Nancy Dorrier

STILL AND YET , being an artist

I don’t know what the scientific explanation is  or if there is any

Even a simple one

Often we make explanations to close down the exploration

Anthropologist Gregory Bateson calls it “an explanatory principle”

You ask a question and make up an answer

you give it and you are sure it  is true

without question

Then that is the end of the exploration

Right now today

Scientists are trying to figure out the submersible Titan explosion

And the rising water level of the ocean

And how to keep old people exercising and not quitting and making excuses

Keep looking, don’t be satisfied with the first answer or even second and third

That is what Bateson is saying

we talk and wax on with answers talking over each other

the exploration here

Is for my art aversion,

fear,

misunderstanding,

all the way to a kind of seasickness

Looking at the canvas with Terrell James

I didn’t even have supplies then, so Paul Ware shared his stuff.

Ciona Rouse and her sister had a writing and collage class in 2022

Cut up magazines and put them together to say something

I still have a little blurb cut out from an old ad they had on the stack of supplies table

An ad for an ocean liner trip, Dollar Steamship Line

This was before zip codes

I loved the writing and wrote about Tempy my maid, and got Ciona to listen to me read and look at my writing and keep it soft and not offensive

A white woman remembering being a young girl with her Black maid, Negro at the time,

I ended up putting my computer on top of my collage supplies and paints and writing

I could hardly bear last week

in the book making Eco dyeing class

Lotta the teacher was teaching to the better students/ artists who were ready to go

Some made 4 books, plus

and lots of fabric covered with leaves they dyed

I made 1 and a half books

I did do some dyeing which just about spent me, bless my heart

I don’t like being in a bad mood and I keep signing up for these classes

The print making not so bad

but yet and still

I did just enough to satisfy the need for 6 print things to make a book

And then Christy put it all together in a folding book for me

I guess if I tell the truth about how bored and impatient I am with myself and  if I could discover the scientific explanation for my habit of

Staying comfortable and knowing

And tasting things Not on my palate

Being an adventurous eater

Next year quilting and stitching

But not writing  and bookmaking

and not stitching and printing

though tempted to yet once again wander into the unknown, not a submersible or spaceship

whew lord have mercy

now to go the thrift stores and get some men’s shirts and learn to do boro and stitch up Thomas’s quilt

am I strange

if I cry?

I can be an adventurer

I regret I didn’t stick with drawing leaves with Mr. Shealey

In college

Still and yet

I met Paul Ware

And Caroline Randall Williams, the  Confederate Monument she said her body was, how could she be so light skinned except for rape in the kitchen and stay in the kitchen, getting fat was the answer so I wrote about Robert E Lee and  my mother with her

So I wrote about

Tempy our maid, I met Cionna and her sister, and wrote about Tempy

Now I have some freedom, I wrote this

I could say it

Because I met you, you, you,

“And that has made all the difference.”

Reference Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”