Icy Child Abuse

 I have only seen Kamila Valieva skate twice. Both times over the last couple of weeks during the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. She was transcendent. I have been watching Olympic figure skaters for 30 or 40 years, and never before can I recall forgetting to breathe. I am no expert, but my amazement was echoed by those who are covering the event for NBC, at least the first time around. As she prepared for her second short program, the commentators were also unanimous, and vocal, in their opinion that she should not be there. They were silent as she finished. Except for one seemingly irrepressible murmur - I couldn’t identify the voice - “Well, I said she was the best I’ve ever seen.” However, as the camera zoomed in for a screen-filling close-up of Kamila’s face, I could not help thinking, “That is a troubled child.”

In applying Distilled Harmony to this sad event, a number of things become clear. First, Foster Harmony where celebrities are concerned is largely a media issue. At best we have pseudo-social relationships with celebrities. We call them by their first names, even when they have retained a second name. They often encourage these false relationships by forsaking their second name - sometimes all vestiges of their given names. We talk about them as if they were real friends. It creates, if anything, a sense of pseudo-harmony. Enable Beauty is likewise a media creation. Popular music, fashion, etc., are created and distributed via the media by celebrity spokespeople - "influencers." Marketers seek to create new versions of beauty every year. So the first two tenets of Distilled Harmony yield no significant insight when considering the Valieva affair.

The third tenet, Distill Complexity, proves more fruitful. There seems little if any debate over the central issue of the banned substances having been present in the sample attributed to Ms. Valieva in December. Unfortunately, that seems to be the single bit of evidence that remains uncontested. Everything else is up for grabs. Which brings us to the fourth tenet: Oppose Harm, which in this instance can also be read as "who is to blame, and who should punished, and how?"

Again clarity is mostly absent. There are some apparent conclusions. The sample tested positive, therefore Valieva should banned from further participation. Allowing her to continue punishes all the other skaters who are apparently competing without the aid of performance enhancing drugs. Period. However, this is where complexity enters the equation. She is 15, and the various Committees overseeing the sport actually have different rules designed to protect minors. Protect them from who, from what? It would seem to protect them from the very people who made it possible for them to participate in the first place. Their coaches, the Russian Olympic Committee. The same cadre of powerful adults who, if the 2014 games in Sochi and the drug scandal reveled there, have proved that they are willing to keep on cheating until they get caught and even after. These are the people Valieva would have to finger. They appear to be the abusers. Abused children often protect those who abuse them.

Let us think about 15 year-old girls for a minute. Having helped raise a couple of daughters, and having taught thousands just a few years older I have some real world experience here. They are fascinating creatures. They want to be liked. They often demonstrate their love of individuality by mimicking the celebrity models presented in the media. They are easily moved to tears and smiles, mere minutes apart. And these are regular, normal, teenage girls.

Now imagine you happen to have been born with a, perhaps once in a lifetime, set of skating skills. Skills that allow you to leave adults breathless. Skills that hang gold medals around your neck. Skills that cause people to say you might well be the best female figure skater in history. Skills that cause you to be given the best coaches, the best training available. And all you need to do is keep skating, keep doing what you are told. And the world will continue to love you. And you are 15.

And then, in the space of a couple of days it all comes crashing down. You are standing on the ice where a couple of days before the ice skating world was at your feet. Smiling, applauding, loving you. But now they think you are a cheat, a liar. Hating you. And all you did was do what you were told to do. And you are still just 15.

I sincerely hope the coaches and committees that paved Kamila Valieva's path to pinnacle of the ice skating world will be as attentive in the chaos that will undoubtedly continue to swirl around her in the aftermath of these disputed Olympics. Were she my daughter, I would take her someplace tranquil. Someplace quiet. I would take away her phone. I would give her hot chocolate and cookies. Give her Winnie the Pooh books to read. Because she is just 15.

Foster Harmony, 2nd ed

Foster Harmony seems like it should go without saying.  It seems like every culture writes its particular version of this tenet into its various cultural canons. Having been born into middle America in the midst of the 20th century, I was raised with this version, commonly referred to as The Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."  Wikipedia tells me that this particular version stems from a couple of places in the Christian New Testament.  But that is far from its singular source.  I have yet to encounter a faith, philosophy, belief system, etc., that does not include this core concept somewhere in the canon of its worldview.  It is hardly surprising that it claims first place among the four tenets of my worldview - Distilled Harmony.

There are a couple of reasons that Foster Harmony is the most important and the most trying of the four tenets.  First is the notion that Foster Harmony is a 24/7, all day everyday objective. It is not a characteristic we can dip into occasionally, when we feel like it, or when we worry that someone is watching or listening. What I mean by that is that we must attempt to make Fostering Harmony a real part of our everyday language and behavior. We need to guard against reacting to, or seeming to condone, the common, daily doses of discord that confront us. From the person who steals your space in the mall parking lot, to the politician or grocery store clerk who informs you that “Those People always do that!” Assuming that you know who “those people” are and what “that” is. It is those snide little pricks of presumed mutual distaste that pop the balloon of harmony. I should point out that this aspect of fostering harmony, because it is so difficult, needs to be seen as a goal. We should not beat ourselves up over occasional, and probably inevitable, slips toward discord.  And it is those slips that reveal a major reason why fostering harmony is so difficult.

Fostering Harmony is a difficult mindset to manifest, because, unless you have been very fortunate, or living in a cave, we have few real models for cultural or intercultural harmony. Far more common, in our nation’s - and our world’s - history, are models for conflict, distrust, war and prejudice - sexism, racism, etc. Even the words of historic pacifists get stolen as motivations for mayhem - holy wars of one strain or another. As I write this the media are all a buzz with several stories: 1) The Olympics, in which the “purity” of international competition unfolds against the threat of one “sort of country” seemingly on the verge of invading another. 2) Suspicion of banned substances being employed by a teenager to gain an advantage. 3) A plethora of stories regarding harassment of some sort or another in a variety of personal, professional and social arenas.

One often feels completely powerless to address this heritage of discord that seems inextricably interwoven with the entire history of our species. So let me posit what might be a helpful first step in helping ourselves down the challenging path to Fostering Harmony: let us try to free ourselves from the frightening notion of “the other.”  Again, a rather simplistic notion: it takes two to have a fight. I am not advocating that one simply backs down from bullies, whether they are on the playground, at the office, or charging up the front steps of the Capitol. But I will address that issue in the fourth tenet, Oppose Harm.  What I am suggesting here is that we avoid our cultural history's inclination to lump people into convenient groups and assign particular characteristics to all members of those groups, and in doing so "demonize" the entire group - make them "the other" whom, again our national and global history tells us, it is OK to demean, incarcerate, or actually kill. Because, somehow, they deserve it.  It is the mindset that underlies all "-ists." Harder, but more harmonic, is the seeking of options to opposition that lead to a third solution which becomes fuller understanding and the chance of win-win.

In closing this particular post let me emphasize a couple of points. Taking a personal role in Fostering Harmony needs to be an objective. It is a slippery slope, narrow path, choose your own descriptor. It is hard. It is often made harder by our failure to recognize discordant inclinations in ourselves. It is so much easier to blame "them" - fill in your own convenient "other." We need to work at Fostering Harmony. 

Distilled Harmony, 2nd ed

It's really not so much a second edition as it is a bit of a refocusing, perhaps a clarification. I have been binging a bit on Curiosity Stream videos that focus on early, say 1400 or so BCE, writings, art and architecture. Most recently a three part series called Genius of the Ancient World that focused on the lives of the Buddha, Socrates and Confucius. But early Islam, Judaism and Christianity, etc., all got their close-ups along the way. What I found fascinating, and frankly depressing, was that many of these faiths, philosophies, belief systems, call them what you will, eventually worked their way around to worldviews similar to the one I advocate in Distilled Harmony, and then promptly chose to behave quite differently than the behaviors seemly demanded by their faith. The bloody battlefields that sadly have become testaments to human history are gruesome reminders of this shared human failing.

I am moved to clarify what I mean by Distilled Harmony by the seeming acceleration of its antithesis in the world around us today. Harmony's antithesis lives under many guises; discord, chaos, intolerance, hatred, deceit. All are simply varying shades of the same dark human inclinations. It is not my intention in these few posts to point accusatory fingers at the individuals or epochs - present or past - who have led us astray. Rather I want to remind us of, and perhaps clarify, the four tenets that form the core of Distilled Harmony: Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity and Oppose Harm.

I will treat each in a separate post. For many of you they will be old friends, for those of you who have joined The Wall more recently, they may help you to understand some of my more oblique musings. 

More. 2nd. ed.

 More  .  . circa  9.19.03

 

More than the finished manuscript

Is the beckoning empty page.

More than the drying canvas

Is the expanse of white.

More than the gleaming sculpture

Is the unformed block of stone.

More than the soaring opus

Is the blank score.

The promise of harmony yet to come

Is sweeter far than all the notes

That have led us to this place and time.

The Subjectivity of Truth

 Interestingly we live in a world where the massive amount of information available to us threatens our ability to discern truth. I found myself in a recent conversation where my honest response to another’s remark was “I don’t believe you.”  Hey, I’m getting up there in years when the old filters don’t work as well as they ought to. Still, I am embarrassed by having made the remark which would probably been better left unsaid. The problem is that the phrase “I don’t believe you” could easily be interpreted to mean “I think you are lying.” . . . 

Slim turned slowly.  A hush fell over the saloon.  “You callin’ me a liar?” Slim stood, without having seemed to move. His hand drifting toward the worn handle of the colt 45 slung with deceptive innocence low on his hip. . .  “Actually, no Slim, What I meant to say was that you, perhaps innocently, prescribe to a difference sense or interpretation of reality than do I.” Slim’s hand flashed like lightning, but not as swiftly as I disappeared beneath the table . . . 

Well, you get the idea. As I thought about it, and I have been, I realized that I really didn’t think my partner in the conversation was lying. “I disagree,” would have been a far more politic and equally truthful response.  But the tenor of current public discourse in America these days has sunk to such deplorable levels that I have found myself thinking more seriously about how does one actually discern truth in the hyper-mediated maelstrom of claim and counter-claim that invade our eyes and ears 24/7?

My current position is uncomfortable: truth is what we decide it to be.  No, I’m not advocating that we throw data, evidence, research and the scientific method out the window.  It is more complicated than that, but not as divorced from that simplistic worldview as I would like it to be. It is easy to take pot shots at sports figures who believe the world is flat, or that “vaccinated” can means something other than having a vaccine injected into your arm, or that the moon landing was staged, and - one would assume - as was the case with all the subsequent space launches by countries, corporations, and the hyper-rich of varying stripes and motivations. But when we dig a little deeper into our own “truths,” life here under the table gets a little less certain. After all, Slim is still out there with his shootin’ iron.

You see I was among those nasty professors who required essays to have footnotes. At this point in time I would like to invite anyone who has graded essays that demanded said footnotes would love to chip in with their own wildest examples: e.g.  “3. This came to me in a dream.” True story, as I live and breathe. Anyhow, the point is that we really do choose what and who to believe. And there are now out there on the internet “sources” to provide support for any, and I do mean any, strange and wild reality or “truth” you wish to cling to.  So what branch out there in the Internet jungle of truth do you want to cling to and why?

I’m not actually asking you to make a list, but I do that from time to time - well, more honesty from year to year, oh, OK, several times each decade.  I am somewhat comforted by the fact that as I grow older there is less variability in the lists, and they seem to reflect an increasingly consistent narrative, a worldview. And, of course, if you have been hanging out here on the Wall for 10 or a dozen years you know that I call my narrative Distilled Harmony, a worldview supported by four pillars or tenets which are, in descending order of import: first, most important, Foster Harmony, in your words, actions, everything. Second, Enable Beauty, again in everything, your the tone of voice and meaning of your words, what you paint, draw, cook, everything. Third, Distill Complexity.  Look for the cleanest, most precise understanding of the questions you face. And forth, Oppose Harm. When all else fails one must confront the people, policies, and practices that are manifested in behaviors that run counter to other three tenets of Distilled Harmony. But, and this is really difficult, you must, in your opposition, still seek to manifest the other three tenets.

I have found, in these monthly, yearly, “decadely,” reviews of my narrative that the components of Distilled Harmony seem to be consistently manifested in the writing, behavior, creative works, language, tone, touch and gaze of the people in my life whom I love and respect. So it seems I share my most central narrative, my most important truths, with those to whom I will always open my door and heart, because I know that no matter how egregious my unfortunate and repeating foibles, they will, in turn, open their doors and hearts to me. And so together we construct trust, forgiveness and truth.

New Gondolas

 OK, just dragging image here from your email:

Now, I'm not going to do anything to it until it appears on blogger. When you get it, try clicking directly on the pic, and see if it expands.

Cheers!

Vegan in a Mason Jar, 2nd ed

Vegan in a Mason Jar?   circa 1.15.04

 

 Maybe it was because I hadn't finished my first cup of coffee. And is coffee good or bad for us this week? I get confused. Anyhow, for some reason the obviously serious story on NPR struck me as very funny. Seems as though a group of folks up in Asheville - North Carolina's version of Soho or The Village - were holding some sort of anti-beef rally. They were mad about mad cow disease. Now, out in South Dakota where a good number of my kin raise beef cattle, this falls under the heading of "Kicking Them When They Are Down" and is considered in bad form. But that isn't where I am headed with this. The story went on to say that the anti-beef protestors were handing out "vegetarian starter kits."

 

Hmmmm, I wonder what comes in a vegetarian starter kit? And what happens once you activate it? I am somewhat familiar with sourdough starter kits. You mix up the ingredients and keep the resulting liquid in a jar in your refrigerator. You can add it to flour to make sourdough, from which you bake bread. Is that the same concept we are following with "vegetarian starter kits?" You mix up the ingredients and keep it in a mason jar in the refrigerator? Then when the mood strikes you, you add it to something and make vegetarians? If it sits a long time do you get vegans? I had this terrible image of digging around in the back of my frig one day and encountering an old forgotten jar of vegetarian starter. I open it and discover that it is stuffed with tiny, incredibly skinny, vegans all shouting "Give us sprouts! Tofu! Tofu!" They swarm out of the jar and rampage through refrigerator flinging all the meat out onto the kitchen floor. "Murderer! Cannibal!" they shriek at me. I slam the door.

Obviously, I need more coffee. And a little breakfast. Eggs. Yeah, eggs. Maybe steak and eggs. Maybe just steak.

Landscape

Landscape

Of course, there is really no such thing as turning off your mind if you have a marker in your hand. I do remember seeing a number of Buddhist monks doing a healing sand painting mandala in the North Carolina Museum of Art a couple of days after 9/11. They seemed able to separate mind and hand - or maybe it was unifying mind and hand. Anyhow, either way the ability was the result of years of training and meditation. I think that train has left for me. Point is that as I was doing my "relax follow the marker cloud" images I naturally began to wonder what might result if I tried to intentionally guide that type of image. I have watched videos of Pollock painting and was unable to discern planning - I have done an attempt to create a Pollock which I may send along if I can find it.

What I am sending here is my attempt to use the clouds process to intentionally create a Landscape. At best I tried to keep the idea of a landscape, hills, rivers, etc., in mind as I moved the initial marker over the page. Same with the color selection. In "Clouds" I used a sort of "dowsing" process. Dowsing for water is a process where you take a forked stick that forms a Y, hold the two ends and walk around the land, when the leading edge dips you have found water. When dowsing for color you sort of defocus your gaze and let your eyes wander over all our markers, when your focus stops you have chosen the next color for the image, you then take the marker and let it wander above the outline image. When it dips you color that portion of the image.

Intentional image is different. You keep you eye on the paper, both in the creation of the outline and the selection of color. I realize that doesn't make much sense. But this is a first attempt. So, ta da, Landscape:

Escaping Genius

.I am just watching a video about Lilias Trotter, the immensely talented artist and long time protege and friend/companion, but most likely never lover of John Ruskin - the English writer, philosopher, art critic, polymath, and grand high influencer of all art in the Victorian era. It is a rather serendipitous video to have chosen for tonight as I have been spending several weeks now using “artists” as the search term for browsing Curiosity Stream.  Naturally, all the A-list artists are there, Van Gogh, O'Keeffe, DaVinci, Monet, Le Brun, Picasso, Rembrandt, etc., and others like Trotter whose names do not fall as trippingly off the tongue. The videos are of varying quality. The best seem to be those produced in France or French-British joint ventures.  Interestingly some of the searches conflated artist and genius, which is to be expected. However, Trotter more than any other, confirms what I often espoused to my students when reflecting on the place that art played in the life of an individual who truly lived the life of an artist. “Art,” I would declare, from my perhaps undeserved, but freely employed role of “the sage on the stage”,  “Is not so much something you chose to do. Rather it is something you come to realize you cannot do without.” 

Trotter, who according to Ruskin could have been the greatest female painter in history, found herself in a double bind. A watercolor genius of the first order, she was also a devout - some might say fanatical - Christian, called to minister to the poorest of the poor. She eventually followed her spiritual calling to become a missionary among the poor in Algeria in 1887. But she never really gave up painting. She kept a journal filled with sketches and watercolors until her death in 1928. She also maintained an illustrated correspondence with Ruskin for more than 20 years. So did she give up her art? In a sense maybe, but perhaps more accurately she married her art to her other great passion, her faith.

Like many things I may have professed throughout my years as a professor, I may have oversimplified my lecture on art. A more accurate assertion could be, to conflate artist and genius myself, that great artists - artists whose works becomes timeless - are geniuses who spend their lives driven by the pursuit of perfection in an art they can never fully abandon. And it is that realization that confirms for me the certainty that I will remain eternally grateful that my DNA unfolded in such a way as to spare me the backhanded blessing of genius. 

I do have some skills that occasionally edge above the middle of the bell-shaped curve, but truth be told, they most often remain in the realm of “art for the artist.” To clarify, creative endeavors can - or so I would profess - broadly be broken into two categories: therapeutic art, art we create for the pleasure, joy, or healing it brings to us; and art that informs, broadens, or advances ART writ large. There is certainly some overlap between the two. Emily Dickinson springs to mind. A poet who wrote, apparently, for the joy and healing it brought her, publishing only a handful of the 1800 or so poems she wrote during her lifetime. It was only later that we discovered the genius of this closet poet who, seemingly unintentionally, advanced the path of big ART.

So where does this leave us in our relationship to art? A bit stranded I would contend. To wander off course a bit, in my years in the classroom of what was largely and erroneously seen as an easy major, Communication, I encountered more than my share of student-athletes. Youngsters with dreams of "the pros" dancing in their eyes. While perhaps a handful realized those dreams to a certain extent, only Russell Wilson, stellar quarterback for the Seattle Seahawks, has achieved the level of fame and success of which the others dreamed. One out of the thousands of dreamers who passed through my classrooms. However, it would seem to counter the reasons I put my own dreams of artistic theatrical stardom aside and sought a somewhat smaller stage, to overtly discourage the dreamers out there in my smaller audience.

So I built in a compromise. As communication could lead to a myriad of careers, I had a standard "think past graduation" exercise in my introduction to communication course. Basically the student had to write an essay about the career they intended to pursue after graduation. And list what courses here at State would best prepare them for that career. But it was a two-part question. The second part was "If your ideal career fails to materialize for whatever reason, what is your fall back option that would allow you to still put all your preparation to good use?" One covert motivation for this follow-up question was to give the NFL, NBA, WNBA, MLB, Olympian, Academy Award, Grammy dreamers a chance to think outside their dream.

Still for most of us, following the art that brings us happiness, joy, calm, inner peace, is by far the best path. Do not worry that you will have missed the chance to live out your inner genius. If genius does reside within you, chances are it will reach in, grab you by the scruff of your neck, and shake you until you can see nothing but its burning demands.

.

Clouds

 I have been working on "cleaning" the "Gondolas" picture for several days now. I believe I have posted the "pre-cleaning" version of that image here before.  The process is designed to ready that hand-drawn image, which is 10x32, for printing on canvas at about 20x48. Anyhow, "cleaning" entails taking the original into Staples and creating a digital version on their large format scanner. Then I pull that digital version into Photoshop and remove all the little tiny imperfections - blobs of color from the markers - so everything is "perfect." I know, I know a little OCD, but what can you do?  This entails zooming in until I am working at the 2 - 3 pixel level.  If I wasn't a bit crazed before, I found myself in need of a break.

Fortunately there is a good therapy for this. I call it "cloud creation," because it harkens back to something we all did as children. You lie on your back on the ground and look up at the clouds and see what figures you can see. Charles Schultz did a wonderful cartoon on the subject. Charlie Brown, Linus and Lucy are gazing up at the clouds and Charlie asks what the others are seeing.  Linus responds with "Well, those clouds over there look like a map of British Honduras in the Caribbean. That cloud over there looks like the profile of Thomas Eakins, the famous painter and sculpture . .  .  etc." To which Charlie responds, "Well, I was going to say a saw a ducky and a horsey, but I've changed my mind." 

Cloud creation is sort of like that.  You take a large sheet of drawing paper, I used 14x17 for this example.  You put on some music that you like, take a black marker, and let the marker go wherever it likes. I used a few different kinds on the example because I like having lines of differing widths. Then when you feel like the doodle is done, or the music stops, you take a variety of other colored markers and fill in the spaces your marker created. You may have noticed I did not say "you have created." It is an important difference. Remember cloud creation is an antidote to the pixel level exactitude of "image cleaning."  Cloud creation is sort of like a Ouija board with markers. You just let it happen - no plan, no design, no intention. Just flow. And this is what came out.

Cheers!

 

Love is a Permanent State of the Heart

Once you truly love someone you are never entirely free from that affection.

That may seem a rather surprising statement to make in a blog written by a divorced/remarried man living in a country where the annual divorce rate hovers somewhere between 40 and 50 percent, and according to Project Sanctuary, “on average, nearly 20 people per minute are victims of physical violence by an intimate partner in the United States. During one year, this equates to more than 10 million women and men.” These media-forward statistics paint a pretty bleak picture for the odds for finding love at all, let alone a permanent version of it, not?

But those of you acquainted with my Distilled Harmony worldview will not be surprised to learn that having looked at love from far more than both sides now I, unlike Joni Mitchell, think I have a better way of looking at love.  And it is a way you can actually play along with. First, you need a balloon. I suggest red, but you can use any color you like. It should be a big balloon and a sturdy one because you are going to fill it up with, what else?, water. (So, weather permitting, you might want to do this outside. Inside, maybe the shower.) But these are simply precautions as the balloon is a model of a metaphor and ideally will not be broken. Now fill the balloon, but only maybe three quarters full, tie it tightly. The idea is that you should be able to squeeze the balloon so that it does not break, but mushes out into different shapes. Try it with your balloon - fun, eh?

Now here is the important part. The balloon represents all the love of which you are capable. But it is only a representation - to be an accurate model it would have to be a balloon without boundaries, because our capability to love is infinite.  It is perhaps easiest to understand the balloon model when we apply it to a couple increasing their family. You have this nice round balloon into which pops a child. So squeeze the balloon in the middle until you have a double sphere balloon. The amount of love - which remember is infinite - doesn’t change it just gets reconfigured. And the same thing happens every time a new beloved enters your life. Your love balloon gets squeezed and a new unique configuration occurs. More kids, more lobes. You meet a new precious person, another lobe is added. Sort of like this but with a much bigger balloon and smaller hand:

But adding a new lob is in itself tricky. In part because we aren't really in control. I wrote back in the late 1990s somewhere in The God Chord that we occasionally meet someone who is singularly in sync with our chord - love or lob at first sight. The contrary is true as well. Fingers on a blackboard. Your balloon is unaffected. The heart wants what it wants - not necessarily what your parents, friends, even you think you want.

In a related point, you will note that the model makes no provision for breakage. For lopping off a lob. For falling out of love. That is because I have come to believe that, from a Distilled Harmony perspective, reducing the expanse of love in our lives is counterintuitive.  Again a song; "Once in love with Amy, always in love with Amy." [Ray Bolger 1949] As we look at our love balloon and squeeze it to welcome new arrivals, various portions expand and contract. The conclusion I draw from that is that once we have loved someone we can never totally “un-love” them. We may come to view them through a haze of anger, disappointment, or whatever. But their little nodule is still out there in the love balloon somewhere, and sometimes it become dominant again. Think about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton; Elon Musk and Tulah Riley, Eminem and Kim Scott, etc., etc. Think about you own favorite

 married/divorced/married/divorced friends or celebrities. Celebrities really have it rough. Celebrity itself makes everything more difficult - everyone is watching, attributing bizarre motivations to whatever you do, which makes you more prone to do bizarre things. Nice to be in the shadows, exploring our own lobs - old and new, big and little.

James Taylor sang, “Love’s the finest thing around.” Amen, James. And I, looking back over 73 years of children, friends, wives and lovers, feel that we serve love best by remembering and cherishing all those with whom we shared, and still, in some way, share love.

In The Hall of Forgotten Gods

.

First, there is the silence

A different kind of quiet

No joy, no sorrow

Just silence

But - with the memory of sound

Brass cymbals

Chanting

Murmurings in unison

Of many different tongues

Choral supplications

Quiet prayers with

The clack of

Prayer wheels spinning

The flutter of

Sacred flags in mountain air

But now

In the simple silence

There is no color

Only  - the memories of hues

Purple velvet garb

Multicolored icons

Crimson berettas

Saffron robes

Black vestments

All flickering in the glow

Of many candles

Lining walls or

Perched in candelabras

Of many names

With differing histories

But burnishing each tint

With a sacred golden glow

All now mired

In the ethereal space

Of no color at all

There are no faces

Of believers

Of any faith or friendship

The want of color

Has already banished

The rainbow of races

Once present in every

Imaginable sacred space

Gone as well the fabulous

Sculpted features of the

Faithful whose countenances

And representations

Graced stone and canvas

Carved and painted

The air itself

Is without identity

Incense and woodsmoke

Mingled aromas

Of sacred feasts

Are as absent as

Sound, color, and visage

And so this absence beyond

Absence collapses

Further still

Becoming singularity

Past time and knowing

And the singularity waits

Until

Called by

Some unknown

Herald

To return

To an expanding

Swift

Beyond possible

To reclaim

Light and

Sound and

Sensing and

Being and

Joy and

Love and

And the realization

Of true deity

Contained within

Each individual

Wrapped

With humility

Each entitled

To

A throne

Until around

The edges

Of this

Most fortunate

Recreation

Creeps

The cautious

Hopeful tapping

Of realized prayer

.

A New Year's Toast

Another New Year's Toast

I hope you had or are having a lovely new year's day. I'm going to send you a couple of bottles of wine - well at least pictures of them. I would like you to see if can see a difference between the two.  The first is the result of simply scanning a drawing in a large format scanner.  The second is the result of a "cleaning" of the first image. That means taking the initial image back into Photoshop and working on the image at the two or three pixel level to remove the little smears or blanks that are visible at that level.  The differences are visible in Photoshop and would be easily seen as a print.

I am curious to know how they appear via blogger. Perhaps the blogger app just compresses the images to the same level.

Here we go:

 

On Hours and Identity

I have no idea why it is taking me so long to write this post, which I started back well before Christmas. Perhaps it is because I have been working on a lot of drawings. That prioritizing will make more sense in what I believe will be the last few paragraphs of this ramble.

OK, you are meeting some folks for the first time. The specifics of the situation are largely irrelevant. It can be anything, social, professional, whatever. You choose what makes sense in your life. Inevitably someone will turn to you and say, “So (insert your name here ____________) what do you do?”

For most of my life - at least for the last 45 years - that was an easy question, “I teach communication at NC State University.” Nowadays, it is a far more nuanced issue.  The cheap and easy way out is to simply say, “I’m retired.” Chuckle, and change the subject, usually with “How about you?”  The clever adversary will return the volley with “Me too.” Then the two of you stare at each other, playing a swift game of Sherlock Holmes. Neither of you come up with “I can tell by the callouses on the fingers of your left hand that you play a stringed instrument, and the flakes of rosin under the fingernails on the right hand would suggest the violin, or perhaps a cello? The fact that you are wearing formal wear to a barbecue would rule out bluegrass fiddle.”  So we may find ourselves stuck with “How about those (insert the name of some college or professional sports team from the immediate neighborhood here.) _________?” The problem with this ploy is twofold: first is that your new acquaintance is an ardent fan of said team and launches into a long a intricate description of the strengths and weaknesses of the Alleycats or whomever, or, two, s/he simply replies “I don’t really follow (insert name of the sport you had chosen here) __________.”

To which you glibly respond, glancing over her/his shoulder, “Oh, there is (insert any name that comes to mind here) _______. I promised him/her/them I would give him/her/them the name of my therapist. I must rush over and tell them before I forget it. Lovely meeting you.”

You see why it was so much easier when you had an occupation that would at least provide a pigeonhole into which you could be neatly stuffed. A quick tip, don’t lie about your profession. This can lead to the dreaded “me too briar patch” - “You’re a forensic mortician, too!? Where did you train?” “Nairobi!?” “Me too! Is that terrible commissary cook still there? The short one who drank so much and put ghost peppers in the coleslaw?” And so on.

But I have been thinking, who do we become when retirement robs us of our convenient pigeonhole? The pigeonhole isn’t simply a conversational convenience, it runs deeper than that. It pokes at our existential “me.” Who am I, and how have I answered the deceptively simple seeming question, “And what do you do?” I came to realize that who we are is most clearly identified by what we spend the majority of our time doing. I mean other than sleeping, or wishing we were sleeping.  Now, I realize that such an assertion does, in many ways, have as many holes as the proverbial Swiss cheese. I mean how many of us actually spend the majority of our waking hours in the activity that we would choose to define us? Before I blush and raise my hand, I need to confess to the significant stretch of time when I - pretty much seriously - believed that a degree in theater would lead to Broadway or the silver screen, I spent most of my time in activities that would fail to really define me. So, that "reality" having failed to materialize, my resultant compromises probably worked out for the best. I really don’t think anyone looks good in ultra-high def. But I digress, let me back up.

I won’t bore you with the years for which my memories are highly suspect and I’ll jump straight to high school. And a bit of a proviso here. The notion that our identity is most clearly defined by how we spend the majority of our time is obviously compromised by the extent to which we have control over our time. So I’m going to suggest that we try to visualize “our time” as a pie chart which we probably first did encounter in high school. If I can steal an example, I’ll stick it in here.

This kind of pie chart let’s us get a better grip on how we really spend time and what portions of a “normal day” are really our own and what portions are controlled by other factors.  A few general assumptions:

Sleep. This is a real biggy, and one that seems incredibly variable. Geniuses seem to provide no guidance. Einstein pursued 10 hours a night,  DaVinci, 5 and those were broken up into cat naps ranging from 20 minutes or so to a couple hours. So our pie chart would simply record what we do - not some mythical “right” amount of sleep.

Work. Another major slice of the pie, and one that bounces around a lot in different times in our life. I guess I think of it as our job, employment, and for much of our lives this becomes the pigeonhole into which others are prone to stick us. “I’m a senior at Treadwell Community College.” “I’m the CEO of Megabucks Marketing.” Anywhere in there. Once we take care of, and evaluate, those two big slices of the pie, over which we often have little day-to-day control (can we all say “COVID?), we can begin to look at some interesting smaller slices.

It is not surprising that I introduce this pie chart idea just as I turn my attention to high school - an environment that we all, to varying degrees, acknowledge is an environment over which we had little, if any, control. You went or you suffered the consequences. That being said I was incredibly fortunate to attend high school at Springfield (Ohio) North High School from 1965 to 1967 - or thereabouts.  During that span of time we had pretty forgettable athletic teams and excellent music and drama departments. John Legend was a 15 year-old grad in 1990. OK, so about a quarter of a century after my class left, and, no we never met, but still. Anyhow, the time that I had control of in high school (which is part of the “work” slice for most high school kids) was spent almost entirely in projects centered in the music and drama departments. I was active in other extra curricular activities but managed to bend those responsibilities to choir, glee club, competitive choral activities, and every play and other drama events I could weasel my way into. Point is this - just about all the high school hours over which I had control were spent on theater and music.

I’m going to stick an emerging pie piece in here. It seems random, but while I didn’t realize it at the time, it would later become important. I was lucky, again, to have been a student - from junior high school through my Ph.D program - before tablet computers were invented. Yet during those years you were supposed to be taking notes, with pen or pencil on paper. I’m mean there is only so much can one “notate” from any lecture - but you need to keep the old writing implement moving to indicate interest and attention. So you doodle. Some might call it drawing. But for me doodling is a more accurate assessment.

This pattern - including the doodling - continued once I went to college. The actual time I controlled in college increased. Naturally I had to find time for required courses, but I could shift those to fit around the courses in my major, theatre.  Then there were my rehearsal times, performance times, post rehearsal bull sessions with the director over late night meals. Taken all together those created a significant slice of the pie, but they were elements I had chosen. So this was the pie I chose to eat, and which expanded my pigeonhole - I am a theater major at Kalamazoo College.

Upon leaving Kalamazoo College, and simultaneously realizing Hollywood wasn't in my future, I began my graduate school career during which the primary pieces of the pie I controlled were studying and "grad-student-type" teaching creating very similar pigeonholes: "I'm a graduate student at _____." "I teach communication at ______." And while I didn't realize it at the time, that pigeonhole "I teach communication/media/technology at ______" - with the situational inclusions of "I'm Andrea/Emily's father", or "I'm Susan/Christine's husband" - would come to define my life for the next 50 or so years. They were not always fully inclusive or descriptive pigeonholes, but comfortable enough for most instances.

And now here I am at the interesting age of 3 score and a baker’s dozen age of 73, and I have a come to pretty good idea how to respond to the question “What do you do?” Which really means who are? What pigeonhole can I put you in?

I am, in descending order an artist/essayist/occasional poet. Now remember this moniker is a purely numeric identity. Other than sleeping, I spend more hours drawing than any other activity. After that I spend more hours writing essays that appear on the Wall, and within those writing hours are poems, some of which, but not all, eventually end up on the Wall.

I should also mention that the first two, drawing and writing, are tightly intertwined.  While drawing I usually listen to music - often to “music without words” classical or some other instrumental variety. This leaves much of my consciousness free to meander around thinking about ideas I might explore on the Wall. Conversely, while jotting down sentences or poems consciously destined for the Wall I often flash on images, photos, and whatnot that may find life as drawings. My nightly meditation sessions often call up images, thoughts, etc., that may find life in either words or drawings.

It is important to note that if I made a pie chart of the big three, even excluding sleep, the three would, in all likelihood, not encompass the whole pie. There are lots of little pieces that wolf down pie. Like walking, a bit of tube watching, watching videos on Curiosity Stream, doing dishes, playing with Vito and feeding Vito, grocery shopping, loading the dishwasher, unloading the dishwasher, FaceTiming or texting , heading down in Big Chicago, for plays, museums, etc., all those little things you thought you might retire from but either can’t or don’t want to leave behind.

Furthermore, and actually most importantly, are the beliefs and the philosophy that guide the construction of the writings and drawings that inform the Big Three. They all need to reflect, manifest, support or clarify the world view that had always been flitting around in my head but really began to crystallize with writing of The God Chord: Physics in the Landscape of the Heart back in the mid-to-late 1990s. Although that book never presents the Distilled Harmony theory, my occasional scanning of early drafts reveals the first suggestions of the quartet that will eventually come to comprise Distilled Harmony; Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity, and Oppose Harm.

Hence, in answer to the question, "So what do you do?" I should respond "I'm an artist/essayist/occasional poet." to which the questioner usually responds with one of these: a) A blank stare. b) "That's interesting. I'm a __________", or c) Oh, "there's __________. I promised s/he them I would give them the name of my therapist. Must run. Nice meeting you."

But, truth be told I usually say, "I'm retired. You?"

 

Schrag Wall PPP: Roll out the Barrel

 The original photograph was taken at Colonial Williamsburg. The locale is a workshop that made and repaired both barrels and wagon wheels.

Looks fuzzy - I'll try to mess around and send a better image.

As promised - Twin 1

 Both images are 38x14. And I forgot to mention PPP stands for Ping Pong Painting because the images sort of “ping pong” back and forth between a computer, a graphics tablet and my drawing table. Here is Twin 1 again:

SchragWall PPP Twin2

 A quick note since we have a few new folks joining us over the holidays, as well as some we have mutually rediscovered.

A post designated 2nd ed., like the recent “Regrets, I’ve had a Few,” post is a “re-post” from the early days of The Wall I have encountered in the course of yet another attempt to put The Wall into book form.

A post designated PPP (like this one) stands for Ping Pong Painting because the image began life as one of my photographs, then gets pulled into Photoshop where I white out the spaces that will make room for the final hand drawn and colored designs. That version of the file is printed out and I do the drawing and coloring of the designs by hand.

If you have any questions just drop me a note at robert.schrag@gmail.com.

Now for today’s post. It is called Twin 2 because you have already seen Twin 1.  I “twin” an image by printing out 2 copies of the image in the “image with blanks where the designs and coloring will be” stage. And then I create two versions of the image using that template. I will resend Twin 1 later. I try to keep to one image per post since it has been my experience that you get a higher resolution image that way which helps if you click on the image and your device pops it out into some graphics application. So Twin2:

Regrets, I’ve Had a Few, 2nd edition. Circa 9/04/2004

 Regrets, I’ve had a few .  .  .  9.02.04

 

OK, it’s true.  I regret that I let Girlfriend hold the water bill.

 

It all comes, of course, from driving a pick-up truck.  Friends assert that I have changed since I traded the Mercedes in for the Ford Ranger.  I’ll admit that I do wear my boots more often these days, and there is something about the side of a pick-up that just begs to be leaned against.  You find yourself saying, “Shucks,” and wondering if it will rain.  But my regret stems from a whole other truck syndrome.  Take a look around and you’ll discover that guys who drive pick-up trucks usually have their girlfriend sitting next to them.  When they cruise through the drive-in at MacDonald’s they never keep the bag themselves – they hand it to their girlfriend.  When they pull up to a tollbooth, they never rummage around for change in the center console; right, girlfriend hands it to them.  Stopped in traffic at the stadium heading for a tailgate party?  Girlfriend hands you a beer.

 

Here’s the problem.  I don’t have a girlfriend.  I had to do all that stuff myself.  It was really bugging me.  So I did the only logical thing.  Right, I went to Wal-Mart and bought a big Tupperware container that fits snugly over on the other front seat.  I call it “Girlfriend,” an affectation I find either droll or pathetic depending upon my current feelings about life.  Now in the evening when I stop down at the end of the drive to get the mail, I slide back into the cab and toss it over to “Girlfriend” as I head on up to the house.  Girlfriend wouldn’t know liberation if it came up and snapped her cute little plastic lid.  She never says, “Hold your own mail you chauvinistic urban trucker wanna be!”  That’s a good thing.  Who wants to listen to that at the end of a long day? 

 

On the other hand, total passivity isn’t all that cool either.  Girlfriend never volunteers, “Hey, hon, this looks important.  Maybe you ought to check it out.”  I mean, it’s a big plastic container for God’s sake.  So the mail tends to stack up there in Girlfriend.  I was cleaning her out this morning when I came across the water bill – under two CDs and an empty Altoids tin.  Girlfriend isn’t very big on neatness.  Problem is, it was due a couple of days ago, and it carried a “new hook-up charge” that wasn’t supposed to be there.  Bummer.  “Girlfriend! Why didn’t you show me this?”

 

She just sat there silently.  Point taken.  It wasn’t Girlfriend’s fault.  It was mine.  I shouldn’t have just left the mail there.  I regret doing it.  But the interesting thing was that regret followed me all through the morning.  It wouldn’t let go.  I mean I knew what I had to do.  Write the check for the legitimate charge and start the bureaucratic hassle of contesting the hook-up fee.  But I couldn’t shake the regret.  It rode along with us; me looking for a parking place and Girlfriend sulking over by her door.  That’s when I began to think about regret as an emotion, as a feeling.

 

I was overwhelmed by the mental image of an abandoned train station.  Night winds out in the middle of nowhere, high plains in winter, tumbleweeds and snowdrifts.  A single lamp flickers behind a cracked window, vainly struggling to hold the cold away.  An ancient engine is hooked to a couple of tired cars, no coal, no will to move.  Regret is a debilitating emotion.  Regret forces us to constantly relive events we freely acknowledge as flawed.  Regret chains us to the past.

 

Life has no rewind button.  The past is over.  Acknowledge it.  Learn from it.  Leave it behind.  Plan for a wiser future, and live that better tomorrow in every moment of your present.

 

“Right, Girlfriend?”

 

“Right, hon.”

Falling Awake

It is dichotomy. I should be quite clear about that right here at the beginning.  “Falling asleep,” going from consciousness to “un-,”  is very often difficult for me. I wish it were not so. “Falling awake,” leaving my dreamworld and returning to waking, is often relentless and able to resist all my conscious efforts to remain asleep. There, now I think we can go on.

Sleeping has always been one of my favorite activities. Well, OK,  it isn’t really the sleeping that I find entertaining, it is the dreaming. The places you go, the people you meet, the adventures you have! - It is all just amazing! Still, I imagine there are probably as may different different explanations and interpretations of dreams as there are dreamers.  Freud got his hand in early, so a fair number of folks followed the leads he set forth in his landmark book The Interpretation of Dreams, back in 1899.  The read is a bit of a slough. I have a kind of War and Peace relationship with it.  Meaning I distinctly remember starting it several times, but have no clear memory of ever having finished it. Still, I have read about it so often that the illusion that I actually read it could easily have crept in. But that is really beside the point since whatever I “know” about Freud’s take on dreams, read or imagined, doesn’t really align with mine. His seems a little too open to idiosyncratic interpretation.

For example, the guy who originally hired me at NC State back in 1980 was a sweetheart of a guy.  Great big guy, an ex-football player,  played offensive line in college. We would have faculty meetings at his house, after all there were only 8 or 9 of us.  The meetings took place mostly in the kitchen where he would serve homemade pasta with fantastic sauce. His wife was equally welcoming and an amazingly talented watercolorist. Sadly, he died relatively young, and yeah, the idea of pasta and football does come to mind. But that is not the point. 

I mentioned that his wife, Annette, was an excellent artist. Well, she was also one in the arts community who did more than her part to put the “New” in “New Age.”  One manifestation of this mindset was her report that she knew that whenever she dreamed of red meat, she was really dreaming about her deceased husband, who had a message for her. No doubt Freud could get great mileage out of this dream. I could not, and I mention it primarily to discourage you from letting Freud creep into our current look at my affection for dreams.  So let me offer some insights into the dreamworld that I find so attractive.

First, life in my dreamworld is almost always new and unique.  I rarely, if ever, dream about anybody that I actually know. There are people in my dreams, obviously people who are precious to me, and who are tightly woven into my life. But their faces are rather indistinct. Sort of my life before lasik. Upon waking I will try to recall who was in the dream. Maybe her? Maybe him? A bit of frustration here as I often wake, as I’m sure many of us do, just prior to some major reveal in the dream plot.

The uncertainty continues through a consideration of locale.  I do occasionally dream about specific places where I have lived.  And a  recurring locus seems to be meetings in large hotels or conference centers where our professional conferences were held. Not a specific one, but locales in that genre.  Often I am lost.  Yeah, yeah I know, why not be lost if I’ve never been here before.  Still, I am supposed to go somewhere to meet someone or deliver a paper. But I’m not exactly sure who, or where or when. Interestingly, I am not stressed as I wander, lost, through these large venues. I would be in “real life.” But these spaces often unfold in scenic places. Interestingly, Venice gets a lot of “recognizable attention,” as do some other pleasant, but unknown, locales. I need to point out that my dreams are, with only a few rare exceptions, pleasant, fun, and fulfilling. And I think that is central to why I object to “falling awake.”  It seems especially unfair as I often have such trouble “falling asleep.”

Recently I have been encountering a new genre of dreams. I call them “flash dreams.”  They seem to occur rather exclusively after napping, before returning to the obligations and activities that may have been instrumental in my declaring: It’s nap time!  Anyhow, it feels like they cram an incredible amount of content into a very short period of semiconscious time, mere seconds to spin out most of a normal “dream script.”  Furthermore they can occur sequentially - that is really the wrong word. Sequentially might be taken to mean that each dream would be narratively related to the dreams that preceded and followed it.  That isn’t really the case.  “Flash dreams,” as I conceive of them, can “flash” by quickly, back-to-back-to-back-to-back one right after another, but seemingly having no narrative relationship to one another. Though I suppose a Freudian could finagle one out of them. 

Perhaps I ought to be hooked up to an EEG machine before claiming these various characteristics for a phenomenon that may be unique to me.  Yet, the experiences of these “flash dreams” are, to date, unfailing positive, and in one recent example, incredibly long-lived. I believe I have mentioned that, by and large, I do not remember dreams unless I can recount them to someone soon after waking, and even then I am not sure if I am remembering the dream itself or my initial reporting of it.

Anyway in a recent “flash dream” - days ago and I still remember it! - I was running along a path in the Glen Helen Nature Preserve in Yellow Springs, Ohio, a place I used to hang out in my high school days. [Do drop me a line if you know where I am talking about, because you would have to be someone I would be delighted to hear from!].  So, like I said, I’m running along a path in Glen Helen. I can hear the rush of the water fall that I know is just up around the bend. It is screened now by lush summer growth thick enough to muffle bird calls and turn the afternoon daylight to a dappled green. I will come out in the thickets above the falls where I can soften my tread and peek out and see if I am alone. I may have heard voices. I arrive in the thicket, the falls are louder now. I reach out to part the branches and — the dream ends.

Ordinarily I would find this an act of neurological high treason. How could my brain do that to me!?  But for some reason flash dreams end more gently, as though they too seek to Foster Harmony and Enable Beauty.  Flash dreams end like the finale of a fireworks display. They light up the sky for a glorious moment of sight and sound, only to then fade slowly out, carving pastel trails down into black velvet.

Shake It Up Baby!

OK, so my hands shake a little. I wish I could blame it on easing into year 73, but it has been with me for as long as I can remember. Never thought about it. The only time it had any impact on my life was in my years doing theater and I had to do some makeup around my eyes. I don’t know how women do that! I had to go with a two-handed grip, right hand on the brush, left holding the right steady, and I still worried about poking my eye out! Then I went up to New York in 1990 to do a spot on Good Morning, America! when Taming the Wild Tube came out, and somebody else did my makeup!! Whoa, was that cool!

But unfortunately there were several other areas in my life when the two-handed option didn’t work, and most had to do with my forays into the field of music. I will not bore you with the painful details of each, but briefly:

Piano. Fueled no doubt by my mother’s ability to sight read on the instrument. My buddy Dan and I drove our piano teacher, poor Mrs. Stupp to distraction. Our piano music kept blowing out of our bike baskets when we left our lessons to ride over to the Milkstore to get milkshakes. Remember this was late 1950s, no fancy “saddlebags,” just wire baskets. And how could you practice without music? Our lack of progress amazed one and all.

Guitar. Fast forward to high school and the age of folk music and Hootenanny. I believe I mastered Michael Row the Boat Ashore and Greensleeves. Three chords, strumming, no picking.

Saxophone. Many years passed between my guitar gathering dust in one closet or another and my fling with the saxophone. I had finished my PhD and secured my first tenure-track teaching position in the wilds of Stevens Point, Wisconsin. Brrrrrrr. Another story for another time. Anyhow I figured I had “come of age,” by some measure or another and it was time to free my inner Eddie Harris. So I rented a saxophone - the only fleeting bit of sanity in this sad saga - and signed up for lessons. My first lesson consisted mainly of how to hold the sax, drooling on the reed, and stuff like that. No actual blowing into the instrument. I headed home with a throbbing version of “Get on Down” playing in my head. I arrived home. Set up the music stand, figured the reed was still soggy enough, and held the sax as instructed and -- blew into the instrument. I believe the moment is no longer listed as a cold case by the Stevens Point PD, as no evidence was ever recovered supporting the neighbor’s contention that someone or something had been terribly dismembered that day in my apartment. I gazed sadly at my shiny toy. Gently put it back in its case, and drove to the music store, returned the sax, and reclaimed the unused balance of my rental fee.

It was then that I realized that the major problem stemmed from the fact, in addition to my minor shakes, my right hand rarely had any idea what my left hand was doing, and vice-versa. Armed with that insight I have managed to avoid activities that required any sort of extended dual-handed consciousness.  I did briefly master three-ball juggling in a college production of The Madwoman of Chaillot.  I think it was fear of failure that made that possible.

But a new issue has surfaced - and it is completely my fault. I have shared a number of my drawings with you here on the Wall. But I always tried to post a picture of the whole image as completed, or nearly so. That masks the current issue. Below is pic of a portion of the image I am currently working on. As you can see I have committed myself to adding color to portions of the image, dots, little squares, etc., that are a millimeter or so in diameter. OK, OK. I am resigned to the time this adds to completing the image, but I still am amazed at the effort it takes to put color in those tiny spots.

The solution is as much mental as it is physical. Physically I go back to the two-handed grip. Mentally I send myself back to the costuming class that I took as a Theater major at Kalamazoo College, lo’ these 50 years ago. We had to design and construct a costume. I think I made a shirt of some type. Anyhow you had to sew seams. To keep the seams straight, I remember concentrating on watching the needle of the sewing machine go up and down. So now, when adding color to these tiny spots, I watch the pen in my hand. Slowly, carefully, up and down. Dot. Dot. Dot. Color. Color. Change pen. Dot. Dot. Dot. Move to another place on the drawing. Create design. Yikes! More tiny little spaces.

Why do I do this to myself?!!  Hush. Quiet. Think like a sewing machine. Dot. Dot. Dot. 

A Raccoon on Hillsborough Street, 2nd ed.

 [I have mentioned before my envy of my sister’s memory. This is one of those times. I have been asked to find a poem previously published here on The Wall. I remember the incident quite clearly, however, the date and the title escape me. So rather than rail against my inability to recall those vital bits of information I have decided to track the poem down. The silver lining to this particular cloud is that I am rediscovering some golden oldies that I get to share with you again. So if I mark a post “2nd ed.” It means I have looked at the piece again and perhaps made some slight changes. The first few are circa 2004ish, so unless your memory is better than mine they may seem entirely new!]

A Raccoon on Hillsborough Street 2nd ed. circa 10.23.04

 

She was clearly more exasperated than frightened by my intrusion.  Pausing and peering at me, her entire demeanor snapped, “Yes? Is there a problem?”

 

I was certainly not going to dispute her right to the half-eaten apple cradled in an appendage far too clever to be called a paw.   I was simply surprised to see her, and a bit embarrassed to have blundered into her parlor unannounced.  However, upon further reflection it became apparent that we were on the back porch.  She would, no doubt, normally receive guests high up in the towering oak that rose just behind the privet hedge.  And that fact alone would strike me from the guest list.

 

I found it a deflating insight.  The oak is just one of many that punctuates this urban landscape with a parallel universe.  I was enchanted with the notion of an entire community of fur and feather, of chitin and complex eye; involved in intricate negotiations and interactions far more ancient and harmonic than our own.

 

Yet, I could hardly expect her to invite me in for a nightcap.  I was, after all, one of them.  One of those seemingly mindless creatures who lay waste the forest, drowns the grasses in concrete, and fills the meadow with huge, leafless burrows.  I was a danger in her world.  I was a car-driver, a coon-squasher, a tree-killer – one of the demons from beyond.

 

I did so want to lead her away from that perception; to point out how fond I was of the furry folk.  I longed to reveal how much joy I drew from her inquisitive face, busy hands and improbable ringed tail.  How could I share with her my envy of her fearless access to the canopy, her companionship with tree and sky?  Of the isolated comfort of a den set so apart from the paths of men?

 

But a door burst open down the street and a troop of students blustered out onto the bricks; voices raised, cell phones chirping, laughing their way into the night.  The lady took her leave, nimbly ascending branches to her privileged life above, while mundane stairs led me down to the world and work. 

The Artist and The Artwork

You may have noticed I quote a lot of songs, poems, plays, etc. The idea is that if someone has already said what I want to say, but better, it makes no sense trying to “improve” when I can simply quote. I think I have already mentioned that when I come across a particularly excellent sentence in a novel I try to contact the author to simply say “Well done. Thank you!” I have also learned that it is wise to make sure the author is still alive. But that is a story for another day.

The question for today is the extent to which a work of art and the artist who created it are facets of the same entity. Sure, being aware of the effort that goes into finding just the right word and crafting an excellent sentence, I do drop authors an encouraging word to let them know that there is someone out there who is paying attention. But on the other hand that doesn’t necessarily mean I want to be their BFF. Actually it more often works the other way around. I when discover that a friend is a “creative,” author, painter, poet, singer, whatever, I am tempted to ask to see, hear, read, whatever, examples of their work. But there are potential pitfalls on that road. What if I don’t like their efforts? Do I lie? Will they know I am lying? Hopefully, I will find the work as delightful as the person - but there is that element of risk involved.

I was reminded of that risk recently when I asked my wife if she knew the title of a particular song for a John Denver quote I wanted to “borrow” for a piece I was working on and she replied, “I hate his work. He was a terrible man!” We have been married long enough that I knew not to point out that that was not the question I had asked. However, later, her non-answer brought me back to question I hadn’t asked but she had unintentionally answered: What are the critical relationships between an artist and their work? Must I find a Woody Allen film flawed because of questionable decisions he has made in his private life?  Do I deny the talent of Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun’s paintings because her patron, Marie Antoinette, was apparently callously oblivious to the harsh lives of the peasants whose deprivations made her opulent life possible - well, at least for a while. Do we deny Picasso’s place in art history because he seemed to switch his artistic style with the acquisition of each new mistress? 6 or 7 depending on what source you consult.

And that last sentence “depending on which source you consult” is one of the two major reasons I believe we need to separate art and artist in any meaningful evaluation of a particular work.  I never met John Denver, and to my knowledge neither did my wife. Did Marie really respond to the assertion that the people had no bread with, “Let them eat cake!” If Marie really did blithely advocate cake for the poor, did Elisabeth concur?” Did Picasso say “Oh, the blue painting is Olga, the pink one is Francoise?” If we wish to argue that an artist’s work is a direct manifestation of their personal beliefs and philosophy then we need to be quite sure that the sources we consult regarding those beliefs and philosophies are themselves credible. John Denver was a contemporary celebrity, which in its own right, negates anything we might know about his private life. If you have seen someone’s face on a magazine at the grocery checkout, you can be fairly confident that the article within is designed to sell magazines, not reveal “the unvarnished truth” about the celebrities on the cover. On the question did Marie Antoinette really say “Let them eat cake!” we would be well advised to remember that when it comes to history, it is the winners who write the histories. Picasso was, at the time of his death both the most famous and the wealthiest artist in France, who, most sources agree, made his heirs and their representatives frantic by leaving no will, leaving the who, what and why of his copious estate - sources vary but all cluster around 20,000 to 30,000 paintings, sculptures, etchings, etc., - drifting in the wind.

The point is that any attempt to link an artist’s work to their beliefs, attitudes and values is most likely doomed to failure simply because of the difficulty of trying to cobble together an accurate depiction of those beliefs, attitudes and values from secondary or questionable sources. I don’t mean to say that the “truth” about artists lives may not lie somewhere in what journalists, critics and historians have written about them. I am saying that winnowing those kernels of truth from the chaff of the articles, videos, exposes, etc.,  that accompanies those kernels is an almost impossible task. And furthermore I am saying that it really doesn’t matter, because even if we could draw a straight line relationship between a work of art and an artist’s beliefs - as is temptingly possible between Picasso and Guernica, that one painting which Picasso refused to “analyze” - we still cannot hope to define a singular psyche of the creator of perhaps thousands of works.

Artists, perhaps more than the rest of us more normal, less-talented folks, seem to shift “certainty” throughout their lives.  It is something we all do. What was "true" for us at 6, is probably called into doubt at 16, 26, 36, and on until 60 and beyond. But because of their status as “public figures,” artists are often called upon to explain and defend those shifts. Ideally the explanation should be made in person, or if deceased this questionable task is handed off to their heirs, critics, biographers or historians. Artists are not alone in this seeming need we have for them to explain their "waffling" on their work and world view. Republicans who began life as Democrats or vice versa, fire and brimstone TV preachers who “stray,” athletes who use “performance enhancing drugs,” famous quarterbacks who conflate “immunization” and “vaccination.”  These celebrities are all often called upon to explain themselves. To "tell it like it is." Furthermore I sincerely believe they would be unable to provide such an explanation even if they wanted to. It takes the likes of Boswell and McCullough thousands of pages to even attempt such reconstructions, and even their painstaking efforts are questioned by other would be "experts."

A friend of mine once reminded me that “we have all been in rooms where we should not die.”  Meaning we have all done and said things, “true” at the moment, yet perhaps better left unsaid and undone, and certainly unexplained in the broader picture of a life. But our foibles rarely hang on museum walls. We are rarely called upon to knit them all into a rational whole. But we do ask just that of artists. We want them to be able to trace their inner lives as a progression of “truths” as reflected in their art. We want the "reality" of an artist to be all wrapped up neatly with a bow on top. That would, I suppose, be nice, but I doubt that such a package could actually be created. Artists seem to be more intense versions of us, you know, normal folks. More swayed by passion, belief, joy and sadness. No doubt that intensity is reflected in their work, but our desire to fully understand the relationship between an artist's art and the person who created the art is most likely doomed to failure.  No doubt there are, in an artist's oeuvre, works the artist would like to assert represent their "real" self, their best self. the self they aspire to be.  But it is more than likely that other works sprang from their "rooms in which we should not die." Our attempting to discern which is which is no doubt an entertaining yet flawed pastime.

Let us conclude this little ramble down the road of art with a thought experiment. You attend a raffle at a professional meeting of an organization of which you are a member. To your delight you win “first prize” that allows you to choose one of two painting.  Yet, the choice is not as simple as it might seem. The paintings are quite similar. Two landscapes, they are the same size, same palette, done in the style of the romanticism of the Hudson River School which has always been one of your favorites. Neither artist will profit from their artwork being chosen. However before making your choice you are informed that one painting was painted by an inmate from a supermax prison, a psychopathic serial killer. The other by a church choir director who gives free music lessons to underprivileged youth after school.

Would knowing which artist painted which painting influence your choice? There is really no right answer. If the psycho versus the minister is a "dealbreaker" issue for you, then you are simply privileging what you know of the artist over the quality of the specific artwork, which is certainly an option and one which easily leads to something like the simple assertion that we can hate John Denver’s music because we hate the man. To me that seems rather unfair to the music.  And by extension, may deny ourselves a number of wonderful artistic experiences for reasons that have little or nothing to do with the quality of the various artworks themselves.  Remember the second tenet of Distilled Harmony is Enable Beauty, not only enable beauty produced by nice people - like Mr. Rogers.

Paintbox

Paintbox

Jack Frost let me tag along today.

The paintbrush flittered here and there.

It seemed quite effortless,

Touching every tree and bush

That caught our questioning eyes.

In the stately maple by the road

Crimson snared the topmost branches,

Pushing slowly down to a brighter red

Which faded past gold to a pure

Yellow, lighter and lighter

Until streaks of original green 

Peeked through, giving up in places

To russet and, just for a while, to

Brown leaves, clinging steadfast 

Until they flitter down

To finally rest upon the ground.

A patchwork quilt resting quietly 

Waiting for a deeper blanket of snow,

And, months from now, 

A renewed burst of green 

Below them, and in tiny buds

Above.