Tag Archives: Puzzles

Terrace Cafe at Night

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IMG_8659In my imagined heaven (unlike the fundamentalist heaven muddled in moral condemnation) van Gogh, along with Rothko and Francis Bacon, while away the mornings appreciating and talking about color.

But for now you’re not yet in heaven.

Instead it’s a warm September evening in 1888.  You still sit on a stool in the Place to Forum glancing to the south down the Rue de Palais in the town of Arles.  Your paint brush dips all over that lead and chromium palette.  The constellations of Perseus and Andromeda shimmer in the sky wedged above the narrow alley: although you capture them imperfectly, some life forms long extinct once unknowingly cast their own eyes toward your future visage that would receive them.

As for us, you remain anchored in a world of substance while I hover in the immaterial world that has not yet come to be.  The street is filled with ghosts, future and past and present, and perhaps you find our presence claustrophobic.  The film between us remains impermeable.  We will never touch.

A blue cloaked waiter ferries glasses of Lillet.  A woman cloaked in a thin coat crosses the street with her husband. None of them pay any heed to you. You’re nearly as invisible as I.  But if not for you, their even now scant mark on history would be lost forever. If they’d known, they might have interceded or perhaps offered corrections.

But the crowd thins until it is just you and I. You are tired.  You will be dead within a year.  And people will champion you and fight over you for a very very long time.  You will ignite passion and fury much like the first wandering preacher.  But if the truth be, I wouldn’t even be here with you on this night but for that odd portal you created with a bit of oil and pigment brushed on to a tightly stretched piece of fabric. Tired yet exultant, you pack up your oils in a wooden box and set to walk home.  You carry a canvas, the paint still sticky and wet.  I follow.  You can’t see me and you never will.

All the same, I would just like you to know.

On the Act of Puzzling

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Here’s the great irony.

The puzzle really only exists in the moment of puzzling; once you place the piece with that satisfying click, the puzzle ceases to exist.

We generate joy more from the act of figuring out, than from the solution itself.

The mind of God must indeed be a desultory place where the unknown unknown does not at all exist.

By definition, serendipity cannot exist in a world without surprises.

I imagined this area to be a thick strap of black dotted with specks of canvas.

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Instead, why look what shone from the walls that night.

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And for better or worse, once the world becomes known, it’s very very hard to regain the bliss of ignorance and innocence.

 

Puzzle Solutions

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Yesterday our friend Carrie sent over some photos of her puzzles inside her puzzle room.

IMG_2205A couple of observations:

  1. She has a puzzle room.
  2. She has lots of cool puzzles.

Clearly Carrie is one of the one percenters of Puzzledom.

Those vying to become our leader agree on few things.  And in these strange and fearful times, they present even fewer options.

  1. I can vote for Donny and then I will become a winner so that one day I can have a puzzle room and lots of cool puzzles of my own.
  2. I can vote for Bernie in which case we will seize Carrie’s puzzle room and puzzles and redistribute them to all the other citizens in the land of Puzzledom. (BTW, if this happens, I call dibs on the 4D puzzle of San Francisco.)
  3. I can vote for Teddy, but then only God knows what will happen (and I mean his own particular God which doesn’t include all the other Gods floating around out there.)
  4. I can vote for Hilary which will result in Carrie keeping her puzzle room and puzzles and me keeping mine and Puzzledom will muddle along much as it always has.

There is, of course, the option presented by another friend, Mary Anne, who sent over an image of her recently completed puzzle of the door to Francis Bacon’s Reece Mews studio in Kensington.

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Mary Anne presently lives in Scotland. In her world they will one day declare independence and establish their own self-governing Puzzledom in which they will drink Scotch, do drunken imitations of Scotty from Star Trek and while away the long dark evenings puzzling wistfully at Bacon’s door.

It doesn’t sound too bad at all.

Peace through Strength

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Friday night all hell broke loose.

The chaos began when Mazie lay down on the puzzle field.

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Later that night she and Anna staged an insurrection and suspended all rules.  They fumbled around with pieces.  They tried to place pieces that lay outside the border.  They worked all helter skelter on one little area and then another little area and then another without any rhyme or reason.

IMG_8566Yesterday morning I instituted martial law.  All rules reinstated plus an additional 5th:  You were allowed to place three pieces and then had to walk away.

Last night we happily listened to the Republican debate as the cafe slowly came into focus.  I learned last night that a civil society can only prevail in these fearful times through strength and waterboarding and things far worse.

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Puzzles

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I like the process because it affords that chance so rarely available in a gallery or museum or even in every day life.

You end up sitting with a masterwork for a very long time and you’re given that rare opportunity to puzzle over the individual brushstrokes and minuscule bits of paint and broad swatches of color disaggregated from any image at all.  You sit with those brushstrokes (or at least the shadow of their facsimile) for days and days and days.

In doing so the obvious becomes, well, obvious.  As does the genius.

First, of course, we seek the boundary.

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Many of us begin by finding the edge pieces.  They’re easy to locate. But they also transform an infinite sprawling mess into something finite and perhaps apprehensible.

We want to declare order and somehow bound the chaos.

Secondly the sandstorm of color is not really that chaotic at all.

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We detect clear patterns.

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Most magnetic and appealing of all burns that mass of of complexly layered yellow and mustard.

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As well the eye and fingers are drawn to the countervailing mass of blue and darkness.

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These two palettes beyond all else seem to dominate.

But there’s that third muddled mess of pastel reflections of the light and darkness, more muted and intertwined.

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And then perhaps you notice that the darkness is not black. It’s violet and blue and umber and pitchy turquoise if there were such a thing.  And scintillating pulsing points of light, more bright and piercing than the warm ochre and mustard and tangerine, punctuate the darkness.

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The darkness is not dark at all, I tell my wife.

But it was, she countered.  For him it was.

I differ.  I still don’t believe it was the darkness that did him in.  Instead, perhaps, it was his perceived inability to render that darkness, to make it as manifest and material and dimensional as he himself saw it.

In his case the brushstrokes themselves mattered most of all.  Perhaps he no longer believed in those brushstrokes.  Or perhaps the loneliness inherent in their execution were too much to bear.