The Art of The Blind

you know why I don't make new posts every day?

Well first it would be to boring for me....but more importantly, well or more outstandingly,  I keep thinking I have something to say, and then I find out I don't.  Especially with this computer...I mean my god, you get on one of these and you immediately wanna go see what Lisa Thatcher has to say about the films...I actually didn't know so many keep getting made, and especially, that is if you believe her, that films of interest keep getting made. And I don't even go to many as I sort of find them all sorta dull and dun to me.

Of course what do I know.  Well nothing, really absolutely nothing.  There are an ocean of painters just like me living on the margin of humanity, working the dirt really, loosening it up for the magnificent painter who is to come.  It's what it takes, always has.

The title is from Picasso of course describing painting.  And Cocteau says Without resistance there is nothing.

Think of the poets.  And certainly not just those in print,  but the Lennons and Dylans, that guy in Radiohead.  But of course there is Ai (may she rest in peace), WS Merwin, Laura Kasischke, and great number of others, and not all in English mind you, but great French, Chinese, Japanese, poets in Urdu, some linguistic twist of English, Spanish, and all languages of the world.  And for all these great ones, there are thousands upon thousands of marginal poets on every piece of dirt on the earth....and each of them is loosening the soil planting their poems like peat and manure to fertilize it, keep it ripe and ready for the next Cendrars, the next Virgil, Villon, Rimbaud...

And that person is here, now existent in this world for some short number of years...!  And the next Picasso is also here doing his thousand upon thousands of drawings, ready to contribute his/her vision to the great happiness of mankind...

And speaking of poets, I must touch again on Jenny Holzer, for it suddenly occurred to me that she is not at all an "artist",  but a poet incognito,  a new Mayaovsky, who while he was in charge of the giant  electrified signboard board in Moscow, would put up his poems and announce them to all of Russia, for even the millions of illiterates in the streets around it would have them told to them.  And the same for Jenny's work, for as she gently puts up her briefest poems for us modern illiterates in electric letters, they too are told to millions of us, photographed and announced...

The Death of Painting

What to do? What to do?   I think I know I think this should work.  But if it doesn't well I will know I've been a fool and that it is someone else, a much closer friend than I thought, and god this will be a terrible price to pay.  But I will do it if I must.

I don't want to.  One thinks and thinks about this stuff.  One gets depressed one gets very sad very determined.  One loses one's health, on loses his since of reality, one loses his mind.  And then he does it.

What is possible, I mean all that is possible must occur.  It seems so unlikely, so insane,  so far from the truth, so far from creation.  One circles the world and then back again.  Here we are.  Again. and again.

Let's make a movie of it.  The Terrible Mistake.  A Fool's Errand.  Let's Kill Some People.  The Mistaken Dead Man.  The Art of The Blind.  I'd hate to have to make movie names.  Seems like an art in itself to me.

All beings in the world are strung on the Lord as pearls on a thread.  Like pearls on a thread or rays of the sun we are all children of God.   -The Bhagavad Gita chapter seven verse seven

Enchiridion

I think these may be near the last of this series.  And it has been fun.  Intense but fun.  In a way.  But really I like things to be a bit smoother.  More calm.  It's nicer then...Yea I hope to get to that again.

To me they look like Spring.  Well like this spring.  Not last years.  Last years was all holes big and small.  And plants to go in them.  This years is all growth.  The ones that lived are leafing out now.  Some didn't make it.  Poor hellebores.  Though some lived and are doing well.

I remember reading Braque.  He said moving among his paintings was like tending his garden.  Prune and trim and plant and move.  His paintings were never finished.  I like to think of my work like that.  Except it isn't.  When mine are done they are done.  And though I often paint the same thing time and again -it is each time a new piece.

And I was just out in my front garden today.  It is always stuffed with trash people leave when walking by.  That certainly inspired my working on collage.  And there I was planting some hosta.  I bought 36 of them to plant en masse.  

A new plant. New growth.  New mulch.  Cut down the grasses and let them grow afresh.  Plan for the unfinished planting I didn't get to last year.  I keep buying bags of mulch.

But actually in no way do I think these paintings an homage to spring.  They aren't.  They are near the last of a series.  More violent than spring.  Less beautiful. Less varied.  More the construct of a mind turned inward.  More twisted.  More human and base.  The spring of a human race.  More bright and less colorful.

Man I'll have to start meditating again.  Figure out what's next.  Hopefully something simple.  These are always the tricky times.  You go through a bunch of tunnels and dead ends on the way.  Then you go back and look through them and you find what you needed.  Some bit of a piece some accident that points in the right direction.  You hope.

Ah I worked this morning.  Only twelve more to plant, a few bags of mulch.   Then I'll be done.  Maybe.  Unless Justine makes me go to the garden center again.  I get crazy inspired.  You know these paintings are like my gardening in one way.  I just can't stop.

My name is Work

So sometimes I look at these and I think hey why not a different color?  Well of course that would take some effort.  I'd have to open a new bottle.  I'd have to decide which bottle to open.  I might not like it when I did that.  I'd have to argue with myself about it.  No, this is a good color I guess.

Well, you could change the composition, what about doing that?  I'm not exactly sure what you are saying.  This isn't a composition.  It doesn't have one.  It doesn't approve of them either.  

Hey. Come on.  This is the same as the last one...!  Well I don't think so.  I think it's better.  And it was painted later, like maybe 10 minutes later. Or maybe it was earlier.   In fact it is telling me something.  I'm not quite sure what though.

And this is a tiny bit different sort of.  Ah no it ain't.  it's part of the endless procession of these guys.  They tell me, each moment, to keep doing them to keep making them,  that though the future doesn't exist, that though each inspirational moment is followed by crushing defeat,  that even though they exist only in some transient moment of keeping sadness in abeyance, it helps somehow, it keeps corruption an death away for another second.

Hello my friend.  Where did you come from?  And who are you?

gnosis

It seems okay on this beautiful spring day to simply publish a few of my new pieces.  With no complicated blog.  Except I can feel the keys under my fingers and I also swear, honestly, that I can feel a muse pounding on my skull, she has something to say yet I'm not sure what it could be.

I try to keep open.  To understand.  To iterate what is being told to me to say.  Yet my mind is clogged. I cannot quite think it I hear it understand it in words.  Words that can explain this pain.  This confusion.

Goodbye muse.  I love you I do.  But you will need to try again later.  I'm sorry.  Right now all receivers are busy all operators are bustling all organizers of my brain are drugged.  If you will leave a number we will call you back immediately when we are free.   Promise.  We do miss you.  Please deposit inspiration now.

All deposits are rewarded with the best product I'm capable of.

Getting Lost in Paris

Now honest I've lived in dozens and dozens of cities big and small.  I've walked everywhere in all of them.  I've never been lost.  I've wandered through Chicago and New York and Los Angeles and San Francisco.  I've been up and down in St. Louis and Detroit and Cleveland.  I've never never been lost.

I've even wandered all over Paris.  I just don't get lost.  I got to Frankfurt and walked all over the joint.  But for some reason when we got to the beautiful city of Paris this time I wandered off and unbelievable to me I got lost.

And it wasn't like we were in some outer dark corner of the joint.  We were in Marais,  the heart of Marais.  Okay.  But I got lost.  Completely lost.  I was lost for 18 hours.  Eighteen hours of walking.  I knew often I was very close to home.  I recognized streets.  But I couldn't find home.  I went out at five that morning and didn't get back till half past eight that night.

I bet it helped that we had no phones that day and that I had no map that worked.  I had no glasses either.  And I just didn't eat that day.  And I just didn't rest.  Strange.  But I had things on my mind.  I also didn't know where we were staying.  What street we were on exactly.

But eventually I found a great guy.  The only one who would let me use his phone.  In fact he simply handed it to me and said,  call anyone in the world, it is fine.  His name is Camera.  He is from Sierra Leone.  Nicest guy I met all day.

I called my wife in the states.  And as I did, she got an email from my brother's wife saying, you know we forgot to give you our phone number in Paris.  And by the way your phones don't work.  And this is our address.  Lynn called the phone company and said, hey the phones don't work over there.  They went hmm, well I can see they are all set up to work,  oh I got it, we forgot to turn them on.  Five minutes later Lynn called me back, and everything was solved...two minutes later my brother showed up in a cab, and two minutes after that, we were back at the apartment.

And that was the only time I've ever been lost in a city.  And I couldn't pick a better city to be lost in.