Louisiana Parkway Avenue

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

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

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

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

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

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
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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

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