Updated: 4/1/2004; 11:00:57 AM
3rd House Party
    The 3rd house in astrology is associated with writing, conversation, personal thoughts, day-to-day things, siblings and neighbors.

daily link  Monday, March 01, 2004

Grocery lists

Via Twilight Café (who got it elsewhere): "my collection of other people's grocery lists". I don't know why I love these. What is it? Is it that it's so universal? (It also reminds me of some of the "visual poetry and letter-inspired art" at "Errata & Contradiction" that I linked to in my last post, particularly Susan Field's.) After browsing through a few, I looked down at my desk and there was this scrap of a grocery list from earlier today:


 

Mistakes, art and life

I wouldn’t say that I’ve been thinking about mistakes particularly lately, but several things I’ve read keep coming back to similar themes. (A happy “accident” maybe?) We all know we can’t learn anything new without making mistakes, though many of us, after childhood, have a harder time accepting our mistakes. And maybe, as a result, we have a harder time learning and/or being open to new things. With children, it’s not a mistake, it’s just playing around. I was just playing around. Similarly, artists use mistakes as part of the artistic process, while they’re just playing around. Anyway, here’s some of what I found…

 

From the book, Clients for Life, the first three of the suggestions for improving empathy:

Put yourself into unfamiliar situations where you have neither mastery nor control

Travel  When you leave the cocooned existence you call your home, you are suddenly exposed to a raft of new sights, smells, tastes, points of view, and sufferings…

Accept occasional failures or setbacks and learn from them

Fait accompli links to an online exhibition at Harvard called “Errata and Contradiction.” From the exhibit’s introduction:

The theme “Errata and Contradiction” was chosen because making mistakes is a part of everyday life, an inherent but overlooked part of who we are, how we speak, and how we interpret the world around us. Forgetting, misreading, and slips of the tongue are a topic for Freud (in his The Psychopathology of Everyday Life), but they are not just a sign of pathology: we risk exposing thoughts we didn’t mean to expose, but the unconscious play involved in misspelling or in jumbling one’s words is akin to the process connected with artistic creation…

Over at Never Neutral, Ernesto Prieto says, “To write is a way of making sense out of experience” and “Experiencing is not only merely letting things happen to us. It means allowing life…to traverse us, to ‘step out of our fortress’”:

Sometimes a radical change in the way we perceive things (does not have to be a 'trauma' as we traditionally understand it, but just meeting someone new, learning something unexpected, discovering a new place, a new sound, smell, color, texture) can make us realize the importance of experience and its undefinable reach. Sometimes we are so used to the same we are not only afraid, but unable to allow difference to show itself before us. And when that happens, our “psychic shields”… clash against the floor with a loud, clear noise. Our fists open slowly to become a handshake, or a caress.

Finally… Okay, this one I looked for, searching for “mistakes” at Poetry Daily:

Rethinking Regret


Let's thank our mistakes, let's bless them
for their humanity, their terribly weak chins.
We should offer them our gratitude and admiration
for giving us our clefts and scarring us with
embarrassment, the hot flash of confession.
Thank you, transgressions! for making us so right
in our imperfections. Less flawed, we might have
turned away, feeling too fit, our desires looking
for better directions. Without them, we might have
passed the place where one of us stood, watching
someone else walk away, and followed them,
while our perfect mistake walked straight towards us,
walked right into our cluttered, ordered lives
that could have been closed but were not,
that could have been asleep, but instead
stayed up, all night, forgetting the pill,
the good book, the necessary eight hours,
and lay there—in the middle of the bed—
keeping the heart awake—open and stunned,
stunning. How unhappy perfection must be
over there on the shelf without a crack, without
this critical break—this falling—this sudden, thrilling draft.


Elaine Sexton
Sleuth
New Issues


Wishing you many happy mistakes.

 


Copyright 2004 © the 3rd house party hostess