What I'm For, or How To Discover Your Purpose In Life By Failing At Everything Else

When I was young, I wanted to grow up to be a scientist.

I spent several years on that, training in the sciences, especially the earth sciences. I pursued that goal all the way to college level classes in geology and chemistry. What stopped me was math studies. I placed in advanced math till the eighth grade, and then I got stuck. Later in life, my Mom said it was because of the math teacher. She had seen it at the time, but had not been able to change it, or talk to me about it; she thought there were psychological problems in play. I had really liked my math teacher at the time, for example he liked to play Beethoven's Sixth Symphony during class while we worked, but he did somehow derail my confidence in my math studies.

I'm not really sure how that happened. I only remember that after 8th grade math, I felt stupid rather than smart in math studies. I had little confidence in my own ability. When it came to college entry exams, I scored nearly perfectly in Language Arts, and only at 50 percent in Math on the SATs. This was after scoring in the top 1 percent in every test battery taken throughout my school years. I still somehow scored in the top 5 percent overall for college entry exams, and placed out of both English and Foreign Language requirements, by getting top marks in Advanced Placement classes for both. But not for math.

I was a gifted child who didn't want to be one. I was one of those child prodigies. But I was bullied for being smart, for being a teacher's pet, for being different. I wanted nothing more than to fit in, to be liked, to be accepted. Well, that never happened. I continued in the sciences, till college, and loved doing geology in the field, partly because I loved being outdoors, and then I realized something.

I wasn't meant to be a scientist.

Well, I was, and none of that work was wasted, but there was a thing in me that could never be suppressed or ignored or set aside. It just wasn't possible. It was too powerful to ignore. It's too much more of what I was, and supposed to be.

I wanted to be a scientist. But I was supposed to be a Maker.

I was born to make art. I'm a natural creative. It's the thing I do best. (Really. I can barely handle mundane tasks like managing money, by contrast.)

It took me a very long time to accept that I'm supposed to an artist, a composer, a worker, a person who makes things. New things. A MAker

I say this with neither pride nor humility. I am neither egotistical about it, or falsely humble about it. It's just a fact. Making things is what I do best.

It's really the only thing I'm any good at. I've tried a lot of other career paths in life, and mostly failed at them. I'm looking at a future of failure again, every time I try to fit in, or be accepted, or be like other people. Fitting in never worked in school, when I was being bullied, and it still never seems to work in my adult life. I seem to fated to always be "other." Again, that's just data, not ego.

In mid-college I changed majors from science to the arts. I switched from geology to music, and transferred to the Music School. Almost everyone tried to talk me out of it, including the Dean of the Music School. But the fact is, I had been playing music since I was 5 or 6 years old, singing as a boy soprano soloist. I began piano studies at age 7. (That was inevitable, as Mom was a concert pianist and music educator. Both my sister and I studied piano. I think it made us better thinkers overall, as later education studies seem to suggest.) Everyone wanted me to continue in science, get a good job, and continue to be an amateur musician. But I couldn't do it. In fact, I had been composing music, and had even had a few pieces played, since I was a young boy. I had won awards for short story fiction by age 16. I had gotten interested in photography at a young age, and got better with every year. Even when I was out studying geology in the field, all summer long in Wyoming, my very first college class, when I returned home I had already taken so many photos in the mountains that people started to notice them. I was a gifted child, and stood out, even though a lot of the time I just wanted to disappear.

After music school, my first job after graduation was ironically with Mathematical Reviews, a monthly review journal, where I got in on the ground floor of the desktop publishing revolution, and became a computer graphics expert, a digital type designer, and more. Working in corporate graphic design jobs was creative enough to be fulfilling for me, and I did it for many years, but it still wasn't enough. A book design company, one of the best places I ever worked for, allowed me to use their gear to teach myself Photoshop, and become even more of an expert. I also started to win awards for photography and digital art. I worked there till they corporately downsized. The book publishing business collapsed starting in 2000, and has radically changed since then. Nonetheless, I still have all those skills.

And corporate employment just never seems to work. I can never seem to make it work. It's like it's prevented. And then my life changed due to chronic illness. I suspect those corporate doors may be forever closed to me now.

So I've got no choice, now, but to go forward with no hope of success but with my only choice being to be what I am, a Maker. I make stuff. It's all I'm any good at. I don't know if it will be enough to sustain me. I guess it's time to do what I'm good at, and forget about the rest.

It's pretty scary, because I've developed trust issues. Really big ones. I guess the only thing I actually trust anymore is Making, in which I never seem to doubt myself, and in which I always have full self-confidence in my ability and need to make things.

I make art of some kind every day. (Well, some really bad days I can't. But that's a symptom of a dark day. I hate it, but I try to get past it.) Even if everything else falls apart, that's still true. ON good days I make things, on bad days I make things, I just make things. I guess that's how to tell that's what you're for: it's the thing that you never stop doing, even when all the rest has been taken away. So that's what you do. That's what you're for.

And that's all I can do. It's all that's left. Wish me luck.

Sealife

Rain on the tin chimney cap, pebbles falling on a black slate seacliff.
Everything is so hard. It all takes longer than it should, longer
than I remember it ever taking before, than i want it to. A wish is not
a promise, not that sudden spring storm that takes breath away.
A mug of tea in hand to light the keeper's soul. These rocks, this island.
Rain on the pebbled path, shattering light in ripples and shards.
The world won't pull itself into shape anymore. I've lost whatever way
I once had. It just falls apart. New paths haven't coalesced. The fog
just sits there, luffing the sails, becalmed. Fog and wind never share.
When my mind fills with fog I make no sail. Even this harbor fills
with ghosts.

        Here I am alone at last. Again and again. Do you see
where the waters meet, surge, blend, change color, finally merge?
Where green and brown become blue, and sink to ancient seabed,
slow limestone forming from the deep rain of falling plankton shell
and skeleton. Limestone is the graves of millions of sea lives.
The same layer and rind of calcium that is the mineral shine
of human teeth. Not mine, which are more than half fake, product
of a childhood spent away from treated water. Lifelong battle till my
minerals flake and fall away, leave gap and gouge in jaw and skull,
holes where pirates put gold, once, when they could.
But I have both eyes.

         And strange cavitation of sea-driven screws vortexing deep waters.
Dark shapes pass close by in the invisible rain and unsilent dark.
In the rain, in another world, I would be warm and naked under
a warming sun. But not yet. Not here. Prophecy is mere
vision that skips across an inner eye like sunlight, starshine,
bad clams. It's as corrosive as it is demanding. Skip ahead,
wild-breasted daughters of sunlit terraces on Mediterranean islets.
Let the wild boys chase you, not knowing you will tame them
once they've caught you. Who owns this trap? Its jaws full of light.

             No,
here I am slunk again in immobility. A broth of lassitude that verges
on desperation. I'm not saying I don't already know. I wish the news
were something that would save me, but it's a perishing blast of ice.
There's a blade of Antarctic iceshelf broken off and floating north,
an island of ice larger than your splayed-out hand from low orbit.
When it grounds and melts, or where, no one can guess, but there will be
hell to pay, a guaranteed disruption and dismay. Prophecy that.
For someone. I'm spinning in polar current circles, as this ice field,
touched down nowhere, frozen and lumbering along. No certainty here,
either.

      It's been awhile since I knew what shape to take to match the world's.
Every certain thing fallen away. Again and again. From first
void-filled vision to slower cracking, a splint on splintered world,
effect preceding cause. We know what caused the plane to fall,
but what caused the plane? What caused falling? It's remote. Iced over now.
Paleolithic.

         Stone axe shattering years between years. Blue red
stone shining when held just so to sun. Slickness of stream-bedded
quartzite sheens like water but doesn't lose shape. Polished sand
that once was river mouth filling the ocean plain below, now
sandstone and glinted mica shale, melted, reforged, made ever harder
beneath the pressure of a world's living, now glass. Still we can see
ripples that lay under river's glint and gleam. Glass-clear trout ghost
across memory of mountain sands that now rise up mid-lake
after being washed and ground to ocean, rippled in waves, crusted,
sealed, frozen, polished, reflecting sun again after long sleep. The memory
of water glistening stone surface as though an ancient river still flowed.
Under time-bent starlight, still, it does. There's no peace in this falling-apart
world, but the long breath of deep time, starlight on wet stone,
at least reminds us how short these few breaths are.

             Your hair
has not spread over my pillow in eons. Will we meet again, in a million years?
Perhaps these atoms, in your bones, in mine, will once again mingle,
making teeth in a future we cannot imagine. Perhaps your stone heart
will indeed be fossilized, preserved between beats as a clenched fist
in concrete sands.

         I cannot wait. Rain on galvanized tin grows louder, steady, still
circling all these eons. Rain wash me away. Rain wash all this to sand.
But the body, breathless, clings, and worries, and wants to go on,
even when we know it never could.

The Road to the Western Lands 2

Joshua Tree: Infrared

Images from Joshua Tree National Park, CA, February 2012



Early morning, a hot day in mid-February in the California desert. Strong shadows with sharp edges in the morning light. Infrared brings out the high contrast between light and dark, creating abstract shapes. The rocks and plant forms are almost alien in this strange light.

The Road to the Western Lands 1

During this just-completed roadtrip I made a lot of grab-shots out the windows of the truck, and of the road ahead of the windshield. Each roadtrip is a bit different, and different in what calls to me imagistically as well. This trip, I found myself interested in photographing the road: the journey itself. The icon of the classic two-lane blacktop highway passing across the middle of desolate nowheres. I made this kind of photo again and again throughout my month-long travels, on all kinds of roads, under many kinds of conditions.

Consider this the beginning of a series.

Grand Canyon

(Images from Grand Canyon National Park, February 2012)

The Range of Light

(Images from Yosemite National Park, CA, February 2012.)





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after sunset
moon and road
converge

in the blur of travel
the long ride home

Guadalupe Mountains, TX

(Photos from Guadalupe Mountains National Park, January 2012.)







On the TX/NM border, the Guadalupe Mountains, which are the same ancient reef formation that is the home of Carlsbad Caverns. You can see El Capitan, the end of the Guadalupes, from the entrance to Carlsbad Caverns; they are connected at the root.







What the Guadalupes have is abundant biological diversity, some amazing views and hikes, and scenery that changes mood and tone as the sun moves across the sky, and the light evolves throughout the day. I spent my time in the Guadalupes this trip mostly near the end of the day, before driving on to Las Cruces, when the light was moving up the walls of Pine Spring Canyon like a curtain raising.





I hiked into the evening, until the shadows turned as cold as the day's sunlight had been warm. I followed trails partway up the canyon, then back down.







I stopped at the foot of El Capitan as the sun bronzed and ambered the hills and rocks, making layers of gold and grey hills fade off into time.

The Books of the Cliffs

incised inscription of dull pen on white black
mind clover mask and trumpet vine ripe with bees
steady crimson face of blood in etching copper knife
long sassafras fade from green to gold ember glisten
this fall, long autumn, when every tree glows as if the first day

unformed soul's preceptor, brilliant stick of lightning
sage of canvas written as flesh, honey and ice
long witness and evocation of fossil bones of owls
sea cliff remnant in breaking stone cliff waves over highway
this road not traveled since the world ended and began

logjam of unshelter, feelings never released into flesh
light of the touch, improbable destiny in orbit in escalade
tones of fire tonguing the waste long cliff fall shades
dancers around confocal firepit shadow cast dancing on stone
in the end ash sage ember gold flakes in a fitful wind

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This is a newer poem in a form I haven't written in for awhile. It began as a form I invented or developed or discovered, take your pick, over a decade ago, which I used intensively for awhile. They are poems in the series I call the Books. Eventually I was planning to collect the best of these poems into an art book called The Books of Silence. I have some designs and illustrations and Photoshop art already for that project done, but I've never finished it. That might move closer towards being completed soon, as I am getting interested in book design and work again. Some of the first poems in the series can be read here.


Palimpsest 1, in the art style I'm thinking of using for the Books

The thing about writing a series of poems is: How do you know when it's complete? How do you know you won't be writing in that form anymore, or building on that series, or assembling poems in the same form? Where do you stop? Do you stop at all?

I've done several different poem series over the years. In truth, I don't always know when a series is done. I don't actively think about it very often. I just let it happen. When a series is done, or seems to be done, it takes awhile to notice that I haven't written anything in that form or series for awhile. Noticing can take months or years, in some cases. When you first notice, you ask yourself if the series is actually done, or if it's resting. At which point you can wait longer, to see what happens. or you can go ahead and collect everything in the series together, make a chapbook, and declare it done. If more poems in the series appear later, you can always add them in, or do a second series. Sometimes things dangle off the edges of intention. You can try to make your art absolutely symmetrical and managed, but life is messy, and that messiness will show up in your art. Control can be more illusion than reality.

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Don't ask me to explain these poems. I can talk about the form, but the images and words themselves are somewhat mysterious, even to me. Some of these poems are very strange, even for me. This poem form is fractal in that it has similar language and imagery on multiple scales. It's been compared to haiku, in that each line can be read as like a haiku. Then you add lines into stanzas, and the scale changes but not the style or content. The poems are also cinematic, in the sense that they are often sequences of images that can create parataxis in the reader's mind, or imply a narrative made from pictures. A poetic cinema, to be sure, ironically non-verbal in effect, although made up from word-paintings.

I like what this form does to language. It gets compressed, and often pared down to just the most luminous images. It makes language lean and spare, and to my mind more poetic, precisely because of the compression. Like haiku.

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There are numerous poems in this form I've not shared anywhere outside of a small circle. Maybe I'll start the gathering process, make that book, and go forward with the development. I'm not sure if I'm done with this series, or form. Maybe another poem will turn up someday. Time will tell.

Taking Flight, by the Rivers

Dalles of the Eau Claire River, WI, October 2011

A daylight time exposure in infrared. Exposure time was about 4 seconds. The softening and blurring of the waterfall comes from the longer exposure. This location is one I discovered accidentally a few years ago while traveling through northern Wisconsin to photograph fall colors. Near the headwaters of the Eau Claire River, this is a small county park of exceptional beauty, northeast of Wausau. It's off the beaten trail, as it were, and hardly anyone seems to know about it. There's no camping, but it's got excellent trails along the water and into the northern pine forest. Ancient metamorphic bedrock is exposed at the earth's surface here, creating huge boulders for the river to rumble through. There are also some erosional features downstream, such as potholes carved into the bedrock by time and the river.

Places like this, where the basement rock crops to the surface, contain a magic of beauty and serenity, pockets of old time amidst the surrounding croplands and remnant forests of the northern Great Lakes region. Similar places full of ancient beauty and rough magic are Interstate Park, along the St. Croix River between Wisconsin and Minnesota, and Devil's Lake State Park, just north of the Wisconsin River north of Madison.

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Taking Flight

A multiple self-portrait made by layering sequential infrared exposures. Each exposure was about 4 seconds long in overcast mid-day daylight. The location was a park above cliffs overlooking the Mississippi River in St. Paul, MN. I set the camera on a tripod, used the delay timer to give me a few seconds to get into position, then the long exposure to blur movement. So this image is a recording of a performance of taking flight, lifting off from the ground, acted out by myself walking along the path.

Smile on the Void

A certain lushness in the field of remembrance, before
everything else kicks in and you're brought back to ground.
It's been a long time since Europe called, with scent, sound,
and long summers. Land so long inhabited by humans
that it sometimes loses its own way; but all you have to do is
scrape down to the lime bedrock, the acid soil under the vineyard,
magnificent pink granites of those hills, and it returns
to its own character, its rhythms indifferent of ours. Its own
way and blessing. Today after months of inner gouging
I feel for the first time scraped over, the top bitumen
of scar and sacrifice backhoed loose, exposing the granite under.
Normally I'm unsentimental regolith: where did this filigree
patterned topsoil come from? How long has it been
accumulating in my valleys, behind my curves and waysides?
How long have I been being eroded?

Backlit at dawn, ultraviolet morning glories creep up the windowpane.
There's something tenacious about the riot of color promoted
by flower gardens as riotous as Monet painted in his tilled
back yard. Something permanent in spirit if never in fact.
Always growing, the way you have to grow into a life, cultivate it,
master your own tendency to over-monitor, over-weed.
Let it be a little wild, that's best. The letters I'm writing
these days don't have much more to say than, I'm still here.
That might suffice, as much as I want to write in the margins,
I've survived, yet I need contact, give me constant reminders I live.
Breeze stirs two arbors, one wrapped in vines exploding with
ultraviolet flowers, the other with pink-and-white. Behind the flower
there's a mysterious green force. Lorca said it: Only mystery
allows us to live, only mystery. I cannot fathom this rich
floral bomb blast. I can only touch it, with eye, camera, memory,
while it never ceases exploding. Every day a different mystery.
I look through new glass at the world.

Under the house's foundations, soil slowly concretizes. It could
take me a million years to grow back what I lost. An eon
of grieving. Can you break free the stones in the dirt, fuse them
into a cemented mass, till they too find mountain streams
that will erode them? It all lies in those unfathomable shadows
under the seal, where sunlight never rows. Exposing the house
bedrock seems a blasphemy; although I constantly expose my own,
no, it's stripped away by time's bristled friction, faster than memory
can build calluses or scar over old wounds. Trace a line where flesh
has been erupted, blood seeping as slow as glowing molten rock
emerging at night from a shield volcano in the pelagic Pacific.
We conceal our hurts with florid lines like that. We use all our
verbal ecstasy to cover up one central frightener: it just hurts.
Agloom on Dover Beach, dodging between the legs of the ignorant army,
we weave a pattern into the sand that if we're lucky we can
memorize long enough to recreate in wool, or yarn, sewn squares.
Abolition and acknowledgment: coexisting cicatrice and cure.
Meanwhile the shadows lengthen on their own.

What salvages the summer from its long unavoided wasting
is the return of the year of the cicada. All night in the trees
surrounding the house, their long rise and fall of thrum, rasp,
and creak becomes a lullaby to soothe. This has been a peak year
for insect love. Walking at midnight under a moon trying to make
an imitation of a Japanese ink-case by flirting with cloud wisps
and the tree-line over the river, constant cicadas deafen.
In bed, later, window open, fan on, their clicks still dominate.
In the morning, a neighbor sweeps her driveway, an identical rasp.
Things fall silent when the thrum gets this loud. The noonday demon
emerges from chrysalis, climbs high, sonars. Inside this vast noise
there's an unquiet silence, an echo inside a cave, a whirled skirt of duende
inherent in van Gogh's crows over a wheatfield as the storm comes in.
Near the end, he stopped painting: the world became too vibrant,
an assault rather than a balm. Inside the summer he died, the summer
I too died, that insect hum fills all the world, while emptying it.
Beauty is only the beginning of terror, after all.
How do you back away from this constant re-emergence of void?
This morning I sense even inside the backlit flower a vast gap between
particles: even what we see as solid is more space than matter.
Light reflects off it, it seems determined whereas it's all just
indeterminate electron whorls, like van Gogh's skies, night or day.
You can see too much. The cicada rise and fall is the sound-call of
that very void, its own voice. I'm reminded perhaps too personally
of almost dying; then of actual dying. This reborn morning life
still uncertain, mapless, inexplicable, impossible to explore.
I'll wear a flower in my hair, attracting lifegiver bees, and hope
that's enough. Sing on, locust, sing.

Abstract Realism in Photography 5: Lake Superior Shore

Photos from the north shore of Lake Superior, at Grand Marais, and at Temperance River State Park, Minnesota, August 2010. These are found photos, things seen when walking along the rock-strewn shore.

The north shore is a mix of glacial erratics and polished stones from when this was a very active volcanic area. There are few sandy beaches, although many of the rivers have small sandbars at their mouths; the beaches are mostly rocks ranging in size from gritty pebbles to fist-sized wave-polished rocks. Some of the stones were weathered to rounded and gouged forms by the glaciers, but on the beaches there is also wave-polishing happening; after all, as a very large inland sea, Lake Superior is large enough to have tides. Many north shore beaches display an incredible mix of color and shape.

The north shore of Superior along the Minnesota coastline, where you see it as a mostly straight line on the map, with terminus at Duluth, was once an active fault, uplifting the Sawtooth Mountains above the lakebed, and volcanoes everywhere. There's a lot of basalt, rhyolite, porphyry, and related rocks. The red and brown colors of many of the stones are from high iron content.



Driftwood, wave-weathered, cedar sticks and curls of aspen bark, litter the beach shingle. Abstract spirals made of natural materials. Most of the patterns and forms we find in art are also to be found in the natural world. The mind of making is the same.





Boulders and cliffs go right to the water's edge at the mouth of the Temperance River, which was named that by the early explorers because it is the only rivermouth on the Minnesota north shore that has no sandbar. The river flows past high cliffs, making cascades of waterfalls in stages down to the deep pools that open past the rocky beach right into the Lake.



On big rock outcrops at the water's edge, there are lots of intrusions into the basalt matrix: ribbons of white quartz, red rhyolite, black obsidian in spots. The red lines passing through the dark grey stone are like inset rivers, compete with pebbles making boulders in their beds.

I sat at one outcrop for an hour on a warm cloudy afternoon, and made a drawing of the red line passing through the grey, like a river.


Red Line (Temperance River State Park, MN, August 2010)

citrine, rose quartz, stone, wood

Experiments in close-up macrophotography, with hard-angled sunlight and natural materials.





Translucent, transparent, opaque, reflective, non-reflective, different refractive indices. Shapes, crystal points, crystals polished to rounded forms, shadows in light. Abstract realism in photography.





Dappled shadows on the wood table from the trees outside, moving in the breeze, making ever-changing shadows. A moment's hesitation and the light has changed.





Natural forms reflected in art made with natural materials. Repeating forms in nature and in art.



The world glows with the light of the word made solid.