even more even more self descriptional whimsy

he describes himself as a comic element: comprising working-class, intellectual-class, creative-class qualities, quiddites and pretensions in an artistic send up of theology, a theological send up of art, and human send up of the human, all in an ironic non-ironic venture to enunciate his thoughts and feelings

he describes himself as outwardly modest, sedate, unassuming, albeit unkempt, rumpled, disorganized, while well read, well traveled, well

he describes himself as risk averse, though risking some things some times, yet defined as "high freedom", which seemingly indicates a propensity to risk: who discovers that while avoiding risk he creates the greatest risk situation of all; he is obscure and creates more obscurity as a way of being knowable but not necessarily known. You know him as a dare-deviled ham sandwiched egging on rank heroes - the ceremonial master of ceremonies

he describes himself as having been busy with besieging ephemera for too long - as if some adult told him, "always be sieged and besieging," - he beseeched besotted besought bees knighted

he describes himself as at home with chaos and organization, a method of non-methodical selection, a practice of chance meeting and indirect advance, that he learned from the storekeepers and mill workers of his youth, that there are speeds and intensities untapped in the work of a person's hands, which may do little if abatement of obscurity and neglect are the sole goal of striving

he describes himself as a complex series of subatomic collisions among nanoparticles configured along beams of beams airier than light conversation in a coffeehouse before coffeehouses became specialized writing centers composed of the disparate and desperate chain reactive socializations available in post-empire post-industrial america

he describes himself as falls asleep with the cat in his lap, both of us snoozing away, a beer and a volume of kierkegaard on the table

he describes himself as wave and particle, light and shadow, matter and empty, speed and composition, surface and variation, time and motion, a series of silences, a queue of occasions, a recounting of episodes, an elaboration of swans, a proposal of clouds, a front of weather, a back of the playing cards, a masque of personas, a smoke of mirrors

he describes himself as a topographic map of an internal tectonic process

he describes himself as a balloon made of made of tiny bits of mica, elevated by quarks, coursing along the boundary of a boundary in media res, sedate, volatile, votive, voting, electing, deploying, employing tongues and kindred every soul and voice, melancholy misbegotterdamerungen

he describes himself as the night sky in the mountains, the streams amplified fall down the valley, frost breathing ground crunching lumbering presence

he describes himself as looking, seeking, hoping for peace and calm, for patterns of grace and love in his life and in others

he describes himself as someone recovering from abuse and trauma, who feels anger "for no reason at all", who feels at times that he's holding together a sense of self that is all cracked up, but still somehow, holding its contents, refusing to utterly break up

he describes himself as someone who struggles with memory - not only in terms of historical events and key episodes of personal life, but also in terms of where the keys are and why he's standing in front of a shelf looking looking ... but for what

he describes himself as someone who doesn't care if anyone reads his wall: he is content to simply talk to himself and the occasional correspondent - and he hopes that people might respond to him, if they feel anyway inclined, out of a sense of kindness and curiosity, rather than obligation or guilt. He describes himself as someone whose are and life might bring some modicum of joy and calm in a symbolic world rife with distractions. Enjoy and respond or not.

what do you have to do to be de-friended?

I de-friend people on facebook in a timely fashion, usually because they begin to bloviate all over my time line. I typically don't comment on people's timelines who I loosely know: not right away and not extensively. Sometimes when I do comment, and I try to always be respectful - as if I were a vague acquaintance commenting on my own timeline - I comment just to see if they respond with interest or kindness or a warning, or in some way, either letting me know I'm welcome or not. The comment below the image got me de-friended off one thread. Oh, well. 

There were over 100 comments on a thread where people were sharing their experience as artists and the struggles they'd had. The thread's author had written on "how an artistic career should progress" and, seeing some responses in the "it's not quite so simple category" I chimed in. I was impressed at how, the longer the conversation went on, some real group work, as Wilfred Bion might say, was going on. 

I was wondering if anyone would respond to what I had to say, either a "get out of here" or an "I understand and hear you" or some such. I was knocked out in the hour. But I wanted to save my response, not to justify myself, but because I said something in it I want to hold onto.

I've had an unconventional art career - in terms of how people who write columns and books on the business of art would talk about it. I've worked as a librarian, adding an MLS to my MFA. I've worked as a webpage editor for a large web design and hosting company (large then, it's a vapor now). I scored writing and math tests for two testing companies. Finally I've worked on an MDiv and become an ordained minister in a mainline denomination. In that process I did some serious work as a chaplain resident in hospitals, Atlanta's inner city, and in assisted living facilities. I was pushed in terms of how I interacted with colleagues, patients, staff, and authority. I learned a lot about hearing people's grief. 

When I listen to other artists I hear a lot of braggadocio, a lot of promotion, insecurity, but underneath it, a lot of grief. Few of us have careers we'd dreamed of (whether we did or didn't go for BFAs or MFAs). We're still artists, even when our career arc is way off track.

"This is a beautiful conversation. L[****]  D[*****] and several of you spoke to me, and I was heartened to see people stick with the spikiness of things. I've painted a long time, squandered some opportunities after my MFA in 86, gotten plenty of bad advice. Coming from a working class background, I've found many steps I should have taken to not be so self-evident and at times since, I've been dirt poor. Things are better now. I'm still painting, drawing obsessively. I'm long past emerging - more obscure and obscuring - which is my problem, my choice. At one opening last year I ran into one of my old professors, who remembering me and delighted to see me, bragged on me no end to the gallery owner - who looked right past me. Such a tough skin I have now. Nice to be remembered."

more self description, more, faster, safer, more effective

he describes himself as someone who, in kierkegaard's words in upbuilding discourses, is in the process of discovering himself; a process that requires stepping out of the ego-boat and swimming around, trying to become at home in the currents and convections and tides that are uniquely his: while the ego is constructed in response to an other, the true material of the self is beyond the gaze of approbation or disapproval where society is distilled into the super-ego. This doesn't preclude interaction with others so much as interacting from a more accurate standpoint with actually firmer boundaries - the paradox of constructing the strong ego is that the boundaries between himself and another are mostly non-existent - this is the source of personal frustration as projected onto the driver in front in the way

he describes himself as on a boat composed of green stems navigating an ocean on the sun

he describes himself as a trebuchet, a fossil diorama, and instructions for zeppelin navigation walking into a bar - on little cat feet, pausing over the city; they order drinks from the horse-faced bar tender here, and move to a table

he describes himself as an eye, a pure scopic drive - what if the whole body were an eye? fantastic, like some pipilotti rist video, moving inside and out, within without

he describes himself as continuing to be

he describes himself as booksih, brainy, innately curious, querying, quavering, quelling, quaffing, chorusing, carousing, carouselling, capering, cavorting, traipsing, going on, ad infinitum, subtracting fi night'em, scouring, scoring, scaling, lapsing, collapsing, dislapsing, singing, singeing, sequeing, sequentialling, initializing, authorizing, authoring, mothering, mouthing err, herring boning, hounds toothing - all in the line of duty, the circle of responsibility, the trapezoid of probity, the trilateral of commissioning

he describes himself as a whirlwind competition, a leg up, a down trodden, a miss begotten, amiss bee gothic tin, an ape aping apiaries, a voice from the future, a face from the pass, a lone a love a river run

he describes himself as not really here, abandoned in place as a child and raised by Das Nichtige, only occasionally being noticed if "something's wrong", otherwise, disposable, interchangeable, negligible, left to narcissism, shame and anger, except when convenient to notice or speak to: classic

he describes himself as a bit nonplussed by Halloween, unlike his friend, Gaye Dimmick, who thrives on the festivities and occult jocularity. He's glad for his friends.

he describes himself as a self-unfulfilling prophecy

he describes himself as someone needing calm

he describes himself as an ancient skeleton, long buried in river silt, finally breaking free of the fabricated remainders of life, and, surrendered to tide and current, finding release into the sea

the ongoing saga of self description

he describes himself in Rabelaisian terms as far as appetite, the consumption of quantities, the quantification of quiddities, the liquidation of quandaries, the quadratics of equanimities, the equanimous accomodations

he describes himself as sentimental: spending hours lost in reverie; swimming through imagined memories; climbing along escarpments of closure

he describes himself as haphazardly gnostic, following in the path of Bruno, Paracelsus, and Sebastian Castello - who said, "to kill a man in defense of a doctrine, is only to kill a man" (a 16th century observation with contemporary pertinence).

he describes himself as a one-man soloist, a one-man sea saw virtuoso, a one-man one man band of brothers, a one man only child grown up into an only child among many one-men soloists for unaccompanied orchestra and viol, whose family motto - here, amuse yourself until we get home - e monobus pluriem, or some such - self-taught, self taut, self tested, self disposed

he describes himself as a paragon of fine tuned moral sensibility, trained in causuistric declensions of ethical faceting, versed in multifarious polysemous penumbras that aggregate and congregate on the surface micro-magnetism of discourse

the ego is a tiny structure created for psychic defense on a vast ocean of repressed or foreclosed symbolic meaning that is also the individual's - meanings all too often projected onto others and which thus pass from a person's self reflection.

he describes himself as shot out of a cannon by l'll orphan annie oakley as daddy warbucks beatnicks of time in tune with the changing canon of midwestern civilization to deliver a stirring address to the assembled assemblage assembly assembling of his peers

he describes himself as self unsufficient, as semi-autodidactic, as un-self reliant, in a spiral out of the loop, remembering outside of the box that he left his keys in there

he describes himself as an obscure camera obscura, a penumbrella, having a blind spot, his right eye, a terror incognito, whar bee minsters

he describes himself as tall - the first thing you have to ask is "relative to what or who?"; and then he goes on to describe himself as swift and organized - and you think but don't ask; finally he goes on about his marksmanship and the subtleties of his short game: he begins assertions with "for those of us versed in the lore ...." or "where I shine is in the ....", and of course there isn't a suitable stick anywhere around ...

he describes himself as consumed with patience patiently consuming a consummate consumer whose great great grandmother died of consumption

he describes himself with caveats and qualifications, lapsing into asides and parentheses, backed up subordinate clauses, deprecations concealing missteps, masks, mirrors, diversion, trompe l'oiel abstractions, camouflage, false flags, indirection, misdirection, et cie

he loves the text about Christ meeting the ten leopards, how he helps them not so much change their spots as accept them. Like the leopards, our own lives encounter rough spots that we seem to carry around with us for years. But these brands need not be taken as signs of incompleteness - they can, by grace, become tokens of enduring love - as one of the leopards in the story comes to recognize.

he finds himself described in what always feels like one of those dubious personality typing tests:
Four with a Five Wing: The Bohemian
Healthy
Healthy 4w5's brings profound creativity and insights of the intrapsychic sort. Their emotions are more under-the-surface than 4w3's, and more private modes of communication (such as writing) are preferred. They have intellectual as well as emotional insights and can often synthesize experiences into something intensely personal yet timeless.
Average
Average 4w5's are devoted to cultivation of a personal worldview, often by philosophical or artistic means. They are more likely than the 4w3's to be reclusive and out-of-touch with the greater social world, and to compensate they adopt unconventional/eccentric ways of life. They can be purposefully obscure and enigmatic in their expressions, then have an elitist and contemptuous view of those who failed to understand them. They tend to withdraw for prolonged periods under stress which can leave them further isolated. As a result, they are prone to hallucinatory states and total alienation.
Unhealthy
Unhealthy 4w5's inhabit a terrifying fantasy-world of their own creation. Their emotional torments are turned inward, causing severe depression and self-destructive thoughts. While average 4w5's can romantize death, unhealthy 4w5's plunge into it.
Famous 4w5's
Johnny Depp, Bob Dylan, Virginia Woolf, "Lin Daiyu", Søren Kierkegaard, John Keats, Sylvia Plath

he describes himself as someone who takes a book off a shelf in order to put it in a stack until he's cleared off enough shelf space to put the stack back on the shelf - this is his contribution to library science, like a widow's mite or something about mustard seeds and castanets into the bibliographic deep

he describes himself as enamoured of the legend of st luke painting the virgin and how this traditions carries on into modern times

he describes himself as mounting the summit, breaching the pinnacle, surmounting the vale,

continuing self definition saga 2

he describes himself using various aides: micrometer, gyroscope, dowsing rods, sextant, x-rays, mass spectroscopy, dunking stool, anemometer, chronometer, electron microscope, and carbon paper

he describes himself as a collage of semi-archival material, detritus salvaged along life's way and organized into a Merzbau revival service of ironic belief

he describes himself as someone who journeys to the Himalayas for a correctly tailored suit; who learned to tie his shoes properly at the lamasery; who taught penguins to properly fix a rich fragrant cup of tea

he describes himself as someone who repeats himself

he describes himself as crippled by conservatism

the continuing saga of self definition

he describes himself as someone who draws on every page, who draws from one closed door to another, who just eats the lemons of life with heavy salt, the last of the nephilim, a crafter of golems, a deviser of divinations, an emblazer of emblamata

he describes himself as conversant in au courant phases and phrases of rapprochement and detente in a rough and tumble helter skelter world besieged and bewailing the rip rack flotsam and jetsam of entropy

he describes himself as an astute observer of human nature, a person who finds infinite opportunities for empathy and pathos, engaged with the particular individual in his or her always already liminal status as "being unto death" in this happy go lucky free for all lottery called life [some restrictions may apply - definitions of "empathy" "pathos" and "liminal" may vary from state to state - void where prohibited - devoid where inhibited]

he describes himself as once supple, once agile, but never very swift, still not swift and even less so

he describes himself as waiting, as trying to be, as being to try

he describes himself as subject to changes in barometric pressure in a fixed exchange rate to alchemic coinage

he describes himself as a face in the crowd, a foot in the door, an ear to the ground, a hand to the plow, an ass in the seats, a mule in the streets, a horse on a boat, an opossum in a sushi bar, a squid on a jet - business class to paris in the spring, while penny's in a stream lost in space down a mountainside, moonshiner in vermont

he describes himself as sentimental: spending hours lost in reverie; swimming through imagined memories; climbing along escarpments of closure

he describes himself as a throwback thrown backwards throne backed throw rugged individual jumbo pack ratty tatty tip top tailored manicured ham handed settler

he describes himself as a numinous presence - a flash of light crossing foliage deep in the woods on a fall day revealing ordinary elements of the wild interspersed with remnants of a lost civilization, a coiled creature carved on stone, once fierce talons now grasped by lichen and moss

he describes himself as a system of multiplicities scattered along a line of flight in media res between the devil and the deep blue sea

he describes himself as having no plans, no ideas - only a sense of some palimpsest of an esthiogenesis of purpose

he describes himself as all chopped out, a clueless mensch with his unmentionables, Loch Ness with his caste of untouchables, railing against the harsh indignities of a world skewed to the blech end of the spectrum

he describes himself as someone who continues

he describes himself as a cannery in a cold mine, a sweet will of the whispered nothing - clandestinely coded clotted cartographies

he describes himself as a saturn 5 rocket hovering over the launch pad, shock waves pounding the air for miles around, seemingly motionless and in abeyance to gravity

he describes himself but doesn't explain himself - he describes others but cannot explain them either: he alternates between confirmation bias and disconfirmation bias - still he enjoys a pleasant evening and is safely home before the squall line and its autumnal gully washer

paraprosdokian

Give a man a duck, and you've fed him for a while; teach a man to duck, and you've helped him keep his head attached.

We feasibly straggle

Jung writes that other people's solutions to problems, while perhaps correct, are not therapeutic - we need to discover our own answers and ways of answering. For instance, as a chaplain, people don't want you to solve their grief (doing so takes even the reality of their grief from them) - what is sought is some affirmation of humanity, some kindness, some presence.

Jung writes that other people's solutions to problems, while perhaps correct, are not therapeutic - we need to discover our own answers and ways of answering. For instance, as a chaplain, people don't want you to solve their grief (doing so takes even the reality of their grief from them) - what is sought is some affirmation of humanity, some kindness, some presence.

the magdalene

the binding

in the breech

I was born among heretics who didn't know it

                                                                                    who'd of thought

that is, what I mean, is that the Christianity I was born into in no way resembles the 1st or 2nd century Church, neither Greek nor Roman; in no way resembles the Church that became the state religion of the East and West; in no way resembles any permutation of churches or worship until the 19th century. Yet,  in the agrarian enclave of North-Central Georgia I grew up in revivals and altar calls and hell fire and damnation were hallmarks of the true church - the very pith and marrow of orthodoxy. Not orthodox! 

Readers may say, "Why does he keep going on about this? Why is this important?" And I could say that each time I write about it, I await a blessed release.

"You're funny, be funny."

I get that. Think of Jesus' statement after the foot washing scene "do you know what I've done to you?" -which we typically think of in terms of changing status, questioning the status of hierarchy - and think of it psychically: "My god, what have you done to me!"

I carry on as I can. I recently wrote that on Face Book I'm the equivalent of the guy two tables over talking to himself. I have to accept that. When Lacan says that the ego is a mechanism of frustration, he's pointing out that our ego is something we've constructed to please an Other - doesn't matter if we can say who that is or not. We think we've constructed an image of our selves and that it's a good one - could have fooled us! The frustration comes when people don't attend to our ego (or when events expose our ego as a construction - events like not making an A, not getting into a group, not getting That job, that house, that spouse, etc) - and we yell and stomp, we become indignant - the Gall! [and when I write We, I mean Me]

For some it's easier than others to say that it's just my ego being diminished, so what! Jung points out that cures don't take place until we make the crucial move ourselves. People pointing things out doesn't help much. In our psychic life, just like in regular warfare, the point of attack resists direct assaults and is best outflanked.

There is some impetus behind my crafting a year long devotional set.

I've written before about what I feel most contemporary devotionals lack. They tend to be bland and unchallenging. Sometimes I would read one of these and I'd laugh in wonder at the interchangability of the opening sentences. 

more self description

he describes himself using various aides: micrometer, gyroscope, dowsing rods, sextant, x-rays, mass spectroscopy, dunking stool, anemometer, chronometer, electron microscope, and carbon paper

he describes himself as a collage of semi-archival material, detritus salvaged along life's way and organized into a Merzbau revival service of ironic belief

he describes himself as someone who journeys to the Himalayas for a correctly tailored suit; who learned to tie his shoes properly at the lamasery; who taught penguins to properly fix a rich fragrant cup of tea 

• Martha Shrout Brown and Roxann Maples-Stokes like this.
• View 2 more comments
• 

  Suzanne Bell yep, that's what I thought. keep it up, Master, friend. keep it up and keep us going into new reams of thought. though I might remind you, the mind is the servant of the master, the maker, the defender of the soul. let that soul be free.

  11 hours ago · Unlike · 1
• 

  Fred Wise What siren song my sister, if I might say sotto voce, render you some freight of response and aphoristic shape, as supple and plain garbed to my ashplant signaled musings on sandymount bank on the outer rocky montebanks, vouchsafes rhythms and tonality to my soul?

  11 hours ago · Like
• 

  Suzanne Bell look to the highest point in the photograph. some twin towers of the soul been torn down to show you its heart, its song-sorrow, its plight in the wicked wind of mind's eye, and men.

  11 hours ago · Unlike · 1
• 

  Fred Wise our skyline is a hodgepodge of architecture's fads over the last half century, and set in the midst of it, a polite salt cellar, the golden domed capitol - the only regret in the view is that the blue domed Hyatt, with its rotating restaurant, is now boxed in, like a childhood Christmas ornament, by newer more serious structures.

  10 hours ago · Like · 1

he describes himself as someone whose driving is academic: there's the passing lane and there's the failing lane

he describes himself as intoxicated with life

he describes himself as a topographic map

he describes himself as someone who gets too excited, too eager, to be the smartest, the most correct, but he's learning to live through his anxiety, to find some quiet within, some point of grace to stand on in the symbolic world of humanity

he describes himself as spinning

he describes himself allusively as a catalog of traits and anecdotes proffering vignettes of imagined and unimaginable events, episodes, follies, parties, engagements, soirees, sorties, and schedulings where he acted out, enacted, proacted, protracted, detracted, transitioned, and perorated.

he describes himself as invisible, negligible, a shadow of his future self - unlike his take no prisoners hell bent for leather alter ago who's in all the papers and passes via word of mouth through the loftiest perches of society

he describes himself as someone who is grateful for kindness

he describes himself as someone who's struggled most of his life to obtain the express written consent of major league baseball

he describes himself as a battle of wits, a game of chess played with monopoly tokens, souvenir shot glasses, and origami swans

he describes himself as becoming better with some set backs, puzzling along finding open doubt preferable to fake certainty, daily grief preferable to bottled optimism

he describes himself as a labyrinth: minotaur pasiphae theseus ariadne minos dadelus all rolled into a trifle for the gods

he describes himself as someone who doesn't like description, who lives a nondescript life, under the radar at the dew line