Letter

In one of my last figure-drawing classes, I try to draw the model with my students. I’m used to easily switching into the tunnel vision necessary to draw, but the lever is faulty this day. Other responsibilities keep intruding into my consciousness. Like that I should be walking around the room, saying something useful to students who paid good money to be here.

I didn’t start out the drawing with any grand ambitions, but a divided mind is no way to work. I pin it to the classroom wall and leave it there a week.

When I come back, it looks no better, but I spray it with fixative, roll it up and take it home. The collage thing has made me believe practically any piece of crap might be salvaged, reused, made to sing some way.

I cut it into pieces and glue several back together. It’s instantly a thousand times better. I leave the figure out. She’ll be part of something else in the future, maybe.

The piles of past I’ve gathered don’t weigh on me the way they sometimes used to. Now, every shitty drawing, homework assignment, embarrassing school photo, or neglected bill holds the potential of rebirth. Ripping pieces give off sparks. Maybe only I can see them. If I work at it awhile, maybe a few others will notice as well.

A friend commissions a painting of the house she’s about to move out of. A couple days later, I strap a folding chair to my bike and pedal to Logan Square.

It’s a warm, sunny afternoon. I set up the chair in a square of grass across the street from the house. A guy walks out of the neighboring house, looks my way, and waves. People walk by with their dogs, park their cars, others get in and drive away. Nobody pulls into the space in front of me to fuck up my view.

A man and his young son go up to the house. He turns my way several times before unlocking the door and going in. His neighbor comes back out and asks how the painting’s going. I explain that a woman who lives there is moving out and wants a painting for a keepsake. He smiles at me and goes back inside.

I can’t tell if it’s going well or not, but get the picture to a point I know too well——the moment that I either have to stop so I don’t wreck it, or throw it away.

I pack up my gear and go meet a friend for dinner nearby.

I text that her painting’s done. She asks for a photo, so I email one. She says it’s beautiful; but what house is that? For a second, I wonder if she’s fucking with me, but then double-check the address. Wrong house.

She wants to buy it anyway, then sends me photos of the house she actually lives in. I start a new painting. While I’m working, I think about all those nice people who passed by and saw me sitting and painting on their street. Unless my friend happened by of course, nobody would’ve known to correct my location. I was five or six houses off.

I’d never been inside, so maybe that was part of it, but the two houses I painted look nothing alike. Is my memory going?

Anyhow, this is the right house.

p.s. The best film about internet fame was made in 1954.

Saturday, I rode my bike to Evanston to read Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” out loud in a park near the lake.

It’s a yearly tradition, going back over twenty years, I think. It’s my third time, but everyone’s first outside in a park. Before, it was inside, a long evening full of drink and food and many many people.

There are about twenty of us sitting in folding chairs on the grass. It’s windy and cool and everyone but me takes care to sit in the sun. I can’t recall a gathering where I was the youngest like I am today, in quite a long time.

I’ve still never read this poem myself all the way through. In fact, I’ve only ever read sections out loud at these gatherings. I go in and out of paying attention while others read. I spend a bunch of time drawing, more just staring into the distance. When I come back, I like hearing Whitman’s words, especially if the reader holds the microphone correctly, so they’re amplified and audible.

But I doubt I could say what the poem is about. I can’t imagine writing in such an ecstatic mode. It’s hopeful in ways I’ve never been. Very American that way. All that self-love too is completely alien to me.

I hope the reading is inside next year. But whereever it is, I’d like to be invited again. It’s sort of like church in its communal aspect. About as close to church as I want to be.