"Sirena"
Then there is synchronicity - another 40 minutes i’ll never get back, opening the not to open easily-serrated cap to my newest bottle of whiskey · also robbing me of the dolorous timber of thunder heralding the pitter patter of the coming rain. I wanted to open this with a description of the strident voices of fear across the road from me, from whom i have learned are visitors to the ward where i live. Just as i was formulating my question of whether i sound that strident in my writing after a few belts - i was faced with the mechanical refusal of access to my attachment · an attachment my conceit has convinced me i am free from. So now rather than being 2 1/2 paragraphs into my daily responsibility, i face 4 1/4 of emotive honor to fulfill what it is allows me to dwell in the comfort of my sleepless nights figuring out how i might have done better. (note: the abbreviated 1st paragraph - the indication of a con on the horizon)
Peace has become such a convoluted equation for me, i no longer understand friend from foe. When i arrived where i now live i reached out to the artist community, out of habit and from a consultation i’d once had with a local authority in the volatile Los Angeles art world - “make friends with local artists” he said; i am still searching for that mythological companion after 20 or more years. L.A. was super-heated at the time and i lived in an artist ghetto known as the “Brewery.” I made friends, even married the dame that introduced me to the locale - a deeply wounded Belgium paper maker · hooked up and 7 years older than i, but all i could see was her blue eyes and svelte, seemingly sexually luxurious physique; lousy model that she turned out to be. I quickly realized that there was little interest in raising the art bar in L.A. but great interest in getting known which included a slavish adherence to the “Banksky” school of art, modeled on the FB school of patrons “move fast and break things.”
I had arrived in Los Angeles at the tail end of that delusional episode at financing my own art production through education and had gambled big on the support of a creative companion in mutual pursuit of a better world; i failed; we failed, but we tried. In the end i was left like a flopping fish out of water in the wilds of a post-creative Hollywood that was, sucking any and all funds from the tanking, but not yet vanquished “dream machine.” My father died - my family disintegrated · i left for the Far East. What i found is that the same ailments and delusions you bring with you anywhere, will be transplanted and nurtured wherever you land. However i was too vain and determined that i would not be thwarted in my effort to justify the years i had spent chasing “fame and fortune,” and sought seclusion upon my return in the high desert of the Southern Sierras. I met the _rump army coming and fled, because by that time i knew i was neither brave nor noble.
I was, however deluded that art was important to the world in which i lived and began a journey in search of where to make art with the support of the local culture, but first i did penance as a school teacher in Nepal, a roll for which i was wholly unprepared. I believed at the time what had been useful to me from my training would translate into usefulness by students who trudged 3-5 kilometers uphill and 3-5 kilometers downhill just to glory in the conceit of educators believing they knew better than 1,000s of years of information being conveyed word of mouth, fuck by fuck and with a heart that can only be gained by trudging across mountain paths for generation by generation. My humiliation was not yet then complete, and i sought more fertile fields of sharing in the South Americas - again, my conceit prevented me from sharing much less from learning anything but how wrong i was · however helpful that has been, still of little value to the people i’d hoped to “enlighten.”
Ultimately i resorted to the fiction of love after having wallowed in a nostalgic, sensual, but ultimately vain reconstruction of a family adventure gone wrong and returned to my hometown a beaten man to attend the death throes of a woman who deemed me worthy of sweeping up her funeral bier, but not worthy of her candor. “No fool, like an old fool,” and when my dear, dear friend made her request more unctuous through threat and guilt of a time long since gone - i gathered the shreds of my existence and cast them into the vortex of unrequited love and found myself in a mythological circumstance entirely of my own doing · old, alone and unprepared for what Leonard Cohen had so eloquently described as the “preliminaries” to what is all of our great transition. Then Covid-19 came and explained how a fascist had absconded with every honorable thing from where i had been raised and i sit facing a “tabula rasa” daily because it is the only decent thing i have left with which to describe my future · go figure.
jts 12/08/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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