THE FUN OF READING

Continuing to review books that have become foundational to my way of seeing, view of the world, weltanschauung, attitude toward life. How could I experience so directly from the source what Leo Tolstoy had to say if I didn't read? Tolstoy is a good place to start. He opened doors in my mind. A man of integrity such that reading his writing, he appears quite sane. Reading his life story, I found him a wise fool. He was not the best at making decisions for himself, though his wisdom was indisputable. Tolstoy was a wise man in the true sense of what wisdom means. Wisdom is not necessarily rational. Mind is rational. Wisdom is beyond mind, includes heart. Poetry is a mix of mind and heart, like prose writing, fiction. The mix of mind and heart, reason and emotion, weaves art forms, clarifies the difference between craft and art. Tolstoy inspires me to want to be fluent in the Russian language so I can read his beautiful stories as he wrote them. They are beautiful in translation, so beautiful it doesn't matter it's translation. Without translation, I could not read Tolstoy. Had I never found Tolstoy, my life would have been diminished. It's not anything I can put a finger on. It has to do with understanding. Like Ralph Stanley sings from the soul of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Leovochka Tolstoy wrote from the soul of Russia. 

I'm having a Russian film festival these months, seeing some of the finest films of my life, like Tarkovsky's the Sacrifice, and I've only begun. Years of reading Tolstoy, Russian names are familiar. I learned how to pronounce them in my head long ago. The names are familiar, not a problem. People I know who read most often won't read Russian writers, they can't pronounce the names. Same with Chinese and Japanese. I trained myself to get over the obscurity of foreign names. Sometimes after a movie, I'll read the names in the credits, like Japanese, and pronounce them in my mind, familiarizing with the names from another language. The same applies to Russian films, French, Italian, Turkish, Bosnian, Romanian. When somebody tells me they can't read a book full of Russian names, I think, Why not? They're phonetic. Learn them at the beginning of the book and they're easy by the end of the book. Some of the names are a bit awkward to the English reading eye, names that make some Polish names easy by comparison. 

I watch films suspending disbelief, reminding self this is only a peephole into how the people live, interact. It's a scripted drama telling a story in a given culture. It's the culture I'm curious about. I see landscape and architecture. I feel like I get a sense of Russian life acted by Russians portraying Russians, attitudes and beliefs. Saw two films on the battle of Stalingrad. First one was a 3 hour documentary told from the German side, using German film footage, filmed among the German soldiers. The Russians were the ones shooting back. Next, a Russian dramatic version of the battle from the Russian side, the Germans the ones shooting back. Saw them a couple days apart. I understand why Stalingrad has the name, the worst battle ever. I'm recalling in the German documentary, an older Russian man interviewed, who had survived the battle, said, "Russia is a great, vast country. Russia has never been defeated and never will." I thought this a commendable national legacy. He knew the "never will" as well as he knew the "never has." I include watching films with reading, as I watch mostly films from all over the earth, reading subtitles. I know less people who can read subtitles than I know who read books. 

Reading books has made it possible to read subtitles, giving access to some wildly extraordinary films, like Akira Kurosawa's Ran, and Dersu Uzala, Zhang Yimou's House of the Flying Daggers and the Hero, Krzysztof Kieslowski's Blue, White and Red, three films, each titled a color in the French flag. I could not have enjoyed these films and hundreds more restricted by inability to read subtitles. I even have a few friends among the people I know who read books who refuse to read translations. They're not authentic, as the author wrote it. Though I don't know Chinese, I can read Mo Yan and Gao Xingjian, both mainland Chinese Nobel Prize winners. I can read Apollinaire's poem, Zone, Rilke's Duino Elegies, the Tao Te Ching, by allowing self to accept translation the only access I have. I can't learn the Turkish language to read Orhan Pamuk, especially when he's available in the language I'm able to read. I can't learn French to read Rimbaud, though have access to several translations into English. In translation, I even have access to Tolstoy's letters. I read to unrestrict myself, to spread my inner horizon, like in Han Yu's words from the Southern Mountains, "A new sun lights the summits / Stretching heights and breadths millions of feet."  Reading has been an educational entertainment throughout my adult life. It is incalculable how much I'd rather read Chris Hedges' book, The Empire of Illusion, than watch anything that's on television, even the races. 

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VINCENT THE OUTSIDER

vincent van gogh

Am a little over a hundred pages into a relatively new biography of Vincent van Gogh, 2012, by two researchers who write very well. It is a thousand pages, enough to put me under. It's a paperback so big I can't hold it while reading with one hand. I stepped into it a bit uneasily, wondering how far I'd get in it before putting it down the last time. I've read a history of Africa that thick and a history of China that thick, and Tolstoy's War and Peace. It's not that I'm inexperienced with long books, just that experience tells me there comes a time in a really long book that I need a break. Reading War and Peace, I took a month in the middle of it, because I didn't want to finish it any time soon. Closing in on the end of it, I did not want it to end. At the end, I was at a loss. Couldn't read anything else for a month. After a long time of living in Tolstoy's writing, all other was so piddling, it's hardly worth the bother to read. I wanted more Tolstoy biographies, memoirs, letters. I even keep a National Geographic magazine among my books because it has a colorized photograph of Leo in it. He was some kind of wild man. In his younger years, he was military academy, fought in wars an officer on horseback, very well off and had a gambling addiction that took much of his land and fortune. He wrote stories that made him a popular Russian writer from the beginning. When War and Peace struck, he became a Russian icon. He was so beloved by the Russian people, even the Czar had no control over him. Anything the Czar might do to admonish Tolstoy for his independent minded writing would bring the wrath of the Russian people down on the Czar. His power would end that moment, which he knew very well. Tolstoy knew it too. The Czar could censure Dostoevsky and other writers at will, but had to concede Leo Tolstoy carried the real power in Russia.

vincent van gogh

It wasn't because Tolstoy was a great guy. He was not a great guy. It was his writing. He can create a world in your mind's eye that sees everything going on. I remember a girl dancing a mazurka to her uncle playing the balalaika. And I remember a wolf hunt, riding a horse, on the horse's back, the mane flapping. He put me on the back of the horse running all-out after a wolf with the wolfhounds leading. He put me on the back of a horse in Anna Karenina, running in a race on a dirt track. I don't remember his description of it, but I remember the feeling well. This was half a century ago. When I read his writing, I feel like I'm experiencing the apex of the human ability to tell a story. His characters come to life, live throughout the story and later in memory. I'm recalling the appearance of Anna Karenina. The man telling the story, a Leo Tolstoy sort of character, a version of himself, was standing before a painting of Anna Karenina painted by the Russian portraitist of the day, moved by her beauty which became universal beauty. A door opens, and Anna, herself, enters the room. The portrait was as nothing in relation to the living Anna Karenina. Tolstoy's long short story, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, had a moment that has stayed with me like a part of myself. When Ivan's spirit was leaving the body, he felt like he was sitting in a train at the station waiting for it to start rolling. He thought he was facing forward, and when the train started moving, he was going backwards. I pick up a book by Tolstoy, and that's it. Finish one, start another. I think I have just about everything he wrote, including letters, on my shelves. He was a major positive influence in my life. I think I picked up Tolstoy the first time inspired by the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Martin Luther King's non-violent protest movement referred back to Gandhi and Thoreau, who were in line with Leo Tolstoy, the first non-violent activist.  

vincent van gogh

I've jumped into a thousand page biography of an artist who has spoken to me over my time visually close to how Tolstoy spoke to me mentally. In some ways, for the same reason, in most ways not. I find "the same" in them that they both are making pictures of life itself. For me, van Gogh's images have the breath of life in them. I feel his painting as I feel Tolstoy's writing. I feel like van Gogh painting flowers was a search for how to show their living energy with paint on canvas. His faces have living, conscious energy. It is the spirit of life I feel like he is attempting to paint on each canvas. I'd been curious about van Gogh for most of my adult life. Irving Stone's writing did not hold my interest. I never paid van Gogh much mind other than appreciation of his painting. I never took an interest in reading the letters with Theo. Didn't even want to see the movie with Kirk Douglas from 1957. I must have missed it when it was new. That was the year of the move from Kansas City to Wichita, during which I missed a lot. It seems like a time outside time. Foremost memory of that time was two weeks before the move, Kansas City tv evening news told about a nineteen year old guy killed in Wichita by a motorcycle gang and left in a ditch. The Fifties was a time of switch-blades, rumbles, motorcycle chains, white gangs and black leather jackets. The Fonze was not even a caricature of that time. Time went by and I decided to see the Kirk Douglas vision of van Gogh, Lust For Life. Did not expect the movie to be anything other than something to get information from, a brief pop culture rendering. Big surprise. It was quite a good film, directed by Vincente Minnelli. By the time it was over, I realized I probably did not see it then because it was an "art film" not shown in mainstream theaters, the only kind I had access to. Or maybe I did see it and forgot it like I forgot hundreds of movies seen in the 1950s.

vincent van gogh

The film made from van Gogh's letters gave such a good depiction of his life, it felt to me that Kirk Douglas brought him to life. It was one of those art of acting jobs where it is Kirk Douglas standing in for van Gogh at the beginning, and by the end it is only van Gogh. Kirk Douglas became him early in the film. Douglas and Minnelli, together, made a living portrait of an artist who painted life itself. I remember arguments from high school years about whether he really saw what he painted. Like, did he really see the sky swirling in air turbulence patterns? Yes, and no. It was how he brought the air to life. He gave the stars the glow we see in them the best it could be rendered two-dimensionally with opaque pigments. So far, in his story, I'm in his early twenties. I've always heard he was insane or something. Though, looking at it from afar, it seemed like in the movie he fell into the place Nijinsky wrote his diary from. I'm curious to see. So far, he's no weirder than a nerd. He liked to take long walks in the country when he was a kid, a loner. AP Carter of the Carter Family took long walks in his boyhood, quit school because he was tired of being bullied as a nerd. Leo Tolstoy comes to mind reading this biography for the clarity of the writing and how the two authors bring characters to life in the telling. Every time I pick up the book, I fall right into it. This doesn't happen very often. It's almost like seeing it as a movie in my mind's eye. By age twenty or so I felt like I knew him, the person, felt like I understood what he was going through. He came from people who did their duty by church and by society, locked themselves into rigid roles. Little boy comes along, whose soul came from a very different experience, whose mind can't reconcile what school and church teach with how he was expected to act within very strict confines. He was born an independent thinker. Nineteenth Century Europe had no more regard for the independent thinker than USA today. He didn't get it, couldn't get it, couldn't fake it, couldn't lock on those chains. His story is that of an outsider. All he needed was understanding. As far as I can see, he never got it. William Blake was the same. He found his understanding in Kate. Van Gogh never found a Kate. 

vincent van gogh himself

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FINDING LEO TOLSTOY

 

henry miller

 

Driving home from seeing the race Sunday, the history of my life as an employee came forward and I followed a thread that runs through all the work life that started a long time before I started working for pay. It started in childhood seeing daddy laid off during Eisenhower recessions, and during union strikes. He worked for GM in Kansas City as a "ding man," he smoothed the bumps on car bodies in the assembly line. Every recession, every strike he found whatever work he could, driving a milk truck, this and that, awful jobs that paid little and frustrated him along with everybody in the house. The guy he worked for driving the milk truck loaned him money to buy a used 51 Oldsmobile, a beautiful car, yellow and white, and repoed it when daddy couldn't keep up with the payments. That really was a frustration. Next was a big Nash tank that had a similar "modernistic" body style. It was parked in the street in front of the house one night during a storm, an electric wire fell onto the car and toasted it. I swore to myself for the rest of my life that I will never work for a big corporation. I set as my life purpose to only work for individuals or very small businesses. This meant a lifetime of minimum wage inspiring me to determine that I will always live on very little. I must learn frugality. It's not that frugal is in my nature, so I taught self over a long period of years. A guideline I carry in my head from artist Marcel Duchamp, "It's not what you earn ; it's what you spend." I've learned along the way that desires are expensive, wanting is expensive. I've trimmed my desire for a new black Ferrari down to wanting what I have, a 93 Buick Century that runs perfectly with a classic motor that doesn't even burn oil 21 years later. Things go wrong, I take it to the mechanic over something rusted away almost regularly. That's ok. It's better than payments. It helps keep a man working for a living in his own business at home where he wants to live, and each repair improves the car. Win-win. I drive on the interstate and see thousands of new cars with the unconscious thought: everybody has a  new car but me, weep weep. Next thought: everybody is making payments but me, tee hee.

 

alberto giacometti

 

Even though the Kansas Fundamentalist church I lived in throughout childhood filled the child's mind with so much contradiction and general obvious falsehood called dogma, I did get a spiritual education. It took fifteen years to reason it all out of my head. I had to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It took fifteen years to find the baby. I've spent my life reasoning away the nonsense. What I found fifteen years later was I had actually exempted the words of Jesus from everything else I'd thrown out, because they bore out. As was said of him in his day, he spoke with authority. He knew what he was saying. It wasn't just that he was smart; he was way beyond smart, in another league. I didn't know I was testing what he'd said, holding it up to the light of experience, but the whole process ran its course and left me with the words of Jesus. I don't' recall a time I did not question in child's mind why the preacher was always talking about Jesus and love, but nobody in the church liked anybody else in the church. And they sure didn't like anybody outside the church. I asked somebody once about love your neighbor and was told it has a spiritual meaning that doesn't apply to this earth. I thought: What? And left it there. All the kid's real questions were passed off with equally vacant knee-jerk nothingisms to the point I quit asking adults anything that mattered. The people in the church didn't get it. The people outside the church didn't get it. Teachers didn't get it. Parents of friends didn't get it. Parents didn't get it. If we're bowing down to Jesus to pray, and avoid each other, and control each other, what's the use of going to church or bowing down to Jesus if you aren't going to get your heads and hearts out of the Old Testament? The moment I left parents' house I ran as fast as Usain Bolt from church mind. It was slow in receding. I find that in the subconscious I carry a moral code for my life: always do work that benefits humanity, not takes away. I saw GM and the other mass corporations taking from us, depleting us, spoiling our planet of its minerals and gold so a few can live in uber-luxury and the many can work for the very least allowable by law, and that struggled for by labor unions. 

 

alberto giacometti

 

A friend told me about a job opening at a shoe store. He got the name of the store wrong, but I didn't know it. I went where he told me and they, too, had an opening. I felt like shoes are a necessary item for us in civilization. Selling shoes gives rather than takes away. I wanted to experience face-to-face with strangers, people I'd never seen before all day every day. I was the shyest kid in school all the way along. I was shy of everything and everybody. I wanted to learn to speak freely with people I did not know as with people I knew. It made a difference; I look back in gratitude to the man who gave me the job in good faith that a kid just out of high school could do the job. It was a great learning at the beginning of my life. From there on, I could enter the world "out there," anywhere, a passport. The high school graduate was in a state of confusion that could have broke-out of a straightjacket like the Hulk. All kinds of shit that happens to the ignorant jumped on me like fleas on a stray dog. I jumped in a bucket of shit way up over the top of my head and did like the frog dropped into boiling water, got outta that shit right now. Thank you, God, for the US Navy. It rescued the clueless kid of my tailspin life for two years. I hated it for that. But, it took me out of my life at a time an escape hatch was necessary. I went into it knowing I needed an education. The reason I wasn't able to get going with advanced education was I could not read with comprehension. I used every minute of free time reading, remembered the titles of the books taught in Senior English, a class I didn't dare take. It involved a lot of reading I couldn't handle. The day before leaving for the airport to go away for two years, a few years after high school, a kid, a senior in high school, a friend of somebody I knew, handed me a copy of Albert Camus' The Stranger to read on the plane. By this time in the life I can see that kid as an angel unawares. One of many I suddenly see, now that I've noticed the pattern. I don't know his name, couldn't pick him out in a lineup.

 

alberto giacometti

 

The Navy was good practice in doing what I did not want to do. Going by my anti-authoritarian interpretation, it was not to the good of humanity. It was to the worst. I had a hard time committing to a role in a death machine. Couldn't do it; never advanced, never took it seriously, only wanted to read. Every port we stopped, up and down the East Coast and the southern Europe, northern side of the Mediterranean, the others looked for bars, I looked for bookstores. The very last thing in the world I wanted was to be carried back onto the ship. I wanted peace, not mayhem. Found Henry Miller's Colossus of Maroussi in Athens, Greece, 1963, so glad now I wrote the place and date in it. Colossus, like The Stranger, was one of the great books of my life, great in that they spoke to my soul like Ralph Stanley's music. Like Camus, Miller woke me up a step further. I'd read a fair amount in those two years, mostly French Existentialists, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone deBeauvoir, Camus, French underground resistance fiction and plays I felt at home in, resistance the key word. Even crawled my way through Heidegger, even getting some of it, a spot here and there, but followed it. His appearance was toward the end, a kind of graduation test given self upon entering the college phase of  my new life making my own decisions. Again, an angel unawares had confidence I could work in his bookstore. The years in the bookstore, side-by-side, interwoven with the years in school educated a major dummkopf to satisfaction of what I wanted from college, a further understanding of how to get along in this world. Every summer I dove into a stack of books. In the summer I read way beyond what we were reading in school. Like Great Gatsby didn't impress me at all, still doesn't. Even movies of it don't. It was good writing. There is a lot of good writing. A whole lot that I Iike better, like Patrick White, Tolstoy and a great long list. I read War and Peace while school was going on. Couldn't stop. He held me like Stephen King holds his readers. Once I found Tolstoy, this was what I was looking for. Have read several biographies, one by a daughter, one by a son. In this house I can actually put my hands on two volumes of his letters. Henri Troyat's biography brought Leo to life. Why am I not reading Tolstoy now? I'm reading Henry Miller now. Like when reading Tolstoy or Patrick White, Naguib Mahfouz, I don't want to read anything else until I feel like a change. These four are people who illustrate an interpretation of great minds. They were benefits to humanity in their time, and in all time, like Sophocles and Harold Pinter. Nelson Mandela comes to mind.

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alberto giacometti

 

 

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GRUMPY OLD BASTARD ON ART

Sitting here with a blank screen looking at the stack of six wood blocks with a new arrangement of rocks balanced on top, enjoying the beauty of the finished wood. Thought popped up in mind that I put a lot of effort into those blocks of wood for nothing. The other side of my mind protested. Nothing? For not selling and getting my money back? Lord Have Mercy! It's one of those times I have to amend a thought, educate self about it. I did not give the blocks of wood three hours of sanding to sell them. I chose to do it because I wanted to see them smooth and polished, not to put a title and price tag on them. These are the two minds that kick-box in my head where making art objects is concerned. One mind is my self looking at it from aesthetic satisfaction the goal. The other mind is an authority figure from outside self saying: You're not doing it right. You need to make some money. I've given Mr Authority my ear because that's just how it is outside myself. I can't live entirely inside self. Don't even want to. Looking at the blocks of wood, mind got with self and said I'm tired of listening to Mr Authority, who is my own invention, anyway. He's a part of me. Alas, not that easy to turn off. I am so at odds with selling. This is what agents are good for. Also, I had something of an agent once who was selling things then told me to start painting pictures of "nigger kids playing around a schoolhouse, cause that's what people want." That was the end of our arrangement for me. I didn't even want to be associated with that kind of mind. It was the mind of authority from outside self about as extreme as it could be. It's right up there with the time I was asked to change a color in a painting to another color that will go with a couch and she'll buy it. The color stayed the same, she didn't buy it. I didn't want her having it after that experience.

 

Mind has struggled with self over the issue of art and money for so long I'm weary of it. Tolstoy dropped his copyright of his writings, gave them to the Russian people, could not take their money any more. His Mr Authority was his wife who unleashed hell on him for giving up his copyright. It was what the family lived on. Suddenly, they had appreciably less income. It drove Tolstoy nuts, the rage in his head between art and money. His last thing to do was to walk away from his Mr Authority. He walked to a train station and died in the station. He must have said to his self what I was saying to my self about the blocks, I'm of an age I don't have reason or justification to go on with the concern of trading art for money. I remember the old-time Regular baptist preachers, who believed their gift came from the Holy Spirit, said, "What's freely received must be freely given." They did not take money for their preaching. The meeting house was maintained by the members. Given that the Holy Spirit is within, I'm with them all the way. It was one of the first things I appreciated about them. I also appreciated that the meeting house had no steeple or cross. It was architecture so simple it looked Japanese. Wooden benches inside made by members of the church; trees cut, sawmilled, hand-sawed to needed dimensions and nailed together. A wood-burning stove in the middle of the room. I have the same feeling about the art spirit. It is a corruption of the spirit to bring money into it. Mr Authority says, you have to be practical, try to remember you live in this world and money is this world's blood flow. Been there done that. This thinking dampens my art spirit the same as a chamber of commerce meeting. Tolstoy made his decision to go with his spirit and walked away.  

 

What do I do? Make things and put them in storage? Give them away? That's a seeming solution. The hitch in this thinking is few people appreciate something they get for free. It has no value if it didn't cost something. Back to money. Back to this world. I've never found a compromise in myself. It's always been like this. I look at the artists who sell for hundreds of thousands and think, How do you paint something knowing it is going to sell for some wildly unreasonable price, you'll get maybe a quarter of it and even that amount is radically unreasonable? It is ambition that took them there. I don't have that kind of ambition. The art market world is antithetical to my interest. It snuffs out my spirit. Since I don't have storage facilities and can't give things away, maybe I'll just think about it and read Henry Miller. I love about writing in this blog that it is not about money. If money were its purpose, I could not be so free. An editor would be in the picture. Some are good, most are terrible. The worst was when the editor at the local paper declared one of my sentences too long and put a period in the middle of it. It was a perfectly clear sentence he made into two meaningless sentences. When I brought this up to him, he told me I was strange. I thought: Me strange? Take a look in a mirror if you want to see what strange looks like. I said, "Remember this: I am the strangest individual you will ever know." Then it comes to I need to be paid to put up with somebody rewriting in my name.

 

I'm seeing Swedish actor Max von Sydow's character in Woody Allen's film, Hannah and Her Sisters, artist husband of one of Hannah's sisters, Barbara Hershey. He's a grumpy old philosopher artist who threw a fit because a new rich rock star wanted colors to go with the décor. Old man von Sydow went into a rant saying he didn't sell his paintings by the yard and refused to deal with the guy further. I had a good laugh at myself. Thank you, Woody Allen. I said that's what I've become, a grumpy old bastard. What can an artist be but eccentric? What artist would want not to be eccentric? Eccentric means being who you are in a world of people acting like they think they're supposed to act according to the unwritten code adhered to better than any written law. Fashion correctness is overseen the same as political correctness. You don't have a tattoo? How uncool is that? You don't know what a croissant is? You never heard of Harry Partch? I sometimes hope what I've learned in this lifetime will carry over into next. Then I wonder what I've learned in this lifetime worth carrying over. Maybe what I've learned only matters for this lifetime. That's good enough. At least I learned whatever it was for this one. I feel like learning about Leo Tolstoy's life and his writings has been beneficial to this lifetime. Why want it to be more than that? It's ok for it to be important in itself. It's ok for my art forms to be important in the doing and the satisfaction or dissatisfaction upon completing the project. I don't want them to be anything other than important  in the doing. Like my friend, Caterpillar, who just now walked through on her way to the water bowl. She won't always be with me. I appreciate her all the more while she is.

sparta scenes

by tj worthington

 

 

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