Linked and Built Together

I've just begun to read Nancy Horan's "Loving Frank," a novel about the love affair between Frank Lloyd Wright and Mamah Borthwick Cheney. It's beautiful, but haunting and tragic, and with every page I further draw a personal connection. Today, I was reading on the metro ride home, and the line that stopped me most was, "Truth against the world." I read it over and over and said it out loud and made it my facebook status. I want to know what it means to me, I'm curious. In the context of the story line, it meant we must believe in our individual truths when the outside world embellishes our lives.

In a lot of ways, the story line in "Loving Frank" reminds me of Erica Jong's "Fear of Flying:" running away to a foreign country with a lover in order to discover oneself, and the discoveries one makes because of love affairs. Being deep within a woman's psyche we learn the sacrifices humans make to move forward, to reach discovery, but within those sacrifices, the deep hurt that is found and the blackness to the discoveries made.

When looking up, "Truth against the world," I fell upon this Frank Lloyd Wright quote, and it made me feel as if I am meant to be studying the man further as if I will continue to discover through his words and work (especially appropriate as I have been temping as a receptionist at an architect firm lately).

If you would see how interwoven it is in the warp and woof of civilization ... go at night-fall to the top of one of the down-town steel giants and you may see how in the image of material man, at once his glory and his menace, is this thing we call a city. There beneath you is the monster, stretching acre upon acre into the far distance. High over head hangs the stagnant pall of its fetid breath, reddened with light from myriad eyes endlessly, everywhere blinking. Thousands of acres of cellular tissue, the city’s flesh outspreads layer upon layer, enmeshed by an intricate network of veins and arteries radiating...

I have scaled these city walls

At the end of the work day today someone was whistling this song in the office. I couldn't see who it was, but the moment stayed with me as I walked to the metro. The whistling reverberated in my thoughts the same as it had sounded as it traveled through the cubicles. I imagined it to be the cleaning man who earlier in the afternoon waved to me in the elevator video camera or one of the architects thinking of the end of the day--in a dreamy mode, pressing their lips together.

On the walk to the way to Dupont Circle, over and over I sang to myself, "These city walls. These city walls." As a writer or artist, don't we all live for these moments? When symbolism is created unknowingly. When real life becomes like a scene from a movie or novel. For me, this is the reason to re-create real life moments: to put down in words what I imagine or experience for others.

Working in the city and living in the suburbs, I have a limited understanding of the "city walls" of Washington D.C. But with each passing moment, I take in the people surrounding, passersby as inspiration.

I love being in a place that feels brand new to me. A place where my observational levels are heightened. A place that inspires me to capture each moment I experience and turn it into poetry, even if the poetry is only in my mind. Even if it hasn't formed itself into stanzas, line breaks, rhythm. And to be reminded that art is made by art. That living and small moments that turn into ideas are the meaning behind art. To know that we all are searching for the perfect line and to be okay with admitting, "but I still haven't found what I'm looking for."