Greetings!

You’ve stumbled onto my new patch of cyber [real] estate. It’s a work in progress, but It’ll always be more drawings than texts and more personal art than published work. I’ve been drawing for over 50 years and this blog/site/whatever is my better-late-than-never attempt to get all the stuff I’ve spent so much time on out there–wherever there is, that is. 

By the way there are many Howard Johnsons out there. These are some I am not: The hotel/motel/restaurant; the inventor of voice mail or a perpetual motion machine; a baseball or jazz tuba player; or the fantasy-realist painter.

Be forewarned I am a cynical sceptic and a left-leaning, semi-reclusive egoist. My personal art reflects this. If drawings of naked people will offend you, scroll no further and stay out of the personal drawings pages.

Constructive criticism is welcome. But remember you are a tourist here. Tread lightly and leave no trash.

The Comet Narcissus

Don’t know how well you can see it on the 485px version but on the 1200px original you can see that the comet is a self portrait. Took me a while to get the lighting right, thank you photoshop. Wacom, too couldn’t have done it with a mouse.

There was a TV show, couple of nights back, where a man said, “There comes a time in every man’s life when he realizes he’s invisible to all attractive women.” British of course, in American TV all older characters are jokes. To which I’d add the fact of his invisibility comes long before his realization of it and in that time/space there is much embarrassment.

The telescope being upside down is on purpose. The handsome -and youthful- couple has no desire or need, reason to look at the aging/fading artist.

The original digression from reading a psych text to metaphor-ing an understanding of via image-ry to thinking that that might make a good drawing to actually making a drawing had a planets vs. comets theme. Thinking about planets staying in orbit because of a balance of momentum and gravity as a metaphor for people “libidinally cathected.” Thank you Hr. Dr. Freud, I now don’t have to embarrass myself by talking of love.

Thinking about how different is a comet, like planets in an orbit but an object not by its gravity but because of its coldness –a ball of ice and dirt, it is- and that coldness is only from its distance from the star it orbits.

With further cogitation, the metaphors kind of fell apart. I’ll not bore you with exactly how. But they held until the drawing was too far along not to finish.  So here it is.

The comet is now a metaphor for narcissism, which is a defensive position. After the optimism of desire fades into envy and before wisdom makes it yearning, the narcissist  says, but doesn’t really believe, “I’m better than that, I’m above all this,” and gets though it.

The desirer first thinks he can get what/who he desires but after multiple failures he loses that desire, but gains an anger, as he’s now envious of others’ successes. Finally the anger fades leaving just an aggregation of sadness for his loss, with a tail of pride.

The sadness is not mourning but melancholia. For with the former, there he could grieve his loss accept that it/she was here-then, it/she is now-there. Realize that both places are really here-now. Accept this and move on.  But with the latter, attempts to grieve fail because there’s no here-then to be here-now and now-there was there-then. he never really had what he feels he’s lost,. And pride won’t let him admit that.

I think about things i sorta/barely-if-at-all comprehend, because I read books over my pay grade. I do it to jiggle loose artsy stuff, which is generally all about me, whoever I am. Today it seems I’m a narcissistic melancholic, but that’ll change when I’m reading a different book. The above mentioned psych text is “On A Darkling Plain” edited by Ivan Ward. And I apologize in advance to those offended by my miss-constructions. But I also say to them: “Get a life.”

Quae Nocent Docent

Yes, many red-heads. You have a problem that? I don’t. The projection of the painting is a cut and paste of the mural from the ‘I didn’t get to Woodstock’ drawing a couple of posts back. It, in panel 1 is bright compared to the dark lecture hall. In panel 2 there’s a spot light that obscures as much as it illuminates the work. And in panel 3 there are multiple backlights but none on the art.

Panel 1 is subtitled Ars Gracia Ars, ‘Art for the sake of art’. The art here is being critiqued, compared and contrasted to only other art in a typical academic fashion. The just dating couple are, as well, wholly into themselves and only themselves.

Panel 2 is Caveat Emptor or ‘Let the buyer beware’. The art is now for sale, given a ‘cash value’ and compared to everything else in the real world.  Likewise the lovers are now married, more contract than couple.

Panel 3 is In Flagrante Delicto or ‘While the misdeed flames’ the couple becomes no more. And you could call what’s left in the frame a modernist abstraction or a post-modernist ex- [or dis-] traction; you could call it no art at all.

So what does it all mean? Stuff I could’ve learned in my youth had I been mature enough to put forth appropriate effort? A career I could’ve had had I been aggressive [and thick-skinned] enough? Or a mate for what ever reasons I don’t even now know I lack?

So … Absit invidia, readers, which means ‘envy apart’ or I mean you no harm.

Ps: the title of this rant [also the title of the poem at the end of it] means ‘things which injure, instruct’ or ‘no pain, no gain’ or even Nietzsche’s  ‘That which does not kill me makes me stronger.’ The epigraph is a plea for lost years from Virgil, also quoted by Kant. I admit I’ve not read any of either [read lots about Kant, tho’] and little of Coleridge.

O! mihi praeteritos referat si Jupiter annos!

Oh! might my ill-past hours return again!
No more, as then, should Sloth around me throw
Her soul-enslaving, leaden chain!
No more the precious time would I employ
In giddy revels, or in thoughtless joy,
A present joy producing future woe.
But o’er the midnight Lamp I’d love to pore,
I’d seek with care fair Learning’s depths to sound,
And gather scientific Lore:
Or to mature the embryo thoughts inclin’d,
That half-conceiv’d lay struggling in my mind,
The cloisters’ solitary gloom I’d round.
’Tis vain to wish, for Time has ta’en his flight —
For follies past be ceas’d the fruitless tears:
Let follies past to future care incite.
Averse maturer judgements to obey
Youth owns, with pleasure owns, the Passions’ sway,
But sage Experience only comes with years.

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1789

Its Own Wreck

A contemplation on a conundrum. An outsized fantasy, a muse that’s both and neither a model and a mate. A muse as a bridge, a relationship to relationships, oversized, impossible and unrealistic, inflated in value and ability to be that, a bridge stretching across and beyond his sort of real space. A selfobject if you’re into that sort of thing. Stretching from his fantasy within a fantasy (this drawing of a painting from life), filling his little room, to over and out the door into his depressive realistic view of not-his-space. There she’s a mate, as they all seem to be, with another.

“…to hope til Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates”
–p.b.shelley

I didn’t get to Woodstock

‘All around me are familiar faces
Worn out places, worn out faces
Bright and early for their daily races
Going nowhere, going nowhere
Their tears are filling up their glasses
No expression, no expression
Hide my head I want to drown my sorrow
No tomorrow, no tomorrow’

–Roland Orzabal

A friend told me my postings were too anonymous, well this one ain’t. The things: The stereo, the wok, the solitaire on the bed are all real as well as I can remember. Even the drum kit was real; I still have the bongos.

Ok, so they really didn’t look like this, parties in 1969. But they felt like this. Call it a time-lapse picture, many parties superimposed. Everybody paired off at some time or other, but here they seem to be all paired off at the same time. Except me.

In spite of this I felt like I belonged to something, paired off as they were they were still my friends. But then it was over. We got jobs and made families; we sometimes lost them and sometimes got/made new ones. We didn’t drift apart we rowed there.

Remember I’m drawing –it’s what I still do now like I did then- in 2009 looking back at 1969. now I see it as the beginning of the end. It didn’t seem like then.

“And I find it kinda funny
I find it kinda sad”

Both the epigraph and the above quote are from the song “Mad World” by Roland Orzabal. It’s certainly not a song from back when. I looked for songs from then, songs that evoke the feelings of the time, anthems even, but the lyrics isolated from those songs, those parties and those times just seem stupid now. “Mad World” gets it better, the looking back part anyway.

 

Labor Day

Artificial Ignorance

We are defined by the people we are near as much as we are defined by who we are inside ourselves. We are near more people at work –if we have a job- for more of our time than anywhere else these days.

As opposed to –literally- our families and our friends. Our families are the few people we see most days in rather ritual and habitual roles, other so-called family members are mere electronic notes replied to or not. Our friends, not of the co-worker sort, are few and far between. They can still be good friends. But our relationships with them are not as they were when we were young; our peers exert almost no pressure now.

Work took over, pushing family and friends aside, one could rationalize it by saying one worked for one’s family and co-workers were the new friends. This ‘worked’ for a while. But work is changing. Until recently it was, as above, family- and friend-like

But Families and friends hung together in spite of it all. They still do. No longer so with work. When things get tough family and friends pull together; but at work they get torn apart. There it’s now more like a crowd of strangers running for their lives.

Artificial Inhumanity

You’ve seen the memos, been to the meetings. We’re still referred to as a ‘team;’ ‘together we’ll remain strong, we’ll survive these troubled times, blah, blah, blah’ they say. But we are really not a wolf-like pack but a frightened herd.

We are treated as a lesser species, a means to an end because most of us work for a corporation, which is only in it for itself, which in spite of its human faces, lacks any human feelings, morality, or empathy.

Cultural Insanity

The corporation is an artificial intelligence that we invented just like gods before it and computers after. And like the other two it’s a mixed blessing for us bags of water, becoming less mixed all of the time.

Shortly after the beginning there was language. Then there were voices that came from nowhere in particular; certainly not from that bag of water sitting across the fire. First we said they came from the trees, mountains streams, anywhere at all really, and then we made scale models of ourselves to give the voices homes. After all we were really all that spoke, voices that resemble ours should come from sources that resemble us, nicht wahr?

As life got more complicated the gods, as we now called the voices, multiplied and the personal god of a tribe leader was listened to by all to the detriment of one’s own god. Under pain of death, we kept our gods to ourselves, and lo and behold they became our thoughts.

Our thoughts now free from god duties could fantasize and remember. We could spacialize time. We could plan and deceive because we were now a unique point of view, whoopee!

Civilization, a social ordering, distinct from, yet contiguous with the individuals in it began to form. God-king became god and king with each building ever more complex institutions to support the two separate concepts. As they absorbed nearby gods and kings the hierarchies grew, then broke up, there were soon many gods and kings again and so on, at much loss of life.

Corporations and Our Discontents

Other institutions began to form, often to protect groups of people from king- and god-based institutions and soon these groups dominated the earth. Today we call these governments and companies.

Companies are essentially real humans telling other real humans what to do. And in the best of them all profit. Real human motives run the show; personal greed is –sort of- kept on a short leash by law and public outrage as well as to a lesser degree, personal altruism.

Out of companies grew corporations. Not really grew, they were invented to protect small groups of individuals –at great cost to other larger groups- from governments and other companies. They are therefore our second form of artificial intellect after the gods, but unlike the gods these creatures are still with us.

Unlike companies which are tools for humans. Corporations use humans like tools. They are, too, a separate and superior species from us; they treat us, when we are workers, like cows to be milked. And when we are customers, like deer to be hunted. In the end, both cows and deer are slaughtered and butchered for profit.

Some times humans introject their corporate superiors to the point of forgetting they are human. But the corporation doesn’t forget, it has no empathy with, even sympathy for us. We are all cows and deer to it; no matter what our titles are. We are all expendable. There is no second from the bottom line.

Happy Labor Day.

Intimate Relations in Cyberspace

“Pinball wizard
S’got such a supple wrist. . .
. . .He ain’t got no distractions
Can’t hear those buzzers and bells,
Don’t see lights a flashin’”
                                                     –- P. Townsend

One’s mouth is a useful organ; with it you eat and sometimes breathe. Useful for sex, too, I hear.  It’s also a sense organ and the only one that’s a two-for-one; it’s the receptive organ of taste, and a generative organ of sound. With it you can scream.

The “Blogosphere” is not that far out into cyber-space. It’s here in my room, on my monitor, I can touch it. If you scream here, people could still hear you. That is, if they can be bothered.

As a blogger, do I care if anybody’s out there? If they are listening?

Sometimes yes: I‘m saying, ‘this I believe.’ which leads to the questions; do you believe it too? Or not? Are either, or neither, of us right? I hope for an answer.

And sometimes no: It’s also a therapy — “Vie gehen Sie, Herr Dr. Blogg?” –  simply a way to get something off you chest, cheaper than a shrink and, in my experience, as effective. Sorry Dr. Blogg.

There is no body language in cyberspace like there is in the “Carnalsphere.” In a blog you can’t see if fellow bloggers couldn’t care less. No eye contact either. No attractive other clearly not attracted; a glance emptying, a gaze gone as quickly as it appeared.

But there could be “I” contact if it wasn’t all about me.

I was thinking about adding the “See me, feel me, touch me, heal me.” quote also from “Tommy” but I decided against it, as it seems a bit pretentious, even for me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Subtle Bodies

The title “Subtle Bodies” has nothing to do with the fringe/esoteric religio-philosophic term. It refers to the women in each of the panels. They are bodies and they are subtle: difficult to perceive or understand, perhaps mysterious or ingenious.

Maybe eidolon might be a better term, a ghost/ideal in ancient Greek, which is an odd combo, don’t you think? But that they are, apparitions, shades (skia in transliterated Greek) of lovers who have left (ghosts) or never were (ideals) but who haunt none the less.

Skia hang out in the Asphodel Fields, the place, down there, where the neither bad nor good dead reside. Tartarus and Elysium being, respectively, the places for those kinds of souls. There is no pain in the Asphodel Fields, but neither is there any joy. Silence reins there as the dead only whisper or speak in “subtle” voices. It’s a gray place, too, neither bright nor dark. There’s enough light to not run into ones fellow skia but not enough to recognize him or her.

Sometimes I think it’s the other way around; it is I who live in “Asphodel Fields,” as a kind of a condominium community for inactive seniors. And there I feel the skias’ presence as willful hauntings when it is really all my doing. In that case call my home “Dysthymia Acres.” I’m one of the skia, not them! I’m in the dimly lit place and the former/never lovers are in their bright new or otherwise separate-from-me lives, too bright and too interesting to see me at all.

These drawings are pictures of my rooms. The bedroom is as it is, the others are less so, but using my real furniture anyway, ‘cept the sofa-bed. Yes, I have a Snoopy soap dish. The eidoloi (a guess at the plural), the subtle bodies are a mix of memories and fantasies of the possible, but not probable kind. In other words, the barely visible sketches of naked women are both ghosts and ideals, both haunting and inspiring my asphodel-like abode. Call it “Dysthymia Acres,” if you want to be more 21st century.

“Thy Body permanent,
The Body lurking there within thy Body,
The only purport of the Form thou art–the real I myself,
An image, an Eidólon.”

  From Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

“By a route obscure and lonely,
    Haunted by ill angels only,
    Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT,
    On a black throne reigns upright,
    I have reached my home but newly
    From this ultimate dim Thule.”

From Dream-land by E. A. Poe

“…the
figurehead, ‘an idol or eidolon …
a mermaid, Thetis upon the prow.’”

 From Helen in Egypt by H.D.

Becoming Conscious

This is the second drawing that began with a ‘me’ in it. I took the me out when I was quite a long way into drawing it. I actually posted the first one, and then reposted the fixed version beside it. This one I caught in time. The ‘me’ was on the ladder in both the upper and lower parts holding a notebook with letterforms of an unknown type and language on the open pages.

The icono-symbol of ‘attractive woman’ was naked as well in the first several tries at this art. The current version is five. The nakedness, like the ‘me’, seemed unnecessary, even wrong, regarding the meaning of it. So I dressed her.

So what exactly is that meaning? The title is ‘becoming conscious.’ is that the meaning?  Kinda. Look at the empty office in the top picture. Is it the unconscious mind? It looks like a series of disconnected ‘nows,’ each one next to the next, but each totally separate. And what’s done in each, done by following un-disobey-able rules, each action unknowable to the next, even tho the rules are the same. Is that what our unconscious minds are like?

But there are ladders leading up to a different point of view. Is that consiousness, where a bigger picture can be seen, the past and the future — time made space-like? Where a separate world is created, not merely reacted to, a world of fantasy and memory, a world observed?

I was on one of the ladders in earlier versions, but I had to take ‘I’ out, for how can I draw my ‘I’? Drawing the ‘me’ is easy, I can draw the inside of my persona, just as I write what I think and I can draw the outside of it just by turning it around in my creative,  conscious mind and drawing what I ‘see’.  But if I can’t see my observing ‘I’ as an observed ‘it’, I can’t draw it.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s a problem of language, that if I understood a language that didn’t have those pesky 1^st 2^nd and 3^rd person things I could make sense out of it all. But other times I feel that without such language parts to place I, you and them there can be no consciousness at all.

Is it that consciousness is unknowable as the concept of 1^st person singular? Is it un-sense-able and un-feel-able too, is it only an intuition and a fleeting one at that. Sorry about seeming to be in Jungian types, I don’t mean to be as I’m using those four words as in plain language.

Back to the art. The top part of the drawing is the non-conscious part of my mind. The attractive woman is only half there; she’s physically breaking through the top of the frame and metaphorically into consciousness. As is the ‘me’, who has climbed up the ladder out of view. But we see what he saw – her body. Her body, naked under clothes, not a paradox as such but a fantasy icono-symbolized –instinct made conscious as he climbed up.

See the little pen? It says ‘I was here’ it’s a potential graffito or signature (another word built from the word sign).  It’s a flat top lever-fill celluloid or resin-bodied fountain pen, I don’t own one but I want to. it’s a fantasy in a fantasy. It’s an art-sex metaphor too, I’m sure you’ve already figured that out. A create-desire one too.

On the lower picture, we see the top half of the upper picture’s attractive woman. Her bottom half was in the upper picture’s office metaphor of the unconscious which is her private – but unknown to her — world. Her top half is in a public – observing and observed — world.

But wait, in the upper part we, the me/I as creator and you as consumer/collector of, commentator on the art-thing, that office of the upper picture is in our heads as well as it is hers. But, again, since she is as contiguous with you as I am, the one office scene is it for all of us. Sad for me, that that contiguity does not extent from her to me.  My understanding of Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious is not the same as that contiguity

There are two attractive women in the lower picture, one inside the other. The smaller is the extension into consciousness of the one in the top picture. The larger one is the exterior of the interior that we see up there. It’s my theory of mind: I believe that in all of you fairly autonomous objects that sort of look and act like the one associated with my I — the one that my I calls home – is an I similar to mine.

And just look at what she’s doing! She’s going from money and that’s a small step from going for status, going for an alpha male companion or going for survival. They are just instincts acted out, tit for tat, literally. I don’t blame her for the all damage she’s done; I understand the need to survive. We all do and so we act without thinking (her lover, too, as he has no head); that’s your collective unconscious for you. I’m just a little either envious or jealous, but can’t remember which is which.

Then there is the hat that’s all that’s left of the ‘me’. A hat that hides the head that is where the office from the upper picture, the conscious and unconscious mind is, same drab colors too, ‘cept a flash of money, or envy green. With an equivalent — remember my theory of mind – my/his hatch and ladder to her hatch and ladder.

One more thing, a paradox; if the bottom half of the woman in the upper picture is contiguous with top half of the woman in the lower picture, her hand can’t be in two places at once. Her hand gripping the ladder in the upper picture can’t be waving in the lower.  I don’t know what this means.

‘Let us be philosophers! Let us be mummies!’

“Maintaining cheerfulness in the midst of a gloomy task, fraught with immeasurable responsibility, is no small feat; and yet what is needed more than cheerfulness? Nothing succeeds if prankishness has no part in it.

 The title on this drawing is a little pretentious, “‘je me verrai, je me lirai, je m’extasierai et je dirai: possible, que j’aie eu tant d’esprit?’[‘I shall see myself, I shall read myself, I shall go into ecstasies, and I shall say: is it possible that I should have had so much wit?’]” so call me on it…

 … as if there were any of you out there paying any attention to me. A fellow blogger said that “they don’t give a crap about you.” He said all they want to hear about is themselves. So true. Way back in high school I was told that I was an egoist, “Self-interest is worth as much as the person who has it.” and well  – as Freddie went on to say, for better or worse  — I still am. But so are all of you.

…actually i called myself on it. i subbed out the original ‘art’ for this one (the little b/w is of the earier piece)  this ital. graph, too. i’ve taken the me out of the picture itself, i’m still here and there and oddly still with you non-existant souls, standing in front of the thing as if it were real art in a gallery or home or something, as opposed to my idealized studio. the computer, lamp, desk and chair are real but the room and view are not… 

 So that’s what this drawing is all about; a twilight of the idols, little god-objects. the ending of their power or their time in the sun. “All that philosophers have handled for thousands of years have been concept-mummies; nothing real escaped their grasp–alive.  When these honorable idolaters of concepts worship something, they kill it and stuff it; they threaten the life of everything they worship…”

 I thought my drawings had power, which they were like idols and through them I could get the gods to get me what I thought/think I wanted. “All passions have a phase when they are merely disastrous, when they drag down their victim with the weight of stupidity…” You can’t always get what you want… Then there is the constant change, now a status quo, and the thinking that there can still be progress, now obsolete. The futile idol worship is wearing me down so I’ll stop before I become nothing.

 … My drawings, my former idols now mere toys,  are still fun to make, even ones about how drawings will not get me what I think I want, what I desire, dream up, fabricate as an ideal. “‘All truth is simple.’ Is that not a double lie?” I still draw some at my job and I’m paid and that’s the only feedback I get there. One of the classes I teach is about drawing so there there’s a little more money and some feedback.

 But I thought the internet — the blog-o-sphere — would be different that posting my art and commenting on others posted are would get some conversations going. But not so far. Cyberspace for me is as silent as the real world, sorry to say.

  If my art is not useful to get me comradery, respect and/or admiration as idols, means to connect with the powers that dole out such things, are supposed to do. Then can it be useful as therapy? “There are cases in which we are like horses, we psychologists, and become skittish: we see our own shadow looming up before us. A psychologist must turn his eyes from himself to see anything at all.”  (re-read ital insert, above) Knowing myself should feel and do good, shouldn’t it? It should lead to a broader understanding, an understanding of  the others, my fellow egoists.  And by understanding them, can I switch gears, change course and get comradery, respect and/or admiration from them?  i doubt it,  but “…art has a right to pure foolishness — as a kind of vacation for spirit, wit, and feeling.” 

Quotes in red – as well as the title of this text —  are from “Götzen-Dämmerung” (Twilight of the Idols) by Friedich Nietzsche. It’s the last book he saw published before he went “mad.” He wrote it in a week, in late summer, 1888. They are from assorted web site translations.

Ample Waves of Gain

I thought I could step back and make a drawing that wasn’t about “art, arbeit and amour.” You know what I’m talking about; a drawing about art about art, about coupling and connecting, about not getting any whatever any is. I succeeded a little; just try to find a “me” in this thing.

The machine is a combine; it’s a perfect symbol for America — see the built-in title and the flag. It’s a symbol for what’s right with this country: hard work, self-sufficiency, ingenuity etc.  But this one is also a symbol for what’s wrong; a combine requires two engines; one moving it along and the other harvesting as it does. The what’s wrong is the disconnect between the two. We, wage slaves, are absolute necessary, we are the 1^st engine — if we stop pulling, the machine stops moving forward and soon there’s nothing here left to harvest, not that we’ll get any of it.

The second engine is the mutual admiration society of two; justice and the corporation. They’ve lost their attributes; she her blindfold, scale, robes and he his human face. The corporation often has a human face but lacks all humanity otherwise. It has as much possibility for kindness, empathy, creativity, altruism etc. as does a lizard, in spite of appearances. And what is justice without her symbols?  She’s a naked woman; she could be a goddess or a prostitute. The corporation tells us she’s the former but uses her as the latter.

Yes I know the 2^nd engine can’t work. But isn’t your reality testing sufficiently suspended if you go along with the rest of the drawing that that’s only a baby step further?

Imagine the wage slaves dropping their ropes and moving on to some place where they would get some of the harvest for themselves. Would the happy couple fondle on; would their reciprocal engine dig a hole; would they, then, sink beneath those ample waves of gain?