Archive for February, 2008

the response to Blacky

Sunday, February 24th, 2008

carrots

Someone brought carrots to my rabbit shrine yesterday morning. He must have eaten them because they weren’t there when I came back in the evening. Logical conclusion I think.

tortoise

There was also a sculptural response to Blacky, about ten feet away, in the form of a giant turtle. The plaque, unfortunately, was unreadable.

I appreciate the narrative reference.

R.I.P. Blacky

Saturday, February 23rd, 2008

Effigy

In my seventh summer my parents and I forgot my rabbit outside in a plastic dog hutch. It died of heat exhaustion.

“Eew”.

“That’s so sad”.

“Is there a rabbit buried here”?

The memorial for my dead rabbit is on view in Washington Square Park until the final hour of melting. It is for every forgotten love represented in the rabbit deaths of the Brodsky-Hollis household; for the memory of Blacky, black from ear to toe, for my mother’s rabbit, death by crazy eye infection, my second rabbit, death by skin infection, and for my brother’s rabbit, eaten alive by rats.

When I was young I wanted to be older for the experience of a great writer. My family was the landscape, beams in a house I never saw because I lived inside of it, and the wild garden behind it. Pain to call pain was chestnut spines in your feet walking barefoot in the spring, and cuts from reaching too deep into a raspberry bush.

Swimming with seals in the Galapagos was common place, bathing in a jungle river was ooky though warm, and the only blow dart I ever aimed at a butterfly awakened a disgust for violence.

Healing was meant to be done alone, and the best playmate is always yourself, seeking truth in a blade of grass.

I retreated from my snowman building companions into a vortex without moving, sucked into the need for realization and beauty. I disappeared cubby hole style into the lonely shelter of art, my real home, the one I saw in myself in being; Inescapeable, Indeterminate, Infinite.

jungle of thought

Monday, February 18th, 2008

relative humidity in my room= 52% = happy cello
temp., because old new york apartments are not allowed to turn of the heat= 82°

learning J.C. Cooper’s Fantasy for Cello and Piano and diving into the jungle, jumbled. if i had a paper dictionary I would go hunting to obsessively alliterate that.

finding myself still thrilled to play a bach prelude for the 213/4487 time, and thinking of it as Andrew Wyeth might “…I’ve walked that hill a hundred times, a thousand times, ever since I was a small child, so it was deathless as far as I was concerned. I could probably just paint a hill for the rest of my life, actually”.

appreciation

Thursday, February 14th, 2008

earlier today I was all for the abolition of valentines day, but then with these mittens and a little more thought, my heart swayed. It is, after all, the only holiday I know of that promotes symbolic cannibalism, aztec style.