pantoum's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- NATURE AND ITS PROCESSES (Wednesday) The chorus walked through our Love and Marriage concert and skit tonight. I'm not singing this semester, but am on the board of directors and am creating the marketing materials and props. I sat through rehearsal hoping to get the information I need to finalize the season program insert. There is more to be gathered, alas, and I fear that I will once again be making this thing the day of the concert. Hope not. What's frustrating to me is that this insert will be placed in a program that is so fucking cool visually—the breast-cancer oratorio we performed last semester was a theme I pushed hard for with the board, and I spent months locating and planning the graphics.I messed with filters and turned a photo of a beaming bald woman into this really awesome cover, found cool artwork and writing by breast-cancer survivors to sprinkle throughout the ads and text. Problem was, I didn't get and didn't get and didn't get the chorus text and people were still selling ads as I was finally laying it out ("I just sold another one. Can you just squeeze it in?"), so I had to frantically rearrange pages to accommodate. I wound up having to put the program together in just a few hours and finally just wrote some of the stuff myself, on the fly. Hence, too many things—proofreading, for example—fell through the cracks.This is what I do for a living and the program has my name on it, so skipping the quality-control steps frustrates me because I know we're inviting mistakes. And I'm a perfectionist about stuff like this. Chorus members say they love my program and, when I can manage to look at it without reading anything, I like it too. It has blatant typos that wouldn't have been there if I'd gotten the material even a day earlier though, and that's hard to take. But enough about that. Or, as my mother would say, no sense beating a dead horse, Bird. • I've been reading a Bill Moyer's interview with Joy Harjo for several days now. Her main point seems to be that humans view ourselves as separate from nature and use language to induce this separation.This makes it all but impossible for us to create a home for ourselves in our world, makes it too easy for us to view nature as a compilation of resources to be plundered. I spend so much of my time seeking out connections and contemplating them, what can be extrapolated from them, how I can use them to convey meaning, build bridges, communicate. And that, to me, is what good art does—it speaks across distances, reveals our connections.Artists use particular symbols, art, magic, pain—whatever works (and it all does)—to capture something larger than themselves, insight that captures what's on the tip of someone else's tongue, what they experience but hadn't articulated or maybe even recognized until they encountered that art, novel, whatever that spoke to them, resonated, reminded them of our connection. Harjo notes that these are "difficult times when the illusion of separation among peoples has become so clear."Moyer: You said "illusion." Because I think it is an illusion. I think this is more the shadow world than it is the real world. Moyer: This world of alienation and of separation is the shadow world? Yes, but this shadow world is also very real. There are many wars going on all over the world and each of them is very real, and the losses people suffer because of them are very real. I don't mean to deny that at all. Moyer: And yet there is something underneath that the artist sees? Yes, but I think artists always have to include what's apparent and real in that vision, even while we're always searching for what makes sense beyond the world.So, basically, she is simultaneously asserting that these separations are an illusion while acknowledging that they exist. This is consistent with her poetry, actually. Humans are separated from everything—unique, a collection of postlapsarian characters sticking our flags down into land or women or poor countries and calling everything ours. Only she would never use those terms. In her big picture, we are all interrelated. Nothing exists—so of course we're not really separate at all. Bear with me. Her point, as I see it, is that we are not really separate from the world around us at all, but are, instead, related to everything (as is everything else)—and our insistence on a world that places us on top, labels us as different, as Other, is just plain wrong.We exist in nature and its processes not as unique beings, but in the same plane as everything else. Even if we isolate ourselves. Even if we build clever little hierarchical structures and create elaborate Great Chain of Being theories and insist that we are separate from our landscape. What most strikes me about this interview is that, when you think about it, Harjo has managed to have her ontological cake and eat it too. What she's positing is that we're all in relationship with nature but we're also separate from it—by choice. I make a probably obscure leap from that to someone with a victim complex, someone who creates alienation, isolation, disconnects. Gotta ponder that one more, see if I can do something with it. We create an illusion of alienation from nature, from our world, and these illusions create our actual alienation, define us.Maybe this is why I like Mary Oliver's writing, despite the fact that, as Poetgrrl points out, she's sort of a one-trick pony. • Meanwhile, my day has been stressful so far and I can't go to the gym at lunch as I normally do because of meetings, but how bad can it be when what I packed for lunch is leftover tortellini with a creamy truffle butter sauce and a mixed green salad with cashews and my first home-grown tomato of the season.I planted Cherokee purples—an odd-looking heirloom that has a blackish hue—and can hardly wait to eat it. So I'm not a particularly rule-bound person—mostly break them, truth be told—but do have a couple of rules for my kitchen:1. don't put tomatoes in the refrigerator (it ruins their flavor),LISTENING TO: PARIS La Belle Époque: The Music of Gabriel Fauré, César Franck, Jules Massenet, and Camille Saint-Saïns, performed by Yo-Yo Ma and Kathryn Stott, currently Massenet's Méditation from Thaïs. It's very beautiful, especially when I stare into an orchid bloom and listen to that cello instead of working. READING: Still reading Carol Guess's Switch and wish I had a block of time big enough to read the rest in one sitting. Also that Moyers interview. SANG IN SHOWER:I don't know where these things come from, but remember singing this song when I was so short that my legs wouldn't reach the back of my Aunt Alice's seat in her Crown Victoria when I held them straight out in front of me—maybe ten years old? Anyway, the song is called Daddy, Don't You Walk So Fast and I have no fucking clue who sang it 12:30 a.m. - 2005-05-18 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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