The first progressive step for a mind overwhelmed by the strangeness of things is to realize that this feeling of strangeness is shared with all men and that human reality, in its entirety, suffers from the distance which separates it from the rest of the universe.
–Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt (1951)
I live a pretty isolated existence so I can’t speak for everyone, but it seems like a lot of people are feeling alienated by the jumbled strangeness that is taking place. It’s an overwhelming sense that the landscape around you as well as the people within it and their customs are foreign to you, that you somehow don’t fit in.
It’s a sense of feeling like a stranger in a strange land, to use that term that descended to us from Moses in the book of Exodus and its later use as the title for the sci-fi classic from Robert Heinlein. It’s a term I’ve employed a number of times through the years to describe the sense of alienation with which I have sometimes struggled.
I have to admit that this feeling is in air around me in recent times. However, this sense that many others may well be experiencing that same sense of estrangement from an existence that once felt naturally homelike makes me believe, like the words at the top from Camus, that there is a progressive step, a way forward from this, at least for us as a group.
Though it overwhelms our minds now, we have to understand that the reality that we observe in this moment does not have to last forever. And because there are so many of us feeling this new sense of strangeness, it will not.
That’s just my feeling this morning. There may not be anything instructive in it. But it perhaps it can provide some comfort, as strangers in this strange land, knowing that beyond the now alien emptiness around us there are others who are looking up at those same seven moons, wondering as I do how they came to be and if they will always be there.
Here’s song that sprang to mind just now. Actually, the lines from the chorus:
Nobody told me there’d be days like these Strange days indeed Most peculiar, mama
It’s Nobody Told Me from John Lennon, recorded near the end of his life and released several years after his murder.
We need limitations and temptations to open our inner selves, dispel our ignorance, tear off disguises, throw down old idols, and destroy false standards. Only by such rude awakenings can we be led to dwell in a place where we are less cramped, less hindered by the ever-insistent External. Only then do we discover a new capacity and appreciation of goodness and beauty and truth.
–Helen Keller, Light in My Darkness (1927)
I came across the passage above from Helen Keller and felt it pretty much summed up what I often try to describe here about the inner landscapes that we create within ourselves, those places that I attempt to represent in my work.
This passage comes from a chapter called Opening the Inner Eye, where she writes of how the limitations set upon her by her disabilities forced her to find compensations that allowed her to function in the outer world. More than that, it opened up an inner landscape to her, a place where she could be her best self. This allowed her to realize that happiness or self-contentment has little to do with outward circumstances but comes from within.
She writes of those who are not physically disabled, people who are living without limitations which has made them “mentally blinded” to this inner world. They are never forced to seek new capabilities within themselves and, as a result, resist anything– society, church, etc.– that expects them to display what Keller describes as nobler things from them. She adds that they then stumble through life with their mental blindness, saying in effect, in her words, “I will be content if you take me for what I am — dull, or mean, or hard, or selfish”
It makes me wonder if perhaps the great divide in this world right now is between those who have opened their inner eye and those who are mentally blind, sometimes willfully so. Might it be a conflict between those who seek to grow into those nobler things and those who refuse to recognize– or are blind to– their lack of them?
Just wondering this morning. I don’t know that there is an answer. In my inner landscape, that’s okay.
Here’s a wonderful piece of music for strolling through that place. This is Cavatina as performed by guitarist John Williams. It was written in 1970 by British composer Stanley Myers (no relation!) for the film The Walking Stick. This version from Williams is better known as the theme for the film The Deer Hunter.
We do not belong to those who only get their thought from books, or at the prompting of books, — it is our custom to think in the open air, walking, leaping, climbing, or dancing on lonesome mountains by preference, or close to the sea, where even the paths become thoughtful.
–Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882)
Below is a poem from the late Nobel Prize-winning Polish poetessWislawa Szymborska (1923–2012) calledPossibilities. I featured it here back in 2015 but it struck my fancy this morning and I thought I’d share it again and maybe add a bit to the original blogpost. It is basically a laundry list of her personal preferences. Some are small and some significant but all contribute mightily to her wholeness as a person. We are all the totality of our own laundry lists of preferences that define our character and personality just as our DNA determines our physical characteristics.
It’s a simple yet thought-provokingly complex poem that leave me wondering about my own preferences, my own possibilities. What are those small things that give you shape, make you who you are? Do we rely solely on these preferences in making the choices that we face in this life? Or do we sometimes make choices that do not align with our own preferences?
There are a lot of Symborska’s preferences that strike a chord with me. For instance: I prefer myself liking people to myself loving mankind. That certainly has been my preference for most of my conscious life.
Then there’s: I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems. Like writing poetry, painting can often seem like an absurd thing to do. I often find myself asking why I am alone in the woods smearing paint on surfaces. Is there a purpose or meaning in it?
But I have known the other side of that coin, living a life where I wasn’t painting, and that existence was far more absurd for me. Absurd to an unsustainable degree.
And that final line says it all: I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility that existence has its own reason for being. We may never know whether there is a reason for our being but that should not take away from the life we have here.
If this is all we get, live by the possibility of your own preferences and not those of any other.
Live as you are. As you want to be.
You might not agree with some of her preferences. That’s okay– they’re not yours to determine. She is simply giving us a loose outline of her individual nature, her humanity. And there’s poetry in that for any of us.
I am also including a song which was a favorite of Symborska, who requested that the version below from Ella Fitzgerald be played at her funeral. The song is Black Coffee and since being written in 1948 by Sonny Burke it has been covered by some of the great vocalists of our times– Sarah Vaughan, Peggy Lee, k.d. lang and so forth. You could pick any as your preference and they are all special. It’s that kind of song. But this version from the great and grand Ella Fitzgerald is extra special.
POSSIBILITIES
I prefer movies. I prefer cats. I prefer the oaks along the Warta. I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky. I prefer myself liking people to myself loving mankind. I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case. I prefer the color green. I prefer not to maintain that reason is to blame for everything. I prefer exceptions. I prefer to leave early. I prefer talking to doctors about something else. I prefer the old fine-lined illustrations. I prefer the absurdity of writing poems to the absurdity of not writing poems. I prefer, where love’s concerned, nonspecific anniversaries that can be celebrated every day. I prefer moralists who promise me nothing. I prefer cunning kindness to the over-trustful kind. I prefer the earth in civvies. I prefer conquered to conquering countries. I prefer having some reservations. I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order. I prefer Grimms’ fairy tales to the newspapers’ front pages. I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves. I prefer dogs with uncropped tails. I prefer light eyes, since mine are dark. I prefer desk drawers. I prefer many things that I haven’t mentioned here to many things I’ve also left unsaid. I prefer zeroes on the loose to those lined up behind a cipher. I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars. I prefer to knock on wood. I prefer not to ask how much longer and when. I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility that existence has its own reason for being.
My delight and thy delight Walking, like two angels white, In the gardens of the night:
My desire and thy desire Twining to a tongue of fire, Leaping live, and laughing higher:
Thro’ the everlasting strife In the mystery of life.
Love, from whom the world begun, Hath the secret of the sun.
Love can tell, and love alone, Whence the million stars were strewn, Why each atom knows its own, How, in spite of woe and death, Gay is life, and sweet is breath:
This he taught us, this we knew, Happy in his science true, Hand in hand as we stood ‘Neath the shadows of the wood, Heart to heart as we lay In the dawning of the day.
— Robert Bridges, My Delight and Thy Delight (1899)
I have things to attend to this morning, so I am sharing a simple trio that deals with something other than the state of the world or even the creative process. The trio today has more to do with love. I guess you could argue that love– or the lack of it– plays a vital part in both the state of the world and the creative process. So, maybe it is pertinent?
I don’t know. I just like this group and felt they all interwove well with each other, all dealing in a way with the theme of two angels. The poem above is from Robert Seymour Bridges (1844-1930) who was a British poet and the Poet Laureate of Britain from 1913 -1930. I was going to include just the first verse but the poem is not that long.
The song, Two Angels, is a longtime favorite from Peter Case. The painting at the top, All of Time, is at the West End Gallery. It’s one of those pieces that stick in my mind, maybe because its creation didn’t come easily. I began it then set it aside for a long time, often looking at what was there and wondering what the next step would be. It was a bit of an enigma. I was finally able to complete it so that it both pleased me deeply and found its own voice. That’s always satisfying.
The hard-fought ones often leave the deepest impressions—in painting as well in love and in life.
This dead of midnight is the noon of thought, And Wisdom mounts her zenith with the stars. At this still hour the self-collected soul Turns inward, and beholds a stranger there Of high descent, and more than mortal rank; An embryo God; a spark of fire divine.
—A Summer’s Evening Meditation, Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743-1825)
I had come across the short verse, taken from a much longer 1773 poem, above a few months ago and set it aside with the intent of using it in a blogpost at some point. I wasn’t sure how to use it or if what I was reading in it was the intent of the poet.
This raised a whole bunch of questions, beginning with: Does the author’s intent matter in what I was seeing in her words? Or does what I see in one of my paintings matter in how others see it? Is someone’s else interpretation of it equally valid even if it differs greatly from my own?
Some tough ones there.
I often use quotes and short passages from literature to initiate a post. While I try to discover their original context and meaning and adhere somewhat to it with my use, I take liberties in my interpretation. I may read something into them that was not part of the original intent, just like you may look at a painting of mine and see something that speaks something to you that is different from or beyond what I saw in it. Something that speaks in a personal language that only you know, something drawn from your own life experiences and sensations.
I think it’s all appropriate so long as the differing interpretation is not employed as justification for anything harmful or denigrating to others. I worry sometimes about that, more so with the writing here than with my painting. Sometimes, in trying to not be too specific on a subject, I recognize the rhetoric of what I have written might be equally applied by those who have a viewpoint that is in complete opposition to what I meant. For example, the definitions of freedom or revolution I write about might not be the same as someone else.
And the vice versa applies here. I check for the original meaning and context because many years ago I used a quote without checking. It’s been long enough that I can’t remember the subject of the quote or from where it came. Whatever it was, it seemed to serve what I wanted to say. I later found out from a reader that its original meaning was the complete antithesis of what I read into it and was trying to convey in the post, that it came from a person associated with hate groups and was meant to advocate some form of white supremacy.
I was mortified and deleted the post immediately. Since then, I try to find the context of anything I use.
But for the most part, the meaning and purpose one takes from a piece of writing, music, or art is theirs alone. I have often told the story of a lady approaching me at an opening. We stood before a painting of mine that was simple composition, sections of two tree trunks that intertwined around each other as they bisected the painting’s surface from bottom to top. I saw in it a certain human sensuality, one that spoke about how we depend on the assistance and affection of others. She hated the painting and let me know that she saw nothing but the subjugation of women and male dominance in it.
I was stunned. I didn’t see anything like that in that piece before she spoke. I saw it after even if it still didn’t register fully in the way she saw it. But I could see what she was seeing.
I didn’t try to tear down her viewpoint or justify my own. No matter how hard I might try to assure her that it was never intended that way, what she saw was what she saw. Her reading of it was as valid as my own. And I let her know that.
And I guess that’s the way it should be, in most cases. You do what you do, you try to express what you are as a human in a way that you hope comes across clearly to others and that whatever you do, it doesn’t harm or be used to harm others. For the most part, it works out okay. Sometimes, it doesn’t.
You just hope you’re not too badly misunderstood. Or worse than that, not heard at all.
Here’s song on that subject. It’s a fine interpretation of a favorite Animals‘ song, Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood from Cyndi Lauper. Good stuff.
Passionata–Included in Little Gems at West End Gallery
There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance … some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning-together from the vertical which produces the false arch. For lack of a keystone, the false arch may be as much as one can expect in this life. Only the very lucky discover the keystone.
― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
Valentine’s Day in the year 2025. Though there is a lot that could be said about both the Valentine’s Day type of love and the year 2025, the two seem incompatible. At this place and time–2025– writing about romantic love seems almost trivial. And that might be a mistake as it may be only love, in its many facets, that sustains us going forward. So, for this Valentine’s Day in the year 2025, I am going back to a post from the good old days– 2022 (yikes!)– that deals with the sustaining power of love. The only difference is the painting at the top from the Little Gems show, which nonetheless serves as well as the painting shown in the original post.
The lines above from the 1972 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Angle of Repose, from the late Wallace Stegner really jumped out at me this morning. To be honest, I haven’t read the book so can’t speak to its context but its concept of two vertical lines tipping together so that they meet and prop each other up to create a self-supporting false arch just seemed like the perfect imagery for today, Valentine’s Day.
Every lasting relationship depends on this arch. I hesitate to use the word “false” though I understand it is in reference to the distinction between “true” arches that have angled stones and a keystone at its apex that binds it all together and “false” arches that have the appearance and serve the same purpose but are constructed in a less sophisticated manner, sometimes haphazardly or by sheer accident.
Two trees falling against one another in the forest, for example.
Or maybe even two trees that grow together and eventually seem almost as one. a la the trees in my Baucis and Philemon based paintings.
I’ve been part of such a false arch for a very long time and as a result Valentine’s Day takes on a different look for me. Though it maintains a romantic aspect, it is more about a deeper recognition and appreciation of all the many aspects that make up that other vertical line that somehow fell my way all so many years ago to create our false arch.
And, as the Stegner lines above point out, this false arch might be as much as one can expect in this life. I certainly can’t ask for anything more.
Here’s one of my favorite Rickie Lee Jones songs, one that seems fit for this post. It’s a song that I never thought received the recognition it deserved. This is We Belong Together, from her classic 1981 album, Pirates, with its cover photo from Brassai of two Parisian lovers of the 1930’s.
It is the artist’s business to create sunshine when the sun fails.
–Romain Rolland, Jean-Christophe, (1904)
I am generally a fan of winter weather. I like colder weather and snow and the quiet it brings. Even so, I have to admit that I am getting tired of it this year. Tired of slipping and sliding on ice, probably because I am still working off a slight concussion from a fall this past weekend that had me stumbling around like a middleweight boxer who had just been hit flush with a haymaker and is forced to take a standing eight count to regain his bearings. Tired of the oppressiveness of the sky’s constant grayness which matches my mood or that of the country a little too much. Tired of wearing layers and layers of clothing and having to put on crampons (ice cleats) just to walk to the studio.
Even the beauty of the snow is compromised at the moment. Here in the woods, it has no fluffiness or moisture now. The thought of going out and perhaps laying in the snow to make snow angels is gone as the thin layer of snow is hard surfaced with sharp icy edges.
Just want some sunshine. Want some brightness. Something to burn away the grayness of the sky and my spirit. Want to feel its warmth on my skin again. That has been such a rare occurrence this winter.
There is some consolation in that I do, at the very least, have my work. I have the luxury of being able to go into it and make my own sunshine, much like passage above which the Nobel Prize-winning French author Romain Rolland wrote in his best-known work, Jean-Christophe.
It does help to have some capacity to create one’s own sunshine. But it only goes so far. It’s not a self-sustaining perpetual motion kind of thing. It needs some input, some help, some influx of outside energy every so often.
It needs to see and feel the real sun occasionally, even if to simply be reminded that it is still there. With it, the bitterness of cold, the trudge of snow, and the skeletal trees of winter are tolerable.
Okay, enough. The gray light of morning is coming through the studio windows. Barely. I have to go make some sunshine.
Here’s an old song from Donovan about a guy I could use right about now, Sunshine Superman.
We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won’t do harm – yes, choose a place where you won’t do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.
–E.M. Forster, A Room With a View
Choose a place where you won’t do harm…
Man, that sounds like advice coming to us from a distant time and place. So much so that it seems almost quaint, almost to the point where many of us do exactly the opposite, choosing places where we can do nothing but harm.
I know this is nothing new. There has always been a streak of malice and vindictiveness within our character. We would often rather sacrifice to harm others rather than to help them.
That’s part of the dark shadow that follows us, obscuring what little remains of our empathy. Not sure why I am writing this this morning, outside of the utter disappointment I sometimes feel in the choice many make to turn away from the sunshine of compassion and live in the deep shadows that are devoid of it.
Actually, this all started when I came across an old blog post that had a Johnny Cash performance of a Loudon Wainwright song, The Man Who Couldn’t Cry. Simply put, it’s a song about a man who lived a life without feeling. This performance is from a time when Johnny Cash was just beginning to reinvent himself, having become irrelevant, seen as a relic of country music’s past. He couldn’t get airplay for his music. He decided to make music that was out of the box.
It is written that though he was a legendary performer, he was terrified for this show as it was one of the first times he had played alone on stage without a backing band. Just a man and his guitar. I like that story, that this man who headlined around the world and had throngs of adoring fans felt the need to move ahead with deeply personal work that was meaningful and often raw. That it meant so much to him that he felt exposed, that he was nervous and afraid.
He chose a place where he wouldn’t do very much harm, and stood in it for all he was worth, facing the sunshine.
Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me — the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art. The artist is the only one who knows the world is a subjective creation, that there is a choice to be made, a selection of elements. It is a materialization, an incarnation of his inner world. Then he hopes to attract others into it, he hopes to impose this particular vision and share it with others. When the second stage is not reached, the brave artist continues, nevertheless. The few moments of communion with the world are worth the pain, for it is a world for others, an inheritance for others, a gift to others, in the end. When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.
We also write to heighten our own awareness of life, we write to lure and enchant and console others, we write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth, we write to expand our world, when we feel strangled, constricted, lonely. We write as the birds sing. As the primitive dance their rituals. If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write. Because our culture has no use for any of that. When I don’t write I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in prison. I feel I lose my fire, my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave. I call it breathing.
― Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin
Why do it?
Even after nearly 30 years of doing what I do–which is paint, if you were still wondering– I still often find myself asking why I do this. There are certainly easier and more lucrative ways to make a living but they normally don’t offer the autonomy, solitude, and non-financial rewards that this life offers.
However, I don’t think it’s as simple as putting everything on a spreadsheet and comparing columns of pros and cons, of which there are plenty of both. I don’t think any single line item on such a spreadsheet would justify doing or not doing what I do.
No, I think it’s something beyond quantification or even justification. It’s something that I know is there, and have known for some time, from a point in my life where I was yet to fully live this life. It’s something I often struggle to put into words. That’s probably why I often find a rationalization for what I do from writers who struggle with that same question. Though they are writing about the act of writing, their observations carry cross all creative disciplines.
I have recently read two wonderful books that deal with this question. One, Art & Fear from David Bayles and Ted Orland, touches on it while dealing broadly with art and creativity while the other The Writing Life from Annie Dillard, gives deep insight into the essential part of the writing impulse which moves, as I said above, across the creative spectrum. Annie Dillard’s book, by the way, was a gift from the Great Veiled Bear this past Christmas and ranks as one of my favorite gifts and reads in a long, long time.
It scratched my itch.
Reading it right after Art & Fear came at a time when I was truly struggling. The two books clarified a lot of issues that had been plaguing me. As a result, I felt that I was less alone in my struggles, that my questions and issues were much the same as other people in the creative fields, even those who appear to be at the top their fields.
I came across the passage at the top from The Diary of Anaïs Nin which neatly sums up much of what I had pulled from these two books. It also lined up well with my view of the need to create one’s own inner world or inner vision, a setting is built on your own beliefs and truths. Perhaps new and inhabitable planet?
Whatever the case, this Passage from Anaïs Nin struck a chord with me and I will be filing it along Annie Dillard’s book, Art & Fear, and Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, so that I can pick it up at any time when I need an answer to that question.
Here’s a favorite song that I have only shared a couple of times over the many years I have done this blog. It seems to make sense with this post and for those of us who are struggling with the time we are now experiencing. This the great Mavis Staples and Jeff Tweedy with an acoustic version of You’re Not Alone.
In Fond Memory— Part of Little Gems at the West End Gallery
When it is said that an object occupies a large space in the soul or even that it fills it entirely, we ought to understand by this simply that its image has altered the shade of a thousand perceptions or memories, and that in this sense it pervades them, although it does not itself come into view.
–Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will (1889)
I have talked a number of times about why I chose the Red Chair as a recurring icon in my work. It is a universal object, one that doesn’t need an explanation of what it is. It even carries with it its own meanings as a symbol. It can be a symbol of power– the seat of authority or throne. It can represent having input or of being heard– having a seat at the table. It can represent a seat in the halls of justice– a seat on the jury or a seat on the witness stand. Or a seat of cross-examination, a seat where one gives information as they know, either willingly or through harsher coercion, to some figure of authority.
I could labor on with more examples and you might even have some that pop in your mind that I might miss. But the one symbol that stands out for the Red Chair is one of memory. For me I tend to mean all memory, but it also represents, more specifically, the memory of those who have died. That empty chair symbolizes the place they hold in our memories and our hearts. This symbolism of the chair in that way crosses many cultures around the world, an empty chair being placed at a dinner table for those recently past.
I saw this come into play as I attended a memorial service yesterday for a friend who recently passed away from brain cancer, a glioblastoma. She was a lovely person and it was obvious from the sizable crowd that she had touched many lives with her own that had ended much too soon.
She had been a teacher at a local school and when the fall semester rolled around, it was obvious to her that she would not be teaching or likely to ever return to it. She and her family started a project to make Red Chair ornaments, some in wood and some in origami, to give to her students to let them know how much they meant to her and to give them something by which they might remember her and the lessons of creativity and optimism she had passed on to them. Her family created a brochure explaining the severity of her illness and the meaning of the Red Chair as she saw it.
It was a lovely and touching gesture. They had a number of the Red Chairs there for those attending the service to take with them as reminder of her life. I have mine here in the studio now and will certainly have her memory in mind when I look at them.
For this Sunday Morning Music, here’s an all-time favorite of mine from Harry Nilsson. This is Don’t Forget Me.
Redtree Times 