Three Weeks To Take Off.....

"Lucklessly she must lie patient

And the vaulting bird be still. O my true love, hold me.

In your every inch and glance is the globe of genesis spun,

And the living earth your sons."

Dylan Thomas

Three weeks left and then I rome, after close to two years grounded and working. When on the Missouri River, madly paddling for St. Louis a thousand miles away, there was ample time to check my reality; what I was doing as a man of twenty-nine and what I hoped to accomplish in my life time. There was plenty of time for reflexions like these to the rhythm of paddle strokes, the twisting river or the far horizon stretched out across the lakes. I grappled with my feelings of how only my painting seemed keep a hold of me, the rest didn't seem to make a lot of sense. It is easy to talk to God when you find your self in a vast landscape, when you are but a speck bobbing through the Great Plains. So talk I did and I spoke my needs. If I was to be a full time artist I needed direction. A month later I found it, though at the time I didn't know it.

It is said to be careful of what you ask for in life for you just might get it. I have been listening to Homer's Iliad and there is a story of a man who is given one wish from a god. He asks the god to make everything he touches turn to gold. He is amazed at how it works, it is so beautiful and the gold so pure and rich. He knows he will soon be the richest man in the world, all he has to do is go on touching his surroundings. Then he finds out that he can't eat gold, this proved a problem do to the fact that you have to touch to eat. He asks the god to take it away and he was granted his second wish as well. In three weeks I will be leaving for my first One Man Art show at a gallery in Brownsville Nebraska. From there I am not sure were the road may lead me. The last year and a half I have been in a long distance mentorship with my artist friend Harry Waldemar Anderson, who is a resident of Brownsville. Over this time period he has helped me grow in my abilities as an artist and as he says there is little more he can teach me at this point. I have also massed over eighty pieces of work, fifty of those piece will go into the gallery showing. On looking back I had no idea what I was asking for when I made my prayers over the river, I had no idea of the painful hours upon hours of trying to work out a problem. I had no idea what I would have to give up to take hold of my dream yet I am not asking for it back ether like the guy with the golden touch. There is a road to travel and I just have to travel it. It could be only for curiosities sake.

Requiem for the Silver Lining

"And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street

Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea."

T.S. Eliot (The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock)

We roll to the sky then dip to see the water, the 5.0 liter Cummings diesel engine wines as Flathead Lake bounces in and out of view. I notice silver lining on the fur and pines along side the road, the light doesn't look this way but only in the spring. Something todo with being washed by winter and reflected with both the cold and the recreation of spring. And the clouds tower in cumulous mass trailing showers over the Rockies.

"This is more like a roller coaster ride than a road!" Dennis states flat and Fig and I laugh and agree. A new road is going in and it will be easier to reach our destination the next visit we make. That and for who ever else wishes to go and that is the bitter sweet part of a new road. I spot sheep up the rocky slope and we slap into the ditch to pull binoculars from the center counsel and watch what was lighter specks of rock become Big Horn's. There aren't a lot of them left so there is always general excitement when they are spotted. We cot site of four more little clusters and counted up wards of fifty altogether, for any of us this made the drive worth while and we settled back for more "roller coaster" action.

The Symes Hotel in Hot Springs Montana still feels to hold the belief of the mystical healing power of the Thirties, when it was built. The Spanish never found El Dorado nor The Fountain Of Youth, they packed their armer from one end of the country to the next and down into the jungles of South America. They were to be eaten alive by worms, never finding everlasting life on earth or unquenchable wealth. By the time the nineteen thirties rolled around Percy Fawcet had disappeared into the Amazon, never to be seen again, totally convinced a lost city did exist. By the time they got done looking for him, the searchers had ether died or found nether Fawcet or the Lost City but had pretty much been over the entire region. By the time the Symes was built W.W.II was just getting kicked off and W.W.I had shattered the belief that the industrial age was going anywhere special. So I guess the investors of this new resort, in the middle of nowhere, must have thought that the sacred indian hot springs and their bubbling waters would be an irresistible draw to the disillusioned but fabulously wealthy cattle, mining, and logging barons of the new state. If they couldn't find El Dorado or The Fountain of Youth then maybe they could believe that some bubbly water could heal their gout.

As I sat watching the little bubbles attach themselves to my leg hair I felt I maybe understood why they would feel healed. People spoke in whispers here and those whispers felt like echos in a vast space. It was early afternoon by the time we had arrived and there were few people to disturb the soaking. Rain showers filtered down on all four sides of the valley yet our island of bubbles sat untouched. A gentleman of the late nineteen seventies/early eights sat beside me and made a comment on the massing rain clouds. I said how much I enjoyed them and he whispered back "oooooh, yaaaa". I felt happier, strangely, that I could share a moment were some one else was enjoying the clouds as I. Then he started to talk, a little louder with each sentence. There was Fig, Dennis, man with smudged skull with rose tattoo on his arm, chubby wife, empty eyed local indian woman and white toothless boyfriend, me and my want-a-be Jimmy Buffet talker getting baked and fizzed. The silence being broken, the speed of acceleration is a wind fall. Through the gate walks two women in ripe early twenties with a bearded man who might be the same but looks early forties. I scoot closer to Dennis as much to get away from the enlarging mouth of Mr. Buffet as to be polite to the new arrivals at my back. They slip in, giggle, two day old booze oooozing from there smooth round skin. "Don't look!" I tell my self but the peripheral is to close and you see with out seeing. The Faded look at them with envious eyes, I feel sick from the contrast. Conversation is moved to the Mandan Indians, El Dorado that was mountains of corn, and Karl Bodmer's paintings. A speech for the new arrivals ensued, moving to what is truly art; he looks at me to agree. Or maybe at the breasts behind my shoulder, his sunglass block the movements of his eyes. I overheat and sit back up on the ledge, ask Dennis if he wants to go. He nods yes but doesn't move. Her pink toenail brushes my leg slightly as she swings her long legs out. "Shit" I think "I should have made eye contact, and then she wouldn't have done that." To not accede to beauty is a personal affront to the holder, it is cruel and punishing to them, for their beauty tents to be all that they have and Ponce de Leon never found the Fountain of Youth. The three move to the cooler pool and Dennis says he is ready to go. I ask him if he had used the shorts, he had lent me, as an oil rag as we move clock wise around the bathers. I make a fateful glance at the pool as I leave, she stares holes in me. I wonder who is profaning beauty more; me for refusing to notice or her acknowledging to flaunt it?

Stopping at the Tamarack in Lakeside we eat our fill, Fig and I share a pitcher of the newest brew on tap. Pulling out of the parking lot we stop to wait for a man with suspendered pants pulled to his armpits and three gallon size growlers clutched in hand. "He has got two!" exclaims Fig "No, he's got three." I respond. "Ya.......... we should mug him." says Dennis.

Walking On Egg Shells

"You can read the life your living but you can't change a word."

Leonard Cohen

"Creatures of mercy

Shoot me down

And set me free"

Bat for Lashes (the horse and I)

I remember thinking when I was in high school that as soon as I could I would get out of the troubles that surrounded me. I could go some where else and find peace and safety from these troubles. I went a many places, for quite a few years.

An Explanation For Cruelty

"The man who cannot visualize a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot." Andre Breton

"If man no longer finds any meaning in his life, it makes no difference whether he wastes away under a communist or a capitalist regime." Jaffe'

Here is the numbing aspect of relativity, the grey shouting void in between the darkness and the light, and the plausible explanations that can't be explained. So why are we lonely when we have love? My friend Jimmy looked at paintings my niece and nephew left on the kitchen table yesterday afternoon. "You can really tell whats going on in a child's mind by what they draw." he commented "It is always smiling faces and sunshine......" We grow older and we gather shadows and we gather moon dust. Then we mix them together in a molotov cocktail and call it wisdom. Jesus said that unless you become like a little child you will not see the kingdom of heaven. The Kingdom of Heaven is also referred to as having no shadows, only light. We connect reality with shade and shadow, as the years pass, and I wonder if this is only a reality we have made for our own safety. Even while looking at each other are we seeing the shadow before the light? I make a glance at beautiful eyes and as they return the look I wish to be a child and love openly with our reservations; to see the "Kingdom of Heaven" stretched out into eternity there. Maybe it is a lustful longing yet I hope my shadows grow less dense as I close with the quickening of time and life on this earth.

Quavor

"The pain had been too pleasurable, the pleasure too painful; so that I feared that in time my mind would no longer be the thing I knew."

-Gene Wolfe- (Shadow & Claw)

"The world just seems to be on wheels ------ going so fast I can't see the spokes ---- and I like it." -Georgia O'Keefe-

There was a panic once in the very back of my mind. A small shadow that would only grow large in dreams, leaving me gasping for air and wild eyed awake. A whispering shadow, madder still that the character Mr. Depp plays in "Alice And Wonderland". A whisperer of feeling not words. How can a seventeen year old have anxieties about how time is so fleeting and would be gone, he would be old and it would all be over? There wouldn't ever be enough time to do what I wanted to do, I was getting old way to fast way to quick! I think I was a lot older then, then I am now. I look at old photos, friends have sent me, and I see old troubled eyes. The world was a heavy burden then. Emotions are real and have wait, they ether propel you or sink you like a rock.

My life is busy now, busy with the swirling of my imagination and dreams. I have even gotten over being worried that my dreams might not come true. A dream in itself has a equilibrium and a thrust, you don't always end up were you think it will take you but believe me it is alway interesting! I think dreams are kind of like hot air balloons, you can kind of guide them but don't think you are going to land the f*^%$cker on a dime!!! Oh I have my anxieties and at times it is a battle to keep a level head. Jesus said "True love casts out all fear" and that "My burden is light and my yoke isn't heavy." He was always getting at something deeper, down there in the bowels of your psyche. The question isn't one we want to answer, it isn't one that we really want to look at. A passing glance is just fine, a complaint here and a grumble there should do it. Yet do we really want to look at the real reason we refuse a light burden over a heavy one? Lets admit it: we like our heavy burdens, we like our fears, for then what would be left to talk about? The wether? Could we get off the ground with the buoy up of our dreams, with out panicking and letting all the air out just so we feel in control? We can't take heavy burdens with us, they are thoughts that anchor our craft to the ground. Be warned though, that emptiness you feel with out them will frighten you. You will feel godless........

Slingshotting my self into my work, panicked that for some reason not one piece would be worth a fart in the breeze and pushing on!!! Somehow it comes together when you are willing to just let it go.