Letter to Orphée

Thinking of a lyre of wood and wire and earth,
an earth lyre, I think of an elemental music,
a music made of earth, metals and woods
and stones of earth, played by wind howling
outside the house this dim, blustery day. The clouds
last evening, and pale light this morning, look like snow coming,
not rain. Rushes of sound, wind blowing across
the housetop, reverberate down the chimney.
Orpheus picks up a strangely curved branch of fallen
wood off the forest floor, strings it with copper wires, and plays.
His lyre summons spirits of the air, voices hiding behind
wind and mist, his singing voice, his poetry, becomes the telling
of seasons, days turning the planet under stars.
An elemental voice describing a concerto of ever-changing forces
and spirals in the sky. Spiral wood beams struck by lightning
embrace a pale white stone from anywhere but here.
Perhaps an ancient sea. You cannot be unaware, Orpheus,
that time and change take us all, that these stones eroding
to dust and leaves in this interstellar wind were once
a shallow sea, or that the peak of our tallest mountain
is made of shells of sea creatures that died millions of years gone
to fall to deep ooze and be pressed into rock
by the pressures of what came after. My home
is a temple of standing stones. Red and gold sandstones
form a shelter around whose curves the wind howls. We work
these metal flakes, gold bright and soft copper green, into veins
of the lyre of Orpheus, seams in the wood, ore seams in the earth.
Its copper strings gleam with forged memory. Its curve
is a memory of birds nesting in the crook of an ancient bole,
a tree much older than any bird, once fallen forgotten
by the descendants of sparrows and robins who once it sheltered.
Birds nest in the hair, the ear, of Orpheus, and dictate their songs
to his receptive tongue, his voice which forgets nothing,
not even the oldest groan of the planet giving spontaneous birth to life.
It's tempting to believe that those who refuse to hear these spirits
singing have themselves no souls, but we must not judge, we must
leave room for revelation. Everything connects. Webs and orbs
and lyre-spiders who weave them. Atoms of everything, whirling
in apparent silence within these fossiled stones, glint and spark
in light cast by the voice of the son of dreaming. His torn limbs
cast upon waters and forest floor. Orphée retrieves his own bones
and sinew as he picks up another fallen treelimb to weave
a newer lyre. Look, will you not: gold leaves glow
in the last rays of afternoon, below this hillside meadow,
and behind that is the whirling sparkle of molecules dancing,
and behind that the velocity of a shining planet, an orb
hurling itself into silence. We are the cliffs we jump from.
Our naked flesh breaks the laketop shimmer as we fall,
we disappear forever into that water mirror, then placidity returns.
Low hum of oceans singing in the blood, wind in the copper wires
of a sacred city, a lyre strung above dark streets the moon guards.
A forest of shadows grows within oil slicks reflecting streetlights
and trash bins. But in time, deep time, this forest made of bricks
will be overeaten and digested by new forests, returned and ink-vined
along borders of papyrus leaves woven into sheets of sand
by the lyre's unending song. The lowest string on a harp
of air and ice, the lowest tone that, struck,
can shatter crystal mountains. Wind strokes
the highest strings into humming.
Orpheus takes breath, opens his mouth to sing again.
What comes forth
shapes wind-blown broken sandflakes
back into mirrors full of starlight.

Are you an Artist or a Maker?

I tend to think of myself as a "maker," because "artist" carries a lot of baggage around what people assume an "artist" to be. This is as true for artists as for non-artists.

(Point of order: Not everyone makes "art" or "fine art," or even "arts and crafts," but everyone has creativity as their human birthright. We are all creative in little ways, and in other ways, even if we do not "make art.")

Although I can call myself an Artist, because I have made "fine art" that has hung in galleries and walls in homes, and I do practice several artforms and art skillsets that are recognized as being "fine art," including music composition, poetry, painting, photography, multimedia, and so on, I tend to prefer to use "Maker" because it's a more neutral term. I make stuff. Some of it is art, some of it is just stuff that a creator makes, or a gadget engineer, or an artist making a sketch.

A lot of the baggage that "Artist" carries is cultural stereotypes and hoary romanticized clichés: you have to suffer for your art; artists are lonely, tortured souls who alone in starving squalor; artists are inherently disorganized and incapable of managing their lives; artists are depressed or suicidal drunks; and so on. Note how many clichés about artists are negative rather than positive: that's the cultural narrative since the early Romantic poets, and it's a narrative that's never been more than 25 percent true. For one thing, if artists really were that tortured and depressed all the time, they'd never actually have the energy to make their art.

Even the associated cultural narrative of "the artist's heroic struggle against the world dragging you down, to produce your masterpiece" is more myth than fact; because even artists like myself, who work more from intuition rather than intellect, still make art as a daily prctice, as a mode or way of being. Part of making things is just to make them, every day, as an ordinary activity. Like going to do your job.

For me, making art is a very positive thing, not a negative thing. It's not work I have to force myself to do, or fight to achieve. Making art is as necessary, and as easy, as breathing. It's not a heroic struggle, not even when I'm struggling against physical ailment or depression. You can view making art as therapeutically balancing or expressing life's many problems (glass half empty), or you can view it as transcending and overcoming life's many problems (glass half full). The truth is, making art is what you do, whether you're having a bad month or a good one; you just keep making art, no matter what. It can be your everyday salvation, it can give you reason to go on living, it can be the routine, the one constant in your life while everything else is falling apart.

Ironically, even though there are many "positive thinkers" out there who probably think I'm negativity personified (probably because I reject their simplistic aphorisms in favor of more nuanced and realistic overviews), in truth I'm very optimistic and positive about the benefits of expanding creativity in one's life to the utmost. I do think it's good that we all make art of some kind, even if no one but you ever sees it or knows you do it. The purpose of making a painting isn't to become a famous painter, it's just to make a painting; fame is often quite accidental, and capricious. And fickle. I make a lot of sketches and other little things that no one ever sees; they're not good enough to share, period. (The only reason you'll ever see early drafts or sketch versions is because I'm interested in the creative process for its own sake, and I sometimes like to examine a piece from inception to completion to see what happens during the process.)

For my recent art installation, "The Temple of Deep Time" (one of ten corn crib installations at Silverwood County Park), I had an overall conception, an early and immediate vision that I had when I first visited Silverwood, and saw the spiral tree rounds and the corn cribs there, and the end result was in fact very close to the original vision, and written proposal. And in order to get to completion, I had to use almost all of my skills as a creative person (the use of combinations of which is the very definition of "multimedia"), including: graphic design, computer work, photography, drawing, carpentry, math skills, a little bit of programming (in collaboration), getting up on ladders and doing construction, weaving, lighting design, electrical wiring, laser and solar technology, research into weather and solar annual variations, music composition, recording studio production skills, illustration, typography, paper arts, woodworking, calligraphy, and more. Even with this list, I've probably left something out.

So all of that went into making this art installation. And I did it all in about six or seven weeks, from inception to completion. (With a few details added later.) and last night I spent several hours doing long-exposure night photography (which I have taught) and HD video, to document the night-time aspects of my art installation, The Temple of Deep Time. The piece is about time, in multiple ways, on several layers, from past to future. Every element and aspect of the piece is a meditation on time, in some way. That is why I included a laser light show, and a music playback system: music is a timebound art, it has duration, then it ends. Music is an artform you cannot experience without time. It's only appropriate that it both in or porters time-bound arts as part of its design, and also requires being documented over time, using time-shifting as well as time-bound technologies. I will at some point do a time-lapse video of the installation, as well.

To make this art installation I used many skills beyond those (assumed to be) reserved for fine art. In truth, I don't draw a strong distinction between making things and making art.

All of this is why Maker seems to suit what I do better than Artist. If we must have labels or titles or categories. Honestly, labels and categories are for theory, which serves to describe what has been made. But I don't think about any of this when I'm making. I just Make.

Woodcarving

A few weeks ago I realized that I needed to be making three-dimensional art. Teaching myself to draw this past year or so, to draw with colored pencils mostly, has been very rewarding. It's been filled with lessons about seeing/drawing, and also with just looking to see what's there. Some of these lessons transfer very well to photography, of course; and also to video. But this is all two-dimensional work. I've realized I need to do something more tactile, more purely physical.

I haven't felt moved to make a landscape art sculpture more than once or twice in a few months; those mostly happen in response to the energy of a specific place and time, and so tend to be very site-specific. They are also usually ephemeral, only the photograph making them endure after the materials themselves have washed away. It's not a disciplined daily practice, but a responsive, spontaneous one. Although I have a small garden around my house here, it's not conducive to making lots of land art; there's not enough space for me to do much, although I have made a few small stone arrangements, in a few spots around the house. Stone magic is earth magic is representational and healing for the place I choose to live for now. Were I living in a designated monastery, I would do the same. It's as if I am living monastically, at times; so I place sacred circles and spirals on the ground around my house. In the spring the flowers emerge through their forms.

Something more abstract in form, yet also more grounded in touch. In touching materials, in kinesthetic appreciation as well as construction. The needs of making are as much the body's desire as the mind's. I sometimes get this from playing piano. Sometimes I get this feeling from running my fingers along statutes in museums, cold bronze and chill marble figures and shapes. There are beautiful Chinese jade carvings, and Indian stone statues, in the Minneapolis art museum that I have always wanted to touch, although it's forbidden. If you can't touch great art of the past, you need to make and touch your own, therefore.

So I bought myself a Dremel rotary tool, and have been sketching on small pieces of wood. Learning to use the tools, the carving of wood, the logistics and smell of it. Wood supple under the tools, taking on the mind's rough shapes, polished until left unfinished. Working with wood means listening to the wood: its imperfections and individual turns of grain and knot. Something abstract will eventually emerge, a natural form that doesn't go against the wood's own desire, but enhances it.



I think of Henry Moore's sculptures. Their rounded, circling forms. There many lacunae, windows to see through, holes into another world, another way of seeing. I've grown up thinking Henry Moore sculptures were naturalistic and lovely. They were considered radical when he first made them; but that was an era of sculptural realism, which he was among the first to completely break away from.



In my travels, I've seen many Moores on-site, where they live, where the activity of the world swirls around them, not quite touching them. Toronto, Ontario. Columbus, Indiana. The world looks different when you peer through a visionary sculpture, to see it. What part of the screen of the world cannot be seen through the holes in a sculpture?



I think of Constantin Brancusi's pure, moving forms. Bird in Space has always been a favorite sculpture series to go look at, and walk around, view from all sides, and feel its surging energy, remarkably capturing blurred movement in solid material. Brancusi himself once remarked, There are those idiots who define my work as abstract; yet what they call abstract is what is most realistic. What is real is not the appearance, but the idea, the essence of things. That's exactly what his sculptures do, I feel, and what draws me to them. There's an essential movement to his work—a reminder that even what we think is solid matter is always vibrating with light and energy, on deep levels beyond the visible. Brancusi at his most pure brings the invisible into the visible, and that is completely realistic and naturalistic. Those who think his work abstract see only the surfaces of things.



I think of Isamu Noguchi, who had a knack for making the stone and wood materials of his sculptures retain their natural textures and forms, yet become more than they were. As if he could see within a slab of granite and draw forth the Urtext, the Archetype of Granite itself. I've never seen a Noguchi piece that doesn't move me, spiritually, aesthetically, emotionally. Often there is a calmness to his finished pieces that quiets my mind and heart; a silence surrounding each polished work which radiates out into the space around it. The subtle nuances of the material, once again the invisible made visible, bring one into close contemplation of the solid materials of the world we live in.

I'm barely beginning, feeling my way into the wood. I'll stay with wood as a material for some time. Stone, perhaps glass, might follow, but later. The tools of carving must first be made into natural extensions of my hands and heart; which means taking time to absorb their tendencies and needs. I'm in no hurry. I have no real ambition, other than to find something in working with wood that addresses, perhaps looks through, a lacunae in myself. It's an ambition to work with the materials, to learn them more closely. My grandfather was a master carpenter, after all, and taught me the basic of carpentry as a boy; I have now his tools and one or two of his old carpentry reference books. So there's a lineage. It's also an ambition to find a way to heal something else in myself, something that is as yet evanescent and vaporous; something I wish to make more solid and real, by bringing it into visibility; something I can't name, that feels connected to the earth, to the ancient past, something pre-verbal, pre-intellectual, old and powerful. Something of the earth magic, made manifest. I'm just setting out on this quest; nothing remotely like Art has yet been made. But I'm in no hurry. It will take time for me to feel my way into the wood, and that required time, those attendant lessons in patient seeing and observant touch, will slow me down enough to have actual effect on the pace of my life. I can feel it, even though I can't feel it, yet.

A Pilgrimage of Arts & Letters

Trikaya, by Frederick Franck, at Pacem In Terris, Warwick, NY

When I set out on this last, most recent roadtrip, what I thought I had set out to do was not what happened. I thought I was going to drive East to visit the Atlantic Ocean at its northernmost continental US locales, in Maine, and make photographs of that place. I did accomplish that. But it turned out that was not the real purpose of the journey.

Very soon it became clear that this last, most recent roadtrip was to be a pilgrimage of arts and letters. That that was its true purpose.

It began and ended with visits to significant locales involving the contemporary art-glass movement. I also visited the home and final resting place of May Sarton in Nelson, New Hampshire; and Robert Frost's first home in New Hampshire, at Derry, where he failed as a farmer while writing the poems for his first books, later first published after the family had moved to England. I visited the locales in Maine and Pennsylvania where the family of painters named Wyeth spent much of their time and did much of their work. I visited Walt Whitman's final home in Camden, New Jersey; although it was closed at the time, and I didn't get to take the tour. Whitman had been with me for much this journey, nonetheless, much in my thoughts and aspirations. I paused at Lake George, New York, where Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe spent a great deal of time, together and separately, making paintings and photos. I spent a luminous afternoon at Pacem In Terris, Fredrick Franck's home in rural New York, a palce surrounded by the art he occasionally felt compelled to make; by the peace of a place dedicated to peace, to reminding us that peace is better than strife; that becoming truly, fully human means transcending the worst aspects of our selves and becoming our best. That visit was so important to me, that I can barely articulate what I experienced, even now. I will attempt it, nonetheless, a bit later.

This journey, to see and feel for myself the locales important and inspirational to several artists and writers who I deeply respect, was the roadtrip's true purpose, not revealed to me till I had already embarked. I wasted some frustration and angst on my intended plans going astray, till I realized what was really going on. After that, the travel was much clearer, if not always easier.

I thought I had set out to make more photographic and video images in natural settings, to discover the wilder places of New England, to visit the Ocean again. I thought I was going to have time to touch the northernmost point where the US touches the Atlantic Ocean, having touched the southernmost tip less than a year ago, at Key West, in Florida.

Well, I didn't make it all the way to the top of Maine. Perhaps another roadtrip. But I had never been to Maine before, and visiting that state was one of my main goals, achieved in the end by spending some time in and around Acadia National Park. And a very beautiful place Maine is. I encountered some friendly people during my visit, all of whom told me a similar story of how they had come to Maine to visit, and never left. I now understand the appeal. It's a beautiful land, if occasionally a harsh one, easy to plant roots in, easy to feel connected to. All the people I met in Maine were open and friendly to a wandering stranger; which is memorable, since not all places are so welcoming.

I thought I had set out to make photographs and video for my own ongoing artwork, my projects involving our series of ambient DVD videos, and for my own personal artistic work. I thought I might have a few quick visits to places along the way that were special, unique, beautiful. I thought I might write a few short poetic pieces about my travels, as usual. And I thought I would return home with a few golden nuggets of beauty in my memory, and in my cameras.

I was wrong on all counts. And that was the best gift of all.

For the trip was richer by far than anything I could have expected or imagined when I set out. There are still stone bells ringing in me, struck by surf, wind, and storm, still echoing inside, whose music I have barely begun to hear correctly, as music rather than noise, as melody rather than mere conversation.

This roadtrip became a necessary immersion in the art and writing that feeds my soul, that I need as much as breathing, that I have needed to reconnect with, to be more immersed in than ever before. The roadtrip became a pilgrimage to places almost sacred in their importance to my life and well-being and art-making. Places I needed to see, needed to be, needed to feel, to take in, to make part of my own memory. To make my own bonds and connections and links to the land law of those places important and sacred to those other artists and writers.

Is sacred too strong a word? No, I don't think so: it's a word necessary to understand the connection to place that some artists must have in order continue their lives. This is a lesson I am still thinking about, that requires more time to take in, outside as it is my usual semi-nomadic idea of myself. It's not that I am going to stop traveling: it's that the places I go to are to be places where I must make even stronger bonds, to their land law, their power, their inherent worth and beauty and trust.

I've written before about the essentially pagan nature of environmentalism, which comes out of deep reverence for the land, out of feeling, not merely intellectual awareness that it's the right thing to do. It's difficult to summon the necessary will to protect something you don't love so deeply. So, for myself, each place I go to visit, even those I now know well from previous travels, it will important to deepen my own bonds with them: to see even more clearly and deeply, to wait a long time to hear the stones sing, before I even pick up the cameras, or put pen to paper. It will take more time.

I thought I had lost this. This connection to the land. I thought I had lost all of it in the flurry of human and personal and family drama that has dominated my life for the past few years: all the drama of my parents' passing, and my own illness, and moving house and home: endings and beginnings. I can barely speak of how it feels to know that I haven't lost my connection to the land, after all. That, rather than being lost, it has deepened, and changed, and become something even more powerful and wonderful and darkly beautiful than once it was. What I once thought was lost has, rather, changed, becoming yet more rich and strange, more vivid and colorful; sometimes shot through with darkness, but with moments of brightness all the more vivid for being outlined in black.

There were other places important to some artists and writers whose work I know well, that I thought to visit on this roadtrip, which did not come to pass, because of constraints on time, travel, and health. They will be visited on other journeys; and there will be other journeys to see those places, as well as to revisit the places I built bonds with on this last, most recent roadtrip. There will be more.

So what I once thought lost has been rediscovered. What I thought I had set out to do was nothing but pretense, a delusion, yet a good delusion because it got me where I needed to be. Now that I'm home again, I can see that I've never been more glad to be wrong about what my purpose was, to have my intentions so consistently derailed, to have suffered through the dark days in order to find the bright days, to be so utterly changed by touching places so many drive right on by never even knowing they're there. I give my infinite gratitude to those forces that waylay us from what we think we're supposed to be doing in order to direct us towards what we are actually supposed to be doing, to find our true purpose revealed.

To be so wrong about what I thought I knew, what I thought I was supposed to discover, and to have been given enough strong hints that even I, blind and dumb and slow-brained and stubborn, could eventually catch on—this too was the best gift of all.