Redtree Times

The Playing Field– At Little Gems, West End Gallery

But purity has a brutal side. Sometimes a strikeout means that the slugger’s girlfriend just ran off with the UPS driver. Sometimes a muffed ground ball means that the shortstop’s baby daughter has a pain in her head that won’t go away. And handicapping is for amateur golfers, not ballplayers. Pitchers don’t ease off on the cleanup hitter because of the lumps just discovered in his wife’s breast. Baseball is not life. It is a fiction, a metaphor. And a ballplayer is a man who agrees to uphold that metaphor as though lives were at stake.

Perhaps they are. I cherish a theory I once heard propounded by G.Q. Durham that professional baseball is inherently antiwar. The most overlooked cause of war, his theory runs, is that it’s so damned interesting. It takes hard effort, skill, love and a little luck to make times of peace consistently interesting. About all it takes to make war interesting is a life. The appeal of trying to kill others without being killed yourself, according to Gale, is that it brings suspense, terror, honor, disgrace, rage, tragedy, treachery and occasionally even heroism within range of guys who, in times of peace, might lead lives of unmitigated blandness. But baseball, he says, is one activity that is able to generate suspense and excitement on a national scale, just like war. And baseball can only be played in peace. Hence G.Q.’s thesis that pro ball-players—little as some of them may want to hear it—are basically just a bunch of unusually well-coordinated guys working hard and artfully to prevent wars, by making peace more interesting.

― David James Duncan, The Brothers K

Hearing yesterday that major league baseball was going to resume once more after this last lockout made me happier than I had expected. It was easy to downplay the game and to find fault in greedy owners and wealthy players especially when the world is coping with a pandemic that refuses to leave and an unjustified war in Ukraine that is flirting on being genocidal.

Cynicism comes pretty easy. I mean, why should anyone care about a stupid game in times like these?

There might not be a satisfactory answer to that question.

All I know is that it made me feel a little lighter, filled with me with the anticipation of seeing games again, of reading box scores and comparing stats. Gave me some small but long sought sense of normality.

And that’s a good thing.

Maybe the excerpt above from The Brothers K, a 1992 novel from author David James Duncan, captures the true purpose of the game. Maybe it is a placeholder, a metaphorical diversion that fills in the void of aggression and the other emotional motivators that drive us to war.

I could believe that. Any reason that keeps people from wanting to physically decimate other people is fine with me. I would prefer a world where a video of a towering home run is much more common than one of a bombed out hospital or mass graves.

I can hope, right?

With that hope in hand and the prospect of the highs, lows and ultimate disappointment that baseball– and life– offers, let’s listen to a short clip of the late great Nina Simone doing a bit of Baseball Boogie. This bit focuses on Jackie Robinson which seems relevant since April 15 marks the 75th anniversary of him breaking the color barrier in baseball. It’s hard to believe it’s only been that long, seems like it should be even further removed in time but baseball, being a metaphor for many things in life, is sometimes unjust and unfair.

Let’s hope for sunny days, smoother infields and fair play in the days ahead.

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I Feel Alright Album Cover- Tony Fitzpatrick artist

I got everything you won’t need
Your darkest fear
Your fondest dream
I ask you questions
Tell you lies
Criticize and sympathize
Yeah, be careful what you wish for friend
Because I’ve been to hell
And now I’m back again

-Steve Earle, I Feel Alright

Don’t feel like droning on this morning, don’t feel like venting into the ether. One of those mornings that is a mix of frustration and weariness with little chinks of despair and anger thrown in just to make things interesting. I look for a song to act as a salve of sorts, something that will give me a little calmness and I come across a favorite from Steve Earle from back in 1996, I Feel Alright.

It’s one of those rare songs that both calms me down while pumping me up. I guess that’s a way of saying it centers me. All I know is that by the time the rhythm section kicks in, about 10 seconds in, I am already feeling alright.

Okay, got to get to work now. You can stay and listen if you want but don’t slam the door on your way out…

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–Oh, the Red Viburnum in the Meadow, Ukrainian Folk Song

Came across a video yesterday of Ukrainian rock star Andriy Khlyvnyuk performing a Ukrainian folk song. He wasn’t singing it in some studio far removed from the war zone. No, he was in uniform on the a street in Ukraine, an automatic rifle across his chest. He had a left the American tour that his group, Boombox, was just undertaking to return in defense of his county.

His initial performance on the street was a cappella. Powerful stuff. The version below is a remix done by South African electronic artist, The Kiffness. Equally powerful.

The song’s title translates as  Oh, the Red Viburnum in the Meadow. It was written in 1914 to honor the Sich Riflemen, a Ukrainian military unit that fought in WW I. The red viburnum or kalyna berry referenced in the song is a national symbol of Ukraine, representing the blood roots and connection to the homeland. The red viburnum is also known as the highbush cranberry though it is not related to the bog or lowbush cranberry.

I believe this version is only the first verse shown above though I am not sure. My Ukrainian language skills are nonexistent. But a later verse in the song certainly speaks to the moment and the spirit demonstrated by the people of Ukraine:

Marching forward, our fellow volunteers, into a bloody fray,
For to free, our brother – Ukrainians, from hostile chains.
And we, our brother – Ukrainians, we will then liberate,
And we, our glorious Ukraine, shall, hey – hey, cheer up – and rejoice!
And we, our brother – Ukrainians, we will then liberate,
And we, our glorious Ukraine, shall, hey – hey, cheer up – and rejoice!

Time for me to get to work but please take a moment to give a listen.

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Rockwell Kent– Man With Plow woodcut

Often I think that however much I draw or paint, or however well, I am not an artist as art is generally understood. The abstract is meaningless to me save as a fragment of the whole, which is life itself… It is the ultimate which concerns me, and all physical, all material things are but an expression of it… We are part and parcel of the big plan of things. We are simply instruments recording in different measure our particular portion of the infinite. And what we absorb of it makes for character, and what we give forth, for expression.

-Rockwell Kent

I have always felt a kinship There are writers, musicians, and artists with which we often feel a kinship. The music, literature, and art they produce feels like it speaks directly to us, that it emanates from a creative wellspring that we share.

For me, one of those artists is Rockwell Kent, whose work I have shared here several times over the years. There is just something in his imagery and in his writings that feels close to my own feelings and perspectives.

For example, his words above could very well describe my own view on our existence and our need for creative expression. Like Kent, I see us as part of some larger plan, the infinite, and that our purpose here is to record and express those things– the emotions and sensory sensations– that make up our particular corner of the mesh of being. This expression of our experience here is meant to makes others aware of our omnipresent connection to the infinite.

Sometimes, it is good to come across Kent’s words and work just as a reminder that there is a purpose to this all. It might be more obvious for some but we all have our purpose here.

And that is good to know, especially on those dark or difficult days when pushing paint onto a canvas seems pointless while the world, our little piece of the infinite, feels as though it is coming apart at the seams.

Rockwell Kent– Sturrall Donegal Island

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THE EVERLASTING SELF

Comes in from a downpour
Shaking water in every direction —
A collaborative condition:
Gathered, shed, spread, then
Forgotten, reabsorbed. Like love
From a lifetime ago, and mud
A dog has tracked across the floor.

–Tracy K. Smith

As in the post below from 3 years back, I wasn’t going to write anything this morning. Wanted to regroup. But his post showed up with a number of hits yesterday and I revisited it and it made me think. 

With all the suffering and death of innocent people we are witnessing in the clarity of a connected cyber world, we who are privileged in our lives forget how we are often privileged in our deaths. as well. Though nothing is truly guaranteed in this life, especially in world filled with guns and viruses, most of us live without the fear of an imminent senseless death. Few of us fear the whistle of an incoming missile or being shot by a sniper as we walk along a city street.

It makes me realize how great the privilege that is held by myself and others, one that allows me to consider my own death in abstract and distant forms. It’s a humbling thought.

Anyway, this post, especially with video of Tracy K. Smith reciting her verse, was just what I needed this morning.

Wasn’t going to write anything this morning but I stumbled across this video and poem and felt like sharing it. It’s The Everlasting Self from Tracy K. Smith, the current United States Poet Laureate. [This was in early 2019, Joy Harjo is the current Poet Laureate]

In this video, filmed just a few weeks ago, Smith reads her poem with the backing of Sō Percussion at National Sawdust, a center for the arts in Brooklyn.

The poem is a simple one at a glance. But in this performance Smith takes the few words of the verse and realigns them time and time again, constantly reconstructing the poem. It uses the same elements but each feels slightly different. It creates a meditative loop, something close to what I described in a recent post, Mantra, that was coincidentally from the same date as Smith’s performance.

This performance struck me because it reminds me of how I often see my work. They are often comprised of fragments of memory– repeated, realigned and reconstructed. They are seldom derived from ground-shaking moments, singular events from my past but rather from tiny bits of small observations and reactions from distinct memories.

The way the light looked at a certain moment. A color seen decades ago. A tree I passed on a solitary walk.

Small things that make up a life.

I sometimes stop on my walk to or from the studio and look carefully around.

I think to myself that if I were to die moments from now, could this be the one memory of this life I carry with me?

Would I go through whatever incarnation there may be in future lives with the memory of the cool wind rustling the maple trees and and the filtered sunlight on the tall green grass beneath the trees?

The richness of the color in the rhododendron flowers? The rhythmic thunk of the pileated woodpecker’s beak against a tree deeper into the forest? The rich earthy fragrance of the mud on my trail?

The silhouette of a hawk against the sky?

Would these images and sound and smells be constantly rumbling around my mind in different iterations for eternity?

This would all be okay with me.

And that’s what I feel from this lovely meditation from poet Tracy K. Smith. Made me feel good this morning.

Take a look and give a listen. Maybe it will do the same for you.

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Dear little not-so-innocents, beware of
Old Grandmother Spider: rump her endearments.
She’s not quite as nice as She looks, nor you quite
        as tough as you think.

― W.H. Auden, Circe

Don’t have much time this morning so this will be short. I saw a story yesterday about a woman in Kviv who, from her balcony, knocked down a small Russian drone with a jar of pickles.

Made me laugh but it also made me cry. I have a soft spot for toughness, for people who endure, who just keep at it and won’t back down even when the odds are dead set against them. I’ve known and loved such people in my life.

A great example of this quality is from the movie Cool Hand Luke, where new inmate Luke (Paul Newman) has boxing match with the prison tough guy, Dragline, played by George Kennedy. Dragline repeatedly pounds Luke to the ground and each time Luke somehow gets back up and comes back at Dragline. The other inmates begin to tell the barely able to stand Luke to give up and Dragline, at one point while Luke is struggling to get up says, “Stay down, you’re beat!”

Finally, an exasperated and humiliated Dragline can’t take it and leaves the ring, making Luke the winner.

Maybe that’s a foolish example. I don’t care.

There’s tough and then there’s tough when you’re overmatched, whether it’s Luke in that prison or that woman Kviv with her jar of pickles.

Or that woman at the top with her yellow cat. You mess with her at your own peril. I bet she has plenty of pickles ready to go.

For this Sunday morning music, here’s Tougher Than the Rest, a Bruce Springsteen song performed by Emmylou Harris. Always liked this version.

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Call of Freedom– 2003

Far better was our homely diet, eaten in peace and liberty, than the luxurious dainties, the love of which hath delivered us as bondsmen to the foreign conqueror!

― Walter Scott, Ivanhoe

The history of man is highlighted by many great achievements of thought and science. Monuments to our progress in attempting to know ourselves and the world we inhabit.

But for all these achievements, they are dwarfed in comparison with the many wars and acts of conquest and subjugation that have taken place throughout our history as a species. Even knowing that, we continue to fall prey to calls to our baser instincts from those who seek more and more– money, power, land, etc.–and repeat the cycle again and again.

And it’s maddening because all most of us want is to be able to sit in a safe and humble home. To eat a meal, to enjoy our families, friends and pets.

To sing and dance. To read a book or watch a film. To take a long walk.

Or to be free to simply stand out in the open and be, without fearing that it might be all taken away in a flash.

It doesn’t seem like too much to ask. Just saying…

Anyway, here’s a song this morning from the late, great Bob Marley. It’s his classic Redemption Song in a video that was released by his estate last year on what was the 40th anniversary of the song’s release and what would have been his 75th birthday.

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In This Moment – At West End Gallery

In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.

― Albert Camus, Neither Victims Nor Executioners

It is a horrible moment in time for anyone possessing even the tiniest possible amount of compassion.

The last several years have brought us to a moment where human death and suffering has been devalued to the point where we find ourselves shrugging off horrific images and statistics, whether from the war in Ukraine or from gun violence ( school and mass shootings on a weekly, if not daily, basis) and the pandemic here (still nearly 2,000 American deaths per day) with barely a second thought.

All I can think when seeing the devastation in Ukraine with the bodies of the victims, too often children, strewn about on streets and buildings is that each of these dead bodies were individuals.

Each had a family. Each had friends. Each had aspirations and hopes. Thoughts and beliefs. A past filled with memories.

Each had a voice that simply wanted to be heard.

Like any of us, anywhere.

And now that has come to an end, leaving family and friends in grieving despair.

I think the same those killed in senseless violence here or from those who continue to die in the pandemic. As much as I want to chide some of those mainly unvaccinated people for their selfish carelessness or hubris, I think mainly that they too have left an unfillable hole among their friends and family.

And a hole in the mesh of humanity.

It is a loss for each of us, a diminishing of us as a whole.

It’s hard to rationalize any of this. How do you make sense of the senseless? How do you find a purpose or end that justifies any of this?

If you have read this blog before, you know I have no answers. I guess the best I can offer is the hope that we maintain our humanity and attempt to see commonality in one another.

To be a thinking and feeling person and to not side with the executioner.

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Maria Prymachenko- A Dove Has Spread Her Wings and Asks for Peace

“I bow down before the artistic miracle of this brilliant Ukrainian.”

–Pablo Picasso, after attending a Prymachenko exhibit in Paris

In the opening days of the current unjustified and unprovoked Russian invasion on Ukraine, in a city about 50 miles northwest of Kviv, the Ivankiv Historical and Local History Museum was burned by Russian forces. Destroyed in the blaze were about 25 paintings by the celebrated late Ukrainian folk artist, Mara Prymachenko.

Maria Prymachenko, considered a national treasure for the Ukraine people, died in 1997 at the age of 88. She lived through some of the most dire times of the last century, surviving childhood polio, World War II and the inter-Soviet attacks on the Ukrainian people from Joseph Stalin.

Though she was disabled and unable to stand as a result of childhood polio, her talent for design and her personal interpretations for traditional symbols in her paintings and embroidery was recognized in her 20’s. She worked as part of the Central Experimental Workshop of the Kyiv Museum of Ukrainian Art which brought together folk artists from the whole of Ukraine in order to create folk art that would showcase the folk art traditions of Ukraine for large international exnhibitions. Her work was displayed in exhibits in Kviv, Moscow and Leningrad as well as the 1937 International Exhibition in Paris.

It was about this time that she had surgery that enabled her to stand and married a fellow Ukrainian who was Red Army officer. The two had a child in 1941, who later went on to also become an artist.

Then life interceded. She struggled through WW II, losing her brother and husband to it. After the war, she was worked to exhaustion on a collective and lived in poverty. She had little time nor strength to create her art. But slowly, her creative flame was reignited.

Over the next several decades she created work and a legacy that saw her rise to the level of national treasure for the people of Ukraine. She received the highest awards and honors of the nation, had street in Kviv and a minor planet named after her, and UNESCO, in 2009, declared it the Year of Prymachenko.

While her work has a decorative element, strong and colorful in the naive tradition, it has its own personal feel. It is both optimistic and weary, coming from a person who imbues their work with all they have seen and experienced, both good and bad.

Her later work often was paired with phrases and proverbs that were written on the reverse of the paintings. I liked that.

But now 25 of her pieces have been destroyed in the effort to erase the people of Ukraine, both culturally and physically.

There are more than 650 of her remaining paintings in a museum in the besieged city of Kviv. If her life and work is symbolic of that nation, those paintings and the nation will most certainly endure.

Here are but a few of her works. The painting at the top of the page and the first one below seem to fit the moment.

Maria Prymachenko- A Dragon Descends on Ukraine, 1987

Maria Prymachenko- Beast,1936

Maria Prymachenko- Rat on a Journey, 1963

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Intrepid– Part of Little Gems, West End Gallery

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth — more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid … Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.

― Bertrand Russell, Why Men Fight

Need to work this morning.

Don’t want to, don’t have to.

Need to.

That kind of morning.

Thought I’d share a triad of painting, thought and music. There are connections running through all three, no doubt, but I’m not going to point them out. That’s your task for today.

Here’s Wooden Ships from Crosby, Stills & Nash.

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