Sheath of feeling. Words groping to touch air.
The original drawing, albiet with photoshop lighting, from a drop-in, non-instructional lifedrawing session at the Toronto School of Art.100 Million Sperm A Day, ink, pencil on paper, text a digital layer, 11"x14", ©2005 Brenda Clews
Hi everyone- I'm not saying that we as individuals want or don't want to have children, or even think about them if we're past child-bearing age, not at all, only that that biological reality is there in heterosexual unions in ways that aren't in homosexual unions.
And then I'm interested in what ways this plays out in culture. But it gets very complicated. I come to this through my work on why the maternal body is problematic not just in our culture but in feminist theory. Where the triad is not really accepted, nor is sexual difference. I'm a sexual difference feminist, in the European sense; rather than a North American feminist in the equality sense (meaning I don't want to adhere to a 'one-sex' model of equality that doesn't recognize my maternal body, its monthly cycles, the children I'm raising, the hormonal fury of menopause). And I need to do this in a non-essentialist way too.
From the September drop-in non-instructional lifedrawing session with the male model:
Do I agree? I have to think long and hard on that one as I read some books she's recommended. I mean it was a position I took willingly a few years ago, almost as a battle cry when I was exploring the literature on the Mothers of Argentina and their effect on the junta's disappearing of people, the loss of their children; by bravely making their grieving and their anger public, they were able to effect change. Based on examples of what mothers can do, perhaps the compassion and care of normative mothering is the way through the dilemma of modern culture. ARM is doing a conference on Carework and Caregiving: Theory and Practice next May. That will help me to deepen my understanding of this concept as it is being explored by feminist theorists currently.
Drawing Down the Muse, ink on paper, 8.5" x 11". These sketches are from a lifedrawing session in Vancouver last July. They were 3 minute poses and I drew three of them on one page. The model had a tatoo of a black cat on her back. By adding the lighting, and creating a literary title, I've turned it into a coven of women in a dramatic setting. They are bathed in what is essentially stage lighting (via photoshop), so a representation of the moon, its shining...
Drawing Down the Moon is the title of a book by Margot Adler. When this ritual is enacted during a full moon, there is a powerful influx of energy. In my drawing I have played on the title, drawing from and connecting to Adler's book, but added a reference to the Muse, or inspiration. I am interested in creativity, our visions and the ways we express them in artistic or literary or musical form. The moon is a very ancient and rich symbol for this process.
It's all in the white moonlight that pulls the ocean with it...
Finding accessing the internet through the library very limiting, and ultimately frustrating, both for posting my writing and art, and especially for the close reading I like to give posts, and the comments I often leave after a day of carrying words with me, I finally got on the phone and called around about internet options. The house in which I am living doesn't have internet or cable. I use a cell phone. And I need to keep my costs way down. So installing a land line was out. It turns out that the cable provider for this area, Rogers, has an "ultra lite" internet service, which they claim is 5 times faster than dial-up, for $20./month, flat rate, no installation fee, no modem rental fee. It took the guy an hour and a half to install it here. And I am ecstatically on-line again. In the intimacy of my living space. Accessing you all in the library was strange, not just because of the time limit, but because reading in a public space over a public computer lacked the intimacy that I have come to enjoy about the way we receive each other's writing on our screens at home. Where it feels like we are talking directly to each other, whispering our thoughts, reflections, expressing our lives...
 Love lies on my heart. Like a sheaf of love letters. Or the eclipsed body of my lover. Hours endlessly relentless. Do I dwell in the silence of the soul? Do I even believe we have a soul? A spark of being, that's all there is. A blazing little spark forging through life. And it lies on my breast tonight, love in my heart, beating, expanding, contracting. The pulse. Love is the pulse. My spark is dim tonight, faint.
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Original sketch with photoshop lighting.
I rather like him in the 'glowing edges' Photoshop filter... so then he's called "SunMan, Oh Apollo Night," and if it's a little contradictory, well whoever said Greek gods weren't.
Without fig leaves should I post this? He's one of my sketches from the lifedrawing session, coloured, and copied onto himself so that there are three of him. I'm calling this drawing, "Three Angels." Who knows what you'll make of this, Blogging buddies...
And am now finally offering a Birth Poster, a collected edition of all my birth paintings.
I apologize for the bleakness of this poem..
Transubstantiation: Katrina, 2005
When the storm hurricanes
blowing a city apart
then impasses breached
when the inland river flows over
containing levees
and brings the flooding ocean back
and death rises
against the attics of redemption
against the attics of wood and tile and tar
where last breaths, last rites
before drowning
in the communion cup
New Orleans became.
Of storm water
debris of ruin and bodies
excrement and chemicals
and the wailing
loss, wailing
in the diminishing wind.
Twenty thousand in the Superdome
stranded, the unescaped
awaiting welfare checks
that were washed away.
Carnage of a city,
so much death.
The Holy Communion of New Orleans,
what the fundamentalist
administration
chose to ignore,
in the richest country in the world.
People starving, senseless dying.
Freedom of all citizens to
inalienable rights, stripped;
democracy nailed on a cross
broken floating on flood waters.
Days
without help.
Helpless
days.
The shock and horror
of being black, racial minorities
poor, destitute, suffering
in the windless silence,
the swirling storm
not even a memory in the clear sky.
And the deaf posturing of the high priests
of Washington.
A city underwater.
A city drowning
in the sins of a country.
A city of death, swollen with
drownings
disease, fetid, slow evacuation.
America, take this chalice
of holy flooded water,
remember how monstrous
you have become,
and drink.
_____________________________________________
NY Times: "A disaster of Biblical proportions..."
Globe and Mail: The Flagging Empire
Women's e News article on Rape Victims; Charmaine Neville's video on the horror of the rape and killing, abandonment by the administration, and survival: Survivor's Story
Finding your creativity in your body, its sensuality…
From Fruitflesh by Gayle Brandeis [paraphrased for women & men who write]:
Relax, perhaps lie on your back, let your breath circulate in your body, “When you feel quiet, open, bring your awareness to the inside of your body. Explore your inner regions, the space inside your skin. Can you feel where your creativity pulses right now? Is it located in your vulva, or phallus, your rib cage, the arch of your foot? What shape does it take? Does it have a colour, a sound, a density?”
I am dreaming my way in. Glimmering rainbows, electrical, channels of energy pulse, throb, unfolding, hovering, swiftly moving currents. Is there a location for this energy? More deeply, envisioning this creative energy, its locus in my body, moving into it---an apex in my vulva, in the folds and membranes, but also floating above like an orchid, sensitive, delicate; and sliding across my thighs, radiating up and down the sides, where my body retains its memory of childbirth, in the skin there, its puckers, spots of cellulite like the remains of a cocoon my babies slid from, losing the elasticity of tight skin, youth, the years of serving others winnowing me, my creativity in the folds of life; sparking in my breasts, curving out from my breath, this place of giving, radiating, the warmth of the loving heart, beating; I feel my creativity rising out of me like a phoenix, rising again and again from the ashes of my existence. And in my graceful hands, in a dream my palms multi-petalled roses exuding softness, tenderness, wild and winsome scent, a lusciousness, hands I barely respect, don’t cradle them, don’t cream them, veins showing like markings of jade across their white skin, but from which everything flows never-the-less; my creativity in my mouth, auras of rubies, sapphires, opals, tourmaline and serpentine and raw diamonds, multi-coloured, rising as if from some volcanic source within; and my creativity flows from behind my eyes, where it is always swirling, thick, dense, blindly seeing the rhythmic music of sounds, images, forming, creating the dance on this caress of canvas, of parchment…
This is inspired by the photo I took to go with the last post and is a whole series of images in itself. Today I wrote this prose poem, away from the images in photo, in my notebook at a cafe, remembering.
~
Follow the curve of birth. Images of fertility. How did they appear with such intimacy? Seeds, eggs, vas deferens, oviducts, ovum, egg sacs, a winged maple seed helio-revolving, honey combs, womb, scrotum, the tubes where living cells spawn. Cracking apart, breaking, blighted, ideas and wishes that form, eggs bursting without yolks, and one perfect moment that rises whole into the world. What is viable, what happens, where desire and its fulfillment are one unfolding. Purple, blue, insect, fowl, animal, human, whirring. Moonscape, the deep unconscious. Libido an overflow of the deep forces in motion, possibilities appearing and disappearing, where the shape of the future occurs. Incipient wholeness. Where it is never still. Three hundred million sperm entering the central canal of the testicles of each man every day. In excess. An abundance of fertility. Eggs waiting, releasing one at a time, a slow, sensual journey towards union. For the one perfect being, the eternal hope of the generations of the future. Striving, giving, living. The deepest music of creation, unbroken, even amidst the shattering, the shards of the half-made, the untenable, the profuse attempts at what are works of art. Then the perfection of the way the unbroken energy flows, syncopates, beats staccato, creates stillness, chaotically refines, prays, meditates through what lives. Solidifies into living form. Strange magnified continents, an image of silence on the edge of creation.
i
What is the surface
of this river
that I am flowing with?
Gliding where the water
paints the trees and sky
in liquid colours,
calm, steady, tranquil, smooth;
underneath, I am a torrent of emotion,
a riptide of passion, flux of feeling
affirming, reeling, denying, spinning
into my own whirlpool.
My journey
back to my city
re-invokes memories
endings, untenable relationships that have lost their power,
that time has spun into the eye of the whirlpool,
currents of emotion, burdens of loss, gone.
I can look at you now
without flinching.
I am not trapped in cycles of unending irresolution.
Because I can leave, wash myself
of algae, reeds, sand and grit,
let the waters rush the detritus that remains
into a spining watery vortex.
This knowledge alone
depotentiates.
ii
I am the gentle
lapping on the shore,
fresh water of coolness...
Do you not see or hear
the thundering waterfall that I am?
I have lotuses growing on my still surface
like stepping stones
of flat jewels, of full moons, of honey cakes.
If you wish the beautific vision
of the saints,
it is here. But stay on the edge where the
stars meet the water.
Underneath, the currents rage like a woman gone
wild, frenzied, writhing, torrential,
hot, and uncontainable...
Courage My Love grows on you. Eventually it becomes the place where you always stop, browse each week before continuing on to buy fruit and vegetables and other health foods at Kensington Market. Occasionally you buy some silver jewelry, earrings or bangles or a pendant, or sometimes just beautiful loose beads that you'll string later, sometimes a vintage slip or skirt or shirt. You'll always touch the jingly silver dancer's belts, for belly dancers or strippers perhaps. You'll run your fingers through the sheer silk scarves from the 50s in the basket on the floor, knowing the last time you bought one it developed moth holes and so you can't again. But touching is okay. You'll admire the silk kimonos hanging almost out of reach, their elegant patterns, cloud-dance colours. You'll look through the dress shirts, dozens of them, wondering if they'll all sell and be worn again. In the Winter you always run your hands through the cashmere, some of the sweaters in mint condition; in the Summer through the silk or cotton skirts. You'll remember the styles of bygone eras; the way women fit themselves to the lines of then current design that is now retro-in. You'll silently talk to the primitive masks on the walls from obscure parts of the world about where they've been, what they're doing here now, where they'll end up. You might ask whoever's behind the counter where the turquoise rings in the jeweler's case came from, or the rich amber bracelets. And you'll see calm browsers like yourself or shoppers who have that hungry look, searching for an item, a bargain, of which there are lots, or something to make them feel fresh and new again. And you'll always find a small satin bag for a semi-precious stone or a tiny carved box or an exquisite card or even some incense if you need to take something with you for the rest of the day like an amulet.
It wasn't that Tristan and Iseult were victims of a love potion that they couldn't remove from the DNA of their cells once eros had altered their chromosomes. It wasn't that they were enslaved to their passion for each other without choice because the potion had altered them forever, opened them to each other fully and definitively and without respite. It wasn't the potion at all. That was a myth. Iseult's mother didn't make a love potion for her daughter and her amour (oh, she knew they would inadvertently drink it on the voyage from Ireland to Cornwall) so they could be trapped in unredeemable desire for each other. She knew that their hearts had already opened to each other. She hoped the love potion would encourage them to follow their passion for each other. But it didn't work. What was wrong with Tristan and Iseult was that they were always trying to do the 'right' thing, to 'please' everybody but themselves: King Mark who Iseult marries, Iseult of the White Hands who Tristan marries, though Kaherdin negotiates as Iseult of the White Hands' brother and Tristan's friend and attempts to help him choose between his divergent loyalties to a peaceful unified state or to his heart. Because of the choice Tristan and Iseult made, to serve others, they found no relief, no solace, no blessing in their love for each other. And their tragedy unfolded and they eventually died because of the jealousy incited among those they tried to live by the rules of convention for..."Make your own flute, and learn to play it from the innermost center of who you are, play it from you soul... the woman who loves your song, as you love hers, is the one." Tony MacasaetFloating on the face of existence, wide ocean of unknowing, do the waves bring us closer, draw us to each other? In the darkness of our isolation, our lives, their solitary attachment to the energy of it all, we can live together, we can die together, but still we are born and die alone. There can be no escape from it. Together and apart, fathom this in the dark sea around us.
Writing and Line Drawing © 2005 by Brenda Clews
On Monday, I walked, buying frames from two stores in different parts of the city, then went to the Art Bar Poetry Series in the evening, ab...
