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Determination made him single-minded and stubborn,
though he got a lot done.
|
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She was indecisive, which made her open to
lots of experiences.
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His contradictory personality is not his most
attractive quality, but it does spark conversation.
|
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She really had her feet on the ground, and
was never thrown by what was thrown at her.
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He always liked to stay up late, and it never
bothered him in the morning. |
|
She likes drama and all the world's her stage,
so avoid her if you don't like being assigned bit parts. |
|
He smoked anything, and smoked too much of
everything, but he was generous, and didn't like to smoke alone. |
|
Her face turned sad when ambulances passed,
after which it took her awhile to return to her normally radiant cheerfulness. |
|
His enthusiasm and offers of help could be
seen by his students as uncool, but it made him memorable so that years
later, in the end, his impact was powerfully felt. |
|
She believed what she believed, though she
could be swayed by time and hard knocks, but since new opinions didn't last
long, nothing much changed after all. |
|
He was so girl crazy he stabbed his best friend
in the back going after a girl his friend had a crush on just because his
friend had the crush. |
|
There was nothing about her that you could
criticize except that she was overly ambitious about her garden. |
|
He would weep when he led the congregation
in prayer. |
|
Dessed fast and loose like your favorite party
girl, she was a brilliant mind with a wide open academic future. |
|
He wore two hearing aids, we played catch and
rode bikes, he was a good friend, and they moved suddenly. |
| |
"People I Have Known" was
drawn and written Nov. 26, 28-30, and Dec. 1-11.
From the weblog, December
12, 2002
A couple of weeks ago Raymond and I were sitting
and talking and I started drawing in ink, or doodling, more like it, rectangles
on the back of a piece of scratch paper. Each rectangle had one or more
squares or rectangles inside of it, and each set of squares or rectangles
was a variation on the previous set, kind of a next step in shifting arrangements
of squares or rectangles.
The arrangements showed a kind of progression,
maybe a kind of animation. Lloyd pointed out that
it could be read as “an abstract rendition of one of those slo-mo drops
of water.” That wasn’t my intention, but it works. I was looking at the
shapes as flat planes dividing and rejoining, moving across a larger plane.
I thought of sheets of color and colored glass, and I also thought of
slow waving hand gestures and something blowing in the air.
This little series could’ve continued indefinitely
but I stopped at fifteen. That seemed like something pushed far enough
to be beyond meaningful, but not so far beyond meaningful that it is meaningless.
I think that last sentence I just wrote, just before this one, about being
beyond meaningful but not meaningless, is something that interests me,
but I’ve never said that before and now I’ll be thinking about it.
I drew all the rectangles pretty quickly in
HTML using Dreamweaver and stashed them, commented out, on my weblog.
I quickly decided on green and yellow but didn’t like the Oakland A’s
association, and so thought about changing the color. However, I’m always
changing colors or shapes to avoid associations,  and so decided to stay with the colors
and see if I could find a way to get beyond the association, as if by
staying with the association it would be too obvious and that would push
beyond the association.
I thought that I’d move one drawing to the
front page each day I flipped, and that if nothing else was happening
I’d at least have a simple drawing to show everyday, which would allow
me to coast, I thought, for two weeks. Other than that it was all pretty
simple, and no great shakes.
Except on the third day, realizing that I
had two weeks of drawings, and knowing that I can pretty easily use drawings
as a writing prompt, I thought that if I wrote a little something for
each of the drawings, one everyday, that after two weeks I’d have a nice
little series of drawings and writings, a kind of finished piece. This
seems to be a method that is working for me pretty well these days, resulting
in quite a few small bodies of work. Through
weblogging I’ve become a firm believer in the practice that if you write
(or draw) a little everyday over time it adds up to a whole lot of something
that could be meaningful.
I don’t know why I started writing about people
that I have known. I know that on the third day, fairly late at night,
someone from long ago popped into my head and I wrote a short sentence
about that person. So from there I thought that all I had to do was think
of someone I used to know and think of one thing to say about them. What
surprised me is some of the people I remembered and what I had to say.
It also surprised me how many memories I had from the 70’s, which means,
more or less, high school years, a period I don’t look back on too fondly.
Why was I thinking about that period? I don’t
know, but if I hadn’t gone through this little exercise I wouldn’t know
that this is something I actually give some thought to. And there a number
of people that I made myself remember late at night when I wrote these
pieces that I haven’t thought about much in a long time, and I think that
was a good ting for me to do. It was a kind of taking inventory, and acknowledging
the memory, presence, and effect of people on me that prior to this experience
appeared not to exist.
People I Have Known I-XV is now compiled on
a single page, combining the writing with each drawing.
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and so decided to stay with the colors
and see if I could find a way to get beyond the association, as if by
staying with the association it would be too obvious and that would push
beyond the association.