Ramblings while waiting for the Barbarians (again)

This was originally intended to be a journal, a journal that began with an artist residency based on my quest to follow the "trail of Spider Woman" in 2007.  To envision what She might represent, across the ages, across the miles, and across cultures into this crucial contemporary time we live in.  I wonder how far I have come or  strayed from that path?  I've tried to be true, and I think I mostly have.  

But now it's been almost 20 years, and I am 77 years old - how did I get here, standing on the near precipice of closing the book of this (yes, very interesting) life?  What a long strange trip it's been, to quote the Grateful Dead.  So....... I'm going to ramble.  If anyone reads this, well, maybe you too sometimes ramble and feel the same.  

Weaver (2007)

Ursula Leguin wrote that "Comfort is irrelevant.  Unless you are an old woman, and then it is everything."  I have to agree with her indeed. But where is "comfort" these days?  This world, beyond the obvious dystopia that America has become, is especially strange to me.  I understand now what my mother meant by "missing the old time ways".  AI?  Computers that talk to you?  AI "companions" instead of a real friend (wasn't that a movie?), banks of laptops where a coffee shop used to be...... I've become an anachronism sitting by the roadside now,  with a few old friends commiserating.    Besides watching Trump do his best to start WWIII and the demise of almost half of our fellow Beings .....  it's sometimes hard to get out of bed in the morning.   

It looks to me like human technology may be advancing and evolving, but humanity hasn't learned much.  Still the same greed and war, violence and ignorance. Is there a Golden Age ahead somewhere?

Lately,  I've been feeling like writing a Memoir,  with certain stories as "touchstones" or breadcrumbs along the pathway.  Sometimes I see them, shining like Hecate's torch in the dark paths of memory, and say "ah, there you are!".  But memoir:  that also seems  vain somehow.  And yet, and yet, I've had some extraordinary moments that may well be worth sharing!

I think of that book "Meetings with Remarkable Men" by Gurdjieff that I had to wade through in my early 20's because everyone said he was "so heavy" (I am not particularly a fan of Gurdjieff, although I do think as Trickster Archetypes he was a great one).  Apparently Gurdjieff never met  any Remarkable Women - a blind spot that hasn't changed much among men today either.  Even in his "all and everything", women were amazingly invisible to him.  

So my Memoir would appropriately be called 

Meetings with Remarkable Women - 

 (All and Everything, Second Wave Series)  

Ha!  Thinking along those lines, I guess I do have a whole lot to share!  Yes, I've met and worked with and learned from some  Remarkable Women! 

When I was 18 at L.A. City College, I announced that "I was going to be an artist!"  I had not one, but three teachers (men) who informed me that I should re-consider that, because there had never been any great women artists.  In other words, my gender didn't have what it takes.  Fortunately, I and women like Judy Chicago said "well, Now there is!"

My idea of being an artist has mostly been a like being a stenographer:  you learn your skills, and be  able and willing to do transcription from the Muses. But there aren't a lot of job opportunities for this sort of thing these days.  In my case, they also don't give residencies to artists over 70 - what they all seem to want is Emerging Artists.  No room for those who have already Emerged.  Several times.   And yet the Powers that Be keep sending me visions,  that I try to make manifest between elderly naps. 

Here comes a literary comment:  I do know that what I love best are the stories people tell of their lives.  I have encountered  many inspired, dedicated spiritual books that unfortunately drone on and on about "love" and "spirit" and "sacred" and end each paragraph with  "you should....." until I'm fast asleep halfway through Chapter I.  These well meaning teachers don't know how to write in ways that aren't like sermons.  Stories are what capture the reader, and can also conveniently contain metaphors that get the message across.  

Another literary failing is the promiscuous use of Abstractions.  At 77, I'm weary indeed of Abstractions (although some Symbols are ok).  But do we really need all those words that take us into "higher concepts"?  I sometimes wonder how well some of those (patriarchal) "higher concepts" have served us?   Hitler had a lot of "higher concepts" and so did the Inquisition.   I suppose, to use a metaphor, I would like to write with my hands in the moist earth, planting seeds that will grow in the imagination.  Just add water.

"The World is not with us enough, O Taste and See"  wrote the poet Denise Levertov.  Abstractions often distance us from that truth, even fascinating  metaphysical abstractions.  "O Taste and See!" is important at 70 something:  I don't need abstractions.  I need sunrises, good coffee, friends to share with,  mountains purple and azure, star scapes, the purring of cats, the taste of yellow wine and fresh bread........... I need to love the World, even as my time grows shorter.  And to say Thank You World as I rise at sunrise each day, listening to the birds greet the Sun, and watering my garden.

I think I've been depressed. I go in the studio, the ideas flood my notebooks, and then that daemonic voice goes "Oh, why bother.  No one cares, it all ends up in the closet anyway".  I confess I sort of agree some days - after 15 years with an AIRBNB in my sculpture garden,  I know very well that I could replace all the art with mops and most of my guests wouldn't notice.  It has been rather deflating.

 

 

And then some line from some perky self-help book pipes up like an inner cheerleader "you make art for yourself!".  Ok, sometimes.  But mostly I am annoyed by that bland justification for dismissing artists as irrelevant hobbyists (unless they are dead and worth a lot of money).  Do physicists "make physics for themselves?"  Do psychologists get advanced degrees to "analyze themselves"?  Are doctors deeply called to learn how to heal in order to "make healing for themselves" while spending the rest of their lives with a "real job" working in a restaurant serving pizzas? So shut up cheerleader.  No, we don't just make art for ourselves, we make it to Communicate, Inspire, Create Beauty and Depth, and Share.  Art and Art Making is a Conversation on many levels.

Depression may in fact be an appropriate, if  useless, response right now. Grief would be an even better word.   The Earth is heating up, the oceans are filling up with plastic, California is burning and Florida is sinking, millions of fellow beings on this beautiful world are becoming extinct every week, refugees are fleeing drought and war, and sociopathic, greed driven men are too often the ones in power.  

Some days I don't know how to get "positive" and "enlightened".  I think about the Roman practice of the Saturn shrine, a somber place that was set aside in their gardens, where one might sit in solitude, and allow the  dark, melancholy  God  to inform and converse with  one's psyche. 

There is a place for the voice of Saturn in the gardens of our lives.  I claim the right to examine this long life I have been privileged to have, to en-sadden about the losses and the disappointments, to grieve the daily destruction of the Living Earth, and the decimation of my country, which for all it's faults, was also a place of hope and idealism and some great innovation. 

When I was a child in the 50's my family toured Italy.  My mother dragged us to Roman temples and mausoleums and museums, and I am embarrassed to say that all I really remember of it all, outside of the wonderful cats in the Coliseum, are the statues without noses.  They always seemed to be without noses, and in my 10 year old imagination, I pictured Romans as toga clad people without noses.

Much later, when contemplating pictures of those impressive (nose-less)  marble statues, I imagined breaking floods  of  roaring barbarians crossing the Rubicon and riding into civilized Rome, looting the Temples, raping the women (women always seem to be perceived as loot), and shouting with glee as they knocked the noses off of every statue they saw.  

Waiting for the Barbarians. ( I do not refer here, by the way, to the poem by  C.P. Cavafy,  or the famous book by  Pulitzer prize winner J.M. Coetzee ,  or even the very powerful performance by Laurie Anderson.  I co-opt the term for my own uses.  As an educated, and thus privileged woman, sitting here sipping tea and enjoying the sound of dawn birds in my garden, sometimes I cast myself as an aristocratic late Roman woman.  How  might she  have felt, sitting in her Atrium,  "waiting for the barbarians" to arrive? 

I've partaken of the higher benefits of civilization, been part of an optimistic generation. In the modern version, I wondered if all the Goddess sculptures in my sculpture garden would be nose-less one day.  Would the Barbarians ride in with their motorcycles, assault rifles in hand and red baseball hats on their heads, eagerly blowing up the Smithsonian or the Met, knocking the noses off of every statue in the place? 

Instead of Star trek, is the future to be more like the Road Warrior? A glorious patriarchal dream of one alpha male duking it out with another for unending narcissistic exploitative supremacy and virgins?  

I'm being truthful, and personal.  It seems like the day to do it. Maybe tomorrow I'll have a solution.