Ceilings Above

It's a bit embarassing to realize how long I've been picking away at the restoration of this tin ceiling, but it is finally done, and the customers (longtime friends) are well satisfied.

This image brings to mind when I spent a year as a student in India. In our program house, the electrical current would fail several times every day, and we had a habit of refering to "Usha the fan god." It was a made-up deity, named after a company named USHA, which seemed to hold a monopoly on the country's fan business.

My friends were probably praying to a ceiling god of their invention these past few months. What you see is the answer. For the occasion, here's a poem by a better known ceiling painter who was physically tired, as I was at 6 AM when I gathered this blip:

Michelangelo: To Giovanni da Pistoia
"When the Author Was Painting the Vault of the Sistine Chapel" -1509

I've already grown a goiter from this torture,
hunched up here like a cat in Lombardy
(or anywhere else where the stagnant water's poison).
My stomach's squashed under my chin, my beard's
pointing at heaven, my brain's crushed in a casket,
my breast twists like a harpy's. My brush,
above me all the time, dribbles paint
so my face makes a fine floor for droppings!

My haunches are grinding into my guts,
my poor ass strains to work as a counterweight,
every gesture I make is blind and aimless.
My skin hangs loose below me, my spine's
all knotted from folding over itself.
I'm bent taut as a Syrian bow.

Because I'm stuck like this, my thoughts
are crazy, perfidious tripe:
anyone shoots badly through a crooked blowpipe.

My painting is dead.
Defend it for me, Giovanni, protect my honor.
I am not in the right place-I am not a painter.