PUNK ART

the foot of somebody's bed

 

Went to the library earlier today to put up title tags for each art object on the walls. I have a hard time finding a word to call my works. I don't like to call them works. They're about play. It's like saying somebody works a banjo. It can be said in slang, like "Peco Watson can really work that banjer." But that means he puts the banjo to work, gets out of it everything it's got in it. He does it playing the banjo. A work of art makes sense in that I've heard it all my life. When art becomes work, the spirit goes out of it. So I don't like to use the word work about art. People on a stage playing pretend is called a play. Play is taken. I like the French, objets d'art, literally objects of art, or to Anglicize it, art objects. I feel like the French version says it even better than art object. But this aint France. We talk American here. I take art objects to be second best, which is good enough when the French is not an option.

 

bang a gong

 

 

Putting up the final touches to the exhibition, I read over a kind of artist's statement I'd written for the occasion. I taped it to a wall to be seen upon entering the room, titled PUNK ART. Two pages of fairly large print told what I meant by punk art, spelled out my guidelines; simplicity, use items I already have, fun.  I did not want to explain, rather give a sense of what is behind the pieces to give the viewers insight to help them see each one the unit it is. I wanted to get it across without saying it that there is nothing to "understand," the things simply are what you see. If asked what one made of nine circles was about, I could only answer they were cornhole board holes. Around here, people know what that means. It's not what it sounds like, but the word is still funny. One of those things like the high school being the Trojans. It's so obviously funny it ceases to be funny immediately. A new kid at school makes a joke about Trojans and nobody laughs, like we're over it, dude, it was funny when we were six.

 

line

 

 

I know a lot of the people who will see the show and won't know most of them. The ones I don't know will be of the same culture as the ones I do know, so I wrote to everyone I know, in my mind, which would also cover everyone I don't know. I was attempting to assist the people of my world seeing for the first time something along the lines of Dadaism. In the room, putting up the tags, I was thinking how curious it is that Dada happened a hundred years ago this year. Upon realizing that, I felt good about what I was doing. I mean by Punk a centennial expression of the Dada spirit. The Dadaists in Zurich, Switzerland, draft-dodgers from WWI, threw open a door to a whole new understanding of art. The Twentieth Century renascence of anti-art, called the Modern, followed. The period  was characterized by an evolving series of movements from Impressionism to Conceptualism.

 

hanging line

 

The century progressed by dissecting art, itself, a step at a time, eliminating form, color, name, design.  The progressive movements went out in Conceptualism, where the art was found in the human mind, conception. So everybody is an artist, like now with cellphone video cameras.  Sly Stone in my head singing, "Everybody is a Sta-ar." In America, less people know about art than science.  I cannot anticipate that anyone has an interest in anything to do with art except for occasional curiosity. That's cool, I have no problem with it. Yes, I do have a problem with it. Makes it kind of lonesome to have a passion about something of interest to so few others. It was my choice. I find it a fun exercise to translate what I'm doing to people who live in my world, Alleghany County, in a way they get it without being told. Some people hold the artist apart from other people. Not me. For myself, as artist, I want the people around me to know that I am just a Joe, like them, no big deal. I continue to play in my adult life making useless items for no reason but the fun in it, same reason somebody else picks a guitar. 

    

masks

all objects by tj worthington

 

 

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THE WILL TO FIND ART

patterns of the flow

Why am I drawn to artistic self-expression? It's deep on the inside, so deep I have no conscious recollection of anything that triggered it in early childhood. I believe it must be experience in past lives that pulled my interest to art at an early age. In the early 1990s I paid fairly close attention to astrology, did my own past-life regressions without a facilitator. I'm recalling a day when I was six or seven, standing in the front yard where we lived in Kansas City, Kansas, Argentine township. I was at a time in the life of recognizing self as white. I was thinking of the Indians, what the white middle class calls the Native Americans. I remember looking at my white arm and feeling deep regret that "my people" will not recognize me when they see me white. I realized I was doomed to a lifetime of living on the side of the enemy of my people, the people that killed my family, my extended family, my tribe, my people. It was an unforgettably heavy-hearted day recognizing I was alone in this world; my people will only see me as the enemy. At that age, I had nothing to go by. Never heard of past lives, parents didn't know about anything like that, nor neighbors, nor other kids. I think I died too young in the recent Indian lifetime at age 14 to have accrued enough karmic crimes to condemn my soul to a lifetime as a white man, the most vile enemy of the Indian people. I think I was a white man before the Indian lifetime, too, an artist in north-western Europe, a post-impressionist who, I imagine was so disappointed and discouraged by Western Civilization by the end of that lifetime when I popped a cap in my head. I wanted to leave civilization and came up next time in a Plains Indian tribe, alas in the last years when the US Army was in full genocidal regalia. Turned up next time a woman who died young in the same part of the world as the time before, north-western Europe, taken by Germans to a concentration camp and gassed in 1941. Born in USA 1942, and grew up in the very center of the country, Wizard of Oz world. I'm afraid I saw that movie in the hard times of German occupation or just before, and wanted to go to Kansas where everything is great.

patterns of the flow

Before the mass buffalo slaughter that gave Buffalo Bill his name he wore with pride, Kansas and all the states from North Dakota to Texas were a great prairie of tall grass the buffalo ranged from Canada to Texas. It was just right. Now, preservationists keep small patches of the buffalo grass protected to keep the strain alive, so maybe it can survive this time of mass extinctions so vast we can't think about it, and do nothing about it but advance the extinctions. Now the Texas Oil Cartel is aiming to run a pipeline down through the prairie states, the great American oil spill slice through the heartland. We don't hear anything about extinctions anymore. Nobody cares. Nobody ever cared. A few people tried to make something of it, but nobody much paid them any mind. Everybody knows we have no power over the corporations destroying our earth and blaming it on us. Television took care of its role keeping the population unconscious and distracted, at odds with one another. What we have of a middle class culture is a sitcom. Television is the only input. American movies now are made for tv, their major market after first run. Television deals in the obvious. I live in a world of people who have spent their lives watching television, Americans. Subtlety, irony, satire are gone with exceptions, the Onion and South Park. But their humor is in the obvious. Lotsa action of every sort. Nothing serious. Just a whole lot of killing going on. You don't have to worry about missing something if you go to the kitchen for a few minutes to make a sandwich. You know how it's going to turn out. Sure, television is an art form. So is a fifteen minute painting. Tv is more about population manipulation than art. I grew up in a home where the television was the shrine, chairs arranged in a half circle around it. Reading not allowed. Daddy thought Norman Rockwell was art, took some night classes to learn how to draw like Rockwell. I only knew of the Nelson Art Museum in Kansas City through school when we had a class trip to the museum one day in 5th grade for an educational walk through. Never saw or heard of it again. Longed to, but I was not a free agent. Turns out it was not far from where my grandparents lived, but nobody knew it. I had no idea where it was. It was a big city, especially to a kid.

 

patterns of the flow

 

High school in Wichita had an art class. I wanted to be in it, looked in through the open doorways, didn't have enough self-esteem to give it a try. Plus, everything I saw around the room on the walls looked dorky. I did not want to do dorky art. I'd rather do nothing than what I saw in the room. Of course, I have no memory of what exactly I saw, only memory of my interpretation of what I saw. It looked stupid to me. If I was going to do art, I didn't want to do stupid art. I was probably looking at it with an idea of Rockwell realism the ideal and they were doing loose, colorful things. Aesthetically, I came out of a cave. That part of the country is a cultural wasteland. Chicago was the only place in that part of the world with a modern art museum in the late 1950s, anyway that I knew of.  I grew up in a world where I learned that no matter what interested me, it was someplace else, some place I was not. Nothing but church and television for input besides school, which I had little motivation for. The first time a work of art really caught my attention was in Chicago, age 19. I went to the modern art museum there, 1962, and saw a lot of paintings I did not get, felt like I was in a new world, paintings like I could not even imagine. I saw a smallish painting by Salvador Dali of two giraffes with fire for manes. It spoke to me mightily. I didn't try to figure it out. Didn't even have a starting place for that. It just connected with me that this guy blows my mind. Perhaps, too, I connected with the Rockwell realism, the only art of my experience before that day. The two years in the Navy were not exactly an aesthetic time, except for watching the surface of the ocean. They called it "skylarking." I didn't care what they called it. I loved being on the ocean aesthetically. The ocean is amazing to look at, experience and think about. One thing for certain, the ocean is indifferent to the human ego. Reading Henry Miller in the Navy introduced me to an interest in art. I liked Miller's aesthetic interest, that the painters he liked were the ones that lived around him that he knew in northern California, Big Sur, not the ones in New York. He opened an aesthetic interest in me that was already there.

 

patterns of the flow

 

The college I went to had no art class and no interest in art anywhere. It was the last half of the Sixties when Pop was happening in New York, an exciting time in the art world. I'd become aware of the abstract expressionists as "pure" art, then Pop popped that bubble right away and definitively. I went to New York for a few days to see Museum of Modern Art and see the real thing I'd only been able to see in photographs, like Warhol's soup cans, Jasper Johns' target and painted flags, Robert Rauschenberg's paint-splattered bed quilt, a taxidermied longhaired billy goat with a tire around its waist and paint smeared on its head. Kandinsky, Picasso, Pollack, a whole new world had opened to me. It was a world I did not know existed. Larry Rivers, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, people whose art I fell in love with. On my own in the college years I read about Surrealists, Dadaists, Expressionists, Abstract Expressionists, Pop and everything about modern art I could find, even reading Harold Rosenberg on the Fifties period. Over the college years I gave myself a good education in modern art and how it got that way. Later, after leaving the city for the mountains, I thought I came to the mountains for the peace to write. That didn't happen. I was forcing the writing too much and stopped, telling myself I will not write again until whatever I have to say writes itself. That didn't happen for a long time. It surfaced in the drawing and painting.  Didn't do anything but work. After the first seven year cycle in which I did nothing but work and read. The next seven year cycle started with taking up drawing to get through the winters. Made pencil drawings of local people and buildings through that cycle. Next cycle I took up painting with oil. Came to me automatically like I'd been doing it since childhood. Five years ago I started writing this daily blog as online journal and interest in painting is waning. This has been a kind of chronology of opening to and discovering art from a wasteland. Part 2 coming up soon I'll dive deeper into motivations that drove my curiosity and interest from a world that did not honor art in any way, didn't even know what it was, to finding art everywhere.  

 

patterns of the flow

 

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A WORLD OF BOXES

kazimir malevich

Talking with different friends yesterday, three, I brought up the subject of the box for some thoughts on the matter. Everyone I talked with said something to the effect of, Who needs a box? These were people who don't have an art expression, though take an interest. It continues in the front of my head that since 1970 we've been in the Post-Modern time, a time in which anything goes. I personally see the Post-Modern period a composite of what was learned through the Modern Period, a kind of universal Dada period. In 1915 a small group of draft-dodging artists from around Europe met in Zurich, Switzerland. They set out to discover art as if none had ever been made before. They acted as something of a cleaver on a chopping block, severed everything that went before and started fresh without reference to the past. They experimented with chance, with nonsense, with the new machine age.  Everything they did was then outside the box. Happening then was Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism. The dozen or so Dadaists in Zurich created a new -ism, totally outside the box, Dadaism. In a period of about 6 months they deconstructed art down to conceptualism. By the end of WW1, they had practiced their art vision outside the boxes, and introduced a new box to Europe and the rest of the world, the box that is not a box, the anti-box. From the end of WW1 to 1969 the world of front-runner artists all over the earth repeated the Dada process of deconstructing art, peeling away superficial layers a step at a time by way of a series of -isms. Surrealism started up in Paris post-Dada, explored interior territory until WW2, after which abstract expressionism in New York came forward. Then minimalism, and Pop, which became an -ism too, and a quick run of new -isms every year unto conceptualism, which revealed the core of what we call art, conception.

 

kazimir malevich

 

One of the better known conceptualist moments was a postcard a "conceptualist" sent around to art dealers in NY and patrons announcing a show at a particular address, a particular time. When the people arrived, it was a locked empty space with nothing going on. The postcard, itself, was the art. I've seen what the Dadaists did in Zurich in half a year repeated universally in half a century, the Modern period. This Post-Modern time started its first cycle in a Dadaist manner where anything goes; realism, abstraction, projection, video, exploring everything. The Post-Modern is a new time of thinking outside the box, but this time with reference to the past, the Modern period. Everybody was too busy watching television and fighting wars to notice that the Modern period, Dada to conceptualism, was the greatest renascence the world has ever seen. Preceding it were the renascence of the classical period of Greece and Rome, and the Renaissance, renascence with an Italian name. The next renascence the Modern period. It was the beginning of a new expansion of mind for collective humanity. Renascences past brought us into Reason. The renascence that was the modern period is bringing us into Intuition. It shows in the evolution of art. It's a long slow process. We still have a world of people who have not caught up with the cosmology of evolution, and even what would be a surprising number, if known, of people who have not yet caught up with the cosmology of round earth. We humans come in all levels of development. I've never argued with someone who believes flat earth. I figure that's their place and their vision. I don't know how to convince someone who does not understand planets and orbits that the earth is indeed round, and I don't believe it matters in everyday life whether someone believes the earth is flat or round. It matters for launching satellites. I believe round earth initially because I was told as a little kid in school it's a fact, like it's fact that George Washington was first president. Get it right for the test. My neighbor Tom would say of the moon-landing propaganda that no man can walk on the moon. The Bible sez the moon is just a light. No man can stand on a light.

 

kazimir malevich

 

Remembering the time he told me his teacher in school said the world was round like a baseball. Little man Tom said, "I aint never seen no mountains on narry baseball." This house used to be the Air Bellows School, it happened in the space I live in, in the space where this is being written. These walls were there. Tom believed he understood baseball, played it when he was a kid. I had to respect his integrity as himself and not let it show that I was tickled. Immediately I saw a baseball magnified to the size of the earth. The mountains would be a hundred miles high. Even the smooth part would be a plain of great high mountains and deep, deep valleys. A ball bearing the size of a baseball magnified to the size of the earth would have huge mountains and vast valleys. His mind really was from another cosmology. He did not need to be converted and I didn't need to be telling him he was wrong, when he was going by experience and I was going by believing what I was taught. He would be disappointed that I was so ignorant to take what somebody else told me without questioning it by way of my own experience. The sun goes across the sky, caint y'see? College boy thinks he knows all about it and didn't even know what a chainsaw was, except for a movie that warped my mind so bad it probably changed my DNA. Jesus brought a new cosmology, love is all there is, summary of the gospels by John Lennon. This cosmology was a little slow taking hold. Finally, all these millennia later, a pope is reintroducing the old cosmology that never went anywhere, as if it were new in a world that never heard of it. This cosmology goes back before gravity. A couple thousand years later, it's outside the box. I continue to wonder what the box is. It comes to me over and over that Western Civ is the box. It is the box that civilization is transcending now. In Asia, Africa and the Middle East, they are transcending their own boxes. My new piece, BIG SUR, is only outside the box pre-Dada. From 1915 on, it's very much inside the box.

 

kazimir malevich

 

Again, I see the box so vast as not to be a box. In conversation with Tom's preacher brother, Millard, who was hard-shell unto stasis, after years of knowing him, I said one day, "If everything is a sin, then I'm free, it doesn't matter what I do when I can only sin." "No, it's not like that." It was quite a time knowing those men from two cosmologies back. I had a difficult time where talking was concerned, because I'm from round earth and understand evolution is the ongoing process of creation. Never use the E-word, it's as bad as the C-word, Communism, the A-word, Atheism, and the F-word. These language restrictions were pre-political correctness. I might make a case for the old restrictions due to limited education, but political correctness is adhered to with the same vehemence in the "educated" middle class. Who needs censorship when we have a population so eager to self-edit? Concerning my own interior boxes, television has so minimal a place in my world as to have no place at all. To go outside my box I could start watching television. That's not even worth an experiment for laughs. I like to tap in periodically for a review of what the people around me are believing this moment and to see what it is they're smiling about all the time. This could be outside my box too, smiling all the time. I could sit in front of a tv with a Bud, a bag of barbeque flavored potato chips and a big smile on my face. Good time for a selfie. Click. Self as Ken doll in environment. Call it art. Instead of doing it, I write it and that is my art expression outside the box. But it's not really. Just sparkles flickering in the universe of the image-ination. Lenny Kaye on the guitar. Keith Jarrett on the keyboard. Go Rimbaud and go Johnny go and do the Watusi. How was that sentence for outside the box? You didn't see it coming. What did it have to do with anything? An outside the box joke, a game I learned from the donkeys, I get a kick outta you.  

 

kazimir malevich himself

 

 

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LOOKING TO THE FUTURE

     civil ensign of the cayman islands



I have a question that I cannot find an answer for, primarily because I'm not involved in circumstances where I could see it more closely than I do. I have an idea, however, the answer is kind of easy, using the movie detective device, follow the money. The question: Why are the corporations so dead set on destroying American Democracy and the American people? They've already destroyed both. It may not look like it yet to some, but in ten years it will be a documentary on the History channel, The Decline And Fall Of Democracy In America. It was the Southern California / Arizona / Texas right wing cancer / dark cabal that took power from the American people and turned it over to the corporate CEO hierarchy. All our laws are passed with corporate support, never without; mostly, however, with corporate deception. Our government operates by deception and the corporations operate by deception. It tells me straight up they are not interested in our well being at all. Just look at the republican party's agenda. Instead of Up With People, it's Up The People.

Corporations have arranged it so they don't pay taxes and they get billions per in government handouts, what the cartoonists are calling corporate welfare. China has the solution. Tax the corporations and use the money to the well being of the people, health care and other public benefits like infrastructure, military, government employees. Here, we the people pave the way for the corporations to run over us and pass us off as road kill. Collateral damage. Whatever. But the corporations fly the Cayman Islands flag on their yachts, not Old Glory. Those little islands have become something of an Ayn Rand haven off the coast of Cuba. A whole lot of white rich people and a whole lot of poor black servants. It might be fun to look at Cayman Islands on Google Earth, count the golf courses and swimming pools. A woman used to live here, she might still be living, though a widow to a man who drove a new gold Cadillac every year and lived year round at the Cayman Islands, evidently with a mistress, in the stock broker world there, while his wife lived at a country club here where the white people were. She came from South Georgia; she don't think too much of darkies. They made her nervous.

Throughout my lifetime I've had a driving curiosity to know all different kinds of people. Possibly it came from growing up in a world of sameness, church every day it wasn't school, Kansas, Fifties television and pop radio it for "culture." The Ed Sullivan show taught me opera singers sound like dying calves. It wasn't until I heard the beginnings of rock and roll that I felt stirred by an art form. Had no idea of art forms before. I knew there were paintings of Mona Lisa and Impressionists, but thought it beyond reach conceptually and in every other way. It had no reality in my life. Then one day when I was 18 I saw a painting by Dali in the modern art museum in Chicago of giraffes with fire on their necks like manes. That was the first unforgettable work of art that caught my attention and pushed my awe button. I wanted to see more Dali. Found a book of Dali, bought it, was blown away utterly by what I was seeing. At the same time in my life, I discovered the poetry of Robinson Jeffers. The first time I stayed up all night reading was the night of the day I bought the Vintage paperback copy of Robinson Jeffers' Selected Poems. Every one of them spoke to me. No other poet has taken me over to the degree he did.

After discovering Dali, my developing interest in art led me to Pop that was happening then, mid Sixties. Pop and abstract expressionism pulled me into interest in art of the 20th century, going to NY to see museums. Every city I go to I find the modern art museum. It's the only thing I ever want to see in any city. By now, my head is so full of so many incredibly beautiful images in painting and sculpture that I've laid eyes on in person, I feel satisfied by now that I've seen a good bit of modernist painting from Impressionists to Conceptualism (Modern period) and beyond into Post-modern and whatever being done now is called. Salvador Dali was the first artist to reel me in. I have an idea I am not the only one. Several years ago, 36 years, I was showing a book of abstract expressionist paintings to a friend who quit school after 8th grade, knew nothing about any kind of art. Looking at the pictures, he was enchanted, saying frequently, "You mean people are finally painting like this?" I said, "Yeah, he (the artist he was exclaiming over) was painting when Old Man Tom was a kid, the generation of our grandparents. He's dead of old age now." "No way!!!"

This crazy time we're in now makes me want to jump ahead to the future when the time of the Revelations prophecy has run its course. I want to be in that thousand years of peace that follows this nut-case time we're in. No more militarist thinking. What a great leap for the male gender. A chance to develop as conscious human beings instead of obedient warriors marching in lock step for an idea of control. To get that time of peace, the trouble-maker in the world that keeps peace from happening will have to be subdued by the rest of the world, perhaps like Germany and Japan after WW2. Before, they were the aggressors that kept war going wherever their pointed their focus. Now USA is doing the same thing, arm in arm with Israel, backing up Israel's arrogance as big brother. I'm wondering if at the end of this WW3 the USA will be on its knees, not allowed to have a military like Germany and Japan. Guns rounded up by Interpol and Americans as warriors shut down. It's the only way we're going to have any peace in the world. Anyway, that's how it looks. But it looks all kinds of ways. This is just one.

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DADA AND A ZEN MONK

l'ange

I go about everywhere I go the observer, even like invisible, surprised people see me and talk to me. A few days ago I saw a film by Ingmar Bergman made in 1977, The Serpent's Egg. It was Berlin in 1923 when the Nazi's made their first push for power that failed, sending Hitler to prison to write Mein Kampf, the fascist scripture. There were a few times Bergman took the lead man, David Carradine, a Jew, therefore invisible, through a maze of shelves of dusty archives underground. It called Kafka to mind every time he went through that maze. It was the Kafka time. He was not far away. Somewhere I read long ago that in his time Kafka's writing was humorous, funny. Today it is our constant sorrow.

I find Kafka too depressing to read now, because his vision has become the way things are. He was part of the beginnings of the Absurd in 20th century theater and writing from Eastern Europe; Alfred Jarry from Romania, Tristan Tsara from Romania, Kafka in Czechoslovokia, sculptor Constantine Brancusi from Romania, later playwright Eugene Ionesco from Romania in Paris, crossing the channel Harold Pinter in London, crossing the ocean Edward Albee in New York. These are only a few. Jerzy Kosinski from Poland, Andrei Cordescu from Romania. At the beginning of the 20th century and end of the 19th century, Romania was the birthplace of a line of artistic thinking that characterized the 20th century in art of every variety.

Tristan Tsara, poet, and Marcel Janco, painter, went to Zurich during WW1 from Romania to get out of the war. They carried that energy that was stirring in and around Bucharest into the Dada way of thinking when they joined some artist draft dogers from Germany, Norway, France who became the Dadists, who together put the history of art on the chopping block, cut it with a cleaver at the present moment, 1915, rendering all that went before as if it never happened. A group of a dozen or so of them gathered around the Spiegelgasse caberet in Zurich.

In 6 months of rapid exploration they spanned the modern movement through conceptualism, where they found their satisfaction, some of them taking their findings with them to Paris after WW1. From there on, the avant garde artists of New York, Paris and Berlin went step by step through the same evolution as the Dadaists went through in Zurich, but over a period of half a century. It's kind of like they were shamans who performed rituals in the spiritual world that manifested in the material world. That was a highly charged time. Marcel Duchamp was in Paris breaking boundaries with every piece of art he made from before Nude Descending A Staircase that came to characterize the modern movement. Duchamp was surely tapped into that same energy in Paris the Dadaists found in Zurich.

By end of war, they all surfaced in Paris, and Paris was alight with artistic energy until the Nazi invasion. The European artists went to New York and one to Los Angeles. Duchamp continued in a New York apartment, few people knowing anything about him. Until the 1960s when abstract expresssionism was happening in New York, bringing the art world's energy across the sea and we figured at last in the world of modern art. The next generation discovered Duchamp. Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and their generation of artists in New York, realized they had the Zen Master of 20th Century art living among them in a small apartment with a wife named Teeny. His art form at the time was taking a piece of rope one meter long, standing on a short stool, holding the rope at arm's length by one end and dropping it. The shape it took on the floor was his work of art for the day. The rest of the time he played chess.

I tend to see art everywhere I look. Today, visiting with someone I didn't know, old, twisted, bent, on the boundary between asleep and awake except when he's asleep, I saw the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the windows, perspectives, questioning how I would paint this room. Looking at his face and twisted fingers I studied how I would paint him, no hair, bald as a baby, bent like a baby, on the verge of sleep like a baby. He could be painted either to give off the aura of a saint or an old cripple of waning spirit, who could be a saint for all I know. I wanted to paint his picture up close, a portrait of the top of his head, hands like bent fists up by his face, eyes closed. Very powerful image. An old Zen monk. I felt like I was just a consciousness seeing him, no more than a consciousness. It was like my body was still out in the car or at home, and only my consciousness was there. It wasn't as empty as that sounds. There was a fullness in it. He, himself was reduced to his own consciousness by a body that doesn't work anymore. He was a full human being coming into his completion. 

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