There are several events that I hope you readers will attend, but I’ll get to those maybe tomorrow. It’s been a while since I blogged, months in fact. I thought I should get something up and keep this blog going. For some reason I feel freer to express myself here. Maybe it’s because I have so few followers at this point, so I feel nearly anonymous, even though I full well know that everything I write and upload here is available to anyone and everyone. Maybe that makes me an exhibitionist who thinks she lives in incarceration, exposing herself fully, limited only by an imagined prison cell. I think that the Internet is that way for many people. Maybe that’s good in some ways, but there are consequences to that logic, and I use the word "logic" loosely here.
I’m back to talking to the paintings on my walls. The one of the Native American woman grinding cornmeal; my mother painted it more than sixty years ago. The painting I often long to escape into, just like that Twilight Zone episode of the former Nazi commander who regularly visits an art museum and admires a painting of a man fishing off the side of a boat, but when he is being chased by police, he wishes himself into the wrong painting. The painting next to the fisherman which is a painting of Jesus hanging on a cross, but of course - his wish is fulfilled. I may have some of that wrong, but that’s how I remember it. Maybe it was a Night Gallery episode. Funny how memory is not very exact. From what I understand memory is filtered experience. It is the filtered experience that we function with, and I use the word "function" loosely here.
I also often talk to the painting of me at the age of three or four that my mother painted. I bounce back and forth telling her I hate her and I love her like an episode of Point/Counterpoint from 60 Minutes . Does anyone remember that? No, no, it’s more like that scene in the movie Change of Habit where Mary Tyler Moore’s character is trying to decide whether she should remain a nun or go with her libido and choose Elvis’s character, who by the way, is a doctor. She looks at Jesus on a cross, then Elvis, a statue of Mary, then Elvis, some other Catholic thing I don't understand and then Elvis. This tells me that Elvis is god and frankly that makes a helluva lot more sense to me than anything else in religion.
I just realized that I wish to be in each of my Mom’s paintings depending on my mood. I look at myself in the pixie haircut and huge brown eyes that I had before I knew the things I know now. When I had so much innocence and was sure that everything I was told was gospel. Well . . . hmmm. . . I guess it was in certain definitions, to someone, somewhere, like my mom.
But like I said, I mostly wish I was in the painting Mom did when she lived in Phoenix, the one of the native woman, just to be somewhere I’m not. It represents a life that would be or could be, more on that later. As a descendant of Irish immigrants and the Cherokee nation, I know I could be a scullery maid anywhere. So I have the stuff to survive.
Next post will be upcoming events.
