I am haunted of people who entered my mind, characters who I thought of, who are merely ideas, shadow templates for specific possibilities, or lenses: Malevich, strangely decorated Tami, typo-writing Dick, and Drawing of Vonnegut, and the assembly of minor deities living in a trailer settlement on the poorly lit side of my mind, who now operate in my studio, who rule me like puppeteers, not in the googley-eyed Rasputin way, but cool, removed, the circus on day off, out of costume, ashing right onto the grass, issuing commands for their own entertainment and convenience.  and Pan, who vibrates in my mind so, and manifests a body in my studio.

The Pan stuff, Machine?  I’m not sure, what was the project?  What was the agreement? Radical Openness?  That’s a book somewhere, I suppose I should add it to the things I should check out. I make a little ceremony. I write the list on paper, and sew it up, and tape it up, and glue it down, and light it on fire, and lie down in the road, and wait for Hammurabi.

Pan sneaks in through the work, quaking and hitching his form from my thought to material.  He became a steel sculpture, like a Rune, a newly discovered letter of the alphabet, an alien hobo glyph or electrical symbol.

The 2011 sculpture was supposed to be the armature for a prone figure. But then that work culminated, and drew to a close, and I saw I had been tricked into making him this body.

Over a year after I made the sculpture, I painted it.  Correction, Thor came stomping through as an oil painting on Pan’s square stock steel spine. Pan sports him like a tattoo. Thor, laughing heartily under his fierce, horned cartoon helmet, and sumptuous Viking sky, is painted up Pan’s back and across his shoulder rod, in turquoise and red.

and when I feel his fingers on my face, in my mind, he commandeers Muse for my hands to make him life organs: pancreas, liver, lungs, he tries so hard but still they are only twisted, sewn and tied paper. (from 2012)

‘Burn them!  Burn them!’ His voice is sonic, even though I know he’s only mouthing the words. ‘light them yourself,’ I say, twirling my orange Bic on my thigh.

He also managed to get the image of his actual eye into the image of the sintering core of a Billy goat’s eye, in one of my phone photographs.

These are all still concoctions of my own circus mind. But not always. Strangely, he appeared in one of two dusk photographs I took in the Western Kentucky countryside. ‘Pull the car over.’  Muse told me I was taking a picture of the not very spectacular sky, but I have learned, yes I have, to do like Muse say, so I pulled over and snapped two photos with my phone.

It wasn’t until later when I got back to my state park rental cottage, and looked at the pictures on the laptop, did I see him, monochrome red and glowing, his hands on his hips, horns so symmetrical as to be cliché, the very exact size of a goat-man, standing in the dry grasses at dusk, in one of the two photos.

And when I go to think myself out of him, I find him there again, like a never-ending stack of hands he has to signal me.  I get into a thinking contest with him, who is thinking whom, I say to him in English and Russian, the way you say every word of a prayer in case there’s points off for skipping.

As steel sculpture, Pan makes his own penises. He’s made seven or eight so far. It’s easy to chalk this claim up to a Freudian, evidently life-driving desire to see the naked mole rat. In fact, I set a large bed of identical green air plants under the sculpture, and weeks later in the sun with uniform misting, only a few plants in the whole bed under him turned bright red, in the shape of his boner.  Another time a spool of wire fell from the top of my ladder, and rolled, unfurling a long, coiling line of wire, circle upon circle like a slid stack of round coasters, from the base of his hip rod in a magnificent, arching hard on all the way up to his shoulder solder.  And he’s a bit of a pervert about it, staying so still, saying nothing, like everything’s the same, and then I look down and see an 11” wooden spoon greeting me in the fashion.  Trot trot trot

and today