A beautiless consideration

Envision a wonderless world, if you will. Aweless and bountiless. Where you are admitted watchlessly, accepted gratelessly, treated hatelessly. Would you be regretless to live there, worshipless, wasteless and successless?

You may smile listfully and think, what kind of worthful hack would propose such a thing? A sightful, guileful cynic. A heedful, needful fool. Who shall remain nameful.

But on the other hand (note the seamful transition), don’t blame me. We are both pitiful and pitiless. Merciful and merciless. Careful and careless. Artful and artless.

Most of all, meaningful and meaningless.

Two ways to disappear

Lived clean and tidy, she lived off lists, check check check, interior world scoured and lemon Pledge scented, windows closed. No pets no smoking no loud talking. Shh. First finish the chores, then if there’s time maybe lay face-up beneath the old oak, maybe jump in the river, maybe count junebugs. But first. Tick tick tick. Washing in, washing out, the dirt onto the rags and the rags into the machine. What, no time? To bed then. When she goes she’ll leave a No. A hole.

But what could a mess have done for her? A contrary wind would overturn the false flowers. A mandala of glass shards point back to the point of impact. A shock, a stop, a broken clock. The open window a channel between in and out. The sun pour in, the sounds of the street below, the air exchange. Her glance fly through the opening, swift as a bird.

Sweet sweet

The fudgy vegan cake I once loved is distastefully treacly. The new chocolate-covered brownie bites that everyone raves about are vapid. The faux ice cream sandwich is so cloying, it’s hard to finish. What has happened to me?

I stopped eating added sugar, that’s what. About six months ago, Zeke and I made a dare that if one of us ate any, that one would have to (cue ominous music) do the dishes for a month. And, since we’re not saints, one day a month we’d have a sugar jubilee and eat whatever we want. It’s been interesting.

I was raised in the Midwest, where after lunch and dinner, something sweet was required for a meal to be complete. My parents are both paragons of moderation – impressively, unbelievably, almost disgustingly so – I’m talking one square of chocolate. The moderation gene was not passed on to me, and through the years I began considering larger and larger proportions of sweet things to be the little something at dinner’s end. Or lunch… or breakfast.

But now, on a cold day, there’s roasted acorn squash with cinnamon and a few raisins, steaming from the oven. Or if it’s hot, my man blends a banana, frozen blueberries, a handful of spinach, and enough soy milk to keep the blender from imploding, and the resultant purple shake is creamy, thick, and satisfying. Figs, apples, coconut – these are now desserts.

And on Sugar Day, flavor is key. The molasses cookie is like chewing syrup, nearly intolerable. But the pumpkin cookie is good, and the banana pie is better yet. Could it be that the taste of actual foods– pumpkin, almond, banana– is what makes something delicious?

Could be. Exhibit A would be diet products. As if it weren’t already obvious that they are an unsatisfying way to eat a lot of something that you try to convince yourself tastes just like something you shouldn’t eat a lot of. The 137-calorie pint of frozen protein dessert? Predictably, it’s going to food purgatory: the staff lounge. Exhibit B would be anything you’d find in a trick-or-treater’s pillowcase. The bite-sized lures of candy corporations taste false and overbearing to altered taste buds.

Perhaps I sound like an elitist food critic, but forgive me: I need to revel in actually having preferences regarding products containing sugar. Before, anything sweet tasted good and was worth consuming. Plants evolved sweetness to encourage animals to eat and propagate their seeds, after all. Sweetness meant safety, meant this isn’t poisonous. But in today’s food world, it may nearly be the opposite.

And perhaps I may sound like one of those health nuts who insist (er, lie) that raw broccoli with a sprinkling of brewer’s yeast is as palatable to them as whoopie pie. But on a sugar day, if I have two or three sugar-things, it’s undeniable: I begin to feel slightly nauseated. My pulse surges and bumps, confusing my body: What’s this? Is she running? Dancing? No, she’s sitting in the chair, blogging. What gives? I actually crave vegetables and water. Then there’s the sugar crash. A haze drops over my brain. There’s pasty film on my tongue. And a slightly greater inclination to be, um, a bitch. As much as being an occasional treat, Sugar Day reminds us why we do what we do for the rest of the month.

Of course, even sans sweets, I’m still irritable and twitchy at times. I can only imagine how much more serene I would be if I were a total Buddha, savoring every breath, movement, sight, word. I still charge through things, fixate on time and result, get impatient. But this is progress. Sweet, sweet progress.

Who wants little pieces of art?

Yes, again! After a fruitful retreat at the Monastery of St. Gertrude in Cottonwood, Idaho, and a careful combing of the contents of my sketchbooks, there has been an unexpected artcropping of mostly two-dimensional, mostly smaller than 11″x 14″ pieces. They are not as planned in terms of subject matter, execution and cohesion as the collection of oil paintings I released in the summer, but there’s lots of color and happiness and freshness.

And they are ready to fly the coop, again for a good cause. This time it’s WORD Inc of Missoula– Women’s Opportunity & Resource Development. WORD is a Missoula non-profit whose programs promote women’s access to stable housing, adequate income, personal/career development, family/school involvement and the creation of policies for social change. They have suffered some loss of funding in the past months. So if you couldn’t spring for spendy postage on a big chunk of canvas, or responded after your art of choice had already been claimed last time, and you’d like to help out a great organization, this could be for you.

All the artwork that’s up for grabs is in an album entitled “Available Works” on the Sideways Gaze gallery site. Click on “Image Details” if you’d like to know the size of a piece and how it was made. If something rings your bell, post a comment, and I’ll be sure to claim it for you and get it in the mail soon. The cost is postage (which shouldn’t be more than a few dollars for anything flat) plus a donation to WORD in an amount that works for you. (A few of the pieces– the more labor-intensive ones– do have suggested amounts.)

Enjoy!

Hey Joe and Nellie Kane

Went out last night just to make a little rout / Met Little Sadie and I shot her down…

Early one mornin while makin the rounds / I took a shot of cocaine and I shot my woman down…

Hey Joe, where you goin with that gun in your hand? I’m goin down to shoot my old lady / I caught her messin round with another man…

There are endless variations on this song. Nobody’s quite sure who first wrote it. I’m told it’s about cocaine and what it does to a guy. Or the beautiful chord progressions, the beautiful melody. Or it’s just the blues. Whatever it’s about, the words are incidental.

So they say. But it doesn’t seem accidental, the overripe American (probably global) tradition of man-kills-woman murder ballads. The musical narration of meting out capital punishment to an unfaithful woman, or to a woman for no given reason at all– just happened, I s’pose, like rain, or a stubbed toe. It’s not that singing about death or even homicide bothers me per se. It’s the frequency of the scenario, and the one-sidedness. If I have to have a murder ballad, at least give me Gillian Welch’s Caleb Meyer, which concerns a woman slaying the man attempting to rape her:

Caleb Meyer, your ghost is gon’ wear them rattling chains / But when I go to sleep at night, don’t you call my name...

Self-defense, as opposed to the man-kills-woman lyric… which seems to happen a lot more often when you sleep with that lovin .44 ‘neath your head.

People also stick up for the Hey Joe tradition by mentioning that the perp never walks free. The law invariably catches up with him:

I begin to think what a deed I’d done / I grabbed my hat and away I run / Made a good run but a little too slow / They overtook me in Jericho…

But a cry of remorse, a bit of sorry, maybe even some amends? No, not so much as a politician’s apology (“I regret that some have felt offended by my actions”). We hear I shouted Lordy Lordy have mercy on me only when the judge declares that heavy prison sentence.

There are lots of songs about killed love, lost love, spurned love, ruined love, unrequited love, idealized love. Pain waters music, and music eases pain. But every so often there’s a song born of joy. Simple mutual respect as an antidote to the endless songs of power and revenge. A couple weeks ago my sweetheart brought home an old melody about, of all things, a blended family. It’s another one where nobody’s sure of the author–some say Tim O’Brien, others attribute it farther back.

As a young man I went riding out on the western plain / In the state of North Dakota I met my Nellie Kane, I met my Nellie Kane.

She was living in a lonely cabin with a son by another man / Five years she had waited for him, as long as a woman can, long as a woman can.

I don’t know what changed my mind / Until then, I was the ramblin kind / The kind of love I can’t explain / That I have for Nellie Kane.

Well she took me on to work that day, to help her till the land / In the afternoon we planted seeds, in the evening we held hands, in the evening we held hands.

Her blue eyes told me everything a man could want to know / And it was then I realized that I would never go, I would never go.

I don’t know what changed my mind / Until then, I was the ramblin kind / The kind of love I can’t explain / That I have for Nellie Kane.

Now many years have gone by, her son has grown up tall / I became a father to him and she became my all, she became my all…

I love it so.

P.S. This lyric also must have touched Gillian Welch. The name of the woman in her song Caleb Meyer? Nellie Kane.

Experiments with bread and wine

After six months of going to Spirit of Peace, the band of faithy people I had fallen in with, something stirred in me. They always would say “The table is open.” Meaning anyone can partake, no specific belief required, no error or identity wrong enough to get you nixed. No merit badge to earn, nothing to say or be. Some called it the Body of Christ, and the Blood, but I heard just as often a whispered bread of life and spiritual drink, or only eyes, no words. It seemed left to each to name. After all, this bunch was halfway kicked out, and halfway left, the Catholic church. Heretics, I suppose; no wonder I feel so at home. In here, women preach, ex-priests marry, nobody rules, the bread’s homemade, and the wine is probably Safeway.

Why, after at least fifteen years of knowing that that stuff wasn’t for me, was there a pull? Because this was an expression of community. Because there was no exclusion. And because there was no pressure. I mean NONE.

And so one day I went to the table and took onto my tongue the heavy crumble of bread and light sweet wine, and became more deeply. What were they really, the food and drink? In my cobbled-together theology, the components of life: earth baked in fire and air, water fermented with spirit. Ruins of other life, wheat and grapes and insects and humans, regenerated, infused. Accepting them, I accept that I too am comprised of these components, am being used, will one day be completely used, am not separate from that cycle of life and death. But that in this, there is also soul, which transcends, which I can’t, and don’t care that I can’t, put into words.

*

Subsequently it occurred to me that I could be a baker too. All the time I make bread. Why not this? So they gave me the recipe, and I burned a bit of the cornmeal and molasses and scraped up the rest, poured it into the dough. Shoved aside keys and cords and papers to clear a tiny place to knead. My moods went out of me through the dough, and instead I thought of people with love – no mean feat for one so disillusioned with our species. The baby loaf rose in the sunlight. Then it baked, barely fitting in the apartment’s small oven, and there was no way to test its readiness without puncturing or slicing, so I had to hope. But it was good. And when it was broken and given, still hot, I felt not my own power, but the swimming flowing energy that always is, coming through my hands and works and my temporary warmth, passing into the people.

*

And witnessing this, what is your typical spiritual unchristian hanger-on to do next? Obviously, sign up to be a minister of the eucharist. Ha! But yes. Yes, I’d like to be another pair of hands sharing earth, water, fire, air, spirit more directly. Eucharist’s from the Greek eukharistia, meaning thanksgiving or gratitude. What could be more right? They will teach me and I will learn, experiment, fall deeper in love. “Everything is preparation for something,” said J. Otis Powell!, a wise man I knew many years ago (and whose name really is spelled with an exclamation point). All right then, I am ready. Exclamation point!

Occupied

Been thinking about this a while. Also, ignoring it. It’s been two months, winter is coming on, and the tent cities are scattering. Where will the energy go?

I have not been a part of it. I can’t get excited any more, or think it will do any good. Of the dozens of protests I attended years ago, almost all left me feeling useless, one-sided, low. Shouting simplistic slogans at nobody. Stale songs from the sixties on repeat. The choreographed dance of marchers and riot police, a marionette show of discontent.

The School of the Americas civil disobedience touched me, when I was arrested along with several thousand others, banned and barred from the property, singing songs in memory of the disappeared. But it happens every year, and the durn place is still training military terrorists, with a sugar-coating of human rights. We marched in view of nobody to the immigrant detention center in Georgia, witnessing to an impoverished town of mostly African-Americans whose only industry was low-paying jobs at the private prison. Against war in DC. Against the PATRIOT Act. Mourning the death of Paul Wellstone in Minnesota. The sole lasting point of light was the march for affirmative action in Cincinnati. The only truly diverse protest I’d belonged to, we walked through the neighborhoods to the courthouse together, people joining along the way. Years later, waiting for a bus in Minneapolis, the headline on a newspaper vending machine caught my eye: affirmative action had been upheld in the five states that the legal challenge had affected. Victory. I actually jumped for joy. But what a rarity.

So my experience inclines me to skepticism about outcomes. Who are these people? To get all corporate, what’s the mission statement? To get all English teacher, what’s the thesis? What’s the solution? Do they know that while maybe we’re the 99% in the USA, globally we’re still the 1%? Do they remember that this didn’t start with Lehman Brothers, that lots of people have been living in a recession their entire lives due to intersections of gender, class, ability, and/or plain old bad luck? Moreover, I’ve heard it suggested that the mainstream publicity paid to these protests is part of a deliberately planned timeline that will see most Americans coming to resent these people just as elections arrive, ensuring that even worse governance will ensue.

But one day I saw that Angela Davis was there. She’s righteous. She says that it’s learning how to unite and communicate and respect each other first, then the action will come. I get pissed at the shiny, plastic anchor who keeps pressing her for “talking points” and a cohesive message. Which is pretty much getting pissed at myself, so I back off that angle.

I’ve already put in my lifetime share of participation – and facilitation, god help me – in consensus discussions. And faux consensus discussions. Already been to as many meetings of any kind as I need for the rest of my life, actually. Guess I must be getting old.

We are poised at the end of this empire. Any victory possible will be a ceding, an integration, taking our proper place in the global order. Usually the end of empire is ugly and ungracious. Invariably another rises, just as avaricious, just as hungry. A delicious sliver of me looks forward to watching the fall, is fascinated by living at the edge of the cliff, in a beautiful wilderness, corrupted, privileged, and precious all the same.

So folks, go for it. You’re obviously not perfect. There are isms floating about those camps, as they float around the whole country, polluting the air. But any fledgling democratic movement has my thumbs-up. May your star rise. May this… may anything… work.

The great art giveaway: accomplished!

It’s been wonderful. So much more satisfying than dollar-selling my canvases, or trying to, which would be a more accurate assessment. I’m grateful to all who wrote, expressed interest, and/or seized the opportunity to donate, barter, or simply receive an A.K. original from my Submerged collection. (Which is to say, Carpe Karp?)

Thanks to you, the Poverello Center has $250 more with which to serve people dealing with homelessness in Missoula. One couple’s donation made it possible to send art to a person without funds to spare for shipping. And the bartering– ooh, so sweet. Lavender-infused sugar, backyard apples, a volunteer winter squash, dried herbs, Georgia honey, an extremely helpful voice lesson for my sweetheart, and plain old positive energy.

It is supremely satisfying to know that the paintings I worked for so many hours and weeks upon are now hanging in New York, Louisiana, Ohio, Montana, Minnesota, Georgia, Missouri, and even Ontario, bringing good juju to good people.

I’ll let you know when the next batch is ready… the oven is preheated, and the dough is rising!

Bombs, eels and swim team

It was a long time coming, but at last I realize that spiritually, I need something to push against. Resistance and difference fuel deeper connection. I don’t mean bigotry or the “prosperity gospel” or apathy towards the needy or oppressed; those conversations need to happen, but what I mean is words and stories.

I’ve gone to faith-y places where I agree with every word said and sung – they’re praising nature and thanking the universe, smudging the elements on new babies’ foreheads – but my heart doesn’t move. The people are good but I feel no motion. Instead, I am pulled to denominations, to specificity, to all the lush details so easy to debunk, deflate, mock. You draw lines, you claim anything, you’re a tempting target. The Dalai Lama lectures on some particular number of jewels, and his laugh penetrates my cells. The Hare Krishnas fill the air with perfume and din and color, which I do not understand, into which I am absorbed. I don’t buy any of it, but my friends see me come out into the dirty New Orleans air and say I am glowing.

And the place I have made my faith home says Lord. Yuck. Sings Jesus, sings Christ, sings heaven. I’m forever substituting “life” and “God” and “spirit” and “light,” or even “death” and “darkness,” which are holy too, instead of those loaded words I would not honestly use, or want to. What is this team I’ve joined?

They read from a book out of which maybe half, or a third, of the readings are what I call “bombs.” Like heavy stones dropped into a lake. The extreme example, of course, is Leviticus. Verse from Leviticus? Bomb. Kersploosh. Whoops– some folks were trying real hard to get it right, but it sank to the bottom. Look at it down there beneath the deep, clear water. Just remember that it’s there, watch out for more incoming, don’t throw any in yourself, and keep swimming. Others are eels, slippery fish. Parables? What the hell did that mean? Ah well, maybe it’ll find a river and lead upstream someday. Keep swimming.

But bombs and eels and questionable proper nouns aside, these are the right people for me. Energy flows. I feel a part. We’re in the same drink, treading and paddling and rescuing one another. We speak different languages, and apparently, for in spite of this we still connect, the difference makes that connection more true.

The book voices