Bran flakes and cold milk - recounted for Zoe

Dear Zoe,

In the digital age, nothing gets lost, but, very rarely, some things also get found.

Your ‘loud chewer Funtrest share' on FB made it impossible for me not to go looking for this long fragment of a letter I wrote about self-portraits that I sent to a young artist friend of mine almost a couple of years ago now. You might pick up the tale here if you wish:

September 2015 … I made a small bit of video for my wife, Dawn, while I was away, hiking with a couple of friends near Eldora, Colorado. She and I have been married for almost thirty years. Now, I love bran flakes and cold milk. Usually I eat two bowls every day. Dawn has told me - every way there is to tell a man - how much the sound of me chewing and slurping my bran flakes drives her up a wall. You could ask her, if you had the time.

I set the small digital camera up on the wide railing along the walkway, part way up on the side of the cabin – it was a house, really – where my friends and I were staying. The shot would be framed by the dark brown siding behind me and a grove of light green aspen back behind, near the deck.

I pressed record. I had made a brief test to ensure that I would be just far enough from the camera so that Dawn would mostly see my head and shoulders. I was wearing a soft, dark green, long-sleeved cotton shirt against the early morning chill. I stepped a few steps to where I had left a white ceramic bowl of bran flakes and milk on the railing. I picked it up and carried it toward the camera, leaning close. The sun was still low, shining bright into my face. I cradled the bowl in my right hand close to the lens. The other held the spoon.

I took a full spoonful of bran flakes, milk dribbling back into the bowl. A mouthful of chewing - slowly, thoughtfully - looking straight into the lens. The sun made me squint. Creases. Bags under those nearly closed eyes. My full cheeks and large nose, sunburned from the alpine hiking. White mustache, almost hiding my upper lip.

She would see my chewing. The camera might pick up the sounds. It was a face that would scare children, but it almost never did. I could never figure that out. A large, red-faced old man. Old enough to know better. I sometimes practiced stretching and twisting my features and bugging out my eyes in the bathroom mirror. How could the neighbor girls, Alia and Maya, Ginny and Sidra not see me as I appear? As I am?

But this video would be for Dawn. She would somehow see me smiling in just the imperceptibly upturned corner of my mouth. Maybe she would see me laughing behind my eyes.

I ate my bran flakes and cold milk, looking at a woman I had loved for thirty years – if only in my imagination on this morning from five hundred miles away. I stepped to the camera and pressed the button to stop the recording.

Let’s call it art with a small ‘a.’ It was more and less than that. I cut off the front and back of the video footage on my computer and attached the self-portrait to an email. The subject line said, “Good morning, Dawn.”

Her reply, the next morning: “Hilarious.” She said that she thought I had an endearing face. How do some people see that in me? I had looked carefully at the video. One big red face. Piggy eyes.

I had recently seen a sketch – a self-portrait of a young woman. I could see life in the few marks she made around the eyes. She had posted a two-dimensional image on a digital screen.  And still there was life. I said something about it to her and she said that after looking into a mirror for a long time, some feeling must have shown through.

It’s as good an answer as any. Tomorrow, I’ll be home. I’ll have a bowl or two of bran flakes and cold milk. Oh, Dawn will say something. She’ll tell me she missed me. She’ll touch my face. She must see something behind my eyes. I’ll laugh as I take another bite of cereal. And I will slurp the way she has heard me slurp a thousand times before.

But love is not about counting. It’s about looking somewhere and seeing something, somehow. I’ve seen it in other people’s eyes. Or maybe it’s my imagination. I think that there is an art to seeing well.

...

Okay …. That’s my word sketch. Poet Billy Collins has said that to make the reader feel, the poet needs to be calculating. So, given our conversation, so far, let’s say that I was aiming for your heart. Not to tear it out, but that you should feel something as you read those few words – feel something about more than just my face. If I completely failed to touch you, I will be disappointed. But it’s just a little bit of art. And maybe it’s also about you. I had felt something as I worked on this self-portrait. I did what I could do. I am not responsible for what you feel. My answer to all of this, such as it is, is that Art happens somewhere – somewhere in between the artist and the person who appreciates a ‘work.’ Without some feeling on both ends, there is nothing but words and lines.

You and I are not clueless. We learn from what reaches our own heart and we work with our medium over time toward some thing that will reach others. We express ourselves – we add something we cannot grasp - and we hope to reach someone else. It’s a charade. Three letters, starts with ‘A.’ Or is it four, starts with ‘L?’

**

… and now, this time I’m adding an additional few words for you, Zoe. The video of me eating bran flakes for Dawn still exists as well. Would you like to see if my words were true – or , at least good enough?

You are right that Dawn and I have figured some things out. We have lived with each other – sometimes for Dawn it’s just with the sound of me chewing my bran flakes and cold milk. But it’s been harder than that. But it is our love – only ours. Love - in the living over time with each other. Everyone else has to make their own love between themselves and some other – and many others, as well. Each love is its own, I do believe. And Love is more than we can ever fully know.

So ask me for the link to the video, if you want to. It’s probably only funny if you know the characters in the story. And even then, well, it’s only a little funny.

And now, with much thanks to Dawn, I get to write some of my own story. It’s what I do with some of my time. And live a healthy life. And laugh.

yours truly,  bert

Self Portrait - From and for Avery

Dear Avery,

I assume that you and I, as artists, are essentially peers. I have been working with words quite seriously for almost four years. You work with different things. But trying to make art is our work. Ignoring the differences between us and what we actually do, our creativity, attention, time, effort, discipline and more, are elements of similar process. We hope for satisfaction in our work, at least.

I also assume that this practice of making art is also going to shape the primary tool that will be used to make more art – that tool is my mind and my body. My work shapes me. See Escher’s hand, drawing a hand. Although, writing is mostly mental, the physical parts are also essential. I must learn to use my senses to experience and perceive a material and social world – my subjects. And I am material. With particular variations, of course, this basic framework I am describing could be used to think about making wooden step stools or writing songs. The good work I will do tomorrow builds on the good work I try to do today. And I try to look carefully at what I have done in the past.

Ira Glass, in a useful video, talks about the time and effort needed for artists to get to where they want to be. His essential point is that the sense that each artist has for what is ‘good’ is the key to their work. And to keep working. I mean to add to that thought the idea that my work over time is also how I will sharpen that creative sense and desire. And as the Zen masters insist, ongoing change is our fundamental constant.

But I do like the place that I find that have gotten to. I’ve done some good work. I think I understand more about what I am trying to do. And I have some time.

And here you also come to the paradox of the writer saying that writing is about so much more than words. This brief description of my processes, too, doesn’t capture everything. So very much cannot be put into words, at least, not by me.  And if you look back in time, you can see clearly how long writers have been writing and writing more words – with some exquisite success - and still not saying everything.

Have you seen the Universe lately, Avery? You haven’t seen the half of it.  This last week I saw a flower I hadn’t seen before, growing high in the Colorado Rockies. I figured out that it is called Sulfur Flower. I took pictures and I could write words, but forget about that. You should see it for yourself. As I kept on seeing Sulfur Flower everywhere, its appearance was not even the same from place to place. And concepts of time blow me away. Anyone who tries to perceive Beauty will discover bafflement. Vastness. intricacy. Randomness and personality. You and I are part of all that.

I cannot completely show you anything with my words. For example, take this fragment of a sketch – based on the wind whispering through the aspen leaves outside the window where I started writing this. Could I say that those leaves are like some dangling threadstrung silver Mylar disks hanging like a curtain across a hallway door? And then the back door opens, and then someone you love comes through that veil of shimmery disks, first their hands and arms, and then all of them. The fluttering of the aspen leaves is kind of like that.

Let me use some of the words you used in your note, I think that those sentences I just wrote don’t feel quite right. But they don’t feel all wrong, either. So I have work to do. And I will often have to be satisfied with what I could manage to say and move on.

And I have written all of this preamble to get finally get to this exercise. My subject, for today’s work, is self-portraiture. You have given me an example that opened a space in my own imagination: your small drawing of a young woman I barely know.

Now it’s my turn.

I made a small bit of video for my wife, Dawn, while I was away, hiking with a couple of friends near Eldora, Colorado. She and I have been married for almost thirty years. Now, I love bran flakes and cold milk. Usually I eat two bowls every day. Dawn has told me - every way there is to tell a man - how much the sound of me chewing and slurping my bran flakes drives her up a wall. You could ask her, if you had the time.

I set the small digital camera up on the wide railing along the walkway, part way up on the side of the cabin – it was a house, really – where my friends and I were staying. The shot would be framed by the dark brown siding behind me and a grove of light green aspen back behind, near the deck.

I pressed record. I had made a brief test to ensure that I would be just far enough from the camera so that Dawn would mostly see my head and shoulders. I was wearing a soft, dark green, long-sleeved cotton shirt against the early morning chill. I stepped a few steps to where I had left a white ceramic bowl of bran flakes and milk on the railing. I picked it up and carried it toward the camera, leaning close. The sun was still low, shining bright into my face. I cradled the bowl in my right hand close to the lens. The other held the spoon.

I took a full spoonful of bran flakes, milk dribbling back into the bowl. A mouthful of chewing - slowly, thoughtfully - looking straight into the lens. The sun made me squint. Creases. Bags under those nearly closed eyes. My full cheeks and large nose, sunburned from the alpine hiking. White mustache, almost hiding my upper lip.

She would see my chewing. The camera might pick up the sounds. It was a face that would scare children, but it almost never did. I could never figure that out. A large, red-faced old man. Old enough to know better. I sometimes practiced stretching and twisting my features and bugging out my eyes in the bathroom mirror. How could the neighbor girls, Alia and Maya, Ginny and Sidra not see me as I appear? As I am?

But this video would be for Dawn. She would somehow see me smiling in just the imperceptibly upturned corner of my mouth. Maybe she would see me laughing behind my eyes.

I ate my bran flakes and cold milk, looking at a woman I had loved for thirty years – if only in my imagination on this morning from five hundred miles away. I stepped to the camera and pressed the button to stop the recording.

Let’s call it art with a small ‘a.’ It was more and less than that. I cut off the front and back of the video footage on my computer and attached the self-portrait to an email. The subject line said, “Good morning, Dawn.”

Her reply, the next morning: “Hilarious.” She said that she thought I had an endearing face. How do some people see that in me? I had looked carefully at the video. One big red face. Piggy eyes.

I had recently seen a sketch – a self-portrait of a young woman. I could see life in the few marks she made around the eyes. She had posted a two-dimensional image on a digital screen.  And still there was life. I said something about it to her and she said that after looking into a mirror for a long time, some feeling must have shown through.

It’s as good an answer as any. Tomorrow, I’ll be home. I’ll have a bowl or two of bran flakes and cold milk. Oh, Dawn will say something. She’ll tell me she missed me. She’ll touch my face. She must see something behind my eyes. I’ll laugh as I take another bite of cereal. And I will slurp the way she has heard me slurp a thousand times before.

But love is not about counting. It’s about looking somewhere and seeing something, somehow. I’ve seen it in other people’s eyes. Or maybe it’s my imagination. I think that there is an art to seeing well.

**

Okay, Avery. That’s my word sketch. Poet Billy Collins has said that to make the reader feel, the poet needs to be calculating. So, given our conversation, so far, let’s say that I was aiming for your heart. Not to tear it out, but that you should feel something as you read those few words – feel something about more than just my face. If I completely failed to touch you, I will be disappointed. But it’s just a little bit of art. And maybe it’s also about you. I had felt something as I worked on this self-portrait. I did what I could do. I am not responsible for what you feel. My answer to all of this, such as it is, is that Art happens somewhere – somewhere in between the artist and the person who appreciates a ‘work.’ Without some feeling on both ends, there is nothing but words and lines.

You and I are not clueless. We learn from what reaches our own heart and we work with our medium over time toward some thing that will reach others. We express ourselves – we add something we cannot grasp - and we hope to reach someone else. It’s a charade. Three letters, starts with ‘A.’ Or is it four, starts with ‘L?’

**

So do you want to see the snapshot from the video that I worked from?

But I want to consider the question I am asking myself? I often like to work – sometimes aiming at one reader. But now that I have made this sketch, do I have something to share more widely? I think that I still have time and work to do.

I’m going to say that you started this exchange, Avery. Inadvertently, perhaps. Oh yes, I jumped at the chance to play with my words and to play this sort of game with you. Kristina will probably tell you that I like to play younger than my mustache, but I have also ridden around the sun quite a few times.

Thank you for our conversation. But it’s really only a bit of our lives. We can keep playing, but we both have other things to do, too. And people to be with.

I look forward to hearing from you and seeing you again. This will be a little irregular, I realize, but I would ask you to give your roommate a hug from me. I miss seeing and talking with her. Or you could have her give you one from me, if you don’t think I am being too forward. Either way, I have a healthy imagination and more gratitude and affection than I know what to do with, sometimes. I try to put some of those feelings into the words that I write. I have seen some of your work. It seems clear to me that you have also glimpsed for yourself some of what I have tried to express in my work.

Sincerely,

a writer you barely know

P. S. link to self portrait

Joseph McGowan - Genesis mural

"Close to the Edge
Genesis, 1.31
And God saw all that He had made and it was very good and the evening and the morning were the sixth day

Joseph McGowan
2.23.1993"

Emily's father finished this mural 2 days before her sister was born in their first home. She last saw it when she was 2 - and just revisited it at age 21.

Scarf

I'm not sure when I got this scarf. I think I might have found it at the Social Services League and thought that Dawn might like it. I liked the color, the patterns. It is just polyester but it feels silky and cool on my skin.

It had been laying around the house, tucked away, for a while. I put it into a white elephant exchange and it came back to me.

I added it to some other stuff for Science Club and a first grader made a parachute out of it, tying the four corners - with my help - to a container that carried an egg down from an upper story window.

I carried the scarf back with some leftover stuff back to my house. That's when I made this upside-down parachute. A couple of thin sticks. Some string. A little tape. I hung it from the pergola over the patio and watched it blow in the wind. It was right outside my study window.

I started taking some photos and videos. I sent some digital copies to a friend as a kind of digital card. She's studying textiles at KU. When she complimented me, this is how I responded.

"Thanks for saying so. I am lucky to have the time and the chance to work at things that interest and amaze me. There is some effort involved and I hope to be able to show something sometimes. It doesn’t have to be that much. Why am I not surprised that you would see something beautiful and interesting in those scarf photos? As Mr. Dylan says, “Buckets of rain, buckets of tears, I got all them buckets coming out of my ears …”

I watched the wind and the rain whip that scarf around in the darkness as I waited for my computer to boot. One corner is blown off the end of one of the sticks again. I don’t know what I can do with that, but I saw something. And I am sometimes amazed by people I never expected to meet. Don’t take this the wrong way, since you know I can be fascinated by thrift store scarves and mop heads on dirty coffee shop floors. "

Perhaps I should have said this: I can be creative, but in a way, that's not the first word that comes to mind. I didn't not make colors, or the wind, even the processes that made the scarf. I have tried to put some things together. To see what is beautiful and interesting in front of me. I'm good at making associations. But what really matters to me is how I associate things with people that I care about - sometimes only a little, sometimes a lot more.

Of course, the longer I have watched this thing, dancing in the wind, the more it became a small part of me. I was just playing. Trying to see what I could see. The parachute kept coming apart, getting tangled. I fiddled with it. I took more images. Some months went by. Here are some different looks at the scarf:

And in the rain:

And this composite taken with flash at night:

Here's a link to a video, with the scarf reflected in the pond. Sailing away

And here are the night sounds, recorded as a black video, with added flash photos taken at about the same time: 

Finally, I took the parachute down, and made a flag out of it.

And now for a few last photos - for now...

The thing is only a scarf. But after playing with it, sharing it, watching how it catches the light and the wind, the night and the rain, it's still just a scarf. But this scarf is now associated in my mind with so much more. Sometimes I touch it and hold it up against my face. Sometimes, it leads me into recollections of people I care about. So much of what I care about cannot be seen directly, after all. 

I'm not just thinking now of Dawn or Emily or Bailie - but I did think about those women as I played at my little art project - just catching a thrift store scarf in thin air. In so very many ways, people inspire me to look at what is beautiful in the world around me and I then think about how I can show them what I seen. 

And the color of this scarf is so very pretty to my eyes.

(Open) Postscript to a friend

It is rare that someone like you and me should even know each other as well as we do. Of course, writers have expressed themselves quite intimately throughout recorded human history. But technology is changing the meaning of distance and time – and cultural rules now allow new possibilities.

We have read some of each other’s thoughts - appropriate and personal (those thoughts), I think. I have been glad to have expressed myself and to have been read, but Emily Dickenson had been turning over in her grave before most of her intimate ideas were revealed.

As a writer – and working at becoming ‘better’ in some undefined sense – I would invite some criticism of what I have written – but still, our face to face friendship matters much more to me. I suppose we shall have to play this part by ear.

Words can be such slippery things. One thing peeks out at me. Both of us use the word ‘you’ in our writing – sometimes being a little  (or a lot) vague about who the ‘you’ really is.

In that poem ‘Spirit in the sky’ that I recorded the other night this much was true:

“Of course, I was thinking of a few young baristas that early morning. I had quite absurdly punched up Greenbaum's song on a device for them the day before. And I would be doing something else besides stopping in at Aimee's on a Sunday afternoon for something to drink and a smile. I was quite literally planning instead to walk among the dead - at a cemetery - while the baristas would likely be dying among the laughing regulars while they did their jobs near the end of their shifts.

But 'you' are many different people. There will be other nights that I will be thinking of you as surely as there are stars and the moon in the sky. And some of you have already passed on.”

This ‘thinking about you’ is all a little like me asking you if I would lie to you. One answer is that  of course I would. Another is that I would never wittingly hurt you. But here is a hard truth. Human beings are unwitting all the time.

One thing that I like about gardening is that I cannot fool myself. I can spread compost, plant tomato plants, hoe and water and pull weeds, but most of the whole process is not up to me. And still I will take some credit. My efforts do matter in small but specific and beautiful and tasty ways.

And now I mean you, Mary, when I say I hope that you and I will get to know each other better. You are one of the stars in my sky. I will have to imagine that the analogy is clear enough, but in some things, words cannot say as well as we can say and mean with the many other ways we have of expressing ourselves as human beings.

But I get a great deal of satisfaction of trying to say some things that matter to me using words. You can ask me some time what I mean when I say that you’re no slouch, either, if you want to. My kingdom for the right emoticon, here.

You, Mary, should see my garden sometime. I think that those words in that sentence mean exactly what they say.

Now I think I’ll listen to Mr. Greenbaum and Mr. Simon one more time, and then see if I can get back to sleep. It’s funny, Norman – perhaps he and Paul won’t mind if I call them by their first names – Norman uses so many words I don’t believe in. And Paul is not really talking exactly about what I’m thinking about in ‘Tenderness.’ But all of that doesn’t really matter. I hear something in their songs that tells me what I mean for myself within the ways that they express themselves – what they have to say.

You gotta wonder what it all means, sometime. ‘Who’ am I talking to? I know that I wonder. But who the ! am I? Maybe you can tell me. ‘Who?’ indeed!

Link back to 'Spirit in the sky'

Mime

Photo by The Lawrence/KC Mimes

Still breathing

Bert Haverkate-Ens

Once upon a time I met a young mime, a woman in black and white with red lips. She was frozen in place, staring off into the space just over my head. I had been shuffling along and maybe I’d been talking to myself. I admit that I was a little lonely and a little lost in my thoughts. I had been seeing very little but the cracks in the sidewalk.

But I swear, that, although there were other people all around me, I heard a soft voice in my ear. It was no more than a whisper that said, ‘look up.’

And there she was, standing completely and absolutely still. One hand was gesturing towards nothing that I could see. I even turned around to look. And when I turned back, the young mime was clearly not looking at me. Her gaze was over my head as I have said.

She stood as still as a statue, hat in one hand. Her skirt fluttered a little. But for all the evidence in front of me, she was but a moment of longing, frozen in time.

I looked into her face. How could she bear the loneliness? I thought to myself. All of this living and animated life flowing past her at such a furious and seemingly carefree pace.

And then it occurred to me, that I myself was feeling exactly the same way. I looked again out to where she seemed to be looking and then I looked deep into her eyes.

I must have stopped breathing, but I could feel my heart pounding. I realized that the young woman inside this exquisite being was unmistakably alive.

Photo by Krissy

It was then that I wondered that if we could only and briefly share our loneliness – she in her still world and I in my moving one – perhaps we might be freed - for a moment, at least. If only I could give her a token of something that I couldn’t put into words.

And then I reached my hands into my pockets.

I know now what a ridiculous sight I must have made as I pulled two empty pockets out of my baggy pants like rabbits out of a hat. And then I nearly wept.

And if I am making this up, you can call me a silly old fool, but I swear that the young mime blew me a kiss with one eye lash.

And then my own stony face must have broken up, a smile cracked onto my old, gray front. And then – stars above – the mime melted right in front of my very eyes.

Not into a puddle - that would be absurd - but into a young woman jumping down from her pedestal into my arms. She planted two red lipped kisses, one on each cheek, and pressed her body into mine.

I suddenly couldn’t move a muscle. Not a single one. At least, not so that you could see – but my heart was now beating wildly.

And then the young mime skipped on down the street. She left me standing frozen there, her hat, with a few bills stuck in it, now in my hand, the other stretched out as if to follow her.

And then I could sense a crowd of people around me, staring at me where I stood – me, as still as statue. I heard a mother behind me tell her daughter – I could only guess who they were by their voices – that a dollar in my hat might wake me up. I heard a very young girl’s voice sound doubtful, but then I heard what sounded like rummaging around in a purse. And moments later a little girl in a pixie haircut and a pink dress was standing in front of me. Out of the bottoms of my eyes, I could see that her head hardly came up to the hat in my hand.

And then – even now I can hardly believe what I am telling you - we must have stood there looking into each other’s eyes forever – it seemed at least like twenty years, or so. That little girl looked back deep into my eyes.

And then I must have blinked (I wasn’t really very good at miming), and in the next apparent instant, her face was face to face with mine and she was dressed in a black and white top and a fluttering black skirt.

She said quite brightly, ‘thank you for holding my hat, I hope I didn’t leave you too long. But I just really needed a sandwich and something to drink. I’d been waiting almost forever.’ I could see her red lips moving. Her eyes were a liquid brown.

And this time it was me, melting into her arms. I kissed her soundly on both cheeks. And in a blink of my eye, she was frozen again, standing still, her slippered feet a fixed part of her pedestal. But this time her eyes were looking deep into mine. I swear to you that as I watched, her red lips never unlocked from their pucker.

But I could hear her whisper, directly into my ear: ‘I’m so very glad that you looked up at me.’

And I smiled back just with my eyes but I said out loud, ‘I think maybe I could use a sandwich and something to drink. Do you know a good place?’

Her free hand was already pointing and I followed the line to a coffee shop half-way down the block. I smiled at her then with my whole face and blew her a kiss and still she didn’t blink an eye. But as I turned around to go, I heard her voice calling in my ear.’ If you stop at Aimee’s  tomorrow, we could talk like real human beings. I’m a barista by day. This is only my night job.’

Photo by John Adair Photographs

Prufrock

Cracked Blue Pitcher Productions presents: "The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T. S. Eliot - read by Bert Haverkate-Ens - with a short story of pitchers and books preceding the poem. The entire video is about 18 min.

Poem only - with background music from 'Still Breathing' sampled.

Poem only.