grey eminences

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

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

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

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

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.

devotional 1

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

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

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

Jeremy encouraged me to write

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

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

annunciation on paper bag

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

another drawing in poetry

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

drawings in poetry magazine 6

drawing in poetry magazine 5

drawings in poetry magazine 4

drawings in poetry magazine 3

drawings in poetry magazine 2

drawings in poetry magazine 1

spring is hear

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

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

corner closet

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

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

engine

loading baggage at jackson hole

lines of snow

lines of snow

pan

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

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

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