THE HEART OF THINGS INVISIBLE

 

tj worthington

 

Earlier today I was looking at how I have changed on the inside since the move into the unknown, a rural road in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I came here at the beginning of my spiritual journey that started in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart, where all ladders start. The last lines of Yeats' poem, Circus Animals' Desertion, stayed in the front of my mind as the ground I stood on to begin a new life in the unknown. "Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start." The ladders of my ambitions before, my desires before, my beliefs before, all came to an end at the chopping block moment of realizing God is. At this moment now, writing to you, I saw an array of delicate multi-colored flowers and the head of Ganesh, the elephant-headed god of beginnings, remover of obstacles, surrounded by radiant flowers. The image faded away. I used to want images that came like that to stay, and regretted them fading away. By now, I've learned to enjoy it when it happens and be grateful it happened. I keep a picture of Ganesh on the wall. A friend bought it from a vendor in the Mumbai airport for something like a dollar, the image made with dye on an 8x10 rectangle of cloth having a simple, Rouault quality about it. It is my favorite Ganesh image of all I have seen. The picture of Ganesh below is the closest  feeling I could find to the image I saw in my mind's eye, though it was only his head I saw and flowers.

 

ganesh

 

 

The moment I caught on that God, indeed, is, I could not go on living as I had lived believing God a creation of the human mind for the few to control the many. Turns out, it was religion I confused for God. I was able for the first time to see behind the mask of religion, beyond to God as God is, the Christ as the Christ is, the heart of things invisible. The same may be said of Krishna and Allah, Buddha. It was different from seeing Jesus the uber-judge, sitting on the right hand of God the Great Judge, tapping his foot for the chance to condemn me to hell on the least zero-tolerance charge. "You shook your fist at me and cussed me once for not giving you what you wanted. For standing up to the Great God of Testosterone, it's the pit of never-ending hell fire for you, to scream in agony forever." The heart of things invisible, a vision of God I can live with rather than dread I might have gone too far this time when I take a drink of good liquor. The heart of things invisible says, A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. And the dire warning from the Judge On High, You better not. I came up in a medieval interpretation of God calcified over multiple centuries, complicated by Protestantism into John Milton's judge on a throne of adamant, and wrung dry of spiritual relevance by American fundamentalism.

 

paradise lost

 

It took fifteen years to clear my head of the theology of you-better-not. It all finally gone, the heart of things invisible pulled me to itself like a fish that took the bait, pulled to the bank by the hook hidden in the bait. Reeled in against my will. Reeled in by a power that seemed to be outside myself, which turned out to be my own higher self, the heart of things invisible. I needed to live with this new realization I could not deny. It was a hundred percent convincing to mind and heart. I needed time to digest what I'd learned and learn more about it, find a way to live that honors the heart of things invisible, and go on living in the world of work, living among other people in a spirit of solitude. Not dismissing others, rather embracing others, allowing others their own spirit of solitude. I've found the spiritual path to be in the world of others, not separate from. The solitude I wanted, I found I could not live, because I needed interactions with others, simply by being a social human being, and there was no sense that I could see in denying it. I went looking for balance, time for solitude and time for others. Do both solitude and social in a spirit of detachment and it's all the same.

 

tj worthington

 

By detachment I mean something like not being driven by things I want for myself, like fixing the rust and dents on my car and having it painted a deep gun-metal blue with money I don't have. I would like to realize the beauty of its lines. But so what. It runs like a race car, has good suspension, a fabulous engine that will just about make the back end drag the ground when I push the pedal to the metal. I can't want more from a car. A car that does 200 in six seconds would land me in the hospital, the grave or jail. It would probably be stolen first by big time car thieves that leave no traces. The car I drive, I can count on no thief wanting. It's the oldest and rattiest looking car in any parking lot. Thieves like flash, not rust. My house looks so ratty, no satellite dish, thieves don't look at it twice, but as something too old-timey to have anything in it of interest, an old-man car parked by the road. And Justin spread the word years ago, "That old man is crazy. He'll shoot your ass. He don't care." My favorite people are of the class of people thieves come from, working class people squeezed out of making legitimate money. They know by my reputation I respect them and honor them. They would be my bodyguards before they'd take from me. I feel confident on my spiritual path that I have learned to honor and respect the down and out people. They're beautiful people, too, when you know their hearts. I'm grateful I am now able to see the most in the least by way of the heart of things invisible. I'm grateful to live in a community where everybody has my back and I have theirs. I've come to learn what it is about humility God loves so much, learned it from the mountain people where even the tough guys have it.

 

 tj worthington

 

 

 

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A LOT OF HIGH-SOUNDING WHATEVER

pulpit by tj worthington

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

 

 

 

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

 

god the mother

 

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

 

god the father

 

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

 

praying man

 

 

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EAST AND WEST

 

brice marden, couplet IV



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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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