Sunday, April 28, 2013

Transdifferentiation


Sometimes you just gotta write a new post even if there is nothing to say.  Garbage always floats around in your head don't it?  Really it's unbelievable just how dumb you can get.  It's like the temperature changing during the day but much faster.  And even the light and darkness changing so fast you can't reckon it.   You feel like you could write Moby Dick one minute then the next your absentmindedly lickin the tops of coke cans.

Your hands and arms don't work no more, and you quit the gym not because you can't afford it but just because you don't like going there no more and you'll save a little money to give to the ever needy IRS.      
You can't bear the greedy bragging lifestyle of the musicians you've hung around with you realize you've become like the cats you feed.



So you kinda just sit and stare at things, and you say stupid old folk kind of phrases like he's just lazy or he ain't too bright.  Look at that squirrel go.

You know when you age it don't happen over the course of say ten years or even five years.  It happens overnight.  You wake up and think --well nothing about nothing,  and you go through the day doing nothing,  and maybe you get a piece of mail.  Send 84 dollars right now or we will take away everything you own you stupid sonofabitch, and we will be there tomorrow morning.

Dang they sure are mad.

You got old that night and you see death smiling at you if you accidentally open the front door.  You watch the sunset from oh about 3:50 o'clock cause you like to be asleep when it gets dark.  You have nothing to offer nobody, nothing to add to the conversation, and in fact when you read about new English professors you just think how goddamn boring can they get?  And no you ain't hungry no more, thank you,  your just sittin there feelin' your skin peal off.  I can't see that no more, can you?

And you begin to think when do I get to that sharp yet gentle curve when I wake up a year younger?

And that's just what started happening.  These ancient people would get to seventy seventy-five and zoom.  The next year they'd be a year younger.  That would go on for five or six years, then suddenly they'd be dead.  Not like they die.  Like they just zap and are dead. Weird really.





Well it happened to me too, but a bit weirder. I just kept gettin younger until I was thirty again.  And for almost everyone it stops, instantly, and you are gone.  Of course I was suprised when one year later I hit thirty one again and by god I curved again.  It made me nervous as hell, and I thought I was done for sure this time.  But I just got younger once more and turned around at thirty and got to thirty one and I've been stuck in that endless fuckin' loop for over fifty years now.


The IMMORTAL JELLYFISH (Turrritopsis Nutricula) species of jellyfish may be the only animal in the world which is immortal.

Since it is capable of cycling from a mature adult stage to an immature polyp stage and back again, there may be no natural limit to its life span.

The key lies in a process called TRANSDIFFERENTIATION, where one type of cell is transformed into another type of cell.  Some animals can undergo limited transdifferentiation and regenerate organs, such as salamanders, which can regrow limbs. Turritopsi nuticula, on the other hand, can regenerate its entire body over and over again....



Now some people think it started with the jellyfish, some transfer or somethin' but I don't know cause I just don't have time to think, I'm always worried that I'm about to die I guess.

You know it's funny.  I would really just like to age and die peacefully.  But I panic on a plane I panic behind the wheel  I panic on ice.  In fact I don't think I even think thirty.  More like an old man who finds himself thirty again.  And for fifty years.  You'd think I'd capitalize on it but I don't.

My arms fell off last week.  Yep, while I was in Paris.  And no sooner but my fingers began growing out of my armpits, big thick long fingers.  I feel like going swimming.  Yea that's what I'm gonna do, go swimming in the warm salt sea.


"Everything is a miracle.  It is a miracle that one does not dissolve in one's bath like a lump of sugar."
--Pablo Picasso




Wednesday, April 3, 2013

split

You know I get up and have all sorts of boring things to do each day that are stupid and useless and time consuming and are fashioned to look important, have deadlines, official letters from scary government departments, endless bills, idiotic demandments, blah blah blah.


And then for some reason I have to make one little painting.  And a voice that sounds similar to mine is speaking in a light lilt.  So I have time I will do one. And only one.  And I never know somehow what it will be.  That seems odd doesn't it.  Yet it is a fact.  Others will stand in my defense.  Honest.  And I work on these paintings.  And in order to spy on it I empty the dishwasher serendipitously glancing at it. I watch it dry.

I know or soon realize that this is not me but some other person wearing a me costume.  That's odd.

But I am there too.  As an observer.  I watch him paint.  And when he gets done.  He does another one.  And one other.  That is all.  And this goes on every day.  Day after day.  Strange.


You know, believe it or not, someone came in my house this January and stole 600 paintings from me.  Nothing else, just the paintings.  That is seven or eight months of my life.  Gone.  It makes me feel a little depressed.   Sort of like my life is ending.  And to top it off, they are rolling up my past life while they are at it, so that my existence equals zero.  There will be no note of my life, no note of my work, nothing to leave my children, just a zero.


All these paintings are gone,  The guy who took them has let me know that if he feels a hint of the police he will just throw them away.  Now he just waits for them to increase in value.

It seems almost impossible doesn't it.  But it is where I live.  The police don't need me and man they expect the same.

I am not busy.  I am the laziest person I know.  Like most artists, I feel like a suicide who does not deserve to live if there is a day that I do not paint.  But I also feel four or five hours is enough to earn my stay here for one more day.

On the best ordinary days of my life, I paint in the morning, go for a walk, take a nap, and run a few errands in the afternoon.  Then in the evening I see my family and read Cormac McCarthy or Henry Miller, Jim Crace or Samuel Delany.  This it seems to me, is a sane and pleasant pace for a day.  But if you call me up and ask whether I won't maybe blow off work and go to the Museum of Contemporary Art or the Art Institute. or just drink all day long I will say no thank you.


I don't drink, never really did except for coffee of course, and it seems it takes up too much time.  And I don't like Art galleries and shopping, don't like movies much, don't like socializing, don't like watching girls, it all seems like taking a plunger to an hourglass, which has so little sand in it already.

I am alone, isolate, and I like that, though it does seem to feel a bit fragile some of the time.  I don't
understand others motivations.  I don't understand what they do.  I'm not really very interested.

There is some complicated math problem I am working on day and night and it can only be expressed through paint.  I am trying to explicate a dream.  But each day my dream is shattered.  Now my memory begins fading.  The past is destroyed through this theft.  I am now alone in this nightmare.

Though I can't discover a loss as large as this, I do remember writers burning their manuscripts. throwing them out the window, quite amazing to me.  But none with painters. None.  Just stolen Dali's and Picasso's...

And now me.  All these paintings are gone.  Forever.  And hundreds more...