Dubious Pleasures

The altar is finished--I think. I thought I might add some blingy stuff to the background of the gaudy calavera. But I don't know. I can't decide. Does it need it or no? (Isn't it the way of amateur artists either to go too far or not to go far enough?)

Anyway, here is it, right side up:



And spun, so you can see that one image is upside down when the pot is right side up:



Ah, The Brain did that! Now all it needs is fifteen coats of varnish and then it's ready to be put outside.

Today I Got A New Journal!

Today I had a second appointment with a new therapist. (I feel sometimes like I have spent my whole adult life either in therapy, looking for a therapist, or in denial about needing therapy.) After my appointment, I went to the crafts store. I bought a small bottle of gold acrylic paint, a roll of contact paper, and a new journal.

This is the first page of my new journal:



The "want have need (blue sky)" page relates directly to what I talked about with my therapist today. (I won't give my therapist's name. That is to protect her anonymity, yes, but also because she has a very uncommon name and when you Google her, you might find out the following: That she very likely had a child out of wedlock when she was in high school, that she sits on the board for a snooty private high school now, that her father died two years ago, and that she's been married twice.) Anyway, yes, today we talked about needs and wants in relation to the idea that you--one--anyone--everyone already has everything they need. That whole idea is, I think, a bullshit therapy idea, one of those ideas that therapists try to use to convince you that you don't need therapy, so: BAM! You're cured.

Cured? Of what?

I said YOU'RE CURED! Get out of my office.

Sigh. Please excuse my being cynical.

This is the second page of my new journal:



Yes, another calavera. I was mostly just messing around with my paints and a couple of quotes, one from M.F.K. Fisher ("...nostalgia is a dubious pleasure...") and one from Dr. Edward Bach, inventor of the famous Bach Flower Remedies that I use daily:

"Those who are dreamy, drowsy, not fully awake, no great interest in life. Quiet people, not really happy in their present circumstances, living more in the future than in the present; living in hopes of happier times when their ideals may come true. In illness some make little or no effort to get well, and in certain cases may even look forward to death, in the hope of better times; or maybe, meeting again some beloved one whom they have lost."

What would it mean, I wonder, to be fully awake in this life? If I take enough of the Bach Flower Remedies, perhaps I may find out.

This Is A Poem by Ales Steger

With Closed Eyes

When you close your eyes you see a poem.
It is emptied of the firmness of all things you secretly desire.
It reminds you of a white room freshly painted
Where summer forgot to close the windows and doors.
But this too is only an insufficient allusion to forms of the physical world.
Entrances and exits do not exist in this poem.
This poem consists only in vaporousness.
The figures floating in it, the metaphors
Hanging on its walls a galactic draft could
dispel and recombine as something else.
Two naked clouds, about to make love,
Are dissolved and exhaled by stars as a cloud
Of a slaughtered wild boar encircled by grey smoke
From the cigarette of a father, who, hidden
In a dark corner of the poem, watches everything. Most likely
He is the true author of all poems. You cannot see him
In the dark until he chooses to appear,
Soundlessly, from behind, playfully covering with his hands your eyes,
Asking: Who am I? Will you kill me? Are you mine?

Translated by W. Martin with the author, Ales Steger