??????

Holy Crap!

I have a midden of folders I've dragged around after me for many decades. It fills (in true midden-style strata) a two-drawer, oak file cabinet. Eyes have not be laid on the contents for as long as it has existed.  Last night, I began to go through it, taking a half-foot high pile of folders and a mug of chocolate mint coffee to the living room sofa where I examined old pages, one by one.

I found the following, written by myself in the '90s while employed by a major pharmaceutical company as a scientific writer, of all things! The page, ripped from a spiral notebook, seems to be a scrap of an initial draft, much crossed out and scribbled over:

Buprenorphine: Covariate Model Study

I. Introduction

Buprenorphine is a semi-synthetic, lipophilic, mixed agonist/antagonist opiode of the oripavine series. In vivo, it ranges from 10- to 100-fold more potent than morphine. It is an FDA approved drug with a known safety profile in both animals and humans.

Three Phase-1 clinical studies were conducted to further identify and assess Buprenorphine safety and efficacy potentials. Based on data derived from these studies, mathematical covariate models were generated: the final model (Run 05XX) was selected both for the concision of its match to the three study results and for the degree to which it excluded the generation of findings in spurious and irrelevant domains.

The objectives of this covariate model study were: 

• To isolate the compartmental pharmacokinetic model most accurately describing the plasma concentration and time profile of Buprenorphine after single and multiple dosing via intravenous and transdermal routes of administration;

• To apply data from the three Phase-! study screenings of covariant effects on the pharmacokinetic transdermal absorption parameters;

• And finally, to project plasma concentration time curves after a variety of dosing scenarios, using the established pharmacokinetic model as the predictive instrument.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

The energy, precision and zeal of this work--both the writing and the collaboration with all the chemists conducting the research--came back into mind like a thunderclap. (Adjunct recollections included my having known in depth what I wrote about!) I sipped my mint chocolate coffee and admired my mind. A bittersweet activity, to be sure, as my mind now hums along at a simian level. . . .

(In the snapshot, the dirt under my fingernails is from having just planted some sugar snap peas in the garden.)

I love the look of a written draft copiously revised; the workings of the mind made visible. . . .

In the files on my lap I also found a critical paper on T. S. Eliot's "East Coker" on which my beloved Barnard Professor Eleanor Tilton wrote: "Very interesting. Discuss in class."  I seem to have argued that despite Eliot's principle of the objective correlative, he commits T. E. Hulme's error of trying to make poetry compete with religion and ends up conveying mystical states through personal conviction.  Wow, I really got into it, too. 

I speak not out of vanity, but with an amazement at a lost capacity to think. Ou sont les neiges d'antant? 

Eva's Fireplace

Well, I was looking for a photograph showing how the bricks were ghosted with a thin latex wash, but the only one I could find makes the bricks look solidly painted--although they're not. It must have been the light. . . .  (That's Eva the boar holding a handmade birding arrow.)

Addendum to previous post:

Michiko Kakutani writes in the NYT of the role literature has played in Obama's thinking

  www.nytimes.com/2009/01/19readhtml?hp.  

wherein she iterates what I've been trying to say, but more specifically related to his reading. I especially note this passage:

"Mr.Obama . . . has tended to look to non-ideological histories and philosophical works that address complex problems without any easy solutions, like Reinhold Niebuhr's writings, which emphasize the ambivalent nature of human beings and the dangers of willful innocence and infallibility."  This is what I meant about breadth of thinking and the willingness to embrace ambiguity. . . . 

aqUYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

This is the title Olive the cat created for this post by settling her furry bum on the warm keyboard (it's 5 degrees outside, and the chill seems to creep inside in spirit, if not in fact). The little sweetheart has spared me the effort of dreaming up an alternative for these musings about Obama, who will be inaugurated in three days.  

(Here her attention 

has been deflected to pawing cream out of a pitcher beside the computer:)

I want to talk about the interstices of personal and national states of spirit, how they effect each other without our being aware.  Henry James once observed that "a novel is a novel as a pudding is a pudding, and . . . our only business with it could be to swallow it:" The meanings I take from this for the nonce are (a) that the blend of novelistic elements should be so homogeneous, so inevitable, that they draw no attention to themselves per se,and (b) as in the novel, so in life.  Our own psychological states and that of the nation are generally so commingled that we swallow them whole and don't even think to tease them out. (Like, if you forget yourself and drink orange juice right after brushing your teeth, you don't think toothpaste + orange juice = bad, you just shudder.)

It so happens that over the last eight years, my personal gloom and that of the nation were such a pudding.  It's name was Anomie.  I've felt alienated and purposeless whenever I've thought about this country's condition.  I think that my personal obstacles would have felt far less daunting if the national scene were bracing me up, and I have a sneaking suspicion I've not been alone in this. . . . (I mean, sure, there have been the happy ones all along, but they're another story.)

All this to come to the present, and a look at the optimism that I find myself sharing with the rest of the country.  (A political ignoramus, I state up front that I'm not dealing with a sophisticated political data bank, but rather with [my own] intuitions.)

I've found my pre election cynicism and loathing of all candidates and media displaced by a growing appreciation of the President Elect. Specifically, of his intellect. I like the way he seems to entertain polarities of thought within a mentality free of Procrustean mutilations of same. His choices of Cabinet members and inaugural speakers (as well as the list of his prior associations)--appalling to so many--suggest to me a breadth of intellectual engagement.

[Somewhere, during the campaigns, I saw a black and white photo of a surly Obama, clad in black leather jacket and slouching outside his NYC digs when he was at Columbia, but now I can't find it to insert here.]

It is as if Obama's thinking operates within one of Vonnegut's chronosynclastic infundibula, those loci within the cosmos where all truths coexist.  

And here I am, feeling a fellow breadth of possibility because there's so much that's not being edited out.  It's a kind of peace, in and of itself, for the mind. It's kind of a freedom--a permission--for the lions and the lambs of thought to lie down together while they're all considered dispassionately.

I am happy and hopeful because this seems true to me now.  I, too, as I assume for Obama, was initiated into this freedom of intellect at Columbia (and, first, Barnard, for me).  I also learned how this realm demands more of the thinker within it than any biased position ever does, be it political, theological, ideological, or whatever else. I, in my putterings about, am no less lazy in meeting intellectual demands than I need be. But Obama now has the screws on him tighter than anyone else on the planet. The question arises whether he'll find the intellectual strength to be true to his intellect--in addition to the political strength to defend it.

Maybe this time and place just days before the Inauguration is a brief hiatus wherein I can think optimistically, as I describe here. Perhaps I delude myself.  Has my general political ignorance left a gap that admits soft thoughts?  My daughter K emails me that Obama "prevaricates, discusses, weighs, circumbilivaginates (if I may quote my old pal Rabelais), but he does not have any gut-felt morals or convictions, and those are what it takes to lead." Perhaps my daughter is right, and I simply succumb to wishful thinking. But perhaps not.  No, come to think of it, both. Mustn't forget the infundibula. . . .

Can Spiders Think outside the Box?

. . . Very silly rhetorical question, that.  Spider sentience and human cognition could only be cognates in a first class Vonnegutian chronosynclastic infundibulum.  Yet this funnel spider's web suspended upside down in space makes thoughts of thinking, and of boxes to be outside of, just too easy.

Here, gratis one Vinay Nihalani (sinlessphotography.blogspot.com/2007/12/funnel-spider.html), is the lovely portrait of a normal funnel spider posing in the mouth of her normal funnel web: 

The tunnel plunges deep into the dark, where the spider can lurk in wait for her prey.  

Ergo, how not to wonder, knee-jerkily, what the author of the aerial web in my garden this morning was thinking? Is it better to ask what cosmic imperative it followed through the night?  

Other possibilities:

The spider

• is the offspring of a funnel spider and an orb-web-spinning spider and suffers some fatal genetics-based confusion;

•  suffers from anomie;

• is mordantly witty;

• knows something the rest of us don't.
  

Promeris Catastrophe

Anyone who has a dog hates this expression of bewildered misery on its face.  Well, the wee Wolsey certainly wore it for several hours the other evening.  I didn't look in the mirror, but I expect that I had it, too.  It all started, I suppose, when the young vet who took over our beloved old vet's practice switched from prescribing Front Line to prescribing Promeris for his flea- and tick-prone clientele. 

In a rare instance of foresight, I had gotten both Wolsey and Olive their 6-month supplies a month before we ran out of their Front Line. And last night, as Wolsey and I sat on the couch watching a movie, I squirted a dose of Promeris onto his neck. Soon, a terrible chemical smell began to bloom in the air. It was reminiscent of a blend of industrial oil and acetone, and it kept getting worse and worse until my eyes were watering and my nose was dripping. Meanwhile, Wolsey adopted the look illustrated above. The episode was rather panic-inducing, to tell the truth. I grabbed a towel, wetted it, poured on a bit of Tide, and scrubbed Wolsey's neck down as if our lives depended on it. Then the poor fellow jumped to the floor and vomited. I didn't barf, but for about 48 hours I felt quite nauseated and had no appetite at all. 

The day after the fateful application, I googled and learned that others have suffered the same phenomena after an application of Promeris.  Just as interesting was the discovery that the majority of users did not. What's with that?  Does Promeris fall in the same category as soapy-tasting cilantro and asparagus pee? Is it anathema only to a subgroup of dogs and people?

I really need to know more about this. And as soon as my temper moderates a bit, I'm taking the $200-plus Promeris supply back to the vet, asking a lot of penetrating questions, and getting my money back!

Wolsey & Olive

Apartment Therapy's having Pet Month, so I decided to celebrate by putting up some pictures of Wolsey and Olive.

I've had The Wee Olive for 17 years, from the time she was a kitten that fit in a teacup.  Her mother was feral, skin and bones, but she kept her kittens spotlessly clean. (A few days after I managed to catch kitten Olive, I saw the poor mother's body by the road.)

Here is a portrait of the grown up Olive:

Very Marlene Deitrich, but here is a picture of her that best captures her disposition:

In short, she's insane. She will be purring on your lap and suddenly stop the music. If you look down, you see that her eyes are pools of insanity. If you move, you can end up in the ER, getting stitches.

And here is a picture of her lurking in the plants at the kitchen window, glaring at a fuzzy thing in a crate--Wolsey, when I first brought him home.  The next picture is of Wolsey himself, asleep in the crate, exhausted from the excitement of moving.

He was seven years old when I got him, but bringing home Wolsey in some ways resembled bringing home one's first baby. I sat and watched him while he slept. I handled him like fragile antique glass. It took us awhile to get to know each other.  But when we did:

And here is my all time favorite of Wolsey. I've included it here before, but one can't get too much of it:

In his first days with me, Wolsey had a wee accident on the kitchen floor. When I came in the kitchen and found it and him, here was his demeanor:

But why? He had never been in a kitchen before, much less made a poo in one!  I wish I understood the poor laddy's hard wiring. . . .

What It Is

A flaw magnet, it turns out, is a natural (as opposed to manufactured) magnet containing a geological flaw that causes the magnet to convert its magnetic field into light.  

When used, say, in the construction of an architectural frieze, the crystaline structure of flaw magnets creates a geometric pattern of light.

I will try to find a picture.

Flaw Magnet

On my birthday, my friend R appeared, well tooled and further armed with secret initiative. (And the double entendre there is for him.)  He disappeared into my garden, and the circular saw and the hammer sang out all day.

Sometime prior to the birthday, R had perceived that the rooftop planting beds on the straw hut were ready to collapse and crush any occupant's skull like a hen's egg. So he built in some structural integrity. (Is that like writing poetry and then going back and putting in the symbolism?) Simultaneously, he converted my intended Purity of Materials look to his own signature Appalachian Gothic style. Which is about as diametrically opposed to my intention as you can oppose anything diametrically.  You would thing I'd be pissed off, no?  Well, no. Instead, I am (a) hugely relieved, and (b) enchanted and happy.

All of which has nothing obvious to do with the titular Flaw Magnet  of this post. That is because the subject of flaw magnets is very complicated. Later today, pictures of R's Appalachian Gothic effect will appear here, along with discussion of Flaw Magnets. (Hint: the designation has nothing to do with magnets that would detect flaws, and everything to do with  magnets that have flaws resulting in beautiful optical effects.)

It's My Birthday

It's official, and I can produce my [creased, yellowed, faded] birth certificate as Exhibit One--I am 70 today, and I commence my 71st year.

On my birthday the first year I lived here, I spied in the woods an old tree stump with the sunlight picking it out of the shadows: 

I went to look closer, and here's what I saw:

And a few weeks later:

Fire in the Morning

<>

As I do every morning, I sit on the bench in the garden and drink my coffee and smoke a fag. I look around me; the garden, at this point of spring, is an unholy mess: seeding flats everywhere; empty plastic flowerpots everywhere; lumber everywhere; the fire bowl heaped with cleared out branches and bits of lumber. 

The fire bowl, I decide, holds the detritus that's making the whole garden a mess, so I light the fire.

The yard, the garden, the bench, the disarray, the fire

The fire. It's gold, and the lavender morning light together, priceless.

When this beautiful fire dies down, the garden's still a mess, but I care much less. I get my trowel to plant the cosmos and morning glories my friend R gave to me yesterday.

Leek

I have grown them in flats. 

I have lain on the ground and tweezed the tiny seeds from a dish to the earth. 

I have danced frenzied fandangos over their patch of ground, sprinkling the seeds from a sieve waved high in the air.

Yet I have never even once enjoyed a crop of stout, hearty leeks, their succulent white bulbs crowned with the frosty blue sword blades.

Here is a mighty leek fresh from its seedling tray this morning:

As well, I transplanted a handful of these to the garden about a month ago, and they look just the same: single shafts of faerie hair.

Surfeits Rock

M. lives down the hill from us, in an old gray Victorian house. In all M. does, he has the unswerving drive of the stock, tunnel-visioned character in a farce. He applies this drive to the maintenance and improvement of many properties in the neighborhood. Most famously, when retained to remove one side of a forked trunk from a tree that shaded my garden for many hours each day, he pressed on and cut down the two largest trees on the property. (This precipitated family blood baths and sieges of terror, but that's another story.)

This week I commissioned him to go with me to [the loathed] Home Depot to buy dirt, manure, and peat moss for the afore-discussed straw house's roof beds. We set out in his giant new Ford truck, but before we'd left the driveway, he told me he knows where to get compost cheaper.

When he came back, his truck was filled with enough compost for all the gardens at Versailles. It was black, and hot, and steam gushed from it and up into the sky. He filled the roof beds:

And then he distributed big mounds of it around the garden.  I don't know why they look so small in the picture below, because they are very large.

When I felt we'd exceeded the point of overkill, I slyly told him to give the rest to my neighbor, S. He said he was actually on his way over to her house, because--inscrutably-- "she wants me to put a door in a tree."  And off he went.

Sweet Pea Ploy

The seeds wrapped in dirt, paper towl, plastic, and, finally, ice

In the four years I've lived here, I've planted sweet peas every spring. Not a seed has sprouted. I plant them nice and early because they love to germinate in the frosty earth. I've tried everything except playing violin sonatas for them as they brood upon themselves underground, but nothing.  This year their obduracy finally pissed me off enough to take them on big time. And I've won!

OK, so they want it cold?  I soaked the littled bastards overnight in a cupful of water in the refrigerator. I took a sheet of paper towel and put a tasty rill of potting soil down the center of it. I sprinkled a line of seeds down the rill and rolled up the towel so they were swaddled in a sausage of soil, sealed it up in a plastic bag, and put the whole thing into a gratinee dish, where I piled on a couple of trays of ice cubes. For a week I've changed the ice cubes often, and today I allowed myself a peek in the dirt. Ha! Several miniscule, pallid prongs have elbowed their way out of their casings!

I love the feelings of shifting gears into determination that leads to victory.

Mutable Fate

From the stars at my birth to my socioeconomic bracket, it was written that I would end up a cranky old lady, notably spindly of build and plump of stock coupons, who teetered about in red Converse high tops with the aid of a slender ebony cane, making the lives of others deliciously, endearingly miserable.

My center of operations would be a mossy and moldering Arts and Crafts mansion, like this one in Rockland County, designed, hand built, and lived in by Henry Varnum Poor [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Varnum_Poor]:

The main house

The art studio in the main house

The potter's shed

Corner of the kitchen

Instead, I am living in a raised ranch basement apartment. 

. . . And, to make matters worse, This outrage to my socio-aesthetic sensibility is contaminated by the fact that I'm happy here. Hence the natural segue to issues of entitlement, bitterness, rage, and depression is ruptured.  Furthermore, I no longer suffer any of them (all so very much very often), so our visit to this terrain is over.

It's bracing to grow up.  At any age.

(As if it suffuses my genes, though, there remains a part of me that wholeheartedly knows I crave my own house--my own terraine, my own timbers--a mossy old house where the rooms are suffused with the scent of wood smoke;where at night the peacocks and peahens shriek on the roof; where the chickens peck and cluck around the door; where the canes of the bamboo grove clack in the wind; where border collies follow me about the property and snooze at my feet while I write. (Along with my actual present fellow, Wolsey the Cairn.))

So what has this to do with mutable fate.  Well, three years ago, when I was still getting my garden here into some fundamental order, I piled seven bails of straw into a little alcove behind the bean vines. My hands and coordinate body parts did it. It wasn't clear to me why, really, so I decided to dub it my meditation nook. I did, in fact, meditate in it twice, and it was good. I especially liked it as a place to get out of the hot sun and hide. 

The thing of straw

 (from the outside, bean vines climbing it)

I decided sometime this winter that the nook occupied a patch of garden that would serve well as a part of the garden, as it receives a lot of sunshine.  This spring I piled on eight more bails and bought lumber to make a green roof to set atop it all.  I've lined pocket beds of the roof with chicken wire and that black, unwoven cloth you use to suppress weeds. I've so far filled one corner of it with garden soil, vermiculite, and manure.  Now I'm taking a brief rest.  

Heirloom tomato plants, which are, after all, vines, will hang down from all around the edge of the roof. Leeks shall sprout up around the cupulla, or turret. Inside, the old bamboo love seat is already in place, for taking in an unsullied view of the woods. And for planning construction of the cob stove for baking bread, which will also warm the dear hovel in the winter. . . .

Mutable, mutable, mutable fate. 

Rocks: Quarry: Magma Pot

The greatest acts of creation can be the messiest. Look at birth.  I continue making rocks, and while they're not up there with birth or with God's rocks, they're pretty fine. The picture above is of my dedicated rock pot with another rock blurping like oatmeal in it. It used to be last Sunday's NYT Classified Section.   The pulp has excreted some oily red ink, and if I hadn't watched "Dexter" last night (for the first and last time), it probably wouldn't look quite so appalling to me. 

This batch is dedicated to the rock that will hold up the paraphernalia (pump, vessel, tubing, electrical wire) for the water that will trickle out of a verdigris covered-length of drainpipe and into a hidden basin with a sweet, echoing sound, like the water deep under a gutter grate that you hear late at night while you're walking your dog along a quiet street.  And all this in the ugly corner where the refrigerator used to be. . . .

[If you scroll down, you can see some pictures of the first rocks to get hot-glued to the wall.]

The Green Fuse?

 I await an explanation for the hardiness of my sedum and parsley (previous post) from some all-knowing botanist who---mirable dictu!---descends on my blog.  Meanwhile, as I rake in the garden, I'm thinking of a line from Dylan Thomas--"The force that through the green fuse drives the flower" (from the eponymous poem).  Maybe there's something particular about the living force of them that protects the sedum and parsley from freezing? 

This train of thought doesn't seem promising. I wish it were, because, wouldn't that be wonderful?

How?

I walked around the garden this morning to rev myself up and perhaps to start raking and burning. There was still a sparkle of frost on the dead sticks and leaves. Everything in sight was dead, except for:

and

The sedum cutting I stuck in the crack of an old stump two years ago is growing. The parsley that's frozen and thawed a hundred times over the winter is growing.  Neither the stump crack nor the few dead leaves are enough to insulate them from the frost. And if I picked them and put them into the freezer, they'd freeze and then thaw into mush.

How can this be, damnit?

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.