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Tuesday, May 3, 2016

Oh MY, Ms. Truitt.. Logos and Flux.

SO, I haven't been reading that much lately, and its a bummer. But the weekends wherein I am 'free' have been taken up with sports and I do this very willingly (so much so that i question why anyone would question such.) because my boys do love their running soccer games and do detest their stultifying baseball games... but I am the mom, and the moon,  so I attend, no matter what 'custody/emotionally self-sabotaging' situations may be interfering in my life. MOM, of the roar variety.  I attend.

SO, what i have been doing is going extremely slowly through one specific book, Prospect by Anne Truitt.  IF you don't know who she is, that is expected, as she was a sculptor in the 60s through the 90s and not that many people are all up on the sculptors. yah. Her work was abstract, wood and layers upon layers of slightly differentiated colors... GO look her work up at www.annetruitt.org ... She was born in 1921 and died 2004, so she is contemporary, but not of my generation.

What this is, is a memoir of her year of turning 70, having a lifetime retrospective of her work in New York, and writing it all down as she goes.  She is extremely well-read, and writes with a gift.

I'm not done with it yet, but it is DEEPLY overdue at the library so i want to share it, finish the reading and then return it before they come after me. There is so much in here for me.  It reminds me a lot of Madeleine L'Engle's 'A Circle of Quiet', which I felt compelled to own, I loved it so.

What I've been grooving on?

Learning about Heraclitus and his views on Logos, the law that nothing changes and the Flux, the law that everything is always changing.
"He conceived of these laws as at once opposite and identical, as the convex and concave of a curving line are at once opposite and identical."

She believes herself to do her best work, when she, herself, grooves on in this space, the apparent discordance, the vibration of the betwixt and between and the space held there. the apart and the together.

I love this.

Throughout my journal of the past month, there are her quotes interspersed something fierce, She teaches about Hermes Trismegistis in the first pages, 'as above, so below'... and this, my favorite when I'm feeling the need to remind myself of my humanity, not just my bath-needing emotional wreckedness...

Homo sum: humani mil a me alienum puto.   I am human: nothing human is alien to me.

This: "a line of meaning was intermittently intersecting the line of our trajectory".   So graphic, so large.


I don't know if the richness of this read is coming across in my scattered way, but she is all of these:  artistic mentor, a mothering mentor and a grandmotherly mentor.

"The phrase 'Oh, it was you.' used to come into my mind when I first beheld my babies."...

Do you remember that moment?  It was exactly in my experience of the births of my children.  A recognition, deep and warm as the womb.


GO, find this at your library, or click the links.  She has two other books of memoir and I will be reading them... GO.

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