Sheila the Wonderbink

As I’ve mentioned, when making Word Art I pencil in the boundaries before I begin writing, so I can shape the words accordingly.  I’d wanted to do one about a night sky, and so I penciled in a crescent moon and some stars and took to writing in that general direction.  Somewhere in the middle of it, I whipped out my pencil and added another shape to work around, based on what I’d been writing.  It’s the first and thus far only time I’ve done that with my work.

Moons, Stars, Comets and Other Possibilities

We are no longer afraid of the night.

The darkness cone warded off by fire is now warded off by electric lights that we do not even control.

We pay a price for this.

The safety of lights on the ground come with the loss of the sacredness of the lights in the sky.

Stars have been reduced to a few distinct points where they were once beyond our ability to count.

If you approach the city at night from the sky, then the effect is reversed, as the lights glimpsed from the airplane seat become constellations crowded with glow.

We may not have breached Heaven with the Tower of Babel but we did manage to shout out the stars with the lights from our skyscrapers.

So many stars we can’t even see, even in isolation with the lights out.

We have amplified our eyes to gaze deeper into the cosmos and seen more than the first earthbound stargazers could ever imagine.

(And yet those who insist on a strict biblical 7-day version of how all life came to be are a bit less vocal when it comes to astronomical science. Why is that?)

The sky at night has long fascinated us.

Granted, this may be in part because it gives us more to look at than the daylit sky does.

(Though you can’t do much with shapes in the clouds by moonlight.)

The sun does not burn our eyes when it is so cooled by the moon’s reflection.

Before we had the full picture, we thought the lights of the sun and the moon were separate sources.

Now we know that the light for both flows from a single point in space.

Even some of the stars we see in the sky are even more reflected light–the ones we call planets.

All other stars, as far as we know, are suns.

They are suns so far distant that the light that reaches us first flared from their surfaces in a past far too distant to comfortably think of.

We (some of us, at least) chart our courses by those distant lights.

Long before the days of GPS, a potential method of tracking the longtitude [sic] of ships at sea was by the position of the stars.

(The clocks won the race in the end.)

Those who aren’t of the nautical bent can still be the sort to chart a course by the stars.

This has been done before we even knew where the light of the stars truly came from.

Enough eyes watched to track the changes as the seasons progressed and ascribe qualities to those changes.

Some still hold to those primitive predictions, as diluted as they have been by modern sensibilities.

We trust others to watch the skies for us, to remind us when there is something remarkable to be seen.

The streaks of light that appear in the night sky at intervals that stretch lifetimes rather than months were once seen to herald portents of the future.

Now we see them coming so that they become the item predicted rather than the sign of what is to come.

The last people that we know of to have used such a light as a portent ended tragically indeed.

Sometimes a tiny light streaks across the sky so suddenly it cannot even be predicted.

These lights are only heralded when they come as a crowd, like an approaching army.

Even then, we know now exact positions, merely the time and place to expect them.

We await randomness on a schedule.

Those are the best ones to wish on, the flashes of serendipity that remind you that something amazing can always come out of nowhere.

They happen just as frequently by day, but the sun overwhelms them so we are blind to their final blaze of glory as they strike the air and find it more substantial than we normally consider it.

These tiny periodic miracles are merely debris in the void rendered transcendent.

They are neither suns nor planets but the detritus of the void in between.

And by their instability and rarity they are rendered precious to us.

The more difficult if becomes to predict an event, the more securely we tie that event to the web of fate in our minds.

(Rationalists may scoff, but rationalists no doubt had to work extremely hard lest their human instincts to seek pattern in the random overwhelm their cultivated judgment.)

Detecting cycles requires a long period of observation to reveal.

Long enough to see the cycle once, at the very least, or more to see the variations of the theme.

(How many cycles did we have to see before those who tracked the stars in the sky noticed that some of them wandered back and forth in most peculiar ways?  Who was the first to see Halley’s Comet before Halley?)

(I myself have witnessed Halley’s Comet once in my life as I write these words.

I hope that time and fate will so bless me that I may witness it again.

If fate is kind, it yet may be possible–I was still but a teenager when it last appeared in our skies.

I saw it on a lonely stretch of Arizona highway with my parents and younger brother.

First time I recall seeing stars undimmed by the lights of the city.

I’d never really seen the Milky Way before, that I could so recall.

My mother even said that she hadn’t seen that many stars since she lived on the farm she grew up on.

My father tried to track the comet’s position by the calculations of science.

My brother used his eyes and said “Isn’t that it over by the telephone pole?”)

Yeah, I know, what’s with the parentheses?  Since I am making this stuff up as I go along, I can wind up on parenthetical tangents that sometimes don’t even get closed until I’m transcribing them and notice that I need to whip out the pen and make a few corrections.  (Ahem.)

The “stars” came out a little murkier than I would have liked, but it gives me a clearer idea of how small I can go in terms of whitespace and still be visible.  This one was started at one of my nights at The Glenwood and I finished it at Thrive where a band called The Roys had some kind of reunion show.

“The clocks won in the end” makes more sense if you’ve read the book Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel.  Which, by the way, you really should.

Prints of this work are no longer available.

The original is not for sale.

On Wednesday nights at The Glenwood, a jazz combo led by a young man named Taylor Kennedy plays in the corner of one of the rooms.  I’ve taken to toting my materials in a well-worn bag and spending a few hours there, sipping wine, listening to jazz and making art.  Questions Without Answers is probably the first one I completed there, and it was a great deal of fun to create.

Questions Without Answers

Can you imagine what would happen if you burst in on a clandestine meeting of philosophers and asked “What’s the meaning of all this?”

You’d be there for days, wouldn’t you?

Where would we be if we had no ability to ask questions?

How can anything get done if we have no way to ask for it?

And how could we ever work out the paths of our lives without the questions that drive us onward to our own destinations?

If no one asked why, there would be no becauses, would there?

So why are some people so reluctant to ask aloud the questions that lurk inside themselves?

It’s not as though these questions don’t exist, is it?

Do they honestly think that if a question remains unspoken it will stay unanswered?

Does it never occur to them that some questions can be answered without words even needing to be spoken?

Have you ever been foolish enough to ask someone “Do you love me?”

You learned a thing or two about how actions speak so much louder, didn’t you?

Why do people ask questions and then act as if there was no answer given when they in fact did get an answer, it just happened to be something other than the answer that they desperately wanted to hear?

Is that the reason why others are afraid to ask any questions in the first place?

Is the answer you’d rather not hear really all that terrible to think about?

Are people so afraid of the truth that they shy away from discerning it?

Why is that?

Isn’t it better in the end to accept the answers you get, even if you’d so much prefer that they would be otherwise?

If we seek the truth, isn’t it best in the end to find it even if it wasn’t the truth we’d been expecting?

What sort of scientist would throw out the data if it didn’t support the hypothesis?

Would we have gotten anywhere if we hadn’t been willing to live with the answers we didn’t want to hear?

Can anybody name a single civilization that managed to be able to suppress any questions without ultimately collapsing?

Is there really such a thing as “too many questions?”

Isn’t it much more likely that there aren’t nearly enough of them being asked?

Or does that just lead to the aforementioned problem with those who freely ask questions but refuse to hear the answers they’d like to hear and thus instead ask the same questions over and over again in the hopes that maybe if they ask the right person in the right place at the right time, they will get the answer they really wanted to hear?

I’d drafted the first two lines in a tweet to the infamous Torley, but, as usual, the line changed a bit as I wrote it into the artwork.  I was quite fond of the opening and had it memorized to quote at people when I showed them the snapshot I’d taken of the finished product on my iPhone.  The best response to it was probably from Tom Flynn, a professor of philosophy at Emory who suggested the reply would be “Congratulations; you’re now one of us.”

Prints of this work are available here.

The original is not for sale.

Spiral was the first prototype for my Word Art that I was willing to show to other people.  (I’d tried something a couple of months prior, but the result was such a hot mess I’m not showing it to anybody until I’ve established a solid enough body of work to render said hot mess into a fascinating historical document.)  I’d cut a sheet of 25% cotton paper to fit an 8 x 10 frame I’d found in a drawer (still wrapped in plastic–where did it come from and why did I buy it?) and traced some pencil lines to define a space within the space.  Then I took a couple of gel pens that I’d gotten as a birthday present from my goddaughter and worked my way around.

Spiral

There are times when the craving itself is so sweet and so strong that satisfaction is something of a disappointment by comparison.

There are other times when the reward is so sweet you wonder why you even considered denying yourself.

And when the source of pleasure is mixed with a dose of poison, how much harder it becomes.

To ride that ever so delicate balance of pleasure and pain, as if balancing profits and losses, income and expenses, how much pleasure makes the pain worth it, how much pain cancels out the pleasure?

Pain is a signal from the body that something is wrong which needs to be set right.

We ignore these signals at our own peril.

But the signals of pleasure are far more muddled, given they are known to transmit at times when a reward is the worst possible thing to be handing out.

But “such are the credentials of pleasure” that we will make a god of that which gives it to us.

Blessed, indeed, are those who take their pleasures from the simple joys of living, who revel in ecstasy but shun intoxication.

But what of those who pass through the deserts of pain to reach the oasis of pleasure?

And what, in turn, of those who seek the oasis of pleasure and find that the gleaming waters they hoped to drink from were merely mirages?

How many addicts choke on sand and call it water, lest they be forced to admit that what they endured was ultimately for naught?

Some pools grow shallower as one drinks.

Others are as deep as oceans, but long and arduous is the journey to reach them.

This perhaps is why we are drawn to the pools that so diminish, for we sometimes wonder if we will ever reach the springs that never dry, or indeed wonder if those springs are even real, or if they are merely illusions themselves.

But ever so sometimes, the shallow pools give us a tiny taste of what the springs can provide and that perhaps beyond all other reasons is why we crave them so.

But the path to the springs, to the living water, is not impossible to tread.

It demands much, but gives much in return.

But far too many mistake the path for the destination.

While others seek the destination but hope to bypass the path.

The path to the center does not come with shortcuts.

Yet it is not as hard a path to tread if one simply keeps the burden light.

How simple and yet how difficult for so many.

We carry burdens on our backs that we need not carry with us and yet we fear to put them down for fear of losing them.

We turn to our panaceas to ease the burdens that we tire of carrying and yet fear to let go of completely.

So the spiral continues, as we drink of wells that resemble the springs we truly seek to ease the heavy weight of the burdens that we know slow our journey to the true wellspring of all.

And the worst of it all is this–that the wellspring you seek can be dug in your heart and no one can take it from you once you have it yourself.

“Such are the credentials of pleasure” is a quote from the book Delusion’s Master by Tanith Lee, and a line I keep in mind when weighing the consequences of certain decisions.

I don’t know if I will ever do another piece like this, because the lines become a little difficult to keep track of after a certain point.  Even though I want the work to stand on its own visually, I also want those who are willing to try and read the words to be rewarded for their squinty efforts.

Prints of this work are available here.

The original is not for sale.