Dreams of wild bears loose in a house, animal bonding, wild animal freedom; teaching art classes, leading people in making art together in community; books, what is a book; questions of what is art, what is it to be an artist; completing the Nanowrimo challenge ...
11/30/11
10:54am
It had rained a long steady rain overnight. The sun came out a moment after she sat down to do her last stint for the Nanowrimo challenge. It was the last day of the challenge. She woke that morning to the sound of drips in her window. It could have been the drip that woke her since one of the drip sounds seemed as if it could be coming from inside the house. She worried whether the workmen had covered their roof work. She had experienced leaky roofs on so many different occasions and places that such drip sounds aroused in her almost a fear of what kind of deluge might be about to break through. The drip stopped soon after her waking. She had not gotten up to investigate. That the drip stopped meant the rain had slowed or stopped.
She had had a somewhat scary dream of being in some big house, (always with the many rooms or living quarters), and catching sight of one or two large bears rumbling around inside downstairs. She had been able to close the doors to the room she was in, but she feared the doors would not hold against these bears who were in search of food. She went around various back stairs and hallways to spread the word there were bears downstairs. If she remembered the dream, everyone seemed oblivious to the possibilities either of there being bears, or their being a danger. She had felt unable to get her message across, to get anyone to pay attention. At one point either the bears changed to lions or there was also a lion on the loose, though it was not yet a huge lion. It seemed she woke from the dream before anything more dangerous could happen.
She believed there were at least two things prompting the particular imagery of this dream. She had just started reading Bernd Heinrich's The Nesting Season. In the beginning he told of his experiences fostering goslings and how geese and goslings had to bond so strongly that they were always attached until maturity. It meant goslings made such pitiable sounds if separated from a parent and the parent had to respond to these sounds. Upon reunion the gosling made sounds of pleasure, sounds that were positive feedback to the parent as well. Heinrich told how this communication or feedback loop created the same response in him at least.
She was not sure how this related to the bear dream but she felt it did somehow. Perhaps because of a film she had seen recently, a film by and starring Robert Redford. There was a bear in this story. The additional material with the movie showed the animal trainer working with the young bear actors. These were orphan cubs he had raised and now much older. Part of his method was to wrestle and rough house in play with them and constantly speak to them in praising tones. They needed the wrestling and the praising to maintain the bond that existed. She had seen how the trainer rolled around on the ground with the bear, completely entwined with it. The bear was not a small animal, certainly at least as big as the man.
In the movie, the bear had badly mauled one of the characters, to the point the man was seriously debilitated for the rest of his life. It had returned at some point, caught, and sent to live a miserable depressing existence in a local wildlife zoo. The victim of the bear attack wanted to see the bear, to face his own fear, and his attacker. Upon seeing the caged bear, the man knew he could not live with himself knowing this magnificent wild animal was living such a restricted existence. He insisted that his buddy get the bear free somehow. They managed to free the bear.
Was the dream about bonding, freedom, wild nature? She did not need to pin down an answer. She did not need to understand an answer. It could be enough to just be affected by the feelings from the dream. Things would unfold over time.
She had gone to the last Nanowrimo 'write-in' just to check in and let the leader know that she had indeed been keeping up with the work. This time they did exchange ideas and experiences. The leader said that all stories, whether fact or fiction, were part of the collective unconscious, and that all stories were mysteries. One told a story to share the mystery the story held. Also that all stories were variations on a theme. One could not find a new story to tell - it was just how one told it,
She thought she had come to terms with how she would cope with holding her classes and fulfilling various art request agreements. She had looked forward to meeting with her students the next morning, much as she would have preferred to be able to sit down to do the Nanowrimo session instead. The night before class there had been too much on her plate to prepare the house for class in the evening. She would have to leave it this week except for the rearranging of furniture to accommodate the students. She had just moved one table when the phone rang. One of the students was cancelling because of an unexpected schedule conflict which could continue indefinitely. She moved the table back to its usual spot and rushed around to complete the rest of her morning preparations. She was ready as she could be at the appointed time. The other two students were usually about ten minutes late. She realized that one had left a message also cancelling coming to class. Now it was too late to call the other student to cancel the class. Usually that had only mildly troubled her. She preferred to have the flexibility to cancel herself if she really needed it, though she rarely did.
The session had gone nicely with just the two of them. But it was a huge side trip or interruption for her. There had been all the emotional energy spent just worrying about how or whether to carry out the preparation routine she usually went through the night before class. She had been ok with that part of it, because it meant that she was following a housekeeping routine. She liked that part of it. But there was always the worry over whether she had the materials on hand that she needed for class, and just how did she intend to proceed with the lesson. That had become a little easier since she had started the free class for adults at the library. At least there, since she had already done some aspect of the lesson, she had some plan to follow already and did not have to create a new plan. She also found the lessons themselves a body of work. But she had questioned the purpose of such a body of work.
She believed that people did not really need art lessons. She herself had hated going to class at art school and cut school so often. She could barely bring herself to get to classes. She really believed that people should and could be learning on their own. On the other hand, yes there were plenty of things she had learned from other people, but mostly in the business of going about one's day and just being open to the ideas of others. There were things to learn everywhere. She loved her lessons in theory but who would ever really learn anything from them? If one had what it took to learn, one could invent all this stuff for oneself. If one did not have an open learning mindset, one would be immune to the effects of the lessons. She wished she could see them in a different way. What else were they? What else could the lessons be seen as? Her approach to how she made up lessons was based on what she used to do for herself when she did make it to her painting classes in art school. She had found the drawing or painting of the model or still life so boring. To keep her own interest she had simply applied various arbitrary restrictions on how she would handle a study. These were not lessons for herself, simply something to make it an interesting exploration or study for herself.
She supposed that the overall story or organization of her lessons was that it somewhat followed a calendar based theme in an attempt to cycle through the diverse limited themes her students liked.
Her involvement with the Nanowrimo project found her old doubts about being an artist resurfacing. She was questioning it all over again. Why had it been so compelling to do this concentrated writing and not art in the same way? But then she had been so far away for so long from her original intentions about art. Those ties had become so tenuous that she no longer had faith there was anything left there. Whether it been the actual writing, or that she'd worked almost daily, on one project with such focus, she did not know.
12:25p 1544 words
The sun was now shining fully and the sky was clear. The winds had been blowing the clouds out from the southwest. The southern or southwestern window had rattled a few times from the strong gust. It was to be a warm day as well.
The kids' class the previous day had been almost a full house. She loved it when lot of people came to class. They had done drawings of Native American motifs and subjects. The first was of a highly stylized and patterned eagle design. Work of this nature allowed people to let loose and color wildly. Because the design was so abstracted, so obviously different than a 'realistic' eagle, yet still identifiable as an eagle, they were freed from the judgement they carried inside them. She loved to see them all so engrossed in their work. She loved the quiet sound of their concentration. And she loved all the work they did. This was what she loved about having classes. If she was able to bring a group of people together in the shared activity of making art together, and having them enjoy the process, she felt her heart swell with joy (and pride). The private classes were more troublesome in that she felt more obligation that she was supposed to 'teach' because they were paying for the classes.
What if the lessons were a record or a kind of book of the art experiences, the history of the classes. Perhaps that was a better way to look at what she was creating overall with the lessons. Just as she loved writing in her journal for her own memory to be able to look back on how she had been thinking or dealing with something on a given day, dealing with events that came up cyclically. Her journals had been such a personal reference source for her. Once she had started with them and found them useful to herself, she had gone on to do it because she wanted it for herself.
Something on that order was what had started her series of painting local scenes. There were several factors, but one was when she had pulled out the stack she had in her painting bag to show a friend. They felt like a book because of their size. They were not bound as a book, but had the feel of a book just because they were a stack the size of a picture book. She knew she wanted one day to make a book of some (or all) of the paintings. And now it did not even matter if she herself made the book. The fact that the paintings existed as a body of work made them have at least the spirit of a book. It was part of their nature.
What was a book? That definition was changing in this day and age. A book was a world, or a window on the world, that one could hold in one's hand and turn the pages or leaves of. There was something about being able to hold it in one's hand with the feeling that one could step through the small space into another world. What about the few huge books that also existed? What made them books? That they had pages to turn? She had heard about some of these world's largest books. If she remembered correctly, one was an enormous atlas. She thought perhaps there was also a large book by Audobon - of birds.
1:03p 2130 words
She was nearly at her word count quota to fulfill the Nanowrimo requirements. Whether she had come to any real resolutions for herself she did not know. Could such questions ever really be solved? She wondered what she would feel like when she was done with it. Would she be as glad as she had presumed she would be, or would she be nostalgic or sad that it ended. She did not imagine that she would try this again the following year. If by then she had learned she could write fiction, if she indeed she had discovered she really wanted to do that or to know she could, then she would not need to do it in November. What would be the point of doing it then? Why would she wait? She had certainly found out she could write that many words in that time frame. If the purpose of it was to prove to oneself that one could write that amount in a month, while at the same time creating a novel, then once one had proved it, one knew it. One did not need to prove it again. One might want to up the ante on it. Once one knew one could make up stories and knew one could write in that time frame, but also knew one wanted to write fiction, one would assumedly go ahead and do it.
This seemed such a different proposition than making art, since she was still so confused over why she made art. She had different levels and purposes for making art. Perhaps that was fine. The art school idea of what art and being an artist meant, had been such a burden to her. It had taken most of her life to outgrow that and she still was not completely free of it.
She wanted to explore this idea a bit further but for right now she wanted to see if she was done with the word count. Her understanding herself as an artist would have to wait.
1:18p 2473 words
As far as she knew she was finished. If she found when she went to validate, that the count came up short, she would have to be ready to write some more. She had better validate early enough to allow for extra writing time if needed.
1:28p 2568 words
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