Moved my blog under duress

Okay, so I moved my blog here from blogger a while ago, thinking the transition was going to be a bit of a hassle, but nothing near the headache it’s actually become.

I don’t know why it seems to be beyond me, but the set up of this template is driving me crazy. Nothing about this layout seems to work as it says it will…and consequently the sidebars on this blog appear to be compiled by an illiterate. Worse, by a computer illiterate. All I wanted was a bit of anonymity, some protection from the ability to be found on line. Sure, I did a foolish thing, I published someone’s name and it brought him straight to me…but is this the kind of punishment I have to endure? Is bad design going to torment me my whole life long, no matter what I do? Haven’t I paid my penance already, in being “found” and forced to move?

I’ve tried setting up the blogspot site again and naturally I can’t import everything I’ve put here since the move, so, no go. But no wonder it’s more popular. It’s just a lot more intuitively designed. I have to keep saving and redoing and saving and clicking to save and hunting about for the obvious with this format on wordpress and I get nowhere–the text boxes don’t format or allow for or respect punctuation. This shouldn’t have to be tougher than brain surgery, people. And for the love of all things pertaining to the goddess, I shouldn’t have to change and rechange and reset and go back and reset the damned colour of the font after changing it for the entire goddamned post.

Already.

(sigh)

That’s One (big one) Down

Yesterday I took a new patient’s case. During the three plus hours I spent with her, she let off a lot of steam, cried a number of hot tears and faced herself with a few admissions she’d never let herself utter before. It was a good session and I feel like Iv’e narrowed the number of medicines to decide between. When it was all over, and she paid me, I drove the cheque straight to the bank and made my last payment on the debt that included the surprisingly substantial cost of my wedding. The cheque covered it completely, with a few dollars left over.

After more than 5 years of monthly torture for that repayment schedule, I’m done; and though I have a long way to go in tackling the rest of the financial disaster that makes up my life at the moment, I feel I’ve at least covered that one event and its immediate financial cost in its entirety.

Yay, me.

Actually, yay Us. I can’t act as though I was the only one working that off. M. and I did it: we paid off a major debt. Now we’ve just got to focus on paying off an even larger debt, fueled with the added momentum of striking this one off our list.

M. comes home this evening, after spending the majority of the last 8 weeks in another house in Toronto. I predict an adjustment–not an easy one. In a lot of ways I’ve felt like the solitude of being in my own cave for a couple of months has been a real luxury.

There is another prospect, another “M” overseas I’ve been considering. He is intriguing, a bit challenging, and he’s got something I crave: a means by which I can just allow myself to be consumed for a while, a means by which I can just escape from everything else that’s pressing on me. How does one burn oneself up in such an entanglement, especially when being completely consumed is what one desperately needs, without completely destroying all of one’s security? He’s willing to risk it (but, why would that matter? There’s not much there to risk). If I’m not I should say so now. Despite the fact that he brings me what I crave, everytime we connect. Despite the fact that I could fall so deeply in love with him I would never find my way out. Despite the fact that even while writing this I know the decision that should be made, and I know it’s the choice I least want.

I always want what’s behind both doors, I never want to decide between the two. I always want to be the Girl with The Most Cake.

(I know better than almost anyone: Cake Kills).

The Annual Scream in High Park, revisited

The Scream wasn’t quite the event I’d remembered. I walked down to the subway and the bank in the 100 degree heat, and I made the mistake of getting on the transit lines right at the beginning of rush hour. By the time I’d reached the air conditioned sanctum of the mall, my comfortable walking shoes had already begun to nibble away at the tender folds above my heels. I ducked into the first pharmacy I could find, right around the corner from the subway exit on Quebec street to find nice fabric bandages which fit perfectly over the threatened spots. I felt much better equipped for the park after that.

I love High Park. I was actually born just across the street from the park, in what was then the St. Joseph’s hospital, just next to the park’s bottomless Grenadier pond. It’s full of ravines and deep forests, oak trees that flame in the fall and paths that snake through the grounds to house bagpipers, the occasional actor working on a soliloquy, and treasures like rare wildflowers in the early spring. I loved the spooky legend of the Grenadiers when I was a child, I loved the shivers the story of those lost battalions, men whose bodies were never found in the glacial pond, would send up and down my spine. Especially when I found myself in the park in the middle of the night, surrounded by the still darkness and the dark whistling breezes as they sailed through the oaks around me.

On this trip, though, walking through the park at that sun baked time felt like walking through an overlit furnace room while being encased in plastic. I just kept feeling warmer and warmer, and the saturated air intensified the effect for me. I arrived a bit too early for the festival, and the stage area was closed off–but it was only when I got there that I remembered attendance always requires a chair or blanket and some form of pillow, plus some icy drinks and an umbrella. I wished I’d remembered! I would have been overjoyed if it started to rain (and there was a bit of a threat of this happening, and I remember it always seems to, each year) but it just never did.

The last time I went was actually 10 years ago, when I had just returned home from living on the East Coast for a while. That show felt comforting in a way nothing else could–it felt reassuring to attend something that would never take place where I’d been living, involving something that would never be valued much there. It was part of “coming home”, or at least I gathered some hope for that possibility just by attending. I even caught a glimpse of a writing instructor I knew there, perched against her bicycle in the darkening ampitheatre. A few years after seeing her there, I heard she died of something she’d been terribly afraid of: cancer.

The show was only half-filled with audience on this night, and most of the people who were there were somehow involved in publishing the readers being featured. That’s not necessarily a criticism, because there is an industry set up around literary talent (and I’m reassured, believe me, that evidence of its existence can still be found). But there were so many publishers and authors and editors present and giggling about poking each other on Facebook that I felt like a tidy minority of one. I hate “social network” sites. A lot. All they seem to accomplish is to limit conversation in social groups to Facebook alone. “Poke, poke, poke…!” they continued. I kicked myself again for not having remembered to bring wine, and some glasses. Surely that would have put a stop to all the social network blather, and just get people to talk to each other. Talk to me, more importantly.

I was alone, and, in their midst, a little bit “in the way”. I moved around to find a seat because the space was completely open to me, but the outdoorsy set up of the ampitheatre was a real physical test. I was trying my best to perch on about 3 inches of concrete terracing, and failing miserably. Finally I moved to a spot under a tree branch, which wasn’t so much curb as stone. Slightly more comfy. It was right in the middle of the social hubbub around the publishers. Oh well. “Facebook facebook facebook”, they blathered; and then, “Ouzunian interviewed me and it was humiliating” plus other gossipy conclusions only the literate (or, rather, “the Toronto Literati”) would give a damn about. I just wanted the readings to start–I was looking forward to the writers just reading their work in their summer clothes, surrounded by people who just want to sit in the heat and be stirred.

A Letter I’ll Never Send

When I wandered around your old home base, a place I’d seen for the first time in my life, I made a note of the number of things which reminded me of you.

The street names that were your name.
Pilots. Airplanes. Propellers.
Rocks soaring out of the earth floor, as red as sunset rays.
Doctors everywhere I looked.
Flowers on old trees opening after the cold.

I met a man on the monorail at the airport who told me to look out for the artwork in the least likely places: 5280 tiny whirling blades in the tunnel, fluttering as we passed by, working hard in half-obscurity. Mountains that hold palaces, places no one knows about except the locals.

Height. Altitude. Pressure. Gold.

I wanted to tell you as much as I could, so much. The more I felt your presence around me, the more I realized that all I was really seeing around me were bold signs of your absence.
At that moment I knew: you weren’t ever going to be back.

Ansel and Alfred

Nick and I went to the AGO this afternoon to catch the the end of the photo exhibit showing Ansel Adams’ collected works and some of Steiglietz’ photography. It was crowded with people rushing in before the show closes this weekend, and the photos were exciting enough that the din in the gallery drowned out the construction workers, painting and drilling on the other sides of the walls. Afterwards we went to the creperie and talked about the works, then talked about open marriages, and just talked. I’m looking around, always, far too needy for male attention for my own good. I am quickly becoming frighteningly too interested. The way I must have been when I was a teenager. Sigh. Must find a few other hobbies.

I love Nicky–his heart is so open and he’s so strong, and today I told him not to ever leave me because he’s one of the few real men in my life I would be lost without. And yet it was so difficult to ask for advice from him, give him a bit of trust (when he’s been such a trustworthy man). I’m afraid I’m the one not worthy of trust, I seem unable to shoulder someone’s trust and to my mind I can tell when I’ll have to abandon commitments. Its a big flaw, I’m afraid, yet I’m so terrified of the possibility whenever it might occur to me. Such a jackass.

So this was the official day of asking for advice from Nick, after the many years we’ve known one another, and I still have the feeling that things will change irrevocably after yesterday’s heart to heart.

But Nicky said, I have to trust. I have to take a few risks with people and trust them to participate with me (and stop feeling like I’ll just be ignored, or told to fuck off, or thought of as being completely nuts, which has happened). I have to trust people enough to just say what I think on occasion. So I’m going to have to tell M. flat out that I want to start seeing other lovers, and see if we can’t work something out between us to accommodate that.

As for what I think about Ansel Adams: he wanted to make icons out of ideas about reality, not give us reality in photographic images. Well, at least, not a reality we could even experience for longer than a second, and then it would still seem imaginary. I think he worked hard to make the mundane archetypal in his photos: a sunset over a small town (shot with a “mistake” lens, of course, a happy accident of timing, location, and error); a cloud over a mountain top; the ubiquitously rendered image of a rose, made that much more real, dimensional, powerful.

Adams’ Moonrise, Hernandez

That must be the thing I’m responding to, in his work: his unwillingness to just look at the world around him as it exists, because he knew everyone just takes it for granted if it’s just left as it is. I can’t look at reality objectively and like it, either.

Stieglitz’s photos are all about the same thing, but the planning element is just that much further developed. I think he waited hours in place for just the right light; I know he looked for events he could use for their predictability.

Stieglitz’s

“Equivalent”

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Adams’ Wood/Rose 

Adams had something of an advantage in this area, simply by focusing primarily on nature photography. The manipulations were harder to detect. You’d hardly notice the fact that both the wood grain and the rose petal’s “veins” mimic each other in this image, and that they are the draw to your eyes, not the rose in itself. I never get the impression, looking at Adams’ work, that the images are just documents–they communicate clearly that he’s used some kind of filter in his shot, some kind of lens which would produce a heightened and altered image of what he saw with his eyes, in the developing process. The Moonrise photo was shot, infamously, with the “wrong” lens/filter on the camera, an impromptu photo taken “on the way home” from a shoot. The photo-altered light makes thy sky look luminous, the tombstones and houses phosphorescent after the image has been developed. Immediately after the shot was taken, the sun sank and Hernandez was in darkness–if the shot hadn’t been taken when it was, as it was, the image would have been lost. 

Most people know about Stieglitz through his marriage to Georgia O’Keeffe, (I love that his first wife kicked him out after returning home to find him “photographing” Georgia), but he also had a very long artistic relationship with Adams.

Stieglitz’s Barn:  Lake George

He often showed Adams’ photos in his gallery and featured his works in magazines he edited and published. His goal was to make photography a recognized art form, and Adams’ goal was to make images which would become so iconic they’d play some role in preserving the wild lands he’d become so attached to. He saw them as endangered, and threatened, and knew they’d never survive without some effort on his part to make others see them as vital as well.

The Gift

RS’s parcel of books arrived for me yesterday–17 pounds of heavy, hard bound tomes purchased in India, delivered directly to me from Maine. The selection was completely “safe”: everything I wanted, everything I needed for my practice, including some skin/tongue atlases, a few books on constitutions, a journal, and a book on how to effectively market your practice. When I found the box, I was astonished. He’d made a number of promises about sending them to me, but he just never did. He made a year’s worth of promises to meet with me, and that never came to pass either. When we last talked about the books and his sending them, I remembered rolling my eyes because his reticence to do as he originally intended just reinforced my understanding that he just didn’t think about me as he used to anymore. It wasn’t a priority, he’d get to it one day, what was the rush? In my own mind I crossed off the arrival of the books. I thought, “he won’t bring them to me, and he won’t send them to me either.” That left me in a kind of despair. But the postmark on the parcel was dated August 1st. He had put them in the mail long before we had our discussion, and I’d “crossed off” the promise in error.

The books are a huge gift. I could tell he selected them carefully, too–planning to make my practice work, wondering what he could choose out of all those books that he knew I would use and love. On one of those calls from India, he told me he promised he would make my practice busier when he got home, and I could tell from his voice and his plans that he wanted to be part of a life with me, a serious part of my life. So it’s heartbreaking to know that he changed all of that thinking shortly after his return, or maybe during one of our conversations while he was still overseas.

When I opened up each hard cover I wondered. He had tucked some bills inside a number of the books–the cash memos from the store in India, a journal note book from the Homeopathic hospital in Vila Pare in Mumbai. A cash register receipt from the Blue Hill Co-op. A sales slip from New Mexico. He’d read through a number of these books as he drove east from Denver, possibly at night before he fell asleep in his car; for company while he sat and ate his meals on the way. They arrived at the right time: just as I was picking up my interest again, making some plans to try and re-open my life in practice after letting it languish for so long. I never really “let go”, but I let the momentum drop significantly. I feel like I’ve been buried for so long now, and wanting to learn again was the only thing that was giving me hope about “resurfacing”. I’m more hopeful now, but with a lot of doubts about what I’m actually feeling.

Maybe what I’m feeling now is that old feeling of being well within his sights–a little bit of surprise, outright adoration for someone who so carefully chose for me. I called to thank him as soon as I could, and realized after I hung up that I won’t stop feeling the way I do about him. It’s addictive, this feeling: here is a man who knows “more about me than I’ll ever guess”, as he said once. He used to have this uncanny ability to know what I was thinking about things–know what I was about to say, know precisely what I wanted but could never ask from him, even sexually, even as far as things like writing. It was astonishing, and also seductive. When it stopped happening between us I think I felt that loss more than any of the other exchanges we shared. So, (after weeks of thinking otherwise) I realise I’m still in love with him; and he is still no longer in love with me.