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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A LOT OF HIGH-SOUNDING WHATEVER

pulpit by tj worthington

I've finished the most recent project and fixed it in place. Made it from parts found over a span of the whole time I've lived here. Every element is something found. No part has been altered except the four wood blocks have been sanded. The little bird at the top was a gift from 45 years ago, a souvenir Christmas tree ornament from Peru. It's a memory of a friend who left the body 35 years ago. I've kept it amidst a collection of found things. I would not have included the bird in the piece if it were going to an unknown buyer. It was going across the road for my friends Lucas and Judy. The bird is in the family, so to speak. The bird is hand-painted wood, not plastic, made in Peru, not China. The box, shelf, I call it the frame, came from the old Dr Grabow pipe factory's wood-working department for making boxes and displays. I think this frame had to do with a display having to do with Dr Grabow pipes. It's made of nice cedar wood and its back is a finish plywood. It's put together with staples, which I like all the better, the very simplest construction: four pieces cut 6 inches long, two pieces cut 41 inches long, a piece of plywood for the back, done. I believe it's original purpose was to hang horizontally. I like it better vertical. This frame has been in the house at least twenty years. It stayed in the room full of my someday-I'm-gonna found objects. Now is the time for realizing the potential I saw when I picked it up and brought it home. Some are the skeletal remains of tree stumps and roots, small, easily carried, wild shapes. 

 

 

 

Next project is to go at a section of pine stump with tempera paint. Only the core remains. It stands upright about two feet. Might stand it atop a stool. Thought I might paint the flow I see in the lines and shapes in the wood. Not to anthropomorphize it or make it look like fish jumping out of water, but to celebrate its own abstract essence, use it for a canvas of itself all the way around, remembering while applying the paint that this is the core of the tree's being, it's what is left of a tree long returned to soil. I will honor it as the relic of an individual tree that once lived. I see trees in the world of plants as the fully individuated plant form. This next piece will celebrate the tree's individual essence. Now is a good time to gather the found things and play with the potential I saw the day I picked up each one. I'm bored of painting inside the lines. It feels, anymore, like filling in the spaces in coloring books. It's a skill. Now I want to bring together art objects I've found along the way, old wood in the forest, even things found at the dump. I have a piece of wood beside me on the left. It is a chip of wood maybe four inches long, about two inches wide. One side is old and fencepost gray, the other side is the inside of the wood where it was ripped by a splitter. This piece broke free and fell into the bed of the pickup unnoticed while somebody was cutting firewood. Wood unloaded, taking the week's trash to the dump, sweeping out the back of the pickup. Within the hour, TJ backs up to the unloading place, went to unlock the trunklid and saw this chunk of wood at my feet, one side old and weathered, the other the raw interior, totally different texture, yin and yang of the same thing. It has found a place among the rocks I stack. This moment it has a small round rock on top of it, and it is standing on a largish white rock that is standing on a smaller black rock on top of a square block of wood. It's good for stacking. It has the earthy color of the rocks, just a different shape, and two sides.

 

god the mother

 

I like using things anybody else would throw away, or already has thrown away. This dark brown tree branch with the two arms upraised was found I don't remember where. It was already old and dry when I found it. By now it is dry to the bone. It soaked up the first coat of tung oil. Before the tung oil it was gray, old gray wood. Two coats of tung oil and it turned to coffee color. I loved it. Of course, goddess would be black. Original mother would be a black woman. I've seen this piece of wood hundreds of times looking for something else. It has been floating about waiting for its day. I felt celebration in it, like Ruth Schowalter's Jubilee pictures of joyous soul in celebration. I wanted it to be an upward feeling. The day I held it to the rectangle of cedar frame, it felt like a puzzle piece fell into place. I wanted the arms to rise up from the top of the frame, and they did, almost a reference to Minoan bull horns. I wanted something between the hands. I thought of a ball first. A little too cliché. I saw the painted bird suspended from a copper wire like a child's toy. My mind immediately took it for a reference to Jerzy Kosinskis's novel, The Painted Bird. Here, in this piece, the bird feels more to me like the lightness of life, the individual soul, goddess/god playing with it like a mother with a baby. I don't mean for any of these allusions and references to appear so that somebody else would see them. They make a story for me in the creation that helps me feel the flow of the piece, that pulls all the parts together into a whole. The flow of the piece, the feeling in it, is for the viewer. The other is back stage, the mechanics of it. I think of these three rectangles something like individual images like tarot cards that have no established meaning; you interpret the image's meaning for yourself. Like a totem of three images. I have my own interpretation. Everyone who sees it will find their own meanings for the images. Or not.

 

god the father

 

Next is god the father. He may look like somebody in the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Who is to say God looks like he was born in Norway? Thor maybe. Krishna told Arjuna if he could see Krishna as he really is, Arjuna could not survive the experience. Who is to say god the father doesn't look like a knot in a log? Who is to say god the father can be seen? Anything visible is a representation, a symbol, a likeness. I figure if I'm going to represent God visually, physically, it could be everything and it could be nothing. I can pick any old thing. A knot in a log. It's an image of the growth process, evolution, life, spirit, god. Not looking for logic. Looking for association. Even that doesn't matter. I like this representation for looking like Confucius with a chicken head. Like there is Hanuman the monkey god, I've an idea this whiteman God that Michelangelo and John Milton articulated is the whiteman god. Pictures of Jesus made in Mexico are very different from ones made in Austria. Buddhas made in India are very different from Buddhas made in Tibet, Thailand, Japan. We so obviously shape the image of God as a projection of ourselves, you see Jesus pictures in cheap frames in discount stores, a white American guy in a red, white and blue gown. I can't completely de-anthropomorphize God; scriptures do say we are made in God's image, whatever that means. It suggests some anthropomorphic resonance for me, though I don't know how much or in what ways. In the rectangle at the bottom of the totem images is a man, possibly a preacher, leaning on the pulpit praying. The maple squares are like talk balloons in cartoons, though without words. They are like sticky-paper notes, statements with no words. God speaks in silence.    

 

praying man

 

 

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CREEPING UP ON ART

frank stella

How was I driven to art? I had no access to any kind of information about art. My dad had a natural talent he never developed. He fussed around some, not much, showed me how to make perspective. My mother took an art class when I was in my first couple years in San Diego where they went for a factory job when WW2 was cranking up. Two paintings she made in that time were always on a wall somewhere in the house. They were beautiful. A psychic many years later told me the artist in the family was my mother. It was suppressed in her by the rooster she lived with that went cockadoodledoo only. That was all he knew. He had to be the big man superior to an ignorant woman and run her painting down until she finally got it she's a failure. Fifteen to twenty years ago when I was visiting in Kansas City, I wanted to borrow mother's car to drive to the Nelson Art Museum. It is automatic custom in the family that nobody lets anybody else drive their car. She said she'd like to go, and she drove. I probably found the greatest insight of my life into who my mother is during that museum stroll. She was drawn to Remington. I wanted to stay with her, but I also wanted to see the art she couldn't connect with. They had a great show going on at the time, a big Frank Stella show of wall sculpture, and a good collection of other new things coming out of New York at the moment. I was at home, loving everything I saw. I couldn't spend as much time as I wanted because she was getting restless. None of it meant a thing to her. I understood. I was that way at the Art Institute in Chicago at age 19. The difference was, I wanted to connect with it and she did not. Nothing outside her experience is of any interest to her. I've always known that. Among the Impressionists she took to a Monet city scene with snow. It stood out. Incredibly beautiful. I got stuck in front of a small Kees Van Dongen painting of a woman in a white slip, black hair an upside-down U, pink skin, surrounded by RED, Coca-Cola truck red. I was in awe. Stood there stunned. Mother waited for me to get over myself. She didn't see anything. She probably thought I was thinking it was sexy. I thought nothing of her absence of interest in the modern. It was totally outside her experience. There was much I wanted to see that I let go for her sake. I get lost in the modern and she's in a foreign country. We were connecting in that time like we never had before, talking about things we'd never talked about. Not secrets. Just anything. We never talked before. The talking in the house went from parent to child, did not include from child to parent except for something like, Can I go out and play?

 

frank stella

 

We went into the oriental rooms that I wanted to see as much as the modern, but wondered how she could handle it. Big Chinese painting of a social scene in some palace garden. She fell into awe. She looked at everything she saw like it was familiar, the way she looked at the Remingtons, though this was the first time for the Chinese. I could stay in that space as long as she wanted. I started watching her, she was in such a state of awe. She saw a life-sized head of a Chinese Buddha carved of sandalwood sitting on a pedestal that put it up face-to-face level. She automatically drifted toward it, reached out her hand and jerked it back about an inch from the face. "I forgot. You're not supposed to touch anything." I thought: Whoa. That was magnetic. Throughout my lifetime she has been the same as a Fundamentalist nun. I wondered if she'd had a recent lifetime as a Buddhist monk in China. Like I said, she only connected with the familiar. Nothing like anything in that room had she seen before in this lifetime. No way it could be so familiar from any experience in this lifetime. Of course, her church doesn't allow such heretical thinking as past lives, so I don't mention it, like I learned very early, don't mention anything. This is somebody locked into a belief system as secure as a bank vault. This is why I imagined entering the Chinese space, we won't be here long. Not only foreign, but a pagan religion. I remember thinking when she reached to touch the Buddha's face, she doesn't know it, but this is the same as her Christ. They are one and the same. I felt like she saw that subconsciously. It told me her reverence is real. It's concealed under a huge system of dogma that I do not hold for real, that I spent fifteen years shedding. I thought the only way she could see the divine in the Buddha head would be if her reverence for the Christ were real. She was more interesting to me in there than anything on the walls. I felt like I understood her religious zeal. It's something she carries with her from lifetime to lifetime. In myself, I tended toward the shamanic from lifetime to lifetime until the modern world where art and poetry are the only places I find comparable to access to the spirit world. I find it natural that our souls would come together, though, like in this lifetime, they just don't intersect. Her fanatical devotion drove me away from her, and keeps me away like a stiff-arm. I sometimes think she uses it to keep people away. She's been a solitary many times in the past.

 

frank stella

 

I, with my own soul history, get taken into Fundamentalist zealotry, somebody with unremembered by the conscious mind experience in the spirit world. They didn't mix. I was taught that everything I do is a sin and the only way I can live in God's favor is to have hands cuffed behind my back, sitting down, being quiet, watching television. By the time I got out of their house, I was the human cannonball. A puff of smoke and a boom. I'm flying through the air as far as the momentum of my intent could carry the kid that didn't know up from down, left from right. Passed all the tests in school. Went to church with perfect attendance by duress. In this atmosphere, in high school I customized cars in my notebooks during class. When I got my own 49 Ford, I customized it in notebooks every day. Made them like 49 Fords I saw in custom car magazines. All through jr hi and high school I put model planes together, then cars, then customized the plastic cars. By senior year I had a few little trophies from model car custom contests in the city. I even used the extra parts to melt and shape the plastic with a hot x-acto knife at the kitchen stove. Mother didn't mind. It kept the kid busy and quiet. I dreamed in that time of designing new cars  in Detroit. I loved car design. This was the Fifties, the age of the land yachts. Every year a custom car show came to Wichita and I was there. I loved it more than anything in my life. I knew a kid who worked at Daryl Starbird's custom body shop and I wanted to work there with all my mind. But then, like with everything in that time, bottomed-out self-esteem didn't allow it. I couldn't ever learn to weld. I couldn't do that kind of advanced work. I could never learn to paint a car perfectly. A guy in a wheelchair had a hobby shop nearby and I thought we became friends. I confided a grievance around daddy. Next thing, all hell broke loose at home. I don't mean partial hell. He'd told daddy what I said. When the shit storm subsided I took a great big cardboard box, filled it with every car I'd made, my entire junk yard of spare parts, everything involved with model car making, tools, glue, the works. I took the box to the hobby shop, put it on the counter and walked out the door never to be seen there again. Never touched another model car. I guess that's how I handle betrayal. I had hillbilly blood then, just like I have it now. I'm not bad and I'm not mean, can't kick anybody's ass and don't want to kill anybody, but when somebody pushes me into a corner, I come out of the corner with Xtreme prejudice. The person pushing me into  corner never wants to see me again. They're the people that have seen my dark side.

 

frank stella

 

Not long out of the Navy in my first Charleston attic apartment where a multi-level parking lot now stands, I don't remember the circumstances, but a young woman I'd become acquainted with was in a really difficult time in her life and I listened over a course of several days. She made out like I did something miraculous when all I did was listen to her story. And she listened to mine. Maybe nobody had ever listened to her. My recollection is so dim I can only see her face. She had to leave, go someplace else. Before she left, she gave me a book of Salvador Dali paintings. I never saw or heard of her again. Don't remember her name. Half a century ago. That book was the kickoff that gave my subliminal and completely uneducated interest in art that was vague as a dense fog the opening, the door to the world of art besides advertising art, the key that had me soon reading about contemporary art going on in NY. Pop was happening. Julien Beck's Living Theater was happening, off-off-Broadway was happening. Warhol's silkscreens, films and hangers-on were happening. It was an exciting time to be following by way of the Village Voice and books and magazines. I went through MoMA the first time like a provincial Italian Catholic might walk into St Peter's in Rome the first time in the 18th Century. Whenever I have gone to a city, no matter where, I go to the art museum first and sometimes only. I don't care about anything else a city has to offer. The only place of interest in Raleigh NC is the art museum. Washington DC, only the art museums. This is how I discovered art, by books and museums. When I talk or write about art, it is not with authority. I see art from a subjective feeling. I'm remembering a Robert Mangold painting about the size of a door, horizontal, the most gorgeous yellow I ever saw, and an odd parallelogram drawn with a single pencil line that wasn't quite parallel. It stopped me and held me until it was tattooed in my mind. I've never seen it reproduced in book or google images. Don't need to. And one of Mangold's at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, a square, soft almost olive, gorgeous, a pencil line circle that misses coming together at the bottom by about an inch. I bought a book of Mangold's work. Every image takes my breath. By now I've read and seen the entire modern period in its expressions in Europe, America and Asia. It is driven by a curiosity around the only subject that has ever interested me in this lifetime. Every place I've ever lived has been a wasteland where art is concerned. I'm used to it. I keep my own library of art books. I follow my own interest. I don't care that the world around me is watching television. It's what Americans do. So I stay on Waterfall road with my art interest my own and pet donkeys. The only thing I really want anymore is to be.    

 

frank stella himself

 

 

  

EAST AND WEST

 

brice marden, couplet IV



When the white page appeared to be written upon, these lines came to me from Louise Gluck's poem, THE WINGED HORSE,

     Here is my horse Abstraction,
     silver-white, color of the page,
     of the unwritten.


Yes, I'm getting on the horse Abstraction and heading into the unknown, going with the horse to see where we go. The flow. I like starting on the white page with nothing in mind. In my early years in the mountains I knew a Regular Baptist preacher well enough that over a period of several years he told me his life, one of my great experiences in the mountains. He told me that in his way of preaching, he approaches the pulpit with nothing in mind. He doesn't study for a given topic to preach on, nothing. It's all about being a vessel for the spirit, keeping mind out of it. It's a gift to be able to speak from the heart without interference from the mind. They say it is the Holy Spirit speaking through them. I watched it for years trying to figure out where the "in the spirit" talk came from. Everything I thought about was not it, until I finally saw that it was exactly as they say, from the Holy Spirit. In the case of Millard Pruitt, his only subject in the pulpit was love. Outside the pulpit it was a word he seldom used; it was a four-letter word, making love. Old country beliefs. But outside his mind, love was all that came through. It was ok when the Spirit talked about love, because then it is only one kind of love the Spirit means. Out here in the world, things are carnal. It's different.

I use that principle when I jump on the horse Abstraction, not because I believe the Holy Spirit will speak through me, because I don't. I won't even go so far as to say my Higher Self comes through, because I don't believe it does. Yet, sometimes I have seen it peep through, though not with my intent. I'm not channeling. I'm having fun. Writing these almost daily entries is the ongoing project I started when I wanted to find a way to stimulate me to write something every day that might be worth reading. The ones I feel like are the best are the ones where one sentence comes at a time and I don't know where it's going, what it's about, the why of it, and when it comes to its end I click the orange publish rectangle and am done with it. It was like walking through squishy mud. A couple weeks later I go back and look at it and it is one of the more interesting ones. To my way of seeing. All this is about my way of seeing because I believe the only reality is subjective. There is no real objective that we live with. Objective needs a lab with set conditions that can be repeated and give the same results. We don't live like that. We live as a self swimming in a sea of other selves, each one the center of the universe. The trick is learning how to live with each other.

In the West, Europe and the 2 American continents, we are born bad and learn to become good. In Asia we're born good and learn to become bad. In the West, self is first, all others last. In Asia, others are first and self is last. The difference between Buddhism and Christendom. In myself, in my adult life I have consciously sought how to become in myself a blend of East and West. First, I have the Western way as my own, because it's the world I was born into and have all my experience in. I wanted to ease that off a bit. When I fell in with Meher Baba and began to be able to understand scriptures of the East, Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim, I came to see that Jesus was Eastern too. He didn't ever talk about me-first-everybody-else-last. I'm not a Paulist, but one thing he said I like, Run the race with patience. Hurry slowly. I see Paul pulling the teachings of Jesus back into codes of restrictions and privilege. Anyway, I wanted to become a blend of East and West. My only access to the East was through reading, also my only access to the West. I spent several years reading discourses of Masters from India, Buddhist writings, Buddhist poetry, scriptures, until I felt I had a fair enough understanding that it was familiar as the Western vision.

First reading Meher Baba's discourses and writings about him I discovered he was saying the same things Jesus said. In fact, when I found myself checking Meher Baba's sayings with the sayings of Jesus, I found them the same. Jesus spoke in parables and Shakespearean English, Meher Baba spoke(or signed) in prose. I like about Meher Baba's prose that he explains what certain spiritual principles mean in practical everyday life ways. The part that brought me out of my slumber was when I saw I was reading Baba in relation to Jesus in my mind when I believed I didn't believe Jesus was the God Man. I saw then I had successfully discarded all the unnecessary belief systems built around the words of Jesus by centuries of theologians thinking up as much nonsense as can be thought up, and kept the words of Jesus. Soon afterward, a year later, when I came to the mountains, my nearest neighbor Tom Pruitt turned out to be a Regular Baptist who had left the church several years before. His Bible was a New Testament and he only read the red letters. That was the only part of interest to him. The red letters are also the content of the Thomas Jefferson Bible, which he reduced to the red letter words. I thought it very interesting I had fallen in with someone who saw it as I saw it, each in our own ways, which were very different, though the same. Jesus was every bit as Eastern as Krishna and the Buddha. They all say the same things, just in different words, languages and images for different cultures.

A Jesus who looks like James Brown is no more inconceivable to me than a Jesus who looks like Willem Dafoe. My guessing of how Jesus looked was a dark Middle-Eastern or North African look. The Hebrew slaves in Egypt in Pharoah times came from South of Egypt. Nubia is South of Egypt. Ethiopia is South of Egypt. Isaac Hayes was right: Moses was black. Five thousand years ago, there weren't many white people in that part of Africa. I feel like Andre Gregory's portrayal of John the Baptist in The Last Temptation of Christ was a good portrayal of a fair likelihood. That part of the world in Bible times was very different from portrayed in Bible movies. The parties in King David's time after a battle, I don't even know if they've been attempted on film. Three thousand years ago everything was so different from us conceptually we can't even imagine what those people were like in the part of the world that is now Iraq and around there, and North Africa. They weren't like Americans is all I can start with. Though my guess is to sit in a coffee shop in Cairo today would not be a great deal different from three millennia ago. Conversation would be the same; names would be different. They still use donkeys in parts of the city.

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