Memo to the Cat

Above - a major dose of lovecat meditation, Maru on a shelf doing nothing

My creativity these days is lending itself to poetry, I am very glad to say, including the major task of cleaning all the art supplies off the work table so I can strew poetry all over it.  But I roamed back in my files and found this, obviously written at a time when my almost limitless patience with the cat must have worn thin.  It does have a rather unfinished feel to it, for which I apologize.  Suggestions for an ending are welcome.

Memo to the Cat

The fact that I walked from my study into the living room does not mean you get treats, even though it is true that I passed physically through Treat Zone.

Meowing loudly, monotonously, repetitively will never break my spirit.

There actually is such a thing as enough petting.

It costs well over a thousand dollars to reupholster the sofa, whereas cats are cheap. 

I moved your chair back where it’s supposed to be, okay.  I’m sorry I moved it.  I wanted to put the printer where it is more convenient for me.  How selfish of me.  I need to remember that I only work here, and you are the Queen.

Getting Through a Bipolar Hurricane

Tuesday night
I just hung up the three shirts I took to Zen tonight, not knowing what I'd need over my tee - the doctor's office today must have been at 65 degrees, and I wanted my fleece jacket.  So I took a short-sleeved denim shirt, a long-sleeved flannel shirt, and a fleece shirt-jacket.  This is why we old ladies get classified as fussy, because we really don't want to catch a chill.  And we've learned.  The hard way.

I seem to learn everything the hard way.  The reason I say that freely is that I'm pretty sure that's not a personal fault unique to me, but just the only way we monkeys learn.  I imagine there are people smarter than that; I hope they know how lucky they are.

But my point was about being messy.  I came home tonight wanting to get a card ready to send to Jacques, who's in the hospital with a painful and serious condition............
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Fast forward to Thursday.
I did get Jacques' card done and out, though our general disorganization made it a challenge.  But it turned out to be a rotten day for me, and I didn't get much else done.  That's been my life for several weeks - up, down, up down.  And sometimes UP
then d

           o

             w

                n........

                          ..... . ;(

 If you're not bipolar, the way this differs from your life is that the ups and downs are occurring on their own internal clock, which has nothing much to do with your actual emotional life.  There is a mysterious switch that turns on dopamine and serotonin, feel-good chemicals like that, gets them flowing well, then uh-oh, they are flooding.

Everyone likes hypomania.  Everything is beautiful, you are confident, you love everyone and want to make art out of everything.  You begin great new projects.  It was in that frame of mind that I took the above picture, just loving the subtle colors I saw from my car in the Safe Auto parking deck at OSU. And by the way, that frame of mind can make it hard to sleep, even when you're very tired.

But the day before that I described in my log as "indescribably wretched."  I remember crying as we did my weekly pills.  Days like this I don't make any progress at all on great projects; I am doing well to take a shower and get Tom to take me to the health club, and force myself to exercise on the Nustep.  If I can find something, anything to distract me on Netflix or a book, that's good.  Those days are just something you get through.  Maybe like huddling down during a hurricane. 

The day I took that picure I was at OSU to talk to my psychiatrist about all that, and he prescribed an uptick in one of my medications.  A week later it seems to have leveled the moods somewhat.  Somewhat.  There is no cure for bipolar, like most of what ails you.

If I have a point to make it is that my life (and Tom's) is definitely made easier by the years of daily practice.  Sitting Zen is especially good for me when I'm being wow, really !creative! and have a thousand things to do, and want to do them all, and start new projects, too.  Nothing is better for mania than pulling the blinds and sitting still in a dim room, preferably cool.  And not moving, not scratching an itch, not answering the phone or writing down the new ideas for great projects that are dancing through your mind.  Letting your muscles relax and your breathing and heart rate settle.

And oddly, sitting is pretty good for neurochemical depression, too, though not in the large quantities of a retreat, in my case.  (Learned that the hard way, of course.)  It can be healthier for me to seek distraction.  But sitting there once or twice a day practicing looking at your sadness and lack of volition, standing back a little mentally to witness them, then letting them move on, not sticking to stories that easily balloon into your whole difficult life.

I'm just here to testify.  That's all.  I haven't found much to read on Zen for bipolars, and other mental afflictions.  Yet we are people who need the help Buddhism can provide just to get by.  I'm beginning to think I might have to write that book.  That should tell you I'm having a good day.

A Discourse with Self, or Why I Don't Meditate

The thought in my mind this morning, planted there by reading Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, is that following our impulses is not real freedom. In fact, we can become slaves to them.  Now, in my case I will point to a really homely little thing, not hanging up my clothes.  It is related to changing outfits under the press of time and throwing things on the bed.  Or deciding I'm too tired at night and draping them over the brass rail thing beside the bed.  And that's what it's for.  So as I write it is occurring to me to take that incitement to disorder out of there. 

Anyway, this standing mess has led me to declare that my New Habit of the Week is hanging up my clothes or putting them in the hamper.  You see how this is not a matter of discipline vs. freedom? More discipline leading to freedom, the freedom of being able to find clean clothes without cursing your way through a heap.

And then there is meditating every day.  You'd be surprised the explanations I came up with yesterday just meandering, talking with my PT guy while he pulled my arm, breaking up lesions in the frozen shoulder.  It is good to talk while he does that, it takes my mind off the pain.  

But I am aware that talking about the reasons I don't do what I actually want to do is not very helpful. There's lots of Why.  In some quarters, explaining why you can't is called excuses, excuses.  I can imagine a dialogue with my higher self:

me: Ummmm

self:  Go ahead.

me:  Well, I was going to explain how it came to pass that I got out of the discipline of sitting every day.

self:  You were going to do that instead of meditate.

me:  Ummm.........  Anyway, they're not excuses.  They're, like, reasons. Cause and effect. Karma. Like how I'm on narcotics, and sick all the time. And the moodswings from the steroids. And this irregular schedule. I could go on all day.  It makes sense.  Really.  I have a lot of reasons.

self:  Uh-huh

me:  So anyway.  Guess I'll go meditate and get a little more friendly with you, this self that seems a little wiser than me. (Though I would like to explain how when the creative impulse hits, you have to go with it.  An artist's life is very messy.  Well, the unsuccessful artists, at least.   And all these medical appointments........

self: So you have lots of good reasons why you don't do what you really want to do.

me:  [struck silent]  

p.s. I did take the brass rail thing (a quilt rack) downstairs. I did meditate.

Why I erased my public blog roll

The fad among Buddhist bloggers of listing their favorite bloggers reminds me that whenever someone "wins" someone loses.

How this goes, the blogger is asked to single out her most helpful post, most beautiful, and so on, seven categories, and then to recommend five other bloggers to do the same.  At the moment this is working out to include bloggers who frame themselves as distinctly Zen.  And I am more electic, and - if you didn't know - the very idea of "Dalai" is Tibetan Buddhism.  Like Christians, like everyone, Buddhists tend to subdivide into tight little cliques.

Still, wouldn't you like to be liked even if you are a little weird?  Wouldn't you like to be picked?

It brings to my mind a workshop I attended at Earlham College several years ago, in fact, just before our lives blew up in our face, and Tom had to retire on disability and I went downhill with kidney failure.  In 2003 I was still able to travel and to drive several hours, still trying to build my courage to seek publication.  The writing conference was early fall, beautiful weather.  I was very pleased to be there, to have done this on my own. 

I don't know whether the teacher in my workshop meant to exclude me; but she didn't include me.  A young woman, she was on the faculty there and knew everyone else in the workshop by name, local women, apparently, who had taken workshops with her before.  She had us go around the room and introduce ourselves with one sentence.  She made a presentation.  Then we wrote a little on the theme, which was daily bread.  Then she selected one woman, and asked her to read what she wrote, and then to name who she would like to read next.

So each woman in turn selected someone she knew.  In this fashion, it zigzagged around the room until every one of the ten women there had read, except me.  I was excited about what I'd written, and anticipating my moment.  There were a few minutes left.  But the teacher visibly did not turn to me, sitting at her right.  She did some other talking, and dismissed the class.  One of the other women came up to me later and tacitly apologized. I went home early, and confused.

Could this teacher have been angry because I came in a few seconds after the bell (I had gone out to fill my water bottle), and she had begun talking?  That would seem to be a ridiculous response.  Whatever impelled her, it must have been intentional.  And the energy felt hostile.  I still feel somehow shamed as I remember it. Excluded, for no reason that I knew. 

My larger point is not this workshop, but to remind people that whenever you form an invitational group, you close doors.  The sandlot baseball we used to play in fifth and sixth grade, before puberty separated us by gender, that too depended on the team captains (the top players) picking people one at a time.  But there was a certain justice in it, in that it was based on winning the game.  The most skilled players were always chosen first.  I was always last, but as I say, that was fair - I couldn't catch or throw, and I couldn't hit the ball, so the fact that I couldn't run didn't come into it, really.  All I had going for me was enthusiasm and the desire to be part of the game.

Once though, a girl named Diane was captain, and she chose me first.  How kind that was! If I could remember her last name and find her, I'd send her a little card of gratitude all these years later.  I hope her life turned out well.  I wouldn't be surprised that it did.

How to Discourage Creativity

There is . . . a dark side to creativity, in that it represents a "quest for a radical autonomy apart from the constraints of social responsibility".  In other words, by encouraging creativity we are encouraging a departure from society's existing norms and values. Expectation of conformity runs contrary to the spirit of creativity. Sir Ken Robinson argues that the current education system is "educating people out of their creativity".
from Wikipedia on the subject

I've seen Sir Ken on TED talks - he quite convinced me, since I could easily make a case that I had the most creativity-discouraging childhood well, probably not ever, probably not in America . . . and probably almost everyone born in 1942 had much that kind of schooling and home. Still, it was harsh. Sad.

But let's not go there.  The fun thing is to think about how being creative is radical, is a form of manning the barricades.  Odd example came to me just now.  I couldn't possibly find the pictures, which are on film in a big box with many other slides and photos, sigh . . . but I had just gotten a new little car, and must have also been in the throes of discovering photography.  For when I left work I got intrigued by the way the snow was piled on the door handle, and began taking pictures of it.  Later my boss and coworker told me they were watching me from the second-story window and laughing.  They couldn't even imagine.  So seeing this somewhat creative act (it wasn't a photo of the family reunion) they saw definite nonconformity.  Their approach was not untypical - they called it crazy and laughed at it.  Not real threatening crazy, but threatening enough to make a point of laughing at it and demeaning me, which would be called "putting you down" as if it is just words, just jokes, and doesn't hurt.

Do you like to be laughed at?

You know what, though?  I think there is not one single person who reads this blog or ever would stumble on this post who does things like that.

You'll be glad to know that not long after that I walked out on that job, though over something worse. Yes, sexual harassment is worse.  But in the same ballpark.

And here's a recent creative photo.  There was more to the sign about no fishing or wading, but this view caught my fancy.

On staying disorganized

Contemplating space - not photoshopped

My friend Suzanne keeps Facebook alive these days by posting a question of the day.  Yesterday's was---If you could wake up tomorrow morning having gained any one ability or quality, what would it be? 
First thought, best thought I believe . . .

. . . and tracking down that phrase led me to a review in the NY Times of a book by that title, selections from Allen Ginsberg's interviews over the years. Wonderful where wasting time can take you.  Just this description of how Ginsberg worked in-spires me, fills me with the breath of creativity.

I suppose I was influenced by Ginsberg in my own method of writing poetry, as well as by an English major's immersion in the great modern poets and, like him, by Buddhist theory and practice.  It is a sort of mysticism.  The reviewer says--

Indeed, Buddhism taught him to eschew rationality in favor of ''ordinary'' or ''spontaneous'' mind, the vast sea of consciousness upon which our concepts and categories, anxieties and prohibitions, float like so much junk. Hence Ginsberg's compositional method, the moment-by-moment transcription of thoughts and images as they passed across his mind.

You can work like this in the visual arts, too.  Recently I marked some words by my current favorite artist, Joe Brainard, on how to make a collage.  He too was actively exploring the visual arts in the sixties, and developed on his own, with almost no academic training, a spontaneous way of working. His studio was a mess.

Back to Suzanne.  My first thought on seeing her question was, I'd like to be much more organized. To have everything in its place.  That would be in the material world - I am reconciled to a mind that is "a vast sea of consciousness" as long as it doesn't get to extremes.  And I realized as I wrote my reply to her that to be organized is fundamentally the opposite of being a spontaneous artist. (I am choosing that term, carefully - you do not "make spontaneous art," you live spontaneously, your discipline is being with, you are an artist.)  [Should that be parenthetical?]

I have sometimes thought of writing studies of the women I've known who were exemplary housekeepers, who kept their domiciles (they didn't feel like "homes") like new.  Not that one can argue from a few examples, just illustrate.  As far as I could ever discover in knowing them (relatives by marriage, alas), their minds were neat and sterile, too.  Interesting how men seldom or never concern themselves with the problem of housekeeping, isn't it?  Insert feminism here.  Have a day.

Law and disorder

There was a time in my life when my unhappiness was not at all about impulse.  Self was constructed of the cement of rules and role, and I didn't seem to have any Real Me in there at all, not even impulses.  NoWun. I was just what I had been told I should be. What satisfied my parents. What was permissible in their narrow thoughts. It's a small cage.  But it has a door that isn't locked.

It sort of amazes me how many lives I have had. That buttoned-up tight time was in my twenties. At that time, nice little house, no mess, because my husband wouldn't have liked mess, because my parents were fiends for neatness, my mother always picking up after all of us, always cleaning. Very little creativity in any of our lives. For a while mine found its out in sewing useful things.  I remember very fondly a pink terry-cloth bathrobe with a hood that I made for Cassie when she was still a toddler. She was so beautiful in it.  I used a pattern, never learned how to sew without one. Now I know people who make gorgeous fabric collages stitched with gold thread, who work with happenstance in their quilting. Back then all I ever saw was quilts according to patterns - even patchwork was done to a grid. Sometimes the question is about finding your impulses.

Reading Chogyam Trungpa this morning on Auspicious Coincidence.  He gets into questions about choice. And making choices is very much about being right in the center, right here, right with yourself and all of it, doing the central, sane thing.  He talks a bit about using divination when we feel stuck, and it made me think of my tarot cards. At another time in my life when I felt very browned-out and stuck, I learned to read tarot with the classic Rider deck.  And it was great for me, it helped move me along.  It is a way to put the Self and all its thoughts and rules aside and enter the situation wide open, put your energy into the cards as you shuffle and cut, so you are putting yourself out there a little.  Listen to the universe, be opened by the symbols on the cards, so that the answer becomes clear. Well, sometimes it doesn't.  But you approached the question.

Always looking for big answers. But I often think the question is, What are you going to do with the thing in your hand?  That's both tangible and a metaphor.

What is the Question?

It's weird to think back on how, when I was in my late forties, I resisted going on blood pressure medication, declaring that I would exercise and cut back on salt (neither of which I really did).  I was already on too many psychotropics, maybe that was it.  But I know a woman in her seventies who was very upset about going on synthroid.  You don't fix your low thyroid function by strength of will. There is something going on in us about being strong and self-sufficient, not aging, not being taken over by an outside force.  Maybe it's instinctive.  In my case, I suspect it's exaggerated by childhood sexual abuse.

When I was put on lithium at around age 35, I was told I would have to take it the rest of my life.  My long depressions and manias had been so destructive that I was glad to finally have a diagnosis, and fully cooperative.  Bear in mind that before the internet, you had to go to a medical library to research these  things.

But in 1999 the psychiatrist I'd worked with for nine years took a job out of town, and I was transferred to a new guy, who took one look at my kidney functions and yanked me off lithium.  That's a story I want to tell, and a long one.  For now I'll just say, I never should have been taken off without cautious ramping down. Psychotropics are powerful, and withdrawal can be a bitch. I know - over time I went off not just lithium, but the other nine drugs that doctor had me on. I know, read it and weep.

Once I had gotten through the withdrawals, I thought I had triumphed, and would never take those drugs again.  My creativity had increased tenfold.  I wrote and wrote, I won some awards, I did readings. I could now expect to write a poem every morning  I found out what I had been missing. I had been creative during those over-medicated years, but nothing like this. I now defined myself as A Poet.

I went along without psychotropics for over ten years, vastly aided by the discipline and calming power of spiritual practice, by Teachers and therapist, by a kind, patient husband.  Then comes kidney transplant.  I don't know whether they do this at every hospital, but at OSU they give every kidney recipient 500 mg. of steroids before the surgery begins, and another 500 afterwards.

You don't want to do this. 'Roid rage pales beside what I experienced. I got through it, I thought, and could even manage to doze off for a few hours once they gave me Ativan at night.  But once I was released and the anaesthetic wore off, I couldn't get to sleep at night.  For hours.  Worked with a psychiatrist at OSU Medical Center who tried Ambien, then Lunesta, and they simply didn't work. I tried all kinds of lifestyle things that are advised for insomniacs.  They didn't work.  What a mess. You can't heal if you can't sleep. So the psychiatrist suggested a low dose of Seroquel.  A psychotropic that can calm the fevered mind and make you drowsy. Once again, I was ready for anything that would help. And it has.

The wonderful Zen Teacher, Robert Aitken, was asked when he was ninety or so, "What is the most important thing?"

He replied, "A good night's sleep."

Ah yes.  The functioning of the human body and mind depends on it.

Right away the Seroquel slowed down my poet's mind.  In the four months since I started taking it, I have written only four poems.  I think any serious poet would think that's okay, if you're pleased with them.  I tend to see it as "not writing poetry anymore."  There you are.

I'm taking this as a sort of experiment.  I don't know whether the day will come when I try going off Seroquel.  There are things about it that I like.  I am more organized, better able to prioritize and then do those necessary tasks.  It even shows in the house, which is getting more organized one drawer at a time.I love that.


But back to my main concern.  The question is not "Should I take meds or not?"  The question is, "What do I need to do to live the way I want?"  Many young artists refuse lithium and similar drugs because they see their creativity as their central identity.  I'm here to say, it isn't.  Your central identity is the health of your body.  Once it goes, you and what you conceive of as your identity are gone.  And you won't care then, I think, whether anyone reads your poems.

Assignment: see color

Green

Green autofixed

Green J's fix

After several weeks of thinking about it, I bought myself Contemplative Photography. Why was I reluctant? I don't know. I have been leafing around in it (sorry, pun) and caught the first assignment - Color. It's like any kind of awareness until you are a Buddha, perhaps, and have no lapses - now wait, I think that's wrong - I am told we lapsed beings are Buddhas, though we are cautioned to try a little harder, nevertheless.

My life: I have only 10 more minutes here, and was just interrupted by a much desired phone call from my transplant nurse-coordinator, Joanie. The dr. wants to raise my Norvasc - I had sent her another fax with a week's blood pressure readings that showed it is still too high for someone whose parents both died from stroke. This concern got moved recently from cardiologist to tx kidney doc, for the kidney plays a part in controlling your BP.  The new one doesn't seem to have caught on.

Back to the more spiritual. Creating art.  Catching photos with the 5-pixel camera on my phone, which turn out pretty nice, especially in outdoor light  The top photo above was my spontaneous catch this morning - I was amazed to see the backs of the leaves were really that light, and stuck with that amazement long enough to take one picture.

Below that, the auto-fix available on Pikasa's editing program.  As soon as I saw it I knew why most photos on the internet look somehow alike.  The program has been tapped to make them conform to a formula.

Below that, the result after I played with it awhile. The more I did, the less I liked it, and I don't like it now.  I tried cropping it different ways - nothing pleased me.  I still prefer the original, the point-and-shoot.  I told Tom I am going to invent The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Visuals.  See it, stay with that- don't mess it up with conceptualizing-, and click.  One take.  The book calls it three stages: the flash of perception, visual discernment, forming the equivalent (or taking the picture). It's just like washing lettuce or talking to a friend - be aware, stay aware, stay aware again.  It's what we practice doing when we meditate. That's why we call it practice.

Smoke

 

I took a number of shots of my altar just now before I realized what it was I wanted to photograph. Maybe I should video it - the smoke is the only thing visibly dancing on the empty altar. And it will change all day long as the light changes.

Thinking inside the box

My schedule begins now, when my (expensive, ridiculous, new) Droid sounds an alarm at 8:00 a.m. Time to stop everything and take my Neoral. A while ago I decided to anchor my day to this in this fashion:

get up, medical stuff, take synthroid
coffee with e-friends
8:00  take Neoral
bodywork, meditate
9:00 breakfast, rest of pills

If this doesn't sound difficult to you, you are not a *Creative!* person.  To be such is to now be considering how I could import an image of the word *Creative!* in joker font and many colors.

Mine is not the smooth, disciplined creativity of many writers who do this one thing, the novel they're working on, and that is the thing they do. Mine is the creativity of someone who goes to a Greek restaurant and is inspired to learn to make avgolemon soup, in fact, to learn Greek cooking, and paint a mural on her bathroom wall, but first wants to figure out how to download photos from her Droid.  Right now the schedule says this person is going to turn the monitor off, pull down the shades, close the door (to the cat), settle down and do nothing else but follow the schedule.   There is a little slack built in, but I try very hard not to let that slack eat into practice time.

This does relate to the fact that lately I have been considering what my Buddhist name would be - Crazy Cloud?  Wild Mind? Wonder what Amasamy would say if I ask him about it. He doesn't do things traditionally.  Speculating on my name makes me sort of chuckle and smile.  Fortunately, I am alone. You don't want to walk down the street laughing at your own mind.  Other people get alarmed; they can't see your mind.  The Zen story about that suggests that you should therefore understand that your mind is not real.

I understand the wisdom of that, but still, my mind is like a fad toy I saw years go on the boardwalk in Atlantic City:  a leash and dog collar that wobbles alongside the walker, so seems to be an invisible dog.  Just electronics, and I guess, so is my mind.  Mental emissions. Yet it strains at the leash at times.  Right now it is saying, I bet there's a video of that on YouTube.  Down boy, down. This should explain why I really do need to meditate.

I always had to suppress a smile when I heard Daniel explain retreat in a public talk or before a retreat, with the words, "All you have to do is follow the schedule."  That's all? I would think ironically (yes, this is possible.)  For some of us that's the hardest thing in the world.  And I know that for some people, it's the easiest.  Relax, let all your desires float past like distant clouds, just sit here motionless in this upright posture till the bell rings.  And don't be late. 

Wild mind that I am I often think about following the schedule - doing the things I have to do.  Yesterday I was making my back hurt doing my weekly pills in the special box with 28 compartments.  This has to be done right, or you'll be sorry.  They include a pill that prevents my atrial fibrillation, another to replace the thyroid gland that had to be removed surgically, others to lower my blood pressure so I don't go out with a stroke like both my parents did, others to prevent a really bad stomach ache brought on by others that suppress my immune system.  Others to help me get to sleep because other pills that suppress my immune response give me Very Active Mind at bedtime.  In other words, these are not frivolous pills, and doing them right is hard for me.  But I must do it once a week.  if I hadn't done it yesterday, I would have awakened today to the necessity of counting out the fourteen pills I take with breakfast.

So, illness has been a stern teacher for me, forcing discipline on someone who wants to walk barefoot through the world, stop to smell the roses, and so on. Discipline is one of the three somethings we learn through meditation, as I recall. But I am not going to stop now to look it up.  Maybe later.

The Kind of Cat I am: The Artistic Temperament in August

I was consoled this morning to see that my most creative, artistic Facebook friends also had -- what to call it? okay, fits. They, too, had fits yesterday. You can call them mini-breakdowns. I had a tai chi teacher who told me to call them "nervous breakthroughs." How right he was - you fall apart, you find some truths in the junk at the bottom the mess, you put yourself back together a little better. Better how? Maybe less constructed. Or more organized. Or over it. Which function is more useful, Control or Delete? Depends.

The kind of cat I am is creative, and generally in need of more mess. All artists make things out of our experience (Norman Fischer is very good on this). In my case, I arrange words or sometimes blocks of color, or angles, to catch someone in a photograph . . . or flowers, one of my favorite forms of art, so impermanent, so frivolous, meant only for my appreciation, which is keenest as I make the arrangement. I make art when I think I should be making something else. See image, a bowl of raw yellow squash, cut in circles, and laid across it a scape of garlic. There it is, found beauty interrupting the task. I would never never want to work as a chef, purposeful and fast, intent on the end product.

The essence of Being an Artist, of allowing one's creativity to flourish, is to have purposeless time, empty time, uselessness. It is from that open, rambling, no-should do-nothing spot that art pops up, that we can hear the poem when it whispers. That place can be peaceful and contemplative, but to tell the truth, the poems that emerge from that later read as . . . boring. The paintings might make good hospital art. It is from the rough and ragged that interesting art comes. Why is that? I suppose because what we want from art is to arrange the rough and ragged in some way that makes us feel better about it. And so, many of my own poems are about death. A death plunged me into writing. I have since written much about other people's death. Now it's about my own. But a Poet once told me, "Every elegy is really about the poet."

This week my friend Bob gave me a refresher in a game I used to play a lot, pinochle. I told him, making a chancy bid, "I'm not a good card player. I like to take risks."

"Actually," he said, "that's what makes a good player."

"It's the same in literature," I said, sweeping in tricks like a riverboat gambler. "It's the people way out there who dare to do what they do and to hell with what you're supposed to do."

I was thinking to myself (as students so often write, as if there's another kind of thinking) how 20 years ago I compulsively wrote a collection of linked stories about people who were friends and showed up in other people's stories. No one was doing that then. I tied myself in monkey knots trying to make the thing into "a novel." Despite that, it won first place in a national contest, but I never had the courage to market the thing aggressively. Agents and publishers want to know, What kind of book is it? See, it's sort of something new, I would have said (if you discount Canterbury Tales). Oh well. They don't want new. They want proven success. Now I am reading prize-winning books of linked stories, Three Junes, for instance. The genre is coming into its own. It's too bad I didn't have the confidence, or connections, back then.

I endowed our cat Sherlock with the quality I wanted to cultivate in my art, total unquestioning self-confidence. He did things his way. Sometimes he seemed to smooth his lapels before walking slowly away, emanating as he did, Well, I guess you don't like what I did, but that's the kind of cat I am. Get used to it. Up on the table licking the roast? That's the kind of cat I am. I bit you? Oh well. That's the kind of cat I am.

Not that I, Jeanne, want to go around doing evil things with no conscience - what I mean is that in a sense, genuine art is disruptive. It breaks the boundaries of Should. To be an artist in any field, that's what you have to do to get down to the real. Everything else is just doing the conventional thing.

It is hell to be an artist, and probably worse to live with us, I don't know. In August in this hemisphere, some of us get way out of balance. I myself am a largely Air person endowed with Fire, and I get all blown about inside by relentless overripe August. It isn't just the sun, it's the time of year. Summer goes all out, ripe and poised on the edge of death. This morning what I saw helicoptering down in the sky across the street was the first maple seed. There are many many redbud seeds in the back yard, clustered like little green bananas, poised on the brink. I am tempted to go out and photograph them - just discovered the macro in my digital camera - but I'll wait until evening. The long light is better then, and I have sworn to stay inside during the heat of the day, with all the blinds closed. Dim and cool feels wonderful.

Art and work

[image: Who is the artist? Answer tomorrow]

I am thinking about art and work today, because I just read an article in yesterday's New York Times about a talented teenage violinist who works as a waitress in a Sonic Drive-in to support herself, and will be going to nursing school, not Juilliard. The story captured my attention because she lives in nearbye Newark. The slant of the story is that this is a tragedy, and I won't be surprised if it turns up some philanthropist who wants to help the young woman pursue her talent.

But I think she might still argue for nursing school. She knows that, in the words of the song, "ain't no money in poetry" or in music. In Newark, Ohio, voters defeat the school levy, and the music program is the first to be cut. There go the jobs of people who majored in music. This girl from a broken family sees that reality, and wants to be able to earn her way in life.

Work. It's something you do because it needs to be done, not because it is fascinating and fulfilling. The stories we have about the Buddha, charmingly accumulated in Thich Nhat Hanh's biography, Old Path, White Clouds, tell us that his work - teaching - was a royal pain. His own cousin (relatives!) tried to break up the community, then tried to murder him. It drove the frustrated Buddha into the jungle to commune with the elephant. Having taught, I can relate to that.

If nobody would do it for fun, the saying goes, "That's why they call it work." This is not true for creative work, I think; a lot of us do it willingly for enjoyment. I can attest to the fact that when you set out to gain something external from your talent, what you do is changed - it becomes work. Putting together a collection of poems to submit for a grant moves you farther and farther from your intimate creative impulse, toward putting yourself in the mind of the judges, who become "consumers" of what is now, alas, a product. Every so often a really talented novelist or poet kills him/herself under the strain of trying to produce something. David Foster Wallace is a recent case.

It might be better after all to earn money some other way, achieve in some worldly precinct, if achieve you must, and play the violin for pleasure in a bluegrass band or an amateur string quartet. It seems to me that an ideal economy would let us earn a living wage by working half-time at something useful, accounting, waitressing, changing babies, and half-time giving ourselves to a creative endeavor, gardening or calligraphy or restoring classic cars.

This morning I watched a video of the Kings Firecrackers, an astonishing performance by a team of girls with jump ropes. It is acrobatics and choreography and, I suppose, sport and art. These talented fourth through eighth grade girls get to do this disciplined performance art for a short time, and then outgrow it and move on. There are so many paths from there; it seems like a Zen blessing of sorts, enjoying your talent fully, moving on in ninth grade to whatever life holds for you now.