9 September 08
Life and Death
This is an exquisite truth:
Saints and ordinary folks are the same from the start.
Inquiring about a difference
is like asking to borrow string when you’ve got a good strong rope.
Every Dharma is known in the heart.
After a rain, the mountain colors intensify.
Once you become familiar with the design of fate’s illusions
Your ink-well will contain all of life and death. – Hsu Yun
I found this on the always surprising, always provocative Whiskey River this morning. I’ve been thinking more about fairyism and the meaning, and purpose, of art. About how Danny Gregory says drawing every day saved his life after a life-and-death event.
I am such a dabbler. A butterfly. I bring people together, give them food, give them work I’ve done, here, have a mudpie, it’s made with love. For the universe, but you’re here, as a deserving member of the universe. You have it. Have a poem, have a book I made, have a painting.
I have lived my life as though this generous spirit somehow let me off the hook of going to the dark places. But we are about to enter some dark places, whoever gets elected here in the US, and it will take only the most supreme pollyannas or the wealthy beyond measure to deny them (they may hope to be dead before New York is 12 feet underwater after the melting ice caps, because if not, they won’t escape either). The question will no longer be “am I really an artist” but “am I really a human being.” There will be tests. Will I be ready?
Here’s what I’m trying to work out, inspired by the likes of her and her and her: how to find wisdom in the dark places. How to be open to it even when it’s terrifying and seems hopeless. How the marks on paper or wood or metal or stone help to make sense of things when there is no sense to be made.
How, in other words, to have art save your life. Or at least contain, direct, preserve your humanity until you die.
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Just how the hell, dear friend, are you apparently linking here to the blog post I’m in the middle of writing and don’t expect to finish for a few days? !! :-)
Not just a talented butterfly, but hugely intuitive, huh?
Oh God. Now you have me all spooked, Jean.
Um, would you like a mudpie?
As a resume, this sucks. Misinformation. You have been creating serious beauty and lighting seriously dark places for years. “Dabbler” is ridiculously inappropriate.
As a post, though, it’s lovely. Fare forward, amiga. xoxo
Yup. Don’t hide your light under a bushel. Not least because of the serious fire risk in low rainfall areas.
And, from one soi disant butterfly to another, is it not said that the unnoted flap of the wing in the forest causes, uh, something big somewhere else?
And about mudpies. They hold a central place in my personal mythology. Reinforced by recent meditative teaching which pointed out that adults generally lack the extraordinary ability to BE that’s demonstrated by every child making a mudpie.
Oh, to make mudpies :-)
Hey dale and evve, welcome. I’m not sure I WAS hiding my light under a bushel: I said I avoided, mostly, dark places. I stand by that. (If I have managed to light some inadvertently, dale, I’d be ecstatic.) The work I’ve done, the mudpies: some of them have been good, a few of them very good. But it’s always on to the next thing, the next dabble.
Mudpies, though: I’m a bloody expert. Any time you like, evve.
Funny, I’ve never seen you as someone who avoids the dark places. I’ve met you in at least one, in fact, herding oblivious presscats and being amazingly patient with them. That’s what we do in the dark places, no?—Work. Do what needs doing. Later, sit on the floor shaking and say, “GodDAMN that was dark.”
Don’t diss the butterfly, eitheralsotoo. Some of us need the news that we are free to do things we’re not good at yet, even if it’s via watching someone who IS good at what-next? she does.
Honest to god, it takes major explosives to persuade me to fiddle with anything I’m somehow not good enough at to make money. I know exactly where it comes from—I knew from sixth grade on that I had to keep those marks damn near perfect if I wanted to go to college because I’d need a scholarship, and I knew (though not quite articulately) that that was my escape and that I really really needed an escape, and I was never allowed to forget that. It’s amazing what stunts of contradiction cognitive dissonance and doublethink I was able to pull off in pursuit of that way out. Problem is, those stunts kinda deform the performer.
I’m not sketching birds but I’m painting every bit of the house that stands still long enough, and fooling around with making three-dimensional holycards. What the hell. It doesn’t have to save me; it’s (chokes, um, erk) art.
Ron: thank you for this. I forget about that: that we work during the dark times. I forget. What it looks like to watch a bird die. What that feels like.
I’d like to see a holycard sometime, when you have a chance…
I think you’ll need to submit something to qarrtsiluni this month…