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Emorries

March 22, 2025 by redtreetimes

Rest Stop – At the West End Gallery

Emorries

n. vivid memories of a certain experience that you carry in your head for years until they’re casually disputed by someone who remembers it very differently—correcting basic chronology, clarifying a misread gesture, or adding context you never knew—which makes you want to look again at all the images you’ve been using to piece together your worldview, wondering what details might’ve been hidden in shadow all this time, or washed out by your own naïveté.

After documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, whose work often addresses the fallibility of memory and how little of reality can be captured in a photograph. Pronounced “em-uh-reez,” like memories, but with a piece missing.

— The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, John Koenig

I am well aware of the fallibility of memory, both my own and of other people in general. Being married so long, I am regularly confronted with recollections of things that have happened in the past– both distantly and recently– that differ wildly from my own memories of the same event. Sometimes one of us has memories that are absolutely absent from the memory of the other. As though only one of us was there.

Most of the time you just shrug it off as the events in question are usually not significant or earth-shattering in any way. They just take up valuable memory space that could better be utilized in holding on to more important things, like the name of some obscure band and the title of their obscure song from 70 years ago that you weren’t even fond of in the first place.

But sometimes, these gaps or misremembrances– these emorries— worry you a bit, especially if it concerns something that held importance to you, something that felt absolutely confident in your memories of it.

As an aging person, you immediately wonder if this is the beginning of some form of dementia. You’ve seen it in people you knew including some you loved so it seems natural to wonder. But you weigh out the facts and examine your other facilities and mannerisms and decide, or at least hope, that there’s nothing to worry about on this account. Unless, of course, you’re already well into dementia which means your observations on the subject are somewhat compromised.

But even if you can shrug that worry off and can be assured that you’re not yet in the throes of dementia, the fact remains that these emorries have somewhat shaken the foundation of the structure of yourself you have slowly built throughout your life. You begin to worry that that these once-trusted building blocks of memory were instead misremembrances, misinterpretations, falsehoods, or outright fabrications of your mind.

This makes you question if you are who and what you think you are and how you believe other people view you. Have you been living in a weird bubble of emorries all this time that is nothing like the reality of it all?

It makes one’s head spin. But then you realize that we’re all subject to the same condition, that everyone you encounter existence is built on their own set of  emorries. They most likely are all contending with the same set of worries. You then realize all we know, our reality as it were, is just a large bubble of emorries, that nobody has total clarity of what is and isn’t.

That moment of realization may well ease your worries or may make your head spin even a little faster. That’s just the way it is. Or just how I am seeing it this morning.

By tomorrow, it will all be just another one of many distant or forgotten emorries.

Here’s a song from an artist that I have never shared here before, for some unknown reason. Maybe he simply slipped from my emorries. Jim Croce died in an airplane crash in 1973 at age 30 when he was at the peak of his success. He left behind a strong legacy in his songwriting and music that doesn’t always get the recognition it deserves. This is his Photographs & Memories. Very soothing stuff…

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Looking For a Mooring

March 21, 2025 by redtreetimes

Anchor— At West End Gallery

It is a strange freedom to be adrift in the world of men without a sense of anchor anywhere. Always there is the need of mooring, the need for the firm grip on something that is rooted and will not give. The urge to be accountable to someone, to know that beyond the individual himself there is an answer that must be given, cannot be denied.

–Howard Thurman, The Inward Journey (1961)

I wrote a couple of weeks back about how part of my response to the veritable dismantling of this country that is taking place was a feeling of grief for something lost. I think that lost something could be defined as many things– a loss of belief, loss of security, loss of trust, loss of respect, loss of pride, loss of honor, loss of community, and on and on.

So much has seemingly– and perhaps irrevocably– been lost by so many that there may not be a single definition that covers our loss.

For me, I define my grief as being for the loss of bearings, of losing a sense of having an anchor that I could rely on at any given time, one that let me know who and where and what I was in relation the world at that given moment.

A sense of place. Of home.

It makes me ache to write about this feeling of loss. It is one of feeling unmoored and adrift in a fast-moving current. Looking back, I can catch a brief glimpse of that place, but it fades further into the distance with each successive glance.

Can I escape this current? Can we? And if I do and somehow find my way back to some of that same sense of home, will these feelings of loss subside?

Can it ever be the same anchor that I once thought it was?

I don’t think anyone really knows that answer. I sure as hell don’t. And I don’t think speculating on it matters. Because if we cannot escape that rushing current, the path back is gone forever.

I know this sounds too stark, too grim. Grief is like that. Even so, it not without hope.

Hope has not been completely lost.

I can still look back and see home, as I define it, in the distance. It’s there and, therefore, a way to it must exist.

We just got to get back to it, one way or another, because where we’re at now ain’t home.

Here’s a favorite song, one of many, from Talking Heads. This is This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody) from their great 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense.

FYI– Howard Thurman (1899-1981), who is quoted at the top, was an American author, philosopher, theologian, Christian mystic, educator, and civil rights leader. He was considered a mentor to MLK and other civil rights leaders.

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Hold Back the River

March 20, 2025 by redtreetimes

Nightbloom— At West End Gallery

The melancholy river bears us on. When the moon comes through the trailing willow boughs, I see your face, I hear your voice and the bird singing as we pass the osier bed. What are you whispering? Sorrow, sorrow. Joy, joy. Woven together, like reeds in moonlight.

–Virginia Woolf, A Haunted House, and Other Short Stories (1921)

What do I have to say this morning? Is there anything that needs to be said? Any grievances, worries, sorrows, joys, that need to be expressed if only to feel as though they have been released from within, even in this little forum?

There’s a desire to say much this morning. But the will to do so is not there.

Maybe that’s the melancholy river bearing on us? I don’t know but that feels right this morning, sitting here in a darkened studio with the glow of my computer screen serving as moonlight.

And in it is sorrow and joy, woven together.

I am going to let the river flow by this morning. Here’s a song, Hold Back the River, whose title and lyrics says something quite different, about not allowing time and tide to wash away the moment. I don’t know if that’s absolutely correct but, as they say, you get what you pay for. This song written and performed by James Bay is from about ten years back. I have to admit that even though it was a platinum record at the time, I was unaware of it before this morning. It’s hard enough keeping up with old music, let alone everything new. But I liked the song and this performance and felt it kind of fit.

Give a listen them step aside– you’re blocking my view of the river.

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Toward Serenity

March 19, 2025 by redtreetimes

In Eminence— At Principle Gallery

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

–André Gide, journal entry, November 23, 1940

The journal entry above from Nobel Prize-winning author André Gide very much speaks to me. Though it serves many purposes for me, I tend to view my work as a means of absorbing and acknowledging the anxieties and pressures that this world often presses upon us, dampening their effects, and then moving, to use Gide’s term, toward serenity.

The darker aspects of the world are still there, an underlying presence that creates a contrasting tension, a counterpoint that serves as a starting point from which serenity and other aspects of light can build.

I am talking about the emotional tone of the work here, but it also roughly describes my actual painting process. Much of my work starts with a dark surface on which light and brightness is built.

Even my work with transparent inks that is more watercolor-ish in nature employs a process where a darker layer of ink is first applied. almost as a dark puddle on a light– usually white and prepped with layers of gesso– surface. This layer, this puddle of ink, is then little by little removed, each deduction revealing more and more light from the underlying surface.

From darkness comes light…

Let’s have a tune this morning. The song is I See a Darkness. It’s one I have played a couple of times over the years, once by Will Oldham (aka Bonnie “Prince” Billy) who wrote and originally recorded it and the other as covered by Johnny Cash, from the American Recordings period late in his life. His work from this time, when his scarred voice carried his age and emotion so eloquently, is potent stuff.

Light coming from darkness…

 I think this part of its chorus fittingly applies to today’s post and to life in general:

Oh, no, I see a darkness.
Did you know how much I love you?
Is a hope that somehow you,
Can save me from this darkness.

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The Moment– and a Mayfly

March 18, 2025 by redtreetimes

A Matter of Perspective— At the West End Gallery

The Moment

The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can’t breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.

–Margaret Atwood

It’s hard to watch the Billionaire Boys Club pillaging day after day, discarding people at will while staking claims and planting their flags on everything in sight. Brazenly displaying the power of their ownership.

I take some solace in putting things into perspective.

For example, the top of Mount Everest is comprised of limestone, sedimentary rock that contains marine fossils. It was formed more than 450 million years ago, during the Ordovician period, at the bottom of a large body of water before shifting tectonic plates and volcanic forces pushed it upward toward the sky, to the rooftop of the world. 

The land surface of the Earth is approximately 29% with the other 71% under water. Our knowledge of the Earth’s history is known primarily from limited examination over a very short period of time of a very small amount of the 29% that is currently above water. We know little, if anything, of what rests beneath the bottom of the other 71%. We know nothing of any other creatures or civilizations might have lived and prospered during their time on this Earth, before all evidence of their existence was plunged into the depths of the seas. 

I can’t say for sure, but it seems plausible that during those intervening 450 million years some being existed who dominated and ruled over the other beings in their region, claiming all the Earth that they could see and reach as their own. 

At the other end of the spectrum, the mayfly emerges from the water each year and lives for but a day. A mere 24 hours.

That lifespan seems ludicrously short and insignificant to us humans. But to the mayfly that timespan is all they will ever know, representing everything within their purpose. For that time period the world they know belongs to them.

Their ownership of their time and space is no different than our own. No less significant or insignificant than our own. When you compare the lifetime of the mayfly with that of the human within the Earth’s timeline, the difference between them is negligible. In the eyes of the Earth’s history, we are little different than the mere mayfly.

When our civilization is long gone and buried at the bottom of some future ocean, what importance will there be in the ownership and power possessed now? For that matter, in just a few years when age or violence has claimed the lives of the tyrants and oligarchs who revel in their power now, what good will the hoarded wealth, be to them?

The real estate and all the things on this Earth they claimed as their own never really belonged to them. As the poem says in its final verse:

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.

In the end we own nothing here. We are but momentary visitors on the great timeline of this Earth.

You might ask how that gives me solace? After all, isn’t it simply evidence of my own insignificance? 

Well, yes, it is.

It shows us to all be little more than mayflies. And when the mayfly’s 24 hours are up, does the life of one mayfly matter anymore than that of another?  

Just thinking out loud this morning. Take it for what it worth– the ramblings of a mayfly…

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An Irish Trio

March 17, 2025 by redtreetimes

Paul Henry- The Fairy Thorn (1936)

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

— William Butler Yeats, The Lake Isle of Innisfree (1888)

St. Patrick’s Day 2025.  No commentary today, just a simple triad of Irish imagery, song and verse.

The painting at the top is from Paul Henry, who spent his life painting his native Ireland from 1877 until his death in 1958. He was perhaps the best-known painter in Ireland through the first half of the 20th century though many of us here in the States may not recognize the name. I didn’t know his work until a decade or so ago, but had an affinity for it instantly, seeing a familiarity between his work and my own, in the stark manner in which the landscape and tree was portrayed.

Most of Henry’s landscapes were set in the west of Ireland, in the Connemara district, an area described by Oscar Wilde as “a savage beauty.”  For many, Henry’s landscapes represent the idealized image of the Irish countryside with simple white cottages set among stark, barren hills and rolling green fields. But his greens are not that bright Kelly green so often used in depicting Ireland. No, Henry often chose blue and brown tints in his work.  He used a very distinct and deceptively cool palette in his painting which enhances the earthy coolness and solitary nature of the landscapes.

The poem, The Lake Isle of Innisfree, is from the great W.B. Yeats and may well be the most famous piece of Irish verse. It has been set to music by numerous artists, referenced in film and television, and is even printed on the Irish passport. I find it’s transcendent tone captivating, a mood much like that which I try to find in my work.

For the song, I am going with Carrickfergus from the collaborative effort between the Chieftains and Van Morrison. This may be my favorite version of this folk tune that feels like it is much older than its actual age, coming as it does from the 1960’s. That old feel may come from the fact that musical scholars have deduced that its melody is a combination of two much older Celtic folk tunes.

Whatever the case, I think it is a lovely fit this morning with the words of Yeats and the painting from Henry.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow…

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Pretzel Logic

March 16, 2025 by redtreetimes

Too Many Moons — At Principle Gallery

Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life.

–Carl Jung, Liber Novus

An attempt to impose something comprehensible on life…

That sounds like a pretty tall task, given the sheer lack of logic and reason it so often displays. It also sounds like the way artists and writers often describe what they are trying to find in their work– an understanding of what is and isn’t. A revealing of the possibility of that which we cannot see and a new perspective on that which we can.

And in doing so, make their own rules while discarding others. Whatever it takes to make sense of the insensible. Using the illogical to find some sort of logic.

That makes sense in a world that seldom moves in a straight line.

Where that takes us, I don’t know. As an artist– if that is what I am– following that twisting and turning line to some sort of end is the mystery and the thrill of it.

Pretzel logic.

And like a pretzel, following its line always brings us back to where we began. Do we know any more at that point?

Who knows?

Maybe that’s the whole point, to let us know that we can’t know what we can’t know. That we must embrace the mystery.

Sounds good. But, of course, that is the result of some pretzel logic.

Okay, that was a long way around the pretzel to get to this week’s Sunday Morning Music. Here is Steely Dan and Pretzel Logic.

But, of course, you knew that, right? Can’t fool you guys…

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The Flux of All Things

March 15, 2025 by redtreetimes

And the River Flows— At West End Gallery

Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the flux of all things? Throw a stone into the stream, and the circles that propagate themselves are the beautiful type of all influence.

–Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (1836)

Looking for some meditative space this morning. Don’t want to write, to be honest. Some mornings it feels like the self-examination that is often requires is just too much. At such time, I find myself wanting to be standing somewhere watching the river flow, my mind emptied and the gentle unceasing rhythm of the water’s motion serving as a droning mantra. 

Then I am neither happy nor sad, nor fearful or unafraid. 

Just there in that moment. Captured in the flux of all things.

And the river flows on…

Here’s song that has, for me, the feeling of that river’s rhythm. This is The Way the Whole Thing Ends from a favorite of mine, Gillian Welch. I particularly like its chorus:

Standing in the backdoor cryingNow you’re gonna need a friendThat’s the way the cornbread crumblesThat’s the way the whole thing ends

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It Don’t Come Easy

March 14, 2025 by redtreetimes

Evercool— At Principle Gallery

Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great wrongs, and they will then be powerless to vex your mind.

–Leonardo da Vinci, Leonardo da Vinci’s Note-Books (1906)

Believe me when I say that I try to follow this advice from Leonardo d Vinci.

That’s all I am going to say this morning. Like the painting above, I want to remain evercool in my patience.

Let me add this: It don’t come easy.

Here’s a tune from Ringo to reiterate that point.

Now get out of here before I lose my patience…

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Too Much Empathy?

March 13, 2025 by redtreetimes

The Universal Symbol for Empathy

Resolve to be tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and the wrong. Sometime in life you will have been all of these.

― George Washington Carver

In recent weeks, the absolutely normal and not-strange-at-all Elon Musk has waxed poet on the subject of empathy. Or to be more accurate, how empathy should be avoided at all costs since, as he put it in a February interview, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”

He has also referred to those who rely on government programs in any way as the “Parasite Class.” You know, the Parasite Class— poor folks on Food Stamps, old folks in nursing homes, people who have lost everything they owned to natural disasters, retirees who depend on the Social Security to which they contributed for their entire lives, farmers who depend on subsidies, veterans who depend on the healthcare and other support they were promised, and so on.

Let’s not forget to include those corporations and those billionaires who greatly profit from huge government subsidies or have built their wealth by exploiting government funded research and development.

He may be right– there may be a parasite class. It’s just might not be the same one he’s pointing at. It’s exploitation for thee, but not for me.

I’ve written a number of times over the years about the declining level of empathy in this country. There was a University of Michigan study from 2009 that spanned thirty years which measured the empathy levels of 14,000 college students over that time frame. It concluded that there was a steep decline from 1979 to 2009 in the levels of empathy among the students surveyed. They surmised that the college student of 2009 was 40% less empathetic than those in 1979. I take the results of this study with a grain of salt since I can’t vouch for its validity, accuracy, or level of bias of its methodology. But even if it is off by a factor of 50%, the results are still troubling.

I thought I’d share another post on empathy that ran a few years back during the week of Thanksgiving.  It includes a quote that has been making the rounds in recent months from a psychologist who interviewed and dealt with Nazi war criminals at Spandau Prison in the aftermath of WWII. His conclusions and opinions on empathy differ greatly from those of Musk.

As do my own. Empathy is not the great weakness of Western Civilization. No, it is unbridled greed that is our weakness. Empathy, in my opinion, might be our greatest strength. It is the thing that binds us together as a people, that makes us raise our voices and march in the streets for those other than ourselves who suffer.

Empathy is the driving force of democracy, equality, fairness, and justice.

Okay, I’m climbing off my soapbox now. Here’s that short post on empathy from a few years back:

Let’s continue this Thanksgiving week’s stream of virtues with a biggie: empathy. The ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes or see through their eyes. To feel their emotions, to try to perceive the circumstances of their life.

As Walt Whitman put it in the immortal Song of Myself, describing his time as a hospital aide during the Civil War when he nursed severely wounded Union soldiers:

I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.

It seems like a simple thing, a natural reaction for most decent people. But it is, unfortunately, becoming a more and more scarce entity. It sometimes feels like there is a total absence of empathy in this world with some folks. Or maybe it’s that they have managed to lop their empathy into smaller bits, reserving it only for people who look and speak and think like themselves.

Empathy is sometimes even mocked these days, derided as a symptom of weakness or softness, something to be exploited. My persona view on this is that empathy is actually a strength, something that allows you to feel compassion with those in need while at the same time giving you the ability to understand and perhaps predict how your adversaries might act.

In this case, a lack of empathy is actually a hinderance to those with less than honorable intentions. This thought takes me back to the words of Gustav Gilbert who was the psychologist at Spandau Prison where the Nazi war crimes defendants were held in 1945:

I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.

Conversely, goodness would include the presence of empathy.

Most of you out there reading this are empathetic folks. If not, you most likely wouldn’t have read this far or be following this blog. So, this is just preaching to the choir. But can you make others feel empathy or, at least, more empathetic to a wider range of others?

I would guess that this can only occur through a willingness to display your own empathy with patience and grace. Much like the words of advice at the top from George Washington Carver.

Do I know this for sure?

No. But who or what can it hurt?

It can only help in some way or another. Try it…

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