neglecting may

mild may

A sleepy day. I'd forgotten the meeting Thursday. I was ill anyway. 

on a pace

March and April were heavy posting months. Time to slow down. Take stock. Yadda Yadda. La de da.

you used to say live and let

Deleuze is right, you can't go tromping around in your past too much. There's nothing there - "let the dead bury their dead," as Christ would say. I wondered yesterday what might have happened to the little pentecostal church that met in the bank basement 32 years ago. The one where my mom decided to get off insulin at - "on faith." I tried all kinds of google searches and couldn't find a trace of any of those people. Mostly they were good people, earnest people - they just believed bizarre things coming from a theology  we called "name it and claim it." Why do you reckon people leave mainline churches (or even established pentecostal churches) for this: like it's not real if an institution of any sort backs it, but this group, led be a minister who split off from a group that split off from X (itself a nth generation split off) has got to have the real stuff - the real 2nd chapter Acts thing - unvarnished with "the doctrines of men" - a free and open spigot of the Holy Spirit! 

When I was a kid I grew up in the country where everyone went to church. Every one dressed up in suits and dresses. Even as a kid I had to wear a tie and coat. None of this clothing fit right; I felt like an encased sausage. I suppose it's to be expected: when you think about the principle that what "preaches" are actions, then this pleasant mainline country church was a real cognitive dissonance factory. People claimed that they were effected by the things said and would have defended to the death their status as believers - they just exemplified nothing that was read. I was a kid. Kid's notice these things. They would have said, "you're just a kid. You don't understand the real world." 

Is consciousness something to do while DNA seeks to replicate more DNA. Human, lizard, worm, bird - all the same to GATC as the process makes and unmakes, zips and unzips, replicates and over inscribes, working out a complex calculation 107.7 billions lives plus are needed for over the course of N-billion years. And we, locked in our subjectivities, look for patterns. Patterns are how consciousness moves forward. And consciousness moves forward by invention. We are inventions by the time we come to moving on our own - such that we might not be moving on our own as much as we think.

Surely I'm a lazy thinker. It seems to me the whole rational/irrational dichotomy popular among some evangelical groups is a misstated problem. Especially when they call Kant irrational - I blink and wonder if I'd read that right. In many ways it's like arguing about the dead ball vs live ball era. It's probably the same ball in both eras - it's more always using a clean ball vs never bringing in a clean ball era. Every human thought is a mixture of rational and irrational. It's uncertain what we're doing with the ball - or what the ball is. 

Absolutes are often framed with this "without these absolutes there's only chaos" - Whatever it is that they want to call absolutes (they = people selling morals as social panaceas, usually), the one absolute in that statement is chaos. Maybe the question is why do we fear chaos? What if we embraced chaos? What if we learned to use so called Chaos? Are we unable to be kind; are we unable to treat each other as human beings in Chaos? We can learn. We have the imagination to do this. 

Above all: Don't give me that Old Time Religion. It was bad for Abraham and Jacob (Jacob testified that his life was miserable. OTR played a big role in that misery); It was bad for Saul and David; it was bad for countless others; It was bad for Jesus and Paul. You'd think by now we'd be wise to its corrosive properties. OTR is bad for you and me. OTR has made some old guys very rich - but for most of us OTR has only meant misery, injustice and oppression.

may I

Here's a post in May. After so many March and April posts - I'm slowing down.

my feelings exactly

blues

I had posted earlier that I would change this image - the leg finally got to me. I know when I drew it that the leg felt right - but the process of moving and adding skewed it out of place - There was nothing left to do (for me) but to go in and move things around with the blunt force of a Q tip dipped in ink.

Today is a heavy blues day. Almost more sadness than I can hold. Nothing to do but paint. That's all that will help. 

process

my mind is the page. one day i realized that having my mind in my head got in the way. part of the process is streamlining the process - and i realized that my mind wasn't serving me well in my head. 

i tend to over think things. i once had a teacher who told me - don't think so much. this helps keep me level - to remember that the page is my mind. this way i don't think in my head, where things are impossible, but on a plane where things are happening - where the material and my body are telling me what the image can be. my head has all kinds of ideas for what an image can be. mostly other people's ideas. other people and influences can't get on the page. on the page is just me and my media. the page is my mind.

think of it like this. when i drive, my mind becomes the road. maybe it's the same way with you and you don't realize it. think how smooth you drive - a painting can feel like that - a painting can feel like flying down the left lane passing the trucks and people from out of town. a painting can feel like working my way through traffic - all moves toward freedom. 

i think sometimes when people are frustrated, their mind is in their head and the page and the media they're using are foreign objects that they feel they should control. these things resist control. but when my mind is on the page - when my mind and the page are one! - then all works as in a prayer - a prayer of listening and stillness.

maybe the rhizome is making a comeback

Horizontal structures seem to be appearing - or becoming necessary. 

sinus pressure cruise

now that I halve your attention

I don't normally repeat - at least consciously; unconsciously is a different thing. Or you can unpack what Deleuze in Difference and Repetition means by "Something isn't repeated because it's unconscious; it becomes unconscious because it's repeated." - or something like that. Anyway, I've taken a couple of things lately and repeated them. This first image is a repetition of an earlier image drawn in Poetry. 

In memory I've lost some of the intensity obtained in a symbol just happening, unpremeditated. I misremembered the central figure as drawing the eye on the page - instead in the drawing, she's reaching for an eye on a page, as a universal eye watches her.

So I'll have to try again. But that is the benefit.

This is not a repetition so much as an instance where I've returned to an image with watercolor and ink. I drew this image on the train leaving Chicago for Schaumberg. Something about the name Mount Prospect struck me. Maybe it was the midwestern fullness of the pre-taped voice announcing the station. 

trope