Confessions of a Genre Hopper

Chapter 1: Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch Hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Baronetage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; there his faculties were roused into admiration and respect, by contemplating the limited remnant of the earliest patents; there any unwelcome sensations, arising from domestic affairs changed naturally into pity and contempt as he turned over the almost endless creations of the last century; and there, if every other leaf were powerless, he could read his own history with an interest which never failed. This was the page at which the favourite volume always opened:

-J.R.R. Tolkien

"Hence the uneasiness which they arouse in those who, for whatever reason, wish to keep us wholly imprisoned in the immediate conflict. That perhaps is why people are so ready with the charge of "escape." I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, "What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and hostile to, the idea of escape?" and gave the obvious answer: jailers."

Well then, let me show you, because that’s what I do for a living.

Right now, it’s this time of the year, and the little ones have just freshly hatched:

You’ll notice they’re still blind and naked when they hatch. So I make them little coats to keep them warm during their first winter:

See how they happily line up to put them on:

See? Better. Now they’re ready to go and explore the world.

And if they make it through the winter and we take good care of them, they will grow up to be strong and wise like their older fellows:

From “Terns” and “Where Does the Temple Begin, Where Does it End” by the American poet, Mary Oliver.

I came across these two snippets of poetry in a short video that randomly appeared in my Youtube feed: “4 ideas for a more creative 2022” by an artist, Ian Roberts. One of the ideas was to “pay attention to your artistic and poetic vision.” This is where he referred to these lines by Mary Oliver. Then he said something like this (paraphrased): both of these quotes speak to the spirit of the artist, of really seeing the world, believing in it, being arrested by it, and finding some way to give personal expression to what you have seen.

I was arrested by the message in these words, as I have been reading Rod Michalko’s book, “The mystery of the eyes and the shadow of blindness”. Michalko writes that neither the artist, not the blind person, can forget the visible world (it is impossible) but in a sense need to do so in order to be able to depict the world ‘artistically’. Both the artist and the blind person “confront the difficulty of discovering both their world and their depiction of it […] It is never ‘easy’ to capture the world artistically or to live in the world without seeing”, writes Michalko. For artists and blind persons, seeing cannot be taken for granted. For others, writes Michalko, “seeing is easy” because most people are “satisfied with seeing whatever there is to see”. I take this to mean that in accepting what we see, we are reassured that the world is as it is; there is a satisfaction and comfort in relying on sight in this way. What both Roberts (via Mary Oliver) and Michalko point to is the act of paying attention to your vision (both literally and metaphorically). This is important in ‘seeing’ the world - not necessarily as it is, but in the meaning of the seeing that emerges from within, as a subjective expression back into the world, in “looking with arms wide open”.

Enclosed walkway. Closely-spaced pergola beams and plant-supporting wall battens, stained to match, increase the feeling of enclosure in the existing side garden.