I do love having the framework of Jell-O Art in my life, especially now when I need something so deeply creative, so buried in that part of my psyche. After 30 years of it, I've long passed the point of thinking of it as something wacky or trivial.
I know plenty of you do, but that hardly bothers me now. Art is art, no matter the medium. As my vehicle for self-expression, it has taken me far further into art than my craft of screenprinting, or even writing, as it uses my whole brain, my body, and my visionary projections. Skill is involved, and the regular problem-solving that any effort takes, from doing dishes to changing the world. It lies on the spectrum of creativity in a not only solid, but delightful way. The fact that it can jiggle does not make it fall off that spectrum.
It does hurt me a little that people think I'm silly. I rarely am, actually. I'm pretty hard on myself about all of the ways I am illogical, and have developed a quality of scanning for a greater truth. I heard a TED talk about this, about the different operations of a "scout" personality as opposed to a "soldier." I shy away from military metaphors but see this more as an explorer scenario. You walk into an unknown woods on your way to an unknown future home, and the scout is looking at all the plants to see if some are familiar and might be food or building materials. The soldier is thinking about the miles walked or to be walked, about a tent site, about enemies, and wondering when the scouts will come back with the needed information about what lies ahead.
The soldier trains to follow leaders and rules, to do what is written in the book. The scout looks at the leaders to get a sense if they are leading in a helpful and honest way, to get to the destination intact and healthy. She looks in the book to see if there is some guidance that might apply to the current situation, although she keeps in mind that it might not apply and might need a little revision or variance. She knows the rules, but won't follow them to her peril, but rather decides repeatedly what the next step might be, according to the gathered impressions, facts that are available, and ways to interpret the facts that might be questioned or shifted to be seen in a new perspective.
Simplified, but I had the insight to see that I am a scout. Of course I still struggle with the good girl and rule follower that I was raised to be, but that scout spark was always in me and caused me a good deal of trouble as the second child in a family of five children, four of us girls. We were raised Catholic with reservations, indoctrinated but with plenty of seeds of doubt sewn as well. We worked together for the family goals, notably on Saturdays when we all cleaned together while we sang.
We also fought for dominance in hidden as well as scratchy and bitey ways, but that felt bad and at some point I stopped competing with oppressive forces and started going around them. Parents only have so much attention and approval to dole out in the capitalist consumer society. Dad had to go sailing to deal with going to work, Mom had to keep everything shiny. Both of them were scouts. We were supposed to be soldiers, like all little kids, but you know how those things go. Or went, in the 1960's and 70's. The Fifties were soon over.
Nothing was idyllic, but it was functional and my scoutiness was satisfied through science and nature, as I spent most of my time in trees, on trails, and on the water, when I wasn't inside a book. I was good at school so made short work of it and gained the skills to use my mind to articulate and evaluate. I loved diagramming sentences, writing lab reports, and creating a system of order, but at the same time I was thinking about other possible results, other facets, other versions of what I thought I was observing. I scouted my way to here and still kept looking back, still try to see that inner landscape that helps illuminate the outer one.
Who knows what parts are nurture or brain patterns that were instinctive or inherited, what parts are damage and which are gifts? I tired of analysis with professionals after years of it. It was productive but when it came to changing myself my stubborn resistance didn't respond to authority. As soon as the therapist assigned a task, I was on the way out of the relationship. I would comply to a point. I am really not a follower, though I can certainly cooperate and have a sister loyalty that comes in handy. If your mind is large enough to question things, I'll want to see inside it. If it is too small to allow any shifts in perspective, I'm not going to bother trying too hard.
I'm a natural complier, since I like peace and space to create, but I do not submit well to authority. If I comply, I still resist inside. I will, intentionally or not, subvert and find a way to do what I feel is best, based on what I know is a wide range of gathered detail and a solid perspective of "what if?" I'm not going to act based on your assumptions unless I have also come to those same conclusions, or can allow that they might be as valid as mine. At least until we can gather some more relevant facts.
Which is not to say I am not gullible and coerced, because nothing inside my brain is so neat and tidy that I can't be fooled. So I am often fortune's fool, or someone's victim, and it does hurt when I figure it out. I actually have a very developed process around it and do many steps of analysis each time it happens. There's a brain pattern and a behavior pattern and I feel that it is a human's duty to other humans to recognize our inner workings that way. If you try to run your control and domination fantasies on me, I will resist, call you out if I can, and work around you with all my might, unless I can avoid you altogether. I don't need it and it damages me to deal with it. It's one of the things I am most sure about in a shifty unsure universe.
To be evolved humans, we first must recognize the patterns that trip us, and the ways we allow them to be set up or set them up ourselves. We have to find ways to stop ourselves from making the same mistakes, scan our woods for better solutions, clearer paths, ways to gain skills to avoid following the wrong leader or the flawed rule. Then we have to have some courage about changing course, communicating if we can, forgiving those who were in error, and ultimately, forgiving ourselves and moving forward with an improvement in functionality if one is available to us. If we can grow that way, which we usually can if we are willing to apply the effort.
Humans are so small so often. I include myself in this. It's easy to complain, to blame, to feel outrage and anger at perceived injustice, to make a judgement. These fall-back emotions come when we are not sure where we're going, not sure if we have a clear way forward, and we get scared. We all get scared. We generally make the mistake of going into a defensive stance...like a soldier. We prepare to fight, and when we fight, we must win. We must dominate.
Yeah, no. Domination is everything wrong with what is going on in our world right now. People making choices for other people based on lies, poor fact collection, biased observations, and illogical assumptions, will make choices that will not serve us. They will pull back the scouts and pick a fight with the people who are cultivating the berry bushes right there, because the soldiers are simply hungry right now. They won't find the communal patch that everyone is welcome to pick from. They won't even think that there will be one.
Reading about the slave-breeding history is still my dominant field of study, and I happen to be reading about Andrew Jackson, and as a scout I certainly see the spin of racism and where it wants to take us. It's all about profit and domination and we are mired in it again, despite the advice of the many scouts out there looking for ways to treat each other better, to not repeat the mistakes of the past, to not go down a flaming hole to hell in the next few years. We may have to live in hell someday, but we don't have to go quietly, and we can drag our feet the whole damned way.
It's my feeling that there are many more scouts than soldiers in my generation, due to the lies we were told in our formative years and our subsequent explorations for a better version of some truth. I would venture to say that this is true for every generation, as each has had some galvanizing experiences that helped them see lies and spin. Maybe the younger people are the most clear of all of us...that could well be true. I hope it is. Lots of them are watching, and lots of them are speaking up too.
I have gone from despair about politics through that shock and awe campaign and am there, solid, in hope. It might be somewhat foolish to base my future on hope. I had a hard time trusting Obama about that, but it makes for a lot better path forward than any other motive. In my smaller worlds, I am not so sure hope will serve, but actually am placing my faith in education. I want these scouts to have all of the available knowledge and accumulated wisdom of our human existence to help us stay on a path that will keep us alive, and with a modicum of happiness and joy, and keep us holding a bit of faith for the future, a core of hope that will convince us the hard slog is worth taking.
Like the pioneers or Lewis and Clark, there will be some self-serving interest in there and inevitably some greed to assuage our deprivation, and it won't feel balanced for a long time, if ever. But all of the scouts are out there, on the edges, looking with their sharp eyes and applying their sharp wits and learning, learning, learning. Taking notes. Doing research. Asking hard questions. Speaking truth to power.
And many of them are making art, some privileged few with Jell-O. I know, it's food (kind of) and an animal product (but made from the things that are thrown away) and you think it's silly and a distraction from other more important kinds of art. But bend your mind to the idea that it's the essence of what is true. Clear, colorful, wiggly and alive, made to bring only
joy and delight, made for you, made from our hearts, and really really not what you used to think about a showy commercial product made of industrial waste and chemicals that destroy health and life that is owned by a major corporate dominator out to kill us all. Some people even think it tastes good (I don't eat it if I can possibly help it.)
Let's not die from it. Let's have a laugh about it. Thanks to all for the Ides of Trump, that was fun and exactly the kind of thing that is super effective on a soul level. Our souls are hoping we will keep our heads under control, and the weapons locked up. See you on April Fools.
What a state our State is in. I am so glad I live here...not that we will be immune to anything. Tourism is one thing I depend on, and no one wants to come to the US now. Unfortunately practically everyone wants to move to Oregon...if only to buy some weed and find some peace. That mix is going to be unpredictable in effect...so we'll see how the summer goes. There certainly are a lot of people yearning for the Fair. I'm one of them.
I am so ready for this political situation to crumble back to some sense of decency and truth. I guess that is as naive as it gets. My level of denial is sometimes amazing to me. Why can't people see the obvious ways to truth? I don't have answers.
I've simmered down about downtown issues, of course, having the luxury of not being able to speak for anyone but myself, and being unwilling to do that right now, at the council level anyway. I watch the live-streams of the public forums, as I can't handle the crowds, and I realize I should be speaking up.
The dogs and smoking thing seems ill-advised but likely to happen...the businesses have a powerful lobby effect and as a downtown business, I don't feel a part of that, yet I do tend to benefit or fall as they do. In the Park Blocks both dogs and smoking are already banned, by our own rules and by the city rules, but we still get plenty of both. Our own members who smoke have tended to comply by stepping into the streets surrounding, and that will be slightly less convenient, but the zone ends at 8th St., so they can go across it. The Farmers and the FSP are both on county land, outside the zone, so it remains to be seen how that will affect them, but possibly unless they do something, the traffic of people with dogs will shift to their sidewalks, if the ordinance isn't widely ignored. Mostly the dog traffic we do get comes on the street, sometimes in dangerous opposition to traffic on 8th, sometimes in the fire lanes along Oak. FSP is a complicated issue and I am actually tending to see how it is useful to have that venue, although I want it to be safer and prettier and more like me. It's not the threat to me it once seemed to be, but more like the part of my yard that needs a little sprucing up and some new plantings perhaps. The drummers need a place, and that is it, and the tourists kind of like to see what the wild side looks like. So we have to work together to get it to be what it can be at its best. I do have a plan for that, personally, but it involves a public-private partnership and process of getting buy-in from the FSP community, and I recognize how difficult that will be to put in place and sustain. Buy-in from the disenfranchised might be too far to expect to go. They have nothing to buy in with, and no motivation to do it. But we'll see. There are plenty of visionaries and do-ers out there thinking about it.
I'm on the side of human rights to survive, and most of the people who own dogs or smoke do feel that it is a survival issue for them. Thus most dogs will indeed be service dogs and I don't see the ban as being effective as a control measure, so that makes it kind of a propaganda measure. I can't help being cynical in these times when that tactic is so over the top. Sure, people shouldn't smoke, but tobacco is legal, and so is alcohol, and discrimination by appearance is not, so these laws feel mean. Anyone who has lived in an urban area, and for me that has included NYC (the Lower East Side in the 70's even) and Washington,, DC, one of the most diverse places in our country, as well as Wilmington DE, corporate world headquarters, in a heavily populated area, anyone who is used to seeing people who look different from themselves, recognizes that we don't get to own everything about our town. "We" includes all of us. Some of us are always in survival mode, and others of us are going to have to adjust to this world reality. We have to come up with these new ideas and work for more humane solutions. Time's a-wasting!
I'm going through all the numbing and normalizing that one might expect in my politics. I have a real love-hate internet relationship, and that doesn't seem likely to get any easier. I read the articles about the analysis techniques that we so willingly allow ourselves to be victims of...it's not like we had much of a choice, except for staying offline and out of Facebook. Without Facebook I would feel awfully isolated, but of course now we pay the price for our alliances in unknown and essential ways. I don't feel much privacy. My spam numbers have ballooned, so I know my server is being targeted, and I myself have not hidden anything much so unless I want to delete my internet presence, I don't have many tools to protect myself.
At the same time as I want to protect myself, I'm liking and hating things all over the net. I'm even using those emoticons I swore I wouldn't. I'm signing up for groups and websites and petitions and opinion polls and considering several subscriptions even though I can't afford it. I have many writers to follow, some of them new to me, some dependably there after many decades. It's wonderful how they have increased access to so many through the same internet interfaces that are so frightening. I'm bonding with people I wouldn't even recognize on the street...that might be embarrassing more than once when the Market opens. It's like there is yet another me, the Facebook me, who is not the real me but is doing quite a bit with my photos and my name. That persona interacts with all the rest of the Facebook people. We know we're real inside, but the edges are blurry...
But we've been in this soup for a long time so it feels fairly like the soup we ordered and have relished. And those of us who lived through and took down Nixon are on the one hand not surprised to be here now, but on the other, doubly shocked that this time it is so blatant and soul-less. I know we are supposed to be fearful, and the tools are brutal, and we are afraid. And this is somehow good for us, to finally feel really disenfranchised like so many gazillions of people have all along. To still have any feelings of privilege at all is strange, though of course I have all kinds of it. So I fight for moments without fear. I do find them (in that denial I'm so good at.)
Still trying to read about slavery, still trying to keep up with all the important nonfiction on the political scene, and it feels good to be using all of those muscles, but other parts of my life have been severely compromised. I have not been able to promote the Jell-O Art Show although that is next on my list today. I don't have the focus for my piece that I need. I haven't been able to write my lines for the script. I look at my costume plans but haven't gotten out the sewing machine. I made myself a pussyhat. I made some flowers. I bought myself a daphne though I didn't plant it yet. It might snow this weekend and I don't want anything to die on me. I planted peas and tomato seeds to haul in and out each day as the weather warms.
I'm doing a lot in my small worlds, and can see that some of it is solely about keeping things under control on the detail level. I have been re-reading all of the bylaws and board materials for my several nonprofit organizations so that, as Secretary, I am sure I am doing my duty of care and educating others so that they can as well. This seems so small but it's part of pinning down the edges of a spectrum where an attorney general can lie under oath and then lie again and again. No administration has ever lied like this...or have they? They used to be less blatant at least. Perhaps this is better.
I feel younger somehow, which is preferable to feeling wrung out and hung out to dry. I'm old, but not all that old. Yet, there's no recapturing any innocence, and joy is thin. I can find it (the daphne, the Jell-O) but it is fleeting. The birds are dependable, with sightings of the Townsend's warbler and an owl in a tree across the street, but several neighbors in my view zone cut down four or five big trees and now there's no skyline and the squirrel habitat is over at my house again. I found a dead possum and I miss it. I expect it ate poison. People don't love possums, and I didn't until I found out how cool they are.
Can't stop to grieve a possum, can only hope there are others that will find my yard. Can't worry too much about this Park Blocks redesign. I can't stop it and will probably like parts of it, at least, if and when it happens, which I hope will be slowly and thoughtfully. I hear lots of people embracing the possibilities and will fake it for awhile as things settle down. I don't always want to have this instant negative reaction to change.
I want to accept myself as I change myself. Life is tricky and I want to be clear with myself, at the very least, but of course human brains aren't really constructed that way. Fooling ourselves is the easiest thing we learn to do. Every time we try to go deep into our emotions, it's painful or confusing and the easiest thing to do is divert and distract. I'm getting fatter and exercising less and April First is coming ever closer, ever faster.
But there's no sense dragging my heels, so I will try to step more quickly. I got my expensive orthotics that are not covered by insurance and my feet have adjusted to them. I will calculate my taxes although I don't see why anyone should pay any this year. I'll eat more veggies and exercise more, and the weather will get nice and I'll have a Market and a birthday, and a huge workload that will keep me busy. So today, I had better try to focus in on getting this world of Jell-O launched and see if I can get my email to work again...I got fooled. I'm going to be fooled...I'm the main fool. Being a fool is human. Fools have rights!
See you in the funny papers.
