What!?: a muse on projection

This mid-July day is starting to cool. Time to do outdoor work. I am preparing my home for sale and there is so much to do that I can start anywhere. It won’t matter where. There is an entire estuary of sucking need, rampant growth and entropy around me. The time I spend on any one task will drain into the quicksand of numbered days and jobs beyond number. So I slow down; way, way down to "notice mode."

“Baby, Baby, Baby just talk to me. Where does it hurt?” I ask, showing the quiet, positive regard a mother might show her child, or a nurse a terminal patient. I am sitting in the front yard, peering under the hood of the little tractor trying to figure out what his reluctance to get up and get going is all about.

A cardinal, the cardinal, is checking his reflection in the side-view car mirror, hopping victoriously on top of it, bending over to look again, “Damn, still there,” I can hear him say as he flies down for another face-off. He’ll do this for hours. I wonder when he eats, fights with his wife, goes to the movies. This bird has no life.

 The ritual has been going on since mid-February and is only one of several ways he has been obsessing with interpretations of his own image, which he finds everywhere. They are the enemy. He protects his family from his image at my bedroom window, my office window, the car mirrors, car mirrors of all my guests and the sky lights in the living room ceiling. Five months now. 

I’m trying to learn something from this.

The oil in the tractor is perfectly clean. I changed it last week. Filters, air and fuel; all fresh. There’s Sea Foam in the gas to dry any water and keep the carburetor clean. I diagnose spark-plug crud and go in search of a socket wrench and new plug.

 On my way I see not the beautiful view, nor the simple handsome house, not the wild flowers: nothing but work that needs doing claims my eye. How have I managed this house and all this land for 30 years? More importantly, why? But I know why. The knowledge is like distant music, just slightly subliminal, repetitious, sung in a language I don’t speak.

I find a spark plug box in the sparkling clean, newly painted tool room but the box contains only a used spark-plug. Now why did I do that?

Yesterday that tractor and I had one of our near death experiences where I lost control on the edge of the hill and it began slipping sidewise. I got the blades turned off but the motor was still on and the transmission engaged when I jumped from the high side, again. Some things just don't bear repeating.

 In hindsight I see that the tires, wet from mowing over newly watered grass, just lost purchase on the hill rim. Thirty years of mowing this place and I had not encountered that particular scenario before. Who knew? I stood above watching it claw and crab its way to a lower altitude.

“Please don’t roll.  Please don’t roll.”

 It didn’t. We both got off lucky this time.

I’m tired. And I regret picking this particular job today. The cardinal woke me up, “tap-tap, tap-tap. tap-tap. . .” on the bedroom window before dawn.

I observed him and his two-tap message, accent on the second beat, over the rim of my coffee cup. Five months ago, against a late winter snow, he’d been glossy with birdie health. Since then he has double-pecked his own image in the glass a conservative three million times and he looks it. His beak is blunted, the handsome black accents around his eyes have taken on the sunken quality of a late life heroin user. And maybe, I’m projecting here, but I think his color is fading. The light in his eye has changed from a spark of life to the small empty bowls of the suicide bomber.

Don’t tell me I’m imagining this. I can hear you. Just look at the pictures. It’s obvious he’s homogenized his brain. How does he do it? And why?  But we know.

“Whit whit whit whit, birdie birdie, chew chew chew chew chew chew.” That’s his favorite refrain. There is no trusted translation and I will not assign them meaning, though I’ve had to de-fuse a few responsive verses of my own involving BB guns, you know, when he just goes on and on and on. It’s his message and he’s sticking to it.

It’s obvious I need to get out more. All I can think to write about is equipment and wildlife. I imagine myself at a gathering of friends, having exhausted the uses of positive regard and the listening skills I practice with the tractor, my turn to actually contribute something to the conversation, and I find myself standing straight of spine, fingers laced at chest level, doing a medley of bird song. How did I get here?

I got here the way the cardinal did. We were drawn by pretty much the same things. And I stayed, as he has, driven to finish what I started. You know you are done when you’ve made something beautiful enough, rich enough, to walk away from with a full heart. That feeling is the fuel that nourishes the  next work of art. It sounds like “Yes, yes, yes, yes,” and when you are full-up with yes, moving to a new work of art is just the thing to do.

“Just so, just so, just so,” I sing. “And that, and that, and that.”

I clean off the old spark plug, skinning my knuckles as usual putting it back in. My poor hands! I think about a manicure. Heels. I imagine a red dress. The tractor starts.

“Whit, whit, whit, whit . . .” I will wear this red dress on a date with a kind man. We will have a leisurely dinner. He will hug me. We will dance slowly, slowly, slow. I will rest that night. And then in the morning I will make something new, something really good. What, what, what what . . ?

That's What I Saw

It was night time. I was lying on the concrete floor, my nose six inches from the glass entrance. It was below freezing outside and it had been that way for weeks. The wild things were hungry and coming up on the porch in search of food. I’d been alone for days and days and I was beyond bored.

 

Six inches on his side of the glass a possum was nuzzling the cat’s dish. His sensitive flexible snout was searching out every leftover crumb. From my recumbent position I was keeping him company though he didn’t know it.

 

A day later, remembering all the details I wrote of his fat pink tapered fingers that seemed to be emerging from soft grey driving gloves; white understory fur with occasional long black hairs that waved in the cold gusts of wind. I thought those flexible hairs must give him a lot of information, almost like antennae.

 

I wrote about his darling ears; the thin curved pink hearts with grey arches above, really his finest feature. Tactfully, I did not to mention his tail.

 

I’d begun leaving a bit of extra food in the cats’ dish for him and any other creatures that might be in need.

 

This week, I saw a possum at the dish in full daylight. I got out the camera and zoomed in.

 

What a shock!

 

Only his hands were as I remembered them. His fur was not dense; the understory was black, not white, and it looked more like a bad perm on a balding head than fur. The longest hairs were white, not black. And the ears! The heart shapes I remembered so fondly were dark grey and only the tip above them was pink. Did I get it totally wrong or was this a mutant brother to the first one?

 

The camera has recorded the truth about what I am calling Possum #2. I’m still on the lookout for #1. I can’t believe he, she, exists nowhere but in my mind. She was darling.  But #2, well, you can see for yourself.

 

 

I know that humans are sloppy and clueless observers whose left brains fib constantly to fill in the gaps in memory. I know that the way we interpret what we see is a reflection of our needs our fears or our beliefs more than reality. But still, I don’t think I could have been that wrong.

 

 

 

Here’s an example of that from earlier in the week:

 

I heard a noise I could not identify. ‘It’s a hawk,’ I thought, ‘hunting,’ but I wasn’t sure. Outside the office window I could see Fluffmudgett turn her head sharply to the east and focus on something. I went to the front door, though I thought that by the time I got outside, whatever it was would be long gone. Still I was curious enough to be hopeful.  I heard it again as I emerged onto the porch and I could see Floyd, slinking in killer-stealth mode, directly east. Focused as a laser, he slipped beneath my car.

 

So, me, I looked up. I believed it was a hawk and was still believing as I scanned the empty cerulean biosphere. More clueless and blind than a possum, who can at least find food even if he fails to detect the human being 12 inches from his left ear, I was looking in the direction of my belief, not my evidence.

 

When I lowered my mystified gaze easterly to the edge of the hill 20 feet in front of me I found myself in a staring contest with a big red fox. The first thing I thought was, ‘Wow, mystery solved.’ The second was, ‘Good show, Floyd, you hot dog, but I know there’s no way you were thinking of taking on this bad boy. Confess! You’re under the car licking your tail.’ I did not, however, take my eyes off the fox. He was flame on snow. He was focused yet detached.

 

Apparently, like me, he needed a little time to process changed circumstance. He was thinking:

 

1.     No danger here. She’s looking for me in the sky.

2.     Damn! (His vision of breakfast disintegrating.)

3.     But I gave them my double bark warning! ‘Everybody off the porch.’ ‘Everybody off the porch NOW! Jeesch!’

 

That fox was laughing all the way down the driveway, shaking his head in amazement.

 

That’s what I saw. That’s what I think. That’s my story. The search is still on for Possum #1.

How Come?

Fluffmudget and Floyd share a little house I bought and positioned for them atop the heat pump. From there, I reason, they have a guard-tower view of the mousey side of the house thus discouraging any rodents intent on home invasion and saving those rodents from a more lingering death by De-Con. I’m compassionate that way.

Lately, however, Fluff’s taken to having her post-prandial nap with her back stuffed out the door of her house. The mice parade by unmolested. And I feel personally responsible.

                  

On January 10th it was very cold and still, there she was, chilling her winter coat in the rain. Why would she do that? Perhaps she was having a hot flash. She is 14 years old. That’s, what, 74 cat years?  Well, really!

But I can only make up stories about what I’m seeing. I can’t know. Fluff and I have a language gap and cognitive limitations. She’s smarter but I’m the one who tells our stories.

People make art in the absence of fact. We all do it. We also make nothing but art in the presence of facts. When we open our mouths, or pick up a tool, the only thing that CAN come out is art. From an incalculable array of limitations and partially understood events we select what we will bring forth. It’s always art. Even a Ph.D. thesis. Even the best designed scientific experiment. Even your daily ‘to do’ list. They are art and can never be anything else.

It’s all relative, it’s all subjective, it all fails as fact because it is not all the facts. And no matter what our intention, or where we are pointing our finger, it’s all always about us.

Could that cat be mooning me?

Well, okay, that story won’t fly. I am not that important to Fluff in this moment of time. Besides, she has much more effective ways of expressing disdain. I flash to her behavior yesterday where upon examining the contents of her breakfast bowl, no canned meat, she walked directly away from me with her tail held up like baton, like a curser, like an exclamation point.

I get it. I really think I do. Of course when my old lab, Dina, began surreptitiously burying her chow in the flower bed, mouthful by mouthful, hauling it slowly across the porch and shoving it into a hole she’d made,  I thought she was just sick-to-death of Purina when, in fact, she was just sick to death. I’m so sad remembering how casually I wondered about the dirt on her nose those last few months. Instead of investigation I just told myself stories. When she died I told myself other stories; like that she had just been too good-hearted to risk hurting my feelings with an untouched dinner.  Again, I don’t know. She was an extraordinarily prescient and kind dog. My point is that whether I had investigated or not I’d never have known the full story of Dina’s reality.

                       

I got the following inquiry from a reader a year ago: “Your blog is very self-revealing. How come?”  I responded to this person who so generously gave me feed-back.

I wrote, “That’s an excellent question. When I know the answer I’ll post it.”

It’s been a year since my last entry though I’ve lived with that question in the back of my mind as events have unfolded. Serious illness, the near loss of an adult child and a bio-hazard that left me homeless over five months have been distractions but still, all the while, I’ve been thinking about self-revelation and life commentary, art and story. I’ve been thinking about compassion and accountability.

It feels like love of life, this desire to use what I am, what I notice and what I can never know, to tell a story. It feels like the desire for communion with my tribe, wherever they are. It is an expression. It is human. I hope it is never hurtful. I aim for art.

As an untrained artist I made my living for 30 years. I never called myself an artist but others called me that.

You see things. You see a bit of how things are and you want to demonstrate your vision of the underlying connectedness that you sense. If you are being commissioned you usually have to incorporate what’s in your client’s head and wallet as well. Okay, that was a challenge. Maybe it was art, in its fashion, what I did.

The story teller or artist is at the center of what they see. It can not be otherwise. My ‘art;’ those thirty years, was fussy, tight, pretty and full of longing to be more than it was. The ‘more’ kept leaking out in little tributaries. It showed me where I needed to go.

It is in relationship that I have to look for my stories and it is in my stories that I look for clues about how to be a faithful and compassionate storyteller. That begins with my relationship with myself but it is about everything. I hope it is not too fussy, tight and pretty. I’m aiming for something closer to compost and the kind of energy you find there.

The practice of relationship or story is only as effective as it is honest. Never honest enough we plug on with our limitations and that leaves all our stories and relationships full of mystery and error. Yet still, through those practices we are enhanced. We find that we are not exactly alone. Both less and more special than we thought.

Everyone I’ve ever loved, I’ve loved for their struggles, not their perfection. And I’ve been pretty up-front about my own struggles and lack of perfection. I see no reason to stop now.

Let there be no unseemly displays. Let there by no unkindness. But light, we need light. The concepts of home, communion and simplicity continue to come up for me and are difficult to explore. The way toward veracity is not as the crow flies and I don’t see how to do it at all without transparency. The inherent risk in first person story is that it will come back to hit us in the face with a scary value added; more revelation than we intended. But putting it out there is how we get to better art. It’s how we get to being a better person.

Love much. Create. Give the world a lot to forgive you for. Things we make secretly and in the dark may be unforgiveable, they won’t accrue interest and they may stink. Jesus said it all the time. "Don't hide your light under a bushel unless you're stalking your dinner."  (from the Fluff Edition of the New Testament. Matthew 5:15)  Stir the compost. Give it light and air. Something good will grow.

So I show the wart. Wrestle with how it fits the whole gorgeous horrifying picture. Fail without shame.  If the mark is missed, recalibrate, get better lighting, take another shot. Don’t look back. Always be looking for a better way of making it happen but do make it happen.

                   

      “Now we see through a screen-mesh, darkly; then face to face:”

 (fragment from the Fluff Edition of the New Testament. 1 Corinthians 13:12)