an entry

Some time ago I was reminded of all those reproductions of praying hands. For myself, I thought, I'd just as soon have an emblem of praying feet.  Praying feet is an alternative to the cliche praying hands have become. I would rather not say what praying feet mean or be satisfied with any meaning that might attach to them - other than "these are not praying hands." I hope one day that praying feet might become as much a cliche as praying hands.

he describes himself as a vessel, a container of symbols

he describes himself opening his mouth: like a pod expelling seeds into the wind

he describes himself as painting over there, sometimes writing, sometimes reading or staring out the window or across the lawn or at the clouds

he describes himself as the boy left alone in the woods, who got off the bus to a locked house, who walked through the rain down a dirt road when the bus ran in a ditch, who forgets what he's told to forget but remembers everything - who remembers the smell of sweat and cotton on a millworker's skin, who remembers air conditioning only in town (otherwise lots of fans, in every room), who remembers light bulbs hanging from the ceiling on cords with string pulls.

he describes himself as floating, separating, coalescing, forming, distilling and solidifying in a protean display of nuance

he describes himself as someone who thinks a horror movie set in a coffee shop called "save room for scream" would be a delightful freakish romp among the urban haute bourgeoisie

the human body is a canvas, a rollering body is a film - what movie do you want to project as you loop about, bumping banging grinding - and all for glory

he describes himself as making friends with his demons and the bitter angels of his nurture: it's taken years with many sing a longs, pool parties, outings, workshops - but all worth it in the end as well as the front

he describes himself with panache and elan, subtlety subtitles and sub rosa - which he's never understood and needs reminding, as a fluffy cat settles in his lap for an extended nap, the pledge drive enters its Nth day - like the Bach cantata, the pledge drive, which he heard performed in college - such a terrible bout of allergies that day - reveal to me lord your will - and sure enough Will did just fine - he, on the other hand, chased away rattlesnakes most of the night

he describes himself as an observation of time and the passing of space, caught up, rended, winded, cooked up, concocted, spun dry, folded, pressed and delivered with a slight bell tone vibrato beyond ear-range reverberating across the skin, settling into wrinkles and creases like a gypsy band

he describes himself as a ten-way intersection of three-way streets with a super-highway parkway overlook vista of the industrial park near the post-colonial village where children race their soapbox super tankers down the steepest hill for incredible prizes: matching socks, prescription lenses, and clip-on bow ties

he describes himself as a Finnegan's Wake style flow chart, not just Yes or No options but Why Not, What Difference, 20 Sided Die, Might, Both/And, Either/Nor, Ether/Noir, Yet, Noh, ... , Then, There, That, That'n, That'n'll - as I remember my grandfather saying, "that there'n'll there'll that'd then ull make a right smart'n'll there'n all" And we all knew implicitly his directions, even as drawn out on the back of receipts, over roads and down back ways, highways and dirt tracks - there there in a clearing was a stump near a mule grazing under the small clouds of summer with flies buzzing languidly among the bee addled pea vines. Here is where it happened as sure as I'm standing here talking to you as sure as you're standing talking to me.

he describes himself as a natural process: cell division, neural connections, consciousness shooting along pathways mostly embodied, filled with the legacy coding that informed life in semi-arid plains, glacial alpine valleys, and temperate zone estuaries

he describes himself as an orphan of orphans, an exile of exiles, a wandering one-off of wanderers, orienting himself with scraps, texts, images, snatches of tunes - birdsong and worm song - the feast of famine, the sage brush, the dogies punching back, the cattle rustling in the leaves, the deer baby sweeps

he describes himself as part of nature: not a force of nature, perhaps an off shoot, a tendril curving in a space-shaped human, like a mainspring in a watch, composed of odd tics

he describes himself as a constructivist composition, all diagonals and blocks of color with graphic elements, repetitions and active negative space

he describes himself as not knowing what to do - as doing things that don't work out; but still, witty, insightful, imaginative. Once there were millions of mules in the South - durable beasts, smarter than horses. I never see them now as I did in my very youth. In their place are orange pylons and high voltage wires. The river is a culvert now, the spring under a parking lot; the meadow where stills once glistened in moonlight is now a 24 hr pharmacy.

he describes himself as blue green, violet, pea green, pea red, sea foam black, burnt white, sky yellow, sparkling gray, flake red, tartan pink

he describes himself as caught between the opposed facts of "no one can tell me what to do" and "no one can tell me what to do"

he describes himself as stumbling, darting, crawling, striding, clambering, drifting, hastening: in a loop, a series of repetitions, like a satellite orbiting an invisible yet dense point of reluctance

he describes himself as a wanderer on the surface of the planet, through subtle terrarium vaults, along mountainous escargotments

bedrock boilerplate bouquet beaucoup

recent sketchbook pages

put some odd pieces of rock in a mason jar and leave it on your desk; explain it as a bouquet from your backyard rock garden

a small artist's book I fabricated one afternoon at the library

It opens from the left instead of the right.

It is composed of scraps of paper, usually preprinted and drawn on. On the first page I used watercolor and pencil, as well as ink.

There is no ostensive "tale told twice".

The content is simply figure studies.

And a poetic misquote.

Images bleed through as reverse palimpsests. 

It is signed and numbered on the colophon. It would fit in your hand; slide into your shirt pocket.

When I scored essays, I remember one student, commenting on the early morning routine, mentioned when someone spoke over the "innercalm" - how I longed to hear the innercalm first thing in the morning

he describes himself as possessed of idiosocratic approaches: he once spent 35 years entertaining thoughts of being one way or another; he once uncovered an ancient civilization in the back yard, which his beagle puppy promptly reburied; once, late in the evening, checking on some burning leaves behind the well house, he encountered a ring wraith who was lost, lonely, unfamiliar with the local customs. And that has made all the difference.

he describes himself as a containing thousands of monkeys furiously typing: simian battalions pounding out sonnets; rivers of lemurs placarding Shakespeare in the parking lot; Godot waits as well - now serving 37

speculations on the natural order

he describes himself as lost in the symbolic, found in the real, being read in the imaginary - like a message on the flyleaf of a book in a bottle in a crate washed up on shore, only to be compressed under layers of sedimentation for uncountable eons -- then to discovered, cracked open from a piece of shale on a shelf, a grinning fossil of consciousness

he describes himself with copious notes, meticulous jottings, cryptic scrawls, leaving behind a series of origami megaliths

he describes himself as a scion of mill workers and farmers, commuting suburbanites, science fiction buffs and quilters

he describes himself as light and shadow

he describes himself as an outlier,

 on the outside looking out inside out and about above

 and within

Bibliography:

Roughing It / Mark Twain ; Moviegoer / Walker Percy ; AntiOedipus / Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari ; Ecrits / Jaques Lacan ; In Praise of Lost Causes / Slovoj Zizek ; The Christian Faith / Friedrich Schleiermacher ; The Recognitions / William Gaddis ; Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror / John Ashbery ; Reader's Block / David Markson ; The Discarded Image / CS Lewis ; Descent into Hell / Charles Williams ; The Man Who was Thursday / GK Chesterton ; Finnegans Wake / James Joyce ; The Poor Mouth / Flann O'Brien ; Artwriting / David Carrier ; Jokes and the Unconscious / Sigmund Freud ; Leaves of Grass / Walt Whitman ; Farewell to and Idea / TJ Clark ; An Alien Heat / Michael Moorcock

White Noise / Don DeLillo and Catch 22 / Joseph Heller - and Phlip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint - and Maurice Blanchot's Infinite Conversation

he describes himself as light and shadow