Nothing better to do with my time than uploading images

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

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

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

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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

skinnydip

untitled

two drawings

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

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

poetry magazine cover

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

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

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

rumination

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

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

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

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

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.