Let me put it this way: I find mysterious pockets of habitual thinking functioning like cradles of jell-o.
Say couple’s therapy is called for: I consciously feel gung-ho, pro-choice, empowered by trust and intention and reciprocal hope. Our determination, our hope. But the rear half of my skull, the scape my subject lands in, I realize is slicky, silently and squishily snuggling into a jello-y bed of “there’s something wrong with me. I’ve got the problems. We’re really trying to figure out why I’m so hard to live with; how my moods impede relational success and happiness; my fears – intimacy. If the truth were told, my spouse is acting graciously and sacrificially in order to get me help.” It’s as natural as instinct for me to believe I’m a burden, a difficulty, a special case.
The endless desires of youth. Our adolescents seem never to be satisfied (perhaps aren’t even “meant” – biologically, psychologically, socially, developmentally – to be), rarely “up” for family events or participation in chores, games or outings. Seem preoccupied with themselves and their wants and preferences, shifts and swerves. Rationally – I sense the raging hormones; the violent ego-mania seeking a code, a reflection, its own DNA; the psychoses of self/other, boy/girl, love/lust and so forth – upheaval and growth! But my torso is wiggling and sliding itself into the slushy comfort of “I have no idea how to guide these kids! Who am I to parent and protect, encourage and inspire? I’m just as fragmented, uncertain, conflicted, aroused and cynical as these guys! No way I’m good enough, strong enough, wise enough, and so on… unqualified to father, even at directing myself!”
The list goes on – as reader, writer, artist. As male, friend, laborer. As handyman, citizen, spouse. As mind, as body, as conglomerate selves:
How does it come so natively to cuddle in, automatically, unself-consciously and familiarly into negative perceptions, fraught with inadequacy, victimhood and failure, with no perpetrator(s) to blame?
Ideologically, philosophically, linguistically, aesthetically, psychologically, and so on, I can adapt party lines and mottos of health, truth, justice, fallibility and courage; equality and imperfection; becoming and process,
but wherever this social solidarity is not called-for or aimed at, this prompting to blend toward community or “normalcy,” my actual mind-body-complex demonstrates an incredible proclivity to nestle and burrow into a gooey surround of personal suspicion and doubt, misgivings and cynicism…like a worm to mud, or a fossil its imprint.
What the I/eye prefers.
How we see what we see.
How something – something – (but what is it?!)
contradicts mind’s understanding and body’s sensation/perception/evidence and goes its own hellbent way in whatever direction it selects!?
Or picture it this way: a runner yearning to the tape.
Arms flung back as if flagged by a gale, chin and neck making way for the shoulders – a pure strive.
And rushing against, past and around…force and flow. Learning the body by all that surrounds, through which it hums and throbs.
The air is full of waves. The waves are full of particles – particles agitating, dancing. Or the fragments are waving, threading this way and that – streaming and winding – I feel it.
Over the curves of my shoulders, the chorus. Deep in my belly – the bass and the drum – caverns of mind. The ticking, the singing, the whispers and thrums. Brass flowers into blooming curlicues, echoing labyrinths – my ears.
In such a wind the eyes will close, and the legs will strive and stride. No matter my position, in the medium of music, I am always moving forward, setting forth – possibly sailing, possibly struggling with every ounce – but making progress.
It glances off the elbows, reverberates the bones. Fills the mouth, stuffs the nostrils – can make it hard to breathe. Sound. Shuddering loins and quaking knees, a tremor-massage, a tumbling. A sleep.
I lean in. Becoming a shaping of waves – reaching, aching and out of breath. Receiving the blast and caress. The force and the flow. I listen, I feel. I am drowning, aware of each inch of my skin. I am falling in flight, my organs engorged. I am musically shaped as a man.
In attempts to make following/reading easier…particularly for pieces and fragments of ongoing series…I’m adding new pages under “Experimenctes” page, a miscellaneous…a fetal gathering of “I, for Instants” posts…. and sections of the work-in-progress “Unknown and Unnamed” and images that inform them…
I venture to say this piece is unnamed and unfinished, but I tell you it’s alive and it dances!
I can touch it with my hands. The wax is smooth like flesh, the collage like scars or scabs – where the texture lies.
Up close – I am underwater on sand, watching the fluxing of weeds. Looking for retinal patterns.
At a distance it traces a woman, her dress kicking out, a-twirl and limning the lithe.
I’m entranced!
It’s Chinese scriptwork of wisdom and way, a beautiful nude languidly branding the air with her limbs – fertile signs and images prodding me – “move!”
Move myself.
Activate.
Address.
What looks like dark ink stands out, but in reality swims under the surface – blotting, inscribing and guiding the paths.
Emotion and gesture alike: drawn swiftly and sourced far beneath, or pressed on and affixed from outside. Each leave their marks – stark and prominent, – resonant emblems of what lies beneath, what responds.
I pretend I am calm, blank canvas to world – but when it brushes or cuts, smothers or slaps, what is bold in me reveals. The fears, the wounds, the anger and dream.
My vision scatters in rage. Vehement dashing and strike. I can promise you this: the world will reveal me.
I have told you: you are with the unknown of the unnamed – a nothing answering to nothing – a cooperative become.
At the end I will be named, will have accumulated and inscribed them. Surface, object, ground: our object.
overweight head, foreshortened body (misjudges lankiness for heft), unintended while inscribing a circle, lines of meaning?, where the webs are sourced?, self-reflexion
To all concerned, or the least bit interested, I am no one on the road to nowhere. It’s taken me a long time to set out, but I have begun! My path has been wily. Many joys and celebrations, discoveries and inventions mark the past. Wounds bored of enormous riggings and bits; injuries, damage and crime barbwire the road. Imprints of loss – great and unexpected gains pock my surface. Years of input and adventure, learning and error track me.
Now I am no one. Purposively, conscientiously and chaotically venturing into the everywhere that is nowhere. Now here.
Sure you can read the past’s path – identifying me, mind and body cropping up here and there, in and out of people’s lives – particular places, practicings and performings. Believe me – that’s not the point.
The point, or series of points, or scattered suggestions of borders, like shot smattering air…is where everything meets, interacts. A porous place, undefined, ever-defining. Unknowns cropping up everywhere.
I’m talking about the enormous field wherein which forms mingle, shaping and providing contents, ever on the verge of in-forming. This inchoate and omnidirectional process we name “becoming,” “coming-to-be,” we know so little about but strive so constantly for a sense of.
Image me then, if it helps. Outline a human, male, having endured four decades existing, of average height and weight, nondescript. (It doesn’t “matter” – the matter is shared commonly, specifics will rise in and out of clarity through encounters).
Here I am, essentially:
Pocket into this figure, wherever you like – an education in classics, advanced studies in music, theology and philosophy. Twenty years of retail labor in bookish culture; three wives, seven children. Smear that around with geographies – their weathers and landscapes, flora and fauna and politics – of the American Midwest, big-city Northeast, farmlands and Great Lakes, Germany, UK, Pacific NW and Israeli-controlled Palestine.
Inject strains of passions: fine arts, literature, music. Linguistics, semiology and phenomenology. Parenting, intimacy and artistic creativity. Psychology, biology, mythology.
Take and run an eraser randomly across, leaving trails for griefs, abandonments and disillusions. Separations, misunderstandings and woundings, coming and going both ways.
Scribble. I mean doodle maniacally in pencil or pen, any color or width. Scratch, wobble, circle, until the figure looks like an indecipherable tangle, a rough frenetic sketch, something built up and crossed out –
that represents the meld. The interlacing and cross-currents of all the things within, without; nurtured or native; learned or instinctual; native or chosen; perpetrated or inflicted.
Voila:
ball-point sketch Alberto Giacometti
there is no one (or every)
moving nowhere (or every)
save this monumental caveat: that bungled mass of human has a goal. In keeping with appearances…he (I) purposes now/here…
All my Words are Silent 