1. On what to focus. 2. on the mothering arts
****
The word “happiness” in the center of one circle, surrounded by 10 slightly larger circles set out at evenly spaced intervals.
^^^^
The long interruption to our regularly scheduled programming is now rescinded. Because hope springs eternal and life-density in the future is always underestimated, the presumption is that more will come of longer length, greater vitality, and more often.
A man named Whistler made a painting of his mother. It is of an old America. Its visual vocabulary may have become so assimilated as to obscure the fact that it is an old weird and internally conflicted America. Like all Americas are, regardless of vintage or how far back in time or moral depth we go. Anna Matilda is so patient, if not unruffled, and yet so very little of the visual math adds up. She is elongated. The depth of the field of the floor is just barely registered. She is not malevolent - the piety is strong in this one - but she is a mystery. Art is about mothers, in the strong sense that old art lives in the shadows of older art, which lived in the shadows flickering on the walls of the cave as the dancing fire crackles and breathes. There is (or was) a monument erected to Anna Matilda in 1938 on the base of which states: A mother is the holiest thing alive.
are the mothers of the past alive today in the habits and practices, virtues and vices, certainties and ambivalences, of their progeny? The answer is proleptic in the question. That you can’t be half-pregnant does not mean you cannot help but be partway determined, somewhat nurtured, good-enough rendered. How much you can help, how much you can overcome, and the varying degrees of how much too-muchness you can handle - these have staying-power salience in the old weird and the new as yet undiscovered Americas.
Of course, doting sons are no more and no less apt to become estranged fathers. This one was raffish, libertine, and said (by Dorian’s father) to have spelled art with a capital I. And doting sons are not necessarily borne up from devoted mothers. That things don’t add up, that causation is a fickle and illegible master, that ifs and thens flourish most unstintingly in the clean ecology of conceptualism, are all things Whistler knew. And, I suspect, his painted mother did, too.
