Redtree Times

Blaze– You Could Win This Painting!

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.

Feed your fire…

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.

Edge of Doubt– At Principle Gallery

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.

Bottle Factory (1994)

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 Jubilee since 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 Heights (1994)

Factory View (1994)

Bound in Time— At Principle Gallery

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.

Like an ascending bird.

In the High Country– At West End Gallery

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 git I 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:

Exiles: The Lost One (2011)

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.

Crown of Ozymandias 2026

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”

–Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias (1818)

I wrote yesterday about a work-in-progress that I was calling Ozymandias after the long-forgotten king in Shelley’s poem that puts our self-importance into the grander context of time.

The mighty now will almost certainly not be so in the future.

The painting is shown here on the right. It is 48″ by 24″ and will be included in my October solo exhibit at the West End Gallery. The image of it shows it as it is now on the easel. I am still deciding if it needs changes or touches here and there. It’s the kind of piece that hits hard and sometimes that initial impact causes me to overlook some small but necessary touches. I generally get to spend some time with a piece, so they almost always get caught before going out into the world.

I spent some time earlier in the week making these sorts of small changes to a few pieces painted months ago. They felt complete after I finished them, but time showed that they needed some small touches. They now feel complete to me, having that sense of rightness I often mention here.

This painting, as I mentioned above, hits hard. I get as far away from it as I can here in the studio and it maintains a powerful glow. Great visual impact, the kind that, with its size, can dominate a space.

It makes a statement.

I loved painting this piece and seeing it now. There is an eye candy element to it that is hard to resist. But I think it has something to say. I think it may something different to every individual viewer.

I can only speak for myself here, but the meaning I take from it is bittersweet, one that hung with me while I worked at it in over the last several days. It reminded me of the temporary nature of my existence and perhaps, of my work. While I might feel emboldened and strong when working on a piece, making a grand statement, it may one day be reduced to nothingness.

My thoughts on it will be meaningless.

Kind of like the words from Ozymandias at the top of the page, carved into the pedestal of that broken statue buried in a desolate desert.

I felt very much like Ozymandias while working on this piece. Big and bold. Regal.

But it came with a bittersweet aftertaste. The sun that might seem to be rising to some felt like it was setting in my mind. I sensed that the boldness and the power was momentary.

That time would soon reclaim its bounty.

I am Ozymandias this morning and this Red Tree is my crown.

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

Here’s a song that has nothing to do with this at all. Probably. I don’t know. Maybe it does. This is John Prine and That’s the Way the World Goes Round.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Soul Boat (2019)

The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it. But we will escape it only by adding something better to it.

–Wendell Berry, Standing by Words: Essays (1983)

I have never had any interest in returning to the past, even those times that are sugar-coated and glorified in my memory. The past is where it belongs, behind us. But, as the recently deceased Wendell Berry wrote above, it defines us as we are now, in the present time. We are the living result of our past, often one which we had little, if any, control over.

There’s good reason to want to escape our past. It can be a great weight to bear, filled as it with traumas and griefs, progressions and regressions.  that can;t be denied.

But here we stand, bewildered and trapped by a past already written with undeniable facts.

And unless we change our present, we will remain so going into the future. Berry writes that we can only escape our past through this change, by adding something better.

That begs the question: What can I add that makes it better?

That’s a hard question for any of us. For me, I would like to say that my work adds something better.

But I don’t really know how much that changes anything for the better in any meaningful, lasting way.

Maybe our additions need not be grand in scale. Maybe even small things in the present serve to lessen the impact of our past on our future.

Maybe even slightly better moves the dial?

I don’t know but I tend to believe that.

Not sure where this came from this morning. Maybe it is the painting I am working on, a large Red Tree piece. As I have worked on it over the past couple of days, I have taken to calling it Ozymandias after the poem by P.B. Shelley. I first read the poem in third grade in a book of poems from Scholastic Books. This poem and many others in that book made a huge impact on my young mind.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said:—Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

I see this new unfinished painting as a symbol of my own hubris in thinking that my work will be around long after I am gone. But will it instead suffer the fate of its namesake?

Not for me to say. Out of my hands. Like any of us, I can only try to do better in some small way.

That might be enough.

Here’s a Jethro Tull song that I shared here about six years back. Felt like it worked for today’s post but what do I know? This is Living in the Past from 1969.