Panting to the end of another calendar year, still unable to say anything much, despite the volume of what there is to say.   I dance Clapton’s Forever Man.  I can hear,  he plucks and coaxes the  metal strings under the same spell I make the holes in the mesh.  I talk to musicians, I sometimes even tap skulls with them, listening in for what it would feel like to make music, and besides a few hums and buzzes, I don’t hear anything except a wall and an upside down cup.

We are woefully behind again, Machine, without even trying.  Now everyone bluetooths to speakers and we are still using a cord like a white baby shoe string. And the adaptor, which looks positively orthopedic, props the glassy new iPhone up so high it blocks the remote control eyeball hole on the speakers, and I can’t turn up the music unless I get up.

 I look at the shadows, I see fierce birds, I dare myself to color them in on the plaster where they fall, knowing I’ll only have enough nerve to draw on paper taped to the wall.  I get Talk To The Hand from the muse when I suggest visually telling one of the infinite possible stories in the shadows.  The sea, or characters in narrative, or writing-esque illuminated text, much the way my paintings look but a tighter, newer expression, clean like Clapton’s rift, spoonfuls of the pull.

 It is of utmost importance that I keep myself empty, in the art as everywhere, especially in the shadows, empty of form, are these lungs?  fungi?  coral? alien plant sex organs? The inside of Jonah’s whale?  Maps? empty of meaning, like keeping a top spinning on my palm.  And, if I can’t take the high road on this, at least I can think of listening to people’s stories about the work, which would never be possible if I had decided it for them, or for me, either, as the story listener.  I can’t bring it to the peoples unless I been there the self, and so I sit under the installation knowing it’s not finished, not knowing in what way.  Drawing of Vonnegut makes himself a ghostly apparition in the shadow of my own wire work, to say, ‘the writing is like that,’ and I ball him up in my mind’s eye and run away.  To get the paper and scotch tape.  And hang the other optics.

I am sure the piece is thrilled that I am going on vacation and also have a hair appointment.  It wants to emerge from a living artist. it likes it, in fact.  Like Humans Do

Needless to say, I have no business attempting to summarize an understanding of the type of symmetry, gauge theory, which, it is speculated by people who can really keep track of their thoughts, permits photons to (I shy away from ‘be’, it’s probably PTSD) ‘be.’  In order to find the foothold on the rickshaw, so that I can foist myself into the moving basket, I am telling myself that photons are consequences of the dynamics of the What’s-it having aspects that are constantly and invariably symmetrical in spacetime, and in some more rare instances, actually manifested in what we who use the photons for life call reality, or life.  Wikipedia forgets that photons are plant food, too.  you can use them for almost anything.

And furthermore, if zero rest mass is the key to long distance interactions, what does that mean for shadows, do they fall no matter how far or are they dissipated so far the photons forget about migrating in the formation of the shadow at all.  I am answered right away with a vision,

(what is the force that gluons exert?)

but to confess, Machine, this perfect, manifested local symmetry is not what comes through my hands,

I look into the shadows and suspect them of asking me for dark red, later, as a trick, no place has the palette this piece calls for.

imagine backing away from the TV until its frame and the room behind it become visible.  Imagine the world of self-and-other drama is seen to be less real, in the same way that dramatic acting is less real, than life.

Life?  We are not going back to that word.  good god.  I think of the Greek artist known to us as Painter of Pan because of one particularly spectacular goat-man on an Urn, who says, “Keep backing away from the frames!” but we already are doing it

The image for this entry is from A Humument