"knowledge of the world"

    Marz being all Anthony Bourdain...

We ate at Boludo last night, a Buenos Aires bistro down the street. I want to like it, but their food is too dense. Eight olives to thick wads of cheese is not a good ratio.
______

Work went well yesterday. Maybe volunteering one day a week (Wednesdays) is a good ratio.

Book's Amina showed me a felted-dino mobile she liked, and we hung it over the Nature & Science section (below, right).
We have more and more hanging decorations in BOOK's, mostly put there by Art Volunteer. He likes Danish modern--he hung the white discs, below left, which I love-- but overall he's creating more of a bordello feel (the silk orange lanterns).
Fine with me.

Also, Grateful-J cut my woodblock down the center––he's a steady hand with a saw. Now I can swap the pages I carved in reverse order and print them correctly.
I need to carve the next two pages now, before Tuesday's class.

The print studio hasn't scheduled fall classes yet. I'm hoping they'll offer more relief printmaking. One student in this beginner's class is a returning student, and the teacher said she'd like to teach Intermediate level.
I'd take it.

The studio is only a mile away, on a bike lane, so even in winter I could easily get there. It's kinda expensive ($350 for a six-week class), but besides instruction, you get ink and paper, which isn't cheap, and of course you get to use the big presses, which print better than rubbing a wooden spoon over the paper.
Most important to me--working around other people. I am the chatty student. I walk around and ask everyone if I can see what they're doing.

But classes or no, I'm going to keep making prints at home. (Maybe I could find (or start) a print show-and-tell meet up.)
________

I invited the new upstairs neighbors for drinks in the backyard after work today. They're a young married couple who moved here from out of state. They seemed pleased I'd asked. 

Kirsten, this invitation was partly your idea! Also, partly me channeling Auntie Vi, who was her neighborhood cruise director, and partly me wanting to be more sociable —within the building. (The former upstairs neighbors had been stand-offish.)

I'd like more contact with humans, especially in winter.
The neighborhood is quite friendly in summer, when I sit outside in the mornings and chat with dog walkers, but it shuts down when it's cold.
_____________

I'm really pleased that Abby (volunteer at the store with lifetime career in special ed) and I have become friends--my first real, in-person friend in years. That is, someone I not only like a lot but who is able and available to show up.

Abby grew up in a family thoroughly fucked by alcoholism--"our couch was up on cinder blocks"-- so she gets trauma and she's deeply compassionate. She somehow figured out how to be a functional grown-up herself, and she can do mutual friendship.
This feels kind of miraculous to me.

Of course I'm meeting her when we're both around retirement age--she says she was a mess forty years ago. (I was pretty messy too.)
Now we've arrived at what T. H. White calls "the seventh sense": knowledge of the world.

He's talking about Queen Guenever in her later years, here:

“There is a thing called knowledge of the world, which people do not have until they are middle-aged.
It is something which cannot be taught to younger people, because it is not logical and does not obey laws which are constant. It has no rule. Only, in the long years which bring women to the middle of life, a sense of balance develops.

You can’t teach a baby to walk by explaining the matter to her logically – she has to learn the strange poise of walking by experience. In some way like that, you cannot teach a young woman to have the knowledge of the world. She has to be left to the experience of the years.

And then..., she suddenly finds that she can do it. She can go on living – not by principle, not by deduction, not by knowledge of good and evil, but simply by a peculiar and shifting sense of balance which defies each of these things often.
She ... continues henceforth under the guidance of a seventh sense. Balance was the sixth sense, which she won when she first learned to walk, and now she has the seventh one – knowledge of the world.”

Yeah, that happens, but not to everyone. It still feels miraculous.