Flip The Blanket

Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible.

M. C. Escher
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Hello Ernie
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This is the 1,841st edition of Vagabond Journeys. I've been writing and posting one almost every day since 2006. To the world at large it would be known as an exercise in futility. Yesterday I had only 15 known readers when I should have hundreds, thousands. So why do I do it?

Love is one answer. I love to feel my imagination wake up and start working. I love to feel that swirl of ideas around my head. I love it when the natural flow of inspiration brings up a concept better than the one I thought of on my own.

Those are selfish things. Need is another one. I need to share my thoughts, ideas, enthusiasm for living and my life experience with other people. Of what use is a senior citizen if he doesn't open up the trunk, go through everything, throw out the old shoes, wasted love notes and foolish dreams, then bundle together the true values of decades of a life lived.

Hope is another reason why I don't give up. As an actor I have played for an audience of one and an audience of five thousand. The performance was always the same as at other times, the same commitment, the same joy. Why does the violinist return to the same concertos he has played before? Why does the golfer take his clubs out to the course even in the cold weather? Because every swing is a finger poked into the magic world of perfection. The golf swing, the music, my writing aren't perfect, but there is always the possibility that one day it will be.

Despair is another reason why to keep writing. An artist is one who must create, who must let imagination loose from any attempt to cage it, who must feel the blessing of inspiration and recognize it when it comes. For me, who lives in a cultural vacuum, I must create the only atmosphere in which I can survive.

The urge and search for perfection may seem like an absurdity to the rational mind. Yet the greatest achievers of the human race were those who did the impossible. I may get the readers I deserve some day, I may not. I may get close to perfection some day, I may not. But I will grab one side of the blanket with the other artists who are willing to try the absurd and flip truth and beauty into the sky and see haw high we can make it fly.

DB - Vagabond Journeys
Never Give Up
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There Is More

The unseen world hath become seen; the unreal hath become the real.

John Newbrough
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Hello Lily
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"Watchman, tell us of the night."
Blessings are awaiting in the dark.
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Something I like to make note of now and then is the fact that all the physical laws that allow us today to have TV, airplanes, computers and space ships have always been there. We didn't invent the laws. Scientists with vision and imagination are hang glided over the cliffs of new wisdom that is just about to reveal itself, old laws coming into consciousness. It is also true of artists with comparable courage and imagination.

Scientists and artists build on revealed knowledge and proven principles to discover new ways of doing things and in the process new principles, new laws. And yet, since they are discoverable, they are not new at all. They have always been there. The motto of the experimental adventurous thinker is "There is more."

It is recorded that the ancient Hebrew prophets spoke one on one with a voice which they called the "word of God." There was a voice, no doubt, but what was it and where did it come from and how could those prophets be so clear of mind that they actually heard it? Socrates spoke of hearing such a voice, so have many others. Even today it isn't unusual to have the answer to a problem come into your head like a silent voice. It has certainly happened to me, many times. I've come to expect it. I was hiking one day in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. It was a long trail over a mountain range I had never been on before. As I was descending from one of the summits I heard a quiet voice right next to me as clear as if someone was standing there. In fact I looked to the side expecting to see someone. But I was alone. The voice said "You're off the trail." I looked down and saw that, in fact, I was not on the trail. Losing the trail can be dangerous if you aren't an experienced hiker as I wasn't. I looked back up and saw a place where I knew I had been on the trail and hiked back up to it. When I got there I saw the trail took a sharp turn which I had missed.

It can also happen with a vision. Sitting quietly with your eyes closed you may see a sight that tells you what you need to know. For some people that vision can come with eyes open.

Some people go through many ways of trying to get in touch with those voices and visions. They draw circles on the ground, read tea leaves, stare into crystal balls or sit and wait over a Ouija board, for example. They are trying to hear the voice or see the sight. These days there are people doing terrible things because they say God told them to. That's a sad state of delusion. At worst it was the devil, or their conscious or unconscious belief in the devil, that spoke. The devil is very clever at masquerading as God. But the best trick the devil pulls is getting people to believe he's real.

The most important thing is to realize that the laws of being are all still there and have always been there waiting to be discovered. And they will be discovered and put to use by those who watch and listen, who know that it isn't over yet, who say "There is more."

"Impossible be strange attempts to those who weigh their pains in sense," wrote Shakespeare. We can look forward to the unseen becoming seen and the unreal becoming real.

DB - Vagabond Journeys
Never give up.
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Seriously

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Ad Reinhardt
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Hello Sandy
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The only people who take serious art seriously are some artists, (occasionally), people who buy art and art critics. The people who don't take it seriously are those who do it, those who sell it and those wretched people who are somehow forced unfortunately to look at it or listen to it against their will. How do I know this? Because I'm an artist and because I've observed the way art is handled in this age.

Watch a good musician in concert. You may see intense concentration while a piece is being performed, but at the end the musician will probably break into a big smile and maybe even a laugh. Sometimes you even see the smile while the piece is being played. It is the joy of music, or dance that you are seeing. The smiles on the faces of the actors at a curtain call are showing the same joy.

I've known artists who will chuckle at a painting they've done or are working on. It's the same with writers. I know that I will get a laugh out of a particularly strange and subtle twist of language when I'm writing. I avoid cliches, because I champion original thought in myself and in others, so I will go searching for the expression that tells the story without repeating the tried and true. And when I see it in other arts, the dancer who pushes his body into a movement I've never seen, or the musician who gives me a surprising cluster of tones, I feel the same delight.

There is a solid bedrock of mystery involved in the relationship between an artist and the work being done. It has to do with value and origination, an invisible generic bond of co-creation between the artist, the work and the inspiration that demands and forces it into being. It is as if there is an anonymous angel of pure spirit that finds it in whatever galaxy it lives, brings it out of hiding and gives it to the artist who is ready to respond.

The scientist will study to uncover the secret laws of nature. The engineer will design the mechanism that measures. moves and controls the natural forces. But what the artist does is transcendental. And who can be serious about that.

DB - Vagabond Journeys
Never Give Up
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The Better Life

Destiny is not a matter of chance. It is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.

William Jennings Bryan
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Hello Frosty
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I spend a lot of space in this journal urging people to use their imagination, to have good realistic dreams and to follow them. Why do I do that? Because the future is life. Imagining and achieving a better future is making a better life. Anyone who is self satisfied is denying themselves a destiny that can outshine any light they may presently be holding up to the world. Why miss the opportunity?

I've shut my eyes and am holding my nose while I keep dunking myself in a baptism of character. I'm cleansing and ridding myself of being defined by my past. I am slowly learning not to regret the things I didn't do or the advantages I didn't have. It's a waste of mental energy and it dirties up the future. I can get angry at my current lack of possibilities but feeling sorry for myself is akin to regretting. It's putting on a dunce cap of negativity.

Here I am, stuck in a dead end, drugged up, wasteland of a place desperately trying to get out and back to New York City, my only real home town. The obstacles to doing that are many and some of them huge. But when I think of what I can do there it sweetens the journey. I can be with other artists. I can learn more about painting, more about theatre. I can be with other, better writers. I can make music.

Achieving the impossible is not impossible once you've achieved it. And you destiny is not written in your past or present. It's written in your thoughts when clearly visualized and lit by the fire of enthusiasm.

DB - Vagabond Journeys
Never Give Up
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Fiddle Sticks

There are many theories about art, from philosophers, academics, critics and others, but for the artist there is only one practice, and it cannot be put into words.

Dana Bate
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Hello Bridgeville, Delaware
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I knew a bass violinist who practiced and played as any other musician would. But sometimes I would see him just staring at the instrument from across the room as if it was a strange being filled with silent mysteries.

I had the same experience once when I purchased a charcoal pencil. It wasn't the first charcoal pencil I owned, but it was brand new and before I sharpened it I just stared at it imagining what mysteries were waiting for me from that primitive drawing material wrapped in wood.

A bass violin and a charcoal stick don't have much in common except one thing, potential. The fiddle isn't going to do anything until the musician sets one of those strings vibrating. The stick isn't going to do anything until the artist applies it to a piece of paper. But then the process begins. One tone leads to another, one line to another. Something vital is taking shape. The practice of imagination, of artistic creativity is happening and a dialogue is taking place, fingers are reaching for tones that want to be heard and lines that want to be seen, choices are made that insist on themselves.

For the poet the words the poem needs and insists on live in the great cosmos of language, waiting to be found, plucked and drawn out. The poet is practicing the art of poetry, the dialogue is alive, the lines vibrate.

We do not think of beauty or truth. If the work is done right things happen, they reveal themselves, they live always as potential within the fiddle and the stick, but when drawn out and given wings they attache themselves with a delicate and invisible force to the artist and his world.

Let the critic say what he wants, he will not know the magic moments of conversation between the artist and his work, the divine dialogue that has no name.

Dana Bate
(never give up)
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SPRING QUESTION
(This is not a contest)

NASA has planned to send a two man mission on an 18 month trip to the planet Mars. It would take 6 months for the astronauts to get there and after 6 months of exploration another 6 months to return.

Should they do it and why, and if not, why not?

dbdacoba@aol.com

Only 6 answers so far

I eagerly await your answer.

DB
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Underneath The Stones

Only there, in the silence of the painter or the writer can reality be rendered, reworked, and made to show its significant side.

Lawrence Durrell
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Hello Djibouti
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We are artists and it is our responsibility to define life to itself. Reality is a gossamer thing that must be poked and probed at all times. Both the scientist and the artist are those who turn things upside down and look underneath. We do it from similar curiosity, but for different reasons.

I, as an artist, like most artists, am on a campaign to reveal the truth about truth, the reality about reality, the beauty about beauty and to render unto humans the shock of pleasure I experience when I discover the reality of the things we take for granted.

I'm not a poet. I wish I were. But I know that in the silence and aloneness of my life I continually reach for the poet's words to express what I find in that silence. To the philosopher the truth will reveal itself in a momentary flash of lightning as a giant landscape with all of it's details clearly seen. At that point the artist attempts to recreate what the philosopher saw. We can only do it in part, but it is in that doing that the mysteries and secrets reveal themselves.

One of the great secrets is the need and reasonability for the thinker to hold the specific and the general in mind at the same time. Every single extant, or thing that is, has its own individual sacred identity which gives it its right to exist, And it is also a part of the whole creation without which the universe would be incomplete. The attachment of a single truth to the whole of reality is more than just a natural network, it is the signification of the determination of existence and beauty.

DB - The Vagabond
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Thinking And Non Thinking

Whoever he may be, and wherever he may be placed, the man who thinks becomes a light and a power.

Henry George
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Do we really think? Or do we just think we're thinking. Do we think that what we think we're thinking is really thinking? Try saying that three times fast.

Physicists tell us that the mere act of observing a phenomenon will cause it to alter its behavior. Is it also true about our thinking? A good actor will be thinking his character's thoughts while at the same time thinking his own. It's a tricky juggling act particularly if observing his thoughts will change them, which they often do.

The philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote a book, which was a series of lectures entitled "What Is Called Thinking?" In it he writes "What is most thought provoking, is this - that we are still not thinking."

That brings up the previous question. Do we think we are thinking when in fact we are not? And why not? Is it due solely to our ignorance of what thinking is, or is there something about thinking itself that prevents itself? As absurd as it may seem, is it possible that the act of thinking about thinking will prevent us from thinking? That is one of the Rubik's cubes of existentialism. What does a bubble look like from the inside?

Some clever artists have designed pieces that present the same paradox. i remember one that was set up at the front of a building in New York. It was a tunnel which a spectator could walk through. From the outside it had unmistakable transparent plastic walls which ran from top to bottom as a normal wall, But when people were in the tunnel they were clearly putting their hands through the wall. I entered and found that the walls were in fact curved out so that they were impossible to touch. It was an illusion but it told a story about how we look at things and hence how we think about them. One wanted to enter the tunnel and touch the wall, but the wall prevented being touched.

Heidegger also wrote "What must be thought about, turns away from man. It withdraws from him. But how can we have the least knowledge of something that withdraws from the beginning, how can we even give it a name?"

What an illusive thing is thinking? There are many different was to think, or to think we are thinking. There is letting the mind wander, which is not really thinking. I have a quote somewhere that says the reason why people get lost in thought is because it's unfamiliar territory. There is rampant imagination, which is close to letting the mind wander, but which sometimes leads into dark and gnarly trails in the jungle. There is structured imagination such as an artist or designer will use. But the end of that is not thinking, but some sort of product. There is the thinking that is the pondering over someone else's thoughts, such as I am doing right now. Reason is a good use of one's mind but is it genuine thinking? Lastly, and most rare, is original, inspired thinking. That is thinking that has no rules and whose results are the most illusive of all. But if the more we think the more thinking withdraws from us how will we ever know not only how to think but what thinking itself really is.

The possible answer Heidegger provides is to see the withdrawing of thinking from the thinking man as also a "drawing with" or a pointing towards. We pursue real thinking and its meaning in our lives because we need to. The physicist may never catch up with the object's changes as he observes it. But will we ever catch up to true immutable thinking? I don't know. But I'm thinking about it.

DB - Vagabond Journeys
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WINTER QUESTION
(This is not a contest)

What was the most significant event that happened in 2010?

dbdacoba@aol.com

Only 6 responses so far

I await your answer.
DB
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How To Disturb The Universe

He who seeks rest finds boredom. He who seeks work finds rest.

Dylan Thomas
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One day I was talking with a young fellow, a high school senior, who had done a few plays in school and was considering majoring in drama when he got to college and then going into show business. He asked me what life was like for an actor. I don't remember everything I said to him, but it went something like this.

Life for an actor is interesting, exciting, aggravating, irritating, satisfying, fulfilling, frightening, insecure, fascinating, difficult, exhausting, vivifying, unpredictable, confusing, revealing, contorted, visionary, preposterous, challenging, inspiring, dangerous, resuscitating and extraordinary. The one thing it definitely never is, is boring.

People don't get into the arts in order not to be bored, but once in it becomes clear that work time is of the essence and down time is spare. If an actor is not memorizing lines, searching the script for it's hidden beauties, working his body, voice and spirit in rehearsal designing and fulfilling his role, taking the great leap into performance when all things else are of no matter, he is out looking for work. And there is nothing boring about it.

I for one am grateful that I was able, and still am, to be an artist. It's a mysterious, magical way to live. Most artists don't talk about it or even notice how special the work they do is to the world. T. S. Eliot wrote "Do I dare disturb the universe." A good artist is at the point of disturbing the universe every time he picks up a pen or a brush. Why? Because he is using natural law as his tool. Because art is not an imitation of nature, it is an imitation, or explanation of the essence of nature, "to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature" as Shakespeare put it, to explain the universe to itself. Physics tells us that when a thing is observed and contemplated it changes it's behavior. It is disturbed.

What gives us the right to do that? I don't know. I only know it's true. There are many excellent ways to live one's life, being an artist is only one of them. But we are given a special trust to do the work we must do. Most artists take it for granted.

I don't know what happened to that boy. Maybe he's a busy actor these days. That would be good. But I'm grateful to him for asking me that question so I could articulate what I know.

DB
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AUTUMN QUESTION

(This is not a contest.)

At what event of the past do you wish you could be present? Why?

8 responses so far.

dbdacoba@aol.com

Thank you.
DB
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Let the artist loose.

Art does not reproduce the visible, rather, it makes visible.

Paul Klee
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Watch out now, I'm going to do some more meanderings about art. Why do I do that? Because I'm an artist. Because I'm proud and humbled to have among my friends and acquaintances those with whom I share a sacred experience, though some artists may not think of it that way, and it's a sacred experience I share with the rest of the world, though most of humanity would not see it that way.

I know a guy who's a mechanic. His hobby is taking photographs. His pictures are excellent. They are beautiful, often with humor, sometimes with pathos. I've shared some of them with a few artist friends. I keep telling him he's an artist, He keeps insisting he's not. But the proof is in the picture.

There's a well known painting my Rene Magritte of a man standing in a suit and hat with an apple covering his face. It's a curious picture as most of his works are. But someone suggested that what if it was a photograph and at the exact mini second the photographer took the picture of the man an apple had fallen from the tree between them. Think about that.

When I was an actor I enjoyed talking with other actors about the processes and results of acting various roles. One day a stage manager, a sweet woman whose friendship I cherish, said "Why do you talk about it? Why don't you just do it?"
I enjoyed talking about it, that's why. I discussed it because I was fascinated by the processes and wanted to understand them on a philosophical level. But she was correct in a certain way because the doing of it was the best way of articulating it. That's why it's called "show business."

I once knew an actor who was obese. He wasn't overweight, he was obese. He had a lifelong issue with weight. He used to say that when he came near the exhaust of a bakery he gained five pounds. But, despite that, he was in excellent physical shape. He was a dancer as well as being an actor. And he was a happy, jovial fellow with a good sense of humor. He had a girl friend, Louise. One day I was visiting them for a party. He had a statue on his bookcase of Bacchus, a naked fat man sitting on a keg of wine with a laurel wreath on his head and a big happy smile on his face. Louise showed it to me and said that she almost left him because of his weight, but when she saw that statue she changed her mind. She stopped looking at the fat man and started seeing the Bacchus he really was.

There's that famous line by Archibald MacLeish, "A poem should not mean, but be."

We make things visible, we crazy artists, and that is a sacred trust.


DB - The Vagabond

Quality Questions 9/04/09

A work of art is a creature which beckons, points and leads the way. But if we see it as merely a thing in itself we are still lost.

DB - The Vagabond
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Climb aboard.
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A CEO of a major American oil company was quoted as saying that he had never given a dollar to any cultural cause in his life, that he never would and he was proud of it. That man is truly lost.

Probably nothing and no group of people suffer from as much criticism, prejudice, misunderstanding, misinterpretation and maligning as art and artists do. I know I have written about the inane habit many people have of not being able to separate the actor from the role he plays. The man who plays the clarinet does not go around all day with a clarinet in his hands. Why should a man who plays a villain go around all day with villainy in his heart? It makes no sense.

Books have been burned or banned from library shelves, paintings have been taken off the walls, statues have been destroyed or covered up, not because of what they are but because of what an ignorant person or group of people think they are.

A work of art can be pleasing and enjoyable on a very simple level, but, yes, sometimes it can be dangerous. But the danger is primarily in its prophetic abilities.

When Pierre Beaumarchais wrote his trilogy of plays about Figaro in the 1770s the hero was a barber, a common man. The aristocrats came and laughed. They were so amused at the idea of a commoner being able to control a nobleman and his family, something they knew would never happen. But within a short time there were revolutions, and near revolutions, in which the common people took over the reins from the oppressive, conservative, aristocratic governments all over Europe and America. Did Beaumarchais' plays cause those revolutions? No. They pointed to them.

Plato says somewhere that when the modes of society change the modes of music always change first. When Arnold Schoenberg developed the twelve tone theory of music compostion in the 1920s in which equal importance was given to each tone of the scale it erased the traditional method of keys with their inner harmonic relationships. There were plenty of polemics about Schoenberg's music but was he preaching Socialism or predicting it?

In the 1940s New York City became the center of the art world with the rise of AbstractExpressionsism and artists such Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline and Hans Hoffman. And what was it telling us? The world had just been torn to shreds by the second world war, culminating in the massive destruction of two civilizations by atomic bombs. Life would never be the same. Painting became nonpolitical and nonobjective. A work of art no longer had to be about something. It became the reality of the artists' emotional and subconscious lives. It was a completely personal revolution, a modern version of the rise of the common man, his thoughts, feelings and experiences. It was now a true communication, as it had always been, but without the limitations of tradition, a communication from the artist to the viewer, one on one.

That revolution made it's way into poetry, theatre, music and dance. And I think that's where the finger was pointing. Freedom. Freedom of expression. Freedom of speech. Freedom from boundaries and limitations. You don't have to paint abstract art or compose twelve tone music. But you can if you want to. It's personal. Your choice. The revolution is still going on (but don't tell the aristocrats or that CEO).

Now there is electronics: computer graphics, electronic music or electronically altered traditional music (rock bands) and massive and complicated special effects in films. What is that pointing to?

The best way to view a work of art is to ask what it is saying to you. Don't make assumptions. Take time and let its message speak. Congratulate yourself. The artist is talking to you. YOU.

DB - The Vagabond
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I enjoy your hugs.
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SUMMER QUIZ

This is not a contest.



A young man out west just took home 88 million dollars from the lottery.



Whether you play the lottery or not, if you suddenly had 88 million dollars, or the equivalent of whatever your currency is, what are the first three things you would do with it?



You have all summer to answer if you wish.

20 responses so far.



DB

Zenith Zeal 6/22/09

A genius is one who sees what is not yet and causes it to come to be.

Peter Zarlenga
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Welcome.
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Question: What do the space shuttle, the 747, a blimp, a hot air balloon, a mountain climber, a tight rope walker, a pole vaulter and a good thinker have in common?

Answer: They all overcome gravity.

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We all daydream. A genius is one who takes his daydreams seriously. All the great and important things that have come to be have all started with thought. Not just any kind of thought, but the thought that reaches out beyond the established limits of what we suppose reality is made of. Not the downbeat thinking Loretta Young spoke of in my last entry. We dream of things that are not possible. We laugh at the absurd ideas that crop up in the free floating mind. And if, by chance, we perceive that there may be a remote possibility that what we dream of may someday become a reality, we turn the whole project over to the mysterious "They." "Someday they may figure out how to do so-and-so." Meanwhile the genius isn't content with waiting for "They," he becomes the "They" in question.

We are all capable of genius on one level or another. The "down beat" thinking that most of us engage in sometimes is one of the worst culprits in the world. It's the voice that says things can't be done, are impossible, against the laws of nature and morally wrong. "If God had meant us to fly he would have given us wings."

I'm an artist, and I know that an artist is also one who takes his daydreams seriously. Sometimes, when I view or hear the work of another artist I'm fascinated to think at what point the artist was in his life when the idea first occurred to him to try to create such a thing. I am equally fascinated by where my own ides come from.

I wonder the same about the great inventions of the world; some are magnificent, like the space shuttle, some are mundane, like the can opener, And yet they are all fingers pointing to the sign that reads "Genius At Work."

DB - Vagabond Journeys
__________________
Do a little summer dance today. Just a couple of steps will do.
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SUMMER QUIZ

This is not a contest.


A young man out west just took home 88 million dollars from the lottery.


Whether you play the lottery or not, if you suddenly at 88 million dollars what are the first three things you would do with it?


dbdacoba@aol.com

http://vagabondjourneys.blogspot.com/