LOVE IS ALL THERE IS

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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DONKEY COLOR

donkey jen in landscape

I see Donkey Jen out the window rubbing her neck in the fork of the dogwood tree. The woman who took care of Jenny before Jen came here told me donkey liked having her neck rubbed, but no place else and definitely don't touch her legs. I put my hand on Jenny's back and she moves away. I touch her leg and she pulls back. She doesn't even like me to touch her neck until after she's seen me petting Jack. Then she wants to be touched. Every time I've seen her at the dogwood tree, she rubs both sides of her neck in the tree's fork, scratching herself. I keep my hands off both the donkeys mostly. It's how they are with each other. When they reach out to touch, they kick. I talk to them and leave them their own rights to their bodies. Their color is so enigmatic to me, I look at them in awe sometimes for the colors they are. Closest I can find a name for is Taupe, a tan color. The name taupe doesn't tell me anything. It could be every shade between dark tan to light tan. I tend to think of their color as "landscape." Their color fits well especially in a semi-desert landscape of their origin, something like south Texas desert. Here, they blend into winter landscape of the grass turned light brown, the leaves on the ground a darker brown, rocks, a kind of pointillist landscape of varieties of brown from light to dark. Browns are often difficult colors to use painting as brown has such a tendency to look flat, lifeless, dull. Yet, when an artist like Neil Jenney paints dirt, the brown is vibrant and still looks like dirt. Marcel Duchamp's series of cubist/futurist paintings, Nude Descending the Staircase, Bride Stripped Bare By Bachelors Even, were painted in shades of yellow between raw yellow to dark brown, and they are retinally vibrant staying in the range of yellows, which I see brown the darker end of same color.

 

donkey jack in landscape

 

The meadow, in effect, is yellow now with a haze of green shoots slowly changing the meadow's color to yellow-green and eventually green, half of which is yellow. The taupe or beige color that the donkeys are has no name as far as I know. Their color is an enigma to me because I cannot find the foundation color to start from. One way of looking at them, I'd want to start with Paynes Gray. Another way of looking at them I'd want to start with raw umber. Another way, I'd want to start with white. Each one of those ways would not be it. It's brown, it's gray and it's off-white. I suppose it is what we call a neutral color, a color that doesn't appear to be a color, colorless. To complicate it further, Jack and Jenny are not the same color. Jack's color leans to gray, but when I look at it as gray, it's brown. When I look at it brown, it's gray. Jenny's variation of donkey landscape color leans very slightly toward cocoa. Seen individually, they seem like the same color, and side by side the difference is radical. Deer carry a variation of the same landscape color. It's the original camouflage. Hunters wear clothes with complex camouflage patterns, largely because hunters shoot from trees in this time. On the ground, it seems like the natural camouflage or black would work best. I'm not a hunter, so I can't say. The donkeys have made for themselves a place to roll in the dirt. Jack scratched at the grass in the place he wanted to use until the grass is gone from a circle with the circumference of a donkey body. They keep one spot in the meadow for dust bathing. The dust keeps fleas and other bugs down. When I put my hand on Jack's back, a cloud of dust rises the same color as his back. I wonder how much of his color is determined by all the dust in his hair. 

 

jack left, jenny right

 

The woman I bought Jenny from told me when she got Jenny (Daisy), she was eat up with fleas. She covered Jenny with used motor oil. It worked. I don't question any further for Jenny's reluctance to be touched. That oil stayed in her hair until weather eventually cleared it away or it was washed off with soap, equally terrible for the donkey. I know Jenny hated it. I choose not to push her beyond her will, knowing she's been through a torment from hell. Animals are as vain about their hair as we humans are. I tell her she has beautiful hair. Jenny loves being talked to so much, I get my interaction thrill from talking to her, speaking into her nostrils like they are ears. She is smelling my breath and feeling the exhalation from every word. Jack isn't particular about being spoken to into his nostrils. He just likes being talked to. This morning I found his braying note. I've sought it for some time. This morning I went out the door and he started singing. I found his note and sang it back to him. It was cold this morning making puffs of breath cloud with his every bray. I loved it that I'd found his note. He sang a note, I sang the note. We went back and forth like this, Jack looking at me like to say this is really fun. He walked to me singing and it seemed like he couldn't stop, he fluttered his lips and made grunt sounds winding down. I handed him a chunk of carrot. It was fun for me that I finally found his note, though am unable yet to get it without Jack's lead. This morning in slanted light they appear darker than later in the day. Photos I get of them in full sunlight, the side of the donkey in shade is almost black and the light side nearly white. The color lightens with sunlight. If the color lightens in the sun, it must darken in the night for round the clock camouflage. I'm recalling that I cannot see them in the night, even when I know I am looking at one of them. I find donkeys with the flashlight and when I turn the light away, they vanish. The hair must have a reflective quality to it, mirroring both light and dark.

 

 barnett newman

who's afraid of red, yellow and blue?

 

That's where I would start trying to mix a color for either one of them, a light color and a dark color. I've not even made one attempt to mix their colors. For me, no color is the hardest color of all to mix. I've begun making sketches of the donkeys, painting them dark red. I want to make basic, simple images of them red, outlined in blue, on green below and blue above, colors straight out of the tube. I'm out of white now, so thought I'd not use white. Enough is left in the tube to take care of the noses and bellies. I want basic, simple, red, yellow, blue, green, orange, purple. No blacks, no whites. Three small ones are in progress. I want them to be about red, yellow and blue. I think of Barnett Newman's magnificent work I had the great good fortune to see before it was destroyed, Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue? It is among my very most favorite works of art I've laid eyes upon. I love its bold red. It seemed like about twenty feet long. I slowly walked the length of it feeling the red. It was powerful. Brings to mind the time I had only ten minutes to see a whole Vuillard show, which I wanted to spend all day with. I nearly ran, no time to spend with any one piece, so I opened up, put mind into hyper-drive and felt it. It was every bit as memorable as the Newman. Memory of Vuillard is dark sage green. It feels like I got more of Vuillard in those ten minutes than if I'd spent three hours. It would be forgotten by now if I'd received the show leisurely. I'm choosing to reduce the colors I use to red, yellow and blue, primarily, basic, raw colors. From years of buying tubes of paint, I have plenty, no need to buy more. If I don't already have it, it will not to be necessary. Whatever paper, canvas, canvas paper, wood I have is what I'll use. No buying anything except turpentine, dammar varnish and linseed oil. I could use some new brushes, but the ones I have still work. Who says I need to use a brush? All I want to paint now is red donkeys very simply.

        

edouard vuillard

 

 

neil jenney

 

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GETTING WEIRD

barnett newman

Something really odd is going on in our collective American experiment with democracy, or maybe it is a wave in the flow of the American continuum. I'd guess looking at what the outer planets are doing now, like Uranus the huge ball of gas, and Neptune, would give some insight into how their influences work on us collectively. It feels to me like a time of gestation, something pushing to come through, held back by resistance. The force is a living thing. The resistance, a false belief system that doesn't work anymore, won't be able to hold it back much longer. It is a time in social evolution to make some major adjustments in distribution of resources. The population is growing and the rich are taking everything to themselves, looking to the day when USA has a peasant class and a royalty class, when all work will be without minimum wage a consideration, corporate work like fast-food joints, robots and computers taking care of all but "services." Since the corporate takeover of government, We the People are being legislated against. This has been going on for a very long time, longer than I have lived. Every day is something in the news about the NC government and the Texas government dipping to the bottom of the swill bucket legislating against women with a passion like they're conducting important business. The sick part is that these men want to dominate women by legislation, since they can't dominate women by intelligence. They are showing me what I've seen all along in my life, that too many men really don't like women, and I don't mean gay men. And I'm sure it's the other way around, women who don't like men living with men. It's very complex psychologically. It's too complex.

barnett newman

 

Talking with Joe in Becca's coffee shop the other day, he brought up how weird things are now. We have people in our government the equivalent of Burger King employees, do what you're told people. We have people in government I can only believe were elected because they're brain-dead. Two-thirds of a century into brain-dead nation, America is sinking quickly to the bottom of all the charts, except CEO salaries and benefits. The republican party has become the magnet for the lower intelligence half of our population. Republican politicians have become missionaries of ignorance. No more education, because educated people vote democrat. Shut women down because women vote democrat. I don't think it's that we Americans are any dumber than ever, though statistics say we are, but we're being so subtly manipulated by the entire corporate world around us, it's hard to find a direction to turn. I found my OFF switch years ago. From the start, I refused to live the suburban American lifestyle. I jumped in when I was young, went in way up over my head, came struggling back up for air and turned OFF any motivation or ambition in myself to fall into the groove of making money the only value in my life. I never ever wanted anyone to say of me, Oh, he is money. I've heard that said of a few people, and when I heard it I kind of retched inside. Like, who would want to be money? I would hate it if everybody looking at me saw money and sucked up to me because I was money.

barnett newman

 

Clever Andy Warhol made huge canvases of money, made silkscreens of money. One of the many quips he's famous for saying has to do with art in relationship with money. He said when somebody buys one of his canvases for two hundred thousand, when they look at it and when they show it to their peers, they see two hundred thousand dollars. Warhol suggested putting the money itself on the wall. Warhol was a satirist who ironically made a major fortune satirizing American culture. Quick-draw Elvis. He even made a portrait of Barbie. And Marilyn Monroe as Barbie. Some years ago, I was someplace out of my usual, an early Marilyn movie was on the tv, Don't Bother To Knock. I was probably laughing inside at how bad it was in so many ways, and Marilyn struck a pose for several seconds. It was the pose Warhol used for his Marilyn image. Looking at it long enough to study it, I felt I saw Warhol's attraction to the image. It was a classic Marilyn image like Jackie O in the black veil is a classic Jackie O image. His portraits of the rich and famous are like fashion magazine images. It was his style, like comic book images were Roy Lichtenstein's style and vertical lines were Barnett Newman's style. Warhol was something of an idiot-savant. Somebody destined to be a hairdresser took an art class and something clicked. Intellect he was not. I've read a couple biographies of him, found his life story an interesting tale of somebody who, as he describes himself, is the same as a two-dimensional movie screen. You project onto him what you want him to be.

barnett newman

I've an idea the craziness of making a silkscreen canvas for a hundred thousand dollars seemed so ridiculous to him he could not take art seriously. It was in that zone of not taking art seriously that he became an artist who represented his time like few others. Warhol loved the fame, the glamor, the wealth, the jet set, because he was, by his own assessment, shallow as a movie screen. He was way shallow on the one hand and way deep on the other hand. An enigmatic character in that way. I tend to see USA much like Warhol. Two-dimensionally shallow on the one hand and infinite depth on the other hand. Everything in between. We are the rainbow of the world when it comes to the American people. None of our "humanity" matters to our corporate government that no longer represents our interests, but works against our interest. It was a series of coups that have come to completion by now. First step: divide and conquer. Herein, I suspect, is the beginnings of finding the answer to why this is such a weird, odd, crazy time. A nation that has been about money and money only from the first ship that left Europe unto present cannot develop into much. We had a moment of flash soon after WW2, but it's energy is long expended by now. Something like the way Chinese will light a long string of firecrackers on the ground or hanging in the air, run with fingers in ears and watch in fascination hundreds of firecrackers going off.  

barnett newman

The greatest part of what I suspect is making everything crazy now is we're 33 years advanced along the divide and conquer strategy of our corporate government to set us at odds with each other and make us more manageable by propaganda. The funny part about this time in our history is the fiction of propaganda has become American reality. Our disinformation campaign will be complete when everything the American people believe is false, saith William Casey, Reaganista CIA director, 1981. The word going around among both the left and the right for different reasons is we're screwed. I saw a cartoon a few days ago of a man with a great big screw running through his chest and sticking out his back. His eyes had the look of a man waking up from heart surgery seeing the bill. One of our two political forces is in lockstep set on eliminating democracy. The other political force is in agreement pretending not to be. Democracy is not only in crisis, it's over. Big changes. Not changes we'll like. We'll wake up one morning, individually, and recognize we're in submission mode. We have no choice. Downsize to a cheaper house, used vehicles, sell some land, forget kids going to college, only sweatshop factory jobs and military available with minimum wage made a thing of the past by legislation or supreme court. They want to put black people back to the way they lived in the late nineteenth century, in Third World poverty, shining rich men's shoes and saying, Yowsuh, boss man. Maybe they'll put Amos & Andy back on tv and Disney's Song of the South. A herd of sheep tend to go where they're driven. I'm grateful to God I unplugged from ambition to get mixed up in the money and status game.

barnett newman

 

 

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