LESS COFFEE, MORE TEA

 

cy twombly

Ran into my only pet peeve I do not tolerate a second time. Years ago I was talking with someone who asked me a question. I started answering and he walked away. First time it ever happened to me. Hadn't been in Sparta long by then. Next time it happened, I said I'll give a second chance. Next time around same character, same thing. That day I learned they do it once, they do it a second and third time. After that one, nobody gets a second chance. Somebody talking with me of their own volition, and while I'm speaking walks away, no second chance. I do not tolerate it. It's about the only thing I can think of, besides an assault, that I don't tolerate. It happened today. I've learned it is a certain kind of person that does it, and I don't want such people in my life. At all. I've been in the mountains too long to pass off in-your-face disrespect. Disrespect gets my hillbilly back up. And I can't find any reasons for it not to. It's a matter of boundaries, personal boundaries. You disrespect me, I disrespect you. It tells me the one who does it has no respect for me, so I withdraw my respect for such individual. And I don't mean big-deal respect, but the basic human respect of presence. And when I withdraw my respect, nothing fills the void, like pulling your hand out of a bucket of water, no trace left that a hand had ever been there.

 

cy twombly

 

I went to meet somebody at the coffee shop at lunch time. I don't like going in there anymore, feel alien. When Selma had it, the air was friendly, lively, awake, fun. She passed it on to somebody who sapped the friendly, lively, awake, fun out of the place in one sweep. First thing, it was made undeniably clear to all the local people who went in there, the people I went in there to visit with, they were no longer welcome. I asked one why he never went there anymore. "She doesn't like me." Asked another, "She doesn't like me." Come in the door from Roaring Gap or High Meadows country clubs and the service is close and personal, like in the movies, doesn't get better. Just a little bit of classism going on under the pretense of liberal. I'd told Selma in the beginning, when the right people found the place, I was gone. Because she was Cuban, the right people stayed away. With present management, all the wrong people have been run off, and I see nothing in there anymore but the right people.

 

cy twombly

 

I walk the political correctness coffee house line, don't say words like nigger, fuck and shit, much, obey disapproval to everyone's heart content but my own. Disapproval in a coffee shop is worse than disapproval in church. Disapproval is the reason I stay out of church. The pretend liberal is such that it makes me not want to call myself liberal anymore. All I see liberal means in the decades of political correctness is membership in the club of the cool people quick to disapprove of words forbidden on tv. Not my set. In this time of the life, I don't have time for, or interest in, self-editing to tippie-toe around somebody's, anybody's PC disapproval. Told they don't approve of something said, I'm awfully inclined to say something like, I don't give a shit. You don't approve of it, you don't say it. I'm not responsible to your approval. Pisses them off. A time in the coffee shop I mentioned I like to watch the race and caught a smarty-pants classist remark, "That's just cars running around in a circle!" I replied, "Yes, in the most minimal way you can look at it." In French it would be her bourgeois nose shot straight up and she was out the door. I laughed on the inside until I about cried, and on the outside pretended not to notice.  

 

cy twombly

 

I have fallen into a pattern there. I take a seat at the bar, pick up the paper and occupy self with something while I wait for anyone who works there to notice somebody came in the door, and sat down. They're too busy to notice. Walk by and don't look, back and forth. Eventually someone notices. I get the coffee. Want to speak to one, forget it. And if permitted a moment of wasted time, it's with an attitude, I don't have time for this (bleep). It feels like in a state or federal government office. At any time I want the attention of anyone working there, I have to arrest their attention, make them look up annoyed, what do you want? I tell myself it's the New Sparta, get used to it, get over it or get out of it. I've got used to it, got over it, am on my way out of it. I want to do my part to support the shop, as I believe Sparta benefits with such a place, but since my friends have been run off, and I'm a working class redneck too, why am I the privileged acceptable one? Today they were mocking and laughing about an old local boy, someone I respect so high up I'd stand up  for him before anybody. I withdrew my attention, thinking, I really don't belong in this place.

 

cy twombly himself

 

 

 

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THE DREAM OF THE KICKING HORSE AGAIN

cy twombly

On the phone this morning with my friend Carole, I brought up the dream of the kicking horse, the reading of it I'd done so far, concluding with self as irrefutable horse's ass. We laughed at the comedy of it, but she didn't think that was the conclusion, and I didn't either, because I'd continued to search after making the conclusion. I don't mean to deny self as horse's ass. I just don't feel like that's the end of it, that there is more, turn the page. She brought up the mailbox, which I'd left out. It's also the ground where I feed the crows. Crow energy there. The mailbox is an extension of self where communications arrive and depart. In a way, the mailbox is a door to the rest of the world. If friends are traveling in India, they can send a postcard and it turns up in my doorway to the rest of the world. I had not seen a mailbox in those words. Of course, we know that's what they do, but without thinking of it in words. Where crow energy is concerned, crow is my totem. I didn't go to a workshop for finding your totem, it finally came to me after noticing the degree of attention I pay to them when I see them. Out driving, a crow flies across the road somewhere out ahead of me, I often speak out loud, and always think, "Hey, friend." I throw seeds to them there every day. It is my way of getting acquainted with my crow neighbors that live in this area. They fly away the moment I open the door, but that's ok. I call to them when I throw the seeds out of the cup. I don't want to tame them or even try to stop them from flying away when I go out. I don't want to give them the error in judgment to think that if one human treats them well, the others will too. I don't work like that.

cy twombly

Looking at the exact spot of the horse kick in this light, it is a high energy spot for my own energy. Therefore, Carole suggested, the horse is a vision of my being, the whole being, who I am. We'd already talked over the chestnut horse back end and the black and white neck and head. We were not satisfied I'd gone far enough in the examination. She suggested it is self looking at self, a mirror image. We were talking about the balance of tame mind and wild hind quarters. I've been writing over the last few weeks about different kinds of knowledge, or knowing, like first hand information from experience and second hand information from somebody else's experience. Say the head and neck are the civilized man, tame, educated to whatever degree, while the rear end is the natural horse, what my old preacher friend Millard Pruitt used to call "the natural man." In his cosmology, the natural man is bound straight for hell without getting saved and going to church the rest of his life. In my cosmology, the natural man is the seat of common sense, intuition. He is not wicked or evil or even a "sinner." Natural man is the body, or the gross world, which I don't see the same way as preacher Pruitt, though I appreciate his understanding. I don't judge it bad. I see it requires self-control and guidance. Carole said she saw a balance. She noted that in my spiritual quest I have not denied inner natural man, but include him as valid and necessary for balance, that balance is foremost in my thinking for my own life.  She said it is important to me that I be a balance of my whole self, all parts working together for balance, denial and suppression unacceptable. We came to experiences of the last few days with my wild friends, not my only friends, just the wild ones. They are the back half of the horse that I am.

cy twombly

The front part of the horse that is self can be seen in my tame friends, in my lifetime of self-education, interest in art of all facets, interior quests. Seeing what I saw last night addressing the dream, the judgment assessed the front part of the horse pretend spiritual and the rest all ass. Seen through judgment, it's discouraging. Interpreted without judgment it became a vision of balance that I value in self. The back part, the natural part of the horse, is kicking, though not aggressively, flexing, alive, like my friends I call wild. The dream might be saying my natural man is alive and well. That's how I want him to be. Friends do the heedless active wildness for me, like I sublimate through them. They do it and tell me about it and my belly hurts from laughing. I really don't want to get in a gunfight with sheriff deputies, nor do I want to drive 140 on mountain highways at night racing, nor do I want to fight somebody who looks at me wrong. My friends who do these things, and much, much more, help me live the experience in their telling, something I really, deep down want to do, but fail to get my thrills from adrenaline rushes looking over the edge. My spotted head and neck don't like adrenaline rushes. I didn't want to die young this time around, wanted a complete lifetime to experience growing old and see what it's about. By now, I'm on the verge of satisfied. This evening I'll be watching the Superbowl with Justin and Melvin, Crystal and kids. We'll tell wild stories and laugh in the mancave through the second quarter and halftime. For somebody who loves at home the poetry of Louise Gluck and John Berryman, the films of Ingmar Bergman and Zhang Yimou, contemporary Chinese fiction, the Journals of Andre Gide, watching the Superbowl and talking shit in the mancave give balance. Might take a look at my horoscope chart. It is surely in there someplace, the need for balance.

 

cy twombly

 

This dream expression of natural man kicking up his heels brought Pinocchio to mind again in relation to identity with donkeys. I've meant to read the story again, the original Carlo Collodi in translation. Having a problem because it's a little too much a children's story. It's that morality is explained to boys every step of the way. Also, dealing in the obvious all the time gets a bit old in a hurry, like tv. Pinocchio goes through an adventure with seven realizations that take him, step by step, plane by plane, through his spiritual quest to become a "real boy," which I interpret for myself, a true human being. Pinocchio goes through the process from what I called earlier the natural man, the gross plane in another way of looking at it, where we start our quest for enlightenment, or what I call becoming a true human being. The part I'm most curious about is his last adventure when he turns into a donkey. This is what happens to self-willed, self-indulgent boys, they grow donkey ears first and then turn into donkeys. They can't talk anymore; they can only bray. They will live the rest of their lives as dumb beasts of burden, jackasses, and nobody will ever know they were once little boys. It makes me wonder if I'm in my jackass, my African Wild Ass, time of my lifetime quest to become a real boy, a true human being. I want to see how Collodi addresses that period of Pinocchio's inner growth, see what the jackass time is about. I'm curious to see what it is about jackass that brought Pinocchio through the final adventure before his realization. Calling it realization is high-sounding, but I don't mean it like that. Realization suggests too much going out in a ball of light. I prefer to think of realization as finally getting it, palm of hand hits forehead: Duh! What took you so long? The Cars are in my head: O Jackie, I thought you knew the way. I like looking at the dream as my inner African Wild Ass kicking its heels saying he's healthy and alive. I looked out the window just now and saw the black and white calf with Jack and Jenny. A whole new way to look at it.

cy twombly himself

 

 

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CY TWOMBLY 1928-2011

cy twombly and his art

I saw on facebook a few minutes ago that American artist Cy Twombly died in Rome today age 83. Above are some samples of his work. Google his name and click on IMAGES in the upper left of the display to see a large variety of his paintings. I am in awe of what he does, have been for a long time. I've seen a few in museums, mostly in Art In America magazine. One I recall specifically was in a show at the Whitney, the biennial. I don't remember the year, late 90s. It was a very, very loose and brief sketch of a Joan Mitchell painting that was hanging at the Met representing her as abstract expressionist. He scrawled some grafitti on it as loosely and freely as it might have got in a subway station for a week. Standing before it, I could only be impressed by his vision, a kind-of cartoon of the public indifference to art, so indifferent the work by Joan Mitchell just another two-dimensional surface to scrawl a teenage ego onto, the same as a wall.

I like Twombly's use of the childlike scrawl as unselfconsciously as a child. He broke loose from an illusion of thought the first run of abstractionists in NY entertained. He takes the seriousness out of abstraction. Twombly was of the Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg generation that followed abstract expressionsim. They saw abstraction all around them. Jasper Johns saw the target, the flag, beer cans and other odd common shapes and colors. They did a kind of cross between abstract expressionism and pop. Twombly leaned more toward abstraction, but his has a lightness about it that says: this is not serious. He painted the principles of abstract painting, but in forms unexpected. The lightness in them is in how they feel and the air space that's in them. They appear weightless, and they appear as spontaneous as a child's scribblings. The childlike spontenaiety brings no mentation with it. He's something like a master of making the appearance over and over in various forms that chance is his aesthetic foundation. Some of my favorites are the ones that suggest a blackboard with children's scribblings in white chalk.

I don't recall where or when I first started seeing Twombly's images. It took a long time for him to soak in with me. It was that lightness, the childlike spontaneity I had a tough time with at first. The almost zen-like simplicity of his works gives the illusion that they just happened. They appear not even to be aware of such art principles as composition. It's like every one of them was made by a child. Twombly uses aesthetic considerations subtly, extensively, giving the appearance of no aesthetic knowledge or appreciation. They are pre-school when it comes to what they are doing. They are totally visual with the appearance of no knowledge behind them, art about as pure as art gets. It impresses me that he is able to put down something consciously in the style of unconscious scrawling. 

Twombly's paintings appear to be of no more artistic value than doodling on scrap paper. They appear free of thought. They're raw and from before the time when we start drawing stick figures, in the time at 2 or 3 years when the child is unable to bring what all it sees into something to put on paper with colors. He's going back to the origins of art, to a child's first experiences with colors and paper, back to da-da. He was from Lexington, Virginia, and went to the art school at Black Mountain down around Asheville.