a rough translation of time folded on time

work in progress - at stopping point

2012-01-18T19:20:00.000-08:00

Conveying a 36inch by 10 yard drawing is problematic: displaying either online, here, or in a show (where to find a wall or enough uninterrupted space). I wanted to push myself some regarding size and used a series of associations to generate content. I also wanted to expand the kinds of media I used - as well as taking some chances: acrylic paint, graphite, ink (water based and permanent, black, bluish, greenish), paint sticks, pastels, oil pastels. I've cut this drawing up into 9 sections (figuratively) to present it here: top to bottom is actually left to right.

my current work in progress

2011-12-24T21:48:00.000-08:00

I bought a 36 inch by 10 yd scroll of strathmore paper back in October and I've been working on it for the last month. As I've stretched out its length along the studio floor, I've been able to create an overall design - a kind of journalistic image like my painting Chronicle of last spring. Good things seem to happen when I make wacky images that take chances like this. At least for me: this is taking chances.
Here are just three details of the last five yards of drawing. I'm using the kitchen sink: inks, watercolors, acrylic, graphite, pencil, pens, pastels (oil and regular), and paint stick. The whole image is flanked by two bowing seraphim figures. In the middle is a life size male nude with tricornered hat. So the image follows the design of the temple altar: The words "times arrow" on the right side indicate that all life is an altar; the image is growing right to left - as in hebrew writing.
One motif of the image is how Jacob's ladder transmorphs into rails - so the railroad theme is a large part of the image. The large central figure stands astride what figure as rails; later I refer to Lamar Lunsford's I wish I was a mole in the ground - with its reference to "railroad men". My dad worked on the railroad for 30 years - make of this what you will.

Louisiana Parkway Avenue

2011-11-19T19:26:00.001-08:00

Early in October a group from 1st Pres went and worked on houses in New Orleans. While there I was able to do some watercolors and this is one. I was interested in the history of each house: the traces left from the original structures, as well as how these traces influenced rebuilding. Nothing was square or straight or level - but improvisation was required in each precise plan. That is, precision was not attainable. So every move had to take into account a kind of skew indigenous to the structure.

almost a year

2011-08-22T09:28:00.000-07:00

I've let things lapse here. When I look at this blog, things are all over the map: a bit of art, some experimental writing, some sermons, some rants. Certainly the last few years have been a time where I've been seeking focus. Now I'm getting ready to consolidate my energies into a site that promotes my art.

some drawings

2010-10-19T10:13:00.000-07:00

I continue to draw, as I have for 45 of my 50 years. For the last 34 years I have pursued an approach to drawing that encourages accident and experimentation - working faster than I can think. I have had spurts of progress during this time - some regresses or black holes, but I've continued forward progress. In the words of my therapist, "drawing [myself] out of unhelpful places."
My art is my compass. Perhaps for a time I sought the certainty of theology - especially stringent systematic theologies - but some of those have been the very black holes of subjectivity [as Deleuze would say] my art has drawn me out of.
To be able to draw and express myself visually has been life to me. The visual has brought to speech concepts that I could not have broached.
I would say, with these drawings, the meaning isn't necessarily in the content. The meaning is in the doing.
At times, as in CPE groups, some have viewed my drawing with suspicion - as if I weren't listening. But this has not been the case. I listen better when I'm drawing.
Tonight I'm driving into Raleigh to draw from a live model for the first time in years. It'll be fun and a bit challenging. The human figure is a puzzle, every day offering new solutions.

recent workshop

2010-10-19T06:39:00.000-07:00

Three weeks ago seven pastors and I got together for a workshop on using art to open up possibilities in creative thinking for ministry. My premise is along this line: that our culture privileges words and speech, while bracketing off images and the imaginary - in the process people are cut off from parts of themselves that are vital and creative. I offer art, and my experience as an artist and minister, to briefly facilitate getting in touch with this bracketed-off side through drawing and painting.
This was my first workshop, so I was grateful for a friendly audience. Still I was anxious that they would find it worthwhile. They responded wonderfully - working during the day and sometimes into the night on paintings and drawings.
The only rules I put forth were that nothing would be called a mistake, that we would cut off the editing/censoring function, and that we would allow associations to flow freely - also I encouraged them to work faster than they could think about it.
These are not easy things for most people to do - to let go of control and to accept accident and experimentation.
All in all the facilities at Ferncliff, the food and drink, the comradery, and the singing (they turned me on to Chris Smither) were excellent.
Thanks to Shannon, Roger, Lander, Neill, Jeff, Drew, Gene for all their work.

recent paintings

2010-10-19T06:09:00.000-07:00

lately i've eschewed upper case. years ago i went entirely lower case, for some reason, but taking german required me to use upper case again. call it at that time a search for some singular identifying trait - now, call it a stylistic intention.
not that that's connected to the images posted here - unless someone wants to hazard a connection.
the top painting is a glimpse of a figure in motion: something like you'd see in muybridge or balla - but the images are clipped, bracketed, not presented as wholes but as fragments. fragments of space and time.
kaja silverman makes a lot out of the myth of orpheus and eurydice: coming to terms with the fragmentation of life, life's limits, we die to narcissistic involvement and become alive to relationality - we can really see each other without needing all to be totalized in our perception.
and finally a shadowy backlit figure about which i haven't brought to speech yet.

October post

2010-10-09T06:36:00.000-07:00

I find that I'm doing the best art of my life right now - springing from stability in my life and some maturity - some getting free of what Lacan calls "the desire of the other." The funny thing about Lacan is when I hear people talk about him in a critical theory context, I wonder, "why are you focusing on that? Where is that coming from?" - but in terms of pastoral care: he makes perfect sense - our language fails to symbolize our experience; the concept of Ego fails to account for subjectivity; our demands are counterproductive to our desires; and we have to live in an 'always wanting more' state. Life is learning to live with our losses - our griefs - a sense of lack that sends us searching - that is the slippage between the "I think" and "I am" of the human subject. In this sense it's no surprise that Lacan quotes Romans 7 from time to time.
About other's desires: I described it this way in my recent workshop/seminar (I'm uncertain what to call these events) - when we are an infant we are forced into the position of other people dictating what we want (tantrums and crying aside - we get the message eventually about what is rewarded and what is punished) - our desires literally are framed by other people, authorities and peers, and then one day we are given the ball (as it were): Sometime around the end of the first half we're told, "OK you're on your own, now go in there and call some plays" - and we finally have control of the game, and we're behind 24-3 or ahead 17-7 and we've no idea how that happened. It's not like even then we get to do what we want - we've still got this Other play calling in our ears (and most of these people should never have been allowed to coach). Drastic measures are called for: the Other must be kicked off the team (though he's sneaky in re-insinuating herself) and you must experiment and make mistakes to find what you're good at to get out of habits (third down quick kicks and the ancient schemes of our parents and grand parents).
Rant Rant
*******************************************************************************
I thought of a devotion while reading Kaja Silverman's Flesh of My Flesh. I was reading early on her reflection on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth and Ovid's telling. She focuses on the Coda of the story - that Orpheus dies and reunited with Eurydice is now able to relate to her: that is, he had to come to terms with his own mortality, his own limits, before he was able to relate to another human being - that is, Orpheus' myth is a retelling of Narcissus. Orpheus charms the world with his gifts but fails to relate to that world - he cannot even understand his loss of Eurydice is is own fault, but must blame and shun women in reaction. When the Ciconian women tear him apart, he becomes aware of his limits - that he is really fragmented: in pretending to self contained he has shielded himself from confronting how his narcissistic wound, untreated, ungrieved, has split him. Ironically it is death that allows him to be relationally whole.
He is finally able to enjoy being with Eurydice, to allow her to walk ahead and to be invisible to her.
(interestingly, she notes how in the last supper Christ recapitulates Orpheus by inviting his disciples to feast on his fragmented body: that's not unusual and may have been prevalent understanding the early church, since Christ and Mary recapitulate the Isis Osiris Horus myth as well - the church takes over pagan iconography and memes)

Anyway, the story that came into my mind follows:
Isaac, years after the binding incident with his father, whenever he would be traveling, if the day was bright and the weather was hot, would feel compelled to take a detour off his route. Coming to a empty place, he would take off his clothes and lie down naked, exposed on rock and soil. He could feel the cold rock on his back, and the soil would cling to him. Clutching himself he would moan and writhe; finally he would cry out, "love me, father!" into the empty sky. Spent, he would lie there, crying.
When it all passed, he would rise up, put on his clothes, and travel on. His eyes remained wet and red.
He would never speak of this.
We only know about this because a sparrow watched him, unseen and still behind a thistle bush.
The sparrow later told the story to a fox in exchange for a piece of fish.

grey eminences

2010-09-02T06:10:00.000-07:00

The other day was a melancholy day for me. Whatever is inside us is complex, not just what we're conscious of. Jung, Freud, Klein, Lacan - all point to this complexity, this unknowable process at work in us, and they conceptualize it as event, timeless symbols or significations. Lacan goes the deepest of any I've read on this matter of the unconscious. He contends that our ego, that sense that I'm thinking my thoughts - and Klein's object relations construction of introjects is contained in what he calls the Imaginary: that is my own conception of an Ego is a product of my imagination. So the ego, that sense that we know what we know, is illusory - that is, it is more a sense that we imagine a sense in ourselves that knows. There is a gap in the cogito, a gap that where we would grasp our identity, we find that it slips further away. At least as long as we think that our goal is to strengthen our Ego - our sense of knowing what we know about who we are - as if our problem were simply one of being informed, and then we would live a life of stasis. Free from the demand of unmet desire.
Our desire is what keeps us going.
I was musing today how in the last few years I've read Merleau Ponty, Deleuze and Gutarri, and now Lacan (along with Freud) - and I feel absolutely liberated. I feel that I've thrown off mental shackles that hampered my artistic sense. I no longer think - What do others say I should read, believe; but What helps me? What frees me?
Free from the "poison gift of transcendence" as Deleuze would phrase it. Living now.

about Art is my Life

2010-08-30T07:39:00.000-07:00

A friend asked me to read over a Wikipedia article she'd written about a mentor of hers, a photography professor, and what struck me in the article was his statement, before each class, that Photography is my Life. He'd say this and the evidence of his life bears it out: he practiced photography and taught it for his productive life. Certainly he didn't have those side tracks into conventionality that I've had.
My life seems complicated (enriched?) by all those things I could do, can do, am doing - that circumvent art production. Perhaps it comes from being around people who don't believe in art - or taking one look at me, don't believe in me. I have learned lately just how much of my life has been made up of the desire of others (thank you Lacan).
I am now concentrating on what my desire is. It's funny: I can imagine people telling me how selfish that is - and then giving me a list of things I should desire - their desire. Didn't they hear what I said - I don't want their desire. After 50 years of pleasing others - now kicking back a bit.

three academic portraits

2010-08-28T12:25:00.000-07:00

I may do more of these, depending on how they meet my needs to visualize the mask of entrenched power. I'm fascinated by these portraits and how they serve as emblems. In the last few years I've noticed a trend toward photographs as attempts at capturing the image (reifying the reminder) of a presence. That's what these images are, among other things: past presences.. A portrait is a haunt, a haint - as my grandmother would say. "How can we convey the power," they seem to ask? Or we could say, that they question power - a reminder that any human who may have held power, discovered its presence as fleeting - and at bottom, discovered themselves as impotent. So an academic portrait displays power and impotence at once. It takes power to have such a portrait painted and to be garbed in such a way; it displays impotence in that this is all there is - a guy in a suit.

a painting I went back into

2010-08-16T08:45:00.000-07:00

I painted this painting in oil close to ten years ago for a show at Brevard College (my first alma mater). Tim Murray had arranged for me to have a large show there and I was pleased to work up 19 paintings and 60-some drawings and watercolors. This painting, and I admit to an appropriationist streak, was a take on Raphaelle Peale's After the Bath (at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City) - nude behind curtain. I added a cello and altered the color, and the drape was initially a landscape painting, and I enlarged the space of the room. Peale's work is a trompe l'oeil bit of handkerchief covering the nude (not many nudes survive from the early years of the republic: Vanderlyn and Washington Allston being rare exceptions).
This painting kicked around for a decade - shown a couple of times, hung up or stored away. Recently I was painting in my studio, our backyard garage, and seeing it lurking behind a ladder, feeling the despair of its existence, put it on the easel and added a big slathering of paint over the landscape and two verticals of green, a vertical of red and another of blue. I preserved the cello.
Several nights that week, as I was venturing off to sleep, I thought about this painting. Mostly I saw the white paint in the middle, which I hoped would be more active and watery than it is. When I was in the midst of painting it (in acrylic this time, a no no, but after 10 years the oil paint has cured surely) I added the bars of color to simplify things, to help the painting breathe. All in all, I think it's better. I searched for a jpg of the original state but couldn't find it. Ten years is the longest intervening time I've experienced with a painting - although I have a watercolor that is an experiment in chance that I've been "working on" for 6 years now.
I wish this painting well.

Devotional 2

2010-07-18T18:32:00.001-07:00

I'll never forget when I returned home from a mission trip overseas and told my parents about the changes God had wrought in my life. First off: I had a new name, Anish Junimajapublin - no more Betty; I was a new woman now, a sacred vessel devoted to the service of the community - sweet, naive, teen Betty had answered a higher calling; and soon I wold conceive a child with a man the universe would reveal to me. I was so excited!
I had never seen mom cry such genuine tears as when I told her that I had come home to return the clothes and belongings of my former life. She hugged me like she wouldn't let me go.

That was ten years ago and not a day goes by that I'm not happy and grateful for how God has led me. I spend most days picking beans alongside my children during the summer; the rest of the year I teach math and birthing techniques at a community college.
A mission trip changed my life and it can change yours too.

devotiional 1

2010-07-18T17:50:00.001-07:00

I have a dream where my head is bolted to the keel of a super tanker. As it courses through the seaways of the world, the detritus and residue of life flow into my open, lamprey-like mouth, are consumed by my body, and exit back into the ocean through my womb as fine Danish-Modern furniture. My family takes this furniture and, selling it, provides meals and job opportunities to refugees from Sudan's and Somalia's civil wars. One of these refugees, Mashoudf Ali, has stayed with us this last year. He works hard and launders money using a dummy corporation he set up on the computer in the family room. His clients are various arms dealers and underworld figures. I'll never forget when the ATF visited. They had questions about some stinger missles in the basement.

I agreed to wear a wire. They placed cameras all over the house. They see everything.
Mashoudf has been away on business for a while.
God is like that. We think that he is away on business. But he sees all we do.
And he waits.

He waits by the phone on the Danish-Modern desk in the study upstairs.
He is with the refugees. He is with the supertanker.
He watches as I glide through the sea lanes.
He enters my mouth.

I don't operate like I'm told to

2010-06-19T15:50:00.000-07:00

Try as I might, I fail frequently in life, to follow the dictates of expectations. I don't post frequently. I don't write when I'm told to write. I find I live inside my head, when I'm encouraged to get out, to experience my emotions, to understand why I feel what I feel and why I'm feeling it. And still, as much as I loved and learned from group work in CPE, I fail. Surely I feel it.
I've finished Delueze's big three: Difference and Repetition; AntiOedipus; Thousand Plateaus - and now I'm embarking on Lacan - who once stymied me, as I was reading Merleu Ponty, and my therapist recommended going into Freud instead, which surely was helpful - no one has written more succinctly on the psyche than Freud -and I wonder, What's the difficulty with Freud - people act as if he's beyond them - or else they reside in the comfortable parody that he's all about sex - thus demonstrating that they know no more about sex than breeders of bulls and cows. So I live in my head and paint from my heart. I give you all a petite "a".

continuing this writing

2010-05-22T07:48:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-20T07:42:00.001-07:00

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

2010-05-20T06:34:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-09T09:21:00.000-07:00

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

2010-05-08T19:08:00.000-07:00

drawing in poetry magazine 5

2010-05-08T14:42:00.000-07:00

drawings in poetry magazine 4

2010-05-08T12:15:00.000-07:00

drawings in poetry magazine 3

2010-05-08T12:08:00.000-07:00

drawings in poetry magazine 2

2010-05-08T11:26:00.000-07:00

drawings in poetry magazine 1

2010-05-08T11:17:00.000-07:00

spring is hear

2010-04-25T05:53:00.000-07:00

I'm taking my time between posts. Not that I don't have things to write. I have a backlog. Jeremy Begbie recommends that I write something. He thinks I could publish somewhere. So I'll give it a try. Meanwhile I'm carving out some time to paint. Even as my CPE residency comes to an end. I've learned a lot. I wish that Alice Miller's Drama of the Gifted Child were more universally read.
I could paint a picture, or describe in words, the projections and counter projections endemic to our society; how most arguments are set against a straw man, filled with vehemence and judgment. Watching the media, reading papers and blogs: one might draw the conclusion that the mass of humanity is disconnected from the reality of life.
I think Deleuze describes this well - albeit in jargon that presents difficulties to people casually opening his books. People desire freedom. People also desire approval. When people move about the world they are threatened by difference. It is hard to see difference as a good thing. So some people, out of paranoia, attach themselves to large social entities - a church, a corporation, the military, the judicial system, government. Other people, see difference but instead of attaching themselves to the large social entities, want to fight these entities. They are afraid not of difference so much, but of being enveloped, becoming mere ciphers, lost in a large enterprise. These people easily attach themselves to people of similar fears,having also needs for relationship - but also nervousness about being engulfed, and they join sects. Not Church but sect; Not corporation but shop; Not military but militia; various libertarian dreamlands. The tenor of these places is fundamentalist - that they're true believers, true upholders of the constitution, true practitioners of capitalism. Deleuze describes this as the subjective black hole; the large entities as the wall of the signifier. It's scylla and charydis - two outcomes of fascism: one outside and the other inside. The person in the hole shakes his fist at the signifier; he is angry and directs his anger at the large entity - but he is angry because he's imprisoned; he's imprisoned himself. He is in the hole of his subjectivity, and he knows he's not free, which angers him - but he directs his anger, not at the hole, but at the signifier. The signifier doesn't care. His companions in the hole want to keep him in the hole - the fantasy of being "the real christians", "the real patriots", "the real capitalists" will yet play out!
Deleuze recommends avoiding the black hole and the signifier. His counsel for freedom is making connections, experimenting, with this in mind: connections don't close off but open up; experiments yield further experiments. Don't judge. Create!
I described this to my therapist and he said that it is my drawing that has saved me. I've drawn my way away from paranoia and out of black holes. Without drawing and painting, sometimes outlandish nudes, but often descriptions of pain - pain that I was feeling, even as I cooperated in my imprisonment, I would have remained in some hole (for me various tiny churches).
Now I'm out. I've been out - but I understand what I'm out from.
I know who I am and what I need.
And I'm only 50.

april so soon

2010-04-01T23:54:00.000-07:00

I can go months without posting. I have things I think about posting and then time slips by. Sometimes the method of getting images ready to upload is daunting. It's my perfectionist tendency.
Today, preparing to go home for my grandmother's funeral has worn me out. Every little frustration has been amplified.
Sometimes emotion floods through me like a flash flood in the desert: without warning a wall of water cavorts down a dry dusty arroyo.
I'm not posting a picture here. Later.
I think grief is like the parable of the lost coin. I've read that grief has a searching quality to it - like how a person might return again and again to an old spot. Searching for lost time, a lost feeling, a lost love.
In the parable Christ is saying that the kingdom of God is like this woman searching for a lost coin. The text in Luke 15 focuses on the woman searching for a coin that is lost and rejoicing in her rediscovery of it: likening such a discovery to the repentance of an individual. But the coin doesn't repent. It's lostness is not something it desires to change - it is the action of this woman that changes the state of the coin. So what is the subject of repentance in this parable and who repents. Could it be said that repentance issues from searching rather than lostness? Not a parable of a lost coin, per se, but of a searching woman?
While she is searching, she is spurred on by the grief of having lost. What have I lost? How could I have been so careless? She asks. She is frustrated, turning over furniture, clearing off shelves, retracing steps. She takes out and puts back in all the items of her house and her day. Does she find it "right where I left it?" Does she wonder, "How did it get there?"
She desires to feel complete again. To put this piece with its companion pieces. But does it, returned to its place, disappear into the crowd, losing its "lost" status. It becomes simply found. Desire is no longer focused on it.
Her joy is not in the coin, but in the finding. She's found her coin, which is rejoined to the other coins. But the coins themselves are just items of the household.
Parables do not lend themselves to easy correspondences.
The Kingdom of Heaven is like a lost coin. The Kingdom of Heaven is like a searching woman. The Kingdom of Heaven is like something we've lost. We are like a woman, tearing her house apart, retracing her steps, for a lost coin. We are like lost coins: we don't know that we're lost. We don't miss our companion coins. We don't miss being part of a collection. Under a floor board or stuck in a book, we're content.
Jesus in the temple knows exactly where he is, and wonders at his parents frantic searching. "I wasn't lost; I was right here," he says. Smart alleck.
Who repents in this parable? Why is repentance like this? Or instead of repentance: whose mind is changed - whose perceptions are altered? Or if not "metanoia" then the hebrew "shuv" - a turning. Did the woman turn and there it was? Did the coin find the woman? Like the coin in the mouth of the fish Peter caught - "to pay taxes for thee and for me."
A woman has 10 silver pieces and obsesses over one she lost. Her mind is filled with what she lost, rather than what she has. She has plenty. She has enough.
What was she thinking when she realized that she'd lost it? At some point she was at peace, content, and only on examination, perhaps pulling out her purse, hearing the comforting jingling of metal on metal, does it strike her that one is missing. Or perhaps she's putting them away and her grip is uncertain on one and she watches in dismay as it rolls away and too slow to respond, she doesn't notice where it went.
If she needs all ten, she is fucked. She has been careless. She lived in a false sense of security. Now she must hunt. Had she planned a nice evening? Had she looked forward to buying food, drink, a gift?
Not "I was lost but now I'm found" but "I lost and now I've found." The Kingdom of Heaven is not a passive state but an active state of searching. The first step is the shock of discovery: what I thought I had is gone! What is that? Our grief is where I consciousness of loss is. Our grief is where we begin searching. "I think I lost it" Lucinda Williams sings, "Nothing can replace it, no memory can erase it." Who knows if I've remembered her lyric right. Still.
Might this parable be about following our grief? Like Lamentations is about following grief. Naming it, not evading it, but going into it. Our grief leads us to the kingdom.

tiny paintings

2010-02-04T16:00:00.000-08:00

corner closet

2010-02-04T13:07:00.000-08:00

an acrylic, 36 x 52, reminiscent of childhood. Childhood has many terrors for some of us. I cannot speak for people who remember it as an idyllic time where an adult remembers being affirmed and taught. Instead I remember feelings of guilt and shame when I remember childhood. I seem to have learned wrong lessons - or not been aptly taught healthy ones. So this painted memory for me contains an element of terror. Perhaps not so for everyone. I remember the closet at my grandparents, filled with quilts, filled with fabric, dark and quiet, smelling like soap. Like bread. Like cotton and sweat.

gargantua

2010-01-26T18:04:00.000-08:00

Drawn when I was rating essays
a bull fight with a giantess
devouring the crowd
piagghi [sic] banging drum

Jami at Chicago's air port, the big one

2010-01-21T10:53:00.000-08:00

engine

2010-01-21T08:51:00.000-08:00

loading baggage at jackson hole

lines of snow

2010-01-21T07:42:00.000-08:00

lines of snow

pan

2010-01-21T07:10:00.000-08:00

I can't remember what Jami baked in this pan, but the pattern, the tonal range and arrangment of elements appealed to me.

the erratic

2010-01-05T13:24:00.000-08:00

we snow shoed over a moraine, exciting for me: this exploration of a glacial landform that I'd studied in class 26 years ago
now to finally walk where the glaciers scraped up boulders in their labored flow
leaving them behind in recession as the earth warmed
so that when i said, "there's an odd rock that seems to have nothing to do with its surroundings," our guide said, "that's a glacial erratic."
wonderful to see it there, where it's rested far from its origin
round and snow covered
how i wished it was in my back yard
like wordsworth's daffodils i recall it in my mind
and heft it on my shoulders
to bring to syssiphus that we might roll together
away from the hill and toward the beach
where such rocks form a marvelous jetty
that we may fish from
and all our friends

glorious new year 2010

2010-01-05T12:59:00.000-08:00

aspens on the granite canyon trail between moose and jackson hole

i'm learning from my disability, my eyesight, the eyesight that can't be fixed, that i don't want fixed
that if jesus were to walk in this room now and say
how'd you like to see like everyone else
i'd say no which astonishes
people and would me if the roles were reversed
and a cancer patient were saying that they
were happy with their cancer
or a deaf person their deafness
but my brain was formed around this disability
like tree roots meshed among the rocks
and though someone might quibble with the tree's formation
it's none the less rooted

tan

2009-12-06T22:19:00.000-08:00

before and after

2009-12-06T21:33:00.000-08:00

At the top, in a destroyed polaroid (intentionally) is a painting of a girl jumping through a hoop. The bottom image is that painting before I painted a dress on her. I like having both images.

busy loading images on facebook and forgetting to put things up here

2009-12-06T19:07:00.000-08:00

He is high and lifted up and his train filled the temple

so sang the pentecostal song leader at this little chuch

meeting in the bank basement in the middle of the week

where every week I brought mom for my appointment with despair.

He is high and lifted up and his train filled the temple

and I'm not certain if there's another verse to this song

over and over again, screaming practically at the top of her lungs

through pevy speakers in a room no bigger than 30 feet deep

if that

And his train filled the temple

my favorite part was when they insisted that I pray for my eye to be healed

that it was from the devil and I needed to "rebuke" satan

and claim the victory "thank you jaishus."

God help us

attempts to clothe some figures

2009-11-12T16:01:00.000-08:00

a pen and ink wash from 1993

2009-11-12T15:56:00.000-08:00

could it be that long ago - but witness the difficulty of capturing the tones

it's a delicate thing

a figure staring into a mirror

her face hidden but for her mouth

mystery and revelation at once

family photos on vacation at panama city in 1971 or 2

2009-11-12T08:40:00.000-08:00

top: my grand father stallworth, me, my cousin, kevin, my grand mother stallworth, nanny

middle: me, mom, dad

bottom: me, nanny, aunt sherrie

conjoined twin santa

2009-11-08T18:45:00.000-08:00

disco drawings

2009-10-25T20:13:00.000-07:00

The series reads from the end at the top to the beginning at the bottom. Revelers are stranded on a rock, perhaps temporarily or a bit longer, who simply began in a small club, without clothes, soon in a large group, then exhausting themselves in various diversions. On the rock they wait. It's very Blanchot.

introduction

2009-10-22T19:42:00.000-07:00

My therapist refers to a moment in my life as an introduction to adult sexuality - which is a funny way to think of it, almost a textbook kind of label. So I did three drawings, at least, on this theme of an introduction to adult sexuality: basically nude individuals loitering like walruses on the sunny rocks, their pudenda and secondary sexual characteristics hanging out nonchalantly.

bay area nudes

2009-10-22T17:13:00.000-07:00

What I did with the color and contrast functions that come in the basic editing function of what microsoft gives us to edit photos with on these things. The bottom reminds me of posters done in the bay area in the 1960s. Hence the title.

title page to an old sketchbook

2009-10-21T17:50:00.000-07:00

landscape

2009-10-21T15:46:00.000-07:00

drawings

2009-10-20T18:05:00.000-07:00

watercolor

2009-10-19T17:03:00.000-07:00

My continuing struggle

2009-10-19T00:21:00.000-07:00

Art - What I'm very good at; ministry - what I am modestly good at
And my history of trying to find things which final result is to sustain my art:
being a librarian, for instance, which didn't work that well.
And now I find myself in tension, even here: loving ministry and wishing dearly that I could make it work in a more artistic and creative way -
when most people I find myself in discussion with on the minnisterial side
have no idea of how art might be ministerial
.
They have never considered, and understandably they don't know what to tell me.
And how estranged I am from the art world in general.
I ask, How did that happen?
How is it that I have taken what the author of the Artist's Way, Cameron, calls creative u-turns.
So many times I've failed to take the risk
And instead I feel that I've listened to the wrong people
And myself am not necessarily the right person either -
that is, I talk myself out of things.
I think of crazy people who got things done
like Pat Keim or Harry Delorme, back in art school,
and wonder how I got stuck in conventionality
and risk aversion.
But there I was.
Now I puzzle over what opportunity might present itself for me.
Is there a ministerial angle and an artistic conjunction?
Am I still thinking too conventionally - probably.
How can I use my creative resources
which if someone said
Draw the craziest, most free associational image that will blow our minds
and I could do something
But if someone asks a simpler thing
As I might ask myself:
Chart an artistic career from this stopping point
using what you have
to make your own way.
Piplotti Rist pours her body out
Damien Hirst sells a dead shark
(I laugh at his quote in the recent artnet article where he says he is nervous about selling his paintings or his paintings' reception - but dead sharks tend to sell themselves)
I ask
What is my dead shark
How am I pouring my body out
?

sky imagery

2009-10-18T11:39:00.000-07:00

theory of painting

2009-10-17T20:38:00.000-07:00

aquarius

2009-10-17T19:51:00.000-07:00

I drew these while sitting at a table in the reading room of the Lilly Library on East Campus. I was probably sitting there with a stack of periodicals: October, Artforum, Art in America, Critical Inquiry, Flash Art, the New Yorker, Harpers, New York Review of Books, Art History, Burlington, Art Papers, Art on Paper, and other things I find essential for having close at hand on a early spring afternoon.

I should get a scanner in order to reproduce my images more accurately - there's wide discrepancy in how they clean up from the photos and the photos are bothered with shadows and discolorations, so that the reproductions here and elsewhere are hardly indicative of the quality of what I do. Sigh.

I find myself lately whistling this tune. The whole age of aquarius is apparently from Jung, but I didn't know that. What will future youth rebellions, 1968s, summer of loves, pattern themselves after? What will be their content? What old gurus will they borrow from? What indicators of that culture will appear in the previous ten years? Who in the 1950s could have guessed the 1960s? Who in 1955 could have guessed that this war the French were fighting for a colonial possession would become the life of their young boy, who was watching Howdy Doody at that moment. In ten years he's at Khe Sahn. Who could guess that these beat poets would begat Dylan? Or that Elvis would begat the Stones? That we'd go from Peggy Sue to Paint it Black? Or who would guess that segregation, which seemed so natural, so "the way it is" would come to an end. The 1960s didn't just happen. The seeds for it were in the 1950s and 1940s, even farther back.

Nothing remains in stasis. No era of prosperity or good feeling endures. Nor does depression - though depression digs further into the soul, sadly, than good things. Our country will come to an end - or at least the way we assume it is - and are we able to face it, to accept it (because certainly the ones coming after us will no more understand our "principles" than we understand such principles that preceded us as hoop skirts and using Thee and Thou) or will we pretend that we can stand upon the stream of change yelling stop. But it will be a flood.

Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.

water color - drawing - water color

2009-10-17T18:16:00.000-07:00

It seemed that I had to make my work more strange

2009-10-17T14:42:00.000-07:00

More play. More play. Life is too short now for conventions, for being bound to making sense, for reifying libido, for hearing that voice that demands conventionality. More play. More lines that might do anything, colors that might go anywhere. I've waited too very late. More play. More play.

baseball

2009-10-16T01:05:00.000-07:00

I love drawing baseball players, especially in those old baggy uniforms. How dainty Tris Speaker looked or even Ty Cobb. Imagine Cobb batting with Barry Bonds' or Galaraga's batting armor! Those big kevlar arm slings and ankle protectors they weilded because they stood so close to the plate - to salve the toll of getting hit. Cobb and Speaker played in a different era: the balls were softer, the dust chalkier, the bats were bamboo; coaches used semaphore and aldis lamps to convey signs to the players; the pony express positioned the outfielders.

So unlike now. Today players play on a grid, determined by senority and pay scale; they do what their press bio says they do and no more - except when an understudy takes their role. "Now playing the role of center fielder for the New York Metorpolitans" - booms the announcer at Chez corporate sponser field, where the grass was planted by microsoft - grown in their development labs for the last seven years, and sometimes they find they have to reboot the infield - but over all the grass performs fine, except when players from a mac sponsored field come to town. Then there are compatibility issues.

Cobb and Speaker never had to face this knid of thing; but today's players have never had to beat up a disabled man heckling them from the stands or take a job cleaning camel stalls during the off season.

Such are the vageries of the pastime. The national past-tense it's called - after a popular gravy of the day, used by soldiers on both sides of the civil war to cover the cabbage pies they had for breakfast, before they developed the game while they were prisoners of war. When they weren't prisoners of war, they went back to their passtime as prisoners of love. Some though were prisoners of Zenda - who inspired the 1950s hit Return to Zenda.

Baseball has provided my life with memorarble moments. My favorite right now was near the end of my playing days. I was playing softball (which is really hard) with Bob and Jeff at Rotary Park in Portales (though the park remains stationary now - the rotating mechanism having broken on a wandering elk) and a lofty fly was popped up right at me. I gauged my position, camped under the ball as it made its descent, pounded my glove, and just as I lifted it to receive the brown rotating sphere, I was struck on the forehead.

Another moment I remember was llistening to a game on radio. The Braves were playing Pittsburgh back when that meant something and Glavine, I think or it could'vee been Avery, was pitching a 2 hitter or even a one hitter. But the score was some bizarre thing lilke 1-0 or 2-1, and it was the ninth, and Van Slyke hit a shot, which Otis Nixon caught running and leaping up the wall in center field. Skip Cary was beside himself.

How I loved listening to him on the radio. Even now I rememeber listening to the Braves on TBS and hearing Cary and Johnson, and it's sad that it's impossible to listen to a game now - hidden as it is on cable, and no longer ubiquitous as their games are scattered on different outlets. I remember watching a Braves game in New Mexico or Colorado. No more.

I couldn't believe he caught that ball. But it was a crazy time when I knew that they'd find a way to win. Now I know that Soriano will find a way to give up a homerun to Ryan Howard or Brad Asmus.

Victory is elusive again. Which is not so bad.

I said that I listen to games on TV just now. I tend to draw and read while a game is on, only occasionally looking at it.

On the night Otis caught van Slyke's liner, I was sitting on a sun porch at night, listening to the radio.

My dad would sit in his study after working on the rail road all day, turn a Hawks game on the TV, a Braves game on the radio, and read the sports page.

That's another memory I have of baseball, or sports in Atlanta: the night Dale Murphy homered off Carlton as Wilkins hit a three pointer in over time vs Sacramento.

Which didn't happen, but that's what watching a game with dad was like, who sometimes looked up from the sports page.

I was thinking tonight that the winningest pitcher, Cy Young, might also have the most losses. That being, for instance (and here I'm mixing sports), the always winning quarterback is easy; losing is tough, it takes a toll. The quarter back who gets back on the field after a loss, after a bad play - how much mental toughness that takes.

Is it stubborness or persistance?

The Romans worshipped Victory, as did the Greeks. Nike! But Christ leads us to victory in his defeat. He helps us find victory in our defeat. We're all defeated. Death takes us all. Yet we're all in the game, even as the clock ticks down, and whether it's 70 years for us, 300 years for a nation, of 5 billion years for a planet - when the sun going red giant will vaporize even a carefully preserved Mona Lisa.

Baseball, as Carlin pointed out, stretches out to infinity. It's desire is to run home, to not get out. As Delueze points out, transcendence misleads us to seek some other place and some other time, when we are better off seeking the infinite possibilities where we are, right now, by making connections, bringing into existence, not judging. No judging: Kant never could.

As Branch Rickey used to say.

crazy stuff I draw in cheap sketchbooks

2009-10-15T20:56:00.000-07:00

Probably not that cheap, but somewhat convoluted, especially the bottom one. The top one exemplifies a kind of freedom, the freedom to cast away and still be whole. I wish that I lived back in the book of Kells day, because I feel that I could have done some wacky stuff - If the vikingts hadn't eaten me or the scralings had not munched on my bones, or the bitter cold hadn't eaten through me in my 30s. Still - drawing lines involuting and convoluting, folding on fold and infolding and complicating - such fun.

gorgons at play

2009-10-15T15:11:00.000-07:00

Among the images I drew while scoring essays: here "gorgons at play". They must have, have had some festivity, some access to enjoyment and letting go. The relentless turning men to stone - that must have drained them. Surely they recharged and engaged their playful side.

not the images I wanted to download, upload, whatever, but whatever.

2009-10-15T14:58:00.000-07:00

Nothing better to do with my time than uploading images

2009-10-15T14:16:00.000-07:00

An image.

I labled both these images "hallelujah" though only one has the word in it and the other is one of the working on the rail road images

2009-10-15T09:35:00.000-07:00

I was contemplating how certain books are labled "bible" such as "repairman's bible" (repair man's bible - what a strange sentence), "hiker's bible" and "bible scholar's bible" - how the suffix partical "bible" is used as a modifier to indicate that a volume is a handbook. But the Bible is hardly a handbook. All my life I've had old codgers and, now, sick patients tell me, pointing to the dusty tome on the TV - "all life's answers are in there." As if that ended the matter, resolved all debates, answered any questions at all. I've found that reading it "actually reading it" tends to engender questions and in some areas mystification.

But a repairman's bible, if it were to model the actual bible, the biblical bible, should begain with a mythic saga of origins, contain a quasi-historical etiological tale of how the device to be repaired came to be, that the device has in fact been 'exiled' (scrapped, broken), and that finally, the device cannot be repaired by the person reading the repairman's bible after all. The one person who did know how to fix the device, a dishwasher perhaps, lived long ago, died and wonderfully rose again (only to be called away to another part of the galaxy). The device can now only be repaired in the next life. Meanwhile, you are free to consider the device as OK - an imputed OK; it is 'virtually' OK. As far as the manufacturer is concerned, the device is OK - even though it does not work. Finallly the repairman's bible would end with a violent tale of the end, where the manufacturer clears creation of all defective merchandise - wherein people whose dishwasher had broken, and who had resorted to doing dishes by hand while considering that the manufacturer claimed that their product was OK, and being promised a working dishwasher 'in the next life', discover, on the manufacturer's return in the apocolyptic scenario, that they can now eat with their hands. The dishwasher now no longer will matter, in the future, when dishes and glasses have been done away with. Hallelujah.

I've been working on this water color for the last several years

2009-10-15T08:18:00.001-07:00

Several years ago, when I was water coloring some color dropped on this page and over time I've kept this page with the other things I'm working on letting it work itself and seeing where it might go. Eventually I signed it, in the lower corner, which may not be visible in these shots, which are cropped a bit.

Someone, a straw man or woman, or a real man or woman, might say, "well you're just letting it happen and calling it art - I could do that." But such an attitude misses the point. Yes, art is easy. Anyone could be putting color on surfaces and, if they let themselves go, produce good pieces. It is possible, under the dictates of mimesis, to make things difficult. The problem with any aesthetic that puts copy=real forward is that versimilitude is not a satisfying end in itself. And even versimilitude is accessible to anyone. Anyone can paint a photorealist painting: get yourself some copies of american artist and practice. After awhile it'll be easy.

The thing is, all art is easy. What isn't easy is the letting yourself go. What isn't easy is the love. Art springs from love and need - the need to make images and the love of using materials. If materials are just a means to an end, then the work will be artless - and if there is no need - then there will be no art made.

It is frustrating that we judge art based on cost, replacement value. And it is frustrating that we judge artists based on fame and money making potential. As human beings our earliest real kin are the earliest artists. Ancient humanity did not start corporations or leave behind ledgers - but they painted and sculpted.

Would that the world was filled with folk artists: making constructions in boxes, painting without rules, crafting and assembling structures and images bringing together disparate elements, dropping paint on paper, over throwing their super egos, their editing out of their creativity.

But it is not. Human beings are taught to conform, to shut up, to follow the rules, to mimic - and in that case, is it any wonder that we are diverted from being artists to being mimics - indeed believing that a mimic is an artist. That the artistry is the mimicry and not the value added of ourselves that lifts the mimicry to the authentically human and humane.

progression, 30 years

2009-10-15T06:39:00.000-07:00

The top two and the bottom 2 drawings are 31 years apart. This is what the work of thirty years is for me. The middle drawing is 3 years after the bottom two - and illustrates how I had begun moving away from my post high school style. What remains constant is the level of imagination and my willingness to assemble disparate elements. I think I'm at my best when I don't care if things make sense.

stuff

2009-10-14T19:14:00.000-07:00

skinnydip

2009-10-12T22:03:00.000-07:00

untitled

2009-10-11T15:46:00.000-07:00

two drawings

2009-10-11T11:55:00.000-07:00

I called these drawings ink and ink2 and when I did them, two summers ago, my pen was wearing out. Because the tube in the technical pen was bent and worn after much use, the flow of ink was problematic. My typical effort to create flow was to take the nib apart, rinse in water, and reassemble it - a time consuming process I don't recommend to people without patience. I loved these messy results as I drew not just with the pen but with the ink that had become smeared on my hands and fingers.

a rumination on the notion of a master signifier and christianity

2009-10-09T18:33:00.000-07:00

This morning I was reading Zizek's Parallax View and among many intriguing observations I came across his discussion of the master signifier and his assertion that such a signifier must be empty. The "nation" for instance is such a signifier in the way the concept is used. People talk about "the nation" as the rational for all kinds of behavior - but what do they mean? The master signifier must be always in the offing, never concrete, thus empty; and the reason is something I relate to Merleau Ponty's thought in the Phenominology of Perception: that the Other is transcendent to me up to the point where he speaks. Speech breaks the illusion of transcendence because then that person is just like me. And so the master signifier cannot speak ever - it must remain mute in order to have an effect or evince power. And what then is the master signifier of Christianity but Christ - between the burning bush and the Damascus Road there is a great silence - that is, for us, between the encounter with the law and the encounter with grace the Christian pivots on a necessarily empty, potential, space. And so Jesus is emptied by the believer (a phenominon we see in the church where people don't know what to say about Jesus, or Jesus is the sum of their projections, having no resemblance to the person depicted in the gospels) -What is the Christian experience: God is crucified, and thus the demand of the law is cancelled. And so we believe in an empty tomb, and we call this emptiness, this poetntial of resurrection or rebirth from death, Christ. At the Damascus Road God is reborn (a weaker but parallel rebirth would be the Emmaus Road and some other appearances - but these appearances fail to produce change, a new direction - the law is abbrogated, but people have nowhere to go - it remains for Paul to give them somewhere: the new creation). And this time instead of enjoining law, the new believer is ushered into grace.

This is Paul's discovery. This is perhaps why Paul's letters, big on the cross and what it accomplishes, are so abbreviated in painting any portrait of Jesus. Paul emphasizes the emptiness of Jesus when he says we no longer know him in the flesh but in the spirit. That is, any attempt to supply biographical content to Jesus as master signifier breaks the illusion of transcendence and robs the believer of the gift of grace. In all this Paul is not docetic - he retains the sense that God in Jesus became a man - but he empties out the actual life of that man. Jesus = 0. Marcion indeed did understand Paul, but Marcion's error is to suppose two Gods, an old one of violence and a new one of love, when what we have is the crucified law-God, the God that demands, reborn as the God of grace, the freedom-giving God who enjoins us to act "true to ourselves" in the phrase "what will you give in exchange for your soul."

The other meditation I had was a reflection on faith and works inspired by my cursory reading of Jean Luc Nancy. In considering what "my faith by my works" in James' letter might be, I inverted the Pauline/Lutheran concept "justification by faith alone without works" as "non-justified by non-faith alone." I applied an artistic prinicple of defining an object by its negative space - when I outline an object's negative space I should arrive at the same contours as if I had outlined its positive space. In this I saw that what non-justifies me is my non-faith. No work or no non-work non-justifies me. That is, the category of non-fiath has no works of sin. Sin, it seems, does not condem me. Sin as faith's opposite (where in Romans Paul says that what is not faith is sin) is put forth by Paul - but Paul does not speak of any classic "sin" as being that which non-justifies me. He doesn't say that people are non-justified by any action on their part (no matter how eggregious, perverse or outside the bounds). So I wonder if when we talk about justification by faith - and then talk about needing to quit sinning, if we're talking about two different things. Paul talks about entering the gift of grace via leaving non-justification by non-faith behind and moving into the category of justificaiton by faith and finding life - hence we are set free by the reborn God. Paul does not talk about entering this state in terms of "not sinning" - that term is the language of the dead God that we crucified. So we find life when we crucify the God of demands (the super ego, the big other, policeman) and in fact we must crucify this God so that God, when reborn, ushers us into a new life (our vocation) of grace and freedom. All this we have in Jesus - out of whose emptiness comes all abundance.

water color

2009-10-08T19:24:00.000-07:00

2009-10-08T19:23:00.000-07:00

poetry magazine cover

2009-10-08T18:52:00.000-07:00

When I don't like the cover for an issue of Poetry, I paint one I like. All my issues of poetry are amply illustrated with sumptuous pen and ink drawings and occasional water colors. I'm especially adept at integrating image and text.

4 years apart

2009-10-08T16:06:00.000-07:00

The top drawing is from a work I did in the summer of 1978 and the bottom image is from a sketchbook I was working on in 1982.

skeleton play

2009-10-08T12:26:00.000-07:00

The top drawing is a skeleton Annunciation I did last January durning a group meeting. You can see a skeleton fetus and, cropped out of my snapshot, a skeleton descending dove. I supposed I wanted to reify the incarnation, to describe it as an actual event, in terms of its concrete presence: there would be such armatures since metaphors don't have bones and structure.

waves, folds

2009-10-08T12:01:00.000-07:00

rumination

2009-10-07T06:06:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning thinking, like every morning as far back as I can remember. I've been thinking of Barth's statement in CD III 3 about how are lives are bracketted by two events, birth and death, and it is these limitations that give us a history. Without ends we would have no story. I am born and have no consciousnous of before being born. I had no choice in that. I remember no felicity or torment. I appeared on the scene - things were already going on: the civil war had happened; immigration from Europe had happened; the Bible had all happened. I learned English in the American South among people who were upper working class/lower middle class; people with prejudices, weaknesses, and limitations about their own best interests - as well as good hearts, loyalty, and pragmatism with a sense of play.
And here I am, 49 years later. The old house is a used car lot; the old farm is a subdivision and day care center; the old south is now infused with diversity.
I am part of a human organism. An organism that began forming 6 million years ago; that began creating art 25000 years ago.
I am consciousness in matter and I can't say how it might be that matter is conscious. I can't say that a tree, though living, is conscious, or that a bird is conscious - the bird, like a dog or cat, is capable of attachment and recognition.
I am in ostensibly the same body I've always had - but it is not the same. My body has changed and grown with little input from my thoughts outside of exercise and diet.
The matter of my flesh and the matter of the air and the matter of this desk are all composed of energy in positive and negative charges, attracted and repelled, solid liquid and gas. Mathematically the room I'm in could be represented by a matrix of ones and zeroes. And how does this matrix change when I'm in the room and move around? Ones and zeroes are added and subtracted along a curve of time. Along that curve of time my consciousness expresses itself, and , as Merleau Ponty says, extrudes time behind.
My self itself is made up of conscious and unconscious. The unconscious does what it does, thinks what it thinks, with no prompting from my conscious. My conscous can only discover what is in the unconscious through projection and free association. If I repress anything, it is my ego's desire not to change that holds it secreted. Since I don't want to see this repressed thing, the unconscious plays about with it - perhaps the unconscious doesn't want it either.
What is the meaningfulness of life among these facts?
Am I being myself? Or am I lost in distractions?
Looking at a photo the other day, a photo of something I thought I remembered well, I was struck with how much was contrary to my memory. I thought, "life, reality is a Russian novel, and I've constructed a comic strip." Of course, the comic strip is now in the novel.
I think this is the thrust of some sayings of Christ: What will you give in exchange for your soul? for instance. Every day I feel that I've exchanged my soul for something. I once had a job that I felt absolutely ate away at my soul. When I was laid off, I felt that I'd recovered my soul, even though I'd lost my livelyhood. Another saying: If you lose your life you'll find it. Perhaps this is a contrast of the Life we find ourselves pursuing, wherein we ask ourselves, What are we doing? The life that after 30 years we ask ourselves, What happened? How did I get here? Did I just give this in exchange for my soul? What was it worth. And a final saying, Except a grain fall to the ground and die, it abides alone, but if it falls and dies it bears much fruit.
And that is the conundrum. We fight that feeling of being alone. We are part of a million year old organism, of which our part is maybe 70 years. In that 70 years we may have a few real connections. Perhaps 50 or more years with a lover, a spouse, a friend.
We abide alone, afraid to die, to give up our hold on what we think is life - a career, a social standing.
Whatever distracts us from who we are.
The question is How to have the career and social standing while at the same time being aware, living, relating.

a nearly perfect photo

2009-10-05T18:15:00.000-07:00

I found this photo of my dad's mom, Granny Wise, and his sister, Mary, circa 1956. A photo I think dad took. The original has a smoother gray scale: that is, when I look at it I see so many different grays, more than in the typical photo. The tone and poses, the activities, all have a stasis, an equipoise that speaks to me. When I first saw it, I thought: the perfect photo. And I could be wrong, but some criteria. But to me, the balance, the solitude, the quiet implied here, were so compelling. It is not a flashy image. Nothing incredible is happening here. Just a mother and daughter preparing dinner. That table was still sitting in that kitchen 50 years later. The interior is not that different. There's now a fixture overhead, newer appliances and a sink in the corner in the back. But it's so very much the same. Well - now Granny Wise is staying with my dad and they're selling the house. Who lives in a house 60 years anymore?

I'm turning my bible, like all my books, into an altered book

2009-10-04T17:18:00.000-07:00

I'm drawing like mad in my Bible, which shouldn't surprise my friends. The bottom drawing is a favorite, Yahweh walking on the vault of heaven. Remember, the ancients, up through the early renaissance, believed that the earth was part of a physical reality that was within reach, that one place was reasonable placed near another - in many ways just the opposite of today's assortment of facts: we live on a rock covered with a thin atmosphere suspendend in space orbiting a sun incredibly distant from the stars, which are not intelligent celestial bodies but fussion reactions blazing away with immense gravitationally induced heat amid a cold, empty space. No gardens of the hesperdies, arcadia, golden lighted dances among the spheres, musically playing above the orbit of the moon. Even young earthers can't deny the facticity of where the earth is and how it's situation is uterly descrepent with the observation of scripture. Scripture's observation is all right with me, just like the Illiad's observation is - I'm not expecting scientific verification in ancient texts; I expect these texts to reflect the milleu they were written in. They operated with the best knowledge they had, which was direct observation. If anything, this shows the flaws in direct observation. The Holy Spirit could have been sending a zillion volts of knowledge into the minds of the yahwest and priestly source, and they would have still operated on the ancient paradigm - it's the way they had been wired through their experience and the absorbtion of common knowledge.

I still like the image though. Much like CS Lewis in his Discarded Image: God tromping around on the vault of heaven like an old man in the attic looking for some old photos; and how wonderful to think that the stars were celestial bodies filled with conscousness and intelligence, as we are but immortal and all knowing, influencing us with their various powers according to the time of our birth and time of day; that there needs be no Progress, because all is made perfectly right and decreed as such by the immutable decree of God, the unmoved mover who moves as he is beloved. It's nice to think that, but it doesn't reflect the facts. And so scripture doesn't reflect facts, as such, but retains an inerrancy, a very small 'i' inerrancy, as it exists in light of the life of Christ as revealed in our minds and sealed on our hearts by the holy spirit.

I'm having a great deal of fun with the song of solomon.

three cheers

2009-10-04T12:01:00.000-07:00

I've been drawing small pieces lately since I've run out of my standard 7 x 9 in meridian paper. I got a larger pad ordered through Amazon and I'm tearing the paper in two. Here I'm drawing in the margins of my Poetry magazine this recurring image of myself, Whitmanesque, pen in one hand, sometimes hoisting a brew, a stout, an ale, an ipa, in the environ of a bar, books handy, a plate with wings or pork sandwich half consumed. Such for me is an eschaton, the game on the TV. Perhaps Jami will come by or perhaps she's already here, and then all things are perfect. Outside on the street it's still sunny, perhaps mid summer. Maybe Bob will come by and play shuffle board.

from beginning to end

2009-10-04T11:17:00.000-07:00

I dont' have any photos available here of Mattie Fay between 1932 and 1986, but I do have these two photos from the final 15 years of her life. In the top photo, she'd been at the nursing home for some months, having had strokes and experiencing dementia. I don't know what to call it. I remember her once saying that she felt like her head was in a knot. Eventually who she was didn't resemble anyone we'd known. We would visit but each visit felt odd, as if we were talking with a child or a stranger.

Early images of my grandmother, Mattie Fay, her family and my grandfather

2009-10-04T10:12:00.000-07:00

The bottom photo, which must be Mattie Fay at her father's funeral in 1918, is so evocative of the 19th century South: the mule, the bonnet, taking a photo in a graveyard - who does that? And then the photos of her with her mom and siblings, alone on the school grounds that was in the mill town her family moved to. And the top photo, my grandfather courting her, in the graveyard next to his daddy's farm. I like how this set is bracketed by two graveyard photos. These photos as well are source photos for the Working on the Rail Road chapbook. My grandmother, for some reason, comes to mind when I hear the song Little Maggie. A song that seems out of character for my teatotaling, church going, grandmother. But then, as she told me, she and my grandfather lived a much rougher life when they first married.

The cover to I've been working on the rail road

2009-10-04T08:44:00.000-07:00

It's on a much larger piece of paper, 10 x 12 or something like that. Meanwhile I continue to expand this theme. I think it is tied into my lifelong frustration with not being heard. I don't get the sense that anyone listens to me: outside of Jami and a few friends. Perhaps you [whoever might be reading this, if anyone] too have had to struggle to insert an observation only to have the conversation continue like nothing was said. Certainly there's a question of relevancy. I ask Am I relevant. Sometimes it's true I'm not. Certainly there's that verse in James that counsels us to be slow to speak and quick to listen.
And I've lived a passive life - because of this? I don't know. I could stand to be more aggressive, more assertive. And I work on that. I work on that understanding aggressive not as ranting or being thoughtless. But standing up for myself. I find that I don't often enough. Defering to others is not my problem. Speaking up for myself is.
I see other people who are good at it.
I wonder what that's like.
In the song, working on the rail road, someone asks for Dinah to blow her horn - which Dinah never does. No one hears the watchman or captain calling - all the livelong day. Do we really hear the whistle blowing? Is it too early in the morning? Meanwhile time passes away. And what is a rail road but two parallel lines disappearing on an horizon - two lines that lead forward, not backward, in time, to a vanishing point, oblivion, the eschaton. Does anyone listen to the singer's warning. Are they caught up, strumming on the old banjo. Dinah trapped in the kitchen [an early feminist critique: women could help if they weren't trapped in the kitchen] by someone - the super ego, the big other. Dinah is a huntress and her skills are being wasted by this someone. The trumpet, the horn, to be blown is the 7th seal, the final blow. The banjo, an instrument of African import, also slaves away, strummed upon, a sturm and drang, and so the Hegelian master/slave dialectic comes to the fore. The eschaton, the millenial kingdom on earth is delayed by human preoccupations with power dynamics.
In the end working on the rail road is a diversion from creativity, a cul de sac, much as my father experienced. A necessity, certainly: food, clothing, housing - such needs, but the humanistic needs, the existential need, goes unmet.
I remember the old commercial "who needs america's rail roads? We do!" which played when I was very young. But do we need this?

WotRR image 14 and a source image

2009-10-03T15:26:00.000-07:00

WotRR images 9-11, 13

2009-10-03T15:19:00.000-07:00

WotRR images 4-8

2009-10-03T15:06:00.000-07:00

Things develop and morph. By image 8 I'm letting lines go and not worrying over surface details. I'm more concerned with composition and creating a sense of freedom and energy. Lately I've been thinking about how, because of childhood trauma, I have lived what I call a disembodied life. I noticed this in Chicago, walking through the Art Institute, and then it hit me looking at the Gustons and the Twomblys - that what I'm looking for lies in the direction of putting out myself in the image. That on the one hand my super ego constrains and inhibits me toward a sense of mimesis and need for precedent - while on the other hand my id and libido demand gratification. What gets lost in this dialectic is what makes the work mine. Jung would probably put the conflict between my shadow and my persona - a dialectic that avoids integration in a self because the persona and shadow aren't directly engaged with the ego. Deleuze might talk about how I judge too much and should concentrate on bringing into existence - take whatever I find and connect it to whatever comes. There's value in all these viewpoints - all lead to a sense of freedom with materials on a surface corresponding with a freedom inside me.

I've been working on the rail road images 1-4

2009-10-03T11:32:00.000-07:00

The first four drawings in my series of "I've been working on the rail road", a song I sing a lot lately, perhaps for it's simplicity. I alter the melody, this morning for instance singing it altered to the tune of U2's Bloody Sunday. I change the verses around and language, singing the song backwards: The banjo strums in kitchen all alone/ Dinah blows her horn to pass the time/ The watchman rails upon the road I've worked/ all day along. When I take the principle of unreliable narrator to the song, mysteries are opened up. What events does this song chronicle? Is it a veiled reference to a Pinkerton union busting activity, a miners' strike?

How do we account for Dinah's reluctance to blow the horn? That she must be asked repeatedly. Who is this person in the kitchen with her? Is there a person at all, or do we merely suspect? And the banjo strumming. An old banjo and not a new one? Does a person really work on the rail road just to pass the time away? All day long? Early in the morning?

In the second drawing from the top, you can see the banjo player's foot on a bit of rail. The only real reference visually to rail roads in any of the series.

I'm also confused about whether a watchman or a captain shouts for Dinah to blow her horn. This song has been around since I was small, singing it in 2nd grade. Yet it's not the classic that Little Maggie is (another song that as I have worked on this series has settled in; another song that has two sets of lyrics, and I wonder in the end of the song, What is this image of her on the banks of the ocean with a 45 strapped around her and a baby?)

I've been working on the rail road is almost as banal song a Polly Waddle Doodle all Day - which opens The Wild Bunch. Still while that song defies decoding, Working on the Rail Road invites it. And so: I have the dialectice of the chess match: a reference to Jung's notion that the unconscious and conscious exist in a dialectic. The characters around them are not distractions but archetypes, symbols indicating an unknown goal - as Jung also said.

Here's a typical frontpiece

2009-10-03T11:20:00.000-07:00

Part of my series "I've been working on the railroad" - a series where I repeat the central theme objects: chess players, cat, banjo, trumpet, minister with raised hands. Through repition things change. I relate this development to Berryman's Dream Songs.

Marginalia from my copies of Poetry Magazine

2009-10-03T11:02:00.000-07:00

One thing I enjoy about Poetry, besides the fact that it consists of poetry, is that the paper is conducive to a type of line, having a good tooth and not slick, and that the white space provided by the format of poems allows for some fun integration of image and text. For me it's practice. Sometimes I find that I do some images that I wish I had done on more artistic paper, higher rag content, more seperable, more presentable. Still I'm content with the volumes, which, when money runs low for purchase of more paper, serves twin functions: material to read and space to draw upon.

folds

2009-09-28T14:17:00.000-07:00

Deleuze emphasizes folds as a metaphor for how concepts open up, how life opens up. Merleau Ponty uses folds to say that "unfold time behind us" or that time folds up behind us. There is this sense that as with a crease, we both sense and nonsense reality. Things are folded away from us. Things fold out. We have a sense of expansion and contraction, as with an accordion, that things can seem temporaly near but spatially distant, or vice versa. Like a gag trick folds indicate that more is nested in a problem than we supposed, or that more can be pulled out, as with the magician and the handkercheif, one after another. Or sentences in Tristram Shandy, containing subordination within suborination, parenthetically paranthetical and apositive alongside apositive.

Artistically folds give us clues to the contour and mass of an object. A flat surface tells us nothing. As the surface becomes scarred, creased, differentially rubbed, more is disclosed. So a fold discloses even as it hides.

Deleuze uses the french Pli and its prefixes and suffixes: complicate, explicate - to describe how folds fit into our concepts of description.

a visit to the museum

2009-09-27T19:46:00.000-07:00

I spent Saturday in the Art Institute of Chicago and most of it in the new wing where they've moved contemporary and 20th century art. I couldn't photograph the Twombly exhibit (which is gorgeous - and I've not been warm to Cy in my life - but here: here are large panels of greens and reds and yellows, where the paint is allowed to course down the surface). Instead I was drawn to the Richard Gober - whose work I'd never seen as a total installation before. The Nasher here in Durham just displayed the litter bag - why show that at all if the rest of the installation is left out? The Guston - I fill more Guston as I grow older. I understand what he's doing. And the comparison with late Morandi - so apt: the hesitancy, the letting things be (a quality I discerned in the Twombly) and the confidence to just let them be. I found this in the Charles Ray who recapitulates Smithson's installation of a tree filling a gallery - although he carved the thing and hollowed it out. So you could say Ray did one more step in the repetition. And the Picasso head of 1927 - perhaps the most Klee like image Picasso did. I went back to this again and again. I couldn't leave it alone.

For me, the art institute is a spiritual experience - as are most great museums: the MFA in Boston, the Metropolitan and MoMA, LA's museum, and Atlanta's - though my home museum is a poor relation. The sad thing is is that the three here in the Raleigh Durham area don't amount to one gallery of either of the first three museums. And don't get me going on what London has to offer: the Courtauld, the National, both Tates.

I go to church for something. Oh yeah.

creation of eve and stuff

2009-09-25T06:26:00.000-07:00

[an addition from the codex beaze, a palimpsest in a margin, underneath the text, aside a rubric and a cartoon of a donkey riding a rickshaw]
"And not just wars and rumors of wars but peace and rumors of peace
and price hikes as well as discounts
and there'll be adjustments for inflation
and people will lose money
and people will make money
people will be getting together for lunch and dinner and eating too much and laughing too much
and many people will not have enough to eat but will still find ways to laugh
and enjoy human relationships.
Basically things will be predicatable
Even moreso, to the point of cliche
and veneration of kitsch and the wrailings against them in all high-minded quarters.
And there'll be plenty of stupidity to go around: two blind men will fall in a ditch, for example, and one will be taken to an infirmary and the other will be left behind
because he was unseen and unheard by the blind rescuers -
oddly enough, he'll be the one to survive. So there'll be lots of irony
And some will get it and others won't,
and some will confuse irony with coincidence
and others will take it or leave it.
As it was in the days of Noah
When the whole earth was flooded and all life destroyed, except for the sea creatures and microorganisms, especially those things that have been living in arctic glaciers all this time,
So it will be in those days.
And pray that your flight isn't delayed
and you have to make a connection at DFW
cause then you're SOL.
The thing is, I said, "no one knows the day or the hour," so quit trying to pin down a day or describe a scenario that means it's just got to happen.
Remember the ending of the book of Jonah: God changed his mind and Jonah was left hanging.
Let that be a sign to you: God talks about fire and cataclysm and armageddon, but She lilkes reconciliation, rebirth and slavation a whole lot more --
a lot more than you probably do.
In fact if you're in this because you want a front-row seat to witness the wholesale destruction of what you hate - you'll be disappointed."

In Luke's gospel for instance, when the disciples think it would be a good idea to rain down fire from heaven to consume unrepentant villages, Jesus thinks otherwise. God doesn't get caught up in projections and countertransference like we do. Whether stuck in rush hour traffic with nothing on the radio and late for an appointment or putting back a cold one at the local pub, God's pretty much the same even-kelned, unflappable Guy/Gal, trinitarian perichoresic being, simple and one and three and complex. Of course that's just one of the ways we're different.

Self portrait with mackeral

2009-09-24T04:42:00.000-07:00

Cartoonishness is the most difficult critique of my work that I grapple with. Sometimes the lines are too facile. But is it not also a strength. A strength when pushed in the right direction - when pushed into or along with my imagination.
I can only go in the direction I am. In the past I've gotten into cul de sacs: places where I fall in love with a principle. For instance, there was a time 31-28 years ago that my work consisted of dots with really faint lines linking them. I am now uncertain what I thought I was doing. The positive thing was: I continued to make images. That's what I can say: every day or so I make a drawing or two or three or four or five or ten.
So Here is a fine drawing of me holding a mackeral.

ruminations

2009-09-20T00:20:00.000-07:00

The bottom drawing needs to be rotated counterclockwise. Sometimes things come out sideways and I don't catch it in the tiny thumbnails.

I love the top two watercolors, perhaps the simplest things I've done.

Blanchot, in Waiting Oblivion, repeats the phrase, which I misremembered later: the phrase - act so I may speak to you. I remembered: Speak so I can hear you.

I like both. I felt that what I misremembered was helpful for CPE.

So much of our speaking is framed such that we are unheard.

Do people really believe that they'll be heard for their rants. The the person being ranted at and the people being ranted among, are actually attuned, listening?

It feels good to the ranter. And certainly I've ranted plenty. And my ranting has done me no good.

The rhetorical tradition doesn't have a category for ranting. Nor bloviation - a wonderful word that depicts what it sounds like: imagine a fat jowled speaker, hand on chest, red faced, other hand gesturing wildly, the heat and light.

It's what I imagine CS Lewis was implying somewhere where he indicated that people become their sins, and in one instance describing someone has having become simply a complaint. I think it might be in the Great Divorce.

Speak in such a way that I may hear you.

Blanchot is like that. A writer engaged by a variety of French philosophers: Jean Luc Nancy, Levinas, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida. I'm almost certain that I'm going to pick up some new volume and someone else will be refering to him.

Blanchot and Celan speak to the issue of our relationality and silence and waiting.

I'm just beginning to read him myself.

Meanwwhile I'm picking up Rauschenberg and Smithson again, after years, both artists exemplifying association and entropy. Ah, to rediscover entropy after all these years: the principle that the work we create is deteriorating the moment we sign it.

How our world tries to live as if entropy did not dog our every move.

Yet even we wear out.

It is hard to grapple with, that one day I won't be here. Just like my mom isn't here, or my grand fathers or my mom's mom, and one day my dad's mom, my dad. My wife. Beautiful and smart.

Quick eyes under earth's lid - Pound writes about soldiers, but about any human being it would suffice to say.

Of course I just appeared in history as well.

A history where certain things had already happened: Babylon, Rome, Charlemagne, Lee and Grant, Washington and Cornwallis, the Devil and Daniel Webster.

I just happened, came to consciousness in the body of a boy growing up in north Georgia in the 1960s, speaking English, seeing with one eye, going to school and being miserable. Trying to piece together reality from fragments: why my dad was aloof, why we read these books and not others, why are we moving, why am I alone.

What a wonder it is to be alive. To breathe air and to feel the sand under my hands at the beach. To touch a branch and shake the leaves, listening to their rustling sound. What a wonder to see light touching a table in a dark room early in the morning, while even the cats are asleep.

How can it be that any of us may have this and then it is gone?

Ecclesiastes, Job, Lamenations, all testify to the early Hebrew belief that this life is all there is. The Psalmist writes, "the dead will not praise you" in more than one place. Only with Daniel in 165 BCE do we get an inkling of resurrection. Isaiah 26 as well - but what is that? 400 BCE may be, 3rd Isaiah. Resurrection and heaven: not Greek Ideas but Persian.

Christ turns the Psalmist's words aside with his assertion that "all live to God. He is not the God of the dead, but of the living." Christ's words here have a hint of Berkeley to them: esse est percipi: the tree in the forest makes a sound because God hears it. God actualizes all our existenses by virtue of her creative omnipresence, infusing time and space in infinite and sinuous ways, we do not fail to Be and are held in Beingness by a God who is Being and Becoming along with us, behind us and before us.

Barth, Jungel, the reformed tradition, are great in emphasizing that the sole purpose of Believing in Jesus is that the most important thing about life after death is being with Jesus in the inter Trinitarian relations, the divine perichorises.

That Jesus is not a means to an end, a ticket to continued existence, where you get to meet great people and converse with them, play basketball with rejuvenated hall of famers, eat fried chicken with the family again on the old porch under the shade trees on the old farm while Rex cavorts in the yard and it's perpetually July 10th.

Jesus promises that we'll be with him. And he and the early church thought that that was a good enough reason for people to leave all, take up their cross and follow him.

This being the case - and it's the strongest case that can be made from scripture and from Jesus' words, it is astonishing the elaborate end of world scenarios and heaven as the apotheosis of free market capitalism memes running afoot.

Again, even in Revelation, the purpose of eternal life seems more to do with worship of God and nothing, not a shadow of a trace of a palimpsest, about self actualization, self realization. We'll be with Jesus.

What does that mean? Some 1st century wandering apocalyptic prophet, resembling a cynic, throwing out cryptic lines like "love your enemy" "the first will be the last and the last first". Victor Furnish points out that Jesus seemed to command love - he didn't inspire it - a phrase that grates on our need for the seamless hero, the docetic Jesus.

So this guy? Paul writes that we knew him in the flesh but now no more; now we know him by faith in the spirit.

Paul is not speaking of Christ in the vague way we might speak of someone being with us in spirit. Paul believed that Christ was physcially present and real, as real as he was or anyone could be. More so.

To me, this is where faith becomes difficult, but the most rewarding. Take away the projections, the wish fulfillment fantasies, and ponder a question without answer: a question that requires rephrasing at every step.

Yet I am drawn ever in. Great is the mystery of Faith: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.

Live in such a way that I may speak to you.

Speak in such a way that I may hear you.

Listen in such a way that emptiness is filled over flowing.

two drawings

2009-09-19T17:03:00.000-07:00

The top drawing is myself, painting, in a mode implying a puzzle.

The bottom drawing is not an image of Eve (though it's all right if people think so, or nearly all right if they think it - however, it's not right that they assert it). It is an image that is polysemous, sure, but in an hellenistic way: either Europe and Zeus (the bull) or queen Pasiphae and the bull of Poseidon (the sire of the Minotaur). Other clues are incorporated: a tortoise and hare, a fluted Greek column in the background. What about the snake (and this seems to tip people off in the garden of eden direction: nude woman and snake - gotta be Eve and the serpent [note serpent, not Satan - who is not in the garden episode; yet people seem to insert him into the garden episode frequently])? The snake refers to the Greek god of healing, starts with an A, sounds like Aesclypius but I'm not sure, as well as to the Cauducus that's part of the Doctor symbol you see on various medical buildings and stationaries. All ancient peoples loved snakes and naked women. For instance: well known minoan figurine is of a topless woman weilding snakes in her hands like thunderbolts. Snakes and naked women - not just confined to the Hebrews - who probably got the idea from the Persians anyway. If this was the garden of Eden, I'd have put a ziggurat, not the greek column, in the background, and included Adam, or a canvas of Adam being painted by St. Paul, who invented the way we see Adam now out of whole cloth supplied by the book of Maccabees.

Anyway, I really like this drawing. I did it on CPE day as some speaker rhapsodied on about Evon Agazarian and system centered group processes. Benzene molecules and various chemical diagrams are in this drawing. And it has a nice overall tonality - I've saturated just about every 1/8th square inch of it with my quick tiny darting pen strokes. Rapture.

A whole segment of christiandom awaits rapture - conspicuously that segment that seems most divorced from knowing what rapture is or being capable of it.

What if some sect decided to make a central doctrine out of the word orgasm. The climax of God's kingdom here on earth. Jesus shall come ...

I'm sure that's been done before. It's cheap. Cheap and beneath me.

Still I like both these drawings. The top one hasn't had quite the career in generating misconceptions yet.

Misconception - there's an interesting word.

I would hate to misconceive the immaculate conception.

That would be like misconstruing flowers at a wedding.

Garcipara's wife - that's a misnomer. An eggregious pun dependent on people knowing Redsox shortstops.

I like both drawings. They exhibit intricacy and inventiveness.

And the stars around the head of the nude woman refer to the stars around the virgin in the immaculate conception, and the virgin's prior identity with Aphrodite, the stella maris, the star of the ocean, as she was called, which ties the greek and hebraic symbols together. Another image that ties early christian with ancient symbols together is the image of Isis holding Horus [I think it's Horus, it's Isis' kid anyway]: looks just like a madonna and child. Much christian iconography makes use of precursors, Roman, Greek, Persian. These associations are mostly lost in the kitschified world we live in today.

Sigh.

free associations

2009-09-17T04:35:00.000-07:00

Freud reports that in the process of free association, the most important thing is not what is voiced, but what remains unsaid, where the resistance is. In a way, an idea from negative theology: the most important and true things about God are the things we don't say, that remain unvoicable. And in our society where we expect solutions and things being ready at hand, the notion that the important thing is eternally out of reach cuts against the flow of our desire.

And what we desire fails us again and again. The push through to satiation, to climax, finds us back again, in the land of want. What would the attainment of desire be? Immolation?

Perhaps this underscores the rational the ancients, including St. Paul, developed against desire; instead they counseled contentment. "Godliness with contentment is great gain." That sums up the attitude of the early church. To be content is to live in the present - whereas desire inflames and calls us to some other place, beckons us to the future before we get there - a future that takes us out of the present. Whereas contentment is a present that carries us into the future. Perhaps I simplify too much.

Outside my window the backyard is soaked. A cricket chirps, and there are more greens than usual. I see one and wonder why I haven't gotten it into a painting yet. Lately I'm seeing more greens and grays than I ever suspected. I could be the influence of Morandi. Morandi whose simple still lifes and landscapes haunt me. And I think I know what the connection between him and late Guston is: the awkwardness of presentation. Both exhibit an awkwardness front and center: presentation and line, color and composition, awkwardly there ThereTHERE. And what intrigues is that this is what most other artists strive to hide. Even De Kooning and Pollock present chaos and violence, but with a polish, an authority. There is nothing awkward in their work. But Morandi and Guston: how awkward and uncomfortable.

I'm listening to Boulez's Pli Selon Pli. My favorite piece of classical music. It folds upon folds, covers and discloses.

Otherwise I listen to Eric Dolphy's Far Cry. How I wish when I was buying CDs back in 1999 that I'd bought more Booker Little. Booker Little and Freddie Hubbard - my favorite trumpet players - more so than Dave Douglas now or Clifford Brown then - who I was more immediately attracted to. More than Miles Davis (except for Bitches Brew - an exemplary jazz album and I increasingly think, Davis' best). I also like Dolphy's Out to Lunch.

David Markson is onto something in his recent work. Work that resembles a literature major's notes. But something solid but hidden lies at the center. The great unnameable in his work.

Jung, Freud, Lacan, Klein, Bion: all agree. Not to cure, to fix, to make go away - but to integrate, to contain, to hold opposites in balance - that is the aim. The goal, the conclusion, is something else, a logical end point.

Desire whirls around a void, the drives, according to Lacan, for whom all drives are death drives seeking to break through the pleasure principle, regardless the cost. Deleuze would say that the drives are not voids but plenums, bursting with abundance. Neither concept invites touching - it would be like putting your arm in a turbine. Why would you do that? Isn't the point that you're getting energy and that it's the energy you should be using.

But this is what we get for thinking that our human predicament is something that needs fixing. We spend too much time trying to fix, to put into place, to fit in, all the conflicts and incongruities of our life. The question is What gives us energy? What takes away energy? What empowers? What deflates?

When Jesus says love your enemies, what if the scribe had asked, as in another place, And who are my enemies? And Jesus had responded with the parable of the good samaritan. Or would Jesus have held up a mirror?

Listening to Jesus, you'd think that his family, his disciples, all were enemies - except the Romans. He never says anything bad about them. Or the samaritans either.

We often take God's speech that she held out her hand to an ungrateful people as a complaint, but what if we hear that as discription. This is what God does: He holds out his hand to ungrateful people.

God doesn't seem to have enemies.

The very people Jesus is harshest with are the ones who insist that they're on his side. "lord lord didn't we do all so many good things in your name." These people, these early volunteers, he tells to scram.

Perhaps God would rather hear, "fuck off."

Perhaps he goes not to those who are well but to those who are sick because these people seem to have a clue.

The people who think they've got it licked, figured out the system: these are the ones who're off. He tells them, "since you say 'we see!' your sin remains."

I'm now listening to Andrea Parkin do weird things with the accordion: fold upon fold.

taking or leaving

2009-09-07T11:02:00.000-07:00

I love this pararble and its hyperparabolic possibilities: Matthew 24:41 (n + 1).

In the same way there will be two guys crossing the country in an old car, perhaps a loaner from one of their dad's or a friend's. At some point they'll discover the gas guage is broken and they'll be stranded in Palestine, TX. At some point a Samaritan will stop and offer them some help. So one will be taken up the road to an open gas station, and the other will be left behind to watch the car and wait.

In the same way two pigs will be feeding at the trough. One day the farmer will come and take one and the other will be left behind. Then the farmer will come back and get that one too.

In the same way there'll be two of anything, cats, zebras, jockeys, lesbians, policemen, unemployed middle managers, incarcerated businessmen, exiled cabinet officials, apocolyptic prophets; invariably differences and divergences will emerge among them that can be summed up as the taking or leaving what they have in common, a place. So it is that two of anykind, unable to exist together will find themselves displaced in relation to the initial reality they'd formed.

So what do we do with this displacement. Is it a displacement that invites replacing? Or is the parable's force in pointing out how slippery it is to label: women grinding, men in the field. One of each can be taken and one of each can be left? What does it matter in view of the culmination of the world. The coming of the son of man.

Here is prime exegetical territory: liberating the text from what it has to mean, whether that meaning is the accretion of orthodox defenses or heterodox insurrections. What is ortho and what is hetero change with the wind - more as expressions of power than of truth.

So two boys are building a tree house in the sand with rocks.

Two dowagers go to see Waiting for Godot and one is taken aback and the other is left speechless.

Two Roman legions are wandering in the forest searching for Arminius.

I think it's best to bombard the text with alternative settings, extrapolating and pushing meaning to the nth - searching for an eternal return.

The son of man is an eternal return. This time coming as a thief. The first time coming in tragedy and the cross - but this time, a thief and in farce? He comes like a flood and in the clouds and gathers his elect. Earlier he came like a mother hen gathering her chicks; now like a fox raiding the hen house.

Two hens will be brooding secure in their hen house; one will be taken and the other will be left behind. Pity the watchdog, Rex, with egg on his face.

good grief

2009-09-07T09:33:00.000-07:00

I've slackened my pace of writing on this blog. I write in many other places. Sometimes I write on facebook, which is not satisfying. At times I've been dissatisfied writing on the blog here: no responses; responses that miss the point; responses that are spam - though there have been responses of understanding, appreciation, and encouragement.

I do a lot of writing on small scraps of paper. Paper scraps that I arrange in a collage of seminarrational resemblance. I don't want to write a narrative so much as the feeling of a narrative.

I think now that no one is reading what I'm writing here, except perhaps Jami or an occasional friend, or someone who types a google search looking for something else. I think that it's a good thing to write in order not to be read. There are many things written for an audience - think : what is your audience. And so minnisters for years are encouraged to write for a group of 8th graders.

I don't know what it says for us that the intellectual development hoped for in our country is 8th grade. Or that the emotional develoopment might be even younger. In clinical pastoral education (CPE) I've learned that emotional deveelopment is muich more important for behaviour and wisdeom than intellectual development.

It's amazing what we can think. Yet the complexity of what we're capable of thinking is belied by the simplicity of our emotional reactions. Most people in our society are reactive. If our politics is a reflection of us, then we see, we feel, in a polarized manner.

So the question is not knowing more: it's knowing what we feel and why we feel it.

What can be done? How can we move beyond reactivity to, as W Bion might say, containing our good/bad feelings together when thinking about others: that a persoon can be good or bad, a mixture, and that our reactivity toward them, our desire to act out, to pull the passive/aggressive thing, is not in ours or their interests: that such reactivity forestalls communication and growth and relationality.

I recommend a mass reading of Alice Miller's Drama of the gifted child.

Our child rearing methods invariably induce trauma prior to cognitive devevlopment. When parental love is not provided in a nurturing manner, the child faces the crisis of the mother being bad. How to get the good mother back, he thinks. He discovers that when he pleases her, the good mother comes back. What happens here, though, is that many times, what is discovered is the mechanism of pleasing: where admiration, compliments, take the place of love. The child still craves love, but gets compliments instead. When the child wants love, he does behavior to get the compliments (this is where he gets the good mother). Over time a split develops, many splits really, where good and bad never reside in the same object at the same time. The child may grow up and his manner of compensating may lead to high levels of accomplishment. If not, it may lead to high levels of grandiosity. The child cannot face the fact that he is ordinary, neither good nor bad in absolute ways. Still the child has a chasm of unlovedness - a chasm that gets deeper and more secret as he becomes an adult.

Miller, Klein and others discuss this development of narcissism much more thoroughly, and I recommend them. But this is my basic understanding of what takes place.

Certainly I see this grandiostiy working in me, a grandiostiy that masks shame and that needs further accomplishment to substitute for love not received as a child. It's not that parents intentionally don't love their children: but I believe that often they don't know how. The baby gets quuiet when they threaten it - mission accomplished; the child behaves when he is spanked - mission accomplished. The child wins a prize, gets all A's, a scholarship, hits for the cycle - all is perfect. Except when the chld strikese out, gets all B's and C's (or that first F), flunks out - then the need is still there, to cover up that empty hole (where the shame of being the bad infant or the guilt of being the hurtful infant) that's still there, and now there's not a compliment, a plug of praise, to substitute for the love the child doesn't know how to ask for, has only sporadically received, and doesn't know how to give or receive (except that it binds with an object of enough emotional umph! to replace the original object that failed).

So what to do for this child. This is where the process of grieving comes in. I think a book like Kathleen O'Connor's commentary on Lamentations "Tear of the World" is helpful in this regard. Though I've found it helplful to read lamentations straight through in one sitting or the book of Job. These books deal with grief in complex and let it all hang out kinds of ways.

solitude

2009-09-06T19:51:00.000-07:00

While at Oak Island this year I experienced solitude in a very personal way. I was not lonely; I was not merely alone; I was not escaping companionship. I was sole, dwelling in myself and resting in myself. I found a place to do this: a spit of sand extended into the sound at low tide. I would walk out at low tide, through shallow water, and sit on this extension of the beach that was made available through the dredging efforts of the Corps of Engineers and the pulling back of the Atlantic. I brought my books, pen and paper, binoculars and camera. I read Blanchot's Waiting Oblivion. I drew in the sand. I observed the distant birds and boats. I looked back at our beach house. I felt equipoise. And when we left the beach I discovered that I retained it in me, independent of location.

Point taken

2009-09-05T07:27:00.000-07:00

Fred Wise
thinks that there's not enough time, that every moment of time is too precious to spend being reactive, nurturing resentments, ranting ad nauseum. Every day in the hospital I see people in distress, nearing their limit, grieving - and it seems, ...that there is no time to waste in any endeavor but love, in any position but in hearing and speaking to our mutual wounds.

I posted this recently, and I think it's an important reflection of mine, born of almost 2 years in different hospitals - I should say, 2 stints in hospitals: it's only a little less than a year now.

What I hoped to get from CPE was a sense of how I am and how people are in limit situations. As Kathleen O'Conner says in her Lamentations commentary, "to extend a gentle reception to the pain of others, we need familiar knowledge of our own pain, grief and doubt. [92]." She also talks about how denial (where we deny our grief through consumerism, escapism, addictions, or violence) blocks our creativity and ability to flourish.

Blanchot reflects this sense of nurturing solitude in order to be with others. In his Awaiting Oblivion, which I read at the beach, I found that lines like "narrow the presence, vast the place" and "he feels liberated by waiting for waiting" and what would happen if my speech were suddenly to make itself heard by me?" - this is all good stuff, and the effect on me was to craft an interior space where I could be with the other.

a wonderful fall

2009-09-04T21:29:00.000-07:00

The story of the Fall

is that we can go out

into the world and fail:

ourselves, each other and God.

god doesn't desert us

nor do we

even the snake has no

hard feelings

There'll be blame and

attempts at covering up

and scapegoating.

But it's not the end of

the world.

Fred Wise
The Fall is like the fall, in that it seems like the end, but is actually a beginning. We don't begin until we fall, and the year begins, in some calendars, in the fall. So I could mean both. Failure characterizes creation; until failure occurs, the creation subsists in a merged identificaiton. With the initial failure resistance is set in motion ... Read Moreand the figure distinguishes itself from the ground. In the Fall we know we are not gods; and in the Falling leaves, we see that god's view of perfection is not uninterrupted stasis. That is: failure is the perfection of creation. The text enjoins us, invites us, to tread with confidence into the world of fall. Perhaps a folly age [foliage] imposes on me.