The sun was like a great visiting presence that stimulated and took its due from all animal energy. When it flung wide its cloak and stepped down over the edge of the fields at evening, it left behind it a spent and exhausted world.
–Willa Cather, One of Ours (1922)
I have to admit that I never read One of Ours, the 1922 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel from Willa Cather. But I think the passage above is wonderful. And for someone who finds themself spent and exhausted at the end of every day, it feels as though it speaks directly to me.
I am currently in the midst of getting work (and myself) ready for next Saturday’s Gallery Talk at the Principle Gallery in Alexandria and my 25th annual solo show in October at the West End Gallery. In past years this would still be a busy and stressful time for me but this year, with the effects of my treatment taking their toll on me, it seems even more pressing. My personal energy budget is running low for much of each day, made worse by the pressing nature of the situation. Stress and anxiety seem to send my fatigue into hyperdrive so its not a good time for someone who is often wracked with anxiety on an almost daily basis.
As a result, little things in my preparation that absolutely must be done keep getting pushed off, sitting undone until the panic forces me to face them at the last possible moment. I have no doubt they will get done. There is no other option short of cancelling everything and that is not a real possibility for me.
So, for the moment, these accumulated, necessary tasks hang over me like the sun upon the sky, as Cather wrote, taking its due from all animal energy.
I guess I am the animal in this equation. It sure feels like it sometimes.
Don’t know why I am sharing this on this rainy Sunday morning. Sorry that there’s not more info or interesting stuff today. This is one of those more diary-like post, I guess, written just so I’ll have an inkling of how things were at some distant point in the future when this moment is long forgotten.
The way my memory is right now, that point in the future might not be so distant. I might need reminding tomorrow morning.
Here’s this week’s Sunday Morning Music. I had some trouble picking a song this morning. Nothing seemed appropriate. I don’t know that this song fits but it will have to do. This is from Prof, an independent songwriter/rapper out of Minneapolis. I shared a song of his here once before. His work is often humorous (and sometimes downright hilarious), bawdy, and profane but is also as often very powerful and poignant. This song is titled Heaven. It is not humorous, bawdy, or profane. It is a simple, stark song.
Simple and stark might just be the ticket this morning.
The Heart Beats in Winter— Coming to the West End Gallery
Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.
~Henry Miller, The World of Sex (1940)
This is a new painting that is part of my October solo exhibit at the West End Gallery. It is a smaller piece at 12″ by 12″ but feels a bit larger with the visual bite– or oomph as I often call the impact of a painting– it provides. It is called The Heart Beats in Winter.
It has a lot of things in it that please me greatly. Most of them are parts of some sort of polarity or contrasts to each other. The painting itself– its strokes and surface– feels raw and rough yet it doesn’t feel sloppy, having an organic feeling of precise organization. It is as it should be.
It also feels cool and stark in tone but also carries a warmth that comes through from the warm colors in the layers of its underpainting. These warm colors are muted by the layers of white above them which allows the Red Tree and the Red Roofs to have greater contrast in the scene. I toned down the roof so that the Red Tree fully dominated the space.
Another part of this painting that interests me is one that is not apparent to the viewer of the painting in its final state. This painting begins on a layer of black paint over a textured gesso surface. This painting’s texture, with its finger swirls and trowel marks, becomes very evident as the painting progresses. On this black textured surface, I then lay out my composition in red oxide paint, as I almost always do, that is applied in a variety of tones that inform the later layers that will be applied above them.
Over this red oxide layer, I then proceed to apply the final underlaying colors of each block. I used a variety of crimsons, magenta, and deep purples here. The sky and the water of the lake is a purple that is almost black to the eye, but purple enough to make a difference later in the painting process. At this point the painting is a dark and almost drab thing to look at it. It would have discouraged me many years before. But the next step begins a remarkable transformation that is exciting to see as each bit of white brings all sorts of light to the scene. And when the final layer of white paint is laid over the moon, which had been left with only the red oxide beneath it, the whole painting takes on a marvelous glow that is far removed from that dark drab state it was in only a short time before.
I was originally visualizing a bare tree instead of the Red Tree in this piece as it progressed. But when it came time to insert the tree, I opted for the Red Tree. A bare tree would have worked well though I would have probably made it larger the Re Tree as it is now. You see, the Red Roofs were already in place, creating the base of a pyramid on which whatever tree I opted for would top. The red slashes of the roof were pretty powerful at this point and a bare tree with little color would require some size to overcome the strength of the reds. The Red Tree, on the other hand, would complete the pyramid easily in a smaller and less dominant size.
The Red Tree with the anachronism of its full foliage in winter, tells a much different story than a bare tree here. I see it as being symbolic of overcoming whatever hardship befalls you, of finding the beauty and joy of life even in desolation. Of our ability to overcome despair. I suppose that is why I chose the passage from Miler at the top, particularly this sentence:
Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.
And as the line preceding this sentence points out, we cannot run away from or shut our eyes to the darkness that surrounds us. We must face it bravely with strength and with eyes and mind open. This was written in 1940 at a point of when the future of the world was very much in jeopardy. Darkness was enveloping the world and running or looking away was no longer an option.
Sounds familiar.
To sum up: So long as the heart beats, even in the darkest of times, we can choose to see the beauty and grace of this life.We can endure.
Here’s a song from Macy Gray with a message that seems to echo that thought. This is Beauty in the World.
The Heart Beats in Winter will be included in my annual solo show at the West End Gallery in Corning, NY. This year’s show, my 25th there, is titled The Jubilee Danceand opens Friday, October 16 with an Opening Reception from 5-7 PM.
True art and true science possess two unmistakable marks: the first, an inward mark, which is this, that the servitor of art and science will fulfil his vocation, not for profit but with self- sacrifice; and the second, an external sign, his productions will be intelligible to all the people whose welfare he has in view.
–Leo Tolstoy, What to Do?: Thoughts Evoked by the Census of Moscow (1887)
I am in the midst of prepping for next Saturday’s (September 26) Gallery Talk at the Principle Gallery. Part of this process entails getting some new work around for the gallery and making sure it is properly framed. You know–the regular routine. But for these Gallery Talks, there is always an added step in my preparation, one that I written about here a number of times over the years.
It is the selection of a painting to be given away in a drawing at the end of my talk.
It is not a task I take lightly. It would be easy to slough off lesser work that only had a bit of meaning for myself and no one else. I have a bunch of that work here and it would be almost condescending to push it off on someone. No, the choices I make for these giveaways have to be real work with meaning that runs deep in me. Pieces that I have the urge to hold on to tightly. Pieces that feel as though giving them away is an act of self-sacrifice, that they take with them a vital part of myself.
Why do this? For one thing, it is an act of gratitude. Without those folks who come to the talks and consider my work, my life as it is might not exist. For another, I see it, much as Tolstoy states above, as an act of fulfilling my vocation or purpose, which is to have my work go out into the world and affect others. Maybe the work will affect the person who takes it home or perhaps the very act of giving away part of oneself will cause someone there to be more giving in their own life.
It is much like skimming a stone across the surface of a pond, an act that creates multiple ripples and changes beyond itself.
It is all I can do at this point.
I have done this for all my Gallery Talks at the galleries that show my work every year since that first one at the Principle Gallery back in 2003. I have given away a lot of chunks of myself over that time, a lot of work that spoke loudly to me. You would think that picking a piece would become easier after all these years but it hasn’t.
In fact, it has gotten more difficult.
I don’t know why this task has become harder. Maybe as I age and health issues make me more cognizant of my own mortality, these paintings that speak so directly and intimately to me become even more part of me. They become precious in a way that causes a visceral feeling of loss when they are gone.
Such is the case with this painting that will be leaving me next Saturday. It is titled Blaze, a substantial 20″ by 24″ painting on canvas from 2014. From Day One, the moment it came off my painting table, this piece has felt like part of me. I think it is best expressed in a blog post below from 2015, part of which describes how I felt connected to this.
In everyone’s life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the inner spirit.
–Albert Schweitzer, Memoirs of Childhood and Youth (1924)
It is a simple piece, one that relies on its color, lines and texture to carry the weight of it. For me, the Red Tree here is an example of the the inner fire coming forth and displaying itself to the world. I felt that the quote at the top from Schweitzer was very fitting. Most people have something inside that inspires passion, sets them ablaze. It often goes untended, sputtering with that person left feeling that there is no one with which to share it — no one to take in the warmth of the fire.
I know this is true for my work, that thing which is an emanation of my own inner fire. Without sharing it, without feeling that it is tended by others, it would likely sputter and go out. Without the eyes of those fire-tenders, my work and my fire, would not exist.
I think that description, especially that final paragraph, makes the giving of this painting even more appropriate. Having it go to someone who has tended my fire and kept it ablaze for these many years seems the right thing to do. And hopefully, its blaze will become their own.
That would make me very happy.
I hope if you’re in the Alexandria area next Saturday, that you can join me at the Principle Gallery for a short visit. The Gallery Talk begins at 1 PM and runs for about an hour, culminating with the drawing for Blaze. From experience, I can tell you that it is a quick hour with some laughs and even a few tears sometimes, some insights, some prizes, and the chance to take home this painting. All for free and open to all.
What more could ask for?
Here’s a song from guitarist Bill Frisell. I have been a fan of his for some time but, as with many things, his work gets a bit lost in the flood of time and thought. iIt as an email from a friend yesterday that reminded me once more of his always fine work. I was immediately enamored of his take of the great Sam Cooke classic, A Change is Gonna Come.
I think this song meshes well with Blaze as it is a painting that holds numerous meanings beyond the one stated above, something that also makes it even more precious to me. The blowing tree, to me, represents strength and in holding fast to your beliefs against the winds from those who will try to force you into being something other than what you know you are. I find it very hopeful and seeing it as tree ablaze is a call to action, which to my mind makes this painting very pertinent and symbolic for our current situation.
Looking at this piece in recent days has brought this thought to mind: Hope is a nail and action is the hammer.
A nail has little value without the hammer. A fire goes out unless it someone to tend and stoke it.
Slow Dance in Blue— Coming to the West End Gallery
With my ninth mind I resurrect my first and dance slow to the music of my soul made new.
–Aberjhani, Visions of a Skylark Dressed in Black (2012)
This aphorism from American poet/author Aberjhani (b. 1957) stood out for me this morning while I was looking for something with which to kick off this post. It seemed to mesh well with what I was seeing in the new painting shown here, Slow Dance in Blue.
Now I don’t know if I have or have had nine minds. I may well have had more than one, maybe three or four. Maybe even five or six. But I can’t vouch for nine. In the end, I guess it doesn’t matter. You work with what you have at any given moment, for better or worse.
Sometimes it feels like I am out there without even one mind.
I am, however, intrigued by the idea that if I indeed had multiple minds, I might use a later mind to resurrect my first– the original, I suppose– and, by doing so, my soul is reawakened, made new.
A reboot. A clean slate.
A soul made new, now that is reason to dance. But how do you dance to such a thing? Is it a dance of jubilation and energy? Or is a slow dance, one where you move to the rhythm of the world that is unique to you? A slow dance that expresses both the sorrow and joy of being? A slow dance that finds the joy in our sorrows and the sorrow in our joys?
A slow dance that expresses our solitary gratitude for simply watching the moon rise?
I don’t know. Maybe it is all of these things. Maybe it is none.
In this case, knowing is not nearly so important as instinctively responding to the feeling that fills the moment.
Sometimes that results in a slow dance in the moonlight, alone but not lonely. Not quite sad and not quite happy. Just content to be there, softly moving to the music and rhythm of that moment.
That is what I see in this painting.
This 8″ by 16″ canvas is soon heading to the West End Gallery for The Jubilee Dance, this year’s edition of my annual solo exhibit there. The show opens on Friday, October 16, with an Opening Reception that runs from 5-7 PM.
Here’s a song that feels custom made for this painting. It’s from Miles Davis in 1959, his version of an old Rodgers and Hart showtune from the 40’s, It Never Entered My Mind. It is blue bit bright. Lovely stuff for a Thursday morning in a sometimes-anxious September.
The Jubilee Dance— Coming soon to the West End Gallery
dreamtree, truthtree tree of jubilee: with aeons of (trivial merely) existence, all when may not measure a now of your treasure
–-e.e. cummings, from Poem 90 in 95 Poems (1958)
This is the title painting from The Jubilee Dance, my upcoming annual solo exhibit at the West End Gallery that open on October 16. This year marks the 25th solo show at the West End Gallery which has represented my work from Day One back in 1995, going on 32 years now.
I felt that 25 years of shows deserved a title as well as a painting that celebrated the event.
I like this piece, 18″ by 24″ on canvas, very much. It has a lovely and warm pop to it along with nice depth into the picture plane. It feels like a gift, if that makes any sense, one that pleases both my eye and mind.
I also think it is a great jumping off point for the rest of the show. I have mentioned the excitement I feel while working in the studio in the recent months, a giddiness that comes in the work that I am producing. Each piece seems to fire me up for the time I at it. This energy from my painting time has been a time of great relief for me in contrast to the sometimes-debilitating side effects of my treatment.
Every evening when I head home for dinner, Cheri asks how the painting went that day. And for the last six or seven weeks my answer has been always the same.
“Fantastic.”
We are both kind of amazed by that answer. That is a pretty rare thing for me for such a time frame. There’s usually more struggle for me. The easy flow and deep groove I am feeling only comes once in a great while and usually lasts for a much shorter time. My only concern is that my judgement of the work I am producing is somehow affected by my treatment. I don’t believe it is, but the hormonal changes I have been experiencing sometimes screw around with me. I don’t think it is but we’ll find out soon enough.
I want to add that the image here is not exact. I believe it needs to be shot again as some of the blues and greens are not right (blues are extremely difficult to capture accurately) where I think they should be. I probably shouldn’t share it until I arrive at an image that fully catches it more fully. That being said, it is probably 90% correct and very much captures the overall feel of the painting. And as I have pointed out many times over the years, if you like the image online, you will like it even more in person.
Hope you can make it in to see this show in October.
Here’s a song that I felt belonged with this painting and show. It’s a favorite song from Leonard Cohen that I share a lot here. This is Dance Me to the End of Love.
Sometimes the most important thing an accomplished person can do is quiet their cleverness.
–Larry Robertson, Great Question (2026)
I don’t think I’ve ever used a quote from somebody I knew but the one above struck a chord this morning. As noted here in the past, Larry Robertson is a columnist, speaker, consultant and the author of several award-winning books. The most recent book, which I have wrote about here, is Great Question, which examines the importance of questioning in all avenues of our lives. Larry interviewed hundreds of highly accomplished people across a wide range of professions while writing this book which has already garnered numerous awards. I am humbled to say that I was somehow included in there.
Larry points out that he got the idea of quieting your cleverness from Kaitlin Chutzi, who serves as director of biomimicry, ecosystem strategy & innovation at Microsoft, which without totally knowing what that entails sounds pretty impressive. The manner of quieting your cleverness that she describes is setting aside those things that we know and take for granted, those things that are constantly speaking to and guiding us, so that there is room for other voices, those things we may not yet now or consider, to speak out, which might provide new insights and directions for our actions.
It is basically reminding yourself that you don’t know everything and should be open to new thought from different points of view.
Even within yourself.
I may not have that completely right, but it is how it came across to me. In trying to put something together quickly this morning I am sure that I am missing the finer points.
The interesting thing is that when I read that phrase, quieting your cleverness, I applied it to what I do as an artist. I guess we all often interpret things by how they relate to our own experiences.
For me, the cleverness that I know is trying too hard to inject an idea into my work inorganically. I showed an early piece last week that I considered a failure that I now consider a good example of my own cleverness. It was an idea that didn’t grow naturally and organically from my previous work and was the product of my thought alone.
It was trying to become before it was fully formed.
I have spoken about this at gallery talks, saying that we are– meaning me– are just not that smart or clever to fully hatch all our ideas without first allowing them to grow within the work. It takes time to soften the hard edges of a new idea that mark it as being inorganic for me.
Even then, it doesn’t always happen. Sometimes we are too clever by a degree.
Quieting our cleverness is a big aspect of finding the silence in which meaningful work grows. Our cleverness is often loud and bossy, a real know-it-all who knows little.
Well, that’s my thought on this. It is probably not as fully fleshed out as it should be as I hurry to write this as the sunlight finally starts drifting in the studio windows. Probably too clever for its own good.
Maybe I will give this idea some time to grow a bit more and we can talk about it at my upcoming Gallery Talk at the Principle Gallery on Saturday, September 26, beginning at 1 PM. All you have to do is ask. I am always looking for great questions at these things.
Oh, besides some laughs and good conversation (which depends on you as much as me) there is, as always, some prizes and gifts. I’ll go into more detail on that in the near future.
Hope you can make it. I’ll try to not be too clever.
That’s usually not a problem.
Here’s a song that has little if anything to do with the subject here, even though its title is a question. Doesn’t matter. Just the right vibe for this morning in this time and place. This is the late great Marvin Gaye and What’s Going On.
Mama’s in the factory She ain’t got no shoes Daddy’s in the alley He’s lookin’ for food I’m in the kitchen With the tombstone blues
–Bob Dylan, Tombstone Blues (1965)
A week or two back I featured an early painting of Eldridge Park, an old local amusement park here that had flourished then feel into extreme disrepair then was reborn in recent years. Eldridge Park sits in the shadow of large bottle factory in Elmira Heights. It was Thatcher Glass for most of the time but is now Anchor Glass. This juxtaposition of the skyline formed by the geometry of the factory’s industrial buildings and cooling towers (if that’s what they’re called) against the amusement park and its adjoining green space always fascinated me.
When I was beginning to work with my newly developed watercolor process in 1994, this place and that contrast made for the perfect subject on which to practice in my newly fund style. I did just these three small paintings that I call The Heights Trilogy. They include Bottle Factory, at the top of this page, along with The Heights and Factory View shown at the bottom.
The three, individually and collectively, have been favorites of mine for all these years. I think the general rough appearance of these scenes and the grittiness of the colors in their skies is a perfect fit for the subject. I was working solely on untreated paper so each of the layers of colors that I laid down in the skies absorbed at different rates, each leaving its own residue. The result of this process was not something you could predict which was the attraction of it for me. Specific planning was futile. Every step in these paintings was just reaction to the step that came before.
As do these three pieces. My memory of these pieces back in 1994 was that they made me feel like I could actually be an artist. There was something in these pieces that separated them from a lot of the other work I was doing at that time, much of which felt like practice. Haltingly learning the licks needed to play the song. These pieces felt more complete. Their own song, their time and place. They felt very much like a turning point.
All three are going to be included in the West End Gallery show that opens on October 16. I was going to call this year’s show Silver Jubileesince will be my 25th solo show at the gallery but have changed it to The Jubilee Dance. It seemed to fit a bit better, at least in my mind.
There’s also a song below from Bob Dylan, off his landmark 1965 album, Highway 61 Revisited. This is Tombstone Blues. Something about it feels right for these paintings.
The true thrift is always to spend on the higher plane; to invest and invest, with keener avarice, that he may spend in spiritual creation, and not in augmenting animal existence. Nor is the man enriched, in repeating the old experiments of animal sensation; nor unless through new powers and ascending pleasures he knows himself by the actual experience of higher good to be already on the way to the highest.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wealth (1860)
Really did not feel like writing anything this morning, unsure that I had anything worth committing to paper. Well, digital paper as it were. But it’s tough habit to break and I do have a promise to myself to write every day. I did have one thought that came to mind unexpectedly as I walked in the dark over to the studio just a short while ago.
Maybe I can share that, for what it’s worth. It might have nothing at all to do with art, though the more I think about, it may have much to do with art. Not really sure at this point since this is not a fully hatched idea. It is still a chick in the egg pecking to emerge into the world.e
The thought I had was about the inequality of wealth that has been taking place here and around the world. The gap between the wealthiest and the rest of us has widened at an alarming rate over the past several decades. It rivals or exceeds the gap that existed during the Gilded Age. John D. Rockefeller, the first billionaire, was long considered to be the wealthiest man in American history, would not be near the top now when comparing his inflation adjusted wealth to some of the present day billionaires.
The point here is that the gap between the ultra-wealthy and the average American is wider than it has ever been. And widening.
My thought walking through the woods this morning was that their immense greed, that has little or no restraint, has virtually erased one of the barriers that they have depended on politically to divide the lower classes over the past three or four decades. It was easy work for them to make a comfortable and large middle-class view the lower-class as beneath them in all ways. Lazy leeches who were somehow taking something from them in their struggle to make ends meet.
But as the greed of the wealthiest increased, the upward flow of money needed to come from somewhere and the middle-class happened to be the next in line since there was little more to take from the poorest among us. More and more average Americans, what used to be called the comfortable middle-class, began to struggle as their own wealth bega a slow decline.
Suddenly the gap between them and those poor folks they once demonized was not so great. They began to see that their plight had more in common with the poor folks than with the very wealthy. The mirage that they had a chance of joining the Rich Boys Club began to fade, replaced with the realization that they were the ones financing and helping those same Rich Boys buy their multiple jets, yachts, and the politicians who would shape the law to protect their scheme.
A scheme that left the average American out in the cold, where they found themself shoulder to shoulder with the poor folks who have known this for some time but couldn’t be heard across the divide between them and those just a bit above them in the class system. A divide devised and built by the Rich Boy Club.
It just feels to me now that the Rich Boys have went to the well once too many times and have, in effect, taken away the power of the dividing line that has provided both and distraction for their avarice. They are slowly killing their Golden Goose.
What does this mean? I don’t know. Not even sure if this is accurate. Just a feeling from an average person sitting in the woods on a dark Sunday morning.
Geez. I wasn’t expecting to write all this. Surely hadn’t planned it when the thought came to mind early this morning. I actually just wanted to share the song below, Ascending Bird from the Silk Road Ensemble and Yo Yo Ma for this week’s Sunday Morning Music. I thought the song fit well with the passage from Emerson at the top which states that real wealth comes not from acquiring and hoarding but from investing in the spiritual.
Investing in the spiritual betterment of oneself and others is the best investment one can make, one that sends the spirit soaring.
When you start working, everybody is in your studio—the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas—all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave.
–John Cage, as told to Philip Guston
I came across this quote yesterday and it hit things right on the nail for me. I recognized exactly what composer John Cage was saying.
When I start painting, my studio often feels like a space filled with people and things. There is that same list that Cage mentions– the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas — and then some. There are sometimes people there I barely knew back in the day who now are taking up precious space. Then there are amorphous shapes hovering around that turn out to be other worries and concerns and reminders of pressing obligations and responsibilities.
My studio is not small but even so, it can get pretty damn crowded.
And from last year up to the present moment, there was yet another presence crammed in among the others, pushing their way to the front of the group. Illness and cancer decided that they would join the party and bring all their friends– the doctors, nurses, techs, pharmacists, and others– who attend to their constant needs.
And they are a needy pair.
There have been times in the past year or so when I couldn’t even see my easel for all the people and things between me and it.
But slowly, day turning to week and week to month, I found ways to show some of them out the door. Maybe that is the origin of the gitI have often used in the recent past to send you packing.
Yeah, you are there in the studio, too. Don’t be offended that I need you to leave. Most days I welcome your presence, as it is a warm and sunny one. Well, for the most part. But unless I can get you out of my space, my easel sits empty and unused.
If I am lucky now, you and all the others slowly make their way out of my space as begin to work. Oh, a few pesky twits hang on in the corners, but soon after the paint begin to hit the canvas they give up and go, as well.
In the past month or so, when I am working it has been just me alone here. And on many of those days, I am not even present as I work. Those are the best days, the fortunate ones where I am totally unfettered from myself and the assemblage of ghosts and thought and things that not long before filled my studio.
Only the work then exists, a universe unto itself at the onset of its creation.
That sounds pretty grandiose, doesn’t it? It’s not meant to be. After all, everything that is created is an extrapolation from the least and the most.
I– the least— have elements of the most within me. As does my work. Same for you and all that you create.
My work, small and insignificant as it might seem, is simply a microcosm of the greater, grander universe.
A sub-universe, you might say.
But it only happens when the crowds that circulate figuratively inside my studio have hit the road. And it’s even better when I go with them.
Like I said above, the past month or so has been just like that. The work displaces everything. The nagging fatigue from my treatment has grudgingly left with the crowd and I feel refreshed. Periodically, his friend, the periodic but constant hot flashes that I have been experiencing, runs out of the corner where he has been hiding dashes out and pokes at me. But since I am not there anymore, the heat and sweat he induces go pretty much unnoticed.
This time freed from all things has been like transported from a prison cell to a cool mountain top.
Of course, when the day is done and I turn away from the easel, it only takes about a half-hour and that space is once again crowded with the old gang. Yeah, you guys, too. Worst of all, the fatigue always wants to make a grand entrance at this point. And he always does, much to my chagrin, the son-of-a-bitch.
But I know now that freedom is nearby on that easel. A portal out of here to that other universe and that cool mountaintop.
I yearn for that mountaintop at this very moment.
Take the hint.
Here’s your parting gift, one that also serves as a reminder:
We would rather be ruined than changed We would rather die in our dread Than climb the cross of the moment And let our illusions die.
–W.H. Auden, Epilogue to The Age of Anxiety (1947)
I came across a post from 2011 this morning that began with the lines above. They words were written by poet W.H. Auden in the aftermath of World War II in his Pulitzer Prize winning poem The Age of Anxiety, a work that later was translated into music in the form of a symphony by Leonard Bernstein and ballet by Jerome Robbins. Though the war had ended, people everywhere struggled with a world that was forever changed. The war had exposed the fragility of our belief in many things and people sought some sort of meaning and substance in this suddenly changed landscape.
These words seemed appropriate for today, on the 25th anniversary of 9/11. That, too, was a time where we were faced with a violent lurch in our world, one that had far-reaching impact on many aspects of our lives from that September day in 2001 to this very moment.
As it was with Auden in 1947, this past quarter century has been an Age of Anxiety. It has been a period of growing fear, alienation, instability for most people. The wound inflicted on our psyche on 9/11 went deep and we responded with anger and fear. This response provided the perfect opportunity for those who would exploit our emotions for material and political gain.
Our continued anxiety was a winning money-making strategy. While the prosperity of the masses was good and reliable for the moneymen, it was not enough. Our fear was the needed market mover.
And we followed along faithfully, easily prompted to be fearful and divided.
Our fear became a valuable commodity in itself.
And we held tightly on to our fear like it was just that.
It was gold to us while our hope was seemingly a note written on the back of an envelope– flimsy and easily lost.
How do we come out of this Age of Anxiety? Have we ever fully emerged from that Age of Anxiety that Auden described in 1947?
I don’t know.
I sit here this morning looking for the hope written on the back of an envelope lost in the papers scattered on my desk. It makes me wonder how we can turn our hope for the future into the valuable commodity it deserves to be, not something to be thrown thoughtlessly aside.
I just don’t know. Wish I did. Wish I believed I did even if didn’t know.
Some cock-eyed optimism might sound pretty damn good right now.
Or not. Again, I don’t know.
These are my thoughts for this day in this our 25th year of our Age of Anxiety.
Just my opinion for what little that is worth. Maybe my thesis and perspective on it is completely off base. Wouldn’t be the first time.
I calls ’em likes I sees ’em.
Pretty sure Auden didn’t write that.
Here’s one of my all-time favorite songs, (Time)The Revelator, from Gillian Welch. I share it here every couple of years or so. When I worked in my first and much more rustic studio (no phone, TV, internet, or other distraction) up in the woods in the early 2000’s, this song was in heavy rotation on my playlist. Time has caught up with my old studio, and it is slowly collapsing into the forest floor. Some kind of symbolism there, I’m sure.
