Tales of the Interregnum

Pulled a muscle or pinched a nerve in my lower back, sufficiently badly to land me in the Sealand General ER on Monday night.  Had the benefit of sage counsel from afar to help me through it, but I pulled out the pencil and paper to help fill the time as well, and alone and cold, half-dressed, in a concrete room full of crutches and cast saws, I found her:

A bit sparse perhaps. But all in all, I’d rather be spending the holidays with her than with Raphaela McGrumpyfists down there.

I have a sketchbook.

You’re supposed to have a sketchbook when you’re an artist;  the story is, you carry it around with you, and you use it to draw what you see around you, or whatever pops into your head, so that later on you can take those fragmentary pieces of art and use them in larger compositions, forge them together into some kind of overwhelming masterpiece.  I think.  It strikes me as the sort of thing that probably got its start back in the late Middle Ages or early Renaissance, when “art” meant oil paintings, and you couldn’t just stand there with the brush and knock out The School of Athens, you had to put some thought into the cartoon first.  (Yes, that’s where the word “cartoon” came from.)  I rarely draw in mine.  I suck at life drawing, and usually only resort to it if I’m god-awfully bored or disinterested in participating in my social surroundings.  I fill the few pages I do with geometric symbols instead, or conceptual sketches concerning ideas I’m hashing through, iconographies.

Still, once in a while, something appears while I’m not paying attention that makes me tilt my head sidewise and pay attention again.  And today, on the bus, it was this:

Angels I have drawn aplenty over the years, but I have never seen her like before.  I can only wonder what she portends.

I have a pretty good idea why her face is hidden, though.  And I’m all but positive I had a taste of those fists once upon a time…

Again and again, however we know the landscape of love

and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names,

and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others

fall:  again and again the two of us walk out together

under the ancient trees, lie down again and again

among the flowers, face to face with the sky.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

—

I have learned to mould and sculpt in matter,

And to pour the lights of the soul.

On the heights of the mountain summits

Stands the princess,

Her body moulded in marble.

All glory gleams from her sculpted eyes,

Till grace dissolves in fainting.

The sun of Jerusalem shone on her…

Terribly did I burn and yearn for her,

And I long for her still…

And she called in her pride:  “He who sings my song,

His shall I be!…”

Now I shall go, now I shall come, and say:

“I have learned your song, here it is in my mouth:

Your body is fairer than the marble of skies,

O daughter of kings,

And the radiance of your eyes than the radiance of souls;

With prayer and fasting I have discovered your secret-

Be mine!…”

-”I Have Learned to Mould”, I. Z. Rimon (translated by Richard Flantz)

Long, long ago [more than six years ;) ], in the Time of Legends, I was the Vice-President of my college’s English Club.

This was not a inherently heroic position.  I did not win it by destroying all comers at a poetry slam (actually, I don’t think the term poetry slam had been invented yet), or by challenging the existing Vice President to short-form literature at fifty paces.  It was conferred upon me because the staff of the college English Club was synonymous with the staff of the college literary magazine, Vitae, and the year before I had volunteered to join the staff of Vitae, at a time when that staff consisted of exactly two people.  One of them, a tall, thin, soft-spoken guy with dark eyes and dark hair, was the President.  The other, a short, passionate, beautifully urban Spanish girl (the term Spanish hadn’t been invented then either) was the Vice President.  She, unbeknownst to me, was scheduled to replace him the following year, the year in question.  So that year, when I showed up for the first meeting (late), she, as the new President, introduced me to the handful of newcomers as the Vice President.  And I, being an articulate sort, said to them:  “Hey.”  (The guy who had been the old President was not only gone, but dead.  And yes, I also became the President in my own time.  Separate story, on both counts.)

After the initial shock, I immediately set about making the Vice Presidency a heroic position, as best I knew how.  I wrote a lot (much of it awful), and critiqued a lot (much of it level), and drew fliers for our various events with artwork that wasn’t very good, but was the best I was capable of producing at the time.  I also talked us up as a force on every occasion I was able (of which there were not too many) to anyone who would listen (who counted few).  And I took myself very seriously, which I was prone to do anyway, although not so godawfully seriously that I was unable to occasionally poke fun at the entire affair, as I did when I wrote for my fellows a brilliant piece simply entitled “Bad Poetry”.  It read as follows: (more…)

“‘Halflings!’ laughed the rider that stood beside Eomer.  ‘Halflings!  But they are only a little people in old songs and children’s tales out of the North.  Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in the daylight?’

‘A man may do both,’ said Aragorn.  ‘For not we but those who come after will make the legends of our time.  The green earth, say you?  That is a mighty matter of legend, though you tread it under the light of day!’”

- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

There are still white dog hairs from Nipper left on my brown winter scarf.

“There’s a happy place where it’s just geometry and women singing in Latin, and that’s where I am right now.”

-me, a long time ago

on the bus, among four African-Americans

Man 1 (to Man 4):  Obama’s in the White House, fool, you ain’t in the White House.  (laughs)
Man 2:  Yeah, he representin’ us.
Man 3:  (correcting Man 2) He representin’ AMERICA.
Man 4:  Yeah. (thinks) He half white, you know, you don’t never hear no one talk about that.

There is a flashing yellow sign I have never seen before in the status bar of Windows, warning me that the hard drive of my mainframe is about to give up the ghost.

Not only is Magic dead, Science is failing!!!