barnett newman
I want to write all night. I also want to be able to function at least by noon. I want to write to you so bad it makes me want to stay up. The clock has just passed Cinderella's curfew. That's no concern to me. I'm not waiting for a pumpkin on wheels to save me from myself. Not my story. In the time when I was young, inexperienced, stupid and lonely, I hoped to fall in love with somebody who would save me from myself. It never happened. Fell in love a few times against all signs that said: don't go there. Only found turmoil of the mind and disappointment. My pumpkin on wheels turned up empty; it wasn't really love, but fantasy. I didn't know anything about love. Finally, in 1975, Meher Baba tapped me on the shoulder to get my attention and taught me over several years how to save myself from my ignorant mind and befuddled heart. He set me in the direction of finding I don't need somebody to save me from myself. If I can't find how to get in line with myself on my own, assigning the task to someone else isn't going to work. It's only real when I can find by my own searching why I think I need saved from myself. I can't trust myself? Experience tells me my mind can make up a lot of ridiculous fantasies. It's only real when I can find in self how to transcend my ignorant self by tuning in to intuition, allowing higher self to have a say in my decisions, become acquainted with higher self that seemed dormant before I saw to rational and emotional satisfaction that God Is. That was all I needed to know. I'd always been told, but never had any conscious experience of God that I was aware of. The God I grew up with was Fear. It took Meher Baba to point to the words of Jesus, God is love. By way of intuition, I already knew it, though it had been buried under a mountain of dogma, the diamond in a coal mine.
barnett newman
I could not have found it on my own. In my years of searching for whether or not there is God, I could not see past religion. Religions convinced me a real God would not allow religionists to do to fellow human beings and the living creatures of the earth as has been done continually in multiples, like the German Christians embracing fascism in the 1930s, like American Christians, today, embracing fascism. I've never been able to reconcile God supporting fascism. It doesn't compute. Fascism is about hate. God is not in it. I could not see, before, that God is not in religion. Religion is of the human mind, not God. I missed it before Meher Baba convinced me God Is, and God Is Love. Simple as that. The preachers start qualifying: Yes, except for...Yes, except for.... God hates the sin and loves the sinner. The only thing I can say to that is bullshit. Love does not hate. The so-called sin gets balanced by karma. It takes care of itself. God doesn't need to be concerned with it. Karma automatically keeps us in balance. As for God as judge, love does not judge. I see no reason to explain. It's simple language. Love is not about controlling. Love is about allowing. There is no except. Love allows us to find our own way, make our own mistakes, learn from our own experience. Control does not allow the individual to learn from ones own experience. It's called doubting. Doubting is a sin. God doesn't approve. Really? Love can't stand up to questioning? I found God by doubting the mountain of bullshit that had accumulated in the barn of my mind. I was led to believe the same nonsense the television hypocrite evangelists dress up God in to fit the confines of their own limited intelligence and knowledge. Like old man Tom Pruitt said of them, they're just makin a racket.
barnett newman
who's afraid of red, yellow and blue?
In my own personal vision, if it's not about love, it's not about God. What's so frightening about love? I think of abstract expressionist, Barnett Newman's painting title, Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue? Alas, it was slashed in the modern art museum, the Stedelijk, in Amsterdam, by an art reactionary. He was evidently the one afraid of red, yellow and blue. Destroyed it. I'm grateful I had a chance to see it when it was living, about three years after it was painted. My response to it was to stand back and look at it for a long time. I walked up to it on the left side and walked the length of it, almost but not touching it, feeling it, walking the length of red from the vertical blue line, feeling the expanse of red all the way to the vertical yellow line. I wasn't aware that I felt anything special, though there is a memory of experience sensing Barnett Newman, himself, in his two-dimensional environment up close to it applying the paint. His presence was the only notable feeling, presence in so intangible a feeling as to make me wonder if I felt it or thought it. I take it that feeling it made me think it. My feeling about the slasher is he could not handle such an expanse of one color being called art. It was a gesture of control. Perhaps the painting became for him a symbol of modern art being out of control; modernism, itself, was destroying art. Perhaps he felt vulnerable in the face of Newman's effrontery. Perhaps, too, among religionists the word love has a great deal of vulnerability associated with it. We can't let down our guard in this world. The devil's watching you in his cross-hairs. You needta be afraid, braced against, just braced against. I recall William Blake, Damn braces, bless relaxes. He, too, had issues with preachers who skirted around the subject of love, a word too charged with carnal associations for comfort in the control department. Control does not allow. Control is about zero tolerance. Jesus or Hell.
barnett newman
According to my mother's preacher, I'm not afraid enough of Satan. I couldn't say anything to that one. I knew there was nothing I could do or say. I don't care if they think I should be very afraid and live in fear because God wants me to be afraid. In my way of seeing, God wants for me that I not worry, thus be happy. I can't talk with anybody who demands I believe and think their way. This mind is what spit me out of Kansas as far as land allowed. They can have their Satan all they want. I confess to concern they want Satan a little too much for my comfort. Makes me uncomfortable talking with my mother, who always brings up Satan and dwells on Satan, talking to me like a preacher wanting to convince me, for my own good, to be like them. Been there, done that, not going back. Didn't buy the tshirt. When she told me I'm not afraid enough of Satan, stressing it with, "You better think about it," all I could say was, "I'll leave Satan to you." I feel sad for her. I'm not looking to control her, so I allow her to adore a preacher who tells her to be afraid. She dragged me through that mud all the way through my school years. I'm free of it. She wants it, she's got it. I don't want it. It's why I'm a thousand miles away. On the telephone, when it gets crazy, I can say, "We're not going there." She's learned that I think independently from Fundamentalist dogma, and she will never let it rest. She bred one as relentless in not hearing it as she is relentless in needing to say it; it's her duty to keep in the front of my mind that I am wrong and headed for an eternity of hell fire. Lord have mercy, how did I get here? Remembering the coal mine of fundamentalist hymn book theology I ran for my life from. Literally ran for my life. We talk on the phone across a divide much greater than a thousand land miles. Love is never an issue, except, the great except, at the end, the duty I-love-you. We have very different meanings for love. Hers is to control; mine is to allow. I learned young never to browbeat anybody for any reason. It's just ego talking. I reject control; she rejects allowing. We're stuck. I feel sad for her that she alienated her first born, but all I know to do is allow it to be what it is. An old hillbilly saying comes to mind, it is what it is.
barnett newman
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