Animal Wilderness

Lamb

2012-01-27T14:58:00.000-08:00

Top Dancing

2012-01-22T05:33:00.000-08:00

La Chiara

2012-01-06T07:04:00.000-08:00

Elder

2012-01-04T14:06:00.000-08:00

Woman

2011-12-15T11:44:00.000-08:00

Gazundite

2011-12-15T11:24:00.000-08:00

Char!

2011-12-01T05:19:00.000-08:00

Out of the Wave

2011-11-25T08:35:00.000-08:00

Footprints

2011-11-20T06:20:00.000-08:00

Face

2011-11-16T05:03:00.000-08:00

Secret Writing Everywhere

2011-10-13T15:52:00.001-07:00

2011-10-13T10:35:00.000-07:00

Caveman

2011-10-13T10:27:00.000-07:00

Pilot

2011-10-06T09:44:00.000-07:00

Anniversary

2011-10-04T07:38:00.000-07:00

bisque, jar detail, laminated clays, rutile, cobalt wash. 21x12x6

Facial

2011-09-29T15:36:00.000-07:00

Just Married

2011-09-19T10:24:00.000-07:00

Sensei and Cowboy

2011-08-18T07:05:00.000-07:00

Vase

2011-08-16T09:50:00.000-07:00

Tea Party Hobbitts

2011-08-11T10:17:00.000-07:00

Vessel

2011-08-03T07:33:00.000-07:00

Towers

2011-07-25T08:08:00.000-07:00

Speculations of ziggurats on Babylon’s plain, excavations of Troy VIIA and the Fall of Babel, a “story possibly… inspired by the fall of the famous temple-tower of Etemenanki.” The towers then will symbolize Ilium. New York, Troy-Babel will show the limit of reason.

Geronimo and Chuang Tzu at the Herberger Theater Center Art Gallery - 9 July to 29 Aug

2011-07-07T15:30:00.000-07:00

Apologia

2011-07-01T15:52:00.000-07:00

"You never know, I said, the ones you give some semblence of burial, to whom you offer an apology, may have been like seers in a parallel culture. It is an act of respect, a technique of awareness." Barry Lopez

Firefly

2011-06-21T09:56:00.000-07:00

THE FIREFLY

CONCENTRATING

All its resources in light

Is never better able to see

Than when near itself.

April 2011

2011-05-09T17:10:00.000-07:00

Bird Rockies

Light

Blue Fox Road Through Mountains

Indian in Cosmos

March 2011

2011-04-30T10:22:00.000-07:00

Gazuntite 3-11-1 Swan 3-11-2

Hermes 3-11-3 Ballet 3-11-4

Blues 3-11-5

Indian in the Cosmos

2011-04-07T13:20:00.000-07:00

Dancer Final Firing

2011-04-02T10:33:00.000-07:00

Red Tailed Hawk / Black Crowned Heron

2011-03-27T05:38:00.000-07:00

Question: What makes a red tail hawk a star?Answer: Who has not watched the hawks on an afternoon in Texas skimming tree tops begin to circle higher and higher, spiral up while you are squinting as they disappear just like stars in the day? Hawks are a kind of day star. Next Question: What makes a marigold a sun?

Rex

2011-03-26T09:04:00.000-07:00

Messenger

2011-03-17T12:05:00.000-07:00

Final firing here

Tsunami

2011-03-11T12:05:00.001-08:00

Last of Winter Revised

2011-03-01T11:17:00.001-08:00

Raven

2011-02-28T07:28:00.001-08:00

I found this bird while glazing, have wanted a raven for a long time. Cobalt oxide.

Storm! Man Overboard!

2011-02-17T06:46:00.000-08:00

Zodiac Making Democracy

2011-02-02T13:08:00.002-08:00

MONSTER OUROBOROS SLAIN! NATIONS IN TURMOIL. WHAT WILL WE DO WITHOUT THE WORM?

This zodiac no longer exists. That is not say it is outdated or prehistoric, which it at first looks. It no longer exists because it blew up, the top and bottom blew up and the sides were left pitted and smoked. It was put to biscuit with another piece, the figure Foresight, which however survived, probably because it had neither top nor bottom. The oddity of this happening during the revolution in Egypt suggests a moral of democracy.

Initially the photos of Zodiac were posted with the statement:

"Let us say this zodiac presents constellations in the promise of a horn blown against the serpent Ouroboros [tyrannt], fulfilled in the upraised arms of the Warrior Deliverer. Remove the top!

Dialogue: Nman: Youse can't kill space and time!

Warrior: Oh yeah? Prove it!"

The top blew off. This all happened during the revolution, the overthrow of false authority which sets itself up as a right. Later, got removed. Put to biscuit kindle an hour, I inadvertently left the controls on high from the previous fire and did not return for an hour. Turning on the fan to clear the smell (and smoke) probably made more thermal shock. In another hour there was a crack. Zodiac exploded all over the kiln.

Making Democracy

on Saturday, February 5, 2011 at 12:48pm

It also exploded the bottom, but the walls stood. The metaphor appeals. Sides standing, top and bottom gone? The moisture trapped by the lid blew out both ends. The other piece in there, Foresight, was open in its center and withstood the blast, but its porcelain face smoked terribly and pitted from the shrapnel. Suppose that an allegory to see things coming? Blow off the top then the bottom goes with it? But the walIs, history stands, carbon bisc the same as making democracy? It has interesting discolorations, there is a fine powdery dust over all its surface.

Shall we say that Foresight before the explosion was inexperienced? Foresight needs to get out of the way? Sometimes the situation is too hot to handle. Self doubt is the last thing it needs. When all the crowds are going another way it is easy to doubt. Prophets who come to mind seem sure enough, but we do not see inside. For the ordinary, go back to how to protect a family. For this foresight is required, but there is a requirement to act on foresight, that is what the life of a father is about, acting on foresight, which you may say of the elders of Egypt, even if their faces get singed. If the top is exploded the bottom may go too. That of course leaves us worse off than when we started. That the walls are still standing is something but the vessel will not hold anything. And who knows how long they stand? Do not turn up the fire too high. Paradoxically, the constellations on these walls yet exist. If the constellations are space and time, the worm eating itself a figure of continuity, the tyranny of life, death and creation continue, then the loss of top and bottom to this universe make further creation.

End note: After, Foresight was bisqued properly. All the imperfections of the explosion fell away. No pits, no marks, pristine porcelain surface! There is a fire that purifies like Ophir, "when he has tried me I shall come forth as fine gold."

The Answer My Friends Is Blowin In the Wind

2011-02-02T10:32:00.000-08:00

Foresight

2011-01-29T12:36:00.000-08:00

Icon

2011-01-24T08:26:00.000-08:00

Footprints

2011-01-23T00:15:00.000-08:00

Tree

2011-01-23T00:10:00.000-08:00

Jar

2010-12-13T05:21:00.001-08:00

China Baskets

2010-12-11T14:43:00.000-08:00

Porcelain II

2010-12-11T13:15:00.000-08:00

Colloquy

2010-12-08T08:33:00.000-08:00

In the plain of the world's dust like a great Sea,

The golden thunders of the Lion and the Honey-Bee

In the Spirit, held with the Sun a Colloquy

Edith Sitwell, The Bee Oracles

Cups

2010-12-07T05:12:00.000-08:00

Burrow

2010-11-22T10:05:00.000-08:00

Beings attracted to piles of rock collect them in memory, smoother than basketballs, river rock with berms of silt, gold traces. Sometimes badger browses below rosemary in the hill, but dreams to build up trail where cliff sheep faint, but real. Not hawk, dog, cat, badger feels earth house, builds entrances, exits, the peace of Texas Canyon, Enchanted Rock, Old Sarum, caer Cromlech. Berm burrows fort all kinds of sleep. Badger day labors burrow. Mouse, Rat, night, day, sleep confines the other. Dreaming a burrow, no matter bairn, occupant meditation runs deep. Still Waters! Not that hawks don't brood, tree lines prevent cat sleep. Sleep is a trail below trees on a hill in the draws of rock veined cairns. Yale prof Robert Shiller says Animal Spirits are a forecasting tool, that irrationality leads to wealth. Yellow Rattler, rich in irreason, what are your faculties? Animal spirits know 1) the reality of hunger 2) laying low. Love the sun, love night! Sleep! So Bunyan says "poor silly Mole, that thou should'st love to be, / Where thou, nor Sun, nor Moon, nor Stars can see." Pobrecito Bunyan. His tortoises are dug when the raptors come down on wires and trees. He takes a white wicker chair out under the garden oak where women bathe in the afternoon mulberry, red bud, almond blooms.

Something Spiritual About Clay

2010-11-18T09:50:00.000-08:00

Say something spiritual about clay. It has to rest after work.

Basket I

2010-11-14T05:18:00.000-08:00

Lily I, II

2010-10-21T05:29:00.000-07:00

Two Views

2010-10-21T05:26:00.000-07:00

Tortoise

2010-09-14T10:45:00.001-07:00

Tortoise Carrying Pot

In the original Tortoise Carrying Pot of raw clay there are three blues, cobalt carbonate and oxide, rutile, a green, nickel carbonate and yellow iron oxide. None of them will fire as such. The pink and blacks will be blue. When I brought it home I couldn't touch it when unveiled that morning. What use is the potter? I had rolled out B mix, laminated with Jamaica and the last found clays of that bag, took it down to 1/4 inch, laid it on a board, sifted on the oxides, pounded in Aunt Libby's acanthus woodcut, pressed a cedar shim in ledges, rolled it up round a plastic tube, picked it up, set it on end and let it dry a little. Too soon I took off the tube to pack newspaper inside. The whole thing collapsed in a sheet. Using my chest, hands (I had rolled the papers up in a big ball) I stuffed the newspapers inside, picked it up and bounced it then on the board, because otherwise it wouldn't sit up (La Primavera, the first of this series, fell in the firing). When I saw the tortoise I got a chill.

Comments: "I heard that in Ch'u there is a sacred tortoise which has been dead now some three thousand years and that the prince keeps this tortoise carefully enclosed in a chest on the altar of his ancestral temple." Chuang Tzu

Chuang Tzu

2010-09-14T10:44:00.001-07:00

2010-08-21T05:43:00.001-07:00

"Yet shimmying sieves vast on cobalt they roil audibly driven only—but uncontrolled where the cobalt is uncontrolled also but quiet. But the cobalt is their condition? ...the huge whirlabout has feathery entrails emerging from their bending poles daggling the cobalt by a leaping speechless hartebeest ...the hartebeest wandering, the vast shimmying fractionation is heard from the cobalt...the fractionators grind the delicate cobalt future once. How can it (what) be the same as sound? ...paired in the condition of the quiet cobalt attacked by blasting motion, they’re hearing it." Leslie Scalapino, Floats Horse-floats or Horse-flows, Chapter 1, Becomes Floats. PennSound, February 14, 2010

Black Eyed Pea

2010-08-20T19:21:00.001-07:00

Pleistocene

2010-08-19T14:59:00.000-07:00

Pony

2010-08-19T11:03:00.001-07:00

They used to capture them in Iceland

to work the British mines

and pull carts all their lives

unless they got away

and made such habitation for

a black horse with flaring nostrils

That was stomping mad.

PONY is really Pit Pony, or Pit Poetry. He spent his life at the bottom of a coal mine. He is the last of his kind. The split on his leg is where it was broken. It healed and it got him back up in the air again. There's no point to a broken pit pony. What can he pull? He has a cousin, Pity, an experimental rabbit who lived in a cage in the basement of the Experimental Science Building. His scientists turned the cage against the wall.

Mortal

2010-08-17T12:08:00.001-07:00

Vase

2010-08-05T11:28:00.001-07:00

2010-06-28T07:10:00.001-07:00

Baby Pegasus

2010-06-02T05:27:00.001-07:00

Baby Pegasus

The Pegasus islands off the Aleutian coast are home to the Pegasus. For that reason they are called baby Aleutians and in childhood range the Pacific. Many babies are sighted at birth before they fly away. Then you can see them. But later their colors reflect the ice and arctic environment, blues, whites, beige, frost colors make them hard to see against the clouds, which is why they are mythological in the first place. Whether there are real such flying horses who can doubt? These are modeled from my years among them.

The babies emerge head first with mane trailing down the back, body submerged in the mother’s. The baby’s wings are furled and it looks as though the mother’s head has disappeared. This confusion of bodies, wings and tails continues to the legs which are fragile, spindly and almost look like the rockers of a rocking horse. The front legs are open and the back legs funnel to a v. The body out of which the baby emerges looks rather like flower by this time, the head of the young sticking up as though emerging. Actually it flies out of the mother on its own just after this stage. The colors are striations of whites, pales beiges, faded violets, faded maroons, everpale with a head dress of all white plumage. This is useful for reflections while flying near the sun. The wings of the mother are spread even if the baby’s are not so it looks on the whole like it is in process of glide, the legs separated as if about to race forward.

Of course they are always born as twins, fraternal we should say, or maybe the difference is from the birth order for they are born some days apart. The Pegasus twin seems to have heavier feet, less mane and its mouth is open as if in full cry at being second or because it is born in song, for the horses sing as they fly. This one’s wings are more fully edged in ivory though the usual sky colors have a sense of the painted desert, subtle pastels. The second baby is often born with a face plate, but is less emerged from the body, which may simply be due to the different times and days of maturity. In addition to the face plate it also has a body wrap as if coming undone, thickish but more spectacular than its brother. Both are male according to custom, but parts of the island where females birth in much the same way are guarded by the adults for whatever reason.

There’s no point in denying that many people think them birds, they have wings after all, and they fly. This stems from a lack of imagination maybe. Among primitives on the islands where they live the Pegasusians are seen more like we would see spaceships. We have only assayed the appearance of the baby. The adults are several times larger than we would think which just adds to the riddle of how they can fly, like some flying boxcar or presidential jet dwarfs the planes around them. To compare them to planes is a good idea and you can imagine the texting produced by seeing one pass as you recline and look out the window. It leaves open the question as to where they are going, but they might ask the same of us. The answer, to Jakarta, is as meaningful as if they were to say to to Andulusia. To understand them better, we fly to real places so called, they fly to mythologicalones. Blame Darwin for this separation of fact from myth, but it has not been so long that myth was fact in the eyes of the world. Then people lived on the ground in huts, died young, but on the plus side saw the stars and lived in rainstorms. We posit that such a life style produces myth more than ours. Living indoors among city lights produces fact. Facts however are brutes while myth is forgiving and produces wonder. We should send anthropologists back to that age to advise us on its merits. Of course this was done but many went native and never returned. It was speculated they were seen riding the backs of Pegasus past the astonished windows of airbuses.

One thing it shows is how short the age of fact really was, since we, having left it, have entered the new age of make believe. If it seems these three ages appear in descenant sequence perhaps can only be known in a fourth age yet unknown. Thus the four ages of the Greeks would come full circle and a lot of foolish things in poems bear out in fact and we will end up quoting them.

Meanwhile the horses are flying past the airplanes invisibly because the screens are down and nobody is looking out. They think they see ufos and seek contact with alien races and forces but deny the horses. Does that seem awkward or backward?

That they are a flying breed of horse would not be believed by a race such as ours who at one time did not believe a bird could fly, despite the contary.

The Pegasus islands off the Aleutian coast are home to Pegasus. For that reason they are called baby Aleutians and in childhood range the Pacific. Many babies are sighted at birth before they fly away. Then you can see them. Later their colors reflect the ice and arctic environment, blues, whites, beige, frost colors make them hard to see against the clouds, which is why they are mythological in the first place. Whether there are real such flying horses who can doubt? These are modeled from my years among them.

Coyote

2010-05-28T08:24:00.000-07:00

Trojan Horse

2010-05-21T06:06:00.001-07:00

Trojan Horse Trojan Horse was let in the city because of its art. This replica was found in old papyrus. It had

Greece

in the belly. After a light spray of shino over found clays with B mix laminated, red shino sprayed and waxed, some trigger pulls of clear penetrated the wax and diffused the orange.

The Thing That's Not

2010-05-17T06:31:00.001-07:00

Pit pony blind in Britain,

got rights in Europe with Ape,

registered to vote in condos

cases were pending in Spain.

Which Kafka's animals understood.
the citizen of Giant Mole
obsessed about it like a dog,
the thing that’s not,
the mole that’s not,
the mind that's not,
the ice foe's not,

dots comprehending
to the end
of pit ponies
deep in this belief
showed Kafka's animals
were men.

2.

White and red tail

lemurs clung

the wall of

Solzhenitsyn’s cell,

pit gerbils

down on the floor

below were

sharked to octopeds.

To break the boundaries

of all that's not

these monsters

were mere traffic stops

to the eating of Borges’ colonel’s

coats of fur,
because the eagle

spaniels of Solzhenitsyn’s

men were animals.

3.

Down in "The Burrow"

electric lights detached
pulsed from their heads.

To give those animals

rights we sought

we gave up the ones we did.

We gave and brought

the black carp up

the Mississippi Derrida bed,

borrowed safe mine ponies like snails,

to pull empires big as whales.

You can visit the stables @ Pit Pony Paradise

Homecoming

2010-05-17T06:30:00.001-07:00

Butterfly Gown

2010-05-15T09:23:00.000-07:00

Le Bourgeois Ubu Roi

2010-05-13T09:52:00.000-07:00

Images from Ubu et la grande Gidouille (1979), Jan Lenica's take on Alfred Jarry's Ubu.
http://50watts.com/#1183005/Jan-Lenica-s-Ubu

After Sky Shadows / A View of Nature / Explorations of Stone

2010-05-04T07:31:00.000-07:00

After Sky Shadows and Remembering José Donoso:

I became a teacher. I should have been a painter, I should have worked in clay. I was working through the mediums: paint, glass, pastel, plant, gardens, erosion dams, construction, propagating natives, planting a large field of lavender.

Stone

In the American Grain, Austin: 1968-1980

Farmers pile glacial stone in upper New York state into walls to separate pastures, but leave plenty for rock work. That was the same stone Bishop Andrew Mack invented a stonepuller to pull from Berks County pastures. Texas Hill Country limestone revealed by the erosion and sheep grazing from 1880 forward century beckoned for gardens to be built upon the sides of the erosion to stop it. These wash gardens and stones were near Indian middens where tribes gathered from as far away as the Midwest to trade (understood by the colors of the flint left behind). They gathered there because it was the only consistent water near the Bandera Pass. There tribes met to throw rocks in the fire to contain the heat, trade the mescal bean and the Mexican buckeye. The chared black middens of these areas are saturated with flint chips, which in a way is what the attempt of Native Texans began to be about. At the time I lived on Spicewood Springs Rd outside Austin the stones escarped with lots of rock made gardens. Even if the soil was a foot deep it grew pumpkins, zucchini, hokkaidos, squash. The rock was so plentiful I began to rock the house, had a cement mixer on a platform in the pasture among the sheep, mixed the mortar black to put beween the stones and rocked the walls before the eyes of the houses came over the hillside and down its nose. I lay on the roof there and heard the world’s cry far off in Austin in the throes of night.

As I began to rock that house, build gardens, grow pumpkins, squash and hokkaidos to hang in the Texas heat, the fixation on America from nature began. The melons, the corn that grew in the six inch deep soil, getting deeper all the time (!) preceded by the March death of the old year, and St. Branden getting in his curragh to sail out into the light. In the poems he speaks like that, "I come from a land in the far away...where all the ages I have been waiting to be Amerycan." It was all wrapped up these children being born and flying around, "what do they do at the tops of mountains, children lifting pretty heads from pillowed beds?" Had I stayed with those fantasies I'd never have been corrected by the real thing as I have. Before long it involved Erik the Red and his quest for fire, the red gold ring of the North where "the red man dances in the sun" where the field of battle was wet with blood, "from the hour of dawn and the shining sun." These poems were a lyric narrative of Ameryca. Those hills were a haven for red birds.

Erik the Red was flying around in the evergreen cedar, the red bird not a symbol, more a bandage over the wound of life. You can mimic its call if you like, not as offensive as calling elk to kill. Nobody thinks you're
going to shoot the redbird, unless they're twelve. What's for dinner tonight dear, did you get any cardinals? Instead the houses come over the hill and down its nose, trunks were snorted, or shorted, if you are literal. How will you mourn the loss, the aching loss of skies and cold and brown furze when nobody is prepared to mourn without deprecating the hill. In England the natives mocked the standing stones. In Texas they buried them. That was part of the America vision too, especially the last six months, September to February, 1950 to 2000. After 2000 the whole thing was academic. Media advertise they found bodies in the north, bodies on the beach, but no bees. Science about fixed it. In William Carlos Williams In the American Grain Ralegh and Eric the Red both lose their sons there. It is any early propitiation for the sins of seeking for the Edda gold and blood and war of the primitive native state that confronts the mind of the foreign, the call of the land to the blood to be changed, all from the frightened Puritans to the Comanche who rode the hills. Artistic the primitive attraction.

Talk

In line with the habit of doing but not thinking, a zen perogrative, I never gave thought to these questions before, but in four or five years they indeed made a vision of

America out of the natural,

since it is after all a vision of nature, of birds and earth and fruit. It was then I fixated on the wood grain surface of planed boards, considered them as photographs, wood cuts of the tree itself, pictures of the risen dead who lived inside the wood. Do you consider it trapped there as we are in flesh? I began to see these things in the wood of office doors, anywhere the grain was preserved, the cuts booked side by side. They were like the heads of faeries. Not to take too fine a point, I began to paint them to illustrate, going too far maybe into nature, but I offer as support the only visit I ever made to a psychologist, on behalf of another person. When he had finished asking his pet questions he said of my answer, you may be the most healthy person I ever interviewed. Pataphysical health enough? The beings, the elfs, the faeries are literal ways the wood photosynthesized the sun and metabolized the water. Little peaks and valleys array themselves in their growth. Surely we are doing the same except we aren't, or are, going to be sold as ranch furniture, the last industry of exhausted nature.

Here is a solution to a problem you never thought existed, the wood grain, countertops, doors. It's good we don't use real wood any more and can avoid this confrontation. Melamine is so speechless. Nature is always saying what we don't want to hear. Talk it says, talk, like I used to say to my sons on our tennis trips in order to stay awake. Talk, or really it is, breathe To compare the sound of helicopters and planes to "the wounds of that symbol the rose... gliding to the lump of a beating heart" that refineries and factories are paving a way of our own preparing, this future needs to consider that even in poetry, even if they say it is upon us we would not know. Ruben Dario called it Alexander-Nebuchadnezzer, but as it says in Calendar, Ophelia is silent about it. It makes you wonder who we can talk to at all.

On the one hand it seems that these ideas were formed years before their expression in Restorations of the Golden Age, and that it is yes and no as to precedence. They grew together while thinking about Purchas and Hakluyt, the Guiana reports, the Spanish letters, the trials, the propagandas, Andrew Marvell, the Elysian Fields, Fortunate Isle, little lamb. I guess in addition to the poems it became what is technically a dissertation, one of the shortest though, maybe 120 pages of real text, but long for a lyric meditation, not that it will save you anything for that. Even though it was called Restorations of the Golden Age in New World Discoveries it knew not the Golden Age now revealed, though Boas, Levin and the primitives try to speak. This failing has been redressed.

It was really poetic research, finding the gold tree as a mine in the earth after Italian renaissance speculations, like the metaphor in the last chapter of Donne's image of Virginia of a new man as corn who grows in the new earth. You can refer this kind of science to Steve McCaffery, the Canadian Pataphysicist, but I did not know him at the time. My introduction to the pataphysical was through Roger Shattuck's and William. Arrowsmith's students and books, who were much offended at the coinage of the term King Ubu instead of Ubu Roi. How they puffed. It may be patapuffery. Whether they were real pataphysicians or not, one was the priest at a catholic church that followed Bishop Ledbetter. These fellows would put marijuana in the monstrance during mass to increase its potency and smoke it after. This is not to speak of antics at Texas cloverleafs when prickly poppies bloomed and the acolytes were out in the moonlight slitting the sides of the poppy blossoms to get the dope. This is solid Jarry stuff, like their disappearing rituals performed in the Texas capitol rotunda, where they said they created astral batteries to heighten their power to identify what particular angel surrounded a customer. The angel never gave any opinion about them to me. What would Yeats have traded for that? Do you think there are three or just one archangel? Whose bidding does it? The superior of these acolytes and friends, ex-military, his wife a psychic, gave services which ordinary people also attended. She asked me once, it being early August, what an eclipse meant. There was one due later that month. I regret saying, "death," for her husband died two weeks later after celebrating mass, still gowned in his robes in a meeting with the altar boys.

A better version of the Golden Age came out in 2007 and other parts stew, but the whole idea of America as a golden age seems superseded by eco-feminist criticism that the masculine take on the feminine is war and not at all innocent, which aspect of the post modern is pretty welcome if you want to account a sense of justice to events, justice being the true realization of the golden age.

I left all this to be a gardener of herbs and native plants, graduated to see them in the social context of the waves of immigration, the degradation of the land and the plants themselves as a kind of ultimate revenge of the datura, mescal bean, mushroom culture these children reaped as new, but fake. Since then it has been traded for banks and electronics. Many of these people never escaped Austin. I got out but once held the keys of five different university buildings: Parlin Hall, Experimental Science, Drug Garden, Pharmacy, and another one they tore down I can't remember.

Wood

I explored wood, both from splitting it with an ax but also for the grain the boards hid, painted to show as a message to all that things are not as they suppose. Earlier I had sculptured these beings out of the wood with a butane torch and a wire brush. They are everywhere crouched in nature not unlike ourselves if silent. As said, the stones cry out.

Glass

I don’t know that this is much different from working in glass as a medium. Not believing in imposing my image of glass on itself, I wanted it to self identify, so took to taking large window panes and breaking them with stress to see the fracture lines, put them on the ground and dropped something on them to break out a pattern and then replaced parts of the break with stained glass. This at least showed the force of impact and gravity as well as the power of glass to break. I learned to control the break, to call it that, that if you hit a thing too hard it will shatter in a thousand pieces.

Paint, Children, Books

I worked in paint the same way, pouring acrylic out of the can onto plywood sheets or canvas, or making a line by squeezing it out raw. Never knowing what the figure was, eventually they settled into faces, houses and plants. These came more naturally at the time than words, which did not really begin to develop until I had worked through the ultimate medium, I mean children. That is the true sculpture, one that has a mind of its own but still you think it can be influenced. Children preoccupied me as they will to bake the vanity and the hubris of the artist out as less and less and more and more his own humanity gets thrown back in his face. In these years of sculpting flesh I took to learning rare books from Bonita Porter, at the end of the 20^th century to see what could be found before. I didn’t know everything would change as it did when the internet made markets available to all.

Construction

By the time I was finished with rare books I had begun finish construction, latent in all the other activities, begun maybe in tearing off the rotten roof off a house in the 80’s if not the rock work of the 60’s, replacing decking, putting gardens and stone walls to prevent runoff, taking out walls of garages and replacing them with windows for a studio. I was involved with raw cedar and natural wood, demoing to a shell, redesigning interiors to create flow, roofs, floors, windows, French doors, city permits, from which there is so much benefit.

Pastels

Coincident with the children I took to driving to the desert two or three times a week early in summer to sketch and explore every back road from Phoenix north. I once dug the car with the two small children out of the Salt River flats with my barehands after it had gotten stuck in sink, found a piece of chicken wire used as a barbacue to get traction. This cured a back problem. Another time we came on two car loads of Pimas standing in the road after a wreck, one bleeding from the nose split like a plum. I drove him out to the highway while he bled, later pastel sketched this al fresco. I sketched the Mogollon and the South Rim of the Grand Canyon since my wife worked weekends there and the two children and I hiked the trails many times. I sketched with Clark Reidy in a Tempe foundry with a few others. I sketched with Ed Mell and a couple dozen advertising artists in a Phoenix house for two years, combined to hire live models and share the cost, all pastels, but I first began in Tempe to model clay from sittings, but the others didn’t want to hold the pose for an hour.

Environmentalism

This is not to speak of athletic outings, softball, volleyball, little league, basketball, tennis, golf. Tennis became its own thing, a story in itself. The point about sculpting flesh got resonant as I began research in the Pennsylvania German backgrounds that completely envelop my father’s family. This led to all the blogs from 2005 and on. It seems that my view of environmentalism, that came from teaching in the 60’s, much influenced this idea of sculpture, the idea that to teach you must take forces and create obstacles to force choices for learning. It was the basis for all my assignments which other teachers found sometimes disturbing. Heredity and environment when known represent these forces. So I wrestled with this heritage and these children. Even if you can’t see them genes are forces. There is no tabla rasa.

There is no end to talk of working in flesh and mind, from my ancestors, aunts, parents, to my own children. Of course I’d not have been involved in any of the flesh without the wife provided to explore these venues. When the children had gone, or nearly, she was the one who brought me finally to work in clay. The Lord made me a nut whose shell contains and it amuses him as an environmentalist, to take forces and create obstacles to force choice. So on the one hand I was given amazing experiences, energies, ancestral backgrounds and education but on the other was completely occluded in the expression so that the body of work was much compressed. I decided to be a writer, but had less talent for it than these other things, including athletics, but I never wanted to be an athlete for its own sake. I was a sculptor however and after all was said and done and I had been full time in the studio for a year it felt like many. “I was sculptor before Egypt, but not with Ra,” Taliesin might say. “I was sculpting in eternity,” says Wisdom, “who is like me?” So rock up and and see.

Teaching

Teaching is a kind of sculpting though and learning. Being on both sides is instructive. If the ends are the same the means are opposite. Much of learning as a student comes from the impact of the teacher’s spirit, Jim Fallon’s enthusiasm, Rhodes Dunlap’s punctiliousness, Donald Justice’ perfectionism, Tom Cranfill’s savior- faire. As a teacher though the specific events mean more. I used to take heavy impasto portraits to composition classes to teach descriptive writing. They were sculptural, coming off the canvas, portraits where one part of the face was especially exaggerated, the eyes, the ears, the lips, the forehead. One of these, Cowboy, eagerly appearing at his girl’s door, hair slicked, bandanna around neck had prominent extended lips, to picture his naivete of himself. After class a young woman in this all black student body came up to the picture as it hung on the wall. She said, "I guess he’s a black man," went up to the painting and kissed him on the lips!

Somewhat before that, at UT Austin, saddled with teaching technical writing for engineers because I had a degree from a technical school and after that technical writing for foreign students, like teaching trees in a wood, which might not be too bad, I wanted some imagination to get the trees thinking. One assignment for writing process had the student describe the step by step action of picking up a loaded .45 from the desk, putting it to their head and pulling the trigger. A number of them died in the exercise, a couple fired into the air. Nobody put in earplugs. A little extreme for today, the point was to engage more than reason in writing.

Describing these events in a studio recently, citing Peter Callas as someone whose work transcended form, the local expert said he knew Callas and didn’t like some of his work, even though Callas is many worlds beyond this speaker. My response was, and continues to be as it applies to teaching and learning, that beauty must be judged with generousity not severity and that the best thing of a poet or artist is the measure, not the least. Translator of Kafka, the poet Edwin Muir makes the point. In the Preface to Muir’s Collected Poems Eliot singles out “The Horses.”as an outstanding statement summarizing the conditions of Glasglow, London, Prague, industrialism and atomic war all in one great poem. If only for that poem alone Muir must be admired and respected. This spirit of generosity, not criticism, brings close the embrace of wisdom.