GROWING FREE OF EXPECTATION

adolph gottlieb

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

jean arp

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

eva hesse

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

jaap mooy

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

jasper johns

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GRUMPY OLD BASTARD ROAD RUNNER

 

jack's nose

Calm, quiet day after a night of big thunder and rain. I went out with a couple of five gallon buckets to shovel up some donkey droppings to spread under the rhododendron around the house. They are huge, ready for some nourishment. I don't know how well it works, but I spread it on the ground out around the outside edge of the branches where the root tips crawl through the ground. I've been told donkey is high potency manure that burns the plants. I'm assuming leaving it on top of the ground and letting the nutrients soak in a little at a time during rains will be more gentle. I'm not tilling it into the ground. The pink rhododendron that get full sun are blooming now while the ones in the shade are just now popping the buds. In my early years in the mountains the pink rhododendron, the ones the people in the old way called purple, bloomed in late June every year. The  blooming has crept forward in time until they're blooming mid May now. I've watched their blooming season advance closer to the end of winter. These rhododendron have almost rounded tips on their leaves. They love sunlight. The other rhododendron has pointed leaves and white flowers the old people called pink. They also called rhododendron laurel and called mountain laurel ivy. It was a language overlap in changing times the old folks couldn't adjust to. Laurel was laurel and ivy was ivy. Somebody comes along saying that's not laurel and that's not ivy, the old folks would let it go by, somebody else trying to make something common into something high sounding. One of the many insights picked up in these mountains was seeing that the people of the old way before electricity and oil were not less intelligent than us because they didn't finish high school and their grammar was different. We from outside the mountains tend to look at the old hillbillies as none to brite, people who were poor because they were uneducated. I see it so the other way around now, I have to watch judging people who take mountain culture for a lesser version of their own, because I did it for too long a time to admit without embarrassment.

 

jack's topknot

 

When it comes to intelligence, they had it all over us. Their educational system taught them how to figure things out. Ours has us memorizing details. Ever tried to read a high school history text book? Detail after detail to be memorized. So boring you never want to read another book the rest of your life. Bring back the Bible, just because it's good reading. I'm not going to say anything about the twitter generation, because I know nothing at all about them. I see a few in the coffee shop and they act like they're not even there. That's the extent of my experience. Recalling a time recently I went into a local restaurant with friend Bill Nixon from Atlanta. I came face to face with the guy who was to seat us, looked to be about 18. I drew a blank. I don't know how to talk to an eighteen year old. So many generation gaps have gone between us I lost track of the young long ago. I'm looking at the guy and he's looking at me and I don't know what to say. Every experience I've had in recent years speaking to somebody that age, they say, What? I didn't want to go through any of it. I put two fingers up. Bill stepped up. He and the guy talked like peers. The kid talked to him like Bill could hear, and Bill was older than me. Bill has taught art in university much of his life. His students are people of that age and he knows how to talk to them. Knows so well, the guy lit up talking with Bill. The difference, Bill saw him person to person, I saw him the other side of a communication barrier. It was all in my attitude. Bill looks like old Walt Whitman and I look like a retired cop. Now, when I have occasion to address the young, I tell myself to receive them for who they are, like everybody else, and talk like the other can hear. In many ways, it's like being in a foreign country among the young in this time of the life. The ones I know, I connect with them easily. It's the ones I don't know that put me in a state of bewilderment. Perhaps I put too much emphasis on not understanding their culture. I admired that moment in Bill. A bit of urban sophistication was in the mix too, none of which I have.

 

jenny's whiskers

 

My friend Meredith I've known since she was a baby. Wasn't around her much, a time or two a year, but feel like I know her. First time I saw her after her PhD, I felt like she was closer and at once farther away. Farther away in that she has impressive knowledge in her head. A time I saw her when she was in high school, she had read on her own for fun, the Iliad and the Odyssey. She was then reading a two inch thick commentary on them. I daresay I was impressed. I might have wiggled my way through maybe one of them, but never the commentary at that age. She now has a baby as cute as she was. Her parents never hit her and she will never hit her baby. My friend Pat, who lives in NY state close to Massachusetts, raised two girls without hitting them. Oldest is now a surgeon. The other works with her in her landscaping business. They are brilliant, beautiful women, inside and out, contributions to the world around them. I'm comfortable in my age, comfortable in my culture, comfortable in my world of friends and neighbors. People come in from outside these parameters and I'm lost for what to say or do. I don't understand people outside my world anymore. I've given so much focus of energy to understanding the culture I live in, the people I know and the mountain of memories that go with advancing age, I don't pay attention to anything outside these fields, or meadows. Nobody tells me anymore I need to pay more attention to the world out there (television). Everyone in my world knows I never will. I've not paid attention to tv since 1961. Only have one now for watching films. Films are art forms. Tv is too, but about as much an art form as a child's coloring book. The art in television is mind manipulation. A century and a half of the study of psychology and what is the result? Mind control by way of television, addictive mind control that creates imaginary reality as directed by.... When you don't watch television and live in a world of people that do, just the frame of mind, ways of thinking make me an outsider. I hear Patti Smith again, Outside of society! That's where I wanna be! Followed by Lenny Kaye's guitar strings. Hail Yeah! Rebel yell.  

 

jack's nostril

 

Outside of society is where I'm comfortable. A thought of being comfortable in society gives me the shivers. There was a time in the life when I never imagined it possible to get out from under the constant assault of other people's expectations, like it would be impossible. The day I turned off caring, it became possible. I came to realize nobody has a right to expect of someone else. I quit allowing other people to expect of me. I quit caring before the move to the mountains. I'm in a place, have been here awhile, where I don't perform other people's expectations unless I agree to it or offer to. I found in these hills that the people outside society are the very most interesting people around. I'm remembering what friend Jr Maxwell told me his daddy, who was born months after the end of the War of Yankee Aggression, told him, Stay away from important people. I was inclined in that direction when he said it, but it was nice to have it so succinctly put. When somebody says, I didn't expect that of you, I think without saying it, that's your problem, not mine. I know I've pist an awful lot of people off with indifference to their expectations. It keeps them away. I don't want around me people who expect of others, especially the unspoken expectations, my favorite kind to trample. I have a maxim of my own on the subject, expect me to walk on your eggshells, they will be broken. It's been my attitude a very long time, so long I don't think about it anymore. It's become my nature. If I wanted to be a social butterfly, I would not choose here to do it. I came to Waterfall Road to perform that corny cliché, find myself. Oh, what a difference it made. A particular church here I liked, felt the spirit good there, went a few times, then the expectations start, "We expected to see you last week, brother." I'm gone. Once expectation raises its head and starts talking, I make tracks, high-speed tracks that barely touch the ground.

 

jenny's eye

 

 

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LETTING GO OF EXPECTATION

 

agnes martin

A doctor's appointment yesterday. Arriving home, I went straight to bed. Woke up later, watched a film of New York artist Matthew Barney, Matthew Barney: No Restraint. I have to confess to not liking it at all. In five or ten years I may find it the most fascinating thing that ever happened. I'll allow for that, because I change. But for this moment, it failed to trip my trigger. The film was about his process of making his art objects, sculptures. Several years ago I saw some of his work at the Whitney in a Biennial, and didn't care for it then. Didn't care for anything in that show but a couple of Agnes Martins and a Cy Twombly. They were so fine, they seemed out of place in the show. I remember leaving the show, out on the sidewalk, back in the world of cars and noise, I saw at the corner a post for the walk-don't-walk signal, next to it a post with a fire alarm box, and beside it a steel wicker-like wastebasket painted black, a black plastic bag inside with trash in it. I saw this and assessed it the best in show. I don't mean to play like Tom Wolfe and come down on contemporary art in New York. Not at all. I'm going by my own personal taste. It felt like a majority of the artists in the show were commenting on living in a trash society. I go outside the museum and find the best sculpture in show is actually a trash bin, a black circle with multiple colors inside making a composition particular to the moment. Next time somebody drops something in it, everything changes. Interactive sculpture. If I'd been stoned, I'd have said, Wow. I am in tune with art as comment on society, a mirror, but after seeing a show of the trash all around us, I'd rather make my own art a reminder of the world we live in that is not trash. In like reasoning, I'd rather shop locally than give my energy to Walmrat.

 

agnes martin

 

A doctor's office visit is as trying for me as taking a driver's license test. After taking the test I see highway patrol lurking everywhere. After a doctor visit, I feel like I'll be dead in a day or two, can't possibly live another week. Come home, lie down on the bed and get a vision of waking up in my coffin and it in the grave. I have confidence in my doctor that is total. He kept my old preacher friend, Millard Pruitt, going through years of heart attacks, living until the body couldn't hold out another minute. My friend Jr Maxwell he kept going until the body couldn't draw another breath. I've witnessed other people he has kept going with his knowledge until there was nothing left to cure. I don't want to hang on as long as they did. It's not that I'm more in a hurry to get to the other side than they were. I think I've come to a place where this side of the veil, the other side of the veil, it's the same; it's my consciousness, my mind, there, the same as here. Different stimulus maybe. Like everything that's around a corner, it's the unknown. I don't like to think about the other side, because I don't want expectations. Misinterpretations make false expectations. Expecting one thing, I miss another. I know I have expectations, but prefer not to entertain them. Dread is a form of expectation and I have plenty of dreads. For example: a meeting. Friday I'm having lunch with my friend Cynthia, for which I have no dread, only look forward to, expectation. This expectation is from experience; I always enjoy Cynthia. The mind I'm in, after a doctor's visit, identification with the body again, reminds me of how poorly I take care of myself, yet continue to get up in the morning to feed my donkey friends. I can't go to a gym. I hated gym in school. Hated lab too. Any class that had a lab, I hated. Had to take a couple of them again, making it all the worse.

 

agnes martin

 

One thing this crazy mind of seeing myself dead the next minute has brought to the front of the mind is a focus I see in myself and others around me on what is wrong. I'm tired of dwelling on what's wrong. Political involvement focuses on what's wrong that we have to change. It's interesting, because it denotes an evolving society on its collective spiritual path. It is something tempting to do on the spiritual path, to come down on oneself for not being good or not doing right or not meditating. It's part of it, possibly a phase. The social fixation on what is wrong in society is the macrocosm of our individual concerns about doing right, being acceptable, being good, wanting to be a better person. I can't help but call it a good thing. At the same time, there is the balance. King David is the best example I know of balance. He was a genocidal warlord, bi-sexual wild man who fed his passions liberally as a king, and in his heart was a love for God so intense that the prophesied Messiah must be in David's blood line. King David shatters for me the notion that good (godly)behavior is the path. I see atheism a place on one's spiritual path. In my case, it was the beginning point. I had to unlearn all the nonsense I'd been taught as religion. Only then was I able to be open to the spirit. The spirit came so convincingly that I had no choice but to go with it. And so clearly that I could re-enter the old belief-system I came up in and appreciate what is real in it. And so certainly that I could worship with any religion on earth in full accord with the people around me. I've chosen no religion, just my own pilgrim way through everyday life.

 

agnes martin

 

I take carrots to the donkeys in the morning, talk to them while they chew donkey hors d'oeuvres. I carry hay through the gate easier while they're chewing on carrots. Without the carrots, they crowd me wanting to get the first chew. It's ok. I stop long enough for them both to tear off something to chew on while they wait for me to put it down. I feel an upwelling of love talking to them and feeding them, watching them eat, walking among them in the meadow. It's a tremendous love feeling when I'm in the meadow. I look out the window at them and feel an upwelling of love. In my house I feel a love embrace. I've found a good balance of battery charging time at home and only the kind of social that doesn't exhaust me, with friends, people I care about who care about me. It's a sight how much love I feel with the donkeys. Caterpillar too, indoors. This is my religion. Baby Vada is my religion. Lunch with a friend is my religion. The car is my religion. Living in the heart is it. King David slaughtered a large part of the Middle-East, broke every rule there ever was, though in his heart he lived his love for God. I remind myself that dying is not the issue. The time between now and then is the issue. When something like a doctor visit throws my head into looking at my death date, I have to spend some time with self, educate self again to understand that when I focus on the end moment, I miss everything happening between now and then.  

agnes martin herself

 

 

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