Nature and creativity

Friday
We had snow overnight in the mountains--at least higher up than where we are.  The effect is to outline the striations on the rock.  Driving to and from Canmore (where I go to a comforting little Communitea Cafe to get a people-watching fix and to check out Knit and Caboodle to see if I can't tempt myself with something), you get a more fluid sense of the mountains than you do from a townsite or a place like the Banff Centre where buildings keep getting in the way.  I find I simply can't imagine the force that led to the Rocky Mountains uplift millions of years ago.  But snow on the mountains makes something of their structure clearer to me.

Today I had to go into Banff for groceries.  It's Saturday, and people are out and about in spite of the relative cold and rain that fell from time to time.  You don't come into the mountains for the comfort, I thought to myself.  You come to be awed, to experience the sublime, and maybe you can do that even better a little cold.  While I've worked this afternoon, rain has fallen on y wooden roof, even while the sun was shining.

Monday
For some reason, as I walked through the rain this morning to my cabin, I thought of the childhood game, "rock, paper, scissors."  The clouds have veiled the mountains.  We don't think about these towering erruptions of earth that are millions of years old being erased by anything, but the clouds can do it very softly.  The woods beyond the window where I work are very still, but their colours are heightened and deepened by the rain.

I've been thinking about why we come to nature for "retreats."  Who goes to NYC for a writer's retreat?  You might well go there for inspiration and for ideas, but you go to Yaddo or Emma Lake or Banff to get the work done, to go beyond the draft you scribbled on the back of your boarding pass.

The slightest thing delights me here.  My pine marten, whose dark glossy fur moves like water over the fallen logs.  A small flock of juncos yesterday.  Sometimes the wind is even higher than the mountains, and a birch outside my window winks its yellow-tinged leaves. My friend Katherine Arbuthnott says that nature provides "soft fascination" that tickles our attention but doesn't grab it by the throat.   Woolgathering, my daughter would say.

So I'm going to hunker down with one of her very urban photographs and write another poem.


http://blueduets.blogspot.com/2010/11/woolgathering.html

Research at Banff

Doing research as a scholar and as a creative writer are very different processes.  When I work on my book about Virginia Woolf's aesthetics, I'm absolutely fastidious:  I read everything I can get my hands on and document every half-idea that interests me.  Creative Writers, however, need to allow their impressions more sway.  I've heard at least one writer remark that you have to immerse yourself in a topic and then forget most of what you've learned when you bring research into your creative work.  This is because you don't want you characters to sound like lecturers--something I'd find particularly easy, I'm afraid.  It's one of the discourses I live inside

In the next chapter of Soul Weather, I'm introducing a young character who is in the last year of her undergraduate degree and is beginning to work on a history honours paper on Simone Weil.  Samantha is borderline anorexic (so I've been learning about anorexia too, mostly by reading people who've been anorexic:  experts are no help here at all!) and is drawn, consciously or unconsciously, to Weil because of her anorexia.  I've read a couple of biographies, but today it was time to begin to read Weil's own work.

There are many interesting facets of Weil's thought that might attract a young person, though one element of her character informs all of them.  Even as a child, she felt a remarkable sympathy for those less fortunate than herself, whether for soldiers at the front during World War I, for her lycee students, for French industrial workers--and workers everywhere, for those fighting in the Spanish Civil War, and later for a humanity in the midst of anti-Semitism and of Nazi Germany's overrunning of Europe as its individuals struggled to define their relationship to God and to what was ethical.  For a while I wondered which of Weil's personae Samantha would find most powerful.  I think this would be Weil the mystic, but since that's all but impossible to write about in a brief honours paper, Samantha will look at Weil's political thought from an earlier part of her career.

Because I didn't want to bring a ridiculous number of books with me, I ensured that Weil's Oppression and Liberty was available as an eBook.  Wanting a different view from that in my forest cabin and thinking that a larger screen would be better for reading (I was wrong, it turns out), I took myself off to the Paul D. Fleck library here at the Banff Centre that they make available to anyone with an artist's card.  As you can see, the scenery is stunning, though because it dwarfs you it may encourage you to pay more attention to your work rather than less.

Weil's Oppression and Liberty is remarkable, not least because she insightfully critiques her own historical moment in 1934.  Unlike most of the French Left, she can see even then that the communist experiment in Russia is more oppressive than the Czar and is horrified that the German working class--the best-educated in Europe--has embraced Hitler.  Her analysis of Marx's errors will only be fully revealed in a couple of years when she begins working in French factories and realizes that the working conditions of the proletariat--the noise, the long hours with few breaks, the physical demands and danger of the work, the quotas set by management that she felt forced you to put aside your very soul and every feeling or individual thought you had in order to survive a day as an automaton--so exhausted the workers that they had no energy left for rebellion.

Interestingly (and I have no idea what this says about my current frame of mind or my own working conditions), I found startlingly incisive her critique of bureaucracy.  She described government in the Soviet Union this way:  "there is a professional bureaucracy, freed from responsibility, recruited by cooption and possessing, through the concentration in its hands of all economic and political power, a strength hitherto unknown in the annals of history."  They were entering, she felt "the age of the technicians of management," and felt that they produced nothing but their own hegemony and control.

More philosophically, she equated human individuality with our own determination to insist that our actions echo our beliefs.

And perhaps, to beleaguered environmentalists who can't convince North American governments to take some leadership on environmental issues, she had this to say:  "There is no difficulty whatever, once one has decided to act, in maintaining intact, on the level of action, those very hopes which a critical examination has shown to be wellnigh unfounded; in that lies the very essence of courage."  Facing the fact that her own historical moment was on the edge of war and that workers would soon be sent to die at the front, facing governments indifferent to high levels of unemployment (which stood at 20% in the early Thirties) and to the working conditions the remainder had to endure, she wrote these remarkable words:  "Nothing in the world can prevent us from thinking clearly."

As you see, I've done exactly what a Virginia Woolf scholar would have done:  I've copied out the great quotations.  How am I ever going to translate this into a young woman's passion and thought?  Keep reading!  Maybe stop taking notes!

Soul Weather: July

I've had the sense that I was focussing too much on my computer screen to see any wildlife besides my little acrobatic marten, but this morning my eye was caught by a doe and fawn eating around my cabin.  They look so peaceful, perhaps because they're vegetarians and seem to find food everywhere:  their coats blend in with the bark of the tree trunks, and light up in the same dappled way when the sunlight hits them.  The fawn was peacefully oblivious and hungry, but the doe would take a bite, sniff the air, and take another bite.  They ambled, it's true, but only after the doe's sense of smell told them it was safe.  Of course I didn't have my camera!

Here's the beginning of the second chapter I've been working on here: 

In July, even the weather slowed down to watch the paint dry. After the weather gods had flooded Maple Creek, Yorkton, the Kawakatoose First Nations reserve, Saskatoon and most recently North Battleford, they’d decided to blow in one of those characteristic Saskatchewan summer days – the kind we make nostalgia from: dry, breezy, the sky so infused with dense blue that it's almost hot. It was the long weekend, and everyone seemed to have left town for Regina Beach or Echo Lake.
Lee is working on the second bedroom, giving Dirk a chance to finish downstairs. He’d allowed her to choose the colours, and she’d decided to find paint that reminded her of celadon glazes. She's used her favourite, an ambiguous blue-grey-green, in her garret and will use it again in the immense downstairs room that stretches from kitchen to living room when it was ready. Perhaps only a potter would have known how smashing it will look with the dark, reddish-brown cabinets. She calls her celadon “green,” but it isn't the colour of leaves – not the grade-school green of elm trees or the yellow green of the trailing sweet potato vines people put in pots with their annuals that has such punch. Celadon is more like water, and just as ambiguous: celadon could be the reflection of that hot blue sky in the green-grey wrinkled elephant skin of Wascana Lake on a windy day. Or the colour of water from melted glaciers, cloudy grey-green where the water is ruffled; cooler, clearer green in peaceful backwaters where the silt has a chance to settle. Celadon has layers. She’s chosen a brown that looks like an iron oxide rich celadon for the larger second storey bedrooms. It's deep and chocolatey with what she liked to call “aubergine notes,” as if it were a wine. She has a pale taupe-y green for the “master” bedroom that looks very Japanese, and a soft teal green for the smaller room, which she is now working on. Like all the colours she's chosen, you couldn't name this one with a single word, and it changes with every breathe of warm July air. You wouldn’t think watching paint dry would be so busy, but it is.


Painting her eyrie, she worked out a system she suspects was like reinventing the wheel. Somehow Dirk assumed that if she could glaze her pots she could also paint walls, but these are the first rooms she's done by herself. It's tempting to do all the work on the ladder across the top of a wall and then to push the ladder away and do the bottom half , but when she tried that on the first wall of her room, she found the nearly-dry paint where the roller strokes met was coming away from the plaster. So now she goes up the ladder with her yogurt carton of paint and her brush, strikes in as far as she can reach, comes down, goes up again with the tray and roller, stretching both up and down, comes down and strikes in the baseboard, finishes the section that demarcates her furthest reach, moves the ladder in again, goes up to strike in along the ceiling. It's not only the room that makes a big circle. By the last wall of a second coat, her thighs are like soft lead, malleable and heavy. Her arms, which should be strong from her work on the wheel, are used to containing and balancing force, not to stretching beyond her balance point.

But in spite of the ache in her thighs and arms, she's learning what painting does to your eyes, how it turns you into an animal made for seeing. Going for a walk or even running errands after several hours of painting is like being high. The world was suddenly irradiated with colour. Aaron Nelson, a potter who now runs the Shaw International Centre for Contemporary Ceramics in Medicine Hat, talked once about travelling in a canoe – or was it a kayak? – all the way down the west coast from Alaska to Vancouver. If you want to know everything there is to know about vessels, he said, spend seven weeks in one. Perhaps the same could be said of colour. If you want to know about colour, paint a whole house. In a world saturated with logos and branding, her colours don't have a meaning; they don't signal your destination: the red and white PetroCan or the green and yellow Superstore or the gold letters that would read, when you got closer, “ Bay.” They aren't the colour of your loyalty. Colour simply is, and you realize how endlessly variable it is as it dries: how it goes on slightly darker but with a damp sheen, and then becomes dappled, grows light and matte. Colour on walls is simply where you are, a pleasure you can live inside.

First day in Banff

Arriving at the Banff Centre of the Arts, at least if you're in the Leighton Artist's Colony, involves forays all over the campus to check in, to move into your room in residence, to get your "artist's card" (which is also your meal card), your Banff National Park sticker for your car, and then wandering off into the woods to see if you can find your cabin.  I'm in a small cabin designed by architect Fred Valentine with a composer in mind.  So it has a piano and wonderful acoustics for my guitar.  I didn't bring any piano music with me, but I'm hoping I can borrow some from the library.  From my little hut, I don't see the mountains; what I've been watching out my huge windows today are wind, light, a single marten who, like an acrobat, trotted along one deadfall log after another.

What I love about writer's retreats is that it somehow reminds you of how many hours there are in the day.  I was working  by 8, and then nipped out to the Banff townsite around 10:30 for food to make myself breakfasts and lunches.  Even with that errand and a brief nap I completed and revised a chapter I hadn't quite finished at St. Peter's and got good work done on a poem.  So what happens to time during our ordinary days?  Can I bottle this discipline and take it home with me?




Today it's cloudy, and the mountains seem to have quietly closed in on themselves.  The forest is quiet, expecting rain perhaps.  

Creativity on Saskatchewan's Country Roads--revisited

Today, Bill and I drove up to North Star Pottery, Mel Bolen's and Karen Holden's studio and home, because I needed to do some research on ceramics before I head to Banff Centre for the Arts next weekend to work on Soul Weather for two weeks.  They live and work in a church south of Carmel (and east of Humboldt) that they've rebuilt to be a studio, home, and shop.  When they bought the land in the 1970s, there were no trees surrounding the building:  just a church on a hill.  They have since planted 10,000 trees which threaten to cut off the view from some of the dormers they've added to the second storey barrel-vaulted space.  A renovated farmhouse is an artist's retreat and the second storey of a rebuilt barn holds Karen's painting studio.

Artists are often generous people.  Mel was certainly being generous with his time today, giving me his Labour Day afternoon to talk about the art and science of ceramics.  He told wonderful stories--of taking a fine arts ceramics class at U of R as an elective and finding Jack Sures working his magic at the wheel.  Jack, he said, didn't baby anybody.  He didn't guide you around the pottery studio and tell you what everything was for.  He simply sat down at a wheel and started to throw.  Mel was instantly attracted to the physicality of it, to its embodiment of the laws of physics. He still gets quite lyrical when he talks about this plastic medium that hardens in the most remarkable way and of his desire to leave in each piece an echo of its plastic, earthy origin.  He was also attracted to the science of it:  inventive potters know the secrets of earth, glazes, and the ways of fire.  Mel talked of working with Jack Sures in a kind of intense apprenticeship that involved everything from moving house several times to preparing clay and building kilns.

But he also talked about the generosity of making art:  that when you invite people to a show or into your booth at Bazaart, it has to be with generosity.  Your work is a gift, and people will sometimes take it and sometimes leave it, but the generosity--and the risk-taking that comes with it--has to be there.  If you are lucky, you will find yourself with the stories, doubtless fragmentary, of the people who buy your work; in turn, your work will become part of their stories.  This is what he loves about ceramics, that people take it into their hands, put it to their lips, cook in it, always trusting the craftmanship.  "Intimate stuff goes on," he says.

But Bolen likes to work the line--one he describes as crooked, sometimes brightly coloured, sometimes grey and fuzzy--between art and craft.  When he hasn't thrown for a while he always starts by warming up his craft by making mugs, moving on to bowls and plates, until something demands that he begin to explore the borders of ceramics and take some risks.  At this point in his career, this seems to involve his use of "terra sigilatta," a slip made from clay that he burnishes by hand into the surface of a leather-hard piece; then he fires it at 2400 degrees in his kiln and then, just to add another variable, throws damp salt into the kiln once the temperature has been reached to release caustic sulphur.  The result is quite wonderfully unpredictable:  the sulfur doesn't reach every part of each piece evenly, so the effects vary; in some places the silica from the clay he uses for this process breaks through the slip; at other places the slip bubbles and crackles. The time and place these pieces occupy in the kiln are written on their surfaces:  the side of a piece that's turned away from the blast of salt looks entirely different than the side that takes its full force.  Some pieces are fired on their sides, propped up on clam shells, so that their undersides are completely different and may have vacancies in the glaze that show where the shells were.  He varies these effects even more by making some of the slips out of "wild clay" just to see what kind of a surface they'll make.   Tradition meets experiment and innovation in these pieces.  That double sidedness of this work can also be seen in the shapes of the vessels he throws for this work--often very classic vases.  But then he might flatten the sides and score them with a nail.  Or he might use an old broken fishing pole to make folds in their sides, sometimes rhythmically and regularly, sometimes randomly and playfully.

This is an inventive and inspiring body of work.

The drive north to Humboldt and back was also quite beautiful.  I don't think I've seen this gently hilly landscape so soon after combining, with the swathes of straw still on the fields.  There was something intimate about the curves and arcs and dips made by the swathes, as if the farmers knew each fold and curve and cranny of their fields.  Toward the end of the day, the setting sun came through a haze made by combining, making the whole landscape ethereal.

Reading like an Editor

I've been spending the last week and a bit putting together the proceedings of the Canadian Creative Writers and Writing Programs proceedings from the first, hopefully annual conference, held at the University of Calgary and the Banff Centre for the Arts last October.  (See blog posts on October 13, 15, and 21.)  Reading like an editor has its down sides.  Do you know how many different ways there are to do a "Works Cited" page--many of them wrong?  Or how inconsistently an individual writer can use dashes?  Or how often you need to check facts:  is "Greenwoods Bookshoppe" really a shoppe, and is there a missing apostrophe there?  (It really is an Edmonton shoppe, and there is an apostrophe at the end of Greenwoods'.)  Why does "Throw Mama off the Train" list a writer and not the author of a screenplay? (I don't have an answer for that one.)  A change in the MLA style guide means that you no longer need the date you accessed a web site or the web address for your "Works Cited" page.  So I've done a lot of deleting of very tiny print.  But just as a fine writer knows that the credibility of her or his voice is bolstered by careful attention to detail, so do conscientious editors know that if a proceedings looks professional and consistent, it's likely to be taken more seriously.  In turn, the papers, which authors gave a lot of thought to, are likely to be taken more seriously.  So here it is:  it's my job.  So I just do it--and take a certain amount of not-quite-perverse satisfaction.

But reading like an editor has more up sides than down sides.  Normally, I read quite a lot of strong fiction and poetry; sometimes I get an opportunity to help an author make a work even stronger.  Sometimes I get to deliver a useful, encouraging rejection.  All of this makes our collective stories stronger, our collective use of language more precise, playful, and inventive. 

In the editing the proceedings, though, I felt like a student all over again.  I learned so much from all the presenters.  Over the next couple of posts, I'd like to share these with some of you; maybe you in turn will share some of your insights and experiences in comments.

Here are two of the inspiring, over-arching observations and beliefs.  First, creative writing classes, whether they're taught in prisons, mental health drop-in centres, colleges, neighbourhood centres, or universities, are thriving (despite the disbelief of administrators and the difficulty they have understanding the value of these classes).  People want to write.  Some of them will simply explore their experiences, their world-views, their culture and society, their imaginations through the written word; others will strive to be published writers.  But who can argue with either goal?  If art is a way of helping a culture think through its dilemmas and challenges, its joys and delights, then both kinds of writers are engaging in that work in their own way.

Second, the people who attended the conference are doing a thoughtful, inventive, compassionate job mentoring their students.  My mantra as a teacher has always been "Find out where your students are and take them farther."  Preconceptions about where that "farther" should be only lead to frustration and a sense of failure.  But look at how much more articulate Greg Hollingshead is:  "Creative writing teaching is like any teaching:  eventually you learn that there is what the student needs to understand but there is also when the student will be ready to understand it.  It's this second consideration that separates the good teachers from the bad and that makes good teaching more like psychotherapy, in a way, in that it's all about sensing what the student is ready to know.  This is particularly true of creative writing teaching, because the student is very likely to have an emotional investment in what is being discussed.  Bad writing is a set of strategies for containing, distancing, walling off that emotion, for rendering it safe for the author.  A large part of teaching writing is communicating to a writer the hard fact that emotion is going to need to be re-experienced if it is ever to be experienced by the reader--which should be the primary reason for the story, or the poem, being written in the first place."  I might want to add to Hollingshead's sense of what bad writing is; I often find that it's an unthought-about formula (often generic) for pretending you're writing without thinking about writing.  But other than that, Hollingshead's sense of what we try to accomplish when we teach writing is unerring.

Hollingshead got his experience teaching at the University of Alberta.  Lenore Rowntree, in contrast, teaches creative writing in a Vancouver drop-in centre for people with mental illness.  In some ways, what she has to say isn't that different from what Hollingshead wrote:  "The level of expression may not be as uniformly high as you have experienced with other groups, but don't become disheartened.  The completion of two or three sentences in an hour-long session is a big success for some.  Occasionally a really good poem or story will be written in a very few minutes and then destroyed.  Try to record at least the idea of it for future use.  Other times a poignant piece is written and then given to you to keep--the writer may have nowhere to keep it or may not yet be ready to live with his or her own words.  If it feels right, accept the piece and have it ready in a file for a later time.  Remember that you may be the only one in the room with access to a computer and a printer.  A typed poem or story is often much appreciated."

Another, inevitable theme was the way the internet is changing how we connect with readers.  I'll write about that later this week.  And I'll make sure you have the web address when the whole proceedings goes online.

And your stories?  What does writing help us do?

Soul Weather: Summer Solstice

While Lee was glazing and firing pottery for Bazaart, and trying to winkle her way into people's daily lives, Dirk was mudding the kitchen.  In all his years of renovations, he'd left the walls of the houses more or less intact.  So when he decided to open the kitchen to the living area, he'd had a lot of destruction to do, and his inexperience made the process not very pretty.  He hasn't figured out how he'll fix the hardwood floor where the studs and footing for the walls had been, but perhaps something clever will occur to him while he puts up Gyprock and begins taping and mudding.  This last is a process he likes.  He tries to do it with as little energy and mess as possible, as if the carefulness of the physical labour gives it more dignity – moves it closer to craftsmanship.  But his inexperience has left him with some spectacular holes in the kitchen walls, so he's filling these in slowly, letting them dry, taping a crack or two, and then going back to add another layer of Polyfilla to the pits and furrows in the kitchen plaster before he returns to mud the cracks and the divots lefts by the screws.

            Last year at this time, he'd missed spring.  In April and May, life completely went missing as he spent early mornings burrowing around in his basement digs with his eyes closed, like a mole, and then came rushing out into the light, dashed into work, and then buried himself completely and sympathetically in his caseload.  Because he wasn't noticing the weather, he was almost grateful for the rain that drowned the fields around Melville and Yorkton, and for the women who flooded into Regina to visit sisters and daughters, needing to talk with someone about their men's despair and helpless fury.  In the more worrying cases, daughters and sisters encouraged the wives to call Mobile Crisis Services.  Sometimes they simply had difficulties understanding their husbands' ranting and railing:  surely crop insurance would get sorted out and it would be tight, but they'd be okay for a year.  These calls weren't taxing.  Being a guy, Dirk could try to explain what it felt like not to have meaningful work.  Income wasn't the only issue for men, whereas a farm wife always had work, and that work counted, whether anybody said it or not.  A meal on the table or a clean shirt said it.  These were also men whose last emotional words might well have been uttered on their wedding days, so getting the farmer to talk about his feelings was probably impossible if not counterproductive.  The urban women's magazine strategies of probing and questioning wouldn't help her deal with his moods.  So Dirk, feeling deeply conflicted, had to talk to women about how to ignore men's moods.  Make a quilt.  Knit a sweater.  Start a reading club or a 'Stitch 'n bitch' group – something that gives you pleasure.  That would get you and your family through.  At the end of the day, he dodged unseeing back through the rain, down into his burrow, and did anything he could to get through to tomorrow.  He watched crummy TV.  Sports and sitcoms required no concentration.  He sometimes played with his sons' gameboy.  Or he played computer games that allowed him to save the universe.

            Then he looked up one day, and found the sky blue and the leaves full-sized.  He'd never before in his life lost a season.  So this year as he works at remaking the ground floor of his house into a space for the group of undergraduates Lee will organize for him, he has all the windows open, which means he's sometimes cold.  But the fresh air keeps Ruby's nose busy when she isn't asleep on the floor in the middle of his workspace, and he simply pulls on the old sweater with its elbows out that's already got its patina of polyfilla and paint.  He turns his Bob Dylan or Bruce Cockburn up loud and gets to work.  While people continue to complain about the rain, wondering if cold grey springs are going to be the new normal on the prairies, Dirk is even happy with the rain.  Well, not happy exactly, but comforted by weather he can inhabit, comforted by a frame of mind that can haunt something besides itself and its distraction.

            So he watches every millimetre of change.  At first, the trees seemed untrusting, which he understands.  Then their buds, snail-like, crept to the ends of branches, where they looked like the round heads of finishing nails.  Then he notices that, in the midst of people's soggy whiny complaints, the leaves on trees and shrubs tended to stretch after a couple of days' rain, though whether this showed enthusiasm and gratitude, or whether they're clutching at sunlight, he doesn't know.

            The weather doesn't seem to be moving in a straight line, though it never does on the prairies.  The weather gods will give you a tiny taste of sun and warmth and then lapse far back into an earlier season.  So that now it is a breezy June day, close to the solstice, and he can hear the rustle of leaves, but the sound is dry and fretful enough that it could be a fall day rather than a prelude to summer. 

            He wants to know where he is, meteorologically speaking.  He doesn't want to look up to be suddenly enveloped in the grief of last fall:  the kids buying supplies, going off to school, meeting new friends, all elsewhere.  Hungry wretchedness fills you when your wife tells you that your kids are happy with the new life they're living without dad.  You stare out the kitchen window while she tells you this.  And afterwards every rainy day when leaves lie in sodden golden puddles under bare branches will carry echoes of this conversation.   It's as if seasons – their smells, their whispers on your skin, the particular angle of light – have a clock that turns back at will and can plummet you again into that mood.  This vision will forever stand for the fact that there's a whole other world you know nothing about. You aren't living here, among the glorious Regina fall days, but in a world where you have no senses, no touch or sight, and your kids report on home runs and new video games matter-of-factly in your weekly phone call, without any engagement in their voices.  Is this because they're as grief-stricken as you are, because their mother is standing right there, or because they've forgotten the smell of you?

The photograph at the top of the page is of an installation at the Walker Art Center.  Unfortunately, I've lost the name of the artist and the installation is no longer listed on their web site.

Minneapolis Institute of Art

There's something very civilized about your first impression of the Minneapolis Institute of Art.  Their website says there's parking on the south side of the building, and there it is.  And it's free.  So is the gallery itself, though they reasonably ask for donations so they can keep it free.  There's a room for children to play and explore in, and a sunny cafe where families can sit at large or small tables and have engaged conversations.  There's a quiet, flower-filled courtyard where you can rest your feet in the shade. The gallery spaces, unlike MOMA, all have some place to sit down and contemplate the work.  The collection ranges widely, though there's one very good Van Gogh, two Monets, a couple of Picassos, two Seurats, two Georgia O'Keefe's--single works by most of the important North American and European artists of the twentieth century--including (Tracy, this is for you) an Egon Schiele portrait that is haunting.

They also balance their collection between art and the "fine arts."  In fact, one of my favourite exhibitions was called "Conversations with wood:  selections from the Waterbury Collection."  The artists represented here had taken "wood turning" into entirely different directions.  Many of these pieces were more sculptural than reminiscent of lathe-turned vessels we find at Bazaart or Wintergreen.   There was a carefully carved "vase" that would hold nothing:  its boundaries were made with flowing carved grasses of dark mahogany.  There was a kind of tiny frieze that looked both realistic and otherworldly with a really long title that made clear it was a piece of beautifully imagined visual science fiction. There was a small flat bowl into which the artist had inlaid a constellation of silver wire that whirled out to nothingness.  It's one of the most peaceful things I've ever seen.   While the MIA lets you photograph most of the work in their collection, as long as you don't use flash, this work is so new that photographs weren't allowed.

As I've been writing, I've been trying to think how I'd describe the difference between my reactions to sitting on a room full of late impressionism or cubism, and standing in a room full of wooden sculptures.  Looking at paintings, I'm gobsmacked.  I'm taught to see all over again, and taught to see the ideas in what I see.  Taught to see an historical moment colliding with a particular sensibility, taught to see a culture thinking through the work of individual artists.  When I leave the gallery, it's as if everything is more intense and meaningful.  Minneapolis, as you can see from the photograph above of downtown seem from the window of the MIA, is a well-treed city.  And they have every kind of tree:  oaks, several kinds of maples, ginkos, trees I can't even name.  When you come out of the gallery, that world is suddenly more intense and present:  you notice every variation on 'green.'  The t-shirt worn by the young man walking toward you probably has cultural significance, as does the way he struts, the music he listens to, his chat with his girlfriend.  After looking at paintings, you are reminded that the visual world has meaning, that meaning is everywhere.  On most days, we're just too busy or too overwhelmed to pay it full attention.

When I'm in a room that's full of work that edges the boundary between art and craft--the Gees Bend quilts I saw several years ago in Denver, or the conversations in wood I saw in the MIA, it's my hands that the work speaks to.  If you Google "Gees Bend Quilts," you'll see the brave, adventurous quilts these women made out of worn clothing.  That they took the more serviceable pieces of dresses or workpants or jeans and made them into these visual explosions is remarkable.  But when you see the quilts in the flesh, you see the patterns of wear, the way the threads have been gentled by time, the subtle patina of use.  They speak to you of daily lives, of the conversation between daily life and the determination to create beauty.  And you want to touch them.  Similarly, "Conversations in Wood" made my hands itch and ache. Though like the paintings, this work has ideas that challenge traditional ways of making and being and seeing, it appeals through our sense of touch in a way that reminds us of how this work is connected to our daily lives.

This is the other work that blew me away, and forced me to think more about Soul Weather.  It's called "An exile dreaming of St. Adorno," and it was created by Siah Armanjani, who came to Minneapolis from Iran.  Because the photograph is taken without flash, so I was sitting against the wall to get enough stability so keep it from blurring, you can't quite see the "exile" in his prison-like room nor can you quite see the way the bars of the inner room echo those in the outer room or the way the black and white ticking on the mattress echoes the bars of the prison/room.  Monastic cell for contemplation or some kind of prison cell the exile has agreed to occupy?  Like the work of Manders at the Walker, this installation is both very peaceful and very unnerving.  The didactic panel referred the viewer to a quotation from Adorno--the "saint" that the exile is dreaming of:  "It is part of morality not to be at home in one's home."  What does that mean?  My character Lee, when she talks of Empedocles, thinks that sometimes we're simply too uncritically comfortable in the present moment, leading I suppose to complacency.  But "home"?  Isn't that the one place where we're allowed to let our critical guard down for the day?  Or, as I'm coming to conclude, does "home" have the perfect balance between peace and challenge that gives us a space where we're both safe and forced to grow and stretch and be more human than we would be if we were swathed in some kind of cocoon?  Please, tell me what you think.

I'll post some photographs to the other blogs I sent from Mpls in the coming days.  Time to practice my guitar.

The Walker Art Gallery

When people asked me why we were visiting Minneapolis, my inevitable answer was "The Walker Art Gallery."  It says something about a midwest community that it can support a gallery devoted to edgy, challenging, moving, provocative, and funny contemporary art.  I hadn't been to the Walker for over twenty years, but this visit was even more remarkable than past ones, probably because Veronica has done a good job of bringing me up to speed on contemporary art.  Bill is also a challenging, thoughtful, quirky companion.  I have good company for art galleries.

Two exhibitions stood out for me.  One was Mark Manders' Parallel Occurrences/ Documented Assignments, though I have no idea what the title means.  Manders originally thought he'd become a poet, but turned to sculpture instead, and the didactic panels rightly identified his sculpture as inherently poetic.  There's a kind of abstract poetic juxtaposition of images  that he can wrench out of context in a way that he perhaps couldn't do with words.  They're so powerful that I felt I couldn't take photographs, even though the gallery allows you to; it seemed voyeuristic.  Manders works mostly with clay and wood.  One powerful image offers the viewer a slice of an enormous clay face wedged in between large plinths of wood, the largest of which is a table turned on its edge.  Because the table legs are slightly inset from the top of the table, they have to be propped up to keep the work vertical.  Manders uses two untitled hardcover books to do this, so that this massive piece ultimately rests on two volumes.  Your reaction to the face wedged between the wood is visceral and immediate:  "There are days when I feel like that," you immediately say.  And then the fragile balance of the whole piece on the books adds another layer to your reaction.  If I were to reduce the idea to something I could say here, I'd say that again it gives you a visceral sense of how finely, tenuously balanced civilization is:  there are some days when it could go either way.

In another piece, he wanted to create a balance that was "both serene and painful."  A beautifully sculpted child's body, with one of its legs torn off at the hip, is tethered to an inverted cross with three piles of sand at the foot.  The stability of the piece, the piles of sand, the expression on the child's face are all serene, yet you simply can't ignore that torn body.  The balance between serenity and pain is provocative and powerfully saddening.

The second remarkable large exhibition was called Exposed:  Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera Since 1870.  The very mass of images--from black and white war photographs dating back nearly to the Civil War, the erotica, the surveillance camera imagery--combine to create a single uneasy enveloping effect:  we are watching one another and are in turn being watched.  One photograph called "The photography club" (I'm sorry I don't remember the photographer:  the image simply stuck in my mind), depicts a photographer photographing a member of the photography club who is in turn photographing a woman splayed in a bay window seat.  (The photographer whose image we see is rather kinder to her than her pornographer:  we only get the suggestive pose of a knee so that the image we see isn't entirely objectifying.)  Its layers are disturbing:  even while the pornographer (dressed in very clubby flannel trousers and sweater) believes he's "an artist" capturing the woman, he in turn is subject to surveillance.  Any domestic, tranquil associations you might have with window seats are undone by the woman's pose.

The most powerful group of images were the war photographs:  they reminded me, like the images of the Spanish Civil War I saw with Veronica in New York City this spring, how powerfully photographers bring fractions of the truth back from the front.  There were, of course, some of the remarkable photographs from the Vietnam War.  But I was most moved by a collage of photographs taken in Rwanda superimposed upon a body; the collage in turn had captured events from the life of this man, so that his story was superimposed upon his corpse.  What better way to say that every time someone dies in war stories also die?  What better way to make the victims human?

In the midst of all this, there was a photograph that made me laugh out loud.  We see the back of Queen Elizabeth II while she watches one of her ceremonially dressed servants throw a soccer ball for two of her beloved corgis.  My first reaction was "How sad!  She doesn't even play with her own dogs."  The didactic panel told us, though, that photographs in this series only pretend to be celebrities.  How it takes the hot air out of celebrity-hood.

Across from the Walker is an immense sculpture garden with a glass fish by Frank Gehry, several sculptures by Henry Moore, trees full of wind chimes (how do you photograph sound?) that are so out of context on a busy Minneapolis street that they surprise you, a huge spoon with a cherry--and lots of work whose provenance I don't know.  What was delightful was how people played among the art, reclining in a huge swing, dancing among plinths, mugging for one another's cameras, even a pair of lovers sleeping.  They were living among the art, finding their experience made richer and more imaginative.

I'll upload some photographs when I get home, but I needed to get the words down tonight while the images were still fresh.

Literature and the environment II: the Minneapolis Zoo

Bill and I are in Minneapolis, and he suggested we go to the zoo this morning.  While zoos aren't quite my thing (animals in captivity tend to make me sad), compromise on holidays is.  It was fabulous, partly because it's a huge, really humane zoo and makes an important contribution to animal conservation.  Each didactic panel tells you how the animal you're looking at is doing in the wild.  I couldn't help write.

This is how we meet nature:
our hands against the glass,

ranks of us in limegreen daycare T-shirts
almost down to our fragile knees.
We believe the sea otter is drawn
to the reach of our curiosity,
can imagine him,
Ernest Borgnine-faced, curious
about us, the sparkly new barret,
the stuffed parrot, the proud ball cap.

Our hands against the glass,
we try to reach beyond distortions:
the African penguins who fly through water
fetch up as questions:
Are they three inches or nine beyond our grasp?
Is that feathers or fur, a tail or fin
they shake with glee as they surface?
(Is it glee?)

This is how we meet nature:
learning to see, to find the patience
without  words
for the colour and texture of snow monkey fur
slowly groomed in the sunshine.