There is a trio of drama encircling me and Steve right now, each story exhausting on its own, and the three of them together feeling big enough that it’s hard not to think that it might not be caused by something like the moon.

though the two of us in our handmade boat are fine.

I am guessing that the triumvirate of drama is why I spent too long in my studio yesterday neurotically researching (is that the word? maybe just googling) autism — my mind, being proven that some of the worst is possible, sought more to worry about.  I am disappointed I couldn’t have been more productive. (Then Robert Irwin reminds me to push, but to live the questions. I am seeking a balance of determination and a gentler form of attention.)

Then outside in the night last night with the dogs, I felt that calm that only nature can give. I’ve heard of that calm, but I don’t think I’ve felt it as strongly as I did last night. Staring up at the stars, the trees towering over me, the world was fine despite me. And even if it hadn’t of been peaceful, even if there were a storm and trees were falling, it’s that indifference that nature offers. Sometimes that indifference makes me feel alone — why does nature always show me new beauty even when I’m clearly upset — but last night it didn’t have to be empathetic, it had to be bigger than me. I felt engulfed by it, in awe of the massive and completely mysterious night sky and every tree shadow of a tree. This wasn’t a moment of explosive awe, it was just quiet, sort of numb, settling me so that I could sleep.

August 14th, 2009 | Category: happening | Leave a comment

Walking into the dining room before I was pregnant did not cause the wine glasses to clink against one other. Walking into the dining room at one, two, three, and four months pregnant did not cause the wine glasses to clink against one other. Walking into the dining room at five months pregnant causes the wine glasses to clink against one other.

August 13th, 2009 | Category: house, the baby thing | Leave a comment

By now it’s apparent how deeply I’ve fallen for Lawrence Weschler’s Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: Over Thirty Years of Conversations with Robert Irwin. (Weschler’s name is more commonly associated with his Pulitzer Prize-winning Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders).

I had thought when I first picked up the book that it would be a series of formal interviews, but it’s nothing like that. Instead it feels like you’re in Irwin’s car right beside him, Weschler in the backseat, and you’re passing the California landscape and listening to Irwin talk, and Weschler’s holding Irwin’s words and directing them at the landscape, at his paintings, and drawing lines to the past and future. I confess that I didn’t know much at all about Robert Irwin before I read the book, and in some ways I still don’t care about him in particular. He asks me to look past him toward my own hopes and observations, to see the world again.

What the book does is it gives me permission. Again and again, the book here in my studio with me, it gives me permission to be here, doing whatever, regardless of whatever. Irwin lives the questions. He can spend a month staring at a line he painted on an otherwise blank canvas, staring at it, napping, staring at it, napping. And by the end of the year maybe he’s made five paintings, five lines, and maybe he doesn’t even care about them anymore, that’s not the point. Maybe that takes him to the desert for a few weeks, and maybe he returns with nothing but a new sense of light. He is pushing himself in ways that only he can see, trying to understand human perception. And by the end of his life he is even more in love with the world. At eighty years old, when the book closes, he can’t live long enough to celebrate in his own quiet way the power of human perception. How many can say that? Being beside him in the car, it’s huge and it’s also — strange word for an art book — comforting. In some ways he lives the life of a monk, secluded in his studio caring about questions that almost no one else can see, and he’s a good person — a good man. And he’s also normal. He loves Coca-cola.

I could quote from the book all year, but here’s one more beautiful passage that captures both Irwin’s energy and Weschler’s writing (p. 235):

If you spend any time with Irwin, you’re likely to notice that he has two quintessential gestures. He’ll be rolling along, expounding at length, and then, at a certain moment, he’ll bring his hand up, thumb and fingers bunched together, like a tulip, which he then proceeds to open out, in a blossoming — his whole face opening, his eyebrows riding up his broad forehead, a bemused grin spreading across his face. It’s an easy gesture of openness and release. You’ve got to keep your sense of humor, he may say; at a certain point, you’ve just got to let things go. The tulip opening. All I’m saying — ppfff, the tulip opening — is that the wonder is still there. Then, at other times, his entire being will seem to focus, to concentrate: his face will scrunch up, his eyes will narrow, he’ll seem to throw all his body weight behind his arm as it screws an imaginary anchor into an invisible massif before him — a gesture gritty with determination. In fact, sometimes he’ll even grunt — mmmff. I mean, either you’re going to do it or you’re not going to do it, and if you’re going to do it you’ve got to get in there and — mmmff — do it. You’ve got to take all that and somehow, man — mmmff — you’ve got to nail it. You really have to bite the bullet if you’re going to do philosophy; halfway doesn’t count for anything and there are no excuses. There are all sorts of excuses, and good ones, for not beating the shit out of yourself, but if you’re going to pursue certain lines of thought, take on certain tasks, well — mmmff — you’ve really got to make the commitment.
———————————
I talk about Irwin’s contradictions, and, in a sense, this is one of the core ones. Because here’s an artist who tries time and again to nail down beatitude. He wants to take all that bliss, all that serenity, all that wonder, and — damn it — he wants to batten it down. He wants to batten it down tight and then — ppfff, the tulip opening — to simply let it go.

August 12th, 2009 | Category: book | Leave a comment

I would buy all of the clothes at bonpoint. And also we would move to Europe.

August 12th, 2009 | Category: overheard | Leave a comment

from Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees by Lawrence Weschler, p. 236

Years ago, when Bob and I were reading philosophy together — as a way of getting to know each other, really — we stumbled upon the formulations of a late medieval neoplatonist theologian and philosopher, a mathematician known as Nicolas of Cusa (1401-1464). Nicolas has this wonderful way of talking aout the difference between logic and faith or, alternatively, between knowing and truth. Logic, he suggests, knowing, is like an n-sided polygon nested inside a circle. The more sides you add, the more complexities you introduce, the more the polygon approaches the circle which surrounds it. And yet, the farther away it gets as well. For the circle is but a single, seamless line, whereas your polygon seems to be breeding more and more lines, more and more angles, becoming less and less seamless. No matter how many sides you add, no matter how closely the inscribed polygon begins to approximate the circle, it never reaches the circle, and at a certain point a leap is required, from the tangent of the arc, from endlessly compounding multiplicity to singleness of being. Another name for that leap, of course, is grace.

August 11th, 2009 | Category: overheard | Leave a comment

August 11th, 2009 | Category: photograph | Leave a comment

August 11th, 2009 | Category: photograph | Leave a comment

It had been a difficult week before we left for our family vacation. Certain things with Rosie that tested my ability to parent too much. Matters that aren’t at core her fault — if our house could raise her singly, they wouldn’t have happened. And that makes it all the more difficult to know how to set limits for her, and to know how to balance feeling furious with also feeling helpless.

The week started off with tension. One minute I would be fine, and then I would remember and be flooded. And the week couldn’t have come at a better time — to distance her from negative influences, to connect her with the earth and a simpler life, to dust out her brain and heart. To help us see the true Rosie, which is brave and strong and empathetic, so caring and wise.

On the second-to-last day, she said she wanted to go for a swim. She had just watched Jack gnaw the meat off a chicken leg, and she put her chicken leg down in disgust. She was feeling pure. She had just been working on AP History homework that’s due on the first day of school. She was feeling proud.

She asked if she could swim from one side of the lake and back, which involves getting someone to row beside you so that all boaters can see you crossing lake traffic. It’s a long way, and Steve said he didn’t want to row right that minute — he had just spent hours at Lake Michigan in the sun, snorkeling with Jack. She asked if she could swim close to shore, then, and he said yes.

Then she asked if she could swim all the way around the lake. He said she couldn’t, that she wouldn’t be able to, it’s just such a terribly long way. This lake is big. Measuring it later, we came up with a guess of six miles around. Storm clouds were coming. The bottom is icky. There’s seaweed and rocks and sharp shells and other things that she usually squeals at.

She said that she bet she could. We couldn’t see the other side, we couldn’t hear anyone over there, we couldn’t see in and out of all the coves. He said he bet her $100. She started doing some gangsta dance she must have learned from a friend. It’s not that we didn’t think that she could swim around the lake, rather that we thought that no one could, certainly not a teenager, certainly not a teenager who had recently broken our hearts. He raised the stakes: $200. She had to hug the shore. She could wear flippers to protect her feet from the sharp bottom. She ran to put on her swimsuit.

Jack became intense. He ran around her like a puppy, chattering nonstop. He ran to get her a towel. He asked her if she’d like a drink of water because she’d be gone so long. He ran to get the binoculars so he could watch her, all the while cheering her on before she’d started, telling her that she could do it. He said he’d follow her, he’d try to follow her halfway.

Off she went, diving off the dock and pacing herself in a freestyle. Jack followed behind her, walking a few feet from the shore, screaming after her, I’m right here. Good job! I’m right here. She was quickly out of sight. We watched her from the shore.

When she was an eighth through, Steve took a boat out with Jack to meet her, just to make sure she was okay. She was going strong, he reported when he returned.

An hour later he took the boat out again, and he and Jack read and fished on the boat beside her to keep her company and to make sure that other boats weren’t getting near her. She kept swimming. She swam so long that they choked their engine and pushed their boat a quarter-way back home.

I was making cookies with the cherries that we’d picked the day before, quiet and alone in the house. Rosie is swimming. Right now and right now Rosie is swimming. She’s still swimming. I would tear up when I thought of it. After all we had been through for her, she was being braver than I felt I could be.

Four hours after she dove off the dock, she returned, hungry and in great spirits.

She said that she had wondered what it would be like when she came home like that, but she never dreamed that we’d all be waiting there at the edge of the dock, all of us cheering her name, all the difficult past back there in the water somewhere.

August 10th, 2009 | Category: happening | Comments (1)

August 10th, 2009 | Category: happening, photograph | Leave a comment