I don’t know if solitude is for everybody. Some people might look at the painting above with a little discomfort, seeing only isolation and loneliness in it. But for myself, it represents a total freedom of the self, one that allows one’s absolute truth to emerge. A freedom that allows one to experience clear glimpses of our connection with all being.
The lines above from Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage express this feeling well. Alone on a shore, one can begin to hear and converse with nature. The lap and roar of the sea becomes language as does the light of the sun and moon as it sifts through clouds above. It is in these conversations that we come to better understand that we are both small and large, insignificant yet integral.
Of course, this is not a practical matter for most of us. I have my own little island of solitude here in my studio but am not isolated. My regular life has me out in the world, interacting with people on a semi-regular basis. But knowing that I will soon be back on my island where the only conversation taking place is in myself steadies me on those occasions.
Hermann Hesse put it well in the excerpt below from his book, Reflections. He mentions it as being a way of bitter suffering. I suppose initially, for those who have been always in the society of others and seldom alone, this may be the case when faced with solitude. But, as he points out, when you get past that discomfort, the rewards of solitude are rapturous.
We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one with all being.
― Hermann Hesse, Reflections
This post is from about five years. I read it this morning and it fit my mood and the painting above so well that I thought I’d rerun it. I had to laugh reading the original because it said I interacted with the public on a regular basis. This was pre-pandemic, of course. In the intervening years I have withdrawn even more. Moved my island a little further from the shore, to put it another way. I ended up changing that to interacting on a semi-regular basis. In five more years I might change that to on a rare occasion. or once in a blue moon. Who knows?
Noon hour in the Ewen Breaker, Pennsylvania Coal Co. / Lewis Hine
It’s such a little song it don’t compare With all your big ones you hear everywhere But when it dawns way in the back of your mind The big ones are made up of the little kind
Union song, union battled All added up won us all what we got now
— I Guess I Planted, Woody Guthrie lyrics/ Billy Bragg/Wilco
Yet another Labor Day.
I consider myself a workingman. A laborer. Always have. Most of my jobs have required physical labor, even this one. I was maybe 20 years old when I was classified as a Skilled Laborer– a Lead Candy Cook– at the old A&P food processing plant here in Horseheads. I became a Teamsters Union steward for my department around then and saw firsthand the effect the benefits and protections a labor union provides can have on working people.
Maybe that’s why I get a bit defensive about the meaning and background of Labor Day. If you ask someone what the holiday represents, they will generally say that it is symbolic end of summer. A last picnic. One last real summer weekend at the lake or shore. If you push them harder, they might finally say that it honors the workers of this country.
But it was created to celebrate the American Labor Movement, those unions and organizers that brought about all of the changes that Dr. King pointed in his 1965 speech before the AFL-CIO:
The labor movement was the principal force that transformed misery and despair into hope and progress. Out of its bold struggles, economic and social reform gave birth to unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, government relief for the destitute and, above all, new wage levels that meant not mere survival but a tolerable life. The captains of industry did not lead this transformation; they resisted it until they were overcome. When in the thirties the wave of union organization crested over the nation, it carried to secure shores not only itself but the whole society.
Fair wages, a shorter workday, a safer workplace, pensions, unemployment insurance, health insurance, vacations, maternity leave, paid holidays such as today– all of these things came from the hard and dangerous efforts of union organizers.
As King points out, the owners– the captains of industry or job creators as we fawningly call them now— did not agree willingly to these changes.
Hardly.
No, they fought with every resource at their disposal including the influence they bought from politicians and the use of intimidation and violence. The history of the labor movement is littered with bodies of workers killed in skirmishes with the hired thugs of the owners.
Every step of progress throughout our history has been opposed by those in power. But progress and change has always come thanks to the efforts of people like those brave folks in the labor movement.
The use of children in the workforce was another thing that was ultimately changed by the labor movement. It’s hard to believe that the scenes shown here in the famed photos of photographer and social reformer Lewis Hine took place just over a hundred years ago in the coal mines of eastern Pennsylvania. Harder yet to believe is that federal labor laws for child labor were not fully enacted until 1938. Earlier attempts at legislation by congress in 1916 and 1922 had been challenged in court by industry and were deemed unconstitutional.
Imagine your child (or your nephew or grandchild) at age 12. Imagine them spending 10 or 12 or even 14 hours a day, six days a week in one of the breaker rooms of a coal mine like the one shown here on the right. Hunched over in the gritty dust of the coal, they picked the coal for differing sizes and to sort out impurities. Imagine the men who are shown in the photo with sticks poking your child, perhaps kicking him to speed him up. Imagine all of this for seven and a half cents per hour.
There were no schoolbooks for these kids. No soccer or Little League. No violin practices. No college prep or videogames. Just a future filled with misery and drudgery and most likely a black lung.
Try to imagine that.
And think that it was all taking place less than a hundred years ago and it ended because of the labor unions and the brave and conscientious people who fought for them.
I know there are problems that arose in the unions over time. They are not perfect by any means. Like all things human, they are susceptible to corruption and selfishness.
But that doesn’t take away from the incredible progress that labor unions provided for our nation’s workers which gave us the most prosperous times in our history. Despite their shortcomings, the idea of workers uniting to have one strong voice is as important now as it was a century ago. Perhaps even more now that corporate world’s political power is enormous and the wealth which buys it is concentrated at the very top at historic levels. In fact, child labor is back on the table for many job creators once more with a major political party advocating for it.
So, celebrate the day at the shore or in a picnic. Have a great day. But take one single moment and think of those kids in those Pennsylvania mines or in those southern mills and the union organizers who battled and bled for much of what you have if you’re in the working class, people who toil every day with little if any recognition, trying to merely live their lives. They raise their kids, they pay their bills, and they simply try to just get along without bothering anyone or being bothered.
They are the people who built this country. They built our infrastructure– the roads, bridges, railroads, power lines along with the schools and factories. They worked in the fields and in the foundries and factories and manned the trains and trucks that brought the products to market. Moreover, these are the people who consumed the products that were made, moved and marketed here.
These were the people who created the wealth of this nation.
I know that this is sounding like a spiel for the 99% of us and against the 1%. Maybe it is. I have gotten so tired of hearing about the job creators and how they must be protected and coddled when very few are pointing out that the great wealth that these few possess came from the sweat and pocketbooks of the many. They didn’t create jobs out of sheer benevolence, for the good of the people. They hire because these employees make even more money for them. They are mere capital investments that produce great returns and once the great returns go away, so do the jobs.
Now don’t get me wrong. It seems that when anybody makes the case for more equality of wealth, they are branded as being anti-capitalist and anti-business. Or communist or socialist which is the preferred nomenclature these days by right-wing political candidates and online trolls.
This is not the case at all.
The greatness of this country comes from this opportunity to succeed in a huge way, to take an idea or an innovation and set the world on fire with it.
You should be rewarded richly.
But remember it comes from the people. Unless you have the people who can afford to buy your product or idea, unless you have the infrastructure these people built to carry that product to these buyers, unless you have the fire fighters and police to protect your homes and offices, an efficient health system to keep people alive, and clean air to breath and clear water to drink, it will never happen.
You can be a hero to many by being a job creator but you must take some responsibility for the everyday heroes who have made you wealthy, probably beyond anything most of these working folks can fathom. It is part of the unwritten contract of our land.
It is only fair.
And that is all the working class has ever asked for–fairness.
After all, though you might be a job creator, they are the true wealth creators.
Okay, I got my spiel out. It’s a mashup of a couple of posts from the past. I’ve added a song from one of my very favorite albums, Mermaid Avenue, from the collaboration of Billy Bragg and Wilco. This is the album where they added music and vocals to unrecorded Woody Guthrie lyrics. Great stuff. Many are pro-labor, which is no surprise to anyone who knows anything about Woody Guthrie. This song, I Guess I Planted, is about the collective power of a union.
For summer there, bear in mind, is a loitering gossip, that only begins to talk of leaving when September rises to go.
–George Washington Cable, The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life (1880)
Ah, September is here, at last.
I have expressed my dislike of August here a number of times over the years. There has often been a grimness in its heat and humidity that always seemed to align itself with some of the lower moments in my life. I dread the month each year but made a conscious effort this year to not mention my distaste for August as it seemed to proceed in a way that was not too awful.
It actually felt a little, how do I say this–good? Well, better than most of the Augusts that I have endured in the 60-some years I can remember on this planet.
Good feels odd coming out of my mouth.
However, even with a relatively upbeat August, it feels better moving into September. There is a cool mist in the air this morning that foretells even cooler mornings to come. Maple leaves are beginning to show a slight change of color and a few leaves have fallen to the ground already.
My internal clock seems to slow a bit with the coming of September. I don’t feel quite so pushed or anxious. Oh, the angst is still there but it moves a bit slower and is a little less aggressive. More manageable.
It has become a tradition here that on each year on this first day of September that I play a very favorite song of mine, September Song. It’s a classic from the American songbook, written in the late 1930’s by Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson for the Broadway musical, Knickerbocker Holiday. It has been recorded by scores of singers over the past century. I have shared performances of it by Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Willie Nelson and several others on this date on this blog. I have never shared the Frank Sinatra version for some unknown reason. It just seemed to get pushed a side since I am such a fan of the versions from the three mentioned above. But Sinatra’s version is a great one as well. It comes from 1965 when he was about 50 years, just entering the autumn of his life much like the subject of the song, (which was Peter Stuyvesant, by the way.) Sinatra was at his creative peak when he recorded this which makes for a great version.
So, for the first Sunday Morning Music of this September, here’s Sinatra and his rendition of September Song.
Night, the beloved. Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of a tree.
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras
With the calm of a tree…
That says it all for me.
I look forward to the night now in a way that I never did when I was younger. It’s much like the passage above from the memoir of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. That time when day is done and tasks are either complete or set aside.
Time to clear the mind and regroup– to reassemble my fragmentary self and prepare for the mental reorganization that comes in dreaming.
And all with the calm of a tree.
I can’t imagine that having any appeal for me as a young person who restlessly wanted to get to the next thing quickly. However, I now look forward to the end of each day. It feels right. Grounded– like the roots of that same calm tree.
And that’s good enough for me.
And to tie thing up neatly, here’s a longtime favorite Leonard Cohen song, Night Comes On.
We are living through a revolt against the future. The future will prevail.
–Anand Giridharadas, The Ink, January 15, 2021
Taking a bit of a break since the West End Gallery show came down and wasn’t planning on writing anything this morning. But I saw Anand Giridharadas this morning on the tube speaking of the Harris/Walz campaign as being the politics of anti-inflammation, that they were normal, caring people whose inclusive stances stand as the direct antithesis to the uncaring, divisive, and inflammatory rhetoric coming from that other guy. He pointed out that we have had a decade or more beset by this sort of inflammatory fever and their campaign seems to serve as a balm of sorts.
I liked that. It reminded me of another article from Giridharadas that I featured here back in early 2021, in the week before the Biden inauguration. That article still seems pertinent today so I thought I’d share it again, as is.
The words above are the final line in a what I believe to be a brilliant essay from writer Anand Giridharadas that was posted a couple of days ago on his blog, The.Ink that bears the heading We are falling on our face because we are jumping high. I hope you’ll click on the link and read this short essay.
In it, he observes that the chaos that we are experiencing is not the chaos that often comes with the beginning of something but is actually the sort that comes with an ending. I have also felt for years that we were watching of the death throes of a certain type of power and control, that those who were predominantly white and male felt they were entitled.
We are falling on our face because we are jumping very high right now. We are trying to do something that does not work in theory.
To be a country of all the world, a country made up of all the countries, a country without a center of identity, without a default idea of what a human being is or looks like, without a shared religious belief, without a shared language that is people’s first language at home. And what we’re trying to do is awesome. It is literally awesome in the correct sense of that word.
This is one of my favorite passages from this essay. To be the country we desire it to be, one that offers equal hope for each of its citizens, is enormously difficult and unlike anything ever done. No nation has ever aspired to so diversely share its rights and governance among all the groups that make up its citizenry.
There are massive challenges and it will not be easy. And in a nation whose default setting is easy, that means we will have to do much more than that which we normally are accustomed to doing. We will have to work and scrap, to strain far beyond what we believe our limits to be.
But if it succeeds, we all benefit, all boats are lifted and we all become part and parcel of something great, something unique in human history.
Something of which we can all truly be proud.
Please give Mr. Giridharadas’ essay a read. It is short but potently hopeful. Definitely worth a few minutes.
For this week’s Sunday Morning Music [this was a Sunday in January, 2021], I am going with a recent tune, Tough to Let Go, from the Drive-By Truckers, whose last couple of albums have been dark and timely. I think it says a lot about what we are seeing in the chaos of this struggle between those who look to the future and those who want to hold onto an imagined past. Our beliefs, even when we can see that they defy logic and fact, are sometimes tough to leave behind. They continue to haunt us and dictate our actions until we can fully separate ourselves from them.
I am thankful for small mercies. I compared notes with one of my friends who expect everything of the universe, and is disappointed when anything is less than the best, and I found that I begin at the other extreme, expecting nothing, and am always full of thanks for moderate good…. If we will take the good we find,… we shall have heaping measures….
–Ralph Waldo Emerson, Experience
Today is the last day to see this year’s edition of my annual solo show, Persistent Rhythm, at the West End Gallery.
It’s always a little bittersweet at the end of any show, seeing the work come off the walls. You wish it could stay up longer, of course. Or that certain pieces had garnered more attention. Or that you could have changed one thing or another or said something different at some time in the gallery.
But it’s also a time to look back on the show with a sense of pride and gratitude. Pride in the sense that I feel that I have done my very best and that each piece in the show well represents what I hope shows through in my work.
The gratitude is for the opportunity to do what I do. Gratitude for those who follow my work and support me. Gratitude for the gallery owners, such as Jesse Gardner at the West End Gallery, who have graciously given me the opportunity to showcase my work. Gratitude for the opportunity to express myself in the way I want.
Yeah, it feels a little sad when a show ends but it also highlights how fortunate I have been to even have a show in the first place.
And that is, in the words of Emerson, one of those small mercies.
And thank you for reading along. Much appreciated.
Now get out of here before I poke you with a stick…
How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.
–Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900)
At the Gallery Talk for my show at the West End Gallery, I mentioned that I wanted to be a writer as a young person. Painting wasn’t even on the table at that time. I said that I was never really a great storyteller, that my writing seemed to always find its way to describing wide open spaces and the silences contained in them.
Not the most fertile ground for great narratives.
I realized at some point that writing would never be the vehicle for carrying whatever it was that I had a need to get across to others. It might have been that my skills were lacking to describe things that were beyond words. Things in the atmosphere, things that we only sense on a subconscious level.
Years later, I found that painting best filled my needs. I found that it was easier to create a meaning for space and silence visually rather than with words that sometimes felt inelegant and insufficient. Painting certainly got my point across more specifically and succinctly than the plodding paragraphs I was producing.
It created a means of access for people other than me to those inaudible feelings and purposes, as Dreiser called them above, in a way that I could never achieve with my writing.
Painting has definitely been more satisfying for me.
It gets me there.
And that’s all I can ask of it.
The painting at the top is a good example of what I am talking about. It would be hard for me to put together a readable and interesting narrative that would fully describe what I sense in this piece with a glance.
Its vague shadows and light say more than many thousands of my words.
The painting is a 30″ by 48″ canvas titled The Blue Moon Calls. It was a late addition to my Persistent Rhythm solo show at the West End Gallery. The show ends at the end of the day tomorrow, Thursday, August 29.
Between the Sea and the Sun— Now at West End Gallery
I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me. That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea. My soul knows that I am part of the human race, my soul is an organic part of the great human soul, as my spirit is part of my nation. In my own very self, I am part of my family. There is nothing of me that is alone and absolute except my mind, and we shall find that the mind has no existence by itself, it is only the glitter of the sun on the surface of the water.
– D.H. Lawrence, Apocalypse, 1930
Just a reminder that there only THREE DAYS left to see my solo exhibit, Persistent Rhythm, at the West End Gallery in Corning. The show comes down at the end of the day this Thursday, August 29th.
I am proud of the work in this show and feel it might well be one of my most cohesive shows, meaning that I didn’t feel as though there was a drop off in quality or expressiveness throughout the group. Each piece had its own lifeforce, its own message, that added to the group as a whole.
I’ve always adhered to the paint the paintings you want to see theory which basically means that there are things you have a need to see in art sometimes that you’re not seeing so it’s up to you to create them. That was pretty much why I began painting and it holds true to this very day. I think this show exemplifies that idea. This show has an overall feel and look that is what I have hoped to come across in the past in looking at the work of others.
Something that would satisfy a need inside me. Feed the soul, as it were.
And it does. Plus, it just looks damn good to my eye. But that’s just me, of course.
Here’s a tune from an artist of which you most likely are unaware. His name is Davy Graham who died in 2008 at the age of 68. He was a British folk/Baroque guitarist who had a style of playing that made him very influential among players in the 1960’s, Paul Simon, Richard Thompson, and Jimmy Page among them. I thought the song below, Rif Mountain, lined up well with the painting at the top from my show and the passage from D.H. Lawrence below it.
What we call our destiny is truly our character and that character can be altered. The knowledge that we are responsible for our actions and attitudes does not need to be discouraging, because it also means that we are free to change this destiny. One is not in bondage to the past, which has shaped our feelings, to race, inheritance, background. All this can be altered if we have the courage to examine how it formed us. We can alter the chemistry provided we have the courage to dissect the elements.
–Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin (1931-1934)
I think this passage from The Diary of Anaïs Nin fits the painting above from my current show at the West End Gallery very well. The way I read this piece, titled White in the Moon, is that it is about the figure in the foreground revisiting their past.
The house, along with the tree, represents their childhood and their early home while the path from it symbolizes the road they have followed away from that place and time. The fields through the path winds represents the patchwork of memory and experience that has brought them to this point from which they now look back.
The light from the moon brings it all alive. It reminds me of an animation I once saw of how the brain works. It pointed out that certain thoughts and memories awaken parts of the brain which was illustrated by that part of the brain suddenly glowing with light.
Maybe that is how memory of our past works– as though we are shining a light on it so that we may get a better look at it.
Nin points out that while we carry the past with us in the form of memories and experiences, we are not anchored by it. We are free to move beyond this past, as well as any other thing that be used to hold us in place such as those she mentions– race, inheritance and background.
Yes, we carry these things of our past with us. Yes, they have shaped our feelings and define us to a degree. But only to a degree. We should live as evolving creatures, continuously adding new experiences and perspectives.
While we may look back at that childhood home from which we came from time to time, it is no longer our home. We now live in a different time and place as a very much changed being.
Examining how we came to be this version of ourselves, to see how the various parts fell into place, allows us to set a course forward, to choose how we may change even more. That can be a scary prospect for some, especially for those who have anchored themselves to the past, but it can be a liberating and expansive feeling.
The road that runs away from our past can be very much open to us. We just to make conscious decisions to follow it forward.
I hope this makes sense since I am clicking the publish button without rereading it. White in the Moon is 18″ by 24″ on canvas and is part of my Persistent Rhythm show at the West End Gallery. The exhibit comes down after the end of the day on this Thursday, August 29.
Here’s what I believe is a fitting piece of music for this post as well as a lovely way to start your week. It’s from contemporary composer Max Richter and is titled She Remembers.
Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh and the greatness which does not bow before children.
― Kahlil Gibran, Mirrors of the Soul
I cry quite often.
I am sure there was a time when I would not admit to this., possibly seeing it as a sign of weakness. As I age, I find myself becoming more transparent Less guarded and less caring of the opinions of others. I have come to see it simply as a part of being human. Certainly nothing to hide.
Like most everyone, I cry at sorrow and loss, such as those times when I miss my parents or grandparents. But I never cry for myself as I once did as very young child.
Certainly, never out of pity for myself or at those all too often instances when I have hurt myself. I learned long ago that that kind of crying didn’t change a thing and just wasted the time needed to get things straightened out. Actually, when things go wrong for me, I usually react with laughter. It helps more than you know. Much more satisfying, that’s for sure.
But I cry a lot. At beauty. At wonder. At the inherent power in goodness and love. At the courage and righteousness of those defiant few that confront hatred and injustice. At the sacrifices made by regular people to help others. At unexpected kindnesses offered. At those moments of feeling attached to all deep feelings. At things that make me absolutely joyous.
I cry sometimes simply at seeing the pure happiness of others.
There are passages in literature and music that instantly bring me to tears. And so many scenes from films. Henry Fonda‘s final scene in The Grapes of Wrath always makes me cry. I also tear up every single time I see the Marsellaise scene from the famous scene in Casablanca where the patrons at Rick’s Cafe drown out the singing Nazis there with their singing of the French national anthem. I am not exactly a Francophile, but that reaction has transferred to just hearing the Marsellaise anytime. Several times during the Olympics. There’s a defiant boldness in it that speaks to whatever it that triggers my tears.
I was brought to tears seeing Gus Walz, the 17-year-old son of vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz, at this past week’s Democratic National Convention openly sob and cry out “That’s my dad!” as his father came to the stage to thunderous applause. It was such an authentic moment of pure joy, pride, and love. It made me like Tim Walz even more because someone who inspires that kind of public outburst of love from their children is obviously a good and loving parent and person.
I also envied him. I can’t think of anyone who would be crying with that kind of love or joy for me in that instance.
Those on the rightwing immediately attacked the younger Walz for his very human display of emotion. It was predictable and right on point for that party as it is now constituted. Cruelty and mockery are among their trademarks now and any recognition of the human qualities of empathy, kindness, and caring is absent. All I could think is how pitiful and awful these people have become. They lack love and warmth for humanity and, as a result, will never know or even imagine the kind of love that would inspire such a reaction from their children.
It is a sad commentary on how that party has transformed in recent decades. I would choose Gus’ raw human emotions over their joyless and ugly cruelty anytime.
Okay, that’s off my chest. Thanks, if you read this far. Here’s this week’s Sunday Morning Music selection. It’s a great performance by k.d. lang of the song Crying from a tribute to Roy Orbison soon after he died. She had performed a wonderful duet with Orbison of this song before.
I can’t say this brought me to tears but there are moments here where she has me in absolute awe. Maybe a tear or two, I don’t know.
Imagine your child (or your nephew or grandchild) at age 12. Imagine them spending 10 or 12 or even 14 hours a day, six days a week in one of the breaker rooms of a coal mine like the one shown here on the right. Hunched over in the gritty dust of the coal, they picked the coal for differing sizes and to sort out impurities. Imagine the men who are shown in the photo with sticks poking your child, perhaps kicking him to speed him up. Imagine all of this for seven and a half cents per hour.
Redtree Times 