I hardly know what that means. The introductory class ended, and I had to sign up for it all over again, (which hurt my ego some, let me assure you!) because I like to think of myself as sharp- a fast learner, and all that self-congratulatory shit. I walked though the last sunny colored day of Fall, watching leaves succumb to gravity, and snapping pictures while they left. It made me think life was running away, and all the great things I'd planned to do (as a teenager, and into my late twenties, even) had a time limit attached I might run out on, but; I'm sorry if I'm not being very clear. My car was broken, so I had to hoof to the Dojo, leave my check, and pick up the package I'd left there, on the last session of the class I'd soon be starting all over, provided they saw fit to let me. (How couldn't they? I didn't know how to roll yet!) I passed my derelict car on the way, where I'd left it, sputtering on its last piston-firing legs. The sad only increased, when I thought how much ego I had there. And how useless it now was, in its present state of humiliation. What's a car to offer you, if it can't go anywhere? What was I? You manage to follow me? What did I have to offer, because it felt like the car was me, and I was broken, somehow.
At least the day was sunny and gorgeous.
She practices on me sometimes. Grab me like this.
And sometimes she gets so mixed up, lefts to rights, we end
up in a great big pretzel. We laugh and start over, pretzeling
some whole new way. What if I did this!? I test
her, and sometimes she knows the answer. See how little force
it takes? She smirks. I'm laying on the floor, afraid to move.
That's amazing! I say to the carpet. How did you do that?
And she tries to show me, but the lefts and rights thing
that gets us all screwed up. Don't use your muscles! She keeps
yelling at me. Relax! If I don't use muscles, how the hell am
I suppose to move? Use Ki! And she launches into large description
of an intangible substance you can't ever feel. How can you feel
it, if you can't feel it? You don't try, and everything
becomes easy. Which asks for more explanation, being such an alluring
possibility, and all. The mind wants to chew it up, and digest
the intellectual repercussions of such-and-such a threat to mind's
desire to master things. Which gets us in a bog. Wherever the
mind chews its cud, it shits all over the ground.
On the way back, when I passed my car again, I looked
it over. It was a material extension of me : The driver (a
word fraught with its own series of stigmas). And I breathed from
my one point, and drained frothing juice, shaken to warm foam
in my backpack
drained it into my one point, and walked
from it too. Then I began to get turned on. Which was interesting
in itself, considering what I was trying to get into. A state
of higher consciousness, you know?
She wanted to talk about adultery, and trysts. What
makes men do it? And I had to remind her, woman want to do
it also. I suppose you're right, but
No buts; I read
in a Scientific American, that
You're just saying that,
to boost men's bullshit. I read that article too. Written
by men, you know. That's because women are all too afraid to blow
the whistle on themselves. We lob softballs back and forth, feeling
their dull thump. Anyway, why did you bring this up? And she tells
me about her car, and the breathing, and how the Akido practice
got her sexually turned on, and I thought, okay - here it comes.
She's having an affair with the instructor stay calm, and what
ever you do, don't be a hypocrite. But that's as far as it went.
She hadn't paved the road with conclusions yet.
I had lunch with my wacky friend, the one who lives
to rock climb, and take dangerous drugs. She was shaking all over
(not sure if it was the double latté, the news, or something
synthetic), practically beside herself with a letter she gripped
tightly, or I should say, mauled, in her right fist. Fuckin'
hell. I can't believe it, I really can't. What?! I got invited
on a climb in Tibet. Can you imagine? Seven peaks of seven-plus,
none of them climbed. I'll need to generate some cash pronto!
What? Where? You're dickin' me? (A term she fondly used.)
No ma'am. I'll be the first woman in the history of the world
to stand on one of 'em twenty three thousand foot peak, gaze down
reverently, and drop a hit of acid. You're not serious. Hell I
ain't!! She was. I could tell. I was speechless. Then I'll
look for a job there. Where?! The Tibetan plateau? (Now
she's really off the steep side of a skyscraper.) No- Nepal.
Plenty of work there for a cultural anthropologist. Relief agencies
would suck me up in a jiffy. Which was probably true. What about
your place full of stuff? Your animals and boyfriend? Fuck all
that! This is a lifetime opportunity we're talking about
here! You can always buy another couch. Which I thought related
to her boyfriend, but it was ipso-facto
I'd walk out on
it all, except my cat. Can't just leave a de-clawed feline
to fend for itself. Which was funny, considering it was hers from
a stray, having mewed at her door every morning for milk. I'd
have to find a place for Millie first. Boyfriends are self-sufficient.
They come and go at will. And she gives me quick-wink,
like I'm suppose to jam that somewhere.
I got back, and the place was an utter mess. THE
DISHES were culturing new forms of life, the laundry hamper smelled
like week-old garbage, and somebody promised they'd deal.
He's so far in his only-thing-that-matters-is-painting world,
he doesn't even notice. Men are hopeless, I realize all over again,
fumbling with the groceries. They're genetically wired wrong,
and have no business letting women take care of them. I need no
video record, to tell me what happened. He got depressed here,
and hot under the collar, the trapped-animal scenario, cuz the
'weather went to hell', and the 'brushes weren't working right'.
He's sitting in the downtown hole in the wall, with all the other
slighted oddballs, commiseration thick in the unspoken air, drinking
cup-etching coffee, and projecting it's false-ambrosia safe haven
from the foreign, money-inebriated world. They congregate at that
cafe once, or twice daily, edging eyes over erudite texts, art
books, faraway dreams, and real world concerns
to make little
nods, feigning disinterest in the facts of intimacy, and never-ending
initiation into Seattle's notoriously-rude intimidation zone.
The place gives heebie-jeebies to most people. The servers are
downright hostile. Basically, I think only the persistent survive.
Either that, or die-hard coffee addicts, who can't settle for
less than peer-ascribed perfection. They do make a heck of a latté,
if you can stand the ambiance of the place. Once your name's on
the nonexistent roster (which may take a decade of sect-like adherence),
people nod differently, which might mean less often, and the wait
staff is even ruder, which is difficult to imagine, but
I've been with him enough there, to see it happen. It makes me
wonder why a body goes there at all, except to feel vindicated
in artistic misery, or to participate in a silent support group
and get totally wired on three shots of espresso for the price
of one, in tall claret mugs. Artistic people, or ones who've chosen
to call themselves that animal, are strange, and at the same time,
wholly predictable. They're addicted to forms of misery, and choose
to surround themselves with others, who feel pangs of inacceptance,
and being misunderstood.
But for some reason, that action gave me no recompense.
The place was empty and sterile. Bodies sat at tables, but no
thought permeated the air. I pondered transoms, which I call leaps
to a new works of art, then toyed with an erotic fantasy or two,
eavesdropping as two sisters jabberwalk Chinese, from illegible
notes. The most-spoken language in the woe-rld. People
shaking their legs in expressed, pent-up emotions, fingers holding
places in thick hard-cover books - staring out the bleak windows
of their eyes, glassine from the deep ahhs hidden in their
throats - hypnotized from water funneling down the silent glass
sheets (called blinds) between the feeling, and the reality of
proper expression. Boy, I'll tell you something: it never
looked so deceptively calm, and likewise, sinister - that
place. You know? Like minutes condense to seconds, feeling like
hours. Even when the regular crowd files in, fingering fresh thoughts,
small seductions, and terminal passion-longing for whatever it
is they doldrum to movement illusion in dead windless lees of
'success', I have to hand it to
(us). We make a living
out of selling-out, by not selling anything. And what I mean by
that, is still obscured by the glass.
Weight is our shit we carry along for life's ride.
Let it go under-side.
I make up sayings to help me remember my important bits of class.
Listen to what we've forgotten how to hear.
Loved ones die; and we don't know it.
Why is that?
This most practical man is speaking, of the old whole new way of being. He is a throwback to polite manners, efficiency, hard-working practicality, and he's spouting nonsense. He's suggests written language didn't exist before, because we didn't need it. He is saying the telephone is a mechanical extension of 'normal' (albeit unused, misplaced, and totally disregarded) communication between humans. A material version of switchboard, neurologically hard-wired ink, finger Braille, fiber-optic, copper wire twists of secret-ineffable formula, a distance of what's under our noses or at such close range, its impossible to see; chop and blend with strong inert admixtures of blind unsubstantiated belief. Cook.
Before leaving, I decide to curtail my men's-club membership. Not that it's exclusively men who linger café no-man's zones, the wandering career misfits-in a highly structured, pragmatic society! But, it's something uniquely male about repression that hands out black-hole diplomas, pushing ideal-starched bodies to gulags like this. I'd have to decide with every dye, chroma, hue, tint I possessed, what I wanted to be, and where I was going. Up, or down. Here, or there. Neither were tangible choices.
Everything is an emotional state of mind.
Extend Ki emotionally.
That be the part that snags me. How do you extend a non-exigent substance, with no measurable qualities, in an emotional way? One of his main students was doing a move, and the instructor went off on him. I actually dropped my jaw. What was your intent? What kind of the Ki were you extending? He didn't know for sure. He was flustered, when the Sensei called a black belt, and told him to perform the more difficult version of that throw. It was a very graceful, fluid movement, the gung-ho recipient hit our floor with a force of a car tapping another, in a polite parallel park. The instructor said, now I will show you your Ki. There was a viscous quality to it. I held my breath, as his body flew towards the floor arrested, by deft twist, in ilk's crowning moment. 'You see now.' Which wasn't any sort of question.
I'd never seen Sensei be anything but kind.
What really got me. Breathing exhaust - hacking out
people's laziness, while I walked from one place to another, thinking:
These are probably the hard-heads that complain about pollution,
about traffic, and no place to park. I get angry at the
way society is structured, with the pedestrian, and the cyclist,
at the last rung of the transportation ladder. We have the least
rights of all, and the lesson there is: Machines are more
important than human beings. Humans; defined by their equipment.
Human needs: registered in regard to the needs of the things they
own. People I loath, pilot mindlessly, a secular destruction of
who we are, driving climate-controlled climate damaging rubber-tired
automatons, wrist-flicking cellular telephones to hurry-hurry
meaningless conversations to let the driver forget his her life
is ticking away, idling noxious gas I'll have to breathe, in the
endless morass of traffic jammed up against all the things people
think they need to drive to experience. It really gets me angry,
and makes me realize what an angry person I must need to be, or
be in general, which is disconcerting, for it conflicts
most-egregiously with the self-projected notion of who I am, an
artistic self, preoccupied with beauty and nature, accepting
all the mayonnaise on top as necessary evil, as past-ignorance
compounded forward, that illumines the beauty even more. In farce
of it, I engorge myself on wobbling daggers thrown at other
people, inuring mysterious inklings I'm the curse of a
disturbance, I will so nobly, to extradition.
He said, "Pay attention to nature. Nature has
the answers, if we can listen in." It made me think of M----.
Hello! He says to terraced firs, and flowers. How beautiful you
look today; he compliments tulips, and snapdragons. To him, the
world is a lover, and all its parts are interesting- or at least,
worth exploration. I wonder why I missed the cat playing into
dogs' lottery, as it twitches its tail, and sniffs the air- two
mutts smirking behind a ragged bamboo grove right next to the
garbage can, strewn litter helter-skelter. I watching a slew of
televisions, synchronized to a perfume ad, across the street.
I was so far from the maker's little jab; and I was waltzing right
by it. Marcel elbowed me, for he knows I'm seldom looking. Check
it out! He whispers, not wanting to disturb its breath-sucking
drama.
I decided to see a counselor.
Hell, everybody else has done it before! Haven't they?
At class, we did this amazing demonstration. 'Think
of all the things you did today,' Sensei said, 'then walk straight
ahead.' Which I did. And he stopped me cold with his clothes-line
arm. 'Now go back and sshake. Get relaxed, get in your
one point, look a point on other wall, and project Ki. Go.'
I breezed right past him, taking his arm as I went.' What happened?
'It is Ki.' You can do this in more than one dimension. Oh really?
It has something to do with keeping weight underside? Perhaps.
And yes. Then he had us walk randomly back and forth, while
one or two surprised students walk straight through us. Miraculously,
I didn't hit anyone. 'That was with Ki, extending forward. Now
think of a point behind you. Go.' Asinine comment; I slam
into a girl. 'It is very difficult, you see sometimes, to make
spirit and the mind whole. To make them one. Tremendous things
can happen when you do, and they help you through your life in
ways, your current ways of things, can not imagine.'
Which I had to think about to decipher. 'I'll tell you why its
doing, is so difficult. We are afraid to make ourselves one with
the spirit, or at least, mind and body
' and here
it gets interesting. We're afraid! Makes sense. We're afraid with
all our being, of being close to other people. And then
there's ourselves. 'People at the shopping mall will move,
for your integration of mind and body projecting forward (to where
you desire to go), because those people are ambling with no purpose.
They have no force of direction in their lives.' I played the
recording back. He'd said it right over my head, ten minutes before.
'
we're afraid to see what's possible, because we'll all
have to leave its ecstasy, when our body drops from the soul.'
And he gets the most humble look on his face; I break into tears.
It is amazing. I don't know what else to say.
It's funny. How you're thinking something over, for
ages, foaming at the mouth over all its repercussions,
for months (years?), and then you finally decide to take
the plunge, whatever it is; you know? Makes me laugh. The instant
you get to that moment - of actually deciding! All
hell breaks loose. People call you offering the very things you're
after, insights come crashing in, money materializes
Hilarious,
really. I mean, the pressure to do something you know you
should, and hitting a breakwater of fear to do it!
What is that wall? Why does it stop us so readily? In comes
Girlyn, all aflame with the class she's taking, sitting me down
and lecturing me about a spirit being too afraid to meet its constituent
parts, and vice versa, right down to the fact we're already
whole, and clasping the fractured parts in some kind of unity,
so why be afraid to come out of the closet with it?! We're afraid
to actualize, and afraid not to, while we already are the very
thing we cleverly claim to attract, and repel. At death, we will
part with the bond we already have, angst-ridden with guilt and
remorse for not bonding it openly, in sight of ourselves; in sight
of our loves. And I wanted to pay to go to a counselor.
Jeeze.
I'm overwhelmed with the battleground love visits
on its opponents. That's we, us and them, all rolled in a post-proverbial
one. I am the tail of one army, fighting the front of another,
both joined by sillier causes, in the huge arc of center. We are
polarized along some indifference, that posits a turn one way
or the other, defining sides.
I've been so busy, the house has fallento
utter
ruination.
It's so damned difficult to stylize a day against
three minutes of his teachings. It's pathetic, how few moments
(in a countless eternity of them) I'm centered, Ki flowing, relaxed,
weight underside. Weight underside is tough. It's making force
grace. It's asking gravity to be your friend. You employ,
what drags others down. You not only fight with it, you
love it; life is full of it, your moments are blessed with
its energy, etc. Each postulate is a mountain I have to
climb, without ropes, tent, ice ax, and the rest of the friggin'
gear. All you get is breath; slow it, watch it go, and come in;
what kind of breath is it? How is it becoming Ki?
(Re: You being it, instead of thinking it:) 'I don't
know' is the circle you won't pencil-in. Weight underside
baffles me. I walk the gangplank of 'Consciousness',
not aware what the definition suggests, but ready to articulate
a lot of crap. That worries me. I breath from the one-point twice,
then think venal thoughts. I feel my silent steps not
shuffle with indecision, feigning hunger, or tired legs, to save
my Enough is enough! from happening. I am a walking dead,
under the insipid illusion, I'm doing something about it.
I'm just as lost as the next idiot, thinking themselves saved,
found, redeemed- worshipping a one true and only sack of
shit. That, worries me too.
I've found the singularly-simple solution for city
noise and haste. It's called "ear plugs". I now walk
screeching brake car horn days in silence mediation, staring trees
to vibrant living fire, hearing my heart beat, feeling blood course,
crunching the fall's leaves, directly underfoot. I say singularly,
but I suppose plugs are plural. One isn't enough, where
some things concern. Their comedy is some inner sounds
get so loud, you want to remove the outer plugs to quiet them
down. Meetings would be better with earstoppers, because then
the people mouthing-off would be forced to hear how stupid they
sound. Violent speech is amplified to an ear-splitting roar. Hard
to miss or ignore. Even what doesn't usually verbalize,
rings louder.
This is why we're different. If we're too similar, we have common genetics, ripe for mutual infection. If one plant of a certain species becomes ill, the clone members of it, are likewise vulnerable. Like the rubber trees in Asia, all originally cut from a few mother plants; potent disease would wipe them out. I always imagined I'd end up (sigh) somebody just like me; but that's a dormant threat to my being, to my work - never challenging - testing with outside opinion, to make it better. One person is waylaid by life, and the other person flaws the exact same way. Where's learning perspective in that? Each member of that union is constantly protecting their worst fears, and most profound vulnerabilities. It's like playing a static game of football, freezing in the bleachers, trying to convince yourself how fun it is.
(These are new thoughts for me, I guess.)
Anyway, I've been studying Obliqueski, which is a
heretical way of referring to O---------, in between working on
the next series of Fall pictures. I have six going for the moment,
which consumes just about all of my time, in between walking to
and fro, tying my shoes, and doing the stinking piles of dishes,
festering last week's organisms. I can tell Girlyn is waiting,
to see how bad it will get. What's his threshold? She's thinking.
How much can I stand on a regular basis? Which is really a test
of her threshold, not mine. Her knight shining armoire
is suppose to tend the shingles on his roof, and the buff of his
hammered plates, an artistic devil-may-care carelessness, and
the private wooing of emotional earthly provisions for a comfortable
future. Knights in shining armor reflect the shallow best-wishes
of the woman they're mirroring. Women project who they
are not, and want it back threefold. But I go on, for naught;
Girlyn is more and less the exception from these sorts of feminine
rue. She is the evolving woman hood, and I mean that, in
the best secret way. Mr. O has me thinking, in minute portals,
through bombast he provides, the reader quivering for flowers,
and delicious smells.
I've necked with some strange people in my life,
but none as odd as M------. He struck me from the very beginning,
because he didn't need women, like most men do. He was
happy being around them, and just as pleased to leave, with or
without sex. They seemed to elicit a passion, he translated to
art. At first, he's more a monk, than a lover. I was some id
of rare new cloth he liked, to run though his hands- feel
the embroidered possibilities of. Makes me a load of emotion to
think of that time, in my life, you know? I guess I never
dealt with them. Sufficiently.
Rather than dangle from a spider's web, or ring the
phones of people who seek solid ground, in a fortress, in their
'castles' of sand, I did next-logical thing. I took an art class.
Italio. Also known, and ridiculed, as dry-point. It was
something new for me. A world in scratched callus blacks and whites.
Perfect for the onslaught of wind; sips golden leaves from the
trees. Perfect for coming winter, and it's stark realism. I eagerly
anticipated the first class. While it rained purrsian cats
and black forest dogs.
Maybe
(whirling gears) 'keep weight underside'
is multi-layered. Weight, as in emotional weight. Let your
emotions drop down, and root you to the earth, instead
of making you top-heavy. Let mind stay light, and let the shit
drip from you, until it's gone. I have to keep telling myself
to relax, without knowing what's tensing me up. Perhaps the appreciative,
hand-wave me full of light joy fluffiness is kept behind a coat
of Varathane : I need to know my problems are solvable!
The other side, looking out through its yellowed-plastic film,
trying to smell flowers, feel ferns, and love the people bumbling
around our planet. The problems aren't solvable. There
is no solvent to melt them, except a pure act of letting them
go. They are 'problems' by the intrinsic nature of memory, which
has pigeonholed them, there. Suspicion surrounding these problems
is magnified by related pain and anguish, serving to support,
supported by the hidden, original trope. You can not remove the
halo of crap, without the permission of the thing itself.
Is this making sense? I remember my writing professor in Junior
college, saying it isn't good to make too much sense - something
like that. Got that thought, and not got inta-it. So I
mentioned the whirligig going round my head, without sounding
out solution, till now. Weight underside tithes from my deepest
scarred places. It asks a supporting cast of the play to abandon
leading lady's role. It asks that cast to form their own
troupe, to go on the road, and seek their fortunes. Leading lady
goes underside. As soon as possible. She's soiled her performance
with too much 'food', and too few cooks. Another comes, to replace
her.
I went, on three hours sleep, to hear the famous academician speak on process retort, to critique of atrocious art. I'd been up all night paying atonement, for the love of earlier-evening partying, when I'd promised myself, to finish the right corner of my piece. Who says artists are immune to the work ethic, my dear? I meanly smeared our conversation's paint, varnish it over, a fruitless move, and gracelessly, gave up Something. The ghost, the ship, the whole bowl of bollix. Never force a painting! (I thought I knew that already.) But wake, pedaling the cold 'For what reason am I doing this?' six miles question your omniscience to the state university, to sit in academically-uncomfortable seats, and count the gray-headed professors. You don't need any set-prescribed mumbo-jumbo number of hours' sleep a night. You're a liberated, non-synchronous being; I tell myself, artfully dodge yawns and plow-furling blinks. The lecture begins - the man, off his rocker and running. We're laughing, lining up world views of dry-speech dilettantes, and shooting them down. He is cutting us to pieces; I'm wide awake; he's talking our language; Yes! I know that passion!; he's the artist too. He knows the agony of producing things too impractical to sell. He knows the dark brooding demands (that make you want) to kill yourself, burn towards ashes, everything you've ever attempted. I cry, openly, wetting my beard with his words. Here is my mentor! Here is my answer; here is the man with the insight, to pull me from my self-inflicted torture. I will anneal myself to his tutelage, spin with his circle, to greatness, climb the articles of I can't, and dive from the imaginary heights. He is the self making man, have-not to have and yet, the art is transparent to me. He is my projection, of what I imagine him to be. He is the woman, a man falls in love with as he is falling in love with himself. He is woman, falling in love with hard-crust man falling in love with himself and her mirror self-love the idea of love it can heal damaged, recluse souls. Question Sir : Can we see some of your art? Faculty is aghast. This is a vagrant breach of pomp and circumstance. Your query is not a part of his discourse, as published whatever inbred journal they all profess to religiously read. He is bashful. Hey Jon, could you get me my briefcase? Looks look he gave a man in front, looking... Why surely. I'd be flattered. And for his bashfulness, I loved him even more. He held some up; I floundered. I judged harshly, as he would judge, whatever I might produce. And then some. 'Butter Knife and Fruit'. Lithographic Contusion of Paper. That's what I wanted to see. Butter knife on fruit reeked slightly of savant-garde, with no spontaneous combustion - at all. He thought this was risking something? And moral is: There is no Outland, in mainstream. He was a deviant in an ultimatly non-deviant culture. His stray from classical design, was hair-breath left of matriculate. Life had coddled him, and a thought accosted me: Has life coddled this jeerer too? What would far left of your social canister, call you? The avant-garde sellout? he huckster-sham artist bonito double-plus stooge? He's under an illusion, his precious art is pain. He is in the arms of an institution, meeting all the foreign-right people in intimate state funded functions, bored and sloshed, with nothing better to do, once his students are satiated with rot. Her question steers him clear of more embarrassment. It is a serious question, having to do with his extra-verbose critiques on New American Methods. As if either of them, understand a whit of the emotion these moments spring from.
I leave, disjointed, disheartened, and more than
ever, devoted to my hopeless task.
I've got my own version of weight. I think about
Teresa, and all the things I could have said to her, had I known.
That's the lesson, I need now. Say it. Say it no matter what,
because you never know why or when you'll mangle your dream profoundly
enough, to never say anything again. I was thinking it at work-
thinking about all the shit I've built up against fellow workers
I smile at, then ask how their weekend was, as if I care.
I never say anything real, and thus - this anger builds
up. It flows over the brim, stains my tabernacle, progresses to
the floor, demands the referee blow the whistle, And get down
to cleanse yourself child, you've been evil. As usual. Invective,
back-stabbing, petite-evil me. Banish her to the closet, to cry
dry tears by herself. Muffle the sound of her sobs so the body
sobbing, doesn't have to hear.
I'm a disaster, really and try-and-try-again-truly. I wonder how I've managed to live with myself for all these years. Sad masochism ossifies the great to stone statures, totally emotionally-voided humans, walking he planet they'll leave, and eventually become famous upon. Isolation is the thesis of art. Makes better people than Teresa jump from parking ramps, with far less enthusiasm. Teresa wasn't tortured by deep-enough reasons. That's my take of the situation. Girlyn would disagree. She thinks child care and metal screws in your dull-skills skull from a no-longer-beautiful hundred ninety stitch DUI accident, are plenty reasons-enough. I think she wanted us to think she din't-wanna to jump. Her splay on the wet-night pavement, was business as usual. I don't mean that badly - it's only the cad that misses the most obvious meow of a cat trapped in the pants of a mistress that wants a man to make happy. That accident did her best-hopes in; you know a better reason Girlyn? Of course she doesn't.
I don't even bother asking.
Litho ink tush, Note: folding the ink correctly, the correct setting on the litho press, the press grease, talcum, gum arabic, those 'grease-loving' ball-ground pencils, crayons, Dankolite, water soluble inks. (What are they for?) Italio (stopout, sugarground, hard ground, soft ground, dry sheen, dry point, 4-1 acid nitric, aquatint-hand shake, drum applied---starchy cheesecloth (missed its name) Whoa. There's a lot of stuff to buy. First Italio print, a soft-ground imprint of a fall leaf. I printed it four times, cranking the obstinate press back and forth, till it gave its messy yellow ink. They looked awful. So I printed them black, and painted one later. My instructor wants to know why I bother etching, if paint hides its art, and I say: It isn't hidden from me.