life – Page 14 – Kelley Eskridge

April Gornik

I am an artist that values, above all, the ability of art to move me emotionally and psychically. I make art that makes me question, that derives its power from being vulnerable to interpretation, that is intuitive, that is beautiful. — April Gornik

I have been wanting for a while to write about April Gornik’s paintings. But instead I just get lost in them, and then eventually wander away from the computer feeling full of light and stillness, full of the under-the-skin hum of a storm on the horizon, full of something bubbling up from deep places.

These paintings punch into me and grab tight, pull me close, closer, right into them. Me inside the painting, the painting inside me. That amazing ecstatic moment of utter connection with the art and with myself.

This is what I look for. Connection with others, connection with self. The fascinating conversation where minds vibrate on the same frequency and time disappears while people wander around in each other’s heads. The meal and the drink that are perfect for the moment, whether it’s nine courses with ancient Margaux or curry and a beer. The kind of sex that is also love and discovery. Music in my headphones, or coming alive right in front of me as the band begins to play. Dancing. Writing something that makes me feel fierce and focused and for that moment totally aligned inside, the tumblers of me all coming together and unlocking parts of myself that I have always hoped would someday be free. The heart-stopping beauty of a dragonfly against a blue sky, or storm clouds, or cool, careless wind rising against a gray autumn sky that makes me feel so full of possibility.

I look for that which will lever me open and expand me, and I find it in April Gornik’s work.

Gornik says her work is non-narrative but yes, full of story. I think so too. The story is there the light — my god, the light. It’s in the size — immense and yet so intimate, so personal. It’s in the motion and the stillness. It’s in the structure, the particular focal points that draw me in, that make me want to find my way into the distance of it and just keep going.

I think of these works as internal landscapes — Gornik isn’t painting a patch of planet Earth, she’s painting her own interior, and mine too. I stand on the edge of these paintings and feel as though I am stepping into myself. If I follow that green path as it begins to burn, in the forest beyond something is waiting to happen, something that already makes me feel huge inside…

Not a narrative, but a story that I understand not so much with my head as with my heart.

…visual arts are and always have been a certain kind of virtual reality. The real power of the visual arts in their capacity as virtual reality is the physicality of the experience, the somatic connection that remains between the work of art, the artist who made it, and the person looking at it. That connection is an essential part of the human experience…
— “An Artist’s Perspective on Visual Literacy” by April Gornik

Amen, sister.

See April Gornik’s work at her website. Read about it here.

And watch this excerpt from a 2007 interview in which Gornik speaks about her work and takes us into her studio as she paints.

I talk in this blog a fair amount about what it means to me to be a human being and a writer. It’s an absolute pleasure to write this little love letter to an artist who talks back to those essential parts of me.

April, thank you for permission to use your images, and thank you so much for your work. I really love it.

A Monday giggle with Eddie

I think Eddie Izzard is fantastic. He’s a great film and television actor, and a brilliant stand-up comic. He’s an English Catholic Jesuit-educated cross-dressing straight man who speaks three languages (at least) and is blindingly smart about many things. His comedy shows are full of historical references and stories, musings on language, and wry observations of pop culture, human nature and the vagaries of the universe.

An added spice for me in watching his work is that he does a thing that I learned to call “role shifting” when I studied American Sign Language. ASL grammar includes role shifting as part of storytelling. If I’m telling you in English about going to the movies with three friends, I will generally use pronouns (he said, she said) or name them (then Jane punched Susan) when I report something about them. But ASL uses role shift instead, which includes locating multiple characters in space (Jane is here, Susan is there, Tom is at the end), and taking on characteristics of whomever is speaking (he said, she said) or acting (then Jane punched Susan). It’s a really cool part of ASL grammar, and I’ve never seen a hearing performer do it like Izzard. I believe it makes the experience that much richer for everyone.

I had the great good fortune to see him live in Seattle last year, a wonderful evening which included a completely ad-libbed conversation with a moth… a funny, smart man who clearly loves his work.

I couldn’t decide between these two clips (both from his show Dressed to Kill). The first takes on historical mass-murderers like Hitler and Pol Pot and why they get away with it. Like much good comedy, it is based in hard and uncomfortable truth. Then we move to imperialism and flags. The clip ends with the famous Cake or Death sequence. The second clip is a take on British versus American films.

And because the clips are from the same show, if you watch them both, you’ll see how Izzard’s themes keep re-emerging so that the show becomes a sort of tapestry.

These are absolutely positively not safe for work!

Have a giggle. Happy Monday.

A nice day

It turns out that I do not have a single interesting thing to say today about changing paradigms or the state of publishing or the power of story, or anything else. I am just living life right now, doing things that are of great value to me but perhaps not so fascinating to the rest of the world. Yesterday I made banana bread because Nicola loves it. And then I went dancing — not a work evening, just a night to dance on the floor. There was a baseball game, and parking downtown was hopeless. Then a homeless man helped me find a parking place, and I gave him some money, and we talked to each other like people about the heat and driving, and we wished each other a good evening. And we both knew that our definitions of “good” were pretty different in our personal contexts. It was hot in the club, and they brought two enormous box fans (almost as tall as me) that blew a cool wind through us, and the women danced, danced, danced. And the men who worked at the club, who brought out the fans, tried hard not to look at the dancing women, and I wondered briefly what it is like for (presumably straight) men to be in a place where looking at women is wrong. DJ Stacey played “Relax” for me (thanks, Stacey), and as it came up I bowed to her and she smiled. I talked to a 50-year-old woman who just came out a year ago and is being brave about everything, including coming to these dances and talking to strangers and maybe even thinking about putting her essay collection out there into the world for publishers to consider… you go, Rebecca. And when it was time to leave, I went out into the street and said no, thank you, I think I’ll be fine to the nice bouncer guy who offered to escort me to my car, and I walked in the custard light of a city sunset past bars and pizza palaces and people sleeping in corners, through the smell of urine and phad thai, through the sounds of the baseball game on someone’s radio, past the watchful gaze of other bouncers in their red-roped doorways and the impassive visual sweep of a cop on patrol. And I got in my car and came home to Nicola with a great big cheeseburger and fries and a chocolate shake that I drank on the way home. And then we had a beer and I told her everything I’ve just told you, and she told me about her evening full of Anglo-Saxon rings and Indian food and the frustration of regionalized DVDs (c’mon, world, can we all just get together on the DVD format if nothing else?) and all the things she was thinking in the quiet peace of our house while I was moving inside the bass beat of music.

It was a nice day.

Low Spark

My parents read this blog, so if the rest of you will just give us a second…

Hi, Mum! Hi, Dad! (blows kisses to parents). I know you’ve heard lots of my bad girl stories from high school and beyond, but I’m not sure whether you’ve heard this one, so let’s go over here into this little corner of the internet while I tell you that I took some drugs in high school you might not know about yet. I’m sure you assumed (correctly) that I occasionally drank liquor and maybe smoked some pot. And I’ve still never snorted cocaine or taken speed or been to one of those parties with a punchbowl full of pills. But I did (okay, here it comes now) drop acid about half a dozen times or so.

Okay, whew, there’s nothing like a little public confession to really put a Saturday in a whole new light. And in front of all these other people!

Hi, everyone, thanks for waiting, I’m back now and I’m pretty sure my folks survived (blows more kisses to parents).

So, yeah, when I was a junior in high school I discovered blotter acid, courtesy of the So Cool girl next door in the dorm who decided that I needed to expand my horizons. I never had a bad time at all. It was always pretty easy for me to yank my mind back from wherever it had wandered off to, if it was necessary.

One necessary time was out in the woods one Sunday afternoon with a group of about eight or so. One of the girls began to unravel around the edges — she couldn’t remember her own name, she was convinced her identity was melting away. She didn’t know who she was. So I blinked and the shiny edges around things dimmed a bit, and I gave her a hug, and took her for a walk, and told her everything I knew about her.

And then at some point she was okay (time gets pretty funny on acid), and I was okay too, but she had, as we sometimes say in our house, harshed my mellow. So my friend Matt and I wandered back to campus and went to the cafeteria for dinner.

But we were too early (that time thing…), so we sat in the common room where, sadly for those around us, there was a piano. Matt and I commandeered it.

What’s your favorite song? he asked.

The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys, I said.

Holy shit, me too! he said, eyes bright. And without further discussion, we launched into a duet of Low Spark. I played the actual piano line and he played the melody. I was hugely impressed that he knew it.

And we sang. I’m sorry, but we did.

And we played.

For 45 minutes.

Until finally, another kid came over to us and said, in the tone of someone on her last nerve, Could you guys PLEASE STOP PLAYING THAT SONG?!

So we did. But I’ve never forgotten that time in the common room on a spring afternoon. And Low Spark is still my favorite song. It still delights me, moves me, describes me. Still takes me right into myself.

So I thought maybe you’d enjoy it too. I’m off now to make banana bread for my sweetie, and I feel a long (good) way from my baby acid-queen days, but it’s nice to remember the time when I was discovering what music was for — that songs could be about me, could make me see more clearly who I am and who I’d like to be.

Happy Saturday.

And enjoy The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys. (Traffic, 1971)

Gone from the game

In case anyone was wondering, this is why I love her. One of the many reasons. I love that we feel the same way about what we do: this urge to tell a story so well that it takes you, heart and mind and body, so that you are inside the story and it’s inside you, and you become each other for a while. And perhaps when you put the words away, some small scrap of the story lives on inside you.

I love that Nicola speaks so fiercely of her work, and I love that I am feeling so fierce about mine these days. That I have given myself to it in a whole new way. And even so, even with all that re-found passion and the tidal wave of change it has brought into my life, I have still been struggling with a thing….

Here’s a story. Last year, when Dangerous Space was released, I had occasion to spend time in a bar with one of SF’s pre-eminent critics, someone whose conversation I’ve enjoyed over the years and whose professional skills I have always respected. This person told me they were reading the collection and considering it for review, but had noticed that most of the stories had been published previously. That’s right, I said.

Well, said the critic, that’s not much to show for 20 years, is it?

I answered politely that I hoped quality counted for more than quantity. But I was hurt, and I was rattled. And ultimately there was no review from this critic, so perhaps I gave the wrong answer.

And since then I have been chewing on this, trying to understand the helplessness and the anger and defensiveness that I felt. Who cares what this person thinks? Well, clearly I cared. And what I have come to believe is that it’s not about this person specifically — it’s about my certain knowledge that a lot of people feel this way about writing, or any other creative and/or professional pursuit. Many people will believe that the worth of my collection is diminished by the ratio of old to new work, and that my worth as a writer is best measured by my churn rate. That quality is only important in concert with quantity.

This is a game that I can never win. Many writers can — they produce good work very quickly, and all props and happiness to them. I think it’s a good thing they can do that. But why does this have to be a zero-sum game? If it’s good they do that, why must it therefore be bad that I do not?

Eleanor Roosevelt said No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. And she was right. But withdrawing that consent is not as easy as stamping one’s foot and saying Stop diminishing me right now! It is a process, and I have been processing.

And today I read Nicola’s post, and I felt the cumulative rush of all the moments of good work I have done in 20 years. Every time I wrote a sentence and felt it ring true. Every time I felt a character come a little more to life within me and on the page. Every time I’ve read the stories or the novel and bam, I’m back in worlds and characters that I love, fictions that vibrate with some of the deepest real things within me, things that I’ve managed to transmute into stories that make other people vibrate in turn.

And you know what? This is where I want to play. Consider me gone from the other fucking game. I will do my best to write everything I want to write, as best I can, and I hope I make a boatload of money. But none of that is the measure of my worth. My worth as a writer is measured by what I write. End of story.

As I’ve said recently, it’s huge for me to be a writer, and I am in charge of how I feel about that. And here’s how I feel: in 20 years, I have said things that only I can say, and other people have heard them, felt them, shared them. I have burned, and I still do. I have done well, and I still do. I have found my own way here, in my own time, and it’s been a marvel. I’m looking forward to doing better and burning harder the next 20 years. I intend, as Nicola does, to reach so far inside you that you’ll have to dig me out with a spoon.

And anyone who doesn’t think that’s much to show for 20 years can go fuck themselves.

I want to see a bunny too

Opus by Berkeley Breathed, 10 August 2008

Click on the image to see it full size.

This cartoon makes me nostalgic for the kind of summer I never really had. I had great times as a kid, but they were urban times (well, as urban as Tampa, Florida got in the 60’s… you may imagine that we weren’t exactly Manhattan South). I didn’t have a tire swing or a lake or a sunny field to ride my bike to. I did have a completely deserted school playground, a series of alleys that wound through some beautiful neighborhoods, a 5-mile stretch of sidewalk that ran beside a bay, although one had to jaywalk (it was jay-running, really, while pushing the bicycle) across a heart-pounding four lanes of fast traffic to reach it. I had movie theatres six miles away. I had a peculiar little stone tower on a nearby street corner — I think it used to be a planter, or something — just big enough to crawl up into and sit and read a book.

And I went to summer camp for several years. Day camp, not sleepaway camp. One of my parents would pack my lunch and my bathing suit in a paper bag and drive me every morning to the pick-up point, where dozens of kids would pile onto buses and off we’d go to the camp — a human-made lake, arts and crafts buildings, stables, a cafeteria, a fire pit, all surrounded by hundreds of acres of Florida scrubland. That meant southern live oaks shoulder-to-shoulder with royal palms, spanish moss, lots of dirt, sawgrass, blue jays and mockingbirds, buzzards, mosquitos, snakes, and the possibility of alligators.

Did I like it? Sometimes. I liked finally getting brave enough to run off the high dock over the lake, grab the rope attached to one of the oak trees, swiiiiing out and drop into deep water. I liked sitting around a campfire singing the “Once there were three fishermen” song because we all got shriek DAMN!! at the top of our lungs, which pleased our eight-year-old conventional selves mightily and never got old. The horses terrified me, and so did most of the other kids. But I always liked lunch.

I still miss the live oaks dripping with spanish moss under the biggest hot blue sky I’ve ever known, but Florida was never my land. It wasn’t until I got to New Hampshire that I discovered the real pleasure possible in wandering around outside with no particular destination. But in the summer, I always went home.

I live a busy life. I have a mind always full of ideas and internal conversation and lists of things to do, a noisy mind. But you know, one summer day before I die, I hope someone drags me out of the house still shrieking about all the things I have to do, and takes me to a tire swing and a lake and a grassy field and maybe for a hamburger and an ice cream cone. And there will be no talk of obligations. We will only talk about bunnies.

Monday morning at the oasis

Confession time: I’m a rock ‘n’ roll woman with a great big soft spot in my gooey gooey heart for 70’s and 80’s pop music.

I started listening to the radio when I was a kid. There was always music on the record player in our house (yes, vinyl, kids, I’m that old…) — James Taylor, Livingston Taylor, Jose Feliciano, Carole King, Neil Diamond, Cream… I don’t remember when I first realized that I liked some of it better than others, that I had preferences. And then I discovered pop radio, and that was me gone. I fell stone in love with The Moody Blues, the Captain and Tennille, Elton John, Blue Oyster Cult, the Five Man Electric Band. I would lay awake in bed at night sometimes and just… listen to Voices from The World Out There.

One of the best presents my folks ever gave me was a cube-shaped AM radio (made of white and red plastic) that mounted to my bike handlebars, so I could ride around the neighborhood singing along at the top of my lungs and terrorizing the neighbors. Now I have a car with windows that roll up, so it’s easier on those around me — but I still love to sing along to that music.

And for whatever reason, today I’m thinking of Maria Muldaur. Because honestly, what could be better to start off a Monday than romance in the desert? And I’m still a sucker for anything that sounds like there ought to be a bellydancer.

Enjoy.

Dandelion Wine

Dandelion Wine is a summer book, every word is rich with summer-ness like ice cream and hot sun, and soft heavy evenings full of tree frogs and parents laughing quietly in the other room and screen doors slamming in the distance.

I first read it in high school, and it didn’t really speak to me. It wasn’t weird enough, and the boy in the book was too young for me to care about, and it was set in 1928 — you may imagine the roll of teenage eyes, god, that was like a thousand years ago…

I was in my 30’s before I understood the deep richness of this book, the joy and the sadness and the absolute brilliance with which Bradbury captures a summer that I never had and yet remember so well. Summer as a state of mind. Summer as a collection of moments out of usual time in which we may, if we choose, live slow and do mundane things and find at bedtime that it has been one of the richest days…

We’ve had very unsatisfactory weather in Seattle these last couple weeks, restless laughing autumn weather that I love, but am not yet ready for. But we are promised summer again this week, and although outside my window it’s hazy and 50 degrees, I see sun and hints of blue sky behind the gray smoke. And today, when the sun comes out (and I know it will, I know), I will stretch out in it with iced tea and Dandelion Wine and remember what it’s like when everything in one’s world is exciting and new and so full of possibility. I’ll remember that from my little deck, a place familiar and known and not so much about possibility as it is about perspective and the considered choice to throw myself into things or not, to be new or not, to sit in the sun or go inside. Because I’m no longer twelve, and I need my twelve-year-old summer days more than ever.

In the first eight pages of the book, Douglas Spaulding, age 12, is out in the woods with his father and younger brother Tom. Doug and Tom are wrestling. And Douglas discovers something amazing:

And at last, slowly, afraid he would find nothing, Douglas opened one eye.

And everything, absolutely everything, was there.

The world, like a great iris of an even more gigantic eye, which has also just opened and stretched out to encompass everything, stared back at him.

And he knew what it was that had leaped upon him to stay and would not run away now.

I’m alive, he thought.

[…]

The grass whispered under his body. He put his arm down, feeling the sheath of fuzz on it, and, far away, below, his toes creaking in his shoes. The wind sighed over his shelled ears. The world slipped bright over the glassy round of his eyeballs like images sparked in a crystal sphere. Flowers were sun and fiery spots of sky strewn through the vast inverted pond of heaven. His breath raked over his teeth, going in ice, coming out fire. Insects shocked the air with electric clearness. Ten thousand individual hairs grew a millionth of an inch on his head. He heard the twin hearts beating in each ear, the third heart beating in his throat, the two hearts throbbing in his wrists, the real heart pounding in his chest. The million pores on his body opened.

I’m really alive! he thought. I never knew it before, or if I did I don’t remember!

He yelled it loud but silent, a dozen times! Think of it, think of it! Twelve years old and only now! Now discovering this rare timepiece, this clock gold-bright and guaranteed to run threescore and ten, left under a tree and found while wrestling.

“Doug, you okay?”

Douglas yelled, grabbed Tom, and rolled.

“Doug, you’re crazy!”

“Crazy!”

They spilled downhill, the sun in their mouths, in their eyes like shattered lemon glass, gasping like trout thrown out on a bank, laughing till they cried.

“Doug, you’re not mad?”

“No, no, no, no, no!”

Douglas, eyes shut, saw spotted leopards pad in the dark.

“Tom!” Then, quieter. “Tom… does everyone in the world… know he’s alive?”

“Sure. Heck, yes!”

The leopards trotted soundlessly off through darker lands where eyeballs could not turn to follow.

“I hope they do,” whispered Douglas. “Oh, I sure hope they know.”

— from Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

May you be happy

Spiritual beliefs can be hard to talk about these days. I don’t mean religion — in fact, I think that religion and spirituality are in many ways farther apart in our culture than perhaps any time since organized religion began. Sweeping statement, I know, and I’m prepared to be told I’m wrong since I am not myself religious, and so have little direct daily experience of how it’s working these days.

I was raised in the Episcopal church. I was the youngest person in our parish to be confirmed in the church. For non-Christians, that means I went to a series of classes to learn about Jesus and scripture, and to understand how mass worked and what it meant to say all those things to god — to be in communion with god. And then when a confirmation class graduates, there is a special Sunday worship service where the priest blesses you and welcomes you as fully practicing members into the church, and then you are allowed to receive communion (wafers and real wine for the Anglicans, thank you very much).

So there I was, Kelley Over-Achieving Eskridge, taking communion when I was eight and feeling pretty much okay with god. Then something happened.

My parents ran the EYC (Episcopal Youth… hmmm, Coalition, maybe?) — the youth group (teenagers) at the church. This was the late 60’s/early 70’s in Tampa, Florida, where we lived in an uneasy tension of cultural change — southern racism struggling with a determined and fairly effective civil rights activist movement, a growing awareness that the Viet Nam war was maybe not such a good idea, the reinstitution of the draft in 1969, the growing hippie culture. All of that was reflected in the kids in the EYC. They got drafted, or their brothers did. They did drugs. They marched.

And they decided to get involved with our church’s sister church in Jamaica. They did a lot to help the church in Jamaica. And eventually, they had about a million bake sales and car washes, and raised money for a trip to visit. I didn’t get to go, but my folks and the EYC kids came back transported by the loving reception they’d found, and the adventures they’d had discovering a new culture. So they had another million bake sales and car washes, and raised enough money to bring the priest, his family, and a bunch of the parish kids to Florida.

And when Father Macmillan arrived, full of joy and peace and eager to establish closer ties with our church, our rector refused to allow him to serve communion mass because Father Macmillan was black.

My parents left the EYC and the parish. And that was when I began to leave god. I am no longer religious. I do have spiritual beliefs, which I’ll keep to myself because I actually do think such things are private — a topic for conversation between people who are close, but not to be offered up in a blog post on a Saturday morning. What I do want to offer up is my experience that the older I get, the more I find myself and others willing to talk about notions of love, of acceptance, of tolerance, of humanizing others (rather than dehumanizing them), in ways that are not connected to religious practice. We are more willing to acknowledge that we’ve felt, for an expansive bright moment, that all people really are human, that we’re all connected somehow to each other and that perhaps that’s a good enough starting place, without the rules and rigidity.

So in that spirit, here’s a thing to share. My friend Karen went to a meditation workshop by this woman and told me about the mediation mantra that they used, which is intended to extend lovingkindness toward oneself and others. I don’t meditate, but I see great value in these words and so I offer them to you:

May you be happy.
May you be safe.
May you be peaceful.
May you live with ease.

That’s my wish for all people today. I will continue to struggle with all the ways that I find to distance myself from other people — irritation, intolerance, anger, disappointment, fear, self-asborption. But this morning I feel that expansive bright moment of connection, and I wish us all well.

Daily life

For those who are interested in the Big Life of the Writer, here is my day today:

Tidy the house
Finish the laundry
Drop off the dry cleaning
Shop for groceries
Put gas in the car and air in the tires
Pay bills (oooh, my favorite part, because it reminds me that cash flow for writers can sometimes really suck!)
Clean up my office
And any other fun chores that come along!

And so the internets will just have to get along without me for the day. Be well, be happy. And if you need more, go listen to the Reality Break interview, in which I sincerely hope I sound more interesting than this post.