Poetic musing
© 2000 Philip E. Harding
Epic
Monumental vision. Superbly realized art. Eternal archetypes brought forward into solid life supporting patterns to sustain and soulfully enrich all life.
A quality of whole life. Brought forward for liberation and spread across the earth in usable patterns of ideas for all to use. A formation of or a clearing away to reveal true faith, authentic design in the arts, right livelihood.
Calm, clear, revealing. A work to the point. Complete from the beginning. Complete in the middle and until the end complete. Complete in part and whole. It is life and it fills the dead rock and earth with itself. The force of life itself fills and patterns the dead and lifeless. It fills the body with life. It transforms gross elements into living breathing body.
From a revealing work in the arts to a way of eating, sleeping, exercising and contemplating complete. It enters and vitalizes. It removes the blocks and restores and creates.
Am I pushing it? Maybe. Maybe I need to.
Need to reach.
There is wax in my ear.
Seven to ten years of coffee and candy
on my breath
I can hear the music but it is
a long way off.
Sunday Jan 12, 1992
lightened sky
trimming the edges of morning clouds
frost air
trimming the walks and cars.
Inside there is the clutter of a way
of life. A way of thinking and acting
that creates wonderful things but leaves
a trail of tools and trimmings, unshelved
books and open cassette boxes, adhesives and
cleaners and piles of clothes.
The only sound is the aquarium air pump.
No passing buses to shake my house.
I don't feel particularly satisfied.
This particular combination of shelving and seating
and layout space has become cramped.
There is dust on everything. I feel tired.
Not at all like doing anything about it.
There are pains in my arms that never seem to
go away. The garden is frozen over. I can't
lose myself there today. Something aches
inside my head. It makes me want to claw
my skull open to scratch it.
It is no wonder I seldom rise this early when
my mind runs down tracks such as these.
A gathering
of myself
on a mountain
A letting go
A picking up
what I wanted to do
who I wanted to be
examinations
what is left
and who
I open the door
on my own house of cards
tonight
a clearing
in the middle
God this hurts
I feel like I've been participating in something
I have no business enjoying. This is not my
life at all. Mine is bloody, broken, shot to hell.
It was kind of fun
pretending to be
just a guy
but war
comes back around,
and torture.
You might want to turn up the heat tonight.
It is going to get a lot colder before
spring comes back around.
I don't know what happened.
I don't want anything anymore.
Emptiness is here for me for now
and I just sit for hours
wondering why I am alive.
Why I don't just die.
Perhaps another Tonight show monologue will help
to distract me from the mystery.
There seems to be a drag on the goal,
obscuring the goal. As if the
method or path to the goal was only
for the benefit of the various distractions.
As if success was more money for the
desires, the lusts and hobbies.
By the light of a single fluorescent tube
I am writing but not easily.
Empty space has swept back across my life.
If there is a dance I can not hear the music.
Winter is here. Like the rest of my life
the car is hard to start.
The shape of avoidance and denial.
(but you can get there from here.)
I was broke.
I was stolen.
Now I pack my bag for the journey
into the twilight cave.
Steam rises off my breath.
I can see for a hundred miles
but I look down and descend.
Not the first
but willingly so
in the pit
I know
I wait for myself.
Blood on the step
Grief runs through me
Affliction
and still I go
weeping.
Why am I able to see this
And yet unable to act - on that.
There is a mountain road.
But I have only seen mountains in pictures.
I have curled up into a ball to sleep
all day. I don't want to look anymore.
A slow comfortable death.
Summer '94
Distressed. I feel a peak of it. like
I'm ready to snap. I don't know what
to do. I feel immobilized. Unable to do
anything. Ready to get drunk. I
don't want to die but when one is
in despair, it feels like an option.
I am so tired. I feel so out of
control of my life. Pushed around
by my wants and needs. Needs I
can't meet, wants I can't fulfill. Hot.
Tired. My head feels like it wants to burst
open. I can only breathe through one
nostril at any one time. I would like
to curl up and sleep forever. Or
until someone comes to buy my art.
To provide some means of creating
again. The problem with napping, with
actually sleeping is that nothing is ever
different when I wake up.
The Japanese thing. When you are
defeated, and there is no hope of escape,
then there is some honor in death.
The mountain?
I seem to have taken up reidence in
a hut in the foot hills where I can
minimize the pain.
blue and green
abstraction and illustration
cold feet and a bowl of vegetables
these are the fish
those are the trees
and if we don't hurry
there will be nothing left but television
What caused the mutation? Who initiated the change?
There are so many birds I must
chase them away from the feeder.
Submerged I rake the weeds
Salted I cover the sky
Formed cold I squirm in the dust
Tired?
Mortally.
I'm not excited by my goals.
They are distant and abstract.
Millions? What on earth for.
For earth.
For a place beyond the fences where signs do not apply.
My shelves are loaded with book I have read
or want to read.
Tonight they are far away.
I don't know anything.
Years of study don't seem to apply.
Years of history don't help me.
Some things change;
some things remain the same.
Archetypes and entropy.
Patterns emerge
some fluid ...some fixed.
Intellect and intuition.
A priori designs and spontaneous renderings.
Countless variations on a theme.
Salt and tissue,
hand print in the sand.
Pains in my flesh
with yet a dream of release.
I have generated this pattern
but I'm not sure where to take it from here.
It is a layer of patterns bound by proportion but now what?
Another layer of pattern? An old
spatial stand by? It is a good
start. Very decorative.
Perhaps too much so.
I am very tired. I feel beat up. I feel
defeated. My mind is spinning on but
my body is wiped out. What is more,
the future looks quite brutal from here.
Hope is just these,
abstractly.
Anyway ,I breath
deeply.
This pain is real,
but so is the garden.
And it is not just here but it
goes and goes.
I close my eyes and feel the way of it,
the weight of it.
The opportunity.
If I go I'll still be here.
If I stay, so there.
So what anyway.
I feel the toxins working their way.
My long fingers tire of the pen
but my mind pushes them on,
pushes it on.
So what now?
Maybe a little less would be appropriate.
What ever happens does.
No point in killing oneself
for an experience of life.
I can still see the mountain
but how to climb it?
I have selected a quiet empty place to brood
off the trail.
A spinning head.
No way out that I can see.
Or should I say I don't want to take
the way that presents itself.
The night grows later.
I am angry. Angry at this town, at life.
Angry at myself.
I feel like there must be a solution
I can't see.
What is wrong with picture: A two day art fair
where a mini-concession nets over $3500.00
selling sodas and ice cream and the best
artists on the site don't make enough to
cover expenses. An art fair run by a woman
who doesn't hang original art in her
quarter million dollar home but actually hangs
paintings on black velvet and wildlife lithographs.
I've been working too hard. The worst part,
the hardest part, has not been
making art, it is trying to market it to the
philistines in this town.
I feel helpless. Every mental pathway I try
tracking out to a solution dead ends.
At least I know what is not working.
But you know what is the hardest part
about doing a show where nothing sells?
Going home and making more art.
My heart is in ruins,
full of thwarted desire and fatigue.
My goals and ambitions have washed away.
What do I have the time and money and will to do any more?
The day has been physical
I can feel it in my hands, legs and back.
I want to slip away.
I want something to make me feel better.
Some new distraction.
If I was still using drugs, I'd say it was a smoke
or a drink that I needed.
I feel depressed. I would go to bed but
I'm not really sleepy. I would be going
simply for the comfort of it.
I have decisions I'm avoiding.
I have things I should be doing.
I don't want to do them.
I want to do big exciting things.
Within,
A certain reluctance to change.
Will I be able to change just what I want,
and not what I would rather keep?
Who changes and who remains the same?
coffee - sugar - meat - grease
water - fruit - vegetable - rice
I can't say I have ever had a
craving for rice.
Fragged out.
Hair twisted and on end.
I hear the expansion of the burner.
Coffee is on its way.
Someone honks a horn.
The idling car needs muffler repair.
Three people get in
speaking Vietnamese.
I'm tired and I don't want to mow the yard.
It isn't even my yard.
And there are other demands
on my time today.
I can hear the water starting to boil.
I blow my nose again.
I think I'm about out of clean clothes.
I go looking for an antihistamine.
The fish bowl needs cleaning.
Hell, everything needs cleaning.
There is so much dirt on the floor
I could grow grass.
My first cup of coffee and a heel of bread.
It is cold in here.
Summer is almost over.
It hardly seemed like I had one.
I feel alone and very sad
to think that I must die
in order to make a living
as an artist (or a poet.)
Why make money?
To keep making art.
Why keep making art?
It is important to me. Why?
It gives life meaning and value. Why?
It explores fundamental issues of who and
what we are, the nature of existence,
where we are going.
It emerges out of itself. It is alive,
it explores because it needs to know,
it needs to be alive and to express itself. Why?
To stop doing so would be to die.
It is existential,
it is the need for what is going on on
the inside to show on the outside. Why?
To resolve inner conflicts. To come to
some kind of resolution, some state
of wholeness, completion. Why?
To stop the pain, the suffering . Why?
To feel whole, to feel alive again. Why?
I don't like pain. I don't want to die.
All real art, despite the artist's desire, is,
ipso facto, a nonprofit activity.
Art as a way of life.
One can't be a part time artist.
It is a totally human activity.
An artist must be wholistic.
One does not just make pictures.
History, religion, the earth, the vegetable garden,
Other cultures and ways of seeing.
All things are the domain of the artist.
It is a shame our society does not support its artists.
However the artist must adapt.
The principle objective must always be the art,
never the rewards of creating the art.
The artist is shaman.
The artist deals with things of spirit.
The artist does not imitate the material world.
The artist gives form to the spiritual world.
Creating art is a visionary activity.
Being a visionary is the principle reward of being an artist.
An artist must have a monk's attitude.
No one is going to pay a monk to pray,
yet the monk prays and endures.
The idol on the altar has her back to the supplicant.
She directs his gaze beyond the alcove
to the cosmos in mind and fact outside
the life he lives.