THE DRUNK MAN AND THE PARROT

found art 

It is a hard time to take anything seriously. The mystery of the obvious stumps a lot of our  politically minded public figures. I like to think, surely they don't "represent" us, but they do. It's like the goal is now the bottom. The latest comedy I've seen several times was a quip from Sarah Palin noting that the new pope is "kinda liberal." Wildman comic Bill Maher's response: Wait til she finds out about Jesus. His jest speaks for the entire time we've had to endure the "Christian Right" harp on taxes. Hearing them makes me laugh. Didn't Jesus say something like, Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's? My take on this saying has to do with paying taxes without making a fuss. For me, personally, it has something to do with staying out of politics. The people who claim Christendom for themselves in the realm of politics exhibit little but venality toward others. Compassion among them is a four-letter word. These are people, who, if attending the crucifixion, would say, "Gimme that spear! I wanna stick him too!" I see them in my mind's eye doing this when they pat their own backs calling themselves Christian. It fails to be a bother to me, because they're only fooling themselves. Back in the 1950s I saw this coming when fundamentalist preachers started turning toward the political arena. The belief system does not stand up well to public scrutiny. Inevitably, the belief system, the fog of dogma around "the word," will be picked apart and declared lunatic. This has already happened, and the reaction has been that they're being denied the right to worship.

found art

Yesterday I spent some of the day with my friend Kathryn. We went by a local diner for pie and coffee, really just a chance to sit face to face and talk for awhile. An old boy we both recognized, but neither of us knew, was sitting at a table nearby. He had the angry white man look of somebody who listens to Limbaugh "religiously." He spoke in our direction asking what we thought of Obamacare. Kathryn said she didn't pay attention to the news. I said I have medicare, it's of no concern to me, and we went on with our conversation. We were not going to jump into that bucket of shit. Just by speaking, he told us where he was coming from. He wanted to gripe out loud. I don't like to be short with somebody, but in a case like this, I can't be short enough. We were not going to let him get started. He's the crazy uncle at Thanksgiving who keeps everybody miserable with his rant. And, by God, he's a Christian. Aint no two ways about it. Kathryn and I talked about him without talking about him, talked about the American white man's mind after a quarter century of Limbaugh mind whipping up artificial anger in white working class men. We spoke of two women we know, both going through divorce, desperate to get away from abusive white men. In both cases, the man was of the Limbaugh rant mind. We felt sorry for the old boy in the restaurant wanting so badly to rant and nobody to listen. At the same time, I felt little to no patience for him, the same as for a Jehovah's Witness at the door interrupting the day pushing their agenda.

found art

We had just come from visiting a friend of ours who had a white man staying with her at the moment. He was drunk and getting drunker. Neither of us knew him. We both read him for a wild card, no guessing what he might do in the next minute. I took it upon myself to keep him calm by encouraging his talk about himself. It could have gone off into blubbering tears over mama or throwing a fit of rage, anything in between. I didn't feel like it was a dangerous situation. It was a dumb white man drunk. Keep him the center of attention and everybody is happy. Kathryn told me later she didn't know what to do about him, how to talk, anything. I felt at home. Just another white guy in a world of white guys who have issues galore and can only address them drunk. He was tremendously hung up inside, twisted in knots probably in early childhood, needing the liquor to soften the hard edges of guilt and self-loathing. I felt I understood the guy. I can identify with somebody who wants to get shit-faced drunk. It feels great on the inside. It just looks stupid on the outside. I don't ever have a problem with somebody being drunk unless it's a mean drunk. We all have our own issues and issues don't get solved overnight, no matter how fast you go at them. It takes years on the psychiatric couch to really start getting insight into dealing with our issues. Guys growing up in a world where it's an embarrassment to expose that you have issues, or to talk about them, or even own up to them, hold so much emotional turmoil inside they often become time bombs. One unpredictable moment sets them off. Getting good and drunk every now and again acts as a release valve in a pressure cooker. The ones that need to get drunk the most are the ones with the most pressing issues.

found art

By the time Kathryn and I were having our pie and coffee, we were wondering what kind of day this is. We talked over what we were seeing and how we were feeling about what we were seeing, not with judgment of the particular individuals, but seeing people locked into their minds such that they miss everything going on around them. I'm wanting to pull my own mind away from the old belief that what I think matters beyond myself. We complain an awful lot because we believe what we think matters beyond ourselves. I want to withdraw my mind from "out there" to "in here." I felt like seeing those two men, one after the other, were telling me that wasting my mind on illusions of what is going on "out there" is distracting me from what is important "in here." I take "in here" to mean the heart, living by the heart, thinking by the heart, feeling. "Out there," I take to mean the constructs of the mind, agendas, even beliefs. I see venality comes out of too much emphasis on mind. The self-centered nature of the "Christian Right" is all mind. None of it comes from heart. The Christians operating from heart are not making the news. In both cases of the men we saw, the drunk man and the parrot, I could honestly say to myself: There but for the grace of God go I. Without the grace of God, I would be both those men in one. I don't mean to imply I thought they were bad people. I saw them unfortunate people, as I would see myself without the grace of God. I can't imagine living without the grace of God.

found art

 

 

 

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WINTERIZED

 

 

carl andre

 

 The last couple days I've been warmifying house and feet. Covered a window and screen door with polyethylene, a kinda clear plastic that lets the light through. Last year I let that room be cold all winter, but don't want a dead zone in the house this year. Put a space heater, one of those Italian radiator-looking heaters that stands on wheels, DeLonghi. Close to it, I put a box with a cushion inside it for Caterpillar, a private napping place for her. She'll discover it tomorrow. She needs a new place. She likes to move around from one place to another and she only has two. This will be her third. A good spot in a box near a heat source. She'll snuggle in there nicely. It will probably cost $10 a month to keep the room warm. It's worth that to give Caterpillar a comfortable spot. It's not spoiling her, but taking her for my partner, my special friend, which she is. Yesterday morning, after a cold-cold night, I went online to LL Bean and found some fleece-lined house shoes that come up over the ankle, as well as two pair of fleece-lined sox. Went to Gil's in town and bought four pair of long warm grippy sox. I will keep my feet warm this winter. Winter is a long time to be freezing below the knees. Warm footwear will do the trick. Caterpillar lives down there in the cold zone below my knees. Must look after her wellbeing too. She wears a permanent sweater. It's not so cold for her as for me. Or so I imagine.

carl andre

My friend Kathryn posted on facebook a video of making a space-heat source using two clay pots, one bigger than the other, a small bread pan, and four small candles per burning that last three hours. Sit the bread pan where you want it, put four little candles in the middle. Plug the hole in the small clay pot with aluminum foil and place it upside down on the bread pan over the candles. Then place the larger pot upside down over the smaller pot. The heat gathers in the small pot, runs out from under the rim, the bigger pot makes a chimney. Warm air rises from the hole in the big pot. It's a good hand warmer. The clay pots heat up and the big one radiates heat into the air around it. It doesn't feel like a big deal of heat, but when I walk by it, I feel it. I keep it on the desk to the right of the computer. I can feel it when the candles go out and it cools down, too.  It makes a good hand warmer and it takes the edge off the cold. It gives the air in the room the scent of hot clay, an earthy incense. The candles cost three and a half cents apiece. Three hours of comfortable space heat for a dime. No electricity involved. The desk is in a corner where the heat doesn't circulate so freely. This little heater takes care of the corner. The outer pot radiates the heat evenly around it and the chimney sends a flow of heat into the air. It is moderate heat, to be sure, but the outer pot gets so hot it can only be touched, at its hottest, very lightly for a second. The interior pot is really hot. This simple apparatus is the best possible hand warmer. Hold hand over the chimney hole and it warms up in a hurry. Place hands around the outer pot up close without touching and hands warm quickly there. I like it because it's an ingenious device that is simple and works on an obvious principle of physics: heat rises.

 

carl andre

 

Already I can tell the difference wearing warm sox in shoes with cold floor. I've taken to wearing a sweatshirt to bed. Without it, a cold night keeps me restless. Sweatshirt does it right. I've never been one in the past to make much of a fuss over the cold. Burned fire wood for twenty years and loved it. I like the heat from burning wood. Kerosene heat is warm enough, but it does not have the same feel of wood heat, or fire heat. The clay pot gives an elemental feeling of heat like the wood stove. It doesn't have electrical coils you dare not touch, or a fan or anything other than natural law, heat rises. I thought I wouldn't use it much when putting it together. Was really doing it to see how it worked, already knowing it would work, because it is so obvious. Now I see I will use it every time I'm at the computer this winter. It takes the chill off the corner. And it's fun in its simplicity. I look at it amazed by the simplicity like I look at Carl Andre's blocks of wood set in relation to each other, amazed at the art in such simple lines. I don't like the plastic over all the windows, because I can't see out. I'd rather leave the windows free of the plastic. The windows are better than paintings on the wall. Each window in this room has a birdfeeder visible in it and birds and squirrels and chipmunks gambol about as I watch. On a morning I'm late getting seeds to the feeders, at least one squirrel tries to attract my attention on the tree nearest the window, using its eyes to draw my attention. Evidently the squirrel believes if it stares hard enough I'll feel it and look. It works.

 

carl andre

 

Last winter, I was cold the whole winter. This winter, I'm going into it determined to keep warm. I keep the room at 65 degrees and wear a sweatshirt or sweater. Upper half is doing ok. It's below the knees I must deal with this year. This year I want heavy sox all winter long. They will make the winter easier to live with. In the past I had the attitude, tough it out. This year I don't care about toughing anything out. I don't have any say beyond the reach of my hands. I know this, yet often I live like I don't know it. Why would I want any say beyond my physical reach? Outside my immediate zone of interest, everything is other people's interest, not mine. My life has been about drawing my interest in from outside my immediate world. Media and beliefs about democracy keep us believing what is really happening is someplace else. Where you are is the nowhere point. I've been drawing inward from an old belief I held that in democracy it is important to engage at least one's attention. I don't believe that any more. We don't have democracy any more, if we ever did, and what I think doesn't even matter in a comment box on facebook. I've been brought up believing in America what I think matters. It only matters to me. That's good enough. It's best I don't have influence or decision-making power beyond myself. I don't make the best decisions for myself. I don't want to make lousy decisions for other people too.

 

carl andre

 

 

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A QUIET PLACE TO GO

The cold is moving in. This year I must find some fleece-lined indoor slip-on boots to wear in the house on the cold floor. And some heavy socks. This floor is so frigid in winter I want to stay in bed all the time or sit with feet up. I don't mind, however. Humans have lived with cold floors in winter as long as we've had houses. I don't care to spoil myself to central heat, air conditioning and the other luxuries. I like living with the elements, like living in a house that is not air tight. I like to feel summer and feel winter and all the weather in between. I like intimate association with the weather the same as with the world of the living, such endangered species as trees, rhododendron, ferns, running water, the animals that come out at night. I like having them around. I like it that coyotes and bears roam freely around my house. The only marauder I have is a coon that is throwing the roof off the birdfeeder in the night to eat leftover sunflower seeds. It's easy enough to replace the roof in the morning. Three possums lived under the house for awhile, until coyotes ate them. Hawks get the birds that come to the birdfeeder. They can't maneuver in among the trees; they wait outside the trees for birds flying out of the tree zone. I dreamed a few nights ago of a big pileated woodpecker pecking on the side of a dead tree, the standing trunk all that was left, the bird clinging to the trunk like they do, that red hammer-head digging for snacks.

 

 

One summer afternoon some years ago I was in the woods across the road, standing on a moss-covered rock beside the creek that runs to the waterfalls. I heard yip-yip-yip-yip, looked in the direction of the sound and saw a pileated woodpecker flying between the trees straight at me with another one close behind it. Both flew about two or three feet above my head, both yipping, like two jets flying through the trees. It was a thrilling experience. Another year in winter I was walking on the old back road along a ridge that dropped off rather steep on both sides. A crow flying low in the trees flew up over the ridge just a foot or two above my head. I heard the sound of wings and thought of the old hymn, Come Angel Band. Once, driving down my road from Air Bellows Gap Road , a crow flew a couple feet above the hood of my Toyota pickup, about where a hood ornament would be. It flew there looking back at me on either side as it flew. It went about a tenth of a mile with me. Twice I've had a redtail hawk do the same in the same stretch of road. The hawk, too, would turn its head sideways and look at me. I don't know if they were telling me they recognize me and my truck as a friendly who doesn't use a smoke-pole, or having a look at the human inside the moving shell. I've had this affection for the living beings I share my world with as long as I remember. My grandmother taught me appreciation for the world of the beings that can't talk. She taught me to transplant flowers so they don't die. She was the best teacher of my childhood.

 

 

I've come to see that this forested mountain I live on, and the culture of the mountain people, as well as the house, all come from the places I found comfort in childhood. A large acreage of woods was beyond the back yard, giving me a great area to play Indian in. The woods were my playground where the tension I carried from home relaxed. It was a safe zone where I was not being punished or berated. My grandmother lived in a room over the garage. She was my comfort in that she knew what I was going through and she allowed me to spend as much time with her as allowed. We worked jigsaw puzzles, listened to Grand Ole Opry, and talked about whatever came up. She always had a male canary singer. She borrowed a hen from a neighbor and her beautiful yellow singer produced little ones. She gave me one of the babies, which I kept until it eventually died of old age. She taught me to love canary song. She taught me how to catch a bird in a cage without hurting its wings. When I was new in the mountains I noticed everybody talked country talk like she did, using words like aint, them and other colloquialisms my parents corrected me for using. They didn't like grandma. Grandma was my lifeline. None of her kids liked her. I heard from different sources that she was a difficult woman not many people liked. She was the one I loved in the family. She was my mother hen. We kept a family of Cochin bantie chickens, a half dozen, started with a hen and rooster. They were black with feathers on their feet. She was particular about her chickens like she was with canaries. The four chicks became my pets.

 

 

I did not learn until I'd been in the mountains about thirty years that her mother and dad went to Kansas from East Kentucky, Pulaski County. It explained why mountain culture was so comfortable to me at the beginning, because familiar. It was my culture as I picked it up from grandmother, who was the same as a mountain woman, though she lived in Kansas. I've heard that two of her brothers were fiddlers. She played a guitar. And I learned her husband, my grandpa who died seven years before I was born, came from East Tennessee, Bledsoe County. Both places are in the Cumberland Plateau. I now live among the woods that were my childhood refuge and grandmother's culture. It's the world I live in. Also, my house used to be the Air Bellows School, where they held revival meetings in the evenings during summer. In the house I have school, another refuge in childhood. I loved going to school, hated going home. It was so very good to be someplace where the teachers that also served as guardians were affectionate in their attention. They were sensible, never flew off into an egomaniacal fit. They were intelligent, even rational. They were the guardians of my world that was safe. Punishment was not the purpose. The schoolhouse is the other part of my world that came from the places I went to for shelter from the storm of undiagnosed mental illness. To a great degree the church was important in childhood for refuge. The preacher was a man I could respect, a man who read books and studied the Bible deeply. The church was a comfort zone. Daddy was on good behavior in church.

 

 

I had no idea what lay ahead in 1976 when I settled the plan to move to the mountains and work manual labor on a cattle farm. It was  the same for me as throwing a dart at a map. I stepped into the future with no idea where I was, except on a map. I'd never heard of anything around here. All I knew was Blue Ridge Mountains, gravel road, lots of woods, lots of meadow, a couple of cemeteries, some old homeplaces, remains of family farms. It seemed to somebody who had never been out of a city, but on the road between cities, like the edge of the universe, land's end, the boonies to the max. That was all I knew. Of course, I'd heard of Appalachian poverty by way of photographers Walker Evans and Doris Ullman, who made Appalachian poverty beautiful. I never saw any of that Appalachian poverty. I saw old farming people. The poverty pictures come from coal mining regions, and there's no coal mining here. We have plenty who have gone to West Virginia or Kentucky to work .in the mines and retired back home. The hands of every coal miner I have shaken are hard as stone. The old time hillbilly farmers had hands of stone too. No matter what the man's character, a man with hands of stone I respect for all the really hard work in those hands. In a way, they intimidate me, because I have some insight into their commitment to a lifetime of hard labor every day, getting drunk on weekends. It's what you do until you die. I could not live a routine that goes on without end, never anything different or new, no curiosity, bent to the plow, a human mule paid the same as slave wages, not quite enough to get by on.

 

 

When my parachute put me down in a remote spot I'd never heard of, it seemed random in the doing. It seemed like chance and circumstance, like letting go and floating free to see where I land. In that time of the life, I was paying close attention to chance, playing with chance, even attempting to flow with chance and see what happens. I let go and gave chance the rein to see where it might go. I'd made nothing of my life using mind. Thought I'd give not-mind a chance. I wrote mind off as a failure---my mind, anyway. Been through a lot of school, read a lot of really good books, known some interesting people, and still didn't know anything. I continued adrift at sea within. I'd thrown everything to do with God out of my life. I gave no attention to the supernatural. I became an existentialist, not the intellectual writing books kind, but the everyday life kind, the kind that sees this physical lifetime is it, same as the church I grew up in. The preacher was a Swede from Minnesota. It was the same religious belief system in childhood that made Ingmar Bergman the existentialist he was. It did the same to me. It seems like I feel Bergman films from the inside, because we were created by the same belief system that both of us rejected as a dreadful fairy tale. I first discovered reading by way of fiction by Camus, deBeauvoir and Sartre, for two years. I had found writers who saw it as I saw it. DeBeauvoir and Sartre, each had a series of novels of the French Resistance during the German occupation. I read all their novels through the course of time in the Navy and some of their philosophy, plus plays by Sartre and Genet. I was using this time in the Navy to learn how to read with comprehension. These are the people who taught me to read. They prepared me for Freshman English.

 

 

By the time I came to the extremity of needing a major change, giving chance a chance, the Divine hand started guiding me in seemingly supernatural ways, like messages in everyday events, things people say. It seemed kind of eerie, like a consciousness was watching me. It also felt interesting. I'd been reading some Hindu and Buddhist writings. These chance occurrences began to have an order and pointed me to Meher Baba's center between Myrtle Beach and North Myrtle Beach, a hundred miles north on highway 17. I wanted nothing to do with anything like that. I was bored with rock stars and gurus. I wanted a quiet place where I could be entirely alone and not be bothered. My initial plan was to take a bus to some unknown small town in South Carolina, rent a cheap motel room until I ran out of money or got it, whatever it was. During three days and nights there, I got it. The direction I called Forward turned 180 degrees. I think of it as the turning point. Shoot an arrow straight up, the farther it gets away from the source, the slower it goes until it finally stops, turns and falls back toward the source. I'd spent my adult life, theretofore, running away from a stifling belief system's interpretation of God. In just a few days at the Center, all my questions were answered by picking up books of Meher Baba's words from a communal bookshelf, opening one randomly and reading the first paragraph my eye fell on. Each time I did that, it was a direct answer to a question that was in the front of my mind. Looking back from now, I can see those three days were the where and when my light was turned on. All my questions were answered and I came away with a whole new set of questions. Mountains seemed like a good place to go.

 

 

 

 

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SKEETER & THE SKIDMARKS LIGHT UP THE NIGHT SKY

skeeter and the skidmarks

scott freeman, edwin lacy, sandy mason, willard gayheart

 

skeeter and the skidmarks

 

Friday night, Skeeter & the Skidmarks lit up the sky over Woodlawn VA with traditional music Skeeterized. Their music holds the audience's attention and doesn't let go. Sometimes I closed my eyes to hear better and the difference was radical. It's the best example I know for how sight limits hearing. I watch these four people whose music I've listened to long enough that I know all the words, hearing them make music, watching them pick and sing, wowed by every moment, happy to be in the presence of this music as good for the soul as laughing. I close my eyes and the quality of the sound I'm hearing increases what seems like immeasurably. I understand why Doc Watson had such a good ear for playing his guitar and banjo, why blind musicians seem to hear the music they are making more clearly than ones distracted by sight. I get into a grove with my eyes closed, sit flowing with the music, open my eyes and the music changes. Eyes closed, it is more like listening to a cd at home, relaxed, grooving to the sound. Eyes open, it's a bunch of people picking their instruments, it's even social in that I see I am among about forty people and know a lot of them. I might be looking at what Willard is doing with his guitar strings while Scott is tearing up his mandolin. I'll miss much of what Scott is doing because my focus is on Willard's strings. I pay attention to what Scott is doing and I lose what Edwin is doing. Sometimes I focus my attention on Sandy, because that's when I best hear what she's doing with the bass. Eyes closed, everybody's individual sound flows with the other sounds as a unit. I like the concert experience of eyes open awhile, closed awhile. To my ear, it is two different musical experiences in one. A quarter century ago at a Frank Sinatra concert, I was so drunk that I saw two of him through the entire show. I think of it as seeing Frank Sinatra twice.

 

scott and edwin

 

scott freeman

 

I think of Skeeter as the house band at the Fiddle and Plow series. This may be their seventh show there. Not complaining. For my satisfaction, they don't play enough. Several weeks ago, I had to miss a show that was Scott and Willard. Those are the best ones for my ear. I love to hear Scott and Willard pick and sing together. They've made music together for so many years, they move together as one. If I had a big wad of money, I'd want to produce a project by Scott and Willard, Live At The Front Porch, because it needs doing and nobody has done it yet. Like Skeeter, Scott and Willard's sound is their own. To them, it's like nothing because they're so used to it. To my listening ear it is dynamite. Soft dynamite. The kind that blows your mind and makes you happy. Skeeter started the show Friday night with Willard singing Silver Dew On The Bluegrass. It's a beautiful song and Willard brings it to life. Willard likes to take old songs from the 1920s and before, and make them his own. Drifting And Dreaming, I Love You Nelly, Won't You Ride In My Little Red Wagon, a Bob Wills song. Unfortunately, the audience takes Little Red Wagon for a children's song and discourage Willard from singing it. They laugh at me when I request it, and I think in turn the unspeakable. Scott sings some good Bob Wills songs too. Another of Willard's old songs I like to hear him sing is Nighttime In Nevada. Then there is The Yellow Rose of Texas, a song Skeeter and the Skidmarks made their own, Willard singing it.  

 

sandy and willard

 

dori freeman

  

Dori Freeman and David Long opened the show with some of the songs she is singing now. David played mandolin accompaniment to her singing that flowed well with her sound. I was struck again by Dori's new degree of control with her voice. Her singing has become more conscious after some years now of performance and practice. I've seen Dori's singing grow and it brings to mind watching my baby friend, Vada, grow. Both are doing something new each time I see them. This time, Dori's singing was on a whole new level. It is still her, still her voice. She's fine tuning it. She's paying very close attention to it the way a musician pays close attention to an instrument, finding the subtle nuances, listening. I was thinking of Carter Stanley, not that she sings like him; his voice played with its own sound like Dori is doing. This is the first time I've heard her sing since she has become a mother. Her music has improved immeasurably since she has been with David. She was good before, and gets better. By now, her singing commands the hearing of the audience. It always has, but now it's in awe. David playing a mandolin is in the zone we think of as "professional," meaning extra good, and Dori's singing has entered that zone. Together, they are working very well musically. It feels like their life together is making music. Dori has a baby, she has the man of her life. She is in double love now and soaring with her music. It is a good time in Dori's life. I'm happy for her. I was hoping she would bring the baby, but it's not a good idea to be hauling so new a baby around in the cold night air. Mothers know it better than I do.

 

david long and dori freeman

 

edwin lacy

 

Edwin Lacy, the banjo in Skeeter, has begun a new phase of his life, recently married to a woman named Roye. Edwin's demeanor has brightened up considerably. I don't mean he was hang-dog before, but I see in him a new light that tells me he is doing all right. I'm happy for Edwin, too. Edwin has a good woman and Roye has a good man. He was wearing a ball cap with a logo that said Wild Goose. It's the name of a new church idea he has arrived at on Tuesday evenings, rocking chairs instead of pews. People bring instruments and they make music. It's the other side of Hillsville, an hour and a half from home. I want to make the trip every week, but every Tuesday I don't want to drive for three hours at the end of the day. I'm even a little shy of driving two hours on a Friday night. This Friday night was one of those black nights that was opaque but for where headlights fell. I was not comfortable driving either way, going or coming home. Plus, I'm so paranoid about highway patrol now, I drive 45 in a 55 and use a turn signal even if there's not a car in sight. I don't like to drive anymore because of the paranoid feeling, esp in opaque darkness. This is new and I don't like it, but there it is. I had not seen Edwin in several months. I was glad to have a few minutes to talk with him before the show. Sandy too. Had a good visit with her before the show. Dori and David were asked to join the band opening the second half. Driving home, I did not play any music in the car, let my mind flow with a mix in my head of Lucinda Williams singing Ventura, and Dori singing Prairie Song. They flowed in and out of each other all the way home.  

 

dori freeman

 

dori and david with skeeter and the skidmarks

 

 

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