Because of you, in gardens of blossoming flowers
I ache from the perfumes of spring.

I have forgotten your face,
I no longer remember your hands;
how did your lips feel on mine?

Because of you, I love the white statues drowsing in the parks
the white statues that have neither voice nor sight.

I have forgotten your voice, your happy voice;
I have forgotten your eyes.

Like a flower to its perfume,
I am bound to my vague memory of you.
I live with pain that is like a wound;
if you touch me, you will do me irreparable harm.

Your caresses enfold me,
like climbing vines on melancholy walls.
I have forgotten your love,
yet I seem to glimpse you in every window.

Because of you, the heady perfumes of summer pain me;
because of you, I again seek out the signs that precipitate desires:
shooting stars and falling objects.

-Neruda

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart)

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go, my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
                                                        i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart)

    e.e. cummings

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.

Autumn Day

Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by.
Now overlap the sundials with your shadows,
and on the meadows let the wind go free.

Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine;
grant them a few more warm transparent days,
urge them on to fulfillment then, and press
the final sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,
and wander the boulevards, up and down,
restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing."



Rainer Maria Rilke

sometimes i am alive because with

(and from my thighs which shrug and pant
a murdering rain leapingly reaches the
upward singular deepest flower which she
carries in a gesture of her hips)

-e.e. cummings, from sometimes i am alive because with

Earth and Rain

"At night I dream that you and I are two plants that grew together, roots entwined and that you know the earth and the rain like my mouth, since we are made of earth and rain."
-Pablo Neruda

Seven times seven

A photo taken late in the afternoon, as I walked up the stairs of my old house.
This is what my life feels like to me.
Unfinished beauty, seen through cracked glass;
much time has passed, and the light falling slantwise.

Grouper - Wind Return

Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves

I do not care if
Our lovemaking is exposed
As the rainbow over
The Yasaka dam at Ikaho
If only I can suck and suck you.

-from the Manyoshu (Collection of Ten Thousand Leaves),  an anthology of ancient Japanese poetry composed between the period between 347AD and 759AD

The wound of incompleteness

“The wound of incompleteness opens me up. Through what could be called incompleteness or animal nakedness or the wound, the different separate beings communicate, acquiring life by losing it in communication with each other. The fate of finite beings leaves them at the edge of themselves … And this edge is [always already] torn.” 
 

—	Georges Bataille, L’Expérience intérieure

In this world

In this world
we walk on the roof of hell,
gazing at flowers.

-Kobayashi Issa

you are like the snow only
purer fleeter,like the rain
only sweeter frailer you

e.e. cummings

Ah Romance. You deceitful Bitch.

I am an admitted Romantic.  But I am no longer a believer.  Though I cannot help my own romantic feelings and tendencies, I no longer believe that romance is what it promises us.  It is not a path to human emotional fulfillment, or happiness.  It is not the door to life-long intimacy and a shared inner life with another.  It does not answer our sense of loneliness, our need to feel connected inwardly to another, for very long.  It does not lead where the feelings it produces suggest that it will lead.  

It is, rather, just an evolutionary ruse.  Bait, for the soul - as beauty is for the eye and pleasure is for the body - to persuade us to procreation.  After which it has no more use for us.  It is a chemical meth lab in our own brain, a precisely targeted drug, as addictive as any opiate, which, after luring us to mate, leaves us to wallow in withdrawal.

The same man who wrote this:

"I arise from dreams of thee
In the first sweet sleep of night,
When the winds are breathing low,
And the stars are shining bright." 

..the very same man, who could pen such romantic, effusive expressions of love; this profoundly Romantic man abandoned, forsook, and rejected the young bride who had given her all to him. 

 

Romance.  I wonder if perhaps it was the first sin of Adam.  After all, whether you believe the story to be some form of truth or not, the scriptures do seem to make much of the fact that it was Eve who was deceived, who thought that the tree indeed held something good, but that Adam acted with clear understanding of the lie and the act before him.

So in the context of this story, if he knew the fruit was forbidden, if he knew that God was not withholding something "good" from them, if he knew that it would make him unhappy, and lead to death and separation from the creator, why on earth would he take it?  What could possibly motivate him to act in complete opposition to what he knew to be true, and good, and would lead to his own happiness, peace, and fulfillment?  What could entice him to do something that he knew, without doubt, that he would regret?

Perhaps he took the fruit from her hand, because he could not bear to see his relationship with his beloved severed.  Perhaps he had to share everything she experienced, had to remain one with her, had to cleave to her, even if it meant following her to hell.  Perhaps he valued his connection to his bride above all else.  Above truth, above God, above even life itself.  Perhaps Adam's sin, the first sin of a man, was to be a Romantic.

intimacy

"Dearest — my body is simply crazy with wanting you — If you don’t come tomorrow — I don’t see how I can wait for you — I wonder if your body wants mine the way mine wants yours — the kisses — the hotness — the wetness — all melting together — the being held so tight that it hurts — the strangle and the struggle." 

— Excerpt of a letter from Georgia O’Keeffe to Alfred Stieglitz

It is not physical pleasure that I seek exactly, though this passage is obviously focused on it.  But the passion I hear in this, the longing.... I utterly identify with it.  What I long to find is someone who understands that physical desire is - or can be - a metaphor for something even more profound.

In Hebrew, to engage in sexual intercourse literally means “to know.”   In the book of Genesis, for instance, we are told that "...Adam knew his wife again; and she bare a son, and called his name Seth..."  I have heard it said that the reason the bible uses this phrase is because the writers were uncomfortable with explicit descriptions of human sexuality.  But based on other passages and accounts found in it, I am persuaded that this is not true.   This is not the modest euphemism of a culture uneasy with raw sexuality.   On the contrary, it seems evident that the writers understood, perhaps better than our own culture does, that sex is an act of the entire person.  Not, at least in most cases, just an act of the body.  

It is well known, and no coincidence I believe, that the most vulnerable part of a man's body are his exposed sexual organs.  And the human penis is somewhat unique among mammals in that the mechanism by which it is held erect is entirely the work of the circulatory system.  It becomes, literally and metaphorically, an extension of his heart.  The heart, pumping blood, holds it out not primarily as a demand for pleasure, but as an offering of what is inside him.  It is an exposing, a baring, of the source of his inner life.  It is a raised flag, an unequivocal declaration of love.  If, in some fairy realm, the same man were able to approach his beloved with his hand outstretched, his beating heart lying pulsing in his palm...  the romance of it would be clear.  And once inside the woman, his pulse is actually beating inside her body.  One heart, during this holy ritual, shared within two bodies.  Two souls, momentarily inhabiting one joined flesh.  Sex is a symbol of the crossing, the momentary dissolving, of the boundaries of self.  An intertwining of personhood.  A vehicle so that two souls may caress one another, braid themselves together.  It is communion.  In fact the word "communion" in Latin means "with-oneness".

 

Yes, I am a guy.  Yes, I have happily had sex that was ostensibly "meaningless", and evasive of the deeper emotional entanglements that it lends itself to.  I know that sex can be just play, and I enjoy it as such.  But finding physical pleasure is actually quite easy.  Finding someone who sees, understands, and embraces my inner life as tightly and passionately as my outward form; finding someone with whom I wish to linger, gazing in wonder, in that intimate space created by physical sex; someone with whom I want to be naked and vulnerable - seen - not just physically, but emotionally and spiritually; finding someone who wants to know, and be known... I find that rather less common.