Nonsense

getting by with a little help from my friends

2006-01-30T02:31:00.000-08:00

This should have been in that last post....but the construction of the "mattress" stretcher is possible via my friend Jack's expertise and the sewing/stretching of the canvas happenned via Juli's smartness (last names are not mentioned because this is the internet...and some people like their privacy...those funny people)

Welcome Back-Invitational Alumni February 10, 5-7

2006-01-29T18:01:00.000-08:00

One week left till this big ole painting in my studio will be finished (God willing and the creek don’t rise). I got back from a month and a half stint at my parents in Atlanta where I did the bulk of it, now is time for the finishing touches. Her name is going to be Resurrection story: the Residue of the Day.
She’s a painting of a double mattress, cushioning, tag, cording around the edges and all. She happens to be a portrait of my parent’s bed at the time when I was born. I haven’t confirmed whether that was my conception site or not (cuz that conversation would freak me out)...some things can stay mysterious. This is just one detail Freud would have fun with...another would be his occasional slips that come out of my mouth like, “I’d love to talk, but I’ve got to get to work on my mattress” or “This workin’ all day on a mattress can get tiring.” As much as these things make me smile, they are not why I have devoted this chunk of time to this painting.

If my pieces over the last three years went on a field trip, I think the “follow the leader rope” that would connect them all together would be vulnerability. I’ve chosen subjects that are kinda silly, kinda pathetic, usually forlorn with the hopes of turning them into superstar-Cinderella-prom queens....but not with lots of make-up and jewelry and steleto heels (or glass slippers if you prefer), but with all their eccentricities, wear stains and out dated styles hanging out for the world to see. I’m taking the very details that would lead to their rejection and turning their volumes up to Spinal Tap’s eleven. And hopefully surprising people when they think they are beautiful...a different kind of beautiful. Not the cliche. Not the airbrushed Vogue magazine model beautiful. Hopefully our eyes will be opened to an unanticipated beauty-a redefinition with some room for complexity. Hopefully these pieces are a sacrament for me in that direction. I think it was in the Great Divorce where CS Lewis described a woman as being beautiful...but instead of her beauty leading men to unfaithful inclinations, it made them all the more ready to cherish their wives. This is the God inspired beauty with which I hope to one day turn heads and the kind of beauty that’s the goal of this exercise in art making. The end of Psalms 51 says this: “Going through the motions doesn’t please you, a flawless performance is nothing to you. I learned God-worship when my pride was shattered. Heart shattered lives ready for love don’t for a moment escape God’s notice.” Evidently that’s the kind of beauty that turns God’s head. Shattered pride, shattered hearts. I’m painting stripped sheets and worn upholstery.

India...continued

2005-12-06T05:21:00.000-08:00

So really throughout this trip there were all sorts of little object lessions in the whole looking, seeing, being seen subject. There is the aspect of what it was like to be an outsider, to be conspicuously out of place. Related is the attention given based on my comparatively light skin...because of my shade of flesh, I all the sudden became powerful and wealthy and beautiful in the eyes people shaped by cultural baggage. Merchants counted the number of times we passed by their booths in a day and occasionally, cursed us when we didn't buy anything, beggers gathered where ever we went, strangers wanted their photos taken with us or of us or with us holding their babies...once, when i got lost on the way back to our hotel in Mumbai, a man who I didn't recognize told me where I was staying...in Delhi mothers sought Juli and I out for tea--literally running down the road to catch up with us---and then introducing us to the batchlors of the household.....

Of course, I did my share of looking too...not to mention my share of trying not to look. I took all sorts of tools that would help me look...three camaras...one with a video button (ironically, sometimes you have to sacrifice a bit of the experience in a moment for the purpose of remembering it later. Juli is smart to not photograph the first couple days.) In the Jain Temple we visited, you were permitted and encouraged to take photos, with the one stipulation of never photographing with your back to an idol. The way different people practised their faith I found particularly interesting...the jenuflects before the Jain idols, the women with shroud covered faces, the rows of Muslem men bowed down in prayer at the set time in Chor Bizaar. Obviously this isn't when I pulled out the camara; I kinda felt a little guilty when I looked for what felt like too long a period of time....something about not wanting to spy on what another person sees as holy.

Probably the one of the toughest confrontation concerning how to see another came with the beggers. It is unfair to assume based on skin tone....but the reality is the dollar carries much more weight than the rupie (as does the Euro, the pound, etc..) There were so many people in need and I am so rich. So many people that I could never give to everyone that asked and still make it home...and then there's the whole philosophy behind it that I haven't worked out in my brain.(what actually helps people that ask for money? Giving directly, giving to organizations that help, keeping food to give, etc...) So the first question that arrose in this confusion and guilt:"when do I give?"...I still don't have a hard fast rule.(probably never will). Sometimes I said no, sometimes I gave rupies, sometimes I bought food, sometimes I said no..prayed, and then gave when the person came back again.) One of the next questions that comes up with the necessity of a "no" answer: "How do you look at someone when you can't give and they keep asking?" Do you ignore them so maybe they won't follow you all the way home? Do you try not to ever catch their gaze to begin with? Do you look them in the eye when you say no?

Arriving at the Ashram in Delhi exposed yet another angle to these questions of looking and seeing. Here people who had once been on the streets (probably in most cases too sick to be one of the beggers but in desprete need of help) were now in community together recovering or having a home in which to die. Many of them bore the signs of trauma, injury, birth defects, handicaps...visual indicators that made pain and vulnerability or just simply difference evident with a first glance. I saw many brave souls maneuvering the streets of Mumbai with similiar situations. One woman I can still see in my mind, adjusting the plank with wheels that transported her body in lue of her legs (legs that looked as if they hadn't grown since age 4) preparing to cross the insanely chaotic downtown streets of Mumbai (the ones that get my pulse going as I try to intersect them with my two good legs). When I first got to the Ashram, all the difference stood out...Does he have that shape of face from Elephantiasis? How did he loose two legs and an arm? Why is he so small? Then after a couple days and some time with the people there, something beautiful and unexpected happenned. I stopped noticing the differences any more than the shape of my own nose or Juli's pretty eyes. The differences just became part of what it meant to be that person....and when I started to love the people, those difference somehow became beautiful to me. Then I remembered how tough it was to really see folks with similiar stories before in Mumbai. How self conscious it made me, how I didn't want to stare, so most of the time chose to look away when in their range of sight. How their forced vulnerability made me feel vulnerable too..."but by the grace of God go I"...Why do I have the particular grace of my good health and they don't? How long will I have this grace? I'm sure God loves them every bit as much as me....

When I noticed my perspective changing at the Ashram, I had this crazy strong desire to sit with people and just look at them, really seeing...not stairing or ignoring, but looking lovingly and respectfully. Somewhere in the middle of this transformation, a seed of self forgetfulness began to grow. When they became beautiful in my eyes, I think for a moment or too, so was I. I didn't have to worry anymore about how I was being perceived. I just started drawing people and letting them look back at me for really long moments of silence....and letting crowds gather to watch every mark i made on the page and every mess-up I had to erase. I could feel redemption happenning. Sometimes people would ask to be drawn, sometimes I asked them. Padam gave a bashful smile when I was drawing the details of his face. I would look up at Seetu and smile till he giggled recording an image of his big joyful laugh in my book. Then, when we were done, I asked the person to sign the drawings of themselves if they could....like it was a contract between the two of us, a mutual agreement take part in the process. Pintu drew this great marshon figure instead, Seetu a pattern of circles.

Of course later, when Provene tried to video tape me for his documentary super close, all-up-in-my-face like, I freaked out again and the self consciousness reared it's ugly head....never quite get there in this life, but there are moments when I have eyes to see more deeply into the inexpressible glory of the people I meet along the way...

Some things I saw, felt, intuited, dreamed, imagined, totally fabricated in India

2005-12-03T06:57:00.000-08:00

I want to record a couple of these snap shots in my brain before they go dark, before I loose the feelings they evoked, the initial interpretations or lack thereof....I think also in there is the hope of sucking out some hidden meaning, sifting through this cacophony of sensations, piecing them apart one by one in order to put them together again a little more whole, with a chance to sit with them a bit longer from a couple more angles. I'm a slow processor. So here goes...

I woke up at 5 am the first morning (which is certainly all about jetlag and nothing remotely close to my normal syncopated body rhythms). I went outside to watch India wake up (leaving my dear lazy ass traveling partners snug in their beds--hehe, just kidding David and Juli). I think traveling anywhere helps me remember that I am alive, but this is particularly true of those first waking moments in India. Even in the 'burbs where we were staying (ok, right now, erase every picture in your head of the suburbs if you have not been to an Indian suburb...I really like Indian suburbs) India is teaming with energy. It's a spicy subji (sp?) of disparate sights and sounds and smells, quite often delicious, occasionally parasite bearing. As people started to come out to begin their day, I attempted some polite people watching, with few exceptions to the rule of finding that I was the one being watched first. The mutton shop across the street caught my attention...my eyes followed the boy carrying a headless, bleeding carcass over his shoulders to a little shack where others were hung waiting for purchase. Big black birds were gathered, also waiting (quite longingly). Side note: there is a small sect of Zoroastreans also known as Siks in Mumbai who don't believe in burying or cremating their dead. Instead they present them to the heavens by way of hungry black birds. This was one part of the culture with which I was happy to leave my interaction at book level knowledge . I wonder if the birds I was watching at the mutton shop lost a bet and were missing out on a buffet down town.

Before you cringe in disgust and superiority (like I do way too often), think about the animals that will return our bodies back again to dust. Any better than birds? I'm not saying this because I'm wanting to appropreate this tradition along with my stocking stuffing at Christmas and turkey at Thanksgiving. It's just a picture of how in India the reality of being alive, particularly the physical reality of being alive as a creature, was always confronting me right out in the open air. At times it seduced me, at times, it slapped me around, but it was always there. Later, when I was staying in Delhi, coming to terms with our Indian rest room (which we affectionately called "squatty potty") and the babbling stream that flowed in front of our house with the latest news from ours and all our neighbors' Indian rest rooms, I eloquently explained to Stefan, who's had feet in both eastern and western soil: "It's not that westerners don't poop. It's just that we're less aware of our poop." Somewhere in that same conversation we talked about all the animals who headed for the hills before the Tsunami. Stefan proposed that at one point, our species had that sensing ability too...that connectedness to the earth. I think it was Juli who said she thought we westerners with all of our convenient and removed living are farthest from that intuition. The bovine growth hormone milk in my cereal probably does muffle that conversation the moon likes to have with the tide that's supposed to be setting my body clock.

Back again to that first morning, daylight began the constant horn-honking, bell-dinging, dog-barking, cow-mooing, merchant-negotiating that complimented nicely the visuals of rickshaws, taxi cabs, "goods" trucks, family-of-5-packed motorcycles, farm animals, children-with-large-wheel-barrows-carrying-cargo-the size-of-small-cars, pedestrians....all aggressively vying for a space on the road. If I were a better student I would remember the term my art history teacher used to describe the tendency within some artistic traditions to cram visual information into every minute section of space. No serene Japanese garden here or clean-lined Swedish design, negative space is to be conquered and subdued. I think she brought up the forgotten term when talking about a Hindu cave temple in India that was carved up the waw-zoo. I have a special place in my heart for this aesthetic...for all the Howard finsters and Trenton Doyle Hancocks and James Ensors and Barry McGees who fill up spaces like visionaries gone mad. Walking the streets of India was like stepping into that delightful frenzy. It's collage incarnate. It's Times Square squared, baby. hehehe

And if the whirling dervish of visual activity in the traffic patterns and the painted patterns (on "the goods" trucks, on henna clad hands, on women's sahris...) doesn't make your heart rate excellerate, certainly the flamboyant adoration of saturated color will do the trick. I must say that I was wooed and won by India's brazen hues....it wasn't a hard sell at all, I had already had a crush for quite some time.....

to be continued

2005-10-11T12:59:00.000-07:00

"There's roads and there's roads
And they call; can't you hear it?
Roads of the earth
And roads of the spirit.

Best roads of all
are the ones that aren't certian.
One of those is where you'll find me
Till they drop the big curtain."

Bruce Cockburn, Child of the Wind

2005-10-10T05:45:00.000-07:00

So the little grey cloud hovered above me with terrential downpours yesterday....which is the condition I think that generally inspires me to write these posts....sorry about that. I am happy now and again too. I talked to my sister for several hours the night before who senses that she is at the point where she will either grow bitter and emotionally closed from the pain of loss she has experienced and the new fear of more loss that same tradegy has brought about in her life...or she could somehow be given a new measure of faith. The bitterness and numbness feels like the more natural option (doesn't it always?) Several other friends this weekend have shared their tragedies with me and I am reminded of my own particular set of disappointments, my own stories that make a loving God seem incongruous with the evidence at hand. We've all got um....not to mention our collective stories that are most of the time, too big to fathom, like the recent earthquake in Pakistan and India. I still don't have bows for these loose ends, but something struck me in the movie I saw last night. The movie "In America", when the Irish Immigrant father is talking to Matias, the man down the hall of his appartment complex who's dying of AIDS. Matias asks if he believes in God and the Irish guy (sorry, I forgot his name) told him that he asked God to take himself in place of his dying son, and God ended up taking both of them....no, he didn't believe.

And here is my passage from the Frederick Buechner book that was on the table this morning about the Kingdom of God:

"As a poet, Jesus is maybe at his best in describing the feeling you get when you glimpse the Thing itself-the Kingship of the king official at last and all the world his coronation. Its like finding a million dollars in a field, he says, or a jewel worth the kings ransom. Its like finding something you hated to lose and thought you'd never find again-an old keepsake, a stray sheep, a missing child. When the Kingdom really comes, it's as if the thing you lost and thought you'd never find again is yourself"

Don't let us loose ourselves in bitterness from these tragedies. Your kingdom come. Your will be done.

Estatic Laughter

2005-09-21T08:20:00.000-07:00

"Sarah and her husband had plenty of hard knocks in their time, and there were plenty more of them still to come, but at that moment when the angel told them they'd better start dipping into their old age pensions for cash to build a nursery, the reason they laughed was that it suddenly dawned on them that the wildest dreams they'd ever had hadn't been half wild enough..."

Frederick Buechner, Particuliar Treasures

"We all end in the ocean. We all start in the stream. We're all carried along by the river of dreams."

Billy Joel, River of Dreams

I've finally found a home!

2005-09-08T14:20:00.000-07:00

"Shocking pink is the navy blue of India." Diana Vreeland

Piles of Bric-a-Brac, negative Space, Dan Eldon, and the mystery of the cross

2005-09-04T07:14:00.000-07:00

I've been looking at pages from the journals of Dan Eldon (daneldon.org), thinking about this trip to India I am about to take and the classes I'll be teaching at Sewa Ashram (delhihouse.org). I'm feeling a tug looking at the work Eldon left behind to embrace my process more...work without clear objectives, scavenge my day to day for visual poetry, embrace surprizes, release aspirations of perfection in favor of expressions with a little more soul. I'm afraid of this. I've wanted to work like this, keep an artist book going, for some time now. Soemthing scary about it to me....I think it's the same kind of fear that happens when I am in a conversation with one who's esteem I highly value, and I'm asked an important core of life kind of question...and I freeze. On the surface there is silence, utter mind-numbing, listenning-to-my-eye's-blinking silence. A couple layers down is the clammer...something like, "THIS IS IT! THIS IS IT! THE ANSWER I'VE ALWAYS WANTED TO GIVE! THE WAY I'VE ALWAYS WANTED TO BE KNOWN! PERHAPS NOW I WILL BE LOVED AND ESTEEMED AND APPRECIATED AND RESPECTED AND EMANCIPATED AND FUFILLED AND COMPLETE AND FREE AND VALUABLE AND JOYFILLED AND FEARLESS AND CONFIDENT AND BEAUTIFUL AND oh shit, what's my answer?

I want my life to be meaningful. I want it so badly, and plan for it so much, that I forget to live it. Just like I want to be known so much that I have a tendancy to nestle myself down into some dark crevace where no one can know me.

My lesson for the last four months or so has been one about detachment. THis theme is one that up until this point, I've never particularly cared for...seen it abused I think through knowing some not so kind/happy/loving ascetics (sp?)...or folks who purge one thing so they feel self-rightious while they binge on another. But I think if you don't get to the life part after the death step, something went wrong. The point is life. if giving up something for a while or indefinately or forever gets you there, it's worth it. I wrote down this Thomas Merton quote (from "No Man is an Island") in my journal, "The only value of our life is that it is a gift of God..." Sometimes the collection of bric-a-brac I store in about a dozen or so over sized trash bags on my back in hopes of someday building a glorious tower to spread the news of my worth far and wide gets in the way of my understanding this crucial life point. Detachment beckens me to lay it down for awhile...let alittle negative space grow around it. And then when the time is right, pick some of it up again for the purpose of giving glory where glory it due.

2005-08-26T16:00:00.000-07:00

So I am housesitting out in the country, out in the middle of no where, all by myself here, with 2 dogs and couple cats as my ministering angels. There's a claw footed tub to soak in and a shower in a crate on the land out back if I want to wash my hair amongst the birds like Francis of Assisi or Eve, or somebody else really granola like that, there's a million great cd's with musicians on them whose music I am getting to know, bookshelves full of old beautiful books from people like Dylan Thomas, CS Lewis, Thomas Merton...I'm reading them one by one, there's a back porch swing from which I can recline and gaze upon endless green, with a spattering of other hues from petunias, humingbirds, and the like. In times when I have more faith than not, I think God is bringing me out here to whisper in my ear, to give me a place to drop all the stuff I've got in my arms to free them for an embrace, to chip away at the hardness that seems to have accumulated more than ever this past year. In times when I don't have faith, I'm no longer alone with God, but simply alone, a perspective with the power to eclipse all the expanses of beauty flourishing out here before I can even identify it as the lense through which I am seeing....and then I start singing bad Cylene Dion songs in my head.

more Beck

2005-08-12T06:40:00.000-07:00

Scarecrow

I'm walking to the other side
with the devil tryin to take
my mind
and my soul's just a silhouette
in the ashes of a cigarette

illusions never fake their lies
trick cards fool the eye
carry zeros over till they add up

bury tears in the chapters you shut

sometimes the jail can't chain the cell
and the rain's too plain to tell
all alone by a barren well
the scarecrow's only scaring himself

I've been digging the ground
through the dust and the clouds
I see miles and miles
and the junkyard piles
I wanted hope from a grave
I wanted strength from a slave
what gives you comfort now
might be the end of you then

Crows are pulling at my clothes
the wind got my fingers froze
standing all day keeping watch
over all the treasures we lost

sometimes the jail can't chain the cell
and the rain's too plain to tell

all alone by a barren well
the scarecrow's only
scarin himself

Beck and Dylan Thomas

2005-08-11T08:03:00.000-07:00

Emergency Exit

14 miles away from
a landfill grave
never pawned my
watch and chain
to the landlord living
inside my head
never paid my rent
till the lights went dead

then I saw my sign
comin up the road
a dead ditch waiting
for to bury my lad

on the avenues
in the plain of day
I threw a roosevelt dime
in a bucket of rain

now hold your hand
onto the plow
work your body
till the sun goes down
what's left of death
is more than fear
let dust be dust

and the good lord near

it's a little too much
too ask of faith it's a little late
to wait for fate
so tell the angels
what you seen

scarecrow shadow

on a Nazarene

kindness will find you
when darkness has fallen
round your bed
kindness
will follow
children will wander
till
the end

Beck from "Guero" (a supremely excellent album)

Oh the wings of the children!
The woundward flight of the ancient
young from the canyons of oblivion!
The sky stride of the always slain
in Battle! the happening
of saints to their vision!
The world winding home!

Dylan Thomas from "Collected Poems" (wish I copied the whole poem from my friend's book)

breathing lessons

2005-07-14T18:57:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me awhile ago that God probably doesn’t like flattery any more than people do. But all over the psalms it says to praise him; that it’s good and right and fitting, that it adds years to our lives, health to our bodies and minds....but you can’t say it if you don’t mean it, just for the happy side effects, can you? Maybe there is something to saying it in the hopes that you mean it later....What this thought led me to is the necessity of receiving, paying attention, tasting, touching, imbibing the goodness of God, so I don’t have to be fake when I tell him how cool I think he is.

When difficult things happened to me as a kid, I remember holding my breath, as if in an attempt to disappear. I still do it, inadvertently, from time to time when I feel stressed or disappointed or even sometimes when the extent of my happiness or excitement or hope scares me. I think it’s a way of me being the judge of what I will and will not receive. It’s seems understandable with the bad, scary, painful stuff; the only problem is you can’t exactly turn it off for the other times; the times when it blocks you from joy. I can’t help but wonder if the more deeply I breathe, the more honest my praise of God will be. I was pissed when Sandie, the theophostic prayer guru, prayed for me to hear something or see something or whatever from God and all I got was silence and some kinda sense or still small voice or whatnot that made it seem as if I should just sit there and breathe. A couple months later it makes a little more sense: With each breath my lungs suck in the present, good, bad or ugly...and this gives me something real to talk to God about, be it in the genre of praise or lamentation.

The moment God was an atheist

2005-03-25T13:45:00.000-08:00

"Christianity alone had felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king. Alone of all the creeds, Christianity had added courage to the virtues of the creator. For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point--and does not break. In this I indeed approach a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss; and I apologise in advance if any of my phrases fall wrong or seem irreverent touching a matter which the greatest saints have justly feared to approach. But in that terrific tale of the passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt. It is written, "Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." No; but the Lord thy God may tempt himself. And it seems as if this is what happened in Gethsemane. In a garden Satan tempted man: and in a garden God tempted God. He passed in some super human manner through our human horror of passimism. When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, , but at the cry from the cross; the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionist choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the athiests themselves choose a god. They will only find one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist."

Orthodoxy, G K Chesterton

2005-03-21T09:27:00.000-08:00

When I was little, I hated to brush my hair, so much so that I just plan didn't. Well, I did, kind of...I brushed the top layer over this enormous nappy tangle I had nurtured against my neck. My mom tried to brush it, my friends' moms tried to brush it, but to no avail. Their method sucked: top to bottom, strait through. I certainly would not stand for that. Only once in a awhile, when my dad sat down with me, did my hair cease to jut out atop this varmet nest my neglect had created. It took hours. He would sit with me, squirming child that I was, and slowly unweave the tangle. Unravel some, brush some (from the bottom) and on and on...When he was done, I could feel the back part of my neck again. pause.

Seems that whenever I start to listen, God tells me something totally nonsensical like: "be still and know that I am God" or "in repentance and rest is you salvation." It doesn't make sense, because I am trying to get God to tell me how to freaken' fix my life...and obviously fixing takes activity right?...and with a tangle this big, frantic activity. Then I remember chariots of Fire, where a man could run in the bliss of knowing God's pleasure. I hunger for that, but I relate to his opponent...the "ten seconds to justify my existence" guy. I always come back to this. This gospel deficit. Neither justifying, nor detangling, is my job. Soul (and sometimes body) stillness, receiving, and passing the love I've received along...this is my lot. But it seems that I rarely make it past the first step.

Funny that this is what I love about art...the stillness it requires. Yes, sometimes the making is frenzied like DeKooning and Pollock, or tense and brooding like some Radiohead songs; but the result, when fully realized is a pause, a sinking deeper into our humanity, the poignancy of being alive and the taste of salty tears...not to mention the ability to finally feel the back of my neck again.

last night's dream

2005-02-28T06:12:00.000-08:00

I rarely remember my dreams, which makes last night's unconscious adventure even more abnormal since it's still ruminating in my thoughts. Here's an excerpt: After a pretty troubling scene where I was present and active within the dream, I was now watching it like a movie. The woman I was, in the scene previous to the present one, acted as if she was in a drug induced state of schizophrenic paranoia. She had a gun with which she was shooting objects with perceived malicious intent she had personified in her mind. Her father, deeply grieved at the state of his daughter, took the gun he was holding and shot it into the sky. Seeing this guesture, I knew he was trying to shoot God. I watched the bullet spin up into the air, growing and morphing as it spinned, watched Pope John Paul fly to the bullet and toss it further up into the heavens. Finally it spun into a letter, at which time a bird swooped down and carried the letter further up and across these dramatic, snow topped cliffs, where it meet with a whole flock of birds, all with letters in their mouths. This scene was followed by the beginnings of another that was cut short by my alarm clock.

..makes me think about a couple things. When I was a little girl and afraid, desperate to know God would hear me, I used to write letters to God and leave them outside....lately in my sarcastic, half cynical/half sincere way, I have asked for prayer with the phrase "shoot one up for me...", through some pretty profound doubts this summer I prayed once"God, if you exist, I hate you..." The deepest part of me didn't mean it. Or maybe I did mean it then; maybe it's just that the part of me that is lasting doesn't mean it. I'm depending on a God who listens to those messages too, accepts them like he would any other letter, preferring the honesty and struggle over a false peace and words of empty flattery.

On another note, I wonder if my subconscious is catholic?

2005-02-23T08:01:00.000-08:00

I saw Hotel Rwanda last night. These kind of stories are too huge for me to store away, pack up in a little compartment for later. The questions they invoke, the realities they painfully demonstrate about our nature, our frailty, our helplessness and guilt sift back and forth in my brain. I don't want to be one of those people who see things like this on TV, pause and admit, "that's horrible" and then finish dinner without another thought of it...but more often than not, I am one of those people. On one hand, there is the whole reality that I am finite, but there is also that menacing fact of my selfishness. The former I can do nothing about, but what about the latter? Where will I spend myself to offer mercy and forgiveness and peace and compassion? How do I become strong enough to offer that strength to others in love, for their good? "God, make me an instrument of your peace..."

The movie and history invoked thoughts along a couple lines in particular. Probably most pronounced is the way the abused so often turn into the abusers. Under colonization, the Hutus were the down trodden, because the whites deemed the Tutsi minority of greater worth due to their lighter skin. I guess all those years the Hutu endured hearing the pronouncement of worthlessness from outsiders called for some sort of vengeful sacrifice, the silencing of those voices now firmly implanted in their heads by the removal of the perceived source of their pain--other human beings. This crazy cycle always seems to go on...past the timeline of the movie, I read an article about how the Tutsis have struck back in so many instances...and abuse begat abuse begat abuse....the story of human history comprised of countless revolutions and counter-revolutions both in our nations and in our families. Jesus's words of turning the other check, the gentle (as opposed to angry) answer that turns away wrath in Proverbs...we are in desperate need of these responses. But this response is counter intuitive when we've been harmed; when everything appears to work according these natural laws, how do you live according to the supernatural? Something's got to give...

We've been talking about the sermon on the mount in church. "Blessed are the poor, they'll inherit the earth, blessed are those who mourn, they'll be comforted, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, they'll be filled...." I've been the conversation facilitator for the past several weeks and this topic came up after I read Nietsche's interpretation of this "upsidedown kingdom:"

"It was the Jews who, with awe inspiring consistency, dared to invert the aristocratic value equation (good=noble=powerful=beautiful=happy=beloved by God) and to hang onto this inversion with their teeth, the teeth of the most abysmal hatred (that of impotence), saying "the wretched alone are the good; the poor, the impotent, the lowly alone are the good; the suffering, the deprived, sick, ugly alone are the pious, alone are blessed by God, blessedness is for them alone--and you, the powerful and noble, are on the contrary the evil, the cruel, the lustful, the insatiable, the godless to all eternity; and you shall be in all eternity the unblessed, accursed and damned!" On the Genealogy of Morals

When I first read Nietsche's summation of this sermon as an outgrowth of the pattern of abuse and counter abuse that seems to comprise the history of human endeavors (evidenced in this particular situation as physical oppression followed by spiritual revenge) I felt my heart in my throat. This has been what has drawn me to God over and over again: that he has told his people to look after orphans, widows, and foreigners. Take care of the vulnerable and downtodden. "If you've done it to the least of these my brothers, you've done it to me." This upsidedown kingdom came to be defined in terms of people in my head...These are the people who are now MOST important (ha, doesn't that surprise you? you thought they weren't important at all!) So I began to set up my own group of elites.

Instead of the ranking of people (these people are the new elites in this crazy band of ragamuffens and outcast that will change the world), I am beginning to see these passages as the ranking of values. Prosperity and wealth and beauty and power and honor are wonderful, but there is a spiritual reality even better, even deeper, infinitely more secure. This reality can't be over taken by a military coup, won't leak out of the holes in your pockets, diminish as you age , deplete itself as you give it away or go the way of your body when you turn again to dust. Maybe when the fish and bread multiplied to feed the 5000, Jesus was making the physical world mirror the spiritual, where love given away multiplies. If there really is something more than pushing your way to the top...to survive ...the "will to power,"and if this something surpasses any kind of satisfaction that the material reality could provide (which is some damn good satisfaction...obviously I'm into the physical world; I make art) then even the poor could be blessed...not because they are not like the rich, but because they are like the rich (and everyone inbetween), infinitely valuable in the eyes of God.

There is something else that I can't deny about this collection of the blessed Jesus named. They all look like pain to me in their various and sundry ways...the poor, the mournful, the persecuted...obvious. The merciful...my gut reaction is to lash out against those who hurt me. The meek...I'd actually prefer to shout my importance from the mountain tops. THose who hunger and thirst for righteousness...I prefer self contentment, thanks. The pure in heart...do you know how many competing desires I have? My name is legion too. ("I will try now to give a coherent account of my disintergrated self, for when I turned away from you, the one God and pursued a multitude of things, I went to pieces" St. Augustine, The confessions)

I buy the reading of this passage that shows all these forms of blessedness as little deaths. Because in this physical world two bodies cannot occupy the same space, something's gotta give. When You give me your shirt after I've stolen your jacket, you have love, but no shirt...your heart may be warmed but your body is still cold. Maybe the pain isn't even from altruism, maybe you're just freaken poor.

Why are all these shitty things linked together? I'm not sure, but there does seem to be something pregnant about pain. Does pain ever just result in nothing? Do you ever get through something horrible, say "phew, glad that's over" and move on as the same person? I don't think I ever have, even if I have tried desperately to get away unscathed. Seems that folks tend to grow in resentment, like the self righteous (me) who have made their own elites to distinguish themselves from those by whom they've been rejected, like the Hutu's killing the Tutsi's and vice versa, like the heads rolling under Robespierre, or the Siberian prisoners under Stalin or the abused Iraqis under the good ole US of A. I might even say that this is the rule. yep, I would. But what about the exceptions to the rule? How do you let pain shape you in such a way as to make you more beautiful? (ie more compassionate, loving, forgiving..) I remember a friend saying that sometimes God honors our prayers for blessing by blessing us with fellowship in the sufferings of Christ. I generally, no always, hate that answer to prayer.

Yeah, so uhm, I don't have a formula for letting pain increase love instead of resentment (or an answer or, most of the time, a clue) Of course there is the default sunday school answer, "Jesus," but what does that mean? (speaking of sunday school answers, check out this quote from Richard M. Nixon "People react to fear, not love--they don't teach that in Sunday School, but it's true"---"Christian nation" my ass. Sounds like we're more into the ideas of Machiavelli than Jesus Christ)

Even Nieztsche said that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. What kind of strength will it be? Will that strength be directed toward revenge or love? There is the tendency to get through pain by avoiding the thought of it, like the criminals being crucified in the Life of Brian who are singing, "Always look on the bright side of life." I can't imagine this being the way of moving through pain toward love. It's not moving "through" at all, more like around. Seems like something as profound as love would require more honesty than that. But how can you look forthrightly at your pain, without denial, without easy answers, without diminishing it's complexity or mystery in any way and still refuse bitterness or revenge or atleast depression?....not only that, not only refusing to enter the cycle, but actively going against it, choosing to push back it's effects with love?

I don't know the answer...maybe the particulars vary for different people. It's striking to me that we are so used to the system of abused turning into abusers that these words Nieztsche put to centuries worth of rejection of this famous sermon, not only fail to see it's beauty, but reinterpret it through the framework of our old hat cycles of ugliness (which turns out to be the meaning's exact opposite). I want to see the wonder of these words and be changed. God, give me eyes to see, a heart to embrace and a body to live this crazy kind of love you've authored...

All I have needed...

2005-02-21T14:46:00.000-08:00

"There is not a guarrantee in the world. Oh your needs are guaranteed, your needs are absolutely guaranteed by the most stringent of warranties, in the plainest truest words: knock; seek; ask. But you must read the fine print. "Not as the world giveth, give I unto you." That's the catch. If you can catch it it will catch you up, aloft, up to any gap at all, and you'll come back, for you will come back, transformed in a way you may not have bargained for-dribbling and crazed. The waters of seperation, however lightly sprinkled, leave indelible stains. Did you think before you were caught, that you needed, say, life? Do you think you will keep your life, or anything else you love? But no. Your needs are all met. But not as the world giveth. You see the needs of your own spirit met whenever you have asked, and you have learned that the outragous guarantee holds. You see the creatures die, and you know you will die. And one day it occurs to you that you must not need life. Obviously. And then you're gone. You have finally understood that you are dealing with a maniac.

I think that the dying cry at the last, not "please" but "thank you, as a guest thanks his host at the door. Falling from airplanes the people are crying "Thank you, thank you, all down the air; and the cold carriages draw up for them on the rocks. Divinity is not playful. The universe was not made in jest, but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it or see. And then you walk fearlessly, eating what you must, growing wherever you can, like the monk on the road who know precisely how vulnerable he is, who takes no comfort among death forgetting men, and who carries his vision of vasteness and might around in his tunic like a live coal which neither burns nor warms him, but with which he will not part."

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

I have been singing "Great is Thy Faithfulness" to God lately. This line never fails to make me cry, "All I have needed thy hand hath provided" Lord I believe, help me in my unbelief...

Nietzsche and G K Chesterton agree!

2005-02-12T07:00:00.000-08:00

Nietzsche says concerning the struggle between the natural, proper values that seem to make the world spin and the Christian perspective:

"The symbol of this struggle, inscribed in letters legible across all human history, is “Rome against Judea, Judea against Rome”–there has hitherto been no greater event than this struggle, this question, this deadly contradiction. Rome felt the Jew to be something like anti-nature itself, its antipodal monstrosity as it were: in Rome the Jew stood “convicted of hatred for the whole human race”; and righty, proved one has a right to link the salvation and future of the human race with the unconditional dominance of aristocratic values, Roman values." Genealogy of Morals

Chesterton agrees in Orthodoxy:

I had tried to be happy in telling myself that man is an animal, like any other which sought its meat from God. But now I really was happy, for I had learned that man is a monstrosity. I had been right in feeling all things as odd, for I myself was at once worse and better than all things. The optimist’s pleasure was prosaic, for it dwelt on the naturalness of everything; the Christian pleasure is poetic, for it dwelt on the unnaturalness of everything in the light of the supernatural. The modern philosopher had told me again and again that I was in the right place, and I still felt depressed even in acquiescence. But I had heard that I was in the wrong place, and my soul sang for joy like a bird in spring. The knowledge found out and illuminated forgotten chambers in the dark house of infancy.”

Getting it

2005-02-11T05:48:00.000-08:00

"The Primary function of art is to objectify experience so that we can contemplate and understand it" Susan Langer in Art as Therapy

"I try to fit all these bits of information into the plot to help me believe you are writing it...to imagine a way it could unfold so I could believe I had purpose....When I start imagining how You are writing this story and it doesn't turn out that way-when things feel synchronized and then topple down like imploding buildings hit by planes...What do I do then? God, if it's to loosen my grip, if it's to lessen my hope in this world, please replace that hope with one that is stronger. Please give me as much already as I can handle in the already/not yet life." me to God, Feb.1,05

Right after I wrote this to God, I read the introduction to Sartre's Nausea. Remnants of the angst that Sartre expressed surrounding his denial of God's existence find a new home in this heart of a theist. They are encapsulated in the questions I pose to this God who may or may not answer. I guess when you are God, you have that perogotive.

"This is the point that all existential writers have repeated over and over: the detestability of existence, Jasper has written: "The non-rational is found in the opacity of the here and now...in the actual empirical existence which is just as it is and not other wise" Why is it not otherwise? Why is it at all? What is this is-ness? Isn't it simply nothing, or rather Nothingness, the unknowable, indispensable Void? What could be more absurd, "nonrational," meaningless? The mind of man, which he did not ask to be given, demands a reason and a meaning-this is it's self-defining cause-and yet it finds itself in the midst of a radically meaningless existence. The result: impasse. And nausea."

The writer of Proverbs said that hope deferred makes the heart sick. I desperately want to take hold of meaning when 99.9% of this life is mystery. Job got no answers. The folks in Hebrews 11, all those giants of the faith, died not having seen what was promised to them. A friend of mine said that we all find ourselves somewhere inbetween hope and fear in this present existence. Edging closer to the fear side of the continuum, I wonder if meaning even exists in the mind of God. Surely there's not meaning everywhere, not in all the details...and then the fear, what if my life is one of those details without meaning?

Are You really aware of the sparrows? What about these hairs on my head, shining grey before I've come anywhere close to "getting it?"

Warsaw Project Space, Friday, December 10, 7-9

2004-12-06T16:29:00.000-08:00

So here I am, proving at least to be consistent in my inconsistency yet again, this time with blogging. I guess it is fitting that there are times heavier in contemplation and times of production, with an attempt all the while to keep some semblance of balance...that ever elusive concept for me. So anyway, I'm hanging my paintings this week for our art opening on Friday, the title of which is the same as this blogg. If I could figure out how to post the invite image I would, but...much to my chagrin, I have no time for technological quandaries right now (do I ever have time for technological quandaries?)

That's right, my dear invisible cyberspace friend, I'm painting. Just got a BFA in painting and what did I do the last year of my degree? Explorations with tupper ware, silver platers, ironing boards, marshmallows, neckties...but no paint. I have eleven (I know, it's a weird number, but the twelfth one didn't work out, maybe he was Judas like Jon Willis said) portraits. The subjects of these portraits are the tired, the poor, the huddled masses in your local thrift store; they are old unclaimed couches. After telling people this, I've gotten several, "Why the hell are you doing that--I don't think I’m gonna get no spiritual experience from looking at no damn couch painting" (I'm very sensitive in my ability to read looks.) My reasons are legion.

One crazy thing I was struck with after entering art school, paint brush in hand, ready to heal the world through painting....painting is out. What do you mean “painting is out...?.” Out like eighties bubble skirts (although I think they’re back in)? Out like country blue and mauve? Who makes these decisions anyway? Chris Burden, the big bad performance artist that had himself crucified to a volkswagen and shot in the arm in a gallery in the 70s said that if the artists who captured the zietgist of their times 100 years ago were around today, they wouldn’t be using paint. Such a statement seems pretty arbitrary, especially since the genre Burden gravitated toward, performance art, has also been around thousands of years, though the western high art tradition only began to recognize it in the 60’s.

A part of me understands this rejection of painting, though, considering it’s history. Since the renaissance it’s been touted as the highest of high art. Right before it had run it’s course and fizzled into humility, the destination of all overweening arrogance, Greenburge, an art critique of the 40s and 50s voiced many of the arbitrary rules the discipline had acquired over the years (and added some of his own)...rules that had as much to do with who was doing the painting as what kind of painting they were doing. As you can imagine, anything considered “decorative” had no place in the cannon of important art. Check out this excerpt from one of my old papers:

“In 1978 Joyce Kozloff and Valerie Jaudon published an article called Heresies that included numerous quotes from the modernist standard despising the decorative. Quotes like Amedee Ozenfant’s proclamation, “There is a hierarchy in the arts: decorative art at the bottom, and the human form at the top. Because we are men” make obvious the particularly Western bias of gendering ornament as feminine (Broude 208). Another time honored argument against ornamentation was its perceived lack of concept, differentiating it from high art. As the progression of self purification within modernism advanced into abstraction, this dichotomy became increasingly problematic. There was such a bias against ornament in Western Art that when the Pattern and Decoration Movement finally became recognized, it took articles like that of the art critic Bourdon entitled “Decorative is not a Dirty Word” to convince people that they would not forfeit their standing in elite art circles if they enjoyed the fruit of this movement.”

One thing that I really like about doing art after high modernism is that many of the “rules” set by the kids on the playground that had all the toys, have been dispelled. I think we have to be careful of counter-rules though...”Oh yeah, you say that painting is the only form of real art? Well, I say that painting is no longer art at all!!” By painting these thrift store couches, I am similtaniously showing how ridiculous these false parameters are (you must paint, you must not paint ornament, you must paint ornament, you must not paint at all) and the power of the artist to surprise and transform, from humility to grandure, common place to luxurious. If we really knew and used our power as artists (we’ve all got it, don’t give me no excuse, business man, you’ve got it too!), the power to transform objects, places, histories, people....those who’ve been rejected into ones that are cherished, things would be different. Live your own uncool with so much passion and gusto that it becomes cool; and if it doesn’t, revel in the secret of your coolness.

2004-09-27T07:22:00.000-07:00

Freud and Nietzsche saw the arts as the decendants of religion, not in some kind of respectful/love-each-other family sense, but in an evolutionary sense. My brother in law (recent phd in psychology--yeah!) explained to me that Freud saw ancient pagan religions with all their crazy ritual orgies and sacrifices to be an early manifestation, ethical monotheism (Judisum, Christianity, Islam...) to be a later, more progressed version and the arts to be the most current evolution of the strand behind religion. This certainly makes so much art theory I've read make sense. (I'm reading, slowly but surely cuz it's tough, Danto's "The Transfiguration of the Commonplace"--a discourse on art theory completely saturated with Christian imagery). It also makes so much art to which I've been exposed more lucid...like my college prof.'s (Todd Pavlisko) work that is currently at the CAC called "Fountain." The sight of it is nothing special, an ordinary commercial water fountain. Only when you are thirsty and approach the fountain for a drink do you take part in his ritual and realize that instead of water, this fountain provides red wine for the taking. With the title, Todd ties this reference of Jesus's first miracle to Duchamp's urinal(also named Fountain), this groundbreaking work in art history that flipped the definition of art on it's head for so many. Then, of course, there is the peice that I researched in my internship at the CAC for the same show (but it couldn't be aquired): Tom Friedman designates a section of a museum floor to be cursed by a witch for the duration fo the show, after which she comes back and removes the curse. Turns out that Cincinnati has three wicca covens, if anyone is interested. Again, the artist connects ancient religious ritual with an element of significance in contemporary art...in this case, ambient and performance art.

So why am I telling you all of this, my dear anonymous internet audience? I've been thinking about how wonderful this discipline is for me, how much I love it in so many different respects...the wonder of making something, the challenge of really seeing, the greater challenge of helping others see what you've seen, the connection of all of this to who we are as human beings, what life is about and what it's like to live it...and now the connection to religion. The only problem is (in/through all these doubts and questions) I still believe in God. In fact I think art made this belief all the more authentic, maybe even transformed it actually into belief. Not visual art; the fact that I was good at visual art kept me from reaping it's benefits for a long time, cuz I never could relax enough to be moved by this kind of art when it was a tool for proving my worth, validating my existance. It was music that edged me toward God. When I was sixteen my sister got a mixed tape from this boy she was dating; that's when I was introduced to the Indigo Girls. I remember how the complexity that I savored in their words poked holes through the one dimensional person into which by that time I had made myself. This was all for the sake of survival, pain can't go deep when there are only shallow waters...but neither can joy. By acknowledging the depth, mystery, wonder, God-likeness in another person through their art, I was admitting it in myself too.

I asked Juli and David about the music with which they (individually) first truly connected. Juli talked about Peter Gabriel and a college class that explained Milgram's experiment where this scientist/phychologist asked people to administer shocks of increasing intensity to those behind closed doors after they failed to give correct answers to questions. Of course, people weren't really shocked, but the participants thought they were and heard their screams. Most of those who participated by the end of the questions where giving the highest degree of shock possible. Gabriel's anthem about this expereiment goes "We do what we're told, we do what we're told, we do what we're told...told to do" I'm looking at the credits of this song right now. Gabriels credits are: CMI, piano, prophet...is prophet a kind of musical instrument?? David talked about first connecting to this rap band, I'm blanking on the name right now. He said it was the first music he reckognized as really true. That's miraculous. Young white teenage boy from Indiana recknizing the truth of an inner city African American man's plight through music. Later when he worked for Mission Year, he'd mystify black kids on a backetball court in Philly cuz he not only knew the names of the artists they adored, he could rap the words with them.

That's some kind of crazy power. The image that accompanies an ad for Carnige Mellon's MFA program shows a desk with some graffiti: a stick figure holding a "will work for food" type sign, except instead the sign reads "Art for Prophet."

So here I am, working in a room adjancent to this 100 year old Cathedral: breath-taking, enveloping, and condemned...complete with angels falling from the sky and everything. Just finished my BFA in painting, wisked myself away right after graduation to work on a religious (partison) nonpartison voter registration campaign out of desperation for $, stood in the philosophy section of a bookstore after late hours of work feeling my pulse increase because there was this whole dialogue of ideas about which I knew next to nothing (alittle more than the organization that was employing me...as it was trying to speak to culture), feeling as if my faith reached an all time low this summer...but still with some, looking at this intermingling of art and philosophy in one hand and my corrupt religious tradition (all of it is corrupt in some respect) tangling with the markings of God in another, stepping into fall like it's the great unknown...

hearing the words of the prophet Ezekiel:

The hand of the Lord came upon me and brought me out in the Spirit of the Lord, and set me down in the midst of the valley; and it was full of bones. Then he caused me to pass by them all around, and behold, there were many in the open valley; and indeed they were very dry. And he said to me, "Son of man, can these bones live?"
So I answered, "O Lord God, You Know."

...

Over the Rainbow

2004-08-21T07:23:00.000-07:00

I was in Pier One last week, cuz on Sunday you can't buy alchohol till 1 and I found myself in the check out isle of Wild Oats at 12:30 with a bottle of wine. So anyway, there I was, listening to this yukalayle (?) remake of Somewhere over the Rainbow. Two memories came to mind. When I was about 5 or 6, my mom, hoping that I would grow up to be a singer, taught me this song and I performed it in front of my sisters' piano music theory class. I sang it with all the passion I could have mustered were I singing a hymn at a revival. For all I knew, it could have been a hymn.

The second memory was from this past Spring. I was in New York at the Whitney Bienniel. People are making things again; when I called one of my teachers from Nashville several months before, frustrated because painting was "out" along with object making in general (in favor of conceptual work that pushed artistic boundaries---fusing with philosopy, socialogy, politics etc...which I think is extremely interesting stuff--but I like to paint and make objects also...) She comforted me by telling me that these kinds of things come in waves and there will be times when the future looks scary or bleak or uncertain and artists will turn again to business of making things. This seemed to be the case in much of the work at the Whitney. Two years ago I heard that the work was largely conceptual, political and confrontational. This show had some political underpinnings, but seemed to be way more subtile. I heard a guide talking about references to the dark ages particularly with it's apocalyptic imagery, many peices seemed to be about consummer culture with all it's sensory inundation and hypnotic effects. The one peice that made the biggest impression on me was an object that ran along the staircase of the museum. The core of it was centralized in one space, this silver metallic and clear plastic, futuristic-looking time capsule with mirrors forming a conical shape in it's center where you could see the distorted image of your face. There was music coming from the core. A cacophany of several voices singing and reciting the words to "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," each one at a different place in the score. Branching off from this core were clear plastic tubes with colored wire inside ending at various points along the stair case. As you walked away from the core, you left the dissonant, chaotic voices but were beckoned by these clear cones at the end of this machine's tubed arms. With your ear to the cone, you could hear the voice of an individual, not a singer, but an ordinary voice, sometimes frail, sometimes off key. Putting your ear to cone after cone, you communed with all sorts of voices, in their own way, rendering "Somewhere over the rainbow." Listening to all those anonyomous absent people sing through their frailty this song about escape and relief ("If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow Why, oh why can't I?") seemed sobering to say the least. With the piece lining the steps of the gallary, thus accompanying me as I traveled from floor to floor, I felt like these people's hopes were following me, haunting me, reminding me of my own. And with the vulnurability of the sentiment, I thought of all those that were likely to not be fufilled....the ache that if I were to fully enterain these hopes there would not be room enough in this life (to say the least), room enough in this whole world to fufill them. The feeling is similiar to the one I've been having as I ride the bus and look into people's faces who obviously aren't "there" and wonder if they know where they are, if they're just shutting down, getting away, if this is the only time in the day when their thoughts can be their own. I often wonder at the fact that we all sit so damn close to each other on those rush hour buses, but at the same time are completely alone in our interior worlds, like the voices in those tubes.

Are these hopes that completely surpass the possibilities of this life simply a narcotic? Are all these things that offer momentary relief, communion, invigoration, passion, joy, amazement hints (foretastes) of something deeper? Are the addictions that we all share in some form just premature escapes, premature attempts at bliss? There have been moments when I have been willing to bet my life on those last sentences. Right now, right this second, I feel the hollowness of not knowing.

Somewhere over the rainbow
Way up high,
There's a land that I heard of
Once in a lullaby.

Somewhere over the rainbow
Skies are blue,
And the dreams that you dare to dream
Really do come true.

Someday I'll wish upon a star
And wake up where the clouds are far
Behind me.
Where troubles melt like lemon drops
Away above the chimney tops
That's where you'll find me.

Somewhere over the rainbow
Bluebirds fly.
Birds fly over the rainbow.
Why then, oh why can't I?

If happy little bluebirds fly
Beyond the rainbow
Why, oh why can't I?

my first blog ever

2004-08-17T15:53:00.000-07:00

So here I am, learning from all the cool bloggers in my life the beauties of sending my thoughts, ideas, questions, ramblings out into cyberspace for anyone to peruse. Is there a spell check on this thing? Ah man, this could get embarracing...cuz I know people are just chomping at the bit to read my thoughts, ideas, questions, ramblings and will probibly also have to endure my pretty horrendous spelling. I remember Heidi Helm telling me about his book she was reading that said that an artist's first great obsticle is to heal past the fact that they can't spell. I think that's a pretty crazy generalization...but it fits me. I would study for hours for those crazy bees and without fail, first word, I'm out.
So why am I blogging now (you ask)? (Gosh, this conversation reminds me of those I would have with my imaginary friend as a child...Brair Fox, lived in the tree next to our house) WELL, I'll tell you why! Lately my mind's been spinning in such a topsy turvy mannor that I'm afraid at any second it's gonna fall off whatever is holding it up (maybe that's a good thing?) I've been reading like my life depends on it, I've been in this crazy solumn, pensive state of mind that I fear if I were to really try to hash out these ponderings with a real live human being I might devour them. And I love my friends, but not for dinner. So that's part of it. When this becomes too much, you just close the little window on your computer...all better. Another motivating factor is the hopes of sorting through this mess of thoughts and the anxiety that seems to be driving them right now. Maybe someone out there will understand, maybe they will tell me their story. for many years I have done all my sorting in journals, mostly in prayer form or these crazy mind maps that tend to get me to the crux of the issue a bit faster than stream of consciousness writing (dang my nonlinear mind). My prayers lately have been more interspersed throughout the day and shorter, "God, please give me faith, I have none" etc...I hope this isn't my replacement for prayer, because I'm lugging a big fat ass mountain of doubt behind me right now.
Despite all that, I think Ill start with some testimony time (preach on). So I've been reading Nietzche's "On the Genealogy of Morals." Not the reason for my struggles now, that would take a great deal more explaining. I guess I am reading him so as not to feel like there may be this big intellectual boggie man under a rock that will make my faith crumble if I ever were to pier beneath it--also just cuz I'm curious and love ideas and want to know more about this person that is "the father of postmodernism"--according to somebody I read somewhere. His narrative about the origins of Christianity has been challenging, to say the least. When I first read his essay on good and evil, my heart sank. I've heard so many critiques on Christianity based on the aweful things Christians have done...no refutations here..the crusades, the witch trials, segregated churches, sexism in the name of God, etc....definately some skeletons there, all of which clumped together amount to just about the antithesis of the crazy sacrificial love that Jesus lived and died. That's the story I've fallen in love with, not those of my "forefathers of the faith." Nietzche attacks that story...faith, hope, love--attacked...frutis of the spirit "patience, kindness, gentleness..."--same. He talks about slave resentment and "spiritual" revolt, religion as a narcotic and excuse for impotence and a means to denial of unbearable meaninglessness. I think what makes it sting so much is the elements of truth in some of his words..like the narcotic bit. I've seen religion used as a narcotic...I've done it (I'm afraid of people, so I think Ill stay in my room and read the bible, I can't make a decision so I'll pray till the opportunity passes or something just happens). I've used it as a tactic of resentment and revenge...I've used it as some kind of spiritual euphamism for the unexplainable horrendous tragedies with which most people have to live and by which some people are crushed. But I can't get past this sacrificial love bit. It doesn't fit in a pure survival of the fittest world. (and no, I'm not saying that because I need to read the bible literally, I don't know how to read the bible...) I don't buy that it's all about resentment. There's alot to talk about there, which I won't go into now but, I guess the main reason why I can't give up this particular kind of love is the kind of self-forgetful yet self-affirming joy I've tasted receiving and giving that love (the giving side still so clumsy and way too rare) AND the utter hell I have felt when I am fixated only my own needs, desires, dreams and am crazy desprit to see them actualized. So, anyway, all that to say, last Saturday night I was stringing these paper flowers (tons of um) that some women in our community made for Juli and Dave's wedding on Sunday. I stayed up late doing it. It was the first thing I have done in a while out of love (regretfully, this whirlwind of thoughts has led me to implode, I think I'm still supposed to be sorting---just not in my little selfish vaccuum) Granted, this kind of love is easy. Not only do I dearly love Dave and Juli, Juli has cared for me as a friend in crazy, amazing Jesus like ways. She asks questions that convince me it's safe to answer honestly, she remembers my story, my struggles and treads gently but somehow can lure me out of my hiding places to courage with her words, she's stayed up until god aweful hours of the morning with me helping me fix the various artistic binds I've gotten myself into. I was thinking of these things as I was stringing these flowers. I asked the God who put such crazy love into my friend and who spun all this sacrificial love into being, to accept the stringing of those paper flowers as worship. Do I know what to do with the Bible?--nope, what about all the forms of Christianity that makes me hyperventilate?--huh, what about the idea of hell?--no answers here....but I know I can never let go of this love and if my life ends up being about anything else, it's not worth it. I've had glimpses of peace in this place, that it's ok to know nothing right now accept that one basic thing...stringing those flowers, drinking magarrita's with Elian, sitting on the front porch laughing with Brooklin, Quanicia and Risa from the hood. Damn, it feels good to laugh. Hoping more times like these are forth coming...