Domestic Left #10: What no tongue can tell
First, some housekeeping: in the fourteen months since I last sent out one of these newsletters (and, in a couple of cases, even before) a number of you reached out to me in various ways, and in the vast majority of cases I failed to respond.
For this, I am deeply sorry. Especially during the first months of the pandemic, for me (as I imagine for almost everyone), every drop of communication was like water in the desert. I valued every response to this newsletter, each unreturned email and text and DM — and I hope to return soon to some sort of regular engagement with my friends, the world, life.
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This will not be a “my plague year” newsletter, despite the temptation to write one. I have a year and a half’s worth of notes for such a piece of writing but really, hasn’t enough ink and internet been spilled on this topic?
I also have a year and a half’s worth of phrases (both lyric and melodic) jotted down for new songs, but not a single one completed. I acquired new equipment for home recording and yet, despite the calm that hours of painstakingly multi-tracking music used to bring me thirty years ago, it mostly sits unused. Despite my periodic efforts to practice playing music (as documented in the last issue of this newsletter), the fingers on my left hand have spent most of the last year and a half soft and uncalloused.
I started this newsletter because I needed a creative pursuit separate from my work, and words seemed the thing I was most skilled at (even if music is perhaps a deeper love, the one I reach for when I am most happy, tired, moved or heartbroken). I suppose this is why I am trying to restart it. But writing is (for once) not what I want to write about right now.
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Last winter, I began to dabble in painting. I’m not sure what possessed me. Maybe Otis Gibbs’ song about Bill Traylor.
I invested around $20 buying brushes and acrylic paint at the craft store, and for “canvases” broke down a few of the Amazon boxes that brought all the things to all of our houses during lockdown. It seemed like an appropriate surface for the historical moment.
Painting felt freeing, possibly because it was one of the first endeavors I’ve engaged in as an adult that was not for other people. When I write, or play music, I cannot fully separate it from my lifelong ambition to be a Writer, or a Musician. I can’t not imagine a reader, or an audience, even if it’s only a handful of people in a coffee shop or pizza joint in a Midwestern college town. Even my attempts a few years ago to learn how to draw, while certainly not driven by any lofty artistic ambition, were motivated by a desire to add that skill to my professional toolkit, so I could add illustrations to the UE NEWS in those instances where graphic interest is needed but photos are lacking.
Painting, on the other hand, has been just for me. I don’t try to visually represent reality (which painting mostly lost its interest in with the invention of photography anyway). The only emotional effects I’m interested in are how the paintings make me feel. I pick up the brush, dip it in some paint, apply it to the surface, consider, repeat.
I love the physicality of it, and the solitude. In this, it is not unlike hiking (something I have relearned to love in the past year), and I now have new appreciation for Thomas Cole carrying his oils and canvasses up into the Catskills, or Albert Bierstadt, in the Rockies.
Mark Rothko apparently turned from large oil paintings to smaller acrylic paintings in his dark final years (his doctor ordered him to quit booze, smoking and regular exposure to massive amounts of oil paints — of which he managed only the third). According to his son, “He was juggling tremendous internal and external difficulties and yet painting more than he ever had and not stagnating or winding down … He was continuing to work in a life-affirming way.”
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After I moved to Pittsburgh in 2017, I finally come to appreciate the advantages of living in a city with a world-class art museum (as I have noted before in this newsletter).
I grew up in a cosmopolitan academic family in a university town, so I learned to museum both from family trips to cities great and small, and from school trips to the museums of Lawrence, Kansas. I discovered my distinctiveness as a non-Christian by asking what I thought was an innocent question during an elementary school field trip to the University of Kansas art museum: why do so many of the paintings here depict unsettlingly brutal and gruesome torture? Museums (especially the Nelson Atkins in Kansas City, with its fantastic collection of East Asian art) also exposed me to the idea that there were cultures vastly different than the one I was growing up in, in an era before the internet made that insight commonplace (or at least commonly available).
But until I lived alone in Pittsburgh, visiting museums was always a social activity. They were fundamentally a collection of things to think and then talk about. Things in museums, whether art, artifact, or extracted from the natural world, were there (I thought) because they are interesting — beautiful perhaps as well, but therefore interesting on account of their beauty.
Going to the Carnegie Museum of Art on my own gave me, for the first time, an appreciation of the sheer physicality of great works of art. Freed of the pressure to figure out what is *interesting* about each piece (and of the pressure to match my path and pace through the museum with that of others), I began to acquire the ability to stop talking with other people in my head about the work, and just feel it.
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While I have a certain amount of trepidation that sharing any of my painting will ruin the whole enterprise for me, here is the piece that is currently my favorite: “Dogs of Quarantine,” painted on the containers of the cheap Portuguese boxed wine that I drank like water at the height of lockdown, arranged with some dried vegetation from the edge of a cemetery.
Although I haven’t been able to do much non-work writing over the past year, I did write a couple of historical pieces for the UE NEWS that warrant sharing. For Pride Month in June, I put together a short summary of the history of the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union (MCS), which Labor Notes picked up and paired with a fantastic short graphic history on the same subject matter. In September I wrote about the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers (FTA) organizing in eastern North Carolina. Both MCS and FTA were, like UE, left-led unions that the bosses and the government, shamefully aided by the mainstream labor movement, did their best to destroy during the Cold War. Both stories, despite their tragic endings (and despite whatever shortcomings I bring to the telling) do what the best stories do: tell us that things could have been different, and (with courage and clarity) still could be.
I’ve also recently been dipping my toes back into the (at least for me) anxiety-infested waters of social media. I’ve always been fascinated by the length that Instagram allows captions to extend to, and the tiny minority of users who take advantage of that to turn a visual medium into a platform for writing. The 2200 character limit, a photo for the lede instead of a headline, the pleasant surprise of finding a small essay in your photo feed — if that appeals to you at all, I’ve got a couple of such posts up, about journaling, trying to use the sun to burn out heartbreak, and my father, who would have turned 80 last Monday.
No playlist this issue, just a single track. Sometimes the first time you hear a song it just grabs you and won’t let go. In mid-July, Spotify’s algorithm decided to put Dar Williams’ “After All” on a “radio” playlist I was listening to. It still hasn’t let go of me.