Redtree Times

Beseech the Moons–At Principle Gallery

Thou hast evoked in me profounder spells than the evoking one, thou face! For me, thou hast uncovered one infinite, dumb, beseeching countenance of mystery, underlying all the surfaces of visible time and space.

–Herman Melville, Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852)

This passage from Melville pretty much sums up the painting shown here. It is about the questioning many of us put to the universe, asking why the world is as it is. Asking what our place in it is. Asking for guidance.

Begging for answers or for a truth to be revealed that displays clearly why life is worth living.

I say that many of us put these questions to the universe, but I may be wrong. It might be that only a small fraction of us feels the need to beg for answers to our questions while standing on a rooftop at night.

Perhaps most of us would simply stand in silent appreciation of the moons’ faces before us. Like a child that accepts what life puts before it without question. As Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård wrote in his 2015 novel Autumn, the first book in his Seasons Quartet:

What makes life worth living? No child asks itself that question. To children, life is self-evident. Life goes without saying: whether it is good or bad makes no difference. This is because children don’t see the world, don’t observe the world, don’t contemplate the world, but are so deeply immersed in the world that they don’t distinguish between it and their own selves. Not until … a distance appears between what they are and what the world is, does the question arise: what makes life worth living?

This passage struck me pretty hard when I read it. I remember that feeling of being a child who is deeply immersed in the world, viewing each experience without judgement or question. Things that I might now see as being questionable or out of the norm felt then as being natural occurrences. Just part of the world that everyone experienced and knew. Or so I then thought.

I felt safe in that child’s world. Accepted and part of it. Nothing was unnatural to me then.

But at some point, as Knausgård writes, a distance appeared between my reality and that of the world. And grew. I can think of instances, some quite early, when that distance first made an appearance. I will spare sharing those instances with you.

But it was in those instances that I began to ask myself questions that never before seemed at place in my child’s world.

Why did some people do the things they do? Why are some people so unhappy or angry all the time? Why is there so much hate in the world? Why do people hurt each other?

It’s an endless list. And it has got longer and longer with each passing year.

I often would like to be that child once more looking up at the night sky and taking simple pleasure in the shape and color of the moon, the patterns formed by the stars, or the movement of the clouds across it without asking what the hell the point of it all was.

I remember nights like that when I was kid, sleeping in the summer on a lawn chair out in the yard in my sleeping bag under an amazing sky. There was a lot less light pollution in the night sky then so the stars would put on a quite a show in the dark sky. I have no memory of putting any questions to that sky then.

Just the beauty and thrill of it was all I remember. Awe.

I have instances now where that feeling returns. I momentarily see the world with childlike wonder, accepting it without question. It is a wonderful moment that makes me feel once more immersed in the world.

I find myself asking why I can’t live my entire life as that child. Then I remember that there is so much suffering in this world and to not ask the question Why? is not something the person I am now can do without feeling some sort of deep guilt.

So, here I am standing on my roof, asking the question Why? to the night sky with all its moons that I can and cannot see. I never get an answer. Don’t expect one. Ever. Part of me thinks that just asking that question Why? is just what I have to do, that thing that makes life worth living for me.

And so long as I get a visit once in a while from that carefree and trusting child that still resides in me, I am good with that.

It is as it should be. Just as a child would see it.

Here’s Annie Lennox asking that same question, Why.

Now get off my roof before the child in me takes a powder and my grumpy old self comes back to push you off. Don’t ask me why I would do that. It’s just the way it is. Now, git.

all present and accounted for— now at West End Gallery

Imagination places the future world for us either above or below or in reincarnation. We dream of travels throughout the universe: is not the universe within us? We do not know the depths of our spirit. The mysterious path leads within. In us, or nowhere, lies eternity with its worlds, the past and the future.

–Novalis, Blüthenstaub (1798)

This new painting, all present and accounted for, is now at the West End Gallery. Though it is small in size, it seems to hit like a heavyweight. It sets off all kinds of thoughts within me and raises many questions. Even its title begs for answers.

I guess that’s a good thing. Even on a morning when I feel a little foggy and am seeking a simplicity without so many questions or concerns.

The title was in my head before the composition was fully formed. It seemed to tell me that though it seemed as though it was concerned with someone or something that was lost and gone, as is the case many of the Red Chair pieces, this particular painting was more about the fact that no part of us was ever truly lost or gone, that the past, present, and future dwells within us. That those we have lost in this world still exist within us and in the atmosphere around us.

We are, after all, all stardust, made from the same material that created the universe. It’s much like the Singularity theory from  Stephen Hawking that theorizes that the universe in its entirety was once a single thing before the creation of all that we know the universe to be now. All that now is was once a single tiny point of zero radius and infinite density that burst forth with the Big Bang, carrying us through all time and space.

We were once all part of that one single point immense mass and energy. We were that one thing.

It makes me wonder if the memory of people, time, and places exist in us as actual minuscule bits of space dust we exchanged at some point. We cannot have these things, these people or times, in whole at this point but that bit we shared is still carried within us forever. And going forward, we share that same space dust and our own with others.

So that title, all presented and accounted for, implies that while it might seem that someone or some time is forever lost, they remain forever with us, in that tiny bit of space dust we once shared.

Maybe that tiny bit of space dust is what we call spirit? I don’t know.

Hey, this isn’t as bad as I thought it would be when I sat down to write. As noted above, I was and remain a little foggy. Of course, I might read this later and put my hands over my face as I utter, “Oh, god, what kind of crap is this?”

Another question I can’t answer.

But, to quote Kurt Vonnegut, so it goes.

Let’s wrap up this thing with a song from Eilen Jewell, whose work I have shared a few times this past year. This song might apply to those folks we sometimes meet where we recognize that bit of star dust we share even though we may have never met them in this life.

That’s probably a tenuous connection at best to what I wrote. Again, so it goes.

This is I Remember You.

Gaining Understanding–At the West End Gallery

There is a bird and a stone

in your body. Your job is not 

to kill the bird with the stone.

—Victoria Chang, from The Trees Witness Everything (2022)

I spent much of the first half of my life trying to kill my bird.

But that bird is still with me now.

It sometimes soars high in the sky and other times chatters from the trees.

And sometimes it quietly rests in its nest high in those trees and observes its world.

The bird is my joy.

I still have that stone.

I still grip the stone tightly in my hand.

But now it only leaves my hand to protect that bird.

You have to protect your joy.

Here is another song from Ren, my current musical obsession. I promised myself I wouldn’t play another of his songs for quite a while, didn’t want to become a fanboy channel. But this song has been haunting my thoughts for a few days. It seems in line with the feel of this short post. Resisting the urge to throw that stone and keep the bird alive inside us is part of learning how to be ourselves, learning how to not fall prey to our reactions to the pressures of the outside world.

The song is How To Be Me. It is a live recording of a duet of Ren and the British artist Chinchilla. I didn’t know anything about Chinchilla before seeing this a few weeks back. She is very much like Ren in that she is an independent recording artist whose work is very eclectic, resisting the confines of being labeled. I have to admit that her long nails distracted me a bit initially. I think it’s the practical part of my inborn manual laborer identity simply wondering how those nails maneuver everyday tasks. But I now think they actually add to the performance. It’s like they reach out and somehow mesh her voice to his.

I think it’s a pretty powerful song and performance. You may see it differently. That’s okay so long as you remember to keep your bird alive.

Maintaining Balance— At West End Gallery

If our heart were large enough to love life in all its detail, we would see that every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer, and that a young or tragic novelty — always sudden — never ceases to illustrate the essential discontinuity of time.

—Gaston Bachelard, Intuition of the Instant (1932)

There was a phrase in the passage above from French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962) that made me stop: every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer.

I don’t exactly know the context or Bachelard’s intended meaning. Don’t really know much about Bachelard or his work, to be honest. Some of it that I found online is way above the limits of my education, intellect, and understanding. But this line had an inkling of insight for me, even if it may not have been that which Bachelard intended.

As I see it, it says that every instant, however insignificant or momentous it might seem, is filled with both potentiality and inevitability. Each instant is a form of rebirth and death.

When one instant begins, another ends.

And in that instant there is both a gift and a price to be paid. A giving and taking. A beginning and an ending. A gain and a loss. Perhaps our gain, the new beginning, comes in the form of new insight, and our loss, the ending, comes in discarding ideas and beliefs that our newly gained insight disproves for us.

Perhaps it is as simple as finding new joy in one instant that replace sadness from another.

Of course, this happens instantaneously and continuously on a subconscious level so that unless we can somehow stop and examine an instant– if our heart were large enough to love life in all its detail as Bachelard put it– it takes place without our knowledge and recognition.

Does any of this have any practical application for our lives?

I don’t know. Like I said, this kind of thinking is way above my pay grade.

But maybe if we realize that each moment is both giving and taking from us, we can then live our lives more consciously, having a greater awareness of the potential significance hidden in every instant.

Maybe. Just spit-balling here before 6 in the morning.

There was another passage in this same book from Bachelard that also struck me deeply. It describes how an instant sometimes provides us with a gift that is true illumination, an instant that changes the arc of one’s life.

Whether it comes from suffering, or whether it comes from joy, we all experience as human beings this moment of illumination at some point in our lives: a moment when we suddenly understand our own message, a moment when knowledge, by shedding light on passion, detects at once the rules and relentlessness of destiny — a truly synthetic moment when decisive failure, by rendering us conscious of the irrational, becomes the success of thought. That is the locus of the differential of knowledge, the Newtonian burst that allows us to appreciate how insight springs forth from ignorance — the sudden inflection of human genius upon the curvature of life’s progress. Intellectual courage consists in actively and vitally preserving this instant of nascent knowledge, of making it the unceasing fountain of our intuition, and of designing, with the subjective history of our errors and faults, the model of a better, more illuminated life.

Part of me wants to believe I had such an instant many years ago. Can one ever be certain of such things?

I do know, however, that I have spent the past 30-some years trying to preserve whatever illumination, how little it may have been in the grand scheme of things, that was given in that instant. Though it may not be profound in its scale, it has certainly added meaning and purpose that was sadly lacking before that instant.

Got to wrap this up. Though this may be a bastardization of Bachelard’s concept, understand that today willed be filled with moments of giving and taking.  Gain and loss. Be aware enough to accept both the gift and the loss for that may be the moment that offers some deeper illumination.

One that changes everything.

Here’s a song that I thought I had shared but found that I had not. Don’t know if it has any connection with this post but it sounded pretty good while I was writing so here it is. Comes from Python Lee Jackson which is probably not name that is familiar with most of you. I didn’t know who they were until I heard this song a few years ago. They were an Australian rock band active from 1965 to 1968, before heading to the UK for a few years, disbanding in 1972. The group’s most famous hit is this song, In a Broken Dream, which features Rod Stewart as guest vocalist.

A Patch of Blue (1995) – At West End Gallery

Dark are the paths which a higher hand allows us to traverse here… let us hold fast to the faith that a finer, more sublime solution of the enigmas of earthly life will be present, will become part of us.

–Carl Friedrich Gauss, in a letter from February, 1823. As quoted in Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science (1955)

Continuing my weekly look back at some of my earlier work, this is a piece from early 1995 that intrigued me from day one. It’s called A Blue Patch and is from January 1995, from the time in between where the West End Gallery had asked me to show my work there and the time when I actually started showing.

I can’t recall clearly what I was thinking in that time. I am pretty sure that my mind was racing as I tried to select and frame the paintings that would be going to the gallery, which was a new and scary experience for me. I was obviously in a manic state since I was still able to paint while framing and still working my day job as a waiter. I was going to add while continuing to build our house, but I was most likely on a break from that since it was the dead of winter.

I am amazed at my ability to multi-task back then, especially since that ability has shrunk greatly in recent years. More than a single task in a day now seems like a towering mountain to climb before me. And some days, even a single task still feels like a hard uphill slog.

But let’s get back to this painting, okay?

I liked it very much then but couldn’t put a finger on the reason why. I felt comfortable in its space but slightly uneasy, It felt as though it had a message for me that I wasn’t quite receiving. Yet it felt big in its completeness. It felt beyond my ability to perceive it.  It was an enigma and a challenge to me.

It seemed to say so little but seemed to say so much in that silence. I just couldn’t quite make out what it was saying to me with its muffled echoes that only teased my limited perceptive abilities.

As a result, I was hesitant to ever show it. It always stood out for me when I went through my older work, but I still wasn’t sure what it had to say. At the time I named it A Blue Patch for the section of blue in the otherwise murky sky, an effect that came with painting over a layer of acrylic that was applied over the whole painting surface beforehand. I was experimenting with that at the time and it eventually became a foundation for my process, albeit with gesso instead of paint.

I don’t know why I initially focused on that blue patch or why it was attached to the title. It all added to its enigmatic feeling.

And maybe that is its purpose and message, that there are things in this world that produce feeling in us that we are not intended to ever fully understand. Maybe it is a glimpse of the ethereal. A peek at the face of eternity. And maybe that is what that blue patch was meant to be for me.

I don’t know.

That might be its appeal for me.

What meaning would there be in life if we knew everything?

This painting is now showing for first time at the West End Gallery.

Let’s have a song with some blue in it. Here’s a song I shared here back in 2015. I guess it’s been long enough that it would be okay to share it again this morning. This is Madeleine Peyroux with her version of Weary Blues.

Sounds about right. I’m a little weary. I’m a little blue. Let it go…

“That’s the way it is.”

I am sorry but I just can’t do it this morning.

Can’t put on a mask and try to distract myself and maybe you or someone else with art or other things pertaining to beauty and the ethereal. Can’t lose myself in music or poetry.

Ever since I saw the clip of that stupid sonofabitch addressing the American people yesterday where he slurred out those five words above, I have been livid.

Oh, well, three dead already, many more seriously injured, and there are going to be more, maybe many more, because I don’t know how long we’re going to be here and have no plan on how to end this thing. 

What could go wrong?

After all, I have purged most of the most experienced negotiators and military leaders and replaced them with people like me– super-brainiacs with no morals or ethics that are loyal to me alone. I have the best lackeys, only have the brightest and the best around me. How can this plan without a plan fail when we have my son-in-law and another billionaire buddy negotiating for us? 

This war, as I call it, will make all Americans safer and richer and healthier and happier and more loved and respected around the globe. Trust me. Haven’t I always told you the truth? Haven’t I always carried through on my promises?

Yes, prices might spike on things for a while, maybe a year or two or three. You don’t mind paying more for gas and groceries– that’s an old-timey word, you know? And you don’t mind if we cut healthcare and welfare and things like that? It has to be done. It costs a lot of dough to carry out this war and how else can we pay for the billion or so it costs every day for god knows how long this war will last if we don’t get it from you leeches?

And, yes, we might have to crack down on our freedoms here in the US to make sure we’re safe from terrorists and those who don’t agree with this war. Yes, we might have to suspend elections because foreigners and traitors are trying to influence and steal them. 

So, if a few dozen troops– okay, maybe hundreds or thousands– have to die for my war, that’s a small price to pay. That’s a price I am willing to pay, a sacrifice I am willing to make.

And if we have to wantonly kill schoolchildren in their schools and the sick in their hospitals, that, too, is a sacrifice I am willing to make.

You know there is no sacrifice too great for me to make.

That’s the way it is.

Goddamn it. I hate writing that and know that it does nothing. But the idea that these troops are going to die for absolutely no reason at this time is maddening. They are not dying to free a people. If we had a plan– and we don’t outside of flattening the cities of Iran, Giza-style–it would be to replace one repressive regime with another.

The only thing it might achieve is in further protecting the billionaire elites and oligarchs from accountability of any sort. To make their slice of the pie larger. And that is most likely the only goal of this war, as he has called it.

We have come so far as a species yet find ourselves living in the stupidest of times, led by the greediest, most dishonest, most amoral and unethical, least compassionate and empathetic morons we could find.

What could go wrong?

I know this doesn’t help in any way. Sure as hell doesn’t change a thing or sway a mind anywhere. I have to do it for myself, so that I don’t blow out gasket in my head this morning. I guess I just want where I stand on this to be on record when the shit finally hits the fan.

And the shit will certainly hit the fan, sooner or later.

This will not end well in any ways. For us. For the Iranian people. For the Middle East or the rest of the world.

And certainly not for our troops.

That’s the way it is…

UPDATE: Minutes after posting this, I have discovered that three US F-15 aircraft have been shot down by friendly-fire over Kuwait in the last 24 hours. What could possibly go wrong?

The Regeneration— At West End Gallery

My hand does the work and I don’t have to think; in fact, were I to think, it would stop the flow. It’s like a dam in the brain that bursts.

—Edna O’Brien, The New York Times (1984)

Still suffering the combined effects of the covid/cancer tag team, especially the fatigue. Not looking forward to the radiation beginning in the next couple of weeks that will no doubt increase it. Work is going slow as a result. Getting some done but at a snail’s pace or so it seems. Too slow for me to find my flow. When it’s there it is much like author Edna O’Brien describes above– a dam bursting and running wild without thought and finding its own direction in the flow.

I have been trying to rediscover that flow in a number of ways. Mainly music in different genres and forms. Stuff out of my range. This brought me recently to the Wales-born artist Ren. He’s been on my radar for several years, often showing up on my feed. I never clicked on any of his videos nor tried to listen to it, writing him off as just another rapper. Not that that is a bad thing in itself. There are a lot of rap artists that produce great music. Just not my bag.

I finally decided to give his work a chance, even if it turned out to be one listen or view. At least I could say I knew his work a bit.

I found myself wandering in a deep and twisting rabbit hole.  It moves in all directions, up and down and forward and backward. It is sometimes raw and rough and sometimes smooth and graceful. There is raw emotion, extreme musicality, lyrics that display a deep and agile mind, impeccable instincts in the musical and visual decisions he makes, and a world view with an emphasis on love, hope, and empathy. He has a geniality that feels always authentic and infectious.

I keep waiting to be disappointed with every new video, song, or performance I come across. Or at least to be able to pin him down and attach a label, as much as I hate to do that with anyone. But I have yet to be disappointed in anything to which he attaches himself, from his street busking days with his Brighton-based band, The Big Push, to his more recent videos that are nothing short of brilliant in their storytelling, cinematography, messaging, and artistry.

As a whole, it feels like a pure expression of art to me. And that’s a rare and wonderful thing to find in anyone’s work. Part of that comes from the fact that he is totally independent with his work, eschewing the restrictions of record companies that would seek to narrow his scope and put a label on him.

And that would be great shame. A loss. There is no one label to attach to his work or his vision. It just flows, no matter where he finds himself musically. And that is what drives my current obsession with his work. I am always seeking for a hint of where the limits of his mind might end or even begin. Or to phrase that differently, what drives his thought process.

What feeds his flow? That is the question that looms large in my mind right now. It’s like searching his work for some sort of key that will unlock my own doors, one that will break my dam open and let my own mind flow free.

And it does feel like it is guiding me to that key in some way. Unexpectedly.

And that’s the way in inspiration usually appears. You know something is missing and you search for it in all the places where you have found it in the past. And it’s not in those places. Then just when you’re frustrated and sick of looking for it, you open a drawer where you are sure it will not be and, lo and behold, it is there.

I don’t usually gush about my favorites here and there is a lot more to say about his background, which informs his messaging to a large degree. But I am going to leave it here and simply share a video of his for this Sunday Morning Music that demonstrates some of his unpredictable range and his performance skills. It is a cover of a dance music hit from the group Jungle, Back on 74, combined with Message in a Bottle from The Police. His covers always feel reinterpreted and enhanced in a very special way. This is a one-take performance, something for which he is known.

I picked this song not because it is representative of his body of work. It is not. I chose it mainly because I have been waking up with this song in my head recently. Sometimes that can be irritating. This has not been.

Pretty chill way to wake up in pretty unchill times.

George Grosz- Explosion, 1917

“Ya know, Edith Evans—great actress, great brain—said something once that just blew the top of my head off: She said that harmony—something I was searching for—was the natural state of things. Harmony is the norm, you see, and we fuck it up. We get scared or competitive or jealous, and we just get all this drama and conflict. So I just relax and know that harmony is the natural state. I get up early, when the harmony is the thickest, before too many people have messed it up, and then I don’t mess it up, and then there’s harmony.”

—Ruth Gordon/Interview with James Grissom

I get up early, when the harmony is the thickest…

Loved Ruth Gordon since I first knew who she was. She was smart, tough, and funny– my favorite combo. Her acting, writing, and personality all reflected these qualities. I think her words here pretty much sum up the reason I get up so damn early every morning– to get up to soak in the harmony while it is still thick and undisturbed.

Before too many people have messed it up.

Got up this morning, even earlier than my abnormal only to find I had missed that window of opportunity to bask in harmony like I was soaking quietly in a warm bath.

Somebody had already destroyed any chance of harmony for this morning and probably much longer. As predicted, the US and Israel had started bombing Iran. I am not going to go into an invective this morning, weighing the rightness or wrongness of this action. Though there is a debatable element of rightness in taking action against an Iranian regime that doesn’t fully represent the will of most of its people while openly oppressing them– sound familiar? — there is a boatload of wrongness when viewing this against a backdrop where this action serves as distracting cover for other even more disturbing revelations and actions.

If we laser focus on this or other foreign conflicts, we take our eyes off the fact that this administration is threatening to use emergency powers to seize control of all elections and that the Department of Defense is seeking to remove all safeguards in the use of AI to surveil American citizens, and more chillingly, allow the use of AI-powered fully autonomous lethal weaponry that can target or kill without a human in the decision loop. Or that DHS spent more than $140 billion in 2025 for ICE and CBP weaponry, creating a domestic force with more firepower than the entire defense departments of most foreign nations. Not to mention the huge proliferation of huge private prisons that, to call a spade a spade, are profit-making concentration camps.

There is so much more, and I could go on and on this morning on the many atrocious, authoritarian/dystopian elements for which this new aggression serves as a distraction.

But I won’t. I will however urge you to stay vigilant and to not take the bait of distraction.

Myself, in the short term I am going to try to find some small hidden pocket of that natural harmony that may have somehow evaded being messed up by some stupid bastard this morning.

If so, I am going to soak in it for a while. Though the world is being kept from settling into its natural state of harmony, that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try to settle into my own.

At least until some other moron barges in and tips over the tub.

It won’t be long now.

Here’s what I will be listening to until that harmony is broken. Maybe this will extend that time a bit. It’s a favorite Philip Glass piece, Mad Rush, that I have shared here in the past. There is a deeply meditative quality to it for me, as though it is the sound of the world finding equilibrium and settling into its natural state of harmony. It may not come soon but it will find it one day. Maybe not in my lifetime or yours or even your kids or grandkids or many more generations beyond.

But the world bides its time, knowing that it exists outside of time and that it will settle into its harmony eventually. With or without us.

Final Offer— Coming to West End Gallery

How can one bargain for anything that is worth while? And what else is worth bargaining for?

–Charles Williams, War in Heaven (1930)

The Bargaining

The painting at the top is a new piece that I call Final Offer. It is a semi-companion piece to another recent painting, The Bargaining, which is in the current Little Gems show at the West End Gallery. I see both pieces as being about the futility of bargaining, pleading, or praying for that which is non-negotiable.

One can’t negotiate away the inevitabilities of this life. In matters of life and death, there are no better deals to be cut when that which you see as your trading partner is nothing more than a cool and timeless eye that sees all and acknowledges none.

The only settlement that comes in this negotiation is in the compromise one comes to with oneself.  And that compromise is that while what will be will be, you are imbued with the strength to come to an understanding and acceptance of it.

That strength is the final offer.

On its face it doesn’t seem like a great deal, does it? One doesn’t get all they desire, isn’t given immunity from suffering, grief, and loss.

But it is the only deal on the table. And it is fair in that it offers no favoritism, no back door deals with anyone no matter how rich or connected they might be. The guy on the garbage truck gets the same deal as the guy in the State House. And the strength we are given is a grand concession by that distant eye.

Nothing to sneeze at, my friends.

That seems like a lot of intent for two small, simple paintings in bits of black and white and red. You might see them as being just some crazy person yelling at the sky. And maybe that is what it all is.

Who knows? Not me, that’s for damn sure.

A little extra info on the short quote at the top from British author Charles Williams, who dies in 1945 at the age of 58. He was an Oxford professor who was part of the Inklings, the informal literary group of Oxford profs led by C.S. Lewis that also included J.R.R. Tolkien. The first incarnations of Lord of the Rings were read by Tolkien at the group’s get-togethers, as were many other works-in-progress from other authors. I really don’t know much about Williams or his published work, some of which appear to be in the same realm of fantasy based on theology and myth as the well-known works of Tolkien and Lewis.

However, one interesting tidbit about Williams that jumped out at me was about his book which was the first major English-language edition of the works of philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. That in itself doesn’t seem too interesting. However, this work was part of the literature event in the art competition at the 1924 Summer Olympics.

Art competition at the Olympics?  What? I have been a big Olympics fan for all my life–how had I missed that?

It seems that from 1912 until 1948 here were Olympic medals awarded for artistic achievement in Literature, Architecture, Music, Painting, and Sculpture. It was coined the Pentathlon of the Muses. One competitor, American Walter Winans, won gold in sculpture in 1912 after having won a gold medal for shooting in 1908.

It came to an end in 1948 when it became obvious that the subjective nature of art and the rules requiring amateur status made the competition untenable. It’s an interesting chapter in Olympic history of which I was totally unaware. Have to do some more research on this one.

In the meantime, here’s a song that deals with a type of bargaining. This is Devil’s Backbone from The Civil Wars.  Might not take a medal at the Olympics, but it’s good stuff, nonetheless.

This seems like a lot this morning, doesn’t it? Probably more than you bargained for, right?

As I said above, some things are non-negotiable.

Take it or leave it. Final offer…