0917

September 17, 2022

 In bed at 9, awake at 2:30, bait bucket/squirrel cage brain, up at 3:13, pas de vin.  Thoughts of Rothko, technique, thoughts of his painting as he was painting, strict secrecy, bourgeois appearance, father a pharmacist, born in Dvinsk, Dvinsk ghetto, the headline "10 Jews left in Drinks, 31,000 Dead". Thoughts of 7303 S. Emerald, father yelling at me, sitting on the floor leaning against the wall in the living room near kitchen doorway, people in the kitchen, Hartman.  Saturday is the day to charge the med-alert device.  Zap half-cup of yesterday's coffee. . . .  Back to bed @ 5:15, up and down till 6:45, little sleep.  Beautiful dawn sky to the east,  clouds a mixture of blue-grays and bright shining whites.  Many chickadees congregate on the feeders.

Distorted 'fun house' photo, bursting brain.

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I'm trying to cut down on posting to FaceBook.  My views are so often jaundiced that I have every reason to believe many of my FB friends have stopped reading them.  No wonder.  I have turned into (or have always been?) a crabby (started to type 'crappy') old man.  Can't exchange views with Kitty anymore; this blog serves as a journal, an outlet for my so -often-jaundiced thoughts.

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I haven't worked on painting for a few days, since I satisfied myself with the salvage job on "Woman in a Black Hat."  I decided I ought to work on something so I decided to try to paint an egg, a brown egg on a white background.  It turns out that that is not such an easy project (color, shape, texture), but I started at least.

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Geri at the rock-climbing facility on Commerce Street south of North Avenue for Ellis's birthday party for her friends.  I'm at home reading Adam Gopnik's New Yorker essay "Can't We Come Up With Something Better Than Liberal Democracy?"  He reminds us that neither now nor perhaps ever has broad-based democracy been considered by everyone to be a desirable form of government.  Also read David Leonhardt's "'A Crisis Coming': The Twin Threats to American Democracy" in this morning's NYT.  AirPods in my ears, listening to Faure's Requiem, soothing settling music for troubling, unsettling readings.  . . . . .  Then, as it happened, I finally watched a CSPAN book program I had been saving for some time, on Robert Parkinson's Thirteen Clocks: How Race United the Colonies and Made the Declaration of Independence.  In it, the following quote by John Adams in 1818 at age 83 appeared: "The colonies had grown up under constitutions of government so different, there was so great a variety of religions, they were composed of so many different nations, their customs, manners, and habits [my addition: climate and economy] had so little resemblance, and their intercourse had been so rare, and their knowledge of each other so imperfect, that to unite them in the same principles in theory, and the same system of action, was certainly a very difficult enterprise.  The complete accomplishment of it, in so short a time and by such simple means, was perhaps a singular example in the history of mankind.  Thirteen clocks were made to strike together - a perfection of mechanism which no artist had ever before effected."  Parkinson summarized his book at the beginning of his talk: "The argumentation for how to make the cause, the cause of fighting the Revolution, was by turning to and employing all sorts of stories, language, images about slave insurrections and violence in the backcountry, especially about Indigenous People."  No surprise there!  "Patriots" like Adams and Jefferson seized on the one non-controversial thing that all the colonists had in common (unlike religion, views on slavery, etc.) and that was FEAR of slave insurrection against their white enslavers and massacres of colonists by 'Indians', domestic insurrectionists and Indian savages working with the King.'

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