Josef Albers at the Museum of Art. It was really nice to see these paintings in real life. I had cut pictures of his paintings out of a magazine decades ago and put them in some long lost journal. I never thought I would try and paint something in the same general area of expression as this, but I started to do that last year. I was inspired by late, fellow schizophrenic Agnes Martin, I have mentioned her here before. I like the formality of the composition and the colors are great to me. I wanted something very somber and easy to paint, as I had kind of lost my feeling for the brush after years on medicines and I wanted to depart from the bright, kind of citrusy palette I had used in university and after that.
I finished my Introvert Power book this afternoon. It was kind of dense and energetic and very informative with lots of references to other specialists and authors, which i always enjoy. I thought that this sort of information should be taught in school, like it's just so incredibly good to know because, according to Laurie Helgoe, the author of the book, more than half - just slightly more than half - of the population is introverted. She describes the qualities of an introvert and the varieties and combinations in quite good detail, and, in short, introverts listen, observe, analyse and collect impressions. They are a yin energy, dark and cool. Of course, there is a spectrum, and she explains that introverts may act like extroverts occasionally and vice versa. She refers to Jung a lot, and she explains the shadow self, and I was so glad because in the last couple of years I had been looking for a good explanation of what that is. She says, "All of the parts of ourselves that we reject go into the unconscious in the form of the shadow archetype. The parts we approve of become the persona." She also writes, "... every mental disorder is only an extreme of the human condition." Maybe that was a quote of a quote, I think it was, sorry my notes are sloppy there. Anyway, it was all very interesting and she even quoted Vincent Van Gogh, whose letters i really love, in describing the loneliness of the introvert. "One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul, and yet no one ever comes to sit by it." It makes me appreciate my life and she does talk about the importance of the internet to an introvert. It's just my friends are mostly online and really, it's so nice to have that. I don't know or remember life before the net anymore. But it is a way to experience an intimacy in conversation and to write, an art form she describes as kind of essential to the introvert type, as I have mentioned. Certainly I would not have been granted Disability if I had not been able to write down my experiences as evidence, instead of when I had sat down with a medical judge and my lawyer, I just couldn't talk and so the appeal with the written application was a life saver. One of the reasons I wanted to read this book is that I had randomly opened it in the store and she talked a little about her experience as an introvert, with children. She grew up as one of 10 children in Minnesota, and she had to have therapy because she only wanted two children herself and it made her feel guilty. I just found it interesting and went back later to pick up the book. It's not the theme of the book, but i like what she said. She wrote that babies remind you of what comes of receiving, waiting and trusting. Having lost one quite early in the pregnancy, I certainly had some of those emotions and I was just glad to read anything of this nature because people just kind of go about having children and they never really discuss what it is like emotionally or mentally generally. In fact, I am surprised at the way people just kind of expect children and babies to be around, as if it wasn't an event in which the mother is 7 times more likely to die, for instance, lol. People are so brave. I mean, you know, it's nice to read that people have to think about this kind of thing too. Just an aside. She talks about the importance of writing for an introvert too, and really she just kind of trips off all kinds of facts at great speed. It was interesting and I'm glad I read it. She wrote, "the road to healthy psychology is to get an identity and then lose it." I watched a film called Carol last night, directed by Todd Haynes and starring Cate Blanchett, who I kind of really look out for I think she's great. It was a really beautiful romance between two women and I thought it was a good film. It reminded me of the only time I have ever been attracted to a woman in my life, I am generally very very heterosexual and really, I didn't even remember this crush until I saw the film. The object of my affection was a blues singer in Nashville and it's just really unlikely this attraction but it was very strong for a few months and quite magnetic. I think it was a prelude to my breakdown a couple of years later. She had a boyfriend who burned her with cigarettes, and I didn't see the burns until what was to be the last day of filming. I was operating the camera and we were in front of her house and her sister came outside with her son, and I was kneeling down and the boy came right to the lens and put his eye there, he was touching the camera with his face. I started to stand again and I noticed that he had cigarette burns in a circle around both wrists and both ankles, and that the singer I was so taken with had an enormous one on her ankle, a burn. I started to kind of lose it and I asked my partner, who was my husband to take me home, immediately. I was not able to calm down and so he took me on a drive for a few days through Mississippi. I cried like the whole time. So anyway, that was my brush with that kind of experience. I remember she visited London, where we lived, for part of the filming project, and we were invited to the country house of an American chicken billionaire, who was a fan and a kind of sponsor of her. As we sat down to dinner I just remember that sitting next to her was like a magnet, very strong, and I even wondered if it was some kind of sound equipment thing, lol. But, yeah, for a few weeks leading into a couple of months I would sing to myself and think of her. Anyway, Haynes' film is lovely.
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