What notice I
Neglected pages don't go unnoticed by me. Business is often about wondering what the heck we are doing. This is my retreat blog, where I can write and not many will notice, updated or not, and I am grateful to my few followers, though they may have given up. Other blogs seem serious and must compete with the fine blogs and sites of presses and writers. I don't consider myself a writer. Here I can write without self consciousness, well, that may never truly be possible.
This day I am at the threshold of a list, or an outline, things to do, directions, considerations. Even raves, the damned oath of multitasking, once deemed an impressive display of activity, some look upon as a lack of focus. What is in a definition, especially these days. Chris Anderson rates Wikipedia more highly than does Andrew Keen. Anderson considers it may be as good as the Encyclopedia of Brittan for it's size and ease of updating or correcting made possible by its nature. Though there is something to be said for true scholarship, a shared editorial-ship is to be commended.
One of my conundrums is in this area. For nine years now I have been building and hopefully improving Deerbrook Editions. But it is coming to a point where help is needed. How does one get help, especially these days. A discussion that is open may appear faulty. Wear your heart on your sleeve and even business people start to sound like therapists. Or one may ponder if you are lining a dream within a dream. A curious state even to imagine, and yet imagination is being given more weight these days but we are not in a renaissance.
It would be most interesting to survey what therapists might say about a dream within a dream, if one could afford to pay for any number of therapists to find out. Actually having a dream where one remembers something, but can't remember if the memory was in a dream or in reality is the question of philosophers. Schopenhauer put it down in The World as Will and Representation. What we have is a personal reality projected and processed by our vision brain, the magical mystery tour .
It is rather like trying to explain to me how carbon credits work, or how they are supposed to not sound like they are an invention for corporations to continue doing what they were supposed to fix twenty five years ago. And now we have thieves stealing carbon credits from the electronic holding to sell to the unsuspecting for millions. They are working on tightening up the security system that manages such credits. Perhaps it is less confusing than bankers betting on the success or failure of financial markets, credit defaults, derivatives, or real estate loans. It's amazing what people will come up with in order to make a bundle.
This day I am at the threshold of a list, or an outline, things to do, directions, considerations. Even raves, the damned oath of multitasking, once deemed an impressive display of activity, some look upon as a lack of focus. What is in a definition, especially these days. Chris Anderson rates Wikipedia more highly than does Andrew Keen. Anderson considers it may be as good as the Encyclopedia of Brittan for it's size and ease of updating or correcting made possible by its nature. Though there is something to be said for true scholarship, a shared editorial-ship is to be commended.
One of my conundrums is in this area. For nine years now I have been building and hopefully improving Deerbrook Editions. But it is coming to a point where help is needed. How does one get help, especially these days. A discussion that is open may appear faulty. Wear your heart on your sleeve and even business people start to sound like therapists. Or one may ponder if you are lining a dream within a dream. A curious state even to imagine, and yet imagination is being given more weight these days but we are not in a renaissance.
It would be most interesting to survey what therapists might say about a dream within a dream, if one could afford to pay for any number of therapists to find out. Actually having a dream where one remembers something, but can't remember if the memory was in a dream or in reality is the question of philosophers. Schopenhauer put it down in The World as Will and Representation. What we have is a personal reality projected and processed by our vision brain, the magical mystery tour .
It is rather like trying to explain to me how carbon credits work, or how they are supposed to not sound like they are an invention for corporations to continue doing what they were supposed to fix twenty five years ago. And now we have thieves stealing carbon credits from the electronic holding to sell to the unsuspecting for millions. They are working on tightening up the security system that manages such credits. Perhaps it is less confusing than bankers betting on the success or failure of financial markets, credit defaults, derivatives, or real estate loans. It's amazing what people will come up with in order to make a bundle.
To the statement that a full sun day bleaches out color I offer some images of the same wood now a week later. Maybe they won't show that much of a difference, see if you can tell. Of course there are a few more leaves.
These photos show how the color on a cloudy day differs from the bright morning sun and how it changes the landscape, this would be for the eye of the painter perhaps useful, perhaps not, by taste, some may like to paint the effects of bright light, as it can be more exciting for an image in paint. I thought it might be interesting to see what I suppose is a difference in mood. Everyone has an approach or an idea for what attracts them. Sometimes preconceptions play a part in what people do and how they live their lives. I think it perhaps healthier to teach art with an open mind, eye, and heart.
Things aren't always what they seem, even to the eye. The hand and eye usually propose something of a dream, a re-presentation of the intent. Increments are not captured in a camera, or painting, but the imagination knows what to provide. Only with time lapse photography do we see the unveiling of life. Ours is a Fleeting Floating World.
Even though there is beauty in the winter wood, in all it's earth tones and simplicity, during and after the snow, this spring it came to me why the early spring is so beautiful.
Walking in the soft rain, the patter of drops from leaves and needles, more than from the sky, varies in volume and in pitch so that standing still and barely moving my eyes I hear depth and space. Looking then at the points of bud appearing on cherries, honeysuckle, dogwood, viburnum, increase by the hour, those points of green redefine the surrounding forest space, which for the most part had become flat, as the days of winter generally concern us elsewhere. Now the blend of bark and dry things take on a new visual, a new depth, a depth of field as everywhere these buds are slowly moving into leaves, and for my eye, they create depth where before we had forgotten, or only dreamed of the coming spring. These buds are in my senses, as if inflated by the wind, a secret celebration, musicians and painters alike, rejoice in life returning. So masterful is nature, many must try to capture this moment in tones and in paint. Some succeed. Perhaps the actual value is in becoming a part of this moment, shared with the autumn leaves, when in a measured amount of time, will no longer be. The attempt to express our feeling for the beauty in some way is life itself.
With the factor of time, even on a Sunday, and the scattered showers, I turn to a camera rather than an easel, attempt to capture what caught my eye on a walk. A canvas I imagine would be more expressive of the sidelong glance, the haze of green appearing around the dark wet tree trunks could be created in paint, and received perhaps better than the photo that seems to fall short in it's exactness. Noticing this encourages me to get out the french easel in time, and render the imaginative sense of color. Even though it would lack the complexity of the forest floor, it would appeal more to the eye and the imagination of the viewer the way that paintings do, at least for me as in the early work of Mondrian, the sublime paint more therapeutic than the harsh reality of the photo. Still, meandering the wood and using my eye as a painter, I am making offerings to the alter of beauty, and I am refreshed.
I have to believe that in our young people is where the hope remains. They will pose the questions and give the answers, as ever, they will have the imagination to make the right choices, show the wise perspectives.
Having something to say, seems a bit like knowing someone, that is, when do we know somebody and when are we saying something? I ask because of: a conversation with someone, albeit an editorial person, about the internet and social networking blogs and the like; and, the drama "Six Feet Under" depicting a man who finds his deceased father had a secret life. And being the one who left home and the family business, found that his father actually was proud of him for leaving. My acquaintance in discussion had no interest in blogs, peoples personal lives, saying, well, can they write, do they have anything to say. What do these have to do with each other? The drama of a son who finds he doesn't know his father, and now never will, invokes a statement about society and in the mind of the audience the question of a son knowing a parent is not as important as the reflection, the thought that is stimulated or the imagination that it creates even if it is through sympathy with the character. What is important is what the viewer finds on an individual level from the experience of watching the drama. Isn't it about the implied image or experience and not the description spelled out. The room that we find our parent had in secret, we don't know what they did there or why, but it is suggested by an outsider that perhaps they needed something that was completely there own. And as Forester says (Finding Forester) about his own writing that happened to become popular and widely read and analyzed, that he wrote the book for himself. Not for the crowd, not for the critics, the intellectuals, but for himself.
Now I am a little sensitive about my writing and what might be thought of my blog, which I claim I do mostly for business reasons, but the statement about the writing on blogs made me wonder about it even more, and the notion of saying something. And the internet, and publishing, for that matter. Today I was sweeping up somewhere in the house and thought of all those stupid emails that come every day, over and over, and how the internet is rather like some middle ages carriage road, you never know who you will find there, who will be conning you, robbing you, and like someone said about a letterpress list I once joined, it's kind of like a cocktail party. I have also been told that to make it in the art world you have to go to lots and lots of cocktail parties if you want to get anywhere with your art business. So we can be creative but we have also to shmooze, and it often seems that we have to be in contradiction and be concerned about the "other" and be salesmen if we want to get "out there," get exposure, get a show or get published. Rather confusing, still, after all these years.
But with writing and having something to say, if I really think about it, I wish I had all those Alumni Bulletins my father won awards for, because I'd love to be able to read his writing and see what I might find if anything about what I know or don't know about my father and his writing. Also I think about how writing and having something to say has many perspectives, different angles to be considered from, right? There are readers, the editors, the styles, the voices, the plots, the scenes, the drama, fiction, nonfiction, etcetera, and how any of these can seem meaningless to a writer if we are to think of something purely as language. And when the object suggests conformity to the subject or vice versa, and not to get too philosophical, what about the reader and what he or she brings to the experience. To suggest in a sentence that one isn't saying something writing about their personal life, well, that just seems simple, narrow, and forgetting about the many books written about personal lives and the memoir, and oh my lord, do we have to come down to the good and bad of it? When it seems, in fact, that it isn't what we are saying but how we say it and what the reader does with it, if we describe the life out of it there is nothing left for the imagination. Yes I am concerned about culture and imagination and literature maintaining a certain level of quality, or as a poet friend once said, relevance, and if relevance is important, as a way of saying that the collective authority on the classical is always interested in maintaining their authority, we the readers are not so much interested in making judgments, as to having found something stimulating. Stein says in "Composition as Explanation" that everyone is naturally indolent and therefore innovation, a new brilliance in composition goes unnoticed, not accepted, until it does after who knows how long and when it does it becomes described as classical. And what of imagination? what will happen or who will know it is happening after generations of being handed our imagination on a plate or a screen or a pod or a video game, being told what we should want by commercials, after so long will there be any imagination left and what is the difference, if any, between reading a book and watching a movie? In "Finding Forester" he says when one is writing one doesn't think, one writes.
So, in the case of being creative, writing, painting, making anything, something is missed if one is concerned with the act and the outcome, as when Julia Cameron says not to be concerned with writing literature when doing morning pages, and morning pages are not to be confused with being creative as they are something one does to unblock creativity, nonetheless. As a visual artist that spent many years with many canvases trying to make paintings and being concerned with making "good" paintings, only to have a teacher tell me I was making "pictures," the best canvases were made only after all the thinking, all the conversations in my head stopped and I was looking and seeing the composition and the paint in the right amounts of each and through practice able to make visual choices that somehow came about by a connection between my hand and eye. Or maybe with my heart, free from all the clutter of the mind. Perhaps Forester is saying that writing is an act of the heart in imagination, having some decent vocabulary, finding what it is that we have to say.
Having something to say, seems a bit like knowing someone, that is, when do we know somebody and when are we saying something? I ask because of: a conversation with someone, albeit an editorial person, about the internet and social networking blogs and the like; and, the drama "Six Feet Under" depicting a man who finds his deceased father had a secret life. And being the one who left home and the family business, found that his father actually was proud of him for leaving. My acquaintance in discussion had no interest in blogs, peoples personal lives, saying, well, can they write, do they have anything to say. What do these have to do with each other? The drama of a son who finds he doesn't know his father, and now never will, invokes a statement about society and in the mind of the audience the question of a son knowing a parent is not as important as the reflection, the thought that is stimulated or the imagination that it creates even if it is through sympathy with the character. What is important is what the viewer finds on an individual level from the experience of watching the drama. Isn't it about the implied image or experience and not the description spelled out. The room that we find our parent had in secret, we don't know what they did there or why, but it is suggested by an outsider that perhaps they needed something that was completely there own. And as Forester says (Finding Forester) about his own writing that happened to become popular and widely read and analyzed, that he wrote the book for himself. Not for the crowd, not for the critics, the intellectuals, but for himself.
Now I am a little sensitive about my writing and what might be thought of my blog, which I claim I do mostly for business reasons, but the statement about the writing on blogs made me wonder about it even more, and the notion of saying something. And the internet, and publishing, for that matter. Today I was sweeping up somewhere in the house and thought of all those stupid emails that come every day, over and over, and how the internet is rather like some middle ages carriage road, you never know who you will find there, who will be conning you, robbing you, and like someone said about a letterpress list I once joined, it's kind of like a cocktail party. I have also been told that to make it in the art world you have to go to lots and lots of cocktail parties if you want to get anywhere with your art business. So we can be creative but we have also to shmooze, and it often seems that we have to be in contradiction and be concerned about the "other" and be salesmen if we want to get "out there," get exposure, get a show or get published. Rather confusing, still, after all these years.
But with writing and having something to say, if I really think about it, I wish I had all those Alumni Bulletins my father won awards for, because I'd love to be able to read his writing and see what I might find if anything about what I know or don't know about my father and his writing. Also I think about how writing and having something to say has many perspectives, different angles to be considered from, right? There are readers, the editors, the styles, the voices, the plots, the scenes, the drama, fiction, nonfiction, etcetera, and how any of these can seem meaningless to a writer if we are to think of something purely as language. And when the object suggests conformity to the subject or vice versa, and not to get too philosophical, what about the reader and what he or she brings to the experience. To suggest in a sentence that one isn't saying something writing about their personal life, well, that just seems simple, narrow, and forgetting about the many books written about personal lives and the memoir, and oh my lord, do we have to come down to the good and bad of it? When it seems, in fact, that it isn't what we are saying but how we say it and what the reader does with it, if we describe the life out of it there is nothing left for the imagination. Yes I am concerned about culture and imagination and literature maintaining a certain level of quality, or as a poet friend once said, relevance, and if relevance is important, as a way of saying that the collective authority on the classical is always interested in maintaining their authority, we the readers are not so much interested in making judgments, as to having found something stimulating. Stein says in "Composition as Explanation" that everyone is naturally indolent and therefore innovation, a new brilliance in composition goes unnoticed, not accepted, until it does after who knows how long and when it does it becomes described as classical. And what of imagination? what will happen or who will know it is happening after generations of being handed our imagination on a plate or a screen or a pod or a video game, being told what we should want by commercials, after so long will there be any imagination left and what is the difference, if any, between reading a book and watching a movie? In "Finding Forester" he says when one is writing one doesn't think, one writes.
So, in the case of being creative, writing, painting, making anything, something is missed if one is concerned with the act and the outcome, as when Julia Cameron says not to be concerned with writing literature when doing morning pages, and morning pages are not to be confused with being creative as they are something one does to unblock creativity, nonetheless. As a visual artist that spent many years with many canvases trying to make paintings and being concerned with making "good" paintings, only to have a teacher tell me I was making "pictures," the best canvases were made only after all the thinking, all the conversations in my head stopped and I was looking and seeing the composition and the paint in the right amounts of each and through practice able to make visual choices that somehow came about by a connection between my hand and eye. Or maybe with my heart, free from all the clutter of the mind. Perhaps Forester is saying that writing is an act of the heart in imagination, having some decent vocabulary, finding what it is that we have to say.
Perspectives. Everything has a point of view. I know, personifications, objects becoming subjects are a stretch, but searching for a crossover, do we ever get the perspective of the almighty eye in the sky? The eye of god appearing in archetypal imagery of early printed books is open (no pun intended) to interpretation, as what may be a sense of the early understanding of the workings of the anatomical eye in correlation to the reflection of soul. Alchemists-- searching, working for the philosophers stone (see: Anatomy of the Psyche by Edward F. Edinger) as symbolism and art of literature and dreams in the middle ages and renaissance give uncanny glimpses of this threshold.
Taking some time to wander with my camera to exercise some sense of creativity by the eyes finding beauty in surrounding still lives, as it were, what remains and what returns. The effects of time and the occurrence of an extent of early spring has in no time, to the snow drops, do they need to know it is March or April, or May?
Thinking of this, and remembering the Futurist paintings (motion) as an expression of time, and some earlier works of mine, reading images with forms or patterns, the eye moves over them one point to another, an expression of time in some small sense, how it exists compared to the time of clocks. Interesting devices could seem an odd reflection in their miniature mechanical movements of transmission, how opposite from the measure of the sun, or the vast expanse of time relation we can hardly imagine within the universe, a concept open to interpretation. Look at this sense of life-time as representation and we enter the world of image and memory. Each existing together and independently often one before the other. Well, it's getting to be time for bed, but not by routine. So not to sound lame philosophically, Schopenhauer has much more to say on the subject of the world as re-presentation, as one translator pointed out so nicely.
Some one found me on the web and wanted me to go down to Woonsocket, RI, to help, to see if I could, restore an old R. Hoe & Co. press like mine.
The original state of the press was in pieces, abandoned in the back room amidst piles of old computer parts, furniture, newspapers in full bindings from the day, pieces of tables and odd machine spare parts.
A newspaper reporter told me it may have been painted gold in 1976 bicentennial celebrations. It required a lot of cleaning, and moving, and setting up with the fabricated replacement parts for the tympan and frisket. It came out looking really nice and is almost ready to print on. So close to being able to print on isn't good enough. So many things to do to accommodate the restoration of this press. In good shape the Hoe is capable of doing fine printing and facilitate teaching of book design in relation to relief printing; as it was a century or more ago, for books and other print media, and transitions of applications in history , as hoped, through hands on workshops facilitate enrichment of student experience. Letterpress, or relief printing, gradually moved out of main production methods with offset litho and digital technologies coming in, not long ago, and is kept alive by folks all over the country to this day. The letterpress fine press movement, as encouraged by Giovanni Mardersteig's Officina Bodoni, seems harder to maintain, but remains hearty due to many people printing, and helping printers with equipment, moving, fabricating pieces, and supplies, and the general appreciation for the book.
This #6432 R. Hoe & Co. washington style iron handpress now sits in the old train station on High and Main Streets, the edge of Downtown Woonsocket's historic section. The station, home to the national parks offices for Blackstone Valley, (The Depot), is one of many interesting and beautiful pieces of architecture on Main Street.
Be Creative
I want to write something about something, but I don't know where to begin, it's late, and everyone is in bed, and it could be there is too much to say. I've been inspired of late, cleaning up the old press and making adjustments, changing the form in the bed for a project for a keepsake, just one poem with some art.
Working on the handpress is from another time. Another time in my life and another time in history, the eighteen hundreds, when everything was massive, industrialization was sweeping, civil war, manifest destiny, reconstruction, carpetbagging. Everyone was writing in those days, well, for those that could it was the way the word was spread, communication was by letter until the telegraph. I don't know if it means much, but people expressed themselves through writing in the everyday, and maybe it isn't so different now, imagination, but it seems like maybe it is. There is something about putting a pen in ink and then to paper, like typewriter's have a certain atmosphere, with the sound of the keys hitting paper, that means, somehow, the writer is speaking and someone is listening, a conscious effort is being made to put into words things of the imagination, hopes, feelings, dreams, and even if nobody reads them, there is energy that goes out and we are becoming.
Julia Cameron speaks of this in her book, "The Artist's Way," Tarcher / Putnam, 1992, when she talks about doing morning pages, a kind of meditation through writing, she also calls it "brain drain" as when you do morning pages you're not supposed to think about that you are writing a novel, but to put your stuff on paper, anger, feelings. Anyhow, she says that it's best to write with a pen on paper and at least three pages, just to make the movement real, to "unblock your creativity", as that is what it's all about, this book, finding and learning ways to be creative, finding your Muse.
'Nough said.
"Art is an act of the soul, not the intellect. When we are dealing with peoples' dreams --their visions, really-- we are in the realm of the sacred. We are involved with forces and energies larger than our own. We are engaged in a sacred transaction of which we know only a little: the shadow, not the shape."
--Julia Cameron
Working on the handpress is from another time. Another time in my life and another time in history, the eighteen hundreds, when everything was massive, industrialization was sweeping, civil war, manifest destiny, reconstruction, carpetbagging. Everyone was writing in those days, well, for those that could it was the way the word was spread, communication was by letter until the telegraph. I don't know if it means much, but people expressed themselves through writing in the everyday, and maybe it isn't so different now, imagination, but it seems like maybe it is. There is something about putting a pen in ink and then to paper, like typewriter's have a certain atmosphere, with the sound of the keys hitting paper, that means, somehow, the writer is speaking and someone is listening, a conscious effort is being made to put into words things of the imagination, hopes, feelings, dreams, and even if nobody reads them, there is energy that goes out and we are becoming.
Julia Cameron speaks of this in her book, "The Artist's Way," Tarcher / Putnam, 1992, when she talks about doing morning pages, a kind of meditation through writing, she also calls it "brain drain" as when you do morning pages you're not supposed to think about that you are writing a novel, but to put your stuff on paper, anger, feelings. Anyhow, she says that it's best to write with a pen on paper and at least three pages, just to make the movement real, to "unblock your creativity", as that is what it's all about, this book, finding and learning ways to be creative, finding your Muse.
'Nough said.
"Art is an act of the soul, not the intellect. When we are dealing with peoples' dreams --their visions, really-- we are in the realm of the sacred. We are involved with forces and energies larger than our own. We are engaged in a sacred transaction of which we know only a little: the shadow, not the shape."
--Julia Cameron
