Friday, July 13, 2007
Saturday, July 07, 2007
Friday, July 06, 2007
Asian Art Show Collages
Collages created from images clipped from the catalogue for the Spring Asian Arts Show at Fort Mason:
Thursday, July 05, 2007
A CAVAFY MOMENT
In the coffee shop I saw the man I should have made love with 50 years ago. Every time he came into that college literature class, he looked at me with those immense dark eyes in that long head of his that suggested the head of some mythological horse creature – obviously Greek with a beauty that overwhelmed me – and his eyes drank me in every time, eyes that never blinked and whose blackness was bottomless. I was so repressed that I could only ignore his steady stares in my direction, but there was also the problem that I was with my straight friend who noticed the man’s look and teased me about it, forcing me to strongly deny any interest, and I had not begun to accept myself because I had yet to find someone who would let me know that I would still have friends if I took a male lover. With so many fears in those times, including imprisonment for being gay, I feared the boy whom I should have loved, could have loved so beautifully, beginning my gay life beautifully, instead of accidentally. And now he stood before me in the coffee shop, and now I was willing to be the lover I should have been, but now my young beautiful Greek boy looks through me as if I am a pane of ice held in front of a blue sky. Here’s that bitter lump in the throat: The ones that got away never swim back.
BLUE SHADOWS OVER US
Hilary Clinton asked people to propose a campaign song. I am too late in submitting this (You may imagine your own blues music to accompany the words):
Blue shadows over me. Blue shadows over me.
I used to be poor and lost in shadows.
I made my way through dangerous alleys, ominous meadows.
I found the true body I am to occupy, and a sound mind,
when I found a colony of the thinking and the kind.
Living in a place that despises me,
I cursed their chains, and set myself free –
but how can I feel that way when I see the same old poverty
around me, such a vast, sad global sea. Who could feel free?
And yet I cannot weep. We turn to shell, empty and brittle.
We turn to stone in a world turning to stone, little by little.
Blue shadows over me. Blue shadows over us.
I talked to a homeless man, and I asked him his name. He said, “I like to be called Anonymous.”
Homeless
As the drivers shift gears, their stuttering trucks
are metallic curtains that slide awkwardly away,
unveiling, across the street, the motionless poor,
huddled together in weathered clothes. My heart shakes
with a caged howl, and turns inward. The howl drops
a well down through me; I follow it toward the bottomless,
where I hope I will drop out into numb ignorance.
But the cold, grey poor sit on my eyeballs all the way down,
and when I look up, they have not been erased by the passing
traffic. As I wait at the bus stop, the homeless awaken;
neatly pack their gear away on neatly ordered grocery carts;
they speak quietly, assist each other in early morning rituals.
-- James McColley Eilers, copyright 2007
Blue shadows over me. Blue shadows over me.
I used to be poor and lost in shadows.
I made my way through dangerous alleys, ominous meadows.
I found the true body I am to occupy, and a sound mind,
when I found a colony of the thinking and the kind.
Living in a place that despises me,
I cursed their chains, and set myself free –
but how can I feel that way when I see the same old poverty
around me, such a vast, sad global sea. Who could feel free?
And yet I cannot weep. We turn to shell, empty and brittle.
We turn to stone in a world turning to stone, little by little.
Blue shadows over me. Blue shadows over us.
I talked to a homeless man, and I asked him his name. He said, “I like to be called Anonymous.”
Homeless
As the drivers shift gears, their stuttering trucks
are metallic curtains that slide awkwardly away,
unveiling, across the street, the motionless poor,
huddled together in weathered clothes. My heart shakes
with a caged howl, and turns inward. The howl drops
a well down through me; I follow it toward the bottomless,
where I hope I will drop out into numb ignorance.
But the cold, grey poor sit on my eyeballs all the way down,
and when I look up, they have not been erased by the passing
traffic. As I wait at the bus stop, the homeless awaken;
neatly pack their gear away on neatly ordered grocery carts;
they speak quietly, assist each other in early morning rituals.
-- James McColley Eilers, copyright 2007
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY
Those who remember my old series THE INTOWN TOURIST (before my hometown, financially, kicked me out), may remember a pretentious fellow I knew, Waldman the Wizard, who would hand me his latest pronouncement. Well, on this "heavenly" or "good luck" day -- 07-07-07 -- here is his latest, headed,
HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY
As scientists continue to search for one grand theory that may unify all the disparate strands of knowledge with one beautifully simple model, I cannot help but think there is something like that we could apply to political life on earth. Surely, others see the same clues in such things as the way every country is divided by its citizens into a North and a South, and how the North is generally equated with the cool and rational, while the South is characterized as emotional and erotic. What can this be but a projection of the axis of the human body, head in the North, genitals in the South, and in the middle, “the heart of the country”? This simple matter is not simple in that it reveals that individual humans collectively project the image of our self-dividing individual self on an entire landscape, and designates that in one region or another, the humans there have been trained over time to identify with one part of the human body. Why? Because individual humans see one part of their bodies as being at war with other parts. This is certainly not an image of wholeness and unity.
["Avocado Qui Tollis Peccata Mundi"]
Similarly, as indicated in Shakespeare’s great tragedy KING LEAR, national governments are projections of the dynamics in that country’s family structures, sometimes tolerant, more often dysfunctional. Now it is generally thought that Hitler was possible because the German family in the early 20th century was usually under the control of a dictatorial father. (We might look at U.S. Presidents in that light – Are most of us “the children of alcoholics” and look for an alcoholic, reformed alcoholic, or another “child of alcoholics” to lead us? What is bound to follow?)
My thesis is that, rather than be entangled so completely in the cross purposes of most political conflicts, we might always check behind that war to consider what fogs over those matters – the individual psyche and the nature of the family in a nation or on the earth in a particular period. In a world society where many, in materially prosperous nations as well as in nations with desperately poor and disenfranchised humans, are not aware that we are not “human”: Extensive education and exposure to humane influences are required, especially a final lesson that questioning and searching is the final permanent state of sanity and good citizenship – rather than influences that tell us to abandon our minds to some person or cause.
[The maze at California Pacific Medical Center]
In every country, civil war is latent or apparent. Again, this is so universal, like the North/South dichotomy, that it should be apparent that individual humans are projecting an internal civil war onto the world, millions suffering and dying because so many individual humans have never faced their own internal civil war, and prefer to deny its existence and project it on the world. Civil war becomes visible when it breaks out between two parties, but, in truth, it goes on continuously, the global "melting pot" becoming so partitioned, general, and dispersed that we fail to recognize that we are blocked and tripped up by our not recognizing that we are in a constant, subliminal state of civil war.
I know this sounds like an absurd project for ending conflict around the earth and in our own streets and homes, but just because it may take a thousand years doesn’t mean that it is not the only way to go – individual enlightenment: Some say it comes in a flash, but I suspect that, instead, it is cumulative, gaining some weight or confidence in itself as it grows: The flash of enlightenment may be on a dimmer switch that gradually grows to the state said to be enjoyed by “the Happy Few.” How many have taken even a first step in that direction without falling away into some dead end cul-de-sac of the mind?
Confucius leads the way in his famous sorites: “If you want the state to be good, you must establish order in your own family. If you want to establish order in your family, you must rectify your own heart. To rectify your own heart, you must clarify your inarticulate thoughts through self-knowledge. Once you have struggled and arrived at sincere and precise definitions in your own mind, you can stabilize your own heart. With this self-mastery accomplished, you may help your own family to set itself in order. Bringing your own house into order can bring good government to the state. And when your state is well governed, human society on planet earth is brought into balance.”
I think these are not just single steps around a circle. For it to work (and why not demand that thinking be muscular and quick in the process of humanization), every question you want to blurt out should pass through all of the chambers of the sorites, to be examined in the light of each chamber, before any expression of the question or the next step to take.
Sweetness and joy to all who attempt to become not the perfect human, but one who is reasonably well-balanced. While the project is the individual human, when our better self is glimpsed it is probably, for the most part, in our relationship to other humans.
[I cannot believe I was ever obsessive enough to create the mandallas on this entry. Below is my "quilted Irene Harmon" -- a paper collage with the young Irene and the older Irene on the beach at Drake's Bay on some 4th of July "of yesteryear":
HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY
As scientists continue to search for one grand theory that may unify all the disparate strands of knowledge with one beautifully simple model, I cannot help but think there is something like that we could apply to political life on earth. Surely, others see the same clues in such things as the way every country is divided by its citizens into a North and a South, and how the North is generally equated with the cool and rational, while the South is characterized as emotional and erotic. What can this be but a projection of the axis of the human body, head in the North, genitals in the South, and in the middle, “the heart of the country”? This simple matter is not simple in that it reveals that individual humans collectively project the image of our self-dividing individual self on an entire landscape, and designates that in one region or another, the humans there have been trained over time to identify with one part of the human body. Why? Because individual humans see one part of their bodies as being at war with other parts. This is certainly not an image of wholeness and unity.
["Avocado Qui Tollis Peccata Mundi"]
Similarly, as indicated in Shakespeare’s great tragedy KING LEAR, national governments are projections of the dynamics in that country’s family structures, sometimes tolerant, more often dysfunctional. Now it is generally thought that Hitler was possible because the German family in the early 20th century was usually under the control of a dictatorial father. (We might look at U.S. Presidents in that light – Are most of us “the children of alcoholics” and look for an alcoholic, reformed alcoholic, or another “child of alcoholics” to lead us? What is bound to follow?)
My thesis is that, rather than be entangled so completely in the cross purposes of most political conflicts, we might always check behind that war to consider what fogs over those matters – the individual psyche and the nature of the family in a nation or on the earth in a particular period. In a world society where many, in materially prosperous nations as well as in nations with desperately poor and disenfranchised humans, are not aware that we are not “human”: Extensive education and exposure to humane influences are required, especially a final lesson that questioning and searching is the final permanent state of sanity and good citizenship – rather than influences that tell us to abandon our minds to some person or cause.
[The maze at California Pacific Medical Center]In every country, civil war is latent or apparent. Again, this is so universal, like the North/South dichotomy, that it should be apparent that individual humans are projecting an internal civil war onto the world, millions suffering and dying because so many individual humans have never faced their own internal civil war, and prefer to deny its existence and project it on the world. Civil war becomes visible when it breaks out between two parties, but, in truth, it goes on continuously, the global "melting pot" becoming so partitioned, general, and dispersed that we fail to recognize that we are blocked and tripped up by our not recognizing that we are in a constant, subliminal state of civil war.
I know this sounds like an absurd project for ending conflict around the earth and in our own streets and homes, but just because it may take a thousand years doesn’t mean that it is not the only way to go – individual enlightenment: Some say it comes in a flash, but I suspect that, instead, it is cumulative, gaining some weight or confidence in itself as it grows: The flash of enlightenment may be on a dimmer switch that gradually grows to the state said to be enjoyed by “the Happy Few.” How many have taken even a first step in that direction without falling away into some dead end cul-de-sac of the mind?
Confucius leads the way in his famous sorites: “If you want the state to be good, you must establish order in your own family. If you want to establish order in your family, you must rectify your own heart. To rectify your own heart, you must clarify your inarticulate thoughts through self-knowledge. Once you have struggled and arrived at sincere and precise definitions in your own mind, you can stabilize your own heart. With this self-mastery accomplished, you may help your own family to set itself in order. Bringing your own house into order can bring good government to the state. And when your state is well governed, human society on planet earth is brought into balance.”
I think these are not just single steps around a circle. For it to work (and why not demand that thinking be muscular and quick in the process of humanization), every question you want to blurt out should pass through all of the chambers of the sorites, to be examined in the light of each chamber, before any expression of the question or the next step to take.
Sweetness and joy to all who attempt to become not the perfect human, but one who is reasonably well-balanced. While the project is the individual human, when our better self is glimpsed it is probably, for the most part, in our relationship to other humans.
[I cannot believe I was ever obsessive enough to create the mandallas on this entry. Below is my "quilted Irene Harmon" -- a paper collage with the young Irene and the older Irene on the beach at Drake's Bay on some 4th of July "of yesteryear":
Sunday, July 01, 2007
LOVERS AND ONE REMARK
Yerba Buena Lovers
George W. Bush stands as if the coat hangar is still in his jacket. He is his own cardboard cutout.
George W. Bush stands as if the coat hangar is still in his jacket. He is his own cardboard cutout.
Monday, June 25, 2007
Adios, Muchachos...
Ever being revised....
OCEAN BREEZES, SPRING FEVER, 1970s, SAN FRANCISCO
A great wind draws itself up, then herds its wild
colts from the Pacific Ocean, across San Francisco,
leaving faeries behind to hug at knees, lassoing
legs with spider-gauze. Brace your feet! The sky’s
motorcycle brats rush forward, brake on Potrero Hill.
Their tires shred in the chain-link canopy over
a walkway spanning Highway 101 where it races
toward Hospital Curve. With cloud and sun,
the canopy drops a shadow net that traces the scales
on the giant shadowfish that wriggles in its net.
We tread, skitterish on that moving ground, over
the roaring stream of cars below, on our way
to 24th Street. There the deli man has forgotten
his prices, spring confusing his hostility. Sleep easy,
anguish of April. Adios, muchachos, compañeros
de ma vida, barra querida… The young men
in hairnets and leather jackets school at 24th
and Hampshire. A day like this feels bountiful
as the Ace of Cups. Invisible pearls bead in our
nostrils. We drink from the secret springs in air.
- James Eilers, copyright 2007
The tune of “Adios, muchachos…” (Goodbye to my buddies ["the companions of my life"] at the local bar…) became known in the United States with the words “I Get Ideas.”
OCEAN BREEZES, SPRING FEVER, 1970s, SAN FRANCISCO
A great wind draws itself up, then herds its wild
colts from the Pacific Ocean, across San Francisco,
leaving faeries behind to hug at knees, lassoing
legs with spider-gauze. Brace your feet! The sky’s
motorcycle brats rush forward, brake on Potrero Hill.
Their tires shred in the chain-link canopy over
a walkway spanning Highway 101 where it races
toward Hospital Curve. With cloud and sun,
the canopy drops a shadow net that traces the scales
on the giant shadowfish that wriggles in its net.
We tread, skitterish on that moving ground, over
the roaring stream of cars below, on our way
to 24th Street. There the deli man has forgotten
his prices, spring confusing his hostility. Sleep easy,
anguish of April. Adios, muchachos, compañeros
de ma vida, barra querida… The young men
in hairnets and leather jackets school at 24th
and Hampshire. A day like this feels bountiful
as the Ace of Cups. Invisible pearls bead in our
nostrils. We drink from the secret springs in air.
- James Eilers, copyright 2007
The tune of “Adios, muchachos…” (Goodbye to my buddies ["the companions of my life"] at the local bar…) became known in the United States with the words “I Get Ideas.”
Friday, June 15, 2007
Center for the Art of Translation
My path was steered to an organization I had not heard of -- the Center for the Art of Translation that launched its latest collection of translations at an event on 14 June 2007. It is hard to believe someone so young and lively as Olivia E. Sears (below) is in charge of the Center:
It was wonderful to hear the music of so many different languages, followed by translations into English. Mette McCall read the Danish for Carsten Rene Nielsen's delightful poems about creatures -- "Spider," "Lizard," "Elephant," "Octopus," with the translations by David Keplinger read by Michael Carabetta of Chronicle Books.
Ms. McCall:
Daniel Alcaron read the Spanish and the English for a selection from Cuban writer Senez Paz, translated by Tom Christensen:
Carol Cosman read the French for "Luxor, Movie Palace" by Chantal Bizzini, and our former socialistic politician, Matt Gonzalez, now a civil rights lawyer, read the English translation by Brad Anderson:
Anita Sagastegui read the Spanish of Chilean writer Vicente Huidobro, translated by Dan Bellm:
It was wonderful to hear the music of so many different languages, followed by translations into English. Mette McCall read the Danish for Carsten Rene Nielsen's delightful poems about creatures -- "Spider," "Lizard," "Elephant," "Octopus," with the translations by David Keplinger read by Michael Carabetta of Chronicle Books.
Ms. McCall:
Daniel Alcaron read the Spanish and the English for a selection from Cuban writer Senez Paz, translated by Tom Christensen:
Carol Cosman read the French for "Luxor, Movie Palace" by Chantal Bizzini, and our former socialistic politician, Matt Gonzalez, now a civil rights lawyer, read the English translation by Brad Anderson:
Anita Sagastegui read the Spanish of Chilean writer Vicente Huidobro, translated by Dan Bellm:
Nature or Artifice?
While looking after Paul Harmon’s cat, Tu Fu, I found Paul's front window to be a painting by Henri Rousseau – nature as artifice – because of a strange tree across the way. (Anne Batmale says that it is a NorfolkPine.) The impression was enhanced when a bird landed on the taller of two poles at the top of the pine. Below the bird, the tree’s precise branches, inverted green umbrellas, were centered on and descending down the trunk, from smaller to larger umbrellas. In the side view, the branches look flat – broad green triangles – arrowheads pointing down and down. Then the bird sitting atop the geometric tree flew away, revealing itself to be a mockingbird: The white spots on its wings made moons cascading through the shutters of its moving wings. Triangle trees... birds that leave white circles in the air...this is a scene from a magical story, a vision in a myth.
Not capturing the mockingbird in flight, I borrowed from the Internet the one superimposed on the photograph above, but the tree is the very tree you see from Paul's window.
Henry Thoreau
Several years ago, I made a Henry Thoreau collage for Paul Harmon. I hope I don't need to explain that the figures around the portrait of Thoreau represent how things turn out with humans who would espouse Thoreau's ideas, and those who would reject them:
"What force has a multitude? They only can force me who obey a higher law than I."
'The State never intentionally confronts a man's sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength."
"THERE WILL NEVER BE A REALLY FREE AND ENLIGHTENED STATE UNTIL THE STATE COMES TO RECOGNIZE THE INDIVIDUAL AS A HIGHER AND INDEPENDENT POWER, FROM WHICH ALL ITS OWN POWER AND AUTHORITY ARE DERIVED, AND TREATS THE INDIVIDUALLY ACCORDINGLY."
"I have read in a Hindoo book that 'there was a king's son, who, being expelled in infancy from his native city, imagined himself to belong to the barbarous race with which he lived. One of his father's ministers having discovered him revealed to him what he was, and the misconception of his character was removed, and he knew himself to be a prince. So soul,' continues the Hindoo philosopher, 'from the circumstances in which it is placed, mistakes its own character, until the truth is revealed to it and it knows itself to be BRAHME'."
"Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous."
"I am as desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject."
If you clicked on the following, you could enlarge it to the point where you could read the words on the original collage, but I just made the words more clear above, for the blog -- But still lack knowledge about how to create various size types -- like th press-on letters of the original!
"What force has a multitude? They only can force me who obey a higher law than I."
'The State never intentionally confronts a man's sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength."
"THERE WILL NEVER BE A REALLY FREE AND ENLIGHTENED STATE UNTIL THE STATE COMES TO RECOGNIZE THE INDIVIDUAL AS A HIGHER AND INDEPENDENT POWER, FROM WHICH ALL ITS OWN POWER AND AUTHORITY ARE DERIVED, AND TREATS THE INDIVIDUALLY ACCORDINGLY."
"I have read in a Hindoo book that 'there was a king's son, who, being expelled in infancy from his native city, imagined himself to belong to the barbarous race with which he lived. One of his father's ministers having discovered him revealed to him what he was, and the misconception of his character was removed, and he knew himself to be a prince. So soul,' continues the Hindoo philosopher, 'from the circumstances in which it is placed, mistakes its own character, until the truth is revealed to it and it knows itself to be BRAHME'."
"Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous."
"I am as desirous of being a good neighbor as I am of being a bad subject."
If you clicked on the following, you could enlarge it to the point where you could read the words on the original collage, but I just made the words more clear above, for the blog -- But still lack knowledge about how to create various size types -- like th press-on letters of the original!
Hiking in Wildcat Canyon...
When Martha Hubert and Thom Burnham invited me to join their friend, Bruce Hillman, on 9 June 2007 for a hike in the East Bay, I did not realize it would be an eight-mile hike to the top of Wildcat Canyon and back down again, but my canvas shoes, and I, survived the hike, and I enjoyed these sights:
First Reflection About Turning 70 is that...
...I am in danger of thinking I know what I am talking about.
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