Am back at Dingo Deli - the weather is hot and humid · my heart is calm and i have a salami sandwich for nourishment. Exercise is very important during the worldwide upheaval we now experience. The city of Hoi An, Vietnam is in pain from the absence of tourists which renders its bucolic terrain remarkably peaceful. My neighbors are grandparents of a small girl child whose squeals of growth can be heard, prior to breakfast, during breakfast - in time for naps and with all the surprises found in the course of a day by an 18, or so - month old human. I try to keep the walls damp so the air blowing into their yard is cool because it gives me a great feeling of accomplishment. I left the Kern River Valley for Europe in April of 2014 - i was on a mission to draw the finest drawings i could manage, and to seek the hand of a French Cameroonean woman i had met leaving Bali 6 years earlier - in the intervening time while renovating a beat-to-shit lakeside home in KKKlan valley, i may have drawn her some dozen times and sent letters to her of my experiences, letters that were primarily addressed to my estranged mother, but in an anthropological/conceptual art piece, i thought - what the fuck and shared these highly personal examinations of a problematic relationship with a (maybe) muse who had consented, only by not declining. Yeah, i know, weird - but it’s weirder for me, than it is for you.
I arrived in Paris and felt that it was important that i be welcomed by her after all this time pitching woo into the aether - when she declined to step out from behind her Sphinx avatar · i moved on; i’d sold a home, left a country, and crossed an ocean: one cannot be more clear than that. That was 2014, it is now 2020 - my sight is failing, and my spirit is flagging · sort of. I understand that life is not over for me, but it has certainly changed. Love is no less important, if only - more so. But not the superheated romance of youth, love has taken on the dimension of compassion for those i do not know, like the necessary awareness of discomfort for the child across the wall enduring a heat her forebears acclimated to, but has become lethal due to no fault of her or her family - almost entirely manufactured by the superheated greed of the culture in which i was raised and to too large an extent i have participated in while a planetary environmental catastrophe through ignorance and arrogance unfolds all around me.
Where and how does one alter patterns, environmental, emotional, and existential? I am now on my 4th beer and am reaching the saturation point where cogency becomes gibberish; yet the shackles of convention are simultaneously relieved - some call it threading the needle, others describe it as walking the tightrope, for me it’s just figuring out which eye and which hemisphere i am viewing the world with at the time. My family spent a lot of time in front of the mirror; it has never been a pleasant experience for me. Even without the mirror, i was never sure which side was my left or right. I do remember one period of my life wearing contacts; it was the first time i could remember seeing my face without glasses - that was strange. The mechanics of understanding the human head became a study as early as 13 when i tried to sculpt the head of George Washington in paper mache based on the “Athenaeum Portrait” by Gilbert Stuart, but it wasn’t until my 60s that i came to realize i have utterly no capacity to see 3-dimensionally - this is only worthy of mention because i had spent almost 45 years of my life attempting to create 3 dimensional objects that demonstrated my understanding of 3 dimensions.
My younger brother who represents my domestic address in the United States has fallen off the grid - this while the country of my birth is in the midst of a possible coup d’etat by a fascist corporate cabal that has for too long manipulated the channels of communication: interpersonal, national and digitally. It is no longer possible to discern who sits where much like it is for me trying to visualize a 3 dimensional object using my rapidly decaying visual acuity. Writing now represents a workaround - workarounds that i ought to be accustomed to by this point in my life, but which are always disconcerting - like walking in a darkened room that one knows by daylight but must parse by memory at night. To have my last link to the land i grew up in grow dark has the same effect; it is destabilizing. Days ago, i thought a walking stick which i know i will need shortly just to motivate upright caused me such distress, i fictionalized culprits and reported them to my neighbors, rendering myself a crazy person in the process; what i experience losing communication with my brother is no different, if only worse.
All i know to do now, is stay the course and be kind to myself, for it seems every time i point a finger of accusation at another, i only find my own self and my personal involvement with that accusation at its origin. It is more than perfectly confusing - it is a downright conundrum. I have not surrendered, for that begins with my last breath, a breath i have taxed to the max with my fixation on tobacco, or as Bob said better, “I left all my hopes and dreams buried under tobacco leaves.” How can i possibly condemn a world so full of insights that i have chosen to ignore through hubris or inattention. We are capable and able to vanquish all we face - me my loneliness, you your ______ fill in the blank. But we choose to blunder forward rather than stopping, even for a moment to relish the splendor just beyond our wrist or out of earshot. The paradox of course, being that all we need to understand about the universe is found mostly between our two ears - understanding ourselves and why we do what we do can be challenging, but will ultimately inform each of us about where we fit and why - good luck · one and all.
jts 03/06/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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