6.17.06

I am giggling with delight that Paul and the girls will be here soon. I spent the morning in my pajamas, watching The Hunt for Red October and IQ (the only remaining available movies) while I finished the last pages for the LuLu journal. The final page – seafoam origami paper with temporary tattoo mermaids and seashells from magazines – gave me fits. I transferred one mermaid image twice, and then decided to scrap it all together in lieu of the origami background, which was also a transfer but took forever to reveal. I think I rubbed my fingerprints off in places trying to get the ink to release from the paper!

While I rubbed away the paper like so many eraser shavings I wondered, can this really be called art? This playful experimentation with things akin to Elmer’s glue and crayons? Usually I think of my collage-play as “craft” or at best “folk art,” but maybe someday I will add enough skill to my kit to actually advance to true art.

Jen says it takes ten years to become a master of a craft. That gives me perspective.

After I finally realized the jig was up on my journal pages. (I’d ruined three and couldn’t progress any longer.) I switched to putting the house back in order. I was afraid I would be crabby with the intrusion if I didn’t have some ritual of re-entry into my (other) real world of chaos and family. Originally my plan was to leave everything as is — I had wanted to show Paul and the girls my studio-like set up in the living room. Instead I settled on taking some digital photos of my messy working life, then dismantled it to make room for my happy crew.

The kitchen table is back in the actual kitchen, and all my stores are tucked away into various corners. Deborah’s decorative touches – the red plaid flannel blanket rolled and tied with a black leather belt, the bright green shag pillows for the red sofa, the loud pink plastic wind up clock on the red shelf – are all back in their tipped-just-so places. I know the girls are going to think the cottage is a fairy world – a cross between Candy land and Johnny Rocket’s. I want it to look just so.

After cleaning the place up, my head had a familiar ache. So I took a little nap, a shower, a snack, and then, feeling better, I went down for the beach for a read. It was sunny but windy, and I sat bundled and happy in my independence, carefully reading Nancy Mairs’ On Becoming a (Woman) Writer. A great deal of it I can’t quite grasp, as I am new to feminist literary criticism. But some of it I get by instinct, though I lose it when I try to parse it. Like this for instance, when Mairs’ quotes Helene Cixous:

A feminine textual body is always endless, without ending: there’s no closure, it doesn’t stop, and it’s this that very often makes the feminine text difficult to read. For we’ve learned to read books that basically pose the word “end.” But this is one that doesn’t finish, a feminine text goes on and on and at that certain moment the volume comes to an end but the writing continues, and for the reader this means being thrust into the void. These are texts that work on the beginning, but not on the origin. The origin is a masculine myth….The question, “Where do I come from?” is basically a masculine, much more than a feminine question. The quest for origins, illustrated by Oedipus, doesn’t haunt a feminine unconsciousness. Rather it’s the beginning, or beginnings, the manner of beginning, not promptly with the phallus in order to close with the phallus, but starting on all sides at a once, that makes feminine writing. A feminine text starts on all sides at once, starts twenty times, thirty times over.

Intuitively, I know that this statement relates to my work both as a writer and as a practitioner of feminine spirituality – as a seeker of the Divine in all the Divine’s forms — feminine, masculine, and Other. I come at it from all sides – looking at it from many points of many stories; not requiring a linear logical construct, but moving via instinct and passion in and out of the many parts of Godstory and my story and our story. It is not a distinctive way of coming at and through and upon the Divine — that is, I do not by any means lay solitary claim upon this way of being. But clearly it is not a typically masculine way – as most cursory indexing of theological texts will quickly illustrate. Rather, it is the way of the artist, the mother, the girlchild, the feminine. And it is a way consciously unknown to me; having not been practiced upon me or by me as a child; having not been offered to me in catechism or documented for me in the seminarian texts I’ve studied and been assigned and offered; or given over to me through the language of history – to the language of men.

Nancy Mairs’ and her scholarly feminine cohorts are giving me something to stew in — it is not unlike hot springs rich with unknown minerals, earthy and vaguely metallic to the tongue, but primordial and familiar too. I do not pretend to understand, I can only sit and brew.