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Mondays With Muddy

23 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by emilypageart in Uncategorized

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Beatrice Allen Page, Beatrice Page, future, journaling, Landscape with Figures, Mondays with Muddy, unpublished manuscript, writing

Here is the second to last excerpt from Beatrice Allen Page’s unpublished manuscript, Landscape With Figures:

“People are beginning to pack up and get ready to leave right after Labor Day. The Rosenblums have already gone. Three or four other people said goodbye to me on the beach this afternoon. In another few days I shall be virtually alone again. This is where I came in – but with what a difference! I shall miss the friends I’ve made but I find I no longer dread being alone.

It seems that without quite knowing when or how it came about, I have decided to stay, at least for the time being. And after that? After that all I can say is what I heard someone say quite seriously on the radio a few nights ago: ‘The future lies ahead.’

Indubitably!”

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Mondays With Muddy

16 Monday Jan 2017

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Beatrice Allen Page, Beatrice Page, constellations, journaling, Landscape with Figures, Mondays with Muddy, stars, unpublished manuscript, writing

We’re nearing the end of my grandmother’s unpublished manuscript. I’m still figuring out what comes next, though I did stumble across some more of her writing that I may choose to post once I’ve had a chance to review it. For now though, here is the next installment from Beatrice Allen Page’s Landscape With Figures:

“The stars are usually still shining – at lest some of them – when I wake up in the early morning now. The sun doesn’t come up until after six o’clock.

I used to wonder how the Greeks decided which particular stars to pick out and arrange in constellations. Now I think I understand; they did it either early in the evening or just before dawn when only the brightest stars were visible to choose from. Orion, for instance, stands out vividly about the time I’m sitting up in bed to drink my coffee.

I have made another observation: the coming of the day does not diminish the brightness of the stars, it diminishes their size. They don’t gradually fade out of sight, they gradually grow smaller as if they were withdrawing into their greater remoteness, until they disappear beyond the range of sight.”

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Mondays With Muddy

09 Monday Jan 2017

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Beatrice Allen Page, Beatrice Page, crickets, journaling, Landscape with Figures, Mondays with Muddy, unpublished manuscript, writing

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

“Some time in the small hours of the night I woke up from a deep sleep. Through the windows, which I always leave with the shades up, I could see a star-filled sky. On an impulse I got up, flung on a robe and slippers and walked down to the middle of the field, where I could get an unobstructed view. It was one of those nights when the stars are exceptionally bright, and there was no sound except the gentle swash of waves on the shore, a whisper of wind, and the incessant fiddling of the field crickets.

I thought of the Psalmist, wakeful at night, burdened with the cares of a kingdom, weary from battle, stepping out of his tent, looking up at the sky, and suddenly released and awed: ‘When I consider thy heavens…the moon and the stars…’ I thought of the Babylonians studying the stars to learn their destiny, and the ancient Greeks immortalizing their mythological heroes in them. I thought of the Mayans keeping watch in their observatories to make their extraordinary calculations. I thought of all the unknown millions of men and women who have stood even as I, down through the centuries, gazing at the panorama of stars, listening to the thundering silence beyond the stars, and feeling a mingling of exaltation and fear. And I was glad of those lowly little crickets whose chirping kept the silence and infinitude from being overwhelming.

It was on just such a night of brilliant stars that I used to imagine the word of the Lord coming unto the prophets. I visualized them standing alone in a boundless open space, on top of a mountain or by the sea or most often in the middle of a vast plain, and out of that silent immensity came the revelation. It began perhaps with a shiver down the spine, then visions and words welling up in their minds, and lastly a compelling urge toward utterance.

Last night I wondered if in those awesome moments they, too, were not grateful for the small, humble, down-to-earth crickets making a joyful noise unto the Lord.”

 

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Mondays With Muddy

02 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by emilypageart in MOndays with Muddy, Uncategorized

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Beatrice Allen Page, Beatrice Page, journaling, Mondays with Muddy, the beyond, writing

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

“I stood on the beach at the edge of the incoming tide, looking out toward the horizon. It was late morning and an onshore wind was just beginning to whip up. The whole ocean came rushing at me in a succession of waves, not threateningly but with the exhilaration of children racing for the fun of it. Each wave, gathering speed and fullness as it rolled nearer the shore, mounted to its culminating incurve and crashed in a shatter of white spray like a burst of laughter. Then as it flung itself upon the sand, it was magically transformed into a lace mantilla. But only for a moment. It was immediately drawn back into the water, leaving just a wavering, foamy fringe that was promptly covered and absorbed by the next wave completing its course.

As always, the multiplicity of rhythms fascinated me. There was a rhythm in the making and breaking of each individual wave. There was a rhythm in the relationship of the waves to one another in their long rush from the horizon, and also in the sidelong border they made along the beach, not breaking simultaneously but in a successive movement, a kind of arpeggio. And underneath it all was the long, slow pulsation of the incoming tide. I began to feel permeated with all the rhythms as if they were inside me as well as outside.

Then for a second, perhaps only a fraction of a second, there came over me once again that haunting sensation that the scene I was looking at was true but it was not the whole truth, that only an invisible veil separated the two and I could almost…almost…see through it. On the other side of it something stirred as imperceptibly as a bird’s intake of breath before the outpouring of song. Once more I stood on figurative tiptoe, holding myself utterly still, fearful that even the beating of my heart might break the spell.

The moment passed, the nebulous glimpse vanished. The actual scene before my eyes seemed even more beautiful than before but the vision of something ‘other’ had eluded me once again by a hair’s breadth, and once again I was left with a feeling of mingled loss and joy, of wordless wonder which gradually faded as subtly as the color fades out of the sky at sundown. Only the memory of the joy I had felt, not the joy itself, was left.

Now as I write this in the evening, I find that I am left with something more than a memory; I am left with a conviction. I no longer feel I must try to explain away those few fleeting ineffable moments in my life as some kind of psychological illusion. I trust these hints and implications of ‘beyonding’ or a ‘within-ness,’ of a Reality beyond reality that cannot be reached by reason or greater knowledge, not be a more-ness of what we already have and are, but only by a moreoever-ness, a quantum jump (to borrow the phrase again) to another orbit of awareness or being.

I could believe that when Thoreau made his famous remark about the person who keeps pace to the beat of a different drum than his companions hear, he was referring not just to a difference in individual temperament or goals, but to that other orbit or dimension, of which most of us, most of the time, are quite unconscious.”

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Mondays With Muddy

19 Monday Dec 2016

Posted by emilypageart in MOndays with Muddy, Uncategorized

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Beatrice Allen Page, Beatrice Page, choose joy, inspiration, journal, kindness, Landscape with Figures, Mondays with Muddy, unpublished manuscript

Here is the next installment of Landscape With Figures, the unpublished manuscript of my grandmother, Beatrice Allen Page:

“Came upon a woman sitting on a camp stool by the side of the road, easel set up in front of her, painting the harbor, which was bright blue today and tufted with little white sales. The picture was almost finished and it was clearly the work of a novice although the woman must have been in her sixties.

She had heard my approaching footsteps and as I was about to pass her, she looked up with a disarming smile and said, ‘It’s pretty awful, isn’t it? I’ve only been painting for about six months.’ And then she went right on to save me the embarrassment of an answer: ‘But I just love it. I see so much that I never saw before.’

Her enjoyment and friendliness were catching and we chatted for several minutes before I went on and left her to finish her picture.

I suppose I’ve always been a little scornful of the amateur artist who plays with his or her talent when he’s or she’s in the mood (I wish there were a pronounce that applied to both sexes) and knows nothing of the self-discipline, the hard work, the ‘agony and the ecstasy’ of the professional.

However, when I think of that woman painting her ‘pretty awful’ picture with such zest, I realize I have undervalued the amateur. As the word conveys, and as she remarked, she ‘loved’ what she was doing. Years ago I read somewhere, or perhaps someone said it to me, a sentence that comes back to me now: Whatever is done with love endures.

That woman’s painting will obviously not endure as art but I have a feeling the act of painting it may endure in some indirect way. It is developing her perceptiveness, increasing her joie de vivre. That joy within herself may spill over onto others – some of it spilled onto me. As a result, later in the day when a man beat me to the one available space in a parking lot over in town which he could clearly see I was aiming for, instead of scowling at him, I smiled affably. He in turn, as a result of my amiability, may have behaved more sympathetically toward the employee he had perhaps meant to bawl out, who in turn my have gone home after work and patched up a quarrel with his wife. And so on and so on. Granted I’m being a little fanciful; who is to say that the joy of one human being in painting a picture, no matter how bad, is not a contribution to other lives?”

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Mondays With Muddy

19 Monday Dec 2016

Posted by emilypageart in MOndays with Muddy, Uncategorized

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Beatrice Allen Page, Beatrice Page, faith, journal, Landscape with Figures, unpublished manuscript

This is the next excerpt of my grandmother’s unpublished manuscript, Landscape with Figures:

“I’ve used the word ‘awareness’ over and over in this journal but with a growing dissatisfaction, partly beccause it has been overused and partly because more and more it seems to me too rational for what I mean. I’ve been trying to think of some analagous word that would pertain not only to the quickening of the mind and feelings but to the senses, the muscles, the whole body; a word that would cover everything from the most sensitive intuitiveness to the ‘knowingness’ that draws the salmon back to its natal waters to spawn, or causes a plant to turn toward the light. A word that would have its head in the stars and its feet on the ground. I wish I could find it.

Speaking of words, I’ve suddenly had a new insight into that word ‘obedience.’ I have always thought of it in terms of obeying the orders of some arbitrary authority, but we also speak of obeying certain principles. To state it in reverse, if you disobey the laws of harmony, you get discord. If you try to disobey the law of gravity by jumping off a high tower with the intention of remaining in mid-air, you fall and get killed. To think of obedience as bringing oneself into accord with natural, or supernatural, forces gives me a quite different feeling about it.”

 

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Mondays With Muddy

31 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by emilypageart in MOndays with Muddy, Uncategorized

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Beatrice Allen Page, Beatrice Page, journal, Mondays with Muddy, unpublished manuscript, wordplay, words, writing

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

“A very soft, feathery, pocket-sized breeze has sprung up this morning. I wish I could think of another word for it. ‘Breeze’ has too sharp an edge: it should be reserved for small winds that are brisk and invigorating. As a matter of fact, on consulting the dictionary, I find that it was originally a nautical term deriving from a Spanish and Portuguese word meaning ‘northeast wind,’ and similar to an Italian word meaning ‘cold wind from the north.’

The only word I know for the kind of wind barely stirring the curtains now is ‘zephyr’ and that’s too poetic and affected for everyday use. Apparently the only way to get around the difficulty is to make a phrase: a ‘breath of air,’ for instance, or a ‘current of air,’ or a ‘tiny puff of wind.’

There is another word I feel is missing when I shift my eyes to the poplar down by the edge of the field. When a good breeze blows through them and the sun is shining on the leaves, they appear to twinkle. But when, as today, there are just little puffs of air stirring through them, the sunlight glinting and glancing off them is not quivery enough to be called a twinkle. I can’t think of any word that describes the rather indolent, intermittent gleaming.

In spite of the richness and flexibility of the English language, it lacks a number of needed words. Most of the new words that are added to the language are either technical or slang. Why do so few writers create new words? There is James Joyce, of course, but his neologisms were mostly made up of combinations of words or plays on words. Gerard Manly Hopkins created several words that admirably served their intended purpose – words like ‘inscape’ and ‘wanwood,’ for example – but they have never become part of general usage.

What is harder to understand is why we have let so many useful and onomatopoetic words fall into desuetude. For instance, the old New England word, ‘scoon,’ meaning to skim, sail or skip upon the water, from which ‘schooner’ presumably derives. Or ‘dornick,’ meaning a stone of a size suitable for throwing. And ‘springal,’ meaning an active youth. How better describe that appealingly gangly lad I saw on the beach early this morning, just looking for something to do, than as a springal searching for dornicks to throw in the water?”

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Mondays With Muddy

24 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by emilypageart in MOndays with Muddy, music, Uncategorized

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Beatrice Allen Page, Beatrice Page, cello, journal, Landscape with Figures, Mondays with Muddy, music, piano, unpublished manuscript

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

“I’ve had occasional glimpses of the Rosenblums sitting on their porch or out in their yard, but apparently they don’t care for swimming and beach-sitting and prefer to stay quietly by themselves. So we’d never met. As I was walking past their house late this morning, however, Mrs. R was just coming out. Even now, a trace of real beauty lurks behind the overlay of heavy make-up and dyed black hair, and there is a faint suggestion of a kind of queenliness in her carriage in spite of the lumpy figure stretch the too-tight dress.

Impulsively I stopped, introduced myself, and told her how much I’ve enjoyed her husband’s cello playing.

She gave me a searching, suspicious, even slightly hostile look which took me aback. Then abruptly she changed, having apparently decided I meant what I said and was not just gushing. Her face took on a glow of warm responsiveness and in a rather deep and slightly raspy voice that was not unattractive, she insisted upon my coming in to meet her husband, promptly abandoning whatever plans she may have had in mind when she came out.

I spent a delightful hour with them, in the course of which I gathered certain facts. He is a cardiologist and what he called a ‘prevented’ cellist, meaning I suppose that he never considered himself good enough to become a professional musician.

‘I’m like Chekhov,’ he explained happily. ‘I have both a wife and a mistress. Medicine is my wife and music is my mistress.’ He talks in a slightly  hesitant way with an accent, and the enlarged eyes behind the thick glasses look at you with gentleness and humor.

‘It is a good in-stru-ment,’ he said, patting the cello lovingly. ‘Good enough for me. It sounds. But sometimes I dare allow myself to imagine it is a Stradivarius. And I, I am Piatigorsky, or sometimes Casals.’

His wife laughed appreciatively although she has undoubtedly heard his little jokes dozens of times. She was once a professional pianist. There were autographed photographs – lares and penates that accompany them everywhere, I suspect – of Toscanini, Horowitz and other musical greats, ranged about on tables, but I could not get close enough to any of them to read the inscription and find out what her name had been. I had a feeling she did not want to reveal it, that she preferred to close off the past from the present. Arthritis in her hands put a stop to her career, which perhaps accounts for the slightly bitter cast of her mouth.

‘But she plays accom-pan-i-ments for me sometimes,’ Dr. R said, bestowing an affectionate look on her.

Their muual pride and joy is their son who is a violinist and currently hoping to land a job with one of the major symphony orchestras. They clearly have great expectations for him.

‘He has a good tone,’ said Dr. R. ‘Full, bi-i-g’ He drew the word out so it sounded almost like ‘beeg’ and opened his arms out in a wide, circular movement. ‘Everything is bi-i-g, full, round. Rococo.’ I doubt if that was the word he meant; I think it just sounded as if it should be. Then as if he were anxious not to brag too brazenly, he added, ‘But the lit-tle things, I tell him the get ground under.’ He twisted his heel into the rug to demonstrate. Nevertheless, when he raised his head, his homely face was alight with the pride he could not conceal.

‘Sometimes he and my husband play duets together,’ Mrs. R said, and added simply, ‘It is beautiful to hear.”

In St. Louis Dr. R plays in an amateur chamber music group. His medical practice keeps him so busy, however, that he has little time to practice the cello. ‘But,’ he says, ‘I play ev-er-y day. No matter how I feel. Even if only for three minutes. One must nev-er miss a sing-le day.’

To see that kind of loving enthusiasm and discipline, particularly without hope of recognition for one’s talent, always makes me feel good. I don’t see it very often. It has made my day.”

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Mondays With Muddy

17 Monday Oct 2016

Posted by emilypageart in MOndays with Muddy, Uncategorized

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Beatrice Allen Page, Beatrice Page, journal, Mondays with Muddy, parental love, parenting, unpublished manuscript

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

“A discussion arose on the beach among a group of mothers as to whether it was possible to love one’s children equally or whether one could not help having a favorite. Most of the women insisted they gave each of their children the same amount of love although they loved each child differently. One or two, struggling to be honest, confessed they weren’t altogether impartial in their emotions even though they tried to be in their treatment, and then tried to rationalize their partiality. One of them said, for instance, that she loved the youngest of her three children most because he needed love more than the others. Another said that her second daughter was so obviously the apple of her father’s eye that she instinctively kept the balance by loving her first daughter more.

My glance happened to fall on Laura Palmer, who has five children but is so young-looking that if she wore her hair down her back, she’d look almost like a teenager. The youthful appearance is due in part to her fresh, unwrinkled skin and in part to a somewhat wide-eyed, ingenuous expression. In fact, ever since I met her, I have regarded her as somewhat naive, not in an irritating, but rather an appealing way.

She was following the discussion with an increasingly bewildered look on her face, and finally when someone said to her, ‘What about you, Laura?’ she burst out: ‘I just don’t know what you’re talking about! How can you parcel out love among your children? I love each and every one of my children with all my heart!’

It was a totally spontaneous remark. Clearly, she was not trying to impress anybody or make herself out to be the most loving mother there. She simply expressed what she felt, astonished that anything so obvious had to be stated. When someone teased her by asking how it was possible to give the whole pie to every child, she looked blank.

Her words, uttered so artlessly, were like a little flash of illumination for me. I suddenly saw how an apparent contradiction could be more true than a truth arrived at by reason, or could be true in another dimension, so to speak. I think that’s what is called non-Aristotelian logic but I’m not sure.”

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Mondays With Muddy

10 Monday Oct 2016

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Beatrice Allen Page, Beatrice Page, changing seasons, fog, journal, Landscape with Figures, Mondays with Muddy, poplars, unpublished manuscript

This is the next excerpt from Beatrice Allen Page’s unpublished manuscript, Landscape with Figures. This is another of my favorite segments. The sentence that begins “The all at once a fresh northwest breeze sprang up” just kills me. Such imaginative and lovely imagery. Sentences like that remind me of why I loved her so much:

“It was still foggy when I got up this morning but while I was having breakfast, tiny currents of air began to stir just enough to send a kind of ectoplasmic wraith floating past the windows now and then – wisps of fog of a different consistency than the quiescent mass of it. It was the beginning of the fog’s withdrawal. When I stepped out in the yard a little later I saw another indication, according to the old wives’ tale, that the fog would soon burn off: little gossamer webs scattered about on the grass.

I’d like to know what spins them. They’re not woven in traditional spider design like the ones hanging between the posts of the railings; they look like tiny doilies of unbelievably sheer chiffon flung lightly on the lawn. It occurred to me that perhaps they weren’t woven by anything, that the dew had simply arranged itself that way by some means incomprehensible to me. I touched a few experimentally. Instead of vanishing abruptly in a spatter of minute droplets as I had expected, they only stretched and tore, which seemed to indicate they were held together by some sort of tenuous filaments. For a second I even thought I could feel them against my finger but all I could see on my skin was a trace of dew.

By late morning the fog was pulling away slowly as if ceremoniously unveiling the blue sky. Then all at once a fresh northwest breeze sprang up, blowing a dazzling sun into view and the poplars burst into delicate clapping like elderly gentlewomen applauding with kid gloves on. The day turned into one of the most beautiful ones we’ve had all summer.

Nevertheless, some minor changes went on behind the scenes during these past few days of fog. An occasional sumac leaf, for instance, has turned scarlet. The woodbine trailing along the ground shows a twist of red now and again. For the first time I discover thick clusters of frosted berries hiding among the leaves of the bayberry bushes, although they must have been gradually developing for quite awhile, just as the days have been gradually growing shorter although I had not really noticed it until this evening when I suddenly realized it was dark before eight thirty.

Autumn is by no means ready to make her entrance but she is standing in the wings biding her time. One quarter of the year of grace I allowed myself will soon be over. It comes over me that I can’t indefinitely postpone deciding where I shall go when summer ends. I don’t think I could face again the loneliness of staying here by myself when everybody else has left.”

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Emily Page

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