HAN SHAN AND BACKWARDS BALLCAPS

brice marden

han shan series

 

Things are changing so fast within, it makes me wonder what is going on. I have my friends I like to see, and do see them, and find the circle shrinking. Not because of people dying out, rather that I am drawing inward at a noticeable rate. Like when I'm used to driving fifty and then am going eighty. It takes more focus. The purpose behind the change from urban living to country road was to move inward, solitude however I define it. I saw my house a monastic retreat, a monastery of one following no religion, the still point of my interior journey to the heart of things invisible. I could not lock myself down in a belief system evolved over centuries and millennia of filtering through the male ego. I mythologized self an American Han Shan living outside the world on Cold Mountain. The likeness was thin, though the spirit close. Han Shan's Cold Mountain has accompanied my time in the mountains like he and I lived parallel lives in different times, different parts of the world, he in the mountains of southern China, I in the mountains of Southern Appalachia, America. It is here that I chose to live out my life in the world, not of it.

 

 

han shan

 

 

70

 

Talking about food won't make you full,

Babbling of clothes won't keep out the cold.

A bowl of rice is what fills the belly;

It takes a suit of clothing to make you warm.

And yet, without stopping to consider this,

You complain that Buddha is hard to find.

Turn your mind within! There he is!

Why look for him abroad?

 

                         ----Han Shan

                           tr Burton Watson

 

 

han shan

 

Han Shan has been my companion in these hills. Many others too, Robert Bly, John Berryman, Henry Miller, Tu Fu, a long list of good reading, Julio Cortazar, Naguib Mahfouz. I have a way of seeing other people's stories, poems in relation to mind, heart and spirit. I like my scriptures to have all three. Poetry, fiction, biographies, essays, histories, I read in the same spirit as reading scriptures. I say, why do a select number of books about God take precedence over a story of someone's life, the poetry of Nirala, Rumi, Hafiz, Rilke, Yeats? Possibly that a scripture is something one can read many times and see new meaning every time as one advances along one's path. The Gospel of John is about as incredible as scripture gets, and the Bhagavad Gita, Buddhist Sutras, discourses of masters who have reached enlightenment. What I mean by mixing poetry and fiction and stories of people's lives with scripture is the subject of all the scriptures is the human heart. The people I know, I know by their hearts. Since letting go of desires, I have unfolded to know the people I know by their hearts.

 

 

brice marden

han shan series

 

It's not like I see good and evil in somebody's heart. Not at all. The heart is where the other is coming from. I don't mean heart like purity or perfection, but heart as in where we're coming from on the inside. Everyone else is coming from the same place in themselves. Some may have the energies blocked off and don't flow so well emotionally. I see what we call good in everybody's heart. I see the heart of everyone I know is where the real individual is. That's who I like to connect with in people I know. Somebody whose heart is not open is of no interest to me. I like to know real people, people who live their lives as themselves without masks. My friend Lucas, retired English professor, once said, "When I see a guy with his ballcap on backwards, I know he has nothing to say that I want to hear." When I need a good laugh, I don't need to rent a Marx Bros movie. Only need to remember Lucas saying that. I have laughed over this sentence a thousand times, at least. I think it every time I see a backwards hat. It comes to mind and I laugh sometimes out loud. I know he knows what he is saying. He's talking from experience.

 

 

 

My experience with ballcaps backward is mountain boys who drive pickups, work construction jobs, a style of a given generation, the tattoo generation that listens to heavy metal. Them and guys in punk bands are the hat-on-backwards people of my experience. I think they're cool people. It is as in-yer-face an anti-intellectual statement as The Sex Pistols. It's a style, like long hair is a style, short hair is a style, hat forward is a style, hat backward a style, brim straight across a style, brim bent in a curve a style. Milly Richardson wears ragged old tshirts with holes in them. It's her style. Ross, her brother, wears cammo pants all the time. It's his style. Justin wears a tshirt, the image a deer head with big rack. It says, White Tail Hunter. It is truly Justin's style. Kid Rock is Justin's style. If I looked askance at Milly's ratty tshirts I'd take her for nobody home. But when I know Milly and Justin by their hearts, who they are, I see full human beings, the whole person present, people I'm happy to have the opportunity to know.

 

brice marden

han shan series

 

 

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SEEING QUADROPHENIA THE FIRST TIME ON A BLUE MOON

judy

 

It is the night of the Blue Moon, a very early Elvis Presley song on the Sun label. It was in this time, and his recordings in 1956, that got him the name, the King. Colonel Parker latched onto his million-dollar baby, Hollywood next and the end of Elvis for me. From then on, he was a glittery spectacle of his fame. I digress. The Blue Moon made a good song. I've seen facebook posts about the Blue Moon like it's something cosmic, a once-in-a-lifetime event in the sky. It hasn't happened since three years ago. Wow. Cosmic. It is the Blue Moon, not because it's blue, but it is the second full moon in one calendar month. July had a full moon on the first and again on the thirty-first. That's it, the significance of the Blue Moon. It is not about the moon. It's about the calendar. The moon came first. The calendar we go by is not the original astrological calendar, but an overlay created by the human mind and collectively agreed upon. It's one of many, has no more significance than being the calendar we go by. It so happened this year two full moons occurred in the same month.

 

view from the deck

 

My friends, Lucas and Judy, are here. They like movies as much as I do and largely the same kinds. We watch movies together in the evenings when they visit the mountains. Both are retired now, this their first stay of a full week. They checked out several movies from the Emory library to bring along, plus my netflix movies and two they brought. Last night we put on Quadrophenia, the Who's second rock opera. We put it on not knowing what to expect. They had seen a stage performance of Tommy in New York and loved it. I had seen the film of Tommy and never connected with it. I had the album in its day, liked it, but it was a disappointment from the Who I wanted to listen to, like the Live at Leeds Who, the Who that rocked my world. None of us knew anything about Quadrophenia, except rock opera, which is no attraction for any of us. We put it on with an attitude it will probably be ok. If we don't like it, we have no lack of something else to see. It took charge of all three of us in the first minute, didn't let us go until the final scene and the credits. We sat gaping while the credits rolled wanting it not to be over.

 

 

view from the deck

 

My appreciation of Peter Townsend the artist skyrocketed while watching the story unfold. He conceived it, wrote the story, created the characters, composed the music and performed it. In my way of seeing, Townsend's is a Woody Allen kind of talent. The story involved teenage boys in London, Mods and Rockers, gangs that fought each other. The time was the Sixties, the Who playing on the radio. The soundtrack was a potpourri of Fifties and Sixties hits, like Da Doo Ron Ron Ron Da Doo Ron Ron, Louie Louie, Green Onions, the Kinks, as wide a variety as was played on the radio over the first decade of rock n roll. The characters in the story did not listen to American psychedelic rock, but bands like the Who that rock a song start to finish. The scene was pre-punk, just before punk broke loose. In the crowd of Mods, I thought I spotted Billy Idol in the role of the Bell Boy. He was ten years older than the scene, though didn't seem so, a Mod. Billy Idol was, himself, a Mod before the punk scene happened. His punk style was Mod. By the time of making the film, 1979, Billy Idol had been through the short-lived punk scene and was in New York and LA making hits, an injection of new London attitudes into American rock.

 

lucas gazes skyward

 

Not  many rock n roll movies are much as films, but this one made a dynamic rock n roll movie with a great soundtrack that was good to hear all the way through. I noticed a few humor moments, like the kid in the story had a photograph of Pete Townsend on a wall in his room, and a wall collage of nude women, and a poster of the Who. In the beginning, I was seeing one thing, a bunch of high school kids hanging out, doing what the young do. They rode about on motor scooters with a seat on the back for girlfriends. The girls were as much fun as the guys. One short girl with short blond hair could dance like she was born to dance. Others jerked about, while she was in flight. Eventually, I noticed the boys our friend whose story we're following ran with, Mods, one of them favored Roger Daltry, vocals with the Who. The one we're following favors Townsend. Another favored Entwistle, the bass player. And the fourth, Keith Moon, was characterized as their black drug dealer. Soon after I got it that these four guys were based in the guys in the band, a scene came up with the four of them gathered round talking. I wanted to give Peter Townsend a thumb-up, good story, great movie. I'd like to see it again before too long.

 

sparkles in the trees

photos by tj worthington

 

 

 

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FAREWELL MY FRIEND

georgia o'keefe

I did not want to write tonight. Hearing about my friend Jeanette passing totally by surprise, evidently just sat in the car and expired at the steering wheel. I've been so shattered I wanted let the writing go and get some sleep. In the bed, I only thought of Jeanette, woke up more the longer I stayed, until I got up. I close my eyes and see Jeanette's profile. She had a beautifully distinctive profile. A nose that gave her face a beauty she did not see. I especially liked  her with her hair pulled back tight. Strong face in profile. She had the facial poise of a dancer. This is my own point of view. Jeanette is, I don't want to use was, in my heart one of the people in my life with a big place in my heart. She and Ty live in Atlanta. It's been several years since I've felt like dealing with the highway for six hours. We don't see each other a lot, but when we do, we pick up as if five years shrank down to a few days. I see Jeanette powerfully in my mind's eye. I close my eyes, I see Jeanette. It's like I look through her image to see the monitor of gray lines on white. It has not yet sunk in that she is absent. I feel no sorrow for her. She's wide-eyed in Gloryland. Ty is having the worst day of his life, as is their boy, Dylan. I see Jeanette's kitchen and the interior of the house she decorated. I see Ty and Dylan in an empty house, bereft by the absence of presence. It's not like she has a round trip ticket. This is one way as it gets. She's the sister of my friend Lucas, who is feeling her absence, as is Judy. Jeanette and Judy are probably each other's closest friends. I'm not good at condolences, like saying, "I'm sorry." I've never understood what it means or why it's always the right thing to say. There's nothing else to say. I see Jeanette in my mind's eye in her house, where I knew her mostly, with dog and cat, the house in a subdivision, set back among trees giving the feeling of being in the woods. 

georgia o'keefe

The one memory that stays in my mind is the time we, Lucas, Judy, Ty, Jeanette and I, met in Athens, Georgia, where Ty and Jeanette were at U of Ga. We drove into Atlanta for the Bob Dylan concert, his first tour, at the Omni. He sold the place out twice. We went to the afternoon show. The night show was next. Driving into Atlanta in Ty's beloved Camaro, we had no idea how to find the Omni. None of us knew Atlanta. We stopped at a gas station to fill up. Asked station attendant if he know where the Omni was. He didn't know. In the car, we were on the way to pull into the road and saw directly in front of us a sign that said Omni Parking. It was straight across the road from the gas station. Not only was it in sight, it was half the landscape. I forget the year, mid Seventies. The Dylan tour was the big event of the year. For all of us it was an epic moment. My only memories from the concert were of Dylan at a piano singing Ballad of a Thin Man, "Something is happening and you don't know what it is, do you, Mr Jones," and the performance of Like a Rolling Stone. The show climaxed with, "Once upon a time you dressed so fine, you threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you. People call, say, Beware doll, you're bound to fall, you thought they were all kiddin you." The Band brought the music up to orchestral, major volume, and lights on the stage so intense Dylan and everybody in the Band were bleached white, ghost-like figures in a field of intense light. The emotional intensity of the moment was the highest. It was the song everybody in the auditorium loved unconditionally. I felt like the concert bonded us like a trench-mate experience in WW2. It was a bright star in the firmament of each of our skies. A fabulous memory we share. I remember Jeanette's joy. She and Ty were in love all the way through their college years and married upon graduation. When it comes to two people in love, Ty and Jeanette were in love from the moment they met and it never went away.      

georgia o'keefe

I think of Jeanette a dedicated teacher who believed in teaching as her role in doing her part to make the world a better place. She has the ability women have to carry full-time work with hours of homework a day, keep a house clean, feed a husband, child and self, shop for groceries, do laundry, clean toilets, keep her life at home going too, and have something of a social life. She kept an extensive flower garden outside and plants inside in good health. I see Jeanette a seeker and a striver. She had a deep and realistic spiritual life. She was like her brother, Lucas, wanting to be the best a teacher could be. I believe they both reached their goals. I sat in on one of Lucas's classes, this day's subject the New England Transcendentalists. He was good. The people in the class paid attention. Jeanette gave the kids at her school full attention. She felt a need deep within to make a contribution in her world to make "the world" a better place. And she did make her world a better place. I don't like to think about Ty and Dylan without Jeanette. I have felt deep loss, but not anywhere near what Ty is going through. My experience is no more than a peep-hole view into Ty's. It's an empty, desolate feeling. Nothing inside but a big black hole. No hope. No anything. No forward, only wanting to go backwards and rewrite the story. There is no changing anything. Followed by the period of grief, hanging on, hanging on, missing it when the grief fades away, feeling guilty because it doesn't hurt so much anymore. Wanting to feel the pain again. It's all that's left. Eventually fall into a groove and go on like before, just in a new way. I cannot imagine Ty without Jeanette. It fails to compute. It's Hansel without Gretel, Yoko without John. Ty's purpose and his support, all went away at once. There is no advice I can give him, no consolation either. Words when you're down and out at the bottom of the pool are like swimmers wiggling above on the surface, silent movement, looks like they have reason, but don't know what it would be.

georgia o'keefe

I'm not one to say, "She's in a better place." She may be, but her part is whatever it is. We on this side of the veil don't know, though each of us has our ideas about it. We in the world of illusion don't even know what's going on where we're at. Jeanette has transcended illusion. We, the ones left without her are more of my concern. This side is where the hard part is. No matter what I think I believe about spirit, soul, I don't know anything. This side of the veil, a black hole has opened in several hearts. I have as hard a time imagining Dylan's pain in this time. It's a bottomless pain without any sign of an end. I don't know what to say, don't know what to do in the face of  such enormous anguish. I feel Oedipus in his agony blinding himself, did not want to see any more. Ty didn't know Jeanette until after high school. There's not been a day of Dylan's life he didn't know Jeanette. I'm not one who can pat them on the back and say, "Everything's gonna be all right." Maybe ten years from now it will be, but it's not now. Nothing's all right, and it's not going to be any time soon. If I were there, all I could do would be to hug and cry. I wouldn't have any words, unless it would be something like shi-it, two syllables. This is not how the story goes. It goes another way, damn it. This kind of thinking is short-lived. For my part, I say prayer for Jeanette's soul, not that I think she needs the assist, just to say, "You got a good'n. You already know her. What can I say? We miss her." My heart embraces Ty, Dylan, Judy and Lucas. It's after five now. I've been at this all night. At first, I did not want to dive into my sorrow and couldn't sleep for seeing Jeanette's face. Writing like this is a meditation, a good chance to dwell on my friend of many years at length, examine what I feel, examine what I think about this moment from out of the blue like a meteorite crashing through the roof, but worse. I'll go take a nap and later in the day when I'm awake, I'll call Ty and hear what he has to say. 

   

georgia o'keefe herself

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THE LAYING ON OF PAINT

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15, 16

Today was laying on the pigment day. I wanted these four quartets to contain the same psychic energy. Thought about doing two today and two tomorrow. Passion o'ertook the application of the paint. After painting two, I was wound up and wanted to do the other two. I covered all four in paint, one after the other. It looks like there wasn't much to it, just spreading the paint with a pallet knife, yet by the time the last one was finished, I was so exhausted I needed a nap. It was the same kind of weariness as after four to six hours of writing. I nearly always go straight to bed upon finishing one of these writings. Slathering on the paint today, I was like a child at daycare playing with finger paints. A look at my hands when the laying on of paint was over suggested I had, indeed, been engaged in finger painting. I'm not somebody who can play with paint and emerge from it spotless. My hands are covered in paint, shirt and pants are spotted, hair has at least one color smeared in it, and often some on the face. I get excited and pay no attention to anything but applying paint to surface. Paint on hands and clothes I think of as collateral damage, part of it. Sometimes I'll be in town and somebody will say, "You been painting." A streak of paint will be in my hair where I scratched my head with paint on fingers. I don't care. Paint on hands and clothes is like wrinkles on the face, signatures of experience. The day was exciting. It started with painting the edge black on each of the rectangles all the way around. Glad it's a fast-drying acrylic. 

13, 14

The red one I wanted to do first, the color I puzzled over the most. I wanted an in-yer-face red, yet a deep red. Just a breath of blue changed the intensity of the red without suggesting purple. The actual red of the pigment is something like left of center in the picture above. The right side of the picture is lighter than the paint. The fresh paint becomes a mirror to the window light. I felt it when the red was right. Mixing the paint with the medium in the bowl, I was liking the red, but needed a deeper red, a red that feels earthy. A tiny touch of blue drew the intensity out of the red while leaving it the same red it was before. Like the raw red was blaring trumpets, the deepened red is a tenor sax. I wanted the red and blue to go together like my associations with art of New Mexico Indians. I did not want to make Southwestern Indian colors in these mountains. Yet a blue haunted my mind, one that is about the same intensity as turquoise, but a deeper blue without the turquoise gem suggestion. Turquoise is a beautiful blue, but I wanted crayola blue in a medium-light range. Red is a powerful color that stands on its own. I wanted a blue that would pull itself up to the intensity of the red to stand side-by-side and not recede. Blue tends to recede visually. I thought a darker blue would go way back. Looking for a lighter blue this side of pastel that would stand next to the red and not fade away. I made a little more blue than I needed by adding more, and adding more, until it felt right next to the red. The paint on this one is so thick, spreading it was like sculpting it. The blue in the photo is not true. The very far left is the closest to actual. I'd put a breath of red into the blue to, again, take the intensity out of it. The blue, like the red, has an earthen quality. It's the earthy quality in these two colors that bonds them.

14

    

Here, again, the left side is closest to the actual color. This pair, the red and blue, will be in a triangle situated above and beside stairs going up to a loft. It's in a corner behind hand railings, a psychological barrier, a fence in front of it, though the triangle is above the hand rails. A stairwell in a corner makes the space unto itself. I wanted to use colors that would honor the space, feel the space, earthen colors, albeit bright, in something of an open cave. I feel like the corner is grounded, and a passageway to the mind's playground. I felt like I wanted to make the colors suggest earth, earth and sky, while primarily playing with red and blue. The stairs lead to Lucas's loft where he writes when he retreats to "the cabin" in the Blue Ridge. The other triangle, the one on the right, is above the space where one enters the door. To the right is the kitchen. The triangle stands above the kitchen, a light space with windows and ceiling lights. I felt like the triangle above the kitchen could be about light. It's where Judy prepares the food she's good at putting together. She cleans up after herself as she goes along, so you never see a mess when Judy is in the kitchen. I just walk through the kitchen and it turns to clutter. Judy has this knack from a lifetime of practice of keeping her space organized and uncluttered. It's easy for her. She cleans up as she goes along. She has a woman come in and give the place a thorough cleaning, dead flies on the floor, before they come for a visit. This way Judy only cleans up after the immediate kitchen concerns. I wanted yellow and white, sun and cloud, egg yolk and egg white, in the right triangle above the kitchen. Maybe it will look like a sign above a Japanese restaurant in a movie. 

15, 16

The big "living room" area Judy divided into dining area with table and chairs around it on the side of the kitchen; the side with the steps to the loft is the reading area and the place for watching movies. I like the yellow and white on the kitchen side. Basic theme for the quartet was red, yellow and blue. Most often, green is used for the fourth primary color when there are only three. Why not use purple or orange? Why always green? Tradition, I suppose. I chose white for this space for its lightness, something to float above the light in the kitchen. Red or blue on the kitchen side would have been a hammer above the soft light. The red and blue belong with the stairwell, a minimalist landscape, the foot path to the mind. First thought for the opposite triangle was to make the tall one yellow and the short one white. I saw in my mind's eye the bold yellow, a color as powerful as red, would draw the energy out of the smaller white one, rendering it absent. The taller one white, the shorter yellow one enhances the white, pushes it all the more forward. The yellow can stand on its own. And the tall white one, in turn, enhances the yellow. I jump at every chance to use white and yellow together. I breathed some red into this yellow I wanted as close as I could get from memory to egg yolk yellow in fertile eggs. The four hang in another room where they will wait a few months before I touch them.  Oil paint is slow to dry, but I love the life in it when it's dry. It holds a luminous quality, to my eye. 

15, 16

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THE MOUNTAIN DOGWOOD WALKING STICK

I  had on my mind a walking stick for my friend Lucas. I'd found two oak saplings I thought would make a good walking stick. Plan was to cut them in the fall and let them dry through winter and carve them into walking sticks next the summer. However resigned I was to the wait, it stayed in my mind that I did not want to wait that long. Id just finished a walking stick for his wife, Judy, and really wanted to have one for him too by next time they came to visit in a week or two. I had a dead mountain dogwood sapling maybe ten feet from the house. It died about three years ago. I've never cut it because I had not yet seen what to do with it. It was too nice a wood to cut it for kindling. Tuesday I was thinking about Lucas's walking stick, saw the dogwood sapling: there it is. I took the long-handled clippers and cut the branches and the top off, then measured it looking for 46 inches, the length I'd made Judy's stick. It feels to me a good length for a walking stick. Fired up to get started, I turned a five-gallon bucket over outside and sat on it with pocket knife for a few hours whittling away the bark, cleaning it down to the raw wood, smoothing the knots, making it smooth from one end to the other. At the handle end, I whittled a rounded dome that fits the palm of the hand comfortably. One doesn't use the palm of the hand on end of the stick while walking, but sometimes it comes in handy to grip the end for whatever reason. I wanted it to be smooth in the hand, wanted the stick smooth to the hand the whole length, tip to tip. A good smooth piece of wood is a sensory delight to the hand. After carving it, I ran my hands all over it looking for rough spots I'd missed. Took a square of sandpaper to it, smoothing the ridges left by the knife, smoothing it to the tip. I left the knife markings on the upper foot I call the handle to designate the handle visually, to keep in its design a step in its process and maybe to give it a better grip. 

This picture shows the round dome carved for the hand and the handle section. I brought the stick in the house after sanding it, enjoying the result of the hours of sitting on the upside down bucket, which, by the way, makes a good stool. It also carries water. The stick has a couple of bends in it, good for spring. My thinking is that a perfectly straight stick, like a dowel, has no spring. A stick with spring in it doesn't jar the hand so much when it hits the ground. The vibration runs through the bones to the feet. A little bit of spring in the stick reduces the jarring factor. I just now conducted a scientific experiment. I happen to have a dowel five-eighths inch diameter, almost the same length as the walking stick. I held the dowel vertically a couple inches above a rock and dropped it to see its vibration. It bounced and vibrated like a banjo string. I did the same with the walking stick and it vibrated quite a lot more, even jumped and gave a nice ring. The lower foot of the stick's length is a good curve where much of the stick's spring is located. Up by the handle is a curve in the stick. I like about a sapling that its grain runs the length of the stick from one end to the other uninterrupted, the flow lines of its growth, of its life. I have such a respect for trees, I want the stick, the tree, to be itself with my carvings minimized to exposing the beauty in a given life form. I avoid the temptation to carve a ring around it or carve initials into it. I want my only influence to be exposing the beauty in the wood. The thing itself, a walking stick, is a creation of the human mind. I want my mind's influence be no more than that. Mind cut it to length, removed the bark and smoothed the knots branches grew from. It's smoothness to the touch from tip to tip is as far as I want to go putting mind influence into it. You might say this is a creation of my aesthetic sense. My ideal for an art creation is to make it look inevitable, like it grew that way, like it is itself without reference to my ego. I allow the stick its own shape with the least altering. It's how I am with the donkeys. I want to allow them to be themselves as much as possible without my "training" altering their minds. 

     

Here is the stick where it touches the ground. The tip is a joint a branch grew from. It makes the tip solid and I feel like the tip end will never split. The tree took up, volunteered, close to where I keep a birdfeeder. The tree does not grow to be huge. It has clusters of flowers like a Queen Anne's lace. It's a dogwood, a mountain dogwood. Another name is pagoda dogwood. I prefer mountain dogwood. We don't have many pagodas around here. The flower of the regular dogwood is four petals. The mountain dogwood is a galaxy of flying bugs when it's in flower. I have sat on steps looking at one in flower that lived here about 25 years. Walking by I saw only a few bugs with big wings. Sitting by it for an extended period of time I saw more and more bugs until I saw the air inside the tree's branches was alive with tiny flying bugs feasting on the nectar in a hundred thousand flowers. They don't make good ornamental trees. This one I watched the bugs in was a volunteer that took up soon after I moved into the house. I let it grow until it died. I was cutting dead branches off every year. I didn't care. The cats loved climbing in it, walking out on the limbs like a tightrope. I didn't think of it ornamental. It took up with me of its own and I accepted it. I liked the tree itself, and these non-decorative characteristics I saw as the life of the tree. The tree the walking stick came from lived a short time, just long enough to give me a walking stick. A giving tree. It lived its short life to be Dr Lucas Carpenter's walking stick in his retirement. He's a doctor of literature, not medicine. He's the kind of professor whose classes I would have loved in 20th Century American poetry and American lit. I'd take as many of his classes as I could. We went to school together and explored writing together, bouncing ideas off each other, reporting discoveries, inspiring each other's interest in the art of writing and reading. Reading is important to both of us. We read very differently. He reads fast; I read slow. He reads a lot of contemporary lit criticism, reading I can enjoy for a paragraph and that's enough. It's valuable to his interest, though not to mine. And what's valuable to my interest is not to his. We don't often read the same books, though we educate our own interests by way of reading. 

I like this bend in the stick that helps to designate "handle." I applied the first coat of tung oil after sanding lightly. The wood soaked the oil up so fast that the end of the stick I started at was dry to the touch by the time I'd oiled it to the other end. I pour a little oil into the palm of my hand and rub it into the wood with bare hands. A cloth soaks up too much oil to satisfy me. I want as close to all of it to go into the wood. I like oiling it by hand too. The first two coats were soaked up by the wood almost immediately. I applied the fourth coat just before sitting to this writing. The third coat took overnight to dry. This fourth coat will be dry by tomorrow. I'll let it dry a couple days before the fifth coat and a few days before the sixth, perhaps final coat. That little dogwood settled the question of how I could have a stick made for Lucas at the same time I give Judy her stick. I did not want to wait a year. Voila! The little dead dogwood I'd never cut down was just outside the door waiting to be found. I left the tree there, seeing it would make a good walking stick, but never had reason to make a walking stick and couldn't decide what length I wanted to cut it. I took my measuring tape and measured 46 inches from where I thought would make a good handle to the tip, a joint where another branch was growing. I wanted that knot on the tip end. The length was just right. I looked at it in admiration of what a good walking stick its shape will make, enough bends for spring, not so much bend to change the course of its relatively straight line. I was happy with the stick. I left the limbs on the ground. I leave the limbs that fall out of the trees on the ground where they fall. They give the birds perches and the squirrels little tunnels to run through playing chase. The ground has a slope and slides downwards over the years. The tree limbs fade into the ground giving it fiber to hold the downward erosion. It's my way of building up the topsoil. It's not much, just a matter of I want the small spot of land that is my domain to breathe with the life of the earth like in the woods. I love having tree frogs and katydids just outside the open door.  

all photos tj worthington

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A POEM BY LUCAS CARPENTER

philippe petit

 

 

 

     YOUNG MAN ON A UNICYCLE

He emerged from the glare of late afternoon sun,

first as a shimmer, then a black silhouette

resolving hypnotically into focus.

So then there's that moment

when the utterly unexpected

(thankfully shorn of danger)

takes even imagination by surprise

and demands something (you know not what)

from you, but the best I can do

(while saving this sudden circus vision

for stories somewhere else)

is a startled stare, reflexive smile,

and a shuffle dance step I made up.

Not taken aback he balanced before me,

tilting forward, backward, back and forth,

the wheel never making a full turn.

He raised his arms like an evangelical in ecstasy

before heading back down the road that takes us home.

                                               ---Lucas Carpenter

philippe petit

 

 

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A POEM BY LUCAS CARPENTER

          NODADATHING

          Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich



          Nothing helps.

          Nothing matters.

          Nothing remains.

          Nothing lasts.

          (Nothing more,

          Nothing less.)

          Nothing is free.

          Nothing is simple.

          Nothing is impossible.

          Nothing works.

          (Nothing ventured,

          Nothing gained.)

          Nothing happened.

          Nothing doing.

          Nothing for me.

          You?



                     --- Lucas Carpenter

          from his book  of poemsThe Way Things Go

kurt schwitters

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A POEM BY LUCAS CARPENTER

           Ellsworth Kelly

   AT THE MOON-LIT DRIVE IN
                           for TJ Worthington


   Dead for years,

   the last show forgotten,

   the Moon-Lit Drive In

   is three-feet deep in grass and broomstraw,

   speakers gone from their askew posts,

   refreshment stand with plywood projection

              booth on top,

   caved in, burnt out,

   floor covered with broken glass and grainy

             asphalt shingles.

   But the four-story screen

   this bright night

   has not a black gap on it,

   moon-covered it glows blank,

   stands impassive, strong:

   Ahab's white, Bartleby's wall,

   leaning on the warm hood of your pickup,

   me finishing the last of the wine,

   you weaving up at the titanic square of  

              moon.


                         ----Lucas Carpenter



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