The beginning of a New Sanity

I am going to kick off this blog with a drawing and two poems. I only began making visual art as a conscious activity about four months; I will explain the overall nature of my artistic endeavors shortly. The first poem I wrote some 3 months ago and another I wrote a few days ago. All three works of art speak for themselves, but I would also like to speak for them, thereby providing multiple lenses through which a reader/viewer may assess the value and import of my work. These secondary descriptive lenses are by no means conceptually obligatory or semantically prior to the original creative acts they append. Indeed, you can completely ignore the commentary - or just enjoy the commentary as art and ignore the originals!

This drawing belongs to what I consider my early phase of drawing and painting: I had just begun to branch out from pure gestural scribbling and to explore more articulated conceptual themes and color patterns, textures, abstract movements and rhythms. I think it is appropriate to explain that while I do regard my work as "Art" in the sense that it has aesthetic values and spiritual values I seek to impart to an unknown audience, I do not limit the quality or quantity of those aesthetic values to those I experienced during the creation stage. See and discover what you like. There are and there are not "things" to see in this drawing and many others to come. I would also like to note that I view my visual art-making as an important psycho-spiritual activity that helps me to open myself up to the more intuitive, purely visio-spatial side of total being, which I have through most of my life largely ignored in favor of the literary, philosophical, and analytical aspects of total being. Hopefully my work can be a similar gateway for other like-minded souls. One last note: this work of art, and many others I have made, fall into a distinct branch of art that may or may not exist for other people: it is Dream Consciousness Art - that is, art that seeks to express what the pure dreaming/subconscious part of my being/our being is in contact with at all times. I typically allow only a minimal amount of planning and rational/analytical and self-critical thought to enter into the creative process. There is no correcting, no erasing, except to contact and extend a Dream Consciousness movement or energy pattern. Words and known images may enter into the fray, but not by conceptual plan or schema - more by impulse and listening to the silence, and allowing my hands and eyes in the creative act to reign sovereign over the whole process.
                                                                                                                                                                  

 The first poem is about personal transformation: my own transformation. I have come to recognize that the self is a construction - it is a narrative. And we get to play with that narrative and change it as we can over time. In my life I seek now to forge a distinct but malleable 'mask' I can 'wear' as an artist, intellectual, poet, translator, and philosopher. This mask is that of Manbeard. The poem is an introduction to the ways of Manbeard (but don't take it too literally. There is a "real' person lurking underneath - isn't there?). By forging and donning such a mask I simultaneously seek to call into question the socio-economic statuses the aforementioned roles play in our society, to re-explore those statuses for our New Age - and to call attention to both the simultaneity and distance between the 'I' behind my chosen mask and the roles this mask is to play.
                                                                                                                                                                  

Manbeard

Manbeard,

Conviction is your mother.

Desperation is your father.

Terror and dreamsmoke combine

To make truth built on lies.

Manbeard, god of truth and lies,

Of secret imagined violence and public peace.

Mortal, the god who enables,

Who bears witness

And brings forth the possible into life.

The god who sends forth unity and love communion with the front hand

With the back hand he summons lust and lies,

Who looks unafraid on death,

On life,

In the hidden depths of souls and bids them come forth with their deepest urgings

By hook and by crook,

By swindle and by swag.

Manbeard waits for understanding in mesh,

In mush,

And knows that escape is

Standing at the grave of sanity.

Collecting consciousness,

Wearing identity’s contorting mask,

He says goodbye.

He says hello. 

                                                                                                                                                                  

This next poem is a poem I actually wrote for someone, someone I may or may not love, depending on the season and the light, but always someone I care about - and someone I always find physically and spiritually attractive, but also unattainable.

                                                                                                                                                                  

For Sarah

You are the bird who cannot be held,

Floating on savage wings of unspeakable

Beauty.

Perhaps I am the one who will hold you next.

You will not look me in the eye, but your feathers rain down on me

And your flight makes shadows over my shoulders.

Do you long for home with your wings outstretched and your heart stumbling

From this long peregrination through the bleeding sky?

I know,

I know,

Don’t tell me anything,

You must keep it all inside that pure chest of yours.

My hands are here should you wish to land,

My head raised, ears waiting for your piercing call

Should you wish to scream of defeat

Or whisper of your dreams.

I seek a home as well as you,

No cages or owners,

nothing but the wide and playful sky

Full of memories and victory.

And across the broad sweep of crumbling loves,

We can spy one another searching for home.

No answers to offer have I, no directions,

But open arms

And eyes waiting to meet your stare.