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

tan

before and after

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

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

a pen and ink wash from 1993

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

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

disco drawings

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.