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Archive for November, 2024

The Heart Still Beats

Posted in Uncategorized on November 20, 2024| 1 Comment »

GC Myers- The Heart Still Beats

The Heart Still Beats— At West End Gallery

We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about.

—Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

Just wanted to share the small painting above that is headed to the West End Gallery who will be hosting an opening this Friday for their annual Deck the Walls holiday show. This piece is 6″ by 6″ on panel and is titled The Heart Still Beats.

This painting holds a simple message for me. Whenever apparent bleakness seems to engulf us, it is important to hold on to the fact that there is still beauty and wonder to be found so long as we keep our hearts open. So long as we don’t allow the sometime harsh bleakness of the world to harden our hearts.

The opened beating heart– and its accompanying active mind– is forever free to find and to create worlds of beauty and wonder.

I see the Red Tree with its bit of color set against the drab gray of the landscape as that open heart. The sun rising over the horizon, also with a bit of warm color, as that distant thing keeps us moving forward. You might call it hope. You might call it a sense of purpose, that thing– a task, a goal, an obligation– that sustains one as they work toward it.

In short, I see this small piece saying that so long as we continue to think freely and keep a sense of purpose, the heart that sustains us will continue to beat.

And that might be enough. It might have to be.

Okay, here’s a song about the heart from Jackson Browne. This is Love Needs a Heart. from his 1977 album, Running on Empty. Hard to believe this song is that old…

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Biding Time

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on November 19, 2024| 1 Comment »

GC Myers- Biding Time 2007

Biding Time, 2007

Waiting for the end, boys, waiting for the end.
What is there to be or do?
What’s become of me or you?
Are we kind or are we true?
Sitting two and two, boys, waiting for the end.

–William Empson, Just a Smack at Auden

I feel like we are in a period of waiting right now. I don’t know what exactly, but it feels like we are kind of frozen in place as we wait for something to happen that will put everything into motion, for better or worse. Like we are waiting for someone to push over that first teetering domino.

Maybe it’s just me in feeling this way. Maybe it’s just the time of the year as we enter the holiday season and I am reminded of the intolerable waiting for Christmas’ arrival when I was a kid.  I am not quite so eager for whatever surprise is in store for us to arrive as I was then.

But whatever it is or isn’t, we– or maybe just me– remain somewhat frozen in place, biding our time. Finding a way to get through this waiting period is all we– or I– can do.

That brings me to the painting at the top, an older piece from 2007 that is titled Biding Time. I used to periodically paint pieces like this that were extremely simple and quiet. I viewed them then and now as meditations, as a means to finding stillness amidst the surrounding chaos. I haven’t painted one in quite some time for reasons I can’t determine which is odd because I always found most of them quietly effective., remaining in my mind for long periods of time.

This particular piece has not been shown publicly in many years and I thought it was time for it to make an appearance once again. The time seems right. It is headed to the West End Gallery tomorrow, in time for their annual Deck the Walls holiday show.

FYI– The verse at the top is from William Empson, a friend and colleague of poet W.H. Auden. In the poem Empson both pays homage and pokes a bit of fun at Auden while capturing the anxiety of post-WW II Europe that was struggling to gain its bearings amidst the nuclear threat that had risen.

Let’s have a song to go with such waiting.  Here’s a favorite, Waitin’ Around to Die from the late Townes Van Zandt.  This is from the 1976 documentary Heartworn Highways, a film that captured the beginnings of the alt-country movement of that time.  This clip features Townes singing to his girlfriend and his neighbor Uncle Seymour Washington, a retired blacksmith born to ex-slaves.

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little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark…

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on November 18, 2024| Leave a Comment »

GC Myers- Moment Revealed

Moment Revealed — At Principle Gallery

What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.

–Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark…

We often look for one singular moment that reveals an ultimate truth, something that answers all our questions. Something that gives structure and meaning to the great riddle that is life. In waiting for that one burst of revelation, we often overlook the tiny clues given to us on a daily basis.

We want it to come all at once, easy and simple. But it comes in dribs and drabs, leaving it up to us to somehow put all these clues, those little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark together for ourselves.

How do we do that?

I don’t know. I am still groping around in the dark. But every so often a match flares up and for a brief and glorious moment there is bright light shining on everything. Of course, it doesn’t last long and I am plunged back into darkness with nothing but the quick flashes of what had been illuminated– partial glimpses of odd angles and shadows–running through my mind. It all makes sense for a brief instant in which I am filled with a sense of understanding.

Not happiness, not even contentment. Just understanding.

And within an even briefer instant, it is gone and I am once more groping in the dark. But at least I know there will most likely soon be more little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark. 

And for the time being, that is all I can hope for. It might be all I ever get so it will have to be enough.

Here’s a song, Everybody Knows from Leonard Cohen, that probably has little connection it whatever it is I wrote about. It’s just that I woke up with this song in my head and it stayed with me while I was walking to the studio in the darkness way too early this morning. Maybe it is one of those little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark?

Maybe. Who knows?

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The Price You Pay

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on November 17, 2024| 2 Comments »

Be Careful What You Wish For- GC Myers 1996

Be Careful What You Wish For — 1996

In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The last is much the worst, the last is the real tragedy.

—Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere’s Fan (1892)

This is a little piece that I did many years ago, that I call Be Careful What You Wish For. It never made it out of the studio except for a brief showing at a public exhibit of my Exiles pieces a few years back. It was never meant to be shown, actually. It was done solely for me.  I can’t say that it’s a great piece of work or even good. But that doesn’t matter because it’s one of my personal favorites. It’s after the old adage: Be careful what you wish because you may just get it. which is pretty much in line with the oft-quoted line above from Oscar Wilde. George Bernard Shaw is sometimes credited for this passage, having employed this same sentiment in his Man and Superman a decade after Wilde.

To be honest, I don’t care who wrote it first. Whoever wrote, it’s a thought I always bear in mind that every desire, every decision comes with a responsibility, a price to be paid that may not be evident on its surface.

 There are always unconsidered consequences we often fail to ponder when making wishes and decisions.

That’s what this small inconsequential painting from 28 years back is about for me. It’s tells a story much like  Pandora’s Box, where Pandora, the first woman created by order of Zeus, is given a box (or jar, in some versions of the tale) by the god Zeus with the instructions to not open it under any circumstance. Of course, she does. Immediately, all the evils in the world are released and, in her panic, she slams the lid back down, trapping Hope in the box.

Part of me wants to editorialize here about the Pandora’s Box that has been opened in the recent election, about the unintended consequences that those who chose to open the box will soon realize. Unfortunately, these darker consequences, the price that must be paid, will be felt by all. That’s all I will say on that this morning.

Just felt that it was an appropriate image for this particular moment. Now let’s get on to this week’s Sunday Morning Music. This is a version of the Bruce Springsteen song, The Price You Pay, from Emmylou Harris. There’s a verse and chorus in there that goes:

Now they’d come so far and they’d waited so longJust to end up caught in a dream where everything goes wrongWhere the dark of night holds back the light of the dayAnd you’ve gotta stand and fight for the price you pay
 
Woah, the price you pay, oh, the price you payNow you can’t walk away from the price you pay

Seems about right…

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Go Ask Frodo

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , on November 16, 2024| 2 Comments »

GC Myers-- Follow the River sm

Follow the River— At Principle Gallery

‘I cannot imagine what information could be more terrifying than your hints and warnings,’ exclaimed Frodo. ‘I knew that danger lay ahead, of course; but I did not expect to meet it in our own Shire. Can’t a hobbit walk from the Water to the River in peace?’

‘But it is not your own Shire,’ said Gildor. ‘Others dwelt here before hobbits were; and others will dwell here again when hobbits are no more. The wide world is all about you; you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.’

—J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

Yeah, I know. Another Tolkien passage in less than a week. I don’t think I’ve ever shared another passage from his books in the 16 years of this blog and now two show up in one week.  Guess that’s the way the Hobbit bounces.

I thought conversation between the hesitant hero Hobbit, Frodo, and the Elf, Gildor, fit with this painting, Follow the River, that’s at the Principle Gallery. The painting has an appealingly safe appearance with its blanket of green and its meandering tranquil river that, with the hills rising from it, feels safely walled in from the outside world. It has the insular warmth and security that I am sure the Hobbits felt in the Shire.

But there is darkness ahead. Part of me wants to see the rising moon in the blackened sky as light against the darkness while another part of me sees it as an ominous eye that surveils our every move.

Maybe it’s a bit of both. I can’t quite tell yet. Time will tell. But the message in this passage–the wide world is all about you; you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out— resonates in this moment. Blissful ignorance will not insulate one from the evils of the world.

Go ask Frodo. He’ll tell you.

Here’s a favorite song from Joni Mitchell that I’ve played a number of times in the past. It has the right vibe for this morning. Here’s her River.

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Welcome to Earth (Again)

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on November 15, 2024| 2 Comments »

Sharing Heart– At West End Gallery

“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies- “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

― Kurt Vonnegut

The words above are from the book God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater from the late Kurt Vonnegut. They are spoken to the infant twins of a neighbor as part of a baptismal speech from Eliot Rosewater, the book’s protagonist.

It seems like a ridiculous bit of advice to speak over infants at a religious ceremony, but the sentiment is striking in its simplicity and practical application.

In nearly every instance, kindness will make the situation better.

I don’t know why I am writing this today. Maybe it’s the shrill ugliness of our society at the moment, marked by naked tribalism and selfish greed.

Or maybe it’s our attack mentality that has become the norm, one where reason and logic are thrown aside and replaced with insults and slurs.

These negative aspects, the hatred and selfishness we are so often displaying, are not sustainable for us as a society. They are the signs of an undisciplined and unprincipled people.

On the other hand, kindness is a sustainable and enduring principle of guidance. It builds up, not tears down. A hand up, not a push down.

Like I said, I don’t why I am writing this. Maybe the thought was that we– maybe just I– needed a reminder that a little kindness does more for the world that all the ugly words spoken with hatred by one person toward another.

So, this is your reminder. We have a short time on this world. Don’t waste your time here being mean-spirited and vengeful.

Be kind to others. Be kind to yourself.

This made me want to hear a little Otis Redding this morning. Try a Little Tenderness. Doesn’t get much better than that.

Have a good and kind day.

I shared this post back at the beginning of 2020 and it has been one of my more popular posts in the intervening years. Even more so when we seem to be in a period of crisis or hardship. Its popularity has really spiked in the past week so I thought it might be worth rerunning as its message is evergreen. But I want to add a word or two to its message of kindness: Be kind but be strong. Kindness is not weakness– it is strength. Hold tight to those values you know are right. Kindness does not include accepting the intolerance and hatred of others.

Kindness in word and action is the bully’s kryptonite.

Welcome to Earth, babies…

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Holding Fast

Posted in Uncategorized on November 14, 2024| 5 Comments »

 

GC Myers- Pondering Blue, 2024

Pondering Blue– At West End Gallery

 

Hold fast to dreams,   

For if dreams die    

Life is a broken-winged bird,     

That cannot fly.    

       ― Langston Hughes

 

The past week has seen many of us dealing with a wide range of emotions– grief, disbelief, confusion, despair, anger, fear, and resignation. I am sure that doesn’t even scratch the surface. Our response to what is taking place hits each of us in all sorts of ways, and not a single one of these emotions pleases us. 

In short, it’s been a hard week. It would be easy to throw up your hands and say, “I give up.”

I have had that impulse more than once during this past week. The future felt dark and dismal. Hope seemed to be a pale light that was quickly fading over a distant horizon.  I am getting older now and it felt like we were facing a struggle that might well extend far beyond the end of my life.

Why not give up?

Well, for one thing, that is exactly what those who seek to dominate the future want from us. They want us feeling defeated and hopeless. And that goes against my contrarian nature. I don’t like being told what to do or not do and I sure as hell don’t like people making assumptions about me submitting to their will.

I think that’s a very American trait. It sometimes makes us hard to understand and difficult to govern. In the long run, it might be the common bond that sustains us.

But even more than that, this past week has reminded me of the work of Viktor Frankl, the Holocaust survivor whose transcendent book Man’s Search For Meaning has sustained me through many dark periods in my life. In his book, Frankl recounts his time in the Auschwitz death camp. He observed that those who were able to survive the horror of that place were those who somehow were able to hold on to a purpose for their life, who saw a future that they needed to strive for, even as the present moment felt hopeless. This purpose, even a modest one, often gave them the drive needed for survival, creating a path forward for them.

It is that need to have a future and purpose on which to hold.  This is allowing me to slowly set aside my grief and hopelessness so that I might get to work on fulfilling that purpose. 

I hold fast to my dreams. And I will not allow anyone to shake them from my grip.

Anyone…

Here’s a more upbeat song that you might expect, the classic Don’t Rain on My Parade, from Barbra Streisand and the film Funny Girl. It’s a song that is about holding onto whatever dream you have despite everything and everyone that tells you to give it up.

Time to get stirred up, folks.

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We Don’t Need Another Hero

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on November 13, 2024| Leave a Comment »

GC Myers-The Uplifted Heart sm

The Uplifted Heart– At West End Gallery

There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world. But sad or merry, I must leave it now. Farewell!

–J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (1937)

These were the final words of Thorin Oakenshield, the Dwarf King, to Bilbo Baggins as he lay dying after the Battle of the Five Armies, which was the conclusive battle between the forces of good and evil in The Hobbit. Thorin realizes in that moment that greed, much like his own dwarfish thirst for gold, was the cause of all the ills of the world, responsible for all the destructive wars of conquest. He understands that if the inhabitants of Middle Earth were all like Bilbo, leading simple, cheerful lives centered on the goodness of life, that evil would cease to exist.

Heroism, by extension, would no longer be necessary.

Tolkien wrote this in the mid 1930’s, during the rise of Fascism and Naziism in Europe, and the storyline mirrors that time.

That the world would be a better place without the overriding greediness for power and wealth that grips this planet might be a simplistic and unrealistic idea.  It probably is.

But it is also an obvious truth and should remain fixed in our minds so that we might better recognize that type of thirst for domination when it raises its ugly head. Without it we are destined to never-ending repeats of the Battle of the Five Armies, where it will be us simple Hobbits who will have to screw up our courage and pay the price to once more quell those darker forces the face us.

It would be nice to not have to do this time and time again, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it be great to be able to focus on the simpler joys of this world? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to not need a hero except for those who pull kids out of burning buildings or cure disease?

I have no answers here, of course. Yeah, it would be great to not need heroes but the lust for power and wealth seems to be part of our DNA. Wish it weren’t so but we’re probably going to need more heroes in the near future. Most likely we’ll find that hero among those Hobbits forced at last to leave the comfort of their Hobbit holes. We surely won’t find that hero in Sauron’s Tower.

But it’s nice to think of a time when heroes are not needed. Sigh.

Here’s Tina Turner and her We Don’t Need Another Hero. You knew there was going to be a song, didn’t you?

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The Misanthrope?

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on November 12, 2024| 3 Comments »

GC Myers- Island Getaway sm

Island Getaway— At West End Gallery

If you ever meet someone who cannot understand why solitary confinement is considered punishment, you have met a misanthrope.

…

If we define a misanthrope as ‘someone who does not suffer fools and likes to see fools suffer,’ we have described a person with something to look forward to.

—Florence King, With Charity Toward None (1992)

Since I no longer expect anything from mankind except madness, meanness, and mendacity; egotism, cowardice, and self-delusion, I have stopped being a misanthrope.

—Irving Layton, The Whole Bloody Bird

I have to admit that I am not too fond of humans in recent days. I used to kid around, saying that I was a misanthrope, but I never really believed it. I felt that there was some redeeming quality, some goodness, in everyone, and that when push comes to shove that they would ultimately do the right thing.

I should have known better. To do so meant ignoring everything I had read about the history of mankind. It’s a virtual laundry list of atrocity and cruelty.

So, maybe I was only kidding myself. Maybe I was–and am–a misanthrope. Or, like the quote above points out, is it even misanthropy when the horrible behavior of humans fails to even live up to your lowest expectations?

Honestly, while I am not thrilled with people in general at the moment, I still hold out hope for them.

Don’t know why.

This reminds me of a post from several years back, Misanthropy in the Morning. I thought it was worth another look this morning:

I wish I loved the Human Race;
I wish I loved its silly face;
I wish I liked the way it walks;
I wish I liked the way it talks;
And when I’m introduced to one,
I wish I thought “What Jolly Fun!

― Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh

On a morning when I am feeling more than a bit misanthropic, I thought I’d express it in the lightest manner I could muster. I guess the verse above from English poet Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh (1861-1922) might do the trick.

I don’t know much about this particular Raleigh and, feeling as I do this morning, don’t really care. Don’t know if he was descended from the more famous Walter Raleigh, the one I best knew from seeing his face on my one aunt’s cigarette packs as a kid. I would imagine so but what does it really matter?

For those of you more interested, this particular Walter Raleigh was a professor of literature at Oxford and that bit of light verse was titled Wishes of an Elderly Man, Wished at a Garden Party, June 1914.

It might be titled Wishes of a Near Elderly Man, Wished in an Art Studio, August 2021. [or November, 2024]

I thought of going with a different piece of verse this morning, like this short bit from Ape and Essence, the lesser-known dystopian novel from Aldous Huxley:

The leech’s kiss, the squid’s embrace,
The prurient ape’s defiling touch:
And do you like the human race?
No, not much.

Or I guess I could have gone with this simple quote from the great German painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840):

You call me a misanthrope because I avoid society. You err; I love society. Yet in order not to hate people, I must avoid their company.

It’s not verse but maybe it gets closer to the bone. Perhaps even closer is this passage from Sinclair Lewis, as laid out it in his It Can’t Happen Here:

… he loved the people just as much as he feared and detested persons…

That might best describe my misanthropic urge this morning. And every other morning.

I like and love people individually but, on the whole, very much dislike persons in the collective sense.

I am not talking about you guys. No, you’re okay.

Really.

I hope you will excuse my curmudgeonly behavior this morning. Now get out of here.

And stay off my lawn…

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Wild is the Wind/ Nina

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on November 11, 2024| 2 Comments »

GC Myers- Offered to the Wind 2022

Offered to the Wind— At West End Gallery

What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakeable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into no constituents.
Don’t waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary.

–Jay Griffiths, Savage Grace: A Journey in Wildness

I had a procedure at a doctor’s office this past week. As I sat there waiting for him to come in, there was music playing. It was modern country music. There wasn’t much to focus on, so I listened more intently than I might have done otherwise. The doctor was running behind schedule and I ended up listening to four songs. I am not saying it was bad or anything like that. It was just nothing. The sound was pleasing but bland. Unmemorable. The lyrics said little if anything. The first two I heard could have been the same song in many ways. It all reminded me of some awful AI concoction.

I was still a bit prickly from the events of last week and the music began to grind on my nerves. I could feel my blood pressure rising. After the fourth song, his assistant came in to let me know he was behind schedule and asked if I wanted to listen to something different.

I said that I did. When she asked what, I said immediately Nina Simone. She instructed the Alexa there to play Nina Simone and when the first notes from her piano slowly began asked if that was right. I assured that it was correct and she left me alone to listen.

The song was Wild is the Wind. I couldn’t have asked for a better song in that moment in that sterile doctor’s office at the end of a perfectly awful week. It captured my mood perfectly. I could feel an easing within me as I sat there. A heavy sigh came forth.

The contrast between that song and the stuff I had heard before was stark. This song had a rawness of emotion and a uniqueness and human touch that the other songs seemed to be lacking. As I said, the others felt to me as though they were created by AI.

Contrasted against the dullness of their conformity, Nina’s song felt like a rebellion of the spirit. Though it is not upbeat and has a sense of loss to it, it did feel wild and free in that moment. The other music, on the other hand, felt boxed in and constrained. No wildness, no freedom.

There seemed to be an analogy there to what I sensed has been happening here in this country. The sense of loss is for that wildness of spirit that seems to be leaking away, being rejected and replaced by uniformity of belief, thought, and action.

Maybe there is no analogy to be had. But for a moment I felt inspired at a moment that was uninspiring in every other way.

Maybe that is the purpose of art — if there is any at all.

Something to think about this morning. Here’s Nina Simone and her version of Wild is the Wind.

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