9/11 BLOOZ

diana toma

30"x 48" mixed media on canvas

It has been September 11 all day. It's a day I don't pay attention to the news. It's all 9/ll corporate news-speak. I'm sympathetic in my heart for everyone concerned who survived or left the body by surprise one morning at work. I'm sympathetic with everyone in NY that day and soon after. I have no patriotic feelings around it. I don't believe anything we're told about it. Don't know what happened and will not know in this lifetime. I only see it as first day of American police state. It miraculously gave birth to the Patriot Act, the virus that deleted the Constitution. After WW2, Remember Pearl Harbor justified perpetual war thereafter. Now Remember 9/11 justifies police state and eternal war on poor people around the globe. Keeping Wall Street booming. It's been a major disappointment in my life to see the American people throw away democracy with such a popular zeal. Even in the most jaundiced moments I'd have never seen it coming. In hindsight, it's clear as 1-2-3. 9/11 makes me question why I pay attention to the news at all. I do, however, see certain progressions acting out step-by-step giving a sense of what's coming and explains much of the noxious malaise in the air now. It helps me understand the senselessness that seems to be in the air. It's everywhere. What was bad before, like poverty and prisons, is worse now. I've not seen a single honey bee this year. Have seen some bumblebees, though so much smaller than usual they look unhealthy. A lot of flowers that seed this time of year have no seeds. I saw a relative few butterflies this year. The Joe Pyes in flower used to be covered by shimmering halos of butterflies. This year I'd see one butterfly, sometimes two. We're in serious trouble. The television has kept us asleep while Capitalist excess swept us aside. We'll lose hi-speed internet soon, as Comcast and Time-Warner are spending millions on lobbying to take what democracy is in the internet away from us. It will happen. USofA is about money, not us.

everyman

This is where 9/11 takes me. I can't get any feeling from the incident having to do with flag waving and memorials. It's too serious a matter for me. It's not something to celebrate. I know, three thousand plus. It makes the event all the worse. I don't even want to go into it. It's too dark and murky a place created by mis- and disinfomation. I must let this go, must separate self from concerns about it. I've come to see 9/11 a moment in a country on a downhill run that kicked in the nitrous oxide, NOS. I'm glad to be in the last years of this lifetime. Maybe next time I can turn up in the mountains of Romania with parents who play traditional music of the region, a place that hopefully has nothing America wants. My greatest disappointment with Obama is that he did not charge Bush, Cheney, Rummy and Rice with war crimes. He symbolically accepted their war crimes into American infallible exclusionism. It wasn't like he really had a choice. He, too, is a corporate marionette. I must concede that what I wanted for the USA all along has been its own ideals, the ideals we're taught in school. Like much else we're taught in school, it must be unlearned to function out here in the world, so to speak. I'm naive of what is going on. I live in a world that I see diminished day by day so fast it makes the head swim. On the one hand, I would like to be like my friends who aren't interested in anything on the news, pay no attention to politicians, don't vote, just live their lives at home with the family bringing up kids, work, hunt, grow a garden, have a riding mower and a pickup and ride the economy's ebb step by step. On the other hand, I like having some insight into the "big picture." I didn't realize before today what a gloom 9/11 brings over me. So much died that I thought was good with the falling men and women and others who didn't make it. The planes did not implode the buildings. That's the beginning and the end of it for me.  

photo by constantine manos

Swing down sweet chariot stop and let me ride, Swing down sweet chariot stop and let me ride. I hear George Clinton in my head and see him on stage with the Funkdelics, Swing down sweet chariot stop. The world would not be real without George Clinton and his beautiful song, Fantasy Is Reality In The World Today. Just keep hangin in there, my granddaddy used to say. Something like that. I'm ready to start calling for a chariot to pick me up and take me to what's next, be lifted up like Ezekiel into a ufo and zoom away at light speed to a place where people have evolved past conflict and killing, and die there. Sounds like Costa Rica. I'd rather die on my mountain. I could not leave my mountain. I could not leave my culture or my friends or Caterpillar without dying. The corporate takeover of our government sideshow is in my mind. Lord Have Mercy. Why do I want all that shit in my mind? All I have to do is turn off that channel in my mind, switch channels. I have control. I could change my focus to the Paris Surrealists, look at pictures and read the writings, read books about the Surrealists. Were I to give as much attention to them as I give to our DC government, I'd have something a whole lot more interesting in my mind after a year. Yesterday I ordered a cd by Boubacar Traore, a singer and guitar picker from Mali. It's the lope of the music, the walk of a camel, a long walk on foot, that pulls me to this music now. He's from a city in the desert near the Niger river. His music flows into me from another world, from outside the world of my experience, foreign, exotic to my ear as a one-string violin. Something new. A new musical experience. I could take myself on my own light-speed flight by switching channels of my focus of attention. I could be reading a biography of Constantin Brancusi or the new biography of Vincent van Gogh. Or have a funkathon listening to George Clinton. 

charles ray

I found the picture at the top, the angel painted today, September 11, on facebook by my facebook friend Diana Toma. She said she had been working on it, was dissatisfied, washed the image off and went after it to satisfaction. A friend who saw it said he saw the towers and the scene on the ground. Diana suddenly saw it. She did not know she had painted the towers, nor did she know she'd painted the chaos on the ground. She was painting an angel making no association in her mind with 9/11. She said she felt like she must have channeled it from the energy of the day, but her mind did not see it. I love the image without the association, but its way of happening without the artist knowing it, slipping around conscious mind, gives it a quality that makes it live. Diana's paintings and drawings have the spirit of life in them. As in the angel's face, Diana's faces are living, individual faces. First time I saw the image, I made no connection by association with 9/11. I saw it an angel between two worlds. The instant I saw the facebook comment about the towers, there it was, like a Rauschenberg silkscreen. I can still see it without seeing the towers. I see it back and forth, with and without, and see it both at once. The image on the one hand is independent of the 9/11 association and on the other hand could be a poster for the Oliver Stone movie. The quality of being both at once, yin and yang together in the turning circle, gives it life. In the angel's face I see a child's innocence looking to God in a beseeching prayer for her mother's life. It's a powerful image. Diana's images are so powerful with feeling they have a living presence. She can paint a cat such that I feel the presence of cat. This is her gift, the power of the feeling in her work. It's a feeling in the heart. The faces she paints show an individual face and an individual feeling. She has a website www.artbydianatoma.com. I found a variety of images googling diana toma artist and clicking on images. And there's a photograph of her favoring Grace Slick in the time of Surrealistic Pillow. Diana's angel painting that happened of its own lifted my spirit about the day. It shows such tremendous compassion, you know an angel like this was there.  

diana toma

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BUTTERFLIES AND SERPENTS

take me to your leader

 

Butterflies dance on the joe pyes in full flower this time of year. Their big head of pink broccoli is a cluster of thousands of little pink flowers. Joe pyes appear to be butterfly paradise, except the butterflies don't have to be dead to get there. A stand of joe pyes this time of year is crowned by a halo of fluttering multi-colored wings. Sometimes the butterflies are all over the flowers, cover them with yellow-black wings spread flat. A stand of joe pyes decorates my bedroom window. Long stalks ten to twelve feet long, leaves that circle the stem at regular intervals. The leaves lean to a dull cloudy green, but in rain the leaves come to life. They glow reflecting the silver light of the sky. One of the more beautiful sights in these mountains I know of is a stand of flowering joe pyes in the rain. It brings to mind a Japanese screen. This stand of joe pyes I got pictures of the butterflies from today came up behind my mailbox. The mailbox post protected them from the County roadside clippers. I encourage them wherever they want to grow. They're a valuable energy source for the butterflies and they're beautiful.    

don't know who my leader is

A Taurus with Venus the ruling planet, I require beauty of some sort in my surroundings. I've got a bad case of it. It's why I can't leave the mountains. It's why I can't stand more than a short time in a city. I have to change channels on my idea of beauty from the flowering green world to chance arrangements of colors and shapes. Maybe this is why abstract art is so right for an expression of the city. In the city we live more in our minds. Everything around us is utilitarian, right angles, left angles, vertical angles, horizontal angles and dull, uninteresting colors. The gray of pavement the dominant color in a city. In my city years I liked to make photographs of the backsides of downtown shops that face the parking lots. That was where I found the abstract compositions I was looking for. A big door that hadn't been painted since it was put there. The wall hadn't been painted since it was new. A cardboard box about four feet high and five twenty-foot fluorescent bulbs standing up from the box against the old brick, chipped paint and grime from years. Images and words from the days when they painted billboards on the sides of downtown buildings. By the time I came along, they were faded, chipped and more beautiful than they'd ever been. They faded into the unseen environment out the back door where plant life grew in cracks, paper trash speckled the ground and collected in corners with leaves.

isn't butterfly leader an oxymoron

I did not know it when I lived in the city that my soul longed for the country, for deep country, Blue Ridge Mountains where they have rattlesnakes, copperheads, bears, coyotes, wolves, mountain lions, bobcats, coons, possums and all the rest of it. It's not as dangerous as it sounds. They are more afraid of us than we are of them. Hunters see them and traces of them, but the rest of us seldom see one unless it runs across the road in front of the car. The critters are mostly out at night. One night coyotes were yipping in a circle around my house. It was a freaky feeling. Some years ago I was sitting in the woods writing. It was getting dark, I was almost finished, and a screech owl just over my shoulder started its trill. I'd never heard one so close. It's a scary sound. I imagine for a mouse it's the sound of the chainsaw in Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I was thinking the bird lets loose this scary call that sets the mice in motion from fear. A mouse moves, that's it, owl shit. I was loving it hearing the screech owl so close. It was also an uneasy feeling hearing such a cold-blooded shrill cry. It's like the miniature owl was saying, Come out my darlings. I'm gonna get you, and when I do I'm gonna kill you, then I'm gonna eat you, ha ha ha ha ha. From a distance, it's a pretty sound to hear after dark coming from the trees among the tree frogs and katydids.

no two ways about it

Out there in the world of what we call nature, it's kill to eat and get killed to be eaten. That's the cycle. I used to think it a crazy setup for a loving God to create. Born, live and die. We humans as we are today are foreigners in the world of the trees where prowling is the mode of walking, looking for signs of something to catch, kill and eat. At the same time looking not to get stalked and killed. We've separated ourselves from that world with exceptions like hermits in the Yukon who live by what they catch from day to day. I don't hunt. I am here to go in peace with the world I live in. In my early years in the mountain I walked all over this area, saw the mountains down on the ground where the wild things live. In later years, I like to go to one spot, sit and look at the landscape, the tree canopy. One time a bluejay stood on a tree limb not twenty feet from my spot. I didn't move. The bluejay groomed itself all over, taking a time-out to preen feathers. It was like watching an actress before her mirror. Sitting on a flat rock in the creek writing one nice summer day, a water snake crawled onto the rock beside me. They're not aggressive, they're not poisonous and they don't bite unless provoked. They do, however, have one grave misfortune; they look like copperheads.

joe pye

It took awhile to be able to tell the difference between a water snake and a copperhead on sight. By this time, I knew what the snake was, because it had given me a serpentine Esther Williams swimming rodeo in front of where I sat. The snake was frustrated because it was trying to scare me off the rock and I wouldn't leave. It wanted to sun there. It was that time of day. The snake placed its chin on the rock inches from my crossed legs looking at me with hypnotic serpent eyes like it was saying, I'm a serpent. You're supposed to be afraid of me. Are you asleep? That day I learned snakes know they scare every living thing. I wondered what it must like to have everything that sees you scream and run or try to kill you. I'd have been happy to give the snake its rock to sun on, but I was writing about the snake and what it was doing, swimming, crawling on the rock, looking me in the eye trying to scare me with the serpent glare. I was writing a video. I couldn't stop writing because I was writing about the moment, the snake's frustration with a giant that didn't know a serpent when he saw one. That's about as daring as I get. I'm no Turtle Man who can dive into a pond and bring up a snapping turtle with his hands. That aint me. I don't go near no snapping turtle. A good old dog like Martha is more my style. Stretch out on the grass, enjoy the sunlight and don't worry about a thing.

martha

 

 

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