'Wasn't It A Strange Way Down...'

This is not at all how I expected to spend any of my time today -- not at all.  

No, I was really on a self-indulgent, argumentative quest, which just goes to show that one never knows what may appear, while one searches for something entirely different.

So.  I'm slated to teach a drawing class, beginning in January, for the local community college.  As the students with whom I'll work have already had one semester of drawing, I want to construct a course focused more on concept and self-knowledge, than on using a pencil to depict an egg on a sheet of paper.  Trying to arrive at a coherent set of progressively challenging assignments, I kept on asking myself the same question: what, exactly, is drawing?

As is the norm these days, I went to my computer for insights and overviews, from other artists and educators, to help guide me to a place of greater clarity, regarding to the discipline of drawing, and the various shapes it can take.  At random, I selected an essay 'Drawing vs Painting', posted in April of 2021, by Eden Gallery (whether this is the name of a person, or the title of an organization, isn't clear).  I hoped this work might provide a jumping-off point, and shed some light on the basic question of what separates the act of drawing from its allied creative disciplines.  

Sadly, this essay added little in the way of the clarity I sought.  Perhaps I should have been alerted by the title  -- 'Drawing vs Painting'.  As though this were a prize fight that would only be over when one combatant is lying unconscious in the ring.  Through the rest of the essay, though, this hint at adversarial practices seemed forgotten.  

But by page three, the essay took a strange, and for me an alienating turn.  In a brief paragraph defining 'painting', the author made a puzzling assertion -- first letting us know that artists who use paint are... painters (who would have thought?) -- and then that some painters are now household names.  Like, for instance... Yoel Benharrouche.  

Maybe my household -- which has included professional artists and educators for the past twenty years -- is lacking the more soigne of art connections, but (with all due respect) I've never heard of Yoel Benharrouche.  And I suspect that few, if any, of my colleagues, professional artists and educators all, would consider Yoel Benharrouche a household name.  

So I looked up Yoel Benharrouche, expecting to find at least a Wikipedia article on him.  Of which there wasn't one.  But there was a biography, presented by a different gallery, and including a' key' to understanding the meanings in his work: the top quarter represents the divine, the left half represents receiving things, etc. And there were illustrations of his manifestly derivative paintings, evocative of Picasso's figurative abstractions, though generally in much brighter colors.  (Oh, and there was one painting featuring a fractured version of da Vinci's "Woman with a Ferret'.  Or Genevra de Benchi, I forget which)  Handsome, eminently above-the-sofa-worthy work from Mr. Benharrouche, without question, but not nearly on a par with such legitimate household names as Lucien Freud, or Francis Bacon, or the late Chuck Close, to scratch the surface.  

Assured that my lack of awareness of Yoel Benharrouche hadn't resulted from my having lapsed, unconsciously, into an art-world coma, I forged my way through the rest of the article, hoping against hope.  But, among other art-historical errors, the author cited Henri Matisse among practitioners of 'the painterly style', working in the first half of the 19th century.  But Matisse wasn't born until the 1890's, and was, in fact, closely identified with the Fauvist movement.   Clearly, the essay's author had only the most tenuous of grasps on the topic at hand.  And there it could have ended.

But...

Having looked up Mr. Benharrouche, I couldn't resist indulging in one of the modern world's mortal sins -- I Googled myself.  Just to compare my web presence, if any -- and is there any weightier determinant of contemporary significance? -- with that of the aforementioned Israeli painter.  I searched for 'Walter Zimmerman glass artist' -- there's also Walter Zimmermann the German violinist, and a Walter Zimmerman elementary school somewhere in California, poor kids.   Voila -- there I popped up, along with the usual assortment of other pictorial material having nothing to do with me.  What I found of particular interest were two images from my 'Incident' series, which work rarely shows up in these venues.  I decided to investigate the source of these photographs.  Which, really, is why I'm writing all of this in the first place.

Some years ago, I was invited to show some work at the Chicago SOFA exposition, at the request of Kate Elliott.  I was teaching in Philadelphia at the time, and was thrilled that my decidedly undecorative work would be on display, among the glamour and gleam and glitz usually associated with all things glass.  I sent off an assortment of these 'Incident' pieces -- first shown in a small gallery space in a small Philadelphia craft shop on Pine Street -- as my contributions to the event, and arranged to be present at the opening.

Needless to say, my work created a silent dissonance, as it usually does.  So, after taking in the thrill of seeing an actual installation of my wall-mounted pieces at SOFA Chicago, I set off to see what other work -- especially glass work -- was on hand.  I shouldn't have been surprised.  I found mostly the same artists represented, exhibiting the work one would expect of them, only bigger and more expensive.  In this context, my work did indeed seem to have broken through some dimensional barrier, separating things decoratively reassuring, from works with a totally different agenda.

So I suppose I should be flattered, that the essayist (I'm really not sure who actually did the writing) chose to include two images from this series of ten which I shipped to Chicago.  The essayist has posted the pictures, wondering why they were there, and what they were about, and suggested that, no matter what any literal reference might be, it must certainly be 'something no man would want to experience'.  

I have tried, as a general rule, not to talk about the antecedents of my work.  When I've broken my own rule, I've been sadly disappointed, because although I may feel driven to use some particular event or experience as a jumping-off point, I invariably find that the responses of viewers are, almost without exception, far more poignant and resonant than the mere facts of my own life.

That said, however -- and since the exhibit in question is but a dim memory, but the question posted under the image of my work still stands, unanswered -- I thought I would once again break my rule of silence.  When I began the pieces that make up the 'Incident' series, I was, for some reason, still haunted by accounts that had surfaced in the press, from time to time, reporting on what Americans sometimes faced, fighting in Africa and the Middle East, especially in Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan.  In particular, my attention had been arrested by abbreviated mentions of men, brutally murdered, then dragged through dirt streets, or left, dismembered and burnt beyond recognition, to dangle on bridges.  

'Something no man would want to experience'.  

It's not as though I exult in having such topics from which to pick, to make the kind of work that I do.  But when -- as I have -- I see someone crossing the room, rather than look more closely at some assemblage I've made (which, always, is cold, inert, non-contagious, allusive instead of diagrammatic), I want to ask -- so which is worse, to confront and to know, or to remain ignorant, and by extension, complacent, and perhaps even complicit?   

The answers are not easy, but I don't believe this means that the questions don't need to be asked.

And all this, from an essay about drawing vs painting.  Isn't the world a wonderful place?

     

   

  

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

Some Time Later On...

Well, this certainly isn't how things were supposed to turn out.

When I launched myself, so confidently, on this bitter journey, to catalog the various jolts and misfortunes and indignities attendant upon approaching the end of one's earthly existence, I had thought, somewhat naively, that I would be spending at least part of at least two or three days a week on the job -- retailing with appropriate ruefulness just how it was feeling, day by day, as the clock runs down.

But lo, these many weeks have trickled past, with nary a word from my fingertips -- in spite of many opportunities, and no shortage of material about which to complain in a picturesque and, I had hoped, bleakly humorous manner.  Days plodded on; seasons changed; conventional festivities were celebrated with more or less sincerity; gloves were lost; one pair of reading glasses after another either disappeared or broke in half; door locks began to malfunction.  No matter how vigorously I applied my store of acrid Protestant guilt and the embedded sense of obligation, my fingers remained either totally idle, or occupied with much less thematically-consistent material.

Until today, for no discernible reason.

Here I've been sitting, transfixed by the word game that fills me with a mixture of fascination, irritation and loathing, while outside, a soft snowfall marks the latest of our winter storms -- possible five more inches ahead, before the projected end of the storm, at nightfall.  And for some reason, as I searched through the letters on the screen, trying to find a more satisfying word than 'ait', or 'the', some set of internal lenses were twisting into focus, and I was looking, again, at one of the more debilitating factors tied to my approaching end days: lack of futurity, and how magically that state robs me of a sense of orientation and purpose.

All through my creative life, I've realized, there was the implication of some upcoming exhibit, some opportunity for me to display my work, that made the efforts seem legitimate and reasonable investments of my time, energy and resources.  Now, for some reason -- and this, in spite of a recent upwelling of inexplicable productivity -- no glimmer of future shows or competitions seems available, as the customary inducement to do something.  Now, if I feel prodded to work, it's more out of a sense of housekeeping -- a tepid desire to tie up loose ends, and not to leave so many things unfinished -- even though I'm more convinced than ever, that everything I've ever done will simply be chucked into some hired dumpster, and hauled off to a landfill in upstate New York.

So I find myself operating out of a kind of unthinking, animal motivation -- some sort of motor habit, or an idle curiosity, to find out just how I did manage to create that particular mix of paints, to achieve just the right wash of neglect and despair?  How ironic that, finally, I have plenty of time and plenty of material, and find that the idea of working makes me sick to my stomach, that there's no comfort in putting paint on paper, or in massing wads of stuff onto flat surfaces, to create my little wall-unit extracts of the larger suspended figures that people seem to find so fascinating -- and which objects, for all their fascination, will spend the brief remainder of their existence, hanging in an old machine shop basement in Newark.

Lack of futurity, lack of the sense that any creative endeavor can possibly represent a sensible, worthwhile investment -- that it makes no sense, really, to bother to learn anyone's name, or remember their birthday -- because I'm really just in a kind of cosmic transportation hubs, and although the schedule hasn't been posted, I'm pretty sure I've got a ticket for one of the next outbound buses.  I can score 20,000,000 points on my computer word game -- it won't make a bit of difference.    

  ©  2015  Walter Zimmerman

Sunday in Park

(Park, as in 'idling, motor running, polluting atmosphere without making any progress or going anywhere)  (Which you probably already knew that)

My reading glasses, when I can locate a pair, seem always to be extraordinarily smeary, as though I store them in a glass of molten wax when they're not under something. 

I no longer need to leave the bathroom faucet dripping.  The cat is dead.

I need to call my friends in Pennsylvania -- the ones I'm always afraid I'll get a call about, saying they're dead -- to tell them that the cat is dead.

I'm wondering if the cheap honey I bought at the supermarket (because the Google map to the farm store was completely misleading), is actually honey, or just some oil byproduct imported from some foreign country, and liberally laced with corn syrup to make it palatable.  This wouldn't be such a concern for me, if (a) this honey were still in the supermarket, aisle four, near the peanut butter, and (b) I hadn't sneakily resumed using honey in my morning coffee, which I used to do all the time, until about four years ago, when I saw my mother again for the first time in decades, and realized that, all along, she hadn't really cared about me in even the tiniest bit, and now she's dead too. 

I certainly will miss the cat more.

In fact, as John decided that we should have Buster the Dead Cat cremated, once he was actually dead, and as Buster the Dead Cat was only outside on his own recognizance one time in his entire life, and didn't particularly enjoy that experience, as the outside is so freakin' big, and there's no dish of cat food, or handy dripping bathroom faucet to drink from, it doesn't really make much sense to bury him there, I'm contemplating a brief return foray into the entrancing world of glass blowing, to make an urn for his ashes, and all the cat hair I gathered, more or less unintentionally, in a bowl in the same bathroom as the dripping faucet, because while he had his head almost upside-down, drinking, I would brush him, over and over again, loving his red hair....  I'm kind of torn between a cobalt blue urn, or one in Roma red -- cobalt is kind of a no-brainer, but has nothing to do with a red cat, and Roma red is so delicious, even though it can tend to blow out unevenly.  Plus I want the urn to have a blown foot, and I suck at blown feet, and they're virtually impossible to do alone anyway, so who am I going to get to assist me, so I can make a container for the ashes of a dead cat that used to drink out of the bathroom sink? 

It's always something.

Glass.  Glass feet.  Glass bottles.  Fake 'outsider art' dolls, made with glass wine bottles as the body, with gnarled wooden extremities and knotted cloth heads, which I can leave outdoors for a while so they look really crappy, and then take them to some flea market and wait until an antique dealer gets a load of them, and then I can sell them for tens of thousands of dollars, and make a bogus video of the artist him/herself (I wonder who can play the part?  I wonder...), talking all ungrammatic-like, about how tough it is to get yer wife to crochet them doll laigs, when she's layin' there, a-dyin' of some durn sickness or t'other...  Much more interesting than, say, faking Vermeers, and I still can't believe that art experts of any discipline could have accepted those bloated, suffocating paintings of Jesus and his followers at Emmaus as real Vermeers...  And, could I go to prison for passing my own art off as the art of someone I'm just pretending to be?  But I still make all the stuff anyway?  Maybe I should make a few dozen dolls first, and pull the fake wool over a few antique-frenzied eyes, before I worry too much about legal niceties...?

Even though I've tried to convince myself that it's too late, that they chose someone else, that I blew the call-back audition, I'm nevertheless waiting for a call from the theater company in Somerset NJ, offering me the opportunity once more to play Judge Turpin in their February production of 'Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street'.  Even though they've already picked someone else.  And it's after noon on a Sunday, three days after the call-backs, and who's going to be calling people now, and besides, the other guy was so much creepier, in the best possible way...  As I was putting myself through this particular wringer yet again yesterday, I think I realized that, of all the creative ventures in which I've involved myself, I think I feel the most genuinely grounded and entitled as an actor -- it still strikes me as unnervingly weird, that I actually know how to blow glass -- that skill seems as divorced from real life as would be the ability to levitate.  If I could.  Levitate, that is. 

I bought yet another box cutter two days ago -- this, despite the fact that I have at least eight others, hiding in obviously clever and unexpected places around the house, and because I actually need to cut... some boxes!  I also bought a pack of replacement blades, which it makes me feel especially clever, because I made sure I bought the blades that would fit the knife, instead of exactly the wrong blades instead, which I would never bother to return, thus giving the new box cutter something else under which to hide itself.  I rarely if ever replace razor knife blades -- I worry about what to do with the old one -- surely some careless garbage man will have forgotten to wear his gloves that day, and cut himself, and get blood poisoning, and die in about six hours, leaving behind a stunned young pregnant widow and three school-aged children who will have to wear clothes they steal from dumpsters at the mall....  The responsibilities are endless.  I also think that blades should really, by rights, last forever, and it's a sin to be wasteful, isn't it? 

But now I'm ready to throw caution to the wind (plus, with over 150 lb of wax at my fingertips, I can easily create a dulling sheath for the dead blade, thus relieving me of the terrible guilt, plus I could never remember those kids' birthdays anyhow...), and change blades freely. As long as I can find the right screw driver, to open the knife, so the blade is accessible.  And so it goes.

(Now, a moment of silence, while I pick at myself and think about all the things I'd really like to write about, but don't, because I don't think it would be such a good idea.  I wonder if I could come up with a mental equivalent of wax, in which I could embed what I think are such inappropriate or unpleasant thoughts, so I could both rid myself of them, and avoid the risk of shocking or alienating or otherwise upsetting anyone who might read them.  It's a terrible burden, being responsible for.... you.

I should probably eat something for lunch.   I had a swiss cheese sandwich earlier, but I'm feeling empty again. 

I hate feeling hunger, but I also seem to believe, on some deep level, that being hungry is a good thing -- that it's virtuous, in the sense of being anti-gluttony, and also, I think it reminds me of feelings I had as a helpless, nonverbal, but definitely non-silent baby.  I think my mother was onl occasionally interested in me -- there's a photo of me, before I could walk, and I'm on the floor with a scattered deck of cards, and my sense is that for my mother, it would have been a toss-up, most of the time, as to whether she'd rather feed me, or play solitaire.  So, feeling hungry seems, somehow, to feel like the necessary precursor to being taken care of -- and the hungrier I get, the more imminent is that attention I crave.  Of course, when I was so depressed a few months ago, I kept on feeling hungry, and kept on feeling hungry, and kept on, until I had lost almost 30 lb, and really, no one ever showed up.  Of course, I didn't stand around screaming either, like I probably did before I could walk.  The squeaky wheel sometimes getting greased, depending on how big it is, and where the mechanic might have gotten to. 

I think I might want to be done, for now.  My mind seems to be wanting to wander toward wondering where I've stashed all my crochet needles, as I think I want to start making the preliminary rough sketches of my first bogus glass bottle doll, while only half-watching what I hope will be old black-and-white movies from the 30's, on TCM.  Or, failing that, some grisly true-crime police procedural -- the tensions feel familiar, with the advantage that, unlike real life, in TV shows, they have to come up with the answers in under an hour.  There are details and events and questions lurking behind my own personal and ancient tensions and mysteries, of which I may never become aware, or to which I may never discover the answers.  

Maybe, with this idea not an uncommon one in my mental repertoire, next time I'll write about my version of heaven.  Stranger things have happened, and certainly stranger things have been thought of.

Now I wonder if, instead of crocheting twine onto a wine bottle, I shouldn't drive out westward, and see if I can't find that farm, and buy some genuine honey.  Before all their bees are dead.




©   Walter Zimmerman         2014 

Smatterings...

Hmmmmm. 

Well, according to my mental math, I'm down to about 703 days, in the countdown to my personal Biblical End Times.  I've been less than dutiful, or faithful, or regular, or disciplined, about this blog, which I find I've been treating exactly as I would a dear old friend:  I think about you all the time, but am too damned lazy to pick up the phone...

And it's not as though I've been sunk in some state of blissful denial, regarding My Personal Finality, et al.  Far from it.  If anything, I've been perhaps a bit too face-to-face with The Inevitable Last Date.  I just didn't want this to turn, so soon, into a blog about cats.  Because...

Buster the Dead Cat, which appellation I began using when it became clear that no amount of brushing or force-feeding or subcutaneous hydration was going to restore his kidneys, is now actually Buster the Really Dead Cat.  As in, post-mortem, cold as a popsicle, stiff as a board, on his way to being cremated Dead.  As in, the no longer peeing in the downstairs hallway, or pestering me to drink water from the bathroom sink, or walking around at night, howling meaninglessly at nothing in particular, cat. 

I tried my best to be faithful, as almost any other pet owner would instantly understand.  After it became clear that a daily session of being wrapped in a bath towel, and being laid in my lap, and having his jaws pried open, so I could ladle expensive, medicine-laced yummy cat food onto his tongue without shoving it into his lungs, was both pointless for him, and stressful for both of us, I fell back to the daily hydration routine.  Which, I was relieved to see, required no bath towel (I did drape a dish towel across my knee, as his bladder control came into question), no prying, and no ladling -- just the quick and determined insertion of a honkin' big needle into the loose skin high on his back, and then flipping the stopper, to allow sterile saline solution to drip into his failing body, 100 cc per visit.  He was almost always calm about it.  Early on, he would even purr a bit, as I stoked his sides and tried to see how low the water level had sunk in the suspended plastic bag hanging from the ceiling in the sun room.  Usually, he would start to squirm a bit, at just about the 85 cc mark, but sick as he was, and indulgent as I wanted to be, I was strict, in keeping him in place, until the prescribed volume of liquid was safely inserted beneath his skin.  Besides, squirm as he might, he wasn't really strong enough to go anywhere, except maybe to fall sideways onto the sofa, and fall asleep on the nest I'd made for him, of t-shirts I'd recently worn, perhaps mistakenly believing that my scent might comfort him.  It certainly didn't keep him awake.

He died in our bed, four nights ago, lying on his ad-libbed cushion of bath towels and hand towels and a wash cloth and a pillow case (he seemed to prefer the smoother fabric, to terry cloth), between John and me, as we slept.  Earlier that evening, I'd held him on my chest, for a couple of hours, either stroking his emaciated sides, or resting a hand gently against him.  Whether I was comforting him, or myself, I may never really know.  What I do know is that it was difficult to believe, that Tuesday morning, that he'd really stopped breathing, finally, after nearly two weeks of no food intake, and near-total inertia.  John checked for a heart beat.  I touched Buster's ears -- that I always thought were so smooth, and darkened at the base, like a tree-ripened peach that shows you just where the nearest leaves used to be -- and there was no immediate twitch.  His cold paws were limp.

Dead.

I'd decided, weeks ago, when the diagnosis was still fresh, that we would be burying him in our back yard -- I mentally pegged out a space, next to our redbud tree, a gift from our dear departed friend Irene, and which had been split in two, a few years ago, by a falling oak branch, but which had healed itself after I tied and taped it back together.  It's a shame I didn't know what I was doing when I planted it.  In any event, the plan was to dig a hole about four feet deep, inter our little red cat, and then fill the hole again.  Maybe place a marker, if I could ever make up my mind what to use, and then actually create it, that is.  I'd made mental note of where the mattox and the spade were, in the garage -- digging down through the underlying clay would be no picnic, I knew.

I also cleared a space in our freezer, as a temporary feline morgue, in case Buster died at a time that John wouldn't be able to attend the burial.  Most of the frozen foods I simply crammed into another crowded space; the small packages of sausages I shifted to the fridge, where I let them thaw, and then tried to turn them into some sort of sad bachelor's dinner -- pan-fried links, with some loose meat squeezed from their casings, drizzled with maple syrup, and served with the remains of store-bought potato salad.  As a meal, it served its purpose, in terms of clearing out freezer space.  I added the uneaten sausage to a desperate batch of pasta sauce, which I hastily stirred up, and mixed with two other containers of left-over marinara, to make a barely acceptable companion for some squid ink linguini, which meal I gulped down while watching an old black-and-white movie on TCM, with Buster zoned out on one flat surface or another, breathing shallowly, his eyes dilated, the tip of his tail occasionally giving a little twitch.  Who would expect, I wondered, that the impending death of an adopted house pet would have a material impact on my dining habits, for at least two meals anyway?
But John voted strenuously for cremation, which meant that I could forget where the mattox was lodged (actually, its yellow plastic handle makes it pretty easy to spot.  Extrication is another matter), and not worry about getting callouses on my dainty hands, while digging and digging and digging, and cursing myself for insisting that the hole be just a bit deeper...  Buster never liked being outdoors anyway.  So I wrapped him yet again, this time in a plush dull-lavender-colored bath towel, and John drove us to the vet's office, where I stood for a few minutes with this inert bundle in my arms, as the vet's assistant talked dog food with a feisty youngish woman dressed in aggressively athletic attire.  Then, we took Buster into one of the non-public spaces, and laid him on the chest freezer/morgue, to be picked up later and taken somewhere else for his final makeover.  John quibbled a bit about leaving the towel -- he's never used it, so he doesn't know how uncooperative it's always been, in terms of actually removing moisture from a wet body -- so, before unwrapping Buster, I took off my dull red waffle-weave rugby shirt, which I've never liked that much anyway, because I was not going to leave my dead cat lying uncushioned and exposed on an old Amana chest freezer.  Turns out, John likes the shirt more than he likes the towel, so that's how we left it -- a small oblong bundle of loosely folded terry cloth, that may or may not have had something inside it.  I was a little weepy, and the vet's assistant gave me a bit of a hug. 

Now I'm thinking of renting some glassblowing time, down in Newark, at GlassRoots, to see if I can make a blown glass urn for Buster's ashes, and also for the hair I've compulsively kept, from all those years of brushing him, while he was crouched in the upstairs sink, drinking the same water, from the tap, as I'd put in his bowl downstairs.  Brush, brush, brush, while he lapped and purred, and every two days or so, I would pull all the cat hair out of the brush, and put it in a red plastic bowl I'd placed on the otherwise useless shelf that former owners had created, when they took out the original claw-footed tub, and built a shower.  Only recently, due to a Facebook comment made by a former student, did I realize that I'd in fact accumulated a lifetime's worth of Buster's hair, in little bundles, packed into that dark red bowl.  If it would spin, I might consider making some kitty fur drink coasters, but the urn seems a more fitting destination.

A blog about a cat.  In spite of myself.  In spite of having the following writing ideas: doing the NYTimes crossword puzzle, and the way it impacts the things I think about each day; a further breakdown of the remaining time, into hours and minutes, and musings on same; a kind of 'bucket list' of projects or goals I might have, for these last weeks and days -- even though the term 'bucket list' kind of makes me shudder; further musings centered on the daily crossword puzzle, this time focusing on particular words, or on experiments of a long-entertained writing project, of creating a story, which must incorporate every single word in the solved puzzle; different musings altogether, on what I might choose -- or not choose -- to do, during this last stretch of life; questions about what other people, reaching or having surpassed this watershed, do with their lives, and how do they face getting out of bed every day?  Stuff like that.  It may yet be that, with the melodrama of Buster the Dead Cat pretty much over and done with, I may actually follow one of these conversational paths.  Stranger things have happened.

Now, though, I believe I'm going to take advantage of the splendid mid-November weather, and go out into the garage, to pull out the lawn mower and attach the cutting-collector bag (I've never used it), and see if, instead of raking all the myriad leaves piled up in our front and (to a deeper extent) our back yards, I can mulch them, and put them around the base of the ornamental cherry tree, and my newest addition to the landscape -- the old ornamental weeping cherry tree, which needs to have suckers trimmed from its main trunk, and the clumped black birch tree, which also needs to be trimmed of its lower branches, once we've had enough sufficiently cold weather, to make the sap run downward, and stop attracting birch beetles.  I can't throw these trimmed birch wands away just yet -- as usual, the mere presence of these objects prompts visions of future art projects, the realization of which lies, in terms of scaled probability, somewhere on the outer reaches, along with having a second date with a Sasquatch, and taking a long weekend on a UFO.

Dealing with the lawn also gives me complete immunity from having to write any more of this -- instead, I can go back to imagining all the wonderful things I could be saying, if I weren't stuck, outside, raking the stupid leaves...

I think we may need to get a kitten.



©  Walter Zimmerman  2014

Sufficiently Alive...

Even before beginning this blog, I suppose, I had a set of unenunciated expectations for myself, and for what I thought I was going to do.  The time frame of 730 days, from my 68th to my 70th birthdays, seemed a convenient framework on which to build a set of observations and reflections about my own mortality, and to confront, at least for myself, the surprising number of basic questions I still have, at what I shrink from terming an advanced age, about living, in and of itself.

It's been just two weeks, by my count, since my initial post, and I've managed already to fail to adhere to my own unvoiced regimen.  Surely, I thought without really thinking, one entry per day, for two consecutive years, shouldn't be unmanageable, given the very real fact that, aside from weekly laundry, and putting out the recyclables twice a month, I have nothing in particular to do, and nowhere important to go.

But also, among that bag of mixed emotions I brought to this self-generated assignment, was what I find shameful to admit: the sad hope that, somehow, by putting myself through this discipline, successfully, I might evade the very end I thought I was so brazenly facing.  Denial is much more clever than I thought, and seemingly much more pervasive, and expert at disguising itself.

Currently, I find myself amid other endings, some more foreseeable than others, but no less debilitating for their predictability.  The production of 'Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street' has its final two performances this weekend --the sixth and seventh public performances we will have given, of what I consider to be the most challenging theatrical work with which I've ever been involved.  I would like to hope that, in these final two shows, I'll finally be able to do my one solo song correctly; our one Sunday matinee was recorded, and of course I managed to stagger, at the very start of the music, and fluff some lyrics, which will be all I'll be able to see, I'm sure, when and if I watch the disc.  In this regard, I feel like a mountaineer who, after rigorous training and considerable preparatory effort, has failed, by only a few yards, of reaching his goal, before it's time to turn around and go back to daily life again.

Our little red cat Buster, whom I've mordantly nicknamed Buster the Dead Cat for online identification, lingers on, in the final stages of fatal kidney failure.  I keep simultaneously hoping and fearing I'll go upstairs and find him dead on the heavy, soft, blue and white and green afghan our friend Toni gave us for Christmas a few years ago.  He seems to prefer sleeping on it, on our big bed.  So far, though, each time I look into the room, he's still breathing, even though there's so little left of him now.  I spend some time, usually twice a day, stroking his bony sides and prominent spine, and after a few moments, he starts to purr.

I've picked out a probable burial site, in the back yard, as near to our badly-situated redbud tree as I can manage to dig a deep enough hole to protect his remains from unsentimental scavengers.  I know where the pick and spade are in the garage.  I have a glass block, flat on one side and curved on the other, that I'm thinking of using as a grave marker for him.  The blue silk brocade fabric I think I'll use as his shroud is currently still a child's jacket, being worn by a big teddy bear that's been banished to our 'guest room' -- hypothetical guests only being accommodated, if they can either sleep while levitated, or are prepared with their own hammocks.  I've cleared out space in our freezer, leaving the top shelf empty, as Buster's temporary morgue, so John can also witness the interment.  Although I am hydrating him with saline solution daily, I have stopped forcing him to eat -- I think it's stressful for him, to be wrapped in a big towel and have his jaws pried open, then to have cat food spooned onto his tongue, so he'll swallow what he doesn't manage to squeeze out of the side of his mouth.  And to be frank, I find this stressful for myself as well -- although I also feel that, as the voluntary care giver, with the opposable thumbs so handy for prying cat jaws open, I am not entitled to complaint.

And it's impossible, simply impossible, to avoid seeing myself in what is proving to be a much more protracted death than I had anticipated.  (Allowing myself to be guided by our vet's tacit assurances, that death by kidney failure is, for the animal, painless and simple, I'm half content and half resigned to let Buster meet his end here in the only real home he's ever known, amid shadows and scents that are familiar to him)  I wonder if anyone will be with me, and whether or not I'll want to have my hand held, or if I'll prefer to have everyone in another room, when the mystery of death overtakes me. 

At the risk of sounding laughably stupid, or of revealing a startling -- and unwarranted -- sense of my own superiority, I am ashamed of the fact that I'm going to die, just like Buster will.  For some reason -- abetted by clever, relentless denial (op. cit.) -- perhaps buttressed by the now-mythic arrogance of the maligned 'boomer' mentality -- I have unknowingly supposed that I might be clever enough, somehow, to evade mortality.  I'm probably misquoting again, but I remember Proust having said something to the effect that 'death is easy.  People do it every day.  Thinking about one's own death, however, is impossible.'

But, in the face of this conceptual imponderability, I find myself perversely determined to keep my eyes open for as long as possible, and to keep reporting back, as it were, from the front lines, about what this struggle (?) entails.  Perhaps -- again nudged by denial, I realize -- I think that by putting up show of pathetic defiance, I'll trick death into seeing me as an inoffensive jester, unworthy of notice.  Sort of the human equivalent of one of those bright clown fish that thrive amid the poisonous tentacles of blind sea anemones, I guess.

I am also sheltering the delusion of being able to clean up my own mess, before I leave the studio, as it were -- even though the thought of merely excavating our basement fills me with despair.  And what I consider to be an especially ironic, or pathetic layer of this despair, is the hope I see embodied in so much of what I've accumulated with such apparent indiscretion.  Instead of striking me as burdens to be sloughed off, many of the oddments I've rescued from one gutter or another still provoke a vision of what I thought they might become.  I'm as unwilling, at some level, to part with these battered and, in many cases, unidentifiable scraps, as I am to find Buster dead, either on the bed or under it -- Buster isn't an especially old cat, after all, and didn't I make a tacit pact, with each of these objects I've adopted, to give them a safe and respectable place to reside, so different from what they would have expected, had they been left to be swept up and dumped in a landfill?

(And actually, I do have an incomplete blog entry, still simmering, I guess you'd say, but which I can't post until what I think are the missing elements are put into place.  So I haven't spent the entire time, between my last post and what I guess will be my next one, watching old movies on TCM.  I seem, simply enough, to want to isolate myself from my own life experience, as from everything else I avoid on a more or less daily basis)

Every once in a while, I do something.  Every once in a while, I start something.  Mostly, though, I sit in a kind of painful indecision, daydreaming about painting this or assembling that, or concocting something else -- all while sprawled on our hand-me-down sofa in the under-lit den.  I wonder, without having whatever you would call it -- nerve?  Insensitivity?  Vulgarity? -- to ask, how people much older than I manage to get out of bed every day, dress themselves, and go out into the world.  For the time being, at least, even my seemingly limitless capacity for spitefulness doesn't seem adequate to get me past my feelings of existential anxiety and horror.  Although I openly question the value of such a belated effort, I've started again, with another therapist, who has said that, together, we can find away around or through my present impasse.  In a way, if I could view it from enough distance, I might even find my own behavior amusing -- a man in virtually perfect health, with more than enough time and resources to do the things he says he's always dreamed out, who is nonetheless both consumed with the dread of wasting time, and yet frozen in an indecision fueled by despair.

So.  Back in the practical world.  I have laundry to continue washing and drying.  I'll pack my gym bag, and drag my passive corpus the eight miles to the Sumit YMCA, and work up a sweat, walking two miles while staying in the same geographic location.   Later, and holding my breath, I'll set out for Madison, and the weekly therapy session -- the one offering a key to my figurative handcuffs.  No one is shooting directly at me, as I often quip.  I'm ambulatory, as is my usual reply to questions of how I am.  I guess that, for today, these factors, and maybe even my own potentially magnificent failures, will have to suffice.


©  Walter Zimmerman (though, why?)    2014

                    

725. But Who's Counting?

Only the sixth day of my mortality count-down, and already I'm in danger of losing track of which day I'm in, and I've already skipped an entire day's opportunity to weigh forth on the benefits and drawbacks of... coming in for a landing, shall we say?  I can barely wait for the struggle, come next August, of ticking off the days, backwards, to figure out which mile marker I've reached...

I've never been very good at counting, actually.  I have a hard time staying focused.  It seems such a boring thing to do.  My mind continually wants to run off in the direction of a color or smell or random memory, and by the time I've reined in my naughty train of thought, I've forgotten whether I'm at 47 or 79.  

This isn't usually too much of a problem, as problems go, in daily life.  Twice in my life, however (at least as far as I can currently recall), this foible or shortcoming did have a material impact, at least on my mood at the time.  With 'mood', in my case, equaling 'my entire life, from beginning to end, focusing mostly on my failures'.  Which is a lot of weight to put on such a small, round word of Germanic derivation. 

When I was in the Air Force, and stationed for a year at the Keflavik Naval Air Base in Iceland, I was supposedly a computer operator, as career fields were then defined.  At that point, however, computers were giant lumbering laboratories for miscalculation, more prone to stopping for no apparent reason, than for providing much useful information.  What I really worked with was punched card equipment, and my nemesis, counting-wise, was the card sorter. 

Once a month, we computer operators had to produce an inventory of everything of any description that the Air Force contingent had, anywhere at all on the Keflavik Naval Air Station.  This meant sorting boxes filled with punched cards -- slim lengths of oaktag-like paper slips, each filled with bits of information, in the form of rows of little rectangular holes.  The card sorter used a series of small brushes, to 'read' the arrangement of these holes, and then send each individual card sliding into a corresponding slot along the machine's four or five-foot length.  Once all the cards had been sorted about a million times, the final arrangement was fed through yet another machine that wasn't really a computer either, so we could print out a paper report, to reassure the bored officers in some office, somewhere across the base's bleak expanse of windblown volcanic rubble, that there were enough cans of beans and rolls of toilet paper for all of us for the rest of the month.  (It doesn't matter whether you understand this or not, as long as you find it really boring.  Think about it)

And I was to stand at this machine, patiently loading stacks of these punched cards into a feeder, setting the column indicator to read the next appropriate column (one letter, one number at a time, please), and then starting the cards on their whirring sort.  Numbers on the cards required only one trip through the reader; letters, composed as they were of two punches, required two.  Then the smaller, sorted stacks were gathered, in order, from their little landing slots, and then straightened up, so they could be put back neatly into the feeder, for the next pass, with those reader brushes set to the next column.

Or, as was too often the case, maybe not.     

I may have done this particular job correctly once, in the year I was there -- but I also think I'm deluding myself.  Much more often, a younger enlisted colleague would be called on to repair the sorting damage I'd accumulate, which repairing usual took this other airman a remarkably short period of time.  The pitying glances I invariably got, from this person of inferior rank, would have withered acres of aspens.  As far as the punched cards were concerned, I was much better at turning them over, and drawing weird pictures in black grease pencil on their blank backs. 

Flashing forward to New York City, in the mid 1980's, and the 39th floor windowsills of the Exxon Building, overlooking the intersection of 6th Avenue and 51st St.  I am now the titular supervisor of a team of data-entry clerks, hired to sit at typing terminals from 5 pm until 1 am, keying in expense information for executive spending accounts and other outlays racked up by the employees of Morgan Stanley, 'the whitest of the white shoe investment firms', (which designation-- as none of the managing directors ever sported albino footwear -- made no sense to me at all.  But then, I didn't really know what investment banking was either.  I just knew that, in one purchase, of an antique demi-lune side table to be used the upper echelon dining room, the company spent more than my annual salary.  And those tables aren't even whole, when you think about it), while on the aforementioned windowsills, are being arranged, in what I hope is numerical order, all the taxi vouchers for all the cab rides racked up by all the employees eligible for such a perk, for whatever month preceded the one back into which we imagine that we are now peering.  Little wrinkled clumps of thin paper, to be smoothed out and stacked up -- taxi company by taxi company, of course -- and sorted by the red number in the upper right hand corner.  A job which was just engaging enough to keep me focused on it, while reminding me that I had been assigned it simply because I was the only employee in the department who had had the gall to go to, and to graduate from, college.

It was one of the most tedious and difficult jobs I ever had to do, while at that job.  The notion that the taxi voucher information could be input in any random order, with the computer (we did have remotely recognizable equipment for that, by this time) doing the sorting internally, seemed inaccessible to my manager, who of all my colleagues was the most threatened by the Penn State diploma I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have been able locate at the time anyway. 

On the other hand, what I mostly did, during the dreary hours when the keyboards were clattering, was to stalk around the Morgan Stanley offices, strewn about on different floors of the building, and make art on the various copy machines to which I could easily gain access.  I have boxes of these prints upstairs in my attic, and a folder of what I think are remarkable prints done on a now defunct Xerox 360 -- sumptuous smears of lush inks that would make Gerhard Richter a little envious, I suspect. 

But I still had to count those damned vouchers.  Or, at least, put them into numerical order, which wasn't that much different, really. 

Sometimes, though, I have to admit that I do actually count, voluntarily, and on purpose.  Or, perhaps more correctly, on purposelessness.

I first happened on counting as a possibly helpful activity, while in graduate school, in Rochester NY, in the early 1990's.  I had a considerable round-trip commute to school every day, and the radio in our old maroon Ford LTD didn't work (in solidarity with the heater and the air conditioner and one of the windows), so my own thoughts were my regular driving companions.  And one day, for no reason I can remember, I actually listened to what I was thinking about -- I realized that I was in an imaginary courtroom, energetically arguing a case before a judge and jury.  The substance of the argument seemed to hinge on some minor imagined driving mistake I'd made, or some other recent wrong I'd committed, but the mental focus and energy expenditure was considerable -- what a lot of concentration I was exerting, on defending myself, to myself, for something that hadn't actually happened!

And then I sort of... came to, I guess.  I realized that, for the most part, this was how, probably for years, I had been spending most of my thinking time -- when I wasn't actually doing something that required my full-ish attention.  I was in a court room, the judge often none other than the woman I refer to as my horrid grandmother, her pale bitter face hovering above the blackest of judicial robes, behind a high podium...

What a stupid thing to do, I realized.  Why on earth, I asked myself, was I spending so much of my time, in these imaginary struggles?  Why didn't I... think about something else instead?  What could be easier -- to say nothing of more pleasant and perhaps even productive?

But I found, much to my puzzlement, that without these habitual and chronic courtroom fantasies, I really had no idea what I should think about.  I did try singing to myself -- bleak old Scottish folk songs about infanticide and adultery and other frivolities -- but that would only work for, at best, half of one portion of my daily journey.  So, for lack of anything else to do, I started to count.

At first, I tried to keep a running tally of how far I'd counted, on the trek between my house and one of the school's more remote parking lots and then back again, but as I've already mentioned, my concentration wasn't as reliable as one might like, and eventually I decided that simply counting to 100, over and over again, had just enough focused carelessness to appealed to me.  Plus, it used a lot less mental energy than trying to argue my way out of a life sentence because I'd taken a right on red when I wasn't supposed to.    

And now this pointless, almost meditative counting has became a habit in its own right.  Currently, when I'm on the treadmill at the gym, I count to my favorite target sum of 100, over and over, timing the count at one number per two strides, with the machine set to 4.2 mph., on a 3.5 incline, whatever that means.  I suspect though, that I'm actually skipping from, oh, say 49, straight to 80, because I'm not really thinking about the counting at all, but am somehow wandering through a more unruly, wordless part of my brain, exploring an alternate world filled with images borrowed from the treadmill's TV screen, that I mute, and tune to the Discovery Channel.  So that, as I make my journey to nowhere but sweatiness, and rack up meaningless numerical sequences, I'm also ruminating on the likelihood that these two particular naked urban-dwelling white folks from America running across a deadly venomous fer-de-lance, right on their path in the Nicaraguan rain forest, as they search desperately for potable water.  All the while being trailed by a TV camera crew toting its own weight in bottled H2O.  Is it any wonder I might forget whether I've reached 52 or 78, when the cameras are once again lingering on blond Adam's remarkably picturesque, naked posterior?

(I also try using meditation technique which encourages me to imagine that I have no head.  But Adam's butt can be such a distraction, even to the headless exerciser) 

(Even to the headless exerciser who is, on the one hand, counting meaninglessly and carelessly, and on the other, demarcating sections of the remaining portion of his predicted mortality)

[A Dread Suspicion: As I was driving to the gym today, and in between counting meaninglessly, I had a chilling thought -- in figuring out how many days make up a 70 year life span, did I remember to include the two quarter-days that get tacked onto every year, just because of the earth's wobbly axis or something like that?  Actually, now that I think about it, I did factor in these extra partial days, though I may have short-changed myself on this negligible hourly overage... 

I'll check the math later.  I've already swallowed my meds, and taken off my socks.  Tomorrow, as has been remarked upon, is another day...]

©  2014   Walter Zimmerman  

 

         

727: Too Tired...

Well, day three of my effort to journal through what, according to Biblical sources, should be the last 730 days of my life -- and I'm fairly dropping with exhaustion.  Not from having done much today -- well, I did go to the gym, for one of my lighter-than-usual 'Sweeney Todd' workouts -- but just from... gravity?  I can't tell. 

But I think that, in an uncharacteristic act of charity toward myself,  I"m going to let this mini-entry stand, for the time being anyway, as today's contribution to the effort.  It's hard enough to write while awake -- writing in my sleep is guaranteed disaster.  (I know, because I recently tried writing an email, while is a similar state of near-torpor, and the next day, on reviewing what I'd written, I found that the closer I got to the end, the less sense anything made, until it looked rather like gibberish, or the result of someone leaning on the keyboard several times.

Life is already too short.  I'm going to take my medication and go upstairs and lie down, and see what happens next.  If it's anything interesting, I"ll tell you tomorrow.  If I can...


©  2014,  Walter Zimmerman.