On Family

While I dearly love my brother, I have to admit he is at a loss being a boy and all. I think I already wrote on him, so I wont go on about him. I actually was going to talk about my sisters.

We came in pairs. First there was me and Camille. The two extremes that you could have using the same pairs of genes. I mean, really, there aren't two people more different than me and Camille. And I love her for it. But the age thing, that is really a big thing because it means we shared a) the same parents b) the same teachers c) the same schools d) the same groups of people (we managed to have different friends for the most part). And in talking to Makayla, I think it all comes down to an observation: comfortability doesn't mean close. Being around Camille isn't comfortable. Comforting sometimes, but hardly comfortable. And yet, Camille and I are close-because we came in a pair.

Then there was Miriam and Clarissa, who are also opposites, but not in extremes. They are a captivating pair actually. And if Camille and I are extremes, these two are the opposite of that. As liberal as I am, Clarissa is less so. As conservative as Camille is, she is matched by Miriam. Ironic, that they are the most mixed pair, the most intertwined.

Then there was Rae. And Rae, though part of a pair, is very very distinct. Her other is Ben, and obviously he doesn't really count as being part of the group of girls. Not only that, their pairing is as distant as the space between Camille and Miriam. So in actuality, they just coexist as separate factions. But Rae is the moderator. She sides with nobody and relates to everyone. She, in her being the youngest, has inherited the insight of both pairs of sisters. While she is attracted to my distinct eccentricity, she also is admires Camille's class. While she laughs with Miriam, she can run with Clarissa (or play ball as is normally the case). She not a fencesitter, but the point. The point that is both included in the group, but is not because she is alone. And it is that strength to be alone that I admire. While it takes strength to recognize your pairing and make it work, it is far harder to be alone. Far far harder.

But Rae will never be alone, because we will never leave her. None of us will, because she completes us. She is our center.

And the even more important thing to note, besides our differences, is the fact that we act as a family. We are a unit that exists to build and sustain the others. Is that not so? It is an empowering notion, when it works. And it is one that depends on our individuality. Because all our smiles are not the same.

To see what Camille said about the sisterhood, check out her blog, at http://cacacamille.blogspot.com/.

Affair of Abandonment

Author's note: I originally wrote this July 31, 2007. It's posted as a note on facebook titled "That Old Familiar Feeling" if anyone really wants to see the original. This has been drastically revised, so do not expect the same thing if you have already read it (ahem, Makayla). I supposed I would also note here that the names could be changed.

**************************

The day I fell in love was the same day I came to dread falling in love. Warren was a brat, and those are people best kept well away from. But it happened, and I fell hard, only to hit the ground and break. Eventually you get put back together. It was not necessarily a Humpty Dumpty case, you know what I mean? It sure wasn't a joyride on the way down from cloud nine though, let me tell you. But that story belongs in a different time, to a different man I refused to recall. He faded as the months passed into a shade that haunts those memories, which is a time I specifically do not think about.

One morning long after that, I forgot how to breathe. I was just walking on the sidewalk. But that's what happened. I was walking with my sister and I found myself unable to remember how to breathe.

The odd thing was it wasn't as nostalgic as it was supposed to be. I saw the man I was in love with at the moment and he glanced my way. I was planning on swooning right about then, at exactly the moment when his hazel eyes met mine; but B-4, boom, I was hit and my battleship was almost sunk, and there I was with no idea how to respond other than to gawk at him. Gawk at his plain, scruffy face, his Cheshire Cat grin hanging almost six full inches above me, which was only present because it was ten in the morning and not a minute before.

He was gone in less than ten seconds. Come back, come back, I cried, but he heard nothing, because I couldn't breathe. I forgot how.

The world could have been spinning, or it could have stopped. I wouldn't know until I had realized time had stopped and the sun hadn't moved, whenever that would be. Does time move if occupied space does not?

Anyway, I ended up looking at some old drawings that day. They were just lying there, so out of pity and boredom I picked them up. They were sketches of athletes. Faceless, flat athletes from the discarded pages of ESPN magazine the year of the Riddick-Morrison rivalry.

I found myself in awe that once upon a time, I did those drawings. I found myself, even at that very moment, transported into a dream world, where nothing tangeable seemed to exist, watching, waiting, wondering exactly what kind of person would find figures, movement, and life so fascinating that they would copy it on a dirty piece of paper.

"You did that" he said. My heart screamed with insanity. I knew that place because I chose to leave it so long ago.

I found myself sitting on the edge of my seat, reeling. There they lay, those tattered pieces of paper, right there in front of me. I faced a girl who gazed back at me, and I could feel within myself the sudden eagerness to discover the real reason for the disappearance of a once radiant self. I grabbed for her, catching the cold wisps of smoke, which almost felt like hanging on to a fairy tale, the one that I had exiled from remembrance.

I clung to the lines as they bent and curved. Swing batter batter, swing, I heard myself murmur as the pencil had wasted itself like a breath of song on a swell. Smudged fingerprints interrupted subtly, almost like the undertone chatter of background noise. Easily forgettable I noted.

Then there it was, like the sun breaking through in the middle of the chaotic thunderstorm. The warm, striking, yet isolated realization that they were never lost; but perhaps rudely pushed aside in the frantic rush that life's events tend to bring. With reverence to the all the forgotten things that make up my life, yet, overflowing eagerness to greet the found splice of my former self, I held out my hand in a practiced gesture of welcome.

It was almost like coming home, Warren told me. He was with me, talking to me, haunting me with smiles and brief outburst of joyous laughter. It was undeniably quite a settling feeling as the sound wrapped around me. One that is so easily forgotten, yet...so unforgettable. And how can it be? Dripping as it is with quintessential nostalgia. I easily forgot that it was him that I had banished and as the rest fell away into disregard, he came to possess them. Yet there they were, there he was, all of it as timeless as the the tire swing in the backyard or the dining room table that I'd eaten Christmas dinner at since my mother broke the glass one of my early childhood.

Warren was as handsome as ever.

My drawings became silent next to the scrapbooks and journals that told countless stories that I smile to remember, which Warren narrated to me, simply existing all the same. And that's all it was; that's all it had to be: just an old familiar feeling.

I smiled, but withdrew my hand. I kicked away, almost dreamily, as one would relaxing in a swimming pool on a hot July day. He stayed, saying nothing. He knew I would be back. Goodbye, I sang to him.

The air was hot, but I could breathe. I felt a pang of guilt as my eyes wandered the drawings once more. He was gone and they were simple sketches once more, and I was left knowing that if I never told, Warren would remain a shade and my tall, hazel-eyed tryst would never know. I laughed like a ten year old who had a secret.

Emma loves Warren forever.

Bittersweet Ambition

Ryan Brown was crazy. He wanted me to drop everything and go to Florence. That's in Italy. He's always been like that I suppose, but somewhere in our teacher-student relationship that quote just to the right by J Fettingist became more and more true, and I had stopped receiving all the things he was putting into my head and was blatantly objecting to them. I only did that because he was crazy. He wanted me to go to Florence.

I did learn from him though. He and Wulf Barsh von Benedict would give me theory articles to read. I was a good student then (a phrase which really 'means I read them'). One of the things Ryan harped on the most was taste. He would come in every morning with a liter of diet coke and crack something about how I was short (he's 6'2"), then he'd sit down for a couple minutes and give his lecture about whatever had pissed him off in the last 48 hours.

I have to make a side note here: you know how there are certain teachers you gravitate towards? Makayla knows, certainly, because she gravitates back to Dr. Cronin. Well, that was me and Ryan. I took Observational Drawing from him. Then the senior illustration course on gesture drawing. Then Intermediate Life Drawing. He pissed me off every single day, and yet at the beginning of every class, I was ready to face him again.

One day he sat down on the edge of the model stand with a stack of papers and handed them out. It was an article called "A Note on Taste." Actually, it was a section of a chapter, "Tone and Colour Design" in a book, Oil Painting, which I'm going to guess is by someone relatively old. Anyway, whoever wrote Ryan's inspiration of the day said that taste is determined by familiarity, and that good taste can be developed. What really seems to sum it up is the last sentence of the chapter, which says:

All good artistic work is new; but its newness is of the inevitable sort that naturally grows from sincerity; not the forced newness for the sake of difference, which characterises so much of the peculiarity that in theses days masquerades as originality.

His point in the whole thing was that it isn't so much about being as it is being while meaning something. And while someone can develop a taste for something, that doesn't mean the antithesis can't exist. It also means that on the individual scale, good and bad are entirely relative, but on the grander scale, they are definite. There is such a thing as skill, and whether one possesses it or not will determine if they are good or bad.

Ryan was huge on that because here's something of a little secret: art is not just about the idea. It has to have one, but there has to be a structure. I like to think of it as language. Movements change it, but it is rooted in a place that it draws upon for stability--for definition. The thing is, once you know what good art really is, crafted through study and reflection and skill, taste is redefined.

The hard part about writing this post is that I didn't drop everything and go to Florence. I stayed. I wont lie, there are days I sincerely wish I had gone. But what really sobers me is that Ryan taught me so much about life, art, humanity, God, and myself that it seems almost like I owe him something. It is a similar feeling towards Mully; but the fact is, Ryan shared what he felt and what he knew to be true on a daily basis. And some days he was completely off. I wont lie--he's an arrogant conceited jerk...but usually he was right. Ryan inspired me to be a great person. I studied every reference he gave me. I aimed as high as I could with every line until I stopped caring. And he said to me that June day in his studio, "Look at you! You're coagulating right in front of me! I don't know what happened to you, but pull yourself together. You don't even get dressed for the day."

I could hate him for that day. But the thing that I've realized as I sit with Makayla and discuss her relationships with Cronin and Muhlestein is that I miss every second of Ryan's influence in my life, and that I will always regret the day I walked out of his studio and never went back.

I didn't draw this. This is a photo of Ryan.

(My mother never knew what he looked like, but she hated him to the core.)