The Cuckoo Bee

Why do the kids write things in alternating capitals and lower cases, like “sOpOrIfIc”? I’m sure there is an obvious answer, like it is fun.

Okay on to whatever I have to say! I’m not sure exactly what it is, but it has to do with euphoria.  When we meet a new person that we like, like a real new friend, we have the sense that they are perfect, and if they like us too we are euphoric, right? Well, I am.  So…that has to mean something, right? That has to be the infinite becoming finite, doesn’t it?  What do we do, then, to find euphoria in the universe, I mean must it come through specific objects? I think so, right? But then they lead us to other, larger things.  I think the objects are necessary.  Hm.

I have the problem that I am always coming up with ideas to explain  things, whereas ideas do not explain.  For example, I was thinking this morning about the ancient Greek idea that the night sky is a colander and the divine light shines through, and that’s what stars are; and that this is a metaphor for the universe, but people are the little holes who let in the divine light, and we see it through each other.  Do you like that? I like it, but it’s not really…something…or is it?  Hm.  Maybe I should have thought about what I was going to say here after all.

Next thing.  I have been very dismissive, or pejorative, about the function of the mind.  I think I was trying to refer, in those instances, to the small or left mind, or the small part of the left mind that is kind of confused and clings to things that are unimportant.  The right mind, or the larger mind, is totally necessary for everything, like understanding stuff.  I believe I may have said that I thought visceral reactions were the more important thing, but it’s all a package.  The physical body, the physical mind, the spirit, the larger mind, feelings, whatever.  So when you get some understanding, or love, or euphoria, it’s in every area of your frame.  Knowledge with the mind is fundamental.  As much as is joy with the heart.  So there.

So I guess the point was, the people who we love and who make us euphoric are bringing this knowledge and joy, but they are not the end result themselves, although they are part of it.  They are pointing out something eternal:  like the Platonic ideal of Love.  I know I have said this before, but I still don’t understand it.  On the other hand, it is beyond understanding.  I think, actually, that was the point of this:  that is exceeds understanding.  Hm.

As though a fog comes over me, and nothing much is going on in my mind or liver.  I can be like, “Hey now, wake up there,” the way my grandpa used to encourage the cows to move in/out of the barn, at which my brain will be like “I’m right here,” but then it all kind of floats away the next instant.  Maybe it is the weird virus I have.  Maybe it is the fact that this summer has been an eternity of exactly the same ninety-degree days, and I am always walking on the very sunny side of the street looking in a hopeless way for Momofuku milk bar, or whatever it happens to be that day, and never, ever finding it.  Reader, I never find anything.  How do all those reviewers on yelp manage to locate these places? If there is not someone who has come to meet me actually in the place, on the phone, coaching me exactly how to enter,  I will never see the doorway, no matter how many times I walk up and down the half-section of block where I know it is.  It’s one of those magical things the universe does.

Do you want to know what else I did today, besides not find Momofuku? I went to the Crocs store in Soho because the little boy’s shoes have all disappeared.  I walked there from the Christopher Street Path station, so it was a little surprising that I found it, but that part went fine.  Then I was going to go to Wichcraft on Broadway, but I couldn’t find that, so I went to Cafe Angelique, and had a salmon stick and a tiny lemonade, and then visited Grace Church, but managed not to try to draw a picture of the apse or nave or whatever it is.  Leaving there I think I already had sunstroke but got more on the way to not find Momofuku, and then in the cab to the ferry I was so confused I started asking the driver why he was going uptown after, of course, asking him to go uptown.  And then went to Starbucks in Hoboken because I thought a milkshake would help me walk home, which it did.  And then I had pickles from the farmer’s market that I got yesterday.  I also got peaches yesterday there, and made a peach crisp, but the children are so unaccustomed to the idea that I could actually cook something for them to eat that they wouldn’t even look at it.  Not even look, let alone taste.  Oh well.  That was what I did today–and it took the whole usable day for me, because 2:00 is nap time and then it’s pretty much all over.  Bye, reader.

My younger son was talking all day, since he woke up this morning at six, about a bad bird.  Usually when we play imagination games there is no villain, or it is Bowser, or possibly Daddy, but today we were hiding all our stuffed animals to keep them away from the bad bird. And protect them from the ravages of the bad bird.  Also that we could, if we had to, break all the bad bird’s bones.  I heard a lot about this bad bird, how terrible and scary it is, and how no one loves it.  I heard about this ten thousand times over today, reader, and then finally when they were in bed at the end of the day, and I was reading them their usual four books, and one of the books had Rockabye Baby in it, there was a picture of a little baby in a cradle hanging at the top of the tree, and Alex goes “That baby is sad, because no one loves it.  That’s the bad bird.” And I said, “Maybe the bad bird’s mommy loves it, I’m sure she does,” and Alex said, “the bad bird doesn’t have a mommy.” Then suddenly something began to dawn on me. It was kind of a major epiphany, like I could feel my brain folding over on itself, and certain facts about the bad bird came bobbing to the surface, like that is was yellow and big and alone, and then Alex whispered fearfully to me “I think the bad bird lives on Sesame Street.”  I don’t know where he is getting his information from, but Big Bird is apparently horrifying.  I tried to tell him Big Bird is just a baby, but he said very persuasively that the Bad Bird is a grownup.  Then he asked me what Sesame Street is in a kind  of excited but terrified way as though longing and not longing to hear the gruesome details.  I don’t remember what I said–I think my mind had been blown.  It doesn’t take much to do that, apparently.  I’m working on reverting to the mindset I had when I was 14, so maybe that’s part of it.  This post is over now.  Love to all, especially poor orphaned mass murderer big bird.

Do you remember, reader who has vanished, the time we were walking down the street in Georgetown and I had a water bottle with the squirt top, and I was squirting it into my eyes? and you were like, “I think it’s supposed to go in your mouth.”  Do you remember that day? Reader, you have helped me out immeasurably in life.  You have a knack for that.  It’s all inside me still.  Should I make a list? These are a few things that come to mind.  As you know I could go on all day.

1.  It was a freezing, gray day in Philadelphia in 1991, and we were going to get some Christmas presents.  I had just taken a shower and my hair was wet, and you commented on that, and we went over to Penn Tower and I bought a pocket watch for my brother.

2.  We were sitting outside the music building in the Spring of 1995 (the building that you said smelled like orphans) and you were feeding sparrows, and it was sunny on the grass, and lovely, even though we were about to graduate.

3.  We were sitting in the snow in the middle of the bridge over 39th street blocking traffic and David Abramson came by, and I was very rude to him.

4.  We were doing “yoga” in the cul-de-sac where the contested fence was, and some jerk had walked through wearing Ecco sandals.

5.  We went to Dairy Queen with Dad on East-West Highway and stood in that shitty parking lot eating whatever it was.

6.  Burrowing flies chased me, you, and Dad out of that scrubby backwoods area that Dad liked to explore at the Outer Banks.

7.  Carrot Cottage.  Whatever happened there. Something about Surfer Girl.  And the Sanitary Fish Market.

8.  When we lived on Garden Street in Hoboken, we sat in the driveway across the street and ate crumb buns, and in Elysian Park playing word association, the record of which I kept in my purse for years.

9.  You drove me and Lucy way out Paint Branch Road of a summer evening.

10.  We smoked with my mother and played super gyp when Dad was away.  Or no, we played super gyp when Dad was there, and we just smoked clove cigarettes and played something else with Mom, and she loved that.

11.  We love Judy Garland.  And The Music Man.  And things that are nice in life.

God bless you, reader.  I wonder if you know how much I miss you. That is all.

1.  The edge, or contour, of objects, is interesting to the eye.  It vibrates.  In painting this effect can be represented by adding an icy blue or whatever to the edge.  In drawing, you know, whatever.  It’s similar to how the eye dilates when you see something you like, and that something then glows.  In other words, reader, the eye loves edges and contours, because then we know we have got a thing in front of us–and we love everything, so everything has a halo.  Objects.  Halos.

2.  What are we doing here? We are manifesting the infinite, and allowing the finite and infinite to flow back and forth.  Then we interact with each other–and contain each other–and more flow back and forth.  Have I been standing in the sun too long, or is this mindbending?  Love, reader, it’s about what love is but not the word.

Whatever.

First, dreams.  In dreams things are detailed, yes? But when you wake up the detail all fades away and in fact it’s probably physically impossible to remember most of it.  However, the feeling of certain dreams stays with you forever, maybe because it always existed in you and was just manifested in the dream–whatever the case, there are certain particular dream feelings that persist.  Leaping forward to random conclusions, we can then assume that our regular life is also like that, and that we are actually dreaming somewhere else, and that the stupid details of this life that one may become obsessed with (like the words people use, the things they do, stuff that happens) are actually meaningless except as the vehicle for real knowledge in the form of real feelings.  So when dealing with a situation, we should ignore whatever actually happened, or what we remember, and just consult our visceral center of fact, and act based on that.  What do you think about that.

That’s the first try of an etching.  Going back to aquatint it later and add other stuff.

Anyway, either related or unrelated is why we can’t judge ourselves–should not, that is, and why other people actually can’t judge us.  There is no judgement because we can’t judge other people, since we are all the same inside.  However, we can imagine that other people judge us, and then we can imagine that we care about that–whereas we actually never do care when someone says some dumb thing–we are just worried that we might care.  But we know that we don’t really care, it is just our brain, forever doubting and raising questions, as is its important but annoying job.  So then we should listen to what we actually know, and not what we are afraid of being the case–because it is not actually the case except when we make it so.   As to not listening, we just need to recognize that all that noise is merely the worried brain fussing, like when my husband is afraid that the world is going to end right this second and it usually turns out that it was just needless worrying, and I do my best to let him fuss and not respond, and eventually it all goes away. Right? I know you agree, reader, because at this point no one is reading except me.  Thus I can conclude with the following: xxxooo, and not worry that you will think I am asking you out. (I am, in fact, asking you out.)

And finally, while we can react to something someone does and be like “ick” or “wow!”, there is no difference in a fundamental way between good and bad.  It’s all just stuff and it all lives together.  Everyone knows that, but everyone knows everything, and then we go around lying all day.  At least I do.  Peace, reader, shalom.

6:15 a.m. I am awoken by children.  I had nice dreams all night and I went to bed early so it is not unduly painful to get up.

6:30-8:00 Children make me play Star Wars on the Wii/watch them play games on my iphone/watch them do various other things.  Meanwhile I make them lunch and breakfast and do the dishes and put the laundry in the washer and pack their swimming things and all that.

8:30 Walk with Alex to school.  Then decide it is too hot to walk Max so get the car and drive him.  Then get juice at A&P on the way home.  Is this not, reader friend, the most suspense you have experienced in decades?

9:15 Get back here and no one is home.  Sad. Sort of. Think about which art class I need to take in the fall.  Definitely oil painting.  Maybe more printing.  Maybe color theory.

10:00-11:30 Work on watercolor.  Decide watercolor not suited for drawing oily subject matter. Pick drawing to use for etching for class tonight. Love the drawing. Work on fabric dough tree, which involves a great deal of visceral emotion regarding fabric choice.  During this period listen over and over to “Teenager in Love” by Dion, for reasons best unexplored.

11:30 Call Daddy to see if he wants to have lunch.  Not there. Call Dick Blick to see if they have copper/zinc plates.  They do.  But they put me on hold for eight minutes and 42 seconds.  I don’t even realize the phone is still on because I thought I had hung up but apparently the speakerphone is on, so while I am sitting here talking out loud to myself I suddenly hear the lady going “what?”. I mean, eight minutes?

11:35-1:00 Mess around on computer.  Then Daddy calls and says he can’t have lunch.  So I put on my hat and walk down to the Taco Truck and then eat my taco on the grass in the park by the water, and it is very windy and sunny, and then get a milkshake at Chock Full O’ Nuts, and walk home with that.

2:45 Got home.  That was a long freaking walk.  Thank God I had a milkshake with me.

3:00 (from now on this is a projection) Had nap.  Involved transport by unicorns to highly colored wonderland. Etc.

4:00 Picked up kids. Less unicorny. More annoying.  Love the kids, but afternoon is not their peak time except for fussing.

5:00 Left for class. Unicorns take me there.

10:00 Back home from class.  Class was swell.  I met a girl there and we became best friends.  The teacher said I am a genius and my work makes him cry–in fact he did cry.  Then he gave me his apron.  I made ten prints and I sent one to my Grandma, and I actually finished writing her a letter, and I mailed it.  Oh and I had a Mountain Dew at Taco Bell on the way home.  Bus ride back lovely but otherwise uneventful.  Fine, it was eventful, it’s always eventful.

10:30 Talked to poopy.  Discovered neverending verdant well of love and emotion. Then dodo. Or maybe I found something to watch on tv.  Or maybe I read Joy in the Morning.

Epilogue:  The only main difference with the projected course of events was that on the way home at 10:00 I was inspired to stop at the Malibu Diner, where I had never been despite living across the street from it for seven years.  They gave me a booth and I had a Monte Cristo.  It was pretty exciting.

I’m kind of excited.  I realized that enlightenment, universal compassion, and unlimited stuff are not, actually, things that we achieve, but are, actually and really, things we already have–and not things that we don’t realize we have, but rather things that we know we have and feelings with which we are very familiar–it is just that we did not name them as universal compassion and whatnot.  And it has nothing to do with liking people but is more basic. It’s all very recognizable, and is what we have experienced a thousand times at different moments, but when people start naming things one gets confused.  That confusion and naming is all totally unnecessary, except to enjoy alleviating the confusion.  Wow.  It’s all very simple and vast and detailed, and easy like butter–you know.  So, whatever, who cares?

I finished my drawing course after ten weeks and it was kind of intense, and overall wonderful.  Next is painting.  Then must move on to everything else.  Here are the last two days of drawing–the same pose, but two different essays.

Unfortunately the last one smeared all over on the trip home.  I think I forgot to post the next one, which was quite a while ago–or maybe I was so annoyed by the model, because she kept moving her legs, that I didn’t post it.  Anyway.  This next one is hatching with pencil, rather than blending with charcoal.

One day last week the model was late so our teacher posed for us during gesture time.  She declined to take off all her clothes, although previously she did pull her skirt up so the class could observe the sunburn on her butt.  She is a nice teacher.

Next we have an item in my collection from another artist, posted here without permission, because it’s mine and how can he stop me? I mean, besides asking, which would do the trick.

All right, and then on the next one I sprayed it with Aqua Net (I also have workable fixative, but it’s so f****ng toxic that I don’t want to use it) (since when do I not swear constantly? what’s going on?) (by the way, that has nothing, as far as I know, to do with universal compassion)…where was I? After hairspray I put on the left side some watercolor and on the right (the orange) an acrylic wash.  I don’t know.

And then one last thing.  I don’t know why I’m posting it even.

I think this is just the joy of drawing on my own and not doing a naked person.

So in other news, I have resurrected the fabric dough tree! Now that I am a real artist, and enlightened, and whatever the fuck other things people try to tell you you are not which you, yes YOU, actually are already, I am going to make some fabric fucking art.  And I lost my two boxes of colored pencils somehow so I bought a box of 40 Caran D’Ache watercolor pencils, which are the softest ones of any colored pencils I tried in Dick Blick (and I tried all of them), so are awesome regardless of whether you make them watery or not.  I don’t like to use the word awesome but…but…Back to Caran D’Ache, the red tin box and the deco-y logo remind me of my childhood friend Christina Way and how she used to have them, and I didn’t because they were too expensive and I would have never dreamed of asking my parents to buy them for me, and how exciting it was to touch them at her house, and how kind of breathless it made me that she had them.  I was excited for her but not envious at all–what a nice little girl I was, like you, reader.

One more thing.  Sin is just forgetfulness, no? A misstep and a forgetting.

A long time ago, we used to be friends. That’s what Veronica Mars says. Sigh.

We only have a couple weeks left of this class.  To be honest, I am getting tired of it.  I like drawing realistically et cetera but I think after this I will do something a little more interpretive.  Although I still have to do representational painting and all that.

Love, reader.  What is love? Why is it that we have to find ourselves in someone else to feel how awesome we are? And then we think we need the other person, when it’s all just what we own ourselves–but I guess we don’t see ourselves that way because we’re wearing ourselves all the time.  It’s subtle.  It’s a different muscle one uses to feel that in an ambient way, I think–or else you need some kind of religious insight.  It’s funny how every religion thinks they have something absolute–I suppose that can be true at the same time it’s untrue, but it seems like whatever any person does is tainted with individuality just because of the fact of our finite existence.  And what am I, anyway?  That’s that same muscle again, the subtle muscle that is not the brain but is the pearl of life inside me–as the Zen master said, Who is it that moves your carcass along this road?  That’s the pearl doing it.  That’s about all I know.  I don’t even know that, I guess.

Anyway, I think that enlightenment is about the simplest and most human things and finding the very self-centered kinds of happiness that we understand–just approaching them from a different angle, so that all the issues and crap don’t necessarily go away, but that they don’t matter.  Do you know what I mean?  I suppose I wanted to talk about the pain of having new friends and that kind of thing, the lovely pain of loving people, but you know all about that–it’s just another real thing.

The other thing is that in the end I think it’s all about the intellect, or conscious, or the small mind, or our ideas, and how they strangle reality if they are allowed to get beyond their function.  How they judge, and lie, and veer away from fact–how words do that, and thought.  The intellect has an  important function, lots of important functions, but it is not fundamental to us where we live–to that thing that moves our carcass along the road.  You know?  I’m talking to myself here, of course.  I guess I know, of course I know, but I should let my conscious forget all about it because why the heck need I burden my mind?

In real news, not that this post is not far too long already, I had a great time last weekend.  What happens when you have a great time?  It ends, and then you’re like, Geez, I want to go back and have some more fun.  And then the next time you have fun you realize how ordinary it all is, and you’re like, I could take this or leave it, but then later you remember all the people and stuff that happened and thinking about it makes it more important, or creates something else…it’s the inflow of finite events and the outflow of infinite feelings or whatever…and the memory is nice, but it can all become false and its own thing that has nothing to do with the reality of last weekend…like the conscious, I suppose memory is useful in its place.  What do I know?  Sometimes fun and love and all that are real in the moment too, and sometimes it becomes realer in the memory…and all those past feelings are in us somewhere, and all the people we love too, in their extremely particularized and finite forms…that love for people, for particular people, and full happiness in myself,  is another subtle muscle that comes out, for me, in my dreams, and it’s all so easy there and simple and obvious how to experience everything–universal compassion, for example, that being an offshoot of appreciation and love for my own whole self; but when I am awake it is that elusive palace of rubies hidden behind a blade of grass–as the Zen master said.  It all is there somewhere, and I’m even seeing it, but not being aware of it–the obvious fact of our own awesomeness.

But I guess love is important, isn’t it? Is it? Because it helps us realize the love we already have, complete in itself, within us? It is the feeling of sweetness that comes with some kinds of completeness in ourselves.  But it’s a pain in real life, no? The need.  The heartache.  The clinging.  I don’t know, reader, is it designed to instigate investigation into our own hearts? Or to give us the feeling that we are supposed to seek with our pearl of wisdom within ourselves? which I think is not connected to the needy love my conscious gives me but may be connected to the whole love that exists between me and other people. Is that the case–is it? Is my own wholeness and happiness related to the love I share with my friends? Or just existence in general? or everything? I mean, is love particularly important? I think so.  It’s that feeling, reader, you know that real feeling, like its own real person, love.

And people…they are very important, I mean the Platonic idea of Love is fine and all that but it doesn’t exist (for me) outside of the beautiful and lovely people I love.  So I suppose then that allows you to find that same feeling, and somehow find those same people, in a more whole sense within your pearl of self…I’m using my brain here, but that is not the solution.  The solution is a feeling or intuition.  Oh, I guess I did talk about the pain of loving people after all, but I forgot what I wrote already, as you should too, nonexistent people.  By the way, the Taco Truck is open in Hoboken. WOO HOOOOO! See you, reader.