Aberration Nation: For Haiti: A Tiny Painting

Monday, January 25, 2010

For Haiti: A Tiny Painting

I just completed this small (5" x 7") piece in honor and support of Haiti.

It will be donated to a project currently being organized by Monkdogz Urban Art (Chelsea, NYC) in which all proceeds will support the relief effort.

The words around the Hibiscus (their national flower) were taken from their national anthem:

"And our souls take courage.
Let us toil joyfully,
For our forebears,
For our country."

I hope this will remind everyone to keep Haiti in their positive thoughts and prayers. In addition, let's not forget to focus on all that we have to be thankful for, and to keep life's aberrations in perspective.

I received the following email story the other day. I usually don't spend too much time reading all the "forwards" I get, but this one caught my eye and made an impression. Here it is ... edited a bit by yours truly ... I'm not sure where the stats came from, and if they're reliable, but nevertheless, they're worth considering next time any of us feels like complaining.

Are you Blessed?

I went to heaven last night ... in my dreams. A angel showed me around. We walked side-by-side into a large workroom filled with angels. My angel guide stopped and said, "This is the Receiving section. Here we receive all petitions said in prayer to God."

I looked around the area. It was terribly busy with tons of angels sorting petitions from people all over the world.

Then we moved down a long corridor until we reached the second section. The angel said to me, "This is the Packaging and Delivery section. Here, the graces and blessings that people ask for are processed and delivered."

I noticed again how busy it was. There were so many angels working like crazy. So many blessings were being packaged for delivery to Earth.

Finally at the farthest end of the long corridor, we stopped at the door of a very small station. To my great surprise, only one angel was seated there--idly doing nothing. "This is the Acknowledgement section," my angel friend quietly admitted to me. He seemed embarrassed.

"How is it that no work is going on?" I asked.

Sadly, the angel sighed and said, "After people receive the blessings they ask for, very few send back an acknowledgement."

"What blessings should they acknowledge?" I asked.

Here's what the angel said,

"If you have food in the refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof overhead, and a place to sleep, you're richer than 75% of those who live in this world.

If you have money in the bank, in your wallet, and/or spare change in a jar, you are among the top 8% of this world's wealthy.

And if you read this on your own computer, you are part of the top 1% in the world who have that opportunity.

If you woke up this morning with more health than illness, you are more blessed than the many who will not even survive the day.

If you have never experienced fear in battle, the loneliness of imprisonment, the agony of torture, or pangs of starvation, you are ahead of 700 million people in the world.

If you attend a temple or church or whatever without fear of harassment, arrest, torture or death, you are envied by, and more blessed than, three billion people in this world.

If your parents are still married, you are very rare.

If you can hold your head up and smile, you are not the norm. You're unique to all those in doubt and despair."

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Novel Passages: Cool Lines from Recommended Books

In actuality I wouldn't have minded sharing the Object's toothbrush. I wouldn't have minded being the Object's toothbrush. I was already well acquainted with the splendors of her mouth. Smoking is good for that. You get a full display of the puckering and the sucking. The tongue often makes an appearance, licking form the lips any stickiness imparted by the filter. Sometimes bits of paper adhere to the bottom lip and the smoker, pulling them away, reveals the candied lower teeth against he pulpy gums. And if the smoker is a blower of smoke rings, you get to see all the way in to the dark velvet of the inner cheek.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
_____

In the novels nothing ever seems to get by him, so how come when he's here, he's not? Perhaps so much assails him that he has to close down ninety percent of himself to phenomena in order not to explode. Though then again, I thought, maybe he's just out to lunch.

The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth
_____

... impulsively, with the tip of my tongue I began to lick the ink of the signature, patiently as a cat at his milk bowl I licked away until there was no longer the "0," the "l," the "i," the "v," the second "i," the "a"--licked until the up-swept tail was completely gone. I had drunk her writing. I had eaten her name. I had all I could do not to eat the whole thing.

" ...This girl is full of tears. You see that the moment you look at her. Inside she is all tears. Can you stand up to her tears, Marcus?"

Indignation by Philip Roth
_____

"No writer ever hits a slump. As Algis Budrys (who is a helluva writer, and who taught me about half of what I know) once said to me: You don't slump, you just reach a plateau. Then you have to get your wind, and readjust your thinking and your synapses, and get set to write better, with more maturity, with greater passion and purpose. He was right."

Harlan Ellison, On Being a Writer
______

"You have not whipped me, whittled me down, or scared me enough to make me quit."

A Mighty Long Way: My Journey to Justice at Little Rock Central High School by Carlotta Walls LaNier
______

"They are crying intensely, the dependable father whose center is the source of all order, who could not overlook or sanction the smallest sign of chaos--for whom keeping chaos far at bay had been intuition's chosen path to certainty, the rigorous daily given of life--and the daughter who is chaos itself."

American Pastoral by Philip Roth
_____

"That people were manifold creatures didn't come as a surprise the Swede, even it if was a bit of a shock to realize it anew when someone let you down. What was astonishing to him was how people seemed to run out of their own being, run out of whatever the stuff was that made them who they are and, drained of themselves, turn into the sort of people they would once have felt sorry for. It was a s though while their lives were rich and full they were secretly sick of themselves and couldn't wait to dispose of their sanity and their health and all sense of proportion so as to get down to that other self, the true self, who was a wholly deluded fuckup."

American Pastoral by Philip Roth
_____

"She had worked like a great artist; for a time--indeed, for years--she had been meaningless, but at the end there was presented to the girl the complete picture of a cheerless, loveless world in which the young rush to destruction until they learn better--a shamefaced world of precautions and barriers which may avert evil, but which do not seem to bring good, if we may judge from those who have used them the most.

A Room with a View by E. M. Forster
_____

"It has seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book."

The Hours by Michael Cunningham
_____

"Sometimes I fear to write, even in fictional form, about things that really happened to me, about things that I ready did, or about the numerous unattractive, cruel, or embarrassing thoughts that I have one time or another entertained. Just as often, I find myself writing about disturbing or socially questionable acts and states of mind that have no real basis in my life at all, but which, I am afraid, people will quite naturally attribute to me when they read what I have written. Even if I assume that readers will be charitable enough to absolve me from personally having done or thought such things--itself a dubious assumption, given my own reprehensible tendency as a reader to see autobiography in the purest of fictions--the mere facts that I could even imagine someone's having done or thought them, whispers my fear, is damning in itself."

Maps & Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands by Michael Chabon
______

"But how will I get out?" And all at once the door was open--and there was Seldon and behind him his mother. "How'd you do that?" I said. "I opened the door," he said. "But how?" He shrugged. "I pushed. I just pushed. It was open all the time." And that was when I began to bawl and Mrs. Wishnow took me in her arms and said, "That's okay. Things like this happen. They can happen to anyone."

The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
______

"Let's formulate our manifesto, gentleman," said Zola. "First, we think all truth beautiful, no matter how hideous its face may seem. We accept all of nature, without any repudiation. We believe there is more beauty in harsh truth than in a pretty lie, more poetry in earthiness than in all the salons of Paris. We think pain good, because it is the most profound of all human feelings. We think sex beautiful, even when portrayed by a harlot and a pimp. We put character above ugliness, pain above prettiness, and hard, crude reality above all the wealth in France. We accept life in its entirety, as good as the countess, the concierge as good as the general, the peasant as good as the cabinet maker, for they all fit into the pattern of nature, and are woven into the design of life."

Lust for Life by Irving Stone
______

The anticipation and dread he felt at seeing her was also a kind of sensual pleasure, and surrounding it, like an embrace, was a general elation--it might hurt, it was horribly inconvenient, no good might come of it, but he had found out for himself what it was to be in love, and it thrilled him.

Atonement by Ian McEwan
______

What really counted was the possibility of escape, a leap of freedom, out of the implacable ritual, a wild run for it that would give whatever chance for hope there was. Of course, hope meant being cut down on some street corner, as you ran like mad, by a random bullet. But when I really thought it through, nothing was going to allow me such a luxury. Everything was against it; I would just be caught up in the machinery again.

The Stranger by Albert Camus
_____

He wished he had inhabited more of his life, used it better, filled it fuller.

The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler
_____

It was more dangerous not to go; I was running the risk of becoming trapped in my own fantasies. So I was doing the right thing by going. She would behave normally, I would behave normally, and everything would be normal again.

The Reader by Bernhard Schlink
_____

How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.

Atonement by Ian McEwan
______

"Do you call yourself an artist?"
"Yes"
"How absurd. You never sold a painting in your life."
"Is that what being an artist means--selling? I thought it meant one who was always seeking without absolutely finding. I thought it meant the contrary from 'I know it. I have found it.' When I say I am an artist, I mean 'I am seeking. I am striving. I am in it with all my heart."

Lust for Life by Irving Stone

Monday, January 25, 2010

For Haiti: A Tiny Painting

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