Category Archives: MOndays with Muddy

Delphi

30 Friday Sep 2016

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After a long, trying, kinda sad day (would have been my parents’ anniversary), another artist on Fine Art America paid me a real compliment. I went to check out her work and came across a photo she had taken of an abandoned ampitheatre. Immediately, this reminded me of one of my favorite poems written by my grandmother, Beatrice Allen Page. I know it’s not Mondays with Muddy, and it’s a good possibility that I’ve posted it before, but I’m going to share it now anyway because it’s my blog and I win. When you’re done reading the poem, be sure to check out the photo I linked to above and “like” her image to boost its visibility on Fine Art America:

DELPHI

Emptiness broods on the ampitheatre.

Time has gnawed at the stone tiers.

Weeds and moss grow in the chinks.

Furtive salamanders scribble

cryptograms in ancient dust.

Throngs no longer gather here

to have their heartstrings played upon

by Attic tragedies.

 

Yet a sombre chorus of women

circles mutely in time’s shadow,

their invisible hands linked in common woe.

The scuffle of their worn sandals

makes a sound like autumn wind

sighing through age-old memory.

Masks conceal their faces.

 

Grief is more durable than stone.

Long before the theatre was built,

the moving choir had begun in hollows of cypress-dotted hills,

on wind-swept plains, inside walls

and towns. And still goes on

down through the ages, throughout the earth

an ever-widening circle of women

mourning the death of the warriors:

fathers…brothers…husbands…sons.

And children not yet born.

Mondays With Muddy

26 Monday Sep 2016

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As a reminder, every Monday, I post an excerpt Landscape with Figures, an unpublished manuscript by my grandmother, Beatrice Allen Page, who I called Muddy. We’re nearing the end of it with only another 35 pages to go. I do have other unpublished works of hers (along with her published works), but none in the style of a journal, so not as easy to break up for weekly posts, so I’m still figuring out if and how to continue with our Mondays With Muddy. I’ll keep you posted, of course. Anyway, here is the next excerpt from the current manuscript:

‘Over at the hairdresser’s I picked up one of the expensive, sophisticated women’s magazines and while sitting under the dryer, I read my horoscope for the month. The prevalence of horoscopes in magazines is another indication of the widespread interest today in the occult and the esoteric, in everything from witchcraft to I Ching.

Why are so many people ‘looking for a sign?’ Are they unwilling to take responsibility for their own lives and decisions? Are they caught in a hopeless bewilderment that makes them grasp at any straw? I suspect most of them would indignantly reject such a suggestion. They probably feel they are seeking not escape from life but greater intensity of life. Instead, however, of searching out the mysteries of existence with patience, humility and awe in the way of previous generations, so many people today see to be looking for a quick and easy road to heaven. Unfortunately a lot of the shortcuts apparently lead to hell.

To dabble in the occult has always been recognized as dangerous. You may stir up demons that get out of hand and take over control. I begin to sound like Mr. Hollis despite the fact the demons to which I’m referring are born and lurk in the dark hollows of the human mind. (As a matter of fact, if I truly believed in a creative, just and loving God, instead of being one of those who are ‘lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot,’ I think the Lucifer myth would offer as plausible an explanation as any other I’ve ever heard for the presence of evil in the world.)

But even if I can’t quite accept Mr. Hollis’s belief in demon-possession, I find it is not at all hard for me to believe that hatred is a force that can erupt in some event that has no apparent relationship to the hater. Sometimes when I read about some cold-blooded murder or ghastly accident, the uneasy thought creeps into my mind that I myself may have had something to do with that bloodshed even though it took place thousands of miles away and is utterly abhorrent to me. It is as if some of the rancor, the meanness, the callousness in my own heart and mind seeped through the body of humankind like a poison in the blood and broken out eventually in violence. Not because my personal thoughts and feelings are working some kind of sorcery akin to casting the evil eye on someone, but because we are all more closely related than we realize. I’m not talking about what people mean by ‘collective guilt’ when they blame society for a crime that has been committed by an individual. I mean something much less obvious, something hidden like a malignant cell that proliferates and spreads to another part of the body before it becomes manifest.

If this were true –  and apparently I have almost persuaded myself that it is – then there is a positive as well as a negative side to it: my good will as well as my malice, my joy as well as my despair, could have an influence on some person or some event either near at hand or far away.

I remember now what B. said to me once when her son was in Vietnam: ‘I pray that Bill’s life will be saved. I can’t conceive of a God who would save one boy’s life because he had a mother praying for him  but would let another boy be killed because he didn’t happen to have anyone pray for him. But I do feel an obligation to keep my spirits up as much as possible, not only for Bill’s sake but for all the other boys involved.’ She groped around for words, trying to explain what she meant. ‘I have a conviction that minds touch one another, that moods may set up waves or vibrations that travel great distances in space and time and affect the thoughts and moods of others.’ She smiled a little wryly, I recall. ‘Call it superstition if you like. I’ve no doubt the psychiatrists have an even less flattering word for it.’ And then catching the look on my face, she added, ‘I suppose you, too, think it’s a crazy notion.’

When I assured her that I found some of the evidence for ESP very convincing, she shook her head and said: ‘I mean something more than that. It’s as if all the people in the world were roped together by an invisible rope, climbing a mountain. Each one has to exert all possible effort not to slip, not just for his own sake but because if he loses his footing, it’s going to pull down the next man who’s roped to him, and then the combined weight of the two falling will exert even more of a pull on those on either side of them, and so on. Of course, people will slip from time to time, people who are in more dangerous spots or who may have less strength. That’s all the more reason for those with a firmer footing or more strength to hold tight and keep climbing.’

Her analogy doesn’t answer the age-old question as to why some of us should have ‘a firmer footing,’ i.e., the opportunity to lead lives of freedom and security while others never have a chance to know anything but war and horror, of deprivation and grief. >That question is as unanswerable as ‘Why is that dog for?’

Mondays With Muddy

19 Monday Sep 2016

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Here is the next installment from Beatrice Allen Page’s unpublished manuscript, Landscape with Figures:

“I brought home from the library C. S. Lewis’s autobiographical book, Surprised by Joy, simply because my eye chanced to fall on it and I have enjoyed other books of his. I read most of the night and my astonishment kept me awake the rest of it, for there I found described far more vividly than I could ever do, the strange, haunting sensation associated with both ‘The Magic’ and ‘the northern mood.’

The magic was always evoked for him, I gathered, by something with a northern connotation. They belonged together as one experience which he calls ‘Joy’ even though, as he says, it might almost equally well be called a kind of grief: ‘an unsatisfied desire which is in itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.’ In each instance it only lasted a moment but it seemed to him of tremendous significance, something quite different from ordinary experiences, ‘something, as they would now say, ‘in another dimension.’ He speaks of it as a ‘stab,’ a ‘pang,’ an ‘inconsolable longing.’ ‘All Joy reminds,’ he writes. ‘It is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still ‘about to be.’

He caught his first glimpse as a child of whatever-it-might-be through nature. His second glimpse of it came through Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin, which aroused in him an intense desire for what he calls the ‘idea of Autumn.’ He went back to the book again and again, not to gratify the desire because it was manifestly impossible to possess a season, but to reawaken the desire.

His third glimpse came some years later when, leafing through a volume of Longfellow, he came upon the lines from Tegner’s Drapa:

I heard a voice that cried

Baldur the Beautiful

Is dead, is dead –

(A ‘northern’ shiver runs down my spine as I copy the words.)

Lewis had no notion of who Baldur was but he was ‘instantly uplifted into huge regions of northern sky.’ He ‘desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale and remote).’

Later on he came to call whatever gave him this sensation, ‘Northernness.’ It might be a landscape or Norse mythology or Wagnerian music. The last surprises me: Wagner’s operas seems too flamboyant, too crushing to be northern, even though they deal with Norse mythology. He speaks of being engulfed in pure Northernness: ‘a vision of huge, clear space hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern summer.’

He wondered for awhile if the bittersweet longing he felt was a disguise for sexual desire – a possibility I, too, have speculated on – and came to the conclusion that sex might sometimes be a substitute for Joy, but no more than a temporary expedient. ‘You might as well offer a mutton chop to a man who is dying of thirst as offer sexual pleasure to the desire I am speaking of.’ (I doubt if he meant to imply there was any resemblance between a mutton chop and sex.)

He learned, even as I, that to focus on the sensation was only to frighten it away, and that it could not be sought for its own sake, for the ‘thrill’ of it. It came to him when he was least conscious of himself and his own feelings or state of mind. Eventually, after his conversion to Christianity, he came to believe that the experience itself was of no importance. ‘It was valuable only as a pointer to something other and outer.’ Since my recent glimpse of The Magic a couple weeks ago, I could almost go along with him in accepting it as evidence of ‘something other and outer’ – not just some momentary psychological state – but I wonder if I shall ever find the explanation or the word for that other and outer.”

Mondays With Muddy

12 Monday Sep 2016

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This is the next excerpt from Beatrice Allen Page’s unpublished manuscript, Landscape With Figures:

“Just read a newspaper article maintaining that the human organism can learn to adapt itself  to a contaminated environment. Even supposing that is so, can the human spirit transcend an atmosphere of ugliness and callousness?

How can we have any reverence for human life if we have no reverence for other forms of life and for the earth on which all life dwells and which is part and parcel of it?

Not that I’m advocating a simple back-to-nature movement as a cure-all for the world’s ills. As George Eliot wrote somewhere, it takes more than turning a man loose in a field of buttercups to make him moral. As long as we have closed our minds and dulled our senses to everything that does not serve our immediate needs and greeds, it won’t avail us much to move to the country or the mountains or the seashore. But if we could look beyond those immediate needs and greeds…

More and more I am coming to believe that if we have become alienated from one another, it is in part because we have become alienated from our common ground of being, in a quite literal sense.”

If Muddy Could See Dance Now

01 Thursday Sep 2016

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Obviously, I’ve been watching So You Think You Can Dance (SYTYCD) again this season. While I love it, it makes me miss my grandmother, Muddy, terribly. Before she met my grandfather, Muddy (Beatrice Allen) was a dancer. In fact, she met my grandfather while she was in Germany touring with Ruth St. Dennis. When she decided to settle down and get married at the ripe old age of 19, she gave up dancing professionally and got rid of all of her photos and other mementos from her dancing days. This, obviously, saddens me because I’d love to see that stuff. But what saddens me more, and what makes me miss her more acutely, is watching the dance shows on TV now, particularly SYTYCD. The variety of styles you get from the myriad of choreographers would, I think, overwhelm her, delight her, sharpen her. When you look at what these dancers are capable of now compared to what was asked of them in her early dance years, it reminds me of looking at footage of early gymnasts compared to now. Hell, to be a dancer now, you have to also have a pretty good arsenal of gymnastic tricks, too. If you don’t have a front aerial, you’re going to have a hard time working.

But I just wish that she were around now so that we could watch together and discuss what we were seeing. I would love to share that with her because I know her insight would be incredible. As you’ve seen on this blog from the Mondays With Muddy posts, you know what a thoughtful and thought-full person she was. I know she would have helped me see each dance, dancer, and choreographer from a different angle. I know it’s just a reality show, but there is real art happening there.

Having moved away from doing so many dancer paintings, I think maybe I’m feeling the gap between Muddy and myself more acutely than normal. So perhaps it’s time to figure out how to revisit that work in a new way. I’m thinking maybe I need to combine the realist work with dance imagery. Still trying to flesh out what that will look like, but definitely a direction I want to pursue.

As an aside, be sure to read next week’s Mondays With Muddy post. It’s my favorite from the whole manuscript, and, indirectly, talks about the first time people said she was a good dancer.

Mondays With Muddy

29 Monday Aug 2016

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Here is the next excerpt from Beatrice Page’s (my grandmother) unpublished manuscript, Landscape With Figures:

“Whoever coined the phrase ‘as the crow flies’ to describe the shortest distance between two points never watched crows at daybreak when they first wake up. They are seemingly catapulted out of the trees, one after another at split-second intervals, sometimes only two or three, sometimes a small flock, all cawing loudly and incessantly as they flap around wildly, as if drunk and having trouble keeping their balance and sense of direction. I can discern no pattern or purpose, just a brawling, sprawling pandemonium until they manage to shake the sleep out from under their wings, regain balance and perspective, quiet down and set off presumably in search of food in a straight line ‘as the crow flies.’

Another thing I’ve noticed about crows, which I’ve never seen mentioned in a bird book, is a peculiar sound they make at times. Everyone know that crows caw, but this other sound they make is a rapid succession of clicks, something like that of castanets. I haven’t been able to figure out what they mean by it.”

Mondays With Muddy

22 Monday Aug 2016

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This is the next installment of Beatrice Allen Page’s unpublished manuscript, Landscape With Figures:

“Unable to throw off a mood of inexplicable sadness all morning. I kept feeling as if someone I loved had just died. Not until early this afternoon when I was sitting down on the ledges did I realize it was the anniversary of Father’s death. Curious how you remember year after year in some buried layer of your mind certain anniversaries which the top of you mind has forgotten.

Then I recalled that at the time of his death, when I had returned here for a few days, I had gone by myself for an hour and had sat in that selfsame spot on the ledges. And I remembered how I had found a measure of tranquility and a consolation of sorts in thinking how long that rocky coats had endured. It was essentially the same as when the last glacier receded from it tens of thousands of years ago: a little erosion by the waves, a little chipping off by winter’s frost, but basically unchanged. It seemed to me it would endure for as long or longer in the future, a background against which untold numbers of individuals might appear briefly even as I, until the universe came to a natural end in fire or ice at some inconceivably remote date. That day I had felt one could almost (but not quite) learn to accept death as the end of the individual without undue agony of mind since the miracle of life itself in all its manifestations would go on virtually forever.

This morning as I sat gazing out over the calm sea, I tried to recapture that pensive mood but instead I became incensed as my thoughts turned toward what we are doing to our world. Even if we don’t bring it to an abrupt and violent end my bombs, we may do it just as effectively by gradual devastation: polluting our rivers and lakes with chemicals and waste materials, poisoning the air we breathe with noxious fumes, contaminating our food either directly or indirectly with pesticides, cutting down forests and draining swamps that support much of our wildlife in order to build shopping centers and airstrips, bludgeoning baby seals to make high-fashion coats out of their skins…

The list goes on and one, as everybody knows, and thank God more and more voices have been raised in warning and outrage during the past few years. At long last it’s being realized that the relationship between humankind and the environment is a matter of health and therefore of life or death. At least some effort is being made to halt the destruction.

But there are those who warn that without a greater effort it will soon be too late. There are those who say it is already too late.

What a paradox that we are all looking for more abundant life in one way or another and at the same time seemingly doing our level best to destroy what life we have.

I came back to the house in a rage and wrote another batch of protest letters to various powers that be.”

Mondays With Muddy

15 Monday Aug 2016

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For anyone new to the blog, every Monday, I post an excerpt from a manuscript that my grandmother, who I called Muddy, left me when she died. She was a published author and poet, but was unable to get this manuscript published because it wasn’t “commercial enough.” I’ve been posting a bit of it each week so that it can finally be out there for the world to read. So, here is the next installment of Beatrice Allen Page’s unpublished manuscript, Landscape with Figures:

“Walked up to the top of the hill overlooking the harbor early this morning. The cumbersome dredger, squat and ugly as a sculpin, that has been deepening the harbor was being ignominiously towed away by a little boat not even half its size, like a dead moth being dragged off by an ant.

The little sailboats swung gently at their moorings and the sun sent dazzling streaks of light gliding up and down their varnished masts. Made me think of those toys we used to have: little monkeys that shinnied up sticks and slid down again.

So many of these August days begin this way in almost utter calm with the ocean smooth and shiny as pale blue satin. I’ve learned, though, that these serene mornings usually develop a predictable pattern. After awhile you notice the water is no longer sleek but has become slightly wimpled and there is a mild stirring and rustling in the trees. The breeze will gradually develop more confidence in its own strength until by mid-afternoon it will be teasing the pines, playfully stroking their needles the wrong way so that you almost expect to see sparks fly out. It will rough up the sea with whitecaps, and when the boats come past the Point, their sails will be laid slantwise.

If you walk along the harbor road facing into the sun and with the wind behind you, the long green ribbons of beach grass become disembodied: all you can see are millions of slivers of light rippling off into the distance.

The wind usually dies down about the same time the sun goes down, and the night becomes tranquil with hardly more than the hint of a breeze. Last evening I walked up the road a little way before going to bed. The crickets were fiddling away to a fare-thee-well on either side of the road. They sounded as if they were all playing together, perfectly synchronized in a trochaic meter like Pe-ter-Pe-ter-Pump-kin-eat-er.

There was one exception, however, who just couldn’t get with it. He never quite got the beat. After several attempts he gave up and fell silent. He was not a member of either group; he was along, somewhere very close to where I was standing. Had he been ostracized for ruining the ensemble, I wonder? Or had he chosen to remain aloof, perhaps in his pride looking upon himself as a soloist, and then to his humiliation found out he wasn’t that good? And had he then come to the resentful decision that if he couldn’t fiddle better and louder than anyone, he wouldn’t fiddle at all?”

Mondays With Muddy

08 Monday Aug 2016

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This is the next excerpt from Beatrice Allen Page’s unpublished manuscript, Landscape With Figures:

“I hear that the doctor from St. Louis – Rosenblum is his name – is himself the one who plays the cello. It must be more than a casual avocation with him because he takes it so seriously. I can set my clock by him. He begins his practicing promptly at eight o’clock and continues until ten o’clock. He works another two hours from three to five.

I find myself listening eagerly for those first tentative strokes of the bow across the strings as if he were apprehensive of releasing disharmony, as perhaps he is. Once the instrument is tuned and the danger is past, there follows a moment of silence which makes me think of the brief, suspenseful pause after the conductor raises his baton, a focusing of every ounce of energy and attention. Then the first note sounds as he beings his technical exercises, slowly at first and it seems to me cautiously (but not timidly) and tenderly like a man beginning to make love to a very shy girl. Tempo and confidence increase, however, as the ‘girl’ becomes more responsive.

After an hour spent on technique, he begins working on repertoire. Not being knowledgeable about music, I seldom recognize the composer, let alone the composition, but that doesn’t detract from the cello’s eloquence. Sometimes the notes tumble forth with a bubbling vivacity as if the instrument were laughing. Sometimes they are torn out in anguish, deep and somber, as if it were trying to restrain sobs. It protests, it rages, it rejoices, it consoles. And occasionally it sounds full of self-doubts and questionings without hope of ever finding the answers.

Even when he plays the same phrase over and over in an effort to get it just right, it never gets on my nerves. I like that striving for perfection that characterizes the real artists – the way, for instance, a conductor rehearses his men over and over on one passage until he has ‘moulded’ it to his complete satisfaction.

I suddenly recall that lovely young harpist (I wonder why harpists are usually women and almost always beautiful) from the Indianapolis Symphony years ago telling me how she could not get the exact nuance the conductor wanted in one phrase, and how she went home and thought about it and thought about it until she could hear and feel inside herself the precise way it was meant to be. When she played it at the performance – and here, in telling me about it, she made a very delicate semicircular motion with one hand, a motion that carried through her shoulders and neck and head with a barely perceptible undulation – when she played it at the performance, she and the conductor exchanged  fleeting glance that said: ‘That was it.’

…Later. Had my first glimpse of the doctor half an hour ago over in the fish market. I heard someone say ‘Dr. Rosenblum’ and I looked up quickly. He was just leaving and I had only a glimpse of a rather short, stocky man with an abundance of iron-gray hair and brown eyes magnified behind thick lenses.”

Mondays With Muddy

01 Monday Aug 2016

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This is the next installment from Beatrice Allen Page’s unpublished manuscript, Landscape With Figures:

“Miscellaneous reflections on people’s attitudes toward one another:

  • If you respect and stand somewhat in awe of science, you describe the scientist as brilliant, dedicated, self-disciplined, amusingly absentminded about mundane affairs, a major hope of our civilization. If you mistrust science, you describe the scientist as coldly intellectual, ruthless, irritatingly absentminded about practical affairs, and a threat to civilization.
  • If you admire and stand somewhat in awe of art, you describe the artist as sensitive, passionate, agonized, spontaneous, original, amoral, appealingly childlike. If you have no interest in art, you describe the artist as touchy, lecherous, self-pitying, irresponsible, eccentric, immoral, and childish.
  • People long for saints. The public wants the doctor, for instance, to conform to an image they have created of the selfless physician going about on his errands of healing, a fumble servant of mankind, utterly indifferent to money, comfort, or any aspect of his own personal life. I suspect this is the basic reason the medical profession has come in for some much criticism in the past few years: it hasn’t conformed to the false image.
  • Most of us don’t make an objective appraisal of a person and then react to him or her emotionally on the basis of that appraisal. We react first and then find reasons to support or explain our reaction. Take falling in love; we don’t tally up all the items that please us and then decide to fall in love – we fall in love and then find all the reasons for it, e.g., he is so understanding, has such a marvelous sense of humor, so much integrity, etc.
  • Similarly, we interpret a person’s actions according to how we feel about him. If we love him, we put the best possible interpretations on everything he says and does. If we don’t like him or trust him, we see cause for censure in everything he says or does.
  • Theoretically, to understand is to forgive. In my experience it doesn’t always work. I think of S., a man with wonderful qualities of mind and heart but one who became at times scathingly sarcastic, inflicting deep wounds in others. I admired him for his good points and tried to forgive his lapses into cruelty by understanding him. I knew the story of his life and that he himself had been subjected to cruel treatment. But try as hard as I could to feel genuine compassion for him, I could never get over my animosity. Then one day I realized my antipathy had little to do with his sarcasm. It was all based on a little gesture of his: in conversation when he thought he had scored a brilliant point or stated something unusually well, he pursed his lips like a child expecting a kiss. It was this incongruous expression on the face of a grown man which I could not bear.
  • I’ve often noticed that people divorce their mates for the very reason they married them. I think of A., who liked to date actresses. He was drawn to what he called ‘dramatic personalities.’ Finally he married one. After a year he asked for a divorce, accusing her of being ‘theatrical.’ I think of M., who married a girl twenty years younger than he and spoke proudly of his ‘child bride.’ It was primarily her dewy-eyed naivete that he found appealing. After awhile her ‘childishness’ got on his nerves. Then there was my friend C., who was attracted to a man for his ‘boyish charm,’ only to find out later she was stuck with being a mother to him. And T., who married a man who ‘had more sex appeal than any man she’d ever met in her life’ – and soon discovered he was not averse to exercising that sex appeal on other women. For her second husband she chose a man for his ‘solid, dependable qualities,’ but somehow after awhile his solidity turned into stolidity.
  • I sometimes think everyone should throw away his first three marriages as simply practice exercises. Perhaps by the time both partners got to the fourth, they’d have learned how to create a really good union. On the other hand, watching many a couple break up, I’ve often wondered if both partners had really thrown themselves wholeheartedly into trying to solve the problems, the marriage might not have been richer in the long run for the difficulties surmounted. I’t’s something like writing a story, I suppose. You have to decide whether the story (or the marriage) is a hopeless failure and should be discarded or whether it’s still in the stage of being a rough draft and can be revised into something worth keeping.”