Redtree Times

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I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.

–Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

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The painting, Galvanic Memory, shown above has long been a favorite of mine. It was painted in 2002 and is among the paintings I call my Dark Work. That phrase has two meanings. The simplest was that it was among my first forays into painting on a black surface, which naturally gave the painting a darker tone. My typical work of the time was brighter, in transparent inks over a white background, which made the darkness of this work seem even more evident. 

The second meaning is the one that I normally use. It all emerged in the aftermath of 9/11 in 2001, a reaction to the seismic shift in this country and in the world brought on by the attacks and our reaction. The work’s darkness reflected both the tone of that time and my own.

This particular painting always spoke to me in a most personal way. I know that sounds funny since my work, and most art for that matter, is all personal by its very nature. But this one felt narrower in scope, like the message it was communicating was meant for me alone.

I don’t know that this is true. It just felt that way at the time. 

It even felt a little different in its appearance. The colors, bright but somewhat muted, and forms, a mix of angles and arcs, gave it what I took as an abstract quality.

There was no full representation of any of its elements. Everything appeared in fragments. You never see the whole tree or the whole chair. Even the window and door are not seen in their entirety.

I saw this as being much like some of my memories. They have a vivid, electric quality in my remembrance, which is where the galvanic part of the title comes in. But even though they are filled with vivid energy, the memories only come to me in fragments. I only experience it in bits and pieces. A remembered glimpse out a window. The way the light broke on the horizon. The chair in the room or the way the tree outside the window stretched across my vision at the time.

I think of the memory of any time as being whole but in fact they are more often mere fragments that we reassemble. It reminds me of a line from a 1992 interview with the late poet Derek Walcott that appeared in The Guardian:

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole.

Sometimes our memory of any given moment takes on greater significance in our minds over time, more than we recognized when it took place. We didn’t take in all the details originally and because the memory has taken on greater importance as we try to fill out those details.

But it is all bits and pieces. Fragments.

I know it’s that way with memories of my parents, especially my mom who died back in 1995. I have vivid memories of moments with her but time and my inattention at the time have robbed me of the whole of that moment.

Moments I took for granted then. Moments seen only in fragments now.

Fragments reassembled with love but fragments, nonetheless. 

I debated about making this piece part of my upcoming June show, Flow, at the Principle Gallery. I wasn’t sure I could give up this painting, representing as it does those shards of my memory. In the end, I decided to let it go. It came down to the fact that it would please me more if someone else were able to find something in it that sparked a response to their own distant broken memories. If it was the beginning of their own loving reassemblage of a past moment, so much the better.

It has already helped me in that way. It deserves to move out into the world again. After all, I forever have the memory of this painting now, even if it comes sometimes in bits and pieces. And if I can’t remember, I have the image to remind me.

Here’s a song that always makes me stop and listen when it comes on. This is Windows Are Rolled Down from Amos Lee. Though the song’s intended meaning is probably not the same as my own take on it, I chose it because there is imagery in it that instantly pulls out distant fragments of memory for me. A childhood summer day riding in the front seat with my dad with the windows rolled down. I don’t know where we’re headed, but I can see the gleam of the chrome of the small triangular wing window that old cars once had. I can feel the wind on my arm as I put my hand out to catch it and feel tis resistance. We’re not talking but at any moment he might break out in some nonsense song, maybe one he made up, that I still know and can hear like it was written in my bones. 

Fragments all, reassembled with love…

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Robot Feelings

It is curious, too, that though the modern man in the street
is a robot, and incapable of love
he is capable of an endless, grinding, nihilistic hate:
that is the only strong feeling he is capable of;
and therein lies the danger of robot-democracy and all the men in the street,
they move in a great grind of hate, slowly but inevitably.

–D.H. Lawrence, published posthumously in 1932

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I was intrigued by the poem from D.H. Lawrence when I came across it a few days ago.

First, I was surprised by him focusing on robots. But thinking about it, it was written sometime in the 1920’s at a time when futurism and robots were in vogue, with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis hitting the movie theaters in 1927. The term robot itself was also first coined and came into use in 1920 in the play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) from Czech writer Karel Čapek. So, robots as a theme might not be as unusual as it first seemed to me.

But it was Lawrence’s cynicism about man living in modernity that caught me off guard. I was ambivalent about it at first. It seemed such a harsh analysis of humanity.

But then again, Lawrence has seen the world spiral into a senseless World War that took far too many lives. Plus, he himself had suffered in the court of public opinion as his work was censored and banned, labeled as pornography. For the last decade of his short life, Lawrence went into a self-imposed exile from his native Britain. He died in France in 1930 at the age of 44.

That might well explain his harsh judgement of the man in the street.

Was he correct?

There are certainly days when I share his feelings, that the collective crowd has become more openly mean-spirited and more prone to hatred than love. Reading the comments of many social media posts makes one believe that we are indeed capable of that endless, grinding, nihilistic hate that Lawrence described. That our ability to collectively love has been replaced by an infinite capacity to hate.

Some days it feels like we are forever being prodded toward hatred, manipulated as we are by media that has become the servant to power and wealth.

Even so, I am probably more generous in my opinion of humanity than Lawrence. While I can see the robotic nature of those who let themselves be pulled into the vortex of hatred, one that makes them small and bitterly unkind when we are, in my opinion, meant to be large and generously kind.

I believe that the individual who thinks and feels freely, who resists the crowd, will persist to outlast the ugly, naked nihilism we are facing today.

That might be my naive hope speaking.

Maybe.

But I will choose hopeful naivete over bitter cynicism and hatred any day.

Here’s a song to cleanse the palate. This is a young Ren (again, sorry) and The Big Push doing an impromptu rooftop performance from a while back. The song is their cover of Bongo Bong which was a hit song around Europe back in 1999-2000 for Manu Chao. It’s a fun song plus it is kind of maintains the theme of this post as it is about being who and what you are and not caving into the pressure of the crowd.

Hopefully naive? Sure, why not?

You be you. Go bang your bongo anyway you want…

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I’m gonna tell you fascists
You may be surprised
The people in this world
Are getting organized
You’re bound to lose
You fascists bound to lose

— Woody Guthrie, All You Fascists Bound to Lose (1943)

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“Ria-Ria-Hungaria!”

That was the chant heard throughout Hungary last night as massive crowds filled the streets of the country’s cities. It was a chant of victory and release as voters showed up at the polls in huge numbers to defeat Viktor Orbán, who had ruled for the past 16 years. Over that time, Orbán created an authoritarian state that became the template followed by other would-be autocracies, such as our current administration.

His reign was marked by staggering corruption, cronyism, control of the press, a consolidation of all governmental powers into his hands, a restructuring of the judicial system to favor his ruling party, a stripping of rights from the LGBTQ+ community, virulent anti-immigration measures, and most importantly in a subservient toady to Putin’s Russia. In this position, Orbán served as Putin’s wingman against the constraints of both NATO and the EU, weakening the power of both. He often cast a vetoing vote against measures that would counter Russia’s western reach and influence.

In the end, it was the corruption, staggering inflation, and the increasing limitation of rights in Hungary that drove the massive surge in voting that created a landslide victory to Peter Magyar. It was a huge mandate for Magyar and his party, which produced a supermajority in their representative body, the National Assembly.

It was also a huge blow to the authoritarian cabal that is in place at the moment. Orbán’s “electoral autocracy” had seemed indomitable with its iron fisted control of the country for much of the past 16 years. If it can happen there, why can’t it happen anywhere where oligarchs seek total control of any country or people?

Seeing his reign crumble so quickly and decisively should serve as inspiration for everyone standing against those with fascist aspirations.

The world owes the people of Hungary a great deal of gratitude this morning.

They proved that the seemingly all powerful, the dictators and kings of this world, are never as powerful as they want us to believe.

They are only as powerful as we allow them to be.

I extend a big Thank You to the people of Hungary.

Much like the good folks in Minnesota in their resistance to ICE brutality and overreach, let their example fuel our own resistance and strengthen our resolve.

Here’s a tune from Woody Guthrie that speaks of the universal truth that led to Orbán’s downfall, that when the people organize and unite against the greed, hatred, and corruption of those who seek to control them, they will inevitably be victorious.

Why? Because fascism and authoritarianism of all sorts, eventually devolve from their own inbred mediocrity. A system that values loyalty over excellence, expertise, and plain old competence is bound to collapse at some point under the weight of ill-advised decisions and unintended consequences.

We’re seeing that play out in real time here with an administration that is based almost entirely on mediocrity, ignorance, and hubris.

With that potent combination, how could you do anything but lose?

The version at the bottom is from one of my favorite albums, Mermaid Avenue, from the collaboration of Billy Bragg and Wilco. This is All You Fascists. Below are Woody’s original lyrics. 1943 or 2026, they still apply.

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I’m gonna tell you fascists
You may be surprised
The people in this world
Are getting organized
You’re bound to lose
You fascists bound to lose

Race hatred cannot stop us
This one thing we know
Your poll tax and Jim Crow
And greed has got to go
You’re bound to lose
You fascists bound to lose.

All of you fascists bound to lose:
I said, all of you fascists bound to lose:
Yes sir, all of you fascists bound to lose:
You’re bound to lose! You fascists:
Bound to lose!

People of every color
Marching side to side
Marching ‘cross these fields
Where a million fascists dies
You’re bound to lose
You fascists bound to lose!

I’m going into this battle
And take my union gun
We’ll end this world of slavery
Before this battle’s won
You’re bound to lose
You fascists bound to lose!

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Baby I got your number
Oh and I know that you got mine
You know that I called you
I called too many times

You can call me baby
You can call me anytime, you got to call me
Give me one reason to stay here
And I’ll turn right back around

— Tracy Chapman, Give Me One Reason (1995)

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I’ve recently been painting a series of small paintings like the one shown at the top, Give Me One Reason. All have the same elements with a few variations, and all are painted in shades of gray and back with the only color coming in the form of a red sun and a sometimes-red roofed house. All contain a small figure, most standing on the peak of the roof of the house, all addressing the red sun in some manner of conversation. There is generally a single bare limbed tree in the near foreground and sometimes one, as here, in the distance. Some have skies with clouds and some, like this one, do not.

The variations I mentioned come in the placement of the figure, the clouds, the tree, the house, and the red sun, as well as how they all sit in the landscape. There is also subtle but important variation in the posture and gesturing of the figure.

I like working with these limitations in mind. It becomes a mental challenge to arrange a small number of the same elements in a small space without the benefit of color and still maintain the individual nature of each painting. It is like assembling a puzzle but doing it different way each time.

It reminds me a bit of an early series that I did around 1995 and 1996. I called the series the Haiku series. The paintings were very simple– a block of color for the sky and one for the field that made up the foreground both separated by the thin white line of the underlying surface. The variations came in the color and ratio of the block of color to one another. There was also an important variation on each side of the white line where the multiple glazing layers of color each left a sharp edge. These edges stack up in an overlapping irregular way, creating an impression of low hills in the distance.

So, like the three lines of a haiku, there were three elements to create an atmosphere in which the reader, or the viewer in my case, could interpret the meaning in how those limited elements came together and played off one another.

These new paintings feel similar in that. The one major difference is the inclusion of the small figure. As I have noted a number of times before, once a figure enters the painting, it becomes the focus of that painting. We humans are always curious when another human becomes part of the picture, wondering what that human might be doing and why. There is ample evidence of that in these pieces.

I find myself asking myself why these figures are in these paintings now and why they often appear on the peaks of the roofs. Why are they speaking to that red sun? And why is that sun red in the first place?

I don’t really know. Maybe in the future when this series has run its full course in my mind, I will see an answer in the assembled imagery of the work. Maybe. Maybe not. Probably not. I suppose some things are meant to be a mystery.

The easy interpretation, and one that has certainly come to my mind, is that it relates to my health issues. Perhaps the figure is attempting to ask some higher power represented in the form of the red sun for a reason why things like this happen. Perhaps that figure is berating or begging that red sun for answers or mercy?

Could that be me up there? I don’t think so. I have not been angry or even questioning as to why I am going through this. As I have said, I know and accept that it’s just the price of admission we pay to experience the wonder that is this world. Everybody has to pay that price in some way.

This is mine.

And I think I might be getting a bargain. Seriously.

And that somehow doesn’t seem fair. So, if that is me up there on the roof, maybe I am asking why some people pay so much more for this privilege and others slide by on the cheap.

All I am asking is for one good reason. Then I’ll climb off that roof.

Let’s get to this week’s Sunday Morning Music. I am sure some of you could foresee this week’s pick. The painting was titled with this song in mind, after all. The song is Give Me One Reason from Tracy Chapman. I was surprised when I discovered I have never shared this song after all these years. Like so many of her songs, it has long been a favorite.

Enjoy it then show yourself out. Sorry to be abrupt but the roof is waiting for me. That red sun has some explaining to do…

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One cannot fix one’s eyes on the commonest natural production without finding food for a rambling fancy.

—Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814)

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This line from Jane Austen really speaks to me, both in the inspirational quality of nature and in the way the mind takes off in any direction at the slightest breeze of thought. Mine certainly does. Even more than normal recently. Reading has become a chore because every sentence from an author often sends my mind racing away from it to some other path of thought. It sometimes takes me half an hour to read a page, most of that time spent following my rambling fancy.

I don’t mind, outside of not getting things read that I feel the need or desire to read. I know that this is just how I am and that it is part of how I process things. How I keep things straight in my mind and find some clarity or order in it. I kind of think I need to do things this way now in order to be to write or paint.

Need to follow that rambling fancy.

My mornings in the studio are most always a ramble of some type. If I don’t have something in mind for the blog when I sit down–which is quite often–I begin a quest of a sort. I listen to music, watch videos, check out the news, look at some sites that I follow, all in an effort to find that food for a rambling fancy, as Austen put it.

This morning, for example, I’ve watched a number of music videos, looked up some musicians of which I was not aware, read several short articles, and did several searches for a variety of things. I try to gauge my rambling fancy on how much my emotions are triggered by whatever catches my attention at the moment. If it moves me, I follow it.

This hasn’t been as accurate a gauge recently because my emotions are already on high alert as a result of the hormone therapy I am undergoing. I have always been highly reactive as far as my emotions are concerned. They have always been right under the surface of my skin ready to burst out at any moment.

Just the way I am designed.

Unfortunately, the new hormone broth running through me has supercharged some of my emotions. They are throbbing on the surface of my skin now. I can’t get through a day now without something I hear or see or read moving me to tears. Hell, this morning I have cried several times already.

I’m crying right now. Not really. Just threw that in for dramatic effect.

Another effect of this is that my writing tends to ramble on, and my personal filters seem ineffective. You probably noticed that if you’re a regular reader. Today is good example of this.

I thought there was a point to be made but now I am not so sure. I’ve rambled off whatever path I began down when this began and now I am in No Man’s Land.

But that’s okay. Well, okay for me. I apologize for wasting your time with my hormone-driven babble.

Here’s a song. Maybe that will make up for my transgression. It’s a wonderful performance of the Led Zep classic Ramble On from Robert Plant and Saving Grace from the other night on the Colbert show. I featured Plant and Saving Grace is an earlier post. Good stuff all the way around.

Got to ramble on now. I have another rambling fancy beckoning to me…

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We do not ask for what useful purpose the birds do sing, for song is their pleasure since they were created for singing. Similarly, we ought not to ask why the human mind troubles to fathom the secrets of the heavens. The diversity of the phenomena of nature is so great and the treasures hidden in the heavens so rich precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment.

–Johannes Kepler, as quoted in Cosmos (1980) by Carl Sagan

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The painting shown from 1998 is titled The Way of the World. It hung for a number of years over my desk in my old studio and for the last 18 years had been on a wall in my back bedroom in my new studio. I guess after 18 years, it isn’t really new anymore. but that is beside the point. 

The Way of the World was painted during my transition to being an artist on a full-time basis. I had recently completed a large commission for Corning Inc. and my work was showing and selling well in three galleries. This piece is very representative of my work at the time, done as it was in transparent inks on untreated paper. I had not yet begun to work on surfaces with underlying textures created by layers of gesso.

It also represented an upward trend in the size of my work, even though it is not large in relation to what I consider my bigger pieces. It is 12″ by 28″ in a 16″ by 32″ frame. A substantial piece but not really large.

The piece only showed for a short time before coming back to reside in my studio. It was with me for so long that, as I recently realized, I began to not see it. Looking at it just a few eeks ago, I tried to understand how this came to be.

It didn’t take long to figure out. 

At the time, as I was saying, I was showing more and more work in several venues. Up to that point, I was dependent on framing my work in store bought frames. I had found a couple of outlets that sold frames that were just okay but limited in sizes. They added nothing aesthetically to the work. They were neutral at best. Plus, it was quite an outlay of cash for me given the number of pieces that were going out to galleries then. I needed to figure out a way to obtain a frame that was affordable, unique, and complemented the work in the way a good setting highlights a fine gem.

I enlisted a good friend of mine who was also a woodworker. It took a couple of iterations before a suitable and effective frame emerged, the one that came to be recognized as my frame. A simple profile in poplar, stained an orange/yellow color that highlighted my work beautifully. Well. at least in my eyes it did.

However, some of the early attempts at finding a frame came up short. And The Way of the World was always in one of those early frames. It was– is–a horrible pine frame stained in blue that has the appearance of dirty pair of blue jeans. It is ghastly on every level.

I took it off the wall recently and freed it from that frame and for the first time in probably 28 years, saw it for what it is without the specter of that awful frame impinging on it. It was no doubt what I saw in it before I imprisoned it back in 1998. It felt like I had come across a hidden treasure, one that had been right in front of me the whole time but was inexplicably invisible.

I put it in one of my regular frames and it feels new in so many ways that please me greatly. I like the way the tree is styled, for example. It is representative of the manner in which I painted trees at the time, two years before the Red Tree began to appear and take hold of me. I like its color and solidity that makes it stands out against the background.

There are flaws in it as well that thrill me. In the hillside on which the tree stands, the large block of blue in the bottom right, there are ink marks that occurred while I was painting. They result from the ink drying too quickly as I am working on the whole block of color. You don’t see them in my work as often now since I can remove them on a surface treated with gesso. The untreated paper I was working with then had no such safety net.

As I said, seeing these sorts of flaws thrills me. I like seeing the hand of the artist, be it the exposed edge of drying paint or in bristles or hairs that become trapped in the paint. It gives me a sense of looking at the work through the eyes of the artist.

It is a very human thing, this willingness to show our all too human flaws.

The flaw of the human hand. Something you can’t produce with AI. 

This painting now feels like a completely painting to me now. Without that crappy blue frame, it can speak its truth. And I see and hear it now. And I like it. 

I don’t know that anyone will else see it in that way. And to be honest, I don’t give damn. I am going to show it again at my show at the Principle Gallery in June, to let it be visible after too long a period of being unseen and unheard.

Here’s song that I am required to play today. It immediately came to mind when I decided to write about this painting but was pretty sure I had played it not too long ago. Looking it up, I found that I had last shared it on this very same day one year ago in a post that was about, of all things, synchronicity. It featured this passage from Tom Robbins:

What we, thanks to Jung, call “synchronicity” (coincidence on steroids), Buddhists have long known as “the interpenetration of realities.” Whether it’s a natural law of sorts or simply evidence of mathematical inevitability (an infinite number of monkeys locked up with an infinite number of typewriters eventually producing Hamlet, not to mention Tarzan of the Apes), it seems to be as real as it is eerie.

The sheer and eerie synchronicity of it made me laugh this morning. Sharing the song was obviously an inevitability that I could not resist. To not share it would have went against the will of the universe and the way of the world.

And who am I to go against that? 

This is That’s the Way the World Goes Round from the late John Prine.

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Worry is a form of fear, and all forms of fear produce fatigue.

–Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness (1930)

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So desperately tired this morning. Bone tired.

Even trying to think seems exhausting. I don’t know if it’s a result of the effects of the radiation coming to a peak. I was warned that this would be about the time it would occur. But part of me wonders if it’s not that combined with mental fatigue of helplessly witnessing the madness taking place here.

I don’t know.

Sat here looking at my computer for too long this morning and was about to hang it up and not post anything today. But that seemed like I would be giving in to my tiredness, as though it was something separate from me, something trying to keep me from being who I am. So, I decided I would post something, anything, even if it is short and not saying much.

It’s an effort, at least. And I guess the same can be said for the collective fatigue we are all experiencing.

Make an effort, even a small, seemingly insignificant one. It is movement and movement is life.

Like they say, use it or lose it.

Okay, here’s a tune I haven’t shared in several years. It is Cry No More from one of my favorites, the ultra talented Rhiannon Giddens. This performance and was produced in the aftermath of the 2015 Charleston, SC church shooting in which 9 church members were murdered. The words below appear at the end of the video. They apply now more than ever.

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The laughter of women sets fire
to the Halls of Injustice,
and the false evidence burns
to a beautiful white lightness.

It rattles the Chambers of Congress
and forces the windows wide open
so the fatuous speeches can fly out.

The laughter of women wipes the mist
from the spectacles of the old;
it infects them with a happy flu
and they laugh as if they were young again.

Prisoners held in underground cells
imagine that they see daylight
when they remember the laughter of women.

It runs across water that divides,
and reconciles two unfriendly shores
like flares that signal the news to each other.

What a language it is, the laughter of women:
high-flying and subversive.
Long before law and scripture
we heard the laughter, we understood freedom.

— Lisel Mueller, The Laughter of Women (1997)

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A good friend down in Texas, Linda Leinen, who you might recognize here as shoreacres, has a marvelous blog, The Task at Hand, that is always highly informative and beautifully written. I urge you to check it out as well as her other blog, Lagniappe, which showcases her terrific nature photography. Great stuff. Whenever she posts anything, I know that I am going to come away with something new to me.

In her most recent post, Linda gave me two new shiny pieces of info. The first was the basis of her post, Easter Laughter, which was something new to me. I am going to use Linda’s words to describe since I would most likely muddle it up in a log-winded way:

The early Christian practice of risus paschalis – Easter laughter – arose after early church fathers began promoting the view that Jesus’s resurrection represented the ultimate practical joke; played by God on the devil, it affirmed the triumph of life over death and good over evil. Joke-telling and shared laughter became perfectly acceptable additions to Easter celebrations.

I found this most interesting. But it was poem she finished her post off with that really spoke to me. It was titled The Laughter of Women from the late poet Lisel Mueller. I am ashamed to say that I was not aware of Mueller’s work, especially after reading of her notable accomplishments including a Pulitzer Prize.

But while I am ashamed, I am not surprised. I have often said I am a wide river but a very shallow one. A lot of surface and not much depth in most spots of my river.

I was glad to carve out a little more depth in my river with the addition of Lisel Mueller’s poetry, particularly this poem since I have long recognized the power in the laughter of women. It can be the most inflating or deflating sound in the world. I have personally known it to be both.

I am going to use my wife as an example, though I doubt she would approve. Making her laugh has brought me the greatest joy I have known for almost the past half century. That was the thing that brought us together in high school. We had a few classes together in which we somehow ended up sitting near one another. One was a class on Death and Dying that focused on the writings of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. I had a habit of making little comments about some of the things said by our teacher, a large former Canadian Football League player, that would make her outright laugh.

I found this most intriguing. As I said, inflating. Making her laugh became my primary objective for that class, damn the death and graves and cadavers that made up the curriculum.

And it is still one of my primary objectives. Her laugher is love for me. I figure if I can make her shake with laughter at breakfast, she still has a thing for me. The same goes if I can make her laugh when we sometimes go through tough times. She might scold me for doing so but we both know that if we are both laughing, things will somehow be okay.

As for the deflating part of her laughter, it usually takes place when I am in the midst of doing something so obviously stupid that it takes on an absurd quality. One example I will share came while I was attempting to move a fallen tree of decent size from a path near the studio by rolling it over into the low ditch next to the path. I pushed on a limb that jutted upward and the log began to move, momentum gathering with its weight. As it began to roll, a limb that was under it came lose and trapped my leg against the tree.

The tree was rolling and, like it or not, I was going to go along for the ride.  I was helpless and hoped that the log’s roll would stop short of doing serious damage.  It pulled me over in a weird slow-motion way and as I went over, I turned my head to look at Cheri, whose face was a strange mixture of terror and amusement. I know that look all too well. Fortunately, the tree just slammed me face down into the wet leaf matter, my leg up in the air behind, still tangled in the limb.

There was a quiet pause that ended with her saying, “You’re so stupid!” We both laughed for quite some time until we both had tears running down our faces, me still with my face in the leaves and still trapped with my leg tangled up in the air.

Deflating? Sure.

But I didn’t mind. Laughter is love.

I know that is different than the deflating laughter of Mueller’s poem. The laughter of which she writes is that which punctures the balloons of ego and injustice. The kind of laughter that points out the smallness and pomposity of power and lets us know that we are not defeated so long as we can laugh out loud at its absurdity.

The laughter of defiance is the scourge of those who seek to control you. Mueller says it so eloquently in the poem’s last verse:

What a language it is, the laughter of women:
high-flying and subversive.
Long before law and scripture
we heard the laughter, we understood freedom.

Laughter is freedom. Laughter is empowerment. Laughter is love.

Thank god for the laughter of women.

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From Of Power and Time by Mary Oliver in Upstream (2016):

Say you have bought a ticket on an airplane and you intend to fly from New York to San Francisco. What do you ask the pilot when you climb aboard and take your seat next to the little window, which you cannot open but through which you see the dizzying heights to which you are lifted from the secure and friendly earth?

Most assuredly you want the pilot to be his regular and ordinary self. You want him to approach and undertake his work with no more than a calm pleasure. You want nothing fancy, nothing new. You ask him to do, routinely, what he knows how to do-fly the airplane. You hope he will not daydream. You hope he will not drift into some interesting meander of thought. You want this flight to be ordinary, not extraordinary. So, too, with the surgeon, and the ambulance driver, and the captain of the ship. Let all of them work, as ordinarily they do, in confident familiarity with whatever the work requires, and no more. Their ordinariness is the surety of the world. Their ordinariness makes the world go around.

I, too, live in this ordinary world. I was born in it. Indeed, most of my education was intended to make me feel comfortable within it. Why that enterprise failed is another story. Such failures happen, and then, like all things, are turned to the world’s benefit, for the world has a need of dreamers as well as shoe-makers. (Not that it is so simple, in fact-for what shoemaker does not occasionally thump his thumb when his thoughts have, as we would say, “wandered”? And when the old animal body clamors for attention, what daydreamer does not now and again have to step down from the daydream and hurry to market before it closes, or else go hungry?)

And this is also true. In creative work-creative work of all kinds-those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward. Which is something altogether different from the ordinary. Such work does not refute the ordinary. It is, simply, something else. Its labor requires a different outlook-a different set of priorities. Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity.

Intellectual work sometimes, spiritual work certainly, artistic work always-these are forces that fall within its grasp, forces that must travel beyond the realm of the hour and the restraint of the habit. Nor can the actual work be well separated from the entire life. Like the knights of the Middle Ages, there is little the creatively inclined person can do but to prepare himself, body and spirit, for the labor to come-for his adventures are all unknown. In truth, the work itself is an adventure. And no artist could go about this work, or would want to, with less than extraordinary energy and concentration. The extraordinary is what art is all about.

— Mary Oliver

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I wrote a whole long thing this morning about this passage from Mary Oliver’s essay Of Power and Time. It was all about my own struggles with the ordinary and the desire for something beyond it, that hunger for eternity as Oliver put it, that eventually guided me here. After rereading it, I decided to heave my words into the trash.

I couldn’t add much of anything to Oliver’s words. It so well describes what I felt then as someone who was then out of love with the ordinary and who now very much appreciates the ordinary from the windows of my studio. From a distance.

This all came back to me recently when I was asked several questions by the writer of the article for the preview of my June Principle Gallery exhibit that will be appearing in an upcoming issue of American Art Collector.  I always struggle with the sort of questions that come in such interviews. I always stumble around, saying things that sound out of character and somewhat nonsensical as soon as they come out of my mouth.

It always feels to me like these interviews are trying to make ordinary something that is by its very nature extraordinary.

The writer in this particular instance asked how I would describe my style in words. I told her that I gave up doing that a long time ago and that I painted because I couldn’t find words for what I needed to express. If I could, I would be a writer and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

I ultimately allowed that if I had to choose a word or two, the words would be unique and human.

Or perhaps uniquely human.

That felt to me as good a description as any other I could think of. If someone someday finds the need to describe my work– hey, it could happen– I hope those words or that term comes to mind.

Well, not sure if this captures what I wanted to say. Like I said, I’m a painter not a writer. There are plenty of words and not much else.

Maybe that is what life comes down to, when all is said and done– lots of words and not much else.

Nah, I don’t believe that for a second.

We are all uniquely human in our own ways which means we are meant to be extraordinary. And that makes it all worthwhile.

Didn’t know what to add as far as an image so I opted to make this sort of a Look Back piece. The painting at the top is an experimental piece from early 1994 that I call Third Stone From the Sun after the Jimi Hendrix song. Oddly enough, I think this all fits together in an okay way.

And for this morning, okay is the standard I am seeking to meet. Any day we are okay is a win in my eyes.

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To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.

–George Santayana, The Life of Reason: Reason in Society (1905)

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Yesterday was a rough day for me physically and after reading the bullshit shown at the top here, it became a rough day mentally as well. It was a holiday cocktail of anger mixed with despair with a sidecar of dread for this country and the human race. It was a bitter drink, to say the least. Happy Easter.

I didn’t think it was real at first. After all, it’s hard to tell the difference these days between what is real and what is not. I mean, how could any president, even one as hideous in practically every way as the current one, post this on an Easter Sunday? Or on any day, for that matter. And how could anyone reading it not come to the conclusion that this was the ranting of an absolute mad man?

And how could anyone with any degree of respect for others or themselves for that matter, defend it or try to rationalize its stated intent to commit crimes against humanity?

But i, of course, was all too real.

I read several people who triedto brush it under the rug by saying it was just his way of negotiating, that he is somehow playing 12-dimension chess.

I call bullshit on that claim. This creature is literally the rooster who plays chess with you and loses then proceeds to knock over all the pieces on the board while strutting around crowing about its victory while shitting all over the board.

Or 12 boards, if you think this is 12-dimebnsional playing.

I have no idea why anyone would be playing chess with the rooster in the first place. But then again, I could never grasp the idea that we somehow let someone who is an adjudicated criminal, a well-documented serial liar, and twice-impeached politician back into the seat of power. I am not going to even mention his misogyny, racism, greed, corruption, disdain for the poor, narcissistic personality, nor his propensity for cheating and chiseling in every aspect of his life.

I am pretty sure that is a woefully incomplete list. It would probably make more sense to simply put up the list of the Seven Deadly Sins. This is a creature who was seemingly designed as a display piece for all seven.

But we did allow him back into power. Yesterday, the thing that kept echoing in my mind was that, as our head of state, he was not sole perpetrator of what he was threatening.

He was threatening to commit war crimes in our name. In your name. In my name. In the name of every person who calls this country home.

Like me, you most likely disavow his actions, now and in the near future. They are loathsome abominations.

But that doesn’t matter. We all carry the burden of his actions, now and well into future. When he commits war crimes, we commit war crimes. When he bombs schools and other civilian sites, we are bombing them as well. When he threatens the use of strategic nukes, it is our threat, too.

His actions are our actions, like it or not.

He’s the fuckin’ rooster we put on that goddamn chessboard.

Sorry for the salty language. If you don’t like it, address your complaints to the asshole in charge. My use of foul language (or is it fowl, in this case?) has increased like it was the price of oil in recent times thanks to him.

I really don’t want to spend my time on things like this when I have other fairly serious things going on that need my attention. I certainly didn’t want to put his post at the top of the page. I actually had decided against doing so last night. But I felt this morning that it is too important to ignore, for any of us. Its madness shouldn’t be shrugged off or normalized. His words from yesterday need to be on the front page of every paper and as the main story of every news broadcast. His words should be echoing in every American’s mind today.

They are words of criminality and madness. And unless we acknowledge that and respond accordingly, they are our words.

Our criminality and madness.

Okay, I’ll stop now. Do I feel better for writing this? No. But sometimes doing things that you feel need to be done doesn’t feel good.

Let’s have a song. Since we’re dealing with barnyard animals this morning, let’s hear a song about another one of them. Here’s an interesting version of the Black Sabbath song War Pigs from singer Sarah King. You weren’t expecting a Black Sabbath tune this morning, were you? This is a haunting acoustic take on the song. It seems to fit this morning, at least for me.

Got to go now. That damn rooster is on my painting table now and I will not have that. If you’re leaving, please take him with you…

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