Redtree Times

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Baby I got your number
Oh and I know that you got mine
You know that I called you
I called too many times

You can call me baby
You can call me anytime, you got to call me
Give me one reason to stay here
And I’ll turn right back around

— Tracy Chapman, Give Me One Reason (1995)

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I’ve recently been painting a series of small paintings like the one shown at the top, Give Me One Reason. All have the same elements with a few variations, and all are painted in shades of gray and back with the only color coming in the form of a red sun and a sometimes-red roofed house. All contain a small figure, most standing on the peak of the roof of the house, all addressing the red sun in some manner of conversation. There is generally a single bare limbed tree in the near foreground and sometimes one, as here, in the distance. Some have skies with clouds and some, like this one, do not.

The variations I mentioned come in the placement of the figure, the clouds, the tree, the house, and the red sun, as well as how they all sit in the landscape. There is also subtle but important variation in the posture and gesturing of the figure.

I like working with these limitations in mind. It becomes a mental challenge to arrange a small number of the same elements in a small space without the benefit of color and still maintain the individual nature of each painting. It is like assembling a puzzle but doing it different way each time.

It reminds me a bit of an early series that I did around 1995 and 1996. I called the series the Haiku series. The paintings were very simple– a block of color for the sky and one for the field that made up the foreground both separated by the thin white line of the underlying surface. The variations came in the color and ratio of the block of color to one another. There was also an important variation on each side of the white line where the multiple glazing layers of color each left a sharp edge. These edges stack up in an overlapping irregular way, creating an impression of low hills in the distance.

So, like the three lines of a haiku, there were three elements to create an atmosphere in which the reader, or the viewer in my case, could interpret the meaning in how those limited elements came together and played off one another.

These new paintings feel similar in that. The one major difference is the inclusion of the small figure. As I have noted a number of times before, once a figure enters the painting, it becomes the focus of that painting. We humans are always curious when another human becomes part of the picture, wondering what that human might be doing and why. There is ample evidence of that in these pieces.

I find myself asking myself why these figures are in these paintings now and why they often appear on the peaks of the roofs. Why are they speaking to that red sun? And why is that sun red in the first place?

I don’t really know. Maybe in the future when this series has run its full course in my mind, I will see an answer in the assembled imagery of the work. Maybe. Maybe not. Probably not. I suppose some things are meant to be a mystery.

The easy interpretation, and one that has certainly come to my mind, is that it relates to my health issues. Perhaps the figure is attempting to ask some higher power represented in the form of the red sun for a reason why things like this happen. Perhaps that figure is berating or begging that red sun for answers or mercy?

Could that be me up there? I don’t think so. I have not been angry or even questioning as to why I am going through this. As I have said, I know and accept that it’s just the price of admission we pay to experience the wonder that is this world. Everybody has to pay that price in some way.

This is mine.

And I think I might be getting a bargain. Seriously.

And that somehow doesn’t seem fair. So, if that is me up there on the roof, maybe I am asking why some people pay so much more for this privilege and others slide by on the cheap.

All I am asking is for one good reason. Then I’ll climb off that roof.

Let’s get to this week’s Sunday Morning Music. I am sure some of you could foresee this week’s pick. The painting was titled with this song in mind, after all. The song is Give Me One Reason from Tracy Chapman. I was surprised when I discovered I have never shared this song after all these years. Like so many of her songs, it has long been a favorite.

Enjoy it then show yourself out. Sorry to be abrupt but the roof is waiting for me. That red sun has some explaining to do…

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One cannot fix one’s eyes on the commonest natural production without finding food for a rambling fancy.

—Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (1814)

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This line from Jane Austen really speaks to me, both in the inspirational quality of nature and in the way the mind takes off in any direction at the slightest breeze of thought. Mine certainly does. Even more than normal recently. Reading has become a chore because every sentence from an author often sends my mind racing away from it to some other path of thought. It sometimes takes me half an hour to read a page, most of that time spent following my rambling fancy.

I don’t mind, outside of not getting things read that I feel the need or desire to read. I know that this is just how I am and that it is part of how I process things. How I keep things straight in my mind and find some clarity or order in it. I kind of think I need to do things this way now in order to be to write or paint.

Need to follow that rambling fancy.

My mornings in the studio are most always a ramble of some type. If I don’t have something in mind for the blog when I sit down–which is quite often–I begin a quest of a sort. I listen to music, watch videos, check out the news, look at some sites that I follow, all in an effort to find that food for a rambling fancy, as Austen put it.

This morning, for example, I’ve watched a number of music videos, looked up some musicians of which I was not aware, read several short articles, and did several searches for a variety of things. I try to gauge my rambling fancy on how much my emotions are triggered by whatever catches my attention at the moment. If it moves me, I follow it.

This hasn’t been as accurate a gauge recently because my emotions are already on high alert as a result of the hormone therapy I am undergoing. I have always been highly reactive as far as my emotions are concerned. They have always been right under the surface of my skin ready to burst out at any moment.

Just the way I am designed.

Unfortunately, the new hormone broth running through me has supercharged some of my emotions. They are throbbing on the surface of my skin now. I can’t get through a day now without something I hear or see or read moving me to tears. Hell, this morning I have cried several times already.

I’m crying right now. Not really. Just threw that in for dramatic effect.

Another effect of this is that my writing tends to ramble on, and my personal filters seem ineffective. You probably noticed that if you’re a regular reader. Today is good example of this.

I thought there was a point to be made but now I am not so sure. I’ve rambled off whatever path I began down when this began and now I am in No Man’s Land.

But that’s okay. Well, okay for me. I apologize for wasting your time with my hormone-driven babble.

Here’s a song. Maybe that will make up for my transgression. It’s a wonderful performance of the Led Zep classic Ramble On from Robert Plant and Saving Grace from the other night on the Colbert show. I featured Plant and Saving Grace is an earlier post. Good stuff all the way around.

Got to ramble on now. I have another rambling fancy beckoning to me…

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We do not ask for what useful purpose the birds do sing, for song is their pleasure since they were created for singing. Similarly, we ought not to ask why the human mind troubles to fathom the secrets of the heavens. The diversity of the phenomena of nature is so great and the treasures hidden in the heavens so rich precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking in fresh nourishment.

–Johannes Kepler, as quoted in Cosmos (1980) by Carl Sagan

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The painting shown from 1998 is titled The Way of the World. It hung for a number of years over my desk in my old studio and for the last 18 years had been on a wall in my back bedroom in my new studio. I guess after 18 years, it isn’t really new anymore. but that is beside the point. 

The Way of the World was painted during my transition to being an artist on a full-time basis. I had recently completed a large commission for Corning Inc. and my work was showing and selling well in three galleries. This piece is very representative of my work at the time, done as it was in transparent inks on untreated paper. I had not yet begun to work on surfaces with underlying textures created by layers of gesso.

It also represented an upward trend in the size of my work, even though it is not large in relation to what I consider my bigger pieces. It is 12″ by 28″ in a 16″ by 32″ frame. A substantial piece but not really large.

The piece only showed for a short time before coming back to reside in my studio. It was with me for so long that, as I recently realized, I began to not see it. Looking at it just a few eeks ago, I tried to understand how this came to be.

It didn’t take long to figure out. 

At the time, as I was saying, I was showing more and more work in several venues. Up to that point, I was dependent on framing my work in store bought frames. I had found a couple of outlets that sold frames that were just okay but limited in sizes. They added nothing aesthetically to the work. They were neutral at best. Plus, it was quite an outlay of cash for me given the number of pieces that were going out to galleries then. I needed to figure out a way to obtain a frame that was affordable, unique, and complemented the work in the way a good setting highlights a fine gem.

I enlisted a good friend of mine who was also a woodworker. It took a couple of iterations before a suitable and effective frame emerged, the one that came to be recognized as my frame. A simple profile in poplar, stained an orange/yellow color that highlighted my work beautifully. Well. at least in my eyes it did.

However, some of the early attempts at finding a frame came up short. And The Way of the World was always in one of those early frames. It was– is–a horrible pine frame stained in blue that has the appearance of dirty pair of blue jeans. It is ghastly on every level.

I took it off the wall recently and freed it from that frame and for the first time in probably 28 years, saw it for what it is without the specter of that awful frame impinging on it. It was no doubt what I saw in it before I imprisoned it back in 1998. It felt like I had come across a hidden treasure, one that had been right in front of me the whole time but was inexplicably invisible.

I put it in one of my regular frames and it feels new in so many ways that please me greatly. I like the way the tree is styled, for example. It is representative of the manner in which I painted trees at the time, two years before the Red Tree began to appear and take hold of me. I like its color and solidity that makes it stands out against the background.

There are flaws in it as well that thrill me. In the hillside on which the tree stands, the large block of blue in the bottom right, there are ink marks that occurred while I was painting. They result from the ink drying too quickly as I am working on the whole block of color. You don’t see them in my work as often now since I can remove them on a surface treated with gesso. The untreated paper I was working with then had no such safety net.

As I said, seeing these sorts of flaws thrills me. I like seeing the hand of the artist, be it the exposed edge of drying paint or in bristles or hairs that become trapped in the paint. It gives me a sense of looking at the work through the eyes of the artist.

It is a very human thing, this willingness to show our all too human flaws.

The flaw of the human hand. Something you can’t produce with AI. 

This painting now feels like a completely painting to me now. Without that crappy blue frame, it can speak its truth. And I see and hear it now. And I like it. 

I don’t know that anyone will else see it in that way. And to be honest, I don’t give damn. I am going to show it again at my show at the Principle Gallery in June, to let it be visible after too long a period of being unseen and unheard.

Here’s song that I am required to play today. It immediately came to mind when I decided to write about this painting but was pretty sure I had played it not too long ago. Looking it up, I found that I had last shared it on this very same day one year ago in a post that was about, of all things, synchronicity. It featured this passage from Tom Robbins:

What we, thanks to Jung, call “synchronicity” (coincidence on steroids), Buddhists have long known as “the interpenetration of realities.” Whether it’s a natural law of sorts or simply evidence of mathematical inevitability (an infinite number of monkeys locked up with an infinite number of typewriters eventually producing Hamlet, not to mention Tarzan of the Apes), it seems to be as real as it is eerie.

The sheer and eerie synchronicity of it made me laugh this morning. Sharing the song was obviously an inevitability that I could not resist. To not share it would have went against the will of the universe and the way of the world.

And who am I to go against that? 

This is That’s the Way the World Goes Round from the late John Prine.

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Worry is a form of fear, and all forms of fear produce fatigue.

–Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness (1930)

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So desperately tired this morning. Bone tired.

Even trying to think seems exhausting. I don’t know if it’s a result of the effects of the radiation coming to a peak. I was warned that this would be about the time it would occur. But part of me wonders if it’s not that combined with mental fatigue of helplessly witnessing the madness taking place here.

I don’t know.

Sat here looking at my computer for too long this morning and was about to hang it up and not post anything today. But that seemed like I would be giving in to my tiredness, as though it was something separate from me, something trying to keep me from being who I am. So, I decided I would post something, anything, even if it is short and not saying much.

It’s an effort, at least. And I guess the same can be said for the collective fatigue we are all experiencing.

Make an effort, even a small, seemingly insignificant one. It is movement and movement is life.

Like they say, use it or lose it.

Okay, here’s a tune I haven’t shared in several years. It is Cry No More from one of my favorites, the ultra talented Rhiannon Giddens. This performance and was produced in the aftermath of the 2015 Charleston, SC church shooting in which 9 church members were murdered. The words below appear at the end of the video. They apply now more than ever.

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The laughter of women sets fire
to the Halls of Injustice,
and the false evidence burns
to a beautiful white lightness.

It rattles the Chambers of Congress
and forces the windows wide open
so the fatuous speeches can fly out.

The laughter of women wipes the mist
from the spectacles of the old;
it infects them with a happy flu
and they laugh as if they were young again.

Prisoners held in underground cells
imagine that they see daylight
when they remember the laughter of women.

It runs across water that divides,
and reconciles two unfriendly shores
like flares that signal the news to each other.

What a language it is, the laughter of women:
high-flying and subversive.
Long before law and scripture
we heard the laughter, we understood freedom.

— Lisel Mueller, The Laughter of Women (1997)

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A good friend down in Texas, Linda Leinen, who you might recognize here as shoreacres, has a marvelous blog, The Task at Hand, that is always highly informative and beautifully written. I urge you to check it out as well as her other blog, Lagniappe, which showcases her terrific nature photography. Great stuff. Whenever she posts anything, I know that I am going to come away with something new to me.

In her most recent post, Linda gave me two new shiny pieces of info. The first was the basis of her post, Easter Laughter, which was something new to me. I am going to use Linda’s words to describe since I would most likely muddle it up in a log-winded way:

The early Christian practice of risus paschalis – Easter laughter – arose after early church fathers began promoting the view that Jesus’s resurrection represented the ultimate practical joke; played by God on the devil, it affirmed the triumph of life over death and good over evil. Joke-telling and shared laughter became perfectly acceptable additions to Easter celebrations.

I found this most interesting. But it was poem she finished her post off with that really spoke to me. It was titled The Laughter of Women from the late poet Lisel Mueller. I am ashamed to say that I was not aware of Mueller’s work, especially after reading of her notable accomplishments including a Pulitzer Prize.

But while I am ashamed, I am not surprised. I have often said I am a wide river but a very shallow one. A lot of surface and not much depth in most spots of my river.

I was glad to carve out a little more depth in my river with the addition of Lisel Mueller’s poetry, particularly this poem since I have long recognized the power in the laughter of women. It can be the most inflating or deflating sound in the world. I have personally known it to be both.

I am going to use my wife as an example, though I doubt she would approve. Making her laugh has brought me the greatest joy I have known for almost the past half century. That was the thing that brought us together in high school. We had a few classes together in which we somehow ended up sitting near one another. One was a class on Death and Dying that focused on the writings of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. I had a habit of making little comments about some of the things said by our teacher, a large former Canadian Football League player, that would make her outright laugh.

I found this most intriguing. As I said, inflating. Making her laugh became my primary objective for that class, damn the death and graves and cadavers that made up the curriculum.

And it is still one of my primary objectives. Her laugher is love for me. I figure if I can make her shake with laughter at breakfast, she still has a thing for me. The same goes if I can make her laugh when we sometimes go through tough times. She might scold me for doing so but we both know that if we are both laughing, things will somehow be okay.

As for the deflating part of her laughter, it usually takes place when I am in the midst of doing something so obviously stupid that it takes on an absurd quality. One example I will share came while I was attempting to move a fallen tree of decent size from a path near the studio by rolling it over into the low ditch next to the path. I pushed on a limb that jutted upward and the log began to move, momentum gathering with its weight. As it began to roll, a limb that was under it came lose and trapped my leg against the tree.

The tree was rolling and, like it or not, I was going to go along for the ride.  I was helpless and hoped that the log’s roll would stop short of doing serious damage.  It pulled me over in a weird slow-motion way and as I went over, I turned my head to look at Cheri, whose face was a strange mixture of terror and amusement. I know that look all too well. Fortunately, the tree just slammed me face down into the wet leaf matter, my leg up in the air behind, still tangled in the limb.

There was a quiet pause that ended with her saying, “You’re so stupid!” We both laughed for quite some time until we both had tears running down our faces, me still with my face in the leaves and still trapped with my leg tangled up in the air.

Deflating? Sure.

But I didn’t mind. Laughter is love.

I know that is different than the deflating laughter of Mueller’s poem. The laughter of which she writes is that which punctures the balloons of ego and injustice. The kind of laughter that points out the smallness and pomposity of power and lets us know that we are not defeated so long as we can laugh out loud at its absurdity.

The laughter of defiance is the scourge of those who seek to control you. Mueller says it so eloquently in the poem’s last verse:

What a language it is, the laughter of women:
high-flying and subversive.
Long before law and scripture
we heard the laughter, we understood freedom.

Laughter is freedom. Laughter is empowerment. Laughter is love.

Thank god for the laughter of women.

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From Of Power and Time by Mary Oliver in Upstream (2016):

Say you have bought a ticket on an airplane and you intend to fly from New York to San Francisco. What do you ask the pilot when you climb aboard and take your seat next to the little window, which you cannot open but through which you see the dizzying heights to which you are lifted from the secure and friendly earth?

Most assuredly you want the pilot to be his regular and ordinary self. You want him to approach and undertake his work with no more than a calm pleasure. You want nothing fancy, nothing new. You ask him to do, routinely, what he knows how to do-fly the airplane. You hope he will not daydream. You hope he will not drift into some interesting meander of thought. You want this flight to be ordinary, not extraordinary. So, too, with the surgeon, and the ambulance driver, and the captain of the ship. Let all of them work, as ordinarily they do, in confident familiarity with whatever the work requires, and no more. Their ordinariness is the surety of the world. Their ordinariness makes the world go around.

I, too, live in this ordinary world. I was born in it. Indeed, most of my education was intended to make me feel comfortable within it. Why that enterprise failed is another story. Such failures happen, and then, like all things, are turned to the world’s benefit, for the world has a need of dreamers as well as shoe-makers. (Not that it is so simple, in fact-for what shoemaker does not occasionally thump his thumb when his thoughts have, as we would say, “wandered”? And when the old animal body clamors for attention, what daydreamer does not now and again have to step down from the daydream and hurry to market before it closes, or else go hungry?)

And this is also true. In creative work-creative work of all kinds-those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward. Which is something altogether different from the ordinary. Such work does not refute the ordinary. It is, simply, something else. Its labor requires a different outlook-a different set of priorities. Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity.

Intellectual work sometimes, spiritual work certainly, artistic work always-these are forces that fall within its grasp, forces that must travel beyond the realm of the hour and the restraint of the habit. Nor can the actual work be well separated from the entire life. Like the knights of the Middle Ages, there is little the creatively inclined person can do but to prepare himself, body and spirit, for the labor to come-for his adventures are all unknown. In truth, the work itself is an adventure. And no artist could go about this work, or would want to, with less than extraordinary energy and concentration. The extraordinary is what art is all about.

— Mary Oliver

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I wrote a whole long thing this morning about this passage from Mary Oliver’s essay Of Power and Time. It was all about my own struggles with the ordinary and the desire for something beyond it, that hunger for eternity as Oliver put it, that eventually guided me here. After rereading it, I decided to heave my words into the trash.

I couldn’t add much of anything to Oliver’s words. It so well describes what I felt then as someone who was then out of love with the ordinary and who now very much appreciates the ordinary from the windows of my studio. From a distance.

This all came back to me recently when I was asked several questions by the writer of the article for the preview of my June Principle Gallery exhibit that will be appearing in an upcoming issue of American Art Collector.  I always struggle with the sort of questions that come in such interviews. I always stumble around, saying things that sound out of character and somewhat nonsensical as soon as they come out of my mouth.

It always feels to me like these interviews are trying to make ordinary something that is by its very nature extraordinary.

The writer in this particular instance asked how I would describe my style in words. I told her that I gave up doing that a long time ago and that I painted because I couldn’t find words for what I needed to express. If I could, I would be a writer and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

I ultimately allowed that if I had to choose a word or two, the words would be unique and human.

Or perhaps uniquely human.

That felt to me as good a description as any other I could think of. If someone someday finds the need to describe my work– hey, it could happen– I hope those words or that term comes to mind.

Well, not sure if this captures what I wanted to say. Like I said, I’m a painter not a writer. There are plenty of words and not much else.

Maybe that is what life comes down to, when all is said and done– lots of words and not much else.

Nah, I don’t believe that for a second.

We are all uniquely human in our own ways which means we are meant to be extraordinary. And that makes it all worthwhile.

Didn’t know what to add as far as an image so I opted to make this sort of a Look Back piece. The painting at the top is an experimental piece from early 1994 that I call Third Stone From the Sun after the Jimi Hendrix song. Oddly enough, I think this all fits together in an okay way.

And for this morning, okay is the standard I am seeking to meet. Any day we are okay is a win in my eyes.

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To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman.

–George Santayana, The Life of Reason: Reason in Society (1905)

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Yesterday was a rough day for me physically and after reading the bullshit shown at the top here, it became a rough day mentally as well. It was a holiday cocktail of anger mixed with despair with a sidecar of dread for this country and the human race. It was a bitter drink, to say the least. Happy Easter.

I didn’t think it was real at first. After all, it’s hard to tell the difference these days between what is real and what is not. I mean, how could any president, even one as hideous in practically every way as the current one, post this on an Easter Sunday? Or on any day, for that matter. And how could anyone reading it not come to the conclusion that this was the ranting of an absolute mad man?

And how could anyone with any degree of respect for others or themselves for that matter, defend it or try to rationalize its stated intent to commit crimes against humanity?

But i, of course, was all too real.

I read several people who triedto brush it under the rug by saying it was just his way of negotiating, that he is somehow playing 12-dimension chess.

I call bullshit on that claim. This creature is literally the rooster who plays chess with you and loses then proceeds to knock over all the pieces on the board while strutting around crowing about its victory while shitting all over the board.

Or 12 boards, if you think this is 12-dimebnsional playing.

I have no idea why anyone would be playing chess with the rooster in the first place. But then again, I could never grasp the idea that we somehow let someone who is an adjudicated criminal, a well-documented serial liar, and twice-impeached politician back into the seat of power. I am not going to even mention his misogyny, racism, greed, corruption, disdain for the poor, narcissistic personality, nor his propensity for cheating and chiseling in every aspect of his life.

I am pretty sure that is a woefully incomplete list. It would probably make more sense to simply put up the list of the Seven Deadly Sins. This is a creature who was seemingly designed as a display piece for all seven.

But we did allow him back into power. Yesterday, the thing that kept echoing in my mind was that, as our head of state, he was not sole perpetrator of what he was threatening.

He was threatening to commit war crimes in our name. In your name. In my name. In the name of every person who calls this country home.

Like me, you most likely disavow his actions, now and in the near future. They are loathsome abominations.

But that doesn’t matter. We all carry the burden of his actions, now and well into future. When he commits war crimes, we commit war crimes. When he bombs schools and other civilian sites, we are bombing them as well. When he threatens the use of strategic nukes, it is our threat, too.

His actions are our actions, like it or not.

He’s the fuckin’ rooster we put on that goddamn chessboard.

Sorry for the salty language. If you don’t like it, address your complaints to the asshole in charge. My use of foul language (or is it fowl, in this case?) has increased like it was the price of oil in recent times thanks to him.

I really don’t want to spend my time on things like this when I have other fairly serious things going on that need my attention. I certainly didn’t want to put his post at the top of the page. I actually had decided against doing so last night. But I felt this morning that it is too important to ignore, for any of us. Its madness shouldn’t be shrugged off or normalized. His words from yesterday need to be on the front page of every paper and as the main story of every news broadcast. His words should be echoing in every American’s mind today.

They are words of criminality and madness. And unless we acknowledge that and respond accordingly, they are our words.

Our criminality and madness.

Okay, I’ll stop now. Do I feel better for writing this? No. But sometimes doing things that you feel need to be done doesn’t feel good.

Let’s have a song. Since we’re dealing with barnyard animals this morning, let’s hear a song about another one of them. Here’s an interesting version of the Black Sabbath song War Pigs from singer Sarah King. You weren’t expecting a Black Sabbath tune this morning, were you? This is a haunting acoustic take on the song. It seems to fit this morning, at least for me.

Got to go now. That damn rooster is on my painting table now and I will not have that. If you’re leaving, please take him with you…

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The word sadness originally meant “fullness,” from the same Latin root, satis, that also gave us sated and satisfaction. Not so long ago, to be sad meant you were filled to the brim with some intensity of experience. It wasn’t just a malfunction in the joy machine. It was a state of awareness– setting the focus to infinity and taking it all in, joy and grief all at once. When we speak of sadness these days, most of the time what we really mean is despair, which is literally defined as the absence of hope. But true sadness is actually the opposite, an exuberant upwelling that reminds you how fleeting and mysterious and open-ended life can be. That’s why you’ll find traces of the blues all over this book, but you might find yourself feeling strangely joyful at the end of it. And if you are lucky enough to feel sad, well, savor it while it lasts– if only because it means that you care about something in this world enough to let it under your skin.

― John Koenig, introduction to The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

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Came into the studio this morning kind of glum. A bit sad. A long way from the effects I experienced a week or so back caused by the steroids I was taking for my radiation. That filled me with a giddy elation that made me feel supercharged.

Not so this morning. But even as I settled in with this glumness, it didn’t feel bad, didn’t feel despairing. I felt satisfied, oddly enough. As though this was to be expected, that this was simply an indicator that I was alive and feeling life as it is in the moment.

A good sadness. Like a cleansing cry.

It reminded me of a post from about three years ago that talks just a bit about the place and need of sadness in our lives. It also mentions a book of poems that was important to me, There Are Men Too Gentle to Live Among Wolves. Cheri gave it to me when we were going out, and we were talking about it just the other day. It played a big part in the formation of what was to become my life.

I am sharing a section of the preface to that small book of poetry here. As a young man with a sadness I had even then but didn’t yet understand, I felt his words spoke directly to me. Almost fifty years later, it still feels that way.

I am one of the searchers. There are, I believe, millions of us. We are not unhappy, but neither are we really content. We continue to explore life, hoping to uncover its ultimate secret. We continue to explore ourselves, hoping to understand. We like to walk along the beach, we are drawn by the ocean, taken by its power, its unceasing motion, its mystery and unspeakable beauty. We like forests and mountains, deserts and hidden rivers, and the lonely cities as well. Our sadness is as much a part of our lives as is our laughter. To share our sadness with one we love is perhaps as great a joy as we can know – unless it be to share our laughter.

We searchers are ambitious only for life itself, for everything beautiful it can provide. Most of all we love and want to be loved. We want to live in a relationship that will not impede our wandering, nor prevent our search, nor lock us in prison walls; that will take us for what little we have to give. We do not want to prove ourselves to another or compete for love.

For wanderers, dreamers, and lovers, for lonely men and women who dare to ask of life everything good and beautiful. It is for those who are too gentle to live among wolves.

–James Kavanaugh, 1970

Here’s the rest of that post from a few years back.

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I recently watched part of a YouTube video of a presentation by the late James Kavanagh. His Wikipedia entry says that Kavanagh (1928-2009) was an American Catholic priest, author, and poet best remembered for his 1967 book, A Modern Priest Looks at His Outdated Church. It was a call for the church to move from its antiquated past become a church of compassion and love. It was a controversial bestseller at the time and Kavanagh soon after left the priesthood.

That wasn’t how I knew him. I knew him from the books of poetry he wrote that were not mentioned on his Wikipedia page. One, There Are Men Too Gentle to Live Among Wolves, was first published in 1970 and has gone through 50+ printings and has sold over a million copies, making it one of the most popular books of poetry ever published. I don’t know that it will ever rival the verse or longevity of the immortal poets, but it is effective popular, straightforward poetry that wears its emotion on its sleeve, meant to be easily absorbed. Simple verses for complex feelings. I knew this book and its title poem well in my teens. It served a great purpose for me, helping form a lot of my goals and ideals at the time.

In the aforementioned video Kavanagh spoke about his embrace of the sadness that was always with him, how it was an essential part of who he was as human being. It wasn’t something to be hidden or avoided.

I understood immediately what he meant by this. I often experience a sense of sadness that is far different from despair. Nor is it joy or elation. Hardly.

It is difficult to describe but it almost seems like a form of pleasure that comes in being moved by the extremes of the human condition, as though it validates our own humanity, our own place in the world. A recognition of those common experiences– good and bad– that we all share in our time here.

Reading the words at the top from the introduction to the John Koenig book, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, brought it into better perspective. The sadness that I know is, indeed, a fullness — an exuberant upwelling that reminds you how fleeting and mysterious and open-ended life can be. 

One can’t fully appreciate the human condition without knowing at least a little bit of that sadness.

I no longer try to stifle this sadness in myself and am easily moved by displays of human emotion that involve feelings of empathy, concern, courage, and tenderness.

The true despair I do feel most often comes from witnessing the acts of those who feel little of these same feelings. People without empathy. The selfish and the greedy. The hateful and the spiteful.

The unfeeling and the unloving.

I don’t know what this means this morning or why I am sharing this. Maybe you’ve felt a sadness that you don’t understand. But it somehow makes you feel a bit more human, a bit more alive. Maybe it’s just that you’re aware of the fullness of this human life.

Hmm…

Here’s a version of the Tampa Red song from 1940, It Hurts Me Too, that later became a hit for Elmore James. Sounds right this morning. This is from modern blues musician Susan Tedeschi. Good stuff.

Good blues…

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A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both. Enough for him that he does it well.

—L.P. Jacks, Education Through Recreation (1932)

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Came into the studio this morning at my usual much too early time. After tending to my studio assistant cats, I sat down to write something here. Wasn’t sure what I had to say or if I wanted to say anything at all. I’ve written an awful lot lately, probably too much, and taking a day off from this might not be a bad idea. I think I’ve posted something every day for close to four months straight. Like I said, probably too much.

But habit is aa hard thing to overcome. I started poking around trying to see if there was anything that sparked a thought. In mere minutes I found myself in a swirl of emotions as I looked at some older posts mentioning my late mom that made me sob and some others about goofy stuff that made me laugh outright.

It’s funny how emotions can sometimes shift and change direction so quickly.

It made me think of the passage above which was one of the drafts I had pulled up when I sat down. I often save quotes and other things that pique my interest as drafts for just such mornings, hoping they spark thought. In this passage, the English minister/philosopher L.P. Jacks extols the virtue of finding playful, joy in one’s work. The master in the art of living finds no distinction between their work and play, seeing them as inseparable parts of themself.

Simply achieving excellence in whatever they do produces a deep and joyful satisfaction.

It made me ponder how there is little distinction between my work and play. But with the flow of emotions I had just experienced fresh in my mind, it made me consider how my work and my emotional responsiveness are completely intertwined.

My work is nothing without my emotion. And to a great extent, my emotions depend on the expression I find in my work.

I have commented a number of times here over the years about how I feel my most powerful work comes when I am on an emotional edge, one that finds me close to tears of both joy and sorrow.

This might be the most valuable asset I possess as an artist, probably far more essential to my work than any innate or attained technical ability or talent. I have often said there many, many painters that are far more talented from the perspective of craftmanship. There are absolutely many more that are better trained and educated than me. And certainly many more that are much more intelligent and knowledgeable than me. And most likely many more ambitious than me.

I can easily admit the superiority of a number of artists in many ways. Except one.

I believe my work is mine alone, my unique emotional response to the world. If you know my work and respond to it, you most likely know me on an emotional level. I think I rival any artist on this point because, as I derived from Jacks words above, there is no distinction between my work and my emotional responsiveness.

My emotional being is fully integrated into my work.

Of course, as always, I could be wrong.

And even If I am right, does that make me a master in the art of living?

No way. But it might be a good start towards getting to that level, if time allows. I think that must be one of those things you don’t fully know until your last minute on this earth.

Well, as has been the case lately, this was all unexpected when I sat down here this morning. Not sure why I even wrote it, to be honest. Probably just a result from a mixture of fatigue and hormones. Thanks for bearing with me.

Shall we have a song? Why not? It’s the least I can give you this morning.

I have played a few Ren songs recently and this is one from several years ago with the band he has played with for quite some time, The Big Push. They basically began as buskers in Brighton, England, playing impromptu sets on the streets for whoever happened along. They quickly developed an avid following and there are some great videos of their street performances where they are surrounded by a couple of hundred people. Though Ren’s popularity as a solo performer has taken off, the Big Push is doing a British tour this year. This early song, It’s Alright, is from back in 2018 or 2019.

It just feels right this morning. It’s alright…

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