This is an installment in the section Friday Frivolity. Every Friday, you'll get a little micro-essay, plus a moodboard, 3 things I'm currently in love with, words of wisdom from what I've been reading lately, a shimmer of poetry, a "beauty tip," and a question to spark your thought.
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Daydreaming Bubble
One day she was very bored. She sat in the living room, which faced out onto the neighbor’s house and the street. Though the year was waning, the trees were still thick with foliage, much of which was still green. The quality of sunlight was like sunlight in an old film photograph; everything ached with an almost painful brightness. The little leaves of the bushes, the gently swaying branches of the old elm, the blades of the evergreens, all glittered in a dreamlike profusion. Now and then a leaf dropped, circling slowly in the air, barely seeming to touch the carpet of fallen branches and bristles, miscellaneous grasses. She could see the texture of the tree bark very clearly, the shapes of sticks and shadows. Across the street, the white house was very bright. A white van sailed along with a gentle murmur, glistening, and then vanished out of view. The sky was so blue, the afternoon so interminable. In the mesh of one window, the light diffused itself like the material of a fairy’s wing (or what had purported to be a fairy’s wing in a book she’d had in childhood), then fell in sharp lines upon the lower blinds and threw its benevolence over the money plant that always sat in the corner, picking out its striations. At moments it seemed to intensify, gathering into itself, and then would release like a breath. Now and then it danced a golden dance on the hardwood floor or swam within a glass fish, throwing out webs and prisms.
She lay down and looked at the ceiling. There shadows hung in the recesses of the coffers. Perhaps she would have a chocolate or make a cup of tea; perhaps the mailman would come in half an hour. She began to blow bubbles with her spit. Most of these popped quickly, could not sustain themselves. She blew a large one, and then it seemed to grow larger and larger, grew around her, hardened and solidified itself, until a sphere of glass circled her head. The light came into it strangely; though she could see the room, it was distorted, some objects larger than she knew them to be, others shrunken, rounded, warped. She could breathe easily, that was no problem. But she felt her being folding into the bubble like a snail into its shell. Visions came—she was in Africa, skirting the banks of the Nile; she was in Asia, climbing the snowy peaks of the Himalayas, lines of prayer flags buffeted by a fierce cold wind; she was in a forest clearing somewhere, and a few sylphlike girls came out of the trees and beckoned her with their bright eyes and cheerful smiles, leading her down a shadowed path; she was on a cliff by the ocean, swaying on the edge of a great immensity.
Her mother came into the room. Her mother was very angry. “I’ve been calling you for the past ten minutes,” her mother said. Her mother took a small hammer and shattered the bubble. It broke apart into a million particles that were like light. Shards lodged in the girl’s skin and glittered there, very softly, without drawing blood.
Mood Board of the Week
La vallée d’Entre-Deux by aer-head on Tumblr: The pastel colors of this painting, the quietness of the horses grazing, the line of birds flying up into the sky, the little patches of purple flowers, all bring me a great deal of joy and serenity. Increasingly, joy and serenity are the only landscapes I want to inhabit.
Kana Tanaka, Daydreaming Bubble (1998), Corning Museum of Glass: Kana Tanaka is an artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area who specializes in glassblowing; according to her website, “She seeks to inspire curiosity and exploration through glass and light.”1 Glass is a tool with which to play, converse with, and understand our perceptions of the world around us: the way it scatters rainbow prisms of light, the way it allows reflections to pass briefly through a car window at night. I love this concept of a “daydreaming bubble” and the way that it’s photographed on a woman just sitting casually in a car—I’d love my own daydreaming bubble! Then I could just put it on, people would know I’m in daydreaming mode and not to disturb me, and then I could happily be in my own little world of imagination and rainbow prisms, real or figurative.
Grietje Postma, 2022-III (2022), woodcut: Grietje Postma (1961–) first started out painting in art school but soon found her way to printmaking and stayed there. Although she uses the technique of color woodcut reduction, her method is a little different from most artists, who work from light to dark: Postma starts off by printing the plank of wood in the darkest color, then cleans it off and carves it, printing a lighter color, and then repeats this process with successively lighter colors. The result is great depth and vitality. Her output—which, averaging around 5 compositions a year, is quite small—centers mostly around meticulously realized trees, captured in different seasons and different lights and attitudes. Some are somber, some are exuberant, all are beautiful. In this one, I love the rich texture of branches and leaves and flowers, a springtime profusion.
Grietje Postma: 1999-I; 1992-I; 2016-IV Photograph by Amber Ortolano of herself: Ever since I saw Keira Knightley wearing that dress in Atonement (2007), I’ve had a fascination with long, emerald-green dresses. Still trying to find my perfect one.
Tiny pink flowers, photographed by mendhak on Flickr: So tiny! So pink! So adorable! So perfect!
News From Home (1977): In the latest Sight & Sound poll of the Greatest Films of All Time, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles was the surprise stealer of the #1 spot, nudging out old standbys like Citizen Kane and Vertigo. An over three-hour near-documentary of three days in the life of a widowed, middle-aged housewife, distinguished by the static shots and extremely long takes that are characteristic of Akerman, it came out in 1975, when Akerman was only 25. She called it “a love film for [her] mother” and an ode to the often thankless work that women do for those they love and care for. Two years later, she came back with another love letter to her mother, News From Home, which takes the correspondence her mother sent her between 1971 and 1973, when Akerman was living in New York City, far from her native Belgium, and layers it in voiceover upon scenes of NYC where Akerman used to like taking walks. “I hope you get through the summer all right”; “Sweetheart, stay well”; “I miss you tremendously”; “Don’t work too hard”; “Write soon”—over the vastness and isolation of the big city, these universally maternal missives, so loving, devoted, and concerned, achieve a certain poignancy. The film never gives us Akerman’s replies—the film itself is the reply.
News From Home (1977), dir. Chantal Akerman Wilhelm Karl Ritter von Haidinger, meteorite fall at Knyahinya, Ukraine on June 9, 1866: Wilhelm Karl Ritter von Haidinger was an Austrian mineralogist who, at the age of only 17, became the assistant of professor Frederich Mohs, creator of the Mohs scale of mineral hardness. After a few years, he moved to Edinburgh, wrote several papers, and then returned to Austria, taking up Mohs’ role as the director of an extensive mineralogical collection after his death in 1839. In June 1866, a meteorite landed in Knyahinya, Ukraine, one of the largest known stony meteorites (500 kilograms, comprising of the main mass of 300 kg and about 200 kg of smaller stones) for many years. Its fall had many local eyewitnesses, many of whom picked up the stones, but the largest is currently in the collection of Vienna’s Natural History Museum, which also contains a painting of the fall.
Japanese tattoo artist Tokumitsu Uchida (Horigoro II) displays tattoos made by his father, Goro Uchida (Horigoro I) in 1955: Tattooing has a long and rich history in Japan—in 1720, irezumi (“insert ink”) was first used as punishment for crimes, in order to identify people responsible for them, and the word still has negative connotations in Japan today. However, opinion of tattooing itself shifted in 1827, when Utagawa Kuniyoshi created a series of prints based on the Chinese book Suikoden, which featured 36 tattooed outlaws who fight against a corrupt government. Kuniyoshi’s illustrations of these outlaws turned their tattoos into symbols of heroism, justice, and bravery. Over a century later, in the wake of World War II, Horigoro I saw the electric tattoo machines of American soldiers and was inspired to create his own. His son, Horigoro II, drew on the Suikoden for inspiration, and his work synthesized Japanese and Western techniques.
The Dolores del Río House, designed by Cedric Gibbons and Douglas Honnold, from The Los Angeles House by Tim Street-Porter: This house was built in 1929 for the glamorous Mexican actress Dolores del Río, who married art director and head of the MGM art department Cedric Gibbons in 1930—his biggest claim to fame might be designing the Oscar statuette. Located in Pacific Palisades, the house replicates the Art Deco sets Gibbons designed for movies at MGM, with black linoleum floors and a staircase on which del Río could make a grand entrance. Gibbons and del Río had their own bedrooms on separate floors, but a trap door in del Río’s dressing room opened to a staircase that led to Gibbons’ dressing room. A house with a secret passageways is a house after my own heart.
Dolores del Río House, from The Los Angeles House
3 Things I’m in Love With This Week
Recipe for Warm Pear Compote from The How Not to Die Cookbook: I recently saw Dr. Michael Greger in person—he was so animated and enthusiastic and funny—and it is always an interesting experience seeing authors of books you have read in the flesh. His recipe for poached pears from his cookbook is one of my favorite fall/winter snacks or deserts, and it’s extremely easy to make. Below is the recipe, as written in the book. I usually omit the date sugar (usually the pears are sweet enough, but if not, I just add more raisins) and just use lemon juice instead of “blended peeled lemon.” I always make this with pears, but the book says you can also try apples, peaches, or plums. I think the key is to just make sure that the fruit is firm and not too ripe, otherwise it will fall apart when cooked.
Ingredients
2 tablespoons date sugar
2 teaspoons blended peeled lemon
2 tablespoons raisins
1 2 to 3-inch/5 to 8-cm piece vanilla pod, split and scraped (or 1 teaspoon extract)
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 1-inch/2.5-cm piece fresh turmeric, grated (or 1/8 teaspoon ground)
4 to 5 ripe Williams pears, cored and cut into bite-sized pieces
Instructions
In a saucepan, combine 1/2 cup/120ml of water with all the ingredients, except the pears, and stir. Once blended, add the pear pieces and simmer over low heat until the pears are tender and the sauce has reduced, 15 to 20 minutes. Serve warm.
WoodWick Hearthwick Candle: My father was extremely sensitive to any sort of scent, so my mother and I never used perfume, scented lotions, scented soaps, candles, etc. However, someone very sweetly gifted us this candle; we tried it for the first time a few days ago, and it made a delightful crackling noise, as of a fire. It has three layers with three different smells, and the first, “Fireside,” was so cozy and lovely. I also think watching the flickering of fire touches something in us that hearkens back to the early days of man. Maybe I’m a candle convert!
The “Dogue” section of Vogue: Okay, I kind of hated on dogs on this Substack—well, not dogs, but dog poop and dog owners—but as I was perusing the Internet, I came across this funny series of “Dogue” articles, and if you know me, you know there’s nothing I fall for quicker than puns. I love the Dogue magazine covers, the interviews with celebrities about their dogs, and articles like “There’s Perfume For Your Pooch, Too.” It’s all just so fun and cute and silly.
Words of Wisdom
The cook gets something done every day; she has no time to ask why she cooks, or to question the ultimate effect upon the world; the plainest cooks are happier than most artists in that they have one dish which they do to perfection—a work of genius in its way.
—Virginia Woolf, from The Essays of Virginia Woolf Volume One
This reminds me of a quote (I can’t find it now) that compares art to gardening, noting that the gardener doesn’t care if the flower dies, she just takes pleasure in the act of making flowers bloom, however temporarily. As artists, we frequently have this anxiety that our work must be important, immaculate, immortal. Such an attitude prevents us from simply getting on with the work and practicing just a little bit each and every day—which, ironically, would get us further in our goals than any hand-wringing about our motivations or our work’s “ultimate effect.”
Poetry Corner
Archaic Torso of Apollo
We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, gleams in all its power. Otherwise the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could a smile run through the placid hips and thighs to that dark center where procreation flared. Otherwise this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur: would not, from all the borders of itself, burst like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell
Until this, my most recent rereading, of Rilke’s poem, I never realized quite how strange it is. In the second line, we get a pair of nonexistent eyes “like ripening fruit”—nonexistent because, of course, the statue fragment is headless, a casualty of the ravages of time, that destroyer of delicate art objects. However, the statue’s face does remain, Rilke asserts: it has diffused throughout the torso itself, which still has the “brilliance” of the Sun God’s lamp-like “gaze” that “gleams in all its power” and “dazzle[s],” and Rilke locates the face’s imagined “smile” in the fragment’s “placid hips and thighs.” The statue, therefore, does not “seem defaced”; in fact, “here there is no place / that does not see you.” Not only are the eyes not gone, not only does the gaze still gleam, but the power of sight that inheres in the torso—not just in one location but all through the whole of it—is so strong that it has very force of speech, which bursts forth sunlike, like a god’s edict: “You must change your life.”
We often think that it is we who see art, but more often than not, it is art that sees us. When we give our attention to a work of art, as Rilke does here, when we answer its call with our own awareness, when we allow ourselves to be absorbed in it, its spirit to enter us, when we put our consciousness out to know it and study it and understand it and observe it, we open ourselves up to being moved to the point of divine realization that strikes us like a star.
Every time I reread this poem, I find I discover some new insight. But no matter how many times I read it, that final injunction, “You must change your life,” never fails to come at me like a thunderbolt—indeed, like the proclamation of a god—and never fails to come to me when I most need it. It’s so unexpected and yet such an intense, tight concentration of what has preceded it. And what imagination—to see a god’s gaze in his torso!
Beauty Tip
Set aside some time to do nothing but daydream—a sort of metaphorical “daydreaming bubble”!
Lingering Question
Is there “one dish” in your life—one skill, one work, one small task—that you would like to “do to perfection”? What is it, and how can you make time to practice it?
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Dear Readers, I hope you enjoyed this little short story! I haven’t posted much fiction on here, but I was inspired by this week’s moodboard. Please let me know your thoughts in the comments, and leave a like if you enjoyed and subscribe to Soul-Making for more! Hope you all have a wonderful weekend <3
Ramya, I love your daydreaming bubble. It is always the mothers ahhhh!
I also like your words "We often think that it is we who see a work of art, but more often than not, we find that it is art that sees us". It is so true. Thank you for presenting such a nice work!