Two Black Dogs

I have come to the desert to assemble loneliness around me as a drape of dried mud to absorb all that flows within, and all the vast plane without. The desert seems appropriate enough to keep my case of loneliness parched enough to wick away all those fluids that have been carrying me to the rivers that carry me to the frontiers of image that carry me to paper productions that carry me to the soft home of comfort and despair. The generous River is actually a dry gulch here, a dusty arroyo of salvation and gravity. And when I watch water flow through concrete tubs in the late evening when walking partakes in exploration, I see a gush of the aqueduct, forced flow from unkind mountains, leveling out in puddles rich by necessity. But I am as always off point. The lavish warmth of loneliness has rendered a new project: somewhere in last evening’s walk, wandering in the old town, I saw the blunt relationships of the adobe solids pressing and easing in adjacent space, aligned on the wise-hoofed trails of donkey and cattle transport. They reminded me of Giorgio’s [Morandi] paintings and I caught a whiff of the oil and turps on his jacket sleeve as he fixed his gaze to the quiet heavy weight of those bottles, boxes and vases that lined up along the rough pine shelves in his studio. I tranced on the warm adobe casas now poured from smoky gray paint denying the obscene obstruction of the desert sunset.

Project notes – on pine shelving reconstruct G’s paintings with hands contorting to role of the objects. How many objects did he actually use in his paintings? Hands should belong to Italian men and women, Bolognese of course. Shoot (video) the hands quickly as they form their poses, then dwell long and slow on the finished “painting”. Consider transitional spaces between each rendering. Could be these obnoxious sunsets I suppose, or the arroyos, or the “rivers”, but maybe too political, or were G’s paintings political in some ways? Call it Morandi’s Fists. Now go to sleep and forget about it. Another tomorrow.

-Belle Pontus, from the Blue Journal, Belle and the Making of Her Mode

…..”You are on your own now”, he said.

“You can tell who are the phonies by listening to people singing the protector’s songs. Only the songs with soul are his and were taught by him. The others are copies of other men’s songs. People are sometimes as deceitful as that. They sing someone else’s songs without even knowing what the songs say.”
Carlos Castenada, The Teachings of Don Juan

At first it was trying for me to understand Belle’s smoldering disregard for her teachers (Jan 2 post from The Blue Journal). I, on the backside of the mirror, worshiped all of my teachers, dumbstruck by their capacity to lasso such precise meaning from the existent art that surely proffered only mystery to me. I sought out and dwelled in the majestic makings of their studio practices. I stole their vocal patterns. I wore their clothes. I drank their labels of red wine, scotch and applejack. It was so that I built myself as a painter and came to be a sort of me.

Having lived so many years in this grand periphery, an equally grand and despotic yearning ground me into rubble.

Someone (later to be revealed as a Teacher) handed me a book to read, the same book quoted atop this tumble of words. In its revelation I remembered the forgotten angels, simple and discreet, who forged my long-time-coming understanding, not by demanding obedience to their well-rehearsed lives and methods, not by making me memorize their faithless scriptures, not by insisting on my treading the gamut of their possession, but rather by gently quarantining me to my own energies, however large or small they may have been; and having settled in there as I have, mostly unknowingly, I was able to grow my own education, capitulating the cosmos, learning the Gatekeeper’s Code (Belle’s term), and forming, forming at the holy speed that swung me into birth. Of this I am now happily and respectfully aware.

Those same Teachers discarded me on the day that I discarded them.

Belle Pontus once screamed on a journal page Just show me the ritual, damn it, and leave me be on the mountain.

“We act our inner symbolism outward into the world. In a very real sense we do create to the world around us since we get it to reflect back our inner symbolism at us. Every man carries a little myth-making machine inside him which operates often without him knowing it. Thus you might say that we live by a very exacting kind of poetic logic—since we get exactly what we ask for, no more and no less.”
Lawrence Durrell, The Dark Labyrinth

Of late I have been horrified that my work is a barrier to this act of expulsion that Mr. L D so describes — a stencil-like rampart, carefully blocking segments of the emission, what misses is released into the world, a frenzy of confusion, fragmenting the story that attends my every moment of contemplation. I do love this faltering with its poetry gliding off of irresponsibility, much like the base of this society in which I comingle. But it is not like breathing, and my aims and hopes have always been to seek a labor of free and unfiltered sensorial communication with the Cosmos, like breathing.

–Belle Pontus, Belle’s Notes, Belle and the Making of Her Mode

Belle Pontus interviewed. from Belle and the Making of Her Mode

SD: Why have you rejected “new technologies” as a realm for your most recent work?

BP: Yes…. I spent some years wandering ‘round technology, the realm. It intrigued me, consumed me. However I remembered and yearned for the certainty of hand-making, whether it be energizing paint to image on the flat surface, or tying string into a knot that can bear an enormous stress of load , yet can be so easily released. When I gather materials and intimately engage them in rhythms of alternating coercion and surrender, I quite certainly arrive at conclusion; and if I concede aesthetic discriminations, and, in the case of the knotted string, abandon the obsequious assessments of outcome, then the conclusion is neither blissful nor dangerously failed; but gainfully satisfying. The Muses are more gently beckoned into service. The Technologies tend to rape, you know.

SD: Can you define conclusion a bit more vividly?

BP: O, I guess…yes…..mmmm….Accomplishment perhaps, in the sense of surviving a task addressed, time passed in the nourishment of labor. And the arrival of an object that is easily released, either into the mind, or back into an enormously mere configuration of its simple self. This is the substance of my suddenly grave posture that does not allow me anymore to conjure in the materials of the New Technologies. This contrariness, as some have deemed my current mode of life and work, is the phantom that flew beside me in the making of The Apprehension of Knots, and Go Home, Orpheus, Go Home. These were my transitions back to painting and sculpting. I am settled now, blissfully engaging a culturally wrecked career, minding the hens, so to speak. This new “art hip” disdain for the object is so troubling, so puzzling, especially in this society we have resurrected.

SD: Resurrected?

BP: Yes, you heard me. Resurrected.

SD: C’mon now. Doesn’t sound like the Belle Pontus of the outrageously raw video project, Eden Pillow, which you destroyed during its premier, or the pay per view interactive internet performance, Dyeing The Vine Red, which simply vanished after you refunded all the subscribers. These were the ignitions of your success.

BP: All now rotting in the garden. Let’s leave it at that.

SD: You know I’m not going to let you wave it all away so simply.

BP: (long pause) Go home, Orpheus, go home.

Duke,

Today Lucca & Rose & I were on our morning migration across campus. After 40 minutes of hoofing it hard and sweaty, we swung the arc homeward, walking the path surrounding the little pond across from the Ag Center barns, where faithfully we greet a big gaudy Muscovy Duck, whom we have named Elvis (the late metamorphosis of Elvis actually). He is so named for he sports a very odd, but luxurious, black pompadour, is a bit wobbly on his webs, and is infested with lumps and warts of fleshy red, white and orange; these mutations (probably not mutant for a Muscovy) when viewed at the right angle of sunrise, dazzle as silver and gold jewelry. Did I mention his cape? He is the king: he perches, squirts chalky shit, pisses and grumbles high court on an aggregate bench. We love him, and sensing his age, always give him wide berth so as not to force his flight into the pond. Not a graceful sight. He’s wonderfully, beautifully, Elvis the Duck. But today he was not on stage. His bloated, peaceful corpse lay under a cypress tree half-way to the water. No molestation apparent. We do have coyotes and foxes in the vicinity. I think it was simply his last flight. The sun had risen. He saw the fire of Apollo reflected from the surface of the water and he hurled himself toward it; but died a little too soon, just like Elvis the Man.

W. H. Auden on W. B Yeats:

Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

So, somewhere deep in the heartland of us all, Elvis the Duck joins Elvis the Man and becomes us. With this concoction, I somehow think we will make it to the pond. I am very aware that this is much too much meditation on a duck’s death, but the hawk in me was seeing, and the spark in the eye of a dead duck thrilled this predator’s eye. Flight was taken.

Thinking of you,

Miguelito

“Look around inside subduing the vanities and find the most pregnant obsession of your imaginings:  one that cautions, one that smells like iodine, yellowy foam on the sea wall.  Bind it for a time and see what’s trying to poke out between the lacings.  This should be the stuff of revelation.  Free these escaping extrusions and let them roam around freely in the observant you.  As they form image take them into your materials.  They will most likely surrender.  Now look for external coincidences to these newly-hatched visions.  If one confronts you (many will), fold it into the everything of your work.  Now read the mystery.  Obsess and repeat the process.   I think this is how I work.  I am not sure.”

 Belle Pontus interviewed.  from Belle and the Making of Her Mode    

Spoondrift = Spray from gale blown waves

It is hard to mind the enormous sense of anxiety and failure that escorts the everyday rain of somehow brilliant projects that ether off untouched unclaimed unrecognized.  These are the daemons that when dressed with a skin of paint can be fixed in a shallow trance a flux upon the Great Days of sorroW and joY…….

—from Belle and the Making of Her Mode

Most of the year a market near my studio quietly vends the most succulent green beans.  I take three lbs. home, spread them out in a large baking pan and mix them with olive oil, 5 knife-flattened toes of garlic, 10 sprigs of fresh thyme, and ground pepper.  I put them in a 500 degree oven and let them sizzle, moving them about a few times with tongs, until they are wilted and beginning to brown.  I remove the pan and let them cool in it.  In a large bowl I mix the zest and juice of a large lemon with ½ tin of anchovies, chopped.  I toss the cool beans, garlic and thyme in this liquor, and taste for salt.  Usually doesn’t need any. 

The painter Carl Plansky makes artisan oil paints under the sign, “Williamsburg” (www.oilpaint.com).  I have used them for years, phasing out all the other brands I fostered since my baby painting days.  One of his colors, green gold, is also succulent, beautifully pigmented and ecstatically transparent.  A glaze of it will summon a warm, yellowy light – the same yellowy light that I can taste in the green beans.