Paulette Beete, Writer

Something blue…

Here is the setting for my one-act play, The Pebble Blues:

SETTING: Jeannie’s studio—a converted guest room. Center is one of Jeannie’s unfinished quilts: a mother and infant set against a cityscape, which is quilted in varying shades of blue. The mother figure, complete except for her face, is appliquéd in shades of brown. The infant—a luminous presence of gold, yellow, saffron—is appliquéd in such a way as to at once appear both in utero and perched on the mother’s lap. The quilt has been pieced together from richly colored and textured fabrics: silks, velvets, satins, brocades. Surrounding the quilt are enlarged black and white copies of paintings that Jeannie has used for inspiration: Picasso’s La Vie; Faith Ringgold’s The Two Jemimas and Picasso’s Studio; Romare Bearden’s Piano Lesson.  Two windows set high in the back wall infuse the room with the changing light of Chicago fall day. Lining the floor, against the back wall, are bins overflowing with fabric scraps sorted by color. On the stage right wall is an old-fashioned pedal sewing machine and also an ironing board and iron. Downstage of the sewing machine is a work table (the kind often called a “wallpaper table”) coverd with sketches for new quilts, pattern paper, in-process appliqués, etc. Both the sewing machine and the work table have their own chairs. Set against the stage right wall is a hanging rack, where jewel-toned, silk shirts handmade by Jeannie for Royal hang in varying stages of completion. A slide projects stands near the sewing machine; it should not be obvious. (When necessary a strip of wall space between the two windows will be used as a screen.) On the stage left wall is a day bed covered with an assortment of design books, artist monographs, and more fabric. The room is so completely Jeannie’s atelier that when anyone else enters, it feels like a trespass. Through a door upstage of the bed, you can glimpse a hall leading to the rest of the apartment.

I wrote this  play about eight years ago, my next-to-last semester of graduate school. I haven’t looked at it since then, except to erase all of the comments from my professor so I could PDF it and submit it to a reading series several months ago. It will have a staged reading toward the end of April. I’ve known for months now that I needed to, first of all, retype it as I have no editable electronic copy, and also to re-enter and rewrite parts of it. But I’ve resisted. It was painful to write, lays me bare in a way that even the poems do not—though I may be the only one who directly notices it. I am troubled by having to engage with the mother character, to admit to myself what she really wants, given how closely she is modeled on my own mother.

I think too that when I wrote it, I expected a husband, a baby in the near future. Now at 42, when I know menopause and I are starting to flirt with the idea of occasionally meeting for cocktails, it is harder to revisit the heroine who is expecting her first child. Still, retyping the setting just now, I was amazed at my imagination, how clearly and thoroughly I imagined the artist’s studio, how even now, I know that space so well. I forget sometimes that I can use my imagination for more than just planning a schedule of blogs at work, or telling other people’s stories. I should add that I have abruptly abandoned Mrs. Woolf in the middle of Saturday, January 21, 1933. After days of reading about her own labors, her own doubts, she’s convinced me to stop procrastinating and just start. It remains to be seen if we’ll still be best friends at the end of this. it remains to be seen if I’ll still recognize myself at the end of this.

Here’s a video of a rainy day in New York City:

http://www.facebook.com/v/10150099148168458

I wish it had kept raining today. I wanted to spend the day cocooned in the blue-gray half-light that fills my apartment on wet days. There’s something about the rhythm of the rain, the crescendo and decrescendo of storm clouds—with their lightning bolts, with their thunderclaps—passing that urges the words out of me. Instead I lay cocooned under blankets, spent another couple of years with Mrs. Woolf as she prodded The Waves from her pen onto the page onto the typewriter, as she fretted, as she admired herself in the praise of others only two sentences later to claim that she was unmoved by any of it. When someone gives me a compliment in front of a group of people, I find myself trying not to smile as if it’s somehow unseemly to bask for a moment in the light of admiration, as if just a soupcon of self-satisfaction is grievous sin. I, too, wait anxiously for the applause, the comments, the Facebook likes. Well, hasn’t anyone read this one? Was it awful? Are people bored already? Is this project too selfish, too uneven, too many things?

I did have a prick of understanding the other day when I thought to myself—ah, this blog is teaching me how to write again, how to shed the mannerisms I invoke when I write for work where I prefer not to write at all. What I mean is, at work, I prefer that those I interview tell the story in their own voices and my job is only to provide some scaffolding on which they can hang their stories, to ease the transition, or turn up the dimmer switch on those thoughts that need more light, need to be sharpened. It is my sensibility I suppose, but it is not my voice. Not my true voice. Not the voice I dream in, or in which I hear stories unfolding in my head. I come here and to my journal to find that voice again, say hello, bid it welcome for a chat, for a dance, for a spin up the coast. We are getting to know each other again, a first date after a long absence. We have not yet kissed but oh the yearning as we lean in toward each other, the electricity, the excitement, the inevitability…

“If God hides in details…then maybe so do we.” — Rebecca Wells (from The Divine Secrets of the YaYa Sisterhood)

Virginia Woolf. Photo by George Charles Beresford via Wikimedia Commons

…by which I mean Mrs. Woolf, of course. Adeline Virginia Stephens Woolf was born this day in 1882. Here’s my recitation of a passage from To the Lighthouse to celebrate.

You can hear a recording of her voice (which quite surprised me) here. (Click on her photo on the far right to start the audio)

Annie Leibovitz during a media tour of Pilgrimage at SAAM this morning.

Because of Annie Leibovitz’s Pilgrimage, I am thinking about portraits of objects. Portraits of absence. Portraits in which the person is the negative space between, around objects.

If you were to catalog every single object in my home—the decorative, the practical, the boxed, the fallen behind the bed and the dresser-turned-kitchen island—what skin tone would I be? What size? What height? What faith tradition? What could you know with certainty? Would your narrative be factual or truthful? Is there no way to tell anything other than a lie?

Let’s limit the number of objects to five: the tall black file cabinet stuffed with poems (is its sister, stuffed with years of credit card statements the truer story, or another true story?); the white bed with its white sheets, the stained blanket, the double layer of towels for “that time,” the books, and last month’s journal to remember this year’s promises; the bookshelves (yes, but don’t you need to call out the unread books or the ones purchased out of sentimentality, how do you screen for aspiration, stick to known facts?), the rugs (and yes, I must insist as they tell a story of line and color, of thrift, of luck, of being childless, of eating too much popcorn and being careless with the coffee grounds). For last, the laptop perhaps, but even that speaks in a borrowed voice, offers only one opinion, tells only what it wants to tell and cannot be coerced into truth.

I am remembering as I write this that over the summer I contemplated the poetry of objects. Can objects scaffold a poem the way they can scaffold a still-life painting? Can a list of objects—three clocks set at different times, a row of crystal candlesticks, a mottled ochre vase—tell a complete story on the page the same as if they were bound together with pigment or film? What transubstantiates “list” to “portrait?” Is it an accumulation of lists? Is it a title?

Virginia Woolf writes, “The poets succeed by simplifying; practically everything is left out.”
With everything thrown out, with a poem reduced mostly to nouns, with no action, can the list exist as a poem? Is it a poem because I am a poet and have written a list? Which leads me to another question someone asked about Pilgrimage: What makes these ordinary photographs art? That Annie Leibovitz shot them? Is any answer completely right?

Here is a poem(?):

Self-Portrait in the Kitchen

laptop
coffee grounds
notebook
cutting board
list of passwords
blue Filofax
card from Jocelyn
heart-shaped ornament
sun-dried tomatoes
garlic bulb
Wyoming stories
credit card bill
birthday card
stamps

A gray day. All day everything on the other side of my window seemed leached of color, edges dull and flat. Even the trucks occasionally rumbling by seemed to have cotton-wrapped wheels. I myself felt muted as it was a day spent with other people’s words, a nip here, a tuck there, a whole-scale re-imagining elsewhere. I suppose the fact that I was under blankets all day—my laptop balanced on an IKEA lap desk—added to that feeling of broadcasting from a cave. The phone didn’t ring once all day (hmmm, did I turn the ringer off again?), and the air wasn’t afire with the usual workday back and forth with my colleagues (what a pack of noisy birds we can be!). Now I’m waiting for the lentils to soften in a pot of Soupergirl’s Lentil Sweet Potato Apple Soup. which will need a pinch or two of salt to brighten the flavor. I think the blankets and I will relocate to the couch to finally watch La Dolce Vita, or perhaps it’ll be more quality time with Mrs. Woolf then an early bedtime. Rain is predicted for tomorrow morning. Perhaps I’ll sleep my way into the sharp edges of the storm, wake to see what salty brightness it leaves behind.

Me at 13-1/2.

Tonight I had dinner with my friend GC, who I’ve now known for 28 years, since I was a sophomore in high school. Every time I see her, I think—wow, she looks like such a grown-up, and wow, she looks exactly the same. We see each other once a year because of an annual conference she attends in DC. We lost touch for a while in our 20s but then I found her again through Google because she joined the swim team at the university where she was attending graduate school so her name showed up in meet results.

Everytime I see GC I think of her growing up with a big beautiful black dog named Beauregard. I think of her mother who was tall and slender and beautiful and commanding in a way I’d only seen mothers be beautiful and commanding on TV. How we pulled over at a gas station on the Belt Parkway and her mother ordered the attendant to fill the tank though it was self-serve. I think of the pink stone and pearl brooch that belonged to GC’s mother that GC gave me a few years ago after her mother died. I think of meeting the boyfriend who became GC’s husband in a NYC bar that had peanut shells and sawdust all over the floor. GC rode her bike everywhere then and the bike chain was thick and heavy and barely fit into her messenger bag.

Tonight we talked about about death being so much more present to us in middle age because of friends we’ve lost and because we no longer believe we’re immortal. We talked about how much she misses New York and how seriously they take customer service at her grocery in Davis. We talked about how much we both need a giant cup of coffee to get started in the morning, and it’s just not the same if it’s coffee you bring to work from home. She kissed me on the cheek at least three separate times in that way that no one really kisses each other on the cheek anymore. We drank hot drinks and asked a woman to take a photo of us and fiercely loved each other as we have since we were 14 and didn’t know yet that friendships don’t always last forever.

You should read this and you should read this too.

I appear to be writing in invisible ink.

I cannot find the quote from Virginia Woolf that I wanted to share so I offer this one instead:

“There’s no doubt in my mind that I have found out to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice….” (July 26, 1922)

I answered a survey for The Rumpus today, and in the “Other comments?” box I told them—by which I mean mostly Stephen Elliott—that somehow getting his Rumpus e-mails, which seem extremely stream of consciousness, had become a type of permission for me to just write what I write however I write it. I don’t think I really mean that about the poetry. With poetry I can’t seem to write any other way than how I write; even if my style varies from poem to poem, I feel that the voice is fairly consistent.

But I have been struggling with my voice for blogging. When I started this blog in late 2010, it was called The Home Beete, and I tried my best to make it a place where I talked about home design. I also started The Christian Beete for addressing faith issues. (That only lasted a couple of posts; I chickened out after I almost lost a friend over a post about a certain unpopular—at least in contemporary times—teaching from the Bible.) The Home Beete sputtered along, but often I just didn’t have the time or energy to do the Internet sleuthing it required, and it always seemed like what I wanted to write about was off-topic.

So far in this iteration of the blog I’ve covered the Bible, literature, home design, and the pros of early middle age. I’ve given up trying to fit things into categories, and I just write about whatever’s on my mind. (Or I put up a quote or a photograph if I can’t quite pin down what’s on my mind on a given day.) And I’m as surprised as anyone if at the end of a given post, I find out I’ve had an epiphany, or landed on a point of encouragement or life lesson. I suppose it’s a little like going to a good therapy session where you allow yourself the freedom to just talk about anything, to simply follow whatever twists and turns the conversation takes, to not worry so much about the destination. That is, I think, how you find out where the really good stuff is hidden. That’s where you stumble across the answer that’s been waiting for you all this time.

I’d like to think that’s something that readers will appreciate about this blog—that you’ll never quite know what you’ll find when you get here. At the very least, that’s what I’m loving so far about writing it.

Have you signed up for Letter in the Mail from The Rumpus yet? Well worth the $5.oo/month. Today’s letter from Margaret Cho was a meditation on airline food.

In case you’re wondering what me and Mrs. Woolf are up to these days. This is what I’m reading—and obsessively quoting from.

[INSERT PROFOUND LIFE-CHANGING POST HERE]

For one of last year’s videos, I photographed my shoes in a number of ridiculous places. And yes, my fridge is, in fact, usually that empty. Sigh…

Projects, projects, projects—I have a million of ‘em! Well, in theory. They just keep announcing themselves at the slightest hint of a trigger.  Exhibit A: This morning as I wait for the bus, I hear my inner wheels spinning and whirring, looking for words to bracket around the morning. I write:

Out into the sharp teeth of morning, a fingernail of moon smug against the fluorescent sky, a meadow of blue just breaking into a blush, faintly, around the sleepy edges.

Next I think: Oh, maybe I should spend a month writing just a few sentences of physical description about each morning.

Exhibit B: After two days when I am especially pleased with my outfits, so much so that I document them for Facebook, I think—oh yes, a month of photographing whatever my primary outfit is for the day.

The ideas keep coming, not limited to those synapses set aside to live, eat, and breathe art. In February, it’s pretty definite I’m going to be purposefully vegan for the month, and then perhaps in April or May, I want to take a walk each and every day. (Though this apprenticeship as a flaneur perhaps has art as its ulterior motive; this is the year after all I rashly promised to engage more with the physical landscape in my writing.)

Why a month? Because it’s possible to stand most anything for 30 odd days, even if some of those days involve cajoling or downright pummeling yourself into the appointed activity. And 30 or so days is enough time for me to take a break, ask “do I want this to be a lifestyle change?” It’s a baby step that can lead to a new habit, or tease out the reasons why a desired habit just won’t (possibly ever) stick. It’s also knowing that,given that there are 12 months in a year, I possibly have 12 chances for an adventure that can be as decadent or as challenging to as inexpensive or as ridiculous as I want to make it.

But still, why projects, projects, projects? In part, it’s the reinvigoration of a new year with an extra adrenaline rush of celebrating a birthday. And, of course, last year I proved to myself that—given the right project, one that’s not what I “should” do but instead meets some need that I can intuit but not quite articulate—I can be a woman who completes projects. That was a huge change in my self-view, as I always tagged myself as a quitter. It had never occurred to me before last year’s video project that the problem lay not with my discipline or commitment, but with the conception of the project itself.

I think these projects arise too out of curiosity. The more comfortable I become with myself, the more I want to get to know this 42-year-old black woman of mixed heritage and eclectic tastes and a killer jewelry collection who claims to be me. I want to scout out all her caves,  her mountaintops too, see if maybe she wants to set up house together, start shopping for a ring….And I think, for now, the way to her heart just may be projects, projects, projects.

p.s. I saw a sneak peek of this exhibit today. Annie Leibovitz’s Pilgrimage is definitely one of the reasons I’m currently project-crazy.