Rather than with the voracious tick that buried itself into my skin today

I celebrate the first day of spring with these inspiring folks.

Red, White, and Blue

With the help of volunteers and VISTA members, programs for inmates in the Grundy County Detention Center include dog handling, art, meditation, and GRE studies. This afternoon I went to see an art show featuring work by four incarcerated women. Each had created four works -- including a mandala, a hand and "moving" lines, a small geometric design, and a collage.

To the cynic who wonders if art has "purpose and value," I would point to this revelation by one the women, writing about her collage: she included a photo of core ice cream because "I love it and because it reminds me I need to work on my core of my being and bring it out."

Like this abandoned building across the street from the courthouse, something may look broken, but it can still be beautiful.

Alternative Facts

According to an article published today in The Washington Post, one man has taken credit (again) for something another man did: "Arnett also discovered the quilters of Gee's Bend, Ala., leading to a blockbuster exhibition." (Mind you, the exhibition was his. The books mentioned in the article are his publications as well.) I saw a number of those quilts in the early 1970s [I think], packed into the trunk of my brother's car, headed to New York for display.

There are other such "facts" in the article, which I will not enumerate.

Suffice it to say that I greatly enjoyed seeing the pictures of art made by artists I have long respected, for example, Lonnie Holley, whom I have featured in this blog: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

These are two of my favorite Holley paintings that the featured individual did not acquire.

Their Eyes

The University Art Gallery currently features large portraits of LGBTI South Africans. Zanele Muholi's Faces and Phases is beautiful and moving. No matter where I stood, or where I sat, or where I walked, I felt eyes holding me in their gaze, those eyes showing pride and sadness and deep dignity and pain and truth. For a bit, I sat to leaf through her book of more than 250 portraits taken over a period of eight years, a creative endeavor of skill and love.

I came home, wanting to know more, and found much, including this.



At a time of extreme "othering" and hate, I honor survivors and those like this "visual activist" who remind us of our common humanity.

Sunny Hours

Before I started walking slowly with a camera, purposely paying attention to the world, one step at a time, I could not even imagine all the tiny miracles, those I missed seeing (in my own childhood yard, for example, with rocks, and trees, and flowers (wild and not), and creek, and caves, and forest) without knowing I was missing them, walking by, hurrying by, not taking time to suspend the hurry and the step to look, really look, but when I did slow up and start to look and listen, I noticed things that shot me right back to college, not to zoology or botany or geology, but to art history where learning to see what one looked at opened whole worlds of possibility, like architectural ornamentation, which brings me to this: circular forms, one man made (which, thinking it might be special, sent me to the internet only to discover that it's a cliched one of millions) and one natural (which surely a friend has identified and cataloged, but remains unidentified to me, even with his superior photos). 

I shall simply enjoy both and note their echoes of one another.

The University Farm: Seasonal Charnel House

After parking, I watched two men get out of a truck and, while a third stayed behind the wheel, walk to the farm building's center back door, where they unlocked it and disappeared inside.

I minded my own business, wandered into the new hoophouse, ambled through, headed up the side of the larger hoophouse, then around it, all the time taking photos. 

When I noticed the dessicated butterflies, beetles, flies, bees stacked inside the interior folds of plastic, and, taken aback, thought of northern European still lifes of dead rabbits and birds and stacked fish on groaning boards, awaiting preparation and consumption, those reminders of fleeting time and death awaiting us all -- at that very moment, I heard a voice.

Looking to my right, I saw two of the men dragging a whitetail deer carcass (field-dressed and knife-slit-belly facing me) toward that very same door, swing it up the steps, go inside briefly, then come out, lock the door, and get in the truck. The third pocketed his smart phone, joined them, and they drove away.

Culling season in Sewanee, the season of darkness.

Color Blocking

Who needs fashion or art on a day like today?

The world offers it own master class.

Sewanee's Blue Period Is More Van Gogh than Picasso

Don't believe me? Just look.

Over Dessert at the Frist Center

RH: I'm surprised by something.

FH: What? (finishing a bite of the lemoncello cake)

RH: In the Islamic art exhibit, there were lots of people, spending time before each work -- the grave steles, textiles, illuminated pages. I was surprised that  so many people wanted to see that exhibit. The guards were so relaxed, even when one woman (wearing the headset for the guided tour) set off the alarm three or four times, all by accident when her raincoat brushed the barrier wire. No one was spewing hateful comments about Islam or the countries represented.

FH: I noticed that, too.

RH: I imagined that people wouldn't be respectful. (chewing her chocolate cake morsel, swallowing) But maybe it's because people who go to an art museum self-select?

FH: Maybe. They could be different. More interested in the world?

RH: Maybe.

FH: I'd like to think the others -- the other ones -- are in the minority.

RH: Yes, me too. (noticing the tree reflected by the tabletop, pulling out the camera, snapping several pictures) Those others reflect badly on the rest of us.

FH: Yes. Yes, they do.

Everything Can Be Beautiful, in the Just-right Light

The Odd Last Thing She did

by Brad Leithauser

A car is idling on the cliff.
Its top is down. Its headlights throw
A faint, bright ghost-shadow glow
On the pale air. On the shore, so far
Below that the waves' push and drag
Is dwindled to a hush—a kind
Of oceanic idle—the sea

Among the boulders plays a blind-
Fold game of hide and seek,
Or capture the flag. The flag
Swells and sways. The car
Is empty. A Friday, the first week
Of June. Nineteen fifty-three.

A car's idling on the cliff,

But surely it won't be long before

Somebody stops to investigate

And things begin to happen fast:

Men, troops of men will come,

Arrive with blazing lights, a blast

Of sirens, followed by still more

Men. Though not a soul's in sight,

The peace of the end of the late

Afternoon—the sun down, but enough light

Even so to bathe the heavens from

Horizon to shore in a deep

And delicate blue—will not keep.

Confronted with such an overload

Of questions (most beginning, Why would she...

So gifted, bright, and only twenty-three),

Attention will come to fix upon

This odd last thing she did: leaving

The car running, the headlights on.

She stopped—it will transpire—to fill

The tank a mere two miles down the road.

(Just sixteen, the kid at the station will

Quote her as saying, "What a pity

You have to work today! It's not right...

What weather! Goodness, what a night

It'll be!" He'll add: "She sure was pretty.")

Was there a change of plan?

Why the stop for gas? Possibly

She'd not yet made up her mind? Or

Had made it up but not yet settled

On a place? Or could it be she knew

Where she was headed, what she would do—

And wanted to make sure the car ran

For hours afterward? Might the car not be,

Then, a sort of beacon, a lighthouse-

In-reverse, meant to direct one not

Away from but toward the shore

And its broken boulders, there to spot

The bobbing white flag of a blouse?

Her brief note, which will appear

In the local Leader, contains a phrase

("She chanted snatches of old lands")

That will muddle the town for three days,

Until a Professor E. H. Wade

Pins it to Ophelia—and reprimands

The police, who, this but goes to show,

Have not the barest knowledge of Shakespeare,

Else would never have misread "lauds"

As "lands." A Detective Gregg Messing

Will answer, tersely, "Afraid

It's not our bailiwick. Missing

Persons, yes; missing poems, no."

(What's truly tragic's never allowed

To stand alone for long, of course.

At each moment there's a crowd

Of clowns pressing in: the booming ass

At every wake who, angling a loud

Necktie in the chip dip,

Airs his problems with intestinal gas,

Or the blow-dried bonehead out to sell

Siding to the grieving mother . . . . Well,

Wade sent the Leader another briefword:

"Decades of service to the Bard now force

Me to amend the girl's little slip.

'Chaunted' not 'chanted' is the preferred . . .")

Yet none of her unshakeable entourage

—Pedants, pundits, cops without a clue,

And a yearning young grease-monkey—are

Alerted yet. Still the empty car

Idles, idles on the cliff, and night

Isn't falling so much as day

Is floating out to sea . . . . Soon, whether

She's found or not, her lights will draw

Moths and tiny dark-winged things that might

Be dirt-clumps, ashes. Come what may,

The night will be lovely, as she foresaw,

The first stars easing through the blue,

Engine and ocean breathing together.

Home?

Why is it that after spending most of my life living elsewhere I always immediately answer the question "Where are you from?" with "Birmingham"?

I haven't lived in Birmingham since 1988.

But.

I still say Birmingham.

It used to be that I bridled when admitting my home -- because of its reputation, well earned, as an equality backwater -- but it's still home.

So after a funeral in Birmingham yesterday afternoon, when someone asked, "Are you going home now?" I answered yes, thinking But I am already home.

Art That Challenges

The Sewanee Women's Center recently hosted artist Sophia Wallace, and currently on view in the library is her anatomical sculpture and text in a work titled Cliteracy.

Not surprisingly, controversy has ensued.

I find the controversy ironic, especially on a college campus where knowledge and free expression are theoretically valued.

Besides, the student dining hall McClurg is a phallic structure if ever there were one.

Nothing Is Wasted

in the woods
(except what people discard, 
but that's another story):
fallen limbs, branches, trees
house small animals; 
their stumps provide perches
or pecking places; 
on decaying wood
mosses, lichens, fungi 
sprout forth, burning
like little suns on dark days;
and sometimes people
build a fire or construct 
an artful shelter
for no reason
other than joy.

Self-expression

"If your subject is your own experience, then as long as you are having an experience, you've got a subject, and that has turned out to be true even into total blindness." -- Sargy Mann

Sargy Mann from Peter Mann Pictures on Vimeo.

Three Good Things on a Rainy Day

I
An unexpected gift of two bars of my favorite goat milk soap. L should know that I enjoyed a long soap using one this evening.

II
Two cats snug in their separate beds.

III
The promise of Indian food and art tomorrow.

Intersections

I

A former student, from many years ago, sent me a message that said, "You always were interested in advances in all areas. I recall in English class your telling us about black holes and what scientists were learning about them." I don't remember this, but I trust her. I have always wanted to know more, especially about the physical world.

II

In tenth grade, I sometimes spent lunch in the biology lab, not because I had to but because I wanted to. I looked, and looked, and looked at anything I put under the microscope. 

III

A camp friend posted a video on her Facebook today of Tim Minchin, an Australian musician/actor/comedian making a graduation speech. In his life list of "nine life lessons," he told the audience that science and art are not separate: "Science is not a body of knowledge nor belief system. It is just a term which describes humankind's incremental acquisition of understanding through observation. Science is awesome."

IV

Another friend alerted me to a New Yorker article titled "Creativity Creep." Joshua Rothman writes, "This watchful, inner kind of creativity is not about making things but about experiencing life in a creative way; it's a way of asserting your own presence amidst the much larger world of nature, and of finding significance in that wider world. By contrast, our current sense of creativity is almost bound up with the making of stuff. If you have a creative imagination but don't make anything, we regard that as a problem -- we say that you're blocked. . . . Among the many things we lost when we abandoned the Romantic idea of creativity, the most valuable may have been the idea of creativity's stillness. If you're really creative, really imaginative, you don't have to make things. You just have to live, observe, think, and feel. Coleridge, in his poem "Frost at Midnight," uses, as his metaphor for the creative imagination, the frost, which freezes the evening dew into icicles 'quietly shining up at the quiet moon.' The poem begins: 'The Frost performs its secret ministry, / Unhelped by any wind.' The secret, silent, delicate, and temporary work of the frost is creativity, too. It doesn't build, but it transforms. It doesn't last, but it matters."

V

People always ask me two questions: "Do you sell your photographs?" and "Who is the intended audience for your blog?"

I want to answer What does it matter?

What matters is that both transform.

Day 22: Another Day That Changed My Life

Almost any Saturday in my childhood: one brother painting in oil; one brother working on a motorcycle; Mother sewing vestments; Daddy on the lathe or table saw or drill; me playing the piano -- all of us tinkering. 

Creating things matters.

Day 16 of 40: Another Day That Changed My Life

What prayer is to a believer, coloring was to me as a child. The holy pages, crayons consecrated in a pristine box, scent of wax nearly censer-borne: I lost myself to patterns and pattern-making. Concentration, experimentation, repetition: flow.

Day 14 of 40: Another Day That Changed My Life

Second Jazz Fest: a voice commanded; I followed. Sister Gertrude beat the tambourine, sang, preached. I joined her congregation. Third fest, I bought my first painting. Every morning it sings "the fields are ripe" and I wake to her call.

A Gallery with Heart

I traveled to Chattanooga today to meet my friend B, and together we met a miracle worker at

 

click above to go to gallery

What's the miracle? The healing power of art. Imagine a gallery, therapeutic community center, studio, community garden, little free library, meeting space all together in one beautifully appointed refurbished building. 

"How did you get the idea for this place?" I asked Ellen (a visionary doer) as she worked on lunch (a hearty lasagna).

"One day, I noticed the courtyard obelisk covered with beautiful tiles made by homeless folks, and I knew what I had to do. This is the result," she said.

I enjoyed my outing with B -- brunch, Niedlov Breadworks, the Hunter Museum of Art's special exhibition of African-American art, cafe au lait, happy chat with a friend -- but it's the gallery and the angel who created it and the blind man debarking a bus, asking "Are you friends of Ellen's?" on entering for lunch and the art-making heart-mending community that I'll remember.

What lasts?

A reminder that there really are good people in the world.