Hand-built clay sculpture, Emmie, by Tammy Vitale of Tam’s Originals

Emmie,here, is the grave marker I made for my 15 year old pug dog when she died.  We "inherited" her at 1 year old from a girlfriend who was getting a divorce.  She was the best dog, and Husband and I wailed for 3 days when she had a stoke and we had to put her down.  We had spent the last year carrying her up and down steps and keeping a close eye on her outside since by then she was mostly blind and maybe deaf (or just ignoring us – we could never tell – neither could the vet).  It took us 3 years of mourning before we decided to open our home to a rescue, named Sueno (Spanish for dream), who is also a pug but much rangier and way more neurotic.  She thinks she’s a cat.  Dogs have their own personalities.  We should not expect one to be like another.  Needless to say, Sueno has wormed her way into our heart, too. 

We haven’t told her yet that when we move, this couch won’t move with us.  We have decided that in order to keep her from having an anxiety breakdown, we will have to take the cushions.

Ok.  That was the "dog and stories" part of this entry.  Here’s the writing. With it’s own stories.

"Was I a woman?  I am challenging the entire History of women in reviving this question  A History made up of millions of singular stories, but traversed by the same questions, the same fears, the same uncertainties.  The same hopes that only a little while ago harbored nothing but consent, resignation, or despair.  Take myself for a woman?  How so?  Which one?  I would have hated to ‘take’ myself ‘for’ a woman, if I had been taken for a woman.

"They grab you by the breasts, they pluck your derriere, they stuff you in a pot, they saute you with sperm, they grab you by the beak, they stick you in a house, they fatten you up on conjugal oil, they shut you up in your cage, And now, lay.

"How difficult they make it for us to become women, when becoming poultry is what that really means!

"How many deaths to cross, how many deserts, how many regions in flames and regions iced over, in order to give myself the right birth one day!  And you, how many times did you die before being able to think, ‘I am a woman,’ without having this phrase signify, ‘Thus I serve?"  Helene Cixous, "Coming to Writing" and Other Essays

"If you write, good ideas must come welling up into you so that you have something to write.  If good ideas do not come at once, or for a long time, do not be troubled at all.  Wait for them.  Put down the little ideas however insignificant they are.  But do not feel, any more, guilty about idleness and solitude….if it is the dreamy idleness that children have, an idleness when you walk alone for a long, long time, or take a long, dreamy time at dressing, or lie in bed at night and thoughts come and go, or dig in a garden or drive a car for many hours alone, or play the piano, or sew, or paint ALONE…."  Brenda Ueland, If You Want To Write:  A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit"

You can see how well this fits also with doing art….she even says that painting leads to writing….perhaps that is why I blog, as a precursor to art, hopefully.  And today I must do kiln loading and no, I haven’t done the hoped for zodiac tile designs.  But I have pressure washed and scurbbed the deck and packed yet more books.

Thought for the day:  "The  business of art lies just in this, – to make that understood and felt which, in the form of an argument, might be incomprehensible and inaccessible…."  Brenda Ueland, again, as above