Quick tune-up

How to reclaim your art practice from the wanderings of the evil eye…sharing in community to ward off further as It is Out on the Town right now:

Once you’ve gotten over your life as a Zucchini (inevitable passage point), listen to Frank Sinatra singing My Way about 500+ x a day. 

Bonus content: Three Coins in the Fountain (Dean Martin version, he needs redemption and calling on him can help do it!)

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Placeholder for future discussion of Howardena Pindell, Agent Orange, green juices at Gary Null's and car accidents. A Pindell I haven't forgotten, Songlines: Labyrinth (Versailles), from a 2018 show at Matthew Marks, Painting Now and Forever...

Reruns

After a little while, having turned in my thesis, writing feels good again, though it coincides with a wave of asphyxiation and despair surrounding my paintings and visual projects, very normal, and certainly helped by keeping the taxi light of language turned on. I am nonetheless as terrified as ever that it is the language light that people like me for, and that I will forever be catching up within the paintings themselves.

That said, my work is always and necessarily about potentials. In spiritual practice, potentials are both imperative (choose your own adventure) and misleading—once I trust and allow these to flower (knowing it is a choice, to allow), they often lead me skipping down the primrose path (borrowing from Mearsheimer on Ukraine...how cursed), to miss who people really are, seeing so very much who they could be, their full expanse. It is nice then, with people, to operate more from non-intervention. In art, though, at least the kind I do, you intervene, make things happen, produce. In that sense, potentials are ideal, they keep things rolling. Within the fixity of production, they enable the kind of perma-protean state I love. 

My truly favorite thing—a lot of people's favorite thing—is to move letters and lines and ideas around or across an open surface: a canvas, a digital page, in the realm of conversation, energetic propinquity, whatever. That is where I am at my best, most integrated. The serene agape of whittling a work down to a totalizing (totemic?) nub. Giacometti's ravenous thumbs, sculpting without end. 

So unsurprisingly I become agitated when, for reasons often celestial and providential, that surface grows musty or closed in, when a tenet of total freedom does not seem possible, or overwhelms while failing to lobotomize—as the way one ought to feel, for instance, during sex. Being in pursuit of that strain of half-liberated, half-lobotomized joy, downloaded from the skies in thanks, the lows are low and the highs high. Why not solve for the polarities within. Not that I even have a Big Joan and a little joan, per say. Too twentieth century! Today's splits are not spatial, but simultaneous. Repeating myself, on the same old tip, one walks about in equanimity, seemingly so neutral, with an inner life all the more congested. My Zoomer problem, and ours. How's that for vintage.

By spring—painting the outer in stripes starker and more vivid.

Rainbows

Rainbows are these days very important. It started about two weeks ago. Don’t yet ask me why, an early conjecture would be that some beyond are perhaps using them to communicate with us. Then there are the old symbolic meanings. What comes after the storm. An arc of hope with a fat hazy middle. Contours faint, usually we only get a glimmer. But now, a whole story. Of peaceability possible again, albeit somewhat at a distance. Auguring light. Leaving all shades of news aside, thinking instead of D. H. Lawrence, his first big novel, from 1915: unconceivable changes weathered, so much technological thrumping and still, the single human heart grows wild and through its reaches, generations go on…

Our spoons

Some questions. Is it that certain forms of socialization, concatenations of people, hello You meet You, no longer exist or that I and my fellows are at a remove from them. (Have I placed myself at a purposeful remove). What am I supposed to learn there. Old tweet of, who watches the watchers. Remembering Pigozzi from the papers of my childhood. Passive to everything. Taking it all in. Surely one day I would head to Ibitha…it all seemed familiar and aging I felt, Bah, who needs those games. Though as late as 2022 wondering why has Bob Colacello gone unadopted by the youth, but by the monied ones, yes already lest you forget, and in all other cases perhaps because of evils we’re not privy to. But Zoomers can sense things. Remembering the heroine in Barbara Comyns’ The Juniper Tree. Remembering Marianne, whose song “Morning Sun” I was dispatching to friends as usual in days prior.

To hold myself to

Haven’t worked for about a week over a month or so and maybe longer than that, in the proper way, I mean, with intention, writing yes but no not painting not the real stuff the stuff that matters and from which I endlessly run, procrastinate, redirect, inventing or rather asking the universe for filler tasks because I am terrified to get back on the bike and somehow Joan Mitchell is breaking my heart again, the fact of her, on top of which the displaced worry as to whether I have a heart worth breaking at all and when will it be for real though, falling in the rink Little Women style, with some non-imaginal non-lecherous authentic party. The Crown is coming up again so is Kimmy Schmidt and the Kino cigarettes song not yet feeling torturous but almost.

Manifold

Can’t stop thinking about the third secret of Fatima, so casually messianic though predating our full cognizance of that arc (ongoing) but to which everyone has, for the last few years, been unwittingly referring by ‘that secret third thing.’ The secret third thing being really…well, Russia, so the prophecy goes, and she is everywhere, in manifold private ways I need not explain, see for yourself, and in others that will soon perhaps become common conversation topics. Those steeped in US consciousness (retweets are not endorsements) think of Russia as the second thing (MAD, brinksmanship, proxy wars) and China as the since-awakened third, identifications that, real talk, already shifted years ago having been useful covers for a time in belying the true shallowness of oppositions, binaries pre-loaded. Such a switchover allowed the secret to begin to transcend material cording constraints and lend itself to subtler waves of emanation. And now it calls collect! A maypole, where networked axes triangulate at some tall yet half-hidden core. Meanwhile, listening to Kino and Shostakovich on loop.

Tertiary definitions

My father always laughs about my approach to language, saying I use words for their third dictionary definition, the last or least case in which one would apply. Just as in a household of girls, he liked to remark, it would always be the third outfit of the twenty tried on that would ultimately be chosen for an occasion.

I realized today I’ve been using the phrase pound of flesh incorrectly in regular deployment, that I have, without knowing it, resorted to a third definition of my own divining. I had thought that the term meant one's sense of private sacrifice, the flesh you yourself are willing to give up or allocate to the obtaining of a certain goal, but rather, as it turns out, it really involves the opposite. It is, in fact, a matter of entitlement, a tribute you demand of someone else, after Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, a piece of security to be collected at a necessarily ugly cost to others.

That I had been relying on an inversion, in the positive, of this expression so often in recent weeks, and that I finally caught myself doing so, feels somehow telling: denoting a new territory for re-development, this being a will to always navigate from inside out, to see myself first as culpable and then to meet the world bracingly, wounds in hand. Rather than, as pound of flesh would imply, doubting Thomas, poking at the world's wounds as if to say, I want something from you, I want more, I do not minimize my stake in this experience, I ask for what I am worth. 

And so that private, third pound, of a self-brutalizing with joy, anticipating some obscure negatory redemption later on, turns out to have been, basically, an obfuscation, it's like a liquid bandage on the true agency made possible by actually asserting what is owed, cutting through to the proof, no pushover mode. And to do so is awakening too, in burning off an unwillingness to speak one's pound, having lived for too long with whatever elephant has sat squatting in the room. 

At the Met bookshop a few weeks back, opening quickly and at random to this passage in Divine Stories / Divyavadana Classics of Indian Buddhism, on King Candraprabha being willing to cross over, when someone else (a brahman) calls for his literal pound of flesh:

Listen, honorable deities, antigods, heavenly birds, celestial musicians, and kinnaras living in the ten directions! Here in this park I will make a sacrifice, a great sacrifice, a complete sacrifice of my own head.

And I will sacrifice my own head, not for the sake of royal power, not for reaching heaven, not for personal pleasure, not for becoming a Sakra, not for becoming a Brahma, and not for the victory of a wheel-turning king. It is for no other reason than that I may attain unsurpassed perfect awakening and so subdue those beings who are unsubdued, pacify the unpacified, help to cross over those who have not crossed over, liberate the unliberated, console the unconsoled, and lead to final nirvana those who have not reached final nirvana.

"By this truth, this vow of truth, may my efforts be successful! And when I have passed into final nirvana, may there be relics the size of mustard seeds. And here in the middle of Maniratnagarbha Park, may there be a great stüpa that is the most distinguished of all stupas.

And may those beings who are exhausted and who want to venerate this great shrine go there, and when they see it—the most distinguished of all stüpas and filled with relics—may their exhaustion cease. And when I have passed into final nirvana, may crowds of people come to my shrines, make offerings, and become intent on heaven and liberation."

I have no interest in sacrificing my head, nor in asking of others their flesh (as our culture is wont to do). But I am interested in growing my heart. 

Nathalie G

In the shower this morning the crystallized message of Nathalie Granger (1972), and why, lately and again Duras, cinema of my new I AM mantra: one of the girls.