Entry #629398, added on 01-13-09 @ 9:51 am EST
Entry Access Restriction: None.
| Raidiant Beings | Entry #629398 |
This year has awakened something ethereal in all of us. If you haven't quite felt it yet, I suggest trying some simple meditation techniques to losen up the ole "psychic muscles". Find yourself a restful spot, preferably outdoors. Deep breathe, center, clear, pause to contemplate the LIGHT and grab onto the first beam you find.
The story below is from today's issue of: http://www.dailygood.org/more.php?n=3558
To All Artists, Known and Unknown
Richard Berger 1998
I remember seeing a threadbare individual sitting in the cafe of the San Francisco Art Institute in 1992. He was very different from the rest of the students and staff personnel. He was old; old in hard years, not with the mellow patina of the well ensconced. He was in the cafe every day I came in, always sitting alone, always smoking and nursing a cup of coffee. Most striking in his appearance was the discrepancy between his physical, and what seemed to be his psychic, circumstances. He was worn, his physical being was worn, his clothes were fragile, almost brittle, garments different from the casually abused garments the students sometimes wore that said, "I don't care," clothing being low in the priority of the things they stood for, for reasons of social demarcation as well as economic urgency. His threadbare garments said, "I do care," not only about preserving the garment for economic reasons, but about the ritual of caring itself, a precious continuity, a ritual of anchorage expressed in the threadbare trousers worn at the seams, white at the line of the upturned cuff, perhaps pressed nightly beneath a mattress; his clothes and his bearing were a diagram of that caring. He was always clean-shaven and fastidious in his appearance.
His flesh was another matter. Too much sun, too much liquor, too many times the senses wide open taking in too much, not enough sleep, not enough food, the reddened eyes drawing another blank at dawn after a tumultuous night; too much life to ever be arrested in likeness. His visage reminded me of some of the portraits by Ivan LeLoraine Albright, an obsessive curmudgeon and astonishing painter who revealed mortality in his subjects by painting every molecule with such individuality that their coherence into a personage isolated the fragility of life by revealing accord in its complexity, evoking and then animating through an infinitely accurate diagramming of a membrane of competing tensions. His visage was just such a diagram.
The complexity produced a radiance about him abetted by the discrepancy between his clothes and his flesh. He seemed the temporary residence for an enduring elsewhere tangent to the worn, but radiant and frail man; and at times, he shone actively with the brilliance of that elsewhere. He was always looking elsewhere, as if he saw things that we didn't, and I experienced one indelible impression of him as he sat at the cafe table with a cigarette smoldering in his lips, warming himself in the morning sun. He suddenly gestured, still sitting at the table; it was a gesture that I imagine an only child would make toward an empty room populated by imaginary friends, a gesture exclaiming, "Look at all my wonderful boys and girls!" Within his gesture was the certainty that these boys and girls constituted a heavenly choir which he was conducting, they bearing him aloft with their song as he guided them. His gestures were the traceries to some paradise via his tattered being, a deliverance beyond comprehension. This went on for a very short time and then he became still, smiling and smoking.
The radiant little man died at the Art Institute. I knew he was homeless and hanging out at the school, but I was unaware that he was living there. He died of exposure over Christmas break, and when he was found beneath a concrete overhang on the Jones Street side of the school, they found a number of sketchbooks in a backpack. He was an artist, a "street artist" as he had described himself to Greg, an employee of the school and one of the few people who had any conversation with him. An unknown artist thrust into our midst his own portable Lascaux, astounding images conceived and executed outside the channels of legitimacy and validation that so many of us need to sustain and guide us, challenging all our notions of the route to authenticity, indicating another depth of being in our midst.
The sketchbooks reveal in obsessive detail the sweetness and mystery of his elsewhere, a realm more compelling for him than our imperfect world, a realm of elsewhere we will only know through him, which seems to welcome us. The last fragment revealed to me in this puzzle that will never be complete was his name, which became known to me only after his death via his signature on a few of his many drawings: Wallace Allen Healey. Greg said that people called him "Wally."
Wally was cremated as John Doe because his family wouldn't or couldn't come from Oregon to verify his identity. Wally's identity, Wally the street artist. What I knew of Wally through his physical being, the posthumous discovery of fragments of his life via others, his images and lastly, his name, represent memorable components in an unusual order of encounter. They are fragments which cohere in spite of their spareness and intermittence, that which is not there being as potent as what is.
I have glimpsed a foreshortened version of such a coherence in several chance observations of how the rooms of people who have been around for a long time can become a summary of their lives. The pared down fragments of Wally's life had no final room in which to reside because he didn't have a home, and yet those surviving fragments of his images and his life cohere somehow to define in summary the sweet elsewhere that was in his images and his being.
I sometimes wonder if these events in their unusual sequence have compelled me to romanticize what might be only a wincing pathos, retroactively endowing it with a magic I hope exists because it is the only bearable reconciliation of Wally's pictures with what there is to know about him. A more remote memory returns in considering this question, by way of Famadou Don Moy, the percussionist with the Art Ensemble of Chicago. He performed solo at the Art Institute some years ago; he filled the stage with an enormous array of percussion instruments, big, small, formal, informal, Chinese gongs and hubcaps, a night clerk's bell and a trap drum set among many others. He came slowly to the stage from the back of the auditorium, playing a drum with maracas, the movement of every extremity expressed in sound, and he chanted: "To all great Black musicians, known and unknown."
Known and unknown. It was an invocation to acknowledge ALL those who gave their lives in pursuit of the great human service, the service of the artist, transforming the sometimes unbearable discrepancy between the way things are and the way they ought to be, into something that makes us want to dance.
An Open Letter to My Writing.Com Friends:
Hi. I sometimes wonder what many of you are doing these days and what I've missed here at a place I once thought of as my second home. Many of you have befriended me and encouraged and supported me through some of the toughest times in my life. Frankly, I don't think I would have come through everything without the encourgement many of you offered.
And now, I find myself wanting to give back to a community that gives. Call it Pay It Forward Payback...lol! The link above has the option to be emailed to you daily. So do your heart and soul a favor and take the time to subscribe and read "The Daily Good" by Charity Focus. They are a real gift. Enjoy!
Economic time have presented interesting alternatives to our daily circumstances. Personally, I made a decision last month to quit my job. My income was goal and commission-based, dependant on the construction industry and economic health of every other profession and the base pay wasn't enough to continue giving away my daily life for. Budgeting, coupon-clipping, attic cleaning and home cooking now replace room plans, color boards, fabric swatches and house calls. And I don't know what waits for me around the next corner, but somehow I believe I might just be more prepared for it now.
An interesting sub plot to my resignation: Later that same evening, I checked my email to find an offer to contribute another article to the January issue of one of our local magazines. Not having much time to prepare a piece of fiction, I sat down and wrote:
An Open Letter To 2009:
Welcome! Your visit here will be brief. It will amount to a mere 8,760 hours. And in the scope of the entire Universe, you’re nothing more than a hiccup. But to us, you represent the most valuable commodity in existence - TIME.
And time is of the essence! It’s been called a thief, although we lose more than ever gets stolen. Time has been known to fly, race against us, be unkind to us and once in a while, even be on our side. And most will agree that timing is everything. Time waits for no one and takes nothing for granted. You’re going to be bringing lots of changes. Change will probably be the one word that best defines your time here.
When your visit comes to an end, you will have given us three hundred and sixty-five unique sunrises and sunsets. And if I were to make a resolution, it would be to witness most of them while using each sunrise to ponder the questions and every sunset to justify the answers.
‘Ode to ‘09
May you bask in the seasons and wink slyly at the Sun
Mark time with the stars the moment sunset’s done
May your days bring glory to months with your name
As they placate Father Time and keep Mother Nature tame
May wisdom teach mankind the reasons for peace
Make wartime a conclusion that no one chooses to reach
Tomorrow is just a promise
Yesterday is simply gone
Today the clock is ticking
As time passes on
Current Mood: Diaphanous
Current Music: "Morning Yearning" by Ben Harper
RubyRed
Write from your heart.....but first, listen to your soul
|
© Copyright 2009 Celestial (UN: celestial at Writing.Com). All rights reserved.
Celestial has granted Writing.Com, its affiliates and its syndicates non-exclusive rights to display this work.
|
Log In To Leave Feedback
Static Items
Books
Forums
Groups
Interactive Stories
Audio
Campfire Creatives
Community Notes
Crossword Puzzles
Documents
Folders
Images
In & Outs
Madlibs
Photo Albums
Polls
Product Reviews
Quizzes
Survey Forms
Web Pages
Word Searches
