hermit plus some digging my way out of my belly button [perhaps]

sure there is the tug to go here or there, to do what i "should." i love the hermitage and my microforest. if i could just figure out how to navigate sanely and joyfully the periods of unpeopled days, to actively put my hand to the tasks, to deal with the administrative blah of making and writing, i imagine staying. i get glimmers of what ifs. what if i stayed here and wrote? what if i stayed here and made? what if i found just enough social tethering so that i don't fret. there really is nothing wrong with a fret or two, but detethered fretting impedes my making, my writing, my bit of tethering that needs to be anchored. some people stress and it activates them. me, stress and other unsightly emotions, i shut down, mope, have difficultly focusing my mind or lifting a limb. being artist, being writer, does not meet the "should" of the patterns in which i was raised (fiscal responsibility and normalcy). fret. i am not doing it the way i am "suppose to", the normal of normalcy. if i manage to be even more frugal [fret], and make the social connections needed in spite of be geolocated in the woods, i want to stay here in this microforest. ha. i want to keep my damn microforest and hermitage. it is so drop dead gorgeous and peaceful. i want to write. ha, which means, write for god's sake kathy. write, type, thumb out, whatever, but get to it. i want to make, so make. i do. it also means i have to jump through the business hoops of proposals, submissions and such. i do but it isn't pushed.

i don't push the business side. i meander. i need to push it, not because i think i should, but because i need to for me. oh crap. i need to push it because i think i am "suppose to." i am "suppose to" if i take this path.  if i want this path, it requires pushing. why? less meandering. fraq, meandering is my nature, it is how i get to the work. it allows for hybridization of thinking, of domains in which i dabble. dang the "shoulds" i embrace!

making, the resulting object, causes pause, but writing seems much more purposeful, meaningful--a method that will push out into my future, into others' futures. at a more macro level beyond me and my narrowed we, is one more impactful, objects or words? binary solution sought because it is lazy, but it isn't an either or, ones or zeros. both objects and writing play out in all that i do and culturally witness. objects, space, light, texture, color, line, atmosphere, are incredibly important. we identify with them, need them. really. i identify with them. what little semi-affluent girl hasn't put on a pair of her mom's heels [object] to exclaim, "look i am mommy." objects and spaces, i use. i use them to construct a reflection of myself. yes, yes, i do. i use them to comfort myself, my mind and moods, or surely i [we] would not pay four bucks for a cup of joe at starbucks [well i don't but only because i don't like coffee]. we wrap our identies around ourself to hold the construct of me and we together.

object and space are clearly very important. does this even connect to my making? yes and no. oh binary ease, go away. identity, comfort, and such don't seem quite the direct compulsion in my making. the objects and space are more reflective of inner culled experiences. well, plus the shear act of making is so dang seductive and compulsive. so there is the reflective object, a tad of identity, and most importantly the need to make the objects and manipulate space. but words, words, how impactful they are [dangle]. my conscious mind constructs itself with words not image or object. the words may stand in for image/object but the structure of the thinking part of me is built on words. without the organizing structure of language in my mind, would object even exist? consciousness? identity? my identity is totally wrapped up in the words that chisel and shape me having bombarded me from without. no matter the resistance, i harvest and harness these external words, i work my self construct even further from the inside. words, building story, reflections, arguments, set my course, my identity, shape my believings, my mishaps and my doubts. scratched out, thumbed out, typed out, internalized, words are the building blocks, required, wanted--quenching and teasing, organizing and leading. i need words in the same fashion i need other. so below making, perhaps even below the need of other, are the words that assemble narrative, story, memory, adaption of my lived and living experience...i need other, i need the scratching out of words words on the page to hold together coherent constructs, i need reflective making, i need a tad of income (dang the need for root canals and tires), and i need green with the sound of wind rustling the trees' canopies.

in my shoulds I have tugged myself into a loop. it is the very thing writing does for the writer. it has brought me back on myself realizing the hermitage is a retreat, needed, gifted, but not a space to hunker down in forever, not a possession [well i did buy it and may be overly attached]...my brain and living needs more other, more writing, more making, lest I get lost in a belly button excavation.

i suppose it is the same just highly unedited; a first draft of sorts

i am reading Anne Truitt's Day Journal. i picked it up (so to speak...more downloaded) i suppose for many of reasons. i am interested in why visual artists write. i write. i need to write. i am compelled to do so. i am try to set a course for the next five years or so; trying to balance and put together what i do well. it is not web design, math always a struggle in high school; the programming i took was continuing ed for my job at the time; it did not relate to my aptitudes, talents, or heart. why it keeps raising its ugly head in my life simply because it has the potential to addresses maslow's hiearchy of needs and university art departments are desperate for it in their design programs. graphic design and programming are not the same. they require completely different parts of the brain. even funnier is that a below poverty level wage would be offered to adjunct those classes when the country is dripping with tenure track positions for the same....hmmmm poverty or liveable wage. what a stupid question. but my brain is not wired for programming and certainly not teaching it. i am wired for the soft side of creativity, maleable and intuitive, live breathing and mentoring.

back to anne and picking up her book. sure i've heard her name, but i really don't know her or her work. well and she is dead. again, why write. is writing my lead or a follow? is it center stage or support or staging? does writing really require my making? does my making require writing? i waiver on what i should do when i grow up. i feel like i should know. i feel like the grow up is on me. why? technically there is no hurry. again, i've zero interest to be pass through my own life as a rock hurled from point a to be. this worries me in terms of the art "market" both directly and the supporting academia...age matters. old is not hip. i am not worried about work ethic, i've plenty. i think it is the game; i've never liked games in any field. life isn't a game; i don't need to win or dominate. i don't need to be more special than X. i don't want to peck, peck. i don't ever think i've really applied for a job, doors have opened. i went through. there were a few hoops just to say we did in terms of securing the positions but not much. i didn't even try out for collegiate basketball, but played. ha. just showed up in the college gym the first weeks of school to shot hoops and was recruited on the spot. it wasn't even a crappy team desperate team[beat a&m, beat rice, etc state champs years in the running]. i loved playing but it wasn't about the game and winning, it was about the physicality, it was about the precision, it was about pushing myself to see what i could do. it was never about winning. it was about playing well. my jobs have been the same. i've never needed to one up, i just needed room and the freedom to do and pursue what i've an inklying for and serves in some way. i've never been competitive, never believed in pecking order or systems. again, ha. i applied for college the first time a month before the fall semester started. picked one school, applied. again for graduate school, i picked one school and applied. of course i had no idea that art school was competitive, i just assumed everyone got in to grad school. i was wrong. i do suck at standardized testing, oral reading groups, and arbitrary systems of pecking order and oppression. if i have to beat you to move ahead in x, i simply don't do x. gaming is stupid, in the end all the game pieces die. i die. you die. so again, i don't want to pass through my own life like a rock hurled, to me that is the competitive game i don't want to play, but damn if i don't need people, need tethering. that tethering comes through a few key human moarings for me. i know this about myself but it doesn't change the fact that largely moarless i ride this phase. so as i try to figure out direction i suppose even though i am trying to weave together my aptitutes, experiences, etc...fundamentally i will probably choose a path, even if an illusion, that will build moarings. of course this is going to require the GRE. grrrrrr. ha. so in fact i do have a pretty clear idea of what i want to do, but a few of the stone hurling activities that are indicative of systems of peck, peck, i must do. so a waffle a bit, crap, in case i can't compete. SQUAT and of course there is no fiscal  security in any direction that seems viable to who i am.

falling off the curb into the woods

why it happens, its frequency, i don't necessarily get. i don't get my teetering plunge as an able bodied semi intelligent relatively conscious entity. but it happens. typically i skirt my writing around it. avoid it. shove it away. pretend it isn't so. snap, clickedy-click some selfies, plastered on smile confirming it hasn't made me ugly yet. it is like loneliness, sadness. it is like extended grief, narrowed friendships or their amputation, damn isolation. to enter any of these, to write through them, unpack them, admit them, well, frankly is like smelling bad as you unbalancedly extend too far over the curb's edge. you counterbalance, stepping just a tad too close to other, your pungent moment waifs, and the other cannot stop their visceral retraction. a straight face they may hold stiff; perhaps even a graceful excising of themselves from you, the apparent stench source. but to discuss, admit hard things, loosened or lost tethers, whether slack or cut, to smell badly, kiss off any coming along side longer than the other can hold their breath. it is not long. you can experience these things, be in the thralls of them for a month maybe two, but then you'd better pull yourself up by those dang bootstraps, scrub your pits, destench yourself, and slap on your happy face. fine. i am just fine. frozen smile, flat eyes you try and twinkle, yet you are thick with the scent of cover up.

i love my woods. it fits who i am and a huge part of what i need. yet, when i have been away, it takes an internal adjustment each time i return. it is beautiful, peaceful; it is highly depeopled. so brushing up against others and then suddenly NOT for days on end is actually difficult. initially it wasn't because there were regular interruptions and capital flow in my peopled teaching practice, though not at the peer level. i have always been smitten with each student crew in unique ways. so though alone in my woods, it was punctuated with people. that practice is set aside for the time. i am not uncomfortable alone with myself. i need space, down time. the hermitage and microforest are nothing but gift. as time has extended pushing forward into my own future as i continue to crunch gravel underfoot, meander the paths, the gift becomes harder to be present within in the particular repeopled days. i work very, very hard to focus to experience this space, to be home, to be fully present, awake. the shadow beast and the sun provide a skeletal structure to the days. the microforest demands its care. i comply. all other tasks, tasks of self promoting, tasks that would move me back into that peck, peck cog system, tasks of readying the hermitage for another, all ify in my compliance to vest. i flounder. i fall off this curb again and again. like a herd of myselfs rushing the edge. i divert, i spin my heels and head back to a city, pup in tow. this system is not working. i wonder a lot about if there must be something wrong with me, something broken. well, working so tied to a crazy maker for two and one half years, did damage. then as i teeter for balance, i reread studies on actual isolation. of course i am no POW and can leave the woods, am not harmed out here, afraid, or held against my will. but still, i see how extended unpeopled days on end skim across and drop me into some of the side effects noted in the isolation studies. i recognize i am not nuts but in fact experience real ramifications of the hermitage's remoteness. i work to make it not so, yet sense i am still find myself at the base of the curb. i am unsure how to weave together who i am into a primary flow, i am unsure of how to wade into the peckish way we live in our money making cohort clusters so evident in our corporate and institutional herds. it sucks because i need the herd, but i've never been good at herd behavior. i watch the peck, peck of the herd, the clutch, see it for what it is. see the pecking for coghoodification. i do understand the need of cog. i get that herd doesn't work without cog systems. i understand that there is a natural tendency to peck. i get that even within these cog peck systems there may be real purpose found, real need for the human. i get that the peck, peck, of late childhood never departs and only becomes more sophisticatedly masked. i just don't want to play that way. i suppose it is pouty of me to not want to play. maybe like scraping the game pieces into its box with a huff and going home. of course i trip on the curb in the process. i don't believe that i am better or that you are, neither stands to far from the curb's edge. we differ slightly, vary on the skill sets we bring to the system, to the interplay, to our coghood. because it is our nature to place ourselves, understand ourselves, promote ourselves in the reflective body of the herd, the clutch, PECK, PECK. so i avoid, put off, those things that would promote climbing the curb's face back into that herd. aggggh, but freaking undisclosed expletives, i need the freaking herd. damn my human wiring as a social entity in need of tethering within systems of coghood.

why can't i be hermit? why can't that be enough? I love my microforest with its hermitage. I am smitten with the crunch of gravel under foot as a i trudge below the green canopies breathey with song. I am not a hermit so it is not enough. it is instead a dilemma of sorts.

i am reading anne truitt's day journal. i get it. i even like to the idea my blog is like an unedited first draft of what she is doing. interesting that she began in clinical psychology, approached fiction writing as well, and then landed in the less temporal space of artist, of discrete object maker. i get the weaving together of psychology, writing, space, and object. i laugh when i read here residency experiences as she quickly runs in the the wall of chica muscles and the physicality of making and her limits. i get it. so how do i do all that, build or insert into new herd, new tethers, when i resist myself in heel dragging, curb falling sabotage because of my visceral repulsion to peck, peck, is so strong, so rippling under my surface. i am pretty sure i've struggled with these systems at a minimum since elementary school oral reading groups. OMG. peck, peck.

very few, except the ones that read me

my life narrows and widens. many tethers severed. probably more than i can actually handle, more than i can protect myself from (dangle). yup. there are definitely parts of me that dangle flipping about, dismoared. yet, the widening is an odd beast. it creates unmoared tethers on my end that i cannot feel, attach to or stroke, but they are surely there. little cyber contacts pulse with texts that indicate it is so. i do understand a part of the widening -- i write, i post, i click, snap. i translate my scrawl, my lived experience, thumbing it out in each post, each status update. i am less transparent becoming more visible, more solid, through the transparency of my moments strung together, analyzed, poetized, sensualized, written, as i own with words what belongs to me with the layers of my livedness.

but, but, i bump into real space, littered and peopled, with each leaving of my microforest. well, i certainly hope so [dangle]. i might be prone to talk, i am, to make up for the lack of spoken words. the count has been dropping exponentially in the depeopled woods. the talk becomes more awkward spilling from my lips than from my thumbs despite the typos and faulty autocorrects. my internal leanings spoken and truncated into undecipherable verbal fragments. typical now, the initial voiced frag stutters and stalls there as other interrupts, "oh, i read that on your ___" so mouth shuts...nothing preprocessed to spill out for building of real connections in real space. on occasions what then comes is so stupid, truthful, kathy spadish, a tad random and something other than it "should" be that, snap, i remember why i live in the depeopled woods. not so much that i am a hermit, i am not. an introvert sure but my peopled historical world has always been narrowly filled with unspoken comforts of just being. it didn't require of me too many words with a handful of others. i could just be there. i could hang without a dangle. words mess with that state. so often kathy randomized spades fall from my mouth. generally spades are uncomfortable small truths. we, me included, like the safety of our illusions. spades no matter how tiny do not help the illusions we like to grasp and clutch to ourselves.

i don't fully understand the how writing became pivotal. it began in grad school in spite of the fact that I was there for the visual, the graphical, not the text based. a goal at the time was to not bore art historians with regurgitated party lines, to not bore myself with dry academic verbiage, to not pretend to "look" smart. well and i was terrified of the dry academic form because language (not logic) in terms of craft has always been difficult and documentation games confounding [i finally learned to preface all texts i amalgamated in regards to the historic as assemblages and noted all books, texts and such that i absorbed in any fashion in the appendix. any truly original idea, i owned as my...own, but indicated the rest as an assemblage of other]. i've no fully functional mental device or system to store or move from symbol to audibly pronounceable word and back again. steel trap, nope; steel sieve, yes. oh, did i mention i hybridize words at will? it works for me. it worked far better when the second Bush was president and i could say, "if he does, i can too!" another goal in picking up the scratching pen was to free up my writing until i found my way into my final thesis. plus the scratch, scratch, of pen to page also prevented me from cutting and pasting text not my own...it forced and still does all I read through my own steel sieve. yet, only in retrospect have i begun to understand that writing has been grounding me in my own life. it gives me a way out of myself, a way into myself. i've had people fall in love with me or a parts of me, befriend me, like me, simply from my words slewn on a posted page. they, the words, let other enter and know me. they are like sign posts as to who and where i am. i made my professors in the privacy of their own grading caves smile with my initial attempts, even laugh out loud as they handled my texts. i've made others cry. some choose to let go of bitterness harbored. some just text me to concur that they ponder a lot on this or that same topic. some simply express a gladness to find themselves unalone in their experiences. some follow. some glance. some mull over. some write off or submit (ha. a comment that is). why i can wear myself naked in a post or thumbed out update, i do not know. i used to believe i was very transparent, authentic, connected in real space. i am to a degree but access both into and out of myself in a knowable fashion is widening through text (shrinking verbally). so i am widening as i have narrowed. others tether to me, while i still, even now, find myself licking the severed.

widening and narrowing, and still i haven't honestly figured out the nine foot vaginas and such.

ha. i've only a couple of months before 2013 will be a year of posting deficits.... can't include facebook status updates...i just can't seem to free myself from those LIKEd strokes...but I need to up my postings...up my writings. need, yes. should, who cares. I just need the writing and oddly posting keeps me accountable to an imaginary audience unknown..

[perhaps editing will come later; i've found i do best to just write and post. the posting helps me find the errors later...]

i might be booked for that

it was suggested that the first line of my book should read, "i make nine foot vaginas and i make a lot of them..." well for sure that is one way to start.

of late i've been contemplating a phd that merges making, writing, process, other, and begins weaving this altogether. though i'd probably jump on another mfa but in creative writing...it is a shorter process and well i have crossed into a certain age category. winding it down isn't an interest but neither is winding it up. i've never wanted to live as though i am a rock being thrown through my own life. i am a ponderer, a meanderer, i lean this way and that and have only just begun to understand which leanings are my own and which are habits of body and thought acquired in route from varying life giving tethers. yes making is a must, writing as well, all connected into something purposeful that is useful for other. but exactly what. as i've been hunting about for what is of interest, what inflames, i keep coming back to what is the role of writing for the visual artist. not in terms of writing the proscribed artist statement or the exhibition proposal, but what is writings function for the visual artist. the artists that have pounded and stroked out their makings for a lifetime, the ones we know of and hear their names tossed about, WRITE. they may journal, publish essays, books, write poetry, prose or even fiction, list out fragments, unpack their lives, but they write. is the writing specific to a personality type or a learning style? do only the life-longers write? what function does it play? does it sustain the making? it is the source for the making? does it run parallel or is it all together something else? well and i just don't care about only the why of it but how might that why be used to strengthen and equip other artists to be life-longers. so not just research the why, but embracing the process and pushing it, and then passing it along.

i write to right my life, hold it together, whole it up. i write to remember, to chase the inkling. i write to make it fit together, to give a sense that there is some kind of freaking logic to it. i write because i have to, i need to, it makes order. it lets me rethink, reedit my life. it lets me stand back and look in, look out. i find and follow the intent embedded and surfacing. though i still haven't figured out the nine foot vagina dilemma. i mean i do have some undisclosed thoughts on topic well no really undisclosed as many have leaked out in posts along the way.

"My hope was that if I did this (writing) honestly I would discover how to see myself from a perspective that would render myself whole in my own eyes." -- Anne Truitt, 1974

so i make nine foot vaginas and i make a lot of them. i've made room, come on in...

perhaps i will start there.

i laugh as though i were a place, a specific space. of course i amneither

[just an exercise]

i do laugh for instantly two spaces call to mind when asked, "if you were a place, what place would you be?" a fun game of sorts but perhaps a tad too deeply revealing. but i will play anyway.

i am that shifting gap, that tiny flitting opening shifting about in the trees' canopies in my microforest that lay at the edge of the pinewoods. yet i am not tree, not leaf nor limb, but that discontinuity of physicality, the void momentarily filled with the dappling light that dances through. i am that microchasm that rides passing itself across the song of the trees' tops stretched taunt with release in the flutter of the voicing breeze. i am that breath, shifting, sighing, ever changing, letting the light in.

laughter.

i am the second stall on the second floor of the Williams Building's women's powder room sequeezed between the Derek and a stairwell. my sides are a slick putridly pale metallic salmon, once all the rage but now outdated. rarely used, almost like new, an odd pristineness in a hidden corner of the structure tucked away. my posterior and peripheral gaps are lined with ceramic salmon and white checked coolness. smack dab at my core, the heart of my function, is a flushable orifice of white porcelain with moving parts of fake chrome. i stand with my weighted middle quietly in wait with my image perpetually cast back at me. on my left in opposition to my hinge is a mysterious barred door. i don't believe the label [mechanical]. i am pretty sure the latch has remained static for the decades i've sat here. i remain fixed, occasionally my door swings and latches. it gets me to thinking again about the uncrossed threshold. my reflection stares back at me as with nothing worth saying which of course is a whole discourse in itself. oh pot.

yes. laughter.

but which am i. at glance they seem binaurally opposites (redundant but I just needed to write that) but not? perhaps worth a ponder.

my attachments have always run extremely deep

I'd say I am good at hiding this, attempt to pretend it isn't so. a material shuffle surely leads to deep heart felt pangs and tears as I touch each object and realign it in my microforest studio. it drives it all home. well i did drive a good bit of it. I hate working with water leaking from my face. I have learned to be more orderly in my various grief processes (ha), I have learned to be more self contained as though I am a fully bound and autonomous entity, but it simply isn't so, so I leak deeply as I shuffle.

I really haven't gotten down the Buddhist practice of non attachment. I get the idea but at some level it seems like bunk. I attach. I suppose much in the same way some believe in closure, which I think as well is bunk. things that connect don't need amputated in most cases; change, sure. amputated, no. bunk to absolute closures. bunk. bunk. bunk.

and so I sit my butt down to lunch on jalepena deer sausage simmered in Sierra Nevada pale ale and read some theory on the pad.