch?
He had a name,
You know.
I called him Foo-foo.
He had a sister, Loo-loo,
And a brother too,
Named Va-va,
And many many cousins,
Too many to count.
They all had names
And they would come
To visit with me
Every day,
To make a living, magic carpet
That would crawl across my face,
And I would give them gifts
Made up of what I had,
Which was myself.
It's so much easier, I've found,
To give,
Than to feel that one is being
Robbed)
After that,
When I saw you,
Sometimes your hands were on my head
Or on my tender belly.
Sometimes,
You were across the way,
And slightly reeling,
It seemed,
Off balance, it seemed,
Like a rock
That's in the process
Of being ground
Against a greater, harder stone,
And getting smaller
All the time.
I really tried to understand
The gifts you brought --
The strange adornments
I was supposed
To choke upon, or wear inside myself.
The colorless wrappings and pinnings,
The foods, from sources
I could not grasp.
And in exchange,
I made sure
We gave you all we had --
Fever.
Lethargy.
Cracked skin.
Diarrhea,
I think you called it.
Cholera,
I think you said it was.
Everything we had --
A stunning numberlessness,
Our adamantine hunger,
An inexhaustible poverty,
The plentiful ailments,
The most exquisite helplessness --
All like a handful
Of the rarest gems
Left to you, to set
Into their proper crown.
And you did what
You felt you had to do --
Prying at me,
Opening my mouth
With your fingers,
And pouring something in,
And not being pleased at all
When all that I could do was give it back again.
Not pleased at all --
I read it in your eyes,
And in the way your face would get,
Like a tired, clenched fist.
You might have tried again,
But another cried,
Then others, more and more,
And you went to him, or her,
Or them.
And Foo-foo's aunt
And everybody else
Came flying back to visit me,
So what I dimly felt
Would be our final banquet
Could begin.
And afterwards?
It really didn't matter so much,
I hope you know that.
What would I have done?
Where would I have gone?
What could I have known?
Who could I have been?
You did your own beautiful best,
Your own shit-besmeared best,
Your own broken, sickness-bedazzled best.
And me? I just happened to be one of those
Who slithered through the desperate net
You spread for us,
So cleverly,
And so diligently,
Every day.
But nothing ever really leaves,
You know.
No one ever really leaves
A sump of woe like this.
Even now,
I am becoming part of the semi-solid place
On which you first put down your incredulous foot.
I rise up again -- this time, without a face --
To mix myself
With what my beaten,
Unnamed family
Has been unable to digest,
Of the little that I've been able
To provide
For them
To eat.
You're here too,
You know --
I told you no one can
Escape --
But I think that, since you still have
Your body on,
You get off easier.
You're being one of
Foo-foo's distant cousins,
Fanning another little girl's face,
Just the tiniest bit,
But the best you can --
Which relief
May well be all
That keeps her here
Another day or two,
While she looks up at the harsh dry sky
And tries to grasp
Just who it is
That she should thank.
Now I think I'll go check on the laundry again. And cry a bit more, in all likelihood.
© 2013 Walter Zimmerman
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
Motor Memory...
It was the way I was washing the dishes that kind of tipped me off.
John was down in New Brunswick for the new Wednesday evening Eucharist service at Christ Church, and I was making baked macaroni and cheese, partly because I kind of like to make baked macaroni and cheese, and partly because the cheese drawer is a little too full, and I hate throwing food away. While the pasta water was gradually coming to a boil, I wanted to do a little clean up, so the kitchen would look a bit more calm and presentable when we were dishing up our meals.
And as I was racing through the process, I noticed the feeling in the pit of my stomach -- a familiar feeling, certainly, but it hadn't occurred to me to trace back to its origins. Why should washing the dishes, while John was probably now on his way home, fill me with such urgency and dread?
What a surprise it must be to discover that this behavior, too, springs from my childhood -- specifically, from the period between my brothers' return from the Orphanage, and their being shipped back again, barely eighteen months later. My father and stepmother would often leave the house in the late afternoon or evening, and, because I was the oldest, I was left 'in charge' of my brothers. (My half-sisters would invariably go with my step-mother, to stay with their grandmother, who couldn't buy them enough dresses and toys) We all had homework to do; there were assigned bed times to be observed, and each of us had a list of chores to have finished before being locked into bed for the night. My job, usually, was to clean up the kitchen and wash the dishes.
I think I was all of twelve, or maybe as old as thirteen. I was good at getting my homework done quickly, if no adults were around. And while my brothers sat at the dining room table, struggling with their arithmetic and spelling lessons, I would do one of the many forbidden things -- I would turn on the stereo in the blond wood case, and play the one 'classical' record in my dad's collection -- 'The Peer Gynt Suite', by Edvard Grieg.
I suppose it was understandable that my dad didn't want his stereo equipment ruined by his oldest son -- even though he himself rarely listened to any music at all -- but I wasn't certain why I'd been specifically forbidden to listen to the Grieg album. It's not as if it was poisonous, I thought. And of course, the taboo is always more attractive than the permitted, so I would listen to these melodies over and over again, allowing the music to transport me. The only cut I wasn't particularly fond of was 'In the Hall of the Mountain King', because it got so loud that I was sure my parents would be able to hear it in the car, on their way down the hill and up our driveway.
And of course, because I was under the spell of this seductive, evocative music, time was passing, and my chores weren't getting done. Until the very last possible minute, at which time I would race as quickly as possible to sweep the kitchen floor, wipe down all the counters, take out the trash, and wash and dry the dishes and put them away. Washing and scrubbing and rinsing in a blur of hands and soap suds, all the while expecting to hear the crunch of the tires on the concrete drive. Dreading what would happen, if I weren't able to finish my work in time. Working as quickly and yet as carefully as I knew how.
This, of course, is what I realized I was doing this evening, in spite of the fact that no one is assigning me anything at all, that my father is dead and I stand the very good chance of never seeing my stepmother again, and that if I want to, I can play the Peer Gynt Suite on my boom box, as often and as loudly as I would like.
But the habits are more stubborn and durable than I would have expected. The postures I adopt, and the inner stresses that reassert themselves without the need of threat or thought, all act as a backwards-looking mirror, if I'm awake enough to notice this.
As I was, this evening, for once. And when I literally had to remind myself that John is nothing like my father or step-mother, or my horrid grandmother either, for that matter. Because I was washing the dishes as though I was about to be punished again.
These aren't things I look for, as though they were old merit badges or especially excellent report cards from grade school. These behaviors permeate my daily life, usually in ways of which I am completely unaware. I was just recalling to John how, two years ago, on one of our last visits with his mother, she had remarked, after I'd planted a flat of some 50 spreading rosemary seedlings in her back yard, that I always seemed to work so fast. For someone who was always made to feel that he'd never done enough, and certainly hadn't done what little he'd managed to accomplish in anywhere quick enough a pace, this was a startling observation. She noticed that... I was working? She though that... I was working... quickly? Why was I working at such a driven pace, after all? The shrubs weren't going to die if they stayed in their cozy flat for another ten minutes. What was the rush?
There's always a rush, because there always was a rush. It's never enough. And I wonder if, someday when I'm washing the dishes and expect John to be pulling into the driveway any minute now, I can finish the chore without the feeling that I'm about to be punished, no matter what.
There's a lot recorded in my bones and my muscles, that's for sure. I wonder what other late-breaking realizations I'll have, as my life winds down, and the hope of altering any of these rediscovered behaviors becomes less and less likely?
Now I'm going to wash some more dishes, and see if there isn't some Grieg I can listen to, without worrying about who overhears me.
© 2013 Walter Zimmerman
John was down in New Brunswick for the new Wednesday evening Eucharist service at Christ Church, and I was making baked macaroni and cheese, partly because I kind of like to make baked macaroni and cheese, and partly because the cheese drawer is a little too full, and I hate throwing food away. While the pasta water was gradually coming to a boil, I wanted to do a little clean up, so the kitchen would look a bit more calm and presentable when we were dishing up our meals.
And as I was racing through the process, I noticed the feeling in the pit of my stomach -- a familiar feeling, certainly, but it hadn't occurred to me to trace back to its origins. Why should washing the dishes, while John was probably now on his way home, fill me with such urgency and dread?
What a surprise it must be to discover that this behavior, too, springs from my childhood -- specifically, from the period between my brothers' return from the Orphanage, and their being shipped back again, barely eighteen months later. My father and stepmother would often leave the house in the late afternoon or evening, and, because I was the oldest, I was left 'in charge' of my brothers. (My half-sisters would invariably go with my step-mother, to stay with their grandmother, who couldn't buy them enough dresses and toys) We all had homework to do; there were assigned bed times to be observed, and each of us had a list of chores to have finished before being locked into bed for the night. My job, usually, was to clean up the kitchen and wash the dishes.
I think I was all of twelve, or maybe as old as thirteen. I was good at getting my homework done quickly, if no adults were around. And while my brothers sat at the dining room table, struggling with their arithmetic and spelling lessons, I would do one of the many forbidden things -- I would turn on the stereo in the blond wood case, and play the one 'classical' record in my dad's collection -- 'The Peer Gynt Suite', by Edvard Grieg.
I suppose it was understandable that my dad didn't want his stereo equipment ruined by his oldest son -- even though he himself rarely listened to any music at all -- but I wasn't certain why I'd been specifically forbidden to listen to the Grieg album. It's not as if it was poisonous, I thought. And of course, the taboo is always more attractive than the permitted, so I would listen to these melodies over and over again, allowing the music to transport me. The only cut I wasn't particularly fond of was 'In the Hall of the Mountain King', because it got so loud that I was sure my parents would be able to hear it in the car, on their way down the hill and up our driveway.
And of course, because I was under the spell of this seductive, evocative music, time was passing, and my chores weren't getting done. Until the very last possible minute, at which time I would race as quickly as possible to sweep the kitchen floor, wipe down all the counters, take out the trash, and wash and dry the dishes and put them away. Washing and scrubbing and rinsing in a blur of hands and soap suds, all the while expecting to hear the crunch of the tires on the concrete drive. Dreading what would happen, if I weren't able to finish my work in time. Working as quickly and yet as carefully as I knew how.
This, of course, is what I realized I was doing this evening, in spite of the fact that no one is assigning me anything at all, that my father is dead and I stand the very good chance of never seeing my stepmother again, and that if I want to, I can play the Peer Gynt Suite on my boom box, as often and as loudly as I would like.
But the habits are more stubborn and durable than I would have expected. The postures I adopt, and the inner stresses that reassert themselves without the need of threat or thought, all act as a backwards-looking mirror, if I'm awake enough to notice this.
As I was, this evening, for once. And when I literally had to remind myself that John is nothing like my father or step-mother, or my horrid grandmother either, for that matter. Because I was washing the dishes as though I was about to be punished again.
These aren't things I look for, as though they were old merit badges or especially excellent report cards from grade school. These behaviors permeate my daily life, usually in ways of which I am completely unaware. I was just recalling to John how, two years ago, on one of our last visits with his mother, she had remarked, after I'd planted a flat of some 50 spreading rosemary seedlings in her back yard, that I always seemed to work so fast. For someone who was always made to feel that he'd never done enough, and certainly hadn't done what little he'd managed to accomplish in anywhere quick enough a pace, this was a startling observation. She noticed that... I was working? She though that... I was working... quickly? Why was I working at such a driven pace, after all? The shrubs weren't going to die if they stayed in their cozy flat for another ten minutes. What was the rush?
There's always a rush, because there always was a rush. It's never enough. And I wonder if, someday when I'm washing the dishes and expect John to be pulling into the driveway any minute now, I can finish the chore without the feeling that I'm about to be punished, no matter what.
There's a lot recorded in my bones and my muscles, that's for sure. I wonder what other late-breaking realizations I'll have, as my life winds down, and the hope of altering any of these rediscovered behaviors becomes less and less likely?
Now I'm going to wash some more dishes, and see if there isn't some Grieg I can listen to, without worrying about who overhears me.
© 2013 Walter Zimmerman
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
A Cat's Life, Sort Of...
It's so not what you think. Though I certainly wish it were.
Today, following the advice John culled from the internet yesterday, on the topic of shoulder injuries, I spent most of my time slumped back on the sofa in the den, trying to keep my ice pack from slipping down my back, or down my arm, or down the front of my tee shirt. Hour after hour after hour. Just sitting there. Napping from time to time, thanks mostly to the pain medication. But mostly just looking into space, or trying to find something interesting on my little portable exobrain. Odd, how with everything in the world virtually at my fingertips, I still have the nerve to complain about being bored.
The cats, as we all know, have no such problem. Even though, as far as I can tell, one day of Silas' life, for instance, is pretty much indistinguishable from any other day of his life, yet he sleeps all the time, as though worn out from exertion (which no one on earth would believe possible), and even seems to dream. But what can he dream about, except the same life he has, over and over again, without any apparent variation? If I ask him, he just glares at me with his yellow-green eyes, and then waddles off to find a different place to sleep.
I did manage to do something intriguing, while waiting for the planet to turn in space, so I could take my afternoon dose of antidepressants -- I looked up the website of the doctor/artist I met last week at Combat Paper, Dr. Eric Avery. (His web address: www.docart.com) When he was giving us a tour of his exhibit at the Print Center of New Jersey, and was talking about a particular self-portrait in one corner of the room, he mentioned the time he'd spent in Somalia, decades ago now. Correction -- he mentioned the grueling, unbearable time he spent at a refugee camp, struggling with nearly no meaningful help, to feed children who were so malnourished that they had to be force-fed, because otherwise they just wouldn't swallow food anymore. He mentioned getting out of the jeep, upon arrival, and being stunned by his surroundings, in that they seemed to consist of a great expansse of mud, and starving human beings, and flies. He said that, in those first moments, as he tried to get his bearings, he gasped involuntarily, and inhaled a fly. The first of many, no doubt, during his year-long stay there.
I also looked up this camp itself, and found some more recollections Dr. Avery had provided the author of the book 'Para-Site'; this was so compelling that I bought a copy, and can't wait to read it, although at the same time I'm afraid it will give me nightmares.
All this interest because, for some reason, the scant few images he tossed out, while we were in that particular corner of his spacious, art-filled exhibit, have continued to resonate, and I think I may be on the brink of writing something -- some poem, I think -- about this experience of his. How cheeky. But, when I told him I thought this might happen, if he didn't mind, he gave me the go-ahead. Now, I just have to permit myself.
Late in the afternoon, I started getting ready for this evening's music rehearsal -- I'd been excused, because of a conflict, but it turns out that, when I filled out the conflict form, I managed to get the dates for the Contemporary Artists' Forum meetings all wrong, so I've been excused on the weeks when I'm free, and scheduled for rehearsals on the weeks when the group gets together. In a way, it doesn't really matter all that much, as I haven't been making any artwork at all anyway, so all I would be doing, while everyone else unpacks work and displays it as best as possible in the meeting space, I'd just be kicking around, waiting for the critique part to begin, and then mostly biting my tongue.
In any event, there I was, at a rehearsal I wasn't scheduled to attend, and grateful to be there. We worked on three of the group numbers, and I'm really looking forward to doing this singing on stage -- it's the jazziest stuff I will ever have sung in public. The fact that, at the end of the show, I'll be, for all intents and purposes, nude on stage, is something about which I try not to think. Besides which, I'll be one of six naked guys, and if I have my way, I'll somehow be in the back...
And now I'm here at home again, with a fresh, dry long-sleeved tee-shirt on, over a short-sleeved tee, and with a sack of ice shoved down over my right shoulder. Re-arranging said sack from time to time, to make sure that most of my shoulder is receiving at least some coolness. When I showered before rehearsal, I was surprised to see that there seems to be no surface discoloration, or swelling, apparent on my shoulder. It would be too much to hope that this will all heal itself up by the weekend, but I'm going to do what I can to help things along, while also continuing with my workout schedule -- I just won't do anything that uses my shoulders, that's all. (He said, not believing a word he was saying...)
Well, substance-free as this seems to be, I think I'm going to leave things as they are for the time being. I believe I'll take another one of my enriched acetaminofen tablets, curl up with a long book, and drift off to sleep down here on the big sofa. I hate sleeping with John when I'm carrying a rattling bag of ice in my shirt, just waiting to leak all over the bed clothes. Plus, he still has a chest and head cold, which means he'll be snoring, and I won't be able to sleep there anyway.
Maybe, in my dreams, I'll be one of the cats -- perhaps gorgeous Coco, who I've decided is a reincarnation of Elizabeth Taylor, except I think the dates are all wrong? And I can dream that I'm asleep, and dreaming about sleeping. (Yawn.....)
© 2013 Walter Zimmerman
Today, following the advice John culled from the internet yesterday, on the topic of shoulder injuries, I spent most of my time slumped back on the sofa in the den, trying to keep my ice pack from slipping down my back, or down my arm, or down the front of my tee shirt. Hour after hour after hour. Just sitting there. Napping from time to time, thanks mostly to the pain medication. But mostly just looking into space, or trying to find something interesting on my little portable exobrain. Odd, how with everything in the world virtually at my fingertips, I still have the nerve to complain about being bored.
The cats, as we all know, have no such problem. Even though, as far as I can tell, one day of Silas' life, for instance, is pretty much indistinguishable from any other day of his life, yet he sleeps all the time, as though worn out from exertion (which no one on earth would believe possible), and even seems to dream. But what can he dream about, except the same life he has, over and over again, without any apparent variation? If I ask him, he just glares at me with his yellow-green eyes, and then waddles off to find a different place to sleep.
I did manage to do something intriguing, while waiting for the planet to turn in space, so I could take my afternoon dose of antidepressants -- I looked up the website of the doctor/artist I met last week at Combat Paper, Dr. Eric Avery. (His web address: www.docart.com) When he was giving us a tour of his exhibit at the Print Center of New Jersey, and was talking about a particular self-portrait in one corner of the room, he mentioned the time he'd spent in Somalia, decades ago now. Correction -- he mentioned the grueling, unbearable time he spent at a refugee camp, struggling with nearly no meaningful help, to feed children who were so malnourished that they had to be force-fed, because otherwise they just wouldn't swallow food anymore. He mentioned getting out of the jeep, upon arrival, and being stunned by his surroundings, in that they seemed to consist of a great expansse of mud, and starving human beings, and flies. He said that, in those first moments, as he tried to get his bearings, he gasped involuntarily, and inhaled a fly. The first of many, no doubt, during his year-long stay there.
I also looked up this camp itself, and found some more recollections Dr. Avery had provided the author of the book 'Para-Site'; this was so compelling that I bought a copy, and can't wait to read it, although at the same time I'm afraid it will give me nightmares.
All this interest because, for some reason, the scant few images he tossed out, while we were in that particular corner of his spacious, art-filled exhibit, have continued to resonate, and I think I may be on the brink of writing something -- some poem, I think -- about this experience of his. How cheeky. But, when I told him I thought this might happen, if he didn't mind, he gave me the go-ahead. Now, I just have to permit myself.
Late in the afternoon, I started getting ready for this evening's music rehearsal -- I'd been excused, because of a conflict, but it turns out that, when I filled out the conflict form, I managed to get the dates for the Contemporary Artists' Forum meetings all wrong, so I've been excused on the weeks when I'm free, and scheduled for rehearsals on the weeks when the group gets together. In a way, it doesn't really matter all that much, as I haven't been making any artwork at all anyway, so all I would be doing, while everyone else unpacks work and displays it as best as possible in the meeting space, I'd just be kicking around, waiting for the critique part to begin, and then mostly biting my tongue.
In any event, there I was, at a rehearsal I wasn't scheduled to attend, and grateful to be there. We worked on three of the group numbers, and I'm really looking forward to doing this singing on stage -- it's the jazziest stuff I will ever have sung in public. The fact that, at the end of the show, I'll be, for all intents and purposes, nude on stage, is something about which I try not to think. Besides which, I'll be one of six naked guys, and if I have my way, I'll somehow be in the back...
And now I'm here at home again, with a fresh, dry long-sleeved tee-shirt on, over a short-sleeved tee, and with a sack of ice shoved down over my right shoulder. Re-arranging said sack from time to time, to make sure that most of my shoulder is receiving at least some coolness. When I showered before rehearsal, I was surprised to see that there seems to be no surface discoloration, or swelling, apparent on my shoulder. It would be too much to hope that this will all heal itself up by the weekend, but I'm going to do what I can to help things along, while also continuing with my workout schedule -- I just won't do anything that uses my shoulders, that's all. (He said, not believing a word he was saying...)
Well, substance-free as this seems to be, I think I'm going to leave things as they are for the time being. I believe I'll take another one of my enriched acetaminofen tablets, curl up with a long book, and drift off to sleep down here on the big sofa. I hate sleeping with John when I'm carrying a rattling bag of ice in my shirt, just waiting to leak all over the bed clothes. Plus, he still has a chest and head cold, which means he'll be snoring, and I won't be able to sleep there anyway.
Maybe, in my dreams, I'll be one of the cats -- perhaps gorgeous Coco, who I've decided is a reincarnation of Elizabeth Taylor, except I think the dates are all wrong? And I can dream that I'm asleep, and dreaming about sleeping. (Yawn.....)
© 2013 Walter Zimmerman
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