Flowers - Descanso Gardens

A trip to a lovely garden near Pasadena on April 18th My sister-in-law, Doris, and her husband, Jeff, my husband's brother, came to visit us from Vermont for the first time ever. His sister Katharine joined us too.  

The weather was wonderful, and we swam every day and shared SoCal lifestyle with them, spring just beginning for them in northerly Burlington where they live. Doris is quite a gardener herself, and we had a good day. Lunch on the beautiful patio area, just so so, but pleasant.

The irises were one of my childhood favorites.  I wish I knew the names of these. They are glorious.

This is "Julia Child", a floribunda with a marvelous fragrance, unlike the heavy fruity odor of some yellow roses.  They are my sister-in-law Katharine's favorite.

"Coco Loco", a strange pink-brown rose I found distinctive and had never seen except in catalogs.

The last of the lilacs - a few were left and the fragrance again powerful and evocative of my childhood.  John loves them, too, maybe more than I do!

The Latest Version: the "You're Worth It" Commodification Syndrome

 

As Laurie Penny recently wrote, for The Baffler, the risk of promoting individual self-care as a solution to existential anxiety or oppression is that victims will become isolated in a futile struggle to solve their own problems rather than to collectively change the systems causing them harm.  - NYT, 3-16-17

Can all this positive thinking be actively harmful? Carl Cederström and André Spicer, authors of The Wellness Syndrome, certainly think so, arguing that obsessive ritualization of self-care comes at the expense of collective engagement, collapsing every social problem into a personal quest for the good life. “Wellness,” they declare, “has become an ideology.”  -Laurie Penny, The Baffler

It is at this point that I confess to you that I’ve been doing yoga for two years and it’s changed my life to an extent that I almost resent. I have trained myself, through dedicated practice on and off the mat, to find enough inner strength not to burst out laughing when the instructor ends the class by declaring “let the light in me honor the light in you.” The instructor is a very nice person who smiles all the time like a drunk kindergarten teacher and could probably kill me with her abs alone, so I have refrained from informing her that the light in me is sometimes a government building on fire.

...Downward-facing dog is not a radical position. Nonetheless, that particular asana is among a few small concessions I make to self-care while I wait for the end of patriarchy and the destruction of the money system.

...The harder, duller work of self-care is about the everyday, impossible effort of getting up and getting through your life in a world that would prefer you cowed and compliant. A world whose abusive logic wants you to see no structural problems, but only problems with yourself, or with those more marginalized and vulnerable than you are. Real love, the kind that soothes and lasts, is not a feeling, but a verb, an action. It’s about what you do for another person over the course of days and weeks and years, the work put in to care and cathexis. That’s the kind of love we’re terribly bad at giving ourselves, especially on the left.

I've arrived at a low place.  The doors are closing, corridors narrowing, tunnel lights dimming. It's the aging, the losses, the regrets.   I see myself with the visage of an Easter Island stone atop a mountain, gazing far, grim and dark and sure and centered and sad, a watcher, a listener.

Zen and the Art of: (substitute any verb)

Robert Pirsig, author of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", has died.  He was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, and suffered much while undergoing treatments available at that time: electroshock, harsh drugs. He himself regarded his catatonic schizophrenia as the state of Buddhist enlightenment.

“The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower,” he wrote. “To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha—which is to demean oneself.”

"Acceptance that there is no wholly satisfactory answer is part of moving forward."  - NY Times, editorial about Senator Bob Kerry's Vietnam civilian massacre.

Do you get to - do you have the right to - move forward after you've done something so heinous?

I guess [so]. Gotta go on with daily life. Forgiveness is better.

My stretch class trainer plays a Deepak Chopra recording.  In his smarmy cheesy voice, he is profound.  "...let go of all recriminations, revenge, and regret..." Something like that.  Otherwise you're always a victim.

Speak memory, seek memory

camera the shield against forgetting

seek existential time, not clock time

stay in silence to look to see

See, inquire, learn, know, look again

Engage memory - make it your partner

by writing, noting details, names

accept that contradictions live in art and

don't have to be resolved

...reveals the fault lines of our ludicrous attempts

to make sense of experience, our faulty knowledge of ourselves and the world 

Paraphrase of Phillip Kennicot, Wash Post Culture Critic

“A talent is a kind of imprisonment. You’re stuck in it, you have to keep using it, or else you get ruined by it. It’s like a beaver’s teeth. He has to chew or else his jaws lock shut.” --Wallace Stegner

The result is an empirical behemoth built on the foundation of a few simple propositions. One, that our awareness of death creates tremendous potential for anxiety or terror. Two, that we learn to manage that terror by embedding ourselves in a cultural worldview that imbues reality with order, meaning, and stability. Three, that we gain and maintain psychological security by sustaining faith in that worldview and living up to the values it convey

While teaching at Pomona College in the early 1970s Williams revisited his typewriter drawings, including some of them in a new booklet called "Random Notes On Painting." Not yet into his 40s, Williams' prose in "Random Notes On Painting" is wearily eloquent:

I find in my life fragments of happiness and delight, more doubts than I can account for, empty and restless afternoons spent bumping off the walls, a vainglorious awareness of my own ambition, a fondness for books, maps, seashells, Black Blues Artists, the habitual use of noisy prose, the pretense that making art is a way to interfere, if only for a moment with death, shame at the forbidden memories that reveal themselves in the dark belly of aberrant dreams, outrage at hunger and sickness and the loneliness of men, anger at my own uneasiness in the world, my fear of being wrong, and my daily confessions of incomprehension.

One tries to work with care, with sagacity, to make things with calm. I would wish my paintings to be abundant, generous-nothing dim, no shadows; to stand in the full light of summer. I would wish my paintings to illuminate. -Guy Williams

As is clear from the lives of Saint Francis of Assisi and so many other saints, the gift of knowledge gives rise to grateful contemplation of the world of nature and joyful praise of the Creator...Pope Francis in a Vatican Radio broadcast yesterday

Painter Joan Eardley - Selected works of landscape

Another lovely painter discovered from art digest websites.  I will probably never see these artists' works but I fall in love at least weekly with an artist I find while I wander virtual beauty.

Catherine in Winter 1961

Winter Fields, Catherine

The Wave

Susan Rothenberg - Late Paintings

I have followed Susan Rothenberg since I saw her famous paintings of horses years ago. The animals seem imbued with distinctive spiritual energy, bursting, filling, almost departing the canvas surfaces that contain them.

Bubbles Yellow

Her ability to paint abstractly while retaining some figuration has always seemed masterful and confident.  Impasto techniques give an opaque yet rich depth to the canvas. The beings are sentient, the forms having a strange awkwardness. I was struck by the same  asymmetric character in the portraits of Alice Neel. The dog's limbs, joints, and contours connect stiffly to the body core.   Yellow Bubble's eyes ask the eternal question: "When are we going for a walk?" 

Dog with Green Head

This dog's gaze is watchful, watchful, almost calculating whether to even request one.

The green head is among the features of the work that make me smile. Matisse painted his wife with a green stripe down her face, shocking French art critics. (They did set themselves up for that, n'est pas?)

The 3 bird paintings recall to me Morris Graves. His paintings of birds, made after World War II, haunt me. 
With their gaunt,aloof presence, they are affected with an isolation and desolation of soul, like looking at photos of emaciated Holocaust survivors. The painted birds seem to have transparent permeable bodies, despite the surface opacity of their materials.

Red Bird

Rothenberg's birds are not bereft creatures, though.
Red Bird broods, back turned towards us, hunched shoulders cradle its bowed head, the dance is finished, and the bird accepts quiet applause.

Look at the colors! The possibilities when using impasto,loose brushstrokes are as compelling as any Old Master secret glaze recipe. These late paintings are so freed in their use of color, sure in the harmonies.    

Pink Raven

The figure/ground relationships mostly remain delineated. Rothenberg seems to have gracefully passed through the needle of "push-pull" 
abstract spatial dynamic theory. Her compositions are pared and simple, but depend on a positive-negative spatial component. Even so, edges  are roughened, overlaid, and blurred, sometimes to the point of partially obscuring the forms, as in 3 Monkeys.

3 Monkeys

The monkeys seem set in plaster, like fossil displays, or emerging from a thick scrim of snow and obfuscation. It's one easy stride to metaphor; the gunk of fundamentalist explanations. I cannot help but think of the 3 wise monkeys admonishing us about conducting ourselves surrounded by evil.

Indigo

The darkness is waiting, more beautiful, seductive, and dangerous than any Disney or del Toro maleficent creature.  This dark bird has power, while Graves' creatures are bereft of all but poignant waning sentience.      

The Caribbean

Rothenberg does not neglect blues. I have been to the tropics many times, and of all the beauty in the world, surpassing even the sunset, tropic blues "zen" me without any koan-type struggles. If this is the void,  subjectivity, I'll float awhile, drown if need be, just to stay in the moment of yielding, the joy of entering warm ocean waters of incomparable splendor. 

But Rothenberg's two swimmers, perhaps illuminated by the resort's spotlights, seem to be lifted by a rising wave, its crest dark behind them. They are languid, suspended, given over. Will they be caught as it breaks, or slide easily down the back? 

And for all the narrative material, the paintings are more important stylistically.  I think Susan Rothenberg has unified form and content, and that is an accomplishment
finally depending on formal painterly means, making for art, not illustration.   

Ineffable Magritte - does the Tao exist?

(these notes are based on an article in the web journal AEON) 
ineffable - too great to be described in words

Add captionRené Magritte, Variante de la tristesse (Variation of sadness), 1957. Oil on canvas, 50 x 60 cm. Kerry Stokes Collection, Perth. Photo: Acorn Photo, Perth. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017.

Magritte (1898–1967) was a conjurer of enigmatic paintings. He did not see himself as an artist, but rather as a thinking human being who conveyed his thoughts through his painting. Throughout his life he sought to imbue painting with meaning equal to that of language. Driven by his curiosity and his affinities with some of the leading philosophers of his age, such as Michael Foucault, he created a remarkable body of work and developed an altered view of the world that is reflected in a unique combination of masterfully precise painting and conceptual processes.   - from the website Eflux, arts and ideas digest

I thought ineffable meant beyond words, a sealed, unknowable meta-reality.  All that can be explained about what is ineffable is a definition of non-knowable, to conceive that we do not know or cannot access the knowledge within.

But if language can discern or conceive something ineffable, then why cannot language explain what the content is?

Because language can conceive of paradox.
Ineffability is a conception and an example of a paradox.

What it isn't, is the inability of the speaker to describe or explain an experience  because of the limits of that individual's education or vocabulary, or unwillingness to attempt to, or his inadequacy to do so.

The idea took hold that ineffability is a symptom of the insufficiency of language to capture the ultimate truths of the world.

...the notion of ineffable truths relies on the notion of subjective facts, we should also give up the notion of ineffable truths

What may be ineffable, or inexplicable, is phenomenal experience - the experiences of the body, the physical, of color, of playing a violin.  

What is mysterious to me:

•the origin of the universe
•the issue of whether animals and plants are   sentient beings 
•why I am alive
•how the brain convinces us we are self conscious beings 
•what is the nature of subjectivity
• how conceptualize the magnitude of the universe