THE INTIMACY OF READING

ralph stanley and the clinch mountain boys

oil on canvas by tj worthington

A facebook friend posted today his thoughts and experience on a lifetime of reading, looking at the books, in particular, that were important to him, that stay with him. Like I look at a bookshelf and my eye falls on One Man's Bible, by Gao Xingjian, a Chinese dissident living in Paris. I feel the same glow in my heart as when I gaze at the window and see a squirrel at the birdfeeder, tail curled behind its head, nibbling a seed. The spine of the book reminds me of the content, as powerful for me in the time of reading it as Henry Miller's Colossus of Marousi in the time of reading it. James Lord's biography of Italian/Swiss/French sculptor, Giacometti, was important, because I came to know him, admire his mind, his vision, how simply he lived. At the end, Giacometti died and was buried. I closed the book, sat in the chair and cried for half an hour. It was the same as hearing of the death of one of my closest friends. I see a piece by Giacometti today and feel his presence in it. The only tool he used was his pocket knife, which inspired use of minimal tools in my own art making. I use a drill, a saw, a brush, and a palette knife, wood glue. 

philippe petit

I see the title, Man On Wire, and remember Philippe Petit, who walked the wire between WTC towers. I have three newspaper articles I've kept because they said something powerful to me. One was an article from the Village Voice when Andy Warhol was shot. Another, Philippe Petit's amazing event walking the wire. The third, an article from a newspaper about Johnny Weissmuller, a famous Tarzan from the Fifties, kept alive a vegetable in an Acapulco condo on the beach, tubes and round the clock nurses. Couldn't talk from stroke after stroke after stroke, unable to die because heart was so healthy from a lifetime of rigorous exercise. All he could do was give out a Tarzan yell from time to time and run shivers through the whole condo. I think the Tarzan story told me exercise aint what it's cracked up to be. Why was Petit's event so meaningful for me? He walked a wire between two buildings that sway, up high in the wind above the city of canyons. I know that I could not even stand on the roof of a skyscraper, could not step out of the elevator or stair well door. I sure as hell could not stand at the edge and look down at the street two tenths of a mile below. I don't know all there is to know about self, not even close, but I do know that. Him crawling over the edge and just stepping onto the wire rates my total respect. I'd rather read about him than Henry Kissinger. 

johnny weissmuller

The Lance and the Shield, by Robert M Utley, a biography of Sitting Bull, hit me as deeply as the Giacometti biography. By the end, I knew Sitting Bull, the man himself, who he was. I felt something I had never before felt from a biography, that I knew this man, knew him well. His values were mine. He seemed as familiar as reading a memoir by someone I already knew well. Like Wendy Salinger's, Listen, a beautifully written memoir of living through sexual child abuse by daddy, illustrated for me why my friend Wendy was wired tight as a banjo string. Sitting Bull, I felt I knew as well as I knew Wendy. I spoke with a woman friend about it who was somewhat psychic. She told me to ask him. I said I don't know how. She said, Yes you do, just do it. Later, at home, I went into a kind of meditation, settled down, and appealed to Sitting Bull in spirit. He appeared. We were in his tipi, either side of a small fire in the center. We smoked the pipe. I was in awe, hesitant to speak. I was thinking this is about more than a silly question. Eventually, I asked him why he is so familiar to me, why I know him so well. He said, "I am your real father." We spoke a little bit more, though mostly sat in silence. I visited him a few more times, no more questions and answers, only silence. I painted a portrait of him that is on the wall maybe four feet from where I sit. My version looks more like Gregory Peck in brown face. 

The Lance and the Shield was reprinted years later with new title and some places rewritten, Sitting Bull. I read it. And found later, a book of stories from the life of Sitting Bull that were passed down through the family, by his great-grandson, Ernie LaPointe. They're among the book treasures in the house. Another treasure in the house is Ralph Stanley's memoir, Man Of Constant Sorrow, written for him by Eddie Dean, who wrote it in Stanley's own words, as if Stanley, himself, wrote it. I have to credit Dean, because it is so beautifully written. I carried the copy to a show at Fairview and asked Ralph to sign it. I couldn't speak. I knew if I spoke a word I'd break out in tears that wouldn't stop. I asked him to sign it by opening the book and putting it before him. He got it. He wrote his signature in it, and that was all I wanted. I'm not one to ask writers to sign books, but this was necessary. I painted a portrait of him and his band playing at Fairview Ruritan, drove it to Clintwood, Virginia, and gave it to the Ralph Stanley museum in appreciation for his music. Asked if I'd like to meet him, I declined. I said I'd turn to jello. They said, he's just a man. I said, I know. He's also Ralph Stanley. A biography of the Carter Family, Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone, opened their music to me, one of the great gifts of my life. A few days ago I started Philip Glass's memoir, Words Without Music. I can see already it's going to be one of those books that is a treasure for how deeply it speaks to me. 

*

BETWEEN THE OLD AND THE NEW

Just about all my life, as far back as I can remember, I've regretted I was not born into a living culture. I came up in American mid-western, post-WW2, working-class, fundamentalist, pop radio and television, a culture that is not a culture. The prairie is a featureless landscape, the essence of nothingness for a kid. I say it is not a culture because it has no center, no center that holds it together. The closest thing to a center is businesses, corporations, the places people work. That we need a source of regular income, work, may be the center. That wasn't enough for me. What a thrill it was tasting my first Cuban food, Pakistani, French, like wow, flavors besides salt and sugar. What could be called culture was largely toxic. Advertising everyplace all the time told me to put aside rational decision making and give myself over to psychological manipulation to act irrationally.  Money, the only valid subject, all else frivolity. I had longings for art, but no one in my extended family, at school or church knew art was anything but a pretty picture of a country scene over the couch. High school had an art class, but they didn't do anything that appealed to me. I didn't know what did appeal to me, but it wasn't what I saw in there. Twelfth grade I discovered the beatniks, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Didn't comprehend much I was reading, but it was cool, about the day's youth, cool cats in New York writing beatnik poetry and driving to the west coast with no money. 

Away from home, out on my own, I stayed at my new home in my apartment most of the time reading. Reading was not allowed in the house. Too much mental and emotional chaos in the air. In senior year of high school, I read paperbacks in my car in parking lots. I'd park and read for an hour or so in my own space. Read books like Peyton Place, A Summer Place, The L-Shaped Room, books movies were made from. Splendor In The Grass. It was a time when the best-selling fiction was taking a step closer to life, how we live. In my apartment that was my own, I read as much as I could. Didn't know what was good to read, so I browsed drugstore paperback racks for something that looked like I might like it. After high school, I believe it was 1962, I was twenty, still in the darkness of no culture where art is concerned in my life, I saw Fellini's film, La Dolce Vita. I didn't know what I was seeing, but it told me there was something out there that was miles beyond anything I'd been exposed to. It wasn't much later that synchronicity put in my hand a copy of Albert Camus' The Stranger. My reading retention at the time was not so good, but I got something out of it. It changed the nature of my reading. For the next couple years I read fiction and plays by French existentialist writers. I connected with the existentialists as they spoke for me the way Henry Miller spoke for me. Their writing resonated with my being. They had just emerged from a war of intent to annihilate their existence. I had just emerged from a belief system that attempted to annihilate my existence. I was unable to live with money, television and a vengeful God my highest ideals.

I read Henry Miller with more appreciation today than then, though not the existentialists. In that time, I only knew I liked to read Miller. Now I know why. He's a good writer and he pays attention to all the worlds we live in simultaneously, physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. And he speaks my mind. He understands there is no objective, all is subjective consciousness. Miller, too, was disappointed by absence of culture in middle class America. I found culture for myself in the South, and from there to Southern Appalachian culture. A frustrated longing to read throughout childhood and youth inspired an adult life of reading. This is not a pattern for everybody. It's simply my own. Growing up in absence of culture, I longed to live in a culture and found culture in the South for my adult life. I don't mean like the arts kind of culture, but Southern culture, the Suthunness that is at home from Louisiana to Virginia. I, like many bred and buttered Southerners, have never been in line with Southern politics, the same as I can't take an interest in Kansas politics. Politically, the South is not me, the same as politics in the rest of the country is not me. I pay a little too much attention to history to be pleased that my country has been taken over by a popular fascist coup. German fascism was tremendously popular, Christian, until excesses of white arrogance united the rest of the western world to shut Germany down for half a century. The same will be the American fate. Like the World Trade Center towers, USA is imploding, destroying itself from within. I'm grateful to be of an age that I may not see in this lifetime the rest of the world unite around shutting USA down. Unity tends to require a common enemy. What more self-righteous a common enemy than the arrogant racist Great Satan?

Southern culture is fading parallel with the fading of Spanish moss in live oak trees due to air pollution. The South as a unity is fading due to mind and spirit pollution. Appalachian culture is fading, engulfed by television culture and fast food. The last people of the culture are gone, the people who lived their lives before electricity and television. The fading of the old cultures is a thread running through international films and writings. The external is expression of a collective spiritual leap. We have learned as much as we could learn from the Age of Fire. Only a little over a century into the Age of the Second Fire, electricity has advanced us so fast the whole of humanity is reeling from the frequency and depth of the changes. By the time I was sixty, everything about my life seemed to be swept from under my feet. The computer, the cell phone with video camera, YouTube. Infinite resources literally at our fingertips on a smart-phone, research advanced to a whole new level. Write anything on google and it will be found immediately. Instant access to information advances understanding for those who use it. Like facebook, it's largely used for pictures of babies, food and pets. I like that about facebook, too, though they're not in my range of interests, except when it's a baby or pet I know. I get what I call the people's news on facebook, bypassing corporate press. In the first half of my years in the mountains, I learned mountain culture. In the second half of my time here, I watch mountain culture fade away. I see in contemporary films that Russian culture is the same as American and European; tv, tshirts, advertising, rocknroll, internet, vehicles, electric stoves, computers, cell phones, suits, similar clothes, belief systems and inebriates, less fascination with guns, old regional cultures fading.

*

   

PATTERNS OF CHANCE

four quartets: the universe

by tj worthington

This new project has been finished a couple days. Original intent was to see it sideways. It was ok, but I like vertical better. Original vision was vertical. Sideways, I liked how it looked like an open book. Vertically, I see a beaded curtain. I turned it often while applying the dots. Did not want to fall into patterns. This one was slow to take with me. I'd never done anything like this before. It was totally new to my experience. I've learned the material object does not always accord with the hologram vision in the head. The idea of it drew me to do it. Some ideas are best left to fade away, so I don't trust all my ideas. Some need to be tried before I see they don't work. And some do work. The finished piece tells me if the vision, itself, worked. I've noticed from writing about the recent projects, when I vary from the original vision, I usually return to it. It's helping me trust original vision more. All dots were applied consciously avoiding patterns. It's hardly chance, though the color arrangements in each line fell by chance. The dots were applied in a quarter section at a time. I wanted each quartet to have its own energy. In dim light across the room it looks like four pages of Chinese writing, white on black. I like the regular rows of colors arranged by apparent chance, like words on a page. If I were to go over a page of any writing in English and mark a color on every occurrence of the word the, the order of the markings would appear to be absence of order, though reading it, the words occur in perfect order.  Brings to mind a quotation from Henry Miller's, Big Sur, Confusion is an order which is not understood. I call it, The Universe, because we do not understand the universe, which has its order. We don't even understand ourselves, in which we have much order we're not aware of. 

cy twombly

I see in it a visualization of my view of the individual in the whole of humanity, or the whole of any group of people, herd of donkeys, school of fish, flock of birds. In winter, I see dozens of snowbirds pecking the seeds I throw on the ground. On first sight, the birds all look alike, slate-gray with white bellies. Watch awhile and one hops a little differently from the others, one has a wing that doesn't fold to its side just right, one has a lighter gray than the others, another has a darker gray. They vary in sizes. I go on watching and it's not long before I recognize a the same ones every day. Each one is uniquely individual. If I were small enough to see their faces, I'd see they have individual faces. Among themselves, each one is as radically unique as individual humans, like in a classroom at school, where all know each other, have their favorites and the ones they don't like. I see in the birds, too, they have individuals they're partial to and the ones they stay away from. I see in a herd of cows they have their friends they stay near much of the time and the ones they avoid. The cattle, like the birds, have no laws and they live in peace. Occasionally, two cows will have a disagreement and settle it however it suits them, a butting of heads or a head in the side, and that's it, a body language argument. We have perpetual war, but in most places on earth people are living in peace. In this county, we have peace. In the next counties, north, south, east and west, they live in peace. It is only in huge population centers where certain people are kept in poverty because their pigmentation is not acceptable in the world of business, gangs and gang wars occur. In the country, two guys get into it and they fight. After they fight, they're friends. 

alberto giacometti

In these almost daily writings, I see patterns running through them while each one is uniquely itself. I go into each one blank with no intentions or ideas. Start with one sentence, follow it with another, then another. Most often, after a few sentences, and in some cases several sentences, I see a line of thinking, then follow it to see where it goes. I learned from an old hillbilly preacher in the Regular Baptist church, to allow lines of thinking to come forward. In the old-time way of preaching, the man steps up to the pulpit with nothing in mind to say, an empty vessel, as they called it. Often, they'd apologize for having nothing to say, then it hit them and it was on. A strict part of the tradition is that the preacher go into his talking with nothing in mind to talk about, the spirit comes in and away he goes. I don't think of my writing as preaching in any way I look at it, though I like the process of allowing whatever is floating around inside rise to the surface and spell itself out. I start with what is in the front of my mind when I put down the first sentence. A flow of thought occurs and I follow it. I think of it as organic writing, a term coined by poet Denise Levertov, whose collected poems have recently been published. Organic in that it grows from inside itself. In the almost-daily writings, I'm recording the thoughts and experiences of one individual, in one place, in one time. It doesn't matter that it's me. I've cut out half the possible viewers by being so freely anti-republican politically. Republicans have become marionettes of the super-rich, power by money. I'm more inclined to honor the working class man and woman than the ruling class. I know how dispiriting working your ass off every day for very little return can be with no end in sight but death.

bill day

I used to have hopes about the fate of the working man and woman, but hope has long gone from my list of desires. I crossed the line from living with hope to living without hope after seeing the Civil War movie, Glory. Drove to Winston-Salem to see it. Friends I share movie interests with liked it. It tore me up more powerfully than almost any move has. I recall walking to my truck, then a crayola blue 78 Toyota pickup with a red door driver's side. I sat down and couldn't turn to key to start. Sat there, hands on steering wheel, unable to come down out of my head enough to drive. I told self with full meaning to give up hope, give it up now, be done with it permanently, prayed as much from the heart as ever to have hope removed from my life, meaning it enough to commit. I still have automatic hopes to some degree, but give them little attention. I watched the regiment of black men, all of them enlisted in the war motivated by belief they were helping their black brothers and sisters, wives and children, mothers and fathers. Intelligent people, uneducated, seeming naive. In the story, I saw black man in relation to white man. In my own case, it was working class man in relation to corporate man. In either case, the little man doesn't stand a chance. If I were to protest and demonstrate, I'd only get beat up by cops, hospitalized or killed. The black men in the regiment dreamed they could one day live a free life. In the end, they were all killed in a suicide attack, a lesser version of Gallipoli. The most symbolic moment of the film was one second long, a head exploding hit by a cannonball. The film exploded my head. I drove home in a new mind. Living it, I've come to see the illusion I suspected hope is, strongly enough to jump in and see. Result, mind calmed way down. Don't worry~Be happy.  

*

  

   

CELEBRITY ROLE MODELS

andy warhol

Earlier, I watched a half hour talk by young actor Jack Gleeson of some pop tv show I've never heard of and don't want to see. He spoke to the Oxford Union about celebrity, this new role in life he fell into unawares. He was insightful. He spoke as himself and as celebrity. He analyzed what celebrity means in our society, role models largely, though he hesitated to see himself as a role model, when all he's wanted to do was to be an actor. Of course, he wanted celebrity status too, but had no idea what he was getting into when the role of celebrity came to him. I felt like he fell short of what he wanted to say. He lost himself in the forest of his mind and research, a talk written in another place and time, the night before, possibly in a hotel room, where one follows mind in one context, then at the place he's meant to give his presentation, it's an entirely different context from the one he'd projected for himself in the writing. I sat through the whole half hour of his talk. It held my attention. Not long after, I saw where Pope Francis ordered the distribution of 400 sleeping bags with papal insignia to the homeless of Rome. Swiss guard and volunteers distributed them, driving around the city in a van looking for people to give the sleeping bags to. I thought, a conscious role model gesture from a celebrity using his celebrity status to call attention to the people who need help. I admired him again. At first, I thought it a bit corporate having Vatican insignia on them, then rethought: the people who receive these sleeping bags will prize them as personal gifts from il papa, holy sleeping bags. 

These are humble people, more than likely all of them Roman Catholic, who hold il papa the highest. It's a refreshing bit of news. His celebrity status is a role model for many, and some of them will repeat the gesture in different cities of the Western world. He encourages people who pay attention to him to be kind to the poor, to see that poverty is a miserable existence. He has already reformed the Catholic church with his own humility. He has a charisma no other pope or public religious figure in my lifetime has had. He extends himself to the poor, not the rich. Kinda upside down and backwards in the world as it is today. I wonder if he might be a light in the darkness. I don't know if any popes in the past have had his compassion. It seems both odd and necessary that a celebrity religious figure who cares for the poor would be in ascendance in this dark time for a world of people living in spiritual poverty. America that calls itself a Christian country hates the poor. The poor are not beloved in Europe either. In a time when only celebrities have voices, it's refreshing to have a papal celebrity who wants to live the teachings of his Master. Like Bob Marley, he's too popular to assassinate. It's fun to know that he is burning the American so-called Christians a blister. They have him identified as Satan in human form. Help the poor? Satanism. Half a century ago, it would have been communism. Enabling the good-for-nothings. Get a job. Great idea. Know anyplace that's hiring somebody who needs mental health care? Get them off the streets, put them in prison where they're abused and given AIDS, often end up in solitary for inability to contain emotions. I hear Fifties comedian Dave Gardner in my head saying, When a man's down, kick him. 

andy warhol

The few times I've seen American Idol, I've been in awe seeing these young people so desperately appealing for celebrity status and a chance to be rich, wanting to be a product, the next Britney Spears and Michael Jackson. Listening to Jack Gleeson talk about role models, I was recalling the time when I was taken with pop star celebrities for role models. Bob Dylan was a good role model for me. He went his own way, struck out in a new direction several times. Pete Seeger wanted Dylan to be the one to take folk music mainstream and Dylan went electric with rock. I think I've used Dylan for a model in my readiness to change my art form from time to time. When what I'm doing gets boring, I change and do something else. I knew intuitively in childhood that my life would be one of many big changes. I've made it a point to be open to the changes and to flow with them. Dylan has been an encouragement to honor my own changes. A guiding light in that way. A celebrity role model. Henry Miller, too, was a celebrity role model. I liked Miller's moral code, his willingness to let go and see what comes next, his writing most of all, his engagement with the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual. I learned from Miller that the people immediately around me in my world are every bit as important as celebrities. It's been among the most valuable learnings of my life. It has opened the door to a lot of people I might not otherwise have appreciated. I learned from Miller that interesting people are everywhere around. Nobody is writing their biographies, but they all have unwritten biographies. I learned much appreciation of others from Henry Miller, as well as appreciation of solitude. It's an interesting subject, the influence of celebrities as role models. It's something I never think about. I can't help but think it would be a horror to be a celebrity. I'm happy on Waterfall Road pursuing my own interests. 

andy warhol

About the most foolishly flattered I'd ever been was when I was asked for an autograph taken for Mick Jagger. The kid was so disappointed when his star sighting turned out to be a dud. I laughed in embarrassment, embarrassed because I was so flattered. I'm laughing that same laugh right now. This would have been 1967 or 8. Now I'd do good to be taken for Walter Brennan. Even then, I didn't look any more like Mick Jagger than Willie Nelson. I think of the Rolling Stone song, Star, that's what you are. One of the great songs about celebrity status. And another Stones lyric, it's the singer not the song. In the old-time way, it was the song, not the singer. Now it's the other way around. It's another time, another experience, another cosmology. I've seen the celebrities of my past fade into history, like Frank Sinatra and Elvis. A few years ago in the grocery store a girl at the register had a name that was a Chuck Berry song. I mentioned the Chuck Berry song. She said, Who's Chuck Berry? I knew then I was in another time zone. Our celebrities change so fast and the role model they manifested is in new faces and names, new ones for each generation. They make us think we're cool for being aware of them. I find in this time of the life when I hear the Rolling Stones as a band of musicians making music, I hear the music better than I ever did when I was listening to stars. Baby Vada, 3, already is enchanted with Elsa, the princess in the children's movie, Frozen. Crystal took her to see the ice show in Greensboro, Frozen on Ice. Elsa waved to the audience in Vada's direction and made Vada's show, "Elsa waved at me!" Vada has an Elsa dress she dresses up in and runs around the house a princess. 

andy warhol by andy warhol

*

BETRAYAL AND READING HENRY MILLER

wassily kandinsky

Today I've been filled up with a loving feeling for my four-legged friends and the winged friends. With that inner joy comes its balance, sorrow that the world I live in has so little use for anything living, even human life. After more than six thousand years of religion, the humans of the world still get their greatest kick out of killing. In the time I was new in the mountains, in awe of the natural world, I saw a blue heron in the lake one day. A lake here is a glorified pond made by a bulldozer, or bull-noser as they're known by the men who drive them. Later in the day, I told old man Tom I'd seen a heron. He said, "Kill it! It'll eat up all the fish in the lake!" I thought, All the fish? The bird isn't big enough to eat all the fish. It was passing through, saw a restaurant and dropped in. I did not kill the bird. The thrill of killing was one of the first characteristics I learned about old man Tom. His eyes sparkled when he told about killing something, anything. The thrill was the kill. I wondered how a man who talked about Jesus with genuine adoration, obeying God and love for God, can want to kill everything around him. In his later years he sat in an upstairs window facing his garden at sunset. I would hear a .22 rifle shot and know Tom shot another deer. He would wait for them to go into his garden he did not keep a fence around, shoot them in the belly with a .22 "so they'll go off and die." He didn't want them to fall down dead in his garden. Set up internal bleeding and they'll go away to die. He talked of it with fascination like he'd figured out something really special. He hated the deer. I asked him about the snakes in my first year. His answer, "Kill ever one ye see!" I didn't follow that counsel either.  

wassily kandinsky

Tom's brother, Millard, an old-timey Regular Baptist preacher. Brilliant man. Bible scholar. Truly inspired in the pulpit. Killing was his answer to solving problems. Seeing the evening news with him one evening, Iran and the Ayatollah issue was on. His recommendation: Nuke em. I said to him, You nuke this one you don't like, another one you don't like, there will come a day you've nuked everybody and you're the only one left. "That'd be all right." He meant it. I wanted to take it for humor, but it wasn't. He meant it. And it fit his character perfectly. Though he preached Jesus and love, outside the church love was a four-letter word and he didn't like hardly anybody. A Reaganista. The part that gave me pause was these are Americans from the traditional belief system of the time before electricity. These are people who call land "improved" when all its trees are cut down. Tom was not above pulling power on me to make me do his will. One example, I had a maple tree growing close to where I park. It was a nice tree. I liked it's color in the fall. Tom told me to cut it. I said no. He went to Ted Stern we were both working for and told him to tell me to cut it down. Really pist me off. I was told to cut it down because Tom wanted me to. After reasoning over it a day or two, I cut it down to keep peace and made firewood of it. Tom said he likes a place open. He can live in a damn desert if he wants to, but leave me alone about my trees! Next spring three sprouts grew up from around the trunk. I let the three maple trees grow in the place where there was one. The tree is even more beautiful now. This memory brings up a time he lied to me looking straight into my eyes. I told him I didn't believe it. He said, You calling me a liar? I had to say, Reckon I am. An intense moment. I did not see myself getting to my car alive. I did expect to be shot there and then. His eyes became shotgun barrels, and I felt like I was shot in his mind. I had nothing to do with him for four months after that. I couldn't even look at him I was so outraged by the betrayal. I thought we were friends after about five years. Turned out we were not. Ok. I never got over it. 

wassily kandinsky

I tend not to get over betrayal. It's not so much a principle I cling to, but deeper than that, down in that place I don't have a lot of conscious control over. Throughout childhood my mother betrayed me every opportunity. I learned early on I could not count on her. She taught me to lie to her. I became a private child. I couldn't count on either parent nor the church. I could count on school. School was my home. Loved going to school in the morning, hated going home. By the time I got into factory school, the fun of school went away. I've had a fondness for school, because that's where the love was in childhood, the other kids I was growing up with and teachers that really liked the kids. A second time, school put me on my feet by way of a small Southern college that was intimately small with a largely good faculty. I came to the mountains and moved into a schoolhouse. The house is the old Air Bellows school house. Now, in this time of the life, the place I call the home of my soul is a schoolhouse. I put all this together and see school in childhood was my refuge, and now in my adult life a schoolhouse is my refuge. My schoolhouse is loaded with shelves and stacks of books. At home with parents I was not allowed to read. If you got time to read a book, you got time to cut the grass, wash the car, wash the dishes. So I watched television. No consequences. As soon as I was in my first apartment, I stayed in and read as much as I could. It was like the dam broke. All I wanted to do was read. It's been that way ever since. I can't read Tom Clancy or Robert Ludlum; that kind of writing spits me out before the end of the first page. Instead of turning to page two, I close the book. There is so much that is good, I'm unable to waste my time on pop testosterone fluff. Thomas Powers wrote a fabulous biography of Crazy Horse. I'm glad I did not miss Saul Bellows' Mr Sammler's Planet by reading some espionage nonsense of the day. 

wassily kandinsky

Something else I'm seeing the first time tonight, my adult life is characterized by reading. It's not the act of reading I like so much, but what I'm learning. I've been in cultures all over the world by way of reading. I read a nicely written novel from China and get a keyhole glimpse into the culture there. Reading takes me inside the minds of some brilliant people. Russian artist Kandinsky wrote two small books on art that taught me some important qualities of color that inform my every use of color. Poetry has been one of the great loves of my life. Reading it more than writing it. I have to thank Allen Ginsberg. He wrote in such a way a high school graduate could read it and feel like he got it, at least somewhat. Next, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the greatest introduction to poetry there ever was. I may have to find a biography of him. Everything I've seen about him over the years has told me this is an intriguing character, a man who truly took his own path and made it work for him. I still love his poetry. It blows my mind he wrote Coney Island of the Mind in the 1940s. Henry Miller's writing was astonishingly contemporary to today in the 1930s and 40s. He was writing in a place and time, but it's more like he was writing in that time, not of that time. His writing does not date. Nor does Ferlinghetti's. Miller's Tropic of Cancer made a sensation with its American edition around 1960. It was originally published in English in Paris, 1934, and I have a copy. It's still contemporary. I love Miller's writing. Reading him, I'm observing his thought process, his attitude toward life, his associations. I feel like he was so formative in my early reading life that now, diving into his mind again, I feel like what I'm reading was written by a close friend I understand well, just from reading his story. I admire his character. I admire the man. I admire who he is. I learn from him. Perhaps his most important message he had for his readers was to love your life and live it. Every page I read by Miller I'm in awe of his beautiful writing, how he tells a story, the freshness of his mind. If I'd spent my life watching television, I'd have never had the opportunity to know anything Henry Miller had to say. A tragic loss it would have been.  

wassily kandinsky himself

*

GRUMPY OLD BASTARD HEARS THE RAIN

 

Another all day rainy day. Sprinkles, nowhere near a gully-washer, a soak into the ground kind of rain, the kind that waters everything gently and raises the receding water table. It's a beautiful day with the leaves everywhere glossy reflecting silver sky. The wild violet stems extend straight up, leaf open to receive the damp air, dance when struck by a drop fallen from the tree above. Trees soften the force of the rain hitting the ground like they soften the wind and summer sunlight. I must live at least near, preferably among trees. I've never understood the determined American genocide on trees. I do, but also don't. Money is the answer and the passion for money disregards everything else. Mammon is not a benevolent god. I must go to netflix and bring up that Jeff Goldblum movie, Independence Day. I remember being disappointed by its Hollywood silliness, but also remember it had quite a lot to say. Big alien mining spaceships were killing off everything living and scooping up the earth's crust for the minerals. We  had no defense. They were scooping up everything, already had half the USA and heading this way. Koch Brothers. Exxon. And a long list more. They have the money. They control the economy. The Appalachian chain, source of water for the eastern half of the continent, is being fracked from one end to the other. Our continent is being made into a desert under our feet, the politicians advancing the desolation kept popular among the people by propaganda. When Yellowstone blows, the western half of the US continent will be rendered desert. The eastern half will turn desert without water. No force is powerful enough to reverse this momentum. It will be known on maps as the Great American Desert. Too many people controlling so much money they have bought our government and turned it against us. We'll soon see the military, too. It's documented in the news every day, we're all watching helplessly, hopelessly, not wanting to admit it. Take another happy pill. Burn anothern. Thank you, Jesus.

 

 

I really did not want to go there. It's so ridiculous now, noticing the obvious is called liberal. Pay the least attention to the obvious and you're a liberal. Liberal, BR (Before Reagan), meant something. Left meant something. AR (After Reagan), liberal and left wing mean, admits to observing the obvious. Conservative and right wing mean, buys hate propaganda. Neither side of the artificial divide created by propaganda has anything to say for itself, but plenty to say about hate for the other side and everyone concerned. The economic depression is artificially created. Major corporations are expatriating themselves, like Walgreen moving its offices to Switzerland, to evade paying US taxes for soaking us. The one percent are talking about the ninety-nine percent coming to get them with pitchforks. What arrogance. Delights me that the Worthington coat of arms has pitchforks. Now that we have a party for teabaggers, why not a party for pitchforkers. Only problem is, I want simple, not complicated. How about no party at all. How about I just stop paying attention to the irrelevant. The American political system has rendered itself irrelevant. So why pay it any mind? Why reward ignorance with attention? I can't stop them, can't change them. They have all power over me. So the Supreme Court appoints Sarah Palin president. What can I do? Watch it on tv. I have no power over them, not even recourse. Best thing for me to do is hunker down at home and feed carrots to donkeys, amen. I must clear my head of the garbage. At the same time, the world around me is crumbling, falling apart, breaking down. How can I ignore it? It doesn't touch me here at my donkey meadow, yet. I go into town and see a few people I know and we speak for a few minutes, friendly.

 

 

I remind self the people I live among, the people I know, facebook friends, are my world. The rest of it is a mental construct in my head built with imaginary Legos of false information. Why occupy mind with false information that is propaganda anyway. What do I lose by withdrawing my attention from the false? Nothing. What do I gain from more attention to my immediate surroundings, to the people in my life, to cat and donkeys? Everything. My life. Among the people I know, on my mountain with cat, donkeys, facebook and blogger is where my attention belongs, not feeling hopeless and helpless witnessing democracy go away out in the open and its demise be a popular thing. The water on my mountain has been poisoned by Christmas tree cultivation. The native trout that survived Waterfalls Creek being fished out and DDT runoff several decades ago have been wiped out at last by fake notions about the Christ. What can I do but laugh and go on? I'm glad the water table went down from subdivision use; it dried up my spring so I can't drink poison water from it. The water I drink now comes from a well, a few layers of rock below, but poison nonetheless. They ask why so much cancer is going around, blaming everything except that the water of the eastern half of the USA is poisoned at its source, the springs in the mountains, all up and down the Appalachian chain. Poisoning the water has too much money invested in it to stop. I find it heartening that I don't have a great deal longer. In Homelandia, as it is becoming with our ethical foundations being swept away by the television and affection for money, together, adding up to a great black hole of emptiness in greater American culture. Why do I feel so compelled to pay attention to the false workings of the Death Star that are false at the core? Drama? Am I afraid I'll miss something? Am I seeing history unfold? It's engagingly interesting to look at it as history, though the line must be drawn and adhered to, to keep emotion out of it. How do I do that when I think I care? Educate myself to uncare? Yes. What is it to care about? It doesn't care about me.

 

by constantine manos

a greek portfolio

 

I was trained from childhood up to care about America the Democracy, not Homelandia. Now I have  nothing where my-country-tis-of-thee is concerned. The feeling is something like it must have felt to be Hungarian when the Soviet Union incorporated Hungary. How could Hungarians care when missiles, tank cannons, an entire army and air force were aimed at them? No recourse. Hunker down, let it be. Follow Voltaire's counsel, mind my own garden. I'll shepherd my own flock, tend my donkeys, visit with friends, stay home and pursue my art interests, hold Caterpillar, go on doing what I do, but keep my mind out of the swirling cesspool of false values. Why not give more mind to thinking about the nature of God? It's a subject infinitely interesting, something like sailing; no matter how many years you've done it, how much or what kind of experience you've had, there is always something new to learn. I must lift the sights of my interior world, raise self above paying attention to ignorance, read in scriptures instead. Wouldn't that be a good exercise. Keep a Tao te Ching at hand to open it when I feel the impulse to turn on radio news. Read a verse from Lao Tzu and dwell in it for five minutes. I daresay it is a tempting exercise. It could be done at first when I feel like it, then maybe as an exercise for a day, kind of like stopping smoking a day at a time. Let go of paying attention to propaganda called news, clear my head of it a day at a time. Let it go like a helium balloon, watch it shrink to a pinpoint in blue sky and vanish. What do I care about current history anymore? I'd rather read Henry Miller's Rosy Crucifixion. I'd rather look at pictures in a book of photographs by Constantine Manos, A Greek Portfolio, photographs of rural island people who continue to live the traditional ways. People living so remotely they don't know what is going on in Athens but through rumor, changed to unrecognizable by the time it reaches them, and they really don't want to know. That's what I want to be, a donkey herder in the mountains. I must let go of the interest that holds my ear to the daily soap opera from the dark side and tune attention more to the light side, to poetry, good writing, scriptures, music, rain.

 

color photos by tj worthington

 

 

*

     

READING HENRY MILLER: TO LIVE AND BE AWARE

henry miller

 

Over the last several days I've found some remarkable insights by way of Diana Toma's prompt in the Daily Creative Practice, where the art impulse came from in self. It was quite a subtle place to go to. I danced around it, spiraling in on the core of it, finding much inspiration toward art and writing from Henry Miller. "Just happen to be" reading his Colossus of Maroussi, a little at a time, rereading by a whim. Picked it from the shelf thinking I'd like to revisit Greece with Miller and dip into his writing again. Pinned down to name a favorite American writer, it has to be Henry Miller. He speaks to me like no other writer has. I've read biographies, memories of him, a lot of what he's written. Haven't read any of his Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, Sexus, Nexus and Plexus. They're too long and I'm a slow reader. I've wanted to read them since they were new, but thick books turn me away on sight. I don't care who wrote them. I'd like to read From Here To Eternity, by James Jones, but it is about four times too long for me. I've been saying of myself in the years after high school I could not read with comprehension. I read Colossus of Maroussi age 22. I picked it up to read it again half a century later to see what I missed, to enjoy it again, to read Henry Miller again. This time around I have found I comprehended more than I thought. It even felt like I had almost memorized the book. I didn't remember a lot of details, but saw a way of thinking, of looking at the world, an attitude toward life I have gradually shaped into my own life. No other writer I've read has seemed like somebody I know, a friend of many years. I found at the end of four days of self-examination looking for the origin of the art impulse in self, it was Henry Miller's influence. I've retained so well what he had to say, I realize now I was reading much closer then than I thought. I see in retrospect I had adopted Miller's way of seeing, his attitude toward life. When I started writing the daily blog, I had reasoned for myself over several years that first person observation is closer to the reality of living in this world than third person, I instead of he. I is more direct, more experiential.

 

henry miller by kalman aron

 

I set out with the notion that this blog is a record of one person's point of view and experience in one place, in one time. I decided at the start not to make any attempts to promote it, just let it be a daily journal. I chose not to make it spiffy online journalism of short paragraphs dealing only in the obvious. Since I tend to long paragraphs naturally, I decided not to chop them up into USA Today speak. I said, I don't care. I'm not in it for money, nor am I in it for popularity and maximum number of viewers. Decided to go ahead and write long paragraphs as I felt like doing. Paragraphs are getting closer to one sentence every year, to one phrase: See Spot run. I decided not to honor that progression, or degression, whichever, and do what I feel like doing. I saw Miller wrote in long sentences and first person. The influence is obvious to me now, but it happened unconsciously. I would never set out to write like Henry Miller, nor would I set out to paint like van Gogh. If ten times as many people would read it if I wrote short paragraphs, I don't want ten times more. I don't care how many see it. First, it is a journal to self, made public because I'd never do it for more than 4 days otherwise. Online gives me a deadline, makes me do it. I don't know who's seeing it, except for some friends, and don't know what others make of it, except for a few friends. That's enough. Feedback is important in any art form. I need feedback, practical feedback, mainly to know if it is connecting with anyone and how it's connecting. I've learned from feedback that when I write with a certain intent, though not stating the intent, it comes through. I've wondered over that one for years, how to get intent across without stating it directly. Turns out, it simply amounts to: intend it. That's one I like to play with in writing, seeing how intent comes through without consciously willing it. I don't mean for you to think I take myself so seriously by calling myself a writer that I'd compare my writing to Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller. Not at all. It is only recently that I've allowed myself to refer to self as writer. I write every day, the original and only intent of the blog. It's been five years of writing five or six days a week. So I call myself a writer. It doesn't mean I'm writing for the New Yorker or the Nation. Just the act of writing makes me a writer. If I ran several hours every day, I'd call myself a runner. When I paint, I am a painter. The blog is my art form in this time. Learning by doing. When somebody asks if I'm an artist, I say, "Sometimes." Sometimes I'm just filling up blank space. Sometimes I may even touch art in a sentence or two.

 

This was quite a revelation in self awareness finding how closely my early years were influenced by Henry Miller, to the point he has been a great influence on the way I live, the way I write. My artistic sensibilities were educated and inspired by Miller. My friend Jean used to tell me I am the perpetual college student, that I live like a college student. Part of what she meant was I live on the very least I can get by on. Like, again something applied from reading, Marcel Duchamp said, It's not what you make, it's what you spend. From reading Miller's writing and Duchamp's interviews, I learned the importance of living frugally. The less money I make, the less my contribution to the Pentagon, two-thirds of my tax dollars. I never felt right paying taxes to keep a war machine going, didn't like it, couldn't do anything about it, but I could arrange minimum contribution to the machine by living on the minimum. In retrospect, I learned that thinking from Henry Miller. Could possibly attribute same to Henry Thoreau. It was that kind of thinking I was drawn to, quiet civil disobedience. Miller had plenty of Thoreau influence. I think something in our society is nuts, I don't have to participate. The Sixties taught me the futility of political resistance. This time we're in now has taught me to stay out of politics altogether, don't even concern myself with pictures of politicians on facebook. Just keep on scrolling. I like the kind of civil disobedience that doesn't get me arrested and hit in the head with one of those cop sticks they get a cheap thrill out of bullying demonstrators with. I leave that to the players. I'm not a player. Lyndon Johnson and the corporate press made me a non-player the summer of 1968. Five years previously, he'd taken power by coup, the day the American dream of democracy died. I withdrew from all political activities. My only political act is voting, despite knowing voting is a joke on us. Pretend participation. Pretend having a voice. I divorce myself from concerns over American democracy. It is also from Henry Miller I developed and interest in American cultures, American history and awareness of politics. I've taken too much interest, just by paying attention. I see self withdrawing further from paying attention. I don't even care what Bill Maher or Jon Stewart are saying this week. They used to make me laugh. Now they make me think: stop making stupid people famous, the republicans they use for jokes.

 

Reading Colossus, I was in a time of wanting out of a screwed up marriage that didn't have a chance, two people didn't know each other turned out not to like each other. I was longing for the freedom to be on my own, no more being bitched at, gamed with, mother-in-law from hell. I saw too much of her in her daughter, realizing it would be a life of liking her less until it turned to living with miserable hate. I wasn't going to do like my parents and live in agony pretending we're all happy in Jesus. Her games got outta hand. I arrived at our address after six months in the Mediterranean. Some man I'd never seen was there with her. A friend from college days. It was a setup. She knew what time I'd be coming in. I walked in the door, saw him, knew her game and rejoiced inside like the young do now, pumping a fist in the air and hollering the Rebel yell, Hail Yeah! I had a lifetime training in keeping a straight face, not letting anything show but surprise. I went straight to him, shook his hand and said glad-to-meet-ya in the best cocktail party style I knew how. He was so nervous it made me feel mean, but I saw what was happening and it made me want to be mean. Didn't need to. This was the kickoff, I was on my way. No problem. Henry Miller saw me through that time. He showed me how to find my equilibrium alone without backup or being kept in line by a force outside myself. He was going it alone after a divorce, doing it well, revealing for me the interior life is the most important. Hooray for the freedom to have an interior life. Miller taught me to let go of concern over other people's judgment and expectations. Looking back to the time Henry Miller entered my awareness, I see now he became something of a lesser spiritual guide.  Since earliest childhood I knew I wanted to live alone all my life. That speed-bump was a mistake that needed settling. Miller was turned against religion, just like I was. He showed me how to live a life of self-awareness, self-education and fun. Enjoy your life. Live your life. Follow your own light. I did not know where that thinking started, and now it's spread out before me like a map on a table. I might want to read his book on Rimbaud again. I have to say, Thank you, Henry Miller, for my life. He's like a facebook friend; we never met, though we're awfully good friends. He didn't know it, but he ranks among the closest friends of my life. I didn't know it either. I have to say thanks to Diana Toma for the insight and to Ruth Schowalter for setting up this momentum called DCP that I have benefitted from in my interior existence and it's fun. Jerry Lee: a whole lotta fun goin on. Rock and roll all night.

 

 

*

 

MY FRIEND HENRY MILLER

Continuing to look for where my own art impulse came from. I know it is in childhood somewhere, because all the way along I longed for art expression. I had self-esteem issues that were debilitating, stopping the kid from doing something I might want to do by telling self I'm not able for any of a number of possible reasons. I'd learned to believe that anything I thought up had been thought before. Anything I can do, somebody else can do better. Or I'll never be able to accomplish, I don't know enough, am not detail-oriented enough. The list can go on forever because these roadblocks are arbitrary, imagined for the particular occasion. All through school I was taught from all directions that if you're going to do something you gotta be great. You gotta make an A. You gotta make a lot of money. You gotta be a leader. I never wanted to be any of that, I, myself. My learning mind was engaged in trying to figure out how this world works and how to get used to its ways and enter that jumble and make a living. It was hard for me to learn it well enough to believe I could jump in and swim. I didn't want to learn it. Gave it a go in college years and a few years after, but it didn't take. I only knew what I did not want as far as work or career is concerned, yet at the same time I had wants that were inaccessible, like a half a million dollar Italian sports car, teenage stuff. In my teens, music was the first art form I paid attention to, rock & roll. Little Richard's early songs had some pretty good lyrics, so did Chuck Berry's. I was drawn to songs with more or less artful lyrics and musicianship. Always listened closely to individual instruments in the bands. Never learned an instrument. Too much chaos in the air at home to allow for learning. And too much chaos inside my head. I knew no one who had ever heard of art. Yet I had a longing inside for some kind of artistic self-expression, believed only gifted people could do art, and it had to be learned with years of training, or so I'd been led to believe. This was the Fifties when abstract expressionism was happening in New York and nobody outside New York knew about it, except in the universities I had no access to.

 

 

 

It is looking like the longing to write came from the childhood years of lying in the bed at night crying from frustration and rage, I felt like I had valuable things to say, understandings I wanted to write down so I'd remember them. I didn't write them because I had no privacy. I was given a diary for a birthday and never wrote in it knowing mother would read whatever I wrote and tell daddy what she saw. I learned to keep to myself any ideas or insights, new understandings. I'm recalling at an age of around ten I'd been out riding the bicycle on an old dirt road through a big field that seemed endless to a kid. I listened to the crows and watched them fly. They were saying haw, haw. It was not caw, but haw. I listened and listened. It was always haw, not caw. Later, at home, excited about my discovery, the kid told daddy the crows are saying haw, not caw. That set him off. NO THEY DON'T--THEY GO KAW, emphasis on the K. By this time, the kid was accustomed to it. Of course, they say KAW. Nothing came of that. By this time I already knew better that to try to talk to him, but was so excited by the discovery about the crows, I kicked myself later for being so ignorant to forget rule number one: do not attempt to talk to him--you know better. That was probably the last attempt I made. It was excitement that made me go against what I knew, so I got with myself about letting excitement take me out of control. He taught the kid self-control because every attempt to approach him with positive attention was turned immediately into negative return. At age 14 crying in the bed at night, the kid got with self and made a vow, I will never cry over them the rest of my life for any reason. That was the end of it. Never cried over anything having to do with either one of them again. Didn't have a problem with crying for some other reason. It was in that time I secured my heart in a vault and forgot the password. School was my safe zone. It's where I found others I liked who liked me. School was where my friends were.

 

 

I had a longing to write, but could not write. It was all I could do to write a one page paper for a class. Had zero command of the language. Had a natural gift for spelling. Or so it seemed. By the end of high school I could not write anything that would make sense. Had a longing to learn the language. By end of high school, I could not read with even minimum comprehension. I dove into reading when school was over. I wanted to go to college, but knew I could not read. Tried taking some classes and learned I wasn't even ready to start. Didn't even consider taking an art class, self-esteem on the bottom of the ocean. Didn't believe they'd even let me in. I was drawn more to learn the language, learn to read with comprehension, feeling a longing to write, knowing I did not know how to write. I read as much as spare time allowed. Bought paperbacks of best-sellers from drugstore paperback racks. Found some interesting books there. Found The Third Eye, the story of the Tibetan monk. It blew my circuits. The ultimate escape from my reality. But I knew I could not sit still that much. Read Alan Watts' The Way of Zen. Didn't get it, but got it read. Some understandings sifted through the chaos of my mind and were retained. It was an introduction to future readings of journals of Zen monks, like Hakuin, that served later to inform reading Chinese and Japanese poetry with a little better understanding than without the peephole into the spiritual vision of the East. I gradually took an interest in Eastern religions, Buddhism and Hinduism. From what I saw in the reading, it was the same as Bible teachings, different places, different names, the same stories. I was going the way of mind, the path of knowledge. I knew I was the bottom of the barrel where knowledge was concerned, and I wanted to correct that. I wanted to learn how to read and learn how to write. I felt like I had something to say without knowing what it was. A rumbling within needed expression.

 

 

 

Here, again, Henry Miller enters. I found a friend when Henry Miller entered my life. Getting close to the core of the matter now. Almost finished  rereading his Colossus of Maroussi, I am seeing, page after page, how I retained what I learned from him and what I learned from him became my own way of living. He encouraged my interest in art. And he encouraged my interest in writing. The interest was already there. Upon college graduation, I worked a year, saved money, sold everything I had with the exception of some LPs and books. Spent a month in Athens. Went to the acropolis half a dozen times, the museum of antiquities, and went to Crete and took a bus from Iraklion across the island to Phaestos to see the ruins of Knossos, the beginning of Greek civilization. And back to the mainland at Athens, took a one day tour bus to the ruins at Delphi. Reading earlier today I came upon his visit to Delphi and before that his visit to Crete. I had forgotten that Miller was the motivation for me to want to go to those places. He published the book a year before I was born. It was almost thirty years after his visit that I was there. Nothing had changed in those places. Reading it now, I can see in my mind's eye the places he saw and wrote about. We took the same road across Crete, and I saw the same landscape he saw. It really is as magical as he tells it. By magical I mean it has a glow about it, like an aura that is not visible, though it enhances the visible, gives the feeling that it's alive. So it's Henry Miller where I got my fascination for Greece, modern Greece more than ancient Greece, though the Greek plays are a pinnacle of art. It is still a regret within that the library in Alexandria burned and took so much we'll never see. It makes what we have all the more precious, Medea, Prometheus Bound, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone. They make Shakespeare seem provincial. It is looking I have to point to Henry Miller for the core of my impulse to art by writing. Meher Baba came along later and opened my heart with a can opener. It took awhile. By this time in the life, I feel like my heart has opened sufficiently that I can live by a balance of head and heart, and write from that balance. And from the balance possibly be able to write something from time to time worth reading.

 

 

the dalai lama

 

 

*