September Newsletter

NO. 38 | September 2024

Sep 01, 2024

My book club is reading White Noise by Don DeLillo right now. It’s one of my favorite books of all time, and this is my third or fourth time reading it. It’s a bit hard to explain what this book is all about, but I will do my best here (spoilers ahead).

It follows what a professor I had called an “accidental family.” The parents, Jack and Babette, have each been married 3 or 4 times, and together, they are raising a band of children from all those different unions. They have been together themselves for only a couple of years. Jack is a professor at a small college: the professor of Hitler studies, a field he pioneered. And they live in a world of noise—our world of noise. Around them, always, is the cacophony of life and industry. And, that noise is interwoven in the text. You don’t read just the careful dialogue or increasingly bizarre plot. You read the noise too: the advertising, the warnings, the TV, the traffic, the mess, the noise.

Jack and Babette share an intense fear of death. They ask each other, silently and out loud, “Who will die first?” This fear drives much of the plot. Babette starts taking a mysterious drug with symbolic symptoms meant to cure this fear. The entire family (and neighborhood) is evacuated after an “airborne toxic event.” Jack goes on a paranoid and desperate journey in search of the drug’s origin and the secrets Babette is keeping (well, actually, forgetting). And through it all, we read the noise. But, despite all the estrangement of words and the horde of language, this isn’t a difficult book to read. It’s pretty funny. The plot is action-packed. There’s a gun.

In the introduction, Richard Power writes, “DeLillo’s great theme is speech—it’s coded traces and intimations…His people scramble for words that might contain their fright; they seek out incantations and spells real enough to solidify their days and infuse their lives with sense. But life and death remain irreducibly strange, infolded processes that defy all the rationalizing of grammar. The force that words seek will not yield to meaning, yet it is still signal.”

There are many things I like about this book, but I find it’s impact so lasting on me because it is really a search for meaning. What matters within all that noise? All that complexity? Where did it come from in the first place? Why do we keep making more? And through it all, we are thinking about death, that ultimate meaning-maker/meaning-taker.

Jack and his friend, Murray, talk a lot about progression (of lives, of plots) through the book. Jack posits early on that all plots move toward death, an exposure of his fear that he hadn’t planned to share with his class that day. Later, Murray asserts the opposite, that “a plot is to live.” He continues: “We start our lives in chaos, in babble. As we surge up into the world, we try to devise a shape, a plan…To plot, to take aim at something, to shape time and space.” In short, we try to make meaning in the noise.

I am glad to be reading this book again now. I think I am teetering on some kind of threshold, moving between things. I have been thinking a lot about complexity, how it feels like all things move toward it. I think about when I first try something new. It can be so easy to try something new! Because it is the most recent of my serious endeavors, I think back to sewing my first shirt in 2021. I can’t remember how long it took, how I picked out the fabric or the pattern, if it was easy or hard. I just remember the elation of sewing that shirt and making that thing and the fervor it created.

Now, I have sewn a lot of things, and that beginner’s blindness has disappeared. And it happens with everything. Have you ever been given the advice to paint like a child? To embrace the freedom of simplicity? As we invest and grow in anything—a craft, an art, a relationship, a sport, a life plan—it gets harder. It gets louder. The metrics of success and joy change. The noise crowds in. Some of it is our noise. A lot of it is the noise of all those other living things out there trying to make meaning themselves. Some of it is just noise.

Of course, also, as things grow more complex, they also change and improve and become new things that we achieve only through dedicating that time and effort. The push through complexity allows us to have real meaning in our lives, but it’s also really hard.

I bought a CSA box from my herbalist friend, Hannah of Foliage Botanics, and in it is an herbal medicine that feels so right right now: Angelica & Wild Rose Oxymel. Angelica is “a remedy for the portals of life…helping us across, helping us process.”

This summer has felt really different for me. Of course, there are lots of things that are different in my summer this year. But, I’m talking more about the things that I didn’t expect to change and that are changing anyway. I have been trying not to fight against this stuff, though, to let it wash over me even if that means spending a day (some days) in bed. And, finally, I feel like I hear a break in the noise. A little silence to step through. A chance at simplicity. Some time to listen to my own noise, voice.

Beyond, Beyond, Beyond album cover for The Crane Wives painted by Rebecca Green - a lovely, gorgeous piece on portal stepping.

Swim Along With Me: Plein Air Painting

I have loved plein air painting and drawing for years, and while I haven’t made as much time for it this summer as I would have liked to, I’m going to spend some time with it now and bring you with me. And, I’m going to tell you all about the plein air set-up Emilio built me.

Inbox cutting off this post? Read the whole thing on Substack.

I treated August a little bit like a vacation after the release of the Swim Along Crossbody! Thank you all so much for the support! I sold all the pre-made bags & way surpassed my pattern sales goal! It’s so, so fun to see people making the bag. 🥹 I rewarded myself with chicken of the woods and goldenrod harvest, swimming, canoe camping, fires, and visiting with these two puppies that joined Emilio’s family.

I almost always spotlight a working artist here, but I have recently become enthralled with the landscape paintings of Maxfield Parrish (1870-1966). I have been looking at them for long amounts of time because there is so much detail to get lost in. The colors blow me away—the time, the light, the setting. Sigh. These also feel like really lovely paintings to end August with.