Posting Ink Ocean again, hosted at my own site, because while it exists on Jamendo, the player there does not seem to be working. Le sigh.
Still one of my favourite drawings. India ink on archival paper. I think it's 11" x 14".
The poem arose from the words that arose in the drawing.
It became an almost 10 minute poem on the Gulf oil spill, the ocean, love, the tides in us.
At the time, I was doing a lot of experimenting with recording different readings of a poem and then layering them so it sounds like an echo but isn't. In this one I was trying for a 'main voice' - the public one; and a 'whispered voice' - the private one. When we make art, we make it with our private, fragile, sensitive whisperings, our delicate words, our delicate brushstrokes, but always mindful that it will also exist in the social world, so public, strong, spoken with clarity and confidence.
+P E Sharpe had some very interesting things to say about being a 'literary thinker' as the source of her art in some respect - which reminded me of this piece. So sharing....
Tonight, for no reason, and not something I have ever done before, he died well before the Internet age, I Googled my Dad. He died in 1984. I discovered some his books are still referenced in an obscure library or so - http://www.worldcat.org/identities/lccn-n87-809900 - not that we knew - he was well-published but never boasted except to say to me once, after your 30th article, who's counting, and who cares? When he mentioned an article he had written for Time Magazine, we went a little crazy, 'Where is it?' 'Why didn't you tell us?', and he simply shrugged, saying he'd written articles for Time before.
It could have been that he simply kept his professional life separate from his family life.
Tonight, on the eve of my mother's passing (whenever it is, a week, a month, a year), I also found an old obituary on his death. It wasn't until after he died reading all the obituaries sent to us from friends and colleagues of his that we realized he was considered a world authority in his field. We knew little of this side of him.
I am unable to paste in the obituary due to the lettering and spacing of the original, so I took a screen capture. I'm posting it in my blog, so that I can find it again.
What do you think? I plan to write it into my painting. Once there, the words can't be changed.
A Palmistry, a Psalm
The hand is a poem. A fragmenting poem in my hand. Fingers blow in the wind like bulrushes. That gnarled branch overhanging the water, a twisted wrist. I wear a carpal bone like a pendulum, the rattle of Coatlique.
Our hands, neuronal cells pulsing nerves probing the world, soft, sensitive. In the signs in the lines on our palms a seer's language. Our journey mapped in grooves of curvature of skin over muscle and bone. Born here; die there. One, or two, or five central relationships. You will /or will not have children. This will be a difficult time; easier there. My, you are a sensualist.
They cut off the hands of thieves. Only I never stole. When was my hand severed? As a child? In the nightmare it is staked in the window, a sign for the henchmen of dictators, thieves of the freedom of souls. Herod's soldiers grabbing the first born; Nazi boots kicking down the doors of the Jews. Marked houses. Signs of those sacrificed on the altars of cruelties of power.
In my hand, you will find I've lived a clean life. Does this echo the ethical universe? Ethos is what enables order, harmony, beauty. This swollen and sore hand is emblazoned with 'the mark.'
I touch you, lying on the soft grasses of the riverbank, glide delicate fingers over your features, reading you, your body of braille. And massage you, warm oiled dance of fingertips and palm whorls penetrating knots, torments, memories. Even as my wrist flicks, and breaks.
My hand drifting downstream, decked in an Ophelia of lace and rings. Hold it; hold me.
__
I made a recording of the prose/poem, if you like to listen while you read.
(Background music by Aymeric, from their album on Jamendo, 'Sometimes,' cut 03.)
___
Some notes on writing process.
(Is this a defense of my style, or a rough explanation of my aesthetic?)
While I like to offer depth and complexity, for the record, I don't do 'stream of consciousness' - I've been working on this for a while, the images, the feelings, the meanings - even if it only took 20 or 30 minutes to write. Nothing comes out of a vacuum, and the semiotic undercurrent in our subconscious minds has not got the metaphoric order of a poem (or prose poem). I like to radiate out to divergent images, spark their neuronal connections, get the whole mind thinking, sometimes puzzled, sometimes recognizing. My poetry hopefully gives the reader a bit of a ride into an imaginative world, a ride that also offers exercise of those faculties of imagination, and the extraordinary ability we have to find meaning in divergent things. And be inspiring, of course. Emotionally, we are a very complex and nuanced species, and our emotional reactions and apperceptions cohere our lives. I like to tell it as it is, in all its paradoxes, ambiguities, irresolvable inconsistencies, its terrors and beauties - this is life, how we live.
A hand, yes. My current 'hand crisis' is what I think I was doing, but then the disembodied quality of the hand made me think of a nightmare long ago, of the strangenesses of our lives, which are like intersecting arcs.
These paintings are becoming a style, I guess. I work from the imagination. When I sit down I have no idea what will emerge. It's scary! Let it be messy. Yikes! Don't over-work and the way to do this is to be fast. Shivers! Just dive in. Though there is a sort of representation of my hand because it's very much a focus now. So is a psychic I saw around the time of the nightmare - a Wiccan witch from Northern Ireland who really was the real deal - who read palms.
Because of the the complex cluster of images that this painting is drawing about itself, I decided to call it, A Palmistry.
Palmistry is a way of reading the life of the person whose palm it is.
The dream, dated June 2, 1980, was quite long, and went on to become much more scary than the beginning, the part about the hand (which is all I'll relate):
There was a darkness outside, pushing in. 'S' was here, and entertaining as always, but aware of the ominousness. He went to the bathroom and when he came out he said that there was a hand on the windowsill with a note beside it (he told me what it said but I can't remember now). I shucked it off, asked if it was an effigy and he said no, it was a real hand. I knew it was a child's hand and had been deliberately severed. I could not go and look at it directly but could only think what poor child in this dear world had been sacrificed. I thought it the work of a demonic cult, and that, like marks on houses, of the first-born to be killed by Pontious Pilate in the Roman era, or the Jews during Nazi Germany, this was a mark that was a warning. I could not consider it a symbol, for it was a real hand from a real child. I saw it clearly in my mind's eye throughout the dream. I could not step into that room, however, and see the hand in flesh and blood as a sign in the window. I could not have borne it - a child of maybe 4 - unbearable. Perhaps it was my own hand.
....The sign of the hand - I was already becoming disoriented and couldn't perceive the situation clearly. I tried to calm 'S' as best I could in my state - my senses were being scattered and broken up....The blackness all around us was growing. The atmospheric temperature was dead still, enclosing, pressing against my home. I tried to stand. All I could see were sections of the visual world - a plane of darkly embroidered fabric in the air, and nothing else. Or a distortion of furniture. Memory told me where to stand for my senses were turning the world into a 3-dimensional Cubist picture that did not have coherence. The world of time and space and the way the senses order it was shot to hell. I could barely negotiate my way around and could not think with any clarity....It was like seeing the world through a crystal prism, darkly....Other dimensions could enter.
My intention had been to write some of the text of the original dream onto the canvas, but... I'll see. It is most strange that with my SLAC wrist and the recommended removal of the scaphoid bone and the fusing of the other bones in the hand with bone taken from elsewhere in the body that I find this old dream re-surfacing.
Can my painting move beyond my immediate concerns to connect with the strangeness of hands, all hands? Look, those red dredges of oil pastel running from her neck and down are not blood, but were meant to represent a red striped top. Lol.
"A Palmistry (in process)", 2012, Brenda Clews,18" x 24", charcoal, oils, oil pastels, oil sticks on triple-primed cotton canvas sheet.
This morning my right knee was a little out, so I decided not to do a yoga set that required sitting in semi-lotus (though semi-lotus is my absolute favourite way to sit, hands down, anywhere, anytime).
A very nice kriya, or yoga set, that works the abdominal muscles. Sleek, simple, effective. It is a fairly rigorous set, though, so unless you are in good shape, do it half time (each exercise exactly half) - 1 minute, instead of two - and make sure to rest a minute between exercises. Also, go at your own pace. It is okay to stop a moment to give those 'unworked' abdominals a rest, and then continue for the remainder of the time.
I find either the timer or the stop watch on my iPhone is a terrific way to time the exercises. That's nowadays - watching the second hand on a clock worked real well when I first began teaching yoga.
Yogi Bhajan's yoga isvery structured. It is important to do all of the exercises, and for the time specified (or all for half the time or a third, just be consistent). In all the years I have done Kundalini Yoga, I have never had a 'bad Kundalini' experience, nor have I heard about this happening from any of the other Kundalini Yoga instructors that I know. Yogi Bhajan's kriyas are balanced and will help to energize you without causing the sorts of problems we have all heard about Kundalini rising in those who are unprepared for it.
Abdominal Strengthening Yoga
because I should include this when I post yoga sets
Note: Scans of these yoga kriyas and meditations have been uploaded to an unlisted album in Picasa and cannot be found by public search engines, but only if you have the link (which is available from this blog). I have begun this album so that I can easily access yoga sets and meditations I am working on. Also, all of the yoga sets in this album were given to me when I attended yoga classes and to everyone attending those sessions (or from freely downloadable on-line sources) - they are not scanned from books, which hold copyright.
If you find these sets and meditations intriguing and try them and like them, I urge you to find a Kundalini Yoga class in your area to properly learn how to do them, as well as how to tune in, the Bhandas, or body locks, the different types of breath work, and so very much more.
throw yellow roses
on your coffin, long, smooth, polished sheen
maple, insignia
of the country we have come to
throw yellow roses
on your coffin
you, dead inside
you, body
dissolving
throw long-stemmed
roses, fresh, soft perfect petals, sun bright
on your coffin
as it slides
into the fires
as if death
were a passion
of the flame
_ In memory of my father,
Dr. D. Richard Clews, 1922-1984
