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A Matter of Degrees?

December 29, 2024 by redtreetimes

To the Main Road
At West End Gallery

I have been thinking about the difference between our highs and lows, between those times when we feel on top of the world and those times when we feel as though we are in an abyss. It’s a typical holiday theme for me, when such contrasts seem to stand out among so many people, including myself.

I wonder what it is in an individual that makes them swing one way or the other, high or low. Is it a massive difference in circumstance and perception between these people?

Or is it just matter of degrees? Could it be that there are times when we only feel 51% positive about everything but that is enough to swing us to what feels like a high point?  And could there be other times when we are only feeling 51% gloomy but that tips the scales enough so that we feel as though the bottom has dropped out on one’s life? 

It seems plausible, given how quickly these swings can shift. But maybe that’s just me. I don’t know, of course. Just thinking out loud. Actually, this thought came after coming across the post below from four years back where the poet Maggie Smith (not the wonderful British actress who we lost this past year) described life as at least fifty percent terrible. Made me think of things in matter of degrees and what is entailed in shifting those the balance one way or the other. I would really like to know.

At the very bottom, I have added this week’s Sunday Morning Music. It’s Superstar from the Carpenters, the brother-sister duo that I never shared here before. Probably because I wasn’t a fan when I was kid and they were everywhere, constantly on the radio and TV. You couldn’t flip on a variety show back then without seeing the two. But over the years, I came to truly appreciate them, especially the glorious tone of Karen Carpenter‘s voice. Her voice seldom fails to provoke a response within me. That would have been a shock to the 12-year-old me back in the day.

But I made the choice of this song not only because it is beautifully written (Leon Russell wrote it with singer Bonnie Bramlett of Delaney & Bonnie), arranged, and performed, but because Karen Carpenter knew more than a little about living a life of shifting degrees. Give a listen and be thankful if you’re seeing the world at least 51% positive today.

GOOD BONES/ by Maggie Smith

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

I came across this 2016 poem from American poet Maggie Smith very early this morning and it really struck a chord. 

We all want things right now, want them to be complete and perfect. Move in ready. But things are seldom that way. It requires imagination and desire to see the potential that things hold. And hard work and determination to reach that potential.

“This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.”

Indeed.

I had never seen or heard this poem but it is quite well known. It has been read and published around the world and Maggie Smith is often asked to read it at events. She calls it her Freebird, which is quite a funny line.

It was written in the aftermath of the 2016 shooting at the Pulse nightclub that killed 49 people. Its popularity was maintained through the momentous 2016 elections here and in the UK –it was called “Official Poem of 2016” by the BBC/Public Radio International— and has continuously popped up throughout the past four years as folks to try to maintain optimism in the dark atmosphere that has marked this era.

I somehow missed it until about 5:30 this morning. Always late to the dance.

But I imagine that this poem will remain popular because, as she points out, the world is at least fifty percent terrible and will no doubt remain so. It will always require plenty of imagination, desire, determination — and throw in loads of blood, sweat and tears– to overcome the awfulness that resides side-by-side with us in this world so that we can make it into that perfect home we all dream of for ourselves.

“This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.”

Indeed.

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They Can’t Take That Away From Me

December 28, 2024 by redtreetimes

Too Many Moons
At Principle Gallery

We may never never meet again, on that bumpy road to love
Still I’ll always, always keep the memory of

The way you hold your knife
The way we danced until three
The way you changed my life
No, no they can’t take that away from me
No, they can’t take that away from me

–George and Ira Gershwin, They Can’t Take That Away From Me, 1937

Coming to the end of the year. As with most every year, there are some things that beg to be forgotten– it seems like there are more of these than normal this year. Not my favorite year in many ways.

But even so, there are always things that I want to remember, things that I want to hold onto that mark this year. Some are bigger memories and some are tiny but everlasting– an impression of a smile or glance from another. A kind word from a stranger or a friend.

Things that remain with you through thick and thin. Things that stay when all else is lost.

Things that can’t be taken away.

Like the old Gershwin song says.

The song, They Can’t Take That Away From Me, was written by the George and Ira Gershwin and first performed by Fred Astaire in the 1937 movie Shall We Dance. George Gershwin died two months after the film’s release. Since that time the song has become one of the great entries to the American songbook, performed by a seemingly endless list of jazz and pop singers. There are so many great versions of this song by some of the greatest vocalists of all time that it’s hard to pick one that might stand out for everybody.

For myself, I always come back to the Billie Holiday versions of the song which she started performing in 1937. I like her early performances but the one below from 1957 is a favorite. It’s a great version that is a clean and bright production with top notch players–Ben Webster on sax and Barney Kessel on guitar– backing her.

Give a listen. And pay heed to those deep memories that no one can take away from you.

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Amor Fati

December 27, 2024 by redtreetimes

9924132 Passing Through Blue sm

Passing Through Blue– At West End Gallery

“I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs (1882)

Amor fati. The love of fate and everything it brings– good and bad.

It is an idea, as proposed by Nietzsche, of having to accept, along with the highs of one’s life, all the lows that tag along with the inevitable suffering that comes with being a human. Loss, grief, sadness, illness, aging– all these things can never be fully avoided. They come to us all in time.

Amor fati stresses that such unavoidable suffering is simply part of who and what we are. It is therefore necessary for our experience as humans to embrace this suffering, to take comfort in knowing that our suffering is not limited to ourselves alone. That it is universal and that there is beauty and grace to be found within it. 

Of course, nobody wants to hear that. we all want a life free of suffering of any sort. That desire, too, is only human. My belief is that by knowing we are always susceptible to the inherent suffering of this life, we begin to understand that we have the ability to control our reaction to our suffering, that we do not have to be overwhelmed by it. 

I have carried this idea with me for quite some time, long before I heard of amor fati, that recognizing that we have a choice in how we react allows us to persevere through our down times. That comes in handy this time of the year for me when I always feel a little more glum or stressed. I know I have a choice in how I cope to what I have come to see as a natural cycle, that I don’t have to react rashly or impulsively.

As I have said before, knowing that the black birds of sadness can come to my trees at any time makes them tolerable. They are just part of the deal in being human. Not too high a price to pay in my opinion.

Amor fati.

Here’s a longtime favorite song, How Blue Can You Get?, from the late great B.B. King. This is from his classic 1964 album Live at the Regal. I first came across it when I was going through the used bin at a local record shop in the late 1970’s and found a beat-up copy of the recording of the fabled show from the Chicago theater. The album was well worn as though whoever had owned it before had played the hell out of it.  

From the second the needle on my turntable snapped into the groove, I understood why that was so. Pure electric, a perfect storm of time, place and people made every moment of that record crackle. One listen and you knew it was about as good as it gets. I still get shivers when I hear it.

Gets me through my own blues.

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Waiting on the Great Veiled Bear

December 25, 2024 by redtreetimes

Edward Gorey Great Veiled Bear Christmas

May the Great Veiled Bear bless your holiday with cookies this year.

…

I am looking out my studio windows into the darkness with the hope that the Great Veiled Bear shows up with a cookie for me. I like cookies…

A favorite from Edward Gorey. Merry Christmas.

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Holiday Touchstones

December 24, 2024 by redtreetimes

gc-myers-archaeology-happy-holidays-2011-sm

We’re so caught up in our everyday lives that events of the past, like ancient stars that have burned out, are no longer in orbit around our minds. There are just too many things we have to think about every day, too many new things we have to learn. New styles, new information, new technology, new terminology … But still, no matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away. They remain with us forever, like a touchstone.

― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

I certainly agree with the paragraph above from Murakami’s acclaimed novel. Over the years my ability to learn– or at least remember what I have attempted to learn– has diminished. I often read or see something new now and consciously try to register it into my memory. But once done, it seems to dilute and run into all the other factoids and processes and thises and thats that have been put there in recent times. It all becomes a dull blob from which I can discern barely anything.

Maybe that blob is the oblivion to which Murakami refers. Data goes in, nothing comes out.

But ask me about a Christmas 50 or 60 years ago and I can recall it well, often with details of aroma and sound and texture. The taste of a holiday goodie. The smell of the tree and the warm feeling from its light in the evening.

Maybe the occasion or the underlying feeling made it a touchstone for me. I don’t know. Memory is a funny thing. You can never tell what will imprint deeply on it, what will remain vivid many years later.

It is sometimes a gift, sometimes a curse. I tend to view those deep memories from holiday season past as a gift.

I hope you do as well. Or will make new memories that press themselves deep into your memory bank. New touchstones.

Have a good holiday. Here’s song that I played ten or eleven years back. It is a holiday song but one most likely not played on your local radio station this time of the year. It’s a beautiful version of the traditional A Child is Born done by the late jazz trumpet player Thad Jones with the Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra.

A lovely and sumptuous song to slow down the moment so that maybe you can remember it later. Let that be a gift to you.

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The Things We Dare Not Tell

December 23, 2024 by redtreetimes

GC Myers- Archaeology- Déjà Vu sm

Archaeology: Déjà Vu— At Principle Gallery, Alexandria, VA

The fields are fair in autumn yet, and the sun’s still shining there,
But we bow our heads and we brood and fret, because of the masks we wear;
Or we nod and smile the social while, and we say we’re doing well,
But we break our hearts, oh, we break our hearts! for the things we must not tell

— The Things We Dare Not Tell, Henry Lawson (1867-1922)

A video for this poem popped up in my YouTube feed for some algorithmic reason I can’t comprehend. I am glad it did.

I first encountered the Australian writer Henry Lawson (1867-1922) a few years back when I stumbled across a poem of his, The Wander-Light, that I shared here. It has been a pretty popular post, receiving a number of views on a daily basis. Doing some research back then, I found that Lawson is an Australian icon, considered to be perhaps the country’s greatest poet and short story writer.  He was a brilliant writer and storyteller but struggled with alcoholism and mental illness for much of his life until dying at the relatively young age of 55 from a cerebral hemorrhage.

Watching the reading of the poem below, I began to think about the secrets we all carry. Oh, we may claim or attempt to be transparent, but we all maintain words and deeds and beliefs that we share with no one. Some we don’t share because, to be honest, they are things nobody would care to hear. Some are too shameful or painful or embarrassing to release from our grip.

I probably share too much here and in my talks. More than most. Mainly because I believe that transparency has a liberating effect. But even so, there are things that will no doubt go unshared to my grave. Well, that is, if I ever decide to die. If I don’t, I might break my silence in a couple of hundred years or so.

It makes me wonder what secret things others will carry to their graves, the good and the bad. Will they ever reveal themselves to some future archaeologist or researcher? Are they hidden somewhere, like one of the artifacts in the Archaeology piece at the top, waiting to be unearthed then put together like a strange and wonderful jigsaw puzzle? Small bits that together tell a bigger story?

The other thing that comes to mind is the one line in Lawson’s poem that resonated most with me:

Oh, the world would be such a kindly world if all men’s hearts lay bare!

I believe it but wonder if that is true. Do secrets keep us apart? Would revelation of all things hidden somehow bring us together?

I don’t know the answer. My lack of answers is no secret, that’s for sure.

Maybe we need those secret things just to maintain that feeling of mystery that comes with not knowing everything about everyone. 

Might that mystery be the thing that drives all types of creativity?

Could be. I don’t really know.

Okay, got to run. I have secrets waiting to be buried as well as some to be shared. It’s the sorting out that counts.

Here’s the poem from Henry Lawson along with the whole poem below it.

The Things We Dare Not Tell

The fields are fair in autumn yet, and the sun’s still shining there,
But we bow our heads and we brood and fret, because of the masks we wear;
Or we nod and smile the social while, and we say we’re doing well,
But we break our hearts, oh, we break our hearts! for the things we must not tell.

There’s the old love wronged ere the new was won, there’s the light of long ago;
There’s the cruel lie that we suffer for, and the public must not know.
So we go through life with a ghastly mask, and we’re doing fairly well,
While they break our hearts, oh, they kill our hearts! do the things we must not tell.

We see but pride in a selfish breast, while a heart is breaking there;
Oh, the world would be such a kindly world if all men’s hearts lay bare!
We live and share the living lie, we are doing very well,
While they eat our hearts as the years go by, do the things we dare not tell.

We bow us down to a dusty shrine, or a temple in the East,
Or we stand and drink to the world-old creed, with the coffins at the feast;
We fight it down, and we live it down, or we bear it bravely well,
But the best men die of a broken heart for the things they cannot tell.

— Henry Lawson

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Affirming Silence

December 22, 2024 by redtreetimes

GC Myers- Affirmation 2024

Affirmation— Now at Principle Gallery

Take refuge in silence. You can be here or there or anywhere. Fixed in silence, established in the inner ‘I’, you can be as you are. The world will never perturb you if you are well founded upon the tranquility within. Gather your thoughts within. Find out the thought centre and discover your Self-equipoise. In storm and turmoil be calm and silent. Watch the events around as a witness. The world is a drama. Be a witness, inturned and introspective.

– Ramana Maharshi

This time of year is one of stress for many, especially for those who are a bit withdrawn. There’s a lot of motion and sound surrounding the tension that comes with the obligation in trying to please others. The calming effect of silence is absent. Thinking about this brought me to the post below from back in 2013, one that I have never revisited. It seems to speak, in a way, to the need for that bit of quiet that might be missing in the season. 

Since this is the time for Sunday Morning Music and since it is the holiday season, I thought I’d share a Christmas song that is as calming as they come. It’s the late great Vince Guaraldi and his Christmastime is Here. This is the instrumental version without the chorus of kids. It’s a good listen anytime of the year.

[From 2013]

I often speak of seeking quiet, even absolute silence. I all too often come up short in my search, usually the victim of my own fears and shortcomings which cause me to fill the void around me with sound and chaos.

Silence is pushed aside.

It is only in those times when I allow myself to be pulled completely into my work that I feel the silence slowly creeping back in, stilling the fears and doubts that seem to wail around me like sirens at times. It is at these moments while painting that I feel in a small way as though I am like a witness that the great guru Ramana Maharsi advises us to be in the passage above.

I am then calm and silent. I watch and gather my inner thoughts as I feel myself melding with the colors and forms before me. It is absolute peace as I go deeper into this inner realm.

That’s as close as I can describe in words the feeling I have when I lose myself to painting. The painting shown here is an example of this feeling. It is a different painting than the one shown in the 2013 post. But like that painting, the one shown, Affirmation, is simple and quiet yet richly harmonious and full.

It feels outside of time, always in the present. It is both inward and outward looking, a silent witness that is not fearful of the future or regretful of the past. It is just as it is– quiet and placid.

All that I seek.

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Absorbing Quiet

December 21, 2024 by redtreetimes

GC Myers- Absorbing Quiet

Absorbing Quiet— At West End Gallery

A world where beauty and logic, painting and analytic geometry, had become one.

–Aldous Huxley, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, 1939

I am relatively sure that my use and interpretation of this passage from a novel by Aldous Huxley is a departure from its original context. The novel, which is considered by some to be the inspiration for Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane script, concerns an ultrawealthy movie mogul who lives with a Hollywood starlet in a vast estate where he displays the products– rare art, for example– of his unquenchable acquisitiveness.

The novel is mainly concerned with his desire to acquire the one thing he can’t have–immortality. The title of the novel is a line from Tithonus, a poem from Alfred Tennyson. which is about a king who asks the gods for immortality.  It is granted but the king has overlooked asking for eternal youth. As he ages, he grows ever physically older and frailer. His immortality becomes a horrible and never-ending burden.

The painting here, Absorbing Quiet, obviously has nothing to do with either novel or the poem. However, I felt that the line from Huxley above captured what I was seeing in this piece– beauty and geometry and maybe a little logic all coming together to create a moment of stillness. And the Red Tree at the center of this stillness, contentedly taking it all in.

Satisfied with what ii contained in that moment, not craving more. Not immortality nor youth. Not fame nor fortune.

Just content in its place in the geometry and beauty of the moment.

An immortal moment.

True wealth. 

You’ve probably had enough Christmas music at this point of the season so here’s a song to go along with the thought. It’s Baby You’re a Rich Man from the Beatles. It beats hearing Last Christmas for the umpteenth time from Wham! or the seemingly endless string of singers who have covered it.

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The Singularity

December 20, 2024 by redtreetimes

GC Myers- Lux Templi

Lux Templi-At the West End Gallery

Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity
we once were?

— Marie Howe, The Singularity

Yesterday, I came across a post from about four years ago of this short animation of a poem from poet Marie Howe. The post and the poem had slipped my mind, but I was moved upon reading it again.

Her poem is titled Singularity and refers to the theory from Stephen Hawking, and others as well. The accepted theory is that when a star dies it collapses into itself until it is finally a single tiny point of zero radius, infinite density, and infinite curvature of spacetime at the heart of the black hole formed from the star’s collapse. A single point of immense mass and energy This was referred to as a singularity. 

Hawking looked at this singularity and wondered since this was the end point of star’s death could it not also be the starting point for future new universes that might emerge if this singularity were to explode outward– the Big Bang Theory.

The underlying thought is that the universe and all that it is was once a single thing before the Big Bang created all that we know the universe to be now.

We were all part of one thing.

No, we were that one thing.

That is as simple as I can put it and still understand it. I am not even sure that simple explanation is correct. Probably off by a large fraction, like the final garbled message in the old Telephone Game, where something is whispered in one kid’s ear at a table. They then whisper it into the kid next to them and so on. By the time the message gets to the final kid, the message usually only contains a small part of the original message. I am probably that kid near the end of this process.

 Admittedly, and much like Howe explains to her audience, my own grasp of advanced physics and most other great scientific theoretical concepts is limited. But the idea that we were once one and that we may all at some point become one again is somehow appealing to something inside me. It makes me think that maybe a form of singularity is the goal of all art– both an inward reduction of totality into a single tiny point as well as an outward explosion of this same totality.

Expressions of mortality and rebirth.

I don’t know for sure. This is just what the kid next to me whispered in my ear. If I’m way off base here, blame it on him. 

 The entire Marie Howe poem is below the video. Take a look then get the heck out of here. I got plans to either collapse or explode this morning. Not sure which it will be. Probably a theory on that somewhere.

 

SINGULARITY
by Marie Howe

(after Stephen Hawking)

Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity
we once were?

so compact nobody
needed a bed, or food or money —

nobody hiding in the school bathroom
or home alone

pulling open the drawer
where the pills are kept.

For every atom belonging to me as good
Belongs to you.   Remember?

There was no   Nature.    No
them.   No tests

to determine if the elephant
grieves her calf    or if

the coral reef feels pain.    Trashed
oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French;

would that we could wake up   to what we were
— when we were ocean    and before that

to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was
liquid and stars were space and space was not

at all — nothing

before we came to believe humans were so important
before this awful loneliness.

Can molecules recall it?
what once was?    before anything happened?

No I, no We, no one. No was
No verb      no noun
only a tiny tiny dot brimming with

is is is is is

All   everything   home

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To Find is the Thing.

December 19, 2024 by redtreetimes

GC Myers- Time Patterns 2024

Time Patterns– At West End Gallery

I can hardly understand the importance given to the word research in connection with modern painting. In my opinion to search means nothing in painting. To find is the thing. Nobody is interested in following a man who, with his eyes fixed on the ground, spends his life looking for the purse that fortune should put in his path. The one who finds something no matter what it might be, even if his intention were not to search for it, at least arouses our curiosity, if not our admiration.

—Pablo Picasso, “Picasso Speaks,” 1923

To find is the thing…

I often write here about searching for something with my work. It’s usually something I can’t describe in any way that helps myself or the reader. It’s just something that pulls me forward.

Well, that’s what I thought, for the most part.

Reading the passage above from Picasso recently set me thinking that perhaps it was not a search at all, at least not in the way I had portrayed it.

Perhaps I was driven onward because I had found something and felt the need to express and share it. Or perhaps to keep that feeling of discovery, that eureka! moment, alive within myself– and within others who sensed whatever I had found for themselves when they viewed the work.

I can’t say for sure. I am still wrangling with this. But it makes some sense to me. A painting begins as an exploration, a search, but as it progresses it moves toward a revelation of some sort. The search is in the process, not in the resulting work.

At least, for the artist. It may differ for the viewer. They may see it as a way toward something they need and seek. Something they may not even realize is needed or sought. Perhaps they will find that same thing in the final work that that I had found, that same thing that seems to somehow answer vague, unasked questions.

Who knows for sure? But this idea that the work in not so much a search as it is a revealing of what has been found satisfies something in me.

Maybe that what was I was looking for in the first place?

Or maybe this is all one of those dreams where everything you wonder about suddenly seems to make perfect sense and there is that momentary feeling of elation that is then suddenly and completely gone once your eyes open.

Could it be that?

I don’t know but here’s an old song from Todd Rundgren that came to mind while I was finishing up. I haven’t heard this tune in many years and Todd Rundgren is one of those artists who was very popular in the 70’s but has faded somewhat from the front of the public mind the in the decades that followed, though he still is actively recording and performing. Just on a smaller stage as the musical outlets    became narrower and more niched. This is I Saw the Light.

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