Manerus Caninus: From the Sublime to the Ridiculous

I'm in a crit group with a slew of other artists now, and we got on the topic of the writer Jorge Luis Borges. We are all mildly ADD in the group and only need a suggestion, a Word, a Name to trigger numerous thoughts and stories. With Borges being mentioned, Chris began this story about waiting in line at a cafe'. There was a striking spanish woman in front of him with a tattoo of a constellation on her neck. Once Chris got up the nerve to ask her about it, she said it was inspired by a Borges poem.




For whatever reason, this triggered my remembering of a similar experience. So I picked up the thread from Chris's story and recalled waiting in line at a Dunkin' Donuts in Niantic. In front of me was a slightly overweight leather clad Harley chick with a cowboy hat. On the back of her neck was a tattoo that very elegantly said DOGGY STYLE. Needless to say, I'm a starbucks customer now.

New Piece: "Into the White- Stephen Vincent Kobasa"

Title comes from the pixies song. Visually thinking of early renaissance images of John the Baptist entering the wilderness and also of Alchemical drawings of the tree coming out of a man.



Upon finally seeing the piece (he waited till the end), Stephen thought of this section of Dante's Inferno

"Midway in our life's journey, I went astray
from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood. How shall I say
what wood that was! I never saw so drear so rank, so arduous a wilderness!
Its very memory gives a shape to fear.
Death could scarce be more bitter than that place!
But since it came to good, I will recount
all that I found revealed there by God's grace"

To be a cyclops is to be self assured.

Doubt is born from something as simple as having two eyes. The tiny distance between our eyes is enough to never feel you are truly seeing something. But ridiculously, the feeling still is "If I only look harder, I will truly see."

Can you say PATIENCE?

Check the tree shadows to get an idea of how many days this must have taken.

HEART OF DARKNESS

Ideas travel and migrate and breed and bring forth. The boat painting has given thoughts to an installation. In the same way that when you learn a new word or discover a name, you suddenly hear it spoken numerous times within a day... so that within finally committing to the making of an installation with an actual boat, I had two vessels offered to me within a pair of days. If one can finally embrace an idea, the world opens before him.
I'm the new owner of a 16 foot monstrosity that may have floated at one time, that may float yet again, but certainly not on water.

I SHALL CALL HIM MINI ME
(no, scratch that)

MARLOW

I'm in the middle of reading Conrad's Heart of Darkness and the narrator's (Marlow's) conscious stream is keeping me afloat:

The yarns of sea men have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. To him, the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze.

The life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There's no initiation into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination- you know, imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.

Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all looked that) I would put my finer on it and say "I will go there" There was one-the biggest ,the most blank so to speak, I had a hankering after. True by this time it was not a blank space any more. It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery- a white patch to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness. But there was in it one river especially, a mighty big river, that you could see on the map, resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land. And as I looked at the map of it in a shop-window, it fascinated me as a snake would a bird-a silly little bird.

Here the earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but here- here you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were----No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it--this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity--like yours--the thought of your remoted kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you--you so remote from the night of first ages--could comprehend. And why not? The mind of man is capable of anything--because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future.

pledge of allegiance

Hello there cyber freaks. the return from my self imposed solitude has left me bitter and old and longing for coffee and your attention. We shall be friends once again.