So he became a dancer to God.
Because his flesh was in love with the burning arrows
He danced on the hot sand until the arrows came.
As he embraced them this white skin surrendered itself to
the redness of blood, and satisfied him.
Now he is green, dry and stained
With the shadow in his mouth.from "The Death of Saint Narcissus" by T.S. Eliotforgive my poor communication for the last few days i am absolutely disoriented, i have the whole production of the world in my body. fear, oh my dear, i wish it was that. it's more like surrender, we can't help ourselves. we don't want to. the forces are in play. terribly (that word chosen carefully) attuned. like that essay. uhmmmmmmm. berger! ooh where is that? please hold la la la need cig and more beer.... oh ps we saw patti smith? did i tell you. very good patti on the night of the 24th (if you see her on the street with her shoe untied please tell her to tie her shoe because she is clumsy.... k, wait a second.... brb. i learned to like beer at the cabin. i never did, did you know that? i like scotch, whiskey but not beer. now i do. it tastes really good after a swim in a glacial river, in the hot sun, watching malcolm and sean fishing. nearly a full moon later. & a smoke. firesmoke & my eyes watering from the bone chill. shivering on the heat of the rock, blue sky already specked with stars and that moon rising. malcolm has his belly up to the water. please don't bring him down. please don't let him go. he's on the same side as you. there are some people who believe in love. a man named john
a man named john wrote a song for me to sing
and the most beautiful flowers i have ever seen
he is a very good man
and he has been an even very good man to me
i hope one day his song i will sing
another love i still love
familiar face to me
a standing arch above my heart
willie was shot once in his mind
and his cry out saved his own life
the second time was through the heart
the doctors pulled the bullet from inside
he had a job to do he said
that's his way of lifei had this weird moment in the pass through to seattle on i90. we stopped at a rest stop and i almost literally collapsed, because the smell of the air, the soft wind and the forests cedar, pine, something. on the mountains sweeping up from the highway, the rain, the fog, the warmth from the ground—all a pouring forth of vast power.
tell us our names, show us how we smell, name us, what skins we wear, the wolves who find each other, the qualities of our mouths and our hands claiming someone, cumming for them. it was overwhelming. and i had the distinct feeling that self-pity was impossible anymore. all things were made through it. What is the famous Beckett line? “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.” it was kind of funny, this litany pounding in my ears, my blood had drained into my feet, because it was physically exhausting. i was left gasping. how fucking ridiculous to feel coherent and continuous, extraordinary complications and interruptions come from the earth. or the rain, my actual being under the dome of heaven, the bridge between the two, the axis. or this familiar, heart-rending sky of the pacific northwest. knowing isn't cleaner than the world, it's made of the stuff.
“It was like so, but wasn’t.” How traditional Persian tales begin.
He said: O Adam, tell them their names,
and when he had told them their names
he said: did i not tell you that i know
what is hidden in the heavens and earth,
and know what you disclose and know what you hide? so. anyways! i found the essay. here you go.
when he painted a small pear tree in flower, the act of the sap rising, of the bud forming, the bud breaking, the flower forming, the styles thrusting out, the stigmas becoming sticky, these acts were present for him in the act of painting. when he painted a road, the roadmakers where there in his imagination. when he painted the turned earth of a ploughed field, the gesture of the blade turning the earth was included in his own act. wherever he looked he saw the labour of existence; and this labour, recognized as such, for him constituted reality.
if he painted his own face, he painted the construction of his destiny, past and future, rather as palmists believe they can read this construction in the hand. his contemporaries who considered him abnormal were not all as stupid as assumed. he painted compulsively—no other painter was ever compelled in a comparable way.
his compulsion? it was to bring the two acts of production, that of the canvas and that of the reality depicted, ever closer and closer. this compulsion derived not from an idea about art—this is why it never occurred to him to profit from reality— but from an overwhelming feeling of empathy.
"i admire the bull, the eagle, and man with such an intense adoration, that it will certainly prevent me from becoming an ambitious person"
he was compelled to go ever closer, to approach and approach and approach. In extremis he approaches so close that the stars in the night sky became maelstroms of light, the cypress trees ganglions of living wood responding to the energy of wind and sun. there are canvases where reality dissolves him, the painter. but in hundreds of others he takes us as close as any man can, while remaining intact, to that permanent process by which reality is being produced.
once, long ago, paintings were compared to mirrors. van gogh's might be compared with lasers. they do not wait to receive, they go out to meet, and what they traverse is, not so much empty space, as the act of production. the 'entire world' that van Gogh offers as a reply to the vertigo of nothingness is the production of the world. painting after painting is a way of saying, with awe but little comfort: it works.
John Berger, "The Production of the World"
