A Tale of Three Artists, told Mother's Day 2008

Long ago...

My mother, Lou Ponder Rogers, Artist, and me.

I will tell you a tale, the one that stands at my beginning.
     My mother was the only child of a woman called Granny. Granny had virtues, but like many witches in tales she was not easy to live with, and tended to eat people right up, if they let her. Especially little children, especially the only one who was hers.  Granny had perhaps already eaten her husband. No one is sure.
     So rather than be eaten up, my mother as a young girl took to dwelling in the wild wood within. She painted what she saw there:

     She had not the eyes for the world as most know it, and little understood what most learn early, and was wise in ways most never see. She thought she would dwell alone within forever. But then one day a bright thing happened. In a gallery of her paintings she saw someone looking who understood. He was a painter, he loved Van Gogh. Sometimes he painted portraits of himself:

     He was warm, and reached into her world, and held her heart in his hands. He asked her to come live with him in a house he had built in the woods by a river, and be his bride. And she did. It was a new thing, entirely.
     Yet there were things she did not know (as in every true tale).  She did not know that he was drawn down, sometimes, into sorrow. Down into the Underworld where no one could follow.


     But he did not stay long there, and it happened only once in a while, and no one told her anything about it. So she thought all was well, and that her life had blossomed, and that the story would stay the same story to the end. 
     She and he painted together, and did other things, and soon she was round and full and there were to be three of them. She did strange, small real things she had not anticipated, like cook and change diapers. She was not sure she was good at it, but she wanted it. One day in January, she and he went out and took pictures of themselves with their baby, handing the camera back and forth between them. 


     Happiness was present, in that moment, there.
     But, the dark below began to call him. Things began to crawl up. The things that beset painters, that whisper at three in the morning asking how you are going to live, with your new wife and your new baby, on paintings. Things also from darker places that we can but guess at.
     She found him crying.
     They had an old shotgun, though they never used it. Now she had to wrestle it away from him. She made him lie down to rest. She did not know what to do. She did her best. At last, he fell asleep.
     Because she needed to think, and because the forest was her own world, she went to walk there. When she came back, he was gone. Her baby lay in its crib, staring silent at the ceiling. No one knows what it was thinking. Or whether he whispered anything to his child before he went.
     She looked everywhere, and did not find him. Everyone looked everywhere. At last the police were called. They came with bloodhounds. The bloodhounds led down to the edge of the river.
     For two weeks she searched in the woods where he had painted. She hoped  and thought what she might do to make things well, and how she had failed, how she might understand him better, how she should not have gone for that walk that night, how if there were yet time she could fix it. She could not throw away the clippings of his hair, swept up. At the end of two weeks, a fisherman found his body on the water. It was a day in May. 
     So we were set on a rough sea in a lifeboat two alone, she and I. Through all the years of my life she was there, unfailing, though often the stars were covered over, and there was little to steer by. 
     She found a safe and wild harbor a year ago in June, when I closed her eyes with my hand.

     Amidst the broken edges of the world that slice the heart, may we find solace, dear friends. Our work is love.


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Early Spring Faery...

A young Faery, holding a flowering branch. She's a tiny creature, perched on faux twigs, who would stand perhaps 5 and 1/2 inches in her stocking feet. If she had stockings. More images before long.  (She'll be flying the eBay faery realm tonight or tomorrow.)
P.S. A possible change of plans: she may not fly as far as eBay, having perhaps found herself a home already, fortunate little creature. We shall see.

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Oh for a Pair of Ruby Slippers.

    As you may know, I’ve been in Colorado, far from my New England home, due to the death of my mother, artist Lou Rogers. I am profoundly glad and grateful to have been here with her as she went. It has been as it had to be.

    But after wresting with the flood of repercussions for some five months, roosting in other people’s houses, I grow desperate to be home again: my own work languishes, my identity evaporates, my bird molts, and I am convinced my mother herself would want me back at my own drawing table. Yet extracting myself brings to mind the great La Brea Tar Pits: ‘I shall soon be safe home again,’ said the Woolly Mammoth to the Smilodon.
    Looming: a great overstuffed rental vehicle, oceans of gasoline, dubious motels constituting the journey home... and even the Bates Motel costs money. Thus, I am tempted to transform my blog into a ruthless marketing machine. But... what have I to ruthlessly market at this moment?? Postcards. These postcards:

Clockwise: Daughter of Lir (Swan Maiden), Mushroom Faery, Celtic Mermaid, and Flidais and the White Deer. They look like real live postcards on the back -- you  know, space to write, but not too much.

    For anyone overcome with desire, each packet of 8 postcards (4 images, 2 of each) is $6.25. + $1.70 shipping/handling, eBay item number  110190174140 at eBay link:: Fantasy Postcards on eBay   Welcome to my shameless Get the Pitiful Artist and Handicapped Bird Home Again Campaign... 

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Friday, October 26, 2007 at 07:46 PM

Many and many thanks for your Comments here, bright Visitors: you buoy the spirit and bring tidbits as intriguing as anything I post...

These days my mind acts like a skipping stone, plashing skittish over things, or sinking murky to the bottom. But I treasure the great trove of kind words come to me by comment and by e-mail, and ultimately, unless I keel over first, they will be answered with care.

Thank you for coming!

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Edith Wharton's Dream

A dream (with which I suspect many of us could identify at one time or another) reported by novelist Edith Wharton, 1913:

“A pale demon with black hair came in, followed by four gnome-like creatures carrying a great black trunk. They set it down and opened it, and the Demon, crying out: ‘Here’s your year - here are all the horrors that have happened to you and that are still going to happen’ dragged out a succession of limp black squirming things and threw them on the floor before me. They were not rags or creatures, not living or dead - they were Black Horrors, shapeless, and that seemed to writhe about as they fell at my feet, and yet were as inanimate as bits of stuff. But none of these comparisons occurred to me, for I knew what they were: the hideous, the incredible things that had happened to me in this dreadful year, or were to happen to me before its close; and I stared, horror-struck, as the Demon dragged them out, one by one, more and more, till finally, flinging down a blacker, hatefuller one, he said laughing: ‘There - that’s the last of them!’
     The gnomes laughed too; but I, as I stared at the great black pile and the empty trunk, said to the Demon:  ‘Are you sure it hasn’t a false bottom?’ “

    ~ Edith Wharton, October 1913, from Edith Wharton, by R.W.B. Lewis, 1975

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