continuing this writing

Deleuze talks about lines: of flight, of segmentation, and some others - saying that we're made up of lines. When I think about this, in conjunction with something DF told me, that I've drawn my way out of some holes, I realize that my lines of desire really are lines. Ingres injunction to DeGas, to make lines - lots of 'em - is apt for my life. My life is marked by lines. When I was young, really young, I took a spool of string at my grandfather's - working at the mill he had many spools of string of different shapes and sizes. I took a spool that pleased me and covered the house with string. I wove string around everything. The mantel, the chair, the rocking chair, the couch, the posts of the bed, under the bed, around the heater. He woke up surrounded by lines.
As a child I didn't know what I knew about lines: they're everywhere moving toward desire and moving to enclose or to transgress, but they don't want to be balled up. Lines want to find their way. They move at their ends and vibrate in the space along their middles. Sometimes lines create other lines in the space between them. Lines move through fields of color and color pushes into them and around them. Lines follow and ever changing aspect of the edge and migrate. Their beauty is in their failure to define - that the object of definition is moving even as they are but the aspect of viewing can't keep up or else speeds too fast.
Now I feel the line moving and I think that the line will lead me to wherever I need to be.

Jeremy encouraged me to write

Jeremy encouraged me to write. Write something he said: You're a good writer; you have some humor; write some essay or something and see if it can be published. So I said, OK. I thought I'd try some strange punctuation choices as well.
What I see I should do, starting off, is to stave off my tendency to rant. Sure my childhood is littered with malefactors: child abusive baby sitters, bad teachers, narcissistic adults, bad preaching, and mediocrity as apotheosis [what could be better than working in the local plants?]. I can talk about that all day, lathering on layer after layer of vitriol. Why not just describe? Why not just describe the way you felt and how you saw things? In some ways these bad people I encountered are straw men now - introjects lolling about my unconscious waiting for a button to be pushed so they can stomp up and down and get my blood boiling. So what if they come off looking a bit human? Might I open up as well that part of me that is human. I'm not, afterall, the romantic protagonist, the tragic hero. As I tell Jami, I'm a simple man. The wonder is that I am a simple man. I've tried to make myself complex, but the equation of my life always balances out with that tidy remainder we chalk up to transcendence. Petit object a.
Let me catch myself now, beginning my memoir of faith, in my ranting. Let me see if I can describe.
The unconscious has no time. Everything that is in there is as fresh as the day it was born: rage, love, shame, guilt, desire, pleasure, pain, fear, delusion, and more - they're all in there. I believe that this bit of Freudian orthodoxy is correct - it's born out in my experience. I've told stories about things long ago and people have said, "it seems like it just happened they way you tell it." Jung says that we are not benefited in cutting out these "pieces of personality" but that we must bring them to light in order that what's good in them might be integrated into the conscious whole. I suppose he's right about that. We can't really get rid of anything anyway - except fool ourselves that it's gone when it's simply back lurking in the unconscious timelessly waiting a chance to break out again - usually, for me, yelling invective at some poor soul who doesn't make a right turn fast enough.
I remember in first grade. My math book: Arithmetic - a rat in the house may eat the ice cream. Yes that's a danger I suppose. A rat might eat me. I thought that once and screamed in the dark. My mom and dad assured me, all was well. Terror. I feel that terror on the bus. Glasses and patch for my lazy eye. Big kids tugging at my shirt collar and asking me what I was looking at when I turned around. How can I get away? Oversized bookbag and ill fitting blue jeans. I sit in class, desk crammed with paper, balled up and discarded. I've chewed the paint off my pencil and with that pencil I try to understand what's happening. What does the teacher want me to do? Jack and Beth have gathered apples into baskets. Jack has XXXXX apples and Beth has XXX apples - together they have how many apples. I'd hate to gather apples all day. They seem young to be working like that. Why not play? Is Beth Jack's sister? What must it be like to have a sister? My baby brother died two years ago and mom's pregnant again. She hopes this one lives. I don't know what to do. They have all the apples they have. I begin drawing, making circles and lines. This might be the apple I'd like. I've done something wrong. Another note home.
Every day I draw in my arithmetic book. I circle answers in the parenthesis in my reading book. I can't read well. Tom and Mike react to the word "what" with surprise like they've never seen it before - each time they see it. I decide to do that too. Now I read like them. I have to be told what words are. Sometimes I forget and read words like I know what they are. I want to be like Tom and Mike. I want them to like me. They don't. They do sometimes, but then they don't. I never know when.
After school I'm off to my grand parent's store. Pa has a store and he lets me work in it. I ring the register and count out change. Sometimes a customer adds a penny, but I figure it out. They don't want pennies back but silver money: a nickel or a dime or a quarter. I stock the shelves and stamp the price on the cans. Purple sticky ink. Gummy out of the bottle and soft on the pad. Ratchet Ratchet goes the stamper on metal. The black crayon marks on the signs, prices: I love the sweep of my grandfather's fives, just like the tailing off of Miss A******'s twos. Her parentheses drawn on the board have such delicate curves, so right. I draw on a brown paper sack, blue pen on greasy fiber. Faces, dogs, dragons, cowboys. Charlie Brown. Nixon just like my favorite cartoonist in the paper.
I love drawing. I'm good at it - the adults tell me so. I draw without tracing. I keep trying to draw like the people in books. I believe I can; no one tells me I can't. I must.

Perhaps that is a good start. A vignette of my life: home, with grandparents, at school. It's only a slice. It may seem that I've intended things to be read one way, but certainly there are others. I think there are no straw men. If anything, I begin as Joyce did his Portrait. Writing from the interior.

annunciation on paper bag

I was at the SBL/AAR in Atlanta some years ago and I drew this annunciation on a bag I'd bought some books in. Note the dove waddling on the ground. Part of my bottoms up theology. Putting the scat into eschatology.
I ponder what sort of theological memoir I might compose. What argot shall I mortgage, to thank thee dearest friend/ for this lamentable mortality, extraterminable pity.
I grew up a Methodist. But both my parents were Baptist. We went to the Methodist church because it was up the road. In an example of how my 9 year old mind worked I reasoned that Baptists were baptized and Methodists were methotized. I was methotized that year. In a few years at 12 our church had a confirmation class and I memorized the apostles' creed: I have to say that this bit of liturgical inscribing was a saving act for me. It gave me the sense that my relationship to God and to the Church was tied to something ancient and universal. Once I had the language inside of me, a language of God's saving purpose through history and Her loving creation of humanity, I was anchored.
The creed was a bulwark for me against the non-creedal preaching of the Baptist church and found in most revivals. I say non-creedal because of the reliance on provoking the super ego: those who practice it love to call it being under conviction - but it is simply nothing more than assailing introverted souls, riven with guilt and shame, to come forward at altar calls - where they'll receive the "free mercy of Christ" which always seems to be conditional, and from which they'll have fallen by next Sunday. Such churches are fertile beds of masochism. I wonder with Earnest Becker in his Denial of Death if revival-oriented preachers are conscious sadists beating their flock of masochists or if they actually believe that they are preaching the gospel.
I remember when I was a young teenager reading the letter to the Galatians. I was astonished. I had never heard this before in church: Christ forgave us and makes us free from laboring under a regime of works; God loves us apart from anything we might do or not do. Mom quickly told me that you have to be careful reading things like that; you could take them the wrong way. So it was back to the flogging stand.
In the midst of all this flogging the creed saved me.
At some point I remember we had classes on higher criticism. The revival sermons disappeared for the most part, replaced with more charismatic emphases. I was caught between these two poles: the intellectual and the "heart strangely warmed" emphasis with a pentecostal edge.

another drawing in poetry

I draw in Poetry magazine. I draw all over the text and in and out of the text. More and more I'm altering each copy that I receive. I enjoy the poems and the criticism and the letters, but the paper is so inviting. God forbid that they ever eliminate white space. Thank heavens that white space is important to the layout of a poem.

drawings in poetry magazine 6

drawing in poetry magazine 5

drawings in poetry magazine 4

drawings in poetry magazine 3

drawings in poetry magazine 2

drawings in poetry magazine 1