elegy for George (remix)

In 1984, I was the featured performing artist on the radio program Studio Live on WCBN-FM Ann Arbor. (Disclosure: I was a longtime volunteer programmer on CBN, and had a couple of regular shows. This was a special event, a live performance show that I was invited to be on.) I just found the cassette master recording of that broadcast, which also includes the tape music piece I made from part of that broadcast in the WCBN Production studio later.

It was during the live broadcast, when we were playing a tape piece of mine, that a phone call came in informing me of the death of my George Cacioppo: good friend, mentor in music composition, founding member of the ONCE Group of experimental music composers in Ann Arbor in the 1960s, and philosophical gadfly. I then made the rest of the live show into a memorial elegy for George.

The piece I made from that evening, "elegy for George," was later broadcast on WCBN, and also played as a tape piece at a memorial concert in George's memory, at the Unitarian church in Ann Arbor. William Albright, my advisor as a composition student, and one of the most important mentors in my life, organized the event, and when he heard I had a piece, he had it included. So my music was performed alongside the music of some of my heroes in modern, experimental, avant-garde music: Robert Ashley, Gordon Mumma, George's own music, and other members of the ONCE Group and Fluxus.

Last night I digitized the cassette without difficulty into my studio computer. Tonight I spent an hour cleaning up the digital version, then making a new piece of music out of it, a remix. Consider the musical category to be trance, drone, ambient, meditation. But the piece itself is a very emotional piece of music, and it can get under your skin.

This version is digitally edited and remixed. It is stretched to three time its original length, then heavily processed in Sony Vegas using heavy-duty reverbs and processors like Lexicon Pantheon and Waves Enigma. Essentially this is an extended, blurred remix. I can also hear maybe adding Tibetan bell sounds to this piece, in another version. Fodder for another ambient/meditation album, an idea I've been working on for a few months.

elegy for George (enigma blur remix)    


George Cacioppo


"Cassiopeia," by George Cacioppo
A marvelously sensual and beautiful piece of aleatoric music that I have performed a number of times.

Writing: Gathering Stems and Branches

There's a writing project I want to start in on. I spent the first part of the morning going through and marking entries in my handwritten journal going back around six years. Marking things I'd written out, but never turned into anything. Some of those pages can be the partial seed of what I want to write now. Formally, zuihitsu, a compilation of things written following the brush. "Twenty-Four Views of Mt. Fuji by Hokusai." Modular. Fragmentary. Linked by mood, topic, tone. Memory books. Pillow Books.

Went into my library to pull out and re-read, or at least skim, some touchstones for what I want to do. Saikaku. The Great Mirror of Male Love. Kenko. Essays In Idleness. Other more modern examples of the form, which after all is an infinitely malleable form. Basho. Oku no hosomichi.

Writing this project will be partially rewriting bits and pieces scattered here and there, bringing them together, making a larger work out of them. Maybe chapbook sized. I'm a good prose writer, although I don't have much ear for fiction. Creative nonfiction is also storytelling, though. I can invent and write if I allow myself to fiction as storytelling, and not wedded to that boring No-Style Style that dominates so much fiction nowadays, the so-called "plain" style.

In reading a literary biography of Roger Zelazny, which I acquired recently, I realize how much he influenced me as a writer of prose. As the book points out, spending a whole chapter on the topic, Zelazny's prose style was always poetic, laced with poetry, frequently requiring a bit of work to get into, but one it revealed itself, sublime. His short "experimental" novel Creatures of Light and Darkness is astounding. It should be taught alongside Wallace Stevens.

That's the only kind of prose fiction I can see myself actually writing: prose fiction that doesn't read like prose fiction. And his short stories, always poetic and sometimes heartbreakingly powerful. Poetic prose that is often oblique, rarely plain.

After reading through old journals this morning, I wrote some notes for what I want to do. Not an outline, never that, just the rule-set for this particular game. Once you write the melody, you improvise around it. Writing prose, for me, to be interesting at all has to be more like jazz, knowing sort of where I'm going but it's 32 bars ahead so take your time and explore the path meanwhile.

This writing project does fall in the category of being prompted, which I know is how I work best. I do well when someone asks me for a piece. Otherwise, I can be lazy, and never get around to it. I love having a deadline, and a goal, and a completion date. I actually work well under deadline pressure.

I also work well when I'm not trying to do anything. When I'm out on a roadtrip, for example, where on those long drives across the land, I do some of my best thinking, and write in my handwritten journal at night, and sometimes in the morning, about whatever I'm experiencing, or thinking about. That's how the elements of the longer haibun sequences of Basin and Range were written, compiled later at home. I scatter a lot of short bits off the back of the wagon, when I roam, and sometimes they add up later.

I'm still gathering. After weeks of thinking about it, at least there's a goal. Awareness of approaching deadlines is my goad. Meanwhile, just keep gathering these loose stems and branches, to build them, and fire them. Ashes and raku to emerge.

Spiritual Art Juried Painting Exhibit 2013

I have four paintings, one of them a group of four smaller paintings that are a series or cluster, in this juried exhibit of "Spiritual Art."

I was encouraged to enter my paintings in this show by a friend, although I had hesitated at first. On one level, even though I did a lot of acrylic paintings in my youth, I hadn't put paint to canvas or paper for almost thirty years till I began painting again last year. So I am both a total beginner at painting, and a very experienced visual artist with years of design, composition, and photography under my belt. In the past I've won awards for my visionary visual artwork, and photography. So, I had mixed feelings.

The call for entries of this show of "Spiritual Art" left their definition of Spiritual very open to interpretation. Being that this is a fairly conservative small town region, I expected that they would receive many entries of frankly sentimental religious art—for example, pictures of angels, and of people praying in church. So I hesitated to be part of that.

Frankly, sentimental religious art makes me cringe. I mean no insult to any artist who paints that kind of art, and I mean no insult to anyone's belief system. The problem I have is not with religious subject matter, but with thoughtless sentimentality. There is so much imitation rather genuine in bad religious art. On the other hand, finding a piece of religious art fresh and filled with life is rare enough that it ought to be celebrated.

My own spiritual tradition lies far outside the mainstream of organized religious worship. The details don't matter, what matters is that the points of convergence I have with the organized religious tradition are all normative to the mystical threads of tradition and usually controversial to the mainstream. As for painting, if you want to see a genuinely glorious and praiseful depiction of Creation, I recommend you take in a van Gogh exhibition.

Painting for me has become a form of personal therapy. I mostly do it for my own needs, and not to illustrate or depict a theme or subject that I want to present to an audience. I use a lot of vibrant colors in my paintings, often in many built-up translucent layers that create depth and subtle lighting effects. Most of what I paint is very abstract. Since I've been doing brush calligraphy for a long time, I have made a few paintings based on that kind of brushwork, even an enso or two, painted rather than ink-brushed. I "follow the brush" when painting, and it is expressive for me, but I don't particularly feel like I am in any school or have any purpose. A lot of what comes out is big bold fields of abstract color, with sometimes just a hint of form that might be a hint of subject. I feel like what I am doing is closer to what Kandinsky originally described in his theories of expressive color, than any more recent school of painting. I know a lot of art history, and I don't want to be part of a school or -ism, I just want to paint. Less theory, more art.

Even though painting for me is a personal expression, mostly, what comes out is abstract enough that it's not a journal entry, or overly personal. People can look at these mostly-abstract paintings and read in whatever meaning they wish, that is their own and not mine. I've talked many times of what I call abstract realism, which is abstraction from nature, but also abstraction not divorced from the form that inspired it. In painting, for me, this might look like an abstract painting that for me evokes a memory of the aurora borealis; but I'm okay with another viewer finding something else in it, or just looking at it purely as abstraction. If they get some kind of emotional or aesthetic response from the painting, I feel it's succeeded.

With all this in mind, I also knew that anything I submitted to a "Spiritual Art" show would probably be quite far outside the box, different from other entries, and quite possibly beyond the pale. I did end up submitting four paintings to the juried show, with no expectation that any of them would get in. I deliberately chose paintings that broke convention, and are very much experimental. One of them is even a three-dimensional work, not a traditional painting. The joke is on me, because all four got in. So what do I know?

Here are thumbnails of the pieces I will have in this show, all of which were painted in 2013:


Void: Emergence


Earth and Sky II


Enso (Meditation in the Marketplace)

This depicts for me the classic saying from Zen meditation practice: "Anyone can meditate alone on a mountaintop. The real test of your meditation practice is when you return to the busy, noisy city, full of sound and lively action, and try to meditate in the marketplace there."


Paleo-Icons

A group from an ongoing series of paintings inspired by prehistoric cave art, petroglyphs, ancient civilizations, and the colors of the rocks and land where such art is to be found. The other source of inspiration here is Byzantine icons, with their formalized styles and color palettes. I'm really enjoying this series, and have done a few more since submitting this grouping to the show. The icons are all the same size, and can be displayed in several different ways.

Songwriting: Happy to be under the influence

Little fits of snow a-fallin'
and I'm tired and cold and ready for spring
Bigger changes are a-comin'
and it's time to let them come on and sing . . .

I'm ready for spring. I'm tired of shivering all the damn time. To speed things up, I gave myself a Southwestern moment for midday meal and made gluten-free (brown rice tortilla) chicken and three-cheese quesadillas. Something I haven't made since I went mostly low-carb, so about a year ago now. Very satisfying.

And as I ate I sat there reading a long article about songwriter Kris Kristofferson. Lots of younger folks only know him as an actor, but it Nashville he's revered as the songwriter who had an impact on how to write country songs the way Dylan did on other kinds of music. Yes, that important. Didn't know that, did you? Kristofferson changed everything, starting with what you could write ABOUT in a country, making things a lot more honest and realistic than they had been at the time.

I put Kristofferson's songs up there with any of the best of the twentieth century. Some of them you already know, although you might not know it because some of them were hits by other singers first. Kris was good friends with Johnny Cash, who had more than one hit from a song written by Kristofferson. So did Janis Joplin.

I will champion Kristofferson as a songwriter forever. I have learned a great deal about writing songs from him. See, he always wanted to be a writer first, which is why he went out and lived a lot of different kinds of life, in order to feed his writing. Back before MFA programs, that's how you became a writer: The Jack London School of Doing a Lot of Jobs and Gathering Experience. It allows you to write with conviction, honesty, and experience. It's still a better way to learn to become a writer than going to school. School has its value, don't get me wrong, including going to school for writing, but it can also be pretty inbred.

So today I think I'll listen to Kristofferson songs, and things like that. And then I think I'll sit down and write something. Maybe a new song. If there's an influence there, it's one I would be proud to acknowledge.

Brother of Clouds

Knives in the eyes of the dark. These hapless watchers
ask you to tell them about it, but don't really want
to hear. Darkness frightens them. Flail and whip of
wanderer to them is but a horse long lost and foundered.
They you ask how you are but don't really want
your answer. To know is to make too real. Politeness' sake
is a ramp down to strata where ears have fossilized,
hardened of hearing, filled with cemented sand.

Silent snow falling on darkest green pine boughs
along the foot of cloudhidden mountains.
Cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown. The old mountain
sage evaporates into mountain mist, leaves behind
a ceremony of blossoms whitening the trailside meadow.
Nowhere to go but up, unless it's out and suddenly
down. Down by way of being rejected by even land's law.
Grains of petals at the foot of his sandals. He waits
a long time for you to find yourself and return.
Stories the world is made of. Story the elements.
Single candle flame becomes a silver vase, hanging
in the darkness. Where's that lantern when it's hopeless?
What sign? A tarantula-dance of shadows shot with lightning.
Nothing hear but the last echo of hooves. Sinew
makes a bond that only bone can break. Rolling in
whitened fields of dry old bones, a single wild rose.
Where did he disappear to, the ancient one? Snow,
belling elk, alder branches, the fall of light
on a frozen water cascade. Spark and glint. Now winter.

We all fall down. All fall. Down into everything
that falls. Under what's fallen is compost and cinders.
Moss into rock-crumble, lichen into rusted bowl.
Nothing left of this battlefield once deemed so
important but empty eye-sockets of caved-in armor
where crickets live. Long thrum of rarest of locust.

If you say it enough perhaps you'll come to believe.
Convincing yourself comes after. Believing before saying
is tongues of gypsum crusting into still small sands.
No meaningful residency. Why this mountain? Why this sky?
This long road. This dusty trail. Marks of a walking stick
left behind even after the wind washes all else
to another valley, another desert lake. Walking stick
pocks in tempest sand. Ancient marks of a lost path.

Flailing at the walls of the conventional. Pull back
from that cliff-edge, heart hammered into silver leaf. What
non-mystics never understand is gods-seeker's necessary
solitude. Whether mountain sage or respected diplomat,
apparently lost to the world or apparently lost in it,
each quiet solitary iconoclastic mystic needs to
to hear that still small voice. That voice drowned
in worlds of convention and rite. You almost lose
any ability to hear it when you spend too much time
in the marketplace of the mundane. There are no substitutes,
accept only the real thing, and we'll tell you what that is.
Even when you sink and fall again into cool relief of
silence.

      Always a risk to believe that words can save you. Always
tempted to record your journey in words, as though words
could contain any journey. You know they don't. You know
the unsaid, unknown, unspeakable, is more real, more true.
Mountain sage can go four months without saying a word.
When he comes down for a few days of gathering and harvest,
out of his lips comes an unstoppable wind, a raspy clear voice
with no words shaped, but meanings clear and graspable
as painted icons on stone cave walls. Nothing could be plainer.
Literally: nothing.

Get back up, from where you've fallen. So they shot off
your leg, so what. Bind the blood and walk anyway.
If you have to pull yourself along even when will fails,
bleeding a trail behind you from that belly wound,
you've found the right track. Nowhere near what
you think you're owed. Nowhere near inherited guides or maps.
Far off to the side of hard times and bitter fruit.
Pull yourself together even when each atom flies apart.

You have to come to stillness to see his trail-markers.
They are subtle, almost silent. Markers known
more by absence, by what is not there, what has been
removed. Look for the void in things. A single milkweed stalk
in a field of yellow daisies. An angled stone removed
from a pile of shingle beside a switchback. Fallen horses
could not be half so serene as this eaten grass. Look on
those days when closest to the edge of despair and self-death
for a marker towards which the wind is drawn, nature
abhorrent of vacuum, magnetic field in place of mineral.
Look. Here's where a stone once rested. Only an outline now.
So someone has been here, and left a sign.
Find it's absent shape in the dark damp stillness
where the wind replaces sense in the desperate night heart.

Lose your mind, just leave it by the trail.
Where you sat down to eat just forget to pick it up
and carry it any further. It will get along just fine alone.
Gradually quieting. Just forgotten. Why it ever mattered
no one anymore knows. Be absent-minded by intent.
Here's a gap in a row of aspen quaking with absence.
Higher up, a crag you can't see, veiled with unfallen rain.
Thunder's distant rumble almost as though clearing his throat.
Nothing could be plainer.

Hull Breach

from the Surgery Diaries

It becomes clear to me why having this ostomy makes me feel so unattractive. I'm fat, I've got an ostomy, I've never felt so sexually unattractive as I do now. And I've been rejected numerous times precisely because of the ostomy. Then again, what do you expect? Most people can't deal with things outside their normative boxes.

And I figured out why, this morning, knowing that friends have been sleeping together in the next room, and myself wanting to go nude today but knowing that I probably won't. I feel completely open and naked already, so why bother?

This isn't a warm-up to a pity party. It's a moment of clarity. It just happens to be about stuff most folks never want to have to think about.

It's that this ostomy is like a breach of integrity. A hull breach. The appliance is like a patch job on an oceangoing vessel, and you have spend a lot of attention on the patch job so that the ship doesn't sink. A breach in structural integrity. If you don't give it lots of attention, this ship will fail.

There are days when I hate it. Hate having to give it this much gods be damned attention. Hate having to think about it all day long, as it constantly demands my attention. Hate having to deal with it when the appliance does occasionally fail, ad there is a mess to clean up. I have lost entire days to this, where nothing else gets done. Some of my friends who have had friends with ostomies, or have themselves had a short-term ostomy, think they understand, and they mean well, but they don't, really. A colostomy is not the same as what I have, a high flow ileostomy. A colostomy is still a once or twice a day thing. But I have to empty the bag multiple times every day, and if I wake up in the night, usually then as well. It's like a demanding baby that won't stop crying. It's like a Siamese twin you cannot ignore. It requires hours of your attention daily. Not minutes. Hours. So there are days when it is hard not to resent it, even when you know it has saved your life and is keeping you alive. Even though I am grateful for being alive, and no longer have a deadly chronic illness, I have this shitbag now, and my quality of life is not significantly improved, nor has it reached the level promised to me when I first agreed to this surgical journey. Life hasn't always gotten better, although it is sustained. I am alive. I am still here.

This breach in hull integrity not only makes me feel unattractive, it is proven to turn people away. No one wants to hear about it. It brings out in many people that same kind of uncomfortable avoidance and insecurity that you see when someone who has never thought before about their own mortality confronts a dying child: when what they have always taken for granted is called into question. People might care for you, but they no longer know how to express it. With an ostomy, even a hug can be a problem. You can have no idea how isolated this hull breach can make me feel. It is capable of denying me even simple basic human contact. How would you feel when you see even people who care about you become tentative about giving you a simple hug? When you need hugs more than you ever have before?

I am struggling with this isolation, even alienation, a lot right now. This entire week has been a battle to just stay afloat. Yes, its depression, shut up with the convenient and misleading labels. I struggle against throwing a self-pity party. I struggle all the more when I see everyone around me making contact, making connections, and I feel excluded. People ask me why my mood is not better, when so many things seem to be going well for me, or at least better. They want me to be upbeat and positive, and the best I can do right now is not be dark and brooding. Call it neutral bouyancy. Call it trying to trim the battleship so that the hull breach doesn't sink it.

A couple of months ago I wrote a song. It was one of these occasional pieces where I sit down at the table or piano, with no plans, then inspiration takes over and a few hours later I have a finished poem, a finished song, a finished essay, usually needing little revision. Experience has taught that I can rely on this kind of inspiration happening often enough to be pragmatic about it. I don't take it for granted, and I also know it will come over me a few times a year. So a couple of months ago, I sat down to play and started working. The words came with the music, at the same time, which is a little unusual. The song, more lieder than folk song, is titled "Still/Here."

It's a simple song, musically, but there's a lot of emotion in it. The song is about survival, about having survived death, on a level that's underneath the surface of the words. You are still here. You are still, here. What lies underneath a song like this is hard personal experience. Its not obvious in the lyrics, although as with poems if you look for buried layers of meaning underneath the metaphor you can find them. What have you survived, that you are still here. What have you lost, that returns to the light.

Last night, I performed this new song for the first time in a concert setting, before a room full of people who had never heard it before. You could hear a pin drop. It was perhaps a little scary. The song ripped something open in me, opened a door to these emotions and deep feelings I'm talking about this morning after. I felt naked. (I feel naked, still, lying in bed in the morning, here, not having put clothes on yet, and not really wanting to.) What small amount of the gift of bards that I might possess was in full operation. I really felt the song as I was singing it. Felt it on every level, more than I ever had. There was applause, although I pretty much ran off the stage. I had to step out of the building, and get my feelings back under control. You know, lest I be weeping uncontrollably, that sort of thing. Getting back to center took awhile. And I have been feeling open and vulnerable ever since. I got almost no comments about the song afterwards, which I don't know what to think of. It would not be the first time that an audience doesn't know how to respond to something of mine. I can guess why, and I don't feel like it at the moment.

I don't feel fragile or hungover this morning, the way an emotional experience can leave you the next day. I feel strong. I also feel very open and very vulnerable. I will be performing the song once again tonight, though I doubt it will be the same. I imagine it will be much more controlled, less of an upwelling of deep waters flooding. After all, the flood already happened, the waters are still settling. I am very much feeling my feelings this morning, so there won't be any surprises on that front. The emotional hull is breached as well as the physical. How do we go through our lives with these walls keep us so separated and safe? When that's an illusion, the grace of this wound, and it is a grace, is that I have no more illusions about safety, security, or boundaries. I don't take any of this for granted anymore.

I am still here. The rest of it is a matter for moment-to-moment attention. Keeping the ship afloat, checking the hull patch every so often, making sure we're trim and sailing on. It's enough to just be still here.

Identities

A Spiral Dance essay

Thinking how the poet plays with identity. How poet Fernando Pessoa created personae (which he called heterenyms): other identities, each with their own characteristic styles and personalities, who wrote his poems. He even had biographies for them. The poet mirrors and duplicates himself. When Pessoa granted himself an imaginary interview, he played both roles, although when the interviewer asked a question the reader saw only dots, so sometimes the answer seemed to arrive from another continent at first.

Sometimes the I of the poem is me, mostly it's not, or perhaps it's part of me, a partial identity. Not as fully realized as Pessoa made his, but that's a matter of degree rather than kind. I do create a speaker in a poem who is not me, or not exactly me, or was me at that moment but is never locked into that stance forever. A snapshot, not a manifesto. I change, what I write will change, how I read what I wrote years ago will change.

Identity is fluid, that's the point. It's neurotic to fix yourself permanently into one identity and become inflexible. There is a playfulness to Pessoa putting on and taking masks off identity, no matter how serious the poems he created were. One of his poetic personae was very serious, actually, while another was a bit of a Trickster.

We all create characters when we retell our lives to ourselves. We use the scattered bits of memory, most of us, to construct a linear narrative out of our own life, to give it shape and order and purpose, and we fill over the gaps with what we tell ourselves must have been true. Then we convince ourselves it was true, and come to believe it. Most people are scared by the chaos and unknowns of life, so construct a narrative to make sense of it. Myths are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, so without even realizing it, most people live mythic lives; especially when they project themselves onto the narrative mirrors of mass entertainment media, novels, sports, movies, pop music, fairy tales. (Which makes you wonder why zombie apocalypse narratives are so popular right now. But I digress.)

One of the innovations of modernist literature, a century ago, was to grow impatient with the unraveling lie of linear narrative and orderly progress, and begin to represent in writing the fragmentation and scattered spotlight that consciousness really is. Not that there is no continuity, rather that continuity flickers and is not orderly and unidirectional. This insight is still true, and still only half-understood. We do love to impose order and make sense of things, even when it's impossible. About half of the past century of literary criticism has been a desperate attempt to reimpose older species of order upon the fragmented state of contemporary literature; that is, an attempt to stuff the genie back into the broken bottle.

And now, a century later, we have a century of writing that depicts stream of consciousness, fragmentation, and the chaos of life, after a century of continuous bloody war, and fragmentation and superficiality have become the fashionable tropes. In this postmodern era of mannerist art, the Ouroborous eating its own self-referential tail, with a hipster wink and ironic smirk, if you write neither reactionary classicist tomes, post-Dickens, post-Tolstoy, nor fragmentary arcane superficial (in the sense of being focused on the surface effects of words rather than their meanings) language poetry, all the critics and other poets will tell you you're lost at sea. In truth, Hip-hop poetry is no different than LangPo practiced by credentialed academics, in that both focus on rhetorical effect rather than content. I've been to readings by both camps where any poet who tried to do something slightly more deep was effectively booed off the stage.

Pessoa, I think, would be tolerantly amused. Because I think that he, like Virginia Woolf, understood the psychology behind what he was experimenting with in his writing. A great deal of the first generation of avant-garde and Modernist art and literature was made in response to the discovery by psychologists of the unconscious (Freud), and later, the collective unconscious and archetypes (Jung). Pessoa was exploring the hall of mirrors that is the personality, the self that conceals from itself the Self. He knew there was a man behind the curtain, pulling the levers, so he gave him a name.

A century later literature has become all about that hall of mirrors: imitation and self-referentiality. Narcissism, which is confused with literary referencing, and is mo longer about finding new ways to depict the evolving workings of consciousness. That psychological insight was new to the artists of a century ago, and they found ways to make their art new thereby. Now that their methods have become the mainstream, there's a lot of flailing around, some of it admittedly better than others, but it mostly repeats the now-familiar. As always seems to happen, the avant-garde becomes established.

Now people are tired of trying to make it new, be original, say things in ways that are new. Exhaustion and irony and despair (in the sense of giving up) are the mainstream of art. Artists are praised these days precisely because they spin the past. The avant-garde has literally become the academic establishment. They hate that, even though they have nothing left to rebel against. Calling a brash new poet every few years "the James Dean of poetry" is more accurate than they know.

We're back to Pessoa's hall of mirrors, his closet full of discrete identities. We don't know who we are anymore, or how to be, and we don't know what to do about it.

And that's a good thing. Because that kind of identity confusion is fertile ground to grow something new and solid in. You see hints of this in the current round of public discourse on identity politics; which is perhaps now in its third generation. People have turned back from a couple of decades of narcissistic identity politics in which they demanded for themselves their share of the pie: now you see a lot of identity politics that is, rhetorically, collective calls for social justice. Thirty years ago the political left was very narcissistic; now, lagging behind as always, the conservative right has become even more self-absorbed and self-centered than the left ever was. What does this have to do with poetry? Everything. If you think that popular culture, and entertainment, and the media, do not reflect all of these evolutions, on every level, you need to start connecting those dots.

And, as a hundred years ago, there are many on the margins, ignored by the critical center as usual, who are doing something new. You mostly haven't heard about them, unless you go questing for them. There are artists making landscape sculptures seeking to reconnect the cultural fragments with the old spirituality of the land. There are poets who wish to synthesize the scattered fragments of consciousness together again, not into the old linear narratives of apparent order, rather into a higher plane of observed order.

Just as mathematics evolved, beginning in the 1970s, from catastrophe theory towards fractals and chaos theory, in which order itself is observed as an emergent property of chaotic systems. (Anyone remember catastrophe theory? I can recall two science fiction books based on the concept. Although surely by now you've heard of fractals and the butterfly effect.)

If I knew where poetry was going, I'd be a prophet, but I'm not. Nevertheless I sense the stirring of change over there, and over there the smell of freshly-turned earth. We find ourselves (our selves) in turbulent transitional times, creating new identities as we go along, as needed, and often by surprise. One great lesson that Pessoa can still teach us is to float, and not take ourselves too seriously.

Who's that knocking at the door?

Songwriting: American Roads

Lost Roads (detail), 2011 ongoing

In the past few weeks I've written three new songs, each in a completely different style. Two of them are fully notated for voice and piano, the third is a folk/country song, a kind of shuffle, called "American Roads." I wrote the basic idea for the lyrics a year ago, and set it aside for awhile.

I have three or four additional lyrics in my notebook that are finished and ready to be set to music; plus many more still being worked on. I decided to keep a lyric-writing notebook a year or so ago, after completing Heartlands and continuing to write new songs. With "American Roads," I now have five or six new songs completed and ready to record. That's starting to feel like an album, or at least an EP. I gather them together as they gradually finish themselves, and perhaps will eventually publish a songbook and an album.

Of the three recent songs, one gave me a very difficult time. It took a great deal of work to hammer it into shape, and I felt despair at the writing more than once. In a bit of unintended irony, when it was finished, I gave it the name "Endless." I started out with an idea, and went with it, got a ways into it, then felt stuck. Then there was a breakthrough, a eureka! moment when I figured out what was needed to finish the song. I then had to go back and rewrite the beginning, and still the ending took a long time to get just right. I can look back on it now, and say, this song is actually pretty good. Perhaps only I will ever see the seams where I made changes and fixes.

Meanwhile, in the middle of that difficult process, I suddenly broke away for an afternoon and a completely different song emerged, in a completely different style. "Still/Here" took less than two hours to write down, start to finish, the words and the music emerging at the same time. I only had to change one or two details, in the end, to finish it up and get it done. The results are good, and I've already heard several people say they like this song a lot. It will get performed soon, one way or another. I look forward to that.

During the process of writing these songs, looking at my own creative process, I noted that this writing took so much effort that I was on;y able to sit down and write every other day. One day on, one day of rest, one day on, one day of rest, and so forth. I don't know if that pattern will continue, whether or not it's part of the new normal.

Then I sat down to write "American Roads." As I said, I completely rewrote the lyrics, then sketched out the basic chord changes, melodies, and harmonic ideas. That was all I could get done in one day. I've written this piece as a lead sheet, just melody, chords, and words. The typical song lead sheet, what you find in The Real Book or on a chart for a studio recording session. It's all you get for a lot of folk music, after all, and this song is definitely within my folksong writing zone. With a nod to light country shuffle in it as well.

Here are the first verse and refrain. (Actually, the song structure is two verses and a refrain every time. Technically speaking, then, that's one verse repeated since the pattern is the same.)

•

Put the kettle on the Coleman
and fire up the truck
load up the blankets and the tent
and turn the radio on

I got this urge for going
right off the deep blue end
a corner of a long sky road
going round a bend

Refrain:
American Roads
winding through the heart
some place I’ve never been
American Roads
open wide for me
and take me home again

•

When I was rewriting the lyrics, I noticed that my original idea had two kinds of lyrical elements: first, specific moments, with specific references to places and activities I've experienced on various roadtrips; and second, a more familiar trope found in many folk, bluegrass and country songs, all derived from old-timey roots-music threads, which were thoughts about home and rootlessness, roaming and yearning for home. So when I was rewriting, for each set of two verses before the refrain, the first verse is specific, the second verse more philosophic and universal.

There's also a twist at the end, with a repeated refrain with new words that take the song off in another direction. Common practice in folk covers.

So, there you have. Three new songs in a couple of weeks. Very satisfying.

I have a lot of other tasks to deal with for the next few weeks, and I wrote these to meet an audition and performance deadline. I always write well on deadline. Having a fixed target often gets my creative juices flowing. But at the moment I'm in the mood to keep going, keep writing, see what happens. Perhaps I'll work some more on more songs this coming week, in between other creative projects and Things To Do that I must get done.

Oh, by the way, I do take requests.

Brief Notes about Making Art, and a Digression

In the form of visual memes. Then a digression.



Catharsis in the arts is underrated. Why do people play the blues, or punk rock, or industrial rock? Because it's cathartic. I've played in bands in all those genres, and more, and rehearsals and gigs were almost always cathartic. I was reminded about catharsis a few days ago, when a lot of bottled up emotion around the Christmas holiday season suddenly came spilling out, triggered by a moment of aesthetic beauty. I remembered that I hadn't been making art for the past few days, and had been tied up in knots with the stresses of the winter holiday season. And then I remembered about catharsis, and was forcefully reminded about how making art keeps me grounded, centered, focused, and literally alive. Catharsis is more than just a pressure-release valve, it's a change of being, even if only for a moment. Art gives catharsis to the audience as well as the artist. The aesthetic moment that triggered all this was a sequence in a favorite movie that always, always gets to me on a very deep level, triggers an emotional response, and leaves washed clean afterwards, the way a good weep does.

Too many new age and neo-pagan artists are so focused on the light, on growth and healing and reminders to "keep it positive," that they forget that Shiva is both Creator and Destroyer. Parvati must be given her due, but so must Kali.

Sometimes you just have to get the darkness out of you by putting it into your art. The Wrathful Deities must have their due.



Art needs to be discursive, digressive, and distracted. All the best art takes you away somewhere, creates a new reality for you to wade around in, be immersed in. Art is nonlinear and even irrational. And that is its strength, and as it should be. Because that is what imagination is. Imagination is anarchic, not rational. Making art must be a journey for the artist as well as the audience, a free exploration of undiscovered and unfamiliar trails.



Life is messy, so is art.

Making art requires improvisation and intuition and inspiration, and not being in control, and not knowing what you're doing, or where you're being led.

Life is an improvisation, a guessing game at times. So is making art. Fingerpainting as well as technical pens. Disorder and chaos as another condition of orderliness. Dionysus and Apollo both.

•



And a digression:

Why do I share some of my art online? I think of it as advertising. Marketing for my arts business, as well as for fun. And I usually share only bits and pieces, and not the actual piece at full size. For that, or a print, people need to visit my online store.

Why don't we respect our artists? Because we have been convinced that art is a hobby, or that we don't need it to survive. Wrong on both counts, of course, but what do you expect from a culture that avoids self-reflection as much as possible, in favor of the loud and brassy self-display of narcissism and mannerism and self-absorption? When was the last time you shared something on your Facebook wall that was for the sake of others, and not basically a form of self-advertising? If you can honestly say, yesterday, then gods bless you.

So why do artists self-advertise online? Finding their audience. Your niche audience can be anywhere in the world, now, and at last you can connect with them. Calling that narcissism seems like a category error, though, because it's about the art, not about you. Note the subtle difference.



Every week I get requests from strangers to use my art for their website for free. These days I mostly say No. Folks, I am trying to make a living from my art.

Can I stop someone from stealing and using an image of mine online? No, but I can remind them that I probably worked as hard to make that piece of art they just "borrowed" as they did to earn their weekly paycheck. Maybe harder, because there's no downtime in art-making, and you never take a vacation. So I can't stop the thieves, but I also won't let them make me paranoid, and I'll continue to share some of my art, to find my audience, to make connections, and to let people know the art is there. Our culture pays lawyers hundreds of dollars an hour, and artists nothing, that's where our priorities really lie, and actions always speak louder than words.

But you can only buy my art from me.

If you like what any given artist creates, support them by buying their art, rather than stealing it or "borrowing" it. I got one of those freebie requests in my email today. I'm thinking about how to respond. I'm thinking out loud.

Not a Message from Our Sponsors

An open letter addressed to no one in particular. Just something that finally needed to be said, once and for all.

Dear Friends,

I love you all.

And it must be said, because it's starting to get annoying: I don't play games.

I don't play video games. I don't play computer games. I don't play online games. I don't gamble. I don't do RPGs or MMORPGs. I never have. I have no interest. I never did. I'm just not interested. Period.

At age 13 or 14, I was invited by junior high school friends to play Dungeons & Dragons for an afternoon, and I have never since been so bored again in my entire life. (In fact I never get bored. There's too much art to make.) The last video game I ever played, either in an arcade or on a computer, was Tetris. (In other words, long ago.) Yes, I do love the "Tron" movies. Yes, I have enjoyed playing on antique, physical pinball machines. ("Black Hole" was a favorite.) I also enjoyed some of those original 8-bit arcade games. ("Asteroids.")

However, I am not now nor have I ever been a gamer. Yes, I know that some friends believe that because I'm a computer-savvy geek and a nerd on several scientific and artistic fronts, therefore I must play computer games. I don't. Yes, I do enjoy playing other games, such as Scrabble, or Battleship. I even own a fine chess set, even though I suck at chess. (I suck at most strategic games like chess, however I am an adept and adaptive on-field tactician.)

As a computer-based creative professional, I often spend the entire day working on the computer. The very LAST thing I want to do when I end my work day (or night) is get back on the computer and play some kind of game. For me computer games are the exact opposite of relaxing.

We all live too much of our lives staring at one kind of screen or another. As a computer-based creative professional, I spend as much time as I can making art. Yes, that often includes looking at the little preview screen on the camera(s). However, when I'm out taking a camera walk, I often don't look at the screen, I just shoot and examine later. The many screens we all look at all day long need to be set aside from time to time. Just go look at the sky, or trees, for gods' sake.

So, friends, I love you all. Please take nothing that I say here as a personal attack. It isn't.

Just please stop inviting me to play stupid games. I'm just not interested.

Thank you. That is all.

Brush Poem: B +

A spontaneous brush poem. Copyright 2012.

Poem Published December 2012

Another poem just published: untitled.

This poem originally began as a song lyric, and might still end up getting set to music. It was inspired by a night spent in a hotel in Winnemucca, NV, when the wind was so strong and fierce that dust came in around the door cracks and the trees thrashed low to the ground. The windstorm lasted all night, making for interrupted sleep and fitful dreams. A memorable night. In the morning, there were ravens by the highway, as I drove on. 

Bolts Of Silk: beautiful poetry with something to say, is a wonderful online journal, edited by Juliet Wilson. The blog-based journal is eclectic in scope and style, with an emphasis on poetry about nature that evokes an experience in the reader. I'm pleased to be published there again. 



Enjoy!

Lux Aeterna: Premiere

In January 2011 I wrote a short piece of a capella music for men's chorus, "Lux Aeterna," on the Latin text from the Requiem Mass.

It's a favorite text of mine, since, although I am post-Christian, there are many areas of spirituality that I find to be universal and eternal. The aspects of the existing organized religions that I find to be congenial and meaningful are those that speak of unconditional love, acceptance, compassion, universal siblinghood (if you will), and holiness.

To define the essential core of my personal spiritual practice more truly than I ever have before, my personal religion is that of the Light. I follow the Light. I may have been born in the darkness, but I work for the Light.

On one level, that's just another label, ultimately misleading because incapable of fully encapsulating what I mean into one word that functions as a label. What do I mean by "the Light"? So much more than I can put into words. Which is one reason I periodically choose to set sacred texts about the Light to music. Music goes deeper than words.

This isn't by any means the first piece I've written about the Light that was written during the dark days of winter, near the winter solstice, or soon after. Nor is it likely to be the last.

The Light is a recurring theme in much of my art-making, including my composed music, and I return to it again and again.

Indeed, when I operate as a fine art landscape photographer, every image made in the camera is made with light, and most are, if you look past the obvious subject of the photo, about the Light. I photograph the quality of the ever-changing light, as one my primary subject matters.

Here is the Latin text of "Lux Aeterna," followed by an English translation. (My own rendition from the Latin, based on a handful of other translations.) It is a text that begins and ends with eternal light:

Lux aeterna luceat eis, Domine,
cum sanctis tuis in aeternum,
quia pius es.
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine,
et lux perpetua luceat eis.

Eternal light shine on them, Lord,
with your saints in eternity,
for you are merciful.
Grant them eternal rest, Lord,
and perpetual light shine on them.

To say that I serve the Light doesn't mean that I deny the darkness, without or within. If anything, I know the darkness so well that I have chosen to serve the Light. (There are a lot of personal biographical and spiritual stories about how I was led to that choice, but those are irrelevant here.)

When I am writing the music to an existing sacred text, the words lead me towards how to depict them in music. I could go into a detailed analysis of my music and how it relates to the text, but in truth I don't think that matters. What matters is that the music have the emotional impact and depth found in the text.

Here's a sample of the music, from the middle of the score, to give you a sense of the setting and musical style:


(Click on image for larger version.)

In just a few days, on December 8 & 9, 2012, "Lux Aeterna" will be premiered by Perfect Harmony Men's Chorus, in Madison, WI, as part of their 2012 winter concert series. The concert this year is themed as Warm Wishes from Wisconsin, and consists this year of mostly popular songs in gorgeous choral arrangements, a few novelties that will make you laugh out loud, and a few story-songs and carols that are powerful and moving, including some of the beautiful Alfred Burt carols. "Lux Aeterna" is the only sacred choral work on this year's winter concert.

I am pleased and proud to have my music sung by this group of excellent singers. I am doubly pleased that so many chorus members have told me that they like this piece a great deal. It is a piece in a fairly modern, somewhat challenging harmonic style (remember what I said earlier about depicting the text in its emotional impact), and they have worked in rehearsal, and that hard work has paid off. We will be premiering "Lux Aeterna" in a resonant performance space well suited to choral music, that will maximize the music's effect, so I look forward to hearing it there.

May the Light preserve and protect you, and lead you home!

The Eclipse Bowl

The Eclipse Bowl, 2012, fine art papier-maché

I am calling this piece The Eclipse Bowl. It reminds me of the moon being eclipsed, which will happen tonight during the full moon. And also of the way the late afternoon directional sunlight fell on the bowl when I was making these photos of it, part light, part dark, as if eclipsed.

I like the way the bowl's edges look like streamers of fire or moonlight. Or the trailing edges of clouds covering the moon.

This bowl was made last week during a papier-maché session from remnants left over from a commission to make a much larger bowl. The stock is gold-marbled cream linen paper. It's exquisite in its subtlety, and affecting in its charm. The bowl looks white from a distance, till you get closer and realize it's cream with gold swirls.

When I made this latest set of bowls, I didn't mix enough white glue into the water-glue matrix, so I ended up having to reglue parts of all the bowls I made in the set, this bowl more than any of the others. Nonetheless, I am very pleased with the end results.



Moon, white and cream and
silver, coin spinning in air,
don't let that wolf devour!

Thanksgiving Gratitudes

One of the things I am grateful for, thankful for, despite all the pain and suffering it took to get me to the point of understanding—the many detours and wrong turns, the early knowledge and adult denials, denials for the sake of propriety and trying to please others, and ending with gratitude even for the horrific medical journey I've been on that culminated in surgery and recovery—is this:

Everything else stripped away, I at least know and accept now that my purpose in life is to make art.

Create. Make things. Write. Make music. Poems. Photography. Digital visionary and shamanic art. Paint. To make art.

It's what I'm best at doing, possibly the only thing I'm really any good at doing. It was what I was born to do.

I knew this when I was a boy, but then everything in life, and almost everyone, conspired to convince me I was wrong, that I could never succeed at being a composer or artist. That I had to find a "real" job. And I believed them. Or enough parts of me were beaten into that belief that I started to sabotage my own artistic success, by doubt and fear and self-created drama.

Enough. Maybe I'll never "succeed" as an artist, by becoming a wealthy and famous composer or writer or artist, but at least I've stopped fighting the core truth: making art is what I'm supposed to do.

Doesn't mean it will always be easy, or pain-free, but having a purpose goes a long way towards making the rest of life bearable.

I'm thankful for knowing what I'm FOR.

I hope you know that about yourself, too.



Thank You for the gift of beautiful and artful things
For the gift of being able to appreciate and enjoy them
For the gift of being able to make them
For the tools and materials and skills used to make them
And for the friends to enjoy making alongside
And for the friends to enjoy them along with

I think it was probably the life-threatening, near-death experiences I've been through recently—during which a lot of nonessential things got pared away, leaving the core of who I am—that this clarity about my purpose came life was able to emerge. A lot of useless drama in my life has fallen away. I have a heightened sense of my own mortality, the limited time on this earth to get done what I want to get done.

It was also a wake-up call to convert some old bad self-defeating habits into a more positive focus on what is possible rather than what was lost. That's still a new thing, still a fragile bit of learning. I have to remind myself to be positive rather than defeatist, most days. At the same time, I find I have less and less patience for those things and people that seem purposed towards wasting my time and energy. Awareness of your own mortality can heighten your impatience about wasting time. Stated more positively, I'll never be bored again. I have no time for boredom. There's too much to do, and I want to do it all.



Asked recently to write a short bio to accompany a set of my poems being published, I acknowledged this new awareness.

Arthur Durkee has finally woken up to the truth that his purpose in life is to Make Things: be an artist, a composer, poet, musician, painter, photographer, songwriter, landscape sculptor, book artist, videographer, etc. This realization came on the heels of a long illness, near-death experience, surgery, and recovery. Creative work is what he does best, and best loves doing; in fact, it's the only thing he's really good at. He's tried a lot of other jobs, from corporate to retail, and never excelled at any of them. He does still dabble for fun in freelance design and illustration for books and magazines, and creating art for musicians, such as posters and CDs. He observes the world from a slight angle, with an artist's eye and a bard's ear, and gives it back within new frames of focus. We are but mirrors and we marvel.

Love Is Hard, Love Is Easy

What's the hardest thing to do in the world?

Love.

Love is the hardest thing to do.

But it's also the easiest.

We make it harder than it needs to be, with our constant feelings that we don't deserve to be loved. We reject those who love us as fools, because we know we're unlovable. So they must be deluded to love us.

But that's wrong.

We are all loved whether or not we deserve it.

That's what unconditional means.

Your task is to overcome those feelings that you don't deserve love, feelings which you hold up like armor, to keep everyone out, to protect yourself. Or so you believe. But all you're doing is preventing love from getting in, by driving it away because you imagine you don't deserve it. Then it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy: you isolate yourself, then call yourself alienated.

It doesn't matter. Nevertheless you are loved.

Deal with it.

Poems Published November 2012

Triggerfish Critical Review

Issue #10 of this excellent poetry journal is now online and ready to be viewed.

I have six poems featured in this issue. I'm pleased with this publication of some of my poetry, particularly since my work was asked for by the editor. It's always nice to be asked for one's poems, rather than the more common experience of sending poems out at random, never to be heard from again.

Three of these poems are published with audio. The audio is a reading of each associated poem, with soundscape and/or music. I spent an evening reading my poems into my studio recording system, then adding music and sound design to them. I on;y finished three of the six readings before publication, though.

The poems themselves are a selection from the diverse range of poems I've written over the last four or five years. It's been a prolific period, with three or four series running simultaneously, and a scattering of individual pieces. Since I was commissioned to write words and music for "Heartlands," I have been writing fewer "pure" poems, and more song lyrics. Meanwhile, here's a garland of poems for your reading delectation.

Hope you enjoy them.

Songwriting: Influences

When you list your influences as a songwriter, everyone who reads such lists has certain expectations, expectations which have become clichéd. Even defying the usual expectations has become clichéd; for example, when a songwriter cites as influence "a flowery meadow," or plays a game of reversals.

Never having myself been a member of the Cult of Dylan or the Cult of Cohen, you won't find their names on my songwriting influences list. That's not to deny giving Bob his due as an occasionally unique and brilliant songwriter, with a knack for a turn of phrase both memorable and fresh. But he's not an influence on my songwriting.

There are a lot of songwriters you learn from, that you can learn craft from by looking at their material, learning their songs, analyzing the scores, just listening. I learn a great deal about songwriting by looking at songs. That's just going to school. But that doesn't mean those songwriters become your influences.

No, your influences are those songs and songwriters that get under your skin, that get at your guts, where you go, "I want to do that!" Not imitate, though imitation is often where we learn to start to write, but incorporate. Some sensibility, or mood, or way of looking at the world you never experienced or imagined before. Songwriters who have influenced me have all had a moment for me, or many moments, where I got lost inside the worlds they created, inhabited those worlds, and started writing about those worlds myself, using my own words and music to respond from inside those worlds.

It's about being haunted. Haunting worlds created inside a song, and being yourself haunted by what you found there. That's the stuff that gets inside your bones and blood, and even though the new songs you write may be nothing like those ones the influenced you musically or lyrically, there's a ghost in there that took up lodging in your chest and still sings through your lungs, using your body as its shell to sing its songs.

It's a hungry host kind of haunting, that won't leave you in peace, but requires you to keep on singing. Eventually you learn that music is the alchemy of survival, just as art is the alchemy of life, transforming suffering into something that can be endured. Just.

One of my influences, by this definition, as a songwriter is John Dowland, the great Elizabethan composer and lutenist and songwriter.

In the alchemical transaction that is music, doing the blues, singing and playing about the worst things in life, makes you feel better. Making music about despair, death, horror, suffering, love lost, loneliness,violation, pain, all that paradoxically helps you feel less alone, feel better. Some days the blues are the only thing that keeps you going. They give you a reason to get through the night, when there isn't any other.

John Dowland wrote the Elizabethan blues. They still help us keep going.

Here are the lyrics to what is still one of the greatest songs by one of the greatest songwriters ever: "Flow, My Tears," by John Dowland:

Flow, my tears, fall from your springs!
Exiled for ever, let me mourn;
Where night's black bird her sad infamy sings,
There let me live forlorn.

Down vain lights, shine you no more!
No nights are dark enough for those
That in despair their lost fortunes deplore.
Light doth but shame disclose.

Never may my woes be relieved,
Since pity is fled;
And tears and sighs and groans my weary days
Of all joys have deprived.

From the highest spire of contentment
My fortune is thrown;
And fear and grief and pain for my deserts
Are my hopes, since hope is gone.

Hark! you shadows that in darkness dwell,
Learn to contemn light
Happy, happy they that in hell
Feel not the world's despite.

A Painting Journal

Aurorae, acrylic on paper, 2012

A painting journal

Trying something semi-new. Keeping a journal as I paint. Writing down thoughts in the pauses between painting during a session. Just as a record of the creative process.

Listening to music, while I paint, on random shuffle on iTunes on my laptop. Keep in mind that on my studio computer, my iTunes library can now play for over 190 days continuously, with no repeats. All kinds of music, truly random.

•

Thursday, November 8
4:16 PM

Feel like painting today. There is sunlight streaming in for the first time in weeks. There’s one painting that I want to finish, now.

Don't be afraid to paint over something you liked before, but which didn't work for this painting. I am finding myself wanting to finish one of the “Lights” (Aurora Borealis) series of paintings today, after having it set aside for weeks. I have the iTunes music library on shuffle, listening to random pieces while painting. All over the avant-classical pop rock map. Copland to Patsy Cline to books on CD to Kate Bush.

Several layers of dry rush blue night sky, over existing backgrounds. Then the luminosity of the aurorae themselves. Lots of edge softenings, nuances, translucencies.

Even though I started this painting with bold geometric shapes, I've moved away towards something more fractal, more natural. Follow the brush. Bold and solid under layers yield to thinner, translucent, feathered upper layers. It looks better that way.

Because of the way I'm painting right now, or because of the abstract-realist subject matter, I find myself using large flat brushes. Angled strokes, really rather calligraphic. Sometimes the brushtrokes form lines and surfaces like geographic texture underneath the more visible layers.

Peter Gabriel to science fiction soundtrack creepiness. “He's got a ray gun!” Melodic punk Bob Mould. Zen shakuhachi.

The painting darkens but the lights still shine through.

•

Thursday, November 8
4:46 PM

The next layers will lighten the painting up again. Let the dark over-layers dry for awhile. Then continue. Often I don't let the acrylics totally dry, because I do like the slight mixing that happens when you dry brush paint over a still slightly wet layer. The same kind of mixing that happens in nature, layers of sedimentary rock feathering and mixing together as they form, bleeding color from minerals leaching into the matrix.

Continuing to photograph each painting in progress, with the idea of using these closeups and sectional photos of color and brushstroke as painted stock backgrounds. Might even create and sell CDs of original stock on my own, of these my own materials. Why not? No one else has them, because no one else has these paintings in progress.

Photographing the painting in progress is also a way of looking at it, contemplating it, looking more closely.

Quick sunset of oncoming winter. There goes the last of the natural light. Even in the failing light, though, continuing to paint, kitchen lights turned on now.

Sometimes the texture of the paper still comes through, as do the lines of brushstrokes on lower layers.

Of course lighting affects mood. Color does as well. Despite what the neuroscientists claim, I don't think that's hardwired, I think it still has some culturally-bound factors. A lot of neuroscientists are not even aware that their own fundamental assumptions about what they observe are culturally-bound; unaware that their cultural bias is Western-scientific; as opposed to, for example, Inuit-mythic or Hindu-Buddhist-cosmological. Is a fish aware that it’s breathing water?

Color palette and language are not the same from culture to culture. What is held in common are the perceived colors of natural world objects. Red berries on forest plants around the world are poisonous often enough to humans to be of note. But there is no equivalent color in the northern Midwest to the color of young rice in the paddies, that unique yellow-green. So what we associate with those colors has at minimum some cultural input and conditioning with regards to how we interpret colors as emotions.

Yet I’m a North American, born on Turtle Island, and my roots for this kind of painting that I find myself doing are in Kandinsky and other branches of early Modernism, from the period before Modernism went ultra-rational, began to worship logical-positivism, and threw away all of its early vestiges of both irrationality and mysticism.

People forget that some of the key branches of early Modernism were deep explorations of the newly-theorized unconscious self, the realm of dreams and myths and archetypes; that got discarded in favor of rational utilitarianism. Not always an equal tradeoff. What the expressive color, the color of expression, in my painting means might mean what it means only to me, but as Kandinsky notes, if the experience of viewing the painting evokes an emotional, or mythopoetic, response in the viewer, all is good.

Laurie Anderson runs into Coldplay. Then 40s pop hits. A favorite slow movement from a Vivaldi cello concerto. Truly random music choices. The BBC Radio drama of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

Rest awhile. Make some more photos of the painting. Think about starting dinner.

•

Thursday, November 8
5:16 PM

I'm not remotely tired of photographing these paintings as I make them. It's not really about recording the process, more about watching change. Each working period yields a new painting. The painting you start with is not always like the painting you end with, and it might change several times during the process. Eventually it tells you when it's done, and you stop.

That's something a lot of my non-artist friends never seem to understand: listening to what the work tells you it wants. Non-artists all too often think art-making is all a conscious act of will, as though it were all planned out, pre-designed, engineered to the artist’s willful blueprint. Well, sometimes you do start out that way, but it almost never ends up exactly as you pre-visualized. It moves. It always has a will of its own. The artist doesn't control things as much as people think. There's a lot of intuition involved.

One of the things that makes a lot of current postmodern art so dry and emotionally flat, and often frankly boring, is precisely a lack of intuition, with too much conscious intent and control. Trust me, I've worked in advertising art and commercial design and illustration, where you are in fact working to a goal, an outline, a conscious intent. Art with a purpose, art intended to pass on a specific message. It's often still creative and fun, and sometimes even nuances, but it's not art that’s meant to endure. It’s meant to be seen once, clearly convey its message, then the reader moves on. Most art you see in magazines is like that. You don't desire to keep coming back to it, to look at it again and absorb it.

When I look at a Jeff Koons piece, for example, it's often very clever and flashy and interesting, really eye-catching and fun. But once I've seen it, I’m done with it. There’s no lingering. Looking at it a second time, I shrug. There is no desire to come back. It's commercial illustration writ large, and what it lacks is precisely that emotional intuition (Kandinsky again) that I find myself seeking from my own paintings. I don't tire of looking at them, or making photos of them.

Probably most artists feel this way about their own work, so it's hardly a revelation, I imagine. If it didn’t interest you as an artist, you wouldn’t return to it, or to doing it.

October Project. A movie soundtrack. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Cowpunk ditties. "I hate to wake up sober in Nebraska." Music rolling on.

Pause to make dinner. Ravel solo piano music.

•

Friday, November 9
11:45 AM

Now we lighten up the colors again, so they emerge from the dark, glowing. Red glows over green.

Thinking ahead, planning ahead, envisioning in advance with the mind’s eye, what photographer Edward Weston called “pre-visualization,” is something I learned to do years ago as a graphic designer. You keep the goal in mind. You can hit the mental undo button to go back a step if necessary. You visualize what the end result will look like, and you approach that visualization even if you never quite match it in the real world. Imagination remains more malleable, in the end.

Working in layers on a painting, adding layers over layers, is for me analogous to working in layers in Photoshop. You know what's above and below, what masks and what shows through, how they interact. There is a similar sense of happy accident, the indeterminacy I often like to see in all the art I do. Being surprised as the artist is one of the things I love about the process. Discovery. The mystery of an unplanned but even better outcome.

Thinking about this further, layers are natural to me because they are prominent in my music, and the music I play and listen to. All those years spent playing Javanese gamelan, which is layered cycles of melody and heterophony. The influence of the Indonesian music I've studied and played on how I play in a jazz or rock combo setting, in which I also tend to think in layers. Avant-garde classical music and jazz, often structured similarly. I'm thinking of Steve Reich's cyclic gradual process music, and also more recently of Nik Bartsch and his ensemble Ronin, in which the tension between layers of melody and rhythmic cycles is integral to the music.

The underlayers of the painting show through in parts, in textures underneath, even when the pigments are covered over or mostly so. Remnants. Memories. Little bits of the past. Every painting is a history as well as a fact.

•

Saturday, November 10
12:34 PM

Recently acquired the special edition DVD of Ed Harris' movie "Pollock," which is an excellent biopic about the artist Jackson Pollock, unsentimental and deeply moving. It’s not a psychoanalysis of Pollock, it’s a presentation of his life. The most interesting and intense parts of the movie are the scenes in which we see the artist at work, creating. To do this role, Harris learned how to paint. He built a studio behind his house, and began to learn. The paintings seen in the film are re-creations of Pollocks, made by the film studio art department, but also worked on by Harris on camera. This is one of the most realistic depictions of a painter in the films: there’s no faking it.

Watching Harris paint as Pollock painted, in character but also DOING the paintings is enthralling. You can see that the actor has absorbed how the painter moved, physically, which gives a strong clue to how he painted. This is a simply terrific film. It inspires me to take up the brushes again today and work some more.

Painting is becoming something that, once I've started doing it, becomes self-sustaining. I still have trouble with all the labels around art: painter, artist, etc. I'd rather than just do it than have a label I have to wear like a name badge. So I still don't think of myself as A Painter, I just paint. I’m happy to say I paint, and leave it at that.

•

Monday, November 12
2:07 PM

This painting is now finished. No title yet, though I do know it’s part of the aurora borealis series. Call it simply “Aurorae” for now. I’ll put it up on the bedroom wall with the other painting, and continue to grow the cluster of paintings there, adding color to my room’s most empty wallspace.

Finished. Rather, I don't know what else to do with it. The end result is a bit darker than I had envisioned, nonetheless it's saturated with rich color. There are a lot of details here I like. Brushstrokes like waves of light and air.

Poet Paul Valery once opined, "A poem is never finished, only abandoned." I feel some of that now. This painting is abandoned. I feel the need to go on, to work on other paintings. To do something new and unknown. To improvise.

In painting as in poetry, there comes a point after which more revision won't fix anything, and often makes things worse. I once was boggled to hear that a poet was teaching her writing workshop students that she sometimes revised a poem sixty times. I frankly find that either unbelievable or pathetic. If it takes that long to "fix" a piece of art, chances are you never will. Either it has defeated you already, or you've gotten stuck.

I don't feel that way about this painting, it just feels done. Abandoned, maybe, or perhaps it’s just telling me that it’s done. I don't know what else to do with it. I'm satisfied. I'm ready to move on to the next piece.

The Day After the Day of the Dead

Some of these guys look a little hungover. Too much fun the night before, maybe. Or blood.





When I went out this morning to start taking down my decorations, I found someone had put a Peanut M&M in the mouth of one of the hanging skeletons. So even the hungry ghosts got fed last night.

You Must Honor Illness

(a Spiral Dance essay)

I've felt pulled off-balance for so long, off-center and not-grounded, and for good reason. I had been ill for twenty years, although it hadn't been diagnosed as what it was till near the end of that time. Then the cure had its own pulls off center, a genuine cure but it comes with its own set of problems, changes and re-creations of what was and what can never be again. I still don't know what the new normal is. If there is one. If there will ever be again a sense of stability and direction.

I spend all this long day waiting, a day where nothing bad happened but I just couldn't get rid of that sense of darkness and void lurking just behind everything you see. Out of the corner of the eye the fabric is ripped away and the play is revealed for what it is, a painted backdrop over nothing. If you turn your head too quickly, the paper rips and you see through the world into that emptiness behind all manifest things.

And that's why I often feel off-balance and fogged out and ungrounded lately. It's just that I don't have any maps any more. All the old maps are useless or incomplete. When you've drifted this far out to sea, there's no sense of which direction to go to find land again. It's water heaving all around, and no smell of shore.

So in the past few days, after a summer's long pull down towards the smiling void, I find myself turning, or returning, to those sources that have given me a sense of center before, a center from which to extend. And so this morning I read, out of nothing that could remotely be called a coincidence, words that linger with me all this long day. Words that come back to me as I fail to find my center and extent once again this late night:

You must honor illness. It gives us time for reflection. As hard as it is, it helps us sort out our priorities. I know there's nothing worse then someone telling you, 'This illness of yours is a gift.' No, it's painful and discouraging. It's not a gift, but it is a time to pull back and take a closer look at one's life.

—Father Sergei, quoted in Mary Swander's luminous book The Desert Pilgrim: En route to mysticism and miracles.

I have tried hard, many times, to honor my illness, and my recovery. Illness has not been a gift. It's been a passage that more or less removed any chance of meeting whatever ambition I had felt years ago for purpose in this life. This doesn't mean there was no direction, but such maps as there were were never more than puzzle codexes in a lost language leading you away from treasure island. Illness sent me adrift and astray. The beneficial knowledge that comes from hindsight about this illness is knowing that in fact my failures in life, so labeled when they occurred, were not a failure of will, not a personality defect, nor a lack of focus. The life-force truly had been sucked out of my blood, blood which tastes like a lost ancestral ocean. I was neither too lazy nor unambitious, I was in truth waylaid by gravitational tides fully veiled until this recent complicated cure.

Still the recovery has been a time of reflection. My priorities, after almost dying, were reshuffled into a new configuration. I know what my purpose here is now, and I know upon reflection what I'm for, what I do best: I am a maker, a bard, an artist, who's really not very good at much else. Self-knowledge is not all roses and lilies, though, as I have discovered I lack any patience for idiocy that would further leech my essence. I know my mortality from the inside out, having almost lost my ability to live. I have a lot to do, and don't want to waste any more time doing it.

So that's the necessary distinction: My illness was no gift, yet it did provide me other gifts. Of self-awareness, of self-confidence in knowing what I'm good at and what I'm supposed to do with it. I'm still recovering. Not what was lost, but what I never had but dreamed. A dream wherein a map guides me no land that ever was, but an island come into being as one discovers it. There's nothing on the other side of those mountains till you cross their range and see what's there, the act of vision itself what solidifies void into form, light into mass. That effortless conversion of energy into matter.

if you let that silence in

Feeling really inward this evening. One of those times when you just want to sit and watch the changing of the light, as the evening sky goes from afternoon to sunset to the indigo of night. Reading until it's too dark to see anymore. That sort of mood. Wanting everyone to just go away and leave you alone, even though it's not that you want to push people away, just that it's hard to be around people when you're in that mood. This is exactly how depression and PTSD alienate: you don't feel like you can connect with anyone, because you're in a different universe than they are. Nothing connects. E.M. Forster's epigram and key phrase from his novel Howard's End was "Only connect." But at the end of his greatest novel, A Passage to India, there's a scene between two of the main characters that raises the doubt that we ever can connect. That it might just not be possible. We try hard but there are always rocks and hills that get in between us, get in our way. I feel on the other side of the mountains from everyone, in these evening moods. This is the ceremony of the changing of the light. No light to see by, till the carriage lights turn on and the sky tries to fill with stars. Which it won't tonight, because of clouds and cold. I need to get out and go grocery shopping, just a few odds and ends, but I don't want to move at all. I wrote a poem some years ago in this mood, and it had some legs, even got published. "La Madonna." A young wife's interior monologue, as she sits in silence, in a quiet moment between the flurry of her usual day. "In a minute," she says, before the poem ends. She'll rejoin the world in a minute. Sometimes you just want some time to yourself, to be still and silent and by yourself. One thing that experience has proven is that extraverts never really understand introverts; they never comprehend why we need to be still and silent for part of our day, how it recharges. I also feel in no rush to be around people these days, as they tend to be noisy and clueless and overbearing. PTSD for me means I get easily overstimulated. It just gets too loud and overwhelming sometimes. I get the sense that lots of my friends really don't understand that. I doubt few of them have even read this far. How do you get a quiet message through the personal and cultural noise? The voice of the divine isn't loud, it's a still small voice, a voice you must listen for, and it's easy to miss. Too much noise, not enough signal, that's the state of the world. It's mostly noise, very little signal. I've had friends marvel at the fact that when they come to visit, I don't have the TV on, or the radio, or even the stereo, using background noise to cover over that silence, that void and gap in conversation and communion that most people seem to be deathly afraid of. Geese are passing over, there's only a thin line of light on the western horizon, everything else has gone blue and grey. People are afraid of silence. We've all gotten so used to the loud noise of cultural that people are afraid of even gaps in conversation. We're so used to fast editing in the entertainment, sharp cuts and jerky camera shots and editing for maximum adrenaline stimulation, that people don't know what to do with themselves if the moment is too quiet. I have friends who are incapable of sitting in silent companionship, saying nothing, just holding space, just sharing the silence. The minute there's a gap in the noise, they try to generate signal. But it always comes out wrong. They stumble. But I'm afraid of the silences and gaps in fellowship. I'm comfortable with silence. The void is a longtime companion that I have come to know very well. Whole worlds can drop into those silences. When I'm driving across the loneliest two-lane highway in the world, a hundred miles from anywhere, out in the desert in Utah or Nevada, or on the unpaved roads of the northern Great Lakes backcountry, I sometimes pull the truck over, turn off the motor, get out, lean against the hood, and just listen to the silence. An hour of the total silence of the desert is worth a month of talk therapy. Things settle in place. Life stops. There's nothing but the present moment, nowhere to be, nothing to do, and most importantly nothing that needs to be said. I know a lot of very smart people who are incapable of silence, who process everything in words, whose lives make no sense to them until they talk it out or think it in their minds in words, till they fill the void gap with their own words. I know writers and poets who never shut up, and don't know how to. But I also know musicians who know the value of a long rest, of the fermata, of the breath-pause in between phrases, that tiny moment of absolute stillness that an entire world can fall through, between the end of one phrase and the beginning of the next. No words there, and none needed. The words fail us at that point, and that's where the bard and shaman know that poetry begins. Purple and grey band of light under the soft lip of steel clouds behind forks of bare trees as the wind stills for long enough for you to hear something in that evening silence that can feel the world. If you let it.

Rural Skies in Infrared

Recently I drove the back roads around my small town, which I often do when I need to get out and clear the cobwebs out of my head. It's like a camera walk, the purpose of which is not to make art, but to do a kind of meditation: to just walk, to see what is there, to see rather than just look. You make images with the camera, but the focus is on the process rather than the product. Sometimes I get only one good image from a camera walk, sometimes I get several. Driving around with the camera is similar, just with a wider range of opportunities.



Open prairie skies, endless sea of grass. . . .



I ended up at one of my favorite local county parks, photographing the brilliant autumn colors. I also set my other camera on B&W and made some infrared photos, and also some drive-by photos of farm buildings and fields as I drove. This photo is the best of the drive-by photos.

Autumn Colors at Their Peak

A few days ago, taking a break from working on projects, I went out for a drive in the afternoon, just to change gears for awhile. That's always a good way to clear out the cobwebs in the head. I wound up driving out to one of my favorite local county parks, where the autumn colors in the trees were at their peak. A stunning display.




Autumn colors in the local park. No one about. A gentle breeze in this sheltered valley becomes a stiff and howling wind on the open farm fields outside.



Stillness in the valley, except for the trees bowing in the wind above the high hill. Stones of memory and silence, embracing entwining encompassing encapsulating. Where the river runs out to dry the stone begins. Wind becoming an ending, a beginning. Becoming light. Always into light.



Bluejay in a golden maple. Thin haze between blue sky and still=green lawn. Spruce bearing fruit that on second glance is little brown birds, and a female cardinal.



The road covered with glory. Leaves by the ditch brilliant with light.

Spontaneous Brush Poem

Not quite insomnia, just that you have difficulty falling back asleep after waking up in the very early morning hours. Read for a bit. Then without thinking about it too much, pull out the digital brush and start painting and writing.













Finish and save one panel, erase and being a new panel, rinse and repeat, till the poem tells you it has come to an end. As poems do. The energy changes when a poem has told you it's at an end, like the water going slack when the well stops pumping.

The title is arbitrary, just what comes into your head at that moment. The brush poem says it wants to be "no. 4" so you agree to it. Nothing more than that.

The back cover title page wants to be different, as if the poem were bound in a hand-stitched Japanese notebook. Small, pocket size, bound in papyrus or hatched brown paper. Maybe that's in fact just the way the poem wants to be bound. Poem in a sketchbook, bound for glory.

An artist is one who responds to experince by making art. Even if it's just not-quite-insomnia in the middle of the night.