Drawings Stay Flat Falling Into Reality

The things you don’t remember
are the criterion of your madness.

from “Mimsy Were The Borogoves”

(from the great 1943 short story
written by husband and wife team
Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore,
not the horrible 2007 movie
‘adapted’ from the story by
filmmaker Robert Shaye)

“Leia was unconscious a lot,” she says. “And I wanted to be unconscious; I have an affinity for unconsciousness. I thought I could play that very well. But I also wanted to be involved in all of it, with Wookiees, with monsters in the cantina. ... They taped a rehearsal and they taped another one, and there was very little direction—and I thought, There is no way that I have it. I didn’t hear anything for about three weeks, so I thought, Well, I’m not going to get to have lunch with monsters.”

Carrie Fisher
quoted in “The Making
of Star Wars”

I remember drawing a color pencil cartoon
of a British blues singer and it still makes me smile.
I bought some new kinds of pastels to add to the pile
of stick-based media I’m going to work with soon

to draw images of a scientist and a tune
derived from birdsongs and a monster lost for a while
but found—dug for unearthed brought to the surface: like oil.
Drawings stay flat. They’re not kites. They’re not a child’s balloon.

A husband and wife team wrote a story about kids.
They wrote that the things you forget as you become old
define your madness as if age is moving away

from a place—a balloon rising or the pyramids
falling into reality out of legends told
by words in lost books or a princess in a screenplay.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .





This Woman From The Canals Of Mars


A Sketchbook Page With No Sketches


On The Edges Of A Dawn Chorus


Checking In On Disbelief And Recognition


“Yet Baghdad Is”