Ars Poetica 3

There is something about singing alone,loudly and wildly, in a car, with the windows rolled up on a deserted road while driving too fast--it exorcises a being.

It only takes one random, perfect note--the one that is the catalyst for a physical and metaphysical flushing. Some preternatural organ below the heart contracts, pumps for a brief time.

It is the note that musicians know, and dare to sound publicly in a deliberate seduction.

An object of experience flushes a being, too. The same way fear, creeping or pouncing, floods us with a single, overwhelming experience that makes us sweat, overreach for metaphors to communicate, take someone by the hand and lead them to the spot where they will also be forced open with ambivalent intention.

The perfectly smooth curve of an ornamented banister that fits deliberately under one's palm; the cleanly beveled edges; its solid forced existence are the artisan's legitimation to bring to question "art" as nothing more than a definition of context, a social licence of means--not ends: the whore of the flesh, the courtesan of the imagination.

There are moments, too, like twisting knives, to pry our shells apart. These are the moments that poets know and dare to sound publicly in a deliberate seduction.

Bookbinding Course, Of Course

These instructions are going to be sloppy since the course was in Norwegian and I am too lazy to look it all up right now. This is for my own reference, but do feel free to come with tips and helpful comments.

This is the sewing frame. Thumb tacks on top and underneath to hold the tape in place.

Line up the paper with the tape strips (7 cm) apart. Mark each side of the tape and a tape's width at each end.

Put the signatures in a vice and saw a groove over each of the marks. Alternatively, you can use and awl and crib and poke holes in each location.

When sewing 10 signatures it is possible to use a single length of thread - 11 book-lengths.

Sew around the ribbons - leave enough thread to knot after you thread down and up one time. Do not sew through the tape.

Be careful to use the hand behind the frame to keep the thread from knotting as you pull it through. At each end, loop the thread through the previous stitch.

Once the signatures are sewn, round them slightly to create a curved spine (horizonally), then put them in the vice. Push wood glue into the spine.

Choose the endbands, which are purely decorative in this case, and the bookcloth and paper for the cover.

 Glue the endbands (headbands and tailbands) in place above the tapes.

Cut two lengths of strong paper to reinforce and cover the spine.

Cut the paper to fit the gaps between the ribbons.

Glue the paper into place, then glue the second strip over the whole length.

Take care not to get glue anywhere it is unnecessary.

Glue the ribbons down over the first and last pages.

Cut the cardboard for the covers. Use sandpaper to round the edges slightly.

Glue the covers to the front and back pages. Use paper to protect the other pages from the excess glue.

Use papers between the pages and covers to aborb the excess moisture while the book is pressed.

Cut a length of thick paper that will extend slighty over the edges of the book's signatures and endbands. Cut the bookcloth to the appropriate size.

Glue the paper to the bookcloth and round the new spine slightly.

Cut slits in the space between the cover and signatures on each side, on both the top and the bottom of the book.

Make sure the new spine extends above the signatures and glue the bookcloth into place. Fold and wrap the bookcloth over the spine to make sure it is tight enough. Use paper to protect the bookcloth from bruising.

Before you glue the bookcloth into place too tightly, make sure you use the bone folder to smooth the bookcloth into the groove between the spine and cover (use the paper to protect the bookcloth).

Carefully glue the bookcloth into place. Fold the bookcloth over the cover and gently tuck it behind the signature spine, using the grooves to create enough room to do so.

Measure for the paper covering. It wil overlap the bookcloth by 2mm and wrap over the edges .5 cm or so (it can be trimmed afterward).

Brush some glue onto the cardboard, and over the paper. Line up the paper to the bookcloth, cover with paper and smooth with a bone folder. If there are air bubbles, you can let the air out with a pin prick. The paper will smooth during the pressing.

Clip the corners carefully so that you can glue them neatly. Glue the short ends first.

Trim if necessary.

Cut the endpapers. One for the front and one for the back. Each will be a rectangle, one "page" will be glued down to the cover, the other will be the loose leave before page one of the book.

Use newspaper to protect the paper from glue and put glue only along the edge of the fold. It is very important to put the fold snuggly into the fold between the cover and the pages.

Then put glue on the top page and smooth it with a brush.

Then close the book! Hopefully, the paper will be glued to the front cover perfectly.

Trim if necessary.

Put paper between the endpapers and the signatures and put the book between blocks and press it.

Re: The Conditions of Happiness

It isn’t a matter of being happy, but experiencing happiness now and then. Like a sudden, warm gust of wind. It has nothing to do with contentment, which is motionless in its complacency. Happiness pushes you like the Santa Ana wind, and almost knocks you off your feet as you walk home from the 4th grade after a good day. A day when Mrs. Mullins stamped your science test with her big, red “Good Job” stamp and scribbled a capital A that looked like a star. A day when you managed to land beautifully from a cherry drop - from the high bar—while Todd and Pam were watching. A day that makes you wish everyone really did break into song like in a Disney film, and that you could be Lesley Ann Warren with a pet alligator, and a father who wears lettermen sweaters and smokes a pipe. And you sing into the warm Santa Ana wind about a bullfrog named Jeremiah.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not a moment of celebration. It’s not about the achievements. It is the feeling of—if not entitlement—the rightness of your place in the world: life is good. It’s a certainty that blows through your heart.

And then leaves you cold.

To Talk of Many Things

I lit three candles.

The first somewhat inappropriate I suppose, since my grandfather was not fond of Catholic rituals. But I figure Lutheran is a good compromise between what he would have liked and what I need. My faith in ritual facing his stubborn elementary faith in God.
 
I lit a candle for my grandmother, too, though her heart still beats and her diaphragm contracts and sucks the stale air into the vacuum it creates. I am sure most people would find my private ritual today offensive. But I am lighting a candle in remembrance of a woman who is gone. All that she was with her sharp edges, bitter and strong - her "love" more readily written in fat letters on a Hallmark card than an embrace: read in the patience it takes to allow a 6 year-old to roll pie crust over wax paper, in the painfully tight snap of foam curlers. The world could be made exact and beautiful - but not without a measure of sacrifice - however small.

All that she was is dead. Etching into my childhood faith, the  faith in a meeting place where she might recognize my face among the cherubs and lost pets. She died in pieces, label by label lost and the world unrecognizable beyond cups and spoons. The last time I told her I loved her, on Christmas day, she was still polite to a stranger: Thank you, she said.

She is shattered, dead. Or I am, perhaps. What does that say of heaven?

The organist is playing something chipper. Practicing a baroque piece at a break-neck tempo. The tourists mill about the lectern. Taking photos without flash. I scribble in a notebook and wonder if my sitting here is appropriate. Somehow the notebook seems more acceptable among the pews than my laptop. Handwriting appropriate for contemplating the iconology of my childhood and the stripping of the trappings of my faith, like the labels falling from of my grandmother's memory, like fragments of a shattered shell: the definitions that held her form, defined her world, defined her in the world.

Has she hatched into something that I will one day recognize?

A woman lights a candle and crosses herself. I have tried that. In all the churches I went to in Rome. But the body language felt foreign. Feigned. And I could hear my grandfather in my ear: not a word, but a snort of scorn. Hocus-pocus is not faith.

I lit a third candle. For the man who took my innocence at six. Who took much more for many years, but I can admit to knowing he wanted more to give. It's okay now. I think. Then I cry and bypass thinking and the shell of identifying a phenomenon. He is dead. The six year old is dead.

I placed his candle on the far side of the globe. Opposite the others. And it resists lighting. Three times I try to light the damn thing and the wick comes away trailing weak, grey smoke. I am self conscious and do not laugh out loud really at the way events play along so well with my private little ritual. It is okay. And if it is not, I am.

The organist pauses and I can hear planes flying over the cathedral. Around the room, on the ceiling, the painting figures are encased in bubbles, like shrouds, or bell jars, or amniotic sacks.

On the far wall is a fresco of St. George and the dragon: a winged crocodile who belches tick-tock, tick-tock warning me to never let go of my childhood faiths.


 

Memento Mori

These nights I watch the thick, fluid occupations of my life compartmentalizing and consolidating like the ooze in a lava lamp. I feel amorphous and free: buzzing like an 18 year-old, or like a stoner walking the fine line between exhilaration and panic.

It's like bloodletting: the writing.

And I dream that my son owns the mask he has shown me -
It once belonged to a 17th century plague doctor.