The earth is inconceivably old, so ancient that to allow ourselves — conceited moderns — to dwell on the inexorability of time, well, all the anti-depressants in the world might not be able to quell the anxiety. And in the context of the universe the earth is but a four billion year old infant.
Our nervous system is designed to deal with this. It is in the business of dampening our sensory experience. If you ever take off the dark glasses put on your dilated eyes by the ophthalmologist you have a sense of the overwhelming nature of our world. Any light, let alone the sun, will paralyze. It is the same for the temporal universe.
It might be better not to think of what this means for us personally. This is the job of religion. Most are founded on the premise that there must be more, this cannot be all there is. You mean we will never see each other again, there has to be a better place, where do we go when we go, what about our thoughts and prayers, and what about our stuff: written words, sculptures, boats, telescopes, children, relationships.
What about them? I doubt the earth cares. We, or at least I, need to get over it. At times I think I have, but dark thoughts still linger in the back of my cranium. After watching my father die a cruel sudden death and my mother a lingering one I thought I was liberated. Now I am not so sure. Each stiff morning I look into the bathroom mirror and evaluate my life. It is instructive.
It happens in an instant. I am amazed how quickly a life, at least mine, can be reviewed. And this is before I have even had a cup of tea. Once the shower’s warm water hits my body the moment is over only to be relived around seven the next morning. What I find interesting is, rather than being depressed by this, I look forward to it. This condensed reverie makes me feel alive.
The fact that I continue to care is comforting. I still have goals and fight the cynicism built up layer-upon-layer year-after-year. I feel secure in my positive moroseness. I welcome it. It scratches an itch that needs to be scratched.
And so this lead me to my inner landscape, or maybe landscapes, the plural is better as there seem to be many. How do I see them — I doodle. The sculptor Darrin Hallowell forbade me to say the d-word. I sketch. I draw. I do not doodle. And though I greatly respect him, I am not sure I agree. I am untrained and have had a similar style since I was a kid.
I know it is a weird habit. I do it everywhere and on anything. I especially like the white butcher block paper that so often covers the tables of Italian restaurants but I am not averse to marking up the agenda of quarterly meetings. I think I have done some of my best work while eating ravioli with marinara sauce. The vast expanse of white paper provides an almost unlimited palette except for wine glasses and the breadbasket.
It is an unthreatening surface unlike an 8 ½” by 11” sheet of paper, a blank document in Word, a page in a sketchbook or the white gesso expanse of a canvas. These require a commitment and invite criticism. To use them I have to expose part of myself to the outside world. Turn myself inside out as it were.
If I like what I have done, I tear off the red stained drawing and sign it (take ownership really). Once home it is filed away in a thick folder with many other similar scrapes. When I worked in steel I used many of these ideas to create at first 2 dimensional, and then through the prodding of my fellow students, 3-D sculptures. I learned I could only make what I could draw.
I call my style expressionless abstraction. Who knows what any of it means. I enjoy people’s reactions when they see the work. They try hard to make it concrete. To make it represent a thing, anything, from the real world. But sadly it is a little like trying to find Yankee Doodle Dandy in a work by Pierre Boulez. It ain’t gonna happen.
All of us have an inner landscape. For some it is so painful that they will do almost anything to suppress it. Think Michael Jackson, Diana Arbus, Mark Rothko, Virginia Wolf. For others they cannot keep it in. It gets expressed in every waking moment of every day. Think Picasso, Dickens, Bach, Ansel Adams. Their willingness and courage to share their inner vision, even if in the end it killed them, has left us with an incredible body of work. It fills the museums, libraries and concert halls of the world.
And here I speak of time again. The above artists occupy at most 500 years. I am not sure how far back we have examples. The cave paintings in France are still only 30,000 years of history and do little to fill in the billions of years. But this is a misunderstanding on my part. Our inner landscapes are the expression of all that time. Time well spent solving problems and creating new problems to solve.
Volume 5855 (4), 5/20/11
