Redtree Times

The Bargaining–Now at West End Gallery

I have been reading the morning paper. I do it every morning-knowing well that I shall find in it the usual depravities and basenesses and hypocrisies and cruelties that make up civilization, and cause me to put in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human race. I cannot seem to get my prayers answered, yet I do not despair.

–Mark Twain, letter to William Dean Howells, April 2, 1899

 I could see this new small painting as representing someone pleading to the heavens for either the salvation of the human race or its damnation. perhaps it’s Mark Twain after reading his morning paper. I know that I suffer that same feeling when reading of how we mistreat one another on a constant basis.

It’s hard to not come away wishing that the Fat Lady would finally sing and bring this whole damn human opera to an end.

Yet there is always a part inside that recognizes that we also possess a huge capacity for goodness and love.

This love-hate relationship that many of us have with our species is a good example of those contradictions I mentioned here yesterday. From moment to moment, we move from begging for forgiveness for our species’ transgressions to pleading that the whole group be obliterated and returned to dust and ash.

With little to offer and not really knowing what we need, we bargain sometimes for the best and the worst.

And unfortunately for us, our bargain for either is sometimes accepted.

The results never match our hopes or expectations. It might be best for us if our pleadings go unfulfilled, much like Twain wrote: I cannot seem to get my prayers answered, yet I do not despair.

I can see this in this piece called The Bargaining. It is included in the annual Little Gems show opening next Friday, February 6 at the West End Gallery. It has a feeling of someone bargaining to both heal and injure. To live or die.

Whatever it takes to keep us from despairing.

Hmm. This went in a much different way than I had expected. But that’s okay. I can live with that. That seems like a pretty good deal I’ve bargained for this morning.

Here’s a song that you may struggle to see how it connects with the rest of this post. It’s a recent performance by Moby and Jacob Lusk of a 1995 song from Moby, When It”s Cold I’d Like to Die. It’s a powerful and stark performance. Like the image of tree without its foliage in the winter.

Maybe I chose this song because I walked to the studio this morning in -2° temps. There is a solemnity and silence in this kind of cold that makes you ponder the coldness of nonexistence. This song presents one of those human contradictions, feeling the pull of both death and life. Many of us have felt an emptiness within us at times brought on by the coldness and dangers of this world. At such times, we feel hopeless and powerless, too tired to keep going. But though we might think that death would end our suffering, we know that the only way out is to keep moving, to find the hope contained in despair.

Maybe that’s the connection of this song here. I don’t really know.  But it is a beautiful song in my opinion.

And that is good enough for me on this frigid morning.