Art After the Stroke, Part Three: Frozen in the Fields of Plenty

[elisem]

So there I was, sorting beads, and it was taking five times longer than it had taken me before the stroke. OK, I thought, giving myself a pep talk, I can learn to do this again in ways that work. I can figure something out. I can do this.

Then I sat down to make some earrings.

Again, I was under time pressure: every year at WisCon I host the Haiku Earring Party, where I give away somewhere between one and three hundred pairs of earrings to people that write haiku inspired by the earrings they choose and the title I give them. I had at least a hundred pairs to make if I wanted to be in any way well-prepared. So I sat down to work... and I froze.

Oh, I didn't freeze right away. I did the thing I usually do for haiku earring-making, which is to set out a bunch of pairs of various beads, usually arranged chromatically on the table, and got my headpins and scrap metal out. (I make haiku earrings mostly out of scrap metal, base metals, using surgical steel earwires, and I often make use of beads kind people have given me. What makes it better is that they're not always the beads I would choose, so I get to (have to!) stretch a little and make stuff that I like out of materials I am not necessarily immediately drawn to. It's a nifty little improve session every time.

Well, usually. This time, I set out beads and wires and got my tools, and picked up a pair of wires to start composing, and I froze.

Seriously, I could not for the life of me figure out how to compose a simple pair of earrings that looked good to me. My sense of proportion, of rhythm, of any of those things, had gone somewhere else and left no forwarding address. It took me twenty minutes to build a simple three-bead pair of earrings. I almost tipped my head down on the table and sobbed. But I didn't. Instead, I built another pair. And then another.

After a dozen pairs, I started noticing that this pair only took about four minutes. (That's still twice as long as haiku earrings take for me to do -- or took -- when I was in the zone.) So that was something. And then I noticed that I was choosing combinations I probably would not have done before. That was another thing, and actually kind of cool, since I liked what I was choosing. But that first pair? That was scary, scary, scary.

However, when I went to the workbench the next time and started to work on necklaces, things had gotten all sorts of easier. I wasn't paralyzed about choices any more. Everything was still overwhelmingly interesting, but I could go ahead and choose, and compose, and see where it took me. More, I started to integrate the new way of seeing what I had made into the assessments I do as I make something. And I think it changed my designs.

I'll try to show you what I mean by that tomorrow, but I wanted to at least post this much in order to move the story past Counting Flax Seeds and the whirlpool I was in at the end of that post, and in order to tell you all that despite choice paralysis that initially had me in its clutches bigtime, there's happier stuff to come.


Art After the Stroke, Part One: Seeing Every Thing
Art After the Stroke, Part Two: Counting Flax Seeds
Art After the Stroke, Part Three: Frozen in the Fields of Plenty
Art After the Stroke, Part Four: And By My Eyes Be I Open
... and more to come.

Comments

[bluestalking.livejournal.com]

Thank you for telling this story this way. <3

[evilrooster.livejournal.com]

I wanted to at least post this much in order to move the story past Counting Flax Seeds and the whirlpool I was in at the end of that post, and in order to tell you all that despite choice paralysis that initially had me in its clutches bigtime, there's happier stuff to come.

Thank you very much for doing that. I found myself a little bereft of words, reading the previous post.

Which is nothing like how you felt living it, of course. Maybe I could get the nice man in the blue box to bring some hugs back in time for you.

[batwrangler.livejournal.com]

Yay!

[selkie-b.livejournal.com]

Oddly what caught my eye upon reading this was the incredible poetry of your tag list on the side... how words relate, how some objects have no relation to their "word" and how we tangle that all together to both construct a sentence and create art.

*HUG* Thinking of you a lot. My mom sent fresh Melange Mysterioux tea which I would be happy to bring by and share...

[elisem.livejournal.com]

Would love to see you -- and have been feeling sad about not getting connection time arranged for a while now. I come home, and then there's Fourth Street/Eisteddfodd, and then there's Convergence, and then I get to have tea again. How does that work for you?

[selkie-b.livejournal.com]

You shall be firmly squeeeeeezed in between July 5th and 10th :D. My step-daughter will be here from the 11th until the 19th - can you believe it???

[magentamn.livejournal.com]

I wonder how much your hesitation was caused by the stroke itself, and how much was being out of practice. Every fall, when I haven't made bread for 3 or 4 months, I have to keep consulting the recipe, and asking myself if I'm doing it right, and sometimes, the first batch of the fall isn't very good. By the next batch, or the one after that, it's really good bread again. How long was it that you couldn't, or didn't, make jewelry? When was the last time you made earrings? It seems like the stroke might have affected your choice of beads, but the rest could be more ordinary.

It's fascinating to read your description of the changes you have been through, but it's also keeping me vigilant about my blood pressure meds.

[elisem.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, I had some control group data for that, because I'd had time when I couldn't work for various reasons before, including after Mike died. This was very different.

[kythryne.livejournal.com]

This is fascinating. The ways of the brain have always intrigued me, especially where perception and art intersect.

Something went wrong in my brain about ten years ago when I first got sick, and the world shifted a lot. I've never quite figured out how I got where I am from where I was. Not that I mind where I am... but I miss where I was, some days.

[firecat]

I'm finding this series of posts very interesting. Thank you for sharing them.

[pameladean]

Am still pondering earlier posts in this series, but very glad to see that things got better. What happened to that first dreadfully difficult pair of earrings?

P.

[elisem.livejournal.com]

They went into the Haiku Earring Party at WisCon this year, and got into someone's hands, and that person wrote poetry, and the great rippling outward of art continues.