........ A fallow painting season - but fruit still forming after the pruning. I have learned over the years that when the muse leaves and your creative self is like a ghost, wandering the halls, to just turn up at your 'place of work' even if your clocking-in card is missing.
I have been feeling my way towards making my mark in Tony's Book, for the Collective Book Project..... I had a blueprint of where I was going....and determined today I would work on it. Tony's Book was sitting on top of 2 books I bought at a Car Boot recently - a book of poetry and an old, beautiful book titled "The Story of 25 Eventful Years" , full of photographs taken between 1910 to 1935. I picked all 3 books up and sat down to begin work. I noticed that a piece of paper was sticking out of the book of photographs and it marked an image with the clock of Big Ben showing 11 o'clock. The work I had intended to do in Tony's book related to clocks so I was intrigued enough to wonder what the poetry book would reveal .... in the index was a poem entitled 'The Layers'. Layers and connections is a theme running through my work so I went straight to that........ what a discovery! ..... The fate of the mark making in Tony's Book was sealed ..............
The Layers
by Stanley Kunitz
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
"Live in the layers
not on the litter."
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written'
I am not done with my changes.
I have been feeling my way towards making my mark in Tony's Book, for the Collective Book Project..... I had a blueprint of where I was going....and determined today I would work on it. Tony's Book was sitting on top of 2 books I bought at a Car Boot recently - a book of poetry and an old, beautiful book titled "The Story of 25 Eventful Years" , full of photographs taken between 1910 to 1935. I picked all 3 books up and sat down to begin work. I noticed that a piece of paper was sticking out of the book of photographs and it marked an image with the clock of Big Ben showing 11 o'clock. The work I had intended to do in Tony's book related to clocks so I was intrigued enough to wonder what the poetry book would reveal .... in the index was a poem entitled 'The Layers'. Layers and connections is a theme running through my work so I went straight to that........ what a discovery! ..... The fate of the mark making in Tony's Book was sealed ..............
The Layers
by Stanley Kunitz
I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
"Live in the layers
not on the litter."
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written'
I am not done with my changes.
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