Redtree Times

Dissolve– 2011

If we were humble, nothing would change us-neither praise nor discouragement. If someone were to criticize us, we would not feel discouraged. If someone would praise us, we also would not feel proud.

–-Mother Teresa, In My Own Words (1996)

Humble. Quite a word.

When we were young the idea of being humble seemed antithetical to all the impulses, desires, and dreams surging within us. The world then sometimes felt simple and easy to conquer. It was all laid out before us. Plans were effortlessly conceived that seemed as though they could not fail.

Time and youthful energy were on our side.

We felt that all we had to do was to proclaim our greatness to make it so.

Of course, all of this had not yet came met the real world, had not shook the hand of reality.

When that happened, soon every word that corrected or criticized became a dagger. After feeling the stab of failure a few times, we were primed so that even the smallest words of praise greatly inflated our ego, our pride, and had us once again breathing the air of self-importance. It made us once again feel invincible.

But time wore on us. Where we once saw a limitless horizon in the distance that we felt was within our reach, we now looked at it knowing that it might well be beyond the limitations of our time and talent. The aspiration to greatness was replaced with an aspiration for simple goodness and self-satisfaction.

Oh, the stabs and slights still came but the scars from the past wounds to our psyche now kept the pain at bay. Tolerable because we knew they would not slay us. And when words of praise came, they now made us feel a bit lighter in our soul but didn’t have the same effect on our ego as they once did. We now knew that praise was ephemeral, little more than a smoke ring to be enjoyed and appreciated for a brief instant before it dissolves into the atmosphere.

I think I am at that point in my life. I can still be hurt by the stab and can feel a small bit of pride from praise. My aspirations now are smaller. I need less to feel satisfied in who and what I am.

As I was telling a friend a few days ago, I feel oddly content as I am now, even as I struggle with illness while living in a world seemingly set to combust.

I feel humbled by life now. Not humiliated. Simply humble.

And maybe that is the lesson of this life?

I don’t know. I can’t speak for everybody. We all have different horizons, different depths and breadths of feeling and desire. My humbleness might seem like humiliation to you. Might seem small to the greatness that you desire’

For me, it is just where I am now. Humble and happy.

This, like a lot of my recent posts, was not on my radar when I started writing. It’s kind of like painting– you make a mark and go from there, hoping for the best, hoping that something coherent and real emerges. I can’t vouch for the coherency of this, but I believe it is real.

All I can ask.

Here’s another song from Ren. Sorry to force my obsession on you but this is most likely the driving force behind this post. This song has been in my head a lot lately. In the waiting room at the cancer center yesterday, this song and its lyrics kept running through my head. It made me feel pretty damn good. This is Humble from Ren and the British singer Eden Nash.

Ralph Steadman– Viral Menace (2020)

We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and—in spite of True Romance magazines—we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely—at least, not all the time—but essentially, and finally, alone.

This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don’t see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.

–Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway

Woke up a little dizzy this morning. Not something I remember having experienced before. A bit unsteady on my feet, sometimes stumbling slightly one way or the other, like I shouldn’t have had that third martini.

To be clear here, I didn’t have any martinis. Just saying.

Anyway, I wasn’t sure I would write anything this morning. I was also a little fuzzy as far my thinking goes. Not that this is much out of the ordinary but it was little more pronounced. But the need to do this blog at this time is, for me, something I can’t neglect. It keeps me afloat in some ways. So, I decided to look for something that wouldn’t require much thought– again, not that far out of the ordinary– that would satisfy this need to put something down.

I pulled up the snip at the top from Hunter S. Thompson from a book of his collected correspondence from the 50’s and 60’s, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967. I’ve had this passage locked and loaded for some time and figured this would be a good day to shoot my shot with it, even if I can’t add much to it.

The passage itself reflects something I began learning from an early age, that you have to learn to love and respect yourself. For one thing, you can’t really love or respect anyone else — or be loved and respected by anyone–without first having done so for yourself.

And secondly and most importantly, as Thompson points out, we ultimately spend most of our lives alone, from birth to death.

Trying to exist in the happiness of others is not your happiness. There’s a lot more to be said on this last sentence but it will have to wait for another morning, he says as his eyes go a little out of focus.

No, one must learn to be alone with oneself and that requires the love and respect of self.

After all, who wants to spend their entire life tethered tightly to a person who they can’t love?

Thompson makes an important distinction in this short passage, that being alone is not being lonely. That thought was like an epiphany for me when I first realized at an early age that I could find real comfort in being alone. That’s not to say that there wasn’t loneliness. As comfortable as we might be in our solitude, we all need other people sometimes.

Wow, this has rambled on for longer than intended and I haven’t even mentioned the art of Ralph Steadman at the top. I’ve been a big fan since coming across it back in the 70’s in the pages of some of Thompson’s books, especially Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

His image at the top, Viral Menace, is from 2020, in the early days of the pandemic. In an article in The Guardian at that time that featured this image, Steadman, who is now 89, stated that we are living in weird times and that Trump is ‘the worst person in our known history.’

Who am I to argue with that? Actually, it is a thought that has ran through my mind many times. If he’s not, he is in the top 2 or 3.

My opinion. I won’t argue with you on this.

In the article, he also spoke about coming across images of his old work in books, saying ‘I’m amazed how many things I’ve done that I don’t remember; I’m going through the book and wondering how on earth I did them.‘

I think that is something I have described here before. I sometimes come across an old piece and I can’t remember painting it or how it came about. I know at once I couldn’t recreate it now, at least in any way that captured what I was seeing in that older piece.

Different moment, different person, different energy, different emotions..

I would imagine that an older singer might have that same feeling on hearing a recording of an early performance. They might try to sing that same song now but it would be different in many ways.

Art is always of the moment. Great art carries that moment within always.

Holy crap, I am just going on and on when I thought I couldn’t write anything at all this morning. Of course, writing a lot doesn’t mean I am saying anything worth remembering. This one of those posts where I will look back it in a few years– hopefully– and wonder what the hell I was thinking. Or not thinking.

Oh well. Que sera, sera. That’s okay with me. Know why? Because I respect myself.

You know I couldn’t kick you out the door without playing this song. This is the always-of-the moment classic Respect Yourself from the Staple Singers. Doesn’t get much better than this.

Okay, you can leave now.

One Path Ends and Another Begins— At West End Gallery

Sun is hangin’ in the sky
sinkin’ low and so am I
Just for the love of someone
and a big red sun
How’m I gonna lose
these big red sun blues

–Lucinda Williams, Big Red Sun Blues (1988)

I have things that have to be done this morning so this will be short. That’s difficult for me since what is taking place in the world as a result of the actions of the idjit-in-charge here begs for comment. Okay, I can’t resist. Here one quick comment:

The situation seems like a spoiled toddler who, left alone and unaware of unintended consequences, wants a cookie in a kitchen cabinet high above his head. All he can see before him is his want of that cookie. Nothing else matters. In attempting to get the cookie, this spoiled brat clumsily sets off a series of events– the aforementioned unintended consequences— that starts a raging fire that eventually burns down the whole house.

And then the whole neighborhood goes up in flames, including a school filled with children, a hospital, and a nursing home. Firefighters are injured and some die in the chaos of the blaze. As a reward, his parents, who have always let their little cretin do whatever his tiny black heart desires and never really liked their neighbors, reward him with a new box of cookies, telling him that all bad things that happen to him are the fault of someone else.

The End. Well, except that this miscreant goes on to become President, mishandle a pandemic, start a war, crash the economy of his country and many others, create a personal army to carry out his whims in his own country, build concentration camps, kill his own citizens, steal and fill his own pockets with the money of his country, demand bribes from companies and countries, spout lies and hatred endlessly, glorify his ugly face and name on anything including a memorial to another president, vilify and deport immigrants, hire perhaps the greatest group of criminal ass-kissing toadies ever assembled to be in his cabinet, use his power to push for the prosecution of his opponents, threaten to cancel elections and reinstate the draft to fight the war he started, and on and on. Oh, wait let’s not forget play golf, strongarm a worthy recipient to give him their Nobel Prize, and desecrate the ceremony for the return of fallen soldiers who died because this creepy manchild wanted a cookie.

But, as some folks I know have told me, he has some good policies they like. I don’t know what they could possibly be, but they’d have to be pretty goddamned good to justify this.

I am sure he will change course soon and things in America will once again be great in, what, about two weeks?

As Foghorn Leghorn might say, “That’s a joke, son!”

Just my take. Okay, that’s not a short comment. But that’s the way it will have to be this morning. At least I was able to use an analogy, a laundry list, and a Looney Tunes cartoon reference.

The Holy Trinity of my existence.

Okay, I really do have things that need doing. Here’s an early song, Big Red Sun Blues, from Lucinda Williams that matches up well with the painting at the top and my own big red sun blues as the neighborhood goes up in flames.

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.