The Wine of Blessedness

“And all the host laughed and wept, and in the midst of their merriment and tears the clear voice of the minstrel rose like silver and gold, and all men were hushed. And he sang to them, now in the Elven-tongue, now in the speech of the West, until their hearts, wounded with sweet words, overflowed, and their joy was like swords, and they passed in thought out to regions where pain and delight flow together and tears are the very wine of blessedness.”

— J.R.R. Tolkien

The Wine of Blessedness

Recommended reading and listening

A gazillion years ago this book was assigned reading for a short round of couples therapy. I read it and had huge ah HA! moments. The therapy didn’t go very well but I found it personally successful. Since then, I’ve recommended the book to people over the years, along with a couple others by the same author.

I had a few Audible credits to use up and for some reason this turned up in recommendations so I took a chance on it. I also found an Audible version of The Art Spirit by Robert Henri (pronounced Hen-rye) and I got that too. Previously I’d listened to a a handful of recordings from the Dalai Lama.

The Art Spirit was good in audio form. Reading it is like reading a lot of quotes and snippets stirred together. The narrator really did a good job and made it sound like a kind, knowledgable and skilled art instructor and mentor, talking to and instructing his students. I came away with a lot to think about, not how to apply paint, but what to aim for and a lot of whys about being an artist.

Today I started the Albert Ellis book, How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable about Anything, Yes, Anything! and it is even better than I remember! If you want to work through the exercises it comes with a PDF version you can download. I also had a moment of being wildly excited as the basic precepts of buddhism snuck in during the introduction. Guess all the time spent with the Dalai Lama was well spent. Also guess I might pick up the new edition after listening to it.

Recommended reading and listening

Gathering encouragement and inspiration

We all need some encouragement and ideas on how to proceed. From when I was in high school, I wanted to make people pause and see small beauty in the every day world. That sort of fit in with the environmental movement of the seventies, but it wasn’t exactly what forestry college was ready for so I spent a lot of time at college taking photos and keeping on.

Recently listened to a six hour or so audio book interview with Paul Simon about his long career and his work and his process – how he ‘follows his ear’ and isn’t too worried about what will be next. He said you need to have a problem to fix and the problem better be interesting so you want to keep working at fixing it. He had one colossal flop – a Broadway musical. He had no experience with that genre going into the project. Some people loved it. Critics hated it. It ran for sixty-eight shows. Then he had to think – what do you do after that?

After The Capeman, Simon’s career was again in an unexpected crisis. However, entering the new millennium, he maintained a respectable reputation, offering critically acclaimed new material and receiving commercial attention. Simon embarked on a North American tour with Bob Dylan in 1999, with each alternating as the headline act with a “middle section” where they performed together, starting on the first of June and ending September 18. The collaboration was generally well-received, with just one critic, Seth Rogovoy from the Berkshire Eagle, questioning the collaboration.

He went on to collaborate with others and kept recording and trying new things. Like working with Herbie Hancock in 2005, reimagining I Do It For Your Love.

And so when people, artists you admire, talk about their work and lives, take a moment and listen. And like Ted Kooser says – throw a lot of horseshoes.

Passing Through from Straw Hat Visuals on Vimeo.

Gathering encouragement and inspiration

Happy Birthday J.R.R. Tolkien

And may hope stay with us in the new year:

…the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. His song in the Tower had been defiance rather than hope; for then he was thinking of himself. Now, for a moment, his own fate, and even his master’s, ceased to trouble him. He crawled back into the brambles and laid himself by Frodo’s side, and putting away all fear he cast himself into a deep untroubled sleep.

~~J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King, Book II, The Land of Shadow.

Happy Birthday J.R.R. Tolkien

Day 28 NaPoWriMo 2022

I went to see a talk that was supposed to happen in April 2020. Then it was rescheduled to September 2020 and then April 2021 and then… Well and here we all were at Proctors in Schenectady and out came Neil Gaiman and said – this feels so weird. Indeed when he asked how many had bought their tickets for April 2020, it seemed most of the audience put their hands up.

We were his first stop on a tour to make up all those postponed and rescheduled tour stops (except one at the NY Public Library). He read stories and poems and chatted and answered questions that had been submitted on white cards.

God speed you Neil Gaiman as you “ricochet across the country” many times. Thank you for making it to Schenectady and you’re welcome back any time.

The theater is loud
then a nervous surge passes
Waiting for speaker

Two men behind me
Pontificating on jazz
And dueling concerts

No speaker has appeared
The crowd buzz continuing
So glad to be out.

Afterwards two men
walking behind me dueling
over other talks.

PS someone somewhere in the audience tried to make some weird announcement about having created an algorithm to do something or other. At first I wondered if it was part of the performance – Neil hardly flinched. A couple people allowed loudly that we didn’t care. She started to repeat her message starting with her name and Neil said – look, I’ll be honest, if you do that, you’ll be torn limb from limb… No one laughed and silence resumed and Neil resumed as though nothing had happened.

Pretty amazing stuff right there.

PPS. I got my new fountain pen. It was indeed the one that had been sent to someone else by accident just as I’d gotten their pen by accident (just a mix up in outer sleeve on the packaging). However the other person, once having removed the pen from the plastic wrapper realized the problem and didn’t proceed. My apologies to you unknown zoom nib writer – I was too excited and didn’t know what “Z” stood for.

Day 28 NaPoWriMo 2022

NaPoWriMo – Day Thirteen

Well, to say the least, it was raining. And then it rained some more. And then Billy Collins did his live reading at 5:30 – Thank you Billy!

When the rain came down
making circles in circles
of the world already so wet
Out painting, grey isn’t
what I was there to do
so I broke out the tea
thinking this will pass.
It poured and I poured.
On my phone, a poet
reading. How amazing,
to sit in your car and
watch a favorite poet
read and talk about
his words. He was, in fact,
apologetically in Florida.
While he spoke I viewed
the fuzzy world past two
watercolor palettes and
laughed so I painted
them and him and went home.
It was a good day despite
the endless rain and news.
Another day of staying home
or at least alone, painting
and writing and finding
a scrap or two of laughter.

I can’t complain really, this morning it was so wet and windy that I stayed in and painted this.

Art to me, is seeing. I think you have got to use your eyes, as well as your emotion, and one without the other just doesn’t work. That’s my art. — Andrew Wyeth

NaPoWriMo – Day Thirteen

NaPoWriMo – Day 11

The mail brought a postcard and the NaPoWriMo prompt brought a link to a lovely archived version of Kate Greenaway’s Language of Flowers. Lovely indeed and a welcome diversion on this cold April morning.

I looked up the meaning of forsythia
hoping to write a poem for you.
The only things in bloom here
right now are maple, forsythia and
of course daffodils.
But, according to my book,
the bright and bobbing flowers
in the front garden mean “regard”
and the hills of maple now a-blush
stands in for “reserve”
which seem like such a
Brontë-ish bouquet –
much room for misunderstanding
and resulting hilarity or tears.
Forsythia though, didn’t make the list.
Looking up other names
brought me to flowering olive
also not in the translations, and
Easter tree, while fitting in the
calendar, didn’t earn a second look.
So I gave up the old resource and
did what I had to do and googled it
and was told by several sources that
forsythia, being an early flower,
means “anticipation”
Since we are all guilty of looking
every time we pass, hoping for
that tell-tale yellow budding
I’ll accept this. And hope you
will accept my child’s fistful of
sunshiny anticipation and regard
on this chilly April morning.

From the quote box:

He who enjoys doing and enjoys what he has done is happy. — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

NaPoWriMo – Day 11

Ah HA! The Job of the Artist

I started reading “No Time to Spare” by Ursula K. LeGuin and what a read it is. A blurb on the back by New York Times Book Reviewer Melissa Febos promised “The pages sparkle with lines that make a reader glance up, searching for an available ear with which to share them.”

And so dear reader, since the cats sprawled nearby look confused by my fist pump just now, this share is for you! (emphasis mine) Ursula writes about that question writers are asked: what does it mean? She encourages readers to seek out reviews and other analysts of writings if they can’t decide for themselves.

It’s a job I do as a reviewer, and I enjoy it. But my job as a fiction writer is to write fiction, not to review it. Art isn’t explanation. Art is what an artist does, not what an artist explains. (Or so it seems to me, which is why I have a problem with the kind of modern museum art that involves reading what the artist says about a work in order to find out why one should look at it or “how to experience” it.)

I’m on page 42 of this slender volume and this just stopped me in my tracks.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled programming.

Meanwhile, today was a gray rainy day, not for painting, but I managed to buy some new socks. I also managed to go into an art supply store and leave without anything. I got an EZ-pass thing for my car after finding out from a co-worker that you can buy them at drug stores and grocery stores. Well, you buy it but they put all the money as a credit on the pass so it’s all good. Did some wash, did some reading, watched a favorite movie.

Yesterday I tried again on the scene I’d painted two days ago. Trying to figure out if it’s the change of paper (at least in part), paints getting rehydrated (they are now), me being rusty (yes and yes) but anyway here’s what happened. No explanations LOL per Ursula. Done from photos I’d taken of each scene.

Ah HA! The Job of the Artist

Happy Birthday J.R.R.!

Happy Birthday J.R.R.!

…the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. His song in the Tower had been defiance rather than hope; for then he was thinking of himself. Now, for a moment, his own fate, and even his master’s, ceased to trouble him. He crawled back into the brambles and laid himself by Frodo’s side, and putting away all fear he cast himself into a deep untroubled sleep.

~~J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King, Book II, The Land of Shadow.

Happy Birthday J.R.R.!

A Reminder to Hope

I’m deep towards the end of Lord of the Rings on audiobook right now and at last, this oft-quoted here reminder that light prevails.

…the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. His song in the Tower had been defiance rather than hope; for then he was thinking of himself. Now, for a moment, his own fate, and even his master’s, ceased to trouble him. He crawled back into the brambles and laid himself by Frodo’s side, and putting away all fear he cast himself into a deep untroubled sleep.

~~J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King, Book II, The Land of Shadow.

I’ve been struck this time at how Sam and Frodo fit together – Frodo has the unasked-for, crushing burden with which he doggedly carries on, not knowing the end; Sam just as doggedly keeps hope for both of them. Hope that they will come out of this and there will be an afterwards, and that the world will survive, because light and goodness are forever above the passing evil.

A Reminder to Hope