Travelblogue I: Solstice

I left on a road trip on the longest day of the longest year. I would drive with the promise of enduring light, the road unrolling over the darkness of months of stress, grief, confusion, and ill health: a slate-wiping or a full immersion baptism—either way, it would happen with music, sky, and a game-like hunt for the best gas prices and cleanest restrooms.

In German, there is an imposing word: Vergangenheitsbewältigung. It means, quite literally, mastering the past. In a German context, it refers to the guilt-filled prospect of dealing with the Nazi past. In my own consideration of recent events, it was less a need to master them as it was an urgent desire to be IN them. My father, to whom I was close and from whom I received many of the traits that make me who I am, had died before the holidays—taking my identity mirror with him.

But just as I was about to dive, in earnest, into the process of grieving his loss, I came down with bacterial meningitis. That was followed by the discovery that the organism had gained entry through a small hole in the front of my skull, through which cerebrospinal fluid was leaking out my nose. What I thought was months-long sinusitis turned out to be my very brain fluid flowing away. Months of hospitalization, surgery to repair the leak, and tiresome recovery later, I packed my new little car and turned my face toward home: the South.

I only stayed on I-5 from Seattle to Roseburg, OR, at which point I took the “wagon road” over the hills toward Coos Bay and picked up US 101. Still—at one and the same time—wound up and depleted, still set-jawed, I tried to inhabit the role of Middle-Aged Woman On Epic Road Trip, Considering Loss and Identity, Remembering Who She Was and Is. I put on the right clothes, I donned the jaunty cap, I cued up the proper tunes. But I was acting. Mostly I felt like a fraud. Mostly I fought the urge to check email from work. Mostly I stumbled over song lyrics and shifted in my seat, gripping the wheel a little too tightly.  But I committed to the role, and by the time I rounded the bend in Port Orford and saw full-out ocean—the waves-crashing-against-craggy-coast kind—I felt my brow starting to unfurrow. I stopped at the first “vista point” and stood on the cliff, listening and breathing in this different air from downtown Seattle for a while, and then pressed on to my first overnight of the trip: Crescent City, California.

Truth? Forgettable. EXCEPT that my hotel room was so scary that I put on the flip-flops I had packed for the eventuality of a hotel pool along the way, and wore them to bed. Yes, I was so afraid that I would get up in the night for an, um, comfort necessity, and would be too groggy to remember to put them on before shuffling over that infested carpet (infested with germs, with bugs, with dirt, with body fluids, with sad endings?) to the bathroom, that I WORE MY FLIP-FLOPS TO BED. I shouldn’t have been concerned. It was solstice, and I couldn’t sleep. I clutched the thin sheet to my chin (being careful not to touch the thin coverlet over it), and stared at the ceiling—with my feet against rubber soles—until I finally dozed off. Day One accomplished.

Jenifer Ward is the Editor of Off Paper and Dean of the College at Cornish College of the Arts.

Looking for the entire series? Click below:

#1: Travelblogue I: Solstice

#2: Travelblogue II: Perigee

#3: Travelblogue III: Key Lime is the Color of Grief

#4: Travelblogue IV: Road to Nowhere

#5: Travelblogue V: Marfa,Texas (art not included)

#6: (Final episode) Ashes and Dust

“How Are We Remembered?” in three, fifty-word poems

Barrens (2009)

I walk the remains
of my village,
each step gasping memory from ash.
For six years
I have stalked the dry barrens,
plush comfort stark against
these black echoes.
I bend at a glint
and resurrect
a flattened silver perfume cap.
I know this smell:
desert, naked sun, relentless wind.

Relics

You promised me
the shabby gods
would show me the relics of me.
Squirrel pointed out the scars in trees.
Mouse showed me the orphaned diaries.
Sol, the opportunities lost.
And Shiva
showed me the bones of promises
along the trails I have walked.
See? You’re not at all a fraud.

Requiem

Hiked up the steep rock
to the cairn at the top.
Sat at the base
and to the wind said, ‘Hello, again.’
I was there
when the last rock was stacked
and the priests walked away.
I remember their song sadly fading,
a Latin requiem
mourning, for all time, immortality.

-(2013, pmcgann)

The above poems were written in response to TPR’s big question, “How Are We Remembered?” by Patrick McGann of Twisp, WA. Patrick is a poet, reformed journalist, privatized whiskey peddler and co-founder of Methow Asylum for Writers.

Who Was Your First Hero, Erin L. Shafkind?

First Heroes: Cowboys, Parents, Television

My heroes have always been cowboys.
And they still are, it seems.
Sadly, in search of, but one step in back of, 
Themselves and their slow-movin’ dreams.

-Recorded by Willie Nelson, 1980, but first released by Waylon Jennings in 1976, and written by Sharon Vaughn.

That song plays in my mind when I think of heroes. My dad took me to my first concert, Willie Nelson, in 1982 when I was twelve. At thirteen, I witnessed my second concert, Laurie Anderson, with my mom.  O’ Superman, Oh Mom and Dad … They divorced in 1976, and just knowing their musical tastes I understand why. But there’s true complexity in all relationships and, while I get that my parents could not stay married, deep down I wanted a ‘normal’ family. So where else would I find normal? On TV! On television, families seemed perfect and I wanted to be there.

On The Brady Bunch I could be a fourth (brunette) sister, and on The Facts of Life I would easily have been a boarding house girl with Mrs. Garrett, and have Tootie and Natalie as my best friends. I looked a little like Molly Ringwald, who starred in the first season, and growing up in LA, I once was accused of being her by a homeless man.

I loved television and would memorize all the intro songs to my favorite shows and sing them with friends on the swing sets after kindergarten. Swinging high on the swings and singing those tunes felt a tiny bit closer to connecting. Except for the time I accidently kicked a teacher in the head who was walking by: she came too close to the entertainment. Fame did not appeal to me, it was more that I related to how family appeared, and how easily conflict was resolved in the 22 minute sit-coms or the 48 minute comedy dramas.

I fantasized about being on Eight is Enough: they could have had nine, or squeeze me into Different Strokes: (‘What you talkin’ about, Erin!’)

I would’ve been a neighbor on The Jeffersons and, although I loved Good Times, I am not sure I could have been on that show as a white girl–but I still wanted to be.

Understanding the dynamics of race, class, and social position wasn’t in my knowledge base yet–I could tell time by TV, but age-wise we’re talking six to thirteen or so, and mostly I was really lonely. In some ways I am closer to Willie’s Cowboys than I might think:

“I learned of all the rules of the modern-day drifter,
Don’t you hold on to nothin’ too long.

Cowboys are special with their own brand of misery,
From being alone too long.”

I admit that I loved the Dukes of Hazard, but even as a young girl was bothered that Daisy Mae had to wear such short shorts; I found it embarrassing. I didn’t understand critical terms like the Male Gaze or objectification, but something sat funny. I just wanted to be part of their family and perhaps drive a fast car. They were maybe the closest I got to TV Cowboys though, since Bonanza seemed too old of a show, although it was in re-runs. I can’t forget Little House on the Prairie. I loved that show and could easily have been an adopted child like Albert. Living on the land, no electricity, going to a one-room schoolhouse, playing in the dirt, I could imagine it. Especially while eating Kraft macaroni and cheese during the cozy winters of Los Angeles in 1980.

My personal Emmy would probably have to go to The Love Boat.

It was Saturday night television at its best, a hodgepodge of characters coming together to help the passengers find love on the sea. (BTW, I have no desire to be on a cruise ship in real life, ever.) My ultimate fantasy? Captain Stubbing would discover me and ask me to come on the show as Vicki’s best friend. I’d drink Shirley Temples with Isaac, play shuffleboard with Julie, complain about queasiness with the Doc, goof off with Gopher and then sit at the Captain’s table with Vicki and her Dad at dinner.

I used to think it was sad that I watched so much TV, but I now believe that it helped shape me. Eventually I could see the chimera and understand the evolution of pop culture in my brain. Loneliness is not a plague as much as a state of creativity if one is willing to wallow for a bit, process and transcend. Once I thought that TV had calf-roped me. Now I think it was really just opening doors, giving me a horse to ride into the sunset.

Erin Shafkind lives in Seattle, WA where she teaches, makes art, enjoys writing and loves taking pomegranates apart one seed at a time. Her favorite colors are red, green, and blue, although she’s partial to blue considering her house, car, and kitty all share the same hue. She still watches TV, but not as much, she also loves to walk at Seward Park, read books and magazines that are printed on paper, and wonders often about the clouds and other weather related phenomenoms. She left Los Angeles in 1988 for Northern California and later came to Seattle in 1997. She will probably stick around, practicing a little of everything and laughing whenever possible.

All images reproduced from a 2010 performance titled “My Life in Pictures”, 12 Minutes Max, On the Boards, Seattle, WA.

A Question of Storage

Changing Big Questions means changing our Off Paper image, and for our new question of How Are We Remembered?, we have selected an Off Paper image that is a little tongue in cheek: the warehouse scene from the ending of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Although we are half-kidding in our choice of image, there is some truth to the fact that every adventure, regardless of how epic it may have been, ends with the question of storage. All of Indiana’s over the top trials and tribulations– the submarines! the explosions! the Germans! the snakes!– are ultimately reduced to a forgotten artifact in a forgotten crate in a forgotten warehouse. And we don’t even have a decent image of that warehouse– just a grainy film still.

Isn’t this how remembrance ineluctably goes? It’s like TS Eliot said in Hollow Men: “This is the way the world ends: Not with a bang but a whimper.” Our experiences are only as enduring as our ability to document them, and the passions of our personal investments are reduced to piles of papers shoved in a box, to digital files on rapidly-obsolescing storage systems (floppy disks, anyone?). The themes of memory and documentation are nuanced and complex, and we look forward to sharing the questions that arise as we ask How Are We Remembered? 

Who was your first hero? An Introduction

When I was a kid, I loved building tiny reading nooks. The landscape of my childhood was populated by a series of idiosyncratically constructed libraries: the corrugated cardboard bookshelves I installed in my dad’s old van, the bedside table and diminutive chair that I tucked into the corner of my closet.

I would spend hours organizing my books according to shifting hierarchical ranking systems that reflected my mood, and I loved the challenge of arranging them in relation not only to other books, but to the larger context of the events going on in my life. The perennial favorites were books that evolved with me, the titles that possessed the versatility to walk in tandem with me as I shifted from childhood to adolescence (and maybe to adulthood? I still mostly think of myself as very tall nine year old who just happens to like men and bourbon), unfurling seemingly endless layers of whatever it was that I most needed.

Nothing—book or otherwise—has consistently touched more points of my life than Bill Watterson’sCalvin and Hobbes. Simply put, Bill Watterson was my first hero. And book tangents aside, first heroes are what this post is about.

The Project Room is in the process of switching between Big Questions. We’ve spent the last year and a half basing our programming and written content around Why do we make things?, and as part of that line of inquiry, we asked contributors to respond to the Quest(ion) prompt What was the first thing you ever made?

In June we are moving to the next Big Question of How are we remembered?, and are changing the Quest(ion) accordingly. As you may have guessed, we are now asking Who was your first hero?

We spent a lot of time trying to come up with the right Quest(ion) prompt. It needed to be broad enough to be a universal experience, but specific enough to evoke a strong personal response. We threw a lot of ideas around and none of them quite worked: it felt a bit like trying to artificially impose a nickname rather than allowing circumstances to naturally give rise to it. But we knew that we finally got it right when Jess bounced Who was your first hero? off of me, and I instantly had an answer.

I became an artist because of Calvin and Hobbes. When I was back home visiting my family recently, I was digging through the attic and found an old childhood sketchbook. It’s from an era when I was apparently deep in my knights/dragons/princesses-in-need-of-saving phase, but it is also full of drawings of my favorite Calvin and Hobbes strips.

Bill Watterson’s comics were my first introduction to the liberating quality of my own mind, to the idea that imagination was limitless. I didn’t understand the nuances of Calvin and Hobbes when I first began reading it, but rather saw my own experiences and passions mirrored in Calvin’s curiosity, independence, and stubborn refusal to conform to external expectations. I also share Calvin’s deep love of dinosaurs.

I first saw in Calvin my own joy of play and forward motion, and as I got older and grew into the conflicted ambiguities of a less binary world view, Calvin and Hobbes was right there with me. Calvin’s experience of finding an injured raccoon and coming to terms with its death was one of my first introductions to mortality: 

And watching the intimate conversation between Calvin’s parents after their house is robbed eased me into the terrifying and universal realization that our parents don’t know everything, that they are real people wrestling with their own sets of fears and fallibilities:

Later, as I began growing into the idea that I was an artist and tried to figure out what that meant, Calvin and Hobbes helped me navigate the pretensions and jargon endemic to fine art in order to find a way to my own voice:

Watterson’s veiled jabs at the structures of high art inculcated me with the still-held belief that sometimes the best thing you can do for yourself as an artist is to go play outside and poke things with sticks:

When I turned eighteen, I got my first tattoo:

Watterson’s little red wagon scenes are some of my favorite strips. They perfectly capture the exuberance of momentum, and offer a physical proxy to some of my most deeply held beliefs. Calvin’s wagon rides taught me that if you’re going to do something, you put the force of your full self behind it and see it through to the end. Hobbes had a habit of jumping off the wagon at the top of the hill, but Calvin was never daunted by uncertainty, and watching him emerge time and time again from ravines and bramble bushes reinforced my dedication to the notion that the hardscrabble journey through the forest is always worth the inevitable crashes. But perhaps most importantly, Watterson’s wagon scenes instilled in me the notion that just because something is heavy and complicated does not mean that it can’t also be really funny.

My parents of course hated the fact that I was getting a tattoo, and they asked me how I could possibly know that I’d still like Calvin and Hobbes thirty years from now. Unlike the lines of my tattoo, which have naturally thickened and blurred over the years, my response has not changed: If I ever reach a point in my life where these messages don’t resonate with me, I will know that I have taken a very, very wrong turn somewhere along the line.

Every time I think that I have wrung everything I can out of Watterson’s work, some new layer emerges and I am proven wonderfully wrong. I have recently begun a creative transition from painter to graphic novelist, and as such, I am revisiting Calvin and Hobbes from a technical perspective. Now I turn to the strip with a fine appreciation for the nuances of Watterson’s brushstrokes, and my palpitations of delight are for the fluidity of his panel design and his incredible ability to capture the trembling potential of an open landscape.

When I told friends that I was writing this piece about Calvin and Hobbes, they questioned if it was really accurate to say that my first hero was Bill Watterson: they thought my hero was actually Calvin. But Watterson obliquely taught me that there is no real division between an artist and the work that they create, and this understanding is something I turn to over and over again. There is something beautiful and brave in watching a mind struggle with itself, and I have profound admiration for the way in which Watterson used Calvin and Hobbes as a vehicle to dispel his own misanthropy and remind himself of his capacity for wonder.

Bill Watterson’s work reminds me of who I want to be both as an artist and as a human being, and he remains the rare exception to the general rule: he is a hero who, for me, has never fallen from grace. When Watterson stopped drawing Calvin and Hobbes in 1995, I unabashedly admit that I cried myself silly. But I ultimately hold tremendous respect for Watterson’s commitment to his own sense of artistic integrity and his decision to end the strip on his own terms. It was a perfect exit.

I keep the last strip of Calvin and Hobbes taped to the wall above my drawing table. It is my absolute favorite piece of art, and it speaks for itself:

Would you like to answer the Quest(ion) and tell us about your first hero? Email me and let’s talk.

A Three Year Timelapse Video of Gender Transition

Your fearless leader (AKA Seen Moderator, AKA Yours Truly) is running around like a chicken with her head cut off this week, so this Seen post about transitions is gonna be short, literal, and absent of commentary. Watch this timelapse video of a three year process of gender transition from male to female.

Who Was Your First Hero, Lee Smolin?

I don’t recall that I had heroes per se, growing up, but my understanding of the possibilities of life was strongly shaped by a few mentors and role models. Here are some of the things that were said to me that I think about every day.

When I was 14 or 15 my father told me that every era is characterized by common beliefs that almost everyone subscribes to. Question them, and you begin to think for yourself, he said. This is important he added, because only by thinking for yourself that you have a chance to do something that matters.

Around 16 I studied general relativity with a mathematician called Paul Esposito who told me to think about a physics or math problem every night before going to sleep.  I still do this and I have often found that I wake with a solution in mind.

Much later, when I was a new graduate student, Richard Feynman told me that in physics there are things that everyone believes but no one can demonstrate. He said that if a lot of very smart people try to prove something and fail, you might find it much easier to prove the opposite. When I told him some of my early ideas about quantum gravity his evaluation was, “Not nearly crazy enough.”

As I was finishing graduate school, I briefly met the philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend after one of his classes, and took the opportunity to ask his advice. “As long as you know exactly what you want to do,” he replied, “no one in the academic world will put as much energy into saying no to you as you can put into saying yes…Never in my academic career,” he finished, “have I spent two minutes doing something I didn’t want to be doing.” I turned for a moment to get my coat and when I looked back again he was gone.

Lee Smolin has made influential contributions to the search for a unification of physics. He is a founding faculty member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. His previous books include The Trouble with Physics, The Life of the Cosmos, and Three Roads to Quantum Gravity. He will be speaking at Seattle’s Town Hall on May 7.