fox with mange
mouse trapped itself in the trashcan at work
botanica familiar
6/12/12
Flexing my sketching muscles - its been a while
fox with mange
mouse trapped itself in the trashcan at work
botanica familiar
6/2/12
The everflowing now
When I was a child, I lived in the heart of the cold, sterile, franchise-faced heart of suburbia, outside D.C. But my saving grace, that I thank my parent for often, was the small drainage creek and half acre of trees that was the unofficial continuation of our backyard.
Once I passed the divide between grass mowed by my brother once a week and leaf-litter shaded by 40 year old trees, there were no more rules, coercive or tangible, to where my feet could take me. I could race through saplings and fallen logs down to the creek, or I could take my time, stopping to overturn rock homes of salamanders and roly-poly troglodytes, taking in the scent of decay and arboreal breath, and half-mindedly dodging the leaves-of-three.
The creek slithered past the homes of unacquainted neighbors, whose backsides were barely discernible beyond the broad leaves of summer, but jarringly apparent in the bareness of winter. Because no one "owned" the creek, kids and dog owners were free to follow its poison-ivy-flanked curves, interrupted briefly by graffiti-laced culverts and urine-yellow bubbly gatherings of water-herded trash.
Sometimes the creek split into trickling tributaries, tumbling between cliffs that towered above my three-and-a-half-foot-tall stature. Visiting them now, I wonder at my childish awe of these slight slopes, amazed that they once seemed like mountain sides, treacherous to climb, my small hands grasping brittle roots and feet slipping on loose rocks in Piedmont clay, aiding erosion's transformation of a tiny patch of wilderness in the ever-hungry belly of suburbia.
It was a swath of respite from the bucolic isolation, from the sterility of dry wall and vacuumed carpet, from the unrecognizable faces of elderly neighbors, from look-both-ways and don't-talk-to-strangers. When I was on the shores of that tiny creek, didn't fear the motivation of bees, robins, or flowers. I could travel in any direction I wanted. Instead of up and down the sidewalk, I could travel up and down trees on branches that, looking at them now - even though we both have grown - could doubtfully hold my weight.
This freedom of movement is hard to find in my adult life. I flirt with it by using a bike to get around the city. Going the wrong way down one-way streets, breaching the street-sidewalk divide with a small nerve-jolting jump, blasting past a line of cars through a red light - these are little victories against the bland oppression of civilization. I'm so accustomed to bending these rules that when I do find myself behind a steering wheel, I can reach alarming levels of frustration a little too quickly. The vein-popping rage of suburban commuters is quite familiar to me. Of course, that empathy disintegrates the moment this rage is direct at me and my bicycle.
It is the constriction of decisions and actions in my adult life that make me feel trapped and stressed out. Manufacturers capitalize on this frustration by filling supermarket shelves with plentiful choices: 50 kinds of pre-bottled salad dressing, 65 brands of sliced white bread, several variations of shapes of red flesh protected from contamination and recognition by Styrofoam and plastic wrap.
But instead of relief, I scan the daunting shelves with terror. I run silent-screaming past carts full of frozen dinners and 12-packs, past robotic cashiers, past cascades of stale air that protect the shopping environment from the dynamic weather of the parking lot. I know my plight is laughable, diagnosable, and hardly life-threatening, but I wish I was brave enough to actually scream on my way out.
One night, a friend revealed to me her use of the German-to-English thesaurus as a divining device. Ask a question while opening to a random page, put your finger down on a word without looking, and it will answer, however cryptically and subject to your own interpretation. Being generally skeptical of divination and hippy-dippy intuition, I asked it a few half-hearted, impersonal questions. The answers were surprisingly curt. "It knows you aren't taking it seriously," my friend said. So I asked it something I have spent many years contemplating: "What will happen if I abandon art?" The word my finger landed on, the German of which eludes my memory, translated to "labyrinth of rules and regulations."
I try not to allow divination practices to influence my decisions, as that is where (I believe) their power lies. But I can't stop thinking about that labyrinth. I've been courting the idea of going to school for biology, in hopes that the potential field work will allow me the opportunity to walk into a wood without following a state-funded or memorial path. Researchers are often granted access to places untrodden by tourists' Tevas.
But what if its a fantasy? What if, in order to be granted this access, I have to jump through endless legislative and departmental hoops, negating any idealized "explorer" aspirations I selfishly harbor? What if I get so lost in the paperwork of scientific exploration I forget my compass of artistic skepticism?
Is there any escape, or is this just adulthood in an era of over-populated human history? Am I being a brat, trying to resurrect my childhood self as a compass for the occupation of my adult life? Should I stop philosophizing and just choose? The choice is murder of all the possible lives. But not choosing is equally murderous, rendering my life a series of mindless service industry jobs.
Once I passed the divide between grass mowed by my brother once a week and leaf-litter shaded by 40 year old trees, there were no more rules, coercive or tangible, to where my feet could take me. I could race through saplings and fallen logs down to the creek, or I could take my time, stopping to overturn rock homes of salamanders and roly-poly troglodytes, taking in the scent of decay and arboreal breath, and half-mindedly dodging the leaves-of-three.
The creek slithered past the homes of unacquainted neighbors, whose backsides were barely discernible beyond the broad leaves of summer, but jarringly apparent in the bareness of winter. Because no one "owned" the creek, kids and dog owners were free to follow its poison-ivy-flanked curves, interrupted briefly by graffiti-laced culverts and urine-yellow bubbly gatherings of water-herded trash.
Sometimes the creek split into trickling tributaries, tumbling between cliffs that towered above my three-and-a-half-foot-tall stature. Visiting them now, I wonder at my childish awe of these slight slopes, amazed that they once seemed like mountain sides, treacherous to climb, my small hands grasping brittle roots and feet slipping on loose rocks in Piedmont clay, aiding erosion's transformation of a tiny patch of wilderness in the ever-hungry belly of suburbia.
It was a swath of respite from the bucolic isolation, from the sterility of dry wall and vacuumed carpet, from the unrecognizable faces of elderly neighbors, from look-both-ways and don't-talk-to-strangers. When I was on the shores of that tiny creek, didn't fear the motivation of bees, robins, or flowers. I could travel in any direction I wanted. Instead of up and down the sidewalk, I could travel up and down trees on branches that, looking at them now - even though we both have grown - could doubtfully hold my weight.
This freedom of movement is hard to find in my adult life. I flirt with it by using a bike to get around the city. Going the wrong way down one-way streets, breaching the street-sidewalk divide with a small nerve-jolting jump, blasting past a line of cars through a red light - these are little victories against the bland oppression of civilization. I'm so accustomed to bending these rules that when I do find myself behind a steering wheel, I can reach alarming levels of frustration a little too quickly. The vein-popping rage of suburban commuters is quite familiar to me. Of course, that empathy disintegrates the moment this rage is direct at me and my bicycle.
It is the constriction of decisions and actions in my adult life that make me feel trapped and stressed out. Manufacturers capitalize on this frustration by filling supermarket shelves with plentiful choices: 50 kinds of pre-bottled salad dressing, 65 brands of sliced white bread, several variations of shapes of red flesh protected from contamination and recognition by Styrofoam and plastic wrap.
But instead of relief, I scan the daunting shelves with terror. I run silent-screaming past carts full of frozen dinners and 12-packs, past robotic cashiers, past cascades of stale air that protect the shopping environment from the dynamic weather of the parking lot. I know my plight is laughable, diagnosable, and hardly life-threatening, but I wish I was brave enough to actually scream on my way out.
One night, a friend revealed to me her use of the German-to-English thesaurus as a divining device. Ask a question while opening to a random page, put your finger down on a word without looking, and it will answer, however cryptically and subject to your own interpretation. Being generally skeptical of divination and hippy-dippy intuition, I asked it a few half-hearted, impersonal questions. The answers were surprisingly curt. "It knows you aren't taking it seriously," my friend said. So I asked it something I have spent many years contemplating: "What will happen if I abandon art?" The word my finger landed on, the German of which eludes my memory, translated to "labyrinth of rules and regulations."
I try not to allow divination practices to influence my decisions, as that is where (I believe) their power lies. But I can't stop thinking about that labyrinth. I've been courting the idea of going to school for biology, in hopes that the potential field work will allow me the opportunity to walk into a wood without following a state-funded or memorial path. Researchers are often granted access to places untrodden by tourists' Tevas.
But what if its a fantasy? What if, in order to be granted this access, I have to jump through endless legislative and departmental hoops, negating any idealized "explorer" aspirations I selfishly harbor? What if I get so lost in the paperwork of scientific exploration I forget my compass of artistic skepticism?
Is there any escape, or is this just adulthood in an era of over-populated human history? Am I being a brat, trying to resurrect my childhood self as a compass for the occupation of my adult life? Should I stop philosophizing and just choose? The choice is murder of all the possible lives. But not choosing is equally murderous, rendering my life a series of mindless service industry jobs.
Exploration on a budget
How often do I explore? How often do my footsteps create their own path, unguided by sidewalks, stairs, or hallways? Even when I take the time to wander a nearby wood, my way is directed by the paths made by others, in order to diminish the effects of my weight on the life processes of the wood's inhabitants.
There have been times in my life when I was afraid to leave my home. Not a concrete fear of violence or oppression, just a dull anxiety that keeps me cooped. Curiously, those times tend to correlate with the weeks after moving to a new place. Perhaps I need the time to explore and feel comfortable in my new home before I can even think of exploring its surroundings. But at the time, I never think of it that way. I think "What's wrong with me? Am I depressed? Am I developing agoraphobia?" I hear about events across town, think about how many people I will have to encounter, not just there but en route. I tell myself to stop being such a baby and I but on my coat and boots, then continue pacing around finding little activities to delay my departure. Even when the environment inside my home becomes a cacophonous soup of practicing musicians, grinding power tools, and room mates laughing around the kitchen table, to the point where I need to escape more than ever, I imagine myself trapped. Instead of walking downstairs and out the door, I jump under a blanket and try to drown out the noise with darkness.
Is it because I know that by walking outside, I will be replacing one striated cacophony with another? Escaping an overly amplified performance to an avenue of sirens, honking, shouting, and helicopter wings. Escaping the geometrical restraint of indoor architecture full of someone else's stuff into the grid of pavement, brick, and regulation. Either place I go, my path is predetermined.
For years, art has been my realm of exploration. The mind is substantially striated by culture, tradition, and genetics, but the act of art-making can allow one to break out of the grid, if only for brief moments.
But the inner realm can become its own prison. when after hours in a studio, I suddenly look up and realize there is a whole world outside.
So what do I do?
Read.
I read about the explorations of others. I watch nature documentaries. Like the suburbanite I was raised as, I pretend to satisfy my exploratory desire by staying comfortably at home and consuming endless packaged goods of ideas. Why don't I just take some trail mix to bed and watch a Lewis and Clarke documentary. Just like the bookstore owner in Neverending Story suggests - "Those books are safe." When I finish pretending I am Craig Childs standing face to face with a mountain lion, I get to be a little girl again.
Then the truest fear grips me - the one that causes middle aged men to buy convertibles. What if I die having never walked without a trail or a map or a goal in mind. What if my last breath is wind on the pages of a book about animals, instead of commingling with the scents of them. What if I die having only read and made art about the creatures I admire so much without having ever experienced them outside the frames of page edges, aquariums, or fences, and without having made any true effort to aid their survival in the midst of certain obliteration by the progress of my species. No one will care if I die like that.
When that fear sweeps over me like the arctic wind I have never felt on my fur-lined cheeks, that is the moment I walk out the door.
There have been times in my life when I was afraid to leave my home. Not a concrete fear of violence or oppression, just a dull anxiety that keeps me cooped. Curiously, those times tend to correlate with the weeks after moving to a new place. Perhaps I need the time to explore and feel comfortable in my new home before I can even think of exploring its surroundings. But at the time, I never think of it that way. I think "What's wrong with me? Am I depressed? Am I developing agoraphobia?" I hear about events across town, think about how many people I will have to encounter, not just there but en route. I tell myself to stop being such a baby and I but on my coat and boots, then continue pacing around finding little activities to delay my departure. Even when the environment inside my home becomes a cacophonous soup of practicing musicians, grinding power tools, and room mates laughing around the kitchen table, to the point where I need to escape more than ever, I imagine myself trapped. Instead of walking downstairs and out the door, I jump under a blanket and try to drown out the noise with darkness.
Is it because I know that by walking outside, I will be replacing one striated cacophony with another? Escaping an overly amplified performance to an avenue of sirens, honking, shouting, and helicopter wings. Escaping the geometrical restraint of indoor architecture full of someone else's stuff into the grid of pavement, brick, and regulation. Either place I go, my path is predetermined.
For years, art has been my realm of exploration. The mind is substantially striated by culture, tradition, and genetics, but the act of art-making can allow one to break out of the grid, if only for brief moments.
But the inner realm can become its own prison. when after hours in a studio, I suddenly look up and realize there is a whole world outside.
So what do I do?
Read.
I read about the explorations of others. I watch nature documentaries. Like the suburbanite I was raised as, I pretend to satisfy my exploratory desire by staying comfortably at home and consuming endless packaged goods of ideas. Why don't I just take some trail mix to bed and watch a Lewis and Clarke documentary. Just like the bookstore owner in Neverending Story suggests - "Those books are safe." When I finish pretending I am Craig Childs standing face to face with a mountain lion, I get to be a little girl again.
Then the truest fear grips me - the one that causes middle aged men to buy convertibles. What if I die having never walked without a trail or a map or a goal in mind. What if my last breath is wind on the pages of a book about animals, instead of commingling with the scents of them. What if I die having only read and made art about the creatures I admire so much without having ever experienced them outside the frames of page edges, aquariums, or fences, and without having made any true effort to aid their survival in the midst of certain obliteration by the progress of my species. No one will care if I die like that.
When that fear sweeps over me like the arctic wind I have never felt on my fur-lined cheeks, that is the moment I walk out the door.
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