2012 Friends Galore
Mike Keenan flew home yesterday morning. However, he was still here to go out to dinner at Miss Saigon with Stan Derilian and his entourage, Ann, his wife, and their friends Stan and Marie, who are traveling with them. Kai wanted to see Stan so she brought her family along too, which put 11 people around the table. The boys came with game tablets so they hardly participated at all, although Ryder traveled under the table to see his Grandma Sue. I caught of a snatch of a conversation between Sue and Ann about Ryder’s syndrome. Ann is a nurse with 40 years experience; she recently decided to retire after she tore a ligament in her ankle. We congregated around that same long table we had the last time we ate there. Stan sat across from me so we could talk. I told him some things about my hospitalization and ongoing health concerns and he told me he was slowing down, no longer taking on new customers, just old ones, and he was spending more time on other interest, like making brandy and betting on horses. It had been decades since I last saw Ann. She looked about the same, only now she is the wrinkled version of what I remembered. The last time I saw her we still lived on the Prichard property. She and Marie are bosom pals and have been ever since they met. Marie is Stan’s second wife who bore none of his six children by another woman now dead. Stan looks like a Mennonite minister, like the salt of the earth, foursquare and knowledgeable about things. He had worked for years for the Canadian Forest service, I think in British Columbia. This is the third driving tour they have made with Derilians. Mike Keenan was at the end of the table with Stan the Mennonite and they chatted amiably. Marie responded enthusiastically to my Mandala Designs, which were on my desk when they stopped at the house. I think she was a painter but I am not sure. Sue paid for the dinner ($234), which upset the Canadian couple that wanted to pay their way. Stan told them they could chip in when they return to Tucson on Friday. That was a change of plan but I thought a good idea. They thought it was incredible that she would pay for perfect strangers.
We still have not seen anything of Bill P while Paul and Stan and Mike have been here, which is unusual for Bill. He no doubt has his hands full with Sue and the two boys, plus he anticipates a visit from Aaron, his son, and his wife and toddler, who we’d like to meet. Yesterday I tried to catch up on some sleep. Guests are welcome but they do wear me out.
Monday, April 9, 2012
Back Cover of BRIDGE
Through my twenties and into my thirties, the era of my professional life as an artist, I was basically a rationalist and a secular humanist, pretty much the ‘religion’ of my main mentors in higher education. I was beyond church-going religion, regarding it as old hat and without merit. I was an abstract expressionist and proud of it and an idealist concerned with justice and human dignity for all. But under this high-sounding cover some pathologizing was going on, that is, there were multiple rivulets sneaking out of me, like secret clues to the sickness and chaos that was roiling deep inside me. They poured out through the chinks in my armour, especially in regard sexuality, masculine identity, personal fears and anxiety, and eventually became part of my creative expression. My marriage was also rocked by these new powers in my consciousness. Beneath my cool and confident exterior self was an inner self set upon by demons and a chaos that I soon realized I had to address or be permanently crippled psychologically. It was like Persephone being dragged down into darkness by Hades. I began to see things as if through a glass darkly and this dark vision deepen when I went to UNLV to teach. By my fifth year in Las Vegas I saw academe as snake pit of vicious scholars; art was a profession and practice that had no meaning beyond its own definition; creativity was a desacralized thing that was turning into a secular exercise in the marketplace. The Vietnam War had painted my horizon’s black, so I quit painting and started drawing in pen and ink—forgetting Pollock and embracing George Grosz and Max Beckmann as my new role models. Bridge in the Fog deals with my transition from a soul lost to one found
Trip to San Diego
We just got home after seeing my primary, Dr. Irene Duarte. The appointment run close to 45 minutes because Sue was with and we had a lot questions related to the recent hospital stay, the new drug cocktail the doctors gave me, when is it proper to call 911, and what to use when the pain in my feet becomes severe. Irene is a 45-year-old Mexican American woman married to a doctor, also Mexican American, who she met in Med school at the U of AZ. She has two kids that must be close to finishing high school. She’s been my primary for at least 15 years. Sue mentioned afterward that the two of us had a nice rhythm together. I usually lead and she responds with information. When we described my condition on 2/23/2012 she said definitely we should have called 911, because in no way could Sue handle my body; she needed help as I was close to completely immobile. If there is a next time we won’t hesitate and call for help. We went through the drug list. The new A-Fib drug, Maltaq, she had never heard of and would check on it. I questioned the double dose of potassium every day. She said that was due to the heavy use of diuretics. But we did a blood test to see where my system is at in regard potassium. She sent in four prescriptions on the list where there was only one more on the bottle. She said all the drugs for neuropathy had, as side effects, a tendency to cause edema, which is no help for me. (I had already told her Dr. Capaccio had removed Exforge from my drug list because it also causes edema.) I told her when the pain got to be around eight on a scale of ten I dropped some oxycodone a dentist had given me a couple years ago, and it handle the pain nicely; in fact, from then on my feet started to improve. She said I should use it again if it gets really bad but no more than twice a week. She’ll see me again in a month and revisit the problem and see how I am doing. She checked my lungs, saying they sounded good with no fluid in them. Last but not least she gave me a home nebulizer, but she forgot to give me the chemical that goes with it. Maybe she’ll call that in to Walgreen’s.
Just before we left home we got a call from Kaia. She and Aaron were in San Diego for a three day celebration for their ten wedding anniversary. They were supposed to drive home this morning with time enough to pick the kids up form school this afternoon, but they have run afoul bad weather in southern California and are having a hard time getting out of the area because rain or snow have closed access to the roads east. Their wedding was marred by cold, windy weather and now on their ten anniversary they had to stay inside their hotel accommodations rather than lying on the beach due to cold and rain and snow, which is also blocking their way home. They called us this afternoon. It took them six hours to get as far as Palm Springs. They were resting in another hotel and were planning to head home early tomorrow morning. Talk about the best-laid plans of mice and men?
The weather here is about the same as southern California. We have had heavy rain, snow in various locations, especially in the mountains, and it hailed when Sue went to the store on Oracle Road. And it is very cold. The weather lady is predicting it will be freezing tonight.
Sue went to visit Larry Masters in UMC hospital this afternoon. He called yesterday to inform her he had a stroke and would she please come see him. She did go and came home depressed because he is in such a complete fog about what happened and they wouldn’t leave him go outside for a smoke, so he kept mumbling I should die—“there is no end to my misery.” On and on the story rolls. I worry about Sue in this mess. What can she possibly owe this guy to put up with his foggy bottom?
Just before we left home we got a call from Kaia. She and Aaron were in San Diego for a three day celebration for their ten wedding anniversary. They were supposed to drive home this morning with time enough to pick the kids up form school this afternoon, but they have run afoul bad weather in southern California and are having a hard time getting out of the area because rain or snow have closed access to the roads east. Their wedding was marred by cold, windy weather and now on their ten anniversary they had to stay inside their hotel accommodations rather than lying on the beach due to cold and rain and snow, which is also blocking their way home. They called us this afternoon. It took them six hours to get as far as Palm Springs. They were resting in another hotel and were planning to head home early tomorrow morning. Talk about the best-laid plans of mice and men?
The weather here is about the same as southern California. We have had heavy rain, snow in various locations, especially in the mountains, and it hailed when Sue went to the store on Oracle Road. And it is very cold. The weather lady is predicting it will be freezing tonight.
Sue went to visit Larry Masters in UMC hospital this afternoon. He called yesterday to inform her he had a stroke and would she please come see him. She did go and came home depressed because he is in such a complete fog about what happened and they wouldn’t leave him go outside for a smoke, so he kept mumbling I should die—“there is no end to my misery.” On and on the story rolls. I worry about Sue in this mess. What can she possibly owe this guy to put up with his foggy bottom?
Origin of an idea
2012_3_23 Origins of an Idea: Rewrite from 6/16/1991
The Hieroglyphic Theater began to germinate in my imagination 22 years ago this month. I remember it like it was yesterday. Suzie and I arrived in Eugene the first week of June, 1969, and once we got settled, first in a small apartment for six weeks, and then in the house on 34th Street, which just happened to have a room that was more than adequate as a studio. While Sue went to summer school I got busy on my drawing board. Through that summer I did a batch of pen-and-ink drawings using the image of the black ball/pearl, which went back to the vision I had had in July 1968, in Las Vegas. I am referring to the experience I call THE INFERNO, the main transformative experience of my life. Most of that early series of drawings were exploratory in nature; indeed, when we went back to Las Vegas the following August I left a pile of drawings I regard as rejects, learning experience at best but not worth keeping. (In 1976 I received quite a shock when we went back to Eugene to visit friends and I discovered that Mike Keenan had salvaged 15 drawings and they were all on his walls at home, and they looked better than I thought they should.)
I remember how excited I was to be exploring a new and personal symbol. When we left Las Vegas I had hoped the move would accelerate my desire to find a fresh approach to my drawing, to get beyond the social narrative and satirical bent I had leaned on for the past five years. I was in search of a more metaphoric approach to imagery, with a different narrative, something that took account of the spiritualization I had experienced through THE INFERNO and Kundalini. I was after something original and I thought the best ticket to achieve that was using the black sphere of vision.
Altogether I probably did some 40 or 50 drawings before that show I had at Oregon State in late November. Probably the most successful drawing of that period was “The Alchemist,” which is owned by Stan Nishimura, an ex-student of mine. Although an enigmatic image, it had a clarity of form and expressive strengthen I found encouraging, which was lacking in many other drawings that I saw as hybrid images of uncertain identity. In fact, the years 1969 to 1973 were a time of working through many ideas that were interesting but lacked focus and cohesion. But by 1974 I had hit my stride and felt I was the master of a personal style and an original narrative. That time frame can be looked upon as my ‘axial period’ as artist and a man.
I drew my first true triple-decker hieroglyph in February 1970. It resulted from a moment of pure inspiration. The idea came to me while I was reading Oration on the Dignity of Man by Renaissance writer-scholar Pico della Mirandola, one of the foremost humanists of his day. I knew about Pico from a Renaissance class I had taught my first year at UNLV, 1965-1966. It was his commentary about the nature on man and his place in the universe according to the ancient wisdom and Pico deeply admired it. Man was seen as “the daemonic intermediate creature” that God placed between the angels above and the beasts below, hence a three level arrangement. Man’s estate was to be “the interpreter of nature” and “to elevate himself above the dung-heap of the inferior world.” Those few words provided me with a moment of illumination: I saw immense possibilities in the triple-decker ontology. An angel in that first hieroglyph represented the ABOVE, and in many future ones a Mandala would represent the highest spirituality, as I understood it. The beasts BELOW were Man’s animal nature and I represent it with a large tapir in that first hieroglyph; but also it represented “hyle,” the material world as such. (Hyle was Greek for “matter.”) Man and his mental abilities existed and flourished in the middle zone, which was elevate from the material zone and in the first hieroglyph I represented it with a self-portrait. I later referred to that level as PSYCHE; it represented a step up, so the speak, but was still short of the full cognizance of the third and highest level, SPIRITUS MUNDI, a world I had glimpsed and tasted and held as the highest attainment possible.
“The Eternal Return” is the name I gave to that first official hieroglyph. The black sphere in it became a black sun; it is near the angel who is dropping his seed on an egg. From this point on I called the series THE HIEROGLYPHIC THEATER that idea coming from Frances Yates book Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, a book I ran into by accident in a Eugene bookstore. One of the great interests to the Humanists was emblem poetry, and as a result they eagerly studied Egyptian hieroglyphs, as symbols with religious meaning. Hieroglyphs were seen as a deep way of stating hidden truths related to a sacred universe. I view them the same way.
My kind of cartoon-like images, or “magic realism” as one reviewer put it, has been misunderstood at times as ‘mere’ cartoons, a low art that doesn’t belong in a gallery or museum. In contrast, Robert Hughes has called Robert Crumb “the Breughel of the 20th century.” There are many other examples: Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Lindner, Mel Ramos, Red Grooms, and Wayne Thiebaud. There is also a whole tribe of illustrators for Graphic Novels that are doing great work, although still on the margins of “fine art.” One could also say the William Blake and Max Beckmann also used cartoon-like figures, and both certainly are in plenty of museums. As Jack Burnham has said of Marcel Duchamp: “The aim of every skilled Hermitic artist is not to lie, but to veil his message in themes so obscure or universal that the possibility of a true identity is never apparent to the public.” I am a mythmaker who operates behind a mask. I am a cartoon striving to be a hieroglyph.
One of the drawings I considered for the cover of Bridge in the Fog more or less sums up my current usage of the hieroglyphic idea. The inspiration for the idea came from a picture of a clown that I found in John Towsen’s wonderful study of the clown tradition through history that represented the Grimaldi Tradition of the 18th century. Towsen’s writes, “Grimaldi was to pantomime comedy what Keaton and Chaplin were to silent film comedy, the genius of whose hands ‘low’ comedy became art.” In other words, the Grimaldi clown was more comic trickster than romantic or magical Harlequin. The figure I worked around was a typical clown with white face, puffy sleeves and pantaloons pants, with a mandala of sorts on his chest. In his hands he has a pig in his raised right hand and fish in his lower left hand. In my version the figure is strutting across a runway with a more absurd and fanciful get-up and make-up, and in his right hand rather than a pig he holds a thunder bolt, like Zeus or Thor might, and in his lowered left hand he holds a fish. Rather than a God figure I offer a lowly clown in praise of folly of man’s earthly estate, as a more fitting image of who and what we are. Still, he has resources. The thunderbolt in his raised right hand indicates some heaven-sent powers are at his deposal, if he but uses them. A current of creativity is always available if we but plug into it. Conversely, he holds a fish in the lowered left hand, for the fish lives in the depths and they must be visited every bit as much as a piece of heaven must be grabbed. So despite his inherent absurdity, the clown’s reach is high, low and deep. The comic trickster is no fool. And of course the black sphere sits near the clown, drawing him like a magnet, high, deep, and low.
In my own case the fish spit out a black pearl during my dark night of the soul. There is a gnostic poem that comes to mind with the mention of a pearl. In The Hymn of the Pearl a seeker goes down into Egypt (the unconscious) to bring back the ‘One Pearl’ (the unifying power) that lies in the middle of the sea, which is encircled by a snorting serpent (Kundalini), thus letting the seeker put on “the robe of glory,” which had been lost (rebirth or redemption.) In Hans Jonas’ fine book The Gnostic Religion writes that in the glossary of gnostic symbolism, ‘pearl’ is one of the standing metaphor for the ‘soul.’ To whit, pearls are hidden with the shell of an animal, which no doubt adds to the lore and lure of the pearl.
The final note to this short essay about the evolution of the black sphere and the three-decker universe is what I discovered in an Egyptian art history course I sat in on with Professor Stein the second semester 1972. He showed a slide one day of the Serekh Motif, a cartouche with an emblem that blew me away when I saw it. It was a cartouche that was common on much of the sacred architecture of the early dynasties, a kind of symbolic cornerstone of Egyptian religious identity. There were three levels with a vertical format. The bottom level was a pillared hall that spatially went deep inside, so there was a three-dimensional feel to the image. In the middle level there was a snake, a cobra, and at the top was a large falcon, a representation of the God Horus. I saw the thing as sheer poetry expressing the essential spirituality of the Egyptian metaphysical understanding of the world. The hall of pillars represented the world of space and time; the snake reveals the Egyptian awareness of “Serpent Power” (kundalini) or world of psyche; and the Falcon/Horus, the high God of the Egyptian pantheon. And of course there are other traditional arrangements of three levels or parts, like, for example, body-soul-spirit; hyle-psyche-pnuema; heaven-earth-underworld or hell. The triple division of spaces provided me with a framework to play in and to give value to each register and to the harmony and reciprocity between them.
The Hieroglyphic Theater began to germinate in my imagination 22 years ago this month. I remember it like it was yesterday. Suzie and I arrived in Eugene the first week of June, 1969, and once we got settled, first in a small apartment for six weeks, and then in the house on 34th Street, which just happened to have a room that was more than adequate as a studio. While Sue went to summer school I got busy on my drawing board. Through that summer I did a batch of pen-and-ink drawings using the image of the black ball/pearl, which went back to the vision I had had in July 1968, in Las Vegas. I am referring to the experience I call THE INFERNO, the main transformative experience of my life. Most of that early series of drawings were exploratory in nature; indeed, when we went back to Las Vegas the following August I left a pile of drawings I regard as rejects, learning experience at best but not worth keeping. (In 1976 I received quite a shock when we went back to Eugene to visit friends and I discovered that Mike Keenan had salvaged 15 drawings and they were all on his walls at home, and they looked better than I thought they should.)
I remember how excited I was to be exploring a new and personal symbol. When we left Las Vegas I had hoped the move would accelerate my desire to find a fresh approach to my drawing, to get beyond the social narrative and satirical bent I had leaned on for the past five years. I was in search of a more metaphoric approach to imagery, with a different narrative, something that took account of the spiritualization I had experienced through THE INFERNO and Kundalini. I was after something original and I thought the best ticket to achieve that was using the black sphere of vision.
Altogether I probably did some 40 or 50 drawings before that show I had at Oregon State in late November. Probably the most successful drawing of that period was “The Alchemist,” which is owned by Stan Nishimura, an ex-student of mine. Although an enigmatic image, it had a clarity of form and expressive strengthen I found encouraging, which was lacking in many other drawings that I saw as hybrid images of uncertain identity. In fact, the years 1969 to 1973 were a time of working through many ideas that were interesting but lacked focus and cohesion. But by 1974 I had hit my stride and felt I was the master of a personal style and an original narrative. That time frame can be looked upon as my ‘axial period’ as artist and a man.
I drew my first true triple-decker hieroglyph in February 1970. It resulted from a moment of pure inspiration. The idea came to me while I was reading Oration on the Dignity of Man by Renaissance writer-scholar Pico della Mirandola, one of the foremost humanists of his day. I knew about Pico from a Renaissance class I had taught my first year at UNLV, 1965-1966. It was his commentary about the nature on man and his place in the universe according to the ancient wisdom and Pico deeply admired it. Man was seen as “the daemonic intermediate creature” that God placed between the angels above and the beasts below, hence a three level arrangement. Man’s estate was to be “the interpreter of nature” and “to elevate himself above the dung-heap of the inferior world.” Those few words provided me with a moment of illumination: I saw immense possibilities in the triple-decker ontology. An angel in that first hieroglyph represented the ABOVE, and in many future ones a Mandala would represent the highest spirituality, as I understood it. The beasts BELOW were Man’s animal nature and I represent it with a large tapir in that first hieroglyph; but also it represented “hyle,” the material world as such. (Hyle was Greek for “matter.”) Man and his mental abilities existed and flourished in the middle zone, which was elevate from the material zone and in the first hieroglyph I represented it with a self-portrait. I later referred to that level as PSYCHE; it represented a step up, so the speak, but was still short of the full cognizance of the third and highest level, SPIRITUS MUNDI, a world I had glimpsed and tasted and held as the highest attainment possible.
“The Eternal Return” is the name I gave to that first official hieroglyph. The black sphere in it became a black sun; it is near the angel who is dropping his seed on an egg. From this point on I called the series THE HIEROGLYPHIC THEATER that idea coming from Frances Yates book Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, a book I ran into by accident in a Eugene bookstore. One of the great interests to the Humanists was emblem poetry, and as a result they eagerly studied Egyptian hieroglyphs, as symbols with religious meaning. Hieroglyphs were seen as a deep way of stating hidden truths related to a sacred universe. I view them the same way.
My kind of cartoon-like images, or “magic realism” as one reviewer put it, has been misunderstood at times as ‘mere’ cartoons, a low art that doesn’t belong in a gallery or museum. In contrast, Robert Hughes has called Robert Crumb “the Breughel of the 20th century.” There are many other examples: Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Lindner, Mel Ramos, Red Grooms, and Wayne Thiebaud. There is also a whole tribe of illustrators for Graphic Novels that are doing great work, although still on the margins of “fine art.” One could also say the William Blake and Max Beckmann also used cartoon-like figures, and both certainly are in plenty of museums. As Jack Burnham has said of Marcel Duchamp: “The aim of every skilled Hermitic artist is not to lie, but to veil his message in themes so obscure or universal that the possibility of a true identity is never apparent to the public.” I am a mythmaker who operates behind a mask. I am a cartoon striving to be a hieroglyph.
One of the drawings I considered for the cover of Bridge in the Fog more or less sums up my current usage of the hieroglyphic idea. The inspiration for the idea came from a picture of a clown that I found in John Towsen’s wonderful study of the clown tradition through history that represented the Grimaldi Tradition of the 18th century. Towsen’s writes, “Grimaldi was to pantomime comedy what Keaton and Chaplin were to silent film comedy, the genius of whose hands ‘low’ comedy became art.” In other words, the Grimaldi clown was more comic trickster than romantic or magical Harlequin. The figure I worked around was a typical clown with white face, puffy sleeves and pantaloons pants, with a mandala of sorts on his chest. In his hands he has a pig in his raised right hand and fish in his lower left hand. In my version the figure is strutting across a runway with a more absurd and fanciful get-up and make-up, and in his right hand rather than a pig he holds a thunder bolt, like Zeus or Thor might, and in his lowered left hand he holds a fish. Rather than a God figure I offer a lowly clown in praise of folly of man’s earthly estate, as a more fitting image of who and what we are. Still, he has resources. The thunderbolt in his raised right hand indicates some heaven-sent powers are at his deposal, if he but uses them. A current of creativity is always available if we but plug into it. Conversely, he holds a fish in the lowered left hand, for the fish lives in the depths and they must be visited every bit as much as a piece of heaven must be grabbed. So despite his inherent absurdity, the clown’s reach is high, low and deep. The comic trickster is no fool. And of course the black sphere sits near the clown, drawing him like a magnet, high, deep, and low.
In my own case the fish spit out a black pearl during my dark night of the soul. There is a gnostic poem that comes to mind with the mention of a pearl. In The Hymn of the Pearl a seeker goes down into Egypt (the unconscious) to bring back the ‘One Pearl’ (the unifying power) that lies in the middle of the sea, which is encircled by a snorting serpent (Kundalini), thus letting the seeker put on “the robe of glory,” which had been lost (rebirth or redemption.) In Hans Jonas’ fine book The Gnostic Religion writes that in the glossary of gnostic symbolism, ‘pearl’ is one of the standing metaphor for the ‘soul.’ To whit, pearls are hidden with the shell of an animal, which no doubt adds to the lore and lure of the pearl.
The final note to this short essay about the evolution of the black sphere and the three-decker universe is what I discovered in an Egyptian art history course I sat in on with Professor Stein the second semester 1972. He showed a slide one day of the Serekh Motif, a cartouche with an emblem that blew me away when I saw it. It was a cartouche that was common on much of the sacred architecture of the early dynasties, a kind of symbolic cornerstone of Egyptian religious identity. There were three levels with a vertical format. The bottom level was a pillared hall that spatially went deep inside, so there was a three-dimensional feel to the image. In the middle level there was a snake, a cobra, and at the top was a large falcon, a representation of the God Horus. I saw the thing as sheer poetry expressing the essential spirituality of the Egyptian metaphysical understanding of the world. The hall of pillars represented the world of space and time; the snake reveals the Egyptian awareness of “Serpent Power” (kundalini) or world of psyche; and the Falcon/Horus, the high God of the Egyptian pantheon. And of course there are other traditional arrangements of three levels or parts, like, for example, body-soul-spirit; hyle-psyche-pnuema; heaven-earth-underworld or hell. The triple division of spaces provided me with a framework to play in and to give value to each register and to the harmony and reciprocity between them.
Dear Mary Ellen,
Dear Mary Ellen,
I went to bed at 11:30 last night and woke up to pee at 12:45 AM. I laid there for the next hour thinking about you and composing a email to you. Finally I got out of bed, put the coffee on and here I am at my computer.
Both Sue and I were hit hard your phone call. I guess neither one of us expected that verdict on you illness. Afterwards Sue cried and I sat outside on the patio silent and grim-faced. We both stared into nothingness. Life can indeed be cruel. You would think all the good service you have rendered to your mother and to your siblings who did not have to carry the load you carried with diligence and unconditional love, that your store of good karma would fill a Wisconsin silo by now, and part of that storage would be a long life and a chance eventually to travel, like we had talked about a few times, as reward for services over time. But things don’t always happen like they should. Instead of an active life in your sixties and seventies, a time of harvest for you, the dice got rolled and came up cancer at 53, which seemed to come on like a whirlwind, in a very short period of time. However, your accepting attitude impressed both Sue and I; and considering what the oncologist told you, it is better to look the disease straight in the eye and get to know it and forget about this hokum about fighting it.
Age makes no difference to whoever rolls the dice. I am 23 years down the road from you and your parents and my mother lived to grand old age, although maybe “grand” is stretching the truth. I check the obits in the local paper and it always surprises me how death strikes all ages willy-nilly, although the majority is usually the elder citizen. In short, it is best to be ready at all times, have your bags packed and your ticket punched. For some reason I think of the moment of death as the time to “grab the tiger by the tail” and hold on to see where it takes you. Why a tiger? Well, I have had several powerful dreams featuring tigers and my favorite poem is William Blake’s “Tiger, tiger, burning bright/in the Forest of the Night.” I also like D.H. Lawrence’s several renditions of a poem he calls “Build your Ship of Death” for your “longest journey” to your “wonder-goal.” I have read those poems over and over through time, as a kind of rehearsal for my own death, which at my age will come sooner rather than later. They remind me we are on our ‘little journey” now which is but prelude to the longer journey to what I think of as “the other side.”
Remember that we love you and you are constantly in out thoughts.
Jerry and Sue
I went to bed at 11:30 last night and woke up to pee at 12:45 AM. I laid there for the next hour thinking about you and composing a email to you. Finally I got out of bed, put the coffee on and here I am at my computer.
Both Sue and I were hit hard your phone call. I guess neither one of us expected that verdict on you illness. Afterwards Sue cried and I sat outside on the patio silent and grim-faced. We both stared into nothingness. Life can indeed be cruel. You would think all the good service you have rendered to your mother and to your siblings who did not have to carry the load you carried with diligence and unconditional love, that your store of good karma would fill a Wisconsin silo by now, and part of that storage would be a long life and a chance eventually to travel, like we had talked about a few times, as reward for services over time. But things don’t always happen like they should. Instead of an active life in your sixties and seventies, a time of harvest for you, the dice got rolled and came up cancer at 53, which seemed to come on like a whirlwind, in a very short period of time. However, your accepting attitude impressed both Sue and I; and considering what the oncologist told you, it is better to look the disease straight in the eye and get to know it and forget about this hokum about fighting it.
Age makes no difference to whoever rolls the dice. I am 23 years down the road from you and your parents and my mother lived to grand old age, although maybe “grand” is stretching the truth. I check the obits in the local paper and it always surprises me how death strikes all ages willy-nilly, although the majority is usually the elder citizen. In short, it is best to be ready at all times, have your bags packed and your ticket punched. For some reason I think of the moment of death as the time to “grab the tiger by the tail” and hold on to see where it takes you. Why a tiger? Well, I have had several powerful dreams featuring tigers and my favorite poem is William Blake’s “Tiger, tiger, burning bright/in the Forest of the Night.” I also like D.H. Lawrence’s several renditions of a poem he calls “Build your Ship of Death” for your “longest journey” to your “wonder-goal.” I have read those poems over and over through time, as a kind of rehearsal for my own death, which at my age will come sooner rather than later. They remind me we are on our ‘little journey” now which is but prelude to the longer journey to what I think of as “the other side.”
Remember that we love you and you are constantly in out thoughts.
Jerry and Sue
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