To whet the stone

You know the children’s song “There’s a hole in the Bucket?” A man is singing to his wife ‘dear Liza.’ There is a hole in the bucket (hence the name of the song) and he is unsure how to proceed. She tells him to fix it, but, as the song progresses, we discover he is unable to do this as there is no wood to fix the hole, the ax is dull so he can’t chop more wood and the sharpening stone is dry so he can’t sharpen the ax, to cut the wood to fix the hole. The song comes full circle.

It is a great song, repetitious, humorous, with a circuitous logic that leaves the listener stumped. What is the man to do? The bucket will hold no water. There is no wood to patch the leak. The ax is dull. He needs water to whet the stone to sharpen the ax. But again, there can be no water, for there is a hole in the bucket.

I admit that this song delighted me as a child. I felt sorry for the man, whose lines in the song I heard as a kind of desperate plea. I imagined the woman growing evermore impatient with her simple-minded husband; as she had to time and again explain to him, fix it. Fit it. Fix it. Only to discover, like he had, that the solution was beyond their immediate means. The song, you see is a dialogue. Not exactly a Socratic dialogue, but a device used to create greater degrees of tension within the logical structure of the song.

Usually when you listen to the song, the man is played as a whiny sort, clueless and inept while the wife is shrill and painfully judgmental. Liza is sure she can present a solution for her husband. Meanwhile, Henry has exhausted the possibilities and has turned to his partner in the hopes that she will find some fault in his logic that allows him to complete his goal. “There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza” is a plea for help. “Where have I gone wrong?” He asks. “Have you Tried A? B? C?” She responds.

The relationship between Liza and Henry made me think of Adam and Eve. Not because there is any clear parallel. Though I suppose one could construct it: What’s wrong with the Apple? Is it poison? Is it bitter? What is wrong with being smart? Why shouldn’t we eat it? I wonder about the rational of Eve, biting into the apple and then offering it to Adam. Was it her way of saying “the bucket be damned!” or “I am going to eat this and prove that nothing will happen”? No, the reason I thought about the first couple in creation was because they acted in tandem, “I ate this apple, here, you try it.” They are working together.

The thing about Henry and Liza is, they are trying to solve a problem. He turns to her, she parrots the solution back to him, and, ultimately, they arrive at the conclusion that the bucket is unfixable. Interpretations that pit the two against one another may add to the comedic moment when both realize that the bucket is unfixable, but detract from the truth that they work in unison.

The other day I was looking around the house thinking: “there is so much to do, Laundry, dishes, piles of children’s toys and brick-a-brac.” It is in moments like these that I hear the old familiar tune come to mind. “There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza.” And all the picking up and the washing and the scrubbing seem like so much work, an impossible mountain of chores that would never go away and I had no idea where to start. Like Sisyphus I would throw my weigh against the stone over and over again wondering if there was ever a solution.

"There must be some way out of here," said the joker to the thief,
"There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief.
Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth,
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth."

As I stood there singing songs of confusion and defeat it occurred to me that I could pick up what was mine, my shoes for example. That might be a place to start. I could wash my coffee cup, I could put my clean clothes away, and so on. In short, I didn’t have to start with the WHOLE house. I could just pick up after myself and see where that lead me. As it turned out, I had a very large part in that particular days mess for it seemed like everywhere I went there was one thing or another that was mine.

My problem then is that what I though was a hole in the bucket was really self- defeatist thinking. “The mess is too big” or “I don’t know where to start” which is different from, “To fix A I need B but B requires A.”

“No reason to get excited," the thief, he kindly spoke,
"There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.
But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate,
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late."

Taking another stab at the song, I should point out that Henry is immersed in the dilemma of the bucket. One conclusion that you might draw is that he has already tried to whet the axe and has discovered that there is no clear solution. Frustrated he turns to his wife. The immediacy with which he answers her suggestions seems to support this interpretation. “With what shall I…?” Could be interpreted as “I tried that but…” The fact that Liza shares with Henry solutions that he has already visited speaks to the like- minded nature of their relationship.

They are equals, and both set about “solving the problem” in the same way. For Henry and Liza, each new situation is met with a set of variables that must be solved. “How do I mend the bucket?” is answered with “With Wood.” Unfortunately for each the solution may fall outside of the liner logical structure of the equation. “I may need to borrow an axe from neighbor Fred” or “I may need to buy a new bucket” or even “Do I need any of these things at all?”

The last solution seems to be the one that the song suggests, for if the stone cannot be whet, what purpose does the bucket serve? The answer in the structure of the song namely that we are metaphorically casing our tail here, creates an ambiguity about the nature of Henry and Liza, that they are simpleminded folk who cannot see the proverbial forest for the trees, or that the spiritual solution, as I like to call it, is to step away from the situation and thus remove yourself from the equation. “The bucket is broken” is both the beginning and the end of the song suggesting that the harder we react to the situation, the less “distance” we cover. Through this line of questioning the absolute nature of their situation is now evident and they have gained nothing but the certainty of the knowledge they already possessed.

All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too.
Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl,
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl

The conclusion of the song suggests that in fact Henry and Liza are now at a completely new place, one of equal footing and ultimately of a kind of equality. This place is one born of frustration but open to the possibility that they can now choose to act or choose not to act with full conviction. The stage is now set for a “real” beginning, of sorts and the song bizarrely begins at last, even as the myth begin again.

Bad Paintings

I was chatting with a friend through an exchange of emails the other day and they asked had I ever painted a bad painting, or at least I read it as a question, as in, “Are you willing to paint a bad painting?” When in fact is was actually a statement “You are willing to risk painting badly in order to paint something new” which is really a huge compliment and true enough, I guess, but it isn’t how I think of myself, and so like anything people say about me, I like to try it on and wear it around for a while and see if it fits. I mean, sure, I paint bad paintings, and yes, I like to experiment, which might look like I like to take risks, but while I like trying new things, I hate having to talk about it, because in art people want to know what it is you are doing or what it is you are trying to say, and about the time they think they have it figured out, I go and change it up and say “that is not it at all, that is not what I meant at all.” Colleagues and professors will ask me “Why did you do that?” and “What does that mean?” and I never have an answer, or at least, I don’t have an answer that I am willing to share, because the answer in my head always sounds so naïve. “It looked cool” or “I was just messing around” and then they shake their heads in collective disdain or worse they say nothing at all because there is nothing to say. It’s like saying “I paint pretty butterflies, aren’t they pretty?” and while that will sell t-shirts, it doesn’t build credibility.

I think there is a question in there. Does consistency build credibility? And the corollary to that is what does consistency consist of? Painting is just painting, but you can’t paint paintings of butterflies one day and spirals and squiggles the next and expect people to understand, so the consistency here isn’t in the act of painting, but in what you paint. A good fiction author writes fiction and a good documentary filmmaker makes documentaries and while yes we are all encouraged to explore other venues, to do so with great abandon tends to confuse.

Then there is this whole other song inside my head that I am whistling away while I type and that is who is the audience? Can you write poetry for some and non-fiction for others? Would Whitman still be Whitman if he spent his off hours writing Civil War documentaries? Or is he Whitman because he spent his off hours polishing his craft and refining those things that he wrote while he was working? I suppose you hear tell of Renaissance men and women who can do it all, the proverbial Jack-of-all-trades who knows no boundaries and no fear. Their myths inspire and delight us, but truth be told (a phrase I have been using a lot lately) Leonardo didn’t finish much, and the stuff he did finish is falling apart. Durer might be a better example, or Michelangelo as both of these me wore numerous hats. But can we honestly expect to measure ourselves by these men, when in all reality most normal, humble people don’t aspire to do so much and nonetheless tend to fare pretty well. There is a lesson here somewhere: I am no Michelangelo, and I don’t want to be.

I will tell you what I told my friend “In short, I have made a lot of bad paintings. But it was never really about what is good and what is bad, in the moment of creation I loved each painting dearly and poured myself into them with abandon. It is odd, but what I think I am really doing in art is working on me, and the painting is just the remnant... kind of like sequin wasting- you punch the little holes making sequins and what is left over, the ribbon, you sell as a decorative bow.” Then my audience is really me and not anyone else and it doesn’t really matter what I paint because I don’t aspire to fame or stardom or any of that jazz, what I really aspire to is being happy and making pretty little paintings that people enjoy and sometimes even making one or two that have a little something extra, some meaning or insight attached to them not that I strive for this, but when it happens, when that magic little something goes ka-pow, then I smile a little secret smile to myself that says “I didn’t mean for it to happen, I didn’t plan for it to happen, but it happened and that’s that!”

Chapter 6

Editors note: My friend the Unreliable narrator’s comment made me realize that pushing God around in a wheelbarrow is really no place to end the story so I thought I would take a stab at a conclusion, though it is really nothing like the conclusion I had originally intended.

The walk home was long. Arduous might have been a better word. Every step left me feeling more like Sisyphus rolling the great boulder up the mountainside. My palms, aching and wet with sweat, I imagined my palms like his: torn and blistered and bloody.

The hard physical labor of the day and emotional burden of my loss taunted me and made my every step more grueling. I thought about the great loves of my life and how they had all been torn from me. My first love, an innocent girl of sixteen who gave me her virginity and promised to love me forever, looked at me though the veil of time and wept maddening tears of sorrow. My second love, a green convertible I bought the summer after my freshman year in college. I saved all year long to buy the car and drove it for three more years before it broke down and I could no longer afford to fix it.

Objects. Material things. Lesser men might have sneered at my list of loves and called me vain, but I knew better. I knew that I have loved these things unselfishly and would have given myself wholly over to them if they had but asked. But none of these, not one, could compare to my compost, my black alchemists gold that had been purified by the sweat of brow and the ache in my back. So glorious was this potent mixture that seeds nearly sprung to life in its presence. That if I were to carelessly let fall even the slightest scoopful onto the ground below the whole of creation would burst forth from that small space of earth and dung and give life where none existed before.

Some have questioned my love of gardening. Commenting on the inordinate amount of time I spent outside on my hands and knees, my face level with the dirt. Was all that work necessary? Why did I keep coming back day in and day out when a twice weekly visit would have been sufficient? Couldn’t I have read or wrote or worked harder at my relationships, my job my faith?

I was so absorbed in these thoughts that I failed to notice the gathering clouds. My mind raced along unperturbed as the gentle breeze picked up around me and blew leaves and discarded wrappers along the pathways and gutters. Till all at once I came to my senses and realized that it had started raining.

I picked up my pace and hurried down the trail, the sky grew ever darker and more foreboding. The same thing had happened only the day before. I stood out in my front lawn pulling weeds and planting snapdragons and azaleas. When I realized that I had been over taken by a storm. That had certainly been a surprise.

A clap of thunder seemed to shake the earth itself. My mind was again racing.. This time with a new train of thought. Had I put my tools away? I couldn’t remember. Where there should have been the crystal clear memory of my activities, scurrying around gathering hoes and rakes I could summon no images. I was as a man struck blind in the road with only my doubts and insecurities to guide me.

I was approaching the neighborhood park when I had spent the morning. My home was close now. I quickened my pace, rounding the corner to my home I pushed Azazias into a clump of bushes at the foot of my drive, then dashing past the garage I ran along the cobblestone path at the side of my house, under a low trellis and along the river stone trail that led into my front yard.

Windblown debris was scattered about lawn. The sky was black and angry casting long shadows about me. I zigzagged along the mounds of flowers and vines passing the mailbox and the front gate to the far corner of the yard. There, beneath a lone cypress tree was my green wheelbarrow. The wind blown it over and the rain had washed the contents clear of the container. My black alchemists gold, my compost had wept along the long streams made by the gutter spouts and flowed down along the very foundations of my home.

Stunned I sank to my knees. The possibility that my compost was stolen was very real to me, and I had of course imagined in dark moments that it might be lost to me forever. But never in my wildest imagination had I thought that I might be the culprit of my own undoing; that my own actions had some how lead to my demise.

In that moment the rain began to fall hard luring the scene in front of me. My mind was a blank slate. As I stared at the scene before me I found myself contemplating my reaction? Was I supposed to cry? To scream in anguish? Where was my despair? Where was my unbridled rage? As I sat there examining the austerity of my feelings, something caught the corner of my eye. I blinked, the way you would if you had just seen something unimaginable. I stared again, this time with eyes bent on seeing.

The rain was like a great velvety curtain that cast a silvery luster to the world. The feeling of being washed clean by the force of nature would have excited me in my youth and in all likelihood I would have eventually masturbated to the memory of it. But what was before me outweighed any of that. I reached down as if to pinch myself but instead only steadied myself against the ground as I erupted in peals of unbroken laughter. Was my house… growing?

Sequin Wasting

The first thing I remember was my sister
Like Cain I watched as the smoke curled
around her toes to the edges of God’s areola

Beneath the old oak tree I played war with my brother
Under the halo of soup vapors we ate and laughed
“Next time I think we should be the vanquished,” he said with a smile

My fingers tick off the beads on a string of jeweled prayers
Slowly I count out resentments upon resentment
The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread

There is a place where I am sitting by the fire
There is a voice that gives life to the voice within my mind
There is a presence that numbers the hours of each day

The sound of the clock ticking resounds within my head
and small silver sequins lilt gently around my ankles
as long strands of ribbon stretch out into the void

The gentle rocking produces a stillness in my heart
while moments of indecision pour out on reams of textured paper
and all the universe spills out in wonder: wasted

Painting Today

(Warning: It's a bit of a history lesson)

The term “Realism” often refers to the artistic movement which began in France at the turn of the nineteenth century. The popularity of realism grew with the introduction of photography - a new medium that captured the immediacy of everyday life and created greater public demand for images that evoked life-like precision. Accurate reproduction of objects, and scenes taken directly from experience was the goal of many Realist artists(Courbet, Sargeant). Realism believed in the ideology of an objective reality and revolted against exaggerated emotionalism in contrast to Romantic artists of the same era. To this end, Realist artists tended to discard theatrical drama, lofty subjects and classical forms of art in favor of commonplace themes.

While technically elegant and precise, the disdain of emotional or dramatic content and the rendering of images with stark frankness often negated plot structure within the paintings and made the content inaccessible to many viewers. The next generation of artists, the Impressionists, steered a course back towards a reflection on subjective experience of the immediacy of the moment, and brought with it a new level of abstraction in art making that allowed viewers to make greater determinations about content and plot within the painted images.

The factious group of Post Impressionist painters (Van Gogh, Cezanne) continued to explore these experiments in abstraction and subjective emotional content further challenging conventional uses of color and form. What followed from this was nearly a hundred years of continuous exploration into the marriage of abstract design and emotional response culminating in the complete negation of form where the work is stripped down to its most fundamental features. Post Impressionism spawned Cubism and Fauvism which in turn inspired countless movements including Futurism, Constructivism, NeoPlasticism, and Surrealsim, fianally culmination in Abstract Expressionism, a movement in art that reflected the perfect marriage between abstract design and emotive content.

But not all artists were convinced and certainly not all exploration ceased. While Abstract Expressionism remained highly influential and spawned a a dozen subsequent movements many artists, especially Minimalist artists distrusted the suggestion that a purely abstract form could have emotive content.

In many ways minimalism was a reaction Abstract Expressionism and, in general, the evolution of abstract design aimed at producing emotion responses from its viewers. Because of a tendency in Minimalism to exclude the pictorial, illusionistic and fictive in favor of the literal, there was a movement away from painterly and toward sculptural concerns. Of primary importance was distilled painting's forms into blunt, tough, philosophically charged geometries. Artistic concerns aimed at creating objects that inhabited a space which could not comfortably be classifiable as either painting or sculpture. Thus, the categorical identity of such objects was itself in question, and avoided easy association with well-worn and over-familiar conventions. In this way Minimalist works of art seemed to create a new category of artistic perception, but it was a perception that necessitated a meditative and deeply person response from its viewers and was therefore still “theatrical” or “emotive” at its core.

If Minimalism was a reaction to Abstract Expressionism, so Pop art could be thought of as a reaction to Minimalism. Pop art represented a return to figurative art as well as a return to the representation of objects culled from the immediacy of everyday life by relying on mass-produced visual commodities of popular culture for its subject matter. However, like Minimalism, Pop removes the material from its context and isolates the object, or combines it with other objects, for contemplation. The “narrative” or subjective content of the work is negated and the emotive content of the work is driven by the viewers own personal evaluations of consumer culture. The upside to this approach in art making is that the content is ever renewing as each new generation looking at the work of art will bring their own ideas of popular culture to the piece. The drawback is in the artist expectation that the viewer’s reaction to consumerist culture will always be negative, but that any positive attitude towards consumerism would result in a banal or clichéd interpretation.

In many ways Postmodernism artists have been struggling to find uniformity between representation and content. Postmodernism is defined as a reaction to modernity or in the case of modern art as a rejection of artistic practices in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of experimentation. In many cases these experiments have been fruitful as well as self defeating, giving rise to greater degrees of experimentation that culminated in the myriad of artistic movements throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth century.

In pursuing a course that involves a radical reappraisal of modern assumptions about culture, identity, history, or language I have chose to use, as a launching point, a reevaluation of the Realist’s rejection of emotive or theatrical content as well as the static depiction of objects that rely solely on optical perception. I have chosen Realism as my “jumping off point” as Realism offers a transcendence of the mundane by offering the possibility of the viewer finding and being made aware of universal themes found in ordinary, everyday objects. In choosing their subject matter Realist artists were identifying archetypes, or the embodiment and the existence of universal forms without content that nonetheless channel experiences and emotions, resulting in recognizable and typical patterns of behavior or responces.It is this notion of the universal in the everyday that continues to facinate and inspire me in my own work.

Mr. Squishy

So I have been reading the short story Mr. Squishy by David Foster Wallace. I actually have an old friend who seems completely enamored with Wallace and have been meaning to read something by him for some time. My friend has mentioned Infinite Jest by Wallace several times, but alas that book is too mammoth for my hectic calendar. Recently I was at an alumni meeting for students of St. John’s College when it was mentioned that they needed a reading for the next meeting. I offered up Wallace as a possible author and everyone seemed to agree. The only problem was, I didn’t know a short story by Wallace from Adam so I went home and G**gled short stories and David Foster Wallace and came up with a title that look pleasing, if not a bit humorous, Mr. Squishy.

When first reading Mr. Squishy I was a bit underwhelmed by the first ten pages. The story read like a litany of minutia. Small unobtrusive facts of everyday life colliding in stereoscopic wonder to the delight of the author. Wallace seemed to take great joy in his ability to create lists of facts and figures that rivaled the book of Numbers.

If I sound a little sarcastic or disapproving it is only because I was so unprepared for Wallace’s signature writing style. In fact soon found myself wondering if there wasn’t some colossal joke being played at the readers expense that I was unawares and decided to change my attitude and allow the waves of detail to wash over me like numbers on an accountants ledger. The meaning of them was lost to me, but the seer fact of their presence was evidence of the writer’s craft.

Let my reader beware. To explain I need to say something of the story itself and for that there are spoilers.

The story of Mr. Squishy is not new, at least not in its subtext. The setting is a corporate focus group in which a facilitator is leading a group of male volunteers though a session on a product that roughly parallels the Ding Dong. As I said the subtext is not new and the story seems to evolve as a kind of criticism on modernity. Where alienation is acerbated by corporate malaise and the whole world has fallen sway to consumerism and the hypnotic allure of fitting in. In fact Wallace’s bludgeoning of detail upon detail seems to mimic the ennui that the cubicle-ridden employee of the modern corporation must experience on a daily basis as they sort through mountains of statistics and redundant studies of studies that were themselves redundant.

Into this world Wallace injects a single personality, Terry Schmidt. Schmidt is the group facilitator, a “cog” in the machines of industry. A pudgy outsider who has used his brains to get ahead and fit into a world that he seems neither to like or respect; a world whose rules he has meticulously learned mastery over so as to become indispensable. As adept is Terry Schmidt at blending into his environment that at first he is nearly indistinguishable from his surroundings.

But the more I ask myself “what is this short story about?” The more I come to believe that this story is about individuality, or the loss of it., or really the illusion of it. For Schmidt the various members of his focus group are mere statistics, even as Schmidt and his peers are mere statistics for his higher ups. Everyone is a statistic to those outsiders that don’t share in our immediate experience. And for those few that our on the same rung of life that we cling to, there is a certain distance. This in made poignant but the unrequited love that Schmidt has for one of his coworkers, a married woman who has faced sexual harassment in the work place and who is basically oblivious to Schmidt’s existence. In Wallace’s world relationships represent another loss of individual identity, and so Schmidt’s love life is one of masturbatory fantasy and illusions of connection. This furthers the idea that Schmidt is an outsider longing of being “one of the gang.” By that I mean living the proscribed lifestyle of society: successful, married, good-looking, everything that Schmidt seems destine to be denied.

Religion too appears in Wallace’s story, the opiate of the masses that offers freedom in the illusion of spiritual awareness and in reality is nothing more than another road leading to conformity. Nothing is what it seems in Wallace’s world, as it is made apparent that even the purpose of the focus group is to create a rational to dissolve the position of moderator as they provide a catalyst of individuality in the group dynamic.

The only avenue of escape in this otherwise inescapable world of conformity seems to be through violence. Schmidt spend his off hours in a homemade chemistry lab growing biological cultures that his dreams of injecting into the same products he seems to be promoting. An renegade urban daredevil makes an appearance scaling the outside walls of the office building creating a crowd of onlookers who are both captivated by his appearance of individuality and terrified at the possibility that he is a terrorist bent on their destruction.

In the end the fate of the myriad of characters is left uncertain. Wallace provide scant details that would allow us insight into the fate of the mountaineer, Schmidt, or his bosses, though I am left with the feeling that even if Schmidt or the Climber were able to “revolt” against the system, their impact would be mere headline news in a cacophony of headlines and would eventually be drown out by the machine.

Homeslice

no paint

Well, folks that about it for my short story writing days. I may add a few chapters later on, but for now I just can’t keep the momentum. It isn’t that I don’t have ideas about where the story is headed. If anything I have too many. No the trouble is, I don’t have the time. You see, I am stuck. I am not getting much of anything done these days, least of all painting. I have completed a sum total of one, yes one painting this semester, not nearly the grand finale I was counting on to graduate soon. At this rate I might take another year to graduate, because, let’s face it, no work means no show, and no show means no diploma. Follow?

I can’t exactly put my finger on why it is I am not painting. There are numerous factors. Moving into the house and selling the old one play top of the list, along with being a good father and husband to my family. Sickness has also been a persistent factor. But if you were to say, “why haven’t you been painting?” I couldn’t point to any one. In fact If I had to single out a culprit I would say it was depression, depressed that I’m not painting that is. How do you like that for irony?

Sorry as it seems I am absolutely true. The more I don’t paint, the more I don’t paint, and the more I don’t paint the worse I feel about it. The worse I feel about it, the more I don’t paint, and so on until I am in the exact spot I am in right now.

J. suggested taking more time to paint, but of course that only meant that the universe sent even more reasons not to paint. Painting puts demands on everyone, not the least of which is J. who gets stuck with the kids and the house etc.

Another huge problem is I really don’t have a place to paint. The easel sits out on the porch right now and whenever I go out there to work I am at the mercy of small children, the weather, everything. I can’t get work done. I need a studio. There is no studio, which means it has to be built, which means more time not painting. Really everywhere I look is painting frustration. Why am I not painting right now? It is too cold and damp outside and there is nowhere to paint inside. I could go to the other house but J. is sleeping and I need to be available for the kids. There is no Internet over there so If I need to research an image or pull up a resource that isn’t available either.

No I am afraid I am in a bit of a spiral sinkhole right now. No creativity means, the juices are not flowing, and by juice I mean, of course, paint.