Manifesto

“Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion - put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.” 

-Wendell Berry,  Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

seven sevens

I cannot help but notice that my life has seemed to change drastically every seven years or so.  Almost to the year.  I admittedly am always searching insatiably for some meaning or rational pattern to life, but these profound changes have certainly not been intentional on my part.  

The upheavals were not as clearly defined when I was younger.  But about the time I was 14, I began to be deeply depressed.  Filled with fear and tormented, both socially and inwardly. It reached the point that I went through a long period of terrible night terrors, and the fear of insanity, by age 17.  I would wake with a start, feeling as if I were being swallowed by a pit of howling terror. But the terror would not cease when I woke. I would lie awake for hours, my heart and mind racing. Later it began to happen in waking moments, at school and in public places.  I took refuge from those horrors by clinging to what little I knew of God, through Christ.  But I was never really healthy, or whole. And my desperate faith was as deformed as my own soul. 

By the age of 21, I had reinvented myself, running from my mental and emotional troubles, and the religion they seemed entangled with.   But I could not escape myself, and my own darkness.  I was married at the age of 28, to another damaged person, that I met at a viciously judgmental church.  To be completely clear, I don't blame that church at all for my issues.  It simply served as a welcoming forum to play out my own brutal self-judgement.  The act of marrying my also wounded wife symbolized my embrace yet again, of the religious rigor that I aspired to live by.  A structure that would bring order to the chaotic darkness within me.

At 35, my wife and I ceased attending that church. I am not really sure what she would give for her own reasons, but for me it was a recognition that whatever I was doing, it had absolutely nothing to do with the real Jesus.  We moved to a new town, looking to build a normal, modest, happy life for ourselves and our children. I found work that suited me finally, and that I enjoyed.  It seemed perhaps that life would begin to make sense. 

By the time I was 42, my wife began her nursing career, which financially freed me to work freelance at architecture and spend more time on my art.  But it also seemed to hasten our growing emotional distance, and the problems in our marriage began to seem settled, and unchangeable.  My mother died soon after, financially enabling us to move to a small artsy, mountain town.  Despite the effort to invest everything once more into our marriage and relationship, we soon separated, thus completing the next transition in my life.

In the bible, the number seven is symbolic of completion, and fulfillment.  Perfection, not in the sense that we use it now, of something being without any flaws - but in the sense of something reaching its fullest and most mature form. 

Seven times seven is 49, my age now of course.  I wonder what I am?  Is my truest, fullest, most mature form something that is a reflection of good, or of evil?  Perhaps this is the year I get to find out.  If, as the writer Oswald Chambers once said, God compels us (so that we will know for ourselves) to spell out what is written in our souls, day by day - does that mean that I get to put the period on it when I so choose?   

To put it another way, what lies at the the core of my being?  Is it the empty abyss?  Or has God come to dwell in it?  Because I am weary, and would like to settle the question once and for all.

Antlers

I am enthralled with a recent book by the artist James Prosek, Ocean Fishes. The very fact that such a book of paintings of individual fishes was even created seems to affirm and capture everything that I am drawn to in this world. Wistfulness at loss, fragility, and the ephemeral nature of all true beauty; wonder at the existence of one single sentient being; and a love of science but a preference for art when faced with the mystery that is just one inner life.

"The field guide notion of a species ‘type’ felt inadequate, even misleading. Prosek’s contemplations culminated in the glorious paintings of his latest book, Ocean Fishes (2012): he made a simple but profound decision to paint the specific, individual fishes he encountered."

(http://www.aeonmagazine.com/nature-and-cosmos/the-science-of-animal-consciousness/)

I am working on a drawing I had planned many months ago, of a deer skull and antlers that my father gave me.  I believe it is the skull of a deer that I helped my father dress and skin many years ago, one of the biggest he ever encountered.

A friend was asking me about my fascination with antlers, why I like and collect them when I am not really much of a hunter in practice.  He wanted to understand what the appeal was.
I had never really thought it through before, but as I put together my answer for him I felt it worth writing down.

Apart from the fact that I simply love the lines and forms that antlers make from different angles, I find them compelling emotionally because they grew from the very body of a magnificent creature, long since dead.  They are like a crown - though one generated by and sprouting from the essential nature of the being itself, made of his very substance and energy.  Not a crown bestowed from without, but one extruded from, indeed a picture of, his very essence.

Dry, dead antlers on the forest floor (or on the wall above my fireplace) are the remnants of glory that remain after the demise of a beautiful, majestic creature.  They outlast him, and are a testament to all that he was, and attained in life.

The drawing I am working on was planned long ago, for all of these reasons.  But it has taken on new meaning for me since my brother's passing, and I am going to title it something that reveals that it is now about him.  Perhaps the title will just be 1965-2013.