My Window

“But about that day or hour no one knows...

And what I say to you I say to all:Keep awake.”

Mark 13: 35 and 37

Listen to me: you could lose this all

Not in the far off sense of environmental catastrophes,

But you, personally. I write this

In bed unable to go out and explore

The shifting meters of sun and cloud;

Hearing only from a distance the occasional bark of dogs

Or the distant wailing of a siren

Mapping the geography of tragedy

While the traffic murmurs.

All those things that never happen, will!

They have happened to me. The stalking specter

Of disease that robs the tongue of taste,

That makes light a searing threat,

That muffles sound and thought

And makes a prison of one's weariness;

Which trades the sky of moving clouds

For a stark white ceiling

And a desperate yearning.

A prisoner in one's own body,

An orphan in one's own city,

A voice crying in a familiar wilderness;

The hand of fate can open

And give you these things unexpected.

So I tell you, walk with your head raised,

Raised to the lofty and infinite sky.

Walk in awareness of the beauty of creation,

The mosaic of green and blue,

The tracing shadows and the jeweled puddles,

The voices of young and old in humanity's chorus;

Walk in this world with joy;

While you can!

Morning, 8:24 a.m.

Some Comments

This is the headpiece to the poem "Dawn"

Before continuing with the progress of this day in August I will make some comments. These images are all of the area immediately around my apartment, as will be the next few. You've seen these locations before. The man walking through the snow in "Orange Pink Sky" is walking on the same path as can be seen "8:26,"and the bollards with iron rings which appear in "Dawn" are also at in my last post showing snow. The have also, by the way, received the attentions of "The South End Knitters." I am fortunate that when I found myself unable to move around, the place I was confined to was so rich in beauty.

I have told you about my pictorial objectives before I started this series, and now that I have shown you some of them I'll tell how my intentions have changed. The change seems to have stuck because as you will realize the images since, since regaining my mobility, have continued to be informed by it. The image that will follow this post "Morning" was the turning point. I made it on a day when I hadn't any choice but to stay put, but you know the latin proverb, "nulla dies sine linea," even when laid low...

This view out of my window (all right, I'll confess, it is actually from the door) is of the yard which quite literally lies outside my window. There are a few spectacular trees and a lot of junk and clutter. I do, after all, look out onto a functioning, unpaved alley, albeit a very nice one. What to do with the beach chairs, cars and garbage pails? What to do with the telephone poles and low hanging wires? I made them a challenge for myself. The artist, in creating, faces a tricky dichotomy. Are the creation of beauty and the depiction of beauty the same thing? It is the difference between coming upon a beautiful view and making a record of it, on the one hand, or taking a much more prosaic view and arranging it in such a way that a formal beauty is achieved that the passerby might never have noticed on the other. What I had to work with included a lot of junk and wires so I decided to accept them as elements in the composition and see what could result. "Morning, 8:24 am" was the result. it was very stimulating to feel that I had created an image that I felt was beautiful from the mix of elements that I was confronted with. The beauty is not a fiction, I do truly experience it out there, but is created in a very complex process of visual selection and processing that the casual snapshot does not partake of. In fact I felt that I had recorded the beauty of my experience rather than the facts of the objects. I'm very proud of that and having done it, I have continued to work with the wires and signs and even the "pedestrian crassness of the playground with it's ground rubber pavement" which you will see shortly.

I have been asked about the word "rident" which appears in the "Dawn" poem and will appear in some others which follow. It is one of my "Thackeray" words. I had to go to the OED to find the meaning: "radiantly joyful"- what other word could describe a child's laugh or the rising of the sun after a storm. English has a huge lexicon of amazing words of which we use only a small percentage, many are duplicates, of course, but many are beautiful, subtle and very specific.

In the corners of the images you will see some lettering and a box. I design these images to be printed on my printer. The sheet size is 13 inches by 19 inches. they are archival prints and I limit the production to 50. Since I am printing them myself I have the ability to number the sequence of the edition in the file itself each time I print one, and I keep records of when and for whom each was printed. I deal with it in a traditional "printmaking" way. Perhaps one day that will matter to someone! The box receives my signature and the date of the print was made.

8:26 AM

The morning sun grazes Carleton Street.

7:26 AM

DAWN

...shall I choose the wings of Dawn for my flight...

Cantata "Ich armer Mensch, ich Sünenknect" J.S.bach BWV 55

Dawn! Look, the ardent sun is rising,

Rising over West Newton street and the corridor;

Rising in the East, or at least seems to be so.

But you perhaps remember that it is we,

And with us this delicate, nacreous sky,

Pearl, mother of pearl, mother of us all,

We with our lungs, and with our fragile,

Our mysterious and powerful air,

We are rising as we spin, hurtling

Through the dark and starry void.

We are spinning on our wobbly axis

Like the top of some giant child.

Whirling so fast he couldn't even see us

As we crawl across the South West Corridor Park.

How rident would be that child's laugh-

And perhaps at our expense as we swarm

In our self absorbed festering across this globe;

As we trace our frantic orbit, spinning on our way.

Spinning, and West Newton Street

has just rushed to edge of light

Where the warm and the vibrant;

Where the massively energetic orb

Is glimmering into view to gild this August day.

And that man, do you see him there?

He is spinning at 1000 miles per hour

While being thrown through the track of our orbit

At sixty seven times that speed, and he is walking;

Being late for work he's charging at perhaps

Six miles per hour; my goodness!

What must the addition of his velocity be?

And he is still determinedly upright.

And what is stranger, he doesn't even notice!

The hours of my days

“In a summer season, when soft was the sun.”

Piers Plowman

Here, let me show you what is outside my door, mundane though it may seem, with its traffic signs and telephone wires and the pedestrian crassness of the playground equipment and its ground rubber pavement.

But it is also under the lofty infinite sky, and caressed by the eddies of breeze, gilded by the sun and jeweled with puddles. I want to show you, look and see the world that Courbet and Constable painted- it is right there, all around you, you are walking through it right now.

Hear the symphonic cacophony of our laughter, and chatter, and dog barks, backed by the murmuring continuo of the ever moving traffic and the percussion of our footsteps.

Even in the most ordinary view there is splendor, I invite you to see it, to swoon in it’s beauty; because,you see, tomorrow you, or it, may be no more.

Believe me, I know!

“August; the hours of my days” is a series of images and text which chronicle my daily journeys through the month of my birth. In it I attempt to depict the passage of the sun, the movement of clouds, and the feeling and beauty of the hours of my days.

GoudamentBricks is a typeface by Manfred Klien

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