hand: 12-14-06

This is my hand today, 2 days after the last cast was off and the pins taken out. The pinky and the whole palm are still bruised, but the swelling is down immensely. The holes from where the pins were sticking out are healing, but the massive scar tissue under the stitches hurts.

I've had three physical therapy sessions since Wednesday, and am working the hand myself every 2 hours. It hurts and kind of sucks, but it's already way better then wednesday when I couldn't move any of it.

A video from yesterday. This is me making my best fist, and my best straight hand. The middle finger is the one thats healing. The others are just sprained and atrophied from 3 weeks of a cast. My wrist has limited movement still too.

bad break

I fell while skating on November 20th and knew right away I'd broken a finger because it was pointing in the wrong direction. An arduous night at a Waterbury emergency room ended with doctors pushing it back best they could and telling me I needed surgery. I had snapped my right middle finger at the base and broken a joint in the hand.

Two days later a hand specialist put it back together with a graft and two 4 inch pins. In the three weeks since I've had a series of casts, my hand reformed, stitches and pins removed, the beginning of physical therapy, and a lot of pain killers.

I'm a right handed artist, I'm a fainter with a low squeam tolerance, and I've got a doctor phobia from hell. Everything about this situation is what I would have liked most to avoid.

Yet, even though it's a bad break and rotten in so many ways, so much about it seemed to go so right. From the tough friends who stayed by my side that night, to the orthopedic nurse standing next to Karl when he got the call who immediately began arranging my care, to even the left handed scissors I'd accidentally bought the week before. So much was in place it was as if it was planned.

Painting, sculpting, spinning, skating, puppeteering, and blogging were dropped for the constant tending of my hand, and a lot of sleeping and eating. But things are starting to return a little at a time. I've gotten pretty good at one handed typing, so I'll be keeping a documentary of my recovery from hereon. I'll post pictures of my hand, but I promise nothing grosser then this xray (though I've got some real gag inducers for anyone with a sick curiosity.) The goal is to get my hand back fast and complete, as well as shed my squeamishness enough to look at the first xray of the break, which I still can't do.

So onward goes the blog. Onward goes my strange, amazing life.

But no more goddamn fortune cookies.

remodeling

Fracture breaks continuity of bone and of important attached soft tissue--including blood vessels, which spill their contents into surrounding tissue.

Even before treatment, the body automatically seeks to repair the injury. Inflammatory cells rush to destroy, dilute or isolate invaders and injured tissue. Tiny new blood vessels called capillaries begin growing into the site. Cells proliferate. The injured person usually must endure pain, swelling, and increased heat at the breakage site for one to three days.

New tissue bonds the fractured bone ends with a soft callus, a mass of connective tissue and exudate (matter escaped through blood vessel walls). Remodeling begins. Within a few months, a hard callus replaces the soft one. Remodeling restores the inner canal.

Once restoration is complete, which may take years, the healed area is brand new, without a scar. Usually thicker, the new bone may even be stronger than the old.

kindred

This woman really does stuff with balloons, among other things.



She writes:

What is the relationship between play and revolution? Creating fissures in reality opens up the possibility for change: change in the everyday/monotonous routine, change in assumptions about 'facts', change in the world in general. The act of "making strange" allows a new perspective for reassessment and critique. Nothing is fixed and anyone can make the environment around them better.

Wow. I love her. Thank you Alvina for finding her!

lefty

league

coincidence

Author, illustrator plan meet and greet

Julia Cooper , Register Correspondent

-MILFORD — Author Josepha Sherman and illustrator Linda Wingerter have seemingly been drawn together by coincidence.

Sherman, a recent transplant from Manhattan, created a multicultural collection of horse folktales titled "Magic Hoofbeats" in 2000. The book, published in 2004, came to life with illustrations by Wingerter, a West Haven resident and teacher of puppetry at Quinnipiac University.

The two women, however, did not meet during the time they both spent working on the book. It took two more years for them to finally get to know each other through Artifax, a small shop in the downtown area offering art from around the world.

"I was exploring Artifax because it looked interesting," said Sherman, who was once an assistant curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "I was wandering around and saw my book and said, ‘That’s me.’"

Sherman’s book grew out of her love for horses. She said her mother gave her a horse toy when she was three and "that was it." It was Sherman’s mother who also helped foster her writing.

"I’ve been writing since I can remember," said Sherman. "My mother was a screenwriter and short story writer. I was always encouraged to write."

Sherman chose folk tales because she said they are "a universal literature."

It was Wingerter’s own love of horses and past experiences that led her to illustrate Sherman’s book.

"The publisher told me that this was a book about horses," said Wingerter. "I grew up on a horse farm in Maine and Vermont. I love horses."

Wingerter also said that illustrating fairy tales and folklore is her "absolute favorite," and such work is hard to come by in the illustration field.

It was only after Sherman found her own book in Artifax that shop owner Ann Solomon decided the two women should get together and introduce their work to the community. In addition to a copy of "Magic Hoofbeats" on display at the store, Solomon also had additional illustrations by Wingerter, which often involve horses.

The store will hold a meet and greet with author and illustrator at 3 p.m. Nov. 25.

Solomon hopes members of the community will stop by to meet the women and have the opportunity to discuss what it means to be an author or an illustrator.

"Their work falls in line with what I try to do here in the shop, which is promote multiculturalism," Solomon said. "And I just couldn’t resist the synchronicity of the situation. It was just such a coincidence."

"At this event people are going to be allowed to ask questions," said Sherman. "We want that because all people are a closet writer or artist."

Wingerter said, "I’ll have my paintings and the book on display so I can show the process that goes on between the two."

interlude (cont'd again)

The soul within our individual souls
loves the one who runs and falls down

more than the one who sits and watches.
The soul within soul lives in a lover.

Consider this metaphor: how you love is
the open sky.


Rumi

fortune cookie #4

Be willing to be uncomfortable. Be comfortable being uncomfortable. It may get tough.

absorption

Spiral Transit
Remedios Varo
oil on masonite
1962

"Remedios Varo believed in magic. Deeply superstitious and strongly attuned to nature, she held a mystical belief in forces beyond the self that influence and direct events. She approached both her life and her art committed to this vision. Strolling along a Mexican street one evening, she noticed plants with beautiful white egglike fruits. Fascinated, she took one to her apartment, set it among her plants on the terrace in full moonlight, and carefully nestled tubes of paint around it. She felt that this conjunction of the special plant, her paints, and the moon might prove auspicious for the next day of painting."

interlude (still cont'd)

On foot
I had to walk through the solar systems,
before I found the first thread of my red dress.
Already, I sense myself.
Somewhere in space hangs my heart,
sparks fly from it, shaking the air,
to other reckless hearts.

Edith Sodergran

interlude (cont'd)

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister.

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape, like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers' sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.


Rainer Maria Rilke

interlude (cont'd)

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.


David Whyte

interlude

I am too tired to blog. I let the poets take over while I rest.

I have begun,
when I'm weary and can't decide an answer to a bewildering question

to ask my dead friends for their opinion
and the answer is often immediate and clear.

Should I take the job? Move to the city? Should I try to conceive a child
in my middle age?

They stand in unison shaking their heads and smiling-- whatever leads
to joy, they always answer,

to more life and less worry. I look into the vase where Billy's ashes were--
it's green in there, a green vase,

and I ask Billy if I should return to the difficult phone call and he says, yes.
Billy's already gone through the frightening door,

whatever he says I'll do.


Marie Howe

Rumi

Rumi reader is probably the most questioned part of the above Antinomia description.

Jalalludin Rumi was a sufi teacher in Turkey in the 1200s, and the originator of the Mevlevi sufis, the whirling dervishes. He had a pretty normal life until he was 34, when he met the mysterious and rebellious wanderer, Shams Tabrizi, who questioned Rumi's faith and threw all his theological books into a fountain. Rumi was so struck with love for Shams that he passed out from a kind of ecstatic epiphany on the spot. Shams immediately became his beloved friend and teacher, the two were scandalously inseparable for years until Shams was killed by Rumi's jealous students. The loss sent Rumi into the deepest despair and he walked around a pole in his garden for a month, and this is the story of how the whirling, the turning, or the sema, came to be.

After he'd worn a circle a few feet into the ground he started writing poetry inspired by the absence of his friend. He wrote so much it filled a couple dozen books. He is the best selling poet in the United States.

It's easy to relate to Rumi's circular method of grieving and admire his way of turning sadness into a joyful dance. And in his poems he comes across as someone you'd very much like to know. He's relentlessly enthusiastic and optimistic, even in the worst kind of longing and heartache. To him the universe is ever playful, and he never loses his sly sense of humor. It seems like he loved life so much he couldn't contain himself. His poems are bursting with fire and wine and love without shame or apology.


Whatever you feel is yours the Friend
pulls you away from.

Decisions made at
night seem strange the next day. Where

are you when you sleep? A trickster
curls on the headboard. Restless in

the valley, you go to the ocean. Then
turning toward the light, you fall in

the fire. Who jiggles this battered
saucepan? The sky puts a yoke on you

to help with turning around a pole.
Teachers get dizzy like students. The

lion that killed you now wonders whether
to drag you off or tear you to pieces

here. There's a shredding that's really
a healing, that makes you more alive!

A lion holds you in his arms. Fingers
rake the fretbridge for music. A

compass revolves around the metal foot
point. Some grow fond of battle armor;

some, satin clothing. Others, like me,
love the word bunches called poetry.

Arden

There is a forest of Arden between the Quinnipiac University cafeteria and the puppetry classroom. Trees with cryptic messages line the path. I'm told art students put them there, but who can really say.

My friend Eliza B has been noticing the messages too.

CWOS 06: Nurse's Office

The Nurse's Office residents: Barbara Hocker, Matthew Feiner, Rebecca Strom, and myself. I loved these three, their work, and sharing a space with them.

Photos from the weekend: visitors must walk through Barbara's shadow forest to find me, Matt's intense 5 year scrapbook room, Rebecca's laundry lines, my collages, a man being mosaic-ed.

Wearing rollerskates the whole weekend promoted the roller derby while enabling me to see exhibits down neverending school hallways. I sold a lot of paintings, I met a lot of new people. Friends from every one of my many circles came out: puppeteers, dollmakers, rollergirls, firespinners, artists, electricians, theater people, church people, RISD people, publishing people, people who know me only from the blog, people who know me only from myspace. It turned out many of them knew each other, or enjoyed meeting each other. Circles overlapped and merged. Any remaining boundaries between Polly's and Linda's life were eradicated. Thank you, everyone!

transformation

On Friday and Saturday I turned part of the abandoned Hamden Middle School nurse's office into an art gallery. It was my fifth year as one of 300 artists participating in the annual City Wide Open Studios alternative space weekend.

Photos of the progression of the space over 24 hours. I had incredible help from my mum, my friends Scott, Paula, Kathleen and Rebecca, and my roomates. A lot of boxes were hauled, a lot of coffee was consumed, and a lot of fun was had by all.

reconstruction

Last week a bathroom began to bloom in my attic. Karl decided we needed one and started building. I've wanted a sink on the third floor where my studio is, but not in the middle of my sculpture studio and storage space, when I'm teaching a puppetry class and getting ready for City Wide Open Studios in the same week.

So Karl brought in our friend Rebecca to help get the basics finished. She did, and then offered to fix the long neglected problem of the hole in my studio.











I've been freezing for 6 years from the wind that comes up through the soffets of this unfinished closet space, despite the many layers of stapled blankets and foam insulation I tried to put there.

In a day Rebecca framed it in, insulated it and hung the door.







I fought and complained about the disruption of my quiet little mess, not realizing how much I apparently needed it. My studio and I have been in shambles. The new door inspired a rearranging of furniture, a new filing system, and the joyful anticipation of adding a chalkboard. I'm still in flux, but I am warm with a renewed optimism about working here.













Rebecca has also been great spirited company in the studio, and I get the added bonus of Roxy, the 9 week old puppy who comes with her.