So Sushi Me

And the things we store and carry

When I was working on paintings for my current exhibit at Burnt Bridge Cellars and thinking about the magic of mundane things I didn't imagine how many layers my thoughts would encounter during my own mundane life.

For example, this week I thought again about things that help us store and carry other things. After I had another appointment with my doctor (we're still trying to clear up the aftermath of having had covid in May. I'm doing better but - ugh!) my thinking went from the external things we carry in boxes and bags to what we carry in our brain pans and how that can help or hinder us.

After my doctors appointment, while feeling really yucky, I got embarrassed and impatient with myself about the slowness of my healing. Sitting in the pharmacy waiting on my prescription my brain was filling rapidly with bullshit messages like “You’re too slow. You're wasting everyone's time”. I knew immediately that this was bullshit, rooted in old messages from childhood for which I had excellent therapy as a young adult. I tried to do the mental debunking of the bullshit like I'd been taught to do in therapy. Step one: don't believe everything you think...

But the bullshit was so loud at that moment, screaming inside my aching head. So, sitting there in the pharmacy, I talked with my wife J. L. Sullens about it. Thank goodness for her! She reminded me that our doctor had said “I'm glad you came in today”, then made another follow-up appointment on the spot and that’s not something someone says or does when they feel like their time is being wasted. She also reminded me that we've seen this doctor for over 10 years and the doctor hasn’t ever cavelierly or callously dismissed us. In fact, our doctor is a pianist so we often spend a bit more time together talking about art and music during our appointments! So with my wife's help I was able to quiet the bullshit thinking and stop carrying those old messages … at least for now. It's so helpful to be reminded to look at the actual facts outside one's mind!! With a more peaceful head-space (despite a throbbing headache) I picked up my prescription and we headed home to dinner. I also texted with friends about it all and that helped too.

Note to self: especially when not feeling well physically, check your brain pan occasionally for any caked on bullshit, use a therapeutic scrubby pad to remove those stubborn stains, it may help to soak it in love and friendship first. If extra scrubbing power is needed - ask for it!

I wrote last week about music and that the invention of musical instruments happened before the pottery wheel and the ability to make large jars for food storage. While working on the painting below which is in my current exhibit I thought a lot about lunch and how we store and carry it.

Here's my painting:

So Sushi Me
By Clancy
4 feet tall, 13 inches wide
Acrylic on flat canvas

The ability to store and carry food were milestones for human flourishing; jars, baskets¹, bags, woven nets, wooden barrels and boxes, metal cans, waxed paper boxes… and eventually refrigeration.

I thought a lot about food storage as I thought towards a new Mundane Magic painting idea, trying different kinds of food storage and different kinds of animals. Then I noticed our cat sitting in an empty cardboard box in real life. That led to thinking of the love cats have of boxes. Then imagining that a cat would love getting a sushi takeaway in one of the origami boxes… then I imagined what kind of cat would like Sushi best (a Siamese of course). All of those thoughts led to my painting So Sushi Me that you see above.

Also this week, as I thought more about carrying things, I drew some new drawings and remembered some older sketchbook pages that fit today’s topic.

Here's another cat-with-box thought from my sketchbook.

While planning my current exhibit I read Ursula K. Le Guin's essay "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction". She talks about the high probability that the first advanced human survival tool was not a weapon, but a container. Gathering was actually a much more significant a food source than hunting. Le Guin points out, that the stories of how the men killed some big game makes for a more exciting story than how the women and men gathered and stored the oats which enabled them to survive between the big hunts. But the big game hunting stories are more dramatic, more exciting, and have easily named individual heros. "I said it was hard," Le Guin notes, "to make a gripping tale of how we wrested the wild oats from their husks, I didn't say it was impossible."

It is easier to draw a lone hero mouse bringing back a big game cherry… 😉

But the challenge of drawing supportive reciprocal community is why I love the new literature genre Hopepunk² so much - it's an effort to to tell the tales of entire communities, rather than lone heros, surviving difficulty and then thriving together in gripping ways! But I digress.

I tried the challenge and drew two mice who worked well together to bring home a strawberry…

Basically brash bullshit stories can be much louder than mundane reality. The bullshit can be something accidental that we, metaphorically, track in on our shoes or find in the bottom of a bucket as we live life. Which is why it's necessary to think about where our thoughts came from and whether they’re worth keeping or not.

One morning this week I was thinking more of human brains and bodies as carrier vessels… and I wrote this in my sketchbook.

And in my further thinking about humans as carriers I remembered a sketchbook page I did a decade or so ago about the categories of the arts. This week I thought of those art categories as carriers of, a storage system for, the human spirit.³

In case you can't read my cursive writing in the photo below, the major categories I listed are: literature, performing arts, culinary arts, media arts, visual arts, architecture/landscape design, philosophy/science/logic/math.

Embedded in each of those categories is human history and memory - but primarily each of those is about getting through today and preparing for tomorrow! They’re often practical human to human aids in balancing, sorting, coping and carrying on with our life experiences and collectively learning to live well.⁴

Mass-corporate slick-slop-pseudo versions of these arts categories are a recent phenomenon. Religions and political authoritarians have often tried to control people by manipulating these categories to the benefit of the powerful. Those bully-style control efforts themselves often inspired creative resistance … see also satire, irony and comedy in general. But there I go digressing again… anyway, here's my sketchbook page.

My exhibit at Burnt Bridge Cellars will continue through the end of July. And the Caplan Art Designs gallery is fielding questions and can ship art anywhere.

After the encouragement of a friend, and because it fits the theme today, I made a lunch box. Link here.

I hope you're able to be held in one or more of the art categories and, as a result, carry a lighter load today. And I hope your lunch is yummy too.

Thank you for being here. 💙💚

1. About early food storage history (brief) https://diversedaily.com/the-evolution-of-ancient-food-storage-from-clay-pots-to-woven-baskets/

2. More about the genre of Hopepunk https://www.epicindie.net/indie-writing/what-is-hopepunk-the-genre-pushing-back-against-grimdark

3. Someone, somewhere, sometime, dealt with loss, pain, grief… and wrote or painted (etc) about it. All of that creativity is a part of the human spirit support system available to us today. “Life has not forgotten you. Whatever you are carrying right now, however invisible you feel inside it, you have not been abandoned by the world. You are still being held.”

If You Are Hurting Right Now, Read This

4. Via all of the arts humans give generously to other humans… which illustrates the theme of this encouraging article.

Human Beings are Givers, not Takers