Uncategorized « Galleryloulou’s Weblog

Uncategorized « Galleryloulou’s Weblog

About « Galleryloulou’s Weblog

About « Galleryloulou’s Weblog

SMILEY’S DICE ON THE LOST DICE

   The throw of the dice this week lands on the lost dice.  It was an unusual time to be writing the column, around four in the afternoon. The sunshine drew me up upstairs to my writing desk, where rays of winter light teased me into believing it wasn’t freezing outside.  I decided to write the column. I knew I shouldn’t write on my laptop because it is deconstructing. The ports and CD player have malfunctioned, the words suddenly go black, and the mouse isn’t operable. But the warmth of the sun, and the window that enables me to see the sky, drew me to the desk and so I worked around the errors.  If someone came into the downstairs gallery, I’d hear the little bell. I began the column and then, the little bell rang.  Richard came by to say hi, and to tell me about Art Basel in Miami;  his  month long episode of painting in T-shirts and sandals, the galas, the ocean, and so I enjoyed the conversation of Richard Kurtz, a very talented living art sort of artist,  he paints abstract graffiti.   Another ring of the bell and it was the Rabbi and his friend. I just met him a week ago. He comes on Sabbath and refuses most everything  I offer. He sat outside on the porch and we talked about the absence of business in Santa Fe.  After the Rabbi left, I took a bath, heated left over soup, and then about nine, I began to write again.   I only had a few paragraphs written from the afternoon, and  when I returned to the column after dinner, the whole piece took another course.  I was writing not what I intended, but it was sailing on a perfect course.   It was writing without the editor, meaning the inner editor that sometimes swoops down and bites your nails off. I was writing about many things that happened. It was titled the Events of December.    When I finished, I clicked to save the document and the laptop responded negatively. It vanished. In fact everything on the computer vanished.      I’ve  thought about trying to recapture the column, trying to reinvent the stream of consciousness that seemed to be marathoning through my soul.   There were so many voices speaking all at once.  I had to figure out how to connect the moment the snow reminded me of a blank piece of paper, and how we must place our print on the snow, on the white page, on our own path.  I wrote about my father, and how he used to mock my adolescent mantra, “ I want to be alone,” and how I could not explain to him why I wanted to be alone.  Then, at one moment in the path of the full moon, I realized I wasn’t wrong, being alone is a part of my life. I was practicing back then.  I didn’t have much to show for it; a few poems, a diary, but nothing I could show my father and say, “ This is what brings me joy.”     I wrote about Santa Fe this season.  This one night I took a walk down Palace Avenue, and the snowflakes fell on my lashes, light as the touch of Alice’s paws when she strokes my face, and it made me laugh, and want to tell someone. As people walked past me, they burrowed their heads  in their coats, and looked to the ground.  There were  people gathering at the Plaza  prancing around a tented booth, wrapped in colorful scarf’s and hats,  netted by  hundreds of flickering Christmas lights. The beauty was  heartbreakingly beautiful.  Contrary to this Bing Crosby White Christmas cinematic  beauty are the empty shops, and the salesclerks  staring through glass windows, or smoking outside in the snow.  Where have all the customers gone?  It is a unimaginably quiet melancholy three days before Christmas.       Last night was the silent night. After a month of receptions and house guests it was the first time I had to look back and recall the events with some crystallization.   At the end of the column, I found that my place was here, and that I was all right with the path I’d taken because it was my print in the world, even if sometimes it is very difficult to walk in these boots.  Our paths begin at birth, and we don’t understand our choices, for many years, until one moment, we do.   take the path all the way in 2008.