I began a drawing yesterday, and it felt good. I stopped previously after 60+ years, because i felt my growing blindness impaired my ability to create worthwhile product - that is a capitalist trap which suggests if your efforts are not “marketable”, then they have no value. The market does not determine my worth, i do. My life has been spent peering into the faces of countless strangers, lovers and loved ones attempting to tease understanding from their expressions. And Madame Paradox in her infinite wisdom is robbing me of visual acuity at that same moment i feel i begin to understand what i am looking at · here is the paradox, it is not for approval that i work, but for release from what i do not understand; i will not understand more if i cease looking however faint my vision becomes, or scribbled my efforts appear.
Much like these chronicles - were they predicated on other’s comprehension of the importance to continue struggling against seemingly overwhelming odds · then we do not deserve anyplace in the pantheon of living species. William Blake - “Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.” I used to believe that desire was the undulating flesh of a loving woman abandoned to her passion - a fiction from my father who tried to teach me that love of the woman could be best understood from her submission to my will. He was a lover, and not in the conventional pejorative connotation so popular with the resurrected Calvinists in our midst, but the opulent loving meaning from the Tantric tradition where it is not only legitimate, but holy to plumb love to its deepest feeling.
Our sterile screen existence that has been exacerbated by “social distancing” - wounded male worth while a cosmetic subornation of woman’s beauty to that of “hydra on steroids and lip gloss.” My pop was a thoughtful poet whose late in life writings lay in the murky crawlspace beneath my youngest sibling’s best guess of success - a 2nd home close enough to Redmond, WA to enjoy the economic gravity, far enough away to demonstrate a semblance of independent thought. If this prose smacks of Snark, it is because you are reading clearly; you know this individual not at all, and possible know less about me - the narrator · It is my lack of clarity conveying the feelings of frustration i possess, but do not own about hurt which he may have knowingly or unknowingly inflicted, but which is my own to resolve rather than propagate out into a miasma of swirling pain that is equal to, or much greater than anything i am willing to face - our world · like it or not.
I contemplated “fear” when formulating today’s writing - i thought about it with all the bluster and denial i was about to call down on the heads of all those driven by fear, but for whom i have yet to find the abundant compassion necessary to share honestly about my own without compounding what is so clear to me about theirs. I accept within my own soul some scope of the feelings of fear i possess - some modern, much ancient. From this emerging awareness i realize how vacant an emotion fear is · sort of. If i cannot dwell closer to my own there is no way that i can communicate easily with anyone else drowning in theirs. There are agents of evil taking notes as we speak, attempting to amplify my open-hearted expression to manipulate your own possibly aware, and possibly sensed unease - these salacious peepers no longer make me afraid, because i am not responsible for frightening you, anymore than you are responsible for frightening me.
If you choose that path - to be afraid · you must walk alone, i cannot join you any longer. I see no percentage in allowing another to influence my distress, much less to enhance my comfort. I believe now that what i feel is perhaps the only domain i can call my own any longer. I am weak about this to the extent i do not have the conviction to spend much time in the company of frightened people, especially those whose fear manifests in some effort to increase my own. I’ve known this fact for sometime and use to resist such efforts by an outwardly confrontational demeanor - there is no interpersonal strategy available for a person who wants to appear scary that will alter that behavior except a profound personal scrutiny of what is important. What is important to me is being able to understand and embrace loving people who care deeply about themselves, and from which are able to calm not only their own anxieties, but be comfortable and confident enough to accept my own tentative steps toward loving them as best as i can with what i possess at the time.
jts 27/09/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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