When I ran across this old drawing with the acrostic “Craz I Ness” my immediate thought was “Needs more Crazy. A LOT more.” So i crzied it up, including having the last two lines cross paths.
Craz I Ness
Cacophonic wail and moan
Rigid blinkless smile of bone
Aerie’s music’s background strains
Zealotries leave marks and stains
The initial sketch, done recently, was an exercise: Use of Quiver-Lines to Emphasize Fear. Did it and moved on. Came back and learned that it wanted to be finished. Brought it to this stage of completion. It is not GUERNICA, nor the Sistine Chapel ceiling and walls, but it should tell a story a little bit different with each viewer.
Here is a truly horrible beginning of a drawing. There is one passage, however, that merits salvage and enhancement. Crop, draw, erase, augment, and this is the result:
Robert Heinlein once wrote a story with a good guy searching the mind of a despicable bad guy for needed information. He used the phrase “…like looking for a jewel in garbage.” Sometimes, Friends, That’s Life.
The original was done when I was into spoons. I still like spoons, but they need a context, even an unreal one.
Long ago an art professor, Scott by name, declaimed to his class, “When you are painting, it is better to make a BOLD LIE than a Timid Truth.” And there is a bit of Bold Truth to that, though this is not a mutually-exclusive, either/or world.
Long before Stephen King wrote UNDER THE DOME, John Brunner wrote STAND ON ZANZIBAR and briefly mentioned “Fuller domes.” And of course Buckminster Fuller, that exceedingly visionary eccentric, had the original notion.
Gloam & Dome
Gopher holes and fumaroles oft perforated the land
Practicing the underground with furrows Meath the sand
Obelisky business sparks imagination too
All the ancient myths in shadow beckon fleet and loom
Makes a zealot want to beat upon a kettled droome
[Originally published in the Facebook group Poets All Call, earlier today.]
five such things
there are five such things as desire
want
ambition
lust
appetite
dissatisfaction
and there are five such things as death
cessation
mortality
zero
discontinuity
oblivion
but there is only one such thing
as you where you are
receiving this message from me
wherever i may be
telling you that you are loved
and that you deserve
good tears and lusty laughter
and the overhauling
of pain
with riotous joy
there are eleven thousand
nine hundred and thirty-two
such
things
as
❤
Sometimes the impulse to draw springs from a mind’s-eye full-blown vision, with all the conceptual exploring already done. Other times there is a vague notion, of a character or a setting or a quotation, perhaps, and some exploration occurs while drawing. Yet other times the artist just grabs something to draw with and thinks, “I FEEL like drawing, but I have no idea. So let’s just see what happens.”
I have only a slight, tickly notion of what I was thinking when I made the original drawing, which likely happened at least eight years ago. I think I was imagining the taking of an oath of office in a future where doing such would be much more reflective of the person elected, and not straitjacketed by hand-on-Bible or other arcana.
Some day I’ll take a drawing as incompletely formed as this one was, make a hundred copies, and finish them a hundred ways, each as radically different from all the others as reality, including my imagination, allows. It will be an odd hat-tip to Andy Warhol, for reasons obvious and not.
The midnight deadline makes for Procrustean design decisions. This page suffers from ten-pounds-of-stuff-in-a-five-pound-bag syndrome. But I will work on it no more, except perhaps one day I’ll use it as the basis from a painting, minimum size 4 feet by 6 feet, so it might breathe.
embryonic relations
embattled loneliness is what we fear
mad circumstances–to be kind–austere
beset, unsettled, nettled, we set sail
receiving imput from both gal and fella
yen-tangled and amiss to cross a t
one fine day one-ll call you mon ami
now comes a kiss or clasp, behold and lo
in time a touch begets a welcome moan
creation’s more than crows and queens and drones
Yesterday’s challenge was tough. Today’s is an easy stroll. I found an index card that took the words “embedded weasel” and bracketed them to reveal important subwords. All I needed was to add weasels and embellish the pseudo-haiku.
the embedded weasel
weaselily eases
in bedfellows’ beds
This was the toughest Finishline challenge so far. The image was OK but not great–it wasn’t conveying an Eon except vaguely. And the acrostic demanded 2/3 of unfinished sonnet to be done, to cleave to iambic parameter, and to make at least a little sense. And it was about 4:40PM, and I only had till midnight. And I was falling-asleep exhausted.
So I did a crazy thing. I looked at what I’d done, really gazed at it, and then I took a nap.
And in the nap I had a weird dream. My high school sweetheart, whom I haven’t seen nor spoken to this century, was offstage in the dream, but in some structure and creating something with chalk. Something expressive. And some of that chalk came my way and I began to practice with it–it was tricky stuff.
I woke up. Used the bathroom, washed my hands. And somehow, with little forethought whatsoever, I attacked the completion of the drawing like a house afire. It was like I was handed a ten-pound set of keys. Bright light with an infinity symbol in it somehow becomes Eon. The pig’s ear calls for attention. The letters beg for articulation. The poem’s meaning is cracked open by bookending the lines of species with an ending that throws a million years at OUR species. And here we are, 10:10 PM.
pig/pigeon/eon
profusive species of the universe
perform and propagate and turn a phrase
perhaps a porpoise has a calf to nurse
percussive pelicans may stop and gaze
perverse Corruption plays a 6-deck shoe
permuting variations of your foe
inadequacies get your poor goat too
ineffability guides Silence so
if searching Truth we get a merry chase
o it’s enough to vex Bartolomeo
in finding sadness we do wet our face
o it can be like Vincent’s brother Theo
give us a million years, and in the main
good future kinfolk MAY have cured our Pain
