On Tribalism and What Art Really Is and Does

On ART: I saw this live in early 1971. It was a huge and shattering experience. I think I lay in my bed for two days afterwards staring at the ceiling. When I got up, I cut my hair like Hanoi Jane, packed up my expensive clothes, studded a pair of used bellbottom jeans, borrowed my Daddy's insulated undershirt, and then went out and joined a bunch of Vietnam War protesters in Memphis. Shaking my head here. But it's true. I got expelled from school twice afterwards. One of my teachers cried when she saw me, every time she saw me from then onward. One teacher became my only support system for two years. But in this moment, I never felt so liberated in my life. And ever since, I've been living in conflict with my environment. The thing I know now, is that I was right all along, even when I thought I was wrong and doubted myself, even when others told me so, even when I went back to things I should not have. I was so literal, this almost destroyed me mentally. And I had no one to talk to about it until twenty something years later when I asked my Daddy for $800 so I could visit one of the smartest therapist in the city of Memphis and talk for forty minutes. Believe me, when I say, I went to this man with a notebook full of scribbles. I am writing this, because the hardest things that any one person will ever do in their life is leave behind the traditions and values of their environment and family and create their own, be it religion, politics, or just local culture. Joyce Carol Oates writes about this all the time. Most people, even brilliant and emotionally sound ones, will never do this. Do we all have to do this? Well, that's debatable. Some people feel that the culture of their environment and family is the best thing ever, that there is no need. I see this in my Facebook feed every single day I look at it. Traditions are valued and nurtured and spread from one generation to another. This is how we ground ourselves and establish identity. But it is tribalism. Too precious, it creates the biases that filter our perceptions and even alters reality. I'd say religion can do this. So can shared beliefs about race, politics, masculinity, the roles of women, sex and sexual identity, the relationship between humankind and nature. The inability to see past our own tribe and traditions is a core problem with our species. But going forward, the future will belong to those people who can. It may not come to them like my beginning, simply reading books all the time and then one day, watching a rock and roll band do something that still is seen as way ahead of its time. The early Grand Funk Railroad was part grunge, part punk, and something very unique. This song went on to be of great value to those soldiers who caught those last flights out of Saigon before the city fell. 

Art is what transcends our tribe. It's what makes a Bob Dylan from a pop star. Art is not something that has rules or that is dictated or organized by an editor or painting teacher, or even a math professor. It is the 'thing' you create out of your own bidding. And while it can make a nod to your influences and tribe, it is never dictated or manipulated by it or other people. Creating good art is the moment of personal responsibility and true autonomy. It will challenge the status quo, often disturb, and perhaps even change people and alter their lives. Art is all about intent and a kind of gutsy form of communication. It's often painful and risky. The people who create art like this have always been the ones to move civilization. It may be a song, or a poem, a painting, a math problem, a performance on a street corner, and yes, even a business of some sort. But it will be art. Art is not about the tools we use. It is about how we use them. Art does NOT look back or hold on to a tribe, it reacts against all that, it violates traditions and creates something new and original. It is just as likely to get negative reviews as it is positive ones. Sometimes it is totally misunderstood for generations. Art is the soul of humankind. That is why I lay on my bed for two days, disturbed, floating, my sense of identity shattered to pieces. And even at my age, I am still trying to gather the pieces up and glue them in a suitable form. Art is ongoing. It's never finished. I am thinking right now, that simply living day to day can be art, too, if attempted. Art is not a job, but it is work.

On Francesca Woodman

She had few boundaries and made art out of nothing: empty rooms with peeling wallpaper and just her figure. No elaborate stage set-up or lights … Her process struck me more the way a painter works, making do with what’s right in front of her, rather than photographers like myself who need time to plan out what they’re going to do.

                                                 Cindy Sherman

Fact

‘It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.’

                                    Sherlock Holmes

On art

“I take seriously Flaubert’s statement that we must love one another in our art as the mystics love one another in God. By honoring one another’s creation we honor something that deeply connects us all, and goes beyond us.” 

—Joyce Carol Oates

Old Fashion Traditional Witchcraft

As someone who has had a wide fascination with folklore and cunning people, I've long wanted to read some books on local conjuring. I once had the pleasure of knowing one of these witches. She was truly one of the most fascinating persons I had ever met. Long dead, she had offered to show me what she called "old fashioned witchcraft" and I'm sorry to say, although she taught me tarot, I passed on the conjuring. If I had been wise enough or brave enough I would have recorded her conversations and preserved her image and voice for future generations. But she made me terribly shy. I think I was half afraid of her and I was younger and less confident.  She was the perfect image of a what we all think is a witch, an older woman, dressed curiously, bent over, with a wicked laugh and sparkle. Her brown eyes are still vivid in my mind, large and always wet-looking, as though she was on the verge of tears and yet, there were no cause. When she looked at you, you felt pierced. I felt pierced. It was like she could see through me and I could hide nothing from her. I felt she knew all my secrets. That is how uncomfortable she made me. I suppose it was part of her power over people. She commanded strength and had a deep conviction about her lifestyle. I envy few anything. But I wanted to know the source of her strength. Of course, at the time, for reasons that are my own, I never spoke of her much. Perhaps it's because I knew others would frown on the associations and that what I treasured about her, most abhorred. In another life, I could have been her and very happy.

Crone work.

Now that I feel like a crone and look like a crone, I've decided to become one.

Why We Write

“We write to heighten our own awareness of life. We write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it. We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely...When I don’t write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing.” 
                                                        ― Anaïs Nin

“One doesn’t become a witch to run around being harmful, or to run around being helpful either, a district visitor on a broomstick. It’s to escape all that - to have a life of one’s own, not an existence doled out to by others.” 
― Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes

Small Kindnesses by Danusha Laméris

Small Kindnesses
by Danusha Laméris

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk

down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”

(found on Jonathan Carroll's Facebook feed)

Why I write.

  It occurred to me today, that writing has really been about self-preservation in a world that is absolutely maddening. It gives me pleasure to write. Happiness. Peace of mind. Joy. That's it. That's the sum of why I write. Nothing more. Nothing less.

THIS

“If you no longer live,
if you my beloved, my love, 
if you have died,
all the leaves will fall in my breast,
it will rain in my soul night and day,
the snow will burn my heart,
I shall walk with frost and fire and death
and snow,
my feet will want to walk to where you
are sleeping, but
I shall live”
― Pablo Neruda

Try Sitting in A Room Alone

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

                           Blaise Pascal

Seeking truth

I've had to do grown up things this month. I've had to be an adult which is good, considering I am over sixty years of age. But the grownup things I have been doing are not the usual ones. I suppose, even as a child, I hated hypocrisy and lies, although a good yarn and fairy tale made me feel really damn good. But real lying. I could never like a lie on someone lips and I found it painful to see people live lies, too, and they did, all the time. It took years to understand why living a lie is so much easier than living a truth. But truth is what I crave. Maybe it's easy for some people, maybe truth is their neighborhood. I don't know. Where I come from people didn't look reality in the eye. It was too damn hard.

Truth

 I am entirely alone. I and my shadow fill the universe. 

Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman

Walking

“My grandmother started walking five miles a day when she was sixty. She's ninety-seven now, and we don't know where the heck she is.” 
― Ellen DeGeneres

I am the mosquito.

“If you think you're too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito in the room.” 
― Anita Roddick

The Weight of My Regard

Francesca Woodman by David D Prince

“Sometimes I’m terrified of my heart, of its constant hunger for whatever it is it wants. The way it stops and starts.”  
~ Poe, singer

Music

“Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definitiveness.” 

~ Edgar Allan Poe

Quotes from the Erl-King

“Eat me, drink me; thirsty, cankered, goblin-ridden, I go back and back to him to have his fingers strip the tattered skin away and clothe me in his dress of water, this garment that drenches me, its slithering odour, its capacity for drowning.” 

                                 from The Erl-King by Angela Carter 

50 Days Until All Hallow's Eve

And I am going to be reading....

The Moon (Luna) Alchemical symbol.

The Moon (Luna) Alchemical symbol.

(my personal symbol, representative in alchemy and tarot)