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Lord of Mischief
may the Lord of Misrule not end as a wicker man but be allowed to see to his fields in spring hereafter. barren were the lands of our neighbors when saturn was still allowed his share of the human mind and barren be our own if we allowed this tradition to be continued. whatever name you might attach to the greedy deed – accident, mischief, malevolence – thou shall not partake of the feast and not grudge nor join your neighbors in their well deserved merriment. instead hold in your heart for twelve nights the coming of the light.
organic sources of light
“Recordings of what?” I inquired. His smile faded. Again it seemed like he was listening to my voice retreating in the library. “She said you were smart,” he remarked, more to himself. I was not sure that was supposed to be a compliment or a reminder to himself. “Who said?” I cut in. I had the uncomfortable feeling of him looking at me again and I felt reprimanded without him saying a word. “Sir, please, who said that?” I rephrased my words.
“Never leave a question before it has been answered,” he advised me, not answering either one of my questions. He fell silent. I stared at him, then lowered my glance, then looked up at him again. He could sit perfectly still, looking very much like the archetypical image of a blind man. It seemed to me, again, that I noticed more visual detail than one should notice. More than I could process. The crease of his pant legs, the way the fine wool fabric folded itself, the nuanced shadows in those folds. His white, chiseled hands, holding on to the walking cane even as he was sitting. And yet, despite or maybe because of the rich details I had an increasingly hard time focusing on him. It was like reading a book when you are very tired already and you can’t focus on the words. You are still reading them mechanically but you do not get their meaning. He faded or rather he diminished in size. He diminished in size but gained in clarity. I wanted to protest. I had a million questions. He looked like an illustration, I thought, feeling very tired, like one of my mother’s illustrations, done in a myriad of very fine, sharp lines. And each of these lines was emanating a fine, very precise, white light.
coloring idaho
My mother was busy preparing dinner and answering questions my sister had while sitting at the big wooden table and doing her homework. This evening she was coloring and cutting out the states and gluing them in the right place on a map of the US. Both my sister and I hated coloring in worksheets and my mother had brought out her expensive Sennelier pastels to persuade my sister to employ some effort on the task. The map as far as it was completed looked like a beautiful velvet patchwork quilt. You can’t achieve that with your Crayolas. I wondered whether her teacher would be able to appreciate the difference.
Montana was already pasted in its proper place. It was colored in layers of gorgeous deep Indigo and now, with a vengeance, Phoebe was wasting pale Vermillion Orange on Idaho. I sat down at the table and watched her. There is something nice about a little kid coloring in even if she detests it. My mother walked past me and ruffled my hair in a distracted way. It was just as much part of her dinner routine as cleaning dishes right after using them. For a moment I was back in a comprehensible, friendly world. No opportunistic cannibalism, no aliens. Phoebe pasted Idaho on to her map and contemplated color choices for Washington State. “Why do they have to be different colors?” she complained but her heart wasn’t in it, you could see that she did enjoy choosing a new pastel stick. According to my mother you can never work with materials that are too good and you should always strive for beauty but I still felt a bit doubtful whether you actually needed art pastels to complete this kind of homework.
Phoebe still had the whole west coast and Alaska to color and paste and she grunted disapprovingly as she studied the worksheet after cutting out Washington State. Washington was going to be Cinnabar Green. I liked the way she held her tongue between her lips when she had to cut something out or color something in. She looked a lot like Plinius, our cat, after his dinner when he sits down on the table and probably contemplates dessert choices waiting outside in the dark beyond the kitchen door. Phoebe looked like that whenever she was focusing on something. Right now she smeared Cinnabar Green all over Washington. The pastel stick made a fat, smacking sound on the paper. At the kitchen bar behind us my mother cracked an egg. The splintering was very clear and pleasing to me. I thought that recently I had been much more perceptive to small sounds. Only this morning on my way to school I had stopped to listen to the sparrows hopping over the path to the front door of our school, their tiny claws scratching the bricks. How much does a sparrow weigh? 35 g?
Phoebe looked up. “Mommy?” she asked. My mother looked up from her mixing bowl. “Which language do they speak in California?”
Art & Writing 