Pneumonia and the Safest Place

Betweet 2000 and the end of 2001, my friend who is like a sister to me, and who had two very small children, was struck with kidney failure several times and fought to keep her life. I lived half the time at my house and half at hers. My sister and I had decided to hang onto our home in case G died, which she nearly did six times in a year and a half. We knew we might be raising two children because, by his own admission, C was no kind of a father to raise kids alone. Then my minister, a friend who had helped me through my husband's desertion and daughter's death, whose wife was a dear friend, hanged himself. And my brother was diagnosed with terminal liver disease one month before his older son hanged himself. Then Jack died. Then my voice teacher and choir director and friend of ten years died.

It was not a good eighteen months.

And at the end of that time (G is STILL with us), my women had an inkling that I would fail if I did not get the hell out of Dodge for a bit. So Nancy, who was going to take a professional photography course in Santa Fe, consulted with my sister about sending me with her. They colluded, this bunch. And for Christmas of 2001, I had a ticket to Santa Fe and a hotel to stay in and ten days to call my own!

Perfect. And it was. Only on the plane ride home, I contracted an odd strain of bacterial pneumonia. Four days after I was home, my fever spiked and I was terribly, terribly ill. I saw the doctor and he gave me two choices. "The hospital today, or you do absolutely NOTHING for the next three days, let other people take care of you, do your breathing treatments religiously and find some way to keep your breathing deep and even. I will see you then, and if you are better, you may continue that way. 2/10ths of a degree higher temperature, you are in the hospital. And do NOT lie down to sleep at night."

Painting My Way Home
I painted. I remembered, in my counseling, yes, I DID do visualizing when the flashbacks started to come. I learned to keep them from coming by a strong, strong visualization of the safest, most serene spot I could imagine. I had two. One was at Sandy Hook, New Jersey. I gave that painting away. The other, my fifth painting ever, is this. I am sorry about the reflection. I gave it to my sister when she was having a particularly rough time two years later. I worked on this every day, played Handel's Watermusik in the background and focused on breathing. It is just watercolor. I surrounded myself with New Hampshire pictures. Water. Granite. Pine. Mountains. The Flume. The Basin. Roadside rushing water. The Lake. You name it. At the other end of the room I did the same with pictures from my Runaways to Red Bank. Nothing but Sandy Hook, West Long Branch, the ocean, rocks. sand. I would move back and forth between paintings, then the couch, paintings, the couch, for about eight or ten hours. I had a gallon of ice water there as well, and a cooler with more ice.

By Still Waters, Peace

From this painting everything else has sprung. I am a woman of granite and water. Mad rushing water has smoothed my edges. Pools of calm reflect the colors of ages. I am a woman of pine and birch, of seasons and extremes, of dark and light. (Well, and I'm just plain nuts to boot, lest you think I've gone all mythical mystic goddess on you.) Northern writers have just as many layers as the southern writers do. It took me until I was about forty-five to know that for sure.

I guess I'm blogging more than I thought I would. Oh, well. Here is the mother painting for me. Again, apologies for the reflection's muted color and lines, but perhaps you can get the feel of it. Oh. I finished both in nine days. On the tenth I rested! No hospital. I was very close to well.

And whenever I look at this painting I seem to automatically breathe more deeply, and I disappear there to rest.

An Old Memory, An Old Blog, Another Painting...

 Not only did I complete a sketch with a gameplan of how to render it with my preferred artist media of watercolor, tissue paper, lace paper, and pen; I also worked on the painting I began in...

 "Excerpt from "Finally-translating-inspiration-into a Painting"

The Transformation begins
And Friday night I lugged a formless, nameless painting -- the one I began on my retreat --upstairs. I did not work on the one I thought I would begin. I worked on one where all I knew is that it kind of looks like choppy water. I said aloud, "PLAY with it, for God's sake. Don't worry about what it is, what it may be, just play with it. Screw the voices. To hell with anything but the process. JUST PLAY." I stomped my foot, which, of course, hurt, but when you are six, you don't care whether or not it hurts. If you are mad, you're mad. Stomping is what you do, at least, if you are six-year-old Jetty.


So I played. And then it began to look like the Lake on a choppy day, the way it did when I'd gaze, unfocused, down from the picture window in the cottage, the one by the giant field stone fireplace my grandpa built--on the daybed, tucked there under the window, with the enormous wood box at its head, the old record player in its beautiful wood encasing at the foot. The room always smelled like pine. Sometimes I would open the wood box top and just smell. I'd climb onto the wood box, crouching, and leap from the box onto the daybed, making sure my feet never touched the floor so that the alligator under the bed could not get me; a cheetah pouncing. Then I'd lie on my stomach and slither up to the window, lean on my elbows that rested on the sill, push my nose against the glass and stare. I was a hissing cobra, and my elbows and head were the hood. But finally I would simply lose myself, seeing nothing but the water, dancing. White caps and sparkles and every shade of blue. Sometimes a maple leaf would drift in my line of sight, and I would blink.


And Grandpa would bring me back home with his laugh, having witnessed my transmutations.


And so I began painting nothing but water. I collaged long lengths of tissue with the flat side down, curves and bumps on top, in every shade of blue I could make.


When I was done for the evening, I stood my lake against the oak desk that was at the cottage, too. The one Grandpa did his paper work at,  by the one light, in the evenings. If I peeked in after bedtime, opening the swinging door from the bedroom hall, I would see him bent over papers.


"Jet. Aren't you supposed to be in bed?" I would see an eyebrow raise and I would giggle and run to my room again.


I played last night, too. And again, for just a little while this morning--long enough to get that darker blue just so, there, toward the top, to balance something or other that I cannot name.

 This first gives a close up so you can see how it is I layered the water. There are about four kinds of paper in the collaged water, each torn strip had been previously painted, then new layers of blue washes were applied. A hint of white caps is done in white acrylic. The leaves were done with three layers of craft weight tissue paper, pre-painted in various shades of yellow and flame, each painted separately, glued together, then glued to the painting. Details were then painted so that I could make them as realistic as possible.

I have done it this way to replicate my little girl wonder at the water and the enormous leaves, as I would position myself so that I saw absolutely no land.

The second gives the beginning of how the whole will look--I've not yet done the single white pine bough that intruded on all views from the left. That bough nearly kissed the window in my mind, but perhaps you can get a little of the feel of the water. The way I work, this painting is perhaps a little over halfway completed. Regardless of when it's completed, this is directly from, as Bruce Coltin so precisely described it, a conversation with one of my ghosts!

The leaf will go off the frame, as will the water.  The whole painting is taped to a board, so I won't get the full effect of a white matte until it is finished. I do want this painting matted white, because the screen frame was bright white. At least that is how I remember it vividly, and how I felt. The leaves are actual size of the largest maple leaves.

This is the first painting where I've finally been able to get a digital image that shows the layer upon layer upon layer that goes into  much of the work.  The mountains in the painting that is my permanent banner reflect approximately twenty layers of paper, all in different variations of white, some toward the top with the irridescent pearl white, some with tinted white washes. I get lost in some odd zone when I am layering papers. It is a free sort of activity, painting sheets of paper, tearing into approximate shapes, gluing with intentional folds, painting again. Most of the time it is almost entirely right brain, with the sporadic left brain--fold this one here. No. Re-angle that one before it dries. Take that one off and put it there. Almost rhythmic.

Okay, so I lied. I cam back already. Today is the day I have a meeting--spiritual stuff--at 3, dinner with the wackos I love at 5, song circle at 7. Painting or doing a lot of sitting activity is not possible if I want to have fun this evening. How I missed singing for five years--it feels like a miracle to have found a group where it does not set off the trigeminal nerve. Where the sound is about hushed harmonies!

That's all for now, though! I do love it when people yell at me to shut up and run with it. More than one person has told me to stop thinking so hard and simply paint, sing, or write as the mood hits. I'm not a good listener...

Thanks.

Memory, Memoir and ... Just a Bunch of Rambling

I realize I've gone longer than I want to without posting. Why? I have been working on a new post and I want to cut some of it, and I have needed to let it percolate a bit.

On the other hand, I always find it interesting reading about the process of writers or artists of any medium. I include the "practical" arts, making little distinction among artisans, artists, writers, what have you. I mean there are cooks/chefs who are artists in my book. ANY time engaging in the creative process is a  large and important part of a person's life, I feel artist is good generic word. I so often see that the process is very much the same. We are inspired to create and we start to act on that inspiration. Sometimes we get all tangled up and must start again. Or we must "edit" our finished product, or it can change along the way. Potters, quilters, cooks who stray from recipes, writers, painters, photographers, metalworkers, sculptors--you name it. I call it art.

I learn from the process as described by others.  I feel less alone. And I feel supported just by reading how other people wind up changing their focus smack in the middle of a project!

But, all this remembering is sure getting in the way of this memoir-writing stuff! It's a total pain in the hoo-hah, I can tell you.

As I started to look at my 300 pages (no exaggeration there) of memoir material and began to choose material where my mother and our relationship were more of a focus, well, then my dad leaped out and said, "GAWDAMMIT! I have something to say." He will not brook SHUT UP from anyone--it was true in life and quite clearly is true from the Great Beyond.

The Demon Was a Boy... Darn it all
And now? Much to my confusion and sometimes distress, the humanity of brother Jim is leaping into my brain. This is hard, yet necessary. It is not so much that I blocked those memories, but for years I had to focus on what I had blocked and simply put them aside.  Now HE won't shut up, either.

The theme broadens then, and I wonder what I want to say and I wonder whether my story will have meaning beyond an interesting read. I find it presumptuous to begin a project and feel that MY handling of life would be any kind of inspiration to follow. Yet what I still find miraculous is the mind that tucks so many wondrous memories in with the horrors, when I blocked out the pain so long ago. It's as if I wrapped the pain up in a whole lot of packing paper, but tucked prisms in there along with each horrific memory. And as I try to figure out where to put the one who was most monstrous, damn it all... turns out that, yes, he was just a baby once upon a time. And a small boy. And a ten-year-old who practically carried his little sister home one day, so she would not burn her bare foot on hot tar. And a teenager capable of showing me true tenderness.

And then, where two of the men start yelling, the third's not far behind.

Jack starts yelling at me, too. "Yo! Jetty. What about when we went to the lake with Feej and sang on the dock. And how I wouldn't let you go in the back room at The Depot when someone was singing up front. And what about when I thought I'd be a minister and you would not hang out the clothes ... and..." Yeah. Right. WhatEVER. So Jack had his dark side even when we were kids.

I look at all the stories, and, believe it or not, I have not told them all in here! I look at them and over and over what I see is a collection of people whose personalities themselves were rain forests of wondrous light and terrifying darkness.

I was the heroine of light, right? Not so much. Inconveniently, I remember my darkness as well.

And Our Heroine Had Her Demons, too  ... No Surprise, I'm Sure
When I was twelve, I was asked to baby sit for a teacher's little girl who was four. When I was there, I kept having images of pushing her down the stairs, of pushing her off a swing, of things that terrified me. I did not do anything to hurt her, but I told Mrs. Richardson that I felt I was too young to care for her little girl. She thanked me for my honesty. I cried through most of that night, believing I must be some sort of demon straight out of hell.  I refused to EVER baby sit through my teens. By my twenties, however, no such visions came to me in the presence of small children.

The lesson was there, though. And I had many demons of my own, biting at my heels. I was hell-bent to self-destruct off and on until at last I sought professional help. And I'm thinking that I cannot leave it out or the book will not state the truth. Truth, as opposed to the facts. Honesty without hiding, without leaving out what is not pretty about me, not just them. (I hate that. It is just so much nicer to stay aloof, to imply that I was pure. But that's also boring, so what the hell.)

So what is the thing I want to say? And do I need to know before I put it all together? The "books" say I should. The "experts" say I should be able to state my theme in a sentence or two--clearly, concisely.

And So It Goes...
And I say, probably I have to simply ramble and THEN see what route I wound up taking. AFTER that, the editing with a HATCHET will be needed.

Unless, of course, I change my mind!

There is something about the men in the house. The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost--those tee-shirts from Jim's girlfriend at the time. The women did not tend to speak up without risking the sarcasm of the Holy Ones. My mother took the brunt of the derision, and that is part of her pain, as well. My sister absented herself from most of the competitive bile from "the boys." She was judged by them, regardless.

I leaped in with both feet, mouth a-blaze, and held my own when I could. I learned to slice people to ribbons at an early age. It saved my skin in junior high, when I was so often the target at school.

Daddy said I came "out the chute going 'Oh, YEAH?' and never looked back." Interesting metaphor... Nevertheless he is right. And I have been struggling for a week with the new stuff that keeps gushing from deep inside, like a geyser from the middle of the sea.  And I am not sure but that this is the thing about it all.  My story reads like a novel. A sweeping southern saga with layer upon layer upon layer.

My mom told me I could NOT be a southern writer, which made me very angry. I was drawn to them. They could tell the scariest, most painful stories without ever losing the beauty of it all.

So I'll just dive in and see where it goes, for all my trying to find focus. I will allow the Carson McCullers and Harper Lee inside run wild.  Maybe there are two books in one. I have no clue. But you are all along for the ride, so ...

Now I will delete the old draft, because I've covered it all here! Undoubtedly, you'll read some of the story in here, but I know I have to keep some of it for the book now, not the blog. So I'll write about other things.

PS
I'm not looking for words of support or comfort. It isn't that. However,  if you all have some story of your process--preferably the part that makes you NUTS, that would be great! And by the way, long comments are ALWAYS welcome. And it can be all about you. That's fine with me. I learn from comments-- A LOT sometimes.