OPEN LETTER TO A FUNDAMENTALIST PREACHER LONG DEAD

salvador dali

Through the late 1940s and the 1950s we were told to be very afraid of nuclear war. The Bomb is gonna getcha. You can't hide from the Bomb. First, it was the A-bomb, then the H-bomb, then the Neutron bomb. I heard an old woman preacher rant about Neutron bombs in the early 1980s, "It'll burn their eyes right outta their sockets." After praising the bomb for its ability not to destroy property. This was the only time I met her. I sure as hell would never have gone to her church. What she told me was that she likes things and dislikes people; that is, the people not dropping dollars in her collection plate. I'd been invited by someone I knew to a "Bible study," one Wednesday evening. This was my early years in the mountains, curious about all aspects of the culture. My mailman of that time was there. He talked about the apocalypse, the rapture and the terrible sufferings at hand for nonbelievers with such zeal for their torment, my respect for him took a downward turn. This was the church mindset I grew up in that set me in motion running for my life away from that mind. It confused me as a kid noticing the church mind was full of derision for the people around them who were not members of the church, a church with attendance seldom more than a dozen, one of them a kid who was present by duress only. I don't know what it was about me that saw the preacher was spreading hate in the name of Jesus, God and the Bible. The contempt toward nonbelievers, the "unsaved," did not mix with my reading of the Bible that said, "God is love." Like Jesus said to his close ones, It's easy for you to love one another. Try loving your neighbor, the people around you, the nonmembers, the people of the world you live in. That's where my fundamentalist upbringing jumped the track. I didn't know of anybody in the church that even liked anybody else in the church. 

salvador dali

I couldn't love indiscriminately, nor could I love the people in the church. I'd been taught about fear and punishment as our relationship with God the judge. I heard about communists that don't believe in God, how they're damned for hell, eternal suffering---they'll get theirs for not being born capitalist Americans. I wanted to talk to the preacher about these issues, but learned early he had no answers. The time the kid brought up the strait and narrow reference in the Bible, noting it is spelled strait, not straight. Same difference. I thought: What? Not according to the dictionary, but the preacher knows better than the dictionary. He knows the Bible. I recall the day at a short-lived bookstore in Sparta an old long-faced preacher stood in the open doorway looking at me. I saw a game about to start and said, "Come on in." He said, "You gonna let me in?" I said, "Sure, it's open to the public." He stepped across the threshold like he was entering the devil's lair and said, "You know, there's only one book." I thought: Oh shit, here we go, and said, "I understand that. But there are a few others." I knew the preacher and he knew me. I was not going to back down from him. I knew him to be a long-faced Bible-thumper with the hawkish eye that kept track of everybody's sins but his own. He was introducing a sermon he had in mind for me: There's only one Book. I wasn't going there and didn't give a shit if I pissed him off. I liberated myself from that mind about three decades before, wasn't going back. And I was not allowing him to control me with his poorly reasoned pontifications. His state of mind was responsible for the worst years of my life. I was not going to humor him. He knew I'd recently left a church and I knew he had heard the gossip around the departure, none of which had to do with what was behind it. He didn't stay long. I have a hard time with a preacher's arrogance; hard time in that I don't honor his role in the masculine hierarchy. I cede nothing of myself to his control. They don't like it. And I say, Good: keeps them away. 

salvador dali

It was bewildering to the kid to be in school learning about the world I lived in, on the one hand, and on the other, church with emphasis on after I'm dead, hell if God won't have me, heaven if I'm lucky. Of course, the preacher is not going to hell for making the people twofold more children for hell than he, himself, but the kid was one heartbeat from hell for thinking about sex. My doctor who diagnosed a heart issue, said in his straightforward minimalism with language, "You're gonna die." I didn't know what to say. I could only think, Duh, and assessed it too disrespectful to say out loud in a place where you say urine instead of piss. I sat thinking, I grew up a fundamentalist, that I will die is one thing I know probably better than anything else. And? By this time in the life, a long time after turning away from church/religion, power of the few over the many, I've found by experience God is love, not a tightrope to walk with hell fire waiting below. I've found what I call raw God, the core, love. The years of religion telling me people of other religions were worshiping the devil, and Satan is everywhere, Halloween forever, took fifteen years of unwinding the burdens of a belief system that kept me in despair. In school, I recall learning the word despair, identifying with it so deeply I got it without having to memorize it. Once I caught on that God is love and love only, it took quite awhile to shed the turtle shell of defense grown from experiences with conditional love as coercion or agenda down through the early years of this lifetime. Spare the rod, spoil the child. Up yours, too, preacher. If God wants me to live my life according to your approval, I don't want anything to do with God. If you want to engage in a constant war with Satan, go for it. I approve. Do what you gotta do. Leave me out of it.  

salvador dali

It was several years after seeing by experience God is love that my heart was able to open. Like a flower, it needed it's time to develop toward opening. The first key I got was that love and understanding are the same. I'd held love as a lofty word and couldn't find my own connection to something so "pure." Upon seeing understanding is love, I thought: I can do that. I started paying attention to understanding others more consciously. I feel like understanding led to, or unveiled, empathy. I have come to a place in the life where I have empathic feelings with everyone I know and everyone I meet. I've come to receive people I am present with aware that this is a soul who passes through many lifetimes, like I am, and this is what they're doing this time around. It does not mean I'm full of charming sweetness. There are some people I really don't like to be around for reasons I don't pet rattlesnakes. Still, they have my empathy. They are souls making it awfully hard on themselves, over and over, never seeming to get it, heads full of blaming others, self-unaware and self-centered. I'm understanding as I'm able and feel empathy for their psychological twist, I have my own, but I get too close, they piss me off, so I stay away. Only one time that I know of have I forgiven somebody. I just dismissed the problem. It went away. The one I held bitter contempt for became in that moment one of my better friends. I'm not saying I'm somebody special because I forgave somebody. We all have our own such experiences. This was mine that taught me how enlightening forgiveness is. I'm not a model of forgiveness. I still carry some bitter resentments difficult to let go of, so I don't worry over them. It's ego. They'll fade into indifference. This new kind of seeing self in relation to others, continual awareness of loving neighbor as self, looking to the good for those around me, has grown out of interpreting God as love. The old one, God as fear, made me want to rebel. God as love is convincing to me by way of experience. By now, my heart is so healed I can cry with donkeys. 

  

salvador dali himself

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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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HOW I DID NOT BECOME A MILLIONAIRE

salvador dali

Henry Miller has been in my mind all day today. I looked at the spines of his books on the shelves, felt drawn to them like they were magnets pulling my mind. I was looking for Colossus of Maroussi, a small Penguin paperback I bought in Athens, April 18, 1965. For some reason that I'm glad of now, I wrote the date on the title page. A few years before, I'd bought book club editions of the Grove Press Tropics. Soon after high school I was reading the paperback of Tropic of Capricorn a friend gave me after he'd read it. Neither of my parents ever exhibited curiosity about anything in a book, except the Bible, "the ONLY book," whatever that means. I left Tropic of Capricorn in the living room one day assuming nobody would touch it for the book cooties. Of course, daddy picked it up and it happened to fall open in his hand to the page I looked at over and over, and he asked where I got it. I said I borrowed it from a friend, was told to give it back. I put it in the glove compartment of my car and read it in parking lots, my introduction to Henry Miller. It was in the time I was discovering Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Dharma Bums, Mexico City Blues. Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind. Joan Baez, beatniks in NY, Bob Dylan. Also reading novels in paperback from drugstore racks movies were made from, A Summer Place, The L-Shaped Room, Peyton Place, Ben Hur, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, the crazy Betty Davis and Joan Crawford thriller. I read the book to try to figure out what was going on in the end of the movie. Started taking an interest in movies a step beyond movies I was used to, out there beyond my grasp. La Dolce Vita by Federico Fellini was the first film to knock my sox off. I didn't feel like I got any of it, would not have done well on a test about it, but I was pushing my way through, learning by practicing. First thing learned after high school, I needed to be able to read with comprehension if I wanted to go to college. First apartment, I stayed home and read as much as possible, wanted everybody to leave me alone.

 

salvador dali

 

I did not want peer pressure, parental pressure, church pressure, think about a career pressure. Nor did I want to look for a way into adult life with adult concerns, money and sex, jump in and find a job to cover expenses. I never wanted to join the hierarchy. I went into adult life knowing only what I did not want to do. I felt ambition, but for nothing. It was just a feeling. I disliked competition. I did my best work at anything where competition was not an issue. I wanted to follow my own light, but my light didn't lead me to anything that would pay the rent. My light pursued reading that paid nothing at all. So I had to work. Work drained the art spirit. I kept work going and read, letting art expression go. During college time, I read more interesting books through the summer than through the school year. Always had a stack waiting for summer. I have followed my own light through adult life, learning history, sociology, habitually self-educating, reading with some comprehension and loving it, reading writers who informed me, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Henry Miller, people who thought about things and wrote their thoughts. In the beginning, I did not know what was "good," so I read more or less by trial and error, looking for what I got the most from. Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti were good introductions to poetry and to reading. They wrote in present day language I understood, and from contemporary mind, which I was a part of by mere existence. They spoke to my rebel spirit, encouraged my inclination to nonconformity, and they articulated American life the television glossed over and ignored. For personal appearance, I chose the look that makes it possible to have a job, a haircut, because I needed the money to get by on. I wanted long hair and to wear Indian kurtas. I wanted to lay about with headphones on listening to Led Zeppelin stoned, but had to work, had to go to school, had to study. My parents did not support me, so I had to give the appearance of conformity to maintain existence.

salvador dali

 

I already knew how to go my own way under the camouflage of clothes that identified me with the world that looked to the ruling class for guidance, instead of looking to beatniks. Ginsberg and Kerouac influenced my first thinking out in the world on my own. Can't leave out Henry David Thoreau, a powerful teacher. I wanted to play bongos and hang at Manhattan coffee shops where Doc Watson and Bob Dylan played. A kid who had nothing about him that could be mistaken for cool connected with the beatnik idea of the cool, and felt cool reading books identified cool. In the late Fifties and into the Sixties cool was very important. To some. A very small percentage. Everybody else kept with the as-seen-on-tv look. I wanted to be a bohemian writer in NYC, a part of the cool scene, uber-cool by association. I didn't want to live like a street bum to be cool, needed to make a living, and was not in NYC. I pretended not to be a rebel at work and in the social life. Had plenty of practice pretending in my life before, with parents. I kept everything about myself a secret from them. The kid was told so many times they were not interested in anything the kid had to say that I finally got it. From then on, the kid went inward on the trail to schizophrenia, but found a way to reverse direction in time. Years before, I had already shut my heart down to them in self-preservation. It took a lot of years to get the heart re-activated. It was in the time, age 17, when mind and heart were both about to blow a gasket, Allen Ginsberg spoke his own paen, HOWL, to my pain. Though I later came to regard Ginsberg the Mr Rogers of poetry, while he was playing that role for me in my subconscious he turned me on to poetry. Just out of the Navy and just into first semester at College of Charleston, I bought the Selected Poems of Robinson Jeffers in a paperback. Thought I'd read a few poems before sleep one night, and never put the book down all night. Read every poem in it multiple times, could not stop. I loved Jeffers' writing, something I'd never seen before, the art in poetry elevated several notches. Loved where his mind was coming from and what he did with it. At the same time, I discovered Salvador Dali and Abstract Expressionism.

salvador dali

These were the doorways that opened the world of art to me mid 20s. Before, I'd only been exposed to Norman Rockwell and Remington as art. I didn't want to go to medical school to study anatomy to be an artist. When I stepped through the doorway to the art world, I went alone, alone in a culture, American television culture that only dealt in the obvious, and dismissed art along with reading, doesn't pay, a waste of time. During and after the McCarthy period, anything incomprehensible to the average television viewer was suspect of subversion, of being labeled with the Scarlet C: communist. Rock n roll was called communist, beatniks were communist, abstract art was communist. Daddy told me when I was 14, "If you ever join the communist party, I'll kill you." Suddenly, I wanted to be a communist. Did not know how to look for communists to join me up. Never found any. As soon as I was out of high school I started a wider search for communists and still couldn't find any. I wanted to be a card-carrying member of the communist party, didn't know anything about it except how to spell Khrushchev. In college I took a course in Soviet History that cured me of wanting to be a commie red pinko. I was disposed to like Stalin, he was Mr Red, himself, the Red Menace, but saw he was a tyrant, who treated his own people worse than the enemy. Lenin I took for just as bad. If Stalin had not had Trotsky killed, Trotsky would have been just like them. Nonetheless, it was an educational search. Communism didn't work, same as capitalism didn't work. Both created a lot of miserable people, a lot of dead people, and a lot of privileged people. I did not want anything to do with any of it, did not want to be another brick in the wall, did not want to give my energy to build and maintain the Death Star, the American Empire. I was not a boy who wanted to grow up to wear a uniform and obey authority. Did not want to be a hippie, either. Just wanted to hunker down out of sight with a book and let the war machine fly overhead. As a non-conformist, I'm no more than the cow in the herd that stays off to itself.    

salvador dali, himself

 

 

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