I'm Just Gonna Talk Here For A Minute. I've Been Stuck At Home A Lot These Last Few Days Quarentining.
I'm just gonna talk here for a minute. I've been stuck at home a lot these last few days quarentining. I just have had thoughts I want to share I suppose and when you are single and live alone in the middle of a global pandemic, sometimes it's hard to find an ear. Like seriously TL;DR who wants to be lectured at. So sit with me for a minute or scroll past this I guess. A lot of us are probably familiar with the famous Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh as an Artist. He was born in 1853 to a middle class family in the Netherlands. He was kinda solemn and quiet. He worked as an art broker for a while in London, and even was a missionary for a time in Belguim. Before becoming a full time painter in France. In his life time he made over 800 Oil Paintings mostly in the last two years he was alive. He wasn't successful as an Artist until after his death. In life he only sold one painting. He was known to struggle with Mental Illness. A Great record of this is in The Letters of Vincent van Gogh. They are available for reading for free through the Van Gogh Museum. This where I'm a lot more familiar with the artist. More as a Writer. There's over six hundred collected letters between him to his siblings, to other impressionist artists at the time or even to critics. Written across three languages, Dutch French and English. Most of the Letters are to his brother Theo van Gogh. In his Letters to Theo he writes with this sense of duty, and calling. Of Urgency. Vincent very often questions his place in the universe, and what he could be doing to better it. If I had time to annotate and write and comment about all 600 letters, I would. There is a lot of meat there to understand him as a person, and by extension an Artist. And when you understand someone else's story better you also sometimes understand your own better too. But I'm just gonna take some selected thoughts here and think alongside him. In April 1878 Vincent writes to Theo pontificating about the proverb "We are Today, what We were Yesterday.", to Segway to my next thought I want to say twelve years later in 1890 Vincent would die by a self-inflected gunshot wound. He was 37 at the time of his suicide. There's this book, "A Grief Observed" by British Author C.S. Lewis which was written in response to his wife's death, American Poet Joy Davidman. Lewis writes "The Pain I feel Now, is the Happiness I had before. That's the Deal" it's published almost a hundred years after Vincent's letter. I wonder if in those last few days of their respective lives if they had thoughts that looked like this often. Where Compassion decays into Despair, or "The Pain we are in Today, is the Happiness we had Yesterday". We can't ever know for certain what thoughts Vincent had on that sad height. But back in that April Letter, I think he finds some peace there. In his closing thoughts he writes "Woe-spiritedness is quite a good thing to have, if only one writes it as two words, woe is in all people, everyone has reason enough for it, but one must also have spirit". Almost all of Vincent's paintings were made in the last two years of his life. Those are the things he left behind. Those are things we inherited. His Woe, but also more importantly his Spirit.
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C'mere sweet child a hard truth is that sometimes you will write whole chapters for a person in your life, but all you will ever be is only scribbles in their margins. An after thought, an editors note.
Death does not invalidate Life. Death does not seek to destroy you. It is not partial or bias to you.
Our Atoms are not our own. They did not belong to us before our birth. They do not belong to us after our death. They return to the Earth and become apart of everything.
Our Mannerisms are carried on by the people who loved us in life. And our spirits I believe live on forever in love.
Death is no more the enemy of Life. Than a period is the end of a sentence. And that's the nice thing about it. Is even after a sentence ends. Another one can keep going. We keep going.
The Poet E.E. Cummings once described the moon as "the Lily of the Heavens". Our word Lily comes from the Greek word Lilium which could mean "Pure", the Greeks called the flower Leirion meaning "True". The painter, Claude Monet very famously painted a collection of over two hundred and fifty impressionist art pieces of water lilies, that specific genus is called Nymphaea, which has the root of the Greek word Nymph, meaning bride. Some now use that word in relation to beauty. A large portion of Monet's paintings were created after the death of his wife, during and/or post-world-war-two. And some of these paintings as well were composed while he had cataracts. The products of the clouded vision of his eyes. I have been lucky enough to witness some of the paintings myself, some here in Indy, while we had them on exhibit during Newfield's "Monet and Friends", or on their permeant exhibit in Chicago, or in Cleveland or where have you. I think it's something so beautiful that we get to interact with art on these levels where our human experience is so contextual and subjective. Just so particular to us as singular individuals. Like you probably will view George Hitchcock's Calypso in a totally different light than I will. I will see it as a piece of art depicting a woman, mourning and grieving the loss of her lover Odysseus. Longing, Pining, Loving. You might just see it as a painting of a sea nymph, a "water lily" one might say now that you know some other words. But art is also objective, and out-of-context sometimes too. Monet states in his own observation and intention of his works “it would produce the illusion of an endless whole, of water with no horizon and no shore”. That is to say like the reach of their intention is finite, but our interaction and interpretation of it is in-finite. It is not definite. An “Endless Whole”. You might know that I, as an individual, I don't view grief/love, joy/sorrow as separate things. They are the same coin, and they buy into this great experience called life. And in contradiction to that, they are probably not too dissimilar as well to “water with no horizon or shore”. Monet probably painted these painting and thought of his wife, Monet probably painted and thought of the war going on around him. E.E. Cummings probably wrote his poems at about or around the same time Monet was painting his collection. While also(!) George Hitchcock was painting "Calypso". Isn’t that beautiful? The Rendering of Associations. I'd like to call it. If we use some entomologic arguments here based off of what I’ve told you in this ‘dissertation’ (jokingly, basically), one might be able build off what Cummings wrote as "the Moon, the true pure beauty of the Heavens.”. Like what have I spent the last five-hundred-some-odd words writing about here. Painters and Paintings? Poetry? Love? Loss? Have I been writing this to the Moon, or is it to you maybe? Or this to one particular special person right now that I think about in my reflections of the moon, or flowers or water? These ‘Illusions’ as Monet might describe or in my case here an allusion of a seamless image. “The Rendering of Associations of The Endless Whole of Life.”
“For some time, Hollywood has marketed family entertainment according to a two-pronged strategy, with cute stuff and kinetic motion for the kids and sly pop-cultural references and tame double entendres for mom and dad. Miyazaki has no interest in such trickery, or in the alternative method, most successfully deployed in Pixar features like Finding Nemo, Toy Story 3 and Inside/Out, of blending silliness with sentimentality.”
“Most films made for children are flashy adventure-comedies. Structurally and tonally, they feel almost exactly like blockbusters made for adults, scrubbed of any potentially offensive material. They aren’t so much made for children as they’re made to be not not for children. It’s perhaps telling that the genre is generally called “Family,” rather than “Children’s.” The films are designed to be pleasing to a broad, age-diverse audience, but they’re not necessarily specially made for young minds.”
“My Neighbor Totoro, on the other hand, is a genuine children’s film, attuned to child psychology. Satsuki and Mei move and speak like children: they run and romp, giggle and yell. The sibling dynamic is sensitively rendered: Satsuki is eager to impress her parents but sometimes succumbs to silliness, while Mei is Satsuki’s shadow and echo (with an independent streak). But perhaps most uniquely, My Neighbor Totoro follows children’s goals and concerns. Its protagonists aren’t given a mission or a call to adventure - in the absence of a larger drama, they create their own, as children in stable environments do. They play.”
“Consider the sequence just before Mei first encounters Totoro. Satsuki has left for school, and Dad is working from home, so Mei dons a hat and a shoulder bag and tells her father that she’s “off to run some errands” - The film is hers for the next ten minutes, with very little dialogue. She’s seized by ideas, and then abandons them; her goals switch from moment to moment. First she wants to play “flower shop” with her dad, but then she becomes distracted by a pool full of tadpoles. Then, of course, she needs a bucket to catch tadpoles in - but the bucket has a hole in it. And on it goes, but we’re never bored, because Mei is never bored.”
“[…] You can only ride a ride so many times before the thrill wears off. But a child can never exhaust the possibilities of a park or a neighborhood or a forest, and Totoro exists in this mode. The film is made up of travel and transit and exploration, set against lush, evocative landscapes that seem to extend far beyond the frame. We enter the film driving along a dirt road past houses and rice paddies; we follow Mei as she clambers through a thicket and into the forest; we walk home from school with the girls, ducking into a shrine to take shelter from the rain; we run past endless green fields with Satsuki as she searches for Mei. The psychic center of Totoro’s world is an impossibly giant camphor tree covered in moss. The girls climb over it, bow to it as a forest-guardian, and at one point fly high above it, with the help of Totoro. Much like Totoro himself, the tree is enormous and initially intimidating, but ultimately a source of shelter and inspiration.”
“My Neighbor Totoro has a story, but it’s the kind of story that a child might make up, or that a parent might tell as a bedtime story, prodded along by the refrain, “And then what happened?” This kind of whimsicality is actually baked into Miyazaki’s process: he begins animating his films before they’re fully written. Totoro has chase scenes and fantastical creatures, but these are flights of fancy rooted in a familiar world. A big part of being a kid is watching and waiting, and Miyazaki understands this. When Mei catches a glimpse of a small Totoro running under her house, she crouches down and stares into the gap, waiting. Miyazaki holds on this image: we wait with her. Magical things happen, but most of life happens in between those things—and there is a kind of gentle magic, for a child, in seeing those in-betweens brought to life truthfully on screen.”
A.O. Scott and Lauren Wilford on “My Neighbor Totoro”, 2017.
I know that my atoms are not mine and that they were forged in stars and scattered across the universe by their deaths. I know that I am a product of bunch of chemical reactions. I know that I will one day die.
I also know that I am more than sum of my parts. That my death, will only be in this body. I will decompose and become apart of everything. I know that my mannerisms will be inherited by those who loved me. Just I have inherited theirs. And I know if there is a afterlife my spirit will live on forever in love and kindness.
But that doesn't make this life any less worth it.
People will envy your strength and success but not the struggle that brought you to it.
A car just came by and illuminated her face for nothing more than a breathe but in that moment I saw her. In her a beauty that has never before been rivaled or matched. My heart paced faster and my eyes watered and all I wanted was to have my hand on her face.
It was that new years eve of 2019 going into 2020 and I had bought a bottle of prosecco. It was a last minute sorta thing like a surprise for my then girlfriend and I to drink she didn't know about it, however, sparkling wine is supposed to be served cold, right, so I stuck it in the freezer. Alcohol takes a lot to freeze, I didn't think nothing of it. I was Bartender for years at that point hadn't had any mishaps. I still keep vodka in my freezer even now. Anyway eleven thirty rolls around and I'm like I'm gonna bust out the champagne. I go and open the bottle, yeah, because the bottom of it froze the pressure made it so that when I popped the cork, it violently exploded off. Shattering the neck of the bottle, and careening the cork into the ceiling light fixture and spilling this half frozen slurry of sparkling wine all over the kitchen floor and the cabinets above me. Erin came rushing into the kitchen and I had to have been standing there with some half stupid half surprised look, I guess. We both just laughed and laughed. She laughed until her stomach hurt. We cleaned up whatever mess I had made trying to be seasonal and romantic, we drank screwdrivers for the rest of the night. The following year of 2021 it was literally during that big ol snow storm we got. It started that same night as Valentines you remember? Morgan hadnt been someone's Valentine before. Not officially. Shed never gotten flowers or other gifts before for Valentines. So I was Morgans first, I also got her this big ol hunting knife because she was big into knives. Anyway it was like midnight o'clock, and she had just gotten home from the airport, like the actual airport she worked there as like an usher for handicap people. And she was tired dude she gotten home ate like a bunch of biscuits and gravy that had been sitting out all day, and she came over in her pajamas and was just this beautiful mess that I completely adored. I wrote this poem about the experience "It's an image. It was February, Winter. The moon had just rose full again. My anxious heart still beating, as she walked up the stairs, she didn't knock she just entered. The warm light from the side of my house cast sight on the Snow caught in her Raven Hair." And we sat on the couch the rest of the night and watched YouTube videos. It was probably like the best and the worst Valentines kisses I had ever gotten, day old biscuits and gravy breath and all. She sent me pictures of her with the knife and roses later that I had used as my phone background for line months. And a voice message of her going "Fuuuck Yoou". whenever I'm in a bad mood sometimes, it's like I can remember some of the worst things that I've done or someone else has and I can stew in it for hours or days, or in the worst case entire seasons of my life. But sometimes I get glimpses of stuff like that, and its just so Human to me, and it isnt as taxing to breathe after that.
We are on your Bed watching Movies while I stroke gently through your hair
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thewritingchild reblogged this · 3 years ago
