Living Designs

Life in Lewiston, Maine

2012-01-05T18:08:00.000-08:00

I'd long ago heard that Lewiston, Maine was the "armpit" of Maine, resounding of all the odd stinks one could smell. Nowadays, to be sure, Lewiston does NOT stink. The river is actually so incredibly beautiful, and I'd do a lot to live by its momentaries.

I didn't grow up in Lewiston, but in the swanky area of Falmouth, Maine, even in the most highly taxed area of Falmouth, along the waterfront, though my parents struggled to stay there, since my father earned a USM professor's wage, which just got us through, and my father sometimes did things to help us get through I know he's not proud of... but Falmouth was street-wise proud, and I didn't grow up surrounded by garbage littering my daily vision of life.

I have lived in many places... various town and communities in California, in Madison, Wisconsin, and in various neighborhoods of both New York City and Boston, and also all along the Cumberland County coast of Maine, and also in Farmington, Maine.

Lewiston could be a nice place to live. Money is not required. I've been low-income most of my life, but I do not choose to live in dirt, trash, etc.

There is one thing I know: the low-income envy the "wealth" of the rich. What do they really envy? They envy the beauty, and the serenity that beauty provides. Believe it or not, that is just outside your door, and entirely available to you. There is absolutely nothing between you and the wealth of the world aside from your resentments.

There is absolutely no reason that the low income people can't have beauty. All that is required is to get off our butts and clean up and make beautiful our surroundings.

What is really beautiful, and what the rich pay for, are those moments when we can contemplate our surroundings, know peace, and learn more about what is different and fascinating: bugs, grass, wind, other people, microbes, etc.

Best, Elizabeth M. Burke

The Land Doesn't Leave

2011-04-27T01:33:00.000-07:00

Novel.
Part I: The Land Doesn't Leave

by E.M. Burke

© Elizabeth Morrill Burke, 2011, Portland, Maine

While some of the events, locales and characters are based on historical, published material, this is a work of fiction and liberties have been taken even with historical, published material—vis a vis the characters in the fiction, and with landscapes. Any named person, except as indicated as from public records, is mere happenstance. References to published material may be found in the acknowledgements.

Part I
Chapter 1
In her eighth summer, on a warm Saturday afternoon in late July, Eva Thompson walked around Andrew’s Nubble, a small nub of land jutting out between two sand beaches. At one place on the ledge where the open ocean surf had smashed for centuries into the granite ledges, the rock had been worn into smooth shallow basins, like a series of large bird baths. Eva stripped down to her underwear and went to lie in one, thinking it might be like a soothing bath. Immediately upon sliding in, she realized the rocks were covered in some algae and more slippery than wet porcelain, and she panicked, grabbing out for any dry piece of rock she could find. She muscled herself out, her legs useless against the slipperiness of the basin, while watching the waves throw themselves against those ledges.
The next weekend, she trudged over a sandbar off the larger of the two beaches to a small uninhabited island. It was a very small island, perhaps an eighth mile wide and long, but just close enough to the larger island to cause the waves coming around both sides of it to deposit sand in the middle between the two land masses. The way even a body of flesh and blood next to another body creates deposits between them.
There had been a man who lived there once, before she was born. He’d built a small house and lived there alone, rowing to shore once a month or so for supplies. Eva thought this would be an ideal way to live, in the company of noises that most people find disquieting—the sound of wind underneath a shrub, the bump of ice flows against the shore in the winter, the fighting of gulls over a crab dropped onto the rocks.
She climbed up a small rocky incline and saw that past the shore, the island was overgrown with poison ivy. In a few places, rocks had been thrown by winter storms past the vegetation and made a path to the island’s interior. Hopping from stone to stone to avoid the poison ivy, several yards in she saw the land dropped down to a small almost perfectly round pond. She scrambled down the embankment and tasted the water. It was fresh and warm and clear. She could see to the bottom—rocks and patches of what appeared to be sand. She crouched down to be sure no passing boat could see her and then quickly stripped out of her clothes and slid into the water.
That sense of disappearing was lovely.
She pulled air deeper into herself . She sighed heavily several times. She floated around and then rolled around, imagining she was a seal, and then swam to the edge of the pond. Pulling herself out, she then lay on a large smooth rock to dry out.
Small coolish breezes began racing across her body. The sun moved below the western tree line. She got chilly.
She dressed and raced up the embankment and saw the tide had returned and covered the sandbar. Cutting her feet on the broken mussel shells underfoot hidden between the top layer of sand and then whipping the tops of her feet in the dune cut grass, she ran all the way home.
For all the challenge she took on in crossing the sandbar, Eva felt the adventure had been better than what she usually did, going through her mother’s walk-in closet and dress bags. The closet bulged with dresses her mother wore prior to getting married, in her heyday, her mother had said. There were silks and taffetas deeply hued, different from Eva’s cottons and wools. There were yards of petticoat mesh dyed to match the dresses that pushed the skirts of the dresses out in soft billows and matching bras for the dresses strapped into the bodices, with thin straps sewn to the dresses which kept the bra straps in place. The billowing of a silk dress seemed to Eva to carry in its swirls secrets—to what is worth desiring, what will be some answer to a problem. Dresses, dancing, and romance. Love. Things her mother must have had at one time. She no longer wore the dresses.
Her mother found her one day sitting cross-legged in front of a white silk party dress embroidered with huge strawberries and vines, and asked, “What are you doing going through my closet?”
That ended that.
The dress bags were also places her mother stashed her booze. The other place was in the bottom of the grandfather clock in the front hall. That was no secret, at least not from Eva.
Thereafter, Eva waited until she knew her mother was out of the house—afternoons when she’d come home to find the house empty and so still she could hear a fly trapped in the drier, buzzing and thwapping itself against the steel metal. Even then, going to the closet meant having to strain for the noises—for the sound of her mother’s car arriving, the sound of the back door squeaking, opening or closing, the sound of breath and moving air. That anxious running in and out of the closet was what had sent her out searching for other places where doors didn’t open or close, moments that weren’t ruled by sounds that meant the end or beginnings of things that were disturbing.
She was late for dinner that evening after going to the sandbar. Her father was already seated at the head of the table, so she had to squeeze around him to get to her chair. She hesitated before pushing around her father. Her father liked to snatch her arm and swivel her so he could swat her behind. If he missed her, if she got to her seat before he sat down, after dinner he’d sweetly beckon her over to his sitting chair, as if he were going to give her a hug or tell her something funny. Sometimes he told her something that made her laugh, kissed the top of her head and let her go. Other times, he’d tickle her so hard the shaking rattled her intestines. She couldn’t get out of his clutch in order to crouch down to constrict her bladder muscles. The pee started rolling down her legs into her socks. The more she struggled to get free, the harder he held, and the tears and pee would erupt in a torrent.
“Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about,” he said
But, she couldn’t stop, and what before had been a paddle became a painful stinging hit.
The first time, she said, “You’re hurting me.”
He said, “How did I hurt you?”
“You hurt my feelings.”
He laughed. “Feelings? I hurt your feelings? What are feelings? Nothing but something you’ve imagined. Feelings aren’t real. They’re a fiction. If you’d said I physically hurt you, that would make sense.”
“You physically hurt me,” she said.
“Now we’re talking about things that are real. I think you’ll survive.”
Hard to argue with. He was, after all, an engineer and had an answer for everything. The three inch nail in her heel that hadn’t resulted in infection, so why after all would she have gone to the hospital? The broken collar bone that would have to heal by itself.
So many things did what they had to do by themselves. He reminded her of that frequently by saying, “What goes up must come down,” and he’d swat her behind.
By age five she’d already begun moving around him the way a town pigeon moved around the person with the breadcrumbs. Coming closer, waiting, but always scurrying off some as the hand tossed the crumbs, and waiting until the person sat still. By age eight, that relationship had become a geometry, like a pencil tied to a string on one end and a center nail on the other. The circle was made by keeping the pencil taut on the string. If the tension on the pencil was let up, the line wobbled, and she wobbled and got confused. His words would confuse her and she’d get close. Sometimes he was sweet, sometimes he wasn’t. The words confused everything. She wanted the sweetness. She was afraid of breaking the circle.
Her father looked up, as she stood before the table, and said, simply, “Dinner is served.” Eva inched around him and sat down.
Her mother came out of the kitchen. She was swaying, trying to keep the casserole dish she was holding straight. Her father watched. Eva watched. She always watched. She watched the casserole dish, seeing it dip and sway with the juice from a pot roast veering towards the lip of the dish.
Her father lowered his head as if he were weary. When her mother finally sat down, still in her apron, Allen said to his wife, “Julia, I think it’s time you went to bed.”
“Yes, Allen,” she said. She looked down into her lap. The skin of her face seemed loose and puffy. Eva could hear her mother’s tears start to plop into the starched apron.
When her mother got up from the dinner table, she stumbled and fell to the floor. Tears leaked out of Eva’s eyes as she saw her mother crumple. Afraid her father would spank her for crying, she shoveled down some dinner and managed to ask politely to be excused from the dinner table without getting her words garbled in the snot and tears. She could hear just as she was shutting her bedroom door her mother crying, “No, Allen, no, stop.”
Perhaps her mother was drunk because there was too much housework and Eva hadn’t helped enough and instead had gone out exploring. Or perhaps it was because she and her mother had fought the day before about the smocked dress Eva did not want to wear to school and her mother thought was a lovely dress for a girl. Or because she was late for dinner.

Eva continued exploring that summer, looking for places on the land behind the beaches where she could get away from the adults.
The backside of the island where the beaches were, facing out to sea toward Europe, had few houses. People who lived on the island year-round built their houses on the mainland facing side, where their boats were protected from open water. Directly behind the beaches there was no house at all and seemed somehow as far from people as she imagined Europe was from it. The lot extended along the water for about a half mile and otherwise stretched back into the interior until it abutted Fern Avenue, where her house was. It was owned by the Navy, but the Navy hadn’t been around so long as she could remember. Across the street from Fern Avenue, the Navy owned another huge swath of land called The Area. It was completely surrounded by a tall chain-linked fence topped with barbed wire. No one went there, or at least not openly. Eva and Tommy went there by a hole they’d dug under the fence.
Eva’s house was two driveways away from that land and also abutted it along one small stretch, which made it easy for her to continue on her walk and slip down its road or pry through the thickets of high bush blueberries, bittersweet and prickly bushes. Once down the dirt road a hundred yards, or well through the thickets, she as good as disappeared.
Sometimes she brought her best friend Tommy with her. If she went out exploring after she was supposed to be in bed, when her parents were fighting, she went alone. On a moonlit night, she could walk down the old road through that property to the big beach and stand on the dunes watching the waves and counting the lighthouses. Sometimes she’d sit in the dune grass and cry, singing between the tears, until the tears were drowned in the song.
In the day, patches of moss in the middle of the lot, in a quiet copse of old oak trees, glowed like emerald green glass amidst the brown leaf covering. Even in the winter, those areas, well protected by large full pines around the seaward perimeter, remained sunlit and windless. The sun reached down through breaks in the tree coverage to warm the boulders and melt the snow, revealing the ever green moss beneath. She pulled up patches of the moss to hold them against her cheek or run them over her eyes. She stuffed them in her pocket to take home, where they grew brown and turned stiff and unloving. She went back and pulled up new patches, each time hoping that that soft feeling would envelope her entirely. She couldn’t have described, with words, what it was like to finally drop the moss and return home—have to return to the house for dinner, or to go to sleep, or whatever she felt should be done, such as dust the legs of the dining room table or the tiny fretwork of the grandfather clock, to try to prevent her mother from standing in despair in the middle of the room—frozen, just standing there with her hands bound up in her apron.
Eva believed that at some point, something might happen in that place, it looked so magical. In Sunday school, the teacher said there was a rock of salvation, and so she waited. But, when she got to there, the ache of searching was still there. Still, she searched. She waited. Part of the test was properly enduring, with grace, the current turmoils. The other part of the test was discovering something important, and Eva decided that it had to be something about this land.

Chapter 2

During World War Two, the Navy had taken a great deal of land on the island to build a huge fuel depo for their ships and for other operations. That seaward facing land must have seemed ideally situated for protecting the two channels on either side of the island which led to the mainland city’s port. Once the Navy’s people stomped around, it probably become clear it was useless except for recreation. Too many ledges and bogs made building roads impossible. No gun mounts were built, nor telephone lines erected, and the existing road was left as it was—a mere wagon path. When the Navy put it up for sale, there wasn’t anything on the beach front property but two old stone foundations from the late 1800s, long covered over with sumac and briar.
When the day arrived that someone came over to look at the land and then hand the real estate agent a check for it, it was a clear day with no signs of anything on the horizon. Just pure blue from one shore to the next. That was 1958, when Eva turned nine. The rumors about the buyer had already flown around the island long before Eva saw the owner—not a local, not even from Maine, it was said.
Eva remembered that day she first saw Bernard Ferrell. She and Tommy had been sitting on a low branch of an old apple tree when a small but expensive inboard boat puttered into the cove. A man wearing a white button down shirt and a brand new boat hat got out, along with another man who was wearing a suit. The man in the suit took his shoes and socks off and rolled his pants up, but they still got wet. The man with the boat hat on stripped down to his boxer shorts. A third man on the boat took the boat back out to anchor it, and then swam to shore.
Eva said to Tommy, “We’re going to lose our beach. That’s what my father says.”
Tommy shrugged. He was more interested in the boat and Eva.

Eva went back and forth, between one horizon and the other, worrying she’d lost the one place she had to go where she could be assured of finding quiet. The blue of the sky said nothing. There were no noises, except the sounds of the man on the beach talking to the real estate agent. She watched the three men walk up the expanse of white sand and up the slope of granite steps to where the grass and bushes began. The man with the boat hat took his hat off and began wading through the thick high grass there, while other men stayed standing on the granite ledge.
Finally, the man with the boat hat turned back to the man in the suit. He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and handed the man with the suit a check, while the third man swam out to bring the boat back in. When the boat puttered off, Eva watched it until it had passed the far northeastern edge of the island and was out of sight. She walked over to where the man had waded through the grass, walking in the line of the tamped down grass, hoping to find some clue about the man, like a dog sniffing things out. There was nothing she could find. She couldn’t find anything. He hadn’t dropped anything. The grass said nothing. She collapsed at the end of where the grass was tamped down and dug a hole, into which she inserted a quarter. She would have bought that land, if she could have. She would have done anything to save that land, to not have to leave it.

The sale of the property was not a welcomed one for most of the islanders, not just Eva. It wasn’t that there was someone on the island who had been outbidded. No one else did bid for the property. Its cove was useless for sheltering lobster boats, given it was so exposed to the open sea, but the islanders had been using the beaches for ages. Bernard Ferrell had trouble reclaiming it. Some of the older teenagers tipped over the foundation joists of the house Ferrell tried to build so many times his first summer, he gave up.
The next summer Ferrell picked up where he left off, but he was more ruthless. He pitched an old army tent and stayed the summer, wandering around with a rifle over his shoulder as if he were trying to remember some marching routine from boot camp, or sitting on his finally erected lobster sized shack’s front porch foolishly shooting at the crows that strutted on the beach. He verbally threatened a few locals to clear off. Bernard barked they were “wasting his time,” which no one understood, since no one ever bothered to go say hello to him.
All this talk about him went on at the store, or on the wharf where people waited for the ferry to town. Eva heard it, heard her father talking to the other men, and she said nothing about her continued forays to that land—what she saw. She continued going to the property, and she watched Mr. Ferrell from various hiding places. She watched him build his cabin, bringing boat loads of lumber. He came with some other men to build the frame. A few of the older island kids tried tipping over his foundation one evening, but he’d camped out near the site, if hidden from obvious view, sleeping under his old army tent with his gun by his side. He’d get up every few hours to take a leak. The night the older kids showed up, Bernard was doing just that. He had his gun with him and he shot it into the air. There was a great scramble in the bushes, and then three figures raced off down the beach and disappeared.
That’s when Tommy’s mother told Tommy that if she learned he’d gone to that property, she’d have Truman whip him. He stopped going with Eva.
Finally one Saturday, Mr. Ferrell arrived in his boat with a woman. She got out of the boat with an armload of things, and then more things, all of which she moved into the cabin. Curtains appeared. Beds. Mattresses. During the week that summer, when the Ferrells weren’t there, Eva ran down to the cabin after dark to shine her flashlight through the windows to see what new things had arrived. Then the summer was over, the windows on the cabin were boarded over, and Eva went back to school.
Over the springs that followed, Eva waited for the Ferrell’s arrival. It was at first nerve wracking wondering when they’d arrive to open their cabin, though eventually she recognized they never came before Memorial Day. One year she saw tire tracks in the narrow dirt road long before she expected anyone. There were scuffles in the grass around the tanks. She waited until nightfall and then went back to the cabin again, noting there were no lights on. Nothing appeared to have changed in the cabin. With a flashlight she saw through the front porch windows there were mouse droppings on the kitchen counter, and the gas refrigerator door was still propped open. A lone Schlitz beer can that still smelled of beer sat on the front porch. That was all it was—the island’s general handyman, Stone, who camped out in one of the Navy’s old wooden watch towers, had been down to change the gas tank.
Over the years into her teens and continuing through college at the local university, Eva relaxed into a routine in going to the land and even came to feel she had developed a private friendship with Mr. Ferrell. She smiled sweetly at him every time she saw him at the store in the summer months, unlike the rest of the islanders, who continued to ignore him. In time, she came to feel he looked for her silent greeting—a small lifting of her hand that wasn’t exactly a wave, but was the island way, accompanied by a smile and eye contact. When she was fourteen, she’d actually silently mouthed a “Hello” and he’d returned the greeting, and they kept that up from then on. She never, however, went to talk to him. She couldn’t have said why. When she slid down the wagon path, she felt that if she got caught by him, they might continue this mute conversation of eyeing and nodding to each other, like two wild animals sharing a patch of earth.
Over time, she learned how to slip into other spaces without others noticing—behind the church so she could get out of staying for the social hour, or into the shadow of a bush when someone was coming up the road she didn’t want to talk to. She became skilled in creating other kinds of distances, verbal and physical, so that others thought she was listening or watching, but she had gone somewhere else in her mind. Occasionally, she lost control of this moving away, until someone would say, “Eva?” and Eva would come out of the daze with a snap of the head. However, most of the time her body would move and her face would change expression so she appeared engaged with whoever was talking to her or was showing her something.
The Ferrell’s property remained her biggest secret. Whenever she’d had gotten well down Ferrell’s road, where no one would see her from the road, she could feel something unclick in her brain and shoulders. A bang, a click of relief, sometimes tears of exhaustion followed. After a bit, she’d be dazzled by a patch of bright green moss in a clearing, or where there was shelter under the low bows of a huge pine. Once potential places for finding the secret, these became over time simply places to crawl into and fall asleep for a bit, without any disturbances.
She got to know the land well. Old apple trees, their trunks pocked by years of woodpeckers, dotted the woods every twenty yards or so. A few of them still put out apples. There were several types of apples—small red ones that were tart but firm, and then some yellow ones, tending to be juiceless and sour. The apple trees closest to the ocean were in rougher shape, the apples flat, dry, bitter, but the red ones up in the middle of the property made fine apple pies, with which Eva plied the minister or island cop when they visited her home. She thought things like this, making pies for visitors, should be done. It would keep things in at least as much order at home as existed. So things didn’t get worse. She was doing what she thought her mother would have done, had her mother been well.
Only much later in her life did Eva stop to wonder if it were possible to have ever have felt if things got worse. Between certain things, how can you feel what is worse? Not knowing how to reach your father at his work place when it occurs to you that maybe it is a crisis if your mother isn’t home by six in the evening, when she is supposed to be there, or being afraid to call him if you do find out how. But then, she didn’t even have a question. She adhered to ritual. Social conventions which people who are brought up properly do. It proved she was properly brought up. It solved certain problems of knowing what to do, or wondering why the minister or cop visited. They were there for social visits, of course. Feed them pie. And don’t call your father, who is a busy man.
One early September day in her eighteenth year, while searching for blackberries, Eva found an old milk bottle half buried under several layers of old leaves, its neck sticking up just enough to catch an arch of afternoon sunlight coming through the oak tree leaf mantle, a circle of bright watery light glowing in the shadowy woods. Nearby she found the upper half of a small china doll. The earth seemed to be spitting up evidence of what people valued. For some reason, that caused her to break into tears.
It was during those summer forays she also saw the thin shiny blue and green oil slicks on top of the old well’s water behind Ferrell’s cabin, and on the bogs and wetlands that stretched behind the hedges of the mowed yard, and in the stream that ran along the boundary between her parents’ land down the hill to the Ferrell’s bogs.

Chapter 3

The summer before Eva entered college was the year her parents, Allen and Julia Thompson, got divorced, producing a nervous hope amongst the islanders that Eva’s mother would get better. Stop her odd manic calls to a few of them, her driving to the end of Beach Avenue at the turnabout where she’d settle into a long drink and stupor, so the cop had to take her home. Stop her too frequent trips to the store for booze she said was for visitors. They had prayed that Julia would leave Allen and finally get better. She did leave Allen, but she didn’t get better, not even for her daughter’s sake. Not even when she decided not to sue for the family house, or the old small summer cottage at the edge of the lawn which was used for guests, but rent a smaller house on the other side of the island. Julia said, “I hated that house,” speaking of the one Eva had grown up in. “It was never done,” she added, as if the house were the thing that had broken her.
Eva often wondered if her mother would get up one morning and feel clear of her obsession with the mud, dust, unpainted walls and crumbs of her married life? Would she find it amusing to wonder where her cigarette lighter had moved to, rather than standing at the kitchen sink staring out over the back yard waiting with all the patience rage can muster for the person who moved her lighter? When had the drinking started? What had caused it? Where was it going? If the lighter never got lost, would she get better? These were the questions she had about her mother, whom she knew little to nothing about aside from what she saw, and she could barely stand to look.
Julia Thompson spoke often of her ex-husband, about how little he’d provided for her, and how she’d fought to make sure that what he had would go to Eva, eventually. She did retain a small three-acre lot of the original family land—just an undeveloped patch of poison ivy, bitter sweet, swamp maples, and a wood shed. She told Eva she’d made Allen Thompson promise to will all his land to Eva, the big house and the old summer cottage, and Eva would of course get that small lot, but it was unclear if the promise was ever written up legally. She’d done that in case her father ever got to thinking he’d give his property to his son Stewart through his first marriage, or if he remarried and had another child.
These things Eva heard about often enough. After the divorce, Eva walked back and forth across the island, between houses. She had dinner with her father a few times a month. She did some cooking and cleaning for him, since he seemed to give her to believe he needed some sort of person around to care for, and this is how it showed itself—by his needing her to clean and cook. After dinner he’d say, “That was a fine meal, little one,” and then he’d settle into a book or some report.
At least once during the hour or so she spent with him, she’d say something like, “There’s this weird blue film in the stream on Mom’s land, just running alongside Ferrell’s road,” thinking he might say, “Oh? What do you think it is?” Or she’d say, “I think I want to go to graduate school in marine or plant biology.” He looked up over his eyeglasses, jerked his jaw back, almost as if he thought she was joking, and said, “That’s good. I guess. No harm in that.” Pause. Shuffle of papers. “Just don’t make the big mistake.”
When the time arrived, Eva applied to graduate school. To her, it had always been a certainty she would entirely leave the island, not come back over the summers because she had no other place to go, if she hadn’t known how hard it was going to be over the years to wait for her ticket off. She’d dreamed so long of setting out on an oceanography explorer boat for a whole summer… a whole summer, with no way to get home. Of standing in sea water collecting seaweeds, becoming closer to some marine animal, where the environment was more stable than on the land. She imagined having only to shift slightly in the water columns to find food and a nice temperature.
She had a plan to get out and that over time displaced the childhood fantasy about the Ferrell’s land. There was something that remained of it, deep inside her, like a sound, but the sound got confused with the sound of her father’s voice, the way he enunciated his words, the way his whole chest seemed to be full of words and gave him that powerful figure he had—a drive to find the secret to the power she believed her father had, what she understood of that power. A drive to discover something important, important enough a story would be made. She’d make the story. Her father would look up from his newspaper or whatever he was studying and say, “Ah, you discovered what the big mistake is, and you avoided it. You’ve succeeded! Congratulations.”
When her acceptance letter came to graduate school, Eva ran with it up a small hill through a briar thick area to a round granite promontory to the sea’s edge on the Ferrell’s land. Thinking she might be able to sit there and absorb peace in reserve, like some animal storing up on fat for the winter, it was strange to feel so jumpy, and she got up and headed back home. She was worried she wouldn’t really know how to be a graduate student. There were so many questions. And it was discouraging to know that when she got home, undoubtedly her mother would be sitting at the kitchen table, perhaps drunk and asleep there, and she’d greet Eva with that slurred speech asking her where she’d been and was she hungry. Or she’d be upstairs asleep and if Eva knocked on her door, her mother would sit up quickly and pretend she’d been reading. Eva wouldn’t be able to share the good news. Her mother would just start crying.
How her mother could stay holed up in that house all day infuriated her. She read good books and watched the specials on the public broadcasting station. She listened to jazz and classical music programs on the radio. But Eva felt her mother said nothing that seemed articulate about any of these, did nothing with what she knew, and her conversations with Eva were irritating. What the hell did Eva care for the poetry of, oh, whoever. She’d come to disregard most of what her mother said, since it all seemed a way for her mother to tie Eva down to her, and Eva did not want to go where her mother was.
She couldn’t discuss how a poem was constructed, which of course was how it came to have any meaning at all. Her mother would be sitting on the john, saying “Eva, listen to this,” and start reading some poem by Theodore Roethke, and then sigh, and say, “Oh, that just breaks my heart. Did you hear me Eva?”
“What breaks your heart, mom? I don’t get it.”
“Don’t you hear it? Just listen.” And her mother repeated, “I knew a woman lovely in her bones,” over and over, and Eva would scream, “Mom, what does it mean to you?”
“You just don’t get it, do you, Eva?”
The importance of understanding chemistry, how all those molecules as building blocks gave a coherency to the rain that fell into the pond, the ocean, the way the soil took up and gave back the nutrients, using the water that fell onto the earth, this made sense. Her father’s understanding of a poem made sense. He’d say the Roethke poem was about the great circle of life, and Eva understood that… how it was all about how living things—trees, birds, humans, creativity—were interconnected.
He’d recite a poem, say one of Wallace Stevens’, saying, “He gets how absurd life is, how it makes no sense at all, unless you understand how logic and speech make the world,” and that was erudite, particularly as he’d follow up with, “Those fools at City Hall think you can design a bridge by a committee. It will wobble and collapse, like a committee does eventually. They don’t understand how things go, how things get done.”
Her father’s erudition felt empowering, and she was crushed when none of those words made sense to her mother, or even to Tommy, who lived and breathed only by what he knew how to do--lobster. Their worlds seemed so small. The words were how thinking happened, and how logical thinking made the world open up to questions. That was why she needed to go to graduate school—to discover the pattern, the reason, of why things happened.
No matter what her mother did or saw or heard, she responded mostly by eventually being manic, or drunk, or depressed, if not this week, then soon. There would be tears, inevitably followed or preceded by rhapsodies about beauty. There would be mad dashes to the piano. Articles about this and that art performance piled up on the kitchen table. And then of course her mother eventually broke into tears, saying she was so sorry she wasn’t available to Eva. For those brief moments, Eva felt she could tell her mother what she needed. She’d try and her mother would rush to put on Ravel’s Bolero and cry out, “tengo los toros,” and try to get Eva to join her in a mad rush to the piano to try to pick out the tune. Sometimes Eva gave in to her mother, but her mother never seemed satisfied. She never took up the reins. And she never was able to give Eva what Eva asked for, so as with her father, though slightly differently, the words were confusing. Her mother would try to drag Eva in to watch something with her, a ballet perhaps, on the television, and the tears would start in her mother’s eyes and she’d sigh about how lovely, lovely it all was. Too much emotion.
There had been no use in going to her father’s either, or telling her father how strange her mother was. That would only make matters worse.
It was impossible to hide in her mother’s house, or even the small cottage at the edge of her father’s land… since he’d see a light on it there. The Ferrell’s cabin became over those years a refuge during the months it wasn’t too cold, from September through almost the end of November, and again from April to the end of May, and she kept a container of kerosene there to refill the lamps, so they weren’t empty come spring. On the day she had crawled up to the ledge, as the Ferrells were using their cottage, unable to concentrate on anything or feel able to stock up on some reserve of peace, she trudged back to her mother’s.
The kitchen was empty and she could hear from the bottom of the narrow stairwell her mother’s wheezy clogged breathing upstairs. She grabbed a sandwich, wrote a quick note saying she was at Tommy’s for dinner, and went back out to a favorite place inside the fence around The Area, the Navy WWII oil depot property in the middle of the island, to a small spot on a hill behind the pond that let out into a fishing harbor. Scrambling around, she looked down and saw a violet growing in the woods. Its purple flower was so odd in the still darkened woods, which was probably what had made her notice it. Then there was another a few feet away, and then another, creating a line that led to what initially had seemed just a pile of rocks, until she realized it was the remains of a stone foundation. It was odd she’d never noticed the stones were organized.
Once there, she continued following what seemed a pale path down the slight hill to the edge of the pond. There were a few violets along that way. At the edge of the pond, the cat’o’nine tails were so heavy, they created a screen behind she could observe unseen any ducks on the pond, or the cars that went by on the road on the pond’s northerly side, or the lobster boats return to the harbor that lay just beyond the road. She sat there watching for some time until she saw a rivulet to her left that came down the hill that fed the pond. In the mud at the pond’s edge, the base of the cat’o’nines were encircled with a thicker than usual film of what appeared to be some oily substance, the same as in the bogs on the Ferrell property.
It had rained heavily for the past two days, and with the new rain, the path of the rivulet was thick with water. She followed the stream back up the hill as it snaked around in large broad curves through the woods, at one point going under a culvert the Navy had made, until it got to where the water seemed to arise. It was a boggy area in the woods just beyond the most northerly mound of the old Navy oil tanks. The water there amidst skunk cabbages, slimy algae and some wild cress was shiny all around its perimeter, with the skunk cabbages appearing to have bright blue and orange streaked stems. The slick covered the bog, except in patches where the surface was agitated by the fastest movement of the water, about an inch from the edges of the current, where the current was slowed by tangle of plant growth.
Around the bog were a few broken ceramic drain pipes. She didn’t see there was any particular pattern to them. They seemed to have just been dumped randomly about, as if they’d been delivered to the spot, but never laid down. Someone might have thought about putting in some drainage, but never got around to it. There was the evidence of some thought someone had for action. An action that perhaps someone could not do, because some second thought prevented it. Someone unable to get to the action, perhaps not because they never got around to it, but because some knowledge prevented it. Better to let the leaking oil seep out in various directions, rather than sending it all to the pond? She pulled one of the oil covered skunk cabbages out and carried it back home, where she stuck it in a plastic bag and left it on her bedroom desk.
Her mother was still sleeping. The house was sickly quiet. The newspaper from the day before, March 18, was still folded up on the kitchen table and she unfolded it. Some tanker, the Torrey Canyon, had grounded on the British Isles, and spilled tons and tons of crude oil all over the beaches of Cornwall. There were pictures of oil covered birds struggling or dead. She sat at a table shuddering, nearly paralyzed from the sense of helplessness. She could feel the life of the bird choking in the black ooze, unable to lift its body up or even its head. (Quinn, William P. Shipwrecks around New England. Orleans, MA: The Lower Cape Publishing Co., 1979: 187). The Portland paper made reference to earlier oil tanker wrecks, including the Liberian tanker Northern Gulf that en route to Portland had hit the West Cod Ledge Rock off of South Portland in November of 1963, dumping 25,000 barrels of oil that coated the Maine coastline. Apparently a buoy had been out of position by four hundred yards, causing the ship’s captain to mis-navigate. A British supertanker, the Federal Monarch, had been disabled seventeen miles off Portland in late January of 1964, though hadn’t wrecked and spilled oil, but many ships during the war had—somewhere in the vicinity of 1700 tankers, with some of the oil soiling the coasts. Eva had never heard anyone mention those wrecks, or talk of damage to the coast and sea life. (Quinn, William P. Shipwrecks Around Maine, Orleans, MA: The Lower Cape Publishing Co., 1983: p. 141, 143, and (Quinn, William P. Shipwrecks around New England. Orleans, MA: The Lower Cape Publishing Co., 1979: 187).
She left the house, carefully closing the screen door so it didn’t bang, and went to meet Tommy at the island’s one restaurant and bar, The Horizon, as usual, at their usual summer time of eight thirty. When she returned later that evening, her mother was still asleep. She looked at the plant and then threw it out, feeling that whatever happened on the island was useless to pursue. She couldn’t stay tied to things that, or she’d never get out.

The Victory Garden versus Fashion in Paris

2010-10-10T15:42:00.000-07:00

Some people are paying more attention to their gardens, and becoming more "English," making sure they've got vegetables growing some place. They're chasing out "rodents"--whether deer, gophers, rabbits, or whatever. It's as if we've entered the Victory Garden era again, except there's no victory. We're thankfully pulling out, if slowly, from our long war in the Middle East, and trying to understand what that might mean for us--shoring up homeland security, and more hopefully throwing our wits and intelligence into non-fossil fuel energy.

What we've got is a Depression, not a Recession, and there's no one daring to say this, but, still, even people with good managerial jobs are paying attention to things like how much tinfoil they use, or how to use the plastic baggies from the grocery story to store their food in, rather than buying new plastic ziplock baggies.

It's so disconcerting to read articles on the New York Times' web page about how to conserve resources, while astride is an ad or article link about how Paris is hot with the newest silks and leggings.

There's still a lot of money out there. There are a few good souls who are taking their money to the streets (The Gates), but you've got to wonder who's buying all that hand-stitched silk (and believe me, it's hand-stitched in China, probably)...

We're still okay. We may be smarter for a few years. The question is will we stay smarter--more energy conscious? Or get swamped by the hedonists who can't grow up and pony up, and who willy nilly lead to the Collapse of Democracy?

Singing Sands Beach

2010-03-11T15:48:00.000-08:00

The Burkes have created a wonderful blog regarding the 9 acres of land they have owned since 1954--which includes Singing Sands Beach (to the low water mark--whereever the water is at the moment), and the last 1/3 or so of Andrew's Beach, also called South Beach.

It is private property, and visitors are asked to contact the owners if they wish to visit.

The owners will be closing the beach to all public use from time to time.

Webesthetics ©

2010-02-12T15:12:00.000-08:00

The art of book making, or of any readable/visual material is about visual interest and ease. I can't count the number of web sites I've visited where the choice of typography and the spacing between lines of type is entirely uninformed, or where the design of the web site is uninformed. The options available for type on this site are limited, also, and that is frustrating.

The more we spend time reading things on computers, the more visual ergonomics is going to be a crucial issue.

What is wonderful about a two-page book that was well designed was that facing pages were harmonious--so one could read one page without being distracted with what was on the facing page. Furthermore, a two-page book allowed one to have one's eyes shielded by extraneous visual data about one. Not true for web pages, Kindle, or any of the new computer formats. Even if one views things that are set up as a two-page spread, the pages are flatly presented, so visual distraction is easy.

Remarkably enough, many companies have designed their web site with equal horizonal strips, and there's no where for the eye to decide where to go. The design is visually tiring, even a little irritating.

Take the first picture provided with this entry. The material is visually pretty, but the dark area below and the light area above are almost equal in size, and my eye can't find a place to rest. I'm straining, really, to see what is in the dark area. Straining is the key word here. I can crop this photograph to make it more visually aesthetic, as in the next image.

My goal is to bring a history of book and other visual experience to the web. Aesthetics is an art, one that begins with training and develops via passion and a natural propensity toward beauty.

Valentine's Day Thoughts

2009-02-14T14:30:00.000-08:00

I've just posted the first four chapters of a novel that I began writing last fall. I'd previously published some of the chapters from there here, but I just deleted them as I've rewritten them.

I don't know if I'll finish this book. I don't know if anyone will read what I've written. I realize that I use this blog mostly as a substitute for school in a way--if I haven't put something new here in a while, I'm flunking myself.

If you do read, I'd love to hear from you any impressions you have.

Living Designs: The Portland, Maine mural by Elizabeth Morrill Burke

2008-11-01T18:28:00.000-07:00

Living Designs: The Portland, Maine mural by Elizabeth Morrill Burke

The Portland, Maine mural by Elizabeth Morrill Burke

2008-11-01T17:05:00.000-07:00

see: http://www.wlbz2.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=94110

An artist's trajectory: from a bachelor's in literature, to a 1/2 year in a Ph.D. program in Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, back to her undergraduate university (UCSC) to study art on her own for a year, living and working out of the ground floor of a rain-flooded barn, to getting accepted to a second BA program in art, but also, at the same time, getting accepted into the 5th year (post-grad) program in studio art at UCSC; returning to homeland Maine where she was granted one of the two slots for Maine painters into the coveted Maine fellows program at Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, moving on to an MFA program in fine arts at Boston University, graduating only to find herself trying to make a living designing, copyediting, editing and producing books ... and then 15 years of null-hood in either painting or writing (pursuiting premedical studies and a MSW and LCSW ... not working ... and finally back to painting ... as a living ... well, others have done better and others have done worse.

Mural Painting--a small life enlarged.

2008-09-04T14:20:00.000-07:00

I've been hired to paint a huge mural in Portland, Maine, through the company I work with, Peerless Painting. The size is material: the wall I'm painting is 110 feet wide and approximately 60 feet high, and the image covers about 100 feet x 50 feet. Where: the Ocean Gateway Parking garage at the corner of India and Fore Streets in Portland, Maine. The City of Portland required the owner of the building to put an image up. The owners chose a section of a panaramic image taken by a photographer in 1910 of the Portland harbor (Casco Bay) from the Eastern Promenade on a day when half of all the six-masted schooners ever built were in the harbor, and this section shows those schooners. It also shows Fort Gorges, some of Peaks Island, Little Diamond, and Cushing Island, and of course other boats in the harbor at the time. While this has been a company "team" undertaking, I have done all the historical research for the image, and most of the drawing and painting, nevermind masterminding the paint colors, since the image is in a sepia scale, rather than in color, and working in a more or less monotone is more difficult than working in color, surprisingly enough.

Fishing & Houses Don't Move

2008-03-15T00:35:00.000-07:00

The short stories previously published here have morphed into a novel, or are trying to. Sixty thousand words so far, and counting, and then figuring after proper editing, I'll have to start fresh. To give me a bit of sense of accomplishment, after months of slogging, publishing here a poem I've slogged through enough.

Fishing

There must be a way to move that doesn’t involve every lead sinker I’ve laid down to catch beasts I turn around and sell. I keep hoping I’ll haul—what? Something that will make the day feel more than how.

There must be a way to come home with more than how to get a check, another way to see all these buoys, ropes, depth sounders and maps with cigarette burns just where I needed to see the depth. I keep coming up with the litter we make, mucking up the seas, as if we had nothing better to do than make things we throw away, eventually. I came to this life at sea because I loved it, but love gets tired and worn to ache and age, and I wonder.

What would it be like to head out in the dark of morning, as chilly as it might be, and feel my mouth were a sail, rather than an anxious metaphor? Rather than setting out with things I’ve put between myself and my blood, my heart, my stomach, and hands, what if I set out with only my ears flapping in the wind to gather up the song of the seabird diving into the waves for its daily bread?

Money is what everyone is after, not before. Once I traded a baseball card for a fresh peach, long before I knew about all the fancy gizmos that would save me from myself, such as this radio and cell phone and a health insurance plan owned by several international banking companies run by physics phds with new financial instruments who once dreamed of leaving this earth for another planet.

Once I heard about two professors who compared the happiness of lottery winners to that of paraplegics. After a bit, the paraplegics got more joy out of daily living. Seems that not having to do anything, of living some place else besides this place where you have to deal with your own laundry, is not the same as not being able to do what you used to; it’s worse.

I think what counts is getting closer to necessity, closer to the way your mouth works, to the way your fingers curve around—perhaps the thrashing of a fish. Seeing with your own eyes the moment the fish’s eyes go dull as you pull the hook out of its mouth and put the fish into yours.

That’s exaggerating, perhaps, but it’s the only way I know how to put what I’m after: I want to feel life between my teeth.

Elizabeth M. Burke
Long Island, Maine
03/2008

Possibilities

2007-11-13T14:05:00.000-08:00

Possibilities

Truths don't leap out of the darkness these days. Even the meteorite shower last night got me only half way to where you left off, at the "probably not." Though that seared through the atmosphere like the punctuation of a typewriter--you could feel the bump it left--I wasn't convinced.

I could sit here for a million nights and not know anything I most want to know, such as whether the New York Times freezes to your driveway before you get up to retrieve it, or if when I use one of the words in the dictionary for the very literate you gave me you'll stop to wonder what you're doing and I'll know that. If these are magical imaginings, they know their desires.

Will there be no more of love's enigmas of arrival, the way waves move outwardly when a boat docks inwardly, the way words pull time forward as they describe time backwards, the way subatomic particles know space so well they end up where they began, and we don't have a clue how that happens. We store our hope in a hypothesis we can't even begin to prove. It's saner than waiting for a letter from space, zip-coded something like *.*.*. Such a letter could blow us to bits. Why pull the rug right out from under myself all over again by believing you? I mean, why settle for certainty, or, in these days, even probabilities?

Look, the frustration of hearing time pass in the night by a little light altering its patterns of excitation, the frustration of saying something to you and not being able to see what it was I said, the frustration of feeling a thought I can't get my hands around, and thinking a feeling must have happened--these are what dreams bring us to--shaggy dog stories of what started out as a great revelation about stories: They end eventually.

I'm certain life is the story I see, or you see, or as anyone sees. But, love isn't a story, even though you and I might be.

Realizing that nothing I've ever loved has stayed put, even if I don't believe the myth of Jesus, I believe in some of the metaphors. "Do not work for the food that perishes." Metaphors are what's possible. At least I've got that nailed down, however it hurts.

May 2002.
E.M. Burke

The Bougainvillea

I returned to see the bougainvillea
take the land so madly, love couldn't be far off.

Great gnarled tendrils rose in the air
like explanations obfuscating everything.

Cool morning mist trapped in the branches
changed the key int he bird's throat.

Water hiding in the ditch beneath
rambled on about the pure nature of mud.

Scents of rose, pepper and lemon
evaporated out of the burnless fire.

Why say this is like something else?
It is something altogether something else.

November 2002
E. M. Burke

The Older One Speaks

Bothersome susceptibility to lips:
Attempting Ah's and living,
yet also like someone who wishes to be
forgotten, untyped, unwritten!

I understand myself enough to understand
Fear is feeling responsible for a child.
To my internal saboteur and a cold light
you are writing, if you see the light.

An epitaph: I was not what you wanted.

August 2001
E.M. Burke

Spider Poem

In the no-face of darkness
there goes on the spread
of star-like pale spiders
upon the death of the mother.

Then to return to the stone,
that chill, a reassurance
of one place on earth, on ground
that holds childhood in firmly,
its sure shocks and enormity:

of the chair by the window
to take up a season for years
the locus of change, fall,
and do nothing but watch
and listen to molecules move.

In a very few words
the soft wound of thinking
your piano makes
sings your grief.

Cars do not go anywhere.
Planes land in snow.
Buildings stand no better
than air, and some worse.

Or to crawl to the ledge,
let go, fall vagrant in air,
tack down threads in circles,
and weave webs, light years.

1986
E.M. Burke

Compliance

Whimsies lurch me into windows,
at dog-eared walls of April.
The nurses listen to my eyes;
they can do the tango.

I dance to anything that worries;
the postman hands me music.
I can walk straight if my bra does
to a clock that shimmies.

Paddling cross the morning
a bottle is my boat back.
A lady is escorted home;
she's gracious with a warning.

My guitar remembers being plucked,
but I'm too loved to care.
I want a trailor so I can travel
where my nightmares wake me up.

Time is mine when I have fallen:
It's written down "Who counts?"
I travel anywhere I want to,
except the known unthought.

2002
E.M. Burke

TRANSLATIONS from the Russian

And there my marble figure,
the face turned in the lake water,
stood, cast under the old maple
heeding the leaves' rustle.

And the light rain washes
its old cloying wound:
cold, white, though but wait ...
I am here, and stone-like grow.

1911
Anna Akhmatova
translated by E.M. Burke 1995

Poem

With a mere artless tune
Love wins, fraudulently.
Yet for some time, strangely,
You are not so gray and gloomy.

And when she smiled
In your house, fields, gardens,
Everywhere it seemed
You were free--and in freedom.

You were light taking of her
And drinking her poisons.
You see, the stars were tremendous,
The grass smelled differently ...
Autumnal grass.

1911, fall.
Anna Akmatova
Translated by E.M. Burke, 1995

Love

Now like a snake recurling--
That same heart that conjures;
Now like a dove it coos and bills
Its image in the barren window.

Now it strikes in the bright hoar frost
Like drowsiness from the clove pinks.
And doggedly, secretly it plods on
Out of a sense of dumb joy and peace.

It alone can sob sweetly.
And to the call of a lone violin, it goes
Only to recognize itself
In yet another estranged smile.

1911
Anna Akmatova
translated by E.M. .Burke 1995

Some Summer's Work

2007-10-08T19:02:00.001-07:00

"Traps." Oil on panel.
This is a 3/4 fragment of the entire image.

"Skee's Dream." Oil on panel.
Another 3/4 fragment of entire image.

"The Annunciation." Oil on panel.
Another 3/4 fragment of entire image.

cars and the sea

2007-08-15T02:10:00.000-07:00

Chapter 1b draft: Life at Sea

2007-08-15T00:39:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago, I had been alternating between jobs as a sternman on a lobster boat. In one position, I was opening lobster traps, pulling out lobsters to put into a keeper's tank or throwing others back into the ocean, throwing various sized and species of crabs, sponges, or sea-squirts back into the ocean, or perhaps small sharks called dogfish, then passing on a trap to a stern-mate, and then finally banding keeper lobsters--those big enough to pass as mature-enough lobsters to sell to eat. In the second position, I received an open trap, strung dead fish on a bait line in the trap, closed the trap, and swung the 90 plus pound trap onto a table-like contraption in the stern of a boat, in a certain configuration. We wanted a string of four, or seven or eight traps, when the captain was ready to set a line of traps, to slide off the back of the boat in an orderly way without all the ropes getting entangled.

My captain had started using five-foot traps, whose weight is of less issue than their length, since swinging 90 compact pounds is a lot easier than swinging 90 pounds spread out over five feet. I had to slide and swing and inch the five-foot long traps as if I were moving a cadaver--all dead weight. Being only five-feet five inches tall and 120 lbs, it wasn't as if I could "throw my weight" into a five foot trap.

I had to stop this work, but not because I wanted to. One might imagine that the work sounds like, in its repetitive nature, working on an assembly line, such as I once worked for a few weeks for a tea company--receiving boxes of tea, packing them in larger boxes, and making sure the boxes were taped up properly. But, despite repetition, life at sea is absolutely nothing like working for Tetley or Lipton or any other tea company manufacturing plant. I may have sung Irish ballads in both instances, but after that, comparisons stop. In a factory, as I recall working in a factory, there is no day or night. There is no wind. There are no swells of sea. There are no porpoises appearing out of nowhere, their fins dancing out of the waves like well-placed but unexpected commas, nor are there the colors and textures of dreams. Strange and wonderful forms do not arrive on an assembly line, since there is no assembly line, but one string of traps after the next, each set in a slightly different environment of sea.

Life at sea is also fundamentally more dangerous, if for those who have grown up at sea and may not feel the danger inherently, just far more joyously fascinating than working any factory or office job out there.

Getting up for work at 4:30 a.m.isn't that hard, after all. Then there's an afternoon to do something else.

Chapter 1 draft: Life at Sea

2007-08-15T00:13:00.000-07:00

In 1992, two artists comrades and myself drove to New York City to see a few shows and visit some galleries. I parked my Volvo station-wagon on Prince Street, or thereabouts, as I recall, between SoHo and Chinatown. When we returned, my camera, my Ricoh manual, entirely manual, had been stolen out of the car.

The two parts of the event that I remember are the car I was driving and the type of camera I had. The Volvo stationwagon drove like a insect, maneuvering turns on a mere wing-beat, had the weight of a small tank and so could plow over snowbanks and sidewalk curbs without disturbing the driver much, and sounded like wind over sand--quiet. I also knew it had a steel interior frame with resilience of the body of a 20 year old. It also had enough space between the front seat and rear window to carry six-foot paintings that were five feet wide. I also knew my Ricoh camera could operate as well as any high fancy $1000 camera, so long as I knew how to use it. I was the operating instructions, rather than the camera itself, and being a painter, someone who likes to be in entire command of all aspects of how she structures her life, I knew the instructions.

To me, a painter, an artist, is someone who make conscientious choices about their values. They think about what they're choosing and why. Also, they're journeymen, rather than employees.

One also might consider them hysterical beings, by and large. Not necessarily obsessive, but by and large generally hysterical--having trouble with authority figures, needing authority figures in order to survive, getting confused about who they are (bodily, financially, emotionally) in relationship to authority figures, and then becoming paralyzed in the process of trying to do all this.

The current definition of hysterical is portrayed by an overly seductive woman--short skirt, tightened boobs, and pouting lips, if sexually frigid, but this is not what Freud originally portrayed when he named his female clients "hysterical." He was seeing women who were paralyzed in some area of their bodies, or, I think now, their minds.

Book Design & Production by Elizabeth Burke

2007-05-15T15:01:00.000-07:00

Copyright 1994 Boston Athenaum Library, Boston, MA. Design and production by Elizabeth M. Burke.

Copyright 1992 Kenneth Rosen. Designed and edited by Elizabeth M. Burke. Printed at the Ascensius Press, Maine.

Other books I've copyedited, designed or produced:

Barthel, Diane. The Preservation Project. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.

Germain, Sylvia. The Book of Nights. Boston, MA: David R. Godine Publisher.

Kennedy, Rick, ed. Aristotelian and Cartesian Logic at Harvard: Charles Morton's a Logick System & William Brattle's Compendium of Logick. The Colonial Society of Massachusetts

Mundy, James. No Rich Men's Sons. Maine: Harp Publications, 1996

Patten, Robert L. George Cruikshank's Life, Times, and Art. Vol 2. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.

Zallen, Doris K. Does It Run in the Family. Consumer's Guide to DNA Testing for Genetic Disorders. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1997.

Long Island, ME: Summer Recycling Creativity 2007

2007-05-01T19:40:00.000-07:00

Architects are taking old train crates to make homes. Someone has turned old vinyl records into bowls. Someone else has come up with a lighter-weight "concrete block" for building houses with, by mixing concrete with chewed up styrofoam from styrofoam cups and the like. People make shoes out of cut-up tires. And then there are people who take old furniture and rehabilitate it, or use the wood to create something new.

Your mission for this summer class is to come up with ideas, concepts, and then a project for stuff that washes up on the beaches or is on Long Island already. Yep ... recycling. Or, alternately, to come up with an idea about how Long Island can recycle its own everyday "waste" into products. You will come up with not just an idea, but work to transform that idea into a product.

You will be engaged in politics, social policy, beliefs, engineering, design, and creativity: first to some up with an idea, then to transform the idea, and all during this process to wonder how to market the idea.

I will be intimately helpful along everyone's path, and I may suggest people team up.

No supplies are necessary, since your supplies are ones you'll find.

Book Design 1: Letterpress Printing & Creativity

2007-05-01T19:00:00.000-07:00

In 1990, I worked with a letterpress shop and the Portland School of Art, with a group of talented students interested in book design and the old-world art of letterpress. I wanted the students to learn more than skill; I wanted them to try to turn the words of a great mind and soul into something worthy of great skill. The work exhibited in the next two slides shows not only how clever they were individually, but how they inherently, long before the "team" work skills became so prevalent in our US of A, did what could be nothing less than brilliant as a team.

I gave the assignment, but they did the work, and it was very fine work.

Images and Arrangements

2007-05-01T17:35:00.000-07:00

landscape and identity

2007-05-01T17:19:00.000-07:00

This is an image taken from a dream, but surely someone knows the feeling of swimming at night, and that is not a dream. To swim at night, in the ocean or a lake, tell me, what is the feeling? What images would you use to describe your sensations and your thoughts?

This image is one I have worked over and over, erasing and redrawing, since 1997, and it is now 2007 -- so for ten years. For me, it holds some of the mystery of swimming at night. A person, an animal, a house: the shadows a bit obscure, but the sense of containment and wildness there.

continuing ... memory and architecture

2007-05-01T16:50:00.000-07:00

Window and tree, or windows and tree ... views from one way considered from another. When did I do this image? When would someone else have done this image, or wanted this sort of image? When would someone want an image of a tree caught between two windows, on either side of an architectural/continental divide? I did it when I was thinking of going into medicine, after a life-time of wanting/hoping to be a writer, or its defunct (to me), a painter: A person who had the fantasy of being noticably by what she had to say. As a painter, it was as someone who was noticable by what she could image forth. No one wants to be "something" (a painter, a writer, an accountant, etc), without wanting to be noticed for something, or at least to have experienced at some point that one's skills were well put. One hardly waits around to be nothing.

And yet, recently, I found myself strangely overjoyed by a small moment in the movie Man on a Train, where the poetry teacher in a small French town who has fantasied all his life about being a famous bank robber, comes home only to be confronted by his gardener. He arrived home, heard noises, obviously fantasized that something dangerous and exciting was happening, turned the corner, and was confronted by his gardener. He asks the gardener how it is that after so many many years he still can't get used to the gardener, though he comes once a week (like someone going to therapy?), and the gardener says, "No one remembers a gardener."

Oh. To be a normal everyday nobody, but be handy, content, and indispensible, after all.

memory and architecture

2007-05-01T16:37:00.000-07:00

It is both the arrangement of images/things in our day-to-day lives and in our dreams that leads us to what is compelling us either toward death or toward life. It isn't the things or the images, but how we arrange them--that say something about how we live. Archeology, the prototype for psychoanalysis, really is about studying how things were arranged, so that someone later made an hypothesis about what a culture or civilization valued and how they lived. How we order what we order, or arrange, speaks of our values and desires.

These images are not simply images, but arrangements, orderings, and implications.

The Diary Worth Publishing

2007-04-09T17:38:00.000-07:00

I've kept a personal journal for years, and about 15 years ago started rereading and then trashing journals from childhood. Really, they were incredibly boring, repetitious, obsessive. I reread them for my own memories, but felt they simply wouldn't be things I'd like to leave for others to read. There are journals worth reading. The writings of Winston Churchill, of Virginia Woolf, the diaries of Anais Nin, or the journals as novels of Doris Lessing.

However, I've always wanted to have some sort of worthy journal. One friend notes down all the books he's read, movie he's seen, etc., and he makes small notes to himself about his impressions. So:

Diamond, Jared. (2005). Collapse. NY: Penguin Press Science. I read this after having read a manuscript about anxiety disorders, written by a bright and interesting psychiatrist, with whom I'd hope to work on a manuscript, as a copyeditor, editor, co-writer. I started delving back into genetics, biochemistry, etc, having been fascinated by those fields while a premed student in my mid to late 30s, and having lived with a geneticist. The project "didn't go," which was disappointing, but I did enjoy the ride.

Diamond, Jared. (2006). The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal. I read this about a month after the above-disappointment. It again confirmed my sense that in labeling our "outrageous" behavior as primate behavior, we have REALLY MISSED THE POINT. Our most outrageous behavior arises not from our primate selves, but from how our higher brain, our logic, interprets and makes sense of our instincts and primitive selves. Our logic ... and please let me refer you now to Christina Stead's novel The House of All Nations ... is completely generally inane. Not our instincts, but our logic--our wits, and our ability to outwit each other. We could only do this if our brains were bigger than our fingers. The chimps don't have the problems we do. Our problem is NOT our primate nature, but our "human" ie big brain nature.

Perenyi, Eleanor. Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden (Modern Library Gardening). Current publication of someone who wrote in the mid 70s or earlier. Smart, funny, and delectable. What she has to say about people afraid of earthworms, and those who light up their gardens at night, nevermind (I say) about condo associations with street lights on all night (and please refer yourself to the smart souls involved with shutting down street lights that shine upwards ... bunch of Cambridge, MA involved souls, because these lights absolutely destroy the night, and also other things) ... a garden at night is a mystery all to itself. Don't destroy the youthful romantic soul by pouring too much light on it. Nor destroy my night-time walks.

Stead, Christina. 1938. The House of All Nations. And welcome to Wall Street!!!!

Coleman, Eliot; Bray, Kathy. Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long. The book I've been waiting for. I never understood how Maine could be on a relatively same longitude as areas in Spain and France, and yet have a much much shorter growing season. Coleman and his crew reveal what I'd always suspected, and given me the good science basis for it. Cheerios!

Well, that's a small beginning. Of course I read a lot more, and I haven't even started on the movies.

Otherwise, I spent the winter working on my forever perfect house/boathouse design and perusing my very very favorite magazine: Taunton Press's Fine Home Building. What with spring coming, there will be less reading and more gardening and building.

Copyright

2007-04-03T05:05:00.000-07:00

This site and contents, unless otherwise noted, copyright © Elizabeth M. Burke 2007 and beyond - all rights reserved. The use of any image or text on any internet site, is not allowed unless written authorization is obtained from Elizabeth M. Burke, or material is in quotes, and attributed to me. Use of my writing or images which sets up the appearance that I have authored any other internet site or material is fraudulent.

House of Grass

2007-02-05T18:52:00.000-08:00

Have you ever fallen asleep in the grass, or in the woods, on a warm, slightly breezy day? It's the most delicious experience to feel that safe in nature.
Copyright 2007 Elizabeth M. Burke

Where Are All the Children?

2007-02-05T13:56:00.000-08:00

I don’t see children playing outside these days. Not even in rural areas. On sunny, snowy winters, I’d expect to see children out sledding, building snow forts, or skating. In the summers, I wonder why I don’t see children out playing kick the can, or any of the myriad of other games children create when they get together. I’m not the only one who has noticed this. My adult friends say the same.

I’ve seen more elderly and middle-aged people outdoors—sledding, flying down a hill, laughing, arms in the air, and then trudging back up the hill, their skin looking healthily flushed, faces open with smiles. I’ve seen middle-aged men out playing with a remote control toy airplane. You could tell from their body language they were having fun.

In my youth, kids went outside after school. We were physically very active and healthy. We learned through each other the rules of fair play. We became concerned about changes in our neighborhood that affected our playing fields. We gained in coordination and self-sufficiency skills. When we wanted to build a fort, that meant learning to use hammers and saws. We became aware of wildlife. We also learned about each other’s families—who had a fun family life and who didn’t. In and out of each other’s houses all the time, we got exposed to other families’ foods, cultures, aesthetics, and their ups and downs.

When one of us complained, “I’m bored,” mothers usually said, “Go outside.” The wisdom was that once outside, something would intrigue us. We’d find our interest. We’d create interest.

True, we lived in a safe neighborhood. We heeded parental warnings about not accepting gifts from strangers, taking a ride from strangers, or wandering beyond prescribed boundaries. And we didn’t travel or play alone. Most of us had mothers at home, or there were elderly people who watched us from their windows and kept an eye on us, I suppose. We did sometimes get into trouble—a bicycle accident that resulted in a broken collar bone, or we’d get splinters. We all know that children don’t have a good sense of their vulnerabilities, and sometimes they do get very injured, or worse, die from accidents, but statistically, that is rare.

Where are the children these days? In my experience as a therapist, I hear that children are most concerned about getting x-boxes, or computer games. Parents tell me that children have televisions in their bedrooms. Kids collect cards for games that relate to computers, not outdoor activities like baseball. Many parents themselves are on computers not just at work, but when they get home. And when parents talk about getting exercise, they’re going to a gym, not outdoors. Of course, that is not a rule, but a trend.

Childhood obesity is now a national problem. The risk of diabetes has risen in all sectors of society due to obesity. Lack of exercise must certainly be a contributing factor.

Loneliness in all sectors of society is also on the rise. There is very good evidence that people have a need for friends and the resulting sense of community to feel good about themselves and do well in studies and work, and also to survive times of personal stress (Osterman, 2000). If children aren’t playing with other children at school on the playground, or after school, and not visiting each other’s houses, they’re not learning how to make friends, how to develop rules of fair play, or even how to create games on their own, which by inference means learning how to create a meaningful life. Someone else—some company with a new computer toy—is creating meaning for us. Parents aren’t even sending kids off to summer camps for any length of time now. The trend is for day camps or a few overnights (Warner, 2006). Perhaps we’re seeing effects of anxious first-time parents or one-child only parents?

There are places where it is not safe to allow children to play outdoors, and attentive community leaders who notice this may make indoor spaces where kids can gather. Environments with guns, drugs, and pimps obviously aren’t save places for children. However, I wonder about the lack of connection people have with the outdoors and with nature. I’ve met adults who believe trees are dead in winter, because they don’t have leaves on them. I’ve read about adults who believe that earthworms are dirty and disgusting, who don’t recognize just how important they are for soil health. As one person said in a New York Times Article, “"Lawns have ticks and disease and worms and stuff. … This way, it's safe and sterile. It's a cleaner area for the children to play. I love nature and I love grass, but I don't want my family exposed to disease." (Kilgannon, 2005). Too bad she doesn’t recognize that the worms and microbes in the soil actually would digest many toxins or harmful microbes to people that arise from stuff people trudge in on the bottoms of their shoes. The natural world for them has become not a place of wonder, but of fear.

This essay is not one with answers, but questions. If you have children, do you send them outside to play? If not, why not? I’d love to hear from you.

Kilgannon, Corey. (Nov. 27, 2005). For some, grass is greener where there isn’t any. The New York Times.
Osterman, Karen F. (fall 2000). Students’ need for belonging in the school community. Review of educational research, 70(3):323-367.
Warner, Judith. (July 20, 2006). Loosen the apron strings. The New York Times.

Elizabeth Burke, LCSW. Maine psychotherapist

2007-02-02T18:37:00.000-08:00

Anxiety has been treated for years as an individual medical problem, but it has also been treated as a problem related to a stressful environment. Therapists and doctors recognize the role stress has in our lives, even if they don't focus much on the systems we live in. They more often focus on how you as an individual manage the stress. I think it is important to look at both issues, because I believe environments and systems (people systems, work systems, community systems) can be very stress inducing. We think we "should" be able to handle stressful environments, without wondering whether in fact we have created environments we are not really well able to adapt to. It's an odd question to ask one's self: How is it humans could create systems and environments they aren't really well suited to--spiritually or health wise? But I think it is an important question to ask. In fact, humans have created systems of living that end up collapsing.

In my work with people, I like to look at things as much from the private individual perspective as the systems perspective, because I believe environments are so critically important to our sense of health and good welfare.

Nature Images

2006-09-13T07:11:00.000-07:00

The first image is a wood block print, two-color. The second is of a species of Datura that has arrived at the beaches of Long Island, Maine--an new arrival. It is a watercolor. Creativity is not just imagining things, but being attentive, and allowing our individually honed perceptions to find expression.

Unique Hand-Painted Rooms

2006-08-07T18:29:00.001-07:00

When people think about decorating their homes, they often think about "buying" things, and getting things finished. But a home can be an expression of deep needs for belonging and being able to express the self without fear of judgment. As much as a a house may belong to us, we may wonder if we belong to a home. It can be extremely therapeutic to consider one's home a process of self and family expression, rather than a showroom for someone else's design, or a showroom of market determined values.

If you're decorating or modeling your house thinking only of its resale value, can you truly feel "at home"? Are you afraid that if you hand-paint a wall, as this wall in the picture, someone else will think your house "too funky"? Ah, as long as the walls are intact, the cellar dry, the electric wiring good, the plumbing operational, why not express yourself fully? You can repaint that wall before selling your house. But I also believe that a home with soul, as long as the structure is good, is always a good investment.
Copyright 2007 Elizabeth M. Burke

the Yurt

2006-07-26T19:52:00.000-07:00

The Yurt : July 13, 2006

This is my 20 foot-wide yurt on an island off the coast of Portland, Maine.
It doesn't look like much from the outside, but inside is a mystery of light and space. I built it as a means to have a place I could live in when others were using my family's cabin, because I want to live simply during months when it is feasible. The aesthetics of living in a building where you can hear the birds, the ocean, the wind--all very clearly--is very different from those of living in a building where you hear televisions, cars, loud music you may or may not like. Living without electricity really gets you to think about energy and light. Living without running water really gets you to think about how much water you use daily generally when in contemporary housing. That awareness can bring a greater appreciation and value to resources we take for granted.

Summer 2006 readings:
Gawande, Atul. "The Malpractice Mess: Dealing with Doctors' Mistakes." (2005, Nov. 14. The New Yorker); 62-71.

Brooks, Geraldine. "Unfinished Business: The Story behind the Sydney Opera House." (2005, Oct. 17. The New Yorker); 96-115.

Dillard, Annie. Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters. 1992. New York: HarperPerrennial. Breathtaking writing about nature, science & the strange things we humans do.

Moore, Lorrie. "You're Ugly, Too." The Best American Short Stories of the Century. Eds. John Updike and Katrina Kenison. (1999. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company); 652-670. Contemporary short story w/ some interesting thoughts about men & pornography and women & house designs.

Goldberger, Paul. "Some Assembly Required: A Modern Way to Make a Modern House." (2005, Oct. 17. The New Yorker): 180-182. About the pre-fab houses of Rocio Romero, 34 yo female architect.

Updike, John. "Deceptively Conceptual: Books and Their Covers." (2005, Oct. 17. The New Yorker): 170-172. Updike writes, "Book covers and jackets might seem to hover beneath serious critical notice, but nothing human is alien to the academic discipline called 'cultural studies,' be it baseball cards or vampire movies or female footgear. All such devices open inward into the secrets of Everyman's psyche and of capitalism's perfidious designs upon Everyman's pocketbook. ... Publishing forms a minor branch of the entertainment industry, and book design is increasingly a matter of fashion--that is, of attention-getting."

Copyright 2007 Elizabeth M. Burke