IN IT NOT OF IT

winged victory

I've wondered for years what it meant to live IN the world, not OF the world. Seems like a fine, wavering line that never stays in one place. Also seems straight-forward. Upon first becoming acquainted with this distinction, I thought, Oh yeah, I get it, I understand. I set out to attempt it and became so confused about its meaning I could only say, I don't get it. First thing, I had to figure out what was meant by "the world." It's a concept I heard about in church my entire childhood, taking it for granted I knew what the world was. There is the world and there is church, its apparent opposite. However, I found church to be part of the world just like the obvious, a poker table, just more subtle to see. That seen, I had to rethink at the start, to include church, religion, as a part of the world, not its opposite or apart from it. The definition I settled on for "the world," is having to do with the human mind. It comes to that made by God, life forms, and that made by the human mind, products, ideas, beliefs. God's creations grow, whereas human creations start their entropy upon completion The only living part of a human creation is in the process of the making. A painting, for example, lives while the artist is making it, applying colors, feeling the process along. Once it's signed, the process of entropy begins. Eventually, it will return to dust, its original form, the dust being God-made, origin of all things and thoughts human-made. Everything that comes from thought is human-made, like the question, does the shadow of a flying bird move? An argument can be made that the shadow does not move. Absence of light cannot move. In like manner, from God's way of seeing, this whole world, even our own existence is illusion created by our own minds. This one is a bit hard for me to grasp, given that ants are just as subject to gravity as I am, and they don't have a human mind, though for an ant's needs, an ant has plenty adequate mind. I start being able to get it looking at atoms as the building blocks of the material world. An atom is nothing but space with one kind of electrical charge orbiting another.

 

 

eva hesse

 

My pocket knife, made of atoms, cuts my finger, made of atoms, and blood appears, made of atoms, all of it the same thing, or same non-thing, solar systems in galaxies, infinite space, what the Buddhists call nothingness. How many universes can exist in infinite nothingness? That nothingness in which we dwell on a really huge electron orbiting a much bigger proton, a star among billions of stars in a major huge galaxy, is an illusion made by my mind? How was it there before I was born, evidenced by books written about it before I was born. I'm not the only one to dream up this illusion of standing upright on earth. It's said in the East that all this creation we live in is created by a belief system believed in common. I have a hard time seeing that, or maybe I've got it wrong. I can't help but see it that if I am walking toward a barbed wire fence and tell myself it isn't there, seeing it is an illusion, a dream, I walk into it and I'll be jabbed and scratched in several places by sharp barbs and thrown backwards at the same rate of force I hit it. Getting up and looking at it, scratching my head saying, but it's an illusion, how could it knock me down and make me bleed? I can see creation in the realm of illusion in something like interpretation of experience and projection of expectation onto experience. Takes it back to attitude toward life, mentally projecting expectations, the experience itself, and interpretation follows, interpreting from the same source as the expectations. I go to London as an American tourist, come home and tell friends I learned as an American in London how it feels to be black in America. An internationally famous actor, like Liam Neeson, can go to London and be received as an honored guest in every restaurant he eats in, hotel he stays in, and the places he peruses in the course of a day. He returns saying London is friendly, gracious, couldn't be better. It was circumstances that made the two experiences different, not so much expectation or interpretation.

 

 

I can see the two experiences self-created in that studio promotions made Neeson a big star, he goes to London and everybody recognizes him, a star. My life experience made me somebody nobody outside my immediate world ever heard of. In London that makes me an American. Every cliché about Americans is stuck on me like sponsor patches on Nascar drivers. No, I don't wear Bermuda shorts; no, I don't wear Nikes; no, I don't wear Hawaiian shirts; no, I don't talk by way of interrupting, loud and endlessly. Doesn't matter, American. Or an Anglo-American girl says to a Chinese-American girl, I just love putting chopsticks in my hair. Projection of what we believe about an other, however limited or fantastic it may be, becomes reality by way of expectation and interpretation, both serving what we go into the experience believing, our attitude toward life. It's our attitude toward life that precedes us everywhere we go, that creates our experience before we get there and concludes it by the time the experience is over. My next question, was there even an experience? Attention on expectation and conclusion at once, the experience slips by, hardly noticed. In this way I can see illusion in attempting to order apparent chaos and nail it down with expectations, conclusions, names, categories, words, language, self-awareness, and then the confusion really begins. Off we go into interpreting the unknowable and calling it God. In American Anglo-centric illustrated Bibles, Moses is white. He came from south of Egypt. That's getting into Nubia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda. You don't see many white people in that region of the world before European colonialism. I'd guess none at all however many thousand years ago Moses lived. And somebody from south of Egypt, I'll venture Ethiopian, could have similar features to an Egyptian of the time, enough to pass for Pharaoh's family. Pharaohs are often portrayed white or off-white. Sculpture portraits I've seen of Pharaoh heads don't have Nordic features. White Moses is projected illusion.    

 

 

In Indian portrayals of the Buddha, he looks like he's from India. In Nepalese depictions, he looks like he's from Nepal. In Tibet, he looks Tibetan. To see a Burmese Buddha, he's from Burma. It's the same in Indonesia, Thailand, China and Japan, as well as everywhere else. In California, he'd have blond hair and a surfer's tan. Aryan Buddha. American Jesus is northern Germany white face, Irish red hair and beard, wrapped in the American flag as a red, white and blue gown. Expectation and interpretation complicating illusion further. And further until we have a whole history in Christendom of believing in a Medieval idea of hell, then a pope comes along in the beginning of the 21st Century and says hell is something a loving God would not do; hell is an invention of the human mind. Expectation and conclusion confirm the projection. Another case of the few controlling the many, operating from the human mind: the world. I attempt to separate IN the world from OF the world by looking at this idea called the world as the illusion, projection of belief, literally not fact-checked, going by what was expected from what was already believed for whatever superfluous reasons were most convincing to a given world-view, attitude toward life, in different times along our way. All the mental construct about God I take to be of the world. I'm more interested in seeing God in the flow of life, the force that through the green fuse drives the flower (Dylan Thomas), the love energy that flows through all life, through the veins in the leaves. Water evaporates into the sky and forms into clouds that rain on the earth. The cycles of life on earth have been so interrupted by heedless exploitation, of the world, there may not be much left for anything but cockroaches and bacteria. Something will evolve to eat roaches, something to eat that, on and on, until we're back to the crisis point we're facing collectively in this crucial phase of our spiritual development. I live in a world of people informed by Faux News, but I don't have to support them, go with them, oppose them, listen to them, give them any attention. At the end of the story Good Soldier Schweik, by Jaroslav Hasek, Schweik was conscripted into the army in the time of WWI. The regiment marching down a road to war takes the road to the right. Schweik sees some flowers growing up the road on the left and goes off walking by himself up the road to the flowers. Schweik was a light-hearted, guileless, comic character who was in the world not of it.  

 

 

 

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THE MAKING OF PROMETHEUS UNCHAINED

 

prometheus unchained

 

Last day of Ruth Schowalter's prompt, make something and tell about the making. This one has been swirling in my head for some time, without any ideas of how to accomplish it. It's the theme that stays with me. I feel like Prometheus is an important figure in Greek mythology for our time. In Aeschylus' play, Prometheus Bound, Prometheus is chained to a rock by the order of Zeus as punishment for giving fire to the humans, a pitiful lot. The humans had degenerated to a place where they couldn't get along with each other. They were killing each other toward extinction. The gods believed the human experiment failed, let them die out. Prometheus, the god of foresight, gave fire to the humans, seeing the humans would evolve reason from fire. With reason, the pathetic humans with their bewildering forebrains could pick themselves up and survive as a species. Zeus knew that with reason the gods would become irrelevant to humanity. Prometheus committed a grave act against the gods. He stayed chained to the rock for several millennia patiently, knowing a day was coming when Zeus would need an answer to a question only Prometheus could provide: Who was plotting to overthrow Zeus? That time came in the mid 19th Century with the discovery of electricity, the new fire. The second fire, electricity, is forecast to take us into intuition, the next step in our collective evolution of the soul. Electricity changed everything. We went from riding horses and wagons to the internal combustion engine with the assist of electricity. Our lamps are no longer fueled by whale oil. We are no longer subject to day and night. We have electric light to function round the clock. A wonderful Hungarian film concerning electricity, comes to mind, My Twentieth Century, released 1989. Painting and writing started changing radically after electricity. Literally from one generation to the next, from Rodin to Brancusi. The range of possibilities for the human mind expanded with the discovery of electricity. Cell phones run on electricity. Mary Shelley's story, Frankenstein, was originally titled Prometheus Unbound. Her husband Percy wrote about Prometheus Unbound. It's the story of the doctor regenerating life using electricity. They and some others of the time recognized electricity the new fire was released to humanity at a critical moment in our collective evolution. They had classical educations. They recognized the new fire that would save us, regenerate us and take us one giant step closer to our ultimate goal, collective enlightenment, would change everything. We are truly in the end of the world. All that went before is gone, unto our ways of thinking, illustrated in the Modern period in all the art forms.  

 

prometheus unchained

 

The object that serves what I think of as Prometheus' head, a relief of his head with a 1/3 profile, is a chunk of cement I found at a building site. Somebody stacking cinderblocks dropped a wad of cement, it dried and became a rock in landscape. I saw found art, picked it up, brought it home, left it on the ground outside to let rain, sun and weather in general clean it. I saw if often through the years it was on the ground just outside my door. Had no idea what to do with it, but it screamed potential. The wooden post I found at a building site, a treated 6x6, a left over left to burn with the scraps. It was in excellent condition and finely cut at both ends. It stayed in the shed I stored found wood in to keep it dry. The flat rock between the post and Prometheus' reclining head I picked up so long ago I don't remember. I had it sitting with an old chunk of tree trunk remains at the root I found in the woods, about the size of a jagged basketball. I have a few of them around, sitting on a flat rock to inhibit rotting, and a few decorative rocks sitting in hollows. This rock was in the hollow of one. I liked it for being almost square and flat on both sides. The chain with hook I found, again so long ago I don't remember where or when. It ended up hanging from a nail in the shed that is now the donkey shed. Didn't know what to do with it. Hanging on the nail I knew where it was. I had used another chunk of cement I'd been keeping several years to paint blue and suggest a still splash. I saw in this piece of cement something more like burning coals in a fireplace than water. It suggested to me a head of curly red hair too. Insight went zing and I saw Prometheus a red-headed Irishman with fire for hair. I picked up the chunk from the ground and brought it in the house, studied it, examined its peaks and hollows, saw it could also be painted to look like a small island of rock and greenery. But it works better as fire. As fire, it feels, again, like catching a split second in the changing shape of a symbol of change. Wasn't the old testament prophecy about the next destruction of the world after water would by fire, the message in the rainbow. Electricity put an end to even traditional belief systems. Traditional cultures going away all over the world is the nature of our time.

 

prometheus unchained

 

Examining the cement, I found it had a face, a bit of a profile, only the suggestion; I wanted no more than a suggestion. I soaked the cement chunk in a mix of latex paint and water three days and nights, letting it dry by day and soaking it at night. It made good primer for the oil paint. I used three oranges from yellow to red and painted the whole thing orange with yellow highlights and reddish trenches. Overnight the different shades of orange faded into a brilliant pastel orange that glows. The ridges still have traces of yellow. I've thought about touching with a brush to make more variety in the hair, but like it so much when I look at it, I don't want to mess it up. Since I had determined Prometheus to be Irish with orange hair, I painted the face pink. Killed the whole thing. It looked like a caricature, like Brenda Starr, 40s comic strip hot dog reporter, or Irish Barbie. I realized Prometheus is not necessarily white. That the Greeks are Balkan white doesn't mean the gods are necessarily white. The gods were about all of humanity, not just one culture. Hindu gods and goddesses are the same as the Greek with different names. The gods are aspects of our human nature. Who's to say Prometheus is not black? The original humans were black. It took a very long time to evolve races. Of course Prometheus was black. A duh moment. I'm recalling a show I saw years ago at that old church in Amsterdam that is now a museum. It was a show of bronze Buddhas from all over Asia. I saw that the Buddha's face had the features of whatever country it was from. A Chinese Buddha had Chinese features. A Buddha from Java had Javanese features, unto Tibet and Nepal where the people look very different from the east Asians. I saw then in my mind's eye how interesting it is that Jesuses tend to be white in Western Civ. In Mexico he looks like a Mexican. Moses in our Western Civ tradition is automatically believed to be white. He was black. He was from south of Egypt. South of Egypt is Nubia, Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania. Black people come from south of Egypt. The Pharaohs were black. Sculptures I see of Egyptian faces from Pharaoh times have Negro features. I remember when Isaac Hayes album Black Moses was new, it was like a shock to everybody, white and black, a possibility that Moses could be black. It was like saying Charlie Brown was black.

 

prometheus unchained

 

I was glad to have a layer of pink to paint the brown onto, for lightness. Brown is a difficult color. I took some burnt sienna and gave it life with some yellow ochre. I was looking for the golden dark honey I see in black skin. I wanted it not just brown, but a golden brown. I think I came close enough. There is no one tone in "black" skin. I feel like the ochre gave it life without drawing attention to itself. The part that is the face has an indented place where an eye would be. The mouth looks like it could be wide open laughing when the light falls in one way. Light falls another way, it looks like a benign smile. The eye looks closed or open determined by the angle of the light. I used no paint to bring out the features. I thought about darkening inside the mouth, but the shadow already did that in a more living way. The only part I felt was mine to do was be sure the brown had life in it. I like that he looks alternately like laughing or smiling. It gives him the visage of someone happy to see what he sees. God of foresight, he sees our bright future ahead that we develop by way of intuition. The hate in the world has to be burned off first, which is what wars are for. There is still a lot of hate, so we have more war in near future. The wars are part of the fire next time that burns off the hate in the air between us. It concerns me a great deal that so much hate has brewed in America over the last 30+ years it will need burning off. It is coming up to the surface to feed a fire. I can't imagine what it will be or what will set it off, but I can imagine it will not be pretty. The school shootings are homeland terrorism, coming from the cancer of hate within. Terrorism is the nature of war now, surprise attacks on civilians back and forth between government and anti-government militarists. It looks to me like a terrorist version of civil war that is happening today in America. Prometheus, the fire next time, the god of foresight who gives us fire, a step at a time, to advance our soul evolution, has become for me deeply significant in this time we're in, on the cusp of the new world, the Age of Aquarius. I wanted to make something I would like to see commemorating Prometheus, a big sculpture in a public space. I can't afford to do that, and I don't want to do the fund raising it would require to make it happen. I compromise by making a small one, a maquette. It was made of all found things lying about in my world. All were in place waiting, like Prometheus on the rock, silently knowing without knowing a time would come the human would see that all these parts belong together. Basic elements, wood, rock, iron, cement and pigment. In the way past lives draw us to the people of our lives, these parts were drawn together by a future lifetime. I chose to call it unchained instead of unbound. Unchained has an immediacy about it, a this moment now. Unbound has only a classical association. It could be by duct tape, rope, handcuffs, anything. Unchained is specific. I hear in my head the band Van Halen, one of their more dynamic songs, Unchained. This is Prometheus now, unchained. Of the gods, he is our true friend.     

prometheus unchained

 

 

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