Among the many things you learn on the Georgia O'Keeffe Landscape Tour at Ghost Ranch is that O'Keeffe's ashes are scattered upon the top of Pedernal - that magnificent mountain that occupies the western horizon. And so, in addition to painting Pedernal so famously and so often, she is also a part of it, in a certain way.
My grandmother's ashes are scattered at the Grand Canyon - a place she loved. I don't know whether she got the idea from O'Keeffe, but it is quite reasonable to assume my grandmother knew the fact about O'Keeffe, at least.
Being made up to look alive and lowered into the ground in a plush, overpriced box makes no sense to me. I had long wished to be cremated when I die - mostly because, I think, it seems simple and pure - a sort of graceful return to the earth - full circle, all that. But recently, I find myself feeling that even this is unnecessary. What does it matter what happens to my body when I am no longer alive within it?
Perhaps mine is a stoic impulse. For a long time, when I would pass an animal dead in the road, I would feel terribly bad not just for the suffering I didn't want it to have felt, but for the humiliating and exposed location in which it died.
Well, I know no remedy for the way the suffering makes me feel. But I no longer feel bad for the location of the animal. I can see now that where and how it died cannot subtract from the grace, and joy, and miracle that was its life. It hurts me no longer that an animal might be laying in the road, but for all the other places it might have met its end. If I say anything to myself, it is that I hope it experienced what happiness its nature afforded it during its life. In such a moment, I might more likely feel pride as feel despair - the idea of celebrating, rather than mourning, life at its end is not some "life hack", but a natural reaction for anyone with a stoic mindset.
And now, I have found that I feel the same for myself. No thought of how I might die - no matter how my body might break, or what dehumanized end I could some day endure - can subtract from the grace of my life. Place me gently in the ground with a ceremony, or throw my lifeless body in a ditch to later be scavenged, it does not matter to me - only what I have done during my life will ever matter.
And so it is, that I have come to feel that it does not matter to me where I am buried, or how my body is otherwise disposed of. I believe that it will matter more to my surviving family and friends. That is not to say, necessarily, that they should be left to decide - I don't think it's right to put such a decision on others - but I think that, in time, I will decide in a way that is compassionate to them and that I believe will give the event whatever meaning it can have, to help them make sense and go on living their own lives to the fullest.
Wednesday, July 13, 2016
Things I Thought About At Ghost Ranch
Today, I visited Ghost Ranch, near Abiquiu, New Mexico - best known as the location where Georgia O'Keeffe spent her summers for the last fifty years of her life, and where many of her most famous paintings were completed. I had long wanted to visit, O'Keeffe being a link to my grandmother, from which my own fixation on the artist has grown.
But, first: what portion of my love for the Southwest is attributable, respectively, to O'Keeffe, my grandmother, or neither? I wish I could say. Unfortunately, I have trained myself to be highly skeptical of each of two very different narratives, each its own epistemological archetype, so to speak:
1) The one that says that one of these was some magical seed that grew into substantially all of my fixation, as if after some critical event, nothing could have prevented it.
2) The opposite one, which says that "it was a buncha stuff" simply because, I suppose, my life has involved so many events, well, how could it have just been one or two things?
No, the truth is probably more complicated - it usually is. I actually think my grandmother - along with the family vacations I took, and the time I spent with her at the Grand Canyon - planted something like the metaphorical seed, which mostly remained dormant for a very long time. Then, two things happened: I started traveling to the Southwest to hike - but, really to explore; and, I rediscovered O'Keeffe not just as something identifiable from my grandmother's wall, but as a compelling artist.
I thought a fair bit about these things at Ghost Ranch. I thought a lot more about what my grandmother would have been thinking, and feeling, had she been there with me. In doing so, I remembered nuances of her personality better than I had in a long time - perhaps better than I had ever remembered them - her sense of humor, her curiosity and love of learning and love of teaching and love of nature and of discovering the world, as it is. Yes, more than a love of nature, I think she taught me a broader lesson about reconciling your own idealism to the reality of the world. To do so is to find joy in real things. To fail to do so is to live in a bubble, and by doing so, to predispose yourself to suffering.
But, I digress.
A number of O'Keeffe's paintings that I was already familiar with struck me more profoundly in this setting, aided as many were by the very landscapes from which they were derived, and the stories surrounding their creation. To see Pedernal in person left me in awe; to see Ladder To The Moon at the same time choked me up. It's been moments just like that one that taught me how important it is to put forth the effort to find some connection, to actively try to understand what others have sought to express.
Ghost Ranch was much, much bigger than I thought. And, the history of Ghost Ranch is quite a bit bigger than O'Keeffe. That's fine. It was interesting. But not all of the history combined could match the small details about O'Keeffe, such as the admission that she would climb up on her neighbor's roof at night when they were gone (she had her own roof onto which she could climb...) - that insight into someone's personality is rare, and it is utter gold. I heard it, and I laughed, and I knew her better at once - I was sure of it.
I sat in the shade and read an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story collection from the library which I have been thoroughly impressed by. I thought about work a little bit - there was just enough reception for me to get random work messages and emails at awkward intervals. I thought about the bottle list at Casey Brewing, which I will visit Thursday.
Why did I go to New Mexico? A combination of reasons, so I say, but Ghost Ranch was the seed that told me that I needed to visit, and was the one thing I was certain I needed to do while I was there. Looked at that way, the time off work and travel expenses made for one pricey visit to Ghost Ranch! And yet I am not disappointed. The people at Ghost Ranch were friendly, and the place was welcoming - you could wander as you wished, and there were hiking trails and small exhibits and plenty of places to relax, in company or solitude. The lunch that was served was wholesome and satiating and communal. And yet, it was not the place with which I connected - it was the mythology of O'Keeffe and her paintings, and through this, my grandmother.
But, first: what portion of my love for the Southwest is attributable, respectively, to O'Keeffe, my grandmother, or neither? I wish I could say. Unfortunately, I have trained myself to be highly skeptical of each of two very different narratives, each its own epistemological archetype, so to speak:
1) The one that says that one of these was some magical seed that grew into substantially all of my fixation, as if after some critical event, nothing could have prevented it.
2) The opposite one, which says that "it was a buncha stuff" simply because, I suppose, my life has involved so many events, well, how could it have just been one or two things?
No, the truth is probably more complicated - it usually is. I actually think my grandmother - along with the family vacations I took, and the time I spent with her at the Grand Canyon - planted something like the metaphorical seed, which mostly remained dormant for a very long time. Then, two things happened: I started traveling to the Southwest to hike - but, really to explore; and, I rediscovered O'Keeffe not just as something identifiable from my grandmother's wall, but as a compelling artist.
I thought a fair bit about these things at Ghost Ranch. I thought a lot more about what my grandmother would have been thinking, and feeling, had she been there with me. In doing so, I remembered nuances of her personality better than I had in a long time - perhaps better than I had ever remembered them - her sense of humor, her curiosity and love of learning and love of teaching and love of nature and of discovering the world, as it is. Yes, more than a love of nature, I think she taught me a broader lesson about reconciling your own idealism to the reality of the world. To do so is to find joy in real things. To fail to do so is to live in a bubble, and by doing so, to predispose yourself to suffering.
But, I digress.
A number of O'Keeffe's paintings that I was already familiar with struck me more profoundly in this setting, aided as many were by the very landscapes from which they were derived, and the stories surrounding their creation. To see Pedernal in person left me in awe; to see Ladder To The Moon at the same time choked me up. It's been moments just like that one that taught me how important it is to put forth the effort to find some connection, to actively try to understand what others have sought to express.
Ghost Ranch was much, much bigger than I thought. And, the history of Ghost Ranch is quite a bit bigger than O'Keeffe. That's fine. It was interesting. But not all of the history combined could match the small details about O'Keeffe, such as the admission that she would climb up on her neighbor's roof at night when they were gone (she had her own roof onto which she could climb...) - that insight into someone's personality is rare, and it is utter gold. I heard it, and I laughed, and I knew her better at once - I was sure of it.
I sat in the shade and read an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story collection from the library which I have been thoroughly impressed by. I thought about work a little bit - there was just enough reception for me to get random work messages and emails at awkward intervals. I thought about the bottle list at Casey Brewing, which I will visit Thursday.
Why did I go to New Mexico? A combination of reasons, so I say, but Ghost Ranch was the seed that told me that I needed to visit, and was the one thing I was certain I needed to do while I was there. Looked at that way, the time off work and travel expenses made for one pricey visit to Ghost Ranch! And yet I am not disappointed. The people at Ghost Ranch were friendly, and the place was welcoming - you could wander as you wished, and there were hiking trails and small exhibits and plenty of places to relax, in company or solitude. The lunch that was served was wholesome and satiating and communal. And yet, it was not the place with which I connected - it was the mythology of O'Keeffe and her paintings, and through this, my grandmother.
Thursday, July 7, 2016
On The Road, and some random thoughts
Today, I am in Wichita, Kansas, on day two of a long - and hopefully low-speed - trip through northern New Mexico and central Colorado. I have a bad habit of trying to rush my time on trips, but today I am near-giddy to admit that I am feeling no such rush. I once called Wichita "the poor man's Omaha"; this goes back to Reid and I's propensity to use that phrase whenever possible. It always makes me giggle a bit inside - not least when it is an unjustifiably reductive and one-dimensional comparison.
To wit: is blogging just the poor man's writing of literature? It often feels that way to me - but, perhaps that is because in my blogging I strive to rise above the mere accounting of facts and to write something internally consistent, something with a shade of permanence, something encoded with some wisdom. Literature is supposed to be nothing BUT that, but I usually find it to be a lot of work. If literature is a world where I might spend a whole morning crafting a particular paragraph to be just right (and I have spent much longer than that), then blogging at least allows me to quickly complete something that I feel accomplishes its purpose, and release it into the world.
Will I ever publish anything literate that I have written? I suppose it pivots on the word, "publish." I would like, at least, to call something finished, and put it in some format that feels, well... Set in stone in some way. I love to think that could be a book that sits on my shelf, but perhaps even that is unnecessary. In any case, I have perhaps six or seven months before my free time largely evaporates; it at least suggests a natural deadline to finish something. And, I suspect I have enough short stories that I like - or, at least like well enough - to form into something that feels "of a piece."
If there is any problem with this strategy, it is that I have not learned how to tell when something is done - I think a person can go on changing a story essentially forever; the longer you gaze into the characters, and the situations, the more cracks you see, and the more you can try to go about fixing them by shifting elements in the story. Doing so, it turns out, is approximately as likely to cause additional cracking as it is to fix the original cracks. Because of this, determining when a story is finished seems to me to be, itself, an artform.
-------------------------------------------------------
I have a Twitter account (@D3302) which I use mostly to follow particular topics - Finance chiefly among them - and a spattering of other unique individuals that I stumble across (Twitter is especially good at that sort of "discovery"). One of those is Chris Arnade (@Chris_arnade). He is an ex-Wall Street banker who travels the U.S. and photographs the poor, especially certain groups that stand for what you might describe as particular "structural" issues in our social fabric - things like drug addiction and immigration. I am not often touched by works of art focused on those subjects - to me, many of them can't help but feel of a piece - trod upon ground, and so for me their impact has largely been drained. But his photos and writing make it through - they feel unlike anything else I have experienced, and they feel important. Somehow, his work seems more real (that old artistic trump card!) than anything else out there right now.
To wit: is blogging just the poor man's writing of literature? It often feels that way to me - but, perhaps that is because in my blogging I strive to rise above the mere accounting of facts and to write something internally consistent, something with a shade of permanence, something encoded with some wisdom. Literature is supposed to be nothing BUT that, but I usually find it to be a lot of work. If literature is a world where I might spend a whole morning crafting a particular paragraph to be just right (and I have spent much longer than that), then blogging at least allows me to quickly complete something that I feel accomplishes its purpose, and release it into the world.
Will I ever publish anything literate that I have written? I suppose it pivots on the word, "publish." I would like, at least, to call something finished, and put it in some format that feels, well... Set in stone in some way. I love to think that could be a book that sits on my shelf, but perhaps even that is unnecessary. In any case, I have perhaps six or seven months before my free time largely evaporates; it at least suggests a natural deadline to finish something. And, I suspect I have enough short stories that I like - or, at least like well enough - to form into something that feels "of a piece."
If there is any problem with this strategy, it is that I have not learned how to tell when something is done - I think a person can go on changing a story essentially forever; the longer you gaze into the characters, and the situations, the more cracks you see, and the more you can try to go about fixing them by shifting elements in the story. Doing so, it turns out, is approximately as likely to cause additional cracking as it is to fix the original cracks. Because of this, determining when a story is finished seems to me to be, itself, an artform.
-------------------------------------------------------
I have a Twitter account (@D3302) which I use mostly to follow particular topics - Finance chiefly among them - and a spattering of other unique individuals that I stumble across (Twitter is especially good at that sort of "discovery"). One of those is Chris Arnade (@Chris_arnade). He is an ex-Wall Street banker who travels the U.S. and photographs the poor, especially certain groups that stand for what you might describe as particular "structural" issues in our social fabric - things like drug addiction and immigration. I am not often touched by works of art focused on those subjects - to me, many of them can't help but feel of a piece - trod upon ground, and so for me their impact has largely been drained. But his photos and writing make it through - they feel unlike anything else I have experienced, and they feel important. Somehow, his work seems more real (that old artistic trump card!) than anything else out there right now.
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