Verdigris

Our cat died; our home has become overrun with mice.  The cat was 18 and frail.  She spent most of the day sleeping on a desk under the warmth of a Luxo lamp like an unhatched egg.  There were no mice in the house for the 18 years over which she presided.  Her rule was absolute.

One day I looked up suddenly to notice a ground-hog cautiously perched on a bolder-of-sorts 100 yards into the woods, surveying the prospects for a permanent home.  And simultaneously I heard my husband open the front door in response to Bellissima’s request to go out.  It’s uncertain that her weight exceeded that of the ground-hog but her presence blazed as immense and ferocious as an angel from the Apocalypse.  She proceeded directly to the poor animal who retired in shame.  The cat ruled with an iron paw.

Our cat has been dead for 2 months at most.  And one morning at 5 am while making coffee I saw a mouse emerge from under the stove at the same time that a scream emerged from my body quite independently of consciousness. Since then there has been mice scat in drawers.  I clean them religiously and then am annoyed to find more.

One day as I drove from the middle of town I was shocked by the site of a mouse desperately clinging to my wind-shield.  Bellissima is likely behind all of this.  Lovingly I would chide her for leaving cat fur on our rugs or complain about her bone shaking cries in the middle of the night as dementia took hold.  She was not amused. Bellissima sent these mice as a demonstration of her wrath and power.

None of this has anything to do with verdigris but I needed to confess to Bellissima that I had greatly underestimated her role.  I am deeply sorry.

Verdigris is perhaps my favorite color.  In the spring – as it is now in the Concord woods – our home appears to float in a verdigris sea.  One might say it is a verdigris miasma – although a miasma of a positive sort.  There is no differentiation between the sea of grass around the barn and the sea of leaves that rises above it.  The peepers in the early morning and late at night play verdigris and it is absorbed by the moss and wild strawberries which blaze as ferociously as Bellissima.

I dedicate my art and my movies to green-ness invoking Federico Garcia Lorca’s poem:

Green, how I want you green.

Green wind. Green branches.

The ship out on the sea

and the horse on the mountain.

With the shade around her waist

she dreams on her balcony,

green flesh, her hair green,

with eyes of cold silver.

Green, how I want you green.

Under the gypsy moon,

all things are watching her

and she cannot see them.

The color transcends light although I call it a color. But I am a victim of my eyes and that is how I experience it.   However, my  hope is that all of us, Bellissima, our dear hounds and dogs, my beloved family, the ground-hog and, yes,  the mice, will eventually reunite at the great table in the great hall that floats above this universe.

And that great table will be resplendent in verdigris ultimately revealing its true nature.

Pomegranate

Wondering if our roof might collapse. Tracey says “the ledeen’s didn’t clear their roof.”. The ledeen’s are saying “the Zellmann-rohrers didn’t clear their roof.”.

Meanwhile my fire is heating the chimney bricks. The bricks are art of the highest order; complex surfaces, infinite shades of russet.

I am mightily proud of my fire. $2,500 of Maine wood-working school did not equip me with the ability to produce hand cut dove tails. No matter. I learned the cellular structure of wood. Laying the wood vertically encourages flames upwards. I am my father’s daughter. He was a combustion engineer. I am a combustion engineer.

The pomegranate walls were definitely my idea. First it was fresh pomegranate juice in the bazaar in Istanbul. Then it was the dangerous pomegranate walls of the Venetian towers listing towards the canal. And of course the bricks which signal pomegranate though of a baser kind.

Now we have pomegranate walls. When the roof collapses they will blaze against the snow.

Softening

17 inches of snow this week.  The rock piles are soft white curves; nothing is angular. Skiing across Harwood meadow, the snow line is heartbreakingly stark against bright blue sky.  I ski this 3 times just to try and understand this contradiction:  the snow softens everything, the snow delineates everything.  5 cups of coffee on Sunday morning.  60 minutes of writing gmail to-do lists.  The dogs have each found a sun spot and are dozing as soundly as I am intense.  Same thing: Sunday softens. Sunday sharpens.

 

Molecular Animation

NYT.com featured an article on the phenomenal Maya-based medical animation work at Harvard Medical School and their newest production, Animating Mitochondria.  This data visualization makes me giddy; beautiful and revealing.  Having studied biology in high school, at Harvard Extension and recently as my daughter’s tutor, I am delighted to see the excruciatingly taxonomied descriptions and diagrams made tangible and knowable.

As an engineer I want to know things work. As a visual artist, I am transfixed by the rendered shapes.  I so love this and wish that I could create this experience for sub-atomic particles. For string theory even.  This is what I want to do.

 

incertae sedis

“When in a tilt-a-whirl, it is often difficult to know the best direction in which to lean,” SZR.  If you hit it right the car spins faster and faster until breath fails.  That spin is a kind of nirvana and when part of it I laugh harder and harder until the moment when breathing is impossible.  Not clear to me why spinning produces eurphoria.  Perhaps the centripetal force wrangles brain waves into a higher state.  Maybe.  The point here is that time is short. The ride lasts maybe 8 minutes and the goal is to maximize the state of resonant spinning within the 8 minutes.  It’s a negotiation.  Best to have 3 people in a car.  The guys on the side are often the ones who make the leaning decision.  Sometimes both try and cancel each other.  Sometimes leaning in the same direction that produced the previous spin fizzles.  Indecision sets in while the precious minutes tick by.  Incertae sedis is really different than this; more about where an orphaned category or species links to another.  But it feels the same.  The three people in a little car, uncertain about how or where to link to the changing force vectors that either stall or magnify a desired state.

My state is exactly incertae sedis.  I know what will spin means (making movies, understanding how things work, oriental rugs, serendipity in travel, wine, horses, my dear dear family)  but continue to search for the right forces to get me there.   Curious, unanticipated events push me:  Hearing Isabel’s delight in identifying the age of the earth (4.3 B) and the size of the riding team (12) and that Dirty O’s has a new name (Big O).  Running when it is 60 F rather than 80 F.  Sealing slate floors so that they shine like the slabs under a vernal falls.  Almost enough to connect but not quite.

My first husband wrote a play in which a character said “My wife is always getting ready.”  That was 30+ years ago. I was that wife and I didn’t realize the degree to which I obsessed about readiness.  But what he interpreted as ‘getting ready’ was really my search for forces that would deliver resonant spin.  Not knowing which way to learn.  Who to listen to.  I think that in the 2nd half of life, those forces are easier to perceive.  Those forces can be self produced.  The rain has just begun in the blue-hour of an autumn evening.  The number of drops increases until the sound is a constant.

Complications.

Last night I, after badly bruising my little toe and running on it for 60 minutes, I was unable to do anything but hobble.  I chose to hobble around Harvard Square which is coming to life after the summer school students have decamped.  Here is why the Harvard Coop is the nexus of the world:

• Free wifi iPad juice
• Abundant and well-worn Harvard chairs
• A cafe conveniently located next to the semi-internationalized magazine rack:  Tattler, Vouge Francais, W
• The idea mart: a central artery of best new books on science, economics, Byzantine art, data visualization, travel  [the essentials] with Coop employees anxious to recommend
• All the DK travel books you could ever, ever, ever want.

I meant to huddle there and begin to write the first of ‘three-things-that-work’ for this space.  And I did begin that list but I was distracted by Atul Gawande’s “Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science” which I could not put down.  A McArthur fellow and surgeon at Beth Israel, his writing was captivating and moving.  I now understand how Jeep Pierce made the practice of anesthesiology as safe as it is today .  And how a Harvard Business School study on efficacy of surgical teams uncovered the importance of having a well-functioning team – which trumped the singular competency of the chief surgeon.

My daughter, at 7 months,  underwent a 12 hour surgery to save her from a golf-ball sized abscess in her frontal lobes.  I will never forget the brain surgeon called in on that Sunday morning; half of the two surgical teams that worked on Isabel throughout the day.  He came for her as we held Isabel in our arms.  And he took Isabel into his arms after a long moment and after he told us that he had children too.  It was not clear that we would see her alive again.  That reverence of that moment came back to me as I read Atul’s book.

His clear-eyed view of the fallibility of doctors inexorably joined with the brilliance that can come from a trained surgeon is a strong theme.  The loneliness of this profession was revealed to me by his writing.  It’s Friday and the beginnings of ‘three-things-that-do-work’ are stirring.

5 That Don’t but 3 That Do.

Many months ago I started a blog called “Living With Isabel”.  It began with “The First Thing That Doesn’t Work” reprinted below:

Being Isabel

You cannot become your daughter. You can’t decide that you will become her damaged right lobe and you will direct her actions and schedule like a puppet. You cannot animate her spirit. She will not absorb what you want her to absorb and rise up out of disarray.

When she is not in line of sight she will be as she will be.

The practice of modeling the behavior you want her to emulate is illusionary. It teaches me but not her. It gives the seductive sense of control and betterment when none exists.

Writing her homework, coloring her pictures, cutting our her cards, doing her art projects to give her a vision of what can be done. These are bankrupt strategies that only send these messages:

1. I, Isabel, cannot do this on my own.
2. Someone will always do for me so I do not need to
3. My mother inhabits a different reality in which I am insufficient to participate so I am gone away.

The motive force behind that blog was re-channeled into a video about her.  In riding students search for feelages; a complex kinetic ‘gestalt’ that is impossible to offer through words.  I’ve found 5 ‘feelages’ that I can only offer through words.  These feelages are about what I think has been helpful to Isabel, perhaps what works.  So over the next 5 days I am posting those five.  Preparation for documenting the first is the focus of my visit to Harvard Square tonight.

Heart.

This post is about sharing the work of someone I greatly admire.  No other agenda.  No big idea.

Bill Warner inspires me.  Avid – his non-linear video editing company – changed my life.  I started to make movies, and help non-professional-movie-makers to make movies, because of Avid.  All of this story-telling helped me to come to terms with the story of my own life.  At TEDxBoston, Bill Warner give an 11 minute presentation about the difference between creating products from the heart versus from the head.  Here is the video.  Bill’s transparency and willingness to be honest about his successes and failures filled and continues to fill  me with hope.  He is savvy and he is honest.  I am on a continual search for people who stimulate the best kind of creativity in others.  Bill is one of those great spirits.

Refreshing complexity.

While at TEDxBoston last month I met Cesar Hildalgo who has twin appointments at MIT Media Lab and the Center for International Development at Harvard. His TED Lecture is here.  His avowed interest is in economics, complexity and visualization of both.  was fascinated by his riff on International Development and simplifying what is a complicated model.  It’s much better to watch his video than for me to describe it.  Highly recommended.

Slate.

We live on rock.  There is rock in the name of our street.  The gas man laughed when we asked about installing service.  He said, “You have rock in the name of your street.  You don’t want us to tell you how much this will cost.”

I cultivate rock.  My brother is a geologist. He helped to map Mars.  Actually he is a limnologist as well; studying the inland water and alluvial fans.  Along with becoming an architect, physicist and/or astronaut I wanted to be a geologist. Rocks delight me.  If I spend more than 10 minutes on my land I am moving rocks into conical sculptures or creating fire pits.  This is an ancient drive that surfaces quickly with me.

It makes my husband nervous since he is afraid he will be recruited to help.  He and my daughter fade away when they see me outside. My son moved to Berkeley he said to pursue twin PhDs. He could have stayed at Harvard but the rock thing may have pushed him over the edge.

So on a walk through the large woods surrounding my home on the street with rock in the name, I came upon a scattering of slate by the side of a newly created trail.  I was as excited as finding a pile of gold.  Scooped up the pieces and put them in my pockets. Took them home and played with them while otherwise working.

There is a Tibetan shrine at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston that I’m drawn to.  It sits in a room with a Bodhisattva. Both are dark grey and supremely calming.  The shrine appears to be made of slate and is carved with entreatments and prayers.  And my large body of art often morphs into shrines: “The Cowboy’s Altar to the Goddess of Love” for example.

So my immediate desire is to take the slate and build an altar engraved with entreatments.  To what and to whom is always the interesting question; the need to create altars as a ceaseless searching and yearning.

Last night I watch Jill Tarter’s TED 2010 Prize speech.  Her emotional delivery was off-putting to me since I want astronomy and cosmology to be affectless.  She spoke of our common ancestry: stardust, hydrogen and it’s heavy progeny, evolved to the state where it inquires about itself.   So perhaps the lust for rocks is an ancient need to reconnect with my inner star matter.  A return trip to the trail was disappointing.  Digging under the ferns produced only dirt.  The slate could have dropped from the sky.  There was no more.