GROWING FREE OF EXPECTATION

adolph gottlieb

I found another measure of my own psychological maturity, or so it seems from the point of view of the interior life. I think I mean by psychological maturity the ability to absent self from a tiresome situation right away without hanging about trying to look like I'm interested, without pretending. I used to try to please people around me who ruled by disapproval. I'd try so very hard to at least give the appearance that I'm approval oriented. I went to a psychotherapist over that one. Had a highly educational experience on the path of Know Thyself. One of my many core questions was why I allow self to be manipulated by disapproval. I've recently seen that approval does not have the hold on my psyche it onetime did. I don't dare attempt to fool myself by saying I don't lean toward approval, and disapproval has no power with me. That would really be fooling myself. I don't take disapproval in this time of my life like I did young when the preacher's wife, who didn't approve of anything, ruled absolutely. I came to a place I said to preacher friend, Millard Pruitt, Since everything I do and can do is a sin, I'm free, I can do anything I want. So what if I sin when I can only sin? No, it's not like that. This is how many of our conversations went. He was still pre-Copernicus and I was post-Darwin. Two cosmologies lay stretched out over several hundred years between us. He was pre-Renaissance and I was post-Modern. It was quite a gulf. I felt like we met on a bridge between his world-view and my own. We were of very different cultures. His culture was in the past of the culture I came from, but he had no reference for my culture. When I talked, it put him to sleep. I encouraged him to talk; I loved hearing stories from his life. He represented for me at the time mountain culture. He was one of my more significant teachers, who, like his brother I worked the farm with, taught without teaching. 

jean arp

I didn't even bother about his disapproval. His disapproval was so absolute it was meaningless. I learned in childhood never to say anything that might provoke judgment. More than likely, that's the origin of much of my character. It was an easy lesson to learn, because it was hell to pay if I ever slipped up and said something like shit or even worse. The kid learned young to edit everything spoken. We start individuating at about three, so by eight or ten we're individuated. I was and it seemed to me the other kids around me were. I recall at about age eight sending a message to my future self, my adult self, to remember that kids are a whole lot smarter than adults can see. I've remembered it every time I've been around kids. I recall one of the random times I saw the Tonite Show with Johnny Carson, he had a woman I supposed was famous and I didn't know it, Selma Diamond. I enjoyed her so much I remembered her name. She was chatting about baby-sitting kids, taking care of kids she knew whose parents were out. Carson expressed dismay she could be so long-suffering. She made it clear the kids are wonderful fun. She said, "They're just little people." As indeed they are. I think of Roman Polanski's film, The Pianist, Warsaw in the time of the German occupation. Polanski, himself, was an eight year old Jewish kid in Warsaw in the time of the film's story. His parents and extended family were taken away. He slipped out of the city and disappeared into the countryside to be taken in by a farm family where he stayed and worked with them throughout the war. That eight year old made some serious decisions. They didn't destroy him. Decisions made in that time gave him the drive that makes him go.   

eva hesse

I've found when I'm around people who disapprove and wait for key words to get in a huff about, I see them like a hawk sitting on a wire waiting for something, waiting for It. Gives them something to talk about later in other company. I don't like to be around people I can't talk with as I talk with my friends. An experience popped up in the front of my mind from several years ago. I was visiting some people I knew who were new here from Florida. They also had invited to my surprise the biggest gossip in the county and her husband. I was miserable. I couldn't talk, knowing everything I said would be told in altered form to a given gossip circle all day next day. I could name many in the circle. I felt like Martha the dog stuck at the door between me urging her out and Caterpillar outside hissing at her, not allowing her to step forward. There wasn't much I could do. I just didn't talk. Couldn't talk. I imagined anything I said misquoted on the phone a dozen different ways. You might say I was struck dumb. Of course, I was judged all the more mercilessly because I didn't talk. It was actually quite obnoxious, but I didn't know how to break the spell of silence. It was like knowing you're being recorded by surveillance cameras. Alone in a room watched by surveillance cameras, I would tend to sit still. Do a meditation. Take a nap. Surveillance cameras have become a new form of the disapproving eye. Add to the disapproving eye the approving eye of the cell phone camera that can also be a disapproving eye. The cell phone camera is subjective, the surveillance camera objective, the eye of law enforcement. A song is playing in my head by Chaka Khan, God Is Watching You. She sings it that God is watching in loving support, yet in certain religions God watches you in disapproval. You sin. The omniscient surveillance camera has a video file on you. You don't have a chance. That's the God I grew up under, the god of disapproval. I prefer the God of love; approval, understanding, allowing, supporting, embracing. 

jaap mooy

It seems like what happened was I took one more step toward freedom from other people's expectations. That's a great freedom in itself. For a very long time I cow-towed to expectation. It got incredibly confusing after awhile. So many different expectations from so many different egos unto conflicting expectations. Finally, it came that expectation is another form of control, especially the silent expectation that can easily be denied if called on it. When I start feeling silent expectations coming on, I'm gone. The humor is that when I saw the light that other people's expectations have nothing to do with me, only with them, that was the end of being expected of. I didn't understand it, still don't, but that's how it bore out. As far as I know I'm free of other people's expectations. When somebody projects an expectation on me now, I pay it no mind. It pisses them off. My attitude: leave me alone with your expectations that are for you, not for me. This is a time in the life that if somebody gets bent out of shape because I didn't say or do what they expected of me, I say: You bent yourself out of shape. I had nothing to do with it. A good one: You're an artist, I expect you'd want to be on the studio tour. I expect you listen to MO-zart. Actually, there are other composers I prefer. We expect to see ye, next week, brother. I had to cut out paying attention to other people's expectations for my own personal behavior. They sent me on an endless maze like a Kafka story, going from bureaucratic office to office looking endlessly for why. It took a long time to learn that other people do not know what's best for me, what I'll love. Netflix recommendations based on what I watch very seldom have one in twenty I would want to see. Amazon's recommendations are closer than netflix's, though they're still way off. I expect you would want to (fill in the blank) is always as far off the beam as a netflix recommendation. I've come to see expecting of others another form of control. I have the choice to participate or not.
     

jasper johns

*

GONNA BE SOME STRANGE CHANGES

Grass in the meadows is a foot high. Daffodils, forsythia, and the service (pr: sarvis) trees are blooming in full flower. In the old days before electricity came to the mountains, the service tree flowers were used to decorate graves on "decoration" Sunday in the spring. Now they use plastic flowers bought at the cheapest places they're sold. These mountains are loaded with daffodils. The old farming people liked them. They are easy to maintain and come back every year. Old home places have passed their daffodils on to the kids and grand kids and whoever wants them after the old people are gone and the house gone, too, for being of another time, not practical in this time. The orange tiger lily is all over the mountains, too, by the same progression from old home place to wherever thy get planted. The tiger lily leaves are up about a foot, like the grass in the meadows.

found art by tj worthington

Inevitably at a certain age, one starts to think about one's own passing into the next life. I watch foreign films, at least 2/3 of the films I see. I see landscapes from all over the world and cities from everywhere. In fact, watching foreign films, as well as American films, are good geography lessons. I see cities in Chinese films I've never heard of that are bigger than Los Angeles by a lot, and much more modern. I see beautiful stories and deep dark stories, all different kinds of people and different cultures. I wonder where I will be a baby next. I can't say I would pick a place, because I wouldn't know what to expect from anyplace. The only real request I have for the reincarnation committee is NOT KANSAS. Been there, done that, not going back. My dream to withdraw from insane civilization is a Tibetan refugee community in the mountains of northeastern India. My dream to be involved in the world of art makes me want to be in a city like Copenhagen. I appreciate Denmark because during ww2 when the German occupation required all Jews to wear arm bands with star of David, everyone in Denmark put on the arm band. I would like to be one of a people that think like that.

vada, 21 april 2013, by tjworthington

 

I don't care where I turn up next time, with some exceptions. I think I've had enough of the American experience for awhile. I got to live in America in its peak of glory, soon after ww2, and have seen it decline from there. The American mind is so incredibly varied, I can't say I have a problem with the American mind, because I like it. I like what it used to be, what I was raised up in, not in everyday life practice, but in belief system. USA I see as Rome becoming Italy. Another generation or two and America's influence in the world will be about the same as Italy's now. Babylon is falling. Given global warming coming on fast, it seems like Scandinavia will be the place to be in near future when forest fires sweep the globe from the heat. It brings to mind the Bible saying about the earth destroyed by "fire next time" after Noah's flood. This is the time of Armageddon coming up soon, burning off the hate in the world, people that hate each other killing each other in masses. The hate in the world is about as extreme as it can get and not be all out war. I like the history of the Appalachian mountains and wouldn't mind being in these mountains next time. Possibly during next lifetime they will become like the Japanese islands when the ocean rises as far as it will. In the time of fire, these mountains will be stripped of trees. Then new kinds of trees will take up, seeds spread by hurricanes, birds and people. Maybe palm trees next. It won't be Margueritaville.

Justin practicing turkey call, by tj worthington

 

 

Wherever on earth I spend the rest of this century, I will have another horoscope, another belief system, another cultural influence, everything different, though same consciousness. The 20th Century was full of changes, unsettling changes that kept it in universal war throughout. The changes to come over the next century will be at least as unsettling. In the time of the Armageddon war, there may be so much smoke in the atmosphere it would cool the intensity of global warming for a period of time. Capitalism is going away. It's looking like the Armageddon war will be a chopping block moment in time like ww1 was in its time and ww2 in its time. It may be the crossing point where Capitalism goes out and whatever is next comes in. I would like to live someplace on the earth removed from the war itself. That may be Asia. The war will be of the Jerusalem religions. The Eastern religions are not at war with each other. They have their hypocrisies, but Buddhists are not seething with hatred for Hindus, though Hindus do tend to seethe with hatred for Islamists like Israelis seethe with hatred for Islamists. This hatred needs burning off and it will have its conflagration. This lifetime I found my peace in the Blue Ridge as the world churned.

 

 crystal's hammock, by tj worthington

Next lifetime I'd like to be in a place where I can live in peace from all the fireworks. Maybe some place like the mountains of Norway around Trondheim. I still think Copenhagen or Stockholm would be places I'd like best to see the changes of this century from, though both may be under water by the end of the century. That is, looking at it from now and where I am now. Things have a way of changing, so I choose not to predict. I prefer to follow the changes like I follow the weather, as it's happening. I can see the ice melt from the Himalayas and vegetation starting up the mountains, first, possibly, in mosses, then small growth, then tree roots taking hold; the erosion process is on, and it won't be long before they are like the Appalachians that were once like the Himalayas. Villages will start, then some will grow into cities and the Himalayan chain could become desirable real estate in today's terms, but no telling what in that time. It won't be long in centuries and lifetimes. The Himalayas could become tropical like the mountains of southern China. I'll be  curious to see what turns art will be taking in the post-Armageddon time. It has the potential to be radically different and beyond anything ever done, a higher-consciousness way of seeing, of thinking, of being. The flow will be to watch the unknown future become history, like now. I would like to learn early to find my center within.

found art by tj worthington

 

 

 

 

*

ART IN A MARTIAL SOCIETY

     louise nevelson, sky cathedral iv

Another warm day and another forecast for tomorrow. Everywhere I go remarks about how good the weather is make me shudder. I can't say anything, because it's not Pollyanna, and it's not like I'm on tv to say anything other than, "Isn't it great, 70 degrees every day in the winter. I love it." Of course, the word when you live in tv world is it's natural, it's a cycle, it happens all the time--it's my fault I don't remember it happening before. It's my fault if I'm depressed and can't appreciate a good day when I get one. Makes me want to say, about July I'll think it's wonderful when it's 135 every day for a month. No, it's not greenhouse gases, it's not the mass of plastic floating in the Sargasso Sea the size of two Texases, and one in the Pacific the same size, plus the Japanese tsunami debris off the coast of Oregon now. It's not the wanton disregard for life by the humans on the earth, killing for the sake of killing, everywhere around the globe. The pervasive disregard for life by the civilized sector of the human species, the species that commits genocide on any other species at will for any reason or no reason, is the foundation of the imbalance that has the earth shaking, rattling and rolling like a dog covered with fleas and ticks, parasites sucking its blood, its life.


American culture is a business, corporate culture with a vast military to protect its things. So focused on money and military, we as a culture, as a society, have become like the Comanche Indians of Texas, a society entirely about warfare. They had no arts or crafts in their culture. What crafts they made were artless. You get the art among the Navajo and the people like them who preferred peace to war. Art has little to no relevance in our American society. Yet, in the 20th Century, American artists have made a serious place for USA in the international art world of the modern and post-modern periods.  Poets and writers have as little relevance in American life as artists of any kind do. Go to art school, learn to make art with computers, get a corporate job.


That's the path for the American with an art talent who wants to pursue it. Making art while having full time job, writing while having a full time job, making music on weekends when you have a full time job. That's the only way art can be made in America, and weekend artists are never respected in any field. We have tremendously huge cities full of people watching television. Very very few are doing anything having to do with art. Some are. When you get into the world of the people who are painting, making music, writing in their spare time, you find it is quite a lot, relatively. For the most part, however, I'd say at least 99.9% of the American people have never heard of Louise Nevelson. More than that. Same with Claes Oldenberg, Helen Frankenthaler, Robert Motherwell, Larry Rivers, Robert Mangold, and all the rest of them. Americans don't even know Winslow Homer and Whistler.


Like Ezra Pound said in the early years of the 20th Century that he writes for six people. That has pretty much been the way of 20th Century art, making it for only a few able to see what the artist sees. Everybody else is busy making money and watching tv. To get a job teaching, one must have a certain number of hours of Education courses. Art is not even a consideration. Some schools have art classes, but they don't inspire any real interest in contemporary art, or even art of the past. In America now, it's all about self-expression. Like every once in awhile I hear somebody I know who doesn't read say, "I'm going to write a book." No they're not. How can you write when you can't read? I always say, "Do it." Our education, our money making, our television watching, our religions have no place for art. My mother, an ardent Baptist, when I gave her a book of pictures of paintings of Jesus from the earliest to present, she never looked at it, never even opened it. Art. What does she care about art? If I were to dismiss a present with equal absence of interest, there'd be hell to pay. I quit giving her anything after that. No matter what the gift, indifference was her response. I doubt she ever noticed I quit giving her gifts.


America in the places people live, towns, cities, suburbs, you can't find an interest in art anywhere without knowing where to look. Might be a gallery some place, but you have to know where. I don't know but a very few people who buy art, the ones who buy mine. A big co-op art gallery in Sparta and a small private one across the street, and middle class suburban people buying summer exurban homes in the mountain. What do they put on the walls? Whatever they put on the walls they don't buy here. And in the houses I've been in, there's no art. Sometimes I see something kind of on the verge of art, flowers and photographs of grandchildren. Americans have never had an interest in art. It's not like something that went away. It's something we never had. Art is about as American as black beans. At the same time, we have big universities all over the country with art departments that teach some really advanced, interesting information about art. Get an MA in art history, and get a job in the mail room of a corporate skyscraper. Teach art history to kids taking it for an easy credit. What does it matter in America if you know the real title for Whistler's Mother is Composition in Gray? What does it matter in Venezuela or China? The same here as everywhere. Like Beavis and Butthead, they'd rather listen to Anthrax.


The only friend I had I could talk about art WITH used it to play one-upmanship games with, which took ALL the fun out of it, rendering it a subject of conversation I never initiated. Said friend I think has dumped me for not bowing down to his opinions as natural law. I can't get concerned about it. If I question the authority of one of his opinions, his ego sends up walls all around with archers all around the top of the walls ready to launch an attack if I slight one of his opinions again. What he believed I should be painting, if I'm a real artist, is what some people were painting in New York in the latter half of the 1950s. He's not aware that anything has happened since Pollack, the apex of pure art. Ho-hum, I say. What if the apex of pure art is Eva Hesse? Jennie Holzer? Agnes Martin? Carl Andre? It's only people who know nothing about art that believe they have to tell me what and how to paint. Years ago someone moved into my part of the mountain. She had substitute taught an art class once in a Florida public school. She knew all about it. Like the spirit, art is not something you know all about, even know about. Edgar Allen Poe said it, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." Some people think a hillside of Christmas trees is a beautiful sight: money. Other people see cancer in the ground water when they see a hillside of Christmas trees. In about a foot of snow I see a Robert Ryman pattern of white cones on a white field.


* 

HERE COMES THE REFORMATION

by kees van dongen

The cold of winter is moving in. The 40s at night, almost 60 the daytime high. Mice are moving into the house. Caterpillar is at an age where she thinks mice are fun to watch. Sometimes during the day she lies on the ground near the birdfeeder and watches the birds. She used to eat them. Now that she's not going after birds, I feel it's safe to have birdfeeders. Otherwise a birdfeeder becomes a trap. Getting snowbirds, nuthatches, gray-black-white warblers, some black & white striped warblers, cardinals, towhees, chickadees. Used to get doves until the warblers started coming around. The warblers dart so fast and turn so unpredictably, I suspect the doves that are shy birds stay away from the swift warblers. Chipmunks run all over the ground under the birdfeeder picking up the leavings the birds sprinkle onto the ground. The squirrel that jumped onto it from a tree has stopped coming around, evidently disappointed by the little seeds.



Putting up the birdfeeder has changed the dynamics around the house. For several years I had a lot of birds, then 3 kittens were born here, I kept them, they ate all the birds and the trees around the house were without birdsong. Only one cat left and she's 14, uninterested in birds knowing she's not fast enough anymore. Now, it's a constant activity of birds flitting around. Since the warblers found the feeder, their flying tactics are amusing to watch. They have the acrobatic sense of flying of swallows. One will come flying in top speed from the woods across the road and with wings and tails spread they hit the air brakes and land on a twig or the top of the birdfeeder. The warblers crawl around on tree trunks like woodpeckers. Without tracing their family tree I'd say they have woodpecker in them, going by the way they move and walk around on tree trunks and big limbs pecking for tiny bugs.



The 20th Century saw a tremendous advance in science, learning about the other animals on the earth with us, the fish. The whole of life on earth has been studied all the way to running shrimps and bats on treadmills. Psychology has studied our ways. Anthropology tells us where we came from. Astronomy has made discoveries unthinkable before the 20th Century. We've just been through the greatest Renascence or Classical Age that's ever been on the earth. Like art in the 20th Century left the aesthetic of traditional thinking in the dust and went its own way with little to no positive attention from the public. Science left traditional thinking too, left the public in the wake. Now, at the end of the century when the renascence is over and the reformation that inevitably follows sets in, the public follows the mind of Karl Rove, comes up with the Tea Party to tear down all that we've gained in the 20th Century, because they don't understand it. Because they've been watching television all the time the discoveries of this most recent renascence were passing them by. Mary Tyler Moore Show was so more interesting than news about the Hubble telescope.



This reformation we've been going into, since 1980 when the Reagan team made a deal with the Ayatollah Khomeini team to help Reagan win the Presidency, is a result of sudden advances of knowledge in all fields of human interest. Art has become incomprehensible to just about everybody, even provincial artists, or maybe them especially. It's ridiculed on television whenever it's mentioned. Schools don't teach it because the teachers don't get it and their teachers didn't get it, so we skip that chapter. My Sophomore Lit professor didn't allow time at the end of the semester to cover the 20th Century. He stopped at The Great Gatsby. Anything since then was a blank for him. Sure, everybody has heard of Picasso, the guy that has eyes and noses going every which way. But that's it. Nobody much outside the art world has heard of Marcel Duchamp, who was far more an influence in Modern Art than Picasso. They were in Paris at the same time. I've seen it said that Picasso was the last 19th Century artist and Duchamp was the first 20th Century artist. I can see it, in that Picasso was in the tradition, breaking out of it. Duchamp was like there was no tradition. He thought so far outside the box there was no box.



The 20th Century was a tumultuous time. Look at art as psychic visions of the collective mind. Look at movies as collective dreams, dreams we have together. Now that the period of greatest discovery, a word I'll use for not being able to think of a better word, is in the past, it has taken us to where we are technologically now. Nearly everyone is asleep to how we got here. It's too great a giant leap for the popular mind to handle. Now we have the reaction. We have an entire nation of a popular television culture afraid of the word evolution. It's almost as bad a word now as nigger. It's not polite to talk about evolution. The republican wing-nuts don't approve. I'm most interested by the nature of this reformation in its religious backlash. Of course, it's the Baptists. The Baptists are dead set on there being only One Way through Jesus Christ Our Lord. Onward Christian Soldiers. Kill em all. Muslims are dead set on there just being one way, the way of the Koran. Duh, it's the same as the Bible with a few extra chapters. Kill em all. The Jerusalem religions. The Baptists wanting to pull us back because Jesus Christ is Lord. Muslims wanting to pull us back because non-muslims are infidels. To Baptists, Muslims are pagans.



It looks like this whole line of civilization called Western came through the waist of the hourglass that is Jerusalem, we've divided up into wars against each other, because at the foundation of each one is the Faith that there is Just One Way to the pearly gates. A man died and went to heaven. His guide was taking him around, introducing him to various ones. It was a big garden party, fruits and vegetables on tables. His guide explained the way things are in Heaven. He saw Hindus and Buddhists, Catholics and Methodists, Sikhs, folk religions galore. He noticed he didn't see any Baptists. He asked his guide why there were no Baptists. The guide said, They live in a big mansion on a hill off in the distance. They believe they're the only ones here. We don't bother them. All three of the Jerusalem religions share the Old Testament value of hitting solves problems. It's like when the three religions get together it's the war to end all wars. They're all so dead set on themselves and so full of hate for the others, this tension can only be burned off in war. And there's a lot of hate between the Jerusalem religions.



The art of the 20th Century has been the only thing that has ever interested me entirely. I didn't know it for a long time coming out of a Kansas tradition. Saw an interview with NY artist Robert Ryman, where he said he had never seen art until he arrived in NY from Nashville. The interviewer couldn't believe he'd had no exposure to art before coming to NY as a jazz musician in the 50s. He couldn't believe she didn't get it that there is no interest in art where he came from. The South for one thing, Tennessee for another, and Nashville for another. Aesthetically, coming from Wichita, Kansas, is about the same as from Nashville, Tennessee. Lotsa cowboy hats, cowboy boots and pickups, but not many Jackson Pollocks around or any big New York art. Out in the provinces the art world has passed provincial artists by and many resent it, many ignore it, many try to imitate it, all different responses. For my own painting, I figure I'm not in NY and I'm not in a city. I'm not in the running for artist of the year. I'm not in the running for anything. I'm painting for the people I live among. I paint them. They are my world.