The Cuckoo Bee

Pictures.  Nice day today.  Damp and cold and fresh airy.

Reader, it’s good to talk to you again!  I went to Costa Rica with my husband, and all kinds of crazy things happened there.  I can’t tell you about it.  It was just a huge ball of fantastic universal feeling and also local feeling.  I love Costa Rica, reader.

Okay, I’m going to go ahead and blab, because there’s nothing I can do if you decide to freak out, but I am friends with the Virgin Mary now.  Are you scared, reader? Do you think I am crazy?  Or do you also have a special thing for our friend Mary? Well, well, whatever.  I also have a special thing for Buddha, but who doesn’t? It’s all the same. All of it is the same, like a huge katamari or a giant die from Dungeons and Dragons.  Reader, can you imagine what I would be like if I could get my hands on some hallucinogenic drugs?

Did I already tell you the story about St. Francis where he goes up to the almond tree and says to it, “Speak to me of God,” and the tree bursts into blossom?  That was kind of how the trees in Costa Rica were, even in the city, except they were speaking to me and I was bursting into blossom–almost blossom, it was always almost there but not quite there, unless it is actually there and I just don’t see it yet in its subtlety, which it occurs to me has got to be the case.  Although there was one moment when I did have actual blossoms–that was on the Rio Toro, a beautiful green river that goes rushing with a lovely musical noise over smooth boulders and winds its way between huge cliffs full of waterfulls, orchids, birds, and monkeys– it was a realization of how it is only about each of us, and not about the Virgin Mary or Buddha or anything, except as we are friends with them.  Anyway, as I mentioned before, blossoming is exactly the same thing as sitting in my room in Hoboken or Bethesda, Md. and shooting marbles into a plastic mug–exactly the same thing.  Different facets of the same thing.  I drew a lot of pictures in Costa Rica but I’m not into posting them right now.  Thinking about Bargue method still.  Peace, reader, or violence–whatever.  Not violence, actually, that’s yucky.  Peace or not-peace.  Goodbye!

Get ready, reader.  There are some things I am dying to tell you.  Are you ready?  No?  That doesn’t matter.

1.  Have you seen the painting by Norman Rockwell of Springtime, entitled, I think, Boy and Fairy?  That is the way the entire world is all the time, with angels singing everywhere, and Buddha, and the Virgin Mary, and Ganesh, and dead relatives appearing constantly, and we are hearing it and seeing it with all the cells of our bodies.  Yes, it’s going to be that kind of day.

2.  Everything we see and think we know is the merest tip of the whole of existence and but is at the same time also the entirety of existence.  We know about the whole of existence somewhere, all throughout our persons, and the mind is just a kind of flashlight that sees certain things, or I don’t know, in fact, or care that much.  But the body and the spirit have just as much knowledge as the mind–more?  Who knows? Not me.  The riveting thing for me is that even in the moments when we think we are utterly ignorant, or are destitute in a spiritual way, we still have everything–everything there is, in the fact that we exist–not only the fact that we are alive, which may be additionally enlightening, but just that we could exist as a pile of bones and flesh is enough to obtain the totality of knowledge.  That knowledge is a wholeness which contains the mind, but is not contained in and does not spring from the mind.  Reader, I know you’re not still with me.  I don’t care.

3.  On to wordlessness.  I remember reading the four parts of a balanced mind, according to some part of Buddhism, were: friendliness, compassion, forgiveness, and joy.  Now what is that about?  A balanced mind is just a balanced mind, not a compendium of parsed mental states or emotions.  It is just what it is.  Wordlessness.  The same is true of the Ten Commandments or whatever other list you have:  it’s not a bunch of things, it’s one thing that can’t be named.  So instead of attempting to narrate what we’re doing in a left brain way, we can just float there in the goodness, or nothingness, as Buddhism would have it, but I do believe nothingness is not a word that works for me.  Although I do love the idea of absence of clinging that is embodied in the idea of nothingess,  I think everything is there all the time, so why call it nothing when it’s everything?  Why indeed.

4.  The key thing, for me, is to realize how extremely special I am.  Do you know what I mean? Maybe you realize the specialness, a specialness beyond any judgement for good or bad, or any label, or any thought, but you don’t realize it entirely, because if you or I did we would be floating through life in a giant ball of universal love and would be one with all our brothers and sisters, everything, in fact, because it’s all the same thing, all matter and air and anything that exists.  Or are we doing that and don’t realize it?  Who knows?

5.  The beautiful paradox is that it is just in the simple act of realizing the awesomeness of our observable self, our body, for example, and what we find ourselves doing as we walk around everyday–that is, just whatever is truly ourselves–in only, and really only, being our earthly self we experience everything, all the unobservable stuff, and it is in our factual, true, earthly self that there is freedom from individual or bodily constraint. Odd!

Phew!  I think I got some of it out.  It’s funny because today was a day I didn’t get a chance to think about anything, and usually I like to spend a while doing that–and of course the whole time today while I thought I wasn’t thinking, something was in fact thinking, just not my consciousness.  What is the brain?  Oh–was I done talking here?

I have been engaging in a tizzy of self-portraits again. Not that you are going to actually see them.  I am very fussy about my self-portraits and am not satisfied with them at all.  I like them, but I am not satisfied with them.  I have been reading about the Bargue method and I love the end product with the shading and the extreme finishing, so I am working on doing something finished now, as opposed to line drawings.  But I do like line drawings. I like absence of detail, which may or may not comport with extreme finishing.  There is something about a plain contour drawing, when it is all right, that gives you an ache to look at.

On to springtime, what about it, reader?  Are you feeling an excess of euphoria?  It is like an orgasm of life all day every day, is it not?  Or is that just all the caffeine and other drugs you keep taking because you get too much fresh air and sun and then get a migraine, and have an out-of-body experience where your dead parent tells you not to tattoo his name on your left shoulder after all?

Moving then on to the usual blah blah, I have to say that I am more and more enamored of wordlessness.  You, reader, may know that I am very wordly, but the whole self is much larger than that.  Obviously.  Words are so little.  On the other hand I do enjoy the mindless drivel, God knows I enjoy that.

Fine, after all that I will post my progress on the self-portrait.  This one never got past the early stages of shading because the proportions are wrong.  But it’s not too bad-only mediocre.

[I removed the picture.  It became horrifying to me.]

I just got completely stuck with it at one point.  Maybe Bargue exercises will help.  See you at the tattoo parlor, reader.

I finished the first go over of the ball.  I don’t feel interested in doing more with it at the moment, since my palette has now dried up and I don’t have the teacher here prodding me to make it better.  It could use smoothing, but it’s okay.

On to self-portrait, I have moved the eyes around three times now and they are still too high, I think, and too close together.  This is also a rough draft.  Fortunately I can’t paint on it right now because it needs to dry so I can take it to class.  That’s good because I’m tired, reader, I’m very tired today–the springtime is making me tired.

By the way, reader, there are so many things I miss about you.  Other things I don’t miss, of course.  You already knew that.

So we are going to skip all those amazing drawings I was lying about last time and move directly to painting.  In class we use Winsor-Newton water-soluble oil paints.  According to our teacher, they are no different from regular oil paint, except they have an emulsifier that allows them to be mixed with water, thus avoiding the use of toxic and brain-damaging turpentine or turpenoid, whatever that is.  We have been painting for three sessions now and we use two colors:  raw umber and titanium white.  Then we mix the color scale so we have seven tones.  That’s our palette.

At first it was quite unhandy to have paint flopping all over the place, but I had a nice time with it all during the last class so now I am painting at home.  The teacher gave me his ball to paint.  I think we all know I like that.

This is the first go-over that I did this morning.  The paint takes a while to dry, although apparently this brown dries faster than other colors; anyway I don’t really need to wait for it to dry to go over it again, it’s just that I am tired of it and all that.  So having most of the paint in my palette left over I went ahead and launched into a painting self-portrait.  This is just to block in some of the light and shade and try to get the shapes in the right place.

Moving on to me, occasionally lately I have had very vivid memories, usually when I am falling asleep or waking up.  This morning it was of a time when I was driving down Wilson Lane in Bethesda, Maryland, going toward River Road on the way to school on a hot spring morning.  Everything was humid and green and those thousands of birds and bugs and whatever were going like crazy, and I had the windows open on the old green Chevy station wagon, and all that soft air was blowing in.  This must have been senior year, because I had that feeling of excitement and jolly fun that pervaded that time; anyway in the memory I went driving by the dentist’s house with the white sign out front, and around the bend down to the little turn-on leading into River Road, and looked over my shoulder at traffic, and went on to school, with all the green trees and the big hill ahead on River Road rising up in the distance, and turned into school with everyone else and parked down in Senior parking, I think that was gravel, wasn’t it? and went up to school to meet my friends and roister around in Assembly and all the rest of the day, because we didn’t care about anything anymore, and were just having a good time.  Well, now I am going to forget all about that except insofar as it is still being lived in the cells of my body–reader, do you get the feeling I am getting weirder all the time?