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Fresh threshold/geranium
I just had my two front porches painted a gorgeous red. I’d give you a photo, but the color on your computers would probably not match the creamy, dreamy richness of Benjamin Moore geranium in Low Lustre Moorgard (with a lifetime warranty!). When a friend of mine came over the other night, she noticed. She said something like, “How do you keep the porch so clean?” When I gave “new paint” as the answer, she asked me for information about the paint. That’s how great it looks and feels. Many–most?–porches in Tucson, when painted, are some version of terra cotta, and the color is often very faded, similar to the pale, muddy orange that my porches used to be. They had been painted long long ago, way before I lived here.
Every summer my father bought a bright red geranium for a planter on the back patio. Bright reds can be harsh, even in flowers. His choice was a mellow red–brilliant and comforting. Like the beauty that my front porches have become.
And depending on the time of day, geranium casts a warm pink reflection on the white walls of my home.
New color energizes the threshold. I and others enter and leave with a freshened spirit.
A simple day
Sometimes life is this simple–watering the plants, painting a gate and then the threshold of the front door, seeing things (seemingly) fall apart then come back together (all apparently of their own accord). Within less than 24 hours. With the bad mood that I tell other people I’m in, teasing myself out of it. With the underlying pleasure of taking things as they come rather than taking things to task.
Incandescence
Celebrities interest me very little, though lately I’ve been reading about the phenomenon of celebrity. Such as David Haven Blake’s Walt Whitman and the Culture of American Celebrity, from which the reader learns about the construction of fame in 19th-century America, and through that, facts about the foundation of today’s fame-as-the-manipulation-of-people, both the celebrity and the public. The worship of personality, the invasion of a so-called personality’s privacy, the publication of supposedly intimate details about celebrities’ lives, and the embodiment of greatness or talent in the celebrity body–nothing new. And all of it historically as now accompanied by–dependent upon?–frequent disinterest in and even ignorance of the artistic, intellectual, or other skills and talents that supposedly generated the “greatness” of the celebrity; and, more in line with the celebrity as star, skills and talents that presumably generated the celebrity’s brilliant luminosity.
At its absolute height, the star’s brightness is incandescence.
INCANDESCENCE. It describes Rita Hayworth in Gilda, which I watched again a couple weeks ago. Gilda is one of my favorite movies, and I can count them on one hand.
As a star and as an actress, Hayworth got Hollywood-ized up the wazoo. But it isn’t that she’s hot, it isn’t that she’s gorgeous. Here’s what she IS in Gilda: transporting. She transports me–deep within myself. There, and only there, I might learn to flame, glow, and sparkle mightily. She is an impetus towards radiance, and I am grateful to her self-creation in the midst of the film industry’s artifice.
Incandescence is a noun, so may seem static, but Hayworth’s incandescence within me operates as a verb. Incandescence is an idea about radiance, which is always in the making.
- November 18, 2009
- Filed under: Beauty, Body and mind, Bookshelf, art, and media, Pleasure
- Comments 3
Bettie Page Buddha
“Wouldn’t it be great to have a character party?” I asked my friends Frances and Harold. Characters being distinctively–and for the party–pleasurably unusual people. Of course, all of us were included.
Later, as Frances and I were walking to a neighborhood cafe for our weekly treat together, she suggested, “What about everyone wearing a costume?” A costume associated with a famous character. Read more
Habits
We think of everyone as having habits and we think of monks and nuns wearing them. We think of performers, whether in Shakespeare’s plays or in the circus, wearing costumes. Costumes indicate a role, or something other than what one really is, and a habit (presumably) indicates something that a person truly is, the monk and nun having chosen to serve the spirit every instant of their lives.
The habits of religious orders are distinctive. The clothing of monks and nuns declares them to be different from other workers, communities, and mini-cultures, who wear everyman and everywoman attire, like suits, or jeans and a T-shirt, or any of the wide array of casual or semi-dressy outfits that we see in the workplace and on the street. Of course, the iconic clothing of religious orders is long, flowing, and supremely simple, and that clothing is worn every day.
- November 11, 2009
- Filed under: Body and mind, My work, Pleasure
- Comments 0
Thank you
I’m so enjoying the responses to my posts. Thank you, everyone, for the following qualities that permeate what you write: enthusiasm, humor, friendliness, intelligence, introspection, close observation, curiosity, insight, and the tender honesty of vulnerability.
Golden skin
Line 8 of Sexual Advances reads:
I’m thinking of your goldenness
The first time I saw my lover naked, the color of his skin surprised me because it was so purely and creamily golden. Maybe the light, which was shining softly into his bedroom, warmed his skin tone. Maybe I’m still enwrapped–enrapt and wrapped up in–the romantic radiance of our initial lovemaking, and maybe that radiance colors my memories and present observations of him.
Of course, he is golden to me–his heart feels rich and enriches mine–as everyone we love is golden when we spontaneously fill the connection between that person and ourselves, and life in the process, with generosity and with first sight, which allows us to see what is truly in front of us. In Sexual Advances I see with first sight every time, in each of the 1,000 lines, and that liberates my vision from looking for what my lover should be in the future or wasn’t in the past, from problems that fear, running rampant, or just walking along at a steady pace, creates out of speculation, obsession, and impatience. Fear turns gold to mud.
- November 2, 2009
- Filed under: Beauty, Love, Men and women, Pleasure
- Comments 1
Charles Alexander’s “Pushing Water 52″
Charles Alexander’s poem “Pushing Water 52″ is gorgeous. Over and over as I read it, I pause, my mind empties of distractions. The lines take me way within myself and so far into the world that nothing at all is worrisome and gathering beauty is as easy as giving it away.
When I heard him read the poem, 1 phrase in particular held me for days and still does. I say held, because I couldn’t let it go, yet I’m letting it free me, like a loved one’s spacious embrace, from fear of stasis and endings: “a stop is an invitation.” Stop as a gentle measure. Stop as an opening to pleasure, for we generally extend invitations to happenings that pleasurably engage or sometimes enlighten us, such as celebrations, cultural events, and quiet dinners. Hearing Charles speak the phrase, I thought of how a period at the end of a sentence invites another sentence, of how the quiet after someone has spoken invites another person to speak or invites both parties into loving silence or invites an action, and mostly of this: when we stop an action or a series of actions, we invite others to act, to feel, to relax. Stop, as an invitation, is itself a generous act.
“Pushing Water 52″ is part of Pushing Water, which is a long sequence to be published in Charles’s next book–he says that may be a year and a half away. The poem will also appear in an anthology of contemporary American poetry which is a special issue of the Duke University Press journal boundary 2.
Besides being a poet, Charles is the director and founder of Chax Press, which, as its website, chax.org, states, publishes poetry that is “experimental” and “humanist.” See the website and also chax.org/blog.
- October 25, 2009
- Filed under: Bookshelf, art, and media, Pleasure
- Comments 2
Actress
In 2004, after a performance of Ambrosia (see my book Clairvoyance for the text and Canadian venue), a compliment from an audience member struck me so profoundly that it initiated an expanded self-terminology. I’ve called myself a performance artist for many years, and because of her comment, I’ve added actress, knowing that actor is the currently preferred term by and for women who act. (Although the November issue of American Vogue calls several prominent women who act actresses.)
The audience member said, “You’re different–talking with you–than you are onstage.” I laughed and agreed, and asked her to articulate the difference. “Onstage you’re so seductive and ethereal.” I surprised myself by responding, “If I were that way all the time, nobody would talk to me! As it is, almost no one talks to me after a performance!” Then she said, “It’s the actress.”
Intimacy and art
An artwork can be an intimate object. It’s a matter of the relationship between the observer and the object. Response, even responsiveness, may be more precise and profound than relationship. For me, pleasure is the ground of responsiveness. In light of that, I’m astoundingly responsive to Caravaggio and Rossetti. Sometimes my own responsiveness, my own intimacy with them/their art surprises me. I want to be closer closer closer . . . They bring me into intimacy with myself, soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-body. The feeling of being in love, not in a horridly romantic obsessive way, but in a light and fascinated way that propels you to want to know, see, and create the best and most beautiful you can be, is the intimacy I feel with Rossetti’s and Caravaggio’s art.
It would seem that materials used by an artist could create greater or lesser intimacy. In an abstract way, embroidery can be seen as more intimate than oil painting, and perhaps experienced as such, because of its (feminine) history and the process itself of embroidering. However, is oil paint, despite its high art history, in and of itself any less intimate or erotic than thread? Is painting in oils any less about touch than is embroidering?
When I think about the effects that many Rossetti and Caravaggio paintings have on me, I know that a complex of intimacies is playing with me. The intimacies are emotional, sensual, psychic, and to a lesser extent intellectual. Their gentle and dynamic reach into my very self inspires and excites me.
