Redtree Times

Be Careful What You Wish For — 1996

Fear makes come true that which one is afraid of.

― Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

I came across the line above from a favorite book, Man’s Search For Meaning, from Viktor Frankl. It made me stop and think for a bit.

I have long believed that if we can give name to our desires, our psyche sets it as a goal and does all that it can, most often in ways of which we are not aware, to make those desires come to be. It gives you in situations that make the desire possible, makes you begin to believe in the possibility and then behave and think as though it were inevitable.

Of course, there has always been a caveat to this. Kurt Vonnegut put it plainly in the introduction to his novel, Mother Night:

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

We can never fully anticipate what may come from our quest to make our desires a reality. There are always unintended consequences, both good and bad.

But Frankl made me think about how the same concept applies to not just our desires but our fears as well. Too strong a fear in us becomes much like a strong desire, with our psyche unconsciously pushing us toward that which we desire/fear. And whatever side of that desire/fear coin turns up for us, we often find ourselves at the mercy of unintended consequences.

Before you slam me for spouting psychobabble BS, let me note that I am just thinking aloud here at 5:30 AM. Later today or tomorrow, I may read this and wonder what the hell I was thinking. But I think it might be possible that by fearing too much, by trying to completely avoid those things we dread, we do create an environment in which they might come to be. Maybe that’s the results of physics, where every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

I don’t know but now that it’s a little after 6, it sounds good enough to believe.

That’s all I go this morning. Think what you will.

But be careful, you never know what might come from it…

Here’s song from Bonnie Raitt from just a few years back that is kind on subject. This is Unintended Consquence of Love.

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Dispersing Darkness– At the Principle Gallery

Man must have light. He must live in the fierce full constant glare of light, where all shadow will be defined and sharp and unique and personal: the shadow of his own singular rectitude or baseness. All human evils have to come out of obscurity and darkness, where there is nothing to dog man constantly with the shape of his own deformity.

–William Faulkner, The Mansion (1959)

I read yesterday that newly elected Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania had entered a hospital to be treated for clinical depression. It reported that he had suffered from this for much of his life.. I am sure that the great stress inflicted on him by the stroke he suffered during his campaign played a big part in this latest bout with his affliction.

I also wouldn’t be surprised that his time in the current DC political climate might have played a role as well. While the potential for meaningful progress and change that is always near at hand there might be inspiring, there is an abundance of the obscurity and darkness to which Faulkner alluded in the excerpt above.

To peer firsthand into the opaque shadows of the darkness there, to see the levers of government manipulated by the force of money and power might well be disillusioning for someone with ideals and ethics, someone dedicated to elevating those with neither money nor power. There’s a darkness there of the quality that, like Faulkner also points out, keeps those in it from seeing the shadow of their own deformity, their own afflictions. It’s a darkness that spawns the rampant shamelessness and selfishness we are seeing now.

I hope that the Senator moves past his darkness. Being the forthright speaker he is, my other hope is that he might make mental health a cause he can champion. It might be a great opportunity to bring attention to a subject, mental health, that is often forced into the background, especially by those in politics, where it is usually portrayed as a sign of weakness or instability. A flaw to be exploited and stigmatized.

Maybe he can shine a light into the darkness.

As someone who has struggled with depression for much of my life, I would love to see a greater safety net for the many who struggle with mental health issues.

And it is many.

Who doesn’t have a family member or friend who has struggled and suffered? Or who struggles now and simply suffers, accepting it as the normal state of being? I know that’s how it was for me in the early part of my life. Many people in my youth scoffed at the word depression even though, looking back now, their own actions and behaviors gave all the indications of that condition. They just accepted the behaviors from it –alcoholism, addictions, suicides, etc.– as being the normal state of being.

With all the years of stigmatization, it’s still a hard thing to talk about. But like any problem, it can’t be improved on until it is named and confronted. I know this well. My life would be vastly different– if I still were even alive– if I hadn’t become aware that darkness in which I was struggling was not the normal state of being. It’s an important subject in this and every other country. It deserves to be moved away from the darkness, where you can see the shadow it casts on our lives in the brightest of light.

I’ve said a lot more than I intended when I started this morning. Maybe too much. Like I said, there is still that stigma present. But it is out there in the light and that can be a good thing. I have work to get to– the work that takes away a lot of my darkness– so we’ll have to talk about this later.

Kind of the same subject, here’s one of my favorites, Killing the Blues, written by Rowland Salley and performed by the late John Prine.

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And Warmth Arrives– At West End Gallery

As flowerlets drooped and puckered in the night turn up to the returning sun and spread their petals wide on his new warmth and light-just so my wilted spirits rose again and such a heat of zeal surged through my veins that I was born anew.

–Dante Alighieri, The Inferno ( John Ciardi translation, 1954)

Been working on a couple of long delayed maintenance projects around here in recent days. Wanting to get a bit more done while I am still running strong on the energy from first light of the new day and the possibility contained in it, I am leaving this short post with you. A new Little Gem, a line from Dante and a great old song from The Rascals to get your day off and running.

Now, I have things that need to be done. As they say–got to make hay while the sun shines.

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Neighborhood Heart— At the Principle Gallery, Alexandria

Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young.

–Roger Angell, Once More Around the Park: A Baseball Reader

Temperatures are supposed to be in the mid 60’s here today. While I am concerned about the reasons and ramifications of our temps being 30+ degrees above the norm, I am happy to enjoy the warmth. It feels springlike and adds to the sensation of pleasure I feel now that baseball’s Spring Training has begun.

And that means that another season of the game is not far away.

Another long season of highs and lows. Another season of exciting victories and crushing losses, of sparkling plays and dreadful errors in the field. The thrill of the long arc of the home run or the wall-climbing catch that robs the batter of his homer. Another season of the cat-and-mouse game that is played out between the pitcher and the batter.

Another year of daily checking of the stats for each player, trying to find traces of an accomplishment that will put their names in the record book alongside those well-worn names from past eras– the Babe Ruths and Hank Aarons, the Cy Youngs and the Bob Gibsons.

And another season of daily checking of the standings, trying to gauge whether your team still has a chance to defeat time, as the great baseball writer Roger Angell put it at the top. While writing about how the time in baseball is what differentiates from other games, Angell also speaks to its connection to the history, players, and rhythm of the past.

Baseball’s time is seamless and invisible, a bubble within which players move at exactly the same pace and rhythms as all their predecessors. This is the way the game was played in our youth and in our fathers’ youth, and even back then… there must have been the same feeling that time could be stopped.

---

Another season of trying to stay forever young. At a time when the world constantly reminds me of slowly diminishing physical abilities, that’s an idea I can embrace.

Here’s a lovely performance of the Bob Dylan song, Forever Young, from Joan Baez.

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Everlasting Bond– At the West End Gallery

Although I conquer all the earth,

Yet for me there is only one city.

In that city there is for me only one house;

And in that house, one room only;

And in that room, a bed.

And one woman sleeps there,

The shining joy and jewel of all my kingdom.

—Anonymous, Ancient Sanskrit Poem

This ia a kind mash-up of past Valentine’s Day posts, with a Baucis and Philemon painting and a favorite love poem to accompany a blog entry that features a great tune from Otis Redding. Here’s that blog entry from five years ago:

Another Valentine’s Day. We often think of it as a day to express your fondness for the one you love. But at its heart, there is an element of yearning and loneliness in the day.

To give someone a Valentine as a kid– or maybe even when you’re a little older–is not only an offering up of your feelings for that other person but also a plea for their attention and affection. It is an admission of need and vulnerability that is very human, as is the need to know that you are indeed loved by another.

This song, These Arms of Mine, is from Otis Redding. For me, Otis can do no wrong and few can better express the yearning that I am describing here than Otis.

Have a good day. And if you love someone, let them know every day, not just on this day.

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Secret Garden— At the Principle Gallery

“Of course, there must be lots of Magic in the world,” he said wisely one day, “but people don’t know what it is like or how to make it. Perhaps the beginning is just to say nice things are going to happen until you make them happen. I am going to try and experiment.”

–Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden, 1911

…until you make them happen.

A lot of us wish and hope for better things and a change from those parts of our lives that disappoint us. But until we act on those wishes and hopes, nothing usually happens.

Things stay the way they are.

Of course, wishing and hoping can be viewed as the primary stages of making a plan of action or setting a course and goal for the future. And that’s important.

Action without a goal can be as fruitless as wishing and hoping without action.

But the two– the wish and the action– put together can produce a sort of Magic, much as Colin the bedridden boy discovered in The Secret Garden. It’s a Magic that is within our grasp once we realize this fact.

I am going to give a really basic example. Many years ago, when I was in the early stages of my art life, I wished and hoped for a solo exhibit. I had only been showing my work publicly for a very short time, less than two years, so I didn’t have a reputation or name to pave the way. It would have been easy to shrug it off and do nothing, but I decided to act on my wish. I had been working on my Exiles series, work that was very personal. I put together a proposal for show of these paintings and introduced myself to the director of the Gmeiner Art Center in Wellsboro, PA, about an hour from my home. She was impressed by the work and the presentation and gave me a solo show that winter featuring the Exiles paintings.

One thing that struck me about this was when a couple of other artists approached me at a local gallery opening around the time the show at the Gmeiner ran. Both were established artists who had been working much longer than I and had actual bodies of work. They seemed kind of envious that I was having this show and asked how I got this show.

My answer was simple.

“I asked for it.”

I could see on their faces that this was a revelation, that this simple action was something they had never thought to do.

You can’t wait for your hopes and wishes to come to you. Sometimes, you have to take the step towards them, to put things in motion and to make Magic happen.

Unfortunately, a lot of us don’t ever get the connection between wishes and actions. And that’s a shame.

Make something happen today. Make some Magic.

Of course, if you read this blog regularly, you probably know that this is all just a setup for playing a song. I thought that today’s words and image would match up nicely with a hit song, Wishin’ and Hopin’, from Burt Bacharach, who died this past week. This is the 1964 hit version from Dusty Springfield. Though it seems a little dated and she seems a little needy in this song about getting a guy, the premise that it takes action to achieve wishes and hopes is correct : You won’t get him/ Thinkin’ and a-prayin’, wishin’ and a-hopin’

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At Land’s End— At West End Gallery

“Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there.

It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.”

― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

This is kind of a reconstructed replay of a post from a couple of years back. It just felt right this morning, sitting here in the studio

It features a song for this week’s Sunday Morning Music, Calling Me Home, from one of my big favorites, Rhiannon Giddens. There’s a line in the song that always jumps out at me:

Remember my stories, remember my songs/ I leave them on earth, sweet traces of gold

It makes me think of that existential question: What is it we leave behind?

That immediately brought to mind a favorite excerpt, shown at the top, from Ray Bradbury in his sci-fi/ dystopian classic Fahrenheit 451. It’s those things to which we devote or full effort, our mind and time, that have lasting effect. Often, things that are done with no real expectation of anyone recognizing your thought or effort in doing them.

It makes me think of my pond. I can see its top now in the winter since the leaves have fallen from the trees.

I built it back in the summer of 1998 during a week spent relentlessly pounding against the hard pan soil beneath the clay of my property on a rented Cat D9 dozer. Still wondering if my brain has stopped reverberating form the beating that Cat gave me. But that was a small price to pay. The thrill of seeing that empty pit fill in the rains later that summer and fall along with the many life forms that soon made it their home were as satisfying as anything I have painted.

I often look at it– as I am this moment– and think that it will be here long after I am gone, supporting lives of creatures that will have no knowledge of my efforts.

And that pleases me greatly. Even as much as any legacy, if any, my work here in the studio will have.

It always comes down to those things we do with love and the people that we touch and affect that outlast the lives we have here on this planet. As Mr. Bradbury put it: Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die.

Here’s the song from Ms. Giddens.

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Riding Rhythm– At the West End Gallery

These things you keep
You’d better throw them away
You wanna turn your back
On your soulless days
Once you were tethered
And now you are free
Once you were tethered
Well now you are free
That was the river
This is the sea!

–This Is the Sea, The Waterboys, 1985

Don’t have much to say this morning but thought I would share a song that I came across this morning. It’s from the ageless Tom Jones and his version of a song from a Scottish band that I have featured here in the past, The Waterboys. This is a song from what is called their Big Music period in the early 1980’s, which is when I first began listening to their music. An interesting and influential group though not many folks here are aware of them now.

This song, This Is the Sea, is masterfully performed by Tom Jones here in a performance from 2021 when he was a mere 81 years of age. I am always fascinated by how he maintains that powerful voice, as well as how he manages to say relevant with his choice of material and his always interesting interpretations of these songs. This is different than the the Waterboys’ original but holds true to the integrity of the song while still making it his own.

As an artist who has went from being a younger artist to a now aging one, I find inspiration in his work from recent years even though I work in a much different medium. It reminds me that I always want to be pushing forward, to not be stagnant and relying on and restricted by those things I have done in the past. You got to push past the boundaries you put up for yourself. Set new challenges.

Because as the song says: that was the river, this is the sea.

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God is not in the vastness of greatness. He is hid in the vastness of smallness. He is not in the general. He is in the particular. When we understand the particular, then we will know all.

–Pearl S. Buck, God’s Men (1951)

…hid in the vastness of smallness…

Though I do not adhere to any single belief system or single deity, I love the excerpt above from Pearl Buck. We often look to the greatest, the loudest, the brightest– the furthest reach of everything– as proof of the miracle of the world in which we exist. The grandeur of the tallest mountains and the deepest seas. 

But so often just the smallest of those things we look past while searching for some reason for our existence hold the very proof we seek. Sometimes small things hold the majesty and power of tall mountains, deep oceans and the sun high in our sky.

If only we pause to look close enough…

Well, that’s my statement for this year’s Little Gems show at the West End Gallery which opens tonight. There’s ample proof of the vastness to be found in smallness in this year’s show from so many of the gallery’s artists. I’ve participated in every Little Gems show since 1995– my first public display of my work– and this might well be the best of those 29 shows. It’s a beautiful exhibit of the power to be found in small works.

Hope you can get to see it.

FYI- The group at the top, all included in this show, are true Little Gems, each measuring just under 2″ by 2.”

I thought I would include a word about the death of Burt Bacharach, who passed away at the age of 94. What a career and what a unique talent! I was both stunned and surprised going through the list of songs he wrote. Most were easily recognizable as the hits he had during the 60’s and 70’s but some were news to me. For example, I was surprised he wrote The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Or The Story of My Life for Marty Robbins, Magic Moments for Perry Como and several others. I’ve sang along to all these songs and more not knowing they were Burt Bacharach songs.

Of course, he is best known for his work with Dionne Warwick. Theirs was one of those rare perfect unions of composer and artist. I played this video here of the two of them back in 2016. It shows Bacharach working with Warwick on a new song before the recording session and displays how beautifully the two worked together. It’s fascinating to see how he communicates his vision for the song to Warwick and how she easily she comprehends and responds to his cues. It goes a long way towards explaining why she was such a perfect vessel for his music. The clip ends with the full recording of the song. The song is Loneliness Remembers What Happiness Forgets.

Good stuff.

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The knack of our species lies in our capacity to transmit our accumulated knowledge down the generations. The slowest among us can, in a few hours, pick up ideas that it took a few rare geniuses a lifetime to acquire.

Yet what is distinctive is just how selective we are about the topics we deem it possible to educate ourselves in. Our energies are overwhelmingly directed toward material, scientific, and technical subjects and away from psychological and emotional ones. Much anxiety surrounds the question of how good the next generation will be at math; very little around their abilities at marriage or kindness. We devote inordinate hours to learning about tectonic plates and cloud formations, and relatively few fathoming shame and rage.

The assumption is that emotional insight might be either unnecessary or in essence unteachable, lying beyond reason or method, an unreproducible phenomenon best abandoned to individual instinct and intuition. We are left to find our own path around our unfeasibly complicated minds — a move as striking (and as wise) as suggesting that each generation should rediscover the laws of physics by themselves.

~Alain de Botton, The School of Life: An Emotional Education

Alain de Botton is right. We have accumulated the knowledge of the ages and made it virtually accessible to almost anyone anytime anywhere. Yet, though we stand at the current and ever heightening apex of knowledge, our emotional and behavioral development has not accompanied us on the climb.

The world has become increasingly complicated and interconnected and we are left to fend for ourselves with little more than our brains and minds. And while that brain might be suitably equipped for the job, we have no idea how to control it. It’s like we have instant access to a very powerful computer yet barely know how to turn it on or off let alone perform up to its capabilities. There’s no owner’s manual or website for customer service.

Some of us fumble around in the dark trying to find out how to make better use of these brains and minds on our own. Some band together and use theirs sparingly, often following the thoughts and guidance of religious and ideological leaders. Some give up altogether and run on autopilot, simply echoing the words and behavior of the mobs.

We try to use it as best we can– with mixed results, which often leaves disappointed, disenchanted, and disturbed.

This brings me to the character depicted in the current Ring of Fire series that is part of the Little Gems show that opens tomorrow at the West End Gallery. They feel as though they are among those who feel lost in this world, who don’t quite understand how the state of things came to this point and are struggling to make their way through it. Faced with a complicated world with complicated dangers, they can only respond in a primal manner.

Trapped in their own rings of fire…

That’s the last thing I am going to say about this series, at least for some time to come. I am having second thoughts on showing this series at all and have few expectations for it. But despite these misgivings, this work serves a great purpose for me in fumbling my own way through my own ring of fire.

I am playing a song from Johnny Cash today that is not Ring of Fire, which you might have anticipated. This is from his later work, near the end of life. This song might also apply to these characters who feel lost and alone, with no other person to turn to. Here’s Nobody.

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