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Print This PostI was concerned about not knowing. Concerned about not being known. Yet I did little to be known outside of persevering with the work. The work being whatever I was doing at the time in my virtual creative space. Mind, body. Divine intervention. Spiritual revelation. The meaning of every day was living every day as if to make it your last. Life was simple. Inevitable. We invited chaos, we invented dogma, we were what we were trying to be but its presence when achieved was fleeting as the collision of particles in an accelerator. That was yesterday.
The smoke was good, the powder okay. In good company we passed days and nights, weeks and months, then years, basking in the nexus of our personal style of aesthetic nihilism. Tomato Soup. “I’m not going to talk to you, either.” I pushed colored wax as far as it would go, canvas board after canvas board, tracing skylines and events, burnishing sunrises and sunsets, until water could not penetrate the multi-colored skin of fingers calloused as the attitudes of even the most insignificant bit player in our amateur reproduction of something someone thought might once have been important. Our version of “Goodbye Columbus” was going under a spell.
The supernumerary muttered an utterance that seemed to bubble from a guttural froth, mimicking the personification of ghosts of Christmases Past at holiday parties for forgotten forebears, where children of badness danced on their backs in four poster beds with the eyes of the world upon them. The clatter came with exaggeration about sordid events, including tales of blood-letting and blood drinking, unfounded, unsubstantiated, untrue, but critical to the end of times as the sodden sought to crawl from their netherworld and spring themselves upon the unsuspecting. Broken nails can be so annoying.
If it looked like I was praying I might have been, an agnostic’s prayer for deliverance from the emptiness of nothing, of the blank page, the darkness behind closed eyes, the hidden scenes yet to be played out on the subterranean stage under the charging hues of hot lights in an empty theater where there was no one to scream “Fire” and the place burned down without the dreams escaping. On Long Street the barber whittled his bas reliefs while the chair sat empty. A more colorful life on Friday night was the Cat’s Meow, but the carvings ended up in museums.
The studio by the rail yards went empty, but not before poetry and prints were married by the Minister of Galleries, posted on the wailing wall of expectations lacking will to live, and distributed as Art in America. But before there was any kind of web. Those strange and sticky strands hold up today. On the red ground above Negril a small complex of clapboard sheds resting on cinderblocks overlooks the family graveyard, beginning with one killed in Kingston. It’s a deniable aphorism that time spent alone is in preparation, if for no other purpose.
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