Third Stone From The Sun (1994)
From Of Power and Time by Mary Oliver in Upstream (2016):
Say you have bought a ticket on an airplane and you intend to fly from New York to San Francisco. What do you ask the pilot when you climb aboard and take your seat next to the little window, which you cannot open but through which you see the dizzying heights to which you are lifted from the secure and friendly earth?
Most assuredly you want the pilot to be his regular and ordinary self. You want him to approach and undertake his work with no more than a calm pleasure. You want nothing fancy, nothing new. You ask him to do, routinely, what he knows how to do-fly the airplane. You hope he will not daydream. You hope he will not drift into some interesting meander of thought. You want this flight to be ordinary, not extraordinary. So, too, with the surgeon, and the ambulance driver, and the captain of the ship. Let all of them work, as ordinarily they do, in confident familiarity with whatever the work requires, and no more. Their ordinariness is the surety of the world. Their ordinariness makes the world go around.
I, too, live in this ordinary world. I was born in it. Indeed, most of my education was intended to make me feel comfortable within it. Why that enterprise failed is another story. Such failures happen, and then, like all things, are turned to the world’s benefit, for the world has a need of dreamers as well as shoe-makers. (Not that it is so simple, in fact-for what shoemaker does not occasionally thump his thumb when his thoughts have, as we would say, “wandered”? And when the old animal body clamors for attention, what daydreamer does not now and again have to step down from the daydream and hurry to market before it closes, or else go hungry?)
And this is also true. In creative work-creative work of all kinds-those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward. Which is something altogether different from the ordinary. Such work does not refute the ordinary. It is, simply, something else. Its labor requires a different outlook-a different set of priorities. Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity.
Intellectual work sometimes, spiritual work certainly, artistic work always-these are forces that fall within its grasp, forces that must travel beyond the realm of the hour and the restraint of the habit. Nor can the actual work be well separated from the entire life. Like the knights of the Middle Ages, there is little the creatively inclined person can do but to prepare himself, body and spirit, for the labor to come-for his adventures are all unknown. In truth, the work itself is an adventure. And no artist could go about this work, or would want to, with less than extraordinary energy and concentration. The extraordinary is what art is all about.
— Mary Oliver
I wrote a whole long thing this morning about this passage from Mary Oliver’s essay Of Power and Time. It was all about my own struggles with the ordinary and the desire for something beyond it, that hunger for eternity as Oliver put it, that eventually guided me here. After rereading it, I decided to heave my words into the trash.
I couldn’t add much of anything to Oliver’s words. It so well describes what I felt then as someone who was then out of love with the ordinary and who now very much appreciates the ordinary from the windows of my studio. From a distance.
This all came back to me recently when I was asked several questions by the writer of the article for the preview of my June Principle Gallery exhibit that will be appearing in an upcoming issue of American Art Collector. I always struggle with the sort of questions that come in such interviews. I always stumble around, saying things that sound out of character and somewhat nonsensical as soon as they come out of my mouth.
It always feels to me like these interviews are trying to make ordinary something that is by its very nature extraordinary.
The writer in this particular instance asked how I would describe my style in words. I told her that I gave up doing that a long time ago and that I painted because I couldn’t find words for what I needed to express. If I could, I would be a writer and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
I ultimately allowed that if I had to choose a word or two, the words would be unique and human.
Or perhaps uniquely human.
That felt to me as good a description as any other I could think of. If someone someday finds the need to describe my work– hey, it could happen– I hope those words or that term comes to mind.
Well, not sure if this captures what I wanted to say. Like I said, I’m a painter not a writer. There are plenty of words and not much else.
Maybe that is what life comes down to, when all is said and done– lots of words and not much else.
Nah, I don’t believe that for a second.
We are all uniquely human in our own ways which means we are meant to be extraordinary. And that makes it all worthwhile.
Didn’t know what to add as far as an image so I opted to make this sort of a Look Back piece. The painting at the top is an experimental piece from early 1994 that I call Third Stone From the Sun after the Jimi Hendrix song. Oddly enough, I think this all fits together in an okay way.
And for this morning, okay is the standard I am seeking to meet. Any day we are okay is a win in my eyes.
Redtree Times 