The Vaporous Softness

Oolong in my old tea bowl

It's raining, but the hay-bale cave out in the garden is dry inside. (However, the wet has let loose the scent of hay.) This is my dedicated meditation spot, which I built from piled up bales last summer. 

 I brought out to my cave with me the words of two people I've never met, and never knew at all before they posted here on my blog.  (For anyone interested: their comments are appended to my next post.) As will be clear to anyone who's read in this blog before, I also brought with me the snarl of frenzy, angst, and loose-ended live wires of my recent attempts to tidy my farging house.  While I sogged through the garden to find a nice, dry corner within the bales, the words of these strangers and my state of mind must have introduced themselves to each other and then communed, with me all unaware, because when I sat down to meditate, my mind was already quiet. Quiet for the first time in, oh, I don't know, months? Yes.  So I just went on to do what you do in your kindly, still place to meditate.  Then I squished through the mud and came back into the house,  where I painlessly finished three massive projects. OK--I finished them in about an hour, so they were only massive within a tortured state of mind. . . .

• I removed all the corroded and paint-coated hardware from the lovely old door I'll use for a headboard to my bed  and applied a transparent wash of pale celadon to it.

• I completed a coat of tarnished copper paint to the old refrigerator I'm dressing up as a  yet older steamer trunk.

• I Ironed and hung two draperies I'd made for my living room window then thrown aside to let Wolsey the dog and Olive the cat apply wrinkles to them.

All the happy juices of my being flowed into these doings, and I seem to have shed wisps of hay on the floor as I worked. Well, I like the history of worn old things around me, and I also like the history of my day around me, too, when it's good, so the hay doesn't count as a mess. And Namaste, alanaincanada and drwende! 

(Then I had some hot tea in my old, cracked, raku tea bowl, as indicated at the top of this post, and enjoyed the vaporous softness of being alive.)

Vortex Redux

For me, the Apartment Therapy Cure is a direct road to needing radical personal therapy. God knows I have tried---and this Spring Cure is my second formal attempt---but the general communal esprit de vivre seems to overexcite my belief in what I can humanly accomplish. 

True, I would far rather see exciting projects bursting to life everywhere I look than to be, say, catatonic or vegetative. Maybe I need to break off from Apartment Therapy and form a satellite sect. For people who get too many ideas to settle down and pursue group goals. (A square peg may not fit in a round hole, but it will function brilliantly if a square hole is made for it.) 

Back in my prof-in-residence days, a colleague from the Art History Dept came into my office, leaned on my desk, and with a face turgid with grief and wet with tears, cried out: "I just want to be loved. Is that so wrong?"  This individual was a bitch on wheels in her less emotional moments, so I assumed a look of neutral compassion and listened while she pounded on my desk and reiterated her cries for love. (N.B. not from me. Her love life had a leak.)  It thrilled me that someone of her sophistication, urbanity  and Phi Beta Kapa-ness could sob out that cliche---I just want to be loved. Is that so wrong? 

I am thinking now that there are many who, like myself, tend to get into hyper-creative states; who feel failed when this happens because they fall by the wayside when part of goal-driven, group endeavors. And that they actually should be beloved and venerated for who they are and what they do. Devoted aides should follow them about, wiping up paint spills here, putting tools away there, and sweeping up broken glass, sawdust, and sharp metal fragments.  It is right that these perps should be loved.

Now I want to insert a picture of my hydrophobic Cairn, Wolsey, trying to get his rubber cheeseburger out of our pond:

Wolf in the Night

I've been circling my blog like a wolf pacing the fringe of darkness around a campfire. (Hmmm---)

Actually, that's a horrible analogy. A wolf's instincts keep him back, while the mysteries of the Inter-farging-net have kept me at bay. My dear son Karl has regained access for me, so I'm back.

However, in the meantime, I've gotten a freelance editing job that keeps me from getting anything else accomplished. I am learning a lot about Freud's life and work in a Roman Catholic Vienna.  Apparently, It Is Written that whenever I attempt the AT Cure, Fin de Siecle Roman Catholic Vienna, spring gardening imperatives, or I don't know what else will keep me from reaching anything like a goal in my house. 

Worse, this frustration leads straight into byways that offer a bit of solace--I take on small, lateral projects to soothe myself: like this pendant lamp I'm making for a new corner in the living room that was created by the construction of my "solarium"(in this picture, the lamp is less than half done and hanging on my bookcase):

Can anyone guess what I'm using to make this curiosity?

Tale of the Enigmatic Solarium

The largest room in my space is the deepest and darkest, almost buried in the side of the mountain. I wanted to put high windows at the south end of it, looking out at the woods and bringing in sunshine. Alas, this would mean bulldozers and back hoes and a king's ransom. The gloom of the space  seeped into my heart at this disappointment.

Then one day I was wandering around outside, and I came upon the great pile of steel window sashes, stolen by a friend from a broken down old Hudson River mansion and given to me.  Each weighs about a hundred pounds. Clearly, manipulating them into a wonder was beyond me.

My friend Jeff responded at once to my call, drove his giant truck down from Mountainville, and turned the steel sashes into a solarium in the darkest corner of my darkest room. All the creative juices of life flow through this man's veins.

Now all that remains is for me to tart up his architecture. Oh, and add the sun . . . .

Hey, I said it was dark . . .

A Nook Comes to Be

All right, enough wool-gathering. 

One of the things I'm focusing on for the Chicago Apartment Therapy Spring Cure is my need for nooks and crannies in an otherwise characterless place. There are 2 main projects under this heading: the first, pictured here, is creation of a kitchen corner, with a table and chairs, and a lamp, and a rock wall, and a fountain.

The refrigerator used to live here. When I'm done, it will be a gemutlichkeit nook where I'll sit and have coffee with friends. Pictures below.

The other main nook project is the creation of a solarium in the deepest, darkest corner of this basement apartment. Stay tuned for photos later today.......

The unforgiving fridge void at the far end of my kitchen

The rock quarry---newsprint transmogrifies into boulders on the kitchen table

Rocks applied to plastic sheeting applied to wall

Unfortunate discovery: the old door destined to be a headboard 

looks terrific with the rocks, Now what do I do?

A Defense of Bliss

As they so often are at the mention of ouija boards, recitations of one's dreams, and purple throes of infatuation, eyes are rolled at proclamations of bliss. Bliss assaults artsy-fartsies, druggies, and dreamers. Bliss is worthless.

It makes me so very happy to respond to my conjured eye-rollers: "Listen, you idiot utilitarians, you cynics and scorched-earth souls! Bliss is a staple of the American character. It is the response of the soul when confronted by the Sublime. Even with the American Transcendentalists and the Hudson River School of painting set aside, we have surfeits of evidence. My favorite example is none less than a passage from Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, "Query V: Cascades," I am not aware of anyone calling this Founding Father an artsy-fartsy, a drugger, or a dreamer. True, he dreamed, and the dreams were mighty, but he was the man for turning them into reality.

Yet here we find him wandering around in the woods, observing his property.  He comes upon a natural bridge of stone and the deep ravine it spans.  His description of it is mainly geological, full of measurements and other concrete facts. Then suddenly he breaks off:

 "The sensation [of observing it] becomes delightful in the extreme. It is impossible for the emotions, arising from the sublime, to be felt beyond what they are here: so beautiful an arch, so elevated, so light, and springing, as it were, up to heaven. the rapture of the spectator is really indescribable!" Then Tom reverts to points of geology, to geographical names.  Just a flash of rapture--of bliss-- with it's  exclamation point--the resort of the essentially speechless writer.

For Jefferson, the idea of the sublime is inextricably part of his experience of America. I can't see him scattering exclamation points over my cans of paint. But what on earth can be deemed transcendental and a source of bliss if not the purest apprehension of the essence of colors.  I ask you. 

Another case of the Sublime [Frederick Edwin Church: "Niagra Falls"]

Bliss

I always thought smells were the most evocative and and yet  evasive of all our five senses' subjects. (Objects. Whichever.)  A smell can waft out of nowhere and fell you with emotion. The smell can do this to you without yielding a clue as to what past event embodied the emotion. This is why I believed what I did and thought that our sense of smell was the most abstract of our senses.

My thinking changed after this morning's spree in Beckerly Lumber, the local source for Benjamin Moore Paints.  My aforementioned design consultant, whose name is Louise, had given me a list of the colors and finishes to buy, and for the first time in my life, I wasn't torn to shreds by color-choice doubts as my paints were mixed.  I came home lighthearted and full of zeal and pried open all the cans.  

Factually, spread before me were Dartsmouth Green (a deep, smokey teal), Blue Haze (an icy, pale, luminous blue), Zephyr glaze, Mercury glaze, and untinted metallic pearlescent base. Facts, though, had nothing to do with what  happened next. 

And I'm saying up front that I prize what happened.  Since I was free of color-choice doubts, it was this:  There was nothing but me and the colors. No thoughts, no surroundings, no time. With the sight of the colors, there came no associations, known or not, as there can with scent. The colors purely disclosed their essences, that's all. If I were forced to name something analogous to this experience, I suppose I'd have to say a divine revelation or vision (except those have content, as far as I know. I've never had one). If you think I'm being hyperbolic, then please just shut up, please--I'm trying to get something intangible out here, please! Even when I used to paint canvases, I never had such an experience of color. It has left my mind with such a deep and wholesome refreshment that I plan to have decor colors dictated to me from now on. (Be warned, Louise!)

So that was the bliss.

This looks like regular cans of paint. How can it be?

Caveat

My blog's not going to be solely about the AT Cure, much less only about living space, but for the time being, The Cure it will be!  Not only have I signed up for it, but yesterday was my first consultation with a most excellent designer, who came to my home and before my eyes,  pulled together a concept and plan for my bedroom that I could never have achieved alone. Well, more accurately, she took my own timid little plan and elevated it beyond my dreams. I am high as a kite with her ideas, and am now off to Beckerly Lumber to buy the Benjamin Moore paints for sample boards. . . .

Oh, and I suppose this must be done: here are some pictures of the bedroom's current state:

---And I note that blogs' time lines are linear upside down. This is pretty disconcerting because my excuses for the chaos pictured are down at the bottom instead of before these photographs. . . .  

On the other hand,  this elected exposure to [potentially] anyone, anywhere on the planet, is giving me a bearable lightness of being--like coughing up one of your deepest and darkest to your shrink. (Hey there, Fred.)

The Whole Catastrophe

My move from a loved, 1840s, 6ooo sq ft, 16 room inn to a basement apartment in a split level ranch triggered the most excruciating aesthetic shock in an otherwise rather happy story. Instead of a fireplace in every room, original wide floorboards, high ceilings, and sunshine through wavy-glassed original window panes, here the small rooms are dark, stark, and Pergo-floored. The largest room has only one window--looking out to what would be a view of mountain woods, if it weren't under a deck. 

Before moving here three years ago, I got rid of about half my household stuff by giving most of it to family and friends and then filling several dumpsters. The remainder of loved things I crammed into this apartment in as orderly a fashion as I could. I learned to move about by jimmying myself sideways between the furniture. And I wept, adopted atheism, became a nihilist for good measure, read Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Saint John of the Cross, and went to bed for three months.

When I got up, it was spring. Thawed waters crashed down through the mountain's gullys, does picked their way through the woods with their fawns behind them, life spread open all its beautiful fans, and my esprit returned. Long a reader of Apartment Therapy, I embraced their 2007 Spring Cure. I read Maxwell's book and plunged into the project like someone hurtling down the Niagra Falls. I worked and strove, and at the end of the cure, I'd gotten rid of yet more furniture (to family, friends), and banished more than half of the books I had culled for the move in the first place.  At AT, the cure formally ended , but I struggled on, and by the end of summer I'd accomplished the hell you see in these photographs:

Note pointless, warped, formica counter, extended on and

 on with nothing beneath it . . . except transient stuff

A corner of what was the sitting room,

because the living room was then the bedroom.

What is this room? There's a bed in it somewhere; a two-burner 

antique iron stove thing; and some piano innards. If that helps.

At this point, my view of life seemed blacker than ever and darkened more with the season's waning light. I wormed my way from room to room, picking up objects, whimpering, and putting them down again.  Tumbleweeds of fur from Wolsey the dog and Olive the cat grew as big as bison cadavers and rolled about audibly.  Dishes piled up in the sink and were quickly webbed over by tendrils of life forms evolving down in the bilge. With every cell of my heart I longed  to go back to the dear old inn that had been my home, and the memories of snow beating on the big old windows while I read before the fire, and of waking and looking out the bedroom window at the Storm King Mountain blue with early mist nearly killed me.  

I couldn't think of what to do until I remembered self-pity.  It is truthfully a too maligned indulgence. I had known for years that this was true, and so I felt no compunction. I plunged, and at once, my will to act vanished. Helplessness came like some sublime narcotic. I floated within the hot ache of it all.  I waited for pity to be applied to me by God.  

After a while, when this didn't happen, I started to feel silly. (I suppose that if I were even more narcissistic than I am, I could have dragged it out longer, but there you are.) I thought of how, in the greater scheme, the fact that my home for now is without a hint of architectural character or grace has less weight than a milkweed seed on the wind. It isn't the self pity itself, but the act of moving out of it, that rinses the mind clean and lets the mind's owner come back into herself.  I now saw the challenges instead of the lacks. I went out and bought lots of paint.

And now it's almost spring. The Spring Cure is starting at apartmenttherapy.com. I'm going to see what happens this time.