s-curve

Like an unexpected late fall rain swollen stream - just rounding the next curve, and the next, and the next.

unfixed

One way to see a crucifix is this: it's not good to nail - fix - stay - anything into one position or place; a reminder that immobilizing something kills it (at least temporarily), whether human, god, or knowledge around us. Ironically the various establishments of Christian churches have often used this image to nail down other people, places, ideas. It seems the usual mode of business - belief stands on - pins down - occupies the territory that the previous belief rested on. Nest-robbing.

I saw a painting on exhibit in the Rubin Museum in New York City - an antique map by Tibetan Buddhist monks of all the monasteries they had established over a mountain landscape - simultaneously depicted as nails pinning down a woman-demon. Each monastery was driven in to fix her - at her hands, shoulders, knees, feet - to a spread position. This is how they conquered the old image, the old way of believing.

Words can nail images down. They don't have to. This naming compulsion, this conquering habit serves up meaning only one way. Opinions: what we nail ourselves down to.

Verses

There are only a couple things you need - a couple verses, a couple books, a couple teachers, a couple saints, a couple artists - to lead the way. More than that is often too much.

apertures

Thought about Hannah Wilke for the first time in a long while last night. But her art-making is with me every time I take lint out of the dryer. That is - a lot, in the past year, which is the first year I've had a dryer to take lint out of.

Now that I've brought her up I realize she's been right below the surface, a guiding agent, in these rites, and I've recreated her in my attempts, my experiments, over and over again.

Came across a good line in an article recently - the idea was that each performance is a re-invention of a really good idea. I am reinventing, in ways, Hannah Wilke's really good idea. Though I wouldn't presume to say I'm doing it as good, as bold, as kick-ass, as her.

Hannah Wilke died of cancer in early 1993, as I was going into my second semester of senior year of college. I came upon her sometime in the four years before - can't remember if I just came across her artwork in the library, or more likely, Amii LeGendre - two years ahead of me and my woman-empowerment goddess - turned me on to her. I went to her posthumous IntraVenus exhibit as a new New Yorker, and could barely stand in front of her huge baby-blue terricloth madonna photos, her chemotherapy-softened beauty.

Looking at her work now I'm relieved to see the mix of media. Thank god we don't have to work with the same material our whole lives. The only consistency we have is our own bodies - which aren't even that consistent, as her explicit documentations make clear. Let's mix it up. Let's be different from ourselves. Let's be many things.

Brother Fire

St. Francis' Order was founded eight hundred years ago this year - in 1209 AD, in Assisi.

St. Francis was so crazy in love with God! So was Clare. Both renounced medieval middle-class. She was a young girl who followed him - escaped the marriage her parents set up. She eloped to Francis' chapel, San Damiano, outside of Assisi, cut off her hair and married God. Both undertook a life of keeping their hands empty - burning themselves up for God.

They created twin orders, the Friars Minor and the Poor Clares. Francis turned over San Damiano to Clare, where she gathered followers, and became its abbess. He died in a hut, on a mat on the floor. She lived more and more in seclusion. By the end, she didn't need to leave her cell to attend Mass - it appeared as a vision on her stone wall. Today she is the Roman Catholic Church's patron saint of television.

I think they were lovers. They shared one meal. I love their foolish love affair with the world and the sun and moon and birds and mountains and olive groves. Their unequivocal sense of place in those God-lit hills of Umbria.

Here is a verse of Francis' Canticle of the Sun, as we descend into the darkest part of the year:

"Be praised, my Lord, through Brother Fire,
through whom you brighten the night.
He is beautiful and cheerful, and powerful and strong."

all saints

Turn the tables to November: cool not cold, damp. Trees' hilarious outburst is over. Now, sober rusts and coppers, with a few deep-yellow maples and birches, like the most luminescent Easter egg I could dye, or its yolk. The prayer begins: "Winter, hold me safe till then!" The spice of the leaves - dying both wet and drying - answers, overpowers.

All saints, all souls - I was called back to haunt this spot again! I've found a chair. Life is good for the departed here, nestled in bowl in hillside.

I look up, in The American Heritage Dictionary:

Evocation: "summoning or calling forth; creation anew through the power of memory or imagination - ' calling out'"

Invocation: "calling upon for assistance, support, or inspiration - 'calling in'"

Don't trust something that doesn't smell. City art-making-and-selling - sanitary poison. Thought-tinkered process, packaging, selling, structure for structure's sake, commentary and comparison - death-dealing. Undercuts evocation, invocation, purpose, feeling, how they are the same as the material, the stuff, the movement, the leaves.