the absence between her thighs

 

 

 

 

 

Truth and Beauty are concepts that got mixed up together when Christianity's star rose in the middle ages, and they have been hard to separate ever since. We know that logically, beautiful people aren't always associated with knowledge or wisdom, but we all have a picture in our heads of the perfect partner - and I bet they are all beautiful individuals. I think its akin to our concept of Santa Claus - all of us knows what he looks like, even though we've never actually seen him, or when I'm talking to religious folk, I like to ask them what God sounds like, or what the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden looked like - the descriptions I get are far richer and more vivid than any church service I've ever been to - because they are a mix of a Grandfather's growl and a willow tree that was in our backyard as a child, they are sourced more from our memories than from our current cultural standards. But Angels are perfect creatures in our minds, because spiritual purity can only be lovely to behold.  

What would Truth look like if it were embodied in human form?

I think we have put so much emphasis on our seeing sense, that we drown out/lose awareness of the messages we get from people through our other (more important) senses. Our survival as a race has been based on this pattern recognition ability, and we add symbolic weight to those patterns naturally - to the point we lose connection to the feeling/sense those symbols are originally derived from. We culturally are a 'seeing is believing' organism and I think that manifests in all aspects of our lives, from consumerism to how we date.

 

My earthy physical presence I think fits the Laborer's concept of Truth - strong, lush excesses unafraid of being handled by rough hands, a thing that can weather storms and bear strong children. So I inadvertently draw the kind of raw earthy individuals who live almost solely in the physical world, and find it practically impossible to comprehend my inner state of being. My mental presence I think fits the Intellectual's concept of Truth - constantly delving inwards, constantly breaking boundaries, always hungry. Unashamed and fearless when encountering our past and future selves. A Vigilante. But ethereal spirit dancer I am not. I often get forgotten by my creative brethren, and the serious, thoughtful, brilliant individuals I am attracted to because the picture they have in their minds show the sturdy competent exterior lacking even a hint of delicate, transcendent beauty. I think learning how to close our eyes and feel connection rather than requiring physical/visual proof is what needs to happen - but it is hard to find individuals willing to be in that undefined space. We are too distracted.

They are both manifestations of Trueness, so in my mind there is no dissonance between my material and immaterial self, but since the evolution of society, like beauty and the beast from its medieval origins to now, we have accepted this visual relationship as an indicator of internal value, even when our concept of mortal beauty is CONSTANTLY changing. Would we hold Truth to such superficial standards? Can Beauty be an experience rather than a reflection? Something sensed rather than seen?

 

I find even in work I am torn between the expectation to either be someone who Thinks, or someone who Acts, and I run from job to job in much the same way I stumble through sexual encounters. Truth doesn't fit in a box. Relationship seeks to define. We all crave different forms of the same thing. I see glimpses of myself/stability/progress in chaos, the less I know about something, the faster I inhale it. Standing still doesn't make me feel strong and rooted, it makes me feel stagnant and prone to disease. Just because other people find stability in being rooted, or have found their version of success or fulfillment on a singular path, doesn't negate the power us Tumbleweeds have in the world. I think there is a difference between what we desire, and what the world has need of, and Truth may be born out of the two coming together into the cosmic 'Place' we all feel so compelled to search for. I don't think that it happens for a lot of people - like the guys who decide that I'm pleasant enough and try to turn a boring liaison into a cookie cutter relationship - I think a lot of people just don't want to work that hard.
 

My thesis professor told me, after years of intense art classes, that I wasn't a Painter. I was one of the better painters in my graduating class, Illustrators paint things, what was he talking about? But after that comment, I began to explore how to utilize a broad range of media to communicate visually. My own (automatic) assumption, based on no explicit experience about what I was training for and planning to define myself with was cutting off the power I could have had, and had no one stopped to show me that, I would be stuck in that box still, and would probably still be in Florida, trying to paint portraits of rich people's grandchildren to survive. I know I have not found the thing that fills me, in work or in love, and the moment I almost feel filled by something, I can already feel it slipping away, much like that river, the one we can never step in again, because it is always moving, yearning towards the ocean. And if that is True, how could anyone else's standards or expectations negate the power of that realization, or attach feelings of Shame or Hurt to it?  By who's standards am I successful or not? Beautiful or not?

 

How can True feel anything but Right?

 

I am not ashamed of my sexual or work experiences, because I see my flesh as a doorway/sacrifice to deeper understanding - but I am ultimately terrified of being truly filled, so I'm trying to live inside of that yearning without expectation. To let the river carry me for a bit, so I can save my struggle/energy for the moments that threaten to drown me. Its like glass half empty vs glass half full- except its more like people who see gravity/life/history as something that roots us to a place in time and space, concrete and visually discernable, rather than gravity/life/history as a constant state of free fall, everything relative to something else, and all of it shifting constantly and overlapping randomly (divinely). 

We choose our reality in science and religion equally, they are the same desire and excuse to have answers so we don't have to Wonder, the way we did as children, a state that used to fill us with excitement about the future and the world and the meaning of Truth. Becoming jaded means we lose the ability to appreciate on some deeper level - but once the magic is gone, what's the point? Why stay?

Roll, Jordan, roll.

 

Time Travel in the Grand Canyon

My boy is too close to the edge,
scanning the cliffs for dinosaurs.

Maybe I should tell him how time accelerates,
how it took four billion years

for these rocks to form
but only thirty thousand

for the river to slice through them.
How last week,

when the wind blew a woman off the rim,
it took her less than a minute

to drop down through the ages,
her shadow on the canyon wall

already a ghost.

 

-Andrew Merton






 

And broken heartstrings bled the blues.

I have not been brave in art. I have been merely a technician, and possibly, that is why making art has always been a painful struggle for me, one I would happily avoid to go cover myself in grease and heft heavy things around. Just because I can use the tools of society's concept of Artist with obvious skill and precision doesn't automatically mean I have said something worthwhile with any of it. All those awful early student paintings my mother is hoarding are the same as anyone beginning the study of a craft - coagulated excesses and structural inaccuracies, just as my first welds were lumpy and unsuited to actually supporting weight, useless - we must all do those same technical studies to build the skill set to actually craft things, and our growth is measured by how far we have evolved since those early attempts at creation. I was always just trying to tell the truth. To do what was 'right'. It is easy to aspire to truth in a discipline, truth of form, but it is only of face value, it can only ever be vaguely structural. Floating on the surface, wrapped around a skeleton, holding something together, but not imbuing it with meaning or experience. We can rely on truth of form and space as being universally agreed upon in its general 'rightness'.

The nude figure is an ideal study subject, as it is often completely devoid of a specific personality, stripped down to a loose similarity that dispels the illusion of self we drape around us/shield ourselves from via clothes, and witty conversations or political stances. I wonder if that has something to do with the proliferation of tattoos in my generation - trying to claim a self-hood that extends deeper than our clothes and is impossible to be robbed of, or so we don't lose ourselves in the constant tidal shifts of acceptability and expectation coming from generations past. I cling to my figure modeling work as a tiny bit of respite, like going to yoga, one of few places where I can safely escape judgement, free from assumptions or expectations related to my role, gender or sexuality. I can completely unmask, allowing a room full of people bear witness to the truth of my existence without feeling the need to protect or defend myself. But it is easy to hide in that intimately non intimate place, never getting past skin deep. To not feel.

I have tried making art as an emotional experience, but a desperate fight always ensues in my brain with what looks correct, and in response to some deep desperate fear of exploration, of straying too far from the recognizable, I give up. I shrug my shoulders. I do something else to avoid the helpless frustration. If Life imitates Art or vice versa, I have spent my Life/Art in search of Truth... not of Self. Maybe I needed to find Truth, so I could construct Self from a premise I can rely on, a foundation rooted in function, where every muscle is justified for its existence and can be moved with purpose... I have been tasting other people's wants and dreams, like Goldilocks, to see which ones taste 'just right'. Artfully avoiding having my own, so I don't have to learn the bitter flavor of disappointment. Trying to embody truth, rather than self helps me lose myself in the machine of working on crews, and the loudest thing being spoken is body language, and we are all an extension of each other, a functioning being made up of characters and muscles allowing me to interact with the varying degrees of wants and dreams, truth and self, and I can be lost in a tidal wave of emotions that pass through me like electricity, but don't weigh me down because they do not belong to me. Sometimes I desperately wish I could bring that home, wrap myself around like a blanket, like a human being, to taste the technicolor realness of wanting something - but I know that the ringing truth of making structural things speaks to our rational selves. I can allow a total sensual immersion in work/coworkers because we are all aspiring towards the same thing, and the similarity of our experiences is reflected in each other with such intimate familiarity that I forget they have lives, girlfriends and wives and children they go home to. Expectations and friends, roommates and pets. Families and needs. When we step offsite, there are rich, throbbing Real Selves where the Rational Men used to be. 

Sometimes I can feel the beast in my blood that I have yet to look in the eyes. I don't know when it woke up, but I am too unsure of its needs and expectations to bring it into existence by calling it by name. I think it is my Self, and that it grows too hungry for me to contain much longer. I have been on a passionate pursuit to break every boundary I've encountered, and have always found truth on the other side, disproving the necessity for other people's boundaries at all. But I can't be truth in my core, truth is just another boundary. It is a thing that sits outside, and on the surface, and while shielding me valiantly from lies and illusion, so too is it shielding me from the richness of emotional experiences.

Maybe Truth is the next boundary I am meant to break.

I came from crocodile mouths. I swam thru the bronx of my mother's belly.

Beach bound on a Sunday, Church day, for baptism by salt water and I was trepidatious. After three intense years of growth and focus on a very urban landscape, and very urban realities, I had fearfully avoided making the trek to NYC's beaches alone, unwilling to dispel the illusions of my childhood in perfect water and soft white sand. That coastline is ever in my thoughts, so contrasted by my daily life, even a recent vicious hurricane couldn't permeate the concrete membrane that separates the city from the earth, and left us practically unscathed while entire mountain towns around us melted and washed away. I never really understood homesickness, but have often felt the pull of far distant tides and the kind of release of total trust that I would never allow myself in my daily war for respect and knowledge from the people stacked up in this city with me. Closing the car door,  I had to actively reconstruct my atrophied beach sensibilities, insecurities of surrendering the white of my flesh to exposure from the elements and the eyes of the person on the blanket next to me, and once in the water, about rolling with the swells instead of fighting them, the pressing nature of reality pulling and choking and breathing around me, like being inside a much larger organism. And in the smack and flow, I had to re-find the rhythm, the pulse that beats through my own veins, that I had been to busy to pay attention to, the cacophony of other people's needs was lost in the white noise of the waves and gull cries, and quite possibly, for the first time in three years... I could feel myself breathe.

My partner in crime dragged out a body board, and I found myself attempting to navigate the waves from above, something I had never bothered with, and giggling and screeching with the seven-year-olds around me on their boards, I became acquainted with a nuance I had never before paid much mind to - how different it is to be on top of the waves, rather than immersed in them. The strength of the pull up into a budding wave, and the force that carries you on top and then crashing solidly and swiftly into the sand is so different than the rolling punching surge in the underbelly of the wave, that catches you unaware and senseless, unable to avoid the body parts or sea life caught in the motion with you. Later, as the tide crept back in, pulling with it decaying crab bodies and seaweed, a helicopter circled overhead, and a police boat chased shadows in the waves. When I asked a passing vehicle with a couple of nonchalant beach cops what was up, I was informed they were searching for a body. A quiet malevolence seemed to surface, reality rushing in with the tide, wrapping itself around me like the sting of the sunburn spreading down my thighs, a painful reminder that even the sun will do us harm, as it nourishes and sustains us.

After my first pilgrimage to the ocean, I decided to try a more urban accessible path to a closer beach, taking my roommate and the subway, in the hopes that I might find a place I could run to on a whim. I had heard the Rockaways were beautiful, but with a belligerent wind and painfully strict swimming boundaries from insistent lifeguards, it was ominous at best. Stealing myself to the water's edge, by the time it was licking and pushing at my calves I was frozen in place, almost unable to bring myself any further in. Late as it was in the day, I found myself once again greeted by the tide, and all the human and oceanic refuse slapping and sticking to my thighs, being drawn shoreward on a sour sweet smelling wind, with only a hint of brine in its odor. Reality and horror filled me down to the core of my being, I could feel my body stutter in its motion towards the pounding surf and come to a panic-filled stop. Chunks of wrappers and bizarre flat paperlike plant matter swirled around me, and my mind was flooded with images of the ganges river, the masses that bathed themselves and their clothing and animals in the polluted waters, other abused and corrupted natural sources of water that were slightly unreal images in history classes from grade school, of the sea life that breathed and lived in this, how only damaged and mutated genes could survive in the monumental funk, that toxicity would only beget more defensive toxicity in a desperate attempt to survive...

And the the shame I felt was quite possibly the deepest I have ever experienced, my revulsion so intense it felt like a rejection of my roots, of the deepest truths at the core of my being. I was bearing witness to the desecration of the womb from which we all clamored out of, it was no longer far past my peripherals, it is here, and it is real. With a childhood that was comprised of watery memories woven and fed to me by deceitful adults, the disappearing of a weak and lazy father figure, tarot cards on my mother's bed and conch shells and coral in the corners of the bathroom and nooks and crannies of windows, I had always sought a sense of the psuedo mother figure in the shores of my childhood, since I could touch and define its truth, its pervasive sense of reality. Abrasive and temperamental, it burned and bruised without apology, scrubbed me clean of impurities and connected me to something larger, almost omnipresent and rooted me to my sense of self.

Now, in what seems to be a perpetual coming of age, as all my deepest beliefs are being tested and redefined, the ocean continues the shattering of my deepest childlike perceptions. Circumstance like a tidal wave is battering everything I have ever used to define myself and my reality, and when the floodwaters drain away, I only wonder what will be left after the deluge, what will still be rooted, who it will be standing in my place, and whether or not she will still have my sassy grin.

ever since i met you on a cloudy monday, i can't believe how much i miss the rain.

finally, stilted and cringing, i drew yesterday. stiff fingers, and bizarre painful yearning, i wanted to. i wanted to record the poorly put artwork on the wall of the coffee shop, and the cheesy guy that wishes he could be a mac ad. it was too beautiful not to.

its been hard watching these students draw, and know what training and skill is inside of me, but i wonder now if a sketchbook was always an entire novel of images that could become the worst weight i've ever experienced: failure. i never drew for me, i drew for other people, i drew to remember things, i drew cause i had to achieve a grade, or study a form for later painstaking illustration, but never for me. just because i saw something witty, and wonderfully human, something that struck me with its wry sense of tragic comedy, to capture a moment, a whisper of mortality.

these art students have it wrong. the ones i'm modeling for are so concerned with the contour, the outermost edge, the vague outline of what makes a pose what it is, not the form, the sense of weight, not the power of a thoughtful, contemplated gesture.

its about looking for that particle, that line, the subtle crease that makes the whole drawing, the scene, the charcoal or pen on paper... finding the moment in a gesture, the shape of being human.

so its coming back. the discourse finding its way to my fingers, the truths i know about illustrating life awakening in my hands that have been numb for some time now. since i have no one to seek favor from, no grades to fight for, i can let go of my intense fear of failure, of not having the best, most skillful drawing to show, and think and observe through my hands, rather than my terrified heart.